Postwar Queer Underground Cinema, 1950-1968
Yale University
Thursday & Friday, February 19-20, 2009
All events take place at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street at the corner of Church Street, except for the Friday reception at the Beinecke Library, two blocks up Wall Street near High Street. Pre-registration is required for this conference and reception.
Thursday, February 19
7:30-10 Queer Underground Film Night
Gregory Markopoulos, The Dead Ones (1949), 35mm film (nitrate negative), b&w, silent, 28 min
Marie Menken, Glimpse of the Garden (1957), 16mm, color, sound, 5 min
Marie Menken, Dwightiana (1957), 16mm, color, sound, 3.5 min
Ken Jacobs & Jack Smith, The Whirled (1957/61), 16mm, color and b&w, sound, 18 min
Andy Warhol film to be announced
Taylor Mead, Home Movies-Rome/Florence/Venice/Greece (1965), 16mm, b&w, ~28 min
George Kuchar, Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966), 16mm, color, sound, 15 min
Plus a special surprise screening of a film from the vault of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative
Friday, February 20
12:45-3 Postwar Queer Underground Cinema
George Chauncey, Yale University, “The Queer Underground as Cultural Formation: Postwar New York and the Politics of Queer Cinema”
Ann Reynolds, University of Texas, Austin, “Home Movies: Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, and Life in Front of the Camera”
Melissa Ragona, Carnegie-Mellon University, “Pop Dionysus: Marie Menken and The Gryphon Group’s Mythic Aesthetic”
Tom Gunning, University of Chicago, “Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks: Incandescent Images Burning through the Celluloid Closet”
3:30-5 Witnesses
Robert Heide, playwright
Ken Jacobs, filmmaker
Amy Taubin, critic
Juan Suárez, Universidad de Murcia, moderator
5-6:30 Reception at the Beinecke
Reception at the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and viewing of “Paper Trail: Documenting 20th Century Film in the Archive,” an exhibition exploring the “paper trail” of scripts, notes, scrapbooks, and printed matter held by the Beinecke documenting the work of filmmakers including H.D. and Bryher, Boris Kaufman, Mary Ellen Bute, Stan Brakhage, and Gerard Malanga.
7-7:30 The Bed at the WHC Theater (ticket required)
Theatrical performance of Robert Heide’s The Bed (1965), which was incorporated in Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966).
Directed by Michael Leibenluft
7:30-9:30 The Queer Underground and the Warhol Factory: The Case of The Bed
Short film screening.
Douglas Crimp, University of Rochester, “Chelsea Girls”
Followed by a panel discussion with:
Robert Heide, playwright
Callie Angell, Whitney Museum of American Art
Marc Robinson, Yale University
Douglas Crimp, University of Rochester
Ron Gregg, Yale University, moderator
Organized by the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities (YRIHS) with support from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Whitney Humanities Center, and additional support from the Department of the History of Art, the Department of Theater Studies, and the Film Studies Program.
Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), and Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966) are widely regarded as some of the most important and influential films of postwar underground cinema. But cinema studies has only recently begun to take seriously the fact that Anger, Smith, and Warhol were gay filmmakers whose films developed a queer aesthetic to explore questions of queer subjectivity and world-making. Moreover, the field has still barely registered the fact that they were not just brilliant auteurs working in isolation but were enmeshed in and influenced by a larger circle of mostly New York-based queer filmmakers, performers, writers, and artists.
This conference seeks to map the contours and assess the significance of this wider cultural formation, which we call postwar queer underground cinema. This cinema largely developed in the 1950s and 60s in the ferment of downtown New York, the scene of complex interactions, collaborations, and conflicts between mostly gay or bisexual male filmmakers and critics and mostly heterosexual but resolutely anti-heteronormative female (and some male) filmmakers as well as between white, Puerto Rican, African American, bohemian, and gay cultures, communities, and artists. We hope to explore the work, interrelationships, and influence of Marie Menken, Willard Maas, Ben Moore, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Barbara Rubin, José Rodriguez-Soltero, Gregory Markopoulos, Mario Montez, Naomi Levine, Shirley Clarke, Charles Boultenhouse, and Parker Tyler, among others, as well as Anger, Smith, and Warhol.
By focusing on neglected individual filmmakers in this scene as well as on groups of filmmakers and other avant-garde artists, the conference hopes to chart and analyze the social networks, collaborations, and conflicts that shaped the queer underground, as well as its broader urban, social, cultural, and political sources and ramifications. The conference addresses questions such as: Did queer underground filmmakers develop a distinctive queer aesthetic, and if so, what were its traits and what was its relationship to and influence on the broader avant-garde? How did underground films explore queer subjectivity, imagine queer futures, or destabilize the boundaries between hetero and homo—and what did it mean that such films were seen and discussed so widely by avant-garde audiences? What was the significance of the queer underground to gay politics and to the politics of the avant-garde as a whole in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly at a time when screening queer films such as Flaming Creatures or Chant d’Amour often provoked the police to shut down avant-garde cinema venues? What was the (social, aesthetic, political) relationship of the film underground to the queer underground theater and arts scenes, to the multiracial social worlds and cultures of postwar New York City, and to other regional avant-gardes in Europe, Asia, and the Americas?
The Friday panels inaugurate a two-day closed workshop, in which a small group of scholars will present new research on postwar queer underground cinema. Each participant will contribute a paper circulated in advance of the conference, and the participants will spend the working sessions discussing each paper in depth and reflecting on the general issues raised by the papers taken together.
Workshop participants: George Chauncey, Yale University; Douglas Crimp, University of Rochester; Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Fordham University; Leanne Gilbertson, University of Rochester; Ron Gregg, Yale University; Tom Gunning, University of Chicago; Lucas Hilderbrand, University of California, Irvine; Ara Osterweil, Muhlenberg College; Ryan Powell, Kings College, London; Michelle Puetz, University of Chicago; Melissa Ragona, Canegie Mellon University; Ann Reynolds, University of Texas, Austin; Marc Siegel, Freie Universität, Berlin; Juan Suárez, Universidad de Murcia.
The event is organized by George Chauncey, Yale University, Ron Gregg, Yale University, and Juan Suárez, Universidad de Murcia, on behalf of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities (YRIHS).