Postwar American Experimental Film and Queer Psychogeography

This essay reads queer American experimental film of the 1940s and 1950s—by Kenneth Anger, Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, and Curtis Harrington, among others—as a form of queer psychogeography: a style of urban dwelling and transit that originated with French surrealism in the late 1920s and was subsequently theorized by Lettrists and Situationists in the 1950s. Psychogeography consisted in drifting through the city in search of evocative or destabilizing spots, which, for postwar American experimental filmmakers, were locations latent with (queer) sexual possibility. This approach allows us to re-interpret these films from an unprecedented perspective. So far conceptualized as cinematic renderings of trances and dreams triggered by the search for sexual identity, the present article shows that this body of work registers as well a material practice consisting in the covert sexualisation of urban space; this practice arises from the attempt of postwar queer subcultures to escape regulation and surveillance during repressive times.