Part I

Introduction

Mulvey’s psychoanalytic feminist film theory had many implications for the study of cinema, and this essay aims to first delineate the way in which these implications have influenced and challenged feminist film theory. Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” raised several issues which have been taken up by feminist film theorists since; as primary examples in relation to horror cinema I use Barbara Creed and Carol Clover, whose works on the monstrous-feminine and the slasher film (respectively) are both seminal and deeply indebted to Mulvey’s theory. The examination of those sources in relation to Mulvey’s theory concludes Part I of this essay.

Part II will analyse two modern horror films which, I argue, take as their subject woman and the feminine in ways which challenge and oppose what Mulvey calls “the language of the dominant patriarchal order” (Mulvey 485). This essay will argue that it is now possible to attempt an analysis of some – by no means all – modern horror cinema, which occupies a position outside of traditional or mainstream patriarchal codification, a position referred to (and henceforth described) as primal sisterhood. ¹

Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic feminist film theory and its implications.

In her paper “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Mulvey posits that “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form,” but that “the paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world” (Mulvey 483). She goes on to describe woman’s central place in the ordering of the patriarchal, and her constitution as signifier of phallic lack; symbolically, woman “as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat” (Ibid. 493).

It was this idea of woman not only as signifier of castration, but as deadly castrator herself, that Barbara Creed theorised in The Monstrous-Feminine (1993), taking as her starting point a lack of discussion of “the representation of woman-as-monster. Instead,” Creed states, “emphasis has been on woman as victim of the (mainly male) monster” (Creed – Monstrous-Feminine 1). But Creed’s analysis by no means suggests that the presence of the monstrous-feminine in cinema indicates a break from the structures of patriarchal language which Mulvey aimed to attack (Creed – Monstrous-Feminine 7, Mulvey 484 respectively). Instead, the monstrous-feminine “speaks more to us about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity” (Creed Ibid.). In effect, whilst theorising the monstrous-feminine gives us access to images of woman previously repressed, it does not constitute a theory of the “female unconscious” independent of phallocentric theory. Nonetheless, to challenge the phallocentric ordering of the unconscious as represented in film is what Mulvey sought.

Carol Clover took Mulvey’s theory (among others) and used the slasher film to demonstrate how the gaze has changed in modern horror – and not just the gaze, but the modes of gender identification at work in cinema. Sue Thornham states in Feminist Film Theory: a reader that Clover argues for an “ambiguous and oscillating gender identity of the slasher film’s Final Girl (which) allows its male spectator, too, to oscillate between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ viewing positions” (230-231).

But in Clover’s own words it is more than that; in relation to Mulvey’s theory (here quoting Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”):

“The classic split between ‘spectacle and narrative, which ‘supposes the man’s role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen’, is at least unsettled in the slasher film. When the Final Girl…assumes the ‘active investigating gaze’, she exactly reverses the look, making a spectacle of the killer and a spectator of herself.

(…)The gaze becomes, at least for awhile, female. More to the point, the female exercise of scopic control results not in her annihilation, in the manner of classic cinema, but in her triumph; indeed, her triumph depends on her assumption of the gaze.” (Clover 245)

What Clover argues the slasher film does, and I argue, what the following films attempt, is what Mulvey called for in her article; a breaking down of dominating, structuring convention, and a constitution of the feminine which does not depend solely on the codes of the patriarchal unconscious in order to be made intelligible. ²

Part II

Primal Sisterhood versus Female Solidarity in Ginger Snaps.

“Woman, animal, death,” Barbara Creed argues, “they are inextricably linked” (Creed Phallic Panic 25). For Creed, they form the essential features of what she calls the primal uncanny (Ibid. 24). In Ginger Snaps, we are clearly in the realm of the primal uncanny; it is the accompanying idea of “sisterhood” which gives us trouble here. ³

In Sue Short’s analysis of Ginger Snaps she quotes Molly Haskell, “framed very much as a lament”, asking the question “where…is the camaraderie, the much vaunted mutual support among women?” (Short 88-89). One of Short’s concerns is “the difficulties of establishing female solidarity, and the greater tendency to depict women in competition with one another” (Ibid.88). The idea that there should be any kind of female solidarity at all is something Ginger Snaps toys with; the sisters Ginger and Brigitte, despite a blood pact which appears twice in the film – and at the end, its import is magnified and transformed by the transference of the lycanthropic virus from one sister to the other – are still divided in the realm of sex, puberty and identity, to the extent that one sister must kill the other, but not before becoming her. For Haskell, this undermines “feminist” notions of unity; but for critical feminism, and by extension I argue the female unconscious (because when we are in the realm of the primal as we are in Ginger Snaps, I argue that we are dealing with issues of the female unconscious) this is the issue of the female subject – within feminism, within society – described perfectly.

Sue Short points to the depiction of women in competition with one another in order to draw this link with Haskell’s lament, essentially arguing that female characters such as Ginger and Brigitte represent the disintegration of the female subject, pointing to rivalry, jealousy and aggression as things which attack female kinship and ultimately destroy it – “Brigitte holds her dead sister…more wolf than human…‘not even related any more’” (Short 98). According to Short, “Brigitte is ultimately forced to make a separation, exclaiming… ‘I’m not dying in this room with you’” – a separation which I do not believe exists, as Brigitte, infected voluntarily with lycanthropy, holds her sister in her arms as she dies. The phrase “I’m not dying in this room with you” can be read to emphasise Brigitte’s wish for Ginger to survive, breaking not only the curse of lycanthropy but the suicide pact the sisters have made and renewed with lycanthropy. Here, it is the “camaraderie” and “solidarity” of the female – expressed by blood pact – which must be broken in order for the feminine to survive, suggesting that the survival of the feminine is more than just a matter of keeping the female subject “solid”.

Ginger Snaps is more than a cautionary tale; it is a complex rendering of the fight to define the female subject against a flattened, “universal” image, regardless of whether any of the females concerned achieve success. It is this fight which Short labels “competition” and “rivalry”, setting the struggle against an unfortunately sexist background which dictates that women should stick together, and that competitive, aggressive behaviour towards other females is “masculine”, a stance Creed criticises and which I refer to above in Part I.

The cautionary aspect of such a reading is further undermined by the “accidental kill” – of all the murder and mayhem executed by Ginger, it is the off-hand, accidental death of Trina which threatens the sisters the most. This is a motif found in both Ginger Snaps and The Descent, but its wider significance is beyond the scope of this essay.

