8

Girl ‘Hood

A Body, a Room and a World of One’s Own

Her Name Is

One of the most powerful feminist fantasies is writing the self in a room of one’s own, even if that room is a forest and writing a dance, as for Tove Böstrom in ‘We the Others’. In staking that claim, feminist cinema creates a new place, which I name the girl ‘hood. As I discussed in chapters four and five, the war film and current British arthouse cinema have placed women, differently, in unexpected places, from the Pentagon to constant motion. The concept of girl ‘hood names the continuum of environments through which women move and in which they act. Girls take up space, but also change it to serve themselves, and connect different places in unexpected ways.

Girls are figures of vulnerability in dominant culture. Their access to public space is highly policed and often curtailed through the inculcation of fearful fantasies. This gives rise to cautionary tales about the pleasures and dangers of straying from the path to grandmother’s cottage. Such protagonists are generally young, straight, white women entering risky territory within a cultural framework that is, broadly, safe; An Education and Fifty Shades of Grey bring this story to the multiplex. Alternately, there are films about ‘go[ing] outside’, in Ava DuVernay’s phrase, in order to forge families in which to belong and become. Such films exhibit an expanded definition of girlhood, including queer and trans* narratives, that redefine these categories against pathology and towards positive grounds for identity. Girl ‘hood is that ground.

In The Punk Singer, Kathleen Hanna notes that girls are always making art in their bedrooms; what’s needed is a way to distribute it economically, effectively and encouragingly. That’s palpable in The Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller, 2015) where for 15 year old Minnie (Bel Powley), alternative comics offer a way out as her drawings infiltrate the screen; later, she sets up as an artist on the boardwalk. Phoebe Gloeckner’s autobiographical, 1970s-set graphic novel charts her difficult route to self-expression; its current adaptation by Heller and continued readership is evidence of her success in entering a network of alternative distribution, spurred by the abusive atmosphere in which she grew up. The bedroom can be a site of terror, as it is for Lucy and Lauren in The Unloved; but, as Morton, Gloeckner, Heller and Hanna all show, art as activism is rooted in the determination to reclaim the bedroom as a private space. Beyond the concept of ‘a room of one’s own’ is the formation of an entire world as your girl ‘hood – a world that begins in the skin, extends through that room, out into the world.

Few recent films have undertaken the relation between the becoming-girl and finding (or making) one’s place as strikingly as Elle s’appelle Sabine (Her Name is Sabine, 2007), actor Sandrine Bonnaire’s filmmaking debut, which won the International Critics’ Prize at Cannes in 2007. Sabine is Sandrine’s younger sister; home movie footage included in the documentary reveals their similarities and differences as teenagers. Several critics have noted that Sabine’s idiosyncratic body language and interactions, framed by her autism-related struggles with socialization, may have formed the basis for Sandrine’s career-defining roles as Suzanne in À nos amours (To Our Loves, Maurice Pialat, 1983) and as Mona Bergeron in Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985). Vagabond is cited as a major influence on their bold, runaway girls by both Carol Morley and Penny Woolcock, an alternative to the Red Riding Hood narrative that prioritizes sexual transgression with older men as an expression of female rebellion.1 Invoking Mona in Sabine, Sandrine’s documentary is thus a double study of young women in formation on-, off- and between screens, challenging our expectations of lived and cinematic girlhood.

As Judith Gould and Jacqui Ashton Smith note, autism is itself a challenge to dominant conceptions of gender, such that ‘girls are less likely to be identified with ASD [autism spectrum disorder], even when their symptoms are equally severe. Many girls are never referred for diagnosis and are missed from the statistics’.² The rare mainstream films that address psychological and physical disabilities for female characters often do so in such a way that strongly genders the disability, sometimes to the extent of implying that either physical impairments or psychological states are manifestations of identifying as female, whether essentialized as ‘hormonal’ or seen as a tragic product of vulnerability to oppression. When Nathan Rabin coined the term ‘manic pixie dream girl’, he used disablist language in referring to the character who inspired it as ‘psychotically chipper’.³ The fantasized free-thinking, free-loving alternative to and for the male protagonist is often similarly crudely associated, by both films and critics, with psychological and/or mental health diagnoses, or even just throwaway insults, as if to rationalize her eventual capture, containment or removal.

Like Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table, which depicts writer Janet Frame’s survival of an incorrect diagnosis with schizophrenia, which almost resulted in a lobotomy, Her Name is Sabine is a rare film that tells the story the other way around. Examining the particular premium on correctly gendered behaviour for women, it explores how any divergence from normative femininity is pathologized. In her late twenties, feeling isolated from her Paris-based siblings after the death of her older brother prompted her mother’s move to the countryside, Sabine was institutionalized and heavily medicated based on an incorrect diagnosis. Sandrine was compelled to make the film by Sabine’s maltreatment in state institutions, and to agitate for the roll-out of versions of the group home where Sabine is recovering some of her earlier adolescent competence and self-awareness. The film reached large and appreciative audiences in France, and thanks to its influence, Bonnaire told the Observer, ‘I am being invited to all the political meetings, with the right people’.4 The home in Charentes seen in the film, which provides one-to-one care, was initially opened due to Sandrine’s intervention, based on her knowledge of a similar centre.

A psychologist at the home defines autism for Sandrine as a loss or lack of bodily limits; the first girl ‘hood that Sabine reclaims is the space of her own embodiment. As I’ll explore in this chapter, girl ‘hood is a space that bridges the inside and outside of institutional contexts through the body. Whether in a family, a school, a sports club, or a group home, there is a pervasive tension between the individual and the institution, accompanied by an ambivalence about the desire to belong, to be somewhere, versus a resistance to conformity.

