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The situation of LGBT+ people has long been characterized as marginal, socially and textually. This is notably true of the history of LGBT+ cinematic representation. However, marginality takes different forms, at the level of characterization (notably in terms of functionality and vividness) and in terms of structure (sometimes really incidental, sometimes serving to create the contours of centrality or to underpin or undermine it). These distinctions are discussed through the case of La dolce vita, a film in which gay characters are apparently extremely marginal but to which they are in fact integral. Comparison is drawn with the representation of ethnicity in the film and of gay characters in a parody of it.

Il m’a raconte une fois avoir drague un type qui disait que tu pouvais reconnaitre l’appart d’un gay a tous les coups, parce qu’ils ont tous les disques de Judy Garland.Kenneth Williams, a propos de Joe Orton Les jeunes Blanc.he.s avaient la contre-culture, les rock stars et le mysticisme. Les Noir.e.s avaient un slogan disant qu’illes etaient beaux et un parti qui demandait le pouvoir. La classe moyenne avait ce qu’elle a toujours eu : la classe moyenne. Les faucons avaient le Vietnam, et le...

Richard Dyer is Art Editor of Wasafiri, an editor at Third Text and a Corresponding Editor on Ambit. He is a widely published art critic, reviewer, poet, fiction writer and also an artist. His crit...

Pedro Cabrita Reis (born 1956, Lisbon, Portugal) is one of the leading Portuguese artists of his generation. For the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) Reis fabricated a complex installation incorporating painting, sculpture, photography and found objects as his contribution to the Collateral Events programme. A Remote Whisper spread through all the rooms of the 700 square metres of the ‘piano nobile’ of the Palazzo Falier, interacting with the walls, doorways and floors, deploying aluminium tubes, fluorescent lights and electrical cables as elements in a complex three-dimensional drawing. Richard Dyer met and interviewed Reis in the Palazzo Falier.

Lena Horne was the first African-American woman to be signed to a contract to a major Hollywood studio, who did however not know what to do with her. Her >colour< – in her voice as well as her looks – meant that she did not fit into the racial hierarchies of the day and she was largely confined oppressively to the margins. However, she was also able to some degree, and in collaboration with other African-American figures in Hollywood, to use this to give a glimpse of African-American modernism in Hollywood cinema. This is thus a case study of cultural production as struggle.

(1994). Vong Phaophanit: Ash and Silk Wall Richard Dyer. Third Text: Vol. 8, No. 26, pp. 91-93.

Fred and Ginger meet. He fancies her and she’s quite taken with him, but he pesters her too much, or she’s got her own career to get on with, or she thinks he’s married, or he’s promised never to marry. Whatever the reason something keeps them apart, except that when they start to dance … Well, what? It’s heaven, they’re in heaven, but just what is it that makes it so, what notion of happiness is embodied in their dancing?

William L. Rivers and William T. Slater (eds.) Aspen Handbook on the Media: 1975-76 Edition (Aspen Institute Program on Communications and Society, 360 Bryant Street, Palo Alto, Calif. 94301—$6.95/3.95) Richard Dyer MacCann and Edward S. Perry's The New Film Index: A Bibliography of Magazine Articles in English, 1930-1970 (New York: Dutton, 1975—$35.00)

Dana H. Hodgdon and Stuart M. Kaminsky BASIC FILMMAKING (New York: Arco Publishing, 1982—$12.95/$7.95) Stewart Bronfeld WRITING FOR FILM AND TELEVISION (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981—$11.95) Leonard Maltin TV MOVIES (New York: New American Library, 1982— $4.95) Alan Frank THE HORROR FILM HANDBOOK (Totowa, NJ: Barnes E. Noble Books, 1982—$24.95) Richard Dyer MacCann and Jack C. Ellis CINEMA EXAMINED: SELECTIONS FROM CINEMA JOURNAL (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982—$9.95 paper)