Books by Balmain Colette
Directory of World Cinema; South Korea
Genre, gender, giallo: the disturbed dreams of Dario Argento
This thesis presents an examination of the giallo films of Dario Argento from his directorial deb... more This thesis presents an examination of the giallo films of Dario Argento from his directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) to The Stendhal Syndrome'' (1996).In opposition to the dominant psychoanalytical approaches to the horror film generally and Argento''s giallo specifically, this thesis argues that the giallo, both textually and meta-textually, actively resists oedipalisation. Taking up from Deleuze''s contention in Cinema 1: The Movement Image that the cinematic-image can be consider the equivalent to a philosophical concept, suggest that Argento''s giallo are examples of what Deleuze calls cinema of the "time-image": provoked and extended "philosophical" acts of imagining the world which opens up a theoretical space of thinking differently about questions of gender and genre in horror film, which takes us beyond the fixed images of thought offered by traditional psychoanalytical andfeminist paradigms of horror. In the opening chapters of this thesis, I argue that the cinematic-image has to be thought "historically", and that it is only be understanding the emergence of the "giallo" in the 1960s within the wider picture of Ital ian national cinema, that we can understand Argento''s films as specific cultural expressions of thought, which are not reducible to paradigms based upon analyses of the more puritan and fixed American horror film (via Mulvey et all). In my subsequent discussion of Argento''s "Diva" trilogy, I consider an assemblage of Deleuzian becoming and poststructuralist feminist thought (Kristeva I Cixous I Irigaray) as a mechanism through which to explore the increasingly feminised and feminist spaces of his later work. This thesis concludes by assessing Argento'' s critical and creative legacy in films such as Toshiharu Ikeda''s Evil Dead Trap (1988) and Cindy Sherman''s Office Killer (1997). In these terms, a Deleuzian "approach", enables a set of readings, which open up the texts to a more productive consideration of their appeal, in a way which other more traditional approaches do not, and cannot, account for. The close textual and historical analysis demanded by Deleuze is both a reconsideration of the [feminist] politics of Argento''s work, and a response to criticisms of misogynism.
South Korean Horror Cinema: History, memory, identity (Interdisciplinary Press/Fisher Imprints: 2012)
Introduction to Japanese Horror Film
This book is a major historical and cultural overview of an increasingly popular genre. Starting ... more This book is a major historical and cultural overview of an increasingly popular genre. Starting with the cultural phenomenon of Godzilla, it explores the evolution of Japanese horror from the 1950s through to contemporary classics of Japanese horror cinema such as "Ringu" and "Ju-On: The Grudge". Divided thematically, the book explores key motifs such as the vengeful virgin, the demonic child, the doomed lovers and the supernatural serial killer, situating them within traditional Japanese mythology and folk-tales. The book also considers the aesthetics of the Japanese horror film, and the mechanisms through which horror is expressed at a visceral level through the use of setting, lighting, music and mise-en-scene. It concludes by considering the impact of Japanese horror on contemporary American cinema by examining the remakes of "Ringu", "Dark Water" and "Ju-On: The Grudge". The emphasis is on accessibility, and whilst the book is primarily marketed towards film and media students, it will also be of interest to anyone interested in Japanese horror film, cultural mythology and folk-tales, cinematic aesthetics and film theory. It covers classics of Japanese horror film such as "Pitfall", "Tales of Ugetsu", "Kwaidan", "Onibaba", "Hellish Love" and "Empire of Desire" alongside less well-known cult films such as "Pulse", "St John's Wort", "Infection" and "Living Hell: A Japanese Chainsaw Massacre". It includes analysis of the relationship between cultural mythology and the horror film. It explores the evolution of the erotic ghost story in the 1960s and 1970s. It examines the contemporary relationship between Japanese and American horror films.
Something Wicked This Way Comes: Essays on Evil and Human Wickedness (At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries)
This book brings together multiple perspectives on the question of evil, crossing between philoso... more This book brings together multiple perspectives on the question of evil, crossing between philosophy, history, film and media studies.
