Film Diary March 2025

Saturday 1st March - Deerskin (2019) dir. Quentin Dupieux

Synopsis in brief is a lonely guy who becomes obsessed with a deerskin jacket that starts talking to him and persuading him that it must be the only jacket in the entire world. I managed to catch this just as it started at 2am on Film4 while surfing channels on a Travelodge telly; was perfect after the pub late night watch. Felt unbelievably French and I've been laughing at the line 'killer style' for weeks now. Is very scrappy and endearing and director/writer/editor/cinematographer Quentin Dupieux has a very silly sense of humour which feels refreshing! Excited to check out more... My partner Ben was v excited to find out the director is also responsible for this French house tune which I think only adds to the fun:

Sunday 2nd March - Flow (2024) dir. Gints Zilbalodis

Me and Ben had a v long hungover drive home and needed something easy when we got home; this was very nice but also really stressful and surprisingly poignant. 

Wednesday 5th March - Remember My Name (1978) dir. Alan Rudolph

bar scene from Remember My Name wherein Geraldine Chaplin and Anthony Perkins catch up

I loved the bar scene. Reminded me of when Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinksi meet again in Paris, Texas. I knew 'the twist' but Ben didn't so he was watching this like it was Fatal Attraction, was a lot of fun to watch this via two perspectives essentially. At first I was annoyed my partner thought the worst but actually having that insight meant Berry Berenson's character was mirrored in my partners viewing till the reveal and I was able to identify with Geraldine Chaplin's character and Anthony Perkins somewhat. So engrossing considering the meandering tone; I expect this is maybe down to Rudolph's mentorship and work with Robert Altman? Very thoughtful filmmaking; annoyingly there seems to be a total lack of criticism on Rudolph but I liked this review by Jonathan Rosenbaum from 1979. Big shout out to the Hit Factory discord for putting me onto this film and Alan Rudolph in general, who I'd never heard of before joining! Very thankful to be introduced and would highly recommend this film if you want something a lil bittersweet and have an interest in women's pictures, 70's cinema or Anthony Perkins star persona; on this note, there are some queer readings of this film floating around on letterboxd in regards to the miraculous combination of plot and casting in Anthony Perkins and irl wife Berry Berenson starring as a couple whose happiness is upended by the arrival of the mysterious stranger (Geraldine Chaplin) from Perkins' past in which makes this film extra intriguing to me. Can't wait to watch more Alan Rudolph!!!

Sunday 9th March - Inland Empire (2006) dir. David Lynch

Cinema trip with my partner and my friend Robbie. Fuck me!!! Loved it and simultaneously wanted it to end the entire time. Lynch inspires deep fear in me, he is the scariest film maker of all time for the nightmares he conjures. I love how the digital cinematography looks in this, distortion and patchy quality feel just right under Lynch's direction. Is there a better filmmaker on actresses and Hollywood? Nightmare stuff, quite literally. 

Monday 10th March - Modern Romance (1981) dir. Albert Brooks

Am a big fan of Real Life and this has been on the watchlist for a while. Didn't realise this would be like a feature length version of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Was horrified to see myself in a lot of Albert Brooks' character. Wish the whole film had been him in the editing room. 

Tuesday 11th March - Heart Eyes (2025) dir. Josh Ruben 

An ok rom com and an atrocious slasher. Should've known better but am always holding out for a good horror comedy...

Wednesday 12th March -  Dark Angel: The Ascent (1994) dir. by Linda Hassani

This was recently covered on the Hit Factory podcast and was already on my watchlist courtesy of a letterboxd review from Angelica Jade Bastien so I thought was time to finally check it out! I did not love this film but I really enjoyed listening to the podcast on it; a frustrating one as everything points to me being into this; would say you should give this a go if you've ever been into Buffy or Charmed but it just didn't land for me. Was just a lil stiff? 

