Virginie Despentes: King Kong Theory (2006–) [FR, ES, IT, EN, BR-PT]

“With humor, rage, and confessional detail, Virginie Despentes—in her own words “more King Kong than Kate Moss”—delivers a highly charged account of women’s lives today. She explodes common attitudes about sex and gender, and shows how modern beauty myths are ripe for rebelling against. Using her own experiences of rape, prostitution, and working in the porn industry as a jumping-off point, she makes the bold, stinging point that when it comes to sex today, everyone’s getting screwed.”

First published in French as King Kong théorie, Grasset, 2006.

English edition
Translated by Stéphanie Benson
Publisher The Feminist Press, City University of New York, New York, 2010
ISBN 9781558616578, 1558616578
143 pages

Review: Rebecca Seal (The Guardian, 2009).

Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (EN)

King Kong théorie (French, 2006, EPUB, PDF, added on 2020-6-3)
Teoría King Kong (Spanish, trans. Beatriz Preciado, 2007)
King Kong Girl (Italian, trans. Camilla Testi, 2007, added on 2020-6-3)
King Kong Theory (English, trans. Stéphanie Benson, 2010, HTML)
King Kong Girl (BR-Portuguese, trans. Marcia Bechara, 2016, added on 2020-6-3)

Scott MacKenzie (ed.): Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology (2014)

“This is the first book to collect manifestos from the global history of cinema, providing the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture. Focusing equally on political and aesthetic manifestos, Scott MacKenzie uncovers a neglected, yet nevertheless central history of the cinema, exploring a series of documents that postulate ways in which to re-imagine the cinema and, in the process, re-imagine the world.

This volume collects the major European “waves” and figures (Eisenstein, Truffaut, Bergman, Free Cinema, Oberhausen, Dogme ‘95); Latin American Third Cinemas (Birri, Sanjinés, Espinosa, Solanas); radical art and the avant-garde (Buñuel, Brakhage, Deren, Mekas, Ono, Sanborn); and world cinemas (Iimura, Makhmalbaf, Sembene, Sen). It also contains previously untranslated manifestos co-written by figures including Bollaín, Debord, Hermosillo, Isou, Kieslowski, Painlevé, Straub, and many others. Thematic sections address documentary cinema, aesthetics, feminist and queer film cultures, pornography, film archives, Hollywood, and film and digital media. Also included are texts traditionally left out of the film manifestos canon, such as the Motion Picture Production Code and Pius XI’s Vigilanti Cura, which nevertheless played a central role in film culture.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2014
ISBN 0520276744, 9780520276741
xxi+651 pages
via slowrotation

Author’s talk (video, 2017, 20 min).

Reviews: Wheeler Winston Dixon (Film International), Matthew Hunt, Bill Nichols (Film Quarterly).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (updated on 2019-7-14)

Bad Object-Choices (eds.): How Do I Look? Queer Film And Video (1991)

“The papers and discussions published here comprise the proceedings of a conference held at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, October 1989, organized by Bad Object-Choices, a reading group formed in the spring of 1987 to address questions of gay and lesbian theory. The proceedings were edited by the following group members: Terri Cafaro, Jean Carlomusto, Douglas Crimp, Martha Gever, Tom Kalin, and Jeff Nunokawa.” (from the Preface)

The publication was prepared as a special issue of October journal, but ultimately rejected by the editors; and further delayed as more than twenty printers refused to print the book–at issue were images in the Patton, Mercer, and Fung essays. It was eventually printed in Germany. (see interview with Douglas Crimp and p. 10)

With essays by Cindy Patton, Stuart Marshall, Judith Mayne, Richard Fung, Kobena Mercer, and Teresa de Laurentis.

Publisher Bay Press, Seattle, WA, 1991
ISBN 0941920208
295 pages

Reviews: Jennifer A. Machiorlatti (Journal of Film and Video, 1993), Thomas Dukes (Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1994), Lauri Mullens (Int’l Gay & Lesbian Review).

WorldCat

PDF (65 MB, no OCR)