"The Greatest Disguise": On Cross-Dressing in Films, In Memory of Blake Edwards

James Garner and Julie Andrews in Victor Victoria (Blake Edwards, 1982). Read Véronique Fernández's article on this film: '"People Believe What They See": Clothing and Genders in Victor/Victoria', Lectora, 7, 2001

Police Inspector: You idiot! That's a man! 
Labisse: It can't be! 
Police Inspector: The person in that room was naked from the waist down, and if that was a woman, then she is wearing the greatest disguise I have ever seen! 

Victor Victoria (Blake Edwards, 1982)

It's the day after the news emerged of the death of American screenwriter and director Blake Edwards at the grand age of 88, surrounded by his loved ones in a California hospital. David Hudson's customary gathering of links to tributes is a very good place to begin to find out, if you don't already know, about the warm esteem in which Edwards was held by critics and other filmmakers.

 

Today, Film Studies For Free presents its own little "cross-dressing-in-international-film"-links homage to its favourite Blake Edwards film, the cross-dressing comedy Victor Victoria. It may not be the queerest of queer films, certainly; it may not even be the queerest of Blake Edwards' queerish films... But it is one of the funniest, with plenty of treats for fans of Julie Andrews and James Garner. It thus stands as a fine testimony to Blake Edwards' gently subversive powers as a screenwriter and a director.

FSFF's author first saw this film, memorably, on its French repertory release in 1984, as a year-abroad student. Alone in a packed cinema, she had the doubly funny but also unsettling experience of laughing at the numerous verbal gags as they were delivered in English, and then waiting for the French audience to laugh as the subtitles unerringly delivered a belated punch, a curious case of comic différance.

• James Allan, 'Sissies, Leeches and Sidekicks: Fags and Hags in the ‘60s and the ‘90', Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Sheraton New York, New York City, NY, 2009-05-25
• Kay Armatage, 'Fetish and Fashion in Canadian Film', TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2006
• Concepción Bados Ciria, Political and cultural cross-dressing, and the negotiation of Cuban-American identities, REDEN, Número 19-20, 2000
• Kathleen Barbara, 'Masquerade: The Female Body in Post-Modern Films', MP: An Online Feminist Journal, December 21, 2004
• Kathleen Barbara,The Post-Modern Body, MA Thesis, Wichita State University, May 2006
• Mark Bernstein, 'Victor/Victoria: It's "Mary Poppins in drag"', from Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983
• David Boxwell, 'Wheeler and Woolsey Queered', Bright Lights Film Journal, 42, 2003
• Rong Cai, 'Gender Imaginations in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Wuxia World', positions, 13:2, Fall 2005
• Terrell Carver, ‘Sex, Gender and Heteronormativity: Seeing “Some Like it Hot” as a Heterosexual Dystopia’, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, Working Paper No. 03-07, 2007
• Bert Cardullo, 'An Afghan Is a Woman', The Hudson Review, Summer 2005
• Gilbert Gerard Castillo, Gender, Identity and Influence: Hong Kong Martial Arts Films, MA Thesis, University of North Texas, December 2002
• Cynthia C. Degnan, 'Living on Girlboy Time: Queer Childhood Temporality and Kinship in Ma Vie en Rose', MP: A Feminist Journal Online, June, 2007
• Richard Dyer, 'Less and More than Women and Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar Germany', New German Critique, No. 51, Special Issue on Weimar Mass Culture (Autumn, 1990)
• Tanfer Emin-Tunc, 'Glen or Glenda: Psychiatry, Sexuality, and the Silver Screen', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 41, August 2003
• Richard Ekins, 'Cross-dressing, sex-changing and film. Fragments from an analysis of screening male femaling', Trans-Gender Archive, University of Ulster, Gendys Conference, 1994
• Heather Erin Emmens, Domestications and Disruptions: Lesibian Identities in Television Adaptations of Contemporary British Novels, PhD Thesis, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, May, 2009
• Brett Farmer, 'Interview with Stacy Wolf about her New Book, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical', Gender OnLine Journal, Issue 28, 2002
• Véronique Fernández, '"People Believe What They See": Clothing and Genders in Victor/Victoria', Lectora, 7, 2001
• Elizabeth Fox-Kales, 'Cinematic Cross-Dressing: Sexual Disguise vs. Gender Transformations', IPSA Conference Proceedings, 2004
• Andrew Grossman, 'Better Beauty Through Technology: Chinese Transnational Feminism and the Cinema of Suffering', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 35, January 2002
• Robert Hanke, 'The "Mock-Macho" Situation Comedy: Hegemonic Masculinity and its Reiteration', Western Journal of Communication, 62(1) (Winter 1998)
• Susan Hayward, 'Simone Signoret 1921-1985: the star as sign-the sign as scar', Modern Languages Publications Archive, 1995
• Mallory Jagodzinski, Of Bustles and Breeches; Cross-Dressing Romance Novel Heroines and the Performance of Gender Ideology, MA Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2010
• Nicholas R. Jones, 'Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night: Contemporary Film and Classic British Theatre', Early Modern Literary Studies, 8.1, May 2002
• M. Alison Kibler, 'Rank Ladies, Ladies of Rank: The Elinore Sisters in Vaudeville', American Studies, 38:1, (Spring 1997)
• Kelly McWilliam, Girl Meets Girl: Lesbian Romantic Comedies and the Public Sphere,PhD Thesis,
  University of Queensland, May 2006
• Deborah Mellamphy, 'The Paradox of Transvestism in Tim Burton's Ed Wood',Wide Screen, Vol 1, No 1 (2009)
• Olga Osinovskaya, 'Cross-Dressing in Soviet CInema: The Case of Hello, I am your Aunt', MA Thesis, Central European Unversity, Budapest, 2007
• Iva Paneva, A study of female aggression as represented in Patty Jenkins' fiction film Monster, e--PhD Thesis, University of Witswatersrand, December 2008
• Sonali Pattnaik, 'Outside the Frame: The Representation of the Hijra in Bollywood Cinema', Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, Issue 22, October 2009
• Robert M. Payne, 'The Crying Game: Crossed lines', from Jump Cut, no. 39, June 1994 
• Jay Poole, 'Psycho: Queering Hitchcock's Classic', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 61, August 2008
• Candida Rifkind, 'Screening Modernity: Cinema and Sexuality in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall On Your Knees', Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne, 2002
• Thibault Schilt, 'François Ozon', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
  
