Felicity Gee | University of Exeter (original) (raw)
Books by Felicity Gee
A History of the Surrealist Novel, 2023
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Magic Realism, World Cinema and the Avant-Garde, 2021
This book follows the hybrid and contradictory history of magic realism through the writings of t... more This book follows the hybrid and contradictory history of magic realism through the writings of three key figures – art historian Franz Roh, novelist Alejo Carpentier, and cultural critic Fredric Jameson – drawing links between their political, aesthetic, and philosophical ideas on art’s relationship to reality.
Magic realism is vast in scope, spanning almost a century, and is often confused with neighbouring styles of literature or art, most notably surrealism. The fascinating conditions of modernist Europe are complex and contradictory, a spirit that magic realism has taken on as it travels far and wide. The filmmakers and writers in this book acknowledge the importance of feeling, atmosphere, and mood to subtly provoke and resist global capitalism. Theirs is the history of magic-realist cinema. The book explores this history through the modernist avant-garde in search of a new theory of cinematic magic realism. It uncovers a resistant, geopolitical form of world cinema – moving from Europe, through Latin America and the former Soviet Union, to Thailand – that emerges from these ideas.
This book is invaluable to any reader interested in world modernism(s) in relation to contemporary cinema and geopolitics. Its sustained analysis of film as a sensory, intermedial medium is of interest to scholars working across the visual arts, literature, critical theory, and film-philosophy.
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Journal Articles by Felicity Gee
Studies in Eastern European Cinema , 2018
Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise was filmed in 1969 on the heels of Chytilová’s now world-f... more Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise was filmed in 1969 on the heels of Chytilová’s now world-famous feature Daisies [Sedmikrásky (1966)]. It symbolically bridges the spirit of the Czech New Wave and the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, which began in August 1968. The director herself has stated clearly that the film is a response to this invasion; it is a radical protest presented through abstraction, and a deliberate juxtaposition of mythology, classicism, eroticism, and formal experimentation, rather than a direct linguistic affront to the authorities. This article reflects on Chytilová’s film within the context of a wider twentieth-century avant-garde, noting particular correspondences and sympathies between international surrealisms, the early twentieth-century Czech avant-garde, and American experimental filmmaking. It explores the collaborative sensory affect created in the film through a synaesthetic blend of haptic encounters staged in an imaginary Eden. Through distortion, collage, convulsive chance, repetition, and slowness, the film builds a radical aura in the Brakhagean sense, delivering an emotional and political intensity via formal rather than narrative elements. In the twenty-first century, Chytilová’s body of work occupies a prominent position in an international female avant-garde, forming dialogues across regional and political boundaries, past and future.
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Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well is only loosely based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, yet its themes... more Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well is only loosely based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, yet its themes of cruelty, revenge, social madness and singular emotional intensity are as quintessentially Shakespearean, as they are fiercely Kurosawan. Continuing the theme of this special issue on the auteur, this article examines how an author, or auteur, especially one as well defined and debated as Shakespeare or Kurosawa, can be said to generate authorial affect(s). Taking Colin MacCabe’s ‘Revenge of the Author’ as a starting point, the article moves towards a theory of authorship that is polyvalent rather than fixed, and like the text or film itself, is ‘continuously determined’ in meaning, deferring neither to the author/auteur nor reader/viewer exclusively. The Bad Sleep Well bears the marks of its authors, yet cannot be fully determined by them. The auteur, I suggest, is not dead, nor purely exalted or fetishized, but rather haunts the film, (theme, style, autobiography) conveying a myriad of ‘transindividual codes’ to be felt or sensed by the viewer. An examination through the philosophical tenets of affect theory, then, considers the idea that an absent auteur is part of a network of affects that generate sensation, and, meaning. Affect theory considers how a given exterior reality is charged by the energy of minute shifts in movement, perception, or imagination. Often this is hypothesised through the relations between a subject and an event, or an object. Enlisting this phenomenological approach, with particular focus on film form, the article demonstrates the infinite potential of authorial affect reverberating through the post-war landscape of Kurosawa’s Hamlet-inflected Tokyo.
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Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema
This paper examines the diva as a site of conflict, a film image that represents a rupture in the... more This paper examines the diva as a site of conflict, a film image that represents a rupture in the status quo and that questions the boundaries of socially constructed identities. Taking as its inspiration film and art historian Angela Dalle Vacche’s interpretation of the modern, ‘anti-conformist’ Italian film diva (Dalle Vacche, 2008) rather than a model of classical Hollywood stardom and the diva as spectacle, the essay argues that the film diva can be said to represent the crisis and ambiguity at the heart of a global social modernisation. It also discusses various ways in which affect – the tension generated by the central character’s indeterminate identity and pathos – can be presented visually.
