WELCOME

Welcome to the Lesbian Film Archive, an attempt to visually catalog lesbian film from 1990-Present. This project began as my senior undergraduate thesis, born out of my interests in media studies, performance studies, and my own identity as a lesbian and wanting to watch movies about me and my friends. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes in Silencing the Past, “we are all amateur historians with various degrees of awareness about our production” (20). This archive, then, is an attempt to intentionally act as an amateur historian, and make the wide variety of lesbian films more accessible to others. Lesbian film is a specific niche in terms of both lesbian history and film history, and yet that is why it is so compelling to me. 

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In 1992, B. Ruby Rich coined the term “New Queer Cinema” in Sight and Sound to describe this watershed moment of queer cinema that was taking place. Thus, this archive begins with the year 1990, as this is the moment when film that was deliberately and explicitly queer was moving from primarily independent cinema to somewhere more public. In a project about quantity more than quality, the goal becomes to trace how lesbians and lesbianism was and is depicted on screen, mainstream enough for these movies to be made but still, often, lurking in the shadows of low culture pulp. 

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This archive’s aim is to catalog films that overtly depict lesbianism on screen in a variety of ways. While I love many films that rely on implicit queerness (A League of Their Own will always have my heart), the goal of this project is canonical and undeniable lesbianism. Thus, while these films may depict queerness in general, they also include lesbians specifically, which is why I focus on the term lesbian.