The London Film and Media Reader 2

The London
Film and Media

Reader 2
Essays from FILM AND MEDIA 2012

The Second Annual London Film and Media Conference
The London Film & Media Reader 2

is published by The London Symposium
on behalf of Academic Conferences London Ltd
This ebook is copyright material, protected by the laws of the
United Kingdom and under international law. It may not be
reproduced or transmitted by any means and in any form, in whole
or in part, without the permission of the publisher.
The individual essays which make up this ebook are copyright
material, protected by the laws of the United Kingdom and under
international law. They may not be reproduced or transmitted by
any means and in any form, in whole or in part, without the
permission of the publisher.
This collection copyright The London Symposium &

Academic Conferences London Ltd 2013
Individual chapters copyright the authors 2013
ISBN 978-0-9573631-4-4
Editorial Office
25 Miranda Road, Lower Highgate, London N19 3RA, UK
The London
Film & Media
Reader 2
The End of Representation?
Essays from FILM AND MEDIA 2012
The Second Annual London Film and
Media Conference
Edited by
Phillip Drummond
The London Symposium

Conference Proceedings Series
Advice to Readers
This ebook was created in PDF
using Adobe Acrobat Professional XI.
It can be read using most freely available PDF readers.
Individual chapters are bookmarked
for ease of navigation.
This ebook is distributed free of charge to those interested in our work.

No-one received payment for their work on the volume. You are invited to
make a modest donation if you would like to support us.
For details, please see our websites at
www.thelondonconference.com
www.understandingbritain.com
www.thelondonfilmandmediaconference.com
The London Film and Media Reader 2
The London Film and

Media Reader 2
Contents
Introduction vi-xiii
Phillip Drummond
Notes on Contributors xiv-xix
1. Textualities
1 / 2-12
Subverting the Classical Hollywood Paradigm:
European Directors and the Rise of Hollywood Mannerism
Jorge Manuel Neves Carrega
2 / 13-25
Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Film and Adaptation
Theory: Hardy's/Winterbottom's Jude the Obscure
Nigel Morris

3 / 26-35
The Dialectic of Ma and Sound: A Critical Reading of
Tru Takemitsus Music for Teshigaharas Pitfall
Lena Pek Hung Lie
4 / 36-43
The Golden Ratio in Time-based Media
Emily Verba
2. Modalities
5 / 45-55
Questions of Economics and Cultural Taste
in the International Flow of Film and Television
Sora Park
6 / 56-67
Beyond Representation: Documentary Films as Affective
and Hospitable Practices - The Nine Muses
Maria-Jos Pantoja-Peschard
7 / 68-77
The End of Representation? Faraldo's Themroc
Marta Jecu and Jos Manuel Gomes Pinto
8 / 78-84
The Classical World and the Cinema: The Return of Peplum
Stefania Gallotta
9 / 85-97
Cinemulacrum:
A Paradigm for the Teaching of Media Culture
Aaron Sultanik
ii
10 / 98-107
The Archive and the Witness:
When the Dead Help the Living
Kit Wise
3. Femininities
11 / 109-120
Representations of Gender, Labour and Identity
in the American Romantic Comedy
Dorothy Leng
12 / 121-128
The Visualisation of Sexual Difference
in the Early Films of Jean-Luc Godard
Esin Berkta
13 / 129-136
Malaysian Indian Identity and Bharatanatyam
in Menons Dancing Bells
Catherine Mariampillay
14 / 137-144
Mothering the Other:
Representations of Maternity in Natali's Splice
zm nal
15 / 145-153
Depictions of Eroticism and Sexuality in the Rain
Song and Dance Sequences of Bollywood Cinema
Vikrant Kishore
iii

16 / 154-164
Haptic Confrontations with the Archetypal Self
in Aronofskys Black Swan
Jessica Escue
17 / 165-175
Gender, Dress and Power: Transvestite Heroines
In The Post-WWWII Western Johnny Guitar
Christa van Raalte
4. Masculinities
18 / 177-186
Romance, Masculinity and the Star Image:
The Work of Leonardo DiCaprio
Julie Lobalzo Wright
19 / 187-198
Discursive Legitimation and Representations of
Subordinate Masculinity in Hollywood Cinema
Jonas House
20 / 199-208
Gay-Friendly Cinema?
J. Edgar and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Lynnette Porter
5. Crime, Violence and Horror

21 / 210-219
Ethics, Politics and Spectacle in the Representation
of Late Modernity: Elite Squad II
Jos Maurcio Saldanha lvarez
iv

22 / 220-229
Crime and Morality in the Work of Liliana Cavani
Daniela Chana
24 / 230-239
Childhood and Monstrosity in the Horror Film:
Interview with the Vampire and Let the Right One In
Joanna Ioannidou
23 / 240-247
Cinematic Violence and Society: Bollywood in Pakistan
Erum Hafeez Aslam
6. Narratives of War
25 / 249-256
Myth and Nostalgia in Cinematic
Representations of World War II
Daniel Binns
26 / 257-265
Cinma-vrit at War: Schoendoerffer, Vietnam
and The Anderson Platoon
Wajiha Raza Rizvi
27 / 266-276
The Vietnam War as Video Game
Dusan Kolcun
28 / 277-286
Contemporary Sri Lankan Art Cinema:
Civil War and an Alternative Nation
Vichitra Godamunne
Introduction
Phillip Drummond
Introduction
The essays which make up this Reader were presented at
FILM AND MEDIA 2012: The Second Annual London Film
and Media Conference, organised by Academic Conferences
London and held at the Institute of Education, University of
London, on 22-24 June 2012. Focussed on the central
question The End of Representation?, the conference again
celebrated, analysed and critiqued the screen-based
traditions of film, TV and digital media. In announcing the
event we invited participants to reflect on urgent issues to do
with a system of audiovisual showing and telling which has
clearly reached a point of exceptional sophistication, yet in a
world which remains so often grossly unsophisticated, and in
which cinema and other media remain, contrariwise, both
important and yet often powerless players. Here is how we
framed the conference in our Call for Papers.
vi
As media forms developed from the birth of photography

and cinema in the 19th Century via radio and television in the
early 20th Century and through to the contemporary digital
era, our ability to represent the world around us has grown
enormously in detail, scope and outreach. In radically
expanding the fields of sound and vision, these increasingly
sophisticated and widespread representational technologies
also broadened the base of authorship, production and
distribution, enabling a larger population of authors and
communicators to converse in an apparently flat system of
exchange.
At the same time, the audio-visual regime remains
dominated by powerfully capitalised and centralised agencies
which both assert novelty and yet reinforce representational
norms. The new forms of popular representation and
exchange, while potentially expanding the imaginary spaces
of the individual, thus face the challenge of finding a new
and significant social role, to go beyond what we might call
the generics of the given. A central focus of FILM AND MEDIA
2012 will therefore be the field of representation at an
apparent moment of plenitude in media evolution. Who has
the power of representation, and who lacks it? In a world
where we can show just about anything, why do we seem to
show so little? If anything can be shown, what is then the
value of representation? Can new forms of representation
find new things to say?
The Event
As in our launch year of 2011, the response was again
remarkable: more than 150 Papers were included in the final
programme, again making the event, we believe, the largest
home-grown UK conference in the field, and the most
vii
internationally diverse, with participants from some 40

nations in attendance. The event was on this occasion still
more special, a triple-header, again running in parallel with
our companion event LONDONICITY 2012: The Second
Annual London Studies Conference, and introducing
UNDERSTANDING BRITAIN 2012: The First Annual British
Studies Conference. These sister events together attracted a
further total of almost 70 Papers. The three events, under
our new overall umbrella The London Symposium, were
open to all participants, sharing Keynote Addresses, Panels,
refreshment breaks and a splendid Conference Reception.
Keynote Addresses were offered at FILM AND MEDIA 2012
by Professor Ian Christie (Birbeck, London), on The End of
Representation: Beginning with the Audience, a scintillating
account of changes in the nature of the cinematic experience
and its consumption by spectators, and by William Horsley
(Centre for Freedom of the Media, University of Sheffield),
who offered a magisterial and chilling account of the topic
Media Freedom? The Battle for Representation.
Our companion events were marked by powerful Keynotes
which took the themes of their respective conferences as
their lecture titles. For LONDONICITY, and opening the entire
event, Professor Jerry White (Birkbeck, London), focussed on
the rise of the multicultural metropolis in his lecture on
London:
City
of
Transformations?,
while
for
UNDERSTANDING BRITAIN Professor Denis Judd (London
Metropolitan University), took as his theme Great Britain: A
United Kingdom?. For more on LONDONICITY 2012 and
UNDERSTANDING BRITAIN 2012, please see our separate
ebooks of Conference Proceedings.
viii
Textualities/Modalities
The first section of the collection, Textualities, deals with
some of the basic conditions of the audiovisual. We begin
with an essay devoted to considerations of stylistic change in
Hollwood, entitled Subverting the Classical Hollywood
Paradigm: European directors and the Rise of Hollywood
Mannerism, by Jorge Manuel Neves Carrega. Nigel Morris
continues this close attention to textuality in his essay
applying and assessing discursive approaches to film
adaptation, in his essay Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Film
and Adaptation Theory: Hardy's/Winterbottom's Jude the
Obscure. We turn more fully to the acoustic dimension, and
to a different cinematic tradition, in Lena Pek Hung Lies
account of The Dialectic of Ma and Sound: A Critical
Reading of Tru Takemitsus Film Music for Teshigaharas
Pitfall. The temporality of cinema, as it relates to other
representational traditions, is the subject of Emily Verbas
essay, The Golden Ratio in Time-based Media.
The second section of the Reader broadens this concern with
textuality to consider a variety of media modalities. Media
products as objects of commercial exchange are the focus of
our opening essay here, Sora Parks investigation into
Questions of Economics and Cultural Taste in the
International Flow of Film and Television. The work of
Derrida is influential for the next two essays. Maria-Jos
Pantoja-Peschard examines the hybrid character of
Akomfrahs experimental documentary The Nine Muses in
her essay Beyond Representation: Documentary Films as
Affective and Hospitable Practices - The Nine Muses, whilst
in The End of Representation? Faraldo's Themroc Marta Jecu
ix
and Jos Manuel Gomes Pinto look back at an historic cult

film in terms of ideas about architectural deconstruction in
the 1970s. The final three essays in this section engage
variously with the modalities of history in relation to film and
media. Stefania Gallotta considers the recent revival of
cinematic interest in the ancient world, in her essay The
Classical World and the Cinema: The Return of Peplum, while
Aaron Sultanik develops ideas about the varying modalities
of media history, in his essay Cinemulacrum: A Paradigm for
the Teaching of Media Culture. Kit Wise considers the work
of a multimedia exhibition as a focus for ideas about memory
and the audiovisual, in the concluding essay here, The
Archive and the Witness: When the Dead Help the Living.
Femininities/Masculinities
The third section of the collection is concerned with ideas of
femininity. Dorothy Leng opens this with a discussion of
Working Girl and Bridesmaids in her essay on
Representations of Gender, Labour and Identity in the
American Romantic Comedy before we turn to European
cinema for Esin Berktas account of The Visualisation of
Sexual Difference in the Early Films of Jean-Luc Godard. The
two essays which follow concentrate on individual films.
Gender in relation to issues of national and class identity are
of concern in Catherine Mariampillays essay, Malaysian
Indian Identity and Bharatanatyam in Menons Dancing
Bells, whilst zm nal applies psychoanalytic theory to her
understandings of science fiction, in Mothering the Other:
Representations of Maternity in Natali's Splice.
Different mediations of femininity, especially in terms of the
treatment of the female body, arte at stake in the final essays
in this section. Vikrant Kishore examines changes in the
symbolic use of song and dance, in his essay Depictions of

Eroticism and Sexuality in the Rain Song and Dance
Sequences of Bollywood Cinema; female identity and
balletic dance, meanwhile, are under the microscope in
Jessica Escues Haptic Confrontations with the Archetypal
Self in Aronofskys Black Swan. The female body in virtual
disguise is then the subject of Christa van Raaltes Gender,
Dress and Power: Transvestite Heroines in The Post-WWII
Western - Johnny Guitar.
If Van Raaltes essay on female masquerade anticipates our
fourth section, Masculinities, then it is notably the case that
the essays in this section are concerned with newly evolving
images of masculinity itself. The process by which a male star
ages and matures, raising questions over his appeal to
audiences, is the subject of Julie Lobalzo Wrights essay
Romance, Masculinity and the Star Image: The Work of
Leonardo DiCaprio. The accompanying essays in this section
are concerned with alternative visions of masculinity in the
cinema, particularly terms of its engagement with gay
identity. Jonas House illustrates some of the challenges in
this area in his essay Discursive Legitimation and
Representations of Subordinate Masculinity in Hollywood
Cinema, while Lynette Porter compares and contrasts two
case studies in her essay Gay Friendly Cinema? J. Edgar and
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Crime, Violence and Horror/Narratives of War
The final section of the Reader examine some harsher issues.
Section 5, Crime, Violence and Horror, opens with a
discussion of crime cinemas reflections on Brazilian society
at a given point in history, in Jos Maurcio Saldanha lvarez
essay Ethics, Politics and Spectacle in the Representation of
xi
Late Modernity: Elite Squad II. Crime cinema from Europe is

seen as having its own set of ideological implications in
Daniela Chanas essay Crime and Morality in the Work of
Liliana Cavani. An adjacent genre, the horror film, is the
focus for Joanna Ioannidous consideration of Childhood and
Monstrosity in the Horror Film: Interview with the Vampire
and Let the Right One In. Concluding this section, Erum
Hafeez Aslam takes a different research approach in her
attempt to map links between cinema and society, in her
essay Cinematic Violence and Society: Bollywood in
Pakistan.
The war film, with its historically grounded mediations of
violence and ideology, is the focus for our final section. Ways
of remembering war are central to Daniel Binns essay Myth
and Nostalgia in Cinematic Representations of World War II,
while the Vietnam war provides the focus for the essays
which follow. In Cinma-vrit at War: Schoendoerffer,
Vietnam and The Anderson Platoon, Wajiha Raza Rizvi looks
at the complex mixture of documentary and fiction at work in
a neglected film account, while Dusan Kolcun looks at the
legacy of Vietnam through discussion of its reincarnation in
the different imaginary world of the videogame. Our final
essay returns to the role of cinema in definitions of
nationhood and national identity, Vichitra Godamunnes
Contemporary Sri Lankan Art Cinema: Civil War and an
Alternative Nation.
Conclusion
The essays which came forward for publication in this
collection give just a passing flavour of this large event. They
represent a wide range of expertise drawn from more than a
xii
dozen countries. Brought together in the mix are established

scholars, early career Faculty, young researchers, and
doctoral students. Their essays reflect a wide range of ways
of thinking about film and media. Following presentation at
the conference, they were submitted for the Reader with
some key editorial concerns in mind. They were to be
compact - not more than 3,000 words, just about the length
of a 20-minute Conference Paper - and they should be
unencumbered by extended academic apparatus.
The intention was to offer a formal record and celebration of
the event by publishing highly readable final versions of a
wide range of learned contributions. As Conference Director,
I could only attend, like any other participant, a small number
of the Papers at their point of presentation. Reading them as
a collection, therefore, and helping them to grow from
Papers into Essays, has furnished a wonderful opportunity
to extend my own understandings of the wide variety of
issues with which they deal. I am most honoured, as with The
London Film and Media Reader 1, to have been entrusted
with the task of bringing them to light in the second volume
devoted to this remarkable series of scholarly encounters.
xiii
The London Film and

Media Reader 2
Notes on Contributors
PROFESSOR JOSE MAURICIO SALDANHA ALVAREZ is an Associate

Professor of Culture, Communication and Urban Space at
Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil. He holds a PhD in Social
History. He has published widely on cinema, literature, culture,
history, modernity, Orientalism and Imperialism.
DR. ESIN BERKTA is an Associate Professor in Cinema and TV at
Mimar Sinan Fine Arts Izmir, Turkey. She holds a first degree in
Sociology from Middle East Technical University, an MFA in Graphic
Design from Bilkent University, and a DFA in Film and TV from
Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. She is the author of 1940l
Yllarn Trk Sinemas (2010).
xiv
DANIEL BINNS is An Australian film academic, screenwriter and

producer. In 2011 he produced The Code for Fox Sports, and The
Aussie Who Baffled the World for National Geographic. He is
associate producer of the upcoming French documentary
series Riviera Reverie, and is developing a feature film in 2014. He
has written on film form, transmedia storytelling, and the interplay
of media and philosophy. He also teaches Film and Media Studies.
JORGE CARREGA lectures in Film History at the University of the
Algarve and Art History and Local Heritage at INUAF, Portugal. He
holds a Masters degree in Comparative Literature. He is a PhD
student in Communication, Culture and Arts at the University of the
Algarve with a grant from the Portuguese Foundation for Science
and Technology, researching The Decline of the Hollywood Classical
Paradigm and the Rise of Hollywoods Mannerism. He is the author
of Elvis Presley e o cinema musical de Hollywood (2010).
DR. DANIELA CHANA is an independent scholar and author of
fiction, based in Austria. She holds a doctoral degree in
Comparative Literature from the University of Vienna. Her short
stories and poems have been published in international journals
and anthologies. Recent publications include essays on Italian and
American literature, independent cinema, and music video.
PHILLIP DRUMMOND is the Director of Academic Conferences
London Ltd. Educated at the University of Oxford, he has been a
contributor to the development of national and regional UK Film
and Media Studies since the early 1970s. He founded and ran the
University of Londons first MA degree in Film and Media, 19802000. Since 2000 he has taught British history, culture and cinema
for a range of US Universities in Britain, currently New York
University in London.
xv
JESSICA ESCUE is researching a PhD in Mythological Studies at the

Pacifica Graduate Institute, USA.
She holds an MFA in
Screenwriting from Hollins University, USA, and an MA in Radio, TV
and Film from the University of North Texas. She is in preproduction with her first feature film, Love is Dead.
DR. STEFANIA GALLOTTA holds a first degree in Classical Studies
from the University of Naples Orientale, Italy, and a PhD in
Historical Sciences of Antiquity from the University of Genoa. She
has been an appointed expert on Ancient Greek History at the
University of Naples Orientale for the past decade, and also in
recent years at The University of Molise, Italy.
VICHITRA GODAMUNNE is a Research Assistant at the
National University of Singapore. She has a BA in Film Studies from
London Metropolitan University and a MA in Communications and
New Media from the National University of Singapore. She worked
for a period in Sri Lanka in advertising and PR.
DR. ERUM HAFEEZ ASLAM is the Communications Manager and
Public Affairs and Faculty at the Institute of Business Administration
(IBA), Karachi. She holds a PhD in Mass Communications. She has
taught Media Studies, Journalism and Sociology in various leading
universities of Pakistan for more than a decade, and is also a freelance writer and blogger.
JONAS HOUSE holds the MRes in Sociology, Planning and Policy
from Sheffield Hallam University, UK, with a thesis on weird
masculinities in recent Hollywood cinema.. He holds a BA in
Sociology from Sheffield Hallam.
JOANNA IOANNIDOU is a graduate of Media and Performance
Studies from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her research,
presented at various conferences in Europe and the US, largely
focuses on monstrous narratives and their audiences, as well as
emotional engagement with fictional characters.
xvi
DR. MARTA JECU is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for

Research in Applied Communication, Culture, and New
Technologies at the Universidade Lusofona, Lisbon, Portugal. She
holds a PhD from the Freie Universitt Berlin. She edited Subtle
Construction (2011), on architecture and the virtual.
DR. VIKRANT KISHORE is a Lecturer in Communication at the
University of Newcastle, Australia. An academic, filmmaker, and
journalist, he has made more than 20 documentaries and corporate
films. His documentaries on Chhau Dance have been screened at
various international film festivals. A recipient of the prestigious
IPRS Scholarship by the Australian Government, he was also
awarded a Fellowship by the German Government at Heidelberg
Universitys Karl Jaspers Centre.
DUSAN KOLCUN is researching a PhD in the Department of English
and American Studies at Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech
Republic. He holds the Masaryk MA Teaching English Language and
Literature for Secondary Schools, following Masaryk BAs in English
Language and Literature and in History. In 2011 his MA Thesis won
the Czech-American Prize for Talented Students.
LENA PEK HUNG LIE is a Senior Lecturer in Music at Universiti Sains
Malaysia. She is a Japan Foundation Fellow whose publications
include studies of Takemitsus film music, John Cage, and selected
Malaysian composers. She led the editorial board for the Malay
language music dictionary Kamus Seni Muzik (2009).
CATHERINE MARIAMPILLAY is researching a PhD in Arts (Film
Studies) at Monash University, Malaysia. Her research explores the
representation of Malaysian Tamils in Malaysian independent
cinema. She also tutors for the Contemporary Film Studies unit at
Monash, with several years of teaching experience at institutions of
higher learning in Malaysia.
xvii
NIGEL MORRIS is Principal Lecturer in Media Theory, and Director

for Education and Students in the College of Arts, at the University
of Lincoln. He holds a first degree in English from the University of
Stirling, an MA in American Literature from Keele University, and an
MA in Film and TV Studies from the Institute of Education,
University of London. His publications include The Cinema of Steven
Spielberg (2007). He is a member of the Advisory Board for The
Annual London Film and Media Conference.
MARIA-JOSE PANTOJA-PESCHARD is researching a PhD at
Goldsmiths, University of London. She graduated in Philosophy at
the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She holds an MLitt
in Philosophy from the University of St. Andrews and an MA in Film
Studies from the University of East Anglia, UK.
DR. SORA PARK is Associate Professor in Communication and
Media Studies at the University of Canberra. She has written widely
on the economics of television, newspaper markets and other
information industries. She also has extensive experience in policy
research and consultancy regarding digital media in South Korea.
JOSE MANUEL GOMES PINTO is an Associate Professor in
Documentary Sciences and in Architecture at the Universidade
Lusofona, Lisbon, Portugal.
DR. LYNNETTE PORTER is a Professor of Film, Communication, and
Humanities at Embry-Riddle University, USA. Her books include
Tarnished Heroes, Charming Villains, and Modern Monsters (2010),
The Hobbits (2012), and Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century
(2012). She serves on the Board of Studies in Popular Culture and is
a contributing editor and columnist for the magazine Pop Matters.
DR. ANNA POTTER spent ten years working in the commercial
television industry in London for Rupert Murdoch's PAY TV
operation BSkyB, where she specialised in programme production
and classification. She is now a Lecturer in Communication at
Australias University of the Sunshine Coast.
xviii
WAJIHA RAZA RIZVI is a media professional, outreach consultant,

and educationalist based in Pakistan, and previously a Fulbright,
FCOSAS, and Chevening Scholar. She runs a small non-profit
organization which collects the archives and conducts research on
rapidly disappearing history of Pakistani cinema. She has produced
and directed documentaries, TV commercials, and TV quiz shows.
She is a member of the FILM AND MEDIA Advisory Board.
PROFESSOR AARON SULTANIK has thirty years Higher Education
experience. He currently teaches at Westchester College, USA. His
publications include Cinemulacrum: A Secret History of Film/Video,
th
1960-2010 (2012), Inventing Orders: An Essay and Critique in 20
Century American Literature, 1950-2000 (2003), Camera-Cut
Composition: A Learning Model (1995) and Film: A Modern Art
(1986).
DR. ZM NAL is an independent scholar who recently obtained
her PhD in American Studies from Kadir Has University, Turkey,
on Technology, Body and Gender: The Representations of New
Reproductive Technologies in the Twenty-first Century Independent
Science Fiction Cinema.
DR. CHRISTA VAN RAALTE is Associate Dean for Media Production
at the University of Bournemouth, UK. She was previously Principal
Lecturer in Media at Teesside University, UK. She holds a BA in
English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford, and
an MA in Cultural and Textual Studies from the University of
Sunderland, together with a PhD in Film Studies.
EMILY VERBA teaches in the Graphic Communication Design
programme at the University of Cincinnati, USA. She is the holder of
an international MFA in graphic design as well as MAs in Visual
Communication and in Iconic Research from the Basel School of
Design, Switzerland. She formerly practised in New York, creating
comprehensive design systems for a range of industries. She has
been widely published.
xix
DR. KIT WISE is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean in the

Faculty Art and Design, Monash University, Australia. He holds a
BFA from the University of Oxford, an MFA in Sculpture from the
Royal College of Art, UK, and a PhD from Monash. His work has
been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in Australia and Italy
and has been included in group exhibitions around the world.
DR. JULIE LOBALZO WRIGHT is a Teaching Associate at Queen
Mary, University of London, having obtained a PhD in Film Studies
from King's College London and MA in Film Studies from Queen
Mary, University of London.
xx
1. Textualities
1 / Subverting the Classical Hollywood

Paradigm: European Directors and
the Rise of Hollywood Mannerism
Jorge Manuel Neves Carrega
Cinematic Classicism and Mannerism

The emergence of Film Studies in the 1970s placed the
concept of the classical paradigm at the heart of an
academic debate that is far from exhausted. One of the most
important contributions to this discussion has been the work
of Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson in their book The Classical
Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to
1960, a major neo-formalist study published in 1985, in
which the authors offered an extensive analysis of what they
postulated as a classical Hollywood style characterised by a
"sense of decorum, proportion, formal harmony, respect for
tradition, mimesis, self-effacing craftsmanship, and cool
control of the perceivers response". 1
In the same year, in a Cahiers du cinema dossier entitled Le

cinma lheure du manirisme, Alain Bergala and others
introduced the concept of mannerist cinema, based on the
analysis of the work of a number of filmmakers who, along
with the painters of the second half of the 16th Century,
shared the feeling that they were living the end of a cycle in
cinema history, during which the perfection of a certain
mode of film representation had already been achieved by
previous filmmakers. 2
Bergala describes mannerism as a phenomenon occurring
after the cinematographic modernity of the 1960s and 1970s
and focuses his attention on contemporary filmmakers like
Wim Wenders, Brian de Palma and Jim Jarmusch. Since then,
the concept of mannerism has been applied to Hollywood
cinema of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s by scholars such as
Jesus Gonzlez Requena, Carlos Losilla, Philip Roger, Dominic
Sipire, Francis Bordat and Laurence Moinerau, whose work
has placed filmmakers such as Von Sternberg, Lang, Sirk,
Hitchcock, Minnelli, Fleisher and Corman in the context of a
Hollywood mannerist cinema that co-existed with the socalled classical paradigm.
As such, cinematographic mannerism cannot be defined as
an artistic period but as a trans-historical aesthetical trend
that manifests itself whenever a filmmaker, feeling the
weight of tradition, invests in formal detail and in portraying
manner as a way of relating to an established film style.
What then is the origin of Hollywood mannerism? How has
mannerism developed and what were the reasons behind its
development within a production system that imposed the
so-called classical Hollywood style as a paradigm? And what
was the role of European filmmakers in this transformation
process?
The Impact of Expressionism

According to Bordwell, the classical style had already been
established as the Hollywood paradigm when, in 1926,
William Fox decided to hire German film director F.W.
Murnau. Acclaimed for his work in avant-garde films such as
Der Letze Mann, Faust and Tartuffe, Murnau went to the USA
with the promise that he would have complete artistic
freedom to direct Sunrise (1927), a film that introduced
Expressionist aesthetics into Hollywood cinema. Murnaus
prestige helped to open Hollywood doors to German and
Austro-Hungarian filmmakers and cinematographers like Paul
Leni, Michael Curtiz, William Dieterle, Edgar G. Ulmer, Karl
Freund, John Alton and Rudolph Mat, but also to other
European directors such as the British James Whale and the
Russian-Armenian Rouben Mamoulian.
Indeed, the Expressionist influence introduced by this first
wave of European directors aesthetically defines a set of
films that marked the period of transition from silent to
sound film, such as Browns Flesh and the Devil (1926), Fos
Four Sons (1927), Lenis The Man Who Laughs (1928),
Dracula (1930) by Tod Browning with camerawork by Karl
Freund, Whales Frankenstein (1931), Hawks The Criminal
Code (1931), Von Sternbergs Shanghai Express (1932) and Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1932) by Rouben Mamoulian, also with
camerawork by Karl Freund.
In these works, the filmmakers revealed a clear artistic
ambition and abandoned the mimetic tradition of classical
Hollywood cinema, exploring the aesthetic possibilities of a
subjective camera and developing an Expressionist visual
style whose mise-en-scne sometimes resorts to an
abundance of decorative elements in the construction of

shots. In this sense, the work of Josef Von Sternberg and his
collaboration with Marlene Dietrich is particularly
representative of a style that broke with the naturalism of
classical Hollywood cinema. Under Von Sternbergs
directions, the actress offers a fully styled interpretation,
which becomes an essential element of a sometimes
delirious mise-en-scne, which is one of the founding
moments of Hollywood mannerism.
Like Murnau, James Whale also started his career in theatre
before emigrating to Hollywood where he had the
opportunity to work at Universal Studios. The German
influence is very clear in Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of
Frankenstein (1935), films that reveal the aesthetic sensibility
of the filmmaker in the development of an elaborate and
openly anti-naturalistic style. In the opinion of Andrew Sarris,
Whales work merits study "because it is so self-consciously
about performance, visibility, recognition and even
authorship itself". 3
The same could be said about Rouben Mamoulian, an
Armenian film director who studied with the Moscow
Vakhtangov drama group, whose stylised approach,
according to Santiago Villa, included the display of
representation mechanisms. 4 In Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1932), Mamoulian reveals the avant-garde influences of his
work through the use of visual metaphors and the subjective
camera of Karl Freund to achieve a complete identification
between the viewer and the main character, thus subverting
the moral code and the principle of transparency that ruled
classical Hollywood cinema. 5
Murnaus style also influenced American directors like John

Ford, Frank Borzage and Raoul Walsh, who were working for
Fox at the same time that Murnau was directing Sunrise
(1927), Four Devils (1928) and City Girl (1930) at the studio.
However the German director seems to have more lastingly
influenced the work of John Ford. Although during the first
decade of his career the American director had developed a
classical aesthetic based on Griffiths dramaturgy and editing,
from 1927 onwards Ford assimilated the European
Expressionist sensibility and constantly wavered between the
two major axes of his aesthetic training, Griffith and Murnau.
For Tag Gallagher, who divides John Fords career into two
main periods - before and after Murnau - Ford's cinema
became totally stylized and artistically conscious. 6 In fact, the
man whom many consider the classical filmmaker par
excellence also directed films like Four Sons (1927),
Hangman's House (1928), The Black Watch (1929),
Arrowsmith (1931) Air Mail (1932), (photographed by
Murnaus cinematographer Karl Freund), The Informer
(1935), Mary of Scotland (1936), The Long Voyage Home
(1940) and The Fugitive (1947), works that reveal a selfconscious formalism in sharp contrast to the transparency of
the classical Hollywood style.
Europe and America
Hitlers rise to power in 1933 initiated the largest-ever
exodus of European film industry professionals to Hollywood.
Directors such as Lang, Dieterle, Bernhardt, Preminger, Sirk,
Siodmak, de Toth, Ophuls, Wilder, Zinnemann, Vidor, Litvak,
and Negulesco sought refuge in the U.S. where they were
joined by the British migr Hitchcock - and in a few years
assumed an important position in American film industry,
introducing a set of stylistic and narrative changes with which

they gradually subverted the classical Hollywood paradigm.
With a cultural background clearly different from the vast
majority of their American colleagues, and an aesthetic
sensibility influenced by artistic vanguards, European
directors were forced to work in the controlled environment
of a production system that imposed a considerable control
over the works produced.
However, despite the link maintained with classical cinema,
the work of those directors marks a detachment from the
classical paradigm that demonstrates the mistrust of
European filmmakers towards the optimism and rationality
of a narrative and formal system that did not reflect the
values of a society traumatised by World War II. Developing
an alternative style to classical dcoupage, based on long
takes, camera movement, expressive editing and stylised
mise-en-scne, most European directors abandoned the
transparency of classical Hollywood cinema and developed a
personal style that Bordwell defines as "a highly selfconscious narration".7
Even if the first signs of a latent mannerism in Hollywood
cinema can be traced to the late 1920s and early 1930s, it
was at the end of World War II, and with the profound social
and cultural changes that occurred during the 1940s and
1950s, that we witnessed the definitive emergence of
Hollywood mannerism. It was during this period that
European filmmakers and cinematographers made an
enormous contribution to the development of film noir, a
genre which in Bordwells view represents "a criticism of
classical technique" 8.
Film Noir
In fact, more than a film genre, film noir was a style, whose
influence extended to a significant part of Hollywood film
production during the post-war years. Combining aesthetic
elements as distinct as semi-documentary realism,
Expressionism and Surrealism, film noir was characterised by
the adoption of an expressive visual style, which the
filmmakers used to show the emotional state of their
protagonists in a narrative that became increasingly more
complex and ambiguous, gradually replacing the optimistic
and idealised world of classical cinema for one of violence
and corruption. European filmmakers were thus pioneers in
the development of an introspective cinema with moments
of great subjectivity, in which we witness the fall of the
classic hero and the rise of the anti-hero.
In films such as Langs Scarlet Street (1945), Wilders Double
Indemnity (1944), Siodmaks The Killers (1946) and
Tourneurs Out of the Past (1947) the protagonists reveal a
moral ambiguity that turned them into victims of their own
weaknesses. In works such as Langs You Only Live Once
(1938), Ulmers Detour (1945), Mats D.O.A (1950),
Premingers Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), de Toths Crime
Wave (1954) and Hitchcocks The Wrong Man (1957) they are
victims of blind justice or circumstances that they cannot
control, reflecting a pessimistic view of society that
undermines a key principle of classical fiction, namely the
notion that people are in control of themselves.
The exploration of the emotional and psychological
dimension of the protagonists resulted in a kind of the
internalisation of the actors performance. Method actors
like Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Paul

Newman and Anthony Perkins were instrumental in the
development of a new acting style, focused on the inner
conflicts of the emotionally tormented hero.
Not
surprisingly, Freudianism and psychoanalysis emerged as
recurring themes during the 1940s and 1950s in films like
Hitchcocks Spellbound (1945), Bernhardts Conflict (1945),
High Wall (1947) and Possessed (1947), Langs Secret Beyond
the Door (1947), Minnellis The Cobweb (1955) and
Mankiewiczs Suddenly, Last Summer (1959).
Narrative Stylistics
The 1940s was also the decade in which the flash-back
became a common narrative device in Hollywood films.
Perhaps influenced by Welles Citizen Kane (1941), film noir
in particular, adopted the flashback device for the creation of
increasingly complex, non-linear narratives like Siodmaks
Christmas Holiday (1944) and The Killers (1946), Curtizs
Mildred Pierce (1945), Bernhardts Possessed (1947) and
Kubricks Killers Kiss (1955). The use of the flash-back and
the dream sequence (so common in European Expressionist
and Surrealist films) contributed to increase the subjectivity
of the narrative. In Stage Fright (1950) Hitchcock manipulates
the viewers expectations with the use of a false flash-back
and in Dmytryks Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Langs The
Woman in the Window (1944) both directors use dream
sequences to take the spectators inside the protagonists
subconscious mind.
The works of European filmmakers exiled in Hollywood
represent a decisive influence on the work of a generation of
American filmmakers who started their careers in the 1940s
and 1950s, such as Kazan, Minnelli, Aldrich, Ray, Fuller,
Kubrick and Frankenheimer. In films like East of Eden (1954),

Bigger than Life (1956), Attack (1956), The Killing (1956),
Forty Guns (1957), Some Came Running (1958) and The
Manchurian Candidate (1962), we witness the disintegration
of the classical style and the rise of ambiguity and formalism
as an alternative to the transparency of a style completely
subordinated to a cinema of genres whose conventions these
filmmakers would ultimately undermine.
The essence of mannerist cinema lies in the relationship
established between classical form and its distortion, image
and its reflection. It is not surprising to find among recurring
themes of mannerism a protagonist fascinated by an image
(a portrait) in which they project their own fantasies and
obsessions. This is the case in such films as Langs The
Woman in The Window (1944), Premingers Laura (1944),
Mankiewiczs The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947), Dieterles
Portrait of Jennie (1948), Lewins The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1945) and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), and
Hitchcocks Vertigo (1958).
Where the process of creating images and reflections is
concerned, one of the major themes of mannerist cinema
was, inevitably, the process of Hollywood filmmaking itself.
Films like Wilders Sunset Boulevard (1950), Minnellis The
Bad and The Beautiful (1952) and Two Weeks in Another
Town (1962), Mankiewiczs The Barefoot Contessa (1954),
Aldrichs The Big Knife (1955) and Rouses The Oscar (1966)
reveal, according to McElhaney, Hollywoods tendency to
look back on itself and take its own internal disintegration as
the starting point for a reconceived notion of the kind of
cinema it feels the need to produce. 9
10
Using Hollywood as theme in films that revealed the inner

problems of the dream factory shattered the transparency of
the classical style by questioning the myth of the star system,
as well as interrogating the studio system and by implication
its narrative and formal style. Wilders Sunset Boulevard
(1950) is perhaps the most important film in this cycle,
addressing the dark side of the industry (the frustrated
dreams of a young screenwriter) and articulating it with a
reflection on its own past in the character of a veteran silent
movie star desperately trying to recapture her past glories
and youth. Sunset Boulevard is a film about false illusions,
broken dreams and the faded memories of a distant past,
that echoed the anxiety of Hollywood itself as the 1950s
began to turn into the era of television.
Hollywoods mannerism is a reflexive and highly stylised
cinema that was born out of an awareness of its own past
and evolved from a crisis of the social, cultural and industrial
system that had originated the Hollywood classical style. That
was a paradigm with which mannerist directors established a
relationship of profound ambiguity that would ultimately
result in the subversion of those narrative and formal
principles, mainly through the adoption of European avantgarde film practices and the emphatic exhibition of style and
technology as spectacle.
11
Notes and References
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical

Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985, p. 4.
2
Alain Bergala et al, Le cinma lheure du manirisme (dossier), Cahiers

du cinma, no. 370, 1985, pp. 10-34.
Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, Chicago:

Da Capo Press, 1996, p. 187.
Santiago Villa, Rouben Mamoulian: El Estilo como Resistncia, Valencia:

Ediciones de La Filmoteca, 2001, p. 20.
Carlos Losilla, La Invencion de Hollywood, Barcelona: Pados, 2003, pp. 3031.
Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films, Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1986, p. 54.
David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern
Movies, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006, p.
182.
8
Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, p. 76.
Joe McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli,

Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006, pp. 144-145.
12
2 / Multimodal Discourse Analysis,

Film and Adaptation Theory:
Hardy's/Winterbottom's Jude the
Obscure
Nigel Morris
Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA)

Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) extends, to the fullest
range of practices and situations, the functional linguistics
developed by Michael Halliday. A central tenet is how
modern English expresses three strands of meaning
ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions
examined in authentic interactions, in specific social and
cultural contexts. Their products are texts: the largest
semiotic entities, experienced by makers and readers as
complete cohesive, coherent, meaningful, comprehensible
within contexts, which, inevitably, vary. Halliday aims to
understand why a text means what it does, and why it is
valued as it is. 1
Critical Language Study, the term used by Norman
Fairclough, examines verbal choices, contexts and meanings;
13
specifically how these implicate power relationships. Gunther

Kress, Theo van Leeuwen, and others extend exploration to
different semiotic modes.2 Multimodal Discourse Analysis
my conflation of a Kress and Van Leeuwen book title with
others by Kress and by David Machin embraces image,
music, sound, gesture, colour, layout, speech, and so on, and
is not medium-specific. 3
Kress and van Leeuwen invert language-centred analysis,
foregrounding Hallidays semiotic perspective to argue that
visual modes subordinate verbal language. Modes, although
not fixed entities as studied traditionally in linguistics, include
anything that a community uses as a sign therefore
everything, and possibly more, that already concerns film
analysis. To recognise a mode - such as typography, one
aspect in my study - necessitates considering social and
functional requirements, that is, whether there is a
community that uses a resource and whether it fulfils
Hallidays metafunctions.
For textual analysis this potentially replaces, problematises,
or supplements subjective interpretation with something
systematic. MDA posits that communicators including
producers, audiences and, for present purposes, analysts
make meanings by gauging the social environment, its
informing relations, and available resources (rhetoric). The
approach might thus help in reconsidering interminable, and
apparently insoluble, debates around adaptation.
Approaching Adaptation
My study of Jude resurrected a problem I thought I had
dismissed eighteen years ago: adaptation, by definition,
involves change. Adaptation cannot be neutral transposition
14
between media, for elements such as theme, character, plot,

and symbolism have no existence outside their activation in
decoding. Meaning is produced through signification, the
interplay of signs activated by the reader bringing to bear his
or her own discursive formation, including knowledge of
codes; it is therefore unique to each instance. 4
While poststructuralist adaptation theory rejects notions of
fidelity and translatability, MDA insists that similar meanings
are expressible across different modes within a culture.
Fidelity and translation are of course metaphors when
describing adaptation. Kress cautions against unquestioning
acceptance of all metaphors of which the idea of film
language is another while insisting that ultimately every
sign operates metaphorically. Texts, including written or
cinematic, recombine existing resources discourses and
intertextuality (which Kress does not address) to forge new
relationships and meanings.
Among the widest and most rigorous surveys of adaptation
studies, the work of Robert Stam recapitulates dozens of
methodologies involving scores of cases. Hundreds of
analyses examine thousands of adaptations from literature,
each text comprising countless discourses produced from
multiple influences, read or watched by tens or hundreds of
thousands. Immeasurable relationships link texts with
intentionally similar titles or other recognised affinities.
Kress appears to dismiss the notion of specific signifying
practices, or at least of inseparable form and meaning, while
recognising that visual communication is tricky to analyse
because images lack clearly discrete constituents, such as
words. In adaptation studies mostly originated in literary
rather than cinematic contexts confidence in languages
15
relative fixedness, implying permanent (canonical) meaning,

accordingly rubs up against fluidity and provisionality.
Film and Media Studies embraces, inter alia, proliferating
codes, discourses, intertexts, paratexts, technical and cultural
determinants, myth, and ideology. MDA, which considers
multimodality interaction of signs in different modes
normal and pervasive, as a unifying theory is necessarily
multidisciplinary. It therefore seems pertinent to adaptation,
which functions at the boundaries of texts, institutions,
audiences, and of the disciplines that study these. The
question is whether MDA surpasses new labelling of existing
concepts.
Approaching Jude
Discourses are apparently transferrable. The challenge is to
identify and explain these: not only textually but how and
why they got there. My study of Jude starts with textual
analysis: not the film initially but its trailer and poster, which
interpellate potential audiences and establish hermeneutics
that shape reading and reception. I then analyse two minutes
and forty seconds of the film, starting with the distribution
company card thereby opening routes into cultural,
commercial, legal, institutional and other contexts.
Materialist determinants - which complicate romantic
conceptions of authorship in adaptation, particularly with
relatively independent auteurs such as Winterbottom - allow
me to argue that European copyright changes prompted ten
Hardy adaptations between 1994 and 2008. These temper a
genre logic that demands difference within similarity a
further writer to follow on from the E.M. Forster and Jane
16
Austen cycles or judgements that Hardys content and style

suited him for the turn of the millennium.
My hope for MDA would be to avoid limitations grounded in
medium specificity. Reductive technological determinism too
frequently supplants recognition of conventions. Identifying
modes might prioritise understanding of what does translate
over obsessive recounting of what does not, as if anything
could be generalised from one instance. The aim is not
merely to describe multiple processes and interactions but to
explain how the film emerges from conflict and contestation.
Results, typically of MDA, are equally banal and esoteric.
Judes credits employ white against black. The Trebuchet MS
typeface Microsofts 1996 release for Internet use
represented modernity. This only partly mitigates Biblical
connotations of unassertive letters on a sombre background.
Typographic centring, Machin insists, evokes history,
formality, tradition, gravity, and momentousness. Context is
all-important, despite Machins rather dogmatic assertions
about what slanting or rounded letters, camera angles,
colours, and juxtapositions mean.
Judes future, carving headstones, relates these capitals to
deaths blackness, underlined by folklore connotations of
rooks cawing on the soundtrack. Im not sure these belong to
any formalised code: they are metonyms, resulting from
similarity with carrion crows. Their meaning is realised in
binary opposition with the baroque musical score when Jude
in Christminster pursues educational ambitions. Nature
accrues meanings the same way Kress and van Leeuwen
claim for colours: these are not signs, but signifiers,
phenomena that gain meaning from cultural incorporation.
Cawing persists, tying everything to the start a textual
17
metafunction - except in the city, where bells mock Jude and

foreshadow the death-knell for his children. Finally, when
Jude and Sue part at their childrens grave, these sounds
coincide.
The massive capitals that flash up the title (Futura
Condensed: Spacing Expanded) portend disruption and
enormity. Antithetical to the flowery elegance used in
Howards End (James Ivory, UK/Japan, 1992), they recall
graphics in Jean-Luc Godards politicised, exuberant
postmodernism, rather than nostalgic heritage. They again
suggest modernity, reinforcing the abbreviated title that
suggests a pared-down, streamlined adaptation which is
unafraid to acknowledge difference from the novel.
Landscape and Metafunction
Initially a slit of light traverses the top of a dark screen,
relating earth to oppression and sky to slim hope. Machin
asserts that sky generally connotes freedom of mind, of
time, from worry 5 evidently antitheses of Judes future.
Machin, having explored the Getty Images bank, comes to an
empirical conclusion. However, without knowing how images
are assigned key words, its unclear what systems enable
such meanings. There are different types of sky, usually
juxtaposed with something else.
Rather than revealing a code, Machins primary evidence is
that this response is common. Its no more authoritative than
my reading, which I could bolster with evidence elsewhere in
the film the textual metafunction and beyond. I however
concur with Kress and van Leeuwens assertion, based on a
November interior design magazine, that seasons have
discursively organised social and cultural meanings. Jude
18
starts in autumn or spring, with seeds newly sown, moves to

summer for romances to flower, and ends them in
midwinter. Unlike Hardys novel, it explicitly chooses
Christmas for the ironic end of Judes hopes for rebirth and
salvation.
High angles fulfil the ideational metafunction, associated
with logic and experience: how sense is made of reality. The
camera repeatedly offers a god-like perspective. Landscape
dwarfs characters, affording concomitant discourses
involving Fates indifference, insignificance of suffering,
Hardys theories about character and environment, or
politicised readings such as subjection to historical forces. If
an image system pertains, significance lies in combining what
camera positions connote generally with discourses brought
to it, perhaps from academic criticism.
As interpersonal metafunction concerned with makers of
meaning, their relationship, and attitude distanced
detachment addresses spectators as undergoing a serious
experience. Compositions simultaneously recall Far From the
Madding Crowd (Schlesinger, UK, 1967) a birds eye view of
sheep as Phillotson leaves for Christminster with young Jude
alongside and Jules and Jim (Truffaut, France, 1962) aerial
shots of steam trains among many homages positing a cineliterate audience, thus declaring reflexivity. Their textual
metafunction includes an image system of characters
constantly journeying.
Shallow-focus close-ups follow Jude traversing the screen,
alternated with frontal and rear shots and tracking from his
viewpoint. Framings, arguably influenced by reading and
writing conventions, establish left as the Given, right as
the New. 6 Jude, moving leftward, accordingly is rooted in
19
place. Phillotsons departure, mostly left to right, shows a

way out but moves also from low to high in the frame, which
Kress and van Leeuwen term real and ideal. 7 Z-axis
movements, subjective and observational, reinforce the
characters journeying, constantly diverted and thwarted.
Shallow focus, a telephoto effect, enables tight framing,
connoting constriction. It isolates the individual, as if carving
a slice from reality, his background nevertheless remaining
visible or reinstated by wider angles. This device, a British
New Wave convention, presents the protagonist as a type, in
social and economic context.
Characters in Motion
Alternating shots align with Jude. He passes hanging birds on
a gibbet while harsh contrast, sharp focus, and sunlight
through mist assert high sensory modality. This relates
discourses to physical perception, naturalising them while
embodying them materially, making them available for
analysis rather than implicit and abstract. Each scale of visual
modality (colour modulation and saturation, detail,
background, depth, light and shadow, tone) places Judes
opening high on truth, certainty, or conviction, associated
with naturalistic representation. Monochrome, Machin
states, is associated with timelessness or seriousness;
however, it equally connotes glamour, or even a particular
time period, as The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius,
France/Belgium/USA, 2011) exemplifies, a reminder that
context anchors meanings.
In this part of Jude, prologue to the tragedy, monochrome
signifies the past in contrast to the remainder, in colour. It
also furthers Winterbottoms anti-heritage agenda by
evoking social realism, where truth-claims came less from
20
naturalism than conventional association with news and

documentary. However, other intertexts, such as David
Leans Great Expectations (UK, 1946), complicate transparent
realism as Jude interweaves cinematic voices as Hardy does
with verbal discourses. A frontal close up frames Jude. A man
attacks from off-screen. The camera reframes and refocuses
to follow action, seemingly surprised, simulating spontaneity
a social realist device.
The farmers beating Jude for feeding birds continues in long
shot through drifting mist. The incident, recalling Pips
encounter with Magwitch, underlines similarities to the
opening of Leans classic adaptation, reiterating selfconscious claim to the tradition. The monochrome, bleak
landscape, boy anxiously looking around and running (as Jude
is about to), paired gibbets, harsh weather, and bird cries,
inscribe a homage (interpersonal and ideational
metafunctions) while establishing circularity with the end
(textual metafunction).
Transitions signalled by inter-titles maintain relentless
tempo, according with Judes vigour, physical and
aspirational. They also paint a frenetically active society. All
heads towards collision: a modern equivalent to Fortunes
wheel inexorably turning in the tragedy on which Hardy
modelled plots. Written information abstract modality
here evokes a literary schema to support such reading. Intertitles also, though, rupture invisible continuity.
They offer fleeting breaks from identification: for reflection,
at very least, that this is fiction, adaptation; in the Brechtian
sense, that the story could be different. Disguised by an
inter-title, a change to Academy aspect ratio from 2.35:1
widescreen letterboxed into 4:3 necessary for positioning
21
superimposed credits suggests, like the shift to colour,

alternative ways cinematic style could represent Hardys
novel.
MDA: A Critique
Stam argues that By revealing the prisms and grids and
discourses through which the novel has been reimagined,
adaptations grant a kind of objective materiality to the
discourses themselves, giving them visible, audible, and
perceptible form. 8 This seems not unlike what MDA offers.
The question is whether MDA advances or distracts from the
project. Does it improve on aesthetic, technical, and cultural
codes that inform audiovisual analysis, including semiotics
well-rehearsed procedures that can guide explorations of
meaning in both film and literature? Kress offers constructive
critiques of both Saussurian and Peircean semiotics, stressing
agency and making over adherence to convention; without
these, there would be no historical change in
communication.
Hence for social semiotics all signs are motivated. Design
returns individual agency (as origin/producer or receiver/
interpreter of communication) to academic fields in which
convention and discourse became dominant paradigms.
Structuralism, for instance, located meaning in the grammar
of the system, heralding the death of the author. Kress does
not however revert to liberal humanist assumptions,
relativist acceptance that meaning is entirely subjective, or
adoption of neoconservative conceptions of the primacy of
consumer choice. Rather his work describes how, say, a
filmmaker, a viewer, or an academic analyst of an adaptation,
participates according to how their present interests the
residue of past experiences that might otherwise be termed
22
their unique, however socially mediated, discursive

formation relates to anticipation of the effects of
participating. It acknowledges, without necessarily
lamenting, that participants meanings differ and that none is
automatically primary.
Yet I sense reinvention of spokes, hubs, rims, and tyres
without certainty of whats being assembled. Kress and van
Leeuwen write: We move away from the idea that the
different modes in multimodal texts have strictly bounded
and framed specialist texts, as in film where images may
provide the action, sync sounds a sense of realism, music a
layer of emotion, and so on, with the editing process
supplying the integration code, the means for synchronising
the elements through a common rhythm. Instead we move
towards a view of multimodality in which common semiotic
principles operate in and across different modes, and in which
it is therefore quite possible for music to encode action, or
images to encode emotion. 9
I dispute the fragmented model of film supposedly replaced.
Theorists have long acknowledged complex interactions. In
1911 Ricciotto Canudo described cinema as a synthesis of
classical arts, and later named film the seventh art,
recognizing its own additional codes and conventions.
Soundtrack analyses identify multiple functions including
predicative and predictive, applicable here to the rooks that
both affirm the reality of the diegesis and elicit foreboding.
Geometrical furrows stretching to the horizon in the
ploughed field figure parallel, predestined lives a conceit
justified by tracking shots that introduce Judes restlessness,
manifested in endless journeys. Image systems forge
correlatives for progress and constraints determined by fate,
economics, prejudice, heredity, law, or individual weakness.
23
Hardys Tragic Ambivalence

