JournalTOCs

Screen
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.222

Number of Followers: 17

Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
ISSN (Print) 0036-9543 - ISSN (Online) 1460-2474
Published by Oxford University Press

[419 journals]

Techno-flowers: entwinements of technology and nature in The Birth of a
Flower and Little Joe
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  Authors: Cooper S.
  Pages: 1 - 21
  Abstract: The UK general release of Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s first English-language feature, Little Joe (2019), coincided at the London BFI Southbank in February 2020 with the launch of a major retrospective of her work, and was accompanied by an extract from the early British natural history film, The Birth of a Flower (F. Percy Smith, 1910). Smith’s pioneering short, made as part of the Urban Science series run by film producer and distributor Charles Urban, comprises colour-tinted time-lapse footage of a succession of flowers unfurling on camera.11 Its subject matter therefore made it an appropriate, if enigmatic, precursor to the different kind of flowers birthed in Hausner’s darkly comic genre-bending arthouse twist on sci-fi plant horror. The full version of The Birth of a Flower has since been included on the BFI BluRay/DVD release of Little Joe, inviting an audience beyond that of the initial London screenings to view them side by side. The Little Joe flowers in Hausner’s film are made by hand and then digitally manipulated; moreover, as the narrative unfolds they are genetically engineered and mass-produced identically under laboratory conditions in order that they exude a scent to make those who possess them happy. In contrast to Smith’s sole focus on the speed-magnified filming in silence of a range of flowers, the Little Joes’ identical, fiery red blooms open out audibly as well as visibly on camera, in various settings and as part of a broader tale of intrigue in which a host of political dynamics are addressed. The films are therefore very different, but the distinction between their respective flowers is not as great as may at first appear. It is the relation between the flowers of these two films that interests me in this essay, even as my discussion of Little Joe ranges more widely. While the earlier film deals with real flowers rather than deploying those that are handmade and digitally enhanced, it does engage in its own practices of artifice, and these are illuminated through juxtaposition with the later film. As I shall argue, it is not the filmic mediation of nature that is witnessed in The Birth of a Flower but the performative constitution of flowers in the land of technology. These ‘techno-flowers’, which come to matter through the filmic manipulation of space and time, are the not-so-distant relatives of Little Joe, and also relate to myriad others within the history of visual culture.
  PubDate: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT
  DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjac004
  Issue No: Vol. 63, No. 1 (2022)
Post-war girlhoods: Jill Craigie, British social realism and local stardom
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  Authors: Price H.
  Pages: 22 - 46
  Abstract: On the BBC’s West of England Home Service in 1947, filmmaker and guest film reviewer Jill Craigie declared that one of her conceptions of a good film was that it should be ‘indigenous in character’.11 Her recent film The Way We Live had focused on the plan for rebuilding Plymouth; it was highly praised by newspaper critics, and when shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946 was deemed ‘one of the best examples of documentary film art’.22 It proceeded to be screened widely in cinemas as well as to housing groups, town councils and film societies.33 The following year, Illustrated magazine featured an article titled ‘Independent Miss Craigie’, announcing that ‘the girl who caused a sensation in art and housing circles with her first two films is now in the hills of Wales, ferreting out those details, sometimes humorous, sometimes sad, which she relies on so much to give her work an authentic flavour’.44 The article is accompanied by photos of Craigie talking to miners in a bar, photographing the industrial landscape from a hilltop (figure 1), observing as a miner receives first aid, and sitting in the corner of a miner’s living room as his daughters sing, and play piano and violin. Film historian David Berry notes that, compared to other mining features, Craigie’s first and only feature film Blue Scar ‘sought its inspiration in the actual urban Wales of the period’.55 An independent production, it was part-funded by the National Coal Board (NCB) and filmed on location in the small mining village of Abergwynfi, in a makeshift studio built in a derelict cinema in Port Talbot, and at a number of collieries in the surrounding area. Basing herself in Abergwynfi for three months to write the script, Craigie was intent on representing the experiences of miners’ daughters. In Illustrated’s interview she vividly imagines their point of view, leading the writer to suggest ‘the girls of Wales have Miss Craigie’s profoundest sympathy’, and emphasizing Craigie’s attention to young women’s lives as part of her local research and production methods.66
  PubDate: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT
  DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjac003
  Issue No: Vol. 63, No. 1 (2022)
The sartorial Islamic Baroque: folded feminisms in the experimental cinema
