Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Preface: Life in the Post Pandemic Age
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction: Complexities, Compromises and Complicities
- 2 Against the Grain: Women Film Practitioners and Theorists Talk Creative Practice and Theory
- 3 Married to the Eiffel Tower: Notes on Love, Loss and Knowledge
- 4 Creativity and Neoliberalism: Between Autonomy, Resistance and Tactical Compliance
- 5 Tactical Compliance and the Persistence of Elsaesser
- 6 Storytelling and Game Playing
- 7 Autonomy and the Other Woman: Queer Active Agency and Postcolonial Expectations
- 8 From Neolithic to Neoliberal
- 9 First-person Expression on ‘Non-Western’ Screens: China as a Case Study
- 10 Scholarly Exploration of the Creative Process: Integrating Film Theory and Practice
- 11 Teaching Practice as Theory: Guerrilla Filmmaking
- 12 Baits of Falsehood: The Role of Fiction in Documentary or From Untheorised Practice to Unpractised Theory
- 13 Repented: A Creative Intersemiotic Translation
- Notes on Repented
- 14 How do you see me? The Camera as Transitional Object in Diasporic, Domestic Ethnography
- 15 ‘Shut Your Hole, Girlie. Mine's Making Money, Doll’: Creative Practice-Research and the Problem of Professionalism
- 16 Feminist ‘Pensive-creative Praxis’ and Irigaray: A Porous, Dialogical Encounter
- 17 The Paths of Creation, or How Can I Help my Dybbouk to Get Out of Me?
- 18 ‘We Want to Kill Boko Haram’: Reflections on the Photographic Representation of Children in a Displacement Camp
- 19 Between ‘Counter-movement’ (Ingold) and ‘Living with Ghosts’ (Demos)
- 20 Screen Memories: A Video Essay on Smultronstället/Wild Strawberries
- Index
Notes on Repented
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Preface: Life in the Post Pandemic Age
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction: Complexities, Compromises and Complicities
- 2 Against the Grain: Women Film Practitioners and Theorists Talk Creative Practice and Theory
- 3 Married to the Eiffel Tower: Notes on Love, Loss and Knowledge
- 4 Creativity and Neoliberalism: Between Autonomy, Resistance and Tactical Compliance
- 5 Tactical Compliance and the Persistence of Elsaesser
- 6 Storytelling and Game Playing
- 7 Autonomy and the Other Woman: Queer Active Agency and Postcolonial Expectations
- 8 From Neolithic to Neoliberal
- 9 First-person Expression on ‘Non-Western’ Screens: China as a Case Study
- 10 Scholarly Exploration of the Creative Process: Integrating Film Theory and Practice
- 11 Teaching Practice as Theory: Guerrilla Filmmaking
- 12 Baits of Falsehood: The Role of Fiction in Documentary or From Untheorised Practice to Unpractised Theory
- 13 Repented: A Creative Intersemiotic Translation
- Notes on Repented
- 14 How do you see me? The Camera as Transitional Object in Diasporic, Domestic Ethnography
- 15 ‘Shut Your Hole, Girlie. Mine's Making Money, Doll’: Creative Practice-Research and the Problem of Professionalism
- 16 Feminist ‘Pensive-creative Praxis’ and Irigaray: A Porous, Dialogical Encounter
- 17 The Paths of Creation, or How Can I Help my Dybbouk to Get Out of Me?
- 18 ‘We Want to Kill Boko Haram’: Reflections on the Photographic Representation of Children in a Displacement Camp
- 19 Between ‘Counter-movement’ (Ingold) and ‘Living with Ghosts’ (Demos)
- 20 Screen Memories: A Video Essay on Smultronstället/Wild Strawberries
- Index
Summary
(These are the key points of Thomas Elsaesser's introduction to the film in October 2018 at Gdansk University and then at the Essay Film Presentation at the cult bookshop in Amsterdam on 2 December 2018, <https://perdu.nl/ nl/r/a-day-on-the-essay-film-visual-erosions-sprouting-words/>)
1. The opening magnificently builds up the blend of a contemplative-reflectiveretrospective mood (Primrose in the boat), and a state of abjection and imprisonment (the somnolent and comatose Temeraire, staring straight at us from behind bars): this foreshadowing the tense psychological encounter between these two characters, clearly heading for a confrontation.
2. This human drama is set off against a serene, breathtakingly beautiful, but mercilessly indifferent natural landscape – a perspective to which the film returns at important moments: it gives us both relief from the tense drama, and it gives us the sense of a larger frame of reference, within which the heart-breaking tragedy of the woman and the abject state of the man are an insignificant blip.
3. In fact, the landscape translates into visual metaphor the enigma of Primrose’s repeated phrase: ‘I’m not your darling’. Nature, too, is not your darling: so that Primrose's gesture of forgiveness, grace and mercy (if that is what it is) is not the response of a weak woman, giving in, because she is needy for human contact and male companionship at whatever cost, and instead, it is the result of her agency as woman who is also a ‘force of nature’.
4. Charmaine delivers an extraordinary performance throughout. She really brings to life the meaning of this character and conveys the complexity of her actions: its ethical as well as political project. Endlessly watchable, she carries the film. Better even than she was in Suitcase.
5. Charmaine's spellbinding presence throws into sharp relief the fact that Eddie has failed to flesh out or develop his character. He is disappointing, especially if one knows his extraordinary performance in Escape, and his equally riveting play in Suitcase. This is a drunken, senile loser, unimaginable that he might once have consorted with the white elite, or that he had the women at his little finger. Once he is tied to the chair he does a better job, but that's not too hard.
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- Creative Practice Research in the Age of Neoliberal Hopelessness , pp. 197 - 199Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020