Jane Campion and Gerard Lee's miniseries Top of the Lake (2013) marked New Zealand-born but Australian resident Campion's return to New Zealand for the first time since The Piano (1993). The show's central subject of child sexual abuse by state officials echoes the different yet resonating political situations in twenty-first century Australia and New Zealand, a state of emergency that allows for the emergence of what Rebecca Solnit (2009) calls a ‘disaster community’. Implicitly addressing critiques of her colonialist gaze in (...) the earlier film, the miniseries both decolonises the idea of the Utopian no-place and offers an alternate, emplaced vision of relational, anti-colonial provisional Utopia through the main, mirroring female characters, Detective Robin Griffin and her half-sister Tui Mitcham. In contrast to contemporaneous police procedurals focussed on lone female officers, Top of the Lake rejects the authority of the police state and offers a resolution aslant that critiques generic expectations of individual heroism and resolution within a legal framework. Looking specifically at how the show knows its place—Lake Wakatipu on South Island, New Zealand—the article offers a close reading of Top of the Lake's formal critique of the male colonial gaze and its adoption of a feminist soundscape in relation to Campion's oeuvre; and considers its politics through indigenous media theory, to argue that it marks an initial step towards a decolonisation of viewing practices in relation to feminist conceptions of Utopia. (shrink)

From 2013 to 2017, Hollywood actor Scarlett Johansson was the star vehicle in four unrelated science fiction films that saw her portray a posthuman female enabled by artificially intelligent technology. As such technologies become ever more ubiquitous in the world, so too are the burgeoning discourses around posthumanism and artificial intelligence, which are predominantly disseminated to non-specialists through science fiction and journalistic media. These discourses hold the power to influence our perceptions of incoming technological advancements. Therefore, it is important to (...) gain an interdisciplinary understanding of these discourses and their intersections in order to contribute to the cultivation of a general population that is technologically literate and empowered, as well as foster productive dialogues between specialists from within and across the sciences and humanities fields. The media’s configuration of Scarlett Johansson as an ‘exceptional’ woman, often by drawing upon the lexicon of science fiction, has initiated underlying connections between the actor and posthuman figures within the genre, contributing to her perceived suitability for such roles. Despite appearing to be the ‘ideal’ candidate for posthuman female roles, Johansson’s repeated casting poses several problematic implications, particularly when taken into consideration through a feminist lens. Not only does it contribute to an agenda that establishes improbable conceptions of how artificial, posthuman entities should look and behave, but it also perpetuates retrograde notions of gender roles. (shrink)

In 'No Apocalypse. Not Now' Derrida claims that 'literature produces its referent as a fictive or fabulous referent, which is itself dependent on the possibility of archivising...'. Taking the Kipling archive as its point of reference, this article considers the claims involved in the idea of a literary archive (with its appeals to authority, intention, origin, propri ety). In view of the continuing fascination with the details and events of Kipling's life (the interweaving of his public and private self, and (...) especially his connections with India and with Imperialism, and with Indian and English worlds and values), what does the history of Kipling's archive tell us, and how is this related to the location and repression of cultural anxieties (and, in particular, to notions of nation and national character). From the unacknowledged use of a quotation from 'If' in an advertisement for a patent tonic in 1919 to the appear ance of Kipling as hypertext in the 1997 Microsoft Word advertisement in the Sunday Supplements, which or whose 'Kipling' is in question in the iconicity of the continuing and contemporary representations of him. As in Derrida's description of De Man, Kipling is now a ghost of the culture. (shrink)

Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metaphysical works lies in what is unseen. There is an embodiment to Kubrick’s films that maintains a sense of subjectivity, but one which is unapparent and non-visual. This opens another way into Kubrick’s works, that of conditions of audibility, affectivity, and signs. To think of embodiment from such an audible perspective requires one to subvert film spectatorship and instead enter the reality of the film’s (...) immanent, borderless unfolding as itself. This essay applies Gilles Deleuze’s semiotic concepts of cinema, metaphysics, and subjectivity to conditions of audibility and unseeing, a connection Deleuze largely ignored in his writings. These dual concepts of audibility and unseeing break prevailing analytical norms in cinema discourse that affirm limitations via material, visual, textual, and spatial reification: subjective-objective delineations, the body and the gaze, sound as necessarily spatial/material, and the dominance of images in regard to aesthetics, surveillance, and evidence. Instead, this essay moves through Kubrick’s constructions of milieu that are unseen in the midst of an otherwise visual unfolding, and audible in the midst of an otherwise sonic unfolding. To consider Kubrick’s films through their audible embodiment, one must detach the microphone from its adherence to space, the body from its visual gaze. Here, sounds, images, and objects become secondary to hearing and signs in a temporal unfolding, resulting in a cinema that is experiential rather than representational. This opens to an actuality of spirit within the world of the film, offering new opportunities for creativity in the cinematic form. (shrink)