Michael Koresky holds roles as senior curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image, college teacher, and collaborator with the Criterion Collection. He examines films from Hollywood's Golden Age that contain queer subtexts, including titles by Alfred Hitchcock and works related to Lillian Hellman. He situates those films within the constraints of the Hays Code, noting that explicit queer content was prohibited and filmmakers used coded means to convey identity. He argues that reassessing these films without modern superiority reveals them as bracing and vital, helping viewers better understand past and present queer experiences.
Michael Koresky has already had a busy year. In April, the filmmaker and movie critic was promoted to senior curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image, the prestigious institution in Queens, New York; he was previously the museum's editorial director. He still teaches college and works with the Criterion Collection, the much-beloved video label that restores and distributes important films from both the past and present.
Too often we've looked back at these movies from a contemporary vantage, as though trying to make them out through an obscuring lattice of dead tree branches, Koresky writes in the book. Clean out the bramble of the past and whatever superiority we may feel as modern viewers and these movies reveal themselves as bracing and vital, allowing us to see our pasts, and therefore ourselves, more clearly.
Collection
[
|
...
]