Beware. This article contains spoilers. Let’s start with a self-evident affirmation. Movies, or more precisely Hollywood, is the ultimate contraption of hegemonic ideological diffusion. The prophetic dystopias in which secret police would place the mechanisms of control inside the private realm of people, fall way short of the intrusive violence of today’s reality. Now we pay…
The movie ‘Compliance’ is disturbing on many different levels, and left me with a feeling of extreme discomfort, and even disorientation, long after the credits rolled, no less because it is based on true events, referred to by the American media as the “strip search prank call scam’. As the story unfolds in the movie in the same sequence as it did in reality, Sandra, the manager of an Ohio “Chickwich” fast-food outlet, receives a call from a man falsely claiming to be a police detective. Referring to himself as “Officer Daniels” or “Sir”, he accuses a young female cashier, Becky, of stealing money from a customer. He then enlists Sandra’s assistance in physically detaining Becky in the store room of the outlet and strip-searching her. Sandra and two other employees are caught up in events that become increasingly unsettling, escalate throughout, and ultimately culminate in the degrading sexual abuse and humiliation of Becky by Sandra’s boyfriend, Van.
Pasolini’s controversial final film Salò (1975), based on Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), poses significant questions regarding the intersection between sadistic torture and sovereignty. The film is divided into four segments, heavily inspired by Dante’s Inferno: Ante-Inferno, Circle of Manias, Circle of Shit, and Circle of Blood. Salò focuses on four corrupt…
In Nicholas Ray’s 1955 Rebel without a cause1 we follow the protagonist Jim Stark (James Dean) into delinquency. In this film, Nicholas Ray and the scriptwriter, Stewart Stern, set out to portray the life of the contemporary American teenager. The story is organized around Jim, recently arrived with his parents in a Los Angeles suburb in the…
On the 16th of June 2011, the Westminster International Law & Theory Centre hosted the London première of Women of Cyprus, a documentary directed by Vassiliki Katrivanou and Bushra Azzouz, followed by a discussion with the first director. The film tries to capture the voices and feelings of women both sides of the 1974 Cypriot partition, namely…
Image: A still from Ataxia, choreographed by Wayne McGregor The release of Wim Wender’s film Pina presents us with an occasion to consider what dance, as an art form and practice, can offer us by way of imagining new ways of being in the world. Unlike other art forms, such as literature or painting, dance as…