‘New Gay Sincerity’ and Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (UK, 2011)
- Submitting institution
-
Manchester Metropolitan University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 225326
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
-
10.7227/FS.19.0002
- Title of journal
- Film Studies
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 4
- Volume
- 19
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 1469-0314
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- November
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/619041/
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
E - Media
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- As the first peer-reviewed article to published on Andrew Haigh’s hugely important breakthrough film ‘Weekend’, the research argues that a significant new trend in gay/queer independent cinema has emerged in the last decade and it establishes a new concept to account for this, namely ‘New Gay Sincerity’. Engaging with debates about the after-effects not only of new queer cinema but about post-postmodernism more broadly, it makes a radical intervention in the study of non-straight cinema. It draws on the literary critical concept of New Sincerity (Jim Collins & Warren Buckland) and perceives a related phenomenon in a cluster of recent gay independent films. It utilises an in-depth analysis, with direct use of comparative reading and theoretical framing, to establish precisely what political and historical discourses have led to the phenomenon and demonstrates what important subcultural work it undertakes. The article compares Haigh’s Weekend to Travis Mathews’ ‘I Want Your Love’ and Ira Sachs’s ‘Keep the Lights On’ to trace a mode of low-key naturalism wedded to a self-reflexivity about their own image-making processes and about gay culture and film history more widely. Given that the article sets out to establish a new paradigm for the analysis of realist same-sex cinema, its contribution to knowledge is substantial in that it courageously advances a new critical and conceptual category, that of the New Gay Sincerity, an elaboration upon earlier filmic models of ‘sincerity’.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -