Ambiguous Cinema

Kelli Fuery is Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries in Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Chapman University, California. She is the author of five books, including Ambiguous Cinema: From Simone de Beauvoir to Feminist Film-Phenomenology and Wilfred Bion, Thinking and Emotional Experience with Moving Images. Her next project examines Bion’s notion of the bizarre object and interconnected themes of hallucination, phenomenology and virtuality.

• PrefaceBeauvoir’s Ambiguity, Cinema and Feminist PhenomenologyMust We Burn Cavani? Moral Ambiguity in The Night PorterMoments of Moral Choice in Debra Granik’s Leave No TraceHabit the Cinematic Encounter: Cheryl Dunye and the ‘Dunyementaries’A New (Ethical) Face on Love: Bad Faith and Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine InA Cinema of the Borderlands: Lucrecia Martel’s ZamaSensuous Co-Performance: Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Beauvoir’s Aesthetic Attitude Femme Desire and The Reciprocal Gaze in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire Conclusion

Quite much more than a mere ‘influence of a philosophy on the cinema,’ Kelli Fuery’s compelling and consequential study actually offers a rich two-way process: films enlivened by complex critical analysis but also the philosophy extended — and productively critiqued, especially around new social identities — by the encounter with moving images.