Manifesto as method for a queer screen production practice

ABSTRACT

The authors reflect on creating a collaborative creative work that was developed both with, and as, a manifesto. Using queer theory as a framework, the authors track the process of developing and deploying a 14-step manifesto and outline their aims for queering screen production through creative practice. The project applies Baker’s (2011) call for a queer-ing of practice-led research, enacting a performative bricolage with a focus on queer screen production that is concerned with more than representation. The resulting 14-minute assemblage film outlines its thesis within an experimental, non-linear structure, comprising clips from the individual authors’ previously produced screen works, interplayed with new content, personal archive and textual elements. It combines the authors’ separate practices in filmmaking, screenwriting, mobile media and documentary in ways that deviate from mainstream categorisations, production hierarchies and workflows. Firstly, the manifesto is situated among others that outline strategies of disruption and resistance. Then, framed by the manifesto steps, the authors reflect on the film’s disruption of dominant narrative models in the context of queer theory’s critiques of heteronormative temporality. They then draw some conclusions around the possibilities of ‘manifesto as method’, and the implications for narrative disruption, queer screen production, and creative practice more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Screen production
• filmmaking
• mobile media
• documentary
• screenwriting
• creative practice
• queer theory
• queer methods
• narrative
• kinship-making
• manifesto

Introduction

In his Introduction to the critical anthology Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures, Scott MacKenzie defines manifestos by observing they are ‘typically understood as ruptures, breaks, and challenges to the steady flow of politics, aesthetics, or history’ (2014a, 1). Of the project of queering, Whitney Monaghan suggests ‘it is about finding gaps, ruptures and mismatches as much as it is about locating incoherencies and challenging the apparent stability of normative binaries’ (2016, 91). In this article, the authors reflect on the process of creating the short film mani-pedi-anti-counter-festo for a queer screen production practice (Black et al. 2022), a collaborative creative work that was developed both with, and as, a manifesto (for a link to view the film, see Black et al. 2022 in reference list). The film (henceforth mani-pedi) is an assemblage of new and repurposed footage and makes explicit its response to (and performance of) the 14 steps of a manifesto; one that the authors call the mani-pedi-anti-counter-FESTO (henceforth FESTO). The FESTO draws on queer theory to explore (and invite) disruptions to mainstream understandings of screen production – its hierarchies, goals and workflows.

Cinematic manifestos are neither new nor scarce. MacKenzie’s abovementioned anthology alone compiles upwards of 175 from across eras, nations and cultural spaces, of which Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme ‘95 is, arguably, the most well-known and influential in contemporary cinema (MacKenzie 2014b, 110). Our FESTO is situated among the feminist and queer manifestos that, as MacKenzie argues, have a role in re-creating a ‘postbourgeois feminist public sphere’ (2014c, 326). The FESTO is likewise concerned ‘not only with representation but active participation [to] reimagine not only the cinema but also social relations themselves’ (MacKenzie 2014c, 326). Visibility has long been at the forefront of queer activism and scholarship but, as Trae Delellis highlights of Hollywood’s 2023 Academy Award nominations, while there is a greater increase in ‘LGBTQ+ representation among the nominees, troubling trends remain’ (2023). Delellis argues that these trends point to ‘an undeniable feeling that films must be filtered through or appear palatable to a heteronormative audience in order to earn a nomination’ (2023). One of the factors driving the FESTO is the question of what makes a screen production practice queer, beyond increasing visibility of queer bodies and LGBTQIA+ relationships on mainstream screens. Such measures, to take Delellis’ point further, are all too often sanitised through homonormative representations ‘in order to be deemed respectable and/or accepted within the diegesis of the film and by the audience’ (Mccollum and Gaffney 2021, 240). The FESTO is interested, instead, in the opportunities that arise when considering the spectrum of screen production in broader, ‘queerer’, ways, through notions of kinship-making, polyphony and the queer art of failure (Halberstam 2011).

Queer-ing method

Because both ‘queer’ and ‘screen production’ are complicated terms that are understood in multiple ways, defining a queer screen production practice is complex and difficult. In the broader fields of scholarship, screen works are usually defined as queer by virtue of their content (queer characters and/or themes), context (e.g. queer festival screenings) or creative team (queer-identifying key contributors). The project of the FESTO argues that these factors alone do not necessarily a queer practice (or even product) make. Rather, the project seeks to interrogate what makes a screen production practice queer in its process, objectives and execution. Beyond textual analyses of finished screen works, typically found in fields such as cinema studies and feminist film theory, the FESTO is part of a larger project examining the development and production processes.

