Punitive Heterotopia in Ann Turner’s Celia (1988)

Ann Turner's 1988 film Celia is set amongst the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1950s during the "Red scare" of the Menzies administration. When 9-year-old Celia's grandma dies, Celia finds emotional solace in the company of her next door neighbours, the Tanners. Celia's conservative father, Ray, attends to stop his daughter from associating with the communist-sympathising Tanners through the gift of a rabbit. In the 1950s attempts to cull Australia's "rabbit plague" involved the widespread banning of rabbits as household pets. When Celia's pet rabbit is taken from her she seeks retribution against the forces of patriarchal domination in her life, including her father and uncle. This retribution involves stylised magick rituals, staged judicial "performances" and acts of direct violence. This paper argues, after Foucault, that, divested of political power as a girl and a child, Celia establishes a phantastical heterotopia that sits radically outside of the hegemonic power structures of conservative Australia. This opens a radical potential for a judicial approach that reflects a child's experiential understanding of the world. Tragically Celia's imitation modelling ensures her replication of the retributive model of punishment of her adult milieu (both in its treatment of communists and rabbits), albeit with a degree of public spectacle repressed by the private space of the adult penal system. More optimistically, Celia's stagings also contain elements of restorative justice. The paper concludes with a consideration of how a penal model based upon restorative justice for under 18s would better serve children's development and rehabilitation

Objectifying Visual Language in Autobiographical Comics

Critiques of the objectification of female characters in comics have often focused upon depictions within the superhero genre (cf. Avery-Natale 2013; Cocca 2014; Nelson 2015). Such arguments adopt the framework of Laura Mulvey's ‘Male Gaze’ (1975) to assess the costuming, physical physique, and narrative role given to such characters. In one comment on similar controversies, Neil Cohn (2014) has argued for a greater emphasis upon the visual language used in objectifying depictions that does not get caught up in debates over realism since, he argues, comics are unconcerned with reality. Autobiographical comics, however, now form a significant part of the comics market and scholarship (cf. Schlichting and Schmid 2019). A tension exists between the rhetorical mode of visual metaphor exploited by comics (cf. Venkatesan and Saji 2021) and the appeal to authenticity made by non-fiction (cf. El Refaie 2012). Focusing on autobiographical comics – here, some published between 1991 and 2018 – allows us to assess how sexual objectification operates within comics without the issue being clouded by irresolvable appeals to reality in the fundamentally escapist/ fantastic superhero genre. The visual language in the comics by Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and David Heatley has been criticized for reducing the ‘other’ to a series of more stagnant, occluded, and restrictive graphic patterns than afforded to their author surrogates. Ariel Schrag's work, meanwhile, points towards possible means of avoiding such tendencies in future autobiographical comics.</jats:p

Animate Dissent: The Political Objects of Czech Stop-Motion and Animated Film (1946-2012)

Czech animated allegories of the period of 1946 to 2012 encode their political ideas in objects and things, rather than through conventional narrative techniques such as voice-over or dialogue. The existence of these objects in cinematic time and space is integral to this process of political encoding, which is achieved through the selection of objects, cinematography and editing. In some of these films, time and space themselves are politically encoded. Materialist critical approaches to the film texts can help illuminate these latent political meanings. 'Thing theory', which puts a critical emphasis upon reading objects and things, exposes the politically resistant role of simple, domestic objects in the films of Jiří Trnka and Hermína Týrlová. Trnka's cinema in particular defends traditional, pastoral modes of being in which the individual is rooted within their environment. 'Actor-network-theory', a means of interrogating the relationship between actors in networks, resonates with the political ideas present in the cinema of Surrealist artist Jan Švankmajer. Švankmajer's central political project is an interrogation of anthropocentrism and attempts by humans to exert systems of control and order upon non-human actors. Rather than celebrating functional, domestic objects like Trnka or Týrlová, Švankmajer's cinema is radically anti-utilitarian. Objects are depicted as things that resist categorisation. 'Rhythmanalysis' – a mode of poetic-scientific investigation developed by philosopher Henri Lefebvre – can be used to unpick the rhythms in the animations of Jirí Barta. Barta's films critique rational clock time and the design of urban spaces through the use of editing patterns and repetition. Finally, all three materialist approaches in combination help illustrate the political content of animated films (and live-action films with significant passages of animation) produced in the wake of the Velvet Revolution. Such films often question the relationship between the individual Czech citizen and the Czech capital city of Prague. The animated films of the aforementioned directors and historical periods, tend to give precedence to the material world of objects over the semiotic world of humans, though these two realms are often shown to be inter-dependent. To this end, the political messages of the films are conveyed not through language, but through images and things.AHR

