Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10772645
Pinar Fontini
On 13 August 2021, Sahraa Karimi posted a letter from her Twitter account. I write you with a broken heart and a deep hope that you can join me in protecting my beautiful people, especially filmmakers, from the Taliban. In the last few weeks, the Taliban have gained control of so many provinces. They have massacred our people, they kidnapped many children, they sold girls as child brides to their men, they murdered a woman for her attire. . . . It is a humanitarian crisis, and yet the world is silent. . . . We need your voice. The media, governments, and the world humanitarian organizations are conveniently silent as if this “Peace deal” with the Taliban was ever legitimate. It was never legitimate. Recognizing them gave them the confidence to come back to power. The Taliban have been brutalizing our people throughout the entire process of the talks. Everything that I have worked so hard to build as a filmmaker in my country is at risk of falling. . . . I do not understand this world. I do not understand this silence. I will stay and fight for my country, but I cannot do it alone. I need allies like you. Please help us get this world to care about what is happening to us. Please help us by informing your countries’ most important media what is going on here in Afghanistan. Be our voices outside of Afghanistan . . . Days after publishing this letter, Sahraa had to flee from Afghanistan as the Taliban took control of Kabul. Within several weeks, I made this interview with her.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10772589
Kata Kyrölä
This article examines the Swedish fantasy-horror-romance film Gräns (Border, dir. Ali Abbasi, 2018) through queer Indigenous thought and the notion of trans aesthetics, exploring how the film may sensitize its viewers to seeing and feeling with gender variance, queer desire, and the trauma of settler colonialism. Drawing on Eve Tuck's call for desire-based research, the article asks what is at stake in queer, trans, and decolonial readings of films that are not necessarily identifiable as such at the surface level. Border centers on a love story between two gender-fluid trolls who pass as human and whose kin have been subjected to genocide, dislocation, and mutilation, but the film's reception largely misses the connection to the treatment of Indigenous Sámi people and transgender people within Nordic settler states. The article argues that Border's ecstatic depiction of gender-fluid desires, bodies, and sex, alongside its examination of the psychic consequences of settler colonial violence, make it a thus far unique film in the Nordic context — even though this examination happens through the distancing effect of trolls as metaphorical Natives. The main characters embody wrongness in the settler nation-state, in heteronormative society, and ultimately in the delimiting category of the human, but the film imagines rightness in nature as a queer, gender-fluid space where all creatures can just be. Through employing notions of trans aesthetics, the (non)sovereign erotic, refusal, and haunting, the article proposes desire-based readings of cinema that envision ways of feeling and existing beyond humancentric, settler, binary notions of gender and sexuality.
{"title":"Reading Border through Desire: Queer Indigenous Theory, Nordic Settler Colonialism, and Trans Aesthetics","authors":"Kata Kyrölä","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10772589","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10772589","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the Swedish fantasy-horror-romance film Gräns (Border, dir. Ali Abbasi, 2018) through queer Indigenous thought and the notion of trans aesthetics, exploring how the film may sensitize its viewers to seeing and feeling with gender variance, queer desire, and the trauma of settler colonialism. Drawing on Eve Tuck's call for desire-based research, the article asks what is at stake in queer, trans, and decolonial readings of films that are not necessarily identifiable as such at the surface level. Border centers on a love story between two gender-fluid trolls who pass as human and whose kin have been subjected to genocide, dislocation, and mutilation, but the film's reception largely misses the connection to the treatment of Indigenous Sámi people and transgender people within Nordic settler states. The article argues that Border's ecstatic depiction of gender-fluid desires, bodies, and sex, alongside its examination of the psychic consequences of settler colonial violence, make it a thus far unique film in the Nordic context — even though this examination happens through the distancing effect of trolls as metaphorical Natives. The main characters embody wrongness in the settler nation-state, in heteronormative society, and ultimately in the delimiting category of the human, but the film imagines rightness in nature as a queer, gender-fluid space where all creatures can just be. Through employing notions of trans aesthetics, the (non)sovereign erotic, refusal, and haunting, the article proposes desire-based readings of cinema that envision ways of feeling and existing beyond humancentric, settler, binary notions of gender and sexuality.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"148 3-4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139190749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10772617
Zara Dinnen
This essay considers the figure of the “user” as an emergent subject of late twentieth-century US culture, in relation to the World Wide Web and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. The user is a subject position that is historical in the sense that use relations have always determined social formations within capitalism, but it has been newly energized in contemporary modes of capitalism after digital computing, and newly weighted in contemporary renderings of the nation-state as service provider. This essay turns to a cultural moment in which a privatized user subject was coming into formation, using comic books of this moment to find the user figure and its stories. The DC Comics archive might not seem the most likely place to find answers to these concerns. But superhero origin stories are always about becoming user in late capitalist imaginaries. Superheroes learn to use their histories to reproduce the world they want. The then newly inaugurated DC Comics character Oracle, aka Barbara Gordon (formerly Batgirl), is becoming a wheelchair user and a computer user. Reading Oracle's 1990s user origin stories, this essay attends to scenes of wheelchair and computer use to work out a theory of user history and user time emerging in 1990s US culture. The comics reveal that the process of becoming user is always intersecting with the processes of becoming a racialized, gendered, classed, (dis)abled subject. They also open up the possibility for other affordances: becoming user as a process which can be torqued in its unfolding.
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Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10772603
Yael Levy
During the 2010s, American television witnessed a growing attention to and presence of women, both in TV representation and in TV creation and production. As part of that development, the self-representation of women who are both the creators and the stars of their shows — such as Lena Dunham (creator and star of Girls; HBO, 2012 – 17), Tig Notaro (creator and star of One Mississippi, Amazon, 2015 – 17), Issa Rae (creator and star of Insecure, HBO, 2016 – 21), Pamela Adlon (creator and star of Better Things, FX, 2016 – 22), and Frankie Shaw (creator and star of Smilf, Showtime, 2017 – 19) — has been on the rise. This article examines these five dramedies in which women both exert authorial voices in telling their own stories and bring to bear performative embodiment in starring in these autobiographical texts. The textual multilayeredness of these author-performers’ autobiographical dramedies, the article shows, reveals the ways in which authorship and performance operate in the realm of women's televisual representation.
{"title":"Their Bodies, Their Selves: Reflexivity and Embodiment in 2010s Women's Autobiographical Author-Performer TV Dramedies","authors":"Yael Levy","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10772603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10772603","url":null,"abstract":"During the 2010s, American television witnessed a growing attention to and presence of women, both in TV representation and in TV creation and production. As part of that development, the self-representation of women who are both the creators and the stars of their shows — such as Lena Dunham (creator and star of Girls; HBO, 2012 – 17), Tig Notaro (creator and star of One Mississippi, Amazon, 2015 – 17), Issa Rae (creator and star of Insecure, HBO, 2016 – 21), Pamela Adlon (creator and star of Better Things, FX, 2016 – 22), and Frankie Shaw (creator and star of Smilf, Showtime, 2017 – 19) — has been on the rise. This article examines these five dramedies in which women both exert authorial voices in telling their own stories and bring to bear performative embodiment in starring in these autobiographical texts. The textual multilayeredness of these author-performers’ autobiographical dramedies, the article shows, reveals the ways in which authorship and performance operate in the realm of women's televisual representation.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"2 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139189028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10772575
Lida Zeitlin-Wu
The postwar era in the United States saw an explosion of mass-produced colors across a range of materials and technologies, as well as increased demand for professional color consultants both within and outside the home. While this period (sometimes called the color revolution) is typically viewed as catalyzing new possibilities for self-expression, this rhetoric of consumer choice in fact served to naturalize existing social hierarchies and normative modes of vision through standardized color. This article looks to the postwar American domestic interior to dissect a historical moment when color, divided into serialized paint swatches, became grid-like, quantitative, and severed from form. It examines several key shifts in the conceptualization of standardized color in the postwar period, particularly as they played into identity formation along racial, class-based, and gendered lines. Analyzing popular archival materials such as paint catalogues and women's magazines alongside the writings of the prominent color consultant Faber Birren (1900 – 1988), the article contends that it was in the midcentury domestic interior that the cultivation and commodification of personality became synonymous with technological and social advancement. Though color consultants emphasized that the home was a space for individual consumers to assert their uniqueness through color customization, this so-called freedom of choice in fact rendered gender, race, and class subject to further standardization and classification in the name of social and technological “progress.”