Like the British films discussed in chapter five, Her Name is Sabine investigates the possibility of a first-person oblique narration or point of view. Although the title speaks in third person, it suggests the centrality of Sabine and her commitment to naming herself. Sabine is not a passive documentary subject but an occasional co-director from in front of the camera, deeply involved in, intrigued by and fully cognizant of the filmmaking process. When another resident of the group home starts throwing and biting, Sabine tells Sandrine kindly that if it’s too much for her, she can leave.

Sabine’s sharp intervention, in which she suggests that it is not she but Sandrine who has a limited emotional capacity, contrasts strongly with claims about autism, and with earlier footage of a non-verbal, disengaged Sabine after her institutionalization. It also forms a telling contrast with one of the film’s most powerful and disturbing scenes in which Sandrine and Sabine watch a home movie of the teen sisters’ trip to New York on Concorde, when Sandrine used her film earnings to grant her sister’s greatest wish. The fairy tale flight and destination are a cue for a terrible mourning that demonstrates Sabine’s returning self-awareness, and a howl of rage against her institutionalization. That grief belongs, differently, to both sisters, but – implies the film – can only be given voice by the more affectively perceptive Sabine, who asks Sandrine to rewind the tape, collaboratively recapturing and redoing her girlhood.

Fig. 21: Sabine watches her younger self, Her Name is Sabine

Both self-documentation and sisterly co-operation, in which a documentarist collaborates with her subject, are prevalent in contemporary feminist cinema. Elle-Maíjá Tailfeathers’ follow-up to ‘A Red Girl’s Reasoning’ is a short documentary co-directed with filmmaker Terreanne Derrick that begins with a reflexive voice-over about their friendship and working relationship. ‘Hurry Up, You Stupid Cripple’ (2013) takes its defiant, provocative name from a game that Derrick, who has cerebral palsy, played with her siblings in the supermarket, hanging back deliberately until, at her insistence, one of them would shout the title phrase. This mischievous childhood memory is made more poignant as the film reveals that Derrick’s long-term memory and communication skills have been badly affected by a car crash in which her mother was killed. ‘It shapeshifted everything’, she tells Tailfeathers, the mythological verb implying the co-directors’ shared indigeneity and overlapping belief systems; Derrick is Gitxsan, Tailfeathers Blackfoot and Sami.

The power of trauma is reconceived through their collaboration and from an indigenous feminist perspective: it literally has the power to reshape the world. Derrick explains that she had to relearn to tell stories, and the film works with her narrative style rather than insisting on linearity, using extensive close-ups, jump cuts and low-angle shots to reorient the viewer’s experience of the world and bring them close to Derrick’s alternate view as she tours us around her girl ‘hood.

Boy I Am

While Derrick is frequently shown actively in motion – walking, riding, talking, wheeling – the film in no way subscribes to a ‘can do’ attitude, or what Stella Young and other disability activists have called ‘inspiration porn’.5 Borrowing the title of Young’s TEDX talk, Sandra Alland has curated the I’m Not Your Inspiration film series, documenting queer and trans* deaf and disabled Scottish artists.⁶ Their work, like ‘Hurry Up’, uses the difference of disability to both question and change social space. Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor, an artist who uses a wheelchair, offer a similar riposte during their freewheeling conversation about what bodies can do in Examined Life. Importantly, Taylor and Derrick are shown as part of social formations, in contradistinction to the usual representation of people with disabilities as an exception, and as lonely. Likewise, Sabine is shown to have become reconnected to her sister, her family, her community at the group home, and – through the film – to the audience, rather than being isolated, as she was when hospitalized.

Community is the core of girl ‘hood, although from Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004, from a screenplay by Tina Fey) to The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola, 2013) it’s the tensions and status contests that tend to propel the drama of post-feminist variations on the girl group narrative. Coppola’s last film has been unfairly derided as being as vacuous as the characters it depicts and the celebrity culture that obsesses them. Its total commitment to their world, however, offers an almost-documentary incisiveness about how adolescent status anxiety mirrors the adult world that condemns and dismisses adolescents as immature. As in Marie Antoinette, what’s sad about the film is how willingly the young female characters participate in the capitalist culture that objectifies them, and how little escape they have.

By contrast, Marieme (Karidja Touré) in Céline Sciamma’s Bande de filles (Girlhood, 2014) both enjoys and questions the stakes in being one of the gang. Girlhood is very much a film about the ‘hood, an unusual representation of contemporary urban space and its post-colonial subjects as female. The filles are banded together by their shared location in the banlieus of Paris, with all that that means socially and economically. Marieme is one of Sciamma’s watchful, thoughtful, powerful leads, defining herself through interaction with a magnetic group of peers led by Lady (Assa Sylla). When Lady renames Marieme ‘Vic. Vic as in victory’ it empowers her to a classic girl ‘hood triumph, when she leaves home (particularly her violent older brother) and enters into the larger, adult world of grey-market Paris.

