Can formally innovative films both expand our understanding of what cinema can be and connect with audiences to convey emotionally impactful experiences? The reception of AVANT-DRAG! confirmed what I had always thought: it isn’t a choice between the two. Audiences around the world, from London (Raindance) to Sarajevo (SFF) and beyond AVANT-DRAG! was showcased in more than seventy festivals) connected with the film’s mix of performance art, camp self-reflexivity and a deliberately unstable visual world – one that did not sacrifice its immediacy in the pursuit of experimentation. In other words, audiences responded not despite the film’s experimental nature, but in part because of the particular forms of connection it enabled. That experience nudged me further away from the rigid categories of conventional “documentary” or “fiction film” and towards the porous, malleable form of the poetic essay film.
Can formally innovative films both expand our understanding of what cinema can be and connect with audiences to convey emotionally impactful experiences?
My thinking takes off from the position I set out in “QinoGlaz: Manifesto for a Queer (No-)Futurist Cinematic Reality”, published for the 2022 Thessaloniki International Film Festival. The manifesto argues that cinematic meaning emerges through intentional fabrication, drag, the amateur gesture and the collision of incompatible materials, rather than through any purported transparency or neutrality. The manifesto also critiques the narrowness of traditional “gay and lesbian cinema” – what Jerry Tartaglia calls “good little queers feeding the culture that would exterminate you” – and instead proposes the creation of unruly, hybrid forms that move between collage, unruly bodies and hauntological temporalities. Working with thinkers such as Preciado, Newton and Edelman, the manifesto makes a case for queer cinematic practices that embrace contradiction, reject linear narrative, foreground the material process of filmmaking and refuse normative claims of clarity.
“Essay film”, in this sense, is simply a name for a moving-image form that allows thinking to happen in performance, in editing, in bodies, in glitches, in mirrors and in the debris of our own queer archives.
My current project follows in this lineage: UCHRONIA is an essay film inspired by Rimbaud’s “Une saison en enfer” (A Season in Hell). I approach Rimbaud not as a biographical subject but as a site for formal intervention. His poem, in many ways, anticipates the core concerns of my project: the rejection of linear narrative, the embrace of multivocality, the use of disidentification as method and the destabilisation of gender and historical time. UCHRONIA utilises these modalities of the poem and aligns with what Barbara Hammer describes as the need to “occupy the dream” in moving-image practice – a need to reclaim the means of dream-production from industrialised, profit-seeking spectacle-makers. The film is structured as a series of fragments, staged tableaux, spoken-word interludes, ritualised performances and archival traces, which together reconstruct moments of queer history, both real and imagined.
What links AVANT-DRAG! and UCHRONIA is not genre but method – a belief that reality is approached obliquely through distortion, humour, sensorial maximalism, confrontation with artifice and the refusal to pretend that cinema ever speaks from a neutral ground. “Essay film”, in this sense, is simply a name for a moving-image form that allows thinking to happen in performance, in editing, in bodies, in glitches, in mirrors and in the debris of our own queer archives.
Fil Ieropoulos