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Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10772561
Gabriel Bloomfield
This essay reckons with the representation of queer sexualities and modes of reading in Jonathan Lynn's Clue (US, 1985). The film, originally a box office flop that has become a cult classic, deploys the character of Mr. Green to concentrate and dispel its queer energies. Although he declares near the start that he is “a homosexual,” Green's sexuality is evacuated from the mystery narrative in a way that no other character's is. Drawing on the insights of queer theory and fan studies from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to Juno Jill Richards, the essay argues that Clue is structured by its anxious, phobic reaction to Green's sexuality; that it both depicts and provokes paranoid queer readings; and that the movie's future depends on the imaginative re-creations and re-queerings of the modern fan culture that has sprung up around it.
{"title":"Green's Clues, or What's Queer about Clue?","authors":"Gabriel Bloomfield","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10772561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10772561","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reckons with the representation of queer sexualities and modes of reading in Jonathan Lynn's Clue (US, 1985). The film, originally a box office flop that has become a cult classic, deploys the character of Mr. Green to concentrate and dispel its queer energies. Although he declares near the start that he is “a homosexual,” Green's sexuality is evacuated from the mystery narrative in a way that no other character's is. Drawing on the insights of queer theory and fan studies from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to Juno Jill Richards, the essay argues that Clue is structured by its anxious, phobic reaction to Green's sexuality; that it both depicts and provokes paranoid queer readings; and that the movie's future depends on the imaginative re-creations and re-queerings of the modern fan culture that has sprung up around it.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"52 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139195773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10772631
Lou Silhol-Macher
This article traces the role of frames in suspending the self in Lovely Andrea (Japan/Austria/Germany), a video essay by Hito Steyerl presented at Documenta 12 in 2007. A seldom-analyzed artwork within Steyerl's otherwise widely circulating and discussed oeuvre, Lovely Andrea has itself been framed as belonging to the genre of the self-portrait, although it certainly isn't straightforwardly autobiographical. In fact, Lovely Andrea calls into question the very notions of “self” and “portrait” by interrogating the conditions of possibility for each, as well as for the combination of the two — the “self-portrait.” This article examines how this tension specifically takes shape in this video essay and argues that Lovely Andrea redefines the filmic genre of the self-portrait by way of detours, undoing frames of identification via a medium that so fundamentally relies on them, and, beyond, undoing a certain idea of self — as a notion and as a practice. Indeed, Lovely Andrea proposes a Hegelian-inspired dialectics of selfhood and medium: suspending, undoing, dissolving these notions in telescopic scenes of framing. Moving across frames to discuss their specific function at various points in the film, this article pairs close analyses with a discussion of Steyerl's own references to philosophy (Hegel) and film theory (Harun Farocki) within and peripherally to Lovely Andrea, demonstrating how the bondage practice of self-suspension so central to this film performs a dialectical coming undone in frames.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10654913
Finley Freibert
Pat Rocco's ONE Adventure, a promotional film for a gay men's nonprofit's tourism subsidiary, documented early 1970s US-Europe homophile coalitions but also incorporated softcore sequences for commercial appeal to a gay male market. Yet Rocco's disavowal of pornography generally — and specifically in the case of ONE Adventure — elides the precarious labor that undergirded his films’ productions. This article proposes that gay media history needs to critically confront nonmaterial overelaboration — the covering over of the material conditions of media production — in media products, their paratexts, and historiography itself. It is necessary for gay media history to take up feminist production history methods to interrogate this elision of labor enacted by cultural history approaches to Pat Rocco's filmmaking. More broadly, the article's concept of nonmaterial overelaboration provides a critical avenue for focalizing labor in other areas of media history.
