Introduction

A New Media-Philosophical Topicality

The title Queer Post-Cinema is not intended to affirm a new queer cinema. Rather, the descriptor post-cinema is meant to open up a view about queer cinema from the perspective of current reflections on the relationship between cinematic dispositives and digital media. These considerations are not uniform but go in many different directions.11See Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, ed. by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Falmer: Reframe Books, 2016) <http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/> [accessed 24 May 2024]; The State of Post-Cinema: Tracing the Moving Image in the Age of Digital Dissemination, ed. by Malte Hagener, Vinzenz Hediger, and Alena Strohmeier (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and Post-Cinema: Cinema in the Post-Art Era, ed. by Dominique Chateau and José Moure (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020) <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1b0fvtp>. In contrast to previous attempts to describe the digital condition of our time in terms of a radical rupture between Beginning of page[p. 2] old and new media, these more recent reflections return to the concept of the cinematographic and give a new media-philosophical topicality to the question of the moving image, its aesthetic qualities, and its environments.22The opposition between ‘old analogue’ and ‘new digital’ media that prevailed in the 1990s had been replaced by the concepts of transmediality and media convergence already at the turn of the century (Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006)). While these concepts are based on the distinction between content and platform, the discussion of post-cinema focuses on the entanglement of technical conditions and aesthetic experience.

The reason for this approach is simple: digital media have not displaced the moving image and film. On the contrary, digital media have given the moving image an unprecedented ubiquity and a new quality. This is evident in the film and video game industries, in the transformation of television, and in the omnipresence of the moving image on the internet and various screens, whether tablets, smartphones, public displays, or those embedded in intelligent environments. At the same time, cinema itself incorporates technical images in movies, such as CGI (Computer Generated Images), as well as from drones, satellites, or mobile phones.33See Francesco Casetti and Andrea Pinotti, ‘Post-Cinema Ecology’, in Post-Cinema, ed. by Chateau and Moure, pp. 193–217 (p. 198) <https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1b0fvtp.15>. The ‘post’ (= ‘after’) in post-cinema indicates, on the one hand, that the time is over in which the classical cinema dispositive, with its analogue projection techniques and its canon of films, was decisive for the definition of cinema, and, on the other, that with the advent of digital media, a digital aesthetic has emerged. It is now necessary to analyse the transformation of the cinematographic and its specific aesthetic difference.44Simon Rothöhler, High Definition. Digitale Filmästhetik (Berlin: August Verlag, 2013), p. 15. See also Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. by Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöhler (Vienna: Synema, 2012). Francesco Casetti,Beginning of page[p. 3] author of the programmatically titled book The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, describes the process of transformation that began with the digitization of images as one of relocation.55Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). This shift in location encompasses not only the place and the way films are received, but also the process of their production and distribution, the way they are perceived, and their embedding in cultural habits and social and economic structures. As a result, Casetti speaks of a relocation of the cinematographic experience.66Francesco Casetti, ‘The Relocation of Cinema’, in Post-Cinema, ed. by Denson and Leyda, pp. 569–615 (p. 584). From this perspective, the question of the post-cinematographic presents a conundrum: it can be posed as a question concerning the ‘experience of cinema beyond cinema’ or as one concerning the ‘experience that relates back to the experience of cinema’.77Ibid., p. 585. Whatever one’s position on this question, post-cinema understands the moving image as part of a changing media landscape, and cinema as part of an experience of perception and self-perception. Casetti refers to Walter Benjamin’s distinction between apparatus and medium, as well as to his understanding of perception itself as a medium.88Ibid., p. 580. This is also how Shane Denson and Julia Leyda interpret the common concern of the essays they have compiled under the title Perspectives on Post-Cinema: ‘Questions of aesthetic and form overlap with investigations of changing technological and industrial practices, contemporary formations of capital, and cultural concerns such as identity and social Beginning of page[p. 4] inequalities.’99Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, ‘Perspectives on Post-Cinema: An Introduction’, in Post-Cinema, ed. by Denson and Leyda, pp. 1–19 (p. 4). By focussing on a moment of ‘transition’, the authors underline that the new media are no longer primarily considered in terms of what is new, but rather in terms of how they are embedded in an ongoing, inconsistent, and indeterminate historical transformation. This change of attitude also extends the temporal dimension of the claimed transition.

