#6: Have You Seen These Women? – Cultural specificity and the (In)visibility of Old Age across Film Cultures
Free in-person public lecture by our team members Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger and Dr. Asja Makarević, Goethe University Frankfurt
31.01.2023, 6-8 p.m.
Goethe University Frankfurt, Campus Westend PEG-Building, Room 1G191
It is often said that women become invisible in society after a certain age. However, ageing women have certainly become more visible in European cinema over the last two decades. But how do filmmakers from different parts of Europe negotiate the visibility of ageing women on screen? Does cultural specificity matter in the (invisibility) of old age across film cultures?
To answer these questions we develop an experimental set-up which we present and discuss in a joint lecture. We look for cultural specificities in performance and reading of age and gender in Swiss and post-Yugoslav cinema by analyzing two examples from a situated perspective and across purported lines of cultural division and difference. The two films are the festival arthouse discovery “Have You Seen This Woman?” (Dir. Matija Gluščević and Dušan Zorić, 2022) and the comedy “Late Bloomers” (Dir. Bettina Oberli, 2006), one of the biggest box office successes of Swiss cinema of the last two decades.
We assume that there are codifications of age and gender which are immanent to the socio-political contexts from which these films originate and in which they find their primary audience. To make these codifications salient and legible we put them to the test in a cross-cultural analysis and the ensuing discussion. We are particularly interested in performative transgressions of socially imposed norms.
Spinoza`s understanding of active and affirmative body offers a conceptual framework to engage with these question. Spinoza defines body not in terms of what it is but in terms of what it can do and become. This implies that its meaning and capacities vary according to the context, in which body finds itself. A Spinozian concept of the active and affirmative body, as further theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri under the term “becoming-woman”, has been gaining more prominence in contemporary feminist theory. Co-joining our cross-cultural readings of Late Bloomers and Have You Seen This Woman? we ask how ageing women can reverse their socially sanctioned invisibility through a process of “becoming-woman”, i.e. by challenging the dichotomic order of gender divisions and the dividing line between young and old age.
Image credit: “Claire Darling”, directed by Julie Bertuccelli, produced by Yael Fogiel and Laetitia Gonzalez, 2018.
Here you can find a brief summary of the lecture written by Dr. Asja Makarević:
Here you can also find the audio recording of the lecture:
Related films:
- Have You Seen This Woman? is a 2022 Serbian fantasy drama film directed by Dušan Zorić and Matija Gluščević starring Ksenija Marinković.
- Late Bloomers is a is a 2006 Swiss tregicomedi directed by Bettina Oberli starring Stephanie Glaser.
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