Every film reflects the concerns of its time, the particular way of looking at the world in that culture, that society, that time. To fully understand a film, you need to know something of the era that spawned it. Each film is influenced by all of the films that have gone before it – the collective consciousness of how we ‘look’ at a film - and will have specific conventions that link it to others of its genre, its type. For your examination, an understanding of the film’s production and of events in the world at that time will offer perspectives on how to better view its narrative presentation and thematic concerns. Beasts of the Southern Wild is quite distinctive for the range of creative influences and processes that influenced its eventual form as a feature film.
The film was the debut feature of its director Benh Zeitlin and upon its release the film enjoyed significant success as a distinctive film that had been produced in the tradition of American independent filmmaking. Beyond its very real-world reference points, it was also a fantasy film and one that was quite different to the kind of fantasy films produced by major Hollywood film studios.
Since the early 1990s, the American independent film has established itself as a particular kind of film in terms of its narrative elements and film aesthetics and in terms of how it is placed into the film exhibition (cinemas, tv, online) marketplace and how discourses develop around it. Certainly, the American independent film is notable for often exploring content that’s arguably distinctive from the content comprising many films produced by major Hollywood film studios. It’s in this respect that the word ‘independent’ functions. The industry context that the words ‘independent film’ refer to indicate something of how a feature film is developed and financed and distributed and exhibited in a way that’s an alternative to the major Hollywood film studios. Independent films exist independent to the narrative conventions of Hollywood and the production conventions of the Hollywood film industry.
Of the independent film production tradition, film scholar David Bordwell has made a useful comment, though, about the perceived difference between major film studio productions and independently produced titles, saying that: “The press has exaggerated the distinctiveness of indie films. People are always looking for novelty, but the fact that something is noticeable doesn’t mean that a seismic change has hit.http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2006/10/14/independent-film-how-different/
For more on the culture of the American independent film, David Bordwell’s entry at his website is hugely useful and it can be found here: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2006/10/14/independent-film-how-different/ The term American independent film, though, has come to indicate an ‘alternative’ to the kinds of films that are typically shown at multiplex cinemas in our own cities and towns and that are most forcefully promoted by studios with immense advertising budgets. Therefore, in itself, the term American independent film has become its own brand; a label that tells audiences something about the kind of story being told and the circumstances of its production. An independently produced film is the end result of a niche network of producers, financiers and audiences. When reality and the reality of movies fuse there’s the opportunity for an especially rich mix of considerations to develop around film craft and representation. For the audiences there are a range of responses to the world depicted by the film.
A key reality and event from which Beasts of the Southern Wild developed was the year 2005 when Hurricane Katrina struck and devastated the city of New Orleans and its surrounding area. As the aftermath of that event unfolded, Zeitlin was documenting it using the video function of his mobile phone. Sometime later he visited parts of New Orleans where Hurricane Katrina had struck. This real-world research informed the development of the ‘fictional’ story of Beasts of the Southern Wild.
The film was developed with the Sundance Film Institute’s project development initiative that had been established to support bringing films to the screen that might not otherwise be developed. The reputation of the Sundance Institute’s support for the film was widely recognized and many news stories ran in 2012 that explained how the film had won a grant from Sundance for its development at the screenplay stage. Upon its release in 2012 at the Sundance Film Festival, Josh Penn and Dan Janvey, producers of the film were awarded the Sundance Institute Indian Paintbrush Producer’s Award and its accompanying $10,000 grant.
