Title: Actresses’ bodies in transition: gestures, performances and figures between inherited models and new subjectivities

Acceptance of submissions for the Notebook section: 1-30 November 2024

Date of publication: July 2025

Coordinators: Gonzalo de Lucas, Annalisa Mirizio, Olga García-Defez and Carmen Guiralt

 

According to Maurice Blanchot (1971: 10), with Détruire, dit-elle (1969) Marguerite Duras gave us a new word and a word of order: destruction as a beginning and the need to destroy love to make revolution, to find new ways of loving. A year after the May 1968 protests, Duras’s book and film of the same name posited the inseparable nature of political resistance and affective forces, while offering two revelations—one literary and the other cinematic—of the possibility of a form of writing in which nullification and emergence “always move together”, as Michel Foucault and Hélène Cixous would suggest some years later (Cixous, 1975: 77) in a conversation about Duras. In fact, it was Cixous herself, in the first pages of her essay “Le rire de la Méduse”, who would reclaim Duras’s word of order to locate the woman’s place of enunciation between “two sides and two intentions: to destroy, or to break; and to predict the unforeseen, or to project” (1975: 17, emphasis added).

 

For the 40^th issue of L’Atalante, we will seek to draw attention to this space between destruction and projection, identified by Duras and Cixous as a site of enunciation, full of speculations and explorations in search of new forms, but also as a transition towards a hidden region that is “on the verge of being discovered” (Cixous, 1975: 17). In the context of the feminist revolution, it is common knowledge that this transition can be located between the dismantling of gender stereotypes (which began in the mid-1970s) and the affirmation of new female subjectivities and transidentities that, in the death throes of the 20th century, asserted previously unforeseen and excess articulations between bodies, discourses and desires (Butler, 1990), without renouncing the discontinuity and contradiction (De Lauretis, 1999) that non-unitary subjects are able to enjoy (Braidotti, 1994).

 

The analysis of these new subjectivities and identities to date has focused mainly to their definitions, performative acts and the effects they have achieved. However, there has been very little research on this space of enunciation located between the destruction of the old and the projection of the new (Cixous, 1975: 17), i.e., the space between revolution and construction, as an interval understood not only as différance, spacing or the becoming-space of time (Derrida, 1972: 34), but also in the terms proposed by Tynyanov as early as 1924, as “a revolution which at the same time constitutes a structure”, a moment when inertia has lost its force, repetition has stopped and “things tear off the masks” (Tynyanov, 1979: 122, 125).

 

Building on the studies of Núria Bou and Xavier Pérez (2018; 2022) on female desire in the Spanish film stars of the Franco regime, we propose to explore this space of enunciation for new female subjectivities and identities through the work of the actresses who, in this transition, were immersed in processes of historical and aesthetic transformation or in political regime changes that brought traditional female archetypes into conflict with the urgent need for sexual emancipation (not only of women, as Spain’s Destape film movement demonstrates) and the political criticism of identity, calling on feminism “to rise to the test of a universe without answers” (Lonzi, 1974: 24).

 

We are interested in investigating the role of the big stars and secondary figures in film history and the formal changes the medium has undergone, particularly in the avant-garde and new cinema movements that first emerged in the 1960s, when these performers are positioned between inherited models and the potential production of new subjectivities and identities. This exploration will allow us to identify how the bodies of these actresses embody, render visible or mirror the multiplication of the self; the figurative displacements and intervals that are brought into play in bodies in transition, in the expression of desire or pleasure; performances that eschew psychology to “create something that happens between ideas and to make it impossible to give it a name. So at every instant, the aim is to provide a coloration, a shape, and an intensity to something that never says what it is” (Foucault, 2018: 185).

