In Curating Deviance, Marc Francis scavenges film history for signs of vibrant, wayward life in the film programming of US art house and repertory cinemas between 1968 and 1989. Francis examines how creative and savvy programmers screened films by the likes of John Waters, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Russ Meyer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and a bevy of others in major cities across the United States, forming intertextual constellations in their repertory calendars. These programs allied a dizzying range of sexual and gendered outlaws, including stigmatized practices often overlooked by LGBT-focused queer theory. Curating Deviance reveals how repertory and art cinemas built a coalition of outcasts stigmatized for their taboo desires or identities, rekindling queer utopian imaginaries.

Marc Francis is Manager of Film Programming in Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale University and has worked at HBO, Warner Bros, and Paramount.

"In Marc Francis’s well-researched and robustly imagined Curating Deviance, art-house revival has found both a cultural history and curatorial rationale that goes beyond nostalgia. With a theorist’s acuity and a cinephile’s affection, Francis reframes stories of imaginative curators and programmers who transformed the movie calendar into a renegade syllabus of maverick desire."
-- Tavia Nyong’o William Lampson Professor of American Studies, Yale University

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Promiscuous Programming: Filmic Eclecticism in Post-1968 Art House Cinema  23
2. Deviant Repertories: The Queer Typologies and Taxonomies of Art House Curating  57
3. Erotic Intertextuality: On the Programmatic Forms of Desire  97
4. Repertory Time: Double Features and the Temporality of Queer Spectatorship  143
5. Fore Shame! On the History of Programming Queer “Bad Objects&requo;  181
Afterword. Curating Queer Cinema After 1989  207
Notes  215
Bibliography  267
Index