Critically, given the setting of Beasts of the Southern Wild, it’s appropriate to know that director Benh Zeitlin had once worked for the Smithsonian Institution (a combination of library, museum and research centre in Washington D.C.in the USA) and this contextual knowledge suggests something of the film’s interest in mythology and something of an anthropological in a specific place and perhaps even an anthropological sensibility that’s focused on depicting a very specific place. Beasts of the Southern Wild, then, combined several existing narrative elements that were drawn together to form the whole. The screenplay adapted and expanded upon Zeitlin’s experience in documenting Hurricane Katrina and the script was also an adaptation of a one-act play by Florida-based writer Lucy Alibar entitled Juicy and Delicious that had explored the idea of how a child reacts to an event of personal devastation. Of the film in relation to her play, Alibar commented at the time of the film’s release that “We were really influenced by magical realism, and seeing how we could make that work cinematically.”http://www.goldderby.com/article/2012/beasts-of-the-southern-wild-lucy-alibar-benh-zeitlin-oscars-movies-entertainment-news-13579086/
For Alibar, two key film influences on the adaptation of the play into a screenplay were Babe and ET: The Extra Terrestrial, both films about young protagonists being confronted by a disruption to their usual circumstances. Alibar’s comment here is a crucial reminder that filmmakers do not develop their projects in a creative vacuum away from the influence of other films. Similarly, as film spectators we never view a film entirely on its own terms; part of our processing of the narrative information is in relation to other films that we have watched. Additionally, Beasts of the Southern Wild was also partly an extension and elaboration of Zeitlin’s short film Glory at Sea which had been about the state of Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. That film had focused on victims of the hurricane who were waiting for their families to come and find them on raft.
An essential part of the film’s independent film status is the fact that it was produced for a very low budget of 1.8 million dollars and used 16 mm film rather than digital video for its production process. The film was produced by New Orleans-based production company Court 13 which defines itself as a grassroots filmmaking organisation. The company’s website describes Court 13 as follows: “Court 13 is a New Orleans-based arts engine who mission is to support the art that inspires the public.http://court13arts.org Critically, Beasts of the Southern Wild features non-professional actors, an approach that indicates an effort by the filmmakers towards a certain authenticity that is focused around minimal artifice in the creation of the illusion of the film. If you wanted an example of this tradition of using non-professional actors in a film we can refer to a range of different and varied examples. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Italian Neorealist filmmakers often used non-professional actors in their films and in the cinema the cinema of the 1970s in America, many filmmakers also emphasised the role of non-professional actors. Additionally, in terms of how useful it is to watch various films that relate to a specific film you are studying you may wish to watch a film named Passion Fish. This was written and directed by a major figure in American independent cinema named John Sayles. Like Beasts of the Southern Wild, the film is set in the rural American south in the state of Louisiana.
Apart from the film’s production context, Beasts of the Southern Wild also has a distinct cultural context that we need to acknowledge and the film’s director, during promotion of the film for its release, acknowledged this, explaining at length that “There’s a ton of New Orleans culture in the film, which I was familiar with to some extent as I live there. Second-line parade culture, jazz-funeral culture is a huge part of the celebration sequence at the start of the film that defines the town. A funeral in New Orleans begins with these tragic dirges but then transforms into a celebratory, joyous party. And then there’s also West Louisianan, Cajan Mardi-Gras culture which has chicken-chasing and all sorts of things and is a lot more engaged with nature than urban Mardi-Gras. We took all of these ecstatic moments of celebration and distilled it into the Bathtub.http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/lff-blog-rebel-charm-benh-zeitlin-beasts-southern-wild
Synopsis
Beasts of the Southern Wild tells the story of a young girl named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) who lives with her father, Wink (Dwight Henry), in an isolated in the Louisiana Delta. Wink’s character is defined in part by his ‘tough love’ towards his daughter, instilling a sense of discipline and resolve in her. He is doing this as he is sure the world will soon end. In a particularly fairy tale-like plot development Wink falls ill and simultaneously the natural world appears to falter and sicken simultaneously. There is an environmental catastrophe unfolding, notably in terms of ice caps melting: causing water levels to rise. Then too there are the rampaging aurochs: prehistoric animals in our contemporary world. Hushpuppy’s life shifts abruptly as she sets out across flooded Louisiana to find her mother.
