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A brief analysis of queer German film of the 1970s through the lens of the tearoom (or sexually charged space of the public bathroom)
Atlas of Contemporary Queer Cinema: Europe 2000-2020, 2023
Taking a cue from the anniversary of the Sicilia Queer Film Festivals, in this chapter we take a look at 20 years of German queer cinema history.
On May 24, 1919, Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) (1919), “arguably the first feature film with an explicitly homosexual theme” premiered at the Apollo Theater in Berlin (Steakley 1999). The film, directed by Richard Oswald in collaboration with sexologist Magnus Hirschfield, depicted a gay relationship between a violinist and his male student and aimed to educate audiences on both the medical legitimacy of homosexuality and the legal discrimination facing homosexual males under Germany’s Paragraph 175. The controversial Different from the Others was soon banned, however, when censorship was reinstated in Germany in 1920. Relegated to Hirschfeld’s archive where its various prints were likely destroyed when the Nazis rose to power, the film exists today as a single fragment. Since, activists, archivists, historians, and film scholars have returned to the extant fragment of Different from the Others in attempt to excavate and historically reconstruct its homosexual content. This essay approaches Different from the Others as a queer, material trace of Weimar sexual culture that resists dominant, seemingly neutral modes archiving and historical reconstruction. The first half of the article examines the instability and difficult-to-define nature of the homosexuality depicted in the original Weimar film. I argue that the educative narrative reflects German efforts to understand male homosexuality legally and socially in a modernizing nation. I then move to investigate how Richard Dyer’s foundational reading of the film in his 1990 Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film, Filmmuseum München’s 1999 reconstruction of the film, and LGBT organization Outfest/UCLA’s recent reconstruction-in-progress inevitably engage and resist an imaginative desire for a contemporary LGBTQ “origin” in the fragmented film. Investigating these recent processes surrounding Different from the Others, I argue that the ephemerality of the film is a crucial part of its material and representational significance as an archived queer narrative, past and present.
2009
This dissertation seeks to read contemporary films as symptoms of the societies they are made in, mainly contemporary Western societies, which I argue to be subtly but intensely homophobic. Films imagine/represent their own subject matter in terms of symbolic, encoded scenes. The decoding for the films I chose occurs through a use of very specific, heavily coded spaces as visualisable shorthand for a complex of homophobic reactions. Filmic texts do not have to have denotative non-heterosexual elements to be termed 'queer'. These texts become queer often in their reception by non-heterosexual audiences. In 'queering' these spaces and films, I extensively make use of tools of social geography, film studies and cultural studies The films I chose are not random choices, but they include certain themes that I believe to reflect the subtle homophobia in our societies. In the first chapter, Geographies of Cruising, I analyze the representation of streets and the leading cha...
This article argues that we are currently experiencing a renaissance of New Queer Cinema (NQC). The original NQC occurred in the early 1990s, which saw a wave of queer films that were successful on the mainstream international film festival circuit, at venues such as Cannes and Sundance. Queer film scholars, such as Michele Aaron and B. Ruby Rich, have argued that films like Paris is Burning (Livingston, 1991), Poison (Haynes, 1991) and Swoon (Kalin, 1992) were united by their sense of defiance. They represented the marginalized within the contemporary LGBT communities. This article looks at recent films such as Weekend (Haigh, 2011), Stranger by the Lake (Guiraudie, 2013), Appropriate Behaviour (Akhavan, 2014), Pariah (Rees, 2011) and the work of Xavier Dolan as being successful queer-themed films that meet the criteria outlined by scholars of NQC. Their success will be determined by their representation in both queer and non-queer film festival circuits and beyond. They respond to the state of contemporary independent cinema and utilize film form to allow for the accessibility of their queer characters. In their own way, they are defiant against mainstream queer representations and demonstrate a resurgence of films that service a community that is in need of queer intellectual stimulation.
