Screening
(13 May) + Lecture (22 May)
PCI Film Series presents Call Me by Your Name (dir. Luca Guadagnino, 2017)
Introduced by Sergio Rigoletto (University of Oregon, USA)
A sensual and transcendent tale of first love, based on the acclaimed novel by André Aciman
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, the new film
by Luca Guadagnino, is a sensual and transcendent tale of first love,
based on the acclaimed novel by André Aciman. It's the summer of 1983 in
the north of Italy, and Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), a precocious
17-year-old young man, spends his days in his family's 17th century
villa transcribing and playing classical music, reading, and flirting
with his friend Marzia (Esther Garrel). Elio enjoys a close relationship
with his father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an eminent professor specializing
in Greco-Roman culture, and his mother Annella (Amira Casar), a
translator, who favor him with the fruits of high culture in a setting
that overflows with natural delights. While Elio's sophistication and
intellectual gifts suggest he is already a fully-fledged adult, there is
much that yet remains innocent and unformed about him, particularly
about matters of the heart. One day, Oliver (Armie Hammer), a
24-year-old American college graduate student working on his doctorate,
arrives as the annual summer intern tasked with helping Elio's father.
Amid the sun-drenched splendor of the setting, Elio and Oliver discover
the heady beauty of awakening desire over the course of a summer that
will alter their lives forever. Source (IMDb)
Practical information
Call me by your Name (dir. Luca Guadagnino, Italy, France, Brazil, Usa 2017, 2.21 min)
Date: 13 May
Time: 17.00- 19.30
Location: Entrance at Muntstraat 2A, MCW-LAB (Grote zaal KNG20)
For more information: http://www.postcolonialstudies.nl/
Time: 17.00- 19.30
Location: Entrance at Muntstraat 2A, MCW-LAB (Grote zaal KNG20)
For more information: http://www.postcolonialstudies.nl/
Admission
is free of charge. However, due to safety regulations, maximum capacity of
the room is 80 people. No exceptions are made. First come, first
seated
Lecture by Sergio Rigoletto (University of Oregon, USA)
The Lingering Specters of the Universal Story in Call Me By Your Name
Under what conditions do minority stories travel from the periphery to the centre? What compromises are required for these stories to enter mainstream contexts of production, distribution and consumption? Is this journey from the periphery to the center always already haunted by the experience of loss and by the betrayal of an original, truthful story?
At a time in
which more and more film festivals historically dedicated to gay and lesbian
issues leave behind their identity politics markers (e.g. the London Lesbian
and Gay Film Festival changing its name to BFI Flare) and filmmaker Xavier
Dolan angrily refuses to accept the Queer Palme at the 2012 Cannes Film
Festival under the motivation that “we shouldn’t label a film ‘gay’”, these
questions lay out some of the problems around the promotion, circulation and
reception of stories which allegedly transcend their concern with difference
and particularity in order to speak to all of us.
Ever since Call Me By Your Name premiered at the
Sundance Film Festival, a common response to the film has been to celebrate it
as a powerfully universal story. Exploring some of the distinctive ways in
which the film may allow this type of response, this lecture asks whether Call Me By Your Name epitomizes a
post-political moment for the kind of cinema that deals with LGBTQ lives, one
in which the exclusionary trap of identity politics gets replaced by the
universal aspiration to address everybody.
This lecture
seeks to expose and make sense of the lingering (homophobic) specters that,
according to several critics, have been banished from the dreamy arcadia of the
Italian villa in which the love between Elio and Oliver blossoms. It will show
that these specters are present in the form of a strange, eerie affect that
haunts the film. By exploring the impact of this affect on the conditions of
plausibility of the story, the lecture will demonstrate that CMBYN is indeed a
universal story not despite but because of the function and significance of
homosexuality within the film. It will show that the claim of universality
carries an implicit aspiration to go beyond difference, an aspiration that is
most apparent in the gesture of the benevolent critic who mentions the question
of homosexuality within CMBYN only to quickly assert its irrelevance. This
aspiration produces an excess that returns to haunt the experience of universal
spectatorship that the film claims to address.
The lecture
ultimately asks whether the category of ‘universality’ may be rescued from its
traditionally essentialist grounding to account for contemporary conditions of
spectatorships and experiences that do not elide difference but appear
inextricably informed by it.
Sergio Rigoletto is Associate
Professor of Italian and Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon (USA). He
has a joint appointment in the Cinema Studies program and in the department of
Romance Languages. His expertise is in European Cinema (especially Italian),
Queer Cinema, Stars Studies, Film Comedy, and Television. His current research
focuses on film star Anna Magnani, the question of authenticity in the media,
and the queer art film. Some of his most recent publications are: Masculinity and Italian Cinema: Sexual
Politics, Social Conflict and Male Crisis in the 1970s (Edinburgh
University Press: Edinburgh, 2014); Popular
Italian Cinema (co-edited with Louis Bayman) (Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2013).
Data 22 May, 2019
Time: 13.15-15.00
Location: Utrecht University: Drift 21,
0.32