Becoming woman that does not exist
By merging two of the most misunderstood and yet influential concepts of not just feminist theory production of the 1970ies and 1980ies we are going to explore what could be at stake in this weeks "Feminism Now!?" project. At the same time the two presentations will reconnect to the last sessions work on the concept of immanence and elaborate further on it.
Stephanie Rothman Double Feature
The Student Nurses (1970)
"Four beautiful young students in their last year of nursing school work hard on their bedside manner to satisfy their patients' every need. They also find time to encounter several hot 1970 issues, such as abortion and protests. The Student Nurses is a good contemporary dual-bill item about the varying romantic experiences of four novice nurses. The acting level is fair at best, which drags down what otherwise is a well-crafted film. Charles S. Swartz produced, and his wife Stephanie Rothman's physical direction is excellent. Executive producer Roger Corman is releasing through his new indie, New World Pictures. The Student Nurses is an exploitation item to be sure, but beyond those angles, general audiences will find a surprising depth." («Daily Variety», 17. 9. 1970)
The Working Girls (1974)
Working Girls, Stephanie Rothman's last picture produced by her own production company, Dimension Pictures, tells the story of three women looking for a job: Honey, Jill and Denise try to make an honest living in male-dominated Los Angeles. In balancing the representation of male and female nudes, Rothman rejects conventional structures of objectification and exploitation in favor of reciprocal sexual attraction. Her films embody progressive new attitudes towards human sexuality, attitudes consistent with her liberal feminism. Sex has consequences in the exploitation cinema of Stephanie Rothman, be it the debates about abortion in The Student Nurses or the images of social transformation in Terminal Island. Women have historically had to pay the price for sexual freedom, and so a feminist eroticism requires a recognition of both the costs and the benefits of sex. Rothman's films reject the alienated sexuality of prostitution and sexual exploitation. Her women don't want to «just lie back and take it». Sex is not to be treated as part of a system of economic exchange, but rather to be part of the regeneration of the social order. (Henry Jenkins)
Writer/director Stephanie Rothman was the first female to be awarded the Directors Guild of America fellowship. Her commercially successful film "The Student Nurses" broke ground in the exploitation film genre as it featured women in leading roles. Her next film, The Velvet Vampire has become a cult hit.
She was one of the few female filmmakers who specialized in low-budget drive-in exploitation fare in the 60s and 70s. Her movies are distinguished by gutsy, strong-willed, and sympathetic women main characters and a radical libertarian feminist point of view. Stephanie was born on November 9, 1936 in Paterson, New Jersey. She was the first lady to be awarded the Directors Guild of America fellowship. Rothman served as an associate producer on "Queen of Blood," "Beach Ball," and "Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet." She co-wrote and co-directed the fright flick "Blood Bath." She made her solo directorial debut with the frothy "Beach Party" romp "It's a Bikini World." Stephanie made two features for Roger Corman's New World Pictures: the excellent "The Student Nurses" -- which was the first and best of the popular nurse comedy cycle -- and the offbeat and inspired horror bloodsucker outing "The Velvet Vampire." Rothman then went to work for Dimension Pictures, where she and her writer/producer husband Charles S. Swartz had a minority share in the company. Stephanie made the charming "Group Marriage," the delightful "The Working Girls," and the gritty "Terminal Island" for Dimension Pictures. Moreover, she wrote the story for the enjoyable fantasy adventure "Beyond Atlantis" and penned the screenplay for the amusingly inane "Starhops." In 2007 Stephanie Rothman was honored with a retrospective on her work at the Vienna International Film Festival. (From http:http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0580571/bio )
Becoming woman that does not exist
By merging two of the most misunderstood and yet influential concepts of (feminist) theory production of the 1960ies and 1970ies we are going to explore what could be theoretically at stake in this weeks "Feminism Now!?" project. At the same time the two presentations will reconnect to the last sessions work on the concept of immanence and elaborate further on it.
"Becoming-woman, as Deleuze and Guattari use it, is not biologically, hormonally, or chromosomally defined. Nor is it a gender theory; gender is a term whose field is composed by specific trajectories in the formation of socio-political and cultural spaces, which may or may not be attached to biological femaleness, which itself is not a transparent or determinate concept. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-woman is not a necessary condition of the possibility of biocultural concepts of femaleness or the feminine, but rather an immanent condition of becomings, and a positive element in an economics of desire, rather than in its socialization through codes and blockages. They refer to it as ‘le premier quantum, ou segment moléculaire (the first quantum, or molecular segment)’ [312] of becomings, and the key to a smooth itinerant line whose motion can be described neither in terms of convergence or rectilinearity, but through the smallest intervals, demon leaps effecting communication between the two orders of force, attraction and repulsion, in a patois which belongs to neither." (Diane J. Beddoes)
"Like many of his infamous one-liners, Lacan's "la femme n'existe pas" is deliberately provocative. For various strains of feminism, it further testifies to the inherent male chauvinism of psychoanalysis, the origins of which supposedly lie, for instance, in Freud's pronouncements about the masculine nature of libido. However, the provocative effects of Lacan's denial of the Woman's existence shouldn't obscure his carefully considered reasons for saying this. In Lacanian discussions of feminine sexuality, what feminism takes to be yet another "masculine bias" continually resurfaces: an emphasis on the fundamental status of the phallus in determining the gender identities of both male and female subjects." (Adrian Johnston)
Exploitation vs Avantgarde
Two different approaches to film-making and -production: a retrospective view on Hollywood and its B-pictures and a current perspective on independent structures - a dialogue between Stephanie Rothman and Nina Menkes, invited by Viennale 07. But as different as the cinematographic structures, chosen by the directors, may be, there is some important mutual ground for Rothman and Menkes: the strive to communicate feminist ideas.
