Gendering History on Screen: Women Filmmakers and Historical Films 9781784535285, 9781786724267, 9781786734266

Table of contents :
Cover
Author Biography
Library of Gender and Popular Culture
Published and forthcoming titles
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Series Editors’ Foreword
Introduction
Chapter Summary
1 Women Writing History Through Film
Women Writing History: Contexts and Opportunities
Performative Authorship
History on Film: from Robert Rosenstone to A League of Their Own
‘Citable in all its Moments’: In-between Spaces and Sewing Machines
Conclusion
2 Reclaiming Undeserving Women: Contemporary Female Biopics
From Positive Images to Undeserving Subjects: A Place for Women?
Oppositional Medicine: The Case of Augustine
Class and Voice: Ambiguity in Monster
Affect and Ageing: The Iron Lady
3 Feminist First-Person Documentaries: Migration, Internment, Reconciliation
First-Person Documentary: Terms and Terrain
First-Person Documentary: Women Directors
Performing Memory
4 Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films
Complicating Collaboration
Europeanising the Holocaust
Reconfiguring Resistance
Women and Resistance
Mimicry and Doubling
Vergangenheitsbewältigung
5 Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies
The Paradox of Exceptionalism
Gendering the War ‘Back Home’
Movies from the Periphery: Occupation
Conclusion
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

Julia Erhart is Associate Professor in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. Her research focuses on contemporary women filmmakers and feminist and LGBT representations in film and television. She is the recipient of a grant from the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2016), a Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning from the Australian Office for Learning and Teaching (2014), and a fellowship from Fulbright (2000).

‘Drawing on insightful readings of a diverse array of films including Monster, Nadar, La rafle/The Round Up and Zero Dark Thirty, Erhart has crafted an eminently readable study of how female directors reshape historical film to make room for women’s perspectives’. Julianne Pidduck, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, the University of Montreal and author of Contemporary Costume Film

Library of Gender and Popular Culture From Mad Men to gaming culture, performance art to steam-punk fashion, the presentation and representation of gender continues to saturate popular media. This new series seeks to explore the intersection of gender and popular culture, engaging with a variety of texts – drawn primarily from Art, Fashion, TV, Cinema, Cultural Studies and Media Studies – as a way of considering various models for understanding the complementary relationship between ‘gender identities’ and ‘popular culture’. By considering race, ethnicity, class, and sexual identities across a range of cultural forms, each book in the series will adopt a critical stance towards issues surrounding the development of gender identities and popular and mass cultural ‘products’.

For further information or enquiries, please contact the library series editors: Claire Nally: [email protected] Angela Smith: [email protected] Advisory Board:

Dr Kate Ames, Central Queensland University, Australia Prof Leslie Heywood, Binghampton University, USA Dr Michael Higgins, Strathclyde University, UK Prof Åsa Kroon, Örebro University, Sweden Dr Niall Richardson, Sussex University, UK Dr Jacki Willson, Central St Martins, University of Arts London, UK

Published and forthcoming titles: The Aesthetics of Camp: Post-Queer Gender and Popular Culture By Anna Malinowska

The Gypsy Woman: Representations in Literature and Visual Culture By Jodie Matthews

Ageing Femininity on Screen: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema By Niall Richardson

Love Wars: Television Romantic Comedy By Mary Irwin

All-American TV Crime Drama: Feminism and Identity Politics in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit By Sujata Moorti and Lisa Cuklanz Bad Girls, Dirty Bodies: Sex, Performance and Safe Femininity By Gemma Commane Beyoncé: Celebrity Feminism in the Age of Social Media By Kirsty Fairclough-Isaacs Conflicting Masculinities: Men in Television Period Drama By Katherine Byrne, Julie Anne Taddeo and James Leggott (Eds) Fathers on Film: Paternity and Masculinity in 1990s Hollywood By Katie Barnett

Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future By Marianne Kac-Vergne Moving to the Mainstream: Women On and Off Screen in Television and Film By Marianne Kac-Vergne and Julie Assouly (Eds) Paradoxical Pleasures: Female Submission in Popular and Erotic Fiction By Anna Watz Positive Images: Gay Men and HIV/AIDS in the Culture of ‘Post-Crisis’ By Dion Kagan Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins By Darren Elliott-Smith Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy By Shane Brown

Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema By Katharina Lindner

Steampunk: Gender and the Neo-Victorian By Claire Nally

Gay Pornography: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity By John Mercer

Television Comedy and Femininity: Queering Gender By Rosie White

Gender and Austerity in Popular Culture: Femininity, Masculinity and Recession in Film and Television By Helen Davies and Claire O’Callaghan (Eds) The Gendered Motorcycle: Representations in Society, Media and Popular Culture By Esperanza Miyake Gendering History on Screen: Women Filmmakers and Historical Films By Julia Erhart Girls Like This, Boys Like That: The Reproduction of Gender in Contemporary Youth Cultures By Victoria Cann

Television, Technology and Gender: New Platforms and New Audiences By Sarah Arnold Tweenhood: Femininity and Celebrity in Tween Popular Culture By Melanie Kennedy Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Post-Feminist Film and Television By David Roche and Cristelle Maury (Eds) Wonder Woman: Feminism, Culture and the Body By Joan Ormrod Young Women in Contemporary Cinema: Gender and Post-feminism in British Film By Sarah Hill

Gendering History on Screen Women Filmmakers and Historical Films Julia Erhart

Published in 2018 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2018 Julia Erhart The right of Julia Erhart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. Library of Gender and Popular Culture 15 ISBN: 978 1 78453 528 5 eISBN: 978 1 78672 426 7 ePDF: 978 1 78673 426 6 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Minion Pro by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

To the memory of my parents, Chuck and Sylvia Erhart

Contents xi xiii xvii

List of Figures Acknowledgements Series Editors’ Foreword

1 5

Introduction Chapter Summary 1

2

3

Women Writing History Through Film Women Writing History: Contexts and Opportunities Performative Authorship History on Film: from Robert Rosenstone to A League of Their Own ‘Citable in all its Moments’: In-between Spaces and Sewing Machines Conclusion Reclaiming Undeserving Women: Contemporary Female Biopics From Positive Images to Undeserving Subjects: A Place for Women? Oppositional Medicine: The Case of Augustine Class and Voice: Ambiguity in Monster Affect and Ageing: The Iron Lady Feminist First-Person Documentaries: Migration, Internment, Reconciliation First-Person Documentary: Terms and Terrain First-Person Documentary: Women Directors Performing Memory

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9 11 13 17 25 33 35 38 40 48 57 63 65 66 89

Gendering History on Screen 4

5

Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films Complicating Collaboration Europeanising the Holocaust Reconfiguring Resistance Women and Resistance Mimicry and Doubling Vergangenheitsbewältigung

93 95 98 101 104 107 113

Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies The Paradox of Exceptionalism Gendering the War ‘Back Home’ Movies from the Periphery: Occupation Conclusion

121 125 138 145 153

Conclusion

155

Notes Bibliography Filmography Index

159 183 197 201

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List of Figures Figure 1.1 A League of Their Own. Columbia Pictures, 1992. Dir. Penny Marshall.

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Figure 1.2 Empathetic humour. The Watermelon Woman. Dancing Girl Productions, 1996. Dir. Cheryl Dunye.

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Figure 2.1 The spectacle of hysteria. Augustine. Dharamsala, 2012. Dir. Alice Winocour.

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Figure 2.2 Self-spectacularisation: the final episode. Augustine. Dharamsala, 2012. Dir. Alice Winocour.

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Figure 2.3 Lee: ‘I had a lot of dreams’. Monster. Media 8 Entertainment, 2003. Dir. Patty Jenkins.

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Figure 2.4 Depicting decline. The Iron Lady. Pathe and Film Four, 2011. Dir. Phyllida Lloyd.

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Figure 3.1 Footage from a prior, uncompleted documentary. Once My Mother. Change Focus Media and Screen Australia, 2013. Dir. Sophia Turkiewicz.

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Figure 3.2 Watching home movies. Halving the Bones. Women Make Movies, 1995. Dir. Ruth Ozeki.

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Figure 3.3 Dialogic documentation. I for India. Fandango and Zero West GmbH, 2005. Dir. Sandhya Suri.

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Figure 3.4 Searching for Sophia's mother's home. Once My Mother. Change Focus Media and Screen Australia, 2013. Dir. Sophia Turkiewicz.

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Figure 4.1 November Moon. Ottokar Runze Film GmbH, 1985. Dir. Alexandra von Grote.

97

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Gendering History on Screen Figure 4.2 After overcoming the guard. Charlotte Gray. Ecosse Films and Film Four, 2001. Dir. Gillian Armstrong.

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Figure 4.3 Charlotte authors a letter to the boys. Charlotte Gray. Ecosse Films and Film Four, 2001. Dir. Gillian Armstrong.

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Figure 4.4 Recovering the story of the angel. November Moon. Ottokar Runze Film GmbH, 1985. Dir. Alexandra von Grote.

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Figure 5.1 Female exceptionalism: Maya approaches Bin Laden's body. Zero Dark Thirty. Columbia Pictures, 2012. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow.

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Figure 5.2 Spc. Rebecca Nava in the arms room, Fort Riley, Kansas. Lioness. Room 11 Productions, 2008. Dir. Meg McLagen and Daria Sommers. Photograph by Julia Dengel.

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Figure 5.3 Brothers. Zentropa, 2004. Dir. Susanne Bier. Photograph by Erik Aavatsmark.

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Figure 5.4 Kelli re-negotiates the consumer sphere. Return. Fork Films, 2011. Dir. Liza Johnson.

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Figure 5.5 Layla poses a question to her cabinet and to Mr Bush. My Home, Your War. Denoux Films, 2006. Dir. Kylie Grey.

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Figure 5.6 ‘God, Construction and Destruction’ segment from 11’09”01: September 11. Makhmalbaf Film House, 2002. Dir. Samira Makhmalbaf.

151

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Acknowledgements This book has taken a long time to come to fruition and would not have been possible without the assistance of a great many people. Early inspiration for the book's theoretical ground came from seminars I attended at the University of California, Santa Cruz offered by Teresa de Lauretis, Donna Haraway, and Hayden White. I thank each of them for the richness and provocation of their ideas. I am indebted to long-standing colleagues Yvonne Keller and Victoria Smith for the candid feedback, camaraderie, and professional backing they offered in early and late stages of the project. Both Yvonne and Vicki read and responded to several iterations of the book and I can't thank them enough for that. Closer to home, I have benefited from the collegiality and friendship of a number of people in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. They include: Barbara Baird, Tully Barnett, Stefano Bona, Helen Carter, Kate Douglas, Nic Godfrey, Diana Glenn, Maria Luz Long, Richard Maltby, Will Peterson, Ruth Vasey, Karen Vered, Son Vivienne, Rossi von der Borch, and Alison Wotherspoon. I would like to thank the organisers of the Gender & Historical Film and Television symposium at the University of Minnesota for a supportive and intellectually stimulating weekend-long gathering at a time when my enthusiasm was beginning to flag, and for the opportunity to test many of the book's ideas out on a group of keen, like-minded scholars. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies and International Auto/biography Association conferences served as indispensable venues where versions of this research were also trialled. I am grateful to Susan Linville for her research and for the encouraging words she extended to me midway through the project. Special thanks are due to my graduate students, in particular Kath Dooley and Natalia Bornay, for bringing matters of gender, screen, and history to the table at just the right time. Pamela Graham shared her enthusiasm about historical media and offered invaluable assistance as a

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Gendering History on Screen research assistant. Flinders librarians Tim Ormsby, Aliese Millington, and Marion Brown were generous in lean times. Friends Gary Campbell, Vicki Crowley, Tanya Court, Liz Fotiadis, Keith Giles, Fiona Ryan, and Magdalena Zschokke distracted me at opportune moments with movie and dinner invitations. Funding for this research was received from the Australian Academy of the Humanities and from the Faculty of Education, Humanities, and Law at Flinders. The Department of Screen and Media supported my bid for sabbatical in the year the manuscript was being finished; all these measures deserve acknowledgement. This book would not exist without the incredible creativity of the filmmakers and producers. Deep thanks are owed to the people who engaged with this research and/or who provided images or permissions. These include Tristan Berge, Beth Freeman, Marcus Gillezeau, Sidsel Hybschmann, Liza Johnson, Alex Juhasz, Anders Kjærhauge, Maysam Makhmalbaf, Sophia Scheding, Molly Schulman, Daria Sommers, Sandhya Suri, and Alexandra von Grote. Sue Maslin, the producer of The Dressmaker, allowed me to use an image from her movie on the book's cover, which she didn't need to do. I wholeheartedly appreciate it! Lisa Goodrum, my editor at I.B.Tauris, was particularly helpful, efficient, and cheery at all periods of the editorial process, answering my many questions with grace and alacrity. Arub Ahmed, the book's production editor, made the words become reality. At the crucial proofreading stage, Pat Fitzgerald offered two seemingly incompatible things – care and speed. Series editors Angela Smith and Claire Nally encouraged me at the start of the project and helped me navigate the treacherous waters from proposal to contract. I would like to thank the author of an anonymous peer review I received 12 months prior to the book's publication; I hope I was able to take those recommendations on board and that Gendering History on Screen is a better book because of them. Neither of my parents lived to see this book appear in print: my mother, Sylvia Erhart, died 12 months (to the day) before the submission of the final draft of the manuscript, in a place that was ten time zones away; my father, Chuck Erhart, died eight years prior to that. I am grateful to both of them for their unwavering encouragement of me as an academic on the other side of the world, and to my siblings, nieces, and

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Acknowledgements in-laws on both sides of the Pacific. None of them ever fully understood what the research was about, but that never managed to dampen their enthusiasm. Finally, my deepest love and thanks go to my partner, Susan Bruce, for her unerring sense of perspective, staunch support, tolerance of my need to talk all the time about everything, willingness to be the household backbone, and most of all for her insistence on the value of life outside of work. I am grateful to Susan for never ceasing to remind me what a weekend is, and to our children Jackson and Kit, for being there to enjoy them with us. Portions of this book have appeared elsewhere. Some of Chapter 3 appeared in ‘Performing memory: compensation and redress in contemporary first-person documentary’, Screening the Past 13 (2001), pp. 1 –18. A portion of Chapter 4 appeared in ‘From Nazi whore to good German mother: revisiting resistance in the Holocaust film’, Screen 41.4 (winter 2000), pp. 388 –403 (the entirety of ‘From Nazi whore’ was reprinted in Queer Screen: A Screen Reader, edited by Jackie Stacey and Sarah Street (2007), pp. 146 –62).

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Series Editors’ Foreword In exploring how gender is represented in popular culture, it is often the case that the creators of such representations are overlooked. This is frequently the case in our approach to film, where very often the ‘star’ is the main actor, or, in an industry that is notoriously sexist, a male director. As a result, most often, we think of ‘women's films’ as being films for women rather than films by women. This book explores the role of the female director in creating historical films across a range of genres, including documentary. The author examines a selection of films from an international field, arguing that the different feminist contexts strongly influence the creation of such works. Erhart makes a convincing case for the recognition of the films explored in this book, and in particular takes issue with the common usage of the term ‘popular’. As with many of the books in this series, ‘popular culture’ is not necessarily that which has the biggest fan base or box office success. The widespread popularity of the films explored here includes the attractiveness of such films to festivals and regionally localised groupings. As such, the wider definition of ‘popular culture’ that this series explores is clearly visible here. – Angela Smith and Claire Nally

xvii

Introduction

As this book was nearing completion, a number of new titles were in the news. Viceroy’s House (Chadha 2017), about the postwar partitioning of India and Pakistan, had been reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald and deemed ‘fascinating, infuriating, entertaining and perhaps misleading’.1 A United Kingdom (Asante 2016), which shows Botswana’s struggle for independence through a true story of interracial marriage, had likewise been called ‘fascinating’ but also ‘stiffly polite’, an example of a ‘Sunday night tele’ approach.2 Directed by female directors and depicting historical circumstances, both films received impassioned but contradictory reviews; they were deemed important, appealing, and relevant, but also unsuitable in some way.3 Gendering History on Screen starts from the idea that movies like these, directed by women and appealing heavily to female audiences, enter a playing field that is not neutral but nonetheless play a vital role in shaping people’s feelings about their national and cultural heritage. How these movies do this has been at the heart of this book’s approach. The notion that historical movies forward a particular point of view is an established critical given, and many historical films have been scrutinised for evidence of an individual director’s national, political, or generational proclivities. Curiously, the gender of individuals directing such movies has attracted comparably little critical attention, as if it were irrelevant to the stories that get told. This blind approach contrasts sharply with the recognised significance of gender in the field of history more generally, where feminist scholars have carved out spaces for the study of women and benefited (on occasion) from methodological re-boots such as the re-valuing of oral history.

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Gendering History on Screen This book is about women filmmakers’ unique contributions to understandings of the past through the lens of historical film. From the selection of subject matter to the framing of events and personalities, women filmmakers are making important contributions across a number of important historical film subtypes in films populated largely with female characters. From this book’s point of view, historical film is a critical category that includes feature films and documentaries that depict past events and personalities, make claims to authenticity, and generally include an element of gravity or sobriety. The boundaries around the definition of historical film set by this book are deliberately broad and include adaptations of novels set in the past and historically themed documentaries, as well as more conventional members of the historicalfilm family (biographical movies or ‘biopics’ and war movies). Because of the breadth of movies potentially included under the historical film umbrella, they have never unambiguously been accepted as a genre, where genre equals a set of films with recognisable and recurring settings, characters, and iconography. As Jonathan Stubbs tells us, ‘simply being “in the past” cannot be regarded as a coherent textual characteristic in itself’.4 Nonetheless, historical films do canvass a recurring set of concerns, including the value of famous people and well-known occurrences for various communities, and the diverse consequences of historical circumstances such as war. Research on films about the past is an enormous and burgeoning scholarly field, with interdisciplinary connections to biographical studies, Holocaust studies, and national film studies. Currently there are hundreds if not thousands of books with phrases like ‘history on film’ or ‘screening the past’ in the title, and much ink has been spilled on taxonomical sorting exercises: how far the definition of historical film extends, what sorts of movies are included (and which ones not), what forms of film advance historical understanding (and which ones do not), whether the form includes movies about the recent as well as the distant past, and so on and so forth.5 In my opinion, and as I’ll go on to discuss in Chapter 1, many of these sorting activities have done a disservice to women directors, whose opportunities to direct historical films have traditionally been more limited than men’s and whose directing experience, pace Kathryn Bigelow and Ava DuVernay, has not tended to include ‘prestigious’ historical categories like

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Introduction war films or male biopics. As I’ve gone about thinking about women’s cinematic contributions, I’ve become less interested in creating hard and fast taxonomies than in considering how films enable audiences to construct relations to history and how movies set in other times and places speak to women through contemporary feminist rhetoric. The approach taken in my book is in step with scholars who emphasise the relational approach between audiences and the past. Phrases like ‘telling stories’ and ‘engaging the past’ that have recently appeared are powerfully suggestive, bringing focus to the space where audiences, film, and history meet.6 As I’ll show, female filmmakers extend this relational component, creating works where representations of the past align with present circumstances in an assemblage of new meanings. *** Where does this book draw boundaries around ‘historical film’? Obviously it is outside its scope to deal thoroughly with every historical film ever made by a female filmmaker. Such a book would be encyclopaedic in length. My choice of films and chapter headings in no way exhausts the category. What I have done is identify relevant forms where female filmmakers have a relatively high creative presence, such as the biopic and first-person documentary. I have selected forms where women’s innovations are especially notable; these include movies about the Holocaust, specifically, movies set in occupied France, and movies about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 are organised to allow close study of these respective forms. As for the selection of movies within individual chapters: films had to be intervening in some way into conventional ideas about agency, memory, heroism, and activism; with a few exceptions films had to be feature-length; and with one exception I explored films produced between 1990 and 2015. These selections were made for the purpose of putting boundaries around what would otherwise have been an enormous subject. In terms of the movies’ production contexts, the study is deliberately transnational to avoid slipping into ‘national film’ frameworks, drawing examples from France, Denmark, Iran, Australia, the UK, the US, and Spain. Likewise, the book takes examples from across the film industrial spectrum, although with a few

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Gendering History on Screen exceptions, the majority saw financing in a lower range than what is extended to big-budget American blockbusters. Where possible, film selections were made in an awareness of existing critical work. For example while The Piano interestingly pushes at genre definitions of ‘historical film’, a lot has been written on this movie already, so other films were selected. Likewise with my selection of movie forms: while costume or period films are extremely important, there is already an established literature on those subjects, so other forms were chosen for the four ‘case study’ chapters. *** How does this book fit into a series on gender and popular culture? If we were to go by the convention of determining a film’s popularity based on its takings at the box office, we would automatically exclude most films by female directors. As Patricia White rightly says, ‘top-grossing is not the most meaningful control group’ for films by women.7 With notable exceptions, women do not tend to direct the superhero-oriented blockbusters that are the commercial bread and butter of the American and, indeed, global industries. However, old distinctions between big budget box-office high performers and publicly funded or smaller-scale works are no longer as serviceable as they once were. How to assess a film’s popularity has become increasingly problematic in an era of diversified ancillary markets. Currently movies earn money in a range of places, from ancillary merchandise to deals with streaming services to sales to game developers. Movies no longer make the majority (or even a sizeable portion) of their profits through that increasingly quaint sounding term, the ‘box office’. In addition to these industrial economic changes and their attendant consequences for how we assess a film’s popularity, it is worth pointing out that once-unquestioned alignment of the popular with American consumption trends could not be more problematic from the perspective of this study, which examines films produced across a range of national and transnational contexts. While a film like The Round Up would undoubtedly circulate as ‘arthouse’ in the US by the sheer fact of its being in a foreign language, the movie was a stand-out success at home in France and thus resolutely popular in its local context. The same could be said for

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Introduction the Danish film Brothers, the international co-production The Piano, and the list goes on. So what does make for the popular, according to the logic of this book? Rather than espousing a one-size-fits-all approach, this study employs a multi-pronged method that takes into account measures of a film’s performance on a spectrum of contextually more localised spheres (like film festivals) and smaller national markets, in addition to a film’s performance at the US box office. Performance criteria thus include critical and festival awards and evaluations against other films within the same generic category (like documentary). Festivals generate their own measures of popularity, such as ‘audience favourites’. Works in this study that have achieved festival recognition include Once My Mother, The Watermelon Woman, History and Memory, Halving the Bones, and November Moon. The sexism of the big-budget commercial filmmaking industry has been asserted over and over, with acknowledgement that women predominantly find opportunities in smaller budget ‘niche’ projects over ones destined for the megaplex. Rethinking these methods ought to suit female filmmakers, whose work can get lost in older and increasingly outof-date data-collection methods.

Chapter Summary The first chapter provides an international overview of women’s contributions to historical film and outlines the book’s understanding of the term ‘female filmmaker’. It explains relevant concepts and issues in the field of historical film scholarship and describes the relative lack of attention to matters of gender, including the delineation of the field in ways that exclude genres of interest to women. It introduces a central conceptual component to this study, which is Walter Benjamin’s idea of history as a ‘constellation’ between past and present,8 and argues that this provides a useful lens through which to view women directors’ contributions. It identifies and engages with four films that extend these philosophies into a contemporary cinematic realm, including the popular commercial movies A League of Their Own (1992) and The Dressmaker (2015), and the experimental mock-documentaries Rosie’s Secret (1994) and The Watermelon Woman (1995).

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Gendering History on Screen Chapter 2 focuses on the contemporary female biopic. It evaluates existing literature that reads biopics about men as quirky and postmodern and biopics about women as ‘intractable’ and ‘pathetic’9 and highlights female directors’ strategies to recuperate unpopular or abject female personalities who inhabit the margins of fame. These include the nineteenth-century hysteria patient Augustine Gleizes in Augustine (2012), the convicted criminal Aileen Wuornos in Monster (2003), and the unpopular British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011). The films’ revisionist approaches to genre are outlined and their establishment of a constellation between past characters and present-day audiences is explored. The chapter establishes how the movies fashion stories of abuse and exclusion into oppositional texts that allow contemporary audiences to connect with unlikely and unlikeable heroines across decades or centuries. How female directors leverage first-person documentary to depict world-significant events of migration and war is the focus of Chapter 3. The chapter examines first-person movies at a broad level and looks closely at five exemplary works: Halving the Bones (1995), about three generations of Japanese and Japanese-diaspora women; History and Memory (1991), about Japanese internment in the United States during World War II; I for India (2005), concerning one family’s experience of migration and return over the course of 40 years; Nadar (2008), about director Carla Subirana’s search for her grandfather who was executed under Franco; and Once My Mother (2013), which shows the director’s mother’s traumatic migration from Poland to Australia. Common to all the movies is a notion of memory as performative memory for someone. The expressly stated motivation for each documentary’s creation is a relative of the filmmaker (typically a mother or grandmother) who doesn’t know or can’t remember things that the director thinks she should. The documentaries thus comprise standsins for the memories that the grand/mothers ought to have, substitutes for, or correctives to, the missing or flawed memory fragments that the older women no longer hold. Chapter 4 explores women’s understandings of resistance and collaboration by examining three feature films by female directors set in occupation-era France. November Moon (1985) is a French –German coproduction set in Paris, about two women lovers, a Frenchwoman and

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Introduction a German Jewish expatriate; Charlotte Gray (2001) is a UK –Australian – German film about a Scotswoman who parachutes behind enemy lines into Vichy-occupied France. The Round Up (2010) focuses explicitly on the real events of the coordinated seizure of 13,000 Jewish women, children, and men from their Parisian homes on 16 and 17 July 1942, their detainment for five days, and subsequent deportation to an internment camp 100 km south of the city. Because of the respective films’ choice to focus on women, each film offers a uniquely female perspective on resistance and collaboration and the matter known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming-to-terms-with-the-past. Due to the weakening of US restrictions on women in armed combat and the lack of a clear definition of ‘the front line’, both of which meant women saw combat in excess of what they had before, recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq fostered new, gendered understandings of ‘soldier’. Additionally, these wars rebranded the image of female ‘victim’, as the ‘liberation’ of women and girls, in Afghanistan especially, became the number one reason justifying on-going occupation. Chapter 5 analyses films’ contributions to gendered notions of soldiering and victimhood on both sides of the conflicts. Specifically, the chapter considers fiction films and documentaries that show the experiences of in-country and returning soldiers and military operatives (including Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Lioness (2008), Brødre (2004), and Return (2011)), and movies that challenge orientalist myths of occupation and victimhood from a woman’s point of view, including My Home Your War (2006); God, Construction and Destruction (a short from the omnibus movie 11’09”01: September 11 (2002)), and Buddha Collapsed out of Shame (2007). To date, there are numerous books on women directors, and many studies of the historical film, though none that employ this book’s approach. Gendering History on Screen brings the two discourses together to make a vital contribution to knowledge of the representation of history in cinema and the accomplishments of female directors.

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1 Women Writing History Through Film

Historical movies can normally be counted on to do well at prestige ceremonies like the Academy Awards, but when women star in or direct those movies, their fate becomes a lot less certain. Within films about nationally significant historical events, like wars, occupations, or migrations, or about prominent personalities, there would appear to be an unspoken set of rules as to how gender ought to be expressed and consequences for films that do not fall into line. Often condemned by critics for being too ‘emotional’ or ‘pathetic’, films by female directors featuring female protagonists may be popular with audiences but judged incapable of expressing ‘serious’ history. Yet with or without critical recognition, women are making important stories about the historical past and bringing new representations of agency and activism to the screen, often in ways that mobilise the past for the present, and often filtered through the lens of contemporary feminisms. This book argues that female filmmakers are creating alternatives to male-authored stories about the past and new understandings of women in history. Their films redefine concepts like valour, resistance, and agency, and call into question methodological components such as evidence and historical worth. Working around the globe in all manner of feature films and documentaries, women are producing nuanced understandings of the

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Gendering History on Screen past through their selection of stories, events, and protagonists and via their materialist and frequently reflexive approach to storytelling. Stories about real historical events and well-known personalities have filled theatres since the beginning of cinema in various genres and iterations, in countries around the globe. Precise generic groupings have waxed and waned but the fact remains: audiences learn more about the past from movies than from any other medium. Research about movies representing the past now comprises hundreds of books and perhaps thousands of scholarly essays, in dozens of languages. Why do we need another book on this subject? To date there has not been a book-length analysis of female directors’ innovations in historical film. In Australia, Iran, France, Denmark, Spain, Germany, the United States, and elsewhere, women have experimented in narrative and other textual elements, taken risks in storytelling, and revised generic conventions. However most of the scholarship on historical films has construed historically significant personalities as male, with the result that women’s contributions on both sides of the camera have often been overlooked. Major English-language anthologies dedicated to historical cinema have typically included one or two essays at best that flag gender in their title.1 Historical films by female directors have not been thoroughly explored in feminist scholarship either. Up until quite recently scholarship on women’s films has tended to fit women’s movies into one of a few relatively narrow rubrics, such as their illustration of an author-centric or auteurist approach, or their advancement of tenets of feminist film theory. In such analyses, women’s representations of sexuality, fantasy, and desire have been deemed more relevant than, or at odds with, their approach to history, memory, and culture. At worst, directors who engaged overtly with such issues were perceived as detracting from matters of a more properly ‘feminist’ nature.2 Gendering History on Screen highlights women’s innovations across four historical film subtypes: contemporary female biopics; first-person documentaries; Holocaust films; and films about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It does not claim to be comprehensive about all women’s films or about all historical films but rather to highlight women’s innovations in these storytelling spaces in order to draw attention both to

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Women Writing History Through Film how women have been elided from historical stories and how they are redefining historical sub-genres to make room for female perspectives. To ground these explorations of women’s innovations, Gendering History draws on a diversity of philosophies about historical representation. Walter Benjamin’s understanding of history as a time-lapse camera that positions past and present in constellation is particularly useful; Benjamin’s materialist idea of the past as a fleeting image that flashes up in times of historical pressure – in times of war, social upheaval, or great sociocultural change – helps fuel my investigation into women’s film productions.3 In the book’s first and final chapters, Susan Linville’s ideas allow me to focus attention on women’s erasure from history’s public spheres. Throughout, I gain insight from the creative contributions of the filmmakers themselves that provide theoretical and practical visions of the various means to gender history.

Women Writing History: Contexts and Opportunities In spite of the fact that they have not been recognised as such, many of the canonical works of 1980s feminist practitioners have, as Alun Munslow has put it, historyed their subject matter; historying here being the action of turning the past into a narrative.4 From the 1980s onwards films receiving public arts support were especially well positioned to experiment in historical representation. Now-venerated movies by Sally Potter, Julie Dash, Jill Godmilow, and others radically revised generic conventions by incorporating experimental aspects. In contexts across Europe especially, women’s cinemas provided excellent opportunities for filmmakers to innovate through stories about war, trauma, and migration. Many of the canonical female directors working in Eastern and Western Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Liliana Cavani, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Margarethe von Trotta, Marlene Gorris, Agnieszka Holland, Márta Mészáros, and Larisa Shepitko, achieved international recognition on the basis of films dealing innovatively with history and memory; some of these directors, like von Trotta and Holland, built careers almost exclusively around these matters. The labours of all of these women have arguably

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Gendering History on Screen cleared professional ground for directors working in current-day Europe and the United Kingdom to move into, like Roselyne Bosch, Alice Winocour, and Agnès Merlet in France; Helena Taberna, Rosa Vergés, and Carla Subirana in Spain; Phyllida Lloyd, Gurinder Chadha, Amma Asante, and Sarah Gavron in the United Kingdom; and Susanne Bier in Denmark. In post-colonial Australian and New Zealand contexts, female filmmakers have similarly achieved recognition for their interesting handling of historical events. In these cinemas, films by Gillian Armstrong, Sophia Turkiewicz, Jane Campion, Rachel Perkins, and Jocelyn Moorhouse have been celebrated both domestically and internationally for their innovative treatment of historical and biographical themes.5 Quite possibly earlier works have paved the way for more recent historical expressions like Bran Nue Dae (Perkins 2009) and The Dressmaker (Moorhouse 2015). In documentary spheres, women continue to make vital and original work about the past in Australia, Spain, Iran, France, and elsewhere. Independent New York-located distributor Women Make Movies continues to extend support to directors working at the margins of the commercial industry. Perhaps because of the prevalence of ongoing conflicts and political struggles in the region, most women directors working in the Middle East have engaged in one way or another with histories of war, occupation, expulsion, and trauma; however, openings available in the cost-intensive, typically masculinist realms of film directing vary according to the position of and ongoing support for local film industries and the condition of women’s rights in the public sphere, both of which are obviously deeply uneven across the region. Egypt boasts a long tradition of women filmmakers going back at least to the 1970s (Ateyyat El Abnoudy, Asma El Bakry, and Safaa Fathy were all born prior to 1960), and pioneers hail from Algeria (Assia Djebar, Yamina Bachir-Chouikh), Tunisia (Moufida Tlatli, Néjia Ben Mabrouk), and Lebanon, where Heiny Srour’s 1974 film Hour of Liberation was the first film to be shown at Cannes directed by a woman from any country. In the present day, Iran offers better opportunities for women directors than most Western countries; world-famous Iranians dedicated to visualising the past include Tahmineh Milani, Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf, Marjane Satrapi, and Shirin Neshat.

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Women Writing History Through Film In the United States, directors working in feature films have creatively fused period film conventions with those of more barefaced ‘women’s film’ genres like romantic comedy and the musical to show the historical past. Desert Hearts (Deitch 1985), A League of Their Own (Marshall 1992), and Yentl (Streisand 1983) have largely been read as women’s films, but they push interestingly at the boundaries of historical film and there is value in treating them as historical film hybrids.6 I believe that rethinking the contributions of a movie like A League of Their Own puts productive pressures on both women’s and historical film categories, as I will show. Contemporarily, US-based filmmakers Julie Taymor, Patty Jenkins, Mary Harron, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, Mira Nair, and Ava DuVernay are making interesting inroads across a range of historical film subtypes, including biopics. Numerous studies over the years have emphasised the influence of the present on historical representations. The context in which historical movies are made obviously matters, and that includes the context of contemporary feminisms. Historical films by women aimed at female audiences reflect and embody elements of feminist thought that permeate the cultures in which the filmmakers find themselves. Women filmmakers face additional opportunities, challenges, and responsibilities to reach into women’s lives in authentic and engaging ways. Directors shape audiences’ sense of the past in movies about a range of pressing and globally significant themes. Common to all of the films under examination is a repositioning of women at the centre of the narrative, a telling of history through women’s eyes, and a depiction of women’s journeys to find agency and voice.

Performative Authorship Authorship or auteurism, as critical shorthand for the shared set of themes within films directed by a single director, has not been looked upon favourably as a way of making sense of the collective activities of commercial cinema. Richard Maltby, quoting Thomas Schatz writes: ‘Schatz has castigated auteur criticism for stalling film history and criticism in a prolonged state of adolescent romanticism,,, by misdescribing the actual relations of power, creative control, and expression within ,,

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Gendering History on Screen Hollywood.’7 Additional fuel for this critique has been provided by feminist media scholars like Lizzie Francke and Amelie Hastie, who encourage researchers to look beyond the role of the director for meaning creation and to include activities such as scriptwriting, popular criticism, and stardom. In addition to the problem identified by Maltby et al., further issues with the filmmaker-based method are theoretical, intersectionalist, and simply practical. Representations are always in excess of a person’s intentions; focusing on a single component of identity potentially obscures other components such as a filmmaker’s nationality and/or ethnicity; and in practical terms, a number of female filmmakers have themselves resisted identifying with terms like ‘woman filmmaker’. But while author-approaches tout court may have fallen out of favour, author-approaches emphasising women’s collective contributions most definitely have not. At the time of this writing, new books have recently materialised showcasing women’s achievements in the contexts of Indonesian, Spanish, Canadian, and global filmmaking, and films by female filmmakers have been analysed across a range of thematic contexts including adaptation, experimental film, and female auteurism. ‘Women filmmakers’ is a term that circulates colloquially and with impact at award ceremonies and film festivals.8 Its deployment has moved significantly from those suggested above to indicate not one personality elevated above the rest but a nexus of relations. As Angela Martin puts it, women filmmakers convey a ‘sense of a film being produced in a context of dialogue within which the filmmaker, the context, and the reader/spectator all participate and from which they all produce meanings that will at least overlap if not actually agree’.9 According to this book, ‘female filmmaker’ has strong heuristic and restitutive components and is informed by the idea that the scholarly playing field has not been neutral. Kathleen McHugh has argued that canonical historiographies of film and media cultures have paid insufficient attention to the impact of feminisms and that women’s filmmaking contributions exceed both the ‘waves’ approach of histories of feminism and the nation-state focus of dominant cinema studies historiography.10 Angela Martin has identified the pitfalls of neglecting female filmmakers, without which, as she puts it, ‘authorship continues its tendency towards a league table,, of great genius,, (read male)’.11 These ,,

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,,

Women Writing History Through Film theorists join a long legacy in women’s film scholarship commenting on the theoretical and political necessity of maintaining that the gender of the filmmaker makes a difference. As a political tool, ‘female filmmaker’ grants authority to and adds visibility in spaces where women’s contributions either don’t exist or are subsumed under other scholarly categories, like world cinema or experimental filmmaking. ‘Female filmmaker’ makes visible women’s creative contributions and counters the issue most familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in the subject, which is that of paucity.12 It is virtually impossible to open a book on women’s filmmaking without encountering a discussion about the tenacity of the appalling statistics that describe women’s low participation in media industries. Though there are gains and losses and corners of the industry deemed more female friendly than others, the facts are that women have been and continue to remain grossly under-represented within film industries around the globe, in spite of their disproportionate stake as media consumers, and in spite of varying attempts to rectify the state of affairs. Following Judith Mayne, Alison Butler, and others writing in this area, Shelley Cobb comments that for feminist academics our main weapon against complacency – in the face of the low numbers of women who get to make films and the potential exclusion of those films from canonical histories – is to write about films made by women.13

In Gendering History I use the term ‘female filmmaker’ performatively to frame filmmakers who author history at a textual level, through the movies they make. The term also refers to directors who create change in the lives of others, most notably (though not exclusively) less well-established female filmmakers. In a 2015 lecture given by Australian film director Sophia Turkiewicz to a largely student audience at Flinders University, Turkiewicz described her professional journey into the world of film directing. She talked about when she was first introduced to film as a student and spoke about the classes she attended. Turkiewicz explained: that was really what changed my life. That was absolutely my love. I realized that that was the direction I wanted to take my career. So really, this is where I started from! And I haven’t been back here

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Gendering History on Screen since that time of graduating, so this is a really special occasion for me to see me sitting there like you were, all those years ago.

Turkiewicz’s noting of the formative value of education is not unusual in the context of a talk given to students in an educational setting. Of interest is her subsequent rhetorical move linking the image of her young self to the current-day crop of students sitting before her. Turkiewicz’s description of the lecture as a chance for ‘me to see me sitting there like you’ is an acknowledgement of her awareness of her own career journey from inexperienced student to successful filmmaker. In theoretical terms, the description of her seeing her former self (the two different ‘mes’ in the sentence) interpellates the students in the audience before her into the role of inexperienced filmmaker that Turkiewicz formerly occupied. And by linking her past (student) self to her present (professional/filmmaker) self, the exclamation offers a performative vision of the person whom the students could aspire to become. In linking of her own past with the students’ collective present, Turkiewicz articulates reflexively and empathetically an ethics of generosity and hope: I was once where you sit now; if I could do it, you can too. Shelley Cobb underscores this aspect of female filmmaking as both ‘representative of female agency and [as] a vehicle for representing the authorising of the woman filmmaker’.14 The performative idea of female director that I note in Turkiewicz’s self-presentation is found in scores of interview statements of multiple female directors and throughout the scholarship on women’s cinema. In addition to its potential effect on upand-coming filmmakers, the articulation of the performative allows for the identification of directors’ cultural impact on the public sphere more broadly, for audiences and feminist critics. Speaking to this idea, Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman write: because they [female filmmakers] operate in the public realm, they strengthen the presence of a female subject who wields power . . . By the very act of making movies these women have positioned themselves as active agents, whatever political or aesthetic agenda they may represent. As such, they command the interest of feministminded critics. The present volume is one example of this desire for female authors.15

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Women Writing History Through Film While the paucity of female directors remains entrenched, colloquial discussions of these circumstances are arguably more apparent to contemporary feminist audiences than they have ever been before. Award ceremonies now provide opportunities for information and enlightenment about the politics of the skewed and often sexist and racist award system, as happened in 2016 around #OscarsSoWhite.16 Currently there is a plethora of social media venues dedicated to tracking the fluctuating presence of female directors, inside of and peripheral to Hollywood and globally. The correlation between the popularity of a movie such as Hidden Figures and increased interest of young African-American women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) careers is just one example of the ongoing importance of stories featuring real women heroes.17 Asking why gender matters in the area of Holocaust research, Pascale Bos maintains that women’s socialisation is central to their understanding of historical experiences and their present-day narrations: gender thus becomes important . . . not because the Nazis were inherently sexist (even though this might be true), or because women or men displayed certain distinct (gendered) behaviors which survivors felt compelled to write about, but because gender is one of the important lenses through which survivors perceive and understand themselves as members of their community.18

Women want and indeed deserve to see themselves as shapers of history; the question is in which movies do they do this, in whose stories, and how. What is the critical understanding of women’s roles in historical films, and what are the expectations for women directing in this space? The promises and possibilities of historical films have fascinated and engaged scholars in ways that will be explained. But where, how, and in what ways do women contribute?

