Women’s Time and Reproductive Anxiety in Contemporary Horror Films

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Qian Zhang

August 2018

© 2018 Qian Zhang. All Rights Reserved. 2

This thesis titled

Women’s Time and Reproductive Anxiety in Contemporary Horror Films

by

QIAN ZHANG

has been approved for

the Film Division

and the College of Fine Arts by

Ofer Eliaz

Assistant Professor of Film Studies

Matthew R. Shaftel

Dean, College of Fine Arts 3

Abstract

QIAN ZHANG, M.A., August 2018, Film Studies

Women’s Time and Reproductive Anxiety in Contemporary Horror Films

Director of Thesis: Ofer Eliaz

In the contemporary capitalist society, the demand for social reproduction generates a “timeline” for women, which specifies what a woman should so at a certain stage of her life. This timeline further causes what I call a “temporal anxiety” specifically for women. This thesis explores how contemporary horror films portray the temporal anxiety for women as sites of social reproduction under capitalism. The thesis mainly focuses on three contemporary horror films: Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent’s The

Babadook (2014), French filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016), and American filmmaker Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015). I use The Babadook to propose an understanding of the nature of the temporal anxiety and use Raw to explain the scope of the temporal anxiety. I further argue that The Witch suggests a way to end the temporal anxiety—by being non-reproductive witches, women fail their reproductive role in the capitalist society and thereby escape from the “timeline” that is imposed upon them.

4

Dedication

I dedicate this thesis to Ofer Eliaz, who is always there for my adventure in film studies.

5

Acknowledgments

This project would not be completed without the supports and encouragements from many people.

I would first like to thank my thesis advisor, Ofer Eliaz. He has been a great advisor, an intelligent reader, and a wonderful friend. Ofer is always available whenever I need help. He taught me how to be a good scholar both by giving me concrete suggestions and by doing excellent work in his own research. In doing so, Ofer has become my role model: an intelligent and sharp researcher and a patient and efficient teacher.

I am also hugely grateful to Louis-Georges Schwartz. This project grew from my first independent study with Louis in the Fall of 2016. The first book we read together,

Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, and the ways we explored the book have had a heavy influence on this project. Louis has been an invaluable resource, an incredible scholar, and a genuine comrade.

I also have received enormous help from Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf. She read substantial portions of the thesis and made detailed suggestions for revision. Erin provided many essays and books for me to develop my interpretations of the three films in this project.

Joan Hawkins is my lovely mentor, who lead me into film studies and treated me like her own student, despite the fact that I was merely auditing her classes. Her classes and her own works on horror and avant-garde films will continue to be a long-lasting and endless inspiration for me. I will forever fondly remember our conversation at Soma 6 which helped me finalize the film list for this project. She also provided precious feedback in the early stages of this project. I wish her the best!

In addition to the individuals I mentioned above, I also want to thank my director of Film Division, Steven Ross, who helped me complete my thesis with funding support.

This project would also not have been successful without the help of my colleagues and friends. Stephanie MacDonell provided me a lot of relevant essays and information for my early research. Kate Keeney patiently read two chapters of this project and gave me incredibly detailed suggestion. Erin Drake and Kate Austin also offered me comments and feedbacks for some chapters of the thesis. Julia Staben has been a great supporter for me in completing this project. I own a great deal to all.

I’d also like to show my gratitude to Indiana University Cinema. It is the womb of my passion and inspiration for film studies. It had been like my home for more than four years and is just incomparable. I will be forever jealous of people who live in

Bloomington. In addition, I want to thank graduate writing center at OU.

Lastly, I thank Hao Hong, my husband, best friend, soulmate, and the worst

“victim” of my anxiety. I am so appreciative of the many ways that he showed his support for me through this time. The amount of appreciation I have for the loving acts of kindness such as repeatedly, endlessly cooking for me in Jeanne Dielman’s way, pouring me a stout or making me a Manhattan when I was burned out, and discussing Deleuze’s works and films with me without reading or watching them cannot be overstated. I also want to add that, for many years, Hao is the ONLY person to encourage me to pursue my dream in film studies, even during the time when I doubted myself. 7

Table of Contents

Page

Abstract ...... 3 Dedication ...... 4 Acknowledgments ...... 5 Table of Contents ...... 7 List of Figures ...... 9 Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 10 Temporalizing the Feminine and the Reproductive Body ...... 12 Time & Women’s Time? ...... 17 Time Mode: Reproductive Time and Non-reproductive Time ...... 23 Contemporary Horror, Ongoing Temporal Anxiety, and Women’s Impossible Temporal Position ...... 25 Chapter Summary ...... 27 Chapter 2: Experiencing Women’s Emptiness of Time--Feminine Repetition from Jeanne Dielman to The Babadook ...... 30 Introduction ...... 30 Non-temporal Interpretations of The Babadook ...... 32 Women’s Time, Affective Experience, Repetition, and Akerman’s Art Film Jeanne Dielman ...... 35 An Affective and Embodied Experience of Women’s Domestic Temporality in The Babadook ...... 44 Conclusion ...... 55 Chapter 3: Repeating the Past and the Repetitive Future–The Transgenerational Repetition in Julia Ducournau’s Raw ...... 58 Introduction ...... 58 Mother in Old Enclosed Spaces ...... 61 Mother, A Living and Haunting Ghost ...... 67 Transgenerational Repetition and Undoing Future ...... 73 Conclusion ...... 76 Chapter 4: The Witch and the End of the Colonial Time ...... 78 Introduction ...... 78 Two Times: Reproductive Time and Non-reproductive Time ...... 83 8

The Reproductive Body and Impossible Temporality ...... 86 Aural Haunting, Women and the Past ...... 90 Individuality and Non-individuality, the Witches Body and Non-reproductive Time ...... 97 Conclusion ...... 110 Chapter 5: Conclusion ...... 112 Bibliography ...... 116 Filmography ...... 127

9

List of Figures

Page

Figure 1. From the film Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936) ...... 40 Figure 2. Jeanne Dielman is doing dishes in the kitchen...... 41 Figure 3. The Opening Shot in The Babadook ...... 47 Figure 4. Amelia is doing dishes at work place in The Babadook...... 50 Figure 5. The image is from an advertisement of Ralph Lauren Wedgwood Pocket Watch Plate...... 55 Figure 6. The mother in Raw sits in the front passenger seat heading towards the vet school...... 63 Figure 7. The mother stands behind the wheelchair at hospital...... 63 Figure 8. The mother’s face is reflected on the window glass in prison...... 63 Figure 9. The mother walks away from the dining table at home...... 63 Figure 10. The faces of Justine, Alexia, and the mother are superimposed. Three faces become a singular face, or three faces repeat in a singular form onscreen. .... 67 Figure 11. The Last Shot in the Film Raw...... 75 Figure 12. The frontier family starts to claim the "new" land...... 92 Figure 13. A zoom in shot of the “foreign” forest...... 92 Figure 14. Thomasin covers her eyes to play peekaboo with her brother Samuel...... 98 Figure 15. A witch is using baby Samuel to make ointment...... 103 Figure 16. The witch sees Caleb...... 103 Figure 17. The witch is approaching Caleb...... 104 Figure 18. The young face and one old hand provide a whole image of the witch...... 105 Figure 19. The father, William, and his son, Caleb, see a hare, which is implied as a form of the witch...... 107 Figure 20. The hare onscreen looks into the audience's eyes...... 108 Figure 21. A shot from the film Hereditary (2018)...... 115

10

Chapter 1: Introduction

Time … gives nothing to see. It is at the very least the element of invisibility itself. It withdraws whatever could be given to be seen. One can only be blind to time, to the essential disappearance of time even as, nevertheless, in a certain manner, nothing appears that does not require and take time. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, 6

In this thesis, I argue that a trend of contemporary international horror films focuses on an alternative way of revealing the experiences of women’s temporal anxiety.

By deploying a feminist reading of a number of temporal concepts—feminine repetition, transgenerational repetition, and non-reproductive time—I analyze the particular form of feminized anxiety invoked by these films. This anxiety is exclusively associated with the impossible temporal position imposed on women in the current capitalist system, in which time is not a neutral concept but rather colonized for the purpose of the capitalist accumulation, i.e. colonial time.1 This impossible temporal position for women within capitalist society guarantees the consistency of social reproduction by transforming the female body into the reproductive body while denying women the ability to create a

1 By colonial time I do not mean that “fractured, uneven, and co-constituted by tension.” (Adib, and Paul Emiljanowicz, "Colonial time in tension: Decolonizing temporal imaginaries." Time & Society (2017), 1.) Rather, I refer to the ways in which time would be used merely for capitalist production and accumulation. Other ways of using time are unthinkable within the dominant ideology of the colonial time. This definition also echoes the notion of colonization of time by capitalism in Shippen’s book Decolonizing Time. By the colonization of time Shippen refers to the ways in which the time is used exclusively for capital accumulation from its use for human needs, and thus time becomes an unthinkable concept beyond the capital accumulation scenario. In other words, time becomes structured as a source to be controlled and unevenly distributed. In this thesis, I particularly focus on the uneven distribution of time in terms of gender, and the ways in which contemporary horror films show the uneven distribution. See Nichole Shippen, Decolonizing time: Work, leisure, and freedom. (Springer, 2014). 11

“consistent” time consciousness. By time consciousness I mean the understanding of time from the perspective of a subject within the capitalist system, and the experience and sense of time with an awareness of the dominant ideology of time in the capitalist system.

In short, this thesis aims to point out the impossible temporal position assigned to women in order to confront the both incompatible and incomprehensible relationship between the concept of colonized time and women.

This project in particular concerns a series of questions: How to understand the relationship between women and social reproduction under capitalism? How is this relationship revealed in the contemporary horror cinema? Is it possible for contemporary horror films to unleash women’s anxiety of social reproduction? In order to investigate these questions, I focus on three contemporary films to explore the ways in which they envision women’s time-images: The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), Grave (English title: Raw, Julia Ducournau, 2016), and The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015). By reading the ways in which these films represent women’s temporal experience, and by revealing the impossible temporal position they unveil, I argue that these contemporary horror films articulate both a confrontation and a destruction of the dominant ideology of time—that is, patriarchal colonial time—in cinema. These films allow time consciousness to rise as a political problem. In addition, I argue that the alternative ways of experiencing women’s temporality and of constructing time in these films allow a new space (or time) for re- examining the identification of the female body with the reproductive body. By temporalizing the female body into both the reproductive body and the nonreproductive body, these films can help us uncover the dominant patriarchal colonial temporality 12 embedded in cinema. I am not only arguing for the ways in which contemporary horror films invent women’s time, but also that they confront and even call the colonial time to end. I also suggest that the horror film makes the experience of women’s time accessible to more audiences in ways in which earlier traditions of experimental counter-cinema has failed to do, and thus further broadens the ways of rethinking the problematic relationship between women and cinema.2

Temporalizing the Feminine and the Reproductive Body

The relationship between women and time in cinema usually gains less attention.

In the introduction to Time in Feminist Phenomenolog, Christina Schües states that

“…there have been numerous feminist discourses on space, the body, sexual difference, and gender, as well as male-female relations with their intrinsic power structures, and the theme of alterity. However, the issue of time has been neglected”.3 Moreover, as

Elizabeth Grosz puts it, “[t]ime is one of the assumed yet irreducible terms of all discourse, knowledge, and social practice. Yet it is rarely analyzed or self-consciously discussed in its own terms. It tends to function as a silent accompaniment, a shadowy implication underlying, contextualizing, and eventually undoing all knowledges and

2 Horror films are usually taken as a popular genre. In a sense, it is comparatively and easily accessible for more audience than art films are. In this sense, I would say that horror as a popular genre is usually recognized for the possible room for pleasure or easing anxiety. In addition, in recent years, many critics have recognized a new trend in horror cinema, which is usually called “New Horror” and embracing some concepts and aesthetic values of contemporary art. In this sense, horror has started to reposition itself from a pure pleasurable genre to a pleasurable space for consciously cultural and political reflection. I would say, similar to French New Extremity, that contemporary horror films reveal an attempt to hybrid art cinema and horror genre. The difference may mainly rely on their different attitudes towards their audience. 3 Christina Schües, Dorothea Olkowski, and Helen Fielding, eds Time in feminist phenomenology. (Indiana University Press, 2011), 2. 13 practices without being their explicit object of analysis or speculation.”4 In her book

Becoming: Exploration in Time, Memory, and Futures, Grosz points out how time is paid limited attention compared to “[t]he apparently equally pervasive and abstract concept of space.”5 Although Grosz does not specifically discuss the notion of time in cinema, her view on the intangibility of time sheds some light on understanding why more film scholars prefer to spend their time analyzing space rather than time in cinema. For example, in the recent edited volume, Spaces of the Cinematic Home: Behind the Screen

Door, editors Eleanor Andrews, Stellar Hockenhull, and Fran Pheasant-Kelly begin with an analysis of space in the film Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock’s, 1960),

… In all, each room has an important role to play in the narrative and, from the exterior to its internal workings, illustrates how the cinematic house is more than just a statement in architecture—its spatial/filmic significance involving the complex interrelationships between external architecture and intrinsic and intertexual connotations of individual rooms and their position (vertically and laterally), size, shape, and contents. As Anthony Vidler notes, this intersection of filmic and architectural aesthetics led to the formulation of a new term in the 1920s, ‘cineplastics’…6 It is worth noting that this way of reading films usually takes the visual over the invisible knowledge. Although some film scholars, such as Ofer Eliaz, start to pay exclusive

4 Elizabeth A Grosz, Becomings: Explorations in time, memory, and futures. (Cornell University Press, 1999), 1. 5 Ibid, 2. 6 Eleanor Andrews, Stella Hockenhull, and Fran Pheasant-Kelly, eds, Spaces of the Cinematic Home: Behind the Screen Door. Vol. 34. (Routledge, 2015), 1. 14 attention to the invisible space, most film scholars still mainly rely on the visual images of space onscreen to interpret films.7

In addition to the investigation of space over time in cinema, gender is also usually taken as a visual and spatial concept, rather than a temporal concept; although women and their roles in social reproduction are heavily associated with temporal urgency. By temporal urgency I mean the ways in which people deal with the notions of pregnancy, abortion, procreation, and postnatal childcare primarily in their relations to time. For example, pregnancy is measured and treated according to its temporal stages, not to mention that people use a temporal notion, “due date”, to predict a real action, labor.8 The way that politicians and activists debate the legalization of abortion is heavily influenced by their different understandings of the stages of pregnancy. Even the time when a woman is forced to think about her marriage is socially tied to the time when her body becomes available for social reproduction. In a general sense, being a mother does not merely refer to the fact of having children but also determines a woman’s “proper” daily schedule, organized around the priority of childcare.9 However, as Kath Weston points out in her book Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age, gender studies tend to discuss the concept of gender within a visual framework regardless

7 Ofer Eliaz, "Acts of Erasure: The Limits of the Image in Naomi Uman's Early Films," Discourse 36, no. 2 (2014): 207-231. 8 The word “labor” is usually taken as a noun to imply the immobile and static status, such as dead labor, and the department of labor. However, this strong sense of stillness gives a way when “labor” is used to express childbirth. I would argue that many words like labor encourage a temporal misunderstanding when these words are used to define women’s temporal transitions. 9 As a mom, she would risk moral criticism if she prioritizes anything else but not childcare. 15 of time.10 Although women’s pregnancy, procreation, and motherhood usually refer to some temporal period in women’s lives, feminist scholars are still inclined to emphasize the spatial ambiguity of the female body rather than taking time into consideration. Julia

Kristeva’s concept of abjection exemplifies this approach. The concept of abjection merely emphasizes the spatial reference, that is, the mother’s body takes a position neither insider nor outside (to the becoming subject/the baby).11 However, the inside and the outside of the maternal body are not coexistent—before childbirth, the spatial relation between the mother and the child suggests the notion of the inside; after labor, the outside replaces the inside. Thus, the spatial ambiguity, which is suggested in the concept of abjection, can only be valid if we treat the maternal body as an atemporal spatial existence.

Thus, I share Kath Weston’s eagerness to conceptualize gender within a temporal framework. As she puts it, “[g]ender [is] not as a thing to be understood, or a conceptual space to be visited, but as a product of social relations imbued with time.” 12 In order to define gender/women in terms of time a clarification of differences between the female

10 Kath Weston, Gender in real time: Power and transience in a visual age. (Psychology Press, 2002). 11 Julia Kristeva, "Approaching abjection," Oxford Literary Review 5, no. 1\2 (1982): 125-149. 12 Kath Weston, Gender in real time: Power and transience in a visual age. (Psychology Press, 2002), Xi. Weston reads these questions as “the sort of relativist question that led to endless debates …” (ibid, 12) I would argue the difference plays a key role in socially, culturally, historically, and politically positioning women within the reproductive temporality, in which social reproduction is guaranteed. Unless this difference could be recognized and debated, it is impossible for women to imagine a “better” future. But unlike Weston trying to ignore how women’s time and their time consciousness constructed differently, I focus on the ways in which women’s time and their sense of time have been culturally and politically constructed differently in the dominant colonial time. 16 body and the reproductive body is necessary. In other words, while the female body is regarded as the body for timeless social reproduction, this notion of the female body conceptually annihilates both the existence of any other type of the female body that is not used for social reproduction and the temporal relations to social reproduction. By this interchangeability, the concept of the female body is de-temporalized.

I use the terms of the reproductive body and the non-reproductive body to break down the common notion of the female body, aiming to conceptually temporalize the female body as well as temporalize the conditions of women in relation to labor and to recognize the impossible temporal position for women under capitalism. I use the notion of the reproductive body to refer to that female body which is exclusively conceptualized as social reproduction in the capitalist system. So, by the reproductive body, I mean that female body socially and culturally constructed as a site of social reproduction. The ways

I define the reproductive body stresses the importance of the temporal references. That is, the reproductive body is not an atemporal female body, but rather the female body incorporated into a temporal relation to social reproduction.13

By contrast, the non-reproductive body refers to those female bodies that are not available for current or future social reproduction. The witch is one of the most salient examples— in the narrative of relevant folklores and films, the witch not only is

13 Many scholars discuss the concept of the reproductive body, more like Julia Kristeva, emphasizing the ambiguous spatial dimensions of the body. See Valerie Traub, "Prince Hal's Falstaff: Positioning psychoanalysis and the female reproductive body." Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1989): 456-474. Jane Ussher, Managing the monstrous feminine: Regulating the reproductive body. (Routledge, 2006). Julia Kristeva, The Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. (Columbia, 1986).

17 incapable of contributing to social reproduction but threatens and destroys social reproduction by murdering and sacrificing babies. Here, it is worth noting that the examples of the non-reproductive body seem more easily drawn from fictional narratives than the nonfictional world. This results from the dominant ideology of colonial time, which consistently serves to transform all female bodies, including queer bodies, into the reproductive body.14 I expand this concept of the non-reproductive body in the third chapter of this thesis, “The Witch and the End of the Colonial Time.”

Time & Women’s Time?

