By Warren Buckland
Columbia University Press, 2021

Reviewed by Matthew Bosica, University of St Andrews
DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v0i18.2282 

Warren Buckland’s monograph Narrative and Narration: Analyzing Cinematic Storytelling is a succinct look at the intricacies of narrative, narration, and other critical storytelling devices in film. The author provides terminology, concepts, and properties that enable the reader to unlock how stories are told cinematically making what is often rendered an opaque process by filmmakers, easy to comprehend. The book, is part of the Short Cuts series, that provides introductions to a myriad of topics in Film Studies for both film scholars and those simply interested in film. Indeed, Buckland’s book in addition to being a key scholarly text, is also an indispensable tool for the screenwriter. The clarity it provides on topic of narrative, would strengthen any writer’s knowledge of the mechanics of storytelling.

Starting with the history of early cinema, in chapter one, Buckland takes the reader on an immersive dive into early modes of narration – from “intertitles, primitive narrators, voyeur-characters” (8) and how they “contribute to the transition from the cinema of attractions to the cinema of narrative integration” (8). A scene from The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903) explores the tension between the director’s “attempt to develop a narrative scene” (6) and lingering notions of “attraction” found in early cinema (ibid).

The second chapter is devoted to Hollywood narrative structure both in classical and contemporary films. Buckland discusses Vladimir Propp and his work in Morphology of the Folktale here. Propp “abstracted” the “seven character types (the hero, the villain, the donor, the helper, etc) and thirty-one narrative functions” (12-13). To illustrate this further, Buckland points to Graeme Turner’s (1988) work in ‘mapping’ these onto the well-known characters of Star Wars (1977) – the Donor (Obi-Wan Kenobi) and The Helper (Han Solo) are just two examples.  Ultimately by doing this, Buckland posits that Propp’s work shows “the same narrative elements are used again and again (recursively) but are “filled in” with different content” (14). To put it plainly, the narrative framework is repeated – it is just the details, supplied by the creators of the story that change it. Buckland particularly uses examples from Alfred Hitckock’s films North by Northwest (1957), Psycho (1960) and Marnie (1964) which “appear to share the same underlying narrative structure” (22), as a further example of these theories. The James Bond franchise is also analysed here, with a specific look at Quantum of Solace (2008), that works as an example of the shift in narrative form within the Bond series compared to earlier forms of narrative expression.

The third chapter explores narration which the author sums up as “the organization of space, time, character experiences, and narrative actions” (47). Using Gone Girl (2014) and Jurassic Park (1993) Buckland illuminates “how narrative actions are reorganized, when spectators receive information about those actions, and how those actions are filtered through characters and narrators before reaching readers or spectators” (29). Using a close textual analysis of the “fence scene” from Jurassic Park, Buckland deftly describes the deployment of narrational manipulation in his book’s most riveting passage. This close textual analysis reinforces to the reader, the author’s argument, that it’s not just what the audience knows but when they know it versus the characters in the film. A definitive overview is also given of Roland Barthes’ definition of hermeneutic code and proairetic code. “The proairetic code is…a technical name for the linear series of linked narrative actions and events.” (31) While the hermeneutic code, as Barthes sees it, “structures narrative actions in terms of multiple elements, including a theme, a proposal, delay, and disclosure” (31).  These structures are then evinced by an analysis of Gone Girl in a revealing case study of a film well known for its narrative complexity.

The fourth and final chapter of Part I, explores “the theory of enunciation” and reflexivity. The author conveys how films purport themselves to audiences and also, and perhaps, more interestingly how they draw attention to these gestures. With an in depth look at Wes Anderson, and by analysis of his masterpiece Grand Budapest Hotel, the author demonstrates to the reader how an auteur draws purposeful attention to the characteristics that both define their films, and in Anderson’s case, how they define his unique style.

Chapter five is entitled Feminism, Narrative and Authorship and utilises Gone Girl once more and while introducing Orlando (1992) as another requisite case study. The author asks questions if Gone Girl  is it patriarchal, feminist, or both? (67). Buckland considers this in relation to second wave feminism. He outlines in clear steps how “it is possible to identify a series of characteristics that inscribe “femininity” into a film” (72) and how authorship influences the making of the feminist film. Challenging the patriarchy inherent in narrative cinema, Orlando, showcases how a film “constructs “another vision” a storyworld that privileges femininity” (78).

Chapter six delves into Art Cinema Narration by inspecting Alice in the Cities (1974) and Inland Empire (2006).  Deciphering Art Cinema through the lens of David Bordwell’s critical piece of film scholarship ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’, Buckland moves away from Hollywood’s dominant narrative forms to the subtle and complex modes of arthouse narration with an emphasis on European New Wave cinema.  Special attention is given to the loosening of ‘cause-effect logic’ in art cinema which is so often prevalent in Hollywood. The author considers both objective and subjective realism in David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Buckland makes clear that understanding these conventions prevalent in art cinema “does not tell us what a film means, but how it means” (93). This allows a deeper level of analysis of both the film’s intention and how narrative can be exploited to great effect.

The penultimate chapter examines contemporary cinema’s puzzle film narrative structure with a focus on “unreliable narration”. Buckland posits that puzzle films “enrich and renew storytelling…and challenge deep-seated cultural conceptions about agency, identity, memory, and time” (94).  Videogame logic, often inherent in science fiction movies like Inception (2011) is explored in the final chapter. The rules of videogame logic are listed and examined using Source Code (2011) as a representative example of this expanding narrative form.

Warren Buckland’s Narrative and Narration: Analyzing Cinematic Storytelling, is a comprehensive yet concise study of storytelling technique in film. The book, a useful tool, for both scholars and writers will provide the foundation needed to understand cinema’s array of narrative forms in an insightful and engaging manner.

