Queer Early Cinema SHANE BROWN Independent scholar Tere is a tendency to think of “queer cinema” as a relatively recent phenomenon within flm history. In 1996, Geofrey Nowell-Smith described queer cinema as bringing together “in a single feld a large number of manifestations of homosexuality in the cinema, from explicit to implicit, from pornography to the most respectable mainstream, all of which could be seen as in some way challenging the heterosexual norm” (Nowell-Smith 1996, p. 756.) Tis description, published in Te Oxford History of World Cinema is a useful starting point in a discussion of what queer cinema is or can be, but note that, in the 1996 edition, it is found under the heading of “New Concepts in Cinema.” Te term “queer cinema” might have been coined relatively recently and therefore considered “new,” and its defnition has been revised, refned, and expanded considerably over the past couple of decades so that it now includes all depictions of otherness within representations of gender and sexuality, but queer images themselves are not new at all, and can be traced back to the earliest days of cinema, more than a hundred years before Nowell-Smith’s defnition was published. Tis entry provides a brief examination of queerness on screen during the earliest decades of flmmaking, from silent cinema, through the introduction of sound, and up to the implementation of the production code in 1934, which roughly coincides with the rise of Hitler in Germany, allowing for an appropriate punctuation point in the cinema of both America and Europe. In 1894 or early 1895, a flm was made at the Edison Studios which has become known as the Dickson Experimental Sound Film. Tis used the kinetophone system in an early attempt to marry flm with recorded sound. Te flm, directed by William Kennedy Dickson, is just seventeen seconds in length, and consists of a single shot of a violin- ist playing into a large recording horn while two men dance together, as a couple, to the music. Vito Russo, in his seminal book Te Celluloid Closet, incorrectly claims that the flm was entitled Te Gay Brothers, and suggests that the two men dancing were an early representation of homosexuality on screen (Russo 1987, p. 6). However, it is likely that the reason for two men dancing rather than a mixed sex couple has nothing to do with sexuality at all. Anthony Slide states that the “two men provided the movement for the moving picture not because they were sexually attracted to each other but simply because there were no female employees at the Edison laboratory” (Slide 1999, p. 25). As with the discussion of queer images from all eras of flm, the intention of flmmakers is not necessarily as important as the way (some or all) audiences interpret what they are seeing. To a modern audience, Dickson’s flm is queer whether that was the inten- tion or not for it upsets the norms of both gender and sexuality. Tese few seconds of Te International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication. Karen Ross (Editor-in-Chief), Ingrid Bachmann, Valentina Cardo, Sujata Moorti, and Marco Scarcelli (Associate Editors). © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/9781119429128.iegmc175