Ruins, Magical Objects, Litter, Synthetics The Queer Materials of Postwar Avant-Garde Film Suárez, Juan A. “Ruins, Magical Objects, Litter, Synthetics.” In _Experimental Film and Queer Materiality_. Oxford University Press, 2024. doi:10.1093/oso/9780197566992.003.0002. > Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s defense of the queer appeal of objects and experiences whose meaning seemed “mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us” makes most sense when contextualized against what Henry Miller labeled “futilitarian” postwar material culture.11 Precisely in reaction against this standard, queer experimental filmmakers embedded their fantasies in aberrant, eccentric, irrational, and unaccountable objects and materials, such as the magical props in Kenneth Anger’s and Harry Smith’s films or the stuttering trifles that populate Marie Menken’s. Others, such as Willard Maas, James Broughton, Ken Jacobs, and Ron Rice explored the queer potential of dated and dysfunctional matter, such as ruins, rubble, and junk. And Fernand Léger, Sarah Kathryn Arledge, and Jim Davis gleefully perverted functional and industrially manufactured materials, such as chrome surfaces, plastics, and synthetics by aligning them with wayward sexualities and desires. Cumulatively, the work of these filmmakers offers a dissident guide to the postwar everyday. It articulates a queer- materialist genealogy in avantgarde cinema— where “materialist” does not refer to the basic constituents of the film image, as it did in Peter Gidal’s definition of “structural- materialist” film in the 1970s, but to the stuff of common life. After all, the critical refusal that animated queer experimental film did not always take the high road of visions, interiority, and myth. It also took the low paths that wound around the odd discards, humble substances, rubble, and irrational objects that were some of modernity’s unspoken material backgrounds.