Greg Youmans - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Greg Youmans
Millennium Film Journal, Apr 1, 2009
"I don't feel like I belong, and that's without real without pride. Pride happens. N... more "I don't feel like I belong, and that's without real without pride. Pride happens. No, I'm just disconnected, from practically everything. I have a few anchors, sometimes I let them go or they let me go, and I drift. That most of the time. Sometimes I hang on for a few days, minutes, seconds, then I let go again. I can hardly look. I can hardly hear. Semi-blind, semi-deaf, I float. Sometimes I sink. But not quite. Something, sometimes a detail, brings me back to the surface, and I start floating again..."1 Chantal Akerman's digital video La-bas (Down There, 2006) contemplates the legacy of the Holocaust on the daily of Jewish people, including Akerman, in and around a Tel apartment building. By focusing on the contemporary of historical trauma, La-bas builds on the earlier films videos of Akerman's documentary series.2 In all of these she eschews the standard cinematic techniques for reflection, notably the use of archival footage, in favor of a discovery of the signs of the past where they mark the the hundreds of anonymous portraits that become post-Soviet landscape in D'Est From the East, 1993),3 the final tracking shot of the East Texas road along which James Byrd Jr.'s body was dragged in Sud (South, 1999), and the slow meditation on the place where desert meets fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in De l'autre cote (From the Other Side, 2002). The camera of La-bas is similarly trained on the here and now: for of the video it gazes out the window of Akerman's at the inhabitants of the building across the way. However, content of La-bas is more expressly personal than that of the preceding documentaries. In the voiceover, Akerman on the significance for her family of both the Holocaust and Israel. Among Northern Jews, Israel is often imagined as a paradise that awaits la-bas, much of the video is about the inability of the country to provide the solace one hopes to find there. Heavy with subjectivity and memory, Akerman's words cannot be reconciled with video's dispassionate and presentisi visual track. As the epigraph to this essay suggests, Akerman is not simply haunted by the Holocaust, but ghosted by it. And one of the main feats of her video is to convey this particular affective state to the viewer. As we watch La-bas, we do not experience an intense affective charge due to the eruption of past figures and impressions into our mundane present - the experience of haunting. Rather, we experience the opposite: the draining of affect and interpersonal connection from daily existence under the weight of unresolved and perhaps irresolvable historical and political events - the experience of ghosting.4 In La-bas, this emptying out of affect, occurring as it does within so politically charged a landscape as contemporary Israel, becomes, paradoxically, deeply poignant. In an essay on the films Yanzhi Kou (Rouge, 1987) and Haplos (Caress, 1982), Bliss Lim presents the temporal dynamic of haunting as it is usually understood: "The ghost narratives in Rouge and Haplos function as an allegorical frame in which an almost-forgotten history becomes newly meaningful as a kind of haunting or ghostly return. These ghost films draw from their respective cultural discourses in order to vivify the present's accountability to the concerns of the. past, and in so doing call into question the ways in which modern homogeneous time conceives of those very temporal categories."5 But as I will show in this essay, La-bas is a "ghost film" that works through a different principle than haunting as ghostly return. By insisting always on the present and by privileging spatial juxtapositions over temporal ones, the video rejects the liberal fantasy of haunting: any possibility of forgiveness, redemption, or heating through communion with the past is foreclosed. Scholarship on haunting has long insisted that the occasion of the ghost demands an intersectional analysis of ethics and affect, and La-bas is no exception.6 Here too we are confounded by a twin sense of ethical imperative and ethical impossibility. …
Porno Chic and the Sex Wars
Millennium Film Journal, 2009
