Curating Deviance

“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

“Witty, theoretically astute, and rigorously researched, Curating Deviance opens new theories of intertextual signification through close reading of ‘promiscuous programming’ in late-twentieth-century repertory and art houses. Francis’s prose is accessible enough for undergraduates, and his arguments will satisfy and surprise seasoned exhibition and queer cinema historians alike.”—Caetlin Benson-Allott, author of The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television