This chapter offers a Lacanian reading of Tarkovsky’s films in terms of an encounter with the radical otherness of the Kantian thing-in-itself, illustrated by the planet Solaris or Stalker’s Zone. This motif, the author maintains, is structurally quite similar to more commercial horror movies dramatizing an encounter with the unknown. The chapter emphasizes the importance of a materialist interpretation of Tarkovsky’s films in which an encounter with the impossible and traumatic Thing is thoroughly devoid of religious and mystical connotations that often accompany commentators’ discussions.
This chapter compares the work of Wishman and Wakamatsu Koji, examining Wishman’s Double Agent 73/Deadly Weapon (1973, 1974) in conjunction with Wakamatsu’s contemporary works Season of Terror (1969) and Ecstasy of Angels (1972) and tracing how their concept of “erotic” was cinematized to cater to the commercial, sexual and political desires of the time. Wishman, as one of the very few female filmmakers, suggested new possibilities in the representation of female agency within male dominated field of erotic cinema. Wakamatsu, largely known for his radical leftism demonstrated how politics could be voiced through the erotic conventions of Pink Film. Following, this chapter traces how Wishman and Wakamatsu came to represent rule breaking and progressive cinema.
In this chapter, Banietemad speaks articulately and at length about her life and work, relating memories and anec-dotes concerning her childhood and her individual path to filmmaking. She also offers insightful reflections on the decisions and circumstances behind the making of some of her most prominent works, and emphasizes the endless inspiration she gets from the many different people in her country, and the social and cultural issues they have always faced.
This chapter considers the question of authorship in A Night to Dismember—a film commonly downplayed in Wishman’s oeuvre due to its stilted production and post-production history—and concludes that the film is quintessentially a Wishman film despite its critical denigration. Considering the film through three lenses—as a Wishman film and its attendant engagement with the hallmarks of her earlier filmography; as a piece of paracinematic horror that draws on/departs from trends of the contemporaneous slasher cycle; and, as an accidental evocation of avant-garde aesthetics—the chapter demonstrates indicates the impracticality of ever fully disentangling its respective authorial and generic influences.
This chapter considers the narrative and aesthetic challenges and creative decisions Jocelyne Saab faced in making her first feature film, Dunia (Kiss Me Not on the Eyes) in 2005. Dunia is a “re-invention” and exploration of many real issues facing Arab women. The film took Saab seven years to make, filmed in Egypt and produced in Egypt, France, Libya and Morocco. Confronted with stark issues facing women in contemporary Egypt, including the continuing tradition of female genital mutilation (then still practiced on 97% of young Egyptian women), as a former front-line journalist and documentary maker Saab found “the truth became too hard to tell”. No longer able to make stories representing reality in Middle-Eastern conflicts, Saab turned to the fictional world of feature film. To understand Saab’s development of narrative and aesthetics in Dunia, this chapter - based on interviews with the filmmaker - melds established screen studies fields including poetics and neo-formalism and the emerging field of script development to discuss the multi-faceted creative process of developing story, metaphor and meaning for the screen.
This introduction locates the volume within the rich scholarship on François Ozon and highlights his commitment to making films that speak to social debates and offer alternative models of sociality grounded in queerness. It also shows Ozon’s attachment to cinema as a tool to connect us all, how it is an integral part of the fabric of society as well as his attachment to words, text and naming. Considering that he has adapted a number of novels and plays and includes references to songs or poems in his work, it is clear that Ozon has a (self)referential approach to filmmaking, a true signature as an auteur and a commitment to social justice. This introduction then includes a summary of all 11 chapters and shows that if Ozon embraces ambiguity and ambivalence, this volume brings the necessary clarity to better understand his oeuvre.
This chapter seeks to analyse Ozon’s strategy to represent French womanhood and to bring forth his criticism of gender expectations and the political and queer dimension of the film. It argues that Ozon manages to empower the ‘trophy wife’ with the very means of her submission: credulity, candour and maternal responsibilities. Adapting a 1970s Boulevard play and drawing on the 2007 presidential elections, Ozon relies on the ghost of the past, of women’s liberation, to comment on contemporary matters.
This chapter offers a survey of her documentary works in search of a unique social realist approach to filmmaking. The chapter argues that, although Banietemad’s auteurship might be evident in her films through their recurring links and themes, it is in her self-reflexive documentaries that we really see her artistic and critical approach to telling stories about ordinary people in society.
This chapter explores the work of Doris Wishman and Carolee Schneemann, two women whose work explores the implications of being a woman, and what it meant to inhabit a body coded female. While the chapter addresses Wishman’s work in the context of exploitation cinema, and her cinema’s relationship to the more established avant-garde and the ways in which her work deserves placement in the avant-garde, it primarily initiates a conversation between Wishman and Schneemann’s work by analyzing the ways they both centralize female bodies in their films and demonstrate the complexities of depicting female nudity.
