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2006 Cinema Studies Student Conference

721 Broadway and La Maison Française
February 24 & 25




Panel Topics

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Hitchcock's Vertigo

Friday, 1:30 - 3:00 in Cinema Studies Rm. 656

The panel will consist of papers from Professor Allen's semester-long undergraduate Vertigo Seminar.

Kathryn Tocci: The Use of Color in Hitchcock's Vertigo

Daniel Gwinnell: Vertigo: The Myth of the Doubled Woman

Richard Allen: Camera Movement in Vertigo



Cinematic Form/ulations

Friday, 3:15 - 4:15 in Cinema Studies Rm. 656

Tarkan Durum: On the Nature and Form of the Trailer

Tarkan uses theories of cinematic essay to interrogate the form of the trailer. Some questions he asks include: How does the completed film relate to the promise of the trailer, and vice versa? Who, or what, is the trailer's author? How does the trailer function within the mode of the cinematic essay, particularly as regards its readership? Tarkan's discussion focues on trailers from a wide variety of cinemas, including genre cinema (the western, or gangster film), auteurist-cinema (French New Wave, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray), Classic Hollywood (Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, etc.), new Hollywood (Kubrick, Scorsese) and contemporary American, European, and Asian cinema.


Wyatt Phillips: Genre-Consciousness and Its Material Conditions in American Silent Film and 'Subliterature'

There has been much scholarship tracing both the visual-arts tradition and, perhaps to a lesser degree, the narrative tradition(s) of the cinema. However, aside from its cursory involvement in these two larger frames of reference, the tradition of genre which was adopted by the cinematic arts has been largely undeveloped. This paper proposes to investigate the origins of generic tropes in film, beginning with the more fully-formed version of genre pictures developed shortly after cinemaÕs transition period (the end of the 1910's) and proceeding back to pre-cinematic referents. One points of focus will be the discussions of genre in early photoplay-writing instruction manuals and its difference from the classification schemas of film distributors and exhibitors. A second area of investigation will be a comparison of the materialist conditions which influenced the rise of the dime novel in America in the mid-to-late 19th century and of those present during the transitional period of the film industry.



Gender, Sexuality, and Ideology

Friday, 4:30 - 5:45 in Cinema Studies Rm. 656

Amber Westcott-Baker: Gender and Marriage Ideology in Pulp Fiction

Using the assumption that film, as well as film criticism, is a reflection of dominant ideology, in 1969 Comolli and Narboni called upon Cahiers du Cinema readers and writers to consider the importance of how consciously films reflect their immersion in ideology, and what steps they take to criticize and re-shape it. Thus, the authors formulated several categories into which, they posited, all films fall with regards to ideology, depending on how closely they adhere to--or how consciously they reject--the ideology in which they were produced. The categories evaluate films both on the level of form and that of content. In many ways, the 1994 film Pulp Fiction defies the seemingly complete categories that Comolli and Narboni suggested, doing what the Cahiers authors did not acknowledge was possible: it shows a challenge to dominant ideology on the level of form, but often falls squarely within that ideology on the level of content. Subjecting the film to narratological analysis, Amber shows its relationship to the dominant ideology with regards to marriage and gender politics.


Rebecka Mamer: Iranian National Cinema and the Effect of Islam on Film Language

In 1979, Iran underwent a cultural revolution that saw, in the most basic terms, a shift from a secular, pro-Western monarchy to an Islamic Republic. Rebecka's work looks at both the changes in the film industry that occurred following the revolution and the new film language that grew out of necessary adherence to Islamic law, particularly with regard to gender. Iran is home to one of the more successful and productive film industries outside of Hollywood, but at the same time is somewhat restricted because of issues surrounding importing and exhibiting films that show unveiled women. The film language of Iran is particularly interesting because of the way it both adheres to and works around the codes surrounding gender, presentation and veiling/unveiling and also because of the distinct position this creates for the spectator. Rebecka's paper draws on secondary texts that discuss general changes in Iranian society as well as how the changes were presented on screen, as well as important and exemplary Iranian films, especially those directed by women and/or focusing on female protagonists and female-centered subject matter.