• Sarah Schulman,' Yidl Mitn Fidl: Yiddish fictional cinema from Jump Cut, no. 31, March 1986
• Jérôme Segal and Monika Kaczek, 'Molly Picon and the Cinematic Archetype of a Jewish Woman', Cinemascope, Issue 14, 2010
• Rose T Sengenberger, 'Ma vie en rose', Writing Portfolio,2009 (scroll down to p. 23-41 in PDF)
• Karen Serwer, 'Mariposas en el andamio: Imagining Utopia through Repetition and Excess', Sexuality and the Public Sphere, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (date unknown)
• Jamie Stuart, The Business and Pleasure of Filmic Lesbians Performing Onstage, PhD Thesis, Bowling Green State University, August 2006
• Isabelle Stauffer, 'Heroines of Gaze. Gender and Self-Reflexivity in Current Espionage Films', Imagendering II, Genders Online Forum, Issue 13, 2006Georgette Wang and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, 'Globalization and Hybridization in Cultural Production: A Tale of Two Films', LEWI Working Paper Series, Paper Number: 36, April 2005
• K.E.Sullivan, 'Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer', from Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000
• Chao-Jung Wu, Performing Postmoderm Taiwan: Gender, Cultural Hybridity, and the MaleCross-Dressing Show, PhD Thesis, Wesleyan University, 2007
  
• Simon Chia-rong Wu, 'Gender Pastiche: Thai Queerness in Beautiful Boxer', Cultural Studies Monthly, 78, 2008
• Niamh Thornton, 'Valentinas, Adelitas, Soldaderas: Explosive Women on Film', LASA, 2009
• Diane Torr and Stephen Bottoms, 'Introduction: Why Act Like A Man?', Sex, Drag, and Male Roles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010)
• Chun-Chi Wang, Lesbianscape of Taiwan: Media History of Taiwan's Lesbians, PhD Thesis, University of Southern California, August 2007
• Stacy Wolf, 'Preface', A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002)
• Barry Wurst II, 'Blake Edwards vs. Hollywood: Sunset and the Myth of Hollywood's Golden Age', Bright Lights Film Journal, 66, 2009

On Todd Haynes: Happy Independence Day!

Film Studies For Free is off on its annual holiday. 
Back in two weeks. Hasta entonces, lectores queridos

Director Todd Haynes discusses his film Far From Heaven following a screening in the Walker Cinema (November 19, 2005)

Double Indemnity: Todd Haynes/Edward Hopper  

Richard Dyer, Professor of Film Studies at University of Warwick and author of White and The Matter of Images will join Todd Haynes to discuss issues raised by his work and the Hopper film programme at the Tate Modern, London, June 4, 2004.