Papers by Balmain Colette
These key questions so eloquently put by Dick also underpin the aims of ‘Evil and Human Wickednes... more These key questions so eloquently put by Dick also underpin the aims of ‘Evil and Human Wickedness.’ Rob uses similar words in his words on themain aim of the project: “I was - and remain - convinced that the problems of evil are inseparably and intimately tied to the problems of what it is to behuman.” 4 The project had, and still has, three mains aims. Firstly, to start adiscourse on the nature of evil and human wickedness, questions which arerelevant to our very being-in-the world. Secondly in order to do this, it isnecessary to open up a dialogue across disciplines and beyond our own areasof interest and/or specialism in order to bring a wider understanding to suchcrucial issues beyond personal interpretations and pre-existing intellectualinvestment. Lastly, while we may not come up with answers to questionssurrounding the continuing problem of evil and human wickedness in theworld, it is necessary to wrestle with the question of evil in its manifoldforms, as this is not a mere ...
Artistry, Crearivity and Emotional: Choreographies of the Self in “Fake Love”
My review for London Korean Links of BTS latest single
Neverland: Holland’s groundbreaking KPop debut in context
In this short piece for London Korean Links, I examine the implications of Holland’s debut single... more In this short piece for London Korean Links, I examine the implications of Holland’s debut single Neverland for KPop.
Neverland: Holland’s Debut In Context
In this article I am examine how Holland the first ‘openly gay’ KPOP Idol to debut challenges Sou... more In this article I am examine how Holland the first ‘openly gay’ KPOP Idol to debut challenges South Korea’s conservative approach to non-normative sexualities.
Whiteness functions as a privileged signifier of difference (Kazami: 1997) not just in Western cu... more Whiteness functions as a privileged signifier of difference (Kazami: 1997) not just in Western cultures but also, and more problematically, in East and South East Asian cultures. The Japanese writer, film critic and poet, Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965), not only perceived his own Japaneseness as hideous caught in the reflection of the cinematic screen, but in ‘A Woman’s Face’ (Onna no Kao, 1922), Tanizaki mediates on the fact that while Western [white] actresses generate a ‘sublime feeling’, and marks that ‘this does not happen with Japanese actresses’. This act of self-orientalism by Tanizaki through which whiteness functions as signifier of racial differences and desire, has a long tradition in East and South East Asian Cultures and therefore cannot simply be ‘read’ as a response to Westernization (see Robb, 1995). Instead whiteness functions as a signifier of privilege and class before Tanizaki’s imaginary misrecognition of the image on the screen. In their report, ‘Skin Lightening and Beauty in Four Asian Culture’, Li et al point out that “In Korea, flawless skin like white jade and an absence of freckles and scars have been preferred since the first dynasty in Korean history (the Gojoseon Era, 2333-108 B.C.E.) In contemporary South Korea embedded within the eventual outcome of the drive towards globalisation is the deracialization of the national and culturally situated subject. In contemporary South Korean horror cinema, the “forgetting” of one’s racial identity becomes a source of horror, whether through cosmetic surgery as in Kim ki-duk’s Time (2006) or the abnegation of self as in Bedevilled (Jang Cheol-Su, 2010).
The psychoanalytic trap in Dario Argento’s L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo/The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970)
Horror Studies, Volume 3 Issue 2, September 2012
In horror cinema, psychoanalysis remains the dominant methodology for interpreting the relationsh... more In horror cinema, psychoanalysis remains the dominant methodology for interpreting the relationship between gender and genre, both in terms of characters within the diegesis and the extradiegetic cinematic spectator. This Oedipalization of horror cinema relies on the disturbing sight/site of female sexuality, the embodiment of male fears of dispossession and castration. However, as Donato Totaro points out, such psychoanalytical models of horror cinema rely mainly on analyses of the American cinematic tradition, rooted in a puritanical tradition; as such, they fail to account for the more liberal ‘gender-political range’ of European horror cinema. Totaro points out that,
in the European horror film there are many instances where (a) the victims are exclusively or mainly male, and (b) the male victim/hero is sexually attracted to the female killer, not repulsed, as with the monstrous-feminine, and hence there can be no disavowal of her femininity.
