The Evolution of New Queer Cinema and Lesbian Representation in Indie Film

Abstract

Films like Desert Hearts (Deitch, 1985) and The Watermelon Woman (Dunye, 1996)– produced a decade apart but both labeled as essential New Queer films– take notably different approaches in terms of aesthetics, strategy, and concern, but each contain key traces of pastiche, appropriation, and social constructionism. Desert Hearts has the look of a mainstream film and plays off of various “traditional” romance tropes, while The Watermelon Woman is more stylistically complex with its utilization of intertextuality and its reflexive, realist aesthetic. Despite these differences, however, both of these films engage in striking reworkings of history. In Desert Hearts, Deitch literally creates a new piece of history (with the film being a period piece, taking place in 1959), reminding viewers that queer stories have always existed– they just haven’t always been seen or told. Similarly, The Watermelon Woman is all about responding to queer erasure and constructing a new history by posing questions about storytelling, memory, and archives. Accordingly, although New Queer films like Desert Hearts and The Watermelon Woman do take notably different stylistic and narrative approaches, they each provide necessary reworkings of history that subvert heterosexual traditions in both film and society, and present nuanced portrayals of queer female stories and intimacy without the sense of objectification, triviality, or disapproval that is often found in filmic representations of WLW relationships.