Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices

Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices

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Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices Sharon Lin Tay

© Sharon Lin Tay 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21776–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 18 17

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Hannah Patterson, who prodded this into existence

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Contents

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction: A Revised Women’s Cinema Through Lynn Hershmann-Leeson’s Cyberfeminist Interventions History and context Arriving at a sustainable ethical stance

1 2 6

1 On the Edges of the Authorial Voice: Liv Ullmann’s Faithless, Gendered Authorship, and Ingmar Bergman 2 On the Edges of the Documentary: Jill Craigie’s Political and Aesthetic Sensibilities Aesthetics of the political; or, politicising the aesthetic Argument and rhetoric Ethics and knowledge

26

42 47 52 57

3 On the Edges of Ethnography: Kim Longinotto’s Institution of Feminist Discourses The radical management of female discontent Interrogating institutions Feminism with women

61 62 71 76

4 On the Edges of Art Cinema: Sally Potter and the Feminist Response Dissecting stories Reinventing narratives Performing the personal and the political Aesthetic convergence and political response

84 85 88 92 97

vii

viii Contents

5 On the Edges of Post-Colonialism: Deepa Mehta and Transnational Cinema Transnational author

108 113

6 On the Edges of National Cinema: Sofia Coppola and Female Authorship The problem with female authorship A cinema of loneliness Lost in translation

126 127 131 134

7 On the Edges of Geopolitics: Sexual Difference in Ursula Biemann’s Video Essays Borderlands Interventions in representation Boundary events

148 153 157 165

Conclusion: Vignettes of a New Feminist Politique: Gisela Sanders Alcántara, Guo Xiaolu, Christina McPhee, Liz Miller The personal is political reconfigured Interdependent media Beyond the evidentiary . . . . . . And towards participatory politics

171 174 184 186 190

Bibliography

197

Index

205

List of Figures 1 Gaea Girls (Kim Longinotto, 2005) 2 Publicity poster for Rough Aunties (Kim Longinotto, 2008) 3 The women’s itineraries, from Remote Sensing (Ursula Biemann, 2001) 4 Working girl and sex tourist, from Remote Sensing (Ursula Biemann, 2001) 5 Desirable national traits, from Writing Desire (Ursula Biemann, 2000) 6 Publicity poster for Yo Soy Alcántara (Gisela Sanders Alcántara, 2004) 7 A layered image from La Conchita mon amor, interactive web (Christina McPhee, 2006) 8 Vernacular shrine, from La Conchita mon amor, interactive web (Christina McPhee, 2006) 9 A hefty water bill, from The Water Front (Liz Miller, 2006) 10 Demonstrating for public services, from The Water Front (Liz Miller, 2006) 11 Publicity poster, from New Children/New York, an ongoing project by Gisela Sanders Alcántara and Lauren Mucciolo

ix

69 82 159 163 163 175 188 188 191 191

194

Acknowledgements This book has benefited from the generosity of many people. The filmmakers included in this project and who shared their works and thoughts with me have my gratitude. Although this book has been four years in the making, the theoretical and political bases of this project dates back further: in particular, my doctoral work with Yvonne Tasker at the University of East Anglia, funded entirely by a studentship and an ORS award, helped shape my thoughts about film culture and feminist theory. Patty Zimmermann further honed these ideas by her generosity and example. Her repeated invitations to participate in the Flaherty seminar and co-curate the digital arts exhibition for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival gave me the opportunities to engage with the richness and depth of independent film culture. The good humour exhibited by Dale Hudson (my co-curator) and Tom Shevory (Patty’s festival co-director) made curating the exhibition for three consecutive years a privilege and a fabulous learning experience. I thank Daniel Bernardi, Ursula Biemann, Nicholas Chare, and Anneke Smelik for their collegiality in reading and/or commenting on particular aspects of this project. Research funding from Middlesex University provided some relief that enabled my research. Thanks also to my friends and family for support and distraction. Amongst others, Annabel Bordmann, Anwar Ibrahim, Sylvain Joret, Min Lee, Harriet Margolis, Cheok Mei-Ing, Carol O’Sullivan, Richard ReesJones, Carol Taffinder, and Yap Tyng-shiuh deserve a mention. Some parts of this book were previously published. The Section ‘Renewing the Image of Thought’ in the introductory chapter is in part a revised version of the article ‘Conceiving Ada: Conceiving Feminist Possibilities in the New Mediascape’ published in Women: A Cultural Review 18.2 (Summer 2007), pp. 182–98 (http://www.informaworld.com). The discussion of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann in Chapter 1 is a version of an essay entitled ‘Gendering the Auteur: Time, x

Acknowledgements xi

Narrative, and Intertextuality in Scenes from a Marriage and Faithless’ that appeared in Northern Constellations: New Readings in Nordic Cinema, edited by C. Claire Thomson (Norwich: Norvik Press, 2006, pp. 217–29). The discussions on Michael Takeo Magruder and Christina McPhee’s respective digital art works in Chapter 7 and the Conclusion first saw the light of day in an article entitled ‘Undisclosed Recipients: Documentary in an Era of Digital Convergence’ published in Studies in Documentary Film 2.1 (2008), pp. 79–88 (published by Intellect Books). The discussion of Ursula Biemann’s Remote Sensing in Chapter 7 first appeared in an article entitled ‘Bodily Traces in Digital Encounters: Materializing Virtualities for the Political Documentary,’ in Afterimage 36.4 (January–February 2009), pp. 20–2.

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Introduction A Revised Women’s Cinema Through Lynn Hershmann-Leeson’s Cyberfeminist Interventions

There is genius in our blood. We will calculate another way. Ada Byron/Tilda Swinton in Conceiving Ada (1995) Ada Byron, the Countess of Lovelace and the daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron, is acknowledged as the person (a woman who lived in Victorian England, no less) to have written the first computer programme. In Lynn HershmannLeeson’s utopian cyberfeminist film, Conceiving Ada, a presentday computer programmer interacts with Ada via computer interface across time. Discussing the limitations and difficulties of living as women in different historical periods as well as the questions of memory and technology, the character who inhabits the present day anticipates future problems that would require solutions. Weakened by ill health but nonetheless encouraged by visions of the future that this peculiar interaction provides, the Ada Byron character smiles and replies, ‘There is genius in our blood. We will calculate another way.’ I have chosen to begin this book with the above anecdote because the Byron character’s assertion describes the spirit of this project. Women on the Edge is a study of twelve women filmmakers who work across different historical periods, genre, political, economic, cultural contexts, and technological forms. The individual chapters’ respective discussions on these filmmakers are distinct, save the concluding chapters 1

2 Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices

on four emerging filmmakers and digital artists. Yet, Women on the Edge contextualises these film practices within a larger film and visual culture and aims to sustain an argument for a feminist ethics in contemporary film and media practices. Such an argument is necessary, especially given the rapid developments in terms of the transformation of film form in conjunction with innovations in digital technology and new media, as well as the changes in the globalisation of media practices and industries, to lay a feminist claim on both political and theoretical terrains. To sustain this argument, this book reconsiders the theoretical bases on which is premised the concept of ‘women’s cinema,’ and show how it is necessary to acknowledge their limitations. This book also suggests new conceptual frameworks in light of today’s media developments within a particular political context in the light of the contemporary digitised, transnational, and hyper-capitalist environment. History and context The women’s film movement of the 1970s and early 1980s cinematically expressed the feminist adage that the personal is political. What followed was a corpus of independent and experimental films that interrogate female concerns such as work, life, domesticity, and sexuality. The validation of the personal as the politics (and ethical premise) of feminist filmmaking practice must, in the contemporary mediascape, and given the radically different questions that women face and ask today, necessarily assume and at the same time exceed the personal. A re-evaluation and criticism of ‘the personal is political’ as a feminist adage runs as a thread throughout this book. The resultant orthodoxy that arose out of heightened theoretical awareness and political activities in the 1970s, and that which constitutes feminist film theory and scholarship is thus interrogated. Specifically, the dominant psychoanalytic methodology that was adopted in feminist film theory (and the Humanities generally) requires a thorough critique for its tendency to depoliticise a field of enquiry that has as its central concern gender politics by shifting its attention to

Re-visioning Feminist Cinema: Lynn Hershmann-Leeson 3

almost exclusively address issues of sexual difference. Interrogating such a theoretical premise in effect expands the scope of ‘women’s cinema’ beyond themes such as domesticity, feminine stories, issues, and concerns to encompass the range of responses to the world that might constitute a feminist media ethics and position. This book considers the ways and extent to which such an ethical position is manifested, and realised, in relation to specific issues and concepts while discussing a particular woman filmmaker in each chapter. The discussion of Liv Ullmann’s Faithless (2000) in Chapter 1 revisits the question of female authorship, and its relation to sexual politics and aesthetics. As feminist film scholars have always known, the quality of normative linearity is not best suited for progressive feminist narratives. In particular, the ways in which classic realism serves the Hollywood penchant for heterosexual closure have been held up in particular for criticism by feminist film scholars. Coming out of Ingmar Bergman’s shadow, Liv Ullmann’s Faithless enacts an instance of feminist critique, intertextually, of supposed liberal cinematic authorship of its silent disregard for the implications for sexual politics. Chapter 2 discusses the works of Jill Craigie, a little known documentary filmmaker outside of Britain. Her relative obscurity is the result of a combination of factors: the sexist British film industry of the 1940s and 1950s, the uncompromisingly socialist stance of her films in relation to public housing, women’s public roles, and art, as well as her early retirement from the industry. Craigie’s oeuvre, however, deserves re-evaluation because of the ways in which they exemplify the aesthetics of the political and the politicisation of aesthetics. These aspects of her filmmaking practice take on more contemporaneous resonance towards political change when her anger at Western European governments’ mishandling of the Yugoslav conflict propelled her, while in her eighties, to travel to Dubrovnik to make Two Hours from London (1995). Chapter 3 considers the observational documentaries of Kim Longinotto, one of Britain’s most prolific documentarists working today, whose works have the distinction of privileging female voices and perspectives. By exploring the films that she has made over three decades, one achieves an

4 Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices

understanding of the urgency for activism and the installation of a feminist ethics in public discourse. Yet, Longinotto’s films do not preach a feminist message, but allow its audiences to arrive at the conclusion for the necessity of women’s political participation, rights, and social justice through their focus on the relationship between women and institutions, be they cultural, legal, or educational. As a grand dame of the feminist avant-garde, Sally Potter’s professional trajectory is perhaps most aligned to the history of the feminist film movement. Her Thriller (1979) is regarded as a classic of the feminist avant-garde, although Orlando (1995) marks her entry into commercial art-house cinema while retaining her feminist sensibilities. The ways in which Potter’s films extrapolate the relationship between the personal and the political, and the increasingly prominent role post 9/11 politics plays in Yes (2005), gestures for us a productive possibility in making feminist film scholarship relevant and innovative in the contemporary media sphere; a prospect that this book explores in Chapter 4. While the first four chapters of Women on the Edge can be seen to offer a rethinking of many of the premises of feminist film scholarship towards a notion of women’s filmmaking as political practices, the last three chapters may be looked at in terms of how we can innovate on the work of feminist film scholarship in relation to new challenges thrown up by our increasingly complex and globalised world. Transnationalism, both as a political reality and an operating concept, effectively serves to demarcate between the first and the second parts of Women on the Edge. Laura Marks’ use of the term ‘intercultural cinema’ would be useful here in helping to tease out the issues involved in an understanding of transnational cinema, especially the way in which the dynamics of power shifts from the centrality of a hegemonic ‘Euro-American West’ to the more complex and nuanced comprehension of a plurality of materialised, and materialising, power relations between dominant and non-dominant cultures and nations. Marks writes: ‘Intercultural’ indicates a context that cannot be confined to a single culture. It also suggests movement between one

Re-visioning Feminist Cinema: Lynn Hershmann-Leeson 5

culture and another, thus implying diachrony and the possibility of transformation. ‘Intercultural’ means that a work is not the property of a single culture, but mediates in at least two directions. It accounts for the encounter between different cultural organizations of knowledge, which is one of the sources of intercultural cinema’s synthesis of new forms of expression and new kinds of knowledge. (2000, pp. 6–7) Along these lines, Chapter 5 considers the works of the Indian filmmaker, Deepa Mehta, and the ways in which her films can be seen to be more productively representative of the complexities transnational cinema beyond the concerns of the post-colonial. As the notion of world cinema predicates on an international film festival circuit that mostly caters to first world cinema audiences, the question of to which audience a film is directed has been a contentious issue. Given the nature of transnationalism and the complex global media ecology that we presently inhabit, a relatively simplistic notion of Third World subjects for first world audiences, as Poonam Arora articulated in relation to Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay (1988), needs more clarification in order to articulate the proliferation of cross-cultural encounters, identities, and the resultant political implications. Arora’s critique of Salaam Bombay lies in the ways in which the film refuses ‘the realisation that there is a Third World in every First World and vice versa’ because the film’s sole demand is for the sympathies of First World audiences; as well as refusing to ‘elucidate the complex social and political conditions’ between Bombay as a global city and its neighbours in relation to the sub-plot of the trafficked Nepalese girl in the film (1994, p. 295). The chapter on Mehta explores these issues in relation to her elements trilogy of films. The discussion in Chapter 6 of Sophia Coppola as an auteur of the American independent cinema seeks to rethink the masculinist premises of the American national cinema. In particular, an interrogation of the notions of home, domesticity, and femininity within the context of the transnational economy and particular networks of power relations provides us with some interesting ways in which to

6 Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices

reinvent film criticism in a feminist mode. The mobilisation of goods, and to a lesser extent, people, across international borders underscores globalisation. Chapter 7 explores the issues of gender, geography, labour, and the mass trafficking of women that form the underbelly of the globalisation process in Ursula Biemann’s video essays towards a materialist feminism in film scholarship. Formally, Biemann’s video essays show that it is no longer adequate to speak in terms of a filmic specificity in the digital age within a context of media convergence, and that digital media provides a hybrid platform for various instances of social and political activism. The mobility that is thrust on women who work in hi-tech sweatshops, perform sexual labour, and who physically cross borders in search of means of survival in a seemingly immaterial, virtual, and digitised world requires the 1970s feminist mantra that the personal is political to extend beyond validating the domestic and women’s creative expression that recalls Virginia Woolf’s need for a Room of One’s Own. Instead, we must reach the realisation that the personal and the material are necessarily political because they are ever more precarious in the postindustrial world, and that both feminist filmmaking practice and scholarship need to articulate a sustainable ethics and politics. Finally, the book concludes by speculating on the forms and concerns of women’s film and media practices by looking at the works of four emerging filmmakers and digital artists: Gisela Sanders Alcántara, Guo Xiaolu, Christina McPhee, and Liz Miller. Arriving at a sustainable ethical stance The feminist appropriation of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy underlies the theoretical foundations of this book, and is that which informs and enables the examination of each of these filmmaking practices as manifesting and perpetuating a feminist ethics. In order to articulate what might be the feminist ethics that props up Women on the Edge’s project of looking at women’s filmmaking as political practice, it is necessary to discuss here the traditions of thought from which this book’s ethical stance deviates, and implicitly rejects, before arriving

Re-visioning Feminist Cinema: Lynn Hershmann-Leeson 7

at a notion of a sustainable feminist ethics in film culture. The 1970s adoption of psychoanalysis in film theory and criticism that effectively hijacked from feminist film scholarship its political impetus is singled out for particular criticism. More generally, the construction of feminist ethics out of moral philosophy predicating on the unity and rationality of the subject has also proved problematic. The act of conceiving a sustainable feminist ethics in feminist film scholarship therefore needs to address these issues. Since what is often known as the ‘linguistic turn’ in Critical Theory, feminist film scholarship has been plagued by the difficulties of sexual difference perpetuated by psychoanalytic film theory. The epistemological grounds for such a construction of sexual difference derive from transcendental philosophy, which has as its basic foundation the idea of consciousness, and therefore, subjectivity. The Enlightenment idea of the thinking subject that pivots on the premise of individual consciousness is founded upon Descartes’ assertion cogito ergo sum, or, I think therefore I am. Such a notion of subjectivity, however, constructs a mind/body dichotomy privileging the mind over the body. While this mind/body opposition aligns the mind with subjectivity, the body becomes objectified by default. The gender implications of this mind/body binary are significant for feminist theory given that subjectivity is taken to be exclusive to the masculine subject: it logically follows that femaleness falls into place as the secondary term of this binary pair. While transcendental philosophy regards the mind as an active agent, the body is considered to be the passive object upon which the mind acts. The inherent phallogocentrism of such a philosophical tradition is therefore responsible for the difficulty of philosophising in, and of, the feminine. Such exclusion of women from subjectivity has repercussions for effective female participation in the political realm. Moira Gatens notes that because women (or for that matter, minority groups) are constructed as different, they are excluded from the image of the modern body politic (1997, p. 86, italics mine). As a result, feminist politics is predicated on a dilemma that counters its effectiveness at the same time that it helps to acknowledge

8 Women on the Edge: Twelve Political Film Practices

the difference that props up a feminist politics in some limited ways. In short, the historic limitations on women’s entitlement to participate in the modern body politic undermine feminism’s political clout and usefulness. Particular to the concerns of this book, the resultant segregation of female difference translates into feminist politics mostly having an impact on ‘female’ or ‘feminine’ concerns, effectively curtailing the influence of a feminist stance on the modern body politic in general, an issue that will repeatedly arise in the following chapters in different manifestations. Most notably, the emergent transnational approach is a feminist attempt at circumventing these historic instances of exclusions and disenfranchisement. Asserting sexual difference constructs women as a political entity, but because the philosophical tradition on which the modern body politic is premised denies women their subjectivity, women’s political entitlement is simultaneously undermined. The question of how we might circumvent the phallogocentrism of thought is thus a matter of political necessity, and requires an extensive exploration of the epistemological grounds on which we enact feminist politics. These epistemological grounds gender the subject as male and are obstacles to the possibility of philosophically constructing a coherent female subjectivity and identity that might strengthen the cause of feminist politics. In the case of feminist film scholarship, Laura Mulvey’s seminal ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ essay that effectively led the 1970s turn to the Marxist–Lacanian paradigm is an apt example of such a conundrum. Significant because of its polemical brilliance, Mulvey’s essay responded directly to its historical context by aligning its perception of oppression to the determinations of a psychoanalytic framework that is decidedly phallogocentric in its insistence on privileging maleness. As the result, feminist film theory got led down what Patricia Mellencamp described as ‘the garden path of theory’ with psychoanalysis and lost its focus on women’s filmmaking as a political practice in film culture (1995, p. 24). An effective way of evading the difficulties of sexual difference as posed by transcendental philosophy is to think of

Re-visioning Feminist Cinema: Lynn Hershmann-Leeson 9

difference not within the context of its opposition to another term, but in terms of difference as positivity. Such a strategy harnesses feminist appropriations of Deleuze’s philosophy to construct a feminist politics, notably, through the work of the feminist philosopher, Rosi Braidotti, among others. Instead of thinking within the confines of a transcendental philosophy, a construction of feminist politics as positive difference pivots on a philosophy of immanence. As Claire Colebrook notes, transcendental philosophy ‘asks the question of how the subject relates to the given’ as opposed to a philosophy of immanence that ‘locates the constitution of the subject within the given’ (1997, p. 63). In her critique of the way that psychoanalysis prescribes the respective psychic development of the male and female child, Nancy Hartstock effectively explains the problem of situating feminism within a transcendental philosophical tradition as leading ‘on the one hand towards a feminist standpoint and on the other towards an abstract masculinity’ (1998, p. 118). In other words, Hartstock critiques the universalising of masculine norms and the localising of feminine concerns to its exclusionary space. Thinking of sexual difference in terms of immanence instead allows for the construction of a feminist ethics that is conceptually innovative in its dealings with situations and issues that arise, instead of perpetually responding to a phallogocentric given. For Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari, the plane of immanence ‘constitutes the absolute ground of philosophy, its earth or deterritorialization, the foundation on which it creates its concepts’ (1994, p. 41). This creative mode of philosophising is opposed to the transcendentalist notion of a subject’s interaction with a particular given that hinges on essence or origins. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari disparage what they call ‘ready-made’ ideas and those who abide by them. They claim that ‘those who do not renew the image of thought are not philosophers but functionaries who, enjoying a readymade thought, are not even conscious of the problem and are unaware even of the efforts of those they claim to take as their models’ (1994, p. 51). In this sense, Women on the Edge is an attempt at renewing the image of thought within

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feminist film scholarship so as to sustain a viable construction of women’s filmmaking as political practice in contemporary film and media culture. Renewing the image of thought

This introduction begins with a description from Lynn Hershmann-Leeson’s Conceiving Ada, a film that illustrates the potentials of cyberfeminism for the purpose of working away from the difficulties of sexual difference. As an attempt to dislodge the phallogocentrism of thought, cyberfeminism provides some pertinent insights for this project’s attempts at sustaining a feminist ethics in women’s filmmaking practices and articulates the theoretical premises on which Women on the Edge is based. In many ways, Conceiving Ada could be seen as a media text that enacts the strategies through which this book attempts to circumvent the conundrums of sexual difference and to posit a renewed understanding of feminist film and media culture within the context of cyberfeminist interventions; and it would therefore be useful here to articulate its processes of feminist-becoming. Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto, written over 20 years ago in 1985, expresses the desire to conceive, and the necessity of conceiving, new ways with which to investigate concepts of gender and difference for the purposes of feminist theory and politics. The manifesto’s perspective stems from a feminist dissatisfaction at the existing approaches with which to analyse gender and sexual difference that consistently negate and undermine women. It is also a glimpse into the possibility of a feminist future enabled by Haraway’s training in the sciences. Haraway writes: The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-Oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense . . . . An origin story in the Western humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss, and terror, represented by the phallic mother

Re-visioning Feminist Cinema: Lynn Hershmann-Leeson 11

from whom all humans must separate; the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. (1997, p. 475) For Haraway, the cyborg paves the way for a departure from discursive premises that confound the possibility of theorising sexual difference positively because these discourses implicitly serve to uphold the wholeness and unity of male subjectivity. The cyborg manifesto seeks to disrupt the perceivably male subject’s centrality in transcendental discourses. In some sense, Haraway’s cyborg manifesto works towards a specific feminist agenda in a fashion similar to the operation of Deleuze’s philosophy because it advocates a strategy that ‘concentrate[s] on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries—and not on the integrity of natural objects’ (Haraway, 1997, p. 479). In other words, like Deleuze, Haraway favours creative discourses that thrive on seeking out productive possibilities through the proliferation of networks, associations, and flow over codifying discursive practices that work to diagnose, delineate, and constrain social, political, and cultural phenomena into recognisable symptoms. The future on which Haraway speculated two decades ago has become the theoretical terrain on which Women on the Edge attempts its intervention towards a sustainable feminist ethics in women’s filmmaking. While real cyborgs are still very much in the making, conceptual possibilities outside the philosophical framework of the male logos is real. Cyberfeminism, defined by Sadie Plant in terms of ‘information technology as a fluid attack, an onslaught on human agency and the solidity of identity’ takes hold of the contemporary mediascape as woman and machine, both previously subservient to man, combine to rebel against the patriarchal order (1997, p. 503). Within feminist film theory, as well as visual culture at large, cyberfeminism presents a serious threat to the psychoanalytic discourse that ‘makes the connection between castration and blindness, the penis and sight, and [that which] seals the fate of woman within the phallic

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organisation of a specular economy for which she is the sold as seen’ (ibid.). In short, cyberfeminism intervenes in the psychoanalytic conceptualisation of woman in feminist film theory in a far-reaching way that posits a renewed understanding of the cinematic medium, especially in the face of technological innovations that radically transforms its premises. That cyberfeminism pivots on the materiality of its medium, the virtuality of a reality that technology enables, dislodges the primacy of a psychoanalytic discourse that more often than not displaces, or treats as transparent, the very medium that it presumes to analyse. Even more significantly, cyberfeminism functions as a theoretical paradigm with which to explore and understand contemporary film and media culture in a manner that does not cede its autonomy to a master narrative. Ada Byron’s pioneering work in programming computer language, together with her remarkable biography as a woman who transgresses the mores of her time, may be where cyberfeminism finds its inspiration. Her work that created the first computer language overturns the Freudian use of weaving as a metaphor that conceals female desire. Using weaving as an analogy for the operation of computer language, Plant writes: With digitisation, weaving no longer screens women’s desire, but allows it to flow in the dense tapestries and complex depth of the computer image. The data streams and information flows of cybernetic machines are the transformation and return of sensuality and the extra-sensory perception denied by the rational speculations of human history. (1997, p. 504) It is this language that weaves, interfaces, connects, and maps that allows the perpetuation of a feminist discourse. As Plant notes elsewhere, Ada Byron represents the ‘point at which weaving, women and cybernetics converge in a movement fatal to [masculinist] history’ (1999, p. 111). Conceiving Ada, a feature film steeped in the tradition of feminist theory filmmaking, dramatises Ada Byron’s life and work. Foregrounding the virtual reality that is part of Ada Byron’s legacy, Conceiving

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Ada stands as a particular cinematic manifestation of the ways in which cyberfeminist premises may be realised via the logic of Deleuze’s creative philosophy. As filmmakers who worked with the aesthetics of feminist theory filmmaking in the 1970s began to make more narrative based films, they imbued narrative traditions with feminist sensibilities. Sally Potter’s Orlando, discussed in Chapter 3, is one such example, and it is one that Conceiving Ada follows through and brings into the digital age. Conceiving Ada depicts the interface between Ada (Tilda Swinton, who also stars in Orlando) and Emmy (Francesca Faridani), a contemporary computer scientist who makes contact with Ada across time via computer interface and who eventually manages to harvest Ada’s memory as genetic data for her unborn daughter. Conceiving Ada’s narrative follows the structure of the genetic code’s double helix, a shape that resembles a long twisted ladder. This structure allows for the narrative’s interweaving of past and present across a computer interface, and resists the classic realist narrative structure that is predicated on a situation of disequilibria and the subsequent restoration of order. The film foregrounds such a structure from the start as it begins with close-ups of a startled Ada, in period dress, staring into the camera as the opening credit sequence begins. An intertitle, with the date and time of 11 March 1993/2.52 PM, separates Ada’s close-ups from that of Emmy’s, also staring straight into the camera. The subsequent close-up of Emmy, however, indicates that she is staring into a computer screen as the tight close-up loosens slightly to reveal a mouse in her hand as well as the sound of clicking. Such interfaces would persist throughout the film, especially towards the end when Emmy and Ada establish contact and speak directly with each other through the interface. This is most evident in shots of Ada looking out of Emmy’s computer screen, while Emmy’s reflection is registered on the lower right-hand corner of that screen. Such a structure not only rejects linear narrativity, but also beckons to a network principle that premises on the aesthetics of connectivity and interaction as opposed to the principles of normativity and containment that govern classic realist cinema.

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This interface between past and present in which Conceiving Ada engages involves a play of doubles. However, the doubling that the film sustains resist the negative dialectics premising in discourses of duality, the doppelgänger, or the psychoanalytic Other that pervade much of the way in which classic realist cinema render the representation of woman. For instance, one thinks of the way in which normative Hollywood cinema schematises woman into either a version of conventional femininity or the mad woman in the attic in, for example, Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), that is imbued with gothic sensibilities, and Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987) that takes the earlier gothic tropes to further misogynistic extremes. The interface between past and present in Conceiving Ada unleashes temporality from the dictates of linearity. As such, the idea of doubling in the film revolves around correspondence, connection, and the possibilities that infinity provides. As Emmy is increasingly involved in the interface, she begins to incorporate Ada’s memory. She notes to Nick, her smothering boyfriend, that she feels as though Ada’s real life resides in her computer, and that she does not seem able to separate their lives. When Ada hears that her favourite lover is actually married and lives a double life, she reflects on its mathematical dimension as ‘two parallel lives running into infinity.’ Significantly, the film does not indulge in this potential plot of a love triangle, a structure predicated on insularity, exclusivity, and the ousting of the extra party, a much beloved trope of filmic narratives that are predicated on heterosexual closure, and as in the examples cited above. Emmy’s final proposal to Ada, which the latter rejects as unfair colonisation, that Ada lives on through her body in order to take her rightful place in history, represents the ultimate rejection of the psychoanalytic notion of Otherness as that which the self defines itself against. Slaying the Other is not of interest in Conceiving Ada as the film is not invested in sustaining the subject’s unity. Instead, the film embraces the potential of women’s loyalty and generosity to one another towards the disruption of history as the continuous narrative of great men or the perpetual drama of the family romance. In relation to the film noir, the psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj

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Žižek objects to the Deleuzean cinematic topography and insists that: We seem to know everything about the social and artistic background of film noir: the traumatic impact of the Second World War on established gender roles, the influence of German Expressionism, etc., but all this is clearly not sufficient to account for the emergence of the noir universe with its unique flavour of all-permeating corruption embodied in the figure of the femme fatale. (1999, p. 100) However, Žižek does not see that from a feminist political perspective, how psychoanalysis prescribes, and what it may have to say about, the all-encompassing threat of the femme fatale is beside the point. By side stepping such psychoanalytic concerns, Conceiving Ada functions as a Deleuzean desiring-machine that sustains a feminist political imperative. The film achieves this perpetuation of a feminist politics via its particular genealogy of female genius through history that also reaches out to, and touches, the cultural significance of the author Mary Shelley, Ada’s peer and friend. In this way, Conceiving Ada sustains a feminist politics via what Volkart describes as Sadie Plant’s cybernetic reasoning: the fact of women’s achievements and ‘their triggering of deterritorialization is that [which] really counts. From [Plant’s] perspective, women are more crucial as nodes and agents than as political subjects’ (2004, p. 102). The interweaving of time that Conceiving Ada undertakes via computer interface transcends the psychoanalytic preoccupation with the past that consists of childhood traumas and primal scenes. Conceiving Ada signals a complete rejection of psychoanalytic premises. Braidotti notes that in order to move into a new discursive order, ‘we need to take collectively the time for the mourning of the old socio-symbolic contract and thus mark the need for a change of intensity, a shift of tempo’ (1997: 529). Conceiving Ada marks this shift for feminist film scholarship that Women on the Edge wishes to sustain: the film heralds a new way of doing feminist film theory

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and criticism that renders psychoanalytic premises neither relevant nor necessary. Conceiving Ada’s double helix narrative structure functions like a series of feminist becomings because it sustains both the past and the present within its filmic reality in a similar way to Deleuze’s insistence that, following Bergson, the past still IS (1991: 55). Conceiving Ada illustrates the Bergsonian understanding of ontology that is not predicated on the linearity of time. Bergson’s notion of memory departs from the Freudian notion of the Unconscious that depends on the recurrence, and repression, of past events and that which constitutes the unity of the subject. In other words, Bergsonian ontology works away from the notion of time as linearity to various discursive advantages. Ira Livingstone remarks on its strategic usefulness: The non-linearity of negotiation is operative in as far as what the parties negotiate are the terms by which each will be construed as competent parties to the negotiation; it is this contradiction between being always already constructed and continually under construction that now animates gendered bodies. (1997, p. 101) Moving away from the perception of time as linearity thus allows feminist film theory to conceive of woman’s ontological status, or being, at the same time that it allows the freedom of continual transformation, change, and becoming. Such a strategy frees the concept of woman from the burden of a psychoanalytic notion of sexual difference that posits woman as the eternal and unchanging Other while it still enables feminists to hold onto an essentialist notion of sexual difference that energises and sustains feminist politics. The works of Diana Fuss and B. Ruby Rich, taken together, allude to the potential of such a strategy in feminist film theory, as summarised by Livingstone above. Defending the feminist film movement, Rich criticises the ‘derogatory dismissal of any woman still holding onto an earlier decade’s political engagement’ as being essentialist (1998, p. 290).

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However, the essentialism that feminist film scholarship is supposed to harbour does not arise from women’s investments in feminist politics. Instead, it emerges out of the psychoanalytic notion of sexual difference that underlies feminist film theory, and that which works towards the patriarchal conservatism of psychoanalytic discourse. As Fuss remarks in her theoretical exploration of essentialism, ‘radicality or conservatism of essentialism depends, to a significant degree, on who is utilizing it, how it is deployed, and where its effects are concentrated’ (1989, p. 20). A notion of feminist essentialism should be based on the knowledge of the ways in which discursive and philosophical formations are masculine and often misogynist; and that feminist thought should be constructed on terms other than those. For Rich, ‘a new politique ought, by its nature, to generate new texts by which its points are proved and its development sustained. When the psychoanalytic cinefeminists veer towards the same classical Hollywood texts long used by a succession of ‘forefathers,’ the transformative nature of their analysis is called into question’ (1989, pp. 292–3). In this sense, Conceiving Ada is an instance of a feminist film practice that seeks out feminist possibilities in the cinema and the contemporary new mediascape beyond the grounds characterised by sexual difference, discursive boundaries, and marginalisation. In the conversations between Ada and Emmy via the computer interface, Ada laments in frustration how she has run out of time. In the penultimate conversation between the two women, Ada poignantly adds, ‘I never became.’ Ada mourns the limitations of being a woman in Victorian times, about how maternity is a chore that is pushed onto her, and for which she has no desire. Instead, her mathematical genius is put on hold and never fully employed. This lack of time, via the various impositions on femininity, is that which hinders the feminist potential of becoming because these impositions forbid women straying from prescribed feminine roles. While Emmy explains to Nick, the boyfriend, how the intertitles of dates and times function earlier on in the film, she explains that nothing ever animates without time.

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This includes feminist becomings. The historical Ada Byron died young while in her thirties. While the film is faithful to this fact, it realises the potential of Ada’s genius through her work as well as in the appropriation, and perpetuation, of this work by women of genius through time, as epitomised by the character Emmy. In this process, the film continues to sustain a feminist genealogy. Despite the difference in epochs, Emmy and Ada face similar problems as enfleshed women of genius: controlling men, interfering mothers, and the difficulty of reconciling with their reproductive function. Conceiving Ada’s reconfiguration of time renders the film’s feminist potential possible: interface allows Emmy to offer her body so that Ada’s memory may continue in an embodied female body. That the film offers up Emmy’s embodiment as a solution reveals the separation of memory from subjectivity. In other words, the film depersonalises memory. Separating memory from the ego, Conceiving Ada dislodges memory’s dependence on ego psychology and psychoanalytic interpretations in the process. By diminishing the importance of ego psychology, the film offers a historical trajectory based on female achievement. Similarly, Women on the Edge attempts to trace a critical trajectory of women’s filmmaking practices as instances of achievements and interventions in the pages that follow. Calculating another way

Working away from the conundrums of sexual difference, Women on the Edge’s project of renewing the image of thought within feminist film scholarship thus needs to begin by questioning certain premises of feminist theory in order to arrive at a viable construction of feminist ethics. Rosemarie Tong, in her book that distinguishes between feminine, feminist, and maternal ethics, considers the characteristics of feminist ethics, which I quote at length below: Feminine, maternal, and feminist approaches to ethics are all woman-centered; they all speak primarily to women about women’s moral experiences. Rather, feminist approaches to ethics are distinctive because they, far

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more than their feminine and/or maternal counterparts, are political . . . a feminist approach to ethics asks questions about power—that is, about domination and subordination—even before it asks questions about good and evil, care and justice, or mothers and fathers. (1993, p. 160) While Tong is right about the emphasis that feminist ethics places on power, she is somewhat off the mark when it comes to articulating how that emphasis on power might be manifested. Thinking about power in terms of domination and subordination is to unwittingly submit, yet again, to a given set of power relations within a pattern of response as set out in transcendental philosophy. A positive and immanent understanding of power is therefore required to conceive of a viable and sustainable feminist ethics. It is more useful, perhaps, to look at power as materialised and materialising relations; and that operates within a complex network of relations. Chapters 5 and 7 on Mehta and Biemann respectively develop this idea in more detail. To construct an immanent understanding of feminist politics’ emphasis on power as positivity, it is also important to pick apart another of Tong’s observations about feminine and feminist ethics: that they speak to women about women’s moral experiences. The idea that a feminist ethics necessarily and exclusively speak to women is a problematic premise, given that it necessarily excludes men, who do in fact make up a large part of what Gatens describes as the body politic, as discussed above. Such a premise also implies that women form a monolithic whole and that they are all necessarily compliant to a particular morality, which is at best untenable. Moreover, such an exclusionary understanding of feminist ethics as being for women, more than providing a ‘safe place’ or a Room of One’s Own for women instead results in isolationism and the limitations of feminist political application and influence. In Chapter 3, we see the importance of having feminist ethics permeate the public sphere in Longinotto’s films about women’s relationships with various institutions. Seeking recourse to moral philosophy in the conception of a

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feminist ethics is a problem that is not exclusive to Tong’s argument, but rather permeates much of feminist theory. For instance, in the introduction to the appropriately titled anthology Daring to be Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-politics, the editors Bat-Ami Bar On and Ann Ferguson observe, ‘questions of moral psychology are a particularly fruitful field for interrogating the relation between ethics and politics’ (1998, p. xvii). They also deflect criticisms of the premises of moral philosophy in the construction of feminist ethics by suggesting that ‘daring to be good’ is not a result of radical feminism’s prudery and that Judith Butler’s question about the prospect, or possibility, of moral agency is more a rejection of ‘identity ethico-politics, and not necessarily moral agency’ (1998, ibid.). Such deflections and the insistence on holding onto the importance of a moral framework in feminist ethics are in fact symptoms of a blind spot in feminist theory, especially given that moral philosophy premises on the notion of the Kantian rational subject who fully utilises his faculty of reason; not to mention that it also amounts to straitjacketing feminism to comply with the activities and behaviours that are becoming of ‘good girls.’ Braidotti’s critique of the insistence to hold onto the premises of moral philosophy in feminist ethics will be the basis on which Women on the Edge constructs its new image of thought for feminist film scholarship. In refuting the appropriateness of morality as part of feminist ethics, Braidotti attributes the insufficiency of liberalism to Kantian moral universalism that believes ‘in a necessary link to the epistemological and knowledge-related aspects of this tradition of moral thinking,’ ‘joins consciousness with rationality in the pursuit of universal moral norms, by making objectivity a crucial concept,’ and genders ‘the notions of reason, objectivity and of the universal itself, which are biased in favour of the masculine’ (2006, p. 13). In other words, Braidotti’s doubts about the prospect of moral agency is, like Judith Butler’s criticism mentioned above, about the philosophical construction of the subject as, firstly, male, and secondly, rational. This effectively post-structuralist (and Deleuzean) critique of moral philosophy also offers an alternative conception of feminist

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ethics that Braidotti articulates, and which I quote in some detail: Ethical accountability is closely related to the political awareness of one’s positions and privileges. Poststructuralist ethics is consequently concerned with human affectivity and passions as the motor of subjectivity, not so much with the moral content of intentionality, action or behaviour or the logic of rights. Alterity, otherness, and difference are crucial terms of reference in poststructuralist ethics . . . . The Kantian model of the judge of reason is overthrown by Deleuze in favour of values which are ‘contingently grounded and politically infused’ [quoting Todd May, 1955]. Deleuze rejects moral judgements in favour of an ethics of force and affects. (2006, ibid.) These characteristics of a sustainable feminist ethics, of being politically aware, contingently grounded, politically infused, and being ‘the discourse about forces, desires and values that act as empowering modes of being’ (Braidiotti, 2006, p. 14) form the basis of progressive power, so to speak, that fuels a sustainable and constructive feminist politics in film scholarship that does not merely respond to a phallogocentric given but charts new grounds for women’s filmmaking as political practices in contemporary film culture. After teasing out the potentials that cyberfeminism has to challenge, and repudiate, the masculine construction of history and theories of subjectivity to circumvent the difficulties of sexual difference in Conceiving Ada, Hershmann-Leeson changes tack from her focus on the technological utopianism that characterises cyberfeminist discourses. In Strange Culture (2007), Hershmann-Leeson continues her engagement with the interface of the body and technology but from the distinct perspective of political activism that perpetuates her feminist ethical position. In 2004, Steve Kurtz, a professor and founding member of the political art collective, Creative Art Ensemble (CAE), woke up at home in upstate New York to find that his wife had suddenly died in her sleep from heart failure.

