Abstract
In this essay I explore a cluster of recent female-authored European art films from different national contexts that draw on pregnant embodiment as a hyperbole of contagion reclaimed as a female mode of expression and resistance in the face of limited opportunities and the strictures of femininity. 17 filles (Muriel and Delphine Coulin 2011, France), Little Black Spiders (Patrice Toye 2012, Belgium) and The Falling (Carol Morley 2014, UK) convey girls’ transformative emotive and bodily experiences in their own terms and allow for intense intersubjective encounters through an arthouse aesthetic based on heightened attention to music, the female voice, pictorial use of landscape and physicality. While these narratives of contagion work towards containment of the political potential of female collectivity through a punitive ending and/or mother-daughter scenarios, it is primarily in the affective force of the films’ aesthetics that new ways of relating between female characters, and between characters and the female viewer are re-imagined across time and space
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