Uncertainty mirrors Hardys ambivalence: Jude hovers
between naturalistic determinism the train metaphor is
central in Zolas La Bte Humaine (1890) and its film
adaptation (Jean Renoir, France, 1938); tragedy untenable
with modernitys severing of organic relationships; and
Becketts absurdism, suggested by the minimalist opening
and senseless, disproportionate suffering. Furrows are,
nevertheless, human impositions on nature. Addition of the
hanging birds starkly conveys the idea Hardys Jude voices
about pervading ugliness reinforced on the soundtrack by
thin, discordant music and his rattle. Strung-up rooks
prefigure Little Judes fratricides and suicide, a grotesquely
misguided extension of Judes compassion.
Jude follows Hardy in what Peter Widdowson identifies in the
late novels as tragic form combined with realism, folk ballad,
melodrama, social comment and ironical, even satirical
tone. 10 Imagery and allusions provide audiovisual
commentary corresponding to insinuations of Hardys
different voices, down to the implication that a character
endlessly hurtling around is going nowhere fast. This, of
course, is interpretation. For commentators not grounded in
film theory and analysis, who include many concerned with
adaptation, MDA provides terminology and methods to both
identify and interrogate sources of meaning that might
otherwise remain impressionistic. For film specialists, it sheds
new light on existing procedures and assumptions, helps test
them against alternative approaches, and provides scope for
recognising additional features, whether to explain and
justify already formed interpretations or draw attention to
meanings that might otherwise be overlooked.
24
M.A.K Halliday, Introduction to Functional Grammar, London: Edward

Arnold, 1994, p. xxix.
2
Norman Fairclough, Language and Power, London: Longman, 1989.
Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse: The Modes
and Media of Contemporary Communication, London: Edward Arnold,
2001; Gunther Kress, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to
Contemporary Communication, London and New York: Routledge, 2010;
David Machin, Introduction to Multimodal Analysis, London: Hodder
Education, 2007.
4
Nigel Morris, Screen Adaptations of Lawrence, in Paul Poplawski (ed.), D

H Lawrence: A Reference Companion, Westport, Connecticut and London:
Greenwood Press, 1996, p. 609.
5
Machin, Introduction to Multimodal Analysis, p. 35.
Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, 'Front Pages: (The Critical) Analysis
of Newspaper Layout', in Allan Bell and Peter Garrett (eds.), Approaches to
Media Discourse, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, pp. 186-219; Kress,
Multimodality, p. 90.
7
Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of
Visual Design, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 193.
Robert Stam, Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation, in

Robert Stam and Allessandra Raengo (eds.), Literature and Film: A Guide to
the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, p. 45.
Kress and van Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse, p. 2.
10
Peter Widdowson, On Thomas Hardy: Late Essays and Earlier,

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.
25
3 / The Dialectic of Ma and Sound:

A Critical Reading of Tru Takemitsus
Music for Teshigaharas Pitfall
Lena Pek Hung Lie
Introduction
The concept of ma (), as a distinctive Japanese notion,
strongly asserts its presence not only in the traditional
Japanese arts and the daily life of the Japanese people but
also, perhaps, in the filmic mode. This essay explores Tru
Takemitsus film music for Pitfall (), directed by
Hiroshi Teshigahara, because of its palpable occurrences of
ma, in order to illustrate the possibility of reading films and
their music-tracks within the terms of this concept. This
study will also pursue the effects of the presence of ma in the
context of the interrelations between sound/silence and
image. The notion of ma in music is the space between
sounds - the silence between two tones which unfolds in
temporal space. This state of space/silence is a phenomenon
of profound intensity that is on a par with sound itself.
Hence, the paradox of ma involves the portrayal of moments
26
of silence filled by limitless events. Because of the volatility

of ma, a brief discussion might be useful of its meanings and
linguistic properties, and of its origins and presence in
Japanese culture.
Ma: Its Origins and Presence
The kanji character of ma - , appropriated from Chinese
ideogram, is defined as a space, an interval or the distance
between two spatial objects or temporal events. Hence, ma
is an interstice occurring within the linearity of temporal
space, and is central to the way Japanese perceive the
concept of time and space. In other words, the concept of
ma is unique to the Japanese as a philosophical notion. Ma
was introduced to the West by Arata Isozaki, a contemporary
Japanese architect, in his 1978/79 exhibition on Ma:
Japanese Time-Space held in the Muse des Arts Dcoratifs,
Paris. In his exhibition text Isozaki expounded this Japanese
concept based on the definition of ma in the Iwanami
Dictionary of Ancient Terms.
According to Isozaki, in spatial terms ma is the natural
distance between two or more things existing in continuity.
in temporal terms, the natural pause or interval between two
or more phenomena occurring continuously. 1 Isozaki also
points out that Ma organizes the process of movement
from one place to another. The stepping stones leading to a
teahouse determine the way one will walk over them, the
ma that is the interval between the stones determines
the walkers breathing rhythm. In relation to this process of
movement, michiyuki () in N and Kabuki theatres is a
journey scene which shows two characters conversing while
travelling together. Despite its diminutive movements,
distance is conceived of as a flow of time perceived through
27
the experiences of the two characters. In other words, the

distance traveled in michiyuki is the temporal duration in
which the characters go through a sequence of events.
Hence, ma is the distance traveled and experience endured
in continuity in a journey. Interestingly there are several
travelling scenes in Pitfall that clearly reflect elements in
michiyuki. thus substantiating Isozakis views on equating ma
to the process of travelling in a journey. At this juncture, a
brief account on the origins of ma in Shinto () and its
subsequent association with N and Kabuki theatres will be
of value in the study of ma, its significance and influences in
Japanese aesthetics and culture, and in due course its
placements and meanings in the music of Pitfall.
Isozaki also asserts ancient Japaneses idea of ma or space as
a void which kami () - divinities or spirits - were believed to
descend to and fill with spiritual force corresponding to
specific procedures and time. In response to this idea, the
Japanese then assigned a holy space known as himorogi (
), an empty square enclosed by four posts tied with a robe.
Hence, a himorogi has since been associated to ma in terms
of the space to which kami descend. To invite kami to
descend to the world, ancient Japanese conducted rituals
such as dance offerings and other forms of stage
entertainment that eventually developed into N () and
Kabuki (). Hence, the true audience of a N theatre
are kami.
In respect to ma in N, Richard Pilgrim explores Motokiyo
Zeamis (1363-1443) idea of moments of no-action to
illustrate its spatial nature and spiritual attributes. 2 In other
words, ma takes the form of such moments where no-action
occurs between actions in N. Moreover, Zeamis successor
28
Kunio Komparu (19261983) validates this philosophical

aspect of ma by reiterating and elaborating on Zeamis
notion of moments of no-action in N, acting is a matter
of doing just enough to create the ma that is a blank spacetime where nothing is done, and that ma is the core of
expression, where the true interest lies. 3
Komparu identifies ma as a negative space-time defined and
enclosed by positive space-time. In line with this concept of
ma, both types of space-time - negative and positive in N
theatre - manifest themselves through performers drama or
stillness of action. Hence, the invisible underlying dynamism
of performers in operation is said to remit profound
expression. Similarly Pitfall also demonstrates the negative
and positive space-time idea of ma in its music, manifesting
these in terms of silence and musical sounds respectively.
Hence the presence of ma in Pitfall can be deemed as
evidential.
Takemitsus Notion of Ma
As a consequence of Takemitsus rediscovery of the music
and musical instruments of his own tradition through biwa
and shakuhachi, he observes the complexity of a single strum
of the strings of a biwa or the dark and desolate/bleak tone
of a shakuhachi that consequently leads him to philosophise
on the abstract notion of ma in music as a metaphysical
continuity. 4 Moreover, he also relates the resonance of ma
to that of the sound that precedes and follows it, and deems
the silence of ma as a deep intensity that can stand up to the
sound. Hence these ideas further support Takemitsus
perception of ma as a complex and powerful concept.
29
In terms of sound and silence, Takemitsu points out that this

binary relationship cannot be displaced and overturned,
because both elements are interdependent and on a par with
each other, thus one cannot subjugate the other. Even
though Takemitsu ascribes the life giver of sound to ma he
also perceives sound as the ultimate primacy that yields
supremacy in the final expression, hence contradicting
himself by privileging sound over silence. Therefore, it is not
surprising that ma as an aesthetic is a significant element in
Takemitsus works as exemplified in his art music such as
November Steps (1967), For Away (1973), and Distance
(1972).
In relation to this, Donald Richie concurs with Masahiro
Shinoda that Takemitsus discrete placements of music as a
form of punctuation in scoring for Harakiri is remarkably rare
in film music: these discrete sounds always set against
silence, which either punctuate an event or, by delaying their
entrance, emphasize it. 5 Although these observations
highlight Takemitsus unique film scoring approach in
economical use of music, the possible presence of ma may
have been overlooked.
The concept of ma is not mentioned by Richie and Shinoda,
the former merely skimming over silence as a backdrop for
which discrete sounds perform their stylistic musical
functions in the narrative. Based on this lack of attention to
ma, I pursue a discussion on the presence of this silence - the
concept of ma, which Takemitsu also refers to as this
powerful silence which gives life to the sound .
30
The Distinction between Ma and Silence in Film

Music in films has an important role in manipulating viewers
emotions and dictating their perception of the narrative. The
effectiveness of a soundtrack in shaping viewers experience
of a film depends on the interactions between music and
image. While diegetic and non-diegetic music have an
immediate effect on how viewers respond to the image in a
scene, the absence of music silence, too, poses a strong
influence on their viewing experience, and in turn their
reading of the narrative.
In her wide-ranging study of film music, Claudia Gorbman
shows that, amidst the complex layers of sound and image
which form a combinatory mode of expression in film, the
absence of musical sound in a film is clearly an important
aspect. 6 Gorbman discusses three types of musical silence in
films which can generate powerful effects on viewers
perceptions - diegetic silence (we hear the sounds of the
world depicted in the film, without background music), nondiegetic silence (passages of the film has no sound at all), and
structural silence (where sound previously present in a film is
later absent at structurally corresponding points). 7 For the
purpose of this discussion, non-diegetic silence or silence in
the film music will be examined to illustrate the presence of
ma in Pitfall.
It should be noted that the notion of ma in films refers to
two states of silence silence in the soundtrack as opposed
to silence in the original film music. The celebrated battle
scene in Kurosawas Ran (1985) and interpolation of silence
in the scene at the night club in Irritus Babel (2006)
exemplify the former. The reasoning behind this argument is
31
that although the silence in these scenes is part of the

soundtrack, it is not originally designed in the film music and
is not organically present between tones in continuity within
a piece of musical composition, whereas within these films
music soundtracks too contain traces of the latter state of
silence. Furthermore, the presence of silence in the film
music for Pitfall also exemplifies this latter state of silence,
and hence could subsequently be viewed as ma in operation.
Ma in Pitfall
The narrative of Teshigaharas Pitfall consists of several
journey scenes - the opening scene in which the miner and
his young son trek out of a shack at the crack of dawn, the
journey scene of the miner and son to a coal mine where he
is promised a position, and the scene where the miner meets
his fate and is eventually stabbed by the man dressed in
white, which I perceive as projecting the concept of michiyuki
in N theatre. Based on these inherent characteristics of the
notion of a journey in both journey scenes in Pitfall and
michiyuki which show two characters travelling together and
the distance travelled is the temporal duration perceived
through the experiences of the characters, we may propose
that the concept of michiyuki in N theatre can be
considered as a principal filmic aesthetic in Pitfall.
The journey scenes and several other crucial segments in the
narrative are accompanied by music which contains
ostensible presence of silence - silence between tones in
continuity in the film music scored for two prepared pianos
and cembalo, thus suggesting the probable presence of ma.
An example of the presence of ma in the music of these
scenes is provided by the long stretches of silence
32
interpolated irregularly in the music of the opening scene.

Such economical use of musical resources which also
excludes diegetic sounds may reflect a sense of anxiety and
an atmosphere of apprehension in this particular scene.
Other examples of the presence of ma involve the sporadic
occurrences of silence in the accompanying music for the
chase scene prior to the first murder.
To further support the idea of ma existing in Pitfall and
consequently in film music, I suggest looking into another
corresponding element between music and N theatre
moments of no-action. As Zeami and Komparu remark,
moments of no-action between actions represent ma. To
grasp the notion of ma in the study of film music, movements
or actions in theatre art form are translated into sound in
musical art. When the concept of ma in N theatre is
translated into the domain of musical art, a no-action
segment in theatre parallels silence between tones in music.
Hence, while moments of no-action in theatre denote no
acting on the part of the actor, moments of no-action in
music mean silence between two tones in succession. It is
this notion of silence - ma - in film music that influences the
viewing and reading of the film. As musical sounds are
connotative signs which add another level to the diegesis,
viewing of the film deprived of sonic signification certainly
attributes to a sense of loss, uneasiness and emotional
confusion. Hence, moments of no-sound - ma - in the music
which accompany such scenes in Pitfall silently projects
limitless meanings on to the narrative.
Therefore, I propose that these journey scenes may be read
in terms of ma by adapting the concept of michiyuki and
moments of no-action in N theatre for the film music for
33
Pitfall. This adaptation opens up another dimension in

reading Pitfall as ma is the central unifying element of the
film. Given that both music and silence communicate
narrative information and exert subliminal power during the
film experience, the operation of ma in Pitfall goes even
further in affecting the perception of the films signification,
specifically in promoting a closer sense of relating to the
protagonist in confronting his every predicament.
Conclusion
While silence and its placements project varying meanings
and functions to the narrative of a film, ma effects emotional
and psychological perceptions on a metaphysical level. Ma
operating in the form of discrete silences between sounds in
continuity adds depth in terms of what is being portrayed. It
cradles the experience perceived by the protagonist, thus
exposing viewers to this experience.
Although such
experience is volatile, ambiguous, and contains non-audible
activities, its ultimate function is related to how one may
perceive the emotions of and circumstances endured by the
protagonists. Through the appropriation of ma in his film
music, Takemitsu influences the way the films narrative is
projected. As a consequence of this appropriation, ma
transcends the interrelationship between sound and image,
thus establishing another dimension in narrative reading. On
the whole, ma in Pitfall connotes danger, fear, anxiety,
agony, befuddlement, and shock the core expression of the
narrative lying dormant in the film music. Hence, ma is
possible in films but remains a volatile ingredient.
34
Acknowledgment
This essay is part of on-going research that was initially conducted under a
grant from the Japan Foundation. My participation in FILM AND MEDIA
2012 was co-funded by the Research Creativity and Management Office
(RCMO) and School of the Arts of Universiti Sains Malaysia. I am grateful
to Jonathan L. Chenette of Vassar College, New York for sharing his
personal copy of Isozakis exhibition text Ma: Japanese Time-Space, which
is now out-of-print. My appreciation also goes to Johan Othman of
Universiti Sains Malaysia for his suggestions and reflections on this essay.
1
Arata Isozaki, Ma: Japanese Time-Space, The Japan Architect, vol. 54,
1979, pp. 69-81.
Richard B. Pilgrim, Intervals (Ma) in Space and Time: Foundations for a

Religio-Aesthetic Paradigm in Japan, in History of Religions, vol. 25 no. 3,
1986, pp. 255-277.
3
Kunio Komparu, The Noh Theater: Principles and Perspectives, New York:
Weatherhill/Tankosha, 1983, p. 73.
4
Tru Takemitsu, Confronting Silence: Selected Writings, Berkeley: Fallen

Leaf Press, 1995, pp. 51-52.
5
Donald Richie, Notes on the Film Music of Takemitsu Toru,

Contemporary Music Review, vol. 21 no. 4, 2002, pp. 5-16.
6
Claudia Gorbman, Narrative Film Music, Yale French Studies, no. 60,
Cinema/Sound, 1980, pp. 183-203, expanded as Unheard Melodies:
Narrative Film Music, London: Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 1987.
7
Gorbman, Narrative Film Music, p. 194.
35
4 / The Golden Ratio in Time-based Media

Emily Verba
The Golden Ratio

Mathematics and visual communication share a long
symbiotic relationship. In their pursuit of order and beauty,
they find common ground through geometry. The golden
ratio is a mathematic and aesthetic phenomenon inherent in
nature, illuminated by Pythagoras and later elaborated upon
by Euclid in 300 BC. It is most simply defined as a line divided
into two uneven segments where the ratio of the entire
length to the longer length contained is equal to the ratio of
the longer length to the shorter length, yielding a ratio of
approximately 8:5. The geometry becomes more
sophisticated as this proportion is used to construct golden
rectangles, triangles, and other increasingly complex
36
polyhedra. The same logarithmic spiral drawn within the

framework of these golden shapes is found empirically in
nature, from the molecular structure of DNA molecules to
the curve of nautilus shells to the shape of galaxies.
It may be assumed that the manifestation of the golden ratio
in nature accounts for our innate enjoyment of it. The
conscious application of the golden ratio to art, architecture,
poetry, literature and musical composition has evoked
subconscious sensory enjoyment consistently since antiquity.
The age of antiquity would apply the mathematical principles
of the golden ratio to all endeavours in their quest to
understand beauty and truth; it was their belief that the ideal
human form possessed the proportions of the golden ratio.
The numerical outcome of the golden ratio, 1.618, may be
represented as the Greek letter phi (), after the classical
sculptor Phidias, who was said to have employed the
proportion heavily in his work.
Virgil utilised golden proportions as the underlying structure
of his epic poem The Aeneid. Philosophically, this was
explained by Aristotle as the golden mean a guiding
principle of living between the unhealthy extremes of excess
and deprivation. Although the Parthenon and many other
structural gems of antiquity employed the golden ratio,
knowledge of these geometric proportions had been
recognized and implemented long before that time, such as
at Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Egypt. From
buildings as diverse as Notre Dame Cathedral, Le Corbusiers
Notre Dame du Haut and the UN Building, the golden ratio
continues to improve the aesthetics and function of
architecture.
37
In 1202, Fibonacci (Leonardo of Pisa) published his Liber

Abaci, which explored basic computational mathematics. This
volume reintroduced a numerical sequence which was
known to Indian mathematicians as early as the 6th Century,
and soon took Fibonaccis name. In the Fibonacci number
sequence, each figure is the sum of the preceding two
numbers, and the division of any number by its subsequent
figure yields approximately 1.618 - the golden ratio.
Consequently, the numerical pattern formed becomes 1, 1, 2,
3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on to infinity. Fibonacci even linked
this number sequence to the breeding patterns of rabbits,
again establishing the uncanny existence of the golden ratio
in nature.
The Renaissance wholeheartedly accepted the golden ratio
as mathematical doctrine in its determined mission to
demonstrate objectivity. Simple rules would make sense of
the utmost complexities. Known in this time period as the
divine proportion, it was extensively used by masters of art,
science and mathematics including Leonardo, Alberti,
Michelangelo, Raphael, Drer and others. From the
compositions of Bach to the construction of the Stradivarius
violin, Keplers Triangle to Rembrandt, the golden ratio has
quietly embedded itself into the most functional and
beautiful man-made artifacts of history.
Art historians and psychologists have identified that the
human eye recognises and prefers the golden ratio, yet are
not able to pinpoint exactly why. In 1876, the German
psychologist Gustav Fechner measured the aesthetic
preferences of various rectangle proportions. He found an
overwhelming proclivity for those forms embodying the
golden ratio. Thus, Fechner proved that the golden ratio is
generally pleasing to ones sense of sight and touch. In
38
discussing these experiments, Rudolf Arnheim suggested that

the golden ratio may successfully combine unbreakable
unity with lively tension. 1
Humans relate to and gravitate toward comprehensible
order and patterns. However, our inherent preference for
and enjoyment of the golden ratio suggests the existence of a
subconscious natural order - innately understandable and
determined by mathematics. Use of the golden ratio in visual
communication may fulfill our need for order and balance,
while offering us the variety and surprise we also seek. The
golden ratios outcome is approximately 1.618. It is an
irrational number; never quite exact.
Beauty rests in this organic irregularity. Again, the root of this
phenomenon lies in nature and mathematics. The limitations
of the golden ratios irrationality enables the limitless, as is
illustrated in the endless logarithmic spiral. Just as the golden
ratio itself is an irrational number, time-based media are
irrational. They do not necessarily follow a particular
chronological order; the inclusion of time within the moving
image renders past, present and future indistinguishable.
Tension is born through irregularity of form, expectantly
giving way to elevated emotion and meaning.
Time in the Cinema
The application and aesthetic influence of the golden ratio in
two-dimensional production, such as painting and
photography, and three-dimensional production such as
architecture, has been extensively researched. It may be
assumed that the same aesthetic enjoyment and quality
experienced in two and three-dimensional space may be
translated into the fourth dimension of Time. However, the
39
application of the golden ratio to visual temporal proportion,

or time-based media, has seldom been investigated. The
outcome of the golden ratio, 1.618, may be applied to
duration, for example, through the establishment of golden
time-points.
The golden time-point in any duration comes at exactly
61.8% of its total length, and is considered the aesthetic
sweet spot in any length of time. Early experiments in cinema
were based upon the sampling of time. Analysis of films as
seemingly different as Eisensteins Battleship Potemkin and
Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey reveal the intentional use of
the golden ratio over the course of a feature-length film.
Kubrick begins the second half of 2001 precisely at the
golden time point of the films duration, preceded by a
dramatic, pitch-black, three-minute intermission complete
with eerie music. Similarly, Eisenstein begins the climactic
Odessa Steps sequence at the golden time point of Potemkin.
Eisenstein was fascinated by Pavlovian psychology, and
integrated these principles into his work. His groundbreaking
efforts in stylized film editing, or montage, paved the way for
modern filmmaking and other time-based media. Eisenstein
discovered through his innovative formal experiments that
rhythms edited metrically to mirror the human heartbeat
have a strong impact on an audience, as this pattern mimics
our biorhythms. He went on to define several primary
categories of montage. Metric montage emphasises tension
created by the length of shots. Rhythmic montage derives
the length of segments from the content within the frame.
Tonal montage uses the characteristic emotional tone to
drive the editing. The conflict and collision of images involved
in these methods of editing gives rise to narrative.
40
In Eisensteins view, film editing absorbed the audience much

more than the passive presentation of information through
long, static shots. In the Hegelian tradition, he offered
viewers the visual equivalent to thesis and antithesis, so that
they might arrive at a form of synthesis carefully crafted by
Eisenstein himself. These dynamic film sequence rhythms
had powerful effects on audiences. It was Eisensteins wish to
create these effects for revolutionary purposes; following
Marx, he believed the goal is not to understand history but to
change it.
Debates over formalism and naturalism, of course, mark the
history of the cinema. Naturalism argues that film should be
used to depict reality as it stands. Formalism argues for
artifice. Whereas formalism emphasizes the importance of
film editing, or montage, to stress difference and
juxtaposition, naturalism stresses similarity. Quintessential
opponents in this conflict were French film theorist Andr
Bazin and Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. A classic
proponent of naturalism, Bazin believed that montage was
too manipulative, and that viewers needed more room to
make personal interpretations through uninterrupted miseen-scne. Emphasis was on reality, not on the image.
Eisenstein, on the other hand, believed that art should
always represent conflict, as its social mission is to illuminate
and mirror the contradictions of our very existence.
New Media Experiences
Moving images allow us to temporarily escape our lives. They
are a window into an abstracted reality, simultaneously real
and unreal. Cinematic fiction is in fact in certain senses more
real than reality itself. This displacement of observed reality
affords the viewer a necessary and comfortable distance
41
which helps in understanding his or her own life. The

distances from which we experience moving time-based
images, however, have dramatically changed. Time-based
media are no longer relegated to the darkness of the cinema,
where viewers are immobile and fully focused on a singular
projection. In our hyperlinked and database-driven lives, the
world is viewed in fragments as we skim headlines and watch
videos while working, driving, and multi-tasking in general.
We are increasingly comfortable with our fragmenting
patience as such; our current reality is therefore best
depicted in fragments. This suggests that the naturalistic,
linear narrative is inadequate to modern experience and that
we may need other models to understand these new
complexities.
We now experience moving time-based images in a variety of
platforms and environments. What Barthes describes as the
pictorial tableau is long gone: the pure, cut-out segment
with clearly defined edges, irreversible and incorruptible;
everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness,
remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its
field is promoted into essence, into light, into view. 2 Our
phones, computers and tablets have become our tableaus,
and we are quite the opposite of immobile. Instead, we may
need to recast ideas about narrative in relation to ideas
about the database, drawn from the world of information
theory and the information society itself. Database, at its
most basic definition, is a set of elements not ordered in any
manner, yet accessible in a variety of ways. Raw film footage,
or time-based imagery which has not yet been edited, may
be considered a database of sorts. It is a readymade platform
which invites deconstruction and manipulation: a new
media object should fulfill two conditions: the juxtapositions
42
of elements should follow a particular system; and these

juxtapositions should play key roles in how the work
establishes its meaning, emotional and aesthetic effect.
These conditions would also apply to the particular case of
new spatial dimensions of a digital moving image. By
establishing a logic which controls the changes and the
correlation of values on these dimensions, digital filmmakers
can create what I will call spatial montage. 3
1
Rudolf Arnheim, A Review of Proportion in Arnheim, Toward a

Psychology of Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1966, pp. 103109.
Roland Barthes, Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein in Barthes, Image, Music,

Text, London: Fontana Press, new ed., 1993, p. 70.
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts:

The MIT Press, 2001, p. 147.
43
2. Modalities
44
5 / Questions of Economics and Cultural

Taste in the International Flow
of Film and Television
Sora Park
The Flow of Cultural Goods

Cultural goods, when traded in the international market, are
typically involved in a one-way flow from larger to smaller
markets. For example, Hollywood films and television
programmes have long dominated the international market.
The relative market size of the exporting and importing
countries determine the direction and amount of flow of
media products. On the other hand, media goods have a
home advantage, which reinforces the one-way flow among
those countries. Market size and cultural discount, as we will
see, are the two major forces that shape the influx of most
media and cultural products. Thanks to the public good
characteristics of cultural products, larger markets benefit
from realising economies of scale. In addition, locality or
45
proximity of the content is essential to cultural consumption,

reinforcing this asymmetry.
While this still holds true in the digital environment, there are
new ways of distributing content that lead to different
consumption patterns. Online social networks not only
distribute cultural content at a low cost but they serve as a
gateway to new content where consumers obtain information
about cultural goods. This instant access, paired with peer
group dynamics, enables content to be consumed widely,
sometimes outside of the traditional mass media. Whether
this new mode of dissemination will lead to market changes
is not yet clear. However, it is certainly is introducing a new
form of cultural flow.
Global Flow of Media Content
Data released by the Bank of Korea show a gain of more than
US$100 million in the first half of 2011 from international
revenues from media content and related services in Korea.
Media content industries in Korea have been growing
exponentially over the past decades thanks to the
attractiveness of the content overseas, where the rapid
growth of demand in Asian markets is a significant factor.
Television advertising market growth is the strongest in Asia
compared to other global markets.
Not only is Asia the fastest growing media market but it
makes up approximately one- quarter of the global TV
audience. According to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and
Tourism of Korea, in 2010 Korea generated US$187 million in
the global TV market, of which 90% came from Asian
countries. In just ten years, there was an increase of no less
than 1,327%. The Korean Wave is a term used to describe
46
this increase in popularity and consumption among Asian

countries of South Korean cultural goods, mostly films,
television dramas and popular music. However, this is not just
a cultural phenomenon but one also closely linked to the
economic gains of Korea.
Cultural products have been long been described as agents of
capitalism and ideology. However, much of the discourse was
heavily focused on worldwide Americanisation. Theories of
cultural or media imperialism explain the media flow from
First World countries to peripheral countries within the
context of economic, political domination of advanced
capitalistic countries. Media play an ideological role in
convincing people in peripheral countries to accept the
asymmetrical economic and political relationship with
countries which are dominant.
Dependency theorists claim that culture is merely a
superstructure built upon economic forces that justify the
existing social structure. Cultural synchronisation is a result of
the asymmetrical flow of communication which provides a
base for international dependency 1. Commercialised culture
penetrates the local culture, resulting in homogenous tastes
for cultural goods. Even though there are instances of
localisation, unequal patterns of media flow dominate the
global market.
On the other hand, microeconomic models tell us that the
one-way flow is a natural result of the economic forces of
media markets. Due to the public good characteristics of
media products, the size and quality are largely determined
by the size of the primary (domestic) market. The larger the
domestic market, the better chance of budgeting higher
quality content, which results in an advantage in the
47
international market. 2
The highly commercial and
competitive environment of Hollywood films, in particular,
enables the vast scope of the products that appeal to both
domestic and international markets.
Cultural discount reinforces this one-way flow by affecting
the media products from smaller markets more so than that
from larger countries. Cultural products are unique in the
sense that people prefer local content if other conditions are
equal. Given the choice of two similar programmes produced
in different countries, people prefer content that contains
familiar values and messages. By importing cultural goods,
the value is diminished to some extent. This diminution is
known as the cultural discount found in the economic
literature addressing the trade in cultural goods 3.
Cultural Proximity and Cultural Trade
Despite the fact that the overseas markets for U.S.
entertainment have increased overall, in some regions the
demand for local entertainment content is experiencing
growth. For example, there is a clear increase in the regional
trade of content among Asian, Latin American and European
countries 4 . Helpful here is Straubhaars concept of
asymmetric interdependence, which explains how countries
possess variable degrees of power and that they are not
dominated by one source or one countrys culture 5. The
concept of missing trade, the home consumption bias, used
in trade literature explains why people may consume foreign
products less than is usually predicted 6.
Quinns study found that media exposure affects the
consumption of foreign products because they function as
information about goods and change the attitudes about
48
foreign cultures. Missing trade can be explained by the

consumers bias towards his or her home country. This is
similar to the country-of-origin concept used in international
marketing field. Studies suggest that cultural discount is
different not only across countries but also across genres.
Certain types of content experience more discount than
others. For instance, cultural discount is found less in the case
of blockbuster films because of the broad target audiences.
That is, Hollywood blockbusters aim to reach the widest
possible international audiences and so adopt strategies to
minimise cultural discount. 7
The cultural proximity argument can be applied to the
pattern of regional television programme trade in Asia.
Among the programme exports from Korea, exports to seven
Asian countries Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, China/Hong
Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand accounted for 90% of
all exports in terms of revenues in 2008, and 86% in 2010.
However, when we look at the actual number of programme
exports, a slightly different pattern emerges.
The number of programmes that are exported from Korea to
the seven Asian countries reached 95% in 2005 but has been
on the decline (76.8% in 2007), which means the number of
countries to which Korea exports its programmes is
increasing. This trend is more obvious if we look at the
increase of exports in various countries. The top ten
importers of Korean programmes are mainly Asian countries,
but the annual increase in Korean programme exports is
greatest in the U.S. (1,040%), Israel (416%) and Turkey (282%)
as of 2010.This indicates that there are new markets for
Korean television shows, and that they do not necessarily fall
within the scope of ideas about cultural proximity.
49
Changes in Cultural Tastes Online

Digital markets show a consistent pattern. YouTube hits for
Korean music video (K-pop) occur mainly in Asia but the
second largest market is North America. In 2012, the music
video of the Korean singer Psy performing Gangman Style
went viral and as of August 26, 2012, only about a month
after its release, it had recorded 58,971,718 hits. By 9
September 2012, it had been viewed by more than 127
million people. Gangnam Style portrays cultural traits that
are unique to Korea, but it was widely consumed by young
people all over the world. This incident is not an isolated
anomaly but a critical point during the gradual process of
Korean cultural goods gaining global acceptance.
This suggests that there is another layer to the argument of
economic and cultural proximity that may better explain the
flow of cultural products. Cultural tastes are not fixed and can
be acquired, usually through repeated exposure. Due to
digital technologies, the costs of distribution have been
reduced dramatically. While this is an enormous concern for
copyright owners and artists, this widespread phenomenon
of free flow has enabled worldwide consumers of media to
be exposed to a variety of cultures.
While cultural discount is a useful concept that explains why
the US does not consistently dominate in all local markets
and why there are differences among import patterns in
countries with similar market size, it does not explain why
there are changes in trading patterns. Such trends indicate
that cultural tastes can change over time and that it is not
necessarily within the boundaries of the general definition of
cultural proximity that is based on national cultures. For
50
instance, despite abundant local production and sufficiently

large market size, there has been incidences where cultural
products flow into other countries. For instance, Brazilian
telenovelas are widely successful in Italy and Korean dramas
are popular in Japan. Another example would be Japanese
anime and Bollywood films.
Not much is known about how cultural factors change across
time. Several attempts have been made to explain the
process of socialisation or education whereby individual
culture is developed. Sociologists label this term as cultural
capital, while economists call it human capital. Both
concepts incorporate the idea that cultural tastes are built up
through repeated exposure over time. According to Moeran,
cultural proximity does not exist a priori but occurs a
posteriori. It is not something out there, but needs to be
subjectively identified and experienced by the audience. 8
Preferences and tastes can be explained by familiarity. People
prefer what they are familiar with and what they are used to.
How people acquire such tastes is another matter.
Psychologists have studied the concept of exposure effects in
numerous experimental settings and found positive
correlation between frequency of exposure and affective
preferences. 9 Tastes are acquired through exposure. For
instance, exposure by media or direct contact with foreigners
positively influences preferences for foreign countries and
culture. Furthermore, media consumption is known as one of
the sources for preferences for imported products. 10 Foreign
media exposure usually has the effect of forming or
reinforcing positive affinity to a country. Although the
direction of the relationship is difficult to infer, there is a high
correlation between preferences towards another country or
culture, products originating from that country and the
51
consumption of media products.

Changes in Film Consumption in Australia
The trends in Australian cinema might shed light on how
cultural exposure can be linked to cultural consumption.
Australia is one of the Anglophone media markets, where
common historical and cultural-linguistic similarities enable
them to share much of the media content. Films and
television programs flow from the US and UK into Australia.
However, in recent years, US imports have decreased slightly
in both numbers and box office share, whereas the number
of movie imports from non-US countries has been
consistently increasing. The increase in multiplex theatres has
enabled movie theaters to exhibit a more diverse array of
films. The proportion in the number of foreign films other
than U.S. imports increased from 21.2% in 1999 to 37.8% in
2009, whilst the numbers grew from 55 releases in 1999 to
133 in 2009. The box office share of non-U.S. foreign films
grew from 6.5% in 1999 to 11.4% in 2009.
The exposure to foreign culture in Australia has been
consistently on the rise. The number of visitors to Australia
has increased over the past decades. Australian Bureau of
Statistics records show that since 1980 the yearly increase in
permanent, long term and short term visitors has been 4.0%,
8.9% and 7.5%. If we examine the data from 1999 to 2009,
the average increase across the years was 6.0%, 11.9% and
2.79% respectively. Long-term visitors - those who stay more
than one year in Australia made up the fastest growing
sector among migrants. Even though the composition of the
population in terms of ethnicity has not changed dramatically
across the years, there is a certain trend towards greater
exchange across different cultures in Australia.
52
Cultural tastes are nurtured and developed with repeated

exposure, a process known as the accumulation of genre
capital. The ways in which people make meaning of cultural
content changes over time, and people are always searching
for new types and topics in cultural goods. Increasingly the
online networks are serving as a test-bed for new cultural
experiments. Online users are now exposed to a vast array of
content in a new way that no other platforms were able to
provide. This new means of cost-effective distribution has
changed the way users consume cultural products and thus is
transforming how people acquire tastes and preferences.
Co-existence of Market and Non-market Consumption
The digital networks open new opportunities of distributing
content in the global markets. Not only does this expand
opportunities for media producers who wish to distribute to
a wider audience in the global markets but its provides media
consumers with the tools to access, consume and share
various content that they test out on online networks. The
ability to get access to any type of content, even in the
absence of commercial distribution, makes it possible to
explore and consume new content. For example, in the Arab
region, prior to the exports from Korean media companies,
audiences have acquired a taste for Korean dramas through
online resources.
In Korea, a diverse range of American dramas is consumed on
digital platforms and then later introduced by cable
companies. There are numerous accounts of how markets
and non-market areas inform and complement each other.
Media audiences are no longer passive consumers but are
active testers, distributors and marketers of content. They
53
distribute their likes through social media, they interact on

fan sites and they consume through multiple platforms
whenever and wherever they are available. As a result, this
expands the opportunities of cultural consumers to be
exposed to a vast array of cultural content and eventually
build new tastes and preferences.
Acknowledgment
The research on which this essay is based has been supported financially
by the POSCO TJ Park Foundations Research Grants for Asia Studies. The
data presented here about the Australian cinema was generously provided
by MPDAA (Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia).
1
C.J. Hamelink, Cultural Autonomy in Global Communications, New York:

Longman, 1983.
Steven Wildman and Stephen Siwek, The Economics of Trade in

Recorded Media Products in a Multilingual World: Implications for National
Policies, in Eli Noam and Joel Millonzi (eds.), The International Market in
Film and Television Programs, New York: Praeger, 1993, p. 15.
Sora Park, China's Consumption of Korean Television Dramas: An

Empirical Test of the Cultural Discount Concept, Korea Journal, vol. 44 no.
4, 2004, p. 287.
4
B. Jaqui Chmielewski Falkenheim, Asymmetries Reconfigured: South

American Television Flows in the 1990s, Canadian Journal of
Communication, vol. 25 no. 2, 2000.
5
Joseph Straubhaar, Beyond Media Imperialism: Assymetrical

Interdependence and Cultural Proximity, Critical Studies in Mass
Communication, vol. 8 no. 1, 1991, p. 43.
6
Michael Quinn, Movies and the Mystery of the Missing Trade: Is

Hollywood Good for U.S. Exporters?, International Trade Journal, vol. 23 no.
2, 2009, p. 234.
54
For further discussion see Francis Lee, Hollywood Movies in East Asia:
Examining Cultural Discount and Performance Predictability at the Box
Office, Asian Journal of Communication, vol. 18 no. 2, 2008; Antonio La
Pastina and Joseph Straubhaar, Multiple Proximities between Genres and
Audiences: The Schism between telenovelas' Global Distribution and Local
Consumption, International Communication Gazette, vol. 67 no. 3, 2005;
Indrajit Banerjee, The Locals Strike Back?, in International Communication
Gazette, vol. 64 no. 6, 2002.
8
Brian Moeran, Perspectives in Business Anthropology: Cultural

Production, Creativity and Constraints, International Journal of Business
Anthropology, vol. 2, 2011, p. 58.
9
Robert Bornstein, Exposure and Affect: Overview and Meta-analysis of

Research, 1968-1987, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 106 no. 2, 1989, p. 278.
10
Sora Park, The Impact of Media Use and Cultural Exposure on the
Mutual Perception of Koreans and Japanese, Asian Journal of
Communication, vol. 15 no. 2, 2005, p. 183.
55
6 / Beyond Representation:
Documentary Films as Affective and
Hospitable Practices - The Nine Muses
Maria-Jos Pantoja-Peschard
Theories of Documentary
Documentary theory has often been restricted to the
question of whether such films can capture reality as it is or
if they are only able to construct and reflect on it. In
discussing documentary filmmaking and its potential for
articulating political criticism, Hito Steyerl has argued that
documentaries should neither be regarded as mimetic
reproductions of reality, as representations that capture the
true essence of facts, nor should these films be understood
as mere constructions of a reality that is inaccessible as such.
Instead, she proposes that the conditions of production and
representation ultimately determine the form of the
documentary and are expressed through it.1 Approaching
documentary in terms of expression allows us to overcome
56
the restrictive focus on representation, and to reflect instead

on how documentaries operate at the level of affect.
This essay considers John Akomfrahs The Nine Muses (2010)
in order to claim that documentaries that are self-reflexive
(documentaries that express their own forms of organisation
and thereby invite spectators to question their modes of
production, hierarchies of knowledge and modes of
distribution) not only target the level of affect but also can
give rise to ethico-political relationships between filmmakers,
viewers and filmed subjects. Drawing on Derridas
understanding of hospitality, I will argue that these are
relationships of hospitality and will conclude that if
documentaries can function as affective and hospitable
practices, they are able to render effective political criticism.
Like Steyerl, Trinh T. Minh-ha affirms that because cinematic
images are representations and mediate reality, they
necessarily involve staging and artifice. And since this is the
very nature of film, then a film which calls attention to the
subjectivity at work and shows the activity of production
[within] production, functions in a way which is most
natural, realistic and truthful. 2 What is seen as the natural
and the staged are not separated; they are part of the same
process of production.
For Steyerl, a good way to overcome the impasse created by
these realist and constructivist approaches is to understand
the documentary form in terms of expression, rather than
just exclusively in terms of representation. This in no way
means denying that documentaries are representational
practices. Instead, documentaries are representations that
necessarily bear an expressive dimension. Their potential for
57
political emancipation really lies in what they express

through their form, and not in what they represent through
their ideological content. The form of a documentary
constitutes an expression of social reality, that is, an
expression of the social relations, the conditions of
production and representation as much as the material and
aesthetic choices. 3 All of these social relations determine
the manner in which the film is put together; and so they are
expressed through the documentary but they are not
necessarily represented within the films content.
The Politics of Reflexivity
Steyerl further makes the point that documentaries made
politically - that is, documentaries that are able to articulate
a political criticism that questions and undermines social,
economic, political and/or cultural hierarchies - have as one
of their core traits that of being self-reflexive. By selfreflexivity, Steyerl means the films overt acknowledgement
that the images produced are made always through a certain
lens. It is important to note here that a documentary that
turns to reflect on its own production is not to be equated
simply with a film that adopts a certain method.
As Minh-ha emphasises, self-reflexivity should not be
reduced to a mere aesthetics, to a purely formalistic and
beautifying device. She claims that a self-reflexive
documentary has an open-ended form, a form that
challenges its own closure and thus suggests other possible
closures and meanings. It is here where the value of selfreflexivity lies, for it aims to prevent meaning from ending
with what is said and what is shown and - through enquiries
into production relations - thereby to challenge
representation itself. 4
58
The aperture to other possible meanings is, according to both

