Beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing through the first decade of the twenty-first century, A... more Beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing through the first decade of the twenty-first century, American independent cinema began to engage the taboo of intergenerational intimacy as its animating provocation and ready-made narrative solution. This chapter analyzes two films associated with the New Queer Cinema that appear to challenge the conservative paradigms of erotic endangerment embodied by these films. By offering portraits of precocious adolescents whose shattering encounters with sexuality defy the norms of pedophilic representation, both L.I.E. (Michael Cuesta, 2001), and Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004) mine the potential of queer sexuality to transform dominant narratives of violation into ambiguous dramas of sexual awakening and kinship. Yet, in spite of New Queer Cinema’s promise to offer an alternative to the standard depiction of the monstrous pedophile, these texts fail to embody a genuinely counter-cinema practice, relying instead on a paradigm of “pedo-normativ...
Desolating any luminous conditions except those of functionality, 24/7 is part of an immense inca... more Desolating any luminous conditions except those of functionality, 24/7 is part of an immense incapacitation of visual experience.-Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and The Ends of SleepShot en plein air with a stationary camera, the earliest films of the aptly named Lumiere brothers enthralled their audiences with an illuminated chunk of the world transformed through framing, magnification and reproduction. Of course, centuries before this well-worn myth of modernity, Plato's allegory of the cave-in which bound prisoners misinterpret shadows on the wall for reality-also pivots on an effect of light. Suggesting the illusory nature of representation, as well as the impossibility of a direct encounter with truth, Plato used the crowd's hostility towards enlightenment as a justification for autocratic rule. Centuries later, film theorists employed the same allegory to explain the dynamics of film spectatorship, comparing the audience's supposed inability to distinguish t...
This essay examines the uncanny role of black performer Dorothy Dean in Andy Warhol's 1965 film M... more This essay examines the uncanny role of black performer Dorothy Dean in Andy Warhol's 1965 film My Hustler.
This essay looks at Kenneth Anger's seminal avant-garde film Fireworks (1947) in relation to the ... more This essay looks at Kenneth Anger's seminal avant-garde film Fireworks (1947) in relation to the zoot suit riots in Los Angeles, as well as some Italian Neorealist films.
This manifesto, published in the Summer 2016 Artforum, investigates why FUCK YOU is such an indis... more This manifesto, published in the Summer 2016 Artforum, investigates why FUCK YOU is such an indispensable survival strategy for feminist and avant-garde artists. Because, let's face it, we live in a world that's so totally fucked that sometimes the only possible response is to acknowledge it with a response of equivalent animosity. Even if it means having to use the F-word (by which I mean feminist).
This essay considers the innovative use of a live radio in Ken Jacobs' experimental film Blonde C... more This essay considers the innovative use of a live radio in Ken Jacobs' experimental film Blonde Cobra (1962).
This essay examines Andy Warhol's little known, sexually explicit film Three. It was published in... more This essay examines Andy Warhol's little known, sexually explicit film Three. It was published in Little Joe.
This essay meditates on the possibility of "cinema beyond cinema" through an investigation of Jam... more This essay meditates on the possibility of "cinema beyond cinema" through an investigation of James Turrell's Meeting, a site-specific installation that has been located at PS1/MoMA since the fall of 1986, as well as several other of Turrell's artworks. Through its invitation for an audience to watch moving images famed by a rectangular interruption in the wall's architecture, I argue that Meeting is both akin to, and a continuum with, forms of expanded cinema. Dispensing with all of the elements that traditionally comprise cinema's technological apparatus other than the use of a frame, lighting, and seats (obviously no camera, film, or projector have been employed in its construction), Meeting is nonetheless, profoundly cinematic. By close reading the piece's site-specific architecture and relational aesthetics, I will analyze Meeting within a tradition of expanded cinema that depends as much (if not more) on the construction of alternative forms of relationality and interaction than it does on technological innovation.
Flesh Cinema explores the groundbreaking representation of the body in American experimental film... more Flesh Cinema explores the groundbreaking representation of the body in American experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s.
This essay thinks about the relationship between queer sex, capitalism, and race in Andy Warhol's... more This essay thinks about the relationship between queer sex, capitalism, and race in Andy Warhol's sexually explicit film Couch (1964).
Jonathan Glazer's gorgeous science fiction film Under the Skin stars Scarlett Johannson as an ali... more Jonathan Glazer's gorgeous science fiction film Under the Skin stars Scarlett Johannson as an alien who has fallen to earth in order to harvest human male specimens. Ara Osterweil's essay "Under The Skin: The Perils of Becoming Female" interprets this film as an allegory of female sexual subjectivity. Insisting that Under the Skin is one of the most powerful feminist films to emerge in the last decade, Osterweil demonstrates how the film boldly and unapologetically presents insatiable female desire, the thrills and perils of embodiment, and the inevitability of patriarchal violence.
Access Provided by McGill University Libraries at 01/17/12 8: 17PM GMT http://muse. jhu. edu/jour... more Access Provided by McGill University Libraries at 01/17/12 8: 17PM GMT http://muse. jhu. edu/journals/mov/summary/v007/7.1 osterweil. html seems so close to each detail he loses perspective on the whole. One aspect absent from this chapter (and most of the book) is ...
... Inside-out: polymorphous, polyester, Pollyanna. ... In Showgirls, that dance consists of lift... more ... Inside-out: polymorphous, polyester, Pollyanna. ... In Showgirls, that dance consists of lifting a bare-breasted (erect-nippled) woman out of an ex-ploding papier-mâché volcano, a sadomasochistic black leather dance of lesbian eroticism consisting of ...
Beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing through the first decade of the twenty-first century, A... more Beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing through the first decade of the twenty-first century, American independent cinema began to engage the taboo of intergenerational intimacy as its animating provocation and ready-made narrative solution. This chapter analyzes two films associated with the New Queer Cinema that appear to challenge the conservative paradigms of erotic endangerment embodied by these films. By offering portraits of precocious adolescents whose shattering encounters with sexuality defy the norms of pedophilic representation, both L.I.E. (Michael Cuesta, 2001), and Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004) mine the potential of queer sexuality to transform dominant narratives of violation into ambiguous dramas of sexual awakening and kinship. Yet, in spite of New Queer Cinema’s promise to offer an alternative to the standard depiction of the monstrous pedophile, these texts fail to embody a genuinely counter-cinema practice, relying instead on a paradigm of “pedo-normativ...
Desolating any luminous conditions except those of functionality, 24/7 is part of an immense inca... more Desolating any luminous conditions except those of functionality, 24/7 is part of an immense incapacitation of visual experience.-Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and The Ends of SleepShot en plein air with a stationary camera, the earliest films of the aptly named Lumiere brothers enthralled their audiences with an illuminated chunk of the world transformed through framing, magnification and reproduction. Of course, centuries before this well-worn myth of modernity, Plato's allegory of the cave-in which bound prisoners misinterpret shadows on the wall for reality-also pivots on an effect of light. Suggesting the illusory nature of representation, as well as the impossibility of a direct encounter with truth, Plato used the crowd's hostility towards enlightenment as a justification for autocratic rule. Centuries later, film theorists employed the same allegory to explain the dynamics of film spectatorship, comparing the audience's supposed inability to distinguish t...
This essay examines the uncanny role of black performer Dorothy Dean in Andy Warhol's 1965 film M... more This essay examines the uncanny role of black performer Dorothy Dean in Andy Warhol's 1965 film My Hustler.
This essay looks at Kenneth Anger's seminal avant-garde film Fireworks (1947) in relation to the ... more This essay looks at Kenneth Anger's seminal avant-garde film Fireworks (1947) in relation to the zoot suit riots in Los Angeles, as well as some Italian Neorealist films.
This manifesto, published in the Summer 2016 Artforum, investigates why FUCK YOU is such an indis... more This manifesto, published in the Summer 2016 Artforum, investigates why FUCK YOU is such an indispensable survival strategy for feminist and avant-garde artists. Because, let's face it, we live in a world that's so totally fucked that sometimes the only possible response is to acknowledge it with a response of equivalent animosity. Even if it means having to use the F-word (by which I mean feminist).
This essay considers the innovative use of a live radio in Ken Jacobs' experimental film Blonde C... more This essay considers the innovative use of a live radio in Ken Jacobs' experimental film Blonde Cobra (1962).
This essay examines Andy Warhol's little known, sexually explicit film Three. It was published in... more This essay examines Andy Warhol's little known, sexually explicit film Three. It was published in Little Joe.
This essay meditates on the possibility of "cinema beyond cinema" through an investigation of Jam... more This essay meditates on the possibility of "cinema beyond cinema" through an investigation of James Turrell's Meeting, a site-specific installation that has been located at PS1/MoMA since the fall of 1986, as well as several other of Turrell's artworks. Through its invitation for an audience to watch moving images famed by a rectangular interruption in the wall's architecture, I argue that Meeting is both akin to, and a continuum with, forms of expanded cinema. Dispensing with all of the elements that traditionally comprise cinema's technological apparatus other than the use of a frame, lighting, and seats (obviously no camera, film, or projector have been employed in its construction), Meeting is nonetheless, profoundly cinematic. By close reading the piece's site-specific architecture and relational aesthetics, I will analyze Meeting within a tradition of expanded cinema that depends as much (if not more) on the construction of alternative forms of relationality and interaction than it does on technological innovation.
Flesh Cinema explores the groundbreaking representation of the body in American experimental film... more Flesh Cinema explores the groundbreaking representation of the body in American experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s.
This essay thinks about the relationship between queer sex, capitalism, and race in Andy Warhol's... more This essay thinks about the relationship between queer sex, capitalism, and race in Andy Warhol's sexually explicit film Couch (1964).
Jonathan Glazer's gorgeous science fiction film Under the Skin stars Scarlett Johannson as an ali... more Jonathan Glazer's gorgeous science fiction film Under the Skin stars Scarlett Johannson as an alien who has fallen to earth in order to harvest human male specimens. Ara Osterweil's essay "Under The Skin: The Perils of Becoming Female" interprets this film as an allegory of female sexual subjectivity. Insisting that Under the Skin is one of the most powerful feminist films to emerge in the last decade, Osterweil demonstrates how the film boldly and unapologetically presents insatiable female desire, the thrills and perils of embodiment, and the inevitability of patriarchal violence.
Access Provided by McGill University Libraries at 01/17/12 8: 17PM GMT http://muse. jhu. edu/jour... more Access Provided by McGill University Libraries at 01/17/12 8: 17PM GMT http://muse. jhu. edu/journals/mov/summary/v007/7.1 osterweil. html seems so close to each detail he loses perspective on the whole. One aspect absent from this chapter (and most of the book) is ...
... Inside-out: polymorphous, polyester, Pollyanna. ... In Showgirls, that dance consists of lift... more ... Inside-out: polymorphous, polyester, Pollyanna. ... In Showgirls, that dance consists of lifting a bare-breasted (erect-nippled) woman out of an ex-ploding papier-mâché volcano, a sadomasochistic black leather dance of lesbian eroticism consisting of ...
This review of my book Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film appeared in ... more This review of my book Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film appeared in the September 2016 issue of Cineaste.
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