History on Film: from Robert Rosenstone to A League of Their Own Scholarly interest in film’s ability to depict the historical past proliferated in the United States in the 1980s. By the time the American Historical

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Gendering History on Screen Review (AHR) gave half an issue in 1988 to a forum on film and history, the discipline of history was not quite as authoritative as it once had been, having been assailed by theorists like Hayden White, who confirmed once and for all that all representations purporting to be historical impose a narrative on raw events.19 Once thought to be an irrefutable transcription of the past ‘as it really was’, history became something that made use of rhetorical emplotment devices, and, significantly, something that could be expressed through other media, like film. The hopes and dreams for film to revivify scholarly disciplines and inject new life into traditional Humanities departments animated much of the writing on history and film from the 1980s onwards, including an essay by Robert Rosenstone in AHR. In it, Rosenstone expressed foresight in articulating the challenges specific to film, which included the adapting and compressing of complex past events to an experience of 90 minutes or less, the balancing of commercial with aesthetic and educational imperatives, and film’s inability to reveal the interpretative labour, the processes by which sources are evaluated and evidence is weighed – what Rosenstone called the ‘thinning of data’. But mostly, Rosenstone expressed excitement about the utopic potential of film as a historiographic medium: film can most directly render the look and feel of all sorts of historical particulars and situations – farm workers dwarfed by immense western prairies and mountains, or miners struggling in the darkness of their pits, or millworkers moving to the rhythms of their machines, or civilians sitting hopelessly in the bombed-out streets of cities. Film can plunge us into the drama of confrontations in courtroom or legislature, the simultaneous, overlapping realities of war and revolution, the intense confusion of men in battle.20

Over the years, Rosenstone has been a champion for film’s potential to express history in provocative and nuanced ways and with emotion and colour; this attention to the sensorial has been valued by many current-day scholars including Alison Landsberg.21 Nonetheless I do not think it is a stretch to say that this passage is not the most evocative representation of women in history: indeed, it is difficult to believe Rosenstone was thinking of women at all when he wrote so compellingly about the labours of miners, legislators, and soldiers. The scant number of articles addressing

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Women Writing History Through Film feminist and/or women’s concerns within anthologies about historical film has been mentioned earlier in this chapter. Particularly within American research on historical films, the impact of feminist discourses has not been hugely visible, either in the contents of the stories that have been discussed or in the research questions that have been pursued.22 The blind spots of scholars writing in the field have not escaped feminists, who have intervened vigorously in the terms of these debates, calling into question historiographic methodologies, generic and cinematic assessments, and the hierarchical sorting process that privileges some movies over others. In an important essay about the film Julia (Zinnemann 1977), J.E. Smyth takes American film critics Vincent Canby and Pauline Kael to task for condemning the movie based on the fact that the eponymous heroine was a composite character and not a real person. Refuting comments by Canby and Kael, Smyth notes the long Hollywood tradition of basing ‘historical explorations of female subjectivity . . . on works of fiction authored principally, but not exclusively, by women’ and also the way the ambiguity in the character’s presence served as a metacommentary on the ‘central problem in rendering the history of women by traditional means’.23 Smyth goes on to argue against the commonly held critical myth that Hollywood has been unable to produce ‘powerful historical texts about women’ and suggests that it may be critics themselves who have been unprepared to capture real women’s lives: ‘would these women’s lives have been appropriate,, and believable,, historical subjects for Canby and Kael? Would the lives of truly heroic women always be too unbelievable for film critics?’24 According to Smyth, what is needed is not simply more female characters, but new means of analysis and fresh ways of seeing. The educative potential of feminist filmmaking to historical research was presciently acknowledged in an early, now canonical essay by Hayden White that appeared in the very same issue of AHR as the essay by Rosenstone, cited above. Commenting on future directions for historiographers, White wrote: ,,

,,

This is surely the lesson to be derived from the study of recent feminist filmmaking, which has been concerned not only with depicting the lives of women in both the past and present truthfully

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Gendering History on Screen and accurately but, even more important, with bringing into question conventions of historical representation and analysis that, while pretending to be doing nothing more than ‘telling what really happened’, effectively present a patriarchal version of history. . . . They show us instead that the criterion for determining what shall count as ‘accuracy of detail’ depends on the ‘way’ chosen to represent both ‘the past’ and our thought about its ‘historical significance’ alike. (Emphasis added)25

When White penned those words in 1988 it is possible he was drawing inspiration from a small cohort of experimental films, like Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982), about the suppression of African-American women in classical Hollywood, or Jill Godmilow’s biography about Alice Tolkas and Gertrude Stein, Waiting for the Moon (1987). Though movies like these have received some attention from feminist critics over the years, they have received hardly any within studies of historical cinema, including studies focusing on modernist or experimental historiographic movies, in spite of the fact they engage centrally and reflexively with those very issues. To my knowledge, White never returned to the subject of feminist film after his brief mention of it in this frequently cited essay, nor has this comment been taken up or developed by others. White was ahead of his time in acknowledging both the importance of feminist methods and the intellectual potential of works thought to be solely creative (i.e. the films themselves). This book shares White’s belief that women filmmakers have powerfully altered not just the ‘what’ but the ‘how’ of historical representation and brought new understanding to the project of historical film. If the historiographic contributions of feminist experimental films remain, after White, largely unrecognised, feminist film academics have asserted the legitimacy of female-oriented commercial movies as vehicles for historical storytelling. Julianne Pidduck, for example, has reclaimed the value of the costume drama as a historical vehicle and in so doing has departed strategically from the authenticity debates in order to embrace the ‘pleasures and possibilities of masquerade – the construction, constraint, and display of the body through clothes’. As Pidduck states, ‘cinema can never offer an unmediated window onto the past, and historical fiction and costume drama alike depict the past through the stylistic, critical and

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Women Writing History Through Film generic vocabularies of present cultural production’.26 Pidduck’s assertion of the value of these feminised genres recalls an earlier passage from Rosenstone’s foundational article in AHR: ‘When historians think of history on film, what probably comes to mind is . . . the big-budget production in which costumes, authentic,, sets and locations, and wellknown actors take precedence over attempts at historical accuracy.’27 ‘Historical romance’, Rosenstone continues, ‘locks both filmmaker and audience into a series of conventions whose demands – for a love interest, physical action, personal confrontation, movement toward a climax and denouement – are almost guaranteed to leave the historian of the period crying foul.’28 In this classificatory schema, history on film is linked with historical accuracy and is opposed to historical romance; history on film is the preferred object (where historical romance is to be avoided). More recently Robert Burgoyne has reiterated this preference. He writes: ,,

Unlike the costume drama or the romance set in the past, history provides the referential content of the historical film. The events of the past constitute the mainspring of the historical film, rather than the past simply serving as a scenic backdrop or nostalgic setting.29

Do these comments evidence a disconnect between expectations commonly placed on historical films and the movies women are actually making or appear to relate to? I sense that the privileging of the esteemed historiographic component of accuracy may be unfavourable to stories about women aimed at female audiences. It is my belief that historical film criteria are not necessarily suited to the measure of the generically intersectional movies made by women directors, which may be answerable to conflicting demands from a number of different feminist communities as well as commercial imperatives which may have little to do with the accuracy criterion. An example of this is Penny Marshall’s extraordinarily popular A League of Their Own (1992), about the formation of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) in the 1940s. At first glance, A League seems completely at odds with the historical film definitions outlined by Rosenstone and Burgoyne: it was made for a relatively big budget (of US$40 million) and positioned the past as backdrop for a largely fictional series of events which may or may not have taken place.30 Nonetheless, the movie depicts in stark detail the historical

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Gendering History on Screen

Figure 1.1

A League of Their Own. Columbia Pictures, 1992. Dir. Penny Marshall.

conditions that governed female participation in professional sports at the time, and the profound social ambivalence surrounding images of ‘professional girls’ in baseball. In doing this, A League brings into question ‘conventions of historical representation and analysis’ along the lines that White recommends. From an audience perspective, A League is a genuine generic hybrid: with stars Rosie O’Donnell, Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, and Madonna, the movie was first and foremost billed as a comedy, but because of the historical setting and story line, the movie can also be classed as a period film, a sports movie, or a classic celebratory studio system biopic as outlined by George Custen. Similar to the classical Hollywood biopic, A League features individuals who are unique and charismatic but humanised and possible to relate to; it presents personalities who are free from contradictory traits and motivated by clear and comprehensible goals, and it employs narrative devices like in medias res, dropping audiences directly into the lives of the movie’s lead characters in 1943 Willamette Oregon.31 The story that it tells is populated with ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ and the raw facts of the League’s evolution are compressed into a short space of time. Geena Davis and Lori Petty are cast as baseballplaying sisters Dottie and Kit; Kit is the scrappy younger sister who, as Custen explains, needs to break from home in order to achieve career greatness.32 Based on a book by Kelly Candaele, son of AAGPBL player Helen Callaghan, A League reputedly patterns many of the main characters after real individuals.33

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Women Writing History Through Film But in spite of these classic biopic-like qualities, other traits fly directly in the face of that category. In focusing on the rags-to-riches growth of the Rockford Peaches, one of 15 real teams in the AAGPBL that came into existence during World War II, A League is about a group of people, rather than an individual, which is the classic biopic’s focus. It uses real names for the team and for the women’s league, but not for any of the individuals that feature. Most significant from the perspective of Gendering History, in contrast to the typical biopic division of labour, which shows men consumed by their professional work and women drawn irresistibly to romantic love, A League sidesteps these formulations and places an emphasis on female solidarity.34 Supporting characters are scripted to suggest diversity in women’s roles; these include the very shy Shirley, who cannot read, and power hitter Marla, who is initially rejected by the talent scout on account of her unsaleable looks. A number of scenes show the women speaking up for each other, and in another departure from classic biopic expectations, the movie shifts attention onto the women’s careers. Promotional materials for the movie detailed extensive training undertaken by female stars, and closing scenes feature real players. Sporting achievements are emphasised in numerous scenes of women training and competing, and discussing career ambitions and impediments to women’s progress are a major theme, as acknowledged by Marla’s father, who states: ‘if she was a boy, I’d be in New York talkin’ to the Yankees, instead of livin’ in this place’. Lack of educational opportunities and the constraints of living in a conservative rural community are also targets, as in an early scene when a radio announcer to whom Dottie’s and Kit’s family listen bemoans the very existence of the women’s team. The result is a much beloved film with articulate liberal feminist political content that 25 years later continues to maintain a strong cult following, at least in part through its selective and opportunistic deployment of a hybrid of generic features. With these, the movie meets feminist demands for stories that acknowledge the entrenched sexism in women’s sports and which are populated by female characters. And to pick up once again Munslow’s neologism mentioned at the start of the chapter, the film reveals the intense power of women’s historying of their own pasts: the major events of the movie are framed as a flashback of

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Gendering History on Screen the main character, Dottie. An opening scene shows the now-ageing Dottie expressing hesitancy about attending a League reunion event, which reluctance works as a hook to draw audiences into the story. She says to her daughter, ‘I’m not comfortable about this. I’m not really part of it. It was never that important to me. It was just something I did. That’s all.’ As the narrative unfolds, the uncertainty expressed at the beginning is gradually overturned: characters who initially voice ignorance and disdain for concept of women’s sports grow increasingly enthusiastic about the League’s value, and the movie culminates in a final scene showing the team’s securing of a place in the baseball hall of fame. By the closing credits, the unequivocally feel-good ending has demonstrated the value of memorialised women’s history for present-day audiences; Dottie’s remembering of past events signals the team’s induction into the hall of fame and, it is suggested, revivified interest in women’s baseball. Produced at the start of a decade of continuing contests against the Title IX Amendment, including the challenges brought to the Supreme Court in the 1992 case Franklin v. Gwinnett County, the film additionally functioned as a beacon for women’s rights in sport.35 And, crucially, it prompted a renewal of interest in the league, leading directly to a large body of interviews through which players ‘developed a collective consciousness of their experiences’.36 According to Kimberly Young, the movie was hugely if not solely responsible for recreating the league’s present-day reputation: ‘players have been inducted into local and state halls of fame, have been the subjects of museum exhibits, and have had schools and playgrounds named after them’.37 These factors certainly set the movie apart from other historical narratives set in the context of maledominated spheres. Alison Landsberg and Vivian Sobchack have each written persuasively about the ability of visual media to generate reflexive awareness about the historical past. Landsberg comments that film can provoke ‘analytical or cognitive processes and meaning making’, while for Sobchack the process of recording the past may even lead to ‘the quickening of a new historical sense and perhaps a more active and reflective historical subject’.38 With her clear-cut links to television comedy and family-oriented blockbusters like Big (1988), Marshall is not typically construed as a ‘serious’ filmmaker who would be linked to such activities, but I would argue that her work

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Women Writing History Through Film stands with other US independent female filmmakers Barbra Streisand and Joan Micklin Silver in drawing attention to small but significant components of otherwise forgotten history, which is reflexively narrated by a woman and about women.

‘Citable in all its Moments’: In-between Spaces and Sewing Machines How might these accomplishments be achieved in a short experimental film with no recognisable Hollywood celebrities, whose principal means of support came from the Australian public broadcaster? Rosie’s Secret (Matthews 1994) is a more explicit critique of women’s exclusion from the public sphere as well as a meta-commentary on present-day desire for female visibility in the space of federal history. Also a media hybrid, Rosie’s Secret initially screened as a short in a multi-part documentary series, was introduced on television as a ‘mock-doc’, and is currently tagged in the genre ‘History and National Identity’ on the Screen Australia website.39 The film relates the story of a ‘major scandal’ that occurred at the 1932 opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge: at the very moment when one official came forward to cut the ribbon, a second, rebellious officer charged past on his horse and usurped the privilege. The movie’s alleged contribution is to ‘correct’ this ‘national myth’: Rosie’s Secret informs us that the ribbon was in fact cut by neither the pre-appointed official nor the military upstart, but by an unknown petty female secretary with strong working-class sympathies. Apparently archival ‘lost’ footage shows Rosie Foster breaking through the crowds, past the men, and cutting the ribbon herself. So shocking was this action that Rosie’s participation was quickly covered up and the story of the military upstart invented to take its place. Foster, the movie claims, was deemed unfit to appear in the historical record; yet as a mockumentary Rosie’s Secret is not a corrective revealing the truth of (the fictional) Rosie’s participation, but a fiction that asks audiences to interrogate the truth of women’s exclusion from historical records as well as their own meta-historical desire for women’s presence in the past. Writing about similarly male-dominated political realms in the United States, Susan Linville analyses contemporary Hollywood movies

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Gendering History on Screen symptomatically for how they both conjure and displace female characters in the creation of national myths that ultimately celebrate and reify male agency. According to Linville, in movies about US history, from Saving Private Ryan to Courage Under Fire, women both signal and occlude other important stories, such as the so-termed collateral damage of the Gulf War, i.e. the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians. Linville’s work reveals what is simultaneously shown and hidden; to do so she draws on the psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny to indicate the destabilisation women potentially auger and contemporary reclamations of the concept by feminist film scholars like Lucy Fischer and Tania Modleski.40 Linville links the uncanny to the seesawing between fascination and revulsion that female characters represent; she calls for it to be refigured as contingent ‘in-between’ space: This kind of art ‘does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ,, in-between space, that innovates and interrupts the performance ,, of the present. The past-present becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living’. The process, in short, is quite distinct from one of evoking an idealized past to assimilate a problematic present, or of constructing a whitewashed present as an antidote to an intractable past. What is at stake is the deconstruction of the boundaries of the historical ‘in between’.41 ,,

,,

Renewing the past, interrupting the performance of the present, refiguring the historical in-between, for the purpose, not of idealising the past, nor whitewashing the present. These are forceful concepts that recall those delineated more than 60 years earlier in the writings of Walter Benjamin, whose ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’ provides a most powerful lens for elucidating innovations within the movies discussed thus far.42 Written at the moment of cataclysmic crisis on the eve of Germany’s invasion of France, the theses are Benjamin’s attempt to carve out alternative epistemologies from historicism, which apprehends the past as a logical, consistent, metered succession of discrete epochs and (for the Marxist Benjamin) empathises with the victors of history. Historicism records the efforts of ‘great minds and talents’, turns past accomplishments into ‘cultural treasures’, and anonymises and erases the labour of the

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Women Writing History Through Film subjugated. It reduces the past to a laudatory narrative about cultural ‘progress’, which narrative underpins the Protestant work ethic.43 In contrast to this approach, Benjamin advocates practices and experiences towards the past that bristle with movement and becoming, positioning the past as a ‘constellation between eras’, the ‘leap’ of a ‘tiger’ into the ‘open air of history’.44 This approach disrupts historicism’s progressional time, opposes itself to the ‘once upon a time’ approach to telling the past, and documents history’s ‘arrest’. It apprehends the past as a fleeting image that famously and violently ‘flashes up’ in a moment of historical emergency, interrupting the ‘homogeneous, empty’ time of the present.45 The take-up of Benjamin’s work within media and cultural studies has been penetrating and durable; it is impossible to overstate its influence. It has been ventured that in the past three decades Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ has perhaps been quoted more frequently than any other single scholarly essay.46 In literary and cultural studies, Benjamin’s ideas have been deployed to shed light on countless cultural objects and activities, from late twentieth-century slavery novels to Latin American visual art to music by the Sex Pistols to new media to Francophone fiction and film.47 In the year 2000 it was stated that the secondary literature on Benjamin equalled 2,000 objects; by now this figure would undoubtedly be higher.48 The sheer volume of ongoing interest in Benjamin’s work is due partly to his understanding of the role potentially played by aesthetic objects, including film, for disempowered groups of people, and to the extraordinary eclecticism of his thinking, which finds roots in a range of influences from Jewish messianic theologism to modernist literature to idealist philosophies and Marxism.49 Benjamin’s materialist understanding of epistemology is intimately tied up as much with Gershom Scholem’s concepts as with the literary modernism practised by Marcel Proust. In Scholem’s work, the process of redemption entails the literal redemption of the individual by the Messiah who has yet to appear. In Proust, the notion of memoire involuntaire (most fully articulated within À La Recherche du Temps Perdu [Remembrance of Things Past]) describes the presence of an object, in this case the well-known madeleine cookie, which intrudes upon the thoughts of the individual without warning and at unpredictable moments. The sensations that the cookie

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Gendering History on Screen communicates to the individual are sensuous by nature, in the area of taste and smell; the memories that they trigger allow individuals to make associations between the present-tense tasting of the cookie and past experience. Significantly for Gendering History, Benjamin’s work has been put into conversation with that of a number of important feminist writers, including Julia Kristeva, Donna Haraway, and most recently Virginia Woolf.50 In a current-day exploration of Benjamin’s ideas, Angeliki Spiropoulou reads Benjamin in constellation with Woolf. Spiropoulou’s foregrounding of the word ‘constellation’, that initially comes from Benjamin, is incredibly powerful and provocative to help me think through the themes and images of women’s historical movies. Spiropoulou identifies overlapping strategies and concerns that range from Woolf’s and Benjamin’s respective subversion of historical writing and events, to their mutual confounding of distinctions between story and history, to a shared ambivalence to some cultural realms, including fashion. She writes: ‘by highlighting the issue of how history is written and by whom, Woolf’s Orlando concurs with Benjamin’s concern with underlining the act of repression or silencing constitutive of official historiography’.51 In the introduction to her rendering of Benjamin’s massive and unruly PassagenWerk, Susan Buck-Morss states that Benjamin’s goal was to ‘take materialism so seriously that the historical phenomena themselves were brought to speech’.52 The materialist rigour that Benjamin advocates productively frames the images offered by female filmmakers who bring the past to the present. The purpose of historical materialism would be to make the past ‘become citable in all its moments’, as an image that unexpectedly and irrationally materialises at critical moments.53 The popular Australian period comedy-thriller The Dressmaker brings scrutiny to the oscillating potency of memory to add meaning to past events and to make the past citable in these ways. At the centre of the movie is Tilly Dunnage (Kate Winslet), who after many years working successfully as a dressmaker overseas, returns home to visit her ageing mother, Molly Dunnage (Judy Davis), in the outback town of Dungatar. The year is 1951; neither Tilly nor Molly can remember the horrific details of the town’s most seminal event, the circumstances surrounding the mysterious death many years ago of the then shire president’s son, Stuart

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Women Writing History Through Film Pettiman. Lacking witnesses, the act was thought to have been committed by Tilly, who was near to Pettiman when he died, and who was held responsible for the murder, and sent away. Like a snapshot in a camera, Stuart’s death had the effect of freezing numerous town personalities into fixed positions (Stuart as victim, Tilly as murderer, Molly as slut, and so on) that finally have a chance to thaw out when the sophisticated Tilly returns to town. The movie’s opening montage comprises a series of brief, disorienting, stylised shots that suggest, in microcosm, the story that will follow. An extremely high aerial shot shows a tiny bus making its way through a brown, barren landscape; the farm rows appear orderly and so geometric that they appear like grains on a piece of wood. Slow motion shots follow of a smiling girl spinning, and of a boy’s face (in extreme close-up), lying sideways with a slight trickle of blood leaking from his mouth. There is a canted shot of a rural back yard and a shot of the face of the girl, now crying and running towards the camera. Unclear as yet as to how they will contribute to the narrative, the shots mirror the haziness in Tilly’s and Molly’s respective memories and insinuate the unpredictable way memory assembles into ‘evidence’. Like A League of Their Own, The Dressmaker features an A-list cast and numerous quirky supporting characters to add flesh to the bones of the story. As in A League, comedy in The Dressmaker often turns on the inversion and hybridisation of generic expectations, as when typically ‘masculine’ generic markers are matched with ‘feminine’ accoutrements. Clear examples of this include the sound of the bell clanging, signalling ‘Spaghetti Western’, synced with the shot of Tilly’s ‘weapon’ (her Singer sewing machine) coming into view; and Tilly’s first words on returning to town, reminiscent of Jack Nicholson in The Shining: ‘I’m back, you bastards!’ There is obvious comedic pleasure to be had in the havoc the modern-minded and practical Tilly begins to wreak on the town, in her flaunting of sartorial sophistication, provision of advice to a succession of dowdy women (and a male cross-dresser, in the form of Hugo Weaving’s character, the police sergeant), and the comeuppance that Tilly eventually gets when she unearths the real story. Where memory was tacitly invoked as a framing device in A League, memory takes on a life of its own in The Dressmaker; it is protean, elusive,

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Gendering History on Screen and capricious but also extremely powerful. The Dressmaker opens with Tilly’s words, ‘I need you to remember me, Mum. I need you to remember, so I can remember’, and continues until that remembering is achieved. Charting the restitution of Molly’s, Tilly’s, and ‘official’ town memories, The Dressmaker prioritises both women’s and other memories often discredited and deemed irrelevant in relation to the official recording of events. In addition to the cross-dressing policeman, who was blackmailed into supporting Tilly being sent away, another supporting character who holds the key to what happened is the intellectually disabled Barnaby. Over and over Barnaby makes the apparently meaningless comment that Tilly moved, which comment is overlooked by everybody, including audiences. When the facts finally come to light – Stuart was a bully whose favourite trick involved running full speed at his victims and ramming them with his head; when Tilly stepped aside Stuart hit the wall and accidentally broke his own neck – only then does the significance of Barney’s comment (that Tilly ‘moved’ aside to escape Stuart’s assault) fall into place. As Max Silverman puts it, the history that returns ‘to shadow the present is therefore not a linear history but one that condenses different moments, and recreates each due to the connection between them, to resemble Walter Benjamin’s famous constellation,,’.54 With the unearthing of the real story, this ‘fancy-frocked, revenge story’ advocates the serious and pressing need to prioritise the experiences of women and the sexually and intellectually marginalised and to pay attention to even the most fragmentary utterances in the construction and assignment of historical responsibilities.55 Made nearly 20 years prior to The Dressmaker with government artsbody support and exhibited primarily on film festival circuits, including LGBTQ film festival circuits, Cheryl Dunye’s now canonical mockdocumentary The Watermelon Woman (1996) shares with Rosie’s Secret and The Dressmaker a deep concern with the politics of shared community memories. In the film, a young wannabe filmmaker stumbles upon information about a little known African-American film actress who played in ‘mammy’ roles in 1930s Hollywood. The filmmaker, ‘Cheryl’, reflexively played by Dunye herself, sets off to make a documentary about the ‘forgotten’ Richards, which project forms the story of the feature film. Even for audiences familiar with Dunye’s ,,

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Women Writing History Through Film performative mock-doc approach, one scene especially attracts attention. In the scene, ‘Cheryl’ sits beside a TV that plays a scene from one of Richards’ ‘old movies’. Squinting her eyes and wringing her hands in an imitation of Richards’ performance, Cheryl wears a kerchief on her head, dabs her eyes, stares directly out at the film audience, and mimes along to the words that her favourite actress is saying. In a movie that is so thoroughly threaded through with irony, the sight of Dunye playing ‘Cheryl’ playing the ‘mammy’ serves the obvious purpose of poking fun at the stereotypical performance of the historical figure that, by contemporary standards, is excessive. The scene plays up the historical differences between the situations of the two women, yet because of obvious parallels that the film sets up (both Dunye and the fictional character ‘Cheryl’ are African-American lesbians who work in the film industry) and because of The Watermelon Woman’s overall interest in the history of Black female stars, the humour is highly empathetic. We laugh with, rather than at, the overdone performance. The overblown quality of both the 1930s and the contemporary spectacles are but components of a theatrical masquerade that each woman plays out (and up) according to respective career demands. In its construction of the fictional character ‘Fae Richards’, who is presented as real, the film draws attention to the failure of definition that formerly protected the borders between fact and fiction, history and fantasy. The film parodies the aspirations of investigative documentary in order to question the pseudo-scientific pretences of hegemonic historiography as well as the exclusionary, male-centred, white-centred, nature of that form. The Watermelon Woman shows history to be an assemblage of relative truths that say as much about the researcher’s desire than about the past ‘as it really was’. The scene that I have discussed gives us the fictional character ‘Cheryl’, played by The Watermelon Woman’s real director, performing an imitation of a ‘historical’ personality who turns out to be a construction. There is an appeal to ‘history’ that is here a fabrication, that furthers a ‘fictional’ plot that in many ways is true. As Leger Grindon would put it, what is on offer are the film’s ‘political aspirations – political in the sense that [this work] promote[s] an understanding of the past that responds to social conflicts’.56

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Gendering History on Screen

Figure 1.2 Empathetic humour. The Watermelon Woman. Dancing Girl Productions, 1996. Dir. Cheryl Dunye.

Like all of the movies thus far explored, The Watermelon Woman deals fundamentally with issues of elision, absence, and forgetting in both its historical subject matter (the African-American lesbian actress) and in the meta-historical neglect of that subject in the fields of both historiography and screen studies (i.e. the lack of archives on the topic). The issue of these absences form a material condition that provides grounds for the film’s coming into being and impacts on the narrative and aesthetic choices that the filmmaker goes on to make. The film aims to restore, revive, re-find, and recreate lost histories, and is itself a meta-historical testament to the difficulty of compiling information about events and people who are outside the bounds of established historiography. The film opportunistically mobilises the technologies at its disposal (the ability to construct a fairly convincing version of archival material) for a political-, community-, and subculturally oriented aim. With Benjamin, the film conceives history through a time-lapse camera, to form an image that is taken up for currentday political praxis; this approach powers my understanding of women’s significance throughout the movies discussed in this chapter, and especially The Watermelon Woman. Not quite a role model, Fae Richards nonetheless acquires contemporary significance beyond what she would

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Women Writing History Through Film have in a mockumentary without political engagement: on the one hand, the figure is clearly a model for Cheryl, an indication of the existence of a Black lesbian past and thus a source of hope and possibility for a Black lesbian future. On the other hand, it is possible to read the shared performance as a disheartening indication of how little things have changed, a depressing reminder of the exhibitionism Black women working in the film industry throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries must perform. In both cases, the presence of the contemporary researcher (‘Cheryl’) transforms history into something meaningful and personal for the film; Cheryl’s and consequently the film’s stance is characterised by affection and familiarity rather than distance and awe.

Conclusion Examples of the constellation that Benjamin indicates, which Spiropoulou and Silverman echo, in the historical films in Gendering History would include the framing device in A League of Their Own, where the presentday character’s looking back book-ends the historical story of the team’s success. They would include the cutaways in the biographical movie Augustine, from the nineteenth-century hospital where the movie takes place to present-day female psychiatric patients articulating authentic narratives. They include the voice-over of the lead protagonist in Monster and the flashbacks in The Iron Lady; each of these examples is another such constellation where the past is invoked to give meaning, vitality, and urgency to the present. They would comprise the angel in November Moon who protectively erases personal knowledge of the future in the story the female Jewish refugee November tells to her lover. The image of the mother’s memory qua photograph (conjured by the daughter) in History and Memory is another example of such a constellation of past and present. As is the image of filmmaker Sophia in Once My Mother, sitting with her ageing mother, scanning together the video that Sophia captured of people speaking about her mother’s sister’s death. They would encompass the exclusion of the disabled character’s testimony in The Dressmaker, re-valued in 1951, and again in 2010, a year which saw the unprecedented visibility of disability activism.57

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Gendering History on Screen The very films themselves, which are images of the past viewed in the present, lend power to the filmmakers and to the women with whom these stories resonate. The images in these films and the performative act of their having been made are correctives to the historical records that have excluded women and where women’s voices have not been heard. In all these examples, moments between past, present, and future line up to bring new meaning to the past and political, revived potency to the present. Women’s cinematic historiographies are fuelled by these ideas, picking up and extending them in stories that depict new ways of seeing, women as agents of change and actors in history. In feature films and documentaries in countries that include France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Australia, Iran, and the United States, female filmmakers are offering alternatives to the male-authored stories and themes that comprise many films about history. Working in documentaries and historical film subtypes, female filmmakers create new understandings of women in history, reframe generic concepts such as fame, heroism, and historical worthiness, and call into question methodological components such as evidence and voice. Their films add complexity to the understandings of the past through their selection of stories, events, and protagonists; in their depiction of historical actors and common themes; and via their frequently reflexive treatment of storytelling elements. While women do not ‘own’ these innovations (they are also found in history films by male directors), women directors are uniquely positioned to bring a revisionist approach and fresh understandings to familiar generic concepts.

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2 Reclaiming Undeserving Women: Contemporary Female Biopics

A cinematic portrait of a real individual, the biographical film, or biopic, has been an enduring and popular vehicle for re-created history on-screen. The biopic initially emerged as an aesthetically predictable and commercially reliable component within the classical Hollywood studio system, fashioning contents from fictionalised plots through the vehicle of studio stars.1 After the demise of the studio system, biopics went into industrial decline, becoming critically unpopular, disappearing from film screens, and migrating to television.2 In the 1980s and 1990s, the biopic underwent a third reinvention to become a prestigious art house genre with international reach into the cinemas of France, Korea, and India, among others.3 Present-day audiences now associate the genre with inventive aesthetics, life writing innovations, issue-oriented subject matter, and the visible presence of well-known or emergent cinema auteurs. Significantly for this discussion, the biopic has always had an appeal for female audiences, with up to one-third of Hollywood studio-era biopics featuring women in lead roles as entertainers, members of royalty, artists, doctors, and teachers.4 Although no-one has produced a quantitative survey of contemporary biopic roles as George Custen did for studio-era

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Gendering History on Screen movies, the form’s importance for female audiences has been pointed out by numerous scholars writing about movies such as Frida, Marie Antoinette, Sylvia, Artemisia, The Queen, and many others.5 Perhaps because of its once denigrated and feminised status, biographical cinema has proved to be a valuable form for emerging and established women directors to gain international acclaim and modest box office success. Margarethe von Trotta, for example, has produced numerous biographical stories over the course of her 40-year long career, initially with Marianne and Juliane (1981), then Rosa Luxemburg (1986), and most recently with Hannah Arendt (2012). Biographical movies have appeared at the beginning and in later years of Jane Campion’s career, with Angel at my Table (1990) and most recently Bright Star (2009). Other movie-making veterans who have explored the genre include Agnieszka Holland (Copying Beethoven 2006) and Mira Nair (Amelia 2009). High profile biopics such as Marie Antoinette (2006) and Selma (2014) have brought prestige to then mid-career directors Sofia Coppola and Ava DuVernay and to cross-over directors with experience in artistic realms other than film, like Phyllida Lloyd (The Iron Lady 2011) and Julie Taymor (Frida 2002). Relative newcomers at the time, Christine Jeffs (Sylvia 2003), Patty Jenkins (Monster 2003), Alice Winocour (Augustine 2012), Agnès Merlet (Artemisia 1997) and Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol 1996; The Notorious Bettie Page 2005) each made use of the form to build up directing credentials. In spite of these auspicious factors, women’s innovations directing biopics have not been taken up much within discussions of women’s cinema, and most biopic scholars rely on movies by male directors when they note innovations in the form.6 Women’s roles as biopic subjects have received a little more attention, forming the subject of Bronwyn Polaschek’s The Postfeminist Biopic, on movies about canonical figures from second wave feminism, and occupying a substantial portion of Dennis Bingham’s Whose Lives are They Anyway?7 However here, too, there is disagreement about the innovations offered by biopics about women and the movies’ ability to alter long-held and often restrictive views of women in the public sphere. For example, Dennis Bingham explains how biopics about men have grown increasingly complex since the studioera celebratory form, featuring a diversity of iterations that include ‘warts-

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Reclaiming Undeserving Women and-all’, ‘critical’, ‘parodic’, ‘appropriative’, and ‘neoclassical’. Biopics about women, he claims, remain ‘intractable’, with women’s lives continuing to emerge in ‘pathetic’ forms. I am not the first to note this disparate characterisation in Bingham’s assessments and to voice disagreement with it. With Bronwyn Polaschek, I too believe biopics about women are far from intractable. However, Polaschek’s own move to explore biopics about culturally venerated women leaves unexplored the popular appeal and cultural function of women in less illustrious positions. Women’s pathways to fame have always been more circumscribed than those available to men, and women within most celebrity industries have faced, and continue to face, pressures to conform well in excess of what famous men experience. A number of exciting new biopics about women, in films by women directors, directly take on the matter of fame in its relation to notoriety and historical worth. The characters in these movies are all fringe subjects of some sort, either wholly unknown, famous but widely abhorred, or famous for their connections to violence or medical aberration. To investigate how ordinarily undeserving female characters are made relevant, vital, and even heroic for contemporary feminist audiences, this chapter considers three movies in detail: Augustine (2012), about the nineteenth-century hysteria patient Augustine Gleizes, Monster (2003), concerning the convicted murderer Aileen Wuornos, and The Iron Lady (2011), about the legendarily unpopular British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Recuperating abject, criminal, and unpopular characters for contemporary audiences requires different filmmaking manoeuvres than are required by, say, the more straightforwardly lauded historical subjects depicted in A League of Their Own (discussed in Chapter 1). Directors are using innovative mechanisms to create important oppositional spaces and to get audiences into the heads, and seeing through the eyes, of despised and denigrated women. They bring life to the past by creatively manipulating time and temporal registers and by giving form to anachronistic visual and aural story-telling devices. At times they sidestep the lives of straightforwardly famous, heroic women to tell important stories through working-class protagonists, as in Suffragette (2015). Through these mechanisms, a constellation between present and past is established and stories of dereliction, abuse, and exclusion are fashioned into oppositional

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Gendering History on Screen texts for present-day viewers. As Walter Benjamin might put it, the present tense in which the movies are seen is refreshed and made revolutionary by recognising its ‘bond of suffering with the past’.8 As such, the images on offer in these films are the antithesis of the positive images once sought by teachers of feminist media.

From Positive Images to Undeserving Subjects: A Place for Women? The notion of positive images is a well-established theme in research about images of women and sub-cultural and/or minority groups. Scholarly investigations into the perceived positiveness of media representations were a factor in mid-1970s forms of English-language media criticism, with a lasting effect on the teaching of media in schools. According to Susan Wengraf and Linda Artel, the authors of Positive Images: Non-Sexist Films for Young People, the aim of this approach was principally didactic, to facilitate ‘young people’s awareness of alternatives to sex-stereotyped behavior’ and to assist them to ‘recognise the powerful ability of film and video to present positive role models’.9 The evaluation of media in terms of their positive or negative effects continues into the present, where such assessments determine outcomes for institutional awards from civil rights organisations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and commissioned research such as ‘Where We Are on TV’, which documents the increased media presence of LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer) role models.10 In opposition to this approach, a strong counter-literature has emerged taking issue with the assessment of images primarily in terms of positivity. This literature identified challenges in methodology, definition, and focus, with contributors pointing out the difficulties in measuring positiveness, audience engagement, and the relation between positive images and audience pleasures.11 Biographical expressions of women’s and/or minority and/or queer lives have been especially vulnerable to expectations of positivity, though lately there appears to have been a move in LGBTQ biographical filmmaking (for example) away from heroic individuals towards persons of more questionable community worthiness.12 J. Edgar

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Reclaiming Undeserving Women (Eastwood 2011) is an excellent example of this, showing the life of the powerful, closeted, and sometimes capricious long-term director of the FBI and disclosing Hoover’s homoerotic relationship with colleague Clyde Tolson. Dallas Buyers Club (Vallée 2013) tells the story of Ron Woodroof, the charismatic Texan who apparently contracted HIV from a female IV drug user and who fought to improve access for HIV patients to pharmaceutical drugs. Both movies ask audiences to broaden their notion of the historical gay past to include more dubious individuals. Pre-dating both J. Edgar and Dallas Buyers Club by nearly 20 years, the experimental New Queer Cinema biopic Swoon (Kalin 1992), about convicted child killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, has been seen as a metaphor for the anger felt by lesbians and especially gay men towards an indifferent political climate during the heyday of the AIDS crisis. Overturning conventional notions of celebrity, J. Edgar, Dallas Buyers Club, and especially Swoon explore what Graeme Turner calls a ‘transgressive notoriety’ that upturns the ‘pro-social, pro-individualist and pro-capitalist discourses that construct the more conventional versions of celebrity’.13 In biopic studies, Dennis Bingham has recently drawn attention to a new cinema form that he calls the ‘biopic of someone undeserving’, or BOSUD. An interesting and complex contemporary category, the BOSUD is an anti-Great Man biopic that defies the orthodox idea that biopics ‘must be about people deemed important in high or middle culture’.14 BOSUDs express an ambivalence to notions of the extraordinary and the heroic and are frequently self-reflexive in their understanding of generic norms. While some appear to display nostalgia for the classic version of the genre, more typical is a sense of parody layered underneath such a stance. Included in Bingham’s list of films fitting into this sub-genre are movies about people working in low culture forms (Auto Focus [Schrader 2003], about Hogan’s Heroes actor Bob Crane, and The People vs. Larry Flynt [Forman 1996], about the creator of the American porn magazine Hustler) and people whose fame derives from their shadowy or sycophantic association with genuinely famous people, like The Assassination of Richard Nixon (Mueller 2004) (about Nixon’s would-be assassin). Despite its obvious scholarly value and cultural relevance, BOSUDs in Bingham’s calculation unfortunately appear to skew towards the male. Of the list of 13 BOSUDs that Bingham mentions, the category largely

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Gendering History on Screen comprises movies about non- or infamous men: just two centre on female protagonists (I Shot Andy Warhol, about American radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas and The Notorious Bettie Page, about the eponymous American pin-up model). Oversight on Bingham’s part, or an accurate assessment of a cultural form that hasn’t yet made the link between undeserving women and entertainment? Regardless of the basis of the dearth of female BOSUDs in Bingham’s calculations, there is evidence that this may be changing. Non-famous, ‘insignificant’ female characters overshadow their more eminent male counterparts in Bright Star and Copying Beethoven, about the respective relationships between John Keats and his real-life beloved, and between Beethoven and a fictional female copyist. Crafted along the lines of contemporary heterosexual femininity, both Fanny Brawne and copyist Anna Holtz are depicted as practical, robust, steady characters in contrast to their artistically gifted and charismatic but physically fragile male companions; both women are presented as intellectual equals with independent career ambitions and accomplishments, in line with ‘companionable’ heterosexual relations. Re-orienting the focus on to Holtz and Brawne in these ways enables new access to the male-dominated worlds of Romantic poetry and music respectively and appeals to female audiences via the construction of a romantic ‘rescue’ subtext not available in earlier biopics of Beethoven or Keats. Shifting focus on to marginal characters further allows audiences to perceive the unseen components necessary for hegemonic masculine fame. However, the respective movies’ new emphases on the professionally equally accomplished female characters does little to challenge the social construction of fame in its connection to professional exceptionalism. This task is approached by the French biopic Augustine.

Oppositional Medicine: The Case of Augustine About the prominent nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his most photographed patient, Augustine emulates aspects of Copying Beethoven and Bright Star by centring its story on the lesser-known female patient rather than the famous male doctor and by also including a heterosexual romantic subtext. However, unlike Holtz

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Reclaiming Undeserving Women and Brawne, the patient in Augustine is not a middle-class professional companion to the famous doctor but a medical aberration and workingclass maid. As I am about to show, this re-positioning opens new possibilities beyond those offered via the chaste and somewhat stereotypical relations depicted in Beethoven and Bright Star and strains the category of the heroic, celebratory biopic in interesting, novel, and sometimes uncomfortable ways. Set in the late nineteenth century, Augustine is stark in its portrayal of women’s victimisation at the hands of a powerful institution, in this movie’s case, the nineteenth-century French medical establishment. Based on the lives of real people, Augustine contains just enough facts to lend credibility to the story and just enough fiction to engage contemporary audiences.15 The film depicts with accuracy aspects of the medical debates of the era, such as the scepticism surrounding hypnosis as a medical tool, Charcot’s valuing of clinical observation and classification, his fruitless search for physiological origins of neurological phenomena, and his relative disinterest in patient’s autobiographical testimonies (which, 20 years later, became the cornerstone of Freud’s preoccupations). It also accurately depicts factual matters from the doctor’s and patient’s respective biographies. Similar to the movie Charcot, the real Charcot was a medical reformer who wanted to protect his patients from the long arm of the Church, and emphasised that his patients’ ailments were not the results of moral failings. Like the movie Charcot, the real Charcot innovated with art and photography in his approach to neurology, was married to a wealthy heiress, and displayed a fondness for animals (including having a pet monkey). As for the patient, Gleizes was admitted to the Salpêtrière Hospital in 1875 because she was suffering from convulsive attacks and paralysis on one side of her body.16 Gleizes was born to poor working parents and, as shown in the movie, obtained work as a maid before coming to the Salpêtrière. She remained at the Salpêtrière until 1880, when she escaped, as the movie also shows, disguised as a man.17 Many of the details about her life, including the medical procedures she underwent, verbatim descriptions of her behaviour, images of her treatment, and poses she was subjected to, are drawn from the second volume of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, the multi-volume record of the hospital’s case histories.18

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Gendering History on Screen In spite of the film’s attention to these details, Augustine is in other ways disinterested in historical fidelity, condensing and abbreviating aspects from the doctor’s and patient’s lives for the sake of narrative economy and present-day appeal. For example, in contrast to what is shown in the movie, Augustine did not leave the hospital directly after her cure but stayed on and worked there for a full 16 months following the attenuation of the symptoms.19 In opposition to the limited portrait provided by the movie, Charcot’s medical influence was not limited to hysteria but extended into Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis; and as far as hysteria is concerned, Charcot always maintained it could affect men as well as women.20 In contrast to what the movie shows, the treating doctor who was closest to Gleizes was not even Charcot himself but DésiréMagloire Bourneville, an ‘alienist’ (as psychiatrists were known at the time), journalist, founder of the progressive medical journal Le Progrès Médical, and principle author of the case studies that fill the Iconographie.21 The downplaying of Bourneville’s role supports the film’s fiction of a romance between Gleizes and Charcot, which component received the most withering criticism from neurological/medical communities.22 As one writer expressed it: Why end this evocation with a bestial coupling between the physician and his patient, an unlikely consummation that never took place? . . . The cause [of neurology] defended would have been better served by an original and truly inventive narrative, rather than this misleading and poor reconstitution.23

In addition to these objections, and partly because of the over-narration to which hysteria (as a literary and cinematic topic) has been subjected, feminist critics also found aspects of the story unacceptable, namely the distortions to Augustine’s life story, including the fact that Gleizes entered the Salpêtrière as a child at the age of 14, rather than at 19 as the movie shows. Even more unacceptable was the fact that Gleizes entered the hospital as a victim of sexual assault by her mother’s lover,24 not, as is depicted, as a reaction to animals in distress.25 Countering these objections, Augustine makes a clear appeal to contemporary feminist sensibilities by including several cutaways to contemporary women speaking about mental illness. The women are attired in clothing from the

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Reclaiming Undeserving Women nineteenth century but speak of present-day experiences with the mental health establishment, making for a jarring and anachronistic combination of formal elements reminiscent of the postmodern approach seen in movies like Swoon, De-Lovely, Marie Antoinette, Infamous, and many others, in which textual elements from the present day are inserted into stories set in the past.26 What to say about such scenes? On the one hand, they serve a commercial function to mark for present-day audiences the political sympathies of the director on the ‘correct’ (i.e. feminist side) of debates between the health establishment and women, and consequently to gain the trust of contemporary audiences who otherwise could be unconvinced about the movie’s more ambiguous feminist credentials alluded to above. On the other, the scenes comprise an oppositional Benjaminian device in their punctuating of the narrative via an extradiegetic, temporally anachronistic element. The cutaways comprise a co-mapping of present and past time frames and a reminder of the political relevance of this nineteenth century story for twenty-first-century audiences, made even more pertinent in light of proposed changes to American healthcare by the Trump administration.27 Like the cutaways, other scenes in the diegesis constellate the past for feminists in the present day. These include scenes that depict Augustine being subjected to a plethora of tests and eventually being found to have what is announced to be ‘ovarian hysteria’. The medical processes that include a naked, unspeaking, and immobilised Augustine being displayed, spoken about, drawn on, pierced, poked, photographed, sketched, suspended between chairs, and stabbed through with a needle are an unwavering indictment of nineteenth-century neurology where women were seen as victims of their own unruly bodies and poor women’s bodies especially were sites inviting experimentation, discipline, and containment. In showing the disease in this way, director Alice Winocour is consistent with a large and long-established feminist literature on hysteria, which sees it as an ‘illness of being a woman in an era that strictly limited female roles’28 or a chaotic ‘wastepaper basket’ of symptoms29 but which has nonetheless provided decades of opportunities for medical investigation, detection, and decryption. Yet while women no longer ‘have’ hysteria, they would appear to still suffer from a disproportionate range of syndromes, disorders, and irregularities, from anorexia and bulimia to depression and

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Gendering History on Screen

Figure 2.1 Winocour.

The spectacle of hysteria. Augustine. Dharamsala, 2012. Dir. Alice

anxiety, from osteoarthritis to stroke and urinary disease. As evidenced by the cutaways to unnamed present-day mental patients who speak of hysteria-like experiences, little would appear to have changed in the current day in how medicine deals with women and with the female body. In addition to establishing Augustine’s victimisation and relating it back to the ongoing (contemporary) treatment of women in medicine, the film eventually also confers on her a sense of power. Finally in the course of the story, her case emerges paradoxically as the lynchpin for the strategy to save the Salpêtrière from financial ruin. Early scenes emphasise the challenge of maintaining, in a sustainable and humane way, the sprawling society of nearly 5,000 women. Almost from the moment he meets her, Charcot (played by 53-year-old veteran actor Vincent Lindon) realises the value of his young and attractive patient (played by the 27-year-old pop star Soko) and prepares to use her as a lure in a demonstration before would-be benefactors. Through the technique of hypnosis, Augustine’s attacks can be provoked, and indeed historical research describes her as unusually easy to hypnotise. Though this procedure is subject to criticisms (Augustine is referred to as Charcot’s ‘protégé’, not ‘patient’, and likened on more than one occasion to actress Sarah Bernhardt), Charcot understands the value of such a display in terms of sponsorship for the

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Reclaiming Undeserving Women failing hospital. He thus plans an event to showcase his now favourite patient before the Academy and hopefully secure a funding stream. Through these and other plot developments, the film makes explicit the value of Augustine’s afflicted body, and indeed those of other women who are trafficked amongst the hospital’s all-male medical team and between the hospital and its coterie of wealthy male patrons, for the benefit of male gain. In doing so the film aligns with ideas from Anglophone feminist theorists such as Gayle Rubin about men’s control of women’s bodies, and with continental theories linking the female body with horror and abjection.30 Due partly to the eerie-sounding music track and the dark cinematography throughout the movie, generically Augustine bears visual and aural resemblance to horror, taking viewers through dark spaces of the hospital populated by women performing all manner of ‘inappropriate’ behaviours: staring vacantly into space, winking lasciviously, or walking catatonically with skirts hoisted up. Images such as these indicate the ghastly nature of poor and working-class female sexuality, which contrasts sharply with that of Clara, Charcot’s buttoned-up wife, and with the mostly middle-class hysterics of psychoanalysis who will occupy Freud some 20 years later.31 The links between abject female sexuality, violence, and horror are visible in a number of films of the contemporary French mini-movement ‘cinema du corps’ or ‘extreme cinema’. Female directors Claire Denis (Trouble Every Day [2001]; Bastards [2013]), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi (Baise-moi [2000]), and especially Catherine Breillat have contributed to this movement, which is known for confronting depictions of the female body, violent and extreme sexual situations, and transgression. Emerging 12 years prior to Augustine, Catherine Breillat’s Romance is a canonical early work from this mini-movement, which depicts one woman’s search for sexual pleasure through ‘risky’ night time experiments in bondage, submission, masochism, and public sex. As the film which famously struggled to achieve classification in a number of countries, including France, Romance has been wrongly classed as pornography;32 the film is distinguished by its forthright depictions of oral sex, anal sex, male and female genitalia, and inclusion of a strong female voice-over, none of which feature in Augustine. However, both films share an interest in the possibilities for the expression of female sexual

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Gendering History on Screen subjectivity within constricting circumstances (including women’s erotic agency within violent heterosexual relations), women’s estrangement from and/or shame about their bodies, and a ‘de-eroticisation of the conventions of sexual spectacle’.33 Like Romance, Augustine is strongly preoccupied with exploring what women stand to gain from their own spectacularisation and what role women’s self-construction as spectacle can play in breaking the gendered circuits of bodily exchange. Augustine’s experience and understanding of herself as spectacle changes with each attack: she enters the hospital as the object of other people’s prurient looks (as in the scene of her first attack), gains notice from the eminent neurologist with the next attack, and departs the Salpêtrière following the final hysterical episode – an event of performative self-construction of which she is the subject and author. Throughout the movie, the hysterical attacks are highly eroticised events, depicting Augustine falling to the floor each time, grabbing her crotch, rubbing her breasts, tearing at her clothes, moaning and writhing. Each attack is performed for the benefit of various onlookers (dinner party guests, fellow doctors, and finally the powerful Academy members). In the movie’s opening scene, for example, a male dinner party guest watches Augustine serve food just before she falls to the floor. He is the sole guest to take notice of her, and his face staring down at her while she lies on the floor concludes the opening scene.34 Yet by the end of the film Augustine constructs herself as willing and cunning performer who can turn the spectacle on or off at will. Just before Charcot’s fundraising event, in which Augustine is to star, takes place, Augustine suffers a violent fall down a flight of stairs and her paralysis is instantly cured. When the fundraising event commences shortly after, Augustine now possesses the power and purpose to refuse to be hypnotised and to derail the funding. Instead, she whispers to the stunned and speechless Charcot that she is ‘cured’, and then falls to the floor in a fake attack. The attack is convincing, Charcot is fêted, perhaps undeservedly, by the Academy, Augustine is carried out on a stretcher, and money is secured. In contrast to the opening scene, in this concluding attack scene Augustine’s look at Charcot concludes the sequence.35 Shortly after this, Charcot and Augustine have sex upstairs and Augustine absconds from the hospital dressed (as stated) in men’s clothing.

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Figure 2.2 Self-spectacularisation: the final episode. Augustine. Dharamsala, 2012. Dir. Alice Winocour.

This depiction of Augustine’s final hysterical attack makes several things clear. In its portrayal of Augustine’s falsifying a hysterical attack that previously had been provoked via hypnosis by the male medical team, the film retroactively casts doubt on the great doctor’s medical abilities and valorises female power, capacity, and auto-therapy, independent of paternalistic assistance and ‘concern’. Secondly, the scene supports claims about the theatricality and artifice of hysteria, women’s reciprocal contributions to the hysteria industry, and the idea of the hospital as a ‘great image factory’.36 Thirdly, the scene offers an idea of female economic power via the suggestion that women were not mere passive bystanders but active contributors to the welfare of the Salpêtrière. In doing so, the scene makes evident the enormous yet normally undepicted value of the female body for medical research and casts new doubt on the efficacy of historical medical methods. Augustine overturns the rigid, gendered hierarchy between doctor and patient and the construction of female powerlessness in health and sexuality. Through re-purposing the spectacle of the female body, the film offers multiple and contradictory feminist fantasies about reciprocated power, the counter-circulation of women’s bodies, and escape from marginalisation and institutionalisation.

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Gendering History on Screen No such fantasies are on offer in Monster, Patty Jenkins’ biopic about Aileen Wuornos, who was convicted and ultimately executed in 2002 in the state of Florida for the killing of six white men. As I shall go on to show, the ethical issues raised by Monster are rich and complex and necessitate new means of connection with contemporary feminist audiences.

