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The Cinema of Agnieszka Holland: Anger and Ethics uniquely combines academic film analysis, biographical detail and personal interviews with the filmmaker, conducted over the course of a year, to trace the development of Agnieszka Holland's female characters and how they have been reshaped across half a century.
Piotrowska considers Holland's distinctive and evolving vision of society, history, gender and family relationships, with particular attention to how the filmmaker's own background has influenced this vision. The study engages with Freud's notion of afterwardness, Marianne Hirsch's concept of posthistory, and the author's theorisations of female authorship and the figure of the "nasty woman" in cinema. Through detailed readings of six feature films, it highlights Holland's extraordinary contribution to global film and television culture, and her movement from despair to a creative rage through collaborations and adaptations.
This original and insightful work will be essential reading for students and scholars of European and world cinema, feminism, gender studies, European history, filmmaking, authorship and applied psychoanalysis and ethics.
List of contents
Preface. Finding Voice: Between Theory and Experience Introduction. Survival and Integrity: The Transformational Cinema of Agnieszka Holland
1. Holland's Background and Influences
2. Early Films: Trapped in Patriarchal Structures
3. The Ethics of Survival: Women Under Historical Oppression
4. Conversations with the Invisible: Trauma, Spirituality, and the Healing Imagination in Holland's Cinema
5. Washington Square and (the beginnings) of Female Agency
6. Spoor: Culmination of Holland's Feminist Vision
7. Green Border: Crossing Political and Ethical Boundaries
8. Critical Reception and Cultural Impact
Index
About the author
Agnieszka Piotrowska, PhD, is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and psychoanalytic life coach. She has published widely on cinema and psychoanalysis, including
Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary (Routledge, now in its second edition). She has held senior academic positions in the UK and internationally and is a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.
