We are wrapping up the semester with a film screening and lecture this week. I hope you will be able to join us.

Film Screening: All of Us Strangers

Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2:30pm to 4:30pm in the Center for the Arts (Building 1P), Room 223. This is a PG CLUE event.

Film Description:

One night in his near-empty tower block in contemporary London, Adam (Andrew Scott) has a chance encounter with a mysterious neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), which punctures the rhythm of his everyday life. As a relationship develops between them, Adam is preoccupied with memories of the past and finds himself drawn back to the suburban town where he grew up, and the childhood home where his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), appear to be living, just as they were on the day they died, 30 years before.

Also, join us for the Queer Lecture Series with Prof. David Gerstner on Thursday, December 12, to discuss the film. Same location and time.

Queer Lecture Series: “Writing Queer Memory and Desire in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers“

Thursday, Dec. 12, 2:30 pm to 4:00pm in the Center for the Arts (Building 1P), Room 223. This is a CC CLUE event.

The LGBTQ Resource Center invites the campus community to an exciting lecture series celebrating our LGBTQ+ faculty and staff! Refreshments will be served.

How do we make others believe in us? What forms of make-believe, image-making and language-games, do we engage in so that those with whom we are intimate might “know who we are,” so that they may in fact believe in who we imagine ourselves to be? In Haigh’s cinematic world, then, writing transforms the world-building of relationships. Writing, that which plays no small role in the scene of his films, is the lynch pin in the cinematic world he creates. It is precisely the “graphie”—the manner of writing—through which make-believe, making believe in self and other, takes place.

This event is pesented by David Gerstner, Professor of Cinema Studies, Department of Media Culture

David A. Gerstner is Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Media Culture at The City University of New York’s College of Staten Island. He also serves as a member of the Doctoral faculty at the The Graduate Center, CUNY’s Film Studies Certificate Program/Department of Theater. In 2024,he was awarded Chevalier de l’ Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has authored multiple books and articles on queer film studies and French and U.S. cinemas. His books include, Queer Imaginings: On Writing and Cinematic Friendship (2023); Christophe Honoré: A Critical Introduction; Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic; and The Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture (editor, 2006—New York Public Library “Best of Reference,”2007). He is co-editor, with Cáel Keegan,of the book series, Queer Screens at Wayne State University Press. He completed a short film, Between Men: A Historical Fantasy, in 2021

These events are a collaboration between the LGBTQ Resource Center and Department of Media Culture.

For more information, contact Jeremiah.Jurkiewicz@csi.cuny.edu at 718.982.3091.

Wishing everyone the best during finals.

By Jeremiah Jurkiewicz (he, him, his)