Affective geographies: Orientations and deviations in Jenni Olson’s Blue Diary

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Blue Diary is the short film that defined the shape of Jenni Olson’s later cinema. Its straightforward structure, a visual composition of California cityscapes, combined with voiceover narration, fits within a tradition of American avant-garde landscape filmmakers. However, in Blue Diary, image and sound take divergent paths. This article argues that Olson’s filmmaking approach reconfigures – through voice and from a queer perspective – American urban spaces, generating new spaces of meaning and deviating from conventional representations.