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Ariel's Corner
Film, TV, Video

Questioning the Margins of English-Speaking Films and Series

Conference Report: 28th SERCIA Conference, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, Auvervilliers, France, September 6-8 2023. Conference organized by Céline Murillo, Nicole Cloarec, Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris and Mehdi Achouche
Sara El Majhad and Joséphine Grébaut

Full text

1The 28th edition of the annual SERCIA (Société de l’Enseignement et de la Recherche du Cinéma Anglophone) conference was held on September 6th, 7th and 8th, 2023, at the Sorbonne Paris Nord campus at Aubervilliers, France. Founded in 1993, SERCIA is a European society gathering researchers invested in the study of English-speaking cinema. This year’s conference was organized by Céline Murillo (Université Paris 13), Nicole Cloarec (Université de Rennes), Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris (Université Paris Nanterre), and Mehdi Achouche (Université Paris 13). It hosted 13 panels in which international scholars presented their work pertaining to a wide range of subfields related to English-speaking cinema and television, as well as a keynote conference given by Jeffrey Sconce (Northwest University).

2The conference theme, “Questioning the margins of English-speaking cinema and TV series” was an invitation to explore and examine marginal filmic and serial traditions in terms of aesthetic, narrative, and economic practices. Building upon the work of scholars such as Jean-Loup Bourget and Thomas Elsaesser, these margins were considered as alternative spaces where films and series are produced, distributed, and consumed in accordance with norms that diverge, and sometimes oppose, those of mainstream culture. The notion of marginal films and series thus encompasses a wide range of cultural productions and practices, among which are exploitation, B, and Z movies, but also those created and produced by minorities and marginalized communities. 

3The first panel dealt with margins within Hollywood cinema, challenging the notion of a strict separation between the major US-American film studios and their periphery through an examination of their dynamics and mutual interactions. Claire Dutriaux (Sorbonne Université) opened the panel with a discussion of the role played by women in regulating cinema in the Southern United States between 1921 and 1945. She noted that, while censors are usually portrayed as men, many censorship boards were in fact operated by women, especially in the South. These white protestant upper-middle class women censors viewed themselves as defenders of virtue and often expressed their fight against obscenity in gendered terms. Refuting the marginal position film historians usually attribute to female censors, Dutriaux concluded that they were, on the contrary, central players in Hollywood until the 1940s. Also addressing the issue of censorship in Hollywood, Joël Augros (Sorbonne Université) interrogated the notion of pre-Code cinema, arguing that what was dubbed “forbidden Hollywood” was in fact mainstream cinema that was retroactively marginalized. In film historiography, the term “pre-Code” appeared indeed as late as in the 1980s. Contrary to widespread belief, not all films released before the Hays Code were “anti-Code”; in fact, many of them received popular acclaim and were later broadcast on television. For Augros, this era of filmmaking in the US should rather be called the cinema of the Great Depression, and should be compared to New Hollywood. Pierre-Olivier Toulza (Université Paris Cité) examined a similar process by which what was once considered mainstream becomes the cinema of the margins, using the example of the classical musicals produced by Twentieth Century-Fox. He argued that those films were marginalized, not because of their unusual narrative and aesthetic characteristics, but because of their limited circulation. Until the 1990s, Fox musicals were absent from documentaries on Hollywood, institutional rankings (such as those of the American Film Institute) as well as academic works. Gilles Menegaldo (Université de Poitiers) then discussed the cinema of Jacques Tourneur, whose career is positioned on the margins of Hollywood in many respects. Not only was he a foreigner—a French filmmaker in the US-American film industry—but he mostly made films that belong to marginal genres, notably horror, and feature marginalized characters. Gilles Menegaldo thus explored the various aspects of Jacques Tourneur’s marginality and his tumultuous relationship with the studios, describing him as a “smuggler” in Hollywood. Sara El Majhad (Aix-Marseille Université) concluded the panel with an examination of the relationship between major Hollywood studios and American independent cinema. Taking up a metaphor from Bourget’s La norme et la marge, she argued that mainstream US-American cinema tends to “cannibalize” its margins whenever it is faced with an existential threat. She used the New Hollywood era and the cinema of the nineties as examples of Hollywood absorbing and destroying independent production circuits, then drew a parallel with the current crisis in the American film industry.