Instead, if we can view the overriding themes of Ginger Snaps as the unifying factors of a kind of primal femininity – blood/fluids/death, woman/sexuality/violence, animal/nature/the pre-patriarchal – then we can examine Ginger (who represents almost all these aspects) and Brigitte (seemingly a pre-patriarchal, pre-sexual girl who nonetheless gets her hands dirty, assuming Ginger’s “identity” as a werewolf in order to find a cure for her sister by engaging in a tense relationship with an overtly mature male figure and eventually killing her sister in a bloody battle), and the other significant female figures of the film (Pamela, the mother who takes responsibility for Trina’s death against all logic, and Trina, the school bitch who Ginger accidentally kills with little aggression and less sympathy), as signifying not aspects of a divided self but aspects of a female subject which, by nature, is in competition with itself and which is constituted (not deconstituted) in the violence of such exchanges. If this is not an obviously “empowering” view of the emergence of a female unconscious order to rival the patriarchal, then we must question the assumption that such an emergence should be “empowering” at all.

Feminism, Cannibalism, and the Female Subject in The Descent.

Here too we are clearly in the realm of the primal – six women descend into the twisting bowels of the earth, muck about in a lot of mud, blood and guts, and finally die there – though it is more the abjection of Creed’s theory (Creed – Monstrous-Feminine 8-14) than the primal uncanny itself. However, abjection in relation to the feminine face of the monstrous does not adequately describe the horror delineated by The Descent – of which the abject constitutes only a third of the film’s horrific or monstrous content. Before the six women encounter the deformed, evolved/devolved humanoids which pursue them through pools and caverns full of human and animal remains in all stages of decomposition and eventually eat them, they first voluntarily elect to descend, and in the final sequence each of their deaths (and Sarah’s entombment in her own madness, both physical and symbolic) is in fact a result of each woman’s transgressions against one (or more) of her sisters. It is this painful exercise in subtle horror – the horror of the female subject essentially eating itself, without the use of teeth – that we find compelling in the first two thirds of the film, and which bears fruit in the overt form of the abject in the last third.

Of no small import is the fact that, with the exception of Juno’s accidental butchery of Beth, and Sarah’s subsequent butchering of Juno, all these transgressions are forgiven – or rather, dismissed. Even when it is only us, as an audience, who can comment on the transgression – as when Sarah first enters the cave, finds a bloody fingerprint, but neglects to say anything about it and thereby allows the entire group to descend unwitting into a trap full of cannibals. We forgive her, because she – and we – are then distracted by a flock of bats bursting out of the darkness to frighten Sarah – and us.

Even Juno’s betrayal of Beth, and Beth’s dying message to Sarah, has this element of forgiveness/dismissal – Juno “kills” Beth by stabbing her in the neck with an ice-pick, but Beth’s response is to plead, “don’t leave me”. When Sarah later finds Beth, dying but not yet dead, Beth’s words again are “she did this to me – she left me”, not “she killed me”, or “she stabbed me in the bloody neck”. For Beth, the transgression is not in the accident, but in the emotional betrayal that proceeds it – both hers, when Juno leaves her, and Sarah’s, when Beth rips the necklace from Juno as she falls and discovers Juno’s affair with Sarah’s now-dead husband. It is not the killing female which Beth (and the spectator) finds monstrous, but the idea of the female abandoning itself. This notion is repeated in the final exchange between Sarah and Juno – even though we have followed Sarah’s parallel descent into the primal, animalistic, pre-patriarchal state closer perhaps than we have followed Juno’s, it is still with Juno that our sympathies lie when Sarah butchers her, exacting revenge and leaving her for the monsters. All of this is Juno’s fault – it was her “ego” and misguided wish which trapped the women in the uncharted cave in the first place – yet we sympathise with her because she has been betrayed by her sister.

We can view this interplay between females – females who take on “masculine” roles without recourse to the presence of the male order within the film, females who continuously affect each other with each decision, good or bad, that they make – as describing the problematisation of the female unconscious. Drawing from Creed and Clover, these women are not merely “phallicised” protagonists; they operate in a world which is too female, too abject, too primal – marked as it is by nature, the animal or non-human, by blood, fluids, death, and the pre-patriarchal “cave” or womb of genesis without recourse to sex, where Sarah and Juno are reborn as their primal selves without recourse to the male – to allow them full expression as mere stand-ins for male counterparts. What is described is a spectrum of the female subject, a map of transgression and forgiveness in relation to the self, where the path home is never discovered. But it is a path charted without necessary recourse to the phallic; that there is no clear way out speaks deeply of the feminist nature of the journey.

Conclusion

If Carol Clover was “deeply reluctant to make progressive claims for a body of cinema as spectacularly nasty towards women as the slasher film is,” despite the fact that it does “in its own perverse way and for better or worse, constitute a visible adjustment” (Clover 247), then this essay can profess no such reluctance towards a brand of horror which is uniquely feminine, if no less nasty to its subject.

The Descent and Ginger Snaps may both be purchased on DVD from our online store.

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Jung’s understanding of individual evil is not a supernatural one; rather, he defines evil as something people are capable of. Individuals are not, themselves, evil. The personal nature of evil, he claims, simply consists of characteristics and urges rejected by the ego, or consciousness. Such inclinations are repressed by the ego, as it cannot countenance that within itself which it regards as evil. These characteristics then constitute the shadow, therefore “to become conscious of [the shadow] involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality” (1951: 145), that which the ego calls evil.

In “The Role of the Unconscious” Jung describes the compensatory function of the unconscious. Instincts “which we have repressed and suppressed… gradually accumulate and, in time… begin to influence consciousness” (1918: 18, 25). The shadow therefore retains those aspects defined by the ego as ‘evil’, and their constant repression causes them to build in intensity until they burst forth with far greater passion than if their manifestation had been allowed. When it is a potentially dangerous urge that is called evil and thus repressed, aggression for instance, the bursting forth of that aggression is unbridled and can become highly destructive. Evil thus occurs, not in the acknowledgement of dark urges, but in their violent expulsion as a result of repression.

