Being Inside Her Silence: silence and performance in Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar.
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Silence as an aesthetic strategy has characterized the work of a number of female filmmakers. From Claire Denis to Moufida Tlatli, the silence of women in the cinema has been remarked upon extensively. Initially, the absence of women (as both active characters and directors) was lamented by feminists who sought to advance a new kind of women‘s cinema that departed from the conventions and traditions of melodrama. With the emergence of directors such as Agnes Varda, Denis and Sally Potter and the discovery and reclamation of the work of Dorothy Arzner and Alice Guy Blâche, the voices of female directors in the cinema have not only emerged but diversified tremendously. The deployment of silence as a strategy, as opposed to silence as absence, has frequently been a part of the work of directors that emerged from an avant-garde art practice (such as Potter). However, silence and how it is deployed within the narrative may also be considered a profound feminist intervention that underscores the long history of women‘s silence as absence or lack of agency within filmmaking practice and within the diegesis of narrative cinema. Other critics such as Des O‘Rawe have remarked on silence in the work of particular auteurist and avant-garde directors:
Author: Sarah Artt
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W910358833