December 20, 2015

Tempting Fate: the Western, The Vampire, and the Monstrous-Femininte in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)



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 Not too long ago, I started Grad School.  Eek.  At the request of a few buddies, and considering the fact that this is also sort of a movies blog, I now present a paper I wrote now some time ago.  Notes and citations are near the bottom.
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http://ww2.kqed.org/pop/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2015/04/a-girl-walks-home.jpg
 


The history of Iranian cinema is a long and torrid affair, much like that of American cinema, as Hamid Dabashi’s “Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past Present and Future” (2001) at times heartbreakingly describes. But despite the government’s frequent and unrelenting attempts at stifling creativity deemed irreputable or in any way damaging to the state (Dabashi, 32; Tait; Rostami-Povey, 6-7; Wright), there has always been, if not a strong, then a strong-willed underground scene (Dabashi, 33-75), and in recent years Iran has enjoyed more relaxed regulations (Dabashi, 253; Ghazi; Issa; Wright). Iranian American director Ana Lily Amirpour’s film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), exists as an extension of this constantly reinventing cinematic history by offering a film which, like many classic underground Iranian films (Dabashi, 28), presents an engaging film which nonetheless succeeds in questioning authority. By merging the genre of the western and the vampire film, as well as employing a variety of inversions of the male gaze, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night critiques and denounces patriarchal ideology as well as discusses how westernization has reshaped Iranian culture.  

September 17, 2015

Life is a Masquerade: Exploring the Unmasking of Gender Conformity and Fostering of Acceptance of the Trans* Community Through the Exploitation of Scopophilic Pleasure in Queens at Heart (1967)

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 Not too long ago, I started Grad School.  Eek.  At the request of a few buddies, and considering the fact that this is also sort of a movies blog, I now present a paper I wrote now some time ago.  Notes and citations are near the bottom. 
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Side note:
1)     The usage of “trans* individuals” and gender neutral pronouns will be employed to discuss the four interviewees in Queens at Heart (1967).  This will be done because, while they do discuss that they are anticipating and saving up for a sex-change operation, and host Jay Martin refers to them as “men,” the interviewees never refer to their own gender, and it would be unavoidably anachronistic to make any assumption in regards the gender pronoun that they would prefer (Killermann 2012).
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Life is a Masquerade:
Exploring the Unmasking of Gender Conformity and
Fostering of Acceptance of the Trans* Community Through
the Exploitation of Scopophilic Pleasure in Queens at Heart (1967)

 http://www.outfest.org/legacy/images/queens_at_heart.jpg

            Little production information remains about the short 1960’s documentary Queens at Heart, and what is accessible only raises more questions. Information on the company named in the Queens at Heart credits, Southeastern Pictures Company, is monolithic compared to that of the film’s host, Jay Martin, of which there is practically none (OpenCorporates 2014, OutFest 2009, Queensatheart.Blogspot.com 2013).  Likely released in 1967, its name appearing as an additional feature for another Southeastern Pictures Company film, She-Man: A Story of Fixation (1976) (Fullmoonstreaming.com 2014), the relative lack of information about not only the host and the trans* individuals interviewed in the film, but information regarding its production, is not surprising given the political environment in which this film was released.  Until the landmark Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court Case in 2003, homosexual acts, deemed “sodomy,” were illegal in many states (Painter 2008).  Until the 70’s, there was only one state which didn’t actively restrict homosexual acts, Illinois, which was the first to remove the ban in 1962 (Painter 2008).  Filmed in this pre-Stonewall-riot environment, where public knowledge of homosexual acts could provide grounds for imprisonment or the citation of hefty fines, as well as provide illegal but socially sanctioned acts of hate-encouraged violence, keeping anonymous the names and identities of the trans* individuals would conceivably have been paramount to their being involved in its production.
           Archival restorations by The Outfest Legacy Project have provided an opportunity to hear the stories of these trans* individuals first hand (OutFest 2009).  The film itself provides for analysis an early attempt to promote understanding and acceptance of this subjugated cross section of humanity. Through a formal analysis of the film, combined with a discussion of the relationship between both male and female scopophilia and film, Queens at Heart ironically succeeds in exposing and thereby promoting tolerance and acceptance of trans* people in the United States.


May 9, 2015

We Don’t Put Out: Objectification, Panopticism, and Collaboration in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1981)

Not too long ago, I started Grad School.  Eek.  At the request of a few buddies, and considering the fact that this is also sort of a movies blog, I now present a paper I wrote not too long ago.  Notes and citations are near the bottom. 

We Don’t Put Out:
Objectification, Panopticism, and Collaboration in
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (1981)

http://glasstire.com/wp-content/themes/glasstire/library/extensions/tim-thumb/timthumb.php?src=http://glasstire.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/video-circus3.jpg&w=620&h=320&q=100


By the late 1970’s, in an unexpected but beautifully orchestrated turn of events, certain members of the punk rock community began to realize that punk had turned into its masturbatory, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing heavy metal forbearers.  Punk now mirrored the commercial, decadent, and youth-centered music from the 60’s they heavily despised.  It was as though they had woken up and recognized they now embodied the easily critiqued image of the punk rock poseur, donning an anarchy symbol as a veiled attempt at rebelling against their inevitable transformation into their parents.  With Crass’ 1978 song “Punk is Dead” ringing in their ears, punk rock musicians began branching off, forming a variety of new genres, including new wave, post-punk, and hardcore.
With new wave taking hold primarily in the inner cities, and post-punk primarily propagating in the UK, hardcore flourished in the American suburbs, its stripped-down, no-nonsense approach to music speaking directly to the disenfranchised suburban sensibility.  With this veritable rebirth of punk came austere, socially and politically minded lyrics; the sincere, forthright rage and intensity with which they sang about battling oppression of any kind being mirrored by their wild and abrasive, but simple, instrumentalization.
During this transitional period, Lou Adler, record producer, director of Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke (1978), and producer of the cult hit Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), teamed up with academy award winning screen writer Nancy Dowd to create the film Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1981).  One of the first roles for both Diane Lane and Laura Dern, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains follows the exploits of an all-girl band, Lane’s character being the oldest at fifteen, as they carve out a space for themselves both under the ominous, repressive shadow of the burnt out, aging heavy metal bands, and along side the unwelcoming, already-insular, equally and ironically oppressive hardcore punk scene. Through an understanding of Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze, Michel Foucault’s theory of panopticism, and Coleman and Rippin’s theory on collaboration, a formal analysis of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains shows that it suggests that women cannot simply wait for men to remove the shackles of the patriarchy; that by recognizing, critiquing, and rejecting established systems of masculinized oppression, specifically that of objectification, as well as ending the practice of self-policing on behalf of the patriarchy, women will be able to make significant strides by collaborating with each other working towards ending their own subjugation.