Lynley Shimat Lys: Performing Weimar Gender Roles: A Study of Asta Nielsen's Hamlet and Ernst Lubitsch's Schuhpalast Pinkus

Lynley discusses gender difference and the possibilities for transcending gender posited by Weimar films Schuhpalast Pinkus (Ernst Lubitsch) and Asta Nielsen's Hamlet (Sven Gad). She argues that these films offer alternative gender roles tied in to Weimar concepts such as the "New Woman," and that even within these explorations of gender, women are forced to balance multiple roles rather than being freed from their old positions.



French Film and Theory

Friday, 6:00 - 7:15 in Cinema Studies Rm. 656

Melissa Zajk: A Special Theory of Narrative Frequency: The Trans-Temporal Mode in The Shining and Last Year at Marienbad

In his book Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, GŽrard Genette describes three modes of narrative frequency: singulative, repetitive and iterative. While Genette does expand upon a fourth mode of narrative frequency -- the pseudo-iterative -- this particular aspect of narrative is less easily expressed in cinematic terms due to its reliance on the use of grammatical tense and a requirement by the spectator to expand his or her understanding beyond the literal. Using Genette as a foundation, I'd like to suggest that there exists another, special mode of narrative frequency that I refer to as the trans-temporal mode, which combines both the singulative and the iterative aspects of narrative frequency in such a way that the entire narrative operates within this conjoined modality.


Katie Kohn: Modus Apparati: The Discursive Structures of Film Ideology

For cinema, ideology functions akin to the the discursive structure set out by Jacques Lacan--a structure that actually entails four discourses and the ways in which they relate to one another. Katie's argument moves beyond the ordinary work of Lacanian film theory, which tends to be restricted to perceptual or even developmental terminology (gaze, voice, identification, mirror stage, imaginary, etc.). While this traditionally psychological focus on Lacan's work has produced some significant scholarship on the notion of cinema as a psychological apparatus, these works are ultimately limited by their understanding of Lacanian theories. Bringing discourse into a discussion of the function of ideology in film brings the "symbolic order" (not only its content, which will always be in a historical context, but also its structure, which is ahistorical) into the room where there was previously, only the subject/viewer and the apparatus/film.


Lisa Broad: Intertextuality in Robbe-Grillet's La Belle Captive

Lisa's paper focuses on Alain Robbe-Grillet's film La Belle Captive (1983) and its complex intertextual relationship to his 1975 novel of the same name. She addresses the notion of "the physical" in Robbe-Grillet's work as represented by La Belle Captive. For him the physical seems to have two primary senses: (1) That which pertains to the temporal/spatial construction of the universe; and (2) That which pertains to the corporeal construction of the human body. Robbe-Grillet's approach to both of these notions appears to be a powerful impulse toward deflation, deconstruction, and destruction. He strives to challenge traditional conceptions of time, space, identity, and morality by creating a world eternally in the present, which he feels can only be truly represented through the filmic medium.



New Media

Saturday, 10:00 - 11:15 in Cinema Studies Rm. 656

Kurt Shulenberger: Working Auteurs: The Directors Label and Music Video Spectatorship

Kurt examines music videos and music video directors within a historiographic framework. The recent legitimization of music videos as film art coincides with its rise in popularity as a commodity of and for the "MTV generation." Kurt focuses in particular on the Director's Label, a distribution company founded by Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry, that deals specifically with music video directors and the canonization of their work. The company has released seven DVDs, each showcasing a particular director and their video, commerical, and other "short format" work. Using the Directors Label as the focal point, Kurt explores how these directors and their work have been given an elevated status of "film art" and how the artists themselves legitimize their own commodities through historiographic means.


Jim Tan: Playing Kingdom Hearts: Video Game Cognition and Diegetic Experimentatioin with Donald Duck and Goofy

The Sqaresoft/Enix and Disney hybrid Kingdom Hearts represents either the most light-hearted video game of the Final Fantasy RPG franchise or the darkest game released by Disney Interactive. Kingdom Hearts's progression follows the spiky-headed, big-eyed Sora, whose rendering parallels the typical Final Fantasy bishonen character, accompanied by Donald Duck and Goofy, two (Jungian) archetypical Disney characters who abandon whatever previous "roles" they served in classic Disney narratives and exist as their "truer" selves-a magician and a knight respectively, commissioned with the task of maintaining the diegetic walls separating Disney narratives. Utilizing the popular familiarity of the game's characters, this paper describes some of the intricacies of gaming and game culture. Basing analysis on the works of James Paul Gee, Mark J.P. Wolfe and Steve Johnson, the paper details the problem solving skills and neural capabilities necessary to successfully play video games. Specific to Kingdom Hearts, Jim describes how success in the game requires an understanding of the cinematic concept "diegesis" and how this concept finds new definition within the progression of the video game. In addition, Jim suggests that Kingdom Hearts exemplifies a reverberation of dojin, a Japanese narrative phenomenon that melds diverse story universes into a coherent whole.


