Articles |
Space, time, auteur-ity and the queer male body: the film adaptations of Robert Lepage
Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. He is author of Here is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities and the Literatures of Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1999), and editor of Literatures, Cinemas, Cultures, a special issue of the journal Essays on Canadian Writing (2002). He is currently completing a book entitled Screening Gender, Framing Genre: Canadian and Québécois Literature into Film
This article examines the intersection of auteurism and adaptation in Robert Lepage's cinema by focusing on the transposition of images of the queer male body from his theatrical source texts to their filmed adaptations. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, the article looks at how Lepage is able to control the form and content of his cinematic narratives more vigilantly than his theatrical ones, particularly where virtual traces of national memory intersect with actual representations of gender and sexuality. That the temporal positioning of his self-translated films has in some senses superseded the theatrical collaborations on which they are for the most part based lends them a degree of spatial ‘auteurity’ in terms of the narrative and imagistic changes inscribed therein. More specifically, the article examines how these changes relate to the re-framing of the queer male body from stage to screen, arguing that the repeated image of the corpse in Lepage's cinematic oeuvre can be tied to the ‘death’ of certain important (homo)sexual significations in his source texts.