Elena

As requested, we’ve completed a full, scene-by-scene, truthiness analysis of Bohemian Rhapsody.

The results for our fact-checking of the 2018 movie about Freddie Mercury’s life, starring Rami Malek, have been added to our Based On a True True Story? interactive. What was the real nature of his relationship with Mary Austin? Did he really meet Jim Hutton after a party? We’ve got the answers.

» Comb through our findings
» Explore the data

The fast-rising Dublin band reflect on their passion for the gentrifying city and its ‘dying culture’ – and rising tensions against the backdrop of Brexit

If there’s any justice, Fontaines DC’s debut album Dogrel will enter the canon of classic dramatic depictions of Dublin. The city is unalterably embedded in the record’s DNA – it is as quintessentially Dublin as the work of James Joyce was a century ago. “I think a lot of our music sounds, to me, like buses and trains and just hordes of people on particular streets in Dublin,” says frontman Grian Chatten, who is sitting opposite me in the Clarence hotel, flanked by his bandmates Conor Deegan III, Conor Curley, Carlos O’Connell and Tom Coll.

The band’s punk licks and brogue-heavy narration present an unvarnished but undeniably romantic version of the city: this is music that sounds like Dublin feels. Chatten’s heavily accented vocals play a part; there are references to specific areas, pubs and landmarks, plus a cast of characters who populate the songs. But there is something more than just portraits. The rough production and rickety rhythms conjure familiar Dublin moods: bustling markets, rain-streaked cobblestones and the rumbling of cold early-morning commerce. “I think of Dublin and our music as one and the same, because it was written by people who were intensely absorbed by the city,” says Chatten. “We were just really consumed by it; it influenced us in just the way street corners looked and how people spoke, and absolutely every aspect of it filtered through.”

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

– Georgia O’Keefe

“We’re selling a pipe dream to your average loser,” boasts the now-incarcerated festival promoter/techpreneur Billy McFarland during Fyre, Chris Smith’s new Netflix documentary about the eponymous 2017 music festival. Across more than 90 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage, staff interviews and pre-festival social media coverage, we see Fyre’s vision of luxury excess burned to the ground as fantasy and reality implode in an embarrassing spectacle of soaking wet tents and processed cheese. But how did it go so wrong?

Footage of the festival’s flashy promotional video featuring celebrities and supermodels like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid lounging on expensive yachts proved how easy it is to sell an idea in the age of influencers and hashtags. Within just 48 hours of going live, the festival had offloaded 95 per cent of its tickets (approximately 5,000) with prices ranging from $1,500 to $12,000, and some attendees reportedly forking out as much as $250,000 for deluxe VIP packages.

Guests were promised performances from Skepta, Disclosure, Major Lazer, Blink-182, Migos and others as well as “first-class culinary experiences” and “entertainment add-ons” that included the chance to rent your own private yacht. It was billed as an unmissable event primed for #livingmybestlive opportunities. At one point in the film, we see festival co-organiser Ja Rule crudely raising a toast to “living like movie stars, partying like rock stars, and fucking like porn stars,” while the gap between fantasy and reality continues to widen.

Because it’s not easy building a luxury festival village from scratch on a remote island with just a few months’ notice. The vicious storm that tore through the Bahamian island of Great Exuma just hours before the guests were due to arrive didn’t help matters either. Back in April 2017, the world watched the chaos unfold in real-time; a maelstrom of angry tweets, disaster relief tents and viral images documented the festival’s downfall as many of us soaked up the schadenfreude at home.

The film shows attendees arriving on the island with nowhere to go, before being plied with tequila for six hours on the beach while the festival site is still being built. However, there is only so much alcohol one can physically take and pretty soon the would-be revellers begin to ask questions. After being piled onto buses, guests are finally taken to the festival ‘site’, which doesn’t quite live up to their expectations. All hell breaks loose, with reports of attendees looting mattresses and toilet rolls like some kind of post-apocalyptic millennial disaster movie.

While all this is happening, moments of pure Shakespearean tragicomedy reveal the truth behind the shambles. A “22-year-old kid” who has never booked a festival is asked to secure Fyre’s A-list lineup. The world-class caterers are fired because the festival under-budgeted by five million dollars. We can only cringe as a bottle of beer is carelessly knocked over a map.

“You’ve ruined my sewage calculations,” says a production manager. Everyone laughs. “You have to stop thinking about models and start thinking about toilets,” he tells them. He has been coming to the Bahamas for 10 years and strongly recommends against putting guests in tents for multiple reasons. After raising too many concerns, he is dropped from the festival team.

On being warned by the logistics manager about the very real danger of incoming guests being left stranded on the island with nowhere to sleep, the festival’s marketing director, Grant Margolin (who again had no prior experience of putting on events or festivals), responds in kind: “At least they will still see your smiling face and crazy yoga skills!” You get the impression that some of the organisers of Fyre are not taking things very seriously.

The extent of the festival’s brazen exploitation of the local workforce hits hard. Labourers worked round the clock to help realise McFarlane’s “pipe dream for losers” and yet many of them were never paid. The most heart-wrenching testimony comes from Maryann Rolle, the restauranteur tasked with feeding 1,000 guests a day, who reveals that she was forced to use some of her own savings to pay her workers. Many of the festival’s disgruntled guests will have been able to brush off the drama and carry on with their lives, however, Rolle’s has been changed forever.

