Queer Film Festival Studies

Click here to visit the full interactive version of the above map.

As identity-based festivals, queer film festivals have a specific relationship to the audience to which they cater. More specifically, most of these festivals have had a strong connection to the political and social movement behind the lesbian and gay/queer agenda and try to maintain this relationship between cultural event and political framework [...]. Because of this history, queer film festivals have a strong tradition of a nuanced critical inquiry into the interconnections of cultural event management, community politics, nation state politics, funding and marketing strategies, and organizational structures [...]. [From Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck, 'LGBT / Queer Film Festivals', Film Festival Research Network, last updated November 2012]

Festivals are the primary markets for international queer film, but they do not simply acquire and screen the films they show; they actually create the economic conditions that enable their production. This is not to imply that queer internationalism is merely inauthentic or commercial and thus without any kind of political viability. Rather, what it indicates is that scholars, activists, and festival directors must begin to look at the economy of queer cultural production as an essential element of queer collectivities and the institutions they form. Conceiving of an international queer community through cultural circulation and consumption begs significant questions about how U.S. audiences understand the role of the festival in defining a gay and lesbian class identity within this global economy. [From Ragan Rhyne, 'The Global Economy of Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals', GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 12, Number 4, 2006]

As the above two scholarly excerpts indicate, the subject of film festivals is one which raises numerous issues of central importance to cultural studies more generally. For this reason, as well as to celebrate the work of scholars who have shared their findings in particular corner of this field online, Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce that the latest set of links to open access queer film studies that it has created for its sibling Global Queer Cinema website is devoted to the topic of Queer Film Festival Studies. You can visit numerous earlier FSFF entries on film festival studies by clicking here.

This most recent collection in the GQC Resources section includes a link to the full, interactive, version of the map at the top of this entry, created by pioneering film festival scholar Skadi Loist (co-founder, with Marijke de Valck,  of the Film Festival Studies Network), which shows 256 LGBT/queer film festivals existing globally since 1977.

For live-link access to all the below resources, please visit this webpage.

