Viewfinder Magazine
Articles Archive - page 8
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Taste, Class and Domestic Décor in Abigail's Party
4th November 2020
Abigail’s Party, Mike Leigh’s excruciating comedy of suburban manners is one of the writer/director’s most enduringly popular and iconic works. First performed at the Hampstead Theatre in London in April 1977, its posterity was assured by a BBC One television adaptation later the same year as part of their Play for Today strand. The play is a claustrophobic portrayal of a nightmarish neighbourhood drinks party, hosted by a socially ambitious (newly) middle class couple; Laurence, a workaholic estate agent and Beverly, a former beautician and ‘a suburban harridan of memorable awfulness’. Their guests are working-class Angela and Tony, plus Sue, an older, upper-middle-class divorcee and mother of the eponymous but never seen Abigail, an adolescent punk.… continue reading.
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Henry Rollins on Screen: Domesticity, Home and the Ballistioscene
4th November 2020
Henry Rollins, whilst reflecting on his career and time as lead vocalist in the American Hardcore band Black Flag, had the significant insight that “home, if I have one, is the road.” The way we might frame a group of celebrated movies filmed during the period of the initial Hardcore scene — The Decline of Western Civilisation Vol. 1 (1981), The Slog Movie (1982), Another State of Mind (1984), Black Flag: Live (1984), Reality 86’d (1991) — is open to revision now, due to a number of more recent movies which have returned the spectator to this most fascinating and durable of American music cultures; including Instrument (1999), Salad Days (2014), and Desolation Centre (2019).… continue reading.
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Kitchens and the Construction of Middle Eastern Female Identity Onscreen
4th November 2020
As one of fourteen grandchildren in a migrant, Lebanese family, one thing I was taught from infancy is that food equals love – and if you love Teta, you will eat just one more falafel, but if you really love Teta, and you happen to be one of her granddaughters, you will let her teach you how to cook. In this paper, I argue that the kitchen in both Middle Eastern and European films about Middle Eastern women holds a privileged position in the home. It emphasises the cultural expectations that Middle Eastern women uphold the traditions, rituals and social conventions of their homeland. The representation of Middle Eastern women and cultures onscreen is inextricable from the kitchen, from which women’s role in traditional households is cemented as that of a ‘cultural carrier’. In short, as Dubsich notes, ‘culture enters through the kitchen’ (1986) – oftentimes via the women who inhabit it.… continue reading.
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No Place Like Home
4th November 2020
During the past months, Blaise Pascal’s claim that all mankind’s problems stem from an inability to sit quietly at home may have seemed truer than ever for many of us. While we have been feeling the strain of staying in, one way out of Pascal’s quandary might have been to catch up on our to-watch lists. Perhaps appropriately watching something that gives a new sense of perspective and possibility to our perception of the domestic sphere we find ourselves spending more time in. In this article, I wish to argue that not one but three films, the so-called Salta trilogy, by the visionary Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, achieve exactly that. They offer us the opportunity to challenge the way we view home as setting and as social realm, notably through two main strategies: letting us perceive what is repressed and excluded within the home, and encouraging us to perceive the home from estranged, unconventional perspectives. … continue reading.
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Widescreen Melodrama and the American Home
4th November 2020
Contemporary media technology encourages us to frame our homes for outside spectators: what to include in the background of a job interview, increasingly conducted by video call? The Twitter account 'Bookcase Credibility' (100K+ followers) began by asking similar questions about prominent interviewees on television news, reviewing their domestic decor from a tongue-in-cheek perspective during the global lockdowns this summer. Zoom's optional 'widescreen mode' presents even more space for communicative savvy in social and work routine, though shooing the cat from view might be more pressing than capturing swathes of cased books. This ‘shot conscious’ way of socialising reminds me of teaching widescreen melodrama at the University of Bristol, where students discuss how the home is constructed to relay vital information about its inhabitants in a fictional cinematic context.… continue reading.
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Home is Where the Hurt Is: EMI Films and the 1970s British Home
3rd November 2020
This year, we became more intimately acquainted with our homes than we ever thought possible. Although our domestic environment may now feel sickeningly familiar, this is something that is not unique to our times; instead, Britain’s connection with the home has always been fraught with tension, as any fan of sitcoms or horror films can attest. Yet there are moments in British society when our place of residence becomes a site of unusually enhanced interest; 2020 will be remembered as one of those years, played out across television news and social media. Fifty years ago, a similar story was developed, albeit via the nation’s cinema screens.… continue reading.
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Sounds of Oppression
31st March 2020
Two video essays on Reggae Innovation and Sound System Culture. ####Sounds of Oppression The history of the reggae sound system inheritance passed down through generations in various music styles (Ska, Rocksteady, Reggae, Dancehall and various sub-genres where it has fused with other cultures). The words and phrases describe the same fight concerning social exclusion within… continue reading.
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Editor's Note, 114.
31st March 2020
Welcome to ViewFinder Issue 114: Decolonising Tackling a subject as big as ‘decolonising’ was always going to prove a tough task, but with added Covid-19 mayhem it’s been a bit trickier. This term’s issue is ever so slightly reduced (in terms of amount of content) and ever so slightly late (in terms of when it… continue reading.
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Critical paralysis: confronting colonialism in photography education
31st March 2020
I have taught ‘history and theory’ to photojournalism and documentary photography students at a central London art and design university for the past ten years. In this setting, I’ve become increasingly aware that as a subject area, photography has a unique level of responsibility to engage with the current sector-wide decolonizing agenda that has finally… continue reading.
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Columbus on a spaceship, or: Decolonising the Anthropocene
31st March 2020
What does global warming have to do with colonialism? The answer is unequivocal: everything. Our efforts for the climate must therefore be decolonial if they are to succeed. After all, taking global warming seriously requires nothing less than changing our colonial relationships with man and nature. Cinema can be at the center of this. Since… continue reading.