Toronto International Film Festival Research Articles

Beans. Dramatic film, directed by Tracey Deer. EMA Films, 2020. 92 min. 2020 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Toronto and online, September 10–21, 2020

Beans. Dramatic film, directed by Tracey Deer. EMA Films, 2020. 92 min. 2020 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Toronto and online, September 10–21, 2020

Cinema’s Cosmic Shifts

Last winter, Oscar campaigns may well have rolled through a city near you: visiting stars, catered snacks, diligent handlers, lots of hopes and dreams. Occasionally, a film or actor so exceeds the transactional nature of these events that mundanity is set aside for a moment and the event becomes special beyond its PR function. So it was when Michelle Yeoh appeared at a Paris screening of Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022), on the night of US Thanksgiving no less, and hung out past midnight, chatting with a crowd that might just have included some Academy voters.1By the time this column appears, Yeoh either will or won’t have been rewarded by the Academy (though she was already awarded by the revised Golden Globes) for her remarkable comeback story as one of the most quintessential action heroines ever rendered on-screen, capping a long career in traditional genre pics. In EEAAO, she plays a Chinese laundrywoman who, transformed, has skills to beat even a Matrix Neo as she battles through the metaverse to thwart evildoers and preserve her family. What a long way the cinema has come since that real-life laundrywoman’s daughter Anna May Wong was deemed both too Chinese and not Chinese enough to star on-screen.2 Hats off to the Daniels for their version of a metaverse that casts mom, dad, and rebel daughter in duels to save not merely the universe but their own family too.Now if only they could save the metaverse of cinema itself. EEAAO was a rare bright spot in a year of releases that, as it gathered year-end momentum, became more and more overwhelmed by a spectacle of bloated, male-ego driven, narratively old hat, and indefensibly expensive movies. Who came up with the idea that such retrograde “flagship” films were the way to get audiences back into movie theaters? Drum roll, please, for the likes of Amsterdam, Babylon, Pinocchio, Bardo, The Whale, The Fabelmans . . . and I am just warming up (which is more than most of the theaters did).It struck me, then, as odd that at the very moment that these bro films were failing to make much of an impression, media outlets were all in a lather over poor box-office performance by She Said. Ignoring or forgiving the bro bloodbath, columnists were lambasting this one film—as though doing so could make the #MeToo mess go away and let boys be boys again, in a sad Armageddon of imagination.But I digress. Kim Masters wrote in the Hollywood Reporter that 2022 was supposed to be “a time for film execs to stanch bleeding, rethink radical change and figure out how to get consumers to magically forget all about that whole direct-to-streaming thing.”3 It’s no surprise that studios are trying to figure out how to get bodies back in seats. While it may be true, as Masters points out, that “the industry is sharply pivoting away from the fevered pursuit of streaming subscribers above all else and back to the old-fashioned notion of making money,” the fact remains that nobody knows “whether audiences will really start showing up regularly.”4France has a partial answer, gleaned from a pandemic-era return to movies in theaters and the country’s ongoing protection of theatrical windows to prevent wholesale defections to streaming. In the good news for 2022, the French (in Paris, certainly) still cherish convening with one another in movie theaters, as in cafes and bistros. In the bad news (for French cinema, at least), the report trumpeting 152 million admissions—nearly 60 percent of the prepandemic audience levels in spite of 138 days when theaters were still closed—noted that those box-office receipts owed their robustness largely to Top Gun: Maverick (opening night at Cannes didn’t hurt) and Avatar: The Way of Water.5 In another report, the best box office for French films belonged to auteurs such as Dominik Moll, Alice Winocour, Louis Garrel, and commercial releases by Cédric Jimenez and Olivier Dahan.6That’s good news for Hollywood’s blockbuster addiction, bad news for all those who still care more about le cinéma. If only there weren’t such intransigent US opposition to regulation, surely this would be the moment to revive the rules against vertical monopoly that came about from the successive antitrust cases of the 1930s and ’40s, culminating in the US Supreme Court decision of May 3, 1948, in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., that forced the big studios to sell off their movie theaters. But I am dreaming. This century marks as profound an antioversight, antipunishment, pro-oligarchical time as any I can remember. No such legislation is forthcoming in an age of monopolies, but just for fun, read up on the legal case on the “Hollywood Renegades Archive” section of the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers’ website.7Meanwhile, US movie theaters continue to close. Most recently, filmmaker Renee Tajima-Peña alerted FQ of the loss of her favorite LA neighborhood place, the Highland Theatre, after one hundred years in operation, writing that it “used to be the place all the neighborhood families would see movies but now the families are getting pushed out of the neighborhood.” Once upon a time, gentrification led to the opening of movie theaters, but in 2023, it can also cause the opposite. In San Francisco, the Castro Theatre—built in 1922 and designed by Timothy L. Pflueger—has long been a showcase for all of the city’s film festivals, which have celebrated their big shows, opening nights, even entire schedules in its storied building. In 2008, when Focus Features held the world-premiere preview of Gus Van Sant’s Milk, it was naturally held at the Castro. Every cinephile in the greater San Francisco area has memories tied to particular nights when alchemy transpired in that movie palace.It came as a shock when the Nasser family, which had built the theater and has served as the steward of its legacy ever since, signed a lease turning the crown jewel over to a live-event entertainment company, Another Planet Entertainment. Soon, word got out that the theater’s seats and raked seating would be removed, making it nearly impossible to continue to hold film screenings there. At this writing, San Francisco’s Historic Preservation Commission had not yet responded to public requests to extend the theater’s existing landmark status to include the interior—and specifically, the configuration of seating.8As questions about the future of exhibition rage on, I can’t help but wonder whether my talk of preserving the film exhibition I love puts me in the ranks of those who wanted to hold onto the horse and buggy back when automobiles were invented or those who opposed tearing up the train tracks in California when, yes, automobiles arrived. Sigh.In other news, film talk was focused for many weeks on Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade poll of great films, with the result that friends and enemies alike were busy quarreling over choices and ratings, particularly over Chantal Akerman’s historic first-place finish with Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.9 Full disclosure: I was invited to contribute but instead wrote a guest column on why I am no longer interested in the name game of lists and rankings.10 Imagine my delight recently upon discovering in an old interview that Akerman, too, had once refused to rank films for the famous poll. Still, the reactions continue, including fury over the fact, overlooked by most of the pundits, that zero Latin American films made this year’s top 100 list despite a pantheon of greats represented consistently in film festivals around the globe (a number of them in Latin American itself) and taught in film syllabi. For shame.The future of film festivals has been a growing concern since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the discussion has escalated since last fall’s precipitous shutdown of the Edinburgh Film Festival and of the building housing it by the charity supposedly overseeing it. Into this dismal scenario rode the Rotterdam Film Festival with a one-day symposium focused on the theme “Quo Vadis, Film Festivals?” It asked about the future of film festivals, providing a space where “film festival and market professionals [could] discuss how festivals can best organize themselves and collaborate with each other amid a shifting industry landscape,” as proclaimed in a press release from the organizers of the festival’s aptly titled “Reality Check 2023.” Stay tuned.The festival director, Vanja Kaludjercic, new to Rotterdam this year, noted in the same press release that festival staff “cannot escape the challenges of the past two years amid the difficulties of the pandemic. . . . [D]o we simply cross our fingers and hope things return to how they were, or can we organize and work together for a sustainable future for our sector?” She announced that the aim of the symposium was “to propose a way forward for the film festival sector, exploring how to unify and organize professional standards in order to create a deeper and more strategic collaboration between festivals.”11 The session’s steering committee was blunter: “The genesis of this event happened during the pandemic as we were watching the operation and role of film festivals disrupted to the core.” After surveying forty film festivals, they planned “a day of interrogating the provocative results . . . as we assess the post-COVID status of the film culture called film festivals.”Finally, note that two venerable US film organizations, one famed for production and the other for exhibition, underwent a changing of the guard last winter. At the New York City flagship nonprofit theater Film Forum, its executive director, Karen Cooper, stepped down after fifty years of leading the pioneering institution, which she had inherited as a tiny loft space in the 1970s when there was no such model, and which she never stopped expanding and leading.12 She has turned its direction over to deputy director Sonya Chung, an insider with her own curatorial taste and the chops to carry the organization into the next phase.A new generation also took over at one of the most venerable documentary organizations in the United States. Native Chicagoan Amir George joined Chicago’s Kartemquin Films, which despite its portmanteau name (derived from the initials of its founders) has always been a beacon of clarity and documentary truths as it transformed from a scrappy production team more than fifty years ago into the “brand” of documentary ethics and authenticity that it is today.13 As its new artistic director, he takes over from Gordon Quinn, cofounder and lodestone in the world of documentary. George is known as a filmmaker but also as a curator at the True/False film festival, cofounder of the Black Radical Imagination touring exhibition, and past programmer in residence at Black Cinema House, at Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation.It’s so wonderful that new leaders have stepped forward, especially because recent months have recorded the passing of a number of important figures whose mark on film over the course of decades cannot be forgotten. Drum roll, please.Irene Cara Escalera starred as Coco Hernandez in Alan Parker’s Fame (1980) and became famous for the