• Chris Berry, 'My Queer Korea: Identity, Space, and the 1998 Seoul Queer Film & Video festival', Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, Issue 2, May 1999
• Noa Ben-Asher, 'Screening Historical Sexualities: A Roundtable on Sodomy, South Africa, and Proteus',Pace Law Faculty Publications, 2005. Paper 589
• Kaucyila Brooke, 'Dividers and Doorways [on the locational politics of Los Angeles's Gay and Lesbian film festival]', Jump Cut, no. 42, December 1998, pp. 50-57
• Phillip B. Cook, 'Gay Sundance 2013: The Year Ahead in Independent Queer Cinema', The Blog, Huff Post Gay Voices, January 17, 2013
• Michael Guillén, The Evening Class blog, 2006-present
• Mel Hogan, '21 years of image & nation: legitimizing the gaze', Nouvelles «vues» sur le cinéma québécois, no. 10, Hiver 2008-2009
• Jamie June, 'Is it Queer Enough?: An Analysis of the Criteria and Selection Process for Programming Films within Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Film Festivals in the United States', MA Thesis, University of Oregon, August 2003
• Alice Kuzniar, 'Schwul-lesbisches Kino aus Deutschland', in: Bildschön: 20 Jahre Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg, ed. by Dorothée von Diepenbroick and Skadi Loist (Hamburg: Maennerschwarm Verlag, 2009)
• Hui-Ling Lin, Bodies in Motion: The Films of Transmigrant Queer Chinese Women Filmmakers in Canada, PhD Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2011
• Skadi Loist, 'Precarious cultural work: about the organization of (queer) film festivals', Screen, 52.2, 2011
• Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck (2010). “Film Festivals / Film Festival Research: Thematic, Annotated Bibliography: Second Edition.” Medienwissenschaft / Hamburg: Berichte und Papiere 91 (2010). (19. May. 2010 (sections: 1. Film Festivals: The Long View; 2. Festival Time: Awards, Juries and Critics; 3. Festival Space: Cities, Tourism and Publics; 4. On the Red Carpet: Spectacle, Stars and Glamour ; 5. Business Matters: Industries, Distribution and Markets; 6. Trans/National Cinemas; 7. Programming; 8. Reception: Audiences, Communities and Cinephiles; 9. Specialized Film Festivals; 10. Publications Dedicated to Individual Film Festivals; 11. Online Resources; Contact / Bio), 2008
• Skadi Loist, 'Queer Film and the Film Festival Circuit', In Media Res, September 14, 2010
• Skadi Loist, 'Das Queer Cinema und die Bedeutung lesbisch-schwuler Filmfestivals: Monika Treut im Interview mit Skadi Loist'n: Bildschön: 20 Jahre Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg. Eds. Dorothée von Diepenbroick, and Skadi Loist. Hamburg: Männerschwarm, 2009. pp. 12–20
• Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck, 'Film Festival Studies: An Overview of a Burgeoning Field', in: Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit. Eds. Dina Iordanova and Ragan Rhyne. St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2009. pp. 179–215
• Scott McKinnon, 'Taking the Word ‘Out’ West: Movie Reception and Gay Spaces', Participations, Volume 7, Issue 2 (November 2010) 
• Kelly McWilliam, 'We're Here All Week': Public Formation and the Brisbane Queer Film Festival. Queensland Review 14(2), 2007:pp. 79-91
• Jenni Olson, 'Film Festivals', GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. 2002. 24 February 2007
• Ricardo Peach, Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema in South Africa and Australia, PhD Thesis, University of Technology, Sydney 2005
• Renee Penney, Desperately Seeking Redundancy? Queer Romantic Comedy and the Festival Audience, PhD Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2010
• Mel Pritchard, 'the big queer film festival list', QueerFilmFestivals.org
• Marc Siegel, 'Spilling Out onto Castro Street', Jump Cut No. 41 (May), 1997
• Amy Watson, Being Inappropriate: Queer Activism in Context, MA Thesis, Central European University 2009
• Gerald J. Z. Zielinski, Furtive, Steady Glances: On the Emergence and Cultural Politics of Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals, PhD Thesis, McGill University, August 2008
• Ger Zielinski, 'On the production of heterotopia, and other spaces, in and around lesbian and gay film festivals', Jump Cut, No 54, Fall 2012
• Ger Zielinski, '"Queer Film Festivals." LGBTQ America Today: An Encyclopedia. Eds. John C. Hawley, and Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009. pp. 980–984
• Ger Zielinski in Conversation with Stephen Kent Jusick, Executive Director of MIX Festival of Queer Experimental Film and Video, FUSE Art Culture Politics (summer issue, 2010), pp. 16-23 

More about → Queer Film Festival Studies

New JUMP CUT: gender, globalization, Third Cinema, history, political activism, racial representation, cinematic form, melodrama, genre, new media, and media institutions

Frame grab from La nación clandestina/The Hidden Nation (Jorge Sanjinés, 1989). Read a great selection of new and translated articles on this Bolivian filmmaker among the numerous essays just published in the latest issue of JUMP CUT

Film Studies For Free welcomes with wide open e-arms the fabulous new issue of JUMP CUT. Just look at all that high quality content, the links to which stretch out below, almost as far as the mouse can scroll.  

JUMP CUT truly goes from strength to strength with its focus on contemporary and international cinema, media, aesthetics, reception and politics. FSFF hasn't digested the entire issue yet, but so far particularly likes the dossier on Third Cinema filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés, Ian Murphy's article on two films by Claire Denis, and Diane Waldman's very thoughtful review of Vicki Callahan's important edited collection, Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History together with Suzanne Leonard's great study of Fatal Attraction.

Its brilliant and hardworking editors -- John Hess, Chuck Kleinhans and Julia Lesage -- deserve our admiration and sincere thanks for all the excellent, politically and ethically engaged research they help to bring into the public domain in our disciplines. Their stance and efforts are as crucial now as they have ever been.

