Papers by Marlène Monteiro
This essay examines the ways in which the representation of the body in painting is the starting ... more This essay examines the ways in which the representation of the body in painting is the starting point of a broader reflection on the plasticity of the medium in two French autobiographical films. In Histoire d’un secret (Story of a Secret, 2003) by Mariana Otero and Leçons de ténèbres (Tenebrae Lessons, 2000) by Vincent Dieutre, the body is indeed at the centre, albeit in very different ways. The first is a documentary about the director’s mother who died of the consequences of an illegal abortion in the late sixties. She was an artist and her paintings, many of which depict lascivious female nudes, pervade the film. The second is a self-fictional essay that weaves together narrated episodes of the film-maker’s story as a homosexual and drug addict with close-ups of Caravaggist paintings which tend to focus on bodies in pain. Whether prefiguring death and embodying the absent body through the latent evocation of maternity in the first case, or looking back into figural art in the second, both films point to the plasticity of the medium through the representation of matter, that is, paint and, ultimately, the body. The way in which both film-makers resort to light, the close-up, and, as far as Dieutre is concerned, the diversity of film formats, embodies what Deleuze defines as the haptic gaze to explore cinema’s own materiality. In addition, the presence of the paintings introduces the issue of intermediality which modestly points to a mise en abyme of the broader question of cinema’s shifting ontology.
L’Archivio/The Archive, XVIII International Film Studies Conference, Film Forum Udine 2011, 2012
For Andreas Huyssen, the archive fever that we have been witnessing in the last decades responds ... more For Andreas Huyssen, the archive fever that we have been witnessing in the last decades responds to a need to conjure the acceleration of time and history fostered by the high-tech revolution. Meanwhile, the booming of self-representation and autobiography (a personal archive par excellence) in film and visual media is in keeping with this general obsession with memory and the fear of oblivion. The archiving process implies a return to the source and Catherine Russell aptly notes that many contemporary first-person films focus on the authors’ parents or grand-parents. This paper compares three artists or film-makers who chose their respective mother as their subject matter: French artist Sophie Calle who had an exhibition about her mother’s death (Rachel, Monique), French film-maker Mariana Otero, whose documentary (Histoire d’un secret France, 2003) investigates into her mother’s death, and finally, Italian film-maker Alina Marazzi who, like Otero, lost her mother during her childhood (Un’ora sola ti vorrei, Italy, 2002). The archive process takes here very different forms, from personal objects to photographs, to travel documentation and archive footage. What prompts these women to collect and keep traces of their relative is the need to conjure absence, loss, and the process of forgetting. Throughout these works, the archive, rather than documenting the past, is brought forward in its physical dimension, thus harking back to Derrida’s insistence on its spatial definition as arkheîon (the house of the magistrates). Just as the process of leaving and/or searching for traces implies a mapping (including in a literal, topographic sense) of memory, the image, by metonymy eventually becomes the arkheîon, as process and container, to respond to and compensate for the void left by death.
Cinéma, architecture, dispositif, 2011
Conference Presentations by Marlène Monteiro
This paper will focus on French artist Sophie Calle. Although she is not a film-maker (she has on... more This paper will focus on French artist Sophie Calle. Although she is not a film-maker (she has only made one film to date), but rather a narrative artist, as she likes to describe herself, Calle’s strategies of self-representation are very similar in many respects to those found in first-person films. As is well known, her work is generally described as self-referential, and tends to combine performance, with photography, writing, personal or found objects, and sometimes video. Like for most artists, her works are often the result of commissions instigated by art institutions or galleries. In addition she plays almost systematically around a set of rules and instructions that she simply invents when they are not imposed on her by the commissioners. One of her first performances, La Filature, (The Shadowing) was the response to a commission ordered by the Musée national d’art moderne in 1981 for an exhibition entitled “Photographic Self-Portraits, 1898-1981”. Calle asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her for one day. In this sense, the photographs taken of her by the detective are not, strictly speaking, self-portraits. Yet, this deviation from the commission principle enabled her to set up a complex narrative device based on the multiplication of points of view and, ultimately reaffirmed her control and authorship while indirectly creating a complex self-portrait. This is one among other several examples that will be examined here, to show how Calle’s self-exposure relies on a necessary dialectical relationship between playing with and bending the rules.
This paper examines the narrative structure of Mariana Otero’s film, which focuses on her mother,... more This paper examines the narrative structure of Mariana Otero’s film, which focuses on her mother, Clotilde Vautier, who died in 1968. Otero was only 4 years old and has no recollection of this tragedy or of her mother. Therefore, she relies on the testimonies of relatives and friends to reconstruct the jigsaw. As an investigative journey, the film stages a literal movement back to the places of Mariana’s childhood and a metaphoric return to the past. In this sense, its narrative structure bears interesting similarities with that of the detective story, and gives a prominent place to Clotilde’s paintings, whose examination partakes of a similar search for traces. Just as the structure of investigation simultaneously looks back into the past and moves forward into the resolution of the crime, the film draws a simultaneous movement back into the past and forward into the narrative and therapeutic process of mourning.
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Papers by Marlène Monteiro
Conference Presentations by Marlène Monteiro