Transgressing the Frame: Filmic Technique, Eros, and Boundary-Blurring in Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses

Abstract Book of the 7th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality

Year: 2026

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Transgressing the Frame: Filmic Technique, Eros, and Boundary-Blurring in Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses

Robert Blankemeyer

ABSTRACT:

Carolee Schneemann’s film Fuses, first shown around 1967-1968, is a depiction of Schneemann and her lover James Tenney having sex, interspersed variously with other scene such as trees, Schneemann’s cat Kitch, a bedroom window. Generating both admiration and controversy upon its release, the film “Notes on Fuses” (1971), Schneemann herself describes her wanting “viewers to confront identifications and attitudes toward their own and the other’s gender.” In this project, I seek to place both this goal outlined by Schneemann and the effective impact of the film within the framework of Eros we have been developing in our course.
Attention will of course be paid to such aspects of the work as Schneemann’s employment of her own body as a medium, cinematographic techniques such as jump-cuts and fades, and the employment of acid to burn the celluloid itself. Drawing on previous research within the field, I will show how these aspects serve not only to blur the lines between sexual and gender difference, but also to invoke the very possibility of a society in which such differences fade away entirely, thereby confronting the viewer with a challenge to imagine what this society would look like and, though I am reluctant to label this a “call to action,” what may be done to achieve it. The main aim of this project, however, is to investigate the narrative, rhetorical, and artistic functions of symbols which Schneemann employs, such as her own cat Kitch, whose role in the film has been described alternately as inherently sensual and inherently asexual, and the bedroom window, about which I have hereto surprisingly been unable to find much discourse, but which, in my view, necessarily invokes such taboos as voyeurism and exhibitionism. I will argue that, through the incorporation of these symbols, perhaps as much as through the scenes depicting human sex itself, Schneemann’s work ultimately points toward the fading away of societally imposed taboos and restrictions on sexuality, thus pointing toward the renewed dominance of the pleasure principle over the reality principle within the framework laid out by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization.

Keywords: Cinema, Feminism, Sex, Eros, Symbolism