Blue Box

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. <br/><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>