The Nun's Story: 'True in its Essentials'

Multiple but ultimately unsanctioned desires brought Fred Zinnemann's film The Nun's Story (1959) into being. The traces of those desires and their abnegation reside both on the level of narrative and, most provocatively, in the visual testimony that the film provides for them. Departing from previous scholarship and exploring the film for its historiographic challenges and spectatorial implications for the gendered and sexualised subject, this essay reaches beyond demonstrating the myriad ways that the Production Code by the late 1950s had trained directors and spectators to find queer sexuality in allusion and subtext. Drawing on psychoanalysis and affect theory, this article examines the reception of Kathryn Hulme's 1956 book on which the film is based as context for the film's subsequent formal production history and cinematic specificities.