The Matter of Absence: Female Disembodiment and Digital Cinema

Abstract

This dissertation finds the female body present even where it appears to be absent. It tracks the gesture prevalent in contemporary science fiction cinema to attenuate the female body through digitisation, and responds by turning to the materiality of the film itself. In so doing, the dissertation extends phenomenological film theory at a feminist slant, posing that the film’s body may support, or even be particularly suited to, female expression. It asks how the film text can reflect, inflect and invoke the female body that it depicts. The dissertation’s proposed synergy between depicted and filmic bodies is innate insofar as the figures at hand share their films’ make-up. Since the millen..