LUX MRes Public Lecture / Flesh Cinema: The Sexually Explicit American Avant-garde

20 April, 2016
– 20 April, 2016
7pm – 9pm
LUX
Still from Carolee Schneemann's Fuses, 1964-1967.

In the early 1960s, American experimental filmmakers turned their attention to representing the body in all of its out-of-control intensities. Working in a film culture in which explicit images were legally prohibited, a group of affiliated friends and artists nonetheless created innovative methods of representing corporeal excess. In this program, we look at three groundbreaking films from the 1960s that reinvented film language in order to represent sexual ecstasy, queer intimacy, and subjective unraveling: Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1963), Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses (1964-1967), and Paul Sharits’s Piece Mandala/ End War (1966).  In the lecture that follows, Ara Osterweil will discuss the ways in which these films transformed the representation of identity and sexuality in American visual culture.
Ara Osterweil is an abstract painter, writer, and scholar of postwar art and cinema.  Although she originally hails from New York City, she currently lives in Montreal, Canada, where is a professor at McGill University. Her book, Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film (Manchester University Press: 2014) examines the representation of sexuality and the role of friendship in films by Barbara Rubin, Carolee Schneemann, Andy Warhol, Paul Sharits, Yoko Ono, Ken Jacobs, and Stan Brakhage. Other writings have been published in Artforum, Little Joe, Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, Millennium Film Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, and Framework, as well as several anthologies and collections.  You can find examples of her painting and writing here.
 

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