Postwar American Experimental Film and Queer Psychogeography

Authors

  • Juan Antonio Suarez University of Murcia
  • Juan Francisco Belmonte-Ávila Complutense University of Madrid

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22439/asca.v52i1.6516

Keywords:

Experimental film, Postwar United States, Surrealism, Queer culture, Urban studies, Psychogeography, Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, Willard Maas

Abstract

This essay reads queer American experimental film of the 1940s and 1950s—by Kenneth Anger, Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, and Curtis Harrington, among others—as a form of queer psychogeography: a style of urban dwelling and transit that originated with French surrealism in the late 1920s and was subsequently theorized by Lettrists and Situationists in the 1950s. Psychogeography consisted in drifting through the city in search of evocative or destabilizing spots, which, for postwar American experimental filmmakers, were locations latent with (queer) sexual possibility. This approach allows us to re-interpret these films from an unprecedented perspective. So far conceptualized as cinematic renderings of trances and dreams triggered by the search for sexual identity, the present article shows that this body of work registers as well a material practice consisting in the covert sexualisation of urban space; this practice arises from the attempt of postwar queer subcultures to escape regulation and surveillance during repressive times.

Author Biographies

Juan Antonio Suarez, University of Murcia

Juan Antonio Suárez is a Professor in English Studies at the University of Murcia. He is the author of Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars (Indiana University Press, 1997), Pop Modernism (University of Illinois Press 2007), and Jim Jarmusch (University of Illinois Press 2007), and the co-editor, with D. Walton, of The Spatial Politics of Contemporary Fiction (P. Lang, 2017). His recent essays have appeared in Grey Room, Screen, L’Atalante, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and in edited collections such as The Music and Sound of Experimental Cinema, eds. Rogers and Barham (Oxford University Press, 2017). He can be reached at jsuarez@um.es.

Juan Francisco Belmonte-Ávila, Complutense University of Madrid

Juan Francisco Belmonte-Ávila is an Assistant Professor in English Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid. He has been a Fulbright doctoral and post-doctoral researcher at Indiana University and University
of Utah, and a government-funded FPI grant recipient at the University of Murcia. He has also been a visiting scholar at McGill University and IT University-Copenhagen. His main areas of research are Cultural Studies, American Studies, and Game Studies. His work has appeared in Continuum, L’Atalante, Cartaphilus, Bit y aparte, and Digitum, among others, and in edited collections such as Playing with Virtuality, eds. Bigl and Stoppe
(P. Lang 2013). He can be reached at jfbelav@gmail.com.

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Published

2020-05-01

How to Cite

Suarez, J. A., & Belmonte-Ávila, J. F. (2020). Postwar American Experimental Film and Queer Psychogeography. American Studies in Scandinavia, 52(1), 33–56. https://doi.org/10.22439/asca.v52i1.6516

Issue

Vol. 52 No. 1 (2020)

Section

Articles