Sciamma suggests that this world is Marieme/Vic’s home writ large, as she exchanges control by her brother for a demanding older male boss. As Mallory Andrews observes:

Even her moment of becoming is staged almost as a superhero origin story. While doing dishes, she discreetly pockets a knife similar to one wielded by Lady. Framed from behind, she grips the edge of the counter backlit by the light over the sink, fully committing her allegiance to ‘Vic’.7

As she rebels against her boss’ orders, the masculine abbreviation of Vic marks a possible gender transition. In the final section of the film, Vic binds their chest to pass as one of the guys, identifying where the power is, but also in contrast to the demand that they dress high femme to deliver drugs to wealthy clients. For Sciamma: ‘In the last shot of the film, Marieme wears the braids of childhood, the makeup of a diva, and the clothing of a boy. She’s possibly everything or none of those’.⁸ Dressed down in a hoodie in the closing sequence, Vic suggests a line of flight from gendered conventions, a final move made possible by the endless fluidity of girl ‘hood.

Feminist filmmakers apply a similarly critical lens to boyhood, particularly concerning young men of colour, as with Woolcock’s One Mile Away. Anita Doron’s adaptation of The Lesser Blessed (2012) focuses on Dogrib teenager Larry (Joel Nathan Evans) who has to come to terms with killing his abusive father in self-defence, and also (through) his status as beta male to best friend Johnny (Kiowa Gordon) who turns out, like his father, to be an asshole. Turning away from the normative lessons of manhood is critical in Annemarie Jacir’s Lamma shoftak (When I Saw You, 2012), as 11 year old Tarek (Mahmoud Asfa) becomes a mascot to a group of guerrilla fighters in a refugee camp, to his mother’s dismay. These films share with Cherien Dabis’ Amreeka (2009), a Palestinian ‘coming to America’ drama, a moving attention to mother-son relationships that are at once protective and jagged. Both Amreeka and Lesser Blessed feature rebellious female adolescent characters who act as the male protagonists’ bolder selves.

Boyhood is as complex as girlhood, particularly at their intersection. Girls are now expected to play hard; that is, to be more normatively masculine. Brunei’s first film in half a century, martial arts drama Yasmine (Siti Kamaluddin, 2015) uses sport as a metaphor at once for its female protagonist’s rebelliousness, and for the strictures surrounding gendered behaviour. Recent films about girls in sport, from Girlfight (Karyn Kusama, 2000) and Bend it Like Beckham to Kicks (Lindy Heymann, 2009), Fast Girls (Regan Hall, 2012) and She Monkeys, as well as documentaries such as Florence Ayisi’s Zanzibar Soccer Queens (2008), enter this difficult terrain. Like films about women on the military frontline, these films consider the pros and cons of entering what is still seen as a masculine world and its impact on girls’ becoming, often getting entangled in vexed questions about gender and sexuality.

Frequently, the difficulty of the terrain is expressed through an outdated and pejorative association of sporty women, and all-female spaces, with lesbianism. Maria Govan’s Rain (2008), the first Bahamian-made feature, addresses it head-on, as teenage runner Rain (Renel Brown) learns that her coach Ms. Adams (CCH Pounder) is a lesbian. The film openly critiques, rather than playing up, the expectation that Ms. Adams’ investment in Rain’s talent is in any way erotic, but also allows Ms. Adams to have a fully-fledged sexual identity. Filmmaker Bette Gordon praises the way in which Kusama handles the complexity in Girlfight, as boxing has ‘the intimate nature of a sport where two nearly naked opponents have agreed to fight each other – focusing on a physicality that is so intense as to be hypersensual’.9

Kusama allows Diana (Michelle Rodriguez) to inhabit the black femme identity that Kara Keeling argues is too often invisible, and whose visibility is so potent; ‘the black femme’, she concludes, ‘might restore a critical belief in the world by revealing that alternatives persist within it’.¹⁰ Diana dates a male boxer, although he is ultimately threatened by her commitment to the sport; but her heterosexuality is uncompromised by the stereotypical association of sporting women. At the same time, the film does not shy away from the ring’s intense homosociality, nor does it punish it. Kusama told Gordon that she took up the sport on the advice of lesbian filmmaker Sande Zeig.¹¹

Elissa Washuta titles her memoir My Body is a Book of Rules, an apt and chilling description of what sport films exemplify but all girl ‘hood films narrate.¹² The girl punks in Vi är bäst! (We Are the Best, Lukas Moodysson, 2013) compose their protest anthem ‘Hate the Sport’ exactly to critique such institutional discipline. Creative resistance to rules is especially apparent in a small, very recent trend for films about trans* childhoods, including first person documentaries such as Boy I Am (Sam Feder, 2006) and She’s a Boy I Knew (Gwen Haworth, 2007) and features such as Mariana Rondon’s unstraight hair-straightening comedy Pelo Malo (Bad Hair, 2014). In Sciamma’s Tomboy, Mikäel (Zoé Héran) takes advantage of the summer holidays to introduce himself to his local peers before being forced to assume his official identity as Laure when school begins. The institution is a threatening presence in abeyance here, its strictures echoed by the anxiety of Mikäel’s parents. Like the threat of a special unit hanging over Mia in Fish Tank, it fuels rebellion rather than containing it, forging a crisis point. Mikäel/Laure’s closing encounter with his crush Lisa (Jeanne Disson) suggests that love and friendship can provide a counter-space in which to formulate his identity.

