ROUGH CUT: Curating Deviance with Marc Francis

Please join us for the next installment of Rough Cut on Thursday, November 13 at 12:30pm in HQ 121. We will be joined by Marc Francis, Manager of Film Programming at Yale, who will discuss his book Curating Deviance: Programming the Queer Film Canon (forthcoming from Duke University Press, February 2026). 

 

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 joined Yale in January 2024. Marc holds a PhD in Film and Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prior to joining Yale, he served as Head Programmer for Wayward Cinema (Los Angeles), Associate Editor at Film Quarterly, and worked in film archiving, preservation, and servicing at Paramount Pictures, Warner Brothers Discovery, and HBO. In addition, he has written extensively about queer film and media as well as documentary. He has been published in Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, InTransition, Jump Cut, and elsewhere.

Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP to nathaniel.lacelle-peterson@yale.edu to let us know if you plan to attend the event. We look forward to seeing you on November 13!