20 Books Like Looking Awry

First remarkable fact: This was written by a philosopher. Second remarkable fact: the study was published at a time when film studies had a strong political orientation, and therefore Cavell’s book was an odd one out, for it had a ‘light-hearted’ subject: seven screwball comedies, made between 1934 and 1949. Its relevance has only been acknowledged in retrospect.

Cavell’s style is colloquial and his aim was to set up a ‘dialogue’ with the films. Even though I am less enamored with his philosophical interventions, this work helped me to truly appreciate all seven ‘comedies of remarriage’ he had selected, and The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) in particular has remained one of my all-time favorites ever since. Any analysis that encourages us to love a movie under discussion is worth recommending.

How can one take the tradition of feminist film studies (instigated by Laura Mulvey’s ‘the male gaze’ essay) seriously and at the same time be hooked to the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock?

Tania Modleski had set herself the task in this 1988 study to combine these two positions that, for a long time, seemed mutually exclusive. Whereas Mulvey had mentioned that the flashback in Hitchcock’s Vertigo was an exception that had proven the rule (of a cinema of patriarchy), Modleski reversed this by making the exceptions as such the rule in Hitchcock’s work. She thus ended up not condemning Hitchcock’s presumed patriarchal attitude but uncovering his ambivalence.

In her readings, she convincingly explains that it is not just a matter of desiring female characters but also identifying with them among others because of their cleverness.

This is a ‘crazy endeavor’ from the earlier days of film studies. Inspired by Christian Metz’s ‘le grand syntagmatique’, so-called film semioticians tried to close-read films as meticulously as possible. This resulted in a number of fascinating shot-by-shot analyses, sometimes of a particular scene (Bellour’s well-known interpretation of 82 shots from The Birds) to full-length schemes (on Minnelli’s Gigi, e.g.).

Stephen Heath wrote a wonderfully detailed essay on Welles’s Touch of Evil, but this was even surpassed by Bellour’s North by Northwest, which, like the earlier mentioned essays, is included in this volume, a translation of articles originally published in French, most of them in 1979 and 1980. Though the laborious method has not been without its flaws (there is an inclination to over-interpretation), Bellour’s efforts nonetheless gave evidence of an unprecedented passionate cinephilia. 

Jean-Luc Gordard famously said that film criticism died with the premature demise of Serge Daney, at the age of 48, in 1992. Daney wrote an incredible number of essays and reviews, and his eloquence is astounding. Daney seems to have undergone something of a breakthrough in the Anglo-Saxon world more than thirty years after his death with some new translations, such as The Cinema House.

I consider him the most original reviewer that has ever lived, for I can never foretell his opinion of a certain film: he is constantly oscillating between cinephilic passion and political commitment, between enthusiasm and derision, and for him, moral issues are determined by a filmmaker’s formal approach rather than content: one can ruin a film by making an inappropriate tracking shot.

One prominent feature of Žižek’s oeuvre that initially brought him to fame is his impressive ability to make Lacan’s writings and ideas crystal-clear and tangibly concrete—and this by contrast with Lacan himself, who often is described as “notoriously difficult.” Écrits is Lacan’s magnum opus, containing his most important essays and articles from the 1930s through the mid-1960s. Although the volumes of Lacan’s Seminar are comparatively easier to read, Écrits provides the single most comprehensive survey of Lacan’s thinking provided by Lacan himself. This 1966 book contains such Lacanian contributions to psychoanalytic theory as the mirror stage, the unconscious structured like a language, and the Real-Symbolic-Imaginary triad. Neither Lacan nor Žižek can be fully comprehended without a tour of the Écrits.

When I was growing up, Paris was the world center for thinkers on existentialism and postmodernism, my two favorite subjects. I knew the names of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir better than the names of my classmates.

John Sturrock has written the best essays ever on the thinkers of that pivotal period in intellectual thought, among them, in addition to Camus and Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan. If you want a smart, eloquent, and accessible introduction to the postmodern thought revolution about the truth—how “true” lost its meaning and how it might mean something again—this is your book!  

I enthusiastically recommend Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France, a must-read for those intrigued by the complex interplay of literature, history, and cultural context.

This book provides an insightful exploration of the writings of four influential figures—Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, Jean Giraudoux, and Andre Gide—in the context of France's pre-World War II history of anti-Jewish thought. Mehlman's essays dive into a range of fascinating topics, from Blanchot's unique conception of literature to Lacan's distinctive style, Giraudoux's connection to Racine, and the intricacies of sexual politics in Gide's work.

I found Mehlman's insights into Giraudoux particularly enlightening. Especially his analysis of The Madwoman of Chaillot broadens our understanding of how historical context shapes literary works, offering invaluable perspectives on the intellectual history of contemporary France.

The banquiers that the Madwoman of Chaillot kills in the 1942 play are openly described as Jews in a 1938 Giraudoux’s text: Pleins Pouvoirs. Don't miss the… show more.

Tomšič basically identifies why psychoanalysis is an anti-capitalist technique and how it emerged in response to the social structure of capitalist society. Psychoanalysis counters resistance to psychic change and to social change, a resistance that manifests itself in capitalism. Tomšič very nicely sees how the neurotic suffering that psychoanalysis treats is the result of one’s integration into the capitalist system, which is why treating it requires an anticapitalist method.  

Beyond Sexuality is the most consequential psychoanalytic intervention in queer theory.

Much of queer theory has used Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality to reject or downplay psychoanalysis. Dean argues that psychoanalysis, particularly in the writings and seminars of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, offers a far more useful theoretical model.

Such theorists as Judith Butler misconstrue sexual desire by focusing on identity, rather than language and its effects. Desire, according to psychoanalysis, does not arise from our identifications—not even our gender identifications—but from the failures of identity. Desire is not constructed in language but manifests precisely where language breaks down.

Beyond Sexuality also offers a psychoanalytic reading of HIV/AIDS in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis.

Of all Freud’s writings, 1920's Beyond the Pleasure Principle occupies a special place in relation not only to Žižek’s conception of psychoanalysis but also to his philosophical/theoretical framework as a whole. This is the text in which Freud introduces his audacious and controversial hypothesis of the “death drive” (Todestrieb). It is not until 1920 that Freud fully brings to light tendencies within the psyche disrupting and disobeying the pleasure principle, forces of negativity able to suspend (if only momentarily) the psyche’s usual pursuits of gratification, satisfaction, well-being, and the like. Žižek repeatedly insists that his core intellectual agenda ultimately is to demonstrate an underlying equivalence between the Cogito-like subject of German idealism and the death drive as per Freud and Lacan.