Nikola Stepić, Concordia Public Scholar and PhD Student in Humanities, will attend the Film Forum 2019 conference in Gorizia, Italy.
As part of the Porn Culture(s) Now section of the conference, he will present on the work of Arthur J. Bressan, Jr., a pioneer of gay independent filmmaking. Stepić is interested in re-reading Bressan's canonical films on the gay liberation movements and the AIDS pandemic through the lens of his earlier pornographic films, tracing the auteur's investment in sexual affirmation as a political gesture across his pornographic output.
The paper is intended to reaffirm Bressan's indexical and productive role in the larger history of gay filmmaking, activism and community building, while at the same time mobilizing these works in order to wrestle with larger methodological questions in the field of porn studies.