Gay Film Studies

Working beyond mainstream practice, Derek Jarman creates films that are unusually musical. Caravaggio, a biography of the artist, is a case in point. Jarman’s collaboration with composer Simon Fischer Turner from the start of the filmmaking  process enables music to assume a structural role, a procedure that turns common music-image interaction
on its head in two ways. First, rather than strive for the audio-visual fusion common to many mainstream films, music and image are here uxtaposed. Second, as music becomes audible, the film’s illusion of realism is destroyed. This article explores how Jarman’s challenge to conventional filmmaking procedure can expose the fragility of reception history by comparing visual, literary, and musical versions of Caravaggio’s
biography.

This article presents a microhistory of Shan Sayles’ entrepreneurship in film exhibition that involved both arthouse and exploitation cinemas. Covering the years up to around 1970, it also functions as a commemoration for Sayles with particular focus on the gay films he acquired for his theaters across the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s.