Mise-en-scene: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration (Issue 2.2, Winter 2017)

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Greg Chan, Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU), Canada MSJ@kpu.ca

ADVISORY BOARD

Richard L. Edwards, Ball State University, USA Allyson Nadia Field, University of Chicago, USA David A. Gerstner, City University of New York, USA Michael Howarth, Missouri Southern State University, USA Andrew Klevan, University of Oxford, UK Gary McCarron, Simon Fraser University (SFU), Canada Michael C.K. Ma, KPU, Canada Janice Morris, KPU, Canada Miguel Mota, University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada Paul Risker, University of Wolverhampton, UK Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, India Paul Tyndall, KPU, Canada

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C o n te n ts Editor’s Note / Greg Chan ....................................................... 3

Articles Monstrously Barren: The Horror of the Childless Mother in Peruvian Thriller El vientre / Andrea Meador Smith ................ 5 Hala Lotfy’s Coming Forth by Day Towards a New Egyptian Cinema / Amir Taha ............................................................... 19

REVIEWERS

Novia Shih-Shan Chen, SFU, Canada Kelly Ann Doyle, KPU, Canada Jack Patrick Hayes, KPU/UBC, Canada Michael Johnston, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, USA Dan Lett, KPU, Canada Kent Lewis, Capilano University, Canada Christina Parker-Flynn, Florida State University, USA Asma Sayed, KPU, Canada Christopher Sharrett, Seton Hall University, USA Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi, India Paul Tyndall, KPU, Canada

Featurette Teaching Mise-en-scène through Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho / Michael Howarth .................................................................. 35

Reviews Traceable / Paul Richard ....................................................... 49

COPYEDITORS

Heather Cyr, KPU, Canada Irene Halliday, KPU, Canada John Donald Redmond, KPU, Canada

A Personal Review of the KDocs 2017 Documentary Film Festival / Andrew Bartlett ...................................................... 40

LAYOUT EDITOR

Irene Halliday, KPU, Canada

Contributors ......................................................................... 57

WEBMASTER

Janik Andreas, UBC, Canada

RESEARCH ASSISTANT

Mat Cruickshank, KPU, Canada

INTERNS

Neil Bassan, KPU, Canada Prabhjot Bhamra, KPU, Canada Melissa Pomerleau, KPU, Canada Patrick Tambogon, Wilson School of Design, Canada

Front cover image: El vientre (Cinecorp, 2014), courtesy of Daniel Rodríguez Risco.

The views and opinions of all signed texts, including editorials and regular columns, are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect those of the editors, the editorial board or the advisory board.

Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration is published by Simon Fraser University, Canada.

ISSN: 2369-5056 (online)

kpu.ca/MESjournal

ISSN: 2560-7065 (print)

One frame at a time

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration Editor’s Note

By Greg Chan, Editor-in-Chief

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ometimes you don’t plan for a thematic issue: it just presents itself.

While it wasn’t originally conceived as a themed issue, the current edition of MSJ has evolved into a dossier on national and transnational cinemas. Our contributors have chosen to unpack this theme with articles on the Peruvian horror film (Andrea Meador Smith’s feature on El vientre); New Egyptian cinema (Amir Taha’s analysis of Coming Forth by Day); Hitchcockian pedagogy (Michael Howarth’s featurette on teaching mise-en-scène through Psycho); sustainable practices in India’s fashion industry (Paul Richard’s review of Traceable); and social justice documentaries through a Canadian lens (Andrew Bartlett’s festival report on KDocs 2017).

Collectively, these articles question whether national/transnational cinemas speak to Hollywood conventions, auteurist filmmaking, and cinema as a site for social activism – plus whether such reconciliation is a requirement of either genre.

Extending the cross-cultural approach of Issue 2.2, contributing author Andrea Meador Smith has recorded English and Spanish MP3s to accompany her feature, while contributor Amir Taha has supplied English and Arabic audio files to supplement his article. (Thank you to Dan Lett for being our English reader). Their recordings can be accessed via our website (journals.sfu.ca/msq/msq/index.php/msq/index) under “Current Issue.” We also have our first undergraduate piece—chosen as

part of our new submission category of undergraduate scholarship—in the form of a video essay by fourth-year English major Emma Wilson. Her miseen-scène analysis of two Canadian literature to film adaptations is part of Issue 2.2’s exclusively online content. If you know of any undergraduate students who have written scholarly film and media studies essays, please encourage them to submit their work to MSJ for consideration. For journal extras, you are invited to subscribe to our new Youtube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCPIPKf8hyWg8QsfgRZ9cKQ. In news related to our themed issue, the MSJ team was recently invited by University of British Columbia Professor André Elias Mazawi to guest lecture in his Educational Studies 565 seminar, in which his students are researching the connections between documentary film festivals, adult learning, and dialogic imagination in world cinema. Our visit included a discussion of open-access publications like MSJ and the KDocs Documentary Film Festival as sites for social justice narratives and documentary activism. As a final project, this inspiring group of students is producing a series of short documentaries to reflect on their learning in the course. For an upcoming issue of MSJ, Professor Mazawi and graduate student Neil Bassan will be co-authoring a film studies pedagogy paper on their experience in Educational Studies 565. Given these developments,

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Editor’s Note

Educational Studies 565 class with the MSJ/KDocs team (starting third from left: Greg Chan, André Elias Mazawi, Naveen Zafar).

a themed issue on film studies and education is moving into development for 2018. Watch for our call for papers for Issue 3.2 early in the new year.

I am pleased to announce that this issue was supported by the work of several additions to the editorial team: reviewers Kelly Doyle (KPU), Philip Grayson (St John’s University), Dan Lett (KPU), Christina Parker-Flynn (Florida State University), and Asma Sayed (KPU), along with layout specialist Patrick Tambogon (Wilson School of Design) and student intern Prabhjot Bhamra (KPU). We welcome them to the team. I would also like to extend special thanks to our outgoing layout editor, Irene Halliday (KPU), who has worked tirelessly on the creation and maintenance of MSJ’s design.

KDocs Outreach Facilitator Naveen Zafar leading the seminar through an interactive "Privilege Walk."

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Finally, I would like to acknowledge and express my gratitude to our official new sponsors: the Faculty of Arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and the KDocs Documentary Film Festival. Both sponsors have stood behind the work of MSJ since its inception and continue to make this open-access project possible. Thank you, Dean Diane Purvey and Festival Director Janice Morris, for your generosity and belief in our work.

Your readings about national and transnational cinemas await. Enjoy the dossier.

December 2017

Embarking on a "Privilege Walk" (www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD5f8GuNuGQ&feature=youtu.be).

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration Monstrously Barren: The Horror of the Childless Mother in Peruvian Thriller

El vientre Andrea Meador Smith Shenandoah University Abstract: Daniel Rodríguez Risco’s El vientre (The Womb, 2014) was a box-office success in Peru and reached an international audience thanks to its run on HBO Latino and FOX Latin America. The film’s villain, Silvia (Vanessa Saba), is a 45-year-old widow who will stop at nothing to get what she wants. In this case, what she wants is to raise a baby since she was never able to carry a pregnancy to term. It is this monstrous barrenness that unhinges her and, in turn, renders her unbearable to the audience.

In this study, the author examines El vientre’s baby-crazed protagonist through the lens of film theorist Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous-feminine, considers what exactly makes Silvia horrific, and explores ways in which the cinematography reinforces her monstrosity to the audience.

Introduction to El vientre

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auded as the country’s first legitimate psychological thriller, Daniel Rodríguez Risco’s El vientre (The Womb, 2014) was a box-office success in Peru and reached an international audience thanks to its run on HBO Latino and FOX Latin America. The film’s ominous tagline, “What she wants is inside of you,”1 warns the spectator of the predatory villain, Silvia (Vanessa Saba), a 45-yearold widow who will stop at nothing to get what she wants. Unable to carry a pregnancy to term and bear her own child, Silvia desperately wants to raise a baby. Her barrenness unhinges her and, in turn, renders her unbearable to the audience. In this study, I examine El vientre’s baby-crazed protagonist through the lens of film theorist Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous-feminine, which she defines as “what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject” (1). Is it the excess of maternal desire that makes Silvia monstrous? Is it her status as a childless woman in a society that glorifies the maternal? Is it

her aging body that stands in contrast to the vitality and fecundity of Mercedes (Mayella Lloclla), the young maid Silvia hires under the guise of cleaning her stately home? In what follows, I consider what exactly makes Silvia horrific and the ways in which the cinematography reinforces her monstrosity to the audience.

Historically, Peruvian cinema has not been known for popular genre films, but rather for socially relevant works that privilege the auteur and are aimed at an international audience, or in the words of film historian Jeffrey Middents, films that are “technically proficient and exportable” (2). The popularity of Ricardo Maldonado’s recent comedies, ¡Asu Mare! (2013) and ¡Asu Mare! 2 (2015), as well as the found footage horror films Cementerio general (General Cemetery, 2013) and Cementerio general 2 (2015), marks a shift from what was traditionally considered representative of national cinema. Capitalizing on the success of the Cementerio general franchise, the popularity of Peruvian horror films MISE-EN-SCÈNE

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reached its peak in 2014, leading to a number of debuts in recent years, including La cara del diablo (Face of the Devil, 2014), written by El vientre star Vanessa Saba, Secreto Matusita (The Secret of Matusita, 2014), El demonio de los Andes (Demon of the Andes, 2014), La entidad (The Entity, 2015), Muerte en los Andes (Death in the Andes, 2015), and No estamos solos (We Are Not Alone, 2016). Critics tend to classify El vientre, which was originally promoted as a horror movie, as a psychological thriller or suspense film (Zavala par. 1).

For the purposes of this study, it is also possible to interpret the film as an example of the hybrid subgenre commonly referred to as psychological horror, given that the emotional instability of villain Silvia is what most unsettles the audience.

Peruvian director Daniel Rodríguez Risco shifted from working as a businessman and university administrator to focus on a filmmaking career in the late 1990s, when he formally trained at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, founded a production company, and began to write and direct short films. His first full-length feature was the drama El acuarelista (The Watercolorist, 2008), which he followed with the thriller El vientre, the horror film No estamos solos, and the dramedy Siete semillas (Seven Seeds, 2016). Rodríguez Risco originally wrote El vientre in 2000, but reworked the script with his brother, Gonzalo Rodríguez Risco, ten years later. The pair won co-production funds from the competitive Fondo Ibermedia, which enabled them to move forward with the project. After five weeks of rehearsal, the cast and crew filmed El vientre in just 26 days between May and June 2012 (Rojas par. 4). In interviews, the director emphasized that a small but talented crew worked with limited resources, utilizing a Red One digital camera, a few lights, a dolly, and— for one day only—a crane (Rojas par. 12). Despite being dubbed “controversial” by the national media for its exploration of “the dark side of motherhood,”2 the film was awarded the 2013 National

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Competition for Post-production Projects of Feature-Length Films to help cover post-production costs and broke Peru’s box-office record for the opening weekend of a national film (Ibermedia par.

6). Rodríguez Risco has already announced the forthcoming sequel, El vientre 2, with shooting scheduled to begin in summer 2017 (Ugarelli par. 17).

Rodríguez Risco’s original script was inspired by Catherine Deneuve’s portrayal of aloof women who avenge the men who hurt them in the films Repulsion (1965) and Tristana (1970). He also has referenced popular North American thrillers Fatal Attraction (1987) and Misery (1990) as initial influences on El vientre. Rodríguez Risco’s fascination with “beautiful, damaged women” (Zelaya Miñano par. 11) clearly manifests itself in his protagonist Silvia, whom he has described as “calculating” and “subtly frigid,”3 and to whom the film’s website refers as “unhinged,” “obsessed,” and “desperate.”4 As El vientre progresses, the viewer will notice connections not only to the female protagonists of the aforementioned films, but also to the literary and cinematic manifestations of Great Expectations’s Miss Havisham: just as Dickens’s eccentric spinster surrounded herself with relics from her long-ago wedding, Silvia stockpiles outdated baby food and clothing and keeps an antique brass crib in her bedroom.

Similarly, spectators will recognize traces of Rebecca De Mornay’s chilling portrayal of a nanny who attempts to usurp her employer in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992).

Having consulted with experts in psychosis, Rodríguez Risco, in agreement with Vanessa Saba, decided not to depict Silvia as a deranged woman but rather as someone fully committed to her mission to have a baby (Romero Carrillo par. 7).5 In the director’s words, the film tackles “the dark side of maternal desire. The story originated when, through a personal experience, I discovered that something as

Monstrously Barren: El vientre

beautiful as maternal desire, upon becoming obsessive, could be distorted into something dangerous.”6 The Monstrous-Feminine and Monstrous Wombs

Barbara Creed’s foundational work on the monstrous-feminine serves as the theoretical basis for my analysis of El vientre’s protagonist Silvia, who embodies “what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject” (1). Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s discussion of the abject in Powers of Horror, Creed specifies three ways that the horror film illustrates abjection: the numerous visual images of abjection that appear on screen—including blood, excrement, and corpses; the crossing of borders as an inherent aspect of monstrosity; and the construction of the mother or maternal figure as abject (11). Creed defends the need for a more precise term than female monster, in her view an overly simplistic antithesis of the male monster, since the horror of the monstrous-feminine differs significantly from that of the male monster. The role of gender, she argues, cannot be separated from the construction of woman as monstrous or the unique ways in which female monstrosity horrifies the audience (3). Moreover, Creed maintains that “when woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions,” noting that one of the various ways in which the monstrous woman tends to be characterized is the monstrous womb (7).

place where the subject is both generated and negated” (“Semiotic Chora” 26, 28), a site of creation as well as destruction. The maternal body functions as a receptacle somewhere between the semiotic and the symbolic, or in Kristeva’s words, “what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora” (28). In the case of El vientre, Silvia’s maternal body never succeeds in producing a subject that transitions from the semiotic to the symbolic. It is worth noting, then, that the protagonist’s very name—Silvia, from the Latin root silva or “forest”—indicates her proximity to the natural world, a realm that is not fully human and does not respect the parameters of the symbolic.

The monstrous womb indicated by the film’s title therefore is not that of the character who actually is pregnant on screen. On the contrary, Mercedes is portrayed as youthful, innocent, and virtuous, despite her dalliance with Jaime (Manuel Gold), and even after she becomes pregnant, her body is not presented as repulsive or threatening. It is, in fact, idealized by means of the accentuation of Mercedes’s health and innocence, not to mention her association with the Virgin Mary vis-à-vis her first name— in Spanish the Virgin is often referred to as María de las Mercedes (Our Lady of Mercy)—and the poster of the Holy Mother that she hangs in her new room in Silvia’s house. The movie suggests that Mercedes has the power to bring about a bright future because of her ability to bear a child, as evidenced by the sunsoaked shots of the film’s final scene. She is the film’s final girl, that stock character of the horror genre “whose story we follow from beginning to end, and the one from whose vantage, even through whose eyes, we see the action; and it is she who, at

The monstrous womb … is not that of the character who actually is pregnant on screen.

The film’s title itself evokes Kristeva’s reading of the term chora, synonymous with “receptacle” and often translated from the Greek as “womb,” that she borrows from Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. Kristeva expands on Plato’s notion of the chora as a “nourishing and maternal” space by conceptualizing it as “the

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the end of the film, brings the killer down” (Glover x). Despite the lingering stigma of single motherhood in twenty-first century Peru (Manohar and Busse-Cárdenas), Mercedes is glorified throughout the film as life-giving and life-affirming.

In El vientre, then, pregnancy itself is not construed as innately horrifying. The womb that is monstrous is the one that remains unseen: never having produced a healthy child, Silvia’s womb is the one that repulses society. Her lack of progeny not only disgusts but also terrifies due to its failure to comply with social expectations for married women, especially women of her standing. The horror of Silvia’s dysfunctional maternal body is illustrated on screen in a pivotal scene, discussed in more detail below, in which she shows Mercedes an album that contains photos of her dead fetuses. Silvia’s ability to conceive already aligns her with the abject, but it is her inability to give birth to a healthy child that makes her womb truly monstrous.

Framing Female Monstrosity in El vientre El vientre takes place in Chosica, a rural area east of Lima that once served as a mountainside resort town for aristocratic city dwellers. Wealthy widow Silvia, who lives alone in a large, stately home outside of town, hires young Mercedes to clean and care for the house. Mercedes becomes involved romantically

Fig. 1: Mercedes (Mayella Lloclla) works at the camal, or local slaughterhouse, before taking a job with Silvia.

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with Jaime, Silvia’s handyman, and soon finds herself pregnant. Unbeknownst to the young couple, Silvia orchestrates their relationship from the beginning, planning to keep their child for herself. However, she does not anticipate resistance from a pair of penniless adolescents. While Mercedes and Jaime attempt to defy her at every turn, it becomes clear that Silvia will do whatever is necessary to claim the baby as her own. As the puzzle of Silvia’s past is pieced together, Mercedes’s future grows more precarious.

