Nouveau Désordre: Diabolical Queerness in 1950s French Cinema

Abstract

1950s France was not the safest cultural terrain on which to build queer cinematic images. 1 The gay men of the 1930s French cinema glory days had beaten a sharp retreat back into the celluloid closet. 2 The Nazi Occupation introduced anti-gay legislation in France for the first time since the 1791 reforms (and this regression was to remain in place until François Mitterand’s 1981 victory). Yet after the war, gay people were associated with collaboration and decadence and seen as agents of corruption that the shiny new, post-Résistance French nation needed to scrub away from its guilt-sodden consciousness as quickly as possible. These were the years of ‘fast cars and clean bodies’, not transgression, experimentalism, or anything remotely ‘queer’. 3 Even the major visible counter-cultural movement in France at the beginning of the decade, Existentialism, was overwhelmingly heterosexual in its Sartre-Beauvoir-Camus-branded café manifestations. If it undoubtedly had its queerer undercurrents and associated players (such as the bisexual writer Violette Leduc, author of the censored adolescent lesbian novel Ravages (1955) and the melancholic autobiography La Bâtarde (1964)), these elements remained muted, unthreatening, in the background. 4 Existentialism would be supplanted by cinema’s Nouvelle Vague (or New Wave) towards the end of the decade as France’s hippest left-field export. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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