Audiences and Critics: Dialogue and Disagreement

The chapter compares audience responses with critical reception. It contrasts professional reviews of La Vie d’Adèle and L’Inconnu du lac in Spain with reactions of ‘amateur’ LGBTQ cinephiles and general audience members online and as collected via questionnaires. It compares critical and non-professional responses to François Ozon, André Téchiné, and Pedro Almodóvar, specifically his La piel que habito and Los amantes pasajeros. Overall it reveals how details of fine response often displace the generalities of the more professional critics or offer more telling readings than those of academic writers or the quality media’s star reviewers.

LGBQ Themes and Responses

The chapter probes responses to representations relating to lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer identities and desires. Three dominant themes emerge: (1) ageing among lesbians, gay men and bisexuals; (2) gay male, and, to a lesser extent, lesbian and bisexual desires and identities; and (3) a sense of shared experience, as a stake in community history or as a personalised mark of identity. The chapter reveals that investment, care, surprise, empathy, (self-) recognition and identification are recurring modes of engagement, and shows how viewers claim varying degrees of closeness to the subjects, characters and people on screen.

Trans Issues

The chapter examines trans films and their reception. It draws on philosophical and theoretical texts about trans and intersex identity politics. It reviews trans activism as related to France and Spain and the place of trans films in LGBTQ festivals. In the main analysis some respondents are seen to express a negotiated form of empathy that transmits their solidarity with the issues portrayed while underlining their difference from the films’ trans subjects. Other participants are shown to identify accounts that resonate with their own journeys towards acceptance and emancipation. Particularities of national culture and contexts are little mentioned by respondents and the chapter suggests that this attests to the transnational relevance and salience of the films’ broader discourses on gender identity.

Cultural Crossovers

The chapter focuses on what France and Frenchness means in dominant discourses that circulate in Spain and the values attached to Spain and Spanishness in France. It offers a contextual and historical background to such values and associations, with reference to the perspectives of sexual politics and LGBTQ cultural exchange. The presentation of a two-way traffic of cultural, political and historical exchange between France and Spain is nuanced by taking into account the multidimensional identities and affiliations of people with regards to nationality and diasporic affinities between the two countries.

Conclusion

In this book we have been tracing cinematically mediated, cross-cultural flows and exchange of tastes, opinions, experiences, desires and values between France and Spain and, as a space of reception, Britain. Through our encounters with events and audiences (including the responses of 440 individuals), we have been asking how LGBTQ experiences and communities are inflected by divergences and commonalities mobilised by certain films and their reception. The various encounters between audience and film, between comment and image, and, indeed, present and past, have revealed some specific ways in which tastes, values, desires and fantasies translate between LGBTQ communities in three wide geographical locations. They have shown how thematic preoccupations of a social or political nature connect across languages through films which either were programmed at festivals and in special screenings or that we separately identified as being perceived as key interventions in terms of their tone, their attack or their structuring of issues. By looking through an LGBTQ lens at what France means for Spain and vice versa, and how certain viewers from Britain themselves apprehend or embrace those meanings, we have tried to forge new articulations between film audience research and our knowledge of sexuality in transnational contexts. This has been facilitated by the emerging range of different films covering varied issues and subject positions. In particular, the major themes that run through the responses – love and relationships, ageing, what is or might be living as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or queer Catalan, citizen of France or Spanish subject – have shaped the discussion. The responses we gathered, as well as being concerned, often in self-questioning ways, with individual identity – like Antonio responding to ...

LGBTQ Film Festivals and their Audiences

The chapter covers the emergence and development of specific LGBTQ film festivals in France, Spain and the UK. The festivals studied are FIRE !! (Barcelona), LesGaiCineMad (Madrid), FICGLB (Barcelona), Zinegoak (Bilbao), Chéries-Chéris (Paris), Ecrans Mixtes (Lyon), Des Images aux mots (Toulouse), the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival/Flare as well as queer film seasons at Manchester’s Cornerhouse cinema, including POUTfest. Audience responses are used to finesse ideas of how the festivals fit into wider discourses on film festivals in relation to niche designing, space and locality, and responsiveness to community and individual spectators’ needs. The chapter draws on the corpus of written questionnaire responses to programmed films across the festivals.

Introduction

The opening shot of Michèle Massé’s 2014 documentary about ageing among four lesbians, Las ventanas abiertas (Open Windows), shows two instantly recognisable cityscape images, one above the other. The familiar smooth grey tiles and windows of Parisian mansard roofs fill the top half of the screen; in the bottom half, a panorama of Madrid’s Palacio Real and the Almudena Cathedral, lit by the setting sun. Two cities, which serve internationally as metonyms for the countries of which they are capitals, countries that have played pivotal roles in the historical evolution of Western Europe, are brought together in a film that examines the experiences of four older lesbians, two in France and two in Spain....