Suzanne Ferriss, ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Suzanne Ferriss, ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola (Bloomsbury, 2023)
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1Reading the Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, it becomes abundantly clear that Sofia Coppola is not merely a filmmaker but a multi-faceted media practitioner within a rich media ecosystem. Her cultural output, layered artistic profile and celebrity persona call for unpacking and scrutiny. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, edited by Suzanne Ferriss, is the first comprehensive collection to take stock of possibly every aspect of Coppola’s oeuvre to this day, making it a valuable contribution to film and media studies but also to adjacent fields as an original case study. Indeed, it provides fresh insights for students and scholars working in feminist studies, independent and art-house cinema, transnational film production, cosmopolitanism and critical race theory.
2The acclaimed director is probably known first and foremost for her surname and is thus preceded by her father’s larger-than-life persona. Francis Ford Coppola brought her to some initial prominence when he gave her a major role in the third installment of The Godfather (1990). The fierce critical response to Sofia’s performance seems to have influenced her public persona and reception of her films. In retrospect, as Ferriss notes in the introduction to the volume, these negative reviews were biased, begging thus the question whether the same reaction would have been reserved for a novice male actor. Ferriss’s edited volume rectifies this injustice by highlighting Coppola’s status as one of the most successful female directors in American cinema and by celebrating her thought-provoking female portraits and unique aesthetic palette. It thus sets off to show how she is a distinct artist with a unique brand name and not merely the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola. Divided into five comprehensive sections, the book exceeds readers’ expectations as it explores the entire spectrum of Coppola’s work, from film to pop music videos, providing original insights and angles from which to examine her contributions to visual culture. Its holistic structure and approach is one of the volume’s greatest strengths.
- 1 Ferriss, Suzanne, “Introduction,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, ed. Suzanne Ferriss (...)
- 2 Baron, Cynthis, Tzioumakis, Yannis, “Sofia Coppola, Indiewood, and Performance,” in The Bloomsbury (...)
- 3 Pesce, Sara, “Sofia Coppola, Cosmopolitan Icon,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, ed. S (...)
3To be sure, this volume celebrates Coppola’s art, demonstrating different and original ways to appreciate her output across a transmedia landscape. The book’s contributors elaborate on her films and all those other media that for many are a “distraction from her films”1 but for others a source of visual pleasure and key to better understanding Coppola’s films and thematic preoccupations. On the one hand, Coppola is celebrated as an awarded indie filmmaker with a mainstream appeal, especially thanks to her sophomore film Lost in Translation (2003). As Cynthia Baron and Yannis Tzioumakis note, Coppola balances both an indie art-house sensibility and mainstream Hollywood aesthetic making her popular in two different film worlds. She simultaneously works with a cast of stars and newcomers and with the backing of independent and major Hollywood studios like her father’s Zoetrope. This firmly places her in the separate category of indiewood.2 On the other hand, the book effectively shows that she is a music video artist, curator, fashion photographer and creator of advertisements with obvious cinematic qualities. Coppola is also revered for having staged an opera in Milan and even as a brand name on her father’s wine collection. More so, she is a fashion icon and hip artist with a particular appeal to different audiences and generations. Her media is consumed by cinephiles, students and scholars but also young generations of digital media natives who help construct her persona across the world and the web.3
- 4 “Suntory Time, Suntory Whisky 100th Anniversary Tribute by Sofia Coppola,” The House of Suntory You (...)
- 5 Bonde Korsgaard, Mathias, “’If you don’t have at least two careers, you don’t fit in’: Transmedia A (...)
4As this review is being written, Coppola is directing an ad for the centenary of the Japanese whisky brand Suntory,4 which featured in Lost in Translation as a prop in the hands of Bill Murray playing in a Suntory ad. Such metatextual play and commentary are staples in Coppola’s films and the intersection of different media and pop culture references across her oeuvre is highlighted by several contributors of the current collection. Indeed, what is striking in her work is the aesthetic and thematic overlap between her films, music videos and ads. Mathias Bonde Korsgaard mentions that Coppola’s status is akin to that of male filmmakers with transmedia connections like David Fincher, Spike Jonze, David Lynch and Michel Gondry. As Bonde Korsgaard observes, exploring filmmakers’ “other” media may reveal unexpected resonances between different media and promote discussions on media hierarchies.5
- 6 Pesce, Sara, “Sofia Coppola, Cosmopolitan Icon,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, ed. S (...)
5Taking a step back to examine Coppola and her work from a more general point of view, Sara Pesce explains how one can understand why she is in fact a cosmopolitan artist thanks to her unique brand name and profile as a globetrotting filmmaker who “straddles multiple social realms and cultural meanings.”6 Taking the latter under consideration, Coppola’s cinematic rendering of international locations, from Tokyo and Milan to Versailles and New York, are ideal source material for research into film and tourism. In her chapter entitled “Psychogeography and cinema(car)tography: cinematic tourism and Sofia Coppola’s films,” Laura Henderson explores themes related to travel and encounters with and within metropolitan cities. The author addresses notions such as culture shock and urban alienation in Lost in Translation, a film that exemplifies what it means to be immersed and lost in a city like Tokyo where the film’s protagonists appear dwarfed and lonely. Moreover, Henderson looks at Marie Antoinette and the sense of place in the Versailles palace through the experience of the young and naïve princess. While initially the historical location is a locus of pleasure and glamour, like most palaces, it becomes one of entrapment and, indeed, estrangement. Thus, Coppola challenges established narratives surrounding major tourist attractions while inviting audiences to revisit these locations.
- 7 Rogers, Jamie-Ann, “Makin Whiteness: The Absent Presence of Race and Class in Sofia Coppola’s Films (...)
- 8 Simonson, Caryn, “Fashion Campaigns: Sofia Coppola’s ‘Mini-Films,’” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to S (...)
- 9 Ferriss, Suzanne, “Introduction,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, ed. Suzanne Ferriss (...)
6Contributors to the volume however call for critical vigilance toward Coppola’s persistent focus on white characters and the influence of class and white privilege in her cinematic outlook. This is an issue highlighted in Jamie Ann Rogers’ critique of whiteness and black absence in the majority of Coppola’s films. According to Rogers, despite good intentions, the director tends to render black characters marginal in comparison to white protagonists and thus creates a racial hierarchy.7 Even On the Rocks, the director’s first film featuring an African-American woman, brushes over the injustices that African-Americans endure, like police brutality. In the case of The Beguiled, the intellectual and cultural advantages of feminist politics are marred by an exclusive focus on aristocratic white women and the absence of the novel’s black slaves. One may thus start to see how “white feminism” may be indeed an issue worth raising. In another chapter, Caryn Simonson looks into the fascinating world of Coppola’s fashion ads and their aesthetic qualities but does not refrain from pointing out how they