As with 2010s ‘Guerrilla Girls Guide to Behaving Badly’, – a series of steps that the anonymous collective (founded in 1985) have described as ‘things we’ve learned along the way’ (Deepwell 2014, 103) – our FESTO urges a queer practice to embrace its position as ‘an outsider […] Look for the understory, the subtext, the overlooked’ (Deepwell 2014, 104). Constructing the appropriate manifesto meant challenging the word itself. Though etymologically the ‘man’ in manifesto is not gendered, the authors strove to question the very nomenclature and queer the exercise, hence, the mani-pedi-anti-counter-FESTO.

In the process of making this manifesto for a queer screen production practice, the authors sought to (1) imagine disruptive methods for making queer screen works, and (2) locate moments within our respective existing and current screen practices (documentary and narrative filmmaking, screenwriting, mobile media) that might illustrate such futures. The FESTO applies Pema Düddul (formerly Dallas Baker)’s call for a queer-ing of practice-led research (2011), enacting a performative bricolage with a focus on queer screen production that is concerned with more than representation. The FESTO arrived from a creative practice collaboration that subscribes to the belief that research is ‘not simply to ask questions; it is to let our curiosities drive us and allow them to ethically bind us; it is to tell stories and to pay attention not only to which stories we are telling and how we are telling them, but how they, through their very forms, are telling us’ (Loveless 2019, 24). The resulting assemblage film sits at the nexus of practice-led research and queer theory, whereby ‘a queered practice-led research can be seen to reframe creative practice and critical research as an ethical intervention into subject information and knowledge production’ (Baker 2011, 33). The work outlines its thesis within an experimental, non-linear structure, comprising an assemblage of clips from the individual authors’ previously produced screen works, interplayed with new content, personal archive and textual elements. It combines the authors’ separate practices in filmmaking, screenwriting, mobile media and documentary in ways that deviate from mainstream categorisations.

To build the manifesto, the authors deployed methods of collaborative and queered co-writing processes (Campbell et al. 2022; Eades 2022; Murray and Rendle-Short 2021) and crossover writing (Carlin 2018; Gale and Wyatt 2017), where queerness is performed through the ‘doing’. In these methods, all four co-authors met online and collaborated across different platforms, brainstorming via video conference (itself recorded as further footage) while at the same time writing into an online document together. This document became the manifesto.

Reflecting on their work and practices, the authors identified common areas of queer themes to populate the manifesto. Parts of the resulting film features screen recordings of this process, which was enacted live online via video conference. The steps were arrived at collaboratively, and content offered to potentially embody those steps was ‘screened’ (via screen share) and then documented. This process generated new points for the manifesto, inspired by themes that corresponded with archives from the authors’ individual practices – hence the manifesto steps inspired content, and content inspired manifesto steps in generative loops. Co-writing into a table of content created a ‘paper edit’ of sorts. Guided by this table, the authors uploaded media files (newly created or excerpted from existing work) to a shared drive. This footage was then assembled into a rough cut and edited down to create the film.

What follows, using the manifesto steps as a framework, are the authors’ reflections on how the work disrupts dominant narrative models in the context of queer theory’s critiques of heteronormative temporality, asking how queer approaches to narrative construction might challenge the heteronormative markers of success and happiness. The 14 steps deliberately incorporate repetition and overlap, representing a disruption to structure and resistance to linear workflows.

The mani-pedi-anti-counter-FESTO for queer screen production

1. Embrace the possibility of failure

Failure is a liberating and freeing place to start if the pressure to succeed is removed. As Jack Halberstam suggests, failure is a queer art that leverages ‘the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely and the unremarkable’ (2011, 88). The FESTO subscribes to the creative practice of failure, allowing for alternative ways of making screen works as well as disrupting the more dominant paradigms of screen production as a way of imagining ‘other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being’ (Halberstam 2011, 88). Angie Black’s feature film The Five Provocations (2018) was produced with elements of risk and the unexpected by ‘capturing’ live performances in a realist narrative drama.

The actors in The Five Provocations were trained to expect surprise character interactions in improvised scenes but did not expect ‘to engage with a performer who had created a character for a live medium’ (Black and Dzenis 2021, 315). mani-pedi opens with one of these scenes, captured as a single continuous shot, specifically called, The First Provocation (Black 2015). The intention of this scene was to provoke a character response in the actor where their reaction was predicted by the director but not dictated in a script shared with the actor. The actor in character was so startled by the performance intervention that the scene failed to stay contained in the way Black had imagined. Instead of resetting the scene, Black worked with the cast to re-frame the narrative to incorporate the failed intervention realising it was far more interesting and queerer than the initial intention. This ‘provocation’ not only provoked the actor involved in the scene but also, and unexpectedly, disrupted the normative ‘established’ expectations of screenwriting and film production. Black suggests that by converging ‘multiple creative disciplinary processes to making and “queering” conventional approaches to filmmaking practice’ (2019, 10) ‘queering the form’ (37) is made possible and is in fact desired.

