Pidduck - After 1980, Margins and Mainstreams
• film historiography as "an archaeological quest for past and often forgotten queer cinematic moments spanning film scholarship, spectatorship and production" (Pidduck, 1990, 265)
• Patricia White - concept of "retrospectatorship" to describe "how past and present cultural imagery is imbricated into the collective and individual fantasy lives of lesbian/gay subjects." (Pidduck, 1990, 265)
• image bank offers more on some subjects than others
• From Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye) - "sometimes you have to create your own history"
• Pidduck combines White retrospec with Dunye's fiction-doc to bridge last 20 yrs of lesbian/gay film
• "we now find ourselves in a cultural moment of 'hypervisibility"'" - queer works entering maintream
• queer audiences are niche markets (** link to Rich)
• does this mainstreaming necessarily mean the end of a "discrete political and critical category for lesbian/gay cinema" (Pidduck, 1990, 266)
• trace key aesthetics and political trajectories: lg film fests, activist art video, new queer cinema, pop genres,
• debates around positive images and transgression
• hypervisbility is north american, enrope, australia, nz, parts of asia
• new regimes of visibility
• 1) film fests:
• film fests as clearest index of film production growth (Dyer in Pidduck, 1990, 266)
• global circuit that White calls the "queer public sphere" (White, 1999, 76)
• "the festival constitute a counter public sphere, providing a collective experience and a literal site of critical reception. What they exhibit and make visible, alongside their programming, is an audience" (White, 1999, 74) and in Pidduck
• surreptitious distribution through art and avant-garde networks , film fests have created an autonomous and safe-ish zone (urban),
• "In many parts of the world, such zones are part of a concerted political project to seize the means of self-representation in the face of widespread cultural invisibility and stereotyping" (Pidduck, 1990, 267) **link to I/O Symposium
• Rich - loyal audiences linked to success of queer film fests
• Gever - audiences approach festivals with a presumption of community, no matter how fictional, "these become spaces that can change our relationship to the screen. Our identities are constituted as much in the event as in the images we watch (1990:201) or (Pidduck, 1990, 268)
• cheap access to equipment has allowed self-representation
• Canada - public access tradition - generated network of community-based artist run centres and indie distributors
• importance = cross fertilization of people and images and ideas
• look into key themes of festival conferences ** great idea! (268)
• INSIDE OUT TORONTO 2008 "Queer media art practitioners are increasingly visible and have established themselves as a powerful creative and political presence in contemporary culture. The Queer Here! Queer Now! Symposium, hosted by Inside Out and Vtape, will bring together artists, activists and academics to explore the presentation and consumption of queer visual culture and to describe those vibrant, unstable and sometimes discomfiting moments of expression." AND "Issues to be discussed include the absence of an identifiable and politicized queer audience, the influence of queer maverick exhibition and micro-cinemas and the mainstreaming of GLBTQ film and video festival programming. (http://www.insideout.on.ca/18Annual/queer.htm, Accessed June 26, 2008)
• Coalition vs. Invisibility: Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces (http://www.image-nation.org/2007/conf-hora-eng.php, Accessed June 26, 2008)
• separate space = ghetto?
• or is our aim to infiltrate? to engage straights?
• ***Rich - 80 to 90% of content remains within fest context (is this still true with the Net?)
• fest are essential for queer film makers, esp lesbians
• community based vs for profit
• shorts and video into features - sign of?
• "at this conjuncture, it is more important then ever to track the fleeting histories of activist and art film and video that helped to lay the foundations for subsequent developments" (Pidduck, 1990, 269)(and inherent value?)
• 2) video art/activist video
• NY queer style (aesthetic)
• is there a queer aesthetic? "agit prop" (response to the AIDS crisis) video from NY in the 80s... and the video "we're here we're queer we're fabulous" in Can context imitating the queer aesthetic of testing the limits collective, divatv, paper tiger tv, etc
• queers developed "highly visible protest tactics" (269)
• ******* link to COPYRIGHT!! zapping practices - "assault on authorship has lead to the practice of anonymous and collective production. Assault on originality has given rise to dictums such as "If it works, use it" or "If it's not yours, steal it"
• Greyson - stategy of reappropriating mainstream media:
• "I don't think we gain anything, as queers and as people commited to an alternate media practice, by disseminating the dominant media, what has gone before and what has oppressed us... Our engagement, our subversion, our poisoning of those genres is going to give us much more (quote sin McGann 1992:11)
• Juhasz - urgency of politics and notion of struggle
• 80s video - short docs, safer sex vids, psa - often collectively authored
• question of content and context are important for sexual imagery
• not much lesbian porn "explicit home-amde sexual imagery has been especially risky and important for lesbians, whose sexuality has historically been either erased or appropriated for heterosexual male fantasies" (Pidduck, 1990, 272)
• anti-porn vs sex positive
• self-reflexivity
• *******Muñoz - autoethnography - a method "that in many ways seeks to reclaim the past and put it in direct contact with the present" (Pidduck, 1990, 276)
• link b/w desire and id
• Rich - 1992 coined NQC
• NQC shares a common style and sensibility: "Call it 'Homo Pomo': there are traces in all of these films of appropriation and pastiche, irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionist very much in mind. Definitely breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist and excessive. Above all, they are full of pleasure" (Rich 1992: 32) in (Pidduck, 1990, 277)
• Clare Whatling - "cinematic images of pathological lesbians work for a contemporary lesbian audience through sheen of nostalgia, which renders the genrative rather than inhibitive (Pidduck, 1990, 279) ** link to Juhasz/nostalgia
• queer - reclaiming it is a celebration of the abject, the criminal, underworld
• NQC emerges when AIDS is no longer the single most pressing concern
• 90 killer films - girls more likely to destroy themselves
• Bronsky - most features rely on positive image politic and "a triumphant, indivi. narrative arc" (281)
• coming out films
• desert hearts - made by a lesbian - explicit lesbian narrative, landmark film
• some think it doesn't challenge lesbian film - as in "divested of any social or political ramification or context that would restrict its generality"
• deLauretis - also dismisses formulaic romance
• do lesbian films have the power to change the conditions of "lesbian visbility"?
• and the responsibility?
• shifting field of lesbian self-representation
• deLauretis argues for the "formal capacity of art cinema to challenge the conditions of visibility" (Pidduck, 1990, 286) 0 films that are not widely available, maybe unpop with dykes
• burden of representation
• Go Fish as breakthrough film - deemed banal by most - speaks to large audiences, outside cult cap of film fests
• combining visual codes with personal agendas and feminism
• ordinariness as limit and horizon of lesbian visibility? the queer is no longer pathological or problematic, characters who merely happen to be gay