Films That Spill

Beyond the Cinema of Transgression

By Marie Sophie Beckmann

Rutgers University Press

Films That Spill is a comprehensive study of the Cinema of Transgression, a hitherto underexamined moment in US underground film culture. Reconsidering the concept of transgressive cinema not only as a description of the intentionally provocative content of the films but also as a feature of a cross-disciplinary practice, Marie Sophie Beckmann explores how filmmaking in the context of the vibrant and intermingling art, music, performance, and film scenes in 1980s Lower Manhattan spilled over the boundaries of artistic disciplines, media formats, and content concepts. This study not only provides a microhistory of these scenes and insight into their afterlife in archives and exhibitions but also represents an innovative contribution to debates within film, media, and visual culture about the methodological and historiographical challenges posed by the expansion of film beyond the discursive boundaries of cinema.

Reviews

A lively, engaging, and interdisciplinary account of the Cinema of Transgression and its afterlives, underpinned by deep archival research and conversations with key figures in the scene. Fiona Anderson, author of Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront

A provocative rethinking of the legacies of the Cinema of Transgression as simultaneously site, scene, and body of works, Films That Spill provides a much-needed revision and insightful probing of the mythos of 1980s downtown New York filmmaking, offering new pathways for understanding its vital, messy imaginaries, circulations, and afterlives.' Elena Gorfinkel, author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s

Author

MARIE SOPHIE BECKMANN is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Art and Visual Culture at Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg in Germany.

Introduction: Spilling/Containment
1          Forgetting the Cinema of Transgression
2          Downtown Images
3          Film Happens
4          Afterlife Formats
Coda: Keep on Spilling
Appendix
Acknowledgments
Bibliography

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