Class and Voice: Ambiguity in Monster Popular culture has long relied on the notion of serial killers as entertainment, often times in films that appear incredibly violent. In research on the ethics of spectating, violent images within movies such as Man Bites Dog and Funny Games receive praise for what Michele Aaron calls their ‘anti-moral’ and ‘contra-disavowal’ qualities that she claims get us to think about how we are positioned as spectators and consumers of violent media.37 According to Aaron, Man Bites Dog raises an awareness in us of our own spectatorial complicity and encourages us to consider how we are ‘accountable or not . . . to the contract of the spectacle’.38 While Aaron does not discuss Monster (2003), the movie offers audiences a similarly complex and challenging spectating experience in its graphic depiction of escalating violence. Yet unlike the movies Aaron mentions, Monster is based on the life of a lesbian sex worker and convicted criminal whose story was still unfolding when writer/director Jenkins was beginning to write her script. Its entertainment is partly fashioned from the materials of the life of a real person, making for a confronting imbrication of entertainment with violence and exploitation, including sexual exploitation. Together these factors prompted a cluster of strategies to gain audience confidence in the new director and to invite audiences to suspend judgements of the subject. In this section of the chapter I will discuss how the movie resists taking an exploitative stance and offers new forms of engagement and empathy with its highly controversial main character. Drawn from a script by Jenkins, Monster tells the story of the events that took place between the time when Aileen Wuornos first met her longterm female lover in the late 1980s and her court appearance and conviction in January 1992. Huddled under a highway overpass, holding a pistol and contemplating suicide, ‘Lee’ (as she is known in the movie) walks into a bar and meets Selby (Christina Ricci), who is escaping demons of her

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Reclaiming Undeserving Women own, in the form of a repressive ultra-Christian father who disapproves of her lesbianism. In contrast to Theron’s Lee, hulking and prone to fly off the handle, Ricci’s Selby is depicted as young, attractive, somewhat manipulative, and, as subsequent scenes show, eager to mix in normative lesbian society. The two women soon become lovers, and Lee promises to support Selby through her work as a sex worker and to help Selby flee her repressive surroundings. One night this plan is upended when Lee is sexually brutalised and nearly killed by a client, whom she succeeds in shooting and killing. Freaked out by the event, Lee announces to Selby her decision to stop sex work, but this is not received as she would like it to be by the increasingly dependent Selby, who wants her to continue the work to keep the money coming in. After unsuccessful and humiliating attempts at finding legal employment, Lee returns to the side of the highway, where she encounters another sleazy customer, whom, with less provocation, she shoots and kills and whose car she then takes. Thereafter, the murders become increasingly motivated by money, which (in the movie’s logic) Lee needs to satisfy Selby’s aspirational tastes. Increasingly distressed and isolated by the activities she is carrying out, Lee finds her world shrinking to the realms of work and flight from one hotel room to the next. Money is an ongoing problem, and by the time a third man is murdered the motivation is purely financial; a wallet photo that Lee finds after killing the client shows him kneeling next to a wheelchair-bound woman, whom audiences take to be the man’s wife. The fourth and final depicted victim does not even seek sex but offers a shower and safe place for Lee to sleep. With this construction of the final murder, audience sympathies for the main protagonist dissolve once and for all. While women who kill their children in a state of post-partum depression, or who kill domestic partners at home in self-defence, are not, as Lizzie Seal puts it, culturally unthinkable, the killings that Aileen Wuornos committed are not easily recuperated via any of the common exculpatory frames about women who kill; Wuornos’ acts thus place her in a category that is beyond the scope of most academic research into women and violence.39 Wuornos claimed that at least two of the killings were committed while she was trying to defend herself against violent aggressors she encountered while working on the Florida highways; indeed, her first victim, Richard Mallory, was a violent and habitual sex

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Gendering History on Screen offender.40 Without spending too much time on the facts of the case, it bears pointing out that it is widely acknowledged that Wuornos received poor advice from beginning to end from a public defence system that was no longer working, that her claims of self-defence had legal relevance but were so poorly managed they became inadmissible, and that the principal witness for the State was her one-time lover, Tyria Moore, who testified against her in exchange for a plea bargain. Because of these and other biographical circumstances, it is not an understatement to say that strong and sustained elements of exploitation shade nearly every aspect of Wuornos’ life, from her childhood as the daughter of an abusive paedophile step-father, to the sex work she became involved with as a teenager, to the ill-treatment and violence she suffered at the hands of clients via her many years in highway sex work, to the severe incompetence she faced from her inept legal team. There is no doubt that taken together, these facts make apparent a number of points that polite society would prefer to forget, about the political economy of sex work and its attendant hazards and the hypocrisy of a homophobic, gender-, and class-biased legal system that has come to reward middle-class men for defending their property and condemns poor queer women for defending their own bodies (Florida was the first state to pass a stand-your-ground law, in 2005). Feminist academics have tended to interpret Wuornos’ actions as lastresort responses to the occupational hazards of the sex work industry, or as Terri Ginsberg puts it, ‘nothing less than ordinary responses to extraordinary conditions’.41 Because of cultural fascinations with women, violence, and sex, interest in Wuornos’ story has been unrelenting and widespread. Wuornos’ life has been over-narrated in both high- and low-brow forms and has been the subject of at least three documentaries (Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, and Damsel of Death),42 several TV movies,43 two books,44 a collection of letters,45 a page on the website ‘bio’, and even an opera. Millions of dollars have been made around her story, which theme has itself been taken up in one of the documentaries about Wuornos, British filmmaker Nick Broomfield’s The Selling of a Serial Killer. Taking a critical view of journalists who profit from people in desperate circumstances, the documentary highlights the avenues of profit for some who were involved in Wuornos’ life, including

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Reclaiming Undeserving Women the lawyer who was initially assigned to her case, the 44-year-old bornagain Christian Arlene Pralle, who adopted the adult Wuornos, unnamed tabloid journalists, and the police.46 By all account Jenkins’ approach to the subject does not appear to have been motivated by financial gain. Interviews she gave at the time of the movie’s release clarified that research leading up to the film was thorough and that the final product was a movie of which Wuornos herself would have been proud. Jenkins described the process by which she backed away from initial plans for a sensationalist straight-to-video movie, due in no small part to Jenkins’ attachment to the story that grew while she was corresponding with Wuornos in prison.47 The meticulous scripting and research process, which included the director’s canvassing of court documents, interview footage, private correspondence with Wuornos, and thousands of letters written by Wuornos to her best friend Dawn Botkins, is well documented, as is Wuornos’ decision to share her story and letters with Jenkins.48 While there was considerable speculation in the press on how a ‘beautiful’ actress such as Theron would ‘transform’ into Wuornos, Jenkins largely rejected being drawn into such discussions.49 Resultantly Jenkins appears a fair and dedicated filmmaker who worked hard to gain Wuornos’ trust and who was well placed to make the film in spite of her support for the death penalty.50 Monster’s journey to success was relatively straightforward: the film was quick to win praise for its relatively inexperienced director, high profile awards for its female lead Charlize Theron, success at the box office, and mostly positive commendations from the LGBTQ and feminist press. Evidencing the general flavour of this commentary, Angelita Manzano wrote in Off Our Backs that this was not the story of a psychopath but a survivor, not a monster, but woman struggling to be recognized as a human being, worthy of love, respect, and dignity . . . Aileen’s murders do not seem evil; they appear to be rational even moral decisions, when made in the context of gross gender and class oppression.51

Bryan McCann largely concurred, saying that the film asked its viewers to consider the kind of world that produces an Aileen Wuornos . . . Monster invites audiences to

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Gendering History on Screen sympathize with a woman for whom conventional wisdom says they should feel no sympathy, and to regard her violence as something other than anathema to the norms of civil (i.e. patriarchal, heteronormative, and capitalist) society.52

I agree that the movie provides an important space for addressing issues of class and privation and that it does this largely through an appeal to LGBTQ audiences. Jenkins’ modifications of the facts of the case have been noted: Wuornos’ real-life lover Tyria Moore, who was more butch, heavyset, and out in real life, was transformed in Monster into the conventionally attractive and closeted Ricci, on the run from a homophobic, Christian family, and Lee’s character was scripted as a non-lesbian who rethinks her identity only when she meets Ricci’s character, whereas in real life Wuornos was already out when she met Moore.53 The choice of the conventionally attractive Ricci to play Lee’s lover no doubt added physical appeal to the couple; the addition of the Christian sub-plot, Selby’s stated desire to be part of a lesbian community, expressed in bars and with a group of friends one day at a county fair, and Lee’s deciding she ‘likes girls’ would also have played well to pro-queer sympathies. How the more marginal Lee would be embraced by queer spectators appears, however, a more complex question. On-screen, Lee is often depicted at a distance from groups of women Selby wants to join; her membership within the queer community is questioned overtly via comments from Selby’s aunt Donna, who quips, ‘she’s not even gay’, and her identity as a ‘street person’ is noted by both Donna and Lee’s Vietnam vet friend, Tom. The point has been made that the exterior location of the real Wuornos’ crimes (i.e. outside the domestic and conventionally ‘feminine’ sphere) led many to interpret the crimes as especially terrifying.54 The film emphasises this locational aspect, with frequent shots of Lee in a public space outdoors or on the edge of the road, which contrast sharply with interior shots of Selby in a bar, motel room, or her aunt’s home; the difference is evident in an early scene showing the two women kissing, when Lee suggests they go to a nearby yard, a suggestion Selby firmly rejects. For Lee, access to privately owned, interior spaces is only ever fleeting (as in the various hotel rooms the women inhabit) and the normative valuing of the domestic as a safe space is out of reach. Often signalling freedom and escape in canonical road

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Reclaiming Undeserving Women movies, cars represent extreme danger in Monster, as the location where Lee is trapped when the first sexual assault takes place and where she is subsequently required to perform oral sex on the police officer. Lee is most ‘at home’ near highway underpasses and on the edge of minor roads and highways in spite of the obvious vulnerabilities and dangers, setting her far apart from glamorous queer women criminals Catherine Tramell (Basic Instinct) and Piper Chapman (Orange is the New Black). The centrality of class to queer expression has been noted most cogently by Lisa Henderson, who identifies the cross-permeation of both class and sexuality in many pro-queer cultural articulations, from the radical quasi-autobiographical writings of Dorothy Allison to awardwinning commercial American television shows such as Modern Family to independent films like Boys Don’t Cry.55 In contrast to those who equate queer culture principally with middle-class expression, Henderson recognises the powerful potential for queer iterations to communicate themes of economic marginalisation and dispossession in vital new ways. In Monster, shame and abjection find their basis in class, as depicted in scenes showing Lee’s abuse by the police, her physical vulnerability walking the streets, her unsuccessful attempts to find lawful employment, and in her frequent misreading of social behaviour codes, as in a scene in a restaurant where she stands up for Selby’s right to smoke. Like Heavenly Creatures, Monster reserves the harshest punishment for the economically disenfranchised protagonist, but vastly complicates the affective meaning and potentialities of her class position; Lee appears both extraordinarily vulnerable and exudes cocky arrogance and charisma. Lee’s boastfully telling Selby that she could be president one day is a fine example of this, born of a desire to impress her new love and evidencing, however fleetingly, the potential for desiring queer butch bluster to displace the cultural injuries resulting from working-class oppression.56 In this and other scenes the scripting and performance of Lee’s character are ultimately equivocal and productively short-circuit audiences’ ability to make judgements about Wuornos. The most powerful vehicle for ambiguity, however, is the film’s voiceover.57 Crafted in large part from letters written by Wuornos to her childhood friend Dawn Botkins, which letters Jenkins had access to,58 the voice-over initially appears a steadying presence, guiding and anchoring

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Gendering History on Screen audiences in and around tumultuous scenes that include a brutal rape by one ‘john’ and an expression of paedophilia by another, sexual assault by a police officer, and the killing of four clients, among others. But as the movie moves along, the stability that is first apparent gives way to a new kind of uncertainty born of the conflict between the voice-over (describing the proceedings from one particular point of view) and image (often showing them from a very different perspective). The result is a destabilising and unsettling understanding of events that moves audiences towards the uncomfortable position of the story’s main protagonist. The voice-over brings two main story times into view: the space of the future, from which the voice issues, which appears calm and insightful, and the space of Aileen’s childhood past, both evoked via the voice-over’s recounting. The future-located voice sounds measured and even upbeat at times, while the childhood stories comprise moments of unfulfilled longings and disappointments. The relatively subdued, moderate emotional quality of those respective accounts contrasts sharply with the diegetic present tense of the movie, where Aileen appears increasingly angry and out of control. With one or two exceptions, the voice-over appears as a salve to soothe events of extreme stress and/or violence, becoming audible in the scene directly following Aileen’s killing of the abusive john, and following the scene with the man who speaks the ‘Daddy’ fantasy. After each scene, the voice-over speaks of seemingly innocent past moments, as when Aileen was told platitudes like ‘all you need is love and to believe in yourself’ and when she rode a Ferris wheel. But where normative childhood storying typically constructs such moments as felicitous, in Monster platitudes and Ferris wheels are renewed opportunities for abuse, carried out in secret. In both examples, the positioning of the voice-over directly following events of present-tense killing creates a third meaning for audiences, retroactively coding ‘harmless’ images from childhood as hazardous, unknowable, and violently shame-inducing. To my knowledge the matter of sound does not figure at all in the philosophies of history of Walter Benjamin, whose brilliant conjectures about messianic time and the past rely predominantly on visual metaphors: constellations; flashing up images; the leap of a tiger. Benjamin’s understanding of the visual arts, drama, philosophy, and literature

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Reclaiming Undeserving Women traversed many continents and centuries, but music was not his field of expertise and the subject scarcely appears in his published writings. Kaja Silverman’s now canonical The Acoustic Mirror59 offers guidance in its analyses of the qualities of voice-overs belonging to on-screen characters in classical Hollywood crime films of the 1940s and 1950s. As opposed to disembodied voice-overs, embodied voice-overs (such as Lee’s) signalled vulnerability and desperation, often issuing from characters in dire circumstances. Examples of voice-overs that Silverman names include that of a dying man in Double Indemnity (1944), a man who has been fatally poisoned in D.O.A. (1989), a man who is shot and killed during the course of the film Laura (1945), and, most famously in Sunset Boulevard (1950), a voice that belongs to a dead man. These voices, according to Silverman, speak ‘less from the heights,, than from the depths,,’.60 Each of the voices Silverman names is affected by trauma and speaks out of compulsion, ‘governed by the need to master an intolerable past’.61 While the voice-over in Monster issues from much the same impulse, mastery is never in reach. A prime example of this appears in the opening frames of the movie, where home-movie montage imagery from Aileen’s early childhood is accompanied by Aileen’s disembodied voice-over. The voice-over says: ,,

,,

I always wanted to be in the movies. When I was little, I thought for sure one day I could be a big, big star . . . Or maybe, just beautiful. Beautiful and rich, like the women on TV. I had a lot of dreams. I guess you could call me romantic, cause I truly believed that one day they’d really come true.

As these words are spoken, audiences see glimpses from another reality, including a shot of a hand roughly pulling a young child from the frame, a bloated face of a middle-aged man staring straight into the camera as if from a child’s perspective, and a teenage girl being offered money while being pushed out of the door of a car. With this temporally and thematically disconnected set of images and sounds, the movie offers two contrasting realities: on the one hand the future-located voice-over tells a fantasy of a time prior to an initial trauma; on the other, the glimpses shown on the image track retroactively re-code that time as already beset

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, Figure 2.3 Lee: I had a lot of dreams . Monster. Media 8 Entertainment, 2003. Dir. Patty Jenkins. ,

by violence and exploitation and the voice-over as disastrously unreliable. While Silverman was obviously working in the language of psychoanalysis, we could say that in Benjaminian terms, the image from the memory – of the child being assaulted and thrown from the car – blasts through from the space of Aileen’s past to the space of her present, to bring into focus the over-representation of poor and lesbian women on death row and the reality of the negative effect being poor and lesbian continues to have on a defendant’s fate.62 Through the voice-over, Monster links instances of Lee’s past with present-day violence, told from the perspective of an impossible future, not in order to explain or exculpate Lee’s actions but to destabilise audience positioning and lend authenticity to the character. Because of the empathy that early utterances create and because of how they thread through later actions, audiences perceive Lee’s experiences and motivations through a complex of emotions. Though the various killings create new forms of distancing and disbelief, these feelings are tempered by the first person telling of the story. The effect is a viewer who is themself emotionally divided, caught in an uncomfortable, oscillating tumult of apprehension and empathy, and ultimately unable to judge this complex protagonist.

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Affect and Ageing: The Iron Lady Though it may seem a stretch to move the discussion from a film about Aileen Wuornos to one about Margaret Thatcher, both The Iron Lady and Monster share a focus on well-known, controversial, once-feared figures whom audiences remember largely for their deleterious acts. In spite of the vast social gulf distinguishing the two women, both Monster and The Iron Lady create entertainment from raw materials that largely comprise negative affect. In the United Kingdom, Thatcher inspires more loathing than almost any other leader in recent history, especially from the left. A quick scan of UK newspaper headlines at the time of her death reveals reactions of jubilation and glee and the staging of ‘death parties’, rather than the sombre responses usually associated with the death of a well-known public figure.63 Thus the choice to construct and market a story around the wildly unpopular figure was acknowledged as contentious from the get-go. For example, Adam Dawtry, writing in Variety just prior to the movie’s release, declared The Iron Lady to be commercially unsaleable, as right-wing audiences would avoid the apparently left-leaning, all-female team’s construction of the subject in decline,64 and left-leaning audiences would simply refuse to spend a full 90 minutes in the company of Thatcher, regardless of who played her.65 When the movie was released, criticisms continued. Susan Carruthers, for example, blasted the movie for distorting various facts of Thatcher’s life to amplify the theme of the former Prime Minister’s self-invention and for failing to comment on, or rather, condemn, the devastating policies that she put in place.66 Reading the review, one gets the opinion that Carruthers had a certain idea in mind of the ‘right’ Thatcher movie, and The Iron Lady certainly was not it. Analysing the movie’s focus on dementia, Sadie Wearing concurred, similarly taking issue with the movie’s politics. While the movie claimed to offer the ‘perspective’ of a person with dementia, Wearing felt it ultimately fell short of this and used dementia as a ‘narrative ploy’ to legitimise a ‘subjective, one sided and thereby politicised account of British politics’.67 In particular, Wearing criticised the movie’s ending, which gives the appearance of ‘resolving’ Thatcher’s dementia by depicting her once-and-for-all decision to banish the vision of her husband, whose hallucinatory presence had been a marker of her illness, as inaccurate to the reality of dementia progression.

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Gendering History on Screen There is no doubt that the movie is hugely uncritical of the devastating policies for which Thatcher is held responsible, that included the unprecedented sell-off of public assets and a so-called deflationary strategy that has been credited with mass unemployment and the gutting of British manufacturing. Some of the disastrous events Thatcher is held to account for, including a crisis in social housing, invasion of the Falklands, and a return to values largely regarded as Victorian, are either completely ignored or barely touched on by the movie. But director Phyllida Lloyd never claimed to shed new light on understandings of such events, but rather to innovate in the portrait of old age: ‘there’s nothing controversial about the bits of political plot that we were showing . . . if we were trying to change people’s opinions it was more . . . to have empathy for old people rather than to vote for David Cameron’.68 Though I agree with Wearing’s point noted above about the movie’s ending, I think the rush to condemn the movie for what it does not show overlooks the movie’s deep innovations in the area identified by Lloyd and rarely seen on-screen: women ageing. The Iron Lady opens on a scene of an aged and declining Thatcher returning to the home where she has been locked in, initiating a conversation with a hallucination of her late husband, Denis, and being whispered about by her minders, who include medical staff, family members, and the police guard standing watch outside. More than a study of what Carruthers describes as a befuddled pensioner, opening scenes mark old age as a ‘problem’ requiring management by family and various medical minders. A flashback places audiences in the World War II-era setting of Thatcher’s young adulthood, revealing her political origins as a child of small business owners and gradual rise through the ranks of the Conservative Party. From this point onwards, the film shuttles back and forth between past and present in an attempt to signal the lack of clear distinction between time frames for people with dementia and how seemingly insignificant present-tense events may activate lengthy and vivid recollections for people with declining faculties. As a study in dementia, the film foregrounds that Thatcher’s flashbacks are triggered by events of a sensorial, bodily nature – an itching at the back of the leg, hearing a sound in the distance, or a single word or phrase taken out of context. A transition from present tense to flashback, depicted near

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Reclaiming Undeserving Women the movie’s beginning, indicates this: the aged Thatcher walking down the hallway comments to her daughter Carol her preference for ‘the company of men’; Thatcher approaches a door and opens it to reveal a room full of people. Choppy cuts show disorienting close-ups on Thatcher’s gloved hand opening the door and Thatcher’s foot, wearing conservative black pumps, while the younger version of Thatcher, ‘Miss Roberts’, walks through the door. The disorienting editing, dialling down of Carol’s voice, sound bridge of male voices laughing, and close-up on the foot, raised to scratch the other leg, reveal the ageing Thatcher’s tenuous perspective; the amplified scratching noise also ascribes an experience of physical discomfort to the young Miss Roberts possibly at odds with the ageing Thatcher’s optimistic present-day recollections, in the conversation with daughter Carol, of her preference for being the ‘only woman in any room’. In the close focus on the bodily experience of its main subject in this scene and elsewhere, the film would appear to be in keeping with movies that emphasise the sensorial in depicted events and aim to transmit such sensory experiences to viewers. The interest in the sensorial in movies finds its origin in Vivienne Sobchack’s writing on The Piano, underpins Laura Marks’ research on the haptic in experimental films and videos, and most recently materialises in Alison Landsberg’s recent writing on historiographic media.69 In Engaging the Past, Landsberg notes that experiences with and of the past, as offered by historical movies or television programmes, are frequently immersive in what they offer to audiences. Audiences no longer want only to see the past but undergo an all-round multi-sensory experience of the past that includes the sensations of touch and sound as well as a visual apprehension of events. In Landsberg’s assessment, such an approach to the past can lead to a more ethical viewing stance, including the creation of empathy in audiences. To build her theory of affective engagement Landsberg draws on Walter Benjamin’s writings on photography and film and his assessments of the revolutionary potential of the (then) new media to augment human perception and reveal that which typically remains invisible.70 For Benjamin, the revolutionary, revelatory potential of the new technologies is both literal, in the way that a close-up can show aspects of a scene that aren’t visible in long shots, and socio-cultural, in the way that Soviet films of the 1920s may reveal oppressive class relations. Benjamin’s familiarity

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Gendering History on Screen with film was famously wide-ranging, encompassing French and Soviet experimental works as well as Charlie Chaplin movies. As Landsberg reminds us, Benjamin was especially intrigued by the potential of cinematic montage to join new physical spaces and to ‘shock’ audiences into new understandings of social relations. Although images offered in The Iron Lady cannot be called ‘shocking’, the frequent and disorienting close-ups, often captured via hand-held camera, on Thatcher’s actual body parts replicate for audiences the bodily experiences mentioned by Landsberg. Ironically, Thatcher’s own decline into dementia is depicted as a struggle against ‘feelings’, as when she responds aggressively to the doctor’s question about how she is feeling: What am I bound to be feeling? People don’t think any more. They feel . . . One of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts . . . I think I am fine.

Thatcher’s notoriously hard-edged and uncaring characteristics are here deployed to draw attention to the severity of her demise, in a scene otherwise replete with denial that anything is wrong. Shifting experiences of denial and acknowledgement and denial of the condition of dementia, which are felt by friends, family members, and the afflicted person themselves, are core themes in The Iron Lady. In addition to the scene in the doctor’s office just mentioned, a further example of this theme is found in a scene featuring the ageing Thatcher and adult daughter Carol, who attempts to ‘remind’ her mother of the current state of affairs (‘Mark lives in South Africa, you’re not Prime Minister any more, and dad, well, dad is dead’). After Carol’s statement, Thatcher holds a look for what feels like a very long time before parrying the conversation into a completely different direction: ‘you look exhausted darling’. In this clear deflection of her very capable daughter’s compassionate attempt to align the ageing woman’s self-understanding with real events, Thatcher sidesteps the issue of her own decline but momentarily regains ground by asserting her motherly dominance; at this time, Carol looks away and wipes her eyes, hiding her grief in an attempt to perpetuate the fiction of her mother’s capacity. Moments like this, that I don’t believe are often depicted in commercial cinema, may account for the positive reception the

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Reclaiming Undeserving Women

Figure 2.4 Depicting decline. The Iron Lady. Pathé and Film Four, 2011. Dir. Phyllida Lloyd.

film received from some dementia professionals, such as Desmond O’Neil, who called it ‘one of the most sympathetic and insightful treatments of dementia ever committed to celluloid’.71 They may also explain why some media studies academics likewise responded positively to the movie, in spite of an acknowledged predisposition not to like the principle subject. Brian McFarlane, for example, called it a ‘moving study in old age, which is not a theme that is often explored in film’.72 Often in vivid detail, the film depicts the widespread social discomfort with the fluctuating patterns of lucidity experienced and exhibited by those entering into dementia. In a suspenseful moment, at a dinner party the ageing Thatcher is called on to comment on events of the day (the hotel bombing in Islamabad). The Iron Lady audiences, who have been sharing Thatcher’s perspective in a flashback, are aware both that she is not following the dinner party conversation and of the intense pressure on her, as a former Head of State, to muster a comment. Her airy but well-received response to the question of how she, as Prime Minister, would have dealt with the recent bombings is an indication both of the social denial of her declining health but also of what little is required to pass for right-wing wisdom: ‘we have always lived alongside evil, but it has never been so patient, so avid for carnage, so eager to carry innocence along with it . . . Western civilization must root out this evil wherever it hides’. Where Carruthers understands the film to be ‘indifferent to ideology’,73 I read the diegetic (dinner party guests’) positive reception of this vacuous yet

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Gendering History on Screen characteristically baroque response as a subtle acknowledgement of the rhetorical bombast characterising right-wing discourse, where detailed grasp of current events does not appear to be necessary. Moments such as this allow empathy for the complex experience of ageing and dementia and also demonstrate what I see as a far from clear-cut endorsement of rightwing politics. *** In this chapter’s discussion of the movies Augustine, Monster, and The Iron Lady, I have identified features of female BOSUDs and explored the varying ways audiences have connected with three unlikely counterheroes. The chapter has delineated how female directors have innovated and made relevant seemingly unsuitable stories for feminist audiences. Forms of engagement that the chapter has identified include the anachronistic connecting of present and past psychiatric patients and methods in Augustine, the ambiguous clashing and combining of temporal registers in Monster, and the jarring and disorienting physicality on offer in The Iron Lady. In part by means of these components, Augustine, Monster, and The Iron Lady rise above the merely ‘sensational’ or ‘conservative’ vehicles that they might have developed into and become important oppositional texts on the respective subjects of medicine, criminal justice, and ageing as they especially relate to women. While the stories are set ‘in the past’ and/or ‘somewhere else’, I would argue that all three films engage contemporary audiences on a visceral and affecting level and demand audiences to create links between the stories and present-day circumstances.

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3 Feminist First-Person Documentaries: Migration, Internment, Reconciliation

With its inclusion of intimate and domestic themes, first-person documentary would seem an unlikely candidate to address large-scale, nationally and internationally significant historical events. The definition of first-person documentary derives predominantly from low-budget and middle-tier funding bodies like film festival and government initiatives and from critical writings on the subject. First-person documentaries make use of alternative means of distribution and exhibition (including museum exhibition) and gain prominence largely through festival activities, awards, and critical appraisals that are external to conventional commercial film industry data; the story of their popularity is thus not reducible to box office statistics.1 First-person documentary is immensely varied in theme, rhetoric, and in how the ‘personal’ element is deployed. While some works remain hermetically focused on the life of an individual, other films position the individual as a mere starting point from which to look out on to the wider world, deploying the personal as the frame to stories with widespread cultural relevance such as migration, internment, and/or war. In spite of women’s long-standing association with the ‘personal’ across numerous cultural and artistic realms, the inclusion of women’s media works in critical discussions

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Gendering History on Screen about first-person cinema has been patchy at best. A scan of chapter headings in recent English-language scholarly books on autobiographical media reveals a nearly complete absence of women directors’ works.2 Fascination with the lives of women artists and directors has tended to surpass interest in their works; audiences may feel a sense of personal connection with female directors and simultaneously struggle to come up with the titles of specific movies they have helmed. Despite the fact that women’s literary autobiographies are recognised as complex, women’s first-person films and videos have unfortunately been associated with a kind of naive realism and deemed incapable of addressing important cultural matters or posing sophisticated philosophical questions, in contrast to works by male documentary makers. While this characterisation has been roundly condemned, biases against women’s films in documentary studies spheres and against documentary in feminist film scholarship have meant the complexity of women’s documentary contributions has been under-examined.3 How female directors leverage first-person documentary to depict the effects of momentous and calamitous events is the focus of this chapter, which examines first-person movies at a broad level and looks closely at five exemplary works, Halving the Bones (Ozeki 1995), History and Memory (Tajiri 1991), I for India (Suri 2005), Nadar (Subirana 2008), and Once My Mother (Turkiewicz 2013). The movies have been selected for their representation of the first-person form and for the breadth of subject matter they collectively cover: Halving the Bones is about three generations of Japanese and Japanese-diaspora women; History and Memory deals with the subject of Japanese internment during World War II; I for India depicts one family’s migration experiences of alienation, exclusion, and belonging through mutually exchanged home movies; Nadar shows director Subirana’s search for her grandfather, who was executed under Franco; and Once My Mother portrays the director’s mother’s traumatic migration from Poland to Australia. Memory, as Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone remind us, is not only individual but cultural, and what is expressed in the small fragments of memory that these movies show form the basis of what are ultimately much larger cultural histories.4

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Feminist First-Person Documentaries

First-Person Documentary: Terms and Terrain Perhaps prompted by the meteoric rise of self-documentation practices on social media sites in the 2000s, the first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a veritable explosion in critical research about subjective or personal documentary. Included under the broad umbrella of these documentary forms are autobiographical documentary,5 subjective cinema,6 first-person documentary,7 journal entry film,8 intimate portraiture,9 diary, self-portrait, notebook, and essay films.10 Common themes within all of these include a highlighting of a personal or subjective perspective, a distancing from voice-of-god-style documentary, and the absence of an institutional voice, such as that of a broadcaster or government.11 While these forms began to flourish in the 1980s with the appearance of the first personal camcorders, first-person work is visible from at least the early 1960s. The initial and ongoing influence of American movements has been asserted, with effects of Direct Cinema, for example, identified in works by Joyce Chopra, Ross McElwee, and Nick Broomfield.12 The stimulus of European art cinemas has also been noted,13 in particular Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicles of a Summer (1961)14 and Raoul Ruiz’s Of Great Events and Ordinary People (1978). Other key early inspirations include diary approaches of Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas and Michael Rubbo’s mockumentary Waiting for Fidel (1974). Contemporarily, the form’s international reach has been affirmed, in countries and geographical regions as varying as Brazil, China, and Guinea,15 and in Canada, Asia, and the Middle East.16 Regarding the limits of the subject, ‘first person’ would seem to include both intimate work that deals with the director’s own life and movies that feature a director speaking ‘personally’ to an audience but who otherwise has little connection to the subject matter. The trope of the director appearing in frame escalates an audience’s sense of a movie’s ‘personal’ quality, even as audiences realise the performativity of that appearance. The careers of directors Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore have been built around such a trope, mobilising what Dovey calls the ‘klutz’ persona to increase an audience’s sense of trust and authenticity of the story. Somewhere in between the über-intimate approach of a Jonathan Caouette on the one hand, and the distanced performativity of a Nick Broomfield on

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Gendering History on Screen the other are first-person films that address widespread collective or cultural matters from a subjective, individual point of view. Bringing in components of the essay film, focused on the ‘world in front of them’,17 such movies often make use of the personal to frame themes of diasporic identity and group belonging.18 In these stories, events that at first appear trivial accumulate layers of cultural importance, and losses that are initially framed as ‘merely’ personal accrue relevance for whole communities. Unsolved family mysteries and unredeemed personal losses belie matters of cultural importance; conversely, cultural events resonate at deeply personal levels. A recurring concern is how individual diasporic, migrant, displaced, or marginalised experiences can be a prism on to history and memory.

First-Person Documentary: Women Directors Perhaps because of how they combine the cultural, political, and personal, women’s contributions in this space have been prolific, rich, and creative. In addition to the influences named above, feminist first-person documentary has roots in at least two complementary camps, the American women’s movement documentaries of the early 1970s and European fiction films by women directors featuring an autobiographical element, such as Peppermint Soda (Kurys 1977), Germany Pale Mother (Sanders-Brahms 1979), Marta Meszaros’ trilogy (Diary for My Children, Diary for my Lovers, Diary for My Mother and Father (1984 – 90), and Chocolat (Denis 1988). In so doing, the movies are well positioned to combine post-realist, post-expositional, and post-evidentiary themes with approaches of a personal nature. In contrast to assumptions about representational naivety mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, firstperson feminist documentaries are highly reflexive and suspicious of conventional forms of evidence. Often they subject such evidence to crossexamination and deploy humour in doing so. For example, both Nadar and Once My Mother use humour in early scenes that depict the filmmakers’ respective attempts to ‘coach’ their subjects (which normally is taboo in documentary). In Once My Mother, footage from prior failed documentary attempts is incorporated into the current film, including a scene in which a crew person interviews the director’s mother Helena

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Feminist First-Person Documentaries about whether she knows why her daughter is making a movie. Helena answers, plausibly, ‘because she loves me’. While this first response appears credible, when a completely different follow-up question receives a very similar answer, Helena’s response now comes across as rote and belies both her lack of understanding of the question and her desire to perform for the documentary her daughter is making (it is clear she has misunderstood the question yet does not want to upset the documentary process). The documentary-within-the-documentary thus reveals the artifice of the subject’s on-camera behaviour. Similarly, in Nadar, an early moment reveals the filmmaker training the grandmother in how to appear on camera, counselling her to avoid looking into the lens. Through the incorporation of such gently comical scenes, the naturalness of documentary evidence is undermined, the footage is re-cast as constructed, and the performance of the documentary actor is reflexively revealed. A further critique of documentary conventions is evident in the movies’ preference for subjective representation, in particular for re-enactment footage. In Nadar and Halving the Bones, fictional or fantasy sequences contrast sharply with sanctioned medical, government, or professional historians’ utterances; the treatment of these sequences contrasts sharply with their conventional documentary value. In History and Memory,

Figure 3.1 Footage from a prior, uncompleted documentary. Once My Mother. Change Focus Media and Screen Australia, 2013. Dir. Sophia Turkiewicz.

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Gendering History on Screen the recurring, technically ‘fictional’ image of Tajiri’s mother at a water tap in the desert is construed as infinitely more ‘true’ than the lavishly welldocumented but completely propagandistic Department of War Information imagery. In Nadar, the romantic, stylised, re-created footage of the director’s grandmother and grandfather represent the director’s longing for a ‘heroic’ past and contrast sharply with state evidence that asserted otherwise. Neither I for India nor Once My Mother relies on re-enactment footage, but they find other ways to prioritise materials that are considered subjective. Once My Mother interestingly incorporates footage from the director’s own archive: unfinished, earlier, film-schoolera versions of Once My Mother that were put away for various reasons. Although the director could not complete them at the time, when they are discovered and incorporated into the 2013 film their flaws testify in wordless ways to the highly complex relation between the director and her subject (who in the case of both the abandoned footage and the 2013 documentary, is the director’s actual mother). In I for India, home movies made by the director’s father and his relatives are more accurate and trustworthy than the patronising material produced by the BBC. As an assemblage, amplification, and expansion by daughter Sandhya of the original home movies produced by her father, I for India is both a documentary (which screened publicly at Sundance, in Karachi, New Zealand, Seattle and elsewhere) and a home-movie audio and video recording of ‘the most intimate thoughts and observations of [the director’s family’s] lives in England over a period of forty years’.19 Throughout the movies, family accounts also prove untrustworthy, tending towards the hyperbolic, the fantastical, the contradictory, and the downright untrue. In Wendy Levy’s film Naomi’s Legacy (1995) the director and her mother argue about which game the grandfather was playing on the day he made his young daughter (the director’s mother) hide under the table (‘maybe I just dreamt the whole rest of it’, wonders the director). In History and Memory, Tajiri’s aunt expresses a clear preference for fantasy in lieu of reality, collecting images of movie stars in a box she then passes on to Tajiri’s sister. The director’s grandmother in Halving the Bones is positioned as a teller of tall tales, inventing illness in order to justify escaping her return to Japan, and overstating the success of her marital relationship as well as her feelings for her new US home. In Nadar

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Feminist First-Person Documentaries the narrator admits she invented a heroic story about her grandfather’s life. In Once My Mother, the director and her mother argue about the identity of people in photographs. ‘That’s you!’, says the director’s mother, who is corrected by the director (‘no, that’s you, when you were in your twenties’). Throughout these documentaries, characters argue about the details of an event, highlighting the fragility of individual memory. Often relatives are not as cooperative as the director hopes they will be, impeding the information-gathering process because they no longer know the answers, grow bored with the questions, or simply want to be selective. Parental forgetfulness (due to mental illness and/or dementia) is the central theme in Janice Tanaka’s Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway? and in Deborah Hoffmann’s Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, as well as in Once My Mother. Grandparental evasiveness is a main issue in Nadar and in Navajo Talking Picture and an important feature in Halving the Bones, as this comment from the director of the latter film attests: I don’t think Grandma ever really opened up to me. She told me some stories, the same ones over and over again. But I think that’s because I didn’t really know anything about her. She could remember her past any way she wanted to. It’s like she was cleaning it up, so she could put it away.

Repeatedly, the movies assert the problem of physical evidence: photographs go missing, written documents disappear or become illegible, records have not been retained or were not made in the first place. What exists cannot be trusted, and what would be reliable is not there. In bringing such issues to light, first-person documentary chooses to reveal the personal and institutional difficulties surrounding the explorations that each seeks to undertake, and to draw attention to the political history of the absence of evidence that circumscribes and limits the stories each is able to tell. As discussed in Chapter 1, the politics of evidence has received extensive attention from a number of theorists, most forcefully Hayden White and Bill Nichols in their critiques of the discourses of historiography and documentary respectively. Ideas of theirs that are now commonplace include the notion that presumably disinterested discourses like history writing and documentary production employ codes, conventions, and tropes in the same way that fiction writing or fiction filmmaking does; and that

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Gendering History on Screen history is no longer a set of puzzle pieces waiting to be fitted together, but an assemblage of more or less relative truths that say more about the contemporary period and the historiographer than about the past ‘as it really was’. Signs of an awareness of the tenuous claims are evidenced in the preference in first-person documentary for overtly non-documentary footage such as subjective representation and re-enactment scenes. As small-budget, formally experimental movies which engage with political themes and which have been funded via private and/or government support, the movies and videos in this chapter, taken as a whole, are rhetorically and thematically closer to the modernist, experimental films of the early twentieth century of which Walter Benjamin was aware than any other group of films discussed in this book. While Benjamin’s critical reputation was certainly yoked to wider cultural practices beyond film, there is no doubt he was influenced by the Soviet avant-garde (especially movies by Eisenstein, Vertov, and Pudovkin) as well as by proletarian films of the Weimar Republic.20 With the movies explored in this chapter, Benjamin believed in the power of art to address communities at a collective level about political issues. Also like the movies in this chapter, he believed in the arresting properties of experimental film to provoke or ‘jolt’ audiences. He wrote that ‘the distracting element [in film] is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator’.21 Although Benjamin’s ideas about film’s potential did not remain static over the course of his life, his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ is noted for its optimistic understanding of film to expose, almost forensically, what lies beyond the naked eye and through this, to enlighten: then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a shapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject.22

First-person documentaries by female directors share with Benjamin a formal and political interest in harnessing the properties of film to

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Feminist First-Person Documentaries manipulate space and time to ‘render’ what was ‘unclear’ and reveal ‘new structural formations’. Like Benjamin’s wider writings, they demonstrate a reflexive awareness of the position of the subjugated in history and a suspicion of conventional forms of historical emplotment and storytelling. They, too, manifest a strong desire to correct or at least counter these conventions via new forms of counter-historical storytelling. The interest in underexplored histories and suspicion of conventional forms of historical storytelling is not unique to documentaries by female directors; what makes them unique is the development of these themes through recurring feminist tropes, such as the telling of stories from women’s points of view, the populating of histories with female actors, and an interest in female generations more broadly. Female generation is a repeating theme in first-person documentaries by female directors, which have featured stories about mothers and daughters (A Healthy Baby Girl, Naomi’s Legacy, Halving the Bones, The Body Beautiful, History and Memory, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, The Ties that Bind, Daughter of Suicide, Once My Mother, Night Cries, I Am My Mother’s Daughter, Immigrant Memories), grandmothers and granddaughters (Halving the Bones, Navajo Talking Picture, Nadar), and stories about women’s generations more broadly (Remembering Wei Yi Fang, Halving the Bones, Nadar). Movies featuring mothers and daughters comprise an important sub-theme in commercial cinemas of both Europe and the US, from ‘women’s films’ and melodramas of classical Hollywood to European art house movies. The incorporation of these topics within the documentaries is complex, providing a link to reflexive tropes named above and delivering emotional affect: nostalgia and longing but also anger and betrayal. The movies leverage the premise of maternal injury or lack, with the filmmakerdaughter seeking in some way to compensate for or make good a loss that she perceives that her mother has suffered, due to illness (Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, The Body Beautiful, A Healthy Baby Girl), abuse (Naomi’s Legacy, Memories from the Department of Amnesia), forced migration (Halving the Bones, Naomi’s Legacy, Once My Mother), or internment (Memories from the Department of Amnesia, History and Memory). A frequent effect of the loss is an incompleteness in the mother’s (or sometimes grandmother’s) memory, which, although it thwarts the

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Gendering History on Screen documentarist’s ability to set the record straight, paradoxically provides the grounds for the documentary to come into being. Repeatedly, filmmakers testify that their reason for making the film or video is to fill in, restore, or compensate for their mother’s/grandmother’s lack of memories about a specific event or chain of events. In the language of anthropology, these works are ‘salvage’ projects designed to recover and make material forgotten histories and stolen memories. Where remembrance is flawed or lacking or the images are not there, the documentary performatively serves to fill the gaps. *** While Ruth Ozeki has lately gained recognition in the literary world with the success of A Tale for the Time-Being (2013),23 Halving the Bones (1995), her second film after her award-winning Body of Correspondence (1994), also has an impressive record of achievement.24 A partmockumentary showing three generations of Japanese and JapaneseAmerican women, Halving the Bones screened at numerous international and documentary film festivals, including Sydney Film Festival, Melbourne Film Festival, Margaret Mead Film Festival, San Francisco Asian American Film Festival, Montreal World Film Festival, on PBS and Sundance in the United States. The film was also nominated for an International Documentary Association Award25 and is an excellent example of the salvage approach named above. The movie begins with home movie footage and diary accounts ostensibly produced by the director’s grandfather and grandmother respectively. Several sequences later the director confesses that she made up both the diary and the home movie footage herself and based her ideas on the real family stories she had heard about the two relatives and on a photo she had once seen of her grandfather holding a movie camera. In Halving the Bones she explains: I made up these things because I never really knew my grandparents. And now they’re dead, and I didn’t have very much to go on. I thought I would understand them better if I just pretended to be them. Anyway. I just wanted to set the record straight.

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Feminist First-Person Documentaries What emerges with this personal confession is a subjective and presenttense dimension to the sequences that was not initially apparent. But there is something else: implicit in the director’s preference for what seems a radically voluntarist version of history is a critique of the matter and question of who gets to ‘have’ a history to begin with. Just prior to Ruth’s comments related above, she qualifies the grounds for her fabrication: ‘I know he really did make those movies, but his cameras and films were confiscated during the war.’ While on the one hand, Ruth’s seemingly wilful ‘pretending to be them’ empties the footage of its historical capital, on the other hand it is not only personal choice that determines her actions, but distinct political, historical circumstances. Without the original seizure of the grandfather’s equipment, Ruth might very well not have had to invent such things; because of the seizure, her creation of the movies is a reminder of the fact that representation, having representation, is only ever politically determined. Certainly no ‘real’ account of 1920s first generation immigrant experience, the 1995 interpretation of that experience that Ruth creates is evidence of the history of absence that is her familial, and indeed cultural, legacy. As the ‘objective’ dimension fades from view, a subjective but implicitly critical political dimension appears in its place. Formally, Halving the Bones makes use of a strong authorial voiceover. The segments into which the film is divided, which include ‘Grandma Matsuye’s Story’ and ‘Mom’s Story’, highlight the centrality of storytelling to the film as well as the key personalities that figure. As in all first-person documentary, the significance of personal matters to issues of culture and cultural identity is a key theme and is well evidenced in a story that is told about the birth of Ozeki’s mother’s, Masako. The story relates that Masako began life misdiagnosed as a cancerous tumour, rather than as a baby. According to Masako, it was not until the day of her birth that she, ‘the tumour’, was perceived as a pregnancy. While Masako is convinced of the story’s significance for her, her daughter is initially unsure of its implications. How might such a truly silly story relate to her experience? Finally, over silent footage of her mother wrestling with a Thanksgiving turkey (which, according to Ozeki, she ‘never really got the hang of’), Ozeki returns to the tale. She says:

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Gendering History on Screen On some level, I really did think of Mom as manifesting certain characteristics of a cancer. The metaphor contained something that I recognized. A deeply rooted conflation of sickness and race . . . The yellow peril . . . The malignant Japanese who had to be excised . . . I’d seen these images all my life and I believed them. Anyway, this was old history, but even so, I knew I shared it. Cancer invades the body. Mine was different from everyone else’s in Connecticut and it was obviously because of mom. Her genes in my body had prevailed. So you see it was this eurocentric and primitive understanding of history and genetics, that left me susceptible to a metaphoric confusion about my mother’s origins. She’d started life as a tumor, and cancerous, she’d spread. I was her offspring, and hardly benign.

Offering here an analysis of the prevalent cancer metaphor, the director highlights how a seemingly simple family tale is the vehicle for a number of complex issues surrounding race and inheritance as they are informed by biology and culture. In Ozeki’s interpretation, cultural isolation and racism are not social products but rather biological matters that have been passed on, as genetic material is said to be. Now, as any reader of social construction theories of race will know, these theories have long held that race is a cultural construction and an effect of historical and social circumstances. Thus the construction of race as genetic and biological in a film as well informed in issues of identity as Halving the Bones flies in the face of contemporary scholarly understandings and is thus highly ironic. However, there is a deadly seriousness to Ozeki’s metaphor of race-asgenetic, that suggests that race is experienced as immutable and lived as if it were a biological attribute, regardless of whether it is culturally constructed or not. From the mother’s understanding of herself as a ‘cancer’ a thorny knot of issues not initially apparent unravels. As with the moment I’ve just discussed, the act of halving the bones, to which the film’s title refers, belies a complex negotiation about identity and cultural inheritance. The title of the film alludes to a family responsibility that Ruth has agreed to take on, which is to transport some of her grandmother’s bones back to her mother in the United States. The bones are meant as consolation for Masako, who wasn’t able to attend the grandmother’s (i.e., her mother’s) funeral, lives contentedly in suburban Connecticut, and appears to express little regret about missing the funeral.