Set in a local slaughterhouse, the opening sequence of El vientre begins in a hand-held shooting style that captures the din of a squealing pig running from the hands of a butcher before cutting to a series of images of raw meat and animal parts. The camera then moves its focus to two young women, one of whom is Mercedes, and tilts down to a split-second detail shot of Mercedes’s hands, backgrounded by her white blood-stained apron, as they slice through pig flesh (Fig. 1). Following a close-up of Mercedes’s face, a straight cut leads viewers to Silvia, who is shot slightly from below and framed by a window in a wall separating the kill floor from the rest of the slaughterhouse (Fig. 2). These initial glimpses of the protagonists presage both the physical and psychological horror that characterize the remainder of the film. First, the shots of Mercedes foreshadow the violent deaths of innocent secondary characters and,

Fig. 2: Silvia (Vanessa Saba) observes young women working on the kill floor of the slaughterhouse.

Monstrously Barren: El vientre

more importantly, her bloody conflict with Silvia at film’s end. Second, the low-angle shot of Silvia, whose white blouse and impeccable grooming contrast with the younger woman’s soiled apron and disheveled appearance, draws attention to her social and psychological power over Mercedes. Silvia is clearly the one in charge in this scene, as she turns her head to an unseen figure and announces that she would like “the one on the right,”7 essentially purchasing Mercedes as other customers might purchase slabs of meat. The framing of Silvia is another key component of this sequence, as it sets a precedent for the angular framing throughout the film that positions the protagonists as seen through windows, behind bars and gates, and inside doorways, thereby contributing to an overall sensation of being trapped.

In addition to the film’s opening sequence, the physical space in which most of the action occurs, Silvia’s historic home, is especially important to the story’s development (Fig. 3). Rodríguez Risco diligently searched for a house that his crew could transform into a sort of prison for its inhabitants. They settled upon an enclosed complex of several adjacent manor houses to serve as the set and, despite the dilapidated condition of the primary house, the crew

managed to create a convincing two-story mansion that, along with its patio and exterior rooms, appears to imprison its owner and her victims (Romero Carrillo par. 8). As it appears on screen, the sprawling structure in which Silvia lives reinforces her solitary experience and isolation from society. Its gloomy interior, barred windows, and small doorways, in conjunction with the close and angular framing of most of the shots inside the house, contribute to the sense that Silvia is confined to a prison of her own making and that, like Mercedes and Jaime, we as spectators have become trapped in her world.

Visually, one of the most striking aspects of Silvia’s character is that she is often wearing white.

Whereas her whitewashed manor house recalls the wealth and gentility of a bygone era, her snow-coloured dresses conjure up associations with Victorian ideals of femininity like purity and passivity, as well as nineteenth-century portrayals of madness. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar note in their analysis of unhinged literary heroines, “It is surely significant that doomed, magical, half-mad, or despairing women […] all wear white” (617), and it is highly unlikely that the colour scheme of Silvia’s wardrobe in several major scenes, including the first and final times we see her, is coincidental. In Silvia’s

Fig. 3: Mercedes arrives at Silvia’s estate on the outskirts of town, unaware that it will soon become her prison.

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Fig. 4: Mercedes grows anxious as she secretly watches her employer hum a lullaby and straighten unused baby clothes in an antique crib.

initial appearance on screen, she is dressed in a white blouse, a spotless garment that bears no resemblance to the bloodied aprons of the young women working in the slaughterhouse (Fig. 1, Fig. 2). In another pivotal sequence, Mercedes, unbeknownst to Silvia, catches a glimpse of her employer wrapped in a flowing white robe and gown as she hums to herself and rocks an empty cradle. An early shot in the sequence, masterfully framed by the keyhole of the protagonist’s bedroom, features a full-frontal view of Silvia in chiaroscuro before cutting to a close-up of her face (Fig. 4). Subsequent shots pan down then back up Silvia’s body, emphasizing the contrast between the whiteness of her robe and the darkness of the room.

The most significant images of Silvia in white come in the film’s final ten minutes when she sports a white dress whose sheer sleeves, lace collar, and ruffled front emphasize her femininity as well as her descent into madness. Each shot of Silvia draws attention to the whiteness of her dress while keeping her face in partial or full shadow throughout a sequence that begins with her playing piano and quickly devolves into her deranged pursuit of Mercedes with a butcher knife. After finally managing to 10

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detain her victim, Silvia plunges the knife into Mercedes’s shoulder, which soils her dress. The whiteness of Silvia’s garment defiled by the splotch of Mercedes’s blood will become further stained by that of the baby during the delivery. Low-angle shots capture Silvia holding the newborn, both of them swathed in white cloth stained by the mother’s blood. The camera angle emphasizes Silvia’s momentary power over Mercedes, but her victory is short-lived. In a final burst of strength, Mercedes stabs Silvia symbolically in the abdomen, and as the camera zooms out to an aerial shot, we see the blood darkening her once-pristine dress (Fig. 5). In a juxtaposition of her first appearance on screen, in which her white outfit clashed with Mercedes’s bloody apron, the final image of Silvia is a lingering full shot, immediately followed by a straight cut to a close up, of her wearing the bloodstained white dress from the birth scene (Fig. 6).

The significance of Silvia’s beauty and poise throughout the film should not be discounted. Elegant clothing, flawless makeup, and a flattering hairstyle enhance her natural beauty, and her assured demeanor reflects and reinforces the place of privilege she enjoys in her small community. Nonetheless, as

Monstrously Barren: El vientre

Fig. 5: One life ends as another begins in this aerial shot of the bloody aftermath of Mercedes’s delivery.

philosopher Kelly Oliver warns in her discussion of the popular subgenre she dubs pregnant horror, “a beautiful woman or adorable child can be more terrifying, particularly in a pedestrian way, than a hideous monster because they are seemingly innocent and attractive; and they are more dangerous because they can pass themselves off as good when they are really evil” (125-126). Indeed, in El vientre, the widow’s beauty goes hand in hand with her monstrosity: as alluring as she may be, her body will come to be seen as horrifying because of its inability to

produce offspring and its proclivity to engage in violent behaviour.

From the film’s beginning in the local slaughterhouse to its final scene in a lavish garden, Silvia is visually portrayed as monstrous in several ways.

First, she is repeatedly depicted in connection with the abject, specifically with blood, with death, and with the female body. She is associated with the animalistic from the opening sequence in which she is shot watching young women lacerate pig carcasses.

Fig. 6: An apparition of Silvia briefly haunts Mercedes’s idyllic ending in a sunny garden.

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As the film progresses, she both figuratively and literally becomes the one with blood on her hands. On screen, we do not see the carnage that results from the murders of Silvia’s victims, although we are aware that she uses her own physical strength to kill the men who stand in her way: her husband, Jaime, and Jaime’s uncle Miguel (Gianfranco Brero). The audacity she displays, as well as the confidence she gains, in murdering these men makes Silvia even more monstrous and, in turn, asserts her resolve to abduct Mercedes’s baby. Eventually, we do witness Silvia shed blood when she attempts to prevent her captive’s escape in the movie’s final ten minutes. We also watch her take charge of Mercedes’s delivery and cut the newborn’s umbilical cord, which recalls the image of the bloody fetus from her photo album.

While Mercedes—who has just given birth, been stabbed, and stabbed her rival in return—remains nearly spotless, Silvia is the one with stained clothes who spends her final moments of life covered with the blood from the baby boy, from Mercedes, and from her own body (Fig. 5).

Second, the camerawork contributes to the visual construction of Silvia as monstrous by amplifying the control she has over her young victim, Mercedes.

The tight, angular framing at first exposes Silvia’s

self-imposed confinement: early on, she appears enclosed in the small opening in her front door, behind window panes, and standing in doorways. Soon, however, the cinematography encourages the viewer to relate to Mercedes, rather than her employer, by reinforcing the feeling that she is being held against her will. Given that Mercedes plays the role of the film’s final girl, as spectators, we are supposed to identify with her cinematically as well as narratively (Glover xi). It should come as little surprise, then, that we start to feel claustrophobic after numerous shots of our heroine behind the bars of windows, gates, and even a crib (Fig. 7). Silvia does not allow Mercedes to leave the house and, after the young woman’s escape and thwarted appeal for protection from the police, Silvia resorts to locking her victim in the bedroom off the patio that separates her from the main house. In an especially effective scene, the shadows from window bars fall upon Mercedes’s pregnant body after Silvia grants her permission to take a short “walk” on the patio. An eye-level medium shot then captures the misery of the young prisoner, centered in the foreground against the backdrop of a wall covered with grated windows, as she shuffles around the enclosed space under her captor’s watchful eye.

Fig. 7: Throughout the film, the shots of Mercedes behind windows, between railings, and inside door frames remind viewers that she is a prisoner in Silvia’s home.

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Monstrously Barren: El vientre

Third, the frequent use of chiaroscuro to accentuate the contrast between light and shadow not only intensifies the film’s dramatic tension, but also casts doubt upon Silvia’s character. Throughout the film, the bathing of Silvia’s face in shadow suggests there is a sinister side to her personality, that she is hiding something, that she is not to be trusted. In fact, in many of the close-ups of Silvia, either the right or left side of her face is fully covered in shadow while the other half is illuminated, a technique that is rarely used for Mercedes (Fig. 8). On the contrary, Mercedes’s face is usually evenly lit, often in frontal shots, which attributes a sort of honesty and openness to the young woman. With respect to interior shots of Silvia’s home, the skillful use of chiaroscuro at several key points—such as when she sings a lullaby to herself in the unused nursery or when she congratulates Mercedes and Jaime on their pregnancy in the formal sitting room—enhances not only the aesthetic quality of the mise-en-scènes but also the solemn and solitary environment in which the widow resides. Thanks in large part to chiaroscuro lighting, one scene in particular is as visually stunning as it is horrifying: the sequence, referenced

above, in which Mercedes enters the sitting room where Silvia is playing the piano and attempts to attack her from behind, not knowing that her captor is armed with a knife. The contrast between light and dark intensifies the ideological impact of the conflict that ensues between the good and evil mother figures. By drawing attention to Silvia’s flowing white dress and her half-lit face as she drops the knife she wields over Mercedes, as she claims that she “isn’t going to hurt my [her own] baby,”8 the lighting scheme also underscores the madness into which Silvia has slipped.

Monstrous Ambiguity Above all else, Silvia’s monstrosity lies in her ambiguity. She epitomizes Kristeva’s notion of the abject: “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Powers 4).

Her in-betweenness is precisely what horrifies the audience, and her monstrous femininity is solidified in a pivotal scene in the final third of the film. In this scene, which takes place in the kitchen, Silvia reveals her past pregnancies to Mercedes by showing her an

Fig. 8: Frequent shots of Silvia’s face in chiaroscuro cast doubt upon her integrity.

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Fig. 9: In this crucial scene, Silvia shows Mercedes rejected adoption papers, photographs of her failed pregnancies, and newspaper clippings about her husband’s death.

album full of rejected adoption applications, pictures of her pregnancies and of aborted fetuses, and newspaper clippings about her husband’s death (Fig. 9).

While it is unclear whether Silvia’s husband, a renowned gynecologist who did not want his wife to have children, somehow caused the miscarriages, it is clear that he sterilized his wife. Silvia points out a photo claiming, “That was the last time,”9 but she refuses to verbalize what her husband then did to her; instead, she mimics a snipping motion with her fingers. As the camera returns to the album, an extreme close-up insert shot of a newspaper headline announces her husband’s death: “a staircase was his final journey.”10 The headline, in combination with her chuckle that he was always “so clumsy,” leads viewers to suspect that Silvia in fact killed her husband, at which point they realize the extent of her instability and truly begin to fear for Mercedes’s safety.

If we accept Creed’s argument that horror films construct the monstrous through forms of abjection such as murder (Silvia’s killing of her husband, Jaime, and his uncle), the corpse (her victims, those of her unborn children), and the female body (Silvia’s sterile body beside Mercedes’s fertile one), then 14

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the aforementioned kitchen scene is crucial to solidifying Silvia’s monstrosity, which cannot be separated from her ambiguity (9). In particular, three aspects of her in-betweenness contribute to the construction of her monstrosity in this scene and throughout the film: first, she is simultaneously associated with lack and with excess; second, she is neither mother nor not a mother; and third, she is neither fully female nor fully male.

The first aspect of Silvia’s ambiguity is that she is simultaneously associated with lack and with excess.

She is neither reproductive (physical lack) nor restrained (emotional excess). Her body, having been rendered incapable of procreating, exemplifies lack.

She is physically unable to fulfill society’s expectations for a woman of her status, not to mention her own aspirations, and she is left alone without a child to rear and without anyone to care for her in return.

Despite this physical deficiency, Silvia is also equated with excess, specifically the excess of her maternal desire. In the eyes of her husband, her reproductive potential—albeit unfulfilled—was out of control, and her yearning to have a child repulsed him to such an extent that he chose to suppress it. Whether Silvia’s unrestrained maternal desire lead to or resulted

Monstrously Barren: El vientre

from her unbalanced psyche is a question that the film leaves unresolved, although it does establish the link between her hunger to have a child and her immoral behaviour. The combination of physical lack and emotional excess is, therefore, one component of Silvia’s role as an ambiguous maternal figure.

A second element of Silvia’s in-betweenness is that she is neither a mother nor a non-mother. She is not a mother in the traditional sense of the word, given that she has not parented biological or adopted offspring. Silvia’s situation forces the viewer to grapple with the very definition of mother: she is a woman who became pregnant several times with the explicit desire of raising children. Although those pregnancies resulted in miscarriages, does that negate her identity as a mother? Moreover, Silvia considers Mercedes to be a surrogate whose baby she will raise as her own. As disturbed as the situation may be, it is evident that Silvia sees herself as a mother-to-be who, after repeatedly having been denied a baby of her own, soon will have the opportunity to parent a child. Analogous to the paradox of the maternal body that is neither one nor two beings, Silvia’s nebulous maternal identity, neither one nor the other, challenges viewers’ understanding of motherhood and problematizes their identification

with and sympathy for her. Like Kristeva’s notion of the abject, Silvia’s incomplete maternity does not respect boundaries and cannot be categorized; she inhabits a liminal space in which she is neither mother nor not mother and, although she may not be missing limbs or organs like the ghosts and zombies typical of the horror genre, her incompleteness nonetheless makes her monstrous to the audience.11 In a film replete with detail shots of her eyes and hands, the maximum cinematographic expression of Silvia’s monstrous incompleteness and in-betweenness can be found in the scene in which she watches Mercedes and Jaime make love in her bedroom, when an extreme close-up features her right eye framed between the blinds of a closet door (Fig. 10).

A third component of Silvia’s monstrosity lies in the fact that, as a result of her infertility, she is neither fully female nor fully male in the eyes of society.

Without offspring of her own, she has not fulfilled the traditional biological role for a married woman.

In seeking a surrogate to bear her child, her relationship to childbearing paradoxically begins to resemble that of a man who must depend on a woman to carry his offspring. Shirley Shalev and Dafna Lemish argue that

Fig. 10: Silvia spies on the young couple’s sexual encounter from behind a closet door.

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contemporary surrogacy provides an infertile woman with a similar option to men, enabling her to accompany the pregnant surrogate mother who carries her child-to-be without physically involving her own body in the carrying process. Thus, her positioning in the reproductive process becomes more equal to that of a man, as she turns from being a means of reproduction into a beneficiary of female reproduction when she achieves parenthood like men do, while their bodies remain unaffected. (333) In El vientre, Silvia’s barrenness allows her to approach a privilege traditionally reserved for men in that, if she can raise Mercedes’s baby as her own, she can transcend the dichotomy that has confined women to either reproductive beings or sexual beings. Shalev and Lemish identify this new sort of female social hybrid as an infertile mother, one who straddles the categories of reproduction and sexuality and “remains whole, just like a man” (333). Moreover, Silvia jeopardizes conventional notions of masculinity and femininity because she destroys each man who poses a threat to fulfilling her maternal desire. She engineers her husband’s death after he sterilizes her; she kills Jaime before he can escape with Mercedes to Lima; and she stabs Jaime’s uncle after he warns that he will denounce her to the police. Her potential to be a parent via surrogacy and her propensity for violence are two ways in which Silvia blurs the lines between male and female, thereby challenging established gender roles and endangering a society that rigidly adheres to them.

strosity (53). As a maternal figure that is both in-between and incomplete, her abjection threatens life— not just the life of Mercedes but, in broader terms, the life and health of a society that expects her to conform to certain expectations and behaviours— and therefore must be eliminated (Creed 1).12 The film suggests that Silvia’s childlessness is an external sign of an internal depravity that may initially intrigue but ultimately repulse the viewer. The viewer in turn cheers for and identifies with Mercedes, the only character capable of successfully confronting Silvia’s abjection or, in Creed’s words, with the ability “to eject the abject and re-draw the boundaries between human and non-human” (53). Building on the work of Kristeva and Creed, Oliver explains that pregnant horror films go beyond other genres in displaying anxiety over female reproduction. In this subgenre in particular, women’s reproductive power “is figured as excessive, violent, and threatening in terms of the evil that may be harbored in women’s wombs (and in their imaginations)” (149). Again, in El vientre this applies exclusively to Silvia, to the woman who is perceived as incomplete and in-between in her relationship to motherhood. It does not pertain to Mercedes, who easily carried her first baby to term, had the strength to deliver it amidst the most horrific of circumstances, and protected it from the evil intentions of her aggressor, Silvia.

