www.miekebal.org The personal website of Mieke Bal
Madame B.
My new film project with Michelle Williams Gamaker explores the unspeakable but tenacious remnants of romantic sensibility that still hold back women today.
Inspired by Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary, the unspoken cultural politics of the cultivation of craving compels us to pursue our search for what in contemporary society is still silenced. Having made films on issues around migration, such as the status of “illegal” immigrants, enforced identities, unnoticed cultural transformations and the loss of domestic life, we have turned to “madness” as the last frontier that separates people living in the same social environment.
All along, the films were motivated by a strong sense of implication. We established a relationship of trust with our subjects, so that the films thrived on intimacy and emanated a sense of collaboration, a feeling of being in the situations together. Now, we feel, the next step is to examine how social silencing affects us all, so that no groups exist exempt from negative social pressures. All emancipation movements in the world cannot fight the constant pressure to believe in those forces that keep society normalised. The forces of romantic love that continuously reformats lives into nuclear families, go hand in hand with those of late capitalism that pushes people towards the purchase of unnecessary goods and in the end, unsolvable debt. The two conspire to make especially women vulnerable to this relentless road to frustration, leading to the endangerment of their lives, or at least, their wellbeing.
There is a long list of Madame Bovary films, and it is not our goal to add to that list. Instead, we reconsider Flaubert’s prophetic vision of the tenacity of this conspiracy of forces, of the complicity between religiously informed family ideology and capitalist cultivation of desire for luxury. We firmly position it in the present Western world, in our own environment. We aim to probe the way this works, without leaving anyone aloof from such pressures as do damage to individual lives as well as to society.
In order to fund this project we request donations, or if you like, offer shares in this project. For donations of €25 or more, you receive a copy (or multiple copies) of the special DVD box of A Long History of Madness. This box contains the 120-minutes film, and a second disc with 140 minutes of various bonus items, including a serious introduction to the film, a hilarious “Making of” segment, interviews between the main actors, and scenes that didn’t make it into the film.
For more information, please view our promotional fundraising trailer for Madame B.
How to become an official supporter of Madame B.:
1) Make a donation by bank transfer to our project account at the University of Amsterdam:
ABN-AMRO 44.66.07.460
UvA-Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen
Reference: WBS element “C.2022.0056.1: Mieke Bal Voortzetting KNAW project” (very
important to add this!)
IBAN Code : NL17 ABNA 0446 6074 60
BIC : ABNANL 2A
Bank address
Dam 2
1012 NP Amsterdam
The Netherlands
2) Send us an e-mail detailing your support (date of transfer, reference and amount), so that we know to send you the DVD. Please include your postal address in your message, which can be sent to: Margreet.Vermeulen@uva.nl
We are very grateful for your support!
Mieke & Michelle
(Cinema Suitcase)
Hubert Damisch: Thinking Aloud
French philosopher and art historian Hubert Damisch (1928) has had a profound influence on generations of art historians who sought to escape the confines of a discipline with rather strict methodological principles. But Damisch is not only an out-of-the-box thinker; he is also a responsible historian. It is in the name of history, not against it, that he defends the deployment of anachronism in our understanding of art from the past.
I feel a strong affinity to Damisch’s work, primarily due to my own work on what I have called “preposterous history” but more generally because of his communicative, dialogic ways of exploring his ideas.
At the occasion of an academic workshop, organised as a collaboration between the French Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) and the American Clark Art Institute, I filmed Damisch in interaction with colleagues. While he seemed the most radical in his convictions, he also had more than anyone else to say about what matters in art. Not representation but a kind of operation; not what an image depicts but what it transforms; not a position “post’” the modern but trying to grasp what happened in modern art.
An extremely learned scholar, this original thinker takes into account what others have written. To me he seemed a model of what academic work is all about: thinking aloud, in dialogue, but thinking his own thoughts, using his capability to conjure up new visions. His interests range from abstract art to quattrocento painting; from exhibitions to perspective, and from psychoanalysis to architecture, photography and film.
Three days of intense discussion are compressed in a twenty-minute documentary that pays homage to a great thinker and a generous teacher.
The Mère Folle Project
This is an ongoing long-term project with Michelle Williams Gamaker. Its centrepiece is a two-hour feature film described as a ‘theoretical fiction’. The film deals with madness, psychoanalysis and intergenerational trauma. The film asks: if your mentally ill patient dies, are you to blame?
For Dr Françoise Davoine, Parisian psychoanalyst, this question becomes disturbingly real as one of her patients, Ariste, dies. Davoine is abducted and put on trial by mediaeval fools and through the course of one hellish night - across several centuries and countries – must argue her case for exoneration.
The Mère Folle project also includes installations, publications, talks and exhibitions, each dealing with madness and society, the potential of psychoanalysis and the social stigmatisation of insanity. Read more.