Thomas Waugh - Böcker

A confessional of the unrepentant, Writing in the Flesh caresses taboos, confronts sentimentality, and recasts memory. Thomas Waugh writes the body back into the intellectual autobiography, revealing the unsettling arguments and politics born from the tastes and desires of his own carnal vessel.Shaped by the arc of a life still in full flight – a preacher’s kid who grows up to be a porn teacher and, along the way, a New Left activist and expert in documentary, queer, and Canadian film – Writing in the Flesh confronts the struggle of writing the self. Against the backdrop of Montreal’s Plateau-Mont-Royal, New York City, and the Punjab, Waugh brings places and people to life in profound and unexpected ways. This is also a memoir about history, the archive, and ephemera: Waugh mines his personal annals for photographs, film stills, testimony, and correspondence to reconstitute the voices of blood and chosen families, to hedge against erratic memory, and to give sense to life. Indebted to the tradition of queer first-person rabble rousers, Waugh takes us on a journey through seven decades of queer relations: the erotic, the pedagogical, the familial, the romantic, the platonic, and, of course, the filmic.Sexy, cinematic, encyclopedic: this vivacious vita celebrates a life filled with family and chosen family, movies, and beefcake. At the same time these pages are, as the title declares, a writing in the flesh: the unveiling of the fraught, vulnerable, declining yet still robust and pleasured body at the very centre of it all.

Spanning more than a century of photography and film, Hard to Imagine is the first visual chronicle of the evolution of gay male image culture, from the canonical works of "art" photography and cinema to the private and often highly explicit productions of amateurs. This comprehensive work explores a vast, eclectic tradition in its totality, analyzing the aesthetics of the visual imagery, its production, circulation, and consumption, and broad social and legal implications.

Whether addressing HIV/AIDS, the policing of bathroom sex, censorship, or anti-globalization movements, John Greyson has imbued his work with cutting humour, eroticism, and postmodern aesthetics. Mashing up high art, opera, community activism, and pop culture, Greyson challenges his audience to consider new ways that images can intervene in both political and public spheres. Emerging on the Toronto scene in the late 1970s, Greyson has produced an eclectic, provocative, and award-winning body of work in film and video. The essays in The Perils of Pedagogy range from personal meditations to provocative textual readings to studies of the historical contexts in which the artist's works intervened politically as well as artistically. Notable writers from a range of disciplines as well as prominent experimental and activist filmmakers tackle questions of documentary ethics, moving image activism, and queer coalitional politics raised by Greyson's work. Close to one hundred frame captures and stills from almost sixty works, along with articles, speeches, and short scripts by Greyson - several never before published - supplement the collection. Celebrating thirty years of passionate, brilliant, and affecting moviemaking, The Perils of Pedagogy will fascinate both specialists and general readers interested in media activism and advocacy, censorship, and freedom of expression.

In the postwar decades, sexual revolutions - first women's suffrage, flappers, Prohibition, and Mae West; later Alfred Kinsey, Hugh Hefner, and the pill - altered the lifestyles and desires of generations. Since the 1990s, the internet and its cataclysmic cultural and social technological shifts have unleashed a third sexual revolution, crystallized in the acts and rituals of confession that are a staple of our twenty-first-century lives. In I Confess!, a collection of thirty original essays, leading international scholars such as Ken Plummer, Susanna Paasonen, Tom Roach, and Shohini Ghosh explore the ideas of confession and sexuality in moving image arts and media, mostly in the Global North, over the last quarter century. Through self-referencing or autobiographical stories, testimonies, and performances, and through rigorously scrutinized case studies of "gay for pay," gaming, camming, YouTube uploads, and the films Tarnation and Nymph()maniac, the contributors describe a spectrum of identities, desires, and related representational practices. Together these desires and practices shape how we see, construct, and live our identities within this third sexual revolution, embodying both its ominous implications of surveillance and control and its utopian glimmers of community and liberation. Inspired by theorists from Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze to Gayle Rubin and José Esteban Muñoz, I Confess! reflects an extraordinary, paradigm-shifting proliferation of first-person voices and imagery produced during the third sexual revolution, from the eve of the internet to today.

The Right to Play Oneself collects for the first time Thomas Waugh’s essays on the politics, history, and aesthetics of documentary film, written between 1974 and 2008. The title, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s and Joris Ivens’s manifestos of “committed” documentary from the 19 0s, reflects the book’s theme of the political potential of documentary for representing the democratic performance of citizens and artists.Waugh analyzes an eclectic international selection of films and issues from the 1920s to the present day. The essays provide a transcultural focus, moving from documentaries of the industrialized societies of North America and Europe to those of 1980s India and addressing such canonical directors as Dziga Vertov, Emile de Antonio, Barbara Hammer, Rosa von Praunheim, and Anand Patwardhan. Woven through the volume is the relationship of the documentary with the history of the Left, including discussions of LGBT documentary pioneers and the firebrand collectives that changed the history of documentary, such as Challenge for Change and ACT UP’s Women’s Collective. Together with the introduction by the author, Waugh’s essays advance a defiantly and persuasively personal point of view on the history and significance of documentary film.

For more than twenty years, film critic, teacher, activist, and fan Thomas Waugh has been writing about queer movies. As a member of the Jump Cut collective and contributor to the Toronto-based gay newspaper the Body Politic, he emerged in the late 1970s as a pioneer in gay film theory and criticism, and over the next two decades solidified his reputation as one of the most important and influential gay film critics. The Fruit Machine-a collection of Waugh’s reviews and articles originally published in gay community tabloids, academic journals, and anthologies-charts the emergence and maturation of Waugh’s critical sensibilities while lending an important historical perspective to the growth of film theory and criticism as well as queer moviemaking.In this wide-ranging anthology Waugh touches on some of the great films of the gay canon, from Taxi zum Klo to Kiss of the Spider Woman. He also discusses obscure guilty pleasures like Born a Man . . . Let Me Die a Woman, unexpectedly rich movies like Porky’s and Caligula, filmmakers such as Fassbinder and Eisenstein, and film personalities from Montgomery Clift to Patty Duke. Emerging from the gay liberation movement of the 1970s, Waugh traverses crises from censorship to AIDS, tackling mainstream potboilers along with art movies, documentaries, and avant-garde erotic videos. In these personal perspectives on the evolving cinematic landscape, his words oscillate from anger and passion to wry wit and irony. With fifty-nine rare film stills and personal photographs and an introduction by celebrated gay filmmaker John Greyson, this volume demonstrates that the movie camera has been the fruit machine par excellence.

This is the first book to survey the entire career of Joris Ivens, a prolific documentary filmmaker who worked on every continent over the course of seven decades. More than a biography of a leftist committed to changing the world through film, The Conscience of Cinema is also a microcosmic history of the documentary and its form, culture, and place within twentieth-century world cinema. Ivens worked in almost every genre, including the essay, compilation, hybrid dramatization, socialist realism, and more. Whether in his native Netherlands, the Soviet Union, the United States, Vietnam, or beyond, he left an indelible artistic and political mark that continues to resonate in the twenty-first century.