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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

4. The Feminine Indistinction in Susanne Bier’s Cinema: The Brothers (2004), In a Better World (2010), Bird Box (2018)

Author : Ebru Thwaites Diken

Published in: Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The chapter explores how the distinction between the inside and the outside and its different articulations (the local and the global, home and abroad, the present and the apocalyptic, the normal and the exceptional) are operationalized in a gendered fashion in Susanne Bier’s films: The Brothers (2004), In a Better World (2010), and Bird Box (2018). The films subvert this distinction, giving important twists to the (im)possibilities of female subjectivity. While the ‘outside’ permeates the inside, society and nature, the present world and the apocalyptic, law and violence become indistinct categories. The chapter suggests that the apocalyptic paves the way to a messianic opening and the move from vision to touch marks the transition from the realm of the masculine symbolic order to the primal feminine ground zero.

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The agora in ancient Greece, the bourgeois public space in nation states, sacred religious spaces are all patriarchal constructs.

Smaill, Belinda. 2014. The Male Sojourner, The Female Director, and Popular European Cinema: The Worlds of Susanne Bier. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies. May 85. Vol 29. No 1, p. 6. Women film makers born in the 1950s and 1960s are situated in the context of an emerging transnational feminism and a global film culture at the expense of a gradual dissolution of a national cinema.

White, Patricia. 2015. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms. Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 201.

Hjort, Mette. 2005. Small Nation, Global Cinema. Minneapolis. London: University of Minnesota Press, p. xi.

Hjort, Mette. 2005. Small Nation, Global Cinema. Minneapolis. London: University of Minnesota Press, p. 16.

White, Patricia. 2015. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms. Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. x.

Bier is the first of the Dogme group to win an Oscar. To name a few of her internationally acclaimed films, Open Hearts (2002) won the Danish Academy Award and the International Film Critics Award at the Toronto Film Festival; Brothers (2005) won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and at the Boston Independent Film Festival; and In a Better World (2010) won the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film and the best director at the European Film Award.

See Moore, Cath. 2017. Position-in-frame: gendered mobility, legacy and transformative sacrifice in the screen stories of Susanne Bier. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/33545182/Position-in frame_gendered_mobility_legacy_and_transformative_sacrifice_in_the_screen_stories_of_Susanne_Bier (accessed 07.01.2020).

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Shiver-Rice, Meryl. 2018. Danish Privilege and Responsibility in the Work of Susanne Bier. In Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Eds. Missy Molly, Meryl Shiver-Rice, Mimi Nielsen, 243–260.

Hojbjerg, Lennard. 2017. The Visual Style of Susanne Bier’s Films. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. Volume 7 Number 3, p. 256, cited in Smaill, Belinda. 2014. The Male Sojourner, The Female Director, and Popular European Cinema: The Worlds of Susanne Bier. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies. May 85. Vol 29. No 1, p. 11.

Hojbjerg, Lennard. 2017. The Visual Style of Susanne Bier’s Films. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. Volume 7 Number 3, p. 256.

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The arguments in this paragraph follow Smaill’s arguments. Smaill, Belinda. 2014. The Male Sojourner, The Female Director, and Popular European Cinema: The Worlds of Susanne Bier. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies. May 85. Vol 29. No 1, pp. 12–15.

Nielsen, Mimi. 2018. Tracing Affect in Susanne Bier’s Cinema. In Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier. Eds. Missy Molly, Meryl Shiver-Rice, Mimi Nielsen, 155–172. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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The arguments in this and the following paragraph follow the argumentation of White Stanley (2014). White-Stanley, Debra. 2014. I Don’t Know How She Lives with This Kitchen The Way It Is. In Heroism and Gender in War Films. Eds. K.A. Ritzenhoff, J. Kazecki, 133–153. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 138.

White Stanley argues that fixing the kitchen serves as a symbolic performance of masculinity in the film. White-Stanley, Debra. 2014. I Don’t Know How She Lives with This Kitchen The Way It Is. In Heroism and Gender in War Films. Eds. K.A. Ritzenhoff, J. Kazecki, 133–153. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 138.

