Heals all wounds: Time, the body and the image of sexual violence in narrative cinema

Abstract

The time of the human body, in its cycles, rhythms and movements finds an onscreen counterpart in narrative time. Where a subject is represented, their corporality marries with the structure and time of their medium, and the harmonious, undisrupted depiction of the body aligns with smooth narrative order. A force for the disruption of the relationship between the body and time is then, logically, violence. With the assault, violation and destruction of our onscreen image so too does this violence find form with a disruption, and perhaps additional violation, to narrative time itself. I will argue that sexual violence offers a unique instance of just such a disruption for cinema, a disruption that occupies a special category, and which presents problems to cinematic narratives that simply cannot be resolved as easily as other forms of action might. When the body is shown to be assaulted, so too does cinematic time feel this violation in a way that is inherently destabilising to the text as a whole, and yet instances of violence contain a kind of irresistible tension for cinematic narratives. The intention of my research here is to examine a small group of films that attempt to depict and engage with images of rape and sexual violence and the narrative and temporal implications of this. Part one will examine a preoccupation with revenge that seems to emerge as a solution to the problems posed by an image of sexual violence. Part two will then look at texts seem to eschew the logic of retribution as a means of domesticating this image. I intend to determine the relationships between these texts in terms of both their shared content and the destabilisation each experiences on the level of narrative temporality. As instances of storytelling each of these unusual narratives suggests that sexual violence presents a special case for narrativising cinematic images and violence, one I intend to deconstruct and analyse.