Collections/March 2022

Queersighted: Stage to Screen

Featuring a conversation between series programmer Michael Koresky and scholar Shonni Enlow Many of the most notable queer or queer-coded English-language films of the mid-twentieth century were based on plays. This is because theater was a medium in which representations of sexuality and desire were more permissible than in cinema, compromised as it was by draconian Production Code rules. In this new edition of Queersighted, series curator Michael Koresky and a special guest, professor and author Shonni Enelow, select and discuss eight envelope-pushing films adapted from theatrical works—including classics by Jean Genet, Lillian Hellman, and Tennessee Williams—that reveal so much about the strange and symbiotic relationship between theater and film, and the representation (and erasure) of gay and lesbian desires, lives, and communities on-screen and onstage.

8 films — 2 on the Channel, 6 unavailable