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

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Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television

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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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Notes

  1. 1.

    Woolf, Virginia. 1938. Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press, p. 167.

  2. 2.

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

  3. 3.

    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.

  4. 4.

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

  5. 5.

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

  6. 6.

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

  7. 7.

    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. 7.

  8. 8.

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

  9. 9.

    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.

  10. 10.

    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).

  11. 11.

    Shiver-Rice, Meryl. 2015. Inclusion in New Danish Cinema: Sexuality and Transnational Belonging. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 152.

  12. 12.

    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.

  13. 13.

    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. 24.

  14. 14.

    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.

  15. 15.

    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.

  16. 16.

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

  17. 17.

    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, p. 4. https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/WS/AAAIW14/paper/viewFile/8851/8323 (accessed 11.02.2020).

  18. 18.

    Hojbjerg, Lennard. 2017. The Visual Style of Susanne Bier’s Films. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema. Volume 7 Number 3, p. 254.

  19. 19.

    https://sciencenordic.com/art-business-denmark/teamwork-brought-danish-films-to-the-top/1379739.

  20. 20.

    http://www.nordiskfilmogtvfond.com/news/stories/combining-art-with-the-market-is-what-defines-zentropa.

  21. 21.

    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.

  22. 22.

    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.

  23. 23.

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

  24. 24.

    Available at: https://www.vulture.com/2016/04/director-susanne-bier-on-women-in-hollywood.html; 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, p. 138. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

  25. 25.

    Wood, Jason. 2016. Talking Movies: Contemporary World Film Makers in Interview. London and New York: Wallflower Press, p. 3.

  26. 26.

    Moore, Cath. 2017. Position in-frame: gendered mobility, legacy and transformative sacrifice in the screen stories of Susanne Bier, p. 56. 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).

  27. 27.

    Redvall, Novrup Eva. 2015. Denmark. In Women Screen Writers: An International Guide. Eds. Jill Nelmes, Jule Selbo, pp. 266–288. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 283.

  28. 28.

    Moore, Cath. 2017. Position in-frame: gendered mobility, legacy and transformative sacrifice in the screen stories of Susanne Bier, p. 59 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).

  29. 29.

    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.

  30. 30.

    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.

  31. 31.

    Erdede, Ruken Doğu. 2018. Film and Ideology (Class Lecture, Department of Cinema, May 2018).

  32. 32.

    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).

  33. 33.

    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.

  34. 34.

    Morrison, Tim. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, p. 38.

  35. 35.

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

  36. 36.

    Irigaray, Luce. 2014. In the Beginning, She Was (çev. İlknur Odabaş, Melika Özallı). Ankara: Pinhan Publications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cinema, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Ebru Thwaites Diken

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  1. Ebru Thwaites Diken
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Transmedia, Digital Art and Animation, School of Computing, Engineering & Digital Technologies, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK

    Diğdem Sezen

  2. Department of Cinema, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Feride Çiçekoğlu

  3. Department of Media, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Aslı Tunç  & Ebru Thwaites Diken  & 

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Thwaites Diken, E. (2020). The Feminine Indistinction in Susanne Bier’s Cinema: The Brothers (2004), In a Better World (2010), Bird Box (2018). In: Sezen, D., Çiçekoğlu, F., Tunç, A., Thwaites Diken, E. (eds) Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56100-0_4

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