Search engine for discovering works of Art, research articles, and books related to Art and Culture
Javascript must be enabled to continue!
On the Maternal ‘Creaturely’ Cinema of Andrea Arnold
View through CrossRef
This article argues that Andrea Arnold's cinematic treatment of the maternal body is transgressive and innovative. Through a close analysis of Arnold's first film Milk (1998) and using an example from Fish Tank (2009) I analyse Arnold's production of what I call a specifically maternal, embodied, sexualised viewing experience. I suggest that the viewer is addressed and positioned as always in a state of being-with the maternal sexual subject on a corporeal, intimate level. I develop a notion of ‘maternal creaturely cinema’ of which, I suggest, Arnold's work is exemplary, and discuss how this particular creaturely cinematic treatment of the maternal is inaugurated in Milk, as well as indicating how it can be traced through in the later Fish Tank. I argue that Arnold's maternal creaturely cinema, through a complex interaction between form and content, transmits to the viewer a mode of ethical relatedness, or hospitality towards the stranger/other, that is situated in a specifically maternal, sexual and corporeal experience.
Title: On the Maternal ‘Creaturely’ Cinema of Andrea Arnold
Description:
This article argues that Andrea Arnold's cinematic treatment of the maternal body is transgressive and innovative.
Through a close analysis of Arnold's first film Milk (1998) and using an example from Fish Tank (2009) I analyse Arnold's production of what I call a specifically maternal, embodied, sexualised viewing experience.
I suggest that the viewer is addressed and positioned as always in a state of being-with the maternal sexual subject on a corporeal, intimate level.
I develop a notion of ‘maternal creaturely cinema’ of which, I suggest, Arnold's work is exemplary, and discuss how this particular creaturely cinematic treatment of the maternal is inaugurated in Milk, as well as indicating how it can be traced through in the later Fish Tank.
I argue that Arnold's maternal creaturely cinema, through a complex interaction between form and content, transmits to the viewer a mode of ethical relatedness, or hospitality towards the stranger/other, that is situated in a specifically maternal, sexual and corporeal experience.
Related Results
Maternal Thinking in U.S. Contexts of Gun Violence and Police Brutality
Maternal Thinking in U.S. Contexts of Gun Violence and Police Brutality
This article retrieves Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking as a resource for analyzing contemporary activism by mothers advocating for gun control and police reform. Concerns about et...
From Chinese independent cinema to art cinema: Convergence and divergence
From Chinese independent cinema to art cinema: Convergence and divergence
With the decline of Chinese independent cinema, art cinema has grown at a fast pace since the mid-2010s in China. There has been a convergence as well as a divergence of independen...
Faroese cinema and transnational nation-building
Faroese cinema and transnational nation-building
In addition to providing a brief history of Faroese cinema in a broad perspective, this article examines the juxtaposition of the transnationalism of Nordic cinema and what could b...
Parenting through Horror: Reassurance in Jennifer Kent's The Babadook
Parenting through Horror: Reassurance in Jennifer Kent's The Babadook
This essay contends that Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014) expands the subgenre of maternal horror by exploring reassurance as a fraught motherly act, one that is imbricated with...
The Struggle for History: Lindsay Anderson Teaches Free Cinema
The Struggle for History: Lindsay Anderson Teaches Free Cinema
In spring 1986, Lindsay Anderson appeared in a television programme on British cinema. This was part of a series of three under the heading British Cinema: Personal View, produced ...
Choisir de choisir — croire en ce monde
Choisir de choisir — croire en ce monde
In the philosophy of Pascal and Kierkegaard and the cinema of Bresson and Dreyer, Deleuze finds “a strange thought,” an “extreme moralism that opposes the moral,” and a “faith that...
The Origin, Practice and Meaning of the Free Cinema Manifesto
The Origin, Practice and Meaning of the Free Cinema Manifesto
In the late 1940s, the independent film quarterly Sequence, which championed a personal, committed cinema, stood for an attitude towards film-making that provided an important basi...
Performing the National? Scottish Cinema in the Time of Indyref
Performing the National? Scottish Cinema in the Time of Indyref
This article examines Scottish cinema during the period 2012–17, assessing the ways in which the nation's constitutional debate, Scottish–English relations and discourses of nation...
Recent Results
Jerusalem Building: Lolly Willowes, Blake and Rural Politics
Jerusalem Building: Lolly Willowes, Blake and Rural Politics
Sylvia Townsend Warner's work is richly allusive, yet the precise purpose of her myriad references to, and echoes of, earlier works of literature often remains opaque. This essay e...
The Bamum Coronation Ceremony as described by King Njoya
The Bamum Coronation Ceremony as described by King Njoya
In the French Cameroons, West Africa, live the Bamum whose population is estimated at about 75,000. Their territory is bounded on the north by that of the British Trusteeship terri...