From Europe with Pride: Heritage, Community and Queer Moves

This paper takes Pride (2014) as a focal point for a discussion of a popular European cinema that looks back on key moments in the twentieth-century political past(s) through the re-enactment of queer scenarios of activism and resistance. My contention is that, as significant as identity politics is the notion of movement itself. Pride ’s intersectional retro-politics injects queer moves into heritage cinema, literally including musical moments of (camp) dance and song that dislodge characters from constraining social spaces and sedimented subjectivities. I look at Pride alongside other examples of new heritage filmmaking through their use of the movement-image (Deleuze) to retrieve the memory of political moments in history through queer moves. Encounters set to music underscore the road trip of a Swiss feminist journalist and her team of radio broadcasters adrift in the Portuguese Carnation Revolution in Les Grandes Ondes (a l’ouest)/Longwave (2013); out-of-step punk musical performances punctuate a queer coming-of-age girl narrative set in the 1980s in El Calentito (2005); dance scenes of queer female eroticism derail heteronormative trajectories of marriage and family in Anni felici/Those Happy Years (2013) and La Belle saison/Summertime (2015), two stories that intersect with the international women’s liberation movement in the 1970s. These films suggest a European heritage cinema as interzone (Randall Halle, 2014). I explore the ways in which these films eschew nostalgia via the stress on movement, queer performativity and the possibility of (not yet formed) communities. By retrieving Pride in (and for) a broader European cinematic context, this paper makes a move towards a reading of the film’s intersectional politics as a timely response to the incompleteness of the European social project of integration.

This paper takes Pride (2014) as a focal point for a discussion of a popular European cinema that looks back on key moments in the twentieth-century political past(s) through the re-enactment of queer scenarios of activism and resistance. My contention is that, as significant as identity politics is the notion of movement itself. Pride's intersectional retro-politics injects queer moves into heritage cinema, literally including musical moments of (camp) dance and song that dislodge characters from constraining social spaces and sedimented subjectivities. I look at Pride alongside other examples of new heritage filmmaking through their use of the movement-image (Deleuze) to retrieve the memory of political moments in history through queer moves. Encounters set to music underscore the road trip of a Swiss feminist journalist and her team of radio broadcasters adrift in the Portuguese Carnation Revolution in Les Grandes Ondes (à l'ouest)/ Longwave (2013); out-of-step punk musical performances punctuate a queer coming-of-age girl narrative set in the 1980s in El Calentito (2005); dance scenes of queer female eroticism derail heteronormative trajectories of marriage and family in Anni felici/Those Happy Years (2013) and La Belle saison/ Summertime (2015), two stories that intersect with the international women's liberation movement in the 1970s. These films suggest a European heritage cinema as interzone (Randall Halle, 2014). I explore the ways in which these films eschew nostalgia via the stress on movement, queer performativity and the possibility of (not yet formed) communities. By retrieving Pride in (and for) a broader European cinematic context, this paper makes a move towards a reading of the film's intersectional politics as a timely response to the incompleteness of the European social project of integration. -Sara Ahmed, 'Orientations. Toward a Queer Phenomenology' (GLQ, 2006) The warm critical reception and instant cultural resonance garnered by the film Pride (Warchus, 2014) upon its opening in UK cinemas in September 2014 1 mark a shift in the way British cinema looks back at the past to engage with political histories.
