Sofia Coppola - The Politics of Visual Pleasure

A feminist study of the mood, texture, tone, and multifaceted meaning of director Sofia Coppola's aesthetic through her most influential and well-known films.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2019

"With this book Rogers has produced a sophisticated and impassioned analysis of Coppola's work... Rogers's main argument - that Coppola manipulates pleasurable images to unsettle rather than mollify us - is utterly convincing. If nothing else, this certainly hits home in relation to my own enchantment with Coppola's work."-Bright Lights Film Journal

All too often, the movies of Sofia Coppola have been dismissed as "all style, no substance." But such an easy caricature, as this engaging and accessible survey of Coppola's oeuvre demonstrates, fundamentally misconstrues what are rich, ambiguous, meaningful films.

Drawing on insights from feminist philosophy and psychology, the author here takes an original approach to Coppola, exploring vital themes from the subversion of patriarchy in The Virgin Suicides to the "female gothic" in The Beguiled. As Rogers shows, far from endorsing a facile and depoliticized postfeminism, Coppola's films instead deploy beguilement, mood, and pleasure in the service of a robustly feminist philosophy.

From the Introduction:

Sofia Coppola possesses a highly sophisticated and intricate knowledge of how images come to work on us; that is, she understands precisely how to construct an image - what to add in and what to remove - in order to achieve specific moods, tones and cinematic affects. She knows that similar kinds of images can have vastly different effects on the viewer depending on their context.... This monograph is an extended study of Coppola's outstanding ability to think through and in images.

List of contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Surface of The Image is Political

PART I: IMAGING ABSENCE AS ABJECTION AND IMAGING THE FEMALE GOTHIC AS RAGE

Chapter 1. The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Chapter 2. The Beguiled (2017)

PART II: EMPTY SUBJECTIVITIES AND MASCULINITY AS VOID

Chapter 3. Lost in Translation (2003)

Chapter 4. Somewhere (2010)

PART III: THE FEMALE BODY AS PATRIARCHAL CURRENCY AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF FEMALE IDENTITY

Chapter 5. Marie Antoinette (2006)

Chapter 6. The Bling Ring (2013)

Conclusion: On Beguilement

References

Index

About the author

Anna Backman Rogers is Professor of Aesthetics and Culture specialising in Feminist Theory at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is the author of American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (2015) and the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the experimental journal MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture.

Summary

A feminist study of the mood, texture, tone, and multifaceted meaning of director Sofia Coppola’s aesthetic through her most influential and well-known films.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2019

“With this book Rogers has produced a sophisticated and impassioned analysis of Coppola’s work… Rogers’s main argument – that Coppola manipulates pleasurable images to unsettle rather than mollify us – is utterly convincing. If nothing else, this certainly hits home in relation to my own enchantment with Coppola’s work.”—Bright Lights Film Journal

All too often, the movies of Sofia Coppola have been dismissed as “all style, no substance.” But such an easy caricature, as this engaging and accessible survey of Coppola’s oeuvre demonstrates, fundamentally misconstrues what are rich, ambiguous, meaningful films.

Drawing on insights from feminist philosophy and psychology, the author here takes an original approach to Coppola, exploring vital themes from the subversion of patriarchy in The Virgin Suicides to the “female gothic” in The Beguiled. As Rogers shows, far from endorsing a facile and depoliticized postfeminism, Coppola’s films instead deploy beguilement, mood, and pleasure in the service of a robustly feminist philosophy.

From the Introduction:

Sofia Coppola possesses a highly sophisticated and intricate knowledge of how images come to work on us; that is, she understands precisely how to construct an image – what to add in and what to remove – in order to achieve specific moods, tones and cinematic affects. She knows that similar kinds of images can have vastly different effects on the viewer depending on their context…. This monograph is an extended study of Coppola’s outstanding ability to think through and in images.

Additional text

“Rogers's book led this reviewer to rewatch some of Coppola's films and decide that at least Lost in Translation (2003) and Marie Antoinette (2006) are masterpieces. What can be better than a book of criticism that leads one to revise one's own aesthetic judgments?” • Choice

“With this book Rogers has produced a sophisticated and impassioned analysis of Coppola’s work… Rogers’s main argument – that Coppola manipulates pleasurable images to unsettle rather than mollify us – is utterly convincing. If nothing else, this certainly hits home in relation to my own enchantment with Coppola’s work.” • Bright Lights Film Journal

“This is a forceful and necessary feminist intervention in film theory; Anna Backman Rogers brilliantly carves out a space for work that is usually marginalized as pretty, as superficial, as ineffable, insisting we reckon head-on with the politics of seeing the world through a woman’s perspective. And she does it in wonderfully straight-talking prose that doesn't shy away from controversy, underlining how necessary it is to tackle these questions, now more than ever.” • Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London

“This work on Coppola makes a genuinely significant contribution to the field of film studies—the writing on The Virgin Suicides is simply the best I have read. It is a radical work, in keeping with the radical, subversive and beautiful films it does justice to.” • Lucy Bolton, Queen Mary, University of London

“Anna Backman Rogers has produced a timely, beautifully written, and trailblazing account of female authorship and femininity in contemporary cinema, full of both conviction and compassion.” • Davina Quinlivan, Kingston University

Product details

• Authors: Anna Backman Rogers, Anna Backman Rogers, Rogers Anna Backman
• Publisher: BERGHAHN BOOKS, INC
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.11.2018
• EAN: 9781785339653
• ISBN: 978-1-78533-965-3
• No. of pages: 200
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Photography, film, video, TV; PERFORMING ARTS / Film / Genres / General, Film: styles & genres, Individual Film Directors, Film-Makers, Film: styles and genres, PERFORMING ARTS / Individual Director