The image of a rebel woman in the Czechoslovak New Wave based on the Daises by Věra Chytilová

Daises by Věra Chytilová is one of the most important films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, from which the image of a rebellious female figure emerges. Due to its complex nature, aesthetic and semantic diversity, this surreal image can be interpreted on many levels, often extremely different. It is both a criticism of consumerism and nihilism, and a feminist manifesto in the Central and Eastern European edition. The communism that dominated this area tended to institutionalize the inequalities between women and men. Due to the complexity of the problem and the multitude of possible interpretations, the film analysis is based on various methodologies oscillating between feminist criticism and Laura Mulvey’s reflections on the categories of corporeality, gender, and the masculinization of the viewer in narrative cinema.

Modernist Embodiment

This article embarks from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s embodied understanding of metaphor in linguistic contexts and proceeds beyond merely an extended notion of “visual” metaphor toward an operational understanding of the term “allegory” in the cinematic context. Specifically, a pattern of Sisyphean landscape allegory in a global array of postwar narrative cinema is identified and explored, in which a psychologically conflicted protagonist struggles against a resistant natural landscape, connoting varying degrees of existential “futility.” The recurrent experiential configuration of this modernist allegory on screen, especially in terms of its haptic dimensions, is explored for its ability to “invoke” social critique—as felt, visceral content.

Introduction

This book is the product of viewing, teaching, and writing about filmmakers whose works have absorbed and fascinated me for decades. Like many people, I have been an avid fan of narrative cinema for most of my life, but the figures I focus on here do not belong to that tradition. For a time, no single term seemed adequate to capture the idiosyncratic approaches of these artists. Parker Tyler, one of their earliest proponents, believed they constituted an “underground cinema,”...

Cinema Panopticum: Wax, Work, Waxworks

“Cinema Panopticum” explores the central conceit of Waxworks—wax figures that come to life and threaten their creator—in the context of popular wax displays in the Weimar Republic. Commonly credited as a cult classic horror film, Waxworks is better understood in the period’s terminology as an “Episodenfilm,” a popular form of early narrative cinema that presented distinct episodes within a unifying frame narrative. Like other early German anthology films, Waxworks participates in the Weimar critique of historicism, foregoing the particularities of historical periods in favour of universal drives and philosophical themes. In this case, the framing narrative updates the classical Pygmalion myth for film-obsessed German modernity. The film is a testament to early cinema’s so-called “encyclopaedic ambition” and a cautionary tale about the potential fetishisation of the filmic image during the transitional period when cinema was establishing itself in opposition to older forms of representation such as wax figure displays.

Transgressive Female Sexuality and Desire in Contemporary Colombian Cinema: Hermida’s La luciérnaga and Rodríguez’s Señoritas

The contemporary Colombian films made by women La luciérnaga (Hermida, 2016) and Señoritas (Rodríguez, 2013) subvert patriarchal gender norms of classic Colombian film narratology through their representation of lesbianism, female sexual self-exploration, and orgasms. The cinematic techniques of these filmmakers construct a specific view of female pleasure, emphasizing the plurality and visibility in cinema of female sexuality and desire. An interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of specific sequences suggests that the aesthetics and visual strategies of these women filmmakers evince pioneering female characters and subjectivities that challenge the traditional gaze on female bodies. Their films offer liberating representations that deconstruct the dominant basis of heteronormativity that has historically characterized Colombian narrative cinema. La luciérnaga (Hermida, 2016) y Señoritas (Rodríguez, 2013), dos películas colombianas contemporáneas realizadas por mujeres, subvierten las normas patriarcales de la narratología clásica del cine colombiano a través de su representación del lesbianismo, la autoexploración sexual femenina y los orgasmos. Las técnicas cinematográficas empleadas construyen una visión específica del placer femenino, haciendo hincapié en la pluralidad y visibilidad de la sexualidad y el deseo femenino. Un análisis de secuencias específicas con enfoque interdisciplinario sugiere que la estética y las estrategias visuales de estas cineastas evidencian personajes femeninos pioneros y subjetividades que desafían la mirada tradicional sobre los cuerpos femeninos. Las películas muestran representaciones liberadoras que deconstruyen la base heteronormativa dominante que históricamente ha caracterizado al cine narrativo colombiano.