By temporalizing gender through the division of the female body into the reproductive body and the non-reproductive body, in this thesis, I investigate the relation between women and time in contemporary horror films. Before discussing this relation, I want to trace the concept of time and the time-image in cinema back to Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Bliss Cua Lim, and Nichole

Shippen, arguing why this thesis pays exclusive attention to the relation between women and time in contemporary cinema. In Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, he writes:

our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present—no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which

14 I would argue that the gay marriage may not be a liberation but rather an alternative control over the gender body for the sake of social reproduction. 18

swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation.15

For Bergson, then, the present is understood as a temporal concept relating to both the past and the present. In this sense, the past is not the present that became the past and disappeared. Rather, the past has been folded into the present, coexisting in another form within the present dimension. In addition, in Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory, time refers to, in Gilles Deleuze’s words, a “radical plurality of durations.”16 As Deleuze notes, Bergson “goes furthest in the affirmation of a radical plurality of durations: The universe is made up of modifications, disturbances, changes of tension and energy, and nothing else.” 17 Bergson’s concept of time helps Deleuze rethink the present and its relations to the past as well as future, which contributes to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the time-image.

Deleuze further develops a Bergsonian concept of time to rethink post-war cinema, arguing that the Second World War formulates a transition from the movement- image to the time-image in modern cinema. For Deleuze, the movement-image provides an indirect image of time, that is, a movement in space as a translation of time; while the time-image is a direct image of time which is not mediated by the representation of movements in space. This time-image is not a consequence of the evolution of the movement-image in film history, but rather could be taken as a re-organization of the

15 Henri Bergson, Creative evolution. Vol. 231. (University Press of America, 1911). 16 Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual. (Routledge, 2002):36. 17 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. (1991), 76-78. 19 relation between time and thought as well as the alternative relationship between the subject and the object in film theory. Specifically, different from the movement-image that shows the ways in which the subject acts and reacts to objects, Deleuze’s time-image exposes the interval after the subject encounters the object and before any actions or reactions take place. Since the interval reveals the ways in which the subject lacks action or reaction within the passing temporal images, the subject becomes no different from the encountered objects. Thus, the subject is no longer the one thinking about and taking action upon the objects. Rather, the thoughts concerning the objects take place upon the subject. This renewed relation between the subject and the object is associated with the time-image in the post-war cinema, which reveals this “renewed” subject and object relationship by directly showing the interval.

However, for Deleuze both subjectivity and time are assumed as a non-gendered and non-culturized existence. Accordingly, the subject for Deleuze is homogeneous and masculine singular, and the time as well as the time-image are homogenous. The homogeneity of both the subject and time thus brings out more questions. Bliss Cua Lim recognizes the existence of the heterogeneous time-image and argues for the different ways in which temporality is revealed in non-Western cinema. In ranslating Time:

Cinema, The Fantastic, and Temporal Critique, Lim points out that Bergson’s analysis of

“the ways in which temporal heterogeneity is spatialized and made linear in deterministic understanding of time” can be used to think both “the temporal logic of colonialism” and 20

“the preemptive workings of contemporary capitalist governance.”18 For the former, it is

“a linear, evolutionary view of history that spatialized time and cultural difference”; for the latter , it refers to “dreams of foreclosing futurity.”19 As such, Lim embraces both

Bergeson’s critique of time and the historical and postcolonial approaches to complicate the interpretations of both the time-image and the narratives in fantastic cinema.

Although Lim obviously recognizes how the colonialization of time is taking place in the postcolonial world, she runs out of time to articulate another important perspective, that is, how time structures dominate and organize women’s experience within the ongoing patriarchal colonial time.20 This mission is pointed out by Schües; as she asserts: “Modern and contemporary philosophy has developed a number of varied and sometimes incompatible time concepts. However, explorations of the relation between time and gender, or feminist issues and time concepts, have been completely neglected by many phenomenologists.”21 Thus, the following question is how to think about the relation between women and time. Is there a concept of women’s time?

Some scholars contrast women’s time to the dominant conception of time as linear and progressive. They argue that women’s time is “cyclical, natural, task-oriented,

18 Bliss Cua Lim, Translating time: Cinema, the fantastic, and temporal critique. (Duke University Press, 2009),13. 19 Ibid. In her footnote, Lim uses Parisi and Goodman’s “Affect of Nanoterror” to link affect to time. See Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman. "The affect of nanoterror." Culture machine 7 (2004). 20 Here, I am using “colonializing” to emphasize the means in which power structure of time expands and unifies, and the term “colonial time” refers to this mode of time, that is, a hierarchal and patriarchal time. 21 Christina Schües, Dorothea Olkowski, and Helen Fielding, eds, Time in feminist phenomenology. (Indiana University Press, 2011), 4. 21 relational and embedded, the time of reproduction, the family and personal relationship.”22 Some assert that the concept of women’s time provides a way to access the knowledge “that the dominant time culture suppresses.”23 And others demonstrate how the commodified clock time restricts women’s particular daily rhythm. Jay Griffiths argues that the menstrual cycle gives women a different experience of time.24 Mary

O’Brien traces women’s time to the “temporal significance of women’s reproductive capacities.”25 In her essay “Women’s Time,” Julia Kristeva uses psychoanalytic, philosophical, and political approaches to isolate women’s time from the dominant linear historical time.26 Two major features of her concept of women’s time, monumental time

(eternity) and cyclical time (repetition), arise from reproduction and motherhood. In this sense, these scholars uncover the relation between the female body and time. However, the assumption of individual women sharing an identical bodily experience in time should be questioned. As Bryson points out, these scholars assume that all women, regardless of their lived experience with reproduction (reproduction, infernality, abortion, etc.), share the same experience of time. To be clear, I have no intention of investigating any individual woman’s decision as to whether they want to have children. Rather, this

22 Valerie Bryson, "‘Women’s Time’," in Gender and the Politics of Time: Feminist Theory and Contemporary Debates, (Bristol: Policy Press at the University of Bristol, 2007), 122. 23 Ibid. 24 Jay Griffiths, A sideways look at time. (Penguin, 2004). 25 Valerie Bryson introduces O’Brien’s ideas of women’s time in the chapter titled ‘Women’s Time’. The ideas of time are from O’Brien’s essay “Feminist theory and dialectical logia.” See Mary O'Brien, "Feminist theory and dialectical logic." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1 (1981): 144-157. 26 Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time," translated by Alice Jardine, and Harry Blake, Signs 7, no. 1 (1981): 13-35.

22 thesis focuses on the ways in which women are socially and culturally constructed as bearers of social reproduction.

Here, Nichole Shippen’s research can help us think about the ways in which women’s time is translated into capitalist time. Although Shippen’s recent book does not particularly focus on colonizing time in terms of gender, her argument on how heterogeneous time is colonialized as homogenous time in a capitalist society contributes to rethinking how women’s time is colonized within the current capitalist system. In her book, Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom, Shippen defines the colonization of time as a means of using time, making sense of time, organizing time, and experiencing time primarily based on the needs of capital rather than the needs of human beings.27 According to Shippen, the fight for time “must address not only the extension of the workday, but also the colonization of free time and leisure.”28 Due to the colonization of time under capitalism going beyond the scope of the realm of production, the theorization of colonial time should not be limited to an examination of work time. As she notes, “the decolonization of time must necessarily involve developing a politics of time that extends the modern fight for time beyond concerns with production.”29 She points out that time has been already de-politicized in various ways. She recognizes how the struggle of time is reduced to “an individual and ostensibly private struggle to balance time constrains of both work and life” but not as “a collective political struggle against

27 Nichole Shippen, Decolonizing time: Work, leisure, and freedom. (Springer, 2014), 2. 28 Ibid, 1. 29 Ibid. 23 the dictates of the capitalist system.”30 In order to re-politicize time consciousness and recognize “the political nature of time under capital” Shippen expands the understanding of capitalist time by pointing out the colonialization of free time and leisure.31 To claim/reclaim time consciousness, it will help us to recognize the heterogeneity of temporal experiences within the seemingly invisible and homogeneous notion of dominant time. Overall, intending to articulate the problematic relation between women and reproduction, as well as the female body and reproduction, I conceptualize the female body within a temporal framework into two different categories: the reproductive body and the non-reproductive body, and further question in what exactly kind of time mode this naturalized women’s relation to social reproduction takes place under capitalism.

Time Mode: Reproductive Time and Non-reproductive Time

This thesis centers on the ways in which contemporary horror films reveal anxieties of social reproduction and further articulate and challenge the social and political construction of reproductive time. In order to further understand how social reproduction grounds women’s relation to time, it is worth a moment of clarification of two temporally relevant concepts: the experience of time and the mode of time. By the experience of time I mean the ways in which the subject uses time and senses time passing. This notion takes individuality into consideration, and thus, at least in this thesis, this notion contributes to understanding gendered lived experience in terms of time. By contrast, the notion of a temporal mode refers to, on the social level, the ways in which

30 Ibid, xii. 31 Ibid, 1. 24 time is defined and organized for some specific purposes in a society. In other words, since time is not neutral, what exactly is the dominant ideology of time in a specific society. The notion of time mode allows not only an articulation of the dominant capitalist time but also an imagination of an alternative decolonizing time mode in cinema. Overall, this thesis explores the ways in which contemporary horror films reveal women’s experience within these two aspects of time.32

Both women’s experience and the dominant mode of time are linked to social reproduction. Silvia Federici argues in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and

Primitive Accumulation that the sphere of reproduction should be understood as a “source of value-creation and exploitation.”33 She criticizes how “Foucault's analysis of the power techniques and disciplines to which the body has been subjected has ignored the process of reproduction, has collapsed female and male histories into an undifferentiated whole, and has been so disinterested in the ‘disciplining’ of women that it never mentions one of the most monstrous attacks on the body perpetrated in the modern era: the witch- hunt.”34 Federici’s research not only acknowledges the association between regulating the reproductive body and capitalist accumulation, but also helps me recognize the ways in which social reproduction plays the most significant role in shaping and naturalizing women’s experience of time in both capitalist society and contemporary horror cinema.

32 In the first two chapters, I analyze women’s experience of time in the film The Babadook and Raw, and two modes of time revealed in the film The Witch in the last chapter. 33 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch. (Autonomedia, 2004), 7. 34 ibid, 8. 25

Contemporary Horror, Ongoing Temporal Anxiety, and Women’s Impossible

Temporal Position

Contemporary horror films are useful for an examination of gendered temporality because they allow women’s repressed temporal anxiety to return and be experienced. In

“The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s,” Robin Wood uses the psychoanalytic concept of the return of the repressed to account for the figure of the Other in American horror films.35 He defines otherness as something “represents that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with (as Barthes suggests in

Mythologies) in one of two ways: either by rejecting and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it, converting it as far as possible into a replica of itself.”36 Wood regards women as one illustration of the Other. Similarly, women’s temporal position as well as their time consciousness, which is supposed to be repressed and invisible in daily life, could be treated as the returning Other that cannot be made sense of by the dominant bourgeois family. Due to horror’s genetic “sympathy” for the repressed, it is not hard to understand why contemporary horror films repeatedly unleash a repressed time consciousness of the minorized gendered subjects.

Moreover, horror is a genre popularized for its genetic relation to the body—both the body onscreen and the body of the audience. The investigation on the body in horror doubtless can help us think through the reproductive body as an important concept in this thesis. Also, due to the phenomena of the sensational in horror films, as Linda Williams

35 Robin Wood, “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s,” in Jancovich, Mark, Horror, the film reader. (Routledge, 2002): 33-40. 36 Ibid. 26 mentions in the essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”, horror as one of the three body genres produces an embodies affect on the audience. 37 Furthermore, these contemporary horror films further explore the bodily affective images with explicit temporal concerns.

In addition, unlike art cinema, these contemporary horror films are more easily accessible to the popular audience due to the popularity of the narratives. Meanwhile, these contemporary horror films go beyond the boundary between art cinema and popular mainstream cinema. These contemporary horror films boldly borrow art cinema’s aesthetic and ideological beliefs, and thus both negotiate the goals of commercial films and raise a series of cultural and social questions within popular discourse. These films center on women’s experience of time explicitly. The Babadook narrates how a single mother temporally struggles between her paid labor and her unpaid domestic work.

Grave shows the ways in which a young woman experiences her transition to adulthood by realizing that both her presence and future are repeating her mother’s past. The Witch creates an alternative frontier colonial settlement story concerning a young girl in which the girl kills her mother to gets rid of the dominant social time and thus undo any unreasonable time-discipline. In addition, this film also strikingly creates an uncanny time that fails to be rationalized and formulated into a linear and progressive temporal dimension. As such, all three films are central to rethinking the relations between women

37 Linda Williams, "Body Genres," Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2-13.

27 and time while positioning all temporal conflicts against the dominant ideology of colonial time.

Furthermore, for these filmmakers— Jennifer Kent, Julia Ducournau, Robert

Eggers—all three films are their debut feature films. A time anxiety rises, because all filmmakers are in their 30s, they are at an age that is culturally often ascribed to motherhood and social reproduction while being young enough to release their first independent feature film. The conflicting temporal position also provides a way of connecting a cinematic temporal anxiety to the reproductive anxiety in the contemporary society. Although not all the films I analyze are directed by women, they each focus exclusively on the experience of women as they struggle against and within patriarchal orders of space and time. At this time of their firstly public release, these filmmakers practically hold both an urgency of starting their directing career and are imbued with reproduction anxiety.

Chapter Summary

By tracing women’s different experiences of time imbedded into colonial time in

The Babadook and Grave, and by articulating an alternative mode of time disruptively haunting the dominant colonial time in The Witch, this thesis examines an increasing gendered temporal anxiety in contemporary horror.

The first chapter begins with Chantal Akerman’s art film Jeanne Dielman, 23

Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975) in order to situate The Babadook into a particular temporal concern. I argue that Jennifer Kent’s 2014 horror film The Babadook exaggerates a temporal anxiety which was previously explored in Akerman’s Jean 28

Dielman. This inherited temporal anxiety initially arises from the gendered experience of empty time in the domestic space in Jeanne Dielman, and this anxiety is further exaggerated in The Babadook by emphasizing the spatial similarities between where the female protagonist could be paid for work and where she cannot be paid for work. In both

“work” places, women's experience of time is formulated by feminine repetition. This feminine repetition provides no visible and accountable accumulation, and thus reveal the emptiness in the gendered experience of time. In other words, feminine repetition is reduced to a pure temporal concept which cannot be seen but only be felt (sometimes as boredom) in cinema. In this chapter, I not only go back to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne

Dielman in order to get a better understanding of the ways in which women’s time is depicted in cinema but also return to Julia Kristeva’s essay “Women’s Time” to examine the possibility of visualizing women’s time in cinema.

In the second chapter, I position the gendered, individual, and personal experience of time into a broader social context by looking at how the film Grave illustrates a teenager girl’s emergence into women’s time and the ways in which the film examines the temporal notion of women’s future. I mainly focus on questions like how the film

Grave reveals either a dead stop or a reversed temporal “evolution” of the becoming reproductive body; how the individual women’s time experience is formulated into a women’s social experience of time; and how the film illustrates a temporal impossibility of women within the patriarchal reproductive temporality. In this chapter, I particularly focus on the ways in which the film rewrites the mother-daughter relationship onscreen.

By discussing how the mother “haunts” the daughter, I argue that the daughter’s present 29 and future are neither promising nor hopeful but rather a temporal returning to her mother’s past.

While the previous chapters focus on two types of women’s time and their relations to patriarchal colonial temporality, that is, reproductive time, chapter 3 continues and finally argues how reproductive time ends in the film The Witch. To be more specific, this chapter shifts its attention to further explore the possibility of an alternative temporality beyond the scope of the dominant capitalist temporality.38 The difference between these two modes of temporality centers on their relations to social reproduction. In this sense, these two modes of temporality can be translated into reproductive time, and non-reproductive time. Thus, the investigation of the conflict between the representations of the patriarchal capitalist temporality and the ones of the alternative time further encourages a rethinking of women's relation to temporality within or even outside capitalism. Roger Eggers’ The Witch exemplifies this seemingly interwoven but destructive confrontation between two modes of temporality. This chapter explores the ways in which non-reproductive time subverts reproductive time in the film

The Witch.

38 Capitalist time and colonial time is too exchangeable in this essay. I should be clearer on their definitions. 30

Chapter 2: Experiencing Women’s Emptiness of Time--Feminine

Repetition from Jeanne Dielman to The Babadook

The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image39

Introduction

The Babadook (Kent, 2014) develops and intensifies women’s anxiety of social reproduction by providing a distinctive temporal experience to the audience. The film is the story of a young mother, Amelia, who is left to take care of her child on her own after the death of her husband. The Babadook is one of a number of recent horror films where women directors use horror to renegotiate the cultural understandings of gender roles, especially in the contexts of domesticity and the workplace. More specifically, these filmmakers draw on and develop the tradition of women’s cinema from the 1970s in which feminist filmmakers explored women's subjectivity within enclosed domestic spaces. In this chapter, I explore The Babadook in relation to both Claire Johnston's notion of women's counter-cinema and Julia Kristeva’s theory of women’s time.40 I argue that The Babadook creates an affective and embodied experience of women’s temporality based on an experience of temporal reproductive anxiety. Through a comparison of the

39 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 1 edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1989), 189. 40 Claire Johnston, “Women’s cinema as counter-cinema,” Society for Education in Film and Television. (1973): 22-33.

31 representation of this experience in The Babadook with the one in Chantal Akerman's

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), I argue that The

Babadook inherits and further develops the notion of feminine repetition. This feminine repetition provides no visible and quantified accumulation like the repetitive social labor of the capitalist workplace, and thus reveal the emptiness of the gendered experience of time. What differentiates Kent’s representation of women’s time from Akerman’s is

Kent’s representation of women’s experience as one that is warped and distorted by the demands of paid work outside of the home. While Akerman explores temporal representation confined in mundane domestic space, Kent interrogates women’s experience of time by expanding the notion of “domesticity” into her working space, and by distorting spatiotemporal relations within the cinematic frame. In the film feminist repetition is not limited to the domestic space but inseparable from women’s experience of time even outside the home. Thus, The Babadook does not only repeat Akerman’s approach of revealing feminine repetition but exaggerates the gendered temporal anxiety.

May 14, 2018, today, I am writing this passage. May 14, 1975, it was the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080

Bruxelles. The same time marker “May 14” brings out an oscillating temporal sense— while objectifying and chronologizing the past, it makes the subjective meaningful past returned. I am fascinated by the ways in which women experience time and how the experiences of time are differently represented in contemporary horror cinema. This

“returning” May 14th makes the rethinking of the relation between women and time, of the relation between Jeanne Dielman and The Babadook more temporally fascinating. 32

Non-temporal Interpretations of The Babadook

Sarah Arnold has traced the centrality of the mother in horror films to Alfred

Hitchcock’s Psycho, released in 1960. According to Arnold, maternal horror has become an accepted subgenre in horror studies since then.41 In this subgenre, the maternal body is the key figure used to analyze women's roles. Films in this subgenre present a conflict between women’s embodied experiences and the social and affective demands of motherhood. The social assumption that women should love their children and take on the roles of social education comes into conflict with, and distorts, the social milieu of the embodied experience that these women seek. As Arnold argues, these films present a dichotomy between the good and bad mother based on their ability to repress their needs as women and to fit into the social consensus of the maternal role.

A group of contemporary horror films directed by women filmmakers has emerged in the past decade to question the accepted social function of motherhood.

