CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10654899
Leah Vonderheide
{"title":"Toward a Feminist Fourth Cinema: <i>Waru</i> (2017)","authors":"Leah Vonderheide","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10654899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10654899","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay offers an analysis of Waru, an omnibus film written and directed by a sisterhood of nine Māori women, which illuminates a philosophy of Māori women's filmmaking and indicates new possibilities for a global Indigenous cinema. In the two decades since Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay declared the existence of a “fourth cinema,” the cinema of Indigenous peoples, the number of dramatic feature films by Indigenous directors around the globe has grown significantly, with particular attention garnered by the success of Māori filmmaker Taika Waititi. Yet, while it would be tempting to declare that Barclay's onetime ideal of a flourishing Indigenous cinema “outside the national orthodoxy” has been achieved, Māori women continue to be marginalized in the film industry. As many critics have noted, Merata Mita's Mauri (1988) remained the only dramatic feature film to be written and directed by a Māori woman for almost thirty years. That finally changed in 2017 with Waru. Drawing from the growing body of scholarship on mana wahine, often referred to as Māori feminism, by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Aroha Yates-Smith, Naomi Simmonds, and Leonie Pihama, this essay argues that Waru's filmmakers recenter mana wahine to devise a new cinematic framework that is simultaneously Indigenous and feminist to enable Māori women to contribute not only to the fourth cinema envisioned by Barclay but also to a feminist fourth cinema grounded in values specific to Māori women.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"95 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10654941
Reem Hilu
{"title":"Calculating Couples: Computing Intimacy and 1980s Romance Software","authors":"Reem Hilu","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10654941","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10654941","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the 1980s, as the market for computing in the home was still emerging, a category of software arose that promised computer-mediated experiences of romance and sex. These programs, which this essay is calling “romance software,” drew on popular psychological and therapeutic discourses to offer couples advice for more satisfying relationships while also managing their interactions with the computer as an intimate or romantic activity. This essay argues that romance software employed the then novel home computer as a tool that could help mediate relational and communication ideals and bolster the heterosexual couple in the context of changing expectations for relationships in the 1980s. Romance software attempted to instantiate computing intimacy — referring not only to the application of computational methods to the management of relationships but also to the romantic or erotic experience of a couple using computers together. Although they amounted to a minor subset of the software introduced during the decade, these programs envisioned computing in the home as a technology to mediate companionate relationships. Romance software demonstrates that some software companies in the 1980s conceived of personal computer users not only as abstracted masculine individuals but rather addressed users within their roles in companionate relationships, in this case as part of a couple. These programs proposed methods through which computing could be used to assist in creating better relationships for couples that had adopted computers into their homes.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10654885
Rebecca A. Sheehan
{"title":"Sharon Lockhart's Philosophy of the Casual: Toward an Eco-Cinema of Sociability","authors":"Rebecca A. Sheehan","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10654885","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10654885","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the cinematic works of the contemporary American artist Sharon Lockhart in the context of what it identifies as philosophies and practices of “the casual,” from the impact of Emersonian aesthetics on post – World War II American avant-garde cinema to Lockhart's unique version of “hanging out,” which resonates considerably with how Leo Bersani defines sociability. Viewing Lockhart's aesthetic signatures (her use of extreme long takes, static long shots, the natural settings of the majority of her films, and the anonymous identity and relations of her subjects, many of whom are children) first as manifestations of Emerson's and Heidegger's efforts to avoid the violence of Western thinking that they call “clutching” and “grasping” at the world, and then as instantiations of Bersani's notion of sociability as “a form of relationality uncontaminated by desire,” the article argues that her films manifest an eco-cinema that proposes living less invasively in the world. It goes on to show that, for Lockhart, this environmental ethos emerges from her use of the casual to delicately craft a cinema of social care that allows its subjects the freedom of not having their relations or identities defined by or within the cinematic frame. Lockhart's cinema is thus unique for deploying an aesthetics that can be described as casual, oblique, and nonchalant, toward ethical ends that have both sociological and environmental implications, what Bersani terms “queer ecology.”","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10654955
David Stephens
