Reframing Bodies

In Reframing Bodies, Roger Hallas illuminates the capacities of film and video to bear witness to the cultural, political, and psychological imperatives of the AIDS crisis. He explains how queer films and videos made in response to the AIDS epidemics in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa challenge longstanding assumptions about both historical trauma and the politics of gay visibility. Drawing on a wide range of works, including activist tapes, found footage films, autobiographical videos, documentary portraits, museum installations, and even film musicals, Hallas reveals how such “queer AIDS media” simultaneously express both immediacy and historical consciousness. Queer AIDS media are neither mere ideological critiques of the dominant media representation of homosexuality and AIDS nor corrective attempts to produce “positive images” of people living with HIV/AIDS. Rather, they perform complex, mediated acts of bearing witness to the individual and collective trauma of AIDS.Challenging the entrenched media politics of who gets to speak, how, and to whom, Hallas offers a bold reconsideration of the intersubjective relations that connect filmmakers, subjects, and viewers. He explains how queer testimony reframes AIDS witnesses and their speech through its striking combination of direct address and aesthetic experimentation. In addition, Hallas engages recent historical changes and media transformations that have not only displaced queer AIDS media from activism to the archive, but also created new witnessing dynamics through the logics of the database and the remix. Reframing Bodies provides new insight into the work of Gregg Bordowitz, John Greyson, Derek Jarman, Matthias Müller, and Marlon Riggs, and offers critical consideration of important but often overlooked filmmakers, including Jim Hubbard, Jack Lewis, and Stuart Marshall.

“And although he does a solicitous and richly nuanced job of situating these works in the ever-shifting cultural dynamics of their production and reception, Reframing Bodies does much more than provide a descriptive and historicist re-appraisal of these video/film texts (although in this enterprise it is both detailed and insightful). Beyond the particularity of Hallas’ interest in AIDS, homosexuality and representation, Reframing Bodies will also be essential reading for scholars and students of both memory/trauma studies and film/media studies more generally.” - Dion Kagan, Screening the Past, “And although he does a solicitous and richly nuanced job of situating these works in the ever-shifting cultural dynamics of their production and reception, Reframing Bodies does much more than provide a descriptive and historicist re-appraisal of these video/film texts (although in this enterprise it is both detailed and insightful). Beyond the particularity of Hallas’ interest in AIDS, homosexuality and representation, Reframing Bodies will also be essential reading for scholars and students of both memory/trauma studies and film/media studies more generally.”, “Hallas looks at reframings of film and video conventions like autobiography, home movies, song, museum installations, and news reports. . . . It is wonderful to see attention given to this important archive. One wishes these were all on DVD and that Hallas could offer commentary as one viewed them! In his thoroughness, Hallas collects a wide range of voices in a kind of fraternity, but one based in a n embrace of complexity and difference and never denying the multifaceted trauma of AIDS. Taken together, they say something different than what each could say alone.” - Chael Needle, Art & Understanding, “Hallas looks at reframings of film and video conventions like autobiography, home movies, song, museum installations, and news reports. . . . It is wonderful to see attention given to this important archive. One wishes these were all on DVD and that Hallas could offer commentary as one viewed them! In his thoroughness, Hallas collects a wide range of voices in a kind of fraternity, but one based in a n embrace of complexity and difference and never denying the multifaceted trauma of AIDS. Taken together, they say something different than what each could say alone.”, “This book presents an original and intriguing re-evaluation of queer film and videos made between the mid-1980’s and the early 2000’s in response to the AIDS epidemic. . . . Reframing Bodies expands our understanding of the political importance of visual media to the act of witnessing and the ongoing efforts of AIDS activism.”

Roger Hallas is an assistant professor of English at Syracuse University. He is the coeditor of The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture.