Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert

The book "Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert" explores Isabelle Huppert's career, offering a unique testing ground for film studies and affect studies. It 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.

Format: Hardback
Length: 168 pages
Publication date: 31 May 2023
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

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

Offers analytic frameworks for performance aesthetics in dialogue with critical theory

Offers new readings of important films through the lens of Huppert's acting

Uses Huppert to theorise screen performance aesthetics in dialogue with debates in the humanities on negativity, affect, and gender

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.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474479837