Steyerl and Trinh, what makes a documentary film truly
critical. A film that challenges rooted ideologies, and
destabilises the status-quo by putting under scrutiny the
representational function of cinematic images and sounds,
questions the authority of documentary representations as
depictions of reality. Thus, the meaning of a documentary
can be said to be political, when it does not let itself be
easily stabilized, and when it does not rely on any single
source of authority but, rather, ... decentralizes it. 5 Even
though every film is in itself complete in its own order, when
the film calls into question its own closure, it opens an abyss
on to other closures by defying a single and totalising subject
of meaning and of knowledge, hence undermining the power
relations that this subject necessarily fosters and maintains.
Representation and Expression
Steyerl argues that it is by means of what the images in
tandem with sounds express - rather than what they
represent - that documentaries can affect viewers and even
mobilise them. She proposes - following Brian Massumis
work on fear 6 - that documentary practice mobilises
spectators by way of affect much in the same manner that
power today addresses us [by triggering and] modulating
the intensity of collective feelings [and emotional
responses]. 7 Understanding the cinematic image in terms of
its affective modulation entails affirming that the image
operates upon us on a sensorial level, which in turn entails
that meaning does not reside (exclusively) at the level of text
or of language, but at the level of an embodied sensory
response.
59
I believe that Steyerls idea that documentaries made

politically are able to engage spectators not (only) by means
of their representational content, but also via what they
express through their form - where form is not merely
montage but also the relations of production, distribution,
circulation and exhibition that determine the film - is relevant
because it explains the political potential of documentary
filmmaking beyond the framework of representation.
Approaching documentaries in terms of expression and affect
allows us to consider aspects and social relationships which
emerge through this form of filmmaking. This is different
from the traditional question of representation and the
power relations existing between those represented and
those with the power to represent and to speak on behalf of
others.
I will argue that since what a documentary expresses can
prompt the spectator to have a sensorial response that
allows other meanings, then the hierarchical relationship
between those who represent, those who are represented
and those who are limited to observe such representations
can be challenged - and instead substituted - by a more
horizontal set of social and ethico-political relationships
among spectators, filmmakers and filmed subjects. I will
further conclude that if this is the case, then documentaries
are not only affective practices, but also hospitable practices
insofar as they can give rise to relationships of Derridian
hospitality.
60
The Nine Muses

Akomfrahs The Nine Muses (UK, 2010) is both a
documentary and a poetic essay that offers a meditation on
the experience of migration, on travel, epic journeys, and on
the ideas of being and becoming. The aim of this film is to
suggest a counter-history, a counter-mythology, and a
counter-memory of the experience of migration by reworking and re-contextualising archival footage taken from
films and newsreels portraying African, Caribbean and Asian
migrants in 1960s and 70s Britain. In line with his previous
work, The Nine Muses crucially revolves around the question
of whether it is possible to extract an image from the
narrative and chronology in which it has been presented, and
re-insert it within another set of images. Thus, the question
underlying the film is what sort of narrative (and mythology)
would result from withdrawing archival images and media
representations of the diasporas in Britain, and instead relocating them in another context of expression. As Akomfrah
affirms:
Diasporic lives are characterized by the absence of
monuments that attest to your existence, so in a way the
archival inventory is that monument. But its contradictory
because the archive is also the space of a certain fabulations
and fictions. So there needs to be a critical interrogation of
the archive. One of the important ways of doing this is to
remove the narrative voice If you remove one of the key
structuring devices from archival images, they suddenly allow
themselves to be reinserted into other narratives with which
you can ask new questions. 8
61
With the aim of challenging the common depiction of

migrants in relation to discussions about crime and other
social problems, Akomfrah draws on epic literature and
English and non-Western poetry including Homers
Odyssey, Miltons Paradise Lost, Becketts The Unnameable,
Sophocles Oedipus Rex, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and many
others. He uses these works throughout The Nine Muses in
the form of voice-over readings and captioned quotations
that serve as a background against which the
phenomenology of the experience of migration is explored,
but also as a lens providing a different approach to todays
much-discussed question of mass migration and its
representation in the media.
Akomfrah claims that in his film he was trying to understand
the process of becoming a migrant and the sense in which
migrant subjectivities seem to be always in a constant state
of arriving but never quite completing the journey, and so in
an endless state of transience and flux. Given that what
characterizes migrants lives is precisely the endless
displacement and rootlessness, then these lives can be seen
on a par with epic narratives - particularly Homers Odyssey.
Connecting archival images of migrants arriving, living and
working in post-war Britain to the Homeric myth and the
figure of the epic hero frees these images from their context
of expression and the narrative chains to which they were
first linked, thereby allowing them to say something
different, to create alternative stories.
Textual Migrations
As regards the use of recorded poetry in his film, Akomfrah
sought to convey that there is an underlying connection
between all the apparently disparate texts and migrant
62
subjectivities. The ontological mark of migrant lives, the

never-ending sense of in-between-ness, is a quality that is
shared by all human beings and not just by migrants. For
Akomfrah, the work of Beckett and Miltons Paradise Lost are
two examples that clearly attest to the fact that human life is
an interminable process. This existentialist rumination is
presented by way of the interweaving of archival footage and
newly shot material with the voice-over readings as well as
the dissonant and non-dissonant sounds and music. In this
way, the film simultaneously offers an investigation of the
experience of migration, and a philosophical contemplation
of the journey as a metaphor of human life.
The Nine Muses is divided into nine sections, one standing for
each of the muses of Greek mythology. In an oblique yet
lyrical manner, the muses of History, Epic Poetry, Choral
Poetry, Tragedy, Music, Astronomy, Comedy, Lyric Poetry,
and Dance are evoked through sequences of intertwined
images that shift between archival footage of migrants in
post-war Britain realizing everyday activities, and Akomfrahs
original filmed material depicting a snowy and icy Alaskan
landscape. While the archival images appear to deal with
constant movement, travel, and hectic urban life, the scenes
of frozen and desolate landscapes, by contrast, seem static
and meditative. In the latter, an anonymous solitary figure
wearing a coat which is sometimes red, sometimes blue and
sometimes yellow stands against, or trudges through, the a
virtually monochromatic snowscape, suggesting the sense of
alienation, isolation and the cold experienced by immigrants
when they first arrived in Britain.
The rich tapestry that Akomfrahs film achieves in the
assemblage of archive and newly shot work together with
the voiceover readings, the poetry quotations, and the
63
contemporary atmospheric music by Arvo Prt in tandem

with Schubert and some traditional vocal Indian music results
in an emotional recreation of the migrant experience; an
emotional map tracing the journey towards and the
encounter with the new land. The Nine Muses evokes the
sensorial and emotional impact that it was for migrants to
leave their countries of origin and arrive in Britain.
The film recreates the sense of strangeness and dislocation
and the cold that immigrants felt; and it does so through
coupling apparently disparate images and sounds in such a
way that there does not seem to be a definitive meaning or a
final closure to the film. Rather, alternative closures and
meanings emerge as possible to the extent that the new and
the archival images are shown to be independent or
detachable from the narrative chains in which they are
inserted. What this film suggests is that there is not such a
thing as a single narrative, nor is there an exclusive authority
to tell the story of migration to post-war Britain. The migrant
experience can be re-presented in many ways and from
many angles.
This aperture to other closures and meanings leaves the door
open for the spectator to ponder in what other ways the
migrant experience could be depicted, and what other
stories and memories could be constructed about diasporic
subjectivities. The questioning on the part of the viewer
entails a challenge to representational practices and hence
an undermining of social, political and cultural hierarchies
and the power relations presupposed by these practices.
Insofar as The Nine Muses engages the spectator in such a
questioning, then the film articulates a political critique and
can therefore be said to be a documentary made politically in
Steyerls sense.
64
Derrida and Hospitality

The fact that the film suggests an open ending and defies
hierarchical authorities, allows others to take part in the
construction of meaning. This, in turn, gives way to the
emergence of different social relationships. Indeed, in the
absence of one single subject of knowledge and meaning, the
social relationships created by the film seem to be more
horizontal rather than vertical, and more equal rather than
stratified. Such relationships between spectators, filmmaker
and subjects filmed can be characterised as relationships of
Derridian hospitality.
According to Derrida, hospitality is an aporetic concept
since its conditions of possibility are also at the same time its
conditions of impossibility. For hospitality to be possible, two
things are necessary. First, there needs to be a host,
someone who is in control of the household and decides who
can be guest and who cannot. However, for genuine
hospitality to be possible, there also needs to be an absolute
welcome of the foreigner or the stranger. This means that
the host has to refrain from placing any restrictions on the
reception of anyone who asks to be hosted. An unconditional
hospitality thus entails that the host give up his mastership,
which therefore implies that the first requirement for the
possibility of hospitality cannot be met. 9
Derrida uses the concept of hospitality in order to discuss
todays so-called problem of undocumented immigrants. He
argues that given that all the laws for the reception of
foreigners inevitably impose conditions on the welcoming of
new arrivals, these laws will always fail to be examples of
absolute hospitality and hence they will always do violence
65
and injustice. Derrida affirms that we must acknowledge the

insufficiency of these conditional laws, and strive to improve
them always in the spirit of absolute hospitality. In the face
of the impossibility of unconditional hospitality, however, we
are not to feel guilty of failure, for hospitality is never an
idealisation or a possibility that we cannot access. For
Derrida, the apparent inaccessibility that unrestricted
hospitality supposes actually opens up other possibilities
since it invites to consider what it would be like to step
beyond the threshold of conditional hospitality.
The Nine Muses can be said to exemplify Derridian hospitality
to the extent that it opens the threshold to contemplating
the myriad ways in which the experience of migration can be
represented and narrated, the myriad ways in which images
can be employed to tell the story of mass migration to Britain
in the 20th Century. Since this film thereby questions the
existence of a single source of authority, a single narrative,
and a single possible signification of the images, it allows
viewers to partake in the articulation of meaning. This, in
turn, means that the social relationships created between
spectators, filmmaker and subjects represented are no
longer vertically stratified, but rather horizontal and hence
ethico-political relationships, relationships of hospitality:
The Nine Muses, according to Akomfrah, is based on a kind
of recycling aesthetic; an idea of post-scarcity aesthetic,
which allows the possibility of re-use but for an ethical
reason. There is a reason to revisit memory; there is a reason
to revisit our past. And then to see whether stuff used in
films previously can say something else later. 10 In inviting
viewers to question and participate in the meaning of the
film, The Nine Muses functions as a space for hospitable
relationships and political criticism.
66

1
Hito Steyerl, Documentary Uncertainty, in A Prior, No. 15, 2007, at

www.aprior.org.
2
Trin T. Min-ha, When the Eye Frames Red, interview with Akira Mizuta
Lippit, at www.trinhminh-ha.com.
Zanny Begg, Making Art Politically: An Interview with Hito Steyerl, Berlin,
2007, at www.zannybegg.com.
Trin T. Min-ha, Documentary Is/Not a Name, October, vol. 52, Spring

1990, pp. 94-95.
5
Trin T. Min-ha, Documentary Is/Not a Name, p.89.
Brian Massumi, Fear (The Spectrum Said), in Positions: East Asia Cultures
Critique, vol. 13 no. 1, 2005, pp. 31-48.
Steyerl, Documentary Uncertainty.
John Akomfrah and Nina Power, Counter-Media, Migration, Poetry:

Interview with John Akomfrah, Film Quarterly, vol. 65 no. 2, 2011, p. 62.
Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques

Derrida to Respond, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
10
John Akomfrah, The Nine Muses: Q & A Session with Helen Dewitt,
at www.bfi.org.uk.
67
7 / The End of Representation?

Faraldo's Themroc
Marta Jecu and Jos Manuel Gomes Pinto
The Politics of Themroc

This essay on Claude Faraldos cult movie Themroc (1973) will
discuss the films apocalyptic vision of humanity, transmitted
through the break-down of social forms of urban existence,
and the way in which the medium of film is engaged in a
performative treatment of architecture. The film shows how
the annihilation of oneself as a social being means a way to
dissolve ones representation. This devouring of
representation itself in an orgiastic and cannibalistic scenario
is intimately connected with the break-down of architecture.
We recall Jacques Derrida's then contemporary
deconstructivist project for a critical, performative
architecture of which the event is a constitutive part. 1
68
The film starts by showing a French worker, Themroc (played

by Michel Piccoli) involved in a monotonous social routine,
imprisoned by his work, in his family apartment (shared with
his mother and his sister). He is under pressure from passersby, his fellow workers, and his bosses. Faraldo does not make
use an articulated language, with the actors shouting and
babbling in a both generic and dehumanising manner.
One day Themroc's nervous cough transforms into a roar.
When he gets home, he closes off his bedroom with a brickwall, smashes down the outside wall to the street to create a
cave, and throws all his possessions out of the window. His
orgy of destruction is contagious soon his neighbors from
across the street are doing the same and it's not long before
the media and the police are taking an interest. At the end of
the film, he commits incest with his sister and with his friends
kills, roasts and eats a policeman.
The strategy of liberation in the film revolves around an
attack on the immediate architecture of the living
environment. This destruction and transformation of space is
accompanied by a sexual revolution, disrupting bourgeois
family dynamics in a contagious manner. There is an explicit
resonance with the theory and actions of the Situationist
International (founded 1957) and the revolutionary
movements of May 1968 in France, when millions of people
occupied public spaces including universities and factories,
plastered Paris with anti-bourgeois slogans often inspired by
Situationist ideas.
Manifestly political, Themroc makes its aesthetic statement
through a functional and coherent reversal of social order,
balance and progress. Anarchic but also nostalgic, the
eponymous Themroc seems to be in search of a lost model of
69
humanity which, by means of vandalism and an apparent

return to chaos can regenerate and reinstate an atemporal
regime which no longer subjugates the individual to a system
which is profoundly foreign to him. Life become a visceral
form of cave-dwelling, with cannibalism providing a luscious
banquet, until the last scene stages a sort of nature vivante of
remains, in a progressive annihilation of self, environment
and of their representation. This latent, ancestral memory of
a pure time beyond representation belongs to a time of the
after which marks the possibility of surpassing an
established and dominant neo-liberal order that has lost the
means of critical self-analysis.
The medium of film itself is awarded a privileged position
here. In a deconstruction of the language of public media,
strategies of illustrating progress and social communication,
or of film's own function as carrier of public values, in the
case of Themroc, on the contrary, it is transformed into a
medium that depicts and transmits decay, the fading of social
norms and codes of communication. Themroc shows how the
medium of film can be reduced to a primordial mode of
communication, opening up areas closed down by the
progressive sophistication of representational techniques.
In this sense the film shows also how the medium negates
itself: by simplifying or completely annihilating mediated
devices for social communication (from which Themroc runs
away) and replacing them with a simple break in the wall, the
communication with others and the outside totally changes.
The film combats the tendency towards a progressively
increasing optimisation of media. The film is also used in this
context to show what cannot be shown, the reverse of social
values and of transmittable information. At the same time it
is not used as a medium of representing fiction. It is engaged
70
as a form of documentation of non-values, values that cannot

be retained in the historic archive.
The Banquet of Loss
Eating, we would suggest, is a form of inverted architectural
endeavour: through material accumulation and apparent
stabilisation and fortification, eating reveals nevertheless the
precarious and feeble nature of the human body. The body,
as another level of architectural configuration, also asserts
the necessity and the longing for another kind of non-bodily
food which is able to maintain and stimulate the profound life
of the human being. The struggle of Themroc for this
nourishment is pursued by means of a process of
elimination: by dismantling the oppressive burdens of society
and culture, he is in search of an a-historical, a-social and
non-progressive modality, in which society could truly feed
its members.
Eating or building can be seen as alterations or fracturing of
the spatial continuum of an object or individual. This process
can find its extreme form in the complete destruction as
denial of the authority of architectural models. By building or
eating, a destructed /reconstructed, non-hierarchical space
emerges which becomes performative. In the following we
investigate this banquet of loss as corresponding to the
creation of a performative and deconstructed form of new
architecture.
Performativity is regarded by Dorothea von Hantelmann as
being the quality of the works to manifest, to articulate in an
expressive way, to become explicit and to gain in this way a
power to create reality. This power develops independently
of the work's content: The performative of a work of art is
71
the reality, which it manifests by the force of its existence at a

place, in a situation, by the force of its production, reception
and lasting. 2 As an interpretative paradigm, performativity
could be applied in principle to any work of art. Each work is
performative simply because of its presence and can
therefore be assimilated solely by how it affects the viewer,
how it acts, how its affect the context. Performativity thus
makes concrete a potential for action, based on the
conjunction of art with the social. 3
In an interview on food and ingestion, Derrida proposed:
The concept of Erinnerung, which means both memory and
interiorisation, plays a key role in Hegels philosophy. Spirit
incorporates history by assimilating, by remembering its own
past. This assimilation acts as a kind of sublimated eating spirit eats everything that is external and foreign, and thereby
transforms it into something internal, something that is its
own. Everything shall be incorporated into the great digestive
system - nothing is inedible in Hegels infinite metabolism. 4
Relevant for the understanding of Themroc is also a
differentiation between human and animal, which in the film
becomes blurred. Contrary to what would seem to be the
case, we would propose that the film does not show an
animalisation of the human, but a regression into the
memory of lost ways of being human that carry their own lost
spiritual values. The re-assimilation of these lost values
presupposes a transformation of the human condition, which
the character Themroc performs.
In the same interview Derrida explains an important
difference between human and animal: for the human, eating
is always symbolic, in the sense of creating an inner space for
assimilating value: Hegel draws a distinction between mans
72
relation to the world and animals relation to the world as

two different forms of eating. Animals have a negative
relation to the object because they simply swallow it. Human
negativity, however, is reflected: man does not in fact devour
the object, but rather incorporates it abstractly, and thereby
creates the inner space that is the subject. Symbolic eating
always remains an invisible precondition of thought.
Cannibalism explores the hidden fears and desires inherent in
breaking the taboo which is destruction, and which at the
same time signifies the renewal of life itself. Cannibalism is
seen here as an inverted creation, which invests Themroc and
his friends with omnipotence. By eating the policeman they
devour an old order and gain the singular potential of
everything edible: that of sustaining life. Eating and building
are both processes of an active existential expression: food
can be understood as a vivid form of architecture, and
construction, as a consumed or devoured matter.
As well as not using everyday language, its images and
sounds become progressively unarticulated. These basic
elements of film decompose progressively, while showing
how everything in the depicted environment returns to a
state of raw material. While communication is only
conducted through groaning, the images become fragmented
and increasingly symbolic, until the last scenes are in effect a
non-narrative collage of the various architectural
environments of a decaying society, interposed with the
pleasures of the cavemen.
Deconstructivism in Film and Architecture
Architecture appears here destroyed, decomposed, a
remnant of a self-consuming society. It is depicted as a ruin
73
that society left behind, a leftover that in turn consumes the

individual. On top of this, we witness a kind of destruction,
that is not progressive (like the one that we see in the urban
environments depicted and which assimilates and annihilates
the individual) but regressive one that goes back in time,
dismantles the layers that society has added to the structures
in which and by which people live.
Destruction is shown as a means of restoring the individual
and bringing him back to himself, just as the medium of film
itself is fragmenting architecture and re-presenting a new
kind of dwelling that liberates the individual. The architecture
created by Themroc proposes a new structure: one that
incorporates movement, transformation, revolution, and the
medium of film is not only its support, but makes this
architecture possible. In the last scenes, the film creates a
movement between a broken, abstract, urban landscape of
prefabricated concrete buildings that seem completely
deserted, and the new anthropological forms of habitation
developed by Themroc and his friends.
Themroc - a meditation on architecture through the medium
film - makes visible those qualities of architecture that
reverberate not only with Situationist manifestos, but also
with Derrida's deconstructivist architectural theories, both of
them contemporary with the film. The so-called
deconstructivist architectural style developed in the 1980s,
and its protagonists Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, Frank
Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and the group Coop Himmelblau, were
trying to materialise the philosophical teachings of Derrida
and transposed them, under his initial supervision,
programmatically into a new alphabet of forms.
An architecture for living sometimes emerged, for example, in
74
which it was impossible to live. In the private houses of Peter

Eisenman, for example, there was no access to the bed, there
were holes in the living room floor, and stairs leading to
nowhere. Functionality is nevertheless rather negated than
reformulated and this formal negation transformed into a
style that finally inverted the initial project of Derrida that
of creating an architecture that surpasses its function and its
formal determination. The 1988 MOMA exhibition
Deconstructivist Architecture, curated by Philip Johnson and
Mark Wigley, showcased the most representative pieces from
recent years.
Unlike the programmatic realisation of a deconstructivist
architecture coming from the discipline of architecture itself,
through a multimedia approach and the inclusion of
movement and the unexpected into the body of architecture,
artists developed progressively an architecture of the event
that approximated the idea of Derrida. From the early works
of Gordon Matta-Clark from the mid-70s to the recent works
of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, an architecture emerged that is by
its essence not subordinated to the function of dwelling and
that exists only in interaction.
In many of his texts and interviews Derrida underlines that
deconstruction cannot become a technique in architecture
and most of all it should not consist in the de-construction of
something already built. Deconstruction has for him its own
rhetoric, which dictates no formal precepts, but on the
contrary should introduce a new way of thinking. As part of a
series of experiments with architecture, coming rather from
art than from architecture as a discipline, Themroc developed
a new way of thinking about architecture, mainly through its
multi-media approach, presenting a performative
architecture that results from film and physical (inter)action.
75
Derrida speaks of plural deconstructivisms, in order to stress

5
He affirms that
the heterogeneity of the concept.
Deconstructivism cannot be seen as a phenomenon of
modernism, and even less of postmodernism (as it had been
interpreted). It can be recognizable in certain ways of
thinking: Deconstruction is not only a technique of an
architect that knows how he can deconstruct something that
has been already constructed. From here we can pass to what
deconstruction connects to writing: its space, thinking as a
path, the opening of a way, which without knowing where it
leads leaves its traces. 6
Derrida understands architecture as the writing of space, the
creation of a dimension for the event, the creation of a
constructional event - a scenography of the transition, that
invents a place, which does not overlast through the stability
of its affirmation, but by sequence, open seriality, narrativity,
the kinematic, dramaturgy, choreography. 7 Derrida also
stresses that the architectural work cannot be understood or
even exist without the existence of its users. At the same
time, his vision of architecture is not an abode, a home, but
should be conceived rather as a undermining of the tectonic
influences of architecture.
An-architecture is one that surpassed its functions of
habitation, so its Heideggerian dwelling function. In
Themroc, besides the architectural conception of the plot - in
the course of the film a building is destroyed, and space is
released - the last scenes of the film reassure us that
architecture is the medium through which Faraldo intends to
construct his discourse. The character Themroc is literally reinventing it: finding its new uses and most of all preparing it
for the present. The association to Derrida's concept of
76
maintenant larchitecture is relevant for the imagining of an

architecture that is maintained for the present and is infused
by it.
Notes and Preferences
1
Deconstruction is considered to have its point of departure in Jacques

Derrida's influential book Of Grammatology (1967; Baltimaore, MD: John
Hopkins University Press, 1998). His first text on architecture was Point de
folie - Maintenant l'architecture (1986), published with a collection of
Bernard Tschumis drawings as La Case Vide, La Villette 1985, London:
Architectural Association, 1986.
Dorothea Von Hantelmann, How to do Things with Art, Zrich: Diaphanes

2007, pp.11-12.
Von Hantelmann, How to do Things with Art, p. 18.
Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson, An Interview with Jacques Derrida

on the Limits of Digestion, www.e-flux.com, Journal, no. 2, 2009.
5
Jacques Derrida in discussion with Christopher Norris in Andreas

Papadakis (ed.), Dekonstruktivismus: Eine Anthologie, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,
1996, pp. 73-78.
Architecture Where the Desire May Live, Dialogue between Jacques

Derrida and Eva Meyer, in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A
Reader on Cultural Theory, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 319-323.
7
Jacques Derrida, 'Point de la Folie - Maintenant l Architecture', in Leach,

Rethinking Architecture, pp. 324-336, Section 3.
77
8 / The Classical World and the Cinema:

The Return of Peplum?
Stefania Gallotta
Graeco-Roman antiquity has fascinated filmmakers since the

dawn of cinema, so that early films on the subject - known
generically as peplum - happily took the heroes of Greek and
Roman antiquity as their protagonists. These films reached
their apoge in the 1950s and 1960s, but then went into
decline. After a long period of silence, films dealing with this
epoch were re-launched with Ridley Scotts Gladiator (2000),
and now appear to be back in vogue.1 I would like therefore
to dwell upon three such films which have attracted popular
and critical interest: from Hollywood, Zack Snyders 300
(2006), Oliver Stones Alexander (first version, 2004), and
from Spain, Alejander Amenbars Agora (2009). I will not
take an interest in the question of their historical
truthfulness, but I will consider the reasons their directors
chose this kind of film in a particular historical moment.
78
300
Snyders 300, based on Frank Millers comic book of 1999,
plays on the contrast between the Spartans, champions of
liberty, and the Persians, presented as a savage horde which
would submerge Greece and wipe out the foundations of
Western culture. It tells the story, coming down to us from
Herodotus, of a well-known event of the Second Persian
War, when a maniple of Greeks soldiers succeeded in
defying, even if briefly, the famous and very numerous
Persian army.
The film was a commercial success, but did not convince
those critics who detected the strongly ideological content of
the film. 2 Some have emphasized proto-fascist aspects, such
as the glorification of violence and militarism, together with
hatred and contempt for others. Others, however, noted the
similarities between the film and some current lines of
American foreign policy, seeing it as a kind of ideological
justification of the clash of civilisations. There are also those
who ventured reversed readings of the allegory in the film,
taking the Persian empire as a reflection of the US and the
Spartans as forerunners of the Islamic resistance. 3
The depiction of the Spartans is not derived from classical
sources but from heroic iconography which is typical of
nationalist rhetoric in the wars of the first half of the last
century. War propaganda is black-and-white: enemies are
carriers of values and lifestyles that would destroy
civilisation: the Persians are mocking, angry, arrogant, but
basically weak and vile: defeating them has above all a moral
motivation. 4
79
A second critical interpretation has preferred instead to read

the stories as a metaphor for how the American people see
themselves. In this perspective, of course, the Americans are
the Spartans of Leonidas, who, alone and few, and faced by
evil, spring to the defence of liberty. Allegory, already
present in the comic book version, is emphasised in the film,
probably because of the climate after 9/11. Persia is the
symbol of all Asia, Islam, Iran.
Director Zack Snyder and designer Frank Miller strongly
defend themselves against such proposals, barricading
themselves behind the principle of the autonomy of art and
denying any ideological and political themes in their works.
In particular, in their opinion, the setting in classical Greece
would rule out references to contemporary events. The film
is just a transposition of the comic, with no pretence at
realism. It is not an exaltation of war but only a show, devoid
of any ideological message. As Snyder gruffly put it in an
interview:
You know, when I see that, when I see someone use words
like neocon, homophobic, homoerotic or racist in their
review, I kind of just think they don't get the movie and don't
understand. It's a graphic novel movie about a bunch of guys
that are stomping the snot out of each other. As soon as you
start to frame it like that, it becomes clear that you've missed
the point entirely. 5
Alexander
Stones Alexander offers an epic account of the exploits of
Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia, and his conquest of
the Persian Empire. The film was much more popular abroad
than in the United States; it did not meet with critical favour,
80
and was the centre of controversy and discussion amongst

both experts on classical history and followers of Stones
work. 6 Disappointed by the reception of a film he had been
planning for years, Stone continued to wrestle with the
material. Following its initial theatrical release, the director
has released three further versions (2005, 2007, 2013). For
Stone, the abiding desire to reintroduce colossal characters
such as Alexander by means of the cinema does not spring so
much from a commitment to historical rigour as to a desire
to dig as deeply as possible into their particular and very
different world of human inwardness.
On this long journey across the known world in the hands of
a learned director who is also a decorated Vietnam veteran,
much of what the ancient sources tell us disappear. Stone
chooses to show only a few snapshots and especially a face that of the nervous and stubborn conqueror, militarily
formidable and humanly fragile. In the film, despite the
constant references to the heroes of myth, we encounter an
all too-human Alexander, the way Plutarch depicted him:
I felt he was a figure outside time, a figure we dont even
understand, because hes frankly pre-Christian, and his
concepts of honor go back to Homer. His concepts of patricide
and matricide in the movie, the concept of conquest itself, the
whole concept of going east to bring the world into unity
this can not be understood in post-Christian terms, because
weve had so many wars ... It was a cruel empire with
enormous amounts of slavery, no freedom, and a lot, a lot of
corruption. When Alexander went east, he took as a model
lessons he learned from Aristotle: the concepts of good
governance ... I know that people in the West were cynical
about it, because of the George Bush experience and all the
81
wars we fought. We really have to forget all that, to see

Alexander in pre-Christian terms. 7
The attacks on the film in the US both by the conservatives
and the liberals, involving criticisms of the degree of
interpretation Stone allowed himself, testify to the
controversial status of a film which is doubly subversive.
Stone emphasises the difference - aesthetic as well as
political - between the drive to explore the new and the
original predatory instinct of imperialism of which today we
see the terrifying, grusome, destructive outcomes.
Im interested, I suppose, in tortured power. The tortured
power of Richard Nixon and Alexander fascinate me. I cant
say the tortured power of George Bush, because it was so
shocking that this fella could become president. So that one
[Stones W, 2008] doesnt qualify as an Alexander-type
movie, although at the time it came out there were these
hollow, superficial comparisons between him and Alexander,
unfortunately because of Baghdad. And nothing could be
further removed from the truth.
When he went East, he never came back. He stayed with the
idea that he would integrate the East and West He wanted
to stay in the East, and he let them govern themselves
autonomously. There was tremendous peace in his wake
The trade that was created, and the language and the culture
that was exchanged between peoples was the opposite of
what happened with Bush and the Iraqi experience, where we
looted and destroyed and we went away and we took the oil
and we tried to reshape the world to the definition of
American power.
82
Agora
A meticulous and sumptuous historical reconstruction,
Amenbars Agora is on the one hand the story of Hypatia of
Alexandria, an intellectual woman persecuted by Christians
for her refusal to bend her integrity to their political aims.
Since the enlightenment Hypatia has been considered a
symbol of freedom of thought, of secularism and she is
considered a victim of religious fanaticism. The film explores
the relationship between religion and progress, between
tolerance, human solidarity and scientific advancement. For
its director, Agor does not attack Christianity, for its
embodies Christian values. Rather, it is opposed to
fundamentalism and hatred; it is not a film against the
Church but rather against religious extremism. 8
Why this film is so timely? The answer lies in the message
that the story of Hypatia brings. This woman has fought for
her ideas, has not succumbed to the forced conversion to
Christianity that many have chosen. We have to recall that in
392, with Theodosius, Christianity became the state religion
and Roman religion, paganism, was prohibited. Hypatia
becomes the symbol of a previous civilisation that has failed
to comply with the hegemonic thrust of the new religion.
Hypatia then rejects the identities that the new Christian
society was imposing she does not become a wife with a
family, devoting herself instead to science and philosophy,
disciplines believed to belong to paganism.
Issues such as misogyny, intolerance, religious extremism,
the inferior status of women and freedom of thought run
through the film. The story of Hypatia offers a critique of a
society, that today we say is modern, but that is often the
83
opposite. The character of Hypatia is often abandoned to the

oblivion of history, when in fact there is much to learn from
her if we attend to the full range of meanings contained in
historical and epic narratives such as these.

1
For interesting accounts of the field, see M. Wyke, Projecting the Past:
Ancient Rome, Cinema and History, New York: Routledge, 1997; M.M.
Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001; Jon Solomon, The Ancient World in the Cinema,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001; and G. Nisbet, Ancient Greece in
Film and Popular Culture, Exeter: Bristol Phoenix Press, 2006.
See, for example, M. Menicocci, 'Lepica moderna di 300: Lettura critica

della graphic novel e del film', Antrocom, vol. 3.no.2, 2007, pp. 127-133.
3
See Slavoj iek, 'The True Hollywood Left', n.d., online at

www.lacan.com/zizhollywood.htm.
See Wu Ming, Allegoria e Guerra in 300, n.d., online at

www.wumingfoundation.com.
Jonah Weiland, '300 Post-Game: One on One with Zack Snyder',

www.comicbookresources.com, 14 March 2007.
For academic perspectives, see See Paul Cartledge and Fiona Rose
Greenland (eds.), Responses to Oliver Stones Alexander: Film, History and
Cultural Studies, Madison-London: The University of Winsconsin Press,
2010.
Stone speaking to the A.C. Club at www.avclub.com in early 2011. For his
detailed engagement with academic responses to the film, see his
substantial Afterword in Cartledge and Greenland, Responses to Oliver
Stones Alexander.
8
See Brian Brooks, Amenbar: Not anti-Christian, but Crusading against

Fundamentalism with Agora, Indiewire, 18 May 2009.
84
9 / Cinemulacrum: A Paradigm for the

Teaching of Media Culture
Aaron Sultanik
Film, Cinema, Cinemulacrum

Cinemulacrum is a term I use to denote contemporary
media culture. 1 It is a conflated word: cinema (the art of the
Hollywood film) and simulacrum (a counterfeit reality).
Cinemulacrum combines two separate terms to forge a new
understanding of media culture: the classical Hollywood film
of the 1930s and 1940s - an original fantasy or otherworldas the model for digital film/video and the representation of
reality on television and in the movies. The hybrid term
cinemulacrum then distinguishes a new period in American
culture, the emerging and ruling media dyad of movies and
television.
85
A movie refers to the popular screen entertainment

associated with movie theatres or television programming.
Pauline Kaels first collection of criticism, I Lost it at the
Movies (1965), appropriates the terms prosaic meaning to
underscore a movies status in the rite of adolescence and
adulthood. The word film alludes to the images recorded by
the light-sensitive properties of silver halide crystals. Film
represents the textual essence of motion pictures, the
visually palpable, kinetically verisimilar depiction of human
motion and emotion.
Cinema possesses a host of meanings, from the commonlyshared nature of movie-going and the many crafts and
industries involved in the production of a film through a
films myriad interpretations. Cinema is the province of the
sociology of movie-going and its intersection with the minds
and lives of its audience. Cinema is the select term to signify
the range of commercial, social, and psychological influences
surrounding the making and reception of motion pictures.
Cinema is the culture created through the institutional
power of movies/film in American and international society.
Simulacrum is first used in 19th-Century literature to
describe mechanically incarnate human figures. 2 It becomes
a favoured theme in the burgeoning fantasy genre of
sf/science fiction, a Pandoras Box of technological invention.
The mystery woman in E.T.A. Hoffmanns 1816 short story
The Sandman is an automaton whose life-like appearance
bedevils the storys narrator. She is a joyless creation, cast in
the shadow of modern mans unshackled intellectual vanity.
Mary Shelleys novel Frankenstein (1818) is perhaps the most
famous 19th-Century dramatisation of the conflicted rational
and religious idealism underlying the scientific breakthroughs
- and Faustian gambit - of the Industrial Age.
86
Simulacra assume a new verisimilitude in post-World War II

society and literature. They gain popular exposure through
the animatronics in Disneylands theme park reconstructions
of American history, employing a technology of mechanicallycontrolled moving figures that will be deployed by the
American film industry and its bestiary of ghouls, dinosaurs
and other creature wonders. Simulacra, however, retain a
fateful spectre. Philip K. Dicks novel The Simulacra (1964)
uncovers the pernicious political uses of simulacra as body
doubles, symbols of an ominous alliance of scientific
invention and media chicanery.
Yet the robots and androids in the works of techno mythmakers like Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein are seen as
protective, even heroic figures. Asimovs Robbie stories are
primary fables for the young reader growing up in a world of
electronics and space exploration; in his 1966 novel The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress, for example, Heinleins superior
thinking machine has garnered the wisdom and wit of
American folklore, an unflappable hero in the American
grain.
The avant-garde science fiction of Samuel R. Delaney Jr.
proffers a more radical vision of the plugged-in,
technologically enhanced space voyager in Nova (1968), a
prototype cyberpunk warrior of the late 20th Century. Where
the cinema is concerned, Schwarzeneggers Terminator may
be the most popular movie cyborg, whose transformation
from the killing machine in Camerons The Terminator (1984)
to the avenging spirit in Terminator 2: Judgment Day
(Cameron, 1991) and Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines
(Mostow, 2003) reflects the reassuring optimism in
87
Hollywoods mix of star-making, franchise-building, and

state-of-the-art special effects.
From Mass Culture to Media Culture
During the first half of the 20th Century, the motion picture
industry provided a mainstream entertainment that was
experienced through weekly attendance at movie theatres. It
was an exemplary form of popular art or mass culture; at
first, an evolving technology of silent moving images and
then talking or sound motion pictures, a collectively-viewed
spectacle of image-making and storytelling. The golden age
of the American film industry, the period from the beginning
of the sound film era through to the 1948 anti-trust ruling by
the Supreme Court in US v. Paramount against the monopoly
of movie theatre ownership by major film studios, was
constructed around a diversified production model of starstudded A-films and an array of B-film shorts, serials, and
genre programmers, and was regulated by a Production Code
that upheld a traditional moral piety for the American films
family-themed entertainment.
The introduction of television in post-World War II American
society revolutionised the impact of mass media and popular
culture in three fundamental ways. The first was inspired by
the development of video technology and the widespread
commercial development and social application of digital
media. If video and the television industry anticipated the
transformation of mass media into our commonlyexperienced communications media of smart phones and
personal computers, televisions acculturation into the daily
lives of Americans created a different ideological
superstructure from that of the movies and American
88
popular culture during the first half of the 20th Century.

Television originally sought to codify the movies familycentred audience as its enduring public, yet the family nexus
of Hollywoods Production Code underwent a critical
modification because of televisions accommodation in the
American home, where this new mass medium faced
protective child-sensitive censorship guidelines. 3
Television and Family Life
The pre-eminence of the young adult as the defining
demographic of media culture underlies the history of
television. The child-friendly Captain Kangaroo and Mr.
Rogers Neighbourhood, together with the ebullient
performance and learning theatre of Sesame Street, are
among the most recognisable examples of childrens fare
during the first twenty years of televisions entry into
American family life. It is, however, televisions prime-time
schedule that reflects the importance of child-sensitive
programming through, arguably, the most enduring staple of
prime-time programming: the family sit-com.
The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy celebrated enduring
archetypes of human desire and fallibility but a majority of
family sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s such as Father Knows
Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Donna Reed
Show, and Leave it to Beaver - and even those featuring
single parent households, as in My Three Sons, Bachelor
Father and The Andy Griffith Show - presented a benign
alternate reality, a white bread vision of a placid, conformist
America.
For a generation of baby-boomers growing up in postwar
America - and their Generation X and Y successors -
89
televisions popular culture, however, was not simply

equivalent to prime times bucolic, antiseptic depictions of
adolescence and family life. Television news and sports
coverage would assume an even greater influence. The 1960
Kennedy-Nixon presidential debates occupy a landmark
status in the annals of television broadcasting, with an
unprecedented number of television viewers for the live
debates. Marshall McLuhan may have intuited the allure of
John F. Kennedys Hollywood persona, but Daniel Boorstin
was among the first to warn of televisions constructed
reality: In a democracy, reality tends to conform to the
pseudo-event. Nature imitates art. 4
Television coverage of the Vietnam War and the Watergate
Hearings situated Americas newest mass medium at the
center of American politics and public controversy. The
growth of the cable industry and satellite technology led to
the introduction of HBO, ESPN, and CNN, decisively altering
the television medium and the media culture it spawned.
HBOs commercial free, unedited, uncensored movies,
ESPNs sports network, the most valuable property in todays
television market, and CNNs round-the-clock news elevated
television into our primary mass medium of news and
entertainment.
The Age of Cinemulacrum
The rise of cable television since 1980 - a period I
characterize as the Age of Cinemulacrum for its marking the
populist reign of television, its spin-off programming and
young adult demographic in a media culture dyad of movies
and television - underscores the foundational influence of
network televisions child-sensitive programming during the
90
first three decades of its penetration into the American

home. The successful entrenchment of MTV, Nickelodeon,
and Cartoon Network in American television viewing habits
throughout the 1980s all testify to a teen-and gradually
tween-locus first exploited by network televisions family
and child-friendly programming. The oft-reported decline in
network viewers from the first decade of cable television in
the 1970s through the streaming digital media of the 21st
Century remains a grossly misinterpreted metric. Cable
provided a technologically facilitated social expansion of
network television, deriving its programming matrix from
network televisions established divisions of news, sports and
childrens programming.
Televisions media priority is not only reflected by the daily
consumption of its combined entertainment, news, and
advertising, but, also, by its re-making of American film
entertainment. The commercial revitalisation of American
film studio production and its re-embracing of the popularity
and optimism of Hollywoods golden age involves a merging
of two mythologies in the films of George Lucas and Steven
Spielberg. Both Lucas and Spielbergs epochal Star Wars and
Indiana Jones franchises of the late 1970s and early 1980s
combined their state-of-the-art technology - the
underpinning for the American films lasting prestige as a
paragon of technological modernity - with the familiar
melodramatic plotting of the Hollywood B-film serial.
The B-film includes a variety of abbreviated comic, dramatic
and educational shorts; yet the valourisation of the B-films
teen favorite serial film and its stripped-down narrative,
blithe storyline, and comic-strip characterisations through
the A-film production values in the Lucas and Spielberg
productions ensured the adoption of the franchise
91
production and serialised narrative as the preferred

commercial and dramatic mode of the Age of Cinemulacrum.
The franchise film gained impetus from baby boomers and
Generation Xs daily exposure to televisions aggregate
culture of recycled Hollywood stars and Madison Avenues
target marketing. It did so by reviving the escapist plotlines of
B-film serials, refurbishing these productions with the
glamour and spectacle of old-fashioned big-budget vehicles,
and imbuing them with the playful, jokey banter shared by
news anchors, televisions ads, and prime time family life.
The B-film, in fact, may constitute a greater influence on
television than that of Hollywoods A-film icon-making star
industry. Through the tandem of the A-films movie star
productions and the B-films aggregate product, Hollywood
consolidated a model of mass entertainment that was readily
absorbed by televisions featured prime time and supporting
morning and afternoon programming. The B-film
predominated, contributing around three-quarters of
Hollywoods 4,000 releases between 1930 and 1940. 5
This reflects the vibrancy of movie-going, especially among
women, children and teenage viewers, who would comprise
televisions crucial daytime audience. The B-films eclectic
entertainment, beginning with a general family interest
newsreel, followed by the specialised child- and young teenoriented product of cartoon and serial, and ending with the
familiar genre programmer of a western or crime story,
proffered a prototypical form of mass entertainment for the
networks and their privileging of the young adult as the
eternal consumer of contemporary media culture.
92
Video, Fantasy, and the Young Adult

I have argued that cinemulacrum represents an apt
historical designation for a unique period in the history of
mass media and modern culture: the technological and social
dyad of digital film/video, or that of the motion pictures and
television industries. The origin of a media culture dyad of
movies and television lies in the golden age of the Hollywood
film and a popular culture that functioned as a true fantasy,
a dream-world safeguarded by the Production Code. The
defining features of a fantasy articulated by J.R.R. Tolkien in
his 1947 essay On Fairy-Stories - a make-believe, physically
autonomous world providing a redemptive moral - was
crystallised by the Hollywood studio film of the 1930s and
1940s.
The motion picture industry provided a paradigm for
television during its adoption into the post-war family home.
Television, however, has transformed cinema - the culture
of movies and film in the first half of the 20th Century - into
cinemulacrum - the counterfeit reality of film and video for
the new millennium. The classical Hollywood film - a
romantic, escapist haven embodied by its star system, its
prized studio production values and stern Production Code has become the everyday reality of television.
One of Marshall McLuhans lesser known aphorisms,
Television made movies an art form, contains one of his
keenest insights.6 McLuhan grasped a basic truism
surrounding the initial convergence of the two
technologically and commercially congruent mass media of
motion pictures and television. Encapsulated by televisions
flattened lighting and lifestyle advertising, the movies did
93
indeed look better: they truly seemed the stuff dreams were
made of. What McLuhan did not foresee is that movies
would be remade in the image of television.
For the Age of Cinemulacrum a guiding principle has been
The Copy, not the Original7. It marks the power of copymaking - and the reign of the television spin-off and the
franchise production - as the new gold standard. While
Hollywood studio filmmaking, especially its B-film amalgam,
became the model for network programming, televisions
incipient youth-oriented consumer branded reality
reconstituted the contemporary Hollywood film. If the Bfilms disparate product exemplified a fundamental operating
principle for the networks 24/7 programming, the networks
ultimate payback to the commercially re-vamped American
film entertainment of the 1980s was the Hollywood
blockbuster, re-made in the image of televisions alternate
reality: the freshly minted original as a special edition copy.
The evolution from a mass culture triad of film, realism, and
the family during the first half of the 20th Century to that of
video, fantasy, and the young adult for the subsequent
period, however, cannot be dismissed as dystopian.
Televisions multi-purpose medium played a vital role in
American society during the transformative precinemulacrum era (1960-1980), from the Kennedy-Nixon
debates and President Kennedys funeral through to
coverage of the Vietnam War and Watergate Hearings.
Furthermore, within this period the movies retained a
different aesthetic from television. Not only was film a more
visually satisfying, higher resolution medium, but the art of
film in the 1960s challenged the very conventions of
television news reporting, its homogenised entertainment
94
and oppressive advertising rhetoric. The emerging youth

subculture that has become the face of the young adult of
the Age of Cinemulacrum, however, has not experienced a
comparable antagonism between film and video, and the rise
of media culture through the video explosion of cable
television, video games, computers and the Internet remains
unabated.
The Study of Media Culture
As a proposed model for the study of media culture, the
notion of cinemulacrum seeks to address the basic
requirements of a paradigm. Has there been a marked
change, or rather transformation, in an industrys raw
materials and economic output? The widespread use of
digital film/video as state-of-the-art, and the re-alignment of
the motion picture and television industries into
contemporary media conglomerates, provide clear-cut
evidence of a technological and commercial revolution.
More importantly, a final question remains: is there evidence
of a similar sweeping change in mass cultures social usage?
In assessing the challenges facing contemporary paradigm
theory, Yvonna S. Lincoln warns of a postmodern blurring of
genres. A proponent of constructivism and its practical
teaching agenda, Lincoln proposes the use of a functional
rhetoric through a preliminary set of formulating axioms.
These defining principles then face the test of historical
substantiation to confirm a dual logical validity and real
world applicability.8
The notion of Cinemulacrum advocates a three-part model
for the study of contemporary media culture. Unlike
Baudrillards widely disseminated precession of simulacra, 9
95
which posits the supremacy of technology in our everyday

lives, cinemulacrum does not see technology as the
exclusive, encompassing agent of historical change. What I
believe is circumvented by Baudrillards inspired thesis of a
predominant technological superstructure is the social interconnectedness of technology (i.e. video) with ideology (i.e.
fantasy) and audience (i.e. the young adult) in contemporary
media culture. The priority of the franchise represents the
convergence of digital medias exemplary communications
and production technology with the fanciful myth-making of
American popular culture.
Yet it is the crucial role of a controlling public - specifically
that of the young adult and its displacement of the family as
the decisive audience demographic - that mediates this
technological and ideological conjoining. The enduring truth
of De Tocquevilles illuminating precept of the tyranny of the
majority, especially in the study of contemporary media
culture, is that Americas youth-oriented culture is a fluid
social entity whose changing demographics of age, gender,
and race are contextualised through the young adults
historical unravelling. The hegemony of media culture arises
from the imagination of the young adult - and its
representation by the commercial, communal, pervasive
otherworld of movies and of television.10
96

