Something big is coming. Bigger than a mammoth. Much bigger.
For modern audiences raised on Pose , Schitt’s Creek , or Portrait of a Lady on Fire , watching The Celluloid Closet feels like excavating a tomb. It is a vital, heartbreaking, and ultimately triumphant historical document that remains, nearly three decades later, the definitive text on queer cinema history.
To understand the film, one must first understand the firebrand who wrote the book. Vito Russo was not a detached academic. He was a gay activist and film historian who came of age during the Stonewall riots. He founded Gay Activists Alliance in 1970 and spent years scouring the archives of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, watching hundreds of films to track the cinematic depiction of homosexuality. The Celluloid Closet -1995-
Hanks, in the mid-90s, was perhaps the most surprising choice. A clean-cut, straight, Oscar-winning megastar ( Philadelphia , 1993) narrating a documentary about gay censorship? It was a strategic masterstroke. It signaled to mainstream America that this history was not "niche"; it was American history. Hanks speaks with genuine anger when describing how the Code destroyed careers, and genuine joy when describing the coded romance in Spartacus (1960), where Dalton Trumbo wrote the line "My taste includes both snails and oysters." For modern audiences raised on Pose , Schitt’s
In 1995, a documentary arrived in theaters that did more than simply recount film history; it held a mirror up to the collective psyche of the 20th century. The Celluloid Closet , directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, remains one of the most vital and incisive documentaries ever made about the American cinema. Based on Vito Russo’s groundbreaking 1981 book of the same name, the film explores the complex, often painful, and sometimes joyous history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) representations in Hollywood movies. Vito Russo was not a detached academic