Sunday, March 19, 2017

Episode #90 - Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (Ms. 45)



"I love the sensory democracy of body horror. It strips everything except the fact we all have bodies, and bodies can hurt."

Cinema is not just watching: it's shivering, sweating, and screaming. Those aspects of the moves are part of what drives Australian film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. The co-editor of Senses of Cinema discusses her interest in horror films through a number of multimedia projects from radio to image collages on Twitter. They also dive deep on her books on rape-revenge, Dario Argento's Suspria, and now her latest on Abel Ferrara's exploitation classic, Ms. 45...or does the film actually belong to its lead actress Zoë Lund? The two look at the unique tension between director and performer, and how this surprisingly complex film has become an icon for feminist horror buffs.

0:00-2:51 Opening 
3:44-10:20 Establishing Shots — Song to Song
11:06-53:39 Deep Focus — Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
54:47-57:04 Sponsorship Section
58:15-1:25:52 Double Exposure — Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara and Zoë Lund)
1:25:59-1:27:47 Close / Outtake

Notes and Links from the Conversation
—Check out Alex's website and her Twitter
—Check out Alex's monographs on Ms. 45 and Suspiria, as well as her two genre reviews, Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study and Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality
—Check out her writing on Senses of Cinema and her radio show Plato's Cave
The story of the Hitchcock Five
—CJ Clover's Men, Women, and Chain Saws and Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis
—Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
The American Nightmare (2000)
—The all female horror anthology XX
Hannah Neurotica and Ax Wound Zine
The Stranger With My Face Film Festival
—Alex's "appreciation" of the films of Roberta Findlay
—Alex on film bros, extreme cinema, and The Revenant
—Kei Fujiwara's Organ
—Daria Argento's The Stendhal Syndrome
—Diane Wolfthal's Images of Rape
—Patricia McCormick discusses Suspiria in her book Cinesexuality
—Laura Marks discusses haptic visuality in Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media
—Australian Film Sites 4:3 and Screening the Past
—Alex's Grant on Australian Female Film Critics of the 1980s and 1990s 
—BJ Colangelo on loving rape-revenge films

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