October 3rd and 4th, 2003
Conference
Abstracts | 1
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Citing
Symptoms: Between The Body and Its Reflections
10:30am Saturday, October 4
"Our Bodies, Other Selves: Representing the Machine in Human Form"
Leah Reich, UC Irvine
In my paper, I will explore cultural representations of the machine
in human form—androids and cyborgs—to understand how the
convergence of flesh and technology affects the structure of the dialogic
between humans and machines. Will such a machine transform this dialogic
into more of what we envision a relationship to be, and if so, how is
this relationship structured? On a more basic level, how is our interaction
with these machines influenced by the relationship between humans and
our own physical bodies as we inhabit them?
I consider two films, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, directed
by Steven Spielberg and Tetsuo: The Iron Man, directed by Shinya
Tsukamoto, as representative of texts that center around machines in
human form. These films are pulled together first by the symbolic use
of human body and its relation to the machine, whether the machine is
internal or external. Through the human form, these movies address issues
of desire, eroticism, labor, reproduction, and the family. Each of these
has significant implications for the central questions of this paper,
and these implications are revealed through theoretically mediated readings
of the texts I have chosen. Additionally, the medium of film allows
for spectatorial positioning; the connection of the perspective provided
in the film to that of the viewer will be critical in discussing how
these implications are illustrated.
At the core of these two films, furthermore, is the theme of alienation—of
the subject (and through the subject, the spectator) from his or her
own body, and of the subject from the larger structure of society as
a whole, which is represented the physical human body, through technology
and technological representation. How does technology alienate us from
both the physical form and from the societal whole while simultaneously
allowing us to explore and penetrate both bodies more thoroughly than
ever before?
"Forrest Gump and Fight Club: What Remains of
the Forgotten Body?"
Natalie Wilson, Ph.D. University of London
In very different ways, the films Forrest Gump and Fight
Club engage with certain types of bodily forgetting. On the one
hand, Forrest Gump quite literally forgets the body, disembodying
history as readily as it supplants Tom Hanks’ body into real historical
footage. Just as Forrest’s disability is quickly forgotten, so
too are war injuries, disease, sexuality, and race put under erasure
in this feel good film. Like the happy face that blankly stares out
from Forrest’s running shirt, the film effaces the material factors
of its bodies and offers instead a de-radicalization and de-politicalization
of both the 60’s and 80’s/90’s.
On the other hand, Fight Club critiques the very bodily forgetting
that Forrest Gump fosters. Suggesting that within advanced
capitalism the body has been supplanted by our ever increasing desire
for objects, the film reveals the bodily harm capitalism engenders.
By focusing on the pervasiveness of violence, ennui, and lack of affect
definitive of the late 90’s, the film mediates on the body as
brutalized not only by other bodies, but by the whole ethos of late
capitalism. Through a sustained focus on minute bodily details –
black eyes, welts, fissures, muscle, fat, sweat, tears, etc. –
the film insists the body cannot be forgotten – that, on the contrary,
we must re-member the body in order to redress the more pernicious effects
of a nameless global capitalism.
"Invisible Matters: Ideology, The Matrix and Working Through
Representation"
Kevin Mcdonald, San Francisco State University
In The Matrix Reloaded there is a character/program named the
'Key Maker'. He provides access to other programs and various areas
within the Matrix system. In the course of allowing the film’s
hero Neo into the computer’s mainframe he is shot and killed by
one of the Matrix’s Agents. Yet the Key Maker is content in that
he has fulfilled his purpose; he has performed the function he was designed
to do. In an earlier scene another character states that programs doing
what they are supposed to do remain invisible. There are, however, other
programs less virtuous in their design and much more ambiguous in their
function. These are the programs that cause problems. This question
of one’s function and its relationship to the operation of the
larger whole is one of several that underlie and inform The Matrix
Reloaded and its predecessor. And like all the many questions the
film poses it paradoxically oscillates between lending philosophical
depth and masking the commodified spectacle The Matrix is in
fact designed to be.
These
tensions and contradictions persist throughout the film. Just as the
relationship between humans and machines blurs within the film narrative
and spectacle become increasingly intertwined on a textual level. The
conflation of these dynamics further compounds speculation regarding
the meaning of these various components as well as the ends they together
constitute and inhabit. Ultimately, what allows the Matrix to work,
both within the film and for its audience, is the primacy it gives to
the visual experience. Implicit in this experience is a hierarchy, a
division between image and its material basis. It is in this regard
that the film percolates with suggestive ideological implications and
parallels. It is also within this divide that Jacques Lacan develops
his theory of the mirror stage. By examining some of Lacan’s key
psychoanalytic concepts (and their subsequent application in film theory)
I would like to speculate on the role of ideology in The Matrix
(moving between both its first and second installment) and contemporary
society. In particular I am interested in the duplicitous nature of
ideology, its ability to serve as both a kind of glue and mortise, an
internal inertia and external apparatus; avenues that are both contradictory
and contiguous. While this disingenuous quality is symptomatic of the
division ideology is born out of it fails to fully register the material
distortion it wreaks. The eye commands all attention, but its most significant
function lies in the blind spot it generates.