Auteur
The idea of the film auteur is a concept that emerged long ago in the 1950s when it was developed and promoted by French, and then American, film critics that the director of a film could be regarded in the same way as the author of a novel could be: as the driving force behind the creation of a cultural artefact that might aspire to be considered in the same light as great literature or painting. Interestingly, the idea of the film author had been promoted in the early 20th century by Russian and British film critics but it did not make its mark on film culture as it would do several decades later. The concept of the author was a key concept in enabling film scholars and critics in the popular press and filmmakers, too, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut in France, to give legitimacy to their theory that at least some of those films produced for the mass audience were worthy of being considered as artistic achievements; as films that demon stated how the craft of filmmaking could be used to ‘say’ something about the human experience. In the BFI Cinema Book we read the following useful definition of the idea of authorship: “Different critical approaches to the work of an auteur can be brought together to demonstrate the historical specificity of ‘authorship’ as a category and the way in which different readings depend on and produce different relations between author, film and spectator.
Auteurs, then, are understood to be film directors who are able to put a strong personal stamp on their films, usually through the mise-en-scene and creative treatment of a plot, characters and setting. By extension, the auteur theory explained that film directors do this in a consistent, identifiable way across many films that they have directed (and perhaps even written the screenplay for, but not necessarily). The auteur theory certainly had an important impact on Hollywood film directors being recognised for their creative achievements. Films were engaging their audiences for a reason and that was to with how the story had been told. Over the decades since the 1950s, the idea of the film auteur has become well established and is certainly used now as marketing tool: for example, when the recent film Dunkirk was released the name of the film’s director, Christopher Nolan, was essential to how it was promoted. Other directors who we might argue can be considered auteurs include the following: Kathryn Bigelow, Andrea Arnold, Eva DuVernay, Jane Campion, Spike Lee, Dennis Villeneuve, Ben Wheatley and Wes Anderson.
Returning to the idea of the independent film we might be able to claim that an independent film that is relatively more free of studio interference in terms of creative choices being made by the filmmaker is ideally suited to the idea of the film director as auteur.
Film Language and Mise-en-Scene
In this part of the resource, we’ll consider the aesthetic of Beasts of the Southern Wild. The film’s visual language and mise-en- scene are certainly distinctive and relate directly to its low budget, independent production status.
There is an accepted relationship between financing of a film and creative risks. The lower the budget, the more creative freedom tends to be the balance.
Beasts of the Southern Wild deploys a handheld camera aesthetic that allows the material to play to the audience’s familiarity with cinema-verite as a style that’s familiar from both documentary and narrative fiction films. Cinema-verite seeks to recreate a sense of reality in terms of how the camera relates to the space in which the story is set. It is often defined by a handheld camera approach to framing and presenting the action. Cinema verite, then, functions a film style intended to mimic reality in terms of how we move through space as we walk or remain motionless. It’s intended to capture a sense of spontaneity that relates to reality. In the BFI Cinema Book, realism is usefully discussed as follows: “…reality itself is not something passively reflected or revealed in art, but an impression constructed with care and artifice… in general, ‘everything holds together, that is every detail, every action will play some – preferably more than one – functional role in the unfolding of the narrative.'
Part of the film’s fantasy elements relate to Zeitlin’s filmmaking background includes a period working with animators in the Cech Republic who worked with Jan Svankmajer. This detail of Zeiltin’s film language is useful in illustrating the fusion of visual approaches that Zeitlin applies to his film. As further evidence that films are not created in isolation from other cultural products (films, books, plays, visual art, news media) and Ben Zeitlin identified the influence of a documentary entitled Dry Wood and a short film made by Julius Avery entitled Jerrycan. The visual style of Children of Men also informed Beasts of the Southern Wild. No film’s creative choices exist in a vacuum and certainly Beasts of the Southern Wild suggests a range of influences on its storytelling style. Zeitlin’s film is certainly significantly influenced by the films of Steven Spielberg and the films of Terrence Malick. Visual realism is a key aesthetic choice of the film and it functions as a counterpoint to the story’s fantasy elements. In this fusion of a very specific place and time with a highly fantastical element, Beasts of the Southern Wild is similar to a film such as Pan’s Labyrinth.