If the 1990s debates had read the British period film largely through the aesthetic and political vacuum of nostalgia, Pride actively places the political past within lived memory at the heart of its thematic concerns and in the centre of the frame. Not only this, but the story of solidarity between the London based 'Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners' group and a Welsh rural mining community threatened by pit closures is enplotted through ample doses of comedy and popular music; Pride thus transformed a little-known episode in the archives of the mining strikes of 1984-5 into what Ben Walters, writing in Sight and Sound, called a 'feelgood treatise on intersectionality' (2014b). And yet, the kind of intersectionality this period's comedy celebrates is less obviously concerned with the complexity of queer social experience than with the figuration of such experience into spaces of encounter which, while not immediately demarcated as queer, prove ripe for potential occupation and remapping. 1 A cursory look at the reviewers covering the film at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014 and in previews in advance of the UK release on 12 September 2014 gives a sense of critics' embrace of the film's narrative nimbleness and emotional authenticity, and its value as a popular film about history addressed to the present. Peter Bradshaw calls it ' an impassioned and lovable film'; Mark Kermode enthusiastically describes being won by its 'spine-tingling charm by the bucket-load'; David Calhoun calls the film 'truly lovely' and writes that while the film is ' defiantly mainstream' it is 'unashamed of shouting about the powers of solidarity, friendship and empathy [and] unafraid to admit that with sticking out your neck comes struggle and sorrow'. Nick Roddick notes the standing ovation at Cannes and argues that the film 'shows a real flair for wrapping character comedy, social history and repeated tugs at the heartstrings'; Robbie Collin notes that in the political climate at the time of the film 'Pride doesn't just feel worthwhile, but essential. It's essential because it's hopeful' (Bradshaw, 2014, Kermode, 2014, Calhoun, 2014, Roddick, 2014, Collin, 2014 Key to Pride's difference is that identity politics are figured through movement itself. Pride opens and closes with scenes of demonstration. In the opening sequence, 20-year-old Joe (George McKay) struggles to join in his first pride march as a decisive step in his route to becoming a gay adult. Joe's first attempt at stepping into the flow of marchers sees him entangled in an awkward dance. Handed over one side of a placard, he nervously protests ('I do not want to be too visible'); when the placard is removed from him, he is left rooted to the ground, motionless against the flow of marchers. Cowed and disoriented, Joe steps out, looking for the safety of the sidewalk, but once there he is thrown off by a homophobic remark by a female passer-by, with which he mechanically agrees-a betrayal of habit. Both on the occupied pavement and on the retreat offered by the sidewalk, Joe feels out of step. Yet it is the improvised chant in support of the miners' strikes that prompts him to step back in, joining the brisk-paced marchers Mark (Ben Schnetzer) and Mike (Joseph Gilgun).
In the opening credits, Mark has already been introduced as the opposite of Joe. Out and proud, Mark takes abuse in his stride, talks back, walks tall and leads the march fearlessly. Mark is unafraid of taking sudden changes in direction-out-of-the-blue he suggests that they rally behind the miners, much to the initial resistance of his comrade in arms. This forward-moving attitude will, little by little, rub off on Joe, up to the festive ending. In the joyous unity march that closes the film, Joe responds to Mike's good-humoured teasing with a 'shut up and march' while confidently lifting his side of the banner up, walking proof of how far he has come. These two complementary scenes bookend a film in which the historical difficulty of social progress is trumped by irresistible figures of movement. The miners' strike that provides the backstory was sealed with political defeat, whereas the advancement of equal rights for LGBTQ individuals became substantially stunted in the 1980s. Undermined by both neoconservative policy (notably the infamous Section 28 of the Local Government Act passed under Margaret Thatcher in 1988, which prohibited councils from supporting LGBTQ citizens and fostering inclusive education programmes) and the social panic surrounding the HIV/AIDS crisis, by the end of the 1980s the gay community in Britain was doubly vulnerable as a key victim of the epidemic and as target of social hate (Kollman and Waites, 2011 In what follows, I trace tropes of movement across fiction films in which, as it (quite literally) happens in Pride's opening scene, political consciousness follows from performative gestures in unlikely directions. By looking at Pride as part of a broader canvas of period films committed to a queer reading of late 20th-century political histories in Western Europe, I want to explore the implications of the words by Sara Ahmed invoked at the start of this article: looking back potentially means going astray-i.e. engaging in forms of deviation that can be seen as both politically meaningful and historically consequential. Writing from a phenomenological perspective, Ahmed explores sexual orientation as it manifests in the body's situatedness in larger spatial structures; bodies are shaped by sedimented histories, 'which they perform in their comportment, their posture, and their gestures ' (2006: 552). Ahmed sees orientation as a matter of tendencies nurtured through the repetition of gestures; the continuous re-arranging the body in space, of following directions or being directed. The present holds nevertheless the potential of changing directions, which may affect the future: 'going astray, getting lost, or even becoming queer ' (2006: 554). This 'becoming queer' (as opposed to the event of ' coming out', conventionally addressed to a heterosexual audience and made meaningful in relation to heterosexual spaces) expresses a different relation to spatial and temporal coordinates, suggesting everyday deviations from tendencies sedimented through time, and from pre-determined postures and lines of movement given by the objects that surround us.