In The Matrix questions of ideology are anchored in the dialectical
exchange between form and function. Throughout the film there is ample
evidence of the division that form and function constantly traverse
and negotiate. It is manifest in the division between the human’s
“real” bodies and the computer generated interface they
assume while “in” the Matrix. It is also displaced into
looming questions of fate, choice, causality, and purpose. The Matrix
system itself faces a similar rift in its dependency on an “intuitive
based program,” the Oracle, as well as the threat of exiled and
rogue programs. In both cases form and function are contingent on one
another, yet also subject to significant modification relative to the
larger context at hand. The visual experience that links humans, machines,
and the text alike suggests that we rethink the dynamic between form
and function in terms of current historical conditions, specifically
the increasing saturation of visual mediation. If the good programs
remain transparent what are we to make of a system based on the opposite
premise? In short, what happens to form when it becomes a function of
its representation?
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Normalizing
Desires: Bodies and the Social Landscape
2:00pm Saturday, October 4
"The Canadian Landscape and the Psycho-geography of the/an Anus"
Peter Hobbs, University of Rochester
In 1967, Pierre Trudeau, who was then Canada's Federal Minister of Justice,
proposed amendments to the Criminal Code that would, among other things,
decriminalize homosexuality and abortion. Announcing these proposed
changes, Trudeau famously stated "In regards to homosexuality,
there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation. What's
done in private between adults doesn't concern the Criminal Code."
He went on to add that "When it becomes public or when it relates
to minors this is a different matter." Despite Trudeau's caveat,
his comments are perceived as heralding a moment of radical change in
the sexual ethos of Canada. The country was celebrating its centennial
and now had a policy of sexual freedom that matched the profile of a
progressive, cosmopolitan state. But, while the amendments removed homosexuality
from the criminal code, an earlier law of gross indecency was reintroduced
in the courts to prosecute homosexuals who strayed from the confines
of the bedroom. This paper examines the policing of homosexual desire
in urban and rural Ontario and how this has given shape to a homophobic
cartography in which the public men¹s room and the figure of the
anus loom large.
"Dreaming the Father's Body: Nuclear Masculinities and the Cold
War Imaginary"
Chris Dumas, Indiana University
The Wizard of Oz famously presents itself as “just”
Judy Garland’s dream – a nightmare of familial disconnection
and social illegibility, at the end of which waits the safety of Home.
But who dreams here – Dorothy, or America itself? In this presentation,
I will examine two films from 1953 (on the fiftieth anniversary of their
release) that are both narratively framed as the nightmares of little
boys: the low-budget sci-fi fantasy Robot Monster (d: Phil
Tucker) and the big-budget Dr. Seuss musical The 5000 Fingers Of
Dr. T (d: Roy Rowland). These films, so different in terms of production,
distribution and reception, are nevertheless revealingly similar in
the ways in which they negotiate sexuality, memory, and nation. Each
is concerned with the opaque memory of the missing father and the threat
of home invasion; each one attempts to solve the dangerous relations
at the heart of the “nuclear family” with a set of paternal
substitutions. And – most importantly – each film centers
around a little boy whose fantasies of knowledge, embodiment, and retribution
can only resolve a central Oedipal impasse through the literal destruction
of the Earth. I will offer a hybrid reading of these two films, utilizing
the critical tools of psychoanalysis and historiography to demonstrate
how the problem of embodiment manifests in each case as a kind of textual
aphasia – a splitting or disintegration of cinematic narrative
that “pays the price,” so to speak, for the paternal threat
at the heart of the American family.
"Bodies, Rest & Motion: Transgendered Identities in Flawless
and Normal"
Shannon Donaldson-McHugh, McMaster University
This paper will argue the discursive limits of “sex” and
corporeal codes of knowledge relative to representations of transsexual
bodies in contemporary film. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of "Sex", Judith Butler argues that the essential
materiality of sexual difference is itself normative, and functions
as a “regulatory ideal” so that categories of “sex,”
just like hegemonic gender identities, function as regulatory practices
“forcibly materialized through time” (Butler 2). As such,
regulatory notions of “sex” have the power to mark bodies
as “normal” and “other” -- to decide which bodies
are culturally intelligible versus those that are unintelligible and,
hence, do not “matter.” Referring to two contemporary films,
Flawless (2000) and Normal (2003), this paper considers
how transsexual identities problematize conventional notions of what
is culturally “intelligible,” and redefines both “sex”
and “gender” as performative.