…Silvia’s childlessness is an external sign of an internal depravity that may initially intrigue but ultimately repulse the viewer.

For Creed, the primary ideological project of the horror film is to purify the abject, which, in the context of El vientre, is Silvia’s embodied female mon-

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Conclusion In her analysis of Hollywood films that feature morally ambiguous mother characters, Kelly Oliver contends that these women are often portrayed as possessing an excessive desire to reproduce and a

Monstrously Barren: El vientre

propensity for evil that result from weakness, passivity, and mental instability, “if not outright insanity” (14). Oliver also points to the nineteenth-century belief that excessive emotion in pregnant women was considered to lead to insanity which, in turn, led to unhealthy or deformed babies (113). With this in mind, even after multiple viewings, I am left with a number of unanswered questions about El vientre, and about Silvia in particular: Did Silvia’s unsuccessful pregnancies cause her madness or did excessive emotion cause her to miscarry repeatedly? Did her unrestrained maternal desire lead to nefarious behaviour or did an inherent immorality manifest itself physically in her monstrous womb? And when, exactly, do we, as spectators, deem Silvia completely and irrevocably monstrous? Is it when we discover her body’s failure to reproduce, or when we understand that she wants to keep Mercedes’s child, or when she kills Jaime (and his uncle and, in all likelihood, her own husband)? That is, do we demonize Silvia after she performs horrifying acts, or do we expect her to commit atrocities because we have already demonized her infertility and supposed incompleteness?

El vientre’s Silvia challenges Western notions of motherhood that designate which women are (not) allowed to be considered mothers and forces the audience to grapple with the lengths to which a “respectable” woman might go to raise a child of her own. Yet El vientre also suggests that Silvia’s excess of maternal desire is the source of her mental instability and immoral behaviour, and a critical reading of the film exposes a link between her infertility and her in-betweenness, the true sources of her monstrous femininity. As an incomplete, ambiguous maternal figure, Silvia poses a threat to the patriarchal society she inhabits and therefore must be stopped.

Moreover, as a threat to life and to order, Silvia cannot exist once Mercedes becomes a mother herself; the young, fertile—and as the film implies, “real”— woman must reject the monstrous-feminine and eliminate Silvia. The film allows the spectator to confront the abject, to confront Silvia’s monstrosity, while restoring the symbolic order by movie’s end.

Like Mercedes, spectators can engage with the abject but ultimately be comforted when the goodness of the ideal mother figure triumphs over the unbearable monstrous-feminine. ■

Notes 1. “Lo que ella quiere está dentro de ti.” Unless otherwise noted, all English translations are mine.

2. See El comercio 4 Dec. 2013; 13 Dec. 2013; 13 Feb. 2014.

3. “El guión, elaborado por el director y su hermano Gonzalo Rodríguez, muestra desde la primera secuencia un personaje calculador, sutilmente glacial, que busca, escoge, sustrae de un espacio preexistente –un camal, en precoz metáfora de su propósito– y compra prácticamente un cuerpo, un recipiente, una incubadora móvil.” My emphasis. Quoted by Gabriel Quispe, par. 1.

4. “Silvia, una hermosa, desquiciada e infértil viuda de cuarenta y cinco años, vive obsesionada con tener un bebé. Desesperada, trama un plan en el que toma el control de una ingenua y, en su mente, fértil huérfana llamada Mercedes.” My

emphasis. See the film’s website at www.elvientrelapelicula.com.

5. It is worth noting that Rodríguez Risco has admitted that, in a previous version of the film, Silvia is the one who emerges victorious, not Mercedes. However, after negative reactions from market studies and a focus group that screened the earlier version, the filmmakers changed the ending to the one that made it to theatres (Lecarnaqué par. 6).

6. “‘Vientre’ trata sobre el lado oscuro del deseo materno. La historia se originó cuando, a partir de una experiencia personal, descubrí como algo tan lindo como el deseo materno, al volverse obsesivo, podía trastocarse en algo peligroso.”

Quoted by Laslo Rojas, par. 6.

7. “La de la derecha.”

8. “Yo no voy a dañar a mi bebé.” Mercedes quickly retorts with “No es tuyo” (“It’s not yours”).

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9. “Esa fue la última vez.”

10. The headline reads “Una escalera fue su último camino.”

11. See Nöel Carroll’s theory of horror, in which he “speculate[s] that an object or being is impure if it is categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory, incomplete, or formless” (32).

Works Cited Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 1990.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.

Fuller, Norma. “The Social Constitution of Gender Identity among Peruvian Men.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 3, no. 3, 2001, pp. 316-331.

Oliver, Kelly. Knock Me Up, Knock Me Down: Images of Pregnancy in Hollywood Films. Columbia UP, 2012.

Quispe, Gabriel. “‘El vientre’ de Daniel Rodríguez, la geometría del miedo.” Cinencuentro, 14 February 2014, www.cinencuentro.com/2014/02/14/el-vientrede-daniel-rodriguez-la-geometria-del-miedo. Accessed 10 February 2017.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 2000.

Rojas, Laslo. “Fotos de ‘Vientre’, película con Mayella Lloclla y Vanessa Saba.” Cinencuentro, 29 June 2012, www.cinencuentro.com/2012/06/29/cine-perufotos-vientre-pelicula-vanessa-saba-mayella-lloclla.

Accessed 7 February 2014.

Glover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton Classics Edition, Princeton UP, 2015.

Romero Carrillo, José. “Daniel Rodríguez.” La vida útil, 14 February 2014, http://www.lavidautil.com/entrevistas7.html. Accessed 10 February 2017.

Ibermedia. “‘El vientre’ bate récords en la cartelera peruana.” Programa Ibermedia, 8 April 2014, www.programaibermedia.com/nuestras-noticias/el-vientre-bate-records-en-la-cartelera-peruana. Accessed 7 February 2017.

Shalev, Shirley, and Dafna Lemish. “‘Infertile Motherhood’: A Television Construction of Surrogacy.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2013, pp. 321-336.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.

Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1982.

---. “The Semiotic Chora Ordering the Drives.” Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller, Columbia UP, 1984, pp. 25-30.

Lecarnaqué, Christian. “El otro final de El vientre.” El pirata, 21 January 2016, elpirata.pe/2016/01/21 /el-otro-final-de-el-vientre. Accessed 10 February 2017.

Manohar, Namita N. and Erika Busse-Cárdenas. “Valuing ‘Good’ Motherhood in Migration: The Experiences of Indian Professional Wives in America and Peruvian Working-Class Wives Left Behind in Peru.” Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, vol. 2, no. 2, 2011, pp.

175-195.

Middents, Jeffrey. Writing National Cinema: Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru. Dartmouth, 2009.

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12. In Peruvian culture, it is still expected that men and women become parents in order to be fully recognized as adults. For more information on gender roles in Peru, including notions of motherhood and fatherhood, see anthropologist Norma J. Fuller’s prolific body of work.

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Ugarelli, Juan Carlos. “Daniel Rodríguez Risco, Director de ‘No estamos solos’: El miedo es la explosión del suspenso.” Cinencuentro, 20 January 2016, www.cinencuentro.com/2016/01/20/entrevista-danielrodriguez-risco-director-no-estamos-solos-pelicula-terror-peruano. Accessed 29 June 2017.

El vientre. Directed by Daniel Rodríguez Risco, performances by Vanessa Saba and Mayella Lloclla, Cinecorp, 2014.

Zavala, Sebastián. “‘No estamos solos’ pudo ser la mejor película peruana de terror.” Cinencuentro, 18 January 2016, www.cinencuentro.com/2016/01/18/critica-no-estamos-solos-pudo-ser-mejor-pelicula-peruana-de-terror. Accessed 16 February 2017.

Zelaya Miñano, Ernesto. “Interview: Daniel Rodríguez Risco Brings Back Classic Thrillers with El vientre.”

Screen Anarchy, 14 March 2014, screenanarchy. com/2014/03/interview-daniel-rodriguez-riscobrings-back-classic-thrillers-with-el-vientre.html.

Accessed 10 February 2017.

MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration Hala Lofty’s Coming Forth by Day Towards a New Egyptian Cinema Amir Taha The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Abstract: Examining the cinematic landscape in Egypt between late 2010 and now, one can speak of a New Egyptian Cinema. The author reasons that cinema is the artistic field that benefited the most from the 2011 Revolution in Egypt. This new style of cinema is marked by a new language and an independent mode of production. One of the films that belongs to this New Egyptian Cinema is Hala Lotfy’s debut film Coming Forth by Day (2012). Coming Forth by Day is about the very life of those left behind, the everyday nameless faces living unnoticed regardless of the times, events, or even history. Lotfy’s film establishes a new type of Egyptian realism – one of rhythm, silence, lightings, camera, settings, and bodies. This article examines two notions of Lotfy’s Coming Forth by Day. The first is the notion of cinematic language and the representation of reality; the second is the notion of rebellion. Each notion is discussed through a close reading of certain scenes. The author maintains that Coming Forth by Day belongs to the Deleuzian concept of the time-image. He also argues that, if the New Egyptian cinema is a result of the Egyptian revolution, Coming Forth by Day contains a rebellious quality. This notion of rebellion is evident on the level of content, but mainly and most importantly, on the level of filmic language.

E

xamining the cinematic landscape in Egypt between late 2010 and now, we can speak of a New Egyptian Cinema. The 2011 Revolution has clearly failed in achieving its social, political, and economic goals, and now Egypt has relapsed into a military dictatorship. However, in terms of art, along with Novel, Prose, and Graphic Arts, I argue that Cinema is the artistic field that benefited the most from the 2011 Revolution in Egypt. Film was one major component during the Revolution in Egypt through which the world witnessed how Egypt’s Tahrir Square became a global symbol. Live broadcasts and amateur footage created a unique narrative of the Arab Spring. A vast number of Egyptian filmmakers, especially from the younger

generation, were active participants in the Revolution, and succeeded in creating a space in which they were able to enjoy their own artistic freedom. This new style of cinema is marked by a new language and mode of production that differs from the mainstream productions in Egyptian Cinema.

One of these films is Hala Lotfy’s debut film, Coming Forth by Day (2012), which first came out in a time of political turmoil, a couple of months after the military coup which ousted the Egyptian Muslim Brothers’ president Mohammed Morsi and the Raba’a massacre on August 14, 2013. Coming Forth by Day presents a new line in Egyptian cinema that was made possible by the eruption of the 2011 Revolution, creating new spaces and possibilities, whether

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for the mode of production, or for the mode of perception. The main production company of Lotfy’s film is Hassala, a cooperative production initiative founded by a group of young artists, including Hala Lotfy, in June 2010 (Lotfy). In 2012, Hassala released its first feature film, Coming Forth by Day, after only three years.

it is concerned with what is, not with what is to come or what was. In fact, it takes the notion of rebellion in the Egyptian context to the next level where it is no longer about the historical event as such, but rather about the possibilities and the space such an event creates: a new and different way of cinematic expression, production, and aesthetics.

Coming Forth by Day implicitly negotiates the status of women in Egypt, sectarianism, religious oppression, and what is more, it breaks the religious and social taboo of death, especially where it concerns a family member with a fatal illness. Coming Forth by Day is about the very life of those left behind, the everyday nameless faces living unnoticed regardless of the times, events or even history.

However, it is the visual style that contains these social commentaries. The film is all about the image; the visual representation is the driving force of any possible meaning in the film. Lotfy’s film establishes a new type of Egyptian realism. This realism is that of rhythm, silence, lightings, camera, settings, and bodies. This article examines two notions of Lotfy’s Coming Forth by Day. The first is the notion of cinematic language and the representation of reality, the second is the notion of rebellion. Each notion is discussed through a close reading of certain scenes. I argue that Coming Forth by Day belongs to the Deleuzian concept of the time-image. I also argue that if the New Egyptian cinema is a result of the Egyptian revolution, Coming Forth by Day contains a rebellious quality. This notion of rebellion is evident on the level of content, but mainly and most importantly, on the level of filmic language. The cinematic language itself is the rebel: it stages time, not action, and

Cinematic Language and the Representation of Reality Coming Forth by Day is all about time. The film is about a day in the life of an Egyptian family in which two women, a mother and a daughter of a disabled man, struggle on a daily basis to survive in the severe social and economic situation in Egypt. Their lives are defined by the illness of the father and the presence of an awaited death. The still life of this family is shaped by oppression, poverty, ill health, disconnection, and injustice among other things. The still life of Soad the main protagonist is, as Gilles Deleuze argues concerning neorealist films, a direct image of time in which each aspect

Coming Forth by Day is about the very life of those left behind, the everyday nameless faces living unnoticed regardless of the times, events or even history.

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is time, on each occasion, under various conditions of that which changes in time. Time is the full, that is, the unalterable form filled by change. Time is ‘the visual reserve of events in their appropriateness.’ (16) This is evident in the choice of the subject matter in relation to the visual style of the film. The use of long takes, minimal camera movement, simple and direct cuts, lighting, and sound design is what creates a time-image film. The notion of narrative causality is entirely missing in the film; even character causality does not exist. Throughout Lotfy’s film, none of the three characters is derived from or defined by the past, nor are they motivated by or moving toward

Coming Forth by Day

the future. The film can be read as portraying the coexistence of and the interplay between life and death, despair and hope, light and darkness, and the end scene might represent a beginning of a different reality driven by a relief from awaiting death. However, Soad and her mother are caught in a reality marked by lifelessness and forgetfulness. The life of this family becomes in itself an everyday banality in the larger context of the life of many Egyptian families. Deleuze discusses Yasujirō Ozu’s cinema by arguing that “in Ozu, everything is ordinary or banal, even death and the dead who are the object of a natural forgetting” (14). Coming Forth by Day does the same: Soad’s imprisonment, the mother’s burden, and the dying father are all ordinary. The question is how the film presents all these ideas visually.

Preparing the Dead (24:37:02-32:43:17) Lotfy called this scene the master scene of the film (Lotfy). She explained that this scene was shot 23 times. And indeed, this scene offers one of the few emotional moments in the film. Soad and her mother nurse the disabled father. It is the daily time to change the bed sheets, dress him in fresh clothes, and attend to his bed sores. The scene takes place in

the father’s room which is, unlike the other rooms of the flat, lit up by daylight. After the mother has succeeded in feeding her husband a quick breakfast, Soad takes her father to the balcony, so he can get some sunlight. For the first and last time in the film, the spectator hears the father’s voice telling Soad to put him back to bed and that he is bothered and bored.

After the opening scene, which takes place inside the dark flat, the spectator moves with Soad and her father closer to the outside world (Fig. 1). The scene (23:06:16-24:36:55) is set on the balcony, and, for a very short time, daylight is fully present. However, the scene is shot in a close frame. Soad stretches her father’s leg and tries to expose his skin to the sunlight; the camera does not show any sign of the outside world; only Soad and the father’s decaying body are visible. When the father utters the first and last words heard from him in the film, the frame widens a bit, but it still remains in close range: the father is in focus occupying the lower right of the frame, while Soad is out of focus in the upper left. The distant outside world is completely out of focus, rather blurred in the background.

Fig. 1: Soad helps her father settle in on the balcony before she and the mother tend to him. (Lotfy 23:51:23)

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The composition of the scene, even though shot in natural daylight (not in the dark and dim lighting of the flat) remains true to the notion of the family’s non-life cut off from the outside world. It is the father, the dying man, whose position in the frame clearly receives the light. For the most part, Soad is in the shade, and when she moves towards the light, she immediately moves out of focus.

While placing a character in the lower half of the frame in relation to another character in the upper half often indicates a weakness and helplessness of the former and expresses the power and dominion of the latter, this is not quite the case here. Ironically, the father does not wish to be in the light and demands to be put back to bed as he is bothered and bored. The composition suggests a possible meaning of the scene by placing the father in focus and closer to the camera.

The position of the father sets the tone and the atmosphere of the frame; the father being in focus, the scene stresses the presence or even omnipresence of death (Fig. 2). This omnipresence is at the same time an absence of this character. It is solely his

Fig. 2: The father and Soad on the balcony. (Lotfy 24:20:33)

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being near death that dominates the lives of all the characters. Being in the light (symbolizing life) is no longer his desire. Only when the father speaks does he become present. His words are a clear statement, “put me back to bed! I am bothered … I am bored” (24:20:33). He desires to go back to his bed where death is near. In addition, Soad, with her distance to the camera and being out of focus, is the helpless and non-living character. She is caught between the permanent presence of death and a desire to live, and a death about to happen and a life which is taking place somewhere on the outside.

