Past event
Fond of Little Tunes: Homosexuality and Music in Hollywood Cinema Talk by Professor Richard Dyer and Scottish book launch for The Richard Dyer Reader - Free - please register via eventbrite link
Writer Richard Dyer will be in St Andrews on 15 November for the Scottish launch of The Richard Dyer Reader, a book recently published by BFI/Bloomsbury and co-edited by Glyn Davis and Jaap Kooijman. Richard will be delivering a lecture with the title ‘Fond of Little Tunes: Homosexuality and Music in Hollywood Cinema.'
There is a long history in the West of associating male homosexuality with femininity and music, and especially with the development of certain kinds of blurry, fluid, sensual classical music in the nineteenth century and beyond. This association with music becomes a way of indicating a character is gay in Hollywood films that could not in so many words or images say he is. This talk will trace this attitude towards music and homosexuality in two films, Rope (Alfred Hitchcock 1948) and Tea and Sympathy (Vincente Minnelli 1956). These were among the first high-profile Hollywood films to deal with male homosexuality, that is, they were about it and sought to keep it at bay, and classical music played a key role in this process.
Richard Dyer is Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at King's College, London, and Professorial Fellow in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. He has been honoured by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies, and Turku and Yale Universities, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. His many books include Stars (1979), White (1997), The Culture of Queers (2002), Nino Rota (BFI, 2010) and In the Space of a Song (2012), and he is the author of BFI Film Classics on Se7en (1999), Brief Encounter (2002, 2015) and La Dolce Vita (2017).
Copies of The Richard Dyer Reader will be on sale at the event, thanks to the support of Toppings and Co!