The Celluloid Closet

The documentary describes how homosexuality was shown in Hollywood films across a century. Open in the silent era, closed after the forties, sick and dangerous in the sixties, a killer in the eighties. Clips from more than a hundred films are used and each is read against the rule of its period. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman direct. The source is Vito Russo's book of the same name; Russo spent years watching films, published it in 1981 and died of AIDS in 1990. The fact at the centre is the Hays code. The censorship text in force from the mid thirties to the late sixties explicitly forbade homosexuality; the result was not disappearance but coding. The characters existed by implication and the audience knew what to look for. The best passages are the screenwriters. Gore Vidal describes writing the relationship between two male characters into Ben-Hur deliberately and not telling one of the actors. Among those speaking are Tom Hanks, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg, Harvey Fierstein and Shirley MacLaine. Lily Tomlin narrates. It was made for HBO and won an Emmy. Who it is for: anyone interested in film history and the argument about representation. Who it is not for: the structure is chronological and conventional, there are a great many clips, and the depth of a book covering more than nine hundred films is not here.