Ageless: Akerman’s avatars'

This chapter demonstrates substantive mastery of the works of filmmaker Chantal Akerman, contributing to an important volume of reflections on Akerman’s late work (from the 1980s onward). Akerman, who died in 2015, was a germinal figure in experimental cinema of the 1970s, and her work remains a key reference point for feminist and formalist experimental filmmaking even today. The theoretical frameworks are entirely new, examining the relationships of ageing and self-representation through Akerman’s oeuvre, and particularly focussing on the figure of the daughter in Saute ma ville (1968), Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), Aujourd’hui, dis-moi (1980), Demain on déménage (2004), La Folie Almayer (2011), and No Home Movie (2015). The chapter deftly makes use of Simone de Beauvoir’s volume on ageing, La Veillesse (1970), to reflect on the temporal stasis induced in the series of daughters depicted in Akerman’s work. The chapter extends these reflections to consider how these ageless avatars are sites of resistance, not only of the passage of time, but also sites of political resistance, and intergenerational joy

Transitional borders and intermedial spectacle: Kiarostami and opera, between France and Iran

This article discusses the complex cultural and theoretical relationships between France and Iran, Europe and the Middle East in recent intermedial work by the film-maker Abbas Kiarostami. Through the installation Looking At Tazieh (2004), the film Shirin (2008) and the staging and direction of the opera Così fan tutte, the article explores the philosophical and contextual implications of spectacle within these trans-cultural productions. In particular, it discusses how French cultural interventions into Kiarostami’s recent intermedial work can be rethought productively outside the remit of francophone or transnational cinemas, instead refocusing on the intermediality of spectacle and modes of enculturated looking in these three recent productions

Absurd avatars, transcultural relations: Elia Suleiman, Franco-Palestinian filmmaking and beyond

This article adopts an innovative new theoretical approach to questions of geopoliltics in transcultural filmmaking. Examining the work of the Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman and French cultural production (on which the funding and distribution of many of his feature-films has been dependent), the article demonstrates significance by enhancing and re-opening the often ‘unspoken’ dialogue of Franco-Palestinian geopolitical relations which has been frequently designated as historical or political, rather than also and in equal measure, cultural, aesthetic, ethical and personal. Deploying close comparative analysis of Suleiman's mute self-representation within his films and auteurist and absurdist tropes familiar to European literature and art in the twentieth century, the article identifies a transcultural form and sentiment within critical tropes of the Absurd, that can consequently be mapped onto Suleiman's films, and the films' aesthetics, specifically in his recent feature films Divine Intervention (2002) and Le Temps qu'il reste/The Time that Remains (2009). Demonstrating significant awareness and engagement with transnational cinemas, Franco-Palestinian geopolitics and histories, and postcolonial film studies, the article innovatively combines these areas in order to better understand how transcultural identities might become useful tools for widening our understanding of cultural aesthetics

The “new” experimentalism? Women in/and/on film

This chapter deploys a range of feminist ethical philosophy and theory that embraces multiplicity and difference, to examine two contemporary art films by female artists Shirin Neshat and Gilliant Wearing. Including the work of French philosopher Marie-José Mondzain on the ethics of looking and Audre Lorde on the celebration of difference, the chapter combines close analysis of the films with these theoretical perspectives that specifically take up a plural, difference-based mode of feminist analysis. Deploying Mondzain's writing on visibility, affect and violence, it first contests spectatorial claims to universal affect by engaging with the bi-cultural positioning of Neshat's WOMEN WITHOUT MEN (2009) in relation to Euro-Western and diasporic/exilic Iranian conceptions of femininity and otherness (and the uneasiness of these cultural translations). Deploying Lorde's writing on difference and her attack on "universal' feminism, combined with Mondzain's approach to vision and imagination, the chapter then explores the active revisions of seeing and visibility, through moments of intense emotional creativity enacted in selected sequences from Wearing's film SELF MADE (2010). It concludes by suggesting that the engagements in this chapter offer a starting ground for what a restitution of difference in relation to contemporary experimental film (by women) might look like, particularly for contemporary tensions in feminist film studies

Backdating the Crip Technoscience Manifesto: Stephen Dwoskin’s digital activism

This essay considers experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin’s work as a lifelong process of technological activism and “knowing-making.” Using recent frameworks from Critical Disability Studies, Chamarette demonstrates how Dwoskin’s decades of activism parallel and in some cases pre-date the evolution of Disability Studies as it is currently situated. As an early adopter of digital and ‘cusp-of digital’ technologies (Hi-8 cameras, Mini-DV tapes, email, digital editing suites), Dwoskin’s creative work aligns with and backdates the “Crip Technoscience Manifesto” developed by Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch in 2019. Drawing on Dwoskin’s films and his archive, now housed at the University of Reading Special Collections (UK) Chamarette reframes Dwoskin’s late creative activity as tactics of technological adaptation, crip technoscience, and spheres of influence within digital and non-digital realms. These digital activisms ultimately give cause to reflect on the ambivalent, interdependent, friction-filled relationships between filmmaking, digitality and disability