There is an element of excitement and fear about the unknown and possibility of failure once you are not operating within the conventions. Dzenis and Maloney underscore the disruptive poetics of The Five Provocations, noting that ‘in queering its realism, it also naturalises its queerness’ (2021, 119). As Black has written elsewhere, ‘It is not just that the work produced investigates themes of queer identities and sexuality, but also that the film process is in itself unstable and queer’ (2019, 9). In this way, this work utilises Baker’s 2011 queer practice-led research approach to locate queerness within the creative process.

As US filmmaker Miranda July explains of her experience of working within the mainstream Hollywood system, ‘[i]t doesn’t matter how creative, or how good a story you have, the actual system for making the movies is not inspiring, is not creative and it’s completely divorced from most people’s lives and the way that most people go about making things’ (July 2008). Black’s work runs counter to systemic methods, testing the possibilities for disruptive queer methods.

The possibility of failure is embraced throughout the authors’ practices as highlighted throughout mani-pedi. In another example, documentary filmmaker Patrick Kelly includes the capturing of an unintentional moment when filming a multi-work documentary project, Honcho Disko,¹ about a queer community. As the result of accidentally recording video footage with the lens cap still on, the shot goes from darkness to overexposed light and a wobbly shot tilts from Kelly’s feet to the crowds’ feet, and further up to a broader (again, overexposed) view of a festival. Such a clip would often be edited out of a finished film, but including such an accidental moment in the mani-pedi places a focus on the ‘rookie errors’ that filmmakers sometimes make, even after years of experience. Including such moments of failure can be seen as a research method in itself, inspiring colleagues ‘who surely have similar experiences of feeling like a failure’ (Hickey-Moody 2019, para. 2). Kelly has written elsewhere about how hyperaccessible filmmaking technologies are ideal devices for producing queer works unlike those we are accustomed to seeing in the mainstream (2022). This clip also speaks to an embrace of queer spaces (see point #14), in that it was shot at the opening of Melbourne’s queer cultural festival Midsumma, as well as the imperfect image (see point #13), but it is discussed here in point #1 as it demonstrates the everyday failures that take place as part of the screen production process. As Muñoz asserts, ‘Queerness is not yet here’ (2009, 1), and neither are Kelly’s cinematographic skills.

2. Embrace disruption of the ever-forward momentum

Freeman defines chrononormativity as an imposition on life narratives, of frameworks that are ‘event-centred, goal-oriented, intentional and culminating in epiphanies of major transformations’ (2010, 5). These are also the aims of conventional screenplay development paradigms (for example, the three-act structure and the hero’s journey) designed to ‘conform to the general requirement of rising action’ (Macdonald 2013, 49). A queer screenwriting practice, as demonstrated by Stayci Taylor’s screenplay experiments within mani-pedi, might mean critiquing linear structures in the same way queer theory critiques heteronormative timelines. Such a practice might seek to reject structures imposing certain worldviews that assume a linear narrative of transformation is the singular goal of the life course. Taylor’s scenes within mani-pedi are constructed by first using the affordances of screenwriting software, such as voice assignation and read aloud options, and then by screen recording the results. Taylor’s queering of story structure is an experiment in resistance to ‘the incorporation of major turning points that spin the story in a new or different direction’ (Murphy 2007, 16). There is no narratival cause and effect between scenes, and few (if any) turning points within them. Where the scene text would typically denote action, it instead offers observations outside of the diegesis, for example, ‘The skating MUFFDIVERS are cooler than you’ or ‘We can learn a lot observing queers in the wild’.

Of chrononormativity, Freeman elaborates that it is ‘the use of time to organise human bodies toward maximum productivity’ (2010, 3). As an example, she points out that ‘film emerged during the era of a reorganization of the social along temporal lines’ and suggests that there is ‘much in the medium that mimics the segmenting and sequencing of time achieved in the era of industrial capitalism’ (2010, xiii). To queer narrative structures, therefore, is to resist ‘the careful social scripts that usher even the most queer among us through major markers of individual development and into normativity’ (Dinshaw et al. [Halberstam] 2007, 182). By refusing conventional temporal markers and plot points, Taylor’s screenplay experiments present characters that are not conventionally ‘productive’. And with this, their queer behaviours have the capacity to disrupt narrative expectations.

3. Embrace a collapse of past, present and future

In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz asks what a queer perspective of futurity might look like? What if, as Whitney Houston suggests, ‘the children are [not] our future’ (2009, 49). Rather than a futuring, which is often framed around the lives of children carrying on after we have gone, Muñoz argues that life should be lived more wholly in the present (2009).

