This thesis examines the representation of maternity in contemporary art cinema, focusing on selected films by Claire Denis, Lynne Ramsay, Andrea Arnold, Sean Baker and, in a coda, Alice Diop. It proposes that these recent directors all explore maternity from the perspective of ‘transgression’, both as it pertains to acts of literal crime, as well as more symbolic or cultural ruptures. The thesis draws on the psychoanalytic work of Melanie Klein as a key theoretical framework, and it argues that Klein is a generative (and often overlooked) point of reference for exploring the role of violence and negativity in recent cinema. I propose that Klein’s model of psychic splitting in early life, an infantile process which violently divides the maternal figure into ‘good mother’ versus ‘bad mother’, is a dialectical binary that operates structurally within the precarious worlds these films depict. Klein’s psychic model is a punitive framework, quick to categorize and punish different behaviours, just as modern systems of neoliberal governance and surveillance are eager to classify different maternal subjects. In both cases, this compulsion is fundamentally grounded within anxieties about dependency, survival, and futurity. The term ‘maternal transgression’ also seeks to describe a cinematic engagement with motherhood and reproduction that exceeds the boundaries of the human and transgresses a strictly Anthropocentric perspective. The thesis also draws on the critical work of Adriana Cavarero, Lisa Downing, Lauren Berlant and Eugenie Brinkema to consider issues of contemporary violence, ethics and precarity.

In the introduction, I set out the key theoretical concerns of the thesis and illustrate how Klein’s psychoanalytic model might help to read the representation of maternal transgression in contemporary art films. I reflect on the role played by motherhood, care, and reproduction in the history of cinema as a medium, tracing a maternal genealogy from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975). I situate the project in relation to existing scholarship and reflect on how the specificity of art cinema shapes the representation of transgression and ambivalent maternal figures. Each chapter of the thesis then focuses on a different mode of maternal labour and infantile development, beginning with ‘origins’ and then turning to consider questions of ‘mess’, ‘feeding’, and ‘play’. Chapter One examines Claire Denis’ film High Life as a philosophical meditation on the intellectual concept of ‘origin’. It suggests that Denis approaches this primordial question from multiple perspectives, including human biological reproduction, ethics, and cosmology. Denis is interested in the role of maternity within a carceral context, both as a mode of criminal transgression and as a form of biopolitical punishment.

Chapter Two turns to the films of Lynne Ramsay to explore how her radical depiction of maternity is characterized as an encounter with material ‘mess’ and its tenacity. Ramsay’s films offer a bold reworking of the traditional associations forged between the figure of mother and the domestic labour of cleaning. Chapter Three turns to the films of Andrea Arnold to examine how her cinema engages with the mammalian maternal body as a site of reproduction, care, and labour. From her first short Milk to her most recent film Cow, Arnold has offered a sustained mediation on these creaturely, embodied issues as experienced by both human and non-human animals. Chapter Four examines the representation of maternal transgression as a carnivalesque mode of ‘play’ in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. In its depiction of neoliberal precarity and different forms of reproductive labour, Baker’s film considers maternity in relation to other contemporary questions of class, respectability, and urbanity. In the coda, reflections on Alice Diop’s Saint Omer occasion a final meditation on transgressive maternity as a dialectical conflict between both care and violence, and life and death.