“I made a whole film, Paris Was a Woman, about lesbians in Paris between the wars. Now we have the internet, and the communication on the web, and people can fly places, and you can live anywhere and still connect with other queer people. But back then you lived in Greenwich Village. You lived in the Left Bank of Paris. You lived in San Francisco. It was so hard if you didn’t.”
Such were the reflections of the award-winning director Greta Schiller when I recently got her on the phone to chat about First Run Features’s newly restored version of her landmark documentary Before Stonewall, in theaters this month (June 21st in NYC, June 28th in LA, with a national rollout to follow). Filmed in 1984 with a team that included co-director Robert Rosenberg and research director Andrea Weiss – who would go on to win both an Emmy for her work and Schiller’s heart (the married couple now run Jezebel Productions) – the film contains a treasure chest of revelations to surprise even the most queer history-savvy viewer.
Setting itself apart from the recent slew of films commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, Before Stonewall, as its title implies, follows the years in lesbian and gay history from the turn of the last century up until 1969. Alternating first-person accounts from the homosexual men and women who lived through everything from WWII to McCarthyism, with often startling archival footage (including my favorite – a clip of Roy Cohn seated silently beside McCarthy as he and a fellow congressional homophobe banter about the words “pixie” versus “fairy”), the film is a fascinating glimpse into an era long forgotten, if we were even aware it existed in the first place. Indeed, while the gay rights movement may have been birthed at Stonewall, homosexuality as an actual identity has been around since the First World War.
And though it might seem like a no-brainer to bring the film back for the Stonewall anniversary, Schiller noted that wasn’t the case. “In 2016 I was invited to the Berlin Film Festival – I had also gone to Berlin in 1984 with the film – for a retrospective screening,” the director explained. “It was, like, we have to get a DCP made because that’s what festivals show now. So then I got in contact with the distributor in New York for that – and also reminded them that Stonewall 50 was coming up.” Fortunately, First Run took the bait.
In addition to the stateside screenings, “It’s playing in some cinemas in Spain, and it’s having a rerelease in Germany, I believe,” Schiller continued.“But the thing is that those countries also have their own gay history films now, which is very exciting. That said, in 1991 I moved to England and ended up living there and making movies for twelve years. The gay rights activist group there was called Stonewall. It became a real buzzword, you know?”
Nevertheless, the still busy filmmaker has high hopes that the doc will allow a new generation both here and abroad to find inspiration from the past. “We had a preview screening at NYC’s Quad Cinema and the audience – of whom maybe out of a hundred people ten had seen it before – the reaction was, like, “I have to tell all my friends and family and coworkers to see this movie in the cinema, because it’s just so powerful to see a film like that with others.” I think the word of mouth will be great.”
And Schiller seemed equally enthusiastic about the current projects on her plate. “I’m just finishing a film about an ecological restoration in a thousand hectare reserve in Spain. It’s basically about using the human hand to repair what the human hand has done to the earth. I filmed there for four years. I’m just about done with the edit right now,” she disclosed.
Which doesn’t mean she’s given up mining history for unexplored gems. “We’re also in the initial stages of production – we fundraise and produce at the same time – on a film that was similarly sparked by an event in 1969,” she revealed. “The City College of New York was pretty much a 90% white institution, but it was situated in the middle of Harlem. It was a time of Black Power and Black Empowerment, so black and Puerto Rican students who were on the campus said, “Wait a minute. We’re in the middle of Harlem, this is a high school, this is a public university, it should be serving the needs of the city.” So they took over the campus, and had these demands about diversifying the campus – and they won. The school ended up having open admissions. If you were in the top half of your high school class you could get free tuition at the city university.”
“Within two years they basically turned the university into a majority people of color institution, which it still is. I teach there part-time,” she added. “That student action literally created the whole black and Puerto Rican middle class in New York City. And they just had their 50th reunion, which we filmed for a couple of days. It was just so moving and powerful, so emotional and exciting.” Which could also be said of Before Stonewall.