This article reads Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (2009) through Lauren Berlant's conceptualisation of impasse and the affective rhythms of survival, which Berlant develops in their reflections on the ...cinema of precarity. This framework, I contend, has the potential to open up new avenues of inquiry within the study of Arnold's work, usually discussed in relation to either British (social) realist cinema or the phenomenological representations of female experience. Situating Fish Tank within the broader framework of the cinema of precarity helps articulate a position from which to problematise the overemphasis on movement in critical writings on the film - which, as I will discuss, is also predominant in both affect theory and film phenomenology. I argue that with its simultaneous focus on movement and impasse, realised through framing and composition of the shot, camera movement, and repetition of visual tropes that convey confinement, Fish Tank is able to capture and aesthetically re-enact the impact of neoliberalism, while simultaneously paying attention to class and gendered styles of bodily adjustment to crisis ordinariness. I conclude that Berlant's critical apparatus illuminates the formal and affective complexity of Fish Tank in new ways, and creates space to address larger questions of affect, aesthetics, and the profilmic body.
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In this essay, DeFalco examines recent European art films that move beyond an implicit interrogation of the revenge tradition to reinterpret the tradition itself in ways that radically challenge the ...possibility of legitimized violence. She argues that what she term "anti-revenge" films, in particular Andrea Arnold's Red Road (2006), and Gotz Spielmann's Revanche (2008), frustrate the desire for vengeance (both the protagonist's and the spectator's), replacing violent spectacle with uneasy engagement that inhibits revenge, gesturing instead toward the possibility, however remote, of forgiveness.
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In this article, I explore the use of space in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Céline Sciamma’s Bande de Filles, two films that depict the experiences of 15-year-old girls in a British housing estate ...and a Parisian banlieue respectively. The spatial motifs related to identity that circulate throughout the films establish a regime of flux, ambiguity, and reversibility that contributes to a depiction of female adolescence as unfixed and unsettled. I argue that both films, in their focus on the lived experience of their protagonists, investigate the landscape of economically and socially peripheral spaces to develop a specifically female approach to contemporary coming-of-age narratives that takes into account the difference that gender makes.
A terminally gray high-rise district of Glasgow provides the mournful landscape for this low-rent "Rear Window," featuring a tightly clenched performance by Kate Dickie as Jackie, a surveillance ...camera operator who keeps an alert eye out for nefarious doings on the streets beyond. Her vocation gives her a front-row view of teen violence, furtive sex and incontinent dogs, a familiar if shifting menu of life events that is jolted when she spots an upsetting figure from her past who is reported to have been just released from prison.
"American Honey" -- This wild, unruly and astonishingly beautiful fourth feature from "Fish Tank" director Andrea Arnold earns its 162-minute running time as it follows a teenager (startling newcomer ...Sasha Lane) who embraces the thrill and adventure of the open road. (2:42) R. "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back" -- Tom Cruise stars for the second time as the nomadic investigator who must break a former Army colleague out of military prison to unravel a government conspiracy. With Cobie Smulders, Aldis Hodge, Danika Yarosh, Patrick Heusinger. Written by Richard Wenk and Edward Zwick & Marshall Herskovitz, based on the book "Never Go Back" by Lee Child. Directed by Zwick. Imax 2D. (1:58) PG-13.
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