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WOMEN, FILM, AND OCEANS A/PART: THE CRITICAL HUMOR OF TRACEY MOFFATT, MONICA PELLIZZARI, AND CLARA LAW by Alessandra Senzani A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 2008 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study is the culmination of interests that developed in Italy and travelled with me through the Australian land, the Ohio snow, and the Floridian tropical sun where the final project ripened. The voices of many scholars, colleagues, friends, and family have made this research possible. Foremost, I owe my thanks to the professors who guided me through this journey. Dr. Freedman has served as a supportive chair and has first helped me polish my theoretical and analytical skills in film studies. Dr. Tamburri has been an academic mentor and his friendly advice and courses have been invaluable to my academic formation. Although through late encounters, I am greatly indebted to Dr. Hokenson for her passionate understanding of the comic and to Dr. Guneratne, whose far-reaching knowledge of Third and accented cinemas has enriched this study in too many ways to count. Many thanks go to all the friends whose laughter and food have nurtured and motivated me through the years in Boca Raton. My greatest debt I owe to my family; to my grandmother who imparted me stern respect for education, to my mother who has passed down to me her passion for global cinema and languages and to my father, who has been a supportive and critical reader of my work. Finally, this study would have never seen the light of day without the encouragement and patience of Stephane, who in fact began it all, with a trip to Australia and his willingness to move, struggle, endure, and adapt so that I could pursue my academic career. iii ABSTRACT Author: Alessandra Senzani Title: Women, Film, and Oceans A/Part: The Critical Humor of Tracey Moffatt, Monica Pellizzari, and Clara Law Institution: Florida Atlantic University Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Eric Freedman Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Year: 2008 The politicized use of humor in accented cinema is a tool for negotiating particular formations of identity, such as sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and class. The body of work produced by contemporary women filmmakers working in Australia, specifically Tracey Moffatt, Monica Pellizzari, and Clara Law, illustrates how these directors have employed critical humor as a response to their multiple marginalization as women, Australian, and accented filmmakers. In their works, humor functions as a critical tool to deconstruct the contradictions in dominant discourses as they relate to (neo)colonial, racist, globalized, patriarchal, and displaced pasts and presents. Produced within Australian national cinema, but emerging from experiences of geographical displacements that defy territorial borders, their films illuminate how critical humor can iv inflect such accepted categories as the national constitution of a cinema, film genre, and questions of exile and diaspora. Critical humor thus constitutes a cinematic signifying practice able, following Luigi Pirandello’s description of umorismo, to decompose the filmic text, and as a tool for an ideological critique of cinem and its role in (re)producing discourses of the nation predicated on the dominant categories of whiteness and masculinity. The study offers a theoretical framework for decoding humor in a film text, focusing on the manipulation of cinematic language, and it provides a model for a criticism that wishes to heighten the counter-hegemonic potential of cinematic texts, by picking up on the humorous, contradictory openings of the text and widening them through a parallel dissociating process. Finally, critical humor in the accented cinema of women filmmakers like Moffatt, Pellizzari, and Law is shown to constitute a form of translation and negotiation performed between the national, monologic constraints of film production and cinematic language, the heteroglossia of the global imaginaries that have traveled since the beginning with film technology, and the local and diasporic accents informing a filmmaker’s unique style and perspective. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 1. Geographical and Cultural Disjunctions: An Accented Cinema in Australia ............. 18 1.1 Introducing Accented Cinema and Creolized Identities ..................................... 18 1.2 Indigenous and Colonial Migrations ................................................................... 32 1.2.1 The Forced Displacement of Britain’s Lowly ........................................... 33 1.2.2 The Sexual Politics of Australia’s Violent Colonial History ..................... 37 1.2.3 Contextualizing Tracey Moffatt ................................................................. 42 1.3 European Migration to Australia and The Politics of Whiteness: The Case of The Italian Australians .................................................................................... 48 1.3.1 Italian Immigration and the Whiteness Test .............................................. 50 1.3.2 The Gender Politics of Italian Migration to Australia ............................... 55 1.3.3 Contextualizing Monica Pellizzari ............................................................. 60 1.4 The Chinese Presence in Australia: Modern and Past Diasporas ....................... 65 1.4.1 Chinese Immigration in the Context of Asian/Australian Relations ......... 67 1.4.2 The Genderedness of Asian Migrations and Anxieties .............................. 70 1.4.3 Contextualizing Clara Law ........................................................................ 75 2. A Fraught National Cinema ........................................................................................ 82 2.1 Accenting National Cinema ................................................................................ 82 2.2 Tracey Moffatt: Tearing down the Nationalist Canvas of Classic Australian National Cinema ................................................................................ 90 2.2.1 Early Filmmaking in Australia and The Ethnographic Film: A Critical Vision through Moffatt’s Nice Coloured Girls ................................ 91 2.2.2 Australian Feature Film and the Spectacle of Alterity: Moffatt’s Resignification of the classic Jedda in Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy ....... 100 2.2.3 Accented Cinema in Australia: The Ghosts of Moffatt’s Bedevil and the Discourses of Australian Multiculturalism ........................................... 108 2.3 Monica Pellizzari: Recovering an Ethnic Identification through Migrant Film Schooling .................................................................................................. 116 2.3.1 Global Hollywood’s Hold Down Under: An Italian Australian Responds to Italian/American Stereotyping ............................................... 117 2.3.2 Pellizzari’s Hybrid Schooling and Cinema: The Role of the Short Film in Women Accented Filmmaking....................................................... 124 2.3.3. An Artistic Journey: Criss-Crossing both Australian and Italian National Cinemas ........................................................................................ 133 2.4 Clara Law: Inbetween National, Diasporic, and Commercial Cinemas ........... 140 2.4.1 Hong Kong Cinema’s Uncanny Signification on Australian Cinema ..... 141 2.4.2 Asian Transnationalism in Australian National Cinema and Society ...... 148 vi 2.4.3 Australian National Cinema in Light of Diaspora: Claiming a Tradition ...................................................................................................... 156 3. Creolizing Counter-Cinemas with Critical Humor ................................................... 165 3.1 Theorizing Critical Humor ................................................................................ 165 3.2 Pirandellian Humor: A Decomposizione of Cinematic Codes .......................... 180 3.2.1. Moffatt’s Parodic Treatment of Multiple Film Tracks ........................... 183 3.2.2 Pellizzari’s Sensuous Satire through Associational Montage .................. 193 3.2.3 Law’s Humorous Disjunctions: Emphasizing Cinematic Kinetics and Haptics ........................................................................................................ 205 3.3 Pirandellian Reflection: Playing with Cinematic Looks ................................... 218 3.3.1 Moffatt Laughs Back: The Ethics of Looking Out and Beyond .............. 222 3.3.2. Pellizzari’s Unruliness: Constructing a World of Female Perspectives................................................................................................. 234 3.3.3 Law Looks at Celluloid Sex: Fetish Humor ............................................ 241 3.4 Pirandellian Masks: Doubling the Mimetic Plays ............................................ 252 3.4.1 Moffatt’s Masquerades of Gender, Ethnicity, and Sexuality ................... 257 3.4.2 Pellizzari’s Medusan Humor and the Female Grotesque ......................... 265 3.4.3 Law’s parodic Gestencharaktern ............................................................. 275 4. Creolizing Genres, Relativizing Hierarchies, and a Touch of Humorous Blasphemy........................................................................................................

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