In its generational contrasts, Tomboy echoes an earlier French film Ma vie en rose (Alain Berliner, 1997). Berliner’s well-received late New Queer Cinema classic shares with Chelsea McMullan’s documentary My Prairie Home (2013) a celebration of the performative as a mode of alternative becoming: where Ludovic (Georges du Fresne) dresses up and dreams of entering the world of her favourite Barbie-like TV show Le monde du Pam, non-gender binary singer Rae Spoon stages their life as a musical in collaboration with McMullan. What is candy-coloured wish-fear in Ma vie is a carefully negotiated and beautifully recorded lived experience in My Prairie Home. Moving between choreographed music video, live performance, interview and voiceover, McMullan scrapbooks Spoon’s story. As in ‘Hurry Up’, there is a sense of co-authorship, almost of the filmmaker bringing her subject’s internal visions to life. The film appropriates and resignifies the iconic (often highly masculinized) attributes of the prairie home Spoon loves, including moose, long-distance bus rides and hikes in the snow. Spoon owns, and is owned by, their prairie home.

Erica Tremblay’s documentary In the Turn (2014) also takes on rural Canadian prejudices, speaking to them through the national/masculine interest in skating rather than on Spoon’s musical slant. The film combines a narrative of enforced socialization in a bad institution with a narrative of becoming in a good alternate family. Crystal, growing up transfeminine in rural Canada, is accepted at church but bullied and excluded at school, having to give up the sports she loves because gender-segregated school teams deny her entrance. We see Crystal’s hard-won self-defined embodiment being erased by her geographical community. Online, she and her mother discover Los Angeles-based queer and trans* roller derby collective the Vagine Regime, who stage a fundraiser to bring Crystal to California for a roller derby training camp. The connection also broadens the documentary into a portrait of a range of queer and trans* embodiments among the adult team members, and – unlike Girlfight or Bend it Like Beckham – foregrounds a sport whose rules have been written by and for the feminist and queer communities. It’s less about fitting in and more about making your own world.

Its narrative contours of sporting empowerment are a familiar North American trope, not least from Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, Whip It (2009), in which Riot Grrrl Bliss (Ellen Page) finds a place to belong via roller derby. In the Turn uses the tropes unabashedly, simultaneously to draw in a broad audience and to change the script. Crystal fits in with the Vagine Regime and with her fellow skaters at camp, but, while previous queer cinema has stressed California as the queer and trans ‘hood, Tremblay uses the international Vagine Regime collective to show that girl ‘hood is really a network, a republic of heaven that can – and has to – be made where you are.

Revolution Girl Style Here!

Roller derby emerged as a feminist force from the cultural constellation of Riot Grrrl music, zines and 1990s feminist film and cultural theory. New Queer Cinema, part of the same matrix, has reawoken in the US, kicking off with Pariah (Dee Rees, 2011). Rees’ debut hews close to the ‘coming of age’ narrative template, but the dapper style it brings to telling a familiar story is thrilling. The film, like its protagonist Alike (Adepero Oduye), has swagger, bringing the viewer with immediacy and confidence into African American lesbian Brooklyn youth culture. A student of Spike Lee, Rees shares her mentor’s ability to capture the energy of a highly specific time and place. The opening club scene, in which AGs (aggressives/butches) flirt with femme performers is a compelling rush: you are right there. Jamilah King argues that ‘one of the Rees’s biggest achievements [is…] turning what was once taboo (openly gay teens) into something that’s painfully ordinary (kids struggling to fit in)’, using that narrative framework as a map to unfamiliar territory.13

Alike faces familiar struggles such as her parents’ conflict and the tension between her education and her social life, but from the new and nuanced position of a queer woman of colour, which enables her to change the situation. The ending, in which Alike gets a scholarship to Berkeley, suggests that she will be enmeshing her learning and partying in the queer capital of the USA, but also that, having chosen a school known for social activism as well as queer theory, she will go on to be an agent of change through her writing.

Alike’s scholarship is also a nod towards the foundations and programmes that support independent queer cinema. Pariah, like Circumstance, was shaped by participation in Sundance Institute labs, and was a beneficiary of the Adrienne Shelly Foundation Women Filmmakers’ Grant, an award honouring the director of Waitress (2006) and star of Hal Hartley’s New American Indie films, who was killed in 2006.¹⁴ The grants and scholarships in Shelly’s name are an example of grassroots feminist organizing for diversity in film, alongside the Sarah Jacobson Film Grant. A smaller sum, it is awarded annually to female, trans* or genderqueer filmmakers ‘whose work embodies some of the things that Sarah stood for: a fierce DIY approach to filmmaking, a radical social critique, and a thoroughly underground sensibility’.15 Winners include KUSAMA: Princess of Polka Dots (Heather Lenz, 2012) and Grrrl Love and Revolution: Riot Grrrl NYC (Abby Moser, 2011), whose footage Sini Anderson quotes in The Punk Singer.

The 1990s phenomenon of girl-made media thus persists into the new century, using all the tools available. Grassroots, self-organized and self-documenting formations such as DIY music festival Ladyfest have been joined by Reel Grrls, which can be seen in action in Wonder Women!. A media arts and leadership programme for teenagers that aims to create representational justice on and offscreen, Reel Grrls formalizes the kind of collaborative, intersectional practices already being realized ad hoc. Rees encouraged Pariah viewers to share their stories of adolescent exclusion and becoming on the Pariah YouTube stream.¹⁶ She joins directors such as Tailfeathers and Bonnaire in finding ways of ‘shapeshifting’ cinematic vision towards a collaborative girl ‘hood point of view.

