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Acknowledgement and Unknown Women : The Films of Catherine Breillat.

‘Acknowledgement and Unknown Women’ is my contribution to a special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research on the films of Catherine Breillat that I co-edited with Lynsey Russell-Watts (University of Nottingham) in 2010. The edited issue was the outcome of a symposium, also organized by myself and Lynsey Russell-Watts, held at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, in April 2008. Contributors to the special issue were Adrienne Angelo (US), Sarah Cooper (King’s College, UK), Lisa Coulthard (University of British Columbia, Canada), Emily-Fox Kales (Harvard/Northeastern Universities, US), Douglas Keesey (Cal-Tech, US), Lynsey Russell-Watts (University of Nottingham, UK) and Catherine Wheatley (UK).

My article takes key strands of my research on Stanley Cavell’s theories of cinema and unites them with major contemporary French filmmaker Catherine Breillat. I argue that Breillat’s films continue themes developed in what Cavell calls ‘Hollywood melodramas of the unknown woman’, though these themes are taken up in the context of contemporary French society rather than in the Hollywood contexts of Cavell’s work. I have taken up such themes in other writings – in my chapter on Cavell in my book The Reality of Film (Manchester University Press 2011) as well as in my article on Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (published in Film-Philosophy 2013). ‘Acknowledgement and Unknown Women’ thus makes a significant contribution to debates on contemporary French cinema as well as adding to research on Cavell’s writings on cinema.