Matsumoto Toshio’s 1969 angura film Bara no soretsu, or Funeral Parade of Roses, presents Shinnosuke Ikehata, better known as Peter (ピーター Pītā) in the role of Eddie, a transvestite who performs as a drag queen in a notorious Shinjuku gay bar named ‘Genet’. Matsumoto’s film is a fusion of experimental avant-garde self-reflexivity and psychological drama that deliberately aims to produce a defamiliarising portrait of 1960s youth culture in Japan. Drawing on Matsumoto’s art historical writing and Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s 1911 manifesto on dynamism in the photographic image, the essay asks whether the subversive metamorphosis enacted in Funeral Parade of Roses can be understood better via recourse to aesthetic theories on affective or so-called indeterminate images.
After analysing the dynamic force of Eddie’s transformation against the upheaval of 1960s Japan, and Matsumoto’s attempts to ‘revitalise’ the production of the image in avant-garde filmmaking, the paper will conclude by summarising the subversive potential that the cinematic image of the diva presents for reinvention.
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Book Chapters by Felicity Gee
Salman Rushdie in Context, 2023
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The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, 2022
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Stone/A Companion to Luis Buñuel, 2013
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Stone/A Companion to Luis Buñuel, 2013
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This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Vernon Press via the ... more This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Vernon Press via the link in this record
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This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the lin... more This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the link in this record.
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Surrealist Women's Writing: A Critical Exploration, 2021
This chapter considers the writing of Claude Cahun, and in particular Disavowals (1930), as a phi... more This chapter considers the writing of Claude Cahun, and in particular Disavowals (1930), as a philosophical testing of the boundaries both of the written word and of the self. Adopting Pierre Mac Orlan's designation of the textual fragments in Disavowals as 'poem-essays and essay-poems', the chapter demonstrates how Cahun's work dialectically engages the realms of the poetic and the philosophical in order to provide a radical commentary on the intimately personal as well as on aspects of society, politics, culture, and gender in the early twentieth century-a commentary that still holds relevance for the twenty-first-century reader.
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Surrealism and film after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries , 2021
This chapter explores the imaginative play of Leonora Carrington's writings in the context of her... more This chapter explores the imaginative play of Leonora Carrington's writings in the context of her collaboration with the Mexican film-maker Juan López Moctezuma. Carrington acted as art director and costume designer for his film The Mansion of Madness (1972), based loosely on Edgar Allan Poe's short story 'The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether' (1845). The mise-en-scène is resplendent with recognisable iconography from both her stories and paintings. Moctezuma considered the camera a magical instrument that allowed for the creation of other worlds, and The Mansion of Madness enters a marvellous asylum through the fairytale trope of the mysterious forest. Carrington took a playful role in the creation of this world, populating it with her signature ideas in the form of objects, and advising on innovatively staged and choreographed scenes that trouble the male gaze. The temporal, spatial, and physical aspects of this collaboration are of interest to studies in film and surrealism, as the film serves as both real and virtual archive of Carrington's creative practice. This chapter considers how Carrington's cinematic adventures cast a new light on the recurring fears and desires in her wider work.
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The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, 2017
Japanese cinema has been defined, critiqued, and consumed on an international scale since the 195... more Japanese cinema has been defined, critiqued, and consumed on an international scale since the 1950s, due in no small part to the sustained success of a group of auteur-directors (Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ōshima). Critical interest in Japanese cinema from its silent era onwards has often tended to focus on a national specificity that reflects the impact of war, colonialism and U.S.-Japan relations. Unlike that of its regional neighbour, the Korean film industry experienced a much later boom in international interest. Impacted by the loss of archival materials, and restricted by the constraints of the Japanese occupation, much less has been written on early and post-war Korean filmmaking. However, critical and commercial success flourished in the early 2000s, heralding new opportunities for the nation’s industry and filmmakers. Japanese and Korean cinemas have evolved from very particular socio-cultural and geo-political histories, yet their proximity – regionally, stylistically, and in relation to transnational migration and increased economic cooperation – is becoming ever more apparent in the films themselves and the way in which they are imagined by spectators and critics.
