Filming the Body in Crisis

Author's talk: Davina Quinlivan introduced by Caroline Bainbridge

Filming the Body in Crisis examines the representation of the body and the ethical, psychological and embodied implications of viewing bodies on screen across a range of moving image media and mainstream films. The book draws on the work of Melanie Klein and Sigmund Freud, and is focused on notions of object relations and embodied film spectatorship, looking at a range of contemporary films including The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick), A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg), Psychiatry and Broadmoor in the work of Pat McGrath, Hunger (Steve McQueen), Blue (Derek Jarman) and the films of Atom Egoyan.

Dr. Davina Quinlivan is a Senior Lecturer in Performance and Screen Studies at Kingston University. Her first book, The Place of Breath in Cinema (EUP, 2012), examined the locus of the breathing body, gender, inter-subjectivity and corporeality in the films of Lars von Trier, Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg with the philosophy of Luce Irigaray. She has published in many journals including Screen, Studies in French Cinema, for which she won the first Susan Hayward Prize for the Best Postgraduate Article in 2010, and Music, Sound and the Moving Image. While she has regularly contributed to the Times Higher Education culture section, her film journalism has also appeared in Dazed and Confused, Little White Lies, Sight and Sound, Vertigo and Litro. She is currently working on notions of girlhood and female expression and developing a book on women and the politics of movement.

Caroline Bainbridge is Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis at the University of Roehampton, where she teaches and researches in the Department of Media, Culture and Language. She has published widely on matters linked to psychoanalysis and popular culture in journals such as Screen and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. With Candida Yates, she founded the Media and the Inner World research network (www.miwnet.org) in 2009 and, together, they have edited special editions of PCS and Free Associations, as well as several anthologies including, most recently, Television and Psychoanalysis: Psychocultural perspectives (Karnac 2013) and Media and the Inner World: Psycho-cultural approaches to emotion, media and popular culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2014). Caroline is the author of A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, women and film (Palgrave Macmillan 2008) and The Cinema of Lars von Trier (Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press 2007). She is Editor of Free Associations, series editor (with Candida Yates) of the Karnac Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture book list, and Film Section Editor of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Her current work takes as its focus processes of mediation and popular cultural politics. It has a particular emphasis on group dynamics, allowing her to draw on her experience as a trained organisational consultant.

Filming the Body in Crisis: Trauma, Healing and Hopefulness is published by Palgrave (2015)