Richard Armstrong (University of Cambridge)
La ‘Diva du Deuil’: Towards a Pantheon of Mourning Women
The last twenty years saw a number of feature films released into the multiplex and the arthouse that dealt with the vicissitudes of grief and mourning. Departing from the dynamic goal-oriented narrative of classical mainstream aesthetics, many of these films were, above all, accounts of interiority. In many ways the legatee of the ‘intellectual melodrama’ of post-war Continental modernism, the mourning film is a narrative of alienation and dislocation. In contradistinction to the horizontal cause-and-effect trajectory typified by Anglo-American narrative cinema, the mourning film’s trajectory is vertical, a history of subjectivity in which time, space, memory, emotion are rehearsed as stark permutations of colour, continuity and performance.
The narrative syntax and visual style of the mourning film is saliently organized around the mourning protagonist. These films revolve around these characters such that it would seem as though she determines the looks, rhythms and energies of what we see. Whilst the intensely visual account of interiority marks the Continental modernist project – Viaggio in Italia (1952), Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Red Desert (1964) – the preoccupation with a woman’s feelings positions mourning cinema in thrall to important, intrinsically histrionic, cycles in the commercial mainstream. If works such as Interiors (1978), Three Colours: Blue (1993), and Morvern Callar (2001), inherit their visionary severity from post-war experiment, others – I Have Loved You So Long (2007), Birth (2003) and Jude (1996) are influenced by pre-war currents in European melodrama and the Hollywood ‘woman’s picture.’ In a post-Jaws multiplex retail landscape geared to meet the needs of a young male spectator, the modern mourning film re-evokes the classic age of a powerfully histrionic cinema built around female protagonists and rehearsed by a pantheon of compelling female stars.
Deploying analytical tools drawn from recent acting theory, feminist film theory and psychoanalysis, this paper seeks to identify a genealogy of the mourning film in such histrionic cycles of the past. In emulation of the classical pantheon, it will propose a modern pantheon of actresses (the gender discrimination is deliberate) around whom has coalesced a new genre.
The narrative syntax and visual style of the mourning film is saliently organized around the mourning protagonist. These films revolve around these characters such that it would seem as though she determines the looks, rhythms and energies of what we see. Whilst the intensely visual account of interiority marks the Continental modernist project – Viaggio in Italia (1952), Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Red Desert (1964) – the preoccupation with a woman’s feelings positions mourning cinema in thrall to important, intrinsically histrionic, cycles in the commercial mainstream. If works such as Interiors (1978), Three Colours: Blue (1993), and Morvern Callar (2001), inherit their visionary severity from post-war experiment, others – I Have Loved You So Long (2007), Birth (2003) and Jude (1996) are influenced by pre-war currents in European melodrama and the Hollywood ‘woman’s picture.’ In a post-Jaws multiplex retail landscape geared to meet the needs of a young male spectator, the modern mourning film re-evokes the classic age of a powerfully histrionic cinema built around female protagonists and rehearsed by a pantheon of compelling female stars.
Deploying analytical tools drawn from recent acting theory, feminist film theory and psychoanalysis, this paper seeks to identify a genealogy of the mourning film in such histrionic cycles of the past. In emulation of the classical pantheon, it will propose a modern pantheon of actresses (the gender discrimination is deliberate) around whom has coalesced a new genre.