Such deviations are at odds with the narrative habits of a middlebrow heritage cinema in which, as I have claimed elsewhere (Vidal, 2016)  It is my contention, however, that through its tropes of movement Pride re-orients the British heritage film-but this is not an isolated move. In two separate pieces  (Gutiérrez, 2003) and Les Grandes Ondes (à l'ouest)/Longwave (Baier, 2013) are invested in queer moves that alter the way we remember, as well as the usability of political memories in the present tense. Although this sample can be hardly considered representative of the diversity of LGBTQ period filmmaking at the popular end, as a group these films suggest a move towards a queer historical-spatial imaginary that requires interrogation outside the vertical histories of nation. In the sections that follow, I connect this 'becoming queer' with a move towards becoming European. Through figures of movement and encounter, I look for cinematic moments in which non-normative communities become visible through bodily re-alignments that queer the past.

Figures of Movement and Queer Encounters in Pride
More reformist than revolutionary, the heritage film has often evoked, through the topographical frames and structures of feeling of historical melodrama, the slowness in the political advancement of minority subjects (Pidduck, 2004: 16). Off (Herman, 1996), or the female factory workers in Made in Dagenham (Cole, 2010), two working-class-oriented comedy dramas with which Pride bears comparison (Griffiths, 2016: 604). By virtue of its affiliation to a longer genre narrative and a welldefined British iconography and tone, Pride performs as a heritage film, containing any political dissonance within consensual memory.
In this regard, Pride suggests a return of the heritage film to the mode of the movement-image. My retrieving of Gilles Deleuze's concept in this context needs some qualification: after all, the action-oriented cinema with which the movementimage is associated would seem at odds with the potential of (micro-)movements that inform Ahmed's phenomenological approach to orientation, for orientations 'take time ' (2006: 554). Contemporary approaches to the queer moving image have instead delved into the temporal interstices where queer experience is located to redefine notions of history and becoming outside and against a heteronormative episteme. 2 And yet, the relationship between these popular films and the archive of queer histories that inspires them can be most productively envisaged in the spatial Vidal: From Europe with Pride 8 created by the editing of the number, with a stress on reactions shots, shows this audience responding in different ways. Dislodged from their sedimented subjectivities the men finally, albeit timidly, partake in the musical moment by standing up and clapping to Jonathan (see Figures 1-3).
Likewise, another musical moment staged in the same space-a spontaneous women-led, join-in sing-along of the classic anthem Bread and Roses-makes for a  as ' a seam so distinctive that any miner anywhere would recognise it', he adds. Cliff's story generates a low-key moment of political pedagogy nevertheless infused with class pride. This invisible thread of commonality and pride is also retrospectively queer, since Cliff will disclose his true sexual orientation to Hefina in the final act.