4Panel 2 was dedicated to marginal aesthetics, through the study of filmmakers resisting mainstream ideology and production. Among them, Jack Kerouac and his unique Beat movie Pull My Daisy (1959), presented by Jean-Marie Lecomte (Université de Lorraine). In his talk, he discussed the genesis and the falsely improvised style of this film, shot by Robert Frank and characterized by Kerouac’s dreamy voice-over (inspired by Japanese benshi performers who provided live narration for silent films) commenting on the silent images of his artist friends. Borrowing from free jazz and turning its back on the New York “cinéma vérité” trend of the time, the film takes the audience to a closed set, peopled with various ethnic groups—from which women seem to be excluded—and offers philosophical reflections on male friendships, predominantly inspired by Buddhism. In the continuity of those remarks on post-modern filmmaking, Roxanne Sexton (Sorbonne Nouvelle) provided an insight on the intricate links between Derek Jerman’s Caravaggio (1986) and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964). Rebelling against Hollywood’s oppressive norms, especially when it came to gender and sexuality, Jerman and Anger both denounced the dynamic of domination at work in arts and politics, as well as the violence of a heteronormative society against the gay community. She insisted on the importance of rituals, embodied by two marginal figures offering a mannerist version of Eros and Thanatos in Caravaggio that is reminiscent of Angerian motifs: on the one hand, a young sex worker turned painter, and on the other his potential lover, a thug acting as his model. This ability to transcend myth in order to highlight their activism is what seems to bring the two filmmakers together, even decades apart. Céline Murillo (Paris Nord) discussed another film that interrogates the gender norms imposed by mainstream culture, by shedding light on Tina L’Hostky, a renowned event curator for the New Wave Mudd Club in New York City, who cast herself as Barbie for an eponymous experimental short film directed in 1977. Murillo underlined the versatility of the artist, who was also an actress, photographer, book editor, and poet, and used her blonde bombshell image to produce an ambiguous film, in which she is shown cooking, then eating a Barbie doll, while being naked. By presenting herself as a cannibalistic yet humanized version of the doll, she seems to be commenting on the destructive side of femininity, as well as the common reification of women as pieces of meat. Her paradoxical nakedness, both unavoidable and de-sexualized, is perhaps used to neutralize the systems of visual oppression uncovered in feminist research at the time, and can be seen as an answer to the voyeuristic representation of women in media, from the margins. Lastly, Rachel Garfield (Royal college of Art) closed the panel with a talk on punk feminist filmmakers, and their use of deflation and visual contradiction. She argued that their relegation to the margins of the margins, which has restricted the very legitimacy of their filmmaking, is due to both experimental choices and invisibilized subject matters. For instance, presenting sex workers by insisting on their subjectivity and the banality of their jobs and lives, as Vivien Dick does in Liberty’s Booty (1980), appears as a way to include the viewer in the experience of the margins, rather than distancing them. The instable and bricolage approach of these women takes sex workers away from normative dichotomies and helps create an intimacy within the subjects’ spaces that releases the mainstream media-induced pressure on women to be perfect.