Thursday 13th March - Onibaba (1964) dir. by Kaneto Shindō

My friend Robbie's pick for film night... it's reputation as a classic Japanese horror film is bizarre as imo this is a classic 60's psychosexual drama. Had been taught a bit about this  reputation being a bit dishonest from some uni modules I did on global cinema years ago (this essay about the Tartan Extreme Asia label/genre was the starting point for this I think) but still, really surprised at how not scary this was! Hard to not be disappointed which feels v unfair on the film itself. Otherwise, a beautiful free jazz soundtrack that I didn't expect and the best looking swamp since I watched Gun Crazy. Big fan of the foreboding hole in the ground of the swamp which I read as a Freudian monstrous feminine all consuming (vaginal) hole.

aforementioned cavernous hole in the swamp from Onibaba...

Friday 14th March - Mickey 17 (2025) dir. by Bong Joon Ho

2nd worst Robert Pattinson in space film. 

Sunday 16th March - Rap World (2024) dir. by Conner O’Malley, Danny Scharar

I love home movies!!! Very funny and astute man child stuff that felt so real I had to check it wasn't actually filmed in 2009. How did they get the footage to look like that???

Monday 17th March - Mahjong (1996) dir. Edward Yang

Cinema with Ben and my friend Sinny, part of the Edward Yang Season at the BFI. We'd all only seen Yi Yi before and had no clue what to expect from this... was the sorta cinema trip that makes you wonder if you'll ever see a better film??? Magic! Felt v lucky to get to see this at the cinema. I really loved this a lot. Perfect yuppie cinema though maybe 'yuppie' is the wrong descriptor. I think I'm trying to get at how the film feels v prescient in regards to modernity, the globalised city and alienated youth... all things that are very much on my mind. The end credit thank you to Olivier Assayas made me rethink Irma Vep which I'd watched a couple months ago and struggled with, excited to rewatch in light of this...*

*it seems like this revisiting of Irma Vep was also inspired by the programme notes at the BFI being adapted from this Jonathan Rosenbaum piece, direct quote is below:

"Critic Kent Jones has written about the effect of music on contemporary life and filmmaking–in particular, the cumulative effect of driving with the radio on–describing “the simultaneous feeling of driving and being driven” that has “created a new strain of narrative filmmaking that risks seeming weightless and uprooted in order to build from this new genre of modern experience.” Jones identifies this strain in such diverse films as Breaking the Waves, Irma Vep, all of Atom Egoyan’s movies, the recent work of Wong Kar-wai, and Yang’s last two features."

Tuesday 18th March - Magic Farm (2025) dir. Amalia Ulman

Press screening.

Wednesday 19th March - Seven Veils (2025) dir. Atom Egoyan

Home movie nightmares. Clunky in parts but then all of a sudden I was totally involved, almost against my will? Reminded me of my first watch of Exotica. Reminded me that I need to watch more Atom Egoyan films asap.

Sunday 23rd March - Celine and Julie Go Boating  (1974) dir. Jacques Rivette and Irma Vep (1996) dir. Olivier Assayas

Watched Celine and Julie Go Boating at the ICA as part of their Rivette season. Was in a very bad mood prior to going in, also witnessed the most obnoxious cinema crowd I've ever encountered. Despite this, I enjoyed it a lot! Confounding and at times made me feel stir crazy with boredom, but Rivette knows this and is playing with the audience and the payoff was v v worth it. Magical! Ben pointed out the use of repetition in the film acts similarly to repetition in experimental music which I thought was super interesting and made me appreciate being bored in the cinema more. 

Watched Irma Vep when we got home as I'd watched it a couple months ago and it had gone totally over my head and felt after 3 hours with Rivette and Mahjong earlier in the week I might be in a better headspace for it, which thankfully we were! The soundtrack and score for Irma Vep are maybe the stand outs for me? The sound design around the rave in a car park (?) is maybe my favourite part? Both unbelievable films that worked really nicely as a double bill. 