Disorientation and the Queer Interzone
This disclosure does not fundamentally alter their relationship (movingly, she had known all along) but reveals to the spectator another invisible fault joining both communities. Both a material reality and a topographical index, the Atlantic fault in Cliff's story is simultaneously a transparent metaphor for class unity across national borders and a synecdoche for the film as a queer interzone (see Figure 4).    The opening sequence uses a jerky zoom shot to propel Sara inwards into a world of queer sensations that hits her as soon as she enters the underground bar El Calentito it attests to the ways in which increasingly queer festivals affiliated to cinephile institutions attempt to serve a broader constituency than their primary LGBTQ audiences (Damiens, 2018: 2). By its very nature as a space for the negotiation between competing representations of history towards consensual images and narratives, the queer heritage film operates, as much queer cinema does, at the intersection of various circuits of consumption and diverse regimes of cultural valuation (Damiens, 2018: 6).
It is this in-between position that makes queer cinema operate as an interzone, allowing for deviant performances of community, family and the couple to become and give separated individuals a sense of possible community' (Halle, 2014: 13).

Going Astray and Reading Queerly
If the consideration of film as a queer interzone opens up spaces for encounters across diverse localities, it also requires that we think beyond the limitations of a politics of visibility, and into the possibility of reading the past queerly, in order to expand the political frame. Sudeep Dasgupta and Mireille Rosello have argued For the metropolitan queer activists, the road trip to Wales works as a frontier, an act of crossing into another, and implicitly less civilised, country. In Longwave,

Vidal: From Europe with Pride 22
the Swiss radio journalists and their sidekick, the impassive sound engineer, take to the road across Portugal, a country they perceive as exotic (a public service announcement by the +SSR calls it a 'less developed people than us, but nevertheless charming, 'sympathique'). Political engagement, as imagined by these comedies, is never straight, but rather enabled by accident and chance: in Pride, in order to extend their solidarity to another oppressed group bypassing the union's channels of communication, the London activists randomly choose a place on the map.
In Longwave, Julie (Valérie Donzelli) and Cauvin (Michel Vuillermoz) alongside Bob, the sound engineer (Patrick Lapp) descend on Portugal with the mission to gather evidence of social progress resulting from the wealthier country's generous sponsorship. They find none. It is however April 1974, and the Swiss reporters land in the middle of a revolution whose early signs, big and small (e.g. briefcases being passed on under the table in local eating places, a tank in the middle of the road), they comically miss. Swiss filmmaker Lionel Baier describes Longwave as the second instalment of a projected tetralogy set on the four cardinal points of Europe, following his earlier feature Comme des voleurs (à l'est) (Stealth, 2006), which featured gay identity themes (not present in Longwave) in a plot involving a road trip across Poland.
Baier 5 notes that the tetralogy is planned as a 'sort of affective cartography of the relations between Europeans' (Baier, 2013a; translation mine), which he expects to continue with features set in the North (Scotland) and in the South (Italy) which, depending on the political situation, 'will be made as comedies, drama or documentaries' (Baier, 2013a LGBTQ film festivals and received coverage by LGBTQ outlets. regime's clad-in-black security forces, in an extended musical sequence featuring a dance confrontation between the two groups (see Figure 14).
In Longwave the revolution comes into being in a third act in which the ' characters come together and look in the same direction-it is then that, suddenly, they see the revolution' (Baier, 2013b;translation mine); this staging of the Carnation Revolution is as naïve in style as it is awry in intention. Disengaged from national alignments, the revolution unfolds as an act of imagination and erotic liberation consummated through a night of group sex involving Julie, the older Bob, the younger Pelé and a set of assorted Portuguese revolutionaries. The comic rendering of local political history once more functions as an interzone, through a revolutionary imagination that is inclusive and distinctively queer (see Figure 15). The film's playfulness is not  By placing Pride in a European perspective, I have tried to identify and problematise the return of queer histories as consensual memory. This critical move is nonetheless prompted by the desire to look at the ways queer popular cinema speaks of creative and institutional gestures towards a Europeanised imagination, binding spectators in different localities. If the interzone emerges, as proposed by Halle, as a topographical designator for an evolving European cinematic apparatus, that is, a set of production, social and textual relations geared towards the performative process of community formation (2014: 9), the queer moves of the heritage film may be one of the most dynamic steps yet towards the revitalization of the very idea of European cinema.