Understood as a process that is ongoing over time, the digitization of images can no longer be tied to a specific date: the accelerated switch to digital projectors since 2010 can be seen as indicating the entry into the final ‘consolidation phase’ of post-cinema.1010Rothöhler, High Definition, p. 17. But that entry can also be seen as having taken place in 2002 with the first ever film to be digitally produced, distributed, and screened, namely Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones.1111Richard Grusin, ‘DVDs, Video Games, and the Cinema of Interaction’, in Post-Cinema, ed. by Denson and Leyda, pp. 65–87 (p. 65). Indications of a change might include the digital distribution of films on DVDs from the mid-1990s and the emergence of a ‘digital cinema of interactions’,1212Ibid., p. 67. or they may be located in the significant transformation of visual aesthetics, which, in conjunction with accelerated hypercapitalism, points to a new media regime.1313Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), p. 2.

Signs of a change can also be seen in the late 1980s in the competition of classical cinema with the electronic image, television, cable television, and video, which paved the way for the ubiquitous availability of moving images in terms of their production, distribution, and editing. Further, streaming practices and the production of new Beginning of page[p. 5] series formats on changing platforms, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, and increasing experiments with VR-technologies, show that post-cinema itself is in a constant state of flux. Post-cinema is, as Casetti and Andrea Pinotti put it, a ‘new territory where the filmic experience can be relocated, but also where the filmic experience can face new challenges and new paradigms’.1414Casetti and Pinotti, ‘Post-Cinema Ecology’, p. 198.

The post-cinematic perspective construes the digital moving image as an element of an ensemble in which digital techniques, cultural habits, feelings, affects, desires, as well as social and economic structures intertwine. Such an intertwining is significant for the methodological approaches associated with post-cinema. This is also indicated by the title of the study with which the US film and literary scholar Steven Shaviro opened his discussion around perspectives on the post-cinematic in 2010, namely Post-Cinematic Affect. Shaviro introduces his analysis of post-cinematic affect with the question of what it feels like to live in the twenty-first century. With reference to Raymond Williams, he links the transformation of media technology to that of the ‘structure of feelings’.1515Ibid. He sees a close interplay between digital technology, changes in visual aesthetics, hypercapitalism, and new forms of subjectivation. Unlike Casetti, Shaviro combines his analysis of post-cinema with a critique of neoliberal capitalism. I take a closer look at Shaviro’s approach in Chapter 2.

New Queer Cinema as Post-Cinema

New Queer Cinema is also interested in exploring forms of subjectivation and criticizing biopolitical strategies of control and exclusion. In queer cinema, however, subjectivation Beginning of page[p. 6] is linked to sexuality beyond the post-cinema perspectives presented above. New Queer Cinema sets out from an experience of subjectivation as entangled with sexuality, an entanglement that is normative: subjectivation means not only subjugation, but the entanglement of subjugation, rejection, and exclusion. The word queer was unmistakably part of hate speech vocabulary at the end of the 1980s, as New Queer Cinema was just forming. At this time, there were as yet no drugs with which to treat AIDS and an openly homophobic attitude dominated politics in the United States. To give expression, upon the advent of AIDS, to the extreme experience of being exposed to mass death and social death simultaneously, the pioneers of New Queer Cinema sought a new cinematic aesthetics that would give space to a sexual desire defamed as queer. In this historical moment, new creative and life-oriented forms of resistance, new political aesthetics and coalitions, and a new theoretical movement, namely Queer Theory, emerged from out of a situation characterized by death, dying, illness, and exclusion.1616Jim Hubbard’s documentary, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (2012), provides us with a good impression of this time.

The term New Queer Cinema was coined by film scholar, activist, and media theorist B. Ruby Rich in her article ‘A Queer Sensation’, published in the New-York-based publication The Village Voice in March 1992.1717The article appeared again under the title ‘The New Queer Cinema’ in Sight and Sound, 2.5 (1992) and was reprinted in the volume New Queer Cinema, ed. by Michele Aaron (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2004), pp. 15–23. Rich finally included an unabridged original version of the text under the same title ‘The New Queer Cinema’ in her documentary volume New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 16–32. My references are exclusively to this latter version. What did it mean to talk of ‘a queer sensation’? In a short period of two Beginning of page[p. 7] years, film festivals, especially in the United States, were dominated by films and videos that showed gay, lesbian, and genderqueer forms of life and subjectivation, and that were full of rage against the prevailing AIDS policy. These included Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991), Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992), Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992), Isaac Julien’s Young Soul Rebels (1991), Jenny Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1991), Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), Laurie Lynd’s short film R.S.V.P. (1991), Sadie Benning’s black-and-white Pixelvision videos (1989–1992), and, last but not least, Marlon T. Riggs’s aesthetically and politically radical Tongues United (1989). Rich described these new films and videos, in a phrase that would be much discussed, as Homo Pomo, with Pomo meaning postmodern1818See Nick Davis, The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press 2013), pp. 10–13.:

In all of them there are traces of appropriation, pastiche, and irony, as well as reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind. Definitely breaking with older humanist approaches with the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist, and excessive. Above all, they’re full of pleasure.1919Rich, The New Queer Cinema, p. 18.

