Queere Zeitlichkeiten in dokumentarischen Filmen

Zeit als normatives Ordnungsprinzip ist in den Queer Studies zu einem zentralen Forschungsgegenstand geworden. Unter dieser Perspektivverschiebung werden Biografien, Archive, Gefühle und Bewegungsgeschichten in den Blick genommen. Natascha Frankenberg greift diese Diskussion aus einer dezidiert filmwissenschaftlichen Perspektive auf und rekonstruiert Beiträge des Queer Cinema zu einer Queeren Zeitlichkeit. Sie analysiert u.a. Filme von Gréta Ólafsdóttir, Susan Muska, Cheryl Dunye, Barbara Hammer und Joey Carducci in ihrem Umgang mit Materialität, Motiven, Narration und Filmform.

Longing and Lust, ‘Red Light’ on a ‘Dark Continent’

This chapter presents a variegated depiction of female sexuality seen from their own point of view, beginning with Carollee Schneeman’s Meat Joy (1964). Woolf’s metaphors for the female sex and lesbian desire is brought to the scene in interracial encounters in She Must Be Seeing Things (Sheila McLaughlin 1987), The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye 1997) and Pariah (Dee Rees 2011). The stereotypical figure of the lustful and man-eating witch is reworked in The Love Witch (Anna Biller 2016) and Jennifer’s Body (Karen Kusama 2009). In Raw (Julia Ducournaou 2016) female sexuality is addressed in a ferocious and intense way. After the explicit poetics of horror of the films of the middle section, this chapter looks at three other films that have a more-implied horror embedded within their narration. In I’m Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni 2017) witchcraft is seen from a totally different non-western perspective, whereas in In the Cut (Jane Campion 2003) we see a combination of poetry, sexuality and a different type of final girl. In the equally poetic Longing for the Rain (Lina Yang, 2013), a contemporary Beijing housewife makes love with a ghost that might not be so benign and slowly takes over her life.

Yet Still

This chapter considers how four films, Looking for Langston (directed by Isaac Julien, 1989), The Watermelon Woman (directed by Cheryl Dunye,1996), Brother to Brother (directed by Rodney Evans, 2005),and The Aggressives (directed by Daniel Peddle, 2005), involve related, but different organizations of time. While all of the films offer insights into the temporality of a present sense of political possibility, the first three films evince a desire for a usable past that might work in the service of the present, while The Aggressives organizes time idiosyncratically in a strategy that provides an opportunity to consider how queer temporality carries spatial implications that might anchor another orientation toward the past, present, and the future—one in which listening for “poetry from the future,” without insisting it be recognizable as such, is an ethical demand of and for our times.

Sensual Excess

This book offers multiple inroads into thinking with and through the dominant tropes of sexuality. By analyzing particular works of art, each chapter draws our attention to specific aspects of pornotropic (violent and exoticizing) capture that black and brown people must negotiate. These technologies differ, but together, they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. In addition, the book identifies and analyzes moments that exceed these constraints—the sensual excess that is theorized as brown jouissance. Brown jouissance is a political and philosophical intervention into what constitutes selfhood, knowledge, and fleshiness. The book works through several examples of brown jouissance in the work of Lyle Ashton Harris, Kara Walker, Mickalene Thomas, Xandra Ibarra, Amber Hawk Swanson, Cheryl Dunye, Carrie Mae Weems, Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, and Maureen Catbagan by dwelling on the analytic possibilities opened by the artwork’s entanglement with the sensual. The sensual, in turn, leads us to imagine possibilities for orienting relationality around queer femininity.

A performance queer na dupla encenação do filme The Watermelon Woman // The queer performance in the double staging of the film The Watermelon Woman

The Watermelon Woman (1996), Cheryl Dunye, é um modelo híbrido de ficção/documentário. A dupla encenação vai da busca de uma atriz negra do cinema mudo ao cotidiano da própria diretora/personagem. Uma associação entre forma e conteúdo permite igualar-se à representação da personagem o deslocamento dos gêneros cinematográficos, tornando o filme uma performance queer, em que a história sobre a vida da mulher-melancia e a realidade de Cheryl se mesclam, dando visibilidade à mulher negra e lésbica./The Watermelon Woman (1996), Cheryl Dunye, is a hybrid movie that is between fiction and documentary model. The double performance goes from the search of a black actress of the silent cinema period to the daily life of the director / character. An association between form and content allows the representation of the character to be equated with the displacement of the cinematographic genres, making the film a queer performance, in which the story about the life of the watermelon woman and the reality of Cheryl merge, giving visibility to the woman black and lesbian.

Structural Laughter and Constructed Intimacies: The Self-Reflexivity of Cheryl Dunye

This interview focuses on Cheryl Dunye's views of the industry from her current position in prestige television, working as a director for Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey's Queen Sugar (OWN, 2016–). The forward-looking conversation concentrates less on Dunye's past films but rather on the work she is doing today in episodic television, her creative process, and her legacy for future generations of media makers. By asking Dunye about her upbringing and early influences, I sought a renewed sense of the groundbreaking filmmaker as a person beyond the characters and constructed intimacies she presents in her films and an understanding of her aims today in episodic television.