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COPYRIGHT 2003 Duke University Press
In Positiv, the opening short film in Mike Hoolboom's six-part compilation film Panic Bodies (Canada, 1998), the viewer is faced with a veritable excess of the visual. The screen is divided into four equal parts, suggesting both a wall of video monitors and also Warhol's famed simultaneous projections. Hoolboom, a Toronto-based experimental filmmaker who has been HIV positive since 1988, appears in the top right-hand frame as a talking head, tightly framed and speaking directly to the camera. At once poignant and wry, his monologue explores the corporeal experience of living with AIDS: "The yeast in my mouth is so bad it turns all my favorite foods, even chocolate-chocolate-chip ice cream, into a dull metallic taste like licking a crowbar. I know then that my body, my real body, is somewhere else: bungee jumping into mine shafts stuffed with chocolate wafers and whipped cream and blueberry pie and just having a good time. You know?" Each of the other three frames is filled with a montage of images from contemporary Hollywood films, B-movies, vintage porn, home movies, ephemeral films, as well as Hoolboom's own experimental films.
These multiple frames feed the viewer a plethora of diverse visual sensations. They include disintegrating and morphing bodies (from The Hunger [dir. Tony Scott, UK, 1983], Terminator 2 [dir. James Cameron, US, 1991], and Altered States [dir. Ken Russell, US, 1980]); the terrified, diminished body of The Incredible Shrinking Man (dir. Jack Arnold, US, 1957); teeming microscopic cells and viruses (from old instructional films); mundane shots of the repetitive medical tests taken by Hoolboom; scratched and bleached-out footage of a family Christmas; and melodramatic reaction shots of horror and pathos (from classic silent films). (1) The imbrication of private and public spheres becomes clear in the film through the way in which the shifting array of images visualize and render into metaphor the personal testimony of the film's talking head. Bodily crisis pervades both the sound and image tracks. Pop culture's diverse iconography of bodily fragmentation accompanies Hoolboom's narration of how he has become alienated from his own body due to the physiological effects of HIV infection. The corporeal fragmentation in these images, the sense of a body in parts, is amplified by the film's formal design: the frame is dissected into smaller frames, and the short film itself constitutes one of six separate parts to the compilation film. Yet these images do more than merely illustrate a monologue performance, for Positiv powerfully demonstrates how we come to use popular culture, and popular cinema in particular, to articulate our sense of self. This engagement with the image is neither a simple identification with the visual signifier as a transparent reflection of lived experience nor a mere inhabiting of a subject position, but rather a complex process of identification, appropriation, and negotiation. Hoolboom's film registers how identity and personal memory are continually inflected by the vocabularies of popular culture.
Despite their systematic marginalization by modern technologies of representation, gay cultural producers have consistently turned to the archive of popular culture in search of an affective and aesthetic vocabulary for articulating and sharing lived experience. (2) However, their attitude is often inscribed by an ambivalence about the possible toxicity of the culture they appropriate. Gay skepticism toward popular culture obviously increased during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, when television and the popular press consistently pathologized and demonized gay men as "AIDS killers." But alongside the numerous critiques of AIDS hysteria in popular culture produced by independent lesbian and gay media over the past two decades, one also finds a significant number of experimental films and videos that approach the visual archive of popular culture as a rich source of affect, rather than merely as a site for ideological analysis. This article analyzes and contextualizes a number of these works, including Michael Wallin's Decodings (US, 1988), Matthias Muller's Aus der Ferne: The Memo Book (Germany, 1989) and his Pensao Globo [The Globe Hotel] (Germany, 1997), and Jim Hubbard's Memento Mori (US, 1995). The films articulate gay structures of feeling in the first two decades of the AIDS epidemic through the dynamics of cinephilia--that is to say, through their affectively charged relationship to cinema and its history.
In using Raymond Williams's term structures of feeling, I am drawing from the conceptualization Williams offers in Marxism and Literature, when he describes such structures of feeling as "specifically affective elements of consciousness" and "meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt." (3) Williams understands these structures as historical and contingent, elements of "a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolatory." (4) Although it has almost become a cliche to cite the magnitude of the social and psychological upheaval experienced by gay men during the first two decades of the epidemic, it is important to recognize the simultaneous scope and diversity of the effects that AIDS has had on gay men. Thus when clinical psychologist Walt Odets argues that all gay men are living with HIV and AIDS, he is actually doing so in the service of articulating the specific needs of HIV-negative gay men. (5) Both seropositive and seronegative gay men must deal with feelings of loss, anxiety, guilt, and isolation, yet in often strikingly different and socially polarizing frameworks. Some of these experiential differences derive from generational distinctions, with more older gay men suffering multiple loss with the deaths of many friends and lovers as well as the loss of a sexual culture they helped to create in the post-gay liberation years before AIDS. Yet even in their differences, determined by age and serostatus, these experiences resonate with the prior experience of loss endured in the process of gay socialization or coming out, which almost all gay men (and lesbians) share in a heteronormative society. As Odets points out, loss is first experienced early in the protogay child's life as the "unattainability of a real self," since this self is connected to forbidden homosexual feelings (72). This "anticipatory" loss of an authentic and meaningful life inscribes gay male subjectivity with indelible traces of loss and nostalgia. The repeated and varied reinscription of such traces by the experience of the AIDS epidemic has profoundly shaped gay structures of feeling over the past twenty years. Even within those two decades, gay structures of feeling in the West have transformed as the epidemic among gay men has evolved from the dire crisis of the early 1980s through the years of activist empowerment to the current muted optimism that has emerged with the arrival of effective antiretroviral drug combinations.
