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9063 results in Film

Page 231 of 454

  • 5 - Audiences and Critics: Dialogue and Disagreement

  • Chris Perriam, University of Manchester, Darren Waldron, University of Manchester
  • Book:
    French and Spanish Queer Film
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 137-159

  • Summary

    Where Chapters 3 and 4 interpreted audience responses collected at festivals, and often to relatively low-profile films, this chapter turns to a slightly different space. The focus now is on queer fictional films and directors who have attracted critical attention from established and professional reviewers in France and Spain. We survey the reception of two of the most controversial and talked about French queer films in recent times – 2013 Palme d'Or winner La Vie d'Adèle (Abdellatif Khechiche, 2012) at Cannes and the Queer Palm winner of the same year L'Inconnu du lac (Alain Guiraudie, 2013) – and consider how the reactions of mainly LGBTQ viewers and online critics diverge from and converge with received critical evaluation. We adopt a similar contrastive and comparative approach in an analysis of the images and reputations of mainstream directors whose work mobilises queer aesthetics, affect, sensibilities and tastes but who, to differing degrees, have achieved canonical status in both countries: André Téchiné, François Ozon and Pedro Almodóvar. Queer films such as La Vie d'Adèle and L'Inconnu du lac have become, as Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover write, ‘major players in contemporary world cinema’ (2014), while Almodóvar, to take one of the directors in question, partly thanks to his enthusiastic reception among some revered French critics writing for highbrow film magazines, has become a key global figure, whose audience share, in France as elsewhere, can rival and even surpass that of Hollywood and domestic blockbusters. The discussion of Almodóvar leads into a study of the responses, again comparing reviews by established and professional critics with occasional or amateur LGBTQ critics, to La piel que habito (2011) – released under its original Spanish title in France – and Los amantes pasajeros (as Les amants pasagers) (2013), the two films he released during the time-period of our project.

    The chapter engages with forms of cinephilia and politically or socially informed film reception. It attempts to show how the finely detailed and often immediate responses by mainly LGBTQ audiences in questionnaires and in discussions (in blogs and forums) nuance the equally finely detailed but close technical analyses of academic and high journalistic writing.

  • 4 - Trans Issues

  • Chris Perriam, University of Manchester, Darren Waldron, University of Manchester
  • Book:
    French and Spanish Queer Film
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 102-136

  • Summary

    C'est une forme de militantisme féministe, anticapitaliste qui remet en cause le genre et, euh, j'ai l'impression que c'est des choses qu'on peut voir ici aussi à Lyon (.) … J'ai pas trouvé ça exotique en fait. (it's a kind of feminist, anti-capitalist militancy that questions gender and, um, I feel that these are the kinds of things we can see here in Lyon (.) I didn't find it exotic in fact.) (Alex, thirty-seven-year-old white French genderqueer project manager, during group discussion about Guerriller@s)

    [És] important coneixer la nostra història.

    (It's important to know our history.) (Oriol a twenty-six-year-old trans male in questionnaire responses to Bambi at FIRE!! 2013)

    ‘No me siento chico, pues, no puedo empatisar en grado sumo con él, porque no he sentido eso, pero entiendo que tiene que ser una solución muy complicada, porque no parece que tienes que ser siempre lo que te marca ya de nacimiento. (I don't feel as if I'm a boy, so I cannot empathise at the highest level with him, because I've not experienced it, but I understand that it must be a very complicated solution, because it seems that you have to always be what you were defined as at birth.) (Marta Isabel, twenty-four-year-old Spanish white European female lesbian undergraduate student during group discussion about Tomboy)

    These comments illustrate the range of reactions among our participants to the corpus films about transsexual, transgender and intersex identities. Their modes of engagement vary from affirmations of identification to expressions of sympathy and non-specialist understanding, via empathy and recognition, that transmit a sense of shared values around gender and, in the first case, class-based politics. Each position depends, of course, on the identity and lived experience of the individual respondent and is formed, as always, within the knowledge that they are participating in academic research. Beyond Oriol's comment, which provides further evidence of how people who consider themselves to be affected by a film's subject transmit a sense of community affiliation, Alex demonstrates how those from outside that community draw on themes that have salience for them, that coincide with their own understanding of their social identities and self-positioning with regards to ideas of bourgeois and heteronormative culture and the ‘mainstream’, while Marta Isabel adopts a more distanced stance.

