Ros Murray

King's College London, Department of French, Faculty Member

Queen Mary, University of London, Film Studies, Post-Doc

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I joined King's College London as a Lecturer in French in September 2016. Prior to that I was a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London from September 2013, and a Research Associate at Manchester University from 2012-13. My research interests centre broadly around the dissident body and its representation in twentieth century French literature and cinema. I am particularly interested in documentary, avant-garde and experimental film and video. My current research project focuses on feminist documentary video in 1970s France, exploring the relationship between video technologies, embodiment and politics. I completed my PhD at King’s College London in 2011, on the work of Antonin Artaud, resulting in the research monograph Antonin Artaud: The Scum of the Soul, which came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.

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Judith L Green

University of California, Santa Barbara

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Bilkent University

Murat Akser

University of Ulster

Andrea Peto

Central European University

Benjamin Noys

University of Chichester

Simon O'Sullivan

Goldsmiths, University of London

Babette Babich

Fordham University

Giulia Sissa

Ucla

Didier Debaise

Université libre de Bruxelles

Lucy Bolton

Queen Mary, University of London

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Papers by Ros Murray

French Film in Britain

Towards a feminist dancefilm philosophy: Martine Rousset's Carolyn Trilogy

This paper focuses on Martine Rousset's Carolyn Trilogy (1978-1980), a series of films on the... more This paper focuses on Martine Rousset's Carolyn Trilogy (1978-1980), a series of films on the dancer Carolyn Carlson. I seek to place Rousset's work within a lineage of feminist dancefilm, from the work of Loie Fuller, to Germaine Dulac, via Yvonne Rainer, Maya Deren, and more recently Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz's installations. I argue that dance presents a challenge to filmic form, and for this reason has been a preoccupation of filmmakers seeking to explore and to expand the perimeters of corporeal expression in film. Dance also shares a privileged relationship to feminism; from a feminist perspective dance engages a kind of movement that transforms everyday gesture, disrupting and challenging linguistic expression, textual language and dominant forms of symbolism. If dance is established as 'an exceptional mode of corporeal activity that can be described as "oppositional"' (Erin Brannigan), it interacts well with an oppositional film practice ...

Philippe Garrel. By Michael Leonard

French Studies, 2020

The Radical Politics of Possibility: Towards a Queer Existential Phenomenology Through Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle (1975)

This article explores the temporalities at work in Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle (1975) using t... more This article explores the temporalities at work in Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle (1975) using the prism of a Beauvoirian existential and phenomenological approach to queer embodiment. It argues that an existentialist approach to the queer focuses on doing rather than being. Through a comparison of Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics with Halberstam’s analysis of queer failure, the essay explores how Je tu il elle stages the tension between two differing versions of failure: one emerging from the anti-social thesis, resting on negativity, refusal, and passivity; the other from an existentialist ethics, engaging in a more positive politics of phenomenological generosity.

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Cruel time in Artaud’s film scenarios

Image and narrative, 2017

This essay considers the temporality of cruelty in Artaud’s unfinished and unrealised film scenar... more This essay considers the temporality of cruelty in Artaud’s unfinished and unrealised film scenarios. It asks not so much what is cruelty, but when is cruelty, suggesting that incompletion is an inherent characteristic of Artaud’s approach. Cruelty evokes both past and future, becoming a form of anachronism in the sense that it brings together disparate timeframes. This disruption of chronological and teleological patterns makes Artaud’s film scenarios relevant to discussions of media archaeology, highlighting the importance of another, perhaps impossible, but no less existent, form of cinema. Artaud calls this “the poetry of what could have been”.

