- Film Studies Department
King's College London
Norfolk Building
Strand Campus
London
WC2R 2LS - 44 (0)20 7848 7840
Elena Gorfinkel
King's College London, Film Studies, Faculty Member
- New York University, Cinema Studies, Alumnusadd
- Cinema Studies, Film Studies, Film Theory, Temporality, Exploitation Cinema, Art and Independent Cinema, and 27 moreArt Theory, Film Analysis, Film History, Philosophy of Film, Global Cinemas, Embodiment, Phenomenology, Materiality, Aesthetics and Politics, Gender and Sexuality, Cinephilia, Avant-Garde Cinema, Still and Moving Images, Visual Studies, Feminist Theory, Boredom, Waste, Decay, Critical Theory, The Body in Film, Cultural Studies, Art History, Cultural Theory, Affect/Emotion, Affect (Cultural Theory), Cinema (Celluloid and Digital), and Sleepedit
- Reader in Film Studies, King's College Londonedit
One of the most fascinating phenomena of 1960s film culture is the emergence of American sexploitation films—salacious indies made on the margins of Hollywood. Hundreds of such films were produced and shown on both urban and small-town... more
One of the most fascinating phenomena of 1960s film culture is the emergence of American sexploitation films—salacious indies made on the margins of Hollywood. Hundreds of such films were produced and shown on both urban and small-town screens over the course of the decade. Yet despite their vital importance to the film scene, and though they are now understood as a gateway to the emergence of publicly exhibited hardcore pornography in the early 1970s, these films have been largely overlooked by scholars.
Defined by low budgets, quick production times, unknown actors, strategic uses of nudity, and a sensationalist obsession with unbridled female sexuality, sexploitation films provide a unique window into a tumultuous period in American culture and sexual politics. In Lewd Looks, Elena Gorfinkel examines the social and legal developments that made sexploitation films possible: their aesthetics, their regulation, and their audiences. Gorfinkel explores the ways sexploitation films changed how spectators encountered and made sense of the sexualized body and set the stage for the adult film industry of today.
Lewd Looks recovers a lost chapter in the history of independent cinema and American culture—a subject that will engross readers interested in media, sexuality, gender, and the 1960s. Gorfinkel investigates the films and their contexts with scholarly depth and vivid storytelling, producing a new account of the obscene image, screen sex, and adult film and media.
"Sex sells, but it also speaks, and few have listened more attentively than Elena Gorfinkel. In Lewd Looks, she untangles the dense, complicated looking relations of the sexploitation film cycle that most have brushed off as a speed bump on the race to hardcore, revealing it instead as a staging of the fundamental American ambivalence and anxiety regarding sex. Full of recovered moments of previously-lost film history and piercing analytical insights, this brilliant book peers avidly into the cinematic gutter, seeing the truths of our culture floating there."
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Whitney Strub, author of Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right
"Groundbreaking and exquisitely presented. With a fearless dedication to archival research, Elena Gorfinkel forges an original research trajectory that can be productively extended to other under-researched media forms as well as mainstream media."
—
Constance Penley, University of California, Santa Barbara
Defined by low budgets, quick production times, unknown actors, strategic uses of nudity, and a sensationalist obsession with unbridled female sexuality, sexploitation films provide a unique window into a tumultuous period in American culture and sexual politics. In Lewd Looks, Elena Gorfinkel examines the social and legal developments that made sexploitation films possible: their aesthetics, their regulation, and their audiences. Gorfinkel explores the ways sexploitation films changed how spectators encountered and made sense of the sexualized body and set the stage for the adult film industry of today.
Lewd Looks recovers a lost chapter in the history of independent cinema and American culture—a subject that will engross readers interested in media, sexuality, gender, and the 1960s. Gorfinkel investigates the films and their contexts with scholarly depth and vivid storytelling, producing a new account of the obscene image, screen sex, and adult film and media.
"Sex sells, but it also speaks, and few have listened more attentively than Elena Gorfinkel. In Lewd Looks, she untangles the dense, complicated looking relations of the sexploitation film cycle that most have brushed off as a speed bump on the race to hardcore, revealing it instead as a staging of the fundamental American ambivalence and anxiety regarding sex. Full of recovered moments of previously-lost film history and piercing analytical insights, this brilliant book peers avidly into the cinematic gutter, seeing the truths of our culture floating there."