In her memoirs, Rich names four decisive reasons for the emergence Beginning of page[p. 8] of New Queer Cinema: the spread of AIDS, Ronald Reagan’s policies, cheap rents, and small camera recorders.2020Ibid., p. xvi. She thereby outlines the backdrop of New Queer Cinema’s emergence as the beginning of that transitional process that Casetti describes as the relocation of cinematic experience. As I explain below, the emergence of New Queer Cinema simultaneously presupposed and set in motion the transition from cinema to post-cinema.

AIDS first appeared on the West Coast of the United States in 1981 and was initially referred to as Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID). Not until heterosexual people also fell ill did the abbreviation get replaced with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). In 1984 HIV was detected as the cause of the disease. 1987 saw the formation of ACT UP — an acronym for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power and also a call to act up, to rebel, to go out — a resistance movement that caused quite a stir.2121See Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009). One of ACT UP’s aims was to politicize AIDS by taking action against the homophobic policies of Ronald Reagan’s government, and by exerting pressure on the pharmaceutical industry to get it to invest money in developing new drugs and making them universally available. AIDS activism was both an analysis and a criticism of health policy in the US and the global policies of the pharmaceutical industry. However, resistance was also brought to bear on the vociferous demands for the compulsory testing of so-called risk groups, as well as for the quarantining, or even tattooing, of HIV-infected people. As indicated by the title of Donna J. Haraway’s 1989 essay ‘The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse’,2222Donna Haraway, ‘The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of the Self in Immune System Discourse’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 1.1 (1989), pp. 3–43. which she dedicated to her gay husband and partner who had died of AIDS in 1986, AIDS activism was a driving force behind the appropriation and further development of biopolitical theories.Beginning of page[p. 9]

Ronald Reagan rode to power in 1981 on the back of a coalition of evangelical, economically liberal, and conservative voters. His term in office lasted until 1989. He introduced consistently neoliberal economic policies. His foreign policy was anti-communist and geared towards intensifying the Cold War through rearmament. The open homophobia of this conservative-neoliberal policy was expressed in his government’s reaction to AIDS: the disease was declared a punishment and homosexuality, a sin.

The ACT UP movement emerged not least from resistance against this conservative-neoliberal-capitalist form of biopolitics. From the very beginning, this queer movement was more than just an advocacy group. It was critical of identity politics and fought not only homophobia, but also racism and misogyny. Queer theory was based on the insight that every identity politics presupposes a politics of representation, one of the constitutive features of which involves the exclusion of subjects who do not belong, whose lives count for less, and who are simply left to die.2323See Lauren Berlant, ‘Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)’, Critical Inquiry, 33.4 (2007), pp. 754–80; Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009); and Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

The third prerequisite for the emergence of New Queer Cinema was cheap rents. Cheap rents meant that big cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and especially New York would soon become the centre of ACT UP and of the queer movement more broadly. ACT UP was supported by young people who had moved to make use of the free spaces available in such metropolises. The New York of today bears little resemblance to the city that the activists conquered for themselves in the second half of the 1980s. This city not only offered cheap rents.Beginning of page[p. 10] It was also neglected and criminalized, and the AIDS epidemic was compounded by a drug epidemic. Part of the challenge associated with the project of politicizing AIDS thus concerned drugs policy, the struggle for better prison conditions, and the need to show solidarity with those without health insurance.

