Exploring the Queer Ecosemiotics of 3 Films

PhD: Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema in South Africa and Australia, 2005

2012

In the attempt to see and use film and digital video as a strategy of resisting the hegemonic sites of articulation of gender, race, sex, etc., as put by Krista G.

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.

In this paper, I posit a theoretical intersection that may seem counterintuitive on the surface, but through my analysis and interrogations, I hope to illuminate how each school of theory seems made to fit into the other. I will disclose my theoretical base first before I establish the history, major postulates, and cinematic purpose for each theory separately and finally move into a section of synthesis in which I intend to reveal the ways that each theory informs the other, forging a new body of work over my theoretical base. Ultimately, I will propose and validate a new, hybrid school of theory that hopefully has incredible potential in application with film. I claim a mode of analysis engaged with the queer ecosemiotics of film. What I call a queer ecosemiotic theory draws on cognitivist, cultural, and semiotic approaches to film. I work from the bases established by New Queer Cinema and ecocinema, each bursting out of the 1990s, as well as the writings of thinkers like Richard Dyer, Karl Marx, Fredric Jameson, Christian Metz, Maureen Turim, and Nicole Seymour.

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory

In this essay, the authors, all experimental filmmakers, discuss the impact of Born in Flames on their own work, as well as the ways their various projects pick up, extend, or change the political questions raised by the film. The relationships of experimental film to political community and community building are explored, particularly in the context of queer, feminist, trans, anti-racist politics and media.

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.

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2015

Drums beat onwards, a snapping and crackling trickle of beats. These sounds are archaic, visceral and elemental. Projected on to two screens are images of water cascading and falling; on the left side we see drops of melting ice falling through the fingers of a brown skinned hand, fingers cupping the droplets; the second image is that of water gushing forth, volcanic, sculptural bursts of foam and columns of mist. The beating drums, the sound of water flowing endlessly through chasms of rock and ice, transport us to an artic environment of magnitude, beauty and mysticism. Images unfold slowly and unsteadily in Isaac Julien's digital video installation True North (2007). Subtle, elemental sounds crystallise such images, crafting edges, sculpting glittering textures and sharp, elliptical rhythms which mirror the arctic landscape and its microcosms depicted within the filmic diegesis. True North, a film about the post-colonial reappropriation of the North Pole (notably, from a black female perspective) and its alternative narratives is visually arresting, but it is the ambient, rhythmic sound of its filmed spaces of ice and snow, trickling, drifting and smooth, which haunts the viewer long after the images fade and drift. True North is ostensibly a very sensuous audiovisual project, but the evocative vocabulary pertinent to phenomenological film theory serves to assert its visual rather than sonic attributes. Phenomenological theory provides an appropriate theoretical framework through which to further discover and flesh out the meaning of Julien's rich mapping of the North Pole but, crucially, its subject matter cannot be easily reconciled with embodied film theory since its questioning of sexual difference and subversion of post-colonial histories tends to scramble, as it were, the coordinates of corporeal subjectivity. Films like True North

2015

If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom. Michel Foucault History of Sexuality I, 5 In the mid-90s India, an 'avant garde', explicit gay film was made by an up and coming 'young turk' of a director. And though the film had a short duration, it had a long life of evolution. 1 This 'deliberate transgression' in the words of Foucault, created an aberration, reflecting the sexual deviation that this short, inspired by poetry and manifesting existential instability, portrayed. In this paper, independent fictional films that followed the just described BOMgAY (Riyad Vinci Wadia, 1996) will be analysed and deconstructed to appraise the aesthetic mechanisms ...

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