—
Whitney Strub, author of Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right
"Groundbreaking and exquisitely presented. With a fearless dedication to archival research, Elena Gorfinkel forges an original research trajectory that can be productively extended to other under-researched media forms as well as mainstream media."
—
Constance Penley, University of California, Santa Barbara
Research Interests: Film Studies, Film Theory, 1960s (U.S. history), Gender and Sexuality, Audience and Reception Studies, and 12 moreHistory of Sexuality, Film History, Spectatorship, Film Censorship, Feminist Film Studies, Feminist film theory, Pornography Studies, Film and Media Studies, Corporeality, Obscenity, Sexploitation film, and Adult Film
Global Cinema Networks investigates the evolving aesthetic forms, technological and industrial conditions, and social impacts of cinema in the twenty-first century. The collection’s esteemed contributors excavate sites of global... more
Global Cinema Networks investigates the evolving aesthetic forms, technological and industrial conditions, and social impacts of cinema in the twenty-first century. The collection’s esteemed contributors excavate sites of global filmmaking in an era of digital reproduction and amidst new modes of circulation and aesthetic convergence, focusing primarily on recent films made across Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Moving beyond the digital as a harbinger of transformation, the volume offers new ways of thinking about cinema networks in a historical continuum, from “international” to “world” to “transnational” to “global” frames.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Global Cinemas in a Time of Networks
Elena Gorfinkel, King’s College London (U.K.)
Part 1: Cartographies, Geopolitics, Aesthetics
Chapter 2: Beyond and Beneath the Map of World Cinema
Dudley Andrew, Yale University
Chapter 3: Frame
Adrian Martin, Monash University (Australia)
Chapter 4: Abstraction and the Geopolitical: Lessons from Antonioni’s Trip to China
John David Rhodes, University of Cambridge
Chapter 5: The City of Bits and Urban Rule: Media Archaeology, Urban Space, and Contemporary Chinese Documentary
James Tweedie, University of Washington
Part 2: Global Ideality, History, Representation
Chapter 6: Toward an Archeology of Global Rhythms: Melodie der Welt (Melody of the World, 1929) and its Reception in France
Laurent Guido, University of Lille (France)
Chapter 7: When Cinema was Humanism
Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick
Chapter 8: African Cinema: Digital Media and Expanding Frames of Representation
N. Frank Ukadike, Tulane University, New Orleans
Chapter 9: Changing Circumstances: Global Flows of Lesbian Cinema
Patricia White, Swarthmore College
Part 3: Kinships, Identifications, Genres
Chapter 10: Hermano and La hora cero: Violence and Transgressive Subjectivities in Venezuelan Youth Cinema
Luisela Alvaray, DePaul University
Chapter 11: Between Love and the Moral Law: The Fatal Mother in Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
Peter Y. Paik, Yonsei University (Korea)
Chapter 12: The Queer Mexican Cinema of Julián Hernández
Gilberto M. Blasini, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Chapter 13: The Gangster Film as World Cinema
Jian Xu, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Chapter 14: Epilogue: 24 Frames: Regarding the Past and Future of Global Cinema
Tami Williams, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/global-cinema-networks/9780813592725
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Global Cinemas in a Time of Networks
Elena Gorfinkel, King’s College London (U.K.)