Key Sequence Analysis
Having made the point that the use of a handheld camera approach is essential to the film’s visual language as being based around a kind of ‘realism’ that somehow seems to minimise the audience’s awareness of the filmmaking process, the film’s visual.
Let’s consider the scene in which we are introduced to the young girl Hushpuppy and her dad named Wink. The scene is notable for the use of handheld camera and absence of music to enhance a sense of place and mood. The images show us an impoverished rural setting and indeed this is a setting that relates to a more recent American movie entitled American Honey.
The film contains a number of sequences that create a sense of a community and a community that engages in group activity and celebration. Notably, there is the meal scene in which Hushpuppy and her friends demonstrate how to ‘beast it’ in how they eat, without any politeness, the food on their plates. There’s a sense here of a primal energy that is part of the community’s identity.
Throughout the film there’s a sense of their home being separate from the America that we typically see in movies. This is a more primal community. As a film about a rural American experience that’s rarely depicted Beasts of the Southern Wild immerses the audience in a very specific place and uses voice over to enrich the story information being communicated by the image and the actors’ performances.
Critical Debates
Something that a film can sometimes powerfully achieve, intentionally or otherwise, is to become a catalyst for wider debates and discussions to take place around representation of communities, individuals and cultures. In 1991, when the film Thelma & Louise was released it prompted a debate in the popular press around film’s representation of women and their experiences.
When Beasts of the Southern Wild was released it was reviewed by a wide range of print and online media outlets, many of these offering high praise for the film. There were, however, a number of reviews and commentaries about the film that expressed less positive responses. The film was even promoted on American tv’s hugely popular Oprah Winfrey tv programme. As such, it may have reached an audience via this particular promotional opportunity that would otherwise have been passed by. In The Guardian newspaper’s review of the film, Peter Bradshaw commented that “Beasts of the Southern Wild is a vividly poetic and maybe even therapeutic response to one of the most painful and mortifying episodes in modern American history, second only to 9/11.https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/oct/18/beast-southern-wild-review Bradshaw’s reference to 9/11 is essential as a way of understanding the film and recognizing its resonance. 9/11 references the date of 11th September 2001 when a major terrorist attack was made on New York City. The event was a national trauma and it provoked a subsequently complex set of national and international events and discussions around the relationship between America, Europe and the Middle East. In a review of the film in The Times Higher Education magazine, Duncan Wu wrote of the film that “The film presents ample reason to deplore the US’ treatment of its poor, whose situation is worse than it needs to be.https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/culture/beasts-of-the-southern-wild/421487.article Contrast this kind of observation of the film, with this excerpt from mainstream film fan magazine, Empire: “Beautiful, funny, timely and tender, this is the American arthouse movie of the year."https://www.empireonline.com/movies/beasts-southern-wild/review/ In a review of the film in the monthly magazine Sight & Sound, published by the British Film Institute, Nick Pinkerton comments that the film tends towards being whimsical whilst other reviewers found its fantasy leanings highly appealing.
In addition to its representation of a specific community, Beasts of the Southern Wild is also an interesting movie in terms of how it contributes the sub-genre of eco cinema; those films that explore relationships with the environment. How easily and routinely we forget, or ignore, that we too are Nature. Other films that very overtly explore our relationship with Nature include Silent Running (a science fiction film), The Abyss (a science fiction film), Jurassic Park (a science fiction film) and Days of Heaven (a historical romantic drama).
The term representation refers to the ways in which characters, situations, images and sounds in a film stand for, or depict, aspects of the real world. That said, it’s appropriate to note that there is potentially no single reality, but instead many versions of reality. Films re- present the world to us, and the visual power of films is particularly effective in making us believe in the worlds they represent. Let’s look, too, at two critiques of the film that counterpoint the very positive reviews and remind us of how a film can function as a lens through which to discuss broader issues that arise in ‘real’ life. The American critic Bell Hooks wrote about how the film provides stereotypes of race and genres and she writes that the character of Wink “is a composite of all the racist/sexist hateful stereotypes that mass media projects about black masculinity.[10] This reservation about the film also finds expression in American periodical New Republic which says of the film that it “deploys a casual racism, vilifies public health workers and romanticises poverty.[11]
Narrative
Beasts of the Southern Wild was released in 2012. When we use the word genre we are, in a sense, talking about storytelling guidelines that a filmmaker commits to, working with them but also possibly interested in adapting them; in doing so, contributing, to the ways in which a genre evolves.
