Event overview
We are delighted to welcome Glyn Davis to speak on queer film in the 1970s as part of the Goldsmiths Queer History speaker series.
‘A Panorama of Gay Life’: The Making of Nighthawks
Paul Hallam and Ron Peck’s film Nighthawks (1978), which depicts the life of a gay schoolteacher in London and his nights of cruising gay bars, is now recognised as a classic of queer cinema. The film’s production was especially lengthy and complicated: the duo initially intended to produce a quasi-documentary ‘panorama of gay life’ that attempted to represent the full diversity of British LGBTQ experience. However, budgetary wrangles and the complexities of communal filmmaking led, ultimately, to the adoption of a more traditional narrative form. Based on research into Hallam and Peck’s archives, this talk will trace the film’s evolution and consider how the initial vision for the film (one less ‘authored’, more collaboratively created) could serve as a model of future queer praxis.
Glyn Davis is Chancellor's Fellow and Reader in Screen Studies at The University of Edinburgh and Project Leader for the HERA-funded project ‘Cruising the Seventies’. Before taking up his position as at the University of Edinburgh, Glyn was a senior lecturer in screen studies at the University of Bristol (2005-2008), and the coordinator of postgraduate studies at The Glasgow School of Art (2008-2012). 'Cruising the 1970s' launched on 15 July 2016, and will run until July 2019. The project involves partner research teams based in Germany, Poland, Spain and the UK. 'Cruising the 1970s' asks: how might we best reconstruct and understand LGBTQ social and sexual cultures from the decade between the advent of an international gay rights movement and the first reported cases of HIV/AIDS, and what can this knowledge contribute to understandings of queer politics and identity in Europe's present and future?
This event is free and open to the public but registration is necessary
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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29 Nov 2018 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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