Unlike the horror films of the 1960s, in which the mother was often condemned for her failure to live up to her proper social role, films like The Babadook and Alice Lowe’s

Prevenge (2016) use images of motherhood as conflicting sites of social negotiation, expressing a tangible, affective “troubling” experience of women’s domesticity. These films share many similarities: they are directed by women; they center on a widowed mother whose mother-son relationship replaces the conventional Oedipal family structure; and they problematize the clear-cut division of good and bad mothers. These

41 Sarah Arnold, Maternal horror film: Melodrama and motherhood (Palgrave macmillan, 2013), 1. 33 similarities set the films apart from earlier maternal horrors directed by male directors, such as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1969), in which the protagonist is a “good” mother because she learns to accept her domestic duties, although she is the socially transgressive woman. In other words, in Polanski’s film, Rosemary plays the good mother, but is also the social vessel for a demonic evil. In this sense she is both a good and bad mother as her role as a good mother is hijacked by the men around her into a force of evil.42 By contrast, as I discuss in this chapter, The Babadook directly confronts and challenges the cultural and moral expectation placed on mothers and thus questions the clear division between the mother and the maternal as a social construct. This new trend in horror reformulates the relation of women to the horror genre in at least two facets. First, this trend challenges the social consensus on the mother’s unconditional love for children. Second, women as film auteurs recreate the ways of representing women and expressing women’s experience of domesticity in horror genre.

Before analyzing The Babadook and comparing it with Jeanne Dielman, I will provide a brief summary of recent popular readings on The Babadook in order to identify a pervading interpretation in terms of women’s role in domestic space. These critical and theoretical interpretations of The Babadook unsurprisingly center on the mother-son relationship between Amelia and her son Samuel. Most of the literature on The Babadook focuses on the ways that the film challenges the conventional mother-son relationship.

For example, in Aviva Briefel’s essay in Camera Obscura, “Parenting through Horror:

42 Barbara Creed uses Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection to argue that the monstrous-feminine is associated with the maternal body in horror films, such as Rosemary's Baby. See Barbara Creed, The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis (Psychology Press, 1993). 34

Reassurance in Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook,” she focuses on maternal authority as a form of reassurance and argues that by “exploring reassurance as a fraught motherly act”

Kent’s film creates fear out of the failure of maternal reassurances and promises.43 With a similar focus on the maternal role in the narrative, Shelley Buerger uses Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject as well as Barbara Creed’s idea of the monstrous-feminine to argue that it is Amelia’s “dispassionate reactions to her son” (and not her love) that is the source of maternal abjection here.44

These scholars recognize the problematic social position of the mother in The

Babadook, but their discussions continue to focus on Amelia’s role as caregiver to her child. What isn’t acknowledged is an alternative experience of female domestic temporality centered on Amelia’s embodied sensations, which separate from her relation to her child. In a unique move for a horror film, The Babadook unfolds the mother-son relationship through the depiction of Amelia's schedule in daily life, spending very little time on the cliché of the sympathetic child. This is shown by a number of formal innovations that appear in excess of the film’s generic narrative. Thus, these essays have

43 Aviva Briefel, "Parenting through Horror: Reassurance in Jennifer Kent's The Babadook." Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 32, no. 2 95 (2017): 1-27. 44 Shelley Buerger, "The beak that grips: maternal indifference, ambivalence and the abject in The Babadook." Studies in Australasian Cinema 11, no. 1 (2017): 39.

Paula Quigley’s essay “When Good Mothers Go Bad: Genre and Gender in The Babadook”, she argues how The Babadook uses elements of the maternal melodrama and female gothic to expand the representations of the maternal ambivalence in horror genre. See Paula Quigley, "When Good Mothers Go Bad: Genre and Gender in The Babadook." The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 15 (2016): 57. 35 overlooked the ways in which The Babadook uncovers women’s embodied experience of domestic temporality.

Women’s Time, Affective Experience, Repetition, and Akerman’s Art Film Jeanne

Dielman

These formal features used in The Babadook are central to the work of a number of feminist filmmakers of the 1970s. In particular, The Babadook has a number of surprising formal affinities with Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. I argue that this formal continuity points to contemporary horror’s interest in depicting women’s experience of time.45 By tracing and re-examining Akerman’s unconventional uses of formal techniques, such as long takes, repetition, and spatial discontinuity, I develop a distinction between feminine repetition and masculine repetition to rethink the cinematic revelation of women’s experience of time. Jeanne Dielman encourages a gendered approach of an affective women's experience of temporality that has been taken up in recent horror cinema. Jeanne Dielman was released in 1975, around the same time as

Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”46 Due to the explicit investigation of women’s gender roles and female subjectivity in art cinema, Jeanne

45 In addition, although there are many similarities in both films, probably due to the bias regarding the body genre horror, no scholar seems interested into analyzing The Babadook by re- reading Jeanne Dielman. The way to interpret The Babadook through re-reading Akerman's Jeanne Dielman t is also based on my intention to further question the boundary between high cultural art cinema and low cultural horror. Due to the space of this chapter, I cannot expand my ideas on this point but just put this concern in the footnote. More discussions can be found in Linda Williams, "Film bodies: Gender, genre, and excess." Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2-13. Joan Hawkins, Cutting edge: art-horror and the horrific avant-garde. (U of Minnesota Press, 2000). 46 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 154, no. 3 (1975): 6-8. 36

Dielman is usually treated as a feminist film made under the influence of the second generation of feminism which aimed to reshape the relationship between women and cinema.47 Jeanne Dielman depicts a single mother, primarily in her role as a homemaker but who also relies on prostitution to help pay for raising her teenage son. Akerman spends three hours and twenty minutes showing the mother’s daily experience across three consecutive days. The length of the film, as well as of the individual shots, confronts the spectator with women’s mundane experience of time in post-war capitalist societies.

The use of extended duration in Jeanne Dielman is key both to the film’s deconstruction of classical and mainstream narrative codes, and to its creation of affective experiences beyond the limitation of onscreen representation. The film’s use of what some scholars have called “real time” is often understood as at once a realistic and experimental gesture.48 Akerman’s use of long takes honestly represents a “realistic” sense of time passing. As Akerman claims, she intended to make the audience feel real time, rather than “stealing” the audience’s time in their life.49 This approach goes against the conventions of constructing time in mainstream cinema where ellipses and other

47 Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday. (Duke University Press, 1996). 48 Many essays mention this point. See B. Ruby Rich, "The crisis of naming in feminist film criticism." Jump Cut 19 (1978): 11. R. Patrick Kinsman, "She's Come Undone: Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and Counter cinema." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24, no. 3 (2007): 217-224. Teresa De Lauretis, "Aesthetic and feminist theory: Rethinking women's cinema." New German Critique 34 (1985): 154-175. Marsha Kinder, "Reflections on" Jeanne Dielman"." Film Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1977): 2-8. etc. 49 Tina Poglajen, “Interview: Claire Atherton”, Film Comment published by Film Society of Lincoln Center, November 2, 2016. https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-claire- atherton/ 37 devices are used to fuse the spectator into the narrative action rather than the real duration of the scene. The use of real time thus challenges the classical narrative codes and editing conventions that are designed to seduce the audiences into giving up their sense of their own time in the theater.

More importantly, Akerman’s approach makes time tangible as the experience of gendered domesticity rather than readable as a narrative function. Unusually ignored as

“empty time,” Akerman forces the viewers to experience the temporality of domestic labor. This confronts the viewer with a series of questions: What are women doing at home? How do women spend their time? Why is women’s time absent from most accounts of real life as well as from mainstream cinema?

Julia Kristeva posits the notion of women's time to address the lack of discussion of temporality as constitutive of women’s experience.50 According to Kristeva, “when evoking the name and destiny of women, one thinks more of the space generating and forming the human species than of time, becoming, or history.”51 Kristeva is not the only scholar who recognizes this missing linkage between women and time within this triangular relationship between women, space, and time. For example, Kath Weston notes in Gender in Real Time that “gender studies has tended to emphasize the visual over the temporal.”52 Here, by “the visual”, Weston refers to visual space. Similarly, for Weston,

50 Julia Kristeva, "Women's time," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1, trans. Alice Jardine, and Harry Blake (1981). 51 ibid. 15. 52 Kath Weston, Gender in real time: Power and transience in a visual age (Psychology Press, 2002), xi. 38 gender studies overlooks the relationship between women and time, and largely focuses on exploring women and women's roles in terms of space.

In “Women’s Time” Kristeva highlights female subjectivity within a temporal dimension, explicitly linking the notion of time to female subjectivity. According to her,

“two types of temporality (cyclical and monumental) are traditionally linked to female subjectivity, insofar as the latter is thought of as necessarily maternal should not make us forget that this repetition and this eternity are found to be the fundamental, if not the sole, conceptions of time in numerous civilizations and experiences, particularly mystical ones.” 53 She further introduces two facets of women’s time—one is repetition, and the other is eternity.54 The first refers to “the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm”, and the latter one indicates “the massive presence of a monumental temporality.”55 However, it is worth noting that Kristeva's concept of women's time, although shedding some light on my understanding of women's time images in cinema, is different from the affective experience of women's time that I discuss in this chapter. While Kristeva frames women’s time historically, this chapter focuses on women’s time in the context of one’s affective experience or the experience of duration. Nevertheless, Kristeva’s notion of women’s time is still inspiring, because the dual registers of repetition and eternity also shape women’s affective experiences of time. In particular, I argue that in Jeanne

53 Julia Kristeva, "Women's time." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1, trans. Alice Jardine, and Harry Blake (1981): 17. 54 As Kristeva writes, “As for time, female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations.” See Julia Kristeva, "Women's time." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1, trans., Alice Jardine, and Harry Blake (1981): 16. 55 ibid. 39

Dielman, women’s affective experience of domestic temporality is represented exactly in terms of a certain kind of repetition and eternity—the repetition of domestic work together with the endlessness of the unseen and unproductive domestic work.

In order to articulate this affective embodied experience, I distinguish feminine repetition from masculine repetition. I find the notion of feminine repetition is easily ignored and treated as interchangeable with masculine repetition, which is exemplified by

Fordism and standardized production. In cinema, masculine repetition can be visualized within the linear and progressive framework of the filmstrip, which is often allegorized in films themselves. Like the assembly line in a factory, masculine repetition can visually produce a product line, which is usually taken as the major spatial dimension onscreen.

Usually, commodities in assembly line are presented with the help of a horizontal dimension within the frame. Multiplying the same product is visualized via a line with repeating breaks or intervals (Figure 1). However, women’s time has no obvious relation to progress and production. Kristeva describes women’s time as cyclical and non- progressive. Women’s time suspends rather than animates duration. I find this distinction useful as a way to break down the concept of repetition of work. It is not that repetition is only assigned to a single gender. Rather, there are two types of repetition: one is visible and valued, the other is invisible and devalued. The latter is what I call feminine repetition, since it seems to never produce the kind of progressive temporality that characterizes masculine time. 40

Figure 1. From Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936)

It is striking, in this context, that Jeanne Dielman focuses exclusively on women’s sensations with a series of “endless” long takes and affective repetitions.56 In a sequence from Jeanne Dielman, after the female protagonist greets her son for school, she starts to clean the apartment. At one point, a long take shows that she is doing dishes by adopting a static camera set behind her back. Throughout this long take, Dielman never turns to the camera; her manual activities are shown through her “vibrating” body onscreen (Figure

2). In doing so, the film provides the audiences with neither image of her facial expressions nor images of her hands at work. With this limited visual knowledge, the audiences cannot predict the end of this chore as well as of the long take. Rather, their eyes drift within this cinematic frame and they spend their time with Dielman doing the dishes.

56 In many mainstream narrative films, such as action movies and thrillers, characters’ emotions are usually emphasized by speeding cuts and close-ups of facial expressions. In doing so, each following shot serves to intensify affects shown in the previous shot. 41

Figure 2. Jeanne Dielman is doing dishes in the kitchen.

In this long take, the dish rack, which is so carefully placed that it never gets full and only shows one plate onscreen at a time, plays an interesting role in revealing feminine repetition. Dielman cooks dinner, cleans the bathtub, sets the dinner table, cleans the dinner table, makes the bed for her son, makes coffee, serves breakfast, polishes shoes, does dishes… A series of chores are easily recognized, but these chores are too “trivial” to count as “real” labor. Because they don’t produce value, they are socially uncountable. Housework is repetitive and takes a lot of time, but is neither countable nor productive. As Barbara Ehrenteich and Deirdre English note:

Housework is maintenance and restoration: the daily restocking of the

shelves and return of each cleaned and repaired object to its starting point in

the family game of disorder. After a day's work, no matter how tiring, the

housewife has produced no tangible object-except, perhaps, dinner; and that

will disappear in less than half the time it took to prepare. She is not

supposed to make anything, but to buy, and then to prepare or conserve what 42

has been bought, dispelling dirt and depreciation as they creep up. And each

housewife works alone.57

It is worth noting that the repetitive housework is most commonly assigned to one gender—the female. As women are naturally and socially responsible for the unproductive but repetitive housework, I thus describe this type of repetition as feminine repetition.

Meanwhile, in the medium shot of Jeanne Dielman doing dishes, the cleaned plates are shown in a “singular” form. Within the frame, only one plate faces the camera.

The audience can see how the clean plates are placed in the drain storage basket one by one, each plate marking a bit of repetitive time. However, due to the frontal framing, the audience cannot count the plates, and thus cannot quantify the amount of work that has been done. The previous visible plate is completely covered by the following one. In this sense the repetition of labor does not produce a new or additional image; Jeanne

Dielman’s time can only be felt but not be seen.

Two additional elements contribute to this shot’s affective experience of women’s time. First, Akerman’s decision to not center the shot on Jeanne’s face or activities encourages the audience’s eye to wander, skimming the surface of the screen. This unmotivated visual wandering exaggerates the anxiety of “nothing to see”. Second, the

57 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English. "The manufacture of housework," Socialist Revolution, 5:4, (1975): 6. 43 chores are de-familiarized by de-visualizing Dielman’s actions, and meanwhile, visualizing a form of pure repetition.

Inspired by Kristeva’s women’s time, I understand repetition in this long take in two ways. First, the repetition diminishes the depth of temporality. The repetition can be understood as Kristeva’s cyclical time. In the temporal sense, the repetition is recurring and makes the beginning and the end impossible to define. Thus, prediction loses its power for imagining difference. In other words, the process of prediction and visual tension becomes a mere act of reclaiming something that has happened in the past or at present, without a future. The audience thus also partakes of the domestic labor of repetitive reclamation that characterizes housework. Second, the repetition also makes time sensible. To prolong the repetition onscreen via long takes bores the audience with

“nothing-new images.” The culturally and socially devalued “trash time” of doing dishes becomes the major block for the audience to digest. Thus, women's boredom in domesticity intensified across the boundary of the cinematic screen, from image to spectator. This reveals, in a powerful and shared affect, the experience of women’s alienation under the capitalism. Dielman is just like a machine, which is repeatedly working without any emotional investment. An anxiety thus comes from a gap between two senses related to time: the awareness of time passing and the awareness of the unpredictable. This anxiety is particularly assigned to women, who are excluded from linear temporal progression.

In addition to the direct investigation into time, Akerman also maintains the sensorial continuity by embracing the recurring empty frames and the offscreen space 44 that defines them. In Gilles Deleuze’s words, these images are a direct representation of time.58 Empty frames and offscreen space are not two isolated concepts. According to

Noel Burch, the empty frame is often used as a marker for emphasizing offscreen space and offscreen activities.59 But due to the “nothing happening” in the offscreen space, both empty frames and offscreen space become non-identical “landmarks”. These landmarks are recurring but disconnected. So, these empty frames onscreen become what Deleuze calls pure optical and sound images, that is, direct time images.60 In Jeanne Dielman,

Akerman’s camera position is carefully chosen and the camera never moves to track

Jeanne’s movements. Thus, Dielman is not a star, adored and followed by the camera, but a figure for repetitive time and its emptying out of space. Although Dielman steps into the offscreen space, the camera never stops filming and thus reserves a lot of the empty frames for a recognizable time. A sensible slowness thus becomes tangible to the audience due to the onscreen nothing-happened empty frame. This way of using the camera helps the audience feel Dielman’s existence in the offscreen space, an existence characterized by the anxiety of empty repetition.

An Affective and Embodied Experience of Women’s Domestic Temporality in The

Babadook

Although Jeanne Dielman and The Babadook are made in vastly different generic and institutional contexts, the narrative and formal similarities between them are striking.

58 Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image, 1 edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1989). 59 Noel Burch, “Nana, or the Two Kinds of Space.” in Theory of Film Practice (Princeton University Press, 2014), 17-31. 60 Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image, 1 edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1989). 45

Both films depict a widowed mother rearing her son alone. Both films show memories while refusing the flashback structure, thus placing the past within or as a component of the present image.61 In addition to these narrative similarities, The Babadook also borrows and complicates Akerman’s formalist inventions in Jeanne Dielman, which further negotiates the early idea of women’s counter-cinema. The following section will shift the focus onto this "horror remake" of Jeanne Dielaman to interrogate how this contemporary horror film creates an affective women’s experience of the emptiness of domestic time, and how this affective experience created in horror genre shed light on women’s counter-cinema.62

The Babadook opens with a sequence depicting Amelia’s dream that begins with her in a car accident at night. The camera turns to her husband who sits in the driver’s seat. Many scholars read this opening sequence as a narrative clue to account for

Amelia’s problematic relation to her son.63 For example, many scholars, including Aoife

M. Dempsey and Paula Quigley, emphasize that a car accident depicted in the opening sequence mirrors the car accident that caused her husband’s death on the way to the delivery room.64 For Amelia, her son’s birthday thus becomes a scar reminding her of the

61 Without any flashback sequences, both films carefully distinguish memories from the past. In other words, no past images is released, the only image is memories haunted the present. 62 I do not literally mean that The Babadook is a remake of Jeanne Dielman in horror cinema. I use "horror remake" to merely emphasize The Babadook inherent a gendered concern from an earlier art film Jeanne Dielman made by a female filmmaker. 63 Toby Ingham, "The Babadook (2014, directed by Jennifer Kent)–A film review from a psychoanalytic psychotherapy perspective." Psychodynamic Practice 21, no. 3 (2015): 269-270. 64 Aoife M Dempsey, "The Babadook." The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 14 (2015): 130. Paula Quigley, "When Good Mothers Go Bad: Genre and Gender in The Babadook," The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 15 (2016): 57.

46 loss of her husband. This, it is often claimed, explains Amelia’s troubled maternal relationship to her son. Although this type of interpretation may seem to make sense within the narrative structure of The Babadook, it fails to account for the film’s inventive formal features in the context of the horror genre.

The Babadook’s opening sequence immediately poses the problem of the emptiness that often characterizes women’s domestic time. This dream can be read as a site where the past is buried within the present. The ways of revealing Amelia’s dream allows the audiences to step into the empty time when Amelia is dislocated by her recurring nightmare. Its striking use of the soundtrack further rewrites the conventional priority given to the image in narrative cinema. While a low and mechanical noise is playing on the soundtrack, suggesting something is happening, the blackness onscreen refuses to provide any image. Following the imbalanced sensational experience, the audience is abruptly introduced to Amelia, who is returning the audience’s gaze in close- up (Figure 3).65

65 Here, I intend to echo the discussions on male gaze in two main journals Screen and Cinema Obscura, since Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In 1970s and 1980s, many film scholars joined in the arguments on negotiating the potential “female gaze” and female spectatorship in cinema. Although these arguments may be tangent to my argument in this chapter, I want to play with the idea of returning women’s gaze to mark how those essays influence on me. And, to be clear, I do not mean that Amelia as a female character connecting her eyes to the audiences’ would reconstruct the patriarchal structure of male gaze. 47

Figure 3. The Opening Shot in The Babadook

On the one hand, the close-up shot facilitates the audience’s recognition of

Amelia without delivering any detailed context. A woman is presumably sitting in a passenger seat of a car and traveling at night. She tries to control her breathing but fails immediately after some small glass fragments fall into the frame. A series of narrative questions may linger in the audience’s mind without any absolute answer at this moment:

Who is she? Where is she? Why is she in a car at night? The lack of clear answers isolates the viewers from the character in the film and allows the viewers to recognize their experience of time in the theater.