Jung sees the same tendency in nations, “for nations are made up of individuals” (1918: 27, 45).  He attributes to Christianity and rationalism the repression of what he calls ‘primitive’ urges, particularly in Germans. The accretion and release of these urges, he claims, brought about the First World War, in which he sees a modern global manifestation of “the primitive’s distrust of the neighbouring tribe” (1918: 27, 44). It is clear that Jung sees this war as an expulsion on an international level of the darkness within the unconscious of nations. It is in the act of genocide, though, that evil on a national scale makes its most blatant manifestation. Rafael López Pedraza understands one example of genocide, the Holocaust, as “a shadow conflict” (1990: 73) in which Nazi Germany attempted to annihilate the Jews, onto whom they had projected their collective shadow. He also identifies the archetype of purity operating within Germany as a powerful repressive function, “[constellating] intolerance” (1990: 73) and drawing the Jews into its “dark shadow” (1990, 73) It is therefore possible to see two of the most serious conflicts of the early 20^th Century as expressions of repressed urges functioning within the shadow.

For this reason, more than any other, Jung claims that it is imperative that Europeans come to understand their shadows. It is in the recognition and acceptance of internal evil that he proposes more devastating, external evil can be prevented. Given that he considers modern Christianity and rationalism responsible for much of the repression that led to such expressions of national evil, his approach to this reconciliation is not only psychological, but also religious. It is in the unconscious that the potential for evil develops, and the language of the unconscious is that of myths. To address the evil that forms in the shadow, therefore, it is necessary to address the myths and archetypes that govern people’s lives. He proposes, therefore, a new understanding of God that takes into account the dark, visceral and destructive aspects of the Christian God, and attends to the needs of the collective unconscious, in which the potential for evil has accumulated through constant repression.

This proposed revisionism is not merely a utilitarian suggestion to prevent repeated upsurges of evil; it is in fact consistent with Jung’s own religious convictions. In his autobiography, Jung recounts two events of momentous religious significance to him. The first is a dream in which he feels he was presented with the vision of a chthonic deity which took the form of an enormous enthroned phallus. Jung asserts that “the phallus of this dream seems to be a subterranean god “not to be named” (1961: 13). If it is indeed God then it is one that responds to the visceral needs of the collective unconscious. The connection between the visceral and this image of a phallus is clear enough, its placement in the earth also ties it to desire and aggression, what Christian morality regards as base and earthy. Jung’s first vision of God is one divorced from the moral deity of Christian dogma; it embraces the desires held in the shadow.

The vision, nonetheless, is tied to Christianity, as it takes place within the cemetery outside Jung’s father’s church. Furthermore, while the burial of this object renders it dead, the phallus is a symbol of life. This thing that is ‘dead’ cannot truly be considered dead, but regenerates eternally. It is possible that Jung sees this as an aspect of the Christian God that is dead and yet regenerating. The second event involves the vision of God on his throne defecating on the cathedral in Basel, destroying it utterly. The act of defecation of course identifies this vision of God with the visceral, while the destruction of the church represents God’s vengeance against the structures of morality and prudishness that Christianity has imposed. Together, these visions of God express not only Jung’s understanding of the baseness of God, but also demonstrate the vengeance of such a god against the bonds of Christian dogma.

Heretical as it may seem, this vision of God as a dark and visceral entity is not inconsistent with the Judeo-Christian tradition. While contemporary Christianity may espouse a God of love, it is at odds to explain the actions of Yahweh in the Torah. This is a god whose wrath annihilates Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:23), who hardens Pharaoh’s heart against the Israelites and then sends plagues when he does not comply with Moses’ demands (Exodus 11:9) and who slaughters the firstborn son of every Egyptian household (Exodus12:30). Yahweh may love the Israelites but the experiences of the Egyptians and others are of God as evil, and this is to say nothing of the untrammeled violence that awaits us at the End of Days. Further, there is something particularly primal about the pleasure Yahweh derives from the smoke of animal sacrifices (Genesis 8:21). In “Answer to Job” Jung discusses the precedent set in the Old Testament for a God not subject to later Christian morality. He identifies in Job’s experience a raging, immoral God, attributing this to the fact that God is “not human” (1952: 547).

-Morgan

The spirited bush girl was a feature of early Australian film. As part of the patriotic nation building drive of the 1920s and 1930s, the bush girl was a wholesome and admirable ideal of womanhood, independent and healthy, representing the prosperity and fertility of the nation. The bush heroine was a prominent figure in films such as A Girl of the Bush (Barrett, 1921) and The Squatter’s Daughter (Hall, 1933). However, somewhat in opposition to the emancipated bush girl, are bush heroines who suffer in their relationships with men. Films such as The Woman Suffers (Longford, 1918) and The Far Paradise (McDonagh, 1928) feature girls trapped by circumstances beyond their control. The young female protagonist is portrayed as the innocent victim of unprincipled men and the inevitable marriage that resolves the film rescues the heroine from her situation, rather than consolidating her power.

The idea of the bush girl is one that is heavily representative of the many changes surrounding the Australian identity as it developed around the beginning of the twentieth century. There is a marked absence of the feminine in the early development of the Australian national type, as cultural pioneers (in particular the bohemian artists of the late 1800s) were trying to present an active, bush-orientated masculine image as the quintessence of Australianness. Women were seen as a “negation of the type” (White 83) because of their natural passivity but more so than this, “’feminine’ values were associated with the ‘respectability’ which the young bohemians condemned” (White 101). However, the inter-war years (from 1919 to 1939) were characterised by a strong drive towards nation building and the taming of the land, and the girl of the bush was an apt symbol of the young, fertile, post-colonial ideal. She was the “flower of the bush” (Tulloch 378) and was a fixture in Australian film from around 1920 to the late 1930s when the increasing prominence of conservative ideology separated masculine and feminine roles and recast the role of women as “decoration and urban mother, […] almost entirely absent from images of rural productivity” (FitzSimons and Ward 128).

While independent women have featured in the cinema of many countries, the ‘bush girl’ appears to be uniquely Australian (Routt 31) and her role in the national consciousness was significant in the inter-war years. As the frontiers of the nation expanded, women gained a symbolic role as the “agents of civilisation and custodians of race” (Lake 154), charged with ensuring the continuation of empire. This is usually expressed through the father-daughter archetype that dominated many films of the time. The close relationship between the father (or father figure) and daughter is echoed in the imperial relationship between England and the empire (Routt 45). The engine of the plot in father-daughter films such as A Girl of the Bush and The Squatter’s Daughter is the inheritance of land and the continuation of the established patriarchal hegemony through traditional relationships. The ‘bush girl’ may be an independent woman but it is this independence and economic self-sufficiency that makes her an object of desire for both worthy and unworthy men. It is interesting to note, however, that while the films reaffirm the necessity for men to sustain the economic strength of the nation (in these films, by means of the secure inheritance of property), “representations of young women on the Australian screen during the 1920s and 1930s are consistently more interesting and memorable than those of young men” (Routt 32).