McFarland is currently serving a six-year jail sentence having pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering and wire fraud. He has been ordered to pay back the $26 million he admitted to stealing from investors. Two attendees were also awarded $5 million in damages. The moral of the story is clear enough: Don’t fuck with rich people. Of course, it’s hard to feel sorry for rich people with seemingly more money than sense. Comedian Ron Funches said it best. “If you have thousands of dollars to go on a trip to see Blink 182, that’s on you,” he told Conan O’Brien. “That is Darwinism at its finest.”

The post Inside Fyre: How a luxury music festival went up in smoke appeared first on Little White Lies.

There’s a reason why Saoirse Ronan is thought of as one of the best actors working today: she possesses the innate ability to make you second-guess as to whether the film you’re watching is really as mediocre as it appears. Mary Queen of Scots, from director Josie Rourke, is as stiff and studied as a fat, dog-eared library textbook, a well-meaning, information-packed drag which is all exposition and no drama.

Yet Ronan’s mellifluous and sprightly presence in the title role forces a reconsideration. How can someone who has sunk her talons so deeply into the throat of this character, has worked so hard on a better-than-convincing Scottish lilt and who is clearly taking all these fanciful, dress-up-box larks extremely seriously, be at the centre of a film in which every other aspect is a paragon of coffee table banality?

But, as the old saying goes, Saoirse Ronan’s ineffable screen magnetism can only get you so far, and so the middlebrow rot of this decorous historical runaround starts to set in.

It begins, like these matters so often do, at the end, with milk-skinned beauty Mary Stuart (Ronan) taking a diva-like last walk to the chopping block where, following a Magic Mike-style execution outfit reveal, she succumbs to the falling axe. Then, we flash back to the upstart’s late teens, where she is smuggled to Scotland from France via boat with plans to make sure she’s next in line for the throne if her cousin, Elizabeth I (Margot Robbie), fails to produce an heir.

The story consists of a lengthy battle of attrition between the formidable monarch and her feisty northern charge, made all the more complex by the fact that they are unable and unwilling to meet in person. Rourke, who awkwardly transitions over to film from a career directing for the stage, attempts to whip up tensions by highlighting the similarities between these two powerful women, whether through the self-assured manner in which they act around their preening and duplicitous male cohorts, or creating extremely strange visual rhymes.

With regard to the latter, there is one appallingly misjudged moment in which a cascade of bloody afterbirth is doubled with scenes of Elizabeth hate-twirling red paper ribbons as part of some mammoth, depressive handicraft session. It’s as if Rourke is trying too hard to embrace the visual and editing tools at her disposal, but at the expense of getting to the heart of these fascinating historical icons.

The script by Beau Willimon (adapted from John Guy’s 2005 biography, ‘Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart’), gives focus to a number of strange details which feel like they pander too much to the progressive whims of a contemporary audience. Italian courtier David Rizzo (Ismael Cruz Cordova) is accepted as a gender-fluid nymph by the all-embracing Mary, even when her downfall is catalysed by his sexual dalliances.

Also, the film pushes hard in making the female characters seem strong to the point of omnipotence, and largely achieves this by making all the male characters vile, backstabbing, patriarchal cretins. Fans of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth films, with Cate Blanchett in the lead, might find some pleasure in this handsome but strangely hollow offering.

The post Mary Queen of Scots appeared first on Little White Lies.

Between A Star is Born, Vox Lux and Teen Spirit, female musicians have been a recurring theme at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. Alex Ross Perry’s contribution sees Elisabeth Moss take centre stage as talented but destructive punk rock star Becky Something. With an eclectic cast including Agyness Deyn, Dan Stevens, Cara Delevingne and Eric Stoltz, Her Smell is an energetic take on stardom, sisterhood and self-discovery. But more than any of that, it’s a chance for Moss to deftly turn her hand to a new acting challenge.

As the lead singer of riot grrrl band Something She, Becky is unreliable, uncooperative, and often unsympathetic. Having successfully alienated her husband Danny (Stevens) and young daughter, her reckless nature undermines her talent and sees her at odds with her bandmates Marielle and Ali (Deyn and Gayle Rankin) while her manager Howard (Stoltz) quietly despairs. With a tour cancelled and new album not forthcoming, Becky spends more time drinking and fighting than performing and writing, and over the course of five acts, we’re there to witness her seeming quest for self-annihilation.

Pink neon lights and the sight of streaked mascara and freshly spilled blood contribute to the film’s scuzzy charm, capturing the chaotic world which Becky inhabits, but the film lives and dies on the powerhouse performance that Moss delivers. Flitting between irrational anger and self-inflicted loneliness, she brings something to Something, a million miles away from her well-known performances in Mad Men and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Wide-eyed with a dangerous grin, we’re introduced to Becky as a glitter-covered whirlwind, Moss bouncing off her co-stars like a pinball as the camera follows her every move. Similarly impressive are the performance scenes – Keegan DiWitt’s original score is catchy enough to stand alone from the film, but Moss’ covers of The Only Ones’ ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ and ‘Heaven’ by Bryan Adams demonstrate that as well as being a talented actor, she’s a brilliant singer too.

Although it could probably stand to lose 15 minutes from its runtime (some of the vignettes lose their momentum as they meander on) this is a soulful portrait of a talented but troubled artist, not to mention an exploration of female friendships within an industry still dominated by powerful men.

The post Her Smell – first look review appeared first on Little White Lies.

coolkidsofhistory:

Frank Sinatra playing poker with a dog, 1955.

Antcipation couldn’t be higher for Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to 2016’s Moonlight. Adapted from the James Baldwin novel of the same name, If Beale Street Could Talk is a sweeping romance set in 1970s Harlem. But far from being gushing or sentimental, the story is steeped in real life, engaged in the political and societal struggles of its characters and unafraid to point out the deep racial injustice which has long engulfed the US. Bursting with life and love yet at once fiercely angry, it’s a faithful adaptation that will break your heart 10 times over.

