RYAN GILBEY, IT USED TO BE WITCHES: UNDER THE SPELL OF QUEER CINEMA

https://notesonfilm1.com/2025/08/21/jose-arroyo-in-conversation-with-ryan-gilbey-on-it-used-to-be-witches-under-the-spell-of-queer-cinema/ Sometimes you read a new book and love it so much you want to speak to its author and find out more. This is what happened to me in relation to Ryan Gilbey’s IT USED TO BE WITCHES: UNDER THE SPELL OF QUEER CINEMA. What I liked most is that I learned a lot from it – all these new films and filmmakers I’d never heard of – and that it was great fun to read: Ryan’s got an enviable turn of phrase. If the narrative is posited as a process of discovery, the book also has an interesting mode of narration: it’s partly personal, sometimes he writes of himself in the third person in a way that reminds me of Èdouard Louis’ novels . This has the effect of delineating events whilst also questioning them and his own perspective on them. It’s a book that interrogates its own delineations with a loose structure that seems to flow from one filmmaker to another, very inclusive, sensitive to the nuances of race and gender and with a spotlight on trans cinema -- with a British perspective but on world –rather than Anglo-American – cinema; and with the big names (Almodóvar, Haynes, Van Sant), not quite absent but playing a supporting role to filmmakers like: Jenni Olson, Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, Elizabeth Purchell, Campbell X, Isabel Sandoval and others. I think it a landmark book, one of interest not only to those wanting to know more about, cinema and/or queer but also by anyone interested in the current cultural landscape. It seems to succeed in doing what I previously thought undoable, which is to get enough of a grip on the increasing and seemingly ceaseless stream of new queer works in order to lay out a landscape whilst offering multiple, tentative, questioning perspectives on it. A landmark book by a wonderful writer. We discuss all of this and more in the podcast below: