The Henry James Review

Abstract:

This article explores the relations among sound, sexuality, and the subjective camera in the conceptual artist Babette Mangolte's film . Inspired by Henry James' novel of the same name, Mangolte's film disrupts Maisie's, and audiences', perception of the domestic sphere through its acousmatic soundtrack. Mangolte's Maisie embodies the polymorphously perverse child whose discovery of sexuality is inextricable from the film's feminist critique of spectatorship. Although Maisie witnesses adult sexuality as a series of repeated primal scenes, the film imagines new forms of desire, pleasure, and identification glimpsed through Maisie's perspective formally enacted via the subjective camera.