Wednesday 25th March - The Last Days of Disco (1998) dir. Whit Stillman

Shoot me, but I think this is the weakest of the trilogy (Barcelona currently being my favourite!). Is fun but the way Stillman writes Kate Beckinsale and Chloe Sevigny's characters into a binary of virtuous and villainous that really rubs me up the wrong way. The male duos of Metropolitan and Barcelona may be flawed and arrogant, but they're totally humanised and their naivety never becomes cruel. In this film, Beckinsale is eventually humanised a little but she's just so sociopathic and Sevigny so boringly innocent, that the contrast creates a dichotomy that doesn't feel fair or as nuanced as he writes the men in the other films... but then the cruelty of there 'friendship' rings true of some aspects of straight female friendship, so who knows. Still enjoy it as a counterpart to American Psycho and other filmic explorations of the yuppie but yet to see any of these films nail the nuances of the career woman in the way I'd like.

Thursday 26th March - Stoker (2013) dir. Park Chan-wook

Felt like Hitchcock refracted through De Palma; surprised at how much me and my partner struggled to be onboard with this as is usually very much our thing. Really loved aspects of this but felt it lost the plot; have got a hunch that the moral murkiness of Mia Wasikowska's character dumbfounded us, which is very funny as I don't think either of us particularly struggle with morally ambiguous characters usually so dunno why it mattered so much this time? Was quite taken by the combination of the fetishistic close ups of Mia Wasikowska donning ultra feminine blood red stilettos and then in the end scenes, the slow panning down and lingering close up of the belt hanging down loose from her waist that felt v phallic... 

Friday 27th March - Heat (1995) dir. Michael Mann

omg!!! Thank you to my friend Andrew for finally making me watch this. Better than I even expected. Unbelievable soundtrack, beautiful cinematography. Big fan of Al Pacino's suits in this. Pretty transfixed on Mann's use of new age/ambient music to soundtrack this macho melodrama, makes everything feel just a lil unreal and dreamy. A timely watch considering Val Kilmer's passing, RIP.

Sunday 30th March - A Complete Unknown (2024) dir. James Mangold

Me and Ben hated this, mainly as I was enjoying everything but Chamalet who was giving such a laboured performance that it totally took me out of the film. Also, it gives you zero context or grounding in the world of folk. Elle Fanning's character is offensively paper thin. This letterboxd review sums up my distaste for it all

Oppenheimer review?

I wrote this sometime after watching Oppenheimer which despite claiming I hated, seems to have gotten under my skin. Below is a revised 'review' that I am publishing as way to get over fear of sharing personal thoughts about film/art/whatever.

---

Low expectations worked in my favour as I was pretty engaged for the entire 3 hours, very relieved that it wasn't the snoozefest I had anticipated. However; it did justify years of Nolan hate I had hoped to challenge. Underwhelming in every way. I'd done some light reading on the irl Oppenheimer and he's clearly a fascinating character and sure, the film doesn't totally glorify him or fall into hero worship... but I don't feel like it did much to counter that either? I was expecting something a lil more scathing... a film that dove deep into his haunted psyche, a film that forced the Friday night multiplex audience into an existential nightmare considering the implications of nuclear war. But no! Nothing!

The actual scene of the bomb, incredibly underwhelming. I understand it could never really be that sublime or awe inspiring; too bad taste. But lets be frank here, that's what we're flirting with the entire film right? The American Technological Sublime that is the invention of the nuclear bomb? I didn't mind the rapid fire editing; the modernism montage in the films first hour at first suggests that not only was Oppenheimer influenced by modernism and that we might consider him a scientific peer of T.S Eliot, Stravinsky or Picasso etc, but that maybe the film itself was playing with this form, that the quick fire editing style and dips into abstraction were an attempt to evoke this mid century movement. Fun! But doesn't really hold up for me... mainly as I think the films overwhelming ugliness undermines any modernist pretentions. Nothing in the film is as visually striking as it should be, the cinematography feel flat. The black and white sequences resembled an Instagram filter at best, nothing about the film felt visually expressive and for something that quite clearly was aspiring to some sorta modernist pastiche, did not deliver! It needed more than just the a million cuts an hour and non linear structure. Fine, the sequences where he imagines the bomb and use of blinding light was exciting and expressive, but still lacking. I'ts a shame the film never delivers, but I also feel this wasn't helped by the fact the last film I'd seen before this was Gun Crazy (1950) which is so beautiful, and so expressive! So well lit! On that note, I thoroughly enjoyed this article on the ending:

