The Ultimate Guide To Lesbian & Gay Film and Video by Jenni Olson

The Ultimate Guide To Lesbian & Gay Film and Video

Jenni Olson

Editor Olson, former codirector of the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (SFILGFF), has compiled entries on more than 2000 shorts and feature films, most of which have been shown at the festival since its inception in 1977. Arranged alphabetically by title, entries open with sufficient videographic information?director, producer, year and country of production, language, running time, format, and U.S. and U.K. distributors?followed by descriptive/critical text ranging from one sentence to half a page. A director index, a variety of subject indexes, and directories to the films’ commercial distributors and mail-order home-video distributors provide ample access to both the entries and the films themselves. Additional sections offer a history of the SFILGFF, advice on programming a festival, and queer critics’ and directors’ top ten lists. Though the texts tend to be too short and more critical information would be welcome (including lists of award winners), the total package is entertaining and informative. And it will prove invaluable to the student of contemporary film or gay studies as the only source of reliable information on many of the short films, documentaries, and low-budget features that comprise what has come to be known as the new queer cinema. However, precisely because of these films’ obscurity, the book will be of less use to the general reader looking for something to pick up at the corner video store. All academic libraries and larger film and gay studies collections in public libraries will be best served by this current work, while general public collections should stock Raymond Murray’s more mainstream Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video (LJ 3/15/95).?Eric Bryant, ‘Library Journal’

Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

This guide includes information on more than 2,000 films and videos from many countries. They range from two-minute shorts to feature films and include a wide variety of experimental, documentary, and narrative media. It appears that the primary citerion for selection is that the film was shown at the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. The alphabetically arranged entries include basic filmographic information (director, occasionally producer, year produced, country of origin, language(s) of film, category, color/b&w, and distributor) and largely descriptive annotations adapted from blurbs in festival catalogs and distributors’ advertisements. In a few instances, where adequate annotations were not available from these sources, the editor solicited comments from a small cadre of knowledgeable film enthusiasts–and these annotations are generally longer and more critical than the annotations based on festival sources.

In addition to the filmography, The Ultimate Guide contains very helpful subject and director indexes and a category index that identifies entries related to lesbian, gay, transgender, cogender, and bisexual themes. Also included is a directory of distributors, a directory of film festivals for lesbian and gay films, a checklist for film programmers offering tips on how to set up an effective film program, and a bibliography.

The main value of this filmography is that it identifies many short and/or little-known lesbian and gay films from all over the world and provides information on where to locate them. Better-known feature films such as M. Butterfly and Emmanuelle are more thoroughly discussed in Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video (TLA, 1994); some films, such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, are not even in The Ultimate Guide. The 1980 Allan Moyle film, Times Square, however, has more complete coverage in The Ultimate Guide than in Images in the Dark. For large public libraries, academic libraries supporting film studies, and specialized film libraries, The Ultimate Guide is a useful supplement to the more comprehensive Images in the Dark.

2000+ entries; subject/director indexes; much more

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