Kate Mondloch, A Capsule Aesthetic: Feminist Materialisms in New Media Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 151 pp. ISBN: 9781517900496 (paperback, $27) Alberto Brodesco and Federico Giordano, editors, Body Images in the Post-Cinematic Scenario: The Digitization of Bodies (Milan: Mimesis International, 2017). 195 pp., ISBN: 9788869771095 (paperback, $27.50) Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, editors, What’s Eating You? Food and Horror on Screen (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 370pp., ISBN: 9781501322389 (hardback, $105); ISBN: 9781501343964 (paperback, $27.96); ISBN: 9781501322419 (ebook, $19.77) Kaya Davies Hayon, Sensuous Cinema: The Body in Contemporary Maghrebi Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). 181pp., ISBN: 9781501335983 (hardback, $107.99)
Browse
Brian Bergen-Aurand
Screen Bodies 3.2 engages with a wide variety of topics—fat studies, contemporary queer cinema, (pre)posterity, puzzle films, grief and truth in filmmaking, feminist materialism, digitized bodies, food and horror, and Maghrebi cinema. As well, the selection of articles in this issue represents studies of several media—tv programs, films, publicity stills, and photographs—from a number of locations around the globe—North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. What holds this general issue together, though, is a concern over expectation, assumption, and supposition: what we suppose screens and bodies do and what we suppose they do not do. As usual, with this journal, the focus of this consideration is doublehanded: screen as projection and screen as prohibition. The articles below explore the duality of screens and our responses to them. They engage screening expectation as showing, exposing, divulging, and, at the same time, as testing, partitioning, and withholding. To screen expectation is to reveal and conceal it, and, as these articles argue—each in their own way—this process is what we all engage in when we engage with screening.
Screening the Slob
Neoliberal Failure, Fatness, and Disability in “King-Size Homer”
Mackenzie Edwards
This article explores the archetype of the slob, narrowing in on its depiction in the episode “King-Size Homer” from The Simpsons (1989–), the long-running satirical animated series created by James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, and Sam Simon. More than simply analyzing what constitutes the slob, this article focuses on how the slob operates. Attention is paid to the enmeshing of fatness and disability. The undercurrent of neoliberal ideology that runs through the episode is made apparent. The article works intersectionally to understand the slob as being someone who is abject in a multitude of ways. Finally, it considers the topic of disidentification and the possibilities that it opens up for a better analysis and understanding of the episode. And throughout the article, the key themes of failure and the pursuit of failure are explored.
Francesco Sticchi
In this article, I analyze Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden (Ah-gassi, 2016) by addressing its puzzle narrative and complex interactive dynamics as embodied and affective categories. In particular, I employ Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope together with Giuliana Bruno’s work on media theory and Steffen Hven’s notion of the embodied fabula to show how the film, in all its aesthetic complexity, enacts a creative and transformative experience based on the continuous subversion of the power dynamics I describe. Furthermore, I demonstrate how this semantic and experiential reconstruction couples viewers’ alignment with the two main characters in their rebellion against patriarchal power and obsessive male fantasies. Ultimately, then, in this article I aim to connect the experiential and affective engagement of the film with a critical reading of power dynamics as ecologically situated structures to be challenged and revolutionized through a creative process of becoming.
Daisuke Miyao
The process of modernization in Japan appeared as a separation of the senses and remapping of the body, particularly privileging the sense of vision. How did the filmmakers, critics, and novelists in the 1920s and 1930s respond to such a reorganization of the body and the elevation of vision in the context of film culture? How did they formulate a cinematic discourse on remapping the body when the status of cinema was still in flux and its definition was debated? Focusing on cinematic commentary made by different writers, this article tackles these questions. Sato Haruo, Ozu Yasujiro, and Iwasaki Akira questioned the separation of the senses, which was often enforced by state. Inspired by German cinema released in Japan at that time, they explored the notion of the haptic in cinema and problematized the privileged sense of vision in this new visual medium.
Editorial
Screening Disability
Brian Bergen-Aurand
This issue of Screen Bodies features a Screen Shots section focusing on screening disability, including essays on new disability documentaries, vacillation and the dis/abled male body—especially as it plays out in Fred Zimmerman’s 1950 film The Men—and questions of masquerade and representations of Richard III on stage and screen. It also includes general essays on “undoing” gender through complicity and subversion, the rise in the importance of the haptic in Japanese society, culture, and filmmaking in the 1920s, and an investigation of uncertainty and the “generosity paradox” with regard to gender, sexuality, and ability in cyborg cinema.
Paul Walker
This article explores interactions with difference, highlighting what I call the “generosity paradox,” a term that refers to how we suspend disbelief and certainty in favor of a constructed potentiality not limited by preexistent knowledge or categories of authenticity and legitimacy. Touching on overlapping concepts from rhetoric, philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, and queer theory, the discussion explicates fictional encounters with radical alterity in the film Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) to show that attempted respite from frustrating, confusing, and frightening interactions limits our voice, undermines difference, and favors a unifying persuasive intent, which more likely than not involves an attempt to change Others rather than allowing our mutual differences to generatively remain.
The Male Body as Vacillation
Disability, Gender, and Discourse in The Men
Elisabetta Girelli
This article considers the representation of gendered disability in The Men (Fred Zinnemann, 1950), Marlon Brando’s first film. A groundbreaking yet deeply ambiguous text, the film explores notions of normative and non-normative physicality through the lens of masculinity, sexuality, and their implications for human status. In the light of key works by disability scholars and of Judith Butler’s discussion of the cultural construction of the body, this article examines the multiple and subversive meanings made available by the film, and the extent to which The Men allows for a different bodily identity based on dissent.
Masquerading Early Modern Disability
Sexuality, Violence, and the Body (Politic) in Richard III
Lauren Coker
Building on Katherine Schaap Williams’s (2009) reading of the play, this article uses a disability studies approach to consider Richard Loncraine’s 1995 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Loncraine’s adaptation allows modern-day viewers to experience a highly visual (and often intimate) exchange with Sir Ian McKellen as Richard Gloucester. Specifically, Gloucester’s verbal claims of a disability that renders him unsuitable as a leader and a lack of sexual prowess are juxtaposed alongside sexually violent visual actions and imagery—particularly in the form of phallic symbols. The juxtaposition of verbal passivity in opposition to visual aggression demonstrates how Richard showcases or hides his disability as he pursues the throne: the first half of the film features Richard masquerading ability, while the second half features him masquerading disability.
A. Anthony, Tess S. Skadegård Thorsen, Steen Ledet Christiansen, and Carmela Garritano
Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, eds., Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 419 pp. ISBN: 9780262036603 (hardback, $49.95)
Katharina Lindner, Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018), 272 pp. ISBN: 9781784536244 (hardback, £72)
Saige Walton, Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology, and the Art of Entanglement (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 280 pp. ISBN 978 90 8964 951 5 (hardback, €95)
Marietta Kesting, Affective Images: Post-apartheid Documentary Perspectives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017). vi +278pp. ISBN: 9781438467856 (hardback, $95); ISBN: 9781438467849 (paperback, $29.95)