  • 1 - Extreme Cinema: Revisiting Body Genres

  • Aaron Kerner, Jonathan L. Knapp
  • Book:
    Extreme Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 1-20

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS EXTREME CINEMA?

    What is extreme cinema? That is the question we intend to explore. In the decade leading up to the millennium, and in the years since then, we have witnessed the emergence of films that have pushed against, if not breached, conventions regarding the treatment of sex and violence in the cinema. For instance, self-appointed morality police, exasperated film scholars and critics decried films such as Eli Roth's 2005 film Hostel —charging the film with being too excessive, and dismissing it as “pornographic,” “sadistic,” or both. If nothing else, the near hysterical response to extreme cinema reveals that it appeals to the visceral experience of the viewer. And repeatedly, these films are accused of disregarding narrative conventions in favor of grandiose spectacles of gore and violence that play to the spectator's baser senses. Extreme cinema, then, is frequently associated with excessive brands of horror, or trends, for instance, in contemporary French cinema (or “New French Extremity” as James Quandt called it) featuring elements of brutal violence sometimes coupled with graphic sexual imagery. We have no intention of disabusing the reader of these presumptions regarding extreme cinema, but would add to this, among other things, humor—the kind that makes one laugh so much it hurts. Furthermore, while the content of extreme cinema attracts considerable attention, and might be its most obvious feature, in many instances these films also experiment with form—composition, audio design, editing strategies. We survey here a wide range of international films that might be associated with extreme cinema.

    We take Linda Williams's landmark essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” as something of a touchstone. Williams positions melodrama, horror, and pornography as the tripartite group of films that constitute the body genres. In all cases the spectator is invited to viscerally share in the experience of ecstatic screen-bodies. Melodrama might elicit tears, pornography intends to sexually arouse, and horror might startle us, making us jump from our seats, gasp, cringe, or avert our eyes at the sight of gore. In contemporary American horror, dubbed torture porn—Saw and Hostel being the most representative films of this type—bodies are torn asunder, wrenched, and contorted.

Extreme Cinema
  • Affective Strategies in Transnational Media
  • Aaron Kerner, Jonathan L. Knapp
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016
  • Extreme Cinema examines the highly stylized treatment of sex and violence in post-millennial transnational cinema, where the governing convention is not the narrative but the spectacle.

  • Appendix I: Standard Questions for Respondents

  • Chris Perriam, University of Manchester, Darren Waldron, University of Manchester
  • Book:
    French and Spanish Queer Film
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 166-167

  • Summary

    DOCUMENTARY FILMS

  • Why did you choose this film?

  • Did you like it? What did you like or dislike about it?

  • Did you think it was true to life? Why, or why not?

  • Did anything about the documentary surprise you?

  • Were you able to identify with any of the characters or events in the film?

  • What do you think of the way the themes of the film were dealt with?

  • Did you like the style of the documentary?

  • Do you think the director did a good job? Why, or why not?

  • Did you know anything about the film before coming to the screening? Where did you get this information?

  • Do you usually watch documentaries? What do you like or dislike about them?

  • Do you regularly attend LGBTQ film events/festivals or is this your first visit?

  • Do you have any other comments to add?

    • FICTIONAL/FEATURE FILMS

  • Why did you choose this film?

  • Did you like it? What did you like or dislike about it?

  • Who was your favourite character? Why?

  • What was your favourite scene? Why?

  • Did you think it was true to life? Why or why not?

  • Did anything about the film surprise you?

  • What did you think of the actors?

  • Were you able to identify with any of the characters or events in the film?

  • What do you think of the way the themes of the film were dealt with?

  • Did you like the style of the film?

  • Did you know anything about the film before coming to the screening? Where did you get this information?

  • Do you have any other comments to add?

    • Other language versions for ‘were you able to identify?’ in question 5 for documentary films and question 8 for fictional/feature films: Cat., ‘T'has sentit identificat?’; Fr., ‘Vous êtes-vous senti proche?’; Sp., ‘¿Te has identificado?’.

    Other language versions for ‘true to life’ in question 5 for fictional/feature films: Cat., ‘representativa de la realitat’; Fr., ‘vraisembable’; Sp. ‘realista’.

