Cet article examine quatre films d’auteurs gais qui se situent en marge des canons du cinéma au C... more Cet article examine quatre films d’auteurs gais qui se situent en marge des canons du cinéma au Canada et au Québec : À tout prendre, Winter Kept Us Warm, Il était une fois dans l’Est et Outrageous!. Deux de ces films sont de Toronto, deux de Montréal; deux furent produits avant la date charnière 1968/1969, deux après. L’auteur analyse ces oeuvres pionnières du cinéma gai et leurs réceptions par l’intermédiaire des grilles cinéma/culture, sexualité/genre, habitat/nation. Ce sont moins des textes nationaux que des textes urbains qui émergent des configurations cinématographiques, sexuelles et spatiales des deux métropoles qui ont présidé à l’émergence de la modernité canadienne et qui furent les creusets de ces quatre films.
We Demand History Sex Activism in Canada, Nov 24, 2010
The production of moving images, film and video, by Canadian LGBTQ activists during the post-Omni... more The production of moving images, film and video, by Canadian LGBTQ activists during the post-Omnibus/pre-AIDS era (roughly 1970-1982), was as uneven and as underdeveloped as the political movements of the day in major Canadian cities. As a young film critic for The Body Politic , the author of the first comprehensive survey of images of lesbians and gays in Quebec cinema (1981) and the teacher of one of the first Canadian lesbian and gay cinema courses on the planet (1982-83), I often lamented the dearth of Canadian film and video production. Despite the fact that Toronto and Montreal each offered its pioneering iconic feature film, Il etait une fois dans l’Est and Outrageous! , I still found myself asking where the Canadian Word is Out or Army of Lovers Revolt of the Perverts -- or for that matter Boys in the Sand-- was hiding. Yet there was more going on in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver than met the eye. Looking back on the 1970s almost forty years later, one can reevaluate the cinematic heritage of those years, as well as the categories of “activist,” “political” and “moving images”—and reconsider the contribution of moving image activism to proto-queer community and subcultural formations during the decade following “We Demand.” The proposed lecture-presentation will take on those tasks, building on the research published in my monograph The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (2006). Showing excerpts from ten exemplary films and videos from Canada’s three moving-image production metropoles, a few familiar but most rescued from the archives or seen in a new light, “We Demand… Moving Images” will develop a subjective survey of the political cinematic landscape in the wake of “We Demand…”—a contrapuntal historiography of activist film and video from 1970 to 1982.
Archivos De La Filmoteca Revista De Estudios Historicos Sobre La Imagen, Oct 1, 2006
Classical homoerotic imagery presupposed three different characterizations in the construction an... more Classical homoerotic imagery presupposed three different characterizations in the construction and expression of the male body. Two of them were objects of the homoerotic gaze, the ephebe (or adolescent youth) and the mature athlete, which are fairly unproblematic visually. These predicated in turn a third body, an implied gay subject, the invisible desiring body of the producer-spectator- behind the camera, rarely visualized within the frame. This third body stood in for the authorial self as well as for the assumed gay spectator. Representation of this third body is unstable and has become problematic. In the gay-authored narrative cinema, as gay themes become more and more explicit after the Second World War, filmmakers replace the alibis of their precursors with an agenda of self-representation and self definiton. Follwing a roughly chronological approach, Thomas Waugh traces the characterization of this “third body” in a number of texts ranging from Mikael to Death in Venice and Teorema. Waugh explores ways to characterize the desiring homosexual, as well as recurrent narrative motifs in plots with gays characters, reflecting diverse conceptions of sexual dissidence
Cet article examine quatre films d’auteurs gais qui se situent en marge des canons du cinéma au C... more Cet article examine quatre films d’auteurs gais qui se situent en marge des canons du cinéma au Canada et au Québec : À tout prendre, Winter Kept Us Warm, Il était une fois dans l’Est et Outrageous!. Deux de ces films sont de Toronto, deux de Montréal; deux furent produits avant la date charnière 1968/1969, deux après. L’auteur analyse ces oeuvres pionnières du cinéma gai et leurs réceptions par l’intermédiaire des grilles cinéma/culture, sexualité/genre, habitat/nation. Ce sont moins des textes nationaux que des textes urbains qui émergent des configurations cinématographiques, sexuelles et spatiales des deux métropoles qui ont présidé à l’émergence de la modernité canadienne et qui furent les creusets de ces quatre films.
We Demand History Sex Activism in Canada, Nov 24, 2010
The production of moving images, film and video, by Canadian LGBTQ activists during the post-Omni... more The production of moving images, film and video, by Canadian LGBTQ activists during the post-Omnibus/pre-AIDS era (roughly 1970-1982), was as uneven and as underdeveloped as the political movements of the day in major Canadian cities. As a young film critic for The Body Politic , the author of the first comprehensive survey of images of lesbians and gays in Quebec cinema (1981) and the teacher of one of the first Canadian lesbian and gay cinema courses on the planet (1982-83), I often lamented the dearth of Canadian film and video production. Despite the fact that Toronto and Montreal each offered its pioneering iconic feature film, Il etait une fois dans l’Est and Outrageous! , I still found myself asking where the Canadian Word is Out or Army of Lovers Revolt of the Perverts -- or for that matter Boys in the Sand-- was hiding. Yet there was more going on in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver than met the eye. Looking back on the 1970s almost forty years later, one can reevaluate the cinematic heritage of those years, as well as the categories of “activist,” “political” and “moving images”—and reconsider the contribution of moving image activism to proto-queer community and subcultural formations during the decade following “We Demand.” The proposed lecture-presentation will take on those tasks, building on the research published in my monograph The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Queering Sexualities, Nations, Cinemas (2006). Showing excerpts from ten exemplary films and videos from Canada’s three moving-image production metropoles, a few familiar but most rescued from the archives or seen in a new light, “We Demand… Moving Images” will develop a subjective survey of the political cinematic landscape in the wake of “We Demand…”—a contrapuntal historiography of activist film and video from 1970 to 1982.
Archivos De La Filmoteca Revista De Estudios Historicos Sobre La Imagen, Oct 1, 2006
Classical homoerotic imagery presupposed three different characterizations in the construction an... more Classical homoerotic imagery presupposed three different characterizations in the construction and expression of the male body. Two of them were objects of the homoerotic gaze, the ephebe (or adolescent youth) and the mature athlete, which are fairly unproblematic visually. These predicated in turn a third body, an implied gay subject, the invisible desiring body of the producer-spectator- behind the camera, rarely visualized within the frame. This third body stood in for the authorial self as well as for the assumed gay spectator. Representation of this third body is unstable and has become problematic. In the gay-authored narrative cinema, as gay themes become more and more explicit after the Second World War, filmmakers replace the alibis of their precursors with an agenda of self-representation and self definiton. Follwing a roughly chronological approach, Thomas Waugh traces the characterization of this “third body” in a number of texts ranging from Mikael to Death in Venice and Teorema. Waugh explores ways to characterize the desiring homosexual, as well as recurrent narrative motifs in plots with gays characters, reflecting diverse conceptions of sexual dissidence
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