Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert - by Iggy Cortez & Ian Fleishman (Hardcover)

About the Book

Engages with the career of Isabelle Huppert, a major figure in French, European, and World Cinema

Book Synopsis

Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert argues that the career of this singular French actor--constituting a corpus of well over a hundred films--offers a unique testing ground for current approaches in film studies and affect studies.
Attention to Huppert's performances can reframe recent discussions on the social and cultural dimensions of emotion and normativity through a compelling paradox: her roles tend to express grandiose and overwhelming conditions central to debates in the humanities--negativity, dispossession, trauma--but through elusive and at times resistant or diminutive forms of expression: what J. Hoberman once called her "genius to distinguish 47 varieties of blankness." Including diverse contributions from an international line-up of established scholars, this volume examines Huppert's flat affect and other registers with an eye to their significance for cinema and media studies, queer and gender studies, star studies and world cinema.

Review Quotes

Framed by an ambitious, imaginative introduction, this volume provides a welcome contribution for readers interested in Isabelle Huppert's astonishing career and powerful star image. It has much to teach a wider readership interested in affect, embodied performance, cinematic institutions, and screen cultures.--Nick Salvato, Cornell University

This transporting collection seizes the key paradox of Isabelle Huppert's performance style--so frank, yet so enigmatic--as the launchpad for a series of inspired, surprising, persuasive analyses of her work. These essays also furnish fresh, rewarding lenses on affect and opacity, whiteness and nation, comedy and irony, motherhood and melodrama.--Nick Davis, Northwestern University

About the Author

Iggy Cortez is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and English at Vanderbilt University. His articles and other writing have appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Camera Obscura, and Film Quarterly, among other venues, on topics ranging from world cinema, digital aesthetics, queer sociality, and the relationship between racialization and technology. He is currently working on a manuscript on night-time in world cinema.

Ian Fleishman is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies as well as in the Department of French, Italian and Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published widely on subjects ranging from the Baroque to contemporary cinema and moving-image pornography. His first monograph, An Aesthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino (2018), was the winner of the Northeast Modern Language Association Book Award.