Queer City Film: Experimental Cinema, Urban Life and the Erotics of Visibility
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The “queer city film” is proposed in this dissertation to be a corpus of experimental cinema and a critical method of spectatorship that establishes links between queer film history and studies of the cinematic city, two fields that have developed in parallel with little explicit overlap. The city is thus analyzed as an opportune vantage point for the discussion of concurrent inventions of homosexuality and cinema in Euro-American modernity. By establishing a continuity between the cinema-and-the-city discourse and queer film theory, this project identifies the emergence of subjective vision in modernity as a precondition for queer vision, thus proposing a new interpretative model for queer cinema that captures historical mediations of divergent expressions of gender and sexuality in visual media. Focusing on queer-authored experimental cinema set in recognizable urban locales across North America and Europe, the project puts film analysis into dialogue with queer theory, material culture studies, fashion and design studies, and cultural geography. To that end, city symphonies are analyzed as the earliest examples of the cinematic city representing a hermeneutics for the visual development of gender and sexual spectrums throughout film history. Gay pornography produced in the United States and Quebec is examined as a genre that put eroticism into dialogue with a documentary impulse, capturing the politically charged issues of queer visibility and public infrastructure through on-location shooting in cities such as San Francisco and Montreal. Finally, pre-digital queer experimental cinema of the twentieth century is surveyed for its sustained, yet often overlooked, interest in the closet of sexual secrecy as a conceptual and physical space denoting a range of domestic practices. By privileging experimental, avant-garde and erotic cinema over commercial film, and by gravitating towards the mediations of urban figures, spaces and surfaces over the narrative plot in queer cinema, the dissertation proposes an intermedial and historical approach to cinema as an archive of queer meanings and fantasies that challenges neat categories of gender and sexual identity, and expands their representational possibilities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".