Film scholar, festival enthusiast, amateur historian, professional queer.
Project Manager, Archive/Counter-Archive, York University. Instructor: York, Concordia, UQAM.
Book: LGBTQ Film Festivals. Amsterdam University Press, 2020.
New research projects on: Cyril Collard's les Nuits fauves (1992); festivals and Covid-19
Order my book: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463728409/lgbtq-film-festivals
Alumni: McGill University (Postdoc), Concordia University (PhD, film studies), UC Irvine (grad. exchange student, visual studies), Sciences Po Lyon (BA/MA, visual studies/communication), UC Riverside (undergrad. exchange student).
Supervisors: Thomas Waugh (phd), Alanna Thain (postdoc 1), Bobby Benedicto (postdoc 1), and Michael Zryd (postdoc 2)
Project Manager, Archive/Counter-Archive, York University. Instructor: York, Concordia, UQAM.
Book: LGBTQ Film Festivals. Amsterdam University Press, 2020.
New research projects on: Cyril Collard's les Nuits fauves (1992); festivals and Covid-19
Order my book: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463728409/lgbtq-film-festivals
Alumni: McGill University (Postdoc), Concordia University (PhD, film studies), UC Irvine (grad. exchange student, visual studies), Sciences Po Lyon (BA/MA, visual studies/communication), UC Riverside (undergrad. exchange student).
Supervisors: Thomas Waugh (phd), Alanna Thain (postdoc 1), Bobby Benedicto (postdoc 1), and Michael Zryd (postdoc 2)
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Videos by Antoine Damiens
Book by Antoine Damiens
Antoine Damiens is a FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow within the Department of English and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University (Montreal).
‘An engaging and original history of queer film festivals and an insider critique of festival studies at large. Damiens has excavated our archives and offered a colourful tapestry of LGBTQ+ struggles over half a century, probing both the friendship and the activism at their core.’
THOMAS WAUGH, CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY, CANADA
Published articles by Antoine Damiens
Queer cinema exists on a spectrum, with films that have crossover appeal to mainstream audiences (such as Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019)) on one end and niche films for queer audiences—from Fig Trees (John Greyson, 2009) to Another Gay Movie (Todd Stephens, 2006)—on the other. This dossier presents an array of case studies of films that rely heavily on the queer film festival circuit for reaching their audience. This mode of distribution does not necessarily seek interest or approval from heteronormative film culture. In this dossier, we propose that this mode of queer spectatorship mobilises and draws value from its own marginality. Through several case studies, we argue that the curation of these events are affective experiences that momentarily bind queer histories and audiences together in the moment of their projection.
We have both written extensively on the queer film festival as a cultural phenomenon. Stuart Richards has analysed the queer film festival as a social enterprise to examine how these festivals need to consider social, economic and environmental sustainability.1 Antoine Damiens draws an alternative history of queer film festivals to question ‘the theoretical and political narratives implied in current festival scholarship.’2 We both advocate for queer film festivals to ensure that transgressive film practices flourish. The values of such film are core to the queer film festival’s social mission.
In this contribution, I argue that the festival’s use of volunteer labor may, at times, be visible to its audience. The amateur trailers, posters, or subtitles created by volunteers often contain imperfections that make it clear the festival is organized by and for the lesbian community. For instance, the trailer for the festival’s 20th edition simply juxtaposes past festival posters, ordered chronologically, on top of a red background. Its imperfect, amateur editing does not aim to increase the festival’s prestige. Rather, this DIY aesthetics makes visible the labor of volunteers and participates in creating a sense of community around the event.
These DIY aesthetics can also be seen in one of the translation techniques used by the festival. As the oldest festival of lesbian cinema, Cineffable premieres and translates a large number of international films into French. It does not, however, always have access to professional translators. In that context, the festival sometimes screens foreign films using two projectors—one for the film and one for a superimposed word-processing document containing volunteer-created subtitles. A Cineffable staff member, visibly present in the audience, scrolls down the document as the film progresses. This manual system entails lags and delays, imperfect superimpositions, and human errors that make visible the labor of translators. While subtitles are usually created by anonymous cultural workers, Cineffable’s translators are defined first and foremost as festivalgoers. In making the labor of volunteers visible, the festival ultimately visualizes its own community.
Disclaimer:
As a cisgender gay man in my early thirties, I have never attended Cineffable. This short contribution is based on my experience working with Cineffable’s subtitles as a translator for theLGBTQ festival Ecrans Mixtes Lyon. It should be understood as an homage to the vital work performed by Cineffable’s organizers.
Papers by Antoine Damiens
Antoine Damiens is a FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow within the Department of English and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University (Montreal).
‘An engaging and original history of queer film festivals and an insider critique of festival studies at large. Damiens has excavated our archives and offered a colourful tapestry of LGBTQ+ struggles over half a century, probing both the friendship and the activism at their core.’
THOMAS WAUGH, CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY, CANADA
Queer cinema exists on a spectrum, with films that have crossover appeal to mainstream audiences (such as Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019)) on one end and niche films for queer audiences—from Fig Trees (John Greyson, 2009) to Another Gay Movie (Todd Stephens, 2006)—on the other. This dossier presents an array of case studies of films that rely heavily on the queer film festival circuit for reaching their audience. This mode of distribution does not necessarily seek interest or approval from heteronormative film culture. In this dossier, we propose that this mode of queer spectatorship mobilises and draws value from its own marginality. Through several case studies, we argue that the curation of these events are affective experiences that momentarily bind queer histories and audiences together in the moment of their projection.