In an excerpt from mani-pedi, a voice lists a rollcall of events drawn from the nine years the filmmaker spent living in an apartment, taken from Kim Munro’s All the Things (2015). These global, personal, embarrassing, futile, profound, queer, banal and repetitive events seem to elude progress. The camera tracks through the empty apartment, emulating a final condition report before vacating. What could be said of this condition? Has it been left the same as it was found?

If the neoliberal self should always be striving forward, refining, succeeding, progressing, kicking goals, what does it mean to, quite simply, not progress according to identifiable and heteronormative markers? That is to say, those ‘who do not have the complete life promised by heterosexual temporality’ (Muñoz 2009, 98). Yet, punctuating the flow of events, and reminding us of small utopias of the present, are images of rainbows, cacti, holidays and beaches, which appear in place of life’s otherwise normative milestones. The denial of narrative advancement in Munro’s film mirrors a queer positionality where life is lived in Muñoz’s present.

4. Embrace sustainable practices

Halberstam commends practices ‘that may be less efficient, may yield less marketable results, but may also, in the long term, be more sustaining’ (2011, 9). Screen production usually requires a pragmatism resulting from budget limitations and – despite this pragmatism often resembling efficiency – the FESTO embraces such pragmatism as part of a broader careful approach.

Screen recordings from laptops and other devices feature at several points in mani-pedi. These not only demonstrate different creative processes, but they can also challenge the status quo of storytelling and fulfil multiple purposes at the same time. For Kelly, using a hyperaccessible smartphone camera means footage can be shot on a whim at any time in a very low impact manner. The age-old technique of juxtaposing two different shots from two different locations (for example, Los Angeles at 06:09, and Melbourne at 06:15) can make for a seamless, pragmatic creation of a new scene. A key benefit of utilising hyperaccessible screen production technologies is that the production process can fit sustainably into other activities that were to take place anyway. In this case, a quick mobile video recording here and there during a visit to Los Angeles can turn a no-budget film into, by definition, a global production.

In terms of including images that point to notions of sustainability on screen, Black’s film Weedling (2023) features an interspecies kinship between a gender non-conforming teen and their spirit plant. mani-pedi includes key moments from Weedling where the protagonist can be observed touching the leaves of the plant, highlighting notions of interspecies care. This example is discussed further in point #7 and, more broadly, the FESTO encourages the practice of seeing interspecies relations as a key aspect of sustainability on screen.

Several points of the FESTO highlight environmentally, socially and financially sustainable practices. These are long-term priorities and the authors are well aware of the balancing act required in this area, while remaining optimistic that to reduce, reuse and recycle, is to achieve something close to total creative freedom in screen production.

5. Embrace the possibility of an alternative to hegemonic forms

Disrupting narrative expectations is to embrace practices that, like the utopian form running through queer theory, might not make the alternative possible but it aims to make impossible the belief that there is no alternative’ (Ahmed 2010, 165). Black’s The Five Provocations is disruptive in its approach to form, and ‘while the film works with conventions of realism, it also disrupts them through transgressive performance and cinematic moments that escape its story logic’ (Dzenis and Maloney 2021, 119). In the same vein, at the centre of Taylor’s work with queering screenwriting are two aims – one, to make the screenplay visible in a production culture that insists ‘Once the film exists, the screenplay is no more’ (Carrière 1995, 148) and two, breaking the rules of how dialogue functions, refusing ‘the form and the content of traditional canons’ (Halberstam 2011, 10). The dialogue in Taylor’s scenes is not, as Robert McKee advises, executing ‘a step in design that builds and arcs the scene around its Turning Point’ (1997, 389). Dialogue is comprised almost entirely of punctuation, as an exercise in decentralising language and experimenting with a page’s negative space:

(Black et al. 2022, 06:42–07:06)

Taylor also repurposes other standardised elements of the screenplay form, beyond their role in production practices. The ‘transition’, aligned right and used to suggest how one scene will move into the next, is used as a tool of visual rhythm for inserting puns and asides (and character headings for reclaiming slurs, as will shortly be discussed).

6. Embrace filmmaking as kinship-making

Of queer kinship, Ames Hawkins (2022) writes ‘we know well that trans and queer folx have historically been excluded, shunned, and otherwise cut off from traditional family support. We have been left to care for and with our own::ourselves’ (the double colon being a part of their queer writing practice). The FESTO is interested in how gestures of care can be located as part of the film production cycle. When film production featuring actors or participants goes well, one can forge relationships that might last a lifetime, just like any other relationship in one’s life (Wallworth 2021). Understanding this as a maker of screen works means that the practice becomes more than just an occupation; it is a way of knowing that allows us to discover new knowledge from a wide variety of experiences.