5The third panel was dedicated to the study of film productions within the Afro-American community and its “margin-center” paradigm. Nathan Rabord (Université Le Mans) discussed Afro-American documentary and experimental filmmaker William Greaves. He took particular interest in his film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), described by the director as “simultaneously cinéma verité, documentary, avant-garde, dramatic”. Rabord characterized this work as the margins of US-American cinema pushed to their experimental limits, noting the “non-direction” of the film and its successive mises en abyme (the film consists of a documentary, a documentary about a documentary, and a documentary documenting a documentary about a documentary). Through this unconventional approach, William Greaves questions the moral codes of his times, specifically those relating to race, sexuality, and social realities. Olivier Esteves (Université de Lille) and Sébastien Lefait (Aix-Marseille Université) then presented the initial results of their ongoing research regarding the representation of anti-black racism in mainstream Hollywood films. They identified three biases involved in the process of obscuring racism, which they described as a “triple remove”. Racist violence is thus presented as a thing of the past, limited to the South and perpetrated by “white trash” individuals. This portrayal thus conceals contemporary manifestations of this type of discrimination, as well as its pervasiveness in the North and its institutionalized nature. Hélène Charlery (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès) then used the example of Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere (2008) to explore the margin-center paradigm developed in bell hooks’s Feminist Theory (1984), as well as Kimberly Crenshaw’s basement metaphor. Depicting Ruby, a woman whose life is gradually taken over by her visits to her husband in prison, the film offers a representation of black female characters in a way the Hollywood-based center of mainstream culture refuses to film them. In order to do so, she places South Central Los Angeles as the geographical center of the film, and has her marginal position—“nowhere”—be the center of her decisions as an agent. This self-representation acts both as a denunciation of the culturally segregated art industry, and a deconstruction of its objectifying gaze through a reappropriation of black women’s image based on their subjectivities, which find themselves at the center of the narrative. Charlery hopes that DuVernay’s work will contribute to leaving the basement metaphor behind, and help build “two different houses” instead. The relation that black filmmakers have with Hollywood is also a strong theme in Jordan Peele’s 2022 metafilm Nope, which Vincent Jaunas (Jean Monnet-Saint Etienne University) presented and commented on in his talk. The situation of the film’s two main characters, horse trainers who try to create a name for themselves in the film industry from their ranch, appears to allegorize the double-bind of African-American people in Hollywood. More specifically, the necessity for them to be included in the center of mainstream culture becomes paradoxical in light of the portrayal of the industry as highly toxic. Peele exemplifies this conundrum by having his reluctant main character, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) finally become an iconic Western hero, and his sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) an innovative image-maker, by defeating an alien, the highly symbolic figure of Otherness. Jaunas added that this ambiguous position is also emphasized by the tribute paid by the film to invisibilized members of the industry, which is depicted as a contagious and nefarious disease.

6Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès) opened Panel 4, which tackled genre-cinema and its margins, with a talk on Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run (1976), which questions the margins of science-fiction by offering a reworking of the myths and stereotypes of the genre. The film depicts an idealized society that is gradually revealed to be a dystopia, in which everyone above the age of thirty is killed in order to preserve resources. Costa de Beauregard mentioned the powerful effects of wonder throughout the film, which are mainly conveyed through its futuristic soundtrack and help the viewers empathize more with the story. Moreover, by blending horror, romance and adventure, and by shedding light on cultural margins through magic and religion, the film appears to be a representative of New Wave reflections on utopia in the 1970s, while still embracing the Hollywood Happy Ending. Hollywood science-fiction and its relation to marginality was also discussed by Guilhem Billaudel (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), through the examples of two figures of isolation in Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009) and The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2011). Indeed, while both films portray characters who find themselves relegated to extreme peripheral positions—namely, alone on space stations—they seem to differ in the way those positions are presented, which can be seen in the different degree of integration of David Bowie’s space-related songs within each narrative. Billaudel argued this might be linked to the situation of each film within the industry. While Moon’s Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) finds comfort in reassuring rituals and even a double of himself in his voluntary isolation within a small space that matches the restricted ambitions of Jones’s debut feature, Mark Whatney (Matt Damon), in The Martian, sees it as a problem to solve. In the latter, the star-studded cast and blockbuster reach contribute to the narrative goal of bringing its character back to the center, whereas Moon embraces its relative marginality in an attempt to “decenter” the motifs of the genre. Adrienne Boutang’s (Université de Franche Comté) talk was a critique of the widely accepted distinction between Hollywood mainstream productions and the European auteur tradition through an analysis of Paul Verhoeven’s career. By examining Hollywood’s influence on his early work and the auteur influence on his Hollywood films, Boutang attempted a deconstruction of the binary paradigm opposing the mainstream cinema of the United States to European auteur films. A cross-examination of critics’ views on his films from both sides of the Atlantic points to a biased assessment on both sides where “European sensitivity” is used as a floating signifier. Boutang thus concluded that Verhoeven should be considered, above all, as a transnational filmmaker who manages to be both an insider/outsider in Hollywood and an American in Europe, making him a “globalized artiste maudit”. Stella Louis (independent scholar) then reviewed the career of filmmaker Russ Meyer, one of the most influential directors of the sexploitation genre. Once dubbed the “Orson Welles of sex films,” Meyer operated on the margins of conventional Hollywood cinema, challenging the norms of acceptability on screen without ever crossing the limits of pornography. Stella Louis analyzed the evolution of the representation of sexuality and gender in his films, from “nudie cuties” to “roughies” to “kinkies,” noting that while feminist scholars initially condemned the sexism in his films, they later provided a more nuanced analysis of female sexual agency in his work. The overview provided by Louis sheds light on the evolving perception of sexuality and gender in the United States through an unconventional perspective, that of sexploitation movies.

