Can fictions of desire determine real pleasures? Do texts regulate the performance of our sexual identities? In Sexuality and the Reading Encounter, Emma Wilson offers a new account of the intimate relations between reading, identity, and identification. Interweaving theoretical debate with analysis of texts by Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous, her study reveals the formative potential and transferential pleasures of the reading encounter.

Photographs of missing children are some of the most haunting images of contemporary Western society. The specter of the child at risk from abduction, abuse, or illness, conjures questions about traumatic loss, protection and the family, nostalgia and childhood innocence. Emma Wilson argues that such questions increasingly return in the work of contemporary filmmakers. She explores the representation of missing and endangered children in a number of the key films of the last decade, including Kieslowski's Three Colours: Blue, Atom Egoyan's Exotica, Todd Solondz's...

The films of Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan immerse the viewer in a world of lush sensuality, melancholia, and brooding obsession. From his earliest films "Next of Kin" and "Family Viewing, " to his coruscating "Exotica" and recent projects such as "Where the Truth Lies, " Egoyan has paid infinite attention to narrative intricacy and psychological complexity. Traumatic loss and its management through ritual return as themes in his films, in particular in relation to his own Armenian heritage. In this study, Emma Wilson closely analyzes the range of Egoyan's films and their visual...

The films of Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan immerse the viewer in a world of lush sensuality, melancholia, and brooding obsession. From his earliest films Next of Kin and Family Viewing, to his coruscating Exotica and recent projects such as Where the Truth Lies, Egoyan has paid infinite attention to narrative intricacy and psychological complexity. Traumatic loss and its management through ritual return as themes in his films, in particular in relation to his own Armenian heritage. In this study, Emma Wilson closely analyzes the range of Egoyan's films...

Alain Resnais, director of "Hiroshima mon amour" (1959) and "L'Annee derniere a Marienbad" (1961), has transformed the representation of memory, fantasy and desire in modern cinema. This illuminating introduction to his work, extending from his earliest documentaries to the musical films of the last decade, traces the evolving patterns of his filmmaking, its changing reflections on mortality, guilt, chance and human doubt. Exploring questions of the time-image, of trauma, of the senses, this volume sets Resnais' films in the context of important current debates in film theory, and provides a...

Photography and memory in Mexico traces the 'life stories' of some of the famous photographic images made during the 1910 revolution, which have been repeatedly reproduced across a range of media in its aftermath. Which photographs have become icons of the revolution and why these particular images and not others? What is the relationship between photography and memory of the conflict? How do we construct a critical framework for addressing the issues raised by iconic photographs? Placing an emphasis on the life, afterlife and also the pre-life of those iconic photographs that haunt the...

In their use of home movies, collages of photographs and live footage, moving image artists explore the wish to see dead loved ones living. This study closely explores emotions and sensations surrounding mortality and longing, with new readings of works by Agnes Varda, Pedro Almodovar, Ingmar Bergman, Sophie Calle, and many others."