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Du cinéma gay aux films queer et trans

Du cinéma gay et lesbien aux films queer et trans

Alice de l’autre côté des intestins

Des Corps qui agissent - Langage et magie dans les Sorts d’Antonin Artaud

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Chantal Akerman: Afterlives

Modern & Contemporary France, 2019

ing the role of the war correspondent in such a context. The text outlines the increasing importa... more ing the role of the war correspondent in such a context. The text outlines the increasing importance of photography in Chérau’s work across his career, justifying the focus on the visual medium in the work itself, as well as pursuing the implication that the visual can in some cases say things that the written word is unable; the art of ‘dire par l’image’ (292). This is later supported by his use of the popular medium of the postcard. These artistic-historical relations then come full circle in the inclusion of the ‘literary reminiscence’ ‘Sur le trésor des caravanes’, the only literary interpretation by Chérau of this period. Réveiller l’archive demonstrates the productive relationship between non-fictional and fictional accounts juxtaposed as interpretations of the same events, or, as Schill puts it, ‘Pour l’écrivain-reporter les implications éthiques de sa mission relèvent autant d’un questionnement moral que d’un questionnement littéraire.’ (18) This constant and complementary questioning is reflected in Schill’s account, particularly in his foregrounding of his relationship as historian with the subject but also with the artists and their interpretations thereof. Schill’s text draws out of obscurity a thorny subject and a difficult period, and as such will be of interest to specialists and non-experts alike, as well as valuable in and of itself for this very reason alone.

Revisiting Jeanne Dielman: Autour de Jeanne Dielman (2004), Woman Sitting After Killing (2001) and Akerman’s ‘cinéma de ressassement’

The Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), 2019

This article revisits Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), seeking to map ... more This article revisits Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), seeking to map its nomadic trajectories through different media. I elaborate on Akerman’s notion of a ‘cinéma de ressassement’, a cinema of mulling over or chipping away. Rather than focusing on the film itself, I concentrate on two lesserknown works that explicitly return to Jeanne Dielman, functioning both as works in their own right and as paratexts, revealing the film’s processes in different but corresponding ways: the installation Woman Sitting After Killing, made for the 2001 Venice Biennale, and Autour de Jeanne Dielman, a making-of documentary shot on Portapak by Sami Frey in 1975, edited by Akerman and Agnès Ravez in 2004, and released as a special feature on the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film. The article contends that these two ‘returns’ to Jeanne Dielman rework the complex temporalities of the film in addition to revisiting its political concerns. Autour de Jeanne Dielman pla...

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‘The Epidermis of Reality’: Artaud, the Material Body and Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc

Film-Philosophy, 2013

This article examines Artaud's 1920s cinema texts, arguing that like other theorists writing ... more This article examines Artaud's 1920s cinema texts, arguing that like other theorists writing at the time, Artaud envisaged the medium of cinema as capable of forging new types of corporeal experience, both through the types of bodies that were portrayed onscreen, and their relationship to the body of the audience, conceived as collective force rather than an individual spectator. It pays particular attention to Artaud's theories of corporeal materiality, and argues that these are relevant to more recent approaches to embodiment and identification in film studies. Whilst Artaud never successfully put his own cinematic theories into practice, these are discussed in relation to Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc ( La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc , 1928), a film which puts distinctions between bodies into question in an unprecedented manner. Finally, through an analysis of the various different critical interpretations of Dreyer's film, the article considers the difficulties inherent in the notion of a universally intelligible affective body, arguing that there is a distinction to be made between a fascist appropriation of collective affect, and a type of body that overcomes the boundaries between self and other.

Activism, affect, identification: trans documentary in France and Spain and its reception

Studies in European Cinema, 2014

This article explores the documentation of trans activism in France and Spain since the 2000s. Th... more This article explores the documentation of trans activism in France and Spain since the 2000s. The first part addresses questions surrounding the place of affect and narrative in documentary film, particularly in relation to trans issues. The second part of the article analyses an audience case study from a screening at the International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Barcelona of Valérie Mitteaux's Girl or Boy, My Sex is not my Gender (2011), considering how different viewers respond to the representation of trans identities. The article builds on qualitative research whilst extending the exploration of sexuality and gender in previous audience studies to a consideration of documentary film, seeking to provide a more nuanced understanding of what audience claims for identification in politicised contexts mean.

