Queer Imaginings: On Writing and Cinematic Friendship

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How do we identify the "queer auteur" and their queer imaginings? Is it possible to account for such a figure when the very terms "queer" and "auteur" invoke aesthetic surprises and disorientations, disconcerting ironies and paradoxes, and biographical deceits and ambiguities? In eighteen eloquent chapters, David A. Gerstner traces a history of ideas that spotlight an ever-shifting terrain associated with auteur theory and, in particular, queer-auteur theory. Engaging with the likes of Oscar Wilde, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, Jean Louis Baudry, Linda Nochlin, Jane Gallop, Cáel Keegan, Luce Irigaray, and other prominent critical thinkers, Gerstner contemplates how the queer auteur in film theory might open us to the work of desire. Queer Imaginings argues for a queer-auteur in which critical theory is reenabled to reconceptualize the auteur in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and desire. Gerstner succinctly defines the contours of a history and the ongoing discussions that situate queer and auteur theories in film studies. Ultimately, Queer Imaginings is a journey in shared pleasures in which writing for and about cinema makes way for unanticipated cinematic friendships. Cover Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Introduction On Writing On Cinema On Friendship Putting It Together A Note on My Better (Queer) Angels Notes I: Politics, Love, and the Queer Auteur 1. Introduction to Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic Performing Black and Queer White Seduction Black Male Homosexuality The Cinematic Notes 2. Past the Post?: Screening Progress and Reappearing Fascism 1. 1.1. 1.1.1. 1.1.1.1. Notes 3. Authorship, A Queer Death: Review of Jane Gallop’s The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time Notes II: Archival Penetration 4. Queer Angels . . . Presenting the Homosexual! The Historian as Liar Les Pochettes-Surprises du Gay Paris Angelic Excrescence Historical Perversions and Surreal Objets d’Art The Perversion of History History as Gossip Notes 5. Hide and Seek, or, The History of Difference under Erasure 6. Penetrating Epstein: Reviews of Une vie pour le cinéma: Jean Epstein, by Joël Daire; Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, edited by Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul; and Jean Epstein, DVD Box Set Notes 7. In Excess of the Cut: Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato Notes 8. Queer Modernism: The Cinematic Aesthetic of Vincente Minnelli Minnelli’s Masculinity and the Arts Small-Town Boys and Dandified “Hysteria” in Twentieth-Century New York Urban Sophistication Notes 9. The Case of the Ceramic Dildo: Notes on Queer Historiography and Ramón Novarro’s Remains Deviously Charming Urban Migrations Tearing at the Skin of History: Bathhouses, Hustlers, and Art Deco Dildos “Souvenirs Drenched in Blood” Teatro Intimo Notes 10. How Do We Look So Far?: Notes toward a Queer Film Philosophy I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. Notes III: On Writing and Cinematic Friendship 11. Queer Turns: The Cinematic Friendship of Marcel Duchamp and Charles Demuth New York and Duchamp’s Cinematic Turn on Gender Queer Cranks Demuth’s “Good Seed” Notes 12. Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied: DVD Review 13. With “Gay Abandon”: The Auteur as Homosexual Writer in the Twenty-First Century Writing and Twenty-First-Century Gay Auteurs Writing Himself into the Film: Lucio Castro The Gay Auteur on the Move: Christophe Honoré Writing Wildly: Camille Vidal-Naquet Notes 14. Strange Days: Christophe Honoré’s Multimedia Trilogy The Novel The Film The Play Notes 15. Speculations on the Origin of the World: Notes toward Queer Feminism, Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, and Christophe Honoré’s 17 fois Cécile Cassard A Cinematic Dry Run “The Aim of All Life Is Death” The Cinematic Womb A Mother’s Touch Push, Draw, Lean The Language of Sound and Light Possibilities Coda Notes 16. Interview with the New Zealand Filmmaker Peter Wells Note 17. Letter to Sam Notes 18. In Memory of Peter Wollen Notes Bibliography Index of Names