screening genders: new queer cinema

 At the same time, gay marriage was neither desirable nor available, let alone legalized, trans identities and stories were not yet emergent, and gay white men still dominated queer crossover culture 

The New Queer Cinema carried the legacies of the eighties as surely as it introduced the hopes and strategies of the nineties 

The New Queer Cinema comprised works that would become important objects for the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, both attracting congressional condemnation and mobilizing support for a new vision of a queer culture that would shift attitudes forever. 

works of film and video feature length and short, experimenting with narrative and gut-punching in message, excited the communities of ... and they proceeded to break out and make an impact on the world at large via film festivals, art-house release, and, eventually, mainstream crossover.  

THE “New Queer Cinema” is a term I coined back in 1992 for a set of films and videos that constituted a major shift in how to make and think about fillm, life, sexuality, aesthetics, and politics at a time of repression, danger, and death brought on by the AIDS epidemic and repressive political regimes in the United States and the United Kingdom. 

Far from heaven 

• Film feeling out of date  

• Not using postmodern filmaking at all  

• Filmic conventions using slow fade between scenes which is used in melodrama films  

• Representing the untangling of her life  

• Critique to understand racial segration at the time 

Superstar: the Karen carpenter story  

• Showcases themes and interest in filmography 

• Her use of drumming was interesting denoting her feminity  

• Use of barbie dolls was symbolic and grounded in feminst analysis 

• Tension between structure and agency  

• Foucault and the docile body  

• Body representative of the state  

• Obedient  

• Regimented  

• Trained  

• How power

Queer ? Cinema of Todd Haynes  

• Work grounded in feminist theory  

• Brown university as a reputation for liberal queer politics and aesthetics  

• Reimagining film at the level of ideology and what it can be productively  

• Studied under marry anne do anne  

• Recreating melodramaas in 1950s in a critical and radical lens  

• Genre is important for haynes  

• Focus

historical context of new queer cinema:

• The democratisation of film and cinema through video and video stores  

• Context: 90s aids crisis and Reagan in USA 

• Queer temporality  

• Short period of time of 'new queer cinema'  

• B ruby rich – questioning if new queer cinema had run its course  

• Cinema could be radical and popular, stylish and economically