Misfit Cinema Histories

Catalog description

Not too long ago, these terms were commonly used to relegate certain populations to socio-political misfit status: queens, fairies, homos, cripples, freaks, idiots. A reorientation of attitudes has occurred in the early decades of the twenty-first century, however, giving cultural legibility to such alleged misfit individuals—and the representation of misfit topics by misfit artists, including filmmakers, in particular. But what preceded this popularization and acceptance of these artists in dominant culture? And how did earlier iterations of such films shape the cinematic landscape we have today? In this class, we examine films that predate, or stand at the very origins of, the cultural shift that granted broader cultural visibility to misfit filmmaking. We will investigate how movies like John Waters's Female Trouble (1974), Pedro Almodóvar’s Laberinto de pasiones / Labyrinth of Passion (1982), and Ken Russell's Tommy (1975) became hallmarks of misfit film aesthetics, laying the groundwork for concepts like New Queer Cinema, Crip, and Disability Film. Critical readings from authors like Pierre Bourdieu, Juan A. Suárez, Julia Kristeva, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Susan Sontag support our inquiries into these films’ impact on aesthetic traditions. Most importantly, we consider the intersectional dimensions of misfit cinemas, interrogating how other elements of social, cultural, personal, and political import—including race, class, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, bodymind disposition, and citizenship—shape our approaches to “misfit” as a category of inquiry in the study of cinema.