Furthermore, the sound design plays a major part, supporting the visual style and enhancing the atmosphere of this scene. Out on the balcony, the spectator hears a mixture of distant sounds in the background. In fact, this mixture becomes a dull noise: birds, radio, shouting, and car sounds. The film keeps the volume of this background low, so it never becomes the dominant sound of the scene. Instead, silence is what dominates the scene. Accordingly, it seems that nothing is able to take place in the life of the three characters: neither sound, nor light.

Coming Forth by Day

Life, in Coming Forth by Day, is all on the outside and never a part of the inside.

I will now discuss the scene in which Soad changes her father’s bed sheets and prepares to dress his wounds (24:36:59). The whole scene, in which Soad and then her mother change the father’s clothes and attend to his wounds, is shot in one long take of eight minutes. The scene contains almost no narrative content: rather, it is a long and a slow representation of a painful and dull situation. It also shows and reveals the life situation of the three characters. The camera only minimally changes its position throughout the whole scene; it is placed on the bright balcony capturing what is happening in the scene with only slow movements. The scene starts, after a direct cut, with Soad taking the sheets and the clothes out of a wardrobe (Fig. 3). Again, Soad is captured in a total low-key light. This visual feature matches her character traits outlined in the previous scene, where Soad is shown out of focus: positioning Soad in the shadow suggests that she is the character who psychologically suffers the most.

In addition, the camera follows Soad’s movements, showing every detail: the clothes, the dirty old

mattress, the fresh sheet with its stains and holes, and the new bandages. When Soad starts to move her father to put him to bed, the camera becomes static. Here, the treatment of the father’s illness, which really is more of a palliative alleviation of the symptoms, mirrors the preparation of the dead for their journey to and through death. The father gets fresh clothes and his sores get disinfected and covered in what appears to be a metaphorical act of mummification. The positioning of the father within the frame enhances this notion; what the spectator sees is mainly his body from behind. From the moment Soad puts him to bed, the father’s face is no longer seen, except when Soad and her mother lay him down. Even then, he seems like a mummy with a vacant look and a stiff body. Throughout the whole scene, he does not utter a word, nor does he make a sound.

Shortly after Soad starts attending to her father, the mother appears out of the dark space outside the room (Fig. 4). She moves in her lifeless fashion and starts to help Soad. The composition of the frame shows the three of them: Soad on the left, the father in the centre, and the mother on the right. The tense

Fig. 3: Soad, back in the father's room, prepares to tend to the father. (Lotfy 24:37:01)

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Fig. 4: The mother enters the room out of the dark. (Lotfy 27:34:01)

and sad relationship between the two is immediately evident the moment the mother enters. The mother asks what she can get her, and Soad tells her impatiently to bring her the ointment. The mother sits down and tells Soad, “leave him … I will hold him” (28:03:50). Throughout the whole scene, the two exchange resentful looks. The few words they exchange are full of accusations and resentment. Their only topic is the father, whom they talk about in the third person although he is present: The mother: Shouldn’t you have let the mattress air out a bit? It smells really bad.

Soad: What have you done about the medical mattress?

The mother: I will ask about the price today.

Soad: Please don’t forget. Ok? As you see, the sores are getting worse. This mattress doesn’t work.

The mother: Leave him, leave him … Hold him from the other side! Hold him well!

The mother: Leave him to me! … Hold!

Soad: Please don’t forget about the mattress!

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The mother: We’ll see … I will go rest for a while before the shift.

(Lotfy 23:11:45-23:12:50) In this dialogue, it becomes clear how both characters project all their personal frustration onto one another and how they use the father to do so. The sense of disconnection among all three characters is also evident. The father does not react or interact in any way. Both women communicate with each other, or rather miscommunicate, in a very impersonal manner.

Soad and her mother are caught in this miserable situation centred on the father; they both have no life, and each is dead in her own way. The process of attending to the father is visually sad, and yet it is also banal (Fig. 5). The realist dimension of this scene is represented in the camera position, the minimal camera movement, the absence of cuts (being shot in a long take), the lighting, and the physical appearance of the characters in addition to the acting, which shows the emotional numbness and psycho-

Coming Forth by Day

Fig. 5: Soad and her mother attend to the father. (Lotfy 31:45:11)

logical exhaustion of the two women. These characteristics also effect dullness and suggest a sense of detachment and heaviness on the level of perception. The position of the camera in the outside world, on the bright side as it were, with its semistatic nature (only the lens moves) establishes a spectator’s point of view. Not only showing but also watching, the camera produces a mode of observation very much concerned with details: objects, bodies, and characters.

Moreover, the use of long takes enhances the sense that what is being seen is a real-life situation without a narrative superimposed on it. This is again what Deleuze hints at when he discusses the concept of the time-image in which the action floats in the situation rather than bringing it to a conclusion. The eight-minute sequence is a scene where everything remains real within the reality of the setting. There is

nothing but the dull room, the old dirty mattress, the stained sheet, the yellowish lighting, the sores on the father’s back, the “zombie-like” mother, and the pale and frustrated Soad. In terms of action, what takes place is changing the sheets, dressing the sores, and clothing the father, all of which is done also in “real time.”

In addition, Deleuze refers also to the concept of “still life” in neo-realist cinema, which can be evoked for this scene. He argues that “the still life is defined by the presence and composition of objects which are wrapped up in themselves or become their own container” (16). To this definition, I want to add that there is an embodied absence in this scene that is related to what Deleuze writes about the presence and the composition of objects. For the very physical presence of the father’s body is in fact an absence of his character and vice versa. Earlier, I referred to MISE-EN-SCÈNE

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Fig. 6: Soad and her mother exchange resentful looks. (Lotfy 31:52:00)

how both women talk about him in the third person and never directly talk to him throughout the whole scene (Fig. 6). What they both deal with is his body and nothing more. Even the father himself does not interact with anyone or react to anything, neither his daughter nor his wife. They never look at him; neither does he look at them. Taking into account the composition of the three characters within the frame, the father is positioned in the centre between Soad and the mother. Their lives are arranged around the father’s illness, and while his body stands physically between them in the scene, his absence/presence is also what stands between them emotionally in their lives. It is the presence of the body that connects the two women, yet the absence of the father as a person is what disconnects them and separates them from one another. In this sense, it is one of the pure optical situations [...] which bring the emancipated senses into direct relation with time and thought. This is the very special extension of the opsign: to make time and thought perceptible, to make them visible and of sound. (Deleuze 17)

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Rebellion: To Catch Up with the Light?

(50:32:59-59:56:22) This section deals with the second half of Lotfy’s film. It is set in the outside world after Soad leaves the apartment. This section discusses two sequences.

The first is the scene in which Soad leaves the flat and goes out (50:32:55); the second scene is the ending of the film.

In the first sequence, Soad tells her mother that she will go out to visit a friend. But later, the viewer sees Soad only on the streets or in microbuses, moving from place to place almost aimlessly. The sequence starts with Soad having her hair done at a hairdresser’s (50:53:04). For the first time, Soad is shown fully in the daylight; however, the lighting remains yellowish with a cold colour tone, which indicates that it is late afternoon. Both the lighting and the tone continue to be realistic in portraying the dull and chaotic characteristics of this part of Cairo. The film does not name the neighbourhood in which Soad lives, but it is clear that it is one of the lower middle-class neighbourhoods near downtown Cairo.

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Fig. 7: The beginning of the encounter between Soad and the young disturbed woman in the microbus. (50:23:59)

After leaving the hairdresser, Soad gets into a microbus heading for Tahrir (Fig. 7). This sequence (52:46:13-59:56:22) signifies a change in terms of montage/editing. For the first time, with Soad now out of the flat, the film employs parallel montage.

When Soad gets into the microbus, the film cuts back to the flat and shows the mother cleaning the floor (53:27:22 [Fig. 8]). Here, the interplay of light

and darkness is thrown into starker contrast with Soad being in the outside world in daylight, and the mother in the dark flat. The effect is heightened by still portraying the mother in a lifeless and ghostly way.

The film cuts back to Soad in the microbus (54:20:09), introducing one of the most powerful scenes in the film. This scene is a long take showing

Fig. 8: Back in the flat, the mother back cleans the floor. (Lotfy 53:27:22)

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an interaction between Soad and a young woman sitting next to her. The young woman starts a conversation, or rather a monologue, with Soad as audience. She starts by asking Soad whether her head scarf is properly covering her hair, then she asks her about the direction of the microbus, telling her she wants to go to Helwan, one of Cairo’s outer districts.

She then compliments Soad’s handbag and asks her where she got it. When Soad tells her that it is old, the young woman says, that it actually looks old. It becomes evident that this young woman behaves rather oddly. She changes the subject, and abruptly asks Soad whether she is Christian, because she does not wear a head scarf. Soad uneasily says no: Young woman: Well, I was like you … Then, I have been told…Well, I am possessed.

Soad: What do you mean?

Young woman: Possessed … A spell was cast on me, and something haunts me, you know; they say; it is easier to be possessed if your hair is uncovered… You are not married, are you?

Soad: No, I am not.

Young woman: What is this then?

Soad: Just a ring.

Young woman: I am 26, and I still have not got married.

Soad: You are still young.

Young woman: No, I should have got married a long time ago … but the person who cast the spell meant for me to be viewed as a chimp, so I would not get married … She … She … (angrily) It is her, that bitch that cast the spell on me.

Soad: Who is the bitch?

Young woman: My stepmother, I know it is her …

Soad: How [do] you know it is her?

Young woman: I know, she does not like me, but …

Soad: How [do] you know it is your stepmother?

Young woman: I know it is her, she does not like me, but I am … Well, I am going to Helwan to see a certain priest in a church there … they say, he is very good … so yeah, I have gone to many sheikhs and done all I could, but nothing worked …

Soad: What [happens] to you?

Young woman: But with God’s will, they will undo the spell … I will keep on going there until they undo the spell … Sometimes, I wake up and I find these things … you know … look …

See? See? (shows Soad her arm) Soad: There is nothing. There is nothing wrong with you.

Young woman: I don’t … look! I mean, he sucks my blood, look how my veins are popping, look! … I have had enough, seriously. He comes at times, while I am sleeping. That son of a bitch … but I will undo it; I will undo it …

He comes while I am asleep, and sometimes I hear voices before dawn, and I wake up frightened. I never see him, but I can feel him … So, that is it, I became a spinster …

Soad: Spinster? You are still young.

Young woman: No, young? Women my age are all married …

You know, I had a lot of suitors, but the spell.

(Lotfy 54:20:09-58:58:04) The scene continues with the young woman asking Soad if she has money to change. Soad asks her how much and takes out her purse, but the young woman snaps a banknote telling Soad; “this one is

“Well, I was like you … Then, I have been told…Well, I am possessed.”

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Coming Forth by Day

good.” Shortly after, the young woman stops the microbus and gets out; the camera moves out of the bus showing her standing there, confused, but only for a second, and then walking off the frame. The camera gets back to Soad, and the scene ends with a cut back to the mother in the flat (59:57:00).

This encounter with the young woman along with the whole dialogue can be read in many different ways. One way is viewing it as a sort of social commentary. The unstable behaviour of the young woman and her ranting reveal several possible readings addressed below. Other than her mother and father, this is the only person with whom Soad has an active encounter in the film. Following the neorealist aesthetics, Lotfy employs a single long take of almost five minutes. The scene is shown in a medium shot and with one camera position. For the first and only time in the film, a scene is shot with a hand-held camera. The camera adapts the movements of the microbus, effectively adding to the verisimilitude of the optical situation. This visual quality establishes the sense of an active observer intruding into the personal space of the two characters. This is not done forcefully, but rather in a realistic manner,

for in public transportation in general, and in these microbuses in particular, there is no personal space at all, as is shown through the two men sitting behind Soad and the young woman (Fig. 9). During the whole scene, both men, and especially the one on the right, are quiet listeners, leaning towards the dialogue, a passive part in the conversation between the two women. Visually, the man on the right is taking the same camera angle as the spectator. This also appeals to the film’s realism: the violation of the personal space in Egypt is an everyday reality on the streets, in public, and even in private transport.

One of the most recent critical social problems in Egypt is sexual harassment. Thus, in some moments, in the second part when Soad is outside, such as when she takes a microbus back home (01:24:24:03), the spectator, especially if Egyptian, expects and sometimes fears that Soad might become a victim of sexual harassment.

Thus, in discussing the dialogue between Soad and the young woman, the implicit social commentary needs to be addressed. The character of this woman is a very tragic one, however, and the impression of everyday banality that I discussed earlier

Fig. 9: The young woman engages Soad in a conversation about her tragedy, while the man in the back intrudes their space. (Lotfy 54:20:09)

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is again evident here. This seemingly psychologically unstable woman with her condition presented in the film is a character one can meet almost every day in Egypt: a young woman failing to cope with living in a patriarchal society, dominated by old traditions, religious orientation, and often ignorance, develops what can only be speculated to be a psychotic disorder. She directly tries to define Soad with her supposed religious identity: no head scarf, thus she has to be Christian. She starts then to talk about her misery which is also based on religious background: she got possessed because she did not wear a head scarf and her stepmother cast a spell on her, so she would not get married. Here comes the second social aspect of marriage for women. It is still a tradition in Egyptian low and low-middle classes that a woman must get married at a young age: 18 to 25 years old. The idea of becoming a “spinster” still is a social stigma for women. A spinster in these social classes is a woman who is approaching or just entered her thirties. The film does not offer an explanation or a cause for the young woman’s mental illness, and is not even concerned with the omission. Yet, it is important to provide a social reading that might help to understand why this woman reached this situation, or at least, to say that her condition seems to be connected to certain social aspects. Social oppression, as represented by the stepmother, is one of them. To be blunt: within Egyptian culture, the stepmother/father is portrayed as an evil figure.

It even became one of the stock characters in popular culture and film; it is a figure who torments the children and turns their parents against them. A colloquial Egyptian proverb comments on this by saying: “I did not know how precious my mother was until my stepmother arrived.”

Another social aspect of this dialogue is indeed sexual frustration. This is to be understood against the backdrop of a culture where marriage still is the only way to practice sex in an acceptable and stable environment. In fact, marriage in Egypt became for many people, especially males, a synonym for sex. In other words, the main motif of marriage is to have regular sex. For women, it is mostly to escape from the strict life and the lack of personal freedom in the family house.

As a final social aspect to discuss here, I want to return to the religious dimension already hinted at earlier. Religion plays a key role in this scene on different levels. Firstly, one must reckon the sectarian situation in Egypt. Since the 1970s, with the beginning of Anwar el-Sadat’s rule, Egypt witnessed the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a tool used by the regime to crush the Egyptian left. Sadat deployed a new sociopolitical strategy meant to replace Gamal Abdel Nasser’s socialist and progressive orientation with conservative Islamic values. After Nasser’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and the 1960s, Sadat started his rule by releasing all imprisoned Muslim Brothers and giving them space to practice religious, social, and political activities (Osman 78).

This seemingly psychologically unstable woman … is a character one can meet almost every day in Egypt...

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Furthermore, in gaining more social space, mosques were filled with fundamentalist imams preaching values and concepts of Wahhabi Islam imported from Saudi Arabia. A conservative and radical strain of Islam came into being accompanied by a certain social code and lifestyle. An example of this new lifestyle was the way people dressed; males wore long beards and white Djelbab, while women wore a

Coming Forth by Day

headscarf, Hijab and even Niqab. Soon, these teachings reached many members of the middle class, and gradually the number of women wearing Hijab increased rapidly. The notion of identity in Egypt became largely defined by religion. Women with open hair are stigmatized, and for some religious dogmatists, it is not even imaginable that a Muslim woman does not wear a headscarf.

In this sense, the young woman with her psychological condition voices this sectarian prejudice openly when asking Soad if she is Christian because Soad does not wear a headscarf. In addition, when Soad reluctantly tells her that she is not Christian, the young woman brands her with the other stigma. The young woman warns Soad about not wearing a headscarf, telling her that she was like her and that is why she is possessed.

cussing this paradox is very complicated, and I cannot develop the topic in full depth. However, it is important to address this point briefly. Despite the increasing sectarian tension in the last forty years in Egypt, there are still many signs of a normal co-existence among Egyptians of different backgrounds.

One of the most explicit examples is a Muslim believing in the power of Christ and Mary to cure and heal despite the radical differences of both religious persuasions.

To summarize, this scene cleverly delivers a social commentary via a realistic dialogue between Soad and the young woman. I argue that the choice of Doaa Oreyqat, who plays the young woman, was crucial to this scene. In terms of physical appearance, just like Soad and her mother, she is one of the ordinary and unnoticed humans, someone who can be encountered every day in the streets of Cairo, one of those who are not remembered.

As the film proceeds, the young woman is again ‘forgotten’; she vanishes from the film’s memory. What is striking about this encounter is not the fact that it is tragic, but rather, the banality of this tragedy. The script along with the acting invokes a sense of black humour in the way the young woman talks, her incoherence, and how she communicates with Soad.