kein.tv / www.missingimage.com
English / 00:43:40 / 93 MB / Ogg Theora
Female Vampire Night
Trouble Every Day, Claire Denis (2001)
Trouble Every Day is the closest Claire Denis has come to making a pure horror film. It is also the closest she has come to making a film maudit. Taking a wholly different view, Philippe Met argues that it "is a superbly refined sample of cinematic art where such typical minuses as a flimsy plot, quasi-nonexistent characterisation, sparse dialogue and minimal regard for genre conventions all become assets rather than flaws." Shane (Vincent Gallo) and June (Tricia Vessey) are a young American couple honeymooning in Paris. Shane is secretly on the trail of one Dr Léo Semeneau (Alex Descas), a research scientist he used to work with and whose unorthodox experiments seem to have mysteriously led to the terrible affliction beleaguering Coré (Béatrice Dalle), Semeneau's wife, and Shane himself: an uncontrollable urge to devour the hapless objects of their lust...
Velvet Vampire, Stephanie Rothman (1974)
Diane, glamorous and wealthy denizen of nightclubs, lusted after by men and women, is a vampire. With the aid of dark glasses and wide-brimmed hats, she can venture out even in the daytime. She drains a horde of victims, including a biker, a mechanic and the mechanic's girlfriend, before she lures Lee and his wife Susan to her mansion in the desert. Lee, who at first succumbs to her charms, panics when he finds the servant drained of blood, and tries to persuade Susan to leave with him. She is under the vampire's spell at the time, though, and refuses to leave. When Susan finds her husband's dry corpse, however, she does try to escape. The Velvet Vampire, while not as commercially successful as The Student Nurses, has become a cult hit. (Clarke Fountain)
Narratives of Nudity
How far can you go within a genre called Exploitation? Stephanie Rothman, known as the first women director in the Roger Corman Clan, talks about the thin lines between MPAA standards, exploitation standards of sex and nudity and her own political visions and aesthetical ambitions.
kein.tv / missingimage.com
English / 00:20:10 / 38 MB / Ogg Theora
Stevie Schmiedel: With or Without Lacan? Becoming-Woman between the Language of Organs and the Anorganism of Language
Stevie Schmiedel writes: There seem to be two “camps,” two ways of reading Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of “becoming-woman” as described in their Thousand Plateaus. My own reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s work confirms an anti-psychoanalytic and anti-dialectical understanding that turns against the psychoanalytic feminism presented by Luce Irigaray, and even against Judith Butler’s Foucauldian re-reading of Lacan with which she defines a political practice of parodic performances. Some recent articles by Deleuzean feminists, who wish to deconstruct molar feminism in order to pose a Deleuzean molecular becoming-woman against it, aim to fuse Lacanian feminisms and Deleuzean methodologies. To me, read close- ly, these fusions are counter-productive. When Jerry Aline Flieger writes, for example, “cultural feminists, such as Judith Butler, who see gender as a largely performative effect, will probably welcome the Deleuzean notion of ‘becoming,’”1 her reading of at least one of the two theorists dif- fers strongly from mine. After introducing my critique of psychoanalytic feminist approaches, which, for the purpose of this paper, I will restrict to the feminist politics of Luce Irigaray and, to some extent, Judith Butler, I will criticize the attempted fusion by concentrating on two examples: Jerry Aline Flieger’s synthesis of Lacanian and Deleuzean concepts in her “Becoming-Woman: Deleuze, Schreber and Molecular Identification,” and Dorothea Olkowski’s fusion of Luce Irigaray and Deleuze in “Morpho- logic: Deleuze and Irigaray,”2 which closely resembles Rosi Braidotti’s combination of Deleuze and Irigaray in her Nomadic Subjects and hence will be referred to.
Ticket to ride: Claire Denis and the cinema of the body
In "Screening the past" Adrian Martin wrote a piece on "Claire Denis and the cinema of the body": "Recall any single film by Claire Denis, or any aggregate image of the mood and texture of her work as a whole: every thing, every body, is in motion. People in cars (Katerina Golubeva in I can't sleep [J'ai pas sommeil, 1994] ramming her vehicle into that of the theatre director who shunned her), in the back of trucks (little France and her black servant at the start of the central flashback in Chocolat [1988]), moving through the crowds that congregate on streets or in bars (Beau travail [2000], I can't sleep), restlessly inhabiting the insecure confines of a home (Chocolat) or an illegal business operation (No fear, no die [S'en fout la mort, 1990]). And dancing, always dancing, married (with a rare skill and taste) to music that is, each time, perfectly chosen: Grégoire Colin as Alain alone in his bedroom dancing to Eric Burdon and The Animals in U.S. go home (1994), the two black cockfighters in their quarters, moving to the beat of Bob Marley's Buffalo soldier in No fear, no die, and (immortally) Denis Lavant, free at last (or maybe simply dead, draining away) in the no-man's-land discotheque of the mind, as he poses, flirts with his own reflection, exercises, and finally cuts loose, spinning and thrashing to the ecstatic Rhythm of the night at the end of Beau travail …"
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/20/claire-denis.html