These forthright women were not the only representations of bush femininity in the inter-war period. The ‘bush girl’ is used in a similar way in more melodramatic films such as Raymond Longford’s The Woman Suffers and, to a certain extent, in the McDonagh sisters’ The Far Paradise. These films foreground the wholesomeness of young women in the country but unlike the “sheep films” (Verhoeven, Sheep Cinema 1), the bush is the setting for the suffering of women. However, they reinforce the simplistic association of the country with goodness and the city with evil, as the city is still presented as the environment ultimately responsible for their suffering as its “moral poverty” (Tulloch 384) can be seen to influence the male characters who cause their distress.

Franklyn Barrett’s A Girl of the Bush is a perfect example of the interpretation of the bush heroine as a symbol of imperial wealth and pastoral fertility. The film was made during a strongly nationalistic period in the Australian film industry (Shirley and Adams 59) and it immediately “locates its heroine at the centre of production and display of Australia’s ‘wealth’ of wool” (Verhoeven, Sheep Cinema 101). Lorna Denver is the quintessential “young rural woman with considerable knowledge and power in relation to the land” (FitzSimons and Ward 123), which is strongly emphasised in the film by the contrast with her lazy ‘cousin’ Oswald Keane, nephew to Lorna’s guardian. A Girl of the Bush is a film that draws a parallel between “country woman and country plenitude” (Tulloch 384) through the opening sequences showing Lorna as an active participant in the production of Kangaroo Flat’s famous wool. The father-daughter relationship between Lorna and her guardian, Jim Keane, is an essential part of the narrative as it establishes the fact that the daughter figure has inherited “the patriarch’s virtue” and is therefore the “rightful heir” to the property (Routt 33, 34). Viewed as an imperial analogy, the colony represents a continuation of empire.

The narrative constantly reiterates the degenerate nature of the city and contrasts it with the wholesome country. The city-country divide is the means by which country life is presented as the ideal, as vice (in reality, a universal phenomenon) is “transferred to the mores of the city” (Tulloch 358) through the character of Oswald and his actions – drinking, gambling and the suggestion of sex. The bush heroine is presented as both the heroine of a naturalistic world, where she is defined by her economic power and fertility, as well as the subject of melodrama. This creates a tension within the story as the bush heroine is the ideal rural woman but as a female protagonist, is strongly associated with melodrama. To solve this, the film establishes an “alternate female discourse” (Tulloch 378) in the story of Mary Burns, who becomes the villain’s innocent victim. In this way, female power is separated from female sexuality (Tulloch 396) and the film reaffirms the traditional cinematic archetype that “younger, unmarried women tend to conform […] to the dichotomy of “damned whores” and “God’s police”” (Molloy 77).

Similarly, historians and critics argue that Ken G. Hall’s The Squatter’s Daughter is a film that is concerned with the association of rural women, breeding and reproductive purity, as “the question of breeding, both of sheep and of men, is at the heart of the plot” (Molloy 67). As in A Girl of the Bush, the narrative is driven by a father-daughter motif and the search for a partner worthy of the bush heroine Joan Enderby in order to safeguard the inheritance of the land. However, there is also a significant fixation with breeding and identity in The Squatter’s Daughter. This association of suitability with good breeding makes it almost inevitable that the foundling Wayne will turn out to be the rightful heir to the neighbouring Waratah Station rather than the villainous Clive Sherrington, as he is clearly the heroine’s choice of mate. Verhoeven suggests that the country of the film is an “Edenic location” (Sheep Cinema, 116), imbuing the couple with biblical significance in their roles as mother and father to the newly united Waratah-Enderby land. Again the bush heroine is associated with the population of the fertile outback and “encapsulates a national desire for prosperity through productivity” (Verhoeven, “Sheep’s Clothing” 153).

Raymond Longford’s The Woman Suffers is a film about young women of the bush that is motivated by a different (and possibly more realistic) conception of the bush girl. In contrast to the female heroines of films such as A Girl of the Bush and The Squatter’s Daughter, The Woman Suffers conveys just that – female suffering. In portraying women as the victims of men however, “the film hammers home a fairly strong feminist message in which men are the villains” (Creed 88). If Lorna Denver and Joan Enderby are ideals of active rural womanhood, Joan Stockdale and Marjory Manton are equally representative of the innocent female victim on the frontier. For these women the frontier society represents not a pure country existence but one defined by “isolation, vulnerability and defencelessness” (Lake 153). Unlike the films with strong bush heroines, The Woman Suffers does not reject the cultural archetype that insists on women being victims.

In the context of the bush heroine, the film explores the negative aspects of feminine fertility and life on the frontier. It highlights the danger young women are exposed to on the edges of civilisation and emphasises their need for protection from “marauding frontiersmen” (Lake 153). In doing so it continues to emphasise the purity of the bush girl. In particular, the strong association of religion, whiteness, nature and water equates Joan’s suicide with a “holy sacrifice” (Creed 88). Creed also suggests that Joan’s death is “used […] to emphasise the form and nature of female suffering” and, with its echoes of pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, reinforces the impression of her as a “betrayed and abandoned heroine” (88). Initially, Marjory appears to be a bush heroine in the style of Lorna Denver, active on the farm during mustering and quite comfortable on horseback. This emphasises the tragedy of her situation, as it seems utterly out of character. Despite being a stronger woman than Joan, this offers her no protection from Philip’s revenge.

Structurally, the film offers a solution to the tragedy of Joan by the exact parallel of Marjory’s story. As Philip seduces Marjory in exactly the same way as her brother Ralph seduced Philip’s sister Joan, there are two outcomes to the story. The negative resolution – suicide – is contrasted with the positive – marriage. The implicit observation in the story is that in a society that has “enshrined masculine values and interests” (Lake 152), women are in particular need of protection from the freedom a patriarchal society affords men. As such, the bush heroine is presented as a symbol of purity and fertility but one in need of masculine protection. It is Philip’s marriage to Marjory that saves her (and her child) from disgrace. This emphasises the truth of the film’s tagline “- while the man goes free!” as neither Philip nor Ralph are held publicly accountable for their actions and while Philip appears to repent, Ralph does not.