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Feminist First-Person Documentaries In contrast to her mother, Ruth seems to enjoy visiting Japan and takes pleasure in meeting her mother’s relatives, and for her making the film is an opportunity to confirm, in spite of language differences, her similarities with the relatives and to tell stories about the things they have in common. For example, we are told that her grandfather shared her passion for photography, and that both mother and grandmother were tough and pragmatic, traits the director also seems to possess. What to make of the apparent disinterest on Masako’s part? Writing about contemporary films and videos that address the unjust incarceration of Japanese-Americans in internment camps in World War II, Glenn Mimura notes that post-redress videos by female filmmakers Lise Yasui, Janice Tanaka, and Rea Tajiri eschew conventional documentary authority and concern themselves with the ‘psychical experience of memories in the present, the traumas the women simultaneously hide and reveal’.26 On the face of it, Ozeki’s movie appears to be less taken up with issues of war and reparation than History and Memory (which I will discuss shortly); yet family trauma resulting from war is likewise important in Halving and frames, albeit in different ways, both Masako’s and Ruth’s respective declared desires for knowledge of the family’s history, challenges in communication, and forms of engagement with the lives of the grandparents and Japan more broadly. With History and Memory, Halving the Bones demonstrates how war and incarceration have lasting effects even on those who did not actually experience them firsthand.27 Though Oseki does not use the word ‘foreigner’ to describe her mother, Masako’s initial feelings about the funeral would seem to be illuminated by the definition provided by Trinh Minh-ha: ‘for those who remain strangers in their homeland and foreigners in their new homes, feeling repeatedly out of place within every familiar world, it is vital to question settlement . . . Home and language in such a context never become nature.’28 We may argue about whether or to what extent Masako fits Trinh’s understanding of ‘foreigner’, but there is no doubt about the role played by the filmmaker and the process of filmmaking in rekindling Masako’s affective connection with her grandparents and Japan more broadly. Actions that Ruth carries out with Masako, like going through her grandmother’s letters, Japanese passport, and pieces of clothing and examining Ruth’s grandfather’s poetry and writing about life in the

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Gendering History on Screen internment camp in Houston, spark Masako’s interest, as does the home movie footage of Ruth’s visit to the Japanese cemetery where the grandparents are buried. Masako quizzes her daughter about the size of the grave markers and the process of scrubbing the stone and comments on the existence of barbed wire above the graveyard, which both women find ironic given the grandfather’s experience as an internee. The viewing of the footage would seem to be a moment of jubilation for Ruth and a turning point of sorts for Masako. While Masako initially seemed a ‘foreigner’ in Trinh’s definition, going through her parents’ effects and watching her daughter’s movie-within-a-movie facilitates her movement to quite a different position. The different forms and means of engagement with respective family and cultural pasts between and across generational members, as impacted by varying traumas of war, internment, migration, and deportation, is a theme that threads through all the movies under discussion, as will be shown. Members of younger generations, such as Ruth, seek knowledge of and opportunities for engagement with members of earlier generations, via varying means and with diverse effects. *** Appearing four years prior to Halving the Bones, History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991) deals centrally with the events surrounding the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II and with the (im)possibility of redress following such experiences.29 History and Memory premiered in the prestigious visual arts context of the Whitney Biennial (NYC) and quickly garnered a slew of accolades: the Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association; Special Jury Prize, ‘New Visions’ Category (San Francisco International Film Festival); and ‘Best Experimental Video’ Atlanta Film and Video Festival.30 The film has also been named one of the top 100 American Films by Women Directors, an achievement for History and Memory, which straddles documentary and experimental forms in equal measure. ‘Who chose what story to tell?’ is the question that animates History and Memory. The words to this question appear over archival footage from the Department of War Information, serving as but the first of many ironic juxtapositions that appear in the movie. History and Memory

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Figure 3.2 Watching home movies. Halving the Bones. Women Make Movies, 1995. Dir. Ruth Ozeki.

is a highly structured work that makes use of a vast storehouse of images and sounds. Taken from a wide variety of sources, these images fall roughly into two different groups, one of which reflects the history of the record, and a second that depicts the histories that are never, or only rarely, seen. Tajiri’s stated wish is to right the balance between the events for which, in her words, ‘there were cameras watching’ and the events whose only witnesses were ghosts, that is, to make visible those things ‘which have happened for which the only images that exist are in the minds of the observers’ as well as those events ‘which have happened for which there have been no observers, except for the spirits of the dead’. These comments announce the video’s central thesis, which is that representation-in-history is a privilege of the victor; and that if you see things the victor does not wish you to see, you could very well wind up as a ghost. The flip side of this thesis is that for the losers of history there is only mere ‘memory’, which only ever exists in fragments. The film wants to give shape to these never-before-seen

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Gendering History on Screen fragments, which include life in the internment camps during World War II, the seizure and physical removal of the family’s suburban house, and the discriminatory policies of a paranoid racist government. These hitherto unrecorded events are contrasted with the hitherto over-recorded ones that appear in Universal news clips, Department of War Information films and public service announcements (PSAs), and patriotic Hollywood movies like Yankee Doodle Dandy. The same events may well figure in both sets of representation; what differs markedly is the ways and means by which they have been recorded, edited, and shown. The family story that is the point of departure for History and Memory is that in 1942 the Tajiri family was removed from its northern California home to a temporary holding station in Salinas; from there the majority of the family was transported to what used to be the Colorado Tribal Indian Reservation in Poston, Arizona. Taken from the Native Americans practically overnight, the land became one of several places that held the 110,000 persons of Japanese descent who were interned during the war under suspicion of treason. That the removal was able to occur in spite of the fact that Tajiri’s father was serving as a soldier in the US army, and in spite of the historically non-existent grounds for the measure (not a single Japanese or Japanese-American citizen was ever convicted of treason on US soil), is but one of the bitter paradoxes that the film brings to light. History and Memory is a lesson in the virtues of collecting, cataloguing, counter-cataloguing, and archiving. Objects from camp experience are located and identified, such as a wooden bird Tajiri’s grandmother made in mandatory carving class; so-called alien ID cards; a drawing made by an interned uncle; a piece of tar-paper from the barracks where the family lived; illegal photographs and 8 mm movies, taken with smuggled-in cameras. Memories, of differing lengths, complexities, and degrees of clarity, are described, argued over, and, in some cases, performed for Tajiri’s camera. These are cross-cut at points throughout History and Memory with other ‘versions’ of history, like Come See the Paradise and Bad Day at Blackrock, and represent memories that relatives might once have had, were prevented from having, or which have grown dim over the years. For example, a version of the train journey to Poston that the family was compelled to take is filmed by the daughter; and an image of Tajiri’s mother filling a canteen at a water tap in the desert is enacted and shown in

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Feminist First-Person Documentaries slow motion. The explicit motivation for these shots is Tajiri’s mother, who has practically no memory of the experience of the camp, except, as her daughter puts it, for why she cannot remember. So, Tajiri explains, ‘on April 12, 1988, I went to Poston in a rental car and filmed the view for her’. Of History and Memory, Peter Feng writes: the fragments of parental narratives and memories out of which cinematic subjectivities are fashioned are not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with one correct solution, but fragments that might plausibly be re-formed in a variety of ways. Indeed, the discontinuous past ensures that many of these fragments have been lost – left behind, destroyed, or sold to profiteers, like the property that Japanese Americans lost when they packed only what they could carry to the camps. It is of course the missing pieces that are treasured the most, and their absence can be marked only with reference to the fragments that have been saved . . . The danger of handling fragments . . . is that your fingers will wear them down, obliterating the sharp lines that provide a clear outline of the missing pieces.31

The missing piece Feng refers to includes, of course, the mother’s memory, which is, ironically, also the prompt for Tajiri to make her video as gift. In History and Memory, this memory fragment is less endangered by a possible wearing down than it is a prompt that provides the opportunity for the new work to come into being. Tajiri’s conceptualising of memory as simultaneously fragile and agentic seems initially counter-intuitive but is actually constitutive of all the works under discussion in this chapter. Memory – vulnerable, shifting, contested – is a productive and performative place holder for the creation of new stories and histories. *** Like both History and Memory and Halving the Bones, I for India (Suri 2005) also explores the potency of visual images to mitigate negative feelings arising from trauma – in I for India’s case, the feelings of homesickness, longing, disorientation, and loss that attend experiences of migration from India to the United Kingdom. The filmmaker’s father, Yash Pal Suri, was born in Punjab in 1932, graduated as a doctor in 1958, and left India in 1966 to gain training in the United Kingdom, taking his

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Gendering History on Screen family with him. A priority for director Suri is documenting the challenges facing Yash and his family upon arrival in the United Kingdom, where racism was an official component of state policy at the prime ministerial level and ran through countless daily exchanges between ordinary individuals; these included recurrent misspellings of Yash’s name and being addressed in racist language on the street. The movie provides evidence of negative treatment of Indian and Pakistani migrants that is ubiquitous and ongoing, and stereotypical Eurocentric conceptions of India more broadly. Evidence of this is in the words of a contemporary community presenter, who offers this romantic depiction: ‘India is a land of tremendous contrasts’, says the presenter, ‘the pain, the pleasure, the beauty, the squalor . . . India is the begging bowl of Asia, the jewel in the crown, call it what you like . . . India is fascinating, frustrating, infuriating, but utterly bewitching . . . .’ From this early moment in Suri’s movie, I for India frames language as central ground for contests between the racist, ethnocentric, and infantilising constructions (drawn from 1960s tourist materials and patronising ‘welcome’ literature) and the more positive selfconstructions created by Yash and his family. I for India’s unique response to the problem of colonial misrepresentation is Yash’s purchase, carried out when he arrived in the United Kingdom, of two sets of image capture and playback devices (two super 8 cine-cameras, two projectors, and two reel-to-reel audio players); one set was sent home to family in India and the other was kept by Yash. Initially a device to stave off homesickness and facilitate communications between the now divided extended family, the result is many minutes of ‘film within the film’ footage shot by Yash, introducing his new UK home to his family back in India, and footage shot by Indian relatives of life at home. The deployment of these sets of footages shuttling back and forth between different Indias concretely upends the colonial construction (i.e. the tourist footage) that was ubiquitous in the 1960s, and has the further effect of giving dialogic voice to two sides of the migration story. Moving back and forth across the surface of the world, between several different time frames, the movie-within-the-movie finally also conveys an instability that mirrors Yash’s own self-described lack of fit, both in the new country and ultimately back ‘home’.

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Feminist First-Person Documentaries Here we might recall the construction of foreigner offered by Trinh, quoted earlier, in the discussion about Halving the Bones. Like Ruth’s mother Masako, Yash, as a new migrant, appears both a ‘foreigner’ in his new home and a possible ‘stranger’ in the land of his birth. The effect of his footage, as Trinh urges, is to ‘question settlement’: after being away from India for 17 years, Yash makes the difficult decision to leave the United Kingdom with his family and return ‘home’. But all is not as he hopes, and less than a year after returning to India the family re-assesses the situation; they depart India and once again head to Britain. About this move, Yash describes his feelings: ‘You found something you’d been looking for, for a long time . . . You didn’t want to let go of it. And you didn’t care if it didn’t last long.’ In Prosthetic Memory Alison Landsberg explores the circumstances through which modern day citizens gain access to memories that are not initially theirs but which become theirs through acts that she terms ‘prosthetic memory’.32 Film, in her description, is well poised to pose important questions about the ‘shape and purpose of memory’ in the contemporary age of mass culture.33 She asserts that film and media versions of the past are more than simply personally affective, but affect audiences ‘prosthetically’: such memories emerge at the ‘interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past’ and ‘suture’ the person into a ‘larger history’.34 In Landsberg’s description, participating in prosthetic memories about important events is not only educative but also potentially profoundly transformative; people watching the ‘prosthetic’ (film and video) materials gain the opportunity to change in response to the representations of experience that they are privy to.35 The case studies Landsberg deals with exemplify problematic instances of ‘memory transmission’: traumatic cultural or historical events where kinship ties were severed and the passing down of memories radically destabilised. Neither essentially progressive nor essentially reactionary, prosthetic memories are powerful, potentially political, and sometimes generative of empathy: ‘the technologies of mass culture . . . of which they are a part open up a world of images outside a person’s lived experience, creating a portable, fluid, and nonessentialist form of memory’.36 The footage created by Yash and his family, and by Tajiri and Ozeki discussed previously, are arguably a little more personal than the independently produced and commercial films that Landsberg refers to in

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Gendering History on Screen Prosthetic Memory. But the effect in all three cases is similar to what she describes, which is to performatively draw attention to the role potentially played by film and video self-representation technologies in the mediation of experiences of migration (in the case of I for India and Halving the Bones) and internment (in History and Memory’s case). With its incorporation of both ‘prosthetic’ memory components (i.e. the home movie footage) and reflexive questioning of Yash’s interaction with such components (i.e. footage of him watching the footage), I for India simutaneously confirms and questions its own status as cultural and temporal mediator to both amplify and contain feelings of homesickness, loss, and post-migration trauma. Because of the incorporation of presenttense footage showing the now older Yash looking back on old home movies, I for India mediates across and through time and space, between dislocated frames of past and present, house and home. In the logic of the movie, being ‘out of place’ is the only place to be. While Yash protests until the very end of the film that he cannot settle anywhere else in the world other than his ‘home country’ (India), he is no longer fully at home in that country or its language (‘Oh God’, he exclaims, ‘what is the word for equivalent in Hindi?’). The conclusion of the movie confirms the perpetuation of family division in the post-colonial space as daughter Vanita leaves on a plane for Australia. As if to reconcile her current decision with his own choice earlier, Yash indicates that migration (and the feelings of precariousness that come with it) is normative for this family: She could not stay here . . . even in this country. And the same thing happened to me in India . . . I could not stay . . . Every parent’s wish is that their child should not go too far, but we hope they don’t forget the nest from where they flew out. It’s her destiny which is taking her there.

A Skype call to Vanita (with Sandhya’s face nearly obscured by her broadcast camera) confirms the ongoing relevance of dialogic documentation of the transnational experience. Walter Benjamin’s 1936 conceptualising of the revolutionary potential of media may appear to ‘belong to a different period than ours’, tenders Miriam Hansen, given the global consolidation of media industries and the

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Figure 3.3 Dialogic documentation. I for India. Fandango and Zero West GmbH, 2005. Dir. Sandhya Suri.

triumph of capitalism in the twenty-first century;37 against this Hansen stakes a claim that the philosopher’s ideas about aesthetics and history remain as relevant as ever in the contemporary period. Reminding us that Benjamin’s concern with film and technology was inseparably hinged to his pronouncements on the philosophy of history – both of which were crafted in response to the then rise of fascism, Hansen claims that his theses have another ‘actuality’ in the present day where they ‘prompt us to trace, in their analysis of the major crisis of Western capitalist modernity in the twentieth century, both the transformations of this modernity and the legacy of its continuing impasses in the twenty-first’.38 The ongoing value for Hansen of Benjamin’s historical-materialist thought is its intersection with a ‘utopianist’ perspective that ‘seeks in the dreams of the past the promises of a future beyond the ongoing catastrophe’.39 To readers’ questioning the mapping of the 1936 philosophical model on to twentyfirst-century-crafted movies, Hansen offers this clarification: Benjamin’s theories are ‘tactical’ interventions not ‘empirical accounts’, ‘a partisan

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Gendering History on Screen manifesto rather than a presumably neutral scholarly treatise’.40 Seen in this light, the dreams of the past that are made available by film and video makers Ozeki, Tajiri, Suri, and others indeed concretise a future beyond current-day catastrophes, be they internment, civil war, world war, or periphery-centre migration. As Hansen puts it, ‘the alienation of the senses that abets the deadly violence of imperialist warfare and fascism can be undone only by the terrain of technology itself’.41 In the concluding two sections I want to explore how these ideas can explicate first-person stories about war, silencing, and repression. *** Desire to investigate the circumstances surrounding the mysterious life and death of a relative who died during the Spanish Civil War motivates Carla Subirana’s experimental documentary Nadar (Subirana 2008).42 In 1940 Juan Arroniz Moreno, an alleged communist and the director’s grandfather, was executed by the repressive, nationalistic, and ultra conservative Franco regime. Arroniz, we hear, is a ‘ghost’ who has thus ‘marked the family forever’ and a figure of secrecy that family members cannot – or will not – talk about. ‘At times I think she chose not to know anything about her father, fearing what she could discover’, Subirana says of her mother, Ana. Having grown up in democratic, post-Franco Spain, Subirana is a member of the ‘grandchildren’s generation’,43 the generation of Spaniards born long after the war’s end who are preoccupied with finding out the truth of historical events that have been disappeared from family and official state histories.44 Nadar aligns with History and Memory and especially with Halving the Bones in tracing how historical events impact on women specifically: Subirana has grown up in a family of exclusively women, due to her grandfather’s early death and her own father’s departure for Puerto Rico early in her childhood; she finds the all-female community of her grandmother and mother’s friends comforting and normal. Her investigation extends to her grandmother Leonor (now in her early nineties and suffering dementia), further-flung relatives such as her mother’s sister Herminia, filmmaker Joaquim Jordà, Montros city and town officials (where her grandparents once lived), and even a handgun historian.

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Feminist First-Person Documentaries The facts of Arroniz’s life remain uncertain and elusive: no photos exist of him, and a tracking shot of a black and white photo of a group of militiamen allows Subirana to state: ‘I’ll never know if any of these was Arroniz, I never saw him. But knowing he could be in this group of men means being closer. But closer to what?’ Acknowledging her own desire to find answers in a way that resembles Oseki’s creation of footage in Halving the Bones, Subirana admits that she ‘invented the story he was a defender of freedom, an idealist’. Just as government policy hampered Oseki’s grandfather’s production of a film (his camera was seized by the government), the Franco regime appears also to have suppressed information about Subirana’s grandfather. To Subirana’s disappointment, state records reveal no political activities at all but rather a series of armed robberies, which Jordà reads as a politically expedient concealment of the grandfather’s membership in the Iberian Anarchist Federation (Federación Anarquista Ibérica or FAI). According to Jordà, Arroniz ‘robbed with social goals’ and his crimes were contoured to fit with fascist historiography, which does not acknowledge political resistance. The erasure and/or rewriting of oppositional political activity in conformation with often racist and/or conservative and repressive political or cultural requirements is a theme that threads throughout nearly all the works discussed in this chapter. In Nadar, historiographic transparency is further impeded by the gendered constraints imposed by the ultraconservative Franco regime. Suspecting there is more to the grandfather’s story than his membership in the FAI, Subirana begins to investigate her grandmother Leonor’s status as a single mother and travels back to the village of Mont-ros, the place of her grandmother’s birth, where her grandparents had travelled in secret. There, she discovers that their marriage was never carried out, due to the presence of Arroniz’s primary, ‘legitimate’ wife, who filed for access to Arroniz’s pension in 1983. The discovery of information about this other wife retrospectively resolves the question of both Leonor’s silence about Subirana’s grandfather and Subirana’s grandfather’s precarious status in the Subirana family. While Jordà connected the secrecy around the grandfather’s story to the facts of his political activity (his statement that the problem was not that Leonor was ‘a single mother’ but ‘the wife of someone who was executed’), Subirana discovers a gendered explanation, which is the fact that Arroniz was the

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Gendering History on Screen partner to two women and maintained two separate families. Where Leonor certainly suffered as the partner of someone thought to have been persecuted for his communist beliefs, as Jordà rightly states, her suffering was further compounded by an even more shameful secret, which was her status as Arroniz’s illegitimate partner. Political repression in Franco’s regime colludes with hypocritical and sexist moralising to create a cascading set of secrecies and shame within the grandmother’s (and mother’s) lives, the result of which was the impeding of the transparent telling of the grandfather’s story. Focusing only on the political side of the story, as Jordà wished to do, does not sufficiently explain the grandmother’s experience. Nadar thus qualifies the experience of war from a gendered perspective and shows how women’s experience (of the illegitimate pregnancy) colludes with ‘official’ history to create unique forms of forgetting and remembering. Natalia Bornay emphasises the gendering of both historical actors and story in Nadar, stating: Nadar’s narration of a silenced family story over three generations of women stresses the positive – but also precarious – aspects of being raised in a fatherless family. Instead of becoming the story of an executed left-wing anti-Franco fighter, the documentary’s focus shifts to the resilience of strong and independent women who were forced by historical circumstances to remain silent.45

Writing about Catalan documentaries including Nadar, Abigail Loxham links them to the political and social contexts within contemporary Spain which seeks to gather ‘together the material artefacts of a troubled past in order to construct a new archive and explore the potential for new memorial practices to honour those whose memories have been effaced’.46 Subirana’s film is one such ‘material artefact’, simultaneously testifying to and rectifying the effacing practices of the Franco regime, in a specifically gendered story. *** Once My Mother (Turkiewicz 2013) extends many of the themes considered so far in this chapter, in a story about a mother’s post-World War II migration from Siberian gulag to Adelaide, Australia, as told by her filmmaker daughter, Sophia.47 An investigation of the intertwining of

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Feminist First-Person Documentaries personal and official histories, the film cross-cuts between stories of Helena’s harrowing experiences as an orphaned child growing up on the streets of Soviet-occupied Poland and Sophia’s adolescence and young adulthood in suburban Australia. Like all the works discussed in this chapter, Once My Mother disrupts the opposition between public history and private stories, using the filmmaker’s personal experiences as springboards to complex historical topics at the heart of twentieth-century European history. As a Polish casualty of the pact between Hitler and Stalin and the subsequent partitioning of Poland, Stalinist practices of banishing minors to a Siberian prison camp, specifically Uczastek, in Sosnowiecki, subsequent forced migrations across central Europe to Buzuluk, Tashkent, and finally Persia, and hypocritical Australian migration policies, Helena feels the days now to be long. The story opens on to the elderly woman in an Australian nursing home, with Sophia playing a key role as detective, support, and mouthpiece for the piecing together of her declining mother’s story, gently prompting and sharing with her discoveries as the story moves along. As her mother is no longer well enough to travel, Sophia retraces the steps of her mother’s mysterious and challenging life throughout Eastern European (once Polish, now Ukrainian) cities of Oleszow, where her mother spent her first years, Lwow, the location of Helena’s last recorded European address, and the refugee camp where her mother arrived after the war, where she (Sophia/ filmmaker) was born. The image cuts back and forth between Sophia in Oleszow showing photos to people to whom she may or may not be related, and Sophia sitting with her mother in the Australian nursing home gazing together at the footage of the recent Polish visit on the monitor. There are bitter discoveries, as when a relative relates the terrible, and apparently new, information that Helena’s sister had been killed when the Soviets first arrived. History, in these instances, hurts; in moments like these the care and love Sophia manifests cannot offset her mother’s loss – as when her mother laments: ‘I’d like to know how my mother looked. I didn’t have photo. No pictures. Nothing.’ There are dead ends and false starts: ‘this was your first real home’, the daughter’s voice-over says of the Polish refugee camp where her mother arrived after the war. ‘This is where you became a mother. The first beats of my heart were heard in this land.’ But, we hear,

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, , Figure 3.4 Searching for Sophia s mother s home. Once My Mother. Change Focus Media and Screen Australia, 2013. Dir. Sophia Turkiewicz.

‘you had no husband, I had no father’. What appears an auspicious beginning is soon troubled by the social devaluing of husbandless mothers. In the style of other first-person feminist documentaries thus far discussed, the film self-reflexively draws attention to key documentary processes, such as the fact that the documentary maker at times made professional use of her mother’s pain. The voice-over states ‘when I was young, I used your life to make my skills as a storyteller’. This activity contrasts sharply with the shame experienced by the filmmaker at the time about her mother’s difficulties speaking English and lack of education and because she felt the stories (‘part of my childhood’) had become an obligation: ‘I stop listening. Your stories are a burden.’ Throughout, documentary self-awareness is couched in the personal language of the mother –daughter relationship. Where Once My Mother departs somewhat from previously discussed films is in the explicit foregrounding of themes of betrayal and forgiveness. Helena, we learn, moved on to the streets from an extremely young age. This difficult beginning repeats when Helena arrives in Australia where, on arrival as an unmarried mother, she had to surrender her daughter Sophia

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Feminist First-Person Documentaries to an Adelaide orphanage. ‘If you were a motherless orphan, how can you wish the same destiny on me?’ is the opening gambit posed by Sophia’s voice-over, and this is indeed the structuring question of the movie. Once My Mother is double-edged as a title, signalling both the possibility of abandonment (‘she was once my mother, but isn’t any longer’) and an enduring, unchanging capacity (‘once a mother, always a mother’). The film tracks the changes between these two meanings, probing and investigating to find common ground, discover new information, prepare ways for empathy, and rid the air of judgement. The movie itself performs the very practical act of forgiving and is a therapeutic object which provides the means through which forgiveness can be arrived at. Ultimately, Once My Mother extends the notion of technology as a means of enhancing or filling in declining or failed memories, like many of the movies discussed. As with History and Memory, Halving the Bones, and Nadar, at the heart of Once My Mother are themes of maternal injury and trauma resulting from cataclysmic and earth-shattering events; the immanent loss of the mother’s memory; and the daughterly act of compensation via the filmmaking process. Helena’s fading memory is the prompt for her daughter’s late-in-life investigation into and completion of her mother’s story via the performative act of completing the film. As with previously discussed works, Once My Mother functions as compensatory fill-in for both past and immanent losses.

Performing Memory What has been left out of history, or removed from memory, are matters of extraordinary familiarity to students of documentary. How the past is, in Benjaminian rhetoric, constellated within contemporary movies is of great interest to students of historiography. What is unique about the examples I have discussed is that they engage important issues like these from a specifically feminist perspective. In the case of the movies considered in this chapter, the mothers (occasionally grandmothers, and in I for India, the father and extended relatives) have access to histories of trauma and language skills of which the documentary maker, often a second- or thirdgeneration migrant, has little or no grasp. Through the knowledge that the older character provides, the past becomes tangible; their recognition

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Gendering History on Screen of the director-protagonist facilitates the latter’s membership in a specific culture or group, without which both culture and family would be lost. First-person documentary in general, and these five works in particular, take pains to distinguish between history on the one hand and memory on the other, suggesting, broadly speaking, that history is what governments and commercial media produce while memory issues from more local sources of enunciation. My interpretation of the films’ and video’s understanding of the word narrows further. ‘Memory’ seems to me to include most particularly those prosthetic sequences of film-within-thefilm (or video-within-the-video), such as photographs, old home movie footage, audio/video letters, and/or enactment footage. What is interesting about this category of footage is its performative aspect. Memory is nearly always memory for someone: the expressly stated motivation for nearly all of the filming-within-the-films is a relative of the filmmaker, typically the filmmaker’s mother (or grandmother) who doesn’t know or can’t remember things that the director thinks she should. In I for India, the director uses the raw materials of the father’s AV ‘letters’ to create a more complete story of the family’s migration-return-migration. Sequences of this sort are stands-ins, supports, or reinforcements of the memories that the (grand)mothers (and in I for India, father) ought to have, substitutes for, or correctives to, the missing or flawed memory fragments that the older family members either no longer hold or may be in danger of soon losing. To turn to the example of the cemetery footage from Halving the Bones; there are two explicit reasons why Ozeki shoots this footage. Firstly, she does so as a tribute to the relatives’ memory, that is, as an offering to them, whose effectiveness is plainly acknowledged by her mother (far better ‘than a couple of flowers that’re going to die’, says her mother). Secondly, she creates the footage as a gift for her mother, compensation for the fact that Masako couldn’t be in the graveyard or in Japan herself. Although Masako was never physically even near the graveyard, that is, never had an image of the gravestones in her head, Ozeki does not discriminate: what is important to her is to supply her mother with a version of ‘memory’ that, by rights, belongs to the older woman. In History and Memory, Tajiri’s motivation for shooting both the train journey sequence and the footage of her mother filling the canteen in the desert is explicitly because her mother was prevented from, or can no longer

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Feminist First-Person Documentaries remember seeing, these events herself. Of these self-produced images, Tajiri says: When someone tells you a story, you create a picture of it in your mind . . . Sometimes the picture will return without the story. I’ve been carrying around this picture with me for years. It’s the one memory I have of my mother speaking of camp while we were growing up. I overhear her describing to my sister this simple action. Her hands filling a canteen, out in the middle of the desert. For years I’ve been living with this picture, without the story . . . Not knowing how they fit together.

In Once My Mother, Sophia’s journey to Oleszow (Oleshiv), the village where her mother Helena was born, is intended to fill in for the fact that ‘so many pieces of your [Helena’s] story are missing’. Sophia’s discovery of the house that belonged to Helena’s brother Pavel, entering into and filming the house, and then returning to Australia to share the footage of the visit with her, closes a small portion of the profound gap in Helena’s lost (stolen) memories of her childhood and parents, who died when she was a baby. In their introduction to Contested Pasts, Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone explore the extraordinarily productive power of memory to alter, add to, subvert, obscure, and conceal dominant notions of history.48 Memory, Hodgkin and Radstone tell us, is ‘bound up with ideas about subjectivity, so also it has a bearing on death’.49 Memory is commonly understood to be generational, passing into history once the rememberer dies. But with traumatic or concealed memories, the situation is much more complex: memories may be covered over or fade from view altogether. In a short essay published in 1929 about the French novelist Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin outlined the significance of forgetting in Proust’s work: ‘the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting?’50 The movies I have explored in this chapter all take shape from the forms of nearly forgotten memories. All salvage projects of sorts, they are distinct in their foregrounding of their processes of construction. Memories are not truthful, no-one has the last word; memories are rather but one view

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Gendering History on Screen amongst many of contested and unresolved representations of the past. In addition to being substitutes for the respective (grand)parents’ missing or flawed memory fragments, every sequence I have named is a representation of the daughter’s desire that the parent have a full and complete ‘prosthetic’ memory. Although the original stories behind the images that Tajiri, for example, carries about her mother’s experience are unknown to her, she hopes that one day she will no longer need to know the original stories. The process by which this is achieved is complex and painful, as she testifies. It is a quest whose solution is that there is no solution, except for forgiveness and, perhaps, another film. As Tajiri concludes: ‘But now I found I can connect the picture to the story. I can forgive my mother her loss of memory, and can make this image for her.’

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4 Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films

The events of the Holocaust have inspired more debates about the possibilities and challenges of representing the past than perhaps any other, with scholars debating the ethics of aestheticising trauma and optimal ways to convey the enormity of suffering. Scores of feature films and documentaries have been made about the subject in most European countries as well as in the United States. In Germany, for example, the debate over how best to represent the past has animated numerous film and television projects since at least the 1962 Oberhausen manifesto, with much of New German cinema concerned with the relations between the postwar generation and the events of World War II.1 German women filmmakers have contributed forcefully to this discussion and created films about women’s wartime experiences, showing how women simultaneously were agents within and victims of the ideologies and practices of National Socialism and its immediate historical aftermath. Deutschland bleiche Mutter (Sanders-Brahms 1980), Peppermint Frieden (Rosenbaum 1983), Hungerjahre (Brückner 1979), and others focused on women’s experiences.2 Like Germany, France has also produced its share of movies about the Holocaust and the period of occupation in particular. However,

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Gendering History on Screen in contrast to their German counterparts, not as many French or Belgium women filmmakers appear to have interrogated the significance of these circumstances. Though two films position events of the war as the starting point for their respective heroines’ loosely autobiographical journeys (Entre Nous [Kurys 1983] and Les Rendez-vous d’Anna [Akerman 1978]), up until recently Boulevard des Hirondelles (Yanne 1993), about Resistance fighter Lucie Aubrac, was the only French film by a female director to concertedly focus on events of World War II.3 In Remembering the Occupation in French Film, Leah Hewitt identifies what would appear to be a feminising of the concept of occupation in popular French cinema; Hewitt notes that ‘one of the most powerful and constant symbols of national contradiction in these films resided in the representations of women’.4 While many films produced in the first decades after the war featured male Resistance members, newer occupation narratives have allowed for a revisiting of the relationship between public and private and women’s overall ability to concretise historical contradictions – to ‘show the twists of this troubled history’.5 Thus, according to Hewitt, women have come to enjoy a special status and increase in visibility as Resistance characters. Indeed, many of the most lauded and iconic films by male directors about occupation have centred on female protagonists. These include Le Dernier Métro (Truffaut 1980, about a theatre group), Une Affaire de Femmes (Chabrol 1988, about a female abortion provider), Lucie Aubrac (Berri 1997), Les Femmes de l’Ombre (Salomé 2008, about a five-woman task force recruited to rescue a British geologist), and Blanche et Marie (Renard 1985, about three generations of women resisters).6 Taking Hewitt’s gendered understanding of occupation as a point of departure, this chapter explores constructions of resistance and collaboration in three feature films by female directors set in occupied France. November Moon (von Grote 1985) is a lesbian love story between a Jewish and a non-Jewish woman which takes place largely in Paris; it was released in time to coincide with the 40-year anniversary of the war’s end and is the second feature by German director Alexandra von Grote.7 Charlotte Gray (Armstrong 2001) is the story of a Scottish woman who parachutes behind enemy lines into France, and La Rafle/The Round Up (Bosch 2010) depicts the rounding up, confinement, and deportation of mostly Jewish women and

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Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films children in 1942 Paris. It is worth reiterating that the first two of these films are international co-productions and thus cannot properly be taken as national evocations, and that, as a whole, the three feature films comprise a multinational set. The method of dislodging the movies from their conventional analytical silos (e.g. the ‘national’ approach prevalent in Holocaust film studies) is aimed to facilitate a focus on the specifically gendered traits of resistance. The confounding of resistance and collaboration within the actions of female characters, the characterisation of these characters as agentic and the linking of that agency with sexuality, and the models for reconciliation on offer will be explored.

Complicating Collaboration Largely available through feminist and LGBT festivals and now available as a feminist classic via Wolfe video, November Moon achieved little in the way of box office success at the time of its release but scooped a number of significant festival awards: Best Film, NY Gay Film Festival; Best Director, Frameline San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival; AGLA (Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Artists in the Entertainment Industry). The film tells the story of a German Jewish woman from Berlin who immigrates to Paris shortly before the beginning of the war and immediately following the death of her father. ‘Stateless’ but possessing a refugee pass, November seeks to remain in France with assistance from the already overburdened local Jewish organisation and from a friend of her late father’s, Chantal. Chantal offers her employment, and shortly after this November meets and falls in love with a Frenchwoman, Férial. Once war breaks out, the women flee the city to the unoccupied zone in the south, where November is captured by the SS, raped, and sent to work in a brothel. With the help of a sympathetic German officer, who later on in the film is executed for having assisted her, she manages to escape from the brothel and make her way back to Paris and to Férial. The events that take place following November’s return to Paris are, in my mind, what distinguish the film as a specifically feminist interpretation of occupation. In Paris, while November remains in hiding in the small apartment, rations grow thin and an anxious Férial soon realises that a strategy must be devised to deflect attention from the fact that she is concealing a Jewish refugee.

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Gendering History on Screen As November practices crouching in a hiding place under the couch, Férial resourcefully resumes a friendship with the film’s most complex supporting character, a collaborator named Marcel.8 Agreeing to become his paramour as well as secretary at the pro-fascist newspaper where he works, Férial effectively remakes herself into a Nazi sympathiser and heterosexual, practically overnight. Insofar as the two women are not found out, the ruse is more or less successful; at least until the war’s end, when Férial is denounced and punished by her nationalist French neighbours, who of course know nothing of her Jewish woman lover. In the very last scene of the film, in what would otherwise be a celebratory moment, Férial is dragged from her home, where she is drinking champagne with her lover, to a public city square. There, her head is shaved and she is assaulted with insults of ‘Nazi whore’ and ‘Nazi slut’. In step with many films discussed in this book, November Moon is obviously invested in disrupting the opposition between public history, stereotypically considered to be important solely to men, and private stories, thought significant mostly to women. Eschewing large-scale depictions of great, historical events – France’s entry into the war, the commencement of occupation, the arrival of the Allies in Normandy, and so on – the film renders such occurrences as fragments of information that are exchanged principally between the women characters. Though the movie includes one very fleeting shot of fighting at the front, it is so brief in duration and so decontextualised from neighbouring scenes that it appears literally out of place. Yet, as my summary of the film’s plot should show, von Grote’s central aim is to re-cast the issue of collaboration from a feminist and indeed lesbian point of view, in order to counter, a posteriori, the accusations that historically were levied at women who had had, or who it was thought had had, relations with occupying officers or soldiers. Sara Horowitz has confirmed the harsh penalties reserved for such women.9 The clandestine relationship between Férial and her lover is an exemplar of but one of the ‘unseen’ components of women’s experience that, hypothetically, would have justified cooperation with the occupying forces. As such, the representation of that relationship is a polemic aimed at those who would, or did, pass judgement because of hearsay or gossip, asking them retrospectively to reflect on the certainty of their perceptions. At the same time, given that the relationship is a lesbian relationship, it is

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Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films also a corrective to a historically located homophobia that prohibited the ‘seeing’ of non-heterosexual romantic liaisons. In the film’s logic, the nonseeing of lesbianism is what the fascists do; to not see is at very least to produce a view of political activism that is inaccurate, if not actually reactionary. The final shot of the film, which is a close-up of November in the city square trying to comfort her battered lover, is an indication of the inadequacy of November’s presence within the frame, and indeed within the story, to counter the violence. In an attempt to right the historical record, the film challenges society’s double standard that acknowledges some forms of presence but not others. The terms of these debates about collaboration continue in a documentary produced by the BBC, Love Story: Berlin 1942, set in a German context. Love Story (Clay 1997) is based on a book by German feminist writer Erica Fischer about a real relationship between two women (one Jewish, one non-Jewish) during World War II. It thus rehearses many of the issues depicted in the earlier feature film in a non-fictional context. Like the couple in November Moon, Felice Schragenheim and Lilly Wust

Figure 4.1 November Moon. Ottokar Runze Film GmbH, 1985. Dir. Alexandra von Grote.

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Gendering History on Screen stood at polar ends of the political and ethnic spectrum. Felice was a Jewish lesbian who was active in the German underground and who stayed alive by passing as a non-Jew, while Lilly, mother of four boys and 1942 recipient of the Maternal Cross for exemplary mothering, was the wife of a German officer and, by some people’s accounts, the ‘ideal’ Nazi mother. Although she separated herself from her husband’s politics and ultimately threw her unqualified support behind her lover – divorcing her husband and helping Felice in her political work – Lilly was initially feared by many of Felice’s friends, who suspected her of upholding fascist ideals. The concerns of Felice’s friends eventually proved unfounded and the political and cultural differences between the women were strategic for Felice: by her own devising and from the advice of several friends, Felice decided to live with Lilly, in part because she thought that no-one would ever suspect a recipient of the Maternal Cross of harbouring a Jew. Like November Moon, the 1997 documentary complicates and amplifies conventional categories of realist historical storytelling, such as heroism, humanitarianism, courageousness, and so on, rather than simply showing women performing tasks that men have typically been shown to do. Like the feature film, the documentary aligns political or ethical correctness with lesbianism, retroactively expanding the scope of the former by associating it with the latter. How Love Story and especially November Moon complicate the matter of collaboration is a major issue for this chapter.

Europeanising the Holocaust As a film with significant authorship input from both the United Kingdom and Australia – directed by Australian Gillian Armstrong, adapted from a book by bestselling British novelist Sebastian Faulks, funded with money from the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany, and starring Cate Blanchett – Charlotte Gray joins the public discourse about collaboration and resistance from a different jumping-off point than either November Moon or The Round Up; it nonetheless makes an important contribution to the contemporary international filmography of women’s resistance. The story centres on a Scotswoman, Charlotte Gray, who is recruited into British Special Operations and offered an opportunity to go behind enemy lines in France in hopes of finding her lover, Peter Gregory, an RAF airman, whose

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Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films plane has disappeared. She submits herself to a military makeover that will allow her to operate undetected in France, hearing instructions to ‘transform’ herself into somebody ‘entirely different’ and to ‘always remember who you are not. From the moment you leave to the moment you land back in England, you are Dominique Guilbert from Paris.’ Ensuing scenes quickly evidence Charlotte’s lack of dexterity in these areas. A lie to her roommate (that she is spending the many hours away ‘learning to drive’) is met with the roommate’s canny observation (‘you can’t drive’), and her first mission inside France, where she is charged with passing a package to another woman Resistance fighter, meets with disaster, as a delay that Charlotte causes in the conversation results in the other woman being caught. Even her stock answer to the question of why she joined the Resistance (that she ‘wanted to help win the war’), is met with scepticism. But rather than give up, Charlotte abandons her first fake identity and adopts the new identity as housekeeper for Monsieur Levade (Michael Gambon), the father of the communist, Jewish Resistance fighter, Julien, and caretaker to two young Jewish boys who are being hidden by Levade. A turning point in Charlotte’s progress as a Resistance fighter arrives on the day the German military rolls through town. Julien irrationally begins shouting at them about the citizens they have caused to disappear, and when he ignores Charlotte’s exhortations to stay quiet she grabs him and kisses him violently on the mouth to silence him. From here, Charlotte begins to become a more agentic but also more ambiguous heroine, thinking up plans to advance the cause while inadvertently raising Julien’s suspicions: when some of Julien’s communist friends are killed he wonders whether she is the mole responsible for the death of his comrades. Although she vehemently denies any responsibility for the killings, in a later scene her British contact introduces the unsettling idea that the killing of the communists could have been an Allied plot in which Charlotte played an unwitting part. A series of sub-plots moves the film deeper into realms of doubt and confusion. Tipped off by Vichy associate Renech, officials storm Levade’s house, seize him and the two Jewish boys, and take Charlotte and Julien into custody. From this moment, Charlotte’s and Julien’s escape again depends on her ingenuity: she asks Julien to kiss her and, while they pretend to begin to have sex, thus enable themselves to overcome the unsuspecting guard.

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Figure 4.2 After overcoming the guard. Charlotte Gray. Ecosse Films and Film Four, 2001. Dir. Gillian Armstrong.

Finally free, Julien asks Charlotte to escape to the south but she stays to perform a final ethical yet, again, false act: pretending to be the boys’ mother, she types out a fake letter to them, reassuring them that ‘she and their father are both well’ and ‘waiting in Germany for’ the boys, with the intention of providing a crumb of comfort during what audiences know will be the boys’ final days alive. The conclusion of the film shows the end of the war, Charlotte’s discovery that Peter is alive, and her emotional reunion with Julien in France, whom she chooses over the RAF pilot. In spite of the fact that the film received generally lukewarm reviews, a number of things are important about this movie from the perspective of this book.10 Like other films discussed in this chapter, Charlotte Gray couches globally significant themes in the format of a love story, specifically a love triangle between the Scotswoman Charlotte, the British RAF pilot Peter, and the French Resistance fighter Julien. Marcia Landy has argued that both prestige and popular representations of the past are permeated with the formal properties and narrative elements of melodrama and that the ‘trappings of the past’ may reveal present-day circumstances.11 In the years immediately following the movie’s release, the European Union achieved a number of noteworthy feats, namely the adoption of a single currency in 2002 and the inclusion in 2004 of eight new member states from central and Eastern Europe. Though Britain was not at the time (nor has it subsequently become) part of Europe in the way

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Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films of France or Germany, the movie’s year of release (2001) marked nearly the mid-point of the career of Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has retrospectively been credited with promoting a pro-European sentiment in Britain, the likes of which haven’t been seen either before or after.12 The movie Charlotte Gray both anticipates and contributes to such sentiments through the incorporation of an important change to the ending of the story: in the movie, Charlotte ultimately chooses the Frenchman Julien over the British Peter, where the novel implies that she will choose the British RAF pilot. In shifting the narrative from what had been an English–Scottish relationship towards an intercontinental, French–Scottish union, the movie arguably promulgates a broader vision of multinationalism than initially appeared in Faulks’s novel. In Constructions of European Holocaust Memory, Malgorzata Pakier asserts that the significance of the Holocaust to European commemorative activities has continued to expand since 1989, to the point that it is now the event in European self-conceptualisation; demonstrating memory of the Holocaust remains a key way to assert that the concerns of Europeans are still unified.13 Considering this movie at a time shortly following a decision by the majority of citizens in the United Kingdom to depart the European Union, the movie enacts a fantasy of unification that, a number of years later, would now appear to be foregone. But Julien, it is important to remember, is not only a Frenchman, he is also a communist and a Jew. The dramatised relationship between the two individuals, Charlotte and Julien, from nonidentical ethnic groups would seem to hint towards a coming-to-terms-withthe-past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), which is in fact a feature in all the films under discussion in this chapter.14 How newly imagined romantic relations play a role in disrupting previous hierarchies is important and will be taken up once all of the feature films have been introduced.

Reconfiguring Resistance The most recent iteration to date by a woman director about women’s experiences of life in occupied France, The Round Up (Bosch 2010) depicts the coordinated seizure and aftermath of 13,000 foreign- and French-born Jewish women, children, and men from their Parisian homes on 16 and 17 July 1942.15 The movie precipitated a flurry of media attention when it

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Gendering History on Screen debuted, including a two-hour panel programme called ‘La Rafle: Une Histoire Franc
aise’ and a contribution by then-president Jacques Chirac to Le Journal du Dimanche. It has been suggested that visibility resulting from these activities assisted the film’s domestic box office performance, which was considerable.16 Events in The Round Up are told through the eyes of Annette Monod – a Protestant nurse, ostensibly based on a real person – David Scheinbaum, a Jewish doctor, and several Jewish families. The families include the Weismanns, which feature a Trotskyite father, religious mother, and son Joseph, who survives the war, and on whom the story is also partly based, the Zyglers, a mother and four children, and the well-to-do Traub family, which includes a professor, his wife, and daughter Hannah. The film depicts negotiations between Vichy and German Reich officials about how to achieve the requisite number of deportees with minimal damage to Marshall Pétain’s reputation (how to maximise the deportation of ‘foreign’ Jews and whether to remove children), scenes of life in the Jewish quarters, and the events of the round up itself: a frenzy of violent and chaotic activity, coordinated by French police, in which most of the Jewish characters are captured and transported to the Winter Velodrome, known as the Vel’ d’Hiv. Inside the Vel’ d’Hiv horrific conditions stem from complete lack of food, water, sanitation, and medical facilities. The second half of the movie takes place there and at the internment camp outside of Paris, Beaune-la-Roland, where a developing romance is suggested between Annette and David. Of the events of ‘the great round up’ it has been alleged that most French people knew nothing until the eponymous film appeared.17 The shifts, developments, and delays within popular understanding of French wartime activities have been authoritatively detailed by historian Henri Rousso, who has authored perhaps the most forceful denunciation of the myth that France under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle was a nation ‘united in resistance’.18 The dominance of the Gaullist perspective, including interpretations of the Resistance as a unified movement free from communist input, is evident in French films from about 1947 up until the end of the 1950s.19 In this period, images of French collaboration are scarce; when collaborators were shown they tended to figure as ‘evil but isolated or abnormal individuals’.20 Images of female Resistance members, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, are likewise difficult to find.21

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Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films In no uncertain terms, The Round Up puts these Gaullist notions to rest and shows the centrality of the French police to the planning and execution of the rounding-up and deportation of the Jews and their carrying out virtually all events (except for the final separation of Jewish adults from children) with virtually no German assistance. The film thus corroborates historical witness testimony, which states that ‘there exists no record of even a single French policeman having refused to participate in his assignment’.22 The film shows furthermore the casual but ubiquitous antiSemitism of the day, in the allusion to real events from 1942 (such as the anti-Semitic ‘exhibition’ ‘The Jews in France’), in the offhand commentary from supporting characters like the female bakery owner on seeing the children’s yellow star, ‘at least now we won’t get them mixed up’, and the references to Jews as vermin, parasites, undesirables, and so on. The movie is not without evidence of French heroism, as shown in the actions of a priest who provides new identities to two fleeing Jewish children, those of a velodrome plumber who provides blank identity papers to a velodrome detainee, and of a policeman who looks the other way when a Jewish girl with false papers exits the Vel’ d’Hiv. But largely the movie refashions dramatic images seen in earlier films and constructs resistance in the ‘little’ acts of pro-Jewish advocacy, such as those of firefighters who provide water to the captives in the stadium and who smuggle out notes and letters from the detainees. Most importantly from the perspective of this book, many of these seemingly insignificant acts are carried out by women, including the main character Annette, a nurse educator who instructs her non-Jewish students to assist the Jewish students to escape, and numerous female characters who try to warn Jewish friends and neighbours. Because of The Round Up’s commitment to the historical facts of the round up itself, where women and children comprised 70 per cent of deportees, the film, like the others discussed in this chapter, offers a vision of resistance that is disproportionately embodied by female characters; and it is through these characters that nearly all of the movie’s affect is achieved.23 In addition to those already mentioned other important sympathisers include the concierge Tati and an unnamed female character at the state records office who generates an alert that the round up is about to occur. The violence and tension that the film depicts even centres on women’s experiences: the sole suicide depicted is that of a woman who throws herself from a

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Gendering History on Screen window, and the most affecting scenes at the film’s end depict the separation of children from their mothers. Rounding-up scenes in the Weismanns’, Zyglers’, and Traubs’ respective flats centre wholly on mothers and children, with fathers who are largely absent.

