The pioneers of what has been labelled New Queer Cinema laid the foundation for a Queer Post-Cinema - a movement in which artists experiment with technology in innovative ways. Through original readings of Todd Haynes's early films, Sharon Hayes and Yael Bartana's videos and installations, Su Friedrich's digital video Seeing Red, Charlie Prodgers's iPhone film Bridgit, and Claire Denis's science-fiction film Highlife, this monograph shows how artists are creating a new form of resistance in the time of the digital image and generative AI.
About the Author :
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky is Professor Emerita of Media Studies and Gender Studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She has also been a visiting professor at several universities in the United States, Paris, and Indonesia. She is an Associate Member of the ICI Berlin, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Historical Museum, and a member of the board of the Centre d'études du vivant CEV/Université Paris Cité. Her research focuses on topics in critical, feminist, and queer theory, media philosophy and epistemology, temporality and media aesthetics, philosophy of technology, as well as Jewish Philosophy.
Review :
Deuber-Mankowsky's book offers much-needed resources for re-conceptualizing the vitality of the queer moving image's heritage and sober optimism about its future. Deuber-Mankowsky undertakes a careful reading of very recent moving-image works by queer artists who raise questions old and new. Across the book there is a productive critical probing of identity politics' usefulness to genuinely queer political projects. Instead, Deuber-Mankowsky points us towards a queerer encounter with the openness of form and technology that promises - one that promises no reproducible future but permits us to imagine and engage with techniques of resistance through which we might invent an unpredictable survival beyond the often intolerable present. - John David Rhodes, Professor of Film and Visual Culture, University of Cambridge.
Drawing on a series of brilliant close analyses of visual works that problematized the idea of post-cinema, Deuber-Mankowsky explores a fragmented landscape in which apparently no coherent rationale takes the leading role. In this landscape, queer cinema emerges thanks to a temporality that embraces pitiless criticism and utopian solutions. Apocalyptic in the original sense of the word, queer cinema embodies the sense of the end and the force of a revelation. A masterful diagnosis of the present, this book is also a manifesto for the future. - Francesco Casetti, Yale University
Deuber-Mankowsky's insightful and cautiously hopeful new book is a revelation. This series of stunning essays is framed by a magisterial introduction that traces our own post-cinematic moment back to New Queer Cinema - productively redefining both by means of this unanticipated mash-up - and concludes with a moving, compelling coda on immersive technologies and artificial intelligence. Informed throughout by enviously accessible expositions of queer theory, affect theory, and psychoanalysis, and drawing especially on the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, the volume is as lucid in its sustained intent as it is exacting in its analysis. Deuber-Mankowsky critically excavates models of queer resistance across an eclectic but nonetheless coherent range of media, ultimately coming to champion an ethic of the interstice: revealing an open field of possibility where nothing less than the future itself is at stake. - Ian Fleishman, Chair of Cinema & Media Studies, University of Pennsylvania
In the course of taking us through the emergence of post-cinema and its digital forms (from vlogs to iPhone videos, from CGI to AI), Deuber-Mankowsky brilliantly shows why, and how, queer challenges to sexual difference and sexual identity are challenges to their forms of media. Questions of subjectivity, history, futurity, documentation, the archive, the gamed, the timed, and the biopolitical are explored in Deuber-Mankowsky's argument that revolutions and dissolutions of sex are made possible by the media that might otherwise be construed as their means of expression. Engaging Kara Keeling on the violence of forms that are 'hostile to the change and chance immanent in each now' Deuber-Mankowsky presents queer post-cinema as resisting that violence. It is, she argues, less a new aesthetic genre than an invitation to grasp the potential within form. In a further twist, the consequences of this understanding of the post-cinematic are shown to impact testimony, survival, even the 'technology' of reproductive technology. - Penelope Deutscher, Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor, Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University.