In the first of a two-part interview, Reel Report speaks to maverick American director Todd Haynes about his latest movie I'm Not There, an unconventional rock biopic about the life of music legend Bob Dylan. Haynes talks about the challenges of telling Dylan's story, casting the six very different actors who play Dylan, and how he plans to take on the Bush administration with his next project (December 7, 2007).

In the second part of Reel Report's two-part interview with Todd Haynes, director of I'm Not There, the rock biopic about the life of Bob Dylan, we talk more generally about aspects of his filmmaking. In particular we ask him about his unique way of story-telling, his approach to the concept of film genres and whether his sexuality has an effect on his ability to interpret characters (December 18, 2007).

On this very appropriate day, Film Studies For Free honours Todd Haynes, a true and truly wonderful American independent filmmaker, with links, above and below, to great videos and many freely accessible and high quality online studies of his work.

Haynes is a big favourite at this blog, and why wouldn't he be as one of the most "cinema-studies literate" filmmakers working today. Here's looking forward to his forthcoming reworking of that Film Studies classic Mildred Pierce...

• Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, The Price of Heaven: Remaking Politics in All That Heaven Allows, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, and Far From Heaven', in The Ethnic Turn: Studies in Political Cinema from Brazil and the United States, 1960-2002, PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2009 (scroll to p. 194)
• Zélie Asava, 'Multiculturalism and Morphing in I’m Not There', Widescreen Journal, No. 2, 2010
• Norman Bryson, 'Todd Haynes's Poison and Queer Cinema', Invisible Culture - An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture Issue 1, Winter 1999
• Rachel Carroll, 'Toxic shock: Gendered environments and embodied knowledge in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Todd Haynes’s [Safe]', Transformations, Issue 14, March 2007
• Donald L. Carveth and Jean Hantman Carveth, 'Fugitives From Guilt: Postmodern De-Moralization and the New Hysterias', March 2007
• Adrian Danks,“… I’m Gone”; or Seven Characters in Search of an Exit: Some Reflections on Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There', Senses of Cinema, Issue 46, 2008
• Amelia DeFalco, 'A Double-Edged Longing: Nostalgia, Melodrama, and Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven', Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 5 (2004)
• Anthony Enns, '"A Name in Search of a Disease": Illness and Identity in Todd Haynes' Safe', Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
• Laura E. Felschow, Todd Haynes: the Public, the Private, and the Performative, PhD Thesis, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, February 1, 2009
• Julie Grossman, “The Trouble with Carol: The Costs of Feeling [On Todd Haynes' Safe]', Other Voices 2.3 January 2005
• Todd Haynes's film: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) 
  
• Lynne Joyrich, 'Written on the Screen: Mediation and Immersion in Far from Heaven', Camera Obscura, 57, Volume 19, Number 3, 2004
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'From the Scenes to Queens: Genre, AIDS, and Queer Love', 2007 
• Rose Ellen Lessy, 'Feminist Treatment: Illness and Impasse in Todd Haynes’s Safe', Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 7(4):291–308, 2006
• Niall Richardson, 'Poison in the Sirkian System: The Political Agenda of Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven', Scope, Issue 6, October 2006
• Rebecca Scherr, '(Not) queering “white vision” in Far from Heaven and Transamerica', Jump Cut, No. 50, spring 2008 
• David L. Smith, 'True, Valid Death Off a Movie Screen: Todd Haynes' I'm Not There', Journal of Religion and Film,  Vol. 12, No. 2, 2008
• Sunny Stalter, 'Down With Love/Far From Heaven', Scope, May 2004
• Nick Stevenson, 'What is Safe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk', Sociological Research Online, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2005
• Mary Traester, 'Hysteria and Ruin: Feminine Immobility And the Problem of Representation in Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven', COLT Symposium, April 15, 2008
• Keith Uhlich, 'Todd Haynes', Senses of Cinema, July 2002
• Nicholas de Villiers, 'Glancing, Cruising, Staring: Queer Ways of Looking', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 57, August 2007
• Sharon Willis, 'Politics of Disappointment: Todd Haynes Rewrites Douglas Sirk', Camera Obscura, 54, Volume 18, Number, 2003

 Cornell Cinema events May 6, 2008

BFI Researchers' Tales: Mulvey, Dyer, Kubrick, Frayling

 Image of Grace Kelly as Lisa Fremont in Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954)

For some time now, Film Studies For Free has been enjoying the videos that the British Film Institute has been posting at BFI Live, its online video channel exploring film and TV culture. There are lots of videos worth seeing at the site but, below, FSFF has singled out and directly linked to some which are especially deserving of the attention of film scholars.