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He calls the emergency services for help, but instead finds himself detained as a suspected terrorists because the local police panicked at the sight of paraphernalia they thought were associated with the production of chemical weapons. In fact, the scientific instruments and petri dishes of bacteria were meant for an art installation about biotechnology and the dangers of genetically modified foods. Some of the scientific material were provided by a Professor Robert Ferrell, a renowned elderly geneticist in Pittsburgh, who was also implicated, harassed by government agents, and whose health deteriorated as a result. FBI agents and other security personnel soon swamped Kurtz’s home and impounded his possessions, including his computers, his cat, and his wife’s body, and made allegations about his links with terrorist organisations on the basis of some Arabic writing on a printed invitation to an art show. Thus began one man’s descent into a nightmare generated by the paranoia of the Bush Administration and its post 9/11 war on terror, as the US government sought a legal precedent that would expand its powers over anyone it deems a terrorist or whom it suspects as being against its politics and agendas. Strange Culture, thus, is a rather particular dramatisation of Steve Kurtz’s case, a film that takes on a story that had yet to run its course because Kurtz’s case was dismissed only in July 2008 whereas the film was first released in January 2007. Given that the case was ongoing and Kurtz could not comment on the events leading to his detention and his experiences with government agents for legal reasons, Strange Culture uses two actors (Thomas Jay Ryan and Tilda Swinton) who interpret the events on screen and then re-enact them in character as Kurtz and his wife. At one point, another actor also performs a statement written by Professor Ferrell’s for the film and alludes to the variety of reasons for the geneticist’s inability to participate directly. In addition, Kurtz himself is interviewed on screen and speaks considerably about his fears of being found guilty and thrown into prison, his trauma at what happened, and grief at his wife’s sudden death, among other things that surround the events that transpired. Real-life friends and colleagues also speak about Kurtz, their experiences, and attempts at fund-raising

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Kurtz’s legal fees as in a conventional documentary, alongside news footage, sporadic comic strip narration of the ongoing drama, and re-enactments of the debates and responses in which Kurtz’s associates and students might partake. Given that Strange Culture documents a story that was still ongoing long after the date of its premiere, the film presents a radical narrative arc that harnesses the various strands of time to insist upon a convergence of the aesthetic, political, real, and fictional. The facts of the ongoing case itself, re-enactments of the events after the death of Kurtz’s wife, scenarios of the actors enacting said re-enactments, interviews given by Kurtz’s friends and associates, as well as documentary footage collaborate to situate this film not merely as a documentation of political injustice. Instead, Strange Culture is an instance of a political filmmaking practice that employs the double helix structure Conceiving Ada uses to construct a theoretical premises through which to reject the masculine socio-symbolic order to activate a feminist political becoming. The philosophical possibility of interweaving the past and present provided for by Bergson’s understanding of time that gives cyberfeminism its technological utopianism is also that which provides a way through which women’s entitlement to participate and intervene in the modern body politic is not limited to female or feminine issues, as demonstrated in Strange Culture. While Hershmann-Leeson’s film practice is clearly aligned to concerns about women, technology, and genetics, as also evident in her Tecknolust (2002), Strange Culture demonstrates the possibility, and necessity, of transplanting theoretical discourses about sexual difference and female subjectivity to materialist and political imperatives. One worthwhile difference to note between the cyberfeminist discourse of Conceiving Ada and the political activism of Strange Culture is perhaps the way in which each film configures the body’s interface with technology. While Conceiving Ada perceives the virtuality enabled by digital technologies as a means through which to evade the difficulties of sexual difference, Strange Culture’s materialist approach discerns a sinister relationship between corporate control, governmental collusion, and biotechnology that threatens the body’s

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well-being via genetically modified food. Although already constructed and completed as a film or aesthetic object, Strange Culture was also paradoxically under continued construction as long as the case against Kurtz dragged on and the issues raised remain relevant. In fact, one might go so far as to observe that the film’s political imperative remains valid and urgent until the injustices perpetrated on the countless victims of the Bush Administration’s Patriot Act are reversed. Strange Culture would thus embody the empowered mode of feminist filmmaking: of being politically aware, infused, and grounded in the contingent so that it is always ready to posit an intervention. The distinction between women’s cinema as countercinema, as formulated in the 1970s feminist film movement towards a feminist avant-garde that resists mainstream ‘male’ cinema, and the disparate strategies with which Women on the Edge proposes to look at women’s filmmaking in the following pages may be made even clearer by Deleuze’s use of the idea of ‘minor cinema.’ In her survey of women’s cinema, Alison Butler applies Deleuze’s notion of minor cinema to feminist filmmaking practices. In order to circumvent the difficulties of difference (or the dangers of marginalisation), Butler writes that ‘women’s cinema is not ‘at home’ in any of the host cinematic or national discourses it inhabits, but that it is always an inflected mode, incorporating, reworking and contesting the conventions of established traditions’ (2002, p. 22). Adopting Deleuze’s use of Franz Kafka as an example of minor literature, Butler explains that the ‘distinctiveness of women’s film-making is therefore not based on an essentialist understanding of gendered subjectivity, but on the position—or positions—of women in contemporary culture, in Kafka’s impasse: neither included within nor excluded from cultural tradition, lacking a cohesive collective identity, but yet not absolutely differentiated from each other’ (ibid.). In other words, such an approach amounts to what might be a viable ethics of feminist filmmaking that also seeks to navigate the as-yet-unfigured transnational terrain on which contemporary film culture is necessarily sited.

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The way in which Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the notion of writing as a woman and the idea of writing as an exercise that produces ‘a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field’ is important as the operating logic of the book to demonstrate the processes of perpetuating a sustainable feminist ethics in film culture and scholarship through women’s film authorship (1988, p. 276). The former notion of writing as a woman depends on identity (or molar) politics, or, being a woman and a writer. The latter concept of writing to produce a becoming-woman that permeates an entire field refers to the potential of weaving into a field feminist sensibilities, energies, politics, and ideas. In Deleuze and Guattari’s example, they refer to literature; in ours, film and media culture. Elsewhere, Deleuze also stresses the importance of figuring a new feminist politics: Female authors, female directors, do not owe their importance to a militant feminism. What is more important is the way they have produced innovations in this cinema of bodies, as if women had to conquer the source of their own attitudes and the temporality which corresponds to them as individual or common gest. (1989, p. 196–7) Women on the Edge therefore considers the myriad ways in which its examples of women’s filmmaking practices may manifest the flourishing of a feminist ethics across film culture and scholarship.

1 On the Edges of the Authorial Voice: Liv Ullmann’s Faithless, Gendered Authorship, and Ingmar Bergman

The social and political upheavals of the 1970s transformed, if not radicalised, film culture in the United States and Western Europe. Such a context of social change allowed a rethinking of gender politics in the cinema, in part giving rise to feminist film theory and criticism as the discourse with which to analyse, question, critique, and challenge the cinematic apparatus and the ideological underpinnings leading to mainstream, or Hollywood, representations of women. With reference to American cinema, the near collapse of the studio system in the 1970s gave rise to two phenomena: (1) the rise of the American New Wave and (2) the emergence of a liberal feminist sensibility in mainstream films, what Annette Kuhn (1986) calls ‘the new women’s cinema.’ Examples of these films would include Kramer vs Kramer ( Robert Benton, 1979), a divorce and custody drama starring Meryl Streep; Cagney and Lacey (Ted Post, 1981), a film about two female police officers that could only have been inspired by feminist activism; Nine to Five (Colin Higgins, 1980), a comic exploration of workplace sexual harassment; and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974), a film that charts a single mother’s trajectory after the death of her husband. In addition, Teresa De Lauretis also observes a spate of ‘commercial, man-made “woman’s films” ’ in the early 1980s that gave liberal feminism ‘its modest allotment of institutional 26

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legitimation’ (1987, p. 138). Given the trenchant feminist critiques of Hollywood cinema, such developments cannot be a bad thing, although De Lauretis reminds us that ‘the success, however modest, of this liberal feminism has been bought at the price of reducing the contradictory complexity—and the theoretical complexity—of concepts such as sexual difference, the personal is political, and feminism itself to simpler and more acceptable ideas already existing in the dominant culture’ (1987, ibid.). This chapter relates the situation that De Lauretis articulates to Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973). The set of factors surrounding Scenes from a Marriage makes De Lauretis’ critique even more relevant to the film than the mainstream American cinema she discusses, given the humanist aesthetics that informs art cinema and the fact that Scenes from a Marriage strongly suggests the infusion of liberal feminist sensibilities that characterise certain 1970s cinema, given its attention to the domestic sphere, microscopic exploration of a marriage breakdown, the liberal representation of heterosexual relationships, and that it takes for granted the wife’s successful career as a lawyer. Indisputably the father of Swedish cinema and a cinematic master within the critical discourse of a high-brow, auteur-led, European art-house cinema, Bergman is often thought to have infused his films with universal and philosophical themes around life and the condition of the soul without much consideration for the distinct gendered perspective that might colour Bergman’s films. For instance, Jesse Kalin’s volume investigates Bergman’s films from such a reverential perspective while Cineaste ran an article by Leonard Quart that describes Scenes from a Marriage as ‘arguably offering the most moving and complex dissection of marriage ever shown on screen’ (2004, p. 32). That the positioning of such a discourse denies the significance of the auteur’s gendered identity becomes clear when one comparatively analyses Scenes from a Marriage with Faithless (Liv Ullmann, 2000), a film scripted by Bergman and which references both Scenes from a Marriage and the extra-filmic discourse around Bergman’s well-publicised relationships with his actresses, notably, Ullmann herself. Asserting Scenes from

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a Marriage’s distinct disregard for gendered subject positions, and the associative sexual politics, this comparative analysis with Faithless also involves implications to a cinematic rendition of time, narrative, and intertextuality that discussions of gendered subjectivities bring. The aesthetic differences between Faithless and Scenes from a Marriage is telling of how the respective film’s sexual politics may be analysed. Perhaps influenced by its original televisual format, Scenes from a Marriage’s episodic form glosses over many of the minute details of the marriage the film professes to dissect. (While the original televisual format spreads over six episodes and lasts just under five hours, the film version that this chapter discusses is under three hours.) The domestic and personal subject matter that Scenes from a Marriage dwells on give the film some sort of feminist legitimacy in a reversal of what De Lauretis describes as the legitimisation of women’s cinema through Hollywood’s adoption of liberal feminist sensibilities in the 1970s. However, the film’s temporal quality reveals the limitations of Scenes from a Marriage’s association with the notion of a women’s cinema, something that Faithless’ aesthetic quality affirms; of which this chapter explores. In her study of the emergence of cinematic time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mary Ann Doane considers the standardisation and rationalisation of time necessitated by the rise of capitalism in order to regulate labour (2002, p. 6). This theory of rationalisation, Doane claims, ‘does not allow for the vicissitudes of the affective, for the subjective play of desire, anxiety, pleasure, trauma, apprehension’ (ibid., p. 13) so much so that ‘time is, in a sense, externalized, a surface phenomenon, which the modern subject must ceaselessly attempt to repossess through its multifarious representations’ (ibid., p. 9). Although Scenes from a Marriage professes a liberal feminist sensibility in its privileging of the domestic and the personal, so much a response to the 1970s feminist call for the politicisation of the personal, the film’s temporality functions on the continuum of rationalised and standardised time. The film’s episodic form, and the introduction of each new scene with an intertitle bearing some profound statement or truism about relationships, gives

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the episodes a sense of being set pieces. In other words, what happens in between the scenes that give rise to a subsequent episode between Marianne and Johan is elided, ensuring a neat linearity in the film’s depiction of this particular marriage it professes to analyse. In comparison to the women’s cinema that 1970s feminist film activism advocates, Scenes from a Marriage does not engage with the feminine time that characterises the private female experience, famously explored in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976). Bergman’s camera, as it were, reserves the exclusive right to subjectivity in a similar way that the classic realist cinema is deemed to exert its voyeuristic control over the image of woman. The aesthetic realisation of a domestic subject matter via a cinematic continuum of surface temporality is therefore not convincing of its professed embrace of the personal. On the other hand, Faithless remedies the flaws of Scenes from a Marriage through its deliberate imposture on time, and in the process allows for the play of subjectivities and desires to flow at the expense of the director’s mastery over the film’s narrative coherence, temporal continuity, and perspectives. Coming back to De Lauretis’ consideration of how one may construct the female social subject in the cinema, she lists the themes encapsulated in the phrase ‘the personal is political’ as ‘the disjunction of image and voice, the reworking of narrative space, the elaboration of strategies of address that alters the forms and balances of traditional representation’ (1987, p. 145). Faithless achieves just that through the ways in which it inserts a consideration of the auteur’s gendered body into the fray. Scenes from a Marriage charts the marriage of a couple, Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson), over the period of a decade in episodic form. Intertitles separate the various segments that make up the film, and each is characterised by a particular phase in the relationship between the two characters. The film starts with the couple being interviewed and photographed for a magazine article about their privileged and exemplary marriage. After the dinner party episode where their guests, another couple on the verge of divorce, tear into each other, the film goes on to show the

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quiet daily negotiations and cracks in Marianne and Johan’s marriage. This culminates in the episode where Johan comes home to tell Marianne that he has fallen in love with a younger woman, Paula, and is moving to Paris with her for six months. Marianne is left distraught. Johan returns, six months later, in a separate episode where the couple attempts to rebuild some sort of post-marriage relationship. He initiates intimacy, which she attempts to resist on grounds that she is trying to get on with her life. He spends the night, but leaves in the middle of it. She shows him a reconciliatory letter that Paula has written to her. In the next segment of the film, they meet to sign divorce papers. The evening begins well, they have sex on the office floor, but ends in acrimony when he changes his mind about signing the papers, enrages her, and then hits her. He confesses that he is tired of Paula. Quite inexplicably, the next segment begins with the couple taking off together to their cottage outside of the city. Now unhappily married to other people, they keep up an affair with each other and come to an acceptance of themselves and understanding of each other. That Scenes from a Marriage is a product of a radicalised 1970s film culture becomes evident when one considers the existence of a similar American film from within the same socio-political context. Same Time, Next Year (Robert Mulligan, 1978) stars Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn as two strangers, married to other people, who experienced an accidental one-night stand with each other. They then proceed to meet each year, over the next three decades, in the same hotel room for their annual rendezvous. Same Time, Next Year celebrates the relationship as one that sustains the two characters through their respective trials and tribulations, does not touch on the film’s more sordid implications of marital infidelity, and is devoid of irony. Like Scenes from a Marriage, the film is an episodic chamber piece (each annual rendezvous is somewhat selfcontained), and propounds a liberal sensibility to relationships and domestic arrangements. The simplistic episodic structure and linear narrativity that govern both Scenes from a Marriage and Same Time, Next Year provide for the objective point of view that foregrounds a stable subjectivity in both films,

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be it the auteurial or spectatorial subject. As such, despite their liberal feminist sensibilities on the narrative level, the films do not work towards circumventing the mainstream cinematic conventions that posit the director and spectator as male and that which the 1970s feminist film movement critique and evade, most notably, via a problematic recourse to the cinematic avant-garde beginning with Claire Johnston’s 1975 manifesto to establish a ‘Women’s Cinema as Countercinema.’ Although Same Time, Next Year and Scenes from a Marriage focus on one set of relationships, this main relationship is tangential to the other relationships in which the protagonists are involved but which neither film regards. In this sense, the radical politics of the 1970s socio-political upheavals that permeate film culture become diluted, and the feminist politics that informs the radical agenda to transform the domestic, the personal, and sexual relations becomes co-opted into morally relative masculine fantasies of multiple partners and relationships with diminished responsibility. Scenes from a Marriage works as a critique of the institution of marriage that hinges on the performance of prescribed gender roles. However, the conservatism of Scenes from a Marriage’s representation of gender roles is belied by its bourgeois assumptions, derived in part from a sense of gender equality predicating on Swedish notions of liberalism, welfarism, and conflict avoidance, that to an extent obscures the inherent differences with which men and women experience their lives in social, political, and economic terms that, for instance, Inga Persson (1990) notes. On the surface, the film is an objective and liberal rendition of a marriage breakdown where the blame is shared and characters revel in the pain of their bourgeois tragedy although it results in all shades of (male) melodrama. Within a social–political context of feminist activism and assaults on bourgeois values, Scenes from a Marriage concedes to female emancipation in exchange for the release from the responsibilities that patriarchal privileges impose on men. The melodrama resides in Johan’s acceptance of his own limitations at the end, a conclusion that elides the power dynamics in the film’s representation of gender relations. Comparisons of the sequences with which the

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film begins and ends show this. Marianne gains the ability to describe herself and articulates her modus operandi at the end of Scenes from a Marriage: ‘I persevere. I enjoy myself. I rely on common sense and gut feeling. I am content with my direction. Time has given me a third partner: experience.’ This is in contrast to the difficulties she experiences in trying to describe herself, apart from her connections to her husband and children, to the journalist at the start of the film. Marianne finds an identity for herself while Johan becomes resigned to his own mediocrity, contrasting sharply with the self-satisfaction with which he talks about himself, and in such glowing terms, in the interview sequence at the start of the film. Be it that Scenes from a Marriage develops Marianne’s character and identity in line with feminist imperatives at the end of the film, her realisation of her growing power pivots on the fantasy of equal opportunity and equality between the sexes, a premise that the film chooses not to question in favour of a liberal and progressive conclusion. As De Lauretis observes about the liberal feminist sensibilities assimilated into 1970s American cinema, the independence and autonomy granted to Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage come at the expense of attempts to critique and analyse gender politics. The power dynamics governing the representations of gender relations, and the ethics surrounding the extramarital affair in which Marianne and Johan embark at the end of Scenes from a Marriage, are issues that Faithless takes on board 30 years later. In ways that Scenes from a Marriage fails, Faithless addresses the issues presented by the former film. The layer-upon-layer of intertextual references that Faithless presents give the film an intricate complexity that Scenes from a Marriage, for all the aesthetic pleasures and liberal sensibilities it provides, lacks. Scripted by Bergman and directed by Ullmann, Faithless comes already textured by the extra-filmic information provided by the discourse surrounding its writer and director, and is further compounded by the film’s inexorable connection to the earlier Scenes from a Marriage. For instance, the female protagonists of both film share a common name, the lead actor makes appearances in both films as characters that are intrinsically associated with Bergman himself, and both

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films share similar plot lines and narrative details (rendezvous in Paris, etc.). Evidence of such deliberate intertextual associations perhaps render Faithless a remake of the earlier film from a politically invested perspective. Geoffrey Macnab, for instance, notes Bergman’s tragic adulterous relationship with a journalist named Gun Hagberg in 1949 as the affair that influenced the ways in which Bergman created female characters in many of his films. Hagberg also becomes the model for the Marianne character in Faithless (2000, pp. 30–2). Erland Josephson, who in a more youthful incarnation was Johan in Scenes from a Marriage, plays the old director (coded as Bergman) in Faithless. The film’s setting on a remote island references Bergman’s self-imposed exile and isolation on the island of Fårø, necessitating a comment on the construction of the male auteur and a particular understanding of his domestic space. In addition, Saraband (2005), the film Bergman made two years before his death, further complicates these references by adding yet another level of intertextual references to the fray. In what might now be termed the Scenes from a Marriage trilogy, Saraband serves as the last instalment. One rather suspects Saraband is Bergman’s attempt to have the last word by having Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson replay their respective characters in Scenes from a Marriage, three decades on. In Saraband, Johan retires to a remote location, à la Bergman on his island. Marianne visits and gets embroiled in the intricacies of Johan’s relationship with his beloved granddaughter and estranged son, all of whom are bereaved by the death of Johan’s daughter-in-law. In a newspaper interview, Ullmann contributes to this pursuit of intertextual references by mentions of autobiographical details, such as Bergman’s unresolved differences with a son who has died and that the film has much to do with his late wife, to whose memory it is dedicated (Macnab, 2005). Faithless’ narrative set-up, of an elderly director who conjures up a woman in his imagination to re-live the tragedy of an extramarital affair and betrayal on a massive scale, attempts to explore the issues that Scenes from a Marriage glosses over. The imaginary woman character that materialises on screen is named Marianne, a detail that references Ullmann’s character

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in Scenes from a Marriage and increases the intertextual associations. She is summoned into existence by either the director’s memory or imagination, and narrates for the director the story of the extramarital affair she has with her husband’s good friend, David, a film director, which then spirals out of control. Intrigued by David’s request for sex, she plots a rendezvous in Paris behind her husband’s, Markus, back. Events then spiral out of control upon their return as the secret meetings continue and David’s jealousy increases, culminating in Markus finding them together in bed. An ugly custody battle for Marianne and Markus’ daughter, Isabelle, ensues, leading to Markus’ attempt at blackmailing Marianne for sex in exchange for custody, which fuels David’s jealous cruelty. David then proceeds to have an affair with an actress on his film set and leaves Marianne. Markus commits suicide. Marianne finds out from the hospital that someone has discovered his body and called for help. She looks up this person and discovers that Markus had kept a mistress throughout their marriage. The cynicism that characterises Faithless cannot be further away from the affirmation of human relationships that Scenes from a Marriage advocates, which in turn raises questions about the politics behind the latter film. Scenes from a Marriage refuses to acknowledge the consequences of relationship breakdowns and extramarital affairs on children and the other partners involved while Faithless wallows in the destruction that infidelity and betrayals cause. Most notably, Faithless focuses the destructive effects of infidelity on the couple’s daughter, Isabelle. Presented as an isolated child who plays alone in her attic room, Isabelle is neglected, often left at her grandmother’s, bears the brunt of her parents’ acrimonious divorce, and invited to participate in a suicide pact with her depressed father. In effect, she is the one character in the film who serves as the contact point for all the estranged characters, including Markus’ mistress, Margareta, who appears late into the film and tells Marianne about her acquaintance with Isabelle. In this sense, Isabelle functions to the description of Deleuze and Guattari’s universal girl within the film’s topography, given that she roams the surface of Faithless’ narrative

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interstice and inhabits the gaps between the characters. Falling victim to the adults’ actions inscribes trauma into her (damaged) history and botches the process of her becoming (1988, pp. 276–7). Such use of the figure of the child to map the networks of power relations is also evident in other films, an idea that is philosophically based on Braidotti’s notion of a politically infused and contingently grounded feminist ethics and which is also further elaborated in Chapter 5 on Deepa Mehta’s elements trilogy. In contrast to the two children in Scenes from a Marriage who only appear briefly for the photo shoot at the beginning of the film, then quickly shepherded out of the shot and never to be seen again, the Isabelle character serves to indict Bergman’s refusal to engage with the sexual politics that Scenes from a Marriage depict. As Ullmann notes in an interview, ‘In Scenes from a Marriage, which Bergman wrote and directed, the couple has two children but you never see them. They didn’t have any importance in the movie, but I wanted to do something different since I know how tough it is for children when people divorce’ (Porton, 2004, pp. 32–4). Where Scenes from a Marriage fails to represent the power dynamics within human relationships, Faithless provides a stark picture: those unable to cope with a spiralling network of betrayal end their lives while those left behind live on in guilt. In its too hopeful depiction of a petty bourgeois relationship, Scenes from a Marriage ignores the spiralling network of destruction and that each character is equally responsible, complicit, and guilty except for Isabelle, on whom the tragedy is inflicted. By situating a child as that one innocent victim in Faithless, Ullmann insists on culpability in an ethically invested gesture that comments on the feel-good domestic melodrama, in which the male abandonment of responsibilities that patriarchal privileges entail passes off as progressive liberalism and of which the woman’s emancipation is but the by-product, that is Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. The call to construct a ‘women’s cinema’ that departs from what was perceived to be the oppressive Hollywood representations of women was resounding in the heady days of feminist film activism in the 1970s. This agenda is to inform

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feminist film scholarship over the next three decades. In her consideration of women’s cinema, De Lauretis writes: The project of women’s cinema, therefore, is no longer that of destroying or disrupting man-centered vision by representing its blind spots, its gaps, or its repressed. The effort and challenge now are how to effect another vision: to construct other objects and subjects of vision, and to formulate the conditions of representability of another social subject. (1987, p. 135) Faithless shows how such an ideal might be achieved, especially through its ready comparison to Scenes from a Marriage. The myriad intertextual references discussed above already gives Faithless a degree of intertextuality that is absent in Scenes from a Marriage, and effectively disturbs the primacy of Bergman’s auteurial voice. On a pro-filmic level, Bergman and Ullmann’s respective voices as scriptwriter and director are in competition, and translate into the multi-vocality of Faithless. That Faithless is in part intended to be a commentary on the romantic notion of the male directorial genius at the same time that the film pays homage to Bergman is evident in the interviews that Ullmann gives. Speaking of Bergman’s welldocumented isolation on his island and status as an art-house auteur, Ullmann is reported as saying: Maybe to be a genius you have to be completely heartless. Maybe you have to make choices to be a great artist or to live comfortably with what you believe in. For me, I’d rather live comfortably with what I believe in. There are some who are probably greater artists, but it’s no good if you have to tread on someone else’s soul. (MacNab, 2000, p. 32) Such sentiments may reflect Ullmann’s intricate understanding of the connection between gender and cinematic genius, and perhaps translate into Faithless’ active subversion of the auteurial voice to flag up the gender politics that surround Bergman and comment on Scenes from a Marriage. By so

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doing, Ullmann incorporates in her film practice the feminist imperative to formulate a new social subjectivity that allows the construction of the female auteurial voice. Within the diegesis, the conversations that the old man has with Marianne and David, alongside the flashbacks, introduce an unstable element to the film’s narrative that is in contrast to the omniscience of Bergman’s camera in Scenes from a Marriage. That the Bergman character in the film conjures up her character undermines Marianne’s subjectivity in some measure, although such a narrative strategy also allows the introduction of the woman’s voice into the film. As she is engaged in conversation with the old man, she materialises as a subject who is as equally complicit as the male characters in the situation, given that her foolhardy decision to start an extramarital affair is that which propels the tragedy. The privilege the film accords to Marianne’s subjective point of view becomes evident in the scene where she faces David’s cruel verbal assault after she returns from meeting with Markus about their daughter, during which she was coerced into sex in return for custody. She narrates the conversation she has with David after she comes home from meeting Markus, after which David abruptly appears in the director’s study to second her version of the story. His account in fact emphasises the cruelty to which he subjects her more than her version of the story, being accompanied by the constant cross-cutting back to the living room where his verbal assault at her is shot subjectively from her perspective. The point where her lover becomes the ultimate bully at Marianne’s lowest ebb is that which causes the director to release a wail of anguish, suggesting that the director is an older version of David living in shame of his past actions. This suggestion is strengthened further by the existence of the music box that Marianne gives to David in Paris, and that sits in the director’s study and the music of which provides the film’s aural motif. In other words, Faithless’ intertextuality is endless and puts paid to attempts at segregating the private and the public, the domestic and the political, the filmic and the pro-filmic, the fictional and the real, one textual system from another. Most importantly, Faithless interrogates the illusion of a privileged

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auteurial perspective that is not textured by the fabric of sexual politics. Despite a clear disintegration of the marriage, the sequence from Scenes from a Marriage presents a somewhat naïve perspective on the situation, wherein Johan appears not able to help himself but go off with a much younger woman to Paris. The naivety occurs where Johan comes home to confess about the affair, pack his bags, make practical arrangements for the family, and leaves. The cynicism that characterises Faithless evades such a version of male melodrama that Scenes from a Marriage maintains. Firstly, the pre-meditated affair Marianne and David embark upon gives no notice to the betrayed spouse and makes no practical provision for Isabelle. Instead, they are caught out in bed together and cause the child to become a victim of marital strife. Secondly, Faithless insists that extramarital affairs arise out of a much darker sentiment than mere personal dissatisfaction. The sequence of Faithless, where David is at his cruellest, refers back to two particular sequences from Scenes from a Marriage to comment on the latter film’s apparent disingenuous representation of a marriage breakdown. David attributes his rage at Marianne to a sense of ‘retrospective jealousy,’ a term Johan uses to describe what he feels about Paula, when he divulges the affair to his wife in Scenes from a Marriage. These two sequences pivot on the use of intimate information about a partner’s sex life with the third party against them: in the case of Faithless, David uses information he connives out of Marianne about her sex life within her marriage. In Scenes from a Marriage, Johan tells his wife about Paula’s sexual history and the intimacy that they share. While Scenes from a Marriage maintains the façade of general goodwill despite what would be a soul destroying situation for Marianne to have her husband express a desire to leave and tell all about his feelings towards his mistress, Faithless holds no such illusion by presenting the brutality that mistrust elicits. Instead of being an expression of love, sex is presented in Faithless as a bargaining chip as well as ammunition against those one desires to hurt, bringing into comparison the politically unexamined depiction of sexual relations in Scenes from a Marriage.

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The custodial battle in which Markus and Marianne engage culminates in Markus’ demand for sex in return for custody, a demand that leads to the jealous tirade that David subjects Marianne when she returns home. That Markus’ quid pro quo demand for sex underlines a desire to demean, and exert power over, Marianne is clear. Comparing the clear motivations behind Markus’ demand and those disguised in the scene where Johan and Marianne have sex on the office floor before signing their divorce papers in Scenes from a Marriage makes it clear how Faithless uncovers the power dynamics that Scenes from a Marriage hides. Although Johan refuses to sign the papers and hits Marianne, this episode is separate from the clear depiction of affection between the estranged couple. The seduction they engage in before the flare up retains an aura of innocence that is untainted by the gender politics that govern their marriage. The different codes of decency governing the representation of explicit sex scenes notwithstanding, given the 30 years that separate the two films, the ways in which Scenes from a Marriage and Faithless depict sexual relations show the implications of the respective film’s understanding of sexual politics. The two sex scenes between the couple in Scenes from a Marriage, where Johan comes home for the first time after leaving home and when they meet up in Johan’s office to sign divorce papers, are remarkable for the extreme close-ups in which they are shot. The close-ups of the couple’s faces as they lie vertical on the floor displace the sexual activity and present sex as the physical equivalent of love and emotional intimacy to somewhat deceptively melodramatic ends. On the other hand, Faithless holds no such illusion and acknowledges in full the use of sex as ammunition or for bartering purposes. Sex is not presented as the physical expression of love and does not exist outside the reaches of sexual politics and power relations, but is instead pivotal for the enactment of these networks of relations: had David and Marianne not consummated the affair, the tragedy would not have unravelled. That the two pivotal sex scenes in Faithless, between Marianne and David in the Parisian hotel and in David’s flat where they are caught by Markus, are in large part long establishing shots that remove the onus from the faciality that the

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close-ups in Scenes from a Marriage exploits. The inappropriate twin beds in the hotel room and the clothes scattered around David’s bedroom floor serve as commentaries to the relationship between David and Marianne and gesture to the wider world implicated by their actions. Towards the end of Faithless, the old director conjures up David, who speaks with regret about his faithlessness and dismal behaviour that leads Marianne to drown herself. David’s occupation as a film director is clearly spelled out, which invites speculation as to whether the old man in the film is conjuring up these characters or reliving the memories of his youth by summoning up his younger self and the woman he had betrayed. This deliberate ambiguity about the narrator’s subjectivity invites speculations about Faithless’ authorship, given the film’s unambiguous autobiographical reference to Ingmar Bergman, its setting up of the character of the old director as Bergman, Ullmann’s direction of Bergman’s script, as well as the extra-filmic discourse about the relationship (both working and personal) between Ullmann and Bergman. In other words, while Scenes from a Marriage does not problematise the authorial voice in its unquestioning acceptance of Bergman’s camera and perspective, Faithless presents at least two competing authorial voices: that of Marianne and the old director’s. The difficulty of following Faithless’ narrative resides in its unique temporality and resistance of linearity. That Marianne’s reminiscences, the accompanying flashbacks, and scenes in the house are woven together renders Faithless’ narrative somewhat confusing, and warrants a retrospective spectatorship that does not so much identify with the action, but work to make sense of the multi-layered narrative and intertextual references. Faithless’ fragmentation of the stable auteurial voice of Scenes from a Marriage is evident in the initial contact between Marianne and the old director. Marianne’s voice-over, which precedes her physical presence, is heard as an echo that the old director strains to hear, almost at the back of his head. That he has to describe, define, and name her in order for Marianne to physically materialise is an acknowledgement of Bergman’s authorship, although what he has conjured up will exceed his mastery and control, to the extent

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that these shadowy figures from the past, or his imagination, as may be, will invade his physical space. This fragmentation of the Bergman character’s stable point of view will result in his impotent, and voiceless, cry of anguish after David’s visitation that details the extent of the emotional destruction that results in Marianne’s drowning. In this way, Faithless dislodges the romantic notion of a masterful male auteurial voice and opens up a discussion on the significance of a director’s gendered subjectivity, especially by comparison with the unproblematic auteurial perspective in Scenes from a Marriage that is maintained to the detriment of a feminist imperative.

2 On the Edges of the Documentary: Jill Craigie’s Political and Aesthetic Sensibilities

As a raging beauty, an avowed socialist, a British documentary filmmaker, a repository of suffragette material, and political wife par excellence to former British Labour party leader Michael Foot, Jill Craigie (1911–99) had always been a difficult personality to pin down within comfortable categories. Within the cinema, she appears mostly in the footnotes of British film history as the victim of the industry’s inherent sexism and the Rank Organisation’s eventually overwhelming commercial interests. In the company of the handful of women who worked in the British film industry in the 1940s and 1950s, such as Betty Box, Muriel Box, Wendy Toye, and Mary Fields, Craigie seemed a minor player who positioned herself awkwardly, both in terms of her gender and political orientation, and who was eventually forced into retirement. Geoffey MacNab, for instance, notes the way in which Craigie became a pawn in the politicking between Filippo Del Giudice and John Davis within the Rank Organisation in his account of the British film industry in the 1950s (1993, pp. 159–61, 225–6). As an exemplary political wife, she inhabited, more willingly, a peripheral role that necessarily placed her husband, Michael Foot, and his high office above herself. In other words, as the product of an arguably less enlightened era that provided distinctly fewer opportunities for women to come into their own, Craigie was relegated to the footnotes of British 42

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film history and occupied the subterranean dimension, albeit permeable, of the corridors of politics and power that involves self-effacement, dinner party menus, general domesticity, and gossip. The circumstances that surround Craigie’s filmmaking career and personal life translate into the particular ways in which she is positioned in both political and filmic discourses, a consequence of which is the limited critical appraisal of her significant, but largely ignored, directorial output. The overt sexism of the documentary fraternity that descended from the Griersonian tradition, the rhetoric of direct cinema to which the documentary tradition adhered, as well as the political and industrial contexts of the day largely colluded to result in Craigie’s relative critical obscurity. Patricia Zimmermann’s criticism of much of the originary or foundational myths about documentary movements is of particular relevance in Craigie’s case: In this history, everything is a traceable bloodline. There are no adoptions, no identities formed out of need beyond textual familialism, political dynasties, and formal strategies. It is a fantasy of singularity, of omnipotence, of aesthetic biologism. With few exceptions, nearly every historical study of documentary ignores the institutions that house film movements, that nurture work, that provide communities when nations, capitalism, and patriarchy destroy them. And, in these psychic configurations of documentary, as Slavoj Žižek would argue, all that is feminine, feminist, interactive, collective, confrontational is repressed. (1999, pp. 64–5) Much has been written about the overt sexism of the British film industry, and especially of Craigie’s male contemporaries in documentary filmmaking. Craigie herself has been quoted observing ‘a woman didn’t get any help from any of these people, you know, except those who made passes’ (Rollyson, 2005, p. 359). In addition, the rhetoric of direct cinema provided British documentary filmmaking a set of manifested goals and aesthetic specifications, whose coherence facilitated

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critical attention and culminated into a distinctive understanding of what constitutes the Griersonian documentary tradition alongside several recognisable names as the heirs to a significant cinematic tradition. While the characteristic aim of direct cinema, to achieve the closest approximation to reality without undue artifice in the filmmaking process, gave British documentary its hallmark aesthetic form in the history of film, the existence of such rhetoric as to what constitutes direct cinema also means that a narrow criteria existed. Moreover, the premise that film is able to offer the possibility of unmediated access to social and political realities is problematic, and one that adherents to the criteria of direct cinema preferred to disregard. Craigie’s films, often combining a strong visual style with an overt political point, were therefore not easily assimilated into the terms of direct cinema, thereby contributing to her marginalisation as she worked outside the orthodoxy of the time. In contrast, Kim Longinotto’s film practice that is discussed in the following chapter, begun at least a decade after the rhetoric and bombast of direct cinema has waned, is an excellent example of the ways in which the observational impulse might contribute towards constructing a feminist ethic in public debates. In addition, the opportunities Craigie had to direct documentaries in the early 1940s and 1950s were also the consequences of a set of political and industrial reasons. The dominant position of J. Arthur Rank’s film company meant that Craigie had to manoeuvre the complexities of commercial cinema to finance her socialist documentaries. As Leo Enticknap notes, the Rank Organisation was willing to accommodate non-fiction shorts that had no prospect of profit because of ‘the complex relationship between the commercial film industry, the political establishment, and the intellectual film culture of the day’ (2000, p. 208–9). To appease the Labour government of the day, the Rank Organisation had to put up the left-wing documentary movement and give the appearance of exercising responsible capitalism (ibid., p. 213). In this sense, while the political climate of the day gave Craigie her break, so to speak, it also presented her with a minefield of sexist attitudes, aesthetic assumptions, and commercial interests with which to content.

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It is therefore within these constraints that Craigie directed four documentaries and one feature film. Her last documentary, Two Hours from London (1994) was made after a hiatus of three decades from filmmaking. The Way We Live (1946) and Who are the Vandals (c. 1967) reflect her commitment to town planning, urban redevelopment, and housing issues. The Way We Live highlights a vision of the post-war reconstruction of Plymouth after the blitz, and Who are the Vandals criticises the architects of what Craigie sees as sub-standard and degrading social housing. Out of Chaos (1944) explores the influence of the war on the British artists Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, and Graham Sutherland while To Be a Woman (1951) is a 20-minute argument for equal pay in postwar Britain. Blue Scar (1949), Craigie’s only feature, is set in a mining town in South Wales and is about the nationalisation of the coal industry. Finally, Two Hours from London (1995) was made when Craigie was in her eighties, and is an indictment of western governments’ refusal to intervene in the Yugoslav civil war and focuses on the devastation of Dubrovnik. A distinct difficulty of attempting to appraise Craigie’s works is due to the passage of time that has rendered most of her films anachronistic, arguably nostalgic, and somewhat unfamiliar. Yet, there are aspects of Craigie’s documentary filmmaking practice that warrant a renewed look, especially in relation to the current trend of political documentary filmmaking: the ways in which her films attempt to underscore the aesthetics of the political and the politicisation of aesthetic, as well as her incisive use of argument towards political change. Writing about the documentary film, Jane Gaines muses about ‘the strange association of apolitical films with social change and radical politics’ (1999, p. 86), and wonders, ‘what is the significance, if any, of the reception of political documentaries in the absence of a struggle’ (ibid., p. 100). Gaines considers the work of political documentaries as that of enabling mimesis: ‘Political mimesis begins with the body. Actualized, it is about a relationship between bodies in two locations— on the screen and in the audience—and it is the starting point for the consideration of what the one body makes the other do’ (ibid., p. 90). Translated into a broader context,

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Gaines’ definition of political mimesis is applicable to understanding media activism: instead of making us into passive consumers of mass culture, films and the media could instil political consciousness and action. An exploration of Craigie’s films, and the context in which they are made, would allow some insights into the operation of mimesis in relation to the political documentary. Craigie’s filmmaking career began in the 1940s. The war years constituted an exuberant time for Craigie, where she found her purpose in life and a sense of belonging. The effects of the war on the British film industry perhaps buoyed her personal experience of the war years. Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards note that, ‘despite all its problems, the period of the Second World War was . . . a time of relative prosperity for the British film industry’ (1986, p. 2) and it provides ‘evidence in abundance of the desire and commitment to build “a better world” once the war has been won; [and] it is clear that the cinema played a positive and purposeful role in its own right in generating adherence to the new found consensus of the war years’ (ibid., p. 13). As her biographer recounts her experience of travelling into war torn Dubrovnik to film Two Hours from London, Craigie was wearing a huge smile even as the rest of the crew were unnerved by the destruction around them. Craigie reportedly told her grandson later, ‘she had been reminded of the war, the greatest part of her life’ (Rollyson, 2005, p. 330). While one may speculate about the personal and psychological reasons behind the fact that the war years provided Craigie with ‘the greatest part of her life’ while reading Rollyson’s biography of Craigie, the fact remains that it is the pretext of the war that plunged her into her filmmaking activities, the result of which provides us with an oeuvre of an avowedly socialist feminist filmmaker. Whatever may be the personal reasons to cause her blossoming in the war years, it remains a fact that Craigie’s filmmaking practice finds its catalyst in the political context in which she find herself, and it is through this engagement with the political that gives rise to the expression of her feminist and socialist ethics. In other words, the feminist and socialist ethics that drive Craigie’s filmmaking practice is closely aligned with the public sphere,

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and departs from the association of women’s filmmaking with a particular personal space as encapsulated by, say, Virginia Woolf’s notion of the Room of One’s Own. Craigie’s frustration at the sexism and obstacles she encountered is testament of the public space that she attempted to stake out with her films, a position quite different from the understanding of women’s filmmaking as a separate and ghettoised pursuit, whether as part of the avant-garde or as staking out domestic and feminine spaces. This context that galvanised Craigie into making documentaries also translates into the impetus that drives her films, for they are all fashioned for the mimetic purpose that concerns Gaines, as discussed above. Aesthetics of the political; or, politicising the aesthetic Writing about computer protocol as the logic that drives new media in terms of a particular manifestation of power, Alexander Galloway uses Sergei Eisenstein’s un-materialised attempt to adapt Marx’s Capital into film form to show how ’a work of political economy [may be turned] into a discursive event, one that may then manifest itself in film form’ (2004, p. 90) and ‘the way in which material objects in the modern era have a tendency to become aesthetic objects’ (ibid., p. 88). Galloway in effect makes the connection between art, culture, and politics, and frames aesthetics and the immaterial realm of culture within the material and the political. In much the same way, Dan Flory, writing about film noir, observes that ‘film noir is best understood not as a genre, mood, movement of visual style, but rather, as discourse’ (2007, p. 245). For Flory, noir provides the framework, or serves as the discursive event, through which to elucidate on issues of race and marginalisation. In Craigie’s case, the effects of the war years may be seen as the factors that gave rise to the aesthetic and political objects that come to be identified as her oeuvre. Quoting Arthur Marwick, Aldgate and Richards evaluate the effects of the war on British society: The war caused ‘destruction and disruption,’ it brought damage, dislocation and upheaval but it also had a

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‘reconstructive’ effect and led to a desire to rebuild better than before; the war was a ‘test’; it challenged society, imposed new stresses and strains, induced the collapse of some institutions and the transformation of others; the war invoked the ‘participation’ of underprivileged groups in the national effort and brought consequent social gains; and finally, the war had a ‘psychological’ effect, it provided a great emotional experience, reinforced ‘in-group’ feelings, and generally rendered change acceptable. (1986, pp. 12–3) In other words, despite the deprivations and destruction, the war years may be seen to have a generally positive effect in terms of instilling national pride, co-operation, and resulting in positive social changes. These effects of the war are those that which Craigie’s Out of Chaos explores; in the process, the film shows how associating the various terms such as aesthetics, culture, and politics with one another provides fertile ground with which to consider the politicisation of aesthetics and the aesthetics of the political. Such an exercise allows a better context for Craigie’s films that are often marginalised as belonging to a bygone socialist past. Out of Chaos (1944) is a particularly appropriate subject for such an re-evaluation, given its exploration of art and politics. Of approximately 27 minutes’ duration, Out of Chaos purports to be both documentary and educational. The film starts by wondering about the public interest in paintings and public galleries at the height of the Second World War in Britain, and goes on to show the works of various painters selected by the government sponsored War Artists’ Scheme to record the war. Introducing the works of these artists, Out of Chaos proceeds to explain how these paintings came about and the various aspects of the war that influenced the artists to paint them. The film also conscientiously brings in the opinions of Eric Newton, then an eminent art critic, who first appears as a voice-over. Towards the end of the film, Newton appears in person to teach art appreciation, rather paternalistically, to a motley crew of characters that has gathered round inside a gallery and propounds the importance of art in life and society.

