Eyelips. On Tejal Shah Between the Waves (2025)

A Gasp of Air: Posthuman Intimacies in Tejal Shah's Between The Waves

New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2018

What does it mean to make love to trash? Experimental video artist Tejal Shah’s work has consistently thought through the limits and capacities of the image to address queer sexuality. In their most recent work, Between the Waves, the artist visualizes a lush feminist dystopia at the end of the world as we know it. Images of bodies – human, plant, and other life – are brought together in shifting relations of intimacy amidst landfill waste, forest swamps, and deserted beaches. This paper develops a temporal critique of Shah’s installation, focusing on waiting as a queer dystopian form of cohabitation. While postcolonialism’s temporality has focused on the hauntings of the past in the present, in this article I take postcolonial interventions into linear temporality as informative for imagining queer postcolonial futures. Through the paper, I pay close attention to the acousmatic sounds of aspiration and nondiegetic breath, contending that such encounters render a postcolonial and posthuman ethics of queer care for selves and others in the midst of environmental ruin.

Queer Cinema in the World

Proposing a radical vision of cinema's queer globalism, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Whether in its exploration of queer cinematic temporality, the paradox of the queer popular, or the deviant ecologies of the queer pastoral, Schoonover and Galt reimagine the scope of queer film studies. The authors move beyond the gay art cinema canon to consider a broad range of films from Chinese lesbian drama and Swedish genderqueer documentary to Bangladeshi melodrama and Bolivian activist video. Schoonover and Galt make a case for the centrality of queerness in cinema and trace how queer cinema circulates around the globe–institutionally via film festivals, online consumption, and human rights campaigns, but also affectively in the production of a queer sensorium. In this account, cinema creates a uniquely potent mode of queer worldliness, one that disrupts normative ways of being in the world and forges revised modes of belonging.

Migrant Thoughts. Cinematographic Intersections. (2020)

Hambre, 2020

As a publishing act, Migrant Thoughts argues that the image is inevitably nomadic and inexorably migrant and, as Henri Bergson reminds us, is everywhere. Everything is image. We are images among images, and in this respect film is no more than one of the media through which images move. Images become a gesture of resistance, as by being just an image and not a just image, as Jean-Luc Godard said, they are worthy and can never be subdued by power, despotism or an all-too human will corrupted by the idea of ownership. They are pure potential for resistance, as they are not a luxury, or a privilege, and much less a possession. On the contrary, they are the permeable condition of passage so that a living thing does not become stationary or stagnant. The image can of course move on the screen, but at the same time, the image makes a whole screen, a whole surface where it can continue. It continues in bodies, in writing, on these pages, as in politics, archives, memory, literature, and philosophy. The image migrates, and in its wake it provides and proposes intersections, intervals. That is, it advances through life affirming what is living as a cinematographic gesture and, in turn, it exceeds and goes beyond film itself. Or, to put it another way, where cinema itself has to open up to metamorphosis, it becomes a gesture of editing between blocks of text. As editors we have proposed a montage in three parts, with two intervals (opening and closing) as false cuts in a flow of images which could certainly exceed and migrate outside of the fragile content of this book. Florencia Incarbone & Sebastian Wiedemann Editors

The language of queer cinema: haptic images and slow temporalities in Kokon (Leonie Krippendorff, 2020)