The film is, in part, a fantasy piece that’s set in the very specific place and moment in time of New Orleans after the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina. The hurricane struck New Orleans in 2005 and one of the byproducts of the natural tragedy was a debate around the lives of the African American community in New Orleans and how it was they who suffered most acutely the effects of the hurricane. As a useful counterpoint to Beasts of the Southern Wild it is useful to also watch the Spike Lee documentary film When the Levees Broke. Lee’s film focused on the impact of the hurricane on the New Orleans community and of his film, Lee has said that “The one thing that was surprising me going in (is) I didn’t think there would be as much humour as there ended up being. But we just successfully captured the spirit of people. It was one of those things that I have to laugh to keep from crying. Some said they were still crying despite the laughing. http://www.popentertainment.com/spikelee.htm
Related to the film’s status as an independently produced film, beyond the Hollywood film industry structures, is that Beasts of the Southern Wild does not need to adhere to narrative conventions in terms of subject. That said, the film still has a protagonist, a specific location, a dramatic three-act structure that resolves itself at the conclusion. In an interview about the film with the Smithsonian Institution’s magazine he noted that casting impacted on the development of the film’s narrative, saying that “The narrative changed and adapted to whatever was going on. We tested it against the actual people and places that are in it. If the story wasn’t true, it would break under the weight of those circumstances. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-benh-zeitlin-made-beasts-of-the-southern-wild-135132724/?device=ipad&no-ist=&page=2
All films manipulate audiences and this is one of the fundamental reasons why we choose to watch a film. It is because we want to experience a change in our emotional condition. We may want to be provoked into laughter, tension, sadness, fear or happiness but we want to be manipulated, in terms of our perceptions and our thinking. Of our emotional engagement with film, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson note “Expectation spurs emotion." What they’re identifying here is the importance of the question we always ask when we watch a film (or read a novel, a newspaper story, play a computer game or, ultimately as we move through our own lives): what happens next? Applying this principle to the micro-level elements of a film, a wide shot provokes us to want to then be shown a shot that takes us closer to the action and then maybe closer still. Film trailers are very good examples of how the question ‘What happens next?’ underpins storytelling.
One of the key issues underpinning our exploration of film and the experience of an emotional response to it is the understanding that emotions can be argued to be culturally formed. Chris Barker in his book Cultural Studies writes that “Emotions are not simply matters of individual interpretation of experience but inevitably a part of the wider cultural repertoire of discussion, explanation and resources and maps of meaning available to members of cultures."
Beasts of the Southern Wild, then, is presented to its audience as an ‘arthouse’ film and when we use the term arthouse the implication is that we are watching a film that is characterized by it being distinct from the kind of film shown at a multiplex cinema. The film scholar David Bordwell explains that art cinema (which neorealism could be classified as an example of) does very particular things, notably: “the art film’s thematic of (the human condition), its attempt to pronounce judgements on ‘modern life’, proceeds from its formal needs: had the characters a goal, life would no longer seem so meaningless… http://academic.uprm.edu/mleonard/theorydocs/readings/Bordwell.pdf
When we think about spectatorship, we need to consider the idea of emotional response. The term emotional response certainly suggests something different to the term intellectual response. In his book Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey explains that audience response can be considered as a process of decoding the meanings and stimuli that a film has been encoded with and that this is central to our understanding of reception. He writes “popular culture is a semiotic battlefield in which audiences constantly engage in a conflict…between an imposed set of meanings and pleasures…"
Some key questions to be mindful of when considering emotional response to film are: Do we react differently to a film if we watch it alone than if were watching it with our family or our friends? Is watching a film at the cinema different to watching it at home or even watching it on your smartphone whilst you sit on the bus? Do repeat viewings of a film lessen, or intensify our emotional engagement with a film? What allows films to be understood? David Bordwell writes “It makes sense to postulate that filmmakers…build their films in ways which will coax most of their spectators to follow similar elaboration pathways.http://www.davidbordwell.net/books/poetics_04cognition.pdf
Audiences, then, can be active or passive in relation to a film (and by extension any media text) and key to the ‘agreement’ we make with a film is that it will encourage audiences to identify and empathise with characters as they experience a range of events that test their emotional, intellectual and physical capacities.
