Description
Book SynopsisFilm and Female Consciousness analyses three contemporary films that offer complex and original representations of women's thoughtfulness and individuality: In the Cut (2003), Lost in Translation (2003) and Morvern Callar (2002).
Trade Review'Film and Female Consciousness opens up enticing fresh horizons for the feminist and philosophical study of authorship and spectatorship in cinema.' - Annette Kuhn, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
'Entering into the seriously playful spirit of Luce Irigaray's work, Lucy Bolton shifts the signifier of the cinematic from womenslaughter to women's laughter. Putting the 'close' into close reading, Bolton attends to the haptic strategies by which Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola and Lynne Ramsay intimate their female protagonists' Irigarayan becoming. Gestural, chromatic, musical, and tactile communion are echoed in Bolton's lucid readings, which will inspire future filmmakers, as well as film theorists, of all genders to enter, like Frannie, Charlotte and Morvern, a hopeful, feminist future.' - Sophie Mayer, author, The Cinema of Sally Potter Film and Female Consciousness is a fresh and engaging approach to what is often considered a well-trodden and even passé subject in film studies. Bolton's book suggests a potential methodology for the future of feminist film criticism in a way that opens up new directions in a discipline that had contented itself with circuitous discussions surrounding the dearth of interesting and new representations of female subjectivity, identity and interiority in mainstream female characters. - Alexia Bowler, Feminist & Women's StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
'Frozen in Showcases': Feminist Film Theory and the Abstraction of Woman
The Camera as an Irigarayan Speculum
In the Cut: Self-Endangerment or Subjective Strength?
Lost in Translation: The Potential of Becoming
Morvern Callar: In a Sensory Wonderland
Architects of Beauty and the Crypts of Our Bodies: Implications for Filmmaking and Spectatorship
Concluding Remarks: The Object is Speaking
Bibliography
Filmography
Discography
Notes
Index
