(“Gay Panic”): On Fan Subtitles
My love for fan-made subtitles started with the Norwegian TV series Skam (2015-2017). Skam is a drama aimed at teenage…
Essays
Women on the Edge: History, Temporality, Sisterhood and Political Militancy in Marge Piercy’s ‘Vida’ and Margarethe von Trotta’s ‘Die bleierne Zeit’
(Crawling titles rise from bottom of frame, white-on-black:) In May, 1972, bombs exploded […] In all, thirty-six people were injured…
Against Lists
Lists of films will not save you. Lists of films will not save films. Lists of films will not reorganise…
The Great Digestive Machine: Inside the Choreography of Loie Fuller and the Underwater Cinema of Geneviève Hamon and Jean Painlevé
If the afterlife exists, I’ve always imagined that I’d like mine to be underwater. I’d be reborn as something with…
Hito Steyerl’s Grey Zone
It’s said that Theodor Adorno asked to have the walls of his lecture hall painted a certain shade of grey….
A Woman Escaped? The Female Automaton in Robert Bresson’s ‘Mouchette’
The first android was a woman. In Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s novel L’Ève Future (1886), a fictionalised Thomas Edison attempts…
Crisis-women: Prostitution and Capitalist Modernity in Lina Wertmüller’s ‘Love and Anarchy’
“That pig must die!” declares Salomè, with tears in her eyes. The pig? Mussolini. Salomè? An anarchist prostitute embroiled in…
Who gets to be ‘the people’? Astra Taylor’s ‘What Is Democracy?’ and Gabrielle Brady’s ‘Island of the Hungry Ghosts’
An impromptu interview on a beach in Miami. A casually dressed white woman in her thirties is perched comfortably on…
Thinking Through Camille Billops (1933-2019)
“You have to have a certain sense of defiance in you so you don’t self-destruct. They can’t stop the creative…
Lorene Scafaria’s ‘Hustlers’ and the Anatomy of the Scam
Recently our headlines have been dominated by young female scammers: scammers whose exploits are spoken of with breathless fascination. Their…
The Queer Subjectivity of Charlotte Prodger’s ‘BRIDGIT’
Near the end of her Turner Prize-winning film ‘BRIDGIT’ (2016), Charlotte Prodger remembers reading “things Sandy Stone wrote in 1994…
Selling Sweat: On the Ethics of Renting ‘Extraordinary Bodies’ in Mika Rottenberg’s Videos
Throughout Mika Rottenberg’s career, the artist has – as she puts it – rented the bodies of extraordinary women. By…
‘You Don’t Know What You Want, Do You?’ The Life And Work of Jane Arden
Jane Arden (a pseudonym possibly drawn from a ‘girl reporter’ comic strip, or a correspondent of Mary Wollstonecraft, or both,…
The (Not So) Queer Failure of Chanya Button’s ‘Vita and Virginia’
Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West met at a party.i According to historical records this was a dinner party, but in…
The Visible Woman: In Conversation with Penny Slinger
Penny Slinger is a British-born multimedia artist, whose dynamic body of work weaves together elements of eroticism, feminism, spirituality and…
Fragments of Lucrecia Martel’s ‘The Headless Woman’ (‘La mujer sin cabeza’, 2008)
1. In Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza, 2008), the protagonist bears her guilt so singularly you…
The Making of a Millennial Woman
Being a millennial feels like being stuck in a permanent state of on-the-cusp adolescence. Sulky, prickly, and painfully hyper-visible, our…
No other voice: Claire Denis’s ‘High Life’
Claire Denis’s latest film, High Life, opens with an exchange of voices: the cry of a baby, Willow, and the…
Pushing at the Wound: Sex in Lola Clavo’s ‘No Love Lost’ and Maria Llopis’s ‘El Belga’
A few years after I first saw it, I wrote a character in my novel Vitrinerie who described Lola…
After Agnès Varda: A Discussion
Following Agnès Varda’s death and inspired by the importance of collaboration in Varda’s work, we asked eight writers, programmers and…
Earth Signs: Reading the Post-Pastoral in Alice Rohrwacher’s ‘The Wonders’ (‘Le Meraviglie’)
There is a scene in Alice Rohrwacher’s 2014 film The Wonders (Le Meraviglie) in which the protagonist Gelsomina, the eldest daughter of a…