Watch Video Essay – Persona Swap

When you discover film for the first time, its a daunting but exciting form of expression, so many doors called genres to open, many probably stay closed. If you ask anyone who has a basic understanding of the delights film has to offer you know there’s probably a few we should take notice to. In 2012 Miriam Bale identified a sub-genre of films featuring the experience of women where the reality of the characters was as unstable as their identity.

Persona Swap is that sub-genre a niche one that basis its subtexts around 3 films – Daises, 3 Women and Persona which makes up part of the name of this 5 and half minutes video Essay….

Persona Swap is a sub-genre that has been rapidly growing in 2015, a sub-genre where women’s merging and dissolving identities are pitted against the backdrop of an unstable reality. Basically a story where the character is forced to rebuild themselves after hitting rock-bottom, friends disappeared what was and what is now is like a blurred reality.

The video essay picks out several films as fine examples of the sub-genre, Phoenix reflects Germany’s fragile sense of identity in the post-war era.When attempting to erase the nightmares of prison camps and betrayed by her husband and the struggle to recreate her old life minus the trauma. In Clouds Of Sils Maria Juliet Binoche plays an actress who revisits a role that help establish her name, now older, playing a new character. She faces that reality of been older whilst resisting not to lash out at those younger actor now in that role.

Other films include Carol, Mistress America and Queen Of  Earth all films explore a woman’s desire within relationships, all once lost now reinvented.Essentially answer the question of how women assert their sense of self.

source: Fandor