Dorothy Arzner's 'The Wild Party' (1929) has been reclaimed for a lesbian cinematic canon, but it is only relatively recently that scholars have engaged more directly with the homoerotics of Arzner's films, and the question of the representability of female homosexuality in late 1920s Hollywood classical cinema. This essay frames its engagement with these concerns in terms of 'The Wild Party's generic history. Often claimed as instituting a new lesbian genre, the all-female college film, 'The Wild Party's innovations can be more persuasively traced to its subtle transformation of an older, nearly exhausted genre: the flapper film. Expanding the film's generic antecedents to consider the flapper as a discursive figure of 1920s American culture, I situate 'The Wild Party' within developing modern female kinaesthetics and spectatorships, during a period in which Hollywood was also systematizing its commodification of femininity and the production of heterosexual romance narratives. If, as Patricia White has convincingly claimed, the representation of female homosexuality in Hollywood film is more often veiled by 'the public sexualization of the female body', then in the case of 'The Wild Party' it is the excessively feminine and kinetic bodies of the flapper that screen - that is, both project and hide from view - lesbian desire as a new form of cinematic knowledge and pleasure. Rather than isolating certain scenes for their lesbian subtext or their resistance to a contemporary pathologized lesbian reading, I argue that the sexual intelligibility of such scenes is inseparable from the kinetic aesthetics of the flapper that Arzner harnesses to organisze the film's visual schema.

Taking as its starting point a cluster of killings in Auckland in 2003-4, An Ordinary Person investigates and analyses the so-called 'homosexual advance defence' to murder. Interviews with lawyers in the cases, legal academics and a journalist are inter-cut with a stylized dramatization and deconstruction of the homophobic narrative that props up the use of provocation as defence to murder in criminal proceedings.

Released in 1995, 'Safe' (US/UK) seems in many ways radically different from Todd Haynes's earlier work. On one level, the film is a forward-moving story about the increasingly debilitating, unidentified illness of a middle-class, suburban homemaker. Devoid of flashbacks or more avant-garde techniques of narrative disruption or interruption, the film's structure appears deceptively straightforward. Attempting to find a cure for her disease, the central protagonist, Carol White (Julianne Moore), commences a journey that takes her away from her comfortable domestic environs in Los Angeles to a retreat in the desert of New Mexico, where she submits to various New Age-inspired therapies. Despite its apparently conventional content and form, 'Safe' confounded critics with its polysemic openness to multiple interpretations and its refusal to offer audiences any insight into the central protagonist's experience or emotional life.¹ These responses are symptomatic of the film's deployment of seemingly contradictory modes of filmmaking. 'Safe' regularly employs a distanced style of cinematography while constructing sequences that deploy editing techniques ordinarily used to suture viewers into the narrative. The effect of this combination is to withhold the identification with character that such classical techniques conventionally secure, while at the same time foregrounding their usual ideological effects.