INTERTEXTUALITY
shifting styles, genre-clash and the refusal of definition
Queering is the perpetuation of internal contradiction
Refusing to be either or any or something
It is nothing and everything
A counterpoint to a constantly shifting norm
It has no interest in binary
In history
At least not as it has been written
Queering filmic form is not about making something unwatchable, it is a careful push and pull, a process of redefinition that pushes against convention and develops a counter-system of structural integrity.
Julia Kristeva’s term intertextuality denotes the “passage from one sign system into another” which “involves an altering of the thetic position - the destruction of the old position and the formation of a new one.” (Kristeva in Moi, 1986, p.111). In simple terms; when a thing is removed from its original context and put in a new context it gains a different meaning in the way that it interacts with its new surroundings.
ELAGABALUS thrives on intertextuality. Pulling from pop-culture, art history, theatre, religious iconography, drag, film and the internet, it is constantly in conversation with itself as part of a broader history. In doing so, it aims to destabilise the often hetero-patriarchal context of its original points of reference, many of them religious, and open up a dialogue between past, present and future. When applied to the moving image, intertextuality remixes and reinterprets style and genre, manifesting a sense of an identity in flux.
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Queer theorist Annamarie Jagose defines identity in postmodern terms as “an effect of identification with and against others: being ongoing and always incomplete, it is a process rather than a property” (Jagose,1996, p.79). Queering film through intertextuality is about refusing to take on a fixed identity and I argue that a film’s identity is defined substantially by the edit.
This is certainly true of Haynes' Poison (1991) and many of the other films of the New Queer Cinema movement - a notion discussed at length by Matthew Sini in his 2011 article Transgeneric Tendencies in New Queer Cinema. He writes, “It may be that the films offer a sort of film history awareness, but they also allude to other films in order to critique the ideological assumptions that formulate some genre conventions” (2011, para. 9).
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Intertextuality encompasses varying degrees of referentiality, but if we take the concept to its most literal manifestation, we arrive at remix culture. Further, within Australian media practice, we arrive particularly at the work of Soda_Jerk, whose prolific, alternative approaches to art and filmmaking I have followed and drawn inspiration from for some years.
The Australian video-art duo consider themselves closer to “renegade archivists” than filmmakers. Their practice, which critiques hegemonic culture through radical media sampling was birthed out of experimental hip-hop and queer performance scenes in the late nineties (Soda_Jerk in Blackmore, 2018). Their controversial 2018 feature film TERROR NULLIUS is an explosively intricate and highly entertaining revisionist history of Australia:
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Part political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a political revenge fable which offers an unwriting of Australian national mythologies. [...] The apocalyptic desert camps of Mad Max 2 become the site of refugee detention, flesh-eating sheep are recast as anti-colonial insurgents and a feminist motorcycle gang goes vigilante on Mel Gibson. (Soda_Jerk, 2018, para. 1)
In TERROR NULLIUS, social narratives and power structures collapse into one another, with multiple histories colliding in the same frame as images are recontextualised and new meaning is birthed.
Above: An excerpt from Soda_Jerk's TERROR NULLIUS (2018)
In the excerpt above, Jennifer Kent’s critically acclaimed 2014 horror film The Babadook is reimagined through a meme-ifed queer lens. In a mastery of relational editing, in-picture manipulation and compositing, scenes from the original horror are merged with gay Australian iconography (Kylie Minogue, Ian Thorpe, Cate Blanchett as Carol, Troye Sivan etc.). The self-contained scene is a throw to the “Babadook is Gay” meme extravaganza of early 2017, but must also be read in the context of the then very recent trauma of the Australian Marriage Equality Plebiscite, which dehumanised an entire community and relentlessly blasted hate speech through the media for over a year in the name of democracy.