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The arguments in this paragraph follow Moore’s argument about gendered spaces in Bier’s films. Moore, Cath. 2017. Position in-frame: gendered mobility, legacy and transformative sacrifice in the screen stories of Susanne Bier, p. 62 https://www.academia.edu/33545182/Position-in-frame_gendered_mobility_legacy_and_transformative_sacrifice_in_the_screen_stories_of_Susanne_Bier (accessed 07.01.2020).

The arguments in this paragraph follow Nielsen’s arguments about the ways in which Bier provides a paradoxical and multi-layered approach to masculinity. Nielsen, Mimi. 2018. Tracing Affect in Susanne Bier’s Cinema. In Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier. Eds. Missy Molly, Meryl Shiver-Rice, Mimi Nielsen, 243–260. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 166.

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Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Standford: Stanford University Press.

Anderson, Travis, Packard, Dennis. 2014. AI Jump Start: A Reappraisal of Editing for Continuity and Discontinuity in Film and Video Games. Intelligent Cinematography and Editing: Papers from AAAI-14 Workshop, https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/WS/AAAIW14/paper/viewFile/8851/8323 (accessed 11.02.2020).

Brooks, Peter. 1985. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess. New York: Columbia University Press.

Erdede, Ruken Doğu. 2018. Film and Ideology (Class Lecture, Department of Film and Television, Istanbul Bilgi University, May 2018).

Hjort, Mette. 2005. Small Nation, Global Cinema. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRef

Hjort, Mette. 2018. Gender Equity in Screen Culture: On Susanne Bier, the Celluloid Ceiling, and the Growing Appeal of TV Production. In Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier. Eds. Missy Molly, Meryl Shiver-Rice, Mimi Nielsen, 134–148. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRef

Hojbjerg, Lennard. 2017. The Visual Style of Susanne Bier’s Films. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. Volume 7 Number 3, pp. 253–265.

Irigaray, Luce. 2014. Başlangıçta Kadın VardI (çev. İlknur Odabaş, Melika Özallı). Ankara: Pinhan Publications.

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Molly, Missy, Shiver-Rice, Meryl, Nielsen, Mimi (eds.). 2018. Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier, pp. 1–12. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Moore, Cath. 2017. Position in-frame: gendered mobility, legacy and transformative sacrifice in the screen stories of Susanne Bier https://www.academia.edu/33545182/Position-in frame_gendered_mobility_legacy_and_transformative_sacrifice_in_the_screen_stories_of_Susanne_Bier (accessed 07.01.2020).

Morrison, Tim. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage.

Nielsen, Mimi. 2018. Tracing Affect in Susanne Bier’s Cinema. In Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier. Eds. Missy Molly, Meryl Shiver-Rice, Mimi Nielsen, 155–172. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRef

Pham, Annika. 2018. Combining Art with the Market is What Defines Zentropa. Interview with Sisse Graum Jørgensen and Louise Vesth http://www.nordiskfilmogtvfond.com/news/stories/combining-art-with-the-market-is-what-defines-zentropa (accessed 11.01.2020).

Redvall, Novrup Eva. 2015. Denmark. In Women Screen Writers: An International Guide. Eds. Jill Nelmes, Jule Selbo, 266–288. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRef

Shiver-Rice, Meryl. 2015. Inclusion in New Danish Cinema: Sexuality and Transnational Belonging. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shiver-Rice, Meryl. 2018. Danish Privilege and Responsibility in the Work of Susanne Bier. In Refocus: The Films of Susanne Bier. Eds. Missy Molly, Meryl Shiver-Rice, Mimi Nielsen, 243–260. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.CrossRef

Virginia Woolf. 1938. Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press.

White, Patricia. 2015. Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms. Durham and London: Duke University Press.CrossRef

White-Stanley, Debra. 2014. I Don’t Know How She Lives with This Kitchen The Way It Is. In Heroism and Gender in War Films. Eds. K.A. Ritzenhoff, J. Kazecki, 133–153. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wood, Jason. 2016. Talking Movies: Contemporary World Film Makers in Interview. London and New York: Wallflower Press.

Title: The Feminine Indistinction in Susanne Bier’s Cinema: The Brothers (2004), In a Better World (2010), Bird Box (2018)
Author: Ebru Thwaites Diken
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-56099-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-56100-0

Copyright Year: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_4