https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/gun-crazy-1950-joseph-h-lewis-ending

Stills from the end sequence of Gun Crazy (1950) dir. Joseph H. Lewis 

erotic thrillers

A brief investigation into erotic thrillers and how the films discussed disrupt the genre. I discuss how erotic thrillers are typically heteronormative or at least perceived to be so, along with being viewed as very much a product of the 'male gaze' which I argue against in the show. I talk Vertigo a lot due to it being one of my favourite films, but also because eroticism and desire are overwhelming themes of Hitchcock's work; I often thing erotic thrillers are just post Hayes code uncensored film noirs/constant riffs off Hitchcock's oeuvre; it feels like almost all erotic thrillers have a trace of Vertigo in them. I also wanted to see if In the Cut or Bound managed to successfully subvert the conventions of the genre and if they challenged the heteronormativity of the mainstream erotic thriller. 

Research Notes

Femme Fatale or Lesbian Femme: Bound in Sexual Difference by Chris Straayer

This essay I found in a book I have called Women in Film Noir, edited by E. Ann Kaplan. It's mainly useful in this show for understanding the femme fatale in film noirs and neo noirs 'as a site of gender and genre turbulence' and how Bound complicates this by making the femme fatale a lesbian femme and the male partner of the traditional noir duo a butch lesbian. Strayyer suggests that Bound 'pushes gender revisions further than it contemporaries' by parodying masculinity in the character of Ceaser and bringing pro-sex lesbian and lesbian feminism discourse into a public dialogue (this is in regards to Corky's character (the butch) questioning of Violet's (the femme) lesbianism due to her sleeping with men for work).

The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema by Linda Williams 

• disrupts fantasies of romance in particular the casting of meg ryan which further disrupt romantic narratives

• wedding ring motif = death of self and marriage in  is death

Too Close to the Bone by Lucy Butler

• In the Cut complicates rather than inverts

• examination of sexuality of private experience

• intentional muddling (not just the narrative but in the mise en scene and cinematography)

still from Body Double (1984) dir. Brian De Palma

Films referenced...

Vertigo (1958) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Body Double (1984) dir. Brian De Palma
Bound (1996) dir. Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski
In The Cut (2003) dir. Jane Campion

police on screen: cinematic representations of police in regards 2 carceral capitalism and necropolitics

Well the title says it all; give it a listen and see below for the films referenced as well as links to all the essays/articles I read for this show! 

The Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway

The Cyborg Manifesto is an uncanny text, it never fails to resonate with me day to day. It is particularly exciting in regards to Robocop; Haraway's assertion that cyborgs are always products of the patriarchal, industrial and military systems is real nice for understanding the failures of Verhoeven's critique of the American prison industrial complex (if you use the figure of the cyborg more loosely it also works really well with BlackKklansman; 'the cop itself is technology of the state').

Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe

'This essay assumes that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.' 

Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang - The Cybernetic Cop: RoboCop and the Future of Policing

This essay was amazing and there are many brilliant quotes I discuss in the show;

'RoboCop—naive, quixotic in his belief that the role of the police is to protect the citizenry—represents a certain idea of the police that circulates as a public fact. When RoboCop was programmed, his three primary directives were to serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law.The fourth classified directive: No fucking with your creator.'

