PhD Oral Exam - Nikola Stepić, Humanities

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

The “queer city film” is proposed in this dissertation to be a corpus of experimental cinema and a critical method of spectatorship that establishes links between queer film history and studies of the cinematic city, two fields that have developed in parallel with little explicit overlap. The city is thus analyzed as an opportune vantage point for the discussion of concurrent inventions of homosexuality and cinema in Euro-American modernity. By establishing a continuity between the cinema-and-the-city discourse and queer film theory, this project identifies the emergence of subjective vision in modernity as a precondition for queer vision, thus proposing a new interpretative model for queer cinema that captures historical mediations of divergent expressions of gender and sexuality in visual media. Focusing on queer-authored experimental cinema set in recognizable urban locales across North America and Europe, the project puts film analysis into dialogue with queer theory, material culture studies, fashion and design studies, and cultural geography. To that end, city symphonies are analyzed as the earliest examples of the cinematic city representing a hermeneutics for the visual development of gender and sexual spectrums throughout film history. Gay pornography produced in the United States and Quebec is examined as a genre that put eroticism into dialogue with a documentary impulse, capturing the politically charged issues of queer visibility and public infrastructure through on-location shooting in cities such as San Francisco and Montreal. Finally, pre-digital queer experimental cinema of the twentieth century is surveyed for its sustained, yet often overlooked, interest in the closet of sexual secrecy as a conceptual and physical space denoting a range of domestic practices. By privileging experimental, avant-garde and erotic cinema over commercial film, and by gravitating towards the mediations of urban figures, spaces and surfaces over the narrative plot in queer cinema, the dissertation proposes an intermedial and historical approach to cinema as an archive of queer meanings and fantasies that challenges neat categories of gender and sexual identity, and expands their representational possibilities.