The Lies of the Land: The Alluvial Formalities of Gothic East Anglia

East Anglia is an evasive region; with its stretches of grey shingle that give way to silt and water, isolated marshes and great, flat panoramas that are literally falling into the sea. This article will show that East Anglia is a broader and more cohesive site of Gothic tradition and possibility than has previously been recognized, even if that possibility is found both textually and topographically in the incohesive, the ephemeral and the immaterial. We will also suggest that the short form is how this has so far been achieved – most famously in the short ghostly tales of M. R. James; more recently in Matthew Holness's unsettling short story ‘Possum’ (2013) and his 2018 film of the same name – and is, in fact, the most appropriate form for this act of textual production.</jats:p

The lies of the land: the Alluvial Formalities of Gothic East Anglia

East Anglia is an evasive region; with its stretches of grey shingle that give way to silt and water, isolated marshes and great, flat panoramas that are literally falling into the sea. This article will show that East Anglia is a broader and more cohesive site of Gothic tradition and possibility than has previously been recognized, even if that possibility is found both textually and topographically in the incohesive, the ephemeral and the immaterial. We will also suggest that the short form is how this has so far been achieved – most famously in the short ghostly tales of M. R. James; more recently in Matthew Holness's unsettling short story ‘Possum’ (2013) and his 2018 film of the same name – and is, in fact, the most appropriate form for this act of textual production

Animate Dissent: The Political Objects of Czech Stop-Motion and Animated Film (1946-2012)

Czech animated allegories of the period of 1946 to 2012 encode their political ideas in objects and things, rather than through conventional narrative techniques such as voice-over or dialogue. The existence of these objects in cinematic time and space is integral to this process of political encoding, which is achieved through the selection of objects, cinematography and editing. In some of these films, time and space themselves are politically encoded. Materialist critical approaches to the film texts can help illuminate these latent political meanings. 'Thing theory', which puts a critical emphasis upon reading objects and things, exposes the politically resistant role of simple, domestic objects in the films of Jiří Trnka and Hermína Týrlová. Trnka's cinema in particular defends traditional, pastoral modes of being in which the individual is rooted within their environment. 'Actor-network-theory', a means of interrogating the relationship between actors in networks, resonates with the political ideas present in the cinema of Surrealist artist Jan Švankmajer. Švankmajer's central political project is an interrogation of anthropocentrism and attempts by humans to exert systems of control and order upon non-human actors. Rather than celebrating functional, domestic objects like Trnka or Týrlová, Švankmajer's cinema is radically anti-utilitarian. Objects are depicted as things that resist categorisation. 'Rhythmanalysis' – a mode of poetic-scientific investigation developed by philosopher Henri Lefebvre – can be used to unpick the rhythms in the animations of Jirí Barta. Barta's films critique rational clock time and the design of urban spaces through the use of editing patterns and repetition. Finally, all three materialist approaches in combination help illustrate the political content of animated films (and live-action films with significant passages of animation) produced in the wake of the Velvet Revolution. Such films often question the relationship between the individual Czech citizen and the Czech capital city of Prague. The animated films of the aforementioned directors and historical periods, tend to give precedence to the material world of objects over the semiotic world of humans, though these two realms are often shown to be inter-dependent. To this end, the political messages of the films are conveyed not through language, but through images and things