With its double-take-inducing title, filmmaker Caroline Berler does not aspire to be the Saphhic equivalent of Vito Russo's classic The Celluloid Closet (book and film adaptation). One will not find excavations deep in motion-picture history; no life and career of silent filmmaker Dorothy Arzner, or even the 1954 gender-bending western Johnny Guitar. But as a more or less contemporary survey of lesbians on film—especially in scripted-narrative films made by lesbians—it succeeds as a well-paced and informative hour.
There is a sort-of salute to a pre-existing horror subgenre of lesbian-vampire movies (too few examples cited for the fandom, mainly 1970's The Vampire Lovers). More typical of mainstream cinema were pictures such as The Children's Hour (1961), The Fox (1967), or The Killing of Sister George (1968), with being queer and female as a state of unremitting misery, curable only by death.
Notably, males (presumably straight ones) directed all these, but with the experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer in the 1970s new horizons opened. Hammer describes her own surprise when a male film-festival audience reacted enthusiastically to her 16mm Dyketactics (1974).
Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames (1983), Donna Deitch's Desert Hearts (1985), and Maria Maggenti's The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love (1995) are also cited as important works, though Robert Towne's widely-released (via Warner Brothers) Personal Best (1982) just winds up a fleet footnote. There are also discussions on the 1994 Rose Troche comedy Go Fish and the Lisa Cholodenko-directed High Art, from 1998, as two crossover pictures whose matter-of-fact plotlines did not rotate around novelty gender switches or agonized coming-out crises.
By the close, we are seeing the gay female experience through the lenses of Asian-Americans (Vicky Du and her short "Gaysians") and even Iranian immigrants (Desiree Akhavan's feature Appropriate Behavior). Interviewees here include critic B. Ruby Rich, folklorist/author Kay Turner, L-Word producer Rose Troche. Inclusivity-minded collections and cinema studies institutions should take note, and perhaps build some shopping lists based on the titles mentioned. Buyers should know of raw language and one explicit nude love scene (via Chantal Ackermann). Recommended. Aud: C, P.