QUEER TEMPORALITY
reworking time and pushing against linearity
We shall not obsess over linearity
The story has been entirely constructed after all
And we revel in our awareness of this
Truth is subjective
Nothing is real
Everything dies
Party
A cut is a cinematic term. It separates two shots. It also joins two shots. It is a device that constructs cinematic space and time and articulates different elements into a new form. (Steyerl, H, 2012, p.176)
Editing reconfigures our understanding of time and space to construct new realities. It is a process of finding in a universe of potentiality - a state of becoming. It is something that happens, not something that is. The concept of queer temporality explores notions of a queer interpretation of time which deprivilege normative expectation and linearity. Queer theorist Jack Halberstam states:
Queer subcultures produce alternate temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience - namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death. (2005, p.2)
ELAGABALUS is a very queer film - conceptually by virtue of its characters and storyline and formally by way of construction. Due to the shifting socio-political landscape and the mainstreaming of queer and feminist ideologies, LGBTQIA+ narratives are more prevalent than ever before, though many of these films lack the experimental oeuvre and socio-political bad-assery of the works discussed in Alienation and Intertextuality - think Love, Simon (2018), Call Me By Your Name (2017), The Danish Girl (2015), even Carol (2015), which was directed by Todd Haynes. Mourning this turn away from experimentation, Alex Jung writes:
The critique would apply to any number of films from the past decade that are nominally LGBT in content, but not queer in structure. (...) They apply salve instead of salt. They’re safe, often boring, and sentimental, following familiar emotional arcs to tell a “universal story.” In short, we’re in a movie moment defined by the political sensibility of the gay-marriage movement. (2018, para. 2)
These formally conventional films are less about a queer approach to temporality and structure than they are about a “they’re just like us” rhetoric towards assimilation.
Experimental queer cinema may not be at the forefront of mainstream consciousness right now, but in the age of the internet, within the rise of sub-cultism, there is a veritable sea of form-defying new content being uploaded every minute. Diving deeply into the trash-filled psyche of internet, I am compelled to cast my attention to pornography.
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Brooke Candy’s 40-minute porno I Love You (2018) was commissioned by Pornhub as part of their Visionaries Directors Club and can be streamed for free online. Edited by video artist Nic Seago, I Love You is a hyper-queer, three-act journey, which starts in a digitised universe then moves through lesbian, gay and trans sex acts. The film served as an early reference point for ELAGABALUS, particularly in regards to design. Though execution wavers at points, I Love You is fascinating for its failure to adhere to pornographic genre conventions, not sitting comfortably within porn, art, or film. In an interview with Gay Times (2018), Candy describes her film as, "an inclusive experimental porno about sensuality, passion, and the act of making love"(Damshenas, para. 5) claiming that she's "on this planet to challenge stigmas and conventional beliefs"(Damshenas, para.8).
Cinema, art and porn all rely on scopophilia, a psychological term that refers to the pleasure derived from looking, which was brought into film scholarship notably by Laura Mulvey in her seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975). Porn, in its unabashed embrace of voyeurism, could be viewed as the most tangible actualisation of this pleasure-deriving phenomenon. There is no ambiguity in porn’s intentional “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey, 1975). Candy’s I Love You, which cites Bruce La Bruce, Matthew Barney and Alejandro Jodorowsky among its major influences, is a spectacle. Excess in every direction, ostentatious and often self-indulgent, it is a heightened performance of its own queerness that is perhaps best understood in terms of a contemporary camp sensibility:
Camp sees everything in quotation marks. (…). To perceive Camp in object and persons is to understand Being-as-playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre.” (Sontag, 1964, p.4)
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The campness of I Love You extends beyond its blatantly queer, performative subject matter and into the way that it is put together - specifically in its treatment of time and space.
