Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies current issue

Pretty: Film Theory, Aesthetics, and the History of the Troublesome Image

Galt, R. — 2009-09-08

This article contends that film studies has consistently denigrated "pretty" images: those that emphasize detailed composition, excess color, or decorative style. While the term deliberately invokes the triviality of "pretty pictures," the article questions this taken-for-granted rhetoric of value, proposing that the "pretty" as a recurrent taste category in film reveals an imbrication of gender, sexuality, and race in the construction of the cinematic image itself. Analysis of the pretty's antecedents in histories of art demonstrates how colonial and patriarchal modes of aesthetic judgment enter into film theory. Within the pretty, then, we might find unexpected potential to think aesthetics otherwise. Pretty is an invented term; that which it names is figured differently and often implicitly across film theories that have few similarities except for this strange commonality in what they reject. After outlining the conceptual potential of the pretty, this article traces a thread among diverse theoretical models, defining the category through its absences and exclusions. Thus André Bazin advocates for the contingent and the unposed, while post-1968 Marxism valorizes the antiaesthetic qualities of countercinema. These practices draw on disparate value systems, but both reject decorative composition. Likewise, while feminist and queer theories have often valued spectacle and surface, a structuring iconophobia can still underwrite even radical accounts of representation. By tracing and interrogating the theoretical history of the pretty and its exclusion, this article seeks to trouble the discursive field of aesthetics and politics in film theory.

The Documentaries of Kim Longinotto: Women, Change, and Painful Modernity

Smaill, B. — 2009-09-08

British documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto has been producing work for three decades. Her films have circulated widely and garnered significant critical acclaim. Despite her prominence in the industry, Longinotto's films have attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention. Her documentaries frequently focus on women and children in not only the United Kingdom but also in cultures as diverse as Japan, Iran, and nations in Africa. This essay explores four of her most well-known recent documentaries, Divorce Iranian Style (1998) and Runaway (2001), both made in Tehran and codirected with Ziba Mir-Hosseini; The Day I Will Never Forget (2002), made in Kenya; and Sisters in Law (2005), codirected with Florence Ayisi in Cameroon. Each focuses on marginalized subjects who also act as the agents of social transformation. Analyzing how the women in these films negotiate the intersection of modernity and traditional or religious law, this essay argues that Longinotto frames the women not as "primitive others" but as entrenched in the complex paradigms of modernity. Moreover, the four documentaries under consideration weave together the activities of expressing pain or witnessing the pain of others (both physical and emotional) and confronting disempowerment. The representation of this pain is integral to how Longinotto's camera perceives individual agency, gender, and political struggle. These are different facets of what this essay poses as Longinotto's "cinema of translation."

Betrayed Promises: Politics and Sexual Revolution in the Films of Marta Meszaros, Milos Forman, and Dusan Makavejev

Parvulescu, C. — 2009-09-08

Eastern Europe has been a terrain on which the twentieth century has challengingly experimented with revolutionary discourse, and cinema has been there to document these experiments. This article focuses on a constellation of Eastern European films from the 1960s and the early 1970s that interrogate sexual practices in "real-existing socialism": Márta Mészáros's Riddance, Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde, and Dusan Makavejev's Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator and WR: Mysteries of the Organism. To what extent has the communist revolution also been a sexual revolution? How did it mange to reform (or fail to reform) some of the state's most enduring institutions, marriage and the family? Has the revolution betrayed its promises to radically address the "woman question"? Has it perpetuated bourgeois values? Could the subjects and regimes of Eastern Europe have survived a sexual revolution? What does sexuality tell us about the repressive politics of Eastern European revolutionary governments?

Now You See It, Now You Don't: Transnational Feminist Spectatorship and Farida Benlyazid's A Door to the Sky

Gauch, S. — 2009-09-08

Relating the trajectory of a young Franco-Moroccan woman who returns to her native city of Fez and embraces a mystical form of Islam, Farida Benlyazid's 1988 feature film A Door to the Sky has become a mainstay at international women's film festivals and in classes on gender and the Middle East. This article examines how Benlyazid's first feature at once engages and resists the burdens of representation that accrue to it as it circulates transnationally. Alternately proposing and withholding insights into Muslim women's lives, Benlyazid's film strives to adapt mainstream narrative film to celebrate Morocco's cultural history and to trace out a feminist trajectory that embraces the country's Islamic heritage. More specifically, it conveys its protagonist's embrace of Sufism simultaneously through a narrative influenced by Sufi poetics and a Sufi-influenced visual aesthetics. Yet relating its message almost exclusively through its protagonist's point of view, the film highlights her individuality, eliding the broader Moroccan feminist and cultural movements in which Benlyazid's film claims to intervene. For transnational feminist audiences, Benlyazid's film thus stages, whether intentionally or not, a series of misreadings that oblige us to ask again and again just what we were hoping to see.

Mothers and Daughters: Abjection and the Monstrous-Feminine in Japan's Dark Water and South Korea's A Tale of Two Sisters

Seet, K K — 2009-09-08

The rarely analyzed Asian horror film, which has had great impact on international film audiences recently as a result of Hollywood remakes, is increasingly mired in the milieu of home and hearth, leading to a new Asian variation of the domestic gothic. With specific reference to Japan's Dark Water (2002) and South Korea's A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), this essay proposes that the current orientation evinces the anxieties of a patriarchal culture denied its sovereignty as the result of a widening gulf between the mythology of the bourgeois family and its actual social manifestations. The female protagonists in these films are, accordingly, associated with Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection (in particular, the construction of the maternal figure as abject through the imagery of parturition and the primal scene) and depicted in various guises as the monstrous-feminine, a potent source of disruption that threatens the symbolic realm. By charting the mother-daughter nexus and suggesting that daughters continue to seek the semiotic chora even after the thetic break, these films also address a discernable lack in Kristeva's theory of abjection by paying due attention to the implications of gender in the psychological constitution of the subject. As a further extension into the cinematic representation of women, the female usurpation of the gaze will also be dissected in terms of its adverse consequences in these films. The essay therefore argues that the current Asian horror film is ultimately conservative and functions as a form of narrative containment, the modern purification ritual that emphasizes the need to be recuperated into the male order of things.

Masculinity in Video Games: The Gendered Gameplay of Silent Hill

Kirkland, E. — 2009-09-08

This article explores construction and representation of masculinity in the "survival horror" video-game series Silent Hill. Noting the dominance of traditional male characters and masculine themes within the video-game medium, the Silent Hill franchise is seen as deviating from this assured, aggressive, and unexamined machismo. The series' protagonists are instead nondescript, flawed, domesticated men—unstable, angst-ridden, and unreliable in a manner that interrogates the dominant mode of masculine gameplay. The problematic nature of video-game interactivity and identity, the extent to which gameplay can exist independent of playable protagonists, and the gendering of video-game goals and objectives are considered. Despite conforming to certain masculine activities—fighting, collecting weaponry, exploring and dominating space—Silent Hill complicates such aspects through the game avatars' unremarkable abilities, limiting supplies, frantic combat styles, frustrating spatial progress, experiences of entrapment, and a pervading sense of helplessness, exemplified by the games' often deterministic linear structures. Overall, this article argues that the games encourage critical distance from the male game characters, the rescue missions they attempt and often fail, the monstrous images of femininity they imagine, and the voyeuristic practices in which they engage.

Call for Submissions: In Practice: Feminism/Culture/Media

2009-09-08