Blame It On

Such projects, alongside the mass experiment in democratization (or exploitation) seen on YouTube and Vine, are increasing access to technical skills while also producing their own conformities. Few grrrl filmmakers apart the from Makhmalbaf sisters or Sadie Benning, who shot her films including ‘Girl Power’ (1992) on a Fisher-Price camera, have achieved widespread distribution for their films while still in their teens. Independently of their considerable filmmaking skill, both Benning and the Makhmalbafs are also the daughters of well-known male filmmakers (James Benning and Mohsen Makhmalbaf). Samira’s first film The Apple tells a story that is the absolute opposite of her own experience of leaving school to study with her father, but may reflect unconscious ambivalence about intersecting a master-apprentice relationship with a father-daughter one. But Samira’s success also opened a door to distribution for subsequent Muslim-world girl ‘hood films by adult filmmakers, such as Persepolis, Wadjda and Sepideh (Berit Madsen, 2014).

Madsen’s documentary won fans at Sundance, not least for its focus on an ambitious young Iranian scientist. Conveyed via gorgeous time-lapse photography of the night sky, Sepideh’s dream of being an astronaut goes beyond the ‘can do’ narrative of post-feminist advertizing described by Natalie Baker as ‘fempowerment’.¹⁷ In Persepolis, Satrapi offers a primer on Iranian feminisms and counter-cultures, a girl ‘hood that never seems to find a place to be itself. This is never truer than when teenage Marjane (voiced by Chiara Mastroianni) confronts a double whammy in exile in Vienna: the nihilist punk culture at her school and the domineering nuns at her boarding house.

The latter put the morality police in Tehran into context, a reminder that surveillant control of adolescent behaviour is not specific to one religion, as Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s terrifying documentary Jesus Camp (2006) makes clear. There are few scenes in contemporary cinema more horrific than a small girl having her mouth taped over in preparation for an anti-abortion protest, as an adult male voice offscreen says ‘Doesn’t she look beautiful?’. Ewing and Grady capture the way in which fundamentalist religion, while asserting control over all children, is most visceral in its girl-training.

In Wadjda, sport is freedom, and the classroom the site of stifling girl-training based on the Qu’ran, echoing the filmmaker’s experience. Haifaa al-Mansour has described the experience of shooting street scenes in Riyadh while hidden in a van, a Kafkaesque irony given that the film is about a young woman’s demand for access to public space and mobility. Dan Zak sums up the irony when he states that al-Mansour ‘misses being in the van, she says, then clarifies herself. It’s not that she misses being in the van. She misses her mind-set when she was in the van’, the mind-set of a ground-breaking, working filmmaker.18

The film shows both Wadjda (Waad Mohammed) and her mother (Reem Abdullah), who is working because she knows her husband is about to leave her, still struggling for basic freedoms. Wadjda’s craftiness in getting the bicycle she desires is not purely ‘can do’, nor is her daring coded as ‘risky’. Al-Mansour wittily has her proto-easy rider earning her rebellion by excelling at Qu’ranic recitation rather than robbing banks. She is clearly a figure of the filmmaker as rebellious daughter, her bike a stand-in for al-Mansour’s camera-van. Imaginatively, al-Mansour remakes her adolescence into a filmmaking girlhood, one in which she took her place in public and told her story.

Made with the imprimatur of King Abdullah and financial support from Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Wadjda also reflects on the delicate balance, and often patronage, necessary for such filmmaking enterprises. Julie Gavras’ La faute à Fidel! (Blame it on Fidel, 2006), like Samira Makhmalbaf’s Apple, is torn between gratitude to and frustration with parental figures of support and inspiration. Although the film is adapted from an autobiographical novel by Domitilla Calamai, the film’s father-figure Fernando (Stefano Accorsi) is clearly a portrait of Gavras’ filmmaker father Costa-Gavras. Having left Greece under the Generals to study film in France, Costa-Gavras was blacklisted from university and from a US visa because of his father’s suspected Communism.19 The film smuggles a detailed account of leftist fervour and thought in early 1970s Paris into a wide-eyed coming-of-age drama.

Anna (Nina Kervel-Bey) is heartily sick of her parents’ sudden political conversion and its impact on her life, including a rotating carousel of refugee nannies from leftist hot spots, getting dragged on marches and her parents fighting about her mother (Julie Depardieu) signing the infamous Manifesto of the 343, publicly declaring her support for abortion rights. Known as le manifeste des salopes (bitches or sluts), its real-life signatories included French film feminists Catherine Deneuve, Marguerite Duras, Delphine Seyrig and Agnès Varda.

At the end of the film, Anna defiantly changes allegiance, choosing to leave her beloved Catholic school for a public one, in solidarity with her parents’ politics. She also establishes her independence and suggestively exchanges her biological family for the alternate family of schoolfriends, with whom she will shape her own, twenty-first century-inflected political trajectory. ‘Gavras’s final shot is a quietly ravishing visual metaphor for Anna’s path to political consciousness: In the schoolyard’s hustle and bustle, she strikes up a friendship with a group of students playing “Ring Around the Rosie” ’.²⁰ In place of the strident dogmatism of her parents’ political rhetoric comes a performative, musical, joyful and embodied solidarity.

An artist parent seeking to recapture the romance of her political days is also an ambivalent figure in Maria Saakyan’s Alaverdi (I’m Going to Change My Name, 2012). Sona’s (Maria Atlas) lonely daughter Evridika (Arina Adju) finds her girl ‘hood online on a suicide fantasy website, where she posts imaginative animations and music. But it is Sona’s ex Pyotr (Evgeniy Tsyganov) who is the unsettling force; reappearing, he distracts Sona further while being romanced by Evridika’s suicidal fantasies. It is through a risky encounter with Pyotr that Evridika works out how to save herself and begin again. Saakyan’s eerie film is one of the best representations to date of adolescent online self-fashioning. For Evridika, the threat of suicide is leverage, one of the few powerful tools available to her as a teenage girl in an isolated small town in post-Soviet Armenia.

