Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure

A feminist study of the mood, texture, tone, and multifaceted meaning of director Sofia Coppolas 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 Coppolas work Rogerss 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 Coppolas 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 Coppolas 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, Coppolas films instead deploy beguilement, mood, and pleasure in the service of a robustly feminist philosophy. From the Introduction: Sofia 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 Coppolas outstanding ability to think through and in images.