Lisa Coulthard

Desublimating Desire: Courtly Love and Catherine Breillat

In its sexually explicit contemplation of romance, desire and violence, Catherine Breillat’s cinema is provocatively suggestive of the tradition of courtly love. Working from Lacan and theorist Slavoj Žižek’s analyses of courtly love, this article asserts its continuing dominance as a romantic discourse as well as its articulation and subversion in the films of Breillat. According to Lacanian theory, this courtly tradition, most frequently associated with medieval European literature and poetry focusing on the conceptions of nobility, chivalry and adulterous desire, still structures sexual and romantic relationships today — an assertion that is not merely borne out by Breillat’s oeuvre, but analyzed, exposed and rendered explicit through her explorations of the inherent violence, cruelty and misogyny at the heart of heterosexual relations. In her frank explorations of the dialectics of distance and proximity, desire and disgust, and love and hate, Breillat confronts love in its multiple forms, violent as well as sexual, thus rendering explicit the fundamental fantasies that anchor and subtend discourses of romance.

Desublimating monstrous desire: the horror of gender in new extremist cinema

Known for graphic gore and formal experimentation, films of European new extremism stand out for the way in which they combine sex with violence, stressing the body in extreme modes of being and rendering its materiality emphatic, uncanny and profoundly disturbing. While this emphasis on sex and violence has been widely recognized in scholarly literature on new extremism, its connections to gendered conventions of genre cinema have not. In this article, we contend that films such as Philippe Grandrieuxs Sombre (1998), Lars von Triers Antichrist (2009) and Claire Deniss Trouble Every Day (2001) directly reference gendered tropes and conventions of horror cinema in their explorations of desire, sexual difference and violence. Far from being inconsequential or secondary concerns, we argue that emphatically gendered characteristics of cinematic horror are crucial to the disturbing impact of these films. By appropriating tropes from the horror film, but refusing them the closure and recuperation customary to narrative conventions of the genre, new extremist films critique these gendered implications, calling attention to the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the gender politics of horror.

The violence of silence: Vocal provocation in the cinema of Michael Haneke

ABSTRACT Focusing on violence in its various psychological, fantasmatic and physical forms, Michael Hanekes films interrogate the failures of communication and intersubjectivity through fractured and ambiguous narratives of suspicion, malaise and alienation. Taking its cue from a comment by Haneke regarding the terrorism of non-communication, this article considers the connection of these thematic and ethical tropes in Hanekes films to the manipulation of the voice/image relation in his films. The speaking face is frequently obfuscated or rendered obscure in Hanekes films as we get close-ups on body parts rather than faces, extreme long shots or darkened shots of speaking figures, voiceless characters and other audiovisual disturbances. Drawing on the work of Michel Chion on the acousmetre and mutism, and paying particular attention to Der siebente Kontinent, Code Inconnu and Das weisse Band, I argue that Haneke stresses a tension between voice and image that offers insight into the themes of non-communication and subjectivity in his films.

Visible Violence in Kiki Smith's Life Wants to Live

Recent theoretical analyses of domestic violence have posited the complicity of medical communities in erasing and obfuscating the cause of injuries. Although medical cultures have engaged in progressive initiatives to address and treat domestic violence, these medical and clinical models can render domestic violence invisible by framing the battered woman as evidentiary object. By analyzing this invisibility of domestic violence through the concept of public secrecy, in this article I consider Kiki Smiths 1982 installation piece Life Wants to Live. Using medical technologies, Smiths installation offers the viewer a vision of domestic violence that recognizes its inherently problematic invisibility and emphasizes the importance of lived, bodily experience.

Broken Bodies/Inquiring Minds: Women in Contemporary Transnational TV Crime Drama:

This special issue concentrates on a dominant trend in contemporary transnational crime television: quality dramas featuring serial criminals who break the bodies/psyches of young women or children, thereby attracting the inquiries of female detectives who have suffered trauma themselves. This trend has generated resources, industrial partnerships, avid viewers, and, importantly for the authors here, feminist commentary across continents. We reframe the debate over whether these shows are feminist or misogynist by exploring staples of transnational language that underwrite their popularity in disparate national markets. In fact, we address the paradoxical gender-based violence and female empowerment at their core as crucial to their transnational legibility by tracking recurring elements that circulate a gendered and raced lingua franca rooted in fundamentals of media aesthetics: strategies of storytelling and genre, modes of perception, and the production of affect. Ultimately, these programs raise questions about cultural currencies of televised feminism in the digital era.

The Listening Detective: Thinking Music, Gender, and Transnational Crime’s Affective Turn:

This essay argues that in extending the audiovisual convention of “thinking music” and focusing it on the traumatized mind of the female detective, crime series such as Top of the Lake (2013–), Marcella (2016–), and From Darkness (2015–) present female knowledge as fundamentally emotional, even irrational. In these series, the female detective is victimized, traumatized, troubled, and her thinking music is distorted, discordant, affectively charged. Arguing that the female detective’s “thinking” music moves away from the forensic mode’s “showing and telling” and toward “listening” as an investigatory model, this essay posits a sonic turn that recalibrates the genre’s engagement with the female victim along affective and emotional lines. Analyzing this trope, this essay connects the female detective’s sonically defined emotional investment to transnational crime drama’s self-reflexive strategies of affective legibility.

Acoustic Disgust: Sound, Affect, and Cinematic Violence

Despite film sound’s affective potentialities for sensations of fear, disturbance, revulsion, and horror, film violence is still primarily considered in visual terms. This chapter seeks to refocus and alter this ocularcentrism by analysing the imperative role of sonic aspects of cinematic violence, especially extreme modes of violence that are seen to go too far and are deemed unbearable or unwatchable. In this chapter, I examine what constitutes the ‘unlistenable’ as an acoustic analogue of the unwatchable and interrogate what I contend is a key aspect of this unlistenability: acoustic disgust. Arguing that the envelopment and intimacy associated with hearing create a particularly fecund environment for disgust, I consider what it is that renders some sounds truly disgusting.

Negative ethics: The missed event in the French films of Michael Haneke

ABSTRACT In their engagement with guilt, complicity and the multiple forms of violence, Michael Hanekes films interrogate the ethical implications of violent action. I argue that this cinematic interrogation of violence articulates an ethics of radicality that can be paralleled with Alain Badious concept of the event. As opposed to the more conventional definition of ethics as an investigation of moral problems, norms or criteria for the way in which we live, ethics in Badiou suggests a revolutionary radicality, one that posits an alteration in the structure of the symbolic, and in the subject that breaks new territory and shatters past frameworks. Similarly engaged with the interrogation of the ethics of violence, Badious concept of the event highlights the way in which Hanekes films articulate an ethical space for interjection. Focusing on the missed events, those ethical encounters with radicality that do not occur, this article argues that Hanekes films suggest a negative utopia by pointing to what could have been.