Fonny (Stephan James) and Tish (Kiki Layne) are madly in love, and always have been – their worlds start and end with each other. Their plans to build a life together are put on hold when Fonny is falsely accused of rape and locked away to await trial, while Tish discovers she’s pregnant and fears for the future of their blossoming family. Fortunately she has the support of her family, including her mother Sharon (Regina King), father Joseph (Colman Domingo) and sister Ernestine (Teyonah Parris), who forge plans to help Tish clear her husband’s name and bring him home. The weight of the justice system is stacked against them, with racism and corrupt cops standing in their way, but their belief in Lonny – or perhaps in Lonny and Tish, more than anything – is a force of nature. Regina King in particular delivers a star supporting turn as Tish’s devoted mother, while Brian Tyree Henry continues his run of solid supporting roles as Fonny’s old friend, Daniel Carty.

Jenkins creates a tender family portrait, moving between the past and the present to illustrate the power of Tish and Lonny’s love, as Tish recalls in narration the story of their courtship and the events which led up to Fonny’s imprisonment. Voiceover narration allows Baldwin’s voice to be heard, and the cast seem to believe in their characters and their stories so much, it’s as though this is a work of documentary more than fiction. Of course, elements of the story aren’t fiction at all – Jenkins connects the case of Fonny Hunt with his real-life contemporaries, showing that Baldwin’s story is rooted in the power imbalances and instructional racism of the American justice system.

Beale Street looks beautiful too, from strong profile shots which frame conversations, to the costume design (Tish sports a beautiful pale yellow cape for much of the film). Jenkins demonstrates his understanding of time and place, but also the romantic nature of memory – the sun always seems to shine a little brighter when Tish recalls her time with Fonny. For a love story to work, you have to invest in the central romance, and it’s impossible not to believe that Fonny and Tish are the real deal.

The post If Beale Street Could Talk – first look review appeared first on Little White Lies.

Shooting a real death is a line cinema rarely crosses. Steven Eastwood, whose new documentary follows hospice patients confronting their final days, explains why this squeamishness does us a disservice

If you watch movies you’ll have seen umpteen deaths, sometimes in a single film. (According to the people who keep a tally of such things, the final Lord of the Rings has cinema’s highest body count, of more than 800 – though presumably that includes orcs.) But what about the dying process itself? What happens to a body that is dying? A taboo-breaking new documentary filmed inside a hospice on the Isle of Wight controversially features a seven-minute scene of the final moments of Alan Hardy, a retired north London bus depot manager.

Island is directed by the artist and film-maker Steven Eastwood. It started life as an installation commissioned by the Fabrica Gallery in Brighton. Eastwood spent 12 months at the Earl Mountbatten Hospice in Newport between 2015 and 2016, working with terminally ill patients, four of whom appear in the film. What’s so dramatic about the footage of Alan’s death is how undramatic is. I don’t know what I was expecting, a deathbed scene like the movies, perhaps: Alan mustering a few profound last words to make sense of it all, or a glimmer in his eyes as life flashes before him.

The forthcoming epic, in which a female character has to save the Earth, looks likely to make surprise revelations about the MCU’s mightiest fighters

It’s starting to look as if Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel will be Marvel’s considered response to all those critics who complained about the lack of a headlining female superhero in the studio’s first nine years. Disappointed that Black Widow always has to fight lower-level baddies because she lacks real superpowers? According to Larson in the new edition of Total Film, Carol Danvers will be able to move entire planets. Upset that the Avengers seem to be led by bickering superblokes while the ladies take a back seat? There may never have been a superhero so intrinsically linked to the survival of humanity as Captain Marvel, whom the studio has pitched as Earth’s best hope in the fight against Thanos (a figure even the Hulk found himself cowering before.) She is even played by an Oscar-winner, just to ensure we are absolutely clear that the half-Kree hero’s arrival in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a very big deal indeed.

All this is as it should be. But is Danvers up to the task? We’ll find out when Captain Marvel is released in March. Set in the 1990s, it will see the superhero battling to stop Earth’s invasion by the Skrulls. The arrival on the scene of the nefarious, shapeshifting aliens, a staple of the comics, throws up all kinds of intriguing possibilities for the past, present and future of the MCU, with the knowledge that they have been around for at least two decades, meaning we could be in for some uncomfortable revelations regarding the true identities of some of Earth’s mightiest heroes.

Turn off your e-mail and social media to get more done

Turn off your e-mail and social media to get more done, Published online: 13 September 2018; doi:10.1038/d41586-018-06213-7

Welcome to Week in Review, our Sunday round-up of the last seven days of activity here at Contemporary Art Daily. Please subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Tumblr, follow us on Instagram, and become a fan on Facebook.

Be sure to keep up with everything happening on our Office Notebook.

This week’s featured exhibitions:

Frances Stark at Gavin Brown

Astrid Klein at Deichtorhallen

Torey Thornton at Jeffrey Stark

Miho Dohi at Hagiwara Projects

Roger Hiorns at Faena Arts Center

Roger Hiorns at Corvi-Mora

“Predatory Behavior” at T293

Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau

Jill Mulleady at Schloss

Michaela Eichwald at Kunstverein Schwerin

The Baltic Triennial at CAC Vilnius

“Five Million Years” at Deborah Schamoni

“Unexchangable” at Wiels

Have an excellent week.

