Sofia Coppola

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 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 Coppola’s outstanding ability to think through and in images.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Surface of The Image is Political

PART I: IMAGING ABSENCE AS ABJECTION AND IMAGING THE FEMALE GOTHIC AS RAGE

Chapter 1. The Virgin Suicides (1999)
Chapter 2. The Beguiled (2017)

PART II: EMPTY SUBJECTIVITIES AND MASCULINITY AS VOID

Chapter 3. Lost in Translation (2003)
Chapter 4. Somewhere (2010)

PART III: THE FEMALE BODY AS PATRIARCHAL CURRENCY AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF FEMALE IDENTITY

Chapter 5. Marie Antoinette (2006)
Chapter 6. The Bling Ring (2013)

Conclusion: On Beguilement

References
Index