Experimental Film And Queer Materiality

"This book shows that experimental cinema revealed a peculiar latency of the modern everyday that can be called queer materiality. Queer materiality designates a sense of queer possibility in modern material culture, which often inspired queer artists and filmmakers to envision wayward bodies and behaviors; it also refers to the way in which sexual and social dissidence was embedded in the objects, technologies, substances, and spaces that make up the hardware of experience. Experimental film offers a rich archive of queer material engagements. This book studies various queer material configurations in the work of well-known filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, or Jack Smith, but it also explores under-recognized figures such as Tom Chomont, Jim Hubbard, Ashley Hans Scheirl or Teo Hernández. Combining history, formal analysis, and theoretical reflection, the book shows how plastics, glitter, mechanical ensembles, urban ruins, garbage, mood-enhancers such as amphetamine, film grain, or noise have been mobilized in the articulation of queerness for the screen. The book's inquiry into the liveliness of matter and into the interface between sexuality and the material world directly resonates with a growing ecological consciousness and with current concerns about the definition and reach of the human in a universe of intricate post-human entanglements"--

Experimental Film and Queer Materiality studies a rich archive of queer material engagements in work by well-known filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, and Jack Smith as well as under-recognized figures such as Tom Chomont, Jim Hubbard, Ashley Hans Scheirl, and Teo Hernández.

An exploration of what experimental cinema was, is, and might become A Companion to Experimental Cinema is a collection of original essays organized around both theoretical and historical issues of concern to film scholars, programmers, filmmakers, and viewers. Newly-commissioned essays written by specialists in the field, along with dialogues conducted with a diverse range of practitioners, focus on core subjects to present an international array of overlapping and contrasting perspectives. This unique text not only provides detailed accounts of particular films and filmmakers, but also discusses new approaches of understanding, characterizing, and shaping experimental cinema. The Companion offers readers an accessible point of entry to the material while seeking to contribute to scholarly debates. Essays explore a wide range of topics within the realm of experimental film, including the shift from traditional biography to broader contexts, the increased attention afforded to local and transnational circuits of exchange, and the deepening of theoretical considerations regarding cultural identity and cinematic aesthetics. Key themes and concepts are inter-woven throughout the text, offering fresh perspectives on experimental cinema’s dialogues with other modes and practices of film and video, its interactions with the non-cinematic arts, its responses to changing technological landscapes, and more. An essential addition to the field, the Companion: Balances introductory summaries and scholarly dialogue with existing literature Explores how the study of experimental cinema can benefit from scholarship in other disciplines Includes numerous analyses of films that are readily available to view via digital media Discusses both canonical and obscure or neglected works Examines the effects of the growing diversification of experimental film scholarship A Companion to Experimental Cinema is a valuable resource for scholars of film studies and art history, curators and programmers, critics and bloggers, filmmakers and artists, and anyone interested in exploring experimental or avant-garde cinema.

Holly Rogers is Senior Lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. Book jacket.

Culture, Space and Power: Blurred Lines collects essays that study contemporary mutations of public and private space in multiple cultural contexts and media from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. The essays range from the general to the specific: the first section will explore how recent trends in globalization, nationalism, city design, and ruralist revival yield particular spatial morphologies. The second part of the volume investigates spaces of privacy and togetherness, including traditional settings for intimacy, such as the home, and enclosure, such as the prison, or the virtual locations created through digital media (cellphones, tablets and computers). At the same time, despite the two-part division into public and private, the volume stresses their connection and interdependency: the extent, that is, to which broader spatial configurations affect private, day-to-day practices and locations.

This book offers an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to Pop art scholarship through a recuperation of popular music into art historical understandings of the movement. Jukebox modernism is a procedure by which Pop artists used popular music within their works to disrupt decorous modernism during the sixties. Artists, including Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol, respond to popular music for reasons such as its emotional connectivity, issues of fandom and identity, and the pleasures and problems of looking and listening to an artwork. When we both look at and listen to Pop art, essential aspects of Pop’s history that have been neglected—its sounds, its women, its queerness, and its black subjects—come into focus.

Auteurism expanded With acclaimed films like Sink or Swim and The Odds of Recovery, Su Friedrich’s body of work stands at the forefront of avant-garde and Queer cinema. Barbara Mennel examines the career of an experimental auteur whose merger of technical innovation and political critique connects with both cinephiles and activists. Friedrich’s integration of cinematic experimentation with lesbian advocacy serves as a beginning rather than an end point of analysis. With that in mind, Mennel provides an essential overview of the filmmaker’s oeuvre while highlighting the defining characteristics of her artistic and political signature. She also situates Friedrich within the cultural, political, and historical contexts that both shape the films and are shaped by them. Finally, Mennel expands our notion of auteurism to include directors who engage in collaborative and creative processes rooted in communities.

The imagined worlds of the cinematic mise-en-scène are rich with textiles: fabrics drape over sets, serve as props, and develop mood and character as dress and décor. A much-needed examination of the cultural and emotional impact of textiles as mediated through cinematic technology, Textiles on Film broadens our understanding of the dynamic relationship between fabric and film. Drawing on scholarship across multiple disciplines and exploring a wide range of films-from lesser-known avant-garde films to big-budget Hollywood productions-this book will inspire scholars and students of film, fashion, and textiles. Close readings of on-screen textiles redirect meaning to that which is often overlooked, including depictions of gender expression, behind-the-scenes labor, and architectural and bodily ornamentation. Attentive to the social nuances of fabrics from polyester to velvet, and to the physical qualities of the textiles themselves, Becky Peterson unearths new possibilities for reading media and textile cultures.