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

Women grow up afraid. From the second we’re old enough to understand the outside world, we’re taught that it wants to harm us. We’re taught to not dress too provocatively (or too conservatively, or too masculinely) or to say anything that might make a man want to hurt us. We’re taught to bow our heads and behave.

Every woman has a story about this fear – about curling her keys in her fist as she walks home alone at night, about worrying about the length of her skirt or worrying that she doesn’t want to wear a skirt and this makes her incorrectly female, about being called ‘frigid’ or ‘dyke’ because she doesn’t want to have sex. For centuries it’s been this way – even in the wake of #MeToo, the light at the end of the tunnel sometimes still seems far away.

Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby is tired of being afraid. She’s tired of being angry too. In Nanette, she uses the familiar format of a Netflix comedy special to tell her powerful story, and to remind women everywhere that they have a story too.

The startling thing about Nanette is that the first half is fairly unremarkable. Gadsby – who is openly gay – talks about growing up in a small, close-minded community in mid-’90s Tasmania, where her sexuality and appearance marked her as different. Describing the sentiment as, “Gays, why don’t you just pack up your AIDS in a suitcase, and fuck off to Mardi Gras,” Gadsby reveals to her audience that homosexuality was a crime in Tasmania until 1997. “Not long enough ago.” The jokes are funny though not particularly groundbreaking – a sort of perfunctory look at being a queer woman, sanitised for a predominantly straight audience.

Around the 30-minute mark, Gadsby begins to talk about the crucial components of her comedy: tension and release. By making jokes about topics which the audience might find uncomfortable – such as her sexuality and the pain she has suffered as a result of it, be it through her own internalisation of rhetoric around homosexuality, or the reaction of others two her – she creates tension among the audience. “I make you all tense and then I make you laugh, and you’re like, ‘Thanks for that. I was feeling a bit tense’.”

She asks, “Do you know why I’m such a funny fucker? It’s because I’ve been learning the art of tension diffusion since I was a children [sic]. Back then it wasn’t a job, it wasn’t even a hobby. It was a survival tactic. I didn’t have to invent the tension – I was the tension. And I’m tired of tension. Tension is making me sick. It is time I stopped comedy.” It’s in this moment that Gadsby transforms her comedy special into a different animal.

Speaking about her Art History degree (“My CV is pretty much a cock and balls drawn under a fax number”), she describes how women have historically been seen as objects, worth something only in relation to men – but more crucially, her disillusionment with how comedy deals with the real world. “Do you know who used to be an easy punchline? Monica Lewinsky. Maybe if comedians had done their job properly, and made fun of the man who abused his power, then perhaps we might have had a middle-aged woman in the White House with an appropriate amount of experience instead of, as we do, a man who openly admitted to sexually assaulting vulnerable young women because he could.”

Stand-up comedy has always existed to confront the worst things about humanity, from Dick Gregory on racism to Ali Wong’s recent confrontation of misogyny early this year in Baby Cobra. In 2016, The Atlantic suggested that, “The best jokes take something awful and make it silly. Go purely light-hearted and you risk being toothless. Too edgy, and […] you’ll make people uncomfortable.” But Gadsby is tired of censoring her own pain for the sake of making audiences feel comfortable. Nanette is a testament to this. It’s time to make audiences feel uncomfortable in order to wake them up.

When Gadsby calls out the complacency of society, she namechecks a list of powerful abusers: Donald Trump, Pablo Picasso, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski. “These men are not exceptions,” she says, “they are the rule. They are not individuals – they are our stories. And the moral of our story is, ‘We don’t give a shit. We don’t give a fuck about women or children. We only care about a man’s reputation.’ What about his humanity?”

In her delivery, Gadsby’s voice cracks, and she seems to be on the verge of tears. Her palpable anger comes from a painful place – she returns to a joke from earlier in her set, about a confrontation she had in a car park with a man who thought she was flirting with his girlfriend, and tells the truth behind the comedy bit – the man attacked her. That’s not funny, though – and it speaks to the way in which women mine our most painful experiences and sanitise them to try and get past them, laughing because it’s easier than confronting the awful reality. Gadsby refuses to play that game anymore.

Nanette is an exercise in honest storytelling as much as it is a sharp skewering of Western society’s entrenched misogyny and homophobia, in which Gadsby’s anger is a catalyst. “What I would have done to have heard a story like mine,” she laments. “To feel less alone. To feel connected.” Women are so rarely allowed to be angry in our culture (after all, where did the word ‘hysteric’ come from?) and in unleashing her rage at the misogyny and homophobia which has impacted upon her life, Gadsby forces her audience to sit up and pay attention.

Silence follows. “This tension? It’s yours. I am not helping you anymore. You need to learn what this feels like, because this tension is what not-normals carry inside of them all of the time, because it is dangerous to be different.” It’s 2018, and Gadsby is bang on. For all the laughter, all the jokes, homophobia, racism and misogyny are still rampant within society. And the pain? The pain of being different or feeling like something is wrong with you? That doesn’t go away because you can laugh about it.

But far from being a rallying cry for the angry, Gadsby points out that “Anger, even if it’s connected to laughter, will not relieve tension. Anger is a tension.” It’s not enough to be angry. In fact, as Gadsby points out, anger ultimately only leads to hate. And comedy? Comedy can’t heal us either. “Laughter is not our medicine,” says Gadsby. “Stories hold our cure.”