As Ahmed suggests ‘it is in ‘not fitting’ the model of the nuclear family that queer families can work to transform what it is that families can do’ (2014, 154). In developing the FESTO the authors asked what this might look like within screen production, concluding that kinship in this context, whilst difficult to define, can often look like methods of care and co-creation, a focus on the interpersonal relationships in and around screen production.

One example of kinship in mani-pedi comes with the inclusion of behind-the-scenes footage from The Five Provocations. Director Black comforts actor Rebecca Bower following a surprise intervention by cabaret performer Yana Alana (Sarah Ward). In another example from Closer Than They Appear (Munro 2014), a split screen presents Munro filming alongside another woman. There is an intimacy in the filmmaking created by the on-screen co-presence. At times the footage creates a simultaneous shot-reverse-shot mirror. At other times, the cameras are directed away from each other as both filmers encounter the surrounding city streets together. Here, filmmaking is shown as a way of co-creating together.

Other examples of kinship are demonstrated in the inclusion of screen recordings from the authors’ video conferences collectively creating the FESTO. Kinship is visually most explicit in those moments, but more broadly, the FESTO proposes that the outcomes of queer, co-creative processes are tangible objects embodying developing kinship, and expressions of the ‘wider units of connection and relation’ (Halberstam 2012, 111) beyond the heteronormative models. In this way, heteronormative methods of storytelling are challenged by accepting that screen production practices and kinship-making practices are one and the same.

7. Embrace interspecies relations

Donna Haraway suggests in The Companion Species Manifesto that we are bonded in ‘significant otherness’ (2003) with and as companion species. For queers, in identifying with ‘otherness’, there is a sense of acceptance by nature and non-humans. The kinship and emotional connections made with companion species – animals/plants/nature – offer alternative nurturing relationships to the heteronormative and western traditional family units. Daniel Kirjner reminds us that ecofeminism examines and ‘debates connections between gender oppression and nature’s depredation’ and questions the artificial separation that is ‘assumed to exist between nature and culture’ (2015, 139–140). In the natureculture debates, Haraway unquestionably leads the way through feminist theory.

mani-pedi includes excerpts from the authors’ previous works which demonstrate the strong connection between human and plant worlds, as a priority above leading protagonists through a standard plot. For example, Black’s short film Weedling (2023) inspires an appreciation of the spirit plant as a character as well as the main protagonist being highly attuned to the Anthropocene. The film’s tagline ‘a weed is just a plant born into the wrong family’ draws a comparison to human perspective and challenges ideologies of fitting into a mainstream. Weedling investigates themes of male perpetrated violence against women and children, biophilia, queer sexuality and gender nonconformity. In conceiving of the project, Black focused on the feminist aim of making films about domestic violence without falling into gendered cinema tropes of showing a woman in fear. The resulting film depicts a gender non-conforming teenager who steals their father’s vintage panel van to save their spirit plant (Barry/Cordelia) and themselves from an unsafe home. Ultimately, they are forced to choose between returning to their mother or losing her to continue their journey into a new world of gender and interspecies queer options.

Kelly’s What’s With Your Nails? (2018) features a moment of the filmmaker painting his fingernails while his dog, Susie, naps on the couch in the background. The mise-en-scène evokes ‘the myriad of entangled, co-shaping species of the earth, contemporary human beings’ meeting with other critters’ (Haraway 2009, 5). This clip, featured in mani-pedi, illustrates the notion of inter-species care where flourishing, and ‘not merely the relief of suffering, is the core value’ (Haraway 2016, 134). Patrick and Susie may be seen simply co-existing in the lounge, but the combination of their combined presence with the ‘self-care’ practice of painting fingernails occurring within the frame signals that this is a moment of companiable relaxation – even luxuriation – for the pair.

8. Embrace inflatable pool animals

The hyperspecific invitation of the FESTO to embrace inflatable pool animals chimes with the Realpoetik Manifesto’s aims to celebrate ‘the performative, the playful, the adventurous’ and claim ‘a space for the frivolous alongside the serious’ (Wilkinson and Alizadeh 2012). This eighth step arrived as an extension of embracing interspecies relations, and from the discovery that inflatable pool animals were already a uniting motif. They feature twice in mani-pedi, and the inclusion of this criterion also speaks to manifesto-as-living-document – in the case of the FESTO, an encouragement for queer screen production practices to find their equivalent of inflatable pool animals by allowing space for whimsy, serendipity, recurring images and indicators of the fabulous.