Olivia Khoo
Edinburgh University Press, 2021

Reviewed by Paulina Zurawska, University of St Andrews
DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v0i18.2281

Until recently there has been a trend in western scholarship of approaching Asian cinema largely from the perspective of national contexts. It is an approach that does not take into account the porous boundaries between nations and inter-Asian nature of a lot of the cinemas from the region. Olivia Khoo’s Asian Cinema: A Regional View eschews this method, and instead presents a regional approach to films of Asia. The author suggests that Asia should not so much be seen as a fixed territory composed of a set group of countries, but as an amorphous and changing landscape of different regions that emerge, and engage with one another. Khoo utilises this definition of Asia as a grounding for a comparative methodological analysis; rather than employing specific methods of comparison, a regional approach encourages the very act of comparison in the first place, without ascribing a set of limits to the comparisons that may take place. Hence, Asia is both object and method: a unique idea, wrought with potential for innovative analysis.

Khoo specialises in Asian and Australian cinema, and their intersection. An interesting mix when considering her approach in this book, where Asian cinema itself becomes a transnational venture. Indeed, chapters of the book focus on pan-Asian productions and Asian remakes of other Asian films. It is a direct challenge to the hegemony of colonial cinemas that imbricates European settlers into the entire ecosystem of film production, and the de-colonisation of these institutions. This method could not work with Asian cinema, since Asian cinema was never able to arise in and of itself, rather the fluctuating and negotiated category of “Asian” has led to myriad considerations of what the term could encompass. The book does not focus on comprehending Asian cinema from a Western perspective, limited in its lived understanding of Asia in general, and each region specifically, but instead considers several perspectives unique to Asia’s own historical, cultural, and economic contexts.

Khoo primarily focusses on the past thirty years of different Asian film industries such as the enmeshed regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, as well as Sinophone cinema, and emerging concepts that redraw the borders defining film industries. The introductory chapter explores developments that catalysed a more collaborative and integrated relationship between these historically disparate industries, setting the stage for the regional approach she then takes in her analysis. From here, Khoo explores in detail some of the changing production practices in Asian cinema that have arisen in response to declining audience numbers and distribution practices, chief among these being a direct move to an online milieu. These chapters are intentionally centring Asia and side-lining the West. It does not deny the influence that Western cinemas have had on Asian industries, but rather focuses on this influence in the context of inter-Asian consequences: how these changes have caused Asian industries to affect one another. For example, Khoo’s chapter on Asian cinema-remakes elucidates on Asian companies remaking successful films in different Asian countries. These remakes are normally handled by the same production company, but also involve collaborations with local film production talent, to help alter remakes to suit new audiences. For example, the Chinese remake of Miss Granny was longer, more dramatic, and more serious, while the Korean original contained more comedic elements and outward emotionality.

The intra-Asian specificity of these methods of (re)distribution is analysed once more in Khoo’s chapter on film distribution and exhibition. Again, Asian cultures are centred and there is an extremely effective case study of the Singapore-based streaming platform Viddsee, which collects short film content and creates dedicated channels for various Southeast Asian nations. Additionally, there is conspicuous overlap of these “National” channels within the platform’s “Regional” and “Subregional” categories, an overt and telling link to the regionalisation of Asian cinemas that the book itself attempts to build. There are, of course, several other platforms that do this: the video streaming platform Gagaoolala is also a highly Asian-focused video streaming platform which hosts short and feature films. In her fifth chapter on queer Asian cinemas and short films, Khoo misses an opportunity to discuss the example of Gagaoolala. Every film on the platform is about queer culture in some way, and there would be much ground that could be covered in analysis about these two topics, especially as a bridge between the this chapter and the next.

Khoo’s subsequent chapter on queer Asian focusses on trends of queer and female authorship with the moving image, including short films as queer production practice. The chapter is essential to the argument that Asian cinemas should be seen as regional and less defined by borders and limitations of geography and cultural stereotypes, given the fluidity and historically transgressive aspects of both female authorship and queer filmmaking. Its case study approach allows a depth of analysis that situates the chapter as one which beckons further research: the limited number of examples gives space for further and alternative works in this area, while the depth of analysis presents strong arguments from which to base this further work. The chapter is an important contribution to the scholarship devoted to queer Asian cinemas, and can be productively approached through diffractive reading with the work of Zoran Pecic’s New Queer Sinophone Cinema.[1] In Khoo’s book, however, we are not limited to the geographical and linguistic barrier that “Sinophone” culture exemplifies. Linguistic barriers, as Khoo demonstrated in the chapter on remakes, matter not when regional modes of production allow intra-Asian collaboration. In a similar way, the chapter Khoo devoted to queer Asian cinemas (particularly her analysis of Sun Koh’s Dirty Bitch) emphasises the need for regional connections. These regional connections allow productions to move quickly and easily across national borders, which Khoo argues is essential in the context of “minor cinema”: films that recognise and maintain their marginal nature. Where these films would not normally be commercially viable, the creation and usage of regional connections allow films like Dirty Bitch to be produced and distributed in ways that only Asian distribution models permit.

Where the book is truly ground-breaking, in the final chapter on 3D cinema and technical innovations. The brief obsession with 3D films in the West followed its rather fringe use in the 80s and 90s. With the release of Avatar in 2009, Western cinemas spent sums of money translating existing films into 3D and making new 3D features to tap into the enormous financial success of Avatar. While this technological innovation fell out of fashion in Hollywood, 3D technology has become a defining feature of Asian cinemas, featuring in everything from mainstream blockbusters to arthouse cinemas. Khoo’s book illuminates this development and expands on the scale of the infrastructure for 3D production that has been constructed in Asia. Production companies in Asia are now able to diversify and spread this technology across the continent, and the need for Western involvement (either from investors, technology companies, or post-production companies) has disappeared. The rendering obsolete of Western film-technology firms has been key, Khoo suggests, to allowing Asian production companies to situate themselves as regional hubs from which 3D film production can occur. The commitment and effectiveness of Khoo’s argument that Asian regional hubs are such essential parts of their film productions sets the book apart as one which does not require Euro-centric and Hollywood-focused examples, but rather views Asian cinemas as a holistic and fully formed set of industries that exist in/as incessant encounters with each other, free from the shackles of post-colonial influences.

