Matthew Tinkcom

Grey Gardens (1975) is one of most important documentary films of the past thirty years, gaining the status of a cult classic. Matthew Tinkcom argues that the film reshaped documentary cinema by moving the non-fiction camera to the heart of the household, a private space into which film-makers had seldom previously ventured.

Grey Gardens

What does camp have to do with capitalism? How have queer men created a philosophy of commodity culture? Why is cinema central to camp? With chapters on the films of Vincente Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and John Waters, Working Like a Homosexual responds to these questions by arguing that post–World War II gay male subcultures have fostered their own ways not only of consuming mass culture but of producing it as well. With a special emphasis on the tensions between high and low forms of culture and between good and bad taste, Matthew Tinkcom offers a new vision of queer politics and aesthetics that is critically engaged with Marxist theories of capitalist production. He argues that camp—while embracing the cheap, the scorned, the gaudy, the tasteless, and what Warhol called “the leftovers” of artistic production—is a mode of intellectual production and a critical philosophy of modernity as much as it is an expression of a dissident sex/gender difference. From Minnelli’s musicals and the “everyday glamour” of Warhol’s films to Anger’s experimental films and Waters’s “trash aesthetic,” Tinkcom demonstrates how camp allowed these gay men to design their own relationship to labor and to history in a way that protected them from censure even as they struggled to forge a role for themselves within a system of “value” that failed to recognize them.

Camp, Capital, Cinema

Working Like a Homosexual

Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain examines queer theory as it has emerged in the past three decades and discusses how Brokeback Mountain can be understood through the terms of this field of scholarship and activism. Organized into two parts, in the first half the author discusses key canonical texts within queer theory, including the work of writers as Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. He provides an historical account of the questions these scholars have posed to our understanding of sexualities-both normative and non-normative-in the historical past and in contemporary life, as well as a discussion of the theories of sexuality and gender offered by these scholars as these phenomena shape the experiences of men and women in the genital, bodily, erotic, discursive, and cultural dimensions. The second part examines Ang Lee's 2005 feature film, Brokeback Mountain, in order to understand the claims and insights of queer theory. Tracing the film's adaptation by screenwriter Larry McMurtry of Annie Proulx's 1997 short story of the same title, this portion of the book examines the film's narrative about two working-class men in the rural mid-20th-century U.S. and the meanings of the sexual and emotional bond between the pair that develops over the course of two decades.

Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain

Amy Villarejo

Keyframes introduces the study of popular cinema of Hollywood and beyond and responds to the transformative effect of cultural studies on film studies. The contributors rethink contemporary film culture using ideas and concerns from feminism, queer theory, 'race' studies, critiques of nationalism, colonialism and post-colonialism, the cultural economies of fandom, spectator theory, and Marxism. Combining a film studies focus on the film industry, production and technology with a cultural studies analysis of consumption and audiences, Keframes demonstrates the breadth of approaches now available for understanding popular cinema. Subjects addressed include: * Studying Ripley and the 'Alien' films * Pedagogy and Political Correctness in Martial Arts cinema * Judy Garland fandom on the net * Stardom and serial fantasies: Thomas Harris's 'Hannibal' * Tom Hanks and the globalization of stars * Queer Bollywood * Jackie Chan and the Black connection * '12 Monkeys', postmodernism and urban space.

Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies

The author offers readers a new perspective on queer politics and aesthetics, discussing the meaning of "camp," the meaning of high and low culture and good and bad taste, and the art of gay cinema and critiquing the post-war rise of an economy around gay culture. Simultaneous.

Matthew Tinkcom

Books

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