Teenage Pregnancy, Contagion and Affect in European Girlhood Cinema by Women

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

for affective encounters between the characters, and between characters and viewer through an art-house aesthetic that stands out in terms of heightened attention to music, the female voice, pictorial use of landscape, symbolic use of insects/nature and bodies in movement.
If the contemporary realist drama 17 filles presents teenage pregnancy as a provocative strategy adopted by desponded schoolgirls to take control of their body and future (pitting them against the older rational generation that advocates birth control/age-appropriate pregnancy), The Falling and Little Black Spiders hark back to the late 1960s and 1970s when contraception and abortion were out of reach for teenagers thus inviting present-day female viewers to recognise 'their bond of suffering with the past' (Erhart 2018: 36) while also tapping into the energy of a period of significant social change and growing feminist awareness to offer a critique of young women's evacuation from patriarchal narratives. However, both films All three films mobilise the state of pregnancy and/or the pregnant body as representing the ultimate breach in the unity of the embodied self to explore active and creative forms of collective agency through motifs of contagion, expansion and multiplicity. The positive reclamation of the trope of contagion so often derided as a pathological site of cultural exchange between women in writing on girlhood and popular culture will be explored in the context of feminist thinking about pregnancy and female embodiment and I turn to (film) theoretical approaches premised on proximity, contact and immersion to argue for an ' aesthetics as placenta' that exceeds narrative containment in dissolving the boundary between character bodies, film and viewer thus offering an engaging utopian notion of a female future based in the collective and the embodied. What 17 filles, LBS and The Falling have in common is a positive exploitation of teenage pregnancy as a contagious condition that empowers girls to come together as a collective body to defy the regulatory force of institutional structures on their lives. This perspective challenges the negative popular discourse of contagion that constructs 'impressionable' young women as a danger to each other and to themselves (Burke 2006). As Catherine Driscoll points out, one of the defining features of public discourses on feminine adolescence is the representation of girls understanding of each body (outside the frames of mother and child) as produced in and through a placental framework of connection and fluid exchange. ' (2001: 202).

Unwanted Pregnancy and the Power of Contagion
While the female-authored narratives of contagion immerse the viewer from the very first images in a subjective narration via cinematography and soundscape motivated by the girl-protagonists' emotional perspective (allowing the viewer to look and feel with the characters), the films also retain a political commitment in drawing in restricted ways, the hysteric's body bears witness to emotional forces and repressed feelings in the form of behaviour or symptoms (Segal 2009). Central to the contagion narratives is a yearning for connection as a reaction to alienation, repression and loss or to put it in Susan Dominus words: Mass psychogenic illness, whatever its mysterious mechanism, seems deeply The Falling and LBS also place emphasis on romantic friendships between women that cross into sexual attraction, conveyed in a circuit of intense female gazes and gestures that speak of desire and identification. The emotional core of The Falling is the intense friendship between luminous Abigail and dark-haired Lydia, a  desperate to have a family of her own) a privileged narrative and moral position as tragic heroine whose emotional journey we are invited to share.
I argue however that the recuperative narrative pull in these female-authored films is surpassed by the affective intensities that circulate between character bodies and filmic aesthetics. It is through aesthetic choices and heightened cinematic expression that these ensemble dramas transmit affective connection and attachment between female bodies as the boundary between viewer and film dissolves.

Unruly Bodies: Excess and Otherness
Mimetic In The Falling the collective fits symptomatically occur when the school enforces domestic femininity onto its pupils, unleashing an orgy of unruly bodies swooning and collapsing on top of each other in tableaux with erotic and mystical overtones ( Figure 1). Significantly, social contagion also affects the young art teacher, Miss Charron, who is increasingly prone to twitching and fainting when she is coerced into resigning for being pregnant out of wedlock and deciding to keep the baby.
In LBS, it is ingénue Katharina, the most creative girl, who introduces rock music, poetry and empowering mythical stories to distract her peers from the stress and boredom of their impending births, thus challenging the passivity/domestic activities deemed appropriate for expectant mothers. The girls' collective rebellion erupts in a hypnotic dance performance that enacts a confrontation between frenzied goddesses and a captive Minotaur to loud and rhythmic music. Attempts by the nuns to keep the girls in their place are met with defiance as 'the little black spiders' increasingly venture out at night to roam the forest where they create their own code of behaviour and movement in a trance-like dance ritual. (Figure 2).

