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 fantasy-by 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.
<p>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 <em>Female Perversions</em>, Lynch’s <em>Mulholland Drive</em>, Almodóvar’s <em>Volver</em>, and Haneke’s <em>Caché, The Blue Box: Kristevan/Lacanian Readings of Contemporary Film</em> demonstrates Julia Kristeva’s concept of the “thought specular,” from her fascinating chapter “Fantasy and Cinema” in <em>Intimate Revolt</em>. Kristeva deserves our full attention as a film theorist. </em></em></p>

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