vol. 5, issue 1: soft Archives - cléo

Editors’ Note: Soft

cléo journal — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 11:59:38 +0000

With this issue of cléo, we wanted to try a little tenderness, as the song goes. It might not seem like the time for a soft approach to, well, anything, but in order to commit to showing up for each other and the earth for the long haul–and we’ll need to–we’re thinking about all the […]

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Dress Coding 9 to 5

mallory andrews — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 11:52:16 +0000

In the foreword to the 1977 guide The Women’s Dress for Success, a book dedicated to help women master their workplace dress codes, author John T. Molloy immediately goes on the defensive when outlining his mission: “This book is designed as a classic “how to” book. Its purpose is to give every American woman a […]

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The Empathy Machine: Why Moonlight Isn’t Universal and That’s a Good Thing

angelica jade bastién — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 11:51:25 +0000

What is film but a medium that asks us to experience worlds — physical and emotional — beyond our own? It’s when it brings us to tears or makes us overflow with joy that film has the possibility of slipping past our defenses to challenge how we perceive the world and maybe even ourselves. The way […]

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“Can I Fuck This?”: Alex Garland’s Ex Machina

veronica fitzpatrick — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 11:50:03 +0000

For all their glossy futurism, female cyborg stories overwhelmingly pivot on the immemorial horror of rape. Whether such films and TV shows allegorize radical social upheaval or contemplate the mysteries of human consciousness, rape scenes inevitably lurk within their narratives. Sexual assault plots pair frequently enough with women’s bodies onscreen, but when those bodies are […]

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Laying Bare the Implications of Touch in Blissfully Yours

Katrya Bolger — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 11:49:12 +0000

In the remote locales where the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul are largely set, an awareness of global market forces and borders gently lingers. The Thai filmmaker depicts how people at the margins confront and transgress such symptoms of modernity at local, communal and bodily levels, conditioning permeable ideas of selfhood. The erotic drama Blissfully Yours […]

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Mapping State Violence Through Aesthetics of Nonviolence in The Prison in Twelve Landscapes

Lydia Ogwang — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 11:48:35 +0000

When it comes to invoking tropes of the “all-American,” the prison industrial system is not likely a signifier with which a nation extolling its virtues would wish to align. Such a connection, however, would accurately be upheld: with the highest incarceration rate in the world[i], invocations of the carceral within discussions of the United States […]

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When Hard Meets Soft: The Painful Pleasures of Nunsploitation Cinema

justine smith — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 11:47:46 +0000

My fascination with nuns in cinema began in high school. I attended a Montreal all-girls Catholic academy and did little socializing outside the institute’s walls. The school had once served as the residence of Canada’s Governor General, until Loyalist rebels burned down the building in 1849, forcing the Governor to flee with his family. Following […]

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The “Undervalued Gesture” in the Lens of Babette Mangolte

Nel Dahl — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 11:46:48 +0000

Behind the lens that shot Chantal Akerman’s iconic Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is camerawoman and filmmaker Babette Mangolte. The landmark film propelled Akerman into the critical spotlight, but at its heart lies the shared bond and vision between the young director and the film’s assured, powerhouse cinematographer. Mangolte fostered an […]

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Soft Light and Focus in Mother of George

Debbie Frempong — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 11:46:09 +0000

In Andrew Dosunmu’s Mother of George (2013), a family drama about a couple trying to conceive a child, Dosunmu and cinematographer Bradford Young play with light, colour and skin to produce a haunting, melancholy glare that speaks to the viewer both aesthetically and metaphorically. As Charles Mudede writers in The Stranger, the film “has no […]

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What’s Not to Touch: Jane Campion’s Intimacies

jaime chu — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 11:42:12 +0000

“Poetry should surprise by a fine excess…and appear almost a remembrance,” the English Romantic poet John Keats wrote to his publisher John Taylor in February 1818, three years before Keats’ death at 25 from tuberculosis, when he still believed he had not written a single immortal thing to make his friends proud. That fall, Keats […]

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