1
See Aaron Sultanik, Cinemulacrum: A Secret History of Film/Video,

1960-2010, London and New York: University Press of America,
2012.
See entries on android, cybernetics, and robot in John Clute

and Peter Nicholls (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction,
London: Van Norstrand & Co., 2001.
3
See Allison Alexander, Children and Television, in Horace

Newcomb (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Television, Chicago and
London: Fitzoy & Dearborn, 1997, vol. 1, pp. 351-8.
Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

(1962), New York: Scribner, 1971, p. 44.
5
See Brian Taves, The B-Film: Hollywoods Other Half, in Tino

Balio (ed.), Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business
Enterprise, University of California Press, 1996, pp. 313-50.
6
McLuhan in interview with Edwin Newman, Speaking Freely, 4

January 1971.
See Sultanik, Cinemulacrum, pp. 89-92.
See Egon G. Guba and Yvonna S. Lincoln, Paradigmatic

Controversies, Contradictions, and Emerging Influences, in Norman
K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds.), The Sage Handbook of
Qualitative Research, New York: Sage Publishers, 2003, pp. 191215.
See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1996.
10
See Sultanik, Cinemulacrum, pp. vii-xiv.
97
10 / The Archive and the Witness:

When the Dead Help the Living
Kit Wise
The Exhibition
This essay focusses on the exhibition When the Dead help the
Living, presented at Light Projects, Melbourne, in April 2011.
It consisted of work by two London-based and two
Melbourne-based artists - Jordan Baseman and Si Sapsford,
Damiano Bertoli and myself, respectively. The work on show
addressed ideas of testimony, the witness and the archive
through the use of digital media and in particular, digital
video. This essay will focus on the digital video works
presented and will thus exclude the digital prints by Sapsford.
In my role as the curator I drew upon Giorgio Agambens
book Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive as
well as Lev Manovichs The Language of New Media. 1 The
first section of this essay focusses on the notion of the
witness, and will discuss Agambens account of Primo Levi as
98
a way of considering the role of testimony in the work of the

artists identified; section two will address the particular
model of the archive defined by Agamben and will attempt to
relate his model to Manovichs understanding of the
database, to identify a new way of understanding the digital
archive as a site for practice.
The digital age abounds with archives of testimonial material
- from YouTube and Facebook, to digitised museum archives
and online open-source video banks, searchable from any
internet connection in the world. At the same time, readily
available software allows us to access digital material that
does not exist in archives and is not intended for
appropriation and then to perform sophisticated
manipulations of the found material - such as the ripping of
commercial DVD movies by the Sydney/Berlin based duo
Soda Jerk. How do contemporary artists respond to the
wealth of archival material associated with the digital age?
More importantly: what can their work tell us about the
condition of the witness and our engagement with
testimony?
Testimony and Witness
Who are the recipients of testimony? In this show, a complex
and often ambiguous system of witnessing is constructed by
each of the artists. None of the artists witnessed first-hand of
the events presented in their work. Instead they operate as
the recipient of testimony: they listened to recordings,
located the archive or reviewed the video material. In
Agambens terms, they are witnesses of the witnessing. Their
role is primarily one of translation or transference, a
collaboration with the original witness who, unlike the
privileged artist, is for whatever reason not able to
communicate directly with the world at large.
99
Agamben theorises this relationship by using the example of

the author and holocaust survivor Primo Levi, and his
account of the Muselmnner. These were the inmates of
Auschwitz who experienced the most extreme horrors and
therefore witnessed the truth of the camps; yet who, by
definition, perished as a consequence of their hardships and
were thus unable to testify - other than through Levi.
Agamben suggests: The survivor and the Muselmann, like
the tutor and the incapable person and the creator and his
material, are inseparable; their unity-difference alone
constitutes testimony. 2
The burden of testimony is therefore shared through a unitydifference of the artist and the witness; and is consequently
communicated to the viewer of the artwork. To extend
Agamben: the audience of the work become witnesses of the
witnessing of the witness. This (arguably) justifies the
creation of the artwork from such charged material by Levi or
whomever, as for Agamben, the viewer is the final recipient
of testimony, third-hand witness of the horrors of our time
(or rather that exist in all time), and is charged with
attempting to understand those horrors as the first step
towards hope for a new ethical territory. The work of art
acts as a necessary catalyst, in fact a crucial vehicle, for
attempting to comprehend what has gone before in order to
prevent its repetition.
The spoken word as testimony was consequently a significant
feature of this show, where it operated across a broad range,
from immediate reportage, to retrospective monologue and
imaginary soliloquy. My piece entitled I cannot see it uses the
well-known radio commentary by Herbert Morrison, an eyewitness account of the Hindenburg disaster of May 1937.
Morrison was a professional news reporter assigned to cover
100
the arrival of the spectacular LZ 129 Hindenburg at Lakehurst

Naval Air Station, New Jersey. Of the 97 people on board, 35
died when the Zeppelin caught fire for reasons that remain
unclear. The full audio recording of Morrisons account was
broadcast the day after the tragedy across America. This was
the first time that a live recording of a news event had been
broadcast, rather than the reading of an edited script, and
also the first coast-to-coast radio broadcast.
The work returns to the spoken testimony as recorded live on
phonographic disks, prior to its synthesis with vision.
Morrisons account moves from mundane observations
about the weather to overwhelming horror at the speed and
scale of the loss of life famously captured in Morrisons
Oh, the Humanity! The viewer of the artwork is forced into
a karaoke-like engagement with the commentary, reading
each word as it is spoken, before it disappears as the next
word if spoken; tracing the quotation as transcribed to fit a
side of printed A4 paper, perhaps the definitive medium of
the archive.
Viewers register and also repeat the account by Morrison,
hearing both his and their own voice. They briefly
experience what Agamben describes as a unity-difference
with the text, becoming the author of testimony; yet they are
also made aware of the failure of the archive to fully account
for the original source, by the lapses in transcription where
recognition of the words is impossible, as well as the
somewhat ridiculous attempts to record as words the intense
emotions expressed through gasps and sighs. The status of
the eye-witness and our engagement with their testimony is
made both intimate and impossible.
Bertolis Continuous Moment: Almost Charlie (Two Times)
similarly questions the construction of identity through the
101
medium of the human voice. His work edits together

sequences from two American TV films about the life of
Charles Manson, both titled Helter Skelter and based on the
1974 book of the same name by Mansons trial by Vincent
Bugliosi (the prosecutor in the Manson case) and Curt
Gentry. 3 Helter Skelter was a term some believe Manson
used to designate a mass race-war that he and members of
The Family aspired to bring about through a series of brutal
killings in California in the late 1960s. He borrowed the term
from the song of the same name by The Beatles through a
misinterpretation of the lyrics, in itself, another form of
composite authorship of the spoken word.
Constructions of Identity
Manson constructed a powerfully charismatic identity that
borrowed from a wide range of sources - part messiah, part
rock-star, part hippy, part gangster. Bertolis work focuses on
the further composite manifestations of Manson in popular
culture: here, the over-stated acting of Steve Railsbeck and
Jeremy Davies in the two TV films. Bertoli similarly reinforces
the unity/difference of authorship by layering the two films
sequences on top of each other (akin to a colour-separation
printing process) so that there is a vertical, screen-based as
well as horizontal, time-based editing of the digital material.
Eerie parallels in the sequences of frames, close ups and
camera angles, even the pace of the narrative, emerge:
Manson becomes filmically schizophrenic, as much as
sociopathically deranged. Bertoli manipulates our empathy
with the protagonist (whether we like him or not) so that we
become similarly fractured and disorientated. Mansons
testimony as evidenced in film and popular culture
oscillates between his words, the novel, the script and our
102
own. Here, Agambens idea that testimony is constructed

through a collaboration between the source and its
activation in an artwork is given free rein, pointing to a
potentially infinite proliferation of testimonies.
Jordan Basemans film No Bloody Chance also uses the
spoken word to consider the quality of testimony and our
response to it. Albert Pierrepoint was amongst the last
hangmen in Britain, and was reported to have executed at
least 433 men and 17 women, before resigning in 1956 after
twenty-five years in the role. Both his father and his uncle
had been hangmen before him.
Baseman uses material from an audio recording of
Pierrepoint held in the British Library National Sound Archive
in conjunction with images of the gallows at the Lansing
Correctional Facility from the Kansas State Historical Society,
where Richard Dick Hickock and Perry Edward Smith
notorious for the murders described in Truman Capotes In
Cold Blood (1965) were hanged on 14 April 1965. These two
archival sources are brought together as coordinates for a
further collaboration that asks us to question our response to
execution as a form of capital punishment, at the same time
as considering the men and women who are asked to be
executioners.
Clearly there is no direct connection between the Lansing
gallows and Pierrepoints recollections we do not know if
the same system of construction was used on both sides of
the Atlantic and the period of Pierrepoints work finishes
before the events Capote describes. Yet this obscure sense of
a lack, of something disconnected or missing in the work, we
ultimately reconcile as being the deceased: both the
villainous celebrities Dick and Perry, as well as the hundreds
of anonymous men and women Pierrepoint dispatched. Like
103
Bertoli, Baseman layers two framed events upon each other;

however one is an analogue still image (a photographic
negative) and the other, the digital flow of the medium of the
film itself.
This layering is invisible and our immediate visual reading of
the work is focused upon the minutiae of the battered
negatives and details both within and beyond the
photographic emulsion. Yet at some point we become aware
of the re-animation which is taking place: that the digital
medium develops and also gives life to the old analogue
mechanics, by constructing a vastly slowed-down simulation
of the first filmic machine, a zoetrope still images flashing
before our eyes to create a sense of movement. Basemans
work positions itself somewhere between the quick and the
dead. Like Pierrepoint, whose testimony seems to be seeking
for some kind of summation and conclusion for his
experiences, we are similarly engaged in a search for
something that we know cannot be placed, but which, like
the persona of Manson in Bertolis work or the authorial
voice in my own work, remains indistinct, unsure,
unassignable.
The Archive
The sub-title of Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the
Archive, indicates the importance Agamben places on the
concept of the archive. Agamben introduces the subject by
way of Foucaults The Archaeology of Knowledge. In
Foucaults work, Agamben identifies an understanding of the
statement - distinct from sentences or propositions - as the
outside of language, the brute fact of its existence. 4 He
suggests that the contextual circumstances of statements are
secondary to their taking place; consequently, the identity of
the speaker (the subject) is uncertain, reduced to a function
104
of the statement itself: a particular, vacant place that may

in fact be filled by different individuals. 5 The statement gives
rise to a position that may be filled by the subject, or a
number of possible subjects, rather than the inverse.
Agamben gives his own translation of Foucault: We can
easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate
without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their
status, form or value, and regardless of our manner of
handling them, would unfold in the anonymity of a
murmur. 6
This understanding of the anonymous murmur of
statements reinforces Agambens pursuit of testimony as
something indistinct and unassignable. However it also
allows him to pursue Foucault further, to engage his
formulation of the archive as the plane of enunciation, the
general system of the formation and transformation of
statements. 7 Agamben notes that in Foucaults model, the
archive is situated between langue and corpus, the system of
speech and the body of speeches that have been said or
written. The archive is consequently neither of these things;
but rather, everything that could have been said, as a
possibility of enunciation: it is the dark margin encircling
and limiting every concrete speech act. 8
As such, it refers to the past, the sum of all possible past
speech acts, but not what was said - hence, the outside of
language. In addition, it does not specify a subject, as it has
not been uttered; it therefore demonstrates - like Bertolis
composite figure of Manson - the anonymous murmur
Foucault recognises as the possibility of all discourse; clearly
distinct from the present but unassignable subject of
testimony (as found in I cannot see it). As De la Durantaye
summarises this inversion of our usual understanding of the
105
archive: the archive is not the storehouse of all the said but
the shadowy domain of all that went unsaid. In other words,
the archive, in Agambens modified sense, is precisely that
which does not appear in any archive; it is what does not
appear in statements; it is their dark margin, illegible but
shaping. 9
The Database
Agambens archive, as the system than generates all that
could have been said, without a subject, can be used to
understand Manovichs description of the database and
online archives such as the internet. Manovich describes the
database as a new symbolic form of the computer age. He
develops this idea to describe a tension between the logic of
narrative and the logic of the database. Manovich argues
that new media reverses the usual model of narrative being
explicit, while the archive/database of sources from which it
is constructed is implicit. On the material level, a narrative is
just a set of links; the elements themselves remain stored in
the database. Thus narrative is virtual while the database
exists materially. 10
In this instance, then, Manovichs idea of the database can
therefore be seen to correlate with Agambens notion of the
archive: the database represents a digital mode of the
systematic matrix of Agambens archive. 11 Like the archive,
the database has the potential to generate all that could
have been said. Manovichs database is thus not a system of
language, but a system of enunciation: a tool for generating
potential histories. This programming is potentially what the
artists in When the Dead Help the Living begin to attempt: to
work in the space around or beyond what has previously
been said, in the dark margin of testimony. In conclusion: this
paper has examined work by three artists to attempt to
106
outline how new media here understood to include filmic

languages can contribute to a better understanding of the
condition of the witness and the relationship between the
archive and testimony.
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz : The Witness and the Archive,

New York: Zone Books, 1999, and Lev Manovich, The Language of New
Media , Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001.
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 150.
Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the
Manson Murders, New York: W.W. Norton, 1974; Helter Skelter (Gries,
USA, 1976) and Helter Skelter (Gray, 2004).
7
8

Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction,

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 288.
10
11
De la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, p. 287.
107
3. Femininities
108
11 / Representations of Gender, Labour

and Identity in the American Romantic
Comedy
Dorothy Leng
Romantic Comedy
Although occasionally American and British films put work
and the workplace at the centre of the drama - for example,
Silkwood (Nichols, 1983), Erin Brokovic (Soderbergh, 2000),
or Made in Dagenham (Cole, 2010) - it is more often used as
a backdrop or plot device. Female characters in popular
cinema have typically been prescribed roles within the realm
of the feminine, associated with the domestic, sexual and
social spheres.
Even in films in which the female
protagonists job is central, the representation of working
women almost inevitably involves an invocation of
sexuality/sexual performance.
In this essay I look at how women and work are represented
in that perennially popular sub-genre of the womans film,
109
the romantic comedy or rom-com. Romantic comedy is

concerned with the (re)union of a pair of lovers and their
(re)integration into society.
Finding someone /losing
them/finding them again are staple elements, played out
through plot twists embracing any or all of a number of
familiar tropes: mistaken/falsely assumed identities; missing
/misplaced objects; accidents/misunderstandings; rivalries
/separations; magic potions and helpers. The comedy arises
from the interplay of these elements, and the confirming or
confounding of audience expectations.
A rich seam of subversive Hollywood comedies from the 30s
and 40s, for example, Adams Rib (Cukor, 1949) and His Girl
Friday (Hawks, 1940), offered us transgressive female
protagonists. These texts challenged the norms about
women both in the workplace and in the marriage bed. For
some critics, the romantic comedies of the 50s and 60s
offered seemingly more stereotypical fare, with comedic
elements undermining the economic independence of the
female protagonist in favour of the work of marriage and
children (although not always successfully as feminist
readings of, for example, the Doris Day rom-coms
demonstrate).
This essay looks at two later examples of the genre Mike
Nichols Working Girl (1988) and Paul Feigs Bridesmaids
(2011). Working Girl was a critical and commercial hit and
made a star of Melanie Griffith. It won multiple awards,
including the Oscar for Best Original Song, and still features in
the top 60 grossing comedies of all time; box office receipts,
according to the Internet Movie Database, total almost $64
million.
110
Bridesmaids was the top grossing comedy of 2011 and has

currently taken nearly $170 million at the box office,
propelling it into the top 10 of romantic comedies, just
behind Marshalls Pretty Woman (1990, $178m), and Zwicks
My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002, $241m). The original
screenplay was the first by Kristen Wiig (star of the film) and
Annie Rumolo, two of the coterie of writers and performers
from the long-running US TV show Saturday Night Live.
Produced by Judd Apatow, creator of a series of hugely
popular frat-boy comedies, Bridesmaids is the only one of
his films to have received an Academy Award nominations.
Working Women?
Working Girl is set in the world of New York high finance in
the booming 1980s. It features Tess McGill, a working class
secretary with big aspirations. Her motivation is to transcend
the limitations of her class and gender and shes studying at
night school to gain the necessary qualifications. Frustrated
by the casual and relentless sexism of her male colleagues,
she embraces the opportunities offered by a seemingly
sympathetic female boss, Katherine Parker.
Her
disappointment when betrayed by that same boss who steals
Tesss perceptive business idea drives her into her own form
of theft: she takes on her bosss identity after Katherine
suffers a skiing accident, and boldly approaches Jack Trainer
(unaware that hes Katherines lover) with her idea.
Tesss deception (a form of cross-dressing, as Yvonne Tasker
points out) embroils her in a series of comic twists and turns
until she is unmasked by Katherines return.1 Cinderella-like,
she gives up the masquerade (and both the love object and
elusive career) and languishes in a sort of no-mans land,
unable to fit back into her old life. A fortuitous encounter
111
enables her to prove ownership of the idea, ensuring her

future with Jack and, more importantly, guaranteeing her a
management job in the City with her own secretary and
office.
Bridesmaids, on the other hand, is set in the industrial city of
Milwaukee in 2010, during arguably the Wests biggest
depression. Its protagonist, Annie, is slightly older than Tess
in her early 30s and shares a similarly unsatisfying romantic
life and dead-end job. Staten Island becomes Milwaukee, a
large US city that has suffered particularly in the recession;
and Manhattan is Chicago, where the successful characters
live and/or work. Annie had achieved her dream with her
bakery business called, tellingly, Cake Baby, which did not
survive the recession. The film opens with Annie in a
depressed state, grieving the loss of her business, facing
economic hardship, and learning that her best friend, Lillian,
has just got engaged.
This news triggers a downward spiral for Annie, resulting in
increasingly violent eruptions of hysteria, threatening the
patriarchal order, which the film works to restore. The
failure of the cake shop, a workplace symbolic of femininity
and the home, prefigures Annies ensuing catalogue of
failures poor choice of men, inability to keep her job in a
jewellery store, ejection by her flat mates, rivalry with Helen
and, ultimately, her rupture with her best friend, Lillian.
The action centres on a series of comic set-pieces through
which Annies disintegration unfolds. It is her choice of a
cheap restaurant that causes the infamous food poisoning
scene; her fear of flying causes havoc and hilarity on the illfated Vegas trip; and its her self-destructive, violent
behaviour in the bridal shower scene that tips the film from
112
the comic to the tragic. These scenes are interspersed with

the on-off romance with Officer Rhodes; significantly, it is
through him that she is able to begin baking again, hinting at
an economic, as well as romantic resolution. The film ends
with a reconciliation between Annie and Lillian and a shifting
of the feminine order in which each bridesmaid undergoes a
transformation in some way.
New York: Female Iconography
Powered by its choral anthem Let the River Flow, Working
Girl starts with a circling close-up of the face and diadem of
the Statue of Liberty. We track the Staten Island ferry
heading towards the Lower Manhattan shoreline, framing
the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. The iconography
reinforces the historic role of NYC as the destination of the
worlds poor whilst highlighting its later development as the
worlds financial powerhouse.
The deregulation of the US financial and banking industries in
the late 70s and early 80s created unparalleled opportunities
to make easy money; but the human cost of such a free-forall had been vividly portrayed in the previous years big hit,
Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987). The superimposition of the
films title over the face of the Statue of Liberty (enduring
female symbol of enlightenment) hints at what is to come.
The camera focuses on two young women whose clothes,
accents, make-up and big hair denote their working class
origins. As they stream off the ferry we learn that Tess is
ambitious, wanting to better herself by taking speech
therapy classes and attending economics seminars, even on
her birthday - much to the bemusement of her best friend,
Cyn. Tess demonstrates the hunger for self-improvement
113
that had motivated the poor, huddled masses celebrated in

the poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed on the statue. It is this
transgressive desire that sets the films narrative in motion.
Cinderella Revisited
Working Girl can be seen as a reworking of Cinderella in
modern dress, but going a step further to foreground our
heroines identity in terms of economic achievement as well
as romantic success. Indeed, Jack Trainer has been seen as
the prize for success, not the reason for seeking it in the first
place. 2 Its title, surely a play on the euphemism working
girls, hints at the connection between work and sex which is
ever-present in Hollywood. As Tess herself says, I have a
head for business and a bod for sin anything wrong with
that? By the end of the narrative she has earned the right to
become a financier through her intelligence, persistence and
boldness. Its a comedy that addresses the paucity, economic
and emotional, of her life on Staten Island and one that
applauds her dogged ambition to improve herself, although
not at the expense of others.
Her desire is to be taken seriously, not to become rich.
Although she finds love, her quest was not for romance, but
career progression. Tess has no visible family in the film, no
economic or emotional support - unlike Katherine, living in
her parents swanky apartment. Tess pays her way through
night school and pursues her professional development in
spite of the total lack of encouragement or interest.
Her uncomprehending boyfriend betrays her; Cyn, her best
friend, cannot understand Tesss motivation but sticks with
her. Although Tess is clearly happy with Jack and they are
portrayed as well-suited the film ends not with them getting
114
married but with Tess in her own office sharing that moment
with her best friend, underlining the resolution of the films
main driver Tesss ambition to become a financier (a career,
not a job). The film is multi-tonal, not afraid to show the
sadness and pain caused by Tesss boyfriends betrayal, and
her realisation that she no longer belongs in her Staten Island
world. Although a rom-com, the heroines drive for career
achievement virtually displaces the romantic resolution, and
this ambition is actively supported by the male love interest.
The World of Work
Working Girl shows us the glamorous world of success and
excess exemplified by Hollywoods version of Wall Street; the
twist is that we see it through the eyes of the women who
work there. We see the large, well-appointed trading floor
with its rolling share/stock prices screens where Tess is some
kind of secretary. She is surrounded by young male traders
who display arrogance and sniggering contempt towards her.
The lowliness of her position is made clear when she answers
the phone and, although she knows the answer to the query,
has to go find her boss in the toilet, explaining resignedly that
the client wont listen to a secretary. Whilst forced to wait
outside her bosss cubicle, an unseen male in another cubicle
demands that she fetch him more paper.
The contrast between this place of work and her next is
marked by the fact that the new office is entirely staffed by
women and is headed by a confident, competent and clearly
economically successful woman, not much older than Tess.
Katherine is all smiles and encouragement: Were a team,
I want your input, Its a two-way street. Perhaps Tess
should have paid more attention to the choreography of the
115
female office. Prior to Katherines arrival the women were

clustering around admiring a colleagues engagement ring,
smiling and joking. This jollity evaporates and silence
descends upon Katherines obliviously breezy entrance.
The film sets Katherine up as Tesss mentor. Tess drinks in
her advice and her clichs: Dress shabbily and they notice
the dress; dress well and they notice the woman. Tess is a
quick learner and begins the process of transformation (or
cross-dressing) by dismantling the signifiers of class losing
the big jewellery, adopting more subtle make-up, taming her
bouffant hairdo: To be taken seriously you need serious hair.
Katherines sisterly rhetoric is undercut by her blithe
exploitation of Tess, albeit without the insistently sexual
overtones of Tesss erstwhile male colleagues. The workplace
offers the perfect setting for Katherines party, at which she
shines at the expense of poor Tess, who swaps the role of
secretary for that of waitress (equally invisible). This
prepares us (though not Tess) for her big betrayal playing
down Tesss idea about a forthcoming merger in the music
industry only to try and pass it off as her own.
The film plays with values and morality in the word of big
business. Tess succeeds not because she has a privileged
background but because she has honest ambition coupled
with an empathetic understanding of the human dimensions
of deals. Her riposte to Trainers toast, Power to the
people, is a softly spoken The little people. Coupled with
her (derided) interest in celebrity and gossip columns, her
business acumen and human insights give her a unique
perspective on the forthcoming Trask merger which trumps
the one-dimensional Katherine. Interestingly, the film
doesnt challenge the basics of capitalism there will be
significant profit in the proposed merger but Tess
116
personifies its more human (feminine?) face in her ability to

find a solution which protects jobs and preserves the
paternal values of the Trask empire. In so doing perhaps she
is embodying the American Dream, 80s-style (we will end
where we began, with stirring shots of the Statue of Liberty).
Bridesmaids: Comedy or Tragedy?
The use of female rivalry as a core plot device is also central
to Bridesmaids. The comedy arises mainly from the absurdly,
ever more competitive relationship between Helen and
Annie, both vying for Lillians approval and attention. For
Annie, however, this competition results in increasingly
abusive, excessive, violent behaviour that paradoxically
brings about the very thing she is desperate to avoid - being
rejected by her best friend. She becomes completely
displaced, deracinated, living back at home with her mother,
infantilised, economically dependent.
Lillians rejection of Annie in the wedding-shower scene is a
manifestation of her earlier symbolic rejection when
announcing her engagement. Annie experiences Lillians
engagement as a betrayal she is leaving the world of
girlhood (tellingly the scene ends with a cut to a picture of
Annie and Lillian as little girls) and it is this rupture which sets
the film in motion.
Although a comedy, the film deploys several tropes drawn
from the tragic - the flawed heroine, hubris, a series of tests
and punishments - before redemption is achieved. Annies
lack of economic power is integral to the film and its
narrative development. It prevents her from having the
degree of control and status apparently enjoyed by the
others, and, especially in her eyes, in contrast to the
117
seemingly unlimited wealth of Helen (or, rather, of Helens

husband). We learn that each bridesmaid is hiding a secret,
maintaining a faade. Helen has no real women friends, is
ignored by her husband and openly abused by her stepchildren; Ruth and Becca have unhappy marriages and have
secretly found happiness each other; Megan was bullied at
school; and Lillian, the Bride, is deeply unhappy and
mourning the loss of her single life with Annie.
Annies turning point comes after the visit from Megan, who
is physically violent and challenges her to Fight for your
shitty life! We then see Annie taking back control - getting
her car fixed, baking a cake for Rhodes, thinking of others,
working to heal the ruptures. She flourishes when the tables
are turned and Helen comes to her to help find the missing
Lillian. Annie and Lillian were last alone together in Lillians
apartment when Lillian broke the news of her engagement.
In a mirror scene, the tables are turned - Lillian is breaking
down and needing help. Annie fixes her and together they
enter the patriarchal realm Lillian gets married, the
friendship is saved, Helen and Annie reconcile. Annie
declares: I will be fine. I am fine.
Troubled Resolutions
Although sold as a feel good film, and critically hailed as a
breakthrough in terms of womens comedy, Bridesmaids is
arguably a film about a womans breakdown, initiated by
economic failure and inability to enter successfully into the
adult realm, signified by work and marriage. The comedy,
heavily reliant on the comic sketch format, is in truth
excessive, verging on the hysterical, and serves to show us
Annies deepening psychic crisis. Rhodes rescues her
118
repeatedly and encourages her to start baking again, thus

offering her a kind of salvation.
The film appears to refuses an easy resolution as she rejects
him - Dont try to fix me! - but the final shot is Annie going
off with him in the back of his police car - a visual pun on the
restoration of the patriarchal order? The resolution of the
film - the wedding, the rapprochement between Helen and
Annie, and Annies tentative reintegration into the
patriarchal realm as evidenced by her arrest by Rhodes feels somewhat forced and does little to counteract the
impact of the violence of Annies eruption. The title weighs
perhaps too heavily upon the film: the examples offered by
her fellow bridesmaids also undermine the message that
marriage is necessary for womans health and economic
wellbeing.
Conclusion
Working Girl offers on one level a heart-warming, uplifting
story of a woman who succeeds in the world of men by
maintaining her integrity and humanity. Despite the star
presence of Harrison Ford, the romance serves to support
Tess not to undermine her (unlike the pre-existing romance
with the character played by Alec Baldwin). It privileges
female friendship, in spite of the seemingly growing gulf
between Cyn and Tess. Although the world of high finance
largely functions as a narrative hook, I would argue that it
succeeds in foregrounding class and gender as barriers
overcome by narrative resolution.
Tesss class identity, ably demonstrated by her clothes,
accessories and humble apartment, and her attempt to
transform this through impersonation provides the basis for
119
the comedy; and yet the film never invites us to laugh at her,
rather we laugh with her at the world of work she aspires to.
Bridesmaids is a more troubling film, one which strains
somewhat against its generic label. It offers many more
female characters for identification, few of them cast in
traditionally feminine moulds. Its heroine is both more
complex than Tess yet, at times, a seeming comic cypher.
Here, it is the comic excess that drives (and at times
impedes) the narrative. Whilst many reviews talked about
the film as harbinger of a new feminist revolution in
Hollywood comedy, conservative values continue to haunt
the text.
Yvonne Tasker, Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema,

London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 21, 40-43.
Julia Hallam, Working Girls: A Womans Film for the Eighties, in Sara
Mills (ed.), Gendering the Reader, London: Wheatsheaf, 1993, p. 177.
120
12 / The Visualisation of
Sexual Difference in the Early Films
of Jean-Luc Godard
Esin Berkta
Introduction
The definition of sexual difference affects the power
relations among sexes and designates the creation of
meaning in society. In daily use, sexual difference refers to
the biological differences between men and women.
Definitions of sexual difference which only rely on biological
differences tend to privilege the male, and the phallus,while
considering the female as a secondary sex which is somehow
lacking and negative. The anti-sexist paradigms which are
trying to change this understanding consider sexual
difference as involving historically and socially constructed
gender identities and roles. This is why poststructural theory
in general, and feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray,
identify sexual difference as one of the major philosophical
issues that probably could be our salvation if we thought it
through. 1
121
The creation of a new philosophical understanding and

with it a new poetics is based on the elimination of
traditional binary oppositions among sexes. This new and
revolutionary approach apires to break the rooted patterns
of patriarchal gender structures in society. Cinema is one of
these new arenas in which sexuality is reproduced. In fact, it
is one of the most popular and effective media through
which old as well as new codes of gender roles are recreated
and distributed by means of sound and image.
Jean-Luc Godard is one of the most important progressive
directors focusing on this subject. He tells stories about men
and women politically. His portrayals move beyond
traditional gender roles and the stereotypes which are
characteristic of the cinematic genres. Therefore, his male or
female characters are closer to what they really are. This
essay examines Godards visualisation of sexual difference in
three of his earlier films concerned with deconstruction of
traditional gender roles and gender-based differentiation:
Une Femme est une Femme (A Woman is a Woman, 1961),
Masculin Fminin (Masculine Feminine, 1966) and 2 ou 3
choses que je sais delle (Three Things I Know About Her,
1967).
The Representation of Sexual Difference in Cinema
Mainstream cinema deploys unconscious mechanisms which
signify men as the subject and the maker of meaning, and
women as sexual objects. These mechanisms are built into
the structure of the gaze and narrative itself by point of view,
framing, editing and other elements. As Mulvey puts it: In a
world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has
been split between active/male and passive/female. The
122
determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female

figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional
exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and
displayed, with their appearance can be said to connote tobe-looked-at-ness. Women displayed as a sexual object is the
leitmotif or erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease... she
holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. 2
One of the main critical issues of feminist film criticism is the
argument that women as women are not represented in the
cinema; the female point of view is not heard or seen;
women are either complementary or contradictory features
of male discourse. On the other hand, female desire is from
somewhere else, as Irigaray suggests: "Woman's desire
would not be expected to speak the same language as
man's...The predominance of the visual and of the
discrimination and individualization of form is particularly
foreign to female eroticism. Woman takes pleasure more
from touching than from looking and her entry into a
dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment
to passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of
contemplation." 3
We cannot understand or change sexist images of women
without considering how the operations of narrative,
shooting, acting, lighting, mise-en-scne. work. This critical
shift from interpretation of meaning to an investigation of
the means of its production locates the identification of
ideology in aesthetic structures and film-making practices
themselves. 4 In this context, Godard is an important director
because he creates a cinematographic language which is
deconstructive of film form and of ideas. Central to the films
I have chosen for discussion are Godards opinions about
womens contradictory place in society.
123
A Woman is a Woman and Masculine Feminine

A Woman is a Woman tells the story of a stripper, Angela,
who wants to have a child. Her lover, Emile doesnt want a
child and so Angela has an affair with his friend Alfred. Then
she repents and turns back to her lover again. The film is
about Angelas efforts to express her desire and to fulfil her
wish to have a child. Although Godard later asserts that this
movie doesnt mean anything except giving pleasure 5, it
represents female identity by not falling into the traps of
patriarchal narration.
Within the story of a woman who uses her sexuality to earn
money, Godard deconstructs the socially defined
conditionings about marriage, the nuclear family, maternal
roles, sexual freedom, having affairs, and prostitution.
Reflecting the the impact of the sexual revolution of the
1960s, he analyses and represents sexuality, polygamy and
the maternal role in a quite unprejudiced manner. As a
result, allowing the female character to create her own way
of life, this film can be seen as an attempt to create a story
which lies beyond the traditional patriarchal structure of
sexual relations.
The second film here, Masculine Feminine (1966), is one of
Godards earliest explicitly political films. Its about the
sexual and political lives of young people in the Sixties. Paul,
a young Socialist, has begun to flirt with a bourgeois woman,
Madeleine, and tries to influence her with his ideas about
society, politics, capitalism, and so on. At first, she is
indifferent to him on her way to becoming a pop singer.
They eventually became a couple, however, and through the
film, we explore the binary opposition between the male-
124
revolutionary character and the female- consumerist

character who are examples of what Godard calls the
children of Marx and Coca Cola.
Madeleine is calm, naive, consistent and successful in a
private world of her own, whereas Paul is somehow anxious,
irritated and weird in his expressionist world-view. Struggling
to realise himself, he seems to accuse Madeline because of
her disinterestedness toward him, his ideals, desires,
opinions, activities and internal pressures. He says that he
doesn't understand women, but in fact it is he himself who is
not understood by women and by the audience. He is
sketched out as a confusing character whose opinions and
perspective contradict with his requests. At the end, Paul
dies in a peculiar way and the difference between sexes
which results in irreconcilable contradictions remains
present.
Godards deconstructive style involves technical strategies
such as voice over, quotations, documentary scenes, direct
address to the camera, generic hybridity, expressive use of
colour, and so on. Godards Brechtian cinema deconstructs
the spectators apparent position of dominance and turns
viewers into critics. This alienation effect is also of
importance for feminist analysis of cinematic production and
the hidden structures of vision and the visual: Vision
performs a distancing function, leaving the looker
unconnected in or unpolluted by its object. As Sartre
recognized, the look is the domain of domination and
mastery; it provides access to its object without necessarily
being in contact with it. 6
125
Two or Three Things I Know about Her

My third film for analysis, Two or Three Things I Know About
Her (1967) tells the story of Juliette, an actress, a wife, a
mother and a prostitute who uses her sexuality to finance
her needs in a new urban way of life. It can be argued that
this film marks the true beginnings of Godards commitment
to the critical representation of the politics of sexual
difference. Here Godard discusses the impact of capitalism
on women. He emphasizes that the maintenance of
consumerism in modern cities is only possible by immersing
ourselves in the consumption of the goods produced by the
capitalist economy.
Moreover, according to Godard, our sexual identities in
modern societies are bound up with the economy rather
than with love or sexuality. The modern economy
commodifies women because it commodifies everything. As
he argues in the film: Enjoying facilities they never had
before, people use gas and hot water without thinking of the
bill to come. This means money for the rent or else doing
without TV, a car, or holidays. A change from their usual
standards, in other words.
Godard demolishes the myth of familial and maternal
sanctity, as well as the segregation of private and public lives.
In his ethnographic observation of French society, the
themes of capitalism and consumerism are crystallised and
they are identified with prostitution, which is deromanticised in the film. In Two or Three Things prostitution
is dislocated from its natural environment to the domestic
sphere, the domain of the family. Thus, the tension between
familial and extra-familial is purposefully blurred. The taboo
126
sexual relations of modern society are transported into the

sacred domain of the family in order to criticise its artificial
consistency.
The socioeconomic and psychological states of characters in
the film clearly echoed the historical conditions of the 60s
and the birth of the consumer society. Striking here are the
philosophical undertones of the economic analysis with
which Godard informs his cinematic style. In this area,
whether men or women, people are trapped in the
uncontrollable changes of the city of Paris (the other elle of
the films title). Rapid urban and rural development have
triggered a social crisis that can be symbolised by a triangle
consisting of consumerism, womens body and the society of
the spectacle. Godard's cinema represents and transforms
this dilemma. Two or Three Things suggests that the female
body is a signifier of commodity fetishism, linking it to the
society of spectacle through the discourse of sexuality in
advertising. While Godard draws attention to the
commodification of woman, in the advertisements of
consumer capitalism as well as in the economy of
prostitution, he also draws attention to a wider eroticisation
of the commodity itself.
Conclusion
Can Godards cinema be seen as an alternative way of
representing women on screen? Godard narrates the
relations and distribution of power based on sexual
difference.
The
construction,
reconstruction
and
deconstruction of gender roles are thus major issues in his
films. His way of visualising the other favours neither the
dominant nor the subordinate in the social hierarchy: I
127
think that my originality is that I dont make any distinction

between men and women. It is just two kinds of animals. I put
my direction and my lines in a mans body and a mans mouth
or in a womans body and a womans mouth without
worrying that because she is a woman she can, or because he
is a man he cant, say it... People expect you to be for this
characters view or that characters view. I say Im for the
picture...I say what Ive got to say in any kind of mouth that I
like. If its a woman, its a woman. I dont think about
whether it should be a man or a woman. 7
1
Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1993, p. 5.
2
Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, p. 27.
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, Ithaca, New York: Cornell
4
John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds.), The Oxford Guide to Film
Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 18.
David Sterrit (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews, Jackson, MS: University

Press of Mississippi, 1998, pp. 3-6.
Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, London and New

York: Routledge, 1990, p. 38.
7
Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds and Politics, London and

Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1980, p. 102.
128
13 / Malaysian Indian Identity and

Bharatanatyam in
Menons Dancing Bells
Catherine Mariampillay
Bharatanatyam and Malaysian-Indian Identity

Malaysians of Indian ethnic origin form the second largest
minority group after the Chinese and are the third largest
racial group in Malaysia. According to Lian Kwee Fee,
Malaysian Indians are only partly integrated with Malaysia,
given the close associations to their native villages. 1
However, I argue that these close connections create a
strong sense of attachment to Indian cultural practices,
which ultimately help to define Malaysian identity. My case
study, Deepak Menons Dancing Bells (2007), is a film about
the Malaysian Indian community and their relationship to the
South Indian classical dance called Bharatanatyam. This
essay will centre on the representation of Bharatanatyam
and its relationship to the issues of race and religion in a
129
multiracial yet profoundly Muslim country through two

characters in the film, Uma, a Malaysian Indian, and the
dance master, a Malaysian-Muslim (we should note that it is
controversial for a Malaysian-Muslim to engage in Indian
cultural practices such as this).
Through these explorations, the essay seeks to assert the
role of Bharatanatyam in the formation of a Malaysian Indian
identity and to affirm its position as a stimulus in promoting
multiculturalism in Malaysias multi-ethnic landscape. In
Khattabs view, the Chinese and Indian diasporas were
plagued with painful experiences of displacement and
disjuncture since migrants arrived in Malaysia with racial,
linguistic and religious differences when compared to the
inhabitants of the host country. 2 I would argue, however,
that the dislocation faced by Malaysian Indians has created a
stronger need to preserve their native cultural practices,
which eventually became a channel for Malaysian identity
formation as seen in the film Dancing Bells.
Dancing Bells
Dancing Bells centres on a marginalised lower class Indian
family in Brickfields, a popular Indian settlement in Malaysia.
The film centres on Umas dream of learning Bharatanatyam.
However, her aspiration is almost unfilled because of poverty
as her mother is the sole bread-winner in a family with two
school-going children to feed. Muthalibs research on
Dancing Bells reveals marginalisation of the Malaysian Indian
community, where he describes the Indian community as a
trapped society 3. Though the marginalisation of the Indian
community is a reality in Malaysia as seen in Muthalibs
findings, it is not my intention to delve into the politics of
race that is apparent in Malaysia in this essay, as my own
130
focus is on Bharatanatyams role in the formation of a

Malaysian Indian identity.
In my exploration of the influence of Bharatanatyam in
identity formation, I firstly argue that the familial and
community support Uma receives in her pursuit to master
the art of Bharatanatyam aids in the formation of her
Dancing Bells introduces
Bharatanatyam in the scene where Uma and her mother
hear the clanging of the dancing bells on the way to school.
Then Uma insists on entering the dance school premises to
witness the on-going Bharatanatyam practice. Throughout
the scene we hear the clanging of the dancing bells to the
rhythm of the dance masters singing, and witness Umas and
her mothers awe at the performance. The scene very clearly
explicates Umas longing for her native tradition, as seen in
her eagerness to witness the dance.
We should also note that the scene is devoid of dialogue
except for Uma and her mothers brief conversation at the
end. The absence of dialogue could be interpreted as a
means of highlighting the Bharatanatyam dance, which is the
central concern of the film. The scene likewise plays a vital
role in the film as it is Umas first encounter with the dance
form and it is here that the audience is made aware of Umas
intention to learn Bharatanatyam. This is realised towards
the end of the scene in the conversation between the mother
and daughter. This scene is also particularly relevant to
Umas Malaysian Indian identity formation as it highlights the
first form of support Uma receives from her mother in her
endeavour to learn the dance, which is made obvious
through the brief dialogue. The next source of
encouragement is her brother who willingly sponsors her
dance lessons though he only works at a car wash. He readily
131
sacrifices his dream of possessing a motorbike in order to aid

in the accomplishment of his younger sisters dream.
The film also represents societys approval for Umas plans to
learn Bharatanatyam. In the film Uma is portrayed as the
helper of her mother where she delivers flowers made by her
mother to a few Indian customers after school. However,
after Uma succeeds in enrolling into a Bharatanatyam
school, she informs these customers that, because of her
dance lessons, she will no longer be able to deliver flowers.
Uma receives positive reactions from her customers - they
congratulate her, bless her and wish her well in her new
endeavour. This leads me to suggest that both the familial
and societal support she receives helps in creating a deeper
sense of belonging to Malaysia and strengthens her
Family and Social Class
At this juncture, I would like to draw some comparisons
between my analysis of Dancing Bells and Mydins reading of
the novels of the Malaysian Indian author K.S. Maniam.
According to Mydin, Ravi, the protagonist in The Return
(1993) disregards the importance of his native culture in the
formation of his Malaysian identity, and this leads to his
marginalisation by his own family and ethnic Indian
community. Mydin further argues that the loss of attachment
to his family and community causes him to be ostracised and
ultimately prevents him from forging a sense of belonging to
his Malaysian identity 4. But this is not the case with Uma, as
her association with Bharatanatyam further reinforces her
bond with her ethnic community and this strengthens her
Malaysian Indian identity. Moreover, I also claim that though
she originates from the lower class of the Indian society and
132
is not from the upper class or a Brahmin, she receives

considerable recognition and praise for her interest in
pursuing Bharatanatyam.
The historical evolution of Bharathantyam led it to become a
somewhat elite, upper class art form after its revival.
Srinivasan shows that between 1935-36 Bharatanatyams
renewal both in its form and motive was due to the efforts of
Rukmini Devi, an upper class Bharatanatyam dancer who was
a Brahmin, and this led to the subsequent monopolisation of
the dance by the Brahmin community 5. Therefore, thanks to
the elevated economic status of most Brahmins,
Bharatanatyam too was perceived as an art form for the
wealthy upper class. Dancing Bells firmly challenges this
notion as it portrays the success of a lower Indian class girl
who is able to pursue Bharatanatyam with the support of her
community and family. Another point to note is that, though
the film depicts the Malaysian Indian lower classes, the film
reveals the realities of the Indian community as well as
depicting elements of multiculturalism, as I hope to go on to
show.
Ramli Ibrahim
The dance master in the film Dancing Bells is in reality of
Malay-Muslim origin. He played by the world-renowned
Bharatanatyam dancer Ramli Ibrahim. A Malay-Muslim who
practices the Bharatanatyam dance raises two very different
issues. First, Ibrahim is a figure who promotes
multiculturalism since he is a Muslim of Malay descent who is
practising an Indian-Hindu dance form. Second, his position
as a Malay-Muslim provokes religious controversy over the
engagement of a Malay-Muslim in such a cultural practice.
Though the film itself does not problematise these issues, I
133
would like to argue that the film is indeed raising these two
pertinent concerns. I argue that through his engagement
with Bharatanatyam, Ibrahim bridges the racial and religious
divisions prevalent in Malaysia since he acclaims and values a
cultural form other than those associated with his MalayMuslim beliefs. On the contrary, Ibrahims position is
problematic as his involvement in Bharatanatyam challenges
the tenets of the National Cultural Policy.
According to Md Nor, Ibrahims attempt to convince the
authorities to accept his artistry as part of the national
culture was unsuccessful 6 . Instead he was seen as an
anomaly to the three principles of the 1971 National Cultural
Policy which prescribes that National Culture must be based
on the indigenous Malay Culture; suitable elements from
other cultures may be accepted as part of the National
Culture; Islam is an important component in the moulding of
the national culture. In another instance, Ibrahims
contemporary dance drama about the Hang Tuah/Hang Jebat
legend was rejected for the ASEAN cultural exchange
programme, according to Sooi, as the officials felt that it was
erotic and thus unsuitable for inclusion 7.
Ibrahim is once again seen as an anomaly, and as a threat to
the NCP. However, at this point he is perceived as a risk to
Malaysian culture itself, which is highly ironic in the light of
that he embodies Malaysias multicultural dimension. Md.
Nor and Soois research similarly indicate that Ibrahim is the
embodiment of Malaysias multicultural make-up and his
engagement with Bharatanatyam is a relevant and necessary
tool to promote multiculturalism in Malaysia. Therefore,
though the film does not problematise this matter, I would
argue that Ibrahim is not only promoting multiculturalism but
is also breaching official state policies.
134
Bharatanatyam and Multiculturalism

Though Dancing Bells is in Tamil, and features a majority of
Indian characters, the film also depicts multiculturalism
explicitly through the characters association to
Bharatanatyam as well as in their relationships with each
other. Meduri proposes that Rukmini Devis International
Academy of Arts, Kalakshetra, ought to be regarded as a
global dance practice reaching a host of countries like Britain,
the US, Singapore and Malaysia 8. The transnational nature of
Bharathantyam is revealed in Dancing Bells when the film
depicts a Chinese girl learning Bharatanatyam at the dance
school. At this juncture we witness the association of a
Chinese person with the Indian culture in a country that is
non-native to both the Chinese person and Indian culture,
suggesting that a three-way amalgamation is taking place.
Through just this kind of intercultural exchange,
Bharatanatyam has established itself in Malaysia as a global
dance form as well as a means of forming multiculturalism. In
conclusion, Bharatanatyam has succeeded in establishing
itself as a global dance from as portrayed in Dancing Bells
since the dance has travelled to Malaysia and has established
itself as an important and relevant cultural practice among
the Indians and non-Indians of Malaysia. Most importantly, it
has transcended from a physical dance form into a vital
nation-building tool that bridges the gap between peoples
from different racial and religious backgrounds as
represented in Menons Dancing Bells.
135

