CAMERA OBSCURAPub Date : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-7584940
E. Mccallum
{"title":"Not Your Mother’s Melodrama","authors":"E. Mccallum","doi":"10.1215/02705346-7584940","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-7584940","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that twenty-first-century melodrama films by female directors rework the core components of classic melodrama form—not only its timing, but also narrative form, agnition, and the underlying fantasy of union. While they retain a focus on objects and setting as bearers of emotion, and on a crisis in intimate relations, the three films by Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, and Ann Hui considered here reconsider melodrama’s possibilities. They all broach ways of rethinking Oedipal fantasy, moving beyond a story of the fraught emergence of the individual to one focused on a collective problem of how we negotiate a proper proximity to cherished others. All three films turn from what could have been to what the past makes possible now and thus change melodrama from a melancholic genre to a generative one.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44672587","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 : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-7584976
Lynne Joyrich
{"title":"Affronting Stardom/Confronting Sexual Violence","authors":"Lynne Joyrich","doi":"10.1215/02705346-7584976","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-7584976","url":null,"abstract":"Recently, there has been an explosion of charges of sexual violence and assault within the worlds of media, journalism, and entertainment, with female stars leading the way in making these charges of sexual misconduct public. Indeed, stars—located at precisely the boundaries of “public” and “private,” working at the intersection of libidinal and financial economies, marked as both “individuals” and “representatives,” figured as both “bodies” and “voices”—provide a powerful locus for both the explosion and exposure of sexual violence, which operates through and across those same categories (as, for example, definitions of sexual violence depend upon particular understandings of the connections or disconnections between bodily events and consciousness of consent or its refusal, between the “outside and the “inside,” between action and affirmation). Given confusions and conflations of these categories, sexual assault and harassment in entertainment industries have paradoxically been both presumed and disavowed, routinized and rejected, made invisible and spectacularized in ways that help to reveal the troubling dynamics of sexual violence and the “troubles” of stardom itself. This piece explores those dynamics, considering how public discourse around these scandals may help us interrogate the problems of both celebrity and sexual violence.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43048307","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 : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-7584892
Ellen McLarney
{"title":"Beyoncé’s Soft Power","authors":"Ellen McLarney","doi":"10.1215/02705346-7584892","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-7584892","url":null,"abstract":"This article charts Beyoncé’s multimedia intervention into the politics of the Trump presidency as she draws on the work of black Muslim and Latinx artists to challenge white monopolies on representation in the Breitbart era. It specifically looks at the political interventions Beyoncé staged through collaborations with Warsan Shire, a British poet born in Kenya to Somali parents; Awol Erizku, an Ethiopian-born American artist raised in the Bronx; and Daniela Vesco, a Costa Rican photographer. This collective of artists forge a black aesthetics at a heightened level of visibility, using new performative technologies to intervene in the politics of #BlackLivesMatter, crackdowns on Muslim and Latinx refugees and immigrants, the proposed wall with Mexico, and neo-Nazi mobilization. Focusing on Beyoncé’s pregnancy announcement, the article explores the politics of representation of black bodies and black lives, as she transforms the trope of suffering black mothers and their martyred black youth into a celebration of black motherhood and the pregnant body. These images are consciously rooted in a genealogy of black women’s representations of black women’s bodies. Despite the political power of these interventions, accusations were leveled at Beyoncé of cultural appropriation and exploitation of suffering by the neoliberal entertainment machine. By mentoring these artists, Beyoncé sought to convey the fertility of creative foment across borders and power hierarchies, even if her star power ultimately eclipsed the message as well as the marginalized artist that she sought to highlight.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42715381","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 : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-7584964
Liz Linden
{"title":"Women with Cameras","authors":"Liz Linden","doi":"10.1215/02705346-7584964","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-7584964","url":null,"abstract":"The essay looks at photographs from American photographer Anne Collier’s ongoing series Woman with a Camera (2006–). The essay argues that Collier’s series anticipates and “invents” the selfie by using anachronistic found materials. A number of Collier’s works in Woman with a Camera depict printed matter from the postmodern period that include photographs of female models posed as if they are shooting playful selfportraits in a mirror, acting as if they are themselves the photographer. Taking Collier’s work as evidence, this essay asks questions about how and why the selfie is so specifically positioned as an artifact of our contemporary moment in technology and culture, addressing some of the more widely held assumptions about selfies and selfie culture today.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49002926","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 : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-7584916
