The Blue Box: Kristevan/Lacanian Readings of Contemporary Cinema

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Informed by the theory of Julia Kristeva, Frances Restuccia analyzes a variety of contemporary films replete with psychoanalytic subject matter and styles. She examines films that present elaborate fantasies and, through them, prompt the viewer to cut across a crippling fundamental fantasyby enabling a mapping of his or her private fantasy onto the one being played out on the screen. Such absorption is a function of the semiotic dimension of the film, which offers the spectator an experience of intimacy, negativity, the gaze, and death.

Kristeva stresses that cinema has the power to bestow desiring subjectivity as a way of resisting the society of the spectacle through the specular. Through analyses of complex films such as Streitfeld's Female Perversions, Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Almodvar's Volver, and Haneke's Cach, The Blue Box: Kristevan/Lacanian Readings of Contemporary Film demonstrates Julia Kristeva's concept of the "thought specular," from her fascinating chapter "Fantasy and Cinema" in Intimate Revolt. Kristeva deserves our full attention as a film theorist.

Reviews

The reimagining of psychoanalytic film theory that began with Slavoj Zizek and Joan Copjec has now come to fruition with Frances Restuccia's The Blue Box. After reading Restuccia's book, no one can sustain any doubts that contemporary cinema demands a psychoanalytic approach, and Restuccia provides a completely revolutionary way of conceiving it. While reading The Blue Box, it is as if one sees the films that Restuccia discusses as ports of entry into an understanding of the psyche and society today. From Haneke to Lynch, the book tackles the key works of the most important living directors, and it sheds light on the most obscure regions of their films. Psychoanalytic film theory is born again with The Blue Box. --Todd McGowan, Associate Professor at the University of Vermont, and author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan and The Impossible David Lynch
In The Blue Box, Frances Restuccia explores a fascinating selection of 'thought-specular' films through a finely tuned reading of Lacanian and Kristevan theory. With delicate precision and clarity, her analysis pursues the crossing points of deeply disturbing fantasies and conceptual rigor in order to bring forth the potential for transformation, both intimate and communal, as the viable answer to the new maladies of our civilization. --Miglena Nikolchina, Chair of the Department of Theory of Literature, Sofia University, Bulgaria.
This is a tour de force reading of a singularly unsettling series of contemporary films, but with an eye to the redemptive, even mystical, dimension of the extreme states they depict, ones entirely at odds with the society of the spectacle. Using Kristeva's countermodel of the 'thought specular'--and engaging extensively with Lacan, Deleuze, iek, Agamben, and psychoanalytic and feminist film theoryRestuccia hails this cinema as providing a key to the 'blue box' of contemporary psychic maladies, in its embrace of nothingness, shame, forgiveness, and love. --Eleanor Kaufman is professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Author Bio

Frances L. Restuccia is an English Professor at Boston College, where she teaches contemporary literary and cultural theory, the modern novel, the world novel, and film/film theory. She is the author of Amorous Acts: Lacanian Ethics in Modernism, Film, and Queer Theory (Stanford UP).