The case study structure of Khoo’s book lends itself to the specificities of Asian regions; that which makes these regions so unique and rich in their collaboration. In the context of the pandemic, this book comes at a time when cultures across the world have shifted to online realms. This virtual realm often transcends geographical borders, allowing for an increasing decolonisation of both cinema and film theory. Khoo’s model of Asia as a method and object of study is one that reflects this but also requires it. To view Asian cinemas regionally requires deep analysis of digital production and distribution methods, which can transcend borders fluidly and quickly. Simultaneously, these digital productions and distributional modes require a regional approach to Asian culture that is responsible for the success of these frameworks. In essence, the book is an essential addition to transnational film scholarship that is rich in potential both for future work on the topic, and for inspiring similar methods that can be used in other film cultures.

Notes

[1] Zoran Pecic, New Queer Sinophone Cinema: Local Histories, Transnational Connections. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Edited by Jill Murphy and Laura Rascaroli,
Amsterdam University Press, 2020

Reviewed by Sam Thomson, University of St Andrews
DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v0i18.2278

In Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art, editors Jill Murphy and Laura Rascaroli present new ways of thinking about the intricate relationship between cinema and contemporary art. Although this collection fits comfortably among the growing body of literature which seeks to bridge these two distinct worlds, it distinguishes itself from a lot of recent work by asking not how cinema has changed contemporary art, but how contemporary art has changed cinema. The authors within this collection are united by interest in how contemporary art’s appropriation of cinema’s languages, aesthetics, and structures can contribute to a richer and more nuanced understanding of the medium of film and all work to expand our understanding of how the moving image can be conceptualised.

Part one of the collection, “Materialities”, focuses on the physical qualities of the moving image. One of the great pleasures of the moving image’s presence within the gallery space is the way in which it forces us to reckon with the material dimensions of the medium. No longer is cinema a distant object on a high-up screen—in the gallery, is it directly before us, in the flesh. Matilde Nardelli, in “Cinema as (In)Visible Object”, takes up this most explicitly, placing artists’ interest in the materiality of film within the broader context of digital media culture’s diminishing physical presence. Works by both Tacita Dean and Elizabeth Price provide the case studies for Alison Butler in “Objects in Time: Artefacts in Artists’ Moving Image”, where she looks at how differing temporalities emerge from analogue film and digital video respectively, suggesting that each artists’ experiments with time work to “rematerialize” the moving image within the gallery space. In the next chapter, Maeve Connolly turns to the actor, a grossly under-examined topic among experimental and artists’ moving image scholars. The body itself has always garnered strong interest with the field, but not the labour of those participating in bodily performance. Connolly persuasively argues that “the acting body” can offer insight into media production and can “investigate how bodies, data, and memories are mobilized as technologies of storage” (85). Then, Volker Pantenburg’s insightful analysis of Gibson + Recoders’ work suggests that the artists’ “projection performances” foreground the material wonders of the projector, not the images themselves, turning the film into “a framework, a system of light, movement, colour, and, sometimes, sound” (115).

Despite the name, part two, “Immaterialities”, is still very much concerned with the material qualities of the moving image, but this section includes a wider historical scope and a more explicit focus on the gallery space. In her chapter, Jill Murphy focuses on William Kentridge’s use of pre-cinematic techniques, such as animation and shadow, to consider how we might challenge the image’s capacity for representation. She suggests that Kentridge’s images’ “leanness” allow for a new way of encountering the screen—one that embraces its novelty and its distancing effect (133). Sarah Cooper’s reading of Douglas Gordon’s Phantom (2011) challenges our sense of the moving image within the gallery, arguing that we ought to see one as an extension of the other, broadening our sense of vision through what we cannot see as much as what we can. Kirstie North turns to Tacita Dean’s Section Cinema (2002) to consider how the artist has explored that material and temporal qualities of analogue film in resistance to the trend towards the digital. Chance and fate form the basis of Dean’s engagement with Marcel Broothaers’ work and to cinema itself, North argues.

The book’s third part “Temporalities” concerns itself with how contemporary artworks have challenged or reimagined the traditional modes of time associated with the cinema. Ágnes Pethő, in her chapter, assesses how the “dioramic tableau” absorbs the qualities of both photography and cinema, and suggests that the form allows for a new way of thinking about stillness in relation to cinema (191). Stefano Baschiera looks at Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographical collection Theatres to understand how the work challenges the cinematic dispositif in its compressing of a feature length film into a single image. Laura Rascaroli’s “Time/Frame: On Cinematic Duration” considers how the frame has contributed to our understanding of art’s temporality. Through a diverse range of case studies, including work by Andy Warhol and Stan Douglas, Rascaroli analyses how artists and filmmakers have foregrounded the viewer’s sense of time and duration in order to critically engage with the nature of the moving image in relation to other art forms. For instance, Warhol’s Empire (1964), she argues, operates like a “(barely) moving painting” (220).

