Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure

by Anna Backman Rogers

A feminist study of the mood, texture, tone, and multifaceted meaning of director Sofia Coppola’s aesthetic through her most influential and well-known films. A Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2019 “With this book Rogers has produced a sophisticated and impassioned analysis of Coppola’s work… Rogers’s main argument – that Coppola manipulates pleasurable images to unsettle rather than mollify us – is utterly convincing. If nothing else, this certainly hits home in relation to my own enchantment with Coppola’s work.”― Bright Lights Film Journal All too often, the movies of Sofia Coppola have been dismissed as “all style, no substance.” But such an easy caricature, as this engaging and accessible survey of Coppola’s oeuvre demonstrates, fundamentally misconstrues what are rich, ambiguous, meaningful films. Drawing on insights from feminist philosophy and psychology, the author here takes an original approach to Coppola, exploring vital themes from the subversion of patriarchy in The Virgin Suicides to the “female gothic” in The Beguiled . As Rogers shows, far from endorsing a facile and depoliticized postfeminism, Coppola’s films instead deploy beguilement, mood, and pleasure in the service of a robustly feminist philosophy. From theSofia Coppola possesses a highly sophisticated and intricate knowledge of how images come to work on us; that is, she understands precisely how to construct an image – what to add in and what to remove – in order to achieve specific moods, tones and cinematic affects. She knows that similar kinds of images can have vastly different effects on the viewer depending on their context…. This monograph is an extended study of Coppola’s outstanding ability to think through and in images.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, Art

Kindle Edition

First published November 29, 2018

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite book of film criticism about my favorite films and my favorite (living) writer/director. (I'm still fairly new to film criticism, but I think Anna Backman Rogers might be my favorite (living) scholar in the field, too.)

Yes, I'm bias as fuck, and I don't even care. Cause this book of essays is as utterly complex and beautiful and passionate and sublime as the cinema visions of Sofia Coppola.

In her author's note, Anna says, "I want to preface what follows with a brief admission: I became a film scholar because of Sofia Coppola's films. Watching The Virgin Suicides (1999), aged seventeen, alone in a small cinema in London was a paradigm-shifting moment for me, it has taken me most of my adult life to comprehend the profound impact that this film has had on me (its affects and effect) and the ways in which it initiated a shift in my own personal course of life."

Same. Except I was in an empty chain-theater in the suburbs of Houston, Texas watching Marie Antoinette by myself.

I'll add that readers outside of film theory, feminist, postfeminist, and philosophy schools should accompany this book with that of Rosalind Galt, Angela McRobbie, Sharon Lin Tay, Kaja Silverman, Laura Mulvey, Audre Lorde, Jean-Paul Satre, Albert Camus, Teresa de Lauretis, Todd Kennedy, Judith Butler, Anna Backman Rogers, Sara Ahmed, and many other voices.

Plus, obviously, Fiona Handyside Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood

[talia ♡]

idk if you guys know this, but as my side job i am actually the driver for the Sofia Coppola Fanclub train

[Fay · Rating 4 out of 5]

“excruciating loneliness is perhaps the defining characteristic of Coppola’s heroines; they are steeped in isolation from the world and from other fellow beings”

[Tillie · Rating 4 out of 5]

the best christmas gift a girl can ask for

[isabel · Rating 4 out of 5]

technically never finished it but like it’s not necessarily a book that i read cover to cover it was more for an essay. but anyway, great book!

anna backman rogers you’re a genuis. thank you for helping me weite my extended essay and for introducing me to the theory of abjection which i now love and care for deeply.

dense, hard to read, convoluted, dense, theoretical, but so cool. thank you anna backman rogers for showing me how much i love media analysis, cultural analysis, and critique. this book genuinely changed my life (in more ways than one). eww how cheesy hahah, anyway, if you like sofia coppola and want to feel really smart while watching virgin suicides, read this!

[Gracie Wiener · Rating 3 out of 5]

academic but interesting