Rich summarizes the new media, whose emergence she cites as the fourth prerequisite for the emergence of New Queer Cinema, under the portmanteau word camcorder. Video cameras with built-in video recorders have been on the market since 1983. Soon thereafter they would be made even smaller, lighter, and cheaper, becoming almost ubiquitous and a key feature of ACT UP. Gregg Bordowitz, currently a professor in the Film, Video, New Media and Animation Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, paints an accurate picture of the role that video activism and the invention of counter-documentary forms came to play in ACT UP’s success in a 1988 article titled ‘Picture of a Coalition’.2424Gregg Bordowitz, ‘Picture of a Coalition’, in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. by Douglas Crimp, special issue of October, 43 (1987), pp. 182–96 <https://doi.org/10.2307/3397573>, repr. in Gregg Bordowitz, The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–2003 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), pp. 19–42. Bordowitz, who had been diagnosed HIV-positive a year earlier at the age of 23, joined the ACT UP movement and became a full-time video activist. He co-founded the Testing the Limits Collective, a group of video activists who saw their documentary work both as being constructive and organizational, and as striving to catalyse political change. Bordowitz describes how, even within the ACT UP movement, it was important to fight against the idea that they were just hobbyists and that politically relevant media work consisted merely in grabbing the attention Beginning of page[p. 11] of mainstream media.2525Ibid., p. 29. The group initially presented itself within the movement as an assembly of independent documentarians who organized screenings and discussed their activities. They thus showed that the intended form of counter-documentary was also a work of networking and supporting the organization of, and communication between, the various different groups. The first documentary that these video activists presented, Testing the Limits, was dedicated to examining how HIV testing created boundaries and how these boundaries enabled forms of exclusion and control of those infected.2626Ibid., p. 24. Based on interviews with activists, this six-minute video presents a fast-cut catalogue of resistance to the government’s AIDS policy. It shows the various places where people gathered, discussed, and were active in New York, and adopts an MTV aesthetic. It has been screened in galleries, on TVs in meeting rooms, and at lesbian and gay film festivals. The small and easy-to-handle recording media, players, and screens became actors in the construction of a complex network that occurred in many places simultaneously. The six-minute pilot video was followed by a 28-minute video called Testing the Limits: New York, and many others. The aim of this video activism was to enable people with AIDS to see themselves making history. The message was that they ought not to perceive themselves as solitary victims, but rather as part of a caring and active community. Thus, a vast array of images, sounds, and testimonies were collected and made accessible to as many people as possible. Not only were screenings held everywhere, but the videos were also shown on a specialized cable TV channel and screened at film festivals. Experimental videos were produced from the documentary Beginning of page[p. 12] material.2727A famous example is Gregg Bordowitz’s Fast Trip Long Drop (1993). In order to distribute the videos as films, they were transferred to 16mm. Documentary media, image, sound recording, and the editing and distribution process, all formed part not only of the politicization of AIDS but also of the everyday lives of those living with AIDS.

This interweaving of documentary, media, and political practices, the ubiquity of moving images in everyday political and private life, and the making available of filmic material has coincided with a process of relocation, that is a post-cinematographic shifting of experience that Casetti associates with the transition to digitalization.

The same applies to the films that Rich lists as direct examples of New Queer Cinema. These films also point to the post-cinematic transformation. At the age of sixteen, Sadie Benning, for example, famously made Pixelvision videos at home in their childhood bedroom using a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera, which their father, the artist James Benning, had given them for Christmas. The videos that they made were revealingly titled A New Year (1989, 5:57 min), Me & Rubyfruit (1989, 5:31 min), Living Inside (1989, 5:06 min), and If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990, 8:56 min). Sadie Benning experimented with collage, sound, and different media to create a new aesthetics that would express not only their desire, but also the violence this lesbian teenager suffered in small-town USA. James Benning first showed Sadie’s videos to his students at CalArts, whereupon they quickly found their way to film festivals and into museums. At the same time as Sadie Benning was producing collage videos at home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, without any studio equipment, the young Todd Haynes was being forced to deal with copyright law after he and his co-producer, Cynthia Schneider, neglected to acquire the rights to the Beginning of page[p. 13] music they had used in their film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), an experimental biopic of the early deceased singer Karen Carpenter. As a result of this neglect, Karen Carpenter’s brother decided to instigate legal proceedings over the rights and Haynes lost, so that the film has been banned from public screening since 1990. Superstar was also shot in a private apartment on 16mm with a cast not of actors but of Barbie dolls. Its production history not only seems to anticipate the production of YouTube videos but also the problems of remix culture. Despite the screening ban, the film became a cult classic thanks to the interactive networking possibilities of digitized film and word-of-mouth propaganda. It is accessible on YouTube where it can be linked, forwarded, and downloaded. Against this backdrop, it seems logical from the viewpoint of media history that students of film scholar Nick Davis would describe Todd Haynes’s film Poison, also accessible on YouTube, not as an ‘art film’ but as a ‘mashup’, and that they would perceive Cheryl Dunye and Sadie Benning ‘less as New Queer mavericks than as Australopithecine precursors to the dawn of YouTube’.2828Davis, The Desiring Image, p. 31.

