DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v20i0.2512

 

Whatever happened to Fay Wray? Even as The Rocky Horror Picture Show (TRHPS) (1975) cemented itself within popular culture as a queer cult extravaganza, many of its references to early Hollywood science fiction and horror cinema icons and experiences fell by the wayside. The power that the film and the midnight, costumed sing-a-long screenings retain is its orgiastic appeal of queer excess played out across a backdrop of horror and Gothic genre tropes, functionally substantiating the production of a popular queer epistemology indelibly linked to the cultural development of speculative fiction. In essence, TRHPS successfully exercised in popular imagination the potentiality of Gothic and Horror to represent queerness within the phenomenological production of emotional affects. The “Floor Show” sequence at the climax of TRHPS, consisting of the songs “Rose Tint My World,” “Don’t Dream It,” and “Wild and Untamed Thing,” summarises the film’s thesis on interplay between queerness and speculative genres. This thesis links queer survivability to emotional and physical excesses beyond the boundaries of normative practice. TRHPS tells us to embrace the transgressive aspects of existential difference. In turn, Vivienne Medrano’s animated music video “Addict” rearticulates TRHPS’s polemic while also pushing deeper into the chaotic and contradictory repertoire of affects within the realm of the abject. Namely, “Addict” embraces the dangers of being the abject where survival is sometimes couched within self-destructive pursuits of fleeting moments of pleasure. As a result, rather than showcase a representation of queerness drawn from the neoliberal frameworks of easily digestible visibility, TRHPS and “Addict” showcase representation divulged from the emotional registers of queerness aided by the lexicon of speculative fiction genres.

Queer Representation: Thinking Beyond the Human Subject

The contentious issue at the heart of queer experience is the position of identity, subject, and self. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner position queer social practices as resistance to heteronormativity.^[1] This resistance is met by neoliberalism working to arrest the elasticity and fluidic character, what Lisa Duggan calls “the new homonormativity”.[2] This homonormativity, in turn, supplies the state with ideal subjects to redefine the boundaries of acceptable behaviour in advancing the state’s political and economic strategies internationally, what Jasbir Puar defines as homonationalism, or “an exceptional form of national homonormativity”.[3] Following Althusser’s theory of ideology, homonormativity functions through multiple layers of society including cultural institutions and practices. As Rosemary Hennessy contends, the centres of cultural critique and education, primarily within the United States, are implicated within the (re)production of neoliberal ideologies.[4] Within this system, queerness is provided a tenuous visibility through commodification which “invariably depends on the lives and labour of invisible others”.[5]

Normativity is seductive precisely because it carries the promise of safety and security. The further one resides from the socially proscribed dimensions of normativity, the greater the sacrifice required to appear as normal. Since normativity is marked by more than just sexual practices,[6] the dimensions of race and ethnicity, of psychic and bodily ability, class and citizenship, figure into even further proscriptions that one does not always have the privilege to “fix,” what Puar calls “biopolitical failures”.[7] When Sara Ahmed argues for the effects of deviation and disorientation, as produced through a politics informed by how one lives, they provide as an example “the very act of describing queer gatherings as family gatherings is to have joy in the uncanny effect of a familiar form becoming strange”.[8] Ahmed’s turn to queer phenomenology centres on “a way of inhabiting the world by giving “support” to whose lives and loves make them appear oblique, strange, and out of place,” an orientation “toward queer moments of deviation”.[9] Rather than treat queer representation as those “representational mandates of visibility politics”, [10] I argue that queer representation must be an affect,  assembled by recognising one’s proximity to feelings, emotions, exclamations, and dis/order.  These queer affects are central to how Gothic and Gothic-derived genres like Horror, function.

(Dis)orienting Space: Chaos, Void, and the Inscrutability of Affects

At the heart of the Gothic genre is the conflict between the rational and irrational. Queer affects in Gothic media come from the structural components of the genre—components like plots, tropes, language, and composition—and the genre’s cultural, material, and historical dimensions. The historic origin of the term “Gothic” emerges as a derogatory trope in enlightenment period art that failed to cater to “neo-Classical tastes” and the growing fetish of rational humanism.[11] From the outset, then, the assumption of Gothic, either by means of dismissive critique or enthusiastic association, is an alignment with “low” taste and popular culture. Fred Bottling attaches two components to the historical emergence of Gothic media and subsequent relegation to the world of disreputable pop cultural production. As the genre developed with greater economic mobility and literacy, its popularity was decoded as “a symptom of a voraciously consumeristic commercial culture in which pleasure, sensation and excitement come from the thrills of a darkly imagined counter-world”.[12] Hence, “Gothic” was saddled as both expressively indulgent and tarnished by capital. At the same time, the subject material of Gothic media embraced diverse flows of transgressive desires that “predate sexuality’s codification” in the nineteenth century, [13] but then they develop alongside one another. The lurid gravity of Gothic pulls from the life codified by society as right and proper with the promises of pleasures beyond the bounds of binary registers of good or bad. Mair Rigby suggests that in the Gothic, “we really recognise… our own construction as uncanny beings, bodies of knowledge that ought to be repressed”.[14] These cultural links between Gothic and the queerness construct a recursive pattern of recognition and adaptation, constantly pushing the boundaries for what is imaginable for queer life. Gothic enables a “low theory” of queerness in culture, enabling the recognition of life beyond the normative.[15]

Emotions are interstitial, suspended between recognition and inscrutability. This leads to the need to “reign in” or “tame” our “irrational” emotions. The irrational world, unlike the rational world, contains all that cannot be codified in language and emotions and provides us with a glimpse into what might reside in such a space “beyond imagining”. Manuel Aguirre argues that “Gothic can be said to postulate two zones… the human domain of rationality and intelligible events; on the other hand, the world of the sublime, terrifying, chaotic Numinous which transcends human reason… These are separated by some manner of threshold, and plots invariably involve movement from one site to the other”.[16] Aguirre invokes the Mandelbrot set fractal as a metaphor for Gothic structure,[17] highlighting how in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian “distance is lengthened through partition, thresholds multiply, each move creates ripples which generate new obstacles and dangers… the whole threatening to stretch advance ad infinitum, to indefinitely frustrate it, or to consume it”.[18] The queer affect here is in feeling the desire to embrace the space beyond, to embrace those expressions deemed irrational, abhorrent, or excessive. That “Gothic” space is best expressed by Karen Barad’s poetic experiments in trans theory and theoretical physics described as “the materiality of imagining together with the imaginative capacities of materiality… Electrical energy runs through disparate topics in what follows: lightning, primordial ooze, frogs, Frankenstein, trans rage, queer self-birthing, the quantum vacuum, virtual particles, queer touching, bioelectricity, Franken-frogs, monstrous re/generations”.[19] Barad establishes theoretical physics as both a metaphor and an ontological basis for queerness, telling us that, at the quantum level, “the void is “the scene of wild activities.”[20] Perverse and promiscuous couplings, queer goings-on that make pre-AIDS bathhouses look tame. The void is a virtual exploration of all manner of possible trans*/formations. Nature is perverse at its core; nature is unnatural”.[21] Life is Gothic all the way down to the quantum level and within us is the kind of vacuous potential of infinite possibilities despite our own material finiteness. These paradoxes or contradictory aspects are at the heart of the queer affects in the Gothic, where emotions run rampant in ways rationality cannot possibly always anticipate.

Gothic Contemporaries

Why then does this case study select The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Medrano’s “Addict” to analyse when far “better” examples of Gothic/Horror media exist? After all, TRHPS is a popular parody of late-night cinema and “cheesy” science fiction. However, TRHPS is a reorientation of the Gothic from a queer (phenomenological) perspective. When Tim Curry appears as Dr Frank-n-Furter it is in a black vampiric mantle that is cast off to reveal the platformed and corseted figure beneath. Like Dr Frankenstein, Frank is also making a creature, and like Frankenstein’s creature, Rocky flees his creator. TRHPS is the queer irony of the Gothic; a monster let out of the closet and on full display in a marriage between the gaiety of musical theatre and the over-the-top drama of genre cinema.

“Addict” is an animated music video produced by artist and animator Vivienne Medrano’s SpindleHorse Toons and composed by songwriter Silva Hound, with vocalists Michael Kovach and Kelly “Chi-Chi” Boyer reprising their roles from Medrano’s Hazbin Hotel pilot. The video is connected to a multimedia project from the mind of Medrano that is set in a Christian inspired Hell populated by sinners and Hell-born demons. The two major media projects are Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss, and both contain a significant element of musicality. In the Hazbin pilot characters break out into songs and reprises in the style of musicals, while Helluva features musical segments in the style of Fosse’s Cabaret where songs occur within the logic of daily life on radios, in theatres, or in classrooms. As Medrano works as both writer and designer, both projects are thematically and aesthetically similar. The characters present in “Addict” are from Hazbin Hotel and the song can function as companion to the pilot and future series as character formation, or it can function as an independent entity. Like TRHPS, Gothic feeling is not at work, but the elements of Gothic entities are, as is the framework of the “sinful.” Additionally, the work is excessively queer, populated with both queer characters and creators/actors, just like TRHPS. Both “Addict” and the Floor Show from TRHPS provide the “queer moments” of affective resistance to the normalising effects of identity-based representation.

Rose Tint my World, I am a Wild and Untamed Thing

The “Floor Show” is a ten-minute sequence at the conclusion of TRHPS consisting of songs “Rose Tint my World,” “Don’t Dream It,” and “Wild and Untamed Thing”.[22] The main cast performs the songs on a theatre stage with the camera assuming the position of the audience. Unlike previous uses of this camera positioning, this is the only time that we are positioned as the diegetic witnesses. This sequence enacts a phenomenological shift by placing us, as the audience of film, into the film as the audience members. Dr Frank-N-Furter is a mix between monster and damsel. When they first appear, they are wrapped in a floor length black cloak, appropriating a particularly vampiric silhouette.

This image of Frank is as both Dracula and Dr Frankenstein, both monsters with the power to birth other monsters. Having already “birthed” the libidinal Rocky, Frank dresses up film characters Brad, Janet, Rocky, and Columbia as mirrors to Frank’s own “perverse” costume. Each one shares their experience since meeting Frank, with Columbia and Rocky concluding their sections with the titular “Rose tints my world/keeps me safe from my trouble and pain.” Brad and Janet sing of how they have been released; Brad feels “sexy” dressed in corset, fishnet, platform heels, garter, and panties. Janet’s “confidence has increased,” her “mind… expanded;” Frankie’s “lust is so sincere.”

The scene transitions via a fanfare as the stage curtains rise and reveals Frank at the base of a stage prop radio tower. Frank sings of their desire to be “dressed just the same” as Fay Wray, declaring from the unfolding staircase about giving “yourself over to absolute pleasure.” They then jump into a pool with “The Creation of Adam” depicted on the bottom, surfacing in an S. S. Titanic lifebuoy singing “don’t dream it, be it.” This recreation of the Biblical creation erases the distance between God and man, through an unchained libido and undifferentiated gender. The four join Frank, swimming into a single snake like mating mass. As the action heats up, the chorus of “don’t dream it, be it” repeats in an ethereal, dreamlike loop until, suddenly, the music snaps into the bombastic drive of “Wild and Untamed Thing” with Frank rising from the pool on Rocky’s shoulders. Frank sings a solo stanza but is soon joined by the rest of the cast in a very wet chorus line. All the while, we are in these seats; the message is as much for us as it is for the performers on stage declaring their formerly repressed desires. This sequence is then broken as Riff-Raff busts into the theatre with Magenta, ending the climactic revelry.

Textually speaking, the sequence draws notice to the lines “rose tints my world, keeps me safe from my trouble and pain,” the second stanza of “Don’t Dream It,” and the final chorus of “Wild and Untamed Thing.” At first it is just Columbia, the veteran Frankie-fan, and Rocky, Frank’s seven-hours-old creature, who sing of the rose tint. Rose tint is an obvious reference to the western idiom of rose-coloured glasses, describing an unduly optimistic or positive outlook. Here it is presented as part of longer phrase, describing the rose tint as a form of protection. However, “rose tint” is presented in a circuitous fashion as both the source and the protection from “trouble and pain”. If we consider “trouble and pain” to be necessary, inevitable facts of existence, then one lesson the line imparts is the importance of seeking a pleasure that makes the pain both survivable and worth it. Brad and Janet, new to Frank’s company, are in the process of discovering the rose tint, allowing them to join the company for “Wild and Untamed Thing” along with Dr Scott.

The second segment of the Floor Show, “Don’t Dream It,” begins with Frank-n-Furter appearing as the stage curtain rises. For the second stanza, Frank descends the staircase one step at a time:

Give yourself over to absolute pleasure

Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh

Erotic nightmares beyond any measure

And sensual daydreams to treasure forever[23]

This second stanza is an embrace of hedonism, of the rose tint, and to “be it” not “dream it.” Line one signals an absolute, rather than an “ordinary” pleasure, which is further defined by the “sins of the flesh” in line two. Rather than merely signal an absolute sexual pleasure, it directly highlights the culturally endowed negativity of sex. It is not pleasures of the flesh, but sins. This signifies not simply a more conservative extra-marital heterosexual act, but a collective experience of what constitutes sinful bodily acts. This feeling is echoed by “erotic nightmares,” which is where this sequence starts dipping into the incomprehensibility of feeling where emotions register paradoxically and out of phase with the linear promise of normative emotional orientations. Nightmares are, for most people, negative experiences that issue forth negative effects such as insomnia, anxiety, nausea, and fear. These negative effects are imbued with the adjective “erotic” which ties to “sins” and “absolute pleasure.” Erotic becomes the rose tint, recolouring the nightmare into something incomprehensible and “beyond any measure”. An erotic eruption from the softer etherealness of “sensual daydreams”, perhaps? Either way, both nightmares and daydreams are invoked as something beyond the rational promise of measurability.

These emotional excesses endeavour to entangle the familiar with the unfamiliar, the conscious (daydreams – desirable) and the unconscious (nightmares – undesirable). The rest of “Don’t Dream It” is the recurring dreamlike “don’t dream it, be it.” This simple phrase insinuates a lot. What are we dreaming? What are we being? It calls on us to externalise the internal, to emote what we feel. From the interstitial space between Adam and God, Frank centres their uncanny self at the spark of all creation. The literal orgy that follows is presented as the expanding and contracting universe spawning new possibilities. The “rose tint” is a fantasy Frank is keen on teaching us, alongside Brad and Janet. We should not merely swim in the fantasies of erotic nightmares but to materialize those desires in our flesh.

With the lesson taught, and adherents earned, Frank launches into the sequence’s final climactic section:

I’m a wild and untamed thing

I’m a bee with a deadly sting

You get a hit and your mind goes ping

Your heart will pump and your blood will sing

So let the party and the sound rock on

We’re gonna shake it til the life has gone

Rose tints my world keeps me safe from my trouble and pain[24]

The stanza is sung three times, once solo by Frank, and the rest by the company. Frank is not the only “wild and untamed thing” as everyone else joins in singing. With the four back on stage, they are all dressed the same. Only Frank is marked with distinctive colours and make up. For these “wild” and “untamed” things, the rules of society’s propriety simply do not apply. Not only that, but the design of their makeup and costumes run counter to normative frameworks of attractiveness. In effect, they adopt a monstrous image to signal their belonging. The water only serves to equalise them more as their makeup runs.

When Frank is hoisted out of the pool on Rocky’s shoulders, they fully exhibit the wild and untamed thing as their makeup runs and their perm now plastered to their head. Furthermore, the section’s significance comes with the three bottom lines, which can be summed up as “party until life has gone keep[ing] me safe from my trouble and pain.” The party, the fun, the extreme life depicted throughout the sequence and the rest of the film is a way of seeing beyond the pain. It is hyper reality of pure sensation. However, this promise of the eternal “erotic nightmare” is interrupted, and the rose tint is smashed. Riff Raff storms in singing “Frank-N-Furter it’s all over/Your mission is a failure, your lifestyle’s too extreme.” Frank is forced to face their pain in the next song sequence, but the Floor Show ends with the declaration of “too extreme.” The lifestyle pushed through the whole sequence is a “failure” and “too extreme” resulting in the execution of Columbia, Frank, and Rocky.

In summation, the interplay of lyrics and visuals diverge from a linear progression of normative affects. The character’s invocation of “rose tints” links queer survivability with monstrous eroticism. By showcasing whirlwind narratives of contradictory emotions, sharing in both pain and pleasure, they align to the symbol of “erotic nightmare” inherent in the body and performance of their creator Frank’n’Furter. This orientation leads them into the wilderness of undifferentiated sexual desire and the conversion to “wild and untamed” things as their façades melt away. However, they are interrupted by the intervention of colonial/military authority of the “new commander” who deems the “wild and untamed” as “too extreme”, proceeding to straighten the lines diverging from the norm. As a result, they destroy not only the creator, Frank, but the space as well, leaving Janet, Brad, and Dr Scott in a crater. This is a reminder that these escapist fantasies, the rose tint, is contingent on both time and space, and places the survival of the self in danger from the structures of hegemonic power. Frank was the point of departure for the three, the force that knocked their narrative line askew. Without the old guard of Frank and Columbia, or even a tangible connection to that world through the “Frankenstein place”, they are left to crawl in hole left by the foundation, without direction.

Leave my Soul to Burn and I’ll be Breathing it in

About 45 years after the release of TRHPS, Medrano launched the full-length pilot for Hazbin Hotel on their YouTube channel, Vivziepop, depicting a Hell overrun with sinners. Charlie, the daughter of Lucifer and Lilith, launches a “rehab” hotel with the goal of preventing the annual Heavenly purge. However, this is Hell, and the sinners are not necessarily looking for redemption, their bodies twisted into impish and animalistic monstrous representations. Angel Dust (voiced by Michael Kovach), an androgynous anthropomorphic spider, and Cherri Bomb (voiced by Kelly “Chi-Chi” Boyer), a cycloptic woman, perform the song “Addict” composed by Silva Hound. The music video was released on the tail of the Hazbin pilot, joining a handful of paratextual media providing more narrative context and development of the world glimpsed in the pilot. There is a level of difficulty in considering a text like “Addict” because it is a self-contained music video that also happens to be part of an early portfolio of a developing franchise. Essentially, there is no master narrative to slot “Addict” into within a Hazbin Hotel timeline of events and developments. At the same time, only the lyrics can be detached from this still fractured narrative because both the visual and aural experience of “Addict” is inseparable from Hazbin, featuring recognisable vocals and character art. However, without the context of Hazbin Hotel, the significance of those recognisable sounds and images are lost. For clarity, this analysis recognizes “Addict” as sung by the Hazbin Hotel characters Angel Dust and Cherri Bomb but assumes an otherwise limited narrative perspective regarding the larger franchise narrative.

The music video opens with Valentino, the owner and operator of a large adult media conglomerate, smiling widely as the scene shifts to a stage. The curtains rise to reveal Angel Dust entwined with a pole. As the music starts and the lights flicker on, the demons in silhouette all fixate on Angel, who appears, at first, only as a black silhouette against a florescent pink spiderweb with a heart shape at the centre. Angel’s verse opens with “till death do us part/but we’re already past that phase/this is a brand-new start”.[25] This institutes a new life phase occurring after separation and after “death” from which Angel can recreate themselves. They are cynical and emotionally excessive, they’ve “let their emotions go” as though nothing matters after overdosing (“and ending up comatose”). Now they live by their mantra “fuck being a sober hoe.” Their life is yours to play with “till the end of the night.” In this case, “you” adheres to the viewer, Valentino, and Angel’s audience. Toward the end of the opening stanza, it cuts to Valentino who breathes out a red smoke cloud which orients to Angel. Angel dances down the pole platform and down the stage runway toward Valentino.

At the wind up to the chorus, the clouds of red smoke briefly coalesce around Angel’s wrists and neck before being inhaled.  Down here in Hell, “surrounded by fire,” their “passion ignites.” They take “a hit of that heaven and hell/ a helluva high.” Immediately, Angel presents themselves as unapologetic and exhausted by the control and expectation of society. As the song shifts into the first chorus section, with Cherri Bomb’s voice doubling Angel’s, the video goes through several jump cuts. From Angel, reclined on their back with eyes closed, continuing to dance, the scene cuts first to Cherri comforting Angel in a bed. The series of three cuts begin with Angel in the same orientation in bed as on stage (on their back with the camera positioned straight above). Unlike on stage, Angel is clutching themself and violently crying. The subsequent cuts have Cherri moving closer (first sitting on the side of the bed) and Angel shifting to their side until Cherri is the one staring up into the camera and Angel is turned away.

Can these two realities exist side by side? Can they exist separately? Or does the neon rose-pink tint of the scene suggest that Angel, despite the pain, is surviving as they can—where who they are brings both pain and pleasure in a cyclical fashion of divergence from a “straight and narrow” existence?

As the chorus continues, the scene focuses on the cartoonish representation of a discarded alcohol bottle that transforms into an improvised explosive device as the scene transitions to Cherri’s volatile assault on the metropolis outside. The video cuts between shots of Cherri jumping across rooftops and lobbing cherry bombs and Angel who leaves the floor, climbing hands over hands (they are a spider, they have extra hands) up the pole. Over the closing lines of the chorus, the pair are slowly drawn together until they occupy the frame simultaneously on either side of a pole. With a final close-up, Angel and Cherri give their most menacing look with wide smiles filled with pointed “teeth” and pupil-less eyes, glowing like pinkish-red lanterns.

Through the instrumental bridge into the second verse, we are given glimpses of Cherri continuing to throw bombs and dancing through rooftops, smoke, and explosions. Angel continues dancing among falling money and flashes of erotic and aroused expressions. As Cherri blows up a screen with a picture of Valentino the video transitions to the mobster’s limo where Valentino is counting cash before pulling Angel into their lap and violently forcing a kiss. The scene cuts to Angel in a bedroom, they violently throw a glass against the wall before sinking to the floor and crying, alone in the dark. This sequence of shots from the end of the first verse to the beginning of the second verse show the intense highs and lows that Angel experiences. Valentino and Cherri are objects in Angel’sorbit, and Angel is currently oriented on a line that leads to Valentino (and a bed with their back to Cherri).

The second verse is sung by Cherri Bomb from the city rooftops. The lyrics shift from the self-reflective focus of the first verse to an external “you”. The opening line “Yeah you fell in love/but you fell deeper in this pit” has no strong referent. “You” can be Cherri narrating their own past experience, the phantom image reflected in the puddle, or Angel. Like Angel, Cherri is unapologetic about their behaviour, “so what if I misbehave/it’s what everybody craves.” The referential ambiguity continues in the middle of the verse with Cherri addressing “you” again “to come if… feeling brave and fancy yourself a mate.” Here “mate” refers to friendship (Cherri Bomb is/was Australian), however, it is left ambiguous as to if this friendship pre-exists or will be established. “You” come because you are a mate, or “you” come because you want to be a mate. Later, Cherri’s “sinful delight” is likewise ambiguous as to it attaching to “your money and power” or the reiteration of “a hit of that heaven…” Here “your” more solidly adheres to image of the mysterious demon, but the other “yous” do not have to have the same referent. The verse closes with the same line as Angel’s. Cherri’s “sinful pleasure,” the hit that gets them high, is explosions, with the scene shifting from the mysterious demon back to Cherri pressing the detonation button. Rather than recalling Ahmed, Cherri’s proximity to explosions is more akin to Puar’s terrorist assemblage with Cherri as the explosive interruptions in normative lines of flight. By first exploding the image of Valentino and then the glitzy neon “Addict” sign, Cherri appears to be interrupting Angel’s line of flight as it pertains to Valentino.

The chorus is sung twice, drawing Cherri and Angel closer and closer together. The first iteration is Angel and Cherri in unison while the second time they trade between the third and fourth lines. The second half is then sung twice more, once to end the song and once more to bridge from the credits to Angel’s reprise.

I’m addicted to the madness

This hotel is my Atlantis

We’re forever gonna have a fucking reason to sin

Let me leave my soul to burn and I’ll be breathing it in

I’m addicted to the feeling

Getting higher than the ceiling

And we’re never gonna want this fucking feeling to end

Just concede and give in to your inner demons again[26]

The chorus elaborates on the “hit of heaven and hell” as they describe to what they are addicted. Only the second line “this hotel…” is out of place. Madness, sin, burning soul, higher, never ending, and inner demons all play to this antisocial alignment toward which Angel, as a queer sex worker and drug addict, and Cherri as a 1980s inspired anarchist punk, are oriented. Atlantis alludes to the hotel as an unfound, mythical place, or simply a fabrication. The line “Let me leave my soul to burn and I’ll be breathing it in” poignantly represents the refusal of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation does not fix the conditions, their “reasons to sin.” By letting your emotions go, you’re also “giv[ing] in to your inner demons again.” Here addiction does not automatically attach to narcotics, but to feelings and emotions. Angel and Cherri have found this feeling and a way to attain this feeling, and it is a way that is considered antisocial as they are both positioned as outsiders, as against our society.

The second chorus occurs after Cherri blows up the “ADDICT” sign and jumps off the roof. The video’s colour palette shifts and Angel and Cherri both don their own colourfully tinted glasses. Whereas the start was an off-vibrant rose hue, the closing is vibrant with whites appearing white and the pinks as unfiltered neon. As the music bridges into the next instrumental section, they are shown individually in a changing room from behind, Angel tightening a corset and donning long pink gloves, and Cherri pulling on a fluffy coat. These actions parallel the dressing up from TRHPS with Angel’s wardrobe being strongly evocative of Frank-n-Furter’s. The instrumental section cuts to another rendition of the chorus with the two dancing on stage, Angel in pink tinted glass, Cherri with a yellow tinted star on their one eye. Cherri then blows up the theatre and the pair strut out together as the block of Valentino-owned sex shops explode behind them. The video ends with Angel parallel with Cherri and their back to Valentino and their entire corporate sex enterprise.

In Marvel Cinematic Universe style, “Addict” includes a scene after the credits. The reprise thematically follows the juxtaposition of “hit of that heaven and hell” by doubling down on mixing negative and positive emotions.

I’m addicted to the sorrow

When the buzz ends by tomorrow

There’s another rush of poison flowing into my veins

Giving me a dose of pleasure that resides by the pain

 

I’m addicted, I’m dependent

Looking awesome, feeling helpless

And I know I’m raising Cain by every highway in hell

Maybe things won’t be so terrible inside this hotel[27]

The end of the first stanza focuses the reprise on “a dose of pleasure that resides by the pain.” Here the cycle presented in the opening verse with the video cutting between Angel singing and breaking down is reproduced as a form of survivability. When they primp in front of the mirror (looking awesome) there is a quick cut in the reflection to Valentino holding Angel in a position of forced penetration (feeling helpless). The flash is a reflection of what is/was behind them, as a reminder of what may recur; one possible avenue their life/death can take. “The sorrow” is any number of negative emotions and feelings from circumstances or coming down from a high. This reprise is the general come down or mellowing out after the high of the chorus. The emotions it communicates is a particular state of alienation, of the temporary alignment that is forced to return to an orientation out of alignment, from the feeling of a place beyond the social back to the antisocial. Those moments on stage, or high on PCP, Angel can imagine belonging, but when Valentino assaults them, they are reminded of their alienation from the objects they try to cling to. With only Cherri as an affective guide, Angel wonders if things will be less bad in the hotel, if it may contain such things as allies who accept them rather than exploit them. Meanwhile, to survive, Angel is cycling through these unbounded states of extreme emotions, seeking alignment however painful and exploitative they are. Getting high is the temporary solution to a wider structural problem of intense alienation. As the music dims for good, Angel crawls into bed; a faint smile forms after their pet pig licks their cheek.

The Wild and Untamed

The only significant thematic difference between TRHPS and “Addict” is death. By the nature of the setting, “Addict” takes death off the table as an outcome. The only threat is an eternity of the cycle of emotional pain and pleasure. Angel’s monstrous excess is not going to result in annihilation like Frank-n-Furter’s. Both sequences share in metaphors of sexual and emotional excess, trading in talks of demons and sins. In other words, both are celebrating a particularly antisocial outlook based on the rules of social propriety dictated by western norms produced from theological connections between evil and excess. With Frank and company, and Angel and Cherri, their monstrous antisocial behaviour is salient to queer experiences. What “Addict” adds to this framework in particular is a “fuck it” attitude that underlines the emotional excess expressed through Angel’s verses and the chorus. They refuse both help and cure from anyone outside their alignment net, especially from those who come from positions in traditional frameworks of power. The power that monsters have is fully embraced through a meta-narrative commitment to the antisociality of desire and indulgence. With queer positioned as monstrous, this is the same as staying queer and refusing the normalising gestures of discourses. This demonstrates a form of emotional or expressive representation that resists the commodification of visibility politics. Whereas representation based on identity visibility relies on linguistic codes, particularly social and legal definitions, “Addict” and TRHPS rely on inherent expressive politics that perform their queerness. Operating as they do from the genre position of Gothic; they reveal the queer potential within the expressive canon of Gothic media and produce a queer theory from within the widely accessible realm of the popular.

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Notes

[1] Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): p. 548.

[2] Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), p. 50.

[3] Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 2.

[4] Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 82.

[5] Ibid, p. 111.

[6] Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” p. 548;

[7] Jasbir Puar, “Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled,” Social Text 33, no. 3 (2015): p. 46.