Finally, in the week that brought the very sad news of the death of Octavio Getino, best known for co-founding, along with Fernando Solanas, the Grupo Cine Liberación as well as for elaborating with Solanas and others the notion of Third Cinema, and in memory of this great film theorist and practitioner, interested readers might like to be reminded of FSFF's earlier related entries (see below), which contain links to numerous, past JUMP CUT offerings, and also check out Michael Chanan's tribute to Getino and historian Eric Hobsbawm here.

• On Popular Memory and Third Cinema: the work of Teshome Gabriel
• Studies of 'Third Cinema' and anti-Eurocentric film culture
• Obstinate Battles for Documentary Memory: Patricio Guzmán Resources Online
• "Roots of Third Cinema" and other Michael Chanan films and videos online
• On Liberation Cinema and Raymundo Gleyser
• Winds of Change: Cinema from Muslim Societies
• Peruvian Cinema (in the age of transnational film finance)
• "Making films anyhow": On Glauber Rocha's DIY cinema

JUMP CUT: A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA

Current issue No. 54, fall 2012

THE FIRST WORD

• The first word: an introduction 
by the editors. 
Highlights and interconnections between essays in this issue.

ASIAN CINEMA AND TV DRAMA

• “Family” in Li Yang’s Blind Shaft and Blind Mountain by Amanda Weiss. A look at globalization and the family in Li Yang's migrant films Blind Shaft (2003) and Blind Mountain (2007).
• Migrant workers, women, and China’s modernization on screen 
by Jenny Kwok Wah Lau.
 Even though China's migrant workers constitute the biggest human migration in the world at this time the life circumstances of these workers receive little attention in Chinese cinema. This article explores how visual media, including installation arts, documentary films, and narrative films expose the often neglected issues of women migrants.
• Defining the popular auteur, or what it means to be human within the machine 
by Caroline Guo.
 Review of Director in Action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong Action Film by Stephen Teo. 
Stephen Teo tackles Johnnie To’s multifaceted role in the Hong Kong film industry: this review picks up where his monograph leaves off to grapple with the filmmaker’s ongoing evolution and rethink the notion of the “popular auteur.”
• Negotiating censorship: Narrow Dwelling as social critique
 by Wing Shan Ho.
 Housing crisis and extra-marital affair—this essay explores how the TV drama Narrow Dwelling skillfully critiques social inequalities under the censor’s eye.
• Digital pleasure palaces: Bollywood seduces the global Indian at the multiplex 
by Manjunath Pendakur. 
Malls, multiplexes and digital cinemas are symbols of the fast-modernizing, neoliberal India of the 21st century and, in these turbulent conditions, Bollywood is expanding its audiences at home and abroad while the political-economic-technological changes have resulted in new conflicts and a reshaping of the film industry's internal structure and operation.
• Chokher Bali: a historico-cultural translation of Tagore
 by Srimati Mukherjee
. Bengali director Rituparno Ghosh challenges the moribund aspects of cultural tradition and shows that mobilization in and out of the “fixed” space of the widow is possible.

LATIN AMERICAN MEDIA

• The Chilean Student Movement of 2011: Camila Vallejo and the media 
by Matt Losada.
 How the Chilean establishment media set out to negatively portray the leader of the student movement, Camila Vallejo, but failed, in large part due to new media responses.
• Made on Rails in Mexico 
by John Mraz.
 How can modern media be employed to represent history — particularly that of workers in underdeveloped countries — in a critical and rigorous way?
• Julio García Espinosa’s Reina y Rey: 
from returning exile to Cuban-American tourist 
by Mariana Johnson. 
Cuba's revolutionary filmmaker and theorist of "Imperfect Cinema" comes to terms with life in the Special Period.

