ABSTRACT
The concept of death as a pulsating force beyond the limits of the organism is explored in a series of films where women and mothers are violently caught within the machinic repetition of death. By looking at physical and psychic trauma, corporeal wounds and bloody mutilation through de Manian materiality, it is possibly to see blood, the other and the body as totally inhuman, confronting the traumatic kernel of a world without and unlike us. Whether one’s world view is disarticulated by mechanical and mindless violence, as in Inside, or a trauma intensifies into a visceral destruction of “civilised” values and a descent into the darkness, as in Vinyan, violence reveals a world beyond the aesthetics of beauty. Screens and bodies become evacuated of interiority as materiality is foregrounded on the surface of the skin. Marina de Van’s In My Skin comes closer to fleshing out de Manian materiality in her treatment of the body as parts, separate from the unity of the body, and as foreign to the mind and subject. In this sense, the female characters encountered in these films do not subscribe to an idea of a healthy and happy subjectivity, trapped within their individual feelings and imaginations, but go beyond the limits of their selves and bodies, towards an affectless, unemotional and detached state where blood and the body are no longer the arbiters of vitalism, but of death as a mechanical force.
