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- Backman Rogers, Anna, 1981
(author)
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A dialogue with Julia Peirone
- 2019
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In: Mai : feminism & visual culture. - 2003-167X. ; :3
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)
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| 2. |
- Backman Rogers, Anna, 1981, et al.
(author)
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A Real Human Being and A Real hero : Stylistic Excess, Dead Time and Intensified Continuity in Nicolas Winding Refn's 'Drive'
- 2014
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In: New Cinemas. - : Intellect. - 1474-2756 .- 2040-0578. ; 12:1-2
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article sets forth that Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) exhibits a ‘complex transformation’ of an American film genre by foregrounding features associated with art cinema and, more specifically, European and auteur film-making. We argue that the film’s appeal derives precisely from an intelligent and cine-literate deployment of the tensions in this dichotomy of European/American film-making. As such, Drive is a film that foregrounds or reveals its own construction in a number of ways, but its appeal lies in the fact that it does not prevent intense emotional engagement on the part of the viewer. It is neither a cold exercise in mere style nor a simple copy of an earlier formula, but rather a film that manages to marry a number of narrative and stylistic features in such a way that the film itself, arguably, is not easy to categorize.
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| 3. |
- Backman Rogers, Anna, 1981
(author)
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Abandoning Happiness for Life: Mourning and Futurity in Maja Borg’s Future My Love (2012)
- 2016
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In: The European Journal of Women's Studies. - : SAGE Publications. - 1350-5068 .- 1461-7420. ; 23:4, s. 353-364
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)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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| 4. |
- Backman Rogers, Anna, 1981
(author)
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American Independent Cinema : rites of passage and the crisis image
- 2015
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Book (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Anna Backman Rogers argues that American independent cinema is a cinema not merely in crisis, but also of crisis. As a cinema which often explores the rite of passage by explicitly drawing on American cinematic heritage, from the teen movie to the western, American independent films deal in images of crisis, transition and metamorphosis, offering a subversive engagement with more traditional modes of representation. Examining films by Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola, this study sets forth that American indie films offer the viewer an ‘art experience’ within the confines of commercial, narrative cinema by engaging with cinematic time (as a mode of philosophical thought) and foregrounding the inherent ‘crisis’ of the cinematic image (as the mode of being as change). Key features Case studies include: The Virgin Suicides, Elephant, Dead Man, Last Days, Somewhere and Broken Flowers Argues for the relevance and importance of American indie cinema as a mode of ‘art’ cinema that offers a challenging viewing experience to a broad audience Engages with and develops on recent scholarship on American independent film from a formal perspective Situates analysis of indie film within the context of American generic cinematic (and historical) traditions
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| 5. |
- Backman Rogers, Anna, 1981
(author)
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And that I see a darkness : the stardom of Kirsten Dunst in collaboration with Sofia Coppola in three images
- 2019
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In: Film-Philosophy. International Salon-Journal. - : Edinburgh University Press. - 1466-4615. ; 23.2, s. 114-136
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst share a long-standing collaboration that has lasted from Dunst’s adolescence onwards and into mature womanhood. As a former child star, Dunst has grown up in front of Coppola’s camera and has come to be closely associated with the director’s rarefied and highly aestheticised cinematic world. I have argued elsewhere (Backman Rogers 2018) that a cardinal and abiding concern of Coppola’s oeuvre is how images come to be collectively and culturally understood; moreover, Coppola is especially concerned with how the (en)gendering of an image can either open up or foreclose sites of contestation . In this sense, Coppola’s complex deployment of Dunst’s onscreen embodiment of femininity is crucial to understanding how her images work on the viewer.
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| 6. |
- Backman Rogers, Anna, 1981
(author)
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Barbara Loden's 'Wanda' (1970): A Radically Negative Aesthetic.
- 2023
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In: Women and New Hollywood: Gender, Creative Labor, and 1970s American Cinema / edited by Aaron Hunter and Martha Shearer. - Ithaca, NY : Rutgers University Press. - 9781978821798 ; , s. 167-182
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)
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| 9. |
- Backman Rogers, Anna, 1981
(author)
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Feminism : “You Cannot Go Deaf to Women's Voices”
- 2023
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In: The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola / edited by Suzanne Ferriss.. - London : Bloomsbury. - 9781350244306 ; , s. 304-320
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)
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| 10. |
- Backman Rogers, Anna, 1981
(author)
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Imaging Absence as Abjection: The Female Body in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides
- 2018
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In: Screening the past. - 1328-9756. ; :43
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)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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