"I don't feel like I belong, and that's without real without pride. Pride happens. N... more "I don't feel like I belong, and that's without real without pride. Pride happens. No, I'm just disconnected, from practically everything. I have a few anchors, sometimes I let them go or they let me go, and I drift. That most of the time. Sometimes I hang on for a few days, minutes, seconds, then I let go again. I can hardly look. I can hardly hear. Semi-blind, semi-deaf, I float. Sometimes I sink. But not quite. Something, sometimes a detail, brings me back to the surface, and I start floating again..."1 Chantal Akerman's digital video La-bas (Down There, 2006) contemplates the legacy of the Holocaust on the daily of Jewish people, including Akerman, in and around a Tel apartment building. By focusing on the contemporary of historical trauma, La-bas builds on the earlier films videos of Akerman's documentary series.2 In all of these she eschews the standard cinematic techniques for reflection, notably the use of archival footage, in favor of a discovery of the signs of the past where they mark the the hundreds of anonymous portraits that become post-Soviet landscape in D'Est From the East, 1993),3 the final tracking shot of the East Texas road along which James Byrd Jr.'s body was dragged in Sud (South, 1999), and the slow meditation on the place where desert meets fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in De l'autre cote (From the Other Side, 2002). The camera of La-bas is similarly trained on the here and now: for of the video it gazes out the window of Akerman's at the inhabitants of the building across the way. However, content of La-bas is more expressly personal than that of the preceding documentaries. In the voiceover, Akerman on the significance for her family of both the Holocaust and Israel. Among Northern Jews, Israel is often imagined as a paradise that awaits la-bas, much of the video is about the inability of the country to provide the solace one hopes to find there. Heavy with subjectivity and memory, Akerman's words cannot be reconciled with video's dispassionate and presentisi visual track. As the epigraph to this essay suggests, Akerman is not simply haunted by the Holocaust, but ghosted by it. And one of the main feats of her video is to convey this particular affective state to the viewer. As we watch La-bas, we do not experience an intense affective charge due to the eruption of past figures and impressions into our mundane present - the experience of haunting. Rather, we experience the opposite: the draining of affect and interpersonal connection from daily existence under the weight of unresolved and perhaps irresolvable historical and political events - the experience of ghosting.4 In La-bas, this emptying out of affect, occurring as it does within so politically charged a landscape as contemporary Israel, becomes, paradoxically, deeply poignant. In an essay on the films Yanzhi Kou (Rouge, 1987) and Haplos (Caress, 1982), Bliss Lim presents the temporal dynamic of haunting as it is usually understood: "The ghost narratives in Rouge and Haplos function as an allegorical frame in which an almost-forgotten history becomes newly meaningful as a kind of haunting or ghostly return. These ghost films draw from their respective cultural discourses in order to vivify the present's accountability to the concerns of the. past, and in so doing call into question the ways in which modern homogeneous time conceives of those very temporal categories."5 But as I will show in this essay, La-bas is a "ghost film" that works through a different principle than haunting as ghostly return. By insisting always on the present and by privileging spatial juxtapositions over temporal ones, the video rejects the liberal fantasy of haunting: any possibility of forgiveness, redemption, or heating through communion with the past is foreclosed. Scholarship on haunting has long insisted that the occasion of the ghost demands an intersectional analysis of ethics and affect, and La-bas is no exception.6 Here too we are confounded by a twin sense of ethical imperative and ethical impossibility. …
The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, 2021
In 2018, the US Park Service finally deemed the informal artist colony Druid Heights, in Californ... more In 2018, the US Park Service finally deemed the informal artist colony Druid Heights, in California’s Marin County, eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. There is no act of preservation that can do justice to everything Druid Heights was and is, and it remains to be seen which aspects will get fixed as official history and which others will fade away or be left to haunt the place in unexpected ways. This chapter analyzes three films that staged competing visions of sexual freedom at Druid Heights: James Broughton’s experimental short The Bed (1967), the Mariposa Film Group’s gay and lesbian interview documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977), and Ed De Priest’s heterosexual pornographic feature Skintight (1981). Together, these films present a valuable case study for understanding the role of cinema in political contestations over the meaning and use of space.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2010
... 4 (1991): 773 98. douglas dowland is a visiting assistant professor of English at Ohio Nort... more ... 4 (1991): 773 98. douglas dowland is a visiting assistant professor of English at Ohio Northern University. DOI 10.1215/10642684-2010-031 interSex in america: a cuLturaL HiStOry OF uncertainty ... Page 9. BOOKS in BrieF 213 uncLOSetinG tHe SOutH Lisa Hinrichsen ...
Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 2012
Millennium Film Journal, Apr 1, 2009
"I don't feel like I belong, and that's without real without pride. Pride happens. N... more "I don't feel like I belong, and that's without real without pride. Pride happens. No, I'm just disconnected, from practically everything. I have a few anchors, sometimes I let them go or they let me go, and I drift. That most of the time. Sometimes I hang on for a few days, minutes, seconds, then I let go again. I can hardly look. I can hardly hear. Semi-blind, semi-deaf, I float. Sometimes I sink. But not quite. Something, sometimes a detail, brings me back to the surface, and I start floating again..."1 Chantal Akerman's digital video La-bas (Down There, 2006) contemplates the legacy of the Holocaust on the daily of Jewish people, including Akerman, in and around a Tel apartment building. By focusing on the contemporary of historical trauma, La-bas builds on the earlier films videos of Akerman's documentary series.2 In all of these she eschews the standard cinematic techniques for reflection, notably the use of archival footage, in favor of a discovery of the signs of the past where they mark the the hundreds of anonymous portraits that become post-Soviet landscape in D'Est From the East, 1993),3 the final tracking shot of the East Texas road along which James Byrd Jr.'s body was dragged in Sud (South, 1999), and the slow meditation on the place where desert meets fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in De l'autre cote (From the Other Side, 2002). The camera of La-bas is similarly trained on the here and now: for of the video it gazes out the window of Akerman's at the inhabitants of the building across the way. However, content of La-bas is more expressly personal than that of the preceding documentaries. In the voiceover, Akerman on the significance for her family of both the Holocaust and Israel. Among Northern Jews, Israel is often imagined as a paradise that awaits la-bas, much of the video is about the inability of the country to provide the solace one hopes to find there. Heavy with subjectivity and memory, Akerman's words cannot be reconciled with video's dispassionate and presentisi visual track. As the epigraph to this essay suggests, Akerman is not simply haunted by the Holocaust, but ghosted by it. And one of the main feats of her video is to convey this particular affective state to the viewer. As we watch La-bas, we do not experience an intense affective charge due to the eruption of past figures and impressions into our mundane present - the experience of haunting. Rather, we experience the opposite: the draining of affect and interpersonal connection from daily existence under the weight of unresolved and perhaps irresolvable historical and political events - the experience of ghosting.4 In La-bas, this emptying out of affect, occurring as it does within so politically charged a landscape as contemporary Israel, becomes, paradoxically, deeply poignant. In an essay on the films Yanzhi Kou (Rouge, 1987) and Haplos (Caress, 1982), Bliss Lim presents the temporal dynamic of haunting as it is usually understood: "The ghost narratives in Rouge and Haplos function as an allegorical frame in which an almost-forgotten history becomes newly meaningful as a kind of haunting or ghostly return. These ghost films draw from their respective cultural discourses in order to vivify the present's accountability to the concerns of the. past, and in so doing call into question the ways in which modern homogeneous time conceives of those very temporal categories."5 But as I will show in this essay, La-bas is a "ghost film" that works through a different principle than haunting as ghostly return. By insisting always on the present and by privileging spatial juxtapositions over temporal ones, the video rejects the liberal fantasy of haunting: any possibility of forgiveness, redemption, or heating through communion with the past is foreclosed. Scholarship on haunting has long insisted that the occasion of the ghost demands an intersectional analysis of ethics and affect, and La-bas is no exception.6 Here too we are confounded by a twin sense of ethical imperative and ethical impossibility. …
Porno Chic and the Sex Wars
Millennium Film Journal, 2009
