Abstract
At the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2009, I chanced upon a screening of a new rape-revenge film, Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, 2009). Its simple narrative was recognizable as that of a rape-revenge film, and yet it was in a completely different package to the more notorious examples of the genre such as I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) or Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981). I was lulled by the film’s panoramic Romanian landscapes and horse-and-cart pace, but through genre expectation and character identification, I still anticipated that the road journey taken by protagonist Katalin (Hilda Péter) would lead to the genre-defining inevitable act of violent revenge against her rapist. Katalin does kill her rapist’s accomplice, Gergely (Roberto Giacomello), but when she catches up with her rapist, Antal (Tibor Pálffy), she converses with him rather than kills him. More shocking than this, she herself is killed in an act of revenge (by Gergely’s brother-in-law [Sebastian Marina]) at the end of the film. I was stunned by this ending and felt almost a sense of outrage at the protagonist’s brutal punishment. The ending went against character identification, against genre expectation and the genre’s laws of justice (based on lex talionis, where retribution restores order following rape), and seemed an affront to my feminist politics.
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Notes
While the connections that both Jacinda Read and Carol J. Clover draw between the second-wave feminist movement and the rape-revenge genre are both convincing and important, it would be erroneous to describe 1970s Hollywood as the genre’s period and place of origin. It is important to acknowledge earlier examples of the genre—from Hollywood and elsewhere—as Heller-Nicholas does in the introduction to her book (2011, 13–19) with titles such as Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950),
Johnny Belinda (Jean Negulesco, 1948),
Safe in Hell (William A. Wellman, 1931),
The Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman, 1960),
Thirteen Women (George Archainbaud, 1932),
Outrage (Ida Lupino, 1950),
and Something Wild (Jack Garfein, 1961).
The earliest film example I can think of is another William A. Wellman film, Beggars of Life (1928),
but The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915) is arguably a strong earlier influence on the genre too.
Heller-Nicholas’ filmography is comprehensive but certainly not exhaustive. Some of the contemporary examples discussed in this book are missing, such as Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi) (Park Chan-Wook, 2005),
Hard Candy (David Slade, 2005),
Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003),
and Acolytes (Jon Hewitt, 2008).
This usage is exemplified by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra’s edited collection, Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (2007).
The editors outline the relationship between feminist scholarship and postfeminist mass media culture in the introduction (2007, 1–25), and the chapters of the collection provide further examples of such critique of postfeminist texts including Bridget Jones’s Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001)
and The Good Girl (Miguel Arteta, 2002).
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© 2014 Claire Henry
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Henry, C. (2014). Introduction: Reapproaching Rape-Revenge. In: Revisionist Rape-Revenge. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137413956_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137413956_1
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