Were I to be catapulted one hundred years into the future, I would not be surprised to find the critical history of the twentieth century bookended by Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet. The critical reputation of both works is propelled by unlikely origin stories. Auerbach fled Nazi Germany to Istanbul, where he wrote about the history of Western Literature from a single shelf of English-language works at a Turkish library. Russo toured libraries and campuses in the 1970s, showing clips of gay representation in movies before there were DVD players or even widespread videotape access.
Both works delved deep with limited resources, but Russo’s work, perhaps because it was born outside of academia, also flew in the face of the late twentieth-century trend towards theory, Letting the theory develop from the works rather than imprinting it on the works as a template was Russo’s gift…and what a gift to film lovers it was. It is easy to overlook and underappreciate the scope of Russo’s film knowledge in an age in which streaming channels proliferate and long-tail libraries provide cinephiles with an embarrassment of riches to explore.
Plenty of the gay or lesbian participants in the documentary articulate forcefully and persuasively the importance of seeing themselves onscreen, but it is important to note that for a certain segment of the straight population (early Gen X), Closet was our critical introduction to the idea of “representation.” We were used to seeing ourselves onscreen (at least I was), but The Celluloid Closet was an important film in getting me to stop and think about why that was important and what impact it had on my emotional and, yes, spiritual development.
By the time I saw Closet, I had already seen many of the films featured in it: Some Like It Hot, Rope, Ben-Hur. It honestly never occurred to me that they had gay subtexts. I was struck, perhaps naively, by how obvious everything seemed once it was brought to my attention. To quote Emily Dickinson: Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth’s superb surprise.
Within Dickinson’s poem is the core of what makes me find The Celluloid Closet “spiritually significant.” Not because it presents an experience that I have had, but because it reveals truths that had been hidden….by my upbringing, my culture, and– yes to some extent — my religion. Most (all?) great art invites us to identify with that which is not us. The “superb surprise” of The Celluloid Closet was not that it made me love what I had previously despised, but that it gave me a new vocabulary with which to think about my own experiences and understand what it means to love my neighbor. — Kenneth R. Morefield (2023)
Arts & Faith Lists:
2023 Top 25 Spiritually Significant Documentaries — #25