Film
Bad Faith and Violence in the Films of Abel Ferrara
Presenter(s): Ethan Cartwright
Advisor(s): Dr. Kelli Fuery
The films of Abel Ferrara are often radical and divisive, not just because they examine violent, powerful characters living in bad faith but also because they directly attack various institutions and ideologies for upholding these characters’ bad faith. As discussed in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), bad faith occurs when a person denies his own freedom and subjectivity, effectively objectifying himself and others around him. In this paper, I analyze three of Abel Ferrara’s films from the 1990s—Bad Lieutenant (1992), Dangerous Game (1993), and The Addiction (1995)—using Sartre’s original thoughts on bad faith, all featuring protagonists immersed in the objectivity of their roles who eventually self-destruct and violently come to terms with their own bad faith. I also discuss Ferrara’s Welcome to New York (2014) in relation to Beauvoir’s interpretation of bad faith, outlining how it contrasts with Sartre. In Ethics, Beauvoir expands on her initial criticisms of Being and Nothingness, that a person is both fundamentally free and constrained by social barriers such as race, class, and gender. Welcome examines a French politician who is arrested for raping a hotel maid, but who never achieves the realization or catharsis that the characters in Ferrara’s previous works do. Instead, he further embroils himself in bad faith by using his political power to objectify his victims and deny responsibility for his abuse. All four films ultimately confront the bad faith created and perpetuated by larger institutions and systems like police departments, late capitalism, and Hollywood filmmaking itself. Through analyzing Ferrara’s works from this perspective, I question whether a viewer can recognize his own bad faith and that of the world around him through watching films with characters undergoing similar journeys.
Juventud en Huelga De La Huelga: Euphoric Melancholia, Crowded Loneliness, and Progressive Guilt
Presenter(s): Diana Alanis
Advisor(s): Dr. Kelli Fuery
Mood landscapes are enriched through an oscillating series of contradictions in Güeros (Alonso Ruizpalacios, 2014) to evoke a visceral catharsis through an internal migration of feeling. Migrating between and through emotions is a liminal space that defies fixed meaning between the “negative” and “positive” connotations of melancholia and happiness. Julia Kristeva’s 1987 Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia is positioned as the conceptual foundation to argue and incorporate the function and sensation of guilt as a necessary self-reflective vessel that endows “negative” emotions with an unrestricted vocabulary, extending beyond verbal communication. Güeros rejects the dichotomy between “negative” and “positive” emotions to mirror a phenomenological experience for the spectator to be, as Christopher Bollas describes in The Shadow of the Object (1987), “in a mood” yet “capable of dealing with phenomena outside the mood space” (99). The characters’ actions and inactions liberate depression from its prescriptive definition as an undesirable state. Being able to recognize participation within a mood prompts immediate judgment of a “good” or “bad” experience and this judgment, as theorized by Sara Ahmed (2010), links the ideal of happy with the notion of “good” (22). Güeros provides a critical subversion of “bad” and “good,” reinterpreting their relationship with “negative” and “positive” emotions. Cinematic moods build an environment that grips the active spectator towards a realm of inescapable affect and allows contradictions of adolescent angst to remain in a constant flux between the expression of heightened emotions and inaction. To be “wrapped up” in a mood and incapacitated towards proper release is a form of catharsis as it confronts an unwillingness and discomfort to linger among unpleasant feelings. As both a love letter to and a critique of Mexican youth, the film establishes an ambiguous stance towards placing judgment on how the characters exercise their feelings or chose not to.
The Frontier Myth Abroad
Presenter(s): Peter Gassett
Advisor(s): Dr. Kelli Fuery
The Frontier Myth, while created from a specifically American context that perpetuates the societal ideas of the ruling class as Roland Barthes affirms, is equally applicable to colonial and postcolonial experiences. The Frontier Myth acts as a defining theme for the Western genre, and films that can be classified as such must negotiate with this mythology. By examining the development of the myth in American history through Richard Slotkin’s work on the subject, the underlying expansionist themes espoused by figures like Teddy Roosevelt will be revealed. Therefore, western films that come out of countries that have been colonies of imperial powers must deal with the Frontier Myth as it relates to their cultural experiences. Films from countries such as Australia, South Africa, and Mexico all make use of the Frontier Myth to contextualize their own exposure to the frontier expansion of a ruling class that enforces their will on the indigenous population. Barthes states that “our society is the privileged field of mythical signification”. The Western genre is perfectly fit for expressing this privileged field, due to its foundation upon the Frontier Myth, and therefore allows films from the previously mentioned countries to communicate their own experience with imperial forces. The Western then, as an extension of the Frontier Myth, is remarkably suited for exploring colonial and postcolonial themes in non-American films.