Laura Mulvey on the Blonde

8 Mar 2010: The world-renowned film theorist presents her thoughts on the Hitchcock Blonde.

Researchers' Tales: Richard Dyer

8 Mar 2010: The writer and academic discusses his instrumental role in the creation of the BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, one of the world's most prestigious celebrations of queer cinema.

Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made? (Part 1)

13 Jan 2010: An illustrated lecture on Stanley Kubrick’s most ambitious yet unrealised project.

Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made? (Part 2)

11 Jan 2010: An onstage discussion of the finer points of Stanley Kubrick’s failed production.

Researchers' Tales: Sir Christopher Frayling on Spaghetti Westerns

14 Dec 2009: Eminent academic and writer Sir Christopher Frayling discusses the Spaghetti Western genre as part of the BFI National Library’s Researcher’s Tales strand.

Researchers' Tales: Sir Christopher Frayling on Film Research

14 Dec 2009: Eminent educationalist and writer Sir Christopher Frayling discusses the practice of researching film.

Film International for free - Lynch, Kieślowśki, Gomorrah, Brokeback Mountain, Tearoom, and Caché

Still from Tearoom (William E Jones, 1962/2007)

A very busy Film Studies For Free has just got round to reading yet another of Intellect's freely accessible journal issues: Film International (Volume: 7 | Issue: 1 February 2009). This was an excellent, highly stimulating read indeed. Below are links to all the main articles. FSFF particularly enjoyed the essays by Orr, Supanick, Sharrett and Ogrodnik.

• 'McMafia rising [on Gomorrah, the Camorra, Roberto Saviano, deregulation, free trade, Naples, Italy, Matteo Garrone]' Rajko Radovic

• 'Last Year at Mansfield: William E. Jones's Tearoom' Jim Supanick

• 'Death of the Strong, Silent Type: The Achievement of Brokeback Mountain' Christopher Sharrett

• 'A Cinema of Parallel Worlds Lynch & Kieślowśki + Inland Empire' John Orr

• 'Performative Radicalism in contemporary Canadian documentary film' William Anselmi and Sheena Wilson

• 'Deep Cuts [on Haneke's Caché, colonialism, distanciation, politics & media]' Benjamin Ogrodnik
  

Angelism and rage: Sally Potter links

Who is Sally Potter?

Sally Potter is exceptional among directors in having made both successful commercial features and experimental films. Besides filmmaking, her career incorporates dance, choreography, music and performance art; these elements are interwoven in her films, all of which - while very different from each other - confront issues around performance, gender and genre and appeal to the significance of musicality and movement in a medium which is in essence non-verbal.
Annette Kuhn

On the surface a satire on fashion, Rage is an indictment of the very market logic that forces stars to parade themselves on the red carpet in Berlin’s inevitable snow. It’s a reclamation of beauty from the bankers, and central to its ravishing struggle is Jude Law as Minx, a Russian-American supermodel. Minx refers to herself in the third person as “she” but the film leaves open the question of how Minx understands this pronoun for herself.

While not as centrally queer as Orlando, Rage is deeply concerned with that queerest of themes: what we say of ourselves and what (secretly) we cannot say but long to. Its compassion is amplified by its stunningly simple visual style; shot in tiny photographers’ studios using greenscreen, the film is also a message to budding filmmakers who think their projects are unlikely to get funding. Potter, a friend of Derek Jarman’s, is one of the few filmmakers committed to his mission of: make things with what you have.
Sophie Mayer

In a brilliant article discussing the role that other media play within film ("The Film Stilled", Camera Obscura 24, September 1990), Raymond Bellour recently suggested that these singular moments of eruption or invasion can point in two quite contrary directions. On the one hand, there are moments of video in film that point backwards, regressively, to a lost, even archaic past. Here, video becomes a sad, deathly emblem of nostalgia in the lives of people who are finding it hard to get themselves together. This occurs in the current release Falling Down, where the relentless camera movement into Michael Douglas' family video in the final shot expresses the complete disintegration of his identity. But, in a completely different spirit, video moments can point forward to utopian, transcendent, sometimes mystical states and experiences. Bellour gives this trend in cinema the curious name of 'angelism' - and what's most curious about it is that he coined the word before seeing Sally Potter's Orlando, where, in its final vision, video texture fills the screen as a child's video camera [that of Orlando's daughter] discovers an angel hovering in the sky, singing.
Adrian Martin

