Dialogic Cinephilia - November 6, 2018

Chemaly, Soraya. "'He Set Out to Kill Women': Self-Proclaimed Misogynist Murders 2 Women at Florida Yoga Studio." Democracy Now (November 5, 2018) ["Two women were shot and killed at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, on Friday when a far-right extremist and self-proclaimed misogynist entered a yoga class and opened fire. Forty-year-old gunman Scott Beierle murdered 61-year-old Nancy Van Vessem, a medical doctor and a faculty member at Florida State University, and Florida State University student 21-year-old Maura Binkley in the deadly shooting. He critically injured four other women, including one woman who was shot nine times. Beierle also pistol-whipped a man in the rampage before turning the gun on himself. Police say Beierle was found dead at the yoga studio from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Beierle had a track record of attacking women, black people and immigrants via online videos and songs and had previously been investigated for harassing women and arrested at least twice, once on allegations of battery against women. We speak with Soraya Chemaly in Washington, D.C. She is a longtime writer and feminist activist and author of the new book “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger.” She is also director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project."]

Consciousness/Mind/Neuroscience/Psychology Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive)

Ex Machina (UK: Alex Garland, 2015) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive)

Roberts-Miller, Patricia. "Teacher Neutrality and Fairness in a Culture of Demagoguery." (Personal/teaching website: February 23, 2018)

Safe (UK/USA: Todd Haynes, 1995) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive)

Singer, Leigh. "The New Canon: Innocence." Fandor (Posted on Youtube: September 30, 2018) ["The dedication that ends Lucile Hadžihalilović’s debut feature Innocence is “à Gaspar” (“to Gaspar”), a tribute to her then-partner, notorious film provocateur Gaspar Noé (Irreversible, Love, Climax et al). Given that Innocence is based on a work by another controversial artist, German author Frank Wedekind, who is somewhat infamous for writing the plays, Pandora’s Box and Spring Awakening – both of which delve into taboos of youthful sexuality, lust and violent power games centered on young girls, who are forced into an unforgiving regime of display, performance, and subjugation — you might well fear the worst. You might fear — as in the title of another Noé film — “enter the void.” Instead, Hadžihalilović produced a suggestive, seductive scary tale. Rather than the in your face, combative type of film that is typical of her former paramour, she instead quietly slips inside your head, and attacks from the inside, out. The beauty of her images – all outdoor scenes shot in natural light – are juxtaposed with the sinister connotations so many of them hold. These quiet horrors are heightened since we, the audience, understand that the young women, by virtue of their age, inexperience, and, yes, innocence, have little concept of the undercurrents occurring in the film. I say potential because Innocence thrives, even flourishes, on its ambiguities, its allusions and what it often doesn’t show. It’s that rare film you can come away from feeling that you have both “figured it out” and also felt that you couldn’t pin it down. It can take an obvious, indisputably awful thing – like exploiting young girls for their physical allure – and hold it up to the light from a different angle and find something even more disturbing. In watching Innocence we learn how the darkest impulses may be our very own."]

Yehuda, Rachel. "How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations." On Being (November 9, 2017) ["The new field of epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently through changes in environment and behavior. Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. She has studied the children of Holocaust survivors and of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks. But her science is a form of power for flourishing beyond the traumas large and small that mark each of our lives and those of our families and communities."]

Winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, Rohrwacher’s vivid story of teenage yearning and confusion revolves around a beekeeping family in rural central Italy: German-speaking father, Italian mother, four girls. Two unexpected arrivals prove disruptive, especially for the pensive oldest daughter, Gelsomina. The father takes in a troubled teenage boy as part of a welfare program, and a television crew shows up to enlist local farmers in a kitschy celebration of Etruscan culinary traditions (a slyly self-mocking Monica Bellucci plays the bewigged host). Louvart’s lensing combines a documentary attention to daily ritual with an evocative atmosphere of mystery to conjure a richly concrete world that is subject to the magical thinking of adolescence. -- The Female Gaze (2018)