{"title":"Appear to Disappear: Blackness, Affect, and the Political Imaginary","authors":"David Stephens","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10654955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10654955","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the role of affect in making possible or impossible particular political visions. It uses Johari Idusuyi's 2015 protest at a Donald Trump rally to discuss how individual affects and microaggressions culminate in larger political boundaries that prevent the mass coalescing of Black people and white-dominated conservative politics. In response to the aggression of the Trump campaign and its supporters, Idusuyi is seen reading Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric. Despite this personal protest, Idusuyi's affective dissent is amplified via its circulation in the media and becomes symbolic of contemporary political incompatibilities. The essay argues that ultimately, Idusuyi's protest challenges racist notions of Black affective life and exposes a foundational incongruency between Blackness and conservative politics.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10654927
Nandini Sikand
{"title":"<i>India's Daughter</i>: It Is Time to Retire the Realist Rape Documentary","authors":"Nandini Sikand","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10654927","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10654927","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay links the historical figure of Phoolan Devi, infamously known as the “Bandit Queen,” a vigilante and the subject of several articles, news stories, books, and a biopic, with the more recent figure of Jyoti Singh Pandey, the victim of a brutal gang rape in 2012, who similarly became the subject of news stories, films, performances, and a TV series. It examines the BBC's commissioned documentary film India's Daughter (dir. Leslee Udwin, 2015) as an example of how the aesthetics of realism can sensationalize sexual assault, engender a spectatorial complicity, and, in this case, scaffold damaging cultural narratives.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10278586
Eleanor Rowe-Stefanik
{"title":"“Scotch! Scotch! Scotch!”: The Inoperative Domestic Scene in Chantal Akerman's Saute ma ville","authors":"Eleanor Rowe-Stefanik","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10278586","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10278586","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article reads Chantal Akerman's short film Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town, Belgium, 1968) with and against texts by Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, and Herman Melville. Rather than being merely a precursor to Akerman's later genre-defining efforts in recording female domestic life, I propose that Saute ma ville displays the potentiality for domestic labor itself to be a destituent practice, rather than an expected component of reproductive, conventionally gendered work. The way that Akerman mobilizes the inoperative actions of her protagonist — a “girl without references” — in her “preference not to” perform the supportive labor of the domestic space and in so doing literally “blow up her town” makes this early work interpretable as structurally concerned and politically motivated recit in the mode of her later films, rather than merely narrative-focused histoire. The protagonist of the film, in her Chaplinesque resistance to allow household chores to sustain her home, displays a conceptual paradigm in which those still separated from politics and from the space of the polis may yet act politically. Reading the film with Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener and Deleuze's and Agamben's responses to that text puts pressure on the limits of Agamben's thought on inoperativity and reinscribes the importance of Akerman's deeply affective cinematography within an anti-capitalist feminist critique.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74925255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10278614
N. Morgenstern
{"title":"Gift or Weapon? Reproductive Decision, the Phenomenology of Pregnancy, and Alien Language in Denis Villeneuve's Arrival","authors":"N. Morgenstern","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10278614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10278614","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay analyzes Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film, Arrival, and elucidates its strikingly original meditation on the ethics of reproduction and the relationships between and among embodied maternal subjectivity, language, and temporality. Drawing on deconstructive theories of language and relationality as well as on the writing of scholars working at the intersection of reproductive biology and feminist philosophy, the essay argues that Arrival uses some of the generic features of science fiction cinema (alien encounter and time travel) to articulate a feminist and posthumanist philosophy of relation and care. Focusing on the film's language of risk, danger, contamination, and even social disintegration, Arrival prompts us to consider how a particularly suggestive account of the maternal-fetal relationship, and of the process of fostering and becoming a relationally determined being, simultaneously engages with the fraught question of reproductive choice and reproductive justice in our contemporary moment. Meditating on the film's visual, sonic, and conceptual representations of the “placental wall” and of the “parasitical” structure of pregnancy, the essay shows how Arrival parallels feminist readings of the materiality of pregnancy that deconstruct the self-possessed or “virile” subject of patriarchal individualism.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82587793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10278628
Helena Shaskevich