A self-willed Eurydice, she both enters and survives the myth without a need for an Orpheus. In Female Perversions, the only feminist cultural theory book to have been adapted as a feature film (Susan Streitfeld, 1996), Louise J. Kaplan talks about self-cutting as a creative act, one that both crafts the body and asserts control over it.²¹ Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Thin (2006) subtly explores the possibility that anorexia might be a perverse form of resistance to body fascism as well as an escape from oppressive families. Suicidal ideation is at once creative and terroristic, an imaginative space charged with intense poetic emotions that is also a demand for attention, a demand that the film, in lieu of Evridika’s mother, answers.

Fig. 22: Billie and James connect online and offline, 52 Tuesdays

Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays (2014) takes a more positive view of parental support for self-fashioning, as well as exploring the increasing similarities between parents and teenagers generated by digital second lives. James (Del Herbert-Jane) announces to daughter Billie (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) that he has decided, finally, to live as the man he has always known he was, telling her he will need time alone, and distance on motherhood, to fashion himself; suggestively, to enter a second adolescence of sexual becoming. Billie goes to live with her father, agreeing to see James for dinner every Tuesday evening. Both parent and daughter turn to digital video as a way to understand the changes in their lives; James becomes part of an online community of people transitioning, sharing documentation of physical and psychological stages of the process. When it turns out he is adversely affected by testosterone, he switches off the camera, the internet and his relationship with Billie.

This allows Billie to enter further into her own digital documentary daring, filming the sexual play of Jasmin (Imogen Arthur) and Josh (Sam Althuizen), a cool older couple from her school. After she falls out with Jasmin, she edits her films together with news footage and her own video diaries, and presents a DVD to Jasmin, who has not consented for the filming sessions to be used as part of an art project. Her distress prompts an intervention by all three teens’ parents, although it is the young people who resolve their friendship bonds together. While Billie’s project is censored within the diegesis, it becomes a frame for our viewing, as her video diaries meditating on time, change, political upheaval and identity appear metronomically throughout the film. Through its frankness, the film holds a space that reshapes the home, the hospital, the school and the screen.

Hyde has said: ‘I feel upset that we as a culture have decided that naked children are pornographic… As the mother of a child I feel we are suggesting that her body is shameful and I’m frustrated by that’. In the same interview, Cobham-Hervey asserted that ‘If it felt scary I would just say “Sophie, this feels scary” ’.22 While this collaborative practice is rare in the mainstream, Hollywood high-grosser Catherine Hardwicke started her film career by co-writing the low-budget Thirteen (2003) with its teenage co-star Nikki Reed. Reed plays Evie, the bad girl next door who leads Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) astray. Melanie (Holly Hunter), Tracy’s mother, is a compelling representation of a working-poor single mom whose struggles with her daughter are fraught with economics as well as the generational divide. Wood’s performance as Tracy is genuinely risk-taking, most notably in the scene in which she terrorizes her mother with the chant ‘No bra, no panties’, embodying Kaplan’s female perversion.

It’s no accident that the film is set in Los Angeles; Tracy and Evie are, suggestively, products of the entertainment industry’s girl-training in the post-feminist era and milieu recounted in Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs (2006). Levy notes in the introduction: ‘As former adult film star Traci Lords put it to a reporter a few days before her memoir hit the best-seller list in 2003 [the year Thirteen was released], “When I was in porn, it was like a back-alley thing. Now it’s everywhere” ’.²³ While I disagree with Levy’s blanket dismissal of pro-sex feminism, it is undeniable that the hyper-sexualization of young women by celebrity and commodity culture became a prominent element of Anglophone girl-training in the late 1990s. Thirteen is the perfect cautionary tale of that moment, in which girl ‘hood explicitly begins to negotiate with an everywhere that is pornified.

To My Sister(s)

Catherine Breillat prefigured Hardwicke’s film with her scintillating and disturbing À ma soeur (Fat Girl, 2001). Desiree Akhavan described it to me as the progenitor of the new wave of sexually-open feminist cinema:

When I saw that film, it was such an incredible moment of thinking: ‘This is what filmmaking is, this is how you fuck with the medium’. I see the way that sex is depicted in films as a feminist pursuit of mine… and that’s something Breillat has done in all her work.24

As Kay Armatage describes, the film was banned in Canada, but a successful legal challenge to the ban not only led to the film’s release, uncut, but to the closing of the Ontario Censor Board.²⁵ Breillat’s film literally opened up possibilities for feminist cinema in Canada.

Western European cinema has been, in general, more open to the risky girl. For Molly Haskell, in her essay on Bonnaire in À nos amours,

The teenage girl on the cusp of sexual awakening is a beloved icon of French cinema… But over the years, as one transfixing newcomer after another, barely out of braces and backpacks, embarks on the vita sexualis, we have to wonder, whose sexuality is it, exactly? Is this the way they see themselves, are these their yearnings, or is this precocious sensuality a projection of the guilty desires and fears of directors old enough to be their fathers?²⁶

Haskell’s question remains relevant. We can ask ‘whose sexuality is it, exactly?’ of cismale-directed films such as La vie d’Adèle (Blue is the Warmest Colour, Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013) or Jeune et jolie (François Ozon, 2014), both of which have won plaudits and brickbats in equal measure from feminist viewers for their fantasies of adolescent female desire/ability.