[8] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006), p. 177.

[9] Ibid, 179.

[10] Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, p. 204.

[11] Fred Bottling, “In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture,” in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Putner (Oxford, UK & Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 3.

[12] Ibid, p. 12.

[13] George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 2.

[14] Mair Rigby, “Queer Theory’s Debt to the Gothic,” Gothic Studies 11, no. 1 (2009): p. 55.

[15] For definition of low theory: Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 15-17.

[16] Manuel Aguirre, “Geometries of Terror: Numinous Spaces in Gothic, Horror, and Science Fiction,” Gothic Studies 10, no. 2 (2008): p. 2-3.

[17] Aguirre defines Mandelbrot as “paradigmatic” of fractal geometry, “characterized by an increasing complexity at its very edge: the closer one comes to the ‘frontier’ between it and the ‘outside’ (the complementary set), the more complex the structure of this frontier is shown to be”.

[18] Ibid, p. 11-13.

[19] Karen Barad, “Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” GLQ 21, no. 2–3 (2015): p. 388.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid, p. 412.

[22] “The Floor Show,” Rocky Horror Wiki, accessed November 17, 2020, https://rockyhorror.fandom.com/wiki/The_Floor_Show.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] “Addict,” Hazbin Hotel Wiki, accessed December 7, 2020, https://hazbinhotel.fandom.com/wiki/Addict.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

 

Bibliography

Aguirre, Manuel. “Geometries of Terror: Numinous Spaces in Gothic, Horror, and Science Fiction.” Gothic Studies 10, no. 2 (2008): 1–17.

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006.

Barad, Karen. “Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings.” GLQ 21, no. 2–3 (2015): 387–422.

Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 547–66.

Bottling, Fred. “In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture.” In A Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Putner, 3–14. Oxford, UK & Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.

Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006.

Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Hazbin Hotel Wiki. “Addict.” Accessed December 7, 2020. https://hazbinhotel.fandom.com/wiki/Addict.

Hennessy, Rosemary. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. 1 edition. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Puar, Jasbir. “Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled.” Social Text 33, no. 3 (2015): 45–73.

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Next Wave: New Directions in Women’s Studies. Duke University Press, 2018.

Rigby, Mair. “Queer Theory’s Debt to the Gothic.” Gothic Studies 11, no. 1 (2009): 46–57.

Rocky Horror Wiki. “The Floor Show.” Accessed November 17, 2020. https://rockyhorror.fandom.com/wiki/The_Floor_Show.

 

Filmography

The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Jim Sharman, United Kingdom, 1975)

Addict. (Silva Hound and Vivziepop, 2020) https://youtu.be/ulfeM8JGq7s.

 

Author Biography

John Francis is a PhD student in Media and Communication at Temple University. They hold a MA degree in Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London and a MA degree in English Literature from Monmouth University. Their research focuses on queer affect and phenomenology in global entertainment media with particular focus on illustrated, animated, and interactive forms. This paper is particularly indebted to feedback received from faculty and peers in the Seminar in Queer and Feminist Studies at Temple University.

DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v20i0.2511

 

In this article,[1] I explore the queer affective experience of disorientation in projective moving image installations through a case study of the artwork Swinguerra (2019) by Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca. Key literature on the uses of projection in contemporary art has described the experience of moving image installations as disorientating.[2] However, this literature has not fully addressed the complex meanings of disorientation or explored this experience in academic writing. Furthermore, a segment of this literature, published in the first years of the 2000s, approaches the experience with projection as phenomenological due to the wandering of the viewer in the gallery, as it occurs in installations that use multiple-projections. Conversely, this literature also approach the necessity to understand projection from a psychoanalytical framework in regards to the experience with works that use single-projection and apply elements such as storytelling, which would incorporate the need for greater concentration and result in a process of absorption.[3] Consequently, some accounts address a presumable experience of absorption emerging from the contact with works of the 1990s onwards as too passive and lacking on corporeal engagement, while others argue that the process of wandering around the gallery results in a distracted viewer that lacks critical engagement with the moving image. This highlights the binary wandering/absorption as the one most commonly used in the work of moving image art scholars writing in the 2000s, even if not directly or explicitly attached to psychoanalytical or phenomenological frameworks.

Nevertheless, the literature that emerged in the second decade of the 2000s challenges these binaries by arguing that a process of absorption does not mean a lack of corporeal involvement, and that wandering around the gallery does not necessarily equate to a lack of critical engagement.[4] However, disorientation as a phenomenological concept remains unexplored even in this context, as it is always only briefly mentioned to describe the experience within projective moving image installations. In order to address this theoretical gap, I employ a case study analysis informed by queer phenomenology and autoethnography, and connected with methodological accounts of “queer-life-writing”[5] and self-narration in the realm of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick named “experimental critical writing”.[6] I adopt autoethnography in this study as a queer methodology that “engages personal experience, reflexivity, memory, and storytelling device” critically to address lived events and create what Tony E. Adams and Derek M. Bolen indicate as intense and vulnerable descriptions of these events through performative writing that engages with the experience of the body in a specific time and space.[7]

Sara Ahmed conceptualises disorientation as the living of specific moments of queer|failed orientation.[8] This means that being disorientated is related to how we react to the moments in which we feel out of place. Disorientation occurs when a common ground fails to support some bodies whilst experiencing certain orientated lines. At this moment, this non-supported body becomes oblique, strange, slips away from common experiences. Ahmed proposes that moments of disorientation can be a phenomenon that we must learn from, as they allow us to look at and read the world differently; i.e., queer the world.[9] According to Ahmed, one of the main results of feeling disorientated is a body that ultimately acts in “disturbing the others”, the core phenomenon of disorientation that will be explored in this study.[10] Disorientation happens in the process of destabilisation of both the bodies and the ground as a continuum feature, becoming a phenomenon that continuously moves around the space and affects how people decide to gather around specific objects to build a common ground.[11] Therefore, whilst moving around in the art gallery, it is important to understand our role as potential agents of affective transformations in the non-hierarchically sensorial environment produced by the process of becoming a disorientated body and consequently disturbing the other bodies. The case study analysed in this article evoked an experience of disorientation due to the constant and confusing process of having to decide which way to look, which room to enter, which side to walk towards, whilst spatially positioning myself (distancing and approximating) regarding the projections and the bodies that shared the common ground of the gallery with me.

Therefore, the main argument developed throughout this article is that the positionality we take in the art gallery concerning the distance and proximity to the projection, both physically and affectively, disturbs the other bodies differently, as it is necessary to implement a besideness attitude in relation to the other visitors and the content in the projected moving images. Consequently, besideness is the key concept used to discuss the disorientating phenomena of disturbing the others in projective moving image installations. Sedgwick conceptualises besideness as a positionality that challenges stable, hierarchical, and binary spatial positions such as beneath and beyond and dualistic thoughts such as “cause versus effect, subject versus object”.[12] Sedgwick further explains that besideness is comprised of “a wide ranging of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivalling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations”.[13] Consequently, Sedgwick claims that besideness is about creating affective spaces for several objects to exist alongside one another as conflicting elements that can foster the building of collectivity whilst drawing attention to particularities. In this direction, I understand besideness in dialogue with Katharina Lindner’s appropriation of this concept, as a spatial and affective attitude to opening yourself to the “spaces of possibility” that shape other people’s bodies according to their positionalities.[14] According to Lindner, this is to reach an affective engagement that allows non-normative forms of relationality and queer embodiments to emerge.[15] Hence, affectively approaching besideness requires an attitude of looking to your side, to what resides beside your body, which means close but not equal to, a distant proximity or a proximate distance.

This process of spatial orientation and decision-making is responsible for affectively activating besideness as an attitude that needs to be conveyed to face the moving image content, as the artwork Swinguerra exposes a besideness position regarding the relationalities established with the people that appear in the film. Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca do not seem to represent someone. Instead, these artists speak nearby the bodies in the moving images, in the sense that Trinh T. Minh-Ha understands as not objectifying or speaking from a distance to the subject that speaks, but one that gets close enough to the subjects and amplifies their voices without undermining their competence of speaking for themselves.[16] To speak nearby is to establish a besideness attitude to give space to voices and positionalities that are frequently silenced in a heteronormative social arrangement, thus addressing the inequalities inherent in the voices that are allowed to speak easily and make decisions for others.

In the following pages, I present an analysis of the experience of visiting the art gallery in which Swinguerra was installed during the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia in 2019, considering the role of the besideness attitude in establishing affective relationalities towards the objects in this space, these being our bodies, the projections, and the subjects in the moving images. I first offer an affective orientated description of this experience and subsequently theoretically explore the disorientated moments of this encounter in the section Distance and proximity as practices of inhabitation. I discuss the role of positioning myself, distant or proximate to the projection, in the creation of the besideness attitude. First I argue that, in moving image installations, projection can become a peripheral element because the visitors are distant from it, as they have to deal with the affective disturbance of the other bodies in the gallery. Conversely, I demonstrate how this process can be approached through the lenses of affective proximities with the projected moving images that do not necessarily require physical proximity in the gallery. Lastly, the subsection named Inhabiting beside approaches how articulating spatial distance and proximity can help us to understand the implementation of a besideness attitude and its developments in the space of the gallery through empathising with the content of the projected moving images.

Swinguerra (2019), by Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca

I wander through the streets of the Giardini in Venice, feeling the sweat running all over my skin and embracing the wetness of my body under an overwhelmingly blue and sunny sky, one that keeps my head facing down towards the warm stone floor since looking up is a sensory battle in which my eyes struggle to remain open while they are led by a nostalgic sensation of having felt this before. A few metres from where I stand, the Brazilian flag flaps smoothly on the national pavilion, and while I walk towards the entrance, my body seems to recognise the temperature that surrounds me as a sign of proximity incited by a potential encounter with a familiar environment. I move into the space, carried by an expectation of finding someone with who I can establish a proximity, one that leads to a certain comfort from being in the presence of what is easily recognisable. A recognition of language, of a body that could move like me, talk like me, while at the same time an upset stomach and breathing movement that seems to travel slowly but heavily through my chest and throat, appearing out of the tension of meeting someone that could match those expectations.

I walk rapidly changing my movements and almost tiptoeing around as if running away from an encounter with proximities that I am not completely sure I want to embrace. Meanwhile, I distance myself from the main entrance of the pavilion and now walk towards a song I can hear from a distance. While listening to this high frequency sound and enticing beats echoing throughout the environment, I quickly move towards the confrontation of an overcrowded and bright second gallery, where the natural light invades the space, filling every inch with a clarity that seems to introduce to the inside space the heat experienced outside in a constant rising of the temperature. While walking, I still perspire, this running water sticking my clothes to my skin, because of the almost tropical warmness, one that weakens my mobility, as if the warmth is pulling my body to the ground and turning my feet into being a heavier element that balances my weight in space and orientates my drowsy body.

In this lethargic itinerary, the song I can still hear drags me forward to the encounter of the amalgamation of bodies that, a few metres from me, seem to gather around, compressed by the sounds that still emanate from an unidentified source. I follow the music and consequently start shaping an encounter with these bodies because I can identify the loud beats as something that will lead me to the encounter with the projection. The high-frequency and frantic sounds reverberate in my body as if I am in a nightclub, one that is clearly overcrowded and where dancing is about the inevitable and accidental touching of other people`s bodies and the mixing of fluids that pass through our skins. I cannot avoid the touch of the other while attempting to find a space for myself to further explore the gallery. Inside of me, the strident tune seems to wander through my bones, energising every inch of my body, and each hair on my arms moves as a result of the random and fleetingly overwhelming movements and spams that my muscles and organs employ in response to the beat of the song reaching my ears and caressing my skin.

I lose myself amongst the other visitor’s bodies, as it is not clear which way to go to find the films I am looking for. As this proximity increases the warmness in the space, the fleeting and refreshing wind emanating from the movement of the fans in others’ hands alleviates the sensorial tension resulting from the occasional friction of skins that occurs in the barrier that the gathering of these bodies creates at the entrance of this gallery. The thickly textured beats, however, remain as an atmospheric magnet that keeps me moving towards the unknown settings of the space and to trespass on the space of the mass of bodies I am facing until I finally identify two projections on opposite sides of the long and narrow gallery. Situated in the middle of the space, between the two projections, I repetitively look from one side to the other, glancing around in a movement that strains my neck, and I mimic the same confusion I notice in other people’s behaviour, as they keep rotating their bodies from side to side.

I cannot seem to recognise differences in the films that would help me with choosing which way to move forward. I turn to the left, throwing my hands forward to intercept the space in between the other people around me, attempting to open a way that will allow my body to slowly move towards one side or the other, breaking the distance from the projection by infringing on the space in which the crowd is gathering in the middle of the gallery. On this side, the song echoes through my body as if an endless gust of wind is attached to the projection and is keeping my eyes open since I can hear lyrics in Portuguese and recognise a queerness in the bodies that I see dancing in the film. The comfort of listening to my mother tongue loosens the tension I feel in my muscles while I push my body against the wall, paralysed by the warmth from the laborious effort of trespassing on the amalgamation of the other bodies.

Watching the people dancing in the films provokes my own body to move as if attempting to sustain the high energy that encloses the space through the fast and uncontrollable beats, where the uneasiness of my tense muscles and rapid heartbeats of my seemingly immobile body viscerally drag me towards a self-questioning movement. What if I am missing something by not watching the film projected on the other side? While turning around to look back, I face again the other bodies and can identify, at a distance, the slight differences of camera angles in the films. I choose to stay here on the left, as the thought of the stressful journey of moving around in this gallery leaves me unsettled since the struggle to again trespass in the space where all these bodies are positioned does not account for the affective and moving relationships I established with the dancing bodies in the films.

While the loudness of the frenetic song seems to increase, I stare at these bodies in the film as if recognising in their movements my own possibilities of inhabiting this space. As if their dancing gestures can somehow mirror movements that are not only employed as a means of confrontation in this dancing battle that I seem to also live, here in the realm of a queer positionality in the gallery. Paralysed by the contact with the film, I move back to my earlier experiences in Brazil while seeing myself virtually beside a diversity of people with whom I can establish an affective proximity precisely because their movements gravitate around my daily gestures in the Brazilian landscapes I can also recognise in the film. After a while of standing by the wall and watching the film, I leave the gallery by walking away and crossing in front of the bodies that face the same projection as me, interrupting their view with my own movements re-energised through contact with the familiar bodies in the projections.

Distance and proximity as practices of inhabitation.

The previous section described the affective experience of disorientation whilst visiting this article’s case study, as an attempt to capture, as closely as possible, the queer affects and sense of disorientation emerging from the live encounter with the artwork. Using the term “encounter” to describe this action is also an attempt to address this moment as one involving “surprise”, [17] “conflict”,[18] “messiness”, [19] “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning”, [20] or the unexpected (sometimes pleasurable, other times frightening) where disorientation can emerge as a queer embodied affect. In a queer phenomenological approach, this embodied encounter is crucially informed by how moving images move us through the kinaesthetic experience of walking, breathing, or shivering but also through the histories and sedimentations that shape our bodies concerning gender, race, class, and sexuality.

For instance, Jenny Chamarette argues that, in a film-phenomenological account, description plays a crucial role in understanding the affective qualities of encounters with films.[21] The description is understood as unseparated from criticality since the act of describing already takes into consideration an analytical relationship between the viewer’s body and its contextual surroundings. Therefore, description is the most suitable method for capturing the fleeting disorientations and queer affects that emerge in the contact with projection. More than approaching queer phenomenology as a theoretical framework, in this article I highlight its use as a queer methodology that can provide queer, non-normative, destabilising and disorientated modes to analyse the experience within projective moving image installations. Consequently, queer phenomenology is understood as a mode to interfere in the academic form, voice, and style of moving image installations’ analyses, highlighting the role of embodied description, positionality, autobiographical approaches and first-person voice as crucial for this endeavour.

Therefore, the use of queer phenomenology and autoethnography includes the possibility to build up a critical analysis of moving image installations that connects the experience of the projection-related disorientation and the disorientations that shape queer lives. This theoretical alliance can help foster queer insights that challenge phenomenology’s universalist ideas of the bodily experience. In this section I will explore the role of the continuum between distance and proximity as a phenomenon that can lead us to build a besideness attitude in the space of projective moving image installations based on the affective description undertaken in the previous section. Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca’s work Swinguerra made me inhabit disorientating environments in which the constant shift between distancing and approximating shaped the modes of relationalities with the projection and the other bodies in the gallery.[22] According to Anne Cvetkovich, art installations are spaces that “facilitate new forms of embodied experience, including feelings that take the form of moods and sensibilities rather than specific emotions. Refusing stable boundaries between the interior and exterior of both self and space, it creates new forms of collectivity and sociality”.[23] Hence, my focus in this analysis is not to highlight the discrete characteristics of distance and proximity as two different phenomena concerning inhabiting the space of projective moving image installations. Instead, I argue that these concepts, which seem to be part of an opposed binary, are interconnected as a mode to create relational affects in the spaces we inhabit as social and collective environments.

Proximity can connect us to something to occupy a space but detach us from the place we leave behind in a non-binary overlay of spatial and temporal dimensions. In this occupation, Ahmed argues that we orientate our attention towards something whilst failing to notice other objects around us.[24] Consequently, distancing from objects we have been attached to means leaving something behind whilst potentially creating an affective contact with other objects. This is in order to create proximities and supportive contacts that can make our positionalities less disorientated as we can detach from harmful affects that may have shaped our lives. Therefore, the continuum between distance and proximity presumes movement. This movement affects other that share the same ground as us, as the desire to distance from or approximate something is informed by the orientated tendencies that shape our bodies.[25] It is important to notice that in discussing the affective qualities of distance and proximity, Ahmed refers not only to physical movements of bodies but also to the relationality that is built based on similarly affective, historical, theoretical, or sexual orientations. The experience with Swinguerra demonstrated that distancing and approximating from objects is a decision-making process that is entangled with an interplay of being in the physical space and affective distances and proximities with what resides outside the gallery and that is embodied through our movements in this same place.

Alison Butler addresses the role of distance and proximity in moving image installations by arguing that these works are imbued with a deictic aspect, where binarisms such as “here and there, now and then, us and them” appear and can allow the viewers virtually to access locations in the world that they would not usually be able to, an affective movement that can provide us with affective displacements in the immersive space of the gallery.[26] According to Butler, whilst these binary positionalities can sometimes appear to be fixed, they can turn into a dialogical endeavour.[27] I would like to advance Butler’s arguments by demonstrating how a process of disorientation occurs not in the rigidness of either here or there, distance or proximity, but in the continuous movement of recognising the materiality and positionality of our bodies whilst establishing a besideness attitude with the content of the projected moving images and the other bodies in the gallery. Consequently, the magnetising aspects of a projective moving image, as eliciting gatherings and proximities in the gallery, lead to the access of queer affects that can disorientate the other bodies located in our surroundings or build queer communalities that turn the space into a queer space.

Based on the claims of Ahmed, I employ the idea of other not as a matter of negating or undermining the existence and experience of someone who is not me, but as a form of mutual bodily extension materialised through the queer affects that can emerge from the collision of different subjectivities. Hence, the other is not me but exists in the conflict of occupying a space beside me, where, according to Ahmed, desire plays a crucial role.[28] A desire to establish proximities with something else as an “affective social force, the glue”[29] brings to the experience a consciousness of what is not me. Nevertheless, an affective confrontation does not imply turning this mutual extension into a single body, as to Ahmed, establishing proximities does not equal merging with or completely understanding other body’s histories.[30] To identify an other, thus, is to recognise the limitations of our histories in addressing the diversity of experiences that shape the bodies that inhabit the same space as we do. A besideness affective attitude towards the other is a confrontation with the limitations of our bodies in speaking for the other, which can sometimes mean ceasing to speak. In the art gallery, my body and the ones I shared the space with mutually affected and disturbed one another, resulting in kinaesthetic empathic responses that were either orientated towards the moving image content or towards the other visitors during the moments of experiencing the work Swinguerra in-between distance and proximity.

In this direction, to distance is sometimes to leave a space towards the encounter with the uncertain, unsettling and disorientating, as the new objects that arrive close to our bodies might not support an orientation that allow us to move forward. Distance is, according to Ahmed, “the expression of certain loss, of the loss of grip over an object that is already within reach”.[31] Hence, the proximity of some bodies can prevent us from moving affectively, but other objects around us may work as an orientation device that redirects us towards more productive ways to proceed with our journeys. To Ahmed, this usually occurs when similar tendencies are followed, as “we tend toward that which is near, just as what is near shows us our tendencies”, and common ground is built to turn the space of disorientation into a queer space that supports the emergence of queer affects.[32] In the experience with this article’s case study, the physical distance from projection, for example, exists because of the proximity of the bodies that prevented me from moving towards the moving images, whilst the contact with the atmospheric qualities of sound worked to establish affective relationships that orientated me towards the subsequent encounter with the projections.

Inhabiting the middle of the gallery in Swinguerra affected my body as a sensorial temporal suspension of the process of decision-making. This happened because I could not move forward without having to engage in a kinaesthetic struggle in relation to the others’ presence, which consequently put me in contact with a queer embodiment in the process of implementing unusual gestures that I normally associate with overcrowded nightclubs, as mentioned in the case study’s description. Imagine you are dancing amidst a large number of people in a nightclub: Your skin will accidentally touch another person’s, you might become shy when someone faces you, you might deny any further interaction, or you might embrace the gaze as a possibility for building an affective relation. You dance moving your arms, your legs, and your head in different directions, as the sound seems to dominate your full body whilst you respond to the spatiality created by the movement of the other bodies that are not yours, but directly affect your sense of spatiality because their proximity disturbs your dancing movements. This is exactly the experience of queer embodiment and disorientation that being in the middle of the gallery in Swinguerra provided me. Now picture yourself dancing in the same nightclub, in the middle of the dancefloor, and you decide to go buy a drink in the bar you can only reach visually from a distance by looking to the other side of the space. You have to open space by positioning your leg amongst other legs, by using your hands to open a way to the bar. By using your hands, I mean not only moving them away from your body. Your hands metaphorically excavate the dancefloor, gesturing with distorted fingers that seem to challenge the normality of their orientation, because the small qualities of your fingers allow you to access the small and empty spaces between the bodies that prevent you from moving. This was my kinaesthetic engagement in the art gallery when attempting to distance myself from the amalgamation of bodies and move towards the projections on the left, whilst the energetic beats of Brazilian funk music kept viscerally moving my insides. However, whilst the amalgamation of bodies kept me fleetingly away from the projections, some other elements approximated me to them.

Consequently, what happens when we physically approximate objects? As Ahmed argues, “Some proximities exist to “support” actions – some surfaces are there to support. The work of support involves proximity and is the ground for the experience of other proximities”.[33] Approximating an object, in queer phenomenological terms, means establishing relationalities that can either start supporting our movements in the common ground (rescuing us from disorientation) or create hostile spaces from which we will need to distance ourselves because they can be extensively or fleetingly traumatic and disorientating for the senses.

In Swinguerra, the positionality of my body amongst an overwhelming and suffocating crowd of people was decisive for me to quickly implement decisions regarding which side of the gallery to direct my attention to and physically move forward. It was the disturbing and disorientating affects resulting from the proximities of the other bodies that put me in closer contact with the surface of the distant projection on the left side. The previously mentioned space crowded with bodies in the middle of the gallery demonstrated the potentiality of the encounter with projective moving images as forming areas of conviviality that consequently were zones of conflict and destabilisation that affectively disturbed the occupants of the space.[34] In the middle of the gallery, the elements that seemed to orbit around the projections were responsible for helping the bodies to choose which side to go or decide to maintain the disorientating experience of staying between the projections. The latter decision might happen as the moving images could not provide an affective relation that provoked some bodies to move towards the projections and approximate one of the sides.

In my experience with Swinguerra, the sound turned out to be mainly responsible for the emergence of a queer affective relationality. I decided to leave the gathering because I could not establish a proximity with the bodies around me. I moved to the left, approximating the projection because of the affective and kinaesthetic relationship that I had started building with the bodies I could see in the films, as they portrayed a queerness that conversed with my Brazilian body’s response to the contact with the Brazilian music that we were all sharing in the gallery and in the moving images. As Giuliana Bruno claims, “Film moves, and fundamentally “moves” us, with its ability not simply to render affects but to affect in transmittable forms and intermediated ways. This means that such a medium of movement moves to incorporate and interact with other spaces that provoke intimate yet public response”.[35] By subsequently taking the position of moving whilst affected by the moving images and closely facing the projection, I could finally identify common grounds that put my body in contact with queer affects supporting my occupancy of the space, as the previous contact with the other visitors did not provide me with any commonalities. The potential encounter with bodies that could look like me, talk like me, or move like me, did not happen in the gathering of bodies or in the first steps I took in the gallery, but in the affective displacement of contacting the bodies in the projections.

Therefore, the experience with the case study demonstrates how distancing from the other bodies in the gallery, either arbitrarily or intentionally, could create disorientating personal and intimate spaces. Conversely, approximating other people in the gallery was disorientating when these bodies did not support, and even disturbed, the movements I intended to employ towards the projections. In the disorientation emerging from the distant proximity or proximate distance from the bodies in the gallery and the projections, a besideness attitude emerged as a possibility to build an affective reconciliation with the queerness that shaped this process; this will be explored in the next section.

Inhabiting beside

In the previous section, I demonstrated how the binarism presumably inherent to the ideas of distance and proximity is instead formed by a continuum of distant proximity or proximate distance. This means that distance and proximity can only exist if understood in relation to one another, as a fluid and non-binary phenomenon that affects what it touches whilst moving to enable connections with different objects that can either support or undermine this movement. It might not be possible to inhabit a space without leaving behind the one we were occupying, the backgrounds, privileges, and histories that affected us, including the disturbing presence of other bodies throughout the temporal developments of our lives. However, it is conceivable to move forward carrying along and beside us a series of objects and affects that will help the improvement of queer movements because they turn the space into a queer space, providing common grounds for people who may live through disorientating lines.

Hence, a besideness attitude towards the other emerges in the fluid temporal and spatial movement of distancing and approximating from different objects, and of identifying who and what lies beside us, to find a common and supportive ground to build and maintain queer spaces. During this process, we might discover that experiences that look distant may have more proximity with us than we would consider. An experience that is not mine and does not affect me does not mean an experience with which I cannot empathise with and establish a besideness attitude to overcome harmful social disorientations that happen, for example, in the life of queer people whose existence challenges heteronormative lines of relationality. However, as stated in this article’s introduction, this means understanding when to talk beside the other. In this section I will explore how the recognition of bodies I encountered in a distant proximity or proximate distance to the surface of the projections rescued me from or pulled me towards disorientation. This happened due to the kinaesthetic empathy with the movements and histories of these diegetic bodies or the installation settings, which led to the rise of besideness as a mode of relationality with the moving images.

I would like to review briefly the kinaesthetic experience of being in the middle of the gallery and amongst the other visitors in Swinguerra. As previously stated, at that moment it was the suffocating atmosphere and the disorientation generated from the proximity of the other bodies that made me choose which side to go, even though I was not secure about the differences in the two projections that I could see from a distance. The initial sustained visual contact with the content of the moving images projected when I stood beside one of the walls to watch the films can easily be read as the moment in which my body established a kinaesthetically empathic proximity that subsequently led to a besideness attitude. Therefore, the first layer of a besideness attitude emerged in the encounter with the others and the disorientation caused by their bodies, and consequently my body, in the middle of the gallery. As discussed in the previous section, it was necessary to embody queerness as a mode to inhabit the same place with other bodies, thus having to implement movements that could only exist in the relationality with the others beside me. Through queer movements, informed by a besideness attitude, we all needed to move with each other, move because of the others, or open space for the other bodies to move, if we intended to reach the projections as a collectively desired object.

The subsequent decision of walking to one side seemed to relate to choosing which side of the battle portrayed in the films I was supporting in the gallery. However, it became virtually impossible to distinguish what side of the battle was chosen. This is because by moving to the left and staying there, it became impossible to access the film projected on the opposite side of the gallery since the amalgamation of bodies prevented me from visually reaching the projections and the sound playing around the environment was the same for both films. Through this process. Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca’s installation appeared to implement in the space the second layer of a besideness attitude concerning their work, since moving to one side was based on the kinaesthetic reverberations of the act of looking at the bodies dancing in the moving image that, to some extent, affected my body. This affective relationship emerged as the bodies implemented movements informed by a queer kinaesthesia. Lindner draws on the work of Jonathan Bollen[36] to define queer kinaesthesia as the modes in which our bodies can move in the space, disrupting social expectations related to our assigned genders.[37] This is to disorientate normative modes of approach to binarisms such as femininity and masculinity, which according to Lindner are informed by the background of the bodies that implement this queer kinaesthesia, and are consequently intersected by relationships with class and race.

Lindner points out how queer bodies inhabit space differently because of the disturbance of binarisms, sometimes leading them to be considered socially wrong, deviant or inappropriate due to the differences implemented in relation to touch, distancing, approximating and contacting other objects. The bodies dancing in the moving images created a zone of conflict not only to keep the bodies of the visitors together but to keep us beside one another to choose which side to go in the dancing battle that happened in the films. Meanwhile, we had to deal affectively with the differences in inhabiting the space. It was the contact with the queer bodies on the screen that turned the space of the gallery into a queer space after the relative sensorially traumatic experience of inhabiting the middle of the gallery along with such a large number of bodies that prevented me from moving. By turning the space into a queer space, the films provided me with an affective mechanism to initiate a walk on common grounds and thus reconnect with the queerness of my body as a mode to overcome the previous stressful disorientation.