Reinventing Resistance

What is gained by recognizing that New Queer Cinema has actively participated in the transition to post-cinema? To answer this question, I would like to begin with Casetti’s optimistic thesis according to which post-cinema represents the end of the classical cinema dispositive at the same time as it opens up a new territory of as-yet unexplored possibilities of cinematic experience.2929Casetti, ‘The Relocation of Cinema’, p. 24. Indeed, the pioneers of New Queer Cinema and the video activists Beginning of page[p. 14] of ACT UP used the new media, camcorders, and cable TV, as well as pop culture, and the experiences of collective resistance to invent a new cinematic aesthetics and new media assemblages. They referred to the emancipatory underground and avant-garde film scene of Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Jonas Mekas, and Jack Smith, among others, and to the feminist video and film art of the 1970s produced by many including Chantal Akerman, Yvonne Rainer, and Ulrike Ottinger. The following chapters show how together with these pioneering artists, works such as Todd Haynes’s early films Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Poison, and Safe, selected videos and installations by multimedia artists Sharon Hayes and Yael Bartana, the digital video Seeing Red by Su Friedrich, the iPhone film Bridgit by Charlie Prodger, and the science fiction film Highlife by Claire Denis, laid the foundation for a queer post-cinema that experiments with technology in different ways and, in the process, as Gilles Deleuze would say, ‘invente la nouvelle résistance’, literally translated, ‘invents the new resistance’, which is to say, creates a new form of resistance to the techno-social mechanisms appropriate to a society of control.3030Deleuze’s phrase ‘inventer la nouvelle résistance’ calls for the reinvention of resistance in the age of electronic and digital images, a call that in turn informs the title of the present book.

Deleuze’s formula ‘inventer la nouvelle résistance’ can be found in his preface to Serge Daney’s 1986 Ciné-Journal, which is titled ‘Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel’.3131See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel’, in Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 68–81 (p. 76); Gilles Deleuze, ‘Lettre à Serge Daney: Optimisme, Pessimisme et Voyage’, in Deleuze, Pourparlers, 1972–1990 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990), pp. 97–112 (p. 108). In the letter, Deleuze addresses Daney Beginning of page[p. 15] directly, taking the latter’s texts as an occasion to reflect on the future of the cinematic image in an era increasingly dominated by television and video. Ciné-Journal brings together a collection of Daney’s articles that appeared in the French daily Libération between 1981 and 1986, years during which the state of cinema was becoming critical and the image, according to Daney, was becoming increasingly subordinated to communication. A famous film critic, Daney coined the name cinéfils, son of cinema, to describe himself; not only was he known for his texts on cinema, his theory of the cinematic image, and his conceptual distinction between the image and the visual, he is also notable for the melancholy inscribed in his cinephilia. For Daney, the cinema was a world of its own, one threatened with extinction by the rise of the electronic image, television, and digitalization. Recently, Pierre Eugène, Kate Ince, and Marc Siegel have pointed out that Daney’s love of cinema is connected to his queerness and can be understood as a ‘queer cinephilia’.3232Serge Daney and Queer Cinephilia, ed. by Pierre Eugène, Kate Ince, and Marc Siegel (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2024) <https://meson.press/books/serge-daney-and-queer-cinephilia/> [accessed 24 May 2024]. Daney died of AIDS in 1992. He was, they claim in their introduction, ‘openly gay throughout his lifetime but decisively private about his homosexuality’.3333Ibid., p. 10. Daney refrained almost entirely from addressing the subject of queerness, homosexuality, or gayness publicly. It is therefore understandable, as Eugène et al. have pointed out, that though his writings have not received much attention in queer film and media studies, they nonetheless ‘contain the seductive lure of queer potential’.3434Ibid., p. 12.

I agree and would further argue that, in his Letter to Serge Daney, Deleuze also addresses the critical moment of Beginning of page[p. 16] this queer potential for a queer post-cinema. Subscribing to Daney’s juxtaposition of cinema and television, Deleuze adopts the thesis that the two are fundamentally different, which is to say not effective on the same level: cinema and the cinematic image have an aesthetic function, while television and the visual are entirely absorbed in a social function. For Deleuze, this means that technology, in the form of television, is immediately social, without there being any shift or gap between the technical and the social. Deleuze calls this technology in the form of television ‘the social-technical in its pure state’.3535Deleuze, ‘Letter to Serge Daney’, p. 74 [p. 105]; my translation. In this state, television appropriates video, subjecting it to a regime of control and surveillance. As Deleuze sees it, the violent death of cinema would occur if

instead of the image always having another image in its background and art reaching the stage of ‘rivalling nature’, all images reflected to me only one single image: that of my vacant eye in contact with a non-Nature, a controlled spectator in the wings, in contact with the image, inserted into the image.3636Ibid., p. 72 [p. 102]; my translation.

The scene that Deleuze is describing here as the violent death of cinema can be transferred to the current political subjugation of digital film and image production, big data, and AI under the regime of control and surveillance that operates in the current state of unbridled capitalism. The death of the cinematic image is synonymous with the reduction of the image to a data set, on the one hand, and to the reaction of the optic nerve, on the other. All of which amounts to the integration of these Beginning of page[p. 17] physiologic-psychological and algorithmic processes into the techniques and strategies of the regime of control.

