Friday, 9 May 2008

Temple University Center City Campus (TUCC) Room 420, 5:30-7:00pm

Directions to TUCC

Elena Gorfinkel, Bryn Mawr College

"'Dated Sexuality:' Anna Biller’s VIVA (2006) and the Retrospective Life of Sixties Sexploitation Cinema"

Respondent: Patricia White, Swarthmore College

production photo from VIVA (Anna Biller, 2006)

American sexploitation cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s has gained a second life in the past two decades through a boom in video and DVD distribution and re-release, and consequently a new, generationally distinct audience, who plumb the depths of the films for their political and aesthetic transgressions. This presentation proposes that what appeals to cult audiences in the present about the “impoverished” tableaus of sexploitation films, a genre that unfurls melodramatic male fantasies about women’s erotic agency in the 1960s, is precisely the shunted melancholia of obsolescence. This is an obsolescence that inheres not only in the strivings of the films’ politically retrograde plots, but also in their erotic content, in the material evidence of their mise-en-scène, and in the extra-textual residues of their embattled mode of production. Sexploitation films maintain a hold on contemporary viewers precisely through the films’ constriction by history, by their seeming containment within their own historical moment and inability to transcend it - as if “time capsules” without a destination. An exemplar of the penchant for “dated sexuality,” filmmaker Anna Biller re-stages the pro-filmic universe of the sexploitation oeuvre in her film VIVA (2006). A Far from Heaven of sorts for the sexploitation cineaste, VIVA’s narrative of two women’s “entrance” into the sexual revolution and its meticulous reconstruction of the genre evokes both Radley Metzger’s lush soft-core films as well as the commodified landscape of the late 60s and early 70s, embodying itself as a time capsule constructed in retrospect. Biller’s vintage mise-en-scène exhibits a collector sensibility that indulges in a productive form of historical fetishism. In “the big lighting, the plethora of negligées, and the delirious assortment of Salvation Army ashtrays, lamps, fabrics, and bric-a-brac,” the film stages the archive of the 1960s and early 1970s as a diorama or an art installation, a space which Biller (as central character Barbi/Viva) enters and inhabits. VIVA, in its indulgence in the artifacts, shoddy conventions and “outdated” precepts of the genre, encourages a historiographic reconsideration of the sexploitation form, particularly in how it speaks to the spectatorial experiences of women, the “undesignated” audience of the genre, as well as to public memories of the sexual revolution. Professor Gorfinkel argues that Biller’s relay of her own spectatorship of the sexploitation genre represents a way of imagining female spectatorship as a form of cinephile wandering through the historical frame – and through a cathexis on the world of forgotten bodies and discarded objects, both material and cinematic.

still from VIVA (Anna Biller, 2006)

Elena Gorfinkel is Lecturer in the Program in Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She received a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University. Her writings on erotic film culture, cult cinema, and cinephilia have been published in the journal Framework, and in the collections Cinephilia: Movies Love & Memory, and Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon. She is currently co-editing a collection with John David Rhodes entitled The Place of the Moving Image, on the role of place and geographic location in our experience of cinema and media. She is also working on a book manuscript, “Indecent Desires:” Sexploitation Cinema, 1960s Film Culture and the Adult Film Audience.

Patricia White is Associate Professor and Chair of the Program in Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore Colloege. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz and graduated in the first class of Film Studies majors from Yale. She is the author if Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Indiana University Press, 1999), and co-author with Timothy Corrigan of the introductory film studies textbook The Film Experience (Bedford St. Martin's, 2004, second edition forthcoming 2008). She edited and introduced a volume of essays by Teresa de Lauretis, Figures of Resistance (Illinois University Press, 2007) and her essays and chapters have appeared in The Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, Screen, Camera Obscura, and Cinema Journal. She is currently writing a book on global women filmmakers.