On the other hand, this close-up shot also challenges cinematic convention which prefers to build a familiarity gradually between the character and the audience via the structures of “interpellation, imbrication or suture.”66 These concepts are used to emphasize passive spectatorship. That is, the audience is passively stitched into films and

66 Anna Powell, Deleuze and Horror Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), intro, iBook. 48 their ideologies. However, in this opening close-up shot, the audience of The Babadook has to actively confront the protagonist and her gaze. The impossible avoidance of eye contact between the audience and Amelia is further intensified by the first unpredictable close-up shot, which takes away any relaxed room for the audience to be comfortable voyeurs of Amelia and her life onscreen. Thus, the close-up of Amelia’s face, rather than fetishizing her body for gendered pleasure, creates an uncomfortable communication between the onscreen body and the bodies in the theater. This uncomfortable confrontation further extends the audience’s experience of time in the theater.

As this opening strongly affects the audience, this affective experience foregrounds a strong sense of self-awareness. As Nickolas Rombes mentions in “The

Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2”, “The cinematic avant-garde has always been highly self-aware, that is, aware of itself as a counter- narrative.”67 Due to the self-aware nature of Paranormal Activity 2, Rombes regards this low budget horror film as an “avant-garde” film and its filmmaker Tod Williams as an avant-garde artist.68 This emphasis on a film’s self-awareness can also be linked to Peter

Wollen's concept of counter-cinema and his emphasis of the self-reflexive in counter- cinema in his essay “Godard and counter cinema: Vent d'Est.”69 According to Wollen, counter-cinema refers to an alternative cinema countering the classical values in

67 Therese Grisham, Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, and Steven Shaviro, "7.1 The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2." Perspectives on Post-Cinema: An Introduction (2016): 841. 68 Nicholas Rombes, "Six Asides on Paranormal Activity 2." Filmmaker Magazine 10 (2011). 69 Peter Wollen. “Godard and counter cinema: Vent d'Est.” in Film Theory and Criticism 6 Ed (Oxford University Press, 2004), 525-533. 49

Hollywood filmmaking. Accordingly, counter-cinema shows the following seven characteristics: narrative intransitivity, estrangement, foregrounding, multiple diegesis, aperture, un-pleasure, and reality. The self-reflexive spirit strongly supports counter- cinema to wake the audience up and thus subverts dominant ideology in mainstream cinema. In this sense, the opening sequence in The Babadook can be understood as self- aware.70

One salient example of The Babadook echoing the empty time represented in

Jeanne Dielman is the ways in which Kent remakes Akerman’s shot of Jeanne Dielman doing dishes. This “remake” is not simply a formalist homage to Akerman, but further questions the potential horror modes of creating an affective experience of women’s time

(Figure 4). As I argue above, the representation of housework in Jeanne Dielman, such as doing dishes, exemplifies the notion of feminine repetition, which provides the audiences a chance to experience the emptiness of women’s time in the domestic space in cinema.

In The Babadook feminine repetition is recreated and complicated. What Kent borrows from Jeanne Dielman is a way of portraying feminine repetition. While similar camera work expresses a similar experience of women’s domestic temporality, Kent further develops the notion of feminine repetition by repeating Amelia’s dishwashing sequence at Amelia’s workplace. This repetition continues to interrogate the questions dominated in Marxist Feminist discussions on gender and division of work.71

70 This awareness of time in theater echoes what I discussed in the previous chapter, the increasing time consciousness. 71 I would also argue that, that Kent borrows the idea of filming woman doing dishes per se is a way of feminine repetition in women’s cinema practice. In this sense, The Babadook is a 50

Figure 4. Amelia is doing dishes at work place in The Babadook.

In The Babadook, Amelia appears at the kitchen within a long shot. Like Jeanne

Dielman, Amelia’s back is turned to the camera throughout the sequence. As in Jeanne

Dielman, the female protagonist’s facial expressions and hand movements are not visible to the audience, and even the drain storage basket is as well placed on her right-hand side.

Meanwhile, the camera is similarly static and fixed and shows nothing more than encouraging the audience to “imagine” Amelia doing dishes. As I have argued in the earlier section, this image of doing dishes exemplifies non-progressive time—it is an image of feminine repetition. These similar elements onscreen could help me apply my argument to this shot. This is the first level of feminine repetition in The Babadook.

However, Kent’s remake does not only replicate these ideas of domestic time found in Jeanne Dielman, but also brings new variations to complicate the cinematic

women’s counter-cinema, which is self-aware and rewrites the classical cinematic codes by repeating feminine repetition. 51 approaches to negotiate women’s sense of temporality through two other types of repetition. The first obvious variation is that Kent adopts a different shot scale. While

Akerman uses a medium shot to demonstrate the claustrophobia by confining Dielman’s kitchen space, Kent enlarges the kitchen space onscreen by taking a long shot of Amelia in a kitchen. Unlike Akerman’s way of representing the kitchen partially, Kent tries to show the kitchen as much as she can. In doing so, more objects are shown onscreen. And everything within the frame, with the exception of Amelia, is paired or mirrored. Two coffee cups hang on the right, and two framed forms are placed on the left. Even the chairs seem to be doubled around a table. In this sense, Amelia becomes a piece of kitchenware which stands out for being unpaired and working alone.

Furthermore, the color tone of this shot in The Babadook is grayish and plain.

This cold tone disrupts a stereotype of a warm colored kitchen that is usually shown in advertisements. The use of color thus creates an office or professional look of this kitchen. As Kent’s kitchen becomes an office, the relationship between women and kitchen becomes clearer: the kitchen onscreen not only indicates that this kitchen is indeed Amelia’s workplace, but also implies that the kitchen in general is women’s workplace, regardless of the physical locations. Actually, more than one kitchen is shown in The Babadook. The kitchen at Amelia’s home also is repeatedly shown onscreen. By interweaving the images of kitchens both at work and at home, The Babadook makes both the notion of “domesticity” and the boundary between workplace and home more ambiguous. Amelia’s life blurs the distinction between home and work. She is like

Jeanne Dielman, doing dishes repeatedly, endlessly, and “unproductively”, but the 52 difference between these two films is obvious: Amelia is not only doing dishes at home but also at work, while Jean Dielman is confined within her apartment.72 Kent translates

Akerman’s idea of women’s social position as domestic labor into a question of women’s social status in contemporary society: has women’s sense of time changed? Although

Amelia could be regarded as a nurse, a skilled professional, this shot dramatically undermines any glorified illusion of Amelia’s professional in the common sense.

This repetition of doing dishes both at home and at work cinematically reflects some feminist scholars’ discussions on domestic work. For example, many Marxist feminist scholars, including Silvia Federici and Michele Barrett, focus on women’s relation to housework and explore the exploitation of women in the capitalist mode of production.73 In general, these scholars recognize that the housework is naturalized and sexualized labor.74 Housework is socially invisible since it functions as unwaged labor. In

The Babadook, we can see Kent echoing the idea of unpaid and invisible “housework” by providing an image of Amelia being “unseen” in the kitchen at her workplace. Following this shot of Amelia doing dishes alone, a shallow focused close-up of Amelia’s face in the corner of the foreground makes a space for introducing Amelia’s male colleague. He

“intrudes” on the enclosed kitchen through the door in the blurred background. Once he

72 Leopoldina Fortunati argues in her book The Arcane of Reproduction that reproductive work, including housework, is productive. See Leopoldina Fortunati, “The Dual Character of Reproductive Work” in The Arcane of Reproduction, trans. Hilary Creek (Autonomedia, 1995), 105-112. 73 Silvia Federici, Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle (PM Press, 2012). Michele Barrett, Women's oppression today: The Marxist/feminist encounter. (Verso Books, 2014). 74 Silvia Federici, “Wages against housework” in Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle (PM Press, 2012), 15-22. 53 gets into the kitchen, the camera shifts the focus to the male colleague in the background, leaving Amelia’s face out of focus in the foreground. Kent relies on this racking focus to undo the revelation of feminine repetition. In addition, Amelia further articulates the naturalized relation of women and housework in her conversation with the male colleague. She says, “[j]ust where a woman should be, in the kitchen.” Although the words are expressed as a joke in the narrative, this joke explicitly uncovers how women are exploited. As Silvia Federici notes in her essay “Wages against Housework”:

Getting a second job does not change that role, as years and years of female

work outside the home have demonstrated. The second job not only increases

our exploitation, but simply reproduces our role in different forms…. Not

only do we become nurses, maids, teachers, secretaries—all functions for

which we are well trained in the home—but we are in the same bind that

hinders our struggles in the home: isolation, the fact that other people’s lives

depend on us, and the impossibility to see where our work begins and ends,

where our work ends and our desires begins.75

Federici’s passage helps make connections between the kitchens shown in The Babadook.

These kitchens cannot be separated from each other. Rather, they contribute to demonstrate women’s exploitation repeatedly. From this perspective, the feminine repetition is replicated beyond the confine of home. Thus, the feminine repetition, which

75 ibid, 20. 54 is essentially located in the empty time, goes beyond the conventional boundary of

“domesticity” in The Babadook.

Another interesting prop used to explore women’s empty time in The Babadook is a “dead” clock. Rather than directly adopting an extremely long take, Kent uses it as a symbol for dead time. In other words, Kent translates Akerman’s use of long take into a prop, a “dead” clock on the wall. In the long shot of Amelia doing dishes at her workplace, an obvious extra space is left above Amelia’s body to emphasize a clock on the wall. Interestingly, the clock points to 10:13, which is a popular time appearing in many clock advertisements (Figure 5). 76 This way to advertise clock is interesting because 10:13 is to a certain extent paradoxical. With a specific time 10:13, the repeating image of a stopped watch or clock is used to demonstrate how accurately the clock works. Kent puts this popular stopped clock at the 12 o’clock direction within the cinematic frame. This dead clock fails to measure Amelia’s time passing while she is doing dishes. Rather, it is more like a metaphor, providing no abstract temporal marker for Amelia to situate her chore activities.

76 Andrew Adam Newman, “Why Time Stands Still for Watchmakers”, The New York Times, (November 27, 2008). https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/business/media/28adco.html?_r=0.

55

Figure 5. The image is from an advertisement of Ralph Lauren Wedgwood Pocket Watch Plate.77

Conclusion

Using Peter Wollen’s concept of counter cinema, Claire Johnston in “Women’s

Cinema as Counter-Cinema” posits the concept of women’s counter cinema.78 She argues that the representations of women in cinema serve the mainstream patriarchal, sexist ideology. She promotes women’s counter-cinema in cinematic practice to subvert the iconography and objectification of women in film, and to “interrogate and demystify the workings of ideology.”79 For both Wollen and Johnston, counter-cinema as an alternative

77 “Wedgwood Ralph Lauren Pocket Watch Platter”, Chairish. https://www.chairish.com/product/1008851/wedgwood-ralph-lauren-pocket-watch-platter.

78 Peter Wollen. “Godard and counter cinema: Vent d'Est.” in Film Theory and Criticism 6 Ed (Oxford University Press, 2004), 525-533. Claire Johnston, “Womens’ Cinema as Counter- Cinema.” Movies and Methods, Vol. 2. Ed. Bill Nichols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976): 208–217. 79 Claire Johnston, “Womens’ Cinema as Counter-Cinema.” Movies and Methods, Vol. 2. Ed. Bill Nichols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976): 208–217.

56 cinema should question and challenge the dominant ideology of classical Hollywood narrative cinema. Johnston further recognizes that the dominant “sexist ideology” is not merely limited to Hollywood cinema, but also present in the European art cinema. Both scholars emphasize how formalist inventions play a role in counter-cinema. This emphasis on formalist inventions as well as the concept of women’s counter-cinema shed light on reading The Babadook through Jeanne Dielman.

When people analyze The Babadook, they usually focus on its narrative. They focus on the mother-son relationship to argue that Amelia’s maternal role is related to the monstrosity as well as the monster. I do not want to say that the maternal is not the key role in this film. Without any doubt, Amelia as a single mother is the main role for creating the horror. However, one major problem is that this type of reading of The

Babadook overlooks the breakthrough in women’s counter-cinema. Simply put, this popular reading cannot distinguish the earlier maternal horror made by male directors from these contemporary maternal horror by female counterparts. These scholars still retain the ways of reading classical horror from a feminist perspective. However, Jennifer

Kent among other contemporary female horror filmmakers actually brings a turning point in horror cinema. They, like other earlier art filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman, consistently investigates the concept of women’s counter-cinema. These films are not only merely centered on female characters. More importantly, they formally and ideologically investigate new ways of creating women’s affective experience of domestic temporality. Without shifting the ways of reading the over-evaluated narrative it would be hard to recognize that The Babadook actually provides an affective experience of time, 57 and this time is gendered and missed in the cinema outside of women’s counter-cinema.

So, I read The Babadook through re-reading Jeanne Dielman, although the two films are usually categorized into two opposing poles: one is an art film identified by its relation to so-called high culture and the other is likely to slip into the “trash” horror, which belongs to low culture. Similar to what Joan Hawkins points out—the boundaries between art cinema and body genres are getting blurred under certain conditions,80 The Babadook is no longer necessarily confined within a single category.81 Comparing The Babadook with

Jeanne Dielman, it allows us to see how women’s counter-cinema subverts narrative dominant genre, such as horror, and how women’s experience of domestic temporality is explored in cinematic practices by these female filmmakers.

In this chapter, I argued The Babadook reveals the emptiness of women’s individual experience of time. The next chapter will position the gendered and individual experience into a broader social context by investigating the ways in which the film

Grave (English title Raw, dir. Julia Ducournau, 2016) explores transgenerational repetition and how this type of repetition positions women into an impossible temporal position—no past, no present, and no future—within the dominant linear capitalist social time.

80 Joan Hawkins, Cutting edge: art-horror and the horrific avant-garde. (U of Minnesota Press, 2000). 81 Some scholars argue that The Babadook can be situated between high culture and low culture. See Jessica Balanzategui, "The Babadook and the haunted space between high and low genres in the Australian horror tradition." Studies in Australasian Cinema 11, no. 1 (2017): 18-32. and Amanda Howell, "Haunted Art House: The Babadook and International Art Cinema Horror." Australian Screen in the 2000s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 119-139. 58

Chapter 3: Repeating the Past and the Repetitive Future–The Transgenerational

Repetition in Julia Ducournau’s Raw

…we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future

than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child.

Lee Edelman, No future: Queer theory and the death drive, 11.

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I looked at Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook as an expression of women’s individual experience of time, arguing that this experience is shaped by the gendered division of labor in both inside and outside of the domestic space.

In this chapter, I turn to Julia Ducournau’s Grave (English title Raw, 2016) to explore the social and generational aspect of women’s time in contemporary horror films. Although we typically see a perspective, in both previous horror films and contemporary society, that the trajectory of a daughter’s life is experientially different from her mother’s, I use a detailed reading of transgenerational repetition in Raw to argue that women are culturally and socially positioned within the dominant social time for social reproduction.

Specifically, I focus on the representation of the maternal figure and the mother-daughter relationship in Raw to illustrate that the mother-daughter relationship is a recurrent and timeless world with an emphasis of temporal recurrence of women as a site of social reproduction, where the daughter’s future is actually a repetition of her mother’s trajectory. I also suggest that the transgenerational repetition unleashes a gendered temporal anxiety regarding social reproduction within the current capitalist society. 59

Raw, like The Babadook, begins with a puzzling car accident. In an extreme long shot, an unrecognizable person walks along a quiet country road. There is then a quick cut to a reverse shot of an approaching car. As the camera cuts back to its initial position, the unrecognizable person disappears, while the car enters into the frame. Suddenly, the person reappears by jumping into the middle of the road. This unpredictable behavior causes the car to crash to a tree. A couple of silent seconds later, the person slowly gets up from the road and walks towards the crash site. We eventually learn that this person is

Alexia, the older sister of the film’s main protagonist Justine. Later in the film a similar sequence takes place in the same road, shown from Justine’s perspective, thus clarifying that the opening puzzling car accident was a way of hunting for human flesh.

Raw uses a static camera technique, an incomprehensible car accident, and cannibalism to interweave cinematic temporal disorientation in order to illustrate a different perspective on the maternal experience. Here, the maternal experience does not merely refer to the representation of experience of Justine’s mother but also alludes to a realization of the mother-daughter relationship. While Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection could still account for the child-mother relationship, Kristeva uses this concept to explain how the individual becomes a subject by rejecting the spatial boundary that links to the maternal. However, the abject fails to explain a unique temporal relationship between the mother and daughter. Ducournau’s camera reveals that something is missing from this account. The missing aspect will be the focus of this chapter, which I will refer to as transgenerational repetition. 60

Transgenerational repetition refers to a repetition of the mother’s experience by her daughter, inscribing women socially and historically within a dominant, repetitive temporality. By investigating the ways in which Raw explores the cinematic representation of transgenerational repetition, we can gain a better view on theorizing a comparative complete maternal experience, which may already begin before a woman becomes a biological mother.82 Moreover, transgenerational repetition sheds light on a disguised and unspoken fear within Raw and other contemporary horror films in that women, have already “died” in the transgenerational repetition. Specifically, in this film, two major questions could be asked: how is the maternal figure depicted as a bearer of transgenerational repetition? And, how does the mother-daughter relationship (i.e., the relationship between Justine and her mother) contribute to broadening feminine repetition on the personal level (see Chapter 2) to transgenerational repetition on the societal level?

Not only does Raw use Justine’s relationship with her mother and concepts of transgenerational repetition to induce anxiety surrounding temporal issues, but it further complicates these temporal issues and exaggerates the temporal anxiety by introducing an older sister into the plot. In order to articulate this gendered temporal anxiety, this chapter will analyze the ways in which Raw brings out a confrontation between transgenerational repetition and women’s emerging temporal consciousness.