Above: Excerpt from the third act of Brooke Candy's I Love You (2018)
The final act of the film (see above) is a glory-hole fantasy performed by two trans women in a perspex toilet cubicle set. Throughout the scene, our perception of time is augmented in a number of ways by the cut. Gratuitous from the outset, the scene takes a full minute and twenty seconds to set up - it revels in its own excess as a dolly sweeps past the cubicles again and again, drawing out time. This is perhaps intended as an anticipatory build up - a masturbatory teasing of the blow-job to come. As we take in the meticulous detailing of the set and performers, our comprehension of space and time is manipulated further through the repeated inclusion of a second perspective. Throughout the sequence, low-fi video camcorder footage is intermittently cut to and superimposed, offering us an alternate view of the set and action and drawing attention to specific details. Fragmented bodies are treated with the same attention as elements of the set resulting in a kind of aesthetic democratisation of information. Here, the setting of the act is regarded with equal importance to that of the act itself. For Candy and Seago, every shot is treated as a money shot, resulting in a somewhat unmodulated viewing experience, almost banal in its excess.
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Porn is a difficult thing to judge in relation to viewer experience as the outcomes are so incredibly subjective, though I Love You does not appear to be claiming a pure porn position, or any position - it is a porno, masquerading as a film, which is masquerading as video art. It’s not quite any of these things, but rather, a dilution of all of them. In its failure to adhere to any specific mode of interpretation, I Love You actually succeeds in carving out a unique space for itself in relatively mainstream porn viewership. Having now garnered close to 700,000 views and a multitude of very divided comments on Pornhub (see below), it is fairly safe to say that this film has a broader reach than most experimental queer cinema and is genuinely exposing new audiences to non-traditional modes of representation, however well-articulated.
Above: Comments section of I Love You (2018) on pornhub
Stylistically, I Love You has quite a lot of crossover with ELAGABALUS, especially in its many throws to digitisation and the general feeling of oneness with the internet. In ELAGABALUS, a similar technique of detailing is used throughout the narrative to draw attention to important plot-points. Casting off the oppressive obligations of continuity, time is repeatedly drawn out, snapped in and stopped completely to add emphasis.
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In the cut, the storyline between Hierocles and Diana was almost entirely fabricated by this method (see below). In the film, it is implied that it is jealousy over the sexual connection between these two characters that sends Elagabalus into a spiral, which results in Diana’s death and triggers a series of events that lead to their inevitable downfall. As none of the characters in the film ever talk to each other, this imperative subplot hinged on a selection of meaningful glances, most of which were not captured on the set. Using reverse motion effects, freeze-framing, masking, and constructive editing to hone in on facial expression and reaction, the connection between these two characters was manufactured predominantly by liberal use of the Avid Effects Palette.
Above: The visual construction of the relationship between Hieorcles and Diana
In a roundtable discussion on theorising queer temporality conducted in 2007, Queer Academic Carolyn Dinshaw discusses “the possibility of touching across time, collapsing time through affective contact” to form inter-generational queer communities. She suggests that by refusing “linear historicism” we are "freed to think further about multiple temporalities in the present” (Dinshaw, et al. 2007, p. 178).
Extending on notions of intertextuality, it is through the cut that multiple histories are able to collide on the same temporal plane. In ELAGABALUS, multiple modes of storytelling intersect with one another, each offering its own internal pacing and approach to cinematic time and space - flux. While the narrative is propelled forward, it is simultaneously moving outwards and backwards through referentiality.
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In ELAGABALUS, each tableau performs as its own microcosmic encapsulation of the plot at hand, while additionally representing a historical parallel which speaks to broader themes and to the commercial art gallery context of its hypothetical exhibition. Further, each tableau must be read in relation to the signposting which bookends each display. As such, the viewer interprets what they see through a number of temporal lenses.
Above: Map of potential thought associations inspired by the Amor and Psyche Tableau Vivant in ELAGABALUS
Presenting themselves as almost (but not quite) static images, these tableaux offer pause in an otherwise fairly relentless sea of information. They are deliberately slow and dreamy. Time is drawn out, reflection encouraged (see above image), before snapping back into the poppy pacing of the narrative. As such, a viewer’s experience of temporality is destabilised (queered) and the alienating artifice of the film is exposed.
Technologically speaking, the notion of queer temporality presents itself most literally in the digital software that constructs the cinematic experience. Multitrack timelines allow the editor to stack and overlap visual and audio content to create nuanced screen language. Thus, the editing process is a queering process - time is moved around, pulled apart and reconfigured.
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The treatment of time and space in ELAGABALUS is tantamount to its stylisation. It is this queering of temporality that lends the film it’s pacing, allowing it to move swiftly through an abundance of visual and conceptual information, to make space for emotional beats, to draw attention to key details, and above all, to luxuriate in its own queerness.
