Programmed November 2024

Queersighted: Queer Noir

Queerness simmers beneath the surface of classical Hollywood noir, with its heightened ambiguity, shadowy identities, and free-floating sensuality. Made during the era of the Production Code, which banned “any inference of sex perversion,” these films, with their characters’ murky pasts and murkier motivations, moved to the rhythms of teasing, unspoken eroticism. To accompany their selection—which runs the gamut from cornerstone titles like Laura and Gilda to lesser-known gut punches like Desert Fury and Cry of the Hunted —series curator Michael Koresky and special guest programmer Imogen Sara Smith sit down to discuss these tricky films, in which wayward souls are bedeviled by grim, transactional heterosexuality and bewitched by queer pasts and paths not taken.

No longer streaming