Civilian earnings of Vietnam veterans

The relationship between military service and post-service earnings of Vietnam veterans was analyzed using the 1976 data of the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men (14 to 24 years of age in 1966). When earning attributes were examined, black Vietnam veterans entered the military from relatively socio-economically advantaged families while the reverse was true for white Vietname veterans. The Post-service earnings analysis of this sample of Vietnam veterans indicated the absence of positive effects of military service on subsequent civilian income. Additional analysis utilizing military service specific variables indicated that neither length of military training nor length of service in the military could be associated with positive post-service earnings returns for Vietnam veteransNaval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Californiahttp://archive.org/details/civilianearnings00chamNANAApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

‘Luminous Entities’: Ricciotto Canudo, spiritism, and nascent film theory

There is no doubt that the traumatic experiences of total war and mass death, and the longstanding socio-cultural phenomena of Spiritism and Spiritualism in fin de siècle Paris, had a lasting influence on modernist writer Ricciotto Canudo’s theories of cinema, as they did on later proponents of French film theory too. This essay therefore speaks to both Canudo’s intermediality – his reflections on cinema as a ‘total’ art form encompassing all others – and his sense of the spirit or spirituality of cinema, which is alluded to in his writings from 1908 to 1923. Although I focus mainly on his later years of work, and specifically on his essay, ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’, there is naturally some overlap between these and his earlier pre-war writing, in particular his ‘Birth of the Sixth Art’, written in 1911, and his essay ‘The Triumph of the Cinema’, written originally in Italian and published in 1908. Both were published posthumously and more widely distributed in 1927 via an edited collection of his works entitled L’Usine aux images (The Factory of Images). In the latter parts of this essay, I also place Canudo’s writing in posthumous relation to some examples of experimental and intermedial photography and film of this period in France, as a speculative and exploratory way of examining what might have been for Canudo’s theories, had he lived to engage with these new and dynamic artworks. Canudo is often seen as a shadowy forebear of later film theory, with the period of strongest influence in relation to his work taking place after his too-early death in 1923, the same year that his last essay, ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’, was published. Thus, in a way, my contribution to this collection does its own spirit work, by bringing the traces of Canudo’s writing and thought into contact with the ghostly images of avant-garde photography and film from 1924 onward

Overturning feminist phenomenologies: disability, complex embodiment, intersectionality, and film

1. This book chapter poses a very substantial contribution to three interdisciplinary fields: feminist phenomenology, critical disability studies, and film studies, showing how an integrated understanding of all three can posit filmmaking as a site from which new feminist understandings of complex embodiment can emerge. Challenging standard feminist phenomenologies of situated embodiment, the chapter specifically invites these models to reconsider gender within the framework of intersectionality – incorporating the lived experience of bodies which are not only gendered, but also normatively labelled as ‘able’ or ‘disabled’, raced, and queer. The chapter accounts persuasively for the relevance of film to feminist phenomenologies, identifying how cinematic techniques can complexify standardised accounts of situated embodiment, reveal implicit ‘ableisms’, and shift an ethical perspective on the world from one of ‘independence’ to ‘interdependence’. The chapter concisely summarises the large volume of existing literature on disability and film, identifying the ableist tropes that are commonly held, but also equally overthrown , in film and the moving image. To demonstrate the case for intersectional, complex embodiment, the chapter employs a range of moving image works, including a sequence from the Canadian documentary EXAMINED LIFE (2008), where activist Sunaura Taylor and Judith Butler take a walk in San Francisco, a promotional video developed by South African disability activist and ambassador Eddi Ndopu to support the costs of his Master’s studies at Oxford University, and the French fiction film Read My Lips (dir. Jacques Audiard, 2000). The chapter is the culmination of a sustained engagement with feminist phenomenologies and film-phenomenology over a decade of the author’s scholarship. It also places an ethical demand upon feminist phenomenologies to acknowledge the very necessary intersections and interactions between disability gender, and race, as a condition of feminist phenomenology’s own critical engagement with the world

The disappearing work: Chantal Akerman and phenomenologies of the ephemeral

In this article I argue that thresholds of attention or distraction provoke a phenomenological engagement with the ephemerality of moving image installations. Thus, patterns of spectatorial attention and distraction offer a potential methodology to examine ephemeral installations which exist for a limited duration, in particular in exhibition spaces. The article probes a range of conceptualizations of attention with relation to contemporary phenomenological film theory, and performance theory, in order to stage a reflective encounter with Chantal Akerman’s recent installation, Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide (To Walk Beside One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge, 2004). It ultimately argues that engaging with a phenomenology of the ephemeral may act as a corrective balance to the narrativizing and canon-building tendencies in recent film criticism of Akerman’s work