Jocelyne Saab’s legacy includes more than a dozen archive boxes, sorted by project. The first collection dates from 1993: every image she shot during the war was made as a matter of urgency, because the few archives she had kept burned with the rest of her childhood during the siege of Beirut by the Israeli forces in 1982. We know Jocelyne Saab for her work on the MENA region where she saw causes to defend or people to enlighten. But her archive offers a new, fascinating, roadmap for her legacy because as a whole it questions the strict Pan-Arabism that researchers and critics assume for her. It contains, among others, six unfinished documentary and fiction projects that would have been shot in Asia if she had found the necessary funding – projects planned in Vietnam, Hanoi, India. This chapter will discuss the unfinished work and Saab’s connection with Asia. This attraction that Saab had for Asia leads us today to reconsider differently a major part of her work and engagement, from the 1980s to the end of her life.
This chapter first situates the 2009 film within Ozon’s existing oeuvre and highlights its innovative aspects. Then, after an analysis of the ways Le Refuge/The Refuge further complicates visions of motherhood and kinship structures, the chapter – using references to Les Amants criminels/Criminal Lovers or 8 femmes/8 Women, among others, – discusses the film’s portrayal of fatherhood through the figure of Paul, an openly gay man and surrogate father to his deceased brother’s child. Finally, the chapter takes into account the French socio-political context and contemporary debates over LGBTQ rights in which the films seems to intervene.
Natale’s chapter addresses a particular class of ghost movies: the type in which the ghost is ultimately refused and relegated to the realm of human imagination and trickery. It focuses on the case of Paul Leni’s The Cat and the Canary to show how this film remediates a long tradition of spectacular entertainments based on the rejection of supernaturalism, and how such rejection has important consequences for the film’s narrative framework and the audience’s response. The chapter applies the concept the “spectralisation of the mind,” proposed by literary scholar Terry Castle, to explain the narrative and conceptual role played by ghosts in this film. After establishing Cat’s connections to the cultural history of ghosts, this chapter situates the film within the tradition of spiritualist exposés. This chapter also includes a broader discussion of the ghost film subgenre made popular by Hollywood between the 1930s and 1960s that proposed interpretations that denied the ‘reality’ of the world of ghosts and spectres.
Jocelyne Saab was one of the most adaptive and versatile filmmakers of her generation. This is evidenced by the creative work she produced in her later years, which took her literary voice, documentary eye, and personal experience of the Lebanese wars and those of its surrounding countries, into photography, video art, and cultural curatorial practice that expanded geographic borders. “The city has no center other than ourselves,” is the concluding line of her 2016 Imaginary Postcards, a 6-minute video homage to the bridge uniting East and West across the Bosporus, designed by Turkish architect Orhan Pamuk. This chapter will examine the work of her later years in light of their adaptive elements, particularly as the more flexible formats of video art, photography, and curation allowed for greater freedom to explore issues of culture that were of increasing concern to her: the culture wars between East and West; Arab women and Western feminism; the negative impact of increasing religiosity; the refugee crisis from regional wars. Describing herself as “a cartographer of the human condition”, she died seeking to understand the world around her as it continued to change, never losing the capacity to find wonder in a single frame.
This introduction outlines the main tendencies in Tarkovsky studies, the most salient of which are English-language auteur studies, methodologically based in film history and formalist analysis, and Russian-language hagiographic and quasi-theological monographs fostering the religious cult of the director. This chapter argues that most Tarkovsky scholars trained in Slavic studies are somewhat reluctant to enter into interdisciplinary dialogue with other film theories and philosophical approaches by relying more on the traditional (empirically oriented) methods of film analysis developed by film history and film hermeneutics. This anthology, the chapter argues, attempts to overcome the methodological narrowness of Anglophone auteur studies on Tarkovsky on the one hand and Russophone hagiographic zeal on the other by opening up the field to different theoretical approaches.
This chapter focuses on Saab’s role as a visual artist and cultural agent. This enables the author to highlight her artistic approach to film, while offering new background information to better understand her artworks. In the final years of her life, Saab developed her identity as a photographer, videographer and cultural agent. Shortly after the release of her feature film Dunia (Kiss me Not on the Eyes) in 2005, she created her first monumental art installation called Strange Games and Bridges, which was exhibited in the National Museum of Singapore in 2006. Still today, research on Jocelyne Saab’s role as a visual artist and cultural agent is scarce. This chapter of her life remains unwritten, it being an enterprise that will enable to place value on not only the lesser known aspects of her career, but on her career as a whole.
As a film historian and critic, the Years of Lead in the 1970s are his burden, which almost became fatal. When the Red Army (RA) in Japan split off into countless groups, the United Red Army (URA) – one of the most radical groups – fought a gunfight against the police in 1972. The Japan Red Army (JRA), another group derived from the RA, built a base in Beirut, working voluntarily for Palestinian refugees. Japanese women’s weeklies portrayed Fusako Shigenobu, the leader of JRA, as a female hero. When he met Jocelyne Saab in 2016, he was already familiar with her work. Their meeting was the fruit of a collaboration which the author reports here, around the last unfinished work of Jocelyne Saab: Shigenobu: Mother and Daughter. Yomota Inuhiko proposes to draw a parallel between Jocelyne Saab's intended narrative and the artist's personal biography, particularly in her relationship with her mother.