With Daney, Deleuze links the distinction between the social function of the visual and the aesthetic function of film with the question of whether film has a supplementary function. A ‘supplement’ is, as Deleuze explains, ‘a kind of gap with a still virtual audience, so you have to play for time and preserve the traces as you wait’.3737Ibid., p. 73 [p. 104]; my translation. ‘Supplement’ here means postponement: the aesthetic concerns the relationship between image and time. For Daney, alterity is the condition sine qua non of an image; for Deleuze, it is a certain quality of time, of what he calls cinematic time: ‘Cinematic time is not time that passes, but one that lasts and coexists. Preserving is in this sense no little thing: it’s creating, creating a supplement all the time.’3838Ibid., p. 74 [p. 105]; my translation.

The following two points are decisive for the connection between Deleuze’s call ‘to reinvent resistance’ and queer post-cinema. First, although Deleuze agrees with Daney that in the form of television only passing time and simultaneity exist, and the new powers of control become immediate and direct, this does not mean that the aesthetic function disappears completely. Rather, according to Deleuze, ‘it is necessary to ask whether control could not be reversed and placed at the service of the supplement function that resists power’.3939Ibid., p. 75 [p. 107]; my translation. The question — and this is what the reinvention of resistance comes down to — as to whether, and how, to think with the digital and electronic media is therefore tied not to the existence of the classical cinema dispositive, but to the existence of creativity, art, and time, insofar as time lasts and co-exists:Beginning of page[p. 18]

How, though, can we still talk of art if it is the world that makes its cinema, directly controlled and immediately processed by television, which excludes any supplementary function? Cinema ought to stop making it, stop making cinema, and develop specific relationships with video, electronics and digital images, in order to reinvent resistance and oppose the televisual function of surveillance and control.4040Ibid., p. 76 [p. 108]; my translation.

For Deleuze, reinventing resistance is thus tied to art. Television’s surveillance-and-control function proves hostile not only to life but also to art. And with the digital world this function has become far more powerful. Now, however, we have to bear in mind that for Deleuze, art is expressive and connected with aesthetics in a specific way. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari call art ‘the becoming-expressive of rhythm or melody’,4141Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 316. and even go so far as to question the idea that art waits for human beings and ‘ever appears among human beings, except under artificial and belated conditions’.4242Ibid., p. 320. Under these ‘belated conditions’, art consists in giving expression to fleeting affections and perceptions, that is in giving perceptions and affections a hold in a material, so that they exist in the artwork, independently of empirical feelings, as ‘a bloc of sensations’.4343Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 164. As such, art is functionally linked to the ‘supplement’, that ‘kind of gap with a still virtual audience’.4444Deleuze, ‘Letter to Serge Daney’, p. 74 [p. 104]; my translation. In short, art is involved in the creative preservation of time,Beginning of page[p. 19] without which there can be no (open) future and no past, but only passing and predictable time. The ever-increasing speed of processing, and the ever-increasing volumes of processed data in AI and deep learning, do nothing to change this reduction of time to passing time. They work only to make it more complex and more difficult to recognize.

As I show in the following chapters, queer post-cinema is concerned with temporalities that are apocalyptic in the same sense that Jacques Derrida interprets apokalypsis, namely as the opening of the future, by recalling that the Greek apokalupsis is a translation of the Hebrew gala, which means to disclose, to uncover, to unveil, or as he puts it:

to reveal the thing that can be a part of the body, the head or the eyes, a secret part, the sex or whatever might be hidden, a secret thing, the thing to be dissembled, a thing that is neither shown nor said, signified perhaps but that cannot or must not first be delivered up to self-evidence.4545Jacques Derrida, ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy’, Oxford Literary Review, 6.2 (1984), pp. 3–37 (p. 4).

The resulting paradoxical dialectic of critique and messianism, of the end of the world and futurity, Derrida summarizes in the following laconic sentence: ‘The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long-lived.’4646Ibid., p. 29.

In her book, Queer Times, Black Futures, Kara Keeling makes a connection between queerness, time, and resistance, a connection that can also be found in the resistant potentials of queer post-cinema. Keeling uses ‘queer’ as ‘an epistemological category — one that involves life and Beginning of page[p. 20] death questions of apprehension and value production’.4747Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019), p. 17. As an epistemological category ‘queer’ makes it possible to analyse, recognize, and express what Keeling calls ‘quotidian violence’, namely

the violence that maintains a temporality and a spatial logic hostile to the change and chance immanent in each now; a quotidian violence presently holds in place a spatiotemporal logic that is hostile to the queerness in time.4848Ibid.