In the collection’s final part, “The Future of Images”, Andrew V. Uroskie, Lisa Åkervall, and D. N. Rodowick all consider how advances in new media technology have altered our sense of the moving image and each offer crucial insight into how these changes may configure our sense of the future. Uroskie’s analysis of David OReilly’s Everything (2017) considers how the form of a video game might allow us to alter how we conceive of a time beyond the Anthropocene, to a world without the human subject. Åkervall considers what happens to the frame of the image in a post-cinematic world. Her analysis of Camille Henrot’s installation Gross Fatigue (2013) and Kevin B. Lee’s online video essay work demonstrate a diversity of ways in which the frame can be reconceived outside of the movie theatre. In the final chapter of the volume, Rodowick argues that modern art’s goal to “release the image from representation” faces new challenges within contemporary art’s new digital media landscape. Through close alignment with Theodor Adorno’s work on aesthetics, Rodowick suggests that we ought to develop new ways of engaging with the crisis of representation in the digital age.

Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art demonstrates that if we are to better understand the medium of film we must look beyond it, to the ways in which contemporary artists’ have remixed, reframed, and reconfigured the moving image in various forms. The authors within this collection propose that we must see the relationship between these two worlds as dialectical, not one-way. Through many of the authors’ detailed textual analysis of artworks and others’ insightful and rigorous theorising, this collection makes a strong and necessary case to reimagine this relationship, providing a crucial intervention into this growing area of study.

Edited by Dominic Lennard, R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance
Edinburgh University Press, 2020

Reviewed by Chris Horn, University of Leicester
DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v0i18.2276

The “Hollywood Renaissance” (or more commonly New Hollywood) is a much-loved era in American cinema, a brief instance of the Hollywood studios actively fostering experimental, intellectually challenging and ostensibly non-mainstream cinema made by a new cadre of cine-literate auteurs. The period, from the late 1960s to the mid-late 1970s, continues to fascinate historians and scholars, this volume being the latest in a long line to engage with its films, directors and historical context. Whereas much of the recent work has moved away from the filmmakers who had originally tended to dominate discussions, this latest contribution gravitates back towards auteurism, and towards individual directors. The premise of this edited collection is that the rollcall of auteurs commonly considered to be key to New Hollywood is too narrow, which in turn has led to a marginalisation of the contribution of many of the period’s most interesting and creative filmmakers. The editors, Dominic Lennard, R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance, assert that “the critical consensus, with minor exceptions” only focuses on six privileged names: Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg (1). The collection therefore focuses on twenty-three “other” directors whose films are “worthy of respectful remembrance [and] have been unjustly neglected” (19). The essays cover a wide selection of disparate filmmakers, ranging from those firmly associated with the Renaissance (for example Peter Bogdanovich, Hal Ashby and Paul Schrader), established directors not commonly thought of as Renaissance auteurs (Sam Peckinpah, John Frankenheimer, John Boorman), and a smattering of more obscure, largely forgotten filmmakers (Jerry Schatzberg, Peter Yates, Joan Micklin Silver).

The designation here of Arthur Penn, certainly in terms of name recognition, as one of the “charmed circle” rather than, for example, Ashby, Bogdanovich, William Friedkin or Brian De Palma, is debatable (6). Further, the existing literature which Lennard et al. cite as the justification for what is, and what is not, within the book’s remit is questionable. While no-one would dispute the centrality in the Renaissance of the six auteurs excluded here, the definitive manner in which they are positioned appears to be based solely on the names studied by Robert Kolker in A Cinema of Loneliness.[1] In order to justify the collection’s overarching premise about which directors tend to be included or excluded from Renaissance scholarship, other sources are proffered but none of these apart from Kolker actually back up the editors’ thesis that there is universal agreement about the identity of the “agreed-upon major players” (7). For example, the editors reference Diane Jacobs’ key early work, 1977’s Hollywood Renaissance, yet two of her chosen five filmmakers are actually featured in this present volume (John Cassavetes and Paul Mazursky) (6).[2] Later on, several of the contributors return to Kolker and couch their arguments in a way that again assumes that his choices are a representation of the entire critical consensus. A Cinema of Loneliness (now in its fourth edition) is undoubtedly a seminal work, but its author never makes any claim that his personal selection of modernist directors is meant to be definitive. Linda Badley begins her essay on De Palma by arguing against Kolker’s criticisms of her subject (102) while Nancy McGuire Roche, on the basis of The Graduate’s status as one of the Renaissance’s founding texts, claims that “it seems a glaring omission that Kolker’s book does not include [Mike] Nichols”, proceeding to use up rather too much space emphasising the point (236).

Of course, there are also filmmakers for whom a case might be made for inclusion (or at least a mention) as this type of volume will always throw up such debates. The directors featured here, we are told, were chosen by its contributors and a short list is provided of filmmakers for which the editors have not been able to find room. Not included even in this supplemental list are three directors whose most well-known films or authorial identity are central to common conceptions of the era: original “Movie Brat” John Milius is omitted entirely, perhaps because of his notorious right-leaning tendencies (apart from a single word on his role as a producer in the Schrader chapter [349]); Dennis Hopper, although Easy Rider (1968) gets a brief mention, is not specifically cited as one of the era’s directors and there is no mention of his historically important, if contentious, The Last Movie (1971); the same might be said about Monte Hellman and Two Lane Blacktop (1971).