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Antonin Artaud

Modern & Contemporary France, 2016

Antonin Artaud: The Scum of the Soul

French Studies, 2015

Introduction 1. The Limits of Representation 2. Through the Digestive System 3. Theatre, Magic an... more

Troubling transformations: Pedro Almodóvar’sLa piel que habito/The Skin I Live In(2011) and its reception

Transnational Cinemas, 2014

By analysing audience responses to a Spanish film among French-speaking viewers uploaded on websi... more By analysing audience responses to a Spanish film among French-speaking viewers uploaded on websites and forums, this article examines what happens when adaptation crosses national and cultural boundaries, with specific attention to representations of transgender and gender issues. The case study is La piel que habito/The Skin I Live In (2011) by Pedro Almodóvar. We compare the adaptation to its French source Mygale (Thierry Jonquet, 1984) and consider its use of Les Yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960), and reveal that the originally polemical subject matter in the novel is rendered even more controversial by the film. The audience responses are used to gauge whether such issues ‘matter’ for the film’s Francophone viewers and their implications for Almodóvar’s image among his admirers. We argue that a distinction emerges between the actual portrayal of transgender and gender characters in Almodóvar’s films and their reception, both among critics and audiences, for whom the filmmaker continues to be seen as a champion of LGBTQ identities and experience. The ‘Almodóvar label’, we suggest, shapes the reception of his films to the extent that recognition of his representations of transgender and female subjectivity as polemical is only found among a minority of viewers.

Nire amaren etxea: Tracing Feminist Genealogies in La Marche de Femmes à Hendaye, Manifestation à Hendaye and Les Mères Espagnoles (Ros Murray y Arantza Santesteban)

by Arantza Santesteban and Ros Murray

ZINE 02, 2021

This article deals with three works made in 1975 by the feminist video collectives Les Insoumuses... more This article deals with three works made in 1975 by the feminist video collectives Les Insoumuses and Vidéa: La Marche de Femmes à Hendaye, Manifestation à Hendaye and Les Mères Espagnoles. It explores how these Parisian feminist video collectives engaged with Basque political activism in the wake of the final assassinations of the Franco regime in 1975. We trace the genealogies of these video tapes as well as those of the activist collectives that they represent, firstly looking at the complex relationship between feminist, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist collectives. We then look at these works as particular, situated examples of videographic border-crossing, looking at the relationship between borders and the frame. Through an analysis of faces and faciality, we look at how the videos develop an aesthetics and politics of resistance, and we analyse how they ultimately offer an alternative, politicised vision of motherhood, echoing and reinforcing the vision of motherhood offered by the mothers who are interviewed on the tapes. Ultimately the article argues that the prism offered by these extraordinary examples of DIY, feminist video-activism give us new insights into the ways in which we might rethink solidarity, offering alternative forms of genealogy through which to approach collective activism, echoing video genealogies, with their complex relationship to other forms of activist film, and feminist genealogies, with their sometimes fraught relationship with anti-fascist and leftist political activism in the context of the Long Sixties.

KEYWORDS:
Feminist genealogies, French feminist video activism, Anti-Francoist activism, Les Insoumuses, Vidéa

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Raised Fists: Politics, Technology, and Embodiment in 1970s French Feminist Video Collectives

Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 2016

At the end of Maso et Miso vont en bateau (Maso and Miso go Boating, Les Muses s'amusent, 1976) a... more At the end of Maso et Miso vont en bateau (Maso and Miso go Boating, Les Muses s'amusent, 1976) a floating, hand-written title credit reads: "No televisual image wants or is able to represent us. We express ourselves with video." An extraordinary example of video's capacity to disrupt and re-invent the hegemonic, bland and watered-down politics of feminism shown on television screens, Maso et Miso vont en bateau concludes by displaying the signatures of four women ("Carole," "Delphine," "Ioana" and "Nadja") intent on proving that only video provides the emancipatory tools their politics require. Collectively known as "Les Muses s'amusent" (Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig, Ioana Wieder and Nadja Ringart), the name of the group, 1 like the title of the film, reveals an ingenious and virtually untranslatable play on words as these women search for new forms of textual and audiovisual language, at once playful, ironic and irate; a language that would always be expressed in the first-person plural.

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Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley, French Film in Britain: Sex, Art and Cinephilia (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), pp. 248, 30 illus., ISBN 978-0-85745-350-1 (hb), £55

Journal of British Cinema and Television, 2014

The Limits of Representation

Antonin Artaud, 2014

French Film in Britain

Towards a feminist dancefilm philosophy: Martine Rousset's Carolyn Trilogy