ReFocus: The Films of Doris Wishman

209 Pages·2021·3.231 MB·English

by  Alicia Kozma, Finley Freibert

ReFocus: The Films of Doris Wishman
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R eFocus: The American Directors Series
Series Editors: Robert Singer, Frances Smith, and
Gary D. Rhodes
Editorial board: Kelly Basilio, Donna Campbell,
Claire Perkins, Christopher Sharrett, and
Yannis Tzioumakis
ReFocus is a series of contemporary methodological and theoretical approaches to the
interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of neglected American directors, from the once-
famous to the ignored, in direct relationship to American culture—its myths, values, and
historical precepts.
Titles in the series include:
ReFocus: The Films of Preston Sturges
Edited by Jeff Jaeckle and Sarah Kozloff
ReFocus: The Films of Delmer Daves
Edited by Matthew Carter and Andrew Nelson
ReFocus: The Films of Amy Heckerling
Edited by Frances Smith and Timothy Shary
ReFocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher
Edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer
ReFocus: The Films of Kelly Reichardt
E. Dawn Hall
ReFocus: The Films of William Castle
Edited by Murray Leeder
ReFocus: The Films of Barbara Kopple
Edited by Jeff Jaeckle and Susan Ryan
ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May
Edited by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum
ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze
Edited by Kim Wilkins and Wyatt Moss-Wellington
ReFocus: The Films of Paul Schrader
Edited by Michelle E. Moore and Brian Brems
ReFocus: The Films of Doris Wishman
Edited by Alicia Kozma and Finley Freibert
edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/refoc
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ReFocus:
The Films of Doris Wishman
Edited by Alicia Kozma and
Finley Freibert
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social
sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values
to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
edinburghuniversitypress.com
© editorial matter and organization Ali cia Kozma and Finley Freibert, 2021
© the chapters their several authors, 2021
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun—Holyrood Road
12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in 11/13 Ehrhardt MT by
IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and
and printed and bound in Great Britain
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 8234 9 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 8236 3 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 8237 0 (epub)
The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
List of Figures vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Acknowledgments xi
Foreword xii
Joan Hawkins
Introduction: Making Films in Hell 1
Alicia Kozma and Finley Freibert
Part I Gender and Genre
1 The Body as Apparatus: Doris Wishman’s Double Agent 73 15
Elena Gorfinkel
2 The Girls in the Mirror: Women’s Horror Filmmaking and
Doris Wishman’s Each Time I Kill 32
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
3 Trans/sexual Negativity and the Ethics of (S)exploitation in
Let Me Die a Woman 47
Harper Shalloe
Part II Cultural History and Adult Film Studies
4 Hardcore Wishman 67
Whitney Strub
5 Bad Bis Go to Hell: Bisexuality as Transgressive and
Lucrative in Doris Wishman’s Roughies 78
Finley Freibert
6 “It’s strange, but it’s wonderful”: Doris Wishman’s
Nude on the Moon 101
Karen Joan Kohoutek
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vi CONTENTS
Part III Comparative Approaches to Authorship
7 Depicting Female Bodies: Doris Wishman, Carolee Schneemann,
and Legacies of Subversion 121
Hannah Greenberg
8 Revolutionization of the Erotic Screen: The Films of
Doris Wishman and Wakamatsu Koji 144
Molly Kim
9 “You can’t say you’re not getting a horror film here!”:
Authorship, Genre, and the Accidental Avant-Garde in
Doris Wishman’s A Night to Dismember 159
Jamie Hook
10 My Teenage Cinematic Love Affair with Doris Wishman 178
Rebekah McKendry
Index 186
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Figures
5.1 Examples of 1960s print commodities that marketed sexual
identities and practices 82
6.1 Moon residents at the real-life Coral Castle 103
6.2 Establishing shot of the bleak lunar surface 107
6.3 Astronauts surrounded by palm trees 108
6.4 Cathy seen as the Moon Queen 112
7.1 The San Remo apartment building stands out as a symbol of
the female body on the horizon in Bad Girls Go to Hell 128
7.2 Chesty Morgan caressing, shaking, and animating her enormous
breasts during the credit sequence of Deadly Weapons 133
8.1 Crystal’s breasts displayed non-erotically and seen from
both female and male gaze 149
8.2 Sex among rebels 155
9.1 An out-of-place optical or “a Doris Wishman touch”? 163
9.2 Grisly, yet artificial, gore effects 167
9.3 Vicki looks at a photograph of Frankie 170
