The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema

Product Description

Since the 1980s the number of women regularly directing films has increased significantly in most Western countries; in France, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat have joined Agnès Varda in gaining international renown, while British directors Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold have forged award-winning careers in feature film. This new volume in the “Thinking Cinema” series draws on feminist philosophers and theorists from Simone de Beauvoir on to offer readings of a range of the most important and memorable of these films from the 1990s and 2000s, focusing as it does so on how the films convey women's lives and identities. Mainstream entertainment cinema traditionally distorts the representation of women, objectifying their bodies, minimizing their agency, and avoiding the most important questions about how cinema can "do justice" to female subjectivity. Kate Ince suggests that the films of independent women directors are progressively redressing the balance, reinvigorating both the narratives and the formal ambitions of European cinema. Ince uses feminist philosophers to interpret such films as Sex Is Comedy, Morvern Callar, White Material, and Fish Tank anew, suggesting that a philosophical understanding of female subjectivity as embodied and ethical should underpin future feminist film study.

Review

“The Body and the Screen makes a fine contribution to the field of film philosophy in its examination of how feminist phenomenology can be brought into dialogue with female subjectivity in film." EuropeNow

"This trenchant volume makes a fine and timely contribution to the field of film philosophy in its examination of how the work of leading feminist philosophers may be brought into dialogue with film. Through Simone de Beauvoir and others, Ince makes a case for rigorous thought about embodied female subjectivity as explored through cinema. This she addresses in close readings of works by the major British and French female directors of the last two decades. Whether in her discussion of the phenomenological geography of Agnès Varda's 'film-world' or of performed co-authorship in Sally Potter, Ince is an acute and erudite interlocutor. The Body and the Screen will quickly become a work of reference in its field." ― Emma Wilson, Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts, University of Cambridge, UK

About the Author

Dr Kate Ince, Reader in French Film and Gender Studies, Univ. of Birmingham.