However, all such issues about selection and canon are relatively unimportant in assessing the overall value of the collection. The standard of individual essays is mostly high, providing assessments of the directors’ contributions to the Renaissance that are scholarly and wide-ranging. In the sense that the span of films made by these directors goes from the very well-known to the almost completely unknown, the book does provide a “shadow” or “other” history of the Renaissance by dint of the absence of the big hitters like Coppola, Scorsese and Kubrick. Approaches to chapters are varied, with no overarching definition provided for what constituted the Renaissance in terms of dates, subject matter or style. Most of the writers work to the parameters of 1967-1980 (from The Graduate to Heaven’s Gate) to frame their discussions, with a couple of exceptions who extend a little into the early 1980s (De Palma and Schrader). Some contributors take a fairly conventional approach in discussing important, well-known films and taking the reader carefully through their chosen auteur’s work of the era, but the most original and interesting contributions are those that take a less obvious route. These fall roughly into three categories: those that are more elliptical in approach, those that explore particularly obscure films, and those that highlight well-known directors or films that are not typically associated with the Renaissance. One striking chapter that manages to combine all three is Daniel Varndell on John Frankenheimer, a seasoned director not commonly associated with New Hollywood. Varndell examines the images in what he calls “little death” scenes that he argues are “key to understanding the power of Frankenheimer’s moral questioning in his 1970s films” (135). Elsewhere, chapters are especially welcome which bring forward the work of directors whose names and work have been somewhat forgotten (rather more so, in fact, than Paul Mazursky, whose chapter by Lester Friedman is titled ‘The New Hollywood’s Forgotten Man’). These include Maya Montañez Smukler on Joan Micklin Silver where she focuses on Silver’s experiences negotiating the divide between studio and independent filmmaking, and Steven Rybin’s perceptive take on Alan Rudolph that focuses on his two 1970s films that “position [him] among the unacknowledged masters of the New Hollywood Renaissance” (298). However, the rounded nature of the collection means that there is also scope for the analysis of some of the Renaissance’s most iconic films, such as The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich, 1971), Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970) or The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973). Dealing with such recognisable titles alongside those barely remembered in popular memory is one way that the volume seeks to foreground how these films are more famous and admired individually than as part of authorial discourses.

A few errors have slipped through: Friedkin followed Sorcerer (1977) with The Brink’s Job (1978) not Cruising (1980) (156); Jon Finch is not Peter Finch’s son (336); and the New York Times seems to have been confused with the New Yorker when the editors state that Bosley “Crowther was summarily replaced by Pauline Kael” (11). However, these are minor quibbles, and it is a strong collection of different perspectives that succeeds in its intention to “overcome the conspicuous silence” about so much of the work discussed, even if one might dispute the extent to which all the filmmakers covered were really “outside of the New Hollywood ‘A List”’ (20).

Notes

[1] Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness (London, Oxford University Press, 1980, 4^th Edition, 2011). Of the six directors specifically excluded from The Other Hollywood Renaissance, Kolker dropped Coppola and replaced him with Spielberg for the 2^nd edition, (1988). For the 3^rd edition, he also added Oliver Stone and then David Fincher for the 4^th.

[2] Diane Jacobs, Hollywood Renaissance: Altman, Cassavetes, Coppola, Mazursky, Scorsese and Others (London: The Tantivy Press, 1977).

By Anna Backman Rogers
Berghahn Books, 2019

Reviewed by Ana Maria Sapountzi, University of St Andrews
DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v0i18.2275

The pretty cinematic image has often been dismissed from rigorous film studies discourse and scholarship for its apparent frivolity and shallowness. In Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (2019), Anna Backman Rogers disrupts this reductive consensus by demonstrating that the pretty image possesses the radical potential as an aesthetic feminist form and language, which is worthy of significant academic consideration and study. To argue this, Rogers bases her research on Rosalind Galt’s trailblazing 2011 study Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image, that refutes the misogynistic idea that the pretty or decorative image is false, shallow, feminine, and apolitical, and argues for its multifarious signification and value due to its ability to provoke from its surface. Focusing solely on the films of Sofia Coppola, a female film director whose work has often been disregarded by film critics and scholars alike for her idiosyncratic, feminine cinematic aesthetic, Rogers demonstrates how the pretty image is strongly political and feminist, and in turn, how Coppola, as a director, is a contemporary “feminist auteure” and creator who wields this particular formal language with astute dexterity. With Sofia Coppola, Rogers shows that the decorative image is, especially in the case of Coppola’s films, not an incidental expression, but rather a finely composed one, that subverts and reorganises the patriarchal taxonomy and subjectivity of mainstream Hollywood cinema.

The opening section of the book, “Imaging Absence as Abjection and Imaging the Female Gothic as Rage”, comprises two chapters. The first, focuses on The Virgin Suicides (1999), a film vaunted by film critics for its dream-like imagery, soundtrack, and dark humour; namely, its superficial qualities. In this chapter, Rogers disturbs this seemingly simple appreciation of the film’s artefacts by arguing that in spite of its oneiric aesthetic, it is suffused with an inarticulable horror with regard to the violence of male desire vis-à-vis the (adolescent) female body. Rogers, here, reads the imagery of the Lisbon sisters as a site of abjection, that at once embodies a resistance to patriarchal norms but also comes to typify its affects. Discussing The Virgin Suicide’s mise-en-scene and cinematography, Rogers pinpoints the unspoken violence in what is omitted or stilled in the film. It is these devices that Rogers advances that enables a voyeurism and fetishism that reductively redefines the girls’ narratives into an object of phantasy against their own stories. The second chapter in this section discusses The Beguiled (2017), the film in which the author considers Coppola to have made her feminist intentions most manifest in. Rogers excavates how Coppola utilises the conventions of the Southern gothic and female gothic subgenres to rework the system of social power that has been defined by patriarchy and which privileges male supremacy. Here, Rogers looks at how the film’s time, space, and power dynamics privilege the female gaze whilst opening up masculinity to a position of vulnerability; a complete subversion of the hegemonic gender conventions associated with the gothic genre and mainstream Hollywood cinema. In this way, Rogers suggests that Coppola announces how women lack absolutely nothing and are in fact violently potent, capable, and whole; a suggestion that comes into antithesis with Freud’s phallocentric theory that women are defined by their lack (in contrast to their male counterparts.)