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The documentary and educational aspects of Out of Chaos are those which earned the film its standing today as an earnest, worthy, and nostalgic piece of work that is of a specific historical time and place. As the result of such a general evaluation and the limiting positioning of Craigie’s persona and filmmaking career as an astonishing beautiful footnote in British film history, the ways in which Out of Chaos uses its subject matter to make the film into an actively politicised political event remain unexamined. Even Craigie’s biographer cannot resist attributing the making of Out of Chaos to the use of ‘her big eyes’ to ‘charm men’ (Rollyson, 2005, p. 39). The historically specific patriotism within the war context that Out of Chaos exhibits extends as far as the segment that features Paul Nash’s Totes Mere/Dead Sea with its accompanying tracking shots of the debris of German fighter planes that have been shot down and Newton’s ominous voice-over description of the shots as a picture of death, much like the skeletons of pre-historic animals. Nash’s images are, the voice-over narrator adds, ‘encouraging to ourselves and depressing to the enemy.’ In relation to the socialist agenda, however, Craigie skilfully politicises the aesthetic of painting diegetically, and the aesthetic of Out of Chaos extra-diegetically, by positioning within the subject matter of painting its context of the war effort, the public roles of the galleries in which paintings are exhibited, and the general populace for whom the art is meant. Out of Chaos begins with intertitles about the intrinsic human need for art and the arguments between people that art provokes. It then cuts to an establishing shot of the National Gallery in London, and then of the gallery’s interiors where people throng its exhibition halls. A cluster of medium shots of various people looking at paintings bring the voice-over narration to ask who these people might be and why indeed are they so interested in art in the middle of a world war. Profiling the various visitors to the gallery, the voice-over narrator speculates on their various professions (a soldier, businessmen, a dandy, and a courting couple) and their reasons for visiting the gallery. Having asked its rhetorical question, the film then flashes back to the outbreak of the war in 1939 that causes culture and artistic pursuits to effectively cease. To further set up the grounds for Craigie’s treatise, the film then

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interviews its first subject, an amusingly stilted director of the gallery, Kenneth Clark (evidently before his television presenting career in the 1960s), who talks about the War Artists’ Scheme and its remit of sending out artists to paint images of the war. In these first minutes of Out of Chaos, Craigie sets the political context for the discussion of painting. The setting of this discursive space that is Out of Chaos involves a cross section of the population and disseminates an egalitarian sensibility in relation to a notion of shared cultural heritage and access to the arts that is centrally funded. Furthermore, although much of this film discusses the works of four wellknown artists, Spencer, Nash, Sutherland, and Moore, it is significant that Craigie incorporates into the discussion the artistic efforts of firemen who publicly exhibited their paintings of (their part in extinguishing the flames of) the fires of London, apparently to wide acclaim. In this sense, the film sends out the message that the creation of works of art, as well as the reception and enjoyment of culture, is rightly within the reach of the people. Right after a shot of the Home Secretary officiating at the exhibition of firemen artists, Out of Chaos superimposes a montage of exhibition posters to a low-angle shot of feet pounding the pavement of a busy road, amongst them, fliers announcing the various exhibitions of works by civil defence, Soviet, firemen, English and Welsh artists, etc. Through such a contextualisation of art and culture, Out of Chaos sets the stage to imbue a particular socialist sensibility into the issues of aesthetic that it discusses. As a lesson in art appreciation for the movie-going masses, the approach that Out of Chaos takes towards the four artists featured in the film could perhaps be seen as auteurial—in the sense of a director-centred approach as in film studies. Worse, it may be seen as combining deference for, say, the Great Men of Wartime British Art with an entrenched sense of paternalism that is often attributed to the Griersonian documentary tradition, although the discussion on the firemen artists gestures to a broader social and community based notion of art. On the other hand, it is more productive perhaps to bypass such evaluations and consider the film in its complex entirety in relation to the politics that it espouses.

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The political orientation of Out of Chaos, and Craigie’s oeuvre in general, is not subject to debate. The films are unequivocal and there can be no mistaking what her films stand for politically. Not only does Craigie set out the political discursive parameters for the exploration of her subject matter, as the above analysis of Out of Chaos shows, she stitches her subject matter of British wartime paintings with an intrinsic political purpose. In other words, through the discussion of British paintings during the war, Out of Chaos aestheticises the politics it advocates in the works of art that the film discusses. Despite exhibiting some deference to the four artists that Out of Chaos features, Craigie sidesteps an easily made accusation of worshipping great male geniuses because of the way she dissects their respective work to accord aesthetic value on material objects. In the segment featuring Stanley Spencer, the film shows the artist traipsing around a shipyard in search of inspiration. Disproportionately framed by the hull of a ship, the artist is seen sketching busily into his notebook. Through a montage of shots that celebrates the landscape of industry and the labour of shipyard workers, Out of Chaos presents a modernist picture of the relationship between human and machine that the voice-over narration confirms as ‘the dramatic symbols on which [Spencer] bases his decorative composition.’ The next shot then shows Spencer hard at work in his room painting a mural inspired by his jaunts at the shipyard, thereby bestowing an aesthetic value to the political sensibility that celebrates industry, labour, and the war effort. As though encompassing both the joys and trauma of the war, Out of Chaos then follows Henry Moore down to an underground station that doubles up as a bomb shelter during the war where he finds inspiration in the image of two women in fretful slumber on the train platform. Moore then shows the process by which he makes a wax drawing of the sleeping women, after which Newton’s voice-over comments on the effects the picture emanates. Describing the swirling movements of Moore’s strokes, Newton comments on the exhaustion, fear, and tranquillity that the picture captures. In a similar way that Out of Chaos aestheticises the vigour of the war effort in considering Spencer’s work, the film accords

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a dignity to the daily suffering endured by Londoners at the height of the war through Moore’s works. The further exhibition of Moore’s sculptures later on in the film also manages to provide a politicised context for the reception of his artworks, thereby enabling Out of Chaos to achieve a perfect confluence of aesthetics, politics, and material relations. Argument and rhetoric As her biographer observes, Craigie is ‘a superb example of an activist filmmaker constructing an argument and fomenting a sense of outrage that twenty-first century documentary film students have compared to the work of Michael Moore’ (Rollyson, 2005, p. 193). Perhaps more so than in Michael Moore’s films, the outrage that Craigie’s films express is derived from a specific set of socialist values to the extent that they become moral positions, similar, say, to the politics espoused in the films made by the British social realist director, Ken Loach. This dogmatism, the ‘this is how it should be’ mode is that which defines the political work of Craigie’s oeuvre and provides the rhetoric to propel her line of argument. The way that Craigie cements a relationship between politics and aesthetics towards making an unequivocal statement about Out of Chaos’ political and ideological underpinnings makes this dogmatism clear. Such strength of conviction is manifest in all of Craigie’s films, and while seemingly unwieldy to audiences today in light of the ideological schizophrenia that characterises much of contemporary British politics since the 1990s, warrants analysis so as to delineate a specific mode of political filmmaking. The film that signals the end of Craigie’s difficult relationship with the British film industry in the 1950s is that which uncompromisingly displays her politics and powers of persuasion. To be a Woman is a 20-minute treatise on equal pay for women in the immediate post-war years. At a time when women were unceremoniously herded back into the kitchen after participating in the war effort and doing ‘men’s work,’ the case for which To be a Woman argues would not fall onto particularly receptive ears in that particular climate.

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Her biographer describes the film as ‘a passionate, uncompromising work. It is full of good argument but it does not have the playful, cunning tone that might disarm an audience and an industry that had little patience for the film’s subject matter’ in the post-war years (Rollyson, 2005, p. 132). The state of political and industrial affairs that affected the reception of To be a Woman aside, that the film seeks no recourse to charm its way into theatres as opposed to many accounts from Craigie’s male contemporaries and critics about her supposed modus operandi, makes it an appropriate reference point with which to also consider Craigie’s filmmaking practice. Comprised mostly of interviews and footages from contemporary sources and the nineteenth-century suffragette movement, To be a Woman makes its argument in two parts. The film begins with a rhetorical question: What does it mean to be a woman in 1950s Britain and how does she compare to women of a hundred years ago? A dialogue than begins between the male and the female voice-overs, whereby the film presents statistics of women in all sorts of paid work and then concludes with the statement, ‘women work while men weep.’ The male voice-over interjects, begs to differ, and then offers up the point of view of a housewife who claims to prefer to stay at home with her knitting. The female voice-over then insists that times have changed although old prejudices die hard, after which the film proceeds to interview a distinguished looking gentlemen who attributes the lower standards of industry to the presence of working women. Influential women artists, composers, aviators, architects, journalists, and politicians that the film then namedrops immediately put this perspective to rest. To drive home the point of the discrimination women face for not being allowed to drive London taxis and buses, the film reminds its audience that at times of war, women had to fly planes. On the issue of women in politics, the film considers whether women use their votes and if voters would vote for women candidates. Through a couple of interviews with policy makers, it concludes that the point is moot and the presence of women in parliament has led to better welfare for women and children.

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Having made sure to tackle every prejudice about women joining the work force and nominally posing a point of significance, that women work while men weep, To be a Woman then launches into the gist of its argument about equal pay for women. Citing the example of the indispensable shorthand typist, the female voice-over asserts: ‘She is not paid for the rate of the job. She is cheap labour.’ This assertion will then become the refrain for the rest of the film. The film cites more examples of gender disparity in wages: between postmen and women, workers in industry, sales people, schoolmasters and mistresses. Disputing the observation made by the male voiceover that men have families to support, the female voice-over then states that following this logic, the family man should be paid more that the bachelor, and besides, women workers increasingly have dependants at home that they have to care for and support (accompanied by an image of a woman taking care of an elderly man). Besides, married men get ‘value and service’ from their wives and home-makers surely do not deserve to be seen as ‘dead weight’. The film then arrives at this argument via an interview with a trade unionist: that people should be paid for the jobs they do and the State should take care of the rest. To pick up its earlier point that ‘women work while men weep,’ the film then asks if unequal pay benefits men and demonstrates a confident grasp of industrial relations and gender politics. The film notes that with the encroachment of the manufacturing industry and changes in the heavy and rail industries, jobs previously occupied by men and that which require skills are increasing taken over by semi-skilled women workers because, and here comes the refrain again, ‘they are cheap labour.’ The film then warns of the dangers of undercutting based on gender lines and shows a footage of a bread queue, arguing that men who work in sectors that practice equal pay are none the worse off. In defeat, the male voiceover makes a last ditch effort to argue for pay disparity by pleading that ‘now isn’t the time.’ It gets cut down by the female voice-over rebutting that ‘now never is the time,’ with once again, accompanying footages of the suffragette movement that echoes the excuse used to delay giving women

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the vote. The film then asks if the women members of parliament have forgotten the plights of other women, if they allow such a situation to persist, turning the spotlight to women in power and thus avoids diminishing its argument by playing on a sexist agenda by only portioning out the blame on men. Finally, the film considers the failure of legislation and reminds the audience that the country has signed the United Nations Charter for Human Rights. Given that it is unthinkable to pay men according to their residence status, religious background, or even hair colour, To be a Woman ends its powerful argument by wondering why we insult women this way, and if it is not time ‘that we in Britain make it a proud thing to be a woman.’ To be a Woman, and the argument it makes for equal wage for men and women, may be seen as preceding Ursula Biemann’s video essays that is discussed in a later chapter of this book. In many ways, Biemann’s video essays that explore the global reorganisation of women in the transnational economy extend the argument about labour issues and wages that To be a Woman makes, albeit for a very different and much more complex political context. Far from being anachronistic specimens from a socialist past, Craigie’s works should be seen as political films that are grounded in its specific political situation and that engages with the issues of the day as the premise of its socialist and feminist ethics. The force of Craigie’s argument in To be a Woman displays a particular logic that underlies her politics, a politics that is perhaps best described with reference to that of Michael Foot’s, to whom she was married for over 50 years. In his introduction to a collection of Foot’s writing, Brian Brivati considers what was, in effect, the systematic dismantling of Foot’s political ideals by Margaret Thatcher’s premiership but argues that: This way of seeing Foot reduces him to what Nye Bevan called the prose of politics. It leaves out the poetry and ignores the fact that Foot’s personal example continues to set a political benchmark. When you want to attack something for being old Left you call it a ‘Michael Foot theme

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park.’ In this insult is also a massive compliment: everyone knows exactly what you mean. (2004, p. xiii) In some way, given the legendary marriage and long collaboration between Craigie and Foot, the poetry of Foot’s politics finds its expression in Craigie’s oeuvre. Much as the Thatcherite era frustrated the political ideals of the Labour Party and transformed the political landscape of Britain beyond Foot’s recognition, it may be similarly said that Craigie’s films could not withstand the political and industrial changes in the post-war years. The conditions of the war allowed the egalitarian ideal that Out of Chaos espouses to thrive despite the entrenched British class system. Remarking on Craigie’s experience of the difficult post-war British film industry, Rollyson writes, ‘Jill watched in dismay as the socialist, democratic ethos of the war years evaporated: “The debutantes came back. It all came back overnight. It was something to do with the Daily Express and Daily Mail. They helped sort of change the mood. It was alarming . . . It was a return to the class system in a big way”’ (2005, p. 125). Nonetheless, the confluence of politics and aesthetics in Craigie’s films makes them instructive for considering some of the functions of the political documentary and how the argument facilitates such a convergence. Even though Craigie’s films and Foot’s politics seem somewhat dated in our eyes, the ethics behind their argument is laudable. Braivati sums up the ethics behind Foot’s writings in this way, which I quote here at length: Foot has not built a wall of words so much as a battering ram. It is a lexicon of positive politics; an overtly partisan rhetoric that has been forged from an intimate acquaintance with three centuries of radical writing . . . It is based on a belief of our shared humanity across races, peoples and to a lesser extent classes. At the heart of Foot’s political credo is the articulation of a burning desire for equality of outcome. But perhaps even more pressing is the unrelenting demand for a peace that means more than simply an absence of war: a peace based on justice and international

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accountability . . . Much of the writing in this collection is as much about literature for its own sake as about politics; as much about love as Labour; as much about passion as power. Instead, Foot the great humanist has a credo based on a trinity: politics, poetry and passion. (2005, p. xiv) These characteristics of Foot’s writings apply to Craigie’s filmmaking oeuvre, and come together particularly in the events in the former Yugoslavia that compelled Craigie to make her last film, Two Hours from London, in 1995 at the age of 84, in collaboration with Foot. Ethics and knowledge The ethics that infuses Craigie’s politics and sense of aesthetics is obvious when one considers the basis of the indictments of governments that both To be a Woman and Two Hours from London make, even if there is an interval of 42 years between these two projects. To be a Woman concludes with a reminder that the British government has signed the post-war United Nations Charter for Human Rights, and wonders if that act was done in good faith or hypocrisy, given how women are denied equal opportunities and pay in the public sphere. Two Hours from London, in a similar fashion, begins with an indictment of the British government’s failure to intervene in the Yugoslav crisis and invokes the number of international agreements that the country, and Western Europe generally, has dishonoured by refusing to get involved in curtailing blatant Serbian aggression against the Croats and Bosnians. At base, these films express an absolute, if somewhat naïve, belief in humanity, justice, accountability, and the necessity of upholding these principles in political life. In addition, however, Two Hours from London addresses the necessity of knowledge in the participation of civil life as the film exposes the deliberate governmental obfuscation of the facts surrounding the Yugoslav crisis because it preferred not to know. Two Hours from London begins with interviews with two politicians, one Labour and the other Conservative. They both

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recount the plea for inaction in parliamentary debates over the Yugoslav crisis and compare the situation to that which precipitates the Holocaust. The film then cuts to Michael Foot who sets the context for the prior discussions about ‘the biggest event that has happened in Europe since 1945’ and states that, unfortunately, our politicians ‘don’t want us to see and understand exactly what has been happening.’ Thus beginning its indictment of British inaction in the Yugoslav conflict, the film recounts the historical events that led up to Serbian aggression against its neighbours after the fall of the Eastern bloc. Throughout this summary of Yugoslav history, narrated by Foot, the film documents the repeated failures of John Major’s government to rise to the humanitarian and political challenges that the conflict presents. This series of failures and refusal to intervene resolutely, the film shows, contribute directly to the genocide, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, mass rape, and the sacking of world heritage sites such as Dubrovnik. In the process, these failures of action undermine humanitarian work and bring the United Nations into disrepute as they had only the mandate to keep peace when there was clearly none to be kept. In some ways, the positive politics that Two Hours from London espouses is similar to that expressed in Shake Hands with the Devil (Peter Raymont, 2004), the documentary that follows Roméo Dallaire, the UN general in charge of peace keeping during the Rwanda genocide, back to the country a decade after the event. In one sequence of the film, Dallaire, who was literally abandoned with a small contingent of UN peacekeepers in the midst of the killings and given strict orders not to act, goes back to Rwanda ten years later and condemns the world community to a stadium packed with Rwandans. Both Two Hours from London and Shake Hands with the Devil serve as damning indictments of the international community’s cynicism and repeated failures to act. Despite their good intentions and moral stance, both Two Hours from London and Shake Hands with the Devil may be criticised for not being cognizant of realpolitik and cynical power relations that more often than not characterises international politics and that which, for instance, Ian Smillie and Larry Minear (2004) articulate.

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The second half of Two Hours from London is a searing indictment of British diplomatic incompetence and poses a continual stream of questions about the civilised and democratic principles behind the idea of Europe, if Western European governments refuse to uphold them, alongside footages of the carnage wrought in this conflict. Showing footage of the London Conference in 1992 where the British governmental appointee to manage the Yugoslav conflict, Lord Owen, states that the government do not accept ethnic cleansing, racist pressures, and force of arms to occupy territories, the film goes on to show that by its refusal of resolute intervention, the British government implicitly supports such actions. In the way that To be a Woman ends by speculating on the hypocrisy of European governments, Two Hours from London confirms this duplicity by declaring, ‘never have our leaders been so contemptible as when they pretended not to know whether perhaps it had been the Muslims themselves who were responsible for the massacre,’ in reference to the Bosnian-Croat civil war caused by the initial Serb aggression. The deliberate obfuscation in which governments engage to mislead and distract the populace becomes an issue that Two Hours from London exposes. Exposing the lie perpetuated by the government as an excuse for inaction, that the warring factions are all as bad as each other, Two Hours from London inserts an additional ingredient into the equation for a politically ethical life: knowledge. Knowledge as a necessity for the safeguard and perpetuation of civil and political life is that which holds together Craigie’s aesthetic and ethical premises. Just as Out of Chaos holds a socialist view of art as something that belongs to the people at the same time that it espouses the importance of art appreciation, Two Hours from London looks aghast at how the British government is able to disregard its moral and political obligations through the deliberate withholding of knowledge about the Yugoslav conflict from its people. The deliberate denial of knowledge is a familiar strategy in a politics characterised by absence, in particular, the absence of policy, justice, and ideology, whereas aesthetic, knowledge, and ethics thrive in a positive politics like that advocated by Craigie’s oeuvre. In The Powers of Nightmare (2004), the

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three-part documentary series made for the BBC, Adam Curtis illustrates the argument about the regime of fear instituted by political leaders that lends legitimacy to their rule. The end of the Cold War and the absence of a definitive enemy had left a political vacuum. As Curtis reiterates in the prologue of each episode, ‘In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.’ Post 9/11 panic about al-Qaida, terror cells and terrorist attacks establish psychic and social boundaries between those experiencing panic and paranoia and those generating these feelings. Perhaps the generation of paranoia and fear that Curtis delineates is the exacerbation of the politics of obfuscation. If one of the purposes of the documentary is to show and galvanise, then the contemporary political documentary will necessarily take on a significant role in public life given the deliberate obfuscations so often perpetrated.

3 On the Edges of Ethnography: Kim Longinotto’s Institution of Feminist Discourses

The free cinema movement that began in the 1950s aimed to achieve the closest approximation to reality without undue artifice in the filmmaking process. Aided by the development of the lightweight camera that also synchronises sound, the free cinema movement was able to lead to the emergence of a documentary practice that professed a distinct aesthetic. The late film historian Erik Barnouw asked whether the free cinema camera serves as observer or provocateur, and concluded that it is neither. Instead, Barnouw observes that both cinéma vérité and direct cinema achieve their impact ‘by inquiry, rather than protest. In both these genres, documentarists were trying to throw light on dark places, while avoiding editorializing’ (1993, p. 262). Such an approach is rather different from the somewhat earlier documentary practice of, say, Jill Craigie, as discussed in the previous chapter, where commentary, protest, and commitment to an ideological position are paramount in her films’ exploration of particular subject matters. Whatever the rhetoric of the direct cinema movement, the aesthetic choices made to privilege observation and inquiry over argument and protestation signal yet another approach through which to invigorate feminist politics or instil a feminist ethics in film culture and documentary practice. Barnouw, discussing the effectiveness of free cinema, observed that it ‘seemed preferable that the material, with all its ambiguities, be offered as a basis for discussion. [Therefore], commentary began to be seen as a limiting rather than a liberating factor’ (ibid., p. 251). 61

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While Craigie’s socialist and feminist politics had much influence on her approach to documentary filmmaking, and might have to some extent diminished the popularity and persuasiveness of her films given the historical circumstances, this chapter explores the different ways with which an observational or inquiring mode of documentary practice might instil a feminist politics. Another way of putting it would be to say that this chapter attempts to unearth the repressed ‘feminine, feminist, interactive, collective, confrontational’ in the psychic configuration of ethnography and direct cinema aesthetics, as Patty Zimmermann, quoting Slavoj Žižek, articulates (1999, p. 65). Perhaps the foremost British documentary classicist working today, Kim Longinotto has an oeuvre of fourteen documentary films that she has been making since 1976. While her training and cinematic allegiances are clear in the ethnographic style of her film practice, Longinotto’s oeuvre, save one, has the distinction of focusing exclusively on women in various stages of life and circumstances. That her films are overwhelmingly about women in Africa, the Middle East, Japan, and the United Kingdom may be attributed to an ethnographic impulse. However, they may be better understood when thought of as making up a film practice that inquires about the intersection of gender, institutions, and activism. Mark Cousins describes Longinotto’s films as discursive. He writes that ‘her films are about what happens when people stop talking and start negotiating, confronting, and contesting. Her movies are not about fight or flight—though there are plenty about the former in them—but about the power of discourse (2009, p. 5). The ethnographic and observational documentary style that Longinotto employs may be the cinematic discourse through which the female, the private, and the domestic is brought into the public sphere and politicised through the process of encouraging the audience to judge what they see and hear. The radical management of female discontent The question about whether gender is about biological determinism or social construction is an age-old one within

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feminist debates that has led to theories of essentialism on the one hand and explorations of gender as performativity on the other. This is also a question that Longinotto explores in her films, especially the ones made in Japan. The five films made in Japan almost exclusively explore the issue of gender construction within a homogeneous culture that operates along strict and oppressive gender lines, and discern the slight possibility for transgressing repressive cultural norms. Yet, the audience would find that the political potential of diverging from gender norms is always in doubt, the more Longinotto trains her cameras on her subjects. Made in collaboration with Jano Williams, the Japan films are peculiar given that their subjects are all performers or entertainers in various guises. Eat the Kimono (1989) is about an itinerant performer, Hanayagi Genshu, who made the news some years before for attacking the owner of a dance school for alleged maltreatment, served time in jail, and subsequently became a social activist through her shows. The Good Wife of Tokyo (1992) follows the lead singer of a London-based band home to Japan and films her mother’s daily routine as both a housewife and a preacher within a religious order. Dream Girls (1993) explores the phenomenon of the highly selective Takarazuka dance and drama school that trains girls for the specific purpose of vaudevillelike performances directed at women audiences, in which the girls who specialise in drag acts are guaranteed the greater popularity and success. Shinjuku Boys (1995) follows a group of cross-dressing women who work in a hostess bar that caters to female customers, while Gaea Girls (2000) tracks the process towards initiation into the world of professional women’s wrestling. The Japan films are quite clear in their advocacy of the view that gender roles are social constructions and need to be in continual performance in order that these roles are upheld. Given that femininity is aligned with the personal and the domestic, the way in which Longinotto may infiltrate such closed private spaces with her ethnographic camera is therefore indirect. Apart from The Good Wife of Tokyo, where she sought access through a Japanese woman living in London and follows her back to her parents’ in Japan, Longinotto

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approaches her female subjects via manifestly public performances of gender on which she trains her camera. By establishing the significance of such gender performance in the public sphere, these films are able to discern the inherent cultural misogyny that is coercive and demands submission. While transgression of cultural norms is possible, as the films’ subjects show, questions remain as to whether these acts of transgressions are socially and politically constructive. Moreover, the existence of such supposed transgression seems useful in ensuring that the dominant culture diffuse accusations of misogyny at the same time that heterogeneity is marginalised into politically and socially impotent spaces under the banner of the exceptional and the perverse. In much the same way, femininity is relegated to the private sphere with the corresponding removal of its political presence and imperative, leading to psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference that trade on femininity as abjection, jouissance, other, and as situated outside of social and political discourses. Female discontent, at once frightful and horrendous, has great powers. For example, the myth of the virgina dentata, encapsulating the fear of female sexual and reproductive powers, has been used to great effect in psychoanalytic theory to sideline female discontent in theoretical discourses. Translating sexual difference into pathology, the use of psychoanalysis in books such as Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine (1993) explains away manifestations of female anger and discontent in mainstream cultural objects as instances of irrationality, hysteria, and monstrosity instead of harnessing the political potential of female discontent and anger for social and political change. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963, served as the catalyst for the secondwave women’s movement because it discerned a profound female discontent in the prosperous post-war America of the 1950s. The second sentence of its first chapter expresses female discontent as such: ‘a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States’ (Friedan, 1992, p. 13). Yet, she writes, ‘Millions of women lived their lives in

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the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands good-bye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the kitchen floor’ (ibid., p. 16). Finally referred to as ‘the problem that has no name,’ Friedan identifies such unsettling discontent among women as the result of being relegated to the private and the domestic sphere, at the expense of educational opportunities, the prospect of meaningful work, financial independence, political rights, and their general psychological well being in the service of a powerful national and cultural doctrine concerning gender roles. This notion of femininity as entrapment is also evident in Sofia Coppola’s films, discussed in Chapter 6, where the female characters retreat into their imaginations for want of anything constructive to do. In similar ways, Longinotto’s films that focus on Japanese women and culture also identify this ‘problem that has no name.’ Yet, instead of the sexual revolution that Friedan’s book is at least partly responsible for activating in American society of the 1960s, Longinotto’s films instead expose, through observation, the radical management of female discontent in Japanese society. The Good Wife of Tokyo follows Kazuko, the lead singer of a cabaret act, back to Japan and her voice-over narration sets the stage for the film’s observations of life around her elderly parents’ household. She reflects that while she is impressed by the cleanliness, beauty, and safety of Japanese society each time she returns, the longer she stays, the more she is reminded of the reasons for leaving in the first place. With this preface, the film proceeds to document her parents’ daily lives, focusing on Kazuko’s mother’s activities as a preacher in a religious order for women. Her mother leads prayers, shares testimonies, preaches, dances, counsels, and entertains her followers. The chats and interviews Kazuko conducts with a variety of women, some of whom are her friends and others from the religious group, provide the discourse of the film. Talking almost exclusively about domesticity, marriage, husbands, and mothers-in-law, a common tread emerges from these conversations. Sometimes affectionate, often disparaging, frequently

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tinged with regret and sadness, but always pragmatic, the women express their ambivalent experiences of domesticity and marriage and for their fleeting bids at freedom or education. More like a support group than a religious order, several elderly women, including Kazuko’s mother herself, confess to finding redemption in religion when marriage and domestic life prove impossible. The sessions that Kazuko’s mother holds at home for her followers include some exercises in enforced laughter, in the belief that one can find joy through the outward act of laughing in unison. The film’s observation of such practices leads to the insight that the discontent expressed by these women are not so much addressed, but contained and managed by small acts of ritual and play-acting. More examples of ways in which female dissatisfaction is managed and contained are evident in Dream Girls, a film about a theatre company that trains girls for a musical stage that caters to female desires. Highly selective, the Takarazuka school runs a strict regime where first-year students are required to spring clean the school each morning with military precision. Given that the school’s management has eschewed the use of electrical appliances, the girls are left to content with all manner of brooms, brushes, dustpans, rags, and dust beaters to eliminate any evidence of dust, grime, or mess in what might be described as choreographed scurrying in organised labour and fear. A visit to the grave of the school’s founder involves more cleaning and sweeping. Upon graduation, the girls get contracts to perform on the Takarazuka stage, where a select few will achieve Takarazuka super stardom. Given that the theatre targets a female audience, the performers selected to play the male protagonist in this musical theatre acquire a large female fan base but are only allowed to reign for two years before she is replaced by another. With no social contact with men, they learn masculine gestures, mannerism, and characteristics from, for instance, a troop of soldiers who visit and perform a march that the girls emulate. Yet, their masquerade is very convincing, if their legions of female fans are any indication. Dream Girls show snippets of these performances—sexual, romantic, glamorous, and full of histrionic gender posturings—to enraptured audiences. Fans line

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the streets with elaborate gifts, flowers, and love letters for a glimpse of their stars. When interviewed, they speak of the escapism that the Takarazuka shows provide, creating a world where men are endlessly kind and considerate to their partners and where women are the centre of the universe. Thus, such theatre allows a form of female address, escapism, and validation like that provided by the woman’s romance novel that Janice Radway (1991) explores as well as the woman’s picture that Andrew Britton (1992) and Mary Ann Doane (1987), among others, discern. The ciphers represented by the female characters in Coppola’s oeuvre, explored in Chapter 6, are but fictional renditions of the feminine parallel universe that Longinotto’s Japan films uncover, whether in the Takarazuka theatre or in the exclusively female religious order in The Good Wife of Tokyo. Takarazuka fans explain on camera their preference for the idealised image of masculinity on stage: the Takarazuka version is better because they are unlike real men who only focus on work, neglect their partners, and have dirty habits. Speaking about gender roles in terms of absolute social circumscription and segregation, these women talk about revelling in their fantasies in the theatre before returning to their lives as housewives and mothers. The allowance for female fantasies and homo-eroticism notwithstanding, given the Takarazuka set up, Dream Girls shows how the regime recuperates its own gender transgression. While its female fans are given respite from their marital and domestic disappointments, the Takarazuka hierarchy and structure ensure that its female players toe the patriarchal line. Apart from the absolute obedience and domestic labour demanded of them while training in the school, the players’ longevity on the stage is limited by the pressure to get married as they get older. Besides, the biggest stars are only allowed two years on their perch, a restriction that would imaginably remove the women’s control over their careers. As a middleaged former performer explains, a girl reaches a crisis point when she nears her 25th birthday as the pressure to get married increases. Moreover, she adds, the strict regime in the school prepared her for married life, so that she is able to keep nodding in agreement when dealing with a difficult husband

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or mother-in-law. Dream Girls explores the question of what happens after their stint on stage ends by following a retiring performer back home. Nearing her 25th birthday, Ako is submitting to her father’s desire that she leaves the theatre so as to find a husband. In the family’s sitting room, he explains that Ako’s experience in the theatre has given her discipline and good manners to be a good wife. Nodding in agreement, Ako adds that former Takarazuka players make excellent wives, especially those who play male roles, as they understand the intricacies of male dressing, as her father holds up an imaginary coat like a Japanese housewife would for her husband at the door each morning as he leaves for work. At the same time that the Takarazuka theatre provides women with an outlet to assuage their various disappointments with real men, it recuperates the sexual transgressions and fantasies unleashed in its shows by reining control on its players and their career trajectories. So long as these transgressions do not leak into the real sexual economy and Japanese women do not demand political rights and social change, the phenomenon of the Takarazuka theatre as well as religious activities in The Good Wife of Tokyo are effective in their management of female desires and discontent. So long as women’s narratives and issues are gendered as such, consigned to the personal and separated from the realpolitik of the public sphere, the possibility of attaining women’s rights and equality closes down. Longinotto’s Japan films in many ways present the exclusively female parallel universes and subcultures that many Japanese women inhabit, separate and marginalised spaces that nonetheless participate fully in the repressive circumscribed gender roles on which a patriarchal social order pivots. The subjects in Shinjuku Boys, Longinotto’s film about a transsexual hostess club that caters to an exclusive female clientèle, are perhaps most consciously invested in the performance of gender as masquerade. Taking on male mannerism, dress, and characteristics, each hostess (or host, given the gender preference) identifies as a particular male template and behaves accordingly towards her/his clients. As they explain, one might be macho and tough talking, another might be jovial and fun loving, and a third might

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specialise in cuddles and physical affection. As the film follows several of these subjects around, it becomes evident that such gender performances filter into their personal lives as they negotiate their ambiguous sexualities and the possibility of intimacy. Gaea Girls ventures into the world of professional women’s wrestling and observes the trials and tribulations of one trainee, Takeuchi, as she strives to pass the tests in order to make her professional debut. In this documentary, the femininity that is otherwise subdued, repressed, and managed in the other films is transformed into a desire for personal empowerment. Contrary to the vision of docile Japanese femininity that is evident, and to some extent, endorsed in, for instance, The Good Wife of Tokyo and Dream Girls, Takeuchi’s declared desire for glory in the wrestling arena, to stand out from the crowd, and to channel her anger and frustration into fights is remarkable for its candid assertiveness. Yet, as the film proceeds to show, her harsh trajectory towards being a prized fighter requires her to cast off all traces of

Figure 1 Gaea Girls (Kim Longinotto, 2005)

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culturally ingrained feminine traits not only in form, but also in spirit. The criticism Takeuchi receives for her performance has nothing to do with her strength or techniques but for not possessing adequate directed aggression to pull punches that matter and would hurt her opponent. During a practice bout after she failed her test for the first time, a senior fighter shouts at her for her passivity. As she casts off the shackles of subordinate femininity and harnesses her energies and anger towards her goal of becoming a professional wrestler, the film also shows three other novices running away or resigning from the programme because of the harshness and brutality. At risk of overstating the case, it would seem that the conventional femininity demanded of Japanese women is difficult to circumvent, given what is observed of some of these novices who gave up. In the interviews given by Takeuchi’s coach and colleagues, there is the implicit rejection of conventional subordinate femininity: in particular, her coach rejects the prospect of marriage, children, and domesticity. Yet, these subjects inhabit an exclusive female subculture that does not trouble the patriarchal status quo. On the other hand, Eat the Kimono presents the possibility of some real threat to the inherent sexism and injustice of Japanese society. As Longinotto follows Hanayagi Genshu, a performer and social activist who once gained notoriety for standing up to mistreatment and fighting back, while she propagates her art and politics on stage, in community halls, and to the media, the possibility of feminist intervention comes to light. Genshu’s assertiveness and willingness to shoot off her mouth, as it were, expose the mien of subordinate femininity as an imposition and a construct. Her performances, usually in traditional dress and ornate make up, alongside her status as a social activist and public personality prise open the contradictions inherent in the ideological enforcement of sexual difference as destiny. As she explains to camera, one must not be dictated to by the symbolism of, and restrictions imposed by, the kimono. Instead of being swallowed up by the forces of culture and traditions, one should instead metaphorically consume, and assimilate, the kimono for one’s purposes. Yet, that flame of feminist intervention is weak, as Eat the Kimono

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documents Genshu’s struggles as she resists the suppression of her activism and societal attempts at her marginalisation when her discontent is unmanageable. Interrogating institutions As structures and mechanisms that underlie social order, institutions govern, support, as well as repress. In this sense, the intersection between institutions and individuals constructs the subject as political and lends urgency and necessity to the feminist slogan that sought the politicisation of the personal. Unlike Althusser’s understanding of Ideological State Apparatuses (1971), where subjects are interpellated and rendered impotent in the face of dominant ideology, Longinotto’s films that explore the interface between women and institutions embrace an approach that strives to offer the possibility of feminist resistance and intervention. Legal and educational institutions, as well as institutional care are those public structures that Longinotto explores. Wherever she trains her camera, Longinotto documents women’s personal experiences as well as their negotiations with public and political discourses. Longinotto’s first film, Pride of Place (1976), made with Dorothea Gazidis while at the London Film School, returns to the boarding school they both attended as girls and follows the school’s boarders for a term. Filmed in cinéma vérité style, Pride of Place is rather an indictment of both the British public school and class systems, in much the same way that Dream Girls, and to a certain extent, Gaea Girls, portray the brutality and sadism that could characterise practices within educational institutions. Pride of Place begins and ends on the last day of the school term, and documents the routines that form part of school life alongside interviews with the boarders. The film begins with the headmistress’ speech to the assembled students and well-heeled parents about the economic situation that might threaten private education. Already, the film prefaces the students’ experiences as within a particular economic and class structure that is tellingly confirmed as the film progresses. The harsh regime and constant criticism from the teachers consolidate class hierarchies and enforce a

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version of middle-class femininity, whether in the students’ manner, dress, deportment, behaviour, or aspirations. While the girls would complain about being told off for the slightest infringement or for not being ‘lady like,’ they also express at other times their aspiration for marriages in which ‘men bring in the capital’ and that are ‘just like with our parents.’ Mary Wollstonecraft, in pleading for the education of girls in 1792, argues for the co-education of children because ‘marriage will never be held sacred till women, by being brought up with men, are prepared to be their companions rather than their mistresses’ (1992, p. 289). In many ways, the school in Pride of Place fulfils Wollstonecraft’s hopes for the education of middle-class women, even though it remains segregated. On the other hand, it is questionable if the partial fulfilment of demands made by a nineteenth-century feminist a 150 years before establishes the effectiveness of feminism and constitutes progress. The legal and institutional care system that Longinotto explores, however, are more progressive examples of the ways in which the personal negotiates with public institutions and social discourse. Theatre Girls (1979), another early ethnographic film, records the depressing situation in a London West End hostel that takes in homeless, destitute, and alcoholic women on demand. Like her films about educational institutions, the picture that Theatre Girls paints of an overstretched holding pen for troubled, slurring, drunk, and aggressive women is incriminating of social provisions that are available to the destitute. In this sense, Longinotto’s observational films may be seen to articulate a particular political sensibility at the same time that they are open to accusations of ethnographic exploitation. Such accusations are especially applicable to Theatre Girls, given the many desperately grim situations that the film unflinchingly depicts, many of them that are both private and disturbing. Instances of fights erupting between the women, shots of them asleep and snoring on chairs and sofas, of some of them wandering in a daze around the house, and one of an elderly woman dancing in her underwear are difficult to watch at the same time that it is perhaps necessary to bring the issue of social care into

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public discourse. Later films such as Runaway (2001), made in collaboration with Ziba Mir-Hosseini, and Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go (2007) pick up where Theatre Girls left off over 20 years before and consider the intersection between the personal with the public and the political in institutionalised care. While Runaway is about a home for runaway girls in Iran, Hold Me Tight records the daily routines of a special school for emotionally disturbed children in Oxford, England. Perhaps the only film in Longinotto’s oeuvre that does not feature women as its primary subject matter, Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go is about a boarding school for children under the age of 12 who have undergone emotional trauma and suffering from behavioural difficulties. With about a hundred staff catering to around 40 students, the school represents for many of these children their last chance to progress to a conventional high school after their stints there end. As a means of coping with and calming down children who are often violent, the staff practises a method of physical restrain, where the children are held down by adults until they are calm enough to be let go. In contrast to the meagre provisions for destitute women in Theatre Girls, Hold Me Tight shows an impressive example of social care that helps these children at an enormous financial cost, and is significant for its account of success with these children despite the odds against them. Parents’ visits and news from the outside about their families are major stress factors for the children featured, and are juxtaposed by the physical intimacy and emotional affection they receive from their carers. Much as the methods of restrain and the physical intimacy between staff and children hint at possible concerns about abuse and paedophilia for contemporary audiences, Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go advocates social investment in children over political correctness and paranoid scaremongering. The institutions that Longinotto’s films advocate are those that politicise the personal and the domestic, and are in contrast to the institutions her Japan films and Pride of Place expose as being platforms from which to manage expressions of femininity and/or politically exclude female discontent. Runaway, set in a Teheran hostel for girls who have run away