Every woman has a story. Every person who’s ever been told there’s something wrong with them has a story. I have a story, and for so long I tried, like Hannah Gadsby, to paper over the cracks in that delicate facade with laughter and anger and drinking and drugs and anything that offered a tiny moment of relief from the pain. But as Gadsby says, “There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.” Nanette is a powerful, pertinent testament to this, and beyond calling bullshit on the abuse that is so entrenched within our society, has the power to make us feel less alone.

The post The power of painful stories in Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette appeared first on Little White Lies.

Man, in playing God, has created Woman since the dawn of cinema. In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) builds a robot with a distinctive female physique that adopts the guise of Maria (Brigitte Helm), a saintly threat to the corporate regime. The machine’s gender identity is nothing more than a shell, however, designed as a physical form without artificial consciousness. For his sequel to Frankenstein, James Whale decided to build a mate for the Monster (Boris Karloff), who while rejecting his advances, is nevertheless designed for the sexual purposes of a male character. When a man has the power to do so, he converts fetishism into reality – sometimes as evident in the director as it is in their protagonists.

The central problem facing these men is what essential quality makes a being female. In Metropolis, the robotic Maria’s masculine penchant for violent rebellion suggests that femininity is not dependent on physicality. Indeed, the character is called the Maschinenmensch: machine man. Today this distinction should be obvious, although since cis actors like Scarlett Johannsson are still being cast in trans roles of the opposite sex, perhaps a quick explanation is required. Sex refers only to the genitalia of a person, while gender is a sociocultural construct made up of characteristics associated with the sexes. It is a category mistake to confuse the two, and one which the geniuses depicted in films are prone to make again and again.

Lang showed a keen awareness of this distinction in 1927, using gender as a means for the audience to be able to distinguish between the real Maria and her mechanical doppelgänger. By comparison, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo features a male protagonist (James Stewart) who is convinced that he can bring back his dead lover (Kim Novak) by dressing a similar-looking woman in her clothes. His attempt to do so is aided by the fact that Madeleine and Judy are in fact the same person, but until he works this out the prospect of recreating someone thought dead overwhelms him.

There is a chilling echo of Hitchcock’s own notorious fascination with blonde women in the film, more of Tippi Hedren than Novak. Still, the meticulous craftsmanship he applies, such as the precise placement of the swirl in Madeleine’s hair, presents an eerie mirror image of Stewart’s performance. Did Hitchcock distinguish between the personalities of Grace Kelly or Janet Leigh? History consigns such questions to speculation, although what is displayed on screen suggests that his notion of the perfect woman depended almost entirely on the aesthetics of sex rather than individual formulations of gender.

Such problems are secondary in the disturbing nature of the plot, blurring behind the more macabre intention of bringing a human back from the dead. Here Stewart’s John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson parallels Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) as a fundamentally unstable man enraptured by the possibility of breathing life into a corpse. While Frankenstein is a modern Prometheus, Scottie is more a modern Pygmalion, not starting from scratch but instead attempting to reshape his model before he is able to fall in love with her. Prior to his encounter with Madeleine, Scottie tells Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) that his interest in women is waning, but in forming the vision of a perfect woman he is committed to making someone for whom he can feel affection.

Perhaps it would have been more revealing if Scottie had attempted to turn a different woman into Madeleine. His obsessing would have never ended, the new lover’s inherent difference preventing the possibility of perfectibility. In his 2011 film The Skin I Live In, Pedro Almodóvar takes this thread further by having a mad scientist sculpt his dead wife from the starting point of a man. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) thus takes the most lamentable misstep of all – the assumption that he can change the gender of the mind.

Having developed the process of transgenesis, a fantastical skin grafting procedure that allows him to give a man the biological features of a woman, Ledgard uses a man he has accused of raping his daughter as his guinea pig. It is a sadistic development from Vertigo, but given the means, there is no reason to doubt Scottie would have tried something just as fucked up.

Rather than a gratuitously transphobic horror, The Skin I Live In is a poignant treatise on the immutability of gender. Ledgard has surgically, hormonally and socially morphed Vicente (Jan Cornet) into his dead wife, building a clone by hand. Were Vicente a trans woman, this would be the stuff of dreams, but by imposing upon a cis man the punishment of gender dysphoria it is harrowing in the extreme. Forced, in the persona of ‘Vera’ (Elena Anaya), to wear dresses and makeup, he destroys clothes sent to him via dumbwaiter and sucks them up with a vacuum cleaner.

While Hitchcock punishes Scottie at the end of Vertigo with the guilt of Madeleine’s death, Almodóvar finishes off Ledgard with a satisfying act of revenge. Yet once Vera has returned to those who knew him before his capture, his body an irreversible female prison, he utters the haunting final line, “I am Vicente”. It comes as a brutal blow as we realise he will now face the same discomfort transgender people endure – a torture too iniquitous to wish on anyone, no matter their crimes.

Having demonstrated that it is impossible to alter human identity, it is important to now question the potential for gendered artificial intelligence. Maria in Metropolis is simply nuts and bolts, while Ava (Alicia Vikander) in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina has been programmed to think and feel as her creator, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), believes a woman does. The problem with the film is that it conflates unrelated aspects of humanity – “Why did you give her sexuality? An AI doesn’t need a gender. She could have been a grey box,” asks Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson). Ava’s sexual feelings have nothing to do with her identity as a woman, and it is due to this that she cannot pass the Turing test – her programming is too much the product of a man’s desires.

Ava thus represents the next stage in a lustful cycle, from the doomed attempt to alter a self-identifying woman in Vertigo, to the biological manipulation of a cis man in The Skin I Live In, and finally in the development of female AI. These films were all made by men about the mistakes of their sinister male characters. The next move is to tell the story from a woman’s perspective, of a woman attempting to create consciousness. Of course, their flaws will be the same, for no matter how far the technology develops, humans can never be gods.

