Film and Female Consciousness

Lucy Bolton is Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, UK. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on film philosophy and film stardom, and the co-editor (with Christina Siggers Manson) of Italy on Screen: National Identity and Italian Imaginary (2010).

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction'Frozen in Showcases': Feminist Film Theory and the Abstraction of WomanThe Camera as an Irigarayan SpeculumIn the Cut: Self-Endangerment or Subjective Strength?Lost in Translation: The Potential of BecomingMorvern Callar: In a Sensory WonderlandArchitects of Beauty and the Crypts of Our Bodies: Implications for Filmmaking and SpectatorshipConcluding Remarks: The Object is SpeakingBibliographyFilmographyDiscographyNotesIndex

'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 Film and Female Consciousness is a fresh and engaging approach to what is often considered a well-trodden and even passe subject in film studies. Bolton's book suggests a potential methodology for the future of feminist film criticism in a way that opens up new directions in a discipline that had contented itself with circuitous discussions surrounding the dearth of interesting and new representations of female subjectivity, identity and interiority in mainstream female characters. - Alexia Bowler, Feminist & Women's Studies