BAFTSS Conference, 2021

Kokon (Leonie Krippendorff, 2020) is a profoundly queer film that deploys some of the techniques of both haptic visuality and slow cinema (Flanagan, 2012) in order to portray the journey of sexual self-discovery of Nora, a German teenager whose identity does not fit within the limiting confines of heteronormativity. She is metaphorically compared to a caterpillar that throughout her coming-of-age summer will blossom out of her cocoon once she leaves the closet (hence the title), occupying that in-between space that Judith Halberstam associates with pre-adult girlhood, with “the not fully realized” (2003: 328). The summer setting of the love story between Nora and Romy -an older teenage girl- allows the director to explore the queerness of improductive, dead times where nothing seems to be happening; according to Edelman (2004:13), “surplus desire erupts when times are not regulated or productive” partially because LGBTIQ+ desires are located outside reproductive futurism. As Schoonover explains, “when an innocent soul” -in this case Nora- finds herself “with too much time on [her] hands, the threat of too much time often gets coded as a vulnerability to homosexuality” (2012: 73): we see her constantly luxuriating in the pool, “wasting time” with her peers or lying bored on her bed, and it is in these seemingly innocent moments where her fascination toward Romy arises. Nominated for a Teddy Award in the last edition of the Berlin Film Festival, and showcased at the Lesgaicinemad Film Festival in Madrid, Leonie Krippendorff’s second film inscribes the protagonist’s queer (teen) sexuality on her filmic text as “a destabilizing force that produces a different model of visuality” (Galt, 2013: 65): a haptic, tactile visuality that appeals to the spectator’s senses beyond the sight (Marks, 2000). Through images of texture, touch and water -generally associated with a fluid, queer way of "being in the world" (Ahmed, 2006)- overexposed shots and disorienting closeups, the female director brings us particularly close to the bodily sensations of the queer teen protagonist, evoking the materiality of the filmic image in a manner that does not allow us to perceive her as a distant, disembodied Other. The appeal to the sensual and the bodily is also present in the film’s constant instrumentalization of the abject (Kristeva, 1982): “disgusting” fluids such as menstrual blood, vomit and spit take a fundamental role in the film’s construction of queer teenage girlhood.

Love Waves – Intimate Procedures – Care Erotics. Wu Tsang and Andrea Thal approaching Tejal Shah

Tay, Sharon Lin. Beyond Sexual Difference: Sustaining Feminist Politics in Film Theory. PhD dissertation. (Norwich: University of East Anglia, 2003)

Chapter 5 - Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema

PhD: Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema in South Africa and Australia, 2005

Festival Review - "Not(e) on the Map", Radical Tradition:30th Alternative Film/Video Festival, Belgrade, Nero Magazine.