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Notes on Contributors
Finley Freibert is currently a part-time Senior Lecturer in Comparative
Humanities at the University of Louisville and an adjunct Lecturer at the
Kentucky College of Art and Design. In 2019, he completed a Ph.D. in Visual
Studies from the University of California, Irvine. Finley researches and teaches
at the intersection of media industry studies, gender and sexuality studies,
and bisexual cultural history. His published work has included peer-reviewed
research articles in venues including Film Criticism, invited scholarly articles
for Flow and the quarterly journal of the non-profit Bob Mizer Foundation,
and in popular LGBTQ+ press outlets The Advocate and Washington Blade.
Elena Gorfi nkel is senior lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London
and the author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s
(2017). She is co-editor of Global Cinema Networks (2018) and Taking Place:
Location and the Moving Image (2011), and edited an issue of Feminist Media
Histories on “Sex and the Materiality of Adult Media” (2019). Her scholarly
essays have appeared in Screen, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies
(Cinema Journal), Camera Obscura, Framework, Discourse, World Picture, and
in several edited collections. She is the recipient of a 2018 Art Writers Grant
from Creative Capital/The Andy Warhol Foundation for her current book
project “Aesthetic Strike: Cinemas of Exhaustion.” She is also at work on a
short monograph on Barbara Loden’s Wanda. Gorfinkel regularly writes criti-
cism in Sight & Sound, Art Monthly, Cinema Scope, and Another Gaze, among
other venues.
Hannah Greenberg has degrees in Film Studies from Mount Holyoke
College (BA) and Columbia University (MA). She currently works as the
Director of Development & Membership at Anthology Film Archives in
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
New York City. Greenberg has also guest programmed multiple film series at
Anthology, including “Women of the West” in 2018 and “A Real Young Girl:
Coming of Age” in 2019. She has been interviewed about her curatorial work
in the New York Times and the Brooklyn Rail.
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is an award-winning Australian film critic who has
written books on Suspiria (2015), Ms. 45 (2017), and The Hitcher (2018), as well
as Rape-Revenge Films (2011), Found Footage Horror Films (2014), and her 2019
Bram Stoker Award nominated Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces. She
has co-edited collections including Cattet & Forzani (2018), ReFocus: The Films
of Elaine May (2019), and Wonderland, the catalogue for the 2018 Australian Cen-
tre for the Moving Image exhibition on Alice in film. Alexandra is a programmer
at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas; a board member of the Miskatonic Institute
of Horror Studies; and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.
She holds a Ph.D. in Screen Studies from the University of Melbourne and is an
Adjunct Professor at Deakin University.
Jamie Hook is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication and
Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he also received his MA in
2012. His research focuses on media adaptation practices across film, literature,
and theater during the sexual revolution and explores their role in reorganiz-
ing taste cultures and negotiating social stigmas. His work has been published
in the Routledge journal Porn Studies and the Palgrave Studies in Adaptation
and Visual Culture book series. He is scheduled to complete his Ph.D. in the
fall of 2020.
Molly Kim is a film scholar specializing in the history of 1970s–80s Korean
cinema, Japanese erotic cinema, film censorship, and genre. Her doctoral
research focused on the representation of women and sex labor in 1970s Korean
hostess films. She currently teaches at the University of Suwon, Korea. Her
research has been published the International Journal of Korean History and
the anthologies Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Visual Media: New Takes on
Fallen Women and Women Make Horror: Feminism, Filmmaking, Genre.
Karen Joan Kohoutek is an independent scholar and poet who has published
about weird fiction and cult films in various journals, literary websites, and
anthologies. Subjects of recent and upcoming publications include Mystery
Science Theater 3000’s versions of the Gamera films, folk magic in the novels
of Ishmael Reed, August Strindberg as a weird writer, and the relationship
between Marvel’s Black Panther and the Black Panther Party. She has also pub-
lished a novella, The Jack-o-Lantern Box, and the reference book Ici Repose:
A Guide to St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, Square 3, about the historic New Orleans
cemetery, through Skull and Book Press.
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