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from home, exposes familial abuse, domestic violence, and deals with the fallout from active attempts at controlling and repressing women. As for the children in Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go, home is more the house of horror than the place of comfort and plenitude for the girls in Runaway. Without the built-in privileges accorded by the entitlement of the British class system in Pride of Place and economic prosperity evidenced in the Japan films, the seemingly benign but in fact radical management of female discontent is translated into active repression here. Yet, masculine anxieties about losing control over the women are more pronounced in Runaway and the other films made in Africa and Iran than in the Japan films where a patriarchal ideal pervades and that which instances of resistance work around. The half dozen girls featured in Runaway are in the hostel because they have escaped their families’ clutches. Their complaints range from the more benign cry for freedom to leave the house, to serious concerns such as constant beatings, forced marriages, prostitution, and sexual abuse. Runaway depicts an honour system that opts for rules and suppression instead of management. With all of the girls who have run away from home, their virginity remains a valuable asset for their families. More than the girls’ welfare, the families are accordingly relieved when their daughters and sisters are found ‘intact.’ For the men, the ability to keep their word carries some weight as the social workers leverage with families by making them sign moral contracts guaranteeing good treatment before letting the girls go home. Between at best a repressive family (or at worst an abusive one) and a public sphere from which women are excluded, the centre for runaway girls bridges the private and the political by advocating for the girls with their families or helping them with building a new life. In Runaway, as well as in the other film made in Iran with Mir-Hosseini called Divorce Iranian Style (1998), sexual politics takes the form of the honour system that pivots on suppressing female sexuality but which ends up oppressing everybody. At the end of Runaway, as a father signs a guarantee that he will treat his daughter better when she returns home, he asks if the director of the hostel would make his wife and daughter promise

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not to leave the house when he is at work so as to put his mind at ease. Hidden Faces (1990), the film Longinotto made with Claire Hunt in Egypt, explores the intersection between feminism and activism in the film portrait of an Egyptian feminist author and activist who writes about women in Islamic communities. Once again, the film shows the operation of the honour system that pivots on female sexuality. On the one hand, it is a system that focuses on the menace that femininity represents for men so that women should be confined to the home. If she has to leave the house, she should then be veiled to protect the public. On the other hand, the woman’s sexual purity must be preserved by all means to protect the family honour, including the practice of female circumcision. As the radical management of female discontent evidenced in the Japan films progresses to active repression in Longinotto’s films made in Iran and Africa, the legal system becomes that which needs to be co-opted in order to enable the activation of a feminist discourse that circumvents the oppression of women. Similar to the access Abbas Kiarostami obtained to witness the legal proceedings in an Iranian court of law in order to make Close-Up (1987), Longinotto and Mir-Hosseini’s Divorce Iranian Style observes the everyday drama that takes place in a family court in Tehran over which a kindly turbaned cleric presides. The judge interprets and applies Sharia law to each of the cases that come before him, and decides on whether each case provides the woman with enough grounds for divorce, arbitration, or custody within the limited provisions for women’s rights in marriage. Longinotto and Mir-Hosseini situate the camera and themselves at the judges’ right hand, while his clerk, Mrs Maher, sits at her desk on the left. From such a privileged position, Longinotto and Mir-Hosseini observe court proceedings and witness stories about impotent husbands and girls married off in their teens to older men and who now wants out of these marriages. Petitioners also plead that the judge enforces good behaviour on errant husbands, rule on the return of marriage gifts that were promised, and reverse the law that makes the woman forfeit custody of children upon remarriage. As a voice-over

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explains, Sharia law assumes that women want to remain in marriages, so the petitioners at this family court are invariably female and in some form of distress about their marital situations. Within the leeway provided for by the law, the judge attempts to resolve marital issues for his female petitioners. Documenting the work of this rather sympathetic cleric, alongside other court officials, Mrs Mahler, and her precocious daughter who drops by after school each afternoon, Divorce Iranian Style in some way appeals for the rights of women to be written into the law. Given that Longinotto’s oeuvre consists of ethnographic documentaries that as a rule do not overtly promulgate their views and positions on the subject matter at hand, Divorce Iranian Style perhaps stands out for the manner in which Longinotto, Mir-Hosseini, and their camera somehow become part and parcel of daily court life. In the case of the 16-year-old Ziba who appears before the judge to divorce her middle-aged husband on any grounds that might be available to her, Mir-Hosseini finds herself responding to the husband’s complaints by shouting out in Farsi behind the camera, ‘Serves you right for marrying a fourteen year old!’ In the case of Maryam, trying to keep the custody of her daughter despite having remarried, the ‘film ladies’ had to testify as to whether they witnessed Maryam tearing up her husband’s court order in the corridor during an argument, an act that would warrant arrest for contempt of court. Their response, that they did not see Maryam tear up the court order, even though Maryam admits to the camera that she did indeed tear it up, gave the judge his opportunity to not detain and sentence Maryam for contempt. A sympathetic, reflective, and liberal judge notwithstanding, Divorce Iranian Style perhaps beckons to the necessity for women to have legal rights so that they do not have to be reduced to begging for justice and be dependent on the arbitrariness of the judge’s sympathies. Feminism with women The inscription of a feminist discourse into the public sphere and the legal system is therefore the course that Longinotto’s

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films advocate. While such a sentiment is well and good, the ways through which a feminist discourse might be instituted is a trickier issue to address. In Hidden Faces, Longinotto follows Safaa Fathay, an Egyptian woman living in Paris, back to Egypt in order to interview the psychiatrist turned writer and feminist activist, Nawal el Saadawi. Interspersed by readings of excerpts from Nawal’s books about women and Islam, the film finds vast discrepancies between Nawal’s writings and activism. Fathay accepted the assignment because of her admiration for Nawal’s writings. However, the film shows her becoming bemused because first-hand experience with Nawal and her various projects for the empowerment of women exposes a yawning gulf between theory and practice. The audience is first introduced to Nawal when she is embroiled in a skirmish with people involved with one of her projects. Later, Fathay questions the arbitrary manner with which Nawal dispenses rewards in a loan scheme. The interview with Nawal’s daughter, Mona, raises further questions about Fathay’s feminist icon, and it becomes clear that the issue of class (which is never mentioned in the film) is the stumbling block in Nawal’s activism. Discussing the reasons for not leaving Egypt despite numerous opportunities to do so, both Nawal and Mona claim affinity with their homeland. Moreover, Mona adds that as an artist, she needs inspiration unlike mere mortals with more ordinary needs such as ‘eating and drinking, getting married, having kids and a nice flat, with money to spend at the weekends,’ in which case she could live anywhere. The selfimportant and condescending implications of the views aired by this mother–daughter pair become more evidently so as Fathay travels to Southern Egypt to visit her family. Here, Hidden Faces shows how in the humbler setting of Fathay’s family home, the ordinariness of eating, drinking, having kids, and living in general is dictated by cultural and gender politics. Her mother’s account of enduring an unhappy marriage with her dictatorial late husband, the interview with the illiterate servant girl who does the chores around the house, and the film’s documentation of Fathay’s brother behaving in exactly the same way her mother described her late husband just minutes earlier confirm this, and effectively raises questions about

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the agenda behind Nawal’s feminist activism. The credibility of Nawal’s activism is then further undermined in the film when the voice-over confirms that Nawal declined the invitation of a visit with Fathay’s aunts as she does not see the relevance of such an encounter for a film about her life. Yet, as the rest of the film shows, the segment with Fathay’s aunts and cousins are perhaps more enlightening of the experiences of women in Egyptian society than Nawal’s various talks and projects. In 1991, the feminist film theorist Tania Modleski wrote a book entitled Feminism Without Women in which she observes the trend in literary criticism to move from questions of women and feminism to broader discussions of gender. Implicit in such a discursive shift is also the transfer of attention from works by women to those written by men and that discusses masculinity as a cultural construct. Arguing that these discursive shifts ‘are actually engaged in negating the critiques and undermining the goals of feminism,’ she asked ‘What’s in these developments for feminism and for women?’ (1991, pp. 3, 5). Although the context is different in Hidden Faces, the title of Modleski’s book is resonant because feminist politics, to put simply, is about and for women even as it invests in the fight for justice and rights. Instead, Hidden Faces shows Nawal at her most articulate talking about her own privations in choosing activism over medicine and describing in psychoanalytically infused language the polemics of sexual difference in Islamic society. Whether discussing the abjection represented by menstrual blood with a woman suffering an obsessive compulsive disorder during a counselling session or about the absolute repression of women by the veil at a public meeting, Nawal discusses sexual difference in essentialist terms. While these insights are by no means irrelevant, Modleski’s question of ‘what’s in it for feminism and women?’ needs to be asked. Moreover, in stating the oppression of women in terms that are more absolute than necessary, Nawal risks installing the regimes of oppression as more infallible than they are. Instead, if Nawal would condescend to gather with Fathay’s aunts, she would learn that although they adhere to the barbarous practice of circumcising

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their daughters, some of them negotiate with centuries of tradition by making sure that the cuts are as superficial as possible. While Fathay returns to Paris in disappointment after meeting Nawal in Hidden Faces, the activism in Kenya against female circumcision that Longinotto unearths in The Day I Will Never Forget (2002) proves to have more direct benefits for women and feminism. Travelling from remote Somalian villages steeped in African traditions where polygamy and the practice of female circumcision is rife, Longinotto also moves into towns and among urban families where female circumcision persists as a traditional practice but is tampered by more modern and ethical considerations. The plight of Simola, a girl rescued from an enforced marriage to an old man after undergoing a botched circumcision that ruined her health, contrasts with the circumcision that two sisters go through under strict instructions from their father that the woman who circumcises them will cut off as little as necessary and avoid stitches if possible. Longinotto films the entire process that, although gory to watch, also differs markedly from the description of a proper circumcision given beforehand by a woman who used to do the job. While the mohel, for want of a better name, describes in excruciatingly elaborate detail the four stitches needed to stem the blood flow and the practice of tying the girl’s legs together that necessitates her urinating on herself, the two girls who undergo circumcision on camera are immediately up and about, even though it was evidently a somewhat distressing experience for them and certainly a rite of passage involving celebratory gifts. These negotiations with traditional practices aside, The Day I Will Never Forget also follows a group of girls who have run away from their villages and are helped by church groups to seek injunctions against their parents for attempting to circumcise them against their wills. Although disgruntled by the court orders, the parents are both warned against enforced genital mutilation, and informed of the seriousness of the law in discouraging such practices. Longinotto’s films about Africa broach issues about the ways in which, for instance, a feminist discourse might be inscribed

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into the law, and what might actually change when women’s participation and a feminist perspective is taken for granted as an intrinsic part of public discourse. While The Day I Will Never Forget documents the incremental progress made by negotiating with traditional norms and public opinion that would be changed by the seriousness of the law in enforcing penalties for infringement, Sisters in Law (2005), a film about female lawyers and judges in a town in Cameroon shows the transformations wrought with the presence of women in high places. In particular, Sisters in Law follows the cases of divorce, domestic violence, and child abuse that the group of women deal with, and presents an instance of feminist ethics that is practised within the law that is in contrast to the rather lonely activism of Hanayagi Genshu in Eat the Kimono, where she fights against an all encompassing injustice. Sisters in Law follows a group of women who run the legal system: they are two judges, a lawyer, a state prosecutor, and a court official. Veraline, the legal aid lawyer, makes house calls and counsels the women she defends about their rights and course of action. Looking at cases of domestic violence and rape from a feminist perspective and with an investment in preserving the rights of women and children overturns the privileges taken for granted by male lawyers, violent husbands, fathers who pimp their daughters, and rapists who assume they would get their way in court. The presence of women judges and state prosecutors in court in effect transforms the interpretation and application of the law and produces a fairer justice system, particularly evident in the crestfallen face of a male lawyer when he loses the defence of a persistent wife batterer that he was so cocksure of winning. In Sisters in Law, a legal system with an investment in upholding women’s rights rejects the use of marriage as a blanket term that cedes women to absolute male control, a premise with which the court room in Divorce Iranian Style, over which the kindly cleric presides, still negotiates. The process of instituting a fairer system of justice, as Sisters in Law shows, involves more than the existence of women judges, lawyers, and prosecutors. That these women in authority are invested in a feminist ethics provides the framework

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that privileges justice, community, and protects the rights of all. Rough Aunties (2008), Longinotto’s latest film made in South Africa, revolves around a group of women who work to bring perpetrators of child and sexual abuse to justice. The women who work for Operation Bobbie Bear do not only go after child rapists and abusers, but are also very much part of the community in which they operate and are shown to have been personally afflicted by the problems in South Africa. As they discuss their work on camera, they contemplate the process through which they become ‘rough aunties’ and conclude that the anger that arises from doing the job they do is that which fuels their activism. Anger in Rough Aunties is channelled into feminist activism that galvanises the community for social change. Female anger is a more politically effective emotion as a catalyst for social and political change, compared to the female discontent that can so easily become self indulgent and pathologised. An intimate and ideal portrait of feminist activism and collectivity, Rough Aunties show the women sustaining one another. Longinotto’s camera is not only able to document the horrendous cases of child abuse the women deal with alongside the town’s child protection officer, but also the personal tragedies that befall each of these women. We learn that Thuli is a single mother whose son was once shot, but who recovered despite the problem she had coughing up the money before the hospital would treat him. Over the course of filming, robbers broke into the house of Eureka’s relative and shot him. He died because they could not raise enough money to send him to a proper hospital where he would have a fighting chance of survival. Sdudla’s young son drowned in a pit that resulted from illegal mining while trying to cross a river. Mildred chooses independence, leaves her husband of 15 years, and moves into a house of her own. In these unfolding personal tragedies and stories alongside the unending stream of abuse cases they handle, the women come round in aid of their colleagues and organise to help as much as they can, down to the gruesome job of cleaning up the blood stains left by the robbery. Jackie, who started the charity, uses every opportunity to counsel and galvanise, as she does at the funeral of Sdudla’s son to rouse the village’s women

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Figure 2 Publicity poster for Rough Aunties (Kim Longinotto, 2008)

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to fight against the illegal mining activities that has already caused six children to drown. With impeccable organisation, these women are fearsome advocates for justice and human rights. Rough Aunties demonstrates the social transformations that are possible when a feminist ethics is in operation with women on the ground.

4 On the Edges of Art Cinema: Sally Potter and the Feminist Response

Of the filmmakers discussed in this book, Sally Potter’s career as a director is most closely aligned with the trajectory of the feminist film movement in both political and theoretical terms. Her Thriller (1979), a widely acknowledged classic of feminist theory filmmaking, parallels the rise of academic film studies and the growing prominence of feminist intellectual investigations into the representation of the woman’s image in cinema specifically and visual culture in general. Tapping into the particular feminist discourse initiated by Laura Mulvey’s 1975 seminal essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ and Claire Johnston’s manifesto, ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema,’ Thriller was to contribute to the development of strategies for an alternative women’s cinema that rejects the cinematic pleasures of the mainstream variety that predicate on the objectification and exploitation of the female image. Yet, with the release of Orlando in 1993, Potter’s filmmaking practice enters into a distinct mainstream art-house mode at the same time that it is still strongly identified with some aesthetic strategies of the feminist avant-garde cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the lushness and high(er) production values of Potter’s oeuvre since Orlando, her films may be seen to remain distinct feminist responses to the cultural, political, and critical contexts from which the respective films derive. The complex intersection of the personal, political, and aesthetic is that which renders Potter’s filmmaking practice highly committed to the project of feminist 84

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filmmaking, while at the same time exceeding the limitations of the 1970s movement. Chapter 1 discusses the necessity of constructing a distinct female subjectivity in thinking about authorship, and critiques the inadequacy of a liberal feminist approach that fails to highlight the complexity of gender politics in relation to Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and Liv Ullmann’s Faithless. Such reductiveness thereby necessitates the sort of radical strategies articulated by the call for a women’s cinema as counter cinema. Amongst the demands are for a cinema that breaks with the illusion of realism, the fragmentation of the relationship between image and voice, and the destruction of the pleasures afforded by the linear and closed narrative structure that characterises classical Hollywood cinema. Importantly, the call for a women’s cinema as counter cinema also required the consideration of how female subjectivity, as opposed to the objectification of the woman’s image, may be instilled into cinematic practice. This chapter looks at how these aspects of a feminist film practice is interwoven into Potter’s remarkable oeuvre at the same time that she manages to exceed the limited scope of a feminist film movement conceived in, and defined by, the politics of the 1970s. Dissecting stories With a background in dance, Potter began making films in 1968. Thriller was the film that established her profile as a feminist theory filmmaker, alongside others such as Julie Dash, Mulvey, Chantal Ackerman, and Yvonne Rainer. Shot in black and white, with lighting effects reminiscent of expressionist conventions, Thriller explores the construction and treatment of femininity in the Puccini opera La Bohéme. Originally about a poor seamstress named Mimi who falls in love with an equally impecunious poet, Rodolfo, La Bohéme is a story about lost love and epitomises the tragedy and helplessness that afflicts the poor. Concerned about her failing health, Rodolfo breaks up with Mimi in a heartless fashion so that she may go off to find a rich suitor who would be able to afford the medication that she requires. Broken hearted, Mimi eventually

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leaves her rich patron and dies tragically amongst her lover and friends, but not before she is given a chance to reunite with Rodolfo and reminiscence about their brief happiness. Effectively, the character of Mimi serves as the narrative’s passive object and sacrificial lamb in order to elaborate on the tragedy caused by poverty. It is precisely such uses of the female persona that Potter’s Thriller interrogates. In particular, the film questions why the working-class heroine has to be sacrificed to an early death. As a more viable feminist conclusion compared to that of the original opera, Thriller creates a thrilling new scenario: Mimi, the new action heroine that Potter creates, and who is the subject and investigator at the centre of the film, becomes reconciled with the old passive heroine of La Bohéme, who was originally objectified and sacrificed. The Gold Diggers (1983), Potter’s first feature-length film, extends Thriller’s investigation. The Gold Diggers explores the connection between the circulation of gold, money, and women in patriarchal economies. Both Thriller and The Gold Diggers employ similar strategies to subvert classic narrative conventions that represent feminine images in stereotypical ways that are in turn telling of the underlying patriarchal ideology that sustains them. The Gold Diggers turns the table on such stereotypes of femininity and presents the male characters as one-dimensional caricatures. Potter’s casting decisions in these two films are also interesting. Colette Laffont, who plays Mimi in Thriller, also plays one of the two lead female characters in The Gold Diggers. That Potter casts Laffont, a black actor, in two leading roles points to her attempt at subverting marginalisation of ethnic actors and images in mainstream cinema. Such progressive casting is very much within the context of British film culture’s uptake of the civil rights movement’s legacy and race equality issues in the 1980s. In casting Julie Christie as Ruby, Potter explores the economics of beauty and the star. While Ruby circulates amongst men, Celeste (Laffont) aids the circulation of money in a bank as a clerk. Later, Celeste decides to take on the role of investigator when she is denied knowledge of her function in this economy. The Gold Diggers may be seen as an extension of Thriller as

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its feature length allows Potter to delve deeper into gender issues relating to power, politics, and economics. By identifying the circulation of gold, money, and women in patriarchal economies, Potter makes a political statement of how the colonisation of women as objects with exchange value parallels the colonisation of the landscape in the search for gold. In a way, The Gold Diggers could also be seen as the precursor of feminist materialist analyses of the systemic oppression of women in global capitalism that Ursula Biemann’s video essays execute, and which are discussed in Chapter 7. Comparing the respective feminist arguments that run through Thriller and The Gold Diggers, it is possible to discern two different strands of thought. Thriller remains very much within the didacticism of 1970s feminist film theory, where concerns about the representation of women within the film text are paramount. Lucy Fisher observes that the progression of Potter’s film practice reflects the ways in which the tables are turned on the 1970s feminist aim to destroy cinematic pleasure that in effect became a grim version of sexual conservatism (2005, p. 134). As Catherine Fowler notes and quotes, The Gold Diggers’ soundtrack consists of a song laid over images of a woman traversing an icy landscape that is a rather tongue in cheek plea for the return of cinematic pleasure: Went to the pictures for a break thought I’d put my feet up have a bit of intake but then a man with a gun came through the door and when he kissed her, I couldn’t take it any more. Please, please, please give me back my pleasure. Please, please, please give me back my good night out. Please give me back my leisure time. I’ve got the pleasure time blues, I’m seeing red. (2005, p. 57) The Gold Diggers shows a broader feminist critique of the oppression of women by delving further into the material conditions that facilitate their continued subordination at the

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same time that the film demands a return of cinematic pleasure for women in film culture. The development of such a critique corresponds with the progressively expanding scope of a particular school of feminist film criticism in the 1980s, where the previously narrow focus on spectatorial pleasure based on Freudian–Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretations of film texts began to incorporate discussions of materialist determinants that facilitate those symptoms of objectification and exploitation. In short, the advent of Cultural Studies allowed a respite from the wholly textual, and mostly psychoanalytic, analyses of film texts. Such an approach also acknowledges, instead of denies, the immense pleasures that women take from supposedly oppressive narratives in mainstream or Hollywood films that cloak suspect ideologies. Reinventing narratives The release of Orlando in 1993 signals Potter’s wholesale re-appropriation of narrative pleasure after the relative didacticism of The London Story. As Potter herself notes in the introduction to her adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel, ‘[she] grew up as part of an aesthetic movement that was all about taking stories apart and looking at the lies that conventional storytelling might tell’ (1994, p. x). Such an observation about the deconstructionism that underlies Potter’s film practice would be an accurate description of the textual work of Thriller and The Gold Diggers. However, ‘with Orlando, [Potter] found [her]self falling in love with narrative’ (1994, ibid.). Although there are many elements that distinguish Orlando from mainstream cinema, the film’s budget, production values, and status as a European co-production situate it very much within mainstream cinema in British industrial terms. An entertaining historical romp through 400 years of British history, the film tells the story of a person named Orlando lives from 1600 to the present day (1993) and who switches gender when the film progresses to the Victorian era. When Orlando becomes female half way through the film, she looks into the camera and deadpans, ‘No difference at all. Just a different sex.’ Of course, as the film progresses,

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sexual politics is played out and everything becomes all too different for Orlando. Apart from being Potter’s ticket into mainstream commercial cinema, Orlando marks yet another phase in Potter’s filmmaking practice where feminist concerns negotiate with entertainment cinema’s pleasures. This contrasts with the cinema of unpleasure that her early films such as Thriller, and to a lesser extent, The Gold Diggers, attempt to create. Perhaps equally important is the fact that Orlando marks Potter’s exit from a film movement that assumes the essentialist idea of sexual difference in order to embrace a concept of sexual difference as non-essentialist, or socially constructed, difference. As Potter notes in the comparison of her adaptation to the Woolf novel, ‘it is Orlando’s unwillingness to conform to what is expected of him as a man that leads—within the logic of the film—to his change of sex. Later, as a woman, Orlando finds that she cannot conform to what is expected of her as a female either, and makes a series of choices which leaves her, unlike in the book, without marriage or property— and with a daughter, not a son’ (1994, p. xi). In other words, such an understanding of gender politics assumes more the cultural demand that one conforms to the expectations of one’s biological sex than the ascription of innate sexual difference in, for instance, the psychoanalytic understanding of gender that underlies so much of psychoanalytic feminist film theory, beginning with Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ essay. Such denial of the essentialist and inescapable consequences of sexual difference also resonates with Woolf’s ideas about women and creativity, whose influence is clearly seen in Potter’s filmmaking practice beyond the latter’s cinematic adaptation of Orlando. In A Room of One’s Own, a treatise on women’s creativity given as a lecture in 1928, Woolf cautions women against expressing their creativity from a position that assumes an implicit gender inferiority or from the perspective of the victim. She instructs that a woman should write ‘as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages [are] full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself’ (2004, p. 108). Such an call aligns

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very closely to Deleuze’s notion of becoming-woman that is discussed in the introduction; a strategy that circumvents the codification of creativity in exclusionary feminine terms and instead facilitates the perpetuation of feminist sensibilities via a philosophy of immanence. The loosening of an implicit prescription of sexual difference in feminist film criticism led on to some productive work that subverts a particularly essentialist understanding of the cinematic apparatus. In discussing the melodrama, Mary Ann Doane notes the special place of the 1940s Gothic woman’s film as a sub-genre. As the Gothic woman’s film concerns itself not with romantic love but with violence and menace, Doane observes within the sub-genre a process of generic miscegenation with film noir and the horror picture. Many of the tropes within the Gothic woman’s film are subversive of the ideologically normative narratives of most classic Hollywood melodramas. For instance, given the Bluebeard narrative thread of these films whereby the heroine perceives her marriage to be a threat to her well-being, the conventional heterosexual closure of classic Hollywood narratives do not apply. Therefore, Doane discerns an implicit meta-commentary on the cinematic apparatus that ‘test[s] the very limits of the filmic representation of female subjectivity for a female spectator’ (1987, p. 125). In other words, the Gothic woman’s film might be seen to challenge the dominant understanding of the woman’s role in Hollywood melodrama. This may also be observed of Potter’s film practice from Orlando onwards. Abandoning the strategy of direct critique and total rejection of ideologically laden representations of women that can be seen in Thriller, Orlando instead takes on gender politics in a performative mode by acknowledging, but yet dismissing, the apparent oppression of femininity in the cinematic apparatus. For instance, Potter sought to undermine Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze that objectifies the female image via the facility of continuity editing by breaking down the fourth wall. Orlando looks at, and addresses, the camera throughout the film, in the process undermining the potency of the male gaze. As Potter notes, ‘I hoped that this direct address would create a golden thread that would

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connect the audience, through the lens, with Orlando, and that in this way the spectacle and spectator would become one through the release of laughter’ (1994, p. xiii). Conceptually, such a filmmaking strategy confronts, and dismantles, the importance of classic realist conventions that lend themselves to psychoanalytic interpretations in favour of feminist political exigencies in film criticism. At the same time, this strategy remains committed to the enjoyment of cinematic pleasure, unlike the more austere and conservative politics that characterises the earlier feminist avant-garde. Rosie Braidotti’s remarks about the ludicrous warnings of ‘the collapse and destabilization of the self—not to speak of civilization—under the attack of the abject others who seem to creep in from everywhere’ is worth nothing here. She dryly notes that ‘any spectator of David Cronenberg’s films will know, however, that this knee-jerk conservative reaction is eminently comic and it can be dispelled as easily as an outburst of laughter’ (2002, p. 41). This laughter that both Potter and Braidotti mention as antidote to the assumption of oppression or victim-hood in feminist film theory and criticism requires further teasing out. While laughter commonly denotes humour, a necessary condition of its function is the existence and use of irony. Whether in art, literary texts, cultural objects, language, or communication, irony requires the complex use of double meanings, reflexivity, and consciousness. In particular, the effective deployment of irony produces a gap between form and content, thereby allowing a sense of performance. While the 1970s feminist avant-garde would have rejected the illusion of realism that enable the subordination of women in mainstream cinema, Potter’s film practice quite early on takes on a certain performativity. Such a sense of the performative in Potter’s film practice may be discerned as an awareness of the issues involved in both the mainstream representation of woman as well as those created in the feminist attempt to subvert the problems of the former. The rest of this chapter will argue that it is precisely this performativity in Potter’s oeuvre, discerned through her ironic take on politics, film form, and other aesthetic practices that causes her films to be considered as a personal feminist response to the world.

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Performing the personal and the political Before Orlando, Potter made The London Story (1987). A short film that spoofs a conspiracy against the government, The London Story integrates Potter’s interest in dance into her film practice and is more of a silent comedic musical than a coherent narrative. Featuring a woman who is very much a femme fatale as the mastermind behind the conspiracy alongside her two unlikely male co-conspirators, the 15-minute film is a circuitous dance between these three characters as they each fulfil their part in this plot to pass on an envelope, the function and contents of which are not revealed to the audience. Filmed in Technicolour at the more famous landmarks in the city of London, the dance sequences are executed to great comic effects, especially the scene of one of the henchman obtaining information at an ice-skating rink. The film then concludes at the South Bank where the three characters perform their closing dance sequence after the successful execution of the plot. The woman wears a bright red dress and dances alongside her two accomplices who have very different physiques—one short and thin, the other taller and fat. Apart from the physical comedy that such dance sequences elicit, the quirks involved in The London Story reinforce a playfulness of style, genre, and form that in many ways foreshadow Orlando. These attempts at playing with elements in images that jar are evident throughout Potter’s oeuvre, an example might be the casting of Cate Blanchett (who is blonde and lanky) opposite Christina Ricci (shorter and rounder) as good friends in The Man Who Cried, and shooting several shots of the two characters together in such a way as to emphasise the difference in physique as well as connote the notion of the odd couple. Such playfulness renders the significance of form as equally important as narrative, and it is this sort of performativity that allows Potter to posit a feminist response beyond, for instance, the rectification of negative representations of the woman’s image or the denial of cinematic pleasure. In fact, the ironic or performative aspect of her films provides the aesthetic space through which Potter is able to stage her interpretation of what the feminist adage ‘the personal is political’ constitutes.

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Discussing the experimental autobiography, Kathleen McHugh observes that autobiographies are ‘a privileged genre for identity politics, demonstrates the crucial importance of the self in Western epistemology and the dependence of both self and epistemology on social, religious, and political infrastructures and institutions’ (2005, p. 108). In Potter’s case, the autobiographical aspects of her films, especially in later ones such as The Tango Lesson (1997) and Yes (2004), emerge from her identification as a woman and an artist. Moreover, Potter does not only merely express her creativity as woman and artist, but it is through these channels of identity formations that Potter articulates her responses to the world, be they political, aesthetic, or epistemological. The Tango Lesson (1997) is Potter’s attempt at autobiography. Potter plays herself in this film that negotiates between different levels of the personal and the political. The film essentially recounts the process of her creative work and documents her personal relationship with the Argentinian dancer, Pablo Veron. In the film, Potter is the female director who attempts to write a screenplay entitled Rage, but she suffers from writer’s block at the same time that she discovers that her house is infested with termites and requires major structural work. She then takes herself away to Paris to learn the tango, and meets a handsome tango instructor with whom she falls in love. She strikes a deal with him: he will teach her the tango and she will in turn cast him in a film and make him famous. Magnificent sequences of tango dancing feature prominently as Potter and Veron work on their relationship that is held together by their encounters with each other through the dance form. The Tango Lesson can be seen as Potter’s exercise in extrapolating the feminist adage ‘the personal is political.’ Throughout the film, Potter negotiates with the creative process, personal relationship, and professional contacts. The writer’s block that causes her to give up making the film about the fashion world called Rage leads to an uncomfortable meeting with Hollywood executives. The film is resolutely about herself, and although still clearly a feminist treatise, the film’s autobiographical elements mean that its narrative evades the didacticism often associated with feminist filmmaking. One

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does not find lamentations on the issue of child care or the dreariness of domestic life here, like one would in, for instance, Riddles of the Sphinx (Mulvey and Wollen, 1997) or Jeanne Dielman. The Tango Lesson is about a woman in so far as it is about Sally Potter, although The Tango Lesson is not quite an exercise in narcissism (as some critics have claimed). James Berardinelli’s online review is typical of such a response. He writes, ‘One of Potter’s most egregious errors is casting herself as the lead. This is her acting debut, and it shows—not only is she ineffective, but she has no screen presence whatsoever. I’m sure that taking the top role in The Tango Lesson appealed to her vanity, but it’s a huge misstep’ (2008, np). Potter unapologetically depicts her relatively privileged position as an independent and creative woman, and there is a clear sense that Potter is already in possession of ‘the room of one’s own’ that Virginia Woolf deems a necessary condition for the expression of female creativity. However, The Tango Lesson is much more than a celebration of that achievement. Instead, Lucy Fisher detects trouble in that privileged creative space. Discussing the beginning of the film where Potter confronts a sheet of blank paper, Fisher notes the female author’s ‘conventional difficulty with creation—a dread and blockade that propels her towards flight’ (2005, p. 132). Fisher further notes that her writer’s block is masked by obsessive-compulsive behavior which focuses on the minutia of domestic space. As the drama continues (and not only Potter’s floor but ceiling disintegrates), we are reminded of the Gothic genre and of the decaying house in which the literary heroine often finds herself. Here we would seem to have the Fall of the House of Potter—whose collapse seem tied to her disquiet with artistic creation . . . . Clearly, A Room of Her Own has proven a troubled site. (ibid., p. 133) Referencing Woolf’s lecture about women’s creativity, Fisher gestures towards the revision of such a position. Woolf sees the financial means to sustain the creative endeavour as the prerequisite of women’s creativity. The ability to afford a room

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of one’s own, together with a lock to keep out disturbances and domestic demands, is imperative for Woolf. However, The Tango Lesson shows that these conditions are no guarantee of the achievement of output. Writer’s block, isolation, and obsessiveness towards domestic chores occur in Potter’s room of her own, as the film shows. In addition, although necessary, the luxury of having a room of one’s own does not provide a public, cultural, political, or discursive arena through which women’s creative outputs might be participatory and/or contextualised. In other words, for an effective feminist response to materialise, the importance of a private space to foster that response may be preceded by the public arena in which to make the difference. The Tango Lesson contains a meta-commentary on feminist theory filmmaking in the same way that the Gothic woman’s film possesses an implicit and ironic critique of the Hollywood melodrama. That Fisher uses the haunted decaying house of the Gothic genre as comparison for the ‘room of one’s own’ is telling of a cautionary tale: women should be careful of what they profess to desire. In the Gothic film, marital fulfilment is seen as the be all and end all of a woman’s life. As Michelle Massé observes, the horror from which the heroine cannot escape is the limitation of her identity to a mirror for the self-representations of father and husband. Furthermore, the overdetermined repetition of this dilemma within individual narratives and in the Gothic genre marks a persistent and active attempt by authors, their characters, and readers to rework the feminine social contract. (1990, p. 682) The recourse open to Gothic women who reject the feminine social contract is madness, epitomised by Bertha in Jane Eyre in Gothic literature. In cinema, the only alternative available to women who reject her subordinate role within the heterosexual romance is often death: the example of the first Mrs de Winter of Rebecca (1940) is telling, alongside all the other discarded and/or dead first wives that litter the genre throughout

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the 1940s. However, Massé argues that neither madness nor death is necessary if the Gothic heroine, the writers who create them, and the readers/viewers who consume them recognise the victimisation of women that pervades the culture. Massé concludes by suggesting affirmative action. While madness and death are options, she suggests a more tantalising alternative of freedom and empowerment. Given that the Gothic genre is heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theory that provides the sexist structure underlying the feminine contract, Massé suggests following the example of Sigmund Freud’s Dora: give notice and walk out of the psychoanalyst’s door (1990, p. 709). Much in the same way that the Gothic woman’s film may be seen to reverse the feminine contract in the Hollywood melodrama, The Tango Lesson reverse engineers Potter’s supposed contract with feminist theory filmmaking. Fisher comments on how Potter questions the doctrine of 1970s feminist film theory and the destruction of pleasure. ‘In the spirit of such feminist revision, Potter rejects her scenario for Rage (a film she admits she did not want to make) and moves from the confines of experimental cinema to the broader realm of modernist narrative’ (2005, p. 135). (Perhaps as an indication of the extent to which the narrative of The Tango Lesson is modernist, Potter’s blog reports that she is reworking Rage as I write this chapter in the summer of 2008. See www.sallypotter.com.) In the modernist film that is The Tango Lesson, when Potter sees Veron for the first time on stage, she trains her gaze on him from her perspective in the audience. In the process, Potter subverts the notion of the masculine gaze that objectifies feminine images, a notion that has long since become a truism in feminist criticism of classical Hollywood cinema. The film plays with the subversion of the masculine gaze by foregrounding Potter’s gaze at Veron and the other two Argentinian dancers as they dance for her in another scene, as well as by the strategic use of mirrors in these particular dance sequences. Also, Potter asserts, instead of conventionally averting, her gaze at Veron while in conversation at the barber shop, in a scene where the director’s eyes are unequivocally associated with the eyes of the camera. Given that The Tango

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Lesson is an autobiographical film, Potter’s insistence on her professional standing and complaints about how Veron does not look but insists on being looked at (and therefore, presumably objectified) show up the limitations of psychoanalytic feminist film theory. Moreover, that Potter evidently possesses the camera, the gaze, and the film(!) gesture towards how material realities precede theoretical speculations. Aesthetic convergence and political response While female creativity is an issue of paramount significance in Potter’s films, The Tango Lesson shows the importance of leaving that self-imposed isolation so that women’s personal creativity would be grounded in public discourse as an appropriate, relevant, and timely response. In Deleuze and Guattari’s trenchant critique of psychoanalysis, they claim that a ‘schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch’ [and recommends] ‘a breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world’ (1984, p. 2). In much the same way, Potter’s works after The Tango Lesson might be seen as her recognition and explorations of discursive, aesthetic, historical, and political imperatives. The Man Who Cried (2000), Yes (2004), and the opera Carmen (2007) that was staged at the London Coliseum are manifestations of that continuing interest in, and responses to, formal, political, and cultural issues that motivate Potter’s film practice. Amongst these are the revision of female roles, the attempts at marrying the aesthetic languages of dance, opera, and film, and explorations of identity politics and xenophobia within specific political contexts. Set during the Second World War, The Man Who Cried is Potter’s only recognisably Hollywood film. Starring Christina Ricci, Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp, and John Turturro, the film is about a Russian-Jewish girl (Ricci) who arrived as a refugee in England during the chaos of the Russian revolution. Seemingly assimilated as an English girl and given the Anglicised name Susie, she grows up and joins a troupe of dancers in Paris in the first step to finding her way to America where her poverty-stricken father had emigrated right at the

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beginning of the film. She befriends a blonde Russian bombshell (Blanchett) who begins an affair with a fascist Italian opera singer (Turturro) while she herself gets involved with a gypsy who performs with a show horse (Depp). Set against the backdrop of the impending German invasion, The Man Who Cried is populated by people who are ethnically on the margins. Susie’s secret Jewish identity puts her more and more in danger as the other characters begin to find out about it, and it is the reason that Blanchett’s character leaves her Italian lover and take off with Susie to America on board a cruise liner after finding out that he has betrayed Susie to an SS officer. On the surface, The Man Who Cried departs from the performativity of, say, Orlando or The Tango Lesson. Its seemingly seamless classical narrative could be seen on the surface as an Oedipal search for Susie’s father, whom she finds at the end of the film in, of all places, Hollywood. Yet, an ideological complexity pervades the closed narrative. Beginning with Susie’s arrival in England and the enforced assimilation of the little girl, the film is sensitive to the difficulties and patterns of diaspora. In different ways, the exploration of migratory patterns and identities are also of especial interests to Mehta and Biemann, whose respective filmmaking practices are discussed in later chapters. Each character belongs to a clearly defined ethnic group, and each has particular vested interests in the outcome of the war. For Susie’s Jewish-Russian landlady in Paris, escaping the Communists left her to confront Nazi concentration camps in later life. For Dante the Italian opera singer, a German victory would mean the continuation of his career. The sympathy that the film accords the Dante character means that he becomes less of a villain in a set piece, but a more psychologically flawed character with deeply held racist tendencies. At any rate, the film’s narrative does not indulge in the consequences of his betrayal that merely propels the two female characters on to a cruise liner bound for New York. Amidst these characters with their ethnic affiliation and vested interests is the joyous celebration of gypsy life and culture. The film relishes the showmanship that Depp’s character and his friends show, the generous, convivial, and communal spirit that epitomises gypsy culture despite the

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hardships and nomadism of their existence. In this way, The Man Who Cried is not the narratively and ideologically normative film that it looks at first glance. While adhering to a linear and circular logic—Susie does find the father she lost at the beginning of the film—the film also posits a politically more nuanced picture of ethnic differences and cultural diversity. The nomadism that characterises gypsy life, as well as Susie’s distinct lack of origins given the political upheavals of her early life, is that which Potter invests. Such an interest in, and commitment to, outsiders is already evident towards the end of The Tango Lesson where Potter and Veron discuss living in Paris as foreigners, and continues to resonate in Yes. The Man Who Cried also references, and challenges, the Hollywood construction of the femme fatale. In the persona of Lola, the blonde bombshell played by Cate Blanchett, is the classic man trap. Yet, despite her distinct feminine abilities to extract from men material and financial resources in exchange for sexual favours, the character of Lola is also vulnerable and human. In search of a better life, she buys into Dante’s anti-Semitism, turns against Susie, and moves into his luxurious apartment. There, she is isolated and alone without her friend, discovering that luxuriating in a bath is perhaps not all there is to it. Realising that Dante might be tired of her, she despairs. Potter captures this ironically in the dinner party scene where Dante flirts with another woman in Lola’s presence. At the recognition of his disinterest, the soft focus extreme close-up of Lola resplendent in her bright red glossy lipstick and peroxide locks registers the change of her demeanour from charm itself to one of despair. The shot both references the flattened out image of the objectified woman that Mulvey delineates in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ and parodies its meaning: the woman’s image denotes a masquerade more than a fetish, given that she does not manage to keep on that mask of feminine allure. Moreover, whenever Lola needs to muster up her feminine charms, Potter captures the almost imperceptible process whereby Lola raises herself to her full height and postures to the best effect, shifting the tone of the film from dark premonitions of a woman’s manipulativeness to the tragic comedy of her situation. Most

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importantly, Potter rescues her femme fatale from the fate meted out to her Hollywood predecessors because Lola has a female friend for whom she looks out, and in the process, acquires psychological nuances before being despatched in the cruise ship’s swimming pool when a bomb apparently falls. The ideological complexities of The Man Who Cried aside, the film is also part of Potter’s project to translate between the different formal strategies of cinema, dance, and opera. As she notes within the context of discussing The Tango Lesson, ‘a large part of my work as a screenwriter and director [is] to find a way of translating, literally and metaphorically, one language into another—the language of dance into the language of film’ (1997, p. x). This experiment of blending together different aesthetic forms has been evident since the release of Thriller, where the narrative of an opera is used to exemplify problems with gender representation. The London Story, of course, is an overt reference to dance. While The Tango Lesson self-referentially references autobiographical details about Potter’s fascination with the tango, The Man Who Cried incorporates these long-held interests into the narrative by painting as its backdrop a dance troupe that supplies extras to an opera house. The backstage gossip, rendezvous, and various going ons are those that sustain the film’s narrative. Figuratively, Potter’s camera serves as a parallel frame to the stage on which the characters perform each night. Seldom disrupting the integrity of the proscenium arch, Potter’s camera is not so much interested in what might be seen from the audience’s perspective than in what the view might be from the position of the players on the stage and even further into the background. While this is clear enough in set pieces on the stage while the characters are in performance, the sense that Potter’s camera is in cahoot with the players instead of training its gaze on them is also evident in other situations. For instance, when Susie and Lola first meet Dante at an upper crust party, they were the first act of the evening. With Depp’s Cesar on his horse flanked by both Susie and Lola, the camera registers their uncomfortable poses while their richly dressed audience retreats from the balcony back into the house. With their audience’s backs turned, the three players relax their poses and Dante’s voice