82 A young woman who is not necessary a mother becomes a paradoxical but significant site of rethinking the conventional notion of the maternal. 61

Mother in Old Enclosed Spaces

In many teen horror films, such as Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), a mother is usually either a narrative block constraining a teenage protagonist with conventional social norms or is reduced to a dysfunctional parent, completely out of sight, such as in

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974). However, in Raw, the mother plays both seemingly incompatible roles. In Raw, the mother acts as both the daughter’s narrative barrier (that is, controlling parent who directly enforces vegetarianism in the household), as well as an absent parent. With regards to her role as the narrative barrier, the mother argues with a restaurant waitress to claim the family identity of vegetarianism when Justine accidently tastes a meatball in her vegetarian plate. The mother also later forces Justine to finish her vegetarian meal at home by brutally ignoring Justine’s dissent.83 Her orders do not allow any negotiation. She insists on controlling what diet could be consumed by her family members. On the other hand, the domineering mother accomplishes these acts while seemingly “camera shy”. She does not appear in most of the story. The few times when she appears she always is in some way obscured. There are no low-angle shots, frontal shots, and definitely no close-ups of the mother; it is hard to find any complete images of this domineering role within the film. Meanwhile, her existence is indirectly suggested via her disembodied off-screen voice, and scenes of her

83 The mother’s vegetarian rule turns out to be a way of regulating her desire for human flesh for fulfilling the conventional social norms. Although this vegetarian principle seems ironic to carry out by a woman who is born with the cannibal gene, the strictness of diet principle also indicates the extent to which the mother’s desire for the human flesh, her desire. There would be more ideas could be developed here. For example, how is the cannibalism applicable to women in contemporary horror film, and is there any change on portraying a cannibal now, compared to the cannibalism depicted around the late 20 century, an era floated with the fear of HIV and AIDS. 62 body leaving the camera with smothering silence. This unavailable visual existence of the mother does not reduce her prominence as a dysfunctional parent figure, as she shadows everything left onscreen. The unfamiliar ways of portraying this domineering mother thus raise many questions concerning both the relationship between mother and daughter and, more broadly, the relationship between women and time. In order to illustrate this, I will begin analyze the different ways of portraying Justine’s mother and then conceptualize the maternal figure as a figure of generational temporality to articulate the concept of transgenerational repetition.

Two major techniques are used to depict Justine’s mother. The first is to directly bring her into some plots, and the second is to indirectly portray her through the conversations among other characters in the film. I will mainly focus on examining the first way. In the first way of depicting the maternal figure, Ducournau carefully considers how to represent this seemingly marginal character (Figure 6-9). As noted earlier, the image of the mother is always partial, and the camera leaves the mother at the edge of the visible. However, the locations where the mother appears in the film are significant.

These instances where Justine’s mother appears are when Justine first visits her new vet school, when Alexia loses her finger and is treated in a hospital, when Alexia gets arrested for murder and isolates into the prison, and before Justine learns the mother’s secret from her father at the family dinner table at home. That is, the mother occupies the enclosed spaces of the school, hospital, prison, and home.

63

Figure 6. The mother in Raw sits in the front passenger seat heading towards the vet school.

Figure 7. The mother stands behind the wheelchair at hospital.

Figure 8. The mother’s face is reflected on the window glass in prison.

64

Figure 9. The mother walks away from the dining table at home.

The significance of these locations can be seen inn Gilles Deleuze’s article

“Postscript on the Societies of Control” where he returns to Foucault’s concept of the disciplinary societies.84 According to Deleuze, Foucault points out a series of “the organization of vast spaces of enclosure.”85 Deleuze continues: “The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school (‘you are no longer in your family’); then the barracks (‘you are no longer at school’); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment.”86 Four of the enclosed spaces discussed by Foucault and Deleuze are the spaces that the mother occupies in

Raw. To be clear, Foucault argues that an individual goes from one enclosed space to another throughout their lifetime. However, what is unique about Raw is that in addition to presenting the mother in these enclosed spaces, Ducournau also depicts her outside of their social structure. In other words, the mother enters the school not as a student, the hospital not as a patient, and enters the prison, but not as a prisoner. In this way, we can also see that the mother in Raw is not a developing character but is a static character, as a mother. With that said, two questions immediately follow: Whether the enclosed spaces are still enclosed in Raw, and, if not, how might one rethink that the mother visits four stereotypically old enclosed spaces.

84 Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1992): 3-7. 85 Ibid.3. 86 Ibid. 65

The first question is already answered by Deleuze in the same article. The disciplinary societies are characterized by spaces of enclosure—family, school, hospital, and prison. Each individual in the enclosed environment is confined by the laws of that environment. Social organization is organized through the clear-cut boundaries between each enclosed space, built within each enclosed space, and disciplined by the threat of surveillance and punishment. However, this type of social organization, according to

Deleuze, has given way to the societies of control. He argues that “a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.”87 Nowadays, the previous enclosed spaces have all entered a state of crisis. The “free-floating control replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system.”88 The controls, unlike mould-like enclosures, are “a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.”89 Simply put, unlike under the threat of implementing the direct punishment in a disciplinary society, controls indicate an inner regulation embedded within each individual. Thus, within the societies of control, an individual may feel more freedom while actually under the free-floating and continuous control. In Raw, the mother’s control is no longer confined within the family, unlike the mothers Jeanne

Dielman and The Babadook. Instead, Justine’s mother does not only give orders within the family to discipline other family members, but she is also “free” to show up at any places where her daughter is and at any time. For instance, when Justine starts the new

87 Ibid. 88 Ibid,4. 89 Ibid. 66 school, her mother is there. When Alexia’s accident happens at night, the mother immediately arrives at the hospital. After Alexia is put into the prison, her mother’s reflection appears on the window through which Alexia sees her family (Figure 9). And, of course, the mother appears to be available to have lunch together with her daughter at home.

Although the maternal figure seems to be absent from the most parts of the film, she haunts her daughters’ lives continuously, acting as a constant reminder of the boundaries of control and discipline. Thus, Raw neither purely mirrors the societies of disciplines in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison,90 nor directly illustrates Deleuze’s concepts of the societies of control. The mother is not confined within the enclosed space, the home, but rather is free to influence her daughter outside of the home. The society depicted in Raw allows the maternal image to escape her spatial restriction as the old enclosed spaces collapse. Meanwhile, the camera repeatedly shows the visual blocks within each enclosed space—the vet school, the hospital, the prison, their home—and thus alludes to a claustrophobia that is associated with disciplining the individuals.

90 Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. (Vintage, 2012).

67

Figure 10 The faces of Justine, Alexia, and the mother are superimposed. Three faces become a singular face, or three faces repeat in a singular form onscreen.

Mother, A Living and Haunting Ghost

Comparing Raw to the previous films discussed in this thesis, it is immediately clear that the mother does not spend as much as time on doing dishes as do the women in both Jeanne Dielman and The Babadook. The repetition of the endless housework is elusive in this film. The only clue may be traced to the last sequence. When the mother uses silence to turn down Justine’s request for not finishing the vegetables on the plate, the mother crosses the camera (which keeps Justine’s facial reaction in focus) to clean up the plates on the dining table. The mother’s repetitive housework is thus mostly off- screen, and the main focus is on Justine’s reaction shot. This intentional “ignorance” of the repetitive housework in Raw actually shifts the question from how women suffer endless repetitive domestic work to the questions of what accounts for the repetitive maternal duty and whether there is a chance for an alternative, non-repetitive future for women, the daughters. The mother-daughter relationship explored in Raw provides a way of thinking through these questions.

In the essay “Repetition Facility: Beauvoir on Women’s Time”, Penelope

Deutscher returns to Simone De Beauvoir’s ideas on temporal repetition to explore the 68 relation between gender and time.91 According to Deutscher, De Beauvoir discusses women’s time through an analysis of maternity. Maternity structures at least two types of repetition that are discussed by De Beauvoir. One is the endless and meaningless repetition of domestic work. The other is that of reproduction, i.e., the repetition of life.

For De Beauvoir, both forms of repetition burden women because neither involve any creative action. De Beauvoir uses action to contrast repetition. The former allows the subject to reach freedom and transcendence, while the latter is a way of rewriting the past that brings no hope for the future freedom. As Deutscher notes, De Beauvoir also accounts for the relation between women and repetition for the “the historically unchanging forms of women’s work.”92 Feminine repetition, as I discussed in the previous chapter, can be used to think about the ways in which contemporary horror films like The Babadook complicate De Beauvoir’s ideas on the repetition of endless and meaningless domestic work. In those sequences of feminine repetition in both Jeanne

Dielman and The Babadook, the popular images of development, growth, and accumulation give way to the uncreative, boring, and homogenous repetitions of domestic work and caring. This replacement brings out the affective experience of repetition that is usually intangible to the audience in classic narrative cinema.

Meanwhile, the way De Beauvoir temporally conceptualizes reproduction as well as maternity also initiates a rethinking of the repetition across generations through the mother-daughter relationship in Raw. But it is worth noting that the film Raw addresses

91 Penelope Deutscher, "Repetition facility: Beauvoir on women's time." Australian Feminist Studies 21, no. 51 (2006): 327-342. 92 Ibid, 328. 69 more questions which fall out of De Beauvoir’s chart and thus urges us to reflect on how different the transgenerational repetition is in this film, recognized in the late capitalism, compared to De Beauvoir’s theorization of the mid 20th century. According to Deutscher,

De Beauvoir notes “the difference between species-life, reproduction and gender role- playing. To identify and link these as repetition is an argument both for and against the idea that women are inveterate repeaters.”93 Deutscher criticizes De Beauvoir’s notion of repetition by pointing out that one repetition could be a breaker of another repetition in

De Beauvoir’s argument. Rather than tracing further into De Beauvoir’s theories, I will shift my attention towards the film Raw to think about the relation between the repetition of life, which can be further developed as the repetition across generations, i.e. the transgenerational repetition, and the repetition of housework.

Based on De Beauvoir’s reading of reproduction, the mother reproduces life based on her own biological capability. According to Deutscher, De Beauvoir explicitly articulates the similarity between housework and reproduction, that is, the spirit of repetition. However, there is an important question that must still be taken into the consideration, which has been already raised by Deutscher. Besides the notion that both housework and reproduction doom women via the repetitiveness, how can we further understand the tension between these types of repetition. In other words, how to understand De Beauvoir’s implication, which is social reproduction may end the repetition of housework.

93 Ibid. 336. 70

In fact, this tension per se is questionable because it assumes that these two types of repetitions are separate. So, as one repetition starts, the other one would be stopped.

However, I argue that housework (including child care) and reproduction are not two independent forms of repetitions, rather both create a dynamic transgenerational repetition together. A woman becomes a doomed mother not merely because she reproduces a life but also because she has to take care of her replicant, her daughter. And child care, in this light, as one part of the domestic work, is repetitive at least on two levels. First, she needs to feed her daughter, make the daughter clean, and dress her properly, again and again. The second part, which is missing in the previous theories, is to make (if not educate) her daughter into a repetition of the social role of motherhood.

Thus, two repetitive women’s works, domestic work and reproduction, are not two similar independent tasks assigned to women. Rather, the two repetitive works repeat each other via the transgenerational repetition. The transgenerational repetition carries on the true endless repetition and continuously positions women into the endless repetition.

In Ducournau’s film Raw, the transgenerational repetition is made visible and tangible.

In Raw, the mother is not like a counterpart to the daughter but more like a ghost as a disappearing and supporting figure.94 By a ghost I do not mean a spirit at unrest but rather as a signifier of the past that keeps influencing the present.95 As I mentioned earlier

94 I do not mean that the mother is not the protagonist. What I mean by a disappearing and supporting figure is how this maternal figure has been portrayed as a shadow rather than a real human being who can take as much as Justine and other characters’ space onscreen. 95 This idea echoes Abraham and Torok’s concept of the transgenerational phantom. The difference is that, for Abraham and Torok, the phantom happens after the loved family members’ death, while I discuss how the still alive mother also could haunt the daughters. See Nicolas 71 in this chapter, the mother in Raw always seems hesitant to face the camera. Each sequence characterized by the mother’s presence centers the influence of the mother in the story—the mother is an actant, in Algirdas Julien Greimas’s term, whose function is to complete the narrative structure.96 However, the camera never follows the mother when every time she appears onscreen. The mother consistently leaves the cinematic frame and leaves her daughter alone to become the focus of those shots. The different ways of relating themselves to the camera create two uneven visual representations of the mother and the daughter, as well as their relations to time. While the daughter Justine, who is portrayed as a figure of the present, appears onscreen -- the ways of visualizing or undoing the visualizing of the mother initiate a temporal anxiety. The temporal anxiety is closely associated with her repeatedly avoiding the camera, which only allows the audience to get a glance at the mother but makes it impossible to confirm what appears in this glance. The frustration with the mother or with seeing the mother completes the images of loss and the images of the past. Something has been lost, although you have run into it but now get no chance in whatever way to re-capture it. Thus, the repetitive disappearing (shunning the camera and omission from the cinematic screen) of the mother onscreen makes up an ongoing image of the past, which is known to the audience in a past tense. This past tensed representation of the mother qualifies this maternal figure as a living ghost, who is living in the narrative but has become the past visually.

Abraham, and Maria Torok. The shell and the kernel: Renewals of psychoanalysis. Vol. 1. (University of Chicago Press, 1994). 96 Algirdas Julien Greimas, "Actants, actors, and figures." On meaning: Selected writings in semiotic theory (1987): 106-120.

72

Another reason why I interpret Justine’s mother as a living ghost is that the ways in which the mother interacts and interferes with the temporal present. I call this temporal interaction the haunting. In other words, the mother as a past tensed figure haunts Justine who is in present tense throughout the film. In Translating Time Bliss Cua Lim theorizes the supernatural and spectral in terms of time. She writes, “Ghosts call our calendars into question. The temporality of haunting—the return of the dead, the recurrence of events— refuses the linear progression of modern time consciousness, flouting the limits of the mortality and historical time.”97 Lim partly defines ghosts as the returning dead.

However, in this chapter I argue that Justine’s mother can be treated as a temporal signifier of the past, a ghostly figure not in the sense of the return of the dead but rather as a signifier of the past that keeps influences on the present.98 The mother was a student in the same vet school. What interests Justine onscreen has already been experienced by the mother in the past. These are all implicitly suggested via the father’s last speech before the closing credits. The father suggests that the fault (the cannibalism) is neither

Justine’s nor Alexia’s. When he talks about Justine’s mother, he removes his shirt to show his scars to his daughter. He implies that both Justine and Alexia are experiencing what their mother had experienced. Moreover, the mother forces Justine to repeatedly

97 Bliss Cua Lim, Translating time: Cinema, the fantastic, and temporal critique. (Duke University Press, 2009), 149. 98 She has no name, unlike the mother Jeanne Dielman or the mother Amelia in The Babadook. One way to refer to her is “Justine’s mother”, which is as a (cross generation) relational signifier playing two roles at the same time—to mark her past reproduction, and to make her existence necessary for the sake of her daughter Justine (or Alexia). Nicolas Abraham, and Maria Torok. “Secrets and Posterity: The Theory of the Transgenerational Phantom”, The shell and the kernel: Renewals of psychoanalysis. Vol. 1. (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 165-206.

73 adopt her strict vegetarian diet, even after Justine discovers her desire for human flesh.

Even this tension between what Justine wants to eat and what she can eat is a repeated version of the struggle that her mother has experienced. By reading the film through reinterpreting the term haunting, we can more easily recognize the transgenerational repetition. In addition, if the haunting could reveal how the past co-exists, confines, and influences the present, then reading the representation of the protagonist Justine through the lens of time will help us understand how the present entangles both the past and the future in the film Raw.

Transgenerational Repetition and Undoing Future

When discussing the transgenerational repetition in Raw I emphasized the mother’s link with the past and Justine’s link with the present, however, Ducournau complicates the relationship between the daughter and the present by depicting Justine in a unique relationship with both the past and the future.99

Justine as a teenage girl appears at the position where she has not been a woman like her mother but bears a force (or a destiny) of becoming such a woman. This position, like Bergson’s sense of the contemporary, is one in which the past has not been passed but exists within the present in an alternative way. Simultaneously, the present also

99 Becoming-woman as a term has been discussed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rosi Braidotti, Camilla Griggers, among others. This concept may be easily used to analyze the teenager protagonist Justine. But since Deleuze and Guattari means to use becoming-woman to question the distinction between femininity and masculinity. In order to focus on the discussion of transgenerational repetition, I think relevant researches could be done outside of this project. See Rosi Braidotti, "Discontinuous becomings. Deleuze on the becoming-woman of philosophy." Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24, no. 1 (1993): 44-55.

74 carries a force towards the future. The future will come, but not yet. The uniqueness of the position in this film comes from how Justine’s future is traced back her mother’s past.

In the narrative, the camera follows Justine to explore a world along with the audience.

However, as the mother’s haunting unfolds and becomes realized, Justine’s present exploration also becomes realized as a repetition of her mother’s school and life trajectory.

Moreover, the film ends up with the dead end of her mother’s trajectory.

Although Justine learns from her father that her own problem with cannibalism is one inherited from her mother, what appalls her is not merely how temporally repetitive this mother-daughter relationship is but also that her mother fails to find a solution. As

Justine’s father demonstrates his belief in Justine to solve the inherent problem, i.e. break the transgenerational repetition, the camera shows nothing but its distrust in the cliché, hopeful illusionary future. The father’s promising words make his scarred body more jarring and disturbing. In the frontal medium shot the father reveals his scarred body to

Justine. The fresh wounds could lead to his death (Figure 11). As Jim Williams’ main theme music runs on the soundtrack, the camera abruptly cuts to red in depth, on which only one word pops out: RAW. Appalled along with Justine, the audience gets the gendered transgenerational repetition but not the future. 75

Figure 11. The Last Shot in the Film Raw

Now we can return to my earlier question: why does Justine’s mother appear only four times and always within a space of enclosure? I argue that the renewing representation of these old enclosed spaces does not aim to capture the linear transition between two types of social organizations, but rather becomes a way of articulating how the contemporary society traps women into the endless transgenerational repetition. In retrospect, Ducournau has already undermined the explanatory power of the assumed linear timeline—following the past, going through the present, and coming to the future—by making every temporal fragment untraceable. As I mentioned earlier, the school, the hospital, the prison, the family, each of them is unidentifiable—no name, no address, no travel distance, no map. Nothing could be used for us to geographically locate each site in place. In addition, the camera is more likely to reveal these indoor spaces with visual blocks: doors, window frames, tables, chairs. The static settings in each scenario visually break those spaces into fragments and also determines the moving trajectories of the protagonist. The visual re-organization of these enclosed spaces undoes the geographic and cognitive relations between each place, which makes all places shown in this film unreal and intangible. Moreover, the fragmentation of these spaces also easily 76 triggers our claustrophobia, which leads to reducing each place as a functional signifier, rather than a real place. Thus, these revised representations of the enclosed spaces bring out an unreal temporal-spatial dimension. In addition to the transgenerational repetition,

Ducournau makes the past, figuring both as these old enclosed spaces and as Justine’s mother traps both the present and the future together.

Thus, the unidentical locations, the old enclosed spaces, the claustrophobic way of contextualizing Justine and her mother’s interactions, all undo the connections between the images of the past, of the present, and of the future and the linear temporal structure.

If the undoing is not account of Laconian death drive, then it at least puts the linear temporal structure into question through the lens of gender.100

Conclusion

In Lisa Baraitser’s essay “Maternal Publics: Time, Relationality and the Public

Sphere”, she summaries other scholars’ ideas on the “age of globalization” by noting,

“[o]ur current age is variously characterized by post-Fordist immaterial labour; precarity; transnational migration; and the development of what Brian Holmes has termed ‘flexible personality’.”101 This globalization undermines the distinction between the local and the foreign and transforms any place to non-place. Raw, in this sense, reveals a complete non-place, where everyone fails to map and navigate. This non-place is associated with a specific temporal sphere, in which the past, the present, and the future are misplaced.