This argument does not imply that inhabiting the gallery with the other bodies was an unproductive experience. Rather, the queerness of the bodies in the moving images was potentially responsible for maintaining some other bodies in the middle of the gallery for a larger period than the one I undertook, as these other people may not have established proximities with the bodies in the moving images. However, even if a process of kinaesthetic empathy does not emerge for some visitors as a process of “in-this-togetherness”[38], as seeing themselves in that context, they could have potentially worked as mechanism to “raise awareness” and build an extended besideness attitude towards the dancers in the films and the bodies beside them in the gallery.[39]

The music video documentary format of Swinguerra opened up space for these bodies to speak for themselves by bringing their dancing movements to the surface of the projections through their own means of social and spatial engagements. Barbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca created a film in which they do not approximate those queer bodies as if they were part of their context. Instead, they employ a besideness attitude, in the sense of letting the dancers shape their means of showing how their bodies can be portrayed in the moving images. Therefore, dancing in this film became a great example of what Lindner states is a spectacular way to re-orientate normative embodiments[40], opening space for the gallery visitors affectively to “investigate questions of gender, sexuality, and desire by paying attention to ‘movement style, spatial negotiation, or relational positioning’”.[41] In the sustained contact with the queer bodies in the moving images a sense of ‘feeling at home’ emerged through recognition of those bodies as part of a cultural context that affectively talked to me as a Latinx American.

According to Cvetkovich, this sort of commonality is crucially informed by affect as it intends to underpin alternative relationalities and “modes of being, and being with others, when established cultures and institutions might not be available”.[42] In the recognition of a Latinx context, a home from which I had been geographically distant, I quickly established proximities with the moving images because the normative aspects of the art gallery did not support my affective movements amongst the other bodies. Regarding being distant from home, Ahmed argues that “’distance’ is also an effect of an orientation we have already taken, which makes what is ‘near’ close to us in more than a spatial sense”.[43]

Ahmed’s words exemplify Cvetkovich’s discussion of an affective common as not existing in fixed physical locations, but as a sensory experience that is shared by the people who gather around common affectivities.[44] Therefore, the ‘at home’ feeling as mentioned by Ahmed, does not equal a specific territory but is instead a metaphor for a place that supports gatherings.[45] In this context, a besideness attitude is about the possibility of bringing someone close to allow them to inhabit a space beside us and make them comfortable even if sometimes at a distance, even if we do not completely embody their histories. This non-coincidence of experiences is an important element to review when approaching the establishment of besideness, an empathic attitude towards experiences that are not ours. I cannot embody experiences I have not lived but I can activate a besideness attitude by trusting the bodies that claim to have lived common, sometimes distant but proximate disorientating experiences.

In Swinguerra a proximity to the projection could only be established through disorientation, as an attempt to disturb and affect the bodies who do not live the experiences portrayed but who can move beside in parallel disorientating common grounds, to re-orientate similarly social experiences that are harmfully based on prejudices regarding class, race, sexuality or nationality. As mentioned before, by putting so many different bodies together in the same space, this moving image installation created gatherings that lead to the confrontation of the affects that travel around, affecting everyone mutually. Cvetkovich reminds us that understanding these relationalities through the point of view of queerness is to approach sensory politics, “a way of making space not only for different kinds of bodies but for different modes of perception, and ones that are fully embodied or material”.[46]

Through opening space for a besideness attitude to emerge, the case study explored in this article built spaces of conviviality through the gathering of different bodies in different circumstances, turning “physical gatherings meaningful as the ways people come together to form collectivities, especially against concerns that such gatherings are too small scale or atomized”.[47] Inhabiting the space of the gallery in Swinguerra allowed common queer affects to emerge as possible mechanisms to disorientate expectations and normative modes of relationalities within the gallery through the constant suspension and restatement of the freedom to move around. These commonalities, however, are crucially informed by conflict, particularities, “ambivalence, mixed feelings and negative affects”.[48] The specific process of empathising differently with the bodies in the films presented in Swinguerra exemplifies how these conflicts were created as a mode to destabilise my body through the establishment of affective distant proximities or proximate distances.

Consequently, in the process of moving around the gallery whilst distancing or approximating other bodies, the projections could become a peripheral element in the immediate spatial experience, as the bodies of the other people disturbed my freedom of movement in the space, highlighting the potentialities of projective moving image as a magnetising element that elicits gatherings through either proximate collectivities or intimate distances. In this context, distance and proximity might imply a level of physical movement, wandering around by leaving a location of the gallery to get physically close to the projection. However, distance and proximity can be understood as a level of absorption, since distancing from one place in the gallery means establishing a sustained proximity with the content of the moving images that will still make you move viscerally. They co-exist as a fluid endeavour.

Through employing a besideness attitude in this context, the experience within projective moving image installations changes what seems far away from our histories into something considerably close to our affective experiences. Besideness undermines the binarism of wandering and absorption in projective moving image installations by establishing distant proximities and proximate distances. In the artwork analysed, we affectively move the bodies in the gallery or the films that seem distant from us to our side to move beside and along with them. In establishing this attitude, small-scale collectivities can be built based on the queer affects that emerge from socially disorientated commonalities concerning sexuality, race, gender, and nationality.

 

---

Notes

[1] This article partially results from my PhD research titled ‘Projective Moving Image Installation as Disorientation Device: a Phenomenology of Queer Encounters’, fully funded by the Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education (CAPES) – Ministry of Education of Brazil (Process number 88881.128292/2016-01) , and developed at The Glasgow School of Art.

[2] For instance, Chrissie Iles (2002), Malcolm Turvey et al. (2003), Sean Cubitt (2007), Mary Ann Doanne (2009), Maeve Connolly (2009), Kate Mondloch (2010), Tamara Trodd (2011), Erika Balsom (2013), Giuliana Bruno (2014), Catherine Elwes (2015), and Alison Butler (2019).

[3] For instance, these two approaches appear in the works of Chrissie Iles (2002), Malcom Turvey et al. (2003), Dominique Païni (2004), Sean Cubitt (2007), Liz Kotz (2008), Gregor Stenmrich (2009), Mary Ann Doanne (2009), Tamara Trodd (2011), Maria Wlash (2011).

[4] For instance, Kate Mondloch (2010), Christine Ross (2011), Erika Balsom (2013),  Giuliana Bruno (2014), Catherine Elwes (2015), and Alison Butler (2019).

[5] Scott Herring and Lee Wallace, Long term: essays on queer commitment (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021), p. 18.

[6] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Teaching ‘Experimental Critical Writing’”, in The ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

[7] Tony E. Adams and Derek M. Bolen, “Tragic Queer at the Urinal Stall, Who, Now, Is the Queerest One of All? Queer Theory | Autoethnography | Doing Queer Autoethnography”, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Volume 4, Issue Number 1 (2017): p. 104.

[8] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), p.  157-158.

[9] Ibid, p. 157.

[10] Ibid, p. 151-152.

[11] Ibid, p. 152-153.

[12] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 8.

[13] Ibid, p. 8.

[14] Katharina Lindner, Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema (London: I.B. Taurus, 2018), p. 5.

[15] Ibid, p. 5.

[16] Trinh T. Min-Ha, “”Speaking Nearby”: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-Ha”, Visual Anthropology Review Volume 8, Issue Number 1 (1992): p. 85.

[17] Sara Ahmed, Strange encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 6; Lindner, Film bodies.

[18] Ahmed, Strange encounters, p. 6.

[19] Heather Love, “Queer Messes”. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Volume 44, Number 3 & 4 (2016): 345-349.

[20] Sedgwick, Tendencies. p. 7.

[21] Jenny Chamarette, “ Embodying Spectatorship: From Phenomenology to Sensation,”   The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), p. 315.

[22] Swinguerra (2019) was installed in the Brazilian National Pavilion located in the Giardini, one of the main exhibition spaces of the International Exhibition La Bienalle di Venezia in the city of Venice Italy. The work occupied the two galleries of the pavilion. In the first gallery a series of photographies were installed on the walls. In the second gallery, the films were projected onto two screens located on opposite walls of the long space.

[23] Anne Cvetkovich, “”It Feels Right to Me”: Queer Feminist Art Installations and the Sovereignty of the Senses”, Feminist Media Histories, Volume 7, Issue Number 2 (2021): p. 44.

[24] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 165-166.

[25] Ibid, p. 114.

[26] Alison Butler, Displacements: Reading Space and Time in Moving Image Installations, (Switzerland: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2019), p. 116.

[27] Ibid, p. 137.

[28] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology,  p. 114-115

[29] Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 128.

[30] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 128.

[31] Ibid, p. 166.

[32] Ibid, p. 126.

[33] Ibid, p. 166.

[34] Some authors in the literature about projection in contemporary art, such as Maeve Connoly (2009), Sven Lütticken (2009), Giuliana Bruno (2014), and Matthew Noble-Olson (2016), Alison Butler (2019), discuss projective moving images’ ability to create areas of conviviality in the art gallery.

[35] Giuliana Bruno, Surface: matters of aesthetics, materiality, and media (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 145.

[36] Jonathan Bollen, “Queer Kinesthesia: performativity on the dancefloor”, in Dancing desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).

[37] Lindner, Film Bodies, p. 81.

[38] Ami Harbin, Disorientation and Moral Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 110.

[39] Ibid., p. 66.

[40] Lindner, Film Bodies, p.  79.

[41] Ibid, p. 81.

[42] Cvetkovich, ““It Feels Right to Me”,” p. 33.

[43] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 126-127.

[44] Cvetkovich, ““It Feels Right to Me”,” p. 34.

[45] Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 126.

[46] Cvetkovich, ““It Feels Right to Me”,” p. 46.

[47] Ibid, p. 47.

[48] Ibid, p. 34.

 

Bibliography

Adams, Tony E., and Bolen, Derek M., “Tragic Queer at the Urinal Stall, Who, Now, Is the   Queerest One of All? Queer Theory | Autoethnography | Doing Queer Autoethnography” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Volume 4, Issue Number 1 (2017): p. 100-113.

Ahmed, Sara. Strange  Encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006.

Balsom, Erika. Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013.

Bollen, Jonathan, “Queer Kinesthesia: performativity on the dancefloor, in Dancing desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.

Bruno, Giuliana. Surface: matters of aesthetics, materiality, and media. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Butler, Alison. Displacements: Reading Space and Time in Moving Image Installations. Switzerland: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2019.

Chamarette, Jenny. “Embodying Spectatorship: From Phenomenology to Sensation”, in The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender. New York and London: Routledge, 2017.

Connoly, Mave. The Place of Artists’ Cinema. Bristol: Intellect and Chicago University Press, 2009.

Cubitt, S. “Projection: Vanishing and Becoming”, in Media Art Histories. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007.

Cvetkovich, Anne, “”It Feels Right to Me”: Queer Feminist Art Installations and the Sovereignty of the Senses”, Feminist Media Histories, Volume 7, Issue Number 2 (2021): p. 30-64.

Doanne, Mary Ann. “The location of the image: cinematic projection and scale in modernity”, in Art of Projection. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2009.

Elwes, Catherine. Installation and the moving image. London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2015.

Harbin, Amin. Disorientation and Moral Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Herring, Scott, and Wallace, Lee, ed. Long term: essays on queer commitment. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021.

Iles, Chrissie. Into the Light: the projected image in American Art, 1964-1977. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002.

Kotz, Liz. “Video projection: the space between screens”. in Art and the moving image: a critical reader. London: Tate Pub. in association with Afterall, 2008.

Lindner, Katharina. Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema. London: I.B. Taurus, 2018.

Love, Heather. “Queer messes”, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Volume 44, Number 3 & 4 (2016): p. 345-349.

Lütticken, Sven. “Liberating Time”, in Art of Projection. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2009.

Mi-Ha, Trinh T. “”Speaking Nearby”: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-Ha”, Visual Anthropology Review Volume 8, Issue Number 1 (1992): p. 82-91.

Mondloch, Kate. Screens: viewing Media Installation Art. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Noble-Olson, Matthew, “Melancholy Projection”, Discourse, Volume 38, Issue Number 3 (2016): p. 390-413.

Païni, Dominique. “Should we put an end to projection?”, October, 110 (2004), p. 23-48

Ross, Christine. “The projective shift between installation art and new media art: from distantiation to connectivity”, in Screen/Space: The projected image in contemporary art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. 2 ed. United States of America: Duke University Press, 1994.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, “Teaching Experimental Critical Writing”, in The ends of Performance. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.

Stenmrich, Gregor. Dam Graham’s Cinema and Film Theory. in Art of projection. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2009.

Trodd, Tamara. “Introduction: theorising the projected image”. in Screen/Space: The projected image in contemporary Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.

Turvey, Malcom et al. “The Projected Image in Contemporary Art”. October, Volume 104 (2003): p. 71-96.

Walsh, Maria. “‘You’ve got me under your spell’: the entranced spectator”. in Screen/Space: The projected image in contemporary Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.

 

Author biography

Danilo Baraúna is a PhD candidate at The Glasgow School of Art, funded by CAPES (Brazilian Ministry of Education). His thesis is titled ‘Projective moving image installation as disorientation device: a phenomenology of queer encounters’, submitted for examination in February 2022. Research interests are in the fields of Moving Image Art, Queer Studies, and Affect Theory. Danilo has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as GEMInIS, TECCOGS – Digital Journal of Cognitive Technologies, Visualidades, and Agenda Politica, as well as book chapters and articles in conference proceedings, and is currently editing a book about the history of moving image art in the Brazilian Amazon to be published in 2022.  Danilo previously worked as a graduate teaching assistant for the Glasgow School of Art’s Fine Art Critical Studies Department, a cultural programmer of Film and Video for the Social Service of Commerce (Brazil), and visiting lecturer at the Federal University of Para (Brazil).

DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v20i0.2509

 

Introduction

In her 2001 work, ‘Studying Reality TV,’ Annette Hill asserts “… [R]eality TV is a powerful genre in that it has an ability to make and remake itself within the contemporary entertainment industry.”[1] Indeed, reality shows have been staple entertainment for diverse audience groups, and their steadily successful course in the history of the medium points to the ways in which the genre undergoes continuous transformations, embedding different themes, forms, and types of reality shows in its desire to garner new audiences. Yet, despite such permutations, reality television has largely been cast in an unfavorable light. The genre’s ostensibly dubious aesthetics and emphasis on superficial topics pertaining to the private domain often place reality programs and their viewers at the bottom of a “moral hierarchy.”[2] Furthermore, research conducted across a wide range of disciplines has accused the genre of conveying racist, misogynistic, and homophobic messages while reinforcing heteronormativity, often together with other relationships of domination.[3]

Nevertheless, how power structures in media are perceived at the moment of reception can be subjective. Several scholars working in queer studies postulate that the reality television genre can not only reify heteronormativity but also expose and sabotage its omnipresent institutions. Phillipa Orme, for instance, who has used the eighth season of MTV’s reality show Are you the one? (2014-) as a case study, has explored how gender- and sexually fluid contestants are represented onscreen. While highlighting reality television’s adherence to homonormative and couple-centered logics, Orme’s article acknowledges “its potential as a documentary form that equally holds the complexity for queer identity.”[4]

Similarly, Ava Laura Parsemain employ a queer theory framework to discuss the seemingly incompatible coexistence of queerness and pedagogy in entertainment television. Their monograph, traversing various television program genres, reveals how reality shows can accommodate queerness and allow their audiences to learn about the queer self and the queer other.[5]

Both works, continuing the cultural studies tradition of studying the polysemous qualities of media texts and the meanings made of their content by active audiences, offer exciting insights into the field of gender and sexually diverse television representation.[6] What is worth mentioning, however, is that the concept of reception, as used within this strand of scholarship, is primarily based on researchers’ practices of watching and interpreting the texts and not on real audiences.[7] Of course, some notable works take an explicitly queer approach in empirical media research and study the interactions of actual entities with reality programs, but they are limited in number.[8] Even scarcer from this literature is the examination of the affective power of media and the emotional responses in which audiences engage while consuming such texts. Recognising the ideological dimensions of media yet wishing to look beyond them, I probe how audiences interact with texts’ content and messages in embodied and affective ways.

The issue of “affective experience” has been studied in a plethora of areas and fields, including cultural studies, psychology, audience, and feminist studies, and generated rich literature that encompasses different aims, approaches, and frameworks.[9] Still, their shared interest in audience engagement with media constructs the latter as “repositories of feelings and emotions.”[10] Misha Kavka suggests that reality television, in particular, constitutes a genre able to foreground “a technology of immediacy, which in turn is experienced as an affect of intimacy.”[11] Indeed, various works preceding Kavka’s have long concentrated on the television genre highlighting the gratifications and pleasures that different reality programs offer their audiences. For example, Charles McCoy and Roscoe Scarborough’s analysis showcases how exposure to reality shows leads viewers to come up with a variety of readings and emotional responses, which may range from expressing complete disapproval and irony to camp and guilty pleasure.[12] Distilling a similar argument, yet within the context of queer audience reception, Andre Cavalcante’s findings demonstrate “the tremendous authority of media and their ability to generate emotional turmoil and affective disruption” while underlining audiences’ ability to manage and cope these images in agentful ways.[13]

Drawing on the above examples, this article uses the Greek version of the reality show The Bachelor as a case study to explore how queer viewers who consume Greek television make sense of the text. The employment of qualitative audience research and the selection of The Bachelor have been made based on specific criteria. Firstly, the available scholarly work on Greek reality television is very little and limited to a small number of edited volumes employing genealogical and theoretical approaches, and studies devoted to interpretations of the reality phenomenon through sociological and cultural perspectives.[14] Although the aforementioned body of work, mainly Ioanna Vovou’s edited volume and articles, have been crucial for understanding the history, ideology, and impact of reality television, there is a marked prioritising of text-centric approaches.[15] Despina Chronaki’s work is an exception to the rule; her chapter, employing semi-structured interviews with Greek audiences and fans of the American RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-), fills a gap in Greek media reception studies, yet does so in an attempt to capture the transnational reach of foreign television reality shows alone. Thus, the case of The Bachelor, studied in the context of this article, aims to explore that under-researched area where audiences and Greek reality television meet. Secondly, the popular romance and relationship multimedia franchise I have chosen to study has received negative feedback from journalists and television critics who denounce the show for its trashy aesthetics and perpetuation of gender stereotypes.[16] Additionally, it is important to note that while The Bachelor was punished by the National Radio-Television Consulate—the Greek independent administrative authority which supervises and regulates the broadcasting sector—with a 180.000 euros fine for showing scenes that contribute to gender equality, several journalists and audience members on social media found the show to be a cultural threat for its viewers and asked for its cancellation via online campaigns.[17] Thus, a second intention of this article is to take part in the ongoing discussion about The Bachelor and shed light on the reception of the show outside the anglophone context.[18]

Following the lead of queer scholars who apply phenomenological thinking to media studies research, I place “the body, and questions of embodiment, at the center of inquiry” to interrogate “where we stand” when we consume media texts.[19] According to Andre Cavalcante, the experiences and feelings of the body are of pivotal significance in qualitative research and can “complement ideological understandings of media audiences by offering a more embodied and dynamic optic.”[20] Thus, an emphasis on those (in)appropriate emotional and bodily responses triggered when consuming culturally inferior television programs from the private sphere of the house may offer fruitful ground for making sense of the audience’s kaleidoscopic responses to the sociopolitical world they inhabit.

Ahmed’s queer phenomenology provides a useful theoretical foundation for understanding how sexual orientations and orientations as ways of residing the world “leave their impressions on the skin.”[21] Ahmed unfolds her argument by exposing how vertical and horizontal lines are extended around us and serve as “straightening devices that keep things in line” and thus ensure that collectives remain with their heads facing heterosexuality.[22] Objects—such as the familial/familiar television device, as I argue here—make “visible a fantasy of the good life” and promise access to this life in exchange for work done to take the well-trodden pathway of heteronormativity.[23] Yet, at the same time, queer phenomenology also promises the joy to explore “other paths and even go astray.”[24] Such queer moments and practices have the potential to form new directions, thus generating “a diagonal line, which cut[s] across ‘slantwise’ the vertical and horizontal lines, . . . perhaps even challenging the ‘becoming vertical’ of ordinary perception.”[25]

Against this backdrop, the Greek version of The Bachelor is discussed; yet the article is not about the reality show per se. The show’s narratives and scripts serve as an impetus for investigating how queer bodies that live outside the majority culture position themselves in relation to The Bachelor and the extent to which they “rework” dominant discourses and ideologies endemic within the reality show. While acknowledging that positive and diverse media representations matter not only for broader sociopolitical change but also for the well-being of gender and sexually diverse groups of people who wish to see themselves represented onscreen, I argue that even strictly heterosexual and heteronormative texts—such as in the case of The Bachelor—can enable queer and pedagogical pleasures for viewers, thus blurring the unfounded dichotomies between high/low culture and heterosexual/queer television.

Method

This study aims to provide empirical accounts of the viewing pleasures that audiences gain by watching reality television. The notion of audiences, as used in the context of this study, refers to individuals who watch television on a regular basis and consider themselves members of the queer community. Queer here is used as a word that encompasses a wide variety of people across a spectrum of sexual orientations and gender identities.  However, despite the research subjects’ positioning under the above umbrella, they are of different ages, physical features, and ethnicity. This intersectionality of identities is of particular interest and should be considered during the analysis of their responses. Another element defining this study is the degree of familiarity that the research subjects share among each other as well as with the researcher. In particular, all individuals included in this study belong to the wider circle of my friends and acquaintances, some of whom I met during the COVID-19 pandemic. From November 7, 2020, up until November 30, Greece entered a second national lockdown and night curfews were among the preventive measures implemented by the government to slow down COVID-19 spread. At that time, Evi, one of the participants of this study, returned to Greece and used her empty family house as a meeting point for her friends. It was during these encounters at Evi’s house that the participants and I started to watch the first and later, the second season of The Bachelor. Unlike other television shows such as comedies and dramas, the story of the Greek bachelor and his love adventures with the twenty women who lived together in a mansion was the only one to spark intense conversations and comments during its broadcast, thus supporting McCoy and Scarborough’s finding that, “part of the enjoyment of watching “bad” television comes from talking about the show, as it is occurring.”[26] The intense emotional reactions generated while consuming The Bachelor prompted me to share with my friends the intention to conduct a study based on their/our responses to the second season of The Bachelor and they gave me their consent. Consequently, what started as a friend gathering evolved into ethnographic research, which led me to encounter some ethical challenges. Nevertheless, my prior engagement with academic scholarship on reflexive research helped me to comprehend my dual and conflicting role as a researcher and friend and make informed choices in all stages of the study.[27]

Taking the form of our relationship into account, I follow what Lisa Tillmann-Healey has named friendship as method.[28] Drawing on feminist and queer research, and building on the idea of friendship as a useful site of inquiry, friendship as method “rejects scientific neutrality, universal truths, and dispassionate inquiry and works towards social justice, relational truths, and passionate inquiry.”[29] Due to its deviation from traditional ethnographic work, friendship ethnography has the potential to reduce power relations (without nullifying them) and does not necessarily require outright planning; instead, it develops over months and is based on dialogue, compassion, and an ethics of care.[30] At the same time, some of its potential drawbacks as a data collection method are related to its small sample size, which renders findings non-generalisable. Another consideration involved blurring boundaries between researcher and participants, which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, research conducted with friends and established acquaintances offers “reciprocity of disclosure” and can thus reach great depth and a high degree of comfortableness.[31] On the other hand, the very involvement of the researcher with the study participants in different contexts obligates the latter to make ethical choices as to what can be shared and to what end from their in-between discussions.

With the above in mind, the study took place between September 7 and December 17, 2021. During this period, I kept notes of the dialogues and comments uttered while watching the episodes of The Bachelor together with the participants. I also phone-called some participants-friends after the reality show’s finale and asked them if they would like to answer a few additional questions. These questions and answers were transcribed verbatim and translated from Greek to English. When I completed the first version of the article, I shared the document with all participants to obtain comments, corrections, and/or clarifications and then integrated their feedback and suggestions. When I completed the article’s final version, I received the participants’ informed consent and asked them how they wanted to see their names appear in the article. Depending on their decisions, I kept real names and personal information intact or used nicknames and non-identifiable data for those participants who did not wish to share their personal information publicly.

Heterosexual lines, ambivalent feelings, and the reality of reality television

Before proceeding with the ways in which queer viewers decode the reality show, it is important to highlight a few points relevant to the study. Although The Bachelor’s episodes were broadcast many times throughout the week by ALPHA TV channel, the participants adopted the habit of meeting towards the end of the week to consume the show together. Indeed, visiting Evi’s family house on Fridays—while her parents were temporarily residing at their village house in northern Greece—turned out to be a regular routine for all participants. Fridays had also been associated with the day of “the rose ceremony,” during which the bachelor presented a red flower to those female contestants he wished to have stay on the show for another week. All participants were interested in watching the ceremony live and finding out who would remain in the mansion but mainly, the responses of the contestants who would be eliminated.

Rafael (NB, G, 25) remembers Sia (figure 1), a female contestant from the first season of the show, whose elimination announcement from the bachelor, Panagiotis Vasilakos, led her to come up with a goodbye speech that would go viral on social media: “you are super handsome, you have a wonderful personality, but you have a huge flaw, and that is your lack of taste (in women).”[32] Rafael has repeatedly expressed their fascination for those female contestants who are not afraid to be “glamorous, sassy, and pugnacious” and is often very much inclined to imitate some of their most memorable reactions. Such aspects of the show, particularly the ways through which the reality show portrays its contestants, have often incited lively discussion from the participants. According to Dana Heller, dating, wife-, and wedding-themed reality television shows are replete with reductive stereotypes, therefore, presenting certain women as “sexually licentious, emotionally manipulative . . . and fiercely competitive with other women for men, wealth, and status” is not uncommon.[33] However, participants expressed their concerns about the ways through which The Bachelor reifies cultural conceptions of gender identity. For instance, while watching a scene from the show where a female contestant rudely interrupts a dialogue exchanged between Alexis Pappas and another contestant, Chrysanthi (F, L, 30) reacts as follows:

Chrysanthi: Now look at that . . . look how much it (The Bachelor) instrumentalises women . . . the harem stays in the house . . . they wear their best dresses and fight for the heart of the maharajah . . . I can’t imagine myself as passive and confined inside a house setting for none!

In this quote, Chrysanthi’s account of the rose ceremony speaks to the promotion of heteronormative beliefs and sheds light on the show’s regressive cultural politics. Most importantly, however, she offers a nuanced understanding of how “the bodies” in/of The Bachelor “become orientated by how they take up time and space.”[34] While detecting the show’s polyamorous leanings, Chrysanthi’s words reveal that the orientation of The Bachelor is actually based on a very particular relation to, and perception of, space, bodies, and objects within it, all of which help to sustain gender binaries in place and render the heterosexual couple a “point” along a horizontal line. Nevertheless, for a body to appear “in line,” to use Ahmed’s vocabulary, intense and repetitive work is required.[35] Thus, the repetitive gendered bodily movements and gestures enacted within The Bachelor can be read as a work of this kind and “an orientation toward the future, insofar as” the contestants’ “actions are also the expression of . . . an intention” for adhering to the heterosexual line.[36]  At the same time, however, for Chrysanthi and other participants, accumulating different “points” of the line might actually have a disorientating and not an orientating effect.

Aside from those gender aspects in the show that “stand out” and are often mentioned during the broadcast of the episodes, a few participants were equally interested in understanding how The Bachelor makes, as Ahmed might have stated, “certain things, not others available.”[37] Among the most cited omissions in the show has been the lack of non-white bodies and bodies residing within the spectrum of fatness. For Evi (F, L, 42), who self-defines herself as a white fat lesbian, the omnipresence of bodies that conform to an ideal of thinness causes bodies like hers, which do not “line up,” “to inherit their own disappearance” on the basis that fat bodies have “made the wrong turn.”[38]

Evi: I am 100% sure that if I watched it with my mother, she would be enchanted with those skinny bitches, and then she would get back to me only to tell me that I need to go on a diet if I want to find more womanly clothes and not stay on the shelf.

Evi’s narrative contains several aspects of her mother’s verbal and non-verbal communication, which work towards “controlling or correcting the operations of [her] body.”[39] Such disciplinary mechanisms reverberate in Dimitris Papanikolaou’s research on the Greek family and bring to mind a particular family constellation he defines as biopolitical. Inspired by Foucault’s thought, Papanikolaou conceptualises the biopolitical family as a functioning agent of the society committed to the project of sculpting normative and ‘proper’ bodies. As he explains, this type of family “works intensely on the bodies of its members…undertaking,” among others, “surveillance over their ‘natural’ gender and their ‘normal’ development.”[40] This means that while subjects who follow gender and body expectations may remain untouched by “the net of Greek kinship,” others, like Evi, who are different, are more likely to accumulate “stress or stress points.”[41]

Other participants, not only advanced critical readings of specific topics (or lack thereof) from the show, but they also shared how particular players triggered diverse emotional reactions for them. Borrowing from the writing of Ahmed, emotion must be understood as “a form of action” which “makes” and “shapes” bodies.[42] For Niki (F, B, 38), the mere appearance of a particular contestant onscreen made her hide herself behind the cushions of the sofa in embarrassment before turning her attention to her phone for distraction. Niki repeats what the contestant in question said on her romantic date with the bachelor and shared her thoughts:

Niki: “Ice is melting, the ozone hole has opened up . . . and all this is bothering me a lot.” Who says that on a date? And with this specific word choice? I wouldn’t dare tell my colleagues that I watch The Bachelor, but honestly, it is tragic and hilarious at the same time.

