Bodies, gestus, becoming: Cinema as a technology of gender and (post)memory (original) (raw)
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The third issue of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image takes up the theme of embodiment and the body, its relationship to Cinema’s history (theory and practice), and its reawakening in a recent body of research which is attentive, not only to film, but also to new media practices. It encompasses the dismantling of one of the foundational theoretical perspectives of film studies for over a century — the metaphor of the disembodied eye — and focuses on a groundbreaking field which as been attempting to integrate the body in conceptual models for understanding art and cinematic spectatorship. It aims to be a contribution to the approaches which have been recently trying to show the fallacy of the distinction between the physical and the mental, focusing on the concept of embodiment taken, either as phenomenological encounter immersed in everyday practices, or as a material and physical process made of fluids, energies and forces. In both cases, the quest for understanding Cinema entails acknowledging its inherent sensuous qualities and recognizing that the intellectual, mental and cognitive activities must be reinterpreted as embodied and carnal. This new understanding of cinema’s spectatorship, which integrates the spectator’s body in the process of his/her emotional and mental encounter with images, has been accompanied by an ongoing development of the moving image’s sensuous and haptic qualities in contemporary world, media practices and artistic scene.
Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 2006
This essay explores several paradigms of representation of the male body in femaleauthored Spanish cinema. First, it concentrates on films that, through a 'didactic' use of the male body, reveal women's sexual polycentredness. Male characters operate as the active counterpart for the inscription of sexual exchanges that dislocates penetration in favour of more polymorphous performances. Second, it analyses films that depict the ageing body. While the 'mature' woman is put on display, the younger male counterpart becomes the essential instrument that substantiates her desirability. In turn, the myth that older men have undeniable sexual appeal is challenged by the representation of their sexually inadequacy. Third, it studies movies that take revenge, through symbolic acts of emasculation, against the perpetrators of phallic violence. And last, it analyses the male body as a woman's double in films that do not counter phallocentrism with gynocentrism. 187 SHC 3 (3) 187-204
Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 2021
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Following Karen Barad's diffractive methodology, we encounter feminist documentary cinema as a diffraction apparatus: that is, as technologies that make part of the world intelligible to another part of the world in specific ways, by means of intra-actions between human and non-human agencies and objects of observation. We propose three analytical tools: materiality, emotionality, and performativity. In this article, we analyse two Spanish documentary films that render visible the potential of feminist documentary cinema for building alliances from and against precarity: Cuidado, resbala and Yes, We Fuck! Reading the insights and patterns raised in each case study through one another (i.e., diffractively), we discuss the intra-actions by which each of these films participates in co-creating the real. We end up describing three possible effects of feminist material-discursive practices in documentary cinema.
This chapter suggests that one way of dislodging film (studies) from its ‘Western’ hegemonic locations is to put ‘the body’, and questions of embodiment, at the centre of inquiry, in order to challenge the taken-for-granted orientations, perspectives and (embodied) points of view of traditionally ‘Western’ film (criticism). This includes the bodies in film, the bodies of film, as well as the bodies ‘behind’, ‘in front’ and ‘around’ film that constitute the embodied contexts for its production, consumption and theorisation. The critique of the ‘Western’ standpoint and orientation of much contemporary film theory and criticism presented here, makes use of phenomenological debates around subjectivity as embodied and lived, as well as of queer critiques of traditional phenomenology, in order to begin to unpack the ways in which ‘Western’, white, heterosexual, male subjectivity has been the structuring norm that film (theory) has been orientated ‘around’ (Ahmed 2006: 115).
De-marginalising and de-centring film studies in bodies, places and on screens
Film education journal , 2022
This paper presents a multimodal conversation that engages the personal teaching and learning experiences of the authors, Berenike Jung (in London when the conversation started) and Derilene Marco (in Johannesburg). Critically reflecting and engaging through an audio recording and letters, Jung and Marco ask each other about the processes of doing and performing the labour of decolonising film teaching in their respective courses and from different global locations. Keeping in mind the impositions and complexities of the pandemic, Jung and Marco also reflect upon the ways in which colonial posturing occurs in film studies spaces, such as highly visible international film conferences. In doing so, they reflect on how engagements such as these keep many scholars and their scholarship confined to traditional Eurocentric and North American strategies, methods and endorsements of approval and relevance. The piece is conversational and self-aware in its self-referential tone. It is intended that readers listen to parts of the audio if they please, but that they are not compelled to do so to find meaning.
Tecnologías de la edad: La intersección entre teoría fílmica feminista y estudios etarios
Investigaciones Feministas, 2020
Tecnologías de la edad: La intersección entre teoría fílmica feminista y estudios etarios Resumen. Los estudios sobre el envejecimiento son una disciplina relativamente nueva cuya intersección con la teoría fílmica feminista puede conducir a importantes replanteamientos metodológicos y teóricos, siendo uno fundamental: la concepción del cine como una poderosa tecnología de la edad. Este ensayo ofrece un panorama del etarismo que ha impregnado las sociedades occidentales con relación al lugar que tanto el envejecimiento como las cuestiones de género han ocupado en la cultura visual. A la luz de planteamientos feministas contemporáneas sobre el envejecimiento y las narrativas del envejecimiento, este ensayo tiene por objeto proponer posibles nuevas direcciones que el cine y la teoría fílmica feminista pueden tomar como parte de un nuevo marco epistemológico. De la misma manera, también explora nuevos paradigmas teóricos a través de perspectivas interseccionales para deconstruir el etarismo de la industria cinematográfica. Finalmente, al centrarse en narrativas sobre el envejecimiento femenino en producciones cinematográficas no hegemónicas, este ensayo propone alejarse de los planteamientos binarios de decadencia/éxito, y sugiere formas afirmativas de mirar los cuerpos que envejecen y de comprender el envejecimiento.
This article reassesses the concept of identification in line with the increased importance phenomenology has taken on in film-philosophy of the 1990s and 2000s. In the 1970s and 1980s, a Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretation of identification dominated film theory and criticism, and spectatorial engagement with elements of films was understood as what psychoanalysis calls secondary identification – the identification with stable subject-positions (characters) in the film-text. But non-Lacanian psychoanalysis and Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology offer film-philosophy a very different understanding of identification as a non image-based, ‘blind’, bodily affective tie that is established between spectators and what Vivian Sobchack describes as ‘the sense and sensibility of materiality itself’ (Sobchack 2004, 65). By first exploring how this more bodily (for psychoanalysis, primary) identification is theorized by psychoanalysts (Freud, Paul Schilder, Henri Wallon) and by film theorists (Kaja Silverman), the article proposes that film criticism make greater use of it in order to engage more meaningfully with the visible cultural specificities – size, skin colour, age, sex – of the images of bodies viewed on cinema screens. It is not just ‘the’ body that needs bringing back into thinking about film spectatorship, but culturally differentiated bodies, both on the screen and in the auditorium. A psychoanalytic and phenomenological film criticism of embodied cultural identity, one that attends to the materiality of the film and of the body-images and objects on the screen, may be the most culturally and politically useful successor to ‘screen’ theory of the 1970s and 1980s.