Submission and Manumission in Michael Rowe’s Leap Year (2010)
Location
University at Albany, Humanities 290
Start Date
6-10-2017 10:45 AM
End Date
6-10-2017 11:15 AM
Description
Soon after winning the Caméra d’Or at Cannes Film Festival for his debut film Año bisiesto [Leap Year], director Michael Rowe characterized his work as “profoundly feminist.” This declaration was received with dismay, since the film featured an indigenous female character involved in an abusive romantic relationship in which she played a submissive role. Taking into account the graphic violence of the images, along with the increasing alienation of the character throughout the film, Rowe’s words might have appeared to be fomenting Freud’s perception of masochism as “an essential inborn psychobiological part of the female sexual role” (Robertiello 56). Masochism, however, is also conceivable as a beneficial psychological tendency capable of subverting the distribution of power by resorting to the double element of contract and catharsis. It is through a non-explicit representation of those two inherent components of masochism how Rowe de-victimizes his character on the screen.
Submission and Manumission in Michael Rowe’s Leap Year (2010)
University at Albany, Humanities 290
Soon after winning the Caméra d’Or at Cannes Film Festival for his debut film Año bisiesto [Leap Year], director Michael Rowe characterized his work as “profoundly feminist.” This declaration was received with dismay, since the film featured an indigenous female character involved in an abusive romantic relationship in which she played a submissive role. Taking into account the graphic violence of the images, along with the increasing alienation of the character throughout the film, Rowe’s words might have appeared to be fomenting Freud’s perception of masochism as “an essential inborn psychobiological part of the female sexual role” (Robertiello 56). Masochism, however, is also conceivable as a beneficial psychological tendency capable of subverting the distribution of power by resorting to the double element of contract and catharsis. It is through a non-explicit representation of those two inherent components of masochism how Rowe de-victimizes his character on the screen.
Speaker Information
Silvia Álvarez-Olarra is an assistant professor of Spanish at CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College. Her research on Mexican literature and film has appeared in collective volumes and journals such as Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, the Routledge History of Latin American Culture, and Mexican Transnational Cinema and Literature. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled A Transfigurative Violence: Sacrifice in Contemporary Mexican Film (2000-2014).