Performing Place In French And Italian Queer Documentary Film

This book explores the space of queer documentary through the modernist optic of Marcel Proust’s ‘lieu factice’ (artificial place), a perspective that problematizes the location of place in a post-postmodern world with a dispersed sense of the real. The practice of queer documentary in France and Italy, from the beginning of the new millennium onwards, is seen to re-write the coherence of ‘place’ through a range of emerging queer realities. Proposing the post-queer as a way of contending with the spatial dynamics of these contexts, analysis of key texts positions place as mourned, conceded and intersectional. The performance of place as agency is considered through the notional film, the radical archive of documentary, the enactment of politics, queer indeterminacy and a phenomenology of the object, the frame and queer mobility. The central themes of family, gender, dis/location, in/visibility and re/presentation question blind investment in the integrity of being emplaced.

This edited volume offers a comprehensive understanding of the queer space in tandem with the transforming socio-cultural-political relationships in a country that exhibits diversified shades of ideologies and history – that is, India. The featured essays deal with the presence of queerness in visual media, particularly in films and the digital arena, from multilingual and multicultural perspectives, thus creating an exhaustive discourse encompassing argument and analysis. This book aims to depict the plurality and complexity of the Indian scenario, fostering mass acceptance of queerness, a rare scholastic endeavour.

The Boys in the Band’s debut was revolutionary for its fictional but frank presentation of a male homosexual subculture in Manhattan. Based on Mart Crowley’s hit Off-Broadway play from 1968, the film’s two-hour running time approximates real time, unfolding at a birthday party attended by nine men whose language, clothing, and behavior evoke a range of urban gay “types.” Although various popular critics, historians, and film scholars over the years have offered cursory acknowledgment of the film’s importance, more substantive research and analysis have been woefully lacking. The film’s neglect among academics belies a rich and rewarding object of study. The Boys in the Band merits not only the close reading that should accompany such a well-made text but also recognition as a landmark almost ideally situated to orient us amid the highly complex, shifting cultural terrain it occupied upon its release—and has occupied since. The scholars assembled here bring an invigorating variety of methods to their considerations of this singular film. Coming from a wide range of academic disciplines, they pose and answer questions about the film in remarkably different ways. Cultural analysis, archival research, interviews, study of film traditions, and theoretical framing intensify their revelatory readings of the film. Many of the essays take inventive approaches to longstanding debates about identity politics, and together they engage with current academic work across a variety of fields that include queer theory, film theory, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, and Marxist theory. Addressing The Boys in the Band from multiple perspectives, these essays identify and draw out the film’s latent flashpoints—aspects of the film that express the historical, cinematic, and queer-political crises not only of its own time, but also of today. The Boys in the Band is an accessible touchstone text in both queer studies and film studies. Scholars and students working in the disciplines of film studies, queer studies, history, theater, and sociology will surely find the book invaluable and a shaping influence on these fields in the coming years.

An authoritative reference covering primarily actors, playwrights, directors, styles and movements, companies and organizations.

From Thomas Edison''s first cinematic experiments to contemporary Hollywood blockbusters, Queer Images chronicles the representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer sexualities over one hundred years of American film. The most up-to-date and comprehensive book of its kind, it explores not only the ever-changing images of queer characters onscreen, but also the work of queer filmmakers and the cultural histories of queer audiences. Queer Images surveys a wide variety of films, individuals, and subcultures, including the work of discreetly homosexual filmmakers during Hollywood''s Golden Age; classical Hollywood''s (failed) attempt to purge "sex perversion" from films; the development of gay male camp in Hollywood cinema; queer exploitation films and gay physique films; the queerness of 1960s Underground Film practice; independent lesbian documentaries and experimental films; cinematic responses to the AIDS crisis; the rise and impact of New Queer Cinema; the growth of LGBT film festivals; and how contemporary Hollywood deals with queer issues. This entertaining and insightful book reveals how the meaning of sexual identity—as reflected on the silver screen—has changed a great deal over the decades, and it celebrates both the pioneers and contemporary practitioners of queer film in America. Queer Images is an essential volume for film buffs and anyone interested in sexuality and culture.

Queer Italy is the first multi-methodological inquiry into the historical, political and representational contexts behind the current plea for civil unions that queers advocate in Italy. Concerned with the links between identity, subjectivity and sexuality in Italy, this book opens Italian studies to previously neglected discussion of queer and migrant subjectivities. The author applies Lacanian film analysis and auto-ethnographic passages to question the uses of queer politics in Italy. Accessible and comprehensive, this is an ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses on Italian culture, cultural studies and film studies.

A unique, multidisciplinary encyclopedia covering the impacts that French and American politics, foreign policy, and culture have had on shaping each country's identity. From 17th-century fur traders in Canada to 21st-century peacekeepers in Haiti, from France's decisive role in the Revolutionary War leading to the creation of the United States to recent disagreements over Iraq, France and the Americas charts the history of the inextricable links between France and the nations of the Americas. This comprehensive survey features an incisive introduction and a chronology of key events, spanning 400 years of France's transatlantic relations. Students of many disciplines, as well as the lay reader, will appreciate this comprehensive survey, which traces the common themes of both French policy, language, and influence throughout the Americas and the wide-ranging transatlantic influences on contemporary France.

"Advancing the current state of film audience research and of our knowledge of sexuality in transnational contexts, French and Spanish Queer Film analyses how French LGBTQ films are seen in Spain and Spanish ones in France. Studying films from various genres, the book examines their reception across four languages (Spanish, French, Catalan, English) and engages with participants across a range of digital and physical audience locations. With a particular focus on LGBTQ festivals and on issues relating to LGBTQ experience in both countries, the authors consider issues such as ageing, sense of community and isolation, and the representation of issues affecting trans people. Examining films that chronicle the local (in portraying national and subnational identities) while also addressing foreign audiences, the book draws on a wide sample of individual responses through post-screening questionnaires and focus groups, as well as drawing on the work of professional film critics and online commentators." -- Back cover.