Niki’s condemnation of The Bachelor does not impede her from viewing it. In fact, her guilty viewing pleasure involves, as Melinda Reid has argued, “the positive direct response of pleasure . . . and the negative meta-response of guilt.”[43] Much like Niki, Chrysanthi felt torn between enjoying and dismissing “objects [that] are all somewhat embarrassing to desire and yet desired anyway.”[44] Such conflicting feelings were activated in those cases where the contestants’ “absurd” performances and “dimwitted” dialogues compromised Chrysanthi’s feminist beliefs. Interestingly enough, however, for Rafael, The Bachelor’s anti-feminist perspective did not clash with his feminist worldview and explained their relationship with the reality show using their age as a defining lens:

Rafael: The Bachelor is a genuinely cringey show. Gen Z consumes pop culture in ways different from previous generations. Far from demure, we (Gen Z) have reclaimed stupidity. So these cringe jokes are funny because we are aware of the intentional stupidity and we make fun of it. . . . It is like reclaiming the word faggot.

While viewing gender as a dimension of inequality in The Bachelor, Rafael employs a reading mode of the text which can be best described through the politics of camp. Drawing on Susan Sontag’s classic Notes on Camp, camp constitutes -among many other things—“a seriousness that fails,” and a type of reception incarnating “a victory of “style” over “content”, “aesthetics” over “morality”, of irony over tragedy.”[45] In short, when consuming texts through a camp sensibility it is possible to step beyond evaluative criteria and admire shows like The Bachelor for their unabashedly failed content. Thus, returning to Ahmed, viewers such as Rafael who read television through camp lenses “follow a diagonal line,” in that they see “the world “slantwise” and allow other objects to come into view.”[46]

On the other hand, there is still the tendency of participants to examine The Bachelor with reference to the genre to which it belongs. Evi has been attentive to the reality aspect of reality television and highlighted how The Bachelor’s contestants’ presence and interaction often take place in ways that appear forced and strange. Several times, Evi has searched videos on YouTube via her phone to check for similarities between the Greek Bachelor and its American counterpart or even brought our attention to particular scenes from the Greek version of the show which she finds suspicious.

Evi: Ours [The Greek Bachelor] is scripted as fuck. Look at some scenes very carefully, you will notice from the players’ expressions that they themselves can’t help but laugh with the absurd things they are expected to say. They are performing roles which are meant to get us hooked. And it works.

This quote echoes Annette Hill’s finding that “the performance becomes a powerful framing device for judging reality TV’s claims to the real”.[47] Given that the pleasure of reality television partly derives from “the belief that the ‘characters’ are sincere,” challenging reality players’ ostensibly transparent performances demonstrates how the pseudo-promise of the real in shows like The Bachelor is bound up with audiences’ willingness to suspend disbelief for the sake of their viewing experience and pleasure.[48] Thus, in a very real sense, any attempt to determine which bodies—be they the ones behind, in front of, or inside The Bachelor—laugh at whose expense becomes futile in the face of reality television’s slippery terrain.

New lines and moments of resistance

The previous analysis showcases how study participants decoded The Bachelor and the kinds of pleasures they experienced while viewing it. Although their answers vary, they all respond to the question of how we face objects that lie ahead of us, as it is in the case of (reality) television. In the part that follows, I explore orientation as a matter of “how we inhabit spaces.”[49] I consider the possibility to turn around, face familiar objects and bodies from a different angle and face new, unfamiliar objects and other people—those that might have been in the background or behind us. Thus, the question I examine here is what participants can extract from The Bachelor and to what extent, if any, they can rework the compulsory orientation of heterosexuality and its social gifts as broadcast onscreen.

Given queer phenomenology’s emphasis on spatiotemporal parameters, the setting where participants consumed the show will be considered. The apartment of Evi’s parents in which the study took place constitutes a typical home space that is inextricably linked to the idea of biological family, marriage, and reproduction. With the advent of the coronavirus epidemic, however, these idea(l)s were seriously compromised. Indeed, the departure of Evi’s parents, together with the temporal occupation of the apartment by Evi and her friends, modified the composition as well as the number of the bodies residing the apartment. Its new temporary residents, although circulating in a space that is not necessarily theirs, spent time together beyond television viewing, engaged themselves in common activities and eventually established a kinship network different from the one that Evi had once experienced when she lived in the apartment with her parents. In a similar way, Evi’s house stopped carrying “the memory of defeat […] and trauma” and served as a safe space that enabled the rest of the participants to feel comfortable.[50] According to Ahmed, “to be comfortable is to be so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends, and the world begins.”[51] Although the feeling of comfortableness is typically associated with forms of privilege granted to white heterosexual bodies in public spaces, here I focus on specific moments of The Bachelor and relevant conversations from the participants, which construct Evi’s house as a space that allows queer bodies to “fit in.”[52]

Particular characters from The Bachelor and scenes involving them have been frequent objects of discussion within the group of participants. Among the characters which have attracted intense attention is Athina (figure 2). Commonly known as “Athina New York,” Athina is a Greco-American fitness instructor, who is memorable for her broken Greek and funny miscommunications with the other contestants in the show. Since appearing on The Bachelor, Athina has gained popularity, leading to numerous talk shows concentrating on her appearance and cheerful character. For the participants, Athina diverged significantly from the rest of the female contestants in that she never found herself involved into catfights. Evi considers Athina to be “genuine” and attributes her distancing from quarrels to language barriers. Chrysanthi, more than any other participant, has consistently expressed her admiration for—and attraction to—Athina, as exemplified by the following quote:

Chrysanthi: she is carefree, smiley and above all hot. If I were the bachelor, I would have no second thoughts. I would take her from the mansion straight away and move with her back to New York.

Cognisant of Chrysanthi’s crush on Athina, Evi and Rafael enjoy teasing Chrysanthi. Yet Chrysanthi is never discouraged by their comments; every time Athina is shown on television, Chrysanthi does not miss a chance to praise her external appearance and character. Such actions are “out of line” and disrupt the pervasive assumption of heterosexuality by exposing and sharing some of the perverse pleasures that one may gain when consuming a heterosexually themed text “in a familiar room.”[53]

Another aspect of watching The Bachelor is the engagement of the participants in ways that escape the active/passive dichotomy. Overall, instead of sitting back, all participants combined the act of consuming the reality show with other activities such as texting, surfing on the internet, talking to each other and other friends through tablets, and playing board games on laptops. Their media engagement, thus, challenged a preferred viewing position in which viewers should be absorbed in watching television and allowed a multiscreen viewing. For some participants, The Bachelor’s content even served as a source of inspiration for the shaping of DIY performances and small acts. Sofi (F, Q, 33), an Albanian woman with many years of experience in acting and singing, was often asked by the rest of the group to copy the behaviors of The Bachelors’ players and she usually accepted the challenge with joy. Other times, Sofi went as far as to deliver her own shows and include the other participants as active agents in her performances. The show titled “I want them all 18 although it’s a sin” is an indicative example. Sofi began this performance by picking a romantic tune on Spotify and placing candles on the table. Then she disappeared for a few minutes only to come back wearing a bra, the bottom of her pajamas, silver heels and with a mustache drawn on her face. Following the style of a romantic date similar to the ones shown on The Bachelor, Sofi approached Evi, Rafaelos, Niki and myself, ensuring physical intimacy. She was talking to each one of us passionately and gently asked each of us in turn to dance with her to the rhythm of the song. The show finished with her saying “it is too hard to choose because I want you all” and brought us all together in a cluster resembling a communal orgy, in which we laughed while she was pretending to be writhing in sensual desire. Right after that, she landed on an armchair and mimicked the pains of labour, pulling out of her pajamas a stuffed elephant which was her new-born baby.

Sofi’s improvised performance, instead of reifying the heteronormative structure of Τhe Bachelor, exposes and parodies its very mechanisms and “creates new angles,” to speak with Ahmed. When I called her to ask about that performance, Sofi answered as follows:

I enjoy making my friends happy, that’s why I do these performances. It is so liberating to take the very stereotypes you hate and turn them upside down. To me, it feels as if the show itself is begging for such parodic enactments.

Humour, hyperbole, naivete, and a sarcastic mood—these are some of the tools that Sofi uses to critique The Bachelor’s conventions. For Hongwei Bai, reading Muñoz, “humour constitutes a valuable pedagogical and political tool for queer minoritarian subjects; through humour, queer performers find strength and solidarity in subverting the assumed seriousness of the dominant discourse.”[54] Far from a passive viewer, Sofi adopts a more proactive and even activist approach which extends beyond her friendship network and the familial space of the house. Aside from delivering such performances, Sofi, along with Evi, is active on social media. Together they take lines from The Bachelor that they find absurd and make memes, exerting their own critique in creative yet uncompromising ways. For Evi, watching the show and posting on twitter (while sharing with us) those aspects she considered problematic in real time turned out to be part of her routine during our gatherings.

I post these tweets in case there is even one person who buys what they see. At the beginning I felt bad for myself but I came to the conclusion that I can be feminist and watch such shows. That I can laugh with what I see and criticise the over-the-topness of such performances. It is empowering to watch what is wrong and judge it and make an impact through your posts.

What is essential in Evi’s words is the sense of being orientated towards and away from The Bachelor. Like other participants, her initial ambivalence about the show reveals how contradictory emotions make bodies move in different directions. However, instead of contemplating this clash of emotions, Evi shared them online. Such actions, departing from negative and inappropriate feelings, turn into productive processes in that they mitigate the private-public divide and have the potential to address different communities of spectators online.

Conclusion

How do people watch television that is labeled as “trash, “problematic,” and “humiliating,” and what do they make out of these programs? These questions served as a starting point to conduct a reception study and explore how the Greek version of the reality show, The Bachelor, which has attracted intensely negative criticism, may be decoded by particular communities of spectators. Investing in cultural studies’ engagement with queer audience research and building on the idea of friendship as method, the study shed light on the diverse readings that queer viewers employ to converse with the genre of reality. It showcased that all the participants who watched The Bachelor comprehended and disagreed with the heteronormative structure of the show. For the overriding majority, the consumption of the text elicits conflicting feelings of pleasure and guilt, yet several participants agreed that the show actually provides them with empowerment and pure amusement. The above emotional responses demonstrated variations in the way viewers decode the text. Many viewpoints expressed by the participants revealed their interest in invisible aspects of the show, such as the omnipresence of white and thin bodies to the exclusion of bodily diverse individuals. Furthermore, another important dimension that emerged from the study was the pervasive culture of heterosexuality, which is manifested in the show through the circulation of heteronormative ideals and traditional gender stereotypes about femininities and masculinities alike.

Although the participants of this study never justified their preference for The Bachelor or compared it to LGBTQI+-related programs, their responses about the reality show, as complemented by Ahmed’s queer phenomenology, unravel the multifaceted process of emotionally engaging with and consuming media texts and showcase that one’s orientation is not only determined by the direction one faces. The voices of the study participants and their experience of/from/in front of The Batchelor reveals that the space we inhabit, the bodies with which we inhabit spaces, and the objects we choose to leave behind, see, and rework, open up habitable worlds where queer politics and spaces are possible.

With this in mind, totalising understandings of the role and functions of media products entail the risk of losing sight of their actual societal impact at a micro level. Consequently, by turning our attention to low culture products and exploring the responses they elicit in diverse groups of viewers, we might start perceiving these programmes in ways that prevent facile criticisms of quality and morality, and perhaps permit different kinds of viewing pleasures to emerge. This study, placed in the context of Greece, served as the first exploration of queer audience studies and, hopefully, an invitation for other researchers interested in exploring this fertile yet largely untouched field.

Acknowledgements

This is a revised and extended version of a paper presented at the “2nd Greek Studies Now Conference: Local Cases, Global Debates,” 15-17 June 2022, held at the University of Amsterdam. I want to thank Professor Dimitris Papanikolaou (University of Oxford, UK) and Professor Maria Boletsi (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) because their comments prodded me to flesh out my ideas about “queer reading practices.” This essay owes its appearance to the extremely useful comments offered by the anonymous reviewers. I am also grateful for the valuable feedback and practical support that the special editors, Philippa Orme and Isaac Pletcher provided me with during each step of the production process. My sincerest thanks go to my research subjects-friends who permitted me to share part of their / our private television viewing experiences in public.

 

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Notes

[1] Annette Hill, “Studying Reality TV,” in The Television Genre Book, edited by Glen Creeber (London: British Film Institute, 2001), p. 161-162.

[2] June Deery, Reality TV (Cambridge: Wiley, 2015); Catharine Lumby, “Real appeal: The ethics of reality TV,” in Remote Control: New Media New Ethics, edited by Catharine Lumby and Elspeth Probyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 11-24; on ‘moral hierarchy’, see Pertti Alasuutari, “‘I’m ashamed to admit it but I have watched Dallas’: the moral hierarchy of television programmes,” Media Culture, and Society 14, no. 1 (1992): 561-582.

[3] Alicia Denby, “Toxicity and Femininity in Love Island: How Reality Dating Shows Perpetuate Sexist Attitudes Towards Women,” Frontiers in sociology, June 2, 2021, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2021.641216/full; MacKenzie Peltier and Lauren Mizock, “Fox’s More to Love: Pseudo-Fat Acceptance in Reality Television,” Somatechnics 2 no. 1 (2012): 93-106; Melusi Mntungwa and Luyanda Ngema, “‘He mustn’t be too much’: Exploring notions of internalised homophobia in Date My Family,” Agenda 32, no. 3 (2018): 62-73; Rebecca Pardo, “Reality Television and the Metapragmatics of Racism,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2013): 65-81; Susan Vertoont, “Would you date ‘the undateables?’ An analysis of the mediated public debate on the reality television show ‘The Undateables,’” Sexualities 21, no. 5-6 (2017): 1-15.

[4] Philippa Orme, “Are you my perfect match? Reality TV as a stage for queer identity in MTV’s Are You the One?,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 60 (2021), https://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/Orme-AreYouTheOne/index.html

[5] Ava Laure Parsemain, The Pedagogy of Queer TV (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

[6] For an introduction to the interplay between media text and the reader/audience, see John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular’,” in Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by Raiford Guins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz (London: Sage, 2005), p. 65. Here I propose an indicative list of works which have engaged in queer readings of popular texts in screen studies: Spyridon Chairetis, “Negotiating heteronormativity in the family melodrama: A case study of Giorgos Katakouzinos’s Angelos/ Angel (1982),” FILMICON: Journal of Greek Film Studies, 4, no. 1 (2017): 7-28; Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Brett Farmer, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

[7] Rafal Zaborowski and Frederik Dhaenens, “Old topics, old approaches? ‘Reception’ in television studies and music studies,” Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 13, no. 1 (2016): 446-461.

[8] Riina Rautiainen, “Portraying Gays on Reality TV Case Gay Army and its Reception,” SQS: Suomen Queer-tutkimuksen Seuran Lehti, 3, no. 1 (2008): 67-74, https://journal.fi/sqs/article/view/53651

[9] For a brief overview of the literature, see Dorothy Hobson, “Housewives and the mass media,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972-1979, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (London: Hutchison, 1980): 105-116; Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, Matthias R. Hastall, and Maik Rossman, “Coping or Escaping?: Effects of Life Dissatisfaction on Selective Exposure,” Communication Research, 36, no. 2 (2009): 207-228; Eric Shouse, “Feeling, emotion, affect,” M/C Journal, 8, no. 6 (2005): 1-25.

[10] Anne Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 7.

[11] Misha Kavka, Reality television, affect and intimacy: Reality matters (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 19-20.

[12] Charles Allan McCoy and Roscoe C. Scarborough, “Watching ‘bad’ television: Ironic consumption, camp, and guilty pleasures,” Poetics 47 (2014): 41-59.

[13] Andre Cavalcante, “Affect, emotion, and media audiences: the case of resilient reception,” Media, Culture & Society 40, no. 8 (2018), p. 13.

[14] Ioanna Vovou, The World of Television: Theoretical Approaches, theory, analysis of programs and Greek reality (Athens: Herodotus, 2010); Evangelos Sorogkas, The Reality Phenomenon (Athens: Kastaniotis, 2004).

[15] Ioanna Vovou, “Injecting Actuality in TV Fiction: The Financial Crisis in Greek TV Comedy Series,” Filmicon: Journal of Greek Film Studies, 6, no. 1 (2019): 112-137, https://filmiconjournal.com/journal/article/pdf/2019/6/6.

[16] Christina Galanopoulou, “Are women in danger from The Bachelor and Alexis Papas? No duh,” Lifo, October 1, 2021, https://www.lifo.gr/stiles/optiki-gonia/kindyneyoyn-oi-gynaikes-apo-bachelor-kai-ton-alexi-pappa-e-ohi-da; Emilios Harbis, “The elimination ritual performed with flowers and the game of publicity in reality television,” Kathimerini newspaper, October 16, 2020, https://www.kathimerini.gr/culture/561119401/i-teleti-ton-rodon-kai-to-paichnidi-tis-dimosiotitas-sta-rialiti/; Nefeli Rapsomaniki, “Reality shows and the realism sexism in society,” Sputnik magazine, October 24, 2020, http://mag.spoutnik.gr/prisma/kinonia/2298/ta-reality-shows-kai-o-pragmatikos-sexismos-tis-ko/.

[17] Avgi Newsroom, “The Bachelor: Thousands of signatures requesting to see Alpha’s reality show cancelled,” Avgi magazine, October 4, 2021, https://www.avgi.gr/koinonia/397400_hiliades-ypografes-me-aitima-na-kopei-rialiti-toy-alpha. For more information about the National Radio-Television Consulate, see Spyridon Chairetis, “Tracing the Ephemeral: ‘Lesbian’ Characters in Greek Television Comedies,” VIEW: Journal of European Television History & Culture, 10, no. 19 (2021): 1-10.

[18] Dana Cloud, “The irony bribe and reality television: Investment and detachment in The Bachelor,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 27, no. 5 (2010): 413-437; Rachel E. Dubrofsky, “The Bachelor: Whiteness in the harem,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 23, no. 1 (2006): 39-56; Scott Haden Church, Tom Robinson, Clark Callahan, Katherine Klotzer Barboza and Daniel Montez, “Savvy viewers and (simulated) reality TV: An analysis of The Bachelor’s appeal to viewers,” Journal of Popular Television, 8, no. 1 (2019): 23-43.

[19] Katharina Lindner, “Situated Bodies, Cinematic Orientations: Film and (Queer) Phenomenology,” In De-Westernizing Film Studies, edited by Saer Maty Ba and Will Higbee (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 152.

[20] Andre Cavalcante, “Affect, emotion, and media audiences: the case of resilient reception,” 2.

[21] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 54.

[22] Ibid., p. 66.

[23] Ibid., p. 90.

[24] Ibid., p. 178.

[25] Ibid., p. 107.

[26] Charles Allan McCoy and Roscoe C. Scarborough, “Watching ‘bad’ television,” p. 49.

[27] Orit Karnieli-Miller, Roni Strier, and Liat Pessach, “Power Relations in Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Health Research, 19, no. 2 (2008): 279–289; Jennifer Mason, Qualitative Researching (London: Sage, 2002); Anna Pechurina, “Positionality and Ethics in the Qualitative Research of Migrants’ Homes,” Sociological Research Online, 19, no. 1 (2014): 1–9.

[28] Lisa Tillmann-Healy, “Friendship as Method,” Qualitative Inquiry 9, no. 5 (2013): 729–49.

[29] Ibid, p. 733. For examples of feminist/queer research, see Judith Cook and Mary Margaret Fonow, “Knowledge and women’s interests: Issues of epistemology and methodology in feminist sociological research,” Sociological Inquiry 56 (1986): 2-29; Helen Roberts, Doing Feminist Research (London: Routledge, 1990); Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, “Introduction: The discipline and practice of qualitative research,” 1-28, in Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000).

[30] Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Andrew Stevenson and Rebecca Lawthom, “How We Know Each Other: Exploring the Bonds of Friendship Using Friendship Ethnography and Visual Ethnography,” Anthrovision: Vaneasa online journal 5, no. 1 (2017), https://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/2525; Isabelle Rivoal and Noel Salazar, “Contemporary Ethnographic Practice and the Value of Serendipity,” Social Anthropology 21, no. 2 (2013): 178-185.

[31] Thomas, J. Berndt, “The Distinctive Features of Conversations between Friends: Theories, Research and Implications for Sociomoral Development,” 281-300, in Moral Development through Social Interaction, edited by William. M. Kurtines and Jacob L. Gewirtz (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1987); Jacquelin P. Wiseman, “Friendship: Bonds and Binds in a Voluntary Relationship,” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 3 (1986): 191–211; James Youniss, “Social Construction and Moral Development: Update and Expansion of an Idea,” 131-148, in Moral Development through Social Interaction, edited by William. M. Kurtines and Jacob L. Gewirtz (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1987).

[32] Rafael is one of the five participants in the study. All names appearing in this article are accompanied with a set of acronyms. When referring to gender identities, F stands for female, and NB for non-binary. The acronyms L(esbian), B(isexual), G(ay) and Q(ueer/estioning) are used to describe the participants’ emotional, romantic, or sexual attraction to other people. Their age is also mentioned.

[33] Dana Heller, “Wrecked: Programming Celesbian Reality,” in Reality Gendervision: Sexuality & Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television, edited by Brenda R. Weber (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 127.

[34] Sara Ahmed, “Queer Phenomenology,” p. 5.

[35] Ibid., 66.

[36] Ibid., 109.

[37] Ibid., 14.

[38] Ibid., 76.

[39] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1995 [1975]), p. 136.

[40] Dimitris Papanikolaou, Greek Weird Wave: A Cinema of Biopolitics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), p. 150.

[41] Dimitris Papanikolaou, There is something about the family: Nation, desire and kinship at a time of crisis (Athens: Patakis, 2018), p. 427; Sarah Ahmed, “Queer Phenomenology,” p. 160.

[42] Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 4.

[43] Melinda Reid, “Guilty Pleasures Revisited,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 80 (2022): p. 191.

[44] Ibid., 191.

[45] Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp (London: Penguin Books, 1964), p. 6 & 10.

[46] Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, p. 107.

[47] Annette Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 449.

[48] Charles Allan McCoy and Roscoe C. Scarborough, “Watching ‘bad’ television,” p. 52.

[49] Sara Ahmed, “Queer Phenomenology,” p. 160.

[50] Giorgos Kesisoglou, “Dimitris Papanikolaou in conversation with Giorgos Kesisoglou: Short-circuit-in-families, public truth telling, queer genealogies and archive troubles,” Metalogos Systemic Therapy Journal, 36, no. 1 (2020): p. 5.

[51] Sara Ahmed, “Queer Phenomenology,” p. 107.

[52] Ibid., p. 134.

[53] Ibid., p. 7.

[54] Hongwei Bao, “Queer Disidentification: Or How to Cook Chinese Noodles in a Global Pandemic,” PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 17, no. 1-2 (2021): p. 8.

 

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Author biography

Spiros Chairetis holds a DPhil in media and cultural studies from the University of Oxford. He has published on Greek LGBTQI+ cinema and television, genre studies, and auto-ethnography. His monograph, Greek Television Comedy: Resilient Texts, Queer Readings, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. His research interests revolve around media and sexuality studies, television fiction, gender anthropology, and the relationship between media, culture, and society.

DOI:10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2385

 

Introduction

As a film editor working primarily in broadcast documentaries, I have often wondered why more raw rushes are not preserved in audio-visual archives. Especially when it comes to news or documentary footage of historically significant events, rushes have a value beyond what a filmmaker or news editor deems significant at the time, and new insights can be gleaned from renewed scrutiny of audio-visual details that may at first have been considered irrelevant or even undesirable. To explore this idea, I am concentrating on news coverage of the siege of eastern Mostar, in southern Bosnia-Herzegovina, between May 1993 and March 1994. Specifically, I examine the burst of media attention in the days around the arrival of the first UN aid convoy on 21 August 1993. Comparing some of the edited accounts of that time with some of the surviving raw footage, I argue for the value of preserving and archiving raw footage of such events, even if the footage may initially appear irrelevant or trivial. It is my contention that the experience of rushes in the archive is qualitatively different from the experience of edited films and reports, in the sense that they often contain unintended images that have the potential to shock in their incongruity, to reveal something of the biases and aims of the filmmakers, and to convey a sense of the “presence” of a past event beyond the experience of an edited account, which is more stringently mediated through the editorial and narrative control of the filmmaker.

The siege of eastern Mostar in 1993-94 was noteworthy in the context of the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina both for its close and highly destructive urban combat, and because the main hostilities were between the HVO (the Bosnian Croat militia) and the ARBiH (the Bosnian government’s army, dominated by Bosniaks), but did not involve the VRS (the Bosnian Serb militia).[1]  The conflict between the HVO and the ARBiH at the time is to be understood in the context of the Vance-Owen Plan of 1993, which proposed the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina into ethnic-majority cantons, effectively rewarding ethnic cleansing. According to this plan, the canton containing Mostar would be majority Croat, so the HVO felt justified to assert their authority over all of it, which was resisted by the Bosniaks of Mostar, who were largely concentrated in the east of the city.[2]

At the time of the siege, from the middle of 1993 to early 1994, I worked as editor and second cameraman for the video unit of the Press and Information department of UNPROFOR, the UN peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia. One set of rushes from Mostar on 21 August 1993 was shot by a colleague of mine at the time. This was preserved in the “UNTV collection” in the Imperial War Museum, London, and is one of my main sources.  As part of my wider academic research into the audio-visual record of the siege of Mostar, I have also recently visited Mostar, and interviews with a number of survivors of the siege have informed my insight into the context.[3]

Commercial news archives and their exclusions

According to a well-worn maxim, “journalism is the first rough draft of history”.[4] While this is usually applied to written journalism, the emphasis on the construction of history as a narrative – the draft – is not incidental, and applies to news in all its forms, including television news journalism.  In my work as a film editor (like most editors, I have found that, in practice, editing is primarily focused on narrative), I have often made use of archival footage to illustrate or evoke historical scenes, and have noted how much broadcast production relies on commercial news archives (AP and Getty Images are currently dominant among these), rather than film museums or repository archives (such as the BFI or the British Library) to source this material.[5] The great majority of entries in these commercial archives consist of edited films or news features (often referred to as “stories”). Listings of raw rushes are rare.

Commercial news archives are not actually archives in the strict definition of the word, which, etymologically, is associated with official record-keeping of the state.[6]  Indeed, according to Michel Foucault the archive is not a “library” or a physical collection of things, but it is first and foremost a system of enunciation.[7]  Under this logic, commercial news archives would have to be characterised as “collections”, even if most of them describe themselves as “archives”.[8]  For the sake of simplicity, I will stick to this self-designation and refer to them as “archives” as well, with the understanding that the criteria that regulate their contents are part of this designation.

Like me, the media archaeologist Trond Lundemo is interested in the question what gets excluded from the archive beyond the formal requirements that regulate the archive. He points out that archiving is not about storage but about selection and that all exclusions create “gaps and lacunae in the preservation of the past”, which means that they are, by their very nature, political exclusions.[9] In privately owned and managed archives of (photographic) moving images, many decisions of exclusion are driven by corporate, commercial criteria that are subject to the logic and contingencies of the marketplace. For example, the majority of archived analogue items in these archives tend not to be digitised: the archives generally work according to what Wolfgang Ernst calls a model of “digitization on demand”, only reacting to current needs.[10] To make matters more complicated, these archives themselves can be traded as capital investments, and often are. Thus, they may fall under different commercial, and therefore archival regimes at different times in their history.[11]

Matthew Butson of Getty Images’ Hulton Archive, confirmed in a conversation about digital conservation that the investment of digitisation is only made for at most 5-10% of a collection, focusing on images that are predicted to generate an income from licenses.[12]  In my own experience it is often the first client requesting an as-yet undigitised entry who pays for the digitisation.[13]

The question of archival exclusion shifts from one of regulatory exclusion to one driven by storage and access: analogue sources are more difficult to access, and run a higher risk of becoming obsolete or falling into disrepair.[14] This raises the question of the political implications of such exclusion. Implicitly, the default mode of audio-visual media is attrition, but obsolescence is ideological, in that it submits to a technological teleology in which sequence is interpreted as progress: newer technology is always somehow considered to be “better”. In addition, the marketisation of the archive is an ideological disposition in itself, favouring a capitalist model of image preservation. In this model, history itself is not seen as a shared cultural heritage, or a kind of commons, but as the raw material for commodification, according to which historical artefacts become objects of economic exchange. 