7Jeffrey Sconce (Northwestern University), in his Keynote speech, talked about “trash cinema.” He distinguished two main eras of trash cinema, the first one going from the 1970s to the 1990s, and the second from the 1990s to the present day. He examined how the idea of center and margins informed each era. According to him, trash cinema came from the breakdown of the studio system, which fostered a plethora of low-budget independent productions that were built for very specific target audiences. They often had educational purposes, with corporate and government propaganda, spreading awareness about the dangers of driving or venereal diseases, and combined poor craft and a transparent ideology (as shown by Eric Schaeffer in his work on exploitation cinema). Analyzing the various cultural origins of those films, Sconce defined three types of margins in response to the midcentury center. The first one, the Situationist International, aimed at repurposing mass culture iconography to spread Marxist or beatnik messages. The second margin resides in Camp and Popism, and partly finds its genesis in queer culture, supported by the likes of John Waters on the one hand and Andy Warhol on the other. Embraced by urban elites, their broad idea was to take and recontextualize the iconography of pop culture and produce an aesthetic of ludicrousness. Lastly, Sconce identified mass satire as the third answer to mainstream culture, which consisted in an adolescent rejection of consumerism and mass entertainment in magazines such as Mad or The Harvard Lampoon. This broad critique of pop culture by all three movements fostered a reworking of mainstream imagery, as well as a fascination for cults and conspiracies, that came from the view of mass entertainment as a system of control. However, the entry of that first movement of trash cinema into the mainstream is what made it come to an end. What changed in the second era is the quantity of trash entertainment available: what Sconce called “trash on demand” means that audiences do not need to depend on television to watch bad programs anymore—they can find it themselves on the internet, or be guided to it thanks to algorithms. He also underlined that it has become more difficult to find actual trash films nowadays, as low-quality entertainment is much more deliberate, which makes trash cinema the target of many parodies and counterfeits. It thus appears that while the first era had a clear target to comment upon, the second one seems to have lost the idea of what the center is, or is so closely linked to it it cannot actually criticize it.

8Extending the exploration of the margins of genre cinema, Panel 5 was dedicated to peripheral traditions and marginal remnants within mainstreamed genres. Celestino Deleyto and Costanza Salvi (Universidad de Zaragoza) discussed the B-Western hero the Cisco kid and his peculiar positioning in the Western canon. Focusing on the six films produced by Monogram in 1946 and 1947 in which the Cisco kid is played by Gilbert Roland, the participants noted that this Mexican protagonist in a Hollywood B-Western disrupts the classical conventions of the genre. Deleyto and Salvi analyzed the Cisco kid as an extension of the Mexican-American border, who defies Manifest Destiny and shares several characteristics with the landscape. As such, the Cisco Kid films of the 1940s provide an alternative to the spirit of conquest linked to the representation of the border in mainstream Westerns and thus rewrite the conventions of a quintessentially American genre. Martin Knust (Linnaeus University) suggested an examination of a different peripheral Western tradition, that of the “Indianer,” a variant of the Western produced in East Germany between 1966 and 1983. Their anti-pacifist stance and rejection of petit bourgeois aesthetics are consistent with their production context during the Cold War by the state-owned GDR production company, whose central aim was to create an anti-western mass culture. Subverting the Western’s classical conventions, Indianers exclude cow-boys and show the conquest of the American West through the perspective of the Natives. Through an analysis of the music and soundtracks of the genre, Knust showed that despite a radical shift from a narrative point of view, the Western model shines through in these features. Andrea Virginás (Babes-Bolyai University) then examined the process through which eco-cinema has become part of mass popular culture and the “marginal” remnants in this mainstreamed genre. Through a comparative analysis of small national films and big-budget studio productions, Virginás noted that eco-cinema has been thrown into the mainstream, adopting Hollywood narrative conventions but conserving some recognizable aesthetic choices. Hubert Le Boisselier (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) ended the panel with a talk on a genre that was similarly “thrown into the mainstream”: the zombie film. Using the notion of the carnivalesque as a conceptual tool, he examined various aspects of the marginality of George Romero’s zombie films. Le Boisselier argued that, because of its medieval and Renaissance origins, the zombie is a fundamentally marginal figure, making its use particularly consistent with the anti-establishment stance of Romero’s films. He notes that, as a subgenre rooted in the grotesque with heavy carnivalesque influences, zombie films operate a reversal of social hierarchies and values which emerges when analyzing issues of race and class in Romero’s features.