The second section of the book, “Empty Subjectivities and Masculinity as Void”, also comprises of two chapters. The first one discusses Lost in Translation (2003), specifically how the film handles the fragility, liminality, tension, and experiences of existential crises. Here, Rogers compares the symbolic function of the characters of Charlotte and Bob, vis-à-vis notions of identity, nothingness, and being. Rogers finds that Lost in Translation reworks ideas of alienation and loneliness from a feminist perspective, as the film suggests that the negative capability that shrouds both characters is expressed as a liberation born from the acceptance that life and meaning can be found in a void, in nothingness. The second chapter looks at male subjectivity and masculinity in crisis in Somewhere (2010), through the lens of the main character, Johnny Marco. In this chapter, Rogers discusses how, traditionally, Hollywood cinema has used masculinity in crisis as a device with which to reaffirm its mythical version of masculinity and phallic power via its amendment. The author advances that Marco’s non-existent mode of being and crisis bleeds into the film’s use of time and space, and effectively counters and infects the structure of patriarchal fictions.

The third section of the book, “The Female Body as Patriarchal Currency and the Commodification of Female Identity”, encompasses two chapters, as well. The first centres on Marie Antoinette (2006), a film that has been criticised by critics and scholars for its visual extravagance and lack of political interrogation of the historical period it is describing. Apropos, Rogers spins these diminutive comments, by arguing that the film’s emphasis on material culture is where its politic statements lie. Rogers advances that the film’s obsession with surfaces, objects, and materiality is used as a critique on the commodification and objectification of the female body caught within a web of transactions of a patriarchal economy. The author advances that the film’s imager, destabilise gendered notions of the cinematic gaze and confront postfeminist values. In this section’s final chapter, Rogers looks at The Bling Ring (2013). Like in the previous chapter, Rogers here too is concerned with issues of materiality, superficiality, and subjectivity, manifest through the dazzling spectacle of contemporary celebrity, fashion, and pop culture in the film. In this chapter, however, Rogers considers the implication of this images vis-à-vis concepts of capitalist consumerism, social networking, and feminism.

Anna Backman Rogers’ Sofia Coppola sheds light onto the intelligent and subversive workings of Sofia Coppola’s cinematic vision, that has long been dismissed and overlooked by film scholars and critics alike. At the same time, and in the same vein as Rosalind Galt, Roger’s book offers gravity and seriousness to the academic study of the pretty filmic image. Each chapter’s subject is rigorously researched and analysed, whilst offering a meticulous theoretical approach, crafted by a constellation of appropriate theories and philosophical ideas. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in reading about Sofia Coppola and her filmic canon, as well those concerned with questioning, researching, and finding the symbolic function and potential of the aesthetically pretty cinematic image.

By Sady Doyle
Melville House, 2019

Reviewed by Srishti Walia, Jawaharlal Nehru University
DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v0i18.2274

In the course of my research, I have often dealt with the treacherous slope on which talking or writing about female monstrosity rests, for the propensity of patriarchal forces to morph female evil for their own advantage is an ever present threat. In other words, elucidating badness from the subject position of a woman is both a challenging (not to say fascinating) and a demanding task. Painstaking attention to detail is needed, to avoid getting misconstrued and branded as an ‘antifeminist.’ One way out of this conundrum is through wit, satire, and irony, particularly at moments where systemic victimisation of women threatens to preclude them from wielding any kind of power, brute and/or sovereign. This is the method that Sady Doyle successfully employs in her book Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy and the Fear of Female Power. The book oscillates between exploring extreme subjugation and supreme power of women via the concept of monstrosity. This approach is both the book’s strength and limitation: strength because of the rigorous resoluteness with which the arguments are put forth; limitation because this ultimately makes it difficult for the text to engage with moral ambiguity, the greyness (not blackness) at the core of female monstrosity. If we agree that fear of women is central to the workings of misogyny, then the metaphor of the cage, Doyle argues, serves two purposes: first and the obvious one is of confinement, to restrict women from accessing male territories of capital and power, but second and the more fascinating one is “to protect the world from what is inside it,” that is to say the patriarchal drive is more concerned with keeping women from getting out than keeping them in “custody” (xv).

Doyle’s book is divided into three conventional seeming parts: Daughters, Wives and Mothers. She draws from Hollywood’s representation of young girls and women – predominantly within the genres of horror/gothic and noir/crime thriller; from mythology and urban legends; and in media reports and literature – to explore the position of women in our collective consciousness/society, our beliefs and ideas about what constitutes femininity, and most significantly to reexamine the construction of female monsters. According to her, patriarchy constructs monsters out of women’s desire and sexuality which are both horrifying in their feral ambition and threatening in their capacity to violate social and biological norms.

One of the most compelling concepts that emerges from the section on Daughters is that of liminality. While drawing a correlation between the perceived beginnings of monstrosity in the figure of the young girl and the period of puberty vis-a-vis the taboo of menstruation, Doyle writes,

In folk belief, magic is often said to accumulate around liminal moments — points of transition, places where something is neither A nor B but both at once… Midnight is the witching hour because it is neither today nor tomorrow… Adolescence is the most frightening and protracted forms of liminality, a time when someone is neither child nor adult, but can seem like either, or both. (9-10)

Hence, in the analyses of The Exorcist (1973) that follows, her sardonic inference that a “little girl is less a person than she is a portal” (14) does hold water; portals, in any case, are transitional, shifting and flexible in their ontological construction. Two ideas come to my mind at this juncture in understanding the figure of the young girl – Gilles Deleuze’s idea of “larval self/ves,” as it opens up the possibility to confront the critical discourse on biopolitics in a new manner where the body of the young girl can be constituted (primarily) as an un-situated body among other bodies;[1] and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “Bare Life” as it fundamentally exists in exclusion from the sovereign power and continuously finds itself within the grasp of death much like the girl.[2] Moreover, it is also worth noting, that Doyle evokes Carol Clover’s iconic “Final Girl,” from the latter’s book Men, Women and Chainsaws, who bypasses her preordained death in the slasher films, and is consequently recognised as a case of exception. The question that remains unanswered in Clover and Doyle’s works is whether the twenty-first century girl, a persistent survivor, is still a case of exception? Further, when the presence of this young girl, on the verge of womanhood, induces anxiety within the structures of a patriarchal order, Doyle argues that this liminal space generates power and creates monsters. However, a monster, she submits, “is not something to dismiss or look down on. A monster does not merely inspire anger or disgust. A monster, by definition, inspires fear” (xiii-xiv).