Finally, the strong tendency to preserve only finished films means that the editing room itself is a significant site of archival exclusion, where the criteria of selection are driven by considerations of editorial policy (and bias), narrative convention and the filmic grammar of montage, rather than the legal-political considerations of the state archive, or the preservationist tendencies of the historical archive.

The feedback loop of historical footage

The question then arises: what do these exclusions of historical footage – on commercial as well as filmic, narrative and editorial grounds – do to our view of history? Or perhaps more pertinently, what do they do to our collective memory of that history? We all know the phenomenon of the Second World War being “remembered” in black and white by subsequent generations, given that their knowledge of the time was mediated through black-and-white newsreel footage.[15] There is of course an ongoing debate about the relations between history and memory, and in the 1980s Pierre Nora introduced the idea that collective memory can be externalised in places, buildings and objects, in what he called “lieux de mémoire”, or “places of memory”. As a result, we can speak of moving images as mnemonic artefacts: “symbolically mediated” memories that have the power to re-implant themselves in their viewers as a type of personal memory, even if their experience was a mediated one.[16] Consequently, historical events can be vividly “remembered” by people too young to have lived through them.[17] Such symbolically mediated collective memories of historical events are a staple of what Aleida Assmann calls “national memory” or “myth”, which are crucial in the formation of national identifications.[18]

The memories contained in audio-visual archives are haunted by multiple gaps and absences, however. Filmic images, as Mary Ann Doane notes, are already doubly haunted: any photographic image, as index, is haunted by the absence of the referent that left its imprint on the photosensitive surface; moving photographic images are also haunted by the lost time between individual frames (necessary to create the illusion of temporal continuity), a haunting that is echoed by the cut, which represents the lost time between shots.[19] To this double haunting I propose to add a third: every cut in an edited film is haunted by lost footage, rushes that were shot but did not make the final edit. Consequently, those rushes are much less likely to have been archived or preserved, and may be neglected, or often lost altogether.

The perception of history as mediated by documentary film is haunted by such neglected or lost footage. Philip Rosen points out the parallels between historiography and the practice of documentary film, in which the “sequenciation” of indexical remnants of the past (rushes) produces a coherent narrative, just as historiography extrapolates narratives from surviving historical remnants or documents, which involves an inevitable filling in of missing parts.[20] Documentary films, insofar as they are placed into various archives, in turn become “documents” for future historiography and documentary filmmaking. This reveals the outline of a feedback loop: the first edit eliminates all the rushes that did not make the first cut and is placed in the archive as a cut film; this film may then be the source for another film, which may only select the most salient or sensational footage from the first edit, and is then placed in the archive as a more recent cut film, which may then be the source for a third film, etc. This tends to produce a diminishing pool of historical images, edited down and re-mediated with each cycle, so the gaps between the images increases while any surviving rushes are increasingly likely to disappear with the attrition of time.

This chimes with the use of archival images from commercial archives in practice according to Phil Clark, who works as film researcher in the broadcast industry.[21] He calls it a “self-fulfilling prophesy”: “well-known” images of a historical event (the ones that have appeared in many films) are more likely to be easily available from the archives (i.e. already digitised in current format), and are more likely to be recommended by the archives’ in-house “researchers” (often in effect sales agents), whose job it is to sell the largest amount of licenses in the shortest amount of time. These recommendations are often accepted by time-starved film researchers with tight deadlines, and the same images are therefore more likely to re-appear in new films covering the same event.[22] A similar feedback loop was described to me by Butson of Getty Images, with the difference that he attributed it to the interaction between search algorithms and the relative laziness of clients: images that have been sold more often get a higher ranking in the algorithm, and therefore appear higher up in searches sorted on “relevance” or “popularity”. At the same time, clients rarely stray past the first six pages of search results, reinforcing the popularity of the highly ranked images.[23] Hence one can speak of a “feedback loop of historical footage”.

The diminishing pool of “iconic” images, that condense complex historical events to easily narrated, and memorable form, are highly instrumental in those collective, symbolically mediated memories that form the basis of political and national identifications.[24] The editing room as a site of archival exclusion puts narrative at the heart of the formation of such identifications, and of the political exclusions that they entail: hence the exclusion of rushes from the archive may reflect something of the exclusion of ambiguity in the historical narratives that help to shape national identity.

Memories of conflict play an especially important role in the formation of such identifications, and play a role in the potential for renewed conflict. The potential of contested histories to reignite conflict is distressingly illustrated by the current threats to the unity of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which were sparked by the Bosnian Serb leadership’s rejection of a law that would ban the denial of the genocide in Srebrenica.[25]

At the same time, the feedback loop of historical footage tends to strip images of their ambiguity, or what Dai Vaughan calls images’ capacity to “exceed their contribution to any given meaning […] in the generation of new meanings oblique, peripheral, or even antagonistic to the text as understood”.[26]  Vaughan’s primary concern is with the preservation of ambiguity in his edited documentary films, and he describes succinctly how the meaning of images is never exhausted.  However, this does not apply equally to all footage: both Pasolini and Doane draw attention to the contingency of the “long take”, which resists being fixed in its meaning, and, of course, raw rushes always consist of longer takes than the films that are edited from them.[27]

Speaking about what is lost with the loss of rushes means speaking about absence, and becomes inevitably speculative. In his discussion of four rare photographs of Auschwitz, taken from within one of the crematoria during its time of operation in 1944, Georges Didi-Huberman proposes an almost psychoanalytic approach to photographic images: “should we not treat the impurities, the lacunae of the image, as we have to treat the silences of speech, which is to unravel them, to struggle with them?”[28] In this proposal he is clearly inspired by the method within trauma studies that treats the silences in witness testimony as significant symptoms of the trauma that cannot be articulated.^[29] What is significant for my purposes is that Didi-Huberman appears to suggest we might treat photographic images themselves as symptoms, as lacunary traces of a greater context, some of which may still be inferred from them.

Arguably this is exactly what is practiced by the more recent, overlapping methods of architectural forensics, data forensics and image forensics. For example, the project Black Friday by Forensic Architecture (FA) displays an exemplary attentiveness to the gaps between moving images: fragmentary moving image phone recordings of Israeli airstrikes on Rafah in the Gaza Strip on the last day of the 2014 Gaza war are placed within a 3D model of the urban environment, and along a timeline of the “real time” of events in order to extrapolate exactly when and where the explosions took place.[30] This allowed FA to reconstruct the wider context of the bombings both spatially (outside of the frame of the recordings) and temporally (between the individual takes of the recordings).

In my wider research into moving images that document the siege of Mostar in 1993-94, I have been struck by how unevenly any documentation is distributed along the 10 months of the siege: months went by with virtually no image production at all, while occasionally the “media spotlight” fell on Mostar, and dozens of hours of footage would be produced within a relatively short period of time, mostly by journalists of international news broadcasters.  From those dozens of hours, usually only minutes can be found in the archives as news features or news agency satellite feeds.  Unusually, however, I have been able to locate some of the raw rushes from the intense media attention that surrounded the first humanitarian convoy to arrive in the enclave of eastern Mostar on 21 August 1993.  To “struggle with the gaps” in the historical record of this siege, I examined those rushes in relation to the edited news features made around the same event, on the wager that an instance in which rushes are not lost, and made accessible to research, may be able to approximate what effects an actual loss would imply in other instances. In other words, what is at stake in this study is the idea that unexpected elements within these rushes may reveal some of the kinds of historical insights we might have lost with other rushes that ended up on the cutting room floor in the process of narrativising the conflict.

The Mostar siege in the archives

For the purposes of this article, I am concentrating on international news coverage of the Mostar siege in the days around 21 August 1993. The news “ecology” at that time and place was of course determined by the state of technology, and the contemporary practices of the “news industry”. In the 1990s, this meant that “field reports” were generally shot on fairly bulky, shoulder-mounted cameras recording to Betacam SP analogue Standard Definition tape.[31] These field reports would often be sent to international broadcasters via satellite. Because high-bandwidth satellite links were expensive, they would be edited down before being offered for sale via the satellite network. From searches in the catalogues of the news archives, it is clear that such “satellite packages” are often the form in which these materials were archived, especially by the news agencies.

Due to the military encirclement of East Mostar, no international news crews managed to gain access to the enclave for the first three months of the siege, and there was little to no reporting on the situation. When the UN negotiated access for its first convoy for months, on 21 August 1993, it arrived with a small consignment of medical aid, and with a number of international news crews in tow. Rather remarkably, barely a day earlier, a CNN crew had arrived on foot and horseback, via an arduous, three-day trek over the mountains from Sarajevo.[32] A few days later, the BBC correspondent Jeremy Bowen arrived with a crew via the same route. Late on 25 August a second UN convoy arrived, this time with a number of trucks filled with food aid, and again, several news crews in tow. This convoy was blockaded in by the local population, and was only able to leave a few days later when a semi-permanent UN office was established.[33]

Due to these convoys, the international media spotlight was briefly on the situation in Mostar, roughly in the period between 19 and 31 August 1993, and a large amount of news reports were produced. A search for “Mostar” between 19 and 31 August 1993 in various news archives yielded a relatively large number of items, the great majority of which were “offline”, meaning they had not yet been digitised from their analogue sources. For example, Getty Images listed seventy-four items, consisting of eighteen duplicates, eighteen (discrete) items originally from the ITN archives, twenty from BBC archives and eighteen from NBC News archives.[34] Only 5 items (all from ITN) were digitised and online, none of which contained footage of the actual Mostar enclave, but mostly from the nearby UN base in Međugorje.[35] The CNN Collection listed three items, all offline, but a request over the phone threw up two additional edited items, and nine reels of raw rushes, one of which was a duplicate.[36]

In addition to the news cameras present, the two UN convoys were documented by a camera from the Press and Information department of UNPROFOR.[37] Six reels of the UN rushes (two from the first convoy, four from the second convoy) and two edited items (a 10-minute video structured as a press release, using rushes from both convoys, and a feature entitled “Sisters of Mostar”, which was edited a year later from the second convoy rushes) are preserved in the UNTV collection in the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London.[38] In the UN rushes of the first convoy on 21 August 1993, at least four other cameras can be discerned: the CNN crew, a TVE (Spanish TV) crew, a Spanish army cameraman and one unidentified crew.[39] A brief, impromptu interview in the street with the UNPROFOR spokesman, Cedric Thornberry, is covered by at least three cameras.[40]

Comparing rushes with edited reports

The interdependence of news organisations and NGOs, and the tendency of the news media to produce events, tend to have the effect that news crews travel in packs, and certain news events can turn into a “media circus”.[41] The sudden accessibility of East Mostar, and the drama of the severe siege it was living through, created a version of a media circus in East Mostar in late August 1993. The contrast with the almost complete lack of audio-visual material from the preceding three months is arresting. The slow aspects of the violence of a siege do not lend themselves to news reporting in the way sudden, spectacularly violent events do, so sieges are often represented through specific events, like the arrival of a humanitarian aid convoy. The effect of this concentration of media visibility is that the majority of the images coming out in the various news reports look very similar, not only because they are largely shot in the same location at the same time, but also because they follow similar conventions in the format of news features that were current at the time.

Familiar features from all the news coverage include traveling shots through no-man’s land into the enclave, cutaway shots of ruined buildings and devastation, aid being unloaded and packed into storage, wounded people in the make-shift hospital, a short interview with a UN or NGO representative (more rarely with a local representative), and local residents crowding around the UN and aid vehicles in the street. From interviews I conducted with survivors of the siege, it became clear how many of those images are coloured by the fact that they are produced in the midst of the media circus. For example, at most times during the siege, it was extremely dangerous to be out on the streets, and residents of east Mostar would only come out of the cellars in well-sheltered areas, running past any exposed areas, even spacing themselves out by 30m so that not more than one person would be injured or killed by a single grenade.[42] The fact that the convoy itself was in town meant that the HVO (the Croatian militia besieging eastern Mostar) would largely be holding fire, producing a welcome break for the population, and creating, certainly for the children, something of a carnival atmosphere. In this case, the familiar question about the influence of the presence of the camera on the pro-filmic becomes a question not so much about the presence of a single camera (although in some shots this plays a role as well), but more about the presence of the entire media circus accompanying the convoy, that radically changed the street view of the enclave. The exception is one BBC report from Jeremy Bowen, which was shot when he arrived in the days between the two convoys: his report shows more empty street views, even while the narration states that the streets are calmer than usual, given a “lull” in fighting between the two convoys.[43]

A general focus on children among the wounded in the hospital reveals a preoccupation with the humanitarian aspects of the story. This falls largely within the framing, widespread in the coverage of the conflict in Bosnia, of the local population as “victims” and the UN and NGO officials as “saviours”, even though in Mostar the local population managed to keep up a significant level of organisation against tremendous odds.[44] One effect of this kind of framing is to downplay the agency of the combatants as political actors, distinguishing only, or at least primarily, between perpetrators and victims.

Two short edited reports from CNN reporter Brent Sadler provide a case in point, when viewed against the rushes that were used to cut them. The reports are dated 21 and 22 August 1993, and most of the material was shot on 21 August, the day of the first convoy. The first report, titled “MOSTAR AID”, focuses on the delivery of medical aid to the makeshift hospital in the enclave, cut out of chronological order for narrative purposes.[45] The only interview is with Cedric Thornberry, and the report includes a scene of Thornberry visiting the hospital. The second report is titled “MOSTAR MUSLIMS” and also contains shots of the hospital, without UN officials this time but with a brief interview with “Dr Mujic”.[46] It starts with shots of the mountain trail which the CNN crew used to enter the enclave, and contains several shots of devastated buildings, street views and a bridge in Mostar, all empty of people. It ends on a piece to camera by Brent Sadler from Sarajevo.

The untransmitted CNN rushes contain a number of elements that would not have fitted into the narrative focus of the two edited reports, and presumably were left out for that reason. There are many shots of the physical destruction near the front line (some of which were used in the second CNN report and in a BBC report of 23 August), some of them containing soldiers and unidentified men in civilian clothes.[47] There are actual front-line shots, traveling along a path cut through the inside of an apartment block, peeking through look-out points at front-line positions, and showing soldiers pointing their rifles through openings between sandbags. There are a few brief interviews with soldiers and with two men in civilian clothing; the questions are posed through an interpreter but the answers (in BHS) are not translated back.[48] The answers focus on the hardships of life under siege, but the soldier also reveals a certain confidence, saying they are not short of weapons and ammunition, and the fighters are highly motivated, eager to rid the city of “those extremists” as soon as possible. There are also multiple takes of a piece to camera by Sadler in front of the burned-out shell of Tito’s villa on the Neretva River, in which he comments on the relentlessness of the fighting (“No mercy is expected, none given. Life hangs on a thread”).[49] To my knowledge, this was never used in a news report. It appears that the CNN crew gathered enough material for a “military story” about the fighting on the urban front line of Mostar, but that this approach was abandoned in favour of stories that were focused on humanitarian issues (the aid convoy, the hospital).

The BBC report from 23 August, which makes use of some of this CNN footage, briefly mentions political aims in the last 20 seconds of the report, but not in a way that all of the residents of East Mostar would recognise.[50] The commentary suggests an equivalence of ethno-nationalistic aims (“the Croats insist Mostar is the capital of their self-declared Bosnian Croat state; the Muslims are battling to claim it as part of their rump-Muslim state”), which ignores the fact that the Sarajevo government had at least the stated aim to be the government of all citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina, regardless of their sectarian affiliation, and not just of a “Muslim state”.[51] Interestingly, of the ex-fighters I’ve spoken to in Mostar over the course of my research, the majority described themselves as “anti-fascist” fighters, pitted against the “fascist” Croatian HVO, many of whose members openly celebrated the Ustashe, the Croatian fascists allied with the Axis powers in the second world war.[52] The Titoist Partisan past was, and is, openly celebrated by these “anti-fascist” fighters, and still today the division in Mostar appears not necessarily as an opposition between Bosniaks and Croats (notably some Serbs and Croats joined in the defence of the East Mostar enclave), but equally as an opposition between those who reject the Partisan past (and often celebrate the Ustashe), and those who celebrate it.[53]

Western journalistic representations of the Bosnian conflict typically fall into two types: the “Balkan discourse”, sometimes also called the “ancient hatreds thesis”, that views the conflict as an “ethnic conflict” based on deep historical, even “tribal” hatreds; and a “genocide discourse” that characterises Bosniaks (and sometimes Croats) as victims of Serb genocide, with implicit reference to the Holocaust.[54] The “Balkan discourse” is considered by many scholars to be based on a “Balkanist” stereotype that views the region as endemically riven by irrational, ethnic passions and conflicts.[55] The reports discussed here appear to mix elements of both these discourses: their insistence to use ethnic identifiers falls into the “Balkan discourse”, while the apparent focus of Bosniak citizens as the victims of violent ethnic cleansing aligns them with the “genocide discourse” (which, in my experience, is the view that most journalists subscribed to on a personal level). What both of these discourses tend to elide, however, is a clear representation of the political aims of the combatants, which could be divided between an ethno-nationalist conception of citizenship and belonging (represented by the Serb and most Croat militias and political leadership) and a civic one (largely represented by the Bosnian Army and government, certainly in east Mostar).[56]

The focus on the humanitarian angle also speaks to a time in the 1990s when “humanitarian intervention” as an idea was actively discussed, and even promoted in the international arena. Robert Meister has characterised this as an era of Human Rights Discourse, in which violence in itself is considered evil (and not a potentially legitimate means to a political end), and therefore something to be prevented in all circumstances.[57] After the end of the Cold War, rather than as an aim to fight for, human rights are seen as needing protection from violation, which has the effect of maintaining the status quo and ultimately justifies a purely utilitarian policy that pursues the “least of all possible evils”.[58] In the context of the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the international focus on the “tragic” humanitarian aspects of the conflict, said to be based on hatreds that were “centuries old”, served the political purpose of emphasising the futility of any further intervention.[59] In May 1993, the Clinton State Department went so far as to urgently request evidence of Bosniak atrocities in order to confer equal blame for atrocities on all sides.[60] Not only did the deflection from the “genocide discourse” prevent international obligations to intervene under the Genocide Convention, but the refusal to engage with actual political aims also prevented any political pressure to take sides in the conflict, which may equally have been a cause for more active intervention.

The portrayal of humanitarian agents as “saviours” echoes the classic cinematic trope of the “white saviour” in which a white protagonist is the necessary agent of rescue or resistance for a group of deserving but incapable non-whites.[61] Catherine Baker shows that the racialisation of the conflict in Bosnia throws up multiple contradictions: not only were many peacekeepers non-white while Bosnians are almost exclusively white, but also the main vector of “othering” in the Western Balkans runs between a (north-western) Europe and a (south-eastern) Balkans, in which each group tends to view themselves as the last “antemurale” bulwark of modern Europe against a chaotic, oriental and pre-modern Balkans.[62] This configuration is described by Milica Bakić-Hayden as “nesting orientalisms”.[63] But as Baker points out, this shifting placement of people at a distance from Europe and modernity is also a racialising measurement, which places “saviour” narratives in the news reporting on humanitarian missions in Bosnia within the “white saviour” trope.[64]

There is a final element that appears in both sets of rushes that definitely would never have made it into any edited account, but which I believe deepens our understanding of the nature of the international involvement in the Bosnian conflict in retrospect. In both sets of rushes there are moments when the crew, the makers of the rushes, are joking and joshing around with the camera. At the beginning of the first CNN rushes tape, evidently on the way to the Mostar enclave, we see reporter Brent Sadler standing on top of CNN’s light-armoured vehicle by a fruit tree in a field, doing a mock piece to camera “I’m in Bosnia picking plums, the Croats are over there, the Serbs are over there, and who’s over there… oh yeah the Muslims are over there”.[65] In the UNTV reels from 21 August, two of my ex-colleagues from the UNPROFOR P&I department occasionally lean into the camera to make a quip with the punchline “psy-ops is looking out for you”.[66] At the end of the second reel, in the aircraft back to base, one of them holds up a note to the camera with a cryptic message which he proceeds to stuff into his mouth.[67]

In the experience of viewing these rushes, the incongruity and apparent lack of seriousness of these passages come as something of a shock.[68] They were clearly not meant to be published or seen by anyone “outside the office”, and resemble “home movies” in the sense that they were made for private consumption, and their preservation might even be an embarrassment to their makers.[69] But it is precisely their private character that reveals something valuable about the privilege, even hubris, of those in the position to produce these images. From my personal experience I know that the pressures and risks in these situations can be considerable, and are relieved in a variety of ways. This can take the form of gallows humour, or incongruous light-heartedness, along with substance abuse and a certain amount of macho posturing.[70]  At the same time, there is the well-known phenomenon of “adrenaline addiction” among war correspondents, and sometimes aid workers. It is worth keeping in mind that these are people who chose to come to a conflict situation, and have the privilege of generally being able to leave as well. The privileges associated with the roles of these outside observers (or even “saviours”) at a time of conflict can in some cases contribute to the abuses that have been well-documented in peacekeeping operations.[71]

The idea of a “shock” is prominent in Benjaminian conceptions of photography and history. Benjamin’s idea of shock is primarily linked with the “assaults upon the subject associated with urban life and modern technologies”, to the point that Benjamin would claim that “in a film, perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle”.[72] For Catherine Russell, this places shock within the realm of montage, as one of the techniques that interrupt “the ‘flow’ of images on which conventional historicism relies”.[73] But montage is also a technique of narrativisation, and for Doane, shock represents the threat of the illegible, the unassimilable, and in that sense is aligned with the contingent.[74]  Contingency is exactly the mark of the long take, and of raw rushes: the longer the camera runs, the greater the threat of something that interrupts narrative intention and cohesion. The shock of incongruity in the CNN and UNTV rushes therefore, is precisely aligned with their status as rushes, but this shock is also what interrupts the “flow” of the conventional audio-visual narrative of the Bosnian conflict.

Conclusions

The insights gleaned from the raw rushes in this case is an indication of the value, in historiographical terms, of the preservation of rushes of any conflict situation. First of all, the rushes allowed me to establish the presence of other cameras and crews, which opens up other avenues of research to pursue, and which is a clear indication of the highly mediated and performative nature of the event depicted in this footage. Secondly, the relative neglect of the front-line rushes in favour of a focus on the humanitarian relief story sets up the international aid workers as “saviours”, and the local population as “victims” with little or no political agency, and leaves aside the question of the political aims the respective antagonists were fighting for. This speaks to an era in which Human Rights are only to be protected from violation, which ultimately favours the status quo, and which is powerless to address “facts on the ground” that have already been created. Finally, the incongruity of the “private rushes” included in the footage provide an unexpected insight into the pressures and the privileges the producers of these images were working under.

As my analysis has shown, the rushes captured during the siege of Mostar can be read to generate meanings “oblique, peripheral or even antagonistic to the text as understood”.[75] In my view, along with other “overlooked” elements within the rushes, they have the potential to evoke what the historian Eelco Runia has called “presence”, described as “the unrepresented ways in which the past is present in the present”.[76] Runia locates this in metonymy: in the overlooked, taken-for-granted figures of speech that form a “presence in absence”.[77] There appears to be a particular affinity between this formulation of “presence” and the potentialities of the overlooked, taken-for-granted elements in rushes that would normally be left on the cutting room floor.

It must be said that this analysis is specific for the technological and institutional circumstances of the 1990s. As Fossati notes, audio-visual media are in continuous transformation, and at any time the media landscape consists of hybrid technologies.[78] At the same time, the exponential rise in the production and distribution of moving images via camera phones and social media platforms has drastically changed our media ecology, producing vast, semi-structured online “collections” of moving images, in which largely random factors decide inclusion and exclusion, and which are all but impossible for humans to search comprehensively.[79] If these can be called archives at all, they are a different type of archive than the commercial news archives I have described above, similarly hidden behind corporate firewalls, but largely opaque even to the corporations that own them, and run them by algorithm. The analysis of inclusion and exclusion, of presence and absence in these “archives” will be an urgent and fascinating subject for further study.

 

Notes

[1]. “Bosniak” is the designation that was officially adopted in by the Bosnian parliament in 1994 to refer to Muslim Bosnians who were usually referred to as “Muslims” in the news media.

[2]. Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, Rev. and updated ed (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1997), 297. Silber and Little, among others, blame the Vance-Owen plan for encouraging the conflict between Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks, as it appeared to reward ethnic cleansing and land-grabs by ethno-nationalist militias.  This plan was partly reversed by the Washington Agreement of March 1994, in which the Bosnian Croat militias (under pressure from Croatia and the US) agreed to join the Bosnian government in a federal entity.

[3]. Orhan, Ševko, Eldin, Nedžad and Sead were soldiers in the ARBiH at the time, Dženana, Amar, Amila, Jasmin, Zlatko and Senada were civilians. They were interviewed between November 2017 and July 2019. I refer to my interlocutors in Mostar only by first name.

[4]. This quote is usually attributed to the American journalist Philip Graham, but variations on it were used earlier by others.

[5]. In searches within the context of my academic research I have found that much material that is available in these news archives is either absent or all but impossible to find in deposit archives. For example, in my search for moving images of Mostar in 1993 and 1994, the British Library index yielded no results, and the BFI’s “BBC Programme Index” yielded only one documentary, while a search for “Mostar” in Getty Images (which handles the commercial BBC archive) yielded 20 BBC items between 19 and 30 August alone.

[6]. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, 9-10. As Derrida points out, the etymology of archive points us to the arkheion, the house of superior magistrates (archons) in Greek antiquity, where official documents are kept under the guardianship of these archons, who are accorded the hermeneutic right and competence to interpret those documents.

[7]. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002), 145–46.

[8]. The exception is the CNN Collection.

[9]. Trond Lundemo, “Archives and Technological Selection”, Cinémas 24, no. 2–3 (2014): 17–18. For Lundemo, this is primarily a technological question, pointing out how analogue information gets lost by compression in the transfer of audio-visual information from analogue to digital formats.

[10]. Wolfgang Ernst, “Digital Memory and the Archive”, Electronic Mediations vol 39 (Minneapolis, MN, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013): 81.

[11]. The Reuters archive was bought and sold multiple times among ITNSource, Pathé, and Getty Images. Adding to the complexity, archives can “handle” collections or other archives without owning them (Getty handles BBC, ITN and NBC collections but doesn’t own the footage), and single items can contain material that has to be licenced through third parties. A truly comprehensive study of the various pressures and real-life practices in moving image archives would have to be large-scale, and is well beyond the scope of this study.

[12]. Matthew Butson, Vice-President of the Getty Images Hulton Archive, in an interview at the Hulton Archive in London about its preservation and digitisation policies, on 7 December 2021.

[13]. In my searches for news footage from the conflicts in Cyprus (1974) and in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-95), in the archives of AP, ITNSource and Getty Images, the great majority of entries would be analogue only. When requesting screeners from ITNSource for news items from Cyprus, I was asked to pay for transfers from 16mm film. The items I paid for later showed up in digital form in the searchable interface of the archive.

[14]. Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel the Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009): 13–17. Fossati argues that audio-visual media are in a state of continuous transformation, so the work of film preservation and restoration is also continuous.

[15]. This may well change for future generations with the current vogue for colourising black-and-white archive footage by Peter Jackson, among others, perhaps most notably in David Shulman’s Auschwitz Untold, which contains colourised footage of WW2 concentration camps.

[16]. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, vol. 1 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996): 2–3.; Aleida Assmann, Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016): 21.; Aleida Assmann, “Transformations between History and Memory”, Social Research: An International Quarterly 75, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 55–56. Assmann’s “Transformations between History and Memory” also provides a useful overview of the relations between memory and history.

[17]. Eyal Sivan, Izkor: Slaves of Memory, Documentary (FR3, IMA Productions, Rhea Films, 1995). A striking example of this is provided in Sivan’s film Izkor, in which Israeli schoolchildren of North African Jewish descent explain to the filmmaker their memories of the Holocaust.

[18]. Assmann, Shadows of Trauma, 22–28.

[19]. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2002): 94, 172, 216.

[20]. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001): 115. The relation between historiography and narrative is highly contested and much commented on, but this falls outside the scope of this article.

[21]. Unfortunately, the same term in an academic context suggests a scholar researching film. However, Phil Clark has about 30 years of experience as a “film researcher” for the BBC and for independent television documentary productions.

[22]. Based on an online interview I conducted with Phil Clark on 19 August 2020.

[23]. In an interview conducted on 7 December 2021.

[24]. Assmann, Shadows of Trauma, 22–28.

[25]. Lamija Grebo, “Bosnian Serb Decree Rejecting Genocide Denial Law Sparks Uncertainty”, Balkan Insight, 13 October 2021, https://balkaninsight.com/2021/10/13/bosnian-serb-decree-rejecting-genocide-denial-law-sparks-uncertainty/; Srecko Latal, “Radical Rhetoric in Bosnia Revives Fears of New Conflict”, Balkan Insight, 5 October 2021, https://balkaninsight.com/2021/10/05/radical-rhetoric-in-bosnia-revives-fears-of-new-conflict/. Remarkably, what has been described as the “Mostarisation” of Bosnia-Herzegovina refers to the fact that the strict allocation of local government positions along ethnic lines in Mostar has paralysed its municipal politics for many years.

[26]. Dai Vaughan, For Documentary: Twelve Essays (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999): 80.

[27]. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 104–5; Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Observations on the Long Take”, October 13 (1980): 5–6, https://doi.org/10.2307/3397696.