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emanates from the house, catching Susie’s attention as he was performing the song she used to hear her father sing. Lola finds her way into the house to flirt with Dante, while Susie spies on them from between balusters from outside the house where she had just been performing. In other words, Susie looks onto the audience space as opposed to the more conventional looking regime that one is used to; a reversal that would also prompts a reference to Dorothy Arzner’s Dance Girl Dance (1940), where the dancing girl breaks the fourth wall and confronts the audience. Potter’s camera is uninterested in the audience’s perspective; it is rather more in tune with the players and the space of the production on which the narrative is centred. The correspondence between stage and screen is somewhat similar to, for instance, Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu (1939). Both La règle du jeu and The Man Who Cried make parallel comparisons between the theatrical stage and the film camera. Both films demarcate theatrical spaces in interior and exterior spaces. The Man Who Cried foregrounds theatrical spaces with the stage on which the characters make their livelihoods as well as the outdoor spaces (in the grounds of various mansions) in which various performances happen, for instance, in the scene where Dante betrays Susie’s real identity. Similarly, La règle du jeu’s interior theatre is the stage on which guests perform as part of the fête. Its exterior stage is just outside the country house when the Marquis announces Andre Jurieu’s demise. While the staging of these films is strikingly similar, the rationale behind their respective compositions is different. Renoir attempts these parallels between the stage and screen to figuratively contrast a theatrical age that is nearing its end with the new technological one that is dawning, as well as to expand upon the realist potentials of the technology that enables long takes and deep focus shots. Potter, however, sets up these parallels to further explore the convergence of different aesthetic forms. Such pursuit of aesthetic convergence would have led Potter to direct the production of Carmen that played at the London Coliseum in 2007. She returns to her interest of re-interpreting the representation of women, as she did three decades ago in Thriller. In Potter’s Carmen, the femme fatale is reconfigured

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from an icon of cruel, morally suspect, and sexualised femininity to the figure of an outsider who makes necessary choices for her survival and desire for freedom. The devotion Potter shows to gypsies, cultural outsiders, and characters with few options continues to be evident in Carmen, as it is in The Man Who Cried. More significant perhaps is the way in which she effectively updates Bizet’s opera for the contemporary audience, and in the process introduces some distinctively cinematic elements into her production in the same way that the opera figures so much in her films. Set in present day England, Potter’s Carmen arrives in the twenty-first century and embraces surveillance culture: Don José is a security guard and the stage is an underworld of surveillance cameras, prostitution, illegal immigrants, and drug-running. Instead of staging a Carmen that exists in the distant fantasy of a bygone Spain, Potter brings Carmen to contemporary England. By making Carmen contemporaneous to its audience, Potter forces contemplation, or response, to present day issues and thereby takes the operatic audience down from the pedestal of the high-art form to confront social-reality. Replete with mobile phones, text messages, grainy surveillance camera footage, and blown-up projections that give an intimate effect of the close-up provide a distinctive cinematic dimension to the stage production, Potter experiments with the convergence of different aesthetic forms to the despair of some mainstream art critics who insist on the integrity of the operatic form. A critic for the Evening Standard, a London evening tabloid, reviews the production this way: No sexual energy, no cigarette factory, no smoke, no castanets, no Seville, no smut, no intensity. Add to this a gipsy heroine who refuses to dance and a vapid staging which misunderstands Bizet’s music and you have a holy mess . . . Potter is an elegant and gifted filmmaker. But she has ignored opera’s simple imperative: to let the music propel the story. Too often visual ornament—screens opening or shutting meaninglessly, jerky CCTV-style footage— pushed Bizet’s enthralling score to the background. (Maddocks, 2007)

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On the other hand, it is clear that Potter attempts to smudge the boundaries between different aesthetic forms in the production, manifesting a deconstructivist sensibility that runs through her artistic practice. Writing about the production of Carmen in The Guardian newspaper, Potter volunteers an anecdote that would scandalise opera purists. She admits to thinking the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935) would be an ideal film to turn into a stage production. She notes: It’s a story in which all operatic vanities are punctured, most of the scenery is ripped or crashes on to the stage, and by the end ‘high art’ lies in shreds and tatters. Ironically, perhaps, looked at in another way, the film is itself an opera, played out by anarchists, danced and sung with love and irreverence, teasing out the big themes, freed from the constraints of crawling realism by its music, its big numbers and its jokes—the entire piece a comic tirade against inauthenticity. Which pretty much used to sum up my own feelings about what opera needed, having become— it seemed to me—a world of pointless epics played out for the rich. A big space for narrow minds. A dusty antique of a form. A dinosaur. And so on (25 September 2007). Thus, it is clear that the impetus behind Potter’s oeuvre is to not conform to the normative conventions that have been set out. Just as her films reject the conventional linear narratives of mainstream cinema, Carmen resists operatic conventions and opens up the production to conversations about the politics of aesthetics. While Carmen elicits discussions about the politics of aesthetics, Potter’s latest film Yes (2004) may be seen as an experiment in fomenting an aesthetics for a feminist political response. A feature film about an affair between a married Irish-American scientist (only referred to as ‘She’) and a Middle Eastern refugee (‘He’) living in London, Yes considers the intricacies of sexual, political, and religious differences in the relationship. Spoken entirely in verse, the film features a cleaning lady who is also the one-woman Greek chorus, a trope that

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also occurs in The Man Who Cried, where Susie serves as the one-woman Greek chorus when she finds herself the only one to have shown up at work in the days preceding the German invasion. The cleaning lady observes and comments on her job and the drama that is happening around her, in particular, about dirt, cleaning, and the unravelling relationship of her employers. While the film never directly alludes to the context of its story, the narrative of Yes is played out against the backdrop of the attacks on the World Trade Centre towers in New York on 11 September 2001, the subsequent American attack on Iraq, the draconian policies on ‘terror’ formulated by various Western governments, and the enraged schism that then opened up between Christianity and Islam. Given the political circumstances of the day, where Arab men are routinely demonised as terrorists, it is notable that Potter casts a Middle Eastern man (Simon Abkarian) as the male lead opposite the actress Joan Allen who plays the Irish-American woman. The national identities of the various characters are, of course, not coincidental. While He is Lebanese, She is of Irish ethnic origins. These details about nationality refer to the bitter conflict over Northern Ireland and the fact that the Irish formerly bore the unfortunate label of ‘terrorist,’ now since passed on to people of Middle Eastern origin. The aunt who is on her death bed, whose voice over commentary informs us, once lived for a socialist ideal personified by Fidel Castro but now regrets observing an ideology that encourages people to live out ‘a life spent longing for things you don’t need.’ In its conception and materialisation, Yes is a meditation on cultural, political, religious, and ideological differences in a particular moment of great political uncertainty. The affair between the protagonists in Yes begins through the sharing of enough common grounds. They find parallels in the importance of the potato for the Irish with that of the apricot for the Lebanese. They communicate their respective experiences of political strife: She, of sectarianism and the Troubles of Northern Ireland; and He, of being forced to abandon his medical profession and into exile because of war. Yet, the differences begin to mount despite their efforts. On the level of class and gender, She is a scientist while He is a refugee

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who waits table and works in kitchens. He verbally attacks Her in the car park about her American identity and perceived allegiance, effectively projecting the larger canvas of political events onto their relationship. Taking her to be representative of an imperialist America, he accuses her of wanting his land and oil, denigrating her Nordic ‘blonde American’ features and verbally attacking her for having emotionally ensnarled him. They spit insults at each other. She calls him a terrorist; He calls her an imperialist. She shouts ‘bigot!’ at him; he spits back ‘bitch!’ Finally, she tells him that he is conflating her with her nationality. She reasons that his accusations are not fair, that these atrocities do not take place in her name, and wonders how did this all start when she is not his enemy. The truth then comes to light: an existence as a refugee with neither dignity nor visibility has resulted in this pent up frustration. He berates her for taking everything for granted while he has to fight for everything. This struggle, of course, is documented in the two scenes in the kitchen with His co-workers, where misconceptions and fear about religion, immigrants, race, and class are played out and culminates into a full blown fracas. Perhaps more than any of her previous films, Yes is Potter’s attempt at positing a direct feminist response to the world around her. She notes: I began to write the film in the context of the precise global conditions of mid-September 2001, in an attempt to meet head-on the extreme situations we were all facing . . . . The notion of pure entertainment, or the story of an ‘inner voyage’ divorced from outer reality, seemed impossible, irrelevant, irresponsible. The challenge was how to contribute positively; how to help energize, clarify, connect, humanize. Fundamentally, how to be of use in such a state of emergency. (2005, p. viii) Such an understanding of her role as a filmmaker allows us to read into Potter’s film an entrenched political stance. Potter’s

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political response to contemporary events may also be framed as an intrinsically feminist one; moreover, it is a version of a feminist politics that is participatory and overcomes the difficulties of sexual difference that the feminist film theory of the 1970s and 1980s found so hard to circumvent in their attempt to hold on to an essentialist idea of femininity. To utilise the metaphor of the Room of One’s Own yet again, Yes is a work of someone who has left that room, along with all its writer’s block, obsessive compulsiveness, and insulation in order to engage with the world. For Potter, the feminist aspect of her response to ongoing world events in Yes resides in the address of the film. That the story is told from the perspective of the female character foregrounds Potter’s gender identification. In other words, Yes responds to the pivotal moment of 9/11 alongside its disastrous aftermath from a female perspective; in particular, the film is narrated from the perspective of a protagonist who experiences the effects of these momentous changes in global politics acutely in her personal affairs. In some way, one may analyse The Tango Lesson in parallel with Yes to conclude that there are many similarities between the two films. For instance, the pairing of two protagonists in a city to which neither belongs, and the examination of the respective relationships within the context in which the characters find themselves. The exception is that, of course, considering the larger and more politically urgent backdrop against which the story of Yes is set, The Tango Lesson seems to recall simpler times. Yet, Yes ends on an affirmative tone, as the couple reunited in places where they may, at least momentarily, escape the burdens of identity and politics. The Tango Lesson, being autobiographical, is an indication of the way in which the personal may be translated into aesthetic creation. Potter shows that she recognises such translation when she notes that ‘Unless direct experience went through the same disciplined transformation as any other material it would stay in the realm of personal anecdote’ (1997, p. ix). Yes, in a more complex fashion, may be seen as Potter’s imagined autobiography. She works out what it might have been like if she did find herself in the situation that the Joan Allen character

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experiences, thereby allowing herself the cinematic or cultural space through which to participate in public discourse about the state of emergency in which we find ourselves. Such is the interface between the personal and the political in Potter’s oeuvre, and perhaps an excellent revised mantra for a politically relevant contemporary feminism.

5 On the Edges of Post-Colonialism: Deepa Mehta and Transnational Cinema

Ethnic minority filmmakers who reside in the West often bear the burden of authenticity when it comes to the representation of their cultures of origination. Such a burden is often tied up with the seemingly simplistic question about a particular film’s national origin, a rhetorical question that is perhaps best answered by applying the film critic Philip Kemp’s duck test in relation to how one measures a British film’s Britishness: ‘If it looks, walks, and quacks like a British film, then that’s probably what it is’ (1999, p. 64). The discourse of national and world cinemas sits at odds with the rather more complex realities of film production and distribution that more often than not involve co-productions, international sources of funding, various locations, a motley cast and crew of different nationalities, and stories that may fall outside the remit of particular national and cultural discourses. The hyphenated identities of many filmmakers with specific cultural backgrounds that involve migration, diaspora, and/or exile often find that audiences for their works expect them to speak for, or represent, their cultures of origination; or for their works to reflect upon their hyphenated cultural identities. As a critique of US or Eurocentric discourses, a hyphenated identity can also be seen, Hamid Naficy observes, as identity cinema’s ‘marker of resistance to the homogenizing and hegemonizing power of the American melting pot ideology’ (2001, p. 15). The BritishAsian filmmaker Gurinda Chadha is a case in point: her films, such as Bhaji on the Beach (1993), Bend It Like Beckham (2002), 108

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and Bride and Prejudice (2004), are explicit in foregrounding the various perspectives of British-South Asian experiences. Bhaji on the Beach explores the experiences of several generations of Punjabi women who live in Birmingham in a story about a day excursion to the beach in Blackpool. Bend It Like Beckham is a story of an Indian girl who pursues football as her preferred sport despite opposition from her traditional parents, while Bride and Prejudice is an Indian take on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with a South Asian cast of characters and replete with Bollywood song and dance sequences. Many ethnic filmmakers, however, resent such reception of their work even as they are interested in reflecting on their lived realities to some degree in their outputs. Deepa Mehta, the Indian-Canadian filmmaker, for instance, is on record for expressing her frustrations about the precise identity of her work. In an interview, Mehta is quoted as saying, ‘The point is, can I—do I—have the ability to do a film that I really believe in? And that’s what it’s about. Because if I start thinking about “Am I too Western, am I too Eastern?” I’d never be able to do anything’ (Levitin, 2003, p. 273). Besides, she advises aspiring filmmakers in Canada to look beyond national funding bodies and institutions to help bring their projects to fruition (ibid., 291). Such a situation raises questions about the limitations we place on ethnic filmmakers and the reception of these films that straddle cultures. Epistemologically, theories of postcoloniality and Third-Worldism that act as the prism through which we understand such films may have implanted these restrictions. A productive work in many ways, Naficy’s An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking may be an example of a particular way of looking at these works, and encouraged a particular East–West dialectic in relation to the works of ethnic filmmakers and artists. An example of constructing a East–West binary in reception of works from filmmakers who straddle cultures is Jigna Desai’s understanding of Deepa Mehta and Mira Nair’s works as diasporic, and that which constructs a conversation between East and West. Desai writes that diasporic films ‘pursue the possibility of maximum exposure within India for their films, attempting to simultaneously locate them within North American national cinemas

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as well as in relation to Indian cinemas’ (2006, p. 121). Desai then concludes thus: [R]eferences to Bollywood and Indian cinematic forms and aesthetics signify not only alternatives to dominant Western cinematic practices, but also a self-reflective claim to the cinematic apparatus itself in the name of the nonWestern. However, this is not to suggest that diasporic films are embraced and easily folded into Indian cinemas and national public cultures; diasporic films may share a contested relationship with Bollywood as well as Hollywood, as is the case with Fire. (ibid., p. 122) Such statements make clear the implicit assumption that world film culture, or more specifically, contemporary Indian art-house films, is in a direct and somewhat antagonistic relationship to both Bollywood and Hollywood. Although Desai mentions the example of Mehta’s Fire (1996), the critique does not show how and why this might be when textual analysis of the film would provide a complex reading of Fire that is more like an example of transnational cinema, as this chapter will proceed in part to explore. In their study of transnational cinema, Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden write about the limitations of both post-colonial and Third-Worldist perspectives. In the case of post-colonial theory, it ‘loses its conceptual coherence when it is called upon to provide analytical groundings for situations that do not have or have not been defined by the imperial or colonial pre-histories for which it has functioned as a deconstructive critique’ (2006, p. 5). The conceptual productivity of Third-Worldism is also restrained by ‘the hybridized and cosmopolitan identities of so many contemporary filmmakers, it could be argued that binary oppositions and tertiary relations have lost even their heuristic value in the complexly interconnected world-system with which even the most marginalized of them must now content’ (ibid., p. 4). In discussing metaphors of mobility in the Western canon, John Durham Peters delineates between exile, diaspora, and

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nomadism; and eventually comes down on the side of diaspora. Be that as it may that exile denotes isolation and a pining for the homeland and diaspora suggests imaginaries of networks and community for people who do not live in their countries of origination, only nomadism as a concept transcends the notion of a place of origination (1999, p. 20–1). Although Peters critiques what he calls the fantasy of nomadism and scolds that ‘those with political rights and civil securities [who] extol homelessness all they want but that such talk is profoundly dangerous for those who are in fact homeless,’ nomadism is the starting point from which to draw up a very necessary new understanding of geopolitics to circumvent the limitations of previous post-colonial concepts (1999, p. 36). Besides, the theoretical potential of nomadism exists on a conceptual level and to make the leap to launch a materialist critique of its implications for the homeless requires considerable qualification. Whereas material homelessness is to be deplored, nomadism as a concept allows the construction of an imaginary that circumvents the limitations that are set against identity politics and narratives, and also provides a description of transnational patterns of mobility. As Chapter 7 on Ursula Biemann’s video essays show, notions of exile and diaspora do not begin to describe the transnational mobilities of Third World women. More to the point, far from depoliticising the oppressed, nomadism provides a figuration of location and politics that does not begin from the dialectic of home and elsewhere. Taking this dialectic further to consider the post-colonial understanding of patterns of mobility and migration, nomadism quells post-colonialism’s implicit premise that the point of origination is located in the East and that the present resides in the West. Towards a better understanding of works by filmmakers whose works and identities straddle various cultures, an attempt to broach a novel discursive strategy is imperative. To go beyond such epistemic conundrum then, we need a new framework through which to think about the reception of films that find their subject matters and politics across national and cultural boundaries. Specifically, this chapter is interested in looking at the ways in which we may be able to transcend the limitations of

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a post-colonial discourse and reach a fuller appreciation of Deepa Mehta’s trilogy of films, Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005) via the notion of a transnational filmmaking practice. Peters describes nomadism as dismantling ‘the notion of home from a specific site or territory, being homeless and home-full at once’ (1999, p. 21). Such a description is useful for thinking about films that traverse cultural and national borders, and importantly, relieves them from the burdens of representation and cultural authenticity. Referencing Naficy, Asuman Suner observes that accented cinema is ‘an extension of auteur theory in the sense that “accented” films are informed by their directors’ autobiographies and marked by their stylistic signatures’ (2007, p. 55). Marking a departure from the concerns of cinematic authorship might be useful for a more politically nuanced appreciation of these films and circumvent the perils of intentional fallacy, as is also the case discussed in Chapter 1 in relation to Ullmann’s Faithless. More to the point, a notion of transnational cinema allows these ethnic filmmakers to escape the dialectics of postcolonial theory and thereby dislodge the centrality of the West in the reception and appreciation of their films. As Suner adroitly notes, certain films and filmmaking practices may be considered transnational because they problematize the question of national identity and belonging by directing attention to the multiplicity of the experience of displacement, de-territorialization, and migration within and across the non-Western world. Testifying to the complexity of the question of displacement in their own geopolitical contexts, they effectively prove that the problematization of the relations of belonging and identity is not the monopoly of the exilic/diasporic subjects residing in the West. (ibid., p. 66) Moreover, Suner acknowledges that by ‘entailing a consciousness about the multiplicity of localities, histories, communities, and selves, this imaginary . . . [also] expose[s] repressive

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local and global situations, and to mobilize resistance against them’ (ibid., p. 55). The notion of a transnational filmmaking practice would therefore be one that first decentralises the West by adopting a broader and more diverse perspective on the geopolitical context of its outputs. Secondly, such a practice might in some way mobilise resistances against repressive situations, be they global or local. This second agenda, so to speak, might be where we could affirm a feminist political imperative in thinking about transnational cinema. Indeed, in their anthology on transnational feminism, Katarzyna Marciniak, Anikó Imre, and Áine O’Healy outline the importance of a feminist political stance in analyses of transnational film and media. They conclude that: A transnational feminist approach to global media culture does not delineate a specialized subfield or set of films for and about women only. Transnational economic developments and the global flow of information, images, and sounds implicate everyone. But they do not create an equal playing field. Feminism, in our understanding, is not a decorative addition or an optional perspective that can be applied to studies of transnational media but an acknowledgement that transnational processes are inherently gendered, sexualized, and radicalized. The borders they erase and erect affect different groups differently. (2007, p. 4) In this sense, then, this chapter explores Mehta’s filmmaking practice as both harnessing transnational and feminist imperatives to posit interventions beyond post-colonial, ThirdWorldist, and feminist discourses. Transnational author Deepa Mehta’s marriage to a Canadian national, and migration to the country in 1973, gave her a hyphenated identity and provided the biographical material through which to contextualise her films within a cross-cultural environment.

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However, as this chapter will show, the post-colonial discourse that considers Mehta as a diasporic filmmaker whose films solely reference the, albeit contested, relationship between her Indian background and her adopted home in the West is unproductive for thinking through a transnational feminist politics in her film practice. Instead, this chapter wants to consider the complexities of geopolitics, mobilisation, displacement, desires, and identity in Mehta’s elements trilogy to come to a more nuanced understanding. The respective productions of Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005) have their stories of opposition, resistance, and controversy. In fact, the controversies elicited by the production of each film preceded its reception, and in some way precondition the reception of these films. For instance, members of Mehta’s crew such as Jasmine Yuen-Carrucan (2000) present accounts of these difficulties while in production. A story about the disintegration of an extended Indian family living under the same roof, the release of Fire met with accusations that its lesbian narrative tarnishes national pride and resulted in the arson attack on a cinema playing the film. Several years later, the production of Water in 2000 met with political bullying, demonstrations, and again, accusations by conservative and religious groups of a deliberate attempt to discredit India to the world by focusing on the ill-treatment of widows. Such disruptions eventually resulted in the delayed release of the film five years later. While not sensationally controversial by the standards of Fire and Water, Earth takes on the weighty issue of religious and ethnic conflicts at the time of the Partition of India and Pakistan. This trilogy of films does not fit within the frameworks of diasporic filmmaking or post-colonial cinema, although Mehta has made films that are more along the lines of Chadha’s oeuvre, such as Bollywood/Hollywood (2002), a pastiche of Bollywood cinema that is also reflective of South Asian communities in Canada. Instead, the structure of these transnational films may be more appropriately understood in terms of either Deleuze’s conception of the rhizome or the metaphor of interconnection more often associated with new media and network culture.

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Eugene Thacker writes that the question of network culture ‘is not one of morality, but rather of ethics’ (2004, p. xx). According to Thacker, thinking about network culture in metaphorical terms ‘provides a general model for discussing relationships (linking, hybridity, boundaries, heterogeneity, etc.)’ (ibid., p. xiv). A further and more expansive understanding of network culture would help lead to an understanding of networks as ‘materialised and materializing media in an important step towards diversifying and complexifying our understanding of power relationships in control societies’ (ibid., p. xv). In network culture, the continual enactment of politics and ethical positions marks the discursive departure from semiotics and fixed meanings. In linguistic terms, it shifts the attention from the noun to the verb; and changes the question from ‘what it means’ to ‘how does it do.’ Thinking about Mehta’s filmmaking as a transnational practice that metaphorically realises the workings of network culture, it is useful that we begin looking at the importance of the spatial and interconnected narrative. Although Earth is set within the context of the 1947 Partition as a consequence of colonial British rule, the film bypasses the British in this multi-faceted political conflict and instead focuses on the different ethnic groups involved. Set in Lahore around a wealthy Parsee family, the story centres on the Parsee girl, Lenny, her beautiful Hindu nanny, Shanta, and Shanta’s two Muslim admirers: Hasan ‘the Masseur,’ and Dil ‘Ice Candy Man.’ Around these characters are Lenny’s parents and an assortment of associates, friends, neighbours, and servants of various class, religion and ethnicity. Earth begins with a formal dinner hosted by the Parsee family, attended by British and Sikh grandees, that ended up as a slogan-calling slinging match between the British and the Sikh guests and desperately mediated by the Parsee hosts. The working classes are not spared this religious and ethnic politics either: on Lenny’s many outings with Shanti and her suitors, friendships between Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh men veer towards breaking point when one or the other voice resentment, racist or disparaging remarks about another ethnic group. The servants who live in the house have various ethnic and religious identifications and

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co-exist happily, even as class (and caste) fissures are explored in the episode where the Hindu family belonging to the Untouchable caste marries off their ten-year-old child, Lenny’s playmate, to a Christian dwarf, much to Shanti’s horror but to Lenny’s parents’ patrician resignation to pragmatism. When a train from India pulls into Lahore’s station with its full load of murdered and mutilated Muslims, tensions begin to rise as Hindus and Sikhs are threatened by mobs. Radicalised by Shanti’s rejection and the discovery that his sisters were casualties on the death train, Dil the ‘Ice Candy Man’ seeks revenge by killing his love rival, Hasan, tricking Lenny into divulging Shanti’s whereabouts, and snatching her away with the help of a lynching mob. The perspectives and interests of different ethnic groups underlie Earth’s narrative, alluding to the networks of relations between cultures and people within the world of the film. While not a novel approach, films that seek recourse to spatialise their narratives may be seen to adhere to a transnational sensibility, given their networks of relations that foreground connections, complicity, tensions, and involvement between disparate characters and stories. Such transnational sensibility is also evident in Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation discussed in Chapter 6, where the linearised forms of narrative, such as that of assimilation, is displaced by a more spatialised narrative form that raises questions about notions of home and nation. More recently, Hollywood films such as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006), Paul Haggis’ Crash (2004), and Matteo Garrone’s Gamorra (2008) manifest such stylistic sensibilities. While Crash and Gomorra are respectively set in Los Angeles and the Italian city of Naples, Babel more explicitly makes transnational connections across the globe even though all three films subscribe to the principles of networks and multiple interconnectivity in one way or the other. As Crash and Gomorra respectively show, the poison of racism and the far-reaching activities of the Italian Mafia materialise networks of power relations that either implicate or affect everyone. Babel consists of four separate stories that take place in Morocco, Mexico, and Japan, all related to the misfiring of a gun. Chronologically, the narrative begins with a Japanese

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tourist on a hunting holiday who presents his gun to his Moroccan guide, who then sells it to a herdsman. The herdsman’s sons proceeded to try out the gun’s prowess by shooting at a bus in the distance. The shot hits an American woman on the bus, effectively delaying the travelling couple’s return home and presenting child care issues for their Mexican nanny back in San Diego who is left with the children. She is then forced to take the children across the border to attend her son’s wedding, and runs into trouble with the border police on the way back. The gun shot thus results in the death of one of the herdsman’s son in a shoot out with the police, a traumatic attempt to get the American woman medical help despite political obstacles, the nanny’s distress and deportation from the United States, and the eventual tracing back of the weapon to the Japanese man, whom we find dealing with his wife’s recent suicide and a lonely, troubled, and sexually promiscuous deaf-mute daughter. Babel’s narrative breadth is by definition transnational, and its spatiality gestures to the underlying principle of network culture. In this sense, it becomes an ethical endeavour to understand the materialising relations of power in the way Babel’s interconnected sets of circumstances play out and the politics that underlies the consequences faced by each of the characters. As Marciniak, Imre, and O’Healy observe, Babel taps into discourses crucial for transnational feminism: ‘female alterity, border crossings, migration, gendered domestic labour, transnational servitude, racialized structures of power’ (2007, p. 8), and these issues are those which posit a feminist approach and ethical response imperative in transnational discourses. More pertinent to a comparison with Mehta’s oeuvre perhaps is Nandita Das’ Firaaq (2008). The actress who plays Shanta in Earth and Sita in Fire marks her directorial debut with a film about the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002, tracking a host of characters across ethnic, religious, and class identifications who contribute to, or are victims of, this particular conflict. Comprising five different sets of interconnected narratives in Gujarat, sometimes by the television news reports that they watch, sometimes by chance encounters, and on two occasions via an orphaned Muslim boy roaming the streets

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and witnessing much of the horror, Firaaq may be seen as an ethical contemplation of the materialised and materialising relations of power that Thacker discerns in network culture. The ethical question replaces a moral one. Characters mistakenly pose questions about the morality of the riots, often coming down on one side or the other. However, emotional questions of culpability are less effective or useful compared to the ethical stance of the film’s aesthetic form that seeks to comprehend the intricate politics behind the perpetration of hatred and violence. In Earth, the characters variously constitute nodal points that join up the particular network around the inhabitants of the wealthy Parsee house. Formally, Mehta emphasises this sense of community and interconnection by frequently employing camera work that revolves around Shanta and her friends as they congregate. For instance, these gatherings in the park have the characters sitting in a circle on the grass as the camera moves around them and their conversations that invariably touch on the imminent Partition. Elsewhere, the ensemble cast is often portrayed together, emphasising the community that characterises the setting. The context that the film sets up will ultimately reach its terrible conclusion when ethnic violence pulls these relations asunder and Dil ‘Ice Candy Man’ seeks his revenge on Shanta and Hasan. As Earth’s narrative works towards its grim conclusion, the film poses a series of questions that transcends a concern with post-colonialism. The episode at the start of the film where the British and Sikh dinner guests come to blows sets the political and social context for its narrative. Beyond the fact of British colonialism is the question of the future of Indian, and the relationship between various ethnic groups therein, in the face of such tumultuous world events. An ethical question is raised when Lenny seeks to find out from her mother the role of the Parsee, given that the child hears so much talk of the Hindu–Muslim conflict, and concludes that they are not so much ‘bum lickers of the British’ but ‘invisible.’ More ethical questions are also raised when one thinks about the effect of the violence on the various characters, whether they succumb to the hatred, learn to adapt, have to endure humiliation, or attempt to shield their friends and neighbours

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from the line of fire. In this sense, throwing up one’s hands in despair at the injustice or asking after the morality of the narrative is less useful than sustaining an aesthetics in the film that seeks a nuanced understanding of the politics behind such stories. In Mehta’s oeuvre, transnational realities are deftly acknowledged and straddled alongside a feminist ethical stance. As the rest of this chapter shows, Fire demonstrates the different ways in which female narrative trajectories might differ given disparate political and cultural contexts. For its recognition of such differences, Mehta’s elements trilogy may be seen as adroit examples of transnational cinema. Levitin describes Mehta as a transnational filmmaker who is ‘a feminist with a distaste for rigid nationalisms and oppressive power relations, and an independent filmmaker with an early-honed instinct for the art of film exhibition’ (2003, p. 274). Such a description expresses the nuances of a transnational feminist filmmaking practice as being beyond national identifications and post-colonial discourses, but yet is attuned to structures of power relations and the necessity of a feminist response to the materialising of such networks of power. A feminist ethical response to the transnational context requires an implicit understanding of both the scope and limitations of feminisms past, and a political desire to put forth a feminist analysis and critique that is politically productive and relevant. Similar to Ullmann’s use of the figure of the female child in Faithless in order to articulate a feminist ethical response to the limitations of liberal feminist sensibilities discerned in Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, as the discussion in Chapter 1 shows, Mehta employs a similar strategy in both Earth and Water to illustrate the interconnected networks of power and oppression. Deleuze’s conception of the ‘universal girl’ is also relevant here in thinking about how the figure of the child, in the process of becoming before its codification into femininity, is able to transcend apparent perimeters and boundaries, to function as the nodal points in a vaster network of relations than those specified in race, class, gender, or ideological terms. In this way, the ‘universal girl’ provides opportunities for feminist ethical responses beyond discursive possibilities

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as previously understood and facilitates a practice of feminist film criticism within the transnational context. Earth’s narrative centres around a child’s activities, effectively setting up access to the various characters and communities that might live in close proximity and are intimately connected, but whose lives might never intersect in meaningful ways. Following Lenny, the camera is able to witness play time in the park with Nanny and her friends, the formal dinner that Lenny’s parents host for important guests at home, the ethnic violence that blows up in the working class neighbourhood where Shanta’s friends live, and also into the intimate private spaces of her parents’ bedroom. In Water, the young Chuiya similarly acts to facilitate the expansion of the narrative. Thrown into decrepit widow housing after the death of her much older husband, the nine-yearold child is then supposed to spend the rest of her life in poverty and mourning according to the dictates of ancient Hindu scriptures. In the widow house, she encounters Kalyani, a beautiful young woman who is forced into prostitution in order to sustain the rest of the widows; Sakuntala, a literate middle-aged widow who devotes herself to religious duties; and a cantankerous old woman, the head of the house and who pimps Kalyani to keep the house going. On an outing to the baths, Chuiya and Kalyani meet a young Brahmin follower of Ghandi’s teachings, Narayan, who promptly falls in love with the latter. After passing several messages to each other via Chuiya, Narayan and Kalyani plan to marry despite guaranteed opposition and go to meet his family. On route, Kalyani recognises the house and realises that she has been sent there before to service Narayan’s father. She drowns herself in the bathing pool. Her death leaves the widow house in financial shortfall, and results in Chuiya being pimped to a rich, upper-caste punter. Narayan, inspired by teachings about justice and an independent future for India, despairs of the way in which the upper castes fail to provide leadership. They are either cynical Anglophiles like his friend or self-justifying and exploitative oppressors like his supposedly benign father. Meanwhile, Sakuntala begins to realise that her religious piety might have been in vain after speaking with

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Narayan to explain to her the system of oppression dressed up as religious doctrine. Shocked that Chuiya has been pimped, Sakuntala rescues the unconscious child and takes her to the train station, where Ghandi is addressing a huge crowd, in the hope that someone will take her away and give her a new lease of life. She meets Narayan there, who is departing the city in disillusionment, and lets him take Chuiya away. This act of facilitating the rescue of a child from the clutches of religious dictates is symbolic for the Sakuntala character, affirming empowerment and liberation from misogynistic conventions, looking on at Narayan and Chuiya on board the train as it leaves the station. Notably, the film’s narrative begins by focusing on Kalyani’s love story but ends by emphasising Sakuntala’s enlightenment, thereby constructing a genealogy of feminist becoming. In ways that the consequences of adult irresponsibility and misbehaviour are inscribed on the child in Ullmann’s Faithless, Chuiya also unwittingly bears the brunt of circumstances beyond her control and serves to bring disparate narrative threads together in Water in order to present a picture that lends itself to feminist criticism. The young Lenny in Earth narrates a regretful story about her childhood and how her beloved nanny was taken away by a lynching mob from the perspective of a limping old lady in a desolate landscape, as we find out at the end of the film. Yet, these fictional narratives in Earth and Water based on South Asian political history use the figure of the child to look towards a future beyond religious and cultural strictures as well as colonial subjection. Chronologically, these narratives bring the trilogy to the present day in Fire, where new configurations in gender politics and transnational relations warrant revision of the critical terrain. Fire, the first film in the trilogy that elicited such controversy with its narrative of a lesbian affair between sisters-in-law, also sustains an ethics that predicates on materialised and materialising relations, although the film’s narrative focuses on the processes and materialisation of desire. A young bride, Sita, marries into Jatin’s family and moves in to an extended family that includes Jatin’s elder brother Ashok, his wife

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Radha, their elderly disabled mother Binji, and a house servant named Mundu. Essentially a film about the limitations of tradition, the film depicts the upheavals caused by this young spirited bride’s entry into the family. Having married her to appease family and tradition, Javit assumed that Sita would accept the fact that he continues a relationship with his Chinese girlfriend, Julie. Instead, Sita makes her disapproval clear and begins a close friendship with the older and steadfast sister-in-law, Radha, who has been dutifully doing the biddings of her husband and mother-in-law for years. Immobile and unable to speak, Binji serves as the family’s moral guardian, ever watchful and vehemently ringing her bell to voice her disapproval. Meanwhile, Ashok is devoted to his guru, financially supporting his spiritual guide and obsessed in his pursuit of freedom from sexual desires, to the extent of tormenting his wife by practising active restrain from her. With Sita, Radha rediscovers intimacy and the pleasures of the flesh, while the house servant distracts himself from his mundane reality with pornographic videos. These activities would then tear the family apart, although Javit’s extra-marital affair appears to be tolerated. Prohibition of desire, whether of Mundu for sexual release through pornographic videos or the sisters-in-law for each other, is the source of the film’s unhappiness. The displacement of marital relations and sexual desires into codes for traditionally circumscribed virtues is that which causes the blockade of desire. Javit feels forced into an arranged marriage because his Chinese girlfriend will not be forced into the confines of a traditional extended Indian family, even if race is not an issue. Radha’s obsequiousness towards her husband and family stems from the assumption of female subordination and sacrifice, as played out in the fast the women had to perform in order to pray for their husbands’ longevity. For Ashok, natural desires for one’s wife are instead displaced into religious piety. If film narratives are imbued with, and operate along, the proliferation of desire as per the dictates of psychoanalytic film theory, the purpose of Fire’s narrative may be seen to be that of setting up obstacles for the proliferation of desires towards the possibility of narrative closure.

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Fire’s narrative, explicitly obstructed or propelled by the proliferation or prohibition of desire within a family, also contains a transnational critique of post-colonial assumptions. Contrary to Desai’s unsustainable conclusion, discussed above, that Fire is representative of contested allegiances to Bollywood and Hollywood cinemas, the film presents a more complex and nuanced picture of India that is beyond its relationship with the Western world. The conflict between traditional demands and modern promises faced, for instance, by Jatin and Radha does not fall within post-colonial prescriptions. Sita, who presents a level-headed critique of traditional demands on femininity, is able to pave a path out of the repressive familial situation for herself and Radha. Jatin, on the other hand, represents an unsustainable approach by attempting to straddle cultural demands and personal desires by keeping a mistress outside the marital home, and whose story leads the film into transnational terrains. While Jatin deprives Sita of martial affections, he is first seen with Julie in bed and applying nail varnish to her toes. Earth presents Julie’s narrative on three separate occasions: first in bed with Jatin; then insisting to Jatin that continual desire is that which sustains their relationship; and then at dinner with Jatin and her family. While not necessarily a sympathetic character, Julie and her family offers a glimpse into an India that transcends its colonial history. In addition, her character prompts reflections on what might be a feminist response to transnational circumstances. Over dinner with her father and younger brother, Jatin is subjected to a monologue about the diasporic history of Julie’s family. Bemoaning the fact that his peasant parents somehow emigrated from China to India while most of the Chinese diaspora headed west, the story that Julie’s father tells complicates an often simplistic understanding of diaspora as an extension of colonial history, for instance, that patterns of migration proceed from the colonies to either the land of the colonial masters in Europe or the United States. Such a perspective dislodge the centrality of the West, even though Julie’s father and brother express similar resentments and frustrations about the discriminations suffered by minority groups

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everywhere. Complaining about how Indian lavatories are not up to scratch, but ‘holes in the ground’, Julie’s father presumably compares Indian sanitation with the higher standards of living in the West, where he clearly prefers to have ended up. Still, this episode in Fire provides an enactment of a particular transnational encounter, not in the usual sense between East and West, but between the two large competing cultures and economies in Asia. What makes this sequence at dinner with the Chinese family uncomfortable and cringe worthy is the bare-faced ambition shown by Julie’s character, and that is actively encouraged by her father. Articulating what he considers a winning formula, presumably towards economic prosperity, he rhetorically asks his daughter how long it took to perfect her ‘Yankee English’, to which Julie replies, ‘six months’. As we discern in this short sequence of the film, the post-colonial trajectory of heading East to West may no longer be the most relevant or productive for former colonial subjects. Instead, advancement for an ethnic Chinese girl born and bred in India comes by way of acquiring a pseudoAmerican accent in six months and finding her opportunities in Hong Kong by exploiting the cultural capital that is derived from the combination of her natural ethnicity and acquired voice. Such convoluted paths to attaining cultural capital are vastly different from, for instance, the strategy of ‘passing’ that Sarah Jane attempts in order to hide her African-American ancestry in Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959). While female alterity, gendered domestic labour, and transnational servitude still applies to, for instance, Amelia, the Mexican maid in Babel, as well as the mobilised transnational labourers in which Biemann is interested in Chapter 7, a singular model does not apply to all female transnational experiences. In relation to Samira Makmalbaf’s Blackboards (2000), Asuman Suner observes that transnational cinema ‘challenge[s] the hegemonic assumptions of Western feminism, making Muslim/Other women singular, abstract, and in need of liberation’ (2007, p. 66). The way in which Mehta fleshes out Julie’s character in Fire sustains such a remark and gestures to radicalised structures of power, and sustains a different version of female transgression than, say, in Sita and

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Radha’s story. Jasbir Jain identifies female transgression in Sita and Radha’s story in terms of their disillusionment with heterosexual relationships as well as the familial and religious frameworks that preach abstinence, domesticity, and sacrifice (2002, pp. 130–1). Jain also reads Fire’s ending at the Sufi shrine as representative of ‘the presence of a humanist faith outside the self-denying rigid religious structures’ that ‘moves away from constricting frameworks and patriarchal institutions to render the acquisition of agency possible for both Radha and Sita’ (ibid., 132). On the other hand, Julie’s position is beyond a narrative arc that predicates on redemption but constitutes what Suner, quoting Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, describes as a transnational imaginary of ‘ “as-yet-unfigured” horizon of contemporary cultural production by which national spaces/identities of political allegiance and economic regulation are being undone and imagined communities of modernity are being reshaped at the macropolitical (global) and micropolitical (cultural) levels of everyday existence’ (italics in original, 2007, pp. 54–5). On such a level, the amorality that characterises the Julie character in Fire is secondary as a feminist concern than the acknowledgement of a fundamental shift of feminist discourses from dualistic or Western-centric feminism to its application in, and adaptation to, transnational circumstances.

