When: Friday, 22 March, 2–3pm
Where: 407 Babel Building, The University of Melbourne Parkville Campus
Louise Cain, The University of Melbourne
“Where the Wild Kids Are: Céline Sciamma and the Queer Forest”
Combining Martin Heidegger’s concept of Holzwege – the tangled forest paths that serve as metaphors for being, knowledge, and truth – with the wild epistemology of queer theorist Jack Halberstam and similar explorations of queer ecology, this paper applies a phenomenological lens to the representation of the forest as a site of queer time, space and being in the work of Céline Sciamma, focused primarily on Tomboy (2011) and Petite Maman (2020). The logic of child’s play and imagination coalesces with the unbound and wild epistemological conditions of the marginalized forest, forming within these two films a discernible ‘world within the world’ that serves as the primary site of development and transformation. Traversing the boundaries between the known, familiar world of French middle-class domesticity and the unbound, wild expanse of the woods, Sciamma’s films offer alternate possibilities of maturation on the margins of heteropatriarchal normalcy for her queer and gender non-conforming protagonists.
Presenter
Louise Cain is a doctoral candidate at The University of Melbourne and a Postgraduate Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the representation of queerness in contemporary francophone cinema, and she is currently completing a thesis on the work of French director Céline Sciamma. She completed an Honours thesis on the sanitisation of queerness in French commercial cinema of the 1980s, for which she was awarded the 2019 A.R. Chisholm Memorial Prize. She works as a tutor and freelance film critic and lives in Narrm/Melbourne.