Thus, the non-present, non-past, and non-future immerges. As the temporal distinction

100 Lee Edelman, No future: Queer theory and the death drive. (Duke University Press, 2004). 101 Lisa Baraitser, "Maternal publics: Time, relationality and the public sphere," in Re (con) figuring Psychoanalysis. (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2012), 221-240. 77 gets blurred, time becomes anything but the linear and progressive time. This experience of the dead time, transgenerational repetition, thus leads to a non-future but marks a full stop for becoming-woman struggling within reproductive time. In the following chapter, I will further explore this gendered temporal struggle in the film The Witch, by arguing how the film imbeds an alternative temporality outside of reproductive time to inspire us to rethink the relation between women and social reproduction.

78

Chapter 4: The Witch and the End of the Colonial Time

The desire to be a mother, considered alienating and even reactionary by the preceding generation of feminists, has obviously not become a standard for the present generation. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time”102

Introduction

The previous chapters provided a reading of the experience of women in contemporary horror films through the lens of temporality. I used the notions of feminine repetition and transgenerational repetition to discuss the temporal anxiety of social reproduction in Kent’s The Babadook and Ducournau’s Raw. Although social reproduction is associated with temporal progression leading from parents to children, the maternal body under these conditions is subject to a logic of temporal repetition. Both

The Babadook and Raw focus on this gendered experience by using different ways to reveal women’s relation to their temporal experience of repetition both inside and outside of the domestic space. In this way, both films raise a similar question: Is there an alternative way to reshape the relationship between women and social reproduction in contemporary horror cinema? I will explore this question using a reading of Robert

Eggers’ The Witch (2016). This chapter builds upon the first two chapters of this thesis.

Whereas the first two chapters discuss the contemporary horror film’s exploration of the

102 Julia Kristeva, "Women's time." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1, trans. Alice Jardine, and Harry Blake (1981): 30. 79 impossibility of women’s time within reproductive time, this chapter concerns the possibility of women’s time as an alternative, and overthrow, of reproductive time. By modes of temporality, I mean a series of ways of constructing and organizing notion of time, and its relations to cultural experiences. For my purpose, I exclusively focus on the ways in which social reproduction functions as a core spirit in generating time-image in contemporary horror films, specifically in The Witch.

The Witch is an excellent film to use for this argument because it builds upon the concept of temporal anxiety by adding another layer of depth in which it interweaves history into a fairytale. Moreover, this temporal anxiety not only questions the classic settlers' narrative of the "New World", but encourages a rethinking of women's reproduction and the reproductive bodies within the colonial narrative. In this way, this chapter explores how The Witch interrogates the relationship between women and the dominant social time that guarantees social reproduction and the progression of colonialism. By examining the ways in which The Witch visualizes the two modes of temporality—the dominant social time and an alternative witch’s time that is incompatible with the former, I argue that The Witch demonstrates an alternative chronotope which ends the dominant social time and sets women free from their repetitive duty of social reproduction. I argue this counter-capitalist chronotope is revealed via women’s alternative relation to the social reproduction, which thus can be regarded as non-reproductive temporality. Moreover, this counter mode of temporality is consistently dismissed from, repressed by, and erased from most colonial settler narratives. The Witch, by turning the fear for both the witch and the witching into a horror 80 story, re-discovers this erasing of counter-capitalist temporality.103 By exploring the representations of the temporal conflict between reproductive time and non-reproductive time (the witch’s time), I argue that the film visualizes an extinction of a frontier family and reveals how reproductive time fails to conquer non-reproductive time, and thus cinematically ends the capitalist chronotope.

Eggers uses a fairytale structure to reconstruct the story of the colonization of the

New England frontiers in the United States. The film begins with a frontier family exiled from a Puritan plantation community in 1630s and shows how the family struggles to survive on uncultivated land at the edge of the forest. This family experiences tragedy after tragedy. First, the baby son (Samuel) goes missing, then the elder son (Caleb) dies from witchcraft. Following this, the twins (Mercy and Jonas) disappear, the father

(William) is killed by the goat Black Phillip, and the daughter (Thomasin) kills her mother (Katherine). The aftermath of all of these events is concluded with Thomasin wandering naked into the forest to join the witches’ Sabbath. The camera fades into black immediately after Thomasin flies into the sky.

The Witch explores the concept of women’s relation to the commons. The notion of the commons has been developed by Silvia Federici in her book Caliban and the

Witch.104 Simply put, by “the commons” I mean the land that is shared but not owned by some people. The concept of land ownership in The Witch is different from what can be seen in other films using narratives of American settlers. Specifically, in other film

103 I intentionally use “the witching” to highlight an on-going witchcraft, in terms of temporality. 104 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch. (Autonomedia, 2004).

81 narratives using American settlers, the concepts of private property and land ownership are neglected. These films seem to portray that land is available to be owned by the new settlers without any question. Indeed, the most classic Westerns, as Joanna Hearne notes in her book Native Recognition: Indigenous Cinema and the Western, “typically suppressed any acknowledgement of Indigenous land ownership by inverting history to figure Natives as the invaders of white settlements.”105 Similarly, in the essay “Racialized

Markers of Gender and Gendered Markers of Race in 1950s Westerns”, Deborah Lynn

Kitchen-Døderlein points out that “[d]espite the multi-cultural, multi-racial reality of the western frontier, Hollywood Westerns released before the 1950s generally portray a boundary land that is white to its core. …non-white characters…are a part of the scenery of the West—and the plot ‘problem’ to be resolved by the [white] hero.”106 The land in

America is thus easily portrayed as the land owned (or at least could be owned) by the white frontiers. However, in The Witch, Eggers contradicts this myth of the settlers as bringing society to an empty land. The Witch shows the white frontier’s failure rather than success of colonial settlement. Thus, this film raises the concern of the ownership of the uncultivated land. The concept of land ownership loses its explanatory power. The uncultivated land in the film already belongs to someone else or the Other.107 The

105 Joanna Hearne, Native recognition: Indigenous cinema and the western. (suny Press, 2012), 43. 106 Deborah Lynn Kitchen-Døderlein, “Racialized Markers of Gender and Gendered Markers of Race in 1950s Westerns.” In A Fistful of Icons: Essays on Frontier Fixtures of the American Western. Edited by Matheson, Sue. (McFarland, 2017), 75. 107 The word “belong” can be used as an equivalent to the word “own”. However, this is not what I want to convey. I use quotes for this word to highlight how the ownership per se becomes a question. In addition, the concept of the Other in relation to the horror film is developed by Robin Wood in “The American Nightmare.” He argues that “Otherness represents that which bourgeois 82 concept of ownership is thus defamiliarized and becomes a “foreign” idea. By contrast, the witches are depicted as the residents of the land.108 In this way, he witches share the land and live on the land in a completely different way from the familiar capitalist concept of ownership. The land is more like the common land, which can be used by anyone who needs it. In The Witch, the witches can be regarded as one group of those women who need to use the land for living. They live on the land but do not draw any line to claim their ownership. Thus, by articulating the differences between ownership and the commons, The Witch raises a question concerning originality of the American national identity.

With that said, Eggers’ film takes it one step further and formulates this question from the perspective of gender, specifically through the role of women in the process of settler colonialism. The two forms of land ownership (that is, ownership and lack of ownership of the land/commons) contrasted in the film are also two forms of gendered relations to ownership and land. While men attempt to claim new ownership of the uncultivated land, the witches (and the European women who identify with them) are attached to the land through pre-capitalist relations and function as obstacles to masculine capitalist ownership. In The Witch, it is the father of the frontier family who tries to claim his own territory by settling down on uncultivated land, although his wife repeatedly

ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with (as Barthes suggests in Mythologies) in one of two ways: either by rejecting and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it, converting it as far as possible into a replica of itself.” Robin Wood, “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s,” in Horror, the film reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, (Routledge, 2002), 33-40. 108 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2004. 83 expresses her will to return to the homeland of England. By contrast, the witches, who are obviously female, are living on this unclaimed land. Furthermore, the witches consistently interrupt this family’s daily life by terrifying and killing the family members.

Thus, ownership is not merely aligned with the division of gender but also splits women into two categories. The first category of women is associated with the forward thrust of social reproduction—giving birth to more children, while the second resists and even is actively hostile to the child and the family that is as a form of social reproduction. The conflict between these two categories of women center the narrative in The Witch. And this conflict is mainly featured through the experience of the daughter, Thomasin, who confronts both the burden of reproduction and the lure of freedom from reproduction. Her mother represents the category of the reproductive woman while the witches signify the forces of non-reproduction. The film ends when Thomasin, having made her choice, kills her mother and follows a goat into the forest to join the witches’ Sabbath. The Witch is thus a contemporary fairytale that changes the historical narrative of American colonialism and can be regarded as a counter-narrative of settler colonialism through the lens of gender. Rather than justifying what happened in the past, the film questions the dominant colonial narrative by tracing back to the mythic fairytale structure of the frontiers.

Two Times: Reproductive Time and Non-reproductive Time

In discussing how Eggers brings out the temporal conflict outlined above, it is important to explain in further detail two key terms I use in this chapter. These are

“reproductive time” and “non-reproductive time”. While I emphasize the temporal 84 category of each term, they function to generate conflicting time modes under the capitalist chronotope in contemporary horror cinema. The term chronotope is used by

Mikhail Bakhtin to discuss the ways in which time and space are constructed in literature.109 In his words, it refers to “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.”110 A chronotope indicates neither scientific, physical time nor social time, although it cannot be completely separated from both physical time and social time. I use the term chronotope to refer to a unique and historical temporal and spatial construction in contemporary horror films.

Reproductive time refers to the ways of rationalizing, measuring, and organizing time to promise potential social reproduction in the narrative of The Witch. For example, the frontier family in this film is burdened with working on the uncultivated land in order to “conquer” the new land. As I have been arguing, conquering and settling here assumes the linear reproducibility of the social structure of the family as the land passes ownership from parents to children. The temporality associated with the family is linear, progressive and follows the causal-effect logic, but it is also tied to the space of the frontier and the destruction of the commons. This mode of time can be taken as a representation of dominant social time that contributes to the capital transition and development of capitalism. Moreover, this mode of temporality is significantly associated with both relinquishing women's "ownership" of their body and the exploitation of women's

109 Mikhail M Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics," in Narrative dynamics: Essays on time, plot, closure, and frames (2002): 15- 24. 110 Ibid,15. 85 reproduction. Due to the exploitation of women's reproductive bodies and reproduction and the relationship between social reproduction and time, reproductive time, in this chapter, refers to a mode of time that guarantees both product accumulation and geographical expansion with a “promising” future.111 Thus, the woman’s body becomes another space that is conquered and temporalized by reproductive settler time, and is included in the capitalist chronotope.

However, non-reproductive time, functioning as an opposition, refers to the temporality that is too thick to be explained in terms of reproductive time (or the capitalist chronotope). It is neither linear nor progressive. It never promises a better future—the very existence the future is put into question by non-reproductive time.

Rather, this mode of time functions as a negation and destruction of reproductive time.

While nonreproductive time coexists with reproductive time in The Witch, the two are radically incompatible. This incompatibility threatens the promise of the future and also leads the family to an unresolvable crisis in the film. If reproductive time is constructed by regulating women's reproduction as well as their potential reproductive bodies, then non-reproductive time is reduced and even diminished as a nonexistent temporal mode, although may preexistent before the capitalist transition. It conjures up the spatial order of the commons that were destroyed and stolen by capitalism through the process of primitive accumulation.112 Thus, the clarification of reproductive time and non- reproductive time contributes to realizing the temporal conflict under capitalism.

111 The future is not as good as this ideology promises. 112 Mark Rifkin explores the ways in which the settler time colonizes the Native American time in his recent book Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-determinaition. 86

The Reproductive Body and Impossible Temporality

Many scholars have studied the concept of the reproductive body from various perspectives. For example, Valerie Traub in her essay “Prince Hal's Falstaff: Positioning

Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body” articulates the ineffable biological potential of the female reproductive body and points out that the female reproductive body is “an object of terror” in the western cultural tradition.113 She uses the biological specificity of the female body to explore the reasons for gynophobia. Other scholars like

Silvia Federici are more likely to treat the reproductive body as a social construction rather than a biological construction. In Caliban and the Witch, Federici notes that: “... the body has been for women in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers: the primary ground of their exploitation and resistance, as the female body has been appropriated by the state and men and forced to function as a means for the reproduction and accumulation of labor.”114 For Federici, the female body under capitalism is the reproductive body. Although she explicitly points out how the body of prostitutes and old women are not used for social reproduction, the notion of the reproductive body is exchangeable with the notion of the female body. The prostitute and the witch are thus inscribed into the position of the witch rather than the woman.115

Although he does not particularly articulate the relationship between time and reproduction, he recognizes that other time modes do exist before the settler’s colonialism. Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-determination. (Duke University Press, 2017). 113 Valerie Traub, "Prince Hal's Falstaff: Positioning psychoanalysis and the female reproductive body," Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1989): 456-474. 114 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch. (Autonomedia, 2004), 16. 115 By the witch I emphasize the non-reproductive feature of the female body, which has been demonized and distinguished from the female body serving to social reproduction. 87

Before continuing, it is important to distinguish the reproductive body from the female body in order to articulate the ways in which the female body is socially and culturally constructed as a site of social reproduction. Reproduction becomes something with which women have to deal. So, reproduction cannot merely be treated as one single potential of the female body.116 Thus, in this thesis, I use the notion of the reproductive body to refer to the female body that is exclusively used for the purpose of social reproduction under capitalism. The ways I define the reproductive body aim to both stress the importance of the temporal references, and point out how the notion of the reproductive body can be understood as a temporal concept. In other words, the reproductive body is not linked to an atemporal biological concept. Instead, this concept of the reproductive body is used to reveal a temporal tension and conflict playing out on and in the female body as social site of reproduction.

This also means, in turn, that any female body that is excluded from the order of social reproduction would be regarded as the non-reproductive body. In The Witch, the witch’s body is the primary figure of the non-reproductive body, which is the center of the analysis in the later sections. The notion of the non-reproductive body, on the one side, frees the female body from women’s duty and destiny of social reproduction by recognizing capabilities (not including reproduction) of women’s bodies. On the other hand, this notion makes the tension between women and time tangible. Simply put, the

116 Marxist feminist scholars argue that not only does procreation belong to the category of social reproduction, but also to any other forms of domestic works. However, since reproduction or procreation can account for the gender division of labor, here the use of reproduction is mainly referring to that women are used to reproduce. That’s why the reproductive body is defined through the relation of women to their pregnancies. 88 non-reproductive body is the “dysfunctional” female body that cannot serve as the reproductive tool and thus cannot be incorporated into the dominant linear and progressive time. In this sense, the non-reproductive body is the “glitch” of linear time that is dominant in the current capitalist society. Although I will discuss the non- reproductive body more in the later sections, I want to make it clear here that the surge of representations of the non-reproductive body, which was usually overlooked in popular culture, actually helps us understand the ways in which women are programmed into the linear and progressive capitalist time.117

As I mention above, the notion of the non-reproductive body provides a site for rethinking the female body within its relation to dominant linear time. It is worth noting that, although the reproductive body that seems to serve well for the purpose of social reproduction, it also reveals some tension or conflict within its relation to reproductive time. Ironically, the notion of the reproductive body takes an atemporal position, although it is used to guarantee the smooth progress of colonial chronotope. In reproductive time, the reproductive body is stretched into two incompatible poles at the

117 The anxiety associated with the non-reproductive body is also intersects with other racial issues. Scholars including Dorothy Roberts, George Yancy, and Katherine Paugh among others explores many questions regarding race and reproduction. See Dorothy E. Roberts, Killing the black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. (Vintage Books, 1999). George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Katherine Paugh, The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition. (Oxford University Press, 2017). Maya Unnithan-Kumar, and Sunil K. Khanna, eds. The Cultural Politics of Reproduction: Migration, Health and Family Making. (Berghahn Books, 2014).

89 same time. On the one hand, the reproductive body is culturally and socially constructed as a domestic "device" for timeless and repetitive housework. Housework, unlike other types of work, is not treated as a real, productive work, and hence its form of dead repetition that I analyzed in Chapter 1. On the other hand, the reproductive body is placed into different time slots based on its role of social reproduction: preparing for reproduction (young girls), biological reproduction (pregnancy), and social reproduction

(motherhood). Thus, the reproductive body is located at the incongruous positions: an atemporal position based on repetition and a generational position encouraging a strict and well-scheduled life centering on social reproduction. In fact, the intersection of both the atemporality and the punctuality of reproductive progress produces an impossible temporal position for the reproductive body. Thus, it is problematic to regard the reproductive body as the perfect temporal position for women, even though the impossible temporal position is constructed by the patriarchal capitalist society. We can call the incompatible positions “the impossible temporality”.

This tension between the two incompatible temporal positions is rarely considered by Marxist feminist scholars, who most insistently interrogate the function of social reproduction under capitalism. Particularly in film studies, the understanding of the representations of women, specifically the female body, is usually taken as an interchangeable concept with the reproductive body.118 Moreover, even though sometimes the representations of the female body is clearly assumed as either the

118 This may explain why women so easily get pregnant or have experienced pregnancy in many genres, such as 17 Girls (Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin, 2011), among others. 90 reproductive body or the non-reproductive body, without taking women’s relation to time into consideration, it would be hard to recognize both the temporal impossibility embedded into the reproductive body, and the ways in which the reproductive body may become non-reproductive. The intention of stabilizing (without considering the temporal dimension) the boundary between the reproductive body and the non-reproductive body leads to a classical distinction of women, which are usually figured as mothers or unmarriageable prostitutes.119 However, this categorization of women overlooks a time- related dynamic gender struggle. In short, defining the reproductive body, first, helps us rethink the impossible position of the female body in the patriarchal capitalist society in terms of temporality. This also dismisses the general assumption of unchangeable representation of the female body.120 The following sections of this chapter elaborate on the ways in which Eggers’ film The Witch reveals a conflict between reproductive time and non-reproductive time.

Aural Haunting, Women and the Past

In The Witch, once the frontier family reaches a seemingly unowned wild land to start their settlement, the soundtrack “discharges” a witchy female chant to set up the foreboding tone of this film to its audience (Figure 12). The camera provides an extreme long shot of this immeasurable and mysterious land that sits next to a dark forest, and then zooms into the forest with a crane shot (Figure 13). The operatic female chanting

119 Many films provide a way of rethinking this distinction by, for example, portraying a female character, who is both a mother and a prostitute at the same time. 120 This is probably the reason why female protagonists are mainly changed through the change of their costumes. Changing costumes are more likely a spatial change—a spatial remapping upon the female body. 91 magically provides neither a pleasurable melody nor any comprehensible lyrics, and it thus creates an effect of an uncanny space. This way of depicting the “new” land for the settlers can be traced back to the historical anxiety figured by the frontier in mythic narratives of America’s “founding.” In the myth, the land is unowned and thus “free” for the taking, and an intrusion would face the indigenous defense. In The Witches: Salem,

1692, Stacy Schiff points out that the conflicts and wars between the settlers and Indians generate a sense of fear among these New England settlers.121 In The Witch, the incomprehensible chanting in this sequence indicates a pre-existing, indigenous presence hostile to the settlers. By using this foreign chanting on the soundtrack, the film prepares the audience for the fate of this frontier family—the “new” land used by the Other cannot be taken by this frontier family with the colonial spirit, and the family must die.122 The seemingly unowned land gradually shows its otherness and foreignness. In a sense, the incomprehensible chanting in The Witch not only indicates the presence of the Other or of foreignness, but also suggests that the Other is a figure from the past. The rethinking of the Other in the past does not demystify American history but rather arouses the anxiety of “losing” the classic history narrative.123

121 Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692. (Hachette UK, 2015). 122 In the mother’s words, the land is cursed. She does not only want to move away from this farm but wants to move back to England. This echoes the opening sequence. In the opening, after the traditional England music fades out to a great sense of melancholia, rather than nostalgia, and after a low voiced group murmuring, the father questions the need to travel to the States. His outspoken challenging of the reason for immigration evokes a “forgotten” anxiety of being Americans in this contemporary society. 123 One of the recent examples is that United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is no longer serving as an agency that was demonstrated to secure “America’s promise as a nation of immigrants.” In this sense, the “old” immigrants seem to close their door to potential new immigrants. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/us/uscis-nation-of-immigrants.html 92

Figure 12. The frontier family starts to claim the "new" land.

