‘Under the skin’ of recent neo-noirs: the case of Drive and Under the Skin

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Zrinyi u. 14
Room: 
412
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - 1:30pm
Add to Calendar
Date: 
Wednesday, December 3, 2014 - 1:30pm to 3:10pm

The Department of Gender Studies

presents

  Margaret Ozierski

Visiting Assistant Professor, VCU Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies

 ‘Under the skin’ of recent neo-noirs: the case of Drive and Under the Skin 

Public Talk

13:30 p.m., Wednesday, 4 December 2014, Zrínyi 14, 412

 This talk analyzes two recent films, Drive and Under the Skin, within the frame of film noir, a category of dark, gritty Hollywood film of the 40s and 50s first named by French critics. While Drive has been hailed by contemporary critics as a prime example of neo-noir, Under the Skin deserves to be viewed in the same light. Both films take up classic elements of the film noir and embed the viewer in the subjective sphere of their featured protagonist. These enigmatic characters – the silent male getaway driver, the “alien” man-consuming woman – are clearly figures in the crisis of masculinity and femininity that feminist critics have written about since the 70s. As I argue, the films Drive and Under the Skin are the current filmic terrain for examining gender politics within an old frame expanded to account for the textured flatness of empty subjectivities, of fluid categories “man” and “woman.” To put it in other terms, the classic femme fatale of film noir returns with a vengeance in these films, not as a murderous, evil woman, but as a phantom category still haunting the screen, troubling identification and bearing witness to gender malaise.

The talk will address the film Drive, while a separate workshop will give students the opportunity to analyze the film Under the Skin, developing concepts and ideas presented during the talk.

***

Margaret A. Ozierski defended her Ph.D. dissertation at Duke University and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her areas of expertise are twentieth century French literature, film and philosophy; French cultural studies; the thought of Beckett, Barthes, Foucault, Badiou, Vattimo, and Agamben. She also leads VCU’s summer study abroad program in La Rochelle, France. She has published an article on Jacques Rivette and contributed a chapter to a recent book on Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. She is currently working on a book project that treats Samuel Beckett’s Film as a dispositif of film noir through which one can better grasp the discourse on gender of neo-noir, notably, recent films like Drive and Under the Skin that have gotten critical acclaim.