Abstract

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 miscontrues 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.

Anna Backman Rogers is a Associate Professor/Reader in Feminist Philosophy and Visual Culture at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She is the author of American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image (2015) and the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the experimental journal MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture.

““This is a forceful and necessary feminist intervention in film theory; Anna Backman Rogers brilliantly carves out a space for work that is usually marginalized as pretty, as superficial, as ineffable, insisting we reckon head-on with the politics of seeing the world through a woman’s perspective. And she does it in wonderfully straight-talking prose that doesn't shy away from controversy, underlining how necessary it is to tackle these questions, now more than ever.” • Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London

“This work on Coppola makes a genuinely significant contribution to the field of film studies—the writing on The Virgin Suicides is simply the best I have read. It is a radical work, in keeping with the radical, subversive and beautiful films it does justice to.” • Lucy Bolton, Queen Mary, University of London

“Anna Backman Rogers has produced a timely, beautifully written, and trailblazing account of female authorship and femininity in contemporary cinema, full of both conviction and compassion.” • Davina Quinlivan, Kingston University