9The sixth panel was dedicated to what was dubbed the “margins of the margins”, bringing together talks on documentaries, essay films and fourth cinema. Glenn Man (University of Hawai'i at Manoa) discussed Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010) which he described as an “anti-western”. Man noted, however, that the primary aim of the film was not the subversion of the Western genre, but rather the conveyance of a feminist and postcolonial discourse. The politics of race and gender are interwoven throughout the film, which aligns the white female protagonist with the Native-American character, culminating in an alliance between the two against the racist and misogynistic Stephen Meek. From a narrative and aesthetic point of view, the film’s use of long-shots puts it in the slow cinema category, despite its classical forward-moving style. David Roche's (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, IUF) talk, “Negotiating Marginalization in Samson & Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009)”, analyzed the negotiation of various marginal spaces—namely the eponymous indigenous Australian heroes’ position in Australia but also in their own village—in a film that celebrates the power of connection over socially, economically, politically and culturally determined hierarchies. Delphine Letort (Université du Mans) underlined the scant attention paid to the documentary form both in film studies and by feminist scholars. Yet the genre is undoubtedly worthy of consideration as it gives rise to realities that are invisible to the mainstream and attracts directors from the margins of society. Letort examined a series of documentaries characterized by oppositional stances and providing a platform to the voiceless. She concluded by noting that the popularization of streaming platforms may be an opportunity to finance and produce similar works.

10Panel 7 was opened by Argyrios Keleris (Université Paris 8), who offered insights into theoretical aspects of US-American independent cinema. He questioned the definition of independent cinema as occupying an in-between space between what the public has come to perceive as a dichotomy between mass culture and high art, thus appearing as an authentic alternative to mainstream narrative cinema. However, Keleris pointed out that the idea of independence, especially as a political attribute, is impossible to clearly delineate, insofar as the supposed autonomy of independent cinema is compromised by unavoidable dynamics of domination. One is thus left with two choices when defining independent cinema—to abandon the concept altogether, or to try and rectify it as exclusively aesthetic or political. He evoked the possibility to use independence as a principle of differentiation by breaking away from the principles of ideological coherence, narrative resolution and happy endings used for mass productions, and keeping the industry competitive through the minor changes some films offer. Joanne Vrignaud (Université de Nanterre) helped exemplify the difficulty to define independent film with the example of Wind River (Taylor Sheridan, 2017), a neo-western which found its promotion marred by the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Produced by independent studios because of its graphic content, it was nonetheless distributed by the Weinstein Company and was in the middle of an aggressive Oscar campaign when the many allegations of sexual misconduct became public. Vrignaud noted that its promotional tour then changed strategies: it promptly tried to erase any link with its distributor’s name, and instead chose to lay the emphasis on its independence by relying on a highly political message, focused on denouncing violence against Native women. This shift did not win the film an Academy Award, but rather highlighted the fact that being independently produced does not mean having full autonomy from Hollywood. Lastly, Benjamin Campion’s talk (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) examined the paradoxical space offered to independent filmmakers and show runners by streaming platforms, which tend to undercut the efficiency of works that criticize them while depending on them to be aired. Shows such as Black Mirror (Channel 4, 2011-2014; Netflix, 2016-), which satirizes the abusive use of AI on Netflix, or Utopia, denouncing overconsumption and pollution on Amazon, seem to have sacrificed their political integrity in order to reach more people. Campion then explained the way this dilemma may have been avoided by others such as Nicolas Winding Refn, who seems to have found his own marginal space within Amazon, with his series Too Old to Die Young (2019). Through it, Refn develops his own version of independence by freeing himself from the constraints of linear TV and creating a show in perpetual formal and narrative movement, which fits the criteria of radical media in its content, aesthetics, and innovative ambition. 