songs she sang in it— especially “Fame”—as well as for singing and cowriting the theme song “Flashdance . . . What a Feeling” in, yes, Flashdance (Adrian Lyne, 1983). However, she had the nerve to stand up for her rights as a performer and took on the music industry in 1985, suing her manager and record company—and eventually winning the jury case. From then on, though, her career was undermined. She paid the price for standing up for herself at a time when women, especially a Black Puerto Rican/Cuban woman, were not allowed to behave that way.14Julia Reichert was an early pioneer of US independent documentary who cofounded New Day Films, the distribution collective that still thrives today. She never stopped leading the charge for films that could trace the lives and histories of ordinary working folks, and women in particular: in the early years alone, Growing Up Female (1971), Union Maids (1976), and Seeing Red (1983). First with one husband/filmmaking partner and then another—Jim Klein for the early films, Steven Bognar for the later ones—she set a standard of documentary that culminated in an Oscar for American Factory (2019), which was also the first release from the Obamas’ new production company. It was a life well lived, according to her principles, and always in collaboration.15Carolyn Strachan was an Australian filmmaker best known for codirecting Two Laws (1981). With her then-partner, Alessandro Cavadini, she answered a call from the Borroloola Tribal Council to collaborate on a documentary about the Aboriginal group’s history of mistreatment. Decades before the term “allyship” became a catchphrase, Two Laws changed the course of documentary (and anthropology) so totally that its impact has been compared to that of Jean Rouch’s own films. Codirected with tribal leaders, the film shows how alternative beliefs, law, and storytelling can construct an entirely different way of seeing and narrating history. Strachan lived most of her life in New York City, a vital and vibrant expat to the end.16Yoshishige Yoshida (Kijū Yoshida), was a vital force in the Shochiku Nouvelle Vague, along with Nagisa Ōshima and Masahiro Shinoda. He went on to start his own production company, making very conceptual films that threaded radical politics and sexuality together with new film forms, often starring his wife, the actress Mariko Okada. He did television documentaries for a decade or so, but then returned triumphantly to filmmaking (and to Cannes) and made a reputation as a critic and theorist. With deep correspondences to the French New Wave, he was described in the French press at the time of his death as a “revolutionary aesthete” whose work significantly merged theory, sensuality, and emotion.17In addition to these figures, known for their films and on-screen performances, the world recently lost four film curators/exhibitors whose work distinctively shaped film culture in the United States in the post-1968 era. They deserve equal respect and remembrance.Adrienne Mancia began working at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964. Consider the date: she started as a secretary, but quickly became an assistant curator, and was named curator of the museum’s film department in 1977. Her career at MOMA lasted for two more decades and coincided with some of the most exciting times in global cinema, which she unfailingly brought back to New Yorkers in epic programs. After leaving MOMA, supposedly to retire, she launched the film-exhibition program at BAM Rose Cinema and continued popping up at film festivals into her nineties.18Joanne Koch led the Film Society of Lincoln Center (now the FLC) through most of its modern existence, a time that not coincidentally paralleled some of the most consequential years of cinema, beginning with her arrival in a lower-level job in 1971. She was a true New Yorker, unflappable and committed, willing to go to the mat for what she believed in—and, luckily for the world, that was cinema. She was savvy and had great instincts, could smell a phony a mile away, and had a sixth sense about the movies that mattered. (Her defense of Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary was legendary.) When she stepped down as its executive director, she joined the FLC’s board. She knew how the world-maker and showed several generations how to love and defend the cinema.19Bill Pence, the cofounder of the Telluride Film Festival—alongside his wife, Stella; Tom Luddy; and the late James Card—was also the owner of Telluride’s Sheridan Opera House, where the festival first showed its films; head of a chain of movie theaters across the Rockies and the West; and a dedicated collector of films and aficionado of archives.20 Pence also had directed the film program at Dartmouth College and spent more than a decade with Janus Films, the company that formed an early component of Criterion. He was a world-maker in the best cinematic sense of the term, and a showman to boot.21Unlike the others, Noah Cowan did not get to live to a ripe old age, due to a Glioblastoma that invaded his brain. Tributes have emphasized his remarkable rise, from a 14-year-old intern in the early years of the Toronto International Film Festival to heading its Midnight Madness shows, functioning as co-director of the festival, and overseeing TIFF’s Bell Lightbox headquarters, cinemas, and galleries. In between, he relocated to New York and co-founded Cowboy Pictures as well as the Global Film Initiative (with the Museum of Modern Art). Finally, he led the San Francisco International Film Society and transformed it over five years into SFFILM, a daring, higher-profile organization. As a critic and curator, his championing of genre films, Asian cinema, queer pioneers, and all things Guy Maddin made Cowan a tastemaker and magnet for an international circle of colleagues (myself included). The disappearance of his good taste, high spirits, raucous laugh, and bottomless energy leave the world a duller place.22Christian Rossipal builds on his own research to uncover the career of the Nigerian-American-Swedish filmmaker Madubuko Diakité. Born in Harlem in 1940, active as a filmmaker in the rich era of the sixties, today Diakité is a Swedish immigration lawyer. His film For Personal Reasons, made in 1973, was inspired by Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. Rossipal describes Diakité as still involved in an ongoing and lifelong memory practice, which now includes the discovery and reconstruction of his early work.Lisa Parks and France Winddance Twine conduct an investigation into the emergent genre of Tech TV, analyzing the dramas that have arisen to capitalize on the fascination with tech culture that has spawned apps, unicorns, and billionaires with startling speed. Looking in particular at the faux-heroic “millennial messiah” figures and their start-up minders and surroundings, their study seeks to expose the discrimination and injustice operative in tech workplaces in general, untouched thus far by TV visualizations.In a special dossier assembled for this issue, “Black Infinite: New Directions in Black Film and Media,” Michael Boyce Gillespie has brought together a series of essays by scholars intent on updating thinking about black representation through an exacting contemporary lens. Racquel Gates unpacks Walt Disney’s Dumbo to rethink its traditional racial readings, from pointing to the shadow cast by Edison’s early film of elephant electrocution as a lynching corollary to recasting the film as a black mother/son melodrama. Julie Beth Napolin takes up the figure of Bessie Smith as rendered in the early “soundie” St. Louis Blues as well as its queer reemergence in Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston. Yasmina Price moves the dossier into the Mediterranean with her analysis of the crossings and hauntings in Mati Diop’s pair of films, Atlantique and Atlantiques. Walton Muyumba examines Raoul Peck’s monumental Exterminate All the Brutes for the director’s construction of a global archive based in no small part in Peck’s own familial history. And finally, Gillespie himself parses the “wake work” of Keisha Rae Witherspoon’s short, T, and its remix of funereal mourning and celebration.Columnists have contributed their expertise on works that look to the past (Manuel Betancourt and Laurie Ouellette) and the imaginary future (Rebecca Wanzo) for clues to personal and political power. Manuel Betancourt, maintaining his custom of looking at three films that together determine the mood of the moment, looks at recent films dealing with political history—No, Nuestra película, and Argentina, 1985—noting that “there will be no revolution without television—or streaming,” and pointing to how images so decisively are “helping draft the ways in which audiences (and citizens and voters and protesters and politicians) come to understand the historical events all around them.”Laurie Ouellette traces the history of physical fitness and its gendered appeal through the new Apple TV series Physical. Contextualizing the series back in a time “when neoliberal discourses of self-maximizing personhood were taking hold,” Ouellette pinpoints the VCR as being responsible for the “flow of aerobics instruction into the home” and the ensuing campaign to hook women onto fitness as their newest requirement.For Rebecca Wanzo, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King is notable for its unprecedented combination of power and sexuality, joining the erotic to the warrior in a brand-new iconography spearheaded, in this case, by Viola Davis. Citing Audre Lorde to argue for a homosocial erotic within a community of Black women, Wanzo sees this conceptualization of “the erotic as power in an action film” as delivering nothing less than a communal experience of joy that deserves a round of celebration.In contrast, Bruno Guaraná devotes his attention in this issue’s “Page Views” to Hunter Hargraves’s new book, Uncomfortable Television, in which the author explores the extent to which the “so-called new golden age of American television at the turn of the millennium operates according to a distinct affective logic centered on discomfort and other unpleasant affects . . . such as irritation and disgust precisely because they privilege individual address over mass appeal.” Thus affect is demonstrated to be an essential component of narrowcasting at a new stage of televisual corporatization.Elsewhere in the books section, which is shepherded by Nilo Couret, reviews include Jaimie Baron’s expansive consideration of Jill Godmilow’s polemical Kill the Documentary: A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars as well as Hayley O’Malley on Christopher Sieving’s Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess; Tanner Benson on Nicholas de Villiers’s Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-liang; Arcelia Gutiérrez on Monica De La Torre’s Feminista Frequencies: Community Building through Radio in the Yakima Valley; Hannah Zeavin on Tung-Hui Hu’s Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection; and Sam McCracken on Kyle Parry’s A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes. As ever, the robust publication schedule evidences the field’s ongoing vigor and expansion beyond, and within, its legacy boundaries.Finally: not in print but equally present are the timely articles that appear on Quorum, Film Quarterly’s online column edited by Girish Shambu, which features interventions into contemporary thinking. Quorum articles are available free and indexed in reverse chronological order on the FQ website at https://filmquarterly.org/category/quorum/.

