Tuesday, April 13, 2010

A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story (2006)


director: Agnieszka Holland

This movie tells a story in a very simple/uncomplicated way (it is made for tv after all) with a huge impact on the viewer. It avoids the melodramatic perspective by equally focusing on the mother and her own dealing with a transdenger teen (after the tragic events narrated here, she becomes an important transgender activist in US). The ethnic/class context is well emphasized in this intersectional story where sexism and cissexism are way more complicated when other forms of inequality are dangerously at play. Not only focusing on the individual drama but on constellations of inequality and by decentering a form of detached/uninvolved narrative (that follows only the hero/antihero), "A Girl Like Me" is a rare gem that must be seen by teenagers at school and adults alike. This is how education functions.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Freud (1962)



director: John Huston

This biopic focuses on some of the events between 1885 and 1890 from, as the title says, Freud’s life. The personal perspective and the expressionist focus on characters and their well-documented dreams are violently contradicted by the opening and ending parts that are narrated by the director in the most positivist/scientific manner. Freud (Montgomery Clift) becomes just another case of a great dead man, a scientific genius in the line of Copernicus and Darwin. In that sense the whole story moves towards the discovery of the Oedipus complex (revealed in the last part of the movie).
Male hysteria or in Freud’s own term, little hysteria, becomes a major theme of this movie and the dramatic engine in the search of an over-arching theory to cure his patient and his own painful neuroses.
Besides the cinematic portraits of Freud, Breuer (Larry Parks) or Viennese physicians, the exploration of Charcot’s persona is one of my personal delights in this movie. Charcot (Fernand Ledoux) and his practice with hysterics (male and female), hypnosis and celebrity are depicted in the way that I imagined the whole business by reading tons of literature on this phenomenon. Freud’s role as PhD student under Charcot’s supervision is explored in a delicate and faithful manner in relation to the written materials on the subject.
Freud's therapy with Cecily Koertner (Susannah York) represents the discovery of the talking cure with its free associations and hilarious “Freudian slips” and also “the cure” for male hysteria in the sense of abandoning it and Freud becoming a father of a major theory. The focus falls on a scientific/ not-fully-embodied discovery of the Oedipus complex and the martyrization of the individual rational scientist in the face of a retrograde society that denies progress. No indication of Viennese anti-Semitism or scholarly masculinism. Freud’s struggle with the Viennese society becomes an individualist fight for novelty and innovation. In this sense, John Huston’s movie is an ode to modernism in scientific discourse.
The cinematic language follows the film noir/expressionist aesthetics and gets mixed very well with the accurate theoretical/psychoanalytical language. What I particularly liked about it was the lack of fear in dealing with theory. There are some complicated ideas out there that you would never hear in more recent biopics, but Charles Kaufman managed to squeeze them in the script (or better say Jean-Paul Sartre, who’s name disappeared from the project after his second draft was considered too long). Surprisingly the narration works better this way. The story becomes more engaging, this is one of the few theoretical thrillers that I have seen.
At the level of acting-directing, Montgomery Clift was under a lot of pressure on the set: the director used the Freudian setting for outing his main actor, emphasizing the repression part (as a direct connection to him being gay) while filming and provoking Monty to speak about his sexuality. No wonder Monty tried to avoid this movie or any contact with its director, to the point of being sued by Universal for the delay of the production.

All in all, Freud is not easy to forget.

image: the Polish version of the poster, from here 

Sunday, April 4, 2010

The return of the ugly


How can we think more positively about beauty? As I observe on a daily basis, beauty is used (as a highly popular term) to define multiple privilege, as a sort of intersectional subjective projection that explores personal entitlement (I am talking about the outside/ inside/ me/ other/ world/ transcendental level). Beauty is always exclusionary, it is always constructed in opposition with the despicable ugly. Instead of claiming the new beautiful (and also a re-assignment of a new ugly), why not claiming the ugly and its negativity? Instead of looking for a positive version of beautiful, why not embracing the ugly but without transforming it into the new beautiful?

Jill wrote a strong manifesto in this sense (I took it from here and even if I have some problems with the whole concept of choice detached from structural inequalities, it is a courageous step against beauty discourses):

The Ugly Manifesta
I’d rather be courageous than beautiful. I will not be demure, quiet and pretty… instead I will be loud, I will get into the face of those who try to oppress others and I will confront them. I will be that loud, “ugly” feminist.

I’d rather be unique than beautiful. I will wear the clothes that make me feel happiest in whatever manner I desire. I will wear as much or as little makeup as I feel comfortable with each day. I will shave as much or as little as I see fit. If I happen to fit some standard of beauty one day, fine; I will not care one way or another because my confidence does not depend on anyone’s approval but my own.

I’d rather be happy than beautiful. I will not waste a moment of my life worrying about how I look to others. I’d rather spend my time concerned with how I am trating others, and interacting with them!

I’D RATHER BE UGLY THAN BEAUTIFUL. Being ugly means saying fuck you to the beauty norms and embracing the person I am, not the person that the world is trying to tell me to be; being ugly means being totally happy with the person I am and never hiding that girl from the world, no matter what.
 photo from Improbable Research

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