CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-9561395
A. Wade
{"title":"Not New to This: A Genealogical Approach to Black Girls’ Media Production","authors":"A. Wade","doi":"10.1215/02705346-9561395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-9561395","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 During the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, the Black press served as a cornerstone of Black social and political life in the United States. For Black Americans, newspapers and magazines functioned as both informational resources and philosophical spaces that engaged conversations of racial uplift, which often centered Black girlhood as an especially important site for assessing racial progress. Despite the evolving nature of media platforms themselves, the relationship between media and Black Americans continues to be a tool by which to measure the pulse of Black life; the role of digital media in the lives of twenty-first-century Black Americans mirrors that of Black magazines and newspapers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of particular note is the way that Black youth, especially Black girls, use digital media spaces to make themselves (and their experiences) visible and generate social discourse through the content they post on social media. In this article, I look at historical Black titles—the Woman's Era and the Brownies’ Book—as well as contemporary Black girls’ social media content to show how Black girls have historically developed a discourse of Black girlhood alongside their adult counterparts who were concerned with racial uplift and continue to author and theorize their lives through digital media.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43738075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-9349455
Vanessa Haroutunian
{"title":"Barbara Hammer and Queer|Art: Granting for the Future","authors":"Vanessa Haroutunian","doi":"10.1215/02705346-9349455","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-9349455","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay describes how the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant came into fruition, created by the pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer and administered through the New York City nonprofit organization Queer|Art. In 2017, Hammer approached her friend and colleague Ira Sachs to set up a grant in her honor, through the nonprofit he founded in 2009 with the mission to create a diverse and vibrant community through the support of LGBTQ+ art and artists across generations and disciplines. Author and grant manager Vanessa Haroutunian describes the process of working with Hammer to develop the grant, how Hammer's commitment to intergenerational, interdisciplinary conversation cultivated permission for future generations to break boundaries with their artwork, and how her legacy continues to be preserved through the grant's existence. Hammer's mission—to make it easier for self-identified lesbian experimental filmmakers to make work—has been upheld by Queer|Art with the generous support of Florrie Burke and the Hammer estate.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43250515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-9349427
J. Lange
{"title":"Hammertime!","authors":"J. Lange","doi":"10.1215/02705346-9349427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-9349427","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This memoir recounts Barbara Hammer's relationship to the Wexner Center for the Arts and its Film/Video Studio residency program, which supported a number of her films between 1994 and 2018. It offers some personal insight into the evolution of Hammer's final work, Evidentiary Bodies (2018), from single-channel video to multichannel video installation. The author describes working with Hammer during the last year of her life and explains the process of organizing the 2019 exhibition Barbara Hammer: In This Body at the Wexner Center for the Arts, which premiered the installation of Evidentiary Bodies and included additional works in other mediums and made throughout Hammer's career around themes of illness, aging, and death.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47734275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-9349329
G. Cornejo
{"title":"Thinking Travesti Tears: Reading Loxoro","authors":"G. Cornejo","doi":"10.1215/02705346-9349329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-9349329","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article offers a reading of the Peruvian film Loxoro (dir. Claudia Llosa, Peru/Spain/Argentina/US, 2011), which stars the transgender activist Belissa Andía. “Loxoro” is the name of a language used by travesti communities to survive in Lima, Peru. The main plot of the film centers on the bond between a travesti mother and her missing travesti daughter. That is why in Loxoro, travesti tears abound. This article raises the following questions: If Loxoro is a language for abandoned and wounded lovers in contexts of dispossession and violence, can travesti tears play a transformative role? What history of travesti tears does Loxoro offer? What forms of travesti loss and kinship imagine the film as deserving to mobilize tears? Can travesti tears foretell transfeminist futures to come?","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42749698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-9349385
Sarah Keller
{"title":"Continuous Weave: Feminist Experimental Filmmaking Genealogies","authors":"Sarah Keller","doi":"10.1215/02705346-9349385","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-9349385","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In the year before her death in 2019, Barbara Hammer gave footage from four incomplete projects as well as funds she had procured from the Wexner Center for the Arts to four fellow filmmakers to use as they wished. Her footage of a Guatemalan marketplace and women weaving was given to Deborah Stratman, whose film Vever (for Barbara) (US, 2019) combines the work of two of her artistic predecessors, Hammer and Maya Deren. Making use of the footage Hammer shot in 1975 as well as passages, images, and sound from Deren's work, Stratman creates a film that underlines several tendencies of feminist experimental art and continues the legacy of all three women's art. Cooperative, collaborative, and productively fragmented, it honors the creative lineage of which it is a part.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46093159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-9349371
