Sisters - (Timecodes) by Johanna Isaacson (Hardcover)

About the Book

A minute-by-minute analysis of Brian De Palma's 1972 horror film, Sisters, which weaves in Marxist feminist theory to foreground an appreciation of the film and bid for its enduring relevance for feminists, despite controversy surrounding its director.

Book Synopsis

A minute-by-minute analysis of Brian De Palma's 1972 horror film, Sisters, weaving in Marxist feminist theory to foreground an appreciation of the film and bid for its enduring relevance for feminists, despite controversy surrounding its director.

Sisters is one of De Palma's most extraordinary and important films, and yet it is often disregarded, misunderstood, or underestimated. The two main characters, Grace and Danielle, represent the second-wave feminist desire for professional autonomy and women's psychosexual oppression, respectively. Yet, this reading seems at odds with the abundant accusations of misogyny and transphobia De Palma has drawn throughout his directing career. Each of this book's 100 vignette chapters makes the case that whatever De Palma's attitudes and intents, Sisters is a revelatory film for feminists, both for its formal diagnosis and estrangement of conventional gendered relationships under capitalism and for its absorption and reflection of the social contradictions of its moment.

The book also asks important, related questions, including: How does Sisters mark the transition from De Palma's earlier "Godardian" phase to his signature "Hitchcockian" style? How does De Palma's Hitchcockian phase inaugurated in Sisters intertwine with 1970s' psychoanalytic feminist theory? How do the contributions of women both as performers and behind the scenes decenter the auteurist rhetoric that is so frequently applied to De Palma's work? This book is a means to appreciate and understand one of the most important films of the 1970s while reassessing the assumptions at the heart of contemporary feminist evaluations.

Review Quotes

"Minute by minute, as shock multiplies shock and the horrors exponentiate, Brian De Palma is met by his antagonist double in Johanna Isaacson, who once again proves to be the single most exciting film critic working today." --Mark Steven, Associate Professor of Literature and Film, University of Exeter, UK

"This book is a masterclass of close reading by one of the most lucid readers of genre cinema and the US today. Isaacson is uniquely illuminating in understanding the complexities of DePalma's complex and often reviled approach to gender, as well as the intersections between cinematic aesthetics, feminism, and psychoanalytic theory within auteur cinema." --Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies, Cornell University, USA

About the Author

Johanna Isaacson is Professor of English at Modesto Junior College, USA. She is well-known as a feminist horror scholar, bridging academic and popular analysis. Her published books include What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (2025), Stepford Daughters: Weapons for Feminists in Contemporary Horror (2022), and The Ballerina and the Bull (2016).