Analyzing The Protagonist Character of Elliot Anderson As Seen In The Film “Black Or White” By Mike Binder

‘Black or White’ described of complains, blames, jealously, selfishness, and understanding about the family love from Elliot Anderson’s character. This research is aimed to know the character of Elliot Anderson as main character by analyzing the evidence from the dialogues and his actions in the film. To know about the character of Elliot Anderson, the writer used the descriptive qualitative method in this paper. The writer employs himself to collect the data by reading script, watching the film and marking them. The writer used the film of Black or White by Mike Binder released in 2014 by Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The writer focused on the dialogues of the film, and then followed by analyzing the character through conscientiousness and neuroticism of personality. In this analysis, the writer finds out that final result about the protagonist character of Elliot Anderson. Elliot Anderson is a recently widower and visible wealthy grandfather. The writer found Conscientiousness of Elliot Anderson characteristic is ambitious and neuroticism Elliot is irritable or anger, complaining person, blaming person, selfish, and jealous. It’s all happened when on one particularly bad day, in which he loses his wife, he wishes people would recognize how hard he is trying and how good his heart is and just leaving him alone in his big house with its big swimming pool and his Mexican maid to raise his young granddaughter Eloise.  Keyword: Black or White Film, Elliot Anderson, Protagonist Character

Deferral and the Dream

Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart (2017), directed by Tracy Heather Strain, recounts the storied life and dissembled desire of insurgent playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry. My analysis of Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart pulls on a thread tucked into the title of Hansberry's famous play. The concept and problematics of deferral not only punctuate the narrative of A Raisin in the Sun but hug the contours of Hansberry's life as an activist, outline the closeted confines of her sexual desire, and concretize with the impact of her untimely death. The phrase “a raisin in the sun” appears in the third line of the first stanza of Langston Hughes's poem “Harlem [2],” which is one of the eighty-seven poems that comprise Hughes's book-length serial poem “Montage of a Dream Deferred” (1994: 426).Harlem [2]What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry upLike a raisin in the sun?Or fester like a sore—And then run?Does it stink like rotten meat?Or crust and sugar over—Like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sagsLike a heavy load.Or does it explode?The dream deferred, or, more appositely, the refusal to accept deferral any longer, is the imperative that sears her famous play, her radical resistance, her love life—and deferral is what we are left with in the wake of her death. In my discussion of Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart, I track the way this deferral, along with an attendant refusal to defer, reverberates through Hansberry's celebrated play and emerges in Strain's film. My analysis pays special attention to the inclusion of photographs and rare archival footage of Hansberry at her Croton-on-Hudson home. I consider the ways that, even though she cloistered herself, sumptuous visual evidence of Hansberry's refusal to defer her lesbian life is burned into the photographs and silent film footage captured in and around her upstate New York sanctuary.Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2017. Over the next several years the documentary was broadcast on PBS, exhibited at museums and colleges across the country, and screened at historic venues like the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and significant locations like the Croton Free Library in Croton-on-Hudson, where Hansberry lived at the time of her death. Given that Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart is the first feature-length documentary film about Hansberry's life, it is noteworthy that very little buzz has surrounded this film. While the documentary had an impactful presence at film festivals with screenings at the Chicago International Film Festival, DOC NYC, and Festival International des Films de la Diaspora Africaine in Paris, the film has gained very little notoriety beyond the festival circuit. The general lack of knowledge about the first feature-length film that chronicles the life of one of the greatest African American playwrights is curious; it appears that while A Raisin in the Sun is world renowned, its playwright may not yet be a household name. As a PBS American Masters production, this documentary's primary outlet was television; Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart did not enjoy a theatrical showing like the documentary films that captured the lives of other Black luminaries from her generation, such as the twenty-first-century documentary about James Baldwin's life, I Am Not Your Negro (2016), Toni Morrison: The Pieces That I Am (2019), and Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (2019). While the obscurity of Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart can be attributed to its sparse programming on PBS, the limited audience of film festival screenings, and the exclusivity of academic streaming services, which have been the primary platforms for accessing the film in the years after its release, the limited knowledge of and access to this film reflect and redouble the shroud of secrecy that surrounds aspects of Hansberry's life—namely, her sexuality. The film's treatment of Hansberry's lesbian relationships further compounds the dissemblance and mystery that haunts this facet of the playwright's legacy. Despite the murkiness that envelops Hansberry's sexuality in this film, Strain creates the cinematic space to appreciate the life and legacy of this dynamic and courageous Black woman playwright who is an underrecognized American treasure. A chance to screen Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart is a chance to hear the voice of an artist gone too soon, to learn about her life outside her famous play, and to spend time with a brilliant, pathbreaking Black woman playwright who was just finding a way to become her own.The title of Strain's documentary is an extraction from a quote by Hansberry that appears in the film. In an interview, she is recorded saying, “One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which affect this world.” Hansberry's imperative to see, feel, and react to the miseries of the world as an activist, writer, and lover comes through in this documentary film. Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart captures the vicissitudes of Hansberry's magnificent life and the heartbreak of her untimely death. The traditional style of framing expert interviews is made exciting by the cast of Black celebrities and the expertise of scholars who knit together this illustrious story.The film moves chronologically, beginning with Hansberry's early life in Chicago. Family photographs, archival footage, and photographs of everyday Black life on the South Side of Chicago in the 1930s accompany the array of interviews, narration by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, and recitation of personal papers performed by Anika Noni Rose. The film incorporates archival footage of interviews with Hansberry herself as well as reenactments of pivotal moments in her life and the priceless home footage of her in Croton-on-Hudson. All of these elements come together to chart the trajectory of Hansberry's life as the youngest daughter of the prominent Black real estate broker Carl Augustus Hansberry. As the film recounts, Lorraine's father loomed large in his family and was a powerful figure in Chicago. He served as the secretary of his local NAACP chapter. He was a philanthropist committed to ending segregation, and to that end he created the Hansberry Foundation to resist racial discrimination with a $10,000 endowment.The documentary spends time exploring a monumental and terrifying moment in Lorraine's young life when her family moved from the South Side to a home in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago, a white neighborhood under a racially restrictive covenant.1 Carl Hansberry would not be intimidated into moving out of the neighborhood by the pressure of white supremacist vigilantism; he and his family lived for several months under imminent threat of violence. Lorraine's memory of this period is distilled in a quote performed by Rose: “My memories of the correct way of fighting white supremacy in America included being spat at, cursed, and pummeled on the daily trek to and from school.”The interviews with Lorraine's sister Mamie and cousin Shauneille Perry, who, as it happens, is herself a playwright and theater director, convey family stories from Lorraine's early years.2 Mamie recalls one terrifying evening when the family was living in their Woodlawn home and a gang of white supremacists descended onto their property. Lorraine was nearly killed when a vandal threw a piece of mortar through their living room window; it narrowly missed her head. The stone was thrown so hard that it lodged into the wall on the opposite side of the window. Leading Lorraine Hansberry scholars Imani Perry and Margaret Wilkerson, given prominent voices in this documentary, describe how this harrowing chapter in the family's life left a lasting impression on Lorraine and became fodder for her landmark play. Eventually, a court order demanded that the Hansberrys leave their Woodlawn home, but Carl Hansberry appealed the order, which led to a hearing before the United States Supreme Court. Hansberry v. Lee (311 U.S. 32) was heard in 1940. Though Carl Hansberry won that case, racially restrictive covenants would not be made illegal until the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968.3An array of interviews with scholars, family members, and theater producers convey Hansberry's biographical details before, during, and after her rise to prominence.4 They describe how she moved to New York City after spending two years studying at the University of Wisconsin. In 1950, when she was twenty years old, Hansberry moved to Harlem as an aspiring journalist full of radical ambition. She began working for Paul Robeson's Freedom, a Negro publication that was new to the scene. She met her soon-to-be husband Robert Nemiroff during this time. They were married in 1953, when interracial marriage was still