A Place for Shadows: A Prolegomena to the Authorship Practices and Films of Joanna Margaret Paul

Abstract

This is an "authorship" study of New Zealand artist Joanna Margaret Paul, with specific reference to her "experimental film" works. Though I will draw on a wide range of theorists, my overall approach is what Laura Marks calls "intercultural cinema." For Marks the term "intercultural cinema" refers to a specific "genre" or "movement" of experimental films created by authors caught "between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge." Intercultural film-makers include feminist, queer, indigenous and immigrant authors (any "minority" which possesses its own "regime of knowledge" and makes experimental film) living in "Western metropolitan areas," whose dominant culture is capitalist, masculine, "hegemonic, white and Euro-American" (a second regime of knowledge). What draws intercultural cinema together (and indeed, one could argue, experimental film in general) is an oppositional stance toward capitalist ideology, the commodification of the art object and the uniformity of classical narrative forms. As David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson write, experimental films are "often deliberate attempts to undercut the conventions of commercial narrative filmmaking" and, as Marks writes, intercultural cinema "flows against waves of economic neocolonialism," and is "suspicious of mass circulation... [as] making commercial cinema still involves significant compromises."