The spectator is somehow induced to laugh when she negatively comments on Soad’s bag right after she compliments her about it, and when she suddenly asks Soad if she is Christian, and finally when she snatches a banknote from Soad’s purse and immediately gets off the bus. The look of concern and sympathy on Soad’s face when her eyes follow the young woman out of the bus is only temporary. The concern on Soad’s face is mixed with some irritation about being ‘robbed’ of money (which will affect her later on).

The young woman thus moves within a socio-religious chain of oppression.

The young woman thus moves within a socio-religious chain of oppression. The social is represented on the one hand by the pressure to marry at a certain age in order not to become a spinster and, on the other, by breaking loose from family oppression, which is an arena to an antagonism between the daughter and the stepmother. The religious aspect is evident, firstly, in the earthly punishment of being possessed because of not committing to the teachings of Islam by wearing her hair uncovered. Secondly, she became a victim of the religious exorcism business, which controls her life entirely, keeps her in a vicious cycle, and worsens her psychological condition.

Moreover, the vicious cycle of religious oppression now widens. After exhausting her options with the Sheikhs, she reaches now to the ‘other side,’ the very side she is prejudiced about: the Christians. She tells Soad that she is on her way to Helwan to a famous priest who practices exorcism in a church. Dis-

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The scene ends with the young woman confusedly stepping out of the frame and Soad checking her purse looking concerned and irritated. This long scene is an encounter of two miserable characters, two tragedies. A young woman probably suffering from psychosis, caught in a vicious cycle of social oppression, and Soad, a thirtyish woman, actually a spinster, whose family life is her prison, a life defined by a death-in-waiting. The moment the young woman steps out of the frame, she ceases to exist entirely. It seems that her existence is completely contingent. The very topics addressed flow “naturally” in the scene and disappear again without any trace. The young woman is an object of natural forgetting. Her being is as banal as the nature of the conversation which lacks a precise subject matter.

In effect, the rebellious aspect in this scene is mainly defined by a rebellion of form rather than of the content. The observational quality of this longtake establishes a sense of continuity of action. However, it is not the content of the action that is being focused on here. Rather, if this scene generates any kind of reflection, it is “not simply focused on the content of the image but on its form, its means and

Fig. 10: Soad, all alone, in the City of the Dead. (Lotfy 01:32:29)

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functions, its falsifications and creativities, on the relations within it between the sound dimension and the optical” (Deleuze 10). In other words, as the film belongs to the cinema of time-image, this scene, which employs neo-realist aesthetics, is marked by an absence of plot in favour of the visual image.

In sum, whether within the Egyptian context or beyond, Coming Forth by Day is yet another line of flight from the dominant narrative cinema. In times of socio-political eruption in Egypt, the film shows a story of an ordinary woman who suffers a life defined by death. It is a story of loss, or rather a story of parting from someone you love. While the scene discussed contains social commentary, both its form and style deliver a sense of banality which causes a natural forgetting through the visual image. Tragedies, injustices, oppression, and suffering are of no importance; they are not the topic, they are just there.

Coming Forth: The Ending After the mother calls Soad and tells her that she has brought the father to the hospital, Soad rushes there, but soon leaves again. She spends the next hours wandering aimlessly until she reaches the City

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of the Dead, where she spends the rest of the night alone (Fig. 10). Except for her encounter with the deranged young woman, Soad’s whole wandering in the outside world is marked by loneliness.

The last scene (01:32:5-01:35:42) begins with Soad entering the flat in the morning. While Soad slowly enters the frame, a banging sound can be heard. Soad enters the mother’s room to find her sitting on the floor with the inside of a mattress all over the place. The mother bangs with a wooden stick into the cotton pieces, imitating an upholsterer, as she attempts to fix the mattress. Soad asks her: Soad: What are you doing?

The mother: I am fixing your father’s mattress.

Smells bad … He can’t sleep on it.

The mother: Where were you? I thought you were buying bread.

Soad: I don’t have money at all. I came walking from Al Hussein.

The mother: You went to Al Hussein?

Soad: How is he doing?

The mother: Sick.

Soad: Where are we going to bury Dad? Where is our cemetery located?

(Lotfy 01:33:12-01:35:27) After Soad asks her mother about what she is doing, she sits next to her, and the room is lightened by daylight; for the first time, the sun is strongly flowing into the flat. The mother is located entirely in the light, while Soad is in the shadow (Fig. 11). However, compared to the whole interior shots, this shot is brighter and less depressive in terms of lighting. The dialogue taking place between the two women represents a sort of relief that goes along with the visual characteristics: this could perhaps even be the beginning of a new phase in their lives. There is no trace of tension or resentment between the mother and her daughter, rather a sense of calm and maybe compassion is felt in this shot. In addition, fixing the mattress seems to be an act of self-occupation rather than an act of denial, given the fact that the father is probably about to die. After the meaningless interaction about where Soad had been, Soad asks a meaningful and real question: “Where are we going to bury Dad? Where is our cemetery located?”

(01:35:27:57). The mother reacts by silently looking

Fig. 11: The mother looks into the light. (Lotfy 01:35:27:57)

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into the streaming sunlight coming from the outside and the film ends, fading out to black.

With this ending, Soad expresses that both her and her mother’s lives could be “reanimated” only after the departure of the father. This life begins with the question of the burial and the ultimate goodbye.

Soad’s journey in the outside world might be a prelude of her coming forth to live. The cinematography during her outside journey makes clear how she is cut off from life. When she goes into Al Hussein Mosque – an almost typical social reaction to the father’s condition being near to death – the act is meaningless to her. Accordingly, religion does not help her in any way and does not offer an answer or even a brief respite. Outside the Mosque, she is all alone watching life going on around her: vividness, noise, and people talking and joking. It seems that only after death and the dead surround her in the last stage of her journey, can she ask her mother the right question. Where religion does not help, the reality of death as represented by the City of the Dead does.

In the Egyptian context, the film breaks the taboo of death and its religious and social sacredness, especially where it concerns a family member with a fatal illness. One does not speak of the burial before the death. The accepted way of dealing with this condition is signified by the mother’s act of fixing the mattress, but then the mother accepts the reality

Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2 the Time-Image. Translated by Galeta, Hugh Tomlison, and Robert Hurley, University of Minnesota P, 1985.

Farid, Samir. “Introduction to Egyptian Cinema.” Festival de Cannes, www.festival-cannes.fr/en/article/57981.html. Accessed 28 Aug. 2016.

Lotfy, Hala, director. Coming Forth by Day. Hassala, 2013.

---. “Personal Interview.” 11 Nov. 2013.

Osman, Tarek. Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak.

2011. Yale UP, 2013.

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evoked by Soad’s question. This reality is that the father’s departure, his physical death is a relief to all, a notion that cannot be accepted socially. The life of a person disabled by a stroke becomes a burden for any family, especially in the middle and lower-middle classes with no possibility of proper health care. At a certain point, it becomes clear that under these conditions, the death of this family member is the only way out of this miserable situation. This relief is indeed never shown, nor spoken of. Coming Forth by Day tackles this idea from the very beginning and thus breaks this taboo with its neorealist aesthetics, which rely completely on the power of the image. In addition, though the film is about the loss of a beloved person, Lotfy succeeds to free the film from any shallow, sentimental emotionality. In fact, the film does not contain any melodramatic build-up at all. Rather, Coming Forth by Day shows this loss as a real-life situation, even in the scene where the two women attend to the father; the banality of the action and its representation are what might be emotionally striking, and not the act itself. The notion of rebellion in Coming Forth by Day is evident mostly in the mode of production. The visual style contains the social commentary. The film is another line of flight from the traditional Egyptian cinema. ■

Teaching Mise-en-scène through Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho Michael Howarth Missouri Southern State University

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ried man, Hitchcock chooses a colour often associated with cleanliness and purity, thus suggesting to the audience that, at heart, Marion is a good person.

Later, however, after she steals forty-thousand dollars, Hitchcock shows her wearing a black bra that symbolizes her sin and provides a strong visual to this important change in her character.

n my Film Perspectives class—which functions as an introduction to the basic elements of film language—I have found that mise-en-scène can be a particularly frustrating concept for students to comprehend. Mise-en-scène, a French term borrowed from theatre, literally translates to “putting in the scene,” and it relates to everything the camera sees, such as costumes, makeup, props, lighting, or even characters’ movement. In this sense, the director controls everything the viewer sees within each frame.

Another clever use of props occurs when the highway patrol officer, played by Mort Mills, interrogates Marion after she has fallen asleep in her car on the side of the road. When showing this scene in class, I tell my students to close their eyes and listen to the dialogue, and afterward I ask them to describe both Marion and the police officer as characters. For the officer, many students select words like “concerned” and “authoritative,” whereas they choose words like “rude” and “anxious” to describe Marion.

Teaching mise-en-scène, I always return to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). The film contains several scenes in which Hitchcock’s use of props and lighting are worthy of critical analysis. For example, we meet Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), clad in a white bra, in the arms of her lover, during the film’s opening moments. Although she is sleeping with a mar-

Then I replay the scene, only this time I tell the students to watch and listen. The most startling visual for them is the realization that the police officer wears sunglasses (Fig. 1). Because the sunglasses hide his eyes, my students argue that the police officer now appears “threatening” and “bullying.” The close-up of his face crowds the frame, making the

Fig. 1: A close-up of the highway patrol officer (Mort Mills) as he stares into the car at Marion Crane.

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viewer feel pinned down by the officer’s attention, which creates a sense of uneasiness.

The use of mise-en-scène also creates an emotional shift in which the viewer moves from seeing Marion as a villain to reevaluating her as a victim.

This occurs because the police officer stares directly at the viewer; thus, by placing the viewer in Marion’s tense position, the viewer feels more sympathy toward her. Kaja Silverman explains that “Psycho obliges the viewing subject to make abrupt shifts in identification,” and these shifts not only add tension to the narrative, but force the viewer to become both victim and voyeur throughout the film (“The Subject of Semiotics” 141). We, the viewers, feel that the officer is interrogating us, and we desperately want the moment to end.

This reoccurring shift between victim and voyeur is best demonstrated when Marion arrives at the Bates Motel. Immediately, the viewer feels apprehensive on account of the gothic conventions that Hitchcock employs to suggest danger: darkness, a thunderstorm, and a winding path leading uphill to an ominous-looking house that is set off in the distance. Moreover, when Marion rents a room for the night, the mise-en-scène confuses the viewer yet

again. Here is a woman who has stolen forty-thousand dollars so she can be with her lover, and who has lied to the police, yet she seems weak and vulnerable when placed inside the frame (Fig. 2).

Notice how Marion is positioned on the left side of the frame, whereas Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is positioned on the right. Since left is often seen as negative, whereas right is seen as positive, it makes sense that a thief like Marion would occupy this part of the picture. However, Hitchcock confuses the viewer by having her look up at Norman, which symbolizes her lack of power and control. As well, the threat in this shot arises from the right side of the frame because Norman is taller than Marion; he blocks a greater portion of the frame, and his face is hidden from view. These three features render Norman more sinister, and they propagate the idea that harm might befall Marion during her stay at the Bates Motel.

Norman then offers Marion a sandwich and a glass of milk, and together they retreat into his parlor to begin a friendly, yet awkward, conversation. This section of Psycho demonstrates the brilliance of Hitchcock because the mise-en-scène—specifically the lighting, props, and framing—generates mood

Fig. 2: Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) checks into the Bates Motel and meets Norman.

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Fig. 3: Marion eats her supper and talks with Norman in the parlor.

and atmosphere while continuing to force the viewer to make those shifts in identification. Hitchcock not only chooses to light Norman and Marion in vastly different tones, but he frames them differently within each shot while also surrounding each character with key objects that help to generate the atmosphere and suspense.

Hitchcock employs a medium shot to show Marion, and immediately the viewer notices several important details (Fig. 3). First, the objects surrounding her are mostly circular and curved: the lamp, the picture frame, and the two vessels in the foreground.

Psychologists often explain that soft, rounded shapes make us feel more comfortable and secure whereas sharp, pointed objects make us feel scared and vulnerable. The placement of these objects within the frame helps to develop further Marion’s character by creating a warmth around her that endears her to us. Yes, she has lied and stolen money, but she has done so out of love for her boyfriend; she is not an evil person, but one who has made terrible mistakes.

Hitchcock chooses to bathe Marion in a bright light, which makes her the focus of our attention.

There are minimal shadows in this shot, which Hitchcock places at eye-level as if the viewer is sitting across from her and engaging her in conversation.

Viewers will also notice many white colours in the shot, and that Marion is positioned more toward the centre of the frame. This clever use of lighting and cinematography creates a congenial atmosphere because the clarity produced by the bright lamp, coupled with the soft shape of each object, lulls the viewer into a false sense of safety and security.

When the camera cuts to Norman, however, the tone of the scene changes (Fig. 4). The objects surrounding him are mostly sharp and angular: the candlestick, the edges of the dresser, and the two picture frames behind him. These pointed objects put the viewer on edge and generate a more sinister atmosphere, which immediately raises the viewer’s interest in, as well as his or her suspicion of, Norman. This apprehension is compounded by the way Hitchcock positions Norman in the shot. He seems wedged in between the wall and the dresser—pinned in from above by the stuffed birds—and the commotion inside the shot creates a claustrophobic feeling that plays against the casualness produced by the shot of Marion.

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Fig. 4: Norman (Anthony Perkins) speaks with Marion about “private traps” and his mother.

Whereas Marion is clearly the centre of the viewer’s attention in the previous shot, Norman fights for attention with every object that crowds inside the shot. This struggle for power and command also arises from Hitchcock’s decision to frame the shot with minimal light. Unlike Marion, Norman is surrounded by darkness, both literally and figuratively. His face is partially obscured by shadows, the brown dresser boxes him in on the left, his own shadow looms on the wall to the right, and the dark picture frames and stuffed birds rest above him.

The camera appears below eye-level, as evidenced by the angle of the picture frames, thus suggesting that the world is off-kilter and something is amiss. The positioning of the camera—while not drastically different from the previous shot of Marion—affords Norman more power because he appears higher up in the frame, which makes sense given that Marion feels vulnerable and is running from the police. While both characters harbour secrets, Norman’s is far more ominous and threatening. In fact, his dialogue mirrors the mood produced by the mise-en-scène when he tells Marion, “I think that we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we

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claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.” Norman’s words are especially true for Marion, though she doesn’t yet realize it; the Bates Motel is her own private trap where she will soon be murdered during the infamous “shower scene.”

The tone of the scene changes again when Marion brings up the subject of Norman’s mother.

Hitchcock complements this tonal shift by altering the angle with which he shoots Norman (Fig. 5).

Again, we notice the sharp, angular objects that surround Norman. We notice the shadows on the wall, and how Norman’s face seems half in light and half in darkness to suggest his dual personalities. More importantly, Hitchcock creates more space inside the shot, which allows the viewer to feel less restrained than in the previous shot where Norman appeared to be boxed in from all sides. But while the viewer might feel less constricted, the composition of this new shot is more threatening because of the owl that looms over Norman as if it will swoop down on him at any moment.

The owl, with its wings outspread and its gaze focused upon him, controls all of the power in this shot and renders Norman as weak and vulnerable, as

Michael Howarth

Fig. 5: Norman becomes agitated when the topic of conversation turns to his mother.

if he is the prey. Indeed, as Hitchcock told Truffaut during one of their many interviews, “Owls belong to the night world; they are watchers, and this appeals to [Norman’s] masochism. He knows the birds and he knows that they’re watching him all the time.

He can see his own guilt reflected in their knowing eyes” (Hitchcock/Truffaut 282). Notice, too, that the owl is positioned on the left side of the frame while Norman is positioned on the right side of the frame.

The owl, which he stuffed, now towers over him in much the same way that his domineering mother— whom he has also stuffed—continues to “speak” with him and control his actions. What we have here, then, is yet another shift in identification, thus confusing the viewer and generating even more suspense. Who holds the power during this scene? Is it Norman, or is it Marion? Both characters appear uncomfortable and defensive, yet both also voice strong opinions and attempt to control the conversation.

Whenever I teach the parlor scene, I like to have the students watch it once through with pen and paper, jotting down every single aspect of the mise-enscène that they notice. Then we discuss their observations and break down the scene together. Finally,

we watch the scene again with new knowledge. This exercise allows my students to realize the value in viewing a scene more than once, affording them a deeper understanding of how mise-en-scène is key to identifying a film’s themes, particularly through the use of props, lighting, and camera angles. As well, this exercise illustrates how a master like Hitchcock uses mise-en-scène to establish and shift a scene’s tone, as well as to develop the characters of Norman Bates and Marion Crane, thus presenting the viewer with two distinct characters who are both grappling with dark secrets and being preyed upon, two characters who are each lost in their own private traps. ■ Works Cited Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, performances by Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, Paramount, 1960.

