Intimacy In Cinema

Though intimacy has been a wide concern in the humanities, it has received little critical attention in film studies. This collection of new essays investigates both the potential intimacy of cinema as a medium and the possibility of a cinema of intimacy where it is least expected. As a notion defined by binaries--inside and outside, surface and depth, public and private, self and other--intimacy, because it implies sharing, calls into question the boundaries between these extremes, and the border separating mainstream cinema and independent or auteur cinema. Following on Thomas Elsaesser's theories of the relationship between the intimacy of cinema and the cinema of intimacy, the essays explore intimacy in silent and classic Hollywood movies, underground, documentary and animation films; and contemporary Hollywood, British, Canadian and Australian cinema from a variety of approaches.

Though intimacy has been a wide concern in the humanities, it has received little critical attention in film studies. This collection of new essays investigates both the potential intimacy of cinema as a medium and the possibility of a cinema of intimacy where it is least expected. As a notion defined by binaries--inside and outside, surface and depth, public and private, self and other--intimacy, because it implies sharing, calls into question the boundaries between these extremes, and the border separating mainstream cinema and independent or auteur cinema. Following on Thomas Elsaesser's theories of the relationship between the intimacy of cinema and the cinema of intimacy, the essays explore intimacy in silent and classic Hollywood movies, underground, documentary and animation films; and contemporary Hollywood, British, Canadian and Australian cinema from a variety of approaches.

Real Sex Films explores one of the most controversial movements in international cinema through an innovative interdisciplinary combination of theories of globalization and embodiment. Risk sociology, feminist film theory, and critical feminist mapping theory are brought together with concepts of production, narrative, genre, authorship, stardom, spectatorship, and social audience as several lenses of understanding and extension in ways of seeing real-sex cinema. Notions of personal subjectivity and critical distance, disciplinary co-operation and critique, and cinematic perceptions of the utopia and dystopia of love within risk modernity are the tensions exposed reflexively and in parallel, as each chapter focuses different lenses communicating intimacy, desire, risk and transgression. This book substantively, methodologically, and theoretically embraces and engages in its consideration of the images, ethics, double standards, and embodiments of brutal cinema. Crossing the boundaries of film studies, media and cultural studies, the ethnographic turn, risk sociology, feminist psychoanalytical, and geopolitical studies, this is a book for students, academics, as well as general and professional audiences.

This edited volume is an inquiry into the representation of intimate relationships in a diverse array of media including cinema, arts, literature, picture books, advertising and popular music. It examines artistic portrayal of intimate relationships as a subversion of the boundaries between the representable and the non-representable, the real and the surreal, the visceral and the ideal, the embodied and the abstracted, the configured and transfigured. The essays focus on artistic mediation of intimacy in diverse relationships, including heterosexual, same-sex, familial, sibling' , political, and sadomasochistic. The collection offers new interdisciplinary and multicultural perspectives on current trends in the study of popular representations of intimacy; representations that affect and formulate people's most personal inspirations, desires, angsts, dreams and nightmares in an increasingly alienated, industrialized world.

Brutal Intimacy is the first book to explore the fascinating films of contemporary France, ranging from mainstream genre spectaculars to arthouse experiments, and from wildly popular hits to films that deliberately alienate the viewer. Twenty-first-century France is a major source of international cinema—diverse and dynamic, embattled yet prosperous—a national cinema offering something for everyone. Tim Palmer investigates France’s growing population of women filmmakers, its buoyant vanguard of first-time filmmakers, the rise of the controversial cinema du corps, and France’s cinema icons: auteurs like Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Gaspar Noé, and stars such as Vincent Cassel and Jean Dujardin. Analyzing dozens of breakthrough films, Brutal Intimacy situates infamous titles alongside many yet to be studied in the English language. Drawing on interviews and the testimony of leading film artists, Brutal Intimacy promises to be an influential treatment of French cinema today, its evolving rivalry with Hollywood, and its ambitious pursuits of audiences in Europe, North America, and around the world.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Virtual Intimacy and Communication in Film brings together a group of psychoanalysts to explore, through film, the new forms of communication, mainly the internet, that enter more and more frequently into the affective lives of people, their intimacy and even the analytic room. The contributors, all practising psychoanalysts, analyse the potential and surprising transformations that human relationships, including psychoanalysis, are undergoing. At present, it is difficult to value the future importance and predict the possible disquieting consequences of the use and abuse of the new technologies; we run the risk of finding ourselves unprepared to face this revolutionary transformation in human connections and affects. Will it be possible in a near future that human beings prefer to fall in love with a machine gifted with a persuasive voice instead of a psychoanalyst 'in person'? The contributors explore the idea that virtual intimacy could begin to replace real life, in sentimental and psychoanalytic relationships. Imagination and fantasy may be strengthened and may ultimately prevail over the body, excluding it entirely. Can the voice of the analyst, sometimes transmitted only by telephone or computer, produce a good enough analytic process as if it were in-person, or will it help to foster a process of idealisation and progressive alienation from real life and connections with other human beings? The film Her (2013), alongside others, offers a wonderful script for discussing this matter, because of the deep and thoughtful examination of love and relationships in the contemporary world that it provides. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Virtual Intimacy and Communication in Film will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists interested in the ongoing impact of technology on human relationships.

Explosive images of sex and violence in films by directors such as Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noe, Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier have attracted media attention for the ways in which they seek to shock and provoke the spectator into powerful affective and visceral responses. This first collection of essays devoted to the new extremism in contemporary European cinema critically interrogates this highly contentious body of work and demonstrates that these films and the controversies they engender are indispensable to the critical task of rethinking the terms of spectatorship. Through critical discussions of key films and directors, this book sheds new light on cutting-edge debates in Film Studies regarding sexuality, violence and spectatorship, affect and ethics, and the political dimensions of extreme cinema.Including important new work from internationally renowned scholars Martin Barker and Martine Beugnet, as well as combining a range of approaches to extreme cinema across audience research and

This book looks at social representations of romantic love as portrayed in films and interpreted by their audiences, using cinema as a means for analysing the state of romantic love today, and the touchpoints and disconnects between its representation on screen and the lived experiences of film audiences. Through a media sociology lens, the book draws on analysis of five contemporary romantic films and the meanings brought to and made from them by socially and economically diverse audiences. Employing both textual analysis and primary interviews, the book contests overly pessimistic perspectives on modern intimacy while acknowledging and exploring some of the challenges, woes and changes that romantic love is experiencing in late capitalism. Concerns and debates over monogamy, the teleology romantic love and the division of labour in relationships percolate in this book’s examination of how audiences’ responses to these films reflect their attitudes and expectations regarding romantic love. This book will have great resonance for scholars and students of not just film studies and media studies, but also audience studies, media sociology, philosophy, gender and sexuality.