Screen Seminars at Glasgow
Speaker: Dr Ger Zielinski, Trent University, Canada
Date/Time: 17 Oct 2013, 5-7pm
Venue: Room 408, Gilmorehill Centre, University of Glasgow
Title: International Politics and Queer Community: On Pinkwashing and Other Claims in and around the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival
(In association with the Document Film Festival)
While claims to community have often invited or provoked heated contestation over membership, inclusion and exclusion, cultural formations built on principles of community building include such tensions within their very fabric. The LGBT film festivals provide a remarkably rich site for analysis in the light of their unique intersection of civil rights, sexualities, genders, identities, taste cultures, cinephilia, etc., all culminating eventually in the event of the festival itself, situated in some real urban space. Continuing my research into the relationship between community and festivals as a form of activism, I address the recent and continuing case of the Frameline: San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and its relation to Israeli-Palestinian politics and lobbying campaigns, both within and outside of the festival. Apart from the historical cases centred on disputes over sexual or gender identities, this case uncovers a very important attempt to articulate international politics through a discourse of sexual rights and identity.
The nature of the lively disputes that take place at film festivals range from the politically motivated to aesthetically challenged, and generally this is considered a healthy exchange. As Thomas Elsaesser notes, “we could also consider the European film festival circuit as special kinds of public spheres, where mediatization and politicization for once have entered into a quite felicitous alliance. We could call film festivals the symbolic agoras of a new democracy.” To be sure, the large A-list and other international film festivals have long provided sites for debate, discussion or at least controversy, an essential or at least expected part of any living festival. Critics will disagree with one another, and from time to time journalists or filmmakers may catch the programmer's or festival director's curious decision, perhaps politically or personally motivated, opportunist, and so forth. While any festival ought to afford or constitute such a space for free dialogue, there are other types of protest or influence that may be violent or in fact political.
This paper offers insight into the complexity of negotiating community identity and its limitations.
Ger Zielinski received his PhD from McGill University and spent two years as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and since then he has been lecturing on film and media studies at Trent University. His three main research projects are (1) the emergence of film festival activism alongside the North American social movements of the 1970s, (2) queer cinematic cities, and (3) transnational underground cinemas of the 1970s and 80s. Recent articles related to these projects include, “On the Development of Queer Film Festivals and Their Media Activism,” with Skadi Loist, in Film Festival Yearbook 4 (2012); “Driving around Los Angeles: The Case of Gregg Araki's 'Irresponsible Movie' The Living End (1992),” in (Re)Discovering ´America´: Road Movies and Other Travel Narratives in North America (2012); and “Berlin’s Underground Film, & Its Imagined Scenes Over and Beyond the Wall,” in Poor but Sexy: Reflections on Berlin Scenes (in press 2013). Zielinski is co-founder of the Film and Media Festivals Scholarly Interest Group associated with the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and has been a visiting researcher at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Columbia University, and University of Toronto, among others.