Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood

by Fiona Handyside

She has received numerous accolades including an Academy Award and two Golden Globes, and in 2004 became the first ever American woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar. From The Virgin Suicides to The Bling Ring, her work carves out new spaces for the expression of female subjectivity that embraces rather than rejects femininity. Fiona Handyside here considers the careful counter-balance of vulnerability with the possibilities and pleasures of being female in Coppola's films - albeit for the white and the privileged - through their recurrent themes of girlhood, fame, power, sex and celebrity. Chapters reveal a post-feminist aesthetic that offers sustained, intimate engagements with female characters. These characters inhabit luminous worlds of girlish adornments, light and sparkle and yet find homes in unexpected places from hotels to swimming pools, palaces to strip clubs: resisting stereotypes and the ordinary. In this original study, Handyside brings critical attention to a rare female auteur and in so doing contributes to important analyses of post-feminism, authorship in film, and the growing field of girlhood studies.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Art

212 pages, Paperback

Published January 29, 2017

Reviews

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the main inspirations for my thesis, which I love so much I ordered my own physical copy to keep forever.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

sofia coppola could’ve made the godfather but francis ford coppola couldn’t make marie antoinette

[em · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hmmm this was really dense and a little advanced for me because I have no experience in like cinema analysis, also I hadn’t watched most of the referenced films. Still though a good read, the idea of girlhood and its relation to feminism in film is so intriguing especially since it has become so popularised and talked about and sophia Coppola has also been put on a pedestal in a lot of social media in our generation for supposedly portraying the transition between being a girl and being a woman. But I think it was a good mix of analysis but also criticism, the chapter about luminosity and sparkle was reallyyyy interesting. Also this is totally barnard core, like Foucault, debeauvoir, etc
“Coppola reminds us again of how girlhood is formatted through a specific aesthetic range which offers up the very condition of being a girl as open and transparent - the pleasures of glitter, pink, rainbows, clouds and curly handwriting are posited as dreamy and girlish; the act of suicide a foolish mistake rather than a forceful rejection. While this would seem to assert girlhood representation as obvious, the diary entry then precipitates another audacious and fascinating use of form where the transparency of girlhood is troubled.”
^favoditd analysis!!

[Aye · Rating 5 out of 5]

No había leído nunca análisis sobre cine pero es todo muy interesante, y Sofia y su cine son muy interesantes. Quedé (más) fascinada