illegal in many US states.5 Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun while living with Nemiroff in their Greenwich Village apartment at 337 Bleeker Street. These biographical threads are complemented by interviews with Hansberry's contemporaries and confidants, from the late Ruby Dee, Amiri Baraka, and Lloyd Richards to Sidney Poitier, Glenn Turman, and Harry Belafonte. These interviews weave together a behind-the-scenes narrative about the casting, production, and opening of A Raisin in the Sun. The prospect of launching the first play written by a Black woman to open on Broadway gave producers such pause and trepidation that they nearly missed the opportunity to stage this groundbreaking production.6 In fact, A Raisin in the Sun first opened in Philadelphia, because Broadway producers were not willing to take the risk on a play written by a Black woman. The run in Philadelphia was such a rousing success that Broadway was compelled to have a change of heart; on March 11, 1959, A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore theater in New York City. In their retelling of the origin story of this production, the interviewed Black Hollywood legends describe how a bashful Hansberry handled her newfound influence and fame. Such stories told by friends, fellow playwrights, actors, directors, and producers pull back the curtain on the life of a reluctant star on the rise.After moving through the remarkable story of how A Raisin in the Sun came to be, the film connects the play's narrative with Hansberry's commitment to activism and Black liberation. The issue at the center of A Raisin in the Sun, what catalyzes the dramatic twists and turns in this play, is the peril of housing, space, and quality of life for a Black family, the Youngers, during the era of jim crow7 segregation. When the life insurance policy of the recently deceased patriarch of the Younger family returns ten thousand dollars, the family becomes fractured: Mama would like to purchase a house; Walter Lee, her son, would like to open a liquor store; Beneatha, her daughter, aspires to go to medical school and would like to use the money to that end. Walter Lee's wife Ruth and son Travis live in the small apartment as well. After Ruth discloses that she is pregnant, Mama makes the choice to buy a house in Clybourne Park, an exclusively white Chicago neighborhood. A representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association pays the Younger family a visit to their South Side apartment in order to persuade them to change their minds, to not move into Clybourne Park, and to accept instead a refund for the purchase of their home. The Youngers refuse. The play ends with the Youngers moving out of their South Side Chicago apartment and into an uncertain future in their new Clybourne Park home. The expectation of Black deferral for the sake of white comfort is the pressure that drives the action of A Raisin in the Sun.The family's concerted and collective resistance to that expectation indexes not only the biographical parallels of the Hansberry family's choice to move into the hotly contested space of the racially restricted Woodlawn neighborhood, it also reflects the writer's life as a radical activist. Like her father, Lorraine deplored segregation; but unlike her father, she was less convinced by the promise of the American Dream. Perhaps witnessing her father's struggle to achieve that dream activated a more radical tack in the journalist-cum–playwright, who was flagged by the FBI because of her political alliances and movement-building activities. To contextualize the racial and political climate out of which Hansberry was writing, Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart uses photographs and newsreel footage of the attacks by police on civil rights protesters in 1963 and 1964. These images show the police in Alabama using German Shepherd hounds and high-powered water hoses to attack, brutalize, and subdue the Black citizens who refused to comply with racist segregationist laws. The documentary includes photographs of Hansberry in action at protests with friends like Nina Simone, and sound recordings of her giving speeches on the utility of violent resistance to white supremacy. Strain focuses in on Hansberry's work in the movement after the acclaim of A Raisin in the Sun and recounts how the playwright used her newfound celebrity and influence to help raise funds for the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress of Racial Equality. One such enterprise raised $5,000 to purchase the station wagon that James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwermer drove to Mississippi in 1964. These freedom fighters were abducted by police on a Mississippi highway and killed. The burned car was found days after their abduction, and their bodies were discovered several months later. This set of events was devastating for Hansberry. The cost of the refusal to wait, to prolong, delay, or defer a dream of freedom was born out in the lives and murders of freedom fighters who did not adhere to the tacit or explicit, violently enforced expectation for Black people to save liberty for another day.The photographs and archival footage not only historically situate the racial and political climate within which Hansberry existed, they also visualize the collective refusal to defer freedom that powered the civil rights movement. The scenes of Black resistance to white supremacy from the civil rights era included in Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart carry an intensified meaning in the contemporary moment. The national uprisings and global protests that erupted in the summer of 2020 after the murders by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta have an incendiary tether through time and space with the civil rights protests of the 1960s in this country. In the summer of 2020, there were lynchings of Black men in California, Texas, and New York (Democracy Now! 2020), while KKK members were making themselves unabashedly visible in public places, and armed white supremacist militias were welcomed by police at Black Lives Matter protests. These horrific realities make perfectly clear that the terror of anti-Black racial violence that Black protesters fought in the mid-1960s is still being battled two decades into the new millennium.8 The refusal to defer resistance to white supremacist violence that mobilized the protests of jim crow segregation during the civil rights movement had been reawakened in recent years by the state-sanctioned murders of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Eric Garner, Mike Brown, and Tamar Rice in 2014, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray in 2015, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016. Tony McDade, a Black trans man, was murdered by the police in Florida two days after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Black trans people who are murdered receive very little attention outside the queer community; by the summer of 2020, the year had already seen twelve trans people of color murdered: Dustin Parker in Oklahoma, Neulisa Luciano Ruiz in Puerto Rico, Yampi Mendez Arocho in Puerto Rico, Monika Diamond in North Carolina, Lexi in Harlem, Johanna Metzger in Maryland, Serena Angelique Velazquez Ramos in Puerto Rico, Layla Pelaz Sanchez in Puerto Rico, Penelope Diaz Ramirez in Puerto Rico, Nina Pop in Missouri, Helle Ja O'Regan in Texas, Dominique “Rem'mie” Fells in Pennsylvania, Riah Milton in Ohio, Jaune Thompson in Colorado, and Selena Reyes-Hernandez in Chicago (Human Rights Campaign 2020). The terror of white supremacy, lethal anti-Black police tactics, and transphobia is at a fever pitch, and the national and global movement that is building to combat this complex of violence has commenced. We refuse to delay, defer, or comply any longer. The black-and-white newsreel footage that appears in Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart of Black men, women, and children being beaten, attacked, and violated by police is indelibly tied to our contemporary moment. We are inextricably linked. We are living in the legacy of those freedom fighters’ collective refusal, at any cost, to defer freedom.Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart then weaves together Hansberry's movement-building work as a radical civil rights activist, her covert lesbian writing and love affairs, her struggles with writing her second play—The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window—and her debilitating battle with cancer. By including both visual and sonic representations of excerpts from her short stories and personal papers, the documentary balances Hansberry's marriage to Nemiroff with the playwright's growing acceptance of her love for women. We learn that Hansberry explored her lesbian identity even while married. During this time, she used pseudonyms, had clandestine relationships, and chose to move out of the city for more privacy. While Hansberry and Nemiroff were married, and even after their separation, he supported her in this facet of her life and aided in her dissembling by making public appearances with her. Rose recites a journal entry in which Hansberry commits to paper a truth about her sexual desire and her marriage: “Bob and I have been getting divorced for years now. Meanwhile we remain the closest friends either of us have, I suppose. I know that what I have always known, before consciousness even, that most important it has to be her. I mean the woman. It apparently simply will not be the man for me.”Though they had been leading separate lives since 1957, Hansberry and Nemiroff officially separated in 1962 when she moved to the home that she bought in Croton-on-Hudson, forty miles outside New York City. While the traditionally shot and conveyed biographical elements of Hansberry's life are illuminating, the most visually compelling aspect of Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart comes through in the footage of Hansberry at her Croton-on-Hudson home and on a road trip in a fabulous convertible car. In a cinematic tenor that runs counter to the staid documentary film conventions used to recount the details of her public life as an acclaimed playwright and radical Left activist, these intimate, quiet, pastoral scenes open up pockets of private life that were as full of bliss as they were rife with loneliness. Shot with what appears to be a Super 8 camera or perhaps Super 16, the frames of vibrant color with rich black undertones depict a carefree Hansberry. There is footage of her at her Croton-on-Hudson home training her dog, a German Shepherd named Shaka, among