Neuchatel Female Trouble Retrospective Blurs Gender and Genre

Upon taking the reins of the Neuchatel Intl. Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF) last year, incoming artistic director Pierre-Yves Walder marked his first edition with Scream Queer, a thematic retrospective that explored the thorny and thrillingly diverse forms of queer representation in genre fare. Now building on the success of that well-received program, the NIFFF director wanted to deliver a sequel of sorts.

“We want to continue last year’s investigations and to take our thematic journeys a step further,” Walder explains. “You could say that this focus will continue to ask and answer the same questions with a slightly different emphasis.”

And so here comes Female Trouble, a 20-film, century-spanning spotlight built on a French play-on-words that blurs gender and genre. Starting with Mario Roncoroni’s silent serial “Filibus,” which mixed sci-fi motifs with gender-fluidity and lesbian desire all the way back in 1915, and on through Jacques Tourneur’s “Cat People” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” some three decades later, the program will spotlight a number of recognizable archetypes from cinema’s golden age.

“The Femme Fatale is a woman who leads men to ruin,” says Walder. “Whereas the Nasty Woman of early cinema goes to the theater, smokes and contradicts her husband in public, breaking out of the role assigned to her by society. But even if vilified – with the Femme Fatale usually punished by end of the film – these characters are, paradoxically, often the most free.”

Skipping a few generations ahead, the retrospective programmers made a point not to dwell on the substantial number of rape-and-revenge thrillers that defined the heyday of exploitation cinema. “Even if we could contextualize them, we just got fed up with showing female rage,” Walder explains.

Instead, the programmers thought up a thematic double-bill, pairing Abel Ferrara’s “Ms. 45” against Jennifer Kent’s “The Nightingale,” allowing the different sensibilities and points-of-emphasis to ping-off one another when treating subjects born of similar violence.  

“Women directors have reappropriated certain genre codes to subvert and adapt them to new discourses,” says Walder. “But what we also wanted to make clear is that there’s no single or overarching feminine sensibility.”

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Across its 20 titles, Female Trouble will showcase and subvert various archetypes, from the Scorned Warrior in the female-directed wuxia “Lady With a Sword,” to the Maternal Guardian incarnated by Sigourney Weaver in “Aliens” to the Camp Crazed Killer of Kathleen Turner in “Serial Mom.” Moving toward more contemporary films, the showcase will highlight the horror genre’s expansive remit.

“I like morally questionable protagonists,” says critic and broadcaster Anna Bogutskaya, who will participate in this year’s event. “And I love the fact that, over the past decade or so, we’ve seen these female protagonists become so incredibly detailed, well-written, and beautifully performed.

“All of which makes me think of genre films as [the heir] to those character-driven, ‘women’s pictures’ of the 1940s and 50s,” she continues. “You really get inside these characters’ minds through heightened situations. There’s a slasher film, and there’s something else going on, and the space given to character development is really striking.”

Co-founder of the horror film collective and podcast The Final Girls, and author of the recently published “Unlikeable Female Characters: The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate,” Bogutskaya will participate in a Female Trouble round-table, interrogating additional archetypes, while heralding new forms of representation that leave old modes behind.

By way of archetypes, the author cites personal favorites the Final Girl, the Avenging Angel, and most especially the Woman on the Verge (“This figure who’s just barely holding it together until everything explodes,” she says, citing “Carrie,” among others); by way of new voices, Bogutskaya speaks of directors Carlota Martínez-Pereda, Prano Bailey-Bond (“Censor”), and Leigh Janiak (“Honeymoon”) in glowing terms. 

In fact, Bogutskaya will share the stage with director Carlota Martínez-Pereda, whose 2022 film “Piggy” is the most recent title presented in the Female Trouble retrospective. The panel will also feature Sitges festival manager Mónica García Massagué, altogether accounting for three inputs giving genre filmmaking and criticism a new charge.

“We’re seeing a new wave of female-led genre film alongside this huge mushrooming of fan-led events, curation, writing, and creation,” says Bogutskaya. “The fact that those two waves are cresting at the same time creates for some really, really rich critical conversation that goes beyond simplistic questions about women [behind the camera]. That’s much less interesting than the films themselves, and the themes and the characters within them.”