AIDS and gay cinephilia

Camera Obscura

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 85-126

  Halles, Roger ^a  

^a SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 34248507540     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-18-1_52-85     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. Natural Born Killers (dir. Oliver Stone, US, 1994),
2. City of Lost Children [La cité des enfants perdus] (dir. Marco Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France, 1995),
3. Rumble Fish (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, US, 1983),
4. Heavenly Creatures (dir. Peter Jackson, Germany/New Zealand/UK, 1994),
5. A Matter of Life and Death (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, UK, 1946),
6. Michael Jackson's music video for the song "Leave Me Alone" (1989).
7. See Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty, eds., Introduction to Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 1-11.
8. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.
9. Walt Odets, In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 14-15.
10. See Douglas Crimp, "Mourning and Militancy," October 51 (1989): 3-18.
11. My analysis of gay male cultural production in this article resonates with the conclusions drawn by Joy Van Fuqua's study of two lesbian video makers' use of their own star obsessions with Elizabeth Taylor and Anna Magnani in bearing witness to AIDS. Van Fuqua argues that videos by Jean Carlomusto (L Is for the Way You Look [US, 1991]
12. To Each Her Own [US, 1994])
13. by Joan Braderman (Joan Does Dynasty [US, 1986]
14. Joan Sees Stars [US, 1993])
15. appropriate the "raw material of popular culture" to "document the presumably private practices of AIDS mourning." Joy Van Fuqua, "Tell the Story: AIDS in Popular Culture" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1996), 88-122.
16. See, for instance, Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1993), 157-72;
17. Alexander Dory, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993);
18. Patricia White, The unInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999);
19. Daniel Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture, (New York: Hyperion, 1997);
20. Brett Farmer, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
21. Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship, 166.
22. White, The unInvited, 36.
23. Farmer, Spectacular Passions, 27.
24. Harris, Rise and Fall, 15.
25. See Paul Arthur, "Lost and Found: American Avant-Garde Film in the Eighties," in A Passage Illuminated: The American Avant-Garde Film, 1980-1990, ed. Nelly Voorhuis (Amsterdam: Stichtung Mecano, 1991), 15-29.
26. Al La Valley, "The Great Escape," American Film 10.6 (1985): 29.
27. Paul Willemen, "Through the Glass Darkly: Cinephilia Reconsidered," in Looks and Frictions (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 227; emphasis mine.
28. Susan Sontag, "The Decay of Cinema," New York Times Magazine, 25 February 1996, 60.
29. Roger Cardinal, "Pausing over Peripheral Detail," Framework 30/31 (1986): 124.
30. Willemen, "Through the Glass Darkly," 237, emphasis mine.
31. Willemen, "Through the Glass Darkly," 126.
32. For the analysis of found-footage filmmaking as a practice of postmodern resignification, see William Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1993);
33. the articles collected in the exhibition catalog Desmontaje: Film, vídeo / apropriación, reciclaje, ed. Eugeni Bonet (Valencia: Institut Valencia d' Art Modern, 1993).
34. Qtd. in Robert Anbian, "Phelan Filmmaking Award-Winners Interviewed," Release Print 11.10 (1988): 17-18.
35. Qtd. in Calvin Ahlgren, "Personal Story Decoded in Bits of Old Footage," San Francisco Chronicle, 25 June, 1989, 37.
36. Tom Kalin, "Identity Crisis: The Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival," The Independent Film and Video Monthly (New York), January/February 1989, 29.
37. In the context of HIV prevention and psychotherapy, this return of traumatic experience has been formulated in discussions of the role that self-esteem plays in seroconversion rates among gay men. See Odets, In the Shadow of the Epidemic, 61-98.
38. Kalin, "Identity Crisis," and Todd Haynes, "A Gay Kind of Film," Afterimage, December 1988, 3. Kalin further observes that, "During both the screenings of The Place between Our Bodies that I attended an AZT beeper happened to go off in the audience, a signal not only to a person with AIDS to take medication but also a sign of just how long ago 1975 seems" (30).
39. The relations between sight and touch in this sequence suggest the functioning of what Laura U. Marks terms the "haptic look." See Laura U. Marks, "Loving a Disappearing Image," Cinémas 8.1-2 (1997): 93-112.
40. Qtd. in Alexandra Jacobson, "Matthias Müller, der Maximalist," in Pioniere, Tüfftler, Illusionen: Kino in Bielefeld, ed. Frank Bell et al. (Bielefeld: Westfalen Verlag, 1995), 47; my translation.
41. Alternatively, Gabriele Jutz reads the zoetrope and the film's pervasive iconography of revolving movement as a metaphor for life. See Gabriele Jutz, "Die Physis des Films: Techniken der Körperrepräsentation in der Filmavantgarde," in Unter die Haut: Signaturen des Selbst im Kino der Körper, ed. Jürgen Felix (St. Augustin: Gardez! Verlag, 1998), 351-64.
42. Alice A. Kuzniar, The Queer German Cinema (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 209.
43. Matthias Müller, "Mes films s'écartent De cette vision des choses," in Scratch Book 1983/1998, ed. Yann Beauvais andjean Damien Collin (Paris: Light/Cone/Scratch, 1999), 306; my translation.