Always already a cultural sign, if we consider the body as a process
-- rather than the site -- of effects under construction and subject
to regulatory practices and disciplines, then transsexual bodies subvert
and undercut Western cultural hegemonies of both sex and gender. For
these bodies that refuse to remain fixed or, in Foucault's terms “docile,”
force us to re-examine notions of “sex” and “gender”
as not originary or pre-discursive, but rather as constructs that always
function within a frame of culturally imposed regulatory forces. The
question then becomes -- how can mainstream culture represent transsexual
figures that subvert and problematize heteronormative, reproductive,
and medicojuridicial hegemonies? And more importantly can they be represented
to account for their very polyvocalities within a culture that demands
their suppression?
Both Flawless and Normal invite audiences to consider
the constraints by which bodies are materialized as “sexed,”
and to reconsider how we think and represent those bodies deemed culturally
“unintelligible.” If “sex” is not a pre-discursive
bodily given, but rather is a cultural norm governing the materialization
of bodies, then through what regulatory norms do “sexes”
materialize? Whose bodies get “othered” and excluded, and
do these films successfully argue that what gets defined as “normal”
or “flawless” are hegemonic fictions that need to be reconsidered
and recontextualized?
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9:00am Friday, October 3
"Perver-sive Spectatorship: Impotence and Pleasures in Suite 16"
Lili Hsieh, Duke University
In this paper, I would like to use a less discussed British film, Suite 16 (Dominique Deruddere, 1994) to revisit the issues of spectatorship in film theories and explore how the notion of spectatorship in film studies in particular and the psychoanalytical theory of phantasy in particular have relied deeply on the image of an impotent, even invalid spectator who is nevertheless aggressive and destructive. Theories of spectatorship in film studies—from Christian Metz’s Imaginary Signifier, Laura Mulvey’s important essays on visual pleasure, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, to Vivian Sobshack’s The Address of the Eye, Linda William’s study on female spectatorship, for example--have posited the gaze as an aggressive, fetishizing, objectifying apparatus which, paradoxically, originates from the position that is deprived of “real” pleasures. Sharing insights from psychoanalysis, film theories have generally seen a spectator as a dreaming voyeurist whose pleasures, although “morbid,” are subversively erotic. In the film Suite 16, the narrative literally carries out such a ‘perver-sive’ spectator—an invalid who uses his camera obscura to gain erotic pleasures, and later to kill. With this intriguing image of a disabled spectator who turns out to be a destructive plotter capable of killing, several questions that have been raised in spectatorship theories can be re-examined: How is our position as a film viewer surtured with this wheeler? How does our gaze coincide with his? In what way does viewing pleasure come from identifying the film as an object? Or do we introject, rather than project, this film-object? By introjection and projection, we are already treading in the territory of psychoanalysis (Cf. Ferenczi, Abraham, Klein, Laplanche, etc.). The implication of psychoanalytical theory incorporated by film studies suggests that as an object to be taken in, the act of seeing/reading/analyzing/theorizing is always an act of perver-sivity: Reading/Viewing pleasure can not but be tinged by cannibalistic pleasures that take in, rather than identifying with, its object. The image of the wheel-chair in Suite 16 is not too much a nuance from the image of an armchair—the difference is who is sitting in it. For a psychoanalyst, a film spectator, a reader, the arm chair seems a proper place. On the other hand, Suite 16 also opens a new venue for us to see that, even for “anthropologist/analyst/spectator/reader” in the armchair, aggressivity is not such a remote, or “disabled” issue.
"Lovely and Amazing: Rewriting Women's Bodies on Screen"
Kate Bernstein, New York University
The representation and objectification of the woman’s body on screen has been a much-contested area in feminist film theory in regards to mainstream Hollywood cinema as well as feminist film practice itself. It is in the cinematic and theoretical tradition of re-writings women’s bodies and re-telling female stories on screen, “the effort and challenge to effect another vision: to construct other objects and subjects of vision, and to formulate the conditions of representability of another social subject” (de Lauretis), that I would like to look at Nicole Holofcener’s 2002 film, Lovely and Amazing, whose progressive form-content relationship will surely position it as a boundary-breaking text in future feminist film criticism. The paper analyzes how Lovely and Amazing, in its form-content relationship, brings to the forefront issues of the woman's body on screen that are masked in Hollywood cinema and therefore empowers the female characters, as well as the female spectators, to have control of their own image. The male enjoyment of the naked and/or fragmented body in the film is interrupted and the body on screen is re-structured and transformed into a space of identification for the female spectator. As a result, what occurs in Lovely and Amazing is a perfect symbiosis of content and form where the structure and story rewrite both the female body in cinema as well as the types of stories told about the female body, and, finally, the cinematic method by which they are told. The film will be discussed in line with an emerging female-directed independent narrative film movement that builds on an feminist avante-garde call to destroy classic narrative cinematic pleasure due to its objectification of the female body and producing an innovative example of an alternative cinematic practice for constructing female bodies in narrative cinema.
