1.0: Blog Contents:2.0 – 2.9: Film's details /
3.0 – 3.8: On The Film's Style /
4.0 – 4.7: The Numinous /
5.0 – 5.10: Momento mori /
6.0 – 6.7: The Mythos /
7.0 – 7.3: Disclaimer//.
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Figure 1: Poster of 'You Are Not My Mother', circa 2021, from: <https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10406596/?ref_=ext_shr_tw>. 2.0 — The Film's Details:
2.1 — Title: 'You Are Not My Mother';
2.2 — First released: 13 September 2021 at the '2021 Toronto International Film Festival';
2.3 — Duration: 93 minutes;
2.4 — Writer and director: Kate Dolan;
2.5 — Producer: Deirdre Levins;
2.5 — Cinematographer: Narayan Van Maele;
2.6 — Editor: John Cutler;
2.7 — Sound-score by "Die Hex" also known as Dianne Lucille Campbell; refer to the web-site: <http://www.die-hexen.com/>.
2.8 — Production company: Fantastic Films;
2.9 — A film made in Ireland, distributed by Bankside Films and Magnet Releasing.
3.0 — On The Film's Style: The film is styled in a realist, or perhaps? "super-realist" manner (the film poster possibly reflects this aesthetic, refer to Figure 1). The realist, documentary approach to the cinematography is found to uncover incidentally, that is, "accidentally", numinous points of vision and focus. This fusion of the documentary style, using the found footage technique, and the subject of the numinous, is taken to it's extreme in the film, 'The Blair Witch Project', 23 January 1999 at the Sun-dance Film Festival (refer to Figure 2), where film or video as a medium is the subject of a medium to the spirit world; the blurring of categories of the real, imaginary and textual, is taken to new limits: the video record is as evidence hijacked by cinema to reveal how contrived it really can be as a cinematic form of thrilling entertainment.
Figure 2: Poster for 'The Blair Witch Project', circa 1999, from: <https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0185937/?ref_=fn_al_tt_0>. 3.1 — Nonetheless, 'You Are Not My Mother' uses "indexical phenomena"—not as circumstantial or documentary evidence—the traditional approach of law enforcement to investigate the disappearance of Angela; the search for the mother of Char, acted by Hazel Doupe, is demonstrated as almost pointless by the police officer during the early moments of the film. The police officer arrives at the house-hold to ineptly ask of the events leading to Angela's disappearance. The suggestion is that the forensic methods to ascertain the truth are lost in such contexts of the mysterious: the disappearance is too great an absence, or there are less orthodox explanations to pursue.
3.2 — The indexical is taken to be incidental to the narrational focus, as signalising a paranoia or repressed thought, or is verifiable as part of the real world. One of the alerting effects involved with repressed thoughts is, while they appear as indicative of some-thing out-side the existing system of narration, viz. as some-thing almost totally disconnected, irrelevant or non-sensical, the thought flitters away as though it was never thought of. The indexical often carries this level of recognition as a subliminal recognition that is recognised as something other than what it usually signifies.
3.3 — Typography provides a good example: a reader will not consider the design of the letter 'a' when a reader is involved with interpreting and responding to a cultural text, such as a leaf-let for: 'You Are Not My Mother'. A misprint of the letter 'a' (for example the image, of Figure 3) on a leaf-let for a film which is based on the super-natural may be re-read as portentous of some further significance. This is the register of interpreting the omen or a medium through which divination is supposed to occur. Otherwise, a reader may over-look the deformity of a letter 'a' in a leaf-let for a film based on the super-natural, and dismiss it as a rare printing error, nothing greater. Refer to Figure 3, the photograph of a graphic of a smudged letter 'a' as an example.
Figure 3: A smudged 'a', that is not really a misprint as such, because misprints really no longer occur, but the "deformity" of the letter is the point, and it is shown; detail from: <https://www.behance.net/gallery/7589157/The-Art-of-Fugue-Theatre-Poster>.
3.4 — There is the so-called common-sense approach and the superstitious approach at either end of the scale. When one approach is taken too extremely then the other is cancelled, often to the disadvantage of "the extremist". There is the often repeated lament, almost of the ages, that "there can never be too much common-sense"; yet when some-one is obsessed with practical matters, the higher-order concerns of society, such as the law, government, politics, ideology, cultural heritage, identity, religion, etc., are forsaken.