Figure 13. A zoom in shot of the “foreign” forest.

The foreignness or otherness is figured as female in The Witch. Although the wars between the Native Americans and the new settlers are portrayed as cruel and fearful in

Schiff’s book, the foreignness in this film is not visualized through the image of the violent, inhuman, male “Indian.” Instead, it is portrayed as women who become the 93 source of foreignness and dread. Two possible interpretations can be made for the ways the chanting’s gendered voice is used. First, it can be explained by what Barbara Creed called the monstrous-feminine.124 Creed borrows Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection to argue that female monsters in American horror films can be understood as a site of abjection.125 The concept of abjection is important to think through because it both outlines the emergence of the sense of subject, and explains the problematic relationship between the becoming subject (the child) and the mother. In this scenario, the child’s fear comes from the mother’s maternal body, a body that is neither wholly inside nor outside of the infant’s sense of self. The infant thus abjects the mother’s body, casts it outside of itself, in order to gain a sense of its separate subjectivity. But this very process of abjection reveals the always incomplete separation of the child from the mother’s monstrous body. Creed uses the notion of the abject to explain the ways in which

American horror films create female monsters as signifiers of the abject mother. In The

Witch, if we use this form of analysis, the female voice could be seen as a signifier of the abject, and can be used to indicate the frontier land as representing the uncanny maternal body. However, this manner of interpretation is problematic. In fact, the emphasis on the female voice, one of the most striking features in the film, makes The Witch different from other previous horror films analyzed by Creed, including Carrie (Brain De Palma,

1976) and Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). First, Creed’s reading is heavily reliant upon visual elements, so The Witch’s use of audible elements is left out of Creed’s analytic frame.

124 Barbara Creed, The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. (Psychology Press, 1993). 125 Julia Kristeva, "Approaching abjection." Oxford Literary Review 5, no. 1\2 (1982): 125-149. 94

While the American horror films discussed by Creed heavily rely on the creation of the abject female body or embodied abjection, The Witch complicates the notion of the monstrous-feminine by creating a disembodied female anxiety, which is tied not to the symbolic but to asymbolic or even antimetaphorical structures. The incomprehensibility of the woman’s voice, in other words, destabilizes the neat symbolic association of the land with structures of subjectivity. The female chanting then intensifies in volume while the camera remains static and continues to show the mysterious woods. This female vocal addition to the wild woods disassociates the gendered voice from its body. Thus, the disembodied female voices, suggesting female monstrosity, become intractable—no sound source, no onscreen body.

In addition, since the concept of the abject is understood as a spatial term, referring to a spatial position that is neither inside nor outside, it cannot provide a suitable lens that accounts for the temporal anxiety so present in this scene. In The Witch, women become an important temporal signifier, not merely a spatial site.126 For example, in the

126 Take two books for example. First, in Space, Gender, Knowledge, the editors Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp points out how the female body is usually taken into consideration in terms of space. They note that “[t]he body, its size, shape, gestures, the very space it takes up, those masculine and feminine norms which mean that men sprawl and women don’t; the differences in physicality that construct and reflect gender norms creates ways of being in space.” They further connect this idea to Michel Foucault’s idea on the body, that is, “the body is a field or surface on which the play of power, knowledge and resistance is worked out.” As we can see, the female body is not treated as a temporal term but rather as a notion suggesting some spatial meanings. See Linda McDowell, and Joanne P. Sharp. Space, gender, knowledge : feminist readings. (New York : J. Wiley, 1997), 203.

In addition, other scholars, including De Laruretis and Kristeva (the abject referring to a spatial status neither inside nor outside), take women as a concept that is discussed in a spatial way. For example, De Laureitis also notes “[i]f the female position in narrative is fixed by the mythical mechanism in a certain portion of the plot-space, which the hero crosses or crosses to, a quite similar effect is produced in narrative cinema by the apparatus of looks converging on the female 95 sequence of the chanting, the disembodied female voices are associated with the still image of the forest, capturing no on-screen movement. Thus, the temporality of action, tied to visual movement, is replaced by a durational time tied to the audible experience.

Moreover, by using a female voice, this audible measurement of time is to a certain extent de-masculinized. Thus, rather than indicating the dominant linear capitalist time,

The Witch can be read as a space for rethinking women and their relation to time (or even their influence upon changing time mode).

Another way to understand why female chanting in The Witch is connected to a foreign land can be traced back to women’s relation to the commons in Medieval Period.

Since the chanting is done by a group of women, the collective female voices reveal a female union offscreen. The reason why a female union is worth noting here is that it subverts the familiar singular image of women—women are usually isolated from other women within the home, where they are instead associated with the husband and their children. The commons remind us of an earlier historical moment when child-care and other “domestic” activities were understood as collective practices. Thus, the incorporation of the sublime image of the woods and the incomprehensible women's chanting on the soundtrack intensifies both the intangibility of the land and problematic ownership of the frontier landscape/the uncultivated land. Both issues immediately evoke the anxiety of settlers and challenge the myth of conquering the uncultivated. As Federici

figure…In that landscape, stage, or portion of plot-space, the female character may be all along, throughout the film, representing and literally marking out the place (to) which the hero will cross.” De Lauretis’s analysis also shows how women are conceptualized as a spatial signifier in reading of the narrative cinema. See Teresa De Lauretis. Alice doesn't: Feminism, semiotics, cinema. (Indiana University Press, 1984), 139. 96 notes in Caliban and the Witch, women relied more heavily on the commons than men did. In her book, Caliban and the Witch, Federici notes:

The social function of the commons was especially important for women,

who, having less title to land and less social power, were more dependent on

them for their subsistence, autonomy, and sociality… the commons too were

[important] for women the center of social life, the place where they

convened, exchanged news, took advice, and where a women’s viewpoint on

communal events, autonomous from that of men, could form ....127

During the transition to capitalism, enclosures were used to evict women from communal lands and to isolate them from other women within individual domestic spaces. In The

Witch, the collective female chanting counters the capitalist privacy with a dual anxiety.

On the one hand, it is a retrospective reflection of women's unity in the commons.

However, preserving common land is impossible during the capitalist transition. After the common land becomes a merely historical reference, the nostalgia of the common land revealed in the film may bring the contemporary audience a sense of anxiety. On the other, this anxiety is also associated with an uncontrolled “feminine power.” It is women who convene on the common land. An anxiety may accompany an unspeakable imagination—what if contemporary “good wives” were no longer defined by proper motherhood but by living a life that allows women to gain more free wills?

Contemporary illustrations of women’s unity outside of the film, such as the Women’s

127 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch. (Autonomedia, 2004), 71-2. 97

March, brings not only cheer but also anxiety.128 This double layered anxiety arises from the possibility of female unity or solidarity, which had been buried but has begun to reappear in the contemporary society.

However, it is unreasonable to suggest that the female voices are completely dislocated from the land and does not imply any relation to the witches in the woods. The witch figure appearing in the later sequence fulfills an expectation to pinpoint a possible source of the disembodied female voices. While the witch figure may be attributed to the incomprehensible female voices, how the witch is depicted further intensifies the temporal anxiety in various ways. In the next section, I argue that The Witch reveals non- reproductive time by depicting the witch’s body as the non-reproductive body. The non- reproductive time immediately puts the causal-effect chain into question and thus challenges the linear time which is grounded in the causal relationship, as well as the capitalist chronotope.

Individuality and Non-individuality, the Witches Body and Non-reproductive Time

Immediately before Samuel is stolen from the family, Thomasin plays peekaboo with him by covering her own eyes and repeating a question: “Where is Sam?” (Figure

14). This scene is depicted through a series of extremely low angle shots of Thomasin's face. In these shots, Thomasin appears in front of unidentifiable sublime grey sky—the color of the sky is neither bright nor dark blue, rather a color between white and black.

128 This may also explain why the media repeated that the Women’s March is a historical phenomenon because it has been a long time since all women unions are welcomed and allowed in history. 98

This shallow space provides nothing but an ineffable temporal-and-spatial dimension.

While Thomasin's face is framed frontally in medium close-up shots, Samuel's smiling face appears in a counter shot. The intercutting between these shots contributes to a sense of temporal continuity but also brings out a temporal anxiety—we are increasingly aware that something bad may happen between these seemingly continuous shots. Indeed,

Samuel disappears during just such an impossible interval. While the intercutting suggests an assumption of a coherent temporality, this impossible interval creates a sense of false or supernatural temporality. To the question of “Where is Sam?” the film offers the answer: in no time.

Figure 14. Thomasin covers her eyes to play peekaboo with her brother Samuel.

While the temporal dimension of this magical vanishing of a baby boy is bodily measured with Thomasin's voice, "Where is Sam?", and her facial reaction changing in a single take, the following scene seems to conflict with Thomasin's experience of time by revealing how the audience experiences a witch's bodily movement onscreen. In the following shot, a breathless old lady carries Samuel and jogs in the forest. A baby’s 99 crying and the witch's shallow breathing become an audible clue for making sense of

Samuel’s atemporal vanishing. In an extreme long shot, a lady in a hood carries something and quickly moves horizontally within the frame. A baby's murmuring becomes the most "visible" clue for connecting this unrecognizable lady to the missing

Samuel. This audible knowledge creates an unsettling two shot, in which it implies that a witch carries a baby into the wild and savage woods. The following shot fills the foreground with branches as a vague figure holding something runs out of the frame. The branches seem to be too wildly tangled for a body to get through, but the witch's body passes as if through an unrecognized path. On the one hand, it is the untimely and untraceable absenting of Samuel that creates a supernatural, neither natural nor cultural, aura; and on the other, it is a more visible witch’s body as it runs through the woods that problematizes Thomasin's experience of immediacy. The mismatched and incompatible temporal dimensions, at the same time, refer to the same tabooed event, which can trigger a jarring "amber alert" in contemporary society. Similarly, the loss of the child radically disrupts both the day-to-day life of the family and the generation progression of settler time. In this sense, not only does the witch interrupt the frontier family's daily routine (a strict way of managing time) and work based on the linear timeline, but the temporal rupture brings a possibility of existence of an alternative temporality outside of linear temporality. This possibility leads to an unavoidable anxiety, which is heavily associated with the failure of accumulation: that is, lacking the future potential labor, the very notion of progress and futurity that underwrites the colonial project comes into question. 100

In The Witch, the witches resist clear identification because they both have no names (or they do not need names) and are treated as a collective union, rather than as a group of individuals. In general, narrative films seem to create characters for narrative development and name or do not name their characters based on their importance to the narrative development. For example, protagonists usually have names and these names are also frequently associated directly with the film: see Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby

(Roman Polanski, 1968) or Carrie in Carrie (Brain De Palma, 1976). But the minor characters do not get named, such as the governor in The Witch or the inspector and the taxi driver in Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002). Although some films portray unnamed protagonists, these characters are mainly taken in singular forms. By singular forms I mean that these characters are treated as individual characters with strong personalities and distinguishable motivations. In other words, the unnamed protagonists can be easily distinguished from any other characters. So, these characters can still be referred with a singular he or she. For example, Jennifer Lawrence plays a character with no name but that is clearly distinguished from other female characters due to her role as a mother in

Darren Aronofsky’s film Mother! (2017). However, in The Witch, not only do the witches have no name, but they are also treated as interchangeable members of a group. These unnamed women, who are living in the forest, are called simply “the witches.” Each witch is difficult to be distinguished from others. In this sense, the nameless witches provide a series of images in which the idea of the individual is problematized.

Since the witches have no names and cannot be individuated, the film suggests an alternative relationship between subjectivity and linear time in cinema. As I mentioned 101 above, the witch appears immediately after Samuel is missing and jogs with a baby. The following sequence implies that Sam is “reformulated” into the witch's magic ointment in a dark room: a naked baby, a knife, a huge muddler, a broom, a tremendous moon. In this sequence, a series of shots, although only loosely connected, easily encourage the audience to come up with a familiar narrative—an "evil old witch" murdering babies for ointment in order to fly on the Sabbath. However, in this sequence the witch herself is only constructed through a series of inconsistent images of the naked female body. By inconsistent images, I mean that the film does not “match” the body parts, leaving open the possibility that the witch in the hut is composed of sets of different bodies, or is in fact multiple witches. In the previous sequence when Samuel is stolen and taken to the forest, the witch is an unrecognizable woman wearing a dark outfit. Later, in this sequence, a sometimes saggy and sometimes lean naked female body is portrayed. The actions shown in the sequence could be understood as a series of actions taking place chronologically. However, the camera provides the most ambiguous identity for the character who is doing the witchcraft. The witch is sometimes lean, sometimes fat

(Figure 15). Her skin seems sometimes tight but sometimes loose. In a later sequence, when Caleb is lost in the woods, a young lady wearing a foreign dress and red hood emerges from a cabin in the woods. When she approaches to kiss Caleb, the camera provides a side angle to show how this witch’s young face is possibly associated with another old hand (Figure 16-18). These incoherent images of the witches consistently raise a question on how to identify a witch as the same one in this taken-for-granted 102 linear and chronological time.129 In this sense, in The Witch, we may need to say that the myth of the witch is not only about the witching narrative, but is constructed by the impossible images of the witch in reproductive time.130

129 Furthermore, each shot is used to break down a process of “cooking” into separated steps, like recipes popular among housewives’ kitchen. This sequence of making ointment and women’s cooking in our real kitchens are similar because of how time is managed in the same way during both activities. In addition, they are similar in the sense that both are involved with a timely impossibility, which is usually devalued as the enemy of intelligent concentration—multitasking. Within the capitalist system, the process of multitasking would only be working if these tasks are organized into a linear series of steps. In other words, the positive idea of multitasking is not to challenge the capitalist linear temporality. Different tasks are reorganized into a new and bigger project that can be fragmented into a new but still linear series of different steps in order to exploit workers by taking the best use of their time. On the contrary, others, who need to do some intelligent works, are not encouraged to multitask at work, such as engineers, IT, etc. Work can be divided based on to what extent the workers need to use their intelligence. In this scenario, the division between mental and physical labors is striking because the clear binary concepts of body and mind, which has been challenged for a long while, is still working, in terms of the linear temporality. Thus, temporality here is no longer a concept isolated from the body, rather it is a concept dealing with the possibility of the body. In this sense, the division of body and mind is probably not the key principle to facilitate the discussion of human activity within the capitalist system. Instead, the relation to the temporality is more likely to determine social relationships under capitalism. 130 At the end of the film, Thomasin joins a group of women around a fire, who are naked, chanting, and dancing. After the camera focuses on Thomasin, all other women disappear completely in the long shot that follows. 103

Figure 15. A witch is using baby Samuel to make ointment.

104

Figure 16. A point-of-view shot: The witch sees Caleb.

Figure 17. The witch is approaching Caleb.

105

Figure 18. The young face and one old hand provide a whole image of the witch.

These chronologically impossible images of the witch bring out one of the key concerns in this chapter: the witch’s body and temporality. Is it a single witch doing a series of things, or many different witches doing different things? The distinction between the ideas of singularity and plurality helps us rethink representations of different temporal dimensions in this film. First, the ambiguous singularity exaggerates the complexities of the notion of the individual. The individual not only quantifies population in general, but also makes one accountable for one’s own time. In Marxist theory, value and surplus value are measured by time, and for the worker this time is associated with their own bodily temporality transformed into a commodity. In this sense, I argue that the number here is an expression of Marx’s concept of alienation. Simply put, human labor is extracted from the individual body and becomes an object that can be quantified and no 106 longer belong to themselves. In this way, questioning the status of the witch as an individual heavily problematizes the quantification, as well as alienation or the possibility of surplus value.

Second, the witch’s body itself is problematic in terms of reproductive time. The singular witch’s body is portrayed as a figure who steals Samuel, who it is implied to kill

Samuel, who makes ointment, who puts ointment on a broom, and who flies towards the moon above the woods. The Witch depicts this series of witching actions from the most ambiguous and unsettling perspective. The camera sits in a series of positions, which are not usually possible with human eyes. From these inhuman perspectives, a blurring, partial, and unrecognizable female figure is implicitly indicated as a witch, who is sometimes older and sometime younger. In other words, she could be the same witch but cannot be located within the linear temporal framework. The old body and, simultaneously, the young body, are arbitrarily “conceptualized” as an unsettling site of witching. The impossible coexistence of incompatible time markers of the female body thus becomes the specific and uncanny feature of the witch’s body.

Pushing this idea further, I find at least two striking things in relation to this incompatible body of the witch. First is how the witch is easily regarded as a shapeshifter. In The Witch, the witch seems not only to change her female appearance between old and young, but she also goes beyond the boundary between human and animal (Figure 19). In this specific case, the hare, which implicitly refers to the witch, forces an encounter with a nonhuman gaze which intensifies the anxiety of non- difference highlighted by the composite nature of the witch’s body. The failure to 107 distinguish the human from animal is also the failure to differentiate culture (the civilized) or nature (the uncivilized) from the unnatural. The distinction between cultivated, the savage, and the undefinable collapses. The audience is forced to confront the familiar categories with a challenge from the animal's look (Figure 20).

Figure 19. The father, William, and his son, Caleb, see a hare, which is implied as a form of the witch.

108

Figure 20. The hare onscreen looks into the audience's eyes.

If this point seems not directly linked to the concept of temporality, then rethinking the arbitrary but discursive relationships between the signifiers— the hare, the young foreign woman, the old naked woman— and the signified, the witch, allow us to get a strong sense of the collapsing of linear capitalist time and of the existence of an alternative temporality. In this experience of incompatible multiplicity, signifier and the signified are no longer clear-cut relations but rather become a discursive “stew”. But the discursive is probably not the best word choice because it still assumes a possible linear relation, in which communication moves from the signifier towards the signified. But in this specific case, since the signifiers (the hare, the young foreign woman, the old naked woman) are able to transmute into one another, linearity of signification is replaced with simultaneity: they are all present at the same time as versions or modifications of each 109 other. Moreover, the notion of a shapeshifter can be understood as a convenient way of dealing with the figure, who fails to be recognized and identified as an individual.

The second point I want to make here is that witching suggests initially a series of actions. These actions or activities are broken into a series of steps. The breakdown and reorganization of these actions are a way of conceptualizing these women’s (witches’) experience within the linear temporality. By doing this, the witching is not only reshaped into a cause-and-effect chain, but also is identified as something unnatural. It’s interesting that the two facets cannot coherently stay together, which explains why the witching and the figure of witches play a destructive role in the capitalist linear temporality. Throughout the film, how the family organizes daily activities is depicted through a series of continuity editing and comparatively long takes. However, in the sequence of witching, which immediately follows the missing scene of Samuel, the editing abruptly becomes looser and more ambiguous.

The witching actions are depicted not through the traditional, objective camera that captures the family’s daily-life. Instead, it is shown through a phantom-like camera that provides a distinctive perspective for us to recognize this temporal disruptive moment throughout the film. Moreover, even though the witching process has been edited into a strong linear sequence, which probably could help the audience to rationalize and make sense the witch’s behaviors, the alienated and dehumanized representations of witching also show its incomprehensibility. The ambiguous images and the looser editing construct this outstanding sequence of witching, and this sequence could be easily distinguished from the rest of the sequences portraying the family life in 110 terms of the representation of temporality. In this sense, this sequence of witching can also be taken as an interruption of the representation of the linear temporality throughout the film.

Conclusion

While the previous two chapters have provided a reading of women’s experience of time in The Babadook and Raw, the current chapter seeks to make sense of the relationship between women’s anxiety of social reproduction and the dominant ideology of capitalist chronotope in contemporary horror films through a detailed reading of

Robert Eggers’ The Witch. As I argued before, both The Babadook and Raw reveal an unpleasant or impossible temporal position for women, in which women merely serve for social reproduction within the linear capitalist time. Consequently, both films raise the following question: Is it possible to alter women’s relation to social reproduction and thereby separate women from this unpleasant temporal position? Keeping this question in mind, I have ended the thesis with a detailed reading of the witch’s time—namely, non- reproductive time—in Eggers’ The Witch. I have argued that The Witch creates a non- linear, anti-capitalist time. This non-linear time—non-reproductive time—is consistently dismissed in, repressed by, and erased from most settler colonial narratives. The non- linear time is dismissed, repressed, and erased because it questions the conventional settler’s colonialism narratives and further destructs the dominant ideology of social reproduction embedded in the capitalist chronotope in this film. The Witch visualizes the extinction of a frontier family and reveals how reproductive time fails to conquer non- reproductive time, and thus cinematically ends the capitalist chronotope. By examining 111 the ways in which The Witch visualizes non-reproductive time, I argue that The Witch unburies an alternative temporality that undermines the dominant capitalist chronotope and sets women free from their repetitive duty of social reproduction.

112

Chapter 5: Conclusion

Regardless of circumstances, women are strangers in the world of male-defined time and as such are never at home there. At best, they are like guests eager to prove helpful; at worst they are refugees, living on borrowed time. Frieda Johles Forman, “Feminizing time: an introduction”, 1

In Out of Time: Desire in Temporal Cinema, Todd McGowan claims, “[t]he fundamental theoretical effort of the twentieth century was the attempt to integrate time into thought.”131 This thesis contributes to this effort while insisting on the specificity of women’s time and its difference from a dominant social time in contemporary horror films. Thus, I have had to return to the beginning in order to explore an alternative and non-repetitive possibility for this integration of time into thought.

I have chosen to build this project on an analysis of contemporary horror films because it is here that the feminine anxiety is directly linked to the maternal body and social reproduction in late capitalism. The two main questions that have driven my exploration are: In what way is women’s experience of time expressed and represented in contemporary horror films? Why is women’s experience of time expressed and represented in these ways rather than others? The three films I have analyzed—Jennifer

Kent’s The Babadook, Julia Ducournau’s Raw, and Robert Eggers’ The Witch—each represents the temporality of social reproduction as central to women’s fraught experience of time in late capitalism. The key to my reading of these films is a unique

131 Todd McGowan, Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema. (U of Minnesota Press, 2011), 1.

113 temporal quality that is shared by all three: repetition. This repetition is both a product of and a challenge to the dominant social time which is linear, progressive, and ultimately serves to guarantee women as sites of social reproduction. Consequently, these films rethink the relationship between women and social reproduction through the lens of temporality.

Another aim of my thesis is to create a new space for re-examining the interchangeability of the notion of the female body and the notion of the reproductive body. By analyzing the female body into the reproductive body and nonreproductive body, I have argued that these films challenge the dominant patriarchal colonial temporality that reduces women’s bodies to sites of reproduction. In addition, I have argued that contemporary horror films often use tropes and film forms that were earlier present in women’s counter-cinema, making these traditions more accessible to a broader contemporary audience.

If one point of this project is to explore how women’s anxiety of social reproduction becomes sensible and tangible through women’s time-images in contemporary horror films, then one question, which has not yet been fully discussed, will emerge: How to articulate and define the unique quality of women’s time-image directed by women filmmakers? Since male filmmakers have their “traditions” to make horror films concerning monstrous feminine, is there anything missing but being captured by female filmmakers, even if they all make horror films involving women’s time-image?

More specifically, are there any—if so, what are—differences between the representations of women’s time in the horror films directed by women, such as The 114

Babadook, Raw, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014),

Honeymoon (Leigh Janiak ,2014), and Prevenge (Alice Lowa, 2016), and the ones in the horror films directed by men, such as Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009), The Witch

(Robert Eggers, 2015), Mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017), and Hereditary (Ari Aster,

2018)?

While I was working on this thesis concerning women and time, repeatedly, I confronted my own procrastinations. In Chantal Akerman’s Sloth: Portrait of a Lazy

Woman (1986), she explores the conflict between procrastinations and productivity.

Akerman visualizes a woman, played by herself, planning to make a film about laziness but “wasting” time by lying in bed, drinking, taking pills, and doing anything but making her film. However, since procrastination is successfully represented onscreen, Akerman’s turns procrastination into a productive cinematic image. In Ivone Marguiles’s book

Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, she comments on

Akerman’s Sloth, writing that “[l]aziness, allowing time to slip by—Akerman compensates for these very quotidian procrastinations by cleaver shortcuts, gathering her pills for the day, for example, she saves time by dropping them all in a glass of water and drinking them at once.”132 Procrastinations, productivity, wasting time, saving time, laziness, time emergency, all these notions of temporality force women to experience temporality as a form of anxiety. To undo the experience of the woman’s body as caught between the demands of reproduction and the affect of waste, it is necessary to discover a

132 Ivone Margulies, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday. (Duke University Press, 1996), 204.

115 new relationship to repetition, one that, as The Witch suggests, would allow us to imagine a social world outside of social reproduction.

Figure 21. A shot from the film Hereditary (2018).

116

Bibliography

Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. The shell and the kernel: Renewals of

psychoanalysis. Vol. 1. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Adib, and Paul Emiljanowicz. "Colonial time in tension: Decolonizing temporal

imaginaries." Time & Society (2017): 1-18.

Andrews, Eleanor, Stella Hockenhull, and Fran Pheasant-Kelly, eds. Spaces of the

Cinematic Home: Behind the Screen Door. Vol. 34. Routledge, 2015.

Ansell-Pearson, Keith, and Keith Ansell Pearson. Philosophy and the Adventure of the

Virtual. Routledge, 2002.

Apps, Patricia, and Ray Rees. "Gender, time use, and public policy over the life cycle."

Oxford Review of Economic Policy 21, no. 3 (2005): 439-461.

Arnold, Sarah. Maternal horror film: Melodrama and motherhood. Palgrave macmillan,

2016.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a

Historical Poetics." Narrative dynamics: Essays on time, plot, closure, and frames

(2002): 15-24.

Balanzategui, Jessica. "The Babadook and the haunted space between high and low

genres in the Australian horror tradition." Studies in Australasian Cinema 11,

no. 1 (2017): 18-32.

Baraitser, Lisa. "Maternal publics: Time, relationality and the public sphere." In Re (con)

figuring Psychoanalysis, pp. 221-240. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2012. 117

______. "Postmaternal, postwork and the maternal death drive." Australian Feminist

Studies 31, no. 90 (2016): 393-409.

______. "Time and Again: Repetition, Maternity and the Non-Reproductive." Studies

in the Maternal 6, no. 1 (2014).

Barrett, Michele. Women's oppression today: The Marxist/feminist encounter. Verso

Books, 2014.

Bergson, Henri, Nancy Margaret Paul, and W. Scott Palmer. Matter and memory. Courier

Corporation, 2004.

Bergson, Henri. Creative evolution. Vol. 231. University Press of America, 1911.

Boljkovac, Nadine. Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema: Gilles

Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

Braidotti, Rosi. "Discontinuous becomings. Deleuze on the becoming-woman of

philosophy." Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24, no. 1

(1993): 44-55.

Briefel, Aviva. "Parenting through Horror: Reassurance in Jennifer Kent's The

Babadook." Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 32, no.

2 95 (2017): 1-27.

Bryson, Valerie. "‘Women’s Time’." In Gender and the Politics of Time: Feminist

Theory and Contemporary Debates, 121-44. Bristol: Policy Press at the

University of Bristol, 2007.

Buerger, Shelley. "The beak that grips: maternal indifference, ambivalence and the abject

in The Babadook." Studies in Australasian Cinema 11, no. 1 (2017): 33-44. 118

Burch, Noel. “Nana, or the Two Kinds of Space.” in Theory of Film Practice Princeton

University Press, 2014, 17-31.

Chanter, Tina. "Female temporality and the future of feminism." Abjection, Melancholia

and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva (1990): 63-79.

Colman, Felicity. Deleuze and cinema: The film concepts. Berg, 2011.

Cornum, Lou. “White Magic” The New Inquiry. 2018. https://thenewinquiry.com/white-

magic/

Creed, Barbara. The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. Psychology

Press, 1993.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The second sex. Random House, 2014.

De Lauretis, Teresa. "Aesthetic and feminist theory: Rethinking women's cinema." New

German Critique 34 (1985): 154-175.

______. Alice doesn't: Feminism, semiotics, cinema. Indiana University Press, 1984.

Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1992): 3-7.

______. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. 1991.

76-78.

______. Cinema II: the time-image. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013.

Deutscher, Penelope. "Repetition facility: Beauvoir on women's time." Australian

Feminist Studies 21, no. 51 (2006): 327-342.

Doane, Mary Ann. "The voice in the cinema: The articulation of body and space." Yale

French Studies 60 (1980): 33-50. 119

______. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator.” Screen 23, no.

3–4 (1982): 74–88.

Edelman, Lee. No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Duke University Press, 2004.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. "The manufacture of housework," Socialist

Revolution, 5:4, (1975).

Eliaz, Ofer. "Acts of Erasure: The Limits of the Image in Naomi Uman’s Early Films."

Discourse 36, no. 2 (2014): 207-231.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2004.

______. Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. PM

Press, 2012.

Fischer, Lucy. Cinematernity: Film, motherhood, genre. Princeton University Press,

1996.

Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. “What’s Behind her Smile? Subjectivity and Desire in

Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet and Chantal Akerman’s

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” Identity and

Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman. Ed. Gwendolyn, Audrey, 27–40.

Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2003.

Forman, Frieda Johles. "Feminizing time: an introduction." Forman, FJ with Sowton, C.

eds. Taking our Time. Feminist Perspectives on Temporality. Oxford/New

York: Pergamon(1989): 1-10.

Fortunati, Leopoldina, and Jim Fleming. The arcane of reproduction: housework,

prostitution, labor and capital. New York: Autonomedia, 1995. 120

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage, 2012.

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 1 edition. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota

Press, 1989, 189.

Goss, K. David. Daily life during the Salem witch trials. ABC-CLIO, 2012.

Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The affect theory reader. Duke

University Press, 2010.

Greimas, Algirdas Julien. "Actants, actors, and figures." On meaning: Selected writings

in semiotic theory (1987): 106-120.

Griffiths, Jay. A sideways look at time. Penguin, 2004.

Grisham, Therese, Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, and Steven Shaviro, "7.1 The Post-

Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2." Perspectives

on Post-Cinema: An Introduction (2016): 841.

Grosz, Elizabeth A. "Space, time, and perversion: Essays on the politics of bodies."

(1995).

______. Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth. Columbia

University Press, 2008.

______, ed. Becomings: Explorations in time, memory, and futures. Cornell University

Press, 1999.

______. "Bergson, Deleuze and the becoming of unbecoming." Parallax 11, no. 2

(2005): 4-13.

______. "Feminism, materialism, and freedom." New materialisms: Ontology, agency,

and politics (2010): 139-157. 121

______. Time travels: Feminism, nature, power. Duke University Press, 2005.

Hawkins, Joan. "Culture wars: some new trends in art horror." Jump Cut: A Review of

Contemporary Media 51 (2009): 1.

______. Cutting edge: art-horror and the horrific avant-garde. U of Minnesota Press,

2000.

Hearne, Joanna. Native recognition: Indigenous cinema and the western. suny Press,

2012.

Howell, Amanda. "Haunted Art House: The Babadook and International Art Cinema

Horror." In Australian Screen in the 2000s, 119-139. Palgrave Macmillan,

Cham, 2017.

Ingham, Toby. "The Babadook (2014, directed by Jennifer Kent)–A film review from a

psychoanalytic psychotherapy perspective." Psychodynamic Practice 21, no. 3

(2015): 269-270.

Johnston, Claire. “Women’s cinema as counter-cinema”, Society for Education in Film

and Television. (1973):22-33.

Kaplan, E. Ann. "Global feminisms and the state of feminist film theory." Signs: Journal

of Women in Culture and Society 30, no. 1 (2004): 1236-1248.

______. Women & Film. Routledge, 2013.

Kinder, Marsha. "Reflections on" Jeanne Dielman"." Film Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1977): 2-

8. 122

Kinsman, R. Patrick. "She's Come Undone: Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai

du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and Counter cinema." Quarterly Review

of Film and Video 24, no. 3 (2007): 217-224.

Kitchen-Døderlein, Deborah Lynn. “Racialized Markers of Gender and Gendered

Markers of Race in 1950s Westerns.” In A Fistful of Icons: Essays on Frontier

Fixtures of the American Western. Edited by Matheson, Sue. McFarland,

2017.

Kristeva, Julia. "Approaching abjection." Oxford Literary Review 5, no. 1\2 (1982): 125-

149.

______. The Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press.

1986.

______. "Women's time." Translated by Alice Jardine, and Harry Blake. Signs:

Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1 (1981): 13-35.

Lim, Bliss Cua. Translating time: Cinema, the fantastic, and temporal critique. Duke

University Press, 2009.

Loader, Jayne. "Jeanne Dielman, Death in Installments." Jump Cut 16 (1977): 10-12.

Mara, Marin. "Book Review: Decolonizing Time: Work, Leisure, and Freedom, by

Nichole Marie Shippen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014." (2018).

Margulies, Ivone. Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday. Duke

University Press, 1996.

Martin, Angela. “Chantal Akerman’s Films: A Dossier” Feminist Review 3 (1979): 24–

45. 123

Mathiowetz, Dean. “ ‘Meditation is Good for Nothing:’ Leisure as a Democratic

Practice.” New Political Science 38, no. 2 (2016): 241-255.

Mayne, Judith. The woman at the keyhole: Feminism and women's cinema. Indiana

University Press, 1990.

McClintock, Anne. Imperial leather: Race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest.

Routledge, 2013.

McDowell, Linda, and Joanne P. Sharp. Space, gender, knowledge: feminist readings.

New York: J. Wiley, 1997.

McGowan, Todd. Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema. U of Minnesota Press,

2011.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. "Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial

discourses." Feminist review 30 (1988): 61-88.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 154, no. 3 (1975): 6-8.

Newman, Andrew Adam. “Why Time Stands Still for Watchmakers”, The New York

Times, November 27, 2008.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/business/media/28adco.html?_r=0.

O'Brien, Mary. "Feminist theory and dialectical logic." Signs: Journal of Women in

Culture and Society 7, no. 1 (1981): 144-157.

Olney, Ian. Euro horror: classic European horror cinema in contemporary American

culture. Indiana University Press, 2013.

Parisi, Luciana, and Steve Goodman. "The affect of nanoterror." Culture machine 7

(2004). 124

Paugh, Katherine. The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age

of Abolition. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Poglajen, Tina. “Interview: Claire Atherton”, Film Comment published by Film Society

of Lincoln Center, November 2, 2016.

https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-claire-atherton/

Powell, Anna. Deleuze and Horror Film. Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Quigley, Paula. "When Good Mothers Go Bad: Genre and Gender in The Babadook."

The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 15 (2016): 57.

Rich, B. Ruby. "The crisis of naming in feminist film criticism." Jump Cut 19 (1978).

Rifkin, Mark. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-

determination. Duke University Press, 2017.

Riley, Denise. Time lived, without its flow. Lulu. com, 2012.

Roberts, Dorothy E. Killing the black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of

liberty. Vintage Books, 1999.

Rodowick, David Norman. Gilles Deleuze's time machine. Duke University Press, 1997.

Rombes, Nicholas. "Six Asides on Paranormal Activity 2." Filmmaker Magazine 10

(2011).

Rosen, Maggie (2017) "A Feminist Perspective on the History of Women as Witches,"

Dissenting Voices: Vol. 6 : Iss. 1 , Article 5.

Schiff, Stacy. The Witches: Salem, 1692. Hachette UK, 2015.

Schües, Christina, Dorothea Olkowski, and Helen Fielding, eds. Time in feminist

phenomenology. Indiana University Press, 2011. 125

Shaviro, Steven. Post cinematic affect. Zero Books, 2010.

Shippen, Nichole. Decolonizing time: Work, leisure, and freedom. Springer, 2014.

Stevenson, Jack. Witchcraft Through the Ages: The Story of Häxan, the World's Strangest

Film, and the Man who Made it. FAB, 2006.

Thornham, Sue, ed. Feminist film theory: A reader. NYU Press, 1999.

Traub, Valerie. "Prince Hal's Falstaff: Positioning psychoanalysis and the female

reproductive body." Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1989): 456-474.

Unnithan-Kumar, Maya, and Sunil K. Khanna, eds. The Cultural Politics of

Reproduction: Migration, Health and Family Making. Berghahn Books, 2014.

Ussher, Jane. Managing the monstrous feminine: Regulating the reproductive body.

Routledge, 2006.

Von Ankum, Katharina. Women in the metropolis: Gender and modernity in Weimar

culture. Vol. 11. Univ of California Press, 1997.

Waller, Gregory Albert, ed. American horrors: essays on the modern American horror

film. University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Weston, Kath. Gender in real time: Power and transience in a visual age. Psychology

Press, 2002.

Williams, Linda. "Body Genres." Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2-13.

______. "Film bodies: Gender, genre, and excess." Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2-

13.

Wollen, Peter. “Godard and counter cinema: Vent d'Est.” in Film Theory and Criticism 6

Ed. Oxford University Press, 2004. 525-533. 126

Wood, Robin. “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s.” in Horror, the film reader,

edited by Mark Jancovich. Routledge, 2002. 33-40.

Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in

America. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

127

Filmography

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce, Quay, 1080 Brussels (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

Carrie (Brain De Palma, 1976)

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

Sloth: Portrait of a Lazy Woman (Chantal Akerman, 1986)

Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002).

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

17 filles (English title 17 Girls) (Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin, 2011)

China Girl (Jane Campion, TV shows, 2013-)

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014)

Honeymoon (Leigh Janiak ,2014)

Goodnight Mommy (Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz, 2014)

The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015)

Grave (English title Raw) (Julia Ducournau, 2016)

Prevenge (Alice Lowe, 2016)

The Levelling (Hope Dickson Leach, 2016)

Mother! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017)

XX (Roxanne Benjamin, Karyn Kusama, St. Vincent, Jovanka Vuckovic, 2017)

Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018) ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Thesis and Dissertation Services ! !