The frisson carried by the rebellious schoolgirl as a figure of transgression is frequently put to work by European feminist filmmakers. Jessica Hausner’s Lovely Rita (2001), Katell Quillévéré’s Un poison violent (Love Like Poison, 2010), Rebecca Zlotowski’s Belle épine (2010), Alice Rohrwacher’s Corpo Celeste (2011), Muriel d’Ansembourg’s short ‘Good Night’ (2012), Frances Lea’s Strawberry Fields (2012) and Agnès Troublé’s Je m’appelle Hmmm… (My Name is Hmmm…, 2013): European female auteures appear to establish themselves with first films that centre on these descendants of Suzanne and Mona, vagabonds of desire, whose girl ‘hood consists of testing boundaries. In Franco-Lithuanian filmmaker Alanté Kavaïté’s Sundance winner The Summer of Sangaile (2015), gravity itself is tested by wannabe pilot Sangaile (Julija Steponaityte), where her loop-the-loops parallel the intense bodily experience of first love and sex with her girlfriend Auste (Aiste Dirziute).

Adolescent female sexuality provides a narrative motor of risk, often in relation to older male figures of wish-fear, and likewise in counter-formation to the Catholic Church as girl-training institution. Yet these narratives are often implicitly framed as hagiographies in which the adolescent girl’s body is the site of spectacular torture to prove her faith/heroism (and provide a legitimate turn-on). Małgorzata Szumowska’s Silver Bear-winning Ciało (Body, 2015) makes dark comedy from the ways in which the Church legitimates and eroticizes images of extreme embodiment. Twenty-year-old anorexic Olga (Justyna Suwala), according to Szumowska, ‘hates her body, which she sees as something useless. She wants to be free, to be void of its corporeality. She is a victim of this contemporary chase for an ideal body which in the end doesn’t exist at all’.27 Juxtaposing Olga’s group therapy sessions with her father’s police work, Szumowska shows how Olga resists girl-training under the Law of the Father, although she chooses a dangerous method.

Like Szumowska’s film, Troublé’s My Name is Hmmm… is compelling in that, unlike the others, it is premised on the reality of adolescent girls’ behaviour and experiences, rather than on Electra fantasies. Céline (Lou-Léila Demerliac) renames herself Hmmm after she runs away on a class trip, determined not to return home to her sexually abusive father. In what could be read as her fantasy, a truck driver called Peter Ellis (Douglas Gordon) takes care of her. Peter’s truck is festooned with fairy lights, op art curtains and sparkly horses, a clear sign that he is Hmmm’s invention, a willed manifestation of a safe girl ‘hood that is at once a bedroom and on the move.

Troublé’s film, like Tailfeathers’ and Derrick’s ‘Hurry Up’, is an essay on how trauma alters perception. Peter and Hmmm encounter Butoh dancers, a bonfire, a dancing windsock and street art, moments of abstract joy that enable Hmmm to rebuild herself in her idiosyncratic strangeness, reflected by the film’s odd temporality and point of view. It shares this strangeness, on the edge of fantasy or allegory, with Innocence (2004), Lucile Hadžihalilović’s sinisterly dreamy adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s novella, Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls (1903). Innocence is a beautiful film, and a film about beauty, in which young women attend a fantastical boarding school they cannot leave. As its title suggests, that beauty is intensified by a sense of fragility, and the film’s overwhelming saturated colour becomes a kind of violation.

Hadžihalilović described her static camera as akin to ‘pinning butterflies in a box’, its fixed framing creating an additional discomfort around the question of what lies beyond the school garden’s high wall.²⁸ The filmmaker told film phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack that ‘the further the story progresses without giving any answers, the more the anxiety builds’.²⁹ Innocence is a problematic for Hadžihalilović, something from which her characters need to break free, in a stark contrast to Hollywood’s insistence on virginal teens.

In the final scene, emergence is conflated with meeting young men, suggesting that innocence belongs specifically to the discarded all-female world of the Gothic girls’ school. Just as the risky-girl film admits and is ambivalent about its schoolgirl frisson, so too the Gothic girls’ school, in which the risk is not just female sexuality but homosociality, often figured as (murderous) hysteria. The unstable lesbian makes an appearance in Mary Harron’s The Moth Diaries (2011), which attempts to adapt a novel by Rachel Klein that is utterly dependent on an unreliable first-person narrator. Harron struggles to find a cinematic equivalent, having to commit to the psychological reality of Rebecca’s (Sarah Bolger) perceptions, be they of vampires or queer desire. The book’s delicate conjuration of grief and its traumatic effects on perception are lost as the film adopts familiar horror tropes that appear to address both a heteropatriarchal fetishization of adolescent girls, and the same audience’s anxiety about what those girls get up to alone, together.

Jordan Scott’s Cracks (2009) makes a better attempt at capturing the ambiguous intensity of boarding school friendships and their fallout, adapting Sheila Kohler’s novel.30 The film’s 1950s English setting, transposing the novel from South Africa, draws attention to the framing of girl ‘hood within oppressive social strictures. There’s a slim suggestion that the girls’ attentive bonding is a nascent proto-feminism that is formed by classism and racism as well as misogyny. Yet the film also shades into lesbophobia, particularly with relation to Miss G (Eva Green), cast initially as a catalyst and then, once her ‘secret’ is revealed, as a predator. Yet the St. Agnes’ Eve scene, in which the girls dress and make each other up, across a range of gender roles, is palpably, tenderly erotic: a door that the film then slams shut.

