Overview
- Demonstrates the importance of Luce Irigaray's writings for understanding the cinematic representation of female interiority and consciousness.
- Structured around analysis of three carefully matched pairs of films
- Contributes to the growing body of work on Film and Philosophy, which is a growing area attracting a lot of academic interest.
- Analysis of modern, respected and well known films as well as popular classics – broad appeal to film scholars and more general readers.
- Focus on female directors – topical because of growing interest in women filmmakers (such as Kathryn Bigelow, Andrea Arnold).
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Film 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). Lucy Bolton compares these recent works with well-known and influential films that offer more familiar treatments of female subjectivity: Klute (1971), The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Marnie (1964). Considering each of the older, celebrated films alongside the recent, unconventional works illustrates how contemporary filmmaking techniques and critical practices can work together to create provocative depictions of on-screen female consciousness.
Bolton's approach demonstrates how the encounter between the philosophy of Luce Irigaray and cinema can yield a fuller understanding of the fundamental relationship between film and philosophy. Furthermore, the book explores the implications of this approach for filmmakers and spectators, and suggests Irigarayan models of authorship and spectatorship that reinvigorate the notion of women's cinema.
Reviews
'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 Studies "With Film and Female Consciousness Lucy Bolton has made an opportune and important intervention in the field as well as a vital contribution to our understanding of how the work of psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray provides fecund material for feminist film theory." - Anna Backman Rogers, author, American Independent Cinema
"What stands out in Film and Female Consciousness, and what makes it exceptional, is quite simply the care and attention given to the films themselves. This makes it very much a work of cinephilia in all of the best senses: it is a book that loves the cinema (and it is a book that makes me want to love the cinema too)." - Richard Rushton, author, The Politics of Hollywood Cinema and Cinema After Deleuze
About the author
Lucy Bolton is Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, UK. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on film philosophy and film stardom, and the co-editor (with Christina Siggers Manson) of Italy on Screen: National Identity and Italian Imaginary (2010).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Film and Female Consciousness
Book Subtitle: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women
Authors: Lucy Bolton
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230308695
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture Collection, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2011
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-230-27569-0Published: 28 July 2011
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-137-50140-0Published: 28 July 2011
eBook ISBN: 978-0-230-30869-5Published: 28 July 2011
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 233
Topics: Film History, Gender Studies, Screen Studies, Feminism, Media Studies, Popular Science in Philosophy