“Psycho–1960–Alfred Hitchcock.” Blushots, November 17, 2012, http://blushots.weebly.com/psycho1.html. Accessed June 8, 2017.

Silverman, Kay. “From: The Subject of Semiotics [On Suture].” Film Theory and Criticism, 5th ed., edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford UP, 1999, pp.

137-147.

Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock/Truffaut. Simon & Schuster, 1983.

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Traceable Director: Jennifer Sharpe Country/Year: Canada, 2014 Production: Clique Pictures Runtime: 1:10

Review by Paul Richard Kwantlen Polytechnic University Traceable, directed by Jennifer Sharpe, is first and foremost a visual feast. Traceability is a new buzzword in the fashion industry. What could be a rather dry topic is transformed by the movie into a succession of gorgeous images that manage to develop a complex theme of social and environmental relevance without flagging or losing the viewer. The aesthetic aspect is well supported by the original music of DJ Spooky, producing the right mix of emotional notes and cues with an exotic flair without ever being intrusive.

This focus on beauty, innovative for an environmental movie, has its downside: there is little opportunity to grapple with the reality of harsh pollution

issues or social inequality problems. The viewer is, at times, left hungry, as if some of the key points were merely glossed over. In particular, the use of the word “traceability” as a sort of short-hand for overlapping but distinct concepts such as transparency, accountability, ethics, and fair trade, risks leaving the viewer with a bit of a conceptual muddle.

Yet, there is no denying its appeal and effectiveness; however, if it is effective, it is because it is calling for an emotional response as opposed to a rational one. This is something that many environmental movies do poorly; those that try often saturate the viewer with depressing and ugly scenes, producing feelings of guilt or disgust, difficult to act upon. By contrast, the emotions generated by Traceable are positive while tracing a roadmap for behavioural change. In that respect it is, to my knowledge, unique.

The Visual Aspects The camera follows budding fashion designer Laura Siegel through her search for traditional, handmade material (Fig. 1). We travel to several locales in

Fig. 1: Designer Laura Siegel (foreground) with a group of women embroidering traditional patterns in Bhuj.

Photo credit: Steven Deneault.

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Film Review: Traceable

Thailand and India, as well as wander through the fashion hub of New York. We view landscapes, through still shots and pans, that could grace travel brochures, such as a golden Buddha clad in saffroncoloured cloth in Bangkok or the Palace of the Wind (Hawa Mahal) in Jaipur. We see laughing children and smiling villagers in traditional settings, wearing traditional garb. We see donkey carts and sundrenched villages, the very images normally used to entice well-heeled travelers looking to experience authenticity. We mostly see glorious, bright colours: the gorgeous reds and yellows of saris, or the deep hues of burgundy and verdigris of embroidered fabrics in India; the pastel rainbows of colours displayed in scarfs on a New York fashion rack; the deep earth colours on the fashion models displaying Siegel’s designs. Outdoor scenes are (almost) all bright and sunny; the darker indoor scenes are done in rich greys, browns, and sepias.

It would be tempting to dismiss the movie as a mere aesthetic essay, a collection of pretty images, especially given a topic such as fashion, a preoccupation with look and appearance. But there is more depth in some of the images, revealing a key to the movie’s message. A close viewing reveals other scenes, where pollution intrudes. But where other documentaries often yield to the temptation of shocking, jarring images of destruction, Traceable leads us on an unexpected path. For instance, in India, the camera lingers on a street scene featuring a donkey and a cow munching their way through plastic garbage strewn about, a common occurrence. But what is striking is the visual quality of the garbage itself. Plastic garbage consists mostly of discarded thin bags, and the thinness that makes them cheap makes them visually drab. A translucent thin plastic film reflects light only partially, and as a result, their appearance is of an interesting hue and saturation.

Director Sharpe selects, instead, a scene where the discarded bags happen to be of a heavier gauge; they are bright spots of saturated yellows and reds in an

echo of the saris shown in a previous scene. Rather than jarring, the scene is visually compelling. In another scene illustrating water pollution, we see a close-up shot of an overflow weir from a dye vat.

The effluent flowing gently from the weir has a strong pink-purple colour. The stone wall above the weir is covered in algal growth: a deep Irish green patch. The stone wall itself is masonry work made of rock, which, as a result of being wetted by the effluent, shimmers in a rich textured grey. The overall effect is rich, brilliant, visually absorbing. Pollution, this?

A common problem with environmental documentaries is a relentless focus on depressing scenes: repellent brown rivers, smokestacks, mining scars, or the sad, stern faces of the victims of environmental injustice. Such images are omnipresent in India, Thailand, even New York, all locations selected by director Sharpe. But their absence from the movie show an obvious editing choice: only beautiful, compelling images are included in the movie. But it is not a case of looking the other way, of refusing to acknowledge reality. Rather, it is a clear attempt at conveying a sobering message in a way that is beautiful, that refuses to be depressing. Far from adopting the dilettante tone of one-percenters discussing poverty at a cocktail party (a potential pitfall avoided by the movie), it is as if the movie is telling the viewer, “Watch till the end, relax. I’ll only show you beautiful things. And I will restore your sense of hope that beauty is the solution.”

The Designer Much of the issue of traceability is embodied in the person of Laura Siegel, a young fashion designer; her progress takes up the majority of the movie’s footage as she struggles in her attempts to build a collection that incorporates traditional craft techniques. Traditional crafts serve as a proxy for traceability in the movie, providing the setting for discussion of the topic by others. The persona of Siegel is

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also used to develop human interest and to build dramatic tension as the movie progresses.

Siegel enters the movie only after fairly lengthy preliminary discussions (after almost ten minutes in the longer version), and she is introduced almost formally by Simon Collins, Dean at the Parsons School of Design in New York, and one of the numerous interviewees who provide context and depth to the movie. Laura, says Collins, early on showed “a passion for supporting communities that make the product,” standing out among other students. Laura herself explains how she wanted to study fashion but did not know how to draw, until her dad pushed her to study drawing. Laura emerges as someone gifted, but vulnerable, unsure of herself, ordinary and utterly likeable, yet with a vision and a determination to pursue it. Still a student, she learns how to crochet traditional patterns in Chang Mai, but realizes that once her trip is over, she will have no way to contact the person who taught her.

After graduating from Parsons, Laura travels to Bhuj, India, a textile centre where traditional techniques have been revived by an initiative called Qasab Craft. We hear her comment that there are “tons of craft here that are not being utilized enough” and that what interests her is “more than the craft, it’s the culture.” She is trying to assemble a collection for a prestigious 2013 New York show in a few months; whether or not she succeeds will determine her fate as a designer. We follow her as she gets to know the women who make unique tie-dyed fabrics or traditional embroideries, or the men who specialize in traditional block printing. She enquires about the materials used – “What did you use to dye?” – so as to ensure that the dyes are of natural origin and do not compromise the health of the dyers. She develops techniques to minimize material loss during cutting – to lower costs, but also to prevent excess waste of “such beautiful fabric.” But she also battles the delays inherent to artisanal work

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(block printers cannot work when it rains, for instance) and suppliers who may or may not be able to meet her deadlines. We root for her the whole way and congratulate her as she is finally greeted by applause at her show in New York, glassy-eyed and sleep-deprived.

Ultimately, the dramatic tension contributes little to the actual theme of movie topic – it follows the expected plot arc with success at the end. Success breeds hope, though, and success is there. As of this writing, Laura Siegel, a few short years later, is an established designer with a successful brand. Her work is available from fifty-two retailers in the United States, three in Canada (including Holt Renfrew, profiled in the movie), and one each in Australia and Europe. Her website states that Our team employs artisans from rural villages all over the world to sustain traditional cultures and crafts. Along with ensuring ethical working conditions and living wages are provided to the skilled artisans, we collaborate with organizations to ensure they receive mentorship and workshops to learn how to maintain practicing their craft, provide for their families, education on wealth management, business practices and more. We firmly believe the hand can produce something beautiful that machines will never be able to, no matter the technology. Thus, we eliminate heavy energy consumption and the resulting pollutants that disperse into the environment of these communities.

So, using hand-crafted techniques matters, even if it affects only a handful of artisan communities.

This initiative sits within the broader Fair Trade movement, which does generate positive results both for the environment and for social justice – sustainability in general. But how is this linked to traceability?

Traceability Leonardo Bonanni is the other key voice in the movie, providing the introduction to the concept of traceability and a contextual narrative throughout.

Film Review: Traceable

Bonanni is the founder of Sourcemap, a company that provides traceability services. He defines traceability as the knowledge of where a manufactured product comes from, who made it, and when. But traceability has, in practice, disappeared from the mass market. Following Bonanni’s introduction, designer Lynda Grose describes what a “Made in America” label really implies when it comes to clothing: the garment is likely to only have been assembled in the country, while the weaving, the dyeing and printing, the cutting, to say nothing of the fiber itself, takes place elsewhere, usually in numerous countries spread across the continents.

Bonanni explains where traceability originates from: the battlefields of the Second World War, when health concerns with respect to the food carried by soldiers was paramount – codes of origin meant that a defective batch, and only that batch, could be discarded quickly before too many soldiers became sick. The concept was eventually applied to all commodities in the civilian market. While this is true, Bonanni misses an opportunity to make a distinction between commodities, which, by definition, are indistinguishable, and artisanal production, for which traceability largely predates this century. For instance, fabric names such as cashmere, angora, or calicut attest to their geographic origin.

Bonanni claims that “companies are like consumers”: they do not know, any more than an average consumer, where their fabric is made, cut or dyed, so complex and opaque is the array of subcontractors and suppliers – traceability is lost, because of the complexities of markets subdivided into thousands of distinct operations, each performed by different actors. The need for confidentiality in trade secrets, of course, contributes to the situation; retailers and clothes manufacturers have given up on asking for traceability from their suppliers, acknowledging that they cannot ask for transparency up the chain while protecting their own trade secrets.

Questionably, Bonanni traces this situation to the emergence of the middle class in the nineteenth century; disposable income made it possible to focus on the wants rather than the needs, creating a vast market where “everyone lost out; there was no traceability.” But while the purchasing power of the middleclass has indeed exploded in the nineteenth century, the demand for luxury goods has always existed, whether or not traceability was present. To take an example from antiquity, silk’s origin was purposefully obscured from the Roman purchasers by the silk road merchants. The fabric was purchased in large quantities by the better-off citizens of the Roman Empire, a nascent middle-class brought about by the years of peace that followed Augustus’s reign (Thorley 71). The phenomenon was sufficiently common for contemporary writers to castigate women for wearing costly silk. While not directly comparable, it is difficult to see how Bonanni’s “all was lost” quip would apply to this early fashion market where silk was not only untraceable but completely mysterious. The movie presents lack of traceability as an a priori bad situation, unfortunately without stating the case directly; the above example of using a quote by Bonanni without support is one of several instances.

In the only instance of disturbing footage in the whole movie, traceability is mentioned in the context of the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013 in Dhaka. The catastrophe killed 1,134 people, most of them textile workers, who were assembling pieces for brands such as The Gap or H&M (Westervelt).

This accident, where casualties were preventable, has led to initiatives to reform industry practices, including improving traceability. Nonetheless, the footage begs the question: would better traceability have prevented this disaster? With experts such as Bonanni available to comment, it is regrettable that director Sharpe did not grab that opportunity.

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Or it may be that Bonanni would have mentioned that traceability, while similar, is not the same thing as accountability. That distinction is vital, but is missing from the movie. Accountability, as expressed by progressive retailers such as Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC), for instance, consists of the ability to ensure that material quality, working conditions, and environmental impact can be measured and held to account through the supply chain; that is, the provenance of a particular item is part of a much broader set of concerns. Traceability, by contrast, originated with the agricultural industry as a means to detect which particular farm may have produced a batch contaminated by weed seeds or disease. It also evolved as a tool for detecting forgeries and fakes; it is in this context that it was first applied to the fashion industry.

This leads to a confusing situation. For instance, why is Laura Siegel using traditionally crafted materials in her collection? Is it because of concerns about authenticity? Or the environmental impact of her work? Or social justice? The role of traceability is not made clear; much of what we see is rather reminiscent of fair trade practices, where certification is key and traceability, if mentioned, simply a way to ensure this. We know that traceability is important for Siegel (advertising for her collections emphasizes this), and we hear her say that she wants to “feel a sense of history in each piece.” Siegel appears to have a fairly romanticized notion of the process, claiming that machines cannot replicate the delicate operations that the human hand can do.

Cultural appropriation is another sensitive topic for fashion that is ignored in the movie, and that is unfortunate, as cultural sensitivity and traceability have been strongly linked. For instance, fashion writer Darío Calmese recently wrote that “calling out cultural appropriation does not kill creative license, it simply forces those who control the narrative and means of distribution to cite their sources” (par. 6)

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The movie, and possibly designer Siegel, conflates two other related but distinct terms, traceability and ethical sourcing. Ethics (and a search for authenticity) is what drives the young designer. But a look at her catalogue reveals only vague attributions, such as “handcrafted in rural India.” The buyer has to believe that the garment indeed comes from one of these progressive communities such as the ones in Bhuj or Jaipur prominently featured in the movie, but true traceability to the ultimate producer does not exist, at least not for the consumer.

Despite this, because of the evident personal relations developed between Siegel and her suppliers, it is clear that the product is ethically sourced, but it is these relationships, and not traceability as such, that allow Siegel to be transparent about her approach and claim that, despite the fact that “fashion is very competitive …[,] people are worried about others copying them.” It is “detrimental to be hiding; the more info you share, the more you’re gonna learn, the more you’re gonna grow.”

One should not blame Siegel or Sharpe for conflating the term “traceability” with accountability or fair trade; however, the whole industry has now adopted the term (see, for instance, the websites fashionrevolution.org or clothingtraceability.com), and this approach is clearly improving sustainability across the whole supply chain (Turker and Altuntas 837; Ditty par. 12).

It may be that the reason that “traceability” has succeeded as an industry buzzword is that it enables consumers to build an interesting personal story, a mental image of a purported authentic connection with the garment maker. This may be dismissed as mere romanticizing a search for meaning and identity; yet it may also hold the for future sustainable practices. Towards the end of the movie, Leonardo Bonanni tantalizingly comments When you know who makes the things you buy, you care more about it; they have more

Film Review: Traceable

value. Where things come from is one of the most important things about them, more so even than what they are. When you buy a product, you buy into a society that you want to create ... My dream is to build a social network so vast that you know the people who have made it [your garment], all the way down to the farm.

In his view, the technology behind social networking is on the verge of making this not only possible but also realistic. To reinforce the point, the viewer is treated to footage of a small village in Zambia, where a solar panel is clearly visible; the narrator mentions that its function is charging cell phones so that artisans can stay in contact with buyers.

The Environmental Impacts For an environmentalist, fashion is a quandary.

There is an enormous environmental impact that arises from concerns with fashionability; it is what drives a large part of consumerism and the discarding of still fine products, be they last year’s car model or outdated clothes. That enormous amounts of waste and pollution are generated, and energy is consumed in the process of discarding garments and producing new ones, simply for the sake of wider lapels, strikes one as the height of absurdity.

That the clothing industry is responsible for enormous amounts of pollution – it is now the second largest source of pollution after oil (Sweeny) – is no longer controversial, even if this is not yet known by the general public. Numerous research reviews are available (see, for instance, Muthu), and their findings have started to trickle through the general media (for instance, Sweeny or Breyer). Garments affect the environment throughout their life cycle: they are difficult to recycle and often end up in landfills or incinerators when not littering; clothes washing or dry-cleaning pollutes; and, most importantly, their production has an enormous impact, both environmental and social. Parsons fashion professor Timo Rissanen, interviewed for the movie,

mentions that “fashion is not sustainable … the system is such that it can’t be fixed … we need something completely new.” Rissanen, a co-author of Zero Waste Fashion Design, cites Uzbekistan as an example of a situation that “doesn’t work: children are taken out of school, nurses out of hospitals” when it is cotton harvest time.

The world clothing and textile industry was worth over $2,500 trillion in 2010. That year, the Chinese textile industry alone processed nearly 37.5 metric tonnes of fiber, over half of the world’s total.

This created over 2.5 billion tonnes of air-polluting soot, and 2.25 billion tonnes of discharged wastewater (textile processing is ranked third among water polluting industries by effluent volume). A Chinese textile mill will use up to 200,000 litres of water for every tonne of fabric dyed, and millions of tonnes of unused fabric end up as waste, each year, because of faulty dyeing. These statistics, compiled

by Breyer, give an insight to the sheer magnitude of the waste and pollution problem.

Facts like these often take centre stage in movies with an environmental theme. For instance, RiverBlue devotes abundant footage to dead rivers in India polluted with dyes, foam and other wastes from the textile industry in India when not lambasting the use of harsh chemicals to produce a “distressed” effect in jeans. Likewise, the movie The True Cost shows instances of the waste generated by so-called fast fashion.