1
Lian Kwen Fee, The Political and Economic Marginalisation of Tamils

Malaysia, Asian Studies Review, vol. 26 no. 3, 2002, p. 310.
Umi Manickam Khattab, Who Are the Diasporas in Malaysia? The

Discourse of Ethnicity and Malay(sian) Identity, Sosiohumanika, vol. 3 no.
2, 2010, p. 160.
Hassan Abd Muthalib, Voices of the Fourth Generation of MalaysianIndian Filmmakers, in Maya Adadol Ingawanij and Benjamin McKay (eds.),
Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia, New York:
Cornell University, 2012, p. 22.
4
Raihanah Mohammad Mydin et al, Themes of Recognition and

Reification in K.S. Manians Novels, Kajian Malaysia, vol. 29 no. 2, 2011,
pp. 34-35.
5
Amrit Srinivasan, Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and Dance,

Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 20 no. 44, 2012, p. 1875.
6
Mohd Anis Md Nor, Eschewing National Culture Policy: Realizing

Multicultural Trajectories For Malaysia Arts, Tirai Panggung, vol. 8, 2008,
pp. 89-90 and pp. 94-5.
Tan Sooi Beng, The Performing Arts in Malaysia: State and Society, Asian
Music, vol. 21 no. 1, 2012, p. 141.
8
Avanthi Meduri, Bharatanatyam as a Global Dance: Some Issues in

Research, Teaching, and Practice, Dance Research Journal, vol.36 no. 2,
2012, pp. 15-16.
136
14 / Mothering the Other:

Representations of Maternity
in Natali's Splice
zm nal
Science Fiction and the Monstrous-Feminine

This essay analyses the representation of what has been
termed the monstrous-feminine in the wider concept
of technology, reproduction, and the maternal body in
Vincenzo Natalis Splice (2009). The film tells the story of a
mad scientist through a satire on modern marriage and
parenting. Splice puts a modern slant on the Frankenstein
myth: why stitch together parts when you can genetically
create a whole? Reproduction is thus a multiple metaphor
that allows for the fictional exploration of maternity, of the
contemporary social and moral ideologies of cloning, and of
general framework of technology. Hence, this essay discusses
the tension between the subject and technology in Splice
with reference to the difficulties of talking about the self as a
137
coherent entity in a technologised world. It also engages the

semiotic-psychoanalytic approach of Julia Kristeva and her
notion of the abject, along with Barbara Creed's critique of
Kristeva. Finally, it examines the definitions of the
other/monster in contemporary Womens Studies.
In the face of rapid changes in new information and biotechnology, the boundary between human and
machine/non-human, self and the other, has become
uncertain. Such is Harraways prime argument in her essay A
Cyborg Manifesto. 1 Unlike the theorists of gender who have
searched for the historical and cultural origins of gender
inequality, and some holistic unity, Harraway asserts that
there is no such basic organisational construct of culture. I
agree with her claim that it is the dissolution of the
boundaries that could help us to solve the problems in the
gendered dualism we have inherited, at least partly, from
Descartes.
For Descartes it is the pure mind which makes someone
visible, not the body. Heavily influenced by Descartes, the
conventional dualism of Western thought foregrounds mind
over body, classifying men as all mind and women as all
body 2. When discussing the body, I refer to current attitudes
towards what it means to be human, attitudes that science
fiction narratives under discussion only mirror and/or distort.
My point is that these current notions of the meaning of
human have been forged through technology, rather than
biology, that reproduces gender and thereby challenges
conceptions of what is to be human, gendered, stable
subject. It has helped the cultivation of beauty ideals, a fixed
self which is determined by patriarchy. The cult of fashion,
strict dietary regimes, and wrinkle free faces are some of the
138
examples of a process for the normal bodies to become

invisible.
Drawing on Harraways formulation of the nature of women
as odd techno-organic, humanoid hybrids, I take as my
point of departure Doanes revised definition of the body as
a direct outcome of the advance of science drawing attention
to questions of the maternal, reproduction, representation
and history 3. According to Doane, Science fiction is more
concerned with the female body, particularly with the body
of the mother and the implications technology has for
reproduction, than with its ability to produce new forms
(androids/cyborgs). The notion of the monstrous-feminine
in sci-fi films is tied to the reproductive functions of the
female body, which is constructed as abject in patriarchal
cultures.
Natalis Splice
Splice posits the possibility of a world in the not-too-distant
future where human DNA might be patented; hence, a
natural body seems to be rapidly eroding. Splice is the tale of
a mutant creation, the prideful achievement of biochemists
Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) who 'splice DNA
from different animals to create hybrid creatures and
proteins of interest to their employers, a pharmaceutical
company which wants to move to the next level with the
current research. What exactly Clive and Elsa did for the
company was to inter-splice the DNA of a number of animals,
so that they can create a brand new trademarked genecreature, whose cells can be replicated to create a hugely
cost-effective new strain of livestock feed.
139
While Clive and Elsa transcend the limitations of human body

through technology or genetic redesign, I would argue here
that their biggest mistake was that they did not, as Vint puts
it, return to a notion of embodied subjectivity in order to
articulate the ethical implications of technologies of bodily
modification. Vint here underlines that biopower is both
the site of ideologys acting upon the body/subject and a
potential site for resistance 4. I would claim that Elsa and
Clives encouraging new male and female creatures - whom
they name Fred and Ginger - to perform a mating ritualdance known as imprinting, contributes to the argument that
there is God-complex issue. Interestingly, the company is not
portrayed as the evil corporation; instead, Sarah and Clive,
the biochemists, are the ones who want to open Pandoras
Box by introducing human DNA into to the splicing
programme, but the company forbids it, whereupon they
commence the experiment in secret.
In this connection the film emphasises how Clive and Elsa
have their own issues as regards children. Clive wants
children, and yearns for a bigger house in which they can
start a family; on the contrary Elsa has absolutely no interest
in children, and this is partly due to the way that her own
mother treated her on their creepy farmstead; Natali obliges
the spectator to struggle for understandings of her past,
allowing evidence to emerge only gradually in the course of
the film. Yet, as Creed emphasise more than Kristeva does,
woman is not, by her very nature, an abject being; rather,
patriarchal ideology constructs her as such. Elsa is the one
who insists on keeping the baby Dren alive, against Clives
misgivings, and treats the hybrid creature as a baby
daughter. In spite of Clives rejections, Clive is also roped in
to play the role of father.
140
But Dren (Delphine Chanac) is, in her own way, a passionate

individual with her own sexual needs, and becomes
infatuated with her pseudo-father Clive, who is aware that
work and stress have meant he has not had sex for a long
time. In earlier sequences, Dren watches Elsa and Clive in the
act of sexual intercourse. Creed remarks that one of the key
figures of abjection is the mother who becomes an abject at
that moment when the child rejects her for her father who
represents the symbolic order 5. Drens intense relationship
with her mother, Elsa, turns her to see her pseudo-father,
Clive, as a symbol of freedom that can help her to create
space between herself and her mother.
The Body of Dren
The mother-daughter relationship in the pre-oedipal phase is
a part of the process of identification, individuation and
dependence. The narcissistically defined Elsa says I am
inside you. You are part of me. When Dren shows signs of
rebellion, Elsa hardens back into the experimental scientist,
echoing the cold treatment that her own mother gave her.
For Kristeva, the authority that the child learns first is
through interaction with the mother, about its body 6. She
suggests, as explained by McAfee, that even before the
mirror stage the infant begins to separate itself from others
in order to develop borders between I and other. What
Kristeva calls abjection is the process whereby the infant
gathers what seems to be part of oneself. From this
perspective, according to McAfee, Kristevas view of that
which is abjected is radically excluded but never banished
altogether 7.
In a very moving sequence in the middle of the film, Dren
becomes aware of her body when she looks in the mirror
141
with the make-up created by Elsa. In another sequence, Dren

is taught about dancing by her pseudo-father Clive, who to
Drens great surprise holds her in the way he holds Elsa. In
return for this openness, Dren, after a while, seduces Clive.
The scene ends with Elsas appearance at the door. Dren
completely fulfils the purpose for which she was designed, at
least in the first part of the film. Here she acts as the perfect
companion who/which yearns for love and affection from
Elsa. It is as if, from the perspective of Dren (which Natali
invites us to inhabit) selfishness appear as a perversion of
virtues by experience and culture.
The films is, however, the story of Drens emancipation from
Elsa, about her unfolding as a subject in her own right in her
capacity as a self-aware, thinking, feeling being. Drens
emancipation process starts when she becomes a seductress
and ends when, returning from the dead in masculine form,
he becomes a killer. Abjection, for Kristeva, is a crucial tool in
diagnosing the dynamics of oppression. In the words of
McAfee, It hovers at the periphery of ones existence,
constantly challenging ones own tenuous borders of selfhood
It remains as both an unconscious and a conscious threat
to ones own clean and proper self. The abject is what does
not respect boundaries. It beseeches and pulverizes the
subject. 8
The Rape of Elsa
Elsas rape is an extremely important event in the film, one
whose repercussions resonate until the final sequence. From
the human point of view, she has been forced to engage an
intimate contact against her will, an act of violation of her
self. The rape is of course a deeply traumatic experience for
Elsa, but I would also argue that the human need to create a
142
distance between the self and the other, and a hierarchy

between male and female, underlies the severity of her
response. Given her construction of herself as the owner this
half-human entity, Dren, Elsa tries to construct power
hierarchies, but Dren while raping her expresses his desire
for inside. He simply says inside of you.
The metaphor of rape expresses the struggle over imposing
ones ideology or power on another. What matters at the
end of the film is how she responds to this traumatic
experience. In the end, however, that achievement takes its
toll; the reality she must confront in is one in which Clive is
dead, and she is host to a hybrid foetus in which the briefly
glimpsed truth about human sexuality has been obliterated.
As Elsa puts it, whats the worst that could happen?. She
achieves what she desires: she is not a victim any more. In a
way Elsa turns her circumstances to good account: a mother
inside, a scientist outside.
Abjection, then, is one of the fundamental processes of
subject in process, and one that threatens its unity. Dren
becomes a product of Elsa and Clives cultural fears and
unconscious desires. Culture is the way that human beings
have civilized their world with their learning (their minds)
and nature is the world in its raw state, the province of
human beings in their animal or bodily being. Drens function
in the film is to represent unfamiliar otherness, one which
challenges the connotative stability of human identity 9. To
sum up, the notion of monstrous-feminine in Natalis Splice
is tied to the reproductive functions of the female body,
which is constructed as abject in patriarchal cultures. This
idea proceeds from Kristevas theorisation of the abject,
defined as that which disturbs identity, system, order and
does not respect borders, positions, rules 10.
143

1
Donna J. Harraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and

th
Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20 Century, in Harraway, Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York and Abingon:
Routledge, 1991, pp. 149-182.
See Ruth Holliday and John Hassard (eds.), Contested Bodies, London and
New York: Routledge, 2001.
3
Mary Ann Doane, Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the

Feminine in Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (eds.),
Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, London and New
York: Routledge, 1990, p. 174.
Sherryl Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science

nd
Fiction, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2 rev. ed., 2006, pp. 8 and 19.
Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis,

London: Routledge, 1993, p. 45.
Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, p. 12.
Noelle McAfee, Julia Kristeva: Essential Guides for Literary Studies, New
York and London: Routledge, 2003, p. 32.
McAfee, Julia Kristeva, p. 46.
Anne Balsamo, Reading Cyborgs Writing Feminism, in Gill Kirkup, Linda

Janes, Fiona Hovenden, and Kathryn Woodward (eds.), The Gendered
Cyborg: A Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 2008, p. 149.
10
Thea Harrington, The Speaking Abject in Kristevas Powers Horror,

Hypatia, vol. 13 no. 1, 1998, p. 150.
144
15 / Depictions of Eroticism and

Sexuality in the 'Rain' Song and Dance
Sequences of Bollywood Cinema
Vikrant Kishore
Erotic Spectacles: Singing and Dancing in the Rain

Song and dance sequences help to make Bollywood cinema
extremely popular and unique, and play a vital part in the
Indian music industry, which is dominated and sustained by
film songs and music. Significantly, song and dance
sequences have contributed immensely in the creation of
Bollywood as a popular culture. Song and dance sequence/s
can be used to depict love, brotherhood, happiness or
sadness, and to explore eroticism and sexuality. Song and
dance sequences have thus contributed immensely to the
creation of Bollywood Cinema as a significant form of popular
culture 1.
In terms of exploring (or exploiting) sexuality and eroticism,
rain has always provided an important form of symbolism in
145
Hindi cinema. This stems from a certain taboo on overt

sexual content in Indian films because of a strict censorship
code, as well as an implicit taboo amongst Bollywood
filmmakers against nudity or even semi-nudity arising from
cultural conventions. Therefore, song and dance sequences
in nightclubs, waterfalls, bathtubs, and rainy situations have
been frequently utilised to provide eroticised and sexualised
imagery. Amongst these settings, perhaps, rain situations
have been exploited the most by Indian filmmakers to
showcase a wet image of leading women whose clothes
cling to the body, every contour of which is brought alive for
the voyeuristic pleasure of the audience.
Prominent Bollywood filmmakers such as Raj Kapoor, Yash
Chopra, Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra, Subhash Ghai and
Prakash Mehra have utilised rain songs in most of their films,
often citing aesthetic reasons. In this essay I will analyse the
use of rain song and dance sequences in Bollywood cinema
to depict sexuality and eroticism, utilising examples from the
films of Yash Raj Films (YRF), a prominent Mumbai-based
production house that is well known for its spectacular
contributions in this area.
Bollywood song and dance sequences represent a world of
fantasy, and more than often it is a tool to invite the
voyeuristic gaze of the (male) spectator. As Jones and
Ramdas observe: much of the erotic is contained within the
song and dance routine where the codes of behaviour, dress
and gesture found elsewhere in the film are violated to give
the maximum pleasure. 2 Raj Kapoor, the showman of Indian
Cinema, sensually depicts his heroines drenched in water in
Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978) and Ram Teri Ganga Maili
(1985). Filmmaker and actor Manoj Kumar, renowned for
making films with patriotic themes, could not resist this motif
146
in the rain song Hai Hai Yeh Majboori in Roti Kapda Aur
Makaan (1974), where Zeenat Aman gyrates seductively in
the rain to tempt the sombre Manoj Kumar to make love to
her. Similarly, in another blockbuster, Namak Halaal (1982),
the rain song and dance Aaj Rapat Jaaye to Hame Na
Bachaiyo! (If We Hold Each Other this Day, then Kindly
Dont Save Us!) is a virtual love-making scene - albeit in a
rather comical manner, and with clothes on - with
conspicuous elements of seduction and titillation.
Erotic dance routines showcasing women in revealing attire
and dancing in a sensuous manner picked up quite rapidly
during the 1960s, which saw cabaret numbers and rain song
and dance performed by scantily clad female characters in
seemingly every other film. By the 1990s, however, flexibility
had begun to characterise the rules and regulations of the
Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which became
rather more accommodating towards the depiction of erotic
and sexual content, depending on the theme and context of
the film. Thus, although the depiction of sexuality and
eroticism has become bolder than ever in Bollywood cinema,
one can still find traditional rain song and dance sequences
in film after film - as in Masti (2004), Fanaa (2006),
Agneepath (2012) and so on.
Playing up elements of eroticism while maintaining an Indian
flavour and observing conservative strictures against nudity,
these erotic rain song and dance sequences have been
important elements of Yash Raj Films output. Over the years,
Yash Chopra has been given the epithet of the master of rain
song and dance, especially with heroines dressed all in
whites 3. Rain song and dance sequences have especially been
a recurring feature in all Yash Raj Films across the decades,
such as Kabhi Kabhie (1976), Faasle (1985), Vijay (1988),
147
Chandni (1989), Lamhe (1991), Darr (1993) and Yeh Dillagi

(1994). Their subsequent films, which saw the advent of
Chopras son Aditya Chopra as the driving force behind YRF
along with Yash, opened up to include a highly westernised
and eroticised approach to rain song and dance in films such
as Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Dil To Pagal Hai
(1997), Mohabbattein (2000) and Hum Tum (2004). I will use
the song and dance sequence Megha Re Megha
(Rainclouds Oh Rainclouds) from Lamhe and Mere
Khwabon Mein Jo Aaye (The One who Comes in my
Dreams) from Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge in order to
analyse the use of rain situations in the films of YRF.
Rainclouds on Rainclouds
In Lamhe (1991), the first song and dance sequence, Megha
Re Megha, is utilised to introduce the heroine, Pallavi
(Sridevi). This is a typical rain song and dance sequence with
the purpose of sensual and sexual representation of the
female body. Megha Re Megha starts with a couple of
verses in the colloquial Rajasthani dialect announcing the
onset of the Hindu month of Saawan that marks the
beginning of the rainy season in India. Provoked by the falling
rain, Pallavi continues the refrain by singing about her
romantic longing for her beloved. The Megha Re Megha
song and dance sequence borrows from a tradition of folk
songs in North India which celebrate the onset of the rainy
season in the form of songs of love and longing. The
sequence also recreates the typical settings of Saawan
festivities, with floral decorations and swings attached to
trees.
Although this sequence uses elements of the traditional
Ghoomar dance prevalent in Rajasthan, the typical Ghoomar
148
dance steps are relegated to the chorus line dancers. Pallavis

dance does not make any attempt to replicate the traditional
Ghoomar steps at all. Instead, she follows the typical
Bollywood form of stylised dance with elaborate hand
gestures, sensual hip thrusts and dramatic facial expressions,
all this while dancing in the rain. Megha Re Megha was
directed by Saroj Khan, the leading Bollywood choreographer
of the 1990s, renowned for her sensuous and erotic
choreography. In this sequence too, Khan includes some
iconic, sexualised steps reminiscent of her other Bollywood
routines - vigorous hip movements and pelvic thrusts that are
not seen in traditional Ghoomar performances.
This is undoubtedly the case with the Megha Re Megha
sequence, where Pallavi is presented in a sexualised and
eroticised manner, even though the festive settings of the
sequence and lyrics of the song expressly invoke the imagery
of pea-hens and rain-clouds borrowed from folk songs of
romantic love sung in the rainy season of Saawan. While the
sequence invokes the tradition of Saawan festivities and folk
songs, the mode in which the dance is actually performed
creates a different image altogether: the traditional customs
of Saawan are conflated with a typical Bollywood rain dance
sequence.
While Yash Chopra agrees that he tries to bring out the
sensuality of the heroines through rain song and dance, he
disputes the charge that the rain sequences in his films are
purely a device to exploit female sexuality. Rachel Dwyer also
concurs with Chopra to say, none of these songs
concentrates on the erotic aspects of the wet and the rain,
although their presentation may be sensual, but on the joy of
the rain and its incitement to celebratory song and dance. 4
Although filmed in a tasteful manner, nonetheless, I find that
149
Chopra undoubtedly utilises rain song and dance sequences

to depict the female body in a sensual and erotic manner,
something which, as I have suggested, appears in almost
every film of YRF.
The One Who Comes in my Dreams
For example, the song and dance sequence Mere Khwabon
Mein Jo Aaye (The One in My Dreams) from Dilwale
Dulhaniya Le Jayenge , attempts to enact a simple confession
of a teenager to her mother, expressing her desire for that
unseen and unknown lover of whom she dreams. The song
and dance could have utilised a simplistic approach devoid of
any sexual or eroticised imagery, stressing the innocence of
Simran (played by Kajol) and her longing for love, affection
and attention. Instead the song and dance is designed in such
a way that it includes erotic and sensual imagery.
The song, in three segments, creates an interrelationship
between Simrans desire and the introduction of the hero,
Raj (Shah Rukh Khan), who is supposedly going to be Simrans
Prince Charming. The first segment introduces Simran in her
bedroom wearing only a towel. The filmmaker tries to show
Simran dancing and prancing around in an innocent manner,
but while she dances in her towel, Simrans choreographed
movements are not just simple steps, but offer a tantalising
invitation to look beyond her towel as she flirtingly and
seductively gazes directly into the camera, inviting the male
audience into her bedroom.
The third segment of the song and dance is set in the rain,
where Simran is shown wearing a micro/mini top and skirt,
which reveals flashes of her undergarment. White clothing
mainly made of light cotton or sheer fabric is the most
150
favoured kind of fabric for rain song and dance scenes in

Bollywood. This is perhaps due to the semi-transparent
nature of the fabric, and once the heroine is drenched in
water, the dress not only sticks to her body but the clothing
appears see-through, thus offering the audience a glimpse of
the eroticised female body.
From Sensuality to Sexualisation
This typical eroticisation and sexualisation of the female body
is repeatedly exploited in the films of YRF through situations
where there is leading ladies are regularly drenched. This
occurs in the pre-1994 rain song and dance scenes in what
has often been called a sensual manner - Rishi Kapoor and
his real-life spouse Neetu Singh expressing their love to the
world with gay abandon in Pyar Kar Liya To Kya, Pyaar Koi
Gunah Nahi (Were in Love, and Love is not a Crime) from
Kabhi Kabhie (1976), or the Gapooji song from Trishul
(1978), where Poonam Dhillon is shown wearing bikini and
later getting drenched in rain wearing all white, or Anil
Kapoor and Rati Agnihotri expressing their love while
promising not to forget each other in the rain song-dance
Mujhe Tum Yaad Karna from Mashaal (1984), or Vinod
Khanna in Chandni (1989) pensively singing Lagi Aag Sawan
Ki (Its Raining Once Again) while watching Sridevi getting
playfully and seductively rain-soaked.
I do not agree with those commentators on the pre-1990s
rain song and dance scenes who claim that they are filmed
sensually and without highly sexualised or eroticized
imagery. These sequences should be analysed in accordance
with the standards of the time they belonged to and not of
the present, where to most they might seem sensual and
more artistic. I find that these song and dance sequences
151
indeed offered highly eroticised and sexualised

representations of the female body during the period when
the films were released.
Their raciness, indeed, created quite a stir. Since the mid-90s
we have witnessed a dramatic rise in the number of highly
glamourised. eroticised and fetishised Bollywood rain song
and dance sequences - Akshay Kumar and Kajol locking lips in
YRFs rain song-dance Dekho Zara Dekho Barsat Ki Jhadi
Hai (See, the Rain is Falling) in Yeh Dillagi, 1994, or Saif Ali
Khan and Rani Mukherjee virtually making love in Saanson
Ko Saanson Me Milne Do Zara (Let our Breath Become One)
in Hum Tum (2002), or Esha Deol seductively dancing in the
rain in Dilbara from Dhoom (2004) to name but a few.
In conclusion, I find that the popular rain song and dance
sequences in Bollywood cinema are used as a device to
exploit female sexuality and to depict eroticism. Over the
years rain song and dance sequences have become bolder
and more risqu. It is also important to note that the
popularity of the rain song and dance waned in the late
1990s with the advent of the item numbers, a style of song
and dance number inspired by the risqu western music
videos popularised by MTV and Channel [V]: an item
number is a dance sequence of raunchy movements and
risqu lyrics with little relation to the plot line, which aspiring
starlets use to debut in Bollywood. 5
In changing times the CBFC also softened its stance towards
sexualised and eroticised imagery, and consequently, item
numbers became almost essential in every Bollywood film,
featuring sleazy starlets, who could dance and gyrate
seductively and erotically in the style of risqu Western
music videos and at times taking a cue from mens magazines
152
such as Playboy. By the end of the 1990s, these item

numbers became so popular that as well as starlets,
Bollywood superstars also began making appearances in
them. Nonetheless, rain song and dance sequences are still
popular in Bollywood cinema, although they are now
becoming akin to the item number, for example Jo Haal Dil
Ka (The State of the Heart) from Sarfarosh (1999), Ishq
Kamina (Naughty Love) from Shakti: The Power (2002),
Bhaage Re Mann Kahin (The Mind is Lost Somewhere)
from Chameli (2004), or Gale Lag Ja (Embrace Me) from De
Dana Dan (2009).
For broader discussion see Rajinder Kumar Dudrah, Bollywood: Sociology

Goes to the Movies, New Delhi: Sage, 2006, and Tejaswini Ganti,
Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema, New York and London:
Routledge, 2004.
2
Gavin W. Jones and Kamalini Ramdas (eds.), (Un)tying the Knot: Ideal and
Reality in Asian Marriage, Singapore: Asian Research Institute, National
University of Singapore, 2010, p. 65.
3
Rachel Dwyer, The Erotics of the Wet Sari in Hindi Films, Journal of
South Asian Studies. vol. 23 no. 2, 2000, pp. 143-160.
4
Rachel Dwyer, The Hindi Romantic Cinema: Yash Chopra's Kabhi Kabhie
and Silsila, Journal of South Asian Studies. vol. 21 no. 1, 2000, pp. 181-212.
5
Rini B. Mehta and Rajeshwari Pandharipande (eds.), Bollywood and

Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora, London:
Anthem Press, 2010, p. 42.
153
16 / Haptic Confrontations with

the Archetypal Self in
Aronofskys Black Swan
Jessica Escue
Jungs Self, Shadow, Persona

In his early writings, Carl G. Jung theorized the archetypal
Shadow, an aspect that he left largely undeveloped but
which is determined by the complex and enigmatic design of
the unconscious and conscious Self. Where the Self diverges
in both consciousness and unconsciousness and
encompasses an integration of opposites, the Shadow is not
antithetical to the Self but instead an aspect that functions to
bring about a sense of wholeness. An uncontrollable,
undeterminable force, the Shadow is seen by Jung as the
dark aspects of the personality unrestrained by the
moralism of the so-called real, and containing childish or
primitive qualities which would in a way vitalise and
embellish human existence 1.
154
Theological dogma and the role of religion in mediating the

Self have restrained human beings from fully experiencing
those aspects, which have been cast aside as being inferior or
less useful, forcing us to repress desires that would otherwise
cause us to act outside the bounds of convention. But
cinema has, with much criticism, been able to explore these
shadowy impulses through dramatic narrative and spectacle
insofar as we can, as spectators, detach ourselves from the
parameters of social and moral conditioning.
In Black Swan (2010), the third installment of what may be
called his trilogy of archetypal death, Darren Aronofsky
signals the presence of the Shadow, demonstrating its
invasion of the bodily landscape in cinematic representation
and posing questions to narrative convention through the
self-referential juxtaposition between ballet, performance
and audience. Black Swan imposes the uncontrollable,
sentient aspects of our unknown selves as they explode into
consciousness by way of predominantly haptic symptoms,
asking us to consider the completeness of being as it must
always be reconciled to its own containment by the
phenomenon of death.
The invasive manifestations of the Shadow are bodied, haptic
in its most perceptible form as first illuminated by Laura U.
Marks in her book The Skin of the Film 2. Haptic imagery is
organic yet misleading, amoral, and when paired with the
conscious discourse of narrative poetics, Black Swan
becomes dualistically paradoxical, oppositional, traversed
only by instances of archetypal syncretism. In the case of
Black Swan, as well as in Aronofskys Requiem for a Dream
(2000) and The Wrestler (2008), this instance of syncretism is
the final archetypal death of the central character as
155
negotiated by his or her movement towards a new

awareness. For Nina, this awareness is thrust upon her; she
is incapable of escaping the repressed, darker aspects of the
Shadow progressively imposed throughout the film upon her
carefully orchestrated performance of identity, until she is
liberated only by death itself.
This image of Self, as presented to the world in order to
eliminate the anxieties of being, Jung termed the Persona:
The persona is a complicated system of relations between
individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind
of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite
impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true
nature of the individual5. 3 For Nina, the Persona of the
classical ballet dancer seems to be all that she has thus far
experienced of her own identity. Not only does she appear
to be either obsessed or conditioned (or both) to fiercely
pursue an unattainable image of perfection, her mother has
engulfed both herself and her daughter in a full-scale
projection of the ethereal, Romantic ideal of the elevated
feminine.
The Body in the Film
The opening image demonstrates the bodied constraints of
formal dance as visually imposed foremost upon the feet,
where the manipulation of the body is systematised by
strapping on prosthetic wooden toe shoes. The audience
meets Nina in a dream, introduced first to the dancing feet not her face, not an exposed, fleshy hand, but a costumed
imposition of her utilitarian Self. The milieu of the
manipulated, altered body is subsequently extended through
a montage of violent modifications to the dancers pointe
156
shoes, enacted in preparation for a surprise audition casting

a stripped-down, visceral reinterpretation of Swan Lake.
Tomas, the artistic director of the New York-based dance
company, requires that whoever is to be cast as the Swan
Queen must be capable of embodying both the white swan
and the black swan. After indicating his expectation that she
will fall short, Nina arrives home to revisit her botched
audition in a sequence beautifully demonstrating the
precariously unnatural suspension of the body turning
repeatedly upon a two-inch surface area of pink satin. But it
is Ninas understanding of success, her Persona, which
deceives her, for though she pushes herself relentlessly
towards perfection, it is Lilys effortless, unkempt dancing
that she most envies and cannot replicate.
We as audience figure prominently in the meta-narrative of
Black Swan, most coherently by being simultaneously
directed towards the gratuitous distinction that Lily is a
component of Ninas Shadow emergence, whilst recognising
that her problematic placement in the narrative cannot also
be conceived of as entirely fictional. Nina first sees a
hyperflash of her own face imposed on what is most likely
Lily traveling to rehearsal on the subway. An underground
space, the subway is a motif of descent where revelations of
the darker self and the deepest aspects of our reality are
most likely to manifest themselves.
It is in this scenario that Nina is particularly susceptible to
encounters with her Shadow, later passing an unchanging
version of herself and still later ignoring, without opposition,
excessively lewd gestures posed by a strange man on another
train. It is the space where, in a shadowed reflection, she
adorns her lips with red lipstick on the premise of
157
confronting Tomas, subsequently returning his sexual

advances by biting his lip and turning the tides in her favor.
Nina is thus cast as the Swan Queen, and so she must
endeavor to behold both the light and dark aspects
contained within her.
Ninas Struggles
The struggle that ensues in the face of the surfacing Shadow
is insistent and painful for Nina in the strongest sense. She
perpetuates an apparently neurotic impulse of scratching,
and hiding this tendency from her mother, and the skin
around her fingernails appears to peel off in gruesome
measure, signifying the gaping loss of her protective outer
shell. These tactile vulnerabilities frighten Nina, but they are
as physically necessary to the dispensations of the physical
body as the Shadow emergence is to the psychic and
psychological disunity she is experiencing.
Yet the ambiguously suspenseful tone and discontinuous
camera positions deployed in Black Swan allow us to imagine
that perhaps these symptoms of the psyche are unrelated, as
it remains a logical component of our patriarchally
disseminated cultural matrix to express suspicion of the
female, the emotional, and the subjective psychological
development of the individual. In fact, it is only by way of the
otherness imbued in Ninas normative reality that she comes
to silently bear the burden of her own archetypal death.
The conventional demands pushed upon the feminine to
bear the weight of purity, whilst having a willingness to
subsume the impositions of male desire, play out in Ninas
experience of stepping into the limelight. She is even
accused of gaining access to her success through sex by at
158
least two other female characters. However, it is not through

the semi-castrated, even caricatured advances made towards
her by Tomas that Nina comes to acknowledge the division of
consciousness that has resulted from her polite, apologetic,
frigid identity. Rather, it is through the rejection of her
mothers authority and the endorsement of her own
autonomy via the expression of morally ambiguous desires
that she is able to reach a place of catharsis, unity, or
transcendence.
The somatic manifestations of Ninas Shadow compel her,
through both fear and desire certainly, towards a state of
new psychic awareness that is only possible by a coexistence
of life and death. Furthermore, she is not capable of making
the conscious existential choice to commit suicide symbolically through her dualistic role as Odette and Odile until she has been confronted with the morbidity of her own
existence: It is as if the soul could only ransom itself from
imprisonment in the somatic world of the demiurge by
complete fulfillment of all lifes demands6. 4 Therefore, the
Shadow can only reveal itself somatically, insofar as the body
is the instrument of both the conscious and the unconscious
Self.
Eroticism and Death
The unawareness of the Shadow is apparent when Nina is
seemingly ignorant of her own bodily frenzy and sexual
abstinence. Her mother tucks her in at night by opening a
music box, circulating a miniature, promenading ballerina
and reinforcing her perpetual status as the virginal maiden.
It doesnt even occur to her that she is enslaved to the
limited revelation of Self that serves her place in the world,
yet cloaks her true nature. Tomas instructs her to feel his
159
touch, to respond to it, and while he seduces her with a

promise of sexual liberation only to deny this, he also forces
her to confront her own desire by asking her to pursue it
actively, imaginatively, to feel it.
Nina returns home and it is simultaneously clear that she is
now both conscious, abstractly, of a kind of deficiency, but
also that she does not understand the base urges related to
being as human, much less being as woman. She attempts to
masturbate in the bath, becoming first frustrated with her
own incapacity to experience physical pleasure, and then
distraught at the blood on her fingers. The succinctness of
this scene suggests both the disembodiment that has come
about through the somatic manipulation of Ninas occupancy
of the dancer persona, but also implies a disconnectedness
from the natural reality of the female bodys life-giving
ability. The womb is also the tomb where unfertilized eggs
pass from birth to death, where the expansion of fecundity
ceases, and where the souls of the dead are received - the
underworld of the goddess.
The Dionysian consort of the goddess, often understood as
the Celtic God Cernunnos, is signified both by Rothbart, the
lover and seducer of the Black Swan, as well as by the statue
standing in the corridor of the performance hall where the
company fund-raiser is held. Early in the film, Nina becomes
fascinated by the wings of Dionysus, and later as she fully
transforms into the Black Swan on stage, these same dark
wings sprout -for the film audience - from her own skin. Yet,
the narrative again reveals the imaginative quality of the
Dionysian Nina, suggesting that for the audience of the
ballet, this performance is most likely a superficial aesthetic
experience, the beauty of form. The film audience, however,
160
is presented with this voyeuristic tableau and asked to

consider: what comes after such a great manifestation of
darkness?
Resolving Femininity and Masculinity
Certainly the parallel between the Gothic narrative of Swan
Lake and the postmodern narrative of Black Swan is not
accidental, and yet, despite the endless cues guiding the film
viewer down a path towards individual transformation,
inevitably one could easily fail to recognise the visible
symptoms of their own Shadow. Of course, this corresponds
to Jungs belief that the assimilation of the Shadow is an
arduous task, and that there are certain features which offer
the most obstinate resistance to moral control and prove
almost impossible to influence7. 5 For him, the Shadow was
not evidence of the existence of evil, but rather the
problematic invasion of moralism in the conscious realm of
mankind. The primordial nature of the human psyche insofar as it was defined by Jung and plays an eminent role in
Black Swan - is related to the deeper, intuitive view of the
body and its ability to regulate human experience.
As a direct result of Victorian values, women historically
found themselves subject to a moralism that cast them into a
position of either extreme favourability or unfavourability.
They could marry or join the church (reaching back to
perhaps even more excessive medieval dichotomies of
female identity), or they could choose to earn a living by
becoming prostitutes or behaving in some unconventional
fashion. The Gothic elements of a few Romantic classical
ballets attempt to subvert this disunity by demonstrating a
refusal of either of these choices. Swan Lake is one such
example, insisting that upon being forced to choose either
161
the light or the dark path, signified by the two suitors,

Odette instead chooses suicide.
Unfortunately, somewhere in the constant rotation of ballets
like Swan Lake and Giselle throughout classical repertoires,
audiences largely came to believe that the swan did, in fact,
kill herself for love, and that Giselle was really just crazy. The
likely minority capable of understanding the paradox of
female identity snared in the trap of the conventional world
was probably made up marginally of quietly intelligent
woman, just as miniscule as the readership of Gothic
literature would have been over two hundred years ago.
As for the misogyny with which the feminine encounters in
the process of self-discovery and self-destruction, we can
suggest that Tomas is not only the source of external
stimulation for Ninas transformation, but that he also
provokes her disunity by denying her the syncretism of both
Self and transpersonal transcendence that the narrative
guides us towards as an audience. Further, when he
describes Beth as destructive, a figure that likely occupies too
much Shadow, he reduces her constantly to a little
princess, a title he also assigns to Nina once she has
completed the unity of archetypal death.
Since the engagement of male desire is inevitable, both for
Nina and for us, the film, rather than rejecting its existence,
forces the cinematic audience to use it as a sort of vantagepoint from which we establish our own poetic distance.
Tomas surprise at Ninas kiss after her Black Swan variation,
where she has learned to balance both Persona and Shadow,
lacks the stoutness of character with which he has previously
subdued her and so we catch a glimpse of his own
prudishness.
162
Through the erotic engagement of the Shadow, ultimately a

literal manifestation of the Self - where Nina veritably sees
her own face staring back at her - it is foreseeable that the
seemingly two-fold death (inconsistent with the sudden,
instantaneous endings of the other two films) signifies a
more complex reflection upon the union of opposites within
the personal archetypal experience. Nina fails to achieve
sexual orgasm which becomes transferred on to her
experience of her body during her Black Swan variation, but
she murders the Shadow so that it can be assimilated,
finally realising that she has been struggling only with herself
to reach this point.
Sex and death thus become bound up as simultaneously
experienced notions of creative and destructive freedoms,
and the archetypal death is, from a Jungian view, finally seen
as some level of ego-demise. The theatrical audience
experiences fully the darkness of the Shadow, and the
perpetual death of the character, but we instead are
ambiguously left with the impression that Ninas actual
death is temporary or even inconsequential. Rather,
suggesting that though we may be limited by what we think
is real, Black Swan tells us that these boundaries may be
mediated through drama, allowing us to achieve a kind of
exegesis, or liberation, a dynamic way through the skin of the
archetype, one that is capable of negotiating the limits
between the seen and the unseen.
163

1
Carl G. Jung, The Essential Jung: Selected Writings, Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1983, p. 134.
Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment

and the Senses, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
3
Jung, The Essential Jung, p. 94.
164
17 / Gender, Dress and Power:

Transvestite Heroines in the Post-WWII
Western - Johnny Guitar
Christa van Raalte
The Western: Sartorial Options for Women

This essay explores the functions of dressing and crossdressing of the female hero in the context of the post-WWII
Western. It suggests that the narrative and sartorial tropes
discussed have a wider relevance, however, particularly in
the light of ongoing critical interest in the contemporary
action babe. My analysis focuses on Nicholas Rays Johnny
Guitar, made in 1954 as a star vehicle for Joan Crawford. This
is one of a number of post-war Westerns centred on
powerful female figures , other notable examples being Forty
Guns (Fuller, 1957) and Rancho Notorious (Lang, 1952). The
advent of these heroines coincides with an increasing
tendency within the genre to problematise masculinity and
the nature of the traditional hero.
165
In his seminal essay The Westerner (first published,

coincidentally, in 1954), Robert Warshow describes the
Western hero as one who looks like a hero, embodying a
certain image of man, a style. 1 While it is not true that the
heroes and villains of early Western were identified by their
white and black hats respectively, it is a myth that articulates
a certain poetic truth. Appearances in the Western are rarely
deceptive: generally speaking the good-looking, rugged man
is the hero, the man with excessive facial hair and scars is the
villain, and any man who devotes too much attention to his
appearance is a 'dude' and not to be trusted 2.
The sartorial options of the Western woman, while more
varied, are equally constrained by genre conventions. Her
costume signals where she belongs, in the ideological
continuum outlined by Leo Marx, between the garden of
civilisation and the wilderness beyond the frontier. 3 The
domesticated woman dresses decorously, usually in pastels
and buttoned up to the neck. Variations on this theme may
include a fashionable hat and gloves for the Eastern
newcomer, and for the pioneer or farmers daughter,
aproned gingham or occasionally practical blue jeans,
signalling the settlers work ethic. The wild woman,
frequently represented by the saloon girl, meanwhile, is
dressed in brighter colours (or darker ones in the case of the
black-and-white film) with decidedly lower necklines or
something clearly marked as exotic if she is of Latin or
Native American ancestry.
For women, then, as for men in the Western, narrative roles
have uniforms, and any shift in narrative role tends to be
reinforced by a change of uniform. Indeed one of the most
striking things about those post-war Westerns that have a
female star at the centre of the narrative is the frequency
166
with which the heroine changes costumes in the course of

the film. This is something never encountered in a male lead,
I would suggest, and one that exceeds the requirements of
verisimilitude and raises issues of masquerade and of
performance - critically, in the case of the cross-dressed
heroine, the performance of gender.
Womens clothes can thus be seen as what Bruzzi has termed
an alternative or disruptive film discourse 4, providing a
commentary upon shifts in status - be they diegetic,
structural, or dramatic. I want to argue that it is in fact only
in terms of this 'alternative discourse' that the ever-changing
wardrobe of these heroines can be understood. Only in the
light of an alternative discourse around issues of gender,
identity and power, moreover, can one explain the curious
recurrence of particular sartorial tropes throughout these
films tropes that in fact are not limited to the post- war
Western, or even the Western in general, but which keep resurfacing in a range of action adventure genres including
those contemporary action films featuring female leads.
Such tropes include heroines who cross-dress to play the role
of gun-fighter or boss, that is, to exert traditionally masculine
forms of power, whether physical or economic; heroines who
adopt the image of the femme fatale to exert sexual power
(although this can backfire, as the role often seems to render
them at least as susceptible to desire as it does the men they
have in their sights); heroines who seem to abdicate power
altogether when they take on the role of respectable
townswoman, a costume in which the most formidable
heroines seem to lose authority and become vulnerable to
(mostly male) abuse; heroines who adopt a version of the
white communion/ wedding dress when called upon to
present themselves as wronged innocents, or marriageable
167
material which they do with variable degrees of success.

Johnny Guitar offers example of all these tropes as its
heroine negotiates the demands of the narrative, performing
a succession of narrative, social and dramatic roles.
The Female Protagonist
Johnny Guitar tells the story of Vienna (Joan Crawford), an
ex-saloon girl who now owns her own saloon, strategically
located to benefit from the coming of the new railroad. This
development is opposed by Viennas arch-enemy, Emma
Small (Mercedes McCambridge), a local rancher who sees the
railroad, and the new settlers it will bring, as a threat to her
business.
She is also jealous of Viennas erstwhile
relationship with the Dancing Kid (Scott Brady) a local
neer-do-well for whom Emma secretly carries a candle.
Despite evidence to the contrary, she blames the Kid and
Vienna for the recent murder of her brother.
The Johnny Guitar of the title (Sterling Hayden) is Viennas
ex, a reformed gunfighter, whom Vienna has now summoned
from a five year exile, ostensibly as a hired gun to help
protect her property. With one significant exception,
however, Vienna fights her own battles - leaving Johnny
relegated very much to a supporting role. Johnny Guitar
comes closer than any other Western of the period to
actually placing a woman in the heros role. Vienna as gunslinger is on one level the very embodiment of Warshows
Western hero.
However the generic construct Warshow describes is a man;
this is not an incidental detail but absolutely fundamental to
the ideology and structure of the genre. Woman (as Fiedler
and Bellour have argued 5), is also central to the structure of
168
the Western so for the female lead to step into the role of
hero creates a narrative problem: who is to represent
Woman? In Johnny Guitar, the solution is for the leading
lady to fulfil by turns the roles of the gun-fighter hero, the
heroine in need of rescue, and the femme fatale.
Viennas costumes help keep these roles distinct, offering a
running commentary on her narrative status at any given
time and in particular her relationship towards power and
gender. Thus she assumes the guise and persona of the
Western hero only while she carries out traditionally male
activities (running her business, threatening her enemies,
duelling with her rival, etc). When undertaking traditionally
female activities (quarrelling with her lover, being captured
and rescued, etc) she assumes costumes to suit.
Vienna in Charge
Vienna first appears as the boss of the saloon, overseeing
her domain and negotiating with railroad executives. Fitted
out as a gunfighter hero, she embodies the challenge to male
privilege noted by Tasker, whereby for women in the cinema,
whatever the diegetic justification, cross-dressing is always
about status. 6 Viennas employee Sam articulates this
challenge direct to camera: Never seen a woman who was
more a man; she thinks like one, acts like one and sometimes
makes me feel like Im not. In this persona, Viennas
demeanour towards Johnny is that of the boss who has
employed him to do a job.
She stops him from playing a melody that might cause her to
betray her feelings and when he suggests that she might
have waited for him, she pours scorn on the notion. However
revisiting the same topic later that evening, having
169
transformed herself into a variation of the femme fatale, she

reacts very differently. Her change of costume seems to
render her as susceptible as she is seductive, and Johnnys
kiss serves to 'un-man her completely as she declares I have
waited for you, Johnny!. The following morning Vienna
appears in a new guise - that of the respectable
townswoman, off to the bank, accompanied by her man in
short a picture of domesticity.
It seems that as part of a couple she does not need the
trappings of power, whether economic, physical or sexual.
Her plan is in keeping with this new respectable, feminine
persona: she intends to draw out all her cash and pay off her
men, close her saloon then sit and wait for the railroad to
come. Unfortunately for Vienna, in this film, as in so many
others, the change into respectable female garb coincides
with a loss of control and increased vulnerability, as Vienna
finds herself caught up in the Kids bank robbery. His refusal
to obey her and abandon his plan, and the kiss he forces
upon her against her will, would never have been tolerated
by the lady boss in gun-slinger guise. Moreover by her
presence at the bank during the robbery, Vienna has made
herself vulnerable to a more serious threat, providing Emma
with the excuse she has been waiting for to get rid of her
rival.
The funeral cortge for Emmas brother is duly transformed
into a posse, bent on the capture and hanging of the Kid, his
crew and his supposed female accomplice. While Johnnys
response is to suggest he ambushes Emmas men and picks
them off one by one, Vienna continues in the domesticated
heroines role for which she is dressed, insisting that there
should be no more killing. This is something of a departure
for a woman who in the first scene of the film threatens to
170
kill her enemy, and in the last makes good on that threat:
both these scenes, however, are enacted by Vienna-as-hero,
in her gun-fighters garb.
The Feminisation of Vienna
The feminisation of Vienna is taken to extremes in the next
sequence, when she appears in what looks like nothing so
much as a confirmation dress. No longer a boss, Vienna is
engaged in the ultimate female activity of sitting and waiting
- and briefly of nursing the wounded, for Turkey, the
youngest of the Kids gang, has been shot and has come to
her for asylum. When the posse bursts into her property for
the second time, they find her seated at her piano, every inch
the 19th-Century lady in her parlour (although the wall of rock
behind her somehow belies this image, emphasising as it
does the sheer strength of will with which she has hewn a
living out of the wilderness).
But the heroines desire to present a classic tableau of
domestic privacy and respectability does not entirely explain
her extraordinary choice of costume. This dress certainly
doesnt look like anything one would expect to find in the
wardrobe of a woman like Vienna, but seems to represent a
textual over-determination of her latest narrative role. For
Vienna is now dressing and playing the part of the wronged
innocent, as though her protestations of innocence refer not
only to the bank robbery, but to her life in general.
Unfortunately her accusers require more than a white frock
to convince them, and the game is up when they discover
Turkey hiding under the table. Vienna, in traditionally female
self-sacrificial mode, encourages him to save himself by
naming her an accomplice to the robbery, and she is carried
171
off by the posse (at which point one is forced to wonder

what happened to the gun with which Vienna-as-hero held
them off on the previous occasion). Vienna as wronged
innocent must instead resort to effectual, attempts at selfdefence by throwing napkins and lampshades. This sequence,
I would suggest, makes absolutely no diegetic sense and can
only be explained in terms of gendered narrative roles,
highlighted by the alternative discourse of costume.
In the guise of victim/heroine, Vienna finds herself as
defenceless as she looks: her saloon is torched and she
herself is taken to be hanged. The narrative at this point
requires Johnny to temporarily take over the role of hero and
engineer her escape. Significantly, when Vienna asks why he
came back for her, Johnnys answer directly addresses the
structural problem this film presents for his character:
First chance I ever got to be a hero. Couldnt pass it up. It is
also his last, since Vienna is shortly to resume her heroic role,
marked by another costume change.
Following this rescue, and the destruction of her saloon,
Vienna has two very different, even conflicting narrative
roles to fulfill more or less in parallel in pursuit of a happy
ending: she must resume the role of gun-fighter hero to
finish off her enemy, and she must simultaneously re-invent
herself as a respectable woman, able to marry and settle
down. For her gunfighter role, as though in compliance with
some unwritten, extra-diegetic rule, she will again assume
masculine dress.
In fact she will literally borrow a mans clothes to do a mans
job a theme that is to be found in a range of actionadventure movies across periods and genres from Drums
along the Mohawk (Ford, 1939) to Blue Steel (Bigelow, 1995).
172
Meanwhile, to fulfill her romantic destiny, she must be

cleansed of her past: conservative genres dont usually allow
their male leads to end up with shop-soiled heroines. The
usual fate of the tart with a heart is self sacrifice and death indeed arguably it is in straying from this convention that
Johnny Guitar really breaks new ground.
The Cleansing of Vienna
These two issues I would argue, explain the sartorial
shenanigans that follow. Vienna and Johnny make their
escape using an old abandoned mine that runs under the
saloon. Here Vienna changes from the hopelessly impractical
white frock into a set of clothes conveniently left behind by
an old prospector. (There is a significant parallel here: these
are the clothes of someone who, like Vienna, staked a claim
and hung in there grimly, as one presumes, for some years, in
the hope of striking gold until finally forced to abandon his
aspirations (and his laundry) in something of a hurry).
As she goes to take the clothes, however, a beam from the
burning building above falls through and catches her dress,
making explicit the parallel between Vienna herself and
Viennas the saloon, every beam of which, she has told
Johnny, was paid for by her work as a saloon girl. Now,
arguably, her sins have been cleansed by the flames as the
fruits of her misdeeds are destroyed. As Vienna dresses,
Johnny quizzes her about her relationship with the Kid the
one remaining obstacle to their romantic happiness (apart,
obviously, from the imminent risks of being burned to death,
hanged or shot) and seems satisfied that this too can be
relegated to a past now symbolically destroyed.
173
Making their way to the Kids lair, a further cleansing takes

place as they cross the river, necessitating yet another
change of clothing at the cabin. It is not clear whose clothes
Johnny has borrowed, but it is made explicit (both in the
dialogue and by the distinctiveness of the costume) that
Viennas latest change is into an outfit belonging to the
recently deceased Turkey. Again there is an implied
comparison: not only does she look better in his clothes than
he did, she is more self-possessed, braver and a better shot
in short, more of a man.
Her adoption of this new wardrobe marks yet another shift in
roles, this time from recently rescued damsel in distress to
gang member and fully paid-up outlaw. It is in the boys
clothes that she undertakes the final shoot-out with Emma.
Vienna has previously complained of the unfair privileges of
being a man, compared with the precarious existence of a
woman. At the end of the film, however, she seems to have
been awarded these privileges. She has, in her own words,
done a lot of living, she has fought and killed and yet she
still gets to live happily ever after. Pointedly, she throws
away her gun, before throwing herself into Johnnys arms for
their final embrace.
In film noir, the femme fatales ever-changing wardrobe
becomes, as Bruzzi has suggested, a metonym for her
untrustworthiness 7. In Johnny Guitar, I would suggest,
Viennas ever-changing costumes are evidence of
untrustworthiness and instability, not so much in her
character, as in the narrative she inhabits and the ideology
that informs that narrative. In other words they offer a
commentary, or alternative discourse around issues of
gender and power in the film, highlighting the extent to
which the gendered and ideologically loaded roles she
174
assumes are just that: roles to be assumed and discarded as

easily as costumes.