This chapter explores the global popularity of Japanese and Korean films in the twenty-first century and discusses some of the similarities and convergences that exist between them. It focuses on key issues of identity, trauma and modernisation, including controversies such as the status of zainichi (ethnic Koreans resident in Japan), and traces how these themes influence aesthetic, style, and narrative. It takes for granted wider debates on the transnational, focusing on the ways in which twenty-first century filmmaking in these regions negotiates local and global concerns. It also provides an overview of more recent developments contributing to the dialogue between the two film industries that includes Hallyu (the Korean Wave), the success of animated films, and the regional blockbuster. From ‘exoticism’ and orientalism to the question of ‘cultural odorlessness’; and from the period film and melodrama to the monster and horror genres, what can we expect from the new era of innovation in Japanese and Korean films?
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A Companion to Luis Bunuel
Luis Buñuel advocated a new realism in cinema, a new and unconventional way of seeing the everyda... more Luis Buñuel advocated a new realism in cinema, a new and unconventional way of seeing the everyday world that was both socially critical and marvelous and irrational. Buñuel’s definition of cinematic reality adopts a surrealist view that considers the exterior object world as an expansive, psychologically invested space where an object as simple as an ordinary glass can be ‘a thousand different things’. His vivid cinematic translations of impoverished social conditions in rural Spain and Latin America were to have a lasting impact on many subsequent filmmakers, one of whom was Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara.
Through an examination of Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950), this chapter explores how common themes and stylistic innovations can be traced in Teshigahara’s ‘fantasy-documentary’ Pitfall (1962). It will discuss how each director’s consideration of a ‘usable’ historical past is built from stark images of the mundane and quotidian, and metamorphoses into strange and magical cinematic worlds that are synchronously real and surreal. Focusing on themes of contingency, irrationality, social and political violence; and faith and the supernatural, this analysis hopes to demonstrate how in both Buñuel and Teshigahara’s work an unresolved tension exists that shall be named magic surrealism: a composite of cinematic surrealism and the art historical term magic realism.
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A History of the Surrealist Novel, 2023
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Magic Realism, World Cinema and the Avant-Garde, 2021
This book follows the hybrid and contradictory history of magic realism through the writings of t... more This book follows the hybrid and contradictory history of magic realism through the writings of three key figures – art historian Franz Roh, novelist Alejo Carpentier, and cultural critic Fredric Jameson – drawing links between their political, aesthetic, and philosophical ideas on art’s relationship to reality.
Magic realism is vast in scope, spanning almost a century, and is often confused with neighbouring styles of literature or art, most notably surrealism. The fascinating conditions of modernist Europe are complex and contradictory, a spirit that magic realism has taken on as it travels far and wide. The filmmakers and writers in this book acknowledge the importance of feeling, atmosphere, and mood to subtly provoke and resist global capitalism. Theirs is the history of magic-realist cinema. The book explores this history through the modernist avant-garde in search of a new theory of cinematic magic realism. It uncovers a resistant, geopolitical form of world cinema – moving from Europe, through Latin America and the former Soviet Union, to Thailand – that emerges from these ideas.
This book is invaluable to any reader interested in world modernism(s) in relation to contemporary cinema and geopolitics. Its sustained analysis of film as a sensory, intermedial medium is of interest to scholars working across the visual arts, literature, critical theory, and film-philosophy.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Studies in Eastern European Cinema , 2018
Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise was filmed in 1969 on the heels of Chytilová’s now world-f... more Věra Chytilová’s The Fruit of Paradise was filmed in 1969 on the heels of Chytilová’s now world-famous feature Daisies [Sedmikrásky (1966)]. It symbolically bridges the spirit of the Czech New Wave and the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, which began in August 1968. The director herself has stated clearly that the film is a response to this invasion; it is a radical protest presented through abstraction, and a deliberate juxtaposition of mythology, classicism, eroticism, and formal experimentation, rather than a direct linguistic affront to the authorities. This article reflects on Chytilová’s film within the context of a wider twentieth-century avant-garde, noting particular correspondences and sympathies between international surrealisms, the early twentieth-century Czech avant-garde, and American experimental filmmaking. It explores the collaborative sensory affect created in the film through a synaesthetic blend of haptic encounters staged in an imaginary Eden. Through distortion, collage, convulsive chance, repetition, and slowness, the film builds a radical aura in the Brakhagean sense, delivering an emotional and political intensity via formal rather than narrative elements. In the twenty-first century, Chytilová’s body of work occupies a prominent position in an international female avant-garde, forming dialogues across regional and political boundaries, past and future.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well is only loosely based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, yet its themes... more Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well is only loosely based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, yet its themes of cruelty, revenge, social madness and singular emotional intensity are as quintessentially Shakespearean, as they are fiercely Kurosawan. Continuing the theme of this special issue on the auteur, this article examines how an author, or auteur, especially one as well defined and debated as Shakespeare or Kurosawa, can be said to generate authorial affect(s). Taking Colin MacCabe’s ‘Revenge of the Author’ as a starting point, the article moves towards a theory of authorship that is polyvalent rather than fixed, and like the text or film itself, is ‘continuously determined’ in meaning, deferring neither to the author/auteur nor reader/viewer exclusively. The Bad Sleep Well bears the marks of its authors, yet cannot be fully determined by them. The auteur, I suggest, is not dead, nor purely exalted or fetishized, but rather haunts the film, (theme, style, autobiography) conveying a myriad of ‘transindividual codes’ to be felt or sensed by the viewer. An examination through the philosophical tenets of affect theory, then, considers the idea that an absent auteur is part of a network of affects that generate sensation, and, meaning. Affect theory considers how a given exterior reality is charged by the energy of minute shifts in movement, perception, or imagination. Often this is hypothesised through the relations between a subject and an event, or an object. Enlisting this phenomenological approach, with particular focus on film form, the article demonstrates the infinite potential of authorial affect reverberating through the post-war landscape of Kurosawa’s Hamlet-inflected Tokyo.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema
This paper examines the diva as a site of conflict, a film image that represents a rupture in the... more This paper examines the diva as a site of conflict, a film image that represents a rupture in the status quo and that questions the boundaries of socially constructed identities. Taking as its inspiration film and art historian Angela Dalle Vacche’s interpretation of the modern, ‘anti-conformist’ Italian film diva (Dalle Vacche, 2008) rather than a model of classical Hollywood stardom and the diva as spectacle, the essay argues that the film diva can be said to represent the crisis and ambiguity at the heart of a global social modernisation. It also discusses various ways in which affect – the tension generated by the central character’s indeterminate identity and pathos – can be presented visually.
Matsumoto Toshio’s 1969 angura film Bara no soretsu, or Funeral Parade of Roses, presents Shinnosuke Ikehata, better known as Peter (ピーター Pītā) in the role of Eddie, a transvestite who performs as a drag queen in a notorious Shinjuku gay bar named ‘Genet’. Matsumoto’s film is a fusion of experimental avant-garde self-reflexivity and psychological drama that deliberately aims to produce a defamiliarising portrait of 1960s youth culture in Japan. Drawing on Matsumoto’s art historical writing and Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s 1911 manifesto on dynamism in the photographic image, the essay asks whether the subversive metamorphosis enacted in Funeral Parade of Roses can be understood better via recourse to aesthetic theories on affective or so-called indeterminate images.
After analysing the dynamic force of Eddie’s transformation against the upheaval of 1960s Japan, and Matsumoto’s attempts to ‘revitalise’ the production of the image in avant-garde filmmaking, the paper will conclude by summarising the subversive potential that the cinematic image of the diva presents for reinvention.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Salman Rushdie in Context, 2023
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The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, 2022
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Stone/A Companion to Luis Buñuel, 2013
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Stone/A Companion to Luis Buñuel, 2013
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This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Vernon Press via the ... more This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Vernon Press via the link in this record
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Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the lin... more This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the link in this record.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
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Surrealist Women's Writing: A Critical Exploration, 2021
This chapter considers the writing of Claude Cahun, and in particular Disavowals (1930), as a phi... more This chapter considers the writing of Claude Cahun, and in particular Disavowals (1930), as a philosophical testing of the boundaries both of the written word and of the self. Adopting Pierre Mac Orlan's designation of the textual fragments in Disavowals as 'poem-essays and essay-poems', the chapter demonstrates how Cahun's work dialectically engages the realms of the poetic and the philosophical in order to provide a radical commentary on the intimately personal as well as on aspects of society, politics, culture, and gender in the early twentieth century-a commentary that still holds relevance for the twenty-first-century reader.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Surrealism and film after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries , 2021
This chapter explores the imaginative play of Leonora Carrington's writings in the context of her... more This chapter explores the imaginative play of Leonora Carrington's writings in the context of her collaboration with the Mexican film-maker Juan López Moctezuma. Carrington acted as art director and costume designer for his film The Mansion of Madness (1972), based loosely on Edgar Allan Poe's short story 'The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether' (1845). The mise-en-scène is resplendent with recognisable iconography from both her stories and paintings. Moctezuma considered the camera a magical instrument that allowed for the creation of other worlds, and The Mansion of Madness enters a marvellous asylum through the fairytale trope of the mysterious forest. Carrington took a playful role in the creation of this world, populating it with her signature ideas in the form of objects, and advising on innovatively staged and choreographed scenes that trouble the male gaze. The temporal, spatial, and physical aspects of this collaboration are of interest to studies in film and surrealism, as the film serves as both real and virtual archive of Carrington's creative practice. This chapter considers how Carrington's cinematic adventures cast a new light on the recurring fears and desires in her wider work.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, 2017
Japanese cinema has been defined, critiqued, and consumed on an international scale since the 195... more Japanese cinema has been defined, critiqued, and consumed on an international scale since the 1950s, due in no small part to the sustained success of a group of auteur-directors (Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ōshima). Critical interest in Japanese cinema from its silent era onwards has often tended to focus on a national specificity that reflects the impact of war, colonialism and U.S.-Japan relations. Unlike that of its regional neighbour, the Korean film industry experienced a much later boom in international interest. Impacted by the loss of archival materials, and restricted by the constraints of the Japanese occupation, much less has been written on early and post-war Korean filmmaking. However, critical and commercial success flourished in the early 2000s, heralding new opportunities for the nation’s industry and filmmakers. Japanese and Korean cinemas have evolved from very particular socio-cultural and geo-political histories, yet their proximity – regionally, stylistically, and in relation to transnational migration and increased economic cooperation – is becoming ever more apparent in the films themselves and the way in which they are imagined by spectators and critics.