In the McDonagh sisters’ The Far Paradise the heroine is not a traditional bush heroine, but is forced into the role of frontier daughter by her father’s criminal activity and alcoholism which have ruined him. In this film, the country is not seen as a bastion of goodness and a respite from the wickedness of the city but a form of purgatory for the heroine, as she is separated from her group of friends by both distance and social circumstance. However, despite the extreme negativity of her situation and the fact that she is not a bush heroine in the traditional sense, she still conveys the image of rural female purity and vulnerability. She is exhausted and ashamed of the “ramshackle farm” (Shirley and Adams 84) but is saved from her situation by Peter, the man she loves. As in The Woman Suffers, the male protagonist acts as rescuer.

The bush heroine was a key figure of the 1920s and 1930s Australian cinema. As a symbol of fertility, national prosperity and the continuation of empire, the active young girl of the bush was an important facet of the national consciousness. Her independence and power were associated with economic self-sufficiency, a fact emphasised by the contrast between the naturalistic heroines of films such as A Girl of the Bush and The Squatter’s Daughter and the melodramatic heroine-victims of Longford’s The Woman Suffers and the McDonagh sisters’ The Far Paradise. The narrative of films featuring the active bush heroine tend to emphasise the notions of patriarchy and succession as both necessary and positive while the films of the passive bush heroine tend to foreground the darker side of a patriarchal social system and women’s vulnerability within it. The former is the more recognised cinematic archetype but both Lake in her study of women on the frontier, and FitzSimons and Ward in their overview of the character across various artistic forms, suggest that the latter is closer to the reality of the bush heroine.

Works Cited

A Girl of the Bush. Dir. Franklyn Barrett. Perf. Vera James, Jack Martin and Herbert Linden. 1921. VHS. NFSA, 1996.

Creed, Barbara, “The Woman Suffers – Again!” Screening The Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film. Ed. Berryman, Ken. Acton, ACT: NFSA, 1995.

The Far Paradise in Women of the Silent Era: Virgins, Vamps and Heroines (Selections from Australian Film 1896 – 1930). VHS. NFSA, 1997.

FitzSimons, Trish and Ward, Susan. “Girls of the Bush – Tracking an Enigma Across Films, Fictions, Memories and Histories.” Screening The Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film. Ed. Berryman, Ken. Acton, ACT: NFSA, 1995.

Lake, Marilyn. “Frontier Feminism.” The Australian Legend and Its Discontents. Ed. Nile, Richard. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2000.

Molloy, Bruce. Before the Interval: Australian Mythology and Feature Films, 1930 – 1960. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1990.

Routt, William D. “The Fairest Child of the Motherland: Colonialism and Family in Films of the 1920s and 1930s.” The Australian Screen. Ed. Moran, Albert and O’Regan, Tom. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1989.

Shirley, Graham and Adams, Brian. Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years. A&R Publishing/Currency Press, 1983.

The Squatter’s Daughter in Don’t Call Me Girlie. Dir. Young, Stewart and Wright, Andree. VHS. Ronin Films, 1985.

The Squatter’s Daughter in Now You’re Talking. Dir. Gow, Keith. VHS. Film Australia, 1981.

Tulloch, John. Legends on the Screen. Sydney: Currency Press, 1981.

Verhoeven, Deb. Sheep and the Australian Cinema. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Publishing, 2006.

Verhoeven, Deb. “Sheep’s Clothing: A dress in some Australian films.” Screening The Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film. Ed. Berryman, Ken. Acton, ACT: NFSA, 1995.

White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981.

The Woman Suffers. Dir. Raymond Longford. Perf. Lottie Lyell and Boyd Irwin. 1918. VHS. NFSA, 1996.

-Morgan

The next generation of modern society will be affected in serious ways by the much debated “climate crisis” that may soon arise on this planet. What would be the ramifications, if any, of said disasters for the modern culture? For instance an example used by Al Gore in his 2006 movie “An Inconvenient Truth” describes a situation wherein the refugees arising from displacement globally could eventually number in the hundreds of millions (in many disaster scenarios, this number can climb to even a billion). In such a situation, would the traditional values of the societal zeitgeist survive? To present an alarmist view of the situation: what of the simple fact that if you look around right now, every single thing on your desk, table etc., comes either directly or indirectly from oil. Imagine a world without plastic, imagine a world where the simple luxuries we take for granted like abundant food and diverse entertainment are not present, where the shoes you wear belonged to your father because it’s difficult to make new ones where the comforts of western civilization become a hindrance rather than a boon. The outcomes of the next 100 years are no more or less extreme, complex or terrifying then the previous century, the difference is that that experience rarely carries and we must learn anew how to adapt to changing conditions in an unstable future.

That wonderful black gold

In 1956 M. King Hubbert created a model that theorized that US oil production would peak in the latter half of the 20th century, specifically around 1970; this has since been shown to be startlingly accurate, predicting the decline in all US oil production: other analysts have put global peak production around 2010 or even as early as 1998. Ironically around the same time the Ghawar field was discovered in what is now Saudi Arabia, which has since produced roughly 60 billion barrels of oil since the ’50s and is the largest oil field ever discovered. So since the ’50s we have been living amidst a glut of oil, a seemingly never-ending supply of what is the most energy rich substance we have ever discovered. I won’t go into too much detail here but suffice to say this world runs on a material that has dictated the foreign policy of most major nations for the last 75 years, has the capacity to usher in a time of major climactic instability, fuels the economy of the world and if we ran out tomorrow most likely a large portion of the human race would starve to death because the trucks bringing the food to the local supermarket would be unable to move. Everything of any consequence is made from oil: the computer you’re reading this on is mostly plastic, which a product of oil; you buy food in plastic bags, in plastic wrappers; the clothes you wear are made halfway around the world and get here using diesel. Simply put, the entirety of the manner in which we live our lives is based upon a resource for which the peak in production was possibly a decade ago.