2002
In this article, I use Dario Argento’s directorial debut, L’Uccello dalle piume di cristallo/The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970), as a demonstrative paradigm of Totaro’s argument concerning the limitations of psychoanalytical models in relation to international horror cinema, where the killer is as likely to be female as male and female sexuality is not predetermined as monstrous, but rather provides a place of renegotiation of gendered norms. Specifically, I utilize Deleuze’s taxonomy of the time-image in order to explore the multiple ways in which The Bird With the Crystal problematizes not only the process of detection, but also the very possibility of detection, a process that calls into question the applicability of psychoanalysis to specific forms of horror cinema, represented here in the form of the Italian giallo.
Taken to its extreme, cannibal cinema can be interpreted as an engagement with excess, the very n... more Taken to its extreme, cannibal cinema can be interpreted as an engagement with excess, the very nature of which transgresses the injunctions against gluttony, lust, and greed – three of the original Deadly Sins or Capital Vices. This is clearly shown in films as disparate as Lenzi‟s notorious Cannibal Ferox (Italy: 1981) and The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover (Peter
Greenaway, France/UK, 1989). In Fincher‟s Se7en (USA, 1995), which loosely takes the seven deadly sins as motivation for its serial killer, the gluttonous victim is forced to eat spaghetti until he chokes to death. While much has been written on the figure of the zombie as an embodiment of consumerism, little has been said about the cannibal. Yet as pure excess and
appetite, the cannibal is capitalism in its most ferocious form. In Sato‟s Naked Blood (Megyaku: Akuma no yorokobi, Japan, 1995), excess is no longer figured as the Other, but as constitutive as the Self. Here shocking scenes of auto-cannibalism can be interpreted as a critique of capitalism and
consumerism taken to its very extreme. Like the coming into consciousness of Romero‟s zombies in Land of the Dead, the excessive nature of uncontrolled appetite[s] in Naked Blood, explodes what McRoy calls „social codes that inform its [the body] socially prescribed shape and meaning.‟ (McRoy, 2008:56). Here capitalism is equivalent to the theological concept
of damnation, and as such there is little surprise that the imagery of Naked Blood is reminiscent of the many Japanese cinematic imaginings of Hell, perhaps most ferociously rendered in Nobuo Nakagawa‟s Hell (Jigoki, Japan: 1960).
Conference Report: Fusion Cultures: Memory, Migration, [Re]mediation, Mobility, A one-day multi-disciplinary conference
The Fusion Cultures Conference at the University of Greenwich, co-organised with New Bucks Univer... more The Fusion Cultures Conference at the University of Greenwich, co-organised with New Bucks University, was a one-day conference whose remit was to examine the complex nature of the relationships and encounters between the imaginary and the real 'East' and 'West', in the present and recent past. Throughout the conference, the term 'fusion' was used as a place from which to explore the concept of interactions and exchanges beyond traditional theoretical mappings such as post-colonialism and post-modernism.
A feminist fairytale Lionel Delplanque's Promenons-nous dans les bois (Deep in the Woods, 2000)
"With its strong anti-oedipal heroine and liberated approach to sexuality," Promenons-nous dans l... more "With its strong anti-oedipal heroine and liberated approach to sexuality," Promenons-nous dans les bois quickly sheds its slasher movie packaging to rewrite a traditional fairytale in feminist terms. So argues Colette Balmain in this sophisticated study of Lionel Delplanque's popular French horror film.
Temporal Reconfigurations in Kubrick's 2001
This article uses Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time Image to render up a re-reading of Kubrick's 2001 ... more This article uses Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time Image to render up a re-reading of Kubrick's 2001 which concentrates on the internal structures, folds and plateaus which make up the text and provide both a resistance to and reconfiguration of contemporary theory.
Female subjectivity and the politics of "becoming other" Dario Argento's La sindrome di Stendhal (The Stendhal Syndrome, 1996)
In this article I argue that in La sindrome di Stendhal Argento shifts from his earlier critique ... more In this article I argue that in La sindrome di Stendhal Argento shifts from his earlier critique of "masculine epistemology" to a more direct engagement with the politics of female identity.