This chapter explores the global popularity of Japanese and Korean films in the twenty-first century and discusses some of the similarities and convergences that exist between them. It focuses on key issues of identity, trauma and modernisation, including controversies such as the status of zainichi (ethnic Koreans resident in Japan), and traces how these themes influence aesthetic, style, and narrative. It takes for granted wider debates on the transnational, focusing on the ways in which twenty-first century filmmaking in these regions negotiates local and global concerns. It also provides an overview of more recent developments contributing to the dialogue between the two film industries that includes Hallyu (the Korean Wave), the success of animated films, and the regional blockbuster. From ‘exoticism’ and orientalism to the question of ‘cultural odorlessness’; and from the period film and melodrama to the monster and horror genres, what can we expect from the new era of innovation in Japanese and Korean films?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A Companion to Luis Bunuel
Luis Buñuel advocated a new realism in cinema, a new and unconventional way of seeing the everyda... more Luis Buñuel advocated a new realism in cinema, a new and unconventional way of seeing the everyday world that was both socially critical and marvelous and irrational. Buñuel’s definition of cinematic reality adopts a surrealist view that considers the exterior object world as an expansive, psychologically invested space where an object as simple as an ordinary glass can be ‘a thousand different things’. His vivid cinematic translations of impoverished social conditions in rural Spain and Latin America were to have a lasting impact on many subsequent filmmakers, one of whom was Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara.
Through an examination of Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950), this chapter explores how common themes and stylistic innovations can be traced in Teshigahara’s ‘fantasy-documentary’ Pitfall (1962). It will discuss how each director’s consideration of a ‘usable’ historical past is built from stark images of the mundane and quotidian, and metamorphoses into strange and magical cinematic worlds that are synchronously real and surreal. Focusing on themes of contingency, irrationality, social and political violence; and faith and the supernatural, this analysis hopes to demonstrate how in both Buñuel and Teshigahara’s work an unresolved tension exists that shall be named magic surrealism: a composite of cinematic surrealism and the art historical term magic realism.
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‘All human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that... more ‘All human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject.’ So wrote Barbara Creed in her legendary treatise against Freud’s framing of women’s bodies in his case studies on ‘hysteria’. Valentine Penrose’s novel The Bloody Countess [La Comtesse Sanglante], was first published in France in 1962, and (after some difficulty) appeared in English translation in 1972. It is a study of Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Bathóry, a medieval noblewoman, who was tried for the murder of eighty young girls. The investigations and testimonies took place between 1610, and her death in 1614 at the age of fifty-five. Penrose’s re-writing of this history creates an intriguing surrealist document which draws on primary source materials, while turning the subject towards a perspective determined by her own personal belief systems – occult, astrological, and non-heteronormative ways of living. What does it mean for a woman - a poet and artist - to momentarily inhabit the life of her biographical subject; especially when the subject is linked to sadistic murder, torture, cruelty, perversion, and fantasy. What does Penrose’s study offer feminist-surrealist studies in literature? In dialogue with Annie Le Brun’s seismic, affective reflection on the literary oeuvre of D.A.F. de Sade in Sade: A Sudden Abyss [Soudain un bloc d'abîme, Sade, 1990], this paper examines the radical act of writing surrealist auto-fiction on sadism two ways: the ‘historical novel’ and the critical reflection.
