The Chronotope of Walking in the Films of Andrea Arnold
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THE CHRONOTOPE OF WALKING IN THE FILMS OF ANDREA ARNOLD LANCE HANSON BA (Hons), MA, PGCE A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. June 2020 This work or any part thereof has not previously been presented in any form to the University or to any other body whether for the purposes of assessment, publication or for any other purpose (unless otherwise indicated). Save for any express acknowledgments, references and/or bibliographies cited in the work, I confirm that the intellectual content of the work is the result of my own efforts and of no other person. The right of Lance Hanson to be identified as author of this work is asserted in accordance with ss.77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. At this date copyright is owned by the author. Signature……Lance Hanson………… Date………January 3rd 2021…………….. 1 Abstract This thesis proposes that the act of walking functions as a dominant chronotope in the work of British filmmaker Andrea Arnold. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept (1988), it demonstrates how walking mobilises a reading of the landscape and the female body that articulates their combined resistance to hegemonic narratives of exclusion and deprivation. Furthermore, by examining its chronotopicity, the function of walking as a discrete element is analysed to reveal its narrative, aesthetic, and contextual significance. Whilst previous studies of the cinematic flâneuse are restricted mainly to European and art-house cinema and their middle class protagonists, this thesis focuses attention on less affluent female characters whose walking takes place not in the metropolis but in the edgelands, suburbs, and social housing estates that constitute the contemporary built environment, along with Arnold’s depiction of the harsh rural landscape of nineteenth-century Yorkshire in Wuthering Heights (2011). This is a study of walking as depicted in Arnold’s cinematic output, along with the three short films with which she began her career, all of which focus upon strong female characters living in areas of economic and social deprivation. From a feminist perspective, her films are “power-to” narratives (Sutherland and Feltey, 2017) that show how female agency is predicated on emotional, and practical, resilience, and Arnold demonstrates this agency by foregrounding her protagonists’ physical and geographical mobility, using walking as their dominant mode of movement. The textual analysis draws on Laura U. Mark’s theories of haptic cinema to examine Arnold’s visual style, combined with a reading of Michel de Certeau whose work emphasises walking as a form of tactile, urban remapping. From this, a new way of interpreting women and walking emerges, and the term ‘haptic flâneuse’ is 2 proposed to describe women’s sensory investigations, explorations, and encounters with the new urban landscape. The conclusions drawn show how walking scenes provide opportunities for female agency, and that such journeys function in excess of their narrative significance, creating an interpretative space to examine the structural, aesthetic, and contextual elements of the films. In this way, the walking chronotope acts as a lens through which Arnold’s work can be interpreted. In summary, this thesis contributes to knowledge in three ways: by providing the first detailed study of walking in Arnold’s oeuvre; by proposing the figure of the haptic flâneuse as a way of thinking about the experiences of women who walk in marginalised spaces; and by demonstrating how a chronotopic reading of walking scenes elevates them from a narrative means to an end to significant film elements in themselves. 3 Table of Contents Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 8 Chapter One: Literature Review and Theoretical Framework 27 Chapter Two: Emergent Chronotopes and Edgeland Aesthetics in Arnold’s Short Films (Milk, 1998, Dog, 2001, and Wasp, 2003) 71 Chapter Three: Crossing Thresholds, Mapping Space in Red Road (2006) 108 Chapter Four: The Haptic Flâneuse and the Edgelands Aesthetic in Fish Tank (2009) 145 Chapter Five: Elemental Modality and Heterotopic Space in Wuthering Heights (2011) 175 Chapter Six: The Counter-Road Movie and the State of the Nation in American Honey (2016) 222 Conclusion 261 4 Bibliography 274 Filmography 330 5 Acknowledgements For helping me get to the end of this journey, I am grateful for the support, patience, and understanding of my supervisors from the University of Wolverhampton: Dr. Benjamin Colbert, Dr. Stella Hockenhull, and Dr. Frances Pheasant-Kelly. This is also for my daughters, Kirsty and Megan, and to Valerie, my mum, who left me too early to see the journey’s end. She might just smile and say, “Well done, son”. Others too numerous to mention have walked with me, and to them, thank you. 6 “How can something as simple and mundane and commonplace as walking be a social barometer to show us the way our society is?” Garnette Cadogan (in Abadi, 2018: n.p.) 7 Introduction The subject of women walking is a common theme in the films of Andrea Arnold, and its significance is evident in a number of ways: the frequency with which it occurs throughout each narrative; the intimacy created by the kinetic cinematography; and the varied geographical spaces mapped out by these characters as they journey across the filmic landscapes. Walking connects Arnold’s female protagonists to a tradition of cinematic flânerie. However, unlike the privileged and affluent flâneuse of heritage film or European new-wave cinema, Arnold’s women appear as marginalised and exploited individuals for whom walking is a functional necessity. Furthermore, it takes place not in modern metropolises but in the contemporary built environment characterised in Arnold’s films by edgelands and areas of social deprivation. Thus, crucially, in place of a flânerie that functions at one end of the scale as a symbol of affected solipsism, and at the other as a means of radical subversion, I argue that Arnold’s flâneuses, despite their disadvantages and deprivations, transform themselves and the disparate landscapes through which they walk and, at the same time, encourage audiences to contemplate, to question, and to modify their attitudes towards these hitherto negatively coded spaces. This thesis therefore considers why we should be concerned with the act of walking in Arnold’s films which are, primarily, about human relationships and the social, physical, and emotional constraints placed upon women. Indeed, why is walking, which in these films does not take on heroic proportions, but is presented as an everyday act, so vital to an understanding of Arnold’s work? These are the substantive questions which frame this thesis, and, by deploying Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (1988) as an overarching framework with which to 8 examine Arnold’s films, I demonstrate how walking mobilises a reading of the landscape and the female body that articulates their combined resistance to hegemonic narratives of exclusion and deprivation. Furthermore, in order to negotiate this challenge, I ask also how walking contributes to the complexities of narrative and character development; how perspectives of the films’ geographical locations are transformed by walking; how questions of gender, class, and race are mediated through walking; and, finally, how Arnold’s cinematic rendering of place and mobility contributes to a new appreciation of the complex figure of the flâneuse. To answer these questions, this thesis combines a formalist approach to the films with a consideration of their social, cultural, and historical contexts, all of which are crystallised through the concept of the chronotope. For Bakhtin, the chronotope is a centripetal unifying force which functions as an intense field of aesthetic, narrative, and contextual signification with which to analyse the temporal and spatial aspects of a text, and it is used here alongside theories of cinematic affect, particularly the work of Laura U. Marks (2000), to consider how Arnold’s new flâneuses help to transform our understanding of the significance of walking in contemporary mainstream cinema. Indeed, this thesis offers a new interpretation of the complex and often contradictory figure of the flâneuse, and, in place of the wandering bourgeois whose encounters with urban space are founded upon a privileged gaze, this study proposes the term ‘haptic flâneuse’. The concept of the haptic flâneuse is central to the walking chronotope and helps to crystallise a number of important elements. Firstly, by foregrounding character, it focuses attention on walking as a vital narrative device; secondly, it defines the ways in which Arnold’s female protagonists interact with the built environment, that is, through tactile 9 experience; and, thirdly, it describes Arnold’s mode of filming which stimulates a sensory response to her cinematic world. Even though Arnold admits that the inclusion of walking scenes is a “conscious decision on [her] part” (Bates, 2017: n.p.), there has been little scholarly attention devoted to walking as a specific motif across all her work. Sara Smyth (2019) and Sue Thornham (2019), for example, limit their references to walking to one film in their respective analyses of Fish Tank (2009) and Red Road (2006). This is therefore the first complete analysis of walking as it appears in Arnold’s oeuvre, and one which functions in three ways: firstly, through the formulation of walking as a particular chronotope, it provides an approach to Arnold’s work hitherto neglected; secondly, by positing the chronotope as a means of understanding the narrative and contextual significance of walking, it demonstrates the importance to Film Studies of examining walking as a discrete element; and, finally, it promotes a new way of interpreting the cinematic flâneuse. In identifying walking as a chronotope, this thesis also shifts the discussion of cinematic walking away from its function as a “reflection of interiority” (Smyth, 2019: 116).