The Illusion of Depth

What's the Opposite of Vertigo ?  In 1975, film theorist Laura Mulvey published her landmark essay, Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema , in which she argues that the very act of watching a film is inherently masculine. The pleasure an audience derives from watching characters on a screen (she asserts) is a voyeuristic pleasure that turns those characters (female characters in particular) into objects for our satisfaction. It was this paper that was to popularise the term "Male Gaze". In backing up her idea, Laura Mulvey cited several films that are essentially built around the notion of voyeurism; most of them directed by Alfred Hitchcock (which possibly tells you more about Hitchcock than it tells you about cinema in general). Chief among those films was his 1958 masterpiece Vertigo . Much has been written about Vertigo over the decades, and I am not about to get drawn into all of that right now. For our current purposes, Vertigo tells the story of a retired detective w...

 Our current film series (as you probably know) has been focusing on Ordinary Ladies .  The films I have selected thus far have all explored this idea in various ways. From the housewife of The Reckless Moment (and its remake) to the little old lady of The Lady Killers ,   the convicted murderer of Yield to the Night  and the grieving widow-turned-politician of The Years Between , these ladies have all, in their own disparate ways, been ordinary . They do not have super-powers, they are not seductresses or vixens, and they are not content to exist on the margins of their stories, as merely the objects of central male characters. Beyond all of that, it must be said that the Ordinary Ladies  we have seen thus far have all had one additional thing in common. They are all female. I am not saying this to be funny or snarky or provocative. I am acknowledging that the concept of gender is a lot fuzzier than you might think. J. K. Rowling got herself into serious ...

 Our last film featured Gemma Arterton and Sam Claflin as a pair of writers who collaborate (very successfully) on a film about the evacuation of Dunkirk.  Although their characters are fictional (and one of them doesn't survive!) it is very easy to imagine that, had their collaboration continued, they would have become the real-life writing team of Muriel and Sydney Box. The Boxes were a very successful and talented husband-and-wife writing team who collaborated on numerous British post-war films. Muriel was also one of the very, very few female directors of her generation (or indeed any other generation; film directing is still an overwhelmingly male undertaking). Next Thursday's film is their adaptation of a stage play by Daphne Du Maurier, and (if it were up to me) one of the great feminist classics of all time. The Years Between tells the story of Diana Wentworth, the wife of a popular and beloved MP who is killed in the early stages of the war, leaving her devastated an...

 A few years ago, hotshot director Christopher Nolan released an epic film about the evacuation of Dunkirk during the Second World War; imaginatively titled Dunkirk . Over the next few weeks, I plan to feature several films that deal with World War II in various ways (all of which still fall within our theme of Ordinary Ladies ) and it seems only fitting to begin with a film that powerfully evokes this crucial moment of wartime history, when so many brave men and women came together to save the lives of so many thousands of soldiers. I'm joking, of course. Featuring Christopher Nolan in a series devoted to women is about as appropriate as including Leni Riefenstahl in a Jewish Film Festival (spoiler alert: it's not appropriate at all). Nolan may very well be a talented and visionary film-maker (I don't think he is, but I'm sure he would disagree with me) but one thing he absolutely does not do is treat women with any respect. The female characters in his films tend to ...

 Welcome back, everyone! Our weekly film nights may have taken a brief "Summer Recess" but we are now back for the Autumn Session, which will begin this Thursday, the 8th of September, at the Victoria Park Baptist Church. As you may recall, our current series has been a celebration of Ordinary Ladies , and we have some very special films lined up over the next couple of months. This Thursday's film is quite a recent one (at least by my standards). Colossal was released in 2016 and stars Anne Hathaway as a young woman who has hit a bit of a low point in her life. Her boyfriend has thrown her out (because of her heavy drinking) and she has been forced to move back into her parents' (vacant) old house while she tries to sort herself out.  Then things get really odd. Although it may look like a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster, Colossal is actually anything but. It was written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo, a brilliant and highly idiosyncratic Spanish film-maker (His 2...

 Some of you will probably recall that the inaugural film in our current series (Ordinary Ladies) was The Reckless Moment , a 1949 drama directed by Max Ophuls in which Joan Bennett plays a housewife who thinks (incorrectly) that her daughter has just murdered her deadbeat boyfriend (The daughter's boyfriend, that is; not Joan Bennett's boyfriend. Damn those misplaced modifiers!). In an effort to protect her daughter, she disposes of the body and hides any evidence of the death; and that's when the trouble really starts. As I say, that was the film that we showed back in June (if you would like to refresh your memory, please click here ). Our next film (on the 28th of July) is a remake of that film, released in 2001 and starring Tilda Swinton in the Joan Bennett role. The Deep End marks the first time I will be showing a film and its remake in the same series, but in this instance I feel that the two films compliment each other beautifully. (Also, if you want to be hyper-p...

Last week, I promised everyone a double-bill of "Blonde Bombshells", and true to my word, here is Bombshell #2. On the surface, Diana Dors might seem to be an odd choice for a series about "Ordinary Ladies". Like many bombshells of the era, her public image was very carefully constructed: the platinum blonde hair; the brutal corset; the weaponised underwear - all of which added up to a "performance" of womanhood that is only remotely plausible if you define "woman" as "Barbie Doll". It's no coincidence that Diana Dors was often described as "The English Marilyn". Like Marilyn Monroe, there was nothing natural or spontaneous about her appearance. Hours of work went into the presentation of her persona, and the end result was "woman" as "object". She was a thing , on display the visual pleasure of others, like so many sex objects before and since. All of which is what makes Yield to the Night so surprisi...