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Taking its title from a comment made by Walter Benjamin in 1928, this paper explores the expansi... more Taking its title from a comment made by Walter Benjamin in 1928, this paper explores the expansion of consciousness through surrealist practice in the early twentieth century. It draws a narrative from the synthesis of poetic form and technological wonder in Valentine Penrose’s 1951 collage novel Dons des Féminines (Gifts of the Feminine), a hybrid form of poem that imagines a utopian union between two women voyaging across the globe. Inspired by her travels with surrealist artist Alice Rahon in India, Penrose expands the natural world and astrological symbolism of her written stanzas through the medium of collage. Full-page and small-scale collages accompany the poetry, augmenting earthly voyages through a celestial imagery that communes with Elizabeth Grosz’s concept of ‘ontoethics’, because it entails relationships between humans and the entire world, organic, inorganic, animate, inanimate. Penrose’s collages recycle images of Victorian heroines, staging them cinematically as if viewed for camera along a centrifugal axis that often lifts them skyward, outwards. The paper reflects on key moments and events in modernism that imagine celestially – August Strindberg’s celestographs, Man Ray’s photograms, telescopic cameras in space, Germaine Dulac’s marvelous films – and considers Penrose’s own reasons for imagining herself elsewhere. It contemplates the gaps, fissures, absences, and presences so characteristic of modernist collage, and considers the links between utopianism and freedom in the act of composing ‘new’ ontological worlds. These collages expand the direct address of the poetry via the marvellous; and they present a strong female presence that commands space and time on its own terms.
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" The possibility of magic realism as a formal mode is constitutively dependent on a type of his... more "
The possibility of magic realism as a formal mode is constitutively dependent on a type of historical raw material in which disjunction is structurally present; [...] on a content which betrays the overlap or the coexistence of precapitalist and nascent capitalist or technological features.
- Fredric Jameson ‘On Magic Realism in Film’
Georgian born Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990) was a filmmaker in the Soviet poetic tradition that firmly turned his back on Soviet Realism. His films present a profoundly collective view of ethnic minorities under Soviet rule that eschews temporal or narrative linearity. Appropriating surrealist collage techniques, Eastern European folk miniatures, religious iconography, poetry, and the tableau vivant into his montage, Parajanov’s hybrid aesthetic is arguably magic realist; however, he has also been described as surrealist, and as a magical-surrealist.
There has been much confusion regarding the overlap of magic realism and surrealism in certain films. Such confusion has been in evidence since German art historian Franz Roh set out to define magischer realismus as a mode distinct from the ‘manufactured’ art of the surrealists, but in the same breath cited Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst and René Magritte as direct influences. Significantly, Magritte’s Le modèle rouge (1935) was later chosen by Fredric Jameson to illustrate the imperceptible join of fantasy and reality that he finds in magic realism. Jameson is the only critic to date that has written at length on both the geo-political and aesthetic properties of magic realism as a cinematic mode. He investigates the ways in which magical real films present the indeterminacy of objects and worlds in the process of transformation. For Jameson, the magic realist position potentially evades the impasse created in his theorisation of the shift from late modernism to global postmodernism.
This paper will show how Parajanov’s films Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964) and The Colour of Pomegranates (1968), which address the material reality of peasant life in the Ukraine and Armenia, can be analysed through Jameson’s theoretical model of a geo-political cinematic magic realism. It will also demonstrate how a self-reflexive aesthetic magic in these films derives from the modernist avant-garde, and surrealism in particular.
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From ‘Outside World” to ‘Down Below”, the Mansion of Madness to the ovoid womb of the Giantess, C... more From ‘Outside World” to ‘Down Below”, the Mansion of Madness to the ovoid womb of the Giantess, Carrington’s work pushes against the seemingly impermeable reality of the room as a fixed structure. This paper explores the recurring fantasy of absolute liberation through creative alchemy and dynamism in Carrington’s intermedial work. It takes as its opening, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s account of Carrington daubing the walls of Luis Buñuel’s ‘impersonal room’ in her menstrual blood, enacting what Jodorowky calls an ‘extreme surrealism’. The multivalent ways in which walls, rooms, and bodies operate across her work provide a means of escape rather than imprisonment.
In her essay ‘What is a Woman,’ Carrington urges the reader, and herself, to look past the ‘blind alley’ leading away to pretension and falseness, better to see in: ‘we must try to look in through the smog in ourselves and ask who or what is this, and what within this we could evolve, live, grow.’ If the self can be seen into, like a room, and the room or house can be mapped, written on, and experienced like the self, a symbiotic relationship between vessel and actant emerges that is at once physical, psychical, and spiritual. This paper will examine the various iterations of the ‘room-self’ in a range of Carrington’s work, from paintings, essays, filmic mise-en-scène, and lastly, the oft-mythologised actions of a ‘dazzling’ (Jodorowsky) artist. Ultimately it hopes to bring into dialogue the feminist spatialities that span both her ‘hands on’ and conceptual explorations of the female in exile.
