vol. 1, issue 1: flesh Archives - cléo

Editor’s Note: Flesh

kiva reardon — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:37:56 +0000

“People who say, ‘Why do women make films like this?’ still think that women don’t have vast territories to explore.” – Claire Denis on Trouble Every Day (2001) cléo was born of a rather inauspicious email. Last year I sent out a call to several writers with the subject line, “A semi-formed idea.” What followed […]

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Holy Motors: “I miss the cameras.”

mallory andrews — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:36:56 +0000

After a thirteen-year hiatus, filmmaker Leos Carax returns with Holy Motors (2012), a kaleidoscopic dawn-to-dusk journey through Paris following the chameleon-like figure known only as Monsieur Oscar (frequent Carax collaborator, Denis Lavant). Oscar is an actor-for-hire, commissioned by a series of unknown clientele to perform as an array of characters, playing out vignettes on the […]

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vol. 1, issue 1: flesh

cléo journal — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:30:50 +0000

2012 has brought into stark relief our culture’s continual fixation on the legal boundaries of the female body. By no means a new topic of debate, what and how the body is controlled has nonetheless burst into mainstream media and thought with Canada’s Bill M312 (known by many as the “When Life Begins” bill, or […]

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Peep Show: Activism and Art in Live Nude Girls Unite! and Crazy Horse

calina ellwand — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:57:31 +0000

Documentary film can take audiences behind the curtain to explore institutional spaces that are seldom seen. When that glimpse exposes systemic injustice, audiences may be compelled to empathize and even rally behind a cause. As a means of galvanizing supporters around a struggle, documentary film can be a powerful tool for activists; especially for marginalized […]

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“It’s Biology”: Zero Dark Thirty and the Politics of the Body

lindsay jensen — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:57:01 +0000

“In the end everyone breaks, bro. It’s biology.” Billing itself as “The Greatest Manhunt in History,” and similarly described by its director as a “first draft of history,” Zero Dark Thirty is a film that asks to be viewed as an impartial, reliable document of historical events—there is little room for the frivolities of fiction […]

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Haywire’s Body Talk

kiva reardon — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:38:21 +0000

“Hey Wonder Woman, you said your piece. Now sit back and shut up.” Spoken by a portly cop mid-way through Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 Haywire, the superhero being told to stay quiet is Mallory, played by Gina Carano. Handcuffed in the back of a police car, her character is an agent gone rogue, seeking revenge after […]

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Radical Intimacies: Harmony Korine’s Gummo and Spring Breakers

julia cooper — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:33:42 +0000

Harmony Korine continually recasts, perverts, and transforms a narrative that is held dear within the American imaginary—the coming-of-age story. From his work as the writer on Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), to his first film Gummo (1997), and now, with the bikini-clad wonder of Spring Breakers (2012), Korine offers explicit portraits of adolescent bodies behaving badly. […]

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