Moving forward, in her section on Wives, Doyle expands the category of monster to lay open the exigencies of seduction as it is attributed to women (femme fatales, home-wreckers, temptresses etc.) while also summoning the institute of marriage to the witness box. She points out that the fear of female sexuality in films like Cat People (1942) and Jennifer’s Body (2009) among others, is the fear of queerness, the fear that women’s desires will exclude men, and the fear that heteronormativity will go for a toss. Even though from a typical (and at times controversial) Freudian vantage point, Joan Riviere – a key author in feminist literature best remembered for her seminal 1929 paper “Womanliness as a masquerade” – has marked this queerness as the fundamental nature of female sexuality. However, Doyle uses Simone de Beauvoir’s work to argue that “to pose Woman is to pose the absolute Other, without reciprocity denying all experience that she is a subject, a fellow human being” (66), to bring home the immanent otherness of monsters. This is also akin to Nina Lykke’s postulation within the framework of feminist science studies, of the female monster as a boundary figure, where she asserts that “being close to nature in patriarchal thought, ‘woman’ may often be found lurking in the discursive spaces representing what lies between universal man and his non-human others”[3] (my emphasis). Lykke goes on to argue (bear with me for this digression, the relevance to Doyle will present itself in a moment) that a female feminist subject must not hesitate to position herself alongside monstrous affairs in the grey zone between the human and the non-human.[4] In fact,

[I]f the feminist subject [attempts] to escape the grey zone of the monstrous through the category of “gender,” she may at first glance seem to be saved. Apparently, she has attained a subject position on the human side of the great divide… Sex is nature, belonging to the non-human part of our being; gender is culture and a purely human affair. Hybrid interpretations are not admitted![5]

Hybrid forms, in fact, are the crux of the matter – woman-panther, woman-serpent, faeries, mermaids, or more specifically, Circe, Medusa, Lilith, Echidna, Tiamat and so on – which often feature in Doyle’s analysis and clarification of media, literary and cinematic texts. She revisits these mythical creatures to amass either female power or attest to their oppressed condition. Violence, so customary to women’s lives, reveals itself poignantly in the section on Mothers. Luce Irigaray was right in her declaration that control of women’s lives is most blatantly discernible at the site of reproduction.[6] But the maternal body is also the site of abjection, from Norma Bates in Psycho to Margaret White in Carrie, more so when it produces monstrous children. Additionally, the maternal, much like the monster, is also the site of insurmountable sorrow and pain, and we confront this when Doyle delineates Mary Shelley’s tragic life that led to the writing of Frankenstein, in which the monster pronounces, “I am malicious because I am miserable… I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion” (139-140). This is precisely what becomes so critical when it comes to understanding evil within femininity, its unfettered link to despair, to sadness.

However, I want to question Doyle: can badness and villainy in women always be traced back to preexisting misogyny, such that bad behaviour ultimately remains safely tucked away in the possession of men? Our attempt to constantly rehabilitate female villainy, within literature and cinema, to look for explanations and justifications for their actions make badness in women an anomaly. In other words, our tendency to somehow alleviate evil from women leaves no room for women to be anything but fundamentally good, taking us, paradoxically, right back into the long-rejected territory of the “ideal” woman. I would end by echoing Margaret Atwood’s remark that “women have more to them than virtue,”^[7] the scope of which is realised, even if not unconditionally, by Doyle. Having said that, this book has been long overdue. We desperately needed somebody to engage with the replete images of dead blondes and the “domineering” bad mothers of popular culture.

Notes

[1] Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. (Columbia University Press, 1994)

[2] Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. (Stanford University Press, 1998)

[3] Lykke, Nina. Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminists Confrontations with Science, pp. 78 (Zed Books, 1996)

[4] Ibid, 78.

[5] Ibid, 78.

[6] Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One, pp. 192-197 (Cornell University Press, 1985)

[7] Atwood, Margaret. Spotty-Handed Villainesses, 10 (NSW Education Standards Authority, 2017)

Edited by Lydia Papadimitriou and Ana Grgić
Edinburgh University Press, 2020

Reviewed by Anna Batori, Babes-Bolyai University
DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v0i18.2273 

Following Dina Iordanova’s iconic monographs, and Dijana Jelača meticulous investigation on post-Yugoslav cinema and trauma, Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and Global Circuits continues the exploration of Europe’s Other by focusing on the region’s post-economic crisis cinematic landscape.[1] Although the new millennium brought about remarkable achievements in terms of film festival successes, the significance of “the second century of Balkan cinema” (xxii) often remains unrecognised and under-negotiated in Anglophone scholarship. As part of the Edinburgh University Press’s ongoing series Traditions in World Cinema, Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and Global Circuits aims to bridge this gap by country-by-country chapters on regional national cinemas, which lists Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Romania, Turkey, Kosovo and Montenegro. The studies in the book primarily focus on transnational links in Balkan cinema in this way to bring the aesthetical, industrial, socio-historical as well as political perspectives of the often-overlooked cinematic region into a productive dialogue. More than that, one of the biggest achievements and novelty of Lydia Papadimitriou and Ana Grgić’s edited collection is that, as Iordanova herself also highlights in the book’s foreword, it veers away from the male-dominated cinematic historiography which put women filmmakers and the investigation of gender roles into scholarly background. Chapters on cinema of Cyprus (Constandinides and Papadakis, 87-100), Kosovo (Borrione and Muco, 121-139), Serbia (Daković, Milovanović and Leković, 190-208) or Slovenia (Petek, 208-228) all survey outstanding female directors -such as the Croatian Vlatka Vorkapić or Vanja Sviličić, the Bulgarian Mina Mileva, the Slovanian Maja Weiss, the Greek-Cypriot documentary filmmaker, Danae Stylianou, the SerbianVanja Kovačević, or the Kosovar Blerta Zequiri- whose work informs audiences of sexist and patriarchal traditions in society, and the struggle of female as well as queer characters in contemporary social sets. This refreshing perspective makes the collection challenge the old-fashioned and well-known scholarly consensus which declared that Balkan cinema “is brimming with testosterone”.[2]

