Female Masochism in Michael Haneke's La Pianiste and Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Female Masochism in Michael Haneke's La Pianiste and Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac PDF full book. Access full book title Female Masochism in Michael Haneke's La Pianiste and Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac by Kristin Yaworski. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Kristin Yaworski
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Masochism
Languages : en
Pages : 85
Get Book Here
Book Description
The figure of the female masochist, along with her desires and experiences, has been largely ignored within theories of masochism and examinations of masochistic aesthetics. With the rise of more graphic and challenging representations of female sexuality in cinema, it is time to readdress the female masochist and her representation in film. This thesis aims to fill this gap by examining representations of heterosexual female masochism in Michael Haneke's film La Pianiste (2001) and Lars von Trier's film Nymphomaniac (2013). Both films centre around a female protagonist whose masochistic desires and impulses propel the narrative forward. While these masochistic desires lead to ugly and violent sexual encounters with the main male character in each film, masochism is not condemned as the reason for this violence. It is, instead, normatizing world views that violently restrict notions of female subjectivity and sexuality. In this thesis, I examine the empowering aspects of masochism presented in these films. The female masochist exercises control over her desires and fantasies by creating and establishing a masochistic contract with her partner. In analyzing the contract in both films, it becomes clear that it allows for the female protagonist to be empowered. That the contract is betrayed and the female masochist is subjected to violence is indicative of how she continues to be restricted by gendered expectations of female behaviour. Such a conclusion is further supported through both films' use of an anti-aesthetic. In contrast to the normative aesthetics of S/M, which emphasize pleasure over pain, the aesthetic in La Pianiste and Nymphomaniac insists on showing the infliction of pain and its effects on the female masochist. It is through this depiction of pain that both films invite spectators to reconsider the dangerous comfort of views that allow for such violence to persist.
Author: Kristin Yaworski
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Masochism
Languages : en
Pages : 85
Get Book Here
Book Description
The figure of the female masochist, along with her desires and experiences, has been largely ignored within theories of masochism and examinations of masochistic aesthetics. With the rise of more graphic and challenging representations of female sexuality in cinema, it is time to readdress the female masochist and her representation in film. This thesis aims to fill this gap by examining representations of heterosexual female masochism in Michael Haneke's film La Pianiste (2001) and Lars von Trier's film Nymphomaniac (2013). Both films centre around a female protagonist whose masochistic desires and impulses propel the narrative forward. While these masochistic desires lead to ugly and violent sexual encounters with the main male character in each film, masochism is not condemned as the reason for this violence. It is, instead, normatizing world views that violently restrict notions of female subjectivity and sexuality. In this thesis, I examine the empowering aspects of masochism presented in these films. The female masochist exercises control over her desires and fantasies by creating and establishing a masochistic contract with her partner. In analyzing the contract in both films, it becomes clear that it allows for the female protagonist to be empowered. That the contract is betrayed and the female masochist is subjected to violence is indicative of how she continues to be restricted by gendered expectations of female behaviour. Such a conclusion is further supported through both films' use of an anti-aesthetic. In contrast to the normative aesthetics of S/M, which emphasize pleasure over pain, the aesthetic in La Pianiste and Nymphomaniac insists on showing the infliction of pain and its effects on the female masochist. It is through this depiction of pain that both films invite spectators to reconsider the dangerous comfort of views that allow for such violence to persist.
Author: Morgan Jennings
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Feminist film criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 95
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this project, I examine the relationship between female masochism, performance, and spectatorship in Michael Hanekes film La Pianiste (2001). The film stages a relationship to sexuality that structures the subjects excruciating negotiations with the other as always mediated by the law, the letter, or the body as instrument, which is allegorized by the protagonists occupation as a piano teacher. In my analysis, I identify the ways in which the film paradoxically offers a critique of mediations effect on the feminine position while encouraging viewers to confront the possibility that desire is only possible through these mediations. Contributing to feminist theory and psychoanalytic film theory, I foreground the way in which the films complex portrayal of female masochism produces indeterminacy via masochistic spectatorship. Ultimately, I argue that the unmarked position of feminine masochism, which is historically, psychoanalytically, and literarily reserved for male subjects, challenges the spectator to take enjoyment into account when approaching mediations of violence and sexuality.
Author: Ruth McPhee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317135997
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Get Book Here
Book Description
Theoretically and representationally, responses to heterosexual female masochism have ranged from neglect in theories that focus predominantly or only upon masochistic sexuality within male subjects, to condemnation from feminists who regard it as an inverted expression of patriarchal control rather than a legitimate form of female desire. It has commonly been understood as a passive form of sexuality, thus ignoring the potential for activity and agency that the masochistic position may involve, which underpins the crucial argument that female masochism can be conceived as enquiring ethical activity. Taking as its subject the works of Jane Campion, Catherine Breillat, Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier as well as the films Secretary (Steven Shainberg), Dans Ma Peau (Marina de Van), Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006) Amer (Hélène Cattat and Bruno Forzani), and Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh), Female Masochism in Film avoids these reductive and simplistic approaches by focusing on the ambivalences and intricacies of this type of sexuality and subjectivity. Using the philosophical writings of Kristeva, Irigaray, Lacan, Scarry, and Bataille, McPhee argues that masochism cannot and should not be considered aside from its ethical and intersubjective implications, and furthermore, that the aesthetic tendencies emerging across these films - obscenity, extremity, confrontation and a transgressive, ambiguous form of beauty - are strongly related to these implications. Ultimately, this complex and novel work calls upon the spectator and the theorist to reconsider normative ideas about desire, corporeality, fantasy and suffering.