With Fanon, Keeling states that ‘the psychopathologies of colonialism are a problem of time’,4949Ibid., p. 81. a claim she juxtaposes with Marx’s well-known dictum that the revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future.5050Ibid. Siding with Fanon’s aim ‘to reveal a temporality that raises the possibility of the impossible within colonial reality: Black liberation’, Keeling then asks ‘what thinking that formulation [poetry from the future] at the conjunction of what we know today as “race,” “gender,” and “sexuality” might offer Cultural Studies and Queer Theory now’.5151Ibid., p. 82. It is not easy to think of a rupture within history that also breaks with history. And yet this is exactly what the formulation ‘poetry from the future’ indicates: ‘a radical break with the past, a break in which “Black liberation” still might be located.’5252Ibid.

According to Keeling, it is Black queer films such as Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1996), Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Women (1996), Rodney Evans’s Brother to Beginning of page[p. 21] Brother (2005), and Daniel Peddle’s The Aggressives (2005) that ‘offer ways to think this presently impossible possibility from within our historical conjuncture (for we cannot think outside it)’. She refers to Deleuze’s concept of affect and calls ‘surplus’ that which Deleuze describes as a supplement in his letter to Daney:

Throughout this book, my attempt to articulate something that exceeds its expression inevitably also produces a surplus, one that cannot be seen or understood, but is nevertheless present as affect.5353Ibid.

The following chapters are not about Black queer films. But they share the assumption that queer as an epistemological category is about the quotidian violence ‘that maintains a temporality and a spatial logic hostile to the change and chance immanent in each now […] [and] that is hostile to queerness in time’. To reinvent resistance also means to hold on to a time in which there is a place for Black liberation, a place without anti-Semitism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, classism, or casteism.

The first chapter shows how Todd Haynes’s early films from 1987 to 1995 tackle the mainstream media-induced, speculative, and affective charge of HIV and AIDS. They examine the normalizing effects associated with the discourse of immunity, in which, paradoxically, immunodeficiency and immune system overactivity are described as equally dangerous. While the experimental film Poison (1989) exposes and transgresses the immunity politics of self-control and horror autotoxicus through the aesthetic staging of vulnerability and pleasure, Safe (1995), an independent feature film, explores the implications and effects of positive thinking and self-love in self-healing practices.Beginning of page[p. 22] Both films focus on the ambivalence of autoimmunization, which are elaborated in Derridean fashion as a pharmakon that, essential to democracy, acts against the Western thinking of totalizing security and self-protection. Backdropped by 1980s feminist theory, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story analyses the bourgeois, white family of prosperous post-war American society as a sort of thanatopolitics. Shot using Barbie dolls in a private apartment and with little money on a Super 8 camera, the film identifies Karen Carpenter’s anorexia as a moment of resistance against the erasure of women as sexual beings and against a politics of death that, as Todd Haynes shows, had long been in effect before it took on a new dimension with the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic. All three films refer aesthetically, formally, and in terms of content, to a sexual difference that is ‘not two yet or no longer’,5454Jacques Derrida, ‘Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference’, Research in Phenomenology, 13 (1983), pp. 65–83 (p. 83). and it is from this that they draw their militancy.

The second chapter is based on works by media and performance artist Sharon Hayes and by video artist Yael Bartana. Each of them explores archives and speculative futures by experimenting with aesthetic processes that I describe as the doing of affective-political work with documents. Sharon Hayes’s work is shaped by her experiences and artistic experiments in the early 1990s as member of ACT UP, New York. Yael Bartana deals with the ambivalent and traumatic historical experiences of Israel, Zionism, and the Jewish diaspora, and explores a place for a post-nationalist messianic time. To do affective-political work on documents is to participate in the contemporary transformation of media culture into media affect culture. At the same time, however, it also reacts to this development. As Beginning of page[p. 23] I show through selected works by Hayes and by Bartana, doing affect-political work on documents is tantamount to resisting the current tendency to understand the concept of affect on the basis of influential, measurement-oriented branches of psychology, such as affective computing. Instead, this work leads documents back into the open spaces of potentiality by reconstituting the aesthetic experience that connects the potentiality of the present with the potentiality of the past. Here I refer once more to Deleuze and his conceptualization of affect in aesthetic terms, and thus as a phenomenon of expression. The interpretation I propose differs from both Brian Massumi’s and Steven Shaviro’s. According to Deleuze, affects are processes of becoming. As processes of becoming, however, affects add new variants and new varieties of feelings. Affects are pure potentialities. If affects are transitions into another state, then these states are infinitely differentiated. They draw people into the process of this differentiation while opening a space of difference, which is simultaneously a space of wishes in which present wishes and present desires, long-gone wishes and long-gone desires, criss-cross. The aesthetic experience thereby not only provides access to variants of the present, but also to the potentiality of the past.