On the day that Rage, Sally Potter's new film, embarks on its 'multiplatform, interactive' release-week (today begin the mobile phone episodes), Film Studies For Free (a big Potter fan of old) is delighted to premiere its own selection of choice, openly accessible, scholarly links to Potter resources:

• Kathleen Barbara, 'Masquerade: The Female Body in Post-Modern Films', MP: An Online Feminist Journal, Vol. 1, Issue 1, December 21, 2004
• Eileen Barrett, 'Decamping Sally Potter's Orlando', from Re: Reading, Re: Writing, Re: Teaching Virginia Woolf conference papers 1994 (Pace University Press, 1995)
• BFI, Sally Potter Filmography
• Tara Brabazon and Vanessa Evangelista, 'Something Queer is Going on Here: A Binary Outlaw's Tour Through Orlando', Outskirts, Vol. 1, May 1996
• Rose Capp, 'Crocodile Tears: Sally Potter's The Man Who Cried', Senses of Cinema, May 2001
• Joan Copjec, 'Thriller: An Intrigue of Identification', Ciné-tracts. 3:3 (Autumn 1980), 33-38 (scroll down)
• David Ehrenstein, 'Out of the Wilderness: An Interview with Sally Potter,' Film Quarterly 47:1 (Autumn 1993), 2-7
• Angelica Fenner, 'Women refocusing [review of Women Filmmakers Refocusing. Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis, Valerie Raoul, eds. New York: Routledge, 2003]', Jump Cut 49, 2007
• Daniel Garrett, 'Dreaming Wide Awake', Offscreen. 9:9 (September 2005)
• Zoë Heyn-Jones, 'Eye and Brain, Torn Asunder: Reading Ideology in Sally Potter’s Orlando', Synoptique 11, March 12, 2008
• Anne Jerslev, 'Sally Potter's "ecrands seconds": a reading of Sally Potter's Work', Nordicom Review, 2, 2000, pp. 275-290
• Annette Kuhn, 'Sally Potter', Screenonline
• Sophie Mayer, 'John Berger on Sally Potter', Vertigo Magazine, No.13, November 2007 See HERE for info about Mayer's book on Potter for Wallflower Press
• Michael Mazière, David Curtis and Steven Bal, 'Artists' Bibliographies: Sally Potter', studycollection.org.uk
• Kristi McKim, '“A State of Loving Detachment": Sally Potter’s Impassioned and Intellectual Cinema', Senses of Cinema, 2006
• Howie Movshovitz, 'Saying "Yes" in iambic pentameter', Podcast for NPR, June 26, 2005
• Jean Oppenheimer, 'Production Slate: Yes - A Cross-Cultural Romance', American Cinematographer Online, July 2005
• Sally Potter's Comprehensive, Chronological CV
• Sally Potter's 'Where Have All the Auteurs Gone?' Masterclass transcript excerpt
• Sally Potter's 'Rage' Pressbook
• Sally Potter: Selected Academic Bibliography
• Sally Potter's website
• Sally Potter's blog
• SP-ARK (web-based open source educational project based on Potter's multi-media archive) (more info HERE, HERE, and HERE)
• Sally Potter, 'Notes on the Adaptation of the Book Orlando', Virginia Woolf Seminar
• Timotheos Roussos, 'An off-beat adaptation: Orlando', Philament: An Online Journal of the Arts and Culture, Issue 3, 2004
• Screenonline Sally Potter pages
• Joel Whitney, 'Yes: An interview with director Sally Potter', Guernica, October 2005
  

In fond memory of Patrick Swayze

The power behind Film Studies For Free's e-throne is a 'person of a certain age', making her (chrono) logically susceptible to a good number of the many charms and talents of actor Patrick Swayze. She is, thus, saddened by the news of his untimely death.

Swayze was an actor of surprisingly slight physical stature, but one who loomed very large and very beautifully, not only in Hollywood and independent cinema, and, of course, in the estimation of his many fans and admirers, but also in the musings of quite a few Film Studies scholars. In particular relation to the latter, he helped to inspire -- FSFF is sure -- many worthwhile studies of (post-)modern gender and sexuality, 'looking relations', and acting in film.