Soda_Jerk are “fundamentally interested in the politics of images - how they circulate, who they benefit and how they can be undone” (Soda_Jerk in Blackmore, 2018). To this end, the intertextuality of TERROR NULLIUS is obligatory in that it relies on an understanding of the original context of its references. With that said, the sheer magnitude and diversity of its source material, mixed with its narrative logic, comedic timing and visual ingenuity give the work a level of innate accessibility, and it is therefore no surprise that the film has done very well internationally.
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Set at an undefined moment in the future, ELAGABALUS is deliberately nowhere and everywhere. Refusing to settle into a specific genre, the true complexity of the beast is very much in its construction - like TERROR NULLIUS, this is a film that has been directed for and by the edit.
Above: Some example of references cited and reinterpreted in ELAGABALUS
As illustrated in the above video, ELAGABALUS is rife with specific historical and contemporary references, though the most glaring, overarching visual style is drawn from internet culture - memes, gifs, short attention spans, vaporwave remixes, fake news, and instantaneous nostalgia. The internet is the ultimate hypertext; everything is interlinked and all information is treated equally, regardless of accuracy or “truth”. Academic manuscripts, legal websites, personal banking, right-wing propaganda and porn all exist in the same nonlinear universe. The cut of ELAGABALUS is intended to reflect the click hole experience, moving through tabs of thought, referencing and re-referencing itself.
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One of your obligations as an editor is to drench yourself in the sensibility of the film, to the point where you’re alive to the smallest details and also the most important themes.(…) The editor is the only one who has time to deal with the whole jigsaw. (Murch in Ondaatje, 2002, p. 29)
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ELAGABALUS is a conceptually and technically challenging film, which, as an Editor, required me to fully comprehend the sum of its parts - to drench myself in its sensibility. Multiple modes of storytelling intersect, including: heightened theatrical drama delivered through monologue and to-camera chorus performance, musical via lip-sync, tableaux vivants and signposting. The film acts as a site for a complex system of historical, artistic, religious and pop-cultural references - always looking beyond itself. In a similar vein to TERROR NULLIUS, which remains accessible despite its labyrinthine referentiality, ELAGABALUS’s adherence to classic three-act structure is intended to offer an entry point into a much larger universe of ideas.
Navigating filmic intertextuality is highly dependent on the internal logic of the edit. Moving from one reference or one story-mode into another needs to feel deliberate - confident. In the development of ELAGABALUS, this was achieved through a constant process of redefinition and refinement - when one thing changed, it would have a ripple effect on the feeling of the rest of the cut. After the Romeo-and-Juliet-inspired style of the opening sequence was established with its titles and masking and fast pacing, this had to be applied to everything else.
The most challenging scene was by far the final one, which right up to the Fine Cut was not having the desired impact. In the end, it was the score that unlocked the rest of the scene. Temping sound and score in ELAGABALUS were hugely important to my process, with the coherency or deliberate incongruity of sound, music, and picture at its centre. The final cue of the final scene was initially temped with an Ennio Morricone track On Earth as it is in Heaven from The Mission (1986), which made it feel overly sentimental - it was too serious for the poppy insincerity of style set up by the rest of the film.
Despite its clear artifice, the death of Elagabalus is supposed to carry emotional weight, but this was too far. I held off on re-cutting the final scene until the very end of the editing block when I found the Perfume Genius track Queen (2014) that now occupies this cue. Once this was in place, the tone of the scene felt established - by cutting through silence, the intensity of the moment that precedes the cue is intensified. From here, I worked backwards to establish the buildup required for the entry of the song to feel as momentous as it could (see timeline view below). There is so much happening in this moment and it needed to feel totally united. Heirocles has fled and Symiamira cradles the body of her dead child in a queer reenactment of Michelangelo’s La Pieta (1498-99) - this is a powerful image which uses the original reference to the famous sculpture to speak to universal notions of tragedy, loss, family, death and resurrection. The audio use of Perfume Genius juts up against the historicism of the image, making it feel current - past and present collide.
Above: AVID Media Composer sequence view of ELAGABALUS final scenes, including all audio tracks.