Figure 1: World energy use over time

Calamitous Calamities

What can possibly go wrong if the climate shifts? Well, before I say anything else. let me mention that during the greatest mass extinction on the planet, at the end of the Permian some 250 odd million years ago, 95% of all species went extinct because a series of events occurred that spiraled the planet into a period of warming so severe that, when it was finished, it took nearly a million years for life to recover. Watch this clip, ladies and gentlemen: this is the doom scenario. This video articulates in a very specific way the method by which life almost ceased to exist, and remember the details; we will be drawing analogies to the modern era after.

If you cling to any kind of notion that this can’t happen again, then think again. The time it took the Siberian traps to erupt was 45,000 years. In that time, the amount of CO2 that was released was comparable to the amount that is stored in the oil reserves currently known. While this is by no means an accurate statement, that amount of CO2 released took the Earth’s temperature up by five degrees, but if the amount of oil, let alone gas and coal, that is left is burned we will have put into the atmosphere a similar amount of CO2 to what it took one of the largest volcanoes the Earth has ever seen 45,000 years to emit, and we will have done it in two centuries.

An increase in atmospheric temperature is only one of several concerns. The oceans exist as they are through the maintenance of a delicate balance of temperatures: the species within it are adapted to a range of temperatures, much like the land-dwelling inhabitants of the rest of the world. If the atmospheric temperatures rise five degrees then the oceans will rise by as much as three or four degrees, which, while not sounding like much, is enough to cause massive ocean-sized algal blooms which will  be capable of depopulating whole entire regions of life. The rise in ocean temperatures will in turn change weather patterns, resulting in the majority of rain falling on the ocean, and rivers changing course or drying completely. The worst outcome, however, is methane hydrates. Over time, living organisms in the oceans die, the majority of these being floating plankton and zooplankton (microscopic invertebrates), as well as everything else. Anaerobic processes eventually break down the rotting material and the waste product produced is methane, a greenhouse gas that is three times as problematic as carbon dioxide to this world. Given that it’s the bottom of the ocean the temperature is low enough to reach the freezing point of methane, so it freezes and sinks to the bottom, becoming intermingled with sediment. This is the most terrifying part of this process, in that, when the methane melts, it destabilizes whole regions of coastline, creating vast earthquakes, tsunamis and making vast coastal areas slip into the ocean, truly biblical in its destructive power.

That’s the bad new. While it’s possible, it is rather unlikely, but what is more likely is by no means less destructive. When rivers and other water courses shift, populations won’t be able to grow enough food, or if rainfall patterns change, as is the most likely outcome. Most plants and animals will have to migrate to climate zones that they are adapted to and if they cannot do that or the zones no longer exist then they will go extinct. The total land mass created by deserts will increase dramatically across the Earth and the annual monsoons that feeds Asia may cease to exist.

Society perhaps

What happens to our society when these events occur? With the possibility of most of India being displaced by rising sea levels, as with Africa, Australia and China, what is the carrying capacity of refugees in various nations? With the probable end of production and cheap labour in developing nations, what will be most likely the outcome most shocking to the affected population is the making of a refugee population in a western nation. Australia has a long history of accepting refugee populations (the Lebanese in the ’80s during Lebanon’s civil war, and people from Somalia in the last decade) but do we have the capacity of infrastructure let alone the marginal political will required if half a billion foreign nationals require a better place to live? There will be physical disasters, flooding, typhoons and hurricanes, mass extinctions and famine, but it is the effects that climate change will have on our societies that will be the ones most in need of mitigation. It will be easy to let millions of refugees die but that is abhorrent to our shared humanity. The lifestyle we lead in the West is completely unsustainable and as is often the case it is other peoples who will pay the price for that very unsustainability having reached a fever pitch. Technology can change the fortunes of disaster if it has to but the will must also exist. It is the current generation of youth who will have to cope with the ensuing disasters of the age.

In abstention

The next 100 years are going to wreak some remarkable changes to our planet, both for good and for ill. A rise in sea levels may create in Australia an inland ocean and over the next few centuries a tropical paradise. We don’t know what’s going to happen in tomorrow’s weather let alone that of the next generation: all we can do is be aware and make the best choices we can.

Notes

I encourage anyone interested in the formation and geopolitical implications of oil to watch the ABC documentary “Crude”, it’s very interesting material.

It would be genuinely remiss, at this late stage, to discount outright any of the films considered momentous by the foremost critical minds of the Western World, as subsequently critically or cinematically unimportant, in opposition to their accrued reputations. The re-evaluatory anti-establishment instincts that reside within most contentious critics have wrought their best and their worst on our modern understanding of the world that the cinema gifts us with, and yet, these films still stand tall.

That having been said, it would be equally negligent not to consider the possibility that many of the films elevated to the status of pantheon members are as celebrated on account of their oft-torturous histories as their content, which is not to their detriment, but ought be taken into consideration nonetheless.

When French director, writer, actor Jean Renoir died, passing away in the February of 1979, at the ripe old age of 84, Orson Welles, quite possibly the greatest cinematic iconoclast of the 20^th century, published a heartfelt obituary in the Los Angeles Times for his close, late friend, and nestled amongst its paragraphs is a claim formed from wholesale immodesty and untold generosity, namely that “Jean Renoir stands on his own: the greatest of European directors: very probably the greatest of all directors, a gigantic silhouette on the horizon of our waning century.”

High praise, indeed, from a man in full possession of a character that Andre Bazin (his article featured in Mark W. Estrin’s collection of interviews with Welles, held as part of the Conversations With Filmmakers series of texts) once described as “god-like as Jupiter…an affable tyrant, wielding a ten-inch cigar instead of a bolt of lightning…truly Orson the Magnificent…the living illustration of [the] particular biology of genius, bent on growing to the bitter end” (p. 48), and yet, fitting.

Nine years earlier, in 1970, Jean Renoir gave an interview with Renoir scholar Leo Braudy (“Renoir at Home”, published separately from Braudy’s 1972 tome, Jean Renoir: The World of his Films). When asked, in passing, Renoir posits, “The best director in our days…that’s Orson Welles. He’s a great creator. The idea of a tycoon is not the same, can’t be the same, after Citizen Kane…” (p. 8 )

Renoir and Welles led separate lives and conducted separate careers, but as the years passed discussion of one would so often provoke mention of the other within the space of the same sentence, paragraph or breath until they were all but inseparable in the critical mind: in 1958, for instance, in the same moment that Bazin remarks on Welles’ Herculean ebullience and how such a thing stands at odds with his ever-advancing age, he illustrates the phenomenon by reference to what he believes to be a similar process at work within Jean Renoir, arguing “maturity…effects a strange metamorphosis…the Jean Renoir we know would be at least half a foot taller than the Jean Renoir of the thirties. Clearly he has amplified in all senses of the word; his very bones doubled in size.” (p. 49)

Whatever they shared personally, it is undebatable that they were both craftsmen of the highest cinematic order, and participated independently in what ought to have been a singularly prescient perception of the nature of film: at its most simplistic, this can be seen to be reflected in that together they occupied, between 1972 and 1992, the top two ranks (Welles’ at 1^st and Renoir at 2^nd) of the much-respected BFI Sight and Sound Critics’ Top Ten, and the first and third, respectively, in 1962 and 2002.

