ABSTRACT
In this chapter Dushi and Rodin examine the phenomenon of the feminine close-up in cinema with the aims of theorizing its relation to the female body and questioning the principle of indexicality, that is, that of an image as an implied “signifier of”, with relation to the representation of femininity. Starting with and against the background of the phallic, “made-to-be-fetishized” close-up, and proceeding to other forms of feminine close-ups and their textual horizons, their discursive itinerary circles around the varying levels of potentiality for what Bracha L. Ettinger (2006) defines as matrixial, that is, beyond-the-phallus, a-structural readings of the image. As opposed to the Freudian vision of the uncanny as a phantasmatic atrocity to be escaped from (disturbing images are to be repressed), the matrixial paradigm provides a pathway to a traumaticity/disturbance as that which opens up a space for one’s self-recreation through identification with the invisible and the unspoken. Within the cinematic context, the maternal connotations of a feminine image inscribed into the feminine close-up render the encounter with a disturbing proximity to gestures, holes and textures of the cinematic image insistently uncanny. This kind of traumatic-and-too-intimate encounter with the image-as-feminine, they argue, opens up a space for transformative and creative reading, as it brings about the undermining of one’s symbolic, in this case, not least one’s imaginary tenets.