  • 2 - Hearing: With a Touch of Sound—The Affective Charge of Audio Design

  • Aaron Kerner, Jonathan L. Knapp
  • Book:
    Extreme Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 21-44

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION: FROM A GRIND TO A SCREAM

    It has been, as the film's title reminds us, nearly 127 hours. Aron, a thrillseeking climber, is deep in the backcountry of Canyonlands National Park, in southeastern Utah, trapped at the bottom of a slot canyon, his right arm stuck between a boulder and the canyon wall. Various attempts to dislodge the boulder have failed, and an earlier effort to slice through his arm with a cheap pocketknife ended when the dull blade came up against a material it could not cut: bone. Aron's last hope for survival is to break these bones, so he thrusts his body up and away from the wall, a forceful movement that the camera mirrors by quickly jolting from the boulder to the empty corridor behind him. A sharp snap penetrates the space. The image cuts back to a close-up of Aron's face as he gasps in pain. To fully get the bone out of the way requires more precise work: he digs into his ripped flesh, wraps his left hand around the broken bones, and physically pulls the dense tissue away from his forearm, which marks the boundary between his living flesh and what he will soon leave for dead. The camera focuses in close-up on Aron's face as he does this, clenching his teeth, grunting and grimacing with pain. A loud pop bursts forth as Aron jerks his head back, allowing sunlight reflecting off the canyon wall to completely envelop the image. Aron's gasps of pain quickly turn into howls of laughter: he has successfully cleared the bone.

    After removing tears from the corners of his eyes, Aron prepares the blade. The camera cuts constantly between different angles of the scene, as he slices open his flesh, digging his fingers into the gash to remove gobs of bloody skin, muscle, tendon, and vein. The procedure moves along slowly, but steadily, until the knife meets a thin, stringy, white fiber: a nerve. From a high angle, the camera peers over Aron's shoulder, down at the arm, flayed open, nerve exposed. As the blade touches the nerve, an electronic grinding noise overtakes all other sound. The camera swerves upward to Aron's shocked face, as if in response to this sudden eruption of noise.

  • Conclusion

  • Chris Perriam, University of Manchester, Darren Waldron, University of Manchester
  • Book:
    French and Spanish Queer Film
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 160-165

  • Summary

    In this book we have been tracing cinematically mediated, cross-cultural flows and exchange of tastes, opinions, experiences, desires and values between France and Spain and, as a space of reception, Britain. Through our encounters with events and audiences (including the responses of 440 individuals), we have been asking how LGBTQ experiences and communities are inflected by divergences and commonalities mobilised by certain films and their reception. The various encounters between audience and film, between comment and image, and, indeed, present and past, have revealed some specific ways in which tastes, values, desires and fantasies translate between LGBTQ communities in three wide geographical locations. They have shown how thematic preoccupations of a social or political nature connect across languages through films which either were programmed at festivals and in special screenings or that we separately identified as being perceived as key interventions in terms of their tone, their attack or their structuring of issues. By looking through an LGBTQ lens at what France means for Spain and vice versa, and how certain viewers from Britain themselves apprehend or embrace those meanings, we have tried to forge new articulations between film audience research and our knowledge of sexuality in transnational contexts. This has been facilitated by the emerging range of different films covering varied issues and subject positions. In particular, the major themes that run through the responses – love and relationships, ageing, what is or might be living as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or queer Catalan, citizen of France or Spanish subject – have shaped the discussion. The responses we gathered, as well as being concerned, often in self-questioning ways, with individual identity – like Antonio responding to Eastern Boys on the basis of his own particular life or like the very many respondents who were careful to state that they identified with some but not all aspects of a given character or situation experience – have expanded and nuanced the idea of ‘sense of community’. We have been able to explore how respondents in the particular circumstances of their viewing of the films (at festivals, at focus groups, at home, abroad, online) themselves configure such notions as belonging, connection, shared history, shared experience, shared values (and, of course, identification).

  • 7 - The End of Extreme Cinema?

