Near-Stillness in the Art Films of Sam Taylor-Johnson and Vanessa Beecroft

Abstract

Feminist art practice has a rich heritage of radical filmmaking, which has contributed to an understanding of its politics as subversive and oppositional. Examples include Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s groundbreaking Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) and Chantel Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), both of which explore sexuality, otherhood and feminism. Mulvey and Wollen’s film is informed by psychoanalysis and addresses the position of women within patriarchy. A range of narrative codes and avant-garde techniques are used to shift the focus from woman as image to woman as a subject of enquiry. These include Mulvey reading to the camera, fragmentation (visual and in dialogue) and the use of multiple voices to disrupt the narrative framework of conventional film. Ackerman’s film is about a widowed housewife and mother who carries out monotonous chores and makes ends meet by working as a prostitute in the afternoons. The film is three hours and twenty-one minutes long and uses a fixed camera to emphasize the duration of mundane tasks such as peeling a potato or looking for a missing button. It uses rhythm, duration and stasis to set up a dialogue between the drama of Jeanne’s sexwork and the ongoingness of life’s domestic routines. Crucial as these strategies are, the grounds upon which they were founded have shifted in relation to the changing relationship of art films to popular culture. If the radicalism of second-wave art films was to be found in the extent to which they sharpened the spectator’s agency, demystifying the illusions of mainstream cinema and raising awareness of film as an ideological construction, contemporary artist-filmmakers operate in a changed cultural landscape. Opposition, reversal and subversion are not enough now that popular culture has appropriated these tactics.