Both of these excellent Canadian documentaries intend to raise awareness of the polluting nature of the fashion industry and alert the general public to the necessity of making better purchasing choices when it comes to clothes. This is also the general aim of Traceable.

When asked in Jamadagni’s interview what viewers should take away from the movie, designer Laura Siegel replied, “I just hope that more people will

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think more before they make each purchase.” Director Jennifer Sharpe, interviewed by Chua for the environmental organization Ecouterre, states that “transparency, to me, means providing consumers a spectrum of information needed to make a purchasing decision” (par. 10). The movie reinforces the point by featuring designers Maxine Bédat and Lynda Grose stressing the importance of consumers choosing well-made, long lasting garments, and quoting Bonanni impressing on consumers (us, the viewers) to “vote with your dollars.”

But where Traceable really differs from The True Cost or RiverBlue (2016) is in its tone. There is almost no harsh footage, as noted earlier; the focus is on beauty, creativity, well-being, and other positive values. Exploiting feelings of guilt is often a temptation of environmental movies, and this is often a pitfall that makes a movie ultimately ineffective. This is particularly the case when dealing with a behaviour as irrational as choosing fashion. Laura Siegel, while assessing supplies in India, mentions that the chosen

Works Cited Benz, Joseph J., et al. “Attributions of Deception in Dating Situations.” The Psychological Record, vol. 55, 2005, pp. 305-314.

Breyer, Melissa. “25 shocking fashion industry statistics.” TreeHugger, September 11, 2012, www.treehugger.com/sustainable-fashion/25-shockingfashion-industry-statistics.html. Accessed May 10, 2017.

Calmese, Dario. “Fashion Does Not Need Cultural Appropriation.” Business of Fashion, June 6, 2017, www.businessoffashion.com/articles/opinion/op-ed-fashion-does-not-need-cultural-appropriation. Accessed June 26, 2017.

Chua, Jasmin Malik. “Traceable Explores Growing Disconnect With How Clothes Are Made.” Ecouterre, April 22, 2015. www.ecouterre.com/traceable-explores-growing-disconnect-with-how-clothes-aremade. Accessed June 25, 2017.

Clothing Traceability, 2011, www.clothingtraceability.com.

Accessed June 30, 2017.

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fabric must be soft and feel good to the touch, since clothing is a “home for the body” – it has to be comfortable. What is striking about her remark is that it appears almost as an afterthought. What Siegel first and foremost seeks are fabrics that are beautiful, distinctive, and authentic.

Indeed, scientists that study the psychology of clothing find that the utilitarian value of clothes is almost irrelevant; clothes are used to create a persona (Solomon and Schopler 508), truthful or not (Benz et al. 305). In that context, then, it is hardly surprising a rational approach to changing environmental behaviour, appealing to reason through an expose of facts and figures, is bound to fail. But Jennifer Sharpe’s approach follows a better strategy: by emphasizing the values that motivate fashion buyers (beauty, distinctiveness, authenticity) and populating her movie with vibrant images of undeniable appeal, she is more likely to reach an audience that would otherwise tune out an environmental message. ■

Ditty, Sarah. “Who Made My Clothes?: How traceability is revolutionising fashion.” Salt, January 22, 2016, www.wearesalt.org/how-to-be-a-fashion-revolutionary. Accessed June 28, 2017.

Jamadagni, Shruti. “Designer Laura Siegel Talks Traceable and Her Journey to Ethical Clothing.” W Dish, www.wdish.com/style/laura-siegel-traceable-designer. Accessed June 26, 2017.

Laura Siegel Collection, 2017, www.laurasiegelcollection.com. Accessed June 23, 2017.

Mountain Equipment Co-operative. “Accountability.”

MEC, 2017, www.mec.ca/en/explore/accountability. Accessed July 7, 2017.

Muthu, Subramanian Senthilkannan. Assessing the Environmental Impact of Textiles and the Clothing Supply Chain. Woodhead Publishing, 2014.

Rissanen, Timo, and Holly McQuillan. Zero Waste Fashion Design. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016.

RiverBlue. Directed by David McIlivride and Roger Williams. Paddle Production Inc., 2016.

Film Review: Traceable Solomon, Michael R., and John Schopler. “Self-Consciousness and Clothing.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 8, no. 3, 1982, pp. 508-514.

Sweeny, Glynis. “It’s the Second Dirtiest Thing in the World—And You’re Wearing It.” AlterNet, August 13, 2014. www.alternet.org/environment/its-second-dirtiest-thing-world-and-youre-wearing-it.

Accessed June 29, 2017.

Thorley, J. “The Silk Trade between China and the Roman Empire at Its Height, ‘Circa’ A. D. 90-130.”

Greece and Rome, vol. 18, no. 1, 1971, pp. 71-80.

Turker, Duygu, and Ceren Altuntas. “Sustainable supply chain management in the fast fashion industry: An analysis of corporate reports.” European Management Journal, vol. 32, no. 5, 2014, pp. 837-849.

Westervelt, Amy. “Two years after Rana Plaza, have conditions improved in Bangladesh’s factories?”

The Guardian, April 24 2015, www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/apr/24/ bangladesh-factories-building-collapse-garmentdhaka-rana-plaza-brands-hm-gap-workers-construction. Accessed June 10, 2017.

The True Cost. Directed by Andrew Morgan, Bullfrog Films Inc., 2015.

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A Personal Review of the KDocs 2017 Documentary Film Festival Festival Review: KDocs February 16 – 19, 2017 URL: www.kdocsff.com

Review by Andrew Bartlett Kwantlen Polytechnic University “KDocs” brands a documentary film festival directed by the exuberant and discerning Janice Morris, a writing instructor in the Faculty of Academic and Career Advancement at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU). Although it depends on institutional support from KPU, multiple sponsors, faculty, student volunteers, and good relations with the Vancouver International Film Centre, KDocs would not have come into being, nor is it likely that it would continue, without the passion of Ms. Morris. She created the festival, she heads its Board of Directors, she personally recruits its speakers, she co-ordinates tasks of such a multiplicity that an ordinary mortal might suffer a nervous breakdown managing them all. Nobody pays her one penny to do any of it. In February 2016, I took in the complete second KDocs Festival (six films over two days). When Ms. Morris asked me in December 2016 to consider attending the whole and composing a candid review of KDocs 2017, I agreed after a brief hesitation: viewing the six films in February 2016 had been emotionally draining. A colleague who had attended two exited the second with a sigh, and she remarked that such films, although stimulating, were “depressing.”

But I agreed to view the eleven films over the four days of KDocs 2017 and put together a review. Six of the documentaries were introduced by keynote speakers. Six were followed by discussion panels and audience-participatory question-and-answer sessions. Five showings engaged audiences with the thrill of contact with directors-in-attendance: Alex 48

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Williams (The Pass System [2015]), Victoria Lean (After the Last River [2015]), Tamara Herman and Susi Porter-Bopp (We Call Them Intruders [2015]), Min Sook Lee (Migrant Dreams [2016]), and Jeff Petry (Wizard Mode [2016]). The KDocs Festival stimulates and inspires its participants in a particularly powerful way: many of its films are accompanied by such opening lectures, panelist conversations, and audience-activist exchanges.

KDocs’s self-declared mission is a focus on “social justice, global citizenship, and community-building.” One might compare it with the “Justice Forum” series at the larger Vancouver DOXA Festival, which runs each May. KDocs might be described as a complete festival that has chosen to limit itself to a set of preoccupations like those of the Justice Forum. That choice is its strength, and yet it cannot escape a paradox: that which makes you strong can be that which makes you weak. Is there any difference between social justice and justice? Is “global citizenship” not oxymoronic, at least a little? If a community must be built, what claim will it have to organic authenticity? I will return to these questions after a narrative survey.

The two opening films treated ecological degradation. Louie Psihoyos’s The Cove (2009) had gained fame for its exposing the bay-bloodying spectacle of dolphin slaughter in Japan. His Racing Extinction (2015) aims to show how overfishing and habitat destruction are driving animals to extinction at terrifying rates. The documentary has the planet-sweeping reach, cinematographic glitz, and editorial finesse of a massively funded project. Psihoyos and his buttonhole-camera sleuths fly to Hong Kong to investigate the trade in smuggled animal parts. On a rooftop of one dealer’s warehouse, they stroll stunned amid twenty thousand shark fins drying in the sun. In Indonesia, his colleagues interview manta ray hunters whom they will nudge toward wildlife tourism. One subplot ends when the Convention on International

Festival Review: KDocs 2017

Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) passes a longlobbied-for ban on trade in manta rays. The film’s bleakness of thesis teeter-totters against gorgeous footage of underwater life, wonder-arousing illuminations of microscopic plankton, and scenes featuring a special camera filter (one thinks of night vision goggles) that lights up carbon emissions spewing poisonously from tailpipes, vents, chimneys – damning, but visually nifty. Only occasionally during Racing Extinction did I wish for less of Psihiyos as a talking head with bookshelves behind him. However, frequently during the second Thursday evening feature, How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change (2016), I wished for less of director Josh Fox in voiceover trying but failing to deliver poetry. Fox became famous after his Gasland (2014).

It may be the most overwhelming “issue”: how to think seriously about the planet, our lands and rivers and habitats, how to stop the destruction that industrial society seems incapable of limiting (see Scruton). But although such films, after subjecting us to apocalyptic content and rhetoric, ritually attach “what-you-can-do” concluding segments, I find the additions disingenuous. They remind me of the hellfire preacher who reassures us we can be saved only after browbeating us into the subdued certainty we are horrible sinners deserving punishment. Racing Extinction and How to Let Go will less inspire the unconverted, I would wager, than induce numbed despair.

No reasonable Euro-Canadian could have exited untroubled from the first Friday film, Alex Williams’s The Pass System (Fig. 1). Originally an “emergency measure” reacting to the Riel resistance, a practice pushed by Indian Agent Hayter Reed (pun in name unintended), the “pass system” lasted from roughly 1885 to 1945. It endured, though it was always secretively extra-legislative. Operating mostly on the prairies, the system required any “Indian”

Fig. 1: KPU Elder-in-residence Lekeyten, speaking and performing prior to the screening of Alex Williams’s The Pass System, KDocs Festival, 17 February 2017.

who wished to leave the reserve for any purpose to get signed permission from a local Indian Agent.

That converted what should have been ordinary affairs into humiliating encounters with paternalist oppression. Stills of the documents recur hauntingly, names of individuals followed by phrases such as: “To get married. 10 days”; “To see daughter. 14 days”; “Hunting big game for food. Two weeks.”

The pass system overlapped with that of residential schools. Interviewee Leona Blondeau explains her understanding of her parents’ tragically letting her go: “If you didn’t go to school, your parents went to jail.” The intractability of the stand-off between the settlers’ government and First Nations indigenous on “Canadian” territory is more ironically captured by interviewee Jacob Pete, toward the film’s end: “They want to control our land and they want to

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control our resources and they want to control our people, and they want to do it in a nice way.” The film made me feel a measure of shame at the privilege that had permitted my erstwhile ignorance.

With After the Last River, directed by Victoria Lean, we visit Attawapiskat in Northern Ontario.

Lean focuses on the community’s struggle for health and dignity in a context where the Crown mechanically privileges DeBeers, one of whose diamond mines has been installed ninety kilometers away. David Lean (her father) works as an ecological toxicologist fighting to get Ontario to acknowledge that the draining of wetlands is turning the rivers poisonous; mercury levels make the fish unsafe for consumption. Houses prove to have been constructed from materials unsuitable for the subarctic: a frail elderly woman with a pail for a toilet pulls back taped carton-sides to show knee-high toxic mould staining her walls. Lean interviews Chief Theresa Spence and follows her to Ottawa. There, despite a 45-day hunger strike, Spence and Prime Minister Harper fail to converse. As Native advocate and New Democratic Party Member-of-Parliament Charlie Angus argues, Harper’s people play the race card to smear Chief Spence for allegedly squandering “taxpayer” dollars (we all know there is nothing more precious in the universe than “taxpayer” dollars). After the Last River offers glimmers of hope with footage of the Idle No More movement, but mostly insists that the “broken” relationship between DeBeers and Attawapiskat may well be representative of that between settler Canadians and First Nations people generally.

Friday’s third feature, We Call Them Intruders, showed young Vancouver activists Tamara Herman and Susie Porter-Bopp fly to Tanzania and Zambia and interview locals who subsist near to a mine run by the corporation Barrick Gold. Impoverished survivors sift basins of water hoping for shavings: “We’re not happy doing this. It’s just like we’re stealing.” Tailings ponds overflow; a hand shakes a bottle

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of mucky, undrinkable water. Herman and PorterBopp visit huts housing individuals “relocated” by Barrick into such isolated separation that no work is nearby, not even a bus to catch. With zippy graphics, Porter-Bopp explains in voiceover how Canadians unwittingly support the industry: RRSPs and pension funds feed these corporate predators. Canada is home to 75% of the world’s mining corporations – 75% – because to the mining industry our “system” is so very hospitable, disregarding the industry’s record of excellence in smashing and trampling the rights of indigenous people in “underdeveloped” countries. Herman and Porter-Bopp interview a banker who offers the small comfort that “ethical investing” is no oxymoron, despite what counsellors at the big five banks repeat with the monotonic regularity of smug hypnotists.

In Friday’s last offering, raspy-accented Werner Herzog dominated Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016), a film in chapters designed to provoke reflection on the tornado speed with which “interaction” on the World Wide Web has damaged our spiritual health at every level. Herzog interviews a tensely-seated family shell-shocked by the goingviral of an image of the decapitated head of their daughter, their sister: “The Internet is the Antichrist,” the mother declares, having understandably entrenched herself behind that militant opinion.

Herzog visits exiles in a wave-free haven who have fled electromagnetic radiation from wireless signals and he treats their vulnerability with tenderness. Lo and Behold is certainly worth viewing. However, partly because Herzog’s explorations targeted no villainous institution owning and operating the machinery of oppression (the “web” may lack any one spider at its spinning-wheel centre) and neither speaker nor panel discussion preceded or followed, I was obliged to process the film in non-splendid isolation on the way home. Perhaps that is why I experienced its screening as something of an anti-climax for my second day of KDocs 2017.

Festival Review: KDocs 2017

Saturday’s offerings shared the theme of stateendorsed violence. The first, Craig Atkinson’s Do Not Resist (2016), stood alone as a bit of direct cinema insofar as no voiceover narration imposed itself and only occasionally did text stills billboard facts.

On the other hand, its musical soundtrack created a relentlessly ominous audio substrate of doom; and Atkinson stitches together such a dumbfounding parade of muscle clowns and debased politicians who stroll before the camera oblivious to both the absurdity of their trust in the efficacy of weapons alone and the self-condemning upshot of their personal vanity, that the thesis has prophetic clarity: American civilian law-enforcers forces have grown terrifyingly militarized. SWAT training guru Dave Grossman instructs his bull-necked pupils they can anticipate the best sex with their wives after shifts during which they have executed a pumped-up arrest. “Monsters are real,” Grossman declares, monstrously committed to unilateral armed force. In the 1980s, there

were about 4,500 SWAT deployments per year; the frequency has swollen to an annual 50,000.

After Spring (2016 [Fig. 2]), directed by Steph Ching and Ellen Martinez, unrolls an intimate portrait of two families forced to flee Syria, residing as if permanently in Jordan’s Zaatari Refugee Camp, not far from Amman. Created in 2012, Zaatari houses over 80,000 people. Celebrities visit regularly.

A market street buzzes and blooms with vendors and consumers. Expectant mothers lie awaiting medical care in a small but clean, professionallystaffed clinic. Residents play on cell phones, watch television, lobby for special trailer-houses. A volunteer from Korea creates a Tae-Kwon-Do school to save the children from dispirited idleness; the narrative arc closes with a heart-wrenching award ceremony held at the newly built Tae-Kwon-Do gym, during which the young graduates honour hardworking Klein Kleinschmidt of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), who has

Fig. 2: Saleem Spindari, Manager, Refugee Settlement Support Projects, keynote speaker before screening of After Spring, KDocs Festival, 18 February 2017.

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run the camp for many years and who optimistically supported the building of the gym.

The deplorable ensnaring of agricultural workers in Leamington, Ontario by Canada’s Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP) made the subject of Migrant Dreams, the work of Toronto’s Min Sook Lee (Fig. 3). Four young people from Indonesia are tormented by the “recruiter” who has linked them to their jobs in greenhouses but then extorts cuts of their wages and threatens if they complain about anything to have them flown home. TFWP “standards” permit employers to house ten persons in 700 square feet, with one bathroom to share. Min Sook Lee powerfully shows that agricultural workers are virtually enslaved; the TFWP lets one employer tie each worker down, and governments make it extremely difficult for them to exercise any status as rights-bearing agents.

Sonita (2015), a film by Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami, closed out the Saturday offerings. It follows the story of Sonita Alizadeh, a teenager living in Iran,

exiled from Afghanistan, who dreams of becoming a rapper – she certainly has talent, as the opening footage of her singing shows. But she is threatened by the prospect and likelihood of a forced marriage.

