[csaa-forum] Indie Cinema Seminar: Claire Perkins ('Not Just a Female Judd Apatow') and Laura Henderson ('Framing the Bling Ring)

[Timothy Laurie]

Screen & Cultural Studies Seminar Series

Theme: “Indies”

Dr. Claire Perkins (Monash University)
Laura Henderson (University of Melbourne)

Time: 12pm-1.30pm, Thursday October 9
Venue: 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne


Not Just a Female Judd Apatow: Lynn Shelton and Female Directors in Mumblecore
Claire Perkins

>From 2005 onward, the mumblecore “subgenre” has closely mirrored the operation of the broader field of American indie discourse. Critics and audiences alike have cultivated a taste culture that values notions of “reality” and “authenticity”, grounding this in a loose set of lo-fi formal characteristics, and a group of maverick auteurs whose visions are seen to defiantly refuse mainstream conventions of narrative, style and characterization—figures like Andrew Bujalski, Mark and Jay Duplass, Joe Swanberg and Lynn Shelton. This paper takes up the case of the Seattle-based Shelton—an editor by trade—to consider the place of the female director within the mumblecore movement. Is this a site where women are marginalized by a masculinist “brand” as they are elsewhere in indie culture? Shelton has prominence within the parameters of this niche movement, but is cast here primarily as “a female Judd Apatow”—an image constructed in the wake of films that were received as her “bromances”—My Effortless Brilliance (2008) and Humpday (2009).

I argue that this image of Shelton discursively excludes from view the feminist dimensions of her filmmaking that give a frank perspective on female desires, ambitions and insecurities. This is most apparent in her most recent features—Your Sister’s Sister (2011), Touchy Feely (2013) and Laggies (2014)—which merge the improvised aesthetic and intimate micro-plots of mumblecore with structured scripts and the presence of bigger indie stars (Rosemarie DeWitt, Alison Janney, Ellen Page). In these films, Shelton takes up the ethically loaded situations and verbose interpersonal dynamics of the “smart” film, but couches these in an expressive, everyday mode that favors the unironic exploration of difficult emotion between female characters. The sensibility that results doesn’t fit neatly with any pre-existing indie category, but does forge important links to other female indie directors such as Nicole Holofcener, Sarah Polley and Lena Dunham (another figure with connections to both mumblecore and Apatow). Examining this sensibility and its transformation of the mumblecore ethos provides an important example of how indie women’s filmmaking can change the traditions, paradigms and institutions in which it is embedded.
Claire Perkins is Lecturer in Film & Screen Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. She is the author of American Smart Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2012) and co-editor of Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and B is for Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics and Cultural Value (SUNY, 2014). Her writing has also appeared in journals including Camera Obscura, Celebrity Studies and The Velvet Light Trap. Claire is currently working on projects investigating the place of female directors in the US independent realm, and the global explosion of transnational television remakes.


Framing The Bling Ring: The Impact of the Mobile Screen on Contemporary Los Angeles
Laura Henderson


A great deal of ink has been spilled over the incursion of mobile technology into everyday life, and in particular in their role in teenage culture. These anxieties are presented and problematised by Sofia Coppola's 2013 film The Bling Ring, a partially non-fiction account of the Hollywood burglaries of 2008. These crimes, perpetrated by teenagers, can be seen as an emblematic of the digital turn in youth culture. Furthermore, when considered through the lens of Coppola's film, they reveal the tectonic shifts of culture, landscape and psychogeography that mobile screens have wrought. While there is growing concern about the role that digital culture has in society, there has been little academic work looking at actual, material changes that this technological shift has catalyzed. This paper aims to consider one aspect of this digital turn, by considering the evolving landscape of Los Angeles. Taking The Bling Ring as a case study, the paper outlines the permeation of the virtual and actual in contemporary L.A., a transfer aided by expectation and repetition.


Blurring the distinction between the filmic and the geographic, this paper presents a meditation on the impact of landscapes on the spectator, and of the spectator on these landscapes. By examining the theory of mass culture from Michel de Certeau and Anne Friedberg's Virtual Windows, the paper proposes that social technology has sped up the collaborative, rhizomatic change in perception. These changes are understood here on two fronts: through a philosophical engagement with "the frame", and with the neuroscience of learning and perception. These two disparate fields are brought together through The Bling Ring, a film which reveals that on a neurological and philosophical level, repetition becomes expectation, which becomes perception. For this reason, the virtual world of film is not just relevant, but crucial to our understanding of how culture changes through technological innovation.

Laura Henderson is a PhD candidate in Screen and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis considers theories of spectatorship in the light of recent neuropsychological research. Her book reviews have been featured in Senses of Cinema.




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