{"title":"Nonmaterial Overelaboration: Gender, Casting, and Camouflaged Labor in Pat Rocco's Promotional Travelogue","authors":"Finley Freibert","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10654913","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10654913","url":null,"abstract":"Pat Rocco's ONE Adventure, a promotional film for a gay men's nonprofit's tourism subsidiary, documented early 1970s US-Europe homophile coalitions but also incorporated softcore sequences for commercial appeal to a gay male market. Yet Rocco's disavowal of pornography generally — and specifically in the case of ONE Adventure — elides the precarious labor that undergirded his films’ productions. This article proposes that gay media history needs to critically confront nonmaterial overelaboration — the covering over of the material conditions of media production — in media products, their paratexts, and historiography itself. It is necessary for gay media history to take up feminist production history methods to interrogate this elision of labor enacted by cultural history approaches to Pat Rocco's filmmaking. More broadly, the article's concept of nonmaterial overelaboration provides a critical avenue for focalizing labor in other areas of media history.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10654871
Maya Sidhu
Abstract This article demonstrates how the interwar French suffragist organization la Femme nouvelle used the platform of the newsreel to make political claims through its collaboration with Pathé’s newsreel magazine Actualités féminines or Women's News. Through the filming of their political actions and educational segments edited together in their newsreel compilation film, Le film de la Femme nouvelle (dir. la Femme nouvelle, France, 1935), the suffragists, led by Louise Weiss, frame themselves as essential workers, fearless political actors, and perfect housewives. These contradictions reveal a strategic manipulation of their gender identity to obtain the vote at all costs. Newsreel making provided the feminists an avenue for political claimsmaking beyond electoral politics. These filmed accounts of their actions give the spectator a sense of being present at the event, which is missing from written accounts of la Femme nouvelle's history. Through this aesthetic liveness, achieved through camera placement and staging in crowd scenes, the suffragists were able to portray themselves as vital political actors. One such filmed protest from 12 May 1935 provides a compelling account of their filmmaking practice, in which the activists march on la place de la Bastille in chains, then break their chains and put them in a bonfire. The French Revolution, referenced by this action, was a popular analogy for the Left, as seen in the film La marseillaise (dir. Jean Renoir, France, 1937). Le film de la Femme nouvelle is significant because it allows for an alternate, feminist history of political filmmaking in the period.
摘要:本文通过与帕瑟尔的新闻纪录片杂志《现实主义》(actualitsamsfsamminines)或《妇女新闻》(Women’s News)的合作，展示了两次世界大战之间的法国女权运动组织“新女性”(la Femme nouvelle)如何利用新闻纪录片的平台来发表政治主张。通过拍摄她们的政治行动和教育片段，在她们的新闻短片剪辑电影中，Le film de la Femme nouvelle(导演。《新女性》(la Femme nouvelle，法国，1935)，由路易丝·韦斯(Louise Weiss)领导的女权主义者将自己定位为必不可少的工人、无畏的政治演员和完美的家庭主妇。这些矛盾揭示了他们对性别身份的战略性操纵，以不惜一切代价获得选票。新闻短片制作为女权主义者提供了一个超越选举政治的政治诉求途径。这些对她们行为的录像记录给了观众一种亲临现场的感觉，这是新女性历史的书面记录所缺失的。通过这种审美的活力，通过镜头的放置和人群场景的上演，妇女参政主义者能够将自己描绘成重要的政治演员。1935年5月12日拍摄的一部抗议影片，生动地描述了他们的电影制作过程。在影片中，激进分子戴着镣铐在巴士底广场游行，然后打破镣铐，把他们扔进篝火里。这一行动所引用的法国大革命，是左派的一个流行类比，正如电影《马赛曲》(La marseillaise)中所看到的那样。让·雷诺阿，法国，1937)。《新女性电影》意义重大，因为它为那个时期的政治电影制作提供了另一种女权主义的历史。
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