Blue Box

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).

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

• Introduction: Film in Intimate Revolt; I. Black and Blue: Kieslowski's Melancholia; II. Hysterical Love Films: Breaking the Waves, Seventh Heaven, Damage; III. The Use of Perversion: Secretary or The Piano Teacher?; IV. Kristeva's Thought Specular: Countering Fetishism in the Society of the Spectacle; V. Psycho: The Ultimate Seduction; VI. Intimate Volver; VII. The Virtue of Blushing: Turning Anxiety into Shame in Haneke's Cache.