In fond memory of his work for the screen, a few links to openly-accessible items of some of that scholarship are given below:

• Katherine Barscay, 'Kathryn Bigelow's Gen(d)re', Cinephile (Post Genre Issue), Vol. 4, Summer 2008
• Douglas Booth, 'Surfing Films and Videos: Adolescent Fun, Alternative Lifestyle, Adventure Industry, Journal of Sport History, Fall 1996
  
• Kathryn Kane, 'Passing as Queer and Racing Towards Whiteness: To Wong Foo, Thanks but No Thanks', Genders OnLine Journal, Issue 42, 2005
  
• Ahava Leibtag, '"The only thing you have to be is yourself": Ideology and Identity Politics in Dirty Dancing and The Last Dance', MA Thesis, Georgetown University, 2002
• Marianne Mulvey, 'Is there sincerity in hollow speech? Feeling the cliché in contemporary performance', Nowiswhere, Issue 3, 2009 (scroll down)
  
• Thomas Piontek, 'Kinging in the Heartland; or, The Power of Marginality', Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 43, No. 3/4, 2002, pp. 125-143
• Nicola Rehling, ''White Masculinity in Cross-Dressing Comedies', All or Nothing: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Popular Cinema, PhD Thesis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2005 (pp. 228-233)
  
• Tracy Sutton and Gregory Fouts, 'Measuring and Contextualising "Chemistry" in the Movies', Journal of Media Psychology, Volume 10, No. 1, Winter 2005
• Brenda Wilson, 'Blurring the Boundaries: Auteurism & Kathryn Bigelow', Cinephile (Gender and Violence Issue), Vol. 1, April 2005

Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993)

Christina Lane, Feminist Hollwyood: From Born in Flames to Point Break (Wayne State University Press, 2000)


John Izod, Myth, Mind, and the Screen: Understanding the Heroes of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)

Happy Saturday Reading: New 'World Picture Journal'

Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge, directed by Cui Wei and Chen Huai’ai, 1959)

Film Studies For Free is delighted to report that the new Summer 2009 issue of World Picture Journal (number 3) has just been posted at its website. The issue is on 'Happiness'

Below are direct links to its three film-related articles. The issue also includes other wonderful essays on Adorno and John Stuart Mill, and a fabulous interview with Adam Phillips:

• Sara Ahmed, Happiness and Queer Politics (includes reference to the Canadian lesbian film, Lost and Delirious [Léa Pool, 2001])


• Jason McGrath, Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People's Republic of China


• Brian Price, On Compromises (on film theory and political philosophy)

Queer Film and Theory Links In Memory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Image from Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999)

Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear of the death at 58 of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the founders of the discourse of 'queer theory', and an inspirational teacher and critic.

Like many other film researchers, some of FSFF's author's own writing on queer films was deeply influenced by Sedgwick's brilliant exploration of the epistemology of the closet.

In memory of Sedgwick, FSFF has assembled a webliography, below, of links to pieces of high quality, freely accessible, scholarly writing (or recordings/videos) on the web on the topic of queer/glbt films and/or queer film theory, a number of which, unsurprisingly, employ her critical insights. Further links added since original post: last updated June 2, 2009.

• John S. Bak, 'Suddenly Last Supper: Religious Acts and Race Relations - Tennessee Williams's 'Desire',Journal of Religion and Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2005


• John Bannister, 'Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, and Susan Sontag: Campaigners of Camp and the Carry On films', Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007
  

• Harry M. Benshoff, 'Notes on Gay History/Queer Theory/Gay Film'


• Chris Berry, 'East Palace, West Palace: Staging Gay Life in China', from Jump Cut, no. 42, December 1998, pp. 84-89


• 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
  

• Orla Juliette Borreye, 'The Significance Of The Queer And The Dog In Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros (2000): A Masculinity At War', Wide Screen Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009

• NEW R. Bruce Brasell, 'The Making of "Monsters": The Queer as Producer', from Jump Cut, no. 40, March 1996, pp. 47-54
  

• Patrick S. Brennan, 'Cutting through Narcissism: Queer Visibility in Scorpio Rising', Genders 36, 2002


• Michael Bronski, 'From The Celluloid Closet to Brokeback Mountain: The Changing Nature of Queer Film Criticism', Cineaste, 2008


• Stella Bruzzi, 'The Talented Mr Ripley', EnterText 1.2, Spring 2001


• Norman Bryson, 'Todd Haynes's Poison and Queer Cinema', Invisible Culture - An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture Issue 1, Winter 1999


• Kathy Burdette, 'Queer Film Theory - Bibliography'


• Alain Chouinard, 'Queering the Québécois and Canadian Child in Jean-Claude Lauzon’sLéolo', Synoptique13, February 2009


• Lesley Chow, 'The Double Standard: The Twins of Two-Faced Woman and Sylvia Scarlett,' Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 59, February 2008
  

• Douglas Crimp, 'Getting the Warhol we Deserve: Cultural Studies and Queer Culture', Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Studies, 1999
  