3.5 — Many women go on about how tidy a house is kept by some other woman, yet tidiness is only a banal aspect of life, that could be of less significance than a woman's opinion of the recent cultural analyses of William Shakespeare's or Henrik Ibsen's plays. To sustain an inquring mind is of vital importance, rather than merely ensuring the house is kept tidy: the process of meaning-making is, believe it or not, prohibited to some women and children of poorer countries: the woman becomes the passenger par excellence; a tourist of her own home-life and community. This process of finding meaningfulness for one-self, that is often under the thumb of oppressors who would prefer to remain unidentified, makes the passenger: a "driver"; involved in life, but with the risks which often beset men such as during "men's adventures".
3.6 — Often such intellectual pursuits are side-lined because the rewards are non-tangible; when the reward is found in developing a position and relation to the world in which society takes place. The spiritual interpretation that can, in some religions, involve divination, often as folk lore traditions, are found to be non-sense, or, at another level, expressive of a secret truth, that, should it be discussed openly, could involve censure; hence, the necessity of encoding the truth within cultural texts and variations of dialect.
3.7 — I often find the films, some of varying quality, insightful of reading in to cultures, as an archæologist might approach an excavated artefact—the Ancient Greek vase, cracked all over is practically useless, but when reconstructed provides a missing piece in understanding one's position in the world, such as either European or Asian: the distinction can mean knowing on what side of the battle to be involved—because the cruellest joke of all, is to find one-self fighting one's own. History matters; identity matters.
3.8 — Style often involves a type of regulation as to deign what is permissibly expressible or prohibited or secretly expressible: may be involved with a dupe and complicity, or a protective stance against perceived "intruders".
4.0 — The Numinous: Arguably, the idiosyncratic chiaroscuro, particular camera angles, a trace usage of computer graphic imaging for horrific effect, within a banal, suburban setting, that is brought in to view at the grand cinematic scale, viz. as some-thing comparable to worship at the altar, an apotheosis of sorts, constitutes this super-realism of which I theorise. The effect is not surrealist in which an almost provocation of the viewer occurs in the spectacle or demonstration; nor is it the hyper-realism or photo-realism of the arts during the past twenty years in which verisimilitude, that is, with a pseudo-scientific or pseudo-medical scrutiny, is used to establish the style of the image, such as exemplified by the Australian sculptor, Hans Ronald Mueck, born circa 1958–; refer to the photograph of 'In Bed', circa 2005, (refer to Figure 4).
Figure 4: A photograph of Hans Ronald Mueck working on 'In Bed', circa 2005, from: <https://www.sartle.com/artist/ron-mueck>. 4.1 — The formulation is based on similar principles which constitute 'magical realism' in literature, except in this sub-branch, the fantastical elements are minimised to the indexical, at the edge or corner as a margin line: the super-natural can be seen in the documentary realist film with a super-realist treatment. 'You Are Not My Mother' circa 2021, is argued to exemplify this 'super-realist' style, as an aesthetic that emerges from the magical realism movement of the 1980s until current.
4.2 — With an almost completely singular point of view sustained through-out the film, an adolescent girl, named Char, reveals her perception of the world as "a thinness to another, spirit world", where the film's style construes the super-natural within a scepticism that is typically applied to matters of the super-natural; often the basis of psychological thrillers / super-natural / horror based texts.
4.3 — A point of a "thinness" between the super-natural and real world, is discussed during an intriguing scene in which, Char, on a school excursion, stands in a subterranean museum amid an oral presentation by a tour guide, acted by Madi O'Connell, models of the museum's building and later video installation; where simulacrum and references to the spiritual are made "all at once" to leave an understandable level of questioning as to what is real, fantasy and spiritual.
4.4 — The scene of the museum—within the vaults of the "Custom House Quay Building", now titled: EPIC, The Irish Emigration Museum, finds Char almost lost in a reality that is absent of true significance, (refer to Figure 5). Char's life is all quite derealised: Char is left questioning what is real, symbolic or imaginary. The adversary emerges, the school bully, during Char's viewing of a video installation to test Char on her family and identity. Char "reality tests" what unfolds by telling the school bully that she "looks shit." Whereas during earlier scenes Char is afflicted with a veritable paralysis: an hysteria of the type celebrated in William Shakespeare's eponymous character Hamlet, whose inertia to act is taken as the model of castration: a prince with-out authority.
