Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783209224 ISBN 13: 9781783209224

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

This book presents a groundbreaking exploration of the hit television series Orphan Black and the questions it raises for performance and technology, gender and reproduction and biopolitics and community. Contributors come from a range of backgrounds and explore the digital innovations and technical interactions between human and machine that allow the show to challenge conventional notions of performance and identity, address family themes, and Orphan Black's own textual genealogy within the contexts of science, reproductive technology and the politics of gender, and extend their inquiry to the broader question of community in a "posthuman" world of biopolitical power. Mobilizing philosophy, history of science and literary theory, scholars analyze the ways in which Orphan Black depicts resistance to the many forms of power that attempt to capture, monitor and shape life today.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrea Goulet is professor and graduate chair of French and francophone studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Robert A. Rushing is professor of Italian and comparative literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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Orphan Black

Performance, Gender, Biopolitics

By Andrea Goulet, Robert A. Rushing

Intellect Ltd.

Copyright © 2018 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-922-4

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii, 
Introduction Andrea Goulet and Robert A. Rushing, 1, 
Part One: Performance/Technology/Gender, 23, 
Gesture in Orphan Black David F. Bell, 25, 
Playing with TechnoDollies: The TV Actress and Other Technologies Christopher Grobe, 39, 
Animating Cloning: Special Effects and Mediated Bodies in Orphan Black and Jurassic Park Simon Porzak, 57, 
Watching While (Face) Blind: Clone Layering and Prosopagnosia Sharrona Pearl, 77, 
Part Two: Reproduction/Biopolitics/Community, 93, 
Game of Clones: Orphan Black's Family Romance John C. Stout, 95, 
Orphan Black and the Ideology of DNA Hilary Neroni, 111, 
Being Together: Immunity and Community in Orphan Black Jessica Tanner, 127, 
The Dancing Women: Decoding Biopolitical Fantasy Robert A. Rushing, 145, 
Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics The Replicant's 'Réplique': Motherhood and the Posthuman Family as Resistance in Orphan Black Andrea Goulet, 167, 
Afterword: Reflections on the Show, and Interviews with Cast, Crew and Creators Lili Loofbourow, 185, 
Appendix: Orphan Black Episodes, 203, 
References, 207, 
Notes on Contributors, 217, 
Index, 221, 

CHAPTER 1

Gesture in Orphan Black

David F. Bell

When I was 14, I had a crush on Hayley Mills. It was 1961, when the original version of The Parent Trap opened, and I went to see it repeatedly, charmed by the young English ingénue. There were no VCRs or DVD players or Netflix streaming then, and viewing meant paying the price of entry each time I saw the film. I was spellbound by a movie in which the same actress played the roles of twin sisters. Precisely what portion of the charm was generated by the features of the actress or by the magic of the caching technique, which allowed her to appear simultaneously as different characters within the same frame, I cannot say for certain now. My recollection is veiled by what I have subsequently learned about cinema and did not know at the time. Little did I realize then, for instance, that Bette Davis had already accomplished the feat of playing twins long before The Parent Trap.A Stolen Life (1946) featured her in the dual role of twin sisters in a film focused more on Davis's portrayal of the contrasting characters than on the cinematographic technique that so intrigued me in The Parent Trap. Davis was to reprise the double role motif in Dead Ringer (1964), with the emphasis once again on her bravura portrayal of twins with quite different psychological traits in a film that was viewed at the time as a vehicle for her acting gifts. But even before the Davis films, Danny Kaye had played twin roles in Wonder Man (1945), and Betty Hutton did the same in the 1944 film Here Come the Waves, and indeed the theme was already well established in the silent period, with Dorothy Phillips as 'twins' appearing together in trick shots in the 1919 The Right to Happiness. In short, there was a cinematic history of twin roles played by the same actor of which I was blissfully unaware.

As for the younger me, I remember well that the cinematographic caching technique played a prominent role in the way I understood The Parent Trap. I did not have the slightest inkling then how it worked – I simply felt its effects. There was a long road to travel before I was to realize that far from being a technical discovery along an idealized evolutionary timeline in the history of film, caching was, quite to the contrary, at the very origin of cinema history. The radically darkened Parisian stage theatres of the late nineteenth century, where Georges Méliès learned his craft, were the sites of trick lighting effects, completely obscuring parts of the visual frame on stage to simulate, for example, guillotined heads separating preternaturally from their bodies. Pre-cinematic theatre already used caching as a key special effect, and the gestural violence of cutting the body into parts, made possible by the illusion, was a ready-made motif.

The simplest caching effects achieved in early cinematography involved blocking out half of the frame by obstructing the camera lens and filming a shot with action in the exposed half field, then rewinding the film stock to the beginning of the shot and reversing the procedure, blocking out the opposite half of the lens and filming action in the other half field (hence the term 'caching' from the French verb cacher, to hide). The two half-frame shots combined into a full frame on the film stock create the illusion that the action in each half frame, temporally divergent in the filming process, is simultaneous. There are important constraints on shots composed in this simplest of manners, and those constraints carry over into more complicated techniques. The background must remain completely stable. Movement in the scenery that disturbs the fit between split frame parts undermines the effect of simultaneity. Moreover, if shots using the same actor are at stake, a stand-in double is often positioned in the cached portion of the frame, because the naturalness of a supposedly concurrent social interaction between two people is otherwise difficult to simulate. Playing to a void while maintaining a sense of dialogue and interaction will falter at some point, but even the attempt to resolve this difficulty by using a stand-in double does not completely solve the problem. Something crucial about animate movement and gesture is at stake here. Gesture is an intensely social interaction: forced to imagine an absent other, or to interact with a substitute other in the form of a stand-in, an actor invariably misses the mark at some point. A perceptible artificiality and occasional timing faults haunt the frame – the ghost of a missing spontaneous social exchange.

Therein lies the rub, which was to become the centre of my reflections on gesture and movement in cinema: as much as I enjoyed watching sequences where caching made it possible to present twins played by the same actor on screen simultaneously, there were always moments when the illusion was broken. In The Parent Trap, twins Susan and Sharon, facing each other in synchronized shots, occasionally did not make eye contact in a way that matched what one might expect – the angle of the gaze was slightly off. Or a reaction gesture after a dialogue line was slightly ill timed and did not quite fit the flow of the conversation. Why? In 1961, I attributed those moments to errors, flawed synchronization, timing faults, technical glitches I thought could be corrected. Why had these slight fissures in the continuity of such scenes not been properly fused? It seemed easy enough to me at the time.

Fast forward to Orphan Black. And then imagine the star-struck teenager of 1961 morphing into an Orphan Black fanboy of 2017. Indeed, one of the ways of consuming a popular contemporary television series is to join the fan base. Loyal viewers exchange information and comments online, often imagining different narrative directions that the story lines could take and writing different scripts to explore them (see, for example, Jenkins 2006). For Orphan Black fans, Tatiana Maslany's evolving performance, embodying multiple clones, is a constant source of discussion and admiration. It far...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783209224
• ISBN 13: 9781783209224
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 236
• Herausgeber: Goulet Andrea, Rushing Robert A.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland