Trans cinema is not a new thing exactly. We've had films popping up since at least 1914 textually, and explicitly since at least Glen or Glenda came out in 1953. The (probable) first ever trans novel came out in 1928 (Orlando by Virginia Woolf).
This blog will be about two books (a first!). One is a much more academic study of trans film images and the other is an overarching history of them.
Shimmering Images is at times extremely dense. Steinbock goes into great detail to dissect obscure trans film (or other sorts of images) for the shimmering quality they attribute to trans existence. They make use of the original methods of physically splicing camera film in order to make seemingly impossible transitions between figures in the first third of the book. I found this part to be the most interesting, particularly the section on Lili Elbe.
While not everyone is a film scholar, I do think this book has many interesting pieces of art, film, and literature that would be of interest to anyone seeking those sorts of trans images. Dandy Dust, Happy Birthday Marsha, Yishay Garbasz's Becoming, and Robert Hayden's poem "Monet's Waterlilies" are some that interested me.
On the other side of things we have Corpses, Fools and Monsters by Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay. This is a much, much more casual read. Somewhat oddly, the authors make value judgments of the films they talk about, "It is difficult for any issue film … to escape the limitations of their genre, and The Christine Jorgensen Story fails as both art and document of Jorgensen's transition" (27). There are also a few curious typos (most notably, Marsha P. Thompson, who is perhaps one of the most famous American trans women alongside Christine Jorgensen and her fellow activist Sylvia Rivera. Her surname is also Johnson, not Thomson).
This book, as may well be assumed, has quite a number of interesting films to look into such as Funeral Parade of Roses, Ma Vie en Rose, and A Trans with a Camera. But I am not a film critic. Watch those movies yourself. I am however, driven by small lapses in information.
On page 79 a section entitled "Dog Day Afternoon: A Sleazy Littlejohn Becomes a Robin Hood at the Movies" begins. It is a section about the film Dog Day Afternoon, based on the robbery of a Chase bank in Brooklyn by John Wojtowicz. He ostensibly robbed the bank in order to pay for Liz Eden's, his at the time girlfriend, bottom surgery. Corpses, Monsters, and Fools says that Eden moved out of NYC and up to Rochester. It doesn't specify a year. In my preparation for the Möbius Library exhibit, I thought including the year she moved to Rochester would be a nice touch. As of writing this blog, the year is still unknown. Basically every article says that she moved to Rochester "at some point" and that she "may have legally remarried and divorced". No article gives a date for the former and the latter usually points to a Los Angles Times Associated Press article from 1987 which only says that, "[Eden].. legally married someone else, and then divorced." Not very specific, is it?
Alright, so I thought, how hard can it be to figure this out.
Rather! said most every source. Articles are semi-contradictory, some have dubious images, some don't source their information well if at all. The closer to the 70s and 80s a source is the more mind-rending it is to see how trans women were discussed. I've requested magazines (mostly from various pornographic periodicals, Eden only seemed to directly interact with those while mainstream publications would just write what they wanted to about her) from ILL only to have the requests canned because an executive order prevents the shipping in of items from outside the country. I've even done what I can to locate people in Rochester who might've just know Eden personally. I've stopped short of booking a train to NYC to see her papers in an archive myself, and even that is a tenuous stopping point. Who knows what will come by winter.
All that said, I am deeply invested in Eden's life and have learned far more than I anticipated. I hope to eventually clear this lapse from the record and have a solid date for her relocation to Rochester.
The paths you'll find in books from English studies collections in medieval libraries at universities near the Finger Lakes are very strange indeed.
Eliza Steinbock, Shimmering Images: trans cinema, embodiment, and the aesthetics of change. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Koller-Collins Collection: PN1995.9.T684 S74 2019
Caden Mark Gardner & Willow Catelyn Maclay, Corpses, Fools and Monsters: the history and future of transness in cinema. London: Repeater, 2024. Koller-Collins Collection PN1995.9.T684 G37 2024