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Certain Women (2016) is a film portrait in which ‘nothing happens’ (Margulies) to seismically cha... more Certain Women (2016) is a film portrait in which ‘nothing happens’ (Margulies) to seismically change the lives of the three titular protagonists. And yet their deliberately unfinished stories hang in the air, suggestive and poignant, between human life and the affective surfaces of the Montana landscape. What does happen in this film is both routine and extraordinary, tense and unpredictable. In the repeated quotidian movements that resemble a pattern of coherence there is a sensory heaviness – disappointment, melancholy, exhaustion – that is transmitted to the viewer. This paper’s focus is on the ways in which the film makes thought visible, in which it captures sensory and emotional energies and fixes them between virtual (film) objects and the viewer.
The paper draws on the formal aspects of affect, as investigated by Deleuze, Brinkema, and Jameson, and explores the ways in which roads, car parks, offices, bricks, fences, a classroom, form a counterpoint to the emotional lives of the film’s characters. The women are limited by their environment, but not through purely socio-economic, domestic, or gendered boundaries. What is left unspoken, or un-acted upon, is instead imagined in the spatio-temporal gaps in the narrative, and projected upon the porous surfaces of Montana, like strange, illusory photograms. Silvan Tomkins’ research found that identical stimuli invoke a 'circus of affective responses' (Sedgwick and Frank) in the perceiver (s). This paper posits that Reichardt’s film and it’s re-imagining of Montana, encourages everything to happen, thereby liberating these women through the infinite possibilities of spectatorial engagement and imaginary catharsis. It seeks to further explore the links between affect, disappointment, female labour and emotional objects/landscapes.
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Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus and Raul Ruiz’s Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting dissect and... more Jean Cocteau’s Testament of Orpheus and Raul Ruiz’s Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting dissect and reflect upon the meaning of art through an arguably surrealist practice. Taking Timothy Corrigan’s assertion that the essay film can be defined by its ‘anti-aesthetic’ foregrounding of the medium itself, this paper examines the extent to which Cocteau and Ruiz’s films foreground aesthetic affect within an essayistic format. It explores the links between the critical essays and texts authored by these filmmakers and their adaptation of the key ideas onto the screen.
Surrealist film is rooted in the subjective impulse to reveal the improbable, irrational, proliferating, intangible and sensational aspects of the object world. Cocteau saw cinema as representing an ‘unreal realism, something truer than truth’ that revealed ‘something else’ deep in the mind that only film could capture; while Ruiz recognised its significance as enabling a ‘joyous trace’, in allowing for 'the emotion of particular instants' to come forth.
This paper questions whether the self-conscious philosophical questions raised regarding the role of the artist, and the catharsis of self-reflexively working through myths, voids and enigmas in their respective films - a ‘testament’ and a ‘hypothesis’ - amount to an essay.
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Abstract from the paper 'Visual Poems': Claude Cahun's Archive of the Self, given at the European... more Abstract from the paper 'Visual Poems': Claude Cahun's Archive of the Self, given at the European Avant-Garde and Modernism Conference, August 29th - 31st, 2014, Helsinki
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Cambridge University Press eBooks, Mar 31, 2023
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Conference Paper ISSS Annual Conference , 2022
Throughout time, across the world, poets have frequently employed metaphors involving spiritual a... more Throughout time, across the world, poets have frequently employed metaphors involving spiritual and sacred architecture. Rural churches, city synagogues, stones and lay lines, ruined abbeys, syncretic altars, coastal mosques-stand in for spiritual awakening, doubt, shame, aspiration, metamorphosis. In surrealist literature and art in Europe, Catholicism is often razed to the ground, as in Buñuel's L'âge d'Or where the bones of bishops and the ruins of collapsing buildings generate simultaneous affect. In the nocturnal impressions of Parisian cathedrals offered to the viewer by Eugène Atget or Georges Brassaï, the solemn architectural stalwarts blanch, as if inhabited by ghosts. Where faith might have been apparent, the impression that it has been abandoned, or is being somehow challenged, resides. These examples all involve the male gaze, and the architectural design and labour to build, is also male. In works of surrealism created by female artists and writers, it seems that an embodied understanding of sacred architecture is tested in different ways. Such is the case across the oeuvre of Valentine Penrose, whose bold exclamation in her poetry collection 'Herbe à la Lune' (1935): 'I am a beautiful cathedral on the carpet [s] of myself.' [Je suis belle cathédrale sur les tapis de moi-même]propels an embodied response to the idea of both cathedral, and woman.
