Nonbinary transfeminine filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun has solidified their position as a leading figure in new trans cinema with their directorial debut, the internet-coming-of-age film We're All Going to the World's Fair (2021), and their recent release, the psychological dysphoria-horror I Saw the TV Glow (2024). In combining nostalgia and horror to queer ends, Schoenbrun's films explore the complex relationships between identity, media, and the internet, sparking intense discussions among trans and cis critics alike.

This special screening of I Saw the TV Glow will be introduced by writer and researcher Dylan Rowen, who considers the power that images have for those wanting to transition from one certain type of life to another; the adoptive pull and allure that the moving image holds over someone with no recourse to normative scripts of cis-hetero belonging. If disjunction and transfiguration are key aspects of a trans cinematic form, how might Schoenbrun’s second narrative feature acutely render these moments of (dis)identification within someone before they even realise that they are trans?

This film is full of shimmering images and coruscating streaks of light; little moments of affiliation and resonance that are bound up with the affective glow of a TV screen playing old re-runs of one's once-beloved show, now tainted with nostalgia. Screen scholar Eliza Steinbock writes that the "cinematic aesthetics of the shimmer pattern the affective space of posttranssexual embodiment." The affective dimensions of a trans identification and desire for transition are multifaceted; both generative and disruptive, and this plays out figuratively within the film and within its general reception. To borrow Steinbock’s term, the film shimmers; it takes on the coruscating quality of a dream, or perhaps of a nightmare. This is a nightmare of living one's life as someone, or something you're not, reaching old age and realising that a different path was there all along. I Saw the TV Glow records this horror; it is a wake-up call to the uncracked egg that "there is still time."

Doors open: 6.15pm

Introduction by Dylan Rowen, and Screening: 6.30pm

About the presenter:

Dylan Rowen is a writer and researcher from Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide, now living and working on unceded Wurundjeri land/Melbourne. They are a PhD candidate in Screen and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, researching representations of homosexual, queer, and trans identities in modernist and avant-garde literature and film. In 2024, they were a Critics Campus fellow at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Their writing can be found in Senses of Cinema, Rough Cut, The Guardian, Cinema Reborn, Meanjin, Cordite, and elsewhere.

Screening as part of the New Trans Cinemas min-program at the University of Melbourne. Keep an eye for future events as part of this series.