The post The flawed logic of constructing gender in film appeared first on Little White Lies.

Picture the scene: it’s 1987, and the slasher – the subgenre that dominated the horror landscape for the first half of the decade – has also been steadily killing itself off, one film after another, until there are few new ideas left to be had. The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, introducing a refreshing kind of slasher icon in 1984, who cracked wise where others merely breathed heavily, is presently being instantiated in its second sequel, Chuck Russell’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.

There will be three more nightmares on elm street in the current run, but they will also suffer the slow and torturous death of their own diminishing returns, as will the slasher in general – and it will not be until 1994 that the franchise will be rebooted and revivified by a returning Wes Craven’s thrillingly metacinematic Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, ushering in a whole new cycle of horror that comes with a postmodern, self-referential bent.

In Doom Asylum, which also came out in 1987, you can see both the whole history of this subgenre’s decline and the seeds of its renewal engaged in a game of cat and mouse. The film, directed by Richard Friedman and shot in a real abandoned asylum, features a plot that is purest slasher: 10 years after a tragic car accident killed Judy LaRue (Patty Mullen) and left her palimony lawyer/lover Mitch Hansen (Michael Rogen) with horrific scars, a group of five preppy teens (including Judy’s daughter Kiki, also played by Mullen) go picnicking outside an old abandoned asylum which a three-woman punk/industrial band, Tina and the Tots, is using as its rehearsal space – only to discover that the disfigured Mitch is still haunting those halls with murderous intent and a bag of coroner’s tools. From here on, co-eds are killed, one by one, in a series of semi-inventively bloody ways, before a final girl confronts the killer.

So far, so standard. But it is in all its bizarre little details that you can see Doom Asylum straining to escape its own conventions with relative integrity. Mitch falls very much into the Freddy Krueger camp of slasher, punctuating all his kill with hit-and-miss quips and still, despite having earned himself the nickname ‘the Coroner’, hanging onto the legal jargon of his previous profession. Yet he also appears to be inspired by the moustache-twirling villainy of actor Tod Slaughter, taking regular (surreal) breaks from his own brutal slaughtering to watch videos of the 1930s melo-horrors (Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, The Crimes of Stephen Hawke, It’s Never Too Late to Mend, The Face at the Window) in which Slaughter starred.

This embryonic self-consciousness (more typical of late-’90s horror) extends to the ensemble of co-eds. Both parents of Jane (the screen debut of Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis) are psychiatrists, and so she feels qualified to subject her co-ed friends to the kind of cod-psychological analysis that critics often bring to slasher movies. That said, they are an eccentric bunch. Darnell (Harrison White) is an African American who dresses and acts like a WASP – although he is still black enough to earn his inevitable place as Victim #1.

Dennis (Kenny L Price) is “retentive”, as Jane puts it, in his obsession with baseball and baseball cards (this obsession being quite literally his only character trait). Kiki’s hunkish boyfriend Mike (William Hay) is chronically indecisive, while Kiki herself is the archetypal ‘dumb blonde’, insisting, when Mike offers to support her in mother Judy’s place, on calling him ‘Mum’ (a genuinely Freudian touch), and later refusing to have sex with him on the absurd grounds that “That’s incest.”

Best of all, though, is Tina and the Tots’ eponymous singer (played by Playboy centrefold Ruth Collins) who, despite engaging in a moment of toplessness that is gratuitous even by slasher standards, proves to be more like Tura Satana’s Varla in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! than some passive bimbo. She easily bests Mike in a fight (that she also picks), and as he dangles precariously from the roof of the asylum, stands over him cackling triumphantly – and she alone actively pursues and confronts Mitch, wanting actively to kick his ass rather than merely, like the others, to escape his clutches.

Apart from this, there are topical references to Reaganite Republicanism, safe sex and the ‘Just Say No’ campaign against drugs. Always goofy and occasionally gory, Doom Asylum is utterly disposable – but it knows exactly what it is. As Mike puts it, “In all those horror movies, whenever a girl leaves by herself, she gets in trouble.” It is the kind of genre rule which, almost ten years later, characters in Scream would be articulating with a similarly savvy self-awareness.

Doom Asylum is released by Arrow Video on Blu-ray in a brand new 2K restoration from the original camera negative, on 16 July.

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Slowly casting off their association with dense and inaccessible art cinema, subtitles have become the translation norm for Western audiences. Yet sometimes the most powerful subtitles are the ones that aren’t there.

Leaving non-English dialogue untranslated has long been a way to ‘Other’ certain characters and cultures, damning them to irrelevance or impenetrability. For example, as the western genre has sought to eulogise the mission of white settlers, for a long time Native American characters were rarely, if ever, translated (when Native languages were used – often it was gibberish, or even English dialogue played backwards). Yet this allowed room for subversion, too. As chronicled by the 2009 documentary Reel Injun, some Native American actors, knowing that the filmmakers wouldn’t bother to subtitle their dialogue, turned their lines into jokes and insults that allowed them to take revenge on the film even as it stereotyped them.

Similarly, when graffiti artists were hired to dress a set in Arabic script for Homeland they wrote ‘Homeland is racist’, hiding a protest against the show’s negative depiction of the Middle East in plain sight. The fact that this story only broke once the episode had aired shows how little care the producers took with the show’s translations. Yet it also demonstrates that untranslated language is not always in the control of filmmakers, particularly when it is used only as part of an orientalist visual style.