Ray Vichot: "#convention @ irc.fan.net": Real and virtual loci of anime fan activity

Society attempts to manage relationships using multiple modes of communication, both real and virtual. Fan communication, typified by fans of Japanese animation, relies on a mixture of virtual communication protocols, epitomized by Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and message boards, as well the physical space of the convention in order to maintain a coherent and large subculture. Through ethnographic research and analysis of pertinent sites of communication, this paper will show how these two disparate networks create a vital subculture. Virtual spaces create fan community via fan translations of media ('fansubs' and 'scanlations'), fan discussion, and "packetizable" (capable of display through virtual networks) fan re-appropriations such as fan-fiction. Real spaces engender a physical vitality, which is expressed through the physicality of the subculture as well through fan re-appropriations such as cosplay, interaction with the professional staff (the retail 'gatekeepers') and unscheduled fan activities.



Reimagining Film Histories

Saturday, 11:30 - 12:45 in Cinema Studies Rm. 656

Jamie Berthe: Modern Historicity and Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon.

Building on several themes central to Philip Rosen's book Change Mummified, this paper investigates the relationship between film and modern historicity in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. Jamie takes an in-depth look at how Barry Lyndon represents history and examines the specific relationship between Barry Lyndon and modern historicity. She argues that Kubrick's film goes much farther than merely representing history; it forces us to grapple with the fundamental issues of historical representation as such.


Molly Kim: Unraveling Mystrious Beauty: An Analysis of De Mille's Cleopatra as Historical Text

Making a film based on the historical event or character has been a debatable issue to many film scholars and historians. History is always told in different modes and different perspectives. In other words, historiography cannot be a pristine record of history, but rather it has to be considered as a certain level of representation of the historical event. Therefore, historical film should be read not as a pure reflection of history but reflection of historiography, and yet it still has its significance in regards to its reference to history. In this respect, the Hollywood film, Cleopatra (1937), directed by Cecil De Mille, is a wealthy looking film in number of ways because, on the one hand, the film uses its cinematic spectacle on the premise of realization of history; but the other hand, the cinematic spectacle is used as a part of narrating a film. This film functions into two different ways, pursuing the realization of history, but, at the same time, largely suggesting its own interpretation of history.


Michael Dow: The Politics of Technicolor: The Reluctant Dragon and the Disney Strike of 1941

By exploiting and compounding the problematics of filmic naturalism implied by the use of Technicolor, Walt Disney attempted to disseminate an idealized representation of his shiny new Burbank Studio ca. 1941, primarily with the hasty release of the anthology film, THE RELUCTANT DRAGON. This paper considers modes of resistance, both active (the concurrent studio strike) and animated (the rival studios) which helped to mold a new "cartoon sensibility" in the 1940s.



East Asian Cinema

Saturday, 11:30 - 12:45 in Cinema Studies Rm. 651

Priyadarshini Shanker: The Cinema of Wong Kar-wai: A Case Study of Chunking Express

This paper attempts an in-depth analysis of Chungking Express as a case in point while arguing that Wong Kar-wai, in a unique negotiation with history, has coaxed out a new cinema which itself serves as 'the fragment of that history.' Priya argues that Wong's films must not be perceived as finished products, but rather should be read as a preview of a work-in-progress and are to be best understood as fragments imbricated within each other. Central to understanding the formal and stylistic as a mode of cinematic narration is a microscopic dissection of the nonclassical evocation of time and space, the two inherent axial components of cinema, on which Wong Kar Wai hinges his allegorical narrative discourse. Wong Kar-wai and his films deserve special attention by contemporary film critics and historians given his unique status as a Postist auteur who is engaged in transacting a very important cultural moment for world cinema. This Hong Kong filmmaker stands at a spatio-temporal junction in history that privileges his mediation and informs his self-reflexive mode.