1
Robert Warshow, Movie Chronicle: The Westerner (1954), in Warshow,

The Immediate Experience, New York: Atheneum Books, 1970, pp. 56, 136.
3
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal
in America, London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies,

London and New York: Routledge, 1997, p.120.
Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American, Leeds: Stein and
Day, 1968; Janet Bergstrom, Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis:
Interview with Raymond Bellour - An Excerpt, in Constance Penley (ed.),
Feminism and Film Theory, London and New York: Routledge, 1988.
6
Yvonne Tasker, Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema,

London and New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 26.
Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema, p. 129.
175
4. Masculinities
176
18 / Romance, Masculinity and the Star

Image: The Work of Leonardo DiCaprio
Julie Lobalzo Wright
DiCaprio and Stardom

While most of the stars of James Camerons original Titanic
(1997), including Kate Winslet, were present at the London
premire of Titanic 3D (Cameron, 2012), Leonardo DiCaprio
was conspicuously absent. Although the excuse was that he
was busy filming Django Unchained (Tarantino, 2012), his
non-attendance reflects DiCaprios well-known aversion to
the film that made him a star. When asked in 2011 about the
impending 3D re-release of Titanic, DiCaprio responded, I
cant tell you how much I dont think about that.1
Up until the original release of Titanic, DiCaprio had slowly
developed his acting credentials by co-starring in This Boys
Life (Caton-Jones, 1993) with Robert DeNiro and receiving an
Academy Award nomination for Whats Eating Gilbert
177
Grape? (Hallstrom, 1993), portraying mentally handicapped

Arnie Grape. In addition, DiCaprio cultivated a rebellious
image through his portrayal of Jim Carroll, high school
basketball protg, poet and drug addict, in The Basketball
Diaries (Kalvert, 1995) and as Romeo in Luhrmanns Romeo +
Juliet (1996).
The promotion of Romeo + Juliet and to a lesser extent, The
Basketball Diaries, presented DiCaprio as a prototypical teen
idol: angelic face, feminine features, almost androgynous at
times, with a brooding sensitivity and a hint of a rebellious
spirit. When Titanic was released in 1997, Leo-mania ensued
albeit with the star publicly displaying antagonism towards
his pin-up image. Male teen idols are often criticised because
of the excessive female consumption of their star image. As
Nash and Lahti note in their study of Titanic, DiCaprio and
female fans, there is a particular degradation for male stars
with a close proximity to both feminized iconography and to
female consumers. 2
The negative association of feminisation often leads male
stars to abandon elements of their star image that are
thought to be not masculine enough, or strive to cultivate an
overtly masculine image (strength, intelligence, savoir faire)
through typical masculine pursuits (sports, outdoor
activities), generally in the company of other men. What was
at stake for DiCaprio was his status as an adult male star,
both through the largely female attention attracted by
Titanic and in terms of his age - he was 23 when Titanic was
released and had been working in Hollywood since he was a
child. Therefore, DiCaprio opens up some interesting ways to
think about contemporary male Hollywood stardom because
of his ability to negotiate his teen idol status, and to remake
himself into a prestigious Hollywood actor.
178
Questions of Masculinity
Film stardom involves the stars on- and off-screen image
working in tandem to create a singular star image. While a
stars on-screen performances are a crucial element, the
broader texts and materials that help inform a stars image
(film reviews, gossip columns, public appearances) cannot be
ignored. After Titanic, however, DiCaprio has sought to
maintain a clear division between his career, including his
environmental activism and his personal life - he does not
appear at public events with girlfriends, nor does he discuss
his personal life in interviews. He even suggests that his lack
of public declarations about his private life is due to his
commitment to acting: ''Defining yourself to the public on a
consistent basis is death to a performer. The more you define
who you are personally, the less you're able to submerge into
the characters you do. People are likely to think, Oh, I don't
buy him in that role''. 3
Since Titanic, DiCaprio has been meticulous in his choice of
film roles, with a driving desire for longevity. He has, so far,
accomplished longevity and the transition from child actor to
teen idol to A-list leading man through a strong association
with what I would term, the masculine - male narratives,
environments and co-stars. DiCaprio has portrayed
characters with professions in typically masculine
environments: as entrepreneur and aviation pioneer Howard
Hughes in The Aviator (Scorsese, 2004), as an undercover
police officer in The Departed (Scorsese, 2006), as a CIA case
officer in Body of Lies (Ridley Scott, 2008), as former soldier
and police investigator in Shutter Island (Scorsese, 2010), and
as the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, in J. Edgar (Eastwood,
2011). In addition, many of his later films position DiCaprio in
a subservient role, often under the tutelage of an older male
179
lead - either a father or a father figure from whom DiCaprio

learns, but from whom he eventually acts independently:
Christopher Walken and Tom Hanks in Catch Me If You Can
(Spielberg, 2002), Daniel Day Lewis in The Gangs of New York
(Scorsese, 2002), Jack Nicolson and Martin Sheen in The
Departed (Scorsese, 2006), Russell Crowe in Body of Lies
(Ridley Scott, 2008).
While he is often paired with other male stars and placed
within male environments, the question of his own
masculinity is often at the centre of the narrative. This can be
linked to his past as a child actor, through the presss fixation
on his transition from boy to man and DiCaprios virtual
inability to age on screen thanks to his baby face (although
he may have finally hit a point in his career where he looks
like an adult). It is not unusual for male stars in their twenties
to appear in coming-of-age films focused on their transition
from childhood to manhood. What is unusual, however, is to
represent a weakened male image when the star wants to
present themselves as an adult, separate from their youthful
and feminised teen idol image.
Women at Fault?
Although DiCaprio has distanced himself from female
iconography and from the narratives that defined his teen
idol status in Titanic, he has not completely abandoned his
romantic image, still appearing in films with central female
characters as love interests. Women are frequently
positioned as pseudo-femme fatales, dangerous women who
lead to the heros downfall. Indeed, the DiCaprio type can
be described as intelligently handsome, but intensely
tortured with his tortured psyche routed in the failings of
the women in his life 4.
180
This especially pertains to three of his most recent films,

Shutter Island (Scorsese, 2010), Inception (Nolan, 2010) and
Revolutionary Road (Mendes, 2008). While these women
(portrayed by Michelle Williams, Marion Cotillard and Kate
Winslet) appear, at first glance, as hazardous women in
DiCaprios life, ultimately, it is his characters own failings as
men that lead to tragedy for his wife and eventually his own
downfall. Thus, DiCaprios post-Titanic career has focused on
narratives that question his adult masculinity and do so
under the guise of traditional notions of manhood.
Thematically, his adult masculinity is interrogated most fully
in Shutter Island, Inception and Revolutionary Road through
his marital relationships.
In Shutter Island and Inception, it is DiCaprios characters
who fail their wives, leading to their own ruin: in Shutter
Island, his wife is mentally unstable, setting fire to their
apartment and eventually killing their three kids; in Inception,
the wife kills herself after DiCaprios character causes her to
question reality. While at first glance it appears these are
dangerous women, it is DiCaprios character who is incapable
of controlling his mentally unstable wife in Shutter Island, nor
is he strong enough to save his wife from her death in
Inception. Although both films position women as
contributors to DiCaprios fragile mental state, hindering his
ability to perform in traditional masculine social roles (as a
husband and father), Revolutionary Road most explicitly
displays his precarious position as the young man attempting
to be a man.
Revolutionary Road
Revolutionary Road reunited DiCaprio with his Titanic co-star,
Kate Winslet, directed by her then husband, Sam Mendes,
181
and based on the 1962 book by Richard Yates. DiCaprio and

Winslet portray Frank and April Wheeler, a married couple
with two kids living in suburban America and overcome with
feelings of loneliness, isolation and despair because of their
mundane lives. Early in the film, Frank and April fight after
her disastrous performance in a local play. April states: You
pathetic self deluded little boy. Look at you. Look at you and
tell me, how by any stretch of the imagination you can call
yourself a man. The following sequence shows Franks
commute from his home in suburban Connecticut to his work
in New York City. The mise-en-scne overflows with men, just
like Frank, dressed in their conservative suits, lifelessly
travelling to work.
In these shots, Frank appears somewhat out of place,
partially because of DiCaprios youthful face underneath his
fedora, but also attributable to Aprils assertion that Frank is
a little boy. His movements appear laboured, as though the
actor is attempting to physically display that the world is
actually on Franks shoulders. DiCaprios physicality has
altered over time, from that of a small boy to that a six-foot
tall young man with a thin, wiry frame. Often DiCaprios
physical presence is exhibited through intense screaming
outbursts and the forcing of his body close to others to
create an intimidating presence. These moments act as a way
for his characters to exert their male authority, an authority
that is contested or almost non-existent in the case of
Revolutionary Road.
Although the marital relationship is the focus of the film, it is
Franks inability to fulfil traditional masculine notions of
strength, virility and security that leads to a rupture in the
family dynamic. His wife begins the film unhappy, wanting to
break from her commonplace life, and is only able to do so
182
through death. Frank, in the meantime, is weak, unable to

provide comfort for his wife, or to stand up to her when she
challenges his moral fibre. April tells Frank at one point, You
never try. If you dont try, you cant fail. It takes courage to
live the life you want to.
April does attempt to support her husband, telling him at one
point, Youre the most beautiful thing in the world. Youre a
man, while his boss implores him, A man only gets a few
chances in life. If he doesnt grab some of them, he begins to
wonder how he became second rate. Franks life, however,
is defined by his inability to prove his masculinity - to be
strong, to be intelligent and to be special (something the
Wheelers are told they are by many people, but come to
realise they are just like everyone else). Frank is emasculated
by his wifes assertion that she wishes to abort their baby,
and by the control his wife temporarily has over family
decisions. Although the two fight often in the film, it is
DiCaprio who is unhinged, rarely able to contain his rage and
vulnerability, appearing as an angry man and a terrified
young child. Frank needs Aprils love and approval, but he is
incapable of providing her with the love and support she
desires.
Versions of Masculinity
One of the key scenes illustrates both DiCaprios physicality
and Franks masculinity being tested. In the scene, the
Wheelers have their neighbour and real estate agent, Helen,
her husband and their son, John, over to their home for
lunch. John was a recent resident of a mental institution and
has a tendency to make accurate, but impolite comments
about people. Frank and Aprils plan to move to France has
been abandoned, not amicably, because of Aprils unplanned
183
pregnancy. Frank explains they are not relocating to Paris

because of a new job he has been offered at work, while
April sits quietly and stews, having engaged in a heated
argument with Frank before their guests arrived.
John doesnt buy their explanation and wants to know the
real reason they arent moving. He begins to taunt April,
suggesting that the little woman decides she isnt quite
ready to give up playing house, but he soon determines she
is too tough and he turns his attention to Frank. After John
muses that Frank may have impregnated April on purpose,
just so he wouldnt have to find out what he is really made
of, DiCaprio jumps up, bangs the table, leans over and
begins sternly telling John to keep his opinions to himself.
Helen reminds Frank that John is not well, in response to
which DiCaprio shouts and points his finger at John.
While his physical presence is threatening, his vocal
explosion is menacing, but also desperate. Both the character
and actor are pushing to be heard, but the encounter ends
with John ignoring Frank. Instead, he whispers to April that
she has a big man in Frank, especially as the only way he
can prove his manhood is by having children. The scene
displays Franks weakness because of Johns ability to
dominate through suggestion. John, however, is generally
correct in his assessments, especially locating Aprils control
over Frank and the emasculation he will endure when she
aborts their child. DiCaprio also appears unable to match his
male counterpoint in the scene even as he shouts and
physically asserts himself. It is perhaps worth noting that
DiCaprio did not receive an Academy Award nomination for
the role while Michael Shannon (John) did receive a
nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
184
The Maturing Star

DiCaprios post-Titanic image has attempted to undo his teen
idol status by presenting him in adult film roles that focus on
masculinity. What is surprising is that these films do not
present DiCaprio as a strong masculine figure, instead
focusing on the failings of man through fear and
vulnerability. Although weak masculinity is often on show, it
is unusual for an A-list Hollywood actor to continuously
portray vulnerable characters without an equal measure of
heroic characters to balance the equation. DiCaprios last
truly heroic role was in Titanic as the catalyst in Roses life,
leading her to break from her social standing and pursue her
own dreams.
In addition to his pursuit of longevity, DiCaprio has dedicated
himself to presenting his image as a great actor. This has
been achieved through the auteurs he has worked with:
Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese (four times), Ridley Scott,
Christopher Nolan and Clint Eastwood; the prestige
associated with his post-Titanic film roles, leading to two Best
Actor Academy Award nominations for The Aviator (Scorsese,
2004) and Blood Diamond (Edward Zwick, 2006); and his
attempt to keep his private life separate from his
professional career. All of these aspects have helped re-make
his star image following Titanic, however, this image has
been re-made without the assistance of female consumption.
Do female narratives and feminine iconography suggest
devalued masculine star images?
DiCaprio perhaps appears to be entering a new phase of his
career, starring in Tarantinos Django Unchained (2012) as a
slave owner hunted down by one of his former slaves and in
185
then in Luhrmanns The Great Gatsby (2013) as Jay Gatsby,

an eccentric millionaire hoping to win back his past love,
Daisy. Will these films demystify the serious artist tag
DiCaprio has gained in the last decade or even reconnect him
with romanticism and female consumption? Time will tell,
but after remaking himself into an A-list leading man, some
have asked if it is time for DiCaprio to lighten up and expand
his range beyond the tortured figures he continues to
portray. A critic for The Los Angles Times suggested last year
that DiCaprio should take inspiration from Titanic and try
some roles with a lighter touch. Even though it would be
risk, she reminded us that, it was fearlessness that made
Jack Dawson the king of the world. 5
1
Belinda Luscombe, 10 Questions, Time, vol. 178 no. 19, 14 November

2011, p. 60.
Melanie Nash and Martti Lahti, Almost Ashamed to Say I am One of

Those Girls: Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio, and the Paradoxes of Girls
Fandom, in Kevin S. Sandler and Gaylyn Strudlar (eds.), Titanic: Anatomy
of a Blockbuster, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999, p. 71.
3
Marshall Sella, The Kid Stays in the Pictures, The New York Times
Magazine, 24 November 2002.
4
Betsy Sharkey, Career Counseling: Lighten up, Leo, The Los Angeles
Times, 8 October 2010.
5
Sharkey, Career Counseling.
186
19 / Discursive Legitimation and

Representations of Subordinate
Masculinity in Hollywood Cinema
Jonas House
The Hollywood Fall Guy

Hollywood cinema has long been the globally dominant form,
and its themes, tropes and narrative devices are instantly
recognisable by audiences all over the world. One such
device is the figure of the fall guy, which is an enduring
character type in Western and particularly American
culture, and has been used with considerable regularity in
Hollywood film. It is a version of a recurrent narrative device
which involves the lampooning of a particular 'condition' in
the interest of low-level comedy, a 'condition' which may be
physical, mental, emotional, ethnic, or social 1. Ergo, the
condition is always a correlate of an attribute that is socially
subordinate in real-life.
187
Scholars such as Richard Dyer have focused their attention on

the way in which mainstream cultural products of which US
film is a particularly good example serve to normalise a
particular set of individual characteristics and position others
as inferior, deviant or Other. 2 This holds for a range of
attributes: the masculine is generally privileged over the
feminine, the white US character over those of different
ethnic origin, and so on. The fall guy character type is just
one way in which this distinction has been achieved.
An example of a fall guy whose 'ethnicity' is the intended
source of comedy is the character of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast
at Tiffany's (Edwards, 1961). Ostensibly the protagonist's
Japanese landlord, Mr. Yunioshi is in fact played by the
American actor Mickey Rooney, who dons false teeth,
squints, and adopts an outrageous accent in order to elicit
laughs from the audience. Clearly, one would expect
outdated and offensive representations such as this to now
be absent from Hollywood; and, indeed, my recent research
on Hollywood's contemporary representations of masculinity
indicates that although the fall guy trope is still in use, there
appears to be a crucial difference in its contemporary
incarnation.
This essay focusses on the fall guys in Marc Lawrences Did
You Hear about the Morgans? (2009) and Andy Tennants The
Bounty Hunter (2010). Crucially, in both cases the condition
which was the intended source of comedy was not ethnicity,
as in the case of Mr Yunioshi, but strangeness. Both
characters exhibited strange behaviour - in which social
norms were transgressed - and both were also relatively
strange in appearance. Their overall strangeness was
apparently intended to elicit comedy and to position them as
a foil to the hero(es) of their respective films. These
188
characters seemed to fulfil the role of the classic fall guy

without recourse to the politically regressive mocking of
socially subordinate masculinities, and thus appeared
outwardly to represent a more progressive version of a timehonoured comedic trope. However, closer analysis of the
characters strongly indicated that their strangeness was in
fact based largely in representations of homosexuality, camp,
and inferior (i.e. feminised) masculinity.
Hollywoods Gay Legacy
Before undertaking a more detailed exploration of these two
characters, it is worth briefly considering Hollywoods legacy
of representing men who are either gay and/or who are
unmanly. Hollywoods representation of gay men has,
historically, been less than favourable. Homosexual
characters have been depicted in a narrow range of ways: the
sissy, the comic relief 3; the social or sexual deviant, the
villain or monster 4. Latterly one might add representations
such as the gay best friend, a type of depiction whose
apparently positive nature does little to change an enduring
reliance on stereotyping in the depiction of gay men.
Nevertheless, there have been positive shifts in Hollywoods
recent representations of gay characters. Good examples are
Brokeback Mountain (Lee, 2005) and I Love You, Phillip Morris
(Ficarra and Requa, 2009), which seem to augur a turn away
from Hollywoods habit of depicting gay characters purely as
gay and little else. Films such as these also offer a break
with the legacy of representing gay men either as comic
relief or as in some way deviant. Gay men, it would seem,
are now able to be protagonists - heroes, even - rather than
being the object of crude comedy, or being hugely overrepresented among the villainous and dastardly.
189
The same can be said of the recent popularity of films with

unmanly or 'nerdy' protagonists. The bespectacled and
intelligent but physically weak and socially inept male once
operated chiefly as a hindrance or a target of comedy. A good
example is that of Lieutenant Ring in Eastwoods war film
Heartbreak Ridge (1986) whose nerdy, bureaucratic
interference in military matters is ridiculed in comparison to
Eastwood's rugged, authentic, hyper-masculine protagonist
Tom 'Gunny' Highway. By contrast, films with nerdy
protagonists - for example, Artetas Youth in Revolt (2009) or
Vaughns Kick-Ass (2010) - are now something of a
phenomenon.
Despite positive shifts in the representation of masculinities
that are not socially dominant, white, and heterosexual,
Hollywood cinema still relies, however, on marginalising and
offensive representations in the production of comedy. While
the strangeness of the two fall guys seems to offer a
politically neutral target for comedy, closer analysis reveals
that this strangeness is partially achieved by the employment
of cultural tropes pertaining to socially subordinate
masculinities. In one example, homosexuality is directly
invoked alongside weakness and masculine inferiority; in the
other, effeminacy and masculine inferiority are invoked
alongside a use of camp that hints at the intertextual
referencing of homosexuality. This blurs the boundary
between laughing at the fall guys' strangeness, and laughing
at their subordinate masculinity. Let's turn to some examples.
Did You Hear about the Morgans?
Lawrences Did You Hear About the Morgans? (2009) centres
on an estranged couple, Paul (played by Hugh Grant) and
190
Meryl (played by Sarah Jessica Parker), who witness a murder

and have to go into a witness protection programme. While
awaiting relocation, they are each assigned a Federal Marshal
for protection. Paul, the male lead, is assigned Marshal
Ferber (played by Steven Boyer). The humour intended to
arise from Ferber's character is based on two things - his
strangeness, and his apparent lack of masculine power in
relation to other male characters.
Ferber's strangeness is achieved through his appearance and
his behaviour. Despite wearing what is conceivably 'normal'
attire for a US marshal (a standard black suit, a shirt and a tie)
Ferber's haircut is unfashionable - verging, in fact, on bizarre
- and the ghost of a moustache is evident on his upper lip. His
expression is an unchanging intense stare, and he is sweating.
He also appears to have dark bags under his eyes. Other than
his suit, Ferber deviates substantially from what is, in the
West, taken to be a 'normal' appearance. His visual
presentation is part of the strangeness that is the target of
the intended comedy in the scene. But his strangeness is not
only constituted by his appearance: a significant part of it
arises from his behaviour.
In the scene referred to above, Paul is showering. Ferber
throws open the door and, in an intense and serious fashion,
announces that there's been an emergency. Having made
this remark, he stares at Paul with an intense look on his face
for almost three full seconds, in which neither man speaks.
After this pause, Paul replies in a relaxed and slightly jaunty
fashion that contrasts with Ferber's panicked entrance, well,
I should certainly hope so, Marshal. There is another pause
of around two seconds where neither man says anything:
Paul is clearly waiting for Ferber to leave. When this does not
happen of its own accord, Paul says Thankyou. Do you
191
mind?, motioning for Ferber to close the shower door. As

Paul puts his head back under the shower, Ferber shakes his
head and says not at all. Paul looks back to see that Ferber
has made no effort to move, and is still regarding him with a
steely gaze. Although only the side of Paul's face is visible, his
expression indicates confusion.
Clearly the humour in this scene is intended to arise from
Ferber's strangeness. While the violation of social norms that
is interrupting someone in the shower is partially constitutive
of strangeness, crucially it is the suggestion of a homosexual
attraction to Paul that seems designed to provide a large
element of the comedy. This impression is bolstered in a
subsequent scene in which Paul is attempting to leave a
plane. Ferber moves into Paul's path and embraces him,
unprompted, for a period of time which appears to be
calculated to be slightly too long. Again, the humorous
strangeness here is partially the result of the violation of
social norms, but also appears to have a firm grounding in
Ferber's implied homosexuality.
In addition to the lampooning of his sexuality, a significant
part of Ferber's characterisation is his masculine inferiority.
Indeed, his purpose as a comic target in this sense provides
the punch-line of an entire scene, in which the Morgans are
introduced to their respective guardians. The Morgans are
first introduced to Meryl's guardian, Marshal Henderson. He
is very tall and well-built, and has a deep voice. Paul asks
Meryl if she wants him to stay the night. She declines, telling
him that I'm gonna be fine with Marshal Henderson. Paul
tells her that's fine, if you think he can handle it.
The joke is, of course, that Henderson can presumably
'handle it' a lot better than Paul (played in Hugh Grants
192
traditional fashion). The arrival of Paul's guardian, Marshal

Ferber, is then announced by a policeman. Ferber walks into
shot, greets Paul, and proffers his hand. He is shorter than all
of the other characters, slight of build, and has a higherpitched voice than Henderson. Paul, taken aback, pauses
before accepting the handshake. The joke is that he does not
look like he can take care of Paul, because of his diminutive
stature. The policeman tells Paul you're in good hands. Paul
replies yes...yes, I'm sure, I'm sure, in a manner that
suggests quite the opposite.
This scene is a conventional fall guy sequence, in which
Ferber's 'inferior' masculinity is the basis of a joke - it is the
condition which is mocked. The humour in the scene is
clearly intended to arise from a realisation on the viewers
part that Ferber appears weak, a lesser man. Ferbers
strangeness is therefore only partially constructed by purely
strange elements, such as his interruption of Pauls shower.
It is, in fact, largely a product of his implied homosexuality.
When this is taken alongside the scene in which Ferbers lack
of masculine power is mocked, the totality of his
representation in fact appears to be that of a largely
conventional fall guy, whose lack of masculinity is derided in
the service of comedy.
Hollywood has in the past been heavily implicated in the
propagation of the notion that homosexuality and
masculinity are mutually exclusive for example, in the
recurrent figure of the sissy and Ferbers characterisation
suggests that little has in fact changed in this respect.
Parallels can also be drawn with Hollywoods legacy of
representing villains as homosexual. By depicting strangeness
as associated with or analogous to homosexuality,
193
representations of the gay man as deviant are continued.

The Bounty Hunter
My second case study is Tennants The Bounty Hunter (2010),
a film which is also about an estranged couple, Milo and
Nicole. Milo (played by Gerard Butler) is a tough, wisecracking ex-cop who is essentially a typical example of the
culturally dominant form of US masculinity - white,
heterosexual, handsome, and evidently very fit. He behaves
assertively and aggressively, stays calm under pressure, and
so on. His ex-wife Nicole (played by Jennifer Aniston), is the
female equivalent in terms of Hollywood gender norms. She
is pretty, blonde, slim and successful, but ultimately, can't live
without Milo. The film's fall guy is Stewart (played by Jason
Sudeikis), an un-cool man who sports chinos and an
unfashionable moustache, and who has developed a
delusional attachment to Nicole after having kissed her when
she was drunk at the office party. As with Marshal Ferber, the
sources of intended comedy in Stewart's character are his
strangeness and his inferior masculinity.
Like Ferbers, Stewart's strangeness is constructed partly
through appearance and partly through behaviour. Stewart's
appearance is 'nerdy' and slightly odd. His moustache, chinos
and pastel-coloured clothing are clearly utilised as a kind of
visual shorthand to signify that he is unfashionable; both
Milo and Nicole wear clothes that are much more typical of
fashionable mid-30s American adults. Stewart's behaviour is
also strange in terms of his violation of a number of social
norms. His dogged pursuit of Nicole is certainly strange in
itself, but he takes it to fairly extreme lengths. In one scene,
for example, he follows Nicole into the female toilets and
waits in a cubicle for her before emerging to ask her on a
194
date. This is a good example of strangeness being the source

of comedy in the classic fall guy style.
In the same way that Ferber's character has been fleshed out
with an odd haircut and a peculiarly intense facial expression,
the characterisation of Stewart as having unfashionable
clothes and a propensity for cheerily ignoring social norms
does not seem, superficially, to be intended to mock any
identifiable 'real-life' masculinity. These purely strange
elements seem to be a target for comedy that avoids
regressive mockery of socially subordinate masculinity.
However, on closer examination, both his strange appearance
and his strange behaviour are shown to rely on tropes of
'inferior', feminised masculinity, including, I would argue, the
use of camp as a target of derision.
Stewarts wardrobe, for example, is not only slightly
unfashionable, but also features a large amount of pastel
colours (pink, lilac, baby blue) that appear calculated,
because of their wider cultural associations, to imply
femininity or childishness, Milo, by contrast, is clad
exclusively in more manly clothes: jeans, check shirts and
polo shirts, all in shades of dark blue. This
masculine/feminine juxtaposition is continued with the two
mens cars. Milos is a 1970s Oldsmobile: big, blue, and boxy,
its intended cultural association appears to be that of a
'manly' car. Stewarts is a recent Mini: small, curvy and red, it
is a model that is often considered a girls car in both the US
and UK. The blue/red distinction continues the gendered
dichotomy between the two men that their clothing helps to
establish.
Stewarts behaviour is another means by which he is depicted
as the lesser of the two men. Milo is a typical example of
195
the masculine ideal that is still a large part of Hollywoods

characterisation. He is strong and heavily built, fearless,
rational, calm under pressure, and exhibits little or no visible
emotion other than, prominently, aggression. Stewart, by
contrast, exhibits behaviour that corresponds closely with the
type of characteristics that Hollywood tends to portray as
feminine: lack of calmness or hysteria under adversity,
irrationality, lack of physical power and ability, highly visible
emotions, and a low pain threshold. It is his peculiar but
crucially feminised masculinity which is the intended source
of comedy.
While the derision of femininity as a subordinating
characteristic is sufficiently offensive in itself to merit
considerable criticism, Stewarts characterisation at times
also hints at an intertextual referencing of cultural tropes
regarding homosexual masculinity. Stewart is of course not a
gay character. Yet his clothing and car suggest a degree of
femininity, culturally associated in the West with male
homosexuality. Similarly, a scene in which Stewart tries to
rescue Nicole from a car uses camp for comic effect. In the
scene, the flustered Stewart really hams it up, scuttling about
a car park at night and prancing between vehicles. He is of
course easily defeated by a calm Bad Guy, dressed entirely in
black, who knocks Stewart unconscious.
Consequently, while The Bounty Hunter does not overtly
deride gay men like Morgans does, the totality of Stewarts
character - that of the feminised, incompetent fall guy continues the lineage of sissy type characters of which
Hollywood Cinema has often made so much fun. While
Stewarts strangeness is outwardly the main source of his
comedy, it is based, like Ferbers, largely on representations
of subordinate, feminised masculinity. These analyses
196
indicate an historic shift in Hollywoods representation of

masculinity. From the earlier explicit mockery of subordinate
masculinities, a more insidious recent formation of the fall
guy now exists in which strangeness provides a degree of
cover for the continued operation of comic tropes that
remain rooted firmly in the past.
The demands placed on cultural producers by gradual but
large-scale political change such as feminism and gay rights in much derided terms, the demands of political correctness
- mean that Hollywood films can no longer subject women or
gay men to the kind of ridicule they once did, but the
continued employment of the fall guy trope is shown to rely
on just these types of mocking representations. Strangeness
is merely a means by which the contemporary fall guy is
discursively legitimated. More direct ridicule of
homosexuality or femininity is now socially unacceptable,
and thus in order for todays fall guy to be a legitimate part of
cultural discourse the overt source of their comedy has to be
strangeness instead. While the strange fall guys superficially
appear to be politically correct incarnations of an historic
trope, closer analysis indicates that in fact very little has
changed in Hollywoods system of representation. The fall guy
remains implicated in the maintenance of a cultural discourse
that holds a specific form of masculinity in high esteem, and
denigrates others.
197

1
Jeffrey K. Johnson, The Visualisation of the Twisted Tongue: Portrayals of

Stuttering in Film, Television, and Comic Books, The Journal of Popular
Culture, vol. 41 no. 2, 2008, p. 246.
For example, Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on

Representation, New York and London: Routledge, 2nd ed., 2002.
Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, London:

Harper and Row, 1987.
Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror

Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.
198
20 / Gay-Friendly Cinema?
J. Edgar and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Lynnette Porter
Gay-Friendly Cinema
J. Edgar and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy recently reached
mainstream audiences around the world and garnered plenty
of awards and nominations in the US and UK. Leonardo
DiCaprio was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild and a
Golden Globe award as best actor for his portrayal of U.S. FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance
Against Defamation (GLAAD) nominated J. Edgar as
Outstanding Feature in Wide Release. Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy was named Best British Film by the British Academy of
Film and Television Arts (BAFTAs), who also chose it as best
adapted screenplay, and the film received three Academy
Award nominations. These films awards were not all that
brought them under public scrutiny or made them
controversial. Each attracted questions and criticism in part
because of their leading characters sexual orientation.
199
Although neither J. Edgar nor Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a

gay film, the title character of the former and at least one
main character in the latter is a closeted gay man during a
time in recent history when it was politically dangerous to be
out. These characters sexuality is but one aspect of a multifaceted role, but it often is singled out as the most
noteworthy in critical reviews. 1
In director Clint Eastwoods biopic, J. Edgar Hoover is overtly
a power-hungry, often paranoid, and ultimately culturechanging force behind the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Covertly, as the film illustrates in numerous scenes, he is torn
between his duty to law enforcement and his friendship (and
implied long-term romantic relationship) with FBI agent
Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). In Tinker Tailor, Peter Guillam
(Benedict Cumberbatch) supervises MI6s scalphunters,
those spies who do the agencys dirty work. He is loyal first to
the Circus, Britains lite espionage force, but also to George
Smiley (Gary Oldman), one of the agencys leaders and a
parental figure to Guillam. One of the many secrets Guillam
keeps is his sexual orientation; he lives with an older male
partner. Throughout the film, Guillam struggles with the
consequences of loyalty and betrayal, at work and at home.
On the surface, these two recent blockbusters seem to make
themselves gay friendly by adding a homosexual character
to a story that ordinarily would not be expected to
emphasise sexual orientation. So little is known about
Hoovers private life that rumours about his orientation could
never be proved. Making Hoover gay increases the scripts
dramatic tension and undoubtedly attracted more people to
theatres. Similarly, John Le Carrs novel portrays Guillam as
more of a James Bond-style spy living with a young woman.
200
Rendering Guillam gay for this film adaptation underscored a

major theme in the film - the power of secrets.
J. Edgar Hoover and Peter Guillam are important characters
who help the good guys - if such a thing is truly possible in
the morally grey world of espionage. Both characters succeed
in their chosen fields and make great personal sacrifices to
keep their countries safe. As shown in their prime, they are
powerful, attractive men who have the respect of their peers
and are given a great deal of responsibility. In short, on the
surface they seem to be positive gay characters, perhaps
even gay role models. The films have much more in common
than these characters, however.
They were released internationally during Autumn 2011, a
season when the best dramatic films typically make their
debut. They were prominently featured at international film
festivals and gained industry attention before they went into
wide release. Thematically, both deal with the secrets kept
by representatives of national governments. Both films are
set in now-historic eras: J. Edgar from the 1930s through the
early 1970s, Tinker Tailor in the early 1970s, although it very
much represents the repressive Cold War attitudes of the
1960s. None of the decades portrayed in either film was
particularly friendly to anyone even suspected of being
homosexual.
Having prominent gay characters in these films might seem
to be an indication of how far cinema and society have come,
both in the U.S. and U.K., since the time periods represented
in these stories. Dig a little deeper, however, and a darker,
more politically conservative warning is revealed. These
characters are able to survive and thrive in their professions
only because they successfully hide their own secret - their
201
sexual and romantic relationship is with someone of the

same gender. The ways in which key scenes have been filmed
illustrate Hoovers and Guillams very real fears that they are
always being watched and harshly judged, whether by
parental figures, the governmental institutions to which they
have dedicated their lives, or God.
Public and Private Lives
Dustin Lance Blacks J. Edgar script emphasizes the duality of
Hoovers public and private lives, which also reflects the
hypocrisy and secrets of other government officials. Black
posits that the fact that Hoover and close colleague Colson
ate dinner together every night and vacationed together
every year reveal a much more intimate relationship. After
Hoovers death, Colson moved into Hoovers house, which he
had inherited, and bought a burial plot as close as possible to
Hoovers. Although J. Edgar clearly illustrates Colsons
feelings for Hoover, the FBI directors emotions are most
often kept firmly under control. The film shows that Hoover
effectively manipulates others because he understands the
power of secrets. Public evidence of Hoovers sexual
orientation would destroy his career - and possibly the FBI he
built. Hoover would never let that happen, and thus, even
years after his death, questions about his true relationship
with Colson abound.
Hoover is very much a product of his religious and social
upbringing during a time when homosexuality was illegal and
possibly a justification for being killed. When Hoover is on
the verge of coming out to his domineering mother, she tells
him the story of a young man caught wearing a dress and
forced to stand in the schoolyard where everyone could see
202
him. Soon after this public humiliation, the young man,

nicknamed Daffy for being a daffodil, committed suicide.
Mrs. Hoover sternly states that she would rather have a dead
son than a daffodil.
When Hoover confides to his mother that he does not like to
dance, especially with women, the scene takes on a double
meaning. In film, dancing is often a metaphor for sex.
Although J. Edgar may never enjoy dancing, he has to know
how to do so in order to meet public expectations. His
mother quite innocently teaches him to dance, thus
encouraging him to subsume his desires and conform
convincingly to societal expectations. Her conviction that her
son must be heterosexual is based not only on her Catholic
faith but on social norms, and she expects her son to elevate
the family to local and eventually national prominence.
When Mrs. Hoover and her son begin to dance, the cameras
elevated placement and downward shooting angle give it,
and therefore the audience, a god-like gaze.
Over time, Hoover develops a hyper-masculine public image.
He carries automatic weapons as he tracks down criminals.
He leads teams of FBI agents into battle. He dresses
impeccably in carefully buttoned-up suits and maintains strict
authority in the office. Especially as a young man, Hoover
establishes the G-man as the national hero, a role with which
he completely identifies. The film acknowledges the rumour
that the FBI director also enjoyed wearing womens clothing.
In one scene, Hoover, distraught over his mothers death,
dons her dress and rosary and stares at himself in a mirror.
He crumples, breaking the rosary and scattering beads on the
floor, as he repeats her mantra for him to stay strong.
203
Again the camera returns to its position on high and looks

down, literally and perhaps judgmentally. The scene visually
juxtaposes two potential realities for Hoover and illustrates
the emotional dissonance between his private and public
personas. J. Edgar Hoover cries twice in this film on both
occasions when he questions his sexual identity and chooses
to subsume his real self in favor of a socially acceptable
public image. Similarly, Tinker Tailors Peter Guillam only
breaks down when he feels forced to choose between his
lover and his career.
Hiding in Plain Sight
Within the Circus, Guillam has been brought up through the
ranks in the shadow of five bosses who work for Control.
After Control is forced out in a power struggle, Controls
right-hand man Smiley also is sent into retirement. When a
mole within the Circus needs to be found, Smiley is brought
out of retirement to determine which of his former
colleagues is a Soviet double agent. Because Smiley can trust
Guillam, he secretly enlists the younger mans help in a
dangerous undercover assignment. Guillam is asked to go
against all he believes in order to spy on his own and help
destroy the mole. The idea that someone subversive can hide
in plain sight and fool even his closest companions takes on
two meanings in Guillams story. He believes in the
organisation for which he works and is sickened by the idea
that someone he knows may be a traitor. Yet Guillam also
might be perceived as a traitor to the organisation because
he is gay; he, like the mole, is not the person his colleagues
think he is.
204
Dialogue and mise-en-scne (for example posters, graffiti) in

scenes featuring Guillam underscore the danger created by
his sexual orientation. In one scene, Guillam visits the
organisations archive and signs in under the watchful eye of
a lovely young woman. She tries to make casual conversation
by asking him about his weekend plans, but her intent is clear
- she is fishing for a date. Guillam is friendly but evasive,
claiming to spend the weekend visiting aunts and effectively
closing off the possibility of an office romance. During this
scene, background posters provide a socio-political subtext.
Remember, Telephone Talk is Not Secure, Safe Safe and
You Never Know Who are visible on posters behind and on
either side of Guillam. They remind the audience and Guillam
that he must hide who he is, because he can never know who
may be monitoring him. Of course, these warnings are
applicable to Guillams mission to help Smiley, but they also
reflect an equally dire personal message.
Later that day, Guillam is interrogated by his bosses, who
begin their discussion with friendly banter. Guillam is asked
what he has been up to, other than chasing our young
virgins. He does not respond in kind and turns the discussion
to his work. The meeting turns ugly when Guillam is accused
not only of failing to recognise that one of his agents has
become a traitor, but of collaborating with him. At first,
Guillam laughs off these accusations. When abruptly asked
How would you like to spend some time in prison?, Guillam
jerks back in shock, for the first time briefly losing his
composure. In retrospect, once Guillam has been revealed to
be gay, this scene takes on a possible second meaning. Is
Guillam afraid because his bosses think he may have
betrayed the agency and his country - or because someone
205
has found out that he is gay, an imprisonable offence until

only a few years earlier?
Smiley warns Guillam that he is being carefully watched by
his bosses and might want to tidy up or do some
housekeeping (i.e., taking care of any secret relationships
that might stand in the way of the job). Taking Smileys
advice, Guillam dutifully goes home to a scene of domestic
normalcy. His partner, a teacher, is marking papers in the
kitchen. Guillam looks devastated. The next scene shows his
partner packing a bag and dropping off his key. While his
partner packs, Guillam twists and rubs his wedding ring,
which, throughout the movie, has been just as obviously
visible on the pinky finger of his left hand as is heterosexual
Smileys wedding ring, worn on the traditional ring finger.
Guillam removes the gold band when he divorces himself
from his partner and, consequently, his sexuality. During this
scene, reflections picked up by the camera, as well as the
cameras longer, unrelenting gaze on Guillams actions,
suggest that Peter is being watched. Reflections indicate that
the camera is outside the kitchen and looking in, possibly
through glass. The shots make the audience aware of the
cameras focus, and the couples muted discussion in the
kitchen reinforces the impression of spying.
In the later scene when the mole is revealed, Guillam hides
outside the house where Smiley has trapped the double
agent. When Guillam receives the signal, he sprints up stairs,
past graffiti written on a wall: The future is female. No
cinematic context is provided for this graffiti, but the subtext
is clear. If Peter Guillam is to succeed, he must act
heterosexual. His future must involve traditional personal
relationships with women; success equals a married,
206
monogamous relationship with a woman, a lifestyle well

represented by loyal, intelligent, all-seeing Smiley. Guillams
sprint up the stairs indicates his acceptance of his new role
and his likely upward mobility within the Circus.
Fictions of the Past, Lessons for the Future?
Superficially, these films emphasise the problems of
upwardly mobile, politically successful gay men developing a
heterosexual public identity and sacrificing love relationships
to this false identity. However, are these high-profile films
merely reminders of a less tolerant past? Although the
filmmakers have never indicated a modern political subtext
to their movies, their choices may be read as a cautionary
tale to audiences living in a time of increasing political
conservatism. The characters who succeed know how to play
the game in order to achieve public and professional
acceptance. According to these films, being gay is not going
to lead to success, but rather to social ostracism, public
suspicion, and perhaps incarceration or death. Although
todays legal consequences of being gay in the U.S. or U.K.
are not as oppressive as those faced by Hoover or Guillam,
audiences are reminded of the implications of a not-toodistant conservative past; the rise of conservatism in 21st Century U.S. and U.K. politics may help audiences link
Guillams or Hoovers world with our own.
Both films, however, also play gay to their advantage. Highprofile films starring popular actors are bound to gain
attention. The portrayals of Guillam and Hoover are
sympathetic. Although the characters ruthlessly deny their
homosexuality, their reasons for doing so are
understandable. Their emotional break-down while they
207
make important decisions about their sexuality makes for

powerful moments in both films. Perhaps, in a few years,
films that show the perils of being gay at the same time they
attempt to gain mainstream acceptance of gay characters in
major roles will be criticised for vacillating between political
conservatism and liberalism without taking a more emphatic
stand. Of course, these films can simply be seen as
entertainment, but the sexual subtexts indicate that
something more is going on. Discerning audiences must
decide whether the films are merely comparing past with
present sexual politics, or whether they are thinly disguised
warnings about what might again happen in a more
conservative political environment.
1
For reviews which emphasise Guillam as a gay character, see

RichWebmaster, Peter Guillam a Homosexual? Thats Pretty Gay,
SmileyWatch.com, 14 July 2011, and Jeremy Yoder, Is This a Thing Yet?
The Rise of the MOTHs [Miserable Old-time Homosexuals], Denim and
Tweed.com, 13 February 2012.
208
5. Crime, Violence &

Horror
209
21 / Ethics, Politics and Spectacle

in the Representation of Late Modernity:
Elite Squad II
Jos Maurcio Saldanha lvarez
Colonel Nascimentos Mission

This essay offers an analysis of Elite Squad II: The Enemy
Within (2010), by Brazilian director Jos Padilha, which tells
the story of Colonel Nascimento of the Rio de Janeiro police.
A sequel to Padilhas Elite Squad (2007), the film is an
account of the relentless struggle against crime and
corruption in the context of late modernity, dramatizing the
crisis of values in Brazilian society during the last fifteen
years. In the opening scene of the film, Colonel Nascimentos
voice-over begins to narrate his tale of combat. A captain in
the first film, he is now a colonel commanding the Special
Operations Battalion (BOPE). His hair is now grey; he is a
man of experience, and his son Rafael has grown into a smart
teenager. He is divorced from his wife Rosane, who couldnt
take any more of her husbands devotion to the police.
210
His friend, Lieutenant Matias, is leading a group that, under

Nascimentos command, will invade the Bangu I penitentiary,
which has been taken over by rebel prisoners . Thanks to
the complicity of the security guards, the leader of the revolt,
the hardened criminal Beirada, has taken over the prison and
slaughtered his rivals. Negotiations are being conducted by a
university professor, Diogo Fraga, a member of a human
rights NGO, and an opponent of Nascimento and his violent
methods. The impulsive Lieutenant disobeys Nascimento's
orders by entering the sector controlled by Beirada. Beirada
takes Fraga hostage and threatens to break off negotiations.
Matias shoots Beirada and kills him; a bloodbath ensues.
Nascimento is accused of ordering the massacre of prisoners.
Given the negative impact, the corrupt governor decides to
dismiss him. Before this can happen Nascimento goes in
person to present his resignation to the governor as he is
having lunch with his staff in a restaurant. As he enters the
building he is recognized by the people inside, for whom he is
a hero, and they applaud him enthusiastically. In the face of
this popular acclaim the governor astutely reconsiders and
promotes him to a powerful position where Nascimento has
the resources to equip his battalion with heavy weapons and
to prepare for a major offensive against crime.
While Matias remains in military detention as a scapegoat,
Professor Fraga gains political office thanks to his work in
defense of human rights. He marries Rosane, Nascimentos
ex, and explains to his son, Rafael (who has inherited a strong
moral sense) that his father is a brutal man. The young man,
who works closely with deputy Fraga, starts a relationship
with an older colleague in the department. During a walk
they are arrested by the police who find a small quantity of
marijuana among the girls belongings. Nascimento appears
211
at the police station upset and demanding explanations of

Rosane. To get his girlfriend off the hook, Rafael, in front of
his father, says that the drug belongs to him. The relationship
between father and son becomes tense and Nascimento
accuses Rosane and Fraga of sabotaging his relationship with
his son.
The Rise of the Militias
Nascimento and the BOPE, in their offensive against drugs in
the favelas in the western area of the city, soon realise that
eliminating the dealers has simply led to the rise of the socalled militias. The militias are made up of police officers who
were initially clearing the communities of the drug criminals.
With arms and prestige in areas where the formal state does
not dare enter, they decided to turn to crime. Many police
officers like Russo and Major Fabio cover up the sale of
narcotics by charging the traffickers protection money.
Nascimentos actions had dramatically reduced the militias
profits, which led to them deciding to abandon the use of
intermediaries. The militiamen began selling the drugs and
took over the supply of gas, cable television and transport.
They rule the people through fear and make agreements
with unscrupulous politicians to ensure their election by
brokering closed votes in which the whole community votes
for the militias candidate. Opposition candidates are
prohibited from entering the area.
The militiamen attack a police station, capturing the weapons
of war and blaming the dealers in the Tanque neighborhood.
The corrupt deputy Fortunato is associated with the no less
corrupt governor and the militiamen. Fortunato, whose
performance in a histrionic and popular TV show has earned
212
him great popular prestige, makes an emotional appeal to

the Governor: eliminate the traffickers and restore order to
the neighborhood. In response to this appeal a police
operation is planned to eliminate the drug dealers.
Nascimento objects because the wire-taps he has installed do
not support Major Fabios claims. Nascimento knows that
the perpetrators of the attack on the police station were
militiamen. At the suggestion of the corrupt clique,
Lieutenant Matias runs the successful operation and captures
the local drug trafficking chief whose testimony convinces
him that Nascimento is right: the theft of the weapons was
committed by a member of the police apparatus in collusion
with politicians.
The corrupt group murders Matias for this revelation while
Nascimento, out to avenge his friend, investigates the role of
the governor and deputy Fortunato in the plot. He has the
support of an investigative journalist, Clara, who is following
up a complaint and finds the link between the criminals and
the governor in a modest house in the favela. When she is
found with the evidence one of the corrupt gang decides she
must be killed.
Now it is Nascimentos turn to be attacked, but he comes out
unharmed while his son Rafael is seriously injured. When he
goes to the hospital to visit him, Nascimento is the target of
another ambush. At the end of the film, he has the
wholehearted support of his former opponent, deputy Fraga,
who manages through a parliamentary committee to hold
the politicians back while the fight continues.
213
Cinema and Politics

The pace of the film moves between the fast-flowing
dynamics of an action film and the narrative rigour of a
documentary, a genre where Padilla began is career. The
documentary is as much an informative exercise as an act of
whistle-blowing. Documentaries have long served as political
weapons; there was a significant growth throughout the
Bush-Cheney era on the theme of the excesses and
consequences of Republican presidential politics.
Documentaries seem to have the function of the pharmakon,
to use Barthess term, as they encapsulate the desire to
restore previous situations by integrating a "textual system" 1.
However, in high modernity this collective desire reflects
something more intense: the desire to heal the pain
resulting from the crisis in the world that seems to go beyond
representation.
Colonel Nascimento tells a story that gradually escapes from
his will, and his powers need the action of a deus ex machina.
This is what happened with the devoted and persistent
policeman Valentine, in Andrew Noccols film, Lord of War
(2005), who thought he had the criminal Yuri Orlov finally in
his hands. Orlov, however, explains to the euphoric
Valentine that his relationship with power is so intimate that
he will be soon released from prison. He explains ironically
to Valentine that he should not worry or be angry, because
he will gain promotion from his superiors. As Valentine's
body is dynamic and tireless, Nascimentos has an area of
potential alarm that Goffman has termed the human Umwelt
(environment). In the plot of the film it is a "consequent
piece of equipment" used in everyday life 2.
214
While on the one hand animals have a wide range of

perception, the human range of perception depends on a
cultural fabric full of connected knowledge and conditions of
body chemistry 3. The Umwelt has an awareness of shared
risks in the form of a flow of actions. Nascimentos narrative
voice realizes that his fate is not dependent on fortune or
destiny but successive complex interactions that operate in
social, cognitive and media contexts.
To highlight this, Padilha employs the use of flashbacks and
flash-forwards, where the narrative order is different to the
order of events. 4 The voice-over narration in the film is
woven of concrete information that was not randomly
accumulated in Nascimentos memory. This suggests and
creates juxtaposed images that point to the impossibility of
narrative closure in the traditional manner of the happy
ending. In this sense it retrieves the key element of the
classic tale of war: for example, after taking a hill, there is
another and then another. The pace of the film installs the
classic and immediate sense of narrative and representation.
Documentary information is fictional and relies on the
complicity of the spectator in whose imagination there is a
mediation between what is real and the appearances
suggested by fiction to produce an effect of reality. Actors,
voices, bodies and actions are all adapted to produce a
representation that makes sense. So, for Jacques Rancire,
memory is not only the result of a set of memories of a
conscience. Memory is a certain set or arrangement of signs,
traces and monuments capable of producing meanings. 5
The notion of modernity as crisis or risk in the film is
recurrent in its images, social roles and representation 6. The
individual becomes an important figure who reflexively
215
suppresses his right to happiness.