Articles on Bolivian filmmaker, Jorge Sanjinés

• Andean realism and the integral sequence shot 
by David M.J. Wood. 
Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés’ radical film theory and praxis: an Andean take on the critique of mainstream cinema and the redemptive power of realism.
• The impossibility of mestizaje in The Hidden Nation: 
emblematic constructions in the cinema of Jorge Sanjinés
 by Alber Quispe Escobar, translated with explanatory notes by Keith John Richards.
• The all-encompassing sequence shot
by Jorge Sanjinés, translated by Cecilia Cornejo and Dennis Hanlon.
Jorge Sanjinés' 1989 essay explains the development of the "Andean sequence shot" and why it is consonant with indigenous Andean concepts of community and time. A key piece of Third Cinema theory never before translated into English.
• The “new” and the “old” in Bolivian cinema
 by Verónica Córdova S., translated by Amy L. Tibbitts. 
Verónica Córdova S. remarks on the motivations of the New Latin American Cinema movement of the 60s as contrasted with current trends and concerns of present-day Bolivian filmmakers. Using the films of Jorge Sanjinés as a model, Córdova explains how new technological advances in filmmaking are influencing Bolivian film production, while, hopefully, remaining in dialogue with the past generation of filmmakers.
• A cinema of questions: a response to Verónica Córdova 
by Martín Boulocq, translated by Amy L. Tibbitts. 
Martín Boulocq responds to Verónica Córdova's comments regarding the motivation of past and present Bolivian filmmakers, offering an entirely unique perspective on what motivates filmmakers to make films.
• Insurgentes: the slight return of Jorge Sanjinés 
by Keith John Richards.
 Jorge Sanjinés’ most recent film, Insurgentes, has aroused differences of opinion within Bolivia; this review examines the film in the context of recent developments in the country.

THEMES IN HOLLYWOOD AND OTHER CINEMAS

1. Race/ethnicity

• Not helping: The Help is stuck in the same stereotypes it's supposed to debunk 
by Kathryn Fleishman.
 Tate Taylor's 2011 film adaptation of The Help erases the continuing complexity of U.S. race relations, but it is all the more treacherous because it so earnestly strives to elucidate them.
• English ladies to liberators? How Pirates of the Caribbean and Alice in Wonderland mobilize aristocratic white femininity
by Kendra Marston. 
Examining the narrative trajectories of female protagonists in recent Holly wood blockbusters reveals that stories of feminist liberation may be utilized in order to mask power structures that privilege whiteness.
• “Machete improvises”: 
racial rhetoric in digital reception of Robert Rodriguez’s Machete 
by Marina Wood.
 Robert Rodriguez's Machete brings the immigration debate to the big screen with heaping sides of exploitation and satire much to the dismay, delight, and disinterest of its diverse audiences.
• Postmodern geekdom as simulated ethnicity 
by Kom Kunyosying and Carter Soles. 
As geekdom moves from the cultural fringes into the mainstream, contemporary media frame white male geeks sympathetically by allowing them to simulate racially marked victimhood in order to justify their existence as protagonists in a world where an unmarked straight white male hero is increasingly passé.
• Babel’s national frames in global Hollywood 
by Leisa Rothlisberger.
 Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel may be a melodrama about the human implications of globalization, but it also reveals the consequences of neoliberal policy for individuals as well as the global film industry.

2. The Mideast

• Looking back on Iraq: winning American hearts and minds
 by Patricia Ventura.
 Using key documentaries and reality TV shows, this essay explores how popular support for neoliberal U.S. war involves powerful forces mobilizing a necropolitics that the essay analyzes in its many facets.
• Narrating the global: pedagogy and disorientation in Syriana 
by Kfir Cohen. 
Stephen Gaghan's Syriana as a way to think the historical and philosophical significance of neoliberalism and globalization.