The centrepieces of collective delirium and self-transcendence in LBS and The
Falling can be read as affection-images 'that connect the figure(s) on the screen to the viewer, not necessarily mediating emotional reactions or leading to action but conflating and collapsing subject with object' in the words of Mieke Bal (2009). The  In foregrounding the loss and suffering of their heroines LBS and The Falling also rely on the 'text of muteness' (Brooks, 1976) that replaces speech and dialogue by music, gesture and an expressive mise-en-scène of desire to resituate the body as a site of affective communication. Set in a repressive past, these films draw on the melodramatic mode to highlight bodily manifestation of repression and trauma related to unwanted pregnancy (rape, miscarriage, death) but also in function of a climactic narrative turning-point that highlights maternal sentiment and works towards the restoration of the mother-daughter bond in intensely emotional and striking resurrection scenes. Sue Thornham (2019)

Girl Talk, Music and Affect
Looking into the ways in which international cinema articulates girls and girlhood, Fiona Handyside and Kate Taylor-Jones point out that sound and music in particular are often foregrounded to express experiences of girlhood that seem to escape conscious articulation and 'to enhance the emotional and affective intensity of audience engagement with the girls' subjectivity' (2016: 124). As Michel Chion (1999) While Katharina's acoustic representation has touches of sadness and vulnerability (a sensibility that is amplified in the first part of the film through the girl's voiceover expressing a romantic yearning that transforms into increasingly desperate pleas to the father of her child in letters that remain unanswered), there is also a quiet authority in Katja's musical leitmotif exemplified by the melodically extended, climactic death/ rebirth scene with its strong religious overtones that perpetuates the bond between Roxy and Katharina through 'their' daughter. The newly born baby's cries punctuate the music score in a life-affirming closing sequence as Roxy breastfeeds and adopts Katharina's baby, naming the girl after her mother.
Contrasting in tone and style with Katja's leitmotif are loud and aggressive music fragments in a variety of genres (rock, punk, electronic) that erupt or spill over in the diegetic world throughout the film to signal the girls' collective rebellion.   Figures 4 and 5).

Natural Landscapes and the Feminine Sublime
In The Falling the sumptuous landscape dominated by the sacred oak tree into which Lydia and Abbie carve their initials is narratively entwined with the intimate bond between the two girls. Throughout the film, the majestic oak tree with its intricate web of branches turns into an ever more enchanting presence, operating pictorially as a metaphor for the connection between young women and In 17 filles it is the beachscape and the sea that functions as a medium of connection between young women. Marking a departure from realism in visual and sound design is the girls' poetic bathing scene (revisited in the closing sequence) that stands out in terms of haptic and tactile imagery. The camera caresses the girls' skin as they move between and around one another, capturing the sense of shared pleasure and solidarity. The swimming, playing and being in water conveyed through movement, gestures and touch evokes a fluidity and freedom of desire while also inviting embodied spectatorship (Marks 2002).
In foregrounding nature as an empowering magical space, occupied and inhabited by girls who connect across time and space, all three films offer the viewer an experience akin to the feminine sublime that embraces excess and tries to find otherness without mastering or domesticating it. As Barbara Claire Freeman explains in her literary critique of the masculinist discourse of the sublime, the very features of the sublime moment such as rapture, merger and identification unsettle the notion of spectatorship in their ability to blur boundaries between subject and object, observer and observed, speaker and listener (1995). Significantly, this loss of control as effect of a sublime aesthetic resonates in the critical reception of LBS and 17 filles that abounds with references to the elusive ' atmospheric' quality of the films (described as uncanny, haunting, enigmatic, unnerving) whereas the frequent recourse to body metaphors in reviews of The Falling such as 'the film gets under your skin' (Steele 2015) and 'terrific film -brings a rush to your head' (Bradshaw 2014) highlights a visceral viewing experience and the destabilising force of the feminine sublime. If 17 filles, Little Black Spiders and The Falling are still infused to a certain (and varying) degree by a postfeminist sensibility in terms of a focus on attractive young white female bodies and a privileged daughterly perspective (at the expense of mature women/mother figures), these European art films offer a more radical version of pregnancy than the individualist and educational scenarios of teenage pregnancy in popular culture in proposing a creative and utopian girlhood space by drawing on the format of the female ensemble drama and through a feminist reclamation of contagion as an empowering collective experience that allows women to relate directly to one another without mediation via the desire of (or for) a male subject.

Conclusion
Even though the political potential of female collectivity is contained through punitive endings and mother-daughter scenarios, I argue that this recuperative pull is surpassed by the affective force of aesthetic and generic elements that have the potential to mimic the role of the placenta, offering spectators an experience that challenges the boundary between self and other, viewer and film. The flow of affective intensities circulating through multiple channels such as the acoustic register (girl talk, music, the female voice), pictorial landscape, bodies in movement, haptic and tactile imagery, camera work and visual/optical effects not only connects the young heroines with each other in intimate ways and with their natural surroundings but also transports the female viewer to a place of belonging that is particularly attractive for women as Monica Swindle reminds us, because of 'the boundary that is created around female bodies rather than between them…a collectivity that many women lament as lacking in womanhood replaced instead by horizontal hostility and competition' (2011).