The Cinema of Mia Hansen-Løve: Candour and Vulnerability

Description

Since 2007 Mia Hansen-Løve has directed a series of meditative film dramas about families, love, vulnerability and growing up, all of them exceptionally attentive to film’s ability to convey the passing of time, separation and loss. As the first book-length study of the films of Mia Hansen-Løve, this volume introduces her cinema to both an academic and a general readership. Exploring her move from acting, via criticism, to directing, the book first investigates the complexity of her situation as a female auteur based in France. With detailed readings of her films up to Maya (2018), it then examines the precariousness of their families, their emphasis on vulnerability, failure, adversity and resilience, the particular candour of Hansen-Løve’s filming style, and the vital parts played by music and time in her cinema. It concludes that her cinema may best be regarded as a thoroughly contemporary one, distinguished by a tendency to transcendence that is both ethical and aesthetic. List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Mia Hansen-Løve, transnational auteur Hansen-Løve as actor and critic Becoming an auteur Transnational authorship in contemporary France The book 1. Fracture familiale Liquid love and the twenty-first-century family Fracture familiale and fi lm form in All Is Forgiven and Father of My Children Fractures of time and place in Things to Come and Maya Liquid society, precariousness, ethics and film Conclusion: girlhood and the ethics of fracture familiale 2. Vulnerable people Fragile life in All Is Forgiven Risk, denial and failure in Father of My Children Failing fatherhood and postmodern French masculinities Life crises in Eden and Goodbye First Love Recovery time in Maya Reconfiguring male domination Vulnerabilisation of the subject 3. Adversity and resilience: the post-secular ethic of vocation Camille’s architectural recovery Paul Vallée’s (re)turn to literature Nathalie Chazeaux’s philosophical resilience Gabriel Dahan, war reporter Conclusion 4. Candid camera, or an aesthetic of transcendence ‘Palpitations of life’ Pastoral beauty in France and India in All Is Forgiven, Goodbye First Love, Things to Come and Maya A transcendental style for the twenty-first century? Candid camera 5. Lost in music Music in Hansen-Løve’s films Conclusion 6. The rivers of time De-spatialising time: Bergsonian durée and Deleuze’s time-image Flow, movement and time in Goodbye First Love and Father of My Children Time tunnels in Goodbye First Love and Maya From narrative to phenomenological realism Moments in time Conclusion: the ethics of durée Conclusion: contemporaneity and the ethic of transcendence Bibliography Filmography Index