56.2

CONTENTS

Drake Stutesman
Editorial

Susan Potter
Valentino's Lesbianism: Stardom, Spectatorship, and Sexuality in 1920's Hollywood Cinema 

Benjamin Halligan and Laura Wilson
"Use/Abuse/Everyone/Everything": A Dialogue on LA Plays Itself

DOSSIER

Geopolitics of Film and Media

Masha Salazkina, Guest Editor
Introduction: Film Theory in the Age of Neoliberal Globalization

Weihong Bao
The Trouble with Theater: Cinema and Geopolitics of Medium Specificity 

Naoki Yamamoto
Eye of the Machine: Itagaki Takao and Debates on New Realism in 1920s Japan

Peter Limbrick
Vernacular Modernism, Film Culture, and Moroccan Short Film and Documentary

Felipe Pruneda Sentíes
A Writing Haunted by Cinema: The Film Theories of Three Latin American Fictions 

Kay Dickinson
At What Cost "Theory"? An Economics and Poetics of Uptake

Bhaskar Sarkar
Plasticity and the Global

Karen Beckman
Film Theory's Animated Map

EDITORIAL 

In volume 56.2 of Framework, Susan Potter’s lushly articulate “Valentino’s Lesbianism” opens new ways of perceiving the “lesbian fantasmagoric” embedded in the erotic nuances of Rudolf Valentino’s appeal. In “‘Use/Abuse/Everyone/ Everything’: A Dialogue on LA Plays Itself,” Benjamin Halligan and Laura Wilson, in a back-and-forth conversation as an analytical device, speculate on what they see as the queer normative breakthrough of Fred Halsted’s “mysterious and yet mythical” 1972 hardcore gay porno film, LA Plays Itself. The dossier “Geopolitics of Film and Media Theory,” guest edited and introduced by Masha Salazkina, examines geopolitics and theories across a range of national perspectives and genres, through the writing of Weihong Bao on early- to mid-century China; Naoki Yamamoto on 1920s Japan; Peter Limbrick on Moroccan short film and documentary; Felipe Pruneda Sentíes on Latin American fiction film; Kay Dickinson on Arab cinema and Rancière; Bhaskar Sarkar on ideas of plasticity, architecture and Indian cinema; and Karen Beckman on animation.

– Drake Stutesman