6 On the Edges of National Cinema: Sofia Coppola and Female Authorship

Writing about the major independent American directors of the 1970s, Robert Kolker describes cinema as the means through which these filmmakers articulate the world and their responses to it. The particular vision of the world espoused, however, is that of the failure of action. This effectively lends Kolker the title of his book, A Cinema of Loneliness. Kolker observes that when these films ‘do depict action, it is invariably performed by lone heroes in an enormously destructive and antisocial manner, further affirming that actual change, collectively taken, is impossible. When they preach harmony, it is through the useless conventions of domestic containment and male redemption’ (2000, p. 10). The contradictions that Kolker discerns between the formal innovations and narrative helplessness of the American New Wave, is of course, a particularly masculinist cinema. His book is an auteurial study of seven directors: Arthur Penn, Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Robert Altman. From the second edition onwards, a chapter on Spielberg replaces the one on Coppola. Fast-forward three decades. Sofia Coppola emerges as a director whose films take on an exceptionally personal quality. These films that are in many ways extended explorations of female spaces re-open Kolker’s enquiry into the auteur-led American cinema of loneliness. Alongside the incorporation of a female perspective, a study of Sofia Coppola as an auteur 126

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in the spirit of the American New Wave also reveals the ideological changes that should be noted. Kolker observes of the 1970s American cinema that even though these films ‘sometimes carry on an ideological debate with the culture that breeds them, they never confront that culture with another ideology, with other ways of seeing, with social and political possibilities that are new and challenging’ (emphasis mine, 2000, p. 10). Contrary to such a statement, this chapter shows the reasons for discussing Sofia Coppola’s oeuvre in relation to the 1970s American cinema, considers the insertion of feminist politics into the discussion, and conceptualises the ideological framework in which to place the critical evaluation of Coppola’s three feature films. The problem with female authorship Cahiers du cinéma’s notion of the politique des auteur emerges as part of a generational revolt against a view of cinema as being derivative of the theatre. Andrew Sarris subsequently coins his theory of authorship and builds up a pantheon of (mostly male) directors as creative geniuses. Angela Martin argues that the ‘original suggestion that the filmmaker should be an auteur was a matter of policy, not theory’ (2003, p. 31). The adaptation of a radical policy within the specific context of the nouvelle vague into a general theory or pecking order of cinematic genius is that which makes it difficult to think about female cinematic authorship. This difficulty is further compounded by the particular theoretical slant of feminist film scholarship: Lacanian psychoanalysis’ theory of subjectivity renders female subjectivity an incomplete and fragmented entity that is never quite oriented into language. If cinema is a language, then one logically concludes that women are never quite masters of the medium. Thankfully though, the influence of Roland Barthes’ declaration of the death of the author heralds a more pluralistic and inclusive theoretical terrain that enables the discourse of female authorship, however fraught. The masculine imperative is mostly taken for granted in Cahiers du cinéma’s policy of authorship, and subsequently, Sarris’ theory of authorship. Martin also takes issue at the

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perspective taken by 1960s and 1970s film criticism, namely, the British Movie magazine run by V. F. Perkins. Noting that there was a dearth of women in Perkin’s particular pantheon, she notes the values that Perkins imposed: Victor Perkins summarized the theory and critical practice of auteurism as looking for the achievement within the single film of values like economy, unity, eloquence, subtlety, depth and vigour [on the one hand; on the other] recurrent themes in a director’s films considered as a series . . . themes, viewpoints and methods of sufficient personal significance to carry over from film to film. (emphasis in original, ibid., pp. 31–2) Emphasising the use of the word ‘vigour,’ Martin means to stress the unproblematic assumption of masculinity in the conception of cinematic authorship in relation to Perkins as well as other distinguished critics of the period. She notes ‘virility is, by definition, masculine . . . and the Nouvelle vague’s call for a personal self-expression is very different from the later feminist call for the personal to be political rather than ego-centric’ (ibid., p. 31). While it is fair to delineate the historical and critical contexts for the adoption and use of the concept of authorship, it is perhaps unwise to extent such criticism to every instance of auteurial criticism that understandably assumes a masculinist stance. The difference between unproblematic masculinist film criticism and feminist perspectives is that of self-consciousness. I would go so far to argue that the process of gaining feminist consciousness, via theories of subjectivity that insist on the problematic construction of female subjectivity, is that which makes the idea of women filmmakers as authors such an awkward concept. As Martin herself notes with regard to her case study of Kathryn Bigelow’s oeuvre, ‘what feminist film criticism/theory has done is talk about female or feminist authorship. Interestingly, Kathryn Bigelow’s work seems to . . . raise considerable problems for this approach, largely because of her mainstream position. But I believe the problem is wider than this and that it emanates from the question of definition’ (ibid., p. 34).

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Indeed, Bigelow’s mainstream position is not the only factor that raises problems for feminist criticism and theory. That her films, such as Point Break (1991) and Strange Days (1995), are not overtly about women characters and do not deal explicitly with feminine issues make them difficult to assimilate. Moreover, that they concentrate on stories about masculine pursuits, issues, violence, and crime makes Bigelow even more problematic for discussion within the framework of feminist film theory and criticism. This question of definition that Martin discerns may be re-framed as a question of self-consciousness that arose as the result of feminist film scholarship being led down a particular garden path of theory. As some form of a manifesto towards a conception of female authorship, Martin recommends Agnès Varda’s notion of cinécriture, or cinematic writing, that predicates on film style (ibid., p. 35). Somehow, that doesn’t seem too different to what Perkins espouses. The difference appears rather to be how feminist consciousness-raising aided by unhelpful psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity effectively saps feminist politics and intervention out of film culture, so much so that we are too busy apologising and redefining what we might mean instead of asserting the range and influence of women’s filmmaking, including those such as Bigelow’s. Therefore, the rest of this chapter unapologetically explores Sofia Coppola’s films that initially come across as being very much identified with a particular notion of femininity, but which reveal themselves to be more complex and interesting on closer scrutiny. Lost in Translation (2003), perhaps because of the film’s generic recalcitrance and less than overt attention to feminine concerns, is often critically discussed in relation to the American New Wave. To a large extent, the emergence of a contemplative and genre-defying film such as Lost in Translation in the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), an exercise in pastiche and visual stylisation, would prove promising to critics and film-goers who mourn the passing of what is often termed the golden age of American independent filmmaking. Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and the Kenneth Bowser documentary of the same name it inspires, identifies the near-collapse of the Hollywood system as that

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which gave rise to the American New Wave in the 1960s. Both popular and critical reviews of Lost in Translation almost without fail make the connection with the American New Wave, thereby consciously or otherwise placing the film firmly within the discursive perimeters of Kolker’s influential study as well as hailing the film as evidence of the continuation, and transformation, of the auteur-led American cinema that is in some sort of antagonistic dialogue with Hollywood cinema. For instance, Stephanie Zacharek sees Sofia Coppola as the twenty-first century torchbearer for the continuation of 1970s American cinema in her review of Lost in Translation in the popular press. She writes, ‘Many critics and faithful filmgoers often mourn that now long-lost golden age of moviemaking, the ‘70s . . . But there’s hope in Sofia Coppola.’ From a similar standpoint, but with a more critical perspective, Maria San Fillippo notes: the refreshing level of honesty and restraint that many are attributing to the film seems to speak to a broader dissatisfaction with the agenda-driven manipulations of so much Hollywood product. Perhaps out of sheer desperation, Coppola is being offered up as antidote to the current crop of so-called ‘indie auteurs’ who scramble to suppress whatever, if any, real feeling [that] exists in their films under a cloak of excessive style, pomo-ish intertextual referencing, and distanced irony. (2003, p. 27) San Fillippo’s remarks distinguish Lost in Translation, as a descendent of the American New Wave, from Hollywood outputs and contemporary independent American films. Such observations echo Kolker’s ideas about the 1970s cinema of loneliness, but only just. They gestures to the intricacies of Lost in Translation’s relationship with the American new wave, especially in terms of how the film’s contemporary transnational context and an incorporation of gender politics in discussions about authorship gesture towards new conclusions. In fact, Coppola’s oeuvre indicates a shift from the aesthetics and ideology of 1970s American cinema and allows for

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meditations on contemporary American notions of gender, race, the self, and otherness in a transnational world where many of the rules governing categories of identity are being re-written. A cinema of loneliness Apart from the obvious reference to the New American cinema that its director’s family name conjures up, Coppola’s three feature-length films to date claim that particular ancestry and submits to Robert Kolker’s description of 1970s American cinema as a cinema of loneliness. In fact, loneliness as part of the female experience is a dominant conceit in The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), and Maria Antoinette (2006), albeit of a sort different to that Kolker refers. Adapted from the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides is about five beautiful teenage sisters who kill themselves to escape their oppressive suburban and domestic surroundings. An act of defiance against their parents’ curfew causes their already limited suburban environment to shrink further to the confines of their bedrooms in the family home. The oppressiveness of this domestic space ultimately leads to the tragedy with which the film concludes. The loneliness of Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette arises from displacement in both marital and geographical terms. While Lost in Translation’s Charlotte finds herself left behind in a Tokyo hotel by her photographer husband and wondering if she still knows the person to whom she is married, Marie Antoinette’s marriage into the French court provides her with every imaginable feminine luxury but not much else besides the rigid protocols of life at court. Writing for Film Comment, Nathan Lee’s observation that ‘with each film Coppola’s Rooms get better furnished yet more empty’ is adroit (2006, p. 26). He adds, ‘[While] Charlotte is vacant, but Marie is pure cipher’ and relates Coppola’s films to ‘Room movies’ inspired by Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles where orphaned siblings retreat into a world of imagination and are then subsequently destroyed by their impulses (ibid., pp. 25–6). The rooms do get more elaborate at the same time that they become emptier: the girls’ bedrooms in The Virgin

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Suicide become Charlotte’s five star hotel in Lost in Translation, which then turns Marie Antoinette’s extravagant series of palatial rooms. The overriding theme seems to be that of entrapment of a particularly complex variety. The Virgin Suicide girls are trapped by their parents’ strict disciplinary regime and repressive code of morality, and their lives become even more unbearable when their most basic routines and comforts are taken away. Charlotte’s entrapment in Lost in Translation occurs in a distant culture, and marriage, where nothing is expected from her as her husband’s appendage and also because she has not figured out what to do after her Ivy League philosophy degree. Marie’s particular prison is gilded and she is a pawn in the game of empire building and marital musical chairs, with hardly any mind of her own. In other words, these female characters whose stories Coppola films have more ghostly attributes than psychological depth because of their isolation in the predicaments in which they find themselves. Yet, Coppola lovingly portrays these ciphers and the rooms they haunt. Audiences thus face the difficulty of putting the finger on the story, or the point, of Coppola’s films. Such haunting of the audience may be explained via a rather convoluted route. The seeming vacuity of Coppola’s three films makes it difficult to fathom the unambiguous care with which she makes them. The warm glow that emanates from the tale of the doomed Lisbon girls in Virgin Suicides, the painstaking details involved in tracing Charlotte’s attempts to kill time and entertain herself in Lost in Translation, and the intricate set designs in Marie Antoinette that co-ordinate exactly with the Queen’s every whim and outfit appear incongruous with the seeming nothingness of the stories they tell. In some way, they are similar to Chantal Ackerman’s feminist classic, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film that depicts the humdrum reality of a Belgian housewife who moonlights as a prostitute and the tragic conclusion to her story, as well as the documentaries that Longinotto made about Japanese women, discussed in Chapter 3. Even though much has been made of Jeanne Dielman’s loving portrayal of mundane domestic chores that are mostly, if not exclusively, performed by

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women, the film’s ending cannot resist high drama and deny a narrative imperative. While Jeanne Dielman ends with the murder of a punter after over three excruciating hours of domestic chores in seemingly real time, Coppola’s films do not supply the narrative twist that Jeanne Dielman does. Coppola’s films resembles more a Jeanne Dielman without the prostitution aspect of the story, which should in (feminist film) theory resist narrative pleasure but which curiously allow the audience to identity with, and feel for, her female characters. In the same way, the female subjects in Longinotto’s Japan films are sympathetic at the same time that they seem alien given their manner, routines, and lives that are portrayed in the films, thereby increasing the sense of exoticism. The question of why we should care about these characters and films can be answered by thinking about the way in which Coppola implicitly critiques the respective characters’ existence and environments, achieved through stretching the duration of these episodes of girls being feminine, frivolous, and doing nothing constructive. Instead of narrating these stories, Coppola extents each film’s duree in the Deleuzean sense, so that the question of the film’s subject is then turned into one about the film’s sensibility. We will recall the second-wave feminist movement’s adage that the personal is political. What followed in the film movement was a corpus of independent and experimental films, such as Jeanne Dielman above, that interrogates female concerns such as work, life, domesticity, and sexuality. However, the adoption of such a feminist axiom to women’s cinema involves an act of misinterpretation. Taking the politicisation of the personal not to mean that the personal is political as well, but instead as permission to direct exclusive attention to private and personal matters. Thus, the frameworks that feminist film theory employ are ill-equipped to respond to the range of issues that fall outside the personal. In some way, the plights of Coppola’s heroines may be seen as the result of the gilded cages that feminist film theory has unwittingly constructed for women by this act of misinterpreting what the politicisation of the personal might encompass. The neighbourhood boys’ narrative that frames the narrative of The Virgin Suicides is telling of Coppola’s take on femininity,

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Lee observes in his Film Comment article. He quotes the boy’s voice-over from the film: ‘And so we started to learn about their lives, coming to hold collective memories of times we hadn’t experienced. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy and how you ended up knowing what colours went together (2006, p. 25). At the same time that the Lisbon girls, Charlotte, and Marie are Coppola’s precious creations to which she delicately attends, their situations are also the traps from which they need to find means of escape. Of these creatures, only Charlotte manages to get away because she reaches out to a stranger (Bill Murray) in the same situation. The heroines of the other two films remain in their cages and march relentlessly towards their respective tragic ends, much in the same way as Jeanne Dielman, and thereby revise Virginia Woolf’s reflections on the need for a room of one’s own: while space for thought and creativity is imperative, one needs to emerge for air, society, and engagement. As we have seen in Chapter 4, Sally Potter also shares such a sentiment about the need to emerge from one’s own room, as evidenced in the discussion on The Tango Lesson. Therefore, Coppola’s oeuvre may be seen to be critiquing the implicit lack of female participation outside of these women’s Rooms. In other words, their failure to question the construction of their respective situations and instead retreat into the comforts of their private prisons is that which leads to the heroines’ demise. The masculine cinema of loneliness that Kolker delineates in 1970s American cinema is thus redefined for the twenty-first century as the gilded prison constructed out of the ashes of the feminist movement. Coppola’s feminist sensibilities are such that her films are acute and intuitive articulations of such discursive issues. However, she also shows the channels through which women might sustain themselves given the situation. The rest of this chapter looks at the ways in which Lost in Translation offers a lifeline. Lost in translation Set in Tokyo, Lost in Translation revolves around two strangers who meet in the bar of the hotel in which they both stay.

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Charlotte (Scarlett Johannson) is a young wife who is left alone in a foreign city as her photographer husband works. Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a middle-aged actor who has come to Tokyo to endorse a brand of whisky for a lot of money. Both find they have become disoriented and overwhelmed insomniacs in Tokyo with neither cultural nor linguistic recourse to get through the week. They then proceed to form a friendship in order to get by. Lost in Translation’s formal innovations are evident in the film’s apparent defiance of genre conventions, to the extent that a particular specialist in 1970s American cinema failed to recognise and acknowledge the film’s influences and genealogy. In his review of the film in the British film magazine Sight and Sound, Ryan Gilbey attributes Lost in Translation’s influences to Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982) and Wim Wender’s Tokyo-Ga (1985). The comparison is obvious and understandable: set in Tokyo, Lost in Translation has in common with Sans Soleil and Tokyo-Ga the set of visual imagery that connotes an exotic and alienating Far Eastern urban culture. However, the one crucial factor that distinguishes Lost in Translation from both Marker and Wender’s respective films is the conspicuous lack of a fascination with the Orient, and the consequent desire to penetrate, excavate, and make sense of an exotic Otherness. While Marker and Wenders seek out the Orient in their respective films, whether in the guise of cultural anthropology (San Soleil) or as homage to Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo-Ga), Coppola draws up two characters that have no particular desire to be in Tokyo. Ignoring this fact, Gilbey concludes that Lost in Translation is a lesser film than its supposed predecessors and comes close to accusing Coppola of racism by claiming that When [Bob and Charlotte] are not mocking Japanese pronunciation, the movie treats the city dwellers as either spookily serene, as in the flower arranging class that Charlotte visits, or comically excitable, like Bob’s greeting party. A scene at the karaoke shindig . . . is unusual for allowing the Japanese people to be more than kooky mascots. (2004, p. 52)

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Gilbey’s review of the film speaks more about the discursive grounds on which the American New Wave and notions of race are situated than the film’s supposed cultural insensitivity. Given that Gilbey is also the author of the recent volume It Don’t Worry Me: Nashville, Jaws, Star Wars, and Beyond, an appraisal of American directors who emerged from the 1970s, it begs the question of why Sofia Coppola would be considered undeserving of mention within the framework of Gilbey’s pantheon. Instead, Gilbey looks for superficial similarities in theoretically complex poetic documentaries that to an extent exhibit fascination at the impenetrable and exotic Orient and renders the narrative led, albeit generically recalcitrant, Lost in Translation unworthy. In other words, the discourse to which Gilbey’s remarks belong loses out on an opportunity to further an understanding of the American New Wave because of particular blind spots it fails to overcome in the same way that feminist film criticism finds it difficult to assimilate Bigelow’s films into its discourse. Remarking on the ambiguous, or lack of, resolution in 1970s American cinema, Gilbey notes in his book that ‘the creative and political climate made possible and necessary endings that were in a sense not endings at all, but lunges into the unknown’ (ibid., p. 20). Lost in Translation in a similar way features an ambiguity and hesitancy that characterise its setting in mysterious environments, be they cultural, physical, or psychological. The same can be said of both The Virgin Suicides and Maria Antoinette. A deep sense of detachment, and of being at a loss, pervades the film, chief amongst which the sense of physical and cultural displacement. Setting up two privileged white American characters of incongruent ages and backgrounds in an alien city and accentuating their discomfort cannot be more similar to this climate of questioning and personal debate that Gilbey, and Kolker before him, discern in the 1970s American New Wave, considering the dominance of white heterosexuality in mainstream American cinema. Moreover, given the deeply masculinist impulses of the American New Wave in the 1960s and 1970s, Lost in Translation also marks a departure from its acknowledged ancestry given its privilege of a female perspective. The film’s refusal of generic

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codes and conventions is made clear by the physical dissimilarity of the two actors who play Bob and Charlotte respectively, and how these differences between them are brought home each time the two characters share a shot: images of them together deny the connotation of heterosexual closure and the happily-ever-after sought by conventional Hollywood narratives. The film’s primary interest in Scarlette Johannson’s character also manages to dislodge the masculine imperatives of the American cinema that Kolker studies. Physically out-of-sync with Japanese compactness, Bob’s displacement is portrayed via his difficulties in the hotel shower, with his too-small bathrobe and slippers, and when he towers over the other passengers in the lift. His moon-crater complexion and rough edges contrast with the systematic and exquisite finishes that characterise the Japanese environment, resulting in much of the film’s physical comedy that builds on Bill Murray’s star persona. In relation to Murray, Lost in Translation references Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993), a film where Murray’s character finds himself trapped in a town (repeating the same day over and over) and operating out of a hotel. In similar ways, both Lost in Translation and Groundhog Day use the motif of the claustrophobic and alien location to effect a contemplation of one’s own identity and life, the difference is that setting this meditation in metropolitan Tokyo rather than small town America implicates a construction of national and cultural identity within a transnational context. On the other hand, Charlotte is drawn more to scale and fits easier into the film’s polished veneer although that also means that her questions and pain exist in deeper recesses. Despite the connection that the two characters have with each other, their displacement in Tokyo leads to unique questions that each character must ask about their lives and marriages. In this sense, like their 1970s counterparts, their dilemmas are personal and their quests towards fulfilment, should they choose to embark, are lonely endeavours. Even as Bob and Charlotte are not drawn to the template of action-driven Hollywood protagonists, they are not the destructive and anti-social characters that Kolker identifies as belonging to the American New Wave. Bob and Charlotte are

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characters in what Deleuze terms ‘a cinema of the seer,’ as opposed to the cinema of the agent (1989, p. 2). According to Deleuze, this cinema of the seer is characterised by a protagonist who ‘shifts, runs and become animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or an action’ (ibid., p. 3). Brought about by socio-political situations that undermine the confidence necessary for unilateral action like those in classical Hollywood narratives, such a description is appropriate to 1970s American cinema as well as Lost in Translation, albeit in different ways. The fissure in an action-driven cinema that gives rise to the cinema of seers occurs at points of historical and political changes. The Vietnam War, the women’s, and civil rights movements are contributory factors leading to the emergence of, and many of the characteristics that epitomise, 1970s American cinema. It is a socially reflective cinema, as Kolker asserts, because many of the films, however disparate, ask questions and share anxieties about notions of gender and cultural identity within a new American epoch. To the extent that the new American directors are overwhelmingly male, 1970s American cinema takes on a masculine form that at times extent to misogynist tendencies in their disavowal of the domestic and by extension, the feminine. The socio-political context that produces a film such as Lost in Translation is, however, that of twenty-first century transnationalism. Far from being the consequence of masculine destructiveness, the palpable loneliness of Lost in Translation is the result of transnational displacement, where ‘loss and deterritorialization are often represented not as transitional states on the transnational subject’s path to either transcendence or tragedy, but instead as more or less permanent conditions’ (Ezra and Rowden, 2006, p. 7). The underlying questions about relationships, gender roles, and cultural identity remain intrinsic, but they differ from the 1970s cinema in the tone and method of inquiry given that the global network of capital that now governs both industrial practices and the construction of identities has irrevocably changed the social–political imaginary. The questions are also phrased differently, which is how Lost in

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Translation takes the American New Wave to places it has not yet traversed. These transformations are also discussed in relation to Deepa Mehta’s film practice in Chapter 5, particularly in relation to post-colonial discourses. Bob and Charlotte are reluctant travellers. They are in contrast to characters in imperialistic narratives about (male) explorers and bounty hunters going out to explore, exploit, and take possession of the Orient (or the West, or some other virgin land, whether geographical or metaphorical) in the same way that Lost in Translation is a vastly different film from Sans Soleil and Tokyo-Ga. Bob would prefer to be elsewhere, more specifically, at home, while Charlotte struggles to keep occupied in Tokyo. On the limousine ride from the airport to his hotel, Bob looks out onto the neon city lights and indecipherable hieroglyphics in bewilderment and becomes even more confounded when he sees an advertising billboard with his own image on it. There is an implicit realisation that while he is personally an open book to the city, Tokyo is a mystery to him. Realising such an unequal balance of power cannot be of much comfort, exacerbated further on in the film by his inability to comprehend his role on the television programme that forced him to extend his stay and later seeing a yet larger portrait of himself splashed on the side of a truck while negotiating traffic, amongst other minor traumatic experiences. At the same time, the missives from home are not particularly comforting, given that they are to get him to choose one colour from a pile of similar burgundy coloured carpet samples, remind him of his failings as a father for forgetting a child’s birthday, and confirm that he has a wife who can do without him. In different ways, their displacements in Tokyo put Bob and Charlotte in discomforting dilemmas: while geographical displacement is somewhat unpleasant, the prospect of home (and of returning to the familiar) is proving to be quite harrowing. Such reversals of the Freudian notion of the unheimlich also raise the question about the relevance or appropriateness of psychoanalytic readings of film texts within a post-industrial and transnational context. Dislodged from the familiar surroundings that affirm her scholastic achievements as a philosophy graduate from Yale

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and an early marriage to a sought after, and no doubt desirable, photographer husband, Charlotte begins to question her complacent existence in the attempts to find distractions. The difference of shot composition between the two sequences where she takes trips out of the city charts the gradual selfdiscovery on which Charlotte embarks. While the first trip to a Buddhist temple culminates in a despairing phone call home about her life and marriage, her trip to Kyoto further on in the film results in a firmer sense of self. The numb inability to appreciate the tranquillity of the Buddhist ritual she observes on the first trip is replaced by the jolt to the senses she experiences in witnessing the small gesture of affection between a couple as a Japanese bride places her hand in the groom’s when he helps her across a threshold, bringing a smile to Charlotte’s face. In some way, that tiny observation of an unfamiliar ritual confirms her fears about her marriage to someone who is self-obsessively oblivious to her needs. Such development in Charlotte’s personal pilgrimage is visually supported by her presence on screen: as she gains confidence and masters her physical and psychological environments, she commands more, and more central, screen space. The character is introduced to pornographic Japanese manga comics from off the shoulder of a fellow subway passenger on that first journey to the temple, somewhat to her bewildered disgust. She is then shown in a shot walking down an alley at the periphery of the frame that then quickly cuts as she proceeds to walk across the frame towards the temple, in effect disallowing her to assert her presence on the screen space. From there, she is content to watch the religious proceedings from a less than ideal vantage point at the back of the shrine, all in all signifying the up-to-now inconsequential presence of her character. Such a treatment of the character’s screen presence contrasts markedly from how she is shot later on in the film when she goes on an excursion to Kyoto. On the Kyoto trip, instead of having to jostle with other subway passengers, Charlotte is shot walking away from the regal stationary bullet train from which she has, presumably, uneventfully disembarked. A strange sense of calm, discernible when technology is working according to one’s needs, emanates from the shot.

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In Kyoto, she is then seen striding across the frame and participating in her surroundings, adding her prayers to the cherry blossom tree and crossing the pond on its stepping-stones, as the character begins to come into her own. The catalyst for Charlotte’s growing confidence and sense of self is, of course, the relationship she has formed with Bob. Notwithstanding the film’s investment in Bob’s psychological trajectory, Lost in Translation’s concern to narrate Charlotte’s rise from inactive despair to relative confidence constitutes a significant deviation from the male-oriented nihilism that critics claim characterises 1970s American cinema, although the motif of loneliness persists in a form that recognises the possibility of community despite the bleakness. This chance for community or emergence from the women’s room, as it were, materialises for Charlotte in Lost in Translation. That Lost in Translation is a more successful or resolved film for most audiences, compared to either The Virgin Suicides or Marie Antoinette, is precisely due to Charlotte’s relative success in locating her subjectivity in the public sphere. The pack of neighbourhood boys attempted, but failed, to reach the Lisbon girls in The Virgin Suicides, and Marie’s parties and affair proved to be unsuccessful in paving her way out of her series of luxurious rooms. Although writing about mainstream romance films such as Notting Hill (Richard Curtis, 1999) and French Kiss (Lawrence Kasan, 1995), Diane Negra discerns a narrative trend where there is a strong association between tourism and romance for the female protagonist; and where the ultimate romantic resolution involves successful coupling in a foreign country. Given that romance narratives ‘have long operated as confirmation that [the U.S] social system is working the way it should,’ such narrative developments like the expatriate romances would suggest otherwise (2006, p. 178). Negra’s observation would be applicable to Charlotte’s predicament in Lost in Translation, raising questions about the conventional privileging of the home or the homeland, although the film reaches more a more nuanced conclusion than in the genre films. As Chapter 5 on Mehta’s elements trilogy shows, metaphors of migration and mobility have been significantly transformed by the transnational context.

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The transnational nature of the way in which Lost in Translation interrogates socio-political and ideological premises revises the perspective from which an American culture could be built or re-constructed. While 1970s American cinema attempts a redefinition of the culture away from post-war ideologies that perpetuate conservative family values, normative gender roles, and looks forward to a linear history of socio-political progress, American cinema in the twenty-first century needs to consider its cultural and ideological underpinnings from outside of home ground. In other words, the shift in emphasis is from that of time to space and place, as previous chapters have made clear. For instance, if one sees Lost in Translation as mapping Charlotte’s personal journey, the film would perhaps find its 1970s equivalent in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974), a film that charts a woman’s growing independence. While Alice’s journey towards a new life of autonomy takes on a linear trajectory, Charlotte’s quest towards confidence is predicated on the implications of geographical and cultural differentiations between an absent America and the overwhelmingly alien Tokyo. The 1970s American New Wave may be seen to confront issues of racial and cultural identities via strategies of insularity and assimilation, strategies from which Lost in Translation departs. This shift of emphasis from time to place/space in the transnational construction of identity becomes evident when one attempts to open up a dialogue between Lost in Translation and, say, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). The central concern in The Godfather is the assimilation of the Corleone family’s Italian identity into a powerful American one, and the film celebrates the idea of a meltingpot America. Of course, such narratives of assimilation exist in American cinema since the 1920s, if not earlier: for instance, His People (Edward Sloman, 1925) and The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927) are both stories about assimilation and the articulation of Jewish-American identity. However, instead of looking inwards at the nation itself for ways to construct an American identity above all else, Lost in Translation considers this issue of national, cultural, and personal identity in terms of how one may deal with the rest of the world; in other words,

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in recognition of a plurality (and materialising network) of nations, cultures, and identities. In contrast to post-colonial discourses that underline the necessity of an Other in order to define the self, Lost in Translation exhibits the opposite tendency. Their encounters with the Orient are that which destabilise Bob and Charlotte’s otherwise complacent lives and arrangements, and cause a gnawing sense of loss. This sense of loss is by no means that of losing an object of desire, but a despondency of purpose and a questioning of what was assumed an original plenitude that is now exposed as a farce, in truth confirming Lost in Translation as a Deleuzean cinema of the seer. Instead of thinking of cultural and racial identities as an exercise of construction, Lost in Translation deconstructs the myth of achieving a stable identity. Coming back to The Godfather, one may pose the question of what exactly constitutes the quest of ‘keeping the family together,’ a motif that runs through all three films and that which drives the successive heads of the household. The qualities of Bob and Charlotte’s respective marriages, and the questions asked of these relationships, in Lost in Translation are instances of such a deconstructive exercise. As the characters struggle to make sense of their lives and situations in the face of what appears to be a monolithic cultural Other, there is little resource left to attempt perfect inter-cultural understanding, much less to condescend to what bewilders oneself. This exhaustion may be the cause of accusations of racism that critics like Ryan Gilbey choose to level at the film with little realisation that the Japanese stock characters reflect not so much a negative portrait of Japanese culture and its people than a confession of the inability to decipher and understand. While Charlotte and Bob managed to distract themselves partying with Japanese friends, the atmosphere is sterile, superficial, ridden with the difficulties of the language barrier, and confined to meaningless nocturnal activities in night clubs, strip joints, and gaming arcades. Even though the scene in Bob’s hotel room with the unsolicited prostitute elicits uneasy laughter, given that the joke is on her pronunciation, its message is precisely that: Bob Harris simply does not understand that he is meant to rip her stockings.

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Besides, that the farcical sequence is mostly in an establishing shot that takes in the rest of the hotel room is Coppola’s attempt to suggest at an honest picture of cultural exchange that often touches upon the political economy of sex, commerce, and material relations, but which does not lend itself to accusations of racism. Much as Scorsese and Woody Allen employ New York City, and Terrence Malick the rural American landscape, as symbolic and trademark locations in their films, Sofia Coppola uses Tokyo to convey inter-cultural alienation and the necessity of re-constructing American identity in the contemporary transnational world. Ben McCann observes the symbolic importance of the national landscape in 1970s American cinema, be it in the psychological study of Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976), the political thriller of The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), or the horror of Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) (2003, p. 83). In relation to the use of landscape in Malick’s films, McCann notes: The cinematic environmental is fundamental to the creation of the self, a notion reinforced by P. Adams Sitney in his study of landscape in the cinema: ‘as the syntax of filmic narrative congealed, genres emerged which were predicated upon dramatising the situation of individuals in distinctive landscapes’ . . . [and quoting Frank McConnell], any form of storytelling is always the story ‘of the individual in some sort of relationship to his social, political or cultural environment’. (ibid., p. 76) By setting Lost in Translation in Tokyo, Coppola achieves the paradoxical effect of intensifying the film’s emphasis on the absent American setting as a fantasy of plenitude. Further, instead of eliciting a longing for the notion of an absent home(land), this emphasis on the absent contemporary American setting provokes the opposite effect. As their forced exiles continue, the characters come to confront and question their supposedly defined life situations and identities even as they cope with their precarious purposelessness

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in Tokyo. In effect, the characters’ distance from a geographical, cultural, and personal America that frames their respective lives and marriages allow for a trenchant critique of what the characters think they have and are, further destabilising the illusion of an already fragile sense of identity and meaning. These shifts in thinking about notions of identity, meaning, home, and variations of otherness render these sited political debates limited and points to the need for more creative and productive ways of thinking about such issues. Acknowledging and implementing these discursive shifts would, for example, render the accusations of Lost in Translation as engaging in a racist discourse naïve and unappreciative of the discursive grounds that is first, inadequately comprehended by the postcolonial discourse of the twentieth century, and second, newly wrought by twenty-first century transnationalism that has shifted the premises of the very discourse. To risk harping on Gilbey’s, perhaps off-hand, remarks about Lost in Translation’s treatment of race in his review of the film, do the Japanese characters seem less like ‘kooky mascots’ in the karaoke party sequence because it is the only sequence in which they are seen engaging in activities in which the reviewer can identify? If so, such criticism aligns itself with a didactical post-colonial theory that borders on some strange version of anthropomorphism in relation to the foreign and that which struggles with the possibility of anything outside of its epistemological grasp that is not reduced to a fetish. Hovering above the didacticism of post-colonial theory and the fetishism of the Orient in films such as Sans Soleil and Tokyo-Ga, Lost in Translation employs an aesthetic of objective scrutiny that epitomises the most lauded traits of 1970s American cinema. The film achieves this sense of objective scrutiny, in no small part, by deferring to composition instead of editing. In praise of Malick’s ‘objective’ cinema, Gilbey contents in It Don’t Worry Me that ‘The primary tool of cinema has long been subjectivity, encouraging the audience to experience every rise and fall of the main characters’ emotions. So those films that eschew hysterical identification in favour of objective scrutiny are liable to be treated with suspicion’ (2003, p. 78). He then heralds the end of

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the New American Cinema and indicates that this pantheon of directorial genius be built with the names of Iranian and Chinese directors, in the process failing to recognise the transformation of American cinema wrought by politics, time, and female directorial genius (ibid., 87). As a socially and politically reflexive film, Lost in Translation scrutinises the nature of cross-cultural relations, with the accompanying rewards, and more often than not, the sense of frustration and futility in attempts to understand and be understood. This motif of miscommunication and misunderstanding extends beyond cross-cultural discourse and applies to the film’s representation of human relationships, in truth epitomising the bleak outlook of 1970s American cinema albeit with one difference: Lost in Translation exceeds the American new wave because it promotes the politics of hope that fuels life. It lays bare the frustration and pain posed by language barriers, cross-cultural interaction, unsatisfactory marriages, and brief encounters without attempting to explain, moralise, or justify. At the end of Lost in Translation, Bob and Charlotte respectively thrive on the relief and hope in the whisper to which the audience is not privy. For him, it is the relief of having expressed his affection for a young woman whose distress he has glimpsed and by whom he has ‘done the right thing’. Back in the limousine, he heaves a sigh of relief at having done right, for once, by reaching out and expressing his feelings, and having them reciprocated. For her, the consolation of connection with someone who sees and understands is that which gives hope for the thereafter, beyond the Japanese experience and her marriage. For indeed, Lost in Translation advocates holding on and continually trying to connect with another person or culture without blinkers, no matter how flawed the attempts, for there is nothing else beside. If the 1970s American cinema of loneliness that Kolker unearthed is a cinema of inertia characterised by an inability to change and the failure of action, the American cinema that Coppola’s oeuvre represents is one that strives towards its own sustainability. Such a cinema exhibits no sign of defeat in the face of a powerful ideology, but rather acknowledges the

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complexity of the landscape that it traverses. Coppola’s cinema assumes a femininity that it neither glorifies nor rejects, but wears as the necessary condition of its gendered existence as it interacts with social and political possibilities that are new and challenging.

7 On the Edges of Geopolitics: Sexual Difference in Ursula Biemann’s Video Essays

Many have observed that cinematic forms have some sort of parallel with the socio-political contexts from which they emerge. Somewhat reductively and retrospectively, Siegfried Kracauer traced German Expressionism to the rise of Nazism some years after the demise of the Weimar Republic. More recently, Gilles Deleuze makes the connection between world history and cinema in his two-volume topography of cinematic forms entitled Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1997) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989). In this influential study, Deleuze discerns a particular cinema of the movement image, characterised by the narrative stability and linearity of classical Hollywood cinema, before the outbreak of the Second World War and a subsequent cinema of the time image, where the consistency of subjectivity, spatiality, and temporality are thrown up in the air. Deleuze attributes this change in film form to the radical transformation of the ideological and political landscapes wrought by the effects of the Second World War. Taking this topography further, one then needs to consider the implication of the collapse of socialist states in Eastern Europe and the rise of the transnational globalised economy for the contemporary political landscape in which a particular political media practice emerges as definitive: the digital video essay. Nora M. Alter, arguing for the extension of Deleuze’s topography to include the relationship between post-socialist politics and the video essay, writes that such a ‘highly theoretical and self reflexive cinema has increasingly 148

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come to assume the critical function of the written film theory essay’ (2003, p. 21–2). Alter’s argument has a two-fold function: one, to displace the dominant strand of film theory that is mediated by a separate semiotic system dominant since the ‘linguistic turn’ of the 1970s; and two, to re-think a theory of film in audio-visual terms, so that ‘a theory of film should be a film’ (ibid., p. 13). Alter’s position is reinforced by the question Edward Small poses in Direct Theory, his book on experimental cinema: How can a semiotic system of images (cinematographic or videographic, likely accompanied by sounds but for the sake of this question, no pertinent written or spoke words) function as that mode of philosophical discourse we regard as theoretical? (1994, pp. 4–5) Such a question alludes back to the discursive trajectory of film studies represented by the early film theorists Siegfried Kracauer (1947) and Rudolph Arnheim (1958), who have opposing approaches to the cinema. While Kracauer considers the machine’s ability to record reality as that which defines the cinema, Arnheim privileges the medium’s inherent ability to manipulate the images it captures. Fortified by inclinations towards realism, narrative, and the generation of psychoanalytic meanings, Kracauer’s approach dominates critical discourses on film while medium specificity takes on secondary consideration. Given the explosion of digitality and new media technologies, we now need to consider the significance of cinematic materiality to sustain a political imperative in the contemporary mediascape as well as the necessity of moving from the image to the interface as a central materialist consideration of digitality. In comparative politics, the ‘third wave’ of transitions from non-democratic rule began in the late 1970s and culminated ‘in the dramatic collapse of state socialism in East Central Europe in 1989 before continuing in parts of Africa and Asia’ (Waylen 2007, p. 1). These dramatic changes in the political landscape of many Eastern European states are then inscribed

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in the lives of its people, with the transition from state enterprise to capitalist economy and the mobility afforded by, amongst other things, accession to the European Union. The implications of these vast changes in the political landscape are myriad for millions of people whose lives are irrevocably transformed and who have to deal with the new world order(s) in which they find themselves, and is a reminder of the human face caught up in, and made to manoeuvre, the complexity of these seemingly straightforward historical shifts. While Chapter 2 touches upon the ethnic conflicts produced by the break up of former socialist states in relation to Jill Craigie’s Two Hours from London and documentary aesthetics, this chapter explores the relationships between this late ‘third wave’ political transition, the interdependent transnational political economy, and the representative strategies undertaken to comprehend and represent these events in the video essays of Ursula Biemann. Based in Zurich, Biemann’s entry into the art world in the late 1980s is influenced by the critical impetus afforded by the proliferation of Cultural Studies, in particular, the postcolonial and feminist perspectives and methodologies with which to ground the purpose and function of her art practice. This methodological shift from the semiotic and linguistic concerns that characterised 1970s Critical Theory alongside the simultaneous rise of globalisation and social activism in the 1980s thus become the theoretical and historical contexts with which to think through Biemann’s video essays. Her video essays serve as critiques and interrogations of symbolic production in both form and content, constituting the clear ethical approach in her practice. While Biemann’s video essays function as the ‘highly theoretical and self reflexive cinema’ that assumes ‘the critical function of the written film theory essay’ that Alter observes above, Biemann’s video works, however, do not fit the experimental cinema to which such descriptions are often applied. Instead, Biemann’s video essays differ from experimental cinema through their overt interest in, and criticism of, material relations while much of what is termed experimental cinema concentrate on more abstract and formal concerns.

