A QUEER ARGUMENT
 
I know this opens that unwinnable argument about what’s art and what’s not and what’s acceptable by the community and who should decide and should the taxpayers fund it and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Anyway. But. Here goes.

 Last week Lord Mayor Robert Doyle opened the Queer Film Festival. That’s its official name but if a heterosexual used the word ‘queer’ to describe a homosexual person they would be accused of being homophobic. And likely to be reported to some anti-discrimination board or licensing authority.
 
Likewise if somebody twisted the words of Queer Film Festival director Lisa Daniel who said: ‘There’s nothing like a gay incest storyline with stupidly handsome men to cause a bit of a spike in ticket sales.’
 
Imagine if I used an incest theme to encourage ticket sales for a play or a movie? There is nothing funny about incest, gay or straight. Handsome or not.
 
I should point out that the Melbourne City Council and the Yarra Council and the Government-funded and grandly named Australian Centre for the Moving Image have all kicked in cash or support for the Queer Festival.
 
Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld would say.
 
But I wonder how war veterans and feminist groups would feel about a film called Bamboo House of Dolls. It is set in World War II with the Japanese slaughtering Chinese and then taking Chinese women and Caucasian nurses to a prison camp.
 
The blurb says: The prison is a cess-pit of sexploitation, gratuitous nudity and catfights in the shower, as the nymphets are bound and whipped, forced into slavery and sex, and tortured by the SM-obsessed lesbian prison warden’.
 
You want to make movies like this? You want to watch them?   If you are an adult, that’s fine.
 
But should taxpayers fund them? I’ll admit I am ambivalent.  Film Commissions, helping the Australian film industry, should be independent. Grants should not be at the whim of somebody’s religious or political bent.
 
Some people are objecting to Film Victoria because it is putting money into the bodies in the barrels Snowtown murders movie.
 
And I bet there was taxpayer money in Wolf Creek probably the most brutal and ghastly film that I did not manage to sit through. Only a movie but it made me feel like throwing up.
 
It’s a tough one. And I know the first rule of theatre is: Suspend disbelief.
 
But should you pay for it?
 
Thursday, March 4, 2010

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2010