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Volume 14, Issue 2, 2024
- Editor’s Introduction
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Editor’s Introduction
More LessThis ‘Editor’s introduction’ notes the interviews and articles published in issue 14.2, all of which address the featured theme: LGBTQ+ films and filmmakers. The interview with Jenni Olson considers her long, multi-hyphenate career in queer cinema as a filmmaker, historian and archivist. The interview with Goran Stolevski focuses on his two award-winning fiction shorts, You Deserve Everything (2015) and Would You Look at Her (2017). The research articles focus on the following: Jenni Olson’s experimental short, Blue Diary; influential post-war avant-garde filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos’s Flowers of Asphalt; the two obscenity trials brought against exhibitors who screened Kenneth Anger’s short films, Fireworks (1947) and Scorpio Rising (1963); the racial and sexual politics of two Canadian shorts, Afronautic Research Lab: Newfoundland (2019) and Welcome to Africville (1999); a short documentary, Playback, that uses archival footage from the late 1980s of a queer nightclub community in Argentina; and the punk avant-garde short filmmaker, Australian Kim Miles.
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- In Focus: Jenni Olson
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A conversation with queer film hero Jenni Olson
More LessThis article features an interview with the incomparable, award-winning Jenni Olson, whose career as a filmmaker of both shorts and feature-length films, archivist, writer, historian and curator is a testament to her enduring commitment to independent queer film culture and audiences.
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Affective geographies: Orientations and deviations in Jenni Olson’s Blue Diary
More LessBlue Diary is the short film that defined the shape of Jenni Olson’s later cinema. Its straightforward structure, a visual composition of California cityscapes, combined with voiceover narration, fits within a tradition of American avant-garde landscape filmmakers. However, in Blue Diary, image and sound take divergent paths. This article argues that Olson’s filmmaking approach reconfigures – through voice and from a queer perspective – American urban spaces, generating new spaces of meaning and deviating from conventional representations.
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- Interview
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Would you look at him: A conversation with Goran Stolevski
More LessOpenly gay filmmaker Goran Stolevski was born in Macedonia and emigrated in his youth to Australia. Between 2007 and 2023, he directed nine short films and three features, as well as three episodes of television. His films frequently depict characters at the margins of society grappling with issues of identity. Two of his best-known shorts, You Deserve Everything (2015) and Would You Look at Her (2017), portray queer characters who are forced to navigate difficult situations in an oppressive society. Stolevski won the Rouben Mamoulian Award for You Deserve Everything at the 2016 Sydney Film Festival, and received the Short Filmmaking Award, International at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival for Would You Look at Her.
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- Articles
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Surreal geographies: Gregory Markopoulos’s Flowers of Asphalt
More LessGregory J. Markopoulos’s short silent film Flowers of Asphalt is a surrealistic study of a young man’s journey through a revelatory daytime dreamscape, a ‘coming out’, set inside the home, on the streets and at the amusement park. Flowers of Asphalt explores the disengaged realism of a waking dreamer – featuring medium and close-up shots, static images, shot-reverse shots and location footage – as the dreamer awakens into a surreal-inflected fantasy. Markopoulos’s experimental narrative presents a release from proscriptive post-war images of domesticity and normative forms of heterosexual behaviour, emancipating the imagination from clinical impositions of space and time, where sexual ‘others’ may roam.
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Fireworks and Scorpio Rising in the courtroom: The struggle between part and whole in the obscenity trials of Kenneth Anger’s short films
More LessThis article examines the obscenity trials against Kenneth Anger’s short films Fireworks and Scorpio Rising. I offer an analytical framework, undergirded by an iteration of Edgar Allan Poe’s concept of ‘unity of effect’, to understand the claims the prosecution and defence made about Anger’s films. I explore the interpretative difficulties the films, as short queer films, posed for the legal actors as they grappled with the ‘taken-as-a-whole’ stipulation of obscenity law.
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Relating racial and sexual difference in Afronautic Research Lab: Newfoundland and Welcome to Africville
More LessThis article applies Kalpana Seshadri’s ideas about race and sexuality to a comparison of two short Canadian films: Dana Inkster’s Welcome to Africville and Camille Turner’s Afronautic Research Lab: Newfoundland. It contrasts the presence of Newfoundland in Turner’s examination of race and enslavement with the absence of Africville in Inkster’s examination of sexuality and settler colonialism to illustrate the relationship between racial and sexual difference and the visibility of Black and/or queer bodies. It argues that Afronautic Research Lab: Newfoundland supports Seshadri’s view that racial identity is rigid when compared to sexual identity; at the same time, Welcome to Africville supports Seshadri’s view that racial difference is no more real than sexual difference, despite having a master signifier (‘Whiteness’) whose purpose is to justify the domination of Black lives.
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Activating dissident memories: Video as a tool for resistance in Agustina Comedi’s Playback
More LessThis article examines how the short documentary Playback: Ensayo de una despedida repurposes archival videos of the underground queer scene in Argentina’s nascent democracy in the late 1980s. Video is used as a tool for documenting queer histories, resisting erasure and reimagining the past. By blending archival footage with fictional elements, I argue that Playback highlights the affective dimensions of queer memory and the power of friendship in sustaining emotional truths and also demonstrates how video archives can be mobilized for resistance and resilience.
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Kim Miles: Inchoate couplings
Authors: Claire Henry and George Evander CunninghamKim Miles is an LGBTQ+ Australian underground filmmaker who created a substantial body of work unique in its appropriation of cinematic form and style in the early 2000s. With her focus on temporal shifts, hyper-saturation, repetition and music, Miles’s work exemplifies a punk attitude to normative modes of cinematic and embodied forms. Reappropriating formal incoherence, Miles creates a trans aesthetic that expands short film form and shows the inchoateness of binary gender relationships.
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