He becomes an
instrument of his own action. He is entitled to realisation in
the spectacle, according to Debord, but high modernity
suppresses traditional values, including the right to
happiness. In The Enemy Within Nascimento is now shown
to be a complete instrument of his own devotion to duty as a
police officer. He has an emotional life with Rafael, his son,
but that is all. We do not see him with a partner or a lover.
His life of devotion not only appears to be a supreme irony,
but a marginal, abnormal and mad existence. As Barthes
suggests, one's devotion to ones work and the sacrifice
which it assumes, can be felt romantically as a curse. 7
The Brazilian Context
Brazilian collective memory of the governments of Fernando
Henrique Cardoso in the 1990s, and the Lula administration
from 2000, were of unequivocally democratic governments.
The institutions apparently worked - even though there were
constant open or covert pressures against the investigative
press. The greatest sensitivity seems to be concentrated on
the objectivity of reporting of corruption scandals. The
Brazilian state, like countless others in late modernity, has
grown progressively weaker. The open or covert adoption by
these governments of the neoliberal agenda has opened the
economy to international flows and has favoured
privatization. In economies characterized by global flow,
crime has expanded exponentially: it offers a future.
Its brands are present in the urban structure of the world, in
the cities of Brazil, and especially in Rio de Janeiro. The
presence of crime in globalisation or late modernity has
resulted in a crisis of representations. This reflects a crisis of
216
capitalism because it undermines the ethics of four centuries

of construction of the modern state. Hence political
corruption is reaching unimaginable levels, leading the
citizenry to feel fragile because justice is slow and outdated,
and lenient legal codes have created a convenient
environment for alliances between crime, the police and
politics all in the apparent direction of prosperity.
The corrupt politician represents a seductive and spectacular
power in the sense proposed by Guy Debord. He acts
discursively on behalf of the common good by creating a
zone of dense shadows that absolves him. The criminal of
high modernity is not the agent that produces the spectacle
but one that is associated with it. In Padilhas film militiamen
and politicians employ the legal system spectacularly.
Moreover, as a political thriller - like the movies of the
Bush/Cheney era - it shows moral and righteous individuals
against corrupt and depraved government officials, who
reach agreements with the police or corrupt governors or
politicians whose offices bear the image of the president of
the Republic 8.
High Modernity
In his Elite Squad films, Padilla seems to question directly
these twenty years of corruption and rampant crime. The
narrative dramatises the emergence of the militia on the
outskirts of the city, the arrogance demonstrated in
employing weapons and putting criminal plans into action.
Criminal operations demonstrate the solid expansion of
capitalism in Brazilian urban society. The film portrays the
dramatic pretense of legality maintained by corrupt power
and its discursive weapons are harmful to the country. 9
217
Nascimentos actions represent the culture of high modernity

in Brazil. If they are risky it is because the representation of a
traditional and stable order is crumbling. It is risky to live in
high modernity with its terrorist attacks, economic and
environmental crises and criminal acts. As Giddens suggests,
"Courage is demonstrated in risk cultivated precisely as a
quality that is put on trial - the individual is subjected to an
integrity test showing his ability to realize the down side of
the risks he runs, and carries on after all, although he is not
required to do so.
A plot in which former police officers use criminal techniques
of power and money is reflected in new urban spaces such as
favelas or settlements that expose inhabitants who are
deprived of the protection of the state to coercion by means
of armed violence backed by political power. These
vulnerable people are exposed to the apparatus of modern
consumption articulated by organised crime and linked to the
electoral system in the representation of post-traditional
urban culture in Brazil. The candidate surrounded by the
militia is accepted in a political ritual that includes food,
drink, dance and song where, according to Debord, the
representation of crisis makes a crisis of reality 10. Thus the
favela becomes the metaphor of the nation and the party
where the candidature of the state governor is decided
becomes both a space for popular recreation and a political
spectacle.
218

Original translation by Victor Deakins.
1
Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972, p. 118.
Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order, New

York: Harpers & Row, 1972, p. 320.
Krzysztof Pomian, Lordre du temps, Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1984, p.

325.
Nol Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, Malden: 2008, p. 139.
Jacques Rancire, La Fable cinmatographique, Paris: Editions du Seuil,

2001, p. 201.
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Identity in the

Late Modern Age, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 3.
Roland Barthes, La prparation du roman: Cours et sminaries au Collge

de France (1978-1979 et 1979-1980), Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2006, p. 271.
Douglas Kellner, Cinema Wars, Hollywood Film and Politics in the BushCheney Era, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, p. 165.
Douglas Kellner, Cinema Wars, p. 169.
10
Guy Debord, La socit du spectacle, Paris: Editions Champ livre, 1971,

pp. 17-18.
219
22 / Crime and Morality

in the Work of Liliana Cavani
Daniela Chana
Cavani and Moral Philosophy

This essay examines the approach to crime and morality in
the films of the Italian filmmaker Liliana Cavani (born in
1937). I will be underlining the political value of her work,
since Cavani reflects on crime in a very progressive way,
addressing different variants of coping with guilt and the
hard-to-draw division between good and evil. I focus for
this purpose on the treatment of sexuality and power in
human relationships both personal and civil, in her films I
cannibali (The Cannibals) (1969), Il portiere di notte (The
Night Porter) (1974), Oltre la porta (Beyond the Door, also
known as Beyond Obsession) (1982), and Interno berlinese
(The Berlin Affair) (1985).
220
Before I turn to Cavanis films, however, some cursory

references to moral philosophy might be of value in order to
show the origins of her thoughts in the larger world of ideas.
The progressive aspect of Cavanis thinking is based on
assumptions which have been established during the last two
centuries by thinkers such as Nietzsche, Arendt and Foucault.
They fought against traditional forms of moral philosophy
according to which ideas of good and evil were given by
nature and were equal for everyone.
The German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (17441803) for instance, was convinced that acting altruistically
was part of the nature of every human being while so-called
evil and egotistical behaviours were learned by the
individual and should be seen as a sort of deformation of
humankind. 1 Since he saw a good conscience as fundamental
to the achievement of happiness, he thought the criminal
incapable of leading a good life because of the bad
conscience that must surely haunt him or her. 2 A completely
different point of view, however, was to emerge in the work
of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).
Nietzsche argued that moral convictions are historically
constructed, and interpreted their development as a story of
decline. 3 According to him, terms like good and evil were
to be seen as instruments of power used by the weak to
offend their oppressors. 4 The tendency to value the weak
and the poor and to criticise the strong and mighty was
interpreted by Nietzsche as an obstacle to progress, since in
order to make a step forward, to him it seemed necessary to
break laws. 5 Other thinkers followed this line of argument. A
Jewish intellectual and refugee during World War II, Hannah
Arendt (1906-1975) pointed out the fragility of moral
221
convictions. From her point of view, Hitler had established a

new moral order in which the torturing and killing of various
social groups was not considered evil but morally good,
and worth striving for. 6
The Morality of Sadomasochism: The Night Porter
Cavani draws attention to some very interesting aspects of
morality, primarily concerning crime, and points out how
hard it can be to judge. This essay will show, for example,
how the filmmaker uses sexuality as a focus for her approach
to moral questions. Since she is blaming civilisation for
repressive moral standards, the only solution seems to be to
find refuge in the private sphere. Deviant sexual behaviour is
thus presented as a sort of civil disobedience.
One telling and controversial example is her portrayal of
offender/victim relationships in her 1974 film The Night
Porter, which tells the story of the sadomasochistic
relationship between the survivor of a concentration camp
and her former torturer. The film reveals how both lovers are
damaged by the crime that one committed upon the other,
since the offender never found a way to free himself from his
bad conscience while his victim never got over her trauma.
They find themselves bound together by the extreme
experiences that hurt the lives of them both.
The plot starts in 1957, in Vienna, when Lucia, a young
woman who had been in a concentration camp during the
war, accidently meets her former torturer Max, who is now
working as a night porter in a hotel. As they recognise each
other, memories come flooding back, and their attraction is
based on very contradictory feelings. A secret
sadomasochistic relationship emerges. There are many hints
222
that Max cannot cope with his guilt. For instance, he claims
that he took on the job as a night porter because he cannot
stand the daylight, and the uniform he is wearing resembles
the uniform he wore in the concentration camp 7. Lucia, too,
has not come to terms with her past, since she is nervous and
insecure, and occasionally regresses to child-like behaviour.
This is evident, for instance, in the scenes in which she is
shown talking to her husband and finding it hard to
contradict him, playing the role of the obedient, decently
dressed housewife.
Cavani manages to make felt Arendts comments about
Hitlers establishment of a new moral order, and morality
being fragile. In watching the film, we see how moral
standards change, insofar as we are provided with two
different perspectives on exactly the same behaviour. Lucia
and Max continue in 1957 the same kind of violent
relationship they had during the war. Back then in the
concentration camp, this relationship was considered
normal, and it was accepted. No one gave Max a hard time
for torturing Lucia, and clearly, Lucia developed a kind of
masochism in order to be able to cope with this suffering. But
after the war, in 1957, when they start doing exactly the
same thing again, it is considered perverted 8. For instance,
Maxs neighbours start being suspicious as he locks her up in
his flat, and start posing inconvenient questions.
The portrayal of sadomasochism in the film functions as a
tool to make a statement of moral philosophy. Offender and
victim are equal in their pain, their desire and their
dependence from each other. Both are not free, but trapped
in their obsession, both knowing that this is a downwardspiral. Still, they cannot give it up. The terms good and evil
have to be dismissed here, since they are not capable of
223
describing the complex constellation in which so many

contradicting sentiments and motives are intertwined.
This film has very often been misunderstood as a simple
celebration of sadomasochism or deviant sexual behaviour,
while its philosophical aspects have seldom been recognised.
One example might be the pop singer Madonna who cited
The Night Porter in her video for the song Justify My Love
(1990) where we see one of her background dancers wearing
the same, very characteristic costume that Lucia is wearing in
one of the key scenes of the film. Since the song is about
sexual freedom and the right to have deviant pleasures, it
demonstrates a slightly nave interpretation of the film,
which is obviously not simply an advertisement for
sadomasochism, but rather a complex statement about how
morality can change in the tradition of thinkers such as
Nietzsche and Arendt.
The Individual and the State: The Cannibals
Another interesting aspect of Cavanis work is her approach
to brutal regimes. Many of her films are situated in
totalitarian states or some sort of repressive surroundings as
her 1969 film The Cannibals. Here she creates a fictional
totalitarian regime in which a woman needs to break a law in
order to fulfil what to her seems a good deed. The film starts
with gloomy images showing rebel corpses lying in the
streets. Signs announce that it is forbidden by death penalty
to touch them.
When a young woman finds the dead body of her brother on
the street she nonetheless decides to organise a funeral and
bury him. Cavani here provides us with a modern version of
224
the myth of Antigone, which deals with the conflict between

the inner conviction of a person and the laws provided by
any kind of regime. As the plot further develops, this young
woman, this modern Antigone, succeeds in taking the body
of her brother out of the city and organising some sort of
celebration for him. As a result, she finds herself hunted by
the police. She ends up getting arrested, tortured and
executed.
Here we also find many allusions to the work of Foucault. We
can see how disciplinary power works, the system of mutual
surveillance and denunciation within the body of a
community 9. For instance, even Antigones friends are
against her plan to bury her brother and dont want to help
her because they have absolutely internalised the laws and
the logics of the regime. They are convinced that it would be
in her best interests to give in and accept the rules of the
government. When Antigone is fleeing from the police,
people on the street denounce her and tell the police in
which direction she went. 10
An interesting role is played by her fianc, a young man
whose father is part of the regime and therefore would be
able to actually do something to save Antigone. After he sees
how Antigone has been tortured, he begs his father to help
her but his concerns remain unheard since his loyal father is
convinced that the laws are correct and should not be
broken. A fight between father and son ensues, the one
representing the regime and the other one becoming a rebel.
As a result, the young man flees into a sort of self-destructing
rebellion reverting to an animal state, behaving like a dog,
walking on four legs and eating from a bowl on the floor.
225
This is another hint at how Cavani puts the blame on

civilisation, insofar as this man shakes off all the artificial,
cultural aspects of life in order to be free from the moral
standards of the regime. Here she clearly agrees with
Nietzsche, who pointed out the connection between morality
and civilization. In the context of the totalitarian regime
where everything is controlled, nature is extremely
domesticated. Totalitarianism may therefore be considered a
parody of civilisation. Since Antigones fianc is not capable
of living according to the ideology of the regime, he logically
needs to return into an undomesticated, wild and animal-like
state. He declares himself to be all the things that are
outlawed by the regime, declaring himself mad, a rebel, a
criminal, a homosexual and so on.
Sexual Politics: The Berlin Affair and Beyond the Door
Here we find something that is typical for Cavani, namely the
idea of rebellion in the private sphere. By enacting deviant
behaviour, by enjoying private pleasures that are forbidden
by the regime, a person can be a rebel and destabilise the
power of the regime. So according to Cavani, sexuality can be
political. For instance, having a homosexual affair in Germany
in 1938 can be a political statement. This is exactly what
happens in her film The Berlin Affair, which tells the story of
the lesbian relationship between the wife of a German
diplomat and the daughter of the Japanese ambassador in
Berlin in 1938. This forbidden love is presented as a sort of
refuge, insofar as these two women become rebels through
their love, dismissing Hitler as an idol and putting their loved
one in first place instead.
This leads to another important aspect of Cavanis cinema,
namely the relationship between love and morality. In many
226
of her films, Cavani shows the cruel aspects of love. For

instance, in her 1982 film Beyond the Door (also known
under the title Beyond Obsession), she tells the story of a
young woman, Nina, whose stepfather (in fact, there are also
hints that he might be her real father) is in prison for the
murder of his wife, her mother. Very soon we understand
that father and daughter are having a sexual relationship,
which actually presents itself as a game of power. They are
making love and fighting at the same time in a bond which is
defined by both love and hatred. Again, as various
boundaries are crossed, simplified moral categories are
dismissed, ideas of good and evil blur.
In this relationship, love is intertwined with compulsion. She
is controlling him from outside the prison and enjoys having
him in a position where he cannot run away and she can
even count the cigarettes he is smoking. He is controlling her
through some sort of emotional torture, by blaming her for
her mothers death (the circumstances are not clear).
Whenever he gets his day-release from imprisonment, he
spies on her and forbids her to meet other men. Later in the
film we find out that the father in fact might not be guilty,
but his daughter is happy to have him locked away so she can
play the more powerful part in their relationship. Years later,
at the end of the film, when he is an old man and getting out
of prison, she decides to join him and start a life together
with him, because she doesnt need to keep him locked away
any more.
As in The Berlin Affair and The Night Porter, the protagonists
relationship in Beyond the Door mirrors a political structure.
This is also evident in the scene where Nina talks about her
grandfather, who was fond of Mussolini and out of jealousy
locked his wife and daughter away in his house. The
227
connection between his fascination with the dictator and his

own sadistic behaviour is implied by Ninas way of telling the
story and by her mention of both aspects as if they belong
together. This underlines the assumption that the portrayal
of a persons sexuality or love life is capable of symbolising
the persons character, thoughts and opinions. Erotic scenes
have their rightful place in the narrative. This is why Cavanis
films are neither voyeuristic nor pornographic.
The film also raises the question of morality in the context of
love. As a typical feature of Cavanis films, the erotic scenes
always show the contradictions and the conflicts that are
evident in a relationship. The erotic scenes between father
and daughter in Beyond the Door very much resemble a
power struggle, since they are staged like a fight between
two animals. This is the art of Liliana Cavani - using erotic
scenes to describe the relationship between two people, for
sure, but also to make moral statements, using sexuality as a
kind of language in which the hard-to-draw-division between
good and evil is symbolised, as well as the close
relationship between love and hatred.
_______________________________
1
Johann Gottfried von Herder, Briefe zur Befrderung der Humanitt,

Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991, p. 747.
Von Herder, Briefe zur Befrderung der Humanitt, p. 750.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Bse, Kln: Anaconda, 2006, p.
30.
4
Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift, Kln:

Anaconda, 2010, p. 37-40.
228
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 34-36.
Hannah Arendt, ber das Bse: Eine Vorlesung zu Fragen der Ethik,
Mnchen and Zrich: Piper, 2009, p. 17.
Marcus Stiglegger, Die Pforte zur Nacht, Nietzsche, Freud und Der
Nachtportier, Splatting Image, no. 53, 2003, p. 15-18.
Anne-Berenike Binder, Liliana Cavani, Il portiere di notte Sensation und

Sensibilisierung, in Anne-Berenike Binder, Mon ombre est reste l-bas:
Literarische und mediale Formen des Erinnerns in Raum und Zeit, Tbingen:
Max-Niemeyer Verlag, 2008, p. 290.
9
Michel Foucault, berwachen und Strafen: Die Geburt des Gefngnisses,

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994.
10
Gaetana Marrone, The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana
Cavani, Princeton, NJ: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 65.
229
23 / Childhood and Monstrosity in the

Horror Film: Interview with the Vampire
and Let the Right One In
Joanna Ioannidou
Visions of Childhood
In an age when, confronted with widespread media
depictions of extreme violence and overt sexuality, we see
corruption lurking at every corner, we are strongly invested
in the notion of childhood innocence. Although Freud
introduced the notion of unfocused sexual drives in children
and argued that the childhood psyche held the key to the
emotional and sexual neuroses of the adult, we still tend to
view children as vessels of pure innocence, which need
protection from the adult facts of life. However, though the
advancements of technology we find ourselves at a stage
where just about everything can be viewed with a few clicks
of the mouse, and our ability to shelter children is at best
compromised, if not impossible.
230
The growing anxiety over the corruption of childhood

innocence has been repeatedly reflected throughout
modernity in the figure of the bad child, as Marina Warner
pointed out in her 1994 Reith Lectures: Never before have
children been so saturated with all the power of projected
monstrousness to excite repulsion - and even terror. 1 As our
adult society is generally considered corrupt, we look at
children as beacons of innocence that need to be preserved,
so the idea of monstrous children inspires feelings of dread
and revulsion.
Emotions of loathing, fear, terror, revolt and aversion have
traditionally been associated with the horror genre. Horror
films, not unlike films in other genres, reflect on the society
they sprung from and become a safe place where
contemporary anxieties and fears can be represented. It is
there then, that we shall look for the little monsters that
express our societys concerns regarding childhood
innocence, and evoke both terror (because of their
uncontrollability) and pity (because of their vulnerability) to
adult audiences.
The notion of monstrous children being both terrifying and
sympathetic is perfectly manifested in the characters of Eli in
Let the Right One In (2008) and Claudia in Interview with the
Vampire (1994). Through a comparative analysis of these two
characters, this essay reflects on the uncanniness of vampire
children as small innocent creatures, who are not in fact
what they seem. Focusing on the similarities between the
two characters, the essay aims to provide meaningful insights
into some of the complex anxieties surrounding childhood. At
the same time, through an analysis of the differences
between the two vampire children, the essay seeks to raise
231
questions about changes in views on monstrous children in

the last fifteen years.
Monstrous Children: Claudia and Eli
Although vampire societies traditionally frown upon the
creation of vampire children, every so often we are
confronted with these little horrors. In the 1994 film
adaptation of Anne Rices Interview with the Vampire,
Claudia may look like a six-year-old girl, and when she is
initially turned she does have the mentality of a child, but, as
the years go by and her mind matures into that of an
intelligent, assertive woman, she grows tired of being unable
to grow up and seeks to revenge those who have condemned
her in an eternal childhood.
Initially the victim of an attack by Louis (the protagonist of
Interview with the Vampire), she is then turned into a
vampire by Lestat (Louis maker and companion) in an
attempt to change Louis plans about venturing out on his
own. Meticulous and cold, Claudia plans the perfect
punishment for both her fathers. She tricks Lestat into
drinking the blood of a poisoned young boy and gashes his
throat, while she forces Louis to part with his last ties to
humanity (that he holds so dear) by creating his first vampire
(a woman to care for Claudia).
In 2008, the Swedish novel Let the Right One In (Lt den rtte
komma in) by John Ajvide Lindqvist was adapted for film
under the same title. It tells the story of Oskar, a 12 year-old
boy who is a victim of bullying, and his evolving friendship
with his new next-door neighbour, Eli, a centuries-old
vampire child. Although the film does not really explain how
232
Eli became a vampire, it is made clear that she considers her

dependency on human blood to be a burden.
Stuck forever in a young body, she needs the help of others
(like Hkan) to survive and not attract the attention of the
authorities. So, although she has super-human strength and
could care for herself, she is still largely dependent on others,
as in all outward aspects she is only a child. Eli seeks not only
support, but also companionship. She does not treat Oskar
merely as someone who could help her navigate an
unfamiliar world, she mostly sees in him a friend who can
sympathise with her.
The Uncanny
In his 1919 essay, Freud defines the uncanny as that which
"arouses dread and horror... certain things which lie within
the class of what is frightening. Freud relates uncanny
experiences to the return of repressed complexes that turn
something which is familiar and old-established in the mind
(heimlich) into that which is unfamiliar (unheimlich): the
prefix 'un' is the token of repression." Freud also identifies
uncanny feelings in response to something which seems to
confirm discarded beliefs in the ability of the dead to return
to life, the omnipotence of thoughts, and the existence of a
double. In his words: "we have surmounted these modes of
thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and
the old ones still exist within us, ready to seize upon any
confirmation." 2
In this sense Claudia and Eli can evoke uncanny feelings on
two levels. First and foremost, their uncanniness lies in the
fact they are vampires, and as such they can be associated
with the (supposedly discarded) belief that the dead can
233
return to life. Although in Elis case it is not made explicit that

she had to die to become a vampire, the figure of the
vampire is generally thought to be transgressing the borders
of life and death by simultaneously being both dead and
alive. Both characters, even when the connection is not
explicit, are associated with anxieties regarding the dead
returning to life, and as such could evoke uncanny feelings.
Additionally, Claudia and Eli transform what is familiar
(childhood innocence) into something unfamiliar (childhood
monstrosity). According to Colette Balmain, the traditional
function of the child within bourgeois mythology is the
perpetuation of the past into the future, the propagation of
the same rather than the embodiment of difference, and a
promise of continuation of the dominant ideological order. 3
Vampire children however, call this function into question.
Instead of representing contemporary societys legacy, which
will preserve its own mores and ideals into the future,
vampire children embody difference. They are the Other;
they may look like us, but they are not us.
Claudias looks are almost doll-like (she is small, delicately
shaped, and has golden curls), but she does not act like a
child. She becomes educated and philosophical under Louis'
tutelage, and an indiscriminate murderer under Lestat's
guidance. She may look like a little angel, but she is a
methodical killer without remorse. She does not need
protection; rather society needs to be protected from her.
She is, also, in touch with her sexuality, and yearns for the
body of a woman that would allow her to bring her fantasies
to life.
Similarly, Eli may usually look like a pretty, wide-eyed little
girl, but she can also appear feral and can be rather lethal.
234
The super-human strength that allows her to climb trees and

snap her victims necks with her bare hands is deeply
unsettling. Furthermore, although the issue of her sexuality
and the nature of her relationship with her guardian go
unanswered in the film, her relationship with Oskar could
hint, for some viewers, at some form of sexual awakening.
Both Eli and Claudia inspire uncanny feelings by disrupting
the normal idea of childhood. They remind us that children
are so like us and yet in crucial ways so different: they are
both vulnerable and demanding, and in touch with the id in
ways that can elicit great discomfort. 4 Looking like children,
but at the same time being so fundamentally different from
them, these vampires confront us with conflicting images of
childhood, inviting us to acknowledge that children are not as
innocent as we would like them to be.
Their insatiable appetite for blood can be associated with
childrens voracity, and their sexuality alludes to the fact that
sexual stirrings first emerge during childhood. At the same
time, by occupying the position of the predator rather than
the victim, they create discomfort, as that is a position
usually associated with the male adult. Being at times even
more powerful that their male adult companions, they do
take the position reserved for children in the patriarchal
family (which expects them to be under the protection of a
male role model, the father), thus challenging our notions of
children as weak and in need of protection.
Monstrous Differences
Although there are common points between the two films, as
both the children vampire characters can be associated with
similar adult anxieties over the loss of childhood innocence,
235
there are also significant differences. As noted earlier, the

characters appearance is extremely different. This is not so
much because they live in different eras - Claudia lives in the
18th Century, while Eli moves to the Stockholm suburbs in
the early 80s - but because they are not both equally
convincing in looking like children.
Claudia is cute and delicate, showing signs of her vampire
nature in very few scenes, counter to Eli, who looks decayed,
after a mere day without blood, and tends to smell like
death. Also, in Claudias case her outfits match the era she is
in and do not attract unwanted attention; whereas Eli seems
to pay no attention to the way she dresses, and usually wears
neither coats nor shoes, managing to look alien in the frozen
Swedish landscape she inhabits. All in all, while Claudias
appearance largely creates the impression that she is a child
like any other and does not really allude to her vampire
nature, Elis otherness is immediately noticeable.
Furthermore, Eli resembles a wild animal while she feeds,
further separating herself from humanity, whereas Claudia
satiates her need for blood while remaining doll-like. When
Eli feeds it is extremely violent and messy (she gashes her
victims throats and gets covered in it in the process) and she
immediately kills her victims by snapping their necks (to
ensure they do not come back as vampires). As a result, Elis
attacks are deeply unsettling. In contrast, Claudia leaves
smalls puncture wounds in her victims and the act of feeding
looks more like a prolonged embrace. Although she kills her
victims by drinking all their blood, the process looks a lot less
violent than in the case of Eli, so the effect of murder is
lessened, and the character does not arouse the same
feelings of fear and disgust.
236
A further aspect of Elis otherness is her gender ambiguity.

Although, Claudias character is very feminine, Eli is
genderless. As time passes, Claudia matures and becomes
interested in having a sex life. She openly flirts with Louis,
and eventually goes as far as kissing him, while during one of
her earlier fits she expresses her frustration in being unable
to have the body of a woman. Eli, on the other hand, shows
no interest in having a sexual relationship, and the question
of her sex is never clearly answered. Her relation with Hkan
could be read as an expression of paedophilia, but the film
does not make the rules of their relationship explicit.
Furthermore, Elis relationship with Oskar remains largely
platonic, and, although she agrees to be his girlfriend, her sex
is intentionally ambiguous. She states that she is not a girl,
but this can be read as a statement that refers to her
vampiric nature, so it does not really answer the question of
Elis sex. There is, also, a scene where the audience (and
Oskar) gets a glimpse of a scar on Elis body where her
genitals should have been, but it only lasts a few seconds, in
effect raising more questions than it answers.
The differences between the two characters speak to the
different times from which they sprang. Claudias
monstrosity is more internal than external, whereas Eli looks
more like the monster she is supposed to be, and represents
the other in more ways than one. Still, both characters are
presented in a rather sympathetic light. This implies that
nowadays we can relate to monstrous characters even if they
are presented as other. Interview with a Vampire reintroduced the idea of sympathetic vampires, and tried to
work against the dominant association of vampires with evil
that was largely the result of Bram Stokers Dracula. But
Louis, Lestat and Claudia rely heavily on characteristics
237
associated with humanity to become sympathetic. Eli,

however, manages to evoke sympathy even if at times she
appears to be completely alien.
Yet, even though in the course of time sympathy relies less
on looking human as we become more familiar with the idea
of sympathetic vampires, the uneasiness evoked by the
notion of atrocious acts being enacted by children remains
unchanged. Claudia looks more like a human child, so she is
not seen taking part in any gruesome scenes that would be
truly disturbing because of her doll-like appearance. Eli,
whose feral looks separate her from humanity, is allowed to
look and act more monstrously, and this does not have the
same shock as such behaviour would if it were performed by
a character looking like Claudia.
Finally, it is important to note that Claudias character is
more sexually aware, while Eli is heavily associated with
violence. It seems then that there is a shift in our fears
relating to childhood innocence. Interview with a Vampire
was written in the 1970s and adapted for the cinema in the
1990s, and it largely represents our fears and anxieties
surrounding sexual awakening, whereas Let the Right One In
is a product of the 21st Century and it speaks more about
contemporary fears regarding violence. Although both films
raise a series of issues that disrupt our notions of childhood
innocence, the weight clearly shifts from sexuality to
violence. Although this shows a shift that can be associated
with the change in our perceptions in the last fifteen years,
we should also take into account that the films have sprung
from different countries, and thus the shift could also point
to differences between American and European culture.
238
In our corrupt times, we look at childhood with nostalgia, as

a time of innocence. Vampire children question our notions
our childhood innocence, as they put us in a position where
we are faced with both the fear of and for them. Both dead
and alive, they tap into our anxieties about transgressing the
borders of life and death. Encouraging us to see children as
both vulnerable and uncontrollable, they inspire uncanny
feelings by confronting us with our complex anxieties
surrounding childhood. Although both films challenge our
notion of childhood innocence, they do not completely turn
their child characters into monsters, allowing us to feel
protective towards these vampires, and maybe just for a few
seconds see them as innocent children.
1
Marina Warner, Little Angels, Little Devils: Keeping Childhood Innocent,

in Warner, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time, London: Vintage
Books, 1994, p. 43.
2
Sigmund Freud, The 'Uncanny', in James Strachey (ed.), The Penguin

Freud Library Volume 14: Art and Literature, London: Penguin, 1990, pp.
339, 368, 370-371.
Colette Balmain, 'The Enemy Within: The Child as Terrorist in the

Contemporary American Horror Film', in Niall Scott (ed.), Monsters and the
Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, New York: Rodopi,
2007, p. 137.
4
John Calhoun, Childhood's End: Let the Right One In and Other Deaths of
Innocence, Cineaste, vol. 35 no. 1, 2009, p. 27.
239
24 / Cinematic Violence and Society:

Bollywood in Pakistan
Erum Hafeez Aslam
Researching Crime, Violence and the Cinema

Crime and violence are major themes that have dominated
cinema screens around the world since the arrival of film in
the late 19th Century, raising concerns about the potentially
damaging effects of these images on vulnerable sections of
society. In about three thousand studies conducted over the
last four decades, researchers have argued that incessant
and excessive exposure to on-screen violence often leads to
anti-social and aggressive behaviours when complemented
with hostile surroundings at home and in the wider society.
The present study examines the possible relationship
between increasing violence in Pakistani society and its
excessive portrayal in popular Indian films, ardently viewed
in Pakistan since the 1970s.
240
The present study heavily engages with theories of culture

and learning which analyse the relationship between onscreen violence and vulnerable viewers who might be
tempted to replicate media violence in real life. As Bandura
indicated, most people, especially children, learn and adopt
behaviour following striking role models both in the real
world and in media. 1 As Jarvie pointed out, however, film
often contributes to social reality in an extremely slow and
subtle manner. 2
It would appear to be the case that changes in attitude and
behaviour express themselves only occasionally and in a
seemingly erratic manner, which appears to be the case in
our own correlation of crime rates in films and in the world
beyond the cinema. This study also hypothesises that people
learn and adopt deviant and even criminal behaviors as a
ready reaction and quick solution to social injustice when
they observe positive reinforcement of deviant actions in
media. Even if the majority of viewers does not turn criminal
in reaction to exposure to violent films, they may become
desensitised or fearful if they take on-screen violence to be a
true representation of the age.
To gauge the changes in frequency and depiction of violence
and crimes both on and off screen during recent decades, a
selection of films and newspapers was sampled from 1976 to
2006. Firstly, five top-grossing films, selected on the basis of
popularity charts and youth polls, were analysed from each
of the decades under study following the sampling
techniques of Shipley and Cavendar. 3 These films were
examined for their portrayal of violent themes and acts.
Then, following Gerbner, a Violence Index was calculated to
identify and compare the trends in the defined time period. 4
241
Subsequently, focusing on crime news, four samples of one

months issues per decade of the Daily Jang, Pakistans
national Urdu daily - sometimes spreading over 20 to 30
news pages - were carefully submitted to content analysis.
Eventually, the findings of the two studies were compared
statistically to evaluate potential linkages.
A basic definition of violent crime is based on offences
against the person. It includes homicide (murder), aggravated
assault, forcible rape, robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, autotheft and arson which also come under the category of
traditional or street crimes. The present study adopts the
definition of violence used by Khan and Rashid in their study
of violence on Pakistan TV. 5 This definition further broadens
the horizon and scope of our study and includes both overt
expression of physical force of the kind noted above, and the
more complex category of verbal and symbolic violence.
The latter involves verbal threats/abuse or gestures. This
might be psychologically and physically injurious to a person
such as yelling, shouting, showing off weapons to threaten,
mostly used as a symbol of power. 6 The inclusion of verbal
and symbolic violence widens the scope of our study in
comparison to Cultural Indicator (CI) research and other such
studies that are confined to acts of physical force only.
Prevalence of Violence
It is clear that there are no direct and immediate links
between the number of incidents in films and news reports
during the four decades. For example, the 1990s return the
highest number of incidents in news reports (370) whereas
the decade simultaneously shows the lowest rate of violent
scenes depicted in sampled films in the same period (62).
242
Similarly, the decade of the 2000s exhibits the second highest

number of violent incidents (360) in reported news, but
second lowest number of violent scenes on film (76).
Subsequently, the rest of the two decades of the 1970s and
1980s reflects a relatively lower figure of violent crimes (76
and 275) compared to the higher number of violent scenes
calculated in the top five popular Indian films (80 and 94
respectively).
Number of Violent
Incidents
Films
Newspapers
370
360
275
80 76
70s
94
80s
62
Decades
90s
76
2000s
Figure 1:
Number of Violent Incidents in Films and Newspapers 1976-2006
Prevalence of Violence
The media of film and the press are characterized by
somewhat peculiar and characteristic trends as far as
prevalence of violence is concerned. While the percentage of
hours containing violence in films consistently decreases
through four decades (from 29% in 70s to 25% in 80s and
16% in 90s), it consistently increases in the real world of
crimes news reports (from 1% to 2% between the 70s and
80s, and 18% in the 90s).
243
The last decade proves to be an exception, with a marked

decrease from 18% to 3% in newspapers, by contrast with a
sharp rise from 16% to 23 % in movies. However, the findings
indicate the possibility that the effects of media and film
content are slow and gradual and it might take more than a
decade to change the mindset of a generation - as discovered
from 1960 onwards by Leonard Erons Columbia County
Longitudinal Study, focusing on 856 children living in
Columbia County, NY and resulting in four waves of data
across the subsequent decades. It was found that heavy
viewers of on-screen violence were more likely to commit
serious crimes, treat their families rather aggressively, and
punish their kids seriously, than non-viewers but the media
violence took more than a decade to exhibit its effects in the
conduct of its viewers. 7
Outcomes
The results of this study show that violence has increased
both in Pakistani society and Indian films during the forty
years sampled, but that the increase is curvilinear rather than
linear in nature. The very fact reflects that the impact of
media messages on society is rather slow, gradual and subtle,
unlike the outcomes proposed by the hypodermic needle or
magic bullet theories of yesteryear. Besides, there is a broad
observation that strikingly popular Indian films (which
actually fill the cinematic vacuum in absence of sufficient
quality local films) play a major role in transmitting patterns
of conduct and defining role models in Pakistani society.
Above all the desensitisation effect of excessive violence in
movies on mass audience is also identified widely.
244
Overall this study supports the results of around more than

half of the British, American and local studies that contradict
mass belief regarding the direct, necessary and sufficient
detrimental effects of media violence on social crime scene.
On the contrary, it strengthens the understanding that media
violence, in conjunction with several other personal,
psychological and socio-economic factors in the
environment, might contribute to the formation of a volatile
and dangerous society as argued by a range of other studies 8.
Even small statistical effects of media violence on aggressive
behavior can have crucial social consequences, since it
affects almost everyone across a large population, influences
individuals gradually, and leaves lasting and subtle
impressions on the unconscious mind through repetitive and
continual exposure over a period of time.
Thus any single incident of violence can trigger pent-up
emotions and result in extremely volatile reactions, as
evident in various recent incidents such as the Sialkot beating
to death of the Butt Brothers in 2010, the killings, stoning
and burning of snatchers and burglars by mobs in Karachi,
Lahore and other cities of Pakistan, and violence during the
Lawyers Campaign in Pakistan. Thus even a negligibly weak
positive correlation of +0.20 between the incidences of
violent crimes in movies and news reports found in the
current study may be have serious social implications in the
long run and inferences should be drawn with caution in the
wider social perspective.
245
Percentage of Filmhours
& Newspages with
Violence
Films
29%
Newspapers
25%
16%18%
1%
70s
23%
3%
2%
80s
Decades
90s
2000s
Figure 2: Percentage of Film Hours and Newspaper Pages containing

Violence in Indian Films and Pakistani Newspapers 1976-2006.
Albert Bandura, Social Foundations of Thoughts and Actions: a Social

Cognitive Theory, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986, pp. 47-80.
2
Ian Jarvie, Movies and Society, New York: Basic Books, 1970.
Wes Shipley and Gray Cavender, Murder and Mayhem at the Movies,
Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, vol. 9 no. 1, 2001, pp. 1-14.
George Gerbner and Larry Gross, Living with Television: The Violence
Profile, Journal of Communication, vol. 26 no. 2, 1976, pp. 172-194.
5
Fazal Rahim Khan and I. Rashid, Violence in the Dramatized

Entertainment of PTV, Gomal University Journal of Research, vol. 13 no. 2,
1993, pp. 205-222.
246
Nancy Signorelli, Larry Gross, and Michael Morgan, Violence in Television

Programs: Ten Years Later, in D. Pearl, J. Lazar and L. Bouthilet (eds.),
Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications
for the 80s, Rockville, MD: National Institute of Mental Health, 1982, pp.
158-173.
7
For early findings, see Leonard D. Eron, Monroe M. Lefkowitz, L. Rowell

Huesmann and Leopold O. Walder, Does Television Violence Cause
Aggression?, American Psychologist, vol. 27 no. 4, 1972, pp. 253-263. For
details of the ongoing project in the Aggression Research Program at the
University of Michigans Research Center for Group Dynamics, see
http://www.rcgd.isr.umich.edu/aggr/Projects/CCLS/description.html.
Such those by as Leonard Berkowitz, Some Effects of Thoughts on Antiand Prosocial Influence of Media Events: A Cognitive Neoassociationist
Analysis, Psychological Bulletin, no. 95, 1984, pp. 410-427; Lynette Kohn
Friedrich and Aletha Huston Stein, Aggressive and Prosocial Television
Programs and the Natural Behavior of Preschool Children, Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley for Society for Research in Child Development, vol. 38 no. 4, 1973;
Wendy L. Josephson, Television Violence and Children's Aggression:
Testing the Priming, Social Script, and Disinhibition Predictions, Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 53 no. 5, 1987, pp. 882-890; Brad J.
Bushman, Moderating Role of Trait Aggressiveness in the Effects of Violent
Media on Aggression, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 69,
1995, pp. 950-960; National TV Violence Study (3 vols.) London: Sage,
1996, 1997, 1998; Craig A. Anderson and Karen E. Dill, Video Games and
Aggressive Thoughts, Feelings, and Behavior in the Laboratory and in Life,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 78 no. 4, 2000, pp. 772790; Craig A. Anderson and Brad J. Bushman, The Effects of Media
Violence on Society, Science, vol. 295 no. 5564, 2002, pp. 2377-2379.
247
6. Narratives of War
248
25 / Myth and Nostalgia in Cinematic

Representations of World War II
Daniel Binns
War and Myth

This essay examines the beginning of the World War II film
canon before moving to the late 1990s and early 2000s,
when a number of politically-charged events occurred
around the world. Key films examined are Michael Curtizs
Casablanca (1942) and Roman Polanskis The Pianist (2002). I
will be looking at the tensions between the grand narratives
of national endeavour and the more localised stories of
individual struggle, and at the historical conditions of
pressure and crisis from which the films arise. The essay
identifies two key sub-genres: the combat film, in which men
and generals must engage directly with the enemy onscreen; and the fringe narrative, where the story takes place
on the outer edges of the conflict.
249
World War II combat films involve a number of key tropes.

