UI Press | Catherine Fowler

Sally Potter

Analyzing an influential film director's vivid deconstructions of gender and narrative

This survey of Sally Potter’s work documents and explores her cinematic development from the feminist reworking of Puccini’s opera La Bohème in Thriller to the provocative contemplation of romantic relationships after 9/11 in Yes. Catherine Fowler traces a clear trajectory of developing themes and preoccupations and shows how Potter uses song, dance, performance, and poetry to expand our experience of cinema beyond the audiovisual.

Potter has relentlessly struggled against predictability and safe options, and her work provides an example of the complexities of being a woman in charge. Instead of the quest to find a romantic partner that drives mainstream cinema, Potter’s films feature characters seeking answers to questions about their sexual, gendered, social, cultural, and ethnic identities. They find answers by retelling stories, investigating mysteries, traveling and interacting with people. At the heart of Potter’s work we find a concern with the ways in which narrative has circumscribed the actions of women and their ability to act, speak, look, desire, and think for themselves. Her first two films, Thriller and The Gold Diggers, largely deconstruct found stories, clichés, and images. By contrast her later films create new and original narratives that place female acts, voices, looks, desires and thoughts at their center.

Fowler’s analysis is supplemented by a detailed filmography, bibliography, and an extensive interview with the director.

“A first-rate study of an important contemporary director. Catherine Fowler’s writing is lucid and readable, and she traces with confidence the myriad cultural influences that shaped Potter’s aesthetic.”--Virginia Wright Wexman, coeditor of Women and Experimental Filmmaking

Catherine Fowler is a senior lecturer in film at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and the coeditor of Representing the Rural: Space, Place, and Identity in Films about the Land.

To order online:
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/85kys5er9780252033827.html

To order by phone:
(800) 621-2736 (USA/Canada)
(773) 702-7000 (International)