And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory

And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory

Anneke Smelik

Language: English

Pages: 229

ISBN: 0312211422

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


And the Mirror Cracked explores the politics and pleasures of contemporary feminist cinema. Tracing the highly productive ways in which feminist directors create alternative film forms, Anneke Smelik highlights cinematic issues which are central to feminist films: authorship, point of view, metaphor, montage and the excessive image. In a continuous mirror game between theory and cinema, this study explains how these cinematic techniques are used to represent female subjectivity positively and affirmatively. Among the films considered are: A Question of Silence, Bagdad Cafe, Sweetie, and The Virgin Machine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

of the film), Magda watches from the window as her father arrives in an open carriage with his bride. When he and the woman are asleep Magda kills him with an axe crying out 'father!', blood splattering all over them. Because this is the first fantasy scene the spectator watches within the film, it is only when s/ he sees Magda sitting with her father on the porch in the next shot that s/he realizes the previous scene must have been fantasmatic. The spectator has yet to 'learn' that the peculiar

Magda looking and each time somewhere on the land we see her father talking and presenting gifts to Anna who keeps running away. It is after these short scenes that Magda's fantasy of the breaking window occurs. In the next scene we first see the Baas and Anna on the land together before the camera cuts to a medium shot of Magda watching them from the porch, commenting in a bitter monologue on their affair. In another cut to her own room Magda continues her monologue Page 61 in front of the

cinematically constructed at the level of discourse while that very subjectivity is denied and eventually destroyed within the story. The opening shot introduces us to a young man staring out at the sea. In a voice choking with emotion he tells an undefined 'you' that he is still alive and is now living on this offshore cargo ship wreck, inviting the 'you' to visit him, Ludo. In the following shot we see him buying some food at the local pub and sending a letter to a 'Nicole'. Page 75 Back on

both the visual and the female body even more than was already the case in western culture. It is plausible to argue that the excessive visualization of contemporary culture has been built on representations of female sexuality. Cinema took an active part in the overproduction of textual and visual representations of the female body. This has resulted in a conventional, if not stereotyped, relation between the female body and sexuality. In cinema the mere appearance of a woman signifies

no more, but Dorothée will swing high on the machine of desire. Conclusion The ways in which female subjectivity and lesbian sexuality are respectively represented in the first and second part of The Virgin Machine are indeed very different to the point of dissymetry. Whereas the first part is marked by abjection, the second part abounds in parody and laughter. The film shows the liberating effect of working through the unconscious material of that fantasy for the main character Dorothée. While

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