Writers on Film

Share

Hannah Strong on Sofia Coppola: Forever Young

Season 1, Ep. 91

An illustrated critical survey of Academy Award–winning writer and director Sofia Coppola’s career, covering everything from her groundbreaking music videos through her latest films


In the two decades since her first feature film was released, Sofia Coppola has created a tonally diverse, meticulously crafted, and unapologetically hyperfeminine aesthetic across a wide range of multimedia work. Her films explore untenable relationships and the euphoria and heartbreak these entail, and Coppola develops these themes deftly and with discernment across her movies and music videos. From The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette to Lost in Translation and The Beguiled, Coppola’s award-nominated filmography is also unique in how its consistent visual aesthetic is informed by and in conversation with contemporary fine art and photography.


Sofia Coppola offers a rich and intimate look at the overarching stylistic and thematic components of Coppola's work. In addition to critical essays about Coppola's filmography, the book will include interviews with some of her closest collaborators, including musician Jean-Benoît Dunckel and costume designer Nancy Steiner, along with a foreword by Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher. It engages with her creative output while celebrating her talent as an imagemaker and storyteller. Along the way, readers meet again a cast of characters mired in the ennui of missed connections: loneliness, frustrated creativity, rebellious adolescence, and the double-edged knife of celebrity, all captured by the emotional, intimate power of the female gaze.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hannah Strong is the associate editor at Little White Lies magazine. Her work has appeared in Vulture, GQ, the Guardian, and Dazed & Confused, and she regularly appears on television and radio as a film critic, largely for the BBC and ITV. Strong lives in London. Little White Lies is one of the world’s preeminent film magazines, pairing a unique editorial angle with beautiful illustration and world-class design.



More Episodes

3/15/2023

Crooked but Never Common

Season 1, Ep. 98
In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948―The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek among them―all from screenplays he alone had written. Cynical and sophisticated, romantic and sexually frank, crazily breakneck and endlessly witty, his movies continue to influence filmmakers and remain popular to this day. Yet despite this acclaim, Sturges’s achievements remain underappreciated: he is too often categorized as a dialogue writer and plot engineer more than a director, or belittled as an irresponsible spinner of laughs.In Crooked, but Never Common, Stuart Klawans combines a critic’s insight and a fan’s enthusiasm to offer deeper ways to think about and enjoy Sturges’s work. He provides an in-depth appreciation of all ten of the writer-director’s major movies, presenting Sturges as a filmmaker whose work balanced slapstick and social critique, American and European traditions, and cynicism and affection for his characters. Tugging at loose threads―discontinuities, puzzles, and allusions that have dangled in plain sight―and putting the films into a broader cultural context, Klawans reveals structures, motives, and meanings underlying the uproarious pleasures of Sturges’s movies. In this new light, Sturges emerges at last as one of the truly great filmmakers―and funnier than ever.
3/1/2023

Will Scheibel talks Gene Tierney and Hollywood Stardom

Season 1, Ep. 96
Will Scheibel is associate professor of English at Syracuse University, where he teaches film and screen studies. He is the coauthor of Twin Peaks, a volume in the TV Milestones Series (Wayne State University Press, 2020), with Julie Grossman. His articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Camera Obscura, Film Criticism, Journal of Gender Studies, and Celebrity Studies.Here's the blurb from the book:Gene Tierney may be one of the most recognizable faces of studio-era Hollywood: she starred in numerous classics, including Leave Her to Heaven, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Laura, with the latter featuring her most iconic role. While Tierney was considered one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, she personified "ordinariness" both on- and off-screen. Tierney portrayed roles such as a pinup type, a wartime worker, a wife, a mother, and, finally, a psychiatric patient—the last of which may have hit close to home for her, as she would soon leave Hollywood to pursue treatment for mental illness and later attempted suicide in the 1950s. After her release from psychiatric clinics, Tierney sought a comeback as one of the first stars whose treatment for mental illness became public knowledge. In this book, Will Scheibel not only examines her promotion, publicity, and reception as a star but also offers an alternative history of the United States wartime efforts demonstrated through the arc of Tierney’s career as a star working on the home front. Scheibel’s analysis aims to showcase that Tierney was more than just "the most beautiful woman in movie history," as stated by the head of production at Twentieth Century Fox in the 1940s and 1950s. He does this through an examination of her making, unmaking, and remaking at Twentieth Century Fox, rediscovering what she means as a movie legend both in past and up to the present. Film studies scholars, film students, and those interested in Hollywood history and the legacy of Gene Tierney will be delighted by this read.