Browsing by Author "Smit, Alexia Jayne"

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    Between the norm and a hard place: representing marginality in Harmony Korine's Gummo
    (2013) De Villiers, Jacques; Smit, Alexia Jayne
    This dissertation centres on an examination of Gummo, the provocative directorial debut by filmmaking enfant terrible, Harmony Korine. While largely dismissed by critics who were put off by the film's visceral intensity, unconventional narrative structure and unsentimental depictions of marginality, I want to counter such criticism by arguing that Gummo in fact offers a refreshingly new approach to cinematic representations of white poverty in the United States. While U.S. cinema has often furnished us with representations of poverty, the majority of these ï¬ lms have tended to focus on characters' economic hardships. By contrast, Gummo is almost unique in privileging the cultural and ideological dimensions - concerns with weight and sporting success, attaining and retaining certain norms of masculine strength and appearance, repeated references to celebrity culture, to name but a few examples - while locating such normative dimensions within the bleak material realities that mark life on the breadline. In so doing, Gummo draws attention to the paradoxical cultural question of poverty in the so-called First World: How does one engage with the daily barrage of ideologically imposed social and cultural norms when one's basic living conditions are diametrically opposed to such norms? While most films tend to treat the poor as always outside and in binary opposition to the normative order, I want to propose that we re-think poverty and marginality's cultural identity as always hybrid and in-between the margin and the norm. Such an interstitial position is articulated by Gummo's highlighting of two very different representational approaches: one based on an abject materiality that is often framed in an almost tactile and disconcertingly visceral manner, the other relying on the maintenance of a plastic or surface aesthetic through which symbolic cultural norms and ideals are semiotically conveyed. Rather than seeking to resolve such approaches' contradictions to one another, Gummo gives cinematic expression to the ambivalent position that results when one occupies both spaces simultaneously. This encourages us to think of marginality interstitially, rather than conceiving of it as merely 'other' to what is considered normative or mainstream. In theorising Gummo's representation of white marginality as an interstitial phenomenon, I have drawn primarily on the work of three quite different thinkers: post-colonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha, gender theorist Judith Butler and film theorist Vivian Sobchack. Chapter one engages with Bhabha's ideas about cultural hybridity, seeking to demonstrate how Gummo represents marginality as a decidedly heterogeneous affair, one that blurs all clear notions of centre and margin. Chapter two explores this breaking down of binary value further by investigating how, through subversive acts of re-signification, the norm or centre can become 'contaminated' by the margin. Here I employ Butler's notion of performativity and citation, which demonstrates how norms can be materialised and cited in non-normative circumstances that challenge the validity of the dominant discourse. Such 'non-normative' materialisation blurs the boundary between that which is normative and that which is 'other'. Chapter three expands this notion of re-signiï¬ cation and hybridity still further. Drawing upon the phenomenology-based theory of Vivian Sobchack, I explore those aspects of Korine's film that - like Sobchack's theory - privilege materiality and the body as sites of experience. I then proceed to read Sobchack in relation to Butler and Bhabha, arguing that the manner in which Korine almost tactically frames the harsh, abject materiality of Gummo's setting plays off and meshes with the presence of symbolic norms and ideals. Gummo and its characters are thus ï¬ rmly lodged in a hybrid Third Space; in-between the cultural signs of 'normalcy' and a materialised space of messy abjection. It is between these two seemingly incompatible dimensions that the film and its characters make meaning and forge a sense of cultural identity.
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    A strange mirror : realism, ambiguity and absence in the work of Harmony Korine
    (2007) Smit, Alexia Jayne; Marx, Lesley
    This dissertation examines the work of Harmony Korine with a particular focus on his use of realism as a disruptive critical tool. My study combines a theoretical and an analytical project. My aim is to defend Korine's works against charges of naive realism by revealing the limits of a structuralist approach to Korine's realism and arguing, instead, for the adoption of the phenomenologically grounded, realist criticism of Andre Bazin. I use Bazin' s observations about the referential or indexical relationship between the camera and the physical world and his definition of 'phenomenological realism' to argue for a privileged and fruitful relationship between Korine's realism and the physical or affective dimensions of the cinematic image. I supplement this discussion with a critical application of theories of affect forwarded by such theorists as Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, as well as theories of the grotesque. In addition, my thesis extends the links that Bazin draws between the restraint defining phenomenological realism and a productive ambiguity to argue that, rather than presenting an unsophisticated realist approach, Korine's realism operates as the primary critical tool in a confrontation with dominant sign systems and, ultimately, with the limitations of both verbal and filmic language.
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    Then it happened; The four degrees of narrative separation : exploring the process of adaptation through biolographical texts
    (2014) Graour, Kristina; Smit, Alexia Jayne
    To write critically about any given text is very different to writing critically about the process of that text’s creation. Given that this essay will deal closely with representations of the self, perhaps it is not out of place for me to open with an autobiographical confession: while I greatly enjoy the former, relishing opportunities to analyse both literary and filmic texts, I have no such fond feelings for the latter, especially when the situation calls for a critical analysis of my own writing process. The task seems to intrude on a sacred space that I imagine most writers value greatly, a time when what will eventually become the ‘finished product’ is still in formation, is still incomplete. Due to the very nature of the process, it is a time when everything is still in flux, when ideas are still seeking their final form. Therefore, subjecting this tenuous process to critical examination seems somewhat like a betrayal of its nature, a desire to fix in meaning that which has no such absolute meaning. As a result, I have strategically avoided such undertakings in the past as much as possible. It then comes as a surprise to me that after completing the screenplay for Then It Happened, I have the desire to do just that. The reason, I believe, is revealing. It is not the aforementioned final product (the screenplay) that has inspired the ideas that will be discussed in this essay, but the process of creating it, for it is the process that brought me into contact with the three incarnations of the biographical narrative that will be discussed below: autobiography, biography and the biopic (in the form of both the screenplay and the final film). If I have done my job as a storyteller relatively well, then – hopefully – upon reading the screenplay, the reader will receive it as one coherent narrative, with a unity of purpose and style. They will not see it as a collage, composed out of several key sources, namely, Frank Capra’s autobiography The Name Above the Title, Joseph McBride’s biography of Capra, The Catastrophe of Success, as well as six other biographies of the key players: Harry Cohn, Robert Riskin, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. The reader might – again, hopefully – glean the sense that a significant amount of research has gone into the screenplay, and from this might infer that multiple sources have been used, but the story should not feel in any way disjointed or 2 fragmented. The purpose of this essay, then, will be precisely to take this story apart and to reveal the collage. In this critical analysis of my writing process, I would like to reverse that very process: instead of stitching together the information gathered through my research, attempting to make the connections invisible, I will magnify those very seams and examine the act of their creation. For I believe that these seams can inform the way that we think about the processes of writing, reading, adaptation as well as the intimate connections between the three, ultimately revealing the importance of narrative in our lives. I will begin, in sections one and two, by examining the forms of autobiography and biography in their own right as well as in their relationships to one another. These sections of the essay will be used to establish a foundation on which the discussion of key questions may be based – questions about subjectivity, interpretation, adaptation and fidelity. Then, in sections three and four, I will look more closely at my own writing process and its intersection with the autobiographical and biographical writings of others. Here I will examine the biopic genre and connect it with reflections on theories of adaptation, furthering this discussion by exploring alternate ways in which both my screenplay, as well as biopics in general, may be read in relation to the contested issue of fidelity.