Craftsmen, then, but in the eyes of their many subsequent critical defenders and, by all accounts, from within the radius of their own appreciation, ones who went largely unappreciated for far too long, at least until they were well past their respective cinematic primes, and this was a growing and always bitterly-seasoned bone of contention shared out equally between the two, and perhaps over which they most ardently bonded.

Welles summarises Renoir’s forty-year cinematic career thus, with rancour and a crisp clarity of phrase that might lead an unsuspecting reader to imagine he was speaking of his own career (true of so much of Welles’ writing), rather than that of his beloved contemporary and colleague: “Some of [his films] were commercial and even, in their time, critical failures. Some enjoyed success. None were blockbusters. Many are immortal.” Taking all of these determinations together and at face value, there is only one product of Renoir’s dedication to his calling that can be said to fit perfectly the description attained: 1939’s La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, as I will refer to it from now on).

The Rules of the Game was Renoir’s Citizen Kane, in more ways than one; indeed, it could be said to be Europe’s Kane, but while there are technical and historical similarities and comparisons to be made, there are also important differences, in the formation of an abiding legend as much as in elements of its formal construction, though despite that it remains a useful analytical tool when discussing critical cinematic watersheds.

It is, for instance, important to note that Citizen Kane’s popular reputation was formed largely on account of the colossal war of words and wills precipitated between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst (the cost of which was perhaps best totaled in W.A. Swanberg’s 600-page biographical tome, “Citizen Hearst” [1961]), and though it was hidden away from public eyes in the direct aftermath of the tremendous legal battle, critically it was immediately appreciated, if not, perhaps, lauded to the degree that it eventually would be. It did, after all, win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and was nominated for eight others.

The Rules of the Game, on the other hand, did not fare nearly so well, even relatively. Indeed, it is a film made infamous predominantly through the propagation of anecdotes regarding its popular reception (or hysterical lack thereof), up to and including purported attempts to incinerate cinemas wherein the film was showing, and it confused French critics almost as much as it did audiences, who reacted with hostility to its explicit contempt for the bourgeoisie.

In Janet Bergstrom’s article, “Jean Renoir’s Return to France”, she attributes a great deal of the critical disdain the film provoked to the fact that Renoir “changed the conception of the hero radically, in part by increasing the number of important characters so that no one of them would carry the action or the moral attitude of the film.” (p. 462) The resultant ensemble film “confused and alienated critics as well as the public.” (p. 462) Bergstrom quotes from numerous 1939 critical reviews of the film, noting the most common element, critical confusion as to where the audience’s sympathies should lie and with which characters. It was not until long after the shadow of WW2 had passed on that the film would begin to be re-evaluated, and late into the ‘50s that it would be acclaimed in Renoir’s native homeland. Truffaut, for instance, in a 1963 interview with Paul Ronder, is notably sympathetic: “Rules of the Game is one of those rare cases where a great film passed over the heads of its public… I’m convinced that sometimes a film-maker must violate his public.” (p. 10)

Still, Renoir’s “bitter disappoint at the hostile French reaction to this film he had put so much of himself into and staked so much of his future on,” (p. 460) was such that, in combination with the arrival of the Second World War on his veritable doorstep, it drove him from his first home and towards America and the American film system (and clearly, into the path of Orson Welles), a decision with which Bergstrom displays a restrained disgust, as she does with Renoir’s post-war work in general, feeling that, whatever merits one picks out, overall “it is simply a fact that the cinema, and not only French cinema, lost a lot when Renoir abandoned the direction he had pursued with so much conviction during the 1930s in France.” (p. 460)

Like Welles, Renoir’s subsequent critical decline, seen retrospectively, is such that it marks out films like 1937’s The Grand Illusion and especially Rules of the Game as almost crystalline in their encapsulation of everything that made Renoir great and, thus, everything his later work came to be seen to lack. Welles’ own personal narrative differs slightly, insofar as that Kane was Welles’ first feature-length film, leading to the propagation of a certain ‘enfant terrible’ mystique, while Renoir had amassed a formidable body of work by 1939.

Bergstrom (using numerous historical documents and comprehensively referenced technical studies) argues that Renoir’s incredibly accomplished directorial style, showcased in the long takes, deep focus and complex choreography of The Rules of the Game, was in later years compromised entirely by executives from RKO (Welles’ studio of choice) and Renoir’s “lack of confidence in his understanding of American business, the American idiom and the American public” (p. 468), arguing that Renoir was reticent, that “there were too many areas in which Renoir, still the new-comer, understandably lacked experience and deferred to the Americans.” (p. 470).

In summary, she notes, having built a strong argument from the exemplary statistically analytical work of Alexander Sesonske, “In Hollywood Renoir was no longer able to work as a writer-director within a system he understood or could influence effectively. None of his American films were as fully integrated, conceptually and technically, as his work of the 1930s.”

Thus, if Renoir’s films after The Rules of the Game were inarticulate through studio meddling and an authorial lack of confidence in the face of an unfamiliar and vaguely hostile system, then such films as he produced before the aforementioned landmark have been received by the passing of time with precious little in the way of extra patience.

Andre Bazin, in his foundational “What Is Cinema? Volume One” defines The Rules of the Game as a landmark in pure cinematic terms, saying, in the process of becoming the director and the man who could produce such a film, he “uncovered the secret of a film form that would permit everything to be said without chopping the world up into little fragments, that would reveal the hidden meanings in people and things without disturbing the unity natural to them.”