A film’s narration, then, serves to influence and direct our emotions. Other elements, such as sound and colour also contribute to a narrative’s manipulative effect. Audience experience, then, is usefully understood as the collective, and individual act of the ways in which we encounter a film and a range of discourses and processes around it. By extension we need to define an understanding of the term audience reception. Chris Barker refers to how a new range of reception studies has stressed that “audiences are active creators of meaning in relation to texts. They bring previously acquired cultural competencies to bear on texts so that differently constituted audiences will work with different meanings.
Another key concept to bring to our work states that audience response to a film text is both referential and critical. The term referential response means “an understanding that reads (a text) as if it were referring to reality. The term critical response means “an awareness of the constructed nature of the text. Almost unconsciously, when we watch a movie, we move back and forth between these conditions. In terms of Beasts of the Southern Wild our responses to the film are partly informed by our knowledge and understanding of the event of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath and some of the cultural debates around it in terms of African American communities in New Orleans.
Ideology and Themes
In the book Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, John Storey writes that “Ideology can refer to a systematic body of ideas articulated by a particular group of people and he further explains that ideology can “indicate how some texts and practices present distorted images of reality. Chris Barker writes of national identity that “Nations are not just political formations. They are also systems of cultural representation. This understanding can be applied to the cultural representation of Louisiana in the film.
Certainly, Beasts of the Southern Wild presents us with a particular response to Hurricane Katrina and, as we’ve already considered, reviews of the film commented on this connection.
Beasts of the Southern Wild is a fantasy piece. That’s the genre that it partly belongs to and in his book Fantasy Film: A Critical Introduction, James Walters defines fantasy as a genre through which “we recognise that a conscious effort is being made to depart from the confines of ordinary, everyday existence: from the natural to the supernatural as it were. This description provides us with a useful overview of the generic structure of the film.
As a way of understanding the film further we can refer to the book The Uses of Enchantment, in which its author Bruno Bettelheim writes that “The deep inner conflicts originating in our primitive drives and our violent emotions are all denied in much of children’s literature, and so the child is not helped in coping with them. But the child is subject to desperate feelings of loudness and isolation, and often experiences mortal anxiety. This definition certainly provides us with a sense of Hushpuppy’s experiences in the story.
Like most films, Beasts of the Southern Wild, combines various genre elements: it is a mythologically informed film, the image of the flood resonates with audiences from a range of ancient narratives. Thematically, the film explores the concept of family and community and of the film its director commented that “I never wanted it to be a political movie. I feel very strongly about environmental issues but I wanted even people who don’t believe in global warming to sit down and watch it. The film is wildly scientifically incorrect. It’s really about what it’s like to have your environment collapse. The film explores Hushpuppy pulling together all these fragments she’s heard about why her environment is falling apart and reconstructing it in her head. When I was down there, I’d hear lots of people talk about how everything around them had changed – how trees they’d carved their names into in their backyards are no longer there. I wanted to convey this sense of history being taken away. For me it was an emotional issue. http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/lff-blog-rebel-charm-benh-zeitlin-beasts-southern-wild
Critically, the American south has often been represented in popular movies as a place of otherness beyond the conventions and ‘civilisation’ of America’s northern states.
