[Commlist] CFP: ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay

CALL FOR PAPERS

ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay

Few filmmakers were more central to both 1960s sexploitation/grindhouse 
cinema and 1970s hardcore film, not to mention 1980s horror b-movies, 
than Roberta Findlay, an underappreciated jack-of-all-trades who wrote, 
directed, worked cameras and lighting, and acted, among other production 
roles. Yet few women filmmakers have so emphatically rejected the label 
of feminist, forestaling any facile recuperative efforts. Findlay broke 
new ground for women in film even as she sneered at the notion, with a 
legacy extending across genres and decades, from Take Me Naked(1966), to 
A Woman’s Torment(1977), to Tenement (1985).

Cult and porn aficionados have long hailed Findlay’s expansive and 
idiosyncratic body of work, locating her in a canon alongside Andy 
Milligan, Doris Wishman, Joe Sarno, and other luminaries of the 
cinematic underbelly. But scholars have been slower to attend to her, 
perhaps in part because her fragmented filmography was partly 
pseudonymous and even today remains partly lost.

We are currently soliciting abstracts of approximately 100-200 words for 
essays to be included in a book-length anthology on Roberta Findlay to 
appear in 2021. As the first comprehensive study of Findlay’s career, 
this collection seeks to deepen our understanding of the filmmaker and 
build on existing existing fan-culture knowledge by bringing that into 
dialogue with ongoing scholarly discussions of exploitation film and 
pornography so that scholarly communities can better attend to Findlay’s 
work and its rich, complex sexual and textual politics and stylistic 
skill and innovation. Essays may focus on individual films or on themes 
and topics that pervade her work.

Possible areas of inquiry could include: Findlay’s striking 
sexploitation collaborations with her then-partner Michael Findlay; her 
turn to hardcore and the evolution of her style across the 1970s; the 
role of horror in her oeuvre; the craftsmanship of her non-directorial 
work; sexual and gender politics; marketing, distribution, and reception 
of her work across time; or other creative and productive angles.

Essays included in the refereed anthology will be of approximately 5,000 
to 8,000 words, referenced in Chicagoendnote style. We especially 
welcome work from BIPOC, female, queer, trans, and other traditionally 
underrepresented groups and voices.

The Films of Roberta Findlaywill be one of the scholarly editions to be 
published by the University of Edinburgh Press in a series of 
anthologies examining overlooked American film directors. Series editors 
are Robert Singer, Ph.D., Frances Smith, Ph.D. and Gary D. Rhodes, Ph.D.

Please attach a curriculum vitaeto your abstract and email them directly 
to the anthology’s editors by August 31, 2020.

Peter Alilunas, Associate Professor, Cinema Studies Department, 
University of Oregon: (pka /at/ uoregon.edu) <mailto:(pka /at/ uoregon.edu)>
Whitney Strub, Associate Professor, History Department, Rutgers 
University-Newark: (wstrub /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(wstrub /at/ gmail.com)>

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