ABSTRACT
The dialogue I initiated with Martine Beugnet for this book is a formal continuation of a series of conversations that have taken place between us over several years. Although our theoretical approaches to cinema are, in many ways, radically different, I became extremely interested in the way that her use of haptic theory could advance feminist thinking about the “problem” of the woman’s body and its representation in cinema. Influenced by American film theorists Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, in particular, her knowledge of French cinema, both of the recent “transgressive” genre (on which our dialogue is focused) and the history of French film more generally, places her in a perfect position to reflect on the series of encounters that we cover here. In the first instance, the centrality of the body and “embodiment” in this cinema is, in itself, a challenge to traditional feminist thinking (in which I include myself) about the female body on the screen in relation to women’s avant-garde film. In a negation of the woman’s body as object of the look and its sexualization in all the multivalent forms of patriarchal culture, feminist experimental film tended to adopt a minimalist aesthetic, very often in combination with the theoretical or essayistic. Beugnet has traced the return of early, pre-minimalist engagement with the body (for instance in the films of Carolee Schneemann) in some performance and installation work by recent women artists. In our dialogue, however, she finds a similar preoccupation with corporeality in the “transgressive” feature film genre. While this is, in itself, of interest to film aesthetics, the unusual number of women directors associated with this cinema is of very particular interest to feminist film aesthetics. The work of the women directors discussed below has, of course, attracted a considerable amount of interest over the years, particularly due to their insistence on the corporal and their unhesitating willingness to display female sexuality on the screen, not as sanitized but as persistently associated with violence, sexual violence, bodily disintegration, and so on. Beugnet’s use of haptic theory and its acceptance of the bodily and the sensuous enables a feminist approach to these films that cuts across both the American theorists’ unwillingness to be limited by a feminist label and the particular directors’ unwillingness to be categorized by gender. Furthermore, Beugnet locates this eruption of the body, its flaunting on the screen as a site of disgust, within particular social and historical contexts. She looks back to the moment in French history, the late 1950s and early 1960s, when a fetishized culture of feminine cleanliness, as well as the “whiteness” and polish of the modern kitchen with which it was closely associated, “masked” the atrocities of the Algerian war and the wounds that it left on the French male psyche. Beugnet suggests that the corporeality of recent women’s films may represent a return of that historic repressed. She also suggests, however, that the dematerializaton of the female body in digital representation gives the insistence of the corporeality of the feminine an immediate, contemporary context. In our discussion, Beugnet extends these topics into areas of more aesthetic concern in which she reflects on the “transgressive” films’ use of a particular cinematic style that raises consciousness of other bodily senses to challenge the usual domination of the optical. Here she notes that the materiality of the human body may fuse with the materiality of film itself, confusing not only the interior of the narrative with the surface of the screen but also challenging the traditional distance between spectator and the cinema. Ultimately, she argues for a cinema that enables its spectator to think through sensuousness and sensation in a way that is of extreme interest to and relevance for feminist film theory.
