
Elena GorfinkelKing's College London | KCL · Department of Film Studies
Elena Gorfinkel
Doctor of Philosophy
About
39
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193
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (39)
Actor-turned-writer/director Barbara Loden's only feature film,Wanda(1970), tells the story of an alienated working-class woman, Wanda Goronski (played by Loden), who abandons her life as a coal miner’s wife and mother, electing instead to drift. Bracing in its realist texture and proto-feminist in its sensibility, it received critical acclaim upon...
This publication brings together filmmakers, designers and artists
whose audiovisual work is shaped around intersectional feminism and
decolonial perspectives to craft spaces for resistance. This attunement
to radical documentary practices means examining hybridity and
unexpected contact zones, or that which is located across and beyond
the institu...
The chapter considers Wishman’s Chesty Morgan films, Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73 , in relation to feminist psychoanalytic theory by analyzing how the female body acts as both a prop and a technology within the films’ modes of address. Discussing the film in context of exploitation as filmic category defined by its mode of production and mark...
This volume—the first ever devoted to director Doris Wishman—covers her vast filmography, and is inclusive of her less discussed later films, hardcore films, and nudist films. By situating Wishman within larger contexts and movements in film history including women’s filmmaking, avant- garde and experimental cinema, and genre film, the volume consi...
One of the most fascinating phenomena of 1960s film culture is the emergence of American sexploitation films-salacious indies made on the margins of Hollywood. Hundreds of such films were produced and shown on both urban and small-town screens over the course of the decade. Yet despite their vital importance to the film scene, and though they are n...
Explores the development of a sexploitation gaze and the assertion of a “freedom to look” at nude bodies in the innocuous nudie cutie and the more violent roughie films 1960-1965, examining the figure of the gawker and the peeper that was so central to the definition of sexploitation as a mode.
There is no better place to end than in the desires for the future of the past, of sexploitation cinema’s febrile imaginary, materialized by a sex film and reflexively about the sex film as a waning form. In the year 2427, a futuristic culture lives on in what remains of Los Angeles, which was ravaged by an earthquake in 1969. The society is ruled...
Considers film regulation one of the defining contexts of the sexploitation film, as it developed on the heels of legal decisions in the late 1950s that rendered nudity in film no longer obscene; it traces the ways that the sexploitation film was censored and regulated in the decade, from obscenity cases and state censor boards to less formal and m...
Takes up the expansion of the “sexploitation gaze” in the latter half of the sixties decade, pursuing the freedom to look as one bestowed on female lust and desire, in films from roughly 1965-1970. Examines film cycles that took up female and “perverse” sexuality, and that dealt with sadism and masochism, lesbianism, sexual “perversions” and with s...
New York City, mid-1960s, black-and-white 35mm film stock and a familiar sexploitation scenario: young Candy leaves her small town. We see her departing on the train. She is fleeing the fate of her mother, a prostitute who has committed suicide. She opines in voice-over about a new life in New York City, which holds the promise of another identity...
Traces the reception of sexploitation film in the latter half of the 1960s, as pornography and obscenity begin to resonate publicly as national problems. It analyzes varied responses of audiences, critics, countercultural observers and researchers to the sexploitation film in the latter part of the decade, as the “adult film viewer” becomes an obje...
What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human. But in what way is an action endured and supported? —Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”
Mediating the border of ar...
We see four women posed and positioned in front of a chain-link fence. Two are sitting on a concrete ledge and the other two standing. Behind them is a pier in New York City in the mid-1960s, the water’s waves providing refracting reflections through the pattern of chain link, as long shots alternate with close-ups of each of the women’s faces look...
American sexploitation cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s has gained a second life in the past two decades through a boom in video and DVD distribution and rerelease, and consequently a new, generationally distinct audience. This article proposes that what appeals to cult audiences in the present about the “impoverished” tableaus of sexploitation...
This chapter explores the ways that 1960s sexploitation cinema, particularly films produced in New York City, sets its sights on the ecstatic mass cultural plenitude of Times Square. Examples of these films include Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), The Lusting Hours (1967), Hot Skin Cold, Cash (1965), Aroused (1966), Career Bed (1969), and Vibrations (1...
Jay Schwartz. (Photo by Silvia Hortelano-Pelaez, courtesy Jay Schwartz)
Jay Schwartz's Philadelphia-based micro-cinema, The Secret Cinema, named after the 1968 Paul Bartel short film of the same name, has for sixteen years been devoted to the screening of a wide spectrum of 16mm films. Culling from his vast collection of educational, industrial, am...
Interview with organizers of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, Local 2110, United Auto Workers, New York University. January 5, 2005
JONATHAN BUCHSBAUM (JB): Were all of you aware of the existence of GSOC once you got here?
ELENA GORFINKEL (EG): Our stipends were being raised to try to ward off the organizing efforts, [so] you knew that th...
Film festivals, from their inception and popularization across the world, have been a locus for the formation of communities and cinephile publics, as well as alternative modes of filmic exchange and circulation. Despite the very nature of their transitory existence and ephemerality, film festivals as cultural events are receiving growing scholarly...
div>They obsess over the nuances of a Douglas Sirk or Ingmar Bergman film; they revel in books such as Franois Truffaut's Hitchcock ; they happily subscribe to the Sundance Channel-they are the rare breed known as cinephiles. Though much has been made of the classic era of cinephilia from the 1950s to the 1970s, Cinephilia documents the latest gene...