the autumn foliage. On another occasion she gazes intently into the camera's lens, then turns away. As seen in figures 1 and 2, there are shots of her posing for the camera before jumping into the driver's seat of her swanky convertible. Figures 3 and 4 show that Hansberry was in the company of women on an out-of-town excursion.In this section of the film we see a blond woman walking on the beach, smiling at someone behind the camera. Is Hansberry the person behind camera? There is footage of Hansberry sitting on a park bench next to a woman with short brown hair. Later, that same woman looks into the camera and makes silly faces. Perhaps Hansberry is the one holding the camera at that moment as well. Through the juxtaposition of still and moving images, and the accompanying narration, it appears that Hansberry acted as both cameraperson and subject in the archival footage and photographs taken during these freewheeling excursions. Because the provenance of this footage, the exact locations and names of those captured on film with Hansberry on a road trip and seaside adventure, are all secreted, this footage begs for exploration and cinematic experimentation. Strain's treatment of this exciting footage fixes these scenes into a linear trajectory of Hansberry's life and offers very little information about the footage itself. Without more details about these scenes, it is unclear how to reconcile this visual evidence of her life as a lesbian.These scenes of outdoor play, road trips, and intimate quiet bring to mind the freedom captured in the footage of Audre Lorde gliding through a street market and dancing at a house party in Berlin, in the film Audre Lorde—The Berlin Years (2012). These scenes rub up against images of James Baldwin strolling through the narrow cobblestone streets in Saint Paul de Vence in James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket (1989). The intimacy of Black queer documentary film from the mid-twentieth century and beyond brings forward a quiet, intimate interior that cuts through and upends the imperative to defer oneself, one's joy, and one's desire for the sake of a collective freedom that is bound up with a deferral that lies at the heart of Black respectability politics. Deferral of any part of one's freedom, these scenes convey, is no freedom at all. The film emphasizes that Hansberry was surrounded by white lesbians, that she was isolated and did not have a Black gay community. Yet the film shows us that James Baldwin called on her to meet with the US Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, in 1964 to confer about the so-called Negro problem. Was Baldwin not a part of her Black gay community? Did she know Audre Lorde? We know, from reading Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Lorde 1983) that Lorde was hanging out in lesbian bars in Greenwich Village during the 1950s and 1960s. If the film had been more interested in exploring Hansberry's lesbian life, perhaps her queer future would have entered the frame. If the film had truly embraced her as a Black lesbian artist, then her legacy on that front could have had a place in this film. It would have been incredible to bring together Black queer artists working contemporarily who recognize Hansberry as their Black queer foremother, as a lesbian elder and a visionary ancestor, so that they could pay homage to her in the film and discuss the playwright's impact on their practice. This particular cinematic journey will have to wait. Deferral truly steals joy, vision, and connection.The scenes of Hansberry on her road trip and at her Croton-on-Hudson home connect with the documentary's revelation that she led a secret life of writing sapphic short stories under the pseudonym Emily Jones and that she contributed letters to the lesbian publication The Ladder.9 Strain superimposes archival footage of Hansberry lying in bed gazing into the camera and looking up to the ceiling, then adds an image of one of Hansberry's letters as it is read by Rose: “January 9th. I am drunk on Canadian Club and Darvon. Have been wrestling with the third act for days now. It is a stone wall. Have been seeing D.S. She was here. Made soup for me, love to me. But no matter what do not finish the play. I really must concentrate on it with all of my might. It is so terribly hard.” This quote begs the question, who is D. S.? The film dances around the answer. Though Hansberry's lovers remain occluded in this film, one of her lovers must be the one who has access to this private, tender, desirous part of her life. The mystery with which Strain imbues Hansberry's love life fortifies a sense of stealth rather than openness. The change in tone in this segment of the film, the downward shift in pacing, is issued in part by the character of the archival footage itself; yet Strain's treatment of this material exacerbates its cryptic quality. The film moves from imparting explicit details about Hansberry's public presence and some facets of her personal life to using raw archival footage in unknown locations with unidentified people. The choice to maintain a furtive cinematic posture inevitably reproduces a sense mystery about Hansberry's lesbian life. The audience is left wondering who she loved, or if she ever fell in love with any woman. The most telling information in the documentary about someone who captivated Hansberry's romantic interest appears in the visualization of a section from one of her annual lists of likes and hates, dated April 1, 1960 (fig. 5).As the juxtaposition of figures 5 and 6 make salient, Strain does not reveal the entire document but includes glimpses of what Hansberry listed under “I Like,” which appears on its front page. She also includes items from the lists titled “I Am Bored to Death With” and “I want,” which appear on the back (fig. 7). This fragment of Hansberry's list of likes does offer a possible answer to one of the film's riddles. In the journal entry from January 9, she wrote that D. S. had visited her and made love to her. Does D. S. refer to the Dorothy Secules who is listed on Hansberry's list of likes? Who is Dorothy Secules? Is she one of the women who are recorded in the archival footage of Hansberry on her road trip?When Hansberry's list is examined in its entirety, much more information is uncovered. This archival document captures the desire and adoration and upset that she carried with her. As figure 6 reveals, Hansberry wrote that she liked her husband most of the time; she also liked “Dorothy Secules eyes” and “Dorothy Secules,” and further down the list, “My homosexuality,” “the way Dorothy talks,” “charming women,” “and/or intelligent women.” Adjacent to the list of likes on this document, Hansberry also listed things that she hated. Interestingly, her homosexuality also appears under that column. Aside from her homosexuality, Hansberry notes that she also hates “sneaky love affairs,” “silly women,” and “my loneliness.” The items that comprise her list of hates move from heartbreak, television, and stupidity, to physical pain, worry about death, and “what has happened to Sidney Poitier.” On the back side of this document, what figure 7 shows, Hansberry writes, among other things, that she is bored to death with “A Raisin in The Sun!” “being a les,” “ ‘Lesbians’ (the capital L variety),” “silly white people,” and “The Great American Money Obsession.” Her list of wants is only three in number, yet the documentary shows only the first two: “To work,” and “To be in love!” The third item reveals more about the particularity of her desire: she also wanted “Dorothy Secules (at the moment).”Even in this list that reveals Hansberry's feelings about herself, an element of deferral exists. The documentary film puts off revealing that Dorothy Secules played a very important role in Hansberry's love life. Hansberry not only liked her and her eyes, she also wanted her. Strain holds back and obscures this detail about Hansberry's desire, and it is unclear why this directorial choice was made. To know that Hansberry was not simply interested in writing sapphic stories and that she did not just have amorphous lesbian longing but that she had a desirous relationship with a woman whose name was Dorothy Secules, or D. S., makes material her Black lesbian desire. Strain handles Hansberry's love affairs in such a way that her film actually prolongs the deferral of recognition of Hansberry's life as a lesbian.The impetus of this film to cloud any specificity about Hansberry's sexuality may stem from the Hansberry estate's history of maintaining this approach. Though the estate donated the playwright's archive to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in 1998, a restricted box existed within that collection. The contents of that box, which include Hansberry's personal papers and essays documenting her lesbian life, would not be accessible until 2013 (Mumford n.d.) The deferred access to the restricted box exemplifies the kind of archival deferral that estranges Black queer historical figures from their own history and community, generations after their deaths. While the archival process is not discussed in Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart, the film does remind viewers that homosexuality was criminalized during the 1950s and 1960s: those who were found to be gay during this time could lose their jobs and their families and be arrested by the vice squad for committing crimes of indecency and sodomy.10 The stakes of being an out lesbian were high for women during this era, but for Hansberry, her fame and standing as a beacon of Black respectability and triumph in the Black community complicated her ability to express her sexuality. This history certainly contributes to the estate's—and by proxy, the film's—anxiety over revealing details about Hansberry's lesbian lovers. Despite the axiomatic, tacit if not overt pressure to deny her sexual desire, Hansberry did not defer this aspect of her own life. The impulse to restrict her sexuality from the realm of public knowledge carries with it a protective stance that is encumbered by a sense of shame that Hansberry did not seem to hold herself but that rather was projected onto her legacy by her estate. This kind of archival deferral disconnects her from her legacy and denies subsequent generations of Black queer artists the opportunity to recognize her as an ancestor who forged a path that they now trod. The expectation to defer Black joy that is at work in Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun is also present in this documentary film, in the restricted access to the playwright's archive and in Hansberry's life as a Black luminary. Unlike Audr

Glamorous Work: Notes from the Red Carpet

AbstractThe Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) attracts filmmakers and film audiences from around the world each year. In this article, I take an ethnographic approach to understand the way film festival organizers bring groups together and act as intermediaries in negotiating the value of particular films and cinema. I argue that film festival organizers engage in glamorous work—a strategy that employs visual cues and artful mediation to cultivate a sense of the extraordinary while obscuring the risky nature of film festival organization. This article considers the risks involved in film festival organization and the way glamorous work attempts to alleviate these risks.

An Introduction

Introduction| December 01 2021 An Introduction Rasha Salti; Rasha Salti Rasha Salti is a researcher, writer and curator of art and film based in Beirut and Berlin. She has co-curated programs on Arab, Syrian, and Lebanese cinema for Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art (NY), and has worked as a programmer for the Abu Dhabi International Film Festival (2009-2010) and the Toronto International Film Festival (2011-2015) among others. At present she is the commissioning editor for the experimental documentary program “La Lucarne” for Arte France. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar B. Ruby Rich B. Ruby Rich Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2021) 75 (2): 38–39. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2021.75.2.38 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Rasha Salti, B. Ruby Rich; An Introduction. Film Quarterly 1 December 2021; 75 (2): 38–39. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2021.75.2.38 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentFilm Quarterly Search You do not currently have access to this content.

Música pós-minimalista em cena: uma análise do uso de trance 4 em Closet monster*

O filme Closet Monster, escrito e dirigido por Stephen Dunn, considerado um dos dez melhores filmes canadenses do ano 2015 pelo TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival), apresenta fortes influências do cinema queer e utiliza a música como elemento fundamental para caracterizar o protagonista, acompanhar a trama e conceder à obra um sentido que não seria o mesmo sem ela. Este artigo foca-se em uma cena próxima ao desenlace do filme (71'32"-75'43"), que se serve da peça musical pós-minimalista Trance 4, do compositor americano Michael Gordon, interpretada pelo grupo musical Icebreaker, concebida em 1995. Desse recorte emerge uma análise que tem como objetivos distinguir a contribuição da peça na composição da cena e discutir a influência mútua das linguagens musical e visual, ambas localizadas em tendências com características determinadas, quais sejam o cinema queer e o pós-minimalismo, respectivamente. Para tanto, a análise é apoiada em Román (2008), Leydon (2002) e Chion (2008), dentre outros autores, transitando entre conceitos como linguagem musivisual, pontos de sincronização e pós-minimalismo musical. O artigo inicia com considerações sobre música pós-minimalista, cinema queer e os protagonistas de Trance, à guisa de contextualização, seguidas pela exploração da cena fílmica de Closet Monster ambientada pela faixa musical Trance 4. Como conclusão, ressalta-se o papel da música na composição da cena. Pretende-se contribuir com este artigo para a ampliação dos debates sobre o uso de música pós-minimalista no cinema queer.