  • Aaron Kerner, Jonathan L. Knapp
  • Book:
    Extreme Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 156-161

  • Summary

    A void that is not nothing but indicates, within its discourse, a challenge to symbolization. Whether we call it an affect or link it with infantile semiotization—for which pre-signifying articulations are merely equations rather than symbolic equivalents for objects, we must point to a necessity within analysis. This necessity, emphasized by that type of structure, consists in not reducing analytic attention to language to that of philosophical idealism and, in its wake, to linguistics; the point is, quite to the contrary, to posit a heterogeneity of signifiance. It stands to reason that one can say nothing of such (effective or semiotic) heterogeneity without making it homologous with the linguistic signifier.

    INTRODUCTION: NOT A STYLE, BUT STYLIZED CINEMA

    As we have indicated in the present volume, one of the most significant tropes of extreme cinema is its potential to elicit affect. And this enterprise is potentially frustrating, for in the very instant that we subject affecting moments in the cinema to analytic discourse we can witness them slip away—in effect trying to render the non-object (semiotic) in the realm of discourse (Symbolic). And for better or for worse, submitting the affective referent to the analytic gaze wields the potential to neutralize that which spawns sensation. Furthermore, the affective experience is hardly universal, and although we have perhaps over-“idealized” the affective as pan-cultural in certain instances, it is clear that it is subject to cultural, historical, and personal mediation. While we appreciate the dangers inherent in such a project, we have nonetheless made preliminary gestures toward identifying general tendencies in extreme cinema.

    Inadvertently, we admit, we might have also “fed the beast.” Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano correctly raise concerns about the term “extreme,” particularly as it has been applied to Asian films. Distributors in fact, have used “extreme,” as a marketing device—promising to deliver spectacles of gore and/or salacious sexual content (almost invariably tinged with violence). “Asia Extreme” is a “DVD label launched by London-based distributor Metro Tartan,” and has been used as a convenient way to package films from radically different cultural contexts. “The strategic designation ‘Asia Extreme’ has undoubtedly created a regional affiliation among these [Asian] directors’ films, but the category itself is purposefully flexible in order to include a range of Asian cinema that seems exportable.”

  • Introduction

  • Chris Perriam, University of Manchester, Darren Waldron, University of Manchester
  • Book:
    French and Spanish Queer Film
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 1-20

  • Summary

    The opening shot of Michèle Massé's 2014 documentary about ageing among four lesbians, Las ventanas abiertas (Open Windows), shows two instantly recognisable cityscape images, one above the other. The familiar smooth grey tiles and windows of Parisian mansard roofs fill the top half of the screen; in the bottom half, a panorama of Madrid's Palacio Real and the Almudena Cathedral, lit by the setting sun. Two cities, which serve internationally as metonyms for the countries of which they are capitals, countries that have played pivotal roles in the historical evolution of Western Europe, are brought together in a film that examines the experiences of four older lesbians, two in France and two in Spain.

    At the heart of Massé's film, albeit unintentionally according to the filmmaker, is the issue that preoccupies us in this book: the existence – or not – of a cinematically mediated cross-cultural flow and exchange of tastes, opinions, experiences, desires and values between France and Spain. For Massé, cultural exchange between the two countries in her film is located principally in the fact that older lesbians in both are facing similar challenges (equality, combating homophobia and so on) and working towards the same goals, but she argues that approaches to those challenges differ (in an email exchange with Darren Waldron). A striking example is attitudes to the construction of nursing homes for LGBT people; where the Spanish lesbians worry that queer residents will be forced to return to the closet, the French lesbians are concerned about the potential of segregation in the provision of accommodation specifically for LGBT pensioners. And yet, diversity of attitudes is, of course, explained as much by individual life experiences as by cultural differences. The two Spanish lesbians are prominent activists, one of whom, Boti García, is now single and the other, Empar Pineda, is married. She, and the two French lesbians (Jocelyne Pasqualini and Micheline Boussaingault), in a relationship together, talk of the continuing importance of romantic attachments and sexual pleasure as we age, while Boti has abandoned seduction for fear of rejection because of her age.

    In this book, we are interested in examining and analysing such divergences and similarities. However, perhaps of greater importance to us is whether and how commonalities and diversity in perception, approach and stance are claimed in the encounter between the audience and the film.

