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Coversheet for Thesis in Sussex Research Online A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details SCREENDANCE: CORPOREAL TIES BETWEEN DANCE, FILM, AND AUDIENCE Frances Rosina Hubbard For the award of a PhD in FILM STUDIES The University of Sussex Submitted December 2013 Acknowledgements I have sourced all of the information for this thesis from the University of Sussex Library (including its online resources) and the British Library, London. This PhD was fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for making it possible. I would like to thank my supervisors, Sue Thornham and Thomas Austin, for their support and patience throughout this process. I would also like to thank Jim Tarran, Keith Simpson, and Natalie West. But most of all, I thank Michèle Allardyce, whose love, support, tolerance, humour and encouragement throughout has enabled me more than she knows. UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX PhD FILM STUDIES SCREENDANCE: CORPOREAL TIES BETWEEN DANCE, FILM, AND AUDIENCE SUMMARY I explore the sensuous, kinaesthetic experience and analysis of screen dance and the interconnectivity between our bodies, film, and heightened embodied sensibility. This physicality creates a dialogue between the rich diversity of screen dance genres under consideration, thereby avoiding hierarchical classifications. It also focuses attention on more abstract cinematic qualities, investigating how cinematic technique (as well as thematic content) generates emotional impact; allowing for the enjoyment of film as a material and sensual medium. However, since our senses have been trained according to the regulatory controls within our socio-historical/cultural contexts, equal attention is given to the ideology of representation, and to the links between embodiment, identities, meanings, and broader relations of inequality. I am particularly interested in how dance and film can function politically, both expressing and disrupting norms and ideologies. But I am also interested in how the presence of dance (and/or choreographed movement) can enhance a film’s agency and its ability to cross time and space, “touching” the viewer and thereby working to transform historical objectification into embodied interaction. I combine a phenomenological lived-body experience of viewing with the epistemological functions that characterise it, using my own somatically felt body as a methodological starting point and a creative practice, and theoretical text-based and socio-historical contextual analyses. This balance between lived-experience and critical discussion is used to explore chapters on the deconstruction of national, cultural, and gendered identity through Flamenco dance and film; dance and physical disability; and avant-garde feminist screendance. A final chapter brings these key themes together by investigating how (psychiatric) disability, feminism, and national identity are treated in a contemporary Hollywood dance film. Whilst embodied perception is never “innocent” and always shaped, I show how the movement of affect and emotion between the film and viewer’s body can constitute an ethical experience, encouraging progressive and self-reflexive political and ideological engagement. Screendance: Corporeal Ties Between Dance, Film, and Audience Table of Contents Introduction 1-37 • 1-3 Affective experience: emotional and physical encounters with film and television • 3-6 The social and political conditions of embodiment • 6-12 Contextualisation: from textual dominance to feminist phenomenology • 12-14 A sensuous turn • 14-19 Critical summary: film as an embodied epistemology • 21-21 The phenomenological paradigm • 21-22 Merleau-Ponty • 22-23 The film’s body • 23-25 The mimetic body and haptic visuality • 25-26 A critique of phenomenology • 26-27 Simone de Beauvoir • 27-28 The tactile eye • 28-30 Other scholars deserving of mention • 31-35 Why screendance and existing research in the field • 35-37 Breakdown of chapters Chapter One 38-77 Deconstruction In Motion: Interrogating National, Cultural, and Gendered Identity through Flamenco Dance and Film • 38-41 Introduction • 41-47 The legacy of colonialism: Orientalism, history, “truth”, and power • 47-49 Politics in/as aesthetics • 49-52 A hierarchy of outcasts • 53-54 “History” as a form of representation • 54-57 The performative and constructed nature of identity • 57-60 The fragmentation of identity • 60-62 Carmen’s “ballet rats” • 62-65 Patriarchal drill • 65-67 A fissure in power