In the paper, I will point to specific examples throughout the film that use cinematography and direction to re-structure the female body, support a cinematic re-writing of the body, and a re-focusing of the male gaze that complements how these four women think about and deal with their bodies in the story. They therefore provide a realistic point of view for the female spectator to identify with a new representation of their own body on screen. Examples of the de--aestheticized versus the objectified female body in Lovely and Amazing that occur throughout the film will be discussed. For example, the first scene of Lovely and Amazing shows the construction of the character’s image as “sexy” and completely breaks the illusion of that sex. The actress’s words, as well as her body language, along with how her body is shot, work together to accomplish the deconstruction. The scene foreshadows the rest of her plight throughout the film, as well as the similar plight of the other three characters, at whether or not they can “play” sexy or attractive successfully. Many other scenes will be highlighted in such a manner as to expose how the cinematic apparatus, for example of the close-up particularly, and its affect on the female body, is changed in Holofcener’s filmmaking practice. For example, what is interesting in Lovely and Amazing is how all the close-ups work to negate and oppose typical glamour and eroticisation without abandoning classic narrative close-up usage and continuity editing, the close-ups work to re-write the female body to become a space where the women’s reactions to the sexuality of their own bodies can be contemplated. The subversion of cinematic representations of the female body, and therefore the denial of voyeuristic pleasure and celebration of identifiable pleasure, that occur in the film will be read through the theories of Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey, Theresa de Lauretis and other prominent feminist film scholars.
“The Exploration of the Body as the Site of Vulnerability and Lack of
Autonomy in the Work of Almodovar"
Susana Perez Pico, San Francisco State University
Almodovar’s work has always been known and valued for its eccentricities regarding sexual types, gender roles and social interaction. It is widely understood that he is the filmmaker of contemporary Spanish women. His female characters, however, are so out of touch with reality that they instantly become caricatures of what could have been representations of gender roles. Not only are these women exaggerated prototypes of feminine traits a large number of them are transvestites and transsexuals but their attitudes to their own bodies are often markedly denigrating and gender-conditioned.
One powerful example of this common attitude can be found in Tie me up! Tie me down! (Atame). The plot of the film shows how a kidnapper and his victim end up in an entangled relationship of interdependence. The woman’s initial repulse becomes a deep need for the vulnerability created by the situation. Her extreme vulnerability is physical the scene that shows the protagonist urinating in front of her kidnapper was widely commented in Spain at the time but the need she ends up developing is emotional. Her psychic dependence turns out to be a direct consequence of her physical situation.
On the other hand, in Talk to her (Hable con ella) the plot sets off with the utter lack of physical autonomy since the two female characters are in a coma and concludes with its recovery. The construction of the mise-en-scene betrays the obsessive pleasure the male nurse draws from the manipulation of the helpless female body he oversees. Film voyeurism is stretched to unimaginable limits by visual devices such as lighting, framing and point-of-view shots. The permanence of this physical existence without awareness of itself is represented by the case of the bullfighter. However, the most interesting feature of the plot is the means by which the recovery of the lost autonomy becomes effective. The protagonist wakes up, that is, her mind comes back to life, and she recovers the autonomy of her body and her life. But this awakening does not happen until her helpless body experiences a sexual aggression. The traumatic interval physically experienced by her body proves to be the miraculous cure that her body needs.
While these two films use the female body to explore the vulnerability of life, Live Flesh (Carne tremula) does so with the body of a man. Javier Bardem plays a policeman who becomes paralytic and ends up a famous disabled basketball player. Although his life becomes utterly conditioned by this new physical hindrance, he seems successful and happy. This idyllic situation cannot last, for it overtly depends on the support of his wife, a woman who does not love him, but instead pities him. The disintegration of his happiness, which has nothing to do with his physical limits, brings about a deeper knowledge of his emotional dependence on others. Regarding the discursive structure, the plot resembles a fairy tale in which the frailty of the body is underscored by the two births that open and close the film.
The three films that I have chosen for this comparative analysis answer to a continuous trait in Almodovar’s filmography: the loss of physical autonomy. This thematic thread allows him to explore the inherent vulnerability of the body and, therefore, the vulnerability of his characters. By means of this manipulation of the body, Almodovar explores the frailty of the social and emotional milestones in which people base their lives. Thus, the body becomes a visual metaphor for the instability of human emotions.
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