They include a hero who is part of a group; an objective;
internal group conflicts; the need to remember and discuss
home; events, conversations and actions suggesting attitudes
to war which might be adopted by the audience; and, finally,
death. 1 Alongside the typical elements of the combat subgenre are those facets of narrative that deal with propaganda
and speak of home. These are critical to the notion of what I
call the grand narrative, in that they justify the
abandonment of the private home they hold dear, to travel
half-way around the globe in order to defeat those who
threaten that home and the wider nation which supports it.
Myth, in this context, becomes a way of interpreting the
present. Nostalgia, by way of comparison, is a way of
remembering the past. Myths, for their part, make sense of
the world, providing recognisable narrative content and
structure. Whether as a narrative device, metaphor,
character trait, or part of the very fabric of a film, nostalgia
in which we return to the past by means of projection and
fantasy, often preferring it to the present - is a crucial
element of storytelling. The cinema itself, of course, has a
strong link with dreaming and fantasy; the very act of going
to the movies is to abandon reality, to suspend disbelief, and
to give oneself over to the film-world. Myth, too, is firmly
tied to the world of film: several ancient myths have been
adapted for the screen, and several screened works have
entered the realm of contemporary myth.
The Power of Nostalgia: Casablanca
During World War II, society was intensely industrialised,
geared towards the production of goods and munitions in aid
of the war effort. The Atlantic Charter paved the way for a
250
widespread policy shift both during World War II and in its

aftermath. From the midst of a society at war came films
such as Casablanca, and filmic discourses of war were
fundamentally altered. These films were about big ideas, high
concepts and about keeping aloft the spirits of those on the
home front.
Rick Blaines Caf Amricain in Casablanca attracts a wide
and varied clientele: Allied and Axis officials, those trying to
escape the war and those chasing them, and those, like Rick,
who try not to be involved. When Ricks former lover Ilsa
Lund arrives at the club with her husband Czech
concentration camp escapee Victor Laszlo both Rick and
Ilsa try to move on, ignoring their feelings, but it soon
becomes too much. What emerges is a love story on the
fringe of war, in a neutral place with no direct involvement
other than it being the place where most can actually leave
and head home for America or for England. But there are
much deeper machinations at work. Rick tries not to get
involved, but in opening his bar to all sides in a war, he also
has a responsibility to each to ensure things do not get out of
hand. Ricks management of political and ideological forces
at work within his club is simple: you make a scene, you
leave.
In this black-and-white film, the lighting in a sense stands in
for colour. The bar is always very brightly lit: a lively place full
of activity, laughter, drinking, and revelry. However, when
everyone leaves, the lights go down. This is a
functional/realist technique - a barman would indeed turn
the lights off at the end of the night - but it also leaves Rick in
a darkened space, alone with his thoughts (or, later in the
film, alone with Ilsa). But in depriving a scene or set of light,
you deprive it of colour: a lack of colour is a lack of vitality, a
251
melancholy. It is this melancholy dilemma with which both

Rick and Ilsa contend throughout the film - whether to give in
to their feelings, or to accept the sadness but be safe.
Music is central to the film, and the symbol not only for Rick
and Ilsas once-flourishing love full of promise and passion
as it was but also for the same melancholy that pervades
the films chiaroscuro lighting and dialogue. The song As
Time Goes By is the catalyst for Rick and Ilsas almostrekindled romance, as it was played during their time in
Paris, and remains a song filled with the regret of a lost
possibility:
You must remember this
A kiss is still a kiss
A sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.
What role, then, does nostalgia play? Is it merely a narrative
driver? Is the song just a Macguffin that is needed to propel
the story along? I would suggest not. In the midst of the
history we know so well World War II with all its political
machinations, atrocities, courage and sacrifice lies this
untold, unknown story of love and loss, and all the questions
of memory, of things which can and cannot be spoken, which
this entails.
The Pianist and the Holocaust
In the 21st Century, false memory is frequently perpetuated
by the media, whose vocabulary (influenced as it is by the
spin-doctors of public relations and media marketing firms)
has supplanted the vox populi. At no time was this more the
252
case than in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the year 1998,
trust in the American presidency took a severe blow, with
several allegations of sexual misconduct against President Bill
Clinton, the most widely publicised of which was the Monica
Lewinksy scandal, itself arising during a lawsuit brought
against Clinton by another woman, Paula Jones.
Despite this, Clinton left office in January 2001 with the
highest end-of-office approval ratings of any President since
the end of the Second World War. As Clinton was seen on
both sides of politics as a balanced and considerate leader,
the transition to a hardline, right-wing, Republican
administration was a jarring one for the American public. This
was swiftly forgotten, however, when, on a sunny morning in
September 2001, two hi-jacked aeroplanes plunged into the
World Trade Centre towers in New York, and a third hit the
Pentagon in Washington D.C. Newly elected President
George W. Bush immediately declared war on terrorism,
demanding justice for these evil acts.
A number of World War II films emerged during this time,
including Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998), Enemy at the
Gates (Annaud, 2001), Harts War (Hoblit, 2002), and We
Were Soldiers (Wallace, 2002). There was a strong focus on
American triumphalism, heroism in the face of overwhelming
loss, and selfless sacrifice for the safety and freedom of
others. In the face of this all-conquering, all-righteous
cinematic mentality came Roman Polanskis film The Pianist,
based on the true story of Wadysaw Szpilman, a Jewish
musician from Poland who survived the Holocaust. A quiet,
reflective drama, Polanskis account of Szpilman is as
personal as it is profound: Polanskis family were moved from
their home to the Krakow Ghetto; his father survived, though
his mother perished in Auschwitz.
253
The film opens with 1930s footage of Warsaw, immediately

entrenching the film in the time and place of the outbreak of
World War II. The use of newsreel footage anchors the film in
the past, evoking memories of times gone by; the images of
people going about their business, the hustle and bustle of a
city full of life, also elicit sadness and a longing for the time
before the Nazi occupation. Cut to long, slender fingers
playing the piano, holding for a long time as Szpilman (Adrien
Brody) plays Chopins Nocturne No. 20 in C-sharp Minor;
then a slow camera movement up the arm, to reveal
Szpilmans face. The movements are slow, deliberate; the
editing is equally considered, as there is soon a cut to the
control room of a radio studio, as we see from Szpilmans
point of view the producer smiling contentedly as he listens
to Szpilman play. On cutting back to Szpilman, there is a
distant boom; with the camera back on the producer,
another boom and the room shakes.
The booms increase in volume, until there is an explosion
outside and the windows break. The producer decides to
flee, urging Szpilman to do the same; the pianist declines, but
is forced to do so when the window between the studio and
the control room explodes inwards. This sequence is typical
of Polanskis style: a sequence of equilibrium, of relative
calm, is shattered by an explosive intrusion, before a cut to
the next scene can restore the peace. The following scene,
for example, shows Szpilman at home with his family,
celebrating Britains declaration of war on the Germans.
There is then, though, a shock, as Szpilmans family deal with
the restrictions the Nazis have placed on them: limiting the
amount of money they can possess, for example. Later they
are forced to wear the Star of David, identifying them as
Jews.
254
Music is a constant presence in the film, used as a character

trait, narrative device, and symbolic metaphor. Music is
inherently part of Szpilmans composition: he is constantly
thinking about music, playing an instrument (often idly), or
thinking of ways music can help him. As a narrative device,
music is the life-raft to which Szpilman clings, as it often
saves him from hideous treatment at the hands of the Nazis.
Indeed, on one occasion, when a German officer discovers
him, on learning that Szpilman was a musician, the Nazi asks
him to play a piano they had found. In return, the Nazi officer
shows Szpilman to a better hiding place, and regularly brings
him food and drink. Music then becomes a symbol for
survival and, later, for the emergence and flourishing of the
Jewish community in the wake of unspeakable horror and
terrible loss.
Rather than play all-out with the medium, as some do to
excess, film artists such as Polanski adjust small elements of
mise-en-scne, music, editing, and colour, to achieve
understated cinematic effect. Often, the result is a clear
colour palette; a range of hues that does not alter for the
duration of the film. Modern filmmakers fond of this
methodology include David Fincher and Christopher Nolan
see for example The Prestige (Nolan, 2006), Zodiac (Fincher,
2007) and The Social Network (Fincher, 2011). A degree of
creative tinkering, however, is evident in the colouring of The
Pianist. Throughout the film, the colour palette is military:
khaki, beige, grey. Polanski removes contrast and thus,
warmth and depth from the image, flattening it, making the
scenes very dull. This serves two purposes: it reinforces the
idea of oppression, and allows, when bright colours do
appear, for moments of brilliant cinematic vitality.
255
From the exact number of those who perished, to the depth

and breadth of the atrocities committed, little is still
absolutely clear about the Holocaust. It is a major dimension
of modern historical memory, but is often treated as a bad
dream: for many years, many Germans denied that the
Holocaust had taken place; worldwide, others simply
repressed the memory in shame, regret, or sadness. It is a
wondrous trait of humanity that we try and grasp the
unthinkable through art. In telling the story of a man who
just wants to write and play music, Polanski cloaks a deeper
meaning, that of the Holocaust and what it meant to the
Jewish community. He masks what is remote, unknown, or
difficult to understand with what is near, well known, and
self-evident.
This, then, is the role of myth to help society understand
itself. Myth and nostalgia are two key elements in films about
World War II. They serve as an emotional or narrative anchor
to which the audience can cling, and also as vehicles for
telling powerful stories about some of the darker moments in
human history. This paper has examined two films, and they
are but two films among many more. Nostalgia is both a
product of these films, and a tool integral to their narrative
and cinematographic construction it is because of this that
they have entered modern mythology.
Jeanine Basinger, The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre,

nd
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2 rev. ed., 2003.
256
26 / Cinma-Vrit at War:
Schoendoerffer, Vietnam and
The Anderson Platoon
Wajiha Raza Rizvi
Historical Background
The Anderson Platoon (1967), directed by Pierre
Schoendoerffer, is a cinema-vrit account of the Vietnam
War. The film makes direct reference to the French defeat in
the First Indochina War (1947-1954) by the nationalist
Vietnamese with military and financial support from China
and Soviet Union. The Americans followed the French into
Vietnam because of their deep-rooted fear of Communism,
which shaped the Second Indochina War (1954-1975)
between the Communist North and the South-based National
Liberation Front.
257
In an escalation of the war, US President Lyndon B. Johnson

escalated the American troop base from 16,000 in 1963 to
550,000 in early 1968 in defence of the freedom of South
Vietnam under the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964. The
Americans threw the first US troops into a totally alien
environment where they could hardly identify the enemy or
their animosity. An initial US reluctance to attack or form a
clear policy for the region gave way to the full-blown
commitment of American military might, just as they had
beaten Indians, French, British, Spaniards, Germans, Italians,
Mexicans, Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese in the past. 1
Shot in black-and-white, the film chronicles the six-week
experiences in South Vietnam of a racially-integrated US 1st
Cavalry infantry platoon combat unit led by a black West
Pointer, Lt. Joseph B. Anderson. Cinema-vrit techniques are
used to avoid the fabrication of a subjective spectacle of war.
The cinema truth of The Anderson Platoon reflects the
experiences of real soldiers without making a political
comment on war, but at the same time challenging official
ideologies of conflict.
The overall structure of The Anderson Platoon involves a
loose chronological narrative. We get to know the individual
and collective stories of a group of emotionally troubled
soldiers fighting and dying together. Schoendoerffer does
not deal with the interior or personal lives of his subjects,
simply the externals of their involvement in the war.
Narrative links among the sequences are made through
groupings of persons involved in particular activities, and
there are some startling contrasts in scenes of waking up,
eating, drinking, and singing.
258
The Anderson Platoon depicts the uncertainties experienced

by the American GIs. Close-ups freeze and transition into
wide-shots to reveal a compassionate picture of their jungle
plight. The freeze frames assert the significance of their
names, origins, and ages (18 to 24) as they express the
perpetual tension, anger, and pathos of war on young faces.
In this alien environment, the soldiers eat, sleep, drink,
smoke, and engage with the uncertainties of their guerilla
war with the Viet Cong of the North-based National
Liberation Front. They also die.
The Poetics of Cinma-Vrit
The Anderson Platoon combines naturalistic documentary
film techniques with the storytelling methods of a fiction
film. It follows the chronology of historical events. It uses
genuine locations and natural lighting to capture some of the
unscripted and unrehearsed actualities of the Vietnam War.
The movements of the subjects in the beautifully composed
frames convey a sense of the atmospheric light and shade
against which the war was fought. The film amalgamates the
imaginative beauty of landscapes and human beings with the
tension, dangers and horror of war.
It opens with a montage sequence revealing the inverted
reflection of a lone farmer ploughing rice paddies, people
traveling in gondolas, static images of the gods in a timeless
shrine, a tree reaching to the sky, smoke, and clouds over
green mountains. The inverted image of the lone farmer
perhaps signifies an inversion - or subversion - of life in
Vietnam. It also points to a desire for production and growth
while the shot of the bulls, seen from behind, suggests the
obstruction of fertility, strength, and stamina. The gondolas
259
suggest movement, but also the cycle of life caught between

dark, sharp edges, and pointed verticals.
The gods in the shrine signify an overarching observance of
lifeless lands; the lone tree implies a drive for production and
growth despite its loneliness. The green symbolises creation,
but the smoke and the clouds float above and mourn the
vigour of the green mountains. This polyphonic montage
offers abstract ideas mirroring a disturbing disparity in the
visual content to draw a conceptually complex picture of the
conflict. Intellectual abstraction is juxtaposed with
imaginative romanticism, which is in turn contrasted with the
horror of the war.
The opening sequence features a powerful narration seeking
to appease all the souls of the unburied dead, the wandering
souls of the beggars, prostitutes, and soldiers and wishes the
viewer to shift from optimistic innocence to the experiential
reality of war. Classic tunes are laid over shots of the South
Vietnamese people during investigations, as well as shots of
the wandering souls of prostitutes and beggars, but not over
the enemy, the unburied dead. Period music as well as
soldier soliloquies in the form of songs are part of life in the
combat zone, in the bush, and in the bunkers. Sync-sound is
used primarily for capturing the soldier soliloquies and
conversations, the interviews and statements of the
suspects, and the ambience, the original and natural sound
effects of real locations.
In the absence of substantive postproduction techniques sound effects or special effects - original sound, period music,
narration, realism and extreme naturalism draw a complex
picture of the war. The chirping of birds is juxtaposed with
shots of soldiers trotting through streams in the jungle; the
260
sound of children crying is linked to shots of soldiers taking

away their parents following an investigation. The sounds of
the choppers churning fans on landing or take-off are
juxtaposed with the impact of the gusts blown through the
crops in the fields. The sounds of gunfire and loading
launchers are contrasted with a meal, a game, a sermon, or
communion as the priest commends the body of Christ to
soldiers.
Questions of Naturalism and Artifice
Occasionally a sense of fiction enters the world of cinematic
naturalism, as when a soldier catches sight of the camera in
the low-angle shot of the soldier and his mate at the roadside
during the parade. The camera and the subject relationship
and distance hint at mutual awareness, however natural. The
soldiers overall behaviour from the moment he picks up the
girl and spends time with her in the hotel room is mirrored
by the excitement of the cameras altered behavior during
this sequence. These sequences appear to be improvised and
constructed and lack the power of true Cinema-Vrit.
Schoendoerffer assimilates certain events from the lives of
the subjects who are truly occupied in their primary activities
during the combat scenes, but in more casual scenes like
those of waking up, picking up the letters and communal
bathing the viewer is aware of the possibility of simulation
and performing for the camera and microphone. In the
waking up scene, some soldiers appear to improvise waking
up naturally for another day of military operations but we
need to bear in mind that all this was recorded so they would
live and be remembered after death.
261
In the letter scene, the camera is placed at a low angle to

shoot the picking up of the bundle and letters. The shot looks
very natural, but it is unlikely to have been accidental. In the
following sequence, the GIs share letters and the picture of a
nude woman in Playboy magazine and express their feelings.
The magazine scene seems to be simulated, like the studio
shots of the radio DJ. These sequences are quite unlike the
rest of the film and its commitment to exposure of the
tedium, treachery, and animosity of war.
In the scenes depicting the village raid, the vacated
camouflaged Viet Cong camp in the jungle, and the
investigation of locals suspects of spying in the village, we do
not see the enemy, is who is instead implied. The enemy
strategically appears in the last part of the film which leads to
triumph in the trenches after a tough war. The US soldiers
death and injury scenes are recorded with sensitivity, care
and compassion, as are the scenes rendering the injuries of
the Vietnamese. The images of the US cargo helicopter
crashing on take-off are recorded naturally from the point of
departure onwards, and intimate images convey the
monotony and apathy of war as soldiers eat, smoke, sing,
and chat normally at the site of the accident. The editing
does not aim at slanting the meaning of the actuality and the
ambience captured naturalistically by the camera and
microphone.
Images of Race and Sexuality
The Anderson Platoon mirrors the wartime realities of
everyday life and the sensitivity and insensitivity of race
relations among members of the American raciallyintegrated platoon and the citizens of Vietnam. The film
shows the soldiers sleeping, singing, and swimming together,
262
sharing food, pictures, letters, and indulging in Playboy, and a

white soldier comforting a black wounded soldier or tending
to an injured Vietnamese boy who clutches a white hat in his
teeth.
Vietnamese children hover around the platoon during the
pig-roasting scene, which includes inserts of a little girl licking
her fingers and a naked boy coming to join them for a bite to
eat, a black soldier trimming hair of a white soldier, and the
GIs giving first aid to sick and wounded Vietnamese children.
In another scene, the noise of a machine-gun is juxtaposed
with a shot of a calm and quiet Vietnamese baby in his
mothers arms. In the concluding scene, the film reveals the
tragedy of war as a white soldier falls besides a black
wounded soldier while others still fight.
To build a sense of the soldiers desire for release from these
pressures, the film follows a GI into Saigon nightclubs for rest
and recuperation. There are links here with the stereotypical
images of Vietnamese soldiers visiting the nightclubs and
dancers depicted by Ron Steinman, who, ironically, draws a
paradoxical parallel between 60s and 70s Saigon and Studio
54 in New York: Maxime, the centre for glitz, corruption,
prostitution, and drugs, looked like a set for a 1930s
gangster movie, but in color 2.
The film also evokes the sexual rapacity of solders at war in a
foreign land. It shows nightclubs, hotels, and American
soldiers pursuing Vietnamese whores. The scenes that follow
the young farmer-soldier from North Carolina into Saigon are
conveyed by a smooth camera movement on the crowded
pavement besides the road, continuity shots from back and
front, and 180-degree camera movement when we come to
the kissing scene in a small room. It would obviously be
263
difficult to create these kinds of shots without on-the-spot

planning, though the inserts of the poor people and beggars
sleeping on the side of the road in this sequence are highly
naturalistic.
Ideological Outcomes
The Vietnam War in all its original social and geo-political
complexity raises questions over the capacity of film and
television to handle conflict situations. While the film does
not offer a direct political judgment of the binaries of war,
The Anderson Platoon offers a chance to understand the
culture of war, soldiers positions within it, and their
feelings about it. The film thus promotes a humanistic picture
of war. Its realism strongly differentiates it from escapist
fiction and Hollywood fantasy. This technique unpacks the
war history without compromising authenticity. The
Anderson Platoon preserves a compassionate picture of war,
revealing the everyday lives, in all their alternating joys,
disorientation, and pain, of the some of the soldiers involved
in it. The film evinces a unity between camera and subjects
that determines the ultimate political merit of the film.
The Anderson Platoon then also amounts to a sermon on
human waste that draws the viewer into a void as objectively
as any war movie ever made, as Howard Thompson said of a
contemporary documentary, A Face of War (Eugene S. Jones,
USA, 1968). 3 As Peter Harcourt argues: propagandas
function to be simplistic and incantatory while setting out
to be anti-American [The Anderson Platoon]ends up creating
a picture so complex that it is hard to range ourselves on one
particular side ... The film is complex in its surface
simplification of the good/evil paradigm 4. As Harcourt
suggests, while the film does not call for social action, the
264
sense of sorrow which permeates the film promises to leave

the audience disturbed by the uncertainties involved, and
may equally give rise to anti-war sentiments in its troubled
spectators.
1
Loren Baritz, Gods Country and American Know-How (Backfire), in

Grace Sevy (ed.), The American Experience in Vietnam: A Reader,
Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989, p. 13.
Ron Steinman, To Eat is to Live: 1985, Inside Televisions First War: A

A Saigon Journal, Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2002,
pp. 173-4.
Howard Thompson, A Face of War Offers Intimate Records of 97 Days

with G.I.s, The New York Times, 11 May 1968.
Peter Harcourt, The Camera and I: Joris Ivens, Cinema Journal, vol. 11
no. 1, 1971, p. 66.
265
27 / The Vietnam War as Video Game

Dusan Kolcun
Introduction
The Vietnam War has rightly generated much scholarly
interest, primarily in the US. Within the cultural field, the
Vietnam War has thus far been given its imaginative life
primarily through film 1 and as a consequence films have
been the primary force shaping the understanding (and also
the misunderstanding) of the conflict. But although new films
about Vietnam still appear from time to time, the cinematic
boom of the 1970s and 1980s now seems to be over. Instead,
the war has slowly been spreading into another medium of
popular culture, namely video games. The aim of this essay is
to sketch the basic trends observable in selected video games
relating to the Vietnam War. The conclusions should be taken
as tentative. Yet despite necessary caution, it is possible to
266
identify some general trends within the body of Vietnam War

video games, and thus to gain an insight how another
medium of popular culture presents a fact of history, a
conflict which has already produced so many books, films,
songs, and poems. There has been a boom in Vietnam War
video games after 2000, and it is on these more recent games
that I focus in this essay.
Action games of various sub-genres predominate, with first
person shooters (FPS) constituting the majority. Strategy
games are rare - Platoon (Digital Reality, 2002), Men of War:
Vietnam (1C, 2011) or Arsenal of Democracy: Viet-Afghan
(BL-Logic, 2010) might serve as examples - and simulators
almost non-existent (with the exception, perhaps of Wings
Over Vietnam (Third Wire Productions, 2004). Another trend
immediately observable is a tendency of these games to
create a feeling of maximum authenticity. (The term
authenticity is more suitable than the term realism, since
the Rambo-style gameplay of most games and the number of
enemies killed make most video games miles removed from
what might be in any sense called real.) This drive towards
the authentic is observable on several levels.
Attempts at Authenticity
Firstly, all games attempt to provide a believable setting
which would resemble closely the theatre of the Vietnam
War. Thus, the iconic landscapes of Vietnam are re-created
on-screen, the level of detail depending on the graphic
engines of individual games. Most games re-create the green
of the jungle, the rice paddies, the small villages and hamlets
with straw huts images which have become strongly
associated with the Vietnam War. But not only do games aim
267
for a generic Vietnam. In many cases they provide real

places, events, and even unit names. Thus, for example,
Vietcong (Pterodon, 2003) offers a mission somewhere on
the Ho Chi Minh trail or in the Central Highlands of South
Vietnam; Men of Valor (2015, Inc., 2004) moves from Da
Nang to the Iron Triangle and to the Marine base of Khe Sanh
near the DMZ; and Vietcong 2 (Pterodon, 2005), along with
some other games, takes the player to the city of Hu.
But attempted authenticity also manifest itself in other ways,
for example in providing the player with period-accurate
weapons and equipment. Far from being content with
providing a few generic weapons (one pistol, one shotgun,
one rifle), many games supply players with dozens of
weapons, all of which were used during the Vietnam War.
For example, Battlefield Vietnam (Digital Illusions Canada,
2004) provides the player with more than 20 weapons - from
pistols and shotguns to sniper rifles and portable mortars - all
of which were used during the conflict.
Even greater care was taken by the developers of Vietcong 2:
the game offers 40 different weapons to choose from, again
all of which were deployed in S.E. Asia. Here, however, one
fact is noteworthy: in terms of gameplay, some weapons are
basically indistinguishable (for example the three AK-47
derived assault rifles, all with a 30-round magazine, identical
accuracy, and similar rate of fire). Thus, there appears little
reason to include them all - apart from authenticity.
Regardless of the number of weapons present in individual
games, great care is always taken to model them accurately
on their real-life counterparts.
But weapons alone would not create a feeling of authenticity
and thus video games employ other means, one of them
268
being period-accurate and war-specific language, notably

English. The impact of the Vietnam War on English has been
significant, as manifested, for example, by a dictionary of
terms containing more than 10,000 entries. 2 And more than
one game uses slang, acronyms, and special nomenclature,
ranging from derogatory racial terms for the Vietnamese
dink, gook, zipper-head) to special military slang (klic for
kilometer or slick for a special version of the US UH-1
helicopter).
How many special words can occur in a video game can be
seen from an introductory cut scene of Vietcong. A dialogue
lasting no more than a minute might seem partly
incomprehensible to a person without a Vietnam War
dictionary: Im here to replace the teams intelligence
sergeant, KIA. I heard he got zapped on night patrol .. We
were going after a couple of VC tax collectors; they were
stealing rice from a local ville. We humped over there and
ambushed those gooks me, Douglass, and a few of the
Yards Then they di-di, but Douglas was unlucky.
There are two more features enhancing the authenticity of
Vietnam War video games. One of them is the soundtrack,
used in many games to situate the well-known visual icons in
the auditory context of the 1960s, using either the wellknown songs of the 1960s in general or songs associated with
the Vietnam War in particular. For example, Shellshock:
Nam 67 (Guerrilla Games, 2004) includes songs by many
bands of the late 1960s, such as the Small Faces, Country Joe
and the Fish, and Status Quo or such notable musicians as
Roy Orbison, Bobby Bland, John Lee Hooker or Sonny and
Cher. In a similar fashion, Vietcong features other bands of
the 1960s, such as Deep Purple, The Standells or The Stooges.
1960s music occurs in other games, although not as the main
269
soundtrack, but rather as in-game music, i.e. being listened

to by the game characters or played on the radio. Such
instances occur in Men of Valor and Conflict Vietnam (Pivotal
Games, 2004).
One last feature employed by some games to increase
authenticity is the use of war-time footage from Vietnam
War documentaries. Cinematically cut scenes created from
documentary footage appear in Shellshock: Nam 67 (as an
introductory movie) and in Line of Sight: Vietnam (nFusion,
2003) and Elite Warriors: Vietnam (nFusion, 2005). In both
cases, films composed of documentary footage function as
narrative elements moving the player forward through the
story.
Historical Understanding
This overall drive towards authenticity and accuracy is closely
connected to other features present in many Vietnam War
video games. One trend can be summarised as on the
beaten track. Along with presenting the iconic (in terms of
the environment and the setting, for example), the games
present only the most well-known facts and events of the
Vietnam War, or - more specifically - of the American war in
South-East Asia. Most of the games take place at the height
of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, namely between 1967 and
1968. The two exceptions are Men of Valor which begins as
early as 1965 with the arrival of first US ground troops and
Vietcong: First Alpha (Pterodon, 2004) which begins in 1966.
Given this chronological framework, the games focus almost
exclusively on one of the most important and well-known
events of the Vietnam War - the Tet Offensive of 1968, which
constitutes the backbone of the single-player campaign of
270
most of the games. Vietcong 2 might serve as the best

example. The game allows the player to experience the war
through the eyes of Daniel Boone who is stationed in Hu.
The entire storyline of the single-player campaign is framed
by the Tet Offensive of 1968, from the first mission which
begins at the mayors residence as it is attacked by the Viet
Cong forces to the final level depicting the battle for the
Citadel of Hu. Thus, the game never moves outside the 1968
Tet Offensive and never leaves the city of Hu at all. In a very
similar manner, the story of Conflict: Vietnam, although
geographically wider, takes place between January 26 and
February 25, 1968, again culminating in the battle for the
Citadel.
The Battle of Hu, including the fight for the Citadel, also
appears in Men of Valor and a mission entitled Battle for
Hu is also included in The Hell in Vietnam (City Interactive,
2007). This virtually exclusive focus on only one phase of the
war might be due to the fact that the Tet Offensive of 1968 is
seen by historians as a major turning-point in the conflict and
the years 1967-1968 as crucial. 3 It might also be due to the
fact that the extensive media coverage of the Tet Offensive
has transformed this event into one of the icons of the
Vietnam War: the fighting around the U.S. Embassy in Saigon
or the protracted and fierce battle of Hu are now staple
visual images of the conflict, well-known to millions of
Americans.
Yet despite this attention to history, or more specifically to
one specific historical event, video games remain for the
most part oblivious of history as such. Whatever means of
storytelling are available to this medium cinematic
segments, voice-over narration or on-screen texts the
virtual Vietnam War lacks any wider historical context. Most
271
games begin in medias res, starting at the height of the

Vietnam War, focusing on one small squad of American
soldiers who have a series of specific missions to complete.
No more history. Even when real documentary footage is
used to enhance authenticity (and this in itself is relatively
rare), the plot-related information provided is far from a
historical documentary.
A voiceover accompanying the introductory cinematic
sequence of Line of Sight: Vietnam is illustrative: Vietnam,
the Central Highlands, just south of the DMZ. The United
States military has decided to build fortified firebases in
heavily controlled enemy territory Our troops will set up
reconnaissance patrols around the base and try to get the
local villages and hamlets to assist us in finding the enemy.
The strategy is designed to get Charlie to come out and
fight. This will be the start of my second tour in country;
Ive been assigned to a SOG team operating out of the base,
its a top secret unit operating well behind enemy lines, on
missions that no one can know about. Many games provide
even less information about the history behind the war.
The only exception, providing at least the most basic
historical background to the conflict, is Shellshock: Nam 67.
Its introductory video mentions the gradual escalation of US
troop levels and the growing U.S. losses and points out the
fact that the conflict might also be seen as a civil war within
the Vietnamese society. Yet this is truly exceptional. Other
games say very little about the war as a historical event or
remain silent on the topic altogether. The ultimate
demonstration of historical myopia, however, is of course the
fact that, again with one exception, all the games are only
playable from the American perspective. The possibility to
play for either the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese is
272
offered in some games in multi-player mode, but with the

exception of Vietcong 2, no game offers a campaign looking
at the war from the Vietnamese point of view.
The Influence of Cinematic Representations
Apart from maximum authenticity and lack of history, the
powerful influence of Vietnam War films can be seen in
certain games. These influences can be seen on several levels
and in some cases they are very strong. Such might be the
direct re-making of a film into a videogame, as has been the
case with Oliver Stones Platoon (1986), inspiring a real-time
strategy game of the same name. Another example of a
game being directly modelled after a movie is Tunnel Rats
(Replay Studios, 2009), a FPS released one year after Uwe
Bolls film 1968 Tunnel Rats. Yet even when there is no such
direct connection, several features in video games are
traceable to specific Vietnam War movies.
For example, a Russian roulette scene presented via a
cinematically cut scene in Conflict: Vietnam is directly taken
from Michael Ciminos The Deer Hunter (1978) and a similar
motif occurs in Call of Duty: Black Ops (Treyarch, 2010).
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) has left its
trace in Men of Valor, where a mission takes the player
upriver on a patrol boat, passing under a bridge very closely
resembling the one in Coppolas film. In the same mission the
player also witnesses a massacre of several Vietnamese,
directly modelled on a river scene in Apocalypse Now where
US soldiers kill the crew of a sampan. It is noteworthy that a
mission involving an upriver journey in a patrol boat appears
in many other video games, from Call of Duty: Black Ops and
273
Conflict: Vietnam to Marine Heavy Gunner: Vietnam

(Brainbox Games, 2004).
But it is likely that Kubricks Full Metal Jacket (1987) has had
most influence upon the virtual Vietnam War. The 1968
battle of Hu, depicted in the second part of the film, has
been a staple of Vietnam War video games, in certain cases
replicating such details as a sniper duel (Hell in Vietnam) or a
group of US soldiers standing over the lime-covered mass
grave of Vietnamese civilians (Men of Valor). Yet even when
such details are not present, the visual imagery of the wartorn Hu of the cinema screen is often very close to that of
its virtual counterpart.
Conclusion
The virtuality and interactivity of video games is something
that other (traditional) cultural mediations of the Vietnam
War were unable to offer. Yet in terms of content, this new
medium has brought nothing new. What can be said of many
Vietnam War films and many novels can also be said of video
games. As many literary narratives of the war have the feel
of experiential truth as their authors re-create for readers the
sights, sounds, smells, feelings, language, and strategies of
war 4, so, too, are video games obsessed with authenticity
and historical accuracy.
Just as many films place themselves squarely at the ground
level avoid historical specificity, [and] repress politically
sensitive issues 5, so, too, have video games only very little
interest in the larger questions of history, replacing the
global context with small-scale narratives. And, as many films
have provided the most compelling statements about the
war 6, so, too, are many games influenced by these films, in
274
many cases replicating the inaccuracies and stereotypes,

such as the Russian roulette myth, for which no historical
evidence has been found. 7 And, as has been the case of
western cultural production in general, the Vietnam War has
been seen primarily as an American experience, and video
games have done nothing to rectify this view.
Yet it would be wrong, however, to blame popular culture for
these shortcomings since clichs, stereotypes, conventions,
and evasions and displacements [] are the life and blood of
popular culture 8. Rather it is much better to look at these
ideological limitations as saying something more profound
about American (or Western) culture as such, a culture which
still has problems moving beyond an ethnocentric view of
history. Popular culture rarely does this, and even when this
happens, it takes time. As it appears today, many people,
however, will turn to popular culture for history. It is
therefore important to note what kind history is conveyed
here.
1
Michael Anderegg, Introduction, in Anderegg (ed.), Inventing Vietnam:

The War in Film and Television, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991,
p. 1.
2
Gregory R. Clark, Words of the Vietnam War, Jefferson, NC: McFarland,

1990.
Robert J. McMahon, Turning Point: The Vietnam Wars Pivotal Year,

November 1967-November 1968, in David L. Anderson (ed.), The Columbia
History of the Vietnam War, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, pp.
191-216.
275
Tobey C. Herzog, Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost, London:

Routledge, 1992, p. 5.
5
Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, Americas Vietnam War Films:

Marching towards Denial, in Dittmar and Michaud (eds.), From Hanoi to
Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, New Brunswick: Rutgers
Michael Anderegg, Introduction, p. 1.
Michael Lee Lanning, Vietnam at the Movies, New York: Ballantine Books,
1994, pp. 92, 201.
Albert Auster and Leonard Quart, How the War Was Remembered:
Hollywood and Vietnam, New York: Praeger, 1988, p. 84.
276
28 / Contemporary Sri Lankan Art

Cinema: Civil War and
an Alternative Nation
Vichitra Godamunne
Contemporary Sri Lankan art films offer critical perspectives

on the islands Civil War. It is important to analyse Sri Lankan
art films and their responses to the war since they are one
medium through which local alternative perspectives
regarding the conflict can be understood. Taking Prasanna
Vithanages August Sun (2003) as a case study, I discuss how
the islands art films offer alternative narratives of the war
and differ significantly from mainstream representations,
which often glorify the military conflict. Sri Lankan art films
foreground the human costs of the war to illustrate how
militarism has shaped the islands society, its economy and
its ideas of morality. August Sun, for its part, won several
national and international awards for Vithanages subtle
insight into contemporary Sri Lankan society.
277
The film functions as a subtle critique of the war, compared

to others such as The Forsaken Land ( Jayasundara, 2005) and
This is My Moon (Handagama, 2000) which are overtly critical
and highly controversial. August Sun highlights issues such as
the socio-economic disparities in the country, war as a
livelihood for the poorest rural communities, and the
problem of politicised Buddhism. In this sense the film offers
a different way of making sense of the islands civil war and
its effects on contemporary Sri Lankan society.
Sri Lankan Art Cinema and a Militarised Society
Art films have been produced in Sri Lanka since 1956. The
first such film, The Line of Destiny, was directed by Lester
James Peries, who is regarded as the pioneer of the islands
art film industry. He directed the first Sri Lankan film to be
critically acclaimed at an international film festival The
Changing Countryside (1965). 1 The second wave of artistic
film directors then emerged in the 1970s.
The present wave of art film directors has its inception in the
1990s and it is they who have been the most successful on
the international film circuit since Lester James Peries in
1965. In spite of the success of Sri Lankan art films in recent
years, the islands film industry as a whole has developed in
an unsteady manner from the 1980s to 2009. This is due to
the onset of political violence resulting in the start of the civil
war in 1983 and the second Marxist insurrection during
1988-9. 2
Both popular and art films have focused on the civil war
which has dictated Sri Lankas politics, economy and society
for nearly three decades. Popular cinema largely glorifies the
Sri Lankan military and is part of the wider process of
278
militarisation in the country. These films are mostly family

melodramas which romanticise the war and highlight the
bravery of the armed forces. Art films, however, often show
a country whose understanding of society, religion and
sexual mores have been severely altered by the civil war.
As critiquing the military conflict is a sensitive issue in Sri
Lanka, some art films have been subject to covert censorship.
For example, This is My Moon was faced with the possibility
of the withdrawal of funds as it contains a controversial plot
where both an army deserter and a Buddhist monk sexually
exploit a Tamil refugee woman. The Forsaken Land, despite
being the first Sri Lankan film to win a Camera dOr at the
Cannes Film Festival, was subject to backlash over its
representation of an army deserter.3 Understanding the
militarised nature of Sri Lankan society and the sensitivities
surrounding its representation is thus crucial to analysis of
the countrys cinema.
Militarisation is a visible process whereby militarised ideas
become normalised in society. It begins before the war
starts and lasts even after the war has ended. As a result,
violence, triumphalism, aggression and ideals of hypermasculinity become the norm. 4 In Sri Lanka militaristic ideas
are promoted through posters, billboards, pop songs and
advertisements which reflect the military servicemen as the
countrys heroes. A sense of duty is instilled in much of the
public - to respect and look after the military for laying down
their lives for the country. Even after the war ended in 2009,
these militaristic ideas continue to be promoted in Sri Lanka.
The armed forces have also become involved in many postwar development projects and aspects of daily life. For
example, the military has been deployed to sell vegetables,
build cricket stadiums and is involved in managing businesses
279
such as a luxury resort and an air-ticketing firm. 5 The

Ministry of Defence is also currently involved in urban
planning.
Ultimately, it is militarisation which governs how the war is
to be represented and remembered. 6 It is these processes
which Sri Lankan art films challenge by not conforming to the
official glorified narratives of political rhetoric.
The
narratives of these films portray how the war has provided
poor rural communities with a livelihood in the absence of
other economic opportunities, the growth of the sex industry
near army transit camps, women who are sexually exploited,
army deserters, and the plight of ordinary people who are
indirectly affected by the war. August Sun deals with several
of these issues.
August Sun
Vithanage stated in an interview that his intention of making
this film was to portray the harsh complexities of the civil war
that the militarized national rhetoric insists on ignoring: I
feel we are losing the middle ground, even the slightest thing
like, lets say, a soldier visiting a brothel. The filmmaker
maybe interested in the soldiers loneliness, but the present
ethnic war will have a big share in the way the situation is
interpreted. The various groups who are thriving on
polarization will come against the filmmaker on their
grounds, because they wish to see the soldier as something
else and the war as something else. 7
The main themes which Vithanage explores in August Sun are
to do with socio-economic disparities, and the minority
narratives of those who are on the periphery compared to
those who are more central and hence more powerful. The
280
film is set in August 1996 and involves three parallel

narratives. The first story involves a young woman named
Chamari who resides in Colombo. Chamaris partner
(Niroshan) is an air force pilot who has been reported missing
by the authorities. Disbelieving the authorities, Chamari
approaches Saman, a Sri Lankan journalist based in London,
who has contacts amongst the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam) combatants and they travel to the north in
order to gain information about Niroshan. Their quest is
unsuccessful.
The second narrative revolves around Duminda, a soldier
who is on holiday with two others in Anuradhapura, a town
in the North-Central Province. They visit a brothel, where
Duminda discovers his sister (Kamani) working. In his anger,
Duminda physically assaults his sister and the latter leaves
the brothel. Later, Duminda visits her at home where he
seeks her forgiveness for his behaviour.
The third story is about a young Muslim boy named Arafat
from Mannar Island, in the northern region of Sri Lanka, then
LTTE-occupied territory. The LTTE evict Muslims from the
area as they believe this community has been acting as
government informers. As Arafats family leaves, he attempts
to take his pet dog with him but fails as his family does not
want to take the animal. By the end of the film, Chamari is
making yet another trip to find out the truth about her
husband, Arafat tries looking for another pet dog while
adjusting to his life at the refugee camp, and Duminda
returns to service after his holiday.
The three narratives are connected by themes of religious
faith and the sport of cricket, which function as normalising
factors. Religion plays an important role in each of the
281
characters lives, particularly during moments of struggle.

Ironically, 1996 - the year of the suicide bombing of the
Central Bank in Colombo and military combat in the north was also the year that Sri Lanka won the Cricket World Cup.
Vithanage has accurately captured the vociferous enthusiasm
that greeted this event. A cricket commentary is constantly
playing in the background, from Colombo to Mannar. As
Chamari and Saman drive towards Mannar, there are people
lighting firecrackers on the streets to celebrate a cricket
victory.
The film contrasts these celebrations and
momentary joy against the ongoing militarism and violence
in the country.
Similarly, dramatic economic differences are visible as the
film moves from 5-star hotels in urban centres to refugee
camps in the north and poor rural villages. Duminda, the
soldier, hails from one such village. It is revealed that it is
Dumindas salary which supports his mother and Kamani,
contributes to the construction of the familys half-built
house, and will even provide the dowry for Kamanis
marriage some day. In this narrative, Vithanage shows that,
for the poorest rural people, war has become a means to
make ends meet and it is they who have ultimately made the
biggest sacrifice in the war.
The third narrative, focusing on the fate of Arafats family,
also brings to the foreground the other victims of the civil
war Muslims from the north. In 1990, the 100,000 Muslims
living in Jaffna and Mannar were ordered by the LTTE to
leave within 48 hours. They were only allowed to take Rs.
2,000 with them, with any additional money and valuables
being confiscated. 8 In some of the most moving scenes of
the film, Arafat is forced to accept that he cannot take his pet
282
dog with him and bids it goodbye from the boat, while his
grandmother has her meagre life savings confiscated by the
LTTE. This story is an admirable effort by Vithanage to make
viewers acknowledge this fringe community and make their
plight visible, since this is an incident which has received
scant media coverage.
Although this particular minority narrative is peripheral,
Vithanage also demonstrates, through a critique of politicised
Buddhism, that there are minority narratives which are very
powerful in the country. Politicised Buddhism refers to
fundamentalist ideas which are also linked to the ideas of
Sinhalese ethnic chauvinism that are propagated by several
groups in the country in order to gain political dominance.
They are not a singularly identifiable group and constitute
only a minority. However, they are powerful enough to
influence Sri Lankan politics. Buddhist fundamentalism
identifies Sri Lanka as the land of Buddhist teaching and
seeks to establish Buddhism as the foremost religion in the
country. 9
It is in the narrative set in Anuradhapura that Vithanage
problematises Buddhist fundamentalism. Anuradhapura is
the ancient city where Buddhism flourished. Today, it is
considered a holy city and an important landmark of Sri
Lankas ancient civilisation. Yet in the film, images of war,
destruction and decay are juxtaposed with those of Buddhist
stupas (religious monuments) to highlight the destructive
power of such fundamentalist ideas.
Vithanage also
questions whether politicised Buddhism can continue to
promote ethnic chauvinism in a multi-ethnic and multi-racial
country. Thus, August Sun is not a glorious narrative of war,
but a subtle contemplation of the national condition, the
283
human side of the conflict, and the characters continual

struggle to endure.
Militarism and Interpersonal Reconciliation
In a country where the narration of the civil war has been
controlled by the state and militarism, many art film directors
have sought to provide alternate narratives of the war and
the changes military conflict has brought about in the
society. In this essay I have discussed how art films have
challenged the dominant narratives and critiqued the
militarised rhetoric of the civil war. In the concluding
section, I would like to raise some thoughts on post-war film
development in the island. Many commercial films produced
since 2009 reflect the post-war surge in Sinhalese
nationalism and the glorification of the armed forces that
have resulted from the continued militarization of Sri Lanka.
However, there are some mainstream films that deviate from
these themes. For example, The Road from Elephant Pass
(Ratnam, 2009) highlights how all Sri Lankans have been
victimised by the war, irrespective of race, and stresses the
need to unite. Mother (Keerthisena, 2010) portrays how
both military servicemen and LTTE combatants dealt with the
realisation of imminent death in the final weeks of the civil
war. While commercial films largely appear to foreground Sri
Lankas militarism, the islands art film industry at present
tends to focus less on militarism and is instead aiming to
promote some level of interpersonal reconciliation between
the countrys various communities.
Art films have begun to emphasise post-war human
relationships and the countrys struggle to come to terms
with the effects of the civil war. For example, Between Two
284
Worlds (Jayasundara, 2009) portrays a devastated and

fractured country which needs to be rebuilt, while Him,
Hereafter (Handagama, 2011) deals with the issue of ex-LTTE
combatants, stresses societys obligation to accept them and
ensure they benefit from post-war economic developments.
A noticeable factor in recent developments in the islands
film industry is the reappearance of Tamil-language films
(such as Mother and Him, Hereafter), the last of which had
seemingly been produced in the 1970s. 10 It is too early to
determine how Sri Lankas art cinema will develop in the
future, and whether they will continue to focus on
interpersonal reconciliation rather than critique the
continued militarisation of the country. What is certain is
that if these films continue to develop in a manner which
reflects the diverse narratives and experiences that exist in
the country, they have enormous potential - provided, of
course, that they are not censored, and that they are
marketed island-wide - to narrow the cultural divide in Sri
Lanka today.
1
See Wimal Dissanayake, Cinema, Nationhood, and Cultural Discourse in

Sri Lanka, in Wimal Dissanayake (ed), Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian
Cinema, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 195.
Wimal Dissanayake, Sri Lanka: Art, Commerce, and Cultural Modernity,

in Anne Tereska Ciecko (ed.), Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture
in a Global Frame, New York: Berg University Press, 2006, p 108.
3
Neloufer De Mel, Militarizing Sri Lanka: Popular Culture, Memory and

Narrative in the Armed Conflict, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007, pp.
221-240.
285
De Mel, Militarizing Sri Lanka, p. 12.
Sri Lankas Army: In Bigger Barracks, The Economist, 2 June 2011.
De Mel, Militarizing Sri Lanka, p. 240.
Interview with Prasanna Vithanage, ravana.wordpress.com, 27 March

2008.
8
Forced Eviction Remembered, Daily Mirror, 14 November 2010.
Tessa J. Bartholomeusz and Chandra R. de Silva, Buddhist

Fundamentalism and Identity in Sri Lanka, in Bartholomeusz and de Silva
(eds.), Buddhist Fundamentalism and Minority Identities in Sri Lanka, New
York: State University of New York Press, 1998, pp. 1-35.
10
Wimal Dissanayake and Ashley Ratnavibhushana, Profiling Sri Lankan

Cinema, Colombo: Asian Film Centre, 2000, p. 95.
286
The London Symposium

Conference Proceedings Series
Series Editor: Phillip Drummond

Associate Editor: Dorothy Leng
THE LONDON READER 1
Essays from the First Annual London Studies Conference 2011
THE LONDON READER 2
Essays from the Second Annual London Studies Conference 2012
THE LONDON FILM AND MEDIA READER 1
Essays from the First Annual London Film and Media Conference 2011
THE LONDON FILM AND MEDIA READER 2
Essays from the Second Annual London Film and Media Conference 2012
THE LONDON FILM AND MEDIA READER 3 (in preparation)
Essays from the Third Annual London Film and Media Conference 2013
THE UNDERSTANDING BRITAIN READER 1

Essays from the First Understanding Britain Conference 2012

The London Film and Media Reader 2

Încărcat de

Informații document

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

The London Film and Media Reader 2

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

The London

Film and Media

Essays from FILM AND MEDIA 2012

The London Film & Media Reader 2

This collection copyright The London Symposium &

The London Symposium

This ebook is distributed free of charge to those interested in our work.