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Abject Spaces in American Cinema: Institutional Settings, Identity and Psychoanalysis in Film
Author(s): Frances Pheasant-Kelly (Author)
- Publisher: I.B. Tauris
- Publication Date: 30 May 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 288 pages
- ISBN-10: 1848855974
- ISBN-13: 9781848855977
Book Description
Symbolically infantilised, forced to reassess aspects of the adult, the only escape is through violence; the eponymous Carrie escapes from her cupboard for a massacre, the women of Girl, Interrupted mutilate and annihilate themselves and Kubrick’s Gomer Pyle shoots sadistic patriarch Sergeant Hartman in the ‘head’. By analysing scenes of horror and disgust within the context of abject space, Frances Pheasant-Kelly reveals how threats to identity manifest in scenes of torture, horror and psychosexual repression and are resolved either through death or through traumatic re-entry into the outside world. Bringing together contemporary theoretical debates and critical disciplines, Abject Spaces in American Cinema offers a coherent and meaningful analysis of institutonal films and shows that the chaos of the abject space cannot be resolved- only escaped. This readable and engging tour of the abject in the institution of film will be immensely valuable to students of Film Studies, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Professor Mark Jancovich, Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia
Frances Pheasant-Kelly s book offers a highly original take on the representation of institutions in American cinema. Through detailed analyses of a wide range of films, she explores some of the ways in which a complex politics of identity manifests itself. This book emerges as a text that is theoretically innovative as well as presenting some fascinating insights into the popular American films with which it deals.
Professor Peter Hutchings, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Northumbria University
Pheasant-Kelly explores the Hollywood cinema s use of institutional settings across a number of different genres – including the prison film, thriller, horror and sports film – and styles. Arguing for the applicability of abjection beyond the familiar spaces of science-fiction and horror, Pheasant-Kelly shows that both subjectivity and, crucially, space are sites of abjection, succeeding in conveying the complex ideas and values that underpin our fascination with institutions as sites of containment and control
Professor Yvonne Tasker, Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia
This study of fictional institutional films is sophisticated and timely. Pheasant-Kelly argues that these films cannot be explained with reference to Michel Foucault s theory of panopticism. Instead, she turns to Julia Kristeva s theory of abjection. This bold argument, which strongly links subjectivity and space and represents a broad new interpretation of abjection, should be of genuine interest to architectural scholars as well as those in film studies and visual culture. –Dr Barbara Penner, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