relations: bodies that do politics • 67-71 A shared somatic experience • 71-72 Encouraging solidarity? • 72-74 The credit sequence: foreign perspective/male discourse • 74-77 Conclusion Chapter Two 78-116 Dancing with Difference: Challenging (Disabling) Perceptions of Disability in Screendance Performance • 78-81 Introduction • 81-85 Dominant cinematic expressions of disability • 86 The filmic mediation of disability • 87 A moment for self-reflexivity • 87-90 The foregrounding of (sexual) subjectivity • 90-93 Visual activism • 93-95 A closed and regulated world • 95-97 The division and transgression of space • 97-102 Woman as a multiple subject • 102-104 Confronting and subverting disability • 104-107 Incorporating disability into dance • 107-108 The intimacy and ethics of tactile images • 108-110 Subverting the loneliness of the ‘heroic’ disabled dancer • 110-113 Different but passive bodies in motion • 113-114 Sexually desiring beings/”monster” predators • 114-116 Conclusion Chapter Three 117-176 Privileging Embodied Experience in Feminist Screendance • 117-119 Introduction • 119-125 Complicating categorisation: feminist interpretation/neglect • 125-127 A diachronic approach: percept and concept/ subject and object • 127-130 Structure and audience engagement • 131-132 Creative possibilities of time: an alternative temporality • 132-133 Enmeshment of reality/unreality • 134 Entering into the film’s rhythm through sound • 135-137 Ethics, form, experience and intuition • 137-141 The physicality of film: chasing after meaning • 141-144 Rejecting conceptualising = conceptual neglect? • 144-145 A feminist politics of the body • 145-148 Intertextuality and verticality • 149-151 The flow of (female) identity • 151-152 Undoing dualisms: vulnerability as a measure of strength • 153-155 A feminist re-visioning of the naked female body • 155-156 Inviting self-reflexivity/objectification? • 156-158 Confounding seduction and catharsis • 159-160 Essayistic filmmaking • 160-162 A ‘Progress towards conscious experience’ • 162-163 Disjuncture: an act of becoming • 163-164 An intellectual corporeality • 164-167 Reinstatement of existential expression • 167-170 A shift towards embodied pleasure • 170-172 Ethical vision? • 172-174 Freedom through the body • 174-176 Conclusion Chapter Four 177-226 Hollywood Cinematic Excess: Black Swan’s Direct and Contradictory Address to the Body/Mind • 177-178 Introduction • 178-181 A phenomenological cinematic psychosis • 182-186 Overwhelming proximity • 186-189 Vertiginous intertextuality and the prefiguration of doom • 189-191 Sonic tactility and the “touch” of madness • 192-196 An intense auditory/bodily experience • 196-202 Contradictory ethical implications • 203-206 An ‘infernal vision of patriarchy’: gratifying (or subverting) the male gaze? • 207-212 A complex negotiation between misogyny and feminism • 212-216 Reinvigorating and exploiting lesbian clichés? • 216-219 A feminist phenomenological assault • 219-223 Black Swan and the crisis of American national identity • 223-226 Conclusion Conclusion 227-233 Bibliography 234-249 Filmography 249-250 1 Introduction Affective experiences: emotional and physical encounters with film and television I have numerous and vivid childhood memories of my mum’s perplexed expression and anxious assertion that “it is only a film Frances”, after witnessing my complete and utter emotional absorption in my favourite film of the moment, often wholeheartedly sobbing and/or deeply affected in some way and for quite some time after the viewing event. Whilst many different genres could (and still can) elicit this type of response in me, it is the magical combination of dance on screen that has quite literally been able to move me in more ways than one. Indeed, I can still remember the heightened level of excitement my sister and I would feel as the theme tune to the American TV spin-off, Fame (1982-87) would begin, religiously dressed for the occasion each week in our red and gold glittery Fame jumpers, matching ra ra skirts and stripy leg warmers, we would be perched on the arm of the sofa ready to leap off into the air with arms and legs spread wide open in a star shape as we and Erica Gimpel (who played Coco Hernandez) belted out the lyric…”Fame, I’m gonna live forever” for the first time in the chorus. The numerous dance scenes that would follow in any given episode never failed to get us up on the (living room) floor, as we imagined we were two of the kids from Fame, emotionally invested
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