"I don't feel like I belong, and that's without real without pride. Pride happens. N... more "I don't feel like I belong, and that's without real without pride. Pride happens. No, I'm just disconnected, from practically everything. I have a few anchors, sometimes I let them go or they let me go, and I drift. That most of the time. Sometimes I hang on for a few days, minutes, seconds, then I let go again. I can hardly look. I can hardly hear. Semi-blind, semi-deaf, I float. Sometimes I sink. But not quite. Something, sometimes a detail, brings me back to the surface, and I start floating again..."1 Chantal Akerman's digital video La-bas (Down There, 2006) contemplates the legacy of the Holocaust on the daily of Jewish people, including Akerman, in and around a Tel apartment building. By focusing on the contemporary of historical trauma, La-bas builds on the earlier films videos of Akerman's documentary series.2 In all of these she eschews the standard cinematic techniques for reflection, notably the use of archival footage, in favor of a discovery of the signs of the past where they mark the the hundreds of anonymous portraits that become post-Soviet landscape in D'Est From the East, 1993),3 the final tracking shot of the East Texas road along which James Byrd Jr.'s body was dragged in Sud (South, 1999), and the slow meditation on the place where desert meets fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in De l'autre cote (From the Other Side, 2002). The camera of La-bas is similarly trained on the here and now: for of the video it gazes out the window of Akerman's at the inhabitants of the building across the way. However, content of La-bas is more expressly personal than that of the preceding documentaries. In the voiceover, Akerman on the significance for her family of both the Holocaust and Israel. Among Northern Jews, Israel is often imagined as a paradise that awaits la-bas, much of the video is about the inability of the country to provide the solace one hopes to find there. Heavy with subjectivity and memory, Akerman's words cannot be reconciled with video's dispassionate and presentisi visual track. As the epigraph to this essay suggests, Akerman is not simply haunted by the Holocaust, but ghosted by it. And one of the main feats of her video is to convey this particular affective state to the viewer. As we watch La-bas, we do not experience an intense affective charge due to the eruption of past figures and impressions into our mundane present - the experience of haunting. Rather, we experience the opposite: the draining of affect and interpersonal connection from daily existence under the weight of unresolved and perhaps irresolvable historical and political events - the experience of ghosting.4 In La-bas, this emptying out of affect, occurring as it does within so politically charged a landscape as contemporary Israel, becomes, paradoxically, deeply poignant. In an essay on the films Yanzhi Kou (Rouge, 1987) and Haplos (Caress, 1982), Bliss Lim presents the temporal dynamic of haunting as it is usually understood: "The ghost narratives in Rouge and Haplos function as an allegorical frame in which an almost-forgotten history becomes newly meaningful as a kind of haunting or ghostly return. These ghost films draw from their respective cultural discourses in order to vivify the present's accountability to the concerns of the. past, and in so doing call into question the ways in which modern homogeneous time conceives of those very temporal categories."5 But as I will show in this essay, La-bas is a "ghost film" that works through a different principle than haunting as ghostly return. By insisting always on the present and by privileging spatial juxtapositions over temporal ones, the video rejects the liberal fantasy of haunting: any possibility of forgiveness, redemption, or heating through communion with the past is foreclosed. Scholarship on haunting has long insisted that the occasion of the ghost demands an intersectional analysis of ethics and affect, and La-bas is no exception.6 Here too we are confounded by a twin sense of ethical imperative and ethical impossibility. …
The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, 2021
In 2018, the US Park Service finally deemed the informal artist colony Druid Heights, in Californ... more In 2018, the US Park Service finally deemed the informal artist colony Druid Heights, in California’s Marin County, eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. There is no act of preservation that can do justice to everything Druid Heights was and is, and it remains to be seen which aspects will get fixed as official history and which others will fade away or be left to haunt the place in unexpected ways. This chapter analyzes three films that staged competing visions of sexual freedom at Druid Heights: James Broughton’s experimental short The Bed (1967), the Mariposa Film Group’s gay and lesbian interview documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977), and Ed De Priest’s heterosexual pornographic feature Skintight (1981). Together, these films present a valuable case study for understanding the role of cinema in political contestations over the meaning and use of space.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2010
... 4 (1991): 773 98. douglas dowland is a visiting assistant professor of English at Ohio Nort... more ... 4 (1991): 773 98. douglas dowland is a visiting assistant professor of English at Ohio Northern University. DOI 10.1215/10642684-2010-031 interSex in america: a cuLturaL HiStOry OF uncertainty ... Page 9. BOOKS in BrieF 213 uncLOSetinG tHe SOutH Lisa Hinrichsen ...
Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 2012