Women and Resistance In addition to overhauling the gender of the Resistance actors themselves, all of the films show changes in the nature and quality of resistance acts. As noted, at the heart of two of the three feature films are cross-ethnic relationships between a Jew and a non-Jew and circumstances that enable the Jewish person to be protected because of the actions of her or his nonJewish lover; in both November Moon and Charlotte Gray the non-Jewish characters appear as pro-Nazi and pro-Vichy respectively but are in fact resolutely the opposite. That both of the non-Jewish lead characters, Charlotte and Férial, function as two things at once – in Férial’s case, protector of a persecuted subject, what Alison Owings would call a ‘righteous gentile’,24 and secretary at a pro-Nazi paper, and Special Operations agent and alleged Vichy mole, in Charlotte’s – raises issues at the heart of Holocaust studies, namely, what counts as resistance? What counts as collaboration? Are there ‘rules’ to resistance? Is there only one right way to act – in Abigail Rosenthal’s words, an ‘appropriate way to undergo one’s Holocaust’?25 At one end of the continuum is the view, authored by Hannah Arendt and developed by Raul Hilberg, that only those actions that directly stemmed or stayed the Nazi advance constitute resistance – such as, for example, that of the woman prisoner who grabbed the gun of the SS officer and shot him, even though it cost her her own life, or the work of underground organisations.26 At the other end are those like survivor Terrence Des Pres, who feels that, within the camps or ghettos, the act of surviving itself qualifies, regardless of how the survivor did or didn’t cooperate in order to stay alive.27 Roger Gottlieb’s definition embraces those of both Hilberg and Des Pres, in that resistance reflects the situational difference that varies from one context to the next.28 For Gottlieb, resistance is a relational concept that is determined according to the circumstances in which the persecuted actor finds him or herself. In other words, if it is the religious aspect of identity that is deemed

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Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films offensive, then public prayer, regardless of the outcome, would qualify as resistance. If it is physical survival, then escape by any means necessary would count. As the principle threat in all three feature films is that of discovery, in Gottlieb’s definition the act of remaining disguised (in Charlotte Gray and The Round Up) and/or hidden (in November Moon and The Round Up) would qualify as resistance. Nechama Tec’s definition is as capacious as Gottlieb’s and moreover extends to acts that often women were uniquely able to perform.29 Included in her definition of resistance is the couriering of information, by both Jews and non-Jews, the provision and management of food and other meagre resources in ghettos, the maintenance of morale in the face of increasingly dire circumstances, and contributions as cooks, nurses, and morale-boosters in various Partisan movements. John Roth offers the term ‘partner’ for the majority of women in Nazi Germany who occupied a position somewhere between perpetrator and bystander, to indicate the inadequacy of previous constructions of participants.30 The specificity of women’s experiences in occupied France and the Holocaust more broadly comprises an extensive literature, which as I’ve suggested has itself precipitated a methodological shift in conceptualising what counts as resistance more broadly.31 In The Round Up the notion of resistance is not constitutive of the main characters’ relationship as it is in Charlotte Gray and in November Moon; though there is a suggestion of attraction between Annette and David, it is consummated only by a single dance in the middle of the story and is not connected with subterfuge, as are the relationships in the other two movies. Nonetheless, The Round Up contains numerous lesser characters who resort to pretence and fabrication in order to escape or to provide assistance to others. The film provides a broad approach to the understanding of resistance, which includes any means of subterfuge or disguise enacted for the purpose of saving a life or lives. Varied and uneven in their success, many of these acts turn on the domestic. These include the non-Jewish neighbour Hélène’s attempt to claim the young Jewish boy Nono as ‘hers’ to protect him from being seized by French police, Sura Weismann’s fabrication to the police that her husband recently ‘died’ of an embolism to short-circuit their search for him, and Louise Zygler’s false statement she is taking her brother to his ‘nanny’. In other instances,

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Gendering History on Screen fabrication pivots directly on the sexual. These include the instance when two sex workers attempt to extend protection to Louise by pretending she is one of them; Hannah Traub’s use of sexuality to distract police to assist her mother and sister to escape; and Hannah’s later falsification of papers and claim to be the velodrome plumber’s wife while exiting the velodrome. Although von Grote’s film features a minor character who is a member of the French Resistance (Férial’s brother), there is not a single scene of him in that context; overall, the film does not seem especially interested in either him or his work. What distinguishes all three features is a criticism of the differential logic that recognises and validates certain forms of resistance over others. For example, while November Moon’s male collaborator, Marcel, aims to cross the border into Germany once the Allies arrive, that option is not open to the female character, Férial. In that film, the mapping of political treachery on to sexual licentiousness via the term ‘Nazi whore’ is a product of the same inequity that allows Marcel to make a midnight hour escape while Férial is roundly humiliated. And, although the progressive-thinking Férial is as disgusted by the Nazis as is her brother, the Resistance fighter, he is able to vent his outrage through the masculinist and socially sanctioned mode of voluntary conscription. Seen through the eyes of her unknowing French neighbours, Férial’s apparent fall from outspoken antagonist of fascism to ‘Nazi whore’ would function, in Dominick LaCapra’s words, ‘transferentially’ for contemporary subjects for whom guilt and atonement are pressing issues.32 Though the documentary Love Story makes this point implicitly rather than explicitly, in that film resistance is likewise principally an act that women carry out, in a world that is predominantly homosocial. Only one of the five major characters of the story, Gerd Ehrlich, is male; and not one of the key women characters, which include Ulla Schaaf and Elenai Predski-Kramer in addition to Lilly and Felice, is visibly linked to a male partner. Like November Moon, Love Story considerably broadens the definition of resistance, including everything from the theft of identification cards to Felice’s passing as a non-Jew to the very act of ‘reckless living’ carried out by both Felice and Lilly. In Charlotte Gray, Charlotte’s success as a member of the Resistance develops in parallel to her explicit expression of love and passion for Julien. The kiss she performs when the Germans are passing by and the pretend-sex she and Julien begin

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Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films to carry out when in custody are greatly more effective than her first action meeting with the female Resistance fighter in the café. Even when the Vichy-associated Renech tries to assault her, the comment she invents to defend herself, that she is menstruating, or, in her words, ‘dirty down there’, relates explicitly back to sexuality and the female body. Above all, what emerges in all films is an idea of resistance that hinges on female sexuality: enacted principally by women, each act is facilitated by a character’s successful apprehension and flaunting of various feminine codes. From Férial’s performance of a Nazi-sympathiser to Felice’s construction of herself as a non-Jew, to Lilly’s appearance as the quintessential Nazi mother, to Charlotte’s self-construction as a French housekeeper, to numerous acts in the Round Up named above, not one of the women is precisely what she appears to be. As I’ve suggested, in all four films survival is achieved by the dissemination of the suggestion that the Jewish and non-Jewish women are other than they in fact are. In November Moon and Love Story, the success of political mimicry, that is, the respective performances of Nazi-sympathisers, that serve as a cover for oppositional activity, is contingent upon their masquerade of sexuality that Germans and collaborationist French do not question. Only by imitating the conventions of heterosexuality is Férial credible as a Nazi-sympathiser. Largely because of her status as a ‘good German (i.e. Nazi) mother’, can Lilly’s activism remain undetected. The mimicry of normative sex/gender relations that would appear purely capitulative is paradoxically what makes oppositional activity possible.

Mimicry and Doubling In addition to the focusing of the three feature films around one or more female characters, central to the three is a general configuring of resistance as an act of female duplicity, mimicry, and/or masquerade. For Homi Bhabha, mimicry is a form of fetishism enacted by the colonised against the coloniser that helps mediate the disempowering and expropriative effects of colonisation. Mimicry is represented in both the stereotype and in the anglicised-but-not-English colonial subject, and involves the apprehension of the cultural codes of the coloniser, including dress, manners, and language, by the colonised subject.33 Mimicry both controls a perceived

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Gendering History on Screen threat to the established order and has the transformative effect of changing the look of colonial surveillance into the distanced and ‘displacing gaze of the disciplined’.34 An agonistic attitude that allows for different forms of agency than earlier metaphors of domination, mimicry produces the colonised as a presence rather than as the purely negative or repressed double of the coloniser.35 Although the racial, industrial, and other differences between the colonial territories Bhabha writes about and Europe in the 1940s might seem to invalidate my invoking of Bhabha in this context, there are structural commonalities between his map and the territories I am describing that are helpful to my thinking about the strategies available. In Love Story, reference is repeatedly made to the contradiction between the apparently fascist and anti-fascist components of Lilly’s personality. While in 1981 she was awarded the Federal Service Cross for her wartime anti-fascism, surviving acquaintances recall her uttering anti-Semitic remarks, and testify to the existence in the living room of her home of a bronze relief of Hitler. In ‘talking head’ footage with the film’s director, Lilly Wust, not surprisingly, denies such charges, blaming her reputation on the fact that she was married to a German officer. While acknowledging people’s contradictory memories of her, the voice of the film comes down firmly on the side of Lilly’s anti-fascism, undercutting negative references to her politics by naming her the ‘supposed Nazi’ and ending with the unequivocal statement that ‘the woman once suspected of being a Nazi, turned out to be the very opposite’. My point here is not to pass judgement on the historical fact of Lilly’s politics but to demonstrate how they function in the world of the historical story. Regardless of ‘what’ Lilly ‘was’, the suspicions about her politics prove strategic, for Felice and for herself as Felice’s safeguard. Talking head footage from a friend, Ulla, directly links Lilly’s reputation to the safety Felice enjoyed. Estimating the reasons Felice trusted she would be safe at Lilly’s house, she states: ‘Lilly was known as a bit of a Nazi. No-one would suspect her of hiding a Jew. So Felice moved in and stayed.’ The significance of Lilly’s doubled identity – her being ‘a bit of’ a Nazi – is further evident in a description of Lilly’s grilling by the Gestapo, during which she denied knowing Felice was Jewish. As the image holds on a photograph of Lilly with her young boys, the voice-over relates that the

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Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films Gestapo believed her, ‘because they couldn’t imagine that a good German mother with four fine sons would harbour a Jew’. Marek Haltof has outlined how certain events associated with the Holocaust generate what he calls ‘double memory’; by this he means that the interpretations and understandings of events will differ depending on the ethnicity of the witness.36 Haltof provides the specific example of the geographic location of the Nazi death camps, which notoriously were located in Poland rather than Germany. Where some have interpreted this situational fact as a confirmation of Polish compliance (buttressed by an essential anti-Semitism), others have argued that the placement of the death camps on Polish soil demonstrate the Reich’s ultimate desire to annex Poland. Far from construing Poles as anti-Semites, this latter view highlights the shared plight of Poles and Jews in the Reich’s future plans. Haltof quotes James Young who says, ‘in this view, the killing centres in Poland were to have begun with the Jews and ended with the Poles’.37 All of the films would seem to elicit this doubled perspective. In Love Story, the doubledness that characterises Lilly’s identity also characterises the women’s demeanour as a couple. While the film informs us of their awareness of the danger they were both constantly in, it also relates how they travelled confidently around the city, visiting friends in cafes, cycling around, going everywhere together, in short, conducting themselves, as a friend Elenai describes it, ‘as though there were no danger’. Although under other circumstances news of such conduct would bring viewers pleasure, because viewers imagine the risks involved, Elenai’s narration induces apprehension. Lilly’s description of how she and Felice took particular pleasure from going to the hotel across from Hitler’s headquarters, the Kaiserhof, has more or less this effect. What is finally apparent from Ulla’s, Elenai’s, and Lilly’s testimonies is a split in Lilly’s identity and in the couple’s actions, that, on the one hand, expresses extraordinary vulnerability, and on the other, exudes confidence and authority – in short, proper, Aryan Germanness. The trope of doubledness is also apparent in November Moon. In that film, each intercultural exchange has two contradictory meanings, an obvious or capitulative one for the occupying forces, and a code or oppositional signification for the French and the Jews. In each case, the (in)ability to see the ‘code’ or covert meaning turns upon the reader’s

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Gendering History on Screen dependence on the stereotype in his or her interpretive process. While November and viewers are aware that Férial’s acceptance of the job at the pro-fascist paper is intended to divert attention from her household, Marcel and his German colleagues are blinded by her coquettish manner, unable to see beyond the masquerade of heterosexuality that she performs. A scene in which Férial appears to dance for the benefit of the Nazis and their French collaborationist friends demonstrates the doubled significance of her actions, that is only partially legible by the Germans but fully visible to viewers. On the night before the Nazi defeat, Férial accompanies Marcel and some of his friends to a bar. Not responding to the men’s overt interest in her, Férial dances, not with them, but alone, by herself, in the middle of the room. Whereas the bar patrons read the dreamy, exuberant smile on her face as evidence of heterosexual, narcissistic pleasure in being looked at, viewers recall an earlier lesbian scene in the movie, where before the war Férial and November danced together in a café before an initially nonplussed but ultimately irate Parisian audience – which scene concluded with the women’s hasty departure from the establishment. Because the film’s viewers remember the earlier dancing scene, they know that Férial’s thoughts are indeed not with the Nazi onlookers in this latter scene, but with her lover who waits for her, with whom she will celebrate later that night.38 In both scenes, there is a good deal more going on in the heads of the dancers or dancer than the other patrons are able to grasp: the first dancing scene marks the beginning of a lesbian love affair, whose existence patrons either don’t see or can’t comprehend, while the second scene coincides with the arrival of the Allies in Normandy – the consequences of which are comprehensible to Férial, but not the Nazis. Especially in the latter scene, there is considerably more power in being looked at than feminist film theory has led us to expect: precisely by not returning the invasive gazes of the onlookers, Férial is able to maintain her doubled status, to remain unavailable to the bar patrons. The scene in which the Gestapo search Férial’s apartment likewise manifests a doubled complex of meanings. Key to the working of the scene is the preceding one, in which Férial, tipped off about the search, hurriedly helps November leave the apartment, to go and spend the night elsewhere. When the Gestapo finally appear, viewers, who know what is at stake but also that the object of the search has flown the proverbial coop, perceive

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Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films Férial’s feigned nonchalance to be highly ironic. While her petulance about cooperating can pass as the legitimate outrage of someone with her ‘connections’ being the subject of a search, viewers have a different opinion. Férial’s reluctance to carry out the officer’s demand to disclose the contents of November’s (by now empty) hiding place under the couch seems to ridicule the entire operation. While Férial’s question, ‘How could anyone hide in the bottom of the couch?’, strikes the officer as merely rhetorical, viewers hear an additional meaning. In cinematic terms, the doubledness or duplicity in Férial’s performance is conveyed throughout the movie via a distinct, repeated framing and blocking technique that is employed in nearly all the encounters between Férial and Marcel. Each encounter between the two is initiated by a lingering shot of Férial turned away from Marcel with her face hidden from him but fully visible to viewers. In each of these scenes, the camera pauses for a few seconds as she stares away from him. Clearly, the purpose of such shots is to generate tension and uncertainty as to whether Férial will continue to maintain her masquerade. And what is most interesting is precisely that Férial’s face does not betray her; even when Marcel’s dictation becomes violently anti-Semitic, she continues to appear detached. While Férial is November Moon’s most blatant mimic, other characters in the film engage in this practice. For example a supporting character, Chantal, one-time lover of November’s father and owner of the local bistro, passes as pro-Nazi by bantering casually and flirtatiously with her German patrons. Whereas the Germans equate Chantal’s hospitality with ‘authentic’ ‘French’ joie de vivre, audiences know that the purpose of her solicitousness is to deflect attention from the fraudulent industry she is involved in (at night she switches labels between costly and inexpensive wines) and from her harbouring of Férial’s brother, the Resistance fighter. The doubled meaning in her telling of a La Fontaine fable in which she disparagingly but indirectly compares the Germans to ants, the subtlety of which is lost on her bar patrons, like Férial’s masquerade, exemplifies her ability to challenge the Germans’ authority, to make a mockery of them.39 In Charlotte Gray, doubling and duplicity is at the heart of the story as previously explained, with Charlotte assigned not one but two false French identities and then a further suggested identity when she is cast as a

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Gendering History on Screen

Figure 4.3 Charlotte authors a letter to the boys. Charlotte Gray. Ecosse Films and Film Four, 2001. Dir. Gillian Armstrong.

potential Vichy mole. She is both the pretend lover to protect Julien from the ire of the officers and, ultimately, his genuine one as well. Charlotte’s own lack of certainty about how she has been used in spying operations finally powers her ultimate ethical, yet false, act of pseudonymously writing the letter for the Jewish boys. The duplicity or doubling that is seen in The Round Up is not reducible to the behaviour of one or two lead characters but is evident across that of a number of supporting characters at different points in the story. As mentioned, Hannah Traub and Louise Zygler mimic alternative sexual/ familial identities not once but twice over the story’s course (‘tarty teenager’ then ‘plumber’s wife’, in Hannah’s case; ‘brother’s caretaker’ then ‘prostitute’, in the case of Louise). Further identity shifts in that film include Sura’s self-construction as ‘widow’ and Hélène’s self-construction as ‘Nono’s mother’. If, in Bhabha’s overtly Lacanian formulation, ‘the recognition of sexual difference . . . is disavowed by the fixation on an object that masks the difference and restores the original presence’,40 certainly the fixation on Férial’s ‘heterosexualness’, Chantal’s ‘Frenchness’, Charlotte’s ‘housekeeper’ qualities, Hannah’s ‘wifeliness’, and Louise’s ‘prostituteness’ can impede or delay the recognition of anti-fascist and/or Jewish and/or lesbian difference that are also at issue. I am arguing that Chantal, Charlotte, Férial, Louise, and

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Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films Hannah are able to play up, and therefore off, the stereotype that is described in Bhabha’s argument, in order to forward their own political survival projects. The women’s sexuality that the fascists interpret as genuine is a construction or a performance of the stereotypical, that returns the men to an illusionary ‘point of total identification’, a place of misconstrued certainty where no questions can be asked.41 Férial’s mimicry of heterosexuality, Chantal’s mimicry of Frenchness, Charlotte’s mimicry of a ‘French housekeeper’, Hannah’s mimicry of ‘plumber’s wife’, Louise’s mimicry of ‘prostitute’ make of each woman a kind of fetish for the Germans, restoring to them the security of ideal relations during wartime, and thereby deflecting attention from the women’s oppositional work. It is important to remind readers that in two of the three feature films I’m discussing, the mimickers are not the Jewish subjects in the stories but rather the non-Jews – Férial and Charlotte. If we agree with Bhabha’s idea that power constitutes a range of subjects, then we must wonder about the effects on the Jewish characters of the respective non-Jew’s undertaking to ‘be’ the fetish herself. I would argue that what occurs when Férial and Charlotte become the fetish is that November and Julien no longer need to ‘be’ it, can cease being the amputated subject Bhabha describes.

Vergangenheitsbewältigung There is tremendous power in the dialogical models thus far outlined. In what remains of the chapter I want to look closely at a reconciliatory model specifically illustrated in November Moon, where reconciliation is a linguistic project that is achieved performatively through language. As I intend to show, coming to terms with the past is contingent on November’s ability to become an agentic, speaking being. The opening shots of November Moon show November’s father telling his young daughter a fable. The scene is a flashback, recollected on the eve of World War II by the now adult November, 20 or so years after she originally heard the fable as a child. What occasioned the original telling was the event of November’s mother’s death; the story her father tells is a Talmud legend about what happens to children just before they are born. As her father told it, an angel kisses children so that they will forget everything that life will bring. In the flashback, he says,

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Gendering History on Screen before they are born their whole life unfolds before them, and also their death. But no one could live knowing when or how they are to die. So God sent an angel and with that kiss, they are able to forget everything about life and death.

Interestingly, for a film whose cultural project is to amplify contemporary awareness of occupation and the Holocaust, the fable insists less on the importance of knowing than on the pain involved in having to know: were one aware of all that is in store, it would be impossible to summon either the hope or strength to continue to live. Not to know, in the logic of the legend, is to inhabit a more liveable, prelapsarian state. Having to know – or in the case of survivors such as Abraham Bomba in Shoah, having to remember – is almost as difficult and painful as the initial historical experience. The issue of foreknowledge has been a nagging one for survivor historians and others attempting to make sense of the devastating effects of war, in particular the racial policies of National Socialism. Lack-ofawareness of the seriousness and extent of the draconian measures associated with the Final Solution has dominated explanations of both Jewish inability to resist and Allied failure to intervene auspiciously. Allegations of Allied anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and Jewish ‘passivity’, on the other, though clearly differing in tenor, aim, and effect, have both been assuaged by the notion that not enough was known in time to make a difference. Some publicising of historical evidence to the contrary, such as that demonstrating early Allied knowledge of the camps and ghettos for instance, has productively and significantly shifted the terms of the debate from the failure-to-know to the failure-to-act. For example, the Washington DC Holocaust Museum’s documentation of the American decision against bombing Auschwitz well after the camp’s purpose was known, and in spite of pleas from Jewish groups to do so, may be one of the most well-publicised examples of such a shift. The issue of the insufficiency of Jewish resistance is, not surprisingly, more complicated. While most historians are in agreement as to the overwhelming paucity of options available, particularly after the 1942 Wahnsee Conference, stereotypes of Jewish ‘denial’ and ‘docility’ have been difficult to overcome.42 Rather than re-asking the unanswerable question, if people

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Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films had known, could it have been stopped, Zygmunt Bauman examines the conditions that produced the possibility for certain actions to occur in spite of what was or was not known. Although focused on differently positioned historical subjects possessing distinctive forms of agency, what both the museum panel and Bauman’s study in particular explore is the nebulous area between knowing and not knowing, that is, the type of knowledge apprehension that involves both knowing and disavowal. If people had known, could it have been stopped? The significance of Bauman’s argument turns upon his displacing of this question. At the risk of exculpating those who knew the extent of the genocide, had means to intercede, and did not take steps to do so, I would like to suggest that the fantasy of a knowledge-suspending angel might be strategically important to a fictional character such as November. Confronted with seemingly insurmountable odds with no means to act, foreknowledge, for the German Jewish refugee, would be an encumbrance to which the sole rational response would be suicide, as it was for Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Warsaw Jewish community council from 1939, who was tasked with coordinating mass deportations, and undoubtedly countless others less well-known. For November as a Jew, the angel’s kiss would constitute not an espousal of inaction but a strategic disavowal, a suspension of knowledge of the certainty of a violent and annihilating future. Not an evacuation of agency, the kiss would be a suspension of knowledge necessary to go on living.43 The idea that one should have to forget in order to begin – or rather that there is already something to forget before one begins to begin – seems a profoundly iconoclastic notion, in that it undermines the conventional relation of the present to the future and subverts the idea of time as unidirectional, continuous, regular, and unique. The value of time that progresses in non-normative ways has obsessed a considerable number of scholars, from Proust to Bergson to, of course, Walter Benjamin; like November, Benjamin also included the figure of an angel in his work, specifically the angel of history that appears in the portion of writing Benjamin was last working on prior to his death (‘Theses’).44 The film’s story of the angel further resonates with Benjamin’s notions in their shared rejection of progressional teleology, his break with Enlightenment notions of progress, but maintenance of very small fissures of hope. Revolution, for

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Gendering History on Screen Benjamin, is far from certain and messianic power is only ever weak. The theological strains of Benjamin’s argument that make some cultural critics uncomfortable are only ever hinted at as potential. What is certain is the ‘catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage’ at the feet of the angel: Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.45

There is no doubt that the events of the Holocaust – including most specifically Benjamin’s exile from Berlin to Paris in 1933, the deteriorating conditions for European Jews throughout the 1930s, the lack of a French visa needed by Benjamin in the final hour to depart France, and his ultimate taking of a morphine overdose in Port Bou in September 1940 – give meaning and frame to a great deal of his work, not least the ‘Theses’, which was likely with him at the time of his death.46 In Benjamin’s final year of life he travelled south through France in flight from the Nazis and probably crossed much of the same terrain portrayed in the feature films discussed in this chapter. At the end of November Moon the fable of the angel is told for the second time. In the intimate scene where Férial learns of her mother’s death, November speaks a version of the story she heard her father tell. She says, before we are born, we know everything that will come to pass in our lives, even our death. But since no one could live, not even for one second, knowing all this, God sent down an angel who kisses us on the forehead before we are born into the world, so that we may forget everything.

As a character whose structural and, in 1940s language, racial position in the story leaves her little room for physical agency, November spends most of the film literally and metaphorically on the run, reacting to the actions and decisions of those with more power and freedom of movement than she. When she is not shown running from or being brutalised by the Germans, November is dependent on the mercy and will of others like Férial and Férial’s mother, spending much of the time

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Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films physically confined, for example in a barn in the unoccupied zone, or in the hiding place in the under part of the couch. Although the film permits her an occasional gesture of defiance, she largely exists as a fugitive who must remain out of sight and away from the light of day. And, most importantly, silent. Throughout much of November Moon, November’s access to verbal agency or voice and the power of analysis is limited and ineffective. Although the beginning of the film opens on an image of her, suggesting that this will be her story, the first words spoken are not hers but those of her father. In the scene where the two women first meet, November is harassed by a set of anti-Semitic boys, but it is Férial who appears, vocally intervenes, and escorts November away. Whereas Férial on two occasions verbally acknowledges her relationship with November (in a scene with her brother, and in a scene with her mother), November never speaks about it directly. In sum, whereas Férial is allowed the luxury of analysis and commentary, November for the most part only silently reacts. Even the film’s title, that would seem intended to address her, dispossesses her: ‘November Moon’ is not a name she has created, but is in fact a nickname made up by Férial’s brother. In the chapter on Shoah in her book on the subject of witnessing, Shoshana Felman writes of the contest between interviewer and witness over breaking the silence on the subject of the Holocaust. The difficulty for both the witness and for those who were not there in speaking about the Holocaust derives from the ‘pact’ of silence struck between the historical event and its witness: as long as the witness remains silent, there is no event to be spoken about; as long as the horror is not revealed, there need not be, need not have been, a witness.47 Thus possibly the most important accomplishment of a movie like Shoah is to desacrilise the historical circumstances and deflate their paralysing power. Which does not erase it, but rather releases it and establishes a powerful, public, and institutionalised forum for voices that had not previously had one, a way for survivors of the experiences of ghettoisation and internment to ‘own’ their own stories, speak them in the first person. Analogously, November’s telling of the Talmud legend to Férial allows her to own what had previously only been spoken to her as a child by another, and, crucially, to locate herself as agent and subject proper of the

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Gendering History on Screen story. There are four signs that indicate this important shift: firstly, that she tells the story, that is, that it is her voice that is heard telling it, not that of her father. Secondly, that the story is told in the present tense, not recollected (she originally recalls it in a flashback). Thirdly, that she tells the story in the first person plural, using ‘we’ (her father had told it in the third person). Fourthly, that, in this new telling, she occupies the position of the angel-agent as opposed to the object, the one receiving the kiss. Brushing back the hair on Férial’s forehead as she relates the story, looking as if she would kiss Férial, November becomes the agent of a narrative that had previously signalled her historical dispossession, constructed her as the forgetter. What this second telling of the story does is allow her to redeem a part of her past upon which her ability to face the future depended and, henceforth, depends. At stake in the re-telling of the angel story is not just the temporal frame of its utterance, the past, but the temporal frame of its enunciation, which is the present. With the recovery of the angel story, November’s past is assumed, released, and made available for the present and indeed for the future. With November’s assumption of the first-person

Figure 4.4 Recovering the story of the angel. November Moon. Ottokar Runze Film GmbH, 1985. Dir. Alexandra von Grote.

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Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films plural pronoun, she identifies herself with the children of the story and, by extension, with the collective subject-victims of the Holocaust. No longer simply the recipient of the story, November becomes, with this re-telling, most importantly, its transmitter. While the first telling, occurring on the eve of the war, coincided with the beginning of a historic loss whose proportions need no emphasising, the second telling, heard at the war’s end, marks not just the possibility of cultural survival but of cultural continuation. And the kiss? As it occurs between two historically adversarial bodies – Jew: non-Jew; subjugator: subjugated – the kiss could signal a tentative reconciliation. At least between Férial and November, and potentially between the different audiences that they symbolically stand in for. Like nearly all shots of Férial and November in the movie, the women are imaged throughout the angel/kiss sequence in an intimate two-shot. From the women’s first encounter after they flee the anti-Semitic boys to various scenes of them in the south of France to shots of them in bed – they are nearly always depicted together in the frame rather than isolated in alternating shots as they would be if von Grote had employed shot/reverseshots. Though there are several meanings we could ascribe to this stylistic choice, the most obvious is that it engenders a sense of unity between the characters. The fact that the two-shot is not employed with other characters in the movie suggests furthermore that it is specific to November and Férial as a lesbian couple. This stylistic choice, and the fact that the kiss takes place between two women, signals finally the need for women, feminists, and lesbians to participate in the process of coming to terms with the past. What the final scene suggests, where Férial is denounced as a collaborator and cruelly humiliated by her neighbours, is that the burden of historical reckoning and accountability has not dissipated but shifted. No longer a scenario that pits perpetrators against victims, the final scene points to the need to cast a wider net around the issue of historical responsibility that too frequently has congealed upon two binary oppositions. Max Silverman has offered the idea of a palimpsest to indicate the nonessentialist, often transversal connections across which memory works. The palimpsest, Silverman argues, productively represents the staging of memory where traces (of memory) ‘overlap, intersect, and are transformed’: ‘the focus on the figure of the palimpsest reveals how time and space are reconfigured through a ceaseless process of straddling and

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Gendering History on Screen superimposition of elements, and condensation and displacement of meaning’.48 Silverman’s articulation of the palimpsest paves the way for his own intelligent analyses of the mutually imbricated histories of colonialism and the Holocaust. In lieu of the competitive, comparative ranking of traumatic memories that are construed as mutually exclusive, Silverman offers the idea that memories emerge not at the expense of prior memories but with them.49 It is not difficult to see in Silverman’s concept of memory the influence of Benjamin’s philosophies, in particular Benjamin’s notions about messianic time; it is also far from challenging to see the relevance of both Silverman’s and Benjamin’s ideas to present-day circumstances. While the events of the Holocaust happened over 70 years ago, the resurgence of Marine Le Pen’s party in France and other nationalist movements around the globe and their reiterative invocation of 1930s narratives and tropes is the clearest demonstration that racism and anti-immigrant phobias are again the drivers of dehumanising and criminal policies, as they were in the 1930s. In the United States, the 2017 detainment of Egyptian-born historian Henri Rousso following the travel ban issued by President Trump on citizens from seven Muslim majority nations further indicates the bitter ‘flitting up’ of the past in the present.50 Benjamin writes: the matter itself [of past experiences] is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand . . . in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.51

All of the feature films discussed in this chapter are memory projects of sorts and reveal both the devastation, cruelties, perils, and possibly – hopefully – ‘treasures’ of the past. Because of the range of audiences that The Round Up, November Moon, and Charlotte Gray address, they are ideal staging grounds for contemporary audiences to revisit concepts of resistance and collaboration. How, or whether, the films enable activities of forgetting and/or forgiveness; how they represent responsibilities to remember – to redistribute the responsibility of remembering – are issues at the heart of contemporary, post-Cold War, French, Scottish, British, German, and Jewish identities.

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5 Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies

A cinematic depiction of dramatic and sometimes violent events, the war film has been seminal to constructions of national identity and a commercial stalwart. As a critical category, the war film has figured centrally in research by Robert Rosenstone, Robert Brent Toplin, and Robert Burgoyne, who examine how it fashions sometimes incongruent historical events into integrated popular myths. While titles like The Green Berets and Saving Private Ryan may connote a kind of simplistic patriotism, many war films demonstrate a capacity for deep analysis and introspection and powerfully assert the senselessness of war. Industrially, the war film is an enduring sub-genre, showing events stretching from World War I to recent occurrences in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a prestige genre, with a film about the US Army Air Corps, Wings (Wellman and d’Arrast 1927), winning the very first Academy Award for Best Picture and many films, including Patton (Schaffner 1970), The Deer Hunter (Cimino 1978), and Platoon (Stone 1986), winning subsequently.1 Of all the film forms discussed in this book, the war film would appear the most stereotypically masculine, with a strong appeal to male audiences and a robust body of scholarship investigating the genre’s complex and nuanced

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Gendering History on Screen expression of masculinity. Statistically, this connotation is at odds with the increased visibility of women soldiers in the public sphere since the early 1990s and with recent military developments in the United States, where the weakening of restrictions on women in armed combat and the lack of a clear definition of the front line meant women in the twenty-first century saw combat in excess of what they had ever seen previously. Regardless of women’s current military contributions, stereotypes of women and war prove difficult to shake. Throughout most of the twentieth century the ‘female soldier’ has been a contradictory icon of modernity and feminism, representing both unique opportunities for women and a departure from the feminine status quo.2 In Soldiers’ Stories, Yvonne Tasker writes how recent stories have displayed an ambivalent relation to discourses of female exceptionalism and have cast military women as fish out of water, unseen and misunderstood within popular and official language about the military. Meanwhile in occupied areas of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the ‘liberation’ of women and girls became the justification for war, women were once again reduced to their status as victims. The mutilated face of Aisha Bibi, which graced the cover of Time Magazine in 2010 accompanied by the words ‘What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan’, was one of a number of memorable images clearly aiming to symbolise the brutality of the Taliban and thus provide a rationale for ongoing war. Although stories about war’s soldiers tend to engage a different set of mythologies than stories about war’s victims, both sets of narratives locate women as a problem within the larger projects of neoliberal imperialism. Gendered tropes of exceptionalism, victimhood, and rescue tend to recur in most stories about the so-called war on terror, making it productive to co-explore myths about soldiers and victims together. As Cynthia Enloe writes in her study of the lives of four Iraqi and four American women, we have something important to discover by thinking of Iraqi and American women together – not because they have known each other (though a few have), not because they have made a common alliance (though some have), but, rather, because thinking about women on several ‘sides’ in the same war might make starkly visible how wars and their prolonged aftermaths depend both on particular ideas about and practices of femininity and masculinity, and on

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Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies women in warring states not discovering their connections with one another.3

This chapter looks at films by female directors that deal centrally with recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which extend and intervene in popular myths of soldiering and victimhood on both sides of the conflict. Specifically, the chapter considers documentaries and fiction films that reconfigure the experiences of in-country and returning soldiers and other military operatives and civilians in occupied countries, in order to establish the counter-myths about soldiering, return, and occupation that female directors are creating, largely from women’s points of view. As throughout most of the book, this chapter asserts that gender makes a difference in the stories that can be told about a nation’s past – even a recent past, as discussed in this chapter – and reveals how women directors are drawing attention to and inverting the roles that women typically occupy as heroes and victims. The first section of the chapter builds on Tasker’s groundbreaking work on women in military movies to establish the historical ill-fit of women soldiers within the military and as a launching pad from which to view women directors’ interventions. It asserts how the images of women in war extend and counter themes of exceptionalism, isolation, and invisibility and correct popular myths, including links between women soldiers, aggression, and scandal. With reference to the literature on the Iraq War film cycle, the second section picks up the notions of ill-suitedness and exclusion in films about homecoming. How female directors revise myths about female soldiers’ experiences, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), is central. The final section considers how female directors are overturning Orientalist stereotypes to give voice to war’s so-called victims: women in occupied spheres.4 It examines new narratives about life on the periphery that expose the historical contingencies at play and reclaim the status of the ‘civilised’ for ordinary Iraqi civilians. *** It has been argued that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been captured by an unprecedentedly diverse range of sources and have received more visual documentation than any other war to date.5

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Gendering History on Screen This documentation includes no less than eight Arab news channels, Western news reporting that was enhanced by embedded journalism, soldiers’ self-documentations of their experiences via handy-cams and blogs, and varying forms of contributions from the point of view of citizens in occupied territories. In the world of fiction filmmaking, a cycle of feature films has been produced in the United States claiming to be based on the real events of these wars. Referred to by Martin Barker as a toxic genre on account of their poor performance at the box office, films in this cycle contained a number of unresolved contradictions and struggled to package fundamentally challenging stories into saleable commercial forms.6 In the less commercially constrained world of documentary, the sheer volume of available primary material together with strong feelings that the Allies were clearly in the wrong, made for a background of productive provocation. Documentaries about the war include films by left-leaning luminaries like Errol Morris analysing and criticising involvement in Iraq, cinema vérité-styled ‘Grunt Docs’ that take soldiers’ perspectives, and documentaries that tell stories from the perspectives of Iraqi civilians.7 Women have enjoyed reasonable production opportunities in documentary spheres, helming and co-helming all forms of non-fiction films, including movies about returning soldiers (The Ground Truth (Foulkrod 2006); Body of War: The True Story of an Anti-Hero (Donahue and Spiro 2008); Poster Girl (Nesson 2010)), immersive movies from the perspective of in-country soldiers (The War Tapes (Scranton 2006); Gunner Palace (Epperlein and Tucker 2004)), films about slain soldiers (The Short Life of José Antonio Gutiérrez (Specogna 2006); Jerabek (Tamarkin 2007)), and movies from the point of view of citizens in occupied areas. Some of these documentaries have been recognised in prestigious contests, such as Laura Poitras’ observational film from the point of view of an Iraqi doctor, My Country, My Country (2006), and Sara Nesson’s Poster Girl, about a female vet with PTSD, both of which point towards some of the positive opportunities enjoyed by some documentary directors. As distinct from war documentaries, feature films on the subject have not tended to be directed by women, perhaps because of the presumably masculine nature of the subject matter and possibly because of the size of the budgets required by some war films, both of which would seem to act against women directors’ involvement. Nonetheless women

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Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies have directed films about returned soldiers, including Brødre/Brothers (Bier 2004), Stop-Loss (Peirce 2008), and Return (Johnson 2011), all of which deal in some manner with soldiers’ post-trauma experiences and, in the case of the last-mentioned two films, pressures to return to war after having already served. And it is important that by far the most well-known and commercially successful film to engage with contemporary war events features women on both sides of the camera, Zero Dark Thirty.

The Paradox of Exceptionalism With a slew of high-profile prestigious awards under its belt and topical, ‘ripped from the headlines’ subject matter that was deemed ‘inherently thrilling’, Zero Dark Thirty itself has borne a strong association with the exceptional.8 Publicity for the movie was studded with superlatives and made much of the movie’s remarkable subject matter, the ten-year long hunt for and killing of Osama Bin Laden, which the Obama administration celebrated just prior to the start of production on the film. ‘The story of history’s greatest manhunt for the world’s most dangerous man’, proclaimed one blog site.9 The film was also deemed exceptional for more tenuous reasons, such as its linking of techniques of ‘enhanced interrogation’ to the production of military intelligence, the allegations that the production team had gained access to classified information, and the authenticity claims by the movie’s producers, whose most notable component included a signed letter of protest from Senators Feinstein and McCain.10 Of particular interest from our point of view was the movie’s extraordinary director, Kathryn Bigelow, the only woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing, and the BAFTA Award for Best Direction, and the movie’s main character Maya, the female CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) operative depicted as singularly responsible for amassing the evidence and possessing the wherewithal necessary to pursue, locate, and ultimately kill Osama Bin Laden. To what extent Maya is a unique or progressive feminist heroine was richly discussed, with some critics welcoming the prioritising of the character’s drive and determination over the usual sex appeal,11 and others viewing the character as a prop for the movie’s neoliberal ideology, designed to curry support for American

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Gendering History on Screen imperialism and for the flaunting of international rules prohibiting the use of torture in interrogation.12 In my discussion of Zero Dark Thirty (hereafter ZDT), I am interested in exploring further the theme of exceptionalism as embodied by the female operative, especially as it relates to issues of vulnerability and isolation. What kind of a model does the heroine embody? Whom does it serve? What are its links to earlier images of military women? Said to have been based loosely on the contributions of one or more unnamed female CIA agents, the character Maya in ZDT is exclusively devoted to the task that others in the CIA have, after ten years, begun to grow weary of. Through dialogue, costuming, and mise-en-scène, Maya is thus the ultimate fish-out-of-water in both the gritty, male-dominated, physically demanding, intelligence-gathering communities in black site environments throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East and in the bureaucratic world of Washington DC. Early scenes of Maya in her first assignment make this apparent, where the character’s bright red hair, delicate feminine physicality, lack of a badge, stilted interaction with co-workers, and uncertain approach to detainees contrast sharply with others in the intelligence group, especially co-worker Dan. Where Dan is attired in standard-issue flack jacket, Maya appears in what Dan calls her ‘best suit’, misreading local intelligence culture and appearing out of step with her colleagues. Ultimately Maya is singled out for her youth (‘you don’t think she’s a little young?’, asks Dan of Pakistani bureau chief Joseph Bradley), inability to socialise (noted by Maya’s friend Jessica), vulnerability (‘you’re on a list’, says ground branch operative Larry, after the attempted hit on Maya’s car), and freakish dedication to her job (‘you’re chasing a ghost’, says Bradley). As Charles-Antoine Courcoux puts it, ‘she is the person most on the outside in a business of insiders’.13 But not all of Maya’s difference is coded as weakness; over the movie’s course audiences see Maya journey from vulnerable oddball to highly accomplished professional. Maya’s loner status increasingly becomes a sign of and reason for her professional success. Although she is constructed as an eccentric by her co-workers, it is precisely her dogged determination, the movie asserts, that drives her to put in the hours to succeed. Dan needs to drop out and ‘do something normal for a while’ but Maya has no such need, constructing herself as chosen for the job. As she remarks to Larry,

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Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies ‘a lot of my friends have died trying to do this. I believe I was spared so that I could finish the job.’ Where Maya initially resists being different from her male colleagues, for example not wanting to wear a hood during the torture of Ammar because Dan doesn’t wear one, her negative perception of this difference ultimately gives way to a more positive self-perception. Reviewing constructions of female soldiers throughout the twentieth century, Yvonne Tasker notes how American and British societies have been at pains to reconcile the typically masculine traits of soldiering with conventions of femininity, and have sought recourse in various popular tropes to smooth over the contradictions; persistent stereotypes since World War II include nurses and auxiliaries (in movies like So Proudly We Hail (Sandrich 1943) and Flight Nurse (Dwan 1953))14 and comedic sidekicks (as in Private Benjamin (Zieff 1980)).15 When opportunities for women in the military began to increase in the 1980s, a new iteration appeared in the form of the exceptional yet isolated military woman. Highly ambiguous figures, contemporary military women appear both within and external to spheres of power and control and may materialise as both warriors and victims. In news stories and entertainment, military women are both celebrated as a sign of self-evident social progress and denigrated via associations with controversy and scandal, ranging from incidents of male harassment reported at Tailhook to the humiliation and torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.16 In ZDT, the CIA operative’s exceptionalism is not only a product of her loner status but also a confirmation of the contested nature of the notion ‘female intelligence officer’. As Jasbir Puar states, ‘exceptionalism paradoxically signals distinction from (to be unlike, dissimilar) as well as excellence (eminence, superiority), suggesting a departure from and mastery of linear technologies of progress’.17 Maya is the exception because female military operatives, in the movie’s logic, are antithetical to and at odds with the collective group of individuals who comprise the CIA. In contrast to her CIA peers in their consistent field attire, in Dan’s case, or office clothes, in the case of the Washington personnel, over the course of the movie Maya sports a wide range of clothing and accoutrements, from a Washington-style tailored suit to different headscarves, to a black burqa, and finally a wig; this range suggests a sartorial exceptionalism and excess that sets her apart from the otherwise

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Gendering History on Screen restrained, conventional intelligence community. Numerous scenes represent her succeeding uniquely but in isolation, often in clear focus in the background at the centre of a crowded room. In meetings with the local Pakistan CIA bureau, the American SEAL team, and finally the Washington CIA, she initially is underestimated – told to sit in the back, expected to remain silent – and then later overturns conventional wisdom about Bin Laden or Al Qaida by providing a key piece of information to advance the investigation (i.e., ‘that’s pre-9/11 behaviour’). While not without their own measures of triumph, each of these moments show her to be segregated and on her own in an environment peopled largely by males. Consider the movie’s penultimate scene, in which Maya comes forward through the crowd of selfcongratulatory back-slapping male SEALs to identify Bin Laden’s body. As smiles explode over the men’s faces, Maya approaches and peers, alone, into the body bag. The grave look on her face and slow movement through the crowd set her apart from the blur of male bodies. The fact that the scene ends on the image of Maya, and there is no shot from her point of view of Bin Laden in the body bag, suggests the ultimate tenuousness of her possession of the observational, investigative look, which has been her modus operandi throughout the film. In journalistic reports about the script development process ZDT underwent it has been reported that the CIA requested changes about various aspects of the script that it found ‘unrepresentative’; these included a scene showing an inebriated group of SEALs firing guns, the inclusion of dogs in some of the torture sequences, and, significantly, a scene showing Maya carrying out torture herself.18 Subsequent to such discussions some scenes, including at least one featuring Maya, underwent re-scripting for what would appear to be the purpose of curtailing qualities that mainstream audiences would find distasteful. Throughout ZDT, Maya’s approach to interrogation is distinguished from the cruel techniques of those such as Dan, and her success is credited largely to her powers of observation. Where Dan engages physically with detainee Ammar (manhandling him; belligerently calling him ‘bro’), Maya gleans most of her information by sifting, at a safe distance, through mountains of DVD recordings of interrogations carried out by others; the single time she carries out an interrogation herself, the waterboarding is carried out via an

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, Figure 5.1 Female exceptionalism: Maya approaches Bin Laden s body. Zero Dark Thirty. Columbia Pictures, 2012. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow.

intermediary, rendering her, in the movie’s logic, somewhat buffered from Dan’s more brutal techniques, in particular waterboarding. In light of the discussion between agency personnel and producers named above, the ascribing of investigative success to Maya’s brains rather than her brawn seems less a feminist triumph than a cynical concession to audiences seeking a new, independent-appearing heroine in a morally acceptable form. The film’s privileging of the quality of observation appears ambivalent at best, in light of the para-textual motivations and given the narrative’s de-emphasising of Maya’s point of view at the story’s end. Although Maya gains much from her powers of observation, her dependence on these qualities leaves her largely as an outsider to the very community she claims she wants to join. Seen through this lens, the final image of Maya alone on the plane appears less like triumph than exclusion, and draws renewed attention to the political tenuousness of female exceptionalism in war. Cynthia Enloe has written compellingly about the limits of female exceptionalism in wartime contexts. Referring to the Vietnamese Women’s Museum, which is devoted to preserving and showcasing women’s contributions to Vietnamese history and culture (including the cultures of war), Enloe explains how hegemonic femininity is nearly

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Gendering History on Screen always made to seem compatible with wartime nationalisms; this compliance, Enloe claims, is found in virtually ‘every institutionalised remembrance of women’s active war efforts in every society for which we thus far have accounts’.19 By extension the unconventional or surprising activities that women achieve in wartime, which might include those of operatives such as Maya in ZDT, are reified and recontained under the framework of ‘the exceptional’ when war is over. As Enloe explains, some women are convinced during a war and immediately after the war that any unconventional roles they played were due only to extraordinary wartime exigencies. These are the women who will be most accepting of a postwar reimposition of prewar gendered ‘normalcy’.20

Viewed through the prism of Enloe’s framing, the exceptional achievements of military women, including those of the fictional character Maya, are ephemeral, without lasting political effect, and unable to create a blueprint for feminist gain. The limits of female exceptionalism in the context of war are apparent in numerous commercial Hollywood features directed by male directors; they are also apparent in Sara Neeson’s documentary Poster Girl (2010), about war veteran Sergeant Robynn Murray. At the very start of her career, Murray was put on the cover of Army Magazine and made up into the eponymous ‘poster girl’ for women in the armed forces. Initially a keen recruit from a military family, Murray was at first an exceptional soldier, but this status quickly becomes a liability once she returns back home suffering from hip and back injuries as well as PTSD. In summarising the characterisation of women in war films, Yvonne Tasker writes that the military woman is ‘at times normalised, at times deviant, often peripheral, and typically controversial when she takes center stage’.21 We have seen the complex imbrication of exceptionalism and isolation in Kathryn Bigelow’s controversial feature film ZDT. Produced to satisfy a much smaller market with completely different box office requirements, documentaries about women soldiers such as Poster Girl can draw back the curtain on matters that thematically haunt the blockbuster ZDT and provide new frames for women’s wartime experiences in light of

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Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies and as distinct from some of the military scandals with which female soldiers have popularly been associated. Lioness (McLagan and Sommers 2008) is one part ‘essay film’ dedicated to bringing public attention to the problem of women’s peripheral military status and one part vérité film aiming to provide female soldiers with opportunities to narrate their own experiences. The documentary exposes the discriminatory treatment of women in the military as an entry point into its exploration of entrenched themes of erasure and ignorance of female soldiers by mainstream news and government media, which recognise women’s participation when strategically advantageous but also frequently conceal, downplay, or deny it. Lioness tells its story mainly through the eyes of five female soldiers, Specialist Shannon Morgan (a mechanic), Specialist Becky Nava (a supply clerk), Captain Anastasia Breslow, Sergeant Ranie Ruthig, and Major Katherine Guttormsen, and draws attention to the gap between the public perception of women’s combat experiences and what those experiences actually comprised. As Captain Lory Manning puts it, there is a big disconnect right now between what the policy says women can do, and what women are doing . . . During the [May 2005] debate in Congress word came down to the House Armed Services Committee from very high up in the Administration saying ‘withdraw that question [of how the Secretary of Defence will comply with the policy barring women from combat] right now, don’t go there, because if we were to obey the policy we’d probably have to pull most of the women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and our ability to wage those wars would fall apart.’ They do not want that question coming before Congress again or catching the public interest while operations in Iraq are still going on.

