Actualités

With a title that translates as Neighbourhood of Ill Repute, and featuring a bisexual love triangle, the 1971 film wowed festivals – before disappearing without trace. Now it’s been rediscovered – by accident

Nobody used the phrase “having a moment” back in 1971. Had they done, it could have been applied without contradiction to developments in queer cinema. It was four years after the Sexual Offences Act 1967 had partially decriminalised sex between consenting men over 21 in England and Wales, and two years after the Stonewall uprising in New York City. Queer desire was everywhere: in Sunday Bloody Sunday, Death in Venice, Pink Narcissus, the trans classic Women in Revolt, the lesbian horror Daughters of Darkness, the gay porn landmark Boys in the Sand and Rosa von Praunheim’s droll and provocative It Is Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives. Fassbinder, who could cough out movies in his sleep,...