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Cambridge University Press eBooks, Feb 16, 2023
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Call for Chapters: Edited Volume Valentine Penrose: Landscapes of Feminist-Surrealist Odyssey Edi... more Call for Chapters: Edited Volume Valentine Penrose: Landscapes of Feminist-Surrealist Odyssey Edited by Felicity Gee https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/english/staff/gee/#research This volume will be the first edited collection in the English language on the surrealist artist, writer, translator, and keen astrologist, Valentine Penrose. The collection seeks to present the intermedial work, as well as the conceptual and ephemeral elements of her oeuvre. Penrose was a frequent traveller, and the collection will address the significance of long voyages, and periods of war and social conflict for the female artist in the early twentieth century. It is also interested in deepening connections between Penrose’s studies in esoteric and occult practices and her feminist-surrealist approach to landscapes and solar systems. It is hoped that this volume will be attractive to scholars and readers of surrealism, and modernist women’s studies, and will serve to broaden knowledge of Penrose’s fantastic and marvellous poetry and prose.
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Certain Women (2016) is a film portrait in which ‘nothing happens’ (Margulies) to seismically cha... more Certain Women (2016) is a film portrait in which ‘nothing happens’ (Margulies) to seismically change the lives of the three titular protagonists. And yet their deliberately unfinished stories hang in the air, suggestive and poignant, between human life and the affective surfaces of the Montana landscape. What does happen in this film is both routine and extraordinary, tense and unpredictable. In the repeated quotidian movements that resemble a pattern of coherence there is a sensory heaviness – disappointment, melancholy, exhaustion – that is transmitted to the viewer. This paper’s focus is on the ways in which the film makes thought visible, in which it captures sensory and emotional energies and fixes them between virtual (film) objects and the viewer. The paper draws on the formal aspects of affect, as investigated by Deleuze, Brinkema, and Jameson, and explores the ways in which roads, car parks, offices, bricks, fences, a classroom, form a counterpoint to the emotional lives of...
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Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 2014
This article examines the diva as a site of conflict, a film image that represents a rupture in t... more This article examines the diva as a site of conflict, a film image that represents a rupture in the status quo and that questions the boundaries of socially constructed identities. Taking as its inspiration film and art historian Angela Dalle Vacche's interpretation of the modern, ‘anti-conformist’ Italian film diva rather than a model of classical Hollywood stardom and the diva as spectacle, the article argues that the film diva can be said to represent the crisis and ambiguity at the heart of a global social modernization. It also discusses various ways in which affect – the tension generated by the central character's indeterminate identity and pathos – can be presented visually. Matsumoto Toshio's 1969 angura film Bara no sōretsu/Funeral Parade of Roses presents Ikehata Shin'nosuke, better known as Peter, in the role of Eddie, a transvestite who performs as a drag queen in a notorious Shinjuku gay bar named Genet. Matsumoto's film is a fusion of experimental avant-garde self-reflexivity and psychological drama that deliberately aims to produce a defamiliarizing portrait of 1960s youth culture in Japan. Drawing on Matsumoto's art historical writing and Anton Giulio Bragaglia's 1911 manifesto on dynamism in the photographic image, the article asks whether the subversive metamorphosis enacted in Funeral Parade of Roses can be understood better via recourse to aesthetic theories on affective or so-called indeterminate images.
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Surrealist women’s writing, 2021
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In the 1960s, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama was living in New York, writing, painting, performing ... more In the 1960s, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama was living in New York, writing, painting, performing and conducting ‘happenings’ at the epicentre of the city’s avant-garde and queer creative outpourings. This paper explores a significant year in the expansion of her art – 1968 – in which Kusama collaborates with filmmaker Jud Yakult on a 16mm film entitled Self Obliteration starring Kusama and capturing her creative and philosophical process. Fear, obsession, and proliferation are thematic constellations in Kusama’s cosmographical understanding of what it means to be human, Japanese, female, and mentally unwell. Her practice at this period of her career is one of active participation in her own narcissistic drives, designed to commune through the boundary between fantasy and reality. Tapping into the issues thrown up by the hippie movement – rebellion against mechanisation, a return to nature, nudism, non-heteronormative sex – Self Obliteration captures a series of happenings based on t...
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Shakespeare Bulletin, 2016
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Wasafiri, 2015
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