Screening Historical Sexualities: A Roundtable on Sodomy, South Africa, and Proteus (with Brassel, Garrett, Greyson, Lewis, Newton-King)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Proteus (2003; 100 min., Canada and South Africa) is a low-budget feature film, directed by John Greyson (Toronto) and Jack Lewis (Cape Town), that made the international rounds of art cinema and queer festivals in 2003 and 2004, with limited theatrical release in New York, Toronto, and other cities. The film advances Greyson's and Lewis's experiments with political essay-narrative forms both in their respective documentary, experimental, and dramatic videos dating back to the early 1980s (including Lewis's Apostles of Civilized Vice [1999]) and in Greyson's theatrical feature films beginning with Urinal in 1988. Based on an early-eighteenth-century court record, Proteus narrates the meeting, sexual relationship, and eventual trial and execution for sodomy of two prisoners in the Dutch Cape Colony, the Dutchman Rijkhaart Jacobsz and the Khoi Claas Blank. Subsidiary narratives focus on the Scottish botanist Virgil Niven, who observed the prisoners, and on the contemporaneous crackdown on sodomites in Amsterdam. GLQ initiated the following virtual conversation among the two directors, queer legal theorist Noa Ben-Asher, American film scholar R. Bruce Brasell, American film critic Daniel Garrett, and South African historian Susan Newton- King. Though it will spoil the plot for readers who have not seen the movie, we offer it as a lively debate about one of the more interesting entries in the new queer cinema. The debate explores the precarious and artful interrelationship of histories, nations, narratives, and the law; cinematic intent and spectatorial interpretation; same-sexuality, conjugality, and difference; and even, as one participant dares to put it, love.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".