9. Embrace the richness of embarrassment

The FESTO contends that ideas around wrongness and making mistakes must be challenged in a queer screen production practice. ‘Mistakes are what makes something art’ queer filmmaker Todd Verow reminds us, ‘Mistakes are life’ (2014 [2009], 394). As distinct from embracing the possibility of failure, the richness of embarrassment suggests that if the possibility becomes the reality, that this be put on display. Making an exception to her commitment to a text-based practice, Taylor interrupts her own screenwriting experiments by adding footage from her personal archive. As the recorded dialogue continues, Taylor is seen in the clumsy act of mounting a floating inflatable flamingo (see point #8, above). When she finally sits astride the flamingo and, believing she is posing for a still image, not a moving one, she adjusts her swimwear over exposed flesh to pose, unaware she is being captured behind the scenes. The sense of embarrassment is emphasised by the audio of screenplay dialogue that was not written in response to this footage, but is now in juxtaposition, potentially supplying new meaning:

(Black et al. 2022, 01:50–02:16)

10. Embrace queer shame

Queer shame can take many forms but can be defined as the shame felt failing to adhere to cultural binaries in relation to gender and sexuality. It is hard to argue against gay pride, but might it also be productive to think about gay shame? As Eve Sedgwick suggests, shame is a disruptive moment and essential for resistance and transformation (2003). David Halperin adds, shame ‘is what propels identities into the performative space of activism without giving those identities the status of essences’ (2009, 43). Shame interjects and asks us to look at ourselves as fluid queer subjects.

In The Rise of Leatherman (Munro 2008), participant Scott Watterson battles the traumas of the past which include sexual abuse at the hands of priests and becoming HIV positive. The film is structured around Watterson’s speech at Australia’s inaugural Leatherman competition, an emphatic validation of the transformative impact of having a physical space to find home and healing among a community. By voicing his shame around childhood sexual assault, his HIV status and not fulfilling the aspirations of a heteronormative life, Watterson elaborates on how these moments were integral to his identity, and further, to the formation of his subjectivity. This key moment in Munro’s documentary demonstrates the significant difference between overcoming and embracing queer shame. Whereas shame often manifests as deep trauma stemming from disapproval of homosexuality or queerness, embarrassment is often experienced as a moment of awkwardness or failure as expressed above.

11. Embrace more failure

Shame might also remind us of failure, that is, an opportunity to embrace yet more failure.

‘All our failures combined might just be enough if we practise them well, to bring down the winner’ suggests Halberstam (2011, 120), who invites us to ‘leave success and its achievement to the Republicans, to the corporate managers of the world, to the winners of reality shows, to married couples, to SUV drivers’ (2011) Halberstam goes on to say that the concept of practising failure perhaps prompts us to ‘discover our inner dweeb, to be underachievers, to fall short, to get distracted, to take a detour, to find a limit, to lose our way, to forget, to avoid mastery’ (2011, 121). As Taylor has written elsewhere, such measures are ‘not the same as relinquishing effort’ but rather ‘risking effort for no reward’ (2022, 72). Failure is always inherent in film production, especially where creative insights are often arrived at, as Munro and Bilbrough suggest, through the ‘messy process of testing and failing’ (2018, 267).

However, as Ahmed reminds us ‘Maintaining an active positive of “transgression” not only takes time, but may not be psychically, socially or materially possible for some individuals and groups given their ongoing and unfinished commitments and histories’ (2014, 53). And while the FESTO is strongly informed by the queer art of failure in processes of making, it hopes to offer this in nuanced understandings of what that means over the breadth of queer experience. Although the FESTO embraces failure and more failure, the authors ‘acknowledge the rhetorical agency enabled by their own relatively privileged positions in the academy’ (Rand 2014, 32). Precarity at the intersections of queerness, class and social politics mean opportunities for the freedom to fail are not equally distributed for those in marginal or otherwise precarious positions. Part of the authors’ embrace of failure is also embracing ‘the uneasiness with which they regard their institutional privilege and agency’ (Rand 2014, 32) while also leveraging academia as a site for political activism.

Embarrassment. Shame. Failure. While not immediately thought of as experiences for queer celebration, these can enable practices that play with and along the edges of our own multiple identities and discover new ways of making and being together.

12. Embrace delinquency and eternal adolescence

This step of the FESTO takes inspiration from ‘activities that probably seem pointless to people stranded in hetero temporalities’ (Dinshaw et al. [Halberstam] 2007, 181). The characters in Taylor’s screenplay screen recordings also engage in so-called youthful pursuits – clubbing, skateboarding – regardless of age, because ‘queer people do not follow the same logics of subcultural involvement as their heterosexual counterparts: they do not “outgrow” certain forms of cultural activity’ (Halberstam 2012, 2):

(Black et al. 2022, 11:29–11:49)

Taylor also repurposes screenplay formatting elements (character headings and the transition mode) for reclamation of homophobic/transphobic slurs and asinine innuendo. Working ‘from our guts, our angst and our broken hearts’ (Verow 2014 [2009], 393), a queer screen production practice demands disobedience and a refusal of cynicism. As queer podcast Food 4 Thot (2017–) would suggest, ‘adulting’ is heteronormative (Norris et al. 2017).