J.P. Meyer: A Hot Patriotic Wind: (Re)Writing History in Post-Colonial South Korean Film

The rise of New Korean Film has seen a wave of commercially successful films--both crowd-pleasing blockbusters and arthouse fare alikeÑthat have attempted to tell both the "true story" of politically-sensitive events which were previously censored or removed from the historical record, while at the same time reflexively admitting their own limitations towards being able to truly represent what actually happened. This paper emamines the complications that both these portrayals and their public reception have had on the idea of a post-colonial nationhood.


Leo Goldsmith: Views from the Oriental Hotel: Tourism in the "Asian-Pacific" Films of Wong Kar-wai

Leo examines the problems and possibilities of a transnational Asian cinema in light of what might be called a discourse of tourism, discussing the politics and practice of tourism as it relates to cinema, and then addressing the implications of tourism in the recent "Asian-Pacific" films of Wong Kar-wai (In the Mood for Love and 2046). In looking at this metaphor of tourism as it is manifested in the films, their production practices, and their reception, Leo suggests new ways of looking at culture through cinema and at the complex process of transnational exchange.



Nationhood and Post-Colonialism

Saturday, 1:00 - 2:15 in Cinema Studies Rm. 656

Evan O'Connell: "A Very Crafty Way of Storytelling": Ghanaian DVD Culture and the Arrival of Kwaw Ansah's Heritage Africa

This paper looks critically, for one of the first times in the United States, at Ghanaian filmmaker Kwaw Ansah's now classic Postcolonial essay film Heritage Africa. Initially released in theaters in 1989, the film was clandestinely circulated abroad as a bootleg in university classrooms and international film festivals. It was not until early 2005 that Ghanaians had the opportunity through a domestic VCD/DVD release to reevaluate the film--now hailed as the most accomplished exemplar of Ghanaian cinema--on their own shores. Unlike other Third Cinema products from developing countries, Heritage Africa is neither deliberately imperfect nor technically deficient by Western industry standards. Instead the camerawork is polished, the color processing sharp, the acting trained and professional, and the plot unfolds in familiar "Hollywoodized" modes of melodrama, tragicomedy, and fast-paced action. Only the subject matter--an African Gold Coast official now named Quincy Bosomfield is promoted to a high rank in the British colonial system, and tragically loses sense of his tribal and African roots in the process--remains particularly Ghanaian. This hybrid product forms a deliberate critique by Ansah that allows him in a Calibanic way to use the cinematic languages of the colonizer to resist and speak back.


Dan Chyutin: The Four Feathers (2002): Revisionism and Mimicry in a Post-Imperial Age

The Four Feathers, A. E. W. Mason's classical fiction novel on the Mahdist rebellion in the Sudan, is considered by many to be a landmark piece in the canon of colonialist literature and has been adapted to the screen a remarkable seven times. Dan focuses his discussion on the last of the Four Feathers adaptations (2002), directed by Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur. This movie is unique in that it may be the only example of an imperial epic movie being directed by a "native" of a formerly colonized nation. How does a "native" filmmaker approach a text that celebrates European subordination of non-Western cultures? Kapur claimed in interviews to take a revisionist stance; rather than reaffirming the film's "timeless" ideological tropes, Kapur's proclaimed agenda was to interpret this colonial text from a post colonial perspective. Dan compares Kapur's version with its famous predecessor - the Alexander and Zolt‡n Korda classic version of 1939, and attempts to answer the following questions: What kind of histories do the two movies write? What do they perceive as the reasons for the British intervention in the Sudan? How do they choose to portray Sudanese and British characters? And generally speaking, in what ways do they conform to or reject the dominant norms and stereotypes of Orientalism?


Anuja Jain: Hindi Popular Cinema: Imagining the Nation

Popular Hindi cinema is often subjected to critical derision with the widely circulated knowledge of this cinema being a cinema of escapism, with narratives that neutralize the discomfiting features of social change for the spectator and transform him into an "immature, indeed infantile, figure bereft of the rationalist imperatives." Anuja argues for meriting popular Hindi cinema more serious attention and close study within the ongoing scholarship on Third Cinema. Her point of inquiry is to analyze the ways in which popular Hindi cinema constructs and reflects the "new" post colonial "nation" post independence (1947). She focuses on how the politics of caste, class, religion, community, gender, and sexuality play out within this cinema and its attempts to define "the nation."