• Rick Curnette, 'Child's Play: The Pixelvision Videos of Sadie Benning', The Film Journal, Issue 4


• Belidson Dias & Susan Sinkinson, 'Film spectatorship between queer theory and feminism: Transcultural readings', Paper for InSEA on Bridge - 7 European Regional Congress 1st - 6th July 2004 Istanbul - Cappadocia
  


• Richard Dyer, 'Homosexuality in Film Noir', from Jump Cut, No. 16, 1977, pp. 18-21


• Tanfer Emin-Tunc and Nichole Prescott, 'Glen or Glenda: Psychiatry, Sexuality, and the Silver Screen', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 41, August 2003
  

• NEW Bryan Ray Fruth, 'Media Reception, Sexuality Identity, and Public Space', e-PhD Thesis, The University of Texas at Austin, 2007
  


• Jane Gaines, 'Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Queering Feminist Film Theory', from Jump Cut, no. 41, May 1997, pp. 45-48


• Stefan Jack Garel, 'Queer Bodies and Settlements', (e-PhD Thesis: University of Exeter, 2008)


• 'Gays, Lesbian, and Transgendered People in Motion Pictures: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library'


• David Gerstner, 'Queer Modernism: The Cinematic Aesthetics of Vincente Minnelli', Modernity, Vol. 2, 2000


• Michael Goddard, 'Beauty Lies in the Eye (So Why Can't I Touch It?)', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 25, 1998


• Andrew Grossman, 'Twelve Tone Cinema: A Scattershot Notebook on Sexual Atonality', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 43, February 2004


• Julie Grossman, “The Trouble with Carol: The Costs of Feeling [On Todd Haynes' Safe]', Other Voices 2.3 January 2005


• Adam Hartzell, 'Queer Pal For The Straight Gal - Wanee & Junah and Queer Friendship', The Film Journal, Issue 7


• Todd Haynes interviewed by Richard Dyer [audio recording from the Tate Modern], 'Double Indemnity: Todd Haynes/Edward Hopper' (4 June 2004)


• Todd Haynes's film: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)


• Zoë Heyn-Jones, 'Eye and Brain, Torn Asunder: Reading Ideology in Sally Potter’s Orlando', Synoptique, 11, March 12, 2008
  

• NEW In Media Res GLBT media-themed week, April 21-25, 2008


• Fiona Jenkins, 'Grief's Testimony: On Almodóvar’s All About My Mother', Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture, Vol. 4, Number 2, August 2007


• 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' (e-Thesis)


• Dmetri Kakmi, 'Queer Cinema: A Reality Check', Senses of Cinema, 2000


• Peter Kemp, 'Bi-Polar Gender-Blender: Sylvia Scarlett,' Senses of Cinema 22, Sept-Oct 2002


• Ewan Kirkland, 'Romantic Comedy and the Construction of Heterosexuality', Scope Issue 9, 2007


• Kevin B. Lee, 'Madchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, 1931)'


• Dennis Lo, 'The Politics and Aesthetics of “Asian American” Sexuality in Ang Lee’s Cross-Cultural Family Dramas: A Case Study on The Wedding Banquet and The Ice Storm', Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies, Vol. 1, 2008


• Patricia MacCormack, 'Barbara Steele's Ephemeral Skin: Feminism, Fetishism, and Film', Senses of Cinema, September 2002


• Patricia MacCormack, Pleasure, Perversion and Death: Three Lines of Flight for the Viewing Body, Transmat Online Book


• James MacDowell, 'What Value is There in Gus Van Sant's Psycho?', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 9, Issue 7, 2005


• Stephen Maddison, 'Pedro Almodóvar and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: the Heterosocial Spectator and Misogyny', Chapter 4 of Fags, hags, and queer sisters : gender dissent and heterosocial bonds in gay culture (New York : St. Martin's, 2000)


• Joseph McBride, 'George Cukor: The Valor of Discretion', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 32, April 2001
  

• Deborah Mellamphy, 'The Paradox Of Transvestism In Tim Burton’s Ed Wood', Wide Screen Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009
  


• Frann Michel, 'The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love', Cineaste, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1995


• D.A. Miller, 'Anal Rope'
  

• D. A. Miller, 'La Ronde', Film Quarterly, Spring 2009
  

• Daniel Mudie Cunningham, 'Driving into the 'Dustless Highway' of Queer Cinema', Film Journal, 2002


• Rebecca Panosky, 'Dorothy Arzner and Gender Representation.” In: “International Female Film Directors: Their Contributions to the Film Industry and Women's Roles in Society.” Chapter 4 of e-Thesis


