Sunday, May 5, 2019

SCREENING AND LECTURE BY SERGIO RIGOLETTO (UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, USA)


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/
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