Film and Anarchist Pedagogy

This chapter focuses on anarchist pedagogy in cinema. Narrative cinema, which has traditionally conceived of the classroom as a cinematic microcosm that can encapsulate the conflicts and contradictions of childhood and adolescence, provides fertile territory for charting the ideological — and often aesthetic — vicissitudes of authoritarian, reformist, and anti-authoritarian education. The chapter then looks at how film can both reflect pedagogical currents, and even function as pedagogical practice itself. It considers “classroom films” such as Richard Brooks's Blackboard Jungle (1955), which is a paradigmatic example of a film in which a teacher is portrayed as a near-saintly redeemer. The chapter also examines classroom insurrections in Jean Vigo's Zero for Conduct (1933) and L'Atalante (1934), as well as Lindsay Anderson's If... (1968). Finally, it discusses the dilemma of the anarchist intellectual, and addresses how anarchist pedagogy extends far beyond the confines of the classroom or academic conference. Released on the cusp of the twenty-first-century, Peter Watkins's La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000) is an exemplary case study in how radical cinema can coincide with anarchist pedagogy and an ethics and aesthetics of self-emancipation.

Figuring (Out) Films: Figuration in Narrative Cinema

This chapter consists of a close reading of Leos Carax's 2012 film Holy Motors. The consistency of the film's diegesis – or the lack thereof – is explored in order to defend the proposition that it is less useful to describe a film as either being coherent (or not) than to see coherence as something that a film can achieve (or fail to do so). Coherence is distinguished from cohesion and consistency, and it is argued that – contrary to what is often assumed – narrative or diegetic inconsistency need not result in the emotional alienation of the viewer. The chapter concludes that Holy Motors represents, among other things, a serious investigation of grief, and that (despite its many contradictions, inconsistencies and moments of apparent incoherence) one of its most significant achievements is that it does not thereby fundamentally disorientate the viewer.

Scouting for scripts: Mizuki Yōko and social issue film in post-war Japan

During the heyday of the studio system in Japan in the 1950s, Mizuki Yōko (1910–2003) was one of Japan’s most prominent and celebrated screenwriters. Despite screenwriting being a markedly homosocial profession, Mizuki forged a remarkable career as a freelance writer, working both for major studios and independent productions. Her collaboration with directors such as Naruse Mikio and, above all, Imai Tadashi resulted in a string of critically acclaimed films. While Imai’s films were lauded by contemporary critics, his approach to directing has subsequently been regarded, especially by western scholars, as somewhat impersonal and his sympathies too leftist. Conversely, these social issue (shakaiha) films, often based on original screenplays by Mizuki, scrupulously displayed the anxieties and ambiguities of the post-war era when the social fabric of Japan was radically reconfigured as its people embraced the newly imported values of democracy and consumerism. In this article, I examine the contributions of Mizuki to the oft-neglected oeuvre of Imai and social issue film in particular. I argue that besides pointing at the capacity and bounds of narrative cinema to engage with timely and sensitive social topics, Mizuki’s working methods underline a screenwriter’s awareness of her own agency in filmmaking.

‘Nothing Will Have Taken Place – Except Place ’: The Unsettling Nature of Camera Movement

In 1897, Stèphane Mallarme threaded this phrase through his culminating work of modern poetry ‘Un Coup de Des’. Michael Snow, commenting on his 1967 film Wavelength, another radical work of modernist vision, invoked Mallarme’s phrase and sets us thinking about how the moving image recreates/explores/questions the nature of place. The radical role of the moving image in providing new modes of our experience of space has been neglected or simply presented as a deviant deconstruction of a dominant commercial narrative cinema. Taking seriously the way the moving image provides new tools for our understanding of our place in a technological world, I will discuss moments of camera movement and the mobile frame in cinema practice, both commercial and avant-garde, historical and contemporary.