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The extension of geopolitics that comes with the relative diminishing of the state and the rise of the transnational corporation requires a renewed consideration of the methods of political analyses. Jean Grugel observes that the importance of civil society in the contemporary political context is ‘reinforced by the trend towards globalization and transnationalization which have reduced the autonomy of the state and diminished its capabilities’; civil society being defined as ‘the sphere of associations, of networks, of agency and of resistance to the state . . . [that is] conceptually distinct from the market’ (1999, p. 12). Much in the same way the realities of women’s lives depart from the concerns of the 1970s feminist movement, and therefore warrants a renewed understanding of women’s filmmaking as political practice, the shift in global politics needs new strategies of analysis, interrogation, and representation—particularly in relation to gender and economic power relations. The digital video essay, descendent of the documentary expository essay that emerged at what D. N. Rodowick (1994) describes as the crisis of political modernism, appears to serve as that with which to explore the geopolitical landscape in an age of digital convergence. In other words, the digital video essay may serve within the contemporary media ecology as that which functions as part of civil society. Biemann writes of her own practice in these ways: The essayist’s intention lies much rather in a reflection on the world and the social order, and it does so by arranging the material into a particular field of connections. In other words, the essayist’s approach is not about documenting realities but about organising complexities; (2003, p. 83) And, It speaks from a particular position that I could describe as that of a feminist, white cultural producer who is in the process of moving from a Marxist to a post-colonial, post-Fordist, post-humanist place and trying to figure out

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how to transpose old labour questions into a contemporary aesthetic and theoretical discourse in a globalized context. (ibid., 89) Such an understanding of the digital video essay establishes some resonance with the work of the earlier genre of the documentary or expository essay but also quite resolutely departs from its ethical and theoretical premises. In much the same way that the expository essay, such as Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima mon armour (1959) that parallels the personal and the political to situate the catastrophic events of the Second World War within the lives of the film’s two characters, the focus of Biemann’s video works considers the relationship of the political with the physical, mental, and socio-economic landscapes of her subjects’ lives. The characteristic subjective voice of the video essay also likens Biemann’s works, that she always narrates herself, to the earlier expository documentaries. However, her video works depart from the earlier expository works in that her ethical and theoretical premise is acutely materialist and politically feminist, and show little interest in the linguistic and traumatic discourses in which the expository essay invests. One may attribute much of this difference to the dissimilar contexts in which Biemann now inhabits and the political and moral questions asked by the earlier film essayists. Writing about the rhetorical strategies used by various activist films and videos about the international trafficking of women, Wendy Hesford notes the importance of understanding the specific contexts and reasons that mobilise these women that extend beyond the simplistic binary opposition that distinguishes between the willing prostitute and the smuggled involuntary victim. Hesford introduces the concept of kairos from classical rhetoric, ‘a multi-dimensional term that refers to a situational understanding of space and/or time and the material circumstances’ (2005, p. 148). Kairos is ‘a dynamic form of critical thinking that challenges old understandings and breaks the cycle of oppositions in order to enable new knowledge’ (ibid.). For Hesford, the need for the application of kairos in feminist materialist criticism is urgent because ‘the risks are simply too

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great for women, men, and children around the world for feminist academics and advocates to get caught up in an old debate over incommensurate theoretical views of identity and politics. Instead, we need to become more attuned to advocates’ strategic and at times uncritical mobilization of identity narratives in ways that may revictimize women and support repressive political and cultural agendas’ (ibid.). In much the same way, Biemann’s digital video essays may be seen as an art practice that departs formally from experimental video work, and as an aesthetic response to particular labour and globalisation issues on an altogether different register—that of a particular materialist feminism; and one that responds to the contemporary digitised, globalised, and capitalist context. The contemporary context from which Biemann’s video essays emerge brings to the fore the issue of the interface between artistic expression and political engagement, much in the same way that Craigie’s documentaries politicises the aesthetic as discussed in Chapter 2. This interface of aesthetics and politics is that which provides the opportunity for the realisation of Alter’s assertion that ‘the theory of film should be a film.’ In the process, Biemann’s practice effectively bridges over several divides and operates on the cusp, both formally and theoretically. Borderlands Borders occupy a privileged position in Biemann’s video works. The margins, the in-between, and the edges are that which animate and attribute meanings to these works. In Performing the Border (1999), Biemann explores the border separating First and Third Worlds, consumption and production, capital and labour, the United States and Mexico that is created by the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and deregulation. In particular, Performing the Border looks at the effects of these economic power relations on gender in a way that engages analyses on different discursive levels. The Mexican city of Juarez borders with El Paso, Texas, and is organised around maquiladoras, or factories, producing computer hardware and hi-tech goods necessary for the

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digital revolution. The settlement thus exists because of the employment these assembly-line factories that are owned by multinational corporations provide, in particular, for the predominantly female workforce favoured by these corporate employers because they are perceivably more docile. While conditions are harsh, surveillance constant, and attempts to unionise are brutally put down in these plants, Mexican women employed in these factories wield relative economic power, to the extent that what little recreation activities available—invariably involving bars and night clubs—cater to a female clientèle and disrupts the dynamics of the traditional relationship between men and women. Limited channels of recreation to assuage the daily grind of poverty and repetitive work notwithstanding, Performing the Border also shows the stark choices available to the Mexican women who emigrate to this border town out of economic desperation: factory work, domestic labour, or prostitution. The implications of such a political and economic set-up are myriad, including a spate of serial killing that brings to the surface the psychic and social effects of transnational capital for workers and communities that exist ‘below the line.’ ‘Below-the-line’ workers differ from those ‘above the line’ in their dispensability, lower status, and fewer rights enjoyed in the workplace. The female workers of interest to Performing the Border would thus be those working within the circumstances provided by the agenda behind the New International Division of Labour (NIDL): [Develop] markets for labour and sales, and the shifts from the spatial sensitivities of electrics to the spatial insensitivities of electronics, [push] businesses beyond treating Third World countries as suppliers of raw materials, to look on them as shadow-setters of the price of work, competing among themselves and with the First World for employment. (Miller et. al., 2005, p. 120) Performing the Border engages in the analysis of gendered political economy in a way that bridges the discursive divide between the Humanities and the Social Sciences, and in the

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process unearths several theoretical issues that would harness an argument for a feminist politics that underlies the medium of the digital video essay. Georgina Waylen articulates these theoretical conundrums as she considers the consequences of gendering the analysis of political economy, which I quote at length below: While the ‘postmodern’ emphasis on the end of metanarratives and on difference and the construction of identities, particularly multiple and fractured identities, is associated with a move away from a concern with structures and towards a focus on the individual, it is a profoundly different kind of individual to the one which performs as the rational actor so beloved of some parts of the social sciences. It is a ‘subject’ motivated not by the notion of rationality advocated by economists, but by a host of other concerns, needs and wishes particular to that subject and often understood using psychoanalytic approaches. (2007, p. 28) The necessity, and usefulness, of such interdisciplinary approaches, Waylen argues, remedies the respective shortcomings inherent in both Humanities and Social Science approaches. Gendering political economy provides a re-evaluation of rational choice, ‘emphasizing as it does the notion of purposeful choice, which can provide a bridge between the false dichotomy of structure and agency’ as well as helping to ‘expand a hitherto missing element of much contemporary women’s studies and gender studies’ by effectively providing a recourse to the enactment of feminist politics in, for want of a better word, ‘the Real’ (ibid., 31–2). In other words, Waylen espouses a version of kairos, or a contextual understanding of political economy from a gendered prism, although from the perspective of a social scientist who finds the wholesale empiricist assumption of the rational subject limiting; and who therefore suggests psychoanalysis as a useful supplementary framework while at the same time acknowledging the de-politicising tendencies of psychoanalysis as a methodology.

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In making the connection between the socio-economic set-up of Ciudad Juarez, the omnipresence of transnational sweatshops in the town, gender relations, and serial killing, Performing the Border exhibits the employment of such a multiplatformed analytical approach, as articulated separately by Hesford and Waylen, that the contemporary transnational political economy necessitates. Utilising Mark’s (1998) thesis about the emergence of serial killing that parallels the development of the Industrial Revolution, Biemann expands on this argument to explore the repercussions of technology, gender, and the body in the digital age in relation to this Mexican border town. While serial killing at the turn of the century may be attributed to various manifestations of the masculine crisis of subjectivity, the serial killings that occur in Ciudad Juarez take on a particular shade that transcends the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century preoccupation with psychoanalysis and the stability of subject. The existence of these sweatshops that almost exclusively hire women skew the traditional Mexican gender dynamics by granting these female workers relative economic power, even though it reaps unpleasant social and psychological consequences. As the computer manufacturer INTEL reportedly admits, ‘We hire girls because they have less energy, are more disciplined, and are easier to control’ (Miller et. al., 2005, p. 121). Performing the Border speculates that the systematic murder of young women in the town may be attributed to the alignment of the body to the post-humanistic machine in hi-tech culture, in which serial killers confuse the relationship between intimacy and technology in relation to women who perform repetitive and robotic work at the assembly lines throughout the day. Such dehumanisation of the natural body thus renders it replaceable and disposable, and casts a profoundly different light on the celebration of the cyborg, post-Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, as a feminist utopian state that circumvents the difficulties of sexual difference. Instead of elaborating on the cyberfeminist discourse, like Lynn Hershmann-Leeson’s films that are explored in the introductory chapter, Performing the Border critiques the dehumanisation of the natural body as symptomatic of male epistemological dominance that

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is displaced onto transnational labour relations. Through its analysis of the gendered political economy, Performing the Border articulates the theoretical difficulties of sexual difference and sustains a more constructive and formidable feminist politics in the contemporary media ecology that accounts for the transnational context of its aesthetic practice. Such an analysis bridges the gap between thinking about femininity in essentialist terms as sexual difference and incorporating the notion of gender identity as mitigated and constructed in relation to a specific feminist media practice, in Biemann’s words, ‘rather than simply arguing against global capitalism and affirming rigid gender identities, reflect and produce the expansion of the very space in which we write and speak of the feminine’ (2003, p. 91). Interventions in representation For Biemann, this space in which to ‘write and speak the feminine’ is clearly different from that conceived by the earlier feminist theory filmmakers whose works express their politics through the privilege of the personal and the domestic. The domestic sphere is no longer that which confines women, and labour issues extend further than the costing of housework, care, and reproduction—tasks almost exclusively performed by women. This update of a Marxist perspective, via a post-colonial and eventually a post-humanist perspective, is evident in a comparison with, say, To be a Woman, Jill Craigie’s 1952 feminist manifesto for equal pay for women that is discussed in Chapter 2. In Performing the Border, that there is a disparity between the First World women who buy underwear manufactured by Third World women living without a supply of running water and who is not rewarded for their contributions to the global economy becomes one of the video’s contending issues. Europlex (2003) meditates on the Moroccan women who daily commute between African and European time zones to labour as domestic servants in Ceuta, the Spanish enclave, as well as the smuggling activities in which women are involved at this particular border crossing according to the complexity of the global economy. While

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the 1970s women’s movement resisted women’s confinement to the private sphere, the women in today’s globalised setting has mobility thrust upon them, whether travelling to offer up the labour of their hands or bodies across various and complex borders, albeit their experience is nothing like the fantasy of the corporate sponsored first-class air travel one associates with the global economy. Such a situation is acutely depicted in, for instance, Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts (2006), a docu-drama inspired by the tragedy of the illegal Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned at Morecambe Bay in England. Casting real-life migrant workers as the cockle pickers, Ghosts follows the trajectory of the mainland Chinese woman cast as one of the cockle pickers from her village in China to her final destination in England. A map with a running bold line traces her journey through China, Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, and finally England via various modes of transport, but mostly hidden inside various poorly ventilated compartments in vehicles; a journey that took six months. At the end of the film, she is seen on board a plane that is landing in China, looking expectantly out of the window, after a decade of exploitative labour in England as an illegal worker as well as dodging and diving from the immigration authorities. While Ghosts makes it clear that the return flight is not easily or frequently achieved by many migrant workers, many of Biemann’s video works show why and examine the global economic processes that warrant the first precarious journey in the first place. Apart from the labour of her hands, women are also mobilised to work in the sex industry. In Remote Sensing (2001), Biemann considers the mobilisation of Third World women to sustain the global sex trade, whether on a voluntary or involuntary basis. Meditating on the difference between the transnational flow of abstract capital that sustains global trade and the rather more physical and embodied movement of women across borders as sex workers to service the global economy, the narrator of Remote Sensing notes how satellite images do not seem to be able to trace the routes these women take while transnational capital flows are precisely enabled by digital technology as a satellite image of

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the globe is depicted. As a digital rendering of data, satellite images lack an indexical relationship to the globe, and therefore only gains meaning at the moment of interpretation. These meanings not only exclude issues of gender and identity because they are crouched in technical terms and digital data, but also have wider symbolic implications because such technology that visually represents, and makes possible, global capitalism and movements, do not grasp the geographical relocation of women that it facilitates. Yet, Biemann’s voiceover commentary, together with the accented voices of the Third World subjects who have been mobilised in this transnational displacement of women, grounds the fantasy of digital abstraction in the material, culturally specific, and enfleshed. The symbolic elision of gender, therefore, is the contending issue in the transnational economy enabled by digital technology. That satellite images do not register these women’s routes

Figure 3 The women’s itineraries, from Remote Sensing (Ursula Biemann, 2001)

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across international borders to perform sexual labour taps into a related conversation about the ‘digital divide’ between haves and have-nots: the assumption of ‘the digital age’ would seem to be rather far fetched for those who do have access to the privileges it accords. While digital technologies cannot register the mobilisation of these trafficked women across borders, it functions seamlessly to enable the generation of what Remote Sensing’s narrator observes as ‘abstract footloose capital’ that fuels the flesh trade that is ‘nonetheless so physical for some.’ Remote Sensing shows how being on the wrong side of the ‘digital divide,’ being confined to the material and embodied, has some significant materialist implications for some. As Remote Sensing articulates, being on the wrong side of the digital divide extends further than demographic discussions of Internet access and use. Being on the wrong side of the digital divide involves being subject to the complex ways in which the processes of international political economy deprive certain people of symbolic privileges that translate into very real consequences. Remote Sensing then proceeds to explore the gendered political economy that necessitates these mobilisations of women for the sex industry and attributes gendered meanings to the apparently clean, digitised, and seamless flow of abstract capital. Aesthetically, Remote Sensing validates these women’s trajectories by representing their journeys with digital travel schedules that gives a glimpse to the length and complexity of their journeys, accompanied by negative images of women’s passport photographs that are superimposed on the video’s images, and serve as an introduction to each of the sex worker or advocate interviewed. As an indictment of the effective selling of Third World women, Remote Sensing examines the consequences of overlapping sexual desires, economic necessities, and migratory patterns. While the sex tourist industry is predominantly fuelled by the hard currency and patronage of Western men, women are also trafficked into the marriage market for labour. This is evident in the account of a Vietnamese woman who was involuntary trafficked into China and coerced to marry a farmer who also needs a farm hand. The value of Thai women in the sex industry may be measured against the relative worth

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of the Laotian or Cambodian women who are newer entrants to the business, and from more desperate economic situations. The effect of such commodification of women’s bodies is perhaps most revealing in Biemann’s conversation with a particular prostitute. When asked if she has a boyfriend, she could not distinguish the difference between ‘customer’ and ‘boyfriend.’ When pushed further and asked if she would have sex with a boyfriend for no financial recompense, she expresses confusion at the question and asked, ‘why?’ Her confusion is significant, for it shows the way in which sex work that appends to the tourist industry differs from the more straightforward notion of paying-for-sex. Within the context of Southeast Asian sex tourism that that particular prostitute inhabits, her personal life and emotions are also embroiled in the work she does and the customer effectively infiltrates her private life, to the extent that she will not exercise her sexuality outside of the commodified sex trade via a series of cultural and political-economic factors. The transition from the age of production to an era of information also affects the expression of sexuality and desire, as Writing Desire (2000) shows. The advent of the Internet allows for the further proliferation of sexual desires and fantasies across national and cultural geographies. Replicating the highspeed connectivity of the digital world, desire takes on a virtual form and is transmitted as words and images, displacing the physical when great distances are involved. In addition, the infiltration of the information age into every aspect of our lives transforms the discussion of sexual expression, autonomy, and reproductive rights to that of political and economic necessities dependent on the dynamics of comparative political economy. The phenomenon of women in Asia and Eastern Europe advertising themselves as marriage partners for western men, as is the men’s pursuit of sex and the fantasy of romance when they go east as sex tourists, is symptomatic of the interface between the dynamics of cultural changes, political economy, and an investment in sexual difference. While the women are motivated by economic necessity, the men are prompted by fantasies of an idealised notion of subordinate femininity that is implicitly underscored by dependence.

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As Writing Desire shows, the Internet offers up opportunities for the playing out of sexual politics in the explicit terms of exploitation, fetishism, and sometimes, the blossoming of love against the odds. Writing Desire begins with an explicit acknowledgement of the digital interface. An image of a beach lined with palm trees, reminiscent of the screensaver image that adorn many personal computers, appear accompanied by a cheery soundtrack and the initial electronic gurgling noises that dial-up connections make. Imposed on this image is an interface on which a list of countries appears. A cursor is shown to click on a particular country on the list, and photographs of women appear on the screen. Shortly thereafter into the video, a female voice-over describes a middle-aged woman’s experience with Internet dating, alongside still photographs of her, her new husband, and their reconstituted family. A widowed Mexican feminist and scholar; she recounts how she overcomes intellectual guilt and various prejudices to begin a courtship with an American military man that resulted in a contented late marriage. After this initial account, the film then goes on to explore the various expressions, and exploitation, of female desire that the Internet facilitates via the three other women featured in Writing Desire. The voice of the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti persist throughout Writing Desire, while Yvonne Volkart, an artist and curator based in Zurich, and Socorro Ballesteros of an immigration organisation based in the Philippines are interviewed on the video. These various women’s perspectives, across different registers, are that which set up the space for Writing Desire’s discourse. Braidotti’s voice-over provides a running commentary on the playing out of female desires in the virtual environment. Braidotti addresses the question of whether the Internet facilitates female desire, and the implications of the loss of embodiment as the consequence of inhabiting the virtual. The virtual expression and transmission of female desire, according to Braidotti, may become imbued with melancholia and longing exaggerated by the processes of women’s fantasies well before the woman obtains the object of her desire. This conversation about the symbolic processes of the interface

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Figure 4 Working girl and sex tourist, from Remote Sensing (Ursula Biemann, 2001)

Figure 5 Desirable national traits, from Writing Desire (Ursula Biemann, 2000)

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between female desire and the virtual then gets more concrete application as Volkart discusses the love story, with oneself as the central heroine, that plays in one’s head when sexually charged emails are exchanged while she sits on a bed in a dimly lit room. Screens of fingers typing on a computer keyboard would be superimposed on aerial views of cities at night, emphasising the forlorn time-space in which these virtual liaisons take place. The inscription of female desire in virtual correspondence, it seems, may be similar to the endless deferral and repression of female desire in, for instance, nineteenth-century women’s writing. While the body disappears for relatively privileged First World women as they embrace the virtual and somehow take on the personae of nineteenth-century romance heroines, albeit in very different circumstances, the use of the Internet by women from Third World and post-socialist countries conversely accentuates their physical existence and embodiment. Biemann comments on the phenomenon of the mail order bride as screens in the guise of Internet windows appear. To illustrate the correspondence via the Internet between virtual lovers, her comments appear in words across the screen, perhaps like a floating television news ticker. Some of the screens containing snippets of Eastern European women’s advertisements for western husbands are layered on top of images of tracking shots across an airport runway at night taken from on board a plane, foreseeing the international travel that will invariably follow the success of any of these virtual encounters. Photographs of numerous women, attached with details of their vital statistics and their preferred means of contact, are also features in Writing Desire. As images of these women on offer run, Biemann remarks on the characteristics of the mailorder bride via her ticker, which the interview with Ballesteros, of the Manila based immigration organisation, confirms as the latter discusses the intersection between romance and commerce of this phenomenon in the Philippines: She is beautiful and feminine; She is loving and traditional; She is humble and devoted.

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She likes to listen to mellow music. The smile is her rhetorical gesture. She believes in a lasting marriage, and a happy home. She is the copy of the First World’s past. Given the vast scope of her digital video essays, this ‘space’ that Biemann constructs to speak and write the feminine is not contained, demarcated, or ghettoised. It is not the room of one’s own that Virginia Woolf advocated earlier in the twentieth century, reserved for the expression of women’s validation and creativity, simply because there is not the luxury for most of these migratory poverty stricken women from non-Western or post-Socialists states who form many of Biemann’s subjects. Nor is this feminine space similar to that Longinotto deciphers in a relatively economically privileged Japan, explored in Chapter 3, where housewives are left to their own fantasies and devices as long as they do not challenge the patriarchal status quo. Instead, this space that Biemann carves out in her media practice may be better described, following Deleuze, as the rhizome that perpetuates and sustains a feminist ethics in the contemporary media ecology that provides a feminist analysis and critique of the world in which we live. The performance of such a stance is not simple, though, and warrants considerations such as those articulated by Teresa De Lauretis when she thinks about the strategies with which to construct the female social subject in the cinema (as discussed in Chapter 1 in relation to Liv Ullmann’s Faithless), with the exception that Biemann’s digital video essays elicit further theoretical and ethical discussions. Boundary events These video essays’ interest in geographical borders notwithstanding, Biemann’s works also exhibit a tendency to exist on the margins of art practices, institutions, formats, and genres. As works that circulate in the realm of independent media and art galleries, the overt political analysis that these works communicate make them somewhat at odds with the form they take. Even as they often share the same platform

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as cyberfeminist art works such as Kristin Lucas’ Host and Jennifer Reeder’s White Trash Girl, Biemann’s emphases on communication technologies and the large scale displacement of women make her works different from the cyberfeminist interest in the appropriation of technology from a gendered perspective. Biemann’s digital videos are ‘boundary events’ like Trinh T. Minh-ha’s, the feminist filmmaker and theorist. About her own film practice, Trinh T. Minh-ha observes that rather than endorsing categories ‘by which the film world largely abides, [she] produce[s] films that [she] consider[s] to be first and foremost “boundary events” [through which] one can view them as different ways of working with the freedom in experiencing the self and the world’ (2005, p. 28). In similar ways, while their subject matter would give Biemann’s various pieces a clear alignment with the documentary or activist film, they are at the same time formally experimental and often adopt video game, Internet, and other forms of new media aesthetics, some of which are discussed above. Such a conflation of form represents an argument for the inconveniently fleshy and cumbersome, and reminds us that although corporate interests in the digital age prefer to forget the needs and demands of the physical and the visceral in favour of the sterile, virtual, and digitised flow of transnational capital, the global economy cannot exist without the services of those who provide for baser human needs. The rhetorical strategy that these digital video essays employ reflect Biemann’s discussion of her practice: Even if video as a medium promises to be of great use for activist work, I don’t see its main purpose so much in catalysing direct social change, nor would I reduce it to mere contribution to an ongoing discourse. I see its primary potential in mediation between the two, as an effective intervention in the performative act of representation. (2003, p. 91) Therefore, Biemann’s video essays may be said to reside in the space between activism and exposition, where the ethics and rhetoric of representational strategies are simultaneously

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demonstrated and interrogated. De Lauretis describes the construction of the female cinematic subject as that involving ‘the disjunction of image and voice, the reworking of narrative space, the elaboration of strategies of address that alters the forms and balances of traditional representation’ (1987, p. 145). The points of fissures and disjunction in Biemann’s video essays, though, elaborate on, and differ from, the agenda of earlier women’s cinema. The manifestation of these concerns are clear in Black Sea Files (2005), a 43-minute video that documents the building of an enormous oil pipeline to pump oil from the Caspian sea to the West. The scale of this pipeline runs through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey, in the process passing through various cultures, livelihoods, and histories that Biemann visits and films. While the political, strategic, and corporate significance of the construction of such a pipeline would dominate discussion, Black Sea Files concentrates instead on the various groups of people whose lives are dependent on, or affected by, this project to secure oil resources for the west: workers on the oil fields, farmers who have to sell off the parts of their land the pipeline traverses, refugees evicted from their camps, fishermen who witness the devastation of fish stock by the effects of oil production, families whose health are affected by oil excavation, the prostitutes and pimps who ply their wares along the pipeline, and even the Istanbul textile sweatshop destroyed by the nearby al-Qaida bombing. Paying attention to these subjects, Black Sea Files is a reminder that the resource that fuels the fast paced, sterile, and transnational digital age is messy, localised, polluting, and leaves behind indelible marks; a complex argument organised by tracing these disparate subjects as nodes on the map of transnational capital and strategic considerations. The spatialisation of these transnational relations have also been discussed in Chapter 5 in relation to Mehta’s film-making practice. Exploring what the voice-over describes as ‘the secondary scene of international affairs,’ Black Sea Files also considers at length the aesthetic strategies Biemann employs in documenting these events, lives, and stories. While interviewing a prostitute about her work and circumstances in the

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presence of her co-worker and pimps through a cacophony of voices and languages, Biemann mentions off-camera the importance of having these women’s stories. In particular, the segment depicting the unrest following the Turkish attempt to evict its Kurdish refugees from the land where they recycle garbage in Ankara, the voice-over considers the ethics of representation: What does it mean to take the camera to go to the field; to go to the trenches? How does it get to the point where she stands at the front next to the journalists, at the very moment of the incident without press pass or gas mask? What kind of artistic practice is this kind of real footage document? That of an embedded artist emerged in search of human confusion and confrontation? How to resist making an image that will capture the whole drama in one frame? How to resist freezing the moment into a symbol? Is an image made in dangerous conditions more valuable than material found in libraries and archives? Is better knowledge that produced at great risk? Setting up the context of the film-maker as a female subject who finds herself on the field, but with neither press credentials nor protective gear, the voice-over in Black Sea Files contemplates the intersection of artistic expression with documentary ethics. The idea of an ‘embedded artist’ adds a new dimension to the notion of journalism and reportage, suggesting the ethical issues around representation, perspective, and the eventual media decontextualisation of events that took place at a distance. The ethics of recording, documenting, and reporting are raised in terms of the value of different types of images: if images gleaned from the trenches are more valuable than archival footage, that would raise the question of whether knowledge or currency has priority in our consumption of current affairs. Does the mediation involved in the reporting of violence and unrest render these events mere electronic white noise that emanates from the television sets? These questions that Biemann poses may be further explored via Michael Takeo Magruder’s digital art works take on issues

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similar to that Biemann tackles. For instance, {transcription} (http://www.takeo.org/nspace/ns017/ns017.htm, date accessed 9 January 2009) is a digital project that attempts the creative transcription of 24-hour news coverage, in the process raising questions about the mediation and remediation of real events in our consumption of current affairs. Processed in real time, {transcription} samples live BBC news coverage, effectively severing the relationship between news broadcast and the events that are being reported. Familiar images taken from BBC news footage slowly and arbitrarily appear on screen, layered on by a digital skin that obscures the clarity of the image. These images are accompanied initially by the sound of scratching, and then one hears the news being read. Scratching and voices are then layered on with more voices of different newsreaders, which are then continuously repeated and layered. The disjuncture between image, voice, and sound that {transcription} effects produces an uncanny experience for the user, oscillating between familiarity and strangeness; an effect achieved by the use of algorithm to disrupt the linearity and veracity of news broadcasts. Rendering the meanings generated by the news broadcast confused and multiple, {transcription} becomes a stream of consciousness experience, although not an unfamiliar one. In fact, this stream of consciousness effect replicates the all too familiar experience of consuming round the clock news broadcast, where the supposed acquisition of information and knowledge through news broadcast instead becomes a form of simulation, alerting us to the often-unquestioning way in which we consume the news. In {transcription}, constant ‘artefacts’ (scratching sounds added to behave like ‘video noise’, like images added to replicate film grain) and the imposition of a ‘digital skin’ (another visual layer on top of the remediated news footage) accentuate the mediation of the news. Causing a radical disjuncture between sound and image, the processes of remediation that these scratching electronic noises and digital skins emphasise alert us to the constant deluge of round-the-clock news coverage, and the perpetual sense of panic and paranoia that the news ultimately engenders.

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Symbols are significant, yet inevitable, results of the processes of representation, but in the example Black Sea Files provides, the images that signify the construction of an oil pipeline provide no real comprehension of the localised and physical impact of such a project. Media reportage of politicians and oil executives signing agreements do not quite explain the political, social, and economic implications of such a project for the affected people who are, simply, not represented—in every sense of the word. As this chapter has shown, much of the purpose of Biemann’s video essays is to translate between the different registers of the symbolic and the material. The space that Biemann carves out to speak and write the feminine, then, works as a certain feminist ethical premise that foregrounds the significance and implication of sexual difference. Sexual difference within the context of geopolitics and the real world order, as Biemann’s video essays show, often translates into an alignment of the feminine with the body—a body that is worked and exploited according to the terms of its sexual differentiation as theoretically comprehended. An aesthetic practice sustained by feminist ethics, however, does not stop at the point of delineating oppression to women. Instead, it employs the arguments and conclusions that it has gleaned towards the perpetuation of a civil discourse in the digital media ecology in which it finds itself situated, the premises of which it constantly appropriates and interrogates. In many ways, a feminist ethical position would take on the modus operandi that Biemann describes in the voice-over about her excavation of knowledge in Black Sea Files: To generate images of oil infrastructure is not an aesthetic project. It is an undercover mission. The challenge is to go undetected, probing for hidden secret and restricted knowledge. Are these cognitive methods any different from that used by geologists, anthropologists or secret intelligence agents? They all probe sediments. . . that give meaning to the space. What is the sediment I should be probing in my artistic field work? What role do I play in this plot?

Conclusion Vignettes of a New Feminist Politique: Gisela Sanders Alcántara, Guo Xiaolu, Christina McPhee, Liz Miller

‘A new politique ought, by its nature, to generate new texts by which its points are proved and its development sustained.’ (B. Ruby Rich, 1998, p. 292) By discussing and analysing the film practices of the women film-makers in the preceding chapters, Women on the Edge sought to situate these sets of films within critical and theoretical contexts that would allow for their reception, and perpetuation, as works that enable and sustain a feminist imperative in the contemporary globalised film and media culture. Instead of delineating a separate female, feminine, or feminist media ecology as was espoused in the heady days of the feminist film movement, a contemporary women’s cinema might be seen as the active and interventionist ‘third term’ that Deleuze employs to show up the imprecision of thought resulting from the formulation of binary opposition (1991, p. 44). Speaking about his work on the philosopher Henri Bergson, Deleuze described Bergsonism, originally published in 1966, in such a way, as the English translators of the book report in their introduction: I imagine myself getting onto the back of an author, and giving him a child, which would be his and which would at the same time be a monster. It is very important that it should be his child, because the author actually had 171

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to say everything that I made him say. But it also has to be a monster because it was necessary to go through all kinds of decenterings, slips, break ins, secret emissions, which I really enjoyed. My book on Bergson seems to me a classic case of this. (1991, p. 8) This notion of intervention, of creating the transgressive and monstrous through critical engagement appeals to the sensibility that propels Women on the Edge. By critically engaging with the works of the women film-makers discussed in this book, the aim is to arrive at a variety of critical strategies and approaches with which to consider the ways and places in which these works would make a difference or insert into a particular discourse a feminist perspective or intervention in order to sustain a political imperative in film and media culture. Ursula Biemann’s voice-over comments about her role as a feminist video maker investigating oil infrastructure in Black Sea Files, with which the previous chapter concludes, also applies to the work of this project: to probe ‘for hidden secret and restricted knowledge . . . that give meaning to the space.’ Biemann’s notion of ‘giving meaning to a space’ is an important aspect of Women on the Edge’s project, specifically, the construction of a feminist ethics that may be sustained in any discourse within the contemporary media ecology. Instead of languishing in the irrelevance of a theory and politics that once seemed enabling, the feminist critic Ruby Rich stresses the importance of a new feminist politics for film and media culture that is sustained by the generation of new texts and ideas in the quotation that opens this concluding chapter to Women on the Edge. Even though Women on the Edge concentrates, in the preceding pages, on discussions of women film-makers who each already possess a substantial body of work, this conclusion builds on those discussions and continues its critical engagement with the works of emerging film and media makers that perpetuate a feminist political imperative in the media ecology. In particular, the works that are discussed here are of interest because, firstly, they expand upon the discussion of the confluence of the personal and

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the political in documentary film-making; and secondly, they provoke reflections on the proliferation of feminist ethics and politics in new forms of film and media practices that radically transforms notions of film form, documentary, and political media practices. This new feminist politics, sustained via the continual generation of new texts that perpetuates a feminist ethics in film culture may be seen to be theoretically dependent upon Deleuze’s commentaries on Bergson in the first of his two cinema books, as Deleuze sees the cinema as a privileged medium for the materialisation of his greater philosophical project. In his second commentary on Bergson, Deleuze elaborates on the ways in which cinema functions as a plane of immanence that consists of moving images. Instead of mimicking or representing reality, as is the conventional understanding of the purpose of art, cinema should encompass or create a new reality in its medium of movement and light. Deleuze writes that ‘with the cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world’ (1997, p. 57). His interest lies in the operation of the film projector and the reel of film that, together, conjure up new realities in light instead of replicating symbolic representations of reality. The purpose of this book, as it were, thus constitutes a series of attempts to tease out, and contemplate, current feminist realities in film culture. In the third commentary on Bergson, Deleuze goes further in describing this cinematic plane of immanence in terms of the qualitative changes that take place when as a lump of sugar dissolves in a glass of water: [The] movement of translation which detaches the sugar particles and suspends them in the water itself expresses a change in the whole, that is, in the content of the glass; a qualitative transition from water which contains a sugar lump to a state of sugared water. (ibid., p. 9) Such a comparison attempts a conception of the cinema as an entity in movement that occurs when the film is projected at a certain number of frames per second. Deleuze’s new

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reality thus materialises through the functioning of the cinematic apparatus, which he calls the Open “because its nature is to change constantly, or to give rise to something new, in short, to endure” (ibid.). This notion of the Open predicated on movement and change relieves film theory from the notion that cinema may be explained by way of a discourse incongruous to the cinema, such as psychoanalytic film theory. Instead, such a conceptualisation of cinema as a continual and immanent process of transformations presents the distinct possibility that an active, viable, and sustainable feminist politics may impinge its ethics and influences upon film and media culture. The personal is political reconfigured Understanding transnational mobilisation of people via the metaphor of network culture helps us to think through issues of migration and identity politics not only in terms of East, West, and hybridisation but also in the more pluralistic terms of negotiating within a network of differing national and cultural interests. The preceding chapters explored films such as Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) and Deepa Mehta’s Earth (2000) as instances of mainstream media works that metaphorically assume an understanding of identity politics as that in digital culture. Many of the works that are discussed in this book also radically configure the concept of home. No longer seen as the place of origination, plenitude, nostalgia, and desired return, the transformation of the notion of what and where the home is also reconfigures identity politics. Independent film-makers such as Gisela Sanders Alcántara and Guo Xiaolu explore in their works the different transnational structuration of identities, in the process rethinking the premises and relevance of post-colonial theory towards the formulation of a transnational sensibility. In Sanders Alcántara’s documented road movie, Yo Soy Alcántara (2004), that investigates the history and present whereabouts of her extended family, she reflects on the different forms that families may take. Making her reluctant brother, Edgar, come along on a road trip to trace her family’s

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Figure 6 Publicity poster for Yo Soy Alcántara (Gisela Sanders Alcántara, 2004)

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history in the Mexican countryside, Sanders Alcántara meets up with various aunts, uncles, and cousins who recount the extended family’s move from the countryside to Mexico City after an arson attack on their land in the 1930s. The family’s continual evolution in the city includes Sanders Alcántara’s own mother’s decision to have not one, but two, children out of wedlock within a disapproving patriarchal culture. Recounting her experience of being raised in a household without a father, and of growing up with the feeling of being marked out as different, Sanders Alcántara also comes to deal with the quarrel over inheritance that had acrimoniously split the family. While she goes about driving long distances to bring the various factions of the family together for a reunion, citing her nostalgia for the large family celebrations she remembers as a child, Edgar passes snide comments to both comic and ironic effects, whether in voice-overs, conversations with his sister, or in direct addresses to the camera. While she tries to interest him into discussing the family as they begin their road trip, he replies that he thinks the topic of family is a drag. When she manages to get most of the family together for a reunion party, he comments, in a voice-over, that his sister’s idea of getting the family together comes straight out of romantic Hollywood ideas of large happy Latino families, such as that in the film Like Water for Chocolate (Alfonso Arau, 1994), where families come together to cook and eat. Yet, Edgar’s comments are juxtaposed with images of the shopping for food, slaughtering of birds, and preparation of the feast as the extended family comes to gather for the first time in 15 years. Later, he addresses the camera and reports that together with some cousins, they were complaining that they did not know who half the people at the party were. In other words, while Sanders Alcántara goes about a documentary project that traces family history in the hope of bring everyone together again to perhaps construct the fantasy of the eternal and happy family, she finds that even though her mother, brother, and other family members participate in this endeavour, her idea of familial plenitude is discovered to be precisely the fantasy that it is. Yet, the film is suffused with warmth and humanity, as if to say it is this straddling of the fantasy image

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of the transcendental and eternal family with that of real and immanent dynamics of human relations is that which defines one’s identity and sense of belonging. Towards the end of the 30-minute documentary, even though she is pleased about the reunion she has engineered, Sanders Alcántara wonders if there might be a repeat of such gatherings for her family and also immediately begins feeling a fresh wave of loss. Her mother, being interviewed after the feast, come down on the side of pragmatism and advises that families are more about bonds and relationships, and not necessarily about blood ties. Perhaps family feuds and historic resentments are not easily resolved over a festive meal, and the conception of home needs to take into account the contingency that also characterises the dynamics of human relationships that continually transforms its construction. Much as Yo Soy Alcántara works through eternal notions of home, family, and belonging and acknowledges the immanence that characterises identity formation and human relationships, Guo Xiaolu’s films also seeks to situate the personal within the political. An emerging Chinese novelist and filmmaker, Guo infuses her films and literary works with her own experiences, emotions, and reflections to the extent that one might ask the question if there is a place where the personal and political does not commensurate. Her debut novel in English, An English-Chinese Dictionary of Love (2007) records in a series of diary entries the experiences of a Chinese girl who arrives in London as a language student. She meets, and quickly moves in with, an Englishman. As her language abilities improve, demonstrated through the progressively more fluent diary entries that make up the novel, she also experiences much cultural misunderstandings and heartache. While not necessarily autobiographical, the personal voice and intimate tone that is much in evidence in An English-Chinese Dictionary of Love are also emphasised in Guo’s films. The ten-minute short film Address Unknown (2007) comprises five static long shots, or ‘postcards,’ of scenes in China as an Chinese accented female voice-over reads out the contents of postcards that she sends to a lover who is far away in London. The five static shots that are dated in both English

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and Chinese, of people working in the kitchen at the back of a restaurant at night, a group of bare-chested men playing cards under some tents in what looks like an outdoor market, a girl tending to a butcher’s stall at a market, a street scene at a decrepit market square where bicycles are parked and where people hang out and chat, and of another view from the back of a quiet alleyway on a rainy night, are by no means images that would make it onto picture postcards that tourists send home. Instead of being idealised shots of a foreign land as on picture postcards, these five vignettes serve as commentaries on contemporary China as the forlorn voice-over monologue speaks of her surroundings, feelings, and pleads for a response from her lover. The bilingual dates on each image are also curious, as if they function more as rhetorical devices gesturing to the film’s transnational sensibility than to facilitate the understanding of a non-English speaking audience, especially given the evident lack of corresponding Chinese subtitles for the voice-over monologue. They seem to extend beyond the post-colonial subject’s conventional trajectory to the West and posits the real, albeit complicated, possibility of the return home even though there is no guarantee that the home of originary plenitude would still be there waiting. ‘She’ addresses her lover in the second person, as ‘you,’ and begins with a monologue about the jet lag she is suffering (having recently returned home from London), the changes in the environment, how the surroundings around her house has become a construction site as a highway is being built, reminisces about her dislike of British food and salads, and wonders if she will eat her first meal at the restaurant on which the camera trains its gaze. As the film progresses and the static images change on the screen, ‘She’ comments on the rising temperatures in Beijing being made worse by the building works in preparation of the 2008 Olympic Games, the rise of venture capitalism as ‘the new way to make money’ in China, and how the city resembles ‘a 40 year old who has started taking cocaine.’ ‘She’ wonders about how her lover is doing in London, given that he is not returning her phone calls and her first postcards have been returned to sender; reflects on

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how the elderly are probably happier with their extended families in China than living alone in the West, and suggests that her lover should move to China instead. Towards the end of the film, she talks about the Chinese’s curious questions about wealthy Westerners and their alleged sexual proclivities. ‘She’ also mentions that she has tried looking for her lover by telephoning his friends to no avail and is frustrated that people are not straight forward in the West. The monologue finishes with her stating that she has cancelled her return flight back to England, even though she thinks about the country and her lover a lot. Address Unknown traverses into similar territory as Biemann’s Writing Desire, in that female desire is seen to be expressed via the act of writing or inscription as in, for instance, nineteenth century women’s writings. Moreover, the melancholia that Braidotti’s voice-over in Writing Desire discerns is also implicit in Guo’s Address Unknown and begs the same question about women’s fantasies and the way in which one may long for, and preliminarily mourn the loss of, the object of one’s desire even before the love object is within reach. Yet, Guo’s film departs from the endless deferrals, repressions, and depoliticisation of female desire, as she juxtaposes the personal with the political and makes use of the alienation and loneliness that may characterise particular transnational trajectories to comment about the state of the world and the specificity of her place within a wider socio-political and sexual economy. Much like the characters of Coppola’s Lost in Translation discussed in Chapter 6, the narrator of Address Unknown straddles geographical dislocation and personal upheavals towards figuring out one’s place in the transnational world. Such acts of straddling the personal and the political is similar to Potter’s film-making practice, where the autobiographical aspects of her work and the formation of her identity (as a woman, a feminist, a dancer, and a film-maker) conditions her aesthetic, political, and intellectual responses to the world. A film about her parents’ visit to Europe, We Went to Wonderland (2008) is a travelogue of that trip as Guo records her parents’ experience in England, France, and Italy. The very different portraits painted of these two elderly Chinese people are the channels

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through which commentaries about China and Europe are made. While Guo’s father expresses intellectual curiosity in all that he observes, Guo’s mother processes her experiences of the foreign and exotic by familiarising them in her pragmatic and plebian fashion. Of course, behind the camera is the presence of their daughter (and whose voice we hear), the director and author who traverses between East and West, whose life trajectory cannot be more different to that of her parents’. That Guo’s father lost his ability to speak through a battle with throat cancer and can only communicate by scribbling on pieces of paper gives the film a particular brand of shootfrom-the-hip commentary. His scribbled thoughts, whether captured by the camera or highlighted as intertitles, serve as his responses to the transnational world as he experiences it, culminating in his conclusion that China has too hastily attempted to erase its history after visits to historic European cities. While Guo’s father is keen to explore and observe the world, all the while expressing his thoughts on having cancer and his enforced vocation as a rice farmer in labour camp during the Cultural Revolution, Guo’s mother just wants to go back home to her comforts and the familiar even thought she has enjoyed her European excursion. The difference of her parents’ personalities, experiences, and responses to the world is that which provides the film with its complex layering of the personal and political, acknowledging that family relations, personal histories as the result of political exigencies, and responses to the world are immanent and inextricably interwoven. This interface of the personal and the political that ceases to be confined within the domestic but that which is acknowledged as a resolute part of public discourse is that which ensures that a feminist ethics is perpetuated and sustained. Distinct from the relatively smaller and more personal scale of Yo Soy Alcántara, Address Unknown, and We Went to Wonderland, Guo’s The Concrete Revolution (2004) is drawn on a larger canvas but yet continues to employ a personal and reflective voice as she documents the rapid development of Beijing and the impact of such developments on the migrant workers who toil in the city. An hour-long documentary about Beijing’s urban