11Panel 8 examined the margins of cinema in the British Isles. Jean-François Baillon (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) opened the discussion with an analysis of Ben Sharrock’s debut feature Limbo (2022). This film echoes the conference theme on various levels: it finds its inspiration in the margins of mainstream cinema, notably Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains (2009), takes place in Scotland, a “fringe” space in the British Isles and relates the story of a Syrian refugee—a protagonist in exile. Aesthetic elements manifesting the notion of exile are central throughout the film and evoke its numerous influences. Baillon noted that Sharrock uses the stereotypical representation of Scotland as an exotic remote land to criticize British migration policies. The film thus suggests a post-nationalist approach, whereby nationality is based on citizenship rather than birth. Despite a marked difference in terms of subject matter, The Banshees of Inisherin (McDonagh, 2022) presented by Christophe Gelly (Université Clermont Auvergne), shares a similar aesthetic of marginality. Several formal devices served to represent marginality in this film, resulting in an interplay of margins: geographical, stylistic, and atmospheric. Some elements such as the unstable boundaries between indoor and outdoor spaces, recurrent tonal shifts, and the insularity of the diegetic space itself seem to bring the margins to the center. Gelly thus concluded that, in The Banshees of Inisherin, marginality serves as centrifugal force, constantly decentering the narrative. Nicole Cloarec (University of Rennes) then presented the work of two directors who position themselves in a radical opposition to conventional mainstream cinema. Ben Rivers’s Two Years at Sea (2011) and Marc Jenkins’s Bait (2019) were both shot on celluloid and hand processed, despite digital cinematography being the norm since the mid-2010. This alternative filmmaking process echoes their unconventional approach to film itself, which falls into the category of slow cinema: undramatic, contemplative and focusing on routine. Filming marginal life through a marginal approach, Bait and Two Years at Sea appear as a stubborn resistance to fast-paced modernity both in their style and subject matter. They could be interpreted as meta-comments on the film industry itself. Cloarec concluded that slow cinema has become the cinema of outsiders, resisting the mainstream through a radical approach to aesthetic, narrative, and formal conventions.

12In Panel 9, Rachel Levistky (Pratt Institute) and Nathalie Rozanes (University of Bern) gave a talk in the shape of a performance, which staged a conversation between the two of them on liberal feminism in TV shows. They commented on the capitalist recuperation of feminism for entertainment, and the way it participates in erasing queer and trans realities in favor of straightness. To illustrate their arguments, they used the example of Zoe Lister-Jones’s 2023 Slip, which shows a woman who travels through parallel universes in order to find her way back to her partner. David Lipson then tackled the marginality of female late-night hosts, and more specifically how they occupy the contemporary male-dominated space of late-night TV. He argued that since 2017, late-night shows have become more and more political, which has led to a growing consciousness that women are underrepresented in this role, although they were originally a space of experimentation pioneered by actress Faye Emerson. However, the few recent examples of female late night hosts, namely Samantha Bee, Lilly Singh, and Ziwe, have shown the precariousness of their position. Their shows are systematically the first ones to be canceled when the industry has to reduce spending, and they are not given the second chances men are given. The only survivor of this structural marginalization is Amber Ruffin, whose show seems to have found a corner on the streaming service Peacock, although its position remains fragile. Also rethinking the way femininity is dealt with on television shows, Anne Sweet (Institut de Gestion Sociale) dedicated her paper to questioning what the mainstream wants the public to see as marginal, through an analysis of Tim Burton’s Wednesday (2022-), one of Netflix’s biggest hits. She argued that the figure of the “weird girl” embodied by Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) masquerades as a marginal character with her asocial tendencies and cynicism, while still embracing mainstream bourgeois values. Being categorized as an outcast despite her couture dresses and high cultural capital leads Wednesday to struggle against an antagonized group of working class teenagers. In Sweet’s opinion, this reveals the hypocrisy of Wednesday’s portrayal in the media, as it tends to encourage people to imitate her by embracing a marginality that is actually quite conventional.