Through visual means, the film advances the argument that women’s military contributions were both central to the success of many on the ground campaigns yet simultaneously were covered up or made invisible in cultural spheres. The movie details the mechanics of this erasure through clips taken from a variety of sources, including congressional politicians’ testimonies, mainstream media reports, commentary from soldiers’

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Gendering History on Screen families, and commentary from the soldiers themselves. The movie also shows the potentially disastrous consequences from such gaps in understanding, in that women were often left under-prepared or inadequately briefed about missions to which they were asked to contribute. The opening of the film is illustrative in this regard. It reveals two contradictory statements. The first reads: ‘In late 2003, US Army commanders in Iraq created a program that sent female support soldiers out on missions with all-male combat units. They were called Lionesses.’ The second statement reads: ‘US policy bans women from units whose primary mission is direct ground combat.’ The tension between these apparently mutually exclusive but nonetheless equally factual statements is emphasised via clever cross-cutting between interview testimony with high ranking army officers, journalists, and politicians about the non-presence of women in combat and evidentiary footage plainly showing women carrying out so-termed ‘forbidden’ or ‘non-existent’ duties. For example, at one point PBS interviewer Jim Lehrer iterates that ‘women are technically forbidden from participating in combat’, as the image reveals a shot of female soldiers brandishing rifles. At another point, California Congressperson Duncan Hunter, Chair of the Armed Services Committee, comments on C-SPAN: ‘there is presently a policy that continues the American tradition of not having women in direct ground combat’. Directly after Hunter utters the comment, the image cuts to footage showing a female soldier operating a machine gun. Writing about the representation of military women in the commercial Hollywood feature film Courage Under Fire (Zwick 1996), Susan Linville describes how that film establishes the heroism of one white woman army captain, who died in combat, during the 1990 – 1 Gulf War. At first glance, the film appears straightforwardly progressive in its depiction of the ‘traumas that war begets as inevitable outcomes’, including the trauma resulting from friendly fire, and in advancing a criticism of wartime manipulation of the media.22 Linville relates how the film builds a case for the character’s medal-worthy status by adjudicating contradictory testimonies about what occurred in battle. Ultimately, the testimony that maligns the army captain is dismissed and the testimony that asserts her courage is established as the true record of events; with this, the heroism of

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Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies the dead female soldier is affirmed. However, in spite of its liberal and seemingly pro-feminist credentials, Courage Under Fire commits a fatal flaw: it fails to provide a visual representation of the ordeal from the captain’s point of view, withholds from the narrative her understanding of events, and thus re-performs the evacuation of female experience and agency in much the same way as Lehrer and Hunter do. As Linville states, the film ‘disregards [the female soldier] as the subject of her own story, using her life and death as the occasion for male-centered tales of war’.23 As with the journalistic and congressional testimonies of Lehrer and Hunter named above, Courage Under Fire expunges women’s experience from the story of war that it ostensibly wants to tell while nonetheless purporting the significance of the story as her story. Clearly there is a disengagement between women’s subjective experiences and what a popular genre film like Courage Under Fire is able to convey. A scene in Lioness captured at a 2006 reunion in which the soldiers watch a History Channel documentary also makes this apparent. The subject of the documentary is a mission in Rimadi where both Lionesses and male marines had fought together. After the documentary voice-over narrates, ‘the tide is finally turning for the men’, Anastasia notes the documentary’s overall failure to give shape to the Lionesses’ contributions, concluding that ‘we’re not mentioned in it at all’. The not-being-mentioned in the documentary that Anastasia identifies is clearly a metonym for the more widespread denial of women’s contributions in the post-2000 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Enloe writes: in narratives of wartime and revolution, women are presumed to be confined to ‘the home front’. They are (merely) ‘the protected’. They are the (silent) ‘grieving’. They are the (voiceless, idea-less) ‘victims’. They are the symbols of ‘the nation’, not its makers.24

Little wonder, then, that public understanding is impeded not only by denial but also by widespread ignorance. Most obviously, commercial news media outlets are ignorant about the Lioness’s involvement, as evidenced by the comments of a CNN reporter who appears unable to answer when asked what ‘Lioness’ means: ‘we don’t really know the exact details of what they do’. Ignorance exists in military families, like Anastasia’s, where her mother misunderstood her daughter’s contribution; later in the movie,

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Gendering History on Screen Becky’s father comments, ‘I found out my daughter was going through house-to-house searches, knocking down gates . . . looking for terrorists, looking for weapons, and that scared me because how many times do soldiers do that and they’re ambushed?’ Finally, even the soldiers display ignorance in their lack of full comprehension of what they were asked to do and occasionally what they accomplished. Writing in her diary, Anastasia expresses that: I still can’t believe that I was in a firefight. That me, a female signal officer, someone expected to support from a desk, was out there. Strangely the one reason that I was out there was because I was female. They needed a Lioness team so badly and so many, that even I as a support officer was pulled in. I hope I don’t have to do them very often.

For the purpose of countering the profound ignorance and widespread erasure of women’s military activities, Lioness aims ultimately to be restitutive: to paint a non-sentimentalised and counter-stereotypical portrait of a cultural identity that still struggles to achieve full figuration in public consciousness. Lioness thus includes a diversity of women that, taken together, mount serious challenges to pre-existing social conceptions of the female soldier stereotype. Opening scenes show Shannon, a nononsense sharpshooter who gained skill hunting squirrels, who puts to rest any suggestion of feminine weakness (she doesn’t care ‘either way’ whether the squirrel she kills is a ‘mama’). Audiences are introduced to Becky as she takes us on a tour of the weapons facility she oversees at Fort Riley, Kansas. The room houses dozens of military weapons, including M16 rifles, long- and short-range rifles, K19 machine guns, RCU remote control landmines, rocket launchers, and ‘old-school’ A2s. After Becky explains how the weapons work, the image cuts to a close-up of jiggling combat boots belonging not to the soldier, but to her male partner, who is trying to soothe their child off to sleep. A later scene showing Becky caring for her diabetic father also contrasts sharply with the comprehensive knowledge she exhibits in the scene in the arms room. The effect of such contrasts is to paint a complex portrait of women soldiers in all their contradictions that resists reduction to any easily available entertainment type.

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Figure 5.2 Spc. Rebecca Nava in the arms room, Fort Riley, Kansas. Lioness. Room 11 Productions, 2008. Dir. Meg McLagen and Daria Sommers. Photograph by Julia Dengel.

Insofar as Lioness succeeds in giving form to what previously has been invisible, it does so while carefully setting itself apart from earlier images of ‘scandalous’ women, especially those produced at Abu Ghraib in 2003. The meaning of Abu Ghraib for contemporary intersectional understandings of gender, militarism, and war has been the subject of numerous feminist analyses, many of which set the specific events in the context of a longer line of colonialist and imperialist activities related to the US occupation.25 Examining the images of smiling, apparently triumphant female soldiers with naked, male, Iraqi detainees, Kelly Oliver, for example, argues that the images recycle well-worn associations between sex and violence and leverage a notion, updated for this particular war, of the female body itself as weapon.26 Analysing military practice beyond what is shown in the photos, namely the use of female soldiers as tools for interrogation to ostensibly ‘soften up’ prisoners, Oliver argues that such approaches depend

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Gendering History on Screen on a series of interlocking assumptions, including the Western construction of female sexuality as threatening and the Orientalist projection of such fears on to detainees. Clouded with stereotypical understandings of Muslim culture, such assumptions provided the imperialist logic fuelling various military practices, such as the use of fake menstrual blood in the interrogation of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.27 As Angela Davis points out, the apparent cultured explanation of these forms of abuse reveals a very trivial notion of culture. Why is it assumed that a non-Muslim man approached by a female interrogator dressed as a dominatrix, attempting to smear menstrual blood on him, would react any differently from a Muslim man? These assumptions about culture are themselves racist.28

In spite of the fact that Lioness’s production year is a full five years after the Abu Ghraib events, the lasting impact of the latter on public conceptions of female soldiers and their potential to further downgrade women soldiers’ already marginal social capital cannot be dismissed. It is worth pointing out the commonalities between the events in which Lionesses were involved and those from 2003. Firstly, both events were authorised from higher up in the military and comprised substantial breaches of military policy. In both cases, instructions were delivered from high up in military command and expected to be carried out without question, with no consequences ensuing for the issuing officers. Secondly, both sets of events featured working-class women who entered the war for largely economic reasons; both sets of participating women experienced mental instability as a by-product of their experience in war. Thirdly, both Lioness missions and operations at Abu Ghraib tasked women with doing things that they lacked training for.29 And finally, in spite of the military’s attempt to paint the Abu Ghraib abuse as resulting from a ‘few bad apples’, a more acceptable interpretation sees Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman as scapegoated pawns to military policy or, in Ryan Ashley Caldwell’s words, ‘fallgirls’ for decisions and policies made much higher up. While the Lionesses are certainly not associated in any way with abuse or torture, they too are victims of military policies that are largely out of reach.30

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Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies Lioness thus takes special care to distinguish the activities of its soldiers from the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib in several key ways. Firstly, the documentary emphasises the commonalities between the women soldiers’ experiences and those of ‘ordinary’ Iraqi civilians. Ranie describes her feelings going in to a house, ‘I felt like the Gestapo. All I could think of, was what would I do if they did this to me?,,’; and Breslow notes similarly: ‘it was strange invading these houses late at night. It was hard to imagine these families plotting against us.’ Sequences such as these draw attention to overlaps in soldier/civilian understanding and co-construct the two communities as emotional beings; ultimately, they point towards the possibility of a shared epistemology or, in Jennifer Hyndman’s words, a ‘more accountable, embodied way of seeing’.31 Secondly, Lioness depicts the trust felt by some Iraqi civilians towards the soldiers and the positive role played by the latter during normally tense operations. In Becky’s straightforward words, the Lionesses were often expressly deployed so ‘the army didn’t look so bad’; images show the American soldiers delivering school supplies and candy to children and standing in the midst of smiling Iraqi women. Evidence of such positive effects is further provided by Ranie, who describes a moment of civilian relief when the soldiers removed their helmets and revealed their gender. What ought to be said about such sequences? On the one hand, it is obvious that scenes such as these make imaginative space for a paralegal, sub-discursive, previously invisible concept – the ‘female soldier’ – that has been suppressed in government discourse and popularly associated with scandal and aggression. But on the other hand, these sequences display an instrumentalist approach whereby the American women soldiers’ apparent gains – their becoming increasingly visible – are mere tools for the more efficient coercion and suppression of Iraqi civilians. As such, they package invasion-as-liberation through the less threatening image of the female soldier.32 Lioness indeed builds visibility for women who have not received the recognition they deserve and, as has been emphasised, in a way that departs clearly from prior stereotypes. But it does this without challenging prevalent Western myths about war and occupation, including the Iraqi need for US military ‘service’, the hierarchies between civilians and soldiers that construe the latter as protectors, the weaponisation requirements of military personnel, and the ,,

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Gendering History on Screen overall justness of ongoing occupation and war. In these ways, Lioness and Zero Dark Thirty are allied in their unquestioning assumption about the legitimacy of Allied forces in the fight against the ‘war on terror’, via forces that happen to include women. In the third and final section of this chapter, we will see how women directors strongly question these assumptions in movies made from the point of view of occupied civilians. The following section resumes the discussion of women soldiers in the distinctive context of civilian society ‘back home’.

Gendering the War ‘Back Home’ Because of their physical distance from the geographic theatres of war, movies centring on soldiers’ return to civilian life offer unique perspectives on war and give shape especially to the domestic identities created in and through war, including those who served their country vs those who did not, those whose service is finished vs those facing redeployment, and those who went to war able-bodied vs those who came home injured or did not come home at all. A number of movies deal with the isolation felt by returning veterans who find the community and gender norms practised in war totally at odds with the requirements for civilian life. An important theme in many films is the returning soldiers’ mental health and their country’s (in)ability to meet those needs; in the words of Douglas Kellner, the films show how ‘the Iraq experience turned typical good-natured Americans into highly traumatised individuals who are dangerous to themselves and others’.33 Movies in the Iraq War cycle are obviously not the first to raise questions about the high cost of war via the figure of the returned soldier. In 1946, audiences watched three World War II veterans struggle to overcome physical and psychological challenges upon their return in The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler 1946), and 30 years later wounded veterans Luke Martin in Coming Home (Ashby 1978), Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July (Stone 1989), and Jacob Singer in Jacob’s Ladder (Lyne 1990) caused audiences to re-evaluate the validity of Vietnam and showcased the difficulties soldiers faced when adapting to post-civilian life. Occupying a less well recognised but still important cultural position, movies such as Stop-Loss (Peirce 2008), In the Valley of Elah (Haggis 2007), and Badland

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Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies (Lucente 2007) reveal the brutal effects of the Iraq war on traumatised returning soldiers and their descent into violence and (self-)destruction. Like the commercial war film genre tout court, movies centring on soldiers’ home-coming experiences have tended to be heavily gendered, with men appearing disproportionately as soldiers and women mainly figuring as wives, mothers, sisters, and girlfriends. The Iraq War films are no mould breakers in this regard: just two of the 23 films included in Barker’s book on the Iraq War cycle of movies, Home of the Brave (Winkler 2006) and The Lucky Ones (Burger 2008), include a female soldier as part of an ensemble cast. And although Grace is Gone (Strouse 2007) is about the fate of a single soldier Grace Phillipps, like Karen Walden in Courage Under Fire (Zwick 1996), Grace is dead at the start of the movie; the film deals largely with her husband’s inability to tell their children what has happened. In cinema studies spheres, the physical and psychological challenges faced by World War II and Vietnam-era characters especially has prompted important discussions about masculinity and trauma; these have included explorations into pop culture’s role in depicting the changing social status of men in postwar periods. Writing about The Best Years of Our Lives for example, Will Kanyusik tells us that following World War II in particular, the physical and mental trauma of war, as well as the unique challenges faced by returning veterans like [Homer] Parish, irrevocably altered not only our understanding of the male body, but of masculinity itself.34

Susanne Bier’s critically acclaimed feature film Brothers (2004) likewise shifts cultural understandings of masculinity, in particular the conflation of masculinity and soldiering, to expose the latter’s latent violence. Major Michael Lundberg (Ulrich Thomsen) is the model of a twenty-first-century career soldier: clean-cut and socially restrained, a perfect son, husband, and father. Michael’s quietly authoritative masculinity is at first positively contrasted with that of his brother Jannik, who sports a leather jacket and swarthy five o’clock shadow, is chronically unemployed, chain smokes, drinks heavily, and has an assault charge hanging over his head. In the extended family, the divisions between the brothers break down along gender lines: the mother dotes over Jannik as if he is still a little boy while

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Figure 5.3 Brothers. Zentropa, 2004. Dir. Susanne Bier. Photograph by Erik Aavatsmark.

the stoic, tight-lipped, unemotional, unexpressive, pro-military father only has eyes for Michael. Michael, the father tells Jannik, ‘never gives up’, where Jannik ‘whines’ like his mother. The catalyst for the movie’s plot is what happens after Michael arrives in Afghanistan. Shortly after flying in, Michael learns that a radar operator, Niels Peter Johansen, has been taken hostage. Michael prepares to be sent in for a rescue; however, his helicopter goes down and he too is captured. Believing there are no survivors, Danish authorities report to Michael’s family that Michael is dead. Funeral arrangements are made, with overt expressions of grief deemed unseemly, except in the case of Jannik, whose drunken antics provide amusement for Michael’s wife Sarah, who senses that he too is an emotional mess. Cutting back to Afghanistan, the movie shows Michael as a prisoner of war in the very same camp as the radar operator. In contrast to Michael, Niels is a failed soldier: fearful and simpering, and, in the words of another soldier, barely able to ‘wipe his own ass without help’. Michael makes himself useful to the Afghan insurgents (who, it must be said, are depicted as barbarous and

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Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies stereotypical ciphers against which to measure the Westerners’ worth) by showing them how to operate outdated military equipment.35 Eventually he is offered the opportunity to go free, but on the gruesome condition that he must personally bludgeon the radar operator to death. In a harrowing scene shot with a hand-held camera almost entirely from the radar operator’s point of view, Michael is goaded into doing this. Shortly after this event, the Allies arrive and Michael leaves the camp. The depiction of Michael’s killing of Niels mid-way through the movie immediately brings about change in all of the myths thus far floated: where once soldier-Michael represented an admirable form of restrained manliness, from this scene onwards he is associated with violence and brutality. Where once his soldiering identity was a suitable topic for dinner conversation, after this event Michael is filled with shame, becomes secretive and deceptive, and unable to admit to anybody what occurred in the prisoner of war camp. From this moment in the movie, the social exaltation of ‘soldier’ as a concept is brought into question by the audience’s inside knowledge of the terrible deed that has occurred. As with ZDT, Brothers exposes the fragility of the myth of military exceptionalism and constructs a hero who is increasingly ill at ease with others – in his case, his family. Like other movies about homecoming, Michael experiences mounting feelings of uselessness once he arrives back at home; the chatter of his daughters starts to wear on his nerves and he begins to doubt his wife’s fidelity. One night he finally snaps, throwing a whiskey glass against the wall, pulling down cupboards, smashing chairs, turning over tables, attacking his wife, all the while yelling: ‘Do you realise what I did to be with you? You don’t understand anything! I’m going to fucking kill you! I’m going to kill you all!!’ When the police finally arrive, Michael’s feelings of complete worthlessness are evident as he grabs one of the officers’ guns, yelling ‘shoot me!’ At the end of the movie Michael finally confesses to Sarah what occurred with Niels; with this he at last begins to let go of his exalted military status and rejoin the non-soldiering community. Strongly critical of the version of soldier-man lauded by Michael’s father in the story’s beginning, Brothers ultimately redeems Michael as a human being by jettisoning his soldier identity. In the ideal espoused at the movie’s end, soldiering is incompatible with socially acceptable forms of masculinity.

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Gendering History on Screen Discussions about war’s impact on cultural ideals of masculinity obviously will – and should be – ongoing, particularly in light of the West’s demonstrated commitment to ‘forever war’.36 Nonetheless the historical equation between ‘men’ and ‘soldiering’ in Brothers and in other twenty-first-century movies about war leaves unexamined the effects of war’s horrors on female military personnel. According to Helen Benedict, women currently make up the fastest-growing group of veterans in the United States but frequently exhibit needs that are quite different from those of male veterans.37 For example, women do not necessarily want to attend therapy groups aimed at men, and may have post-traumatic stress symptoms that differ markedly from their male colleagues. Female veterans are more likely to become victims of self-targeted blame and anger,38 suggesting that the notion of ‘female veteran’ may put pressure on the notion of the ‘dangerous’ and presumably male individuals characterised by Kellner at the start of this section and the vision of soldier offered within Brothers. What might female post-traumatic stress look like? The micro-budgeted Return (Johnson 2011) sheds light on this.39 The film looks at the experiences of returning National Guardswoman Kelli against the backdrop of a post-industrial, small-community, economically distressed Ohio town. Things begin well enough. The uniformed Kelli (Linda Cardellini) is met by husband Mike (Michael Shannon) and two young daughters in a small airport after returning from Iraq; everybody heads back for a small welcome-home party in the backyard. The banal, grating chatter of a female friend quickly suggests in a subtle way that the world is perhaps just a little too loud and trite for Kelli, who, like Brothers’ Michael, is no longer fluent in the domestic banter of civilian life. Kelly’s feelings of isolation continue to grow when she realises that her husband has made changes to the domestic sphere, namely the kitchen, in her absence. Shopping in a superstore further precipitates Kelli’s unease, as at one point she pauses before a wall of monitors in the electronics section, overwhelmed by multiple images of herself reflected on the screens. At home she continues to self-isolate, questioning the colour scheme in the home. Her husband and young daughter largely ignore her, as they cuddle on one side of the couch, laughing at ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’.

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Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies Under George W. Bush’s Republican administration in the time just prior to the scripting of Return, the Veteran’s Administration (VA) underwent drastic changes in the way it was able to support returning soldiers. As the principle American domestic body charged with looking after veterans’ financial, medical, employment, and housing affairs, the VA suffered a series of dramatic cuts in 2005 – precisely at a time of increased need. Problems that had previously existed but were compounded by the cuts included waiting times for veterans to be transferred to the VA system, a burdensome bureaucracy that required applicants to fill out up to 22 paper documents for the processing of a claim, and a backlog of as many as two years on claims once the paperwork had been filled out.40 Not known for its ability to cater to female veterans in the period prior to the cuts, after 2005 the VA grew even less well equipped to handle women vets’ specific problems. Some of the issues women faced included a paucity of inpatient post-traumatic programmes specifically for women (in 2005 there were six such programmes in the entire country) and a lack of staff training in areas of combat trauma, coupled with sexual violence.41 In Benedict’s words: most VA hospitals were built with large open wards intended only for men, and although all 153 VA hospitals treat women, there are a mere twenty-two stand-alone women’s health clinics that offer a full range of services . . . . This lack of services is disastrous.42

Kelly’s challenges in Return speak both to the widespread, documented experiences of returning female veterans as outlined by Benedict and recall, in scripting and mise-en-scène, themes of isolation and exclusion experienced by both Maya in ZDT and Michael in Brothers. Like them, Kelly is a proverbial fish-out-of-water and outsider from the hegemonic, and in her case, civilian, community that would like to celebrate her achievements but, when they impinge on her capacity to manage in the domestic environment, is quick to re-position her as community pariah. And there is a further twist: where Michael’s experience in the camp, which essentially produces his trauma, is pitched as an aberration from the normative experiences of male soldiers, Kelli’s disquiet stems from no apparent cause other than the sheer irreconcilability of the profoundly contradictory components of her own identity. And while Michael’s trauma is essentially recuperated at that movie’s end, Kelli’s uneasiness in

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Gendering History on Screen Return is neither redeemed nor contained but is rather ongoing and omnipresent, conveyed through unrelenting visual and aural dissonance from the civilian world: the over-brightness that is asserted in the toy section of the department store, and the garishness of the balloons and signs advertising ‘blow out sale’. Aurally, Kelli is frequently at odds with other characters’ perspectives. At one point hard-edged thumping music, which she alone hears through earphones, sets her apart from the quiet heard by other women; later she sits in silence while various bits of trivia are audible on the sound track (advice from a radio announcer on how to succeed at a cupcake eating contest, the chatter of friends, the laugh track from a television). The suggestion is that her feelings are enduring and inescapable, and, because of their profound connection with consumer culture (the toy shop; the superstore), all the more consequential for Kelli as a female vet. The bubblegum colours and cheery sounds that Kelli cannot handle are both the language through which consumer culture communicates and its reward. As a woman, Kelly’s adversity functioning in such spheres leaves her at an operational loss and heralds a rapid descent that will see her expelled from both community and family. Like the documentary Lioness, Return makes painfully apparent what is unique about Kelli’s experience as a female returnee. A pivotal moment in

Figure 5.4 Kelli re-negotiates the consumer sphere. Return. Fork Films, 2011. Dir. Liza Johnson.

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Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies Kelli’s declining mental health comes when she forgets to pick up Jackie, her older daughter, after school. By this point Kelli has been made aware that her husband is having an affair, but she is powerless to do anything about it. The husband organises an order whereby he has custody of the children and Kelli has visitation only on weekends. Kelly has a minor car crash while under the influence of alcohol and is forced to attend Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) as a result. While Kelli would possibly benefit from being in a veteran’s group, the movie makes clear that it will not be that group. Kelli’s intersectional identity, as a veteran, a mother, worker, and PTSD sufferer are not accommodated by the one-size-fits-all self-help meeting and the group leader’s bland claim that ‘telling your trauma is an important step’ prompts Kelly to walk out in disgust. Having lost her job and driver’s licence, and in danger of losing access to her children, her phone rings and she is told she must remobilise. The ending of the movie sees Kelly engage in a series of risky behaviours – unprotected sex in the hope of becoming pregnant; a half-hearted attempt to run away with the children – none of which save her from the fate that comes at the movie’s end: redeployment. Overall, Return sheds light on themes of female exclusion, loss, and dereliction for one female veteran in the aftermath of war. The film positions Kelli’s experience of post-return stress increasingly in opposition to stereotypically feminine spheres of home, family, and consumer society. Via the focus on the specific issue of child custody, the movie also provides a clue of what female soldiers may stand to lose either as a result of a long absence and/or mental illness upon returning home. Women are evaluated according to their capacity in domestic spheres; those who have lost their fluency there are no longer fit to be mothers or wives. They may be soldiers, or they may be women, but never both.

Movies from the Periphery: Occupation Thus far in this chapter we have explored myths of female soldiers and soldiering, from the exceptional to the aggressive to the pariah soldier depicted in Return. We have established the fluctuating characteristics and frequently fragile appearance of women soldiers in entertainment since 2001. In a mainstream cycle of movies that Tasker terms ‘military rape

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Gendering History on Screen movies’ from the early 2000s which include G.I. Jane (Scott 1997), Rough Treatment (Cooke 2000), and The General’s Daughter (West 1999), Tasker draws attention to a different component within the woman soldier’s identity: that of victim. In Tasker’s reckoning, popular entertainment’s tendency to associate military women with heightened (and often sexual) violence once again confirms women’s ill-suitedness to military culture and re-signifies them as needing male protection. In analysing the positioning of Third World women within rhetoric about the war on terror, feminist scholars have analogously noted the prevalence of the trope of victim as a justification of Western militarisation. The research on Iraqi and Afghan female victims in this context is rich and expansive.43 It has been easy, Sonali Kalhatkar writes, ‘to condemn the barbaric,, men of Afghanistan and pity the helpless women of Afghanistan’.44 In the literature on this subject, the Time magazine image of Aisha Bibi, mentioned at the start of this chapter, has been singled out for its manipulation of Western sentiments and for its doubled victimising of the depicted young woman – firstly via the physical cutting and secondly via the circulation of the image, sado-pornography, in the words of one scholar.45 Analyses have placed Bibi’s image in the context of the colonialist language of salvation and made links to orientalising processes dating back to the nineteenth century. As Shahnaz Khan writes, the Time magazine image points to ‘accompanying arguments about the superiority of European civilization and culture . . . Bibi Aisha is the authentic oppressed woman who needs to be saved’.46 Even in well-meaning documentaries about Iraq and Afghanistan, it would seem the orientalising trope of third world female victim is never far away: in The War Tapes a soldier describes how the Humvee he was riding in accidentally hit and killed a girl as she was crossing the road; according to the soldier her body underwent massive trauma from both the Humvee and the following vehicles which failed to stop. In The Ground Truth, a soldier describes his decision to shoot and kill an Iraqi woman who was approaching him, only to find out she was reaching for a white flag. Both incidents are positioned as life changing, traumatic, and highly emotive in the soldiers’ respective narratives, fuelling new enlightenment about the politics of violence and war. In a disjointed, poetic, almost Proustian recollection of the event, the traumatised soldier in the Humvee concludes, ,,

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Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies ‘I remember looking down and I see cookies. Oh God. She was carrying cookies and they were spread all over the road. I thought of my mother.’47 My conviction is that we should applaud this comment as evidence of slow and considered thought by one professional in a context not known for fuelling introspection. But why must the women be maimed and killed, for these realisations to emerge? Both examples mark the Iraqi women as victims and handmaids to the soldiers’ enlightenment and in neither are the women’s voices heard. In Lioness, there is one brief but memorable scene, which I’ve described, where local women stand unspeaking on either side of a US female soldier, demonstrating support. In Brothers and ZDT, Afghan and Pakistani women do not even make an appearance. Small-budget fiction films and documentaries where women retain creative control are uniquely able to give voice to women in occupied spheres, to transform them from ‘victim’ to ‘actor’, and to serve as antidotes to the orientalist narratives identified above. My Home, Your War (Grey 2006) considers the devastating effects of the war in Iraq from the perspective of an Iraqi woman civilian before, during, and after the invasion. The documentary’s central subject is 40-year-old mother Layla Hussan, whom audiences are initially introduced to via an email which Layla reads out loud: Everybody here is working and living their daily life. We are all praying for no harm to happen. I feel if something happens to us, we the innocent people, it will mean the language of humanity is gone forever and instead there will be the languages of the savages, who are far away from civilization.

Interspersed between shots of the email text, written four days before the Allied attack on Iraq, are images and sounds from the cityscapes of Baghdad, including ordinary citizens, military choppers, coalition tanks, explosions, and machine-gun fire. There is little doubt that official Allied discourse in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 (9/11) and leading up to the invasion of Iraq was belligerent and dehumanising in its positioning of Arab and especially Muslim citizens, calling suspected perpetrators of violence ‘evildoers, irrational . . . the forces of darkness, uncivilised, intent on destroying civilization’.48 The power in Layla’s perspective, around which the entire

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Gendering History on Screen film is organised, is its reclaiming of the position of the ‘civilised’ for ordinary Baghdad citizens. After the opening titles, the film introduces us to Layla’s son Amro and her husband Yassir and describes the meeting of Layla and filmmaker at a Baath party event in the final days of the regime, where Layla had been conscripted to serve as translator. Shots show Layla speaking of her hopes and dreams from inside her home, out of sight of Baath party spies. The filmmaker returns to her home in Australia and the relationship continues via telephone conversations. TV footage of George Bush claiming to ‘carry on the work of peace’, ‘defend our freedom’, and ‘bring freedom to others’ contrasts starkly with Layla’s recorded voice, that expresses mounting fears about the imminent assault. Layla describes her anxious preparations, which include the gathering of bottles of water and dry food; later she describes the lack of electricity and escalating feelings of stress, which cause her nearly grown son to begin to sleep in her room with her at night. The minutiae in these descriptions convey a truth that is absent from coalition platitudes. The remainder of the movie chronicles the uncertainties that increasingly confront ‘ordinary’ Iraqis in the occupation period. Over a series of visits the filmmaker portrays a closing window of hope for Layla and Baghdad more generally, where Layla’s suburb has become a ‘no-go zone’, and regular occurrences of street gun battles and beheadings are the norm, as the city descends into civil war. For the filmmaker, who admits her privilege returning to Australia, these events will be watched from what is in reality a safe distance. The movie concludes as it began, with emails from Layla, only this time, read out by the filmmaker, and the self-shot footage of Layla, captured via a camera that the director has sent. Through this footage we learn of Amro’s growing militarisation and self-distancing from his parents. Concluding footage shows him seated on the floor, handling various weapons; later footage shows him demonstrating his capacity to handle them. The ending of the movie is uncertain at best, expressing the filmmaker’s hope that she will see Layla again, with footage (taken from Baghdad) suggesting a potentially more sinister outcome and turn of events. Ending the film with the filmmaker’s voice marks Layla’s attenuating position in the final moments of the movie, a sad indication of the future of both her family and her city.

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Figure 5.5 Layla poses a question to her cabinet and to Mr Bush. My Home, Your War. Denoux Films, 2006. Dir. Kylie Grey.

In his book about media made either directly or allegorically in response to the policies of George W. Bush, Douglas Kellner surveys the cycle of documentaries about the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath; these include cinéma vérité movies about US soldiers, ‘witness’ documentaries, documentaries about Iraqi civilians, and films taking a clearly partisan approach, including right-wing pro-war documentaries.49 Not one of the documentaries discussed focuses on a female protagonist; and while Kellner claims in the book’s introduction that the book will engage movies that ‘highlight political battles over . . . the politics of race, gender, and sexuality’,50 the footnote at the end of the sentence leads us to his comment that this will occur in a ‘succeeding volume’ which, at the time of the concluding of the writing of Gendering History, has not yet appeared.51 Women’s lives are worth hearing about. Stories like My Home, Your War focus attention on the details of women’s lives under occupation, which get lost in grand narratives of such events. Samira Makhmalbaf’s short film God, Construction and Destruction from the collectively made omnibus movie 11’09,,01: September 11 (2002) offers a critique of the ethnocentrism and specifically American-centrism which construct the events of 9/11 as if they resonated identically, with the same weight, in all locations around the world. The film shares the interest of My Home, Your

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Gendering History on Screen War in chronicling the minutiae of everyday life on the periphery. The opening scene shows a village’s early morning collective effort of retrieving water from a well, largely, it turns out, to make bricks for a new structure – likely a shelter against the American nuclear attack, which villagers believe to be imminent. Men, women, and children all pitch in, taking time to argue about what happened to a child’s parents who may have fallen in the well. The bucket is slow to come up. Just as it surfaces, a cry is heard, ‘Hurry up! America wants to bomb Afghanistan!’ Emphasising somewhat more home-grown concerns, a voice replies, ‘the well is drying up, we can’t make more mud’. While American news media in 2001 often presumed a seamless response to the events of 9/11, the latter cry about the mud and the building of the shelter suggest the partiality of that particular narrative and that more local concerns – such as a crippling five-year drought – may also have contributed to on-the-ground occurrences, in this case the departure of the refugees from Afghanistan and settlement in Iran, where the story takes place. The words at the well also introduce a narrative practically never heard in mainstream US news reporting: widespread fear of American retaliation, particularly nuclear attack. When the school teacher arrives, she collects the children for school, offering books as an incentive, and exhorts them to see the power of education: ‘there are three million Afghan refugees living in Iran. You can’t stop atomic bombs with these bricks.’ Once in class, she reports on the events that took place in New York City (presumably earlier in the day). She invites the children to share what they know of this event. ‘Someone dug a well and two people fell in and died!’, a five-year-old voices. ‘No, a more important event!’, exhorts the teacher. Another child ventures, ‘they buried auntie in the ground up to her neck in Afghanistan, and then stoned her to death’. ‘No’, replies the teacher, ‘a more important global event’. At this point, the children are finally speechless, perhaps unable to think of anything more important than the death of the auntie and the two people in the well. Relenting, the teacher finally explains that earlier in the day, aeroplanes hit two towers in New York City. She tells the children they must remain silent for one minute to honour the victims, but many cannot resist philosophising about who may have been responsible for the event (they suggest God), whether God has aeroplanes, and the reasons why God

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, , ,, Figure 5.6 God, Construction and Destruction segment from 11 09 01: September 11. Makhmalbaf Film House, 2002. Dir. Samira Makhmalbaf. ,

sometimes chooses to kill people (‘so as to make new people’, suggests one). Because they were unable to follow instructions, the teacher asks them to step outside, repeat the minute of silence, this time in the shadow of the tall chimney that is itself meant to be a stand-in for the World Trade towers. Issuing in large part from the children’s perspectives, God, Construction and Destruction appears at once a child’s naive response to what the West considered the gravest events of 9/11 and subversively comedic. The children’s dumbstruck rejoinder to and ignorance about the ‘more important global event’ is clearly a metaphor for the thornier politics of location, in particular assumptions about ‘universal’ understandings of, and sympathy with, American victimhood. Where American politicians and commercial media industries by and large reduced the overwhelming complexity of decades of neo-imperialist activities to overly simplistic narratives populated by ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, the scene at the well and young children’s mystification more accurately captures the knotty historical contingencies at play. Samira Makhmalbaf has commented at many points throughout her career on the importance of youths’ perspectives. Only 17 when she made her first feature, from an early age Makhmalbaf had to counter accusations that her early successes were due

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Gendering History on Screen largely to the interventionist hand of her famous filmmaker father.52 There is a long history of political campaigns manipulating images of defenceless children to curry support for military invasions. In her short film, Makhmalbaf positions children centrally but she constructs them as sovereign subjects with important contributions to make, not proto consumer-citizens waiting patiently to have their childhoods ‘returned’ to them.53 Makhmalbaf’s short movie is not the only film to depict contemporary Afghan life from the point of view of a child. Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame, directed by sister Hana Makhmalbaf (2007), likewise uses a child’s perspective to amplify and explore current day political challenges. As in God, Construction, and Destruction, in Buddha Collapsed children’s fantasies and games likewise allegorise in a fascinating way contemporary Afghan life, where America is a long way away, even as ‘ordinary’ citizens still suffer the effects of decades of occupation and violence. Buddha Collapsed adopts a most vulnerable point of view of a six-year-old girl who attempts to travel the unsafe terrain from her home to school in the hope of gaining an education. Young Baktay is shooed away from the market and from classes reserved exclusively for male students and is ambushed and captured twice by a gang of older, bigger boys playing war games. In the first ambush, the boys identify as members of the Taliban. They surround Baktay, seize her notebook, tell her she is a heathen and a sinner who ought not to go to school, and finally put her in a hole ready for stoning. A paper bag is put over her head and she is dragged along like a war trophy. During the second attack, the boys appear to switch sides, again surrounding Baktay but this time playing the part of Americans while Baktay and her young male friend Abbas are told they are terrorists. The fluidity of the boys’ roles over the course of the film, as both Taliban and US military members, indicates the relative interchangeability of both sets of ‘occupiers’ from the perspective of ordinary Afghan citizens as well as the movie’s staunch refusal to pick sides in its depiction of the complex historical story of Afghanistan and occupation. Buddha Collapsed eschews polarising depictions of occupiers and occupied and depicts the boys as equally tyrannical in both roles. Crucially, both Taliban-boys and American-soldier-boys demand and construct a victim, in both cases Baktay, who has little input into either the game or the various roles she is

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Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies forced to play. ‘Heathen’ and ‘terrorist’ are identity inventions with little ground in reality and conferred upon the powerless by the powerful (in both cases, the gang of boys). Where Abbas goes along somewhat with what the bullies require, Baktay loudly proclaims her dislike of war games and remains non-compliant throughout, a resistance that largely seems to prolong and provide new opportunities for the boys’ bullying behaviour. Ultimately Buddha Collapsed is less interested in easy answers than in prompting audiences to perceive similarities in varying forms of repression and power, especially in their effects on a gendered citizenry.54 In centring on the young girl’s experience, the movie gives voice to a group about whom much is said but from whom little is heard, and sheds light on the gendered effects of militarism in the occupied environment.

Conclusion In the introductory chapter to their excellent anthology entitled (En)Gendering the War on Terror, Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel claim that the visibility of women in the war on terror ‘remain problematically under-theorized’.55 A lot has been theorised in the ten years since that book’s publication, and some of the blind spots have no doubt been addressed, not least by a number of the books and edited collections referenced in this chapter. War movies play a major role in shaping ‘official war stories’, which, with Hunt and Rygiel, I believe camouflage the true agendas, interests, and policies that underlie war, for the purposes of securing national consent.56 There are very high stakes in the creation and shaping of war narratives, making it all the more pressing to analyse the ‘camouflage’ and, in the case of the movies analysed here, those that seek to expose it. War’s distinct impact on women and girls is an important subject that does not receive nearly the focus it deserves. In her historical study of women in Iraq, Noga Efrati testifies to the Allies’ overall lack of support for women’s rights as well as the increase in gender-based violence during invasion and occupation that made women’s rights go backwards to what they were like in the period of British-backed monarchy.57 Scholars have noted Western policy makers’ ability to manipulate ‘crisis situations’ in the non-West in ways that support global capitalist systems and global supremacism.58 Feminist scholars have analysed how George W. Bush

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Gendering History on Screen manipulated the language of feminism to justify military strategy in the period following 2001. The fantasy of the Third World female victim draws from a long Orientalist trajectory of Third-World voiceless women requiring rescue by the West and has been central to the war on terror. Susan Linville has outlined how gender works as a ‘glossy fetish’ through which ‘history is jettisoned’ in movies that on the one hand appear to honour women as national symbols but which in reality suppress their historical locations.59 This chapter has explored new constructions, stories, and images that probe and challenge society’s ambivalence around the notion ‘woman soldier’ and ultimately expand that notion. The chapter has drawn back the curtain on the myth of female exceptionalism to expose how it belies more socially questionable, but always lurking, positions of oddball, outcast, and pariah. It has examined the Orientalist positioning of Iraqi and Afghan female ‘victim’ and established important counter-voices in the so-called war on terror, those of Iraqi and Afghan women.

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Conclusion

The starting assumption for this book is that it isn’t possible to depict past events from a neutral point of view and that striving to do so means rendering only half the story. Women’s perspectives shed light on localised enunciations which often become buried in the quest for objective or impartial histories. This book has identified four contemporary historicalfilm forms where women directors have made a significant impact. As stated in the book’s introduction, these case studies comprise just a partial corrective to the masculinist array of historical films that currently make entertainment from foundational myths, origin stories, and from the lives of important personalities in countries around the globe. Women are making a multitude of cine-stories about historical events and reframing critical notions of fame, activism, agency, victimhood, and heroism. These stories deserve to be brought to light, not as an incremental addition to the project of universal understanding, but as a proclamation of women’s particularities and differences. This book has utilised ideas of Walter Benjamin to foster understanding of how women’s stories set in the past may reach across and ‘blast through’ to present-day audiences. Where the young Benjamin was schooled to associate history with tradition and authority, he later came to see history as something that probed the present and deprived it, in Hannah Arendt’s evocative phrasing, of its ‘peace of mind’.1 The book has canvassed the multiple ways female directors have brought images of the past to unsettle and disturb contemporary filmgoers. As Benjamin sought new ways of dealing with the past and expressed hope for technology’s revolutionary potential, this book has demonstrated how women

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Gendering History on Screen cine-historiographers forge new associations across and between different periods of time. As Esther Leslie states: memory is not just of the past, but juts into the future too, though this can only be discerned retrospectively. In the frames of the scenes recounted, shared details register the inventory of a future that will yet come into being, and that might have already been anticipated under an attentive enough glare.2

Women directors are using their cameras to create collective memories of overlooked events and underestimated participants and, with these, to make connections into the lives of contemporary audiences. This book has explored women’s depictions of wartime events, from those of World War II to those in ongoing wars in the Middle East. It has studied instances of social inequity and vulnerability, as shown in biopics about in/famous women and in documentaries about migration, internment, and political persecution. Many of the represented ‘pasts’ explored in this book are of global significance and most of them refer to events of personal or collective trauma and/or human precarity. So where to now? In the second decade of the twenty-first century, trauma is associated most visibly with migration, as unprecedented numbers of people have fled human rights abuses, poverty, and declining security in regions across Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. The magnitude of these migrations and the sheer number of humans involved point strongly towards a need for further scrutiny, by historians, filmmakers, and other cultural workers.3 How asylum seekers have been mischaracterised as religious extremists, security risks, and/or angry, unskilled young men travelling on their own without women and children has been detailed and contrasts sharply with the gendered experiences of those seeking refugee status, which are in fact diverse and heterogeneous. What are required are clearly more particularised images of ‘migrant’, ‘asylum seeker’, and ‘refugee’ that are attentive to the voices and points of view that are often suppressed. Fremde Haut/Unveiled (Maccarone 2005) is a fictional film about migration set in the early years of the twenty-first century that engages vigorously with these stereotypes. The movie tells the story of Fariba Tabrizi (Jasmine Tabatabai), a middle-class, educated Iranian who flees

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Conclusion urban Tehran for Germany, on account of persecution she experienced for being in a relationship with another woman. After she arrives, Fariba’s application for asylum is turned down but ironically a glimmer of hope arrives when a male acquaintance commits suicide and Fariba takes on his identity and, by extension, his political refugee status. Disguised as her acquaintance, Fariba moves into the community and finds low-paying employment in a sauerkraut factory in a small rural town. She meets and falls in love with a woman, who doesn’t initially know Fariba’s gender, but the fear of discovery, pettiness, and blunt racism she encounters make for many challenges. The end of the film shows in clear terms the bankruptcy of an easy solution, as Fariba is deported back to Iran. As a film by a German filmmaker that takes place almost entirely in Germany, with some input from Tabatabai on the script, the movie shines light on German attitudes to refugees rather than Iranian attitudes per se. The movie overturns stereotypes about current-day Germany, which is often perceived as welcoming but which in the movie provides fertile ground for racist attitudes to develop, and current-day Iran, which the West classifies as a ‘developing’ nation which nonetheless boasts, particularly in Tehran, a large middle-class urban populace whose attitudes are more worldly than those of the residents of the German small town where Fariba lives. Further, the movie exposes the hypocrisy of Germany’s approach to asylum, which extends protection to political refugees but has not always taken into account the specific dangers LGBT seekers face at home, and debunks the myth of liberation that refugees hope to obtain on reaching the West. For Fariba, life in Germany means the perpetuation of a different form of a disguise, ongoing fear that her real identity will be discovered, and terrible consequences when she is exposed. Popular at both LGBTQ and mainstream festivals upon release, Unveiled has been interpreted as a positive sign that ‘lesbian cinema’ has internationalised.4 At its simplest, internationalism here entails the recognition that audiences for queer stories no longer exclusively cluster in cosmopolitan centres like San Francisco, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Barcelona, and that queer films now enjoy a more peripheral reach beyond urban, First World centres (due in part to the increase in technological affordances, e.g., DVD and streaming services). At its most complex, internationalism is rendered narratively at the level of the story in

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Gendering History on Screen Unveiled, which short circuits the Western consumption of exotic and/or long-suffering non-Western characters (e.g., Western feelings of sympathy/superiority over non-Western queers in repressive environments) to focus the spotlight back on First World attitudes. In so doing, Unveiled reveals the shaky ground under Western attitudes of tolerance and acceptance that attracted so much world praise throughout 2015, especially in Germany. Unveiled is just one of many fiction films by female directors that have appeared since the year 2000 that have focused on the historical relations between asylum seekers and new host countries, particularly, but not exclusively, in the EU. Themes of migration and asylum are not of course new in cinema, as I note in Chapter 3, though the urgency for female directors to helm projects on these subjects seems to be increasing in the early years of the twenty-first century, especially in art cinema spheres. In UK and European post-colonial contexts, Brick Lane (Gavron 2007) shows the experiences of Nazeen, a Bangladeshi woman, who arrives in London for an arranged marriage, while Shun Li and the Poet (Segre 2011) and Inch’ Allah Dimanche (Benguigui 2001) tell the respective stories of a Chinese migrant to Venice and an Algerian immigrant to France. On the other side of the Atlantic, Mexican director Patricia Riggen’s La Misma Luna/Under the Same Moon (2007) relates a story about a young Mexican boy who travels to the United States to find his mother after his grandmother dies. A Columbian migrant to New York City is at the centre of Entre Nos/Between Us (La Morte and Mendoza 2009). Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir has made a pair of films on the subject of migration: Salt of This Sea (2008), about an American woman whose parents were refugees, and When I Saw You (2012), about the experiences of a young Palestinian boy and his mother in a Jordanian refugee camp in 1967. There is no doubt that these movies comprise an important area for future study, though not by any means the only one. As stories of emerging nations come into view, as new leaders gain prominence, as conflicts develop and intensify, women filmmakers will be there. With an approach that is unique, interventionist, and which cannot be subsumed under existing modalities, women filmmakers will make their mark.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Paul Byrnes, ‘Viceroy’s House Review: entertaining but misleading’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 May 2017. 2. Guy Lodge, ‘Arrival; Mum’s List; A United Kingdom and more – reviews’, Guardian, 19 March 2017. 3. Further movies by women directors that engage dynamically with the historical past and that make strong statements about race, war, and/or colonialism, which appeared as this book was going to press, include Where Hands Touch (Amma Asante), Nightingale (Jennifer Kent), and The Beguiled, for which Sofia Coppola won best director at Cannes in 2017. 4. Historical Film: A Critical Introduction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 10. 5. Does the category cover movies about seminal historical events, like JFK and Selma, or does it include any film set in the past, like The Piano? Does it include movies falling under the documentary label? And what about the time period of depicted events? Does it only include movies set in the distant past, or could it include movies about more recent events, like Zero Dark Thirty? David Eldridge has drawn the magical number five around his objects and claimed that ‘as long as the setting of the film’s action predates the year in which it was released by more than five years, it has been counted as a “History Film”’. David Eldridge, Hollywood’s History Films (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2006), p. 5. 6. Mike Chopra-Gant, Cinema and History: The Telling of Stories (London; New York: Wallflower, 2008); Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 7. Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 8. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’ in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Harry Zohn (trans.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 253– 64, p. 263.