This was the criticism levelled at Wes Anderson after he left the bulk of the Japanese dialogue in Isle of Dogs unsubtitled (though it is often translated by other means). Similarly, David Lowery’s A Ghost Story subtitles its ghosts’ silent dialogue but not the Spanish of minor Latino characters. The effect of these choices remains hotly contested – at the very least, it indicates that we can never assume a single viewing experience. Skipping translation does not mean that those words are not understood – it just means that they are not understood by everyone. Of course, incongruous subtitles can provide humour, as in Annie Hall and the infamous scene from Downfall that’s become one of the internet’s most enduring jokes.

Recent science-fiction cinema posits a future that elides translation in a different way. In 2017, both Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner 2049 featured English-speaking protagonists explore a multilingual city with ease – they understand dialogue in languages they never speak, suggesting that either technological advancement or naturalised linguistic diversity has eliminated the need for translation. Yet these moments are rare enough to feel tokenistic, and they ignore the fact that translation is a necessary part of multilingualism. Cutting out the process of translation is simply one way to dispense with the issue altogether.

Both of those films heavily display the Asian signage that is a mainstay of futuristic urban landscapes, but the dialogue is still mostly in English. Also released in 2017, Valerian is set in a city that boasts over 5,000 languages, yet English is practically the only human language we hear. Meanwhile 2005’s Firefly, set in the 26th century, features Mandarin exclusively for the untranslated profanities of its otherwise English-speaking characters; we meet next to no Chinese people. It seems the humans who go into space are selective in the languages they take with them.

But not all missing subtitles are simply deference to the supremacy of English. Kelly Reichardt’s 2010 western Meek’s Cutoff, set in 1845, follows a group of white settlers traversing the Oregon desert who along the way capture a Cayuse Native American – only credited as ‘The Indian’. They don’t share a common tongue, and his dialogue is not subtitled, so it’s not clear to us or them if he will lead them to water or to an ambush.

The Indian is no simple stereotype. Rather, his presence highlights the discord between the settlers and the land – his home – that they have charged into. As they try to guess his intentions, they are clearly drawing upon their own hopes, fears, and prejudices. Blowhard guide Stephen Meek advocates protectionist violence, whereas Michelle Williams’ pragmatic Emily Tetherow wants to cultivate trust with the stranger. Their fractured power struggle is far more intractable than a mere language barrier. In fact, Meek’s Cutoff is a film about invaders struggling to understand all sorts of signs in the unforgiving landscape where they become lost.

Moreover, the characters’ communication is marked by differences other than language. It is repeatedly the men who gather and make plans, while the women keep their distance and make guesses as to the conversation. For the women in particular it’s clear that all of Meek’s macho discourse is a sign not of his knowledge but of a vain, blustering ignorance. And they all believe that the language of trade and barter has a universality that will see them through – Emily even decides to help the Indian only because, as she says, “I want him to owe me something”. They are hopelessly unprepared for their mission, and highlighting the difficulties in translation only serves to make this clear.

Perhaps the most radical recent example of non-translation is 2014’s The Tribe, a film about criminal enterprise at a boarding school for the deaf. The dialogue is entirely in unsubtitled Ukranian sign language. It’s an audacious move, particularly given the already difficult subject matter, yet The Tribe succeeds with a startling structure and visual design. There is no musical score and only 34 shots, all of them wide, with no close-ups or inserts that might obscure the action.

This austere style makes for uncomfortable and at times harrowing viewing – we are, in the absence of aural dialogue, compelled to fix our gaze. Omitting translation lays bare the essence of communication: we all try to capture what we can of what’s being said, all according to our own biases, experiences, company, and viewpoint. Of course, the story can be gleaned without subtitles, but the nuance depends on the audience.

The point isn’t that translation is unimportant, but that it is multifaceted, complex, and never objective. This fact is overlooked by subtitles that are built to be as undisruptive as possible. Yet every aspect of a film’s construction is a sort of translation: the way a character is shot, how that shot is cut, and the accompanying music all transfer as much meaning as words spelling out their dialogue.

Linguistic diversity is a part of life, whether it’s navigating a dozen languages in the course of a day or mediating between different generations. Indeed, when it comes to how people actually communicate day to day, the boundaries between different languages, gestures, signs, or behaviour are not as firm as they might first appear. We all pick up these different tools as and when we need them, changing them in the process. And no form of language, be it Bengali, body language, or emojis, can resist the tides of change. Those films that use translation – or its absence – to challenge, involve or provoke the audience can help develop the capabilities of cinema to more intricately reflect how we all communicate, or fail to.

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Phytoplankton growth is limited in vast oceanic regions by the low bioavailability of iron. Iron fertilization often results in diatom blooms, yet the physiological underpinnings for how diatoms survive in chronically iron-limited waters and outcompete other phytoplankton when iron becomes available are unresolved. We show that some diatoms can use siderophore-bound iron, and exhibit a species-specific recognition for siderophore types. In Phaeodactylum tricornutum, hydroxamate siderophores are taken up without previous reduction by a high-affinity mechanism that involves binding to the cell surface followed by endocytosis-mediated uptake and delivery to the chloroplast. The affinity recorded is the highest ever described for an iron transport system in any eukaryotic cell. Collectively, our observations suggest that there are likely a variety of iron uptake mechanisms in diatoms besides the well-established reductive mechanism. We show that iron starvation–induced protein 1 (ISIP1) plays an important role in the uptake of siderophores, and through bioinformatics analyses we deduce that this protein is largely diatom-specific. We quantify expression of ISIP1 in the global ocean by querying the Tara Oceans atlas of eukaryotic genes and show a link between the abundance and distribution of diatom-associated ISIP1 with ocean provinces defined by chronic iron starvation.