13Panel 10 had Hélène Charlery, Emmanuelle Delanoë-Brun, Delphine Letort and Nolwenn Mingant reflect on the way they approach film studies as teachers and researchers since #MeToo entered the global radar. Delphine Letort started by underlining that since #MeToo seems to have changed film sets in various ways, for example by including more intimacy coordinators or policing inappropriate behaviors, those changes should be incorporated in research and teaching practices. A large part of that could be done by systematically spreading awareness. For instance, the harassment and assault cases that concern many canonical filmmakers such as Hitchcock or Polanski can be acknowledged when studying their works. Nolwenn Mingant also offered her insight on the impact of feminism and gender issues on her studies, as it led her to question the very tools she had been using in her research, which she realized manifested an internalized male gaze. Thus, she now tries to look for other possible research methods that would enable her to move away from the male experience of film. Among her reflections, she evokes the possibility of a female oppositional gaze, inspired by bell hooks’ studies on black moviegoers, that would shed light on new perspectives on the canon. Besides, she evoked the choice to focus on the physical reaction one has when watching films and series, in order to move away from a binary viewer experience, and perhaps lead students to appreciate the corporeal effects of film. Hélène Charlery also emphasized the importance of teaching bell hooks’ texts to include the oppositional gaze in curriculums, in order to recenter the traditional narratives focused on in film studies, and agreed that the physical effects of diversity in film should not be overlooked. As for Emmanuelle Delanoë-Brun, she remarked on the tremendous changes that have happened in film studies in recent years that have enabled women to become not only objects of research but also subjects. She noted that some topics that were once avoided are now openly discussed in class, specifically sexual violence, but also stressed the need to relocate old films in the past, and approach them with nuanced perspectives. Recentering studies on figures that have been relegated to the margins, such as the cleaning lady in Rear Window (1954), could be a way to rework our approaches, without exclusively focusing on the violence of older films. A discussion between the four participants and the audience brought attention to Mulvey’s notion of male gaze and how it should be rethought in contemporary studies beyond the male/female binary, and observed through a lens that includes the plurality of subjectivities at work in filmmaking. The question of mainstream feminism also emerged and the possibility of teaching it by taking into account the different criticisms and comments that can be made about big-budget film productions, which do not necessarily need to conflict with personal enjoyment of such films. Finally, the safe spaces that were created within classrooms since #MeToo have been noted, although the need for more training in terms of gender biases is still important, and needs to spread beyond the confines of Section 11. 

14Audrey Molinier, a graduate student from Nanterre University, started Panel 11 with a talk on the Daniels’s unusual filmmaking style. Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan have indeed managed to create an aesthetic of excess and transgression, in which the body is subjected to all kinds of taboos and contortions. She noted that their work, whether it be through music videos, short films, or feature films such as Swiss Army Man (2016) or Everything Everywhere All at Once (2021), was based on combining high-brow and low-brow references in order to create new images and incongruous effects. Sara Pesce (University of Bologna) then discussed the Amazon series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-2023), in which Midge, a Jewish woman in the 1950s, becomes a stand up comedian. Pesce focuses on what makes her appealing to audiences as a figure of marginality in her domain. According to her, Midge’s popularity mainly rests on the contrast between the intimate, if not taboo content of her comic discourse, and the sophistication of her costume design. Not only does Midge exemplify the use of costume as a subversive comic device, but she also seems to draw her inspiration from Jewish female stand-up comedians such as Elaine May, who use their misfortune and Jewishness for laughs, thus exploiting their precarious position. To end the panel, Shannon Wells-Lassagne (Université de Bourgogne) presented her paper about adaptation and margins in the dystopian miniseries Station Eleven (HBO Max, 2021), adapted from Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel. The narrative follows a troop of performers playing Shakespeare in a world that has collapsed because of a global pandemic. What she remarked is that in the post-apocalyptic world, the marginal becomes central, in that what used to be secondary in people’s daily lives starts to occupy a central place for the survivors. Reducing, reusing and recycling have thus replaced the tendency people had to dismiss what surrounds them and to primarily value mainstream content. Instead, they seem to have become ways to redefine what is normal and deal with isolation and trauma. Art is therefore given a new role and recentered as necessary rather than secondary in a world that has had to rethink their priorities.