Figure 5: A film still from 'You Are Not My Mother'; image from: <https://filmthreat.com/reviews/you-are-not-my-mother/>. 4.5 — The "derealised" is approximated visually through the cinematographic techniques by Narayan Van Maele, that in one film review was compared to the cinematically influenced photography of Gregory Crewdson; for example: 'The Disturbance', circa 2014, (refer to Figure 6).
Figure 6: A photograph titled: 'The Disturbance' circa 2005, by Gregory Crewdson, from: <https://www.thebroad.org/art/gregory-crewdson/disturbance>. 4.6 — At the monumental scale of the cinemagraphic, the point of a camera's focus is to fore-ground an aspect of significance that is part of a narrative in which the contexts of significance is made. But when an apparently irrelevant point of observation is fore-grounded, the signifier is mysterious, possibly portentous and, quite to the contrary of the purely positivistic approach of interpreting a text, that the signifier can be dismissed; the marginal is what is most important.
4.7 — The still life artistic convention often denies the narrational, yet inasmuch a narrative is denied, a back-ground of significance emerges as important through indexical phenomena, often registered at the peripheral or syntactical levels of consciousness for exclusion or erasure. I discuss briefly here on the psychology of perception as a process intrinsically bound to elimination: a reduction by way of focus that eliminates the apparently irrelevant. This is a process that is arguably amplified by cinema in which the visual is played out at such a monumental scale.
4.8 — The super-realist film is a type of propaganda film, in which the film's values and beliefs are intended to hypnotise the audience—which is a criticism that could be leveraged at all forms of artistic expression: the audience or reader wants to be transported, moved, that is, changed by a new knowledge of an experience of artistic creation. The main point of assessment ought to be regarding the morality of the text, but the moral question is often dismissed as hypocritical, and I wonder whether this failing of human nature or character might be taken too far as signalising a complete failure, when often such failings signify a fall from which a lesson is learnt and the continuance of striving for ideals is resumed by picking one-self up, dusting off and going onwards.
4.9 — This 'super-realist' style aims at reducing the distance between the screen and audience member, rather than the realism that occurs in satirical forms of texts, which often really tell the truth with the allowance, the style is naïve, crude or vulgar: the reduction of value in style renders the message less threatening, particularly on a political level. One need only read the satirical cartoons of politics to appreciate this observation.
4.10 — In this style the suspension of disbelief takes effect at a greater effectiveness, than in other styles: the formula is, the greater the belief that is invested in the perception of a world coming in to view through the film, the greater the impact of the excitement and, often catharsis, that further takes place among the audience.
5.0 — Momento mori: This film apparently of the horror genre, is similar to the momento mori, in which death rears it's ugly head in the consciousness of an adolescent girl: the death of her mother, of which she feels responsible: yet she may be the only blameless one. A comparison may be made to the photo-realist art of Ben Schonzeit, born 9 May 1942–, the United States Of America, such as: 'Speckled Vase', circa 1988, acrylic on canvas, (refer to Figure 7) in which stylistic modalities are juxtaposed to heighten the realistic quality of the subject, viz. the still life. The green world in the back-ground, consisting of shadows is that emerald synonymous with Ireland, peculiarly flattened, skewed, compared to the painted still life, that is, apparently rendered in vivid, pseudo-scientific reality.
Figure 7: Photograph: 'Speckled Vase', circa 1988, by Ben Schonzeit, from: <http://www.benschonzeit.com/flowers/>.
5.1 — The psychological reality of this point is denied in a series of denials which leave the back-ground having to provide the information necessary to construct any-thing other than thrilling superficiality, that is, going from the indexical—for example, from a psychological perspective, Char is blithely unaware of the relationship between Angela and her brother, Aaron, to venture towards the taboo of incest and infanticide.