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Notes to Pages 6 –14 9. Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2010).

Women Writing History Through Film 1. See, for example, Richard V. Francaviglia, Jerome L. Rodnitzky and Robert A. Rosenstone, Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film, 1st edn (College Station: University of Texas Press, 2007); Marcia Landy (ed.), The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000); Robert A. Rosenstone, Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Vivian Sobchack (ed.), The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996); Robert A. Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu (eds), A Companion to the Historical Film (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2013). 2. Barbara Quart’s assessment of Joan Micklin Silver’s 1975 film Hester Street is an example of this: ‘Joan Micklin Silver’s debut film, Hester Street, came out in 1975, before Girlfriends, its feminist content less clear, its impact less startling, because more disguised under the historical ethnicity of its subject matter.’ Barbara Quart, Women Directors: The Emergence of a New Cinema (New York: Praeger, 1988), p. 51. 3. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’ in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Harry Zohn (trans.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 263. 4. Alun Munslow, The Future of History (New York: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 8–9. Quoted in Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu (eds), A Companion to the Historical Film (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 71–87, p. 72. 5. Early examples include, among others, My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong 1979; AFI winner best film), Silver City (Sophia Turkiewicz 1984), Angel at My Table (Jane Campion 1990), The Piano (Campion 1993; AFI best film winner and Academy Award nominee), and Oscar and Lucinda (Armstrong 1997). 6. Silver’s film Hester Street has been almost entirely forgotten, in spite of the film’s close attention to historical detail and the setting of a large portion of the film’s dialogue in Yiddish. Quart, Women Directors, p. 51. 7. Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 33. 8. Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 9. Angela Martin, ‘Refocusing authorship in women’s filmmaking’, in Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis and Valerie Raoul (eds), Women Filmmakers: Refocusing (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 29– 37, p. 35.

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Notes to Pages 14 –19 10. Kathleen A. McHugh, ‘The world and the soup: historicizing media feminisms in transnational contexts’, Camera Obscura 24/3 (2009), pp. 111 –51, p. 116. 11. Martin, ‘Refocusing authorship’, p. 30. Martin is quoting Carrie Tarr, Diane Kurys (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 5. 12. In Australia, as I was completing an early draft for this book, the situation had grown so dire that the peak industry national cinema body ‘Screen Australia’ commissioned a 32-page report on the status of women in the industry, identifying a five-point plan to redress women’s participation and success and providing AU$ 5 million in seed funding for initiatives. 13. Shelley Cobb, Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (London: Palgrave, 2015), p. 3. See also Alison Butler, Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen (London: Wallflower, 2002); Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990). 14. Cobb, Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, p. 1. 15. Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman, ‘Introduction: experimental filmmaking and women’s subjectivity’, in Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman (eds), Women and Experimental Filmmaking (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005), pp. 1 –17, p. 5. 16. #OscarsSoWhite refers the uproar that resulted from the announcement of the 2016 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominees, which saw, for a second year in a row, only white actors and actresses chosen in the top four categories. The author of the initial tweet was April Reign. April Reign, interview by Aggi Ashagre, 25 January 2016. Available at https://www.npr. org/2016/01/25/464244160/a-conversation-with-the-creator-of-oscarssowhite (accessed 1 April 2016). 17. Jenavieve Hatch, ‘“Hidden Figures” is already inspiring more girls to go into STEM’, Huffington Post, 30 January 2017. 18. Pascale Rachel Bos, ‘Women and the Holocaust: analyzing gender differences’, in Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg (eds), Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), pp. 23–50, p. 38. 19. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 20. Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘History in images/history in words: reflections on the possibility of really putting history onto film’, American Historical Review 93/5 (1988), pp. 1173 –85, p. 1179. 21. Rosenstone, ‘The history film as a mode of historical thought’, in Robert Rosenstone and Contantin Parvulescu (eds), A Companion to the Historical Film (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 71 –87, p. 71. 22. Heritage scholarship from the United Kingdom has mounted an important counter-argument. Research by Claire Monk and Bel
en Vidal, for example, has

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Notes to Pages 19 –24

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

framed heritage cinema as a meeting place for national culture and gendered viewing, and Sue Harper has explicitly argued that definitions have been too narrowly drawn. See Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Drama (London: BFI, 1994); Bel
en Vidal, Heritage Film: Nation, Genre and Representation (London: Wallflower, 2012); Claire Monk and Amy Sargeant (eds), British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage and Costume Film (London: Routledge, 2002). J.E. Smyth, ‘Julia’s resistance history: women’s historical films in Hollywood and the legacy of Citizen Kane’, in Rosenstone and Parvulescu, A Companion to the Historical Film, pp. 91 –109, pp. 106– 7. Ibid., p. 107. Hayden White, ‘Historiography and historiophoty’, The American Historical Review 93/5 (1988), pp. 1193 –9, p. 1199. Julianne Pidduck, Contemporary Costume Film: Space, Place and the Past (London: BFI, 2004), p. 4. Rosenstone, ‘History in images’, p. 1178. Ibid. Robert Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2008), p. 4. Variety reported that the budget for the movie was US$50 million, which in 1992 put it higher than The Last of the Mohicans. Todd McCarthy, ‘A League of Their Own’, Variety, 29 June 1992. George Frederick Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Ibid., pp. 155– 6. Coach Jimmie Dugan (Tom Hanks) is said to be based on baseball great Jimmie Foxx, promoter Walter Harvey on chewing gum mogul P.K. Wrigley, league players Dottie and Kit on real-life sisters and baseball players Margaret Maxwell and Helen Candaele St Aubin (whose given names were Callaghan). Helen Nordquist, ‘St Aubin, Helen Callaghan Candaele (3/13/1929 – 12/8/1992)’, San Jose Mercury News, 10 December 2014, Available at https:// aagpbl.org/index.cfm/articles/st-aubin-helen-callaghan-candaele-3-13-1929 – 12-8-1992/241 (accessed 1 April 2016); Jeff Merron, ‘Reel life: “A League of Their Own”’, ESPN, n.d. Available at http://www.espn.com/page2/s/closer/ 020511.html (accessed 1 April 2016). Custen, Bio/Pics. Title IX is the landmark law passed in 1972 in the United States that requires equity for boys and girls in every educational programme that receives federal funding, including academic and athletic scholarships in schools and universities. Kimberly Young, ‘“Take me out to the bellegame”: how the AAGPBL gained and maintained its highly respected reputation’, in David C. Ogden and Joel

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Notes to Pages 24 –27

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

Nathan Rosen (eds), A Locker Room of Her Own: Celebrity, Sexuality, and Female Athletes (Jackson, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 2013), pp. 23– 42, p. 38. Ibid. Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 29; Vivian Sobchack, ‘Introduction: history happens’, in Sobchack, The Persistence of History, pp. 1– 14, p. 7. See https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/the-screen-guide/t/rosies-secret1994/7814/ (accessed 1 April 2016). Linville notes Fischer’s work on cinematic doubles in movies about sisters and Modleski’s investigation of Vertigo. Susan E. Linville, History Films, Women, and Freud’s Uncanny (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), pp. 17– 18. See Lucy Fischer, Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women’s Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988). Linville, History Films, Women, and Freud’s Uncanny, p. 117. She is quoting Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 7. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Harry Zohn (trans.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 253– 64. Benjamin’s project on the Paris arcades also engages centrally with the materialist theory of experience. See Susan Buck-Morss, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, pp. 256–9. Ibid., pp. 261– 3. Ibid., pp. 255, 61. Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), p. 87. Ya-Huei Lin, ‘The slave trade in the work of Fox, Johnson, and Spielberg’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14/5 (2012). Available at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol14/iss5/8/ (accessed 1 April 2016); Juan Felipe Hernandez, ‘La química de la memoria: A Benjaminean approach’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 22/3 (2013), pp. 259–70; Benjamin Court, ‘The Christ-like antichrists: messianism in Sex Pistols historiography’, Popular Music and Society 38/4 (2015), pp. 416–31; Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. 44; Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013). St
ephane Symons, Walter Benjamin: Presence of Mind, Failure to Comprehend, Social and Critical Theory, vol. 14 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 7.

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Notes to Pages 27 –35 49. Classified as a Marxist, Benjamin has been called ‘the most peculiar Marxist ever produced by this movement’. Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Harry Zohn (trans.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 1–55, p. 11. Certainly whatever Marxism Benjamin adhered to was tempered by his interest in Jewish messianism. See Symons, Walter Benjamin, p. 3. 50. Sigrid Weigel, Body-and Image-Space: Re-Reading Walter Benjamin (London: Routledge, 2003); M.I. Franklin, ‘Reading Walter Benjamin and Donna Haraway in the age of digital reproduction’, Information, Communication & Society 5/4 (2002), pp. 591–624; Angeliki Spiropoulou, Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Benjamin’s deployment of gender metaphors has been extensively debated. See for example Weigel, Body-and Image-Space; Eva Geulen, ‘Toward a genealogy of gender in Walter Benjamin’s writing’, The German Quarterly 69/2 (Spring, 1996), pp. 161– 80; Janet Wolff, ‘The feminine in modern art: Benjamin, Simmel and the gender of modernity’, Theory, Culture and Society 17/6 (2000), pp. 33 –53. 51. Spiropoulou, Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History, p. 77. 52. Buck-Morss, Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, pp. 3– 4. 53. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, p. 254. 54. Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory, pp. 3– 4. 55. Luke Buckmaster, ‘The Dressmaker review – a batty, fancy-frocked revenge story’, Guardian, 16 October 2015. 56. Leger Grindon, Shadows on the Past: Studies in the Historical Fiction Film (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994). 57. Including the historic election of Kelly Vincent, ‘Dignity for Disability’ party member, to the South Australian parliament.

Reclaiming Undeserving Women: Contemporary Female Biopics 1. George Frederick Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Other significant references include A/B Studies, Biography, and Journal of Popular Film and Television, each of which has featured special issues on the biopic. 2. In the 1970s and 1980s, biopics became staple fare on television, where they continued to be seen as a cash cow. See George Frederick Custen, ‘The mechanical life in the age of human reproduction: American biopics, 1961– 1980’, Biography 23/1 (2000), pp. 127–59; Carolyn Anderson and John Lupo, ‘Hollywood lives: the state of the biopic at the turn of the century’, in Steve Neale (ed.), Genre and Contemporary Hollywood (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 90– 104; Robert Rosenstone, ‘In praise of the biopic’, in Richard

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Notes to Pages 35 –38

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

Francaviglia and Jerome Rodnitzky (eds), Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film (Arlington, TX: University of Texas at Arlington Press, 2007), pp. 11 –29. See essays in Tom Brown and Bel
en Vidal, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture (New York: Routledge, 2013); Minier and Pennacchia, Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). The number of total biopics made during the years of the classical studio system was 291; the total number of biopics about famous women (or women who were part of a married couple) was 89. Custen, Bio/Pics. See chapters in Bronwyn Polaschek, The Postfeminist Biopic: Narrating the Lives of Plath, Kahlo, Woolf and Austen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Minier and Pennacchia, Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic; Brown and Vidal, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture; Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2010). Sophie Mayer touches on biopics. Sophie Mayer, Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (London: I.B.Tauris, 2016), pp. 108– 11. Bronwyn Polaschek investigates biopics about women by male and female directors. Polaschek, The Postfeminist Biopic. Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? And there is a single essay on the female biopic in Brown and Vidal, The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. Eli Friedlander, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 193. Susan Wengraf and Linda Artel, Positive Images: A Guide to Non-Sexist Films for Young People (San Francisco, CA: Booklegger Press, 1976), p. 30. Quoted in Diane Waldman, ‘There’s more to a positive image than meets the eye’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 18 (1978), pp. 31– 2. The latest mobilisation of the concept I believe would include a monograph such as Gay Identity, New Storytelling and the Media, which notes how storytellers develop and relay narratives of self-invention and ‘move forward in this way, uninhibited by histories of shame, stigma or oppression, providing a relay of new narratives, focused on the personal self. New storytellers offer narratives of vernacular and intimate engagement, revealing personal and everyday democratic ideals unencumbered by historical oppression.’ Christopher Pullen, Gay Identity, New Storytelling and the Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 22. As examples, Pullen includes expressions by Gore Vidal, k.d. lang, and new media worker Waymon Hudson. Waldman, ‘There’s more to a positive image than meets the eye’, p. 31. See Julia Erhart, ‘Toward a new LGBT biopic: Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008)’, in William Wepstein and Barton Palmer (eds), Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: Biopics and American National Identity (Ithaca, NY: SUNY, 2016), pp. 261–80.

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Notes to Pages 39 –43 13. Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 2nd edn (London: Sage, 2013), p. 25. 14. Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway?, pp. 147– 50. 15. Film review by Olivier Walusinski, Jacques Poirier and Hubert D
echy, ‘Augustine’, European Neurology 69/4 (2013), pp. 226 –8. 16. Known in the hospital records as X, L, Gl, Louise, Louise Glaiz., and several other names, she became known in later literature in the history of medicine as simply ‘Augustine’. See Georges Didi-Huberman, The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris (New York: Norton, 2011), p. 148. 17. Ibid., p. 208. 18. Via Charcot’s voice-over, the patient is identified as ‘active, intelligent, affectionate, and impressionable, but also capricious, and quite enjoys attracting attention. She is a coquette, taking great care in her toilette and in arranging her thick hair now one way, now another. Ribbons, especially brightly colored, are her bliss’. Didi-Huberman, The Invention of Hysteria, p. 87. 19. Hustvedt, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris, p. 206. 20. Ibid., p. 26. 21. For info about Bourneville, see ibid.; Walusinski, Poirier and D
echy, ‘Augustine’. 22. See ibid.; Alan A. Stone, ‘Augustine’, Psychiatric Times, 14 November 2013; Martin Liebscher, ‘Secrets – and lies? The Seventh European Psychoanalytic Film Festival’. Medical Humanities 40 (2014), pp. 69 –70. 23. Walusinski, Poirier and D
echy, ‘Augustine’, p. 228. 24. Stone, ‘Augustine’. 25. The movie does indicate that one of the patients has experienced rape, but the patient is the supporting character Blanche, not the main character Augustine. As with the downplaying of Bourneville’s significance noted above, such modifications clearly prop up the development of the doctor– patient romance, which is key to the movie’s appeal, which a backstory of sexual assault would foreclose. At least one reviewer felt such omissions ultimately troubled the emancipatory narrative offered by the movie’s conclusion. See Judith Surkis, ‘Alice Winocour’s Augustine’, Fiction and Film for French Historians: A Cultural Bulletin. Available at http://h-france.net/fffh/the-buzz/alicewinocours-augustine/ (accessed 1 April 2016). 26. Erhart, ‘Toward a new LGBT biopic’. 27. Christina Cauterucci, ‘Trumpcare is the perfect document of the GOP: pro-birth, anti-woman, anti-child’, Slate, 26 June 2017. 28. Hustvedt, Medical Muses. 29. Surkis, ‘Alice Winocour’s Augustine’.

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Notes to Pages 45 –50 30. Gayle Rubin, ‘The traffic in women: notes on the “political economy” of sex’, in Rayna Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly View Press, 1975), pp. 157– 210. 31. Although it is especially poor, abject women whose lives are at stake, parallel cutaways to Charcot’s wealthy wife Clara being cinched into her corset demonstrate that the dynamics sometimes cut across class. 32. Lisa Downing, ‘French cinema’s new “sexual revolution”: postmodern porn and troubled genre’, French Cultural Studies 15/3 (2014), pp. 265 –80; Marya T. Mtshali and Breanne Fahs, ‘Catherine Breillat’s Romance and Anatomy of Hell: subjectivity and the gendering of subjectivity’, Women: A Cultural Review 25/2 (2014), pp. 160–75. 33. Downing, ‘French cinema’s new “sexual revolution”’, p. 269. 34. Like Augustine, Romance also criticises the medical establishment for its ‘traffic in women’. In an ending scene that has not received nearly as much attention as the scenes of the protagonist’s night time adventures, Romance offers a strong critique on the (mis)use of the female body in medical care. In the scene, the voice-over describes a fantasy while the image depicts women’s bodies lying flat and bisected by a partition. The top halves of the bodies appear in a brightly lit, sterile section of the space which resembles a medical facility, while the bottom halves appear in a dimly lit room which resembles a brothel. On the brothel side, male customers take turns having sex with the bodies, while on the medical side, various men console the different women. With this scene and the final shot which links a shot of a man ejaculating on to a woman’s belly with a shot of medical lubricant, Breillat links medicine’s and prostitution’s respective uses and abuses of women’s bodies. 35. And indeed historical evidence about the Salp^etrière – in particular analyses of the production of photographs during which women clearly held poses for many minutes at a time – casts doubt on the authenticity of hysterical attacks at that time. 36. Didi-Huberman, The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, p. 44. 37. Michele Aaron, Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On, vol. 35 (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), p. 118. 38. Ibid., p. 120. 39. Lizzie Seal, Women, Murder and Femininity: Gender Representations of Women Who Kill (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 2. See also Kyra Pearson, ‘The trouble with Aileen Wuornos, feminism’s “first serial killer”’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4/3 (2007), pp. 256– 75. 40. Lynda Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 152.

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Notes to Pages 50 –52 41. Terri Ginsberg, ‘Lesbian violence as fascist crusade in Monster’, Genders 43 (2006). Available at https://www.colorado.edu/gendersarchive19982013/2006/03/01/lesbian-violence-fascist-crusade-monster (accessed 1 April 2016). In an early interpretation of Wuornos’ case, Lynda Hart sees her as someone who refused to buy into the circuits of exchange set up by class-based patriarchy. Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression, p. 141. Hart construed the case as pushing back against the unspoken rules in prostitution, which is that prostitutes are both ‘necessary and dispensable’. Ibid., p. 142. 42. Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (UK, Nick Broomfield, 1994), Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (UK, Nick Broomfield, 2003), and Damsel of Death (US, Jacqueline Giroux, 2002). 43. Including Overkill: the Aileen Wuornos Story (US, Peter Levin, 1992). 44. Sue Russell, Lethal Intent (New York: Kensington Publishing, 2002); Michael Reynolds, Dead Ends: The Pursuit, Conviction and Execution of Female Serial Killer Aileen Wuornos, the Damsel of Death (New York: St Martin’s True Crime, 2003). 45. Aileen Wuornos, Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in Her Own Words 1991 – 2002, Lisa Kester and Daphne Gottlieb (eds) (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2011). 46. And this documentary in turn has itself been questioned for its own profiteering motive. Paige Schilt, ‘Media whores and perverse media: documentary film meets tabloid TV in Nick Broomfield’s Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer’, Velvet Light Trap (2000), pp. 50 –61. 47. Decca Aitkenhead, ‘The gift of a killer: director Patty Jenkins tells Decca Aitkenhead about Aileen Wuornos, Charlize Theron . . . and the making of Monster’, Guardian, 27 March 2004. 48. Patty Jenkins, interview by Stephanie Snipes, 2004; Aitkenhead, ‘The gift of a killer’. 49. Bryan McCann notes how the film’s subject matter was undercut by recurring discussions of Theron’s beauty. Bryan McCann, ‘Entering the darkness: rhetorics of transformation and gendered violence in Patty Jenkins’s Monster’, Women’s Studies in Communication 37/1 (2014), pp. 1 – 21. 50. Aitkenhead, ‘The gift of a killer’. 51. Angelita Manzano, ‘Monster: the retelling of the Aileen Wuornos story’, Off Our Backs, January –February 2004, pp. 60 –1. 52. McCann, ‘Entering the darkness’, pp. 5– 6. 53. Tanya Horeck, ‘From documentary to drama: capturing Aileen Wuornos’, Screen 48/2 (2007), pp. 141–59. 54. Seal, Women, Murder and Femininity: Gender Representations of Women Who Kill, p. 33.

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Notes to Pages 53 –59 55. Lisa Henderson, Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production (New York: New York University Press, 2013), p. 25. 56. Ibid., p. 74. 57. Some were critical of the voice: Jonathan Romney, ‘Monster (18): dying is an art. And she does it very well’, Independent, 3 April 2006. Available at http:// www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/monster-18-54756. html (accessed 1 April 2016). 58. N.P. Thompson. ‘The horrible is easier than you think’, A Laughter of Inner Devils, 4 January 2004. Available at https://nptonline.wordpress. com/2004/01/04/monster-the-horrible-is-easier-than-you-think/ (accessed 1 April 2016). 59. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). 60. Ibid., p. 52. 61. Ibid., p. 53. 62. Ilan Meyer, Andrew Flores, Lara Stemple, Adam Romero, Bianca Wilson and Jody Herman, ‘Incarceration rates and traits of sexual minorities in the United States: National Inmate Survey, 2011 –2012’, American Journal of Publlic Health: Transgender Health 107/2 (2017), pp. 267– 73; Bernadette Rabuy and Daniel Kopf, ‘Prisons of poverty: uncovering the pre-incarceration incomes of the imprisoned’, Prison Policy Initiative press release, 9 July 2015. 63. See for example Barry Neild, ‘Margaret Thatcher’s death greeted with street parties in Brixton and Glawgow’, Guardian, 9 April 2013; Daily Mail Australia, ‘Left’s chorus of hatred: champagne in the streets, Students Union Cheers and vile internet taunts’, 8 April 2013. 64. Including the actions of Meryl Streep, who donated her US$ 1 million acting fee to the cause of a National Museum of Women’s History in Washington, DC. Jim Cullen, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 89 –90. 65. Adam Dawtry, ‘Iron Lady continues to divide’, Variety, 5 December– 11 December 2011. 66. Specifically, Carruthers’ criticisms included the fact that Thatcher’s husband Denis was already a millionaire when they married, not an equal as the movie shows. Susan L. Carruthers, ‘The Iron Lady’, Cineaste 37/2 (Spring 2012), pp. 51– 2. 67. Sadie Wearing, ‘Dementia and the biopolitics of the biopic: from Iris to The Iron Lady’, Dementia 12/3 (2013), pp. 315 –25, p. 321. 68. Phyllida Lloyd, interview by Lloyd Evans, 31 December 2011. Available at https://www.spectator.co.uk/2011/12/meryl-maggie-and-me/ (accessed 1 April 2016). 69. Alison Landsberg, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Vivian

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Notes to Pages 59 –65

70. 71. 72. 73.

Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Landsberg, Engaging the Past, pp. 13 –14. Cited in Wearing, ‘Dementia and the biopolitics of the biopic’, p. 322. Brian McFarlane, ‘Fragments of an adamant life: The Iron Lady’, Screen Education 66 (Winter 2012), pp. 28– 35, p. 31. Carruthers, ‘The Iron Lady’, p. 52.

Feminist First-Person Documentaries: Migration, Internment, Reconciliation 1. As has been asserted in Chapter 1, box office is the very bluntest of instruments in measuring audience response. 2. For example, Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (New York: Wallflower Press, 2009) organises chapters around work by Harun Farocki, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Michel Antonioni; Scott MacDonald, American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013) contains chapters titled ‘Ed Pincus’, ‘Timothy Asch’, ‘Robert Gardner’, ‘Robb Moss’, ‘Ross McElwee’, and one titled ‘Lorna and John Marshall’; Jim Lane, Autobiographical Documentary in America (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002) is perhaps the exception for its inclusion of a single chapter titled ‘Women and the autobiographical documentary: historical intervention, writing, alterity, and the dialogic engagement’. 3. For earlier rehearsals of this discussion see Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (eds), Feminism and Documentary (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Alexandra Juhasz, ‘They said we were trying to show reality – all I want to show is my video: the politics of realist feminist documentary’, in Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (eds), Collecting Visible Evidence (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 190 – 215; Kelly Hankin, ‘And introducing . . . the female director: documentaries about women filmmakers as feminist activism’, NWSA Journal 19/1 (Spring 2007), pp. 59– 88. 4. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, ‘Introduction: contested pasts’, in Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (eds), Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1– 12, p. 6. 5. Leah Anderst, ‘“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at these images”: the “viewing I” in contemporary autobiographical documentary’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 28/2 (2013), pp. 212 – 41; Tony Dowmunt, ‘Autobiographical

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Notes to Pages 65 –66

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

documentary – the “seer and the seen”’, Studies in Documentary Film 7/3 (2013), pp. 263–77; Jane Chapman, Issues in Contemporary Documentary (Cambridge: Polity, 2009); Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Keith Beattie, Documentary Screens: Nonfiction Film and Television (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Kathleen McHugh, ‘Lourdes Portillo, Rea Tajiri, and Cheryl Dunye: history and falsehood in experimental autobiographies’, in Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman (eds), Women and Experimental Filmmaking (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005), pp. 107 – 28; Lane, Autobiographical Documentary in America; Julia Lesage, ‘Women’s fragmented consciousness in feminist experimental autobiographical video’, in Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (eds), Feminism and Documentary (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 309 – 38; Catherine Portugues, ‘Seeing subjects: women directors and cinematic autobiography’, in Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (eds), Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 338 – 50; Elizabeth W. Bruss, ‘Eye for I: making and unmaking autobiography in film’, in James Olney (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 296 –320. Rascaroli, The Personal Camera. Alisa Lebow (ed.), The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary (London: Wallflower, 2012); Julia Erhart, ‘Performing memory: compensation and redress in contemporary feminist first-person documentary’, Screening the Past 13 (2001), pp. 1 –18; Jon Dovey, Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television (London: Pluto Press, 2000); Patricia Aufderheide, ‘Public intimacy: the development of first-person documentary’, Afterimage 25/1 (1997), pp. 16 –18. Lane, Autobiographical Documentary in America. Ibid. Rascaroli, The Personal Camera. The form’s resistance to categorisation has itself been acknowledged by critics; see ibid.; Michael Chanan, ‘The role of history in the individual: working notes for a film’, in Lebow, The Cinema of Me, pp. 15– 32, p. 18. Lane, Autobiographical Documentary in America. Rascaroli, The Personal Camera. Cited in Chanan, ‘The role of history in the individual’, p. 24. Lebow, The Cinema of Me, p. 6. Renov, The Subject of Documentary. Chanan, ‘The role of history in the individual’, p. 24. Further examples include: first-person in the role of witness (ibid.) or participant observer; leveraging what Alisa Lebow calls ‘first person plural’ or what Juhasz calls the cinema of ‘we’.

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Notes to Pages 68 –81 19. Sandhya Suri, ‘I for India: director’s statement’, n.d. Available at http://www. iforindiathemovie.com/statement.html (accessed 1 April 2016). 20. Leila Mukhida, ‘Politics and the moving image: contemporary German and Austrian cinema through the lens of Benjamin, Kracauer and Kluge’, PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, October 2014, p. 37. 21. Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Harry Zohn (trans.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 217– 51, p. 238. 22. Ibid., p. 236. 23. A Tale for the Time-Being won the LA Times book prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; see http://www.ruthozeki.com/events/ (accessed 1 April 2016). 24. While Ozeki’s own movies date from the 1990s she worked from 1985 as an art director in the commercial film industry designing sets and as a director of documentaries for Japanese television. See http://www.ruthozeki.com/about/ long-bio/ (accessed 1 April 2016). 25. Ibid. 26. Glen M. Mimura, Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 85. 27. Ibid. 28. Minh-ha Trinh, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 194. Quoted in Mimura, Ghostlife of Third Cinema, p. 80. 29. See http://reatajiri.com/ (accessed 1 April 2014); Mimura, Ghostlife of Third Cinema; Marita Sturken, ‘Absent images of memory: remembering and reenacting the Japanese internment’, in T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White and Lisa Yoneyama (eds), Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 33– 49; Darrell Y. Hamamoto, Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000). 30. Laura U Marks, ‘A Deleuzian politics of hybrid cinema’, Screen 35/3 (1994), pp. 244 –64; Janet Walker, ‘The traumatic paradox: documentary films, historical fictions, and cataclysmic past events’, Signs 22/4 (1997), pp. 803– 25. 31. Peter X. Feng, Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 99. 32. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 33. Ibid., p. 1. 34. Ibid., p. 2. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., p. 18.

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Notes to Pages 83 –91 37. Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), p. 87. 38. Ibid., p. 90. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., p. 88. 41. Ibid., p. 92. 42. Festival successes for Nadar include: Nomination Best Documentary (Gaudí – Spanish academy awards); Rotterdam International Film Festival; Valladolid Film Festival (Seminci). See http://www.ewawomen.com/en/carla-subirana. html (accessed 1 April 2016). 43. Natalia Sanju
an Bornay, ‘Confronting silence and memory in contemporary Spain: the grandchildren’s perspective’, in Jennie M. Carlsten and Fearghal McGarry (eds), Film, History and Memory (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 48–64. 44. How female Spanish directors have dealt with this history has been the subject of a PhD dissertation by Natalia Sanju
an Bornay, ‘Contemporary Spanish women cineastes: constructing a feminine memory of the Spanish Civil War, Francoism and the transition period through twenty-first century fiction films and documentaries’, Flinders University, 2015. 45. Bornay, ‘Confronting silence and memory in contemporary Spain: the grandchildren’s perspective’, p. 62. 46. Abigail Loxham, ‘Objects of memory in contemporary Catalan documentaries: materiality and mortality’, Senses of Cinema 60 (October 2011). Available at http://sensesofcinema.com/2011/feature-articles/objects-of-memoryin-contemporary-catalan-documentaries-materiality-and-mortality/ (accessed 1 April 2016). 47. The award page on the film’s website signals numerous prestigious domestic and international awards, including Audience Award (Krakow Film Festival); Time of History Award (Valladolid Film Festival); Award for Outstanding Human Values (Polish Film Festival in America); Finalist (FIPA Festival Biarritz); Best Feature Documentary (Australian Directors Guild); Audience Award Best Documentary (Adelaide International Film Festival); Audience Award Best Film (Canberra International Film Festival); Best Feature Documentary (Nomination, AACTA Awards). Available at http://oncemymother.com.au/ (accessed 1 April 2016). 48. Hodgkin and Radstone, ‘Introduction: contested pasts’. 49. Ibid., p. 9. 50. Walter Benjamin, ‘The image of Proust’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Harry Zohn (trans.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 201– 15, p. 202.

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Notes to Pages 93 –96

Revisiting Resistance and Occupation in Holocaust Films 1. Cinematic efforts to make sense of German participation date back to Wolfgang Staudte, The Murderers Are among Us (1946). 2. The matter of women’s participation in contemporary German cinema has received considerable attention. Canonical texts include Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (London: Verso, 1992); Barbara Kosta, Recasting Autobiography: Women’s Counterfictions in Contemporary German Literature and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Susan E. Linville, Feminism, Film, Fascism: Women’s Auto/Biographical Film in Postwar Germany (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998); Richard W. McCormick, Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Ingeborg Majer O’Sickey and Ingeborg von Zadow (eds), Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema (Albany, NU: SUNY Press, 1998); Gabrielle Weinberger, Nazi Germany and Its Aftermath in Women Directors’ Autobiographical Films of the Late 1970s: In the Murderer’s House (San Francisco, CA: Mellon Research University Press, 1992). 3. The relatively few French and Francophone women filmmakers who have depicted events of occupation and the Holocaust contrasts sharply with the number of directors focusing on the traumatic events of colonialism, which include Agnes Varda, Marguerite Duras, Claire Denis, Assia Djebar, Brigitte Roüan, and Marie-France Pisier. 4. Leah D. Hewitt, Remembering the Occupation in French Film: National Identity and Postwar Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2008), p. 10 (emphasis Hewitt’s). 5. Ibid. 6. For information about Blanche et Marie see Suzanne Langlois, ‘Blanche et Marie: a film on the women of the Resistance’, unpublished paper presented at Gender and History symposium, Minneapolis, May 2017. 7. Von Grote was partly raised and attended school in Paris; her first feature was Weggehen um Anzukommen (1982); see http://www.alexandra-vongrote.de/ (accessed 1 April 2016). Information about the release date of November Moon is in Heiko Rosner, ‘Review of November Moon,’ Film-echo Filmwoche 4.5/24 (1986), p. 27. 8. One aspect that was well received even by people who did not especially like the film was the representation of the ambivalence of life under occupation. See Marli Feldvoß, ‘Novembermond’, epd Film 3/2 (February 1986), p. 31; Margret K€ohler, ‘Filme Von Frauen’, Medien 29/2 (1985), pp. 76–82; Rosner, ‘Review of November Moon’. 9. Sara R. Horowitz, The gender of good and evil: women and Holocaust memory’, in Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (eds), Gray Zones:

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Notes to Pages 96 –103

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), pp. 165–78, p. 172. Middling reviews and box office for Charlotte Gray were largely on the grounds of what was considered plot implausibility. There were criticisms of the film that ought now to be familiar to readers, such as the prioritising of the love story as an unrealistic means to motivate the heroine and the absence of grand set pieces about the war. Marcia Landy, Cinematic Uses of the Past (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 17. Oliver Daddow, New Labour and the European Union: Blair and Brown’s Logic of History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Malgorzata Pakier, The Construction of European Holocaust Memory, Warsaw Studies in Jewish History and Memory, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013), p. 2. The trope of an ethnically mixed romance is prevalent in numerous movies about the Holocaust, including Liliana Cavani’s now canonical The Night Porter, where Max, the ex-Nazi hotel employee, and Lucia, the wife of an American conductor and concentration camp survivor, play and re-play the events of the past in a shifting representation of a chain of actors, with Lucia alternatively standing for ‘women, who could stand for victims, who could stand for Jews’, and so on. ‘Signifying the Holocaust: Liliana Cavani’s Portiere Di Notte’, in Laura Pietropaolo and Ada Testaferri (eds), Feminisms in the Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 206 – 19, p. 216. The round up is also the subject of a 1976 film Monsieur Klein (Losey). Dinah Assouline Stillman, ‘The Vel’ D’hiv’ roundup: the new fascination in French Cinema’, Image and Narrative 14/2 (2013), pp. 63– 73, pp. 66– 7. The debut of the film also brought controversy to the movie’s director, who in one interview lashed out at critics who called the film excessively emotional. Ibid., p. 63; Ronald C. Rosbottom, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light under German Occupation, 1940 – 1944 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014), p. 284. Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome De Vichy (Paris: Seuil, 1987). This stance has most recently been reiterated by Robert Gildea, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of French Resistance (London: Faber & Faber, 2015). Langlois, ‘Blanche Et Marie’, p. 4; Andr
e Pierre Colombat, The Holocaust in French Film (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1993), p. 20. Ibid., p. xii. Langlois, ‘Blanche Et Marie’, p. 4. Rosbottom, When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light under German Occupation, 1940 – 1944, p. 275.

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Notes to Pages 103 –108 23. Because of the historical belief that Jewish men were at greater risk of being deported than were Jewish women and children, many men managed to be physically absent or concealed at the time of the round up. Rosbottom, When Paris Went Dark, p. 277. For further discussion of less stringent monitoring of women vs men, throughout the war, with the claim that this resulted in some dangerous work like couriering being predominantly accomplished by women, see Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men, and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 264 – 5. 24. Alison Owings, Frauen: Women Recall the Third Reich (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1993), p. 432. 25. Abigail Rosenthal, ‘The right way to act: indicting the victims’, in Roger S. Gottlieb (ed.), Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 126– 40, p. 138. 26. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Allen, 1962). 27. Terrence Des Pres, ‘Us and them’, in Roger S. Gottlieb (ed.), Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), pp. 109– 25. 28. Roger S. Gottlieb, ‘The concept of resistance: Jewish resistance during the Holocaust’, in Roger S. Gottlieb (ed.), Thinking the Unthinkable, pp. 327– 44. 29. Nechama Tec, Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 30. John K. Roth, ‘Equality, neutrality, particularity: perspectives on women and the Holocaust’, in Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg (eds), Experience and Expression: Women, the Nazis, and the Holocaust (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003), pp. 5 –22, pp. 8– 9. 31. Elizabeth Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, Hannah Diamond, and Helene Sinnreich all offer excellent and thorough literature reviews on women and the Holocaust, including how notions of resistance have been revised in light of women’s experiences. See Elizabeth R. Baer and Myrna Goldenberg, ‘Introduction: experience and expression: women and the Holocaust’, ibid., pp. xiii –xxxiii; Hannah Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France, 1939 – 1948: Choices and Constraints (Harlow: Pearson Education, 1999); Helene J. Sinnreich, ‘Women and the Holocaust’, in Samuel Totten (ed.), Plight and Fate of Women During and Following Genocide, vol. 7 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), pp. 25–46. 32. Dominick LaCapra, ‘Representing the Holocaust: Reflections on the historians’ debate’, in Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 108–27. See also Eric L. Santner, ‘History beyond the pleasure principle’, ibid., pp. 143 –54. 33. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 87. 34. Ibid., p. 89.

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Notes to Pages 108 –117 35. Ibid., p. 88. 36. James Young, quoted in Polish Film and the Holocaust: Politics and Memory (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), p. 1. 37. Ibid. 38. Because of stylistic commonalities between the two dancing scenes – such as muted lighting, a relay of close-ups on the caf
e patrons’ faces, the dancer(s)’ expressions of enjoyment and their patent disregard for the patrons’ stares – the analogy between the first homophobic set of viewers and this second fascist set could not be more clear. 39. And indeed, the film even allows (some of) the Germans to appear equivocal in their loyalty to Nazism, as is the case with the petty officer who facilitates November’s escape from the brothel. The ambiguity of this character is further reinforced by a sympathetic and, I believe, quite radical, identification that the film sets up between him and November, via a dissolve from a close-up of November’s face to a close-up of his face, as he is executed. 40. Bhabha, The Location of Culture p. 74. 41. Ibid., p. 76. 42. How Jews simultaneously knew of and continued to participate in their own extermination is the question animating the chapter entitled ‘Soliciting the cooperation of the victims’ in Zygmunt Bauman’s seminal sociological study of the Judenräte – the Jewish leaders who administered the ghettos, acting as a link between them and the outside world. On this see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 43. A comparable process would appear to be taking place at the end of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which concludes with the words, ‘it was not a story to pass on’. As November’s ‘forgetting’ is always only a kind of temporary stand-in for the act of ‘remembering’, Morrison’s ‘pass on’, which means both to ‘repeat’ and to ‘let go’, also has at once a doubled and, it would seem, mutually excluding signification. Toni Morrison, Beloved: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 1987). 44. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Harry Zohn (trans.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 253– 64. 45. Ibid., p. 255 (emphasis Benjamin’s). 46. David S. Ferris, The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 20. 47. And it is for this reason that Felman designates the Holocaust as an ‘eventwithout-a-witness’. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 219.

177

Notes to Pages 120 –125 48. Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), p. 22. 49. Ibid., p. 21. 50. James McAuley, ‘US detains and nearly deports French Holocaust historian’, The Washington Post, 26 February 2017. Available at https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/26/u-s-detains-andnearly-deports-french-jewish-historian/?utm_term¼.2e651f30a5b7 (accessed 1 April 2017). 51. Walter Benjamin, ‘A Berlin chronicle’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), pp. 293 – 346, p. 314.

Gendering Iraq and Afghanistan War Movies 1. In addition to those mentioned, a full list of ‘best picture’ winners in the war film genre include All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), From Here to Eternity (1953), Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Patton (1970), The Deer Hunter (1978), Platoon (1986), and The Hurt Locker (2009). 2. Yvonne Tasker, Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 5. 3. Cynthia Enloe, Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), p. 14 (emphasis Enloe’s). 4. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 5. Douglas M. Kellner, Cinema Wars: Hollywood Film and Politics in the BushCheney Era (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), p. 199. 6. Martin Barker, A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films (London: Pluto Press, 2011), p. 25. 7. The identification of the three genres is essentially Patricia Aufderheide’s. Susan Carruthers has also produced a useful taxonomy in her trio of articles for Cineaste. Patricia Aufderheide, ‘Your country, my country: how films about the Iraq War construct publics’, Framework 48/2 (2007), pp. 56 –65; Susan L. Carruthers, ‘Say cheese! Operation Iraqi Freedom on film’, Cineaste 32/1 (Winter 2006), pp. 30– 6, ‘Question time: the Iraq War revisited’, Cineaste 32/4 (Fall 2007), pp. 12– 17 and ‘Bodies of evidence: new documentaries on Iraq War veterans’, Cineaste 34/1 (Winter 2008), pp. 26– 31. 8. Dana Stevens, ‘Zero Dark Thirty: a vital, disturbing, and necessary film’, Slate, 14 December 2012. 9. Rachel Mathias, ‘Trailer: ‘“Zero Dark Thirty” Uncovers history’s greatest manhunt’, Business of Cinema, 14 February 2013. Available at http://business

178

Notes to Pages 125 –136

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

ofcinema.com/hollywood/trailer-zero-dark-thirty-uncovers-historys-greatestmanhunt/59484 (accessed 1 April 2016). Steven Zeitchik, ‘Senators say “Zero Dark Thirty” is “grossly inaccurate”’, LA Times, 20 December 2012. Paul Harris, ‘Valerie Plame Welcomes new breed of fictional female spy in Zero Dark Thirty’, Guardian, 15 December 2012. Marouf Hasian, ‘Zero Dark Thirty and the critical challenges posed by populist postfeminism during the global war on terrorism’, Journal of Communication Inquiry 37/4 (2013), pp. 322– 43. Charles-Antoine Courcoux, There’s something about Maya: on being/ becoming a heroine and the “war on terror”’, in Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Jakub Kazecki (eds), Heroism and Gender in War Films (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 225–43, p. 233. Tasker, Soldiers’ Stories, pp. 78– 100. Ibid., pp. 191– 9. Ibid., p. 204. Jasbir Puar, ‘Feminists and queers in the service of empire’, in Robin L. Riley, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (eds), Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialisms (London: Zed Books, 2008), pp. 47– 55, p. 47. Ben Child, ‘CIA Requested Zero Dark Thirty Rewrites, Memo Reveals’, Guardian, 7 May 2013. Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2004), p. 199. Ibid. Tasker, Soldiers’ Stories, p. 3 (emphasis added). Susan E. Linville, History Films, Women, and Freud’s Uncanny (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), p. 92. Ibid., p. 101. Cynthia Enloe, Seriously! Investigating Crashes and Crises as If Women Mattered (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), p. 21. In addition to works already cited, see also Tara McKelvey (ed.), One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007); David Levi Strauss and Charles Stein (eds), Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004). Kelly Oliver, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Ibid., p. 22. Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 58. Quoted in Oliver. Women as Weapons of War, p. 34. Ryan Ashley Caldwell, Fallgirls: Gender and the Framing of Torture at Abu Ghraib (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 25.

179

Notes to Pages 136 –146 30. Ibid. 31. Jennifer Hyndman, ‘Whose bodies count? Feminist Geopolitics and lessons from Iraq’, in Riley, Bruce Pratt and Mohanty, Feminism and War, pp. 194–206. 32. Melisa Brittain, ‘Benevolent invaders, heroic victims and depraved villains: white femininity in media coverage of the invasion of Iraq’, in Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel (eds), (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 73– 96, p. 76. 33. Kellner, Cinema Wars, p. 223. 34. Will Kanyusik, ‘The problem of recognition: the disabled male veteran and masculinity as spectacle in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives’, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 6/2 (2012), pp. 159–74, p. 160. 35. For an excellent discussion of the movie’s stereotyping of the Afghan soldiers, see Debra White-Stanley, ‘“I don’t know how she lives with this kitchen the way it is”: military heroism, gender, and race in Brothers (2004 and 2009)’, in Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Jakub Kazecki (eds), Heroism and Gender in War Films (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 133 – 52, pp. 139– 40. 36. Brian Castner, ‘Still fighting, and dying, in the forever war’, New York Times, 9 March 2017. 37. Helen Benedict, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Boston, IL: Beacon Press, 2009), p. 203. 38. Ibid., p. 204. 39. Return was supported by the Sundance Institute in partnership with the Annenberg Feature Film Fellowship and the Maryland Film Fellowship. 40. Benedict, The Lonely Soldier, p. 203. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropological reflections on cultural relativism and its others’, American Anthropologist 104/3 (September 2002), pp. 783 – 90; Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000); Alyson M. Cole, ‘The other V-word: the politics of victimhood fueling George W. Bush’s war machine’, in Riley, Bruce Pratt and Mohanty, Feminism and War, pp. 117 – 30; Jennifer Fluri, ‘“Rallying public opinion” and other misuses of feminism’, ibid., pp. 143 – 57. 44. Sonali Kolhatkar, ‘“Saving” Afghan women (how media creates enemies)’, Women in Action 34/3 (April 2002), pp. 34– 6.

180

Notes to Pages 146 –156 45. Patricia Skinner, ‘The gendered nose and its lack: “medieval” nose-cutting and its modern manifestations’, Journal of Women’s History 26/1 (2014), pp. 45– 67, p. 46. 46. Shahnaz Khan, ‘The two faces of Afghan women: oppressed and exotic’, Women’s Studies International Forum 44 (May – June 2014), pp. 101– 9, pp. 102– 3. 47. In The Ground Truth, the soldier says he will never forget the killing: ‘that’s why this war is so different. You’re not just killing another soldier, you’re killing a family.’ 48. Sunera Thobani, ‘It’s bloodthirsty vengeance’, in Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter (eds), After Shock: September 11, 2001: Global Feminist Perspectives (Vancouver: Spinifex, 2003), pp. 91 –6, p 92. 49. Kellner, Cinema Wars. 50. Ibid., p. 33. 51. Ibid., p. 49. 52. S.F. Said, ‘“This girl behaves against it”: an interview with Samira Makhmalbaf’, in Corinn Columpar and Sophie Mayer (eds), There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2009), pp. 163– 71, p. 169. 53. Catherine Scott, ‘Rescue in the Age of Empire: children, masculinity, and the war on terror’, in Hunt and Rygiel, (En)Gendering the War on Terror, pp. 97–117. 54. The success of Buddha Collapsed at film festivals, including human rights film festivals, has been detailed. See Sophie Mayer, Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (London: I.B.Tauris, 2016), pp. 63– 5. 55. Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel, ‘(En)gendered war stories and camouflaged politics’, in Hunt and Rygiel, (En)Gendering the War on Terror, pp. 1– 24, p. 1. 56. Ibid., p. 4. 57. Noga Efrati, Women in Iraq: Past Meets Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. ix – xv. 58. ‘If women really mattered . . .’, in Hawthorne and Winter, After Shock, pp. 493– 525, p. 518. 59. Susan Linville, Feminism, Film, Fascism: Women’s Auto/Biographical Film in Postwar Germany (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998), p. 3.