  • 2 - LGBTQ Film Festivals and their Audiences

  • Chris Perriam, University of Manchester, Darren Waldron, University of Manchester
  • Book:
    French and Spanish Queer Film
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 41-67

  • Summary

    Je vais au festival ‘Des images aux mots’ depuis 3 ans. Et vois tous les films. Je ne participe pas aux gay pride. Voisins, entourage savent que je suis lesbienne. Je tiens la main de ma pétite amie maghrébine depuis 20 ans. Et l'embrasse dans la rue [depuis] avant le PACS.

    (I have been going to the Des images aux mots festival for three years and I watch all the films. I do not participate in the gay pride. [My] neighbours and entourage know that I am lesbian. I have been holding my Maghrebi girlfriend's hand for twenty years. And I have been kissing her in the street since before the PACS (civil partnership)) (Daphne, 40-year-old French female, volunteer with WWOOF International, on the LGBTQ film festival in Toulouse)

    I've visited all 27 LLGFF festivals! (Malcolm, 65-year-old British white retired male, attender at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, March 2013)

    The above responses are testament to the resolute investment of some of our participants in their ‘local’ LGBTQ film festival. Declarations of longstanding patronage are utilised by the second of these respondents as proof of his commitment, while the first cites her consistent presence over a shorter period as a marker of her self-affirmation as lesbian. This particular respondent makes a series of illuminating suggestions in which attendance at the LGBTQ festival is aligned with broader political acts in her life (longstanding openness about her sexuality to her peers and the people she encounters in her everyday life, and habitual public displays of affection for her partner, which predate the formal legalisation of same-sex partnerships). Gay Pride emerges, via implication, as enabling a much less committed display of lesbian identity than a film festival, given her apparent keenness to deny any participation in that particular event.

    Daphne's response, though, may also be said to paint a certain picture of the ‘typical’ LGBTQ film festival-goer as having a strong sense of LGBTQ political identity and community affiliation. As such, her remarks could illustrate the point that we made in the introduction that our use of festivals as principal sites of recruitment for our research may limit the breadth and diversity of viewers that we access and consult.

  • 6 - Crying: Dreadful Melodramas—Family Dramas and Home Invasions

  • Aaron Kerner, Jonathan L. Knapp
  • Book:
    Extreme Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 130-155

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION: CRY ME A PUDDLE (OF BLOOD)

    Melodramas are family affairs—usually involving the destruction of the familial unit—that typically elicit tears from the spectator. And in the genre's insistence upon the discharge of bodily fluids from the spectator, melodrama shares certain affinities with pornography. Furthermore, like horror and pornography, melodrama nests its affecting ruptures within discrete numbers framed by otherwise conventional “realistic” narrative sequences. When conversing with his composer, Marvin Hamlisch, for Sophie's Choice (1982), Alan Pakula told him, “The film is so emotional, the film is about such horror, that it runs the great danger of becoming emotional pornography.” Sophie's choice— choosing which of her two children would be sent to the gas chamber—is terribly heart-wrenching, and it verges on the pornographic precisely because of the setting (the ultimate human horror of the concentration camp) and the fact that the entirety of the film rests on this single emotive moment.

    Unlike pornography, horror, or other affecting instances in extreme cinema that might on their own carry a strong charge, the emotive events in melodrama generally cannot stand on their own and be as affecting as when seen in the context of the whole narrative. For instance, the concluding moments of Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955), if seen on their own, might strike the spectator as utterly pat—as they would not have any emotional investment in the unconscious man (Ron) and the doting woman (Cary). This is not to suggest that this holds across the board. It is certainly possible to take melodramatic scenes in isolation and discover that they are affecting. For instance, the heart-wrenching scene in Sophie's Choice on its own, in isolation from the narrative, wields the potential to spawn tears in the spectator. However, what this latter example demonstrates is that it is nonetheless laden with narrative, and is emotionally charged. There is within this isolated scene enough of a narrative arc—we are introduced to a mother and her children; the mother is compelled to make a choice; and it resolves (unhappily) in a choice being made. The “micro narrative” featuring the loss of a child offers enough narrative context for the spectator to become emotionally invested in the characters.

French and Spanish Queer Film
  • Audiences, Communities and Cultural Exchange
  • Chris Perriam, Darren Waldron
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016
  • Advancing the current state of film audience research and of our knowledge of sexuality in transnational contexts, French and Spanish Queer Film analyses how French LGBTQ films are seen in Spain and Spanish ones in France.

Page 231 of 454