EXISTENTIALISM AND

CONTEMPORARY CINEMA
A Beauvoirian Perspective
Edited by
Jean-Pierre Boule and Ursula Tidd
i
Berghahn Books
New York Oxford
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Jean-Pierre Boule and Ursula Tidd
Chapter 1 Beauvoir's Children: Girlhood in Innocence 17
Emma Wilson
Chapter 2 'DevenirMere': Trajectories of the Maternal Bond in
Recent Films starring Isabelle Huppert 33
Ursula Tidd
Chapter 3 Claire Denis's Chocolat and the Politics of Desire 53
Jean-Pierre Boule
Chapter 4 Revolutionary Road and The Second Sex 67
Constance Mui and Julien Murphy
Chapter 5 Simone de Beauvoir, Melodrama and the Ethics of
Transcendence 81
Linnell Secomb
Chapter 6 La Petite Jerusalem: Freedom and Ambiguity in the
Paris banlieues 97
Claire Humphrey
Chapter 7 'How Am I Not Myself?' Engaging Ambiguity in
David O. Russell's / V Huckabees 109
Bradley Stephens
Chapter 8 Encounters with the 'Third Age': Benguigui's
Inch'Allah dimanche and Beauvoir's Old Age 123
Michelle Royer
viii Contents
Chapter 9 Eastwood Reading Beauvoir Reading Eastwood: Ageing
and Combative Self-Assertion in Gran Torino and Old Age 135
Oliver Davis
Chapter 10 Les Belles Images} Mid-Life Crisis and Old Age in
Tamara Jenkins' The Savages 149
Susan Bainbrigge
Chapter 11 Feminist Phenomenology and the Films of Sally Potter 161
Kate Ince
Notes on Contributors 175
Index 179