Part 1: Cartographies, Geopolitics, Aesthetics
Chapter 2: Beyond and Beneath the Map of World Cinema
Dudley Andrew, Yale University
Chapter 3: Frame
Adrian Martin, Monash University (Australia)
Chapter 4: Abstraction and the Geopolitical: Lessons from Antonioni’s Trip to China
John David Rhodes, University of Cambridge
Chapter 5: The City of Bits and Urban Rule: Media Archaeology, Urban Space, and Contemporary Chinese Documentary
James Tweedie, University of Washington
Part 2: Global Ideality, History, Representation
Chapter 6: Toward an Archeology of Global Rhythms: Melodie der Welt (Melody of the World, 1929) and its Reception in France
Laurent Guido, University of Lille (France)
Chapter 7: When Cinema was Humanism
Karl Schoonover, University of Warwick
Chapter 8: African Cinema: Digital Media and Expanding Frames of Representation
N. Frank Ukadike, Tulane University, New Orleans
Chapter 9: Changing Circumstances: Global Flows of Lesbian Cinema
Patricia White, Swarthmore College
Part 3: Kinships, Identifications, Genres
Chapter 10: Hermano and La hora cero: Violence and Transgressive Subjectivities in Venezuelan Youth Cinema
Luisela Alvaray, DePaul University
Chapter 11: Between Love and the Moral Law: The Fatal Mother in Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance
Peter Y. Paik, Yonsei University (Korea)
Chapter 12: The Queer Mexican Cinema of Julián Hernández
Gilberto M. Blasini, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Chapter 13: The Gangster Film as World Cinema
Jian Xu, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Chapter 14: Epilogue: 24 Frames: Regarding the Past and Future of Global Cinema
Tami Williams, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/global-cinema-networks/9780813592725
Research Interests: Globalization, Film Studies, Film Theory, Space and Place, Latin-American Film, and 15 moreFilm Genre, Networks, Urbanism, Italian Cinema, Film History, German Cinema, Global Cinemas, Film and History, Chinese Cinema, Film Aesthetics, African cinema, Queer Cinema, Temporality, Film Criticism, and World Cinema
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Commissioned programme essay for cineclub The Machine that Kills Bad People screening of WANDA at the Institute for Contemporary Art, London, May 2, 2018. https://www.ica.art/whats-on/machine-kills-bad-people-cry-when-it-happens-wanda... more
Commissioned programme essay for cineclub The Machine that Kills Bad People screening of WANDA at the Institute for Contemporary Art, London, May 2, 2018.
https://www.ica.art/whats-on/machine-kills-bad-people-cry-when-it-happens-wanda
https://www.ica.art/sites/default/files/downloads/ICA%20Wanda_%20Loden_%20lodestone_v2.pdf
https://www.ica.art/whats-on/machine-kills-bad-people-cry-when-it-happens-wanda
https://www.ica.art/sites/default/files/downloads/ICA%20Wanda_%20Loden_%20lodestone_v2.pdf
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This essay analyzes the film Under the Skin's production of its alien’s impossible interiority, in her attempts to eat and to have sex. Exploring the film's staging of the philosophical difficulty of a subjective sensory experience, this... more
This essay analyzes the film Under the Skin's production of its alien’s impossible interiority, in her attempts to eat and to have sex. Exploring the film's staging of the philosophical difficulty of a subjective sensory experience, this essay considers how the work resonates with traditions of feminist thought and new materialist, speculative philosophies.
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Screen 55:4 (Winter 2014)
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From medicine to philosophy to political theory, sleep has of late become a subject of extensive rumination and consternation. Whether conceived as territory of subjective possibility exceedingly contaminated, by the depredations of... more
From medicine to philosophy to political theory, sleep has of late become a subject of extensive rumination and consternation. Whether conceived as territory of subjective possibility exceedingly contaminated, by the depredations of “24/7” capital (as per Jonathan Crary), or as a threshold corporeal state that signals the zero degree of human vulnerability and the alterity of subjectivity (as per Jean Luc Nancy), sleep resonates in our contemporary moment with pressing questions about mediation, labor, exhaustion and lived time. In the context of accelerating temporalities and unrelenting compression, sleep represents a disappearing currency for the overworked, oversaturated, hypermediated subject, but also connotes a certain (necessary) luxury. What are the potentialities and opacities proffered by cinema's figuration of sleep? Sleep when made an object of cinema's gaze is both pervasive and reflexive, as it can mark transitional narrative temporalities, spaces of erotic surplus, nonagentic performance, as well as recall some of the most fundamental ontological precepts and blind spots of filmic representation. Looking at sleep as both a condition of temporal alterity as well as potential zone for spectatorial surrender, this talk will analyze Tsai Ming Liang’s No No Sleep (2014), Sergei Loznitsa’s The Train Stop (2000), and Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's Somniloquies (2017). Drawing on histories of sleep and insomnia, the presentation considers how the interstitial nature of sleep facilitates examination of cinema’s preoccupation with bodily endurance, performative labor, erotics and exhaustion, as well as a reconsideration of corporeal inactivity and its cinematic value.
http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/en/winter-2017-2018/elena-gorfinkel/
http://www.kracauer-lectures.de/en/winter-2017-2018/elena-gorfinkel/
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Keynote at University of Florida, Film Studies Symposium, Harn Museum of Art, January 29, 2016