Elena del Río

Rethinking Feminist Film Theory: Counter-Narcissistic Performance in Sally Potter’s Thriller

Feminist film theory of the 70s and 80s was marked by a deep suspicion of the female body as source of aesthetic and visual pleasure. Inspired by Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the unconscious structures that govern the relations of visual/spectatorial pleasure and gender in classical narrative cinema, feminist theorists strove to restore to women those aspects of subjectivity that the patriarchy had historically suppressed. If patriarchal interests had rendered woman a speechless and thoughtless body, reclaiming her capacity to examine the logic of her predicament through rigorous analysis would become the foremost objective of a feminist critical agenda. Not surprisingly, feminist film theory was initially heavily drawn to the theoretical models furnished by semiotics and psychoanalysis. In both these models, the body is not so much a material entity in itself as it is a written and spoken sign. The notion of the body as linguistic or symbolic sign accorded well with the feminist efforts to revalorize woman’s speech and to promote her integration within symbolic social and cultural systems. Born of urgent necessity, this analytical stress did not foresee the new imbalance it would foster, as it would relegate the sensual and bodily aspects of female subjectivity to a practically irrelevant status. Indeed, in their strategic erasure of the body, feminist film critics did not sufficiently account for the difference between the fetishized body (the product of a specific form of patriarchal representation) and the lived-body. The latter, a phenomenological concept described by Vivian Sobchack as the site of an “excessive, mobile, and ‘wild’ signification” (144), may enable a reading of the female body (or indeed, any body) as engaged in possibilities of action and meaning in addition to, or in place of, those stipulated by culture. Although the particular lived-body is always known to us as a limited set of discriminating categories (male/female, white/black, old/young), it simultaneously resists a totalizing reduction to these homogenizing/fetishizing binaries. If the particular body has the potential to perform “in excess of the historical and analytical systems available to codify, contain, and even negate it” (Sobchack 147), it means that the female body should be regarded as more than just the fetishized immanence constructed by the male

Kino und das Affektiv-Performative

Ein kräftiger Strang verselbständigt sich, eine halluzinatorische Wahrnehmung, eine Synästhesie, eine perverse Mutation, ein Zusammenspiel von Bildern reißt sich los, und schon ist die Vorherrschaft des Signifikanten in Frage gestellt. Die Semiotik der Gesten, der Mimik, des Spiels etc. gewinnt bei Kindern ihre Freiheit zurück und löst sich von der »Kopie«, das heißt, von der beherrschenden Sprachkompetenz des Lehrers – ein mikroskopisch kleines Ereignis stürzt das Gleichgewicht der lokalen Mächte um.

Violently Oscillating: Science, Repetition and Affective Transmutation in Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz

This essay looks at Fassbinders Berlin Alexanderplatz to trace the  films transformation of a mechanistic scientific discourse into  affective indeterminacy. Through patterns of repetition of a key event, the film considers its protagonist as a complex web of constantly shifting forces – a network of biological, social, political and semiotic flows coalescing in a body that exists in a state of perpetual oscillation between force and mutilation, ecstasy and pain. The role of physics and other materialist discourses in the film is thus not to fixate subjectivity, but rather to provide a passage into its affective transformations and the intense desubjectification that results.