Senses of Cinema, 2013
[Introduction to the special dossier Pride on the Margins] Queer cinema exists on a spectrum, with films that have crossover appeal to mainstream audiences (such as Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019)) on one end and niche films for queer audiences—from Fig Trees (John Greyson, 2009) to Another Gay Movie (Todd Stephens, 2006)—on the other. This dossier presents an array of case studies of films that rely heavily on the queer film festival circuit for reaching their audience. This mode of distribution does not necessarily seek interest or approval from heteronormative film culture. In this dossier, we propose that this mode of queer spectatorship mobilises and draws value from its own marginality. Through several case studies, we argue that the curation of these events are affective experiences that momentarily bind queer histories and audiences together in the moment of their projection. We have both written extensively on the queer film festival as a cultural phenomenon. Stuart Richards has analysed the queer film festival as a social enterprise to examine how these festivals need to consider social, economic and environmental sustainability.1 Antoine Damiens draws an alternative history of queer film festivals to question ‘the theoretical and political narratives implied in current festival scholarship.’2 We both advocate for queer film festivals to ensure that transgressive film practices flourish. The values of such film are core to the queer film festival’s social mission.
The Directory of World Cinema: Argentina 2, Vol II, 2016
First paragraph: It is ironic that the first narrative sound film ever to be produced in Argentina, Los tres berretines/The Three Amateurs (Enrique Susini, 1933) featured a gay secondary character, Pocholo. This character initiated a mode of representation that has long dominated the national screen, particularly in mainstream film-making, even until today. Pocholo became, metaphorically speaking, the long-standing currency for the on-screen 'queer' the mockingly-represented stereotypical effeminate man, deprived of real characterization or psychology, just a caricature that has no obvious meaningfulness for the main heterosexual characters or for the heteronormative resolution of the plot. The irony lies in the fact that this apparent plot 'irrelevance'; is undermined by the very abiding recurrence of this ‘ridiculed gay man vignette’ through the decades. The insistence of this figure in Argentine cinema – used even, albeit for differently-targeted derogatory purposes, in two sequences of a political film as aesthetically radical as La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 1968) – must surely be telling us something about the country’s unacknowledged sexualized cultural history.
Proposing a radical vision of cinema's queer globalism, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Whether in its exploration of queer cinematic temporality, the paradox of the queer popular, or the deviant ecologies of the queer pastoral, Schoonover and Galt reimagine the scope of queer film studies. The authors move beyond the gay art cinema canon to consider a broad range of films from Chinese lesbian drama and Swedish genderqueer documentary to Bangladeshi melodrama and Bolivian activist video. Schoonover and Galt make a case for the centrality of queerness in cinema and trace how queer cinema circulates around the globe–institutionally via film festivals, online consumption, and human rights campaigns, but also affectively in the production of a queer sensorium. In this account, cinema creates a uniquely potent mode of queer worldliness, one that disrupts normative ways of being in the world and forges revised modes of belonging.
Camera Obscura, 2020
The following article investigates the origins and functions of particular settings in queer films by examining four examples from different national contexts: Shortbus (dir. John Cameron Mitchell, US, 2006), Weekend (dir. Andrew Haigh, UK, 2011), Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac, dir. Alain Guiraudie, France, 2013), and Tropical Malady (Sud pralad, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand, 2004). The textual analyses highlight a range of prevalent queer film settings, such as the road and nature, in which queer characters take refuge. The study aims to identify a transnational countercultural stance in various uses of setting by concentrating on the notion of escape in a theoretical framework that draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, José Muñoz, and Marc Augé. In the context of the study, the production of alternative spaces in queer cinema is treated as a revolutionary practice that challenges homophobia and heteronormativity, which sometimes coexist with class inequality and racism. The discussion finally suggests that there is a social critique of civilization behind the escapism and pessimism, as well as utopianism, in queer cinema. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tv88UNAlY9cVqFCCK-HVcoWM9HvzVNyp/view?usp=sharing https://askucuk.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/queer-film-settings.pdf https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-8359530
Archaeometry, 2024
Источниковедение в современной медиевистике. Мат-лы конференции. , 2020
CUMHURİYETİN 100. YILINDA TÜRKOLOJİ ÜZERİNE İNCELEMELER, 2023
Private museum as public space: Local remembering and memory politics in Yan’an, China. Memory Studies, 17(3), 581-598., 2024
Philosophy World Democracy, 2022
The Elephant, 2023
Гражданское процессуальное право (2019), 2019
"Ai margini della Commedia. Il Dante Vallicelliano", a cura di Paola Paesano e Gianni Pittiglio. Rome: Viella, 2023.
A figura na Comunicação visual, 2024
Journal of Marine Science and Technology, 2004
Academia Medicine, 2023
Integral Equations and Operator Theory, 2020
International Journal of Biological and Chemical Sciences
International Conference on Business, Economics and Social Sciences (ICBESS), 2022
Frontiers in neural circuits, 2016