3rd Global Conference
Friday 16th November - Sunday 18th
November 2007
Salzburg, Austria
Session 4: Erotic Representations
Chair: David White
“Tickling Rallery”: Eroticizing the Stage in English Restoration Comedy (1660-1700)
Denis Lagae-Devoldere
Maître de conférences, Paris IV-Sorbonne, Paris, France
The scopophilic dimension of the second half of the English 17th century was not only manifest in the increasing scientific interest in “anatomies”, it was also prevailing in the theatre of the time, namely in comedies. One obvious reason for such a trend was the oft-commented emergence of female actresses on the Restoration stage, causing an objectification of the female body as well as a growing importance of the voyeuristic character on stage – possibly reflecting the voyeuristic (male) spectator. This eroticizing of the female body ought to be seen in a larger perspective as an overall eroticizing of the stage, following Roland Barthes’s provocative question (“Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?”, The Pleasure of the Text) and applying it to the whole theatrical “contract” of the Restoration comic stage. In that respect I wish to focus on the vogue of the “discovery scene” in Restoration comedies, which became more and more spectacular and repeated even within particular plays because of the technical improvements and innovations of the day (the increasingly elaborate use of “flats” sliding along the stage area, the widening and the sloping inclination of the set in the Italian-type “box-set” structure). Studying a series of comedies from 1660 to 1700, I shall try and show the evolution of that particular stage trick that was the discovery scene: from its gradual and somewhat awkward emergence in the early 1660’s to its full-fledged use in the 1680’s with playwrights such as Behn, Otway and Southerne. Once a “scène à faire”, the device ended up being more often than not parodied, delayed or toyed with, thus making the audience aware of its artificiality along with the limitations of visual ostension.
Arguably the scopophilic trend of the day and its consequences on the spectacularity of the comedies might have been yet another cause for the gradual emergence and final prominence of the so called “sentimental comedy” of the 18th century, in which the discovery scene was stripped of all its “erotic” potentialities and served for surprise effects only.
“Ring My Bell: ‘Breaking the Waves’ (1996) as Lars von Trier’s Hagiographic Pornography, or Pornographic Hagiography
Eric Kristensson
University of California, Los Angeles,
Scandinavian Section,
Los Angeles, CA, USA
One of the most decidedly Danish aspects of Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves” (a film set within the United Kingdom both physically and linguistically), is its apparent Kierkegaardian interest in juxtaposing sensual and ethical (or theological) elements. The auteur von Trier is not without culpability as we are left to try and make sense of the non-sensical bells which visibly chime at film’s end. But it is through the raw juxtaposing of an extreme Calvinistic denial of the body with a bloody submission to unbridled sensuality (on the part of its heroine, Bess) that the film gains its power and offers its meager and perhaps mocking conclusion.
Primarily, however, this paper identifies this tension in terms of Nietzsche’s dual Apollonian/Dionysian drives, which he derives as art-sponsoring impulses whose engaged opposition creates the highest of art forms—Attic Tragedy (Nietzsche was of course not Danish but, was first widely propagated by the Dane Georg Brandes in the 1880’s). Nietzsche’s dream-like Apollonian approximates the overly-determined Calvinists of Bess’s hometown, while his intoxicated Dionysian parallels the invasion of this world by Bess’s fiancé Jan from the oil-rig offshore. And Nietzsche’s metaphysics of art (i.e. The Birth of Tragedy, 1872) may bring us only as far as understanding the natureof Bess’ telos (ostensibly found in the bells). So we return to Kierkegaard for interpretation of Bess’ process.
This paper finally argues, then, that “Breaking the Waves” is not primarily interested in its obviously presented dichotomy of the sensuous and ethical realms. Rather, like in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (and in Kierkegaard’s terms) its focus is the divide between the ethical and religious spheres. Thus, the orgiastic stage of Bess’s life is read as her existentially-dictated road to salvation, a process which makes no less sense than Abraham’s willingness to murder.
Who's Afraid of the Indian Lesbian Film?
Aneeta Rajendran
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
1996, a film made by a Canadian-Indian, Deepa Mehta, introduced a new erotic and sexual category into Indian public culture. The "lesbian" entered the life of the average Indian, and as various lesbian activist organisations all over India note, providing anecdotal evidence that is surprisingly homogeneous for a very heterogeneous territory, that this film, Fire, has also provided their helpline callers with an invaluable narrative of self-reference. This film has, despite the again heterogenous spectrum of responses it received from its public, indeed almost singlehandedly re-engineered the lexicon available in Indian public and private cultures for speaking about the sexual and erotic. But in the wake of Fire came several other films, in English and in Indian regional languages, almost all of them, paradoxically, made by diasporically located Indians, that sought to refine and nuance Fire’s documentation of the lesbian, but which have not, for various reasons, received much critical attention, a lacuna this paper will try to fill.
Chutney Popcorn (Nisha Ganatra, 1999, English), and Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, 2006, English), both of which are located in the diasporic First-world, and Sancharram (The Journey, Ligy Pulappally, 2004, Malayalam), located in rural Kerala, are, I argue, significant cinematic landmarks in the Indian lesbian’s journey into the public sphere and deserve to be studied for their engagement with both the male gaze and for queering sexual and erotic diegetic possibilities. While Fire, according to Deepa Mehta is not a lesbian film, or only incidentally a lesbian film, these other films do not feel the need for any such apologetics, but engage head on with the question of lesbian erotic and sexual awakening and expression within distinctively Indic or non-Western cultural locations. I shall contrast these films with the phenomenon of what I call the “commercial lesbian” as she appears in Girlfriend (Karan Razdan, 2003), a mainstream Bollywood film ostensibly about two lesbians, who, however, are reformed by the love of a good man. The journey from Fire to Nina’s Heavenly Delights is thus a journey from an initial erotic discomfort to a later almost ecstatically frank examination of female sexual expression, which stands in contrast to the absence, with the (sad) exception of Girlfriend, of any strong female (straight) characters in mainstream Bollywood film, not to mention lesbian ones. I shall also examine earlier films like Razia Sultana (1961, Hindi), Umbartha (Morning, 1979, Marathi), and Deshadana Kili Karayarilla (The Migratory Bird Never Cries, 1986, Malayalam) where the female protagonists have had central roles with definitely homoerotic possibilities, but where they have had to “pay” for their rejection of male authority in different ways. However, in stark contrast to these female marginalizations, gay characters seem to have more visibility (though through hackneyed and stereotypical gags and characters still) and acceptance, which begs the question: is the Indian screen afraid of the lesbian? Is it the audiences who are afraid or is it someone else? I argue that these films have changed the landscape of desire in Indian film in various ways by anchoring themselves in an autonomously female space, which is conspicuous for its absence in the depiction of the mainstream “straight” Indian movie “heroine.”