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Often described as an art of abstraction and subjective introspection, experimental film is also invested in exploring daily objects and materials and in channeling, in the process, a peculiar perception of the modern everyday that this book calls queer materiality. Queer materiality designates the queer latency of modern material culture, which often inspired queer artists and filmmakers to envision wayward bodies and behaviors, and refers to the way in which sexual and social dissidence was embedded in the objects, technologies, substances, and spaces that make up the hardware of experience.
This book studies a rich archive of queer material engagements in work by well-known filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, and Jack Smith as well as under-recognized figures such as Tom Chomont, Jim Hubbard, Ashley Hans Scheirl, and Teo Hernández. Combining history, formal analysis, and theoretical reflection, author Juan A. Suárez shows how plastics, glitter, mechanical ensembles, urban ruins, garbage, amphetamine, film grain, and noise have been mobilized in the articulation of queerness for the screen. Experimental Film and Queer Materiality is an inquiry into the liveliness of matter and into the interface between sexuality and the material world.
List of contents
- 1. Introduction. Sexuality on the Outside: Experimental Cinema and Queer Materiality
- 2. Ruins, Magical Objects, Litter, and Synthetics: The Queer Materials of Postwar Avant-Garde Film
- 3. Amphetamine and Queer Materiality in Andy Warhol's Factory Films
- 4. Crashing Bodies, Excrement, and Plastics: The Kuchar Brothers in the Sixties
- 5. Glitter and Queer Embodiment in Seventies Film and Performance
- 6. Film Grain, Discontinuous Representation, and the Queer Corporealities of Underground Cinema
- 7. The Afterlives of Film Grain: Precarious Bodies, Poor Images
- 8. Synthetic, Exotic, Magnetic: The Noise of Queer Experimental Film
About the author
Juan A. Suárez is Professor at the University of Murcia in Spain. He is the author of Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars; Jim Jarmusch; and Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday. His essays have appeared in Screen, Journal of Film and Media Studies, Grey Room, and New Literary History, among others, and in numerous edited volumes, most recently in The Music and Sound of Experimental Film, The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, and A Companion to Experimental Film.
Summary
Experimental Film and Queer Materiality studies a rich archive of queer material engagements in work by well-known filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, and Jack Smith as well as under-recognized figures such as Tom Chomont, Jim Hubbard, Ashley Hans Scheirl, and Teo Hernández.
Additional text
"Juan Suárez's new book on queer materiality in experimental film is fiercely original, thrillingly insightful and simply a great joy to read. Through a series of stunning readings and revelatory theoretical elaborations, Suárez makes a brilliant case for the myriad ways that sexuality is enmeshed in the object world of everyday life. He shows us how glitter, amphetamines, Ben-Day dots, brightly colored plastic and other materials of post-war consumer capital were essential elements of the sexual worlds presented by filmmakers like Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Marie Menken, the Kuchar Brothers, and Andy Warhol. In so doing, Suárez makes a major contribution to queer theory and film studies."
Report
"Juan Suárez's new book on queer materiality in experimental film is fiercely original, thrillingly insightful and simply a great joy to read. Through a series of stunning readings and revelatory theoretical elaborations, Suárez makes a brilliant case for the myriad ways that sexuality is enmeshed in the object world of everyday life. He shows us how glitter, amphetamines, Ben-Day dots, brightly colored plastic and other materials of post-war consumer capital were essential elements of the sexual worlds presented by filmmakers like Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Marie Menken, the Kuchar
Brothers, and Andy Warhol. In so doing, Suárez makes a major contribution to queer theory and film studies."
Jonathan Flatley, author of Like Andy Warhol
