Gated reverb: Queering the pitch in Trade Queen

Director David Wagner says Trade Queen ‘was never intended to be a period film’. However, the suitability of black-and-white 35 mm for the story points to the inflection between markers of analogue and digital registration as one that also codes the boundary between queer and straight experience. This article argues that while Trade Queen is tagged as a film without dialogue, the use of sound design and music in the film is critical to a narrative told aurally as well as visually. Furthermore, it is the use of sound in this film – which ends with vinyl interference – that articulates the tension between analogue and digital, and between heteronormative and queer experience. In punchlines, the synthesized reverb of Ruby Treasure’s score, and in interiors heard from the gated picket fence, we hear as well as see the transitions between public and private selves.

The symbiosis of images and non-diegetic sound in Lynne Ramsay’s Brigitte

The article investigates the poetic and intertextual narrative structure of Lynne Ramsay’s short documentary film Brigitte. Based in a factory in London, Ramsay’s work carefully captures the well-known photographer Brigitte Lacombe in a narrative set-up, which avoids face-to-face interviews. In this postclassical storytelling structure, black-and-white still photographs and voice-over narration melt into a poetic form that narrates personal and interpersonal histories. The article analyses this very avant-garde symbiosis of images and non-diegetic narration through a close textual analysis, while it also investigates the very form of postclassical short documentary set-ups.

Silent revelations in Trade Queen

Six years since its release, the main reveal of David Wagner’s Trade Queen is no longer socioculturally sensational given how drag culture has been integrated into mainstream media. The dialogue-less film, nonetheless, artfully delivers a nuanced story of identity, tension between one’s exterior and interior, between what happens in the compartmentalized nine-to-five and after-hours self-states. It raises the question of gender performativity through subtle looks and gestures – how Mr Schmidt and Mr Jonas navigate their complex relationship.

From rivers to reservoirs: Swimmer as psychogeographic cinema

In Swimmer, Lynne Ramsay makes a compelling case for a British psychogeographic cinema that takes its audience off the nation’s streets and into its waterways. The proposition recalls – but moves beyond – the earlier sensorial explorations of Glasgow’s canals seen/heard/felt in Ramsay's first feature-length film Ratcatcher.

On the edge of alienation: La Vis

This analysis will show that Metallika is designed as an absurd and exaggerated form of a mechanical, industrial society in which different types of alienation are organized.

Doing and repeating in Echo

The characters in Echo are trapped in a repetitive mechanism. In this article, I explore the differences between the doing and the repeating of the same acts, also involving the ways in which characters ask and answer questions in relation to those two processes.