Surveillance and the Body in the Millennium Trilogy

A growing discourse in surveillance studies is leading the field away from socially neutral theories and introducing methodologies that account for factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation. However, scholarship on surveillance in the arts, among which voyeurism and panopticism remain dominant, has been slower to adopt models that address these sociological dimensions of surveillance. This interdisciplinary article argues for expanding the theoretical and sociological scope of scholarship on surveillance in the arts, using Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels and the Swedish films adapted from them as a case study. This series of narratives features three scopic regimes: the state’s surveillance apparatus, the protagonist’s own surveillant gaze, and the male gaze, each of which operates on and through the body of the central character, Lisbeth Salander. These representations, as so many others, demand that we break away from the panoptic model and employ a theoretically intersectional approach. The author integrates theories from surveillance studies, feminist film theory, and the social sciences to develop such an approach.

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Distinguishing the Female Protagonist in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven

Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación ◽

10.18682/cdc.vi117.4283 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Kyle Heger

Keyword(s):

Original Film ◽

Film Theory ◽

Class Differences ◽

Feminist Film Theory ◽

The Core ◽

Societal Norms ◽

The Social ◽

Todd Haynes ◽

Feminist Film ◽

Design Score

When a movie is remade the primary story changes in order to reflect the social norms of a new audience. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and Far From Heaven (2002) are replicas of the original film All That Heaven Allows from 1955. Each film tackles different issues with the female as the protagonist. Social class, race and homosexuality are at the core of these three films. In this paper, I will discuss all three films and interject how the heroine discovers herself and why she needs to evolve. As each heroine finds herself, she strives to break the monotony that society has constructed for her and by breaking free she discovers what she has been looking for on her own terms. Societal structures barricade our protagonist by creating obstacles for her to move through, like class differences, racial bigotry and love. The female’s journey will be looked at through a critical analysis of each film including its production design, score and lighting. Feminist film theory will help us understand how these generations look at female characters on film. In the next decade, this film may be told through a completely different filter based on the societal norms of what that generation is facing.

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Postmodern messiahs: the changing saviours of contemporary popular culture

Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis ◽

10.30674/scripta.67351 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 21 ◽

pp. 196-212

Author(s):

Sofia Sjö

Keyword(s):

Science Fiction ◽

Narrative Analysis ◽

Film Theory ◽

The Body ◽

Modern World ◽

Religion And Spirituality ◽

Feminist Film Theory ◽

The Past ◽

Contemporary Science ◽

Feminist Film

The messiah myth is alive and well in the modern world. Contemporary science fiction film has taken the myth to heart and given us an endless stream of larger than life heroes. The heroes of the present are, however, not exactly the same as the heroes of the past. A changing world demands new things of its saviours. Using a textual and narrative analysis based on insights gained from feminist film theory and cultural studies, this article looks closely at the messiah theme in science fiction films and TV series from the last three decades. The study explores the changes that have occurred in relation to images of the body, the attitudes and personalities of modern heroes, gender, questions of power and ideas of the transcendent. The article then discusses what these changes both between newer and older heroes and between contemporary heroes and the traditional messiah story might say about religion and spirituality in the modern world. Finally the article explores the question of why the messiah myth still finds an audience today.

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Bodies, Gestus, Becoming: Cinema as a Technology of Gender and (Post)memory

Deleuze and Guattari Studies ◽

10.3366/dlgs.2018.0332 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 12 (4) ◽

pp. 555-571

Author(s):

Belén Ciancio

Keyword(s):

Queer Theory ◽

Latin American ◽

Film Theory ◽

The Body ◽

Theory And Practice ◽

Feminist Film Theory ◽

Political Cinema ◽

Feminist Film ◽

The One ◽

The Third World

The first issue this essay examines is the articulation of the cinema of the body, the feminine gestus, and the ‘political cinema’, which begins with the philosophical shout, ‘Give me a body, then!’ and ends with the ‘Third World Cinema’ as a cinema of memory. How is this Deleuzian concept in tension with the one proposed here of ‘missing body’? The second issue concerns the importance of the body for theory and practice within feminist film theory and queer theory. The question of the body is introduced in-between these two lines in the context of a series of Latin American documentaries. The final problem is then how to see and show a body that is missing, like an outside of the body image, and of a certain regime of the visible and the audible that tends to be fixed in topics by the production of technologies of (post)memory.

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