Spring Break
Antigone's Noir
DVD supplement
Domietta Torlasco
Issue date: 5/1/09 Section: Spring 2009
antigone's noir
domietta torlasco is a critical theorist and filmmaker currently
working as an assistant professor of italian and screen cultures
at northwestern university in chicago. she holds a ph.d. in rhetoric (uc
berkeley) and an mfa in film, video and new media (school of the art
institute of chicago). her book on the undoing of the detective story
in italian art cinema, the time of the crime: phenomenology, psychoanalysis,
italian film, was published by stanford university press in
2008.
Antigone's Noir (29min., mini-DV, 2008) comprises three episodes or portraits
(Lenox, Effie, and Judy Barton) in which I look back at the world of film noir and envision what might have happened before a film started or after it ended, shifting the relation between background and foreground, protagonists and marginal figures, male and female characters. For me, returning to such pivotal post-war genre opens up the possibility of showing what is virtually present and yet impossible to see in our cinematic past-irreverent configurations of memory and desire, unruly lines of power-taken beyond the stereotypes of the femme fatale and the innocent woman. To this end, I work with narrative residues and audio-visual fragments, mixing scenes shot in contemporary urban settings, documentary photographs, and footage from public archives.
In Lenox, the opening piece, I play against the catastrophic scenario of Kiss Me Deadly and its hard-boiled soundtrack through slow-paced camera movements and serene compositions, defining a domestic interior in which violence is unavoidable, yet ultimately displaced away from the female body. In the following piece, entitled Effie and inspired
by the character of Sam Spade's secretary in The Maltese Falcon, I continue to maintain violence off-screen, as if suspended between past and future, always on the verge of reoccurring. Now, though, the atmosphere is one of claustrophobia-images are hyperbolically flat and the relentless shot-reverse shot montage fatally binds together still and moving
domietta torlasco is a critical theorist and filmmaker currently
working as an assistant professor of italian and screen cultures
at northwestern university in chicago. she holds a ph.d. in rhetoric (uc
berkeley) and an mfa in film, video and new media (school of the art
institute of chicago). her book on the undoing of the detective story
in italian art cinema, the time of the crime: phenomenology, psychoanalysis,
italian film, was published by stanford university press in
2008.
Antigone's Noir (29min., mini-DV, 2008) comprises three episodes or portraits
(Lenox, Effie, and Judy Barton) in which I look back at the world of film noir and envision what might have happened before a film started or after it ended, shifting the relation between background and foreground, protagonists and marginal figures, male and female characters. For me, returning to such pivotal post-war genre opens up the possibility of showing what is virtually present and yet impossible to see in our cinematic past-irreverent configurations of memory and desire, unruly lines of power-taken beyond the stereotypes of the femme fatale and the innocent woman. To this end, I work with narrative residues and audio-visual fragments, mixing scenes shot in contemporary urban settings, documentary photographs, and footage from public archives.
In Lenox, the opening piece, I play against the catastrophic scenario of Kiss Me Deadly and its hard-boiled soundtrack through slow-paced camera movements and serene compositions, defining a domestic interior in which violence is unavoidable, yet ultimately displaced away from the female body. In the following piece, entitled Effie and inspired
by the character of Sam Spade's secretary in The Maltese Falcon, I continue to maintain violence off-screen, as if suspended between past and future, always on the verge of reoccurring. Now, though, the atmosphere is one of claustrophobia-images are hyperbolically flat and the relentless shot-reverse shot montage fatally binds together still and moving
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