Alison Wielgus
{"title":"“The Harder I Swim, the Faster I Sink”","authors":"Alison Wielgus","doi":"10.1215/02705346-7584916","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-7584916","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers the role that Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake (BBC/SundanceTV, 2013) and Top of the Lake: China Girl (BBC/SundanceTV, 2017) play in the post-network television landscape. Situating the series among the globalized genre of serialized post-network crime shows that feature female detectives, this essay argues that Campion reworks the genre’s fascination with victimized women from her auteurist and Antipodean perspective. While the characterization and actions of the female detective resonate with other programs’ protagonists, Campion challenges dominant discourses of victimized women by intervening in the global circulation of women’s bodies on television. By drawing on Zoë Sofia’s work on female bodies and container technologies, this essay argues that Campion’s use of pregnant victims and her exploration of a female detective’s history as a survivor of sexual assault allow her to interrogate the typical treatment of female corpses within crime television. Through circuitous investigations that leave enough narrative space for detours like the settling of Paradise, where women transform shipping containers into domestic spaces for struggling women, Campion provides a countermodel to crime television focused on forensic progress through a case. Campion similarly takes the container of serialized crime drama that circulates the globe in a post-network television landscape and creates space for women’s stories from the Antipodes. Pausing the narrative to indict the treatment of female victims, Campion also unearths the melodramatic underpinnings of serialized crime dramas that resonate with her own filmography.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49609550","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 : 2019-09-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-7584928
Yosefa Loshitzky
{"title":"A Tale of Two Feminists?","authors":"Yosefa Loshitzky","doi":"10.1215/02705346-7584928","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-7584928","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most engaging, yet controversial, public intellectuals of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt continues to be attacked with the same venom and ferocity that followed the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) more than fifty years ago. This article discusses why Arendt remains such a divisive figure and why her intellectual legacy is still so unsettling, particularly for Zionists. The essay examines how these issues are represented, negotiated, and problematized in Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt (Germany/ Luxembourg/France, 2012). It explores how one of the most prominent contemporary feminist filmmakers, whose work celebrates the life and activism of revolutionary women from Rosa Luxemburg to Gudrun Ensslin from the Red Army Faction, transforms the “historical Arendt” into a “cinematic Arendt.” Although not a revolutionary in the tradition of Luxemburg, the German-Jewish political thinker Arendt is an interesting choice for a left-leaning, post-Holocaust German woman director. Yet Arendt presents a paradox for feminists due to the contradictions embedded in her works and public pronouncements. The article examines these contradictions and how Arendt emerges from this film, which attempts to portray a politically engaged intellectual woman, a figure that is almost entirely absent from the film screen.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43004941","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 : 2019-05-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-7264196
M. Maziere
{"title":"Chantal Akerman in London","authors":"M. Maziere","doi":"10.1215/02705346-7264196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-7264196","url":null,"abstract":"Chantal Akerman in London \u0000This essay tracks the development and production of a series of interconnected projects revolving around the work of Chantal Akerman between 2013 and 2016 in London involving retrospective screenings, in-person presentations, symposiums, a major exhibition, an international conference, and a publication currently in production. \u0000This Akerman project, which grew spontaneously, was initiated by A Nos Amours (curators and filmmakers Adam Roberts and Joanna Hogg), who presented an exhaustive retrospective of Akerman's film and video works over a two-year period, Ambika P3 who presented a major exhibition Chantal Akerman: NOW, the conference ‘After Chantal’ presented by the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media at the University of Westminster and the upcoming publication dedicated to Akerman by the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ). \u0000This essay aims to reveal the collaborative nature of the working processes behind this project and the organic manner in which it developed as well as the challenges it posed at a critical time in the artists’ life. In its totality the project and indeed its process, with its multiplicity of outputs and the collaborative dedication of the partners, has become a fitting testament to the strength of the work of Chantal Akerman.","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46939955","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 : 2019-05-01DOI: 10.1215/02705346-7264208
Sandra Percival
{"title":"CHANTAL? A Dialogue with Sonia Wieder-Atherton","authors":"Sandra Percival","doi":"10.1215/02705346-7264208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-7264208","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44647,"journal":{"name":"CAMERA OBSCURA","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43379547","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}