The films I examine here were made during the emergence of the activist culture of ACT UP and in the decade that followed, a period when gay cultural producers were increasingly attentive to the imperative, so succinctly articulated by Douglas Crimp in 1989, as the need for both mourning and militancy. (6) Our calmer but rather numbed present frequently promotes an amnesia around the not-too-distant past and a disavowal of the continuing psychic toll of the epidemic on gay men. To look at these films now is to be reminded that below the emergent structures of feeling around the current notion of AIDS as a chronic, manageable disease, there are deeper, residual structures of loss. As works of experimental cinema, the films invest form with greater significance than narrative, relying on the expressivity of their distinctive cinematic forms to address their audience, rather than on the conventional identificatory functions of narrative and performance. This is a cinema of moments. Fashioned out of the archive of industrially produced cinema, these moments carry the unmistakable traces of loss and nostalgia that have come to be inscribed in classical Hollywood cinema and, more generally, in postwar American mass culture. It is this affective relationship to the cinematic archive that renders these films works of cinephilia. Cinephilia becomes the dynamic through which AIDS-related structures of feeling around loss come to be articulated. It is, however, manifested in different textual forms. Decodings and Aus der Ferne incorporate found footage from ephemeral and popular cinema, whereas Pensao Globo and Memento Mori appropriate CinemaScope and Technicolor, two specific film technologies indelibly associated with classical Hollywood.
While each of the films analyzed here performs its own distinctive engagement with industrially produced cinema, the films do share a common artisanal mode of production and similar circumstances of distribution and exhibition. The contexts producing these films involve a number of different discursive frameworks. Aesthetic contexts include American underground film, found-footage filmmaking, autobiographical film, and contemporary queer cinema, while cultural ones include forms of AIDS mourning, gay spectatorship, and the cultural space of lesbian and gay film festivals. This article works to extrapolate the interdeterminacy of these various contexts since the textual address of the films should be read through the optics of the cultural practices conditioning both their production and reception. Central to these practices is what I am calling gay cinephilia--the set of gay cultural practices revolving around a collectively shared passion for cinema and its history. (7) While this article concentrates on cultural practices performed by gay men (predominantly forms of spectatorship and filmmaking) and acknowledges the specificities attendant to such a focus, it will also draw, when necessary, from ideas and theories relevant to both lesbian and gay cultural practices. (8) The specific advantage in deploying the concept of gay cinephilia in the analysis of these films lies in its ability to account for their cinematic meaning and affect in terms of a set of cultural practices shared by both filmmakers and audiences. Moreover, cinephilia is a dynamic that, I would argue, structures the reading practices of gay viewers and the formal techniques taken up by gay filmmakers.
The Context for Gay Cinephilia
Over the past two decades, lesbian and gay film scholarship has focused as much attention on the social and psychological relationship lesbians and gay men have to cinema as it has on the representation of homosexuality and queerness within film texts. (9) Judith Mayne argues that film spectatorship has become "a component of the various narratives that constitute the very notion of a gay/lesbian identity, from coming out stories to shared pleasures in camp, to speculations about the real lives of performers." (10) Gay spectatorship embodies an array of performative manifestations incorporating social, cultural, and psychological components. First and foremost among them is the issue of gay men's and lesbians' psychic engagement in the cinema. Brett Farmer and Patricia White have each emphasized the complexity of these engagements, which include the dynamics of identification, desire, and fantasy. As White notes, for instance, same-sex star crush narratives shared by lesbian or gay subjects involve "a complex negotiation between identification and desire, and between idealization and recognition." (11) Not merely psychological but also social, they facilitate the constitution of lesbian or gay identity through an identification with others who share one's own preferences. As Farmer elaborates, Hollywood and its products became a "veritable lingua franca" within urban gay male subcultures in the postwar era, providing a "capacious reference system" for gay subcultural appropriation and recoding. (12) Farmer's comments here indicate the very historicity of gay spectatorship: classical Hollywood cinema facilitated a specific form of spectatorship performed by gay men during this period.
Daniel Harris contrasts this historically marked spectatorship of classical cinema to gay men's current engagement with popular culture: "In the absence of the gay-positive propaganda in which contemporary gay culture is saturated, film became a form of `found' propaganda that the homosexual ransacked for inspiring messages, reconstituting the refuse of popular culture into an energizing force." (13) Interestingly, Harris frames his discussion of gay spectatorship in terms similar to those used to describe the practice of found-footage filmmaking, which has become a major formal tendency within contemporary experimental filmmaking. (14) These similarities include the treatment of popular culture as found material; the fascination with material deemed ephemeral, refuse, or trash; and the process of reconstituting or reworking such material. His comments suggest the kind of confluence of reading strategies and aesthetic practice that I will be investigating more extensively later in this article.
Al La Valley stresses the processes of fragmentation and reconstitution in his characterization of gay men's textual reading practices of classical Hollywood. La Valley was one of the first critics to emphasize gay men's willingness as viewers to ignore narrative linearity and closure: "They treasured film not so much for its narrative fulfillments as for its great moments, those interstices that were often, ironically, the source of a film's real...
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