Punk aesthetics in cinema: The intersections of punk movements, queer histories and subcultural filmmaking
Gürbüz, Temmuz Süreyya
Gürbüz, Temmuz Süreyya
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Identifiers
http://hdl.handle.net/10379/17005
https://doi.org/10.13025/17043
https://doi.org/10.13025/17043
Repository DOI
Publication Date
2021-10-24
Type
Thesis
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Abstract
This research combines historical and political investigations into the relationship between punk subcultures and film, tracing the development of punk aesthetics on screen through certain independent, avant-garde and experimental European and North American films from the early 1970s to 2000s. It examines these films’ low-budget, collaborative and DIY backgrounds and how their aesthetics are shaped by the materiality of subcultural contexts. The corpus starts with the “punk cinema” canon that focuses on famous bands and locations, exploring the aesthetic elements of the early half-documentaries, such as transparency and fact-fiction hybridity, in order to uncover the role of cinema in the larger canonizing historicities of punk. Moving beyond the limits of “punk cinema,” the study unravels the intersections between punk, queer and feminist subcultures in the later chapters, covering considerable ground in terms of how subcultural cinema has been in close contact with the cultivation of queer politics in the pre-digital phase of cinema. As such, the corpus revolves around three main categories thematically distinguished according to their aesthetic and economic positioning as well as production and reception conditions: early punk documenting in cinema; low-budget films of certain European auteurs created out of subcultural environments, such as Pedro Almodóvar (in relation to la movida madrileña), Derek Jarman (in relation to London’s punk and gay underground in the late 1970s), and Virginie Despentes (in relation to pro-porn feminism and French New Extremity); and American “trash cinema” and John Waters, structuralist film and the New York’s No Wave movement. The chapters situate punk aesthetics, queer histories and counter-cinema within a larger discussion around identity politics and aesthetic reclamation of anti-social negativity through avant-garde cinema.
Funder
National University of Ireland Galway
Publisher
NUI Galway