Series focuses on contemporary queerness

An ongoing campus event encourages people to see beyond some preconceptions of queerness and to discover it as it is represented in cinema. Contemporary Queer Cinemas Public Film Series

Wednesday nights at 7:45 p.m. in 3415 Posvar Hall, unless otherwise noted

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An ongoing campus event encourages people to see beyond some preconceptions of queerness and to discover it as it is represented in cinema.

Cathy Hannabach, a visiting lecturer and director of the Contemporary Queer Cinemas Public Film Series, has organized a series of free screenings on campus. The series is sponsored by the women’s studies department and the films are meant  to call attention to queerness in narrative, spaces and different national contexts.

Most of the films are shown on Wednesday nights in 3415 Posvar Hall, with the exception of a film screening and director’s talk with Monica Enriquez-Enriquez, which will be held at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theateron March 2.

“A lot of people don’t have a good understanding of what ‘queer’ really is, and so by looking at the queerness of children, the queerness of vampires, how space and race are constructed in these very queer manners, it’s really expanded all of our definitions of what it truly means to be queer,” said Rachel Ackerman, one of Hannabach’s students.

“The project as a whole takes a cultural studies approach to film. Rather than looking at individual films as isolated texts, there’s been a huge push in critical film studies over the past several years to look at production as a set of practices irreducible to just a film as a text,” Hannabach added.

Consequently, the series also focuses on circulation, distribution and exhibition practices with an interest in the norms they embody and the role they play in shaping our experience of cinema.

As Hannabach put it, the project is “part of a desire to think about film studies as something that has a unique, public dimension. There’s a strong emphasis on public cultures: What is the role of film historically as well as contemporarily in conceptions of the public?”

For example, the series examines the New Queer Cinema, a film movement that Hannabach said “shifts how questions and representations of queerness show up in different contexts.”

This Wednesday’s selection, the Wachowski siblings’ 1996 neo-noir “Bound,” will present a case study in that shift. As Hannabach described it, “the film is organized around a crime narrative. So, in that way, it’s kind of conventional: It’s about money and who stole whose money and the violence that happens in that context. And, like all good film noirs, it has the classic femme fatale.”

But, crucially, she added that “the main narrative is disrupted through figurations of lesbian desire and butch-femme performances of gender. It makes the femme fatale femme, rather than just this straight version of ‘the dark woman.’ It makes literal the queer-femme part of femme fatale.”

Other films that will be shown include Wong Kar-Wai’s 1997 film, “Happy Together,” a visually kinetic study of a homosexual relationship and its dissolution, and Eytan Fox’s 2006  piece, “The Bubble,” about straight, gay, Israeli and Palestinian lives all converging in Tel Aviv, Israel.

“I wanted to take an approach to contemporary queer cinemas that was broad in the sense that it’s not exclusive to a single, national cinema. These films address issues of gender, sexuality, race, citizenship, violence and war as they pertain in specific, national contexts,” Hannabach said. “But by grouping all of this under the rubric of queer cinemas, I’m not trying to imply that queerness looks the same or is experienced the same way or even necessarily means the same thing in all those contexts.”

People interested are welcomed to take up these questions at the Wednesday screenings, where Hannabach hopes to see a cross-section of the local community.

“As a public humanities project, I wanted it to be able to straddle the border between the University and the community and to rethink the boundary between those,” she said.

“It’s a really great opportunity for traditional women’s studies students to learn more about filmmaking and cinematography,” said Joy Horner, another student of Hannabach’s and a film series attendee.

For more information, and to participate in further discussion of the series, visit http://pittqueercinema.wordpress.com.