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Isabelle Huppert, Modernist Performance
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Book Presentation:
Isabelle Huppert's modernist performance style illustrated through detailed readings of key films, demonstrating her immense social impact.
Isabelle Huppert's oeuvre constitutes perhaps the most significant feminist body of work to have emerged in the wake of the second wave of the women's movement, a period of intense social change. The emphasis on autonomy, or the "anti-victim," which comes to define Huppert's persona, is supported by a modernist style of performance. Huppert's refusal to surrender herself to the viewer through a character one fully knows disrupts the expectations of identification, inviting a distinctive approach to her characters. By creating a character informed by who she is, Huppert signals a process usually kept invisible. Huppert's performances invite an active form of critical reading, directing one to fill in gaps and consider the character in relation to the social world. The directors she works with welcome her collaboration; Huppert's performance, in conjunction with the mise-en-scène, generic conventions, and the film in its totality, creates the "meaning" of the film. Thus, Isabelle Huppert, Modernist Performance demonstrates its premise through close readings considering how performance must be read in tandem with the whole.
About the Author:
Florence Jacobowitz is a scholar, film critic, and a founding editor and contributor to CineAction magazine. She has taught film studies at York University in Toronto, Canada; coedited a collection of essays titled Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust; and has contributed to several edited volumes on Hitchcock, feminist film criticism, and genre studies, including film noir, melodrama, and the Western.
Press Reviews:
Florence Jacobowitz effectively brings together insights gleaned from a wide range of scholarly, journalistic, and filmic sources. Her writing style is exquisite, making the book accessible to a wide audience and a pleasure to read for academics. The descriptions of ideas, films, performance details, and more are clear and engaging; the observations about the films also reveal a significant depth of insight and compassion.
-Cynthia Baron, author of Modern Acting: The Lost Chapter of American Film and Theatre
Close analyses of an impressive range of the star's challenging films underpin the argument for the distinctiveness of Isabelle Huppert's performance style here. These accessible, informative accounts locate Huppert in the context of her contemporary collaborators and explore how we can read her work against earlier modes of star performance.
-Edward Gallafent, professor emeritus of film studies, University of Warwick
Florence Jacobowitz provides us with a compelling, innovative, in-depth study of this wonderfully intelligent and versatile actor. Isabelle Huppert is often perceived as cold and detached as a performer, but she is so much more than that, and Jacobowitz's meticulous investigation into what she terms Huppert's modernist performance style deeply enriches our understanding and appreciation of this complex artist.
-Susan Hayward, professor emerita, University of Exeter
In a deft examination of Isabelle Huppert's modernist performances, Jacobowitz reveals how Huppert's enigmatic, yet creative acting styles elicit viewers' critical engagements with cinema and the feminine.
-Homer B. Pettey, professor emeritus, University of Arizona, and coeditor of French Literature on Screen
See the publisher website: Wayne State University Press
See the complete filmography of Isabelle Huppert on the website: IMDB ...
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