Modern Mythology and Media

Saturday, 1:00 - 2:15 in Cinema Studies Rm. 651

Cara Cusumano: Western Cultural Hegemony and the Revision of Classical Myth in Fellini-Satyricon and Black Orpheus

This paper is concerned with the treatment of classical myth in Western and non-Western films. In particular, I would be looking at Federico Fellini's Fellini-Satyricon (1969) and Marcel Camus' Orfeu Negro (1959). Both films use the fragmentation and revision of classical fictions as a way of making contact with their own contemporary cultures. Fellini's film is very interested in fragmentation, which accurately reflects the fragmentary nature of Petronius' original text, thereby speaking not only to the realities of canonical Western historical sources and historiography, but also to the contemporary social and political climate of Italy in the 1960s. Camus' film, on the other hand, rereads a classical legend, the Orpheus myth, through its own cultural lens. In its application of Brazilian culture to a myth emblematic of Western cultural history, Orfeu Negro can be read as an attempt to legitimate Brazilian culture by equating it with canonical Western myths. This paper will be primarily concerned with how various revisions of the Western canon (classical myth) in these two films alternately serve to construct and break down cultural histories.


Ryan Scanlan: 'Buffy,' Mythology, and Semiotics


Katie Brewer Ball: (Re)Sounding Magic and Mystery: The Hideously Fabulous Wizard People, Dear Reader

Created by comic book artist Brad Neely, Wizard People, Dear Reader is an artistic re-imagining of the Chris Columbus film and J.K. Rawling book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. This version of Harry Potter doubles on one hand as part of a reimagined never ending saga of possibilities, and on the other hand as a re-captioned work suggesting nothing beyond the spatial or temporal confines of the Warner Bros frame. Katie suggests that Neely's ambiguous desire to pervert Harry Potter makes Wizard People a space of romantically real escapes. Brad Neely's theatrical fandom intervention into the commercial film (and Harry Potter) industry through its renegade restaging locates the routes of potential, that, while they are inevitably framed by a capitalistic structure of spectatorship and consumption, provide fleeting pleasures for minoritarian individuals.



Authorship and Film

Saturday, 3:00 - 4:15 in Cinema Studies Rm. 656

David De Benedetto: Moving Texts: The Film Titles of Saul Bass and Beyond

Saul Bass has been widely praised as the pioneer of film title design. Trained as a commercial graphic artist, Bass' titles are conceptual in an advertising sense. His designs typically revolve around a graphic distillation of an issue in the story to create an identity or logo for the film. Some of these visual metaphors have become iconic, such as the paper cutout of a body in Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, the stylized balloon in Around the World in 80 Days, or the spiraling vortexes superimposed on an eye in Vertigo, as well as later titles for Broadcast News, Big and Goodfellas. Martin Scorsese has said "Bass fashioned title sequences into an art, creating in some cases, like Vertigo, a mini-film within a filmÉ His graphic compositions in movement function as a prologue to the movie - setting the tone, providing the mood and foreshadowing the action." This paper will examine the highlights of Saul Bass' illustrious career in film, while questioning the nature of his status as the first great title designer in cinema.


Abbey Butcosk: Formalism and Intertextuality: Consciousness of the Viewer in Godard's Contempt

Formalism and intertextuality in film both make the viewer self-conscious that he/she is watching a film rather than participating in reality. One example of these techniques is Godard's Comtempt (1963), which uses both of these elements to point to film as a medium. These techniques become evident when viewing the film through the critical lenses of Bazin and Barthes, two major theorists on realism and intertextuality. Bazin points out that the long shot and long take make a film more realistic since there are fewer disruptions to the action. However, Godard uses these techniques in such a way that they make the viewer completely aware of the film's construction.


Joanna Slotkin: The Rehistoricization of D.W. Griffith: Challenging the Legend in a Postmodern Age

Joanna analyzes various historiographic techniques used in the biographization of the "legendary" D.W. Griffith, examining the constructed nature of Griffith the "legend," and calling for his postmodernization and recognition of Griffith as simulation. Beginning with Griffith's defense of Birth of a Nation, the historical recreation of Griffith injects itself into realms of representation and simulation that remove it from a first-order presentation. Philip Rosen's writings on the "document" and the "documentary" shape her arguments regarding the historians' search for authenticity through the filmic document. Joanna subsequently examines the simulation of Griffith himself in the work of his historians, particularly in the works of Terry Ramsaye, Lewis Jacobs, and Tom Gunning.



