Archaic Modernism: Queer Poetics in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini by Daniel

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Offers the first book-length, English-language examination of three adaptations of Greek tragedy produced by the gay and Marxist Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Archaic Modernism makes the case that these three films are as essential as those Pasolini films more often studied in the Anglophone world.

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In Archaic Modernism, Daniel Humphrey offers the first book-length, English-language examination of three adaptations of Greek tragedy produced by the gay and Marxist Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini: Oedipus Rex (1967), Medea (1969), and Notes Towards an African Orestes (1970/1973). Considering Pasolini's own theories of a "Cinema of Poetry" alongside Jacques Derrida's concept of écriture, as well as more recent scholarship by queer theory scholars advocating for an antirelational and antisocial subjectivity, Humphrey maintains that Pasolini's Greek tragedy films exemplify a paradoxical sense of "archaic modernism" that is at the very heart of the filmmaker's project. More daringly, he contends that they ultimately reveal the queer roots of Western civilization's formative texts.Archaic Modernism is comprised of three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on Oedipus Rex, assessing both the filmic language employed and the deeply queer mythological source material that haunts the tragedy even as it remains largely at a subtextual yet palpable level. Chapter 2 extends and deepens the concept of queer fate and queer negativity in a scene-by-scene analysis of Medea. Chapter 3 looks at the most obscure of Pasolini's feature length films, Notes Towards an African Orestes, a film long misunderstood as an unwitting failure, but which could perhaps best be understood as a deliberate, sacrificial act on the filmmaker's part. Considering the film as the third in an informal, maybe unconscious, trilogy, Humphrey concludes his monograph by arguing that this "trilogy of myth" can best be understood as a deconstruction, gradually more and more severe, of three of the most important origin tales of Western civilization.Archaic Modernism makes the case that these three films are as essential as those Pasolini films more often studied in the Anglophone world: Mamma Roma, The Gospel According to Matthew, Teorema, The Trilogy of Life, and Salò, and that they are of continuing, perhaps even increasing, value today. This book is of specific interest to scholars, students, and researchers of film and queer studies.

Author Biography

Daniel Humphrey is associate professor of film studies and women's and gender studies as well as the coordinator of the film studies program at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Queer Bergman: Gender, Sexuality and the European Art Film and articles in Criticism, Screen, GLQ, Post Script, Invisible Culture, and elsewhere.

Review

Daniel Humphrey introduces us to Oedipus Rex, Medea, and Notes Toward an African Orestes as if Pasolini had made these films in the ancient world, as if cinema were an archaic, forgotten art of which only strange fragments can be found, and an uncanny prequel to the actual Greek tragedies.--Alessandro Carrera "University of Houston"This is a fine book, and one hopes that Humphrey will do a second on Pasolini's last four films.-- "CHOICE Connect"

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Detailed textual readings evoking the archaic sensibility and modernist style of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Review Quote

Pier Paolo Pasolini has often presented a stumbling block for critics and audiences alike, given his controversial film theory, his eccentric formal practices, his troubled relationship to the Italian Left, and his unapologetic homosexuality. In this fascinating and ambitious study, Daniel Humphrey is able to show the necessary--indeed, structural--relationship between those things. Humphrey's analyses of three lesser-studied works of Pasolini pay nuanced attention to the transgressive formal systems of the films, in the process making important contributions to current debates about queer futurity, queer spectatorship, postcolonial filmmaking, and the ethnographic impulse in the art cinema of the 1960s.

Promotional "Headline"

Detailed textual readings evoking the archaic sensibility and modernist style of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Details ISBN0814346065 Author Daniel Humphrey Short Title Archaic Modernism Publisher Wayne State University Press Series Queer Screens Language English Year 2020 ISBN-10 0814346065 ISBN-13 9780814346068 Format Hardcover Subtitle Queer Poetics in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini Pages 208 Imprint Wayne State University Press Place of Publication Detroit, MI Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2020-11-10 NZ Release Date 2020-11-10 Illustrations 38 black & white images Publication Date 2020-11-30 UK Release Date 2020-11-30 DEWEY 791.430233092 Audience Professional & Vocational US Release Date 2020-11-30 We've got this

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