Friday, May 26 • – 5
Ever since Agnès Varda’s 1994 coinage, cinécriture, combined with Hélène Cixous’ écriture féminine (from 1976), it has been possible to talk about a cinécriture feminine. With Audre Lorde’s famous observation (1984) that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” these ideas still determine the limits of what a meaningfully posthumanist, if not a genuinely feminist, filmmaking style might look like.
This paper compares three films, all from 2022, two by women filmmakers—She Said (Maria Schrader) and Women Talking (Sarah Polley)—and one by a male director, Tár (Todd Field, 2022), on the basis of their mutual yet diverse engagement with innovative approaches to cinematic representation. By the latter I mean both representation as the making present again of what is now absent (the profilmic event, the referent, etc.), and also the “political” sense of making space for heretofore under-represented faces, voices, identities—in this case, those of women. Not that women have gone un-represented in film in a certain sense; rather, these particular films all engage with the challenge of representing difficult, controversial or ethically problematic material in the audiovisual language of film through the deliberate and strategic avoidance of any conventional or expected tropes, effects, or scenic structures—most notably, something like the “male gaze”.
In short, each of the three post-#Metoo films in its own way meets the challenge of the violence at the core of its respective story by avoiding all explicit visual reference, instead exploiting sound, off-screen space, and especially editing, to allude to, suggest, or gesture toward that which cannot or, for various reasons, should not, be shown. In meeting this formal and stylistic challenge, each film also represents a different manifestation of an apotropaic feminist-posthumanist cinema, itself representative of a larger critique of an anthropocentric and anthropomorphic world, with the Humanist masculinist subject at its center, looking out from its privileged perspective on those others whose voices and identities—however indirectly or ironically—are now beginning to find expression.
References
- Åsberg, Cecilia and Rosi Braidotti, editors. (2018a). ‘Feminist Posthumanities: An Introduction’, in Cecilia Åsberg and Rosi Braidotti (eds), A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities, 1- 22, Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
- Barad, Karen (2003). “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 3, University of Chicago Press, pp. 801-31.
- Braidotti, Rosi (2022). Posthuman Feminism. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.
- Cixous, Hélène, Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen (1976). “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1:4 (Summer), pp. 875-893.
- Dirse, Zoë (2003). “The Gender of the Gaze in Cinematography: A Woman with a Movie Camera.” Women Filmmakers: Refocusing. Jacqueline Levitin, et al. (eds.). Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, pp. 433-46.
- Ferrando, Francesca. (2019). Philosophical Posthumanism. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hauskeller, Michael, Thomas D. Philbeck and Curtis D. Carbonell (2016). “Posthumanism in Film and Television.” In The Palgrave Handbook ofPosthumanism in Film and Television, London: Springer, 1–7.
- Kaplan, E. Ann (2010). “Is the Gaze Male?”. The Film Theory Reader: Debates and Arguments. Mark Furstenau (ed.). London and New York: Routledge, pp. 209-21.
- Lorde, Audre (2018). The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Penguin Books [1984].
- Martin, Angela (2003). “Refocusing Authorship in Women’s Filmmaking.” Women Filmmakers: Refocusing. Jacqueline Levitin, et al. (eds.). Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, pp. 29-37.
- Mulvey, Laura (1975). “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3: 6–18. Silverman, Kaja (1988). The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
- Varda, Agnes (1994). “Varda par Agnès,” Cahiers du cinéma 14, trans. in Alison Smith, Agnès Varda, XX.
Russell J. A. Kilbourn is Professor and Chair of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU). He publishes on memory, film, comparative studies, critical posthumanism, and postsecular cinema. His books include The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino and The Memory Effect.