April 25, 2019
Thursday, April 25, 2019
Ranging from digital drag revisionism to post-bohemian celluloid, this screening and talk showcase works from eight years of “Dirty Looks,” a queer avant-garde film series that, since 2011, has brought queer artists’ cinema to audiences in NYC, LA, the Bay Area, and in a touring series, across the country. Curator Bradford Nordeen will show highlights from the past eight years and discuss the contemporary state (and status) of queer cinema production, distribution, and preservation. On varied formats including 16mm, super8, Hi8, HD video and Getty stock footage, the diverse films in this screening demonstrate the role experimental aesthetics has played in the formation of contemporary queer subjectivities, combining a punk taste for the unconventional with a utopian desire for more.
Featuring films by Mariah Garnett, Aimee Goguen, Brontez Purnell, Jill Reiter, Michael Robinson, Warren Sonbert + Wendy Appel, Chris E. Vargas and Xina Xurner.
Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Film & Media seminar, the Department of English, Arts Research Center, and UCHRI.
Additional “Curating Dirty Looks” Screening
City of Lost Souls
Rosa von Praunheim, Stadt Der Verlorenen Seelen
16mm on digital video, 91min., 1983
Screening and discussion:
Tuesday, April 23, 2-4pm, Dwinelle 188
In 1983, German documentary enfant terrible Rosa Von Praunheim trained his lens on the trans and gender defying Americans who ruled the nightlife scene in Berlin as cultural émigrés. Scripting the loosest of narratives around their wily New Wave performances, City of Lost Souls follows Angie Stardust, who runs the boarding house and adjacent restaurant, “Burger Queen,” where her lodgers earn their keep. Jayne County offers her only feature film starring turn and along the way, the film depicts some of the most honest and alarmingly prescient intergenerational dialogues concerning trans life ever dedicated to celluloid.
ARC’s 2018-19 program is a collaboration between ARC Interim Director Natalia Brizuela (Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese), Tarek Elhaik (Anthropology, UC Davis), Anneka Lenssen (History of Art), Leigh Raiford (African American Studies), and Poulomi Saha (English), supported by a generous grant from the The University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).
This project was supported in part by the University of California Office of the President MRPI funding MR-15-328710.