Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image
In Reframing Bodies, Roger Hallas illuminates the capacities of
film and video to bear witness to the cultural, political, and
psychological imperatives of the AIDS crisis. He explains how queer
films and videos made in response to the AIDS epidemics in North
America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa challenge longstanding
assumptions about both historical trauma and the politics of gay
visibility. Drawing on a wide range of works, including activist tapes,
found footage films, autobiographical videos, documentary portraits,
museum installations, and even film musicals, Hallas reveals how such
“queer AIDS media” simultaneously express both immediacy and historical
consciousness. Queer AIDS media are neither mere ideological critiques
of the dominant media representation of homosexuality and AIDS nor
corrective attempts to produce “positive images” of people living with
HIV/AIDS. Rather, they perform complex, mediated acts of bearing
witness to the individual and collective trauma of AIDS.
Challenging
the entrenched media politics of who gets to speak, how, and to whom,
Hallas offers a bold reconsideration of the intersubjective relations
that connect filmmakers, subjects, and viewers. He explains how queer
testimony reframes AIDS witnesses and their speech through its striking
combination of direct address and aesthetic experimentation. In
addition, Hallas engages recent historical changes and media
transformations that have not only displaced queer AIDS media from
activism to the archive, but also created new witnessing dynamics
through the logics of the database and the remix. Reframing Bodies
provides new insight into the work of Gregg Bordowitz, John Greyson,
Derek Jarman, Matthias Müller, and Marlon Riggs, and offers critical
consideration of important but often overlooked filmmakers, including
Jim Hubbard, Jack Lewis, and Stuart Marshall.
Roger Hallas is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University. He is a co-editor of The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture.
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