Emma Wilson

Atom Egoyan

The figure of a woman reclining, in repose, displayed, abandoned, fallen, asleep, or dreaming, returns in the work of women filmmakers and photographers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Filmmakers Agnès Varda and Catherine Breillat, and American photographer working in Paris, Nan Goldin, return to the paintings of Titian, Velázquez, Goya, Courbet, and others, re-imagining, and re-purposing, their images of female beauty, display, (auto)eroticism, and intimacy. This book, a sensuous evocation of these feminist works, claims a female-identified pleasure in looking. The artists explored align images of repose and sensuality with other images of horizontality and proneness, of strong emotional content, images of erotic involvement, of vulnerability, of bodily contortion, of listlessness, grief, and depression. The reclining nude is for all three artists a starting point for a reflection on the relation of film, projections, and still photography, to painting, and a sustained re-imagining of the meanings conjured through serial returns to a particular pose. This book claims that the image of the reclining nude is compelling, for female-identified artists - and for all allied in feeling and picturing femininity - in the sensitive, ethically adventurous, politically complex feminist issues it engages. The reclining nude is an image of passivity, of submission, of hedonism. It allows thought about passivity as pleasure, about depression and grief figured posturally, about indolence as a form of resistance and anarchy. Through this image, female-identified artists have claimed freedom to offer new focus on these extremes of emotion. They are re-imagining horizontality.

Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and Nan Goldin

The Reclining Nude

"Kieslowski's last films have indelibly marked the past decade. His cinema has renewed the representation of the human subject and emotion in film: space and luminous surface reveal the finest, most fragile impressions of states of mind and human consciousness. This study is the first to offer specific focus on Kies'lowski's last films, on his French-language cinema and its place within the broader context of French film-making. Engaging with Deleuze's discussions of the time-image, and recent work in trauma theory, Emma Wilson offers radical insights into the innovation in Kies'lowski's explorations of memory, temporality, loss and desire. A charged defence of Kies'lowski's work, Memory and Survival offers new readings of this cinema of blind chance and fleeting beauty."

Memory and Survival the French Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski

Alain Resnais, director of 'Hiroshima mon amour' (1959) and 'L'Annee derniere a Marienbad' (1961), has transformed the representation of memory, fantasy and desire in modern cinema. This illuminating introduction to his work, extending from his earliest documentaries to the musical films of the last decade, traces the evolving patterns of his filmmaking, its changing reflections on mortality, guilt, chance and human doubt. Exploring questions of the time-image, of trauma, of the senses, this volume sets Resnais' films in the context of important current debates in film theory, and provides a concise account of critical discussions of his work in France and beyond. Yet it also offers a highly personal and detailed engagement with individual images and scenes in Resnais' films. A passionate and partial defence of Resnais' work, old and new, this volume stands apart in its attention to the more tangible and moving pleasures of his films, their pathos, rigour and visual beauty.

Alain Resnais

French Cinema Since 1950 brings together modern scholarship of the most widely viewed and studied works of the period including classic films such as TruffautAIs The 400 Blows, ResnaisAI Hiroshima Mon Amour, and works by Godard as well as critical previews of some of the most recent French films up to 1998. It covers relevant directors and their writings, and provides a comprehensive overview of different types of cinema, from thrillers and love stories to historical drama and autobiographies.

Personal Histories

French Cinema Since 1950

Andrew Webber

'Cities in Transition' looks at the complex yet enduring relationship between cinema and the city, discussing how early cinema, digital technology and changing urban geographies have all impacted upon notions and representations of the modern city.

The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis

Cities in Transition

Ian James

This collection of essays addresses the question of lucidity as a thematic in literature and film but also as a quality of both expression and insight in literary criticism and critical thought more generally. The essays offer treatments of lucidity in itself and in relation to its opposites, forms of obscurity and darkness. They offer attention to problems of philosophical thought and reason, to questions of literary and poetic form, and of photographic and filmic contemplation. Ranging from engagements with early modern writing through to more recent material the contributions focus in particular on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French prose and poetry, the field which has been the predominant focus of Alison Finch’s critical writing. They are written as tributes to the distinctively lucid insights of her work and to the breadth and clarity of its intellectual engagement.

Essays in Honour of Alison Finch

Lucidity

Sexuality and the Reading Encounter is a provocative new study of the relations between reading and desire. Emma Wilson makes analyses of scenarios of pleasure and pain, eroticism and loss, in texts by Prouts, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous. Her argument emerges from current debates in feminist and queer theory. It cuts across divisions between male and female, gay and straight, arguing for a new relation between fantasy and identity.

Identity and Desire in Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous

Sexuality and the Reading Encounter

Photographs of missing children are some of the most haunting images of contemporary Western society. Wilson contends that the loss of a child is perceived as a limit-experience in contemporary cinema, where filmmakers attempt to transform their means of representation as a response to acute pain and horror. She explores the representation of missing and endangered children in a number of the key films of the last decade, including Kieslowski's Three Colours: Blue, Atom Egoyan's Exotica, Todd Solondz's Happiness, Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady, Lars von Trier's The Kingdom, and Almodovar's All About My Mother.

Cinema's Missing Children

Marion Schmid

Chantal Akerman was one of the most significant directors of our times. Focusing on Akerman's works of the last two decades, a period during which she diversified her creative practice, this collection traces her artistic trajectory across different media.

Afterlives

Chantal Akerman

Nicholas Hammond

William Burgwinkle

The most comprehensive history of literature written in French ever produced in English.

The Cambridge History of French Literature

Tracing the evolving patterns of Alain Resnais's filmmaking, and its changing reflections on mortality, guilt, chance and human doubt, this work provides an introduction to the French film director's work, from his earliest documentaries to his musical films.

Emma Wilson

About

Books

Join the club