of Mania Akbari and Ana Nyma (Anonyme)
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  Authors: Shilina-Conte T.
  Pages: 47 - 67
  Abstract: The system of sartorial modesty, or hijab, is pervasive in Iranian culture, which in turn has had a considerable impact on the organization of codes in Iranian cinema. Due to strict government censorship, Iranian directors often rely on veiled allegories, and the work of notable male Iranian filmmakers, such as Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, has been widely discussed in this context.11 Even though the creative output of Iranian women directors has enjoyed comparable attention, for the most part existing film criticism touches upon the work of more famous arthouse filmmakers, such as Rakhshan Banietemad and Samira Makhmalbaf. In this essay I compare two less well-known Iranian experimental women directors, Mania Akbari and Ana Nyma (Anonyme, or Anonymous),22 placing their artistic practices within a discussion of global perspectives on feminist theory, multiplicities of feminism in a transnational setting, and renewed questions of women’s agency, activism and authorship in different locales.
  PubDate: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT
  DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjac001
  Issue No: Vol. 63, No. 1 (2022)
Filming-gardening in the neoliberal age: ambivalences in the life and work
of Anne Charlotte Robertson
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  Authors: Voelcker B.
  Pages: 68 - 91
  Abstract: ‘Making my diary has literally saved my life’, wrote the Massachusetts filmmaker and gardener Anne Charlotte Robertson (1949–2012).11 Taking personal responsibility for her well-being during episodes of mental illness, Robertson gardened and filmed her garden as a form of diary. This practice culminated in her magnum opus, Five Year Diary, an autobiographical film begun in 1981 and ending far later than its title anticipated, in 1997. At over 36 hours spread across 84 Super-8 reels, the film documents 16 years of Robertson’s life, foregrounding the therapeutic and environmental benefits of organic gardening. The Diary is shot handheld, often in rapid takes, roving and cutting between house, garden, plants and vegetable preparation in the kitchen. For Robertson, being well meant being in the garden, with a camera in one hand and seeds in the other, responding to changes in light, to flowers blossoming, tomatoes ripening or compost maturing.22
  PubDate: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT
  DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjac005
  Issue No: Vol. 63, No. 1 (2022)
Projecting Cavell: new contexts, new questions Introduction
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  Authors: Rennebohm K; Wheatley C.
  Pages: 92 - 99
  PubDate: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT
  DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjac002
  Issue No: Vol. 63, No. 1 (2022)
Hollywood’s white privacy: Stanley Cavell and James Baldwin
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  Authors: Fay J.
  Pages: 100 - 106
  Abstract: I have a fantasy of discovering archival television footage in which Stanley Cavell and James Baldwin talk about their respective philosophies of film, their modes of autobiographical writing, and maybe also their shared fixation on Bette Davis. While I have no evidence that Cavell and Baldwin read, much less responded to, each other’s work, this essay puts them in conversation around the nettlesome question of privacy and its gendered and racialized dimensions on film. In his books The World Viewed and Contesting Tears, Cavell poses a series of questions about character and privacy that Baldwin both answers and complicates in his philosophical memoir The Devil Finds Work, a reflection on Hollywood written in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.11 At the same time, Cavell’s elaboration of privacy, especially as it relates to the character of the ‘unknown woman’, suggests something of his own politics of world refusal. In my contribution to this dossier I bring Cavell’s reading of Now Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) to bear on Baldwin’s reading of Lady Sings the Blues (Sidney J. Furie, 1972) in an attempt to tease out the vicissitudes of white privacy, and what is at stake for a character and her world when this cinematic right is denied.
  PubDate: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT
  DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjac006
  Issue No: Vol. 63, No. 1 (2022)
Orders from an unborn baby: maternal scepticism, vengeance and
voicelessness in Alice Lowe’s Prevenge
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  Authors: Devereaux M.
  Pages: 107 - 114
  Abstract: In his discussion of the ‘melodramas of the unknown woman’, Cavell writes that melodrama and tragedy both ‘classically tell stories of revenge’, and that ‘philosophical skepticism will in return be readable as such a story, a kind of violence the human mind performs in response to its discovery of its limitation or exclusion, its sense of rebuff by truth’.11 For the sceptic, the fact that we cannot access fundamental truths about the nature of reality and ‘other minds’ leads to a shrinking away from life. As a result, the sceptic ‘haunt[s] the world’,22 unable to rectify the desire to be known and acknowledge others with the fear of these very same things. Evoking the pre-symbolic realm, Cavell describes such a state as a craving for the ‘nothingness’ of our existence before language and its attendant ‘games’.33 Provocatively, he hypothesises it as a gendered experience, suggesting it is not that
