The aesthetics of impasse and the affective rhythms of survival: Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank as cinema of precarity

ABSTRACT This article reads Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009) through Lauren Berlant’s conceptualisation of impasse and the affective rhythms of survival, which Berlant develops in their reflections on the cinema of precarity. This framework, I contend, has the potential to open up new avenues of inquiry within the study of Arnold’s work, usually discussed in relation to either British (social) realist cinema or the phenomenological representations of female experience. Situating Fish Tank within the broader framework of the cinema of precarity helps articulate a position from which to problematise the overemphasis on movement in critical writings on the film – which, as I will discuss, is also predominant in both affect theory and film phenomenology. I argue that with its simultaneous focus on movement and impasse, realised through framing and composition of the shot, camera movement, and repetition of visual tropes that convey confinement, Fish Tank is able to capture and aesthetically re-enact the impact of neoliberalism, while simultaneously paying attention to class and gendered styles of bodily adjustment to crisis ordinariness. I conclude that Berlant’s critical apparatus illuminates the formal and affective complexity of Fish Tank in new ways, and creates space to address larger questions of affect, aesthetics, and the profilmic body.