Graphics Edge

Film and Female Consciousness looks at a group of films which offer new and original representations of women's interiority and individuality: In the Cut (2003), Lost in Translation (2003), and Morvern Callar (2002). Lucy Bolton compares these films with those which offer more standard — albeit provocative and interesting — treatments of female subjectivity: Klute (1971), The Seven Year Itch (1955), and Marnie (1964). Considering each of the older, well-known films alongside the recent, experimental films illustrates how contemporary filmmaking techniques and critical practices can work together to create complex and provocative depictions of on-screen female consciousness. Drawing on the philosophy of Luce Irigaray in relation to women's cultivation of self-knowledge, this book examines each female character as she goes through a process of transition or transformation. This approach demonstrates how participating in the encounter between Luce Irigaray and cinema can yield greater understanding of both fields. '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