Patricia White
{"title":"Introduction: Late Hammer","authors":"Patricia White","doi":"10.1215/02705346-9349371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-9349371","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This introduction to a dossier of short pieces on Barbara Hammer locates the work of the late filmmaker in the context of feminist film culture and the journal Camera Obscura. It briefly reviews several phases of the artist's career before focusing on the output of the last decade of the filmmaker's life. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Hammer made work dealing with her body; gave footage she shot over the years to several filmmakers to finish as they wished; set up a grant for lesbian experimental filmmakers; and collaborated with curators, archivists, and her partner, Florrie Burke, to shape her own legacy. Pieces by the collaborators who contributed to this dossier are introduced.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43626678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-9349413
Market Street
{"title":"Conjuring Barbara","authors":"Market Street","doi":"10.1215/02705346-9349413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-9349413","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This personal essay remembers the filmmaker's encounters with Barbara Hammer as teacher, mentor, and friend. It traces the production of So Many Ideas Impossible to Do All (dir. Mark Street and Barbara Hammer, US, 2019), a film that considers Hammer's epistolary relationship with the poet Jane Brakhage.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49321914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-9349469
R. K. Davis
{"title":"Ephemeral/Material","authors":"R. K. Davis","doi":"10.1215/02705346-9349469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-9349469","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This piece examines the transfer of Barbara Hammer's archive to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The archivist working with the collection highlights the complex emotions involved with this process and reflects on how her own archival work was influenced by Hammer.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49450932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-9349315
T. Miller
{"title":"Rewitched: Retextuality and the Queering of Bewitched","authors":"T. Miller","doi":"10.1215/02705346-9349315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-9349315","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 At the same time the 1960s sitcom Bewitched aired in reruns next to drag queens on LOGOtv, a cable channel targeted to LGBTQ viewers, it also aired on the former National Christian Network channel (FamilyNet) immediately preceding a lineup of church programs featuring far-right, anti-gay hosts. Bewitched's ability to appeal to these very different channels’ brands and audiences underscores a textual vigor and sustainability for success in syndication that even the best so-called quality shows today lack. While some may deride a study of syndication (and reruns especially) as irrelevant and passé, syndicated programs are neither of those things if their continued popularity assures our familiarity with them. As a text, Bewitched is already supple enough to motivate two politically opposing media brands to pick it up, but the context of each of these channels’ flow, including commercials, station IDs, and edits to content, can make the experience of watching the same episode of any show on different channels a wholly different textual experience. This article returns to foundational theories of TV flow and intertextuality to propose retextuality as a theoretical and methodological intervention in studies of television. It argues that in syndication, the production labor of syndicators, executives, programmers, and marketing departments effectively retextualizes shows like Bewitched, offering scholars opportunities for new textual analyses and new insight into the marginalized and queer audiences syndicated programming often serves.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43162264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-9349399
Ronald Gregg
{"title":"The Documentaries of Barbara Hammer: Lesbian Creativity, Kinship, and Erotic Pleasure in the Historical Margins","authors":"Ronald Gregg","doi":"10.1215/02705346-9349399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-9349399","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer turned from experimental filmmaking to feature-length documentaries in the early 1990s. These late documentaries illustrate her distinct perspective on queer history and affect, which was influenced by 1970s lesbian feminism and queer scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s. Her structure and style in these films draw on the tools of both conventional historical documentaries and experimental film. Offering an astonishing range of evidence, Hammer creatively presents queer plenty from the margins of the archive. Through this evidence, Hammer affirms past queer lives, celebrating and highlighting rebelliousness, agency, creativity, queer kinship, and passion. Additionally, Hammer attempts to communicate with and embody the past, physically and emotionally seeking out and feeling the interior and exterior lives of her biographical subjects, who are predominantly creative women, including the poet Elizabeth Bishop, the Dada artist Hannah Höch, the surreal photographer Claude Cahun, and the painter Nicole Eisenman.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46174208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}