The Consequences of Cinema: An interview with Gael García Bernal (Toronto International Film Festival)

The Consequences of Cinema: An interview with Gael García Bernal (Toronto International Film Festival)

Mademoiselle de Joncquières réal. by Emmanuel Mouret

Reviewed by: Mademoiselle de Joncquières réal. by Emmanuel Mouret Anna Dimitrova Mouret, Emmanuel, réal. Mademoiselle de Joncquières. Int. Cécile de France, Édouard Baer, Alice Isaaz, Natalia Dontcheva. Moby Dick, 2018. Following Fritz Wendhausen's silent film Madame de la Pommeraye's Intrigues (1922) and Robert Bresson's Les dames du bois de Boulogne (1945), this feature is another adaptation of an episode in Diderot's novel Jacques le fataliste et son maître, published at the end of the eighteenth century. Mouret offers a contemporary reading of this pre-revolutionary love triangle tale and its twists of deception, revenge, and redemption. Viewers witness and feel the spirit of libertinage and the female characters' agency as both perpetrators and victims. Madame de la Pommeraye (Cécile de France) [End Page 251] is a beautiful aristocratic widow living in a vast estate outside Paris. For several months, she hosts Le marquis des Arcis (Édouard Baer), a prominent libertine who strives to win her heart. Le marquis succeeds in seducing her, making her his latest conquest. He leaves her mansion believing that they will stay good friends. Devastated, la Madame designs a revenge plan: "Ma colère est pleine d'un esprit de justice. [...] Je vois en moi le genre féminin, et en lui, le genre masculin." Her stratagem involves two of society's cast-out women, Madame de Joncquières (Natalia Dontcheva) and her daughter Mademoiselle de Joncquières (Alice Isaaz), who, in order to survive, have been driven to prostitution. Madame de la Pommeraye stages circumstances and meetings between the Joncquières and le Marquis. As premeditated, the exceptional beauty of Mademoiselle de Joncquières (who resembles "une vierge de Raphaël") smites le marquis, who is made to believe that the young woman is a devout virgin. Shot in soft daylight and pastel colors, the film is a visual pleasure. Although the exposition is a bit long and the titular Mademoiselle de Joncquières appears relatively late, the story captivates and flows smoothly from scene to scene. Mouret's cinematic tools create a specific sense of place and time. The juxtaposition of nature scenes and lavish interiors contributes to the impact of the first part of the film. Mouret uses long shots for the magnificent outdoors and close-ups and medium shots inside the mansions. Later, the characters' dangerous liaisons are filmed mostly in the buildings' closed spaces, adding to the sense of psychological manipulation. At times, the dialogue is too theatrical, but the conversations capture the old-fashioned eighteenth-century French language and expression. Henceforth, the gossip of Parisian aristocrats conveys the fate and disgrace of the Joncquières. The conversations flow seamlessly with the film score: baroque music played on a harpsichord, a typical musical instrument in pre-revolutionary France. The superb costume design by Pierre-Jean Larroque earned him a second César des meilleurs costumes in 2019, following his work on Marguerite (2015). The feature premiered at Toronto International Film Festival (2018), ranking as one of the top three films. It will please not only the fans of period dramas such as Les liaisons dangereuses and Ridicule, but anyone interested in representations of the turns and twists of human nature. Anna Dimitrova Columbus State University (GA) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Heteronormativity and Toxic Masculinity in Stephen Dunn’s Closet Monster

Premiering at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival to great acclaim (it won the award for the Best Canadian Feature, and was eventually included in the IFF’s annual Canada’s Top Ten), Stephen Dunn’s Closet Monster employs monsters metaphorically, primarily in order to express the psychological damage of violent homophobia and to comment on toxic masculinity. Yet monstrosity is not merely a metaphor but also a strategy: the protagonist, a closeted teenager named Oscar, appropriates both monstrosity and heroic narratives in order to manage life as a homosexual person in a deeply homophobic environment of contemporary suburban Canada. The magic realist details which permeate Closet Monster – the talking pet hamster, the scenes seamlessly fusing body horror with realism – exemplify the film’s poignant, almost fairy-tale-like approach to “homophobia-related violence” and the effects of PTSD initiated by Oscar’s witnessing of violent enforcement of gender normativity in his childhood. This paper proposes to examine the politics of the film, in particular Dunn’s deployment of monstrosity in the representation and condemnation of violent homophobia and toxic/hegemonic masculinity. As these issues are inextricable from the wider cultural context of normative gender and sexuality, Dunn’s criticism of heteronormativity is discussed as well. It is in this context, also, that the film’s depiction of the production, policing and elimination of “monstrous” (i.e. homosexual) bodies is examined. Article received: March 11, 2018; Article accepted: April 10, 2018; Published online: September 15, 2018; Scholarly analysis or debateHow to cite this article: Petković, Danijela. "Heteronormativity and Toxic Masculinity in Stephen Dunn’s Closet Monster." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 16 (2018): 43−54. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i16.253

Love: The Eleventh Annual Orphan Film Symposium

Research Article| September 01 2018 Love: The Eleventh Annual Orphan Film Symposium Liz Czach Liz Czach Liz Czach is associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. During 1995–2005 she was a film programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival. She researches and publishes on Canadian and Quebecois film, home movies and amateur film, and film festivals. Her current research project is a book-length study of travel-lecture filmmaking tentatively titled Your Ticket to Adventure! Travel-Lecture Filmmaking in the Post-War Era: 1945–1980. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2018) 72 (1): 80–85. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2018.72.1.80 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Liz Czach; Love: The Eleventh Annual Orphan Film Symposium. Film Quarterly 1 September 2018; 72 (1): 80–85. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2018.72.1.80 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

On Platforms

Women-led serials have been getting a lot of attention lately for bringing “the female gaze” to the small screen. Jill Soloway—the television auteur behind Transparent (Amazon, 2014–) and the recent adaptation of Kraus's novel, I Love Dick (Amazon, 2017–)—even taught a class on “The Female Gaze” at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016, defining it as “an intersectional gaze” and “a SOCIOPOLITICAL justice-demanding way of art making.” But the female gaze is actually a very vexed concept. Since it was first invoked via exclusion in Laura Mulvey's foundational “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1975, it has been haphazardly defined more often by what it is not than by what it is. Three current series—I Love Dick, GLOW, and Insecure—all explore how women empower themselves through experiences of abjection: states of vexation and alienation that disrupt their expectations of or participation in social life. All three shows demand respect for their characters by figuring defeat, failure, and desperation as stages women must pass through to challenge patriarchal cultures. While all three shows feature diverse casts and strong female leads, I Love Dick and GLOW introduce characters of color only in supporting roles that contest but never destabilize the white protagonists' racial solipsism. This strategic but facile gesture reveals how far these shows have to go to confront the entangled injustices of social inequality. To incorporate the experiences and insights of women of color meaningfully, their creators would have to abandon the narrative commitments and familiar pleasures of white feminist television, which still needs to decenter whiteness both narratively and figuratively. Insecure's trenchant comedy thus provides a model for future feminist television. Its self-critical but antiracist humor challenges white feminism's and television's historic neglect of black women.

