{"id":16063,"date":"2021-05-14T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-14T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/?p=16063"},"modified":"2025-04-08T10:41:27","modified_gmt":"2025-04-08T10:41:27","slug":"sofia-coppola-the-surface-of-the-image-is-political","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/sofia-coppola-the-surface-of-the-image-is-political","title":{"rendered":"Sofia Coppola: The Surface of The Image is Political"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Director Sofia Coppola. (SBS<\/a>) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the spirit of esteemed director Sofia Coppola’s fiftieth birthday on 14 May, 2021, we are delighted to share an excerpt of the introduction to Anna Backman Rogers’ award-winning title Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure<\/a>.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Purchase Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure<\/em> in eBook format via our website for 20% off<\/strong> with discount code SOFIA50<\/strong> (offer valid until 16 May, 2021).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Surface of the Image is Political<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Anna Backman Rogers<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sofia Coppola possesses a highly sophisticated and intricate\nknowledge of how images come to work on us; that is, she understands precisely\nhow to construct an image \u2013 what to add in and what to remove \u2013 in order to\nachieve specific moods, tones and cinematic affects. She knows that similar\nkinds of images can have vastly different effects on the viewer depending on\ntheir context: an image redolent with nostalgia and melancholy may contain or\npresage harm or threat in The Virgin Suicides<\/em> (1999), and yet when\ntranscribed to the setting of couture (Marc Jacobs\u2019 \u2018Daisy\u2019 campaign), it will\nsignal bucolic and halcyon youthfulness devoid of any sinister atmosphere. This\nmonograph is an extended study of Coppola\u2019s outstanding ability to think\nthrough and in images. In what follows, from a resolutely feminist perspective,\nI will explore the mood, texture, tone and multifaceted meaning of Coppola\u2019s\naesthetic. In short, I will take my cue from Coppola herself and take images\nand the affect and effect of images seriously by reading surface in order to\nreach depth. It is my belief that this is the essential work that Coppola\u2019s oeuvre\nasks of us as viewers: if we cannot engage with the surface of the image as a\nprovocation, we miss its signification entirely. Surface, then, is deeply\nmeaningful in Coppola\u2019s diegetic worlds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet the surface of the image is continually denigrated as mere frippery \u2013 an insubstantial substitute for hard, scientifically rigorous, implicitly masculine knowledge (often associated with language rather than the image, or diegesis rather than mimesis). The image \u2013 especially the decorative image \u2013 is viewed all too often as seductive, beguiling, deceptive and false. In her groundbreaking study of the \u2018pretty\u2019 image, Rosalind Galt writes that \u2018even in the context of a positive evaluation of content, pretty images lead inevitably to the spectre of empty spectacle\u2019 (Galt 2011: 12). Film studies in particular has devoted a suspiciously copious amount of time to defaming decorative images and, moreover, associating this kind of image with femininity and femaleness; in other words, it is a discipline (alongside film criticism) that has worked assiduously to insist that there is nothing of import to consider once the curtain (surface and spectacle) is drawn back. As such, there is, I suggest, an alarmingly misogynist agenda at play here. My contention is echoed in Galt\u2019s suggestion that: \u2018The rhetoric of cinema has consistently denigrated surface decoration, finding the attractive skin of the screen to be false, shallow, feminine, or apolitical\u2019 (Galt 2011: 2). Moreover, Galt notes that: \u2018Many critics hear in the term (pretty) a silent \u201cmerely\u201d in which the merely pretty is understood as a pleasing surface for an unsophisticated audience, lacking in depth, seriousness, or complexity of meaning\u2019 (2011: 6). Alongside Galt, I insist that the image itself as spectacle contains manifold signification and that this is what must be borne in mind when we are asked to attend to images such as those produced by Coppola. It is no coincidence, to my mind, that Coppola\u2019s latest film, The Beguiled<\/em> (2017), overturns the clich\u00e9d priapic narrative of its original (The Beguiled<\/em>, Don Siegel, 1971) by relating events from a female perspective through the trope of visual beguilement. Coppola has, after all, always displayed an acute understanding of how to use a phallic economy of images and words against itself. Feminist politics is, for her, a question posed through production design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue reading here<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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About the book<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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CHOICE<\/em> OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE 2019 <\/strong>
SOFIA COPPOLA<\/a>
The Politics of Visual Pleasure<\/strong>
Anna Backman Rogers<\/em>

\u201cRogers’s book led this reviewer to rewatch some of Coppola’s films and decide that at least <\/em>Lost in Translation (2003) and<\/em> Marie Antoinette (2006) are masterpieces. What can be better than a book of criticism that leads one to revise one’s own aesthetic judgments?\u201d<\/em> \u2022 Choice<\/strong>

All too often, the movies of Sofia Coppola have been dismissed as \u201call style, no substance.\u201d But such an easy caricature, as this engaging and accessible survey of Coppola\u2019s 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<\/em> to the \u201cfemale gothic\u201d in The Beguiled<\/em>. As Rogers shows, far from endorsing a facile and depoliticized postfeminism, Coppola\u2019s films instead deploy beguilement, mood, and pleasure in the service of a robustly feminist philosophy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Purchase the eBook<\/a> for 20% off<\/strong> with discount code SOFIA50<\/strong> (Offer valid 14 May 2021 – 16 May 2021).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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