• Susan Pelle and Catherine Fox, 'Queering Desire / Querying Consumption: Rereading Visual Images of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art', Third Space, Vol. 6 Issue 1, Summer 2006


• Matthew Ogonoski, 'Queering the Heterosexual Male in Canadian Cinema: An Analysis of Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo', Synoptique, 13, February 2009


• Ryan Powell, 'Putting on the Red Dress: Performative Camp in Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows,' Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007


• Kate Rennebohm, 'Queering Childhood: An Examination of Claude Jutra’s Dreamspeaker', Synoptique 13, February 2009


• Elena del Rio, 'Performing the Narrative of Seduction: Claire Denis's Beau Travail', Kinoeye, Vol. 3, Issue 7, Spring 2003


• Julian Savage, 'The Conscious Collusion of the Stare: The Viewer Implicated in Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul,' Senses of Cinema, 16, Sept-Oct 2001


• Heide Schlüpmann and Karola Gramman, 'Mädchen in Uniform', trans. Leonie Naughton, Screening the Past, 12 January 1998
  

• NEW Ian Scott Todd, 'Outside/In: Abjection, Space, and Landscape in Brokeback Mountain', Scope13, February 2009
  


• Neera Scott, 'Sublime Anarchy in Gus Van Sant's Elephant', Senses of Cinema, 2005


• Steven Jay Schneider, 'A Tale of Two Psychos', Senses of Cinema, 2000


• Yael Sherman, 'Tracing the Carnival Spirit in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Feminist Reworkings of the Grotesque', Third Space, Vol. 3, Issue 2, March 2004


• Anneke Smelik, 'Gay and Lesbian Criticism'


• Anneke Smelik, 'Art Cinema and Murderous Lesbians'


• Anneke Smelik, 'The Carousel of Genders'

• NEW Carter Michael Soles, Falling Out of the Closet: Kevin Smith, Queerness, and Independent Film, e-Thesis University of Oregon, 2008
  

• Irini Stamatopoulos, 'Ang Lee's Cowboys', Offscreen Journal, Volume 11, Issue 2 (February 28, 2007)


• K. E. Sullivan, 'Ed Gein and the Figure of the Transgendered Serial Killer', from Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000, pp. 38-47


• Denise Tse Shang Tang, 'A Dialogue on Intimacy with Chan Kwok Chan in Yau Ching's Ho Yuk: Let's Love Hong Kong', Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context Issue 14, November 2006


• Donato Totaro, 'Psycho Redux', Offscreen Journal, 2004


• Evangelos Tziallas, 'Looking Beneath the Skin: Reconfiguring Trauma and Sexuality', Stream: A Graduate Journal of Communication, Spring 2008 1(1)


• Justin Vicari, 'Reading/Watching Fassbinder', Film Journal, Vol. 1, No. 13, Winter 2006


• Amy Villarejo, 'Interview with Tish Pearlman for Out of Bounds/Cornell University' [about Queer film and queer film theory] RealPlayer file, 29 mins 30 seconds


• Nicholas de Villiers, 'Glancing, Cruising, Staring: Queer Ways of Looking', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 57, August 2007


• Nicholas de Villiers, '”The vanguard - and the most articulate audience”: Queer Camp, Jack Smith and John Waters', Forum, Issue 4, Spring 2007
  

• Adam P Wadenius, 'The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection And Todd Solondz's Happiness', Wide Screen Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009
  


• Tamsin Whitehead, 'Rejecting the Margins of Difference: Strategies of Resistance in the Documentary Films of Pratibha Parmar', Third Space, Vol. 7, Issue 2, Winter 2008


• Damon Young and Gilbert Caluya, '”A Vessel of Imagery”: An Interview with Gregg Araki',Senses of Cinema, 2005

P.S. Another set of must-reads from the Reverse Shot website - just click on the film-title links below for some great reading on queer cinema and television:

Reverse Shot - Proposition 24: Defining a New Queer Cinema

by MK and JR

Broken Sky by Michael Koresky

The Wire by Chris Wisniewski

Lan Yu by Andrew Chan

I Love You, Man and the Apatow Comedy Factory by Michael Joshua Rowin

Hairspray by Leo Goldsmith

Be Like Others by Joanne Nucho

Casino Royale and the new James Bond by Andrew Tracy

Brokeback Mountain, Milk, and the Queer Prestige Film by Matt Connolly

The House of Mirth by Jeff Reichert

Far from Heaven by Chris Wisniewski

Milk by Michael Koresky