Film and Audiovisual Media colloquium - Eliza Steinbock (Maastricht University): Ghosts in My Throat

Following a filmmaker’s speculative approach to history, the lecture aims to move beyond historical approaches to understanding “what happened” through tuning into “how did it feel” and asking the speculative question of “what might have happened” (Muñoz 1996, Hartman 2019)? Worlds created by/in counterpublics, can live on through us, as the ghosts of absent bodies in our throats. Whose body, whose throat exactly, is a bit muddled, as I will show through analysis of Canadian white trans masculine filmmaker Chase Joynt’s recent documentary feature films. This is because of the use of reenactment to generate folds in time that kiss together otherwise disjointed points, and the polyphonic expression in his films of ‘voice’ that meld and resonate bodies who otherwise exist in different moments. Could welcoming their ghostly feelings into our bodies redress in some way the harm of how these historically overburdened (racialized and misgendered) figures have been sequestered, if not held captive in the cultural and literal archive?