Author: Bonnie Honig
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190600179
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 470
Get Book Here
Book Description
The disturbing and intense films of Lars von Trier are often dismissed as misogynist, misanthropic, or anti-humanist. This book, however, invites us to engage with his work to found a new feminist vision and discover what might be distinctively hopeful for the future of our fragile human condition.
Author: Ruth McPhee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethics in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 552
Get Book Here
Book Description
Since the mid 1990s, several films have emerged in European and North American cinema that portray female subjectivity in terms of masochistic sexuality. This thesis will examine several films that represent in varied ways female sexuality centred upon the desire for pain, submission, or humiliation. The primary films under discussion in successive chapters are Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, 1996), The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 200 l ), Secretary (Steven Shainberg, 2003), Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999), and In the Cut (Jane Campion, 2003). These films will be discussed within the context of existing theoretical explorations of masochism in psychoanalytic and film theory. I shall argue that within these theories, there is a blind spot in the conceptualization of a specifically female heterosexual masochism. Much existing discourse (particularly within psychoanalysis) focuses primarily upon masochism within the male subject. In theorizing female masochism, this thesis will move away from the negative connotations of perversity, passivity, and subjection that have permeated discourse around this form of sexuality, and instead argue that masochism may be associated with an active agency of the subject. The representations of female masochistic subjectivity in these films are characterized by this activity, although it is an activity that is sometimes portrayed as ambiguous in its implications for the female subject and the choices they make. Each of these films is notable for its engagement with ethical concerns: because of the power dynamics inherent in the masochistic relationship, the question of ethics will be central to this thesis, in terms of the films' depictions of intersubjective relationships, and of how the spectator is positioned and challenged by their imagery and themes.
Author: Robert Phillip Kolker
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1906924031
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 349
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Altering Eye covers a "golden age" of international cinema from the end of WWII through to the New German Cinema of the 1970s. Combining historical, political, and textual analysis, the author develops a pattern of cinematic invention and experimentation from neorealism through the modernist interventions of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Maria Fassbinder, focusing along the way on such major figures as Luis Buñuel, Joseph Losey, the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, and the work of major Cuban filmmakers. Kolker's book has become a much quoted classic in the field of film studies providing essential reading for anybody interested in understanding the history of European and international cinema. This new and revised edition includes a substantive new Preface by the author and an updated Bibliography.
Author: Amber Jamilla Musser
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479832499
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268
Get Book Here
Book Description
The author uses masochism as a lens to examine how power structures race, gender, and embodiment in different contexts. Musser employs masochism as a tool for probing relationships between power and subjectivity. Engaging with a range of debates about lesbian S&M, racialization, femininity, and disability, as well as key texts such as Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, Pauline Réage's The Story of O, and Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Musser renders legible the complex ways that masochism has been taken up by queer, feminist, and critical race theories. Furthering queer theory's investment in affect and materiality, she proposes "sensation" as an analytical tool for illustrating what it feels like to be embedded in structures of domination such as patriarchy, colonialism, and racism and what it means to embody femininity, blackness, and pain.
Author: Kerner Aaron Kerner
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474402917
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Get Book Here
Book Description
Extreme Cinema examines the highly stylized treatment of sex and violence in post-millennial transnational cinema, where the governing convention is not the narrative but the spectacle. Using profound experiments in form and composition, including jarring editing, extreme close-ups, visual disorientation and sounds that straddle the boundary between non-diegetic and diegetic registers, this mode of cinema dwells instead on the exhibition of intense violence and an acute intimacy with the sexual body. Interrogating works such as Wetlands and A Serbian Film, as well as the sub-culture of YouTube 'reaction videos', Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp demonstrate the way content and form combine in extreme cinema to affectively manipulate the viewing body.
Author: Paula J. Caplan
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595357504
Category : Masochism
Languages : en
Pages : 327
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Finally, a definitive study that debunks one of Freud's most damaging myths--that women are inherently masochistic--...offers healthier ways...to view female behavior." MS. Magazine "Concrete, convincing...sensible...revolutionary, calling for nothing short of a revision in our thinking about women..." Philadelphia Inquirer "...not a quick-fix pop psychology do-it-yourselfer but a thoughtful examination of a persistent, self-defeating myth." Chicago Tribune "...outstanding scholarly debunking of [an] extremely damaging cultural belief...it contains valuable lessons for...the mental health professions." Readings "So convincing are her arguments...that often one is left wondering how on earth such theories could ever have been taken seriously." Morning Star, London
Author: Heidi M. Schlipphacke
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 083875757X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Nostalgia After Nazism is a compelling, sophisticated entry in the growing field of German and Austrian memory studies. It introduces into German studies a nuanced set of tools drawn from the broad panoply of contemporary theory and sets those voices onto the broader historical landscape of post-World War II confrontations between the West's recent history and its present. The result is a highly readable, impeccably documented volume that joins the best of literary history and close readings to a broad spectrum of theoretical models. Nostalgia After Nazism offers an exemplary model for cultural scholarship after the supposed ̀end of theory,' recapturing how theory, history, and the texts of culture are mutually illuminating."---Katherine Arens, The University of Texas at Austin --