Conclusion 1. Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Harry Zohn (trans.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 1– 55, p. 38. 2. Esther Leslie, ‘Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin: memory from Weimar to Hitler’, in Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (eds), Memory: Histories,

181

Notes to Pages 156 –157 Theories, Debates (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), pp. 123 – 35, p. 129. 3. For example, in 2015 more than one million people crossed borders into Europe, a fourfold increase from 2014. BBC News, ‘Why Is EU struggling with migrants and asylum?’, 3 March 2016. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/world-europe-24583286 (accessed 1 April 2016). 4. Michele Aaron, ‘Passing through: queer lesbian film and Fremde Haut’, Journal of Lesbian Studies 16/3 (2012), pp. 323– 39.

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Bibliography Landsberg, Alison, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). ———, Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Landy, Marcia, Cinematic Uses of the Past (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). ——— (ed.), The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). Lane, Jim, Autobiographical Documentary in America (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). , Langlois, Suzanne, Blanche et Marie: a film on the women of the Resistance , unpublished paper presented at Gender and History symposium, Minneapolis, May 2017. Lebow, Alisa (ed.), The Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary (London: Wallflower, 2012). , Lesage, Julia, Women s fragmented consciousness in feminist experimental , autobiographical video , in Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (eds), Feminism and Documentary (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 309– 38. Leslie, Esther, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin: memory from Weimar to , Hitler , in Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (eds), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), pp. 123 –35. Liebscher, Martin, Secrets – and lies? The Seventh European Psychoanalytic Film , Festival , Medical Humanities 40 (2014), pp. 69 –70. , Lin, Ya-Huei, The slave trade in the work of Fox, Johnson, and Spielberg , CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14/5 (2012). Available at http ://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol14/iss5/8/ (accessed 1 April 2016). , Linville, Susan E., Feminism, Film, Fascism: Women s Auto/Biographical Film in Postwar Germany (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998). , ———, History Films, Women, and Freud s Uncanny (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004). , , Lodge, Guy, Arrival; Mum s List; A United Kingdom and more – reviews , The Guardian, 19 March 2017. Loxham, Abigail, Objects of memory in contemporary Catalan documentaries: , materiality and mortality , Senses of Cinema 60 (October 2011). Available at http://sensesofcinema.com/2011/feature-articles/objects-of-memory-incontemporary-catalan-documentaries-materiality-and-mortality/ (accessed 1 April 2016). MacDonald, Scott, American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013). Maltby, Richard, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). , Manzano, Angelita, Monster: the retelling of the Aileen Wuornos story , Off Our Backs (January– February 2004), pp. 60 –1. , Marks, Laura U., A Deleuzian politics of hybrid cinema , Screen 35/3 (1994), pp. 244 – 64. ———, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). ,

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Gendering History on Screen , , Martin, Angela, Refocusing authorship in women s filmmaking , in Jacqueline Levitin, Judith Plessis and Valerie Raoul (eds), Women Filmmakers: Refocusing (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 29 –37. , ,, Mathias, Rachel, Trailer: Zero Dark Thirty Uncovers history s greatest , manhunt , BusinessofCinema, 14 February 2013. Available at http://business ofcinema.com/hollywood/trailer-zero-dark-thirty-uncovers-historys-greatestmanhunt/59484 (accessed 1 April 2016). Mayer, Sophie, Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (London: I.B.Tauris, 2016). , Mayne, Judith, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women s Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990). , McAuley, James, US detains and nearly deports French Holocaust historian , The Washington Post, 26 February 2017. Available at https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/02/26/u-s-detains-and-nearly-deportsfrench-jewish-historian/?utm_term¼.2e651f30a5b7 (accessed 1 April 2017). McCann, Bryan, Entering the darkness: rhetorics of transformation and gendered , , , violence in Patty Jenkins s Monster , Women s Studies in Communication 37/1 (2014), pp. 1– 21. , McCarthy, Todd, A League of Their Own , Variety, 29 June 1992. McCormick, Richard W., Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). , McFarlane, Brian, Fragments of an adamant life: The Iron Lady , Screen Education 66 (Winter 2012), pp. 28 –35. McHugh, Kathleen, Lourdes Portillo, Rea Tajiri, and Cheryl Dunye: history and , falsehood in experimental autobiographies , in Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman (eds), Women and Experimental Filmmaking (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005), pp. 107 –28. ———, The world and the soup: historicizing media feminisms in transnational , contexts , Camera Obscura 24/3 (2009), pp. 111 –51. McKelvey, Tara (ed.), One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007). ,,, Merron, Jeff, Reel life: A League of Their Own , ESPN, n.d. Available at http:// www.espn.com/page2/s/closer/020511.html (accessed 1 April 2016). Meyer, Ilan, Andrew Flores, Lara Stemple, Adam Romero, Bianca Wilson and Jody Herman, Incarceration rates and traits of sexual minorities in the United , States: National Inmate Survey, 2011 – 2012 , American Journal of Public Health: Transgender Health 107/2 (2017), pp. 267– 73. Mimura, Glen M., Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Minier, Màrta, and Maddalena Pennacchia, Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). Modleski, Tania, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988). Monk, Claire and Amy Sargeant (eds), British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage and Costume Film (London: Routledge, 2002). Morrison, Toni, Beloved: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 1987). ,

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Filmography

, ,, 11 09 01: September 11 (Youssef Chahine et al., CIH Shorts, CDP et al., 2002). A Healthy Baby Girl (Judith Helfand, Independent Television Service, 1996) A League of Their Own (Penny Marshall, Columbia, 1992) A United Kingdom (Amma Asante, Pathé, 2016) Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield, Channel 4, 1992) Amelia (Mira Nair, Fox Searchlight, 2009) Angel at my Table (Jane Campion, Hibiscus Films, 1990) Artemisia (Agnès Merlet, Première Heure, 1997) The Assassination of Richard Nixon (Niels Mueller, Anhelo Productions, 2004) Augustine (Alice Winocour, Dharamsala, 2012) Auto Focus (Paul Schrader, Sony Pictures, Propaganda Films, Good Machine, 2003) Bad Day at Blackrock (John Sturges, MGM, 1955) Baise-moi/Rape Me (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, Pan-Européenne, 2000) , Ben Annemin Kiziyim – Ich bin Tochter meiner Mutter/I Am My Mother s Daughter (Seyhan Derin, HFF, 1996) The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, Samuel Goldwyn Productions, 1946) Blanche et Marie (Jacques Renard, FR3 Films, 1985) Body of War: The True Story of an Anti-Hero (Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro, Mobilus Media, 2008) The Body Beautiful (Ngozi Onwurah, The British Film Institute, 1991) Boulevard des Hirondelles (Josée Yanne, MJN Productions, 1993) Bran Nue Dae (Rachel Perkins, Robyn Kershaw Productions, 2009) Bright Star (Jane Campion, Jan Chapman Films, 2009) Brødre/Brothers (Susanne Bier, Zentropa, 2004) Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (Hana Makhmalbaf, Makhmalbaf Productions, 2007) Charlotte Gray (Gillian Armstrong, Ecosse Films, 2001) Chocolat (Claire Denis, Cerito Films, MK2 Films, 1988) , Chronique d Un Été/Chronicles of a Summer (Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, Argos Films, 1961) Come See the Paradise (Alan Parker, 20th Century Fox, 1990) Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter (Deborah Hoffman, Deborah Hoffman, 1994)

197

Gendering History on Screen Copying Beethoven (Agnieszka Holland, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, 2006) Courage Under Fire (Edward Zwick, 20th Century Fox, 1996) Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, Truth Entertainment, Voltage Pictures, 2013) Daughter of Suicide (Dempsey Rice, Daughter One Productions, HBO, 2000) Desert Hearts (Donna Deitch, Desert Hearts Productions, 1985) Deutschland bleiche Mutter/Germany, Pale Mother (Helma Sanders-Brahms, Helma Sanders-Brahms Filmproduktion, Literarisches Colloquium, WDR, 1980) Die bleierne Zeit /Marianne and Juliane (a.k.a. The German Sisters) (Margarethe von Trotta, Bioskop Film, SFC, 1981) The Dressmaker (Jocelyn Moorhouse, Film Art Media, Screen Australia, 2015) , Entre Nous (a.k.a. Coup de foudre)/Between Us (Diane Kurys, Partner s Productions, Alexandre Films, 1983) Fremde Haut/Unveiled (Angelina Maccarone, MMM Film Zimmermann & Co., Fischer Film, 2005) Frida (Julie Taymor, Ventanarosa, Miramax, 2002) Girlfriends (Claudia Weill, Cyclops, 1978) Grace is Gone (Jim Strouse, Plum Pictures, The Weinstein Company, 2007) The Ground Truth (Patricia Foulkrod, Plum Pictures, 2006) Gunner Palace (Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, Nomados, 2004) Halving the Bones (Ruth Ozeki, Women Make Movies, 1995) Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta, Heimatfilm, Amour Fou Luxembourg, MACT Productions, 2012) Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, Wingnut Films, New Zealand Film Commission, 1994) Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi, Chernin Entertainment, Levantine Films, 2016) History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (Rea Tajiri, Akiko Productions, 1991) , I Am My Mother s Daughter (Suzie Galler, Muse Entertainment, 2001) I for India (Sandya Suri, Fandango and Zero West, 2005) I Shot Andy Warhol (Mary Harron, Killer Films, 1996) Il portiere di notte/The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, Lotar Film Productions, 1975) Illusions (Julie Dash, Julie Dash, 1982) The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, Pathé, 2011) J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood, Imagine Entertainment, Malpaso Productions, 2011) Jerabek (Civia Tamarkin, Tamarkin Productions, 2007) , L Armée des ombres/Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, Les Films Corona, Fono Roma, 1969) La Rafle/The Round Up (Roselyne Bosch, Légende Films, Gaumont, 2010) Le Dernier Métro/The Last Metro (Franc ois Truffaut, Les Films du Carrosse, 1980) , Les Femmes de l Ombre/Female Agents (Jean-Pierre Salomé, Les Chauves-Souris, 2008) , Les Rendez-vous d Anna/The Meetings of Anna (Chantal Akerman, Centre du , Cinéma et de l Audiovisuel de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Hélène Films, Paradise Films, 1978) Les Salauds/Bastards (Claire Denis, Alcatraz Films, 2013) Lioness (Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers, Room 11 Productions, 2008)

198

Filmography Lore (Cate Shortland, Rohfilm, 2012) Love Story: Berlin 1942 (Catrine Clay, Timewatch, 1997) Lucie Aubrac (Claude Berri, CNC, D.A. Films, October Films, 1997) Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, Columbia, 2006) , , Mémoires d immigrés, l héritage maghrébin/Immigrant Memories (Yamina Benguigui, Bandit Productions, Canal þ , 1997) Monster (Patty Jenkins, Media 8 Entertainment, 2003) My Country, My Country (Laura Poitras, Praxis Films, 2006) My Home, Your War (Kylie Grey, Denoux Films, 2006) Nadar (Carla Subirana, Benecé Productions, 2008) , Naomi s Legacy (Wendy Levy, Wendy Levy, 1995) Napló apámnak, anyámnak/Diary for My Father and Mother (Márta Mészáros, Budapest Filmstúdió, 1990) Napló gyermekeimnek/Diary for My Children (Márta Mészáros, Budapest Játékfilmstúdió, Mafilm, 1984) Napló szerelmeimnek/Diary for My Lovers (Márta Mészáros, Mafilm, Zespol Filmowy, 1987) Navajo Talking Picture (Arlene Bowman, Mosaic Films, 1985) Night Cries (Tracey Moffatt, The Australian Film Commission, 1990) The Notorious Bettie Page (Mary Harron, Killer Films, 2005) November Moon (Alexandra von Grote, Ottokar Runze and Sun 7, 1985) Of Great Events and Ordinary People (Raoul Ruiz, Institut National de , l Audiovisuel, 1978) Once My Mother (Sophia Turkiewicz, Change Focus Media, Screen Australia, 2013) The People vs. Larry Flynt (Milos Forman, Columbia, 1996) Peppermint-Frieden/Peppermint Peace (Marianne Rosenbaum, Nourfilm Filmproduktion, 1983) Peppermint Soda (Diane Kurys, Alexandre Films, 1977). The Piano (Jane Campion, CiBy 2000, 1993) Poster Girl (Sara Nesson, Portrayal Films, 2010) Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, Pathé, 1999) Remembering Wei Yi Fang, Remembering Myself (Yvonne Welbon, Our Film Works, 1996) Return (Lisa Johnson, Fork Films, 2011) Romance (Catherine Breillat, Flach Film, 1999) Rosa Luxemburg (Margarethe von Trotta, Bioskop Film, 1986) , Rosie s Secret (Lisa Matthews, Lisa Matthews Productions, 1994) Saat el Fahrir Dakkat, Barra ya Isti Mar/The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (Heiny Srour, Srour Films, 1974) Selma (Ava DuVernay, Plan B Entertainment, Cloud Eight Films, Harpo Films, 2014) Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, BBC, 1985) The Short Life of José Antonio Gutiérrez (Heidi Specogna, PS Film Zürich, 2006) Souviens-toi-de moi/Remember Me (Zaida Ghorab-Volta, Voleur Productions, 1996) Stop-Loss (Kimberly Peirce, Paramount, 2008) Suffragette (Sarah Gavron, Ruby Films, 2015) Swoon (Tom Kalin, Killer Films, 1992) Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, BBC Films, 2003)

199

Gendering History on Screen The Ties that Bind (Su Friedrich, Downstream Productions, 1985) Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, Rezo Productions, 2001) Une Affaire de Femmes/A Story of Women (Claude Chabrol, MK2 Productions, 1987) , Viceroy s House (Gurinder Chadha, Pathé, 2017) Waiting for Fidel (Michael Rubbo, National Film Board of Canada, 1974) Waiting for the Moon (Jill Godmilow, New Front Films, AB Films, 1987) The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, SenArt Films, Scranton/Lacy Films, 2006) The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, Dancing Girl Productions, 1996) , Who s Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway? (Janice Tanaka, Fo-Fum Productions, 1996) Yaura-T-Il Neige à Noël?/Will it Snow for Christmas? (Sandrine Veysset, Ognon Pictures, 1996) Yentl (Barbra Streisand, United Artists, Ladbroke Entertainments, 1983) Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, First Light, Annapurna, Columbia, 2012)

200

Index

#OscarsSoWhite, 17, 161n.16 9/11, 128, 147, 150– 1 11’09”01: September, 11 see also God, Construction and Destruction; Makhmalbaf, Samira Aaron, Michele, 48 Abnoudy, Ateyyat El, 12 Abu Ghraib, 127, 135– 7 abuse, 6, 37, 53, 54, 71, 136 activism, 3, 9, 33, 97, 107, 155 aesthetics, 16, 18, 26, 27, 32, 35, 83, 93 African-American, 17, 20, 30, 31, 32 agency, 3, 9, 13, 95, 108, 115, 116, 117 female, 16, 46, 133, 155 male, 26 aggression, 123, 137 Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (Nick Broomfield), 50 Akerman, Chantal, 94 see also Les Rendez-vous d’Anna Algeria, 12, 158 All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), 21 –3 Allies/Allied forces, 96, 114, 124, 138, 147, 153 Amelia (Mira Nair), 36 American Historical Review (AHR), 17–18, 19, 21 Angel at my Table (Jane Campion), 36, 160n.5

anti-Semitism, 102, 108, 109, 114 Arendt, Hannah, 104, 155 armed combat, 7, 122, 131, 132 Armstrong, Gillian, 12, 98 see also Charlotte Gray; My Brilliant Career; Oscar and Lucinda Artel, Linda, 38 Artemisia (Agnès Merlet), 36 Asante, Amma, 1, 12 see also United Kingdom, A; Where Hands Touch Assassination of Richard Nixon, The (Niels Mueller), 39 Augustine (Alice Winocour), 6, 33, 36, 37, 40– 8, 62, 166n.25 Australia/Australian, 3, 7, 6, 10, 12, 15, 25, 28, 34, 64, 82, 86 –8, 91, 98, 148, 161n.12, 164n.57 auteurism, 13–17, 98 authenticity, 2, 20, 56, 65, 125, 167n.35 authorship, performative, 13– 17 see also auteurism Auto Focus (Paul Schrader), 39 award ceremonies, 9, 14, 17 awards, 5, 38, 51, 63, 95, 121, 125, 173n.47 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Academy Awards), 9, 125, 161n.16 see also #OscarsSoWhite

201

Gendering History on Screen Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards (AACTA) Awards, 173n.47 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), 125 Bachir-Chouikh, Yamina, 12 Bad Day at Blackrock (John Sturges), 78 Badland (Francesco Lucente), 138 Baer, Elizabeth, 176n.31 Baise-moi (Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi), 45 Bakry, Asma El, 12 Barker, Martin, 124, 139 Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven), 53 Bastards (Claire Denis), 45 Bauman, Zygmunt, 115, 177n.42 Ben Mabrouk, Néjia, 12 Benedict, Helen, 142, 143 Benguigui, Yamina, 158 see also Immigrant Memories; Inch’ Allah Dimanche Benjamin, Walter, 5, 11, 26 –8, 30, 32, 33, 38, 43, 54, 56, 59 –60, 70– 1, 82, 83, 89, 91, 115– 16, 120, 155, 163n.42, 164n.49 constellation, 5, 6, 11, 27, 28, 30, 33, 37, 54 and epistemology, 26, 27 and film, media, and technologies, 59 –60, 70, 82 –3 history/historiography, 5, 11, 27, 54, 120, 155 ‘The Image of Proust’, 91, 173n.50 influence on media and cultural studies, 27 and Marxism, 26, 164n.49 Passagen-Werk, 28 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 26, 83, 115, 116, 159n.8, 160n.3, 163n.42, 163n.43, 164n.53, 177n.44

‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, 27, 70 Bergson, Henri, 115 Best Years of Our Lives, The (William Wyler), 138, 139 Bhabha, Homi, 107–8, 112– 13 Bibi, Aisha, 122, 146 Bier, Susanne, 12, 125, 139 see also Brødre/Brothers Big (Penny Marshall), 24 Bigelow, Kathryn, 2, 13, 125, 130 see also Zero Dark Thirty (ZDT) Bin Laden, Osama, 125, 128 Bingham, Dennis, 36–7, 39 –40 ‘biopic of someone undeserving' (BOSUD), 39 –40, 62 biopics, 2, 3, 6, 10, 13, 22– 3, 35– 62, 156, 164n.2, 165n.4 Blair, Tony, 101 Blanche et Marie (Jacques Renard), 94 Blanchett, Cate, 98 Body Beautiful, The (Ngozi Onwurah), 71 Body of Correspondence (Ruth Ozeki), 72 Body of War: The True Story of an Anti-Hero (Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro), 124 Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone), 138 Bornay, Natalia, 86 Bos, Pascale, 17 Bosch, Roselyne, 12 see also La Rafle/The Round Up Boulevard des Hirondelles (Josée Yanne), 94 Bowman, Arlene see Navajo Talking Picture box office, 4, 5, 36, 51, 63, 95, 102, 124, 130, 170n.1, 175n.10 Brakhage, Stan, 65 Bran Nue Dae (Rachel Perkins), 12

202

Index Breillat, Catherine, 45, 167n.34 see also Romance Breslow, Anastasia, 131, 133–4, 137 Brick Lane (Sarah Gavron), 158 Bright Star (Jane Campion), 36, 40, 41 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 68, 97 Brødre/Brothers (Susanne Bier), 5, 7, 125, 139, 141, 142, 143, 147 Broomfield, Nick, 50, 65 see also Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer Br€uckner, Jutta, 93 see also Hungerjahre Buck-Morss, Susan, 28 Buddha Collapsed out of Shame (Samira Makhmalbaf), 7, 152 –3, 181n.54 budget big, 4, 5, 21 low/small, 63, 70, 142, 147 Burgoyne, Robert, 21, 121 Bush, George W., 143, 148, 149, 153–4 Butler, Alison, 15 Caldwell, Ryan Ashley, 136 Callaghan, Helen, 22, 162n.33 Campion, Jane, 12, 36 see also Angel at my Table; Bright Star; Piano, The Canby, Vincent, 19 Candaele, Kelly, 22, 162n.33 Caouette, Jonathan, 65 capitalism, 39, 52, 83, 153 Cardellini, Linda, 142 Carruthers, Susan, 57, 58, 61, 169n.66, 178n.7 Cavani, Liliana, 11, 175n.14 celebrity, 37, 39 Chadha, Gurinder, 1, 12 see also Viceroy’s House

Chaplin, Charlie, 60 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 40–4, 46 Charlotte Gray (Gillian Armstrong), 7, 94, 98, 100, 101, 104, 105, 106, 111, 120, 175n.10 Chocolat (Claire Denis), 66 Chopra, Joyce, 65 Chronicles of a Summer (Jean Rouch/ Edgar Morin), 65 class, 25, 37, 41, 45, 48 –56, 59, 136, 156, 157, 167n.31, 168n.41 Clay, Catrine, 97– 8 see also Love Story: Berlin, 1942 Cobb, Shelley, 15, 16 Cold War, 120 collaboration, 6, 7, 94, 95– 101, 102, 104, 107, 110, 120 colonialism, 120, 159n.3, 174n.3 Come See the Paradise (Alan Parker), 78 Coming Home (Hal Ashby), 138 Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter (Deborah Hoffmann), 69, 71 Cooke, Audrey, Rough Treatment, 146 Coppola, Sofia, 13, 36, 159n.3 see also Marie Antoinette Copying Beethoven (Agnieszka Holland), 36, 40, 41 Courage Under Fire (Edward Zwick), 26, 132, 133, 139 culture, 10, 73, 74, 90, 126, 129, 136, 146, 162n. 22 consumer, 144 mass, 79, 81 military, 146 popular, 4, 48, 139 queer, 53 Custen, George, 22, 35 Czerniakow, Adam, 115 Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée), 39 Dash, Julie, 11, 20

203

Gendering History on Screen see also Illusions Daughter of Suicide (Dempsey Rice), 71 Davis, Angela, 136 Davis, Geena, 22 Davis, Judy, 28 Dawtry, Adam, 57 de Gaulle, Charles, 102 Deer Hunter, The (Michael Cimino), 121 De-Lovely (Irwin Winkler), 43 Deitch, Donna, 13 Denis, Claire, 45, 66, 174n.3 see also Bastards; Chocolat; Trouble Every Day Denmark, 3, 10, 12, 34 Department of War Information, 68, 76, 78 deportation, 7, 76, 94, 102– 3, 115 Des Pres, Terrence, 104 Despentes, Virginie/Thi, Coralie Trinh, 45 see also Baise-moi Diamond, Hannah, 176n.31 Diary for My Children (Márta Mészáros), 66 Diary for My Lovers (Márta Mészáros), 66 Diary for My Mother and Father (Márta Mészáros), 66 Djebar, Assia, 12, 174n.3 D.O.A. (Corey Yuen), 55 documentary, 2, 5, 7, 9, 12, 25, 31, 34, 50, 93, 97, 98, 106, 123 – 4, 130, 131, 133, 137, 144, 146, 147, 149, 156, 159n.5, 168n.46, 172n.24 first-person, 3, 6, 10, 63– 92 mock-, 5, 25, 30 –1, 33, 65, 72 Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder), 55 doubling, 107–13 Dovey, Jon, 65 Dressmaker, The (Jocelyn Moorhouse), 5, 12, 28, 29 –30, 33

Dunye, Cheryl, 30– 1 see also Watermelon Woman, The duplicity see doubling Duras, Marguerite, 174n.3 DuVernay, Ava, 2, 13, 36 see also Selma Eldridge, David, 159n.5 England, Lynndie, 136 Enloe, Cynthia, 122, 129–30, 133 Entre Nos/Between Us (Paola Mendoza and Gloria La Morte), 158 Entre Nous (Diane Kurys), 94 epistemology, 26, 27, 137 Epperlein, Petra and Tucker, Michael, 124 see also Gunner Palace erasure, 11, 85, 131, 134 ethnicity, 14, 109, 160n.2 Europe Eastern, 11, 87, 100, 126, 156 West, 11, 12, 71, 87, 108, 182n.3 European Union (EU), 100, 101, 158 exceptionalism, 40, 122, 123, 127, 129, 129–30, 141, 154 exclusion, 6, 15, 25, 31, 37, 64, 123, 129, 143, 145 exploitation, 48 sexual, 48, 50, 56 fame, 6, 34, 37, 39, 40, 155 family, 2, 75– 6, 78, 82, 84, 86, 90, 145 fantasy, 10, 31, 47 –8, 67, 68, 101, 115, 154, 167n.34 fascism, 83, 84, 85, 97, 98, 106, 108, 113 Fathy, Safaa, 12 Faulks, Sebastian, 98, 101 Felman, Shoshana, 117, 177n.47 female/women filmmakers, 2, 3, 5, 9, 12–6, 20, 23, 28, 34, 75, 93 –4, 158, 174n.3 femininity, 40, 122, 127, 129

204

Index feminism/feminist, 1, 3, 9, 10, 11, 13–17, 19, 21, 23, 36, 37, 42– 3, 45, 47– 8, 50, 63 –92, 95– 6, 110, 122, 129, 130, 135, 146, 153– 4, 160n.2 Feng, Peter, 79 fiction films, 7, 66, 123, 147, 158 film festivals, 5, 14,63, 72, 181n.54 Adelaide International Film Festival, 173n.47 Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Artists in the Entertainment Industry (AGLA), 95 Atlanta, 76 Australian Directors Guild, 173n.47 Canberra International Film Festival, 173n.47 Cannes, 12, 159n.3 FIPA Festival Biarritz, 173n.47 Frameline San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, 95 Gaudí, 173n.42 Krakow Film Festival, 173n.47 LGBTQ, 30, 157 Margaret Mead, 72 Melbourne, 72 Montreal World, 72 NY Gay Film Festival, 95 Polish Film Festival in America, 173n.47 Rotterdam International Film Festival, 173n.42 San Francisco Asian American, 72 San Francisco International, 76 Sundance, 68, 72 Sydney, 72 Valladolid Film Festival, 173n.42, 173n.47 filmmaking commercial, 5, 10, 13, 60, 63, 71, 81, 124– 5, 130, 139, 172n.24

experimental, 11, 14, 15, 20, 25, 59, 60, 70 feminist, 19 fiction, 69, 124 women’s/female, 14, 15, 16 Fischer, Erica, 97 Fischer, Lucy, 26, 163n.40 flashback, 23, 33, 58, 61, 113, 118 Flight Nurse (Allan Dwan), 127 Foulkrod, Patricia, 124 see also Ground Truth, The Foxx, Jimmie, 162n.33 France, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12, 26, 34, 35, 45, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100–1, 102, 116, 119, 120, 158 France, occupied, 3, 101, 105 Francke, Lizzie, 14 Frida (Julie Taymor), 36 Fremde Haut/Unveiled (Angelina Maccarone), 156– 8 Freud, Sigmund, 41, 45 Friedrich, Su see Ties that Bind, The Funny Games (Michael Haneke), 48 Galler, Suzie see I Am My Mother's Daughter Gambon, Michael, 99 Gaullist, 102– 3 Gavron, Sarah, 12 see also Brick Lane; Suffragette Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), 38 General’s Daughter, The (Simon West), 146 Germany, 10, 26, 93, 98, 100–1, 105, 106, 109, 157– 8 Germany Pale Mother/Deutschland bleiche Mutter (Helma Sanders-Brahms), 66, 93 G.I. Jane (Ridley Scott), 146 Ginsberg, Terri, 50 Girlfriends (Claudia Weill), 160n.2

205

Gendering History on Screen Gleizes, Augustine, 6, 37, 41 –2, 166n.16 see also Augustine; Winocour, Alice God, Construction and Destruction (Samira Makhmalbaf), 7, 149, 151, 152 Godmilow, Jill, 11, 20 see also Waiting for the Moon Goldenberg, Myrna, 176n.31 Gorris, Marlene, 11 Gottlieb, Roger, 104–5 Grace is Gone (James C. Strouse), 139 Grey, Kylie, 147 see also My Home Your War Grindon, Leger, 31 Ground Truth, The (Patricia Foulkrod), 124, 146, 181n.47 Guantanamo Bay, 136 Gunner Palace (Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker), 124 Guttormsen, Katherine, 131 Haltof, Marek, 109 Halving the Bones (Ruth Ozeki), 5, 6, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72 –6, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 89, 90 Hanks, Tom, 22, 162n.33 Hannah Arendt (Margarethe von Trotta), 36 Hansen, Miriam, 82– 4 Haraway, Donna, 28 Harman, Sabrina, 136 Harper, Sue, 162n.22 Harron, Mary, 13, 36 see also I Shot Andy Warhol; Notorious Bettie Page, The Hart, Lynda, 168n.41 Hastie, Amelie, 14 Healthy Baby Girl, A (Judith Helfand), 71 Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson), 53 Helfand, Judith see Healthy Baby Girl, A

Henderson, Lisa, 53 heroes, women as, 17, 123 heroism, 3, 34, 98, 103, 132, 155 Hester Street (Joan Micklin Silver), 160n.2, 160n.6 heterosexuality, 40, 46, 107, 112 Hewitt, Leah, 94 Hilberg, Raul, 104 historicism, 26– 7 History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (Rea Tajiri), 5, 6, 33, 64, 67– 8, 71, 75, 76, 78 –9, 82, 84, 89, 90 Hitler, Adolf, 87, 108, 109 Hodgkin, Katharine, 64, 91 Hoffmann, Deborah, 69 see also Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter Holland, Agnieszka, 11 see also Copying Beethoven Hollywood, 14, 17, 19, 20, 22, 25, 30, 35, 55, 71, 78, 130, 132 Holocaust, 2, 3, 10, 17, 93–120 Home of the Brave (Irwin Winkler), 139 Horowitz, Sara, 96 Hour of Liberation (Heiny Srour), 12 Hungerjahre (Jutta Br€uckner), 93 Hunt, Krista, 153 Hunter, Duncan, 132, 133 Hyndman, Jennifer, 137 hysteria, 6, 37, 42 –4, 47 I Am My Mother's Daughter (Suzie Galler), 71 I for India (Sandhya Suri), 6, 64, 68, 79–80, 82, 89, 90 I Shot Andy Warhol (Mary Harron), 36, 40 identity, 14, 66, 74, 153 cultural, 73, 134 national, 25, 121 religious, 104

206

Index Illusions (Julie Dash), 20 Immigrant Memories (Yamina Benguigui), 71 In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis), 138 Inch’ Allah Dimanche (Yamina Benguigui), 158 India, 1, 35, 79 –82 Infamous (Douglas McGrath), 43 International Documentary Association Award, 72 internment, 6, 7, 63 –92, 102, 117, 156 invasion, 137, 152, 153 of the Falklands, 58 of France, 26 of Iraq, 147, 149 invisibility, 59, 123, 131, 135, 137 Iran, 3, 10, 12, 34, 150, 157 Iron Lady, The (Phyllida Lloyd), 6, 33, 36, 37, 57– 62 isolation, 74, 123, 126, 130, 138, 143 J. Edgar (Clint Eastwood), 38– 9 Jacir, Annemarie, 158 see also Salt of This Sea; When I Saw You Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne), 138 Jeffs, Christine, 36 see also Sylvia Jenkins, Patty, 13, 36, 48, 51 –2, 53 see also Monster Jerabek (Civia Tamarkin), 124 Jews/Jewish, 7, 27, 94, 101–7, 109, 112–16, 119, 120, 176n.23, 177n.42 Johnson, Liza, 125, 142 see also Return Juhasz, Alexandra, 171n.18 Julia (Fred Zinnemann), 19 Kael, Pauline, 19 Kalhatkar, Sonali, 146 Kanyusik, Will, 139

Kellner, Douglas, 138, 142, 149 Kristeva, Julia, 28 Kurys, Diane, 66 see also Entre Nous; Peppermint Soda La Misma Luna/Under the Same Moon (Patricia Riggen), 158 La Rafle/The Round Up (Roselyne Bosch), 4, 7, 94, 98, 101 –4, 105, 107, 112, 120 LaCapra, Dominick, 106 Landsberg, Alison, 18, 24, 59– 60, 81 Landy, Marcia, 100 Laura (Otto Preminger), 55 League of Their Own, A (Penny Marshall), 5, 13, 17– 25, 29, 33, 3 Le Dernier Métro (Franc ois Truffaut), 94 Le Pen, Marine, 120 Lebow, Alisa, 171n.18 Lehrer, Jim, 132, 133 Les Femmes de l'Ombre (Jean-Pierre Salomé) 94 lesbianism, 56, 96– 8, 112, 119 Leslie, Esther, 156 Levy, Wendy, 68 see also Naomi’s Legacy LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer), 30, 38, 51, 52, 157 Lindon, Vincent, 44 Linville, Susan, 11, 25– 6, 132–3, 154, 163n.40 Lioness (Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers), 7, 131– 8, 144, 147 Lloyd, Phyllida, 12, 36, 58 see also Iron Lady, The Love Story: Berlin, 1942 (Catrine Clay), 97–8, 106– 9 Loxham, Abigail, 86 Lucie Aubrac (Claude Berri), 94 Lucky Ones, The (Neil Burger), 139

207

Gendering History on Screen Maccarone, Angelina, 156 see also Fremde Haut/Unveiled Madonna, 22 Makhmalbaf, Hana, 12, 152 Makhmalbaf, Samira, 12, 149, 151 – 2 see also Buddha Collapsed out of Shame; God, Construction and Destruction Maltby, Richard, 13–14 Man Bites Dog (Benoît Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel), 48 Manning, Lory, 131 Manzano, Angelita, 51 Marianne and Juliane (Margarethe von Trotta), 36 Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola), 36, 43 Marshall, Penny, 13, 21, 24 see also Big; League of Their Own, A Martin, Angela, 14 masculinity, 12, 106, 121– 2, 124, 127, 139, 141–2, 155 masquerade, 20, 107 Matthews, Lisa, 25 see also Rosie’s Secret Maxwell, Margaret, 162n.33 Mayne, Judith, 15 McCann, Bryan, 51, 168n.49 McElwee, Ross, 65 McFarlane, Brian, 61 McHugh, Kathleen, 14 McLagan, Meg and Sommers, Daria, 131 see also Lioness media, 14, 15, 18, 24, 27, 38, 48, 59, 63–4, 81, 82, 90, 131– 2, 133, 149, 150, 151 media studies, 27, 61 Memories from the Department of Amnesia (Janice Tanaka), 71 memory, 3, 6, 10, 11, 28, 29, 33, 56, 64, 66, 69, 71, 77, 79, 89 –92, 101, 119, 120, 156

cultural, 10, 64 double, 109 fragments of, 64, 79 history and, 10, 11, 66, 77, 79, 90, 91 missing or flawed, 6, 90, 92 mother’s, 33, 71, 79, 89, 90 performative, 6, 89– 92 prosthetic, 81 –2 Mendoza, Paola and La Morte, Gloria, 158 see also Entre Nos/Between Us Merlet, Agnès, 12 see also Artemisia Mészáros, Márta, 11, 66 see also Diary for My Children; Diary for My Lovers; Diary for My Mother and Father metaphor, 39, 54, 74, 108, 116, 151, 164n.50 Middle East, 12, 65, 126, 156 migration, 6, 9, 11, 63– 92, 156, 158 Milani, Tahmineh, 12 mimicry, 107– 13 Mimura, Glenn, 75 mockumentary see documentary, mockModleski, Tania, 26, 163n.40 Moffatt, Tracey see Night Cries Monk, Claire, 161n.22 Monster (Patty Jenkins), 6, 33, 36, 37, 48–56, 57, 62 Moore, Michael, 65 Moorhouse, Jocelyn, 12 see also Dressmaker, The Morgan, Shannon, 131, 134 Morris, Errol, 124 Morrison, Toni, 177n.43 Munslow, Alun, 11, 23 Muslims, 120, 136, 147 My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong), 160n.5 My Country, My Country (Laura Poitras), 124

208

Index My Home Your War (Kylie Grey), 7, 149 myth, 7, 19, 25– 6, 102, 121– 3, 137, 141, 145, 155, 157 Nadar (Carla Subirana), 6, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 84– 6, 89, 173n.42 Nair, Mira, 13, 36 see also Amelia Naomi’s Legacy (Wendy Levy), 68, 71 narrative/s authentic, 33 emancipatory, 166n.25 historical, 24, 81 imposed on raw events, 18 occupation, 94 Orientalist, 147 past turned into, 11 and the Protestant work ethic, 27 of self-invention, 165n.10 soldiers’, 146 of wartime and revolution, 133 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 38 National Socialism, 93, 114 Native Americans, 78 Nava, Becky, 131, 134, 137 Navajo Talking Picture (Arlene Bowman), 69, 71 Nazis, 17, 96, 98, 104, 106– 10, 116, 177n.39 Neshat, Shirin, 12 Nesson, Sara, 124 see also Poster Girl Nichols, Bill, 69 Night Cries (Tracey Moffat), 71 Notorious Bettie Page, The (Mary Harron), 36, 40 November Moon (Alexandra von Grote), 5, 6, 33, 95 –6, 97, 98,

104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 111, 113, 116–17, 120 occupation, 7, 9, 12, 93–120, 123, 136–8, 145– 53, 174n.3, 174n.8 O’Donnell, Rosie, 22 Of Great Events and Ordinary People (Raoul Ruiz), 65 Oliver, Kelly, 135 Once My Mother (Sophia Turkiewicz), 5, 6, 33, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71, 86– 9, 91 O’Neil, Desmond, 61 Onwurah, Ngozi see Body Beautiful, The, 71 oppression, 51, 53, 165n.10 Orientalism, 123, 136, 154 Oscar and Lucinda (Gillian Armstrong), 160n.5 OscarsSowhite see #OscarsSowhite Owings, Alison, 104 Ozeki, Ruth, 64, 72 –5, 81, 84, 90, 172n.24 see also Tale for the Time-Being, A; Body of Correspondence; Halving the Bones Pakier, Malgorzata, 101 Pakistan, 1, 128 palimpsest, 119– 20 Patton (Franklin Schaffner), 121 Peirce, Kimberly, 125, 138 see also Stop-Loss People vs. Larry Flynt, The (Miloš Forman), 39 Peppermint Frieden (Marianne Rosenbaum), 93 Peppermint Soda (Diane Kurys), 66 performativity, 16, 34, 46, 65, 72, 82, 89, 90, 113 Perkins, Rachel, 12 see also Bran Nue Dae persecution, 156, 157 Pétain, Marshal, 102

209

Gendering History on Screen Petrolle, Jean, 16 Petty, Lori, 22 Piano, The (Jane Campion), 4, 5, 59, 159n.5, 160n.5 Pidduck, Julianne, 20– 1 Pisier, Marie-France, 174n.3 Platoon (Oliver Stone), 121 Poitras, Laura, 124 see also My Country, My Country Poland, 6, 64, 87, 109 Polaschek, Bronwyn, 36 –7, 165n.6 pornography, 45, 146 Poster Girl (Sara Nesson), 124, 130 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 123, 124, 125, 130, 142, 145 Potter, Sally, 11 Pralle, Arlene, 51 Private Benjamin (Howard Zieff), 127 Proust, Marcel, 26, 91, 115, 146 A La Recherche du Temps Perdu [Remembrance of Things Past], 27 Puar, Jasbir, 127

Riggen, Patricia, 158 see also La Misma Luna/Under the Same Moon rights civil, 38 human, 156, 181n.54 women’s, 12, 24, 153 Romance (Catherine Breillat), 45 Rosa Luxemburg (Margarethe von Trotta), 36 Rosenbaum, Marianne, 93 see also Peppermint Frieden Rosenstone, Robert, 17– 25, 121 Rosenthal, Abigail, 104 Rosie’s Secret (Lisa Matthews), 5, 25, 30 Roth, John, 105 Ro€uan, Brigitte, 174n.3 Rousso, Henri, 102, 120 Rubin, Gayle, 45 Ruthig, Ranie, 131, 137 Rygiel, Kim, 153

Quart, Barbara, 160n.2 Queen, The (Stephen Frears), 36

Salt of This Sea (Annemarie Jacir), 158 Sanders-Brahms, Helma, 11 see also Germany Pale Mother/ Deutschland bleiche Mutter Satrapi, Marjane, 12 Saving Private Ryan (Stephen Spielberg), 26, 121 Schatz, Thomas, 13 Scholem, Gershom, 27 Schragenheim, Felice, 97 –8, 106– 9 Scranton, Deborah, 124 see also War Tapes, The Screen Australia, 25, 161n.12 Seal, Lizzie, 49 Segre, Andrea, 158 see also Shun Li and the Poet Selma (Ava DuVernay), 36, 159n.5 sexism, 5, 17, 23, 86

racism, 17, 74, 78, 80, 85, 120, 136, 157 Radstone, Susannah, 64, 91 reconciliation, 63– 92, 95, 113, 119 Remembering Wei Yi Fang, Remembering Myself (Yvonne Welbon), 71 Rendez-vous d’Anna, Les (Chantal Akerman), 94 resistance, 6, 7, 9, 85, 93 –120, 153, 176n.31 Return (Liza Johnson), 7, 125, 142– 5, 180n.39 revisionism, 6, 34 rhetoric, 3, 16, 18, 62, 63, 70, 89, 146 Ricci, Christina, 48 –9, 52 Rice, Dempsey see Daughter of Suicide

210

Index sexuality, 10, 45, 47, 53, 95, 106, 107, 113, 136, 149 Shannon, Michael, 142 Shepitko, Larisa, 11 Shining, The (Stanley Kubrick), 29 Shoah (Claude Lanzmann), 114, 117 Short Life of José Antonio Gutiérrez, The (Heidi Specogna), 124 Shun Li and the Poet (Andrea Segre), 158 Silver, Joan Micklin, 25, 160n.2, 160n.6 see also Hester Street Silver City (Sophia Turkiewicz), 160n.5 Silverman, Kaja, 55–6 Silverman, Max, 30, 33, 119–20 Sinnreich, Helene, 176n.31 Smyth, J.E., 19 So Proudly We Hail (Mark Sandrich), 127 Sobchack, Vivian, 24, 59 Soko, 44 soldiering, 7, 123, 127, 139, 141 –2 soldiers female, 7, 122– 5, 127, 130– 8, 139, 145, 146, 154 male, 18, 96, 122, 143, 146, 152 returning, 124 –5, 138– 9, 143, 145 Spain, 3, 10, 12, 34, 84, 86 Specogna, Heidi, 124 see also Short Life of José Antonio Gutiérrez, The Spiropoulou, Angeliki, 28, 33 Srour, Heiny, 12 see also Hour of Liberation Stein, Gertrude, 20 Stop-Loss (Kimberly Peirce), 125, 138 storytelling, 10, 20, 34, 71, 73, 98 Streisand, Barbra, 13, 25 see also Yentl Stubbs, Jonathan, 2 Subirana, Carla, 6, 12, 64, 84– 6 see also Nadar

Suffragette (Sarah Gavron), 37 Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder), 55 Suri, Sandhya, 64, 79– 80, 84 see also I for India Swoon (Tom Kalin), 39, 43 Sylvia (Christine Jeffs), 36 Tabatabai, Jasmine, 156, 157 Taberna, Helena, 12 Tajiri, Rea, 64, 68, 75, 77, 78 –9, 81, 84, 90–1, 92 see also History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige Tale for the Time-Being, A (Ruth Ozeki), 72, 172n.23 Taliban, 122, 152 Tamarkin, Civia, 124 see also Jerabek Tanaka, Janice, 69, 75 see also Memories from the Department of Amnesia; Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway? Tasker, Yvonne, 122, 123, 127, 130, 145–6 Taymor, Julie, 13, 36 see also Frida Tec, Nechama, 105 technology, 17, 83, 84, 89, 155 television, 24, 25, 35, 38, 50, 53, 55, 59, 93, 148, 164n.2 Thatcher, Margaret, 6, 37, 57– 61, 169n.66 see also Lloyd, Phyllida; Iron Lady, The Theron, Charlize, 49, 51, 168n.49 Thi, Coralie Trinh, 45 Third World women, 146, 154 Thomsen, Ulrich, 139 Ties that Bind, The (Su Friedrich), 71 Title IX Amendment, 24, 162n.35 Tlatli, Moufida, 12

211

Gendering History on Screen Tolkas, Alice, 20 Toplin, Robert Brent, 121 trauma, 11, 12, 55, 75, 76, 79, 82, 89, 93, 132, 139, 143, 145, 156 Trinh Minh-ha, 75 –6, 81 Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis), 45 Trump, Donald, 43, 120 Turkiewicz, Sophia, 12, 15 –16, 64, 86, 160n.5 see also Once My Mother; Silver City Turner, Graeme, 39 Une Affaire de Femmes (Claude Chabrol), 94 United Kingdom (UK), 3, 7, 12, 34, 57, 79–81, 98, 101, 158, 161n.22 United Kingdom, A (Amma Asante), 1 United States of America (US), 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 13, 25, 26, 68, 71, 78, 120, 121, 124, 132, 135, 137, 142, 147, 149, 150, 152 Varda, Agnes, 174n.3 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 7, 101, 113–20 Vergés, Rosa, 12 Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock), 163n.40 Veteran’s Administration (VA), 143 Viceroy’s House (Gurinder Chadha), 1 victimhood, 7, 122– 3, 151, 155 victimisation, 41, 44, 122, 123, 146 victims, women as, 7, 43, 93, 122, 123, 127, 133, 136, 142, 146– 7, 152, 154, 175n.14 Vidal, Belén, 161n.22 Vietnam, 129, 138, 139 violence, 37, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56, 84, 97, 103, 135, 139, 141, 143, 146–7, 152, 153 sexual, 143, 146 visibility, 15, 19, 25, 33, 35, 70, 77, 94, 102, 122, 137, 153

voice, 13, 34, 48– 56, 65, 80, 108, 117, 147, 156 voice-over, 33, 45, 53, 54, 55– 6, 87, 88, 89, 108, 133, 166n.18, 167n.34 von Grote, Alexandra, 94, 96, 106, 119, 174n.7 see also November Moon von Trotta, Margarethe, 11, 36 see also Hannah Arendt; Marianne and Juliane; Rosa Luxemburg vulnerability, 38, 53, 55, 79, 109, 126 Waiting for Fidel (Jonas Mekas/ Michael Rubbo), 65 Waiting for the Moon (Jill Godmilow), 20 war, 6, 9, 11, 12, 18, 63, 75, 76, 84, 86, 94, 114, 122, 129, 130, 132– 3, 135, 137–8, 142, 146, 153, 159n.3 films, 3, 121, 124, 130 on terror, 122, 146, 153, 154 War Tapes, The (Deborah Scranton), 124, 146 wars Afghanistan, 3, 10, 121– 54 Gulf 1990 –1, 26, 132 Iraq, 3, 10, 121–54 Spanish Civil, 84, 173n.44 World War I, 121 World War II, 6, 23, 58, 64, 75, 76, 78, 86, 93, 97, 113, 127, 138, 139, 186 Watermelon Woman, The (Cheryl Dunye), 5, 30 –2 Wearing, Sadie, 57, 58 Weaving, Hugo, 29 Weill, Claudia see Girlfriends Welbon, Yvonne see Remembering Wei Yi Fang, Remembering Myself Wengraf, Susan, 38 Wexman, Virginia Wright, 16

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Index When I Saw You (Annemarie Jacir), 158 Where Hands Touch (Amma Asante), 159n.3 White, Hayden, 18, 19 –20, 22, 69 White, Patricia, 4 Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway? (Janice Tanaka), 69, 75 Wings (William Wellman and Harry d’Arrast), 121 Winocour, Alice, 12, 36, 43 see also Augustine Winslet, Kate, 28 witnessing, 103, 109, 117, 149, 171n.18 Woolf, Virginia, 28

Wuornos, Aileen, 6, 37, 48– 53, 57, 168n.41 see also Jenkins, Patty; Monster Wust, Lilly, 97– 8, 106 –9 Yankee Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz), 78 Yanne, Josée, 94 see also Boulevard des Hirondelles Yasui, Lise, 75 Yentl (Barbra Streisand), 13 Young, James, 109 Young, Kimberly, 24 Zero Dark Thirty (ZDT) (Kathryn Bigelow), 7, 125, 126– 8, 130, 138, 141, 143, 147, 159n.5

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