A social worker advocates for Sonita but lacks authority to release her from the legal grip of her mother. In rivetingly intimate scenes, Ghaem Maghami captures dialogues between Sonita and that unhappy-seeming woman who accepts without a flicker of resistance the traditions that would see her daughter sold as property, as she was sold in her childhood. The mother privileges one of Sonita’s brothers: “He needs to collect the money from your bride price, so he can pay for his own bride.” As with the final Thursday and Friday films, I lamented the lack of any conversational framing around Sonita.

After attending, over 54 hours, to nine featurelength documentaries that dramatized severe disempowerment, trauma, misery, exile, corruption, abuse of power, violence, and victimization; nine films that exposed and analyzed gigantic social-political crises

Fig. 3: Human rights advocate Jennifer Chieh Ho (left) and Min Sook Lee, director of Migrant Dreams (right), participants in the panel discussion following the film, KDocs Festival, 18 February 2017.

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Festival Review: KDocs 2017

and problems with neither “solution” nor end in sight; after absorbing the contributions of the keynote speakers and the never dull post-film panels (I missed nothing) – late Saturday night I walked through my front door and plunked myself down, demoralized. The world was a smorgasbord of disasters and I was a waste of space for having done nothing to “change” it. A white-skinned heterosexual male of Anglo-American descent, salaried, unionized, upper-middle class, able-bodied, blessed by good health, I have never gone hungry. I possess neither victim nor activist credentials. I will not cheat by claiming my vocation is itself activism. I feel obliged, however, in this review, not to disavow that moment of exhaustion – though I refuse to do more than blink, cornered and obtuse, at the paradox of risking the insinuation of a claim to victim status precisely for having none.

That late Saturday night crash explains why I found the “positive” Sunday films nothing less than delightful. Roger Ross Williams’s Life, Animated (2016), based on the book by New York journalist Ron Suskind, had comic power and life-affirming

zeal unlike anything else at KDocs 2017, with perhaps the exception of the oddly affirmative After Spring. Owen Suskind, Ron’s second-born son, got lost in autism in early childhood – but only until his parents and brother discovered they could communicate with Owen by imitating voices and roles of characters he understood perfectly, having spent countless solitary hours locked into penetrating studies of Walt Disney cartoons: “I’m Peter Pan and you’re Captain Hook.” Life, Animated is uproariously funny, as many bursts of audience laughter proved.

Owen, I wager, will delight the most cynical hearts.

After his girlfriend Emily dumps him, Owen asks: “Why is life so full of pain and unfair tragedy?”

Owen asks the question with a genuineness so disarming, it seems transcendent. We are to infer at the film’s end that he will continue to pursue happiness, although the best answer may be silence. And what watching Walt Disney cartoons did for Owen, excelling at games of pinball did for Robert Gagno, the Burnaby-native protagonist of the festival’s last film, Wizard Mode (Fig. 4). Like Life, Animated, the film squarely faces the struggle of a person to overcome isolation, gain self-confidence, and manage fear of

Fig. 4: Left to right: Robert Gagno, Maurizio Gagno, Kathy Gagno, Emma Jean Sawatzky, Katie Leigh Miller. Panel discussion following Wizard Mode, KDocs Festival, 19 February 2017.

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loss: “I have to learn how to not let stress win,” Robert confesses – something everyone must learn. During the closing gala, I was thrilled to meet Robert face-to-face. *** The peculiar strength of the KDocs Festival lies in features such as its pre-film keynote speakers – William Rees, Lisa Monchalin, KPU’s elder-in-residence Lekeyten, Wade Deisman, Saleem Spindari, Min Sook Lee, and Faith Bodnar. It derives from the contributions of the panellists during the post-film discussions (too many to name here), who were all – without exception – prepared, articulate, engaging, and informative.1 One of Janice Morris’s achievements as Festival director is her success with creating groups of interlocutors. One pattern I observed supports my intuition that KDocs would be wise to continue prioritizing introductory speakers and postfilm discussions. The pattern: more than one expert and activist endorsed the “conversation” metaphor.

They claimed activism not only begins with but also depends upon “listening”: listening seems passive but it takes energy, patience, care, skill – listening to the stories of First Nations people; listening to the stories of exploited migrant workers; listening to the stories of refugees who have fled from war zones, leaving everything behind. Another suggestive pattern was a recourse to the concept of “the human.”

On Friday afternoon, First Nations activist Jenn Allen claimed, alluding to the facts of pervasive persistent colonialism: “They’re slowly killing us off… we’re not considered human beings.” “Migrant rights are human rights,” panelist Jennifer Chieh Ho of the BC Federation of Labour asserted after Migrant Dreams. “I’m [treated as] a subpar human being as a migrant worker in this environment,” claimed Hessed Torres, on the same panel. In the Sunday exchanges concerning issues related to inclusion and intellectual disability, panelist Katie Leigh Miller of

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the Bodies of Film Club spoke up: “we’re not different… we’re all still people.”2 Such appeals to a baseline of belonging to humankind may suggest that the oft-decried entanglement of leftist and “identity” politics is a rather loose entanglement. Social justice thinking may do well to strengthen anew the links between concepts of human identity and human rights thinking (see Ignatieff and his interlocutors).

Meanwhile, KDocs could dare to lengthen and elasticize its political spectrum. Its commitment to the pillars of “social justice, global citizenship, and community-building” makes it susceptible to a characterization as ideologically monotone. A participant of my description who had viewed only two or three screenings (rather than eleven) probably would have experienced things differently. Nevertheless, it is not irrelevant to report that attending KDocs 2017 startto-finish felt tantamount to spending four days inside what one might call the Church of Social Justice.

I do not intend the moniker as mockery of a misplaced intensity. On the contrary, I speak as one who believes churches and religious communities function, as do other civil institutions in a “free” society, mostly as public goods; I speak also as one who (regardless) felt mostly at home during the Festival. But others may well have found KDocs predictable in its largely unchallenged left-leaning assumptions.

Almost all KDocs’s films (perhaps Herzog’s excepted) belong to the category of the “advocacy” documentary (see Aufderheide 77-91). Overall, throughout the festival, there was no representation of those holding “opposing views” – nobody representing the police after Do Not Resist (for example) or Canadian mining interests after We Call Them Intruders. When we see, at the end of an advocacy documentary, the generic still that reads X declined all our requests for an interview, the unspoken inference is that the decision to withhold guarantees blameworthiness: their silence signifies, and it is a silence packed full of unowned blame. Advocacy itself (whether

Festival Review: KDocs 2017

left- or right-leaning) probably must restrict its investments in the dialogic. I am not here upholding what have recently and correctly been described as idiotic insinuations of “moral equivalency” between persecutors and victims. Oppression is real; real oppressors are accountable in ways the oppressed are not. In many cases, I suspect, “dialogue” between oppressors and oppressed may get the latter nowhere. I am reporting, however, my strong impression that the speakers, panelists, discussants, and audience contributors at KDocs 2017 were almost always (perhaps just always: I ransack my recall for exceptions and find none) contemptuous of “capitalism”; were enrolled under the banner that reads governments can and should solve problems more quickly than civil society or the private sector ever could; and were sometimes carelessly content to indict a blanket “Western” heritage. Ironically, one problem was that the unacknowledged beast in the room – capitalism – was identified as such, by name, only once, by director-in-attendance Min Sook Lee, and even then, only by implication when she named its opposite, “socialism,” as the politics we need. My point, however, is that I find it difficult to imagine (for example) someone standing up at KDocs and

starting “I am a paid-up member of the Conservative party; I voted for Stephen Harper” without fearing groans or hostility or both. Nor was there any sign of any awareness that “social justice” itself labels a concept naming the end-point of an agenda contestable and contested. To point that out is to risk being labelled as a dreadful reactionary: that there can be justice without social justice is something “conservative” thinkers suggest. But not all “conservative” thinkers are despicable; many are wise and humane.

Perhaps KDocs should rest content with its welldefined mission, one to which it is certainly entitled.

Perhaps KDocs 2016 and 2017 have only innocently reflected the dominant culture of advocacy documentary back to itself, and to expect more is to expect too much. I will not be troubled if the impressions I have reported prove anomalous. Meanwhile, I have great faith in director Janice Morris, who (I believe) will meet the challenge of staging some vibrant conversations not only between like-minded people, but also between truly differently-minded people, at future KDocs festivals.3 ■

Notes 1. The KDocs website (www.kdocsff.com) offers a rich and detailed archive of names and affiliations, including the complete 2017 printed program in PDF form. In my opinion, KDocs’s record of peopling and managing pre-film speakers, directors-in-attendance, and post-film panel discussions has been consistently excellent in a way that, perhaps surprisingly, it has not been for DOXA (Vancouver’s Documentary Film Festival). I mention this not to denigrate the bigger and more ambitious festival, which I love, but to praise the organizational discretion and what we might call the diplomatic intuitions of the KDocs director, who manages the selection of all the Festival’s speakers and discussants single-handedly.

2. These quotations are from my personal KDocs 2017 Festival notebook, but I have not been able to verify their accuracy against sound recordings of the Festival discussion panels. If the speakers believe any corrections are necessary, MSJ and I will welcome their requests.

3. Reliable informants have told me that such conversations (more risky and difficult ones) have occurred at other KDocs events I did not attend. I am not surprised, because I did not suspect that any willful policy of exclusion was the cause of the discursive sameness that I experienced.

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Works Cited After the Last River. Directed and produced by Vicki Lean, Indiecan, 2015.

After Spring. Directed and produced by Steph Ching and Ellen Martinez, After Spring LLC, 2016.

Aufderheide, Patricia. Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2007.

Do Not Resist. Directed by Craig Atkinson, produced by Laura Hardwick, Vanish Films, 2016.

How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change. Directed and written by Josh Fox, produced by Fox and Deia Schlosberg, International Wow Company, 2016.

Ignatieff, Michael. Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, edited by Amy Guttman, with contributions from K. Anthony Appiah, David A. Hollinger, Thomas W. Laqueur, and Diane F. Orentlicher, Princeton UP, 2001.

KDocs: Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Official Documentary Film Festival, www.kdocsff.com. Accessed February 19, 2017.

Life, Animated. Directed by Roger Ross Williams, produced by Williams and Julie Goldman, The Orchard, 2016.

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Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World. Directed, produced, written, and narrated by Werner Herzog, Saville Productions, 2016.

Migrant Dreams. Written and directed by Min Sook Lee, produced by Lee and Lisa Valencia-Svensson, Cinema Politica, 2016.

The Pass System. Directed by Alex Williams, executive producer James Cullingham, narrated by Tantoo Cardinal, Tamarack Productions, 2015.

Racing Extinction. Written by Mark Monroe, directed by Louie Psihiyos, produced by Olivia Ahnemann and Fisher Stevens, Oceanic Preservation Society, 2016.

Scruton, Roger. How to Think Seriously about the Planet: The Case for An Environmental Conservatism. Oxford UP, 2012.

Sonita. Directed and produced by Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami, TAG/TRAUM Filmproduktion, 2016.

We Call Them Intruders. Directed by Susi Porter-Bopp and Tamara Herman, produced by Geneva Guerin, Cinécoop Productions, 2015.

Wizard Mode. Directed and produced by Nathan Drillot and Jeff Petry, Salazar Films, 2016.

February 15—18, 2018

Vancity Theatre | 1181 Seymour Street, Vancouver, BC

Open to all! Opening night and closing night receptions, speakers, panels, Q&As, and more! For more information and to purchase tickets, visit KDocsFF.com

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MISE-EN-SCÈNE The Journal of Film & Visual Narration Contributors ANDREW BARTLETT teaches writing and literary analysis for the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. He designs special writing assignments to motivate his students to attend KDocs events.

His book Mad Scientist, Impossible Human: An Essay in Generative Anthropology (Davies Group Publishers) appeared in 2014. A study of four classic instantiations of the Frankenstein myth, it contains a long chapter on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. His publications also include “Nuclear Warfare in the Movies” (Anthropoetics Spring/Summer 2004). He attends the Vancouver International Film Festival and the DOXA Film Festival. His intellectual work has been influenced by the ideas of Rene Girard; he has long been a member of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion.

MICHAEL HOWARTH received his B.A. from James Madison University where he double-majored in English and Secondary Education with a minor in Film Studies. He received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska at Anchorage, and he received his Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

His primary teaching areas include children’s literature, young adult literature, film studies, American literature to 1900, creative writing, and 19th-century British literature. He directs the Honors Program at Missouri Southern State University where he is an associate professor and is on the editorial board for Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy.

PAUL RICHARD is the coordinator the Environmental Protection Technology program at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in the Greater Vancouver, where he teaches courses in Environmental Issues, Air Quality, and Water Resources Protection. He also teaches in (and is a member of the steering committee of) the Policy Studies and Sustainability program. He holds a Ph.D. from the interdisciplinary program in resources management of the University of British Columbia. As an instructor, he is interested in environmental stories that convey optimism and can inspire students. His research interests include the physical and human geography of the Elbe River, where environmental and social resilience are woven within the rich and troubled history of Germany and the Czech Republic. He has also participated in research in composting systems, water and soil quality, urban stormwater management, and urban green 58

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spaces connectivity. He is also particularly interested in how environmental issues are portrayed in the arts and popular media. He lives in Vancouver.

ANDREA MEADOR SMITH is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and chair of the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies at Shenandoah University. She completed a Ph.D. in Spanish at the University of Virginia, with a specialization in Latin American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has taught Spanish courses at all levels for the University of Virginia, Shenandoah University, and Semester at Sea. In addition to teaching language, literature, and culture for the past two decades, Smith has travelled with students to sixteen countries and has several more on the horizon.

Her current faculty position has allowed her to participate in interdisciplinary collaboration by teaching in other programs, such as English, Communications, and Film Studies. Her most eye-opening and humbling professional experience in recent years has been serving coaches and student-athletes as an NCAA Faculty Athletics Representative.

Smith’s current research addresses representations of race and gender in South American literature and film, an interest that evolved from her years of work on the NEH-funded Cine con clase Spanish film database. Her work has been published in a variety of academic journals, such as Hispanic Poetry Review, Hispania, and Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas. Since attending an international film festival for the first time in Lima, Peru, in 2017, she now spends hours searching the internet for someone to fund her travel to future festivals.

AMIR TAHA was born in Egypt, studied English Literature in Cairo, and moved to Germany in 2003. In 2011, he finished his Masters of International Literatures at the Tübingen University with the topic: Fractured Narratives in Selected Postmodern Films: Schizophrenia, Masculinity, and Violence in David Fincher’s Fight Club and Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible.

In spring 2017, he successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, Film between Counterculture and Revolution: From the Anglo-American Youth Movements of the 1960s to the Arab Spring in Egypt, with magna cum laude. Amir held and taught various seminars on Cultural and Film Studies at Tü-

bingen University. Starting June 2017, he is a visitor researcher at WiSER via The Literary Cultures of the Global South project.

EMMA WILSON is an English major and Anthropology minor currently in her fourth year at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Her goal is to pursue a career in library science, specializing in teacher librarianship. She first became interested in film studies in May of 2017 when she took Greg Chan’s English 4401: Topics in Canadian Literature course. Throughout the semester, the class examined works of Canadian literature and how they were adapted into both films and television series.

Emma became fascinated with the level of detail that the filmmakers include in their adaptations, from bold decisions such as colourful costuming choices, to minute details, such as a slight change in the camera angle. She is thankful that she had the opportunity to participate in this course as it has changed the way that she views films and television series. It inspired Emma to create this video essay, which is her first academic publication. She is thrilled to be contributing to this journal, and she hopes to do more in the future. Emma Wilson’s video essay on mise-en-scène appears exclusively online as part of Issue 2.2, available at kpu.ca/MESjournal.

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CALENDAR OF EVENTS 2018

Media, Communications & Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) Conference

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Kwantlen Documentary Film Festival (KDocs)

Society for Cinema & Media Studies (SCMS) Conference

January 10–12, 2018 London, UK Theme: Creativity and Agency www.meccsa2018.org

February 15–18, 2018 Vancouver, BC www.kdocsff.com

March 14–18, 2018 Toronto, ON www.cmstudies.org

Popular Culture Association (PCA) National Conference

Popular Culture Association of Canada (PCAC) Conference

Film Studies Association of Canada (FSAC) Conference

March 28-31, 2018 Indianapolis, IN pcaaca.org

May 3-5, 2018 St. Catherines, ON canpop.ca

May 29-31, 2018 Regina, SASK Theme: Gathering Diversities filmstudies.ca

Tel Aviv International Colloquium on Cinema & Television Studies

Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)

June 4-6, 2018 Tel Aviv, Israel Theme: Post-Truth & The Moving Image tau.ac.il

September 2018 Toronto, ON tiff.net

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Conference on the Image November 3-4, 2018 Hong Kong Theme: Artificial Images & Visual Intelligence: Seeing in the Age of Big-Data ontheimage.com