[28] Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003): 124.

[29]. This broad field of study is beyond the scope of this article, but significant contributions were made by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth, and Paul Antze among others.

[30]. Forensic Architecture, The Bombing Of Rafah: Black Friday, forensic-architecture.org, 2015, https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-bombing-of-rafah .

[31]. What is known as Standard Definition (SD) was the standardised resolution for video and television, which was 480×640 pixels in countries using the NTSC standard, and 576×768 pixels in countries using PAL or SECAM standards.

[32]. Because this connection existed there is still some contention as to whether the siege of Mostar was a real siege. My position is that for regular residents of Mostar this certainly amounted to a siege (after all, Sarajevo was also tenuously connected to the outside world with a tunnel under the airport).

[33]. In a calculated and well-coordinated action, a large group of mostly women and children surrounded the vehicles of the UN convoy, demanding a permanent presence of the UN in the enclave. Part of the understanding was that such presence would diminish the threat of random mortar attacks, and there was widespread sympathy in the UN for their position.

[34]. As mentioned above, Getty “handles” but doesn’t own the BBC, ITN and NBC material.

[35]. One of the online items was mislabelled: its description starts “CMS Serbian militia leader intvwd” whereas “Adnan” is a Muslim name and indeed the voice-over quotes him saying that he “lost 100 men for every meter lost to the Serbs”, so he clearly belonged to the ARBiH. Mislabelling is not uncommon in commercial archives: often descriptions are second or third-hand, and based on rough log notes from the field.

[36]. I requested and indeed received especially digitised screeners, but to the best of my knowledge those were not made available via the CNN online search function. This is another example of the “digitisation on demand” model of most news archives.

[37]. The camera in the first convoy was operated by Simo Vaatainen (who was not a professional cameraman), and the one in the second convoy by Will Stebbins. I edited the 10-minute video press release at the end of August 1993 with Stebbins.

[38]. The video unit of P&I was significantly restructured and expanded to become its own department as “UNTV” after I left early in 1994. Of the dozens of reels of rushes we shot in the time before the expansion, only a handful survived in the collection at the IWM, illustrating how easily rushes from a conflict situation can get lost.

[39]. United Nations, MOSTAR Rushes UNT 933/01, United Nations 1993.

[40]. United Nations, MOSTAR Rushes UNT 933/01; Brent Sadler and Mark Biello, MOSTAR CNN Rushes Tape No. FC7904, CNN Collection 1993.

[41]. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time: Disorientation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008): 116.

[42]. From interviews with Orhan and Ševko, and also from conversations with Jimmi James.

[43]. Jeremy Bowen, War Stories, Reissue edition (Simon & Schuster UK, 2014): 180–84; Jeremy Bowen, Feature on Mostar for BBC News 6pm, 27 August 1993; Eamonn Matthews and Jeremy Bowen, Unfinished Business, 1993, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkS8YlASVzk . Bowen would return less than a month later with a BBC documentary crew, staying for about two weeks, during which time many of the “usual conditions” in the enclave had resumed. As a result, the conditions depicted in this documentary, titled Unfinished Business, are closer to the conditions experienced throughout the siege by the population of east Mostar, and the film is still highly regarded locally.

[44]. Bowen is again the exception by including a brief scene of the centralised kitchen, and mentioning the impressive level of organisation in the enclave.

[45]. Brent Sadler, MOSTAR AID CNN Edited Report, CNN 1993. The medicines were unloaded at the end of the day, but this is shown at the beginning of the report to establish the humanitarian purpose of the convoy.

[46]. Brent Sadler, MOSTAR MUSLIMS CNN Edited Report, CNN 1993. The hospital shots and the interview with Dr Mujic are not in the CNN rushes I have, and are probably from two reels that I believe to be missing from what I received: the tape numbers of the rushes start from FC7901; after the arrival of the crew in east Mostar (at the end of tape FC7902), the number FC7903 is skipped and tape FC7904 starts with a shot right on the frontline. In addition, FC7904 ends just before the moment the medical aid is unloaded by the hospital, an event that is included in the MOSTAR AID report. There is a tape FC7905, dated 8/21/1993, but this must be mislabelled: it depicts the evacuation of wounded children that happened after 25 August. It is not clear if the original reels still exist.

[47]. Carole Walker, Feature on Mostar for BBC News_lib Cu-229070. 23 August 1993, BBC Broadcast Archives.

[48]. ‘BHS’ stands for Bosanska-Hrvatska-Srpska, and is the current politically neutral designation of the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian.

[49]. Brent Sadler and Mark Biello, MOSTAR CNN Rushes Tape No. FC7904. A “piece to camera” is a technical term for a statement by the reporter addressed directly to the viewer.

[50]. Walker, Feature on Mostar for BBC News_lib Cu-229070.

[51]. Silber and Little, Yugoslavia, 208.

[52]. In 2019 I collaborated with Jimmi James and Smajo Bešo on a small online survey of current and former Mostar residents based on samples of untransmitted rushes posted by James. In the 44 responses, the term “Croat” was mentioned five times, the term “fascist” four times, and “Ustashe” three times. “Tito” and “Yugoslavia” were invoked twice each, while “Bosniak” and “Muslim” were mentioned only once each. I cited the results of this survey as part of a presentation of my research at the conference Why Remember? in Sarajevo on 9 July 2019, but otherwise they have not been published.

[53]. In February 2018, I attended the commemoration of Partisan fighters who fell during the liberation of Mostar from fascism in the Second World War, at the Partisan Memorial Cemetery in West Mostar. It was attended by a large crowd of people, replete with Yugoslav-era flags. The event was organised by the Association of Anti-Fascist Heroes and Martyrs, a Tito-era veterans association which continues its activities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Partisan Memorial Cemetery, even though it has the status of a national monument, is regularly vandalised with graffiti of swastikas and Ustashe symbols and slogans.

[54]. Catherine Baker, Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? (Manchester University Press, 2018): 128, https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526126610.; V. P. Gagnon, The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). Gagnon attributes the ubiquity of the “ancient hatred thesis” mainly to the influence of Robert Kaplan’s book Balkan Ghosts.

[55]. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[56]. Darryl Li, The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity, Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020): 64.

[57]. Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights, Columbia Studies in Political Thought/Political History (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011): 7–8.

[58]. cf. Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2011).

[59]. Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (William Collins, 2021), 306. On the issue of false equivalence, see also Helen Walasek et al., Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2016): 6–7.

[60]. Power, A Problem from Hell, 307–8.

[61]. Matthew W. Hughey, “The White Savior Film and Reviewers’ Reception”. Symbolic Interaction 33, no. 3 (2010): 475–96. Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dances with Wolves (1990) are notorious examples, but Avatar (2009) also falls squarely into the genre, showing that “non-white” can cover a wide range of Others.

[62]. Baker, Race and the Yugoslav Region, 127–32, 146. Baker shows how local objections to the presence of non-white peacekeepers was often tinged with racism.

[63]. Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia”, Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917–31, https://doi.org/10.2307/2501399.

[64]. Baker, Race and the Yugoslav Region, 129.

[65]. Brent Sadler and Mark Biello, MOSTAR CNN Rushes Tape No. FC7901, 1993.

[66]. United Nations, MOSTAR Rushes UNT 933/01.

[67]. United Nations, MOSTAR Rushes UNT 933/02, 1993.

[68]. I certainly was reminded with a shock that the “psy-ops” punchline was indeed a running gag among some of my colleagues, along with an only half-joking wager on who in the office was the CIA operative.

[69]. I requested and received the CNN rushes as “screeners”, which implies that in principle the footage is available to be licenced for use in a documentary film production. I requested and received copies of the UNTV footage from the IWM archive specifically for academic research.

[70]. Bowen, War Stories, 183. Tellingly, Bowen describes CNN cameraman Mark Biello as “a nice guy, a big drinker who called himself Mad Dog and did everything he could to become a journalistic legend”.

[71]. For an overview see Ragnhild Nordås and Siri C. A. Rustad, ‘Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Peacekeepers: Understanding Variation’, International Interactions 39, no. 4 (1 September 2013): 511–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/03050629.2013.805128. Some allegations of sexual abuse by UN soldiers in Mostar were related to me during my interviews, but as far as I am aware, no formal accusations have been made against the Spanish Battalion that was operational there at the time. Other forms of the abuse of power by UN peacekeeping forces in Haiti are powerfully documented in the film It Stays With You: Use of Force by UN Peacekeepers in Haiti, by Cahal McLaughlin and Siobhán Wills.

[72]. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 13.; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, New ed. (London: Fontana, 1992), 175.

[73]. Catherine Russell, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, Camera Obscura Books (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 28.

[74]. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 14.

[75]. Vaughan, For Documentary, 80.

[76]. Eelco Runia, “Presence”, History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 1.

[77]. Runia, 20.

[78]. Fossati, From Grain to Pixel the Archival Life of Film in Transition, 19–20.

[79]. Lundemo, “Archives and Technological Selection”, 22.

 

Bibliography 

Assmann, Aleida. Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016.

———. “Transformations between History and Memory”. Social Research: An International Quarterly 75, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 49–72.

Baker, Catherine. Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? Manchester University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526126610.

Bakić-Hayden, Milica. “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia”. Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995): 917–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/2501399.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New ed. London: Fontana, 1992.

Bowen, Jeremy. War Stories. Reissue edition. Simon & Schuster UK, 2014.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Electronic Mediations; v. 39. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Fossati, Giovanna. From Grain to Pixel the Archival Life of Film in Transition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2002.

Gagnon, V. P. The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Grebo, Lamija. “Bosnian Serb Decree Rejecting Genocide Denial Law Sparks Uncertainty”. Balkan Insight, 13 October 2021. https://balkaninsight.com/2021/10/13/bosnian-serb-decree-rejecting-genocide-denial-law-sparks-uncertainty/.

Hughey, Matthew W. “The White Savior Film and Reviewers’ Reception”. Symbolic Interaction 33, no. 3 (2010): 475–96. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2010.33.3.475.

Latal, Srecko. “Radical Rhetoric in Bosnia Revives Fears of New Conflict”. Balkan Insight, 5 October 2021. https://balkaninsight.com/2021/10/05/radical-rhetoric-in-bosnia-revives-fears-of-new-conflict/.

Li, Darryl. The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020.

Lundemo, Trond. “Archives and Technological Selection”. Cinémas 24, no. 2–3 (2014): 17–39. https://doi.org/10.7202/1025147ar.

Meister, Robert. After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. Columbia Studies in Political Thought/Political History. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Vol. 1. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Nordås, Ragnhild, and Siri   C. A. Rustad. “Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Peacekeepers: Understanding Variation”. International Interactions 39, no. 4 (1 September 2013): 511–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050629.2013.805128.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “Observations on the Long Take”. October 13 (1980): 3. https://doi.org/10.2307/3397696.

Power, Samantha. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Glasgow: William-Collins, 2021.

Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Runia, Eelco. “Presence”. History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006): 1–29.

Russell, Catherine. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Camera Obscura Book. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Silber, Laura, and Allan Little. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. Rev. and Updated ed. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1997.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time: Disorientation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Vaughan, Dai. For Documentary: Twelve Essays. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.

Walasek, Helen, contributions by Richard Carlton, Amra Hadžimuhamedović, Valery Perry, and Tina Wik. Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage. New York and London: Routledge, 2016.

Weizman, Eyal. The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza. London: Verso, 2011.

 

Filmography

Bowen, Jeremy. Feature on Mostar for BBC News 6pm_ ANBH739R, 27 August 1993. BBC Broadcast Archives

Bowen, Jeremy and Matthews, Eamonn. Unfinished Business, 4 November 1993. BBC Broadcast Archives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkS8YlASVzk

Forensic Architecture. The Bombing of Rafah: Black Friday. forensic-architecture.org, 2015. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-bombing-of-rafah.

Getty Images. 74 Mostar Videos and HD Footage, web impression, accessed 10 December 2021. https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/videos/mostar?assettype=film&begindate=1993-08-19&enddate=1993-08-30&offlinecontent=include&phrase=mostar&recency=daterange&sort=best&license=rf,rr

McLaughlin, Cahal and Wills, Siobhán. It Stays With You: Use of Force by UN Peacekeepers in Haiti, 2018. https://vimeo.com/409176307

Sadler, Brent. MOSTAR AID CNN Edited Report 90573913, CNN Collection 1993.

———. MOSTAR MUSLIMS CNN Edited Report 90574044, CNN Collection 1993.

Sadler, Brent, and Biello, Mark. MOSTAR CNN Rushes Tape No. FC7901, CNN Collection 1993.

———. MOSTAR CNN Rushes Tape No. FC7904, CNN Collection 1993.

Sivan, Eyal. Izkor: Slaves of Memory. Documentary. FR3, IMA Productions, Rhea Films, 1995.

United Nations. MOSTAR Rushes IWM UNT 933/01, United Nations 1993.

———. MOSTAR Rushes IWM UNT 933/02, United Nations 1993.

Walker, Carole. Feature on Mostar for BBC News_lib Cu-229070, 23 August 1993. BBC Broadcast Archives.

 

Author Biography

Lennaart van Oldenborgh is a practice-based PhD candidate in the Media, Communications and Cultural Studies department at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 1993-94 he worked for the UN mission in the former Yugoslavia (UNPROFOR), before settling in London in 1997, where he established himself as a documentary film editor. He edited the 2018 BAFTA winning documentary Basquiat: Rage to Riches for BBC Studios. He co-directed the feature-length documentary film Bitter Lemons with Adnan Hadzi, about the post-conflict situation in Cyprus, which premiered at the Solothurn Film Festival in 2014, and published Performing the Real, in The State of the Real (2007, I.B. Taurus). From 2017 to 2019 he taught film theory and tactical media as Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London.

DOI:10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2384

*This article contains images of nudity and sexual behaviour*

 

“What does flesh become?”

—Thomas Waugh, from The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writing on Queer Cinema

The spectre of Barbara Hammer haunts this paper. As I watch and re-watch Nitrate Kisses (1992), I take notes cloaked by her recent death in 2019. I watch for the queers, like myself, who mourned her death as voyeurs of her work, and I find myself replaying the same scenes in Nitrate Kisses over and over. Here is one of them: two bodies move on screen, grainy and out-of-focus, filmed on black-and-white 16mm film. Limbs rise, entangle. Arms, legs, fingers, and lips move fluidly. At times it is impossible to identify what body parts the camera lingers on, angling curiously, unobtrusively, around the twisting figures on the carpet. Skin is magnified and expands to fill entire shots. Pores become something whole. Shadows from the window blinds rib the two bodies with bars of darkness. Sunlight glistens on saliva and wet hands.

Nitrate Kisses unfolds in three phases. Each phase features a queer couple having sex aligned with voice-over interviews and archival materials (photographs, letters, and other ephemera) detailing a particular historical trauma. Phase I sees an elderly lesbian couple having slow, gentle sex on a sunlight-dappled carpet; the movement of their bodies is interspersed with photographs of an unidentified building in ruins and lesbian pulp fiction book covers. This phase highlights the general erasure of lesbian relationships from the sanitised, hegemonic historical record. Phase II of the film shows two gay men having playful, spirited sex while the voice-over features interviews with different gay men outlining the impact of the Motion Picture Production Code on gay male life. Later in the phase, men share personal stories of loss experienced during the AIDS crisis. Phase III features two young, punk women (leather dykes) engaging in BDSM sex, as voice-over narratives and photographs piece together the stories of queer women who were purposefully disappeared from greater historical narratives of life experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. In each phase, archival materials frame the erotic encounters, providing a means of sensing, feeling and witnessing pain.

Observing the sex scenes in Hammer’s experimental documentary compels me to argue that queer sex can become an archival practice of both remembering and processing violence and death. Indeed, the limits of our corporeal boundaries can be tested and re-drawn through the various acts of queer sex in Nitrate Kisses, reconfiguring past traumas and pain for queer people. Hammer must employ the erotic body as an archive because she is working in the absence of conventional archives to transmit knowledge about queer loss, trauma, and death across generations.[1] I argue that Nitrate Kisses thus employs the erotic body to achieve three main objectives: (1) to reinscribe the past in the present, specifically within and upon the flesh of her performers; (2) to make visible lesbians and gay men previously disappeared from the historical record via mass death and purposeful archival erasure; and (3) to bring queer apparitions – ghostly figures, figures representative of the past – to bear upon present-day bodies via physical touch. In this sense, Hammer presents a deeply embodied, sensorial archival practice or remembering and subverting historical trauma and loss. Each of Hammer’s objectives is tied to her overarching directorial ambition to re-imagine and construct an archive in which pleasure and pain exist on a continuum connecting past and present. Each phase of sex in the film develops from bodies moving intimately with historical loss and trauma – as if trauma itself were an entity. Ghostly sex indeed.

While sex in Hammer’s film is not an antidote to queer death and cannot make up loss of life, I argue that the scenes of queer sex in Hammer’s film break open generative spaces in which the physical body mediates historical traumas, introducing new forms of desire and a unique kind of queer futurity. Hammer deploys the body mid-intercourse as a canvas to project the most affecting depths of suffering, transmutated through physical touch and expression of pleasure. The body in Nitrate Kisses becomes a cypher for past historical pain. Sex becomes a method of remembering historical injustices and making them visible for the viewer to bear witness to trauma that has shaped queer cultural memory. In Nitrate Kisses, the body is not a stable object, perhaps not even a “body” at all; rather, it becomes representative of a “figure for relations between bodies past and present.”[2]

In my analysis of queer bodies and sex in Nitrate Kisses, I engage historian Elizabeth Freeman’s methodological erotohistoriography, which understands the body as a tool to write the “lost” or the past into the present. For Freeman, erotic pleasure is a means of understanding and knowing – a form of “historical consciousness intimately involved with corporeal sensations.”[3] In Nitrate Kisses, the past is inscribed upon the moving bodies as they have sex. Thus, paradoxically, death is inscribed or imprinted upon the living in the moment of copulation, and upon and through their pleasure.

My analysis of trauma as unfolding and transforming through the act of sex is critical because it reads queer sex directly against narratives depicting queer desire ending in death. As Heather Love maintains, “the history of Western representation is littered with the corpses of sexual and gender deviants.”[4] The depiction of lesbian love as tragic, isolated, and concluding in death is widely reflected in historical cinematic representations of lesbian life. Such notorious films include Mädchen in Uniform (1931), which concludes with an attempted suicide on part of a queerly coded schoolgirl, and The Children’s Hour (1961), in which a similarly coded protagonist hangs herself. In this essay, I use a framework of erotics which positions the pleasuring/pleasured queer body against its antithesis: the murdered, tortured or vanished queer body. Mid “procreation” or “reproduction,” the bodies in Nitrate Kisses promise a kind of queer futurity – if not biological or genetic, a powerfully symbolic form of futurity. According to my method of analysis, then, mass queer historical death or erasure is neither overlooked nor shied away from, nor does it play a starring role in consuming the bodies at the heart of this research.

I will begin by briefly summarising sex and the body as both relate to the tradition of queer-feminist experimental film before reviewing the theorisation of queer historicity, trauma, and the body. I then complete a three-part analysis of each phase of Nitrate Kisses, examining how traumatic memory is inscribed upon and through the bodies having sex and how accompanying pain is re-worked by the physical, sexual body, giving way to new forms of queer desire and pleasure and invoking a queer-feminist archival practice. Lastly, I open my analysis up more broadly to consider how erotic physical touch and the body’s materiality engender differing forms of experiential, embodied archival knowledge. 

The Influence of Queer-feminist Experimental Film

Hammer’s oeuvre stems from a lineage of feminist experimental cinema ushered in by the sexual revolution in the early 1960s, and includes films produced by Yvonne Rainer and Chantal Akerman, to name only a couple of notable directors. Linda Williams aptly defines feminist and lesbian films produced during this porno-chic era as “hard-core art.”[5] Williams’ analysis of these films reveals their slippery positioning between pornographic cinema and avant-garde artistic film. Representations of the erotic female body thus dominated feminist experimental film, much to the chagrin of the second-wave feminist anti-pornography movement, vigilantly spurred on by lesbian feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon.[6] But for Hammer and her sex-positive corollaries, the explicit female body was clay, “palpable, malleable…the raw material” of their films.[7] As Ara Osterweil argues, experimental cinema constructed flesh as “an endlessly variable substance that could come unbound…through shattering encounters with desire, sex, pain, birth and death”.[8] Graphic sexual depictions of the female body were the “primary artistic tool[s]” of feminist auteurs.[9] Their bodies were political weapons,  “battleground[s]” where, as Waugh explains, queer bodies “squeez[ed] every drop of pleasure and pain” from structures of censorship and control.[10] We see this reconceptualisation of the body and of flesh in Nitrate Kisses, introducing and expanding possibilities for not only what a body is, but what it can do.

Theorizing Queer Historicity, Trauma, and the Body

“For groups constituted by historical injury,” argues Heather Love, “the challenge is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it.”[11] For Love, looking backwards into the past is necessary to guarantee the future survival of queer women. Queer history, she asserts, centres around a “politics of the past” – the shared, embodied myths and feelings that Love argues are constructed via the long-term effects of past traumas and homophobia: suffering, escapism, regret, shame, melancholia, and failure.[12] The lesbian in history, Love argues, is always turning back to the past, nostalgic, mired in unresolved loss, grief, and mourning and obsessed with “wounded attachments.”[13] Similarly, Ann Cvetkovich understands the perceived queer attachment to trauma as an “archive of feelings,” driven by an urgent compulsion to “never forget” the pain and loss of the past.[14] But unlike Love and Cvetkovich, Freeman approaches queer historicity not through a focus on loss, injury, separation, displacements or “negative and negating forms of bodily experience” (what she terms as “queer melancholia theory”), but rather a focus on queer pleasure as “encountering, witnessing, and transforming history.”[15] Contrasting Love and Cvetkovich’s preoccupation with trauma, Freeman’s erotohistoriography is:

        …distinct from the desire for a fully present past, a restoration of bygone times. Erotohistoriography does not write the lost object into the present so much as encounter it already in the present, by treating the present itself as hybrid. And it uses the body as a tool to erect, figure, or perform that encounter.[16]

For Freeman, the body may pleasure “itself with the past,” figuring a much different relationship between history and the queer body than imagined by Love or Cvetkovich.[17] In this relationship, history pleasures the body rather than troubling it. While Hammer seizes Love’s challenge for queers to engage the past without suffering bodily or psychic destruction, she does so following Freeman’s edicts. I intervene here to propose that Hammer’s work synthesises these two contrasting theoretical schools of thought. She acknowledges the necessity for queers to turn to the past, to honour the urge to “never forget,” but she is wary of becoming mired in loss and pain. In Nitrate Kisses, Hammer overlays the present with the past – suffusing her bodies with pastness, with the trauma of her performers’ queer ancestors – but the act of sex, the eroticism of their bodies, works the pain, the pastness, the loss and trauma.

What Flesh (and Sex) Become

I turn here to Phase I of Nitrate Kisses, which explores how lesbian existence is largely rendered invisible throughout history. Phase I pinpoints certain, sharp moments of grief: an unnamed, unseen narrator tells the story of American author Willa Cather, whose memorial scholars visit from around the world while routinely failing to mention her lesbianism in their research. Another anonymous speaker discloses the burden of invisibility, who describes the closeted lifestyle of Cather and her partner: “they developed an attitude of extreme discretion, and before her death they burned all of [their] letters.” Scenes of abandoned homes and empty fields play slowly, then begin to speed up frenetically. Another anonymous speaker cuts in: “lesbians disappear first of all because we are women, women disappear,” she says. “They disappear because they are deviant, because it’s still shameful.” These statements, and the weight of the pain expressed in them, bleed over and through the bodies of two women embracing on a bed. The viewer watches an intimate, slow sex scene unfold. Other painful narratives are confessed as the physical intimacy between the two women progresses: stories of violent raids on lesbian pubs by gangs of policemen, of the difficulty of coming into lesbian consciousness, and descriptions of lesbian women losing gay male friends during the AIDS crisis. While we are not privy to the faces or even names of the speakers, including the blurred-out, pixelated faces of women dancing together at lesbian socials that play intermittently, we are given lingering, intense shots of a woman’s face contorted in pleasure as she receives cunnilingus. The pain and grief of the speakers, in this sense, is transposed onto and through the woman receiving pleasure – indeed it becomes her pleasure.

At the same time as we hear a speaker recollect being called a “dirty lesbian” and “dyke,” we see the women having sex smile and laugh. The erased life existences of queer women emerge, channelled into an intersubjective, liminal space broken open by sexual contact, constructed by both pleasure and the pain of recollection. Those made invisible become, I argue, the most visible as they burgeon uncontrollably from the two women’s bodies as grins, moans, laughter, and other expressions of physical pleasure. Here we can consider Nick Davis’ conceptualisation of desire and pleasure as mutable, “passing through and forcing changes within subjects rather than belonging to them as static [and] innate.”[18] Davis, theorising a Deleuzian model of queer cinema, argues that desire and pleasure do not “settle into any one arrangement but concern flows and frictions across and within them all.”[19] We can apply Davis’ ideas to Phase I of Nitrate Kisses. We see desire and pleasure work expansively, in nebulous, fluid, and interconnected ways between the two women’s bodies as both forces are sutured to past traumas. The desire and pleasure of the two women play, as queer theorist Margrit Shildrick states, “across points of connection between disparate surfaces or entities.”[20] In the case of Nitrate Kisses, these points of connection are made between the grieving bodies of the ghostly narrators reliving painful memories and the pleasured/pleasuring bodies of the two women having sex.

Similarly, in Phase II of Nitrate Kisses, the institutionalisation of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1933 and the AIDS crisis beginning in the 1980s are featured as two historical events whose accompanying cultural memories steeped in pain and trauma are productively worked through the act of a gay male couple having sex. Here, the AIDS crisis is explored or portrayed as an equally destructive force of queer eradication akin to the metaphorical extinction of gay men from cinema via the Code. As in Phase I of the film, voice-over narratives in Phase II are shared by nameless, anonymous speakers as the couple continues to have sex – except in this case, the narratives depict losses attributed to the AIDS epidemic. One speaker explains how he and a partner lost fourteen close friends in a single year. “It was relentless,” he says.

While the AIDS crisis section of Phase II directly mirrors the structure of Phase I, Hammer’s exploration of the Code’s incapacitating effect on queer bodies is stylistically different. As one of the men poises, about to enter his partner, a textual scroll-up of the Code is superimposed across the couple, beginning with Section II, “SEX.” The Code continues to scroll over the bodies having sex, who are ironically engaging in the very acts prohibited by the Code, including what the Code terms “illicit sex,” “scenes of passion,” “excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces,” and the most marked delineation of Section II of the Code, the fourth component, which states: “sex perversion or any inference of it is forbidden.”

The Code led to the production of films that centred around queer death as the pinnacle tension – Rebecca (1940) is a strong example, in which a queerly coded protagonist, Mrs. Danvers, meets an untimely death at the film’s conclusion.[21] We might read this as a suggestion that queerness could not acceptably be presented as a liveable experience – it had to be put to death, so to speak. Ultimately, the Code reflected the powerful arm of the Catholic church during the 1930s.[22] The Code attempted to reach into the bedrooms of Americans by officially controlling and censoring on-screen sex.

In contrast to Phase I, the prohibition of queer existence is physically imprinted upon and through the flesh of the two gay men having sex as the body becomes a site of inscription for pain. Here, we can build on Osterweil’s thesis on flesh in experimental film as an “endlessly variable substance” by invoking Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of flesh – what Laura Mulvey and Martine Beugnet interpret to be a form of “embodied consciousness.”[23] As the men frolic on the bed, their flesh, scrolled over with the words of the Code, becomes imbued with embodied consciousness. Their moving limbs become animated, enlivened with a specific purpose – to rebel against the Code: sex-as-rebellion, perversion-as-rebellion. Shots from the silent film Lot in Sodom (1933) are also interspersed with these sex scenes, which further subverts the deeply “moral” nature of the Code. Nothing short of Christian propaganda, Lot in Sodom conveyed the punishment of, among other various other sins, homosexuality. Because the male actors featured in the film were dressed in garish costumes, were heavily made-up, and their physical movements exaggerated, the effect is campy and queer. As one of the men giving a voice-over interview in Nitrate Kisses ironically explains: “you are supposed to learn a lesson in the telling of a moral tale, but … the telling of the lesson … becomes very seductive.”