5.2 — Rather than the audience partake purely in the girl's malady, a sort of private universe, a rebus of indecipherable textual inscriptions—which would ultimately exclude the audience—the girl is found in a multi-regional, cultural mythos of a family and community, where Char's beliefs are not merely her own, but are shared and inasmuch engender an historical truth "by way of back-ground". Note, the changeling myth is known to the Celts, Gauls, Nords, Slavs, Arabs and Northern America.
5.3 — There is an earlier film, 'The Changeling', 28 March 1980, Canada, (refer to Figure 8) arguably that was an influence on Kate Dolan, stylistically, because Peter Medak's examination of the changeling phenomena in Seattle, Canada, is possibly one of the first films to demonstrate a super-realism, that again pivots on the mythos of the changeling. Peter Medak's film of 1980 makes minimal use of special effects and a cinematography that is large scale, negotiates the interior spaces of homes with a sense of the uncanny regarding privacy, the domestic scene of family life and the public world.
Figure 8: Photograph: 'The Changeling', circa 1980, film poster from: <https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0080516/>.
6.0 — The Mythos: The grand-mother, Rita, played by Ingrid Craigie, is suspicious, it is suggested, that Angela is no longer her, it is suggested, but an "impostor" or a döpple-ganger; that is a folk-lore legend left as a possibility, rather than examined. The theme of the changeling mythos emerges as the central thematic concern of the film. The matter of the impostor, the döpple-ganger, is often one too painful to place as the subject of entertainment, even when that entertainment is of the genre of psychological thriller / super-natural / horror.
6.1 — The theme of the changeling is often deemed less painful, because infants are the ones made subject to the swap involving an abduction made of a "true child", for an ersatz replica, that was once the bastard sibling or look-a-like cousin, may now be a clone—a suggestion that sounds futuristic, but legislation passed through various parliaments world-wide prohibit human cloning, such that cloning is a reality, out-side the law.
6.2 — The subject matter of the changeling is treated as a peripheral concern, as one that constitutes a denial to the perspective of Char whose fanciful, child's mind prefers the fairy tale explanation rather than the gritty truth, that some-one has abducted her infant sibling (a suggestion only), or one of the family members has committed an act that is too horrible to conceive, such as that her uncle Aaron, acted by Paul Reid, has killed the infant.
6.3 — What can the explanation be exactly? Angela had previously been almost bed-ridden with what is inferred as being a major depressive disorder, since her disappearance, she has returned and transformed in to an occassionally exuberant, but impetuous, and at times intimidating woman.
6.4 — Within Char's isolated world, Angela's transformation is explained as a swapping for another, who resembles her, identically, but nevertheless is not her, viz. the matter of the impostor.
6.5 — The "super-realist" style returns the inquiry of what is happenig to a query of the truth of perception and matters of authenticity and imitation: abstract subjects which often constitute a director's pre-occupation of a film of the psychological thriller / super-natural / horror genre. This is because the super-natural establishes a limit of knowable knowledge and horror often identifies an experience of trauma which has occurred in the outer limits of knowable experience, except that it has become mythified.
6.6 — While there are back-ground matters as to the real reason for Angela's depression, such as a grief for an aborted infant or killed infant (that is, to conject for a moment), the grand-mother is inferred as silencing and covering over the truth with a fantastical story, that nonetheless is plausible according to Irish folk-lore, the changeling, viz. that Char's mother is a changeling, and a changeling may unexpectedly change among other defining characteristics.
6.7 — The truth is, that the grand-mother may have murdered a new-born child which has led her daughter to depression, and to create the impression that Rita is telling the truth, that Angela is a changeling, Rita has organised for Angela to receive high doses of lithium that change the patient's personality and appearance to seemingly verify the truth of a changed or possessed woman.
7.0 — Disclaimer: This blog post is the exclusive intellectual property of Craig Steven Joseph Lacey, 4 December 1976–; Google email: craigsjlacey@gmail.com; by way of law, no hacking, copying, editing or disseminating of it is permitted.
7.1 — Four photographs have been used within this blog: Figures 1 to 8; each of which is identified to a resource and is used within the editorial rights' context.
7.2 — Craig Steven Joseph Lacey, 4 December 1976–, Australia; 189 Leichhardt Street, Spring Hill, Queensland, Australia, 4000; Ⓒ 2022, Craig Steven Joseph Lacey.
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