'What is the future of law enforcement? RoboCop is it. It is the place where the violence and coercion of prisons and police meet soft counterinsurgency. On the one hand, the militarization of the police. On the other, cybernetic forms of control. The old Detroit of RoboCop, devastated by the effects of Reaganomics, becomes the corporation’s testing ground for technologies of war. Nowadays, data mining and predictive analytics work alongside these instruments of brute force.

'RoboCop’s pursuit of the truth of his origin laid bare a technocratic capitalist conspiracy.'

BlacKkKlansman: The liberal blind-spots of a visionary filmmaker by Hamid Dabashi

Flesh and Emptiness: or, 42 Ways of Looking at Paul Verhoeven 

a still from Robocop: the animated series (1988)

Films referenced

Robocop (1987) dir. Paul Verhoeven

BlacKkKlansman (2018) dir. Spike Lee

I don't have a big watchlist to share for this show but check out this Letterboxd list by Zeno if you fancy some anti police films...

slackers and burnouts

Discussing nihilistic teen films from the late 80's to the mid 90's. Examining moral panic around 'killer teen' films such as River's Edge and how American coming of age fiction fetishises white youth. I wanted this show to be quite personal as I had a really intense visceral reaction to River's Edge, Kids was also a really formative film for me as a teenager. However... I am not very skilled at articulating deeply personal reactions to film so my failure to communicate it has led to a year long obsession with stories that centre slackers, burnouts, 'degenerates' and other poor kids left to fend for themselves. Consequently, I will be revisiting this theme on the show soon! 

(Anytime I tell people I love Kids I have to give a non disclosure about the infamous date rape scene, the fact that I love a film that mostly follows predatory 15 year old boys... but idk, has anyone actually hung out with teenage boys or been one before? Don't you remember?)

I've always been ashamed of how much I love his films as they are often labelled as crude, exploitative and perverse due to the often salacious content. His films are lurid, grimy and confrontational; I think a lot of people hate Larry Clarke because they just think he's a pervy old man leering at teens, his fixation on youth and teenage sexuality provokes audiences disgust for obvious moralistic reasons. But, like all the films mentioned in this show and this write up, the disgust is a weird defence mechanism. These films are populated with first time actors, they're closer to neo realism then they are exploitation flicks* (despite the constant labelling of teensploitation) and they are largely based off real crimes and lived experience.

It was only watching Bully on the Girls, Gut's, & Giallo live stream a couple months ago that I realised how maligned these films are; I recommend signing up to the Patreon to access the notes that host Annie Rose Malamet provides, there's some great essays reccs about these films in the context of transgressive cinema!

American teen film is rife with mcmansions and the ultra rich, often the only depictions of anyone even marginally lower class become caricatures of white trash; it's refreshing to watch films that treat their subjects with care and nuance, films that aren't solely poverty porn. I find them comforting as much as they disturb me, cathartic almost. 

There is no McMansion fantasy, just a dirty  mirror.

Essays of interest:

The Sense of an Ending: Youth Apocalypse Films

Oral history of River's Edge

Oral history of Bully

Why Do Sex and Murder Follow Girls to Florida?

An interview with Rebecca Godfrey

Films Referenced

River's Edge (1986) dir. Tim Hunter

Kids (1995) dir. Larry Clark

Other slackers and burnouts on screen...

Out of the Blue (1980) dir. Dennis Hopper

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982) dir. Lou Adler

Bully (2001) dir. Larry Clark

Thirteen (2003) dir. Catherine Hardwicke

Under the Bridge (2005) by Rebecca Godfrey (book)

Fish tank (2009) dir. Andrea Arnold

White Girl (2016) dir. Elizabeth Wood

Skate Kitchen (2018) dir. Crystal Moselle

*I would like to clarify that I have no beef with these films being labelled teensploitation, I just feel they are lumped into this genre as a way of delegitimizing the emotional empathy these films have for being a teen! No faux angst here, it's all raw teen terror!

technology + gender

Exploration on how technology and its relationship to gender is portrayed on screen! There's a focus on Ex Machina, Her and Videodrome  mainly due to the fact I wrote my dissertation on these films. Was meant to focus more on Tetsuo the Iron Man as it works a lot better for the arguments I'm making but there wasn't enough time to do it justice.

Main theme for the show is the 'double male fear of technology and women' as Andreas Huyssen wrote in their essay The Vamp and the Machine about Fritz Lang's Metropolis (the first cinematic cyborg is featured in this!). The crux of this show is that in cinema, fear of women gets ascribed to the technological body. There's no key text for this show as a lot of my views and analysis are informed by a lot of late 90's cyber feminism and general gender theory. Would recommend checking out this Guardian long read on accelerationism if you're not familiar with it. It's a viewpoint I engage with a bit on this show but in general I think it's really fascinating and relevant for right now. I also highly recommend reading Donna Haraway's The Cyborg Manifesto  as is very relevant to this show as well as being all round pretty inspiring stuff!! A lot of academics dismiss Haraway as being way too theoretical and fantastical but I think it works very well to inspire; after all it is meant to be a manifesto and a myth...

Some more essays on the cinematic cyborg that I've enjoyed;

Ex-Machina and the Feminine Body through Human and Posthuman Dystopia

“You bet she can fuck” – Trends in Female AI Narratives within Mainstream Cinema: Ex Machina and Her

David Cronenberg: Virtual Exhibition

Diseased Umby Cord from eXistenZ

Films referenced...

Videodrome (1983) dir. David Cronenberg

Her (2013) dir. Spike Jonze

Ex Machina (2015) dir. Alex Garland

Other sexy tech films...

Metropolis (1927) dir. Fritz Lang

Shivers (1975), Crash (1996) and eXistenZ (1999) all directed by David Cronenberg

the entire Alien series 

After Hours (1985) dir. Martin Scorsese*

Tetsuo the Iron Man (1989) dir. Shinya Tskumato

Ghost in the Shell (1995) dir. Mamoru Oshii

Lost Highway (1997) dir. David Lynch*

Cam (2018) dir. Daniel Goldhaber

*not sci fi films but certainly about emasculation in the face of modernity/urbanisation like in Tetsuo so fit the themes! After Hours has undercurrent themes of yuppies/the modern man being emasculated so his clerical/data entry work is particularly fitting (typing has historically been a 'women's' job for various reasons since the 1870's and culturally the work is still heavily 'feminised' - a perfect example of Husseyn's double bind in action). Check out Zizek's analysis of Lost Highway to see why I've included it... mainly for the observation that the protagonist 'is terrified of the enigma that is his wife' and it fit's into the discussion around male inertia and impotency 

Teenage Apocalypse Series

Looking at Greg Araki's Teenage Apocalypse series as part of a wave of queer cinema released in the late 80's and early 90's. I was joined by my good friend Conor Toner for this one; we talk about the new queer cinema movement and millennial anxiety. The primary text we discussed was Queer Temporal Camp by Dustin Bradley Goltz and secondary sources were Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag and Linda Hutcheon's Theory of Parody.

New Queer Cinema was a wave of mostly American and British independent films released in the late 80's and early 90's. Socio-politically they're partially a response to Reagan and Thatcher and growing conservatism of the 80's; Araki's films for me hit all the same points as a Bret Easton Ellis novel but way less self indulgent. They are brash, garish and sexy! They are overtly political but also disaffected and absent! They're films for outsiders and have a no care for assimilation into mainstream culture (despite a lot of these directors now being Hollywood staples). If you wanna watch more new queer cinema I recommend these lists; BFI intro to New Queer Cinema  and a brief history of the scene on Vulture. I  also recommend this very thorough article on The Doom Generation frog Dazed which features interviews with the director Greg Araki as well as the 2 stars of the film Rose McGowan and James Duvall which you can read here!