 

Studying actresses’ images will also facilitate an opportunity to reflect on how bodies, gestures and performances document these processes of transformation while they contribute to creating, foreseeing or imagining new figures of the feminine (Brenez, 1990) that may even open up areas of indecision into which the body tends to escape (Deleuze, 1981). Particular attention will also be given to the quality of lab experiment that characterises unsuccessful attempts, operations of resistance that failed because “[w]hat we value in the period of an interval are not ‘successes’ and ‘ready-made things’ […]. We need a way out. ‘Things’ may well be unsuccessful; what is important is that they bring closer the possibility of ‘successes’” (Tynyanov, 1979: 139).

 

The study of actresses can thus recover a kind of thinking that “occurs in the interstice, or the disjunction” (Deleuze, 2006: 72). With this in mind, this issue will also aim to draw attention to the aesthetics and procedures of the fold (Deleuze, 1988) that act as mechanisms of difference, never shunning irregularity, excess, strangeness or movement, combining opposite directions, dissonant chords, acceleration and inflection. In the specific case of filmmaking, studying this space of enunciation of actresses as an interval means identifying it in accordance with Vertov’s theoretical perspective, as a “force of difference, but not only the difference between two shots; there is an interval between any two shots in the film because they all participate in the vision of the same social phenomenon” (Aumont, 2020: 61).

 

Analysing actresses from the perspective of film editing, for the opportunity it offers for association and comparison, also points to the possibility of genealogy as a critical method, not so much for the idea of rendering what cannot be seen visible as for the work that images do to show how one sensory experience is transformed by another. Genealogy draws out memories and knowledge from disregarded details, as it is an “approach that attends to the stories, but above all to the gestures, the minor movements, the way of resting one’s hand or of wearing one’s hair, a prolonged past, the contours of a wall, being sensitive to things, perceiving relationships” (Soto Calderón, 2023: 62).

 

However, although the practice and theory of editing have worked with the relationship between images as a strategy and a key element of conception and creation in filmmaking ever since the 1920s, the interval and the interstice have rarely been analysed in relation to the tradition of star studies and the images of actors. We believe that the acting work of women—whose bodies became the site of political, theoretical, aesthetic and social tensions in the last few decades of the 20th century—is the ideal place to begin an exploration of this type.

 

Possible lines of research include:

 

• Actresses’ bodies as texts, maps, hypertexts, or palimpsests.
• The actress’s performance as an intersection of historical and political tensions: resistances, symptoms of transformation, gaps, turns.
• Editing as a way of thinking: how actresses are conceived of from the perspective of editing.
• Transition and folds through editing: hazards and successes resulting from the chaos of the image.
• The multiplication of the self: splits, ruptures, mirrors, metamorphoses.
• New ways of editing between bodies and figures: avoiding symmetries, experimenting with new associations.
• Interrogations of the domestic space.
• Emotional states in the actress’s performance on the basis of cinematic modernity and its relationship with other artistic practices and related theoretical and social spaces.
• The actresses’ legacy: new subjectivities in Spanish cinema since the end of the Franco regime.
• Film history viewed from the perspective of the sensory and aesthetic transformations embodied by actresses.

 

REFERENCES

 

Aumont, J. (2020). El montaje. Buenos Aires: La marca editora.

 

Blanchot, M. (1971). L’amitié. Paris: Gallimard.

 

Bou, N., Pérez, X. (eds.) (2018). El cuerpo erótico de la actriz bajo los fascismos. España, Italia, Alemania (1939-1945). Madrid: Cátedra.

 

Bou, N., Pérez, X. (eds.) (2022). El deseo femenino en el cine español (1939-1975). Arquetipos y actrices. Madrid: Cátedra.

 

Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press.

 

Brenez, N. (1990). De la figure en général et du corps en particulier. Dissemblance et figuration. Paris: Flammarion.

 

Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

 

Cixous, H. (1975a). «“À propos de Marguerite Duras”, par Michel Foucault et Hélène Cixous». Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, 89, 1975, 8-22.

 

Cixous, H. (1975b). Le rire de la Méduse. L’Arc, 61, 39-54.

 

De Lauretis, T. (1999). Soggetti eccentrici. Milan: Feltrinelli.

 

Deleuze, G. (1981). Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation. Paris: Éditions de la différence.