44. See P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde: 1943-1978, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 30-31.
45. Kuzniar also reads the seductive stranger as a doppelgänger: "The lead character follows his apparition down the streets, perhaps in desire, perhaps longing for death. The two are never shown together in the same frame; instead the editing cuts back and forth between them, suggesting that this angel of death is a hallucination of the dying man (we only hear one set of footsteps)." Kuzniar, The Queer German Cinema, 210.
46. Alternatively, Peter Tscherkassky suggests that this technique constitutes an allusion to the classical Hollywood conventions for depicting ghosts where "characters' deaths have been represented by showing their souls leaving their bodies but maintaining the same physical aspects." Peter Tscherkassky "A Poet of Images," in program for XXXVI Mostra internazionale del nuovo cinema [Thirty-sixth annual festival of new cinema], (2000): 173.
47. Tscherkassky, "Poet of Images," 173.
48. François Truffaut, The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 149.
49. J. Hoberman, Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 248.
50. Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 53.
51. Mary Beth Haralovich notes of Sirk's use of color that "while the realist narrative space provides normal sources for all the colors, All That Heaven Allows also uses the ability of color to function as an emphasis in itself: as spectacle, as excess, and as potentially distractive of the primacy of narration." Mary Beth Haralovich, "All That Heaven Allows: Color, Narrative Space, and Melodrama," in Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism, ed. Peter Lehman (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990), 70-71 n. 42.
52. Müller, "Mes films," 306.
53. Qtd. in Jacobson, "Matthias Müller," 45.
54. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, "Imitation of Life: On the Films of Douglas Sirk," in The Anarchy of the Imagination: Interviews, Essays, Notes, trans. Krishna Winston (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 8g.
55. Müller has stated that "I feel very close to melodrama. It is very important to me that my films produce a great emotional effect." Müller, "Mes films," 306.
56. See Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: St. Martin's, 1986), 141-94;
57. La Valley, "The Great Escape," 33.
58. Memento Mori is dedicated to Greg Robbins and David Feinberg. Philippe Ariès notes, "Beginning in the eighteenth century, the memento mori that had previously been objects of piety became mourning lockets. Their purpose was not so much to help prepare the wearer for death, but to perpetuate the memory of the deceased." See Images of Man and Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 243-47.
59. Emily Dickinson, The Compbete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little and Brown, 1960), 489.
60. Daryl Chin, "Super-8 and the Aesthetics of Intimacy," Jump Cut 37 (1992): 78-81. Chin mistakenly describes Elegy in the Streets as a Super-8 film.
61. Patricia R. Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 154.
62. Matthias Müller speaks of his embrace of Super-8 as a redemption of an ideologically circumscribed format: "First of all it was an old, home movie, amateur gauge for fathers whose reactionary films all looked alike in a permanent repetition of themes: family, holidays, Christmas. We had to free Super-8 from the cliché that it could only be used for individual memory." Qtd. Mike Hoolboom, "Old Children and AIDS: An Interview with Matthias Müller," Independent Eye, 11.2-3 (1990): 90. Interestingly, Jim Hubbard notes that unlike Müller, "I never had the problem of rejecting familial versions of Super-8. My family never took home movies and very few stills as a matter of fact, so at least in part, my moviemaking is a reaction to a very unreflective family situation." Jim Hubbard, e-mail to author, 9 August 2002.
63. John Belton notes "even though CinemaScope remained associated with classical narrative films, it introduced a level of visual spectacle that often threatened to overwhelm the narrative. This threat could be contained only by a shift in terms of the kinds of films that were made - a shift to historical spectacle - which functioned to naturalize pictorial spectacle." John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 194.
64. Hubbard notes that in addition to Hollywood films like The Ten Commandments and Lawrence of Arabia, two European widescreen films, Federico Fellini's La dolce vita (Italy/France, 1960)
65. Jacques Demy's Lola (France/Italy, 1960) were also significant influences on Memento Mori. Hubbard, e-mail to author, 9 August 2002.
66. Belton notes the specific tension between realism and spectacle in the exploitation of these film technologies: "The 'greater realism' produced by the new technology was understood, it would seem, as a kind of excess, which was in turn packaged as spectacle." Belton, Widescreen Cinema, 195.
67. For a cogent account of such memorializing practices, see Simon Watnev, "Acts of Memory," in Imagine Hope: AIDS and Gay Identity (London: Routledge, 2000), 163-68.
68. Sitney, Visionary Film, vii-xi.
69. See David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
70. Following James's revisionist lead, Juan A. Suárez argues that the underground films of Anger, Smith, and Warhol must be understood in the context of their use of mass culture and tlieir engagement with gay cultural practices. See his Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
71. Arthur, "Lostand Found," 17.