Suspended in History

Abstract

This chapter explores cinema as a place to learn about one’s origins and make sense of one’s position in the world; it opens up an existential problematic by reorienting queer understandings of kinship and genealogy. The past becomes a place for identification and the biopic its cinematic form. Queer filmmakers’ returns to the past are also conditioned by longings for community and lineage. Matthew Mishory’s Delphinium: A Childhood Portrait of Derek Jarman (2009) conditions this chapter’s re-reading of Derek Jarman’s films as taking part in a project of queer genealogy. Mishory, Jarman, and Ken Russell form a lineage of queer filmmakers who look to queers of the past to reimagine that past differently, to re-present it queerly.