We have both written extensively on the queer film festival as a cultural phenomenon. Stuart Richards has analysed the queer film festival as a social enterprise to examine how these festivals need to consider social, economic and environmental sustainability.1 Antoine Damiens draws an alternative history of queer film festivals to question ‘the theoretical and political narratives implied in current festival scholarship.’2 We both advocate for queer film festivals to ensure that transgressive film practices flourish. The values of such film are core to the queer film festival’s social mission.
In this contribution, I argue that the festival’s use of volunteer labor may, at times, be visible to its audience. The amateur trailers, posters, or subtitles created by volunteers often contain imperfections that make it clear the festival is organized by and for the lesbian community. For instance, the trailer for the festival’s 20th edition simply juxtaposes past festival posters, ordered chronologically, on top of a red background. Its imperfect, amateur editing does not aim to increase the festival’s prestige. Rather, this DIY aesthetics makes visible the labor of volunteers and participates in creating a sense of community around the event.
These DIY aesthetics can also be seen in one of the translation techniques used by the festival. As the oldest festival of lesbian cinema, Cineffable premieres and translates a large number of international films into French. It does not, however, always have access to professional translators. In that context, the festival sometimes screens foreign films using two projectors—one for the film and one for a superimposed word-processing document containing volunteer-created subtitles. A Cineffable staff member, visibly present in the audience, scrolls down the document as the film progresses. This manual system entails lags and delays, imperfect superimpositions, and human errors that make visible the labor of translators. While subtitles are usually created by anonymous cultural workers, Cineffable’s translators are defined first and foremost as festivalgoers. In making the labor of volunteers visible, the festival ultimately visualizes its own community.
Disclaimer:
As a cisgender gay man in my early thirties, I have never attended Cineffable. This short contribution is based on my experience working with Cineffable’s subtitles as a translator for theLGBTQ festival Ecrans Mixtes Lyon. It should be understood as an homage to the vital work performed by Cineffable’s organizers.
My intervention specifically looks at five documentaries made by and about LGBT/Q film festivals - 25! (Frameline San Francisco), Acting Out (Hamburg Lesbisch Scwhule Filmtage), Bending the Lens (London Lesbian Festival), History doesn’t have to repeat itself (MIX NYC), and Artivism (various European festivals), all produced and released in the last decade.
Although particularly formulaic and consisting mostly of talking heads intercut with festivals’ ephemera, I argue that these documentaries participate in festivals’ obsession with knowledge production. Not only do they 1. echo the aesthetics and politics of queer documentary filmmaking as ‘archives of feelings’ (Cvetkovich 2003) – thus re-negotiating the relationship between film exhibition and filmmaking itself, they also 2. urge us to conceptualize curation as an archive of LGBT cultural world-making, positing festivals as sites for the constant re-negotiation of cultural memory.
Interweaving formal analyses of these documentaries with an ethnographic account of their reception, my intervention hopes to further festival studies’ commitment to cultural analysis: as archives, festivals make time “matter”. They simultaneously register various historically and geographically situated imaginings of queerness and address the present of LGBT identities -- thus fostering a tactile engagement with the history of queer representation itself.
I argue that Cineffable’s unconventional subtitles uniquely reveals how cinematic organisations negotiate queer politics: (1) the circulation of Cineffable’s subtitles participates in an invisible effort of cooperation and solidarity building that preserve the festival’s lesbian specificity. Moreover, (2) these subtitles materially inscribe the act of translation onto the films; they foster a specifically feminist praxis of intercultural and intergenerational translation.
In drawing on both festival studies and feminist historiography, this paper reveals some of the practical tactics through which festivals cooperate with one another and negotiate their identity within their respective circuits.
Based on an extensive archival research conducted in North America and Europe, I pay attention to various screenings organised by then emerging critics/scholars (Thomas Waugh, Richard Dyer, B. Ruby Rich, and Vito Russo) within field defining conferences, newly created film studies departments, and community-based centers. In drawing an alternative history of 1970s gay and lesbian film studies, I (1) argue that 1970s critics/scholars mobilised the festival format as a way of curating or creating the idea of a “gay and lesbian cinema,” both within and outside of academia. I (2) pay attention to the relationships between film scholarship and criticism: the then-emerging discipline of film studies provided a space for a rather hybrid academic labour – one that adopted the personal dimension of gay liberation politics, strategically mobilised both academic modes of knowledge production and film criticism, and used curation and festival-organising as a resource through which knowledge could be created and disseminated. I conclude that (3) this specific use of the festival format reveals a different conception of academic labour, one that built upon “committed” scholars’ relationships with community organisers and social movements.
In resituating the role played by festivals in curating gay and lesbian film studies, this paper pays homage to scholars who are now slowly retiring (Waugh, Dyer). In so doing, it hopes to simultaneously revive the utopian impulse at the core of 1970s film studies and offer a reconceptualization of the relationship between festival organising and academic labour.