13. Embrace the imperfect image

From experimentation to wobbly camera work, from approximation in framing to an active accentuation of flaws and from general blurriness to mismatched frames creating added blur in post-production, the FESTO urges queer screen production practices to embrace the imperfect image. Julio García Espinosa’s manifesto on imperfect cinema maintains that ‘perfect cinema – technically and artistically masterful – is almost always reactionary cinema’ (2014 [1969], 220). Rejecting the status quo of slow motion 4K Netflix beauty, an embrace of the imperfect image puts the personal, the portable, and the failures front and centre, and the juxtaposition of flawed images creates new meanings. As Verow has declared of queer cinema in particular: ‘The obsession with ‘technical perfection’ has got to stop!’ (2014 [2009], 394).

Kelly (2022) has written elsewhere about the hyperaccessibility of smartphones and the resulting potential for queer storytellers to use such devices to create screen works that might contribute to more diverse representation for queer communities. Queer communities have a long (if, at times, hidden) history of using consumer technologies to document queer nightlife. Paul Andrew’s The Man in the Irony Mask ([1998] 2013) uses camcorder footage and archival photography to create a tribute film to Sydney performance artist and AIDS activist Brenton Heath-Kerr. The material reveals intimate moments separate to the dancefloor or stage, including one scene in which Heath-Kerr, dressed in a Tom of Finland-inspired costume, dances in what appears to be a backstage area or adjacent room to a party, recorded privately away from the rest of the attendees. The handheld camcorder footage in this scene – imperfect in all its glory – combined with the mise-en-scène, gives the sense that we are watching a playful and intimate moment that challenges expectations of mainstream storytelling. Similarly, Kelly’s accidental shot discussed in point #1 brings the viewer into his inattentive perspective as it puts a filmmaking error front and centre in a finished film.

The excerpts assembled in mani-pedi seek to highlight the strange angles, shaky frames and accidental recordings that challenge reactionary approaches, and give a sense that what is watched is a creative, collaborative and, at times, intimate process unfolding.

14. Embrace queer space

The FESTO asks what a queer space is or can be. When considering MacKenzie’s aforementioned thoughts on manifestos – ‘ruptures, breaks and challenges’ (2014a, 1) – it seems logical that a queer screen production practice should sit (un)comfortably on the margins pushing for change. Typically, a queer space is understood as one of four sites as outlined below. The FESTO suggests the idea of queer space may arrive where these intersect.

1. Queer Creative Space: a place to investigate, experiment and play where the process of making challenges the industrialised way of making and the outcomes are not known. A development and production space that is open to different ways of working from the traditional, hegemonic, industrialised, dominant filmmaking processes where the outcomes are already predetermined. A creative space that allows for working on the fringe/edges/peripherals, that is not just open to different ideas, processes, makings and risk but encourages them. In the screen recordings of the authors’ collaborative online meetings featured in mani-pedi, a virtual environment is shown that offers a glimpse into how a queer creative space can operate.

2. Documenting Queer Spaces – documentaries, archival footage and other nonfiction that represent queer lives and worlds in time and place: These recorded moments in time have an impact and influence on culture and are important for queer visibility and place in history. Queer space can also be a space of potentiality where we can remake ourselves. For example, in The Rise of Leatherman, Scott uses the queer space of the Leatherman competition to perform his transformation of self-acceptance. The film not only represents a queer space but employs post-realist strategies such as musical fantasy sequences to create an onscreen queer space.

3. Queer Space on Screen – fictions: when thinking about queer space, it is possible to borrow from French queer filmmaker Celine Sciamma’s concept of ‘desire scenes’, as a creation of idealised space but also a way of making (2020). A fictional idea of a utopian space that is different from the hegemonic heteronormative space. A place to depict queer identities that diverge from normalised binaries in relation to gender and sexuality. A transgressive space beyond queer representation where there is an opportunity for depicting and highlighting difference, but also hope, a here/now and future worth fighting for. The FESTO celebrates the use of humour and camp within narrative fiction as a device to challenge preconceived ideas around queer stories and worlds. A feminine and queer space that tackles serious themes with humour and silliness, tenderness and lightness of touch that allows women and queers to have agency. Taylor’s scene headings in the screenplay screen recordings excerpted in mani-pedi, play with the liminality of queer space by interchangeably using EXT. QUEERSPACE, EXT. @_, INT. QUEERSPACE, INT. QUEER SPACE (the one or two-word distinction, a subtle but important one). Taylor describes the action within as ‘All the fucking QUEER QUEERS queering up a storm’ (Black et al. 2022). These queer spaces are interleaved between deliberately archetypal straight spaces – INT. CHURCH, EXT. TOWN SQUARE, EXT. MARKET – as a way to explore the rigidity and fluidity of straight/queer space and time.