3. History

• A working-class hero is something to be: class in 70s U.S. cinema 
by Peter Steven.
 Review of Derek Nystrom's Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema
• Performing the new economy: New York, neoliberalism, 
and mass communication in late 1970s cinema
 by Stanley Corkin.
 Howard Beale is mad as hell, but can he stop the tide of neoliberalism?
• The unquiet memory of the Hollywood Blacklist 
by Clay Steinman.
 Review of Alan Casty’s Communism in Hollywood: The Moral Paradoxes of Testimony, Silence, and Betrayal and Joseph Litvak’s The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture
. Sixty-five years after it began, the Hollywood blacklist continues to offer new lessons for left cultural practices, including the right’s ongoing response to them.
• Feminist film history
 by Diane Waldman.
 Review of Vicki Callahan (ed), Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History and Suzanne Leonard's Fatal Attraction
• “The lesser of the attractions”: Grindhouse and theatrical nostalgia 
by Kevin Esch.
 The Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez double-feature experiment celebrated a bygone era of grindhouse moviegoing. Was anybody listening?

4. Institutions: Law, Production, Exhibition

• The Hurt Locker litigation: an adult’s story
 by Robert Alpert
. Jeffrey Sarver, the alleged doppelganger to Kathryn Bigelow’s fictional character, William James, is crushed in real life, where law, on the one hand, and ethics and morality, on the other, frequently do not coincide.
• Interview with Zalman King—“In defense of myself, it’s not soft core” 
by Peter Lehman, with introduction by Chuck Kleinhans. 
Zalman King talks about the unusual and intense sexual journeys at the heart of his films and TV shows that he argues distinguish them from soft-core.
• On the production of heterotopia, and other spaces, 
in and around lesbian and gay film festivals 
by Ger Zielinski.
 Thinking through the varied, contested spaces of the lesbian and gay film festivals with the concept of heterotopia.

5. Queering the entertainment

• Glee: coming out on U.S. teen television 
by Whitney Monaghan.
 Employing an ensemble of queer adolescent characters, Glee offers multiple variations to the coming out narrative.
• Jeepers Queerpers: exploring queer identity in Jeepers Creepers 2 
by Patrick Bingham. 
Jeepers Queerpers explores the complex relation between the slasher film, (homo)sexuality and monstrosity.
• RuPaul’s Drag Race as meta-reality television 
by Nicholas de Villiers. 
RuPaul’s Drag Race—considered as a “meta-text” that incorporates and parodies Paris Is Burning, America’s Next Top Model, and Project Runway—demonstrates how drag-as-citation destabilizes notions of originality, and how queer culture is passed on in the age of new media.

DOCUMENTARY

• Framing the world economics in a tuna can: 
Luc Moullet tracks the Origins of a Meal/ Genèse d’un repas (1978) 
by Audrey Evrard.
Insisting that the globalization of French economy should be seen as a perfected form of colonialism, Luc Moullet's documentary is as relevant to today's viewers as it was to its initial audience over thirty years ago. Where contemporary films often vilify corporate interests, Moullet prefers to point to shared responsibility in the devastating exploitative nature of the global food trade.
• Truth in the mix: 
Frederick Wiseman’s construction of the observational microphone 
by Giovanna Chesler.
 By closely examining the construction of soundtracks in Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries High School and Domestic Violence, Chesler explores how sound editing in observational-style documentary provides a seemingly continuous foundation that enables storytelling and editing techniques more familiar to fiction filmmaking.
• Consciousness-raising and difference in 
The Woman’s Film (1971) and Self-Health (1974) 
by Shilyh Warren. 
To reconsider the aesthetic legacies and political fantasies of feminist documentaries of the 1970s means that we also have to come to terms with some of their real rhetorical limitations.
• On suffering and human eloquence: 
commemorating 9/11, televised U.S. coverage in 2011 
by Isabel Pinedo.
 Televised programs commemorating the tenth anniversary of 9/11 sought to construct redemptive narratives of various kind, but the most powerful, the mini-eulogies and the documentary approach, revolved around human affect in contrasting ways.
• Streaming death: the politics of dying on YouTube 
by Jennifer Malkowski. 
Documentary footage of two violent deaths—Oscar Grant’s and Neda Agha-Soltan’s—circulating on YouTube reveals the promise and perils of activist Internet video.
• Julia Bacha’s Budrus (Palestine), Ali Samadi Ahadi’s The Green Wave (Iran), Leonard Retel Helmrich’s Position Among the Stars (Indonesia) — transnational collaborations for art and impact in new documentary cinema 
by Daniel Miller.
 Three contemporary documentaries are attracting notice as they go out from festivals into the world to do real work.
• Media activists for livability: an NFB experiment in 1970s Vancouver 
by Jean Walton.
 In the early 1970s, the National Film board brought its Challenge for Change Program to a troubled suburb on Canada’s West Coast, putting cameras into the hands of disenfranchised residents. The land use battles that ensued complicated Vancouver’s image as the Shangri-La of the North.
• Give me shelter: the ecology of the home in Blue Vinyl and Libby, Montana 
by Robin L. Murray and Joseph Heumann. 
In Blue Vinyl and Libby, Montana, it’s not just how you live and how you build your home, it’s where you live and what’s around you that contribute to the everyday eco-disasters associated with constructing and sustaining shelter.