Queer Temporal Camp is the big essay for this show and is a real exciting read! It's about how time is treated on screen; the argument in brief is that cinema usually engages with a straight timeline which suggest the course of life in a narrative fits into the following stages: grow up, mature, copulate, have children and die. This heteronormative structure can be found in almost all film really, there is almost no other option. Consequently, a lot of queer film also follows this trajectory and like the move to legalise gay marriage as the focal point for gay rights, it's about a culture of assimilation. Queer temporality is about portraying and imagining a non heteronormative timeline; where do our characters go if they cannot marry, reproduce or even have a lifespan past 30 in light of the AIDS crisis (this is quite a contextual article as obviously gay marriage is legal, HIV is no longer a death sentence and IVF exists; though I'd like to stress that even though options like IVF exist; why the presumption that a life must include the nuclear family/that the only valid family is genetic? What real purpose does marriage serve?) Consequently, this essay examines how Araki presents a 'queer' sense of time and uses camp to undermine and interrogate 'straight time'.

press shot from The Doom Generation

Film's referenced

All directed by Greg Araki; The Teenage Apocalypse Series

Totally Fucked Up (1993) 

The Doom Generation (1995) 

Nowhere (1997) 

More 'New Queer Cinema' 2 watch...

Born in Flames (1983) dir. Lizzie Borden

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987) dir. Todd Hayne

Tongues Untied (1989) dir. Marlon Riggs

Looking for Langston (1989) and Young Soul Rebels (1991) dir. Julien Isaacs

My Own Private Idaho (1991) dir. By Gus Van Sant

The Living End (1991) dir. Greg Araki

Go Fish (1994) dir. Rose Troche

The Watermelon Woman (1996) dir. Cheryl Dunye

But I'm a Cheerleader (1999) dir. Jamie Babbit

Slashers

Examining the Slasher genre! Specifically looking at audience reception and trying to debunk the myth that only horny teenage boys watch these. This show relies heavily on Carol J Clovers book  'Men, Women and Chainsaw's' (you can read the introduction here) and Linda Williams theory of 'jerk cinema' (which you can read in full here).

I mostly discuss Carol J Clover's theory of the bisexual spectator and the gender confusion that is implicit in 'male' viewers of slashers. She suggests the viewers are bisexual (outdated terminology which I have interpreted as meaning androgynous/gender neutral) as the slasher genre is narratively fixated on women's trauma and the women's perspective in this trauma. Clover suggests that the teen boy spectator is forced to identify with the 'final girl' due to them being the heroine of the film and there being an inability to identify with the villain due to use of masks/disfigurement and general dehumanisation. Therefore there is no choice but to identify with the 'final girl' of the film (who is usually pretty virginal and androgynous; Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween is the traditional example). Therefore these films suggests an ability to see outside of there gendered perspective and that these films have the potential to transgress the hegemonic male teen perspective and are more than just voyeurism n sadism. Also a fun note is that Clover came up with the term final girl so is well worth a read of this book!

One thing that was left out of this show was a discussion of 'final boys' which are unconventional but really very exciting when they do occur cause it's even more gender muddling. The only occurrences I've come across are in Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Final Destination and The Evil Dead; I think its something I'd like to come back too on a another show I reckon! It's also not a conversation I come across much aside from the documentary about the gay subtext of Nightmare on Elm Street 2 called Scream Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street and this article on the Final Destination series which is more about the existential factor of slashers. 

(if anyone has any suggestions on final boys please get in touch!).

This chart here is taken from Linda Williams essay Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess which I refer to throughout. It's not too dense and also examines pornography and melodrama so is a lot of fun if you're into any of those! She discusses the displacement of sex in horror and its relationship to what she calls the three 'body genres' which is what this chart is displaying. To summarise, she defines a body genre as being something that makes you physically 'jerk'; so to masturbate and be aroused with pornography, to convulse in fear and excitement in slashers/body horror films and finally the tears that are evoked by melodramas. She focuses on these three genres as they are usually deemed as low culture and are dismissed by the excess they portray. 