The bodies of queer men in Phase II can thus be read along a continuum: the same bodies in Lot in Sodom that signify eventual queer death and intended to instil fear and disgust in male viewers could have provoked feelings of attraction or arousal in others. Desire and sexuality seem to “decompose and recompose according to different encounters.”[24] Both desire and sexuality are evoked not only through the couple having sex in Hammer’s film but also for the actors in Lot in Sodom and their supposedly condemned viewers. Desire and pleasure are thus presented in Phase II as polymorphous, metamorphosing as “conjoining and detaching particles, series and peaks, virtualities and intensities of desire.”[25] As the couple’s flesh moves in an embodied consciousness, their flesh marked by the eradicating words of the Code, desire and pleasure unfold in what Shildrick terms a “fluid indeterminacy.”[26] Connections are continuously drawn between the couple having sex according to what Davis asserts are “highly eroticized unions, breakdowns, hostilities, reunions, ecstasies, surfeits, and losses.”[27]

Phase III of Nitrate Kisses is markedly different from Phase I and II because, while the structure of this phase is similar to the first two, the lesbian couple filmed having sex are two leather dykes engaging in BDSM sexual play. This scene is interrupted by shots of concentration camp ruins, broken windows, gravestones and bunkers, and details the experiences of lesbian women under the Third Reich. Playing over the sex scene and shots of architectural deterioration is a song by queer German singer Claire Waldo, whose mechanical, forceful chorus repeats, “Oh, don’t ask why, oh don’t ask why, I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die.” The practice of BDSM embraces pain as a form of sexual and erotic pleasure. As Timo Airaksinen explains, when BDSM practitioners welcome and indeed urge on feelings of pain and enact gestures of “violence,” the very meanings of pain and violence are reconfigured, altering their ability to wound.[28]

BDSM sex presents us with the most cohesive, integrated representation of pain and pleasure in Nitrate Kisses – violence transmutated into pure desire and sexual bliss felt on part of the leather dykes. Phase III explores what might be considered a “sex-violence-body nexus.”[29] BDSM practices here interrogate the idea of wounding-as-pleasure, focusing on an “erotics of wounding”[30] and injury deeply invested in consensual, enthusiastic participation.

In this section of the film, shots of mass graves, the narrative of a woman speaking about recognising a fellow lesbian while held in Ravensbrück, rows of empty chairs, Waldo’s cryptic lyrics and the ever-present ruins are read into the pain harnessed and deployed as power and pleasure in the BDSM sexual practices between the leather dykes. Thus, the “wounds” or injuries that the women inflict upon each other may best be understood as a process – part of the process of attempting to transform historical pain and trauma through sex. To wound in this case might be considered something sacred, rather than horrific, a transformative ritual of sorts.[31] Thus, through the practices of BDSM, the two leather dykes “mobilize erotic pleasure in… events normally experienced as tragic, violent and traumatic.”[32] This ability to wield pain effectively leads to a “multiplication of potentialities of the female body” in its capacity to experience and express pleasure and desire.[33]

Instead of disconnecting or distancing themselves from the past, the queer bodies in Phase III of Nitrate Kisses refuse psychic destruction and instead caress it knowingly. Hélène Cixous remarks on the fear of recalling painful memories, stating, “we are always afraid of seeing ourselves suffer. It is like when we have an open wound: We are terribly afraid of looking at it…and at the same time we are perhaps the only one person capable of looking at it.”[34] Perhaps the only way to bear witness to such traumatic historical truth without succumbing to it – perhaps the most strategic way to examine the wound – is to mediate pain with pleasure, to make from pain, or make pain itself, something beautiful and sublime. We may be able to watch trauma unfold on and through the performers’ bodies without wounding ourselves so deeply in the process. And we may be more aptly primed to receive the images and statements from voice-over interviews that allow us to apprehend a much broader, encompassing scope of pain.

Archival Materiality and Physical Touch

In each of the three phases of Nitrate Kisses a singular hand guides the viewer from scene to scene, calling attention to particular, fine details: a hand slowly twisting the knob on a dilapidated door to admit the viewer into the darkness of an abandoned house; a hand tracing a woman’s silhouette on a photograph; a hand feeling the grooved words engraved on a tombstone; a wet hand fucking; a hand pointing to a 1909 bill established in Germany that officially criminalised lesbianism.[35] This is a spectral hand, upon first appearance seemingly disembodied and free-floating, associated with no particular voice or entity in the film, and it seems to extend outwards from the viewer’s own body, positioning the viewer as holding the camera, entering into ruins, remembering, or having sex.

The hand is possessed by the materiality of the archival objects it encounters – the physical sensations produced by touching and interacting with these objects. To look is not enough. The hand, the archivist’s body, must get closer. As Alexandra Juhasz explains, feminist film demonstrates a need for the past, for history, to be “alive, instructive, interactive.”[36] We might conceive of the involved hand as symbolically refuting the traditional objective relationship normally constructed between documentary subjects and filmmakers. We might also think of Hammer’s involved hand as contesting the classic “separation between artist and art object.”[37]

Hammer’s embodied participation in the film means that her use of the camera also actively works against the “filmmaker-as-fly-on-the-wall-theory” often deployed in documentary film.[38] Instead, as Osterweil explains, Hammer approaches her subjects with great intimacy, merging “emotional transparency with corporeal closeness.”[39] As Hammer wonders,  “the problem for me is how to take the camera to bed without objectifying the erotic experience, how to make the camera a sexual additive.”[40] Thus, even in shots where Hammer’s hand is not featured interacting with archival objects, the viewer is aware of her holding the camera – filming becomes a tactile and visceral act. Hammer uses the camera as an extension of her own physicality, as if another participatory body in the sex scenes.

Anna Cooper Albright asks: “how is one touched by history?”[41] I ask: how might one touch history? For Hammer, “making up” lost history is a material, embodied and physical archival process. The body and its capacity for physical touch (here exemplified by the ever-inquisitive, probing finger and embodied camera) convey a means of generating and processing knowledge through “bodiedness.” The body, in this case, is a “site of consciousness and cognition … involv[ed] in the recovery and reenactment of memory.”[42] It is physical touch – the touch of a finger on a photograph, for example – that becomes a conduit for accessing archival knowledge, and for unlocking what exists below the photograph, what cannot be felt merely by looking. Physical touch is critical to Hammer’s archival project because, as Ivo Van Hove claims, “the body makes us remember.”[43] Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland argue that knowledge can be accessed or even generated via bodily physical states and actions. Visceral physical interaction may therefore generate historical knowledge. Perhaps put most bluntly by Freeman, archival materiality and the necessity of physical touch reveal that “history is a hole to penetrate, but not with the usual instruments. That Sapphic finger.”[44] Indeed, erotohistoriography espouses that mere physical contact with historical materials may provoke pleasurable bodily responses “that are themselves a form of understanding.”[45] I point here to Julie R. Enszer’s investigation of lesbian poet Minnie Bruce Pratt’s personal materials stored at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (Harvard University). Enszer describes finding, much to her surprise, Pratt’s vibrator:

After carefully folding and rewrapping the batik outfit, I unfurl the acid-free paper that wraps Minnie Bruce Pratt’s vibrator. It is light. Lighter than any vibrator I have ever held. I realize there are no batteries in it. It is big. Bigger than any vibrator I have ever owned. It is cream. It is plastic. It is ridged. Idly, I unscrew the base, where the batteries belong. I gently run my hands along the hard plastic. I want to smell it. I look around. No one is looking at me here in the archives. No one seems to care that I have found this intimate    object of pleasure.[46]

Enszer emphasises the significance of corporeal pleasure as a fundamental component of lesbian-feminist epistemology. We can read the pleasure conjured by the physical touch of archival materials as a significant element of practice for Hammer’s lesbian-feminist archival methodology. For Hammer, lesbian sexuality is a means of feeling through and understanding the past experiences of queers before her. The touch of the finger to a photograph, or to engraved words on a tombstone, demonstrates a tactile exchange between the physical body and material objects. In this case, the literal finger representing the archivist becomes a boundary or conduit through which historical knowledge transmits by osmosis. Physical interaction with archival materials, as demonstrated by Enszer, precipitates a change within the body of the probing researcher or archivist. Enszer is surprised by the weight of Pratt’s vibrator, its ridged sides. Her experience is far from voyeuristic; rather, holding Pratt’s vibrator plunges Enszer immediately into Pratt’s psychic territory. In this sense, pleasure-as-knowledge aroused by physical touch in the archive is a transformative force.

We might relate Enszer’s experience in the Schlesinger Library to Hammer’s “Sapphic finger.” Enszer draws continuous parallels between her own life experiences and Pratt’s. Various physical aspects of the vibrator trigger Enszer’s memories of her experiences with a vibrator. In Nitrate Kisses, the hand touching various artefacts – whether it be the photographs, text, or objects – seems to touch past, touch beyond, the bare surface it encounters, puncturing into the pastness of the artifacts themselves. Here I am reminded of Freeman’s metaphor of history as a “hole to penetrate.” At one point in Phase III, for instance, Hammer’s finger (or metaphorically, our hand as archivist/viewer) seems to point at a photograph of Willa Cather dressed and passing successfully as a man. But rather than merely point to Cather, I interpret the finger as trailing gently over Cather’s heart. The finger does not carry out a cold, informative act of pointing-as-exposure (“see that this body is Willa Cather dressed as a man”); instead, it seems to strain for a connection to Cather available only through intimate physical touch with Cather’s body via the medium of the photograph.

Physical touch as exemplified by Enszer and Hammer gestures to what Lucus Hilderbrand terms “cross-temporal queer contact.”[47] This contact can be understood as the multitude of connections between present and past queer people that expose “recurring desires in the past and … fantasies of queer pasts, communities and even asynchronies and anachronisms across generations and eras.”[48] Such cross-historical touch indicates, as Freeman argues, a “queer becoming-collective-across time.”[49] This is a kind of becoming that does not adhere to temporal, spatial, or physical boundaries. As Freeman explains, some bodies register “on their very surface the co-presence of several historically contingent events, social movements and/or collective pleasures.”[50] The bodies featured in Hammer’s films are conflations of queer experiences and identities. Queerness, specifically lesbian sexuality, can be understood as unfolding in an interconnected, intersubjective process. Hammer’s physical touch as archivist/filmmaker reaches through to Willa Cather’s 1930’s stoic, repressed butchness, and that same archival queer desire intertwines with Enszer’s meticulous, surprising study of Pratt’s vibrator, held in the palm of her hand, years later. In this sense, the “disembodied” Sapphic finger introduces not only physical touch but paradoxically, a fluid apparitional touch to Nitrate Kisses – a touch that seems to connect moments in queer history, striving to create “new types of collective experience.”[51] It serves as the site for political action: at one moment Hammer/the viewer is connected to Cather, at another moment they may be connected, in some psychic way, to lesbians tortured during the Holocaust by, as exemplified in another part of Phase III, the hand touching a German bill or reference book defining the term “lesbian.” The Sapphic finger (Hammer’s ever-present hand) is uncanny, seeming to intrude upon scenes without warning, a manifestation of the viewer’s own desire to reach out and touch Cather, the graves, the pain of others. It feels for us, energetically operating according to its own force of life.

Bodily Decay and Filmic Ephemerality

The materiality of the body in Nitrate Kisses marks it as “an ephemeral field site.”[52] The body, of course, persists only as long as a human life span, if it does not first fall peril to one of the forms of death – symbolic or otherwise – detailed in any of the three phases of Hammer’s film (erasure of historical existence, a biological epidemic such as AIDS, or genocide, in the case of the Holocaust). In drawing attention to the ephemeral, material nature of the body, Hammer reminds us that film, particularly nitrate film, is also subject to inevitable decay through the process of nitrate acetate degradation.[53] Nitrate, like the delicate biochemistry of the human body, has a highly unstable chemical composition. Just as the body ages and deteriorates, so too does film. Gerda Cammaer explains that only twenty percent of the films produced in the 1920s still exist. We are reminded that, like the lost films, queer bodies are lost, rendered invisible, and may slip into gaps in history. The bodies of Holocaust survivors or loved ones of AIDS victims, and their narratives, like nitrate film, are hurtling towards full disappearance. In this sense, Hammer’s repetitive, sustained shots of ruins, scraps of photographs, and even voice-overs given in overlapping, chaotic fragments become ominous. They point to what has been left of queer life when the historical record is sanitised, and reflect the narratives of the silenced, those made absent who are not privy to the luxury of “traditional, seamless, narrativized historiography.”[54] Perhaps the title of the film, then, gestures to the fleeting, queer “kisses” – highly unstable in and of themselves, true kisses of nitrate – made across time, made between the archivist and the deceased, between historical bodies and the ever probing Sapphic Finger. 

Conclusion: “it is necessary to be touched” 

Nitrate Kisses facilitates a “polymorphous desire to touch and open up.”[55] That is, physical touch in the film becomes conflated with other bodily senses, including vision and sight. Hammer explains:

When I had my experience coming out in 1970, I touched a woman’s body for the first time when we made love. All the corpuscles on my skin were highly charged by touching a body similar to my own. I think that my sense of sight is connected to my sense of touch.[56]

 I think here of the Code scrolled over the intertwined, writhing bodies of the gay men or the deep, throaty voiced refrain of Claire Waldo’s “I tell you we must die” echoing out and over the leather dykes as they strike each other. Like Hammer’s polymorphous, archival touch, Williams explains that sex no longer “takes place at a single moment in a single event,” rather it may unfold across different temporalities and bodies.[57] The different forms of pleasure, desire, and sex that ripple through Nitrate Kisses elucidate the contrasting modes or practices of survival adopted by queer people in the face of death or erasure. Touch, though, is dangerous, or perhaps, what prompts touch is dangerous. The sex scenes in Hammer’s film, toeing the line of pornographic cinema, are driven by tension, a fear even, that “we may be ineluctably drawn to touch [the] images, to touch ourselves, or to touch others.”[58] But as Hammer asserts conclusively, “it is necessary to be touched.”[59] Physical touch and sex in Nitrate Kisses does not undo the past loss of queer life. Yet, sex, eroticism and physical touch, framed in Nitrate Kisses through the use of archival materials, are able to grow a cross-temporal queer figure capable of surviving into the future. It is through Hammer’s subversive archival practices that the bodies in Nitrate Kisses – the elderly lesbian couple, the gay male couple, and the leather dykes – stand as incarnations of this figure of queer futurity, something or someone that secures queer survival by combatting loss, trauma, and pain with pleasure.

Notes

[1] Alana Kumbier, Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive (Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, 2014) 3.

[2] Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011) 116.

[3] Freeman, Time Binds, 96.

[4] Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) 1.

[5] Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008) 259.

[6] Chuck Kleinhans, “Barbara Hammer: Lyrics and History” in Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks, ed. by Robin Blaetz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) 168.

[7] Thomas Waugh, The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000) 239.

[8] Ara Osterweil, Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-garde Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014) 14.

[9] Ara Osterweil and David Baumfleck, “Emergent Bodies: Human, All Too Human, Post Human” in The Anatomy of Body Worlds: Critical Essays on the Plastinated Cadavers of Gunther Von Hagens, ed. by T. Christine Jespersen, Alicita Rodríguez, and Joseph Starr (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009) 190.

[10] Waugh, The Fruit Machine, 144.

[11] Love, Feeling Backward, 1.

[12] Love, Feeling Backward, 21.

[13] Love, Feeling Backward, 42.

[14] Ann Cvetkovich, “In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings: Documentary and Popular Culture,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 110. September 6th 2021, DOI:10.1215/02705346-17-1_49-107.

[15] Freeman, Time Binds, 58.

[16] Freeman, Time Binds, 96.

[17] Freeman, Time Binds, 56.

[18] Nick Davis, The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 190.

[19] Davis, The Desiring-Image, 25.

[20] Margrit Shildrick, “Prosthetic Performativity: Deleuzian Connections and Queer Corporealities” in Deleuze and Queer Theory, ed. by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) 127.

[21] Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin, Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) 36.

[22] Tanya Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema (London: Wallflower Press, 2006) 84.

[23] Laura Mulvey and Martine Beugnet, “Corporeality, Transgressive Cinema: A Feminist Perspective” in Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015) 190.

[24] Teresa Rizzo, Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction (London: Continuum, 2012) 52.

[25] Davis, The Desiring-Image, 17. 

[26] Shildrick, “Prosthetic Performativity,” 121.

[27] Davis, The Desiring-Image, 12.

[28] Timo Airaksinen “The Language of Pain: A Philosophical Study of BDSM” SAGE 8, no. 2 (2018): 1. September 9th 2021, DOI;215824401877173.

[29] Vivien Burr and Jeff Hearn, Sex, Violence and the Body: The Erotics of Wounding (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 2.

[30] Burr and Hearn, Sex, Violence and the Body, 2

[31] Greg Youmans, “Performing Essentialism: Reassessing Barbara Hammer’s Films of the 1970s,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 27 no. 3 (2012): 105. September 7th 2021. DOI:10.1215/02705346-1727473.

[32] Anthony McCosker, “Transformations of Pain: Erotic Encounters with Crash,” in Sex,Violence and the Body: The Erotics of Wounding, ed. by Vivien Burr and Jeff Hearn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 104.

[33] Chrysanthi Nigianni, “Butterfly Kiss: The Contagious Kiss of Becoming-Lesbian,” in Deleuze and Queer Theory, edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) 169.

[34] Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing (London: Routledge, 2005) 29.

[35] Ruby Rich, Chick Flicks, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) 200.

[36] Alexandra Juhasz, “Bad Girls Come and Go, but a Lying Girl Can Never Be Fenced in” in Feminism and Documentary, ed. by Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 96.

[37] Osterweil and Baumfleck, “Emergent Bodies,” 241.

[38] Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, Feminism and Documentary (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 13.

[39] Ara Osterweil, “A Body Is Not a Metaphor: Barbara Hammer’s X-Ray Vision,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 14, no. 2-3 (2010): 193. September 16th 2021,  DOI:10.1080/10894160903196533.

[40] Jacquelyn Zita, “The Films of Barbara Hammer: Counter­currencies of a Lesbian Iconography” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media no. 24 (1981): 15. September 7th 2021. https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC24-25folder/BarbaraHammerZita.html

[41] Anna Cooper Albright, “Touching History” in Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, ed. by Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018) 73.

[42] Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland, Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory.(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018) 6.

[43] Ivo Van Hove, “The Body Makes You Remember” In Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, ed.by Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018) 72.

[44] Freeman, Time Binds, 109.

[45] Freeman, Time Binds, 105.

[46] Julie Enszer, “Feverishly Lesbian-Feminist: Archival Objects and Queer Desires” in Out of the Closet, into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, ed. by Amy Stone and Jamie Cantrell (Paw Prints, 2016) 166.

[47] Lucas Hilderbrand, “Sex Out of Sync: Christmas on Earth’s and Couch’s Queer Sound Tracks,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 28, no. 2 (2013): 45. September 9th  2021, DOI:10.1215/02705346-2209916.

[48] Hilderbrand, “Sex Out of Sync,” 1.

[49] Freeman, Time Binds, 123.

[50] Freeman, Time Binds, 123.

[51] Osterweil, “A Body is Not a Metaphor,” 190.

[52] Tomie Hahn, “Stalking Embodied Knowledge—Then What?” in Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, ed. by Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018) 34.

[53] Gerda Cammaer, “Canadian Cinema, Ephemeral Cinema” in Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada, ed. by Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014) 289.

[54] Diane Waldman and Janet Walker. Feminism and Documentary (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 21.

[55] Hilderbrand, “Sex Out of Sync,” 53.

[56] John David Rhodes, “This Was Not Cinema: Judgment, Action, and Barbara Hammer,” Film Criticism 39, no.1(2015): 115.

[57] Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “frenzy of the Visible”(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010) 262.

[58] Kelly Dennis, Art/porn: A History of Seeing and Touching (Oxford: Berg, 2009) 3.

[59] Rhodes, “This Was Not Cinema,” 120.

 

Bibliography

Airaksinen, Timo. “The Language of Pain: A Philosophical Study of BDSM.” Sexualities, no. 2 (2018). 1-9. September 9th 2021, DOI;215824401877173. doi:10.1177/2158244018771730.

Albright, Anna C. “Touching History.” In Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, edited by Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland, 73-74. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018.

Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.

Bissell, Bill, and Linda Haviland. Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018.

Burr, Vivien, and Jeff Hearn. Sex, Violence and the Body: The Erotics of Wounding. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Cammaer, Gerda. “Canadian Cinema, Ephemeral Cinema.” In Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada, edited by Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer, 284-93. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014.

Cixous, Hélène, and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. London: Routledge, 2005.

Cvetkovich, Ann. “In the Archives of Lesbian Feelings: Documentary and Popular Culture.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 107-47. September 6th 2021, DOI:10.1215/02705346-17-1_49-107.

Davis, Nick. The Desiring-image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Dennis, Kelly. Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching. Oxford: Berg, 2009.

Enszer, Julie. “Feverishly Lesbian-Feminist: Archival Objects and Queer Desires.” In Out of the Closet, into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, edited by Amy Stone and Jamie Cantrell, 149-70. Paw Prints, 2016.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Hahn, Tomie. “Stalking Embodied Knowledge – Then What?” In Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, edited by Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland, 28-34. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018.

Hilderbrand, Lucas. “Sex Out of Sync: Christmas on Earth’s and Couch’s Queer Sound Tracks.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 28, no. 2 (2013): 45-75. September 9th 2021, DOI:10.1215/02705346-2209916.

Hove, Ivo Van. “The Body Makes You Remember.” In Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, edited by Bill Bissell and Linda Haviland, 72. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018.

Juhasz, Alexandra. “Bad Girls Come and Go, but a Lying Girl Can Never Be Fenced in.” In Feminism and Documentary, edited by Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, 95-110. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Kleinhans, Chuck. “Barbara Hammer: Lyrics and History.” In Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks, edited by Robin Blaetz, 167-86. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Krzywinska, Tanya. Sex and the Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2006.

Kumbier, Alana. Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, 2014.

Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

McCosker, Anthony. “Transformations of Pain: Erotic Encounters with Crash.” In Sex, Violence and the Body: The Erotics of Wounding, edited by Vivien Burr and Jeff Hearn, 10. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Mulvey, Laura, and Martine Beugnet. “Corporeality, Transgressive Cinema: A Feminist Perspective.” In Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures, 190-202. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015.

Nigianni, Chrysanthi. “Butterfly Kiss: The Contagious Kiss of Becoming-Lesbian.” In Deleuze and Queer Theory, edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, 168-78. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Osterweil, Ara, and David Baumflek. “Emergent Bodies: Human, All Too Human, Post Human.” In The Anatomy of Body Worlds: Critical Essays on the Plastinated Cadavers of Gunther Von Hagens, edited by T. Christine Jespersen, Alicita Rodríguez, and Joseph Starr, 240-58. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009.

Osterweil, Ara. “A Body Is Not a Metaphor: Barbara Hammer’s X-Ray Vision.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 14, no. 2-3 (2010): 185-200. September 16th 2021,  DOI:10.1080/10894160903196533.

Osterweil, Ara. Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-garde Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.

Rich, B. R. Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

Rizzo, Teresa. Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction. London: Continuum, 2012.

Rhodes, John David. “This Was Not Cinema: Judgment, Action, and Barbara Hammer.” Film Criticism 39, no. 1 (2015): 115-58.

Shildrick, Margrit. “Prosthetic Performativity: Deleuzian Connections and Queer Corporealities.” In Deleuze and Queer Theory, edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr, 116-28. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Waugh, Thomas. The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Waldman, Diane and Janet Walker. Feminism and Documentary. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010.

Williams, Linda. Screening Sex. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Youmans, Greg. “Performing Essentialism: Reassessing Barbara Hammer’s Films of the 1970s.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 27, no. 3 (2012): 101-35. September 7th 2021. doi:10.1215/02705346-1727473.

Zita, Jacquelyn. “The Films of Barbara Hammer: Counter­Currencies of a Lesbian Iconography.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 24 (1981): 2-18. September 7th 2021. https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC24-25folder/BarbaraHammerZita.html

Filmography

Barbara Hammer, Nitrate Kisses, directed by Barbara Hammer (1990; New York City, USA: 1992), film (DVD).

Lot in Sodom, directed by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber (1993; USA: 1993), film.

Mädchen in Uniform, directed by Leontine Sagan (1931; Germany: 1931), film

The Children’s Hour, directed by William Wyler (1961; USA: 1961), film.

Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (1940; USA: 1940), film.

 

Author Biography

Rachel Lallouz is a PhD student, editor, and creative writer in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada). Her primary areas of research include queer theory and contemporary art, autobiography, and queer-feminist medical humanities. Her research is funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Award.

DOI:10.15664/fcj.v19i0.2381

 

“Welcome to the exercise show!” a boy’s voice announces, his palm covering the phone camera lens. “Today you’ll be seeing our coaches…let’s start!” He lowers his hand to reveal two white, healthy-looking six-year-olds in school clothes. They look at each other and giggle. “Ten jumping jacks!” says the off-camera voice. The kids count together as they bounce up and down in syncopation, arms flailing. “Five push-ups!” The children move to the floor, moving to an exercise that resembles frog jumps. When they have finished the set, they turn towards each other, grinning widely, pleased with their accomplishment.

This video of the younger children at a family gathering was taken on my sister’s phone by her elder child. None of the adults in the home were aware of the recording until later that evening, when she discovered it on her phone. From there it was sent to me and other relatives. I then forwarded it to a friend in Barbados, who participates in an online fitness group with her friends, a group of middle-aged Black women of the African diaspora, spread out across the globe. She then passed the video on to them. A minute’s worth of living room child’s play had made it to several continents in less than a day, moving across geographies, generations, cultures, and racial identities.

What kind of video is this? It is not purely what we have come to think of as the home movie, in which only “invested spectators”– those who care about the children involved in its production – have a stake or interest in watching, preserving, or circulating the text.[1] Viewers beyond the family saw it even before some of the children’s parents. And despite its resemblance to online video memes (in both length and content), it is not exactly what is typically thought of as social media either, because it was circulated through direct, private messaging rather than through online social networks (such as Facebook or Instagram) or discovered by viewers through video search outcomes (as we would expect from video sharing platforms like YouTube or Vimeo). What, then, if it were to be posted on an online sharing platform and happened to go viral and earn profit for the person who posted it? The actual and potential lifecycle of this particular video points to a myriad of questions about for whom this video holds meaning. It matters who holds power over how that video might be appropriated, manipulated, monetised, or preserved. Its particular production and circulation path troubles existing categories of non-professional media, as does the content.

Archives of personal, family, or community media have always been rich and complex sites of analysis, albeit relatively closed ones. However, when we now upload personal media to video sharing platforms we subject them not only to new economies of scale, but of meaning and audience as well.[2] One’s personal media, once posted online, has the potential to reach millions of strangers, whose responses and interpretations will most certainly differ, reflecting new meaning back onto the text through comments and how, when, and to whom it is circulated. This is compounded by the fact that it is almost impossible to possess or destroy a home movie once it is uploaded to an online platform. Someone may choose to remove the video, but that does not protect against prior downloads or the likely possibility that the file will remain on the platform’s server. It is in these ways that the video text and its interpretation become quite literally out of the hands of the makers and subjects. Is the category of the home movie even useful in discussing the production and circulation of digital self-made media?

The capacities and uses of digital recording technologies and online file sharing platforms have complicated the status of the category of home movies and necessitate a revision to the analytical frameworks that several scholars have offered in the past. We are therefore compelled to confront a lacuna in the field of Cinema and Media Studies, a gap in language and theory for media that troubles the line between familiar amateur or nonprofessional forms, and what is commonly considered to be social media production. This essay puts home movie scholarship from the field of Cinema and Media Studies into conversation with digital media studies to examine the cataclysmic encounter between personal and social media production, circulation, and archival practice, in order to explore what might be revealed about the machinations of capitalist and datalogical forces regarding what gets produced, what gets circulated, what gets preserved, and why.

While the ubiquity of mobile media has enabled self-produced videos to become a fixture of popular culture, the prolific use of platforms such as YouTube and TikTok now requires us to take stock of how systems of producing, organising, and circulating this media are impacted by corporate profit motives, backend functionalities of the sites, and the inherent social bias embedded in them due to their existence within technosocial artifacts of racial capitalism.[3]

This essay questions what is valuable from the study of home movies that might help us to elucidate changes in self-made media making, and where are we pushed to find new taxonomies for understanding contemporary practices and their import.

A Brief Overview of the (Fragile) Category of Home Movies

Home movies have historically shared common characteristics and aesthetics over many decades, and across media technologies. The common home movie conventions have become recognisable – from the shaky handheld camera, lack of professional lighting or sound, and grainy or pixelated footage, film stock or tape quality[4] to the tacit acknowledgement from the subject(s) that they are aware of the camera.[5] The home movie look has been relentlessly reproduced because of its familiarity as a form. Its formal characteristics have even become shorthand in many narrative and documentary films and television shows to signify realism, historical evidence, nostalgia, or a behind-the-scenes vantage point. Several video editing software programs now include “home movie” filters to give footage the look of small gauge film stock. Home movie clips, even the apocryphal ones created for narrative fiction programs, provide an intimacy through suggested access to more private moments – a backstage or backstory for the characters. Filmmaker and scholar Michelle Citron suggests that home movies construct “necessary fictions” used to shape specific narratives, rather than serving simply as recorded evidence of the particular dynamics or details of a family’s past.[6] The common use of home movies as quotations in fictional and documentary texts therefore underscores the paradox of the home movie genre itself; while they are used by makers and audiences as a way of presumably indexing the real, home movies only deepen or complicate stories that are being told.

Home movies, as a category, have had a niche role in the last several decades of cinema and media scholarship. The widespread access to imaging technologies after World War II encouraged many scholars to begin to consider the home movie to be as worthy of study as broadcast or commercial media.[7] Visual anthropologist Richard Chalfen’s 1986 book Snapshot Versions of Life continues to provide a particularly useful framework for understanding the conventions and communicative purpose of homemade media, specifically, for its introduction of the concept of the home mode of media production.[8] Beginning with the premise that the home is not just a geographic but a conceptual space that is continually remade and reaffirmed through symbolic mediation, Chalfen describes the ways in which home is imagined through homemade media production while distinguishing personal and private features of home mode communication from mass modes of communication.