Apparatuses, Globalities, Assemblages: Third Cinema, Now

2011

Colonial wounds endure but are refigured in 21 st century cinematic landscapes. These are spaces of memory and mourning, as well as sites of creativity and transformation. New assemblages of power emerge along with equally complex amalgams of resistance, producing multiple and competing cinematic regimes. Third Cinema, the cinematic movement that emerged alongside "Third World" struggles for decolonization in the late 1960s, laid claim to a global space of cinematic production outside existing geo-political relations of power, hierarchies of communication flows, and towards the liberation of the "Third World" and its cinemas. But while Third Cinema has ample genealogies and global sites of production, its critical tools have not been sufficiently engaged in an analysis of contemporary cinematic production, including digital video, interactive video installations, Internet art, and film, in the contemporary context of globalization, the transnationalization of capital with information technology at its core. Third Cinema offers the opportunity for understanding and developing generative intersections between the cinematic decolonization movements of the "Third World" and the present context of cinematic praxis of the "Global South." This dissertation engages the cinematic texts of Cao Fei, the Raqs Media Collective, Michelle Dizon, Cecilia Cornejo, and Fanta Régina Nacro in a conversation with Third Cinema. The texts selected for study include video, video installation, Internet art, and film. This selection highlights the diversity of contemporary cinematic practices and expands the definition of the cinematic. The process and conditions of production are analyzed, and key examples of each artists' cinematic texts are given a close reading. This conversation is anchored by three critical terms: apparatus, globality, and assemblage. Each of these draws upon genealogies that both productively resonate with historical notions of Third Cinema while also transposing it across theoretical scales. The notion of the cinematic apparatus has been key to previous theorizations of relations of power and knowledge production in cinema. It is used here as a technic for mapping the rearrangements of power and the attendant epistemic interventions evidenced in the cinematic praxis of these artists. The inquiry is centered on the question of how each artist produces a novel assemblage of the cinematic apparatus, understood as a relationship of author, cinematic text, and spectator, and how, in turn, this produces forms of globality, epistemes that are contentious responses to particular geo-political spaces of knowledge production. The inquiry proceeds through a politics as intertwined. Even more importantly, it provided the possibility of practicing film and politics with an equally integral poetics. This poetics, furthermore, was a poetics imbued with a distinctive voice, one that was fearless and forthright. This is the opening scene for this dissertation: The opening of this book. My first acknowledgement, then, must go to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose scholarship and artwork remain enormously generative achievements, always producing further affirmations and criticalities. If this dissertation marks a return to this book, it is only because many people have made this time-space travel possible. The writing of a dissertation, as many have observed before me, is a collective project. First and foremost, the voices I would like to acknowledge belong to those of my dissertation committee. My dissertation chair, Trinh T. Minh-ha, is a mentor, teacher, and colleague who consistently opens pathways of passionate, transformative scholarship, for myself and many, many others. Minh-ha's friendship and hospitality, rigorous scholarship and poetics, breadth and depth of knowledge across the disciplines, and keen critique combined with kind generosity, have made this project possible. Her books and films form a constellation of visionary openings. Laura E. Pérez opened the initial door to the University of California-Berkeley and has kept opening doors ever since. Her work on spirituality and transformation come from rich insights drawn from life, of which she is never afraid. Nelson Maldonado-Torres has a voice that enables a wide and deep imaginary of liberation. His dislocating of modernity and unleashing of being also creates a condition that makes this work possible. Deniz Göktürk is a fearless and precise critic, the best of friends for a writer. Her engaged transnational scholarship is also a model for this work, as well as her humor, commitment to interdisciplinarity, and productive skepticism. My department at the University of California-Berkeley, the staff and faculty of the Ethnic Studies Graduate Group, are committed advocates for the assertion of other worlds of sense and new forms of rigorous, interdisciplinary scholarship. In addition, the staff and faculty of the Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women's Studies have been generous, providing me with another supportive location at which to think and work. Beyond these companions, there have been important conversations in seminars, working groups and conferences that have contributed to the production of this work. Most importantly, I would like to acknowledge the members of the Visuality and Alterity Working Group (2005-2008), including Lindsay Benedict, Laura Fantone, and Annie Fukushima, whose work established a set of terms that enriched the thinking done here. The Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC-Berkeley provided a wonderful home for that group. I have listened, over the years, to other voices, which have been constantly in the background: Those of my family. I thus acknowledge the contribution of my children, Isadora and Joaquin Bratton-Benfield. Their voices provide the soundtrack of my life, and is, in fact, a sound that infuses it with sheer pleasure. My partner, Christopher Alan Bratton, is a trusted interlocutor and creative collaborator whose spirit infuses this project. My parents, Dalida Quijada Benfield and Marion W. Benfield, Jr. are loving and generous, and have been important examples for me of risk-taking and fearless living.

Art and Activism in India Published by Tulika Books, New Delhi Edited by Shivaji K Panikkar and Deeptha Achar (2012) On the Making of Bombay Longing: Queer Activism in Art and Cinema - Georgina Maddox

Georgina Maddox examines, through the lens of personal experience during the making of a short film, 'Bombay Longing', with filmmaker Shalini Kantayya , at the phenomenon of art and activism through the medium of independent short films. This paper is not shaped as a systematic and linear exposition of a well-worked out argument; rather, it carries marks of the fragmentary nature and episodic structure of the film itself. On one hand, I seek, in this paper, to locate the film in the arena of queer activism, I draw on concepts such as ‘outing’ and ‘closet’, ‘mainstream’ and ‘minority’, ‘self’ and ‘other’ to articulate the manner in which the logic of the film is implicated in the context of queer thought, queer issues. On the other hand, my paper seeks to reflect upon the implications of the entry of queer activism at the site of art. What happens to art when it becomes activist? The film is a three minute DV (digital video) presentation that was jointly directed by the two of us. The film thematizes queer identity: Bombay Longing dovetails between the personal and public in a manner that most art and often, much of literature does. To say that it occupies a political space would in that sense, not be incorrect although its stance is more understated. Put simply, it is not openly propagandist in making a statement about queer identity in a metropolis like Mumbai, but rather, allows the viewer to decode the tensions, possibilities and contradictions of such a subject position from the three personal narratives strung together. The central protagonist, the ‘artist’ herself, carries the narrative through public and private spaces negotiated by her, addressing what it means to travel these spaces as a queer person in a society which is largely heterosexist.