15The participants in the last panel discussed margins outside Hollywood, in a geographical sense. Through an analysis of Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990), Marine Soubeille (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Université de Lorraine) examined the way Austinian cinema steers away from mainstream US-American. She showed that this feature, one of the most successful independent films in cinema history, challenges the stereotypical representation of Texas all the while subverting Hollywood narrative conventions. The slow aesthetic, minimal directorial interventions, seamless montage and offbeat acting style situate the film on the margins of mainstream US-American cinema, and participate in drawing more attention to the setting than to the characters: instead of the typical plot-driven narrative, Slacker paints the portrait of the city of Austin. Soubeille highlighted the film’s debt, in terms of subject and style, to New York movies such as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991). Mikaël Toulza (Université de Lille) then explored the relationship between the tourism industry and Hollywood cinema in Louisiana. Noting that the state has become a tourist hub since the Postbellum period and has been described as a “Southern Hollywood” after the decentralization of shooting imposed by the 1947 decree, he traced the parallel history of tourism and filmmaking in Louisiana, drawing attention to their mutual dependency. While Hollywood constructed and promoted a stereotypical representation of Louisiana, the tourism industry embraced and exploited those stereotypes which, in turn, drew more tourists to the state. Whereas this seems like a win-win situation for both industries, Toulza highlighted the alienating effect it might have on locals. Citing New Orleans cinema specialist Vicki Mayer, he noted that New Orlenians have become tourists in their own city. 

16The 28th SERCIA conference brought up an extensive number of perspectives on the margins of cinema that embraced the breadth of theoretical, aesthetic or thematic approaches of the topic available in film and television studies. Questioning marginality, its different shapes, its limits, its evolutions and its relation to the center was possible thanks to the variety of panelists whose insights covered genre, gender, race, film production and distribution, from within the heart of the US-American industry in Hollywood to the geographical peripheries in the English-speaking world. Many talks were notably concerned with the way contemporary filmmaking has seen its margins be dramatically upset by political minorities whose voices are finally reaching the center, but now have to deal with their ambiguous relation to it. The impact of the #MeToo movement and fourth wave feminism was shown as having transformed mainstream norms of representation and the access to visibility of certain margins, although its cannibalistic recuperation by the capitalistic Hollywood system is something that filmmakers and panelists alike continue to be wary of. The theme was also the opportunity to present radical works that defy the norms of genre or traditional distribution, and instead try to renew and create their own uncompromising spaces within the margins they choose to stay in, by questioning the very dynamic they have with the center. Marginality was thus presented as a place of both loneliness within a system and comfort in one’s autonomy. In this regard, a comparison with normality could make it seem deprived of power, limited in its material resources and its reach, yet in many ways it has proved to be a space of self-fulfillment for cinema, as it enables all types of subjectivities to be embraced. More often than not, the political ambiguity of the margins and their paradoxical position—of both dependence and rejection—in regards to mainstream media, as well as the ever changing character of their delimitations, was pointed out in order to highlight the difficulty of actually defining them. However, the conference was able to acknowledge the obstacles to questioning the margins while still offering a multiplicity of ways to deal with them from many angles, thanks to the participants’ admiration for the infinite potential of cinematic margins despite the current profit-oriented threats affecting Hollywood.

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References

Electronic reference

Sara El Majhad and Joséphine Grébaut, Questioning the Margins of English-Speaking Films and SeriesMiranda [Online], 28 | 2023, Online since 18 September 2024, connection on 21 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/56765; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.56765

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About the authors

Sara El Majhad

ATER
Aix-Marseille Université
sara.el-majhad@univ-amu.fr

Joséphine Grébaut

PhD Candidate
Université Paris Nanterre
j.grebaut@parisnanterre.fr

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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