Matías Piñeiro’s Viola and the Resonant Drift of Love

Matías Piñeiro’s Viola and the Resonant Drift of Love Constanza Ceresa1 If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again, it had a dying fall. Oh, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound, that breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more. ‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before. O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou, That, notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there, Of what validity and pitch soe’er, But falls into abatement and low price Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy That it alone is high fantastical. —William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 1 With this brief monologue, Orsino, the Duke of Iliria, opens Twelfth Night, the Shakespearean comedy that is being rehearsed by a group of female performers in Matías Piñeiro’s film Viola (2012). Although the fragment quoted above does not appear in the film, it aptly expresses how the discordant “spirit of love” resists categorization into a single meaning. The spirit of love emerges as a synesthetic “sweet sound” that “breathes upon a bank of violets,” later turning into an intolerable noise that falls “into abatement and low price.” Viola articulates the precarious shapes of “fancy” through the entanglement of different discourses, genres, and subjects, allowing theatre, [End Page 87] literature, music, design, maps, text messages, emails, and pirated films to intersect in a vibrant dialogue. It is now firmly accepted that one of the characteristics of contemporary aesthetic production pertains to the loss of boundaries between disciplines and artistic genres. As Florencia Garramuño states: “Contemporary aesthetics’ transformations propitiate modes of organization of the sensible that put into crisis ideas of belongingness, specificity and autonomy” (245). Such porosity of language not only questions automatized categorization of genres (how a form responds to an identity), but also strengthens new forms of interaction between fiction and reality, art and spectator. By means of technical and narrative operations, Viola positions itself in that interstice in order to create an indiscernible zone where gender identities and meanings are dissolved. In this article, I will first examine how the tension between cinema and theatre that lies at the heart of the film breaks boundaries between different forms of perception. Second, I will explore in what way the baroque imaginary unleashed by the Shakespearean play contributes to blurring the limits between reality and artifice. Finally, I will explore how the performative2 repetition of texts and gestures creates an unstable affective network in which bodies, sounds, and gazes contaminate characters’ everyday lives. I will conclude that Viola shows that the resonance of love, as a social and affective force, circulates beyond what is visible. Cinema and Theatre in Tension Matías Piñeiro (1982, Buenos Aires) is a graduate of the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, currently living in New York. He has made five films to date: El hombre robado (2007), Todos mienten (2009), Rosalinda (2011), Viola (2012), and La princesa de Francia (2014), the last of which was released at the Lorcano Film Festival. The first two films engage with the work of 19th-century Argentine writer and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,3 while Rosalinda, Viola, and La princesa de Francia4 are part of a series of films that explore the feminine world in William Shakespeare’s comedies. Viola was released in September 2012 at the Toronto International Film Festival and shown at the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) in 2013, where María Villar, Agustina Muñoz, Elisa Carricajo, and Romina Paula shared the award for best female performer. As in other Piñeiro films, a literary text (in this case the rehearsal of a scene from a Shakespeare comedy) becomes the catalyst for a series of unexpected connections. The film’s plot is apparently simple. The title character delivers [End Page 88] pirated DVDs throughout the Buenos Aires as part of her boyfriend’s video business. Along the way she joins up with a group...

Reporting the Start of a Season: Toronto International Film Festival

Reporting the Start of a Season: Toronto International Film Festival

Overcoming the Stigma: The Queer Denial of Indiewood

sex sells, except when it comes to Indiewood films with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) content. This is significantly evident when looking at the two trailers that were released for Tom Ford's A Single Man, film detailing day in the life of depressed gay British professor. Although neither trailer presents the film's basic narrative or emphasizes that the film is an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name, both present few key shots accompanied by the film's score. Tom Ford's initial trailer for the Toronto International Film Festival illustrates the film's gay content alongside other elements of the film's narrative. We have the shot of Colin Firth and Matthew Goode kissing, shot of Firth looking into Nicholas Hoult's eyes, and ultimately an equal pairing of Firth interacting with male characters as he does with female, particularly Julianne Moore. The film was then sold to the Weinstein Company, whose subsequent trailer tells markedly different story: Goode's and Hoult's names are removed from the final moments of the trailer; the gay kiss is removed; and there is conspicuously unsubtle attempt at pushing both Firth and Moore for Academy Awards-we even get quote from Playboy describing the film as a movie of beauty, mystery, visual dazzle, and emotional resistance. If one had not heard anything else about this film, one could easily assume from the Weinstein trailer that this is semiindependent film detailing the relationship between Firth and Moore. This stark difference led Indiewire film critic Peter Knegt to claim that this was the heterosexualization of gay film: In with the Oscar buzz, out with the gayness. It seems the Weinstein Company doesn't want to take any chances with all those homophobic Academy members (A Tale of Two Trailers). This approach is indicative of many LGBT films in that there is distinct downplay of content to favor the quality characteristics of the films, which in this case is perhaps most notable in the conscious decision to replace scene of Firth and Goode kissing with claims of the Oscar buzz surrounding Firth and Moore.The intention of this article is to identify how this differentiation between queer and quality content occurs within the LGBT films of Indiewood. Indiewood films are marketed as an art-house alternative to Hollywood but in fact are distributed by specialty divisions of major distribution companies. Brokeback Mountain and The Kids Are All Right, for instance, were distributed by Focus Features, which is subsidiary of Universal Pictures, which is subsidiary of NBC Universal, which in turn is division of the Comcast Corporation. A political-economic critique of this corporate formation questions how explicitly narratives are marketed to mass public with the sole purpose of making financial profit. Existing scholarship shows that quality features traditionally associated with cultural capital are highlighted in the promotion of these Indiewood films, perhaps most notably in the literary-adapted films distributed by Miramax (Collins 142). Highly celebrated literary figures dull the stigma associated with the commodification of films within Hollywood. This article argues that promotion of LGBT Indiewood films follows this same strategic approach. These films are surrounded by paratexts that distinctly emphasize quality cultural capital while downplaying any content. As Indiewire critic Peter Knegt has identified with the trailers for A Single Man, these are films that these subsidiary companies, alongside the private Weinstein Company, want to promote to mass public beyond niche audiences. Within this process, queerness becomes the very liability for these films to overcome.IndiewoodAbove all else, Indiewood is an economic trend. The Indiewood, or semi-independent, film signals shift in the production, distribution, and exhibition of many independent films, where specialty divisions owned by major media conglomerates distribute independently produced films (King 1; McDonald 354). …

Toronto Turns Forty

B. Ruby Rich reviews the fortieth edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, taking stock of TIFF from its origins to its present incarnation.

Toronto International Film Festival 2015

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2015 The print ads and trailers for Toronto's 40th edition (10-20 September 2015) showed a striking motif of a powdered explosion at reduced speed varying only by colour scheme - a nice metaphor for the celebratory blast of diversity that any healthy entity turning forty ought to enjoy. But far from being complacent, Toronto humbly adapted to a competitive festival circuit by tweaking key strategies (all but retreating from 2014's decision permitting only world premieres to screen on its opening weekend), while also launching new ideas (the inauguration of a juried feature film competition eponymously named after Jia Zhangke's 2000 film Platform). On a related note, Sinophone content dominated this year's skinny selection of about two dozen Asian films, about half of which came from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Elsewhere, the Philippines and...

Toronto 2014

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2014 Although Toronto raised the stakes in the bloodsport of festival politics by saving its prime opening weekend slots only for world premieres, it's still early to tell if it can be kingmaker of the US awards season. Ironically, interest in the opening weekend haul of its 39th edition (4 - 14 September 2014) was muted, while films tipped as derby favourites had premiered elsewhere. In this game of give-and-take, a win for Toronto's ego can mean less exposure to important films. Away from Hollywood buzz, several directors returned with new works for the second year running: Peter Chan, Lav Diaz, Hong Sang-soo, Sono Sion, Johnnie To and Tsai Ming-liang (for Hong and Sono, it's their third year running). And for its sixth 'City to City' program, Toronto chose Seoul with eight titles spanning the genre variety that has sustained South Korean...

Are you burning?: Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames circa 2012

The essay documents a screening of Born in Flames held in January 2012 in response to the exclusion of women and feminists from the Toronto International Film Festival. The essay includes the authors' explanation of the events leading up to the screening, documents from their organizing, and a transcript of the conversation with audience members.

Around the Circuit

Toronto International Film Festival 2012: 6-12 September, 2012 A report by Barry Keith Grant Madeira FilmFestival 2012: 2-6 May, 2012 A Report by Ryan Prout Expand New Horizons in Poland T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival: 19 - 29 July 2012 A report by Marcin Radomski