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development in view of the 2008 Olympics, The Concrete Revolution is also in part Guo’s meditation on modern China and her personal trajectory within that history. Subtitled Notes on the New China Approaching the Year of the Monkey, the narration begins with an anecdote about an old man who steps out of his house one morning to get a newspaper. Walking slowly, he finds that the news vendor is no longer in business when he reaches his destination. Turning back to retrace his steps home, he becomes lost as he finds the landscape transformed. Entirely narrated by the director herself, The Concrete Revolution works by the clever juxtaposition of the voice-over narration and the images of the Chinese revolution in order to elicit a commentary that is both political and personal. In particular, the film locates the personal within the political by tracing and seeking out the personal stories behind the larger narrative of China’s rise in the modern world and situating the director’s own trajectory within that national narrative. The anecdote of an old man lost in China’s rapid development sets the tone for a film that seeks to distinguish between the mythology of a vast nation’s rise to power and the realities faced by the migrant workers whose labour feeds that very myth from which they are excluded. The film begins and ends at a vast train station, the point where masses of migrant workers both arrive at and leave after having transformed the physical landscape of the capital city. Images of rising skyscrapers, aspirational advertising for modern property developments, the launch of the first Chinese-made rocket, preparations for the Olympic Games, and modern young Chinese people embracing consumerist culture collude to perpetuate the national myth that such progress represents the future of the supposedly socialist state, and that indeed, the twenty-first century is Chinese. Yet, in The Concrete Revolution, Guo seeks to explore the material and political realities behind those myths by taking her camera out into the city and engaging as many migrant workers as she could find willing to speak to her. Right after the opening titles, there is an unexplained image of a crane demolishing an old traditional Chinese house with the backdrop of modern high rise residential towers which begs the question of whether

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it signifies progress or the wilful demolition of history and culture. Staking out at various construction sites, Guo interviews construction workers about where they have come from and their feelings about working in the city while at the same time dodging the censorious foremen in colour-coded hard hats who would intimidate the workers. Images of these workers sleeping in crowded tents, eating simply, and working on the construction sites confirm their exclusion from the aspirations of the collective Chinese nation. Guo acknowledges such a huge social divide, explaining the difference between herself and a young worker she has just interviewed: the fact that she is a university graduate accords her a different political status in China compared to these peasants who are only allowed to stay in the city for the sole purpose of work. Even though The Concrete Revolution finally focuses on a handsome young man named Zhang Xiaomei who has been employed to arrange for the demolition of traditional hutong houses and a middle-aged construction worker, Mr Yan, who longs to return to his family in the country for the Spring festival, the film meanders into Guo’s personal trajectory within Beijing’s recent history and industrial development. She recounts the various types of accommodation she has been in since moving to Beijing more than a decade ago, from the initial guest house, to the twenty-storey tower block with the vindictive neighbour, then to a traditional hutong that had a convivial atmosphere, and finally, the modern one-bedroom unit that she has purchased off-plan from a property developer and into which she will soon move. However, identifying herself as part of the China that is aspirational and progressive does not necessarily erase Guo’s interest in tracing the alternative Chinese trajectory. Following Xiaomei, the film paints a portrait of an ambitious young man who is at a loss and sits all night at an Internet café watching martial arts films. He acknowledges moral ambiguity at the job he is doing, arranging the demolition of people’s traditional homes, and is being pursued by a woman who is seeking further compensation for the demolition of her house. The film’s empathy extends also to Mr Yan, who like the rest of the workers, would regurgitate the standard state

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line about the necessity of personal sacrifices for the sake of Chinese industrialisation and progress, but upon further questioning, breaks down in tears and reveals his despair at not being able to remit money for seeds and fertilizers at the family farm because he has not been paid his wages for the past three months. When Xiaomei decides to leave Beijing for the Spring festival, an occasion for the largest annual migration in the world as the entire Chinese population proceed to return to their ancestral villages for the celebrations, Guo films him at the train station. However, a desolate Mr Yan is left behind to work through the lunar new year because his wages are being withheld until the project is completed. Xiaomei has not decided on his destination. He could either go back home to the north or take on a friend’s invitation to travel to work in the industrialised south. Guo reflects in her voice-over that such journeys are not about mere distances, but are also travels in time as images of peasants in the interior of a crowded bus fill the screen. When one returns to one’s ancestral village, it might be a journey of thousands of miles but it is also a trip decades back in time. Should Xiaomei go south, he goes towards the future both in terms of his personal trajectory as well as his participation in transnational capitalism. As if to prove the point that distances also equals time travel, the film documents Guo’s return to her ancestral village, a sleepy, rural fishing village that appears to exist in the 1950s, right at the end of the film. The use of a grainy film stock in this part of the film aids in affecting the notion of having travelled in time and space. The present, it seems, is the place of limbo in China, as Mr Yan is held hostage to the aspirations of a nation’s prosperity that explicitly excludes him. Yet, Mr Yan is the only character in The Concrete Revolution for whom home is the symbolic representation of originary plenitude. As a bit player and potential collateral damage on the transnational stage, Mr Yan is excluded from the privileges accorded by the globalised new world order. For the rest of the players in transnational capitalism and culture, however, the conventional conceptualisations of home and family are radically configured and become contingent to political and

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economic exigencies as Sanders Alcántara and Guo discover in their respective film-making practices. Interdependent media The films discussed above reconfigure the scope and definition of the personal and the political for film practices that operate within a transnational context. A contemporary film and media culture that operates akin the Deleuzean plane of immanence that is suffused with a feminist ethics should therefore encompass or create a media ecology that perpetuate a feminist politics in its responses to the world. In particular, within the context of increasing corporate monopolisation of mainstream film and media cultures, the necessity of sustaining an independent film and media culture becomes more urgent. In addition, the digital convergence and the transformation of the cinematic medium to encompass a multiplicity of platforms and varying possibilities of interactivity and participation also warrants a rethink of the methods through which media is produced and our critical assumptions of the ways in which these media forms and objects function. Helen De Michiel, writing what amounts to a manifesto for the production of participatory public media in the digital age, cautions against the unsustainable traditional models of documentary production and distribution. Instead, she advocates a community-based model of documentary production, where the process from inception to distribution and consumption involves partners and collaborators. In this way, these projects could trigger social transformations within the community in which it is based as well as facilitate an independent filmmaker’s desire to complete her/his project. In addition, as such collaborations meet the twin objectives of effecting social change and realising the creation of a cultural artefact, they could conceivably be more attractive to potential funders (2008, p. 12). This, De Michiel argues, is ‘one of the most important ways to redefine the success of a nonfiction media project in an era of digitally networked culture’ (ibid., p. 8). Multi-platformed channels of distribution redefine the ways in which cultural objects may be accessed and

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used, and as De Michiel argues, fundamentally change the notion of independent filmmaking to that of interdependent filmmaking (ibid., p. 14). The notion of interdependent filmmaking marks some sort of departure from the auteur focused approach that is prevalent in film criticism, and indeed, its prevalence is evidenced in the form that this book has taken. Yet, diminishing the status of the independent filmmaker appears not to be the point of this notion of interdependent filmmaking. The feminist criticism of the auteur approach in film studies has often been directed at the elevation of male directors to near god-like status, which results in the feminist response that diverts its focus to the achievements of female filmmakers instead. This notion of independent filmmaking often alludes to a particular, and I might say, masculine, glamour associated with freedom, adventure, and possible guerrilla tactics. Ann Kaneko, reflecting on her experiences of making a documentary about undocumented migrant workers in Japan, compares the ways in which she relates to her subjects compared to some male filmmakers and in effect articulates a feminist ethics in documentary filmmaking. She cites several examples, one of which is Dennis O’Rourke’s The Good Woman of Bangkok (1995), where the film-maker enters into an exploitative relationship with the prostitute as his subject and acknowledges the imbalance in the power relation. In these cases, Kaneko observes how ‘their relationships with the women subjects are very much influenced by the inherent power inequities of being men interacting and filming women who are exploited by men. When a woman filmmaker directs women subjects, the power configuration is intrinsically different’ (1999, pp. 170–1). Echoing Kaneto’s comments about the implications of gender in film-making practices, De Michiel’s proposal of interdependent filmmaking appears to be an antidote to such entrenched masculinist Wild West notions of how to go about film production by positing a practical and viable alternative that also takes into consideration the communities around which the films are made. The benefits of interdependent filmmaking, as particular works by Christina McPhee, Liz Miller, and Sanders Alcántara illustrate, appear

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to be the inculcation of feminist voices and political interventions on the plane of immanence that is independent media.

Beyond the evidentiary . . . Discursively, the documentary film has had a rich and complex historical trajectory that effectively gave rise to its particular rhetoric and theoretical orientation. The post-war rise of Italian neo-realism that strives towards truth in the uncontrolled event, the technological innovations of the 1950s that provided filmmakers the portable equipments with which to make documentaries that appear to further eliminate artifice, the rise of various film movements such as Direct Cinema in the United States and Canada, Free Cinema in Britain, and cinéma vérité in France all contribute to the alignment of the documentary film with ideas of realism and truth. However, the proliferation of new media, resulting in the loosening of the indexical relationship between signifier and signified, raises doubts about the fidelity of representation to its referent and presents significant implications for documentary practice in the digital age. The documentary tradition’s discursive currency has traded upon several fundamental theoretical premises, of which access to unmediated reality is often simultaneously contentious and prized. The discrepancy between the necessity of mediation and a desire for immediacy is that which pervades much of documentary studies; in another conversation, it is also a central concern in thinking about mediation and the convergence to digital. The documentary’s historical preoccupation with truth is continually challenged by the media’s capacity for camouflaging truths for political exigencies. Contingency of meaning is also heightened by the non-linear, non-representative, evocative, and participatory characteristics of new media. The California-based digital artist Christina McPhee’s La Conchita mon amour (available at www.christinamcphee.net/la_ conchita.html) considers ethical questions around documentation and taps into states of panic and paranoia. La Conchita mon

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amour references in its title the trauma of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima that could not be fully articulated in Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima, mon amour (1960). La Conchita mon armor is a digital video project about the struggles of life in the beach community of La Conchita in California that was inundated by debris flow after a devastating mudslide. The work explores the panic that is the result of heightened awareness and fear that living with the aftermath of an environmental disaster brings, in particular, about the prospect of the mudslide reoccurring at a time when governmental assistance for victims of cyclical recursion of natural disasters is not forthcoming. Caused by increased winter rain that comes as an effect of global warming, this digital video project documents the interface between human response and geological data. As McPhee notes in the statement accompanying the project, the aftermath of this environmental disaster is one from which La Conchita residents cannot escape and are forced to live through, both literally and financially, given that their properties are rendered worthless by the mudslide; it therefore becomes impossible for the residents to re-mortgage their damaged homes and/or move away from the area. As a performative act of witnessing, La Conchita updates the cinematic manifestations of political modernism, as articulated through the documentaries of filmmakers such as Resnais, Marguerite Duras, Agnès Varda, and Chris Marker. In this way, La Conchita brings a formal discourse of the expository documentary into the Internet age at the same time that it transcends the expository mode in specific ways. Searching for meaning after the destruction of the landscape, McPhee records the rituals that the community performs to grieve for those who died in the mudslide as well as to survive as a community abandoned by the state. As a digital project, La Conchita imbues documentary realism with subjective evocation to such an extent that the project effectively displaces the importance of the documentary image’s indexicality. Instead of contemplating the impossibility of representing trauma in, for instance Night and Fog (Resnais, 1955) or Hiroshima mon armor, La Conchita attempts the evocation of trauma via the algorithmic processes of selection and combination.

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Figure 7 A layered image from La Conchita mon amor, interactive web (Christina McPhee, 2006)

Figure 8 Vernacular shrine, from La Conchita mon amor, interactive web (Christina McPhee, 2006)

The viewer’s experience of La Conchita is contingent and interactive, and not unlike the notion of mining for geological information. Still photographs, composited images, and video clips of the landscape, environment, and vernacular shrines allow the viewer to piece together the relationship between geological instability and psychological trauma. In this case, the evidentiary is not dependent on the indexical relationship between signifier and signified. Instead, the

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viewer arrives at ‘evidence’ of the trauma suffered by the La Conchita residents by looking at the mudslide in terms of its geological impact on the psychological subject. As McPhee notes in the essay accompanying the project, ‘La Conchita stores landscapes of information beyond what the obvious visible evidence discloses. The site is marked by the invisible mathematics of large-scale disturbances from seismicity patterns (there is a major fault, called Red Mountain Fault, running through the sea cliff upon which the village rests), to tidal patterns now altered by rising marine temperatures since the seventies’ (2006: np). In this sense, the work interrogates the relationship between the visible and the evidentiary, and shows the limits of representation in instances of panic and trauma. The instability and contingency of meaning that La Conchita conveys differ from the notion of unspeakable trauma or the sublime in which many modernist expository documentaries are often invested. Investment in the claims and processes of trauma often undermine the political potential of modernist documentaries because such an approach more often than not indulges in supposed despair and incomprehension at horrific acts instead of implementing rational analysis that would build the case for constructive political responses. McPhee gestures towards a non-representational strategy, given the limits of representation, via the database aesthetics of her performative documentary that pivots on the algorithmic processes that are key to producing a plurality of meanings. Images and field recordings of vernacular shrines, graffiti, chain-mail fencing and barricades in the aftermath of the mudslide, alongside images of the physical landscape make up the La Conchita project. Geological data and human responses to the disaster quantify the impact of the environmental disaster, in the process broadening an understanding of what the environment means and encompasses. By amplifying the leaps and elisions between observed facts culled from geological readings and the community’s trauma as subjective response to the disaster, evidence is therefore rendered materialist; effectively harnessing the digital and virtual to the material, the environmental, and the political. These issues

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are also similar to the ones that Biemann’s video practice encounter, as explored in the previous chapter. Whenever visible evidence fails to articulate the situation involved, ethical questions surrounding the act of representation come into play. La Conchita mon amour seeks recourse in the poetic rendering of the trauma that environmental destruction brings. McPhee’s use of field recordings and a particular operatic soundtrack featuring a mournful female voice adds to the subjective evocation of the natural disaster. Her documentation of the landscape and instances of human response to the loss of lives, the aftermath of the mudslide, and its continuing threat refuses the creation of spectacle. While McPhee claims in her project essay, ‘disaster images become pornography almost by default’, she also asks ‘how to generate narrative about a place of continuing catastrophe in a way that occludes spectacle? Is there a way to escape the anaesthetic of the daily news, and its remains online?’ (ibid., np). . . . And towards participatory politics Beyond the limits of representation that result either in the voyeuristic delights of spectacle or the incomprehension of trauma, La Conchita qualifies the trauma and sufferings of the community by seeking to understand the combined impact of environmental disaster and governmental neglect. Much along the same lines, Liz Miller’s The Water Front (2006) also traces the effect of environmental injustice on a mostly Black working class community in Michigan in the United States. Once a thriving city buoyed by the auto industry that has since relocated elsewhere, Highland Park is now a run-down community with 16,000 people, a large proportion of whom are elderly. Like the residents of La Conchita, the subjects of Miller’s film are finding it difficult to keep their homes at the same time that they cannot afford to move away. Further along than La Conchita in allocating blame on state failure and corporate mismanagement, The Water Front focuses on the community activism that fought against the privatisation of the city’s water works and supply. When the residents of Highland Park began receiving water bills costing anything up

191

Figure 9 A hefty water bill, from The Water Front (Liz Miller, 2006)

Figure 10 Demonstrating for public services, from The Water Front (Liz Miller, 2006)

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to 10,000 dollars when the national average is just under 500 dollars a year, a series of unpleasant events begin to happen. Protests at the ridiculous water bills are ignored, and the state begins turning off the water supply of people who could not pay. Divisions between class and race become acute in these actions. In order to enforce payment, the management consultants hired by the city council to supposedly balance the books begin to attach disputed water bills that are in default to residents’ property tax bills, threatening the already oppressed residents with eviction. Following both the activist group that formed to fight against the privatisation of Highland Park’s water works and supply as well as the corporate accountants brought in by the city council, The Water Front reveals the different cultures and motivations that characterise the two groups. While the corporate consultants’ chief interest is in the figures and revenues that they aim to generate, the community activists seek to reverse the threats of defaulting on their utilities bills. As the management consultants conclude that a private company should be brought in to manage the water supply, the activists propose its own water affordability plan based on fixed monthly contributions and community participation on every level of decision making to counter what they begin to discover is an insidious corporate bid to take over the city’s valuable water works. The activist coalition, led by a handful of women, scores a victory when they discover that the size of the salary bill for these consultants is way above what the highest paying city official earns while every public service and facility has been cut to the bone. The activists’ moral victory translates into successful community action as the consultants are sent away and the community retains their rights to a water supply as a public good. The Water Front reveals in explicit detail the ways in which race and class divisions are open wounds in Highland Park’s fight against the privatisation of the water works, as White contractors decline to go into Black communities to turn off the water supply at the instigation of the middleclass management consultants. Even more significant than class and race divisions is the gendered use of water that the film alludes to in its interaction with the residents. Washing,

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cleaning, and feeding are instances of work that is gendered as female labour. Watching the water supply dry up, The Water Front interviews the women in their homes, kitchens, and bathrooms as they worry about where to shower the children and the effective condemnation of their houses. While ostensibly about governmental failure and environmental injustice, The Water Front is an example of an interdependent film that expresses an explicit feminist politics in its acknowledgement that the right to potable water is a feminist issue as it also concerns the community, environment, justice, and corporate attempts to commercialise public goods. The notion of a community-based film, for purposes of political action and predicating on participation, is made more probable given that the digital convergence provides a multiplicity of media platforms on which these works might effect their interventions. McPhee’s La Conchita, discussed above, is a prime example of a multi-platformed work that may be received as gallery installations, an online interactive video project, and as ambient video on more conventional screens. The digital convergence challenges documentary practice beyond its aim of accumulating visible evidence towards the consideration, and documentation, of its processes and political effectiveness. Patricia Zimmermann, looking forward to the future of feminist film historiography, counsels that ‘we urgently need to not get stuck in the analog, but to ruthlessly combine the analog and the digital in our fight for feminist media spaces and places’ (1999, p. 82). After making her autobiographical documentary, Yo Soy Alcántara, that reconfigures the interface between the personal and the political within a transnational context, Sanders Alcántara began a communitybased project on first-generation Latino immigrant youths in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives. Beginning in September 2006, Sanders Alcántara and her producer Lauren Mucciolo began spending their weekends teaching filmmaking techniques and media literacy to a group of disadvantaged Latino youth in Bushwick, a deprived neighbourhood with a mostly Black and Latino population in Brooklyn. In collaboration with a non-profit community group, the workshops Sanders Alcántara and Mucciolo run aim to encourage and

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equip the youths to make films about their experiences of being first-generation migrants and of adapting to their new country. Through these workshops and film projects, the participants learn technical skills and the ability to articulate their experiences towards their individual empowerment. The participants direct, edit, storyboard, and also serve as cast and crew in one another’s films. The films produced by the group have since travelled to various national and international film festivals as well as being broadcasted on television. The young directors have also been enabled to travel with their films, attend conferences and festivals in which they discuss their films, and meet other film-makers. This ongoing project by Sanders Alcántara and Mucciolo, entitled New Children/New York, also exists as a website (http://www. newchildren-newyork.com). The site documents the rationale of the project, updates on the activities of the groups, hosts the short films that the group makes, and solicits

Figure 11 Publicity poster, from New Children/New York, an ongoing project by Gisela Sanders Alcántara and Lauren Mucciolo

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funding from art councils, grant-making bodies, and individual donors to keep the project going. A documentary of this project, directed by Sanders Alcántara is also in progress, and when completed, would serve both as a film in its own right as well as documentation of this community-based youth project. The documentary film will focus on four participants of the workshop and contain vignettes of the films that they make. However, the efforts of the rest of the group, mostly between five and ten minutes long, may be viewed on the New Children/New York website. For instance, The Life of Dasha (Sam Rosario and Robert Moore, 2008) is a fictional account of a girl who self harms and finds it difficult to be reconciled with her sexuality. Even though she attends meetings that provide a safe place for gay and lesbian young people to discuss their sexuality, she commits suicide and leaves her good friend distraught. Fifteen-year-old Kelvin Lara made My Life (2008), the story of an unsettled childhood and of being taken into care after his drug addict mother was found unconscious, as well My Movie (2008), a tongue in cheek film about his neighbours and friends and shows not only his familiarity with the aesthetics of cartoons and TV cop shows but also the boy’s pride at his output. Desconocido (Fausto Chadán, 2008) is about the director’s experience of being an Ecuadorian undocumented immigrant as he relates his relationship with the city, the family and country he left behind, and his hopes for the future. Yet, not all these short films dwell on the young people’s difficult lives, although the films provide an exceptional level of access into the experiences of these inner city kids. iRainbow (Robert Moore, 2008) interviews a group of teenagers on their sexualities and presents at least one account of the awkwardness and difficulty of coming out to less than sympathetic family members. The film’s use of friends and neighbours as interview fodder celebrates these young people’s sexual orientation and dispels homophobia. iFashion (Suichiro, 2008) discusses teenage anxieties about fashion and belonging, concluding that people are people whatever their fashion and subcultural preferences. As if in confirmation of the generation’s technological savvy and the successful merchandising of Apple computer products, iTofu

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(Deziree Camacho, 2008) is about the director’s decision to go vegetarian, to the dismay and bemusement of her merry, bilingual, and carnivorous Latino family. She films the many butchers around her neighbourhood as well as the family dinner table that is ladened with meat, although the family grudgingly accepts her vegetarianism by presenting her with a birthday salad instead of a cake. Her choice of diet also reveals the implicit fracture that characterises her lived experience as an immigrant youth: a vegetarian diet is difficult to keep to in her own ethnic neighbourhood, whereas it is sanctioned in Manhattan where she is able to eat out as a full fledge vegetarian. The films and media works discussed in this book show the varying levels and different ways in which the personal may be seen as political. The new feminist politique, therefore, departs from its concerns with domesticity and femininity, and must function in response to the contingency of situations, contexts, meanings, and media ecology that it confronts at any given time. As Zimmermann states, ‘we need to discover how the next generation surfs the gendered, racialized global streams of the new world order to create new kinds of feminist imaginings’ (1999, p. 82). Returning to the refrain from Conceiving Ada with which this book began, it is therefore imperative that we always have the wherewithal to calculate another way.

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Index

NB: References to illustrations are printed in bold Abkarian, Simon, 104 An Accented Cinema Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Hamid Naficy, 2001), 109 Address Unknown (Guo Xiaolu, 2007), 177–80 Akerman, Chantal, 29, 85, 132 Alda, Alan, 30 Aldgate, Anthony, 46–7 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974), 26, 142 Allen, Joan, 104, 106 Allen, Woody, 144 Alter, Nora M., 148–50, 153 Althusser, Louis, 71 Altman, Robert, 126 American New Wave, 129–31, 136–7, 139, 142, 146 Arnheim, Rudolph, 149 Arora, Poonam, 5 Ballesteros, Socorro, 162, 164 Barnouw, Erik, 61 Bar On, Bat-Ami, 20 Barthes, Roland, 127 Bergman, Ingmar, 3, 27, 29, 32–3, 35–7, 40–1, 85, 119 Bergson, Henri, 16, 23, 171–3 Bergsonism (Gilles Deleuze, 1966), 171 To Be a Woman (Jill Craigie, 1951), 45, 52–7, 59, 157 Biemann, Ursula, 6, 19, 55, 87, 98, 111, 124, 150–3, 156–9, 161, 164–70, 172, 179, 190 Black Sea Files (2005), 167–8, 170, 172

Europlex (2003), 157 Performing the Border (1999), 153–7 Remote Sensing (2001), 158–61, 159, 163 Writing Desire (2000), 161–5, 163, 179 Bigelow, Kathryn, 128–9 Biskind, Peter, 129 Black Sea Files (Ursula Biemann, 2005), 167–8, 170, 172 Blue Scar (1949), 45 Bollywood/Hollywood (2002), 114 Bowser, Kenneth, 129 Box, Betty, 42 Box, Muriel, 42 Braidotti, Rosi, 9, 15, 20–1, 35, 91, 162, 179 Bride and Prejudice (Gurinda Chadha, 2004), 109 Britton, Andrew, 67 Brivati, Brian, 55–6 Broomfield, Nick, 158 Burstyn, Ellen, 30 Butler, Alison, 24 Butler, Judith, 20 Byron, Ada, 1, 12–15, 17–18 Byron, Lord, 1 Cagney and Lacey (Ted Post, 1981), 26 Cahiers du cinema, 127 capital (Karl Marx), 47 Carmen (Sally Potter, 2007), 97, 101–3 Chadha, Gurinda, 108, 114 Christie, Julie, 86 Cineaste, 27

205

206 Index

cinema 1 The Movement-Image (Gilles Deleuze, 1997), 148 cinema 2 The Time-Image (Gilles Deleuze, 1989), 148 A cinema of loneliness (Robert Kolker, 2000), 126, 131, 200 Clark, Kenneth, 50 close-up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987), 75 Cocteau, Jean, 131 Colebrook, Claire, 9 Conceiving Ada (Lynn Hershmann-Leeson, 1997), 1, 10, 12–18, 21, 23, 196 The Concrete Revolution (Guo Xiaolu, 2004), 180–4 Coppola, Francis Ford, 126, 142 Coppola, Sofia, 5, 65, 67, 116, 126–7, 129–36, 144, 146–7, 174, 179 Lost in Translation (2003), 116, 129–32, 134–46, 174, 179 Marie Antoinette (2006), 131–2, 136, 141 The Virgin Suicides (1999), 131–3, 136, 141 Cousins, Mark, 62 Craigie, Jill, 3, 42–62, 150, 153, 157 To Be a Woman (1951), 45, 52–7, 59, 157 Blue Scar (1949), 45 Out of Chaos (1944), 45, 48–52, 56, 59 Two Hours from London (1994), 3, 45–6, 57–9, 150 The Way We Live (1946), 45 Who are the Vandals (c. 1967), 45 Crash (Paul Haggis, 2004), 116 Creed, Barbara, 64 Cronenberg, David, 91 Curtis, Adam, 60 cyberfeminism, 11–13, 21, 23

Dallaire, Roméo, 58 Dance Girl Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940), 101

Daring to be Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-politics (Bat-Ami Bar On & Ann Ferguson, 1998), 20 Dash, Julie, 85 Das, Nandita, 117 Davis, John, 42 The Day I Will Never Forget (Kim Longinotto, 2002), 79–80 De Lauretis, Teresa, 26–9, 32, 36, 165, 167 Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 9, 11, 13, 15–16, 20–1, 24–5, 34, 90, 97, 114, 119, 138, 148, 165, 171, 173, 184 Del Giudice, Filippo, 42 De Michiel, Helen, 184–5 Depp, Johnny, 97–8, 100 Desai, Jigna, 109–10, 123 Descartes, René, 7 direct cinema movement/free cinema movement, 43–4, 60–1 direct theory (Edward Small, 1994), 149 Dissanayake, Wimal, 125 Divorce Iranian Style (Kim Longinotto, 1998), 74–6, 80 Doane, Mary Ann, 28, 67, 90 Dream Girls (Kim Longinotto, 1993), 63, 66–9, 71 Duras, Marguerite, 152, 187

Earth (Deepa Mehta, 1998), 112, 114–21, 174 Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (Peter Biskind, 1998), 129 Eat the Kimono (Kim Longinotto, 1989), 63, 70–1, 80 Eisenstein, Sergei, 47 An English-Chinese Dictionary of Love (Guo Xiaolu, novel, 2007), 177 Enticknap, Leo, 44 Eugenides, Jeffrey, 131 Europlex (Ursula Biemann, 2003), 157 Ezra, Elizabeth, 110, 138

Index 207

Faithless (Liv Ullmann, 2000), 3, 27–9, 32–41, 85, 112, 119, 121, 165 authorial voices within, 36–7, 40 children, foregrounding of, 34–5 intertextual associations with Scenes from a Marriage (1973), 32–3 sexual relations within, 38–40 Faridani, Francesca, 13 Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987), 14 Fathay, Safaa, 77–9 The Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan, 1963), 64–5 Feminism Without Women (Tania Modleski, 1991), 78 Ferguson, Ann, 20 Ferrell, Professor Robert, 22 Fields, Mary, 42 Film Comment, 131, 134 Firaaq (Nandita Das, 2008), 117–18 Fire (Deepa Mehta, 1996), 110, 112, 114, 117, 119, 121–5 Fisher, Lucy, 87, 94–6 Flory, Dan, 47 Foot, Michael, 42, 55–8 Fowler, Catherine, 87 free cinema movement/direct cinema movement, 43–4, 60–1 French Kiss (Lawrence Kasdan, 1995), 141 Freud, Sigmund, 16, 88, 96, 139 Friedan, Betty, 64–5 Fuss, Diana, 16–17 Gaea Girls (Kim Longinotto, 2000), 63, 69, 69–71 Gaines, Jane, 45–7 Galloway, Alexander, 47 Gatens, Moira, 7, 19 Gazidis, Dorothea, 71 Ghosts (Nick Broomfield, 2006), 158 Gilbey, Ryan, 135–6, 143, 145 The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), 142–3

The Gold Diggers (Sally Potter, 1983), 86–9 Gomorra (Matteo Garrone, 2008), 116 The Good Wife of Tokyo (Kim Longinotto, 1992), 63, 65–9 The Good Woman of Bangkok (Dennis O’Rourke, 1995), 185 Gothic woman’s film, 89, 94–6 Griersonian documentary tradition, 43–4, 50 Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993), 137 Grugel, Jean, 151 Guattari, Félix, 9, 25, 34, 97 Guo Xiaolu, 6, 174, 177, 179–84 Address Unknown (2007), 177–80 The Concrete Revolution (2004), 180–4 An English-Chinese Dictionary of Love (novel, 2007), 177 We Went to Wonderland (2008), 179–80 Hagberg, Gun, 33 Hanayagi, Genshu, 63, 70–1, 80 Haraway, Donna, 10–11, 156 Hartstock, Nancy, 9 Hershmann-Leeson, Lynn, 10, 21, 23, 156 Conceiving Ada (1997), 1, 10, 12–18, 21, 23, 196 Strange Culture (2007), 21–4 Tecknolust (2002), 23 Hesford, Wendy, 152–3, 156 Hidden Faces (Kim Longinotto, 1990), 75, 77–9 Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais & Marguerite Duras, 1959), 152, 187 His People (Edward Sloman, 1925), 142 Hitchcock, Alfred, 14 Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go (Kim Longinotto, 2007), 73–4

208 Index

Host (Kristin Lucas, 1997), 166 Hunt, Claire, 75 Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959), 124 Imre, Anikó, 113, 117 Iñárritu, Alejandro González, 116 It Don’t Worry Me: Nashville, Jaws, Star Wars, and Beyond (Ryan Gilbey, 2003), 136, 145 Jain, Jasbir, 125 Jane Eyre, 95 Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), 144 The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), 142 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1976), 29, 94, 132–3 Johannson, Scarlett, 135, 137 Johnston, Claire, 31, 84 Josephson, Erland, 29, 33 Kafka, Franz, 24 Kalin, Jesse, 27 Kaneko, Ann, 185 Kant, Immanuel, 20, 21 Kemp, Philip, 108 Kiarostami, Abbas, 75 Kill Bill Vol. 1(Quentin Tarantino, 2003), 129 Kolker, Robert, 126–7, 130–1, 134, 136–8, 146 Kracauer, Siegfried, 148–9 Kramer vs Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979), 26 Kubrick, Stanley, 126 Kuhn, Annette, 26 Kurtz, Steve, 21–4 Lacan, Jacques, 88, 127 La Conchita mon amour (Christina McPhee, 2006), 186–90, 188, 193 Laffont, Colette, 86

La règle de jeu (Jean Renoir, 1939), 101 Lee, Nathan, 131, 134 Les Enfants terribles (Jean Cocteau, 1950), 131 Levitin, Jacqueline, 109, 119 Like Water for Chocolate (Alfonso Arau, 1994), 176 Livingstone, Ira, 16 Loach, Ken, 52 London Coliseum, 97, 101 The London Story (Sally Potter, 1987), 88, 92, 100 Longinotto, Kim, 3–4, 19, 44, 62–3, 65, 67–8, 70–3, 75–7, 79, 81, 132–3, 165 The Day I Will Never Forget (2002), 79–80 Divorce Iranian Style (1998), 74–6, 80 Dream Girls (1993), 63, 66–9, 71 Eat the Kimono (1989), 63, 70–1, 80 Gaea Girls (2000), 63, 69, 69–71 The Good Wife of Tokyo (1992), 63, 65–9 Hidden Faces (1990), 75, 77–9 Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go (2007), 73–4 Pride of Place (1976), 71–4 Rough Aunties (2008), 81, 82, 83 Runaway (2001), 73–5 Shinjuku Boys (1995), 63, 68–9 Sisters in Law (2005), 80 Theatre Girls (1979), 72–3 Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003), 116, 129–32, 134–46, 174, 179 Lucas, Kristin, 166 MacNab, Geoffrey, 33, 36, 42 Maddocks, Fiona, 102 Magruder, Michael Takeo, 168 Major, John, 58 Makmalbaf, Samira, 124 Malick, Terrence, 144–5

Index 209

The Man Who Cried (Sally Potter, 2000), 92, 97–102, 104 Marciniak, Katarzyna, 113, 117 Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006), 131–2, 136, 141 Marker, Chris, 135, 187 Marks, Laura, 4, 156 Martin, Angela, 127–9 Marwick, Arthur, 47 Marx Brothers, 103 Massé, Michelle, 95–6 May, Todd, 21 McCann, Ben, 144 McConnell, Frank, 144 McHugh, Kathleen, 93 McPhee, Christina, 6, 185–90, 193 La Conchita mon amour (2006), 186–90, 188, 193 Mehta, Deepa, 5, 19, 35, 98, 109, 112–15, 117, 119, 124, 139, 141, 167, 174 Bollywood/Hollywood (2002), 114 Earth (1998), 112, 114–21, 174 Fire (1996), 110, 112, 114, 117, 119, 121–5 Water (2005), 112, 114, 119–21 Mellencamp, Patricia, 8 Miller, Liz, 6, 185, 190 The Water Front (2006), 190–3, 191 Miller, Toby, 154 Minear, Larry, 58 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 166 Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, 73–6 Modleski, Tania, 78 The Monstrous-Feminine (Barbara Creed, 1993), 64 Moore, Henry, 45, 50–2 Moore, Michael, 52 movie, 128 Mucciolo, Lauren, 193–4 Mulvey, Laura, 8, 84–5, 89, 94, 99 Murray, Bill, 134–5, 137 Naficy, Hamid, 108–9, 112 Nair, Mira, 5, 109 Nash, Paul, 45, 49–50

National Gallery, London, 49 Nawal el Saadawi, 77–9 Negra, Diane, 141 New Children/New York (Gisela Sanders Alcántara & Lauren Mucciolo, ongoing website project), 193–6, 194 Desconocido (Fausto Chadán, 2008), 195 iFashion (Suichiro, 2008), 195 iRainbow (Robert Moore, 2008), 195 iTofu (Deziree Camacho, 2008), 195–6 The Life of Dasha (Sam Rosario & Robert Moore, 2008), 195 My Life (Kelvin Lara, 2008), 195 My Movie (Kelvin Lara, 2008), 195 Newton, Eric, 48–9, 51 Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955), 187 A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935), 103 Nine to Five (Colin Higgins, 1980), 26 Notting Hill (Richard Curtis, 1999), 141 O’Healy, Áine, 113, 117 Orlando (Sally Potter, 1993), 4, 13, 84, 88–92, 98 O’Rourke, Dennis, 185 Out of Chaos (Jill Craigie, 1944), 45, 48–52, 56, 59 Owen, Lord Geoffrey, 59 Ozu, Yasujiro, 135 The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), 144 Penn, Arthur, 126 Performing the Border (Ursula Biemann, 1999), 153–7 Perkins, V.F. (Victor), 128–9 Persson, Inga, 31 Peters, John Durham, 110–12 Peter Wollen, 94 Plant, Sadie, 11–12, 15

210 Index

Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991), 129 politique des auteurs, 127 Potter, Sally, 4, 13, 84–107, 134 Carmen (London Coliseum, 2007), 97, 101–3 The Gold Diggers (1983), 86–9 The London Story (1987), 88, 92, 100 The Man Who Cried (2000), 92, 97–102, 104 Orlando (1993), 4, 13, 84, 88–92, 98 The Tango Lesson (1997), 93–100, 106, 134 Thriller (1979), 4, 84–90, 100–1 Yes (2004), 4, 93, 97, 99, 103–7 The Power of Nightmares (Adam Curtis, 2004), 59 Pride of Place (Kim Longinotto, 1976), 71–4 Pride and Prejudice, 109 Quart, Leonard, 27 Radway, Janice, 67 Rainer, Yvonne, 85 Rank Organisation, 42, 44 Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), 14, 95 Reeder, Jennifer, 166 Remote Sensing (Ursula Biemann, 2001), 158–61, 159, 163 Renoir, Jean, 101 Resnais, Alain, 152, 187 Ricci, Christina, 92, 97 Richards, Jeffrey, 46, 47 Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen), 94 Rodowick, D.N., 151 Rollyson, Carl, 43, 46, 49, 52–3, 56 A Room of One’s Own (Virginia Woolf, 1928), 89 Rough Aunties (Kim Longinotto, 2008), 81–3 Rowden, Terry, 110, 138

Ruby Rich, B., 16–17, 171–2 Runaway (Kim Longinotto, 2001), 73–5 Ryan, Thomas Jay, 22 Salaam Bombay (Mira Nair, 1988), 5 Same Time, Next Year (Robert Mulligan, 1978), 30 Sanders Alcántara, Gisela, 6, 174, 176–7, 184–5, 193–5 Desconocido (Fausto Chadán, 2008), 195 iFashion (Suichiro, 2008), 195 iRainbow (Robert Moore, 2008), 195 iTofu (Deziree Camacho, 2008), 195–6 The Life of Dasha (Sam Rosario & Robert Moore, 2008), 195 My Life (Kelvin Lara, 2008), 195; My Movie (Kelvin Lara, 2008), 195 New Children/New York (ongoing website project), 193–6, 194 Yo Soy Alcántara (2004), 174–7, 175, 180, 193 San Fillippo, Maria, 130 Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1982), 135, 139, 145 Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, 2005), 33 Sarris, Andrew, 127 Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973), 27–41, 85, 119 male subjectivity/authorship within, 29–30, 40 Saraband (2005), links with, 33 sexual relations within, 39 Scorsese, Martin, 126, 142, 144 Shake Hands with the Devil (Peter Raymont, 2004), 58 Shelley, Mary, 15 Shinjuku Boys (Kim Longinotto, 1995), 63, 68–9 Sight and Sound, 135

Index 211

Sisters in Law (Kim Longinotto, 2005), 80 Sitney, P. Adams, 144 Small, Edward, 148 Smillie, Ian, 58 Spencer, Stanley, 45, 50–1 Spielberg, Steven, 126, 144 Stone, Oliver, 126 Strange Culture (Lynn Hershmann-Leeson, 2007), 21–4 Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995), 129 Streep, Meryl, 26 Suner, Asuman, 112–13, 124–5 Sutherland, Graham, 45, 50 Swinton, Tilda, 1, 13, 22 Takarazuka, 63, 66–8 The Tango Lesson (Sally Potter, 1997), 93–100, 106, 134 Tarantino, Quentin, 129 Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), 144 Tecknolust (Lynn Hershmann-Leeson, 2002), 23 Thacker, Eugene, 115, 118 Thatcher, Margaret, 55 Theatre Girls (Kim Longinotto, 1979), 72–3 Thriller (Sally Potter, 1979), 4, 84–90, 100–1 Tokyo-Ga (Wim Wenders, 1985), 135, 139, 145 Tong, Rosemarie, 18–20 Toye, Wendy, 42 {transcription} (Michael Takeo Magruder, 2006), 169 Turturro, John, 97–8 Two Hours from London (Jill Craigie, 1994), 3, 45–6, 57–9, 150 Ullmann, Liv, 3, 27, 29, 32–3, 35–7, 40, 85, 112, 119, 121, 165 Varda, Agnès, 129, 187

Veron, Pablo, 93, 96–7, 99 The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999), 131–3, 136, 141 ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (Laura Mulvey, 1975), 8, 84, 89, 99 Volkart, Yvonne, 15, 162, 164 Water (Deepa Mehta, 2005), 112, 114, 119–21 The Water Front (Liz Miller, 2006), 190–3, 191 Waylen, Georgina, 149, 155–6 The Way We Live (Jill Craigie, 1946), 45 Wenders, Wim, 135 We Went to Wonderland (Guo Xiaolu, 2008), 179–80 White Trash Girl (Jennifer Reeder, 1995), 166 Who are the Vandals (Jill Craigie, c. 1967), 45 Williams, Jano, 63 Wilson, Rob, 125 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 72 ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-cinema’ (Claire Johnston, 1975), 31, 84 Woolf, Virginia, 6, 47, 88–9, 94–5, 134, 165 Writing Desire (Ursula Biemann, 2000), 161–5, 163, 179 Yes (Sally Potter, 2004), 4, 93, 97, 99, 103–7 Yo Soy Alcántara (Gisela Sanders Alcántara, 2004), 174–7, 175, 180, 193 Yuen-Carrucan, Jasmine, 114 Zacharek, Stephanie, 130 Zimmermann, Patricia, 43, 61, 193, 196 Žižek, Slavoj, 14–15, 62