The blue box : Kristevan/Lacanian readings of contemporary cinema / Frances Restuccia.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Restuccia, Frances L., 1951- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Kristeva, Julia, 1941-.

Kristeva, Julia.

Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981.

Lacan, Jacques.

Motion pictures--Philosophy.

Motion pictures.

Motion pictures--Psychological aspects.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (186 p.)

Other Title:

Kristevan/Lacanian readings of contemporary cinema

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Continuum International Pub. Group, 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Informed by the theory of Julia Kristeva, Frances Restuccia analyzes a variety of contemporary films replete with psychoanalytic subject matter and styles. She examines films that present elaborate fantasies and, through them, prompt the viewer to cut across a crippling fundamental fantasy-by enabling a mapping of his or her private fantasy onto the one being played out on the screen. Such absorption is a function of the semiotic dimension of the film, which offers the spectator an experience of intimacy, negativity, the gaze, and death. Kristeva stresses that cinema has the power to bestow desiring subjectivity as a way of resisting the society of the spectacle through the specular. Through analyses of complex films such as Streitfeld's Female Perversions, Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Almodóvar's Volver, and Haneke's Caché, The Blue Box: Kristevan/Lacanian Readings of Contemporary Film demonstrates Julia Kristeva's concept of the "thought specular," from her fascinating chapter "Fantasy and Cinema" in Intimate Revolt. Kristeva deserves our full attention as a film theorist.

Contents:

Introduction: Film in Intimate Revolt

I. Black and Blue: Kieslowski's Melancholia

II. Hysterical Love Films: Breaking the Waves, Seventh Heaven, Damage

III. The Use of Perversion: Secretary or The Piano Teacher?

IV. Kristeva's Thought Specular: Countering Fetishism in the Society of the Spectacle

V. Psycho: The Ultimate Seduction

VI. Intimate Volver

VII. The Virtue of Blushing: Turning Anxiety into Shame in Haneke's Caché

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [167]-170) and index.

ISBN:

9781441150066

1441150064

9781441177445

1441177442

9781628929027

1628929022

9781441127730

1441127739

OCLC:

1065322926