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In pornography, female masturbation is a mainstay. Male fantasy dictates that it is almost always a titillating act for a man to watch before placing himself in the action. Accordingly, it tends to serve as an appetiser to the main dish of penetrative sex. Cinema, while generally less explicit, follows a remarkably similar line of logic on the subject of female self-pleasure.

The earliest example of a film depicting a female orgasm might well by 1933’s Ecstasy, in which Hedy Lamarr’s face is framed in ravishing close-up. But she’s with a man, and when there are men involved, the focus invariably shifts. Women have long been denied the physical know-how or self-confidence to take responsibility for their own pleasure – a problem fostered by both Catholic and Freudian ideas about female sexuality. For as long as masturbation was seen as shameful or psychologically suspect, cinema largely reflected that by ignoring it altogether.

When the gaze of the camera is male, the mannequins onscreen behave not only according to male fantasy, but to his ego. Sexually voracious or self-gratifying women are often there simply for titillation. Sharon Stone’s full-frontal nudity in 1993’s Sliver, for example, allows the audience and the voyeur to watch as she reaches climax in the bath. Contemporary arthouse fare such as Palme d’Or winner Blue is the Warmest Color is hardly better. What should have been a sensual exploration of a lesbian affair often reads like a straight man’s lusty portrayal of it. As Adèle Exarchopoulos writhes and grasps at her bare breasts in her masturbation scene, Abdellatif Kechiche’s camera hungrily roves over her body. These performative soft-core scenes are a far cry from the sweaty and less picturesque reality.

But autoeroticism for women can also exist in defiance of male sexual power, as a sort of challenge to his sexual supremacy. Maybe that’s the reason so many onscreen masturbators are depicted as either comic or darkly neurotic. Even respected male filmmakers are guilty of this. In Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, Nicole Kidman’s cruel protagonist struggles to get off while the apparent ease of male masturbation is highlighted. In Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts’ tearful masturbation scene is laden with symbolism and despair. The miasma of shame still hangs heavy around these women characters.

Even when the attitude is more freewheeling, as with Lars von Trier’s 2013 two-parter Nymphomaniac, certain issues remain. The juvenile Charlotte Gainsbourg is preternaturally at home with touching herself, and in Vol 2, she experiments in order to regain sensation in her nether regions. But von Trier’s viewpoint is jaded and miserable on the subject of sexuality, seeing nothing joyous or even particularly sexy about the act. These dismal depictions of female masturbation do it a representational disservice, perhaps even more than the picturesquely sexy ones do. Surprisingly, it’s a somewhat more anodyne film, Pleasantville, where a 1950s housewife learns the thrills of self-stimulation for the first time, which suggests that women might actually masturbate for fun.

Moving further into the realm of arthouse cinema reveals a more lax attitude towards the subject at hand. In Park Chan-Wook’s Stoker, a gothic psychodrama of delicious sexual impropriety, Mia Wasikowska’s inexperienced teen has a cathartic shower scene while thinking of her debonair Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) committing murder on her behalf.

Catherine Breillat’s often disturbing work on female sexuality, which regularly involves humiliation and rape, does offer an alternative exploration of the same subject. In Romance, a film that was likened to pornography upon its release in 199, protagonist Marie (Caroline Ducey) explores her own body with triumphant results. She may have some guilt about pleasuring herself when she has a boyfriend around, but her solo dalliances and fantasies – which feature some very explicit shots of erect penises – are nonetheless thrilling.

In Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, another film fascinated by the intricacies of power in sexual relationships, Isabelle Huppert plays a fiftysomething woman who has no problem casually knocking one out while watching her hunky neighbour out the window. It’s this ‘no big deal’ attitude toward female masturbation that seems sorely lacking in most cinema.

More generally, female desire onscreen can be a tricky subject. When the issue is not mutual attraction, but sexual longing – the kind which would engender fantasy and masturbation rather than an actual encounter – the logical conclusion is often missing. The pining women we see onscreen are not shown masturbating or reaching solo orgasm. Take Don Siegel’s The Beguiled, a film of roiling horniness and teenage hormones run amok. With a rugged young Clint Eastwood as the object of affection, it’s not surprising that the cloistered, sexless schoolgirls – and their teachers – are knotted-up nests of longing. The women of Magic Mike XXL, meanwhile, may stare and giggle, but we can only guess at what they do when they leave the gyrating Channing Tatum behind.

That longing is perhaps more easily shared by cinemagoers when sexual activity is withheld. That ability for subtlety means traditional cinema still has its fair share of arousing moments. Pornography reveals everything with the stated intent to turn you on, and while feminist pornographers like Erika Lust offer plenty to choose from, it seems that feature filmmaking isn’t far behind. For a Bustle poll where women were asked to talk about Hollywood sex scenes they masturbate to, a wide variety of unexpected choices appear. These even include shots of Megan Fox in the Transformers series. Personal taste may be fickle, but it seems that a simple lingering shot of a particular actor is as good as porn for some viewers.

Still, when it comes to truly realistic, normalised images of female masturbation, it’s television that seems to be doing it best. Broad City’s nonchalant treatment of dildo use and pencilled-in ‘me’ time normalises the act in a quietly radical way. In Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge has a ho-hum wank next to her sleeping boyfriend – until, lo and behold, a Barack Obama press conference comes on and she can finish spectacularly. It’s funny, but it communicates the similarities between women and men when it comes to masturbation. It can be earth-shattering or mundane, but there’s nothing shameful or rare about it.

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