Framing Agnes, Chase Joynt (dir.) (2022), Canada: Fae Pictures and Level Ground

Abstract

In Chase Joynt’s documentary Framing Agnes (2022), the pathologizing voice of the medical expert and the sensationalizing frameworks of the daily talk show are subverted in a powerful rendering of transgender experience in North America in the 1950s. Built on previously unseen dossiers of transgender patients at UCLA, Joynt’s ‘communally-driven excavation’ engages with debates around ethical storytelling, the problematics of historical icons, and the politics of transgender visibility. Through six intimate encounters with the past, Joynt employs an historical approach that, as Carolyn Dinshaw describes, harnesses ‘ideas of the past, [creates] relations with the past, […] in efforts to build selves and communities now and into the future’ (Getting Medieval, 1999). Combining film review with a literary-historical analysis of the case study ‘genre’, this submission will analyse the promises and pitfalls of Joynt’s cinematic endeavour, asking what a reframing of trans historicities might achieve in the safeguarding of increasingly besieged futurities