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- Backman Rogers, Anna, 1981
(författare)
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Imaging Absence as Abjection: The Female Body in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides
- 2018
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Ingår i: Screening the past. - 1328-9756. ; :43
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Imaging Absence The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999) relates, via retrospective and acousmatic voiceover, the story of the Lisbon sisters. During the 1970s, the five Lisbon girls are born and raised in a strict Catholic household in suburban Michigan. As they are on the cusp of becoming your women, they all take their own lives. Their deaths trouble, haunt and distend the adult lives of the boys who grew up in their neighbourhood and came to worship the girls. Seemingly traumatised by the inexplicable nature of the girls’ suicide pact, the male narrator – who stands in for all of the boys who loved them – states that adulthood is a place where these men are “happier with dreams than with wives”. The Lisbon girls function as the catalyst for these dreams and come to represent a lost, halcyon past. While the film abounds with entrancing and mesmeric images, a careful reading of these sequences reveals their predication on a host of clichés and acts of wilful reinterpretation. At its most beguiling, the film betrays its own narrative. As the boys/men desperately attempt to relive, recapture, retell and make sense of the Lisbon girls’ tragedy (to render it meaningful), Coppola’s lyrical and metaphorical images exceed the immediate function of representation and elude the grasp of understanding. In other words, the film works on a formal level to unravel the task of making meaning that is set in place by its narrative. Here, the image is used and revealed precisely as a cliché, as Gilles Deleuze (2005) characterises it. [1] The Virgin Suicides is comprised of threshold images or images that strain at the limits of understanding. Their status as clichés serves to indicate states of breakdown and exhaustion: the place where understanding ceases and feeling overwhelms. The Virgin Suicides is a film that is predicated on the absence of the female body. It painstakingly examines the ways in which the adolescent female body is eviscerated of its meaty corporeality and recast as a priapic cliché. In visual culture at large, female phenomenological experience of the world is often denied. It is recuperated only as a shallow vessel capable of containing and shoring up the highly specific male fantasy of what a young woman should be. Coppola’s film stages the logical conclusion of what it means to lead such a whittled down and brittle existence in the service of a patriarchal agenda: self-annihilation. In reaction to a cultural and ideological regime of images that is imposed on the female body from outside of itself, The Virgin Suicides centres on effects of internalised violence and anger. At its devastating core, the film argues that real, embodied, fleshy female existence is nowhere to be found on-screen. It is with this absence (the absence of a void that haunts) that Coppola engages.
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- Backman Rogers, Anna, 1981
(författare)
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Abandoning Happiness for Life: Mourning and Futurity in Maja Borg’s Future My Love (2012)
- 2016
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Ingår i: The European Journal of Women's Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 1350-5068 .- 1461-7420. ; 23:4, s. 353-364
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- A dilemma, posed as a question, lies at the heart of Maja Borg’s poetic and alternatively distributed documentary film, Future My Love (2012): why do we labour so hard to sustain relationships that are fundamentally deleterious and corrosive to our wellbeing ? The detrimental bonds on which the film focuses are those that maintain our connection to an economic system that has thrown us into an acute state of crisis and the stillborn emotions that keep us attached hopefully to a romantic partnership that we have already outgrown; this elision imbricates and implicates the personal in the political . Indeed, Borg herself has stated that it was through the lens of her own personal loss that she was able to explore and to question our global relationship to an economic system that is fast failing us: ‘(t)he question that kept coming back to me was: if we know what is wrong with the economy and we know how to change a lot of what is wrong, why don’t we? I needed something in the film to explore that issue: why we don’t change the fundamentals of a relationship when it is hurting us. So, that’s when I brought in my experience of love – I needed something that was true to me, that I understood personally and that I could explain and make universal’ (in Fielder 2012). In the film’s opening moments, Borg addresses, by way of dedication, the idealistic lost love of her life (actress and activist Nadya Cazan), thus: ‘my only way to tell you what I could not then is to try to understand it your way: “Our global economy simply does not work. We have to find something new”. It is equally hard to learn to live without you.’ Through a prism of painful and, at times, unbearable emotion, and by blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, the real and the fictional, this film urges us to imagine ourselves into a future in which it might be possible to live otherwise; but this requires us to abandon the future we have already imagined and, as the film evinces through archival imagery from the 1950s or golden age of capitalism, imaged ourselves into. Moreover, the intimate nature of the voiceover that is such a prominent part of the film’s poetics – namely, its address from the first person to the second person – works to foreground reparative labour: there is a form of power in naming loss. By drawing on the work of Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed on the cultural politics of emotion, Judith Butler’s work on the act of mourning, and the writing of Eva Illouz, Luce Irigaray, and Alain Badiou on love (in the age of late capitalism), I set forth a (mostly) queer reading of Borg’s film as an intervention into traditional narratives of happiness. More specifically, the work of Ahmed and Berlant in particular engages directly with the notion of futurity as a promise within a critical context – a context that was powerfully and controversially outlined already by Lee Edelman in No Future (2005). In contrast to Edelman, though, Berlant and Ahmed do not call for us to reject the future, but to rethink the place from which hopefulness over the future emanates. As such, their work seeks to un-ground and destabilise those life scripts to which we so readily subscribe and to open up new ways of imagining and imaging life and the notion of futurity. In short, this article contends that Future My Love pleads with us to abandon ‘happiness for life’ (Ahmed 2010: 75), to forsake an ideology that is invested in a highly specific conception of what it means to flourish and to thrive, to mourn and name our losses, and to think about the future creatively and without cynicism.
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- Backman Rogers, Anna, 1981
(författare)
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Imaging grief and loss : Laura Mulvey's Death 24 x a second as film-philosophy
- 2015
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Ingår i: De Arte. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0004-3389 .- 2471-4100. ; :92, s. 11-18
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Laura Mulvey's work has always evinced a fascination with the still image. In her landmark article of 1975 on 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema', she extrapolates the essence of what the female body denotes on screen as stillness. As a filmmaker, works such as Marilyn distil sensual corporeality and stardom into a series of minute gestures that reveal the heart of identity as performance. With the publication of her book Death 24 x a second in 2006, Mulvey once again made a timely intervention into academic discourse on the future of the film image and the nature of the cinematic medium from the perspective of the still image as signifier of death. This article sets forth that Mulvey's work is best read in light of her interest in stillness as the very basis of the cinematic. As such, Death 24 x a second is not only a study of the meaning of the digital image and an assessment of its analogue history, it is also a film philosophy: a manifesto of what it means to be captured on film, how film functions as archive and its very materiality as a series of static frames.
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- Carroll, Joseph, et al.
(författare)
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A Cross-Disciplinary Survey of Beliefs about Human Nature, Culture, and Science
- 2017
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Ingår i: Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture. - 2472-9884 .- 2472-9876. ; 1:1, s. 1-32
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the “science wars” over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring patterns divided into two main sets of disciplines. Genetic influences were emphasized in the evolutionary social sciences, evolutionary humanities, psychology, empirical study of the arts, philosophy, economics, and political science. Environmental influences were emphasized in most of the humanities disciplines and in anthropology, sociology, education, and women’s or gender studies. Confidence in scientific explanation correlated positively with emphasizing genetic influences on behavior, and negatively with emphasizing environmental influences. Knowing the current actual landscape of belief should help scholars avoid sterile debates and ease the way toward fruitful collaborations with neighboring disciplines.
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