Hollywood and the World

Saturday, 3:00 - 4:15 in Cinema Studies Rm. 651

Tori Wunsch: Native American Cinema and American National Cinema: Nationhood, Cinematic Language, and Power Structures

Examining Native American cinema in the context of national identity brings to light the many complexities of the relationship between Native American cinema, on the one hand, and American national cinema, on the other. Several of these complexities can be seen by looking at the problems inherent in defining a nation, the hegemonic language of Hollywood cinema, and the difficulty of gaining access to knowledge and power. Native American cinema is confined by the construct of nationhood, which seeks an abstract collective identity and suppresses the minority voice. In broad terms, the Native American concept of nationhood involves a communal approach and an importance on ancestral heritage. Beyond this, however, defining a Pan-Native American national identity is problematic; each tribal nation has it own unique understanding of nationhood.


Nate Brennan: 'Nothing That's Human Is Foreign to Me': Yellowface Orientalism and the Troublesome History or Race and Hollywood during the Second World War, 1936-1945

This paper focuses on the Hollywood representation of Asians and Asian Americans during the war period, beginning with the Sino-Japanese conflict that prefigured the United States' entrance into the war on December 7, 1941 and then the period of the war itself until its end in August 1945. Focusing specifically on the use of yellowface, the racial cosmeticization of a white performer into an Asian stereotype, and "Oriental," Nate considers the multiple definitions of yellowface as an ideological and national construct, in which not just white performers but Asian actors adopt the "yellow" mask. This paper thus examines the many uses of yellowface performance in the war era and the ideological implications that come along with them.


Alex Perry: Re-Interpretation and Misrepresentation: International Remakes from the Tramps to the Turks.

Unbeknownst to many Americans, there exist in the world several countries which - thanks to copyright loopholes - remake popular American films; Turkey and Brazil in particular have a sizeable number which have found their way back to America in bootleg form. Alex compares several examples with their original counterparts, including the American, Turkish and Brazilian versions of The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars. The differences between each country's filmmaking industries, as well as the conditions under which the specific versions were made, are large factors in the contrast between different versions of films. By taking a close look at the foreign remakes of popular American films, Alex draws conclusions about the respective cultures' filmmaking industries.



Unsightly Visualities of Sex

Saturday, 4:30 - 5:45 in Cinema Studies Rm. 656

Étienne Meunier: How Dangerous is Hazzard?: The risk of authenticity in gay porn performance

This work is grounded on the idea that the study of porn performance--of what porn stars do, and how it is received--can reveal much about the sexual culture in which the medium evolves. Étienne investigates the case of Johnny Hazzard, a new gay porn superstar that enjoys some of the best work conditions in the industry, and the recent release of the movie Bolt (Chi Chi LaRue, 2004), a mega-production centring around him. Drawing on live promotion events, gay press and websites, videos, and a personal interview with the star, Étienne compares the work of the performer with others in attempt to understand Hazzard's unique qualities. Étienne argues that the porn industry emphasizes the authentic and dangerous aspects in Hazzard's performance as a mean to counter some dissents that a variety of gay writers expressed about the porn industry (John R. Burger, RenŽ-Paul Leraton, Paul Morris), and thus bringing their products closer to the gay community. However, by saying that "Johnny is what sex is about," porn makers reiterate the long time paradox of porn movies discussed by film scholars: a tension between show and event, between porn film as presenting a reality of practices as opposed to the representation of a fiction or fantasy (Linda Williams, Richard Dyer, Bill Nichols). Is this denial of the constructed aspects of porn antonymous to the constitution of a vibrant gay public culture of sex?


Alice Black: Irréversible


David Kentley Harvey: Unspooling "Anal Rope": Rethinking Hitchcock's Homophobia as Difference

D.A. Miller's duly influential essay "Anal Rope" positions Alfred Hitchcock's tightly wound Rope (1948) as, at best, politically negligent and, at worst, homophobic. But, is it, really? In a "peculiar" presentation in 11 short parts, I will present something different. Another question will also be resolved: "David Kentley Harvey?!" Indeed.