4. Queer Film Festivals – a contested space: Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt suggest that the location in which queer people access cinema makes queer space possible as a site for queer film festivals and their audiences (2016). They also suggest that ‘what cinema means in these films is rarely prescriptive. It is a space that is never quite resolved or decided, at once local and global, public and private, mainstream and underground’ (Schoonover and Galt 2016, 3). Conversely, Verow laments the queer film festival as an end to the New Queer Cinema (a term coined by critic B. Ruby Rich), explaining (2014 [2009], 394):

   As soon as less adventurous filmmakers started making shiny happy films, a New Gay-sploitation Cinema took over. Tepid gay and lesbian festival programmers (and exhibitors and distributors) were quick to pick up these nonthreatening, ‘audience pleasers’ so they could sell out their opening nights and keep their boards of directors happy – but what was the cost?

When ‘an anonymous band of renegades’ launched Brooklyn Babylon Cinema in the 1990s, it was to present ‘the profane, the filthy, the rejected’ as synonymous with ‘the visionary, the naive and the artful’ (Berry and Jusick 2014 [1998], 555–556). The intersection of queer spaces into an idea of queer space aims to embrace the same sort of apparent contradictions.

Conclusion

The FESTO arises from the early stages of a project that aims to articulate queer screen production practice, especially those practices challenging heteronormative modes of storytelling and essentialist arguments of homonormativity (Blackman 2011; Duggan 2003) that insist on queer/straight alignment. As a manifesto for a screen practice, the FESTO aspires to MacKenzie’s assertion that ‘one must see moving images as a constitutive part of the real: as images change, so does the rest of the world’ (2014a, 1). As demonstrated above, in structuring the manifesto the authors chose statements over questions and positive over negative framing.

As Monaghan argues, the ‘efficacy of queer theory lies in its capacity for resistance: to normativity, to rigid binaries, to linearity’ (2016, 34). The act of making a collaborative creative work that was developed both with, and as, a manifesto resists the linearity of process and the binary of process. The 14 steps that make up the FESTO, and the 14 min of mani-pedi, are both expressions of the same playful guidelines. Rather than refining and then applying a manifesto, the authors collaborated to create a manifesto through making.

MacKenzie defines ‘manifesto films’ as those bringing ‘an experiential level of analysis to the act of reimagining the cinema that simply writing about it cannot’ (2014d, 628). Is mani-pedi-anti-counter-festo for a queer screen production practice a manifesto film? An essay film? Or, from Lauren Berlant (2022), an ‘assay’ film – using strings of association to loosen the structures we take for granted? Much like the queer space it inhabits, perhaps it is all and yet none of these things. By reflecting on the development and creative expression of a manifesto for queer screen production practices, this article has aimed to demonstrate the possibilities of manifesto-as-method, and the implications for narrative disruption, queer screen production and creative practice more broadly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stayci Taylor

Stayci Taylor is Senior Lecturer at RMIT. She brings to her research an ongoing practice in screenwriting, script editing and performance. She is the co-editor of two books on script development, and one on creative writing methods. Publications include works in TEXT, New Writing and the Journal of Screenwriting.

Angie Black

Angie Black is Senior Lecturer at VCA, University of Melbourne. They are an award-winning director who specialises in filmmaking as practice-led research. Their debut feature film, The Five Provocations (2018), along with an extensive body of short films, explore innovative approaches to filmmaking and actively promote on screen diversity.

Patrick Kelly

Patrick Kelly is Senior Lecturer at RMIT. He is a filmmaker, media producer and artist, currently working on a documentary film project about Honcho Disko, an inclusive queer performance night, and exploring notions of identity, belonging and community in and around queer documentary film practice.

Kim Munro

Kim Munro is Lecturer at University of South Australia and a documentary researcher and practitioner at the intersection of immersive and interactive technology and social and environmental issues. Kim was the conference programmer for the Australian International Documentary Conferences (AIDC) for the 2020 and 2021 events.

Notes

1 This ongoing project so far includes the films The Trouble (Kelly 2020) and Honcho Disko: The Documentary: The Lecture: The Musical (online performance for Melbourne’s Midsumma Festival 2022).