According to Stephen Tifft in his “Theatre in the Round: The Politics of Space in the Films of Jean Renoir”, the socialist politics of The Rules of the Game are implicitly and in permanence bound up in Renoir’s late ‘30s obsession with deep focus and long takes, arguing that in doing so one could “tame the disruptive tendencies of cinematic language in order to make the mediation of the imagine unobtrusive” in an effort to “reproduce…reality” (p. 329).

Tifft’s work is based in the comprehensive groundwork of Bazin, but this fact is worth less than one might imagine simply by virtue of the fact that Bazin arrived on the scene first and has staked out of all the available ground, meaning one is all but forced to stand upon his formidable shoulders. Tifft does, however, locate one of the true origins of the later Italian neorealist tradition in Renoir’s 1935 work Toni, arguing it “[establishes] a highly naturalistic mise en scene…and [uses] non-professional or local actors who came from the region and class of their characters and spoke with native accents…his later films…continue to stake out a powerful claim to realism…but this now centers…on the naturalized standing of the spectator.” (p. 331)

Bergstrom feels similarly, noting “although Renoir kept his distance from party affiliations, his films showed a strong social and political sensitivity to the inequities of class structures in France and a sympathy for the working class.”  (p. 456)

Peter Harcourt concurs, arguing, “when a film-maker composes in depth, he allows the spectator to select certain features within the frame that he then can respond to. Hence the ambiguity of potential response…the film-maker who depends more upon editing, is more concerned to direct the response of the spectator.” (p. 23) This vaguely ‘democratic’ approach to formal composition resides fully in line with Renoir’s equally vague socialist, humanist politics.

There is a particularly cynical argument that routinely and inevitably raises its head when one professes a wish to discuss the idea and subsequent critical maintenance of a cinematic canon: to wit, the suggestion that the critical (as opposed, perhaps problematically, from popular appreciations, both in the moment and with an eye to retrospectivity) reputations of films like Citizen Kane and Rules of the Game are future-proofed, so to speak, by the anecdotally robust controversies (as discussed above) they evoked in the era of their assembly and exhibition, rather than by the fact that their critical and popular relevance remains a power in the world no matter how far from the origin of such monoliths we grow.

As I say, it’s a case formed from hardened cynicism and little else, assuming that critics are unable to determine for themselves the qualities of a film, formal, emotional or otherwise, or, perhaps more incredibly, that there is some conspiracy to keep truly ‘important’ films out of the public eye and to instead favour ‘safe’ films, whatever they are.

Boston University film theorist and Cassavettes scholar Ray Carney combines a particularly vitriolic form of this raison d’être with virulent anti-mainstream invective, leading to his declaring Kane, “one of the ten most over-rated American films of all time.” (”Citizen Kane on its Fiftieth Anniversary: The Greatest Movie Ever Made?”) and “[Schindler’s List] is a Hollywood producer’s self-congratulatory fantasy of how giving people a chance to work for you is doing them a big favor” (”Pulp Affliction: The Sorry State of Contemporary Film”). This is clearly his prerogative, and doubtless many possessing of a homogenous agenda will align themselves similarly.

For a defence of the films under attack to be mounted, however, is a simple matter, far simpler than one might imagine, and it’s one to be found, encapsulated in its entirety, in Peter Harcourt’s “What, Indeed, Is Cinema?”, wherein he states in no uncertain terms that “Bazin is at his best, as are all critics, when he is talking about the films that have engaged him most deeply.” (p. 28)

What more needs be said than that a critic’s engagement (indeed, an audience member’s engagement, for that matter) with a film should not be assumed to be false, no matter the intellectual or political contempt in which you hold the critical establishment that birthed them: when a film has touched and influenced so many both sentimentally and cognitively, it isn’t a ruse or grounds for derision. To continue to deploy such rhetoric in the name of questioning the fundamentals is to needlessly shake the foundations of your own house without desiring to build something more viable where the wreck might one day stand (perhaps the true purpose and calling of all self-identifying polemicists).

You can acquire the Criterion edition of Rules of the Game from Amazon.com.

Works Cited:

Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema? (Vol 1) (What is Cinema?). New York: University of California P, 1968.

Bergstrom, Janet. “Jean Renoir’s Return to France.” Poetics Today (Duke University Press) Creativity and Exile 17 (1996): 453-89. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Carney, Ray. “About Ray Carney: Career Overview.” People.bu.edu — people on the Web at Boston University. Boston University. 07 June 2009 <http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/aboutrc/bio.shtml>.

Carney, Ray. “Citizen Kane on its Fiftieth Anniversary: The Greatest Movie Ever Made?” People.bu.edu — people on the Web at Boston University. Boston University. 7 June 2009 <http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/carncult/orfilms.shtml>.

Carney, Ray. “”Pulp Affliction: The Sorry State of Contemporary Film,”" The Baffler May 1996.

Harcourt, Peter. “What, Indeed, Is Cinema?” University of Texas Cinema Journal 8 (1968): 22-28. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Litle, Michael. “Sound Track: “The Rules of the Game”" University of Texas Cinema Journal 13 (1973): 35-44. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Renoir, Jean, and Leo Braudy. “Renoir at Home: Interview with Jean Renoir.” University of California Film Quarterly 50 (1996): 2-8. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

The Rules of the Game. Dir. Jean Renoir. Perf. Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Jean Renoir. DVD. Criterion, 2004.

Swanberg, W. A. Citizen Hearst A Biography of William Randolph Hearst. New York: Collier Books, 1981.

Tifft, Stephen. “Theatre in the Round: The Politics of Space in the Films of Jean Renoir.” Johns Hopkins University Theatre Journal 39 (1987): 328-46. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Truffaut, François, and Paul Ronder. “François Truffaut: An Interview.” University of California Film Quarterly 17 (1963): 3-13. JSTOR. JSTOR. La Trobe Library, Bundoora. 24 May 2009. Keyword: renoir.

Welles, Orson, and Mark W. Estrin. Orson Welles Interviews (Conversations With Filmmakers Series). New York: University P of Mississippi, 2002.

Welles, Orson. “Jean Renoir: ‘The Greatest of All Directors’” The Los Angeles Times 18 Feb. 1979: 1-1. Orson Welles Archive. 23 Nov. 2006. 24 May 2009 <http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=120>.

Welles, Orson. “Jean Renoir: ‘The Greatest of All Directors’” The Los Angeles Times 18 Feb. 1979: 1-1. Orson Welles Archive. 23 Nov. 2006. 24 May 2009 <http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=120>.