Léa Poole’s Lost and Delirious (2001) also curtails its central lesbian relationship, but makes clear that it is classism and homophobia that leads to tragedy. Adapted, once again, from a novel (Susan Swan’s The Wives of Bath, based on her own boarding school years), Poole’s film updates Swan’s novel from the 1950s.³¹ Yet the conventions of the Gothic girls’ school are so powerful that there are few signs of the 1990s bar a long take in which Paulie (Piper Perabo) sobs convulsively to Ani DiFranco over the end of her relationship with Tori (Jessica Paré). Paulie’s Shakespeare-quoting, fencing and hawking are at once bold adoptions of traditionally masculine pursuits, and a sad mimicry of Tori’s class status. While the film eschews the novel’s daringly grotesque ending, in which Paulie murders a man and glues his penis to her pelvis in an attempt to win back Tori, it is clear that possessing the mobile phallus (in the form of the fencing foil, ‘pale, stale, male’ quotation, or bird of prey) cannot be the solution, whatever the frisson it allows.

THEM AND US

Carol Morley’s The Falling (2014) adopts the ruse of a Gothic girls’ school drama, amping up the horror cues with flash inserts, called ‘subliminals’ by the filmmaker.32 These often show body parts or bloody hands, accompanied by a buzz drone, dramatizing the mass hysteria (now called mass psychogenic illness) sweeping through a private girls’ school in Oxfordshire in 1969. Like Innocence, The Falling associates female adolescence with the natural world, but here it is autumn rather than spring, with massive trees both decaying and deceptive as their reflections tremor in the lake. Girls, suggests the film, are still waters beneath whose reflective surfaces are dark depths. The film leaves the cause of the mass illness ambiguous, invoking grief, desire, rage, historical change, ley lines, hormones, performance and suggestibility. It moots what I call patriarchal affective disorder, transmitted from the state via the school and the family, as the real cause.

‘IT’S THEM AND US, TITCH’, shouts the protagonist Lydia Lamont (Maisie Williams) (aka Lamb, a reference to Blakean innocence) at her sceptical friend Titch (Rose Caton), who refuses to accept that Lydia’s fainting has a biological cause. Morley has her fainting schoolgirls interrogated by a disbelieving psychiatrist (Simon Paisley Day), whose questions show the limits of medical science. Indeed, the girls resist him with silence or, in Lydia’s case, a sharp assertion that he is patronizing her. Although the film shares with The Moth Diaries and Lost and Delirious an unrequited lesbian love story at its centre, the focus of the plot is not how Lydia goes uncontrollably mad after the death of her best friend Abbie (Florence Pugh), but how she very much goes sane. While her intelligence is engaged by the damaging double standard and her vision shapeshifted by trauma, she cannot articulate her new knowledge in words because she is pierced to the core by loss. Fainting – and Lydia’s compulsive relationship with her brother Kenneth (Joe Cole), who had briefly been Abbie’s lover – are the expressive female perversions that get her through.

In a device hauntingly similar to Morley’s short ‘Stalin My Neighbour’ (2004), in which Annie (Alicya Eyo) answers questions about a past trauma she wants to forget as asked by an offscreen documentary-maker who turns out to be imaginary and internal, the psychiatrist in The Falling is initially represented solely as an adult male voice offscreen. It is only Lydia who is able to re-embody this voice of God, through cuts between her twitchy gaze and medium close-ups of a foot, a calf and finally a face. Whereas the psychiatrist remains a powerful authoritative voice to the others, to Lydia’s frank gaze he is just a man (in bits).

Her realizations about how the world works are painful and maddening, but powerful, as her teachers learn when they attempt to isolate her from her friends. Morley is generous to the teachers, particularly the melancholy Miss Mantel (Greta Scacchi), who sees herself as a trembling ghost reflected in the classroom window. When she tells Abbie that she, too, will be ‘living history’ it’s hard not to hear her name as a reference to celebrated novelist Hilary Mantel, and to imagine a different future for this thwarted woman, who is painfully prompted by Abbie’s death to remember the girl she once was. Yet these private glimpses (including near-hysteria fostered between Miss Mantel and headmistress Miss Alvaro [Monica Dolan] about being middle-aged and misunderstood) do not disrupt keeping up appearances: it is Them and Us.

Lydia contests this closed front, standing up in her final school assembly and declaring, ‘You all know something is wrong. Are you not going to fight for the truth?… Kill the system! It’s killing you!’ She calls for solidarity in the face of systemic oppression, and her friends all back her, telling her she is not crazy, even as she punches into the crumbling plaster wall of the school toilets, determined to find the ‘something’ that is poisoning her life. She finds it not at school, but at home, with her agoraphobic and emotionally distant mother Eileen (Maxine Peake). Or rather: she finds it between the two, at the oak tree that was hers and Abbie’s special place.

Above all, girl ‘hoods are made in spaces and places where girls come together, either physically, or technologically, or imaginatively. Evridika and Billie demonstrate that the internet is as powerful a site of girl ‘hood as the sports field or the malls where Marieme/Vic and the Mean Girls roam. These often temporary spaces, used against their purpose, might offer a place a girl can call home, where she can come to inhabit her body (or, in the case of trans*, non-binary or intersex characters, also his, hir or their bodies). Flung up in the branches of an oak tree, almost a girl in the moon, Lydia pulls herself out of the institutions of school and the nuclear family. She creates a new kind of girl ‘hood, a fragile night-time space that incorporates the transgenerational, the queer, the elemental, the spiritual and the performative; a displaced place in which she can become.