EXPERIMENTAL and NEW MEDIA

• Identity, interactivity and performativity in Michelle Citron’s Queer Feast
 by Kathleen Scott. 
An exploration of interactive narrative and form in the work of experimental filmmaker Michelle Citron.
• Video games, cognitive capital, the cognitariat, and the dream factory's seedy streets: patrolling the citizenry of LA Noire 
by Dennis Broe and Ken Cohen in conversation.
 A critical discussion of LA Noire, a game that claimed to revolutionize the industry but which this article contends raises perennial questions relevant to gaming in general regarding the cognitariat, surveillance culture and the digital panopticon.
• “Making it through”: 
sickness and health in Su Friedrich’s The Odds of Recovery 
by William C. Wees.
In vivid and intimate detail, Su Friedrich's autobiographical film offers literal and metaphorical views of the consequences of sickness and the pleasures of recovery.
• New media and politics: populist revolt, state control, and elections 
by Lyell Davies.
 Review of Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns, eds., Tweets From Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution as it Unfolded, in the Words of the People who Made it; Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom; Richard L. Fox and Jennifer M. Ramos, eds., iPolitics: Citizens, Elections, and Governing in the New Media Era
• Work-in-progress: Marie Menken and the mechanical representation of labor 
by Caroline Guo.
 Through her experimental short films, Marie Menken reveals how cinema’s capacities lie not only in the mechanical workings of the camera but also the potentials of human labor, leading us to bigger reflections on the inextricable ties between filmmaking, labor, and modern society.
• The Cry of Jazz and the expressive politics of music and race 
by Chuck Kleinhans.
 An interview with Ed Bland, director of the landmark 1959 film on jazz music and African Americans in U.S. society, reveals the context of the experimental documentary's argument and analysis.

CRITICAL ANALYSES

• Should the Dark Knight Have Risen?
 by Todd McGowan. 
The radical politics of Christopher Nolan's new film lies in Bane's voice and in its critique of the idea of harmony and balance, as represented by Miranda Tate.
• The rape-revenge film: biocultural implications 
by David Andrews.
 This article looks at rape-revenge movies from a biocultural perspective, using sexual-selection theory to understand rape-revenge conventions.
• Feeling and form in the films of Claire Denis 
by Ian Murphy. 
Shattering the laws of traditional narrative, Denis’ films Beau travail (1999) and Vendredi soir (2002) promote a purely rhythmic form that calls for a deeper mode of viewer engagement – with the screen, and with the self.
• Time After Time: cinema, trauma, and (a)temporality 
by Allan Cameron. 
Review of Todd McGowan's Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema

THE LAST WORD

• Days of whines and ruses
 by the editors.
 Non-electoral concerns: class, race, sex and higher ed/media studies

More about → New JUMP CUT: gender, globalization, Third Cinema, history, political activism, racial representation, cinematic form, melodrama, genre, new media, and media institutions