The Monogamous/Promiscuous Optics in Contemporary Gay Film

Cüneyt Çakırlar & Gary Needham (2020) The monogamous/promiscuous optics in contemporary gay film: registering the amorous couple in Weekend (2011) and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016), New Review of Film and Television Studies, 18:4, 402-430

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2020.1800329

This article explores representations of same-sex intimacy in contemporary gay cinema by focusing on two films, Weekend (2011) and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo (2016). Both films spatialise intimacy, which is reflected in a formal appeal to monogamous and promiscuous optics. What interests us here is how the rela- tional politics of monogamy/promiscuity can be considered as stylistic and ideological registers in gay filmmaking. Informed by Leo Bersani’s work, we investigate how gay cinema tests the social viability/intelligibility of same-sex intimacy against a centring of the self. Furthermore, we explore how gay films use form and style to situate both their politics and their spectators through specta- cles of erotic relationality. Following Bersani, the article proposes a theory of cinematic optics that privilege the impersonal over the personal, and the onto- logical over the psychological. Weekend ‘ovalises’ intimacy and locates the couple formally and ideologically. The couple in Weekend’s space of sociality operates within a monogamous optic that presents intimacy through stabilising identities and psychologising subject positions. Théo & Hugo, however, reorients spectator- ship as impersonal and promiscuous in finding a way to express the experience of cruising and sociability in ways that are dispersed and extensible.

Losing Mothers: Queer Allure of Julianne Moore

Cüneyt Çakırlar presented an audiovisual essay on the star-image of Julianne Moore at the symposium Performing Stardom: New Methods in Critical Star Studies, which took place at the University of Kent (29 May 2015). The symposium was hosted by NoRMMA (Network of Research: Movies, Magazines, Audiences) and focused on way to explore film studies research through nontraditional approaches. Examples included: performance, video essays, interpretative dance, creative fiction/non-fiction, poetry, music, and any kind of multimedia project. Through this symposium, the team explored the connections between scholarship and fandom, research and creativity, the benefits and disadvantages of exploring an (audio)visual art through (audio)visual means, and the development of the innovative and ever-emerging field of practice as research. 

Çakırlar's response to the event took the form of an audiovisual essay. Çakırlar's videographic analysis reflected on the queer potentialities of Julianne Moore’s on-screen star image that comes to repeatedly reveal her presence as an unconventional, if not failed, maternal embodiment. The essay focused on the ways in which Moore’s body-image has frequently become an object of (i) (queer) cinematic pastiche, (ii) an ambivalent transgressive sexuality, and most significantly, (iii) an uncanny erotic of motherhood. Çakirlar's piece is currently under review for intransition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies.    

Jake Yuzna's Open at Kuenstlerhaus Stuttgart

The exhibition at Kuenstlerhaus Stuttgart, Skeptical Thoughts on Love, departs from artistic perspectives that conjecture multiple forms of attachment, intimacy, and obsession. Methodologically speaking, it is inspired from the physical reality, potential impact and transformative power of love. The exhibition speculates on the potentiality of love as if it is the only possible form of resistance for cognitive/collective revolution in our contemporary solitude, demands silence as a conceptual tool to deal with human relationships and art works, and proposes to operate as a testing ground for introspection, self-analysis and self-reflection.




Participating artists:

Natalie Czech, Keren Cytter, Mariechen Danz, Leyla Gediz, Judith Hopf, Matthias Megyeri, Henrik Olesen, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Johannes Paul Raether, Sophie Reinhold, Emily Roysdon, Eva Schmeckenbecher, Jake Yuzna and Adbusters

The show ends with the screening and discussion of Jake Yuzna's film Open (2010). Open generates a strong vision, and contemporary panorama of how gender, sexuality and identity transform through diverse forms of love, attachment and intimacy. It is the first American film to win the Teddy Jury Prize at the Teddy Award (Premier: Berlin Film Festival in 2010). The film also won Best Narrative Film at the TLV Festival in Tel Aviv Israel, Best Performance at Newfest, as well as having the Jake Yuzna named a Four in Focus filmmaker at Outfest. Much of the film was inspired by the artist and musician Genesis P-Orridge, who served as creative consultant on the film and an interview with her made by Yuzna has been shown as part of the installation at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. 




Cuneyt Cakirlar gives an introductory talk on the film and moderates the post-screening discussion with the curator of the show Adnan Yıldız on 30 March 2014. 

Global Queer Cinema

Global Queer Cinema is an AHRC funded research network in the Translating Cultures scheme, and is located in the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex. The organisers are Rosalind Galt (Sussex) and Karl Schoonover (Warwick).

The first symposium Queer Cinema and Aesthetics of the Global that Galt and Schoonover organised took place in 12-13 May 2012. This event brought together international scholars to consider the aesthetics and politics of queer cinema in a global context. Speakers included David Eng (University of Pennsylvania), Patricia White (Swarthmore College), Gayatri Gopinath (New York University), Song Hwee Lim (University of Exeter), Catherine Grant (University of Sussex), Michael Lawrence (University of Sussex), Shamira Meghani (University of Leeds) and Cüneyt Çakirlar (NTU). This two-day symposium’s format was participatory and aimed to generate debate and analysis. Speakers screened short clips from queer film or other moving image media and present informal analyses. Moreover, the participants circulated samples from their current research on the subject before the event and a series of intensive workshops and roundtable discussions took place. Questions Galt and Schoonover aimed to address included:

          (i) What is rendered visible by placing these three terms together: ‘global’, ‘queer’ and ‘cinema? What tensions are revealed, what rhetorics engaged?

          (ii) How do presiding visions of the global depend upon the inclusion or exclusion of queer lives?

          (iii) How do the politics of neoliberalism and human rights discourse intersect with queer lives? How does contemporary queer film and media practice engage and refuse these tensions? How can we think about queer visual aesthetics, and how do questions of form, style and genre coalesce in contemporary queer politics?

         (iv) What kinds of global communities are produced (or precluded) by the histories of the queer film festival, or of other modes of queer media consumption?

         (v) How can we theorise the role of popular cinema, art film, the avant-garde, community and activist media in these political landscapes? Are these distinctions necessary critical tools?

The second and final workshop, which took place on 5-7 April 2013, reiterated the same format. The aim of the network was again to bring together scholars working on international topics in queer film and visual cultures, and to engage both senior and emerging scholars. The event comprised Cüneyt Çakirlar (NTU), Rohit Dasgupta (University of the Arts), Samar Habib (SOAS), Hoang Nguyen (Bryn Mawr), John David Rhodes (Sussex), B. Ruby Rich (UC Santa Cruz), Deborah Shaw (Portsmouth), and Juan Suarez (Murcia).

For further details of the project, please visit http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/gqc/

For a sample of Cüneyt Çakirlar's contribution in these two events he was invited to, please visit page of the journal Screen (52:3).