{"title":"Archiving Feeling in Yvonne Rainer's Journeys from Berlin/1971","authors":"Helena Shaskevich","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10278628","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10278628","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Yvonne Rainer's third and most explicitly political feature-length film, Journeys from Berlin/1971 (US/UK/West Germany, 1979) explores the relationship between personal and political trauma through the lens of the instability and violence that ravaged West Germany during the period commonly referred to as the German Autumn (1977). Through a close reading of the film's formal structure, this essay argues that Journeys from Berlin/1971 represents Rainer's attempt to imagine a feminist counterpublic in the form of a queer “archive of feelings.” This essay traces the film's narrative junctures, comprised of five distinct and incongruous tracks layered and juxtaposed in a collage-like form, arguing that Rainer creates points of connection between scenes of domestic intimacy and political violence. In doing so, Journeys bridges the typically privatized and historically negated realm of everyday traumas of women and queer subjects with the public space of political trauma and asserts the primacy of both within national histories. This essay further argues that the female revolutionaries who emerge within these charged touchpoints act as figures of queer possibility. Their explicit and often spectacular refusals and failures — of the liberatory promises of bourgeois motherhood on the one hand, and political activism on the other — deny any possibility of a reparative fantasy within the film. Made during a period of significant aesthetic and personal change in Rainer's life following her attempted suicide, the film's form as an alternative archive of feminist resistance ultimately acts as both catharsis and a means of bringing this alternative community into being.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90980523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10278558
P. Flanery
{"title":"Lock Them Up: The Cold Conservatism of Ang Lee's The Ice Storm","authors":"P. Flanery","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10278558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10278558","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article considers how The Ice Storm (dir. Ang Lee, US, 1997) reframes the politics of Rick Moody's novel of the same name and works via a network of symbols to align character Elena Hood (Joan Allen) with Hillary Clinton, suggesting an analogy between the scandals of the Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton presidencies. Simultaneously, the film mounts a sustained campaign to constrain female sexuality, chiefly through its sanitizing of male characters’ own sexuality and recasting of Wendy Hood (Christina Ricci) as a sexually predatory Riding Hood/witch figure. Through its constraining of social transgression more generally, punishing Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood) for the sins of his parents and wider community in a way that can be read fruitfully through Jacques Derrida's “Plato's Pharmacy,” the film produces a narrative of profound conservatism even as it courts progressive audiences. Notwithstanding its “independent” status, its distribution through Fox (then owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp), situates the film institutionally in ways that challenge our understanding of the category of “independent” as necessarily politically progressive. The film's double-dealing, this article argues, demands that we attend to the phenomenon of a film that invites identification with progressive or transgressive characters only to punish them with reintegration into regimes of the normal or, failing such a maneuver, death. The lingering question this article identifies is how we hold to account films that are misunderstood as belonging to canons of progressive aesthetics while functioning as stealth engines of retrograde normativity.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90971417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-10278600
Timothy Ridlen
{"title":"Art on Film at Finch College: Reproductive Labor in the Enrichment Economy","authors":"Timothy Ridlen","doi":"10.1215/02705346-10278600","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10278600","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Finch College was a small women's liberal arts college located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan open from 1900 to 1975. The Contemporary Wing of the Finch College Museum of Art held a number of important exhibitions for conceptual art, experimental media, and film organized by the museum's curator, Elayne Varian, from 1966 to 1975. This article addresses how ideas of process, reproduction, and documentation were being reconfigured at Finch, especially in film and media art of the 1960s. Robert Morris's film installation, Finch College Project (US, 1969), is emblematic of this larger turn toward process in the visual arts; however, Varian's Projected Art exhibitions complicate our understanding of how and why artistic process became a subject of interest. In light of what Boltanski and Esquerre have recently identified as an “enrichment economy” and what feminist thinkers of the time theorized as reproductive labor, works in the Projected Art series shift attention to the reproductive labor of caring for, curating, collecting, and consuming visual art and film. I argue that Varian's exhibitions as a whole complicate our understanding of process-oriented work during the postwar period, especially film and media that moved into gallery exhibition spaces. These works attacked the existing modes of production by turning toward process, complicating the status of photographic reproduction, and contributing their own surplus value through reproductive labor.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85427758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}