Whatever It Is, I'm Against It: Comedy and Jewishness in the Work of Stephen Dwoskin

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay reframes the infamously grave and grueling experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin as a comic artist. Experimental film in the UK is usually discussed in terms of the marginal history of artists' film and video, or the form's relationship to elite contemporary art. Stephen Dwoskin was engaged with these concerns. He was, however, also a devotee of Hollywood film, like his fellow filmmakers in the New York underground, and like the group of "film enthusiasts" that founded the London Film-Makers' Co-op on its model and screened popular and generic American cinema alongside avant-garde and arthouse works. This essay will argue that comedy in particular, a genre enriched by Jewish artists between his birth in 1939 and his leaving for Europe in 1964, was a major shaping intertext on Dwoskin's work. It will further argue that an engagement with comedy and its practitioners allowed Dwoskin to explore Jewish-related themes in a subterranean manner when Jewish identity was not a usual subject in experimental film—unlike the directly queer, black, or post-colonial films made by his contemporaries. After a survey of two major Jewish thinkers on comedy—Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud—the major intertext discussed in the essay will be the early work of the Marx Brothers. In the first films where he played a version of himself, Dwoskin appropriated themes, images, and even narrative approaches introduced by American Jewish comics like the Marx Brothers, such as the foregrounding of the precarious, unstable, or disruptive body; the comedy of sexual dysfunction and bodily failure; and identity crisis resulting from social marginality. With Dwoskin, as with these comics, such themes and structures resulted in the subversion of mainstream narrative modes and character stereotypes.