A title does not ask, but demands that you make a choice: On the otherwise films of Bruce LaBruce

Criticism

Volumn 48, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 95-126

  Brinkema, Eugenie ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67649528867     PISSN: 00111589     EISSN: 15360342     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/crt.2007.0016     Document Type: Review

References (30)

1. "Art or Porn?" Guardian Unlimited Film. Available at http://film.guardian.co.uk/quiz/questions/0,5952,1196044,00.html. Accessed May 2, 2005
2. Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 117
3. See Ara Osterweil's useful essay "Andy Warhol's Blow Job: Toward the Recognition of a Pornographic Avant-Garde," in Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 431-60
4. Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) 24
5. For an account of this change through the narrative of one specific theater in Hartford, Connecticut, with the advantageous confusion of being named "Art Cinema," see Adam Bugler, "But Is It Art?" Hartford Advocate, September 2, 2004, available at http://www.hartfordadvocate.com/gbase/ News/content?oid=oid:79844, accessed May 2, 2005
6. See Linda Williams, Hardcore: Tower, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 184-89
7. Bruce LaBruce, "Baader-Meinhof," interview with Richard Huffman, available at http://www.baader-meinhof.com/special/LaBruceInterview. htm, accessed May 4, 2005
8. This definition has its problems, as do any attempts to force coherence out of such an unwieldy collection of representations, one for every fetish, fetishes themselves unlimited. Crucially, however, I wanted to insist that "arousal" is not the necessary sexual affect desired by pornography: other affects (here deemed sexual), including disgust, curiosity, nausea, shame, and horror, are all produced by different types of pornography, themselves demanding new genres, new subgenres, or moves away from genre theory altogether. For example, in accounting for porn star Ron Jeremy's popular appeal, Emily Shelton writes, "In the case of Jeremy, whose body has visibly deteriorated in direct proportion to his growing popularity, the connection between disgust and desire is particularly acute;" "pornography has a ... complex relationship to displeasure" (Emily Shelton, "A Star Is Porn: Corpulence, Comedy, and the Homosocial Cult of Adult Film Star Ron Jeremy," Camera Obscura 51, vol. 17, no. 3 [2002]: 119, 122)
9. Irish Examiner.com, March 9, 2005, accessed May 2, 2005, available at http://www.irishexaminer.com/text/storyasp?j=59948407569&p=599484x8z8z& n=59948408315
10. Wilinsky, Sure Seaters, 24
11. Steven Neale, "Art Cinema as Institution," Screen 22 (1981): 32
12. Some, though, characterize this change instead as a "return": "Explicit sex has returned to the art-film circuit with a vengeance," writes Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune about the Toronto International Film Festival. It is left unclear in this review whether that return is in reference to recent history (i.e., it was here in 1999 with Romance and 2001 with Intimacy, and now it has returned again) or if it is indeed a reference to the history of explicit sexuality intertwined with the classical Art Cinema of fifty years ago (Mark Caro, "Line between art film and porn becoming almost as thin as a G-string," Wichita Eagle, Kansas.com, September 26, 2004, available at http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/entertainment/9760665.htm? template= contentModules/printstory.jsp, accessed May 4, 2005)
13. Numerous film reviewers have noted this trend in writing on the specific films mentioned above. For more on the phenomenon in general, however, see Linda Williams, "Cinema and the Sex Act," Cineaste 27, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 20-26
14. For more on Breillat, perhaps the best-known auteur in this new category, see Liz Constable, "Unbecoming Sexual Desires for Women Becoming Sexual Subjects: Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Catherine Breillat (1999)," Modern Language Notes 119 (2004): 672-95
15. See also Adrian Martin, "'X' Marks the Spot: Classifying Romance," Senses of Cinema, issue 4, March 2000, available at www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/4/romance.html, accessed May 2, 2005
16. Also see Eugenie Brinkema, "Celluloid Is Sticky: Sex, Death, Materiality, Metaphysics (in Some Films by Catherine Breillat)," Women: A Cultural Review 17 no. 2 (2006): 147-70
17. Ray Pride, Demonlover, Review, Movie City News, September 19, 2003, available at http://www.moviecitynews.com/reviews/demonlover.htm, accessed May 4, 2005
18. Steve Ramos, "Look Away," Cincinnati CityBeat, December 12, 2004, available at http://www.citybeat.com/2004-12-22/cover5.shtml, accessed May 2, 2005
19. Lynda Nead, "'Above the Pulp-line': The Cultural Significance of Erotic Art," in More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography, and Power, ed. Pamela Church Gibson (London: BFI Publishing, 2004), 218
20. Glen Helfand, "Randy Iconoclast," Salon.com, October 11, 2002, available at http://archive.salon.com/sex/galleries/2002/10/18/labruce/index_np. html, accessed May 4, 2005
21. Interestingly, coauthor Restivo has also written a book on art cinema: The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002)
22. Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film, second ed. (London: Routledge, 2003), 63
23. Anat Pick, "New Queer Cinema and Lesbian Films," in New Queer Cinema, ed. Michele Aaron (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 109
24. Helfand, "Randy Iconoclast," 1
25. Internet Movie Database review of No Skin Off My Ass, available at http://imdb.com/title/tt0102544/, accessed May 5, 2005
26. See entry for "Bruce LaBruce," available at http://imdb.com/name/nm0478418/, accessed May 2, 2005
27. All user comments from Internet Movie Database entry for Skin Gang, available at http://imdb.com/title/tt0196102/usercomments, accessed May 2, 2005
28. Helfand, "Randy Iconoclast," 2
29. LaBruce, "Baader-Meinhof."
30. Helfand, "Randy Iconoclast," 4