Ivone Margulies: “Questions Staged: In-person Reenactment and Serial Monologue Films”

This talk defines a new instrumental mode of cinema devoted to framing reflection around historical, political and social issues—the serial monologue film. After a brief foray on the role of monologues and theatricality in para-juridical reenactment films, I will focus on dramatic fictions where a series of imbalanced dialogues—with one person speaking extensively while the other listens—engage the viewer in broader reflections on Western civilization (The Talking Picture); on national hegemony and resistance (The Silence of the Sea) or on women’s lives in Iran (Ten.)

Ivone Margulies is Professor of Film at Hunter College, and the Graduate Center at City University of New York, (CUNY). Her most recent book In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema (2019) was launched with a related series at Anthology Film Archives. She is the co-editor (with Jeremi Szaniawski) of On Women’s Films: Across Worlds and Generations. She is the author of Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday and the editor of Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema. She has published on performance and realism in French and Brazilian cinemas as well as on moving image artists Steve Fagin, Stan Douglas, Sharon Lockhart and Ana Maria Maiolino. She co-edited with B. Ruby Rich a Film Quarterly dossier on Chantal Akerman; translated and staged (with Flora Sussekind) Akerman’s Une Famille en Bruxelles in Portuguese.