 

Deleuze, G. (1988). Le pli. Leibnitz et le baroque. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

 

Deleuze, G. (2006). Foucault. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

 

Derrida, J. (1972). Marges- de la philosophie. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

 

Duras, M. (1969). Détruire, dit-elle. Paris: Gallimard.

 

Foucault, M. (2018). Werner Schroeter and Michel Foucault in Conversation. Foucault at the Movies. New York: Columbia University Press (pp. 179-192).

 

Lonzi, C. (1974). Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile. In Sputiamo Su Hegel. La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale. E altri scritti (pp. 11-19). Milan: Rivolta femminile.

 

Soto Calderón, A. (2023). Imágenes que resisten. La genealogía como método crítico. Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona.

 

Tynyanov, Y. (2018). Interval. In The Futurists, the Formalists and the Marxist Critique (pp. 106-143). London: Ink Links.

 

L'Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos accepts submissions of unpublished essays on topics related to film theory and/or praxis that stand out for their innovative nature. Articles should focus on approaches to the cinematographic fact made preferably from the perspectives of historiography or audiovisual analysis. Those texts that approach novel objects of study with rigorous and well-evidenced methodologies will be appreciated. Articles that take as their main reference the processes of signification through the analysis of the audiovisual form and/or the narratological elements specific to our field, focusing on methodologies specifically related to the treatment of the image will be favoured in the selection process. Although we accept works with other methodologies that approach the filmic fact from transversal perspectives (Cultural Studies, philological approaches, etc.) we consider that the main interest of the journal is located on the studies that take the specifically cinematographic expressive tools as the main elements of discourse. Likewise, texts that are not limited to describing, enumerating or summarizing details of the plot, but that rigorously apply a specific and well-evidenced analysis methodology, reaching particular and novel results, will be given priority.

Below are a few aspects to keep in mind:

• Submissions must be original and must conform to the submission guidelines of the journal and to the standards and scientific rigour expected of an academic publication.
• Submissions will be evaluated for the originality of the topic explored, especially if it relates to an issue not previously addressed in the publication. Submissions dealing with topics previously addressed in the journal may be rejected. The content of the issues published to date can be consulted on the journal's website.
• All submissions will undergo an external peer review process that will respect the anonymity of both authors and reviewers (double blind peer review) in an effort to prevent any possibility of bias. In the event of a very high number of submissions, the Editorial Board will make a prior selection of the articles to be peer reviewed, choosing the articles deemed the most appropriate for the issue. Failure to observe the submission guidelines and/or standards of originality and academic rigour will result in rejection of the submission by the Editorial Board without external review.
• The acceptance of the manuscripts will be notified to the authors within a maximum period of six months.
• Articles (which should be between 5,000 and 7,000 words including all sections) must be submitted via the website of the journal as .odt or .docx files, using the template provided for this purpose. A blind version of the article will be provided. A complete version of the article and any images (.jpg, .png) must be uploaded to the website as complementary files. A detailed version of the submission guidelines can be found at the following link. Any articles that fail to meet these requirements will be rejected automatically.
• The selected articles will be published in a bilingual edition (Spanish and English). The authors of the texts accepted for publication must pay the costs that result from the translation or revision - in the case of providing, along with the original, a translated version - of their article.
• If the original manuscript is in English, the authors of the accepted papers must provide a professional translation to Spanish. The Executive Editorial Board may also require a revision by the translator recommended by the journal for Non-English speaking authors.
• If the original manuscript is in Spanish, the authors of the accepted papers for publication must pay the costs that result from the translation to English or revision—in the case of providing, along with the original, a translated version—of their article. In all cases, and in order to guarantee the quality of the translations and the unity of linguistic criteria, the text must be translated or proofread by the translator recommended by the journal, a freelance professional specialised in Film Studies. His work will be paid in advance and via credit card, bank transfer or Paypal by the authors.
• L'Atalante does not offer any compensation for published articles. For more information: info@revistaatalante.com