Sofia Coppola: A Cinema of Girlhood

by Fiona Handyside

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784537142
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/30/2017
Series:	International Library of the Moving Image
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Fiona Handyside is Senior Lecturer in European Film at the University of Exeter and received her PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. Previous publications include International Cinema and the Girl: Local Issues, Transnational Contexts (2015) and Cinema at the Shore: The Beach in French Cinema (2014) and her research has appeared in a number of jourbanals such as Continuum: Jourbanal of Media and Cultural Studies, European Jourbanal of Cultural Studies, Studies in French Cinema and Screen.

Table of Contents

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments ix

1 Sofia Coppola: Postfeminist [d]au[gh]te[u]r? 1

2 Luminous Girlhoods: Sparkle and Light in Coppola's Films 42

3 'There's No Place Like Home!' The Exploded Home as Postfeminist Chronotope 96

4 Dressing Up and Playing About: Costume and Fashion 136

Conclusion: The Agency of Authorship 160

Notes 165

Bibliography 187

Filmography 197

Index 199

Editorial Reviews

In this book, Fiona Handyside does not shirk from tackling the “thorny paradoxes” in Coppola’s canon but rather weaves these issues into an insightful analysis of her films as both feminine and feminist. Written in beautiful prose, Handyside argues that the glittering, gilded cages in Coppola’s films show us the light and the dark of girlhood culture.

Lucy Bolton