Disruptive poetics in The Five Provocations

ABSTRACT

The Five Provocations (2018), Angie Black’s debut low-budget, independent feature film, began production without a script. Free from the requirements of development funding and operating with what she described as a ‘no budget’ model, Black worked with her actors to develop characters and stories in an extended period of improvisation. While improvisation in low budget, independent cinema is not new, Black’s film distinguishes itself in several ways. Firstly, it uses an additional improvisation mode in which performers, working with feminist burlesque traditions, interrupt the narrative at certain key moments. In this way, the film doubles its improvisation. Furthermore, in queering its realism it also naturalises its queerness. Improvisational strategies in low budget, feature filmmaking, and the unpredictability they produce, are often associated with notions of authenticity and realism. Using the cinematic theory of Jacques Rancière to frame a textual analysis of the film, we argue that, while the film works with conventions of realism, it also disrupts them through transgressive performance and cinematic moments that escape its story logic.

KEYWORDS:

• Improvisation
• performance
• cinema
• independent film
• screenwriting‌
• feminist burlesque

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A deferral is a fee (or part fee) for services or supply that is paid from revenue generated from sales of the film rather than from the production budget.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Dzenis

Anna Dzenis is a Screen Studies lecturer and researcher who has taught at La Trobe University, Victorian College of the Arts and RMIT. She teaches screen literacy, screen criticism, world cinema, film history and theories of visuality. She is a scholar of photography and cinema and brings these two disciplines together in her teaching and research. She is co-editor of the online journal Screening the Past, and has published essays in Senses of Cinema, Screening the Past, Lola, Real Time, Metro, The Conversation, 24 Frames: Australia and New Zealand, The Oxford Companion to Australian Film, Screen Hub and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films.

Noel Maloney

Noel Maloney teaches screenwriting and performance writing in the Bachelor of Creative Arts and the Bachelor of Arts at La Trobe University. He researches contemporary scriptwriting in Australia, and focuses on the tensions between writing, script development processes and production cultures, with a particular interest in practices that challenge traditional narrative and production hierarchies.