Ultimate Guide To Lesbian & Gay Film and Video

Editor Olson, former codirector of the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (SFILGFF), has compiled entries on more than 2000 shorts and feature films, most of which have been shown at the festival since its inception in 1977. Arranged alphabetically by title, entries open with sufficient videographic information?director, producer, year and country of production, language, running time, format, and U.S. and U.K. distributors?followed by descriptive/critical text ranging from one sentence to half a page. A director index, a variety of subject indexes, and directories to the films’ commercial distributors and mail-order home-video distributors provide ample access to both the entries and the films themselves. Additional sections offer a history of the SFILGFF, advice on programming a festival, and queer critics’ and directors’ top ten lists. Though the texts tend to be too short and more critical information would be welcome (including lists of award winners), the total package is entertaining and informative. And it will prove invaluable to the student of contemporary film or gay studies as the only source of reliable information on many of the short films, documentaries, and low-budget features that comprise what has come to be known as the new queer cinema. However, precisely because of these films’ obscurity, the book will be of less use to the general reader looking for something to pick up at the corner video store. All academic libraries and larger film and gay studies collections in public libraries will be best served by this current work, while general public collections should stock Raymond Murray’s more mainstream Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video. (Eric Bryant, “Library Journal”)