The category of the home mode draws boundaries around an autonomous field of practice in which amateur representations of domestic life and other things known to the invested spectator are produced to be (re)viewed by those within a delimited sphere that excludes strangers and mass audiences. Chalfen argues that the home mode must be studied distinctly from the professional formal codes, commercial system of exchange, and public context of typical image production. He argues that home movies, like family photo albums and other cultural artifacts, are produced in the home mode and therefore possess clearly defined conventions for the types of images produced, the circumstances under which they are made, and the kind of people and events that can be represented. In this way, the home mode is a means to symbolically unite the community through a visual network of social relationships. Home mode artifacts hold an important cultural function in the retention of details of people, places and events.

In the pre-digital time of Chalfen’s writing, he noted that home mode media had autobiographical functions – to represent the events of one’s own life, and to observe one’s image in action, as well as rites of passage and seeing one’s place in relation to others in the family. These functions have been used by families as performances of membership, identity and lifestyle, and they have enabled individuals to produce and circulate their own images, measure them against other images, and negotiate their place in a mediated culture.[9] As a result, and perhaps most vital to our definition of the home movie form for the purposes of this article, viewers who were not already connected to the diegetic world of the home movie were therefore less able to draw on its contextual, intertextual, and indexical references. The symbolic world at the time of Chalfen’s writing of the late 1980s was a relatively closed one. In other words, if you did not know or care about anyone in a given home movie, you would be less likely to care or want to watch it. If you have ever been asked to sit through another family’s home movies, you have likely already discovered the truth in the claim.

We can utilise the concept of the home mode to account for contemporary media making practices because it is not simply a technological device deployed in a private setting (the family) but an active mode of media production representing everyday life: “a liminal space in which practitioners may explore and negotiate the competing demands of their public, communal and private personal identities.”[10] The home mode provides a flexible lens with which to examine home movie production practice across time and technologies, and is therefore useful to us in our studies of contemporary online digital media in both formal characteristics and semiotics. In addition to the continuing impact of the specificities of the media that is used for recording and playback, the home mode is shaped by technological and economic structures.

Invoking Chalfen’s original description of the home mode, film scholar James Moran, who was writing in the context of analogue video of the 1990s, reminds us that rather than existing solely at the service of a nuclear family, the home mode works to construct an image of home as a “cognitive and affective foundation [for] situating ourselves in the world.”[11] It also temporally situates, family members as it serves as material evidence of generational continuity – of one’s connections to others, groups, rituals, and traditions. The act of video recording itself becomes an active tie that binds. Moran argues that the home mode has become more elastic to accommodate the shifts in familial constitution and dynamics, while families have continued to use the home mode to articulate and make visible their relationship.[12]

Using the symbolic work of home movie texts, other cinema and media scholars and practitioners have provided ways to think of home movie production and preservation as a site of ideological (re)production. As Patricia Zimmerman argues in her ground-breaking 1995 book Reel Families, home movie making practices, and their resulting image memories, serve an ideological function beyond the family dynamic. Writing at a time when VHS recording technologies made home movie recording, transfer and duplication more widespread, her historical study of nonprofessional film from 1897 until the mid-1990s considers the ways in which amateur film is “not simply an inert designation of inferior film practice and ideology but rather is a historical process of social control over representation.”[13] Zimmerman observes that ideology flowed through the home movie maker, often a family patriarch, who had the resources to buy a camera and process films, frequently relying on instruction manuals that encouraged particular norms of representation. The home movie obscured class, as well as other kinds of social differences, while promoting the (white, middle-class) nuclear family as the place of leisure and the centre of all meaningful activity. In these ways, she argues, home movies encouraged a retreat from social and political participation as well as family truths. Personal archives of home movies, therefore, can be seen as potent sites of a localised struggle over meaning, which is one reason why utilising home movies in personal documentary and experimental films has been such a compelling technique.[14]

Just as home movies in the personal sphere, through their organisation and use, have been part of an exercise of power, home movies have also historically been used in the production of and resistance to state and imperial power. Scholars such as Veena Hariharron and Julia Nordegraaf and Elvira Louw have illustrated how colonial archives of movies of everyday life of white settlers and bureaucrats were used to exert power by fortifying the colonial logics of domination and subordination and colonial ways of seeing the colonised other.[15] Just as many independent professional filmmakers have reworked their personal home movies to make interventions into family representation, many others have also used home movies to resist dominant state narratives.[16] And, with the ubiquity of digital, online video, anyone with an internet connection, a smartphone camera, and the appropriate software can edit videos to remix their personal media collection with available professional media. As YouTube proliferates with fanvids and remixes, critiquing state power has become common social media fare.[17]

Expanding the home mode; challenging the archive

The audience for home movies prior to online video sharing platforms was typically limited to private viewings by technology, too, as sharing movies was not possible without duplicating the footage and securing technologies for playback. For these reasons, home movies were rarely seen by others outside of the family or community depicted. With the introduction of consumer video in the late 1970s, however, amateur recording and reproduction devices proliferated, making home movie production more portable, less expensive, and simpler to use, widening the scope of who and what could be recorded and shared. Even so, with rare exceptions, home movie circulation was still limited to existing personal networks.

Recognising the value of home mode media as a site of communication and meaning-production, there have been efforts on the part of several institutions, scholars, and organisations to collect “orphan” and “found” films, discern their provenance, screen, and catalogue them, as well as to collect the home movies of marginalised makers and make them available to researchers, artists, historians, genealogists, and community residents. There is an existing foundation of resources and networks that have been active in finding, organising, screening, archiving, contextualising, and circulating analogue media that might have otherwise found itself in a landfill or passed from attic to yard sale and back again.[18]  This includes the work of the Center for Home Movies, which has long organised public and community-based screenings of personal and “found” home movies, Rick Prelinger’s gargantuan efforts to upload and make available found, donated, and open-source audio-visual media files through Archive.org, the traveling Found Footage Film Festival, and the archives at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Prominent among the many community history projects that exist is film scholar Jacqueline Stewart’s South Side Home Movie Project (SSHMP) which was launched in 2005 as “an archival and research initiative to collect, preserve and exhibit amateur films from Chicago’s South Side” to correct the “notable absence of home movies (especially from minorities) in the canon of film scholarship.”[19] Increased public availability of home movies provides access to individual and family self-representations; at the same time, it also makes possible the use of home movies as a vital access point for academic approaches that trace the home movie’s journey from official history to the more variegated and multiple practices of individual and collective memory.[20]

As Jasmyn Castro argues in relation to the home movies of Black families and communities, while they were initially recorded for the intention of private viewing, they ultimately “operate outside of the representational norms of mainstream theatrical media and thereby [are] able to transcend its limitations.”[21] In doing so, they “redefine mis-and-underrepresented Black communities; they provide an intimate moving image record that complements and counters the often-negative imagery in the media” while providing a resource for “re-examining and understanding the African American experience.”[22] The home media archive therefore works in contradistinction to commercial film of the same era of their production, what Castro calls the “microhistories that challenge the parameters of broader histories and film canons.”[23] Yet, as much as home movies have the potential to present “plural pasts” that challenge dominant representations, Crystal Mun-Hye Baik warns us not to see them solely as an “oppositional schematic of power,” but rather as full of contradictions that reflect the complexity of everyday life, a place to “track the discursive tensions” that emerge from the pairing of the everyday with a yearning for visibility.[24]

Baik urges us to consider the ways in which archives of historical home movies – whether they are in a family attic or a museum – are always remediated, generating new inscriptions of meaning through the act of curatorial decisions. As Stewart explains of her work with the SSHMP, the act of constructing a catalogue requires the archivist to contend with “overwhelming detail.” Specific taxonomies and metadata are most useful when the archivist has additional context through oral histories and active participation with those who have connections to the texts.[25] In the archivist’s struggle to organise and make these home movie collections legible to the public, we are reminded the extent to which the arrangement and categorisation of any given archive and its parent organisation shapes the meaning surrounding its artifacts.[26]

These scholars gesture here not just to the incredible labour of home movie archiving and the process of remediating, but also to the process of signification and resignification that occurs along the way. The meaning that is inscribed through the cataloguing, screening, and circulation of home movies, hits high velocity with file sharing technology. Recent online video sharing platforms such as YouTube, and other file sharing applications have catapulted home mode media originally produced in the domestic sphere into the public realm. As a result, a vast and expanding international archive of home movies has begun to further complicate boundaries of public and private while demanding attention to its ongoing significance across geographies, families, cultures, time, and technological platforms.[27] There are the obvious transformations, such as the ubiquity of high-definition cameras, online digital storage, and the ability to instantly share media to an unlimited audience across tremendous distances, and these changes have certainly shaped what is produced and shared. But I seek to draw attention to the less visible machinations of online media platforms and the ways they disrupt the concept of the home mode. Wider circulation adds complexity to the increased intermingling of amateur and commercial production[28] while it amplifies an already common “amateur vernacular.”[29] A combination of regulatory, technological, monetary, and social forces have come to bear on content and circulation. In what follows I point to several important shifts, aiming to bring digital media research to bear on our discussion.

Platforms as Archive and Curator

Prior to the ubiquity of mobile media and file sharing platforms, most home movie collections had been stored, maintained, or discarded by someone with a close (typically familial) connection to the people depicted. Artifacts of the domestic sphere and community life that typically wound up as part of the detritus and heirlooms of estates, their full context was unlikely to be understood by outsiders well enough for archival or even screening purposes.[30] Even most of the home movies that found their way into museum or library archives had very few people involved interacting with them.  Home movies were also, by-and-large, not monetised – with the notable exceptions of Kato-chan Ken-chan Gokigen TV in Japan (1986 debut), the long-running hit television program and franchise America’s Funniest Home Videos (1989 debut), and other international spinoffs which solicited viewers to submit videotaped clips of home movies for possible broadcast and prize money.

I am using the term “archive” as a term for sites for file storage, organisation, and narrativisation as opposed to a “collection,” which refers more to accumulation and private meaning to the collector, than use.[31] Referring to online video sharing platforms as archives is a complicated issue, as online file sharing platforms to date have not defined themselves as such. If anything, the disappearance or difficulty of finding videos online is more of a defining feature than any kind of reliable preservation and organisation system. However, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook have become ad hoc and default archives for many home mode movies, as many people have posted there in order to share widely within and beyond their networks. In doing so, they have, perhaps inadvertently, submitted their content (and rights to it) to the platform, in perpetuity. Yet while many users rely on platforms to host their videos, the actualities of how, where, and when the content is viewed and circulated are in part impacted by the laws and regulations (in most cases, the lack of regulations) that govern the platforms.

Conversely, some individuals, organisations, and institutions may intentionally use these platforms as an archive for their media, without necessarily knowing (or understanding) the terms and conditions that will shape the video’s half-life. In other words, while these platforms may appear to function as archives for long-term storage and access, the actual functionality and fickleness of the systems in play betrays that potential. If we do accept these platforms as de facto archives, we must ask: who or what, then, is the archon, organising and systematising the files? We know that what can be seen by an individual user at any given time is a product of what search terms they have used, along with the meta-data and algorithms that shape what is viewable to them. That is very different from a grandparent making decisions about whether to transfer and duplicate the family’s VHS home movies for the family or a community collecting the home movies they have gathered from others to develop a local archive for future historiography and identity formation.

The organisational logic of contemporary user-produced file sharing platforms is structured around optimising reach, and ultimately profit. Meta-data (the information users enter about their videos, including hashtags) and algorithms (embedded formulas that determine which videos play when and for whom) structure the user experience. Home mode media, then, is subject to the logics of the platform to determine its audience, and in turn, the audience to determine its lifecycle. As a result, videos are distributed and decontextualised from the family or home mode context and re-contextualised within streams of content chosen by the platform. For example, imagine a video of a person making a wedding toast. The toast was then posted on YouTube and watched by not only the attendees and people who could not make it to the event, but by others to whom the video was suggested when they typed in search terms that matched the keyword tags. Search words like “weddings” or “toasts;” might call up this specific video, but even some seemingly minute detail or subjective reading such as “bridesmaid in ugly dress” or “funny speeches.” Even suggestions of broadcast clips such as “Wedding Toast – Saturday Night Live” or infotainment from topic-related organisations such as the public speaking club Toastmasters offering “Toastmasters Wedding Toast Tips” might come up. Whatever meaning the invested spectators of the initial wedding event might attribute to the subsequent video is situated in intertextual flows of meaning, by the algorithms that guide associations between videos. While the complexity of search terms and results also impacts the archives of home movies in general, what I aim to draw attention to here is how results found through online for-profit video sharing platforms organise home movies according to monetary logics – what is most liked, shared, commented on and therefore, monetisable. Video content is bound up in advertising revenue, and the profit-oriented structures of the site. Viewers are directed towards content that has proven itself successful according to these governing principles.

Platforms have Politics

As scholars of media and technology such as Tarleton Gillespie, Sofia Ujuoma Noble and Ruha Benjamin have all argued, online platforms are not neutral.[32] They have existing politics that determine development and coding systems and the ways they are taken up by users often reflects and reinscribes social biases. Moreover, depending on their governing and regulatory structures, such as what counts as “offensive” or the flagging or blocking of copyrighted content, media sharing platforms will impose particular norms upon the videos that they host. At this very basic level, the invisible structures on the platform are already shaping what we do and do not see of other users’ videos. On YouTube, community (also read as corporate-mandated) guidelines are literally presented as “common sense principles.”[33] It is assumed that users will have an intuitive sense of what to post or not to post. And yet, that videos that circulate do so is because of their successful harnessing of algorithms and manoeuvring within a (digital) attention economy rather than due to their inherent social value. Evaluative structures, such as the “likes”, “hearts”, and “shares” found on many platforms, are known to boost attention, and further ensure the spreadability of the video.[34] Video recommendations on YouTube, much like the automatic replenishing of videos on TikTok, are based on browsing history and the keywords and metadata attached to videos one has watched previously. When we treat platforms as neutral systems, and as de facto video archives, we fail to see how our encounters with these systems are shaped by their systems at every level.

Algorithms are designed to keep you watching.[35] This is because a user’s time online produces capital, for the person who posted, as well as for advertisers, and investors through digital labour that may be experienced by users as pleasure or even fandom.[36] The social capital of “likes” and “shares” is rewarded with monetary capital to the content creator, which is tied up in profit generated by the platform through its corporate relationships, and increasingly, directly to content producers as they acquire “influencer” status (meaning that they have large followings to their social media accounts that they leverage to persuade people to buy or use products and services).[37] Capital is produced even when online file sharing platforms are not the vehicles of circulation. The circulation of the video of the children playing discussed at the start of this article, sent via an enriched online messaging platform, is an example of this. Circulation of the video was fully reliant on the makers and viewers having access to the technologies, broadband infrastructure (WiFi with the necessary speed), and storage capacity to record and/or share the video. Each share represents an investment and reliance on those systems that, while not immediately recognisable as bound up in capital, are, in the truest global sense. If the video were to be uploaded online and circulated through a platform like YouTube or TikTok, it is possible that, depending on how it was tagged and thereby framed for the audience, it could be monetisable to the person who posted it. We know that the home mode has truly moved out of the domestic sphere when we consider that any one of the current or future recipients of the video could choose to post it online and, if it were to circulate widely, profit from it.

Home movie aesthetics and conventions, and what they signal, have played an important role in the success of YouTube, TikTok and other platforms that are used for sharing user-produced videos. With the advent of viral videos and subsequent monetisation, a market opened for home movie uploads, particularly ones that mimicked successful formulas that had been codified through America’s Funniest Home Videos and its spinoffs years earlier.[38] AFHV and its lookalikes first introduced the idea that home movies could be mass entertainment that could attract sponsors, while the prize categories on the program organised videos into tropes that possible contributors could select or perform content for. Online meme culture resembles this self-fulfilling cultural production; easily reproduceable, imitated, or parodied content begets more of the same, hence the relentlessness of participatory viral video trends, like families doing choreographed dances (such as the “Nobody Dance” challenge) or clips of couples pranking each other (#couplecomedy).[39]

When the formula is subverted, as in the example of the video Shanika Bradshaw posted of her 103-year-old grandmother Madie Scott answering questions about what it was like to pick cotton in Georgia when she was a young girl (on TikTok as @blackbeauty_3), there is promise that the platform may yield the kind of archive of oral history that might empower the descendants of African American sharecroppers and formerly enslaved people in ways that home movie archivists have sought to do.[40] The conversation between granddaughter and grandmother possesses home mode characteristics – a nonprofessional recording device and an intimate conversation between the two in which Bradshaw sounds genuinely surprised at aspects of her grandmother’s story, as a television plays loudly in the background. Yet at the same time, we see the home mode being redefined in the intentional editing down to soundbites for a wider audience, and the additional overlay of text “Me asking my grandma about picking cotton.” What’s more, there is description below the video that encapsulates the most shocking aspects of Scott’s three-minute story: “Grandma picked cotton from 3am to 5pm every day. She was paid barely anything. Smh! #storytime.” There is communication happening within the family as Scott shares her story with her kin, but further, through Bradshaw’s editing and posting choices, communication also takes place with an imagined audience. That audience was not only hailed when Bradshaw posted the video to TikTok, but when she added a Twitter hashtag to circulate it by way of an additional platform.

The media buzz inspired by the virality of Bradshaw’s video suggests its reach and impact. However, on the platform itself, there is no “outside” of existing profit structures. While Bradshaw and her grandmother may ultimately get paid for the views of the video, the platform profits from its circulation. The media outlets that have publicised the human interest and historical value of the video also profit from this content, such as People Magazine, the NY Post, and The Independent. What comments will appear, who shares the video, and with what framing is beyond Bradshaw (and certainly her grandmother’s) control. In this way, the platform acts as archon, constantly re-contextualising the video in new ways to new people in response to user clicks, comments, and shares.

While the video depicts Scott telling an important part of her history, and the history of racial injustice in the United States more generally, Bradshaw’s lack of control over the interpretation, framing, circulation, and use of the video once it is circulating through the platform, is potentially troubling. Ruha Benjamin warns that the tenets of racial capitalism are encoded into media technologies like TikTok, as the technosocial structures that undergird online video file sharing platforms work to reproduce existing biases.[41] She writes of what she pointedly identifies as a “New Jim Code,” in which recent technologies invoke discriminatory practices of previous eras while claiming to be more objective or progressive. It is the perceived neutrality of these technologies that is dangerous, for they continue to do the work of reproducing inequality and racist ideologies, further obscuring how Black people’s labour and bodies continue to produce capital for white entities. Sheldon Pearse has written about how despite the diversity of TikTok content producers, the most visible and most followed TikTok trends feature white stars, often “feed[ing] off of the content of smaller users in an act of vampirism, growing stronger as competitors wither away, using culture as a commodity to maintain their positions.” Black cultural production is thereby credited to white producers. And as Safiya Noble underscores in Algorithms of Oppression, the pornographic and anti-Black results that appear when conducting a Google search for “Black girls” emerges from either “corporate logic of either wilful neglect or a profit motive that makes money from racism and sexism.” [42] It is of critical importance for scholars in the field to identify, analyse, and help undo the white supremacist architectures of the platforms we examine. Even though online video file-sharing platforms may appear to enhance the visibility of people at the margins, we must look to the structures that condition, and profit from, their participation.

Conclusion

Online practices of self-representation challenge earlier frameworks of “amateur” and “non-professional” media production by opening up onto different kinds of capitalist relations as they expand on existing notions of how we think about “home” and other personal/domestic spheres. As we consider the status of home movies in the online digital landscape, it is important to consider the ways home mode communication is no longer simply adjacent to commercial media practices, but rather, part of a diverse, self-made media production ecology that is contiguous with other commercial and profit-oriented media practices. The home mode of making, as we have understood it as a field, has been replaced by personal media that has been sculpted by makers and algorithms to deliver clicks, likes, shares, and ultimately, profit. The representation of the personal sphere, performance for a possibly unknown audience, and the overlapping of circuits of meaning that are inscribed and reinscribed through online video-circulation puts pressure on existing taxonomies and frameworks.

Online video platforms and the media they store and circulate now structure meaning and reinscribe relationships of power within and among home mode representations while pushing us to attend to the curatorial power of the systems and entities that shape what circulates, how it does, and why. Of importance is attention to how capital flows through these systems, commodifying images, affect, gestures, expression, movement, sounds, and desire, and how and where existing social biases are reproduced or challenged.

Notes

[1] Richard Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1987), 11.

[2] José Van Dijck, Mediated Memories: Personal Cultural Memory in the Digital Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

[3] Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Crow (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019).

[4] Vivian Sobchack. “‘Me, Myself, and I’: On the Uncanny in Home Movies” in The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier: Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions, eds. Julian Hanich and Daniel Fairfax (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 205-217.

[5] Liz Czach,“Acting and Performance in Home Movies and Amateur Films” in Theorizing Film Acting, ed. Aaron Taylor, (Routledge, 2012), 160-174.

[6] Michelle Citron, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

[7] Erens, Patricia, ed. “The Galler Home Movies: A Case Study.” In The Journal of Film and Video 38 (nos. 3-4 summer-fall 1986: 15-24), 4.

[8] In his study, Chalfen analysed home movies shot between 1940-1980 by approximately 200 (mostly white upper-middle class) families living in the north-eastern United States, in conjunction with the data from survey questionnaires and interviews collected from the participants. The study is a content analysis of the people who appear in the images and aims to resolve how real-life and symbolic pictorial communities are related to each other, and how on-going human life has been transformed into symbolic representation. Through ethnographic analysis, Chalfen endeavores to resituate the historical importance of the forgotten archives of amateur images. He argues that these images could bring into focus other hidden dimensions of social and cultural significance and work toward (re)interpreting twentieth-century ideals, while providing inroads toward the production and circulation of histories that can challenge those promulgated by (professionally produced) Hollywood cinema and network television

[9] Chalfen,10.

[10] James Moran, There’s No Place Like Home Video (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002),132.

[11] Chalfen, 61

[12] Moran argues that scholars must extend the notion of the home mode “to household, to place of residence, or to a place of origin.” The home mode is “an ideal envisioned as the synthesis of three experimental domains: a personal, private space for memory or solitude; a social, public space for family or group interaction; and a physical space designed for comfort or security.” It is in this expansion of the conception of the home mode that videos of events like protest marches and Pride parades can fit; they are events in which values, traditions and symbols of groups are transmitted and maintained. Moran, 61.

[13] Patricia R. Zimmerman. Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), xv

[14] In tandem with home movie scholarship, many filmmakers have appropriated their own family home movies to destabilise and redress representation in the texts, utilising the home mode as a fluid substrate with which to rewrite personal and family histories. Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim (1990, 16mm, b&w, 48 m), Michelle Citron’s Daughter Rite, Peggy Ahwesh’s From Romance to Ritual (1985) and The Vision Machine (1997), Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (2003), and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (2003).

[15] Veena Hariharan. “At Home in the Empire: Reading Colonial Home Movies—The Hyde Collection (1928–1937).” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 5, no. 1 (January 2014): 49–61; Julia Noordegraaf and Elvira Louw, “Extended Family Films: Home Movies in the State-Sponsored Archive.” Moving Image 9, no. 1 (2009), 98;

Crystal Mun-Hye Baik, “The Right Kind of Family: Memories to Light and the Home Movie as Racialized Technology” in Screening Race in Nontheatrical film, eds, Marsha Gordon and Allyson Nadia Field, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

[16] Karen L. Ishizuka and Broderik Fox have emphasised how resistant ways of seeing are made possible through filmic depictions of the subaltern, highlighting the work that movies made by incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II that provide first-hand accounts of subjugation and the experience of internment. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmerman’s edited collection Mining the Home Movie brings these seemingly contradictory sites of nonprofessional production to the fore to recognize an historical method that finds evidence and draws interpretations of history from the disjunctures and contradictions of plural pasts, while also presenting a quarry of audio-visual details from which to extract information for future inquiry. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman, Patricia R. Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2008); Broderik Fox, “Home Movies and Historiography: Amateur Film’s Re-Vision of Japanese-American Internment,” Spectator 26:2 (Fall 2006): 9-21.

[17] E. Charlotte Stevens defines fanvid as “derived from television and film sources, and approximate commercial music videos in form and duration, but are non-commercial fan works which construct creative and critical analyses of existing media. Vids are currently made and distributed digitally; however, the practice itself predates fandom’s move online. Structurally, a vid is a montage of extracts from media in a personal archive. E. Charlotte Stevens. “On Vidding: The Home Media Archive and Vernacular Historiography” in Cult Media: Re-Packaged, Re-released and Restored, edited by Jonathan Wroot, and Andy Willis (Springer International Publishing, 2017).

[18] Center for Home Movies, https://www.centerforhomemovies.org; Prelinger Archive, https://archive.org/details/prelinger;  Found Footage festival, http://www.foundfootagefest.com/, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://www.si.edu/museums/african-american-museum, The South Side Home Movie Project, Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture https://csrpc.uchicago.edu/programs/projects/sshmp/

[19] The South Side Home Movie Project, Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture https://csrpc.uchicago.edu/programs/projects/sshmp/

[20] Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman, Patricia R. Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2008).

[21] Jasmyn R. Castro, “Black Home Movies: Time to Represent” in Screening Race in Nontheatrical film, eds, Marsha Gordon and Allyson Nadia Field, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

[22] Castro, 373

[23] Castro, 373

[24] Baik, 357

[25] Jacqueline Najuma Stewart. “Giving Voice, Taking Voice: Nonwhite and Theatrical” in Screening Race in Nontheatrical film, eds, Marsha Gordon and Allyson Nadia Field, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), xix

[26] Here I am drawing on the work of Allan Sekula’s seminal essay “The Body and the Archive,” in which he illustrated how the filing cabinet where mugshots were stored actually produced “the criminal” through their organization and use. For Sekula, the apparatus surrounding the visual is what held the meaning even more than the particular images it contained. Sekula, Alan. “The Body and the Archive,” October, (1986) 39, 3-68.

[27] In 2010, the Center for Home Movies held a Digitization and Access Summit at the United States Library of Congress. As the CHM website states, “the Summit participants addressed the technical and legal issues surrounding the digitization of amateur film and video, the role of cataloging and description, and the impact that significantly increased online access to home movies would have on home movie makers, families, researchers, documentary filmmakers and the public.” https://www.centerforhomemovies.org/homemoviesummit.html

[28] For more on the relationship between home movies and television production, see John Thornton Caldwell’s book Televisuality: Style Crisis and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 

[29] I am drawing on Hetrick, who, referring to amateur video practice, uses the term video vernacular as “a new and more precise category to describe nonfiction videos made by untrained camera operators who attempt to realistically reflect life around them. Patricia Aufderheide also uses this term in the 1995 edition of Columbia Journalism Review (33, no. 5).

[30] Dwight Swanson. “The Tantalizing Challenges of the Home Movie Archive,” Velvet Light Trap; Austin Iss. 70,  (Fall 2012): 59-60.

[31] E. Charlotte Stevens. “On Vidding: The Home Media Archive and Vernacular Historiography” in Cult Media: Re-Packaged, Re-released and Restored, edited by Jonathan Wroot, and Andy Willis, Springer International Publishing, 2017, 148.

[32] Tarleton Gillespie, “The Politics of ‘Platforms’” New media & society 12, no. 3 (2010): 347-364, Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018), Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Crow (Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 2019).

[33]Berliner, Lauren S. “Shooting for Profit: The Monetary Logic of the YouTube Home Movie” in Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, ed. Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young and Barry Monahan. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 289-300.

[34] Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media (New York, NY: NYU Press,

2013).

[35] Jia Tolentino, “How Tik Tok Holds our Attention,” The New Yorker, September 23, 2019

[36] Mark Andrejevic. “Estranged free labor.” In Digital labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed Trebor Scholz (Routledge, 2012), 157-172.

[37] “Are Social Media Influencers Worth the Investment”? https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/08/21/are-social-media-influencers-worth-the-investment/?sh=1ff82e32f452

[38] Berliner, 289-300.

[39] #nobodydancevideo, https://www.tiktok.com/tag/nobodydancevideo?referer_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mabelandmoxie.com%2F&referer_video_id=6807326063543274758&refer=embed, accessed December 1, 2021.

“#couplecomedy,” https://www.tiktok.com/tag/couplecomedy?referer_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cosmopolitan.com%2F&referer_video_id=6808982629845634309&refer=embed&is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1, accessed December 1, 2021.

[40]https://www.tiktok.com/@blackbeauty_305?referer_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blackenterprise.com%2F&referer_video_id=7029850485989379333&refer=embed

[41] Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Crow (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019).

[42] Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2018).

 

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Author Biography

Lauren S. Berliner is Associate Professor of Media & Communication Studies and Cultural Studies at University of Washington Bothell where she teaches courses in digital media studies and visual culture.  She is the author of the book Producing Queer Youth: the Paradox of Digital Media Empowerment and co-editor of Feminist Interventions in Participatory Media: Pedagogy, Publics, Practice. Her writing has also appeared in JCMS, The Cine-files, several edited book collections, and can be seen in a forthcoming issue of Feminist Media Histories (Spring 2022) She is also an Associate Director of The Festival of (In)Appropriation, an annual showcase of experimental media.