The incorporation of affective intensities within cinema constitutes a vital aspect of filmmaking as gendering; such an argument shall be realised through an analysis of Rosemary, an experimental short film loosely based on the true story of Rosemary Kennedy, the eldest sister of John F. Kennedy. In November 1941, Rosemary was forced to undergo a lobotomy by her father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who felt as though ‘her behaviour had now become a menacing disgrace to the Kennedys’ political, financial and social aspirations’.[1] Aged only twenty-three, he surgery left her unable to walk or talk without physical therapy and rehabilitation.[2] Employing historical revisionism – defined as interpretations seeking to “dismantle the ‘truths’, at times mythologised, of traditional historiography”[3] - and postmodern techniques, Rosemary seeks to depict the infamous story through a mixed media format, physical performance, and montage editing; manipulating historicity to form a narrative in the present and champion the voices of marginalised women. Kate Clifford Larson posits the lobotomy as a radical method for silencing women, conforming to a long prevailing pattern of psychiatric oppression and coercive control:

‘Women, in particular, made up the largest group of lobotomy patients. Women who were depressed, had bipolar illness, or were sexually active outside the range of socially and culturally acceptable limits of the day (…) were considered candidates.’[4]

Rosemary employs the Kulsehov effect to avoid encapsulating such an experience explicitly, opting for a montage style and affectivity to deconstruct viewers’ prejudice surrounding disability. Anchored by sound, the bandages adorning Rosemary’s head indicate the debilitating surgery has taken place, whilst costume and the recurring motif of flowers reference her long-gone days as a debutante; falling petals embellish Rosemary and juxtapose the indexical signs of injury. Close-up shots of Rosemary’s bloody face, toes and fingers seek to establish this film as a work of abjection rather than objection. The depiction of such material in a fast-paced, successive manner aligns with Eliza Steinbock’s concept of ‘shimmering images’, based on the understanding of gender as limited by language.[5] Steinbock places emphasis on corporeality to argue that ‘shimmers are difficult to grasp as knowing identities’ as the image is constantly changing.[6] Although Steinbocks statement originally referred to transgender identities, considering this statement in relation to Rosemary and its intersectional feminism posits that disabled identities are capable of ascending beyond the corporeal.

Encapsulating Steinbock’s ideas visually, the film begins with a wide shot depicting the protagonist sitting solemnly in a chair. The arrival of a woman into the frame, holding a flower bouquet and family photographs, propels the film into a non-linear narrative incorporating archive footage of the Kennedy family. It is unclear whether the performative sequence that follows takes place within the film’s diegesis, or as a manifestation of Rosemary’s imagination. This aligns with Freudian repression, in which ‘an instinctive craving meets with resistances which render it ineffective’.[7] Such psychoanalytical undertones, anchored by the hallucinatory cinematography, of Rosemary echo Jane Arden’s The Other Side of the Underneath, an innovative blueprint for feminist cinema employing surrealist imagery and theatricality to represent schizophrenic women in the 1970s.[8] Intertextuality and abjection invite the viewer to ascribe feminist meaning to Rosemary as a polysemic text, in line with Julia Kristeva’s work. Kristeva posits abjection as that which rejects ‘borders, positions, rules’ and instead ‘disturbs identity, system, order’.[9] As well as referencing her lobotomy, depictions of Rosemary smearing blood across her face and stomach serve to deconstruct ‘the binary oppositions that structure the paradigm of sex-gender sexuality’.[10] Engaging with such depictions of the monstrous-feminine, as theorised by Barbara Creed, derives “the mother–child relationship as marked by an untrammelled pleasure in ‘playing’ with the body and its wastes.”[11] The only other character depicted in the film serves to represent Rosemary’s mother, thus a depiction of abject material represents their fractured relationship due to Rosemary’s condition, prompting an affective nostalgic response as well as inciting the themes of pregnancy, menstruation and motherhood.

To conclude, Rosemary deviates from the true story of its titular character and challenges historicity to construct a progressive, empowering representation of disabled women. Roland Barthes summarises the ‘shimmer’ as twinklings that outplay or baffle the paradigm, suggesting the film perpetuates positive representations of stigmatised bodies through brief, fleeting visuals.[12] The abject nature of the film demonstrates a merging of Kristeva and Steinbock’s work in gender studies with affect theory, granting privilege to the embodied experience. Close-up shots of Rosemary’s eyes as she weeps align with Brinkema’s reading of the tear as a polysemic entity and the body as the locus of affective production. The montage style renders the reason for Rosemary’s tears ambiguous, as ‘pleasure and pain are inextricable and muddled’, subsequently serving as a cathartic release of sorrow, anxiety, terror, and other such passions.[13] Thus, Rosemary is freed from the bounds of social convention and patriarchal expectation, dancing in elegant dresses through rose petals and decorated in her own blood, sweat and tears, negating disability and femininity as mutually exclusive entities.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland, and Rosalind Krauss. “From the Neutral: Session of March 11, 1978.” October 112 (Spring 2005): 3-22.

Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Cattini, Giovanni C. “Historical Revisionism: The Reinterpretation of History in Contemporary Political Debate.” Transfer: Journal of Contemporary Culture 6, (2011): 28–38.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. London; New York: Routledge, 1993.

Freud, Sigmund. “Repression.” The Psychoanalytical Review 9 (January 1922): 444.

Hodges, Katherine. “The Invisible Crisis: Women and Psychiatric Oppression.” Off Our Backs 33, no. 7/8 (July-August 2003): 12-15.

Key, Andrew. “Girl Interrupted: Revisiting Jane Arden’s The Other Side of the Underneath.” The Quietus, February 25, 2022. https://thequietus.com/articles/31203-film-jane-arden-other-side-underneath-50-anniversary.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Larson, Kate Clifford. Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter. Boston: Mariner Books, 2016.

Steinbock, Eliza. Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Filmography

The Other Side of the Underneath. Directed by Jane Arden. UK: British Film Institute, 1972. DVD.

[1] Kate Clifford Larson, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (Boston: Mariner Books, 2016), 158.

[2] Larson, Rosemary, 169.

[3] Giovanni C. Cattini, “Historical Revisionism: The Reinterpretation of History in Contemporary Political Debate,” Transfer: Journal of Contemporary Culture 6, (2011): 28-38.

[4] Larson, Rosemary, 166.

[5] Eliza Steinbock, Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

[6] Steinbock, Shimmering Images, 8.

[7] Sigmund Freud, “Repression” The Psychoanalytic Review 9 (January 1922): 444.

[8] The Other Side of the Underneath, DVD, directed by Jane Arden (1972; UK: British Film Institute, 2009).

[9] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.

[10] Steinbock, Shimmering Images, 10.

[11] Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), 32.

[12] Roland Barthes and Rosalind Krauss, “From the Neutral: Session of March 11, 1978” October 112 (Spring 2005).

[13] Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 4-6.