TALKS
A selection of recent presentations & talks
Always unfinished: performing, failing, reckoning with “woman” in early cinema
Entr’acte Flashtalk, theme “woman”: 22 November 2024
A recording will be available soon to WFHI members.
A real-time experimental, auto-theoretical, and historiographical elucidation of the category “woman” as it has emerged across my research in early cinema. It’s key words, phrases, and proper names include: Woman, Louise Brooks, the image, visibility, the street, traffic in women, psychoanalysis, Marlene Dietrich, fantasy, lesbian, parallax, deep time, late cinema, stardom, everyday, ephemera, scavenging, retrospectatorship, Rudolph Valentino, trans*, and reckoning. The flashtalk unfolded as a series of images, articulated to a set of conceptually anchoring quotations from scholars across the fields of feminist silent cinema studies and queer theory, interwoven with auto-theoretical and critical-creative discursive passages.
‘Specks of things’: minor archives, queer historiography
Just Futures Co-Lab public seminar and programming series, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, Bangalore, India, 28 October 2023.
In this talk, I discuss my work in (and with) the early cinema archive, in particular my queer historiographical approach to thinking about the co-implicated histories of cinema and sexuality. I explore alternative ways of thinking about, and working with, the early film archive through an account of the making of the short video “Traffic in Kisses” (7 minutes) co-created with Kiki Loveday (Smith College) (https://www.frameworknow.com/audio-visual/63-1-2). Remediating early kiss films, “Traffic in Kisses” is an artefact of a collaboration, an “archive of feeling” (Ann Cvetkovich) and thought about how early cinema attempts to discipline the erotic. The video’s brevity and hand-made collage aesthetic represents a continuation of my interest in the queer performative and a critical commitments to the ephemeral, or as José Esteban Muñoz puts it, the “traces, glimmers, residues and specks of things.” Muñoz’s expanded definition of the ephemeral evokes its importance in terms of queer historiographical modes of identification and selection, and the valuation of those materials, texts, and media that evidence a mode of being or erotic relationality that may no longer exist or be perceptible to us now, but that we might differently reanimate in the present.
TV Tiddas
Short provocation as part of the SSSHARC Queer TV Huddle, 8 August 2023.
Focused on the documentary series Queerstralia (ABC, 2023), this short piece explores how an interview between co-host Nayuka Gorrie (Gunai/Kurnai, Gunditjmara, Wiradjuri, Yorta Yorta) and Todd Fernando (Wiradjuri), ambivalently queers the everyday relations on which reconciliation might be based through televisual Indigenous camp humour. The sequence is one example of how the series, drawing on long-established interview conventions of performance and dialogue, establishes a space of Indigenous behind-the-scenes intimacy shared with an audience that includes non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples such as myself (a queer Pākehā migrant, from Aotearoa New Zealand).
Summoning the archive, familiar and strange
Invited floortalk, SCA Gallery x sydenham international (Consuelo Cavaniglia and Brendan Van Hek), “friends, relations, lovers and ancestors”, 24 August 2022.
Focused on the work of Helen Grace, the exhibition presented a selection of her films, centering them in conversation with younger contemporary artists, Kay Abude, Sarah Rodigari, Grant Stevens, Leyla Stevens and Shan Turner-Carroll.
The elements of the artworks were for the most part from the archive; either whole works taken out of storage to be re-encountered in the present, or works that redeployed archival material, photographs in boxes, redigitised analog photographs, repurposed to new ends.
In looking at and reading some of Helen’s work, I was reminded of Michel Foucault’s writing on the archive, a more poetic articulation of the archive in terms of how it informs our sense of self and subjectivity: “The … archive, then, involves a privileged region: at once close to us, and different from our present existence, it is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us.” In other words, the archive can be familiar and strange to us. We summon it, much like the time traveller in Chris Marker’s 1962 photograph collage La Jetée, “to the aid of the Present.”
Friendship as a way of filmmaking: Revisiting Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)
Department of Art History, University of Sydney, online, 24 September 2020.
The blunt, single word title Blue belies its aesthetic hybridity and multiple material forms, just as the authorial attribution “Derek Jarman” fails to make legible its collaborative modes of creative development and production. This talk traced the genesis of Blue, including its prehistory as performance and audio recording (when it almost became Bliss rather than Blue), and its various manifestations as art installation, broadcast event, book, autobiographical AIDS documentary, CD-ROM and Blu-ray. The aim was to bring to critical visibility the collaborative processes and social effects of its making and ongoing exhibition.