Assignment 8:

1.He went to Bard for a summer, which is a school known for experimental filmmaking, and he had a very influential teacher in high school that introduced him to Stan Brakhage and other avant-garde filmmakers. Superstar fit into the trends in the way that it was screened, a "hybrid position between the more traditional experimental film venues, which had rejected it, and other broader arts and semi-theatrical venues.  

2.  It reminds me of our discussions on Van Sant, who constantly alludes to other works in his films.  Psycho is a prime example, taking it out of context and giving it new meaning.  We distinguished both Van Sant and Soderbergh as directors who cast against type, and so it seems that maybe a way of showing authorship is in the way that they manipulate common images to society and make us see them in a different light.  (However, if this is a quality of all three directors, maybe they're not so unique after all, huh? )

3. MacDonald thought that Sirk's Imitation of Life was ridiculously over the top, but Haynes said that he took them seriously because he wasn't introduced to them until college.  Haynes saw a Lucille Ball show live and was amazed that she could be so governing as director and then play a childish woman.  He also noted that he tried to make Far From Heaven as close to the way that a film would have been made in the fifties, making it a cinematic representation of those times.

4. Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, and Jack Smith are all discussed as influences or having similarities to Poison.  Poison stirred controversies because it was reviewed as just being about anal sex in prison, and politicians were angry and wanted to charge him with "inappropriate use of taxpayer money" because he made material that might offend American sensibilities.  

5. His idea of "death of the subject" means that the individual can no longer feel, and goes into the waning of affect.  But "if subjects continue to feel, then they may not be dead".  

6. Post-modern melodrama "considers the workings of emotion in the framework of modern identity and the dynamics of pathos in cultural production", and are centered around the "feeling subject".  Some filmmakers associated with melodrama are Fassbinder and Almodovar for their self-consciousness.

7.  It illustrates the play between postmodern theory and melodramatic pathos and treats them as products of social circumstances.

8. Un Chant d'Amour was an important turning point in his career because it was one of the last things he ever made, it was the only film that he made, and it was the beginning of his "disappearance from the text".  His view of the homosexual life was incompatible with the Gay Liberation movement because he could not "comprehend its affirmation of a gay identity or the demand for gay positive images". 

9. She notes that the structure is made up of three stories: Horror, Homo, and Hero.  She notes that he changes between them, and she creates parallels between them such as the spit motif, and their similarities with their treatment of death.  By paralleling the stories, it becomes like a cinematic montage, which is how Genet's writing style has been characterized, and this parallel story relates back to D.W. Griffith's Intolerance.  Also, it goes back to the theory of montage by Soviet theorists in the 1920s: cinematic meaning is not contained in a single shot, but in relation between shots.

10. Michael Laskawy says that abuse as a child leads to criminal activity and homosexuality, which leads to AIDS.