The 1994 film Go Fish opens in a classroom where the teacher asks the class to make a list of “women that you think are lesbians or that you know are lesbians.” The answers she gets are everything from Eve to Virginia Woolf to Margaret, Dennis the Menace’s next-door neighbor. One student then asks why they are making the list. The teacher responds: “Throughout lesbian history there has been serious lack of evidence that’ll tell us what these women’s lives were truly about.… lesbian lives and lesbian relationships, they barely exist on paper, and it is with that in mind and understanding that meaning and the power of history that we begin to want to change history.”
On Saturday night Yale Film Archive gave its audience insight as to how Go Fish did just that. A new digital restoration of the Rose Troche-directed film was presented in celebration of LGBTHistory Month as part of the YFA’s Cinemix series. The crowd at the Humanities Quadrangle was also treated to a Q&A afterward with the film’s co-writer, co-producer, and lead actor Guinevere Turner (who plays Max in the film) moderated by Justin LaLiberty, director/curator at Cinematographe, a sub-label of Vinegar Syndrome, which recently released a new Blu-ray edition of the film in celebration of its 30th anniversary.