Of this Chris Fennel writes for the BFI website that “filmmakers have always been drawn to the atmosphere and the iconography of the Deep South. The states that form the bedrock of the region – South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana – were some of the first to be admitted to the Union and so have acquired a fascination that is specifically American. Deep South films confront issues of discovery, race and segregation, freedom, home, violence and destiny – themes that are mapped on a landscape that is by turns fetid and transcendental, isolating and regenerative.
Perhaps more than any other region on screen, the Deep South has been the subject of some fatuous caricatures and malicious stereotypes. Its reputation as traditional and conservative – which goes as far back as its secessionist past – has often been presented as a kind of backwardness, all rednecks and buckteeth, hookworm and trailer-trash. But most filmmakers are drawn to the Deep South for its epic stories and historical specificity. http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-films-set-deep-south
Significantly, Beasts of the Southern Wild, offers an alternative to the cliché representations of black magic and its relationship to black people as evidenced in films such as the animated film The Princess and the Frog and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
In a very incisive response to the film by Agnes Woolley in a piece entitled The Politics of Myth-making: Beasts of the Southern Wild, we read the following: “In one particularly troubling scene, Hushpuppy and a group of girl orphans hitch a ride on a vessel scouting the bayou for survivors and go in search of their missing mothers. Arriving at a low-lit floating Bordello – emblazoned with the legend “girls, girls, girls? – the children are immediately seduced by a group of cooing, cosseting women in varying stages of undress. Each child slow dances with their surrogate mother watched over by the adult male punters, whose presence intimates the provisionality of the encounter. Shot in womb-like ambient reds and warm oranges, the scene is clearly designed to evoke those maternal qualities of comfort, security and tactility of which they are deprived in the Bathtub. Following her own symbolic mother into the kitchen, Hushpuppy is given a dish of carefully prepared delicacies to eat with cutlery in place of the whole barbecued chickens she is forced to chew off the bone in the Bathtub. As food acquisition and preparation are crucial to survival, the marked distinction here is significant; in situating the domesticated female kitchen firmly in the realm of fantasy, the film demonstrates the inadequacy of stereotypical feminine qualities for survival in the ‘wild’. Worryingly, Hushpuppy’s feeble and irresponsible protomother – self-professedly unable to look after anyone but herself – recalls a number of recent films, such as John Hillcoat’s The Road (2009) and Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter (2011), in which mothers are either absent or passively inert when confronted with impending disaster. https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/agnes-woolley/politics-of-myth-making-beasts-of-southern-wild
In Representation, Realism and Fantasy (BFI, 2003) the point is made that various kinds of representation give audiences various insights into particular cultures, meanings and varieties of knowledge of the world and it tends to be the case that most films construct themselves with a transparent style, the intention being that the viewer feels they are being given a window on a world that has been captured on film. Typically, filmmakers usually want viewers to forget that everything in the film they are watching has been constructed; that it’s an illusion.
Beasts of the Southern Wild is an allegory that uses the uncertainties of childhood and a child’s perspective on an event to focus the story’s attention, and ours, on the broader, wider world.
Beasts of the Southern Wild’s focus on a child amidst a fantastical experience is a familiar convention of narrative. Vicky Le Beau has suggested that in film children serve a particular function in terms of theme, commenting that “Closer to the state of infancy, an infant (literally, without language) the small child tends to be discovered at the limit of what words can be called upon to tell, or to mean – a limit that then generates the questions of how to convey the child’s experience in language, of what in that experience, of what in the image, falls outside of, and so resists, the world of words. By contrast, when it comes to the representative of the child, cinema, with its privileged access to the perceptual, its visual and aural richness, would seem to have the advantage: closer to perception, it can come closer to the child. Beasts of the Southern Wild, then, functions as a valuable example of how a non-mainstream film and the context of its production allows a filmmaker to explore a subject typically beyond the reach of American major film studios output. Worlds beyond our own reach can be offered to us by all kinds of cinema and Beasts of the Southern Wild happens to evidence this through the ‘alternative’ quality of American independent cinema.