Women, film, and oceans a/part

The politicized use of humor in accented cinema is a tool for negotiating particular formations of identity, such as sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and class. The body of work produced by contemporary women filmmakers working in Australia, specifically Tracey Moffatt, Monica Pellizzari, and Clara Law, illustrates how these directors have employed critical humor as a response to their multiple marginalization as women, Australian, and accented filmmakers. In their works, humor functions as a critical tool to deconstruct the contradictions in dominant discourses as they relate to (neo)colonial, racist, globalized, patriarchal, and displaced pasts and presents. Produced within Australian national cinema, but emerging from experiences of geographical displacements that defy territorial borders, their films illuminate how critical humor can inflect such accepted categories as the national constitution of a cinema, film genre, and questions of exile and diaspora. Critical humor thus consti tutes a cinematic signifying practice able, following Luigi Pirandello's description of umorismo, to decompose the filmic text, and as a tool for an ideological critique of cinema and its role in (re)producing discourses of the nation predicated on the dominant categories of whiteness and masculinity. The study offers a theoretical framework for decoding humor in a film text, focusing on the manipulation of cinematic language, and it provides a model for a criticism that wishes to heighten the counter-hegemonic potential of cinematic texts, by picking up on the humorous, contradictory openings of the text and widening them through a parallel dissociating process.