This theory nicely links up with contemporary critical reactions to slashers which often compared it to pornography due to the use of screaming in these films (wonderfully satirised in The Slumber Party Massacre when a bunch of boys utter the line 'women love to scream!'), the presence of excessive nudity and sex as well as the camera techniques used to make a lot of these films. 70's exploitation films such as Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left  and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre both use camera angles associated with early hardcore pornography such as handheld footage etc. As Linda Williams points out in the essay though, this 'pornographic' element of slashers is hardly unique to the genre; filmmaking is rooted in the sex industry and most peoples disgust at the genre is due to its focus on the 'excess' and 'grossness'.

Films referenced 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre dir. Tobe Hooper (1974) 

The Slumber Part Massacre dir. Amy Holden Jones (1982)

Midsommar dir. Ari Aster (2019)

Other films 2 watch in relation to slashers...

Halloween (1978) dir. John Carpenter 

Alien (1979) dir. Ridley Scott

The Evil Dead (1981) dir. Sam Raimi

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) dir. Wes Craven

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) dir. Wes Craven

Final Destination (2000) dir. James Wong

It Follows (2014) dir. David Robert Mitchell

Witches and the abject

First show for Sable, and in the tradition of October being Halloween the entire month I thought I'd start with witches on film! Rather than a comprehensive history of the witch on screen I wanted to focus on the following three films in detail, specifically in relation to Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject.

Julia Kristeva - The Powers of Horror

Pretty sure that's the entire book linked up there! A quick summary is that it is an object or something that disturbs identity, system and order. It's related to the uncanny but it's way more violent. Kristeva suggests that certain individuals possess an abject quality and it is why we are repulsed by certain things and feel 'horror'. The famous metaphor Kristeva uses is the skin on boiled milk. The skin on boiled milk is 'abject' as its almost inexplicably gross, and the revulsion we typically feel is because the skin on the milk is a liminal and in theory reminds us of our own corporeality. It makes us hyper aware of our existence and it freaks us out; that feeling is the feeling of abjection! I would like to be able to explain this metaphor better but its dense and this webpage does a better job than I do.

But the reason I wanted to discuss it is because I feel it resonates with modern films representation of witches! Witches are a well known symbol and historical account of how if women stray from the hegemonic ideal they are totally vilified and punished. All of these films treat the relationship to magic as a dubious path for our heroines and The Craft and The Witch really stray into boring moralistic territory which I'm not bothered about...

Other big inspiration for this show is that witchcraft is something that feels like a very feminine response to trauma and I'm intrigued by what feels like renewed interest in witchcraft. Is it a collective response to the collective trauma of the modern age? Trauma runs through all three films discussed but I do hate that all three portray witchcraft as patriarchal. I'm not keen to claim that 2 male directors has lead to the patriarchal portrayal of witchcraft in The Craft and The Witch as I think that's just gender essentialism and reductive. The Love Witch actually critiques this which is nothing but credit to Anna Biller being queen of pastiche and parody (I thought about Linda Hutcheon's theory of parody for this, read here ) Her take on witchcraft being centred on cults and new age mysticism means it resonates loads with our current girl boss neo lib post feminism nightmare.

Films referenced 

The Craft (1996) dir. Andrew Fleming

The Witch (2015) dir. Robert Eggers

The Love Witch (2016) dir. Anna Biller

Other films 2 watch in regards to witches, cults and the abject...

Rosemary's Baby (1968) dir. Roman Polanski

Belladonna of Sadness (1973) dir. Eiichi Yamamoto

Suspiria (1977) dir. Dario Argento

Practical Magic (1988) dir. Griffin Dunne

Jennifer's Body (2009) dir. Karyn Kusama