In his writings on Japan, Lafcadio Hearn points out that ‘The myth of Medusa has many a counterpa... more In his writings on Japan, Lafcadio Hearn points out that ‘The myth of Medusa has many a counterpart in Japanese folk-lore’, as in the beautiful young woman whose hair turns into serpents at night or the hair of the wife and the concubine of Kato Sayemon Shigenji which at night turn ‘into vipers, writhing together and hissing and biting.’ (2006: 44). Hair in Japanese religion is ‘at once attractive and frightening, desirable and potentially dangerous’ (Ebersole, 1998: 78). With the potential to be possessed by malevolent kami (spirits), it is little surprise that disorderly and dangerous hair, which possesses the power to attack and kill the living, provides a source of horror in Japanese cinema and is one of its most identifiable tropes. While, until recently, censorship of female pubic hair functioned to ‘construct and circulate […] an ideology of male dominance (Allison, 1998: 214), unbound and embodied female hair subverts such ideology and instead functions as a mark of insurrection against traditional gender categories which construct woman as Other in terms of respectability and filial duty. This paper examines the use of hair symbolism as a mode of feminine/female protest in Japanese horror cinema with reference to three films: Kaidan (Kwaidan, Kobayashi: 1964), Miike’s One Missed Call (Chakushin ari: 2003), and Apartment 1303 (Oikawa: 2007).
The Enemy Within: The Child as Terrorist in the Contemporary American Horror Film
Myths and Metaphors of Ending Evil, Amsterdam: …, Jan 1, 2007
... of the Dead, directed by George Romero, US/Italy: 1978 Dead End, directed by Jean-Baptiste An... more ... of the Dead, directed by George Romero, US/Italy: 1978 Dead End, directed by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa, France/USA ... directed by George A Romero, USA, 1968 The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin, USA, 1973 It's Alive, directed by Larry Cohen, USA ...
Uploads
Books by Balmain Colette
Papers by Balmain Colette
in the European horror film there are many instances where (a) the victims are exclusively or mainly male, and (b) the male victim/hero is sexually attracted to the female killer, not repulsed, as with the monstrous-feminine, and hence there can be no disavowal of her femininity.
2002
In this article, I use Dario Argento’s directorial debut, L’Uccello dalle piume di cristallo/The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970), as a demonstrative paradigm of Totaro’s argument concerning the limitations of psychoanalytical models in relation to international horror cinema, where the killer is as likely to be female as male and female sexuality is not predetermined as monstrous, but rather provides a place of renegotiation of gendered norms. Specifically, I utilize Deleuze’s taxonomy of the time-image in order to explore the multiple ways in which The Bird With the Crystal problematizes not only the process of detection, but also the very possibility of detection, a process that calls into question the applicability of psychoanalysis to specific forms of horror cinema, represented here in the form of the Italian giallo.
Greenaway, France/UK, 1989). In Fincher‟s Se7en (USA, 1995), which loosely takes the seven deadly sins as motivation for its serial killer, the gluttonous victim is forced to eat spaghetti until he chokes to death. While much has been written on the figure of the zombie as an embodiment of consumerism, little has been said about the cannibal. Yet as pure excess and
appetite, the cannibal is capitalism in its most ferocious form. In Sato‟s Naked Blood (Megyaku: Akuma no yorokobi, Japan, 1995), excess is no longer figured as the Other, but as constitutive as the Self. Here shocking scenes of auto-cannibalism can be interpreted as a critique of capitalism and
consumerism taken to its very extreme. Like the coming into consciousness of Romero‟s zombies in Land of the Dead, the excessive nature of uncontrolled appetite[s] in Naked Blood, explodes what McRoy calls „social codes that inform its [the body] socially prescribed shape and meaning.‟ (McRoy, 2008:56). Here capitalism is equivalent to the theological concept
of damnation, and as such there is little surprise that the imagery of Naked Blood is reminiscent of the many Japanese cinematic imaginings of Hell, perhaps most ferociously rendered in Nobuo Nakagawa‟s Hell (Jigoki, Japan: 1960).