vol. 1, issue 3: doom Archives - cléo

Editor’s Note: Doom

kiva reardon — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 15:13:40 +0000

“Where have all the interesting women gone?” -Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman (2009) Is feminism doomed? It would seem as much, based on the watered-down, easily marketable form of post-feminism that dominates the media landscape. Sheryl Sandberg’s neo-liberal, capitalist Lean In is being touted as the manual of modern feminism; Noah Baumbach’s charming but ultimately […]

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“Anger is part of my relation to the world”: An Interview with Claire Denis

kiva reardon — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 15:12:36 +0000

Claire Denis has never shied away from monsters. While her work is described as sensual and erotic (both true), her films are never sentimental. They are complex, engaging with the fact that life, while often beautiful, is also harsh, cruel, and painful. This pain has been explored in relation to colonial history (Chocolat, 1988), the […]

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Come On, Get Happy…Justine

hayley crooks — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 15:11:58 +0000

“In its earliest uses unhappy meant to cause misfortune or trouble.” -Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness Melancholia (2011) is the story of two sisters and their family who, like the rest of humanity, must face the end of the world as the planet Melancholia hurls toward Earth. Comprised of two parts named for the siblings, […]

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She’s Come Undone: Longing and Agency in Kazuo Hara’s Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

ela bittencourt — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 15:11:16 +0000

Director Kazuo Hara’s documentary Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 follows the story of the director’s ex-wife, the outspoken twenty-six-year-old radical Japanese feminist Miyuki Takada. While navigating the relatively new terrain of their breakup, Miyuki is also politically invested in challenging traditional conceptions of women’s roles at home and in Japanese society. The film is […]

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Motor City’s Gendered Shift: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Detropia

calina ellwand — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 15:09:48 +0000

A majestic tower, stark against the night sky and crumbling at its edges, sways on the verge of collapse. The camera cuts away before the inevitable, but a feeling of vertiginous nausea lingers. Scenes of decaying infrastructure, ghostly streets, and demoralized factory workers are among the doomsday landscapes with which filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel […]

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We Still Need the Women’s Army: Form and Politics in Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames

brent bellamy — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 15:09:00 +0000

“I don’t want to tell a story. I have no story to tell. I have problems to figure out.” —Lizzie Borden Lizzie Borden’s radical feminist quasi-documentary Born in Flames (1983) constructs its story through a deeply space-oriented plot. That is, where (the socialist democracy of the U.S.A) is often more important than when (ten years […]

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Lessons in Loss: Gender and Grief in Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar

stephanie latella — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 15:08:01 +0000

Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar (2011) opens with a quintessentially Québécois scene: children, bundled against the cold morning, loitering and teasing each other in a snowy Montreal schoolyard. Fifth-grader Simon (Émilien Néron) rushes from the bustling winter scene into the empty school to collect milk for his class. As he arrives at the doorway of the classroom, […]

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Attacked by Nothing: Barbara Hershey and The Entity in Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space and Dream Work

tara judah — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 15:06:01 +0000

In Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity (1982), Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) is violently attacked by a presence with no physicality. Intended as a supernatural suspense thriller rather than a horror film, The Entity received middling reviews on release, and seemed destined to be nothing more than another 1980s genre film. However, Austrian avant-gardist Peter Tscherkassky […]

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This Is the Rhythm of My Life: Failure in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail

julia cooper — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 15:04:57 +0000

“To fail in everything, it is true, will always remain possible.” –Derrida, Specters of Marx In Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1999), the eminence of doom is almost palpable; from the foregrounded terrain of war, to the protagonist Galoup’s (Denis Lavant) exclusion from the taut brotherhood of legionnaires and his reflections on mortality, it is a […]

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vol. 1, issue 3: doom

cléo journal — Thu, 28 Nov 2013 17:01:42 +0000

Doom is the thematic incitement for the third issue of cléo, and we invite writers to consider its diffuse, spectral, and ominous meanings and representations in film. Doom is sensory and it is visceral. It portends calamity, catastrophe, apocalypse, death, tragedy, annihilation. Yet doom is also a form of prescience and a mode of intuition. […]

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