The third chapter performs a close reading of Su Friedrich’s 2004 digital video Seeing Red as part of queer post-cinema. A lesbian director who began her film career in the 1970s as an autodidact, Friedrich’s experimental Super 8 and 16mm films have helped shape queer cinema in terms of form and content. Friedrich attributes the essential difference of her earlier films to the fact that she worked exclusively with the then new technology of video. Seeing Red can be interpreted as a commentary on the spread of vlog culture and as a continuation of Friedrich’s artistic exploration of the interplay between the filmic medium,Beginning of page[p. 24] the personal, and the political. Yet Seeing Red also marks a break with Friedrich’s earlier films, going beyond mere play with genres: as I show, in keeping with Deleuze and Guattari’s references to play in their genealogy of assemblages and with Walter Benjamin’s linking of play and the second technology, Friedrich uses digital video technology to make filming itself a game in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, namely as a passage and a movement of intensification, as a form of playing through repetition, and a run of variations. More than a playing with technology, however, Seeing Red is also a film about getting older and the related experiences of time’s passing, lack of success, and the anger of being unable to counteract the passage of time. Friedrich’s at once playful and rules-based approach to the production and post-production of her video is not only reminiscent of Benjamin’s characterization of the second technology as ‘endlessly varied test procedures’, but also of Tarde’s and Deleuze’s idea of small variations. The red in the video expresses the becoming of the rhythm, and in this respect is more than just another variation. It marks a boundary and creates a place to stay in time. Seeing Red lets us participate in the emergence of art.

The video work analysed in Chapter 4 also emerged from an experiment with digital image technology. Here, however, the camera is even smaller. The video in question is Bridgit by the Scottish-based visual artist Charlie Prodger, a film for which she won the 2018 Tuner Prize and that consists entirely of footage she shot with her iPhone. At the same time, the video covers a vast timespan that stretches back to the Stone Age. The title, Bridgit, refers to the name of a Celtic goddess who is associated with the power of fire, light, and fertility, and has a complex appearance. The name also refers to the many mysterious stone circles — Neolithic period relics that have existed Beginning of page[p. 25] for more than 4,000 years — that inhabit the landscape of Aberdeenshire, where the footage was shot and where Prodger has lived since childhood. In Bridgit, Prodger draws on the established aesthetics of queer cinema but also goes beyond them. Her interest in the materiality of technology and in the sculptural plays a central role in this. This interest also guides her experiments with the iPhone as a small digital film camera held close to the body. The media-aesthetic entanglement of bodies, desire, perception and self-perception, landscape, time, and queerness is sculptural and releases a virtual force that opens a cross-temporal place for a fluid, queer desire, and a relational, ever-changing lesbian separatism. Prodger explicitly positions herself at a critical distance from current celebrations of commercialized queer aesthetics and certain ideas of gender diversity, namely those that she considers are guided by the attention economy of digital media and seek to conform to, applaud, and recognize majority society. Basing my analysis on a close reading of Bridgit, I also discuss the question of how the queer post-cinema in question here differs not only from the commercialization of queer aesthetic forms but also from the generic term of queer experimental film.

Finally, the last chapter takes up the question of queer negativity and the end of time. Claire Denis approaches the paradoxical dialectic of the end of time and futurity in her dark 2018 space movie High Life. The film exposes the gendered and racially differentiated violence of thanatopolitics inherent in today’s biopolitics and shows the ways in which the death drive can become a resistant moment that opposes the current conflation of reproductive technology and thanatopolitics. The film combines astronomical speculations about the curvature of space-time in black holes with a critique of the thanatopolitics of reproduction, thus making an original contribution to the understanding Beginning of page[p. 26] of queer temporalities. In terms of the significance of the death drive, one might think here of the influential and much-discussed book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive by queer theorist Lee Edelman.5555Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005). Edelman states that the figure of the imaginary Child symbolizes a reproductive futurism and that queer negativity is the only appropriate response to the violent exclusion of queers connected with reproductive futurism. Following Deleuze and his interpretation of Freud’s death drive, I argue that reproductive futurism in High Life is not considered from the perspective of ‘individual life’ but from that of the ‘between moments’ of ‘a life that is impersonal and yet singular’.5656Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life…’, trans. by Nick Millett, Theory, Culture & Society, 14.2 (1997), pp. 3–7 (p. 5) <https://doi.org/10.1177/026327697014002002>. Despite the omnipresence of death, the question that High Life poses concerns not death itself, but the in-between of death and individual survival. The film thereby opens up the possibility of thinking about time, reproduction, and biopolitics beyond the alternative of ‘reproductive futurism’ or ‘no future’.