The Uterus As a Narrative Space in Contemporary Cinema from the Americas
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The Uterus as a Narrative Space in Contemporary Cinema from the Americas Anne Carruthers Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Modern Languages Newcastle University May 2017 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the uterus as a narrative space in contemporary cinema from the Americas. The thesis offers a timely change in focus for film studies in relation to pregnancy and the female reproductive body as it investigates the overlooked space of the uterus, and speaks to the increasing importance of the critical medical humanities. Through close textual analysis, framed phenomenologically, I argue that the uterus is a distinct narrative space by bringing into dialogue film theory and scholarship on the foetal ultrasound to create an analytical framework, which includes biotourism, collaborative coding, and the notion of ultrasound bonding. The thesis is divided into three main chapters. In Chapter One I establish the uterus as a narrative space in Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007, USA); Maria Full of Grace/María, llena eres de gracia (Joshua Marston, 2004, Colombia/USA/Ecuador); Gestation/Gestación (Esteban Ramírez, 2009, Costa Rica), and Stephanie Daley (Hilary Brougher, 2009, USA) by bringing together Vivian Sobchack’s notion of the screen as premises for perception (1992) and Julie Roberts’ notion of collaborative coding (2012a; 2012b). Chapter Two argues for the existence of a biotourist narrative in The Milk of Sorrow/ La teta asustada (Claudia Llosa, 2009, Peru/Spain); Quinceañera/ Echo Park (Wash Westmoreland, Richard Glatzer, 2006, USA); Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (David Lowery, 2013, USA), and Apio verde (Francesc Morales, 2013, Chile). Chapter Three highlights the transformation of the foetus in Up (Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, 2009, USA); The Bad Intentions/Las malas intenciones (Rosario García-Montero, 2011, Peru/Argentina/Germany); Pan’s Labyrinth/El laberinto del fauno (Guillermo del Toro, 2006, Spain/Mexico/USA); and Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2009, USA/UK/Germany/France) by bringing Janelle Taylor’s (2008) notion of bonding into dialogue with the Marksian recollection-object. The thesis focuses attention on narrative spaces in the body in relation to film form, rather than representations of the pregnant body or the figure of the mother and, thus, differs significantly from other scholarship to offer a bold analytical shift on the subject of pregnancy. iii iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have been extremely lucky to have an experienced, supportive cross-disciplinary supervisory team: Professor Guy Austin in the School of Modern Languages (SML) and Dr Stacy Gillis in the School of English Language, Literature and Linguistics (SELLL). I appreciate both their pastoral care and professional encouragement, which has given me huge confidence as an academic and has made me feel very much part of the research community. I am very grateful for research and travel awards during the course of my study. SML and the Research Centre for Film and Digital Media (RCFDM) awarded me funds to attend a summer school in critical theory in Utrecht, led by Professor Rosi Braidotti, in 2013; the Screen conference and the Film-Philosophy conference in 2014; and a research and archival trip to Women Make Movies (WMM) in New York in 2015. Many thanks to Hannah Goodwin who made me feel very welcome at WMM. I was awarded research funds from SELLL to present a paper at the Cognitive Futures in the Critical Humanities conference at Durham University in 2014. The Fran Trust at Foundation Scotland awarded me a research and travel grant to present a paper at the Ethics of Storytelling: Historical Imagination in Contemporary Literature, Media and Visual Arts conference at Turku University, Finland in 2015. I would like to thank the filmmaker Francesc Morales Brucher from Efectomorales Production Company in Chile for access to the film Apio verde, and to Esteban Ramírez from Cinetel in Costa Rica for access to the film Gestation/Gestación. I would also like to thank Julie Roberts from Nottingham University for being so accessible and helpful over the last few years. My research work has been enriched by my involvement with the MILAN (Medicine in Literature and the Arts at Newcastle) Film Festival. Thanks to Eleanor Holmes and Jo Matthan and the rest of the team for giving their medical perspective to film analysis. I would like to thank Stefanie Allum from Northumbria University for co-convening with me the North East Film and TV Research Networking initiative that we both expect to become an annual meeting between the two universities. The postgraduate research community in SML at Newcastle has been incredibly important during my studies and I am grateful for the advice and support of my research colleagues in Film Studies especially Gary Jenkins, Lydia Dan Wu, Mani Sharpe and Luis Fallas, as well as Latin Americanists Antonia Manresa, Sarah Bennison and Alba Griffith. Thanks to Suzanne Moffatt for advice and encouragement. I am indebted to Sue Vecsey from Newcastle University for all her time and advice on formatting. Special thanks to my most important Ph.D. colleagues Tessa Holland and Kate Stobbart – without their company every step of the way the journey would have been much harder and much less fun. I would like to thank my parents, Terry and Joe, and my mother-in-law, Pam, for understanding how important this work was. My beautiful children Rita, Harry and Joe have been – in equal measures – nonplussed and proud of my academic efforts during which they have moved through secondary school, university and into work. Finally, my husband Guy Pilkington, a film fan who has supported me throughout and has always put everything into perspective, and perspective means everything when you are doing a Ph.D. v vi NB. This thesis includes English, American English and Spanish. In order to have some continuity, I use the English spelling of foetus as opposed to the American spelling of fetus in the main body of the thesis. I will leave original American English spellings in quotations. The titles of films will be given in English and the original Spanish where appropriate. All film titles will be shortened throughout the text. The titles for films in Spanish always use a capital letter for the first word followed by lower case for the rest e.g. El laberinto del fauno; I will follow this convention in all titles given in Spanish. The thesis uses a small number of screenshots from the DVD of each film as an integral part of academic critique. All the images in the thesis are crucial, fully referenced, and there to support my academic analysis. vii viii CONTENTS Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... v List of Figures ........................................................................................................................... xii Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Separating the Uterus from the Foetus beyond the Ultrasound ........................................ 16 Rethinking the Uterus; see Womb .................................................................................... 26 Learning to Love Abjection .............................................................................................. 34 The Pregnancy Genre ....................................................................................................... 40 Corpus of Films ................................................................................................................ 53 Chapter Outline ................................................................................................................ 72 Chapter One .............................................................................................................................. 75 Narrative Negotiations: The Act of Viewing the Ultrasound Scan Collaborative Coding as ‘Perceptual Glue’ ...................................................................... 77 Recognising Absence on Screen....................................................................................... 81 Uterine Frame and the Imagination .................................................................................. 84 Capturing a Moment in Time ........................................................................................... 87 An Act of Translation: Portable Imagery in Juno ............................................................ 90 The Pregnant Body in Transit in Maria Full of Grace ................................................... 102 The Segregated Uterus in Gestation ............................................................................... 111 ix Duration and Repetition in Stephanie Daley .................................................................. 123 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 133 Chapter Two ........................................................................................................................... 137 Internal Landscapes and Biotourist Narratives Transposing Scale .......................................................................................................... 139 Internal Architecture .....................................................................................................