  PubDate: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT
  DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjac007
  Issue No: Vol. 63, No. 1 (2022)
Stanley Cavell and the queer thought of movies
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  Authors: Wallace L.
  Pages: 115 - 122
  Abstract: Stanley Cavell is not usually counted among queer theory’s fellow travellers, but his account of film’s capacity to capture the extraordinary in the ordinary, including the ordinary of married life, is an exceptional resource for thinking about queer attachment in the era of marriage equality.11 In the context of the invitation to contribute to this Screen dossier, I re-read his essay ‘The thought of movies’, which is typical of his occasional writings on film.22 From the outset Cavell establishes an intensely personal voice that slides between the first-persons singular and plural, thereby collectivizing the idiosyncratic observations being put forward. Autobiographical details are used throughout to anchor otherwise abstract claims. Seemingly arbitrary textual objects are described in terms both diegetically exact and thematically free-ranging. The occasion behind his essay – in this case a lecture for the American Film Institute (AFI) – is used to justify the near-verbatim recycling of ideas and arguments from previous publications. And all of this is underwritten by an unshakeable confidence that the resumption and extension of a formerly disputed idea will now find readerly agreement. While these are all mimicable traits – like impersonating a movie star, to use a Cavellian example – a faithfulness to Cavell does not require fidelity to his critical style. Instead it requires adherence to his method of bringing into the space of textual interpretation experiential vectors that may generate unexpected recognitions, these being more widely applicable than the individual films or personal circumstances to which they were initially attached. That is the autotheoretical invitation of his work.33
  PubDate: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT
  DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjac010
  Issue No: Vol. 63, No. 1 (2022)
Found footage at the receding of the world
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  Authors: Davies B.
  Pages: 123 - 129
  Abstract: Of the various developments following the recent and ongoing reassessments of Stanley Cavell’s writing on film, one of the most important has been some scholars’ proposal of a greater rapprochement between Cavell’s thought and experimental or non-narrative cinema. Increasingly such scholars are recognizing that despite Cavell’s seeming disavowal of experimental film, the implications his writing bears for it are substantial.11 So far, however, there has been no explicit accounting of Cavell’s relationship to one of the characteristic techniques of experimental cinema, namely the substantial or exclusive reliance on found or repurposed footage. There are several reasons for regarding this omission as a missed opportunity. Cavell’s emphasis on film’s capacity to displace persons and things, and thus for it to facilitate a certain reflexivity among things screened, raises questions about what becomes of footage when it is displaced from its original context.22 Additionally, experimental cinema’s reappropriation of images from Hollywood films has often functioned, albeit sometimes at the level of parody, to probe themes central to the opening chapters of Cavell’s The World Viewed. Here the principal example would be Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958), with its explorations of what Cavell formulates as Hollywood’s reliance on types and typicality, though the variety of cases examined by William Wees in his work on found footage and movie stars would also be relevant to Cavell’s concerns with stardom.33 Finally, Cavell’s frequent noting of narrative films’ reliance on archival or stock footage, expressed most evocatively in his remarks in The World Viewed on François Truffaut’s use of newsreel footage in Jules et Jim (1962), points toward lines of thought in his work that still await further examination.44
  PubDate: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT
  DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjac009
  Issue No: Vol. 63, No. 1 (2022)
The digital human something; or, the case of Miquela
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  Authors: Stevens K.
  Pages: 130 - 136
  Abstract: The major Hollywood casting agency CAA recently signed a new performer, Miquela, a young woman who identifies as queer and multi-ethnic. She is also digital. Miquela rose to fame as a ‘virtual influencer’, one of several such figures on social media who share their seeming-lives with millions of followers. She makes music, has a biologically human boyfriend, and even takes selfies in moisturizing face masks. Miquela is part of a growing population of virtual people that includes not just influencers but companions, therapists, hologram performers and individuals in deep fakes. In this essay I ask what happens when we encounter what I call a ‘digital human’ in screen fiction. What does it mean to label such a figure young, queer or multi-ethnic' What is the fate of identitarian political representation in the age of the digital character'
  PubDate: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT
  DOI: 10.1093/screen/hjac008
  Issue No: Vol. 63, No. 1 (2022)