The collection reconceptualizes contemporary Balkan cinema not only by adopting female perspectives on filmmaking but, instead of focusing on the system change and post-Yugoslav wars, it puts the year of the global economic crisis as starting point. Characterized by severe unemployment, migration, new tendencies of neoliberal policies, and the European Union’s neocolonist framework, the new era saw the re-birth of nationalist and racist ideologies which clearly left an imprint on cinematic productions.[3] Be that Bosnian (Jelača, 34-50), Montenegrin (Jovanovic, 139-154), Cyprian (Constandinides and Papadakis, 87-100), Serbian (Daković, Milonanović and Leković, 190-208) or Turkish cinema (228-250), the narratives of several films reflect upon contemporary existential stuckness and financial hardship – something that Pavičićearlier named as the “cinema of normalisation”.[4]

On the other hand however, the post-crisis years opened up ways to international and cross-border collaborations as well as film festivals that helped contemporary Balkan cinema to receive more attention and create in a great variety of (popular) genres (Doncheva, 52). The Montenegrin-Serbian Igla ispod praga/The Black Pin (Ivan Marinović 2016), the North Macedonian-Kosovar Vrakanje/ The Return (Kastriot Abdyli, 2018), the Bulgarian-Croatian Voevoda (Zornitsa Sophia, 2017) or the Croatian-Serbiab-Montenegrian Svećenikova djeca/The Priest’s Children (Vinko Brešan, 2013) are only a few of the collection’s mainstream examples, which, thanks to the inter-Balkan/inter-European coproductive background, successfully question orientalist approaches, while also sharing a unique South European flavour.[5] Paradoxically, the economic crunch thus fostered transnational and trans-ethnic interactions among filmmakers and production companies and resulted in a new wave of quality art as well as mainstream films and the growth of regional film festivals and participation. This “affinitive cosmopolitanism” (Williams and Myftari, 29), has provided “an opportunity for working through collective and individual trauma’ and strengthened cinema’s role to ‘destabilise dominant (…) hegemonic narratives about war and ethno-national belonging on a transnational scale” (Jelaća, 38). It seems that, while topics of war, trauma, ethnic and religious conflicts are still key topics of Balkan cinema, the new (cross-border) films communicate a more universal image of the region and its inhabitants. For instance, Constantin Popescu’s Pororoca (2017) presents a father’s personal crisis as he is trying to find her disappeared daughter, Erion Bubullima’s Sex, Storytelling and Cellular Phones (Sex, përrallë dhë cellular, 2015) narrates a domestic crisis and infidelity, while Miloš Avramović’s The South Wind (Južni vetar, 2018) and Janez Burger’s Ivan (2017) mirrors everyday crime, societal corruption and one’s trapped-like situation in the contemporary crisis-laden economic context. While the national past and present as socio-political frameworks cannot be overlooked in the post-2008 filmic corpus, new cinemas often reckon with the explicit representation of war, ethnic conflicts and stereotypical Balkan representations. The edited collection enumerates several less-known examples which operate on a global level and are worth of future examination. As the chapters illustrate, Balkan cinema has arrived in a new stage: the growing presence at prestigious film festivals, the increased participation of female filmmakers and new topics and perspectives all predicate a promising next decade for the region’s film industries and urgently call for further scholarly analysis. These might include gender perspectives in recent Balkan cinema, the impact on and presence of the economic crisis on screen and contemporary topics of migration, Europeanization and the very position, identity and role of the Balkans in contemporary socio-political and filmic discourses. As an institutional survey on the post-2008 cinematic Balkan landscape, Contemporary Balkan Cinema: Transnational Exchanges and Global Circuits is definitely the zero ground for that.

Notes

[1] See Dina Iordanova. Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture, and the Media. (London: BFI, 2001); Dijana Jelača, Dislocated Screen Memory. Narrating Trauma in Post-Yugoslav Cinema. (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and The Cinema of the Balkans (London: Wallflower Press, 2006); Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 61-65.

[2] Mima Simić, “Gender in Contemporary Croatian Film,” in Contrast: Croatian Film Today, edited by Aida Vigan and Gordana P. Crnković, 89-100. (Zagreb, Croatia: The Croatian Film Association in Association with Berghahn Books, 2012)

[3] Dušan Bjelić,  “Introduction: Balkan Transnationalism at the Time of Neoliberal Catastrophe”, Interventions, Volume 20, Number 6 (2018), 751-758.

[4] Pavičić, Jurica, ‘“Cinema of Normalization”: Changes of Stylistic Model in Post-Yugoslav Cinema After The 1990s”, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Volume 1, Number 1 (2010), 43–56.

[5] See for instance Jameson, Fredric. “Thoughts on Balkan Cinema.” In Subtitles: On the Foreignness of the Film, edited by Atom Egoyan and Iain Balfour, 232-256. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004) and Longinović, Tomislav. “Playing the Western Eye: Balkan Masculinity and Post-Yugoslav War Cinema.”, In Eastern European Cinemas, edited by Anikó Imre. (London: Routledge, 2005), 35-47