Race d'Ep

Wednesday April 17, 2024, 7:00 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 W. Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA

The screening will be followed by a round-table discussion with Juan Antonio Suarez from Spain, who is an expert on queer experimental cinema, and Antoine Idier from Paris, who is an expert on Lionel Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem, moderated by Julien Gutierrez-Albilla, USC

Tickets: Free

At https://link.dice.fm/hd189266617d

This LA Filmforum screening is open to the public and co-sponsored by the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab, Visual Studies Research Institute, Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture PhD program, Departments of Comparative Literature and Latin American and Iberian Cultures, and Del Amo Foundation.

Lionel Soukaz's Race d’Ep (1979) was made in collaboration with Guy Hocquenghem, the most famous queer theorist in France. It focuses on the history of modern homosexuality, and its association with the development of photography, from the late-19th century to the post May-68 gay liberation movement. Establishing a dialogue with Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality and underscoring the radical politics of queer activism after the May 68 Student Revolution, Soukaz’s film is an experimental documentary about the increasing visibility of gay culture in a pre-AIDS era.

Masks are highly recommended at Filmforum shows - N95 or KN95.

Digital screening

Special thanks to Stéphane Gérard for the copy of Race d’Ep

The screening is in conjunction with a conference at USC:

This event is dedicated to the post-May 68 gay and lesbian liberation movement and its connection to Spanish and French experimental cinema. It will include an academic paper on Adolpho Arrieta’s Las intrigas de Sylvia Couski (1974) and another on Lionel Soukaz’s Race d’Ep (1979). Arrieta’s fiction film, which was made in France due to the director’s exile from Spain during the last years of Franco’s military dictatorship, bears witness to the significant role of transgender activists associated with the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action, as well as other Latinx intellectuals, such as the Cuban poet, Severo Sarduy, for the pursuit of sexual liberation and left activism in the 1970s.

            Juan Antonio Suarez, University of Murcia, Spain, will speak about Arrieta’s film, and Antoine Idier, Institute of Political Science, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, will focus on Soukaz’s film. Professor Suarez has published on the cinema of Arrieta. Dr. Antoine Idier is an expert on the French queer theorist, Guy Hocquenghem. Given his expertise, Dr. Idier will provide the audience with a unique reflection on Soukaz’s film.

            The papers will have responses from CSLC alumni or current graduate students and will conclude, perhaps, with the screening of Lionel Soukaz’s Race d’Ep (1979) at 2220 Arts + Archives in the evening. Together, this event will emphasize the educational importance and political purpose of these queer experimental films in the context of the 1970s gay and lesbian liberation movement and of LGBTQ+ movements today.

            Juan Antonio Suarez is the author of Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars (Indiana University Press, 1996), Pop Modernism (University of Illinois Press, 2007), and Jim Jarmusch (University of Illinois Press, 2007). His articles and chapters on queer and experimental cinema have appeared in journals including Grey Room, Criticism, and Screen.

            Antoine Idier is the editor of Yann Beauvais Agir le cinéma – Écrits sur le cinéma expérimental (1979-2020) (presses du reel, 2022), and the author of a monograph dedicated to Michel Journiac, Pureté et impureté de l'art: Michel Journiac et le sida, from 2019. Dr. Idier is also the author of LGBT +: archives des mouvements LGBT + une histoire de luttes de 1890 à nos jours, published in 2018. Idier published Les vies de Guy Hocquenghem: politique, sexualité, culture in 2017.