70 research outputs found
'A hatred so intenseâŠ' 'We need to talk about Kevin', postfeminism and womenâs cinema
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Beyond Bluebeard: feminist nostalgia and Top of the Lake (2013)
Jane Campionâs films have repeatedly used the Bluebeard story as a myth underpinning their narrative structures. This article examines the way in which her 2012 TV series, Top of the Lake both uses and moves beyond this myth, arguing that its central focus on mothers and daughters draws instead on another, related myth, that of Demeter and Proserpine. This story, Mary Jacobus has suggested, is the Greek myth that Freud does not select, indeed represses, in his search for a founding myth that would ground the psychoanalytic story of childhood development. It is also a myth which, in a gesture of âfeminist nostalgiaâ, feminists have repeatedly appropriated in their desire to recover a âlostâ, unalienated mother-daughter relationship. Top of the Lake, I argue, is both an exercise in and investigation of such feminist nostalgia. Campionâs evocation of the myth of Proserpine/Demeter to underpin its complex mix of female Gothic and detective story counters the dominant cultural narrative of Oedipus. But like Jacobus it remains suspicious of utopian fantasies and the unalienated body
Space, place and realism: Red road and the gendering of a cinematic history
John Hill has described the way in which the male-centred narratives of British âworking-class filmsâ of the 1980s and 1990s mobilise the idea of working-class community as âa metaphor for the state of the nationâ. Writing on films of the same period by women directors, Charlotte Brunsdon deems it more difficult to see these films as representations âof the nationâ. There are, she writes, âreal equivocations in the fit between being a woman and representing Britishnessâ.
This article explores this issue, arguing that the history of British cinema to which Hillâs chapter contributes is not only bound up with a particular sense of British national identity but founded on a particular conception, and use, of space and place. Taking Andrea Arnoldâs Red Road (2006) as its case study, it asks what it is about this sense of space and place that excludes women as subjects, rendering their stories outside and even disruptive of the tradition Hill describes. Finally, drawing on feminist philosophy and cultural geography, it suggests ways in which answering these questions might also help us think about the difficult questions raised by Jane Gaines in a number of articles, around how we might think together feminist film theory and film history
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Womenâs Time and the cinema of Marleen Gorris
This article examines the cinema of Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris in the light of Julia Kristevaâs concept of Womenâs Timeâ and of more recent attempts to conceptualise a temporality that is lived âin the feminineâ but is not, as Kristevaâs is, either outside historical time â as cyclic and/or monumental â or aligned to the repetitive drudgery of domestic labour. Drawing on Lisa Baraitserâs (2017) concept of âunbecoming timeâ, a time that âwill not unfoldâ but is lived as endurance, as âstaying beside othersâ, and as care, it argues that Gorrisâs films seek to depict such a temporality. The article first explores the shifting engagements of feminist theory with concepts of time and the relationship of these to ideas of subjectivity and narrative, in particular cinematic narrative. It then examines the cinema of Marleen Gorris in the light of these concepts, focusing on three of her films that span a twenty-five year period: her second film, Broken Mirrors (1984); Antoniaâs Line (1995), her fourth film and winner of the 1996 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film; and her most recent and possibly last film, Within the Whirlwind (2009). It gives most attention to Within the Whirlwind. In many ways Gorrisâs most ambitious film, it is also her least discussed, and of her films, the one that focuses most directly on historical time
Reflections on equality, diversity and gender at the end of a media studies headship
This article reflects, from a feminist perspective, on a five-year period as Head of a School of Media. It considers the position of media studies within the new academic capitalism, and the re-masculinisation of the university that this has produced. It considers strategies employed by the field to stake its own claim to that masculinisation, in particular the embrace of âthe digitalâ. Finally it describes the challenges this posed for the author, and tactics employed in dealing with them
Women directors in Hungarian cinema 1931â44
Virtually nothing has been written about Hungary's three pioneering women film directors in English or Hungarian. The only mentions of the three directors and their films are found in throwaway comments in Hungarian works of film history, in an incorrect entry in a national filmography (Varga 1999), and in a dismissive article of 1985, which ignores one of the three films altogether. This article seeks to make up for this critical and historiographical oversight. This article asks why did these filmmakers succeed; and why and how did they succeed in an industry so utterly dominated by men? The other aim of this article is to move beyond discovery, and read the films in their context to assess the contribution they made to national cinema and the dominant nationalist discourse in interwar and wartime Hungary
Undoing violent masculinity: Lynne Ramsayâs You were never really here (2018)
Reviewers described Lynne Ramsayâs You Were Never Really Here (2018) as a âTaxi Driver for a new century.â Certainly, its narrative of an inarticulate killer who is also the would-be saviour of a lost and damaged âlittle white girlâ recalls that of Scorseseâs 1976 film., and the two films share a fragmented, hallucinatory quality. Yet what such comparisons miss is both the devastating critique of this culturally powerful narrative to be found in Ramsayâs film, and the connections it makes between this paradigmatic story of a failed and violent but ultimately sympathetic white masculinity and another: that of the traumatising mother who is responsible for the violence of her psychotic son. In this article, I explore the nature of Ramsayâs critique, arguing that her film both refuses and interrogates both of these readings of gender. Ramsayâs protagonist, like Scorseseâs, is a traumatised war veteran, but his identification is not with a fantasised and recuperative ideal masculinity but with its feminised victims: girl and mother. His tragedy is not that he fails in his rescue attempt, or that he is in thrall to the âdeath motherâ, but that he believes that the means of this rescue might be masculinity
âIâm not your motherâ: British social realism, neoliberalism and the maternal subject in Sally Wainwrightâs Happy Valley (BBC1 2014-2016)
This article examines Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley (BBC1, 2014â2016) in the context of recent feminist attempts to theorise the idea of a maternal subject. Happy Valley, a police series set in an economically disadvantaged community in West Yorkshire, has been seen as expanding the genre of British social realism, in its focus on strong Northern women, by giving it âa female voiceâ (Gorton, 2016: 73). I argue that its challenge is more substantial. Both the tradition of British social realism on which the series draws, and the neoliberal narratives of the family which formed the discursive context of its production, I argue, are founded on a social imaginary in which the mother is seen as responsible for the production of the selves of others, but cannot herself be a subject. The series itself, however, places at its centre an active, articulate, mobile and angry maternal subject. In so doing, it radically contests both a tradition of British social realism rooted in male nostalgia and more recent neoliberal narratives of maternal guilt and lifestyle choice. It does this through a more fundamental contestation: of the wider cultural narratives about selfhood and the maternal that underpin both. Its reflective maternal subject, whose narrative journey involves acceptance of an irrecoverable loss, anger and guilt as a crucial aspect of subjectivity, and who embodies an ethics of relationality, is a figure impossible in conventional accounts of subject and nation. She can be understood, however, in terms of recent feminist theories of the maternal
âNot a country at allâ: landscape and Wuthering Heights
This article explores the issue of womenâs representational genealogies through an analysis of Andrea Arnoldâs 2011 Wuthering Heights. Beginning with 1970s feminist arguments for a specifically female literary tradition, it argues that running through both these early attempts to construct an alternative female literary tradition and later work in feminist philosophy, cultural geography and film history is a concern with questions of âalternative landscapesâ: of how to represent, and how to encounter, space differently. Adopting Mary Jacobusâ notion of intertextual âcorrespondenceâ between womenâs texts, and taking Arnoldâs film as its case study, it seeks to trace some of the intertextual movements â the reframings, deframings and spatial reorderings â that link Andrea Arnoldâs film to Emily BrontĂ«âs original novel. Focusing on two elements of her treatment of landscape â her use of âunframedâ landscape and her focus on visceral textural detail â it points to correspondences in other womenâs writing, photography and film-making. It argues that these intensely tactile close-up sequences which puncture an apparently realist narrative constitute an insistent presence beneath, or within, the ordered framing which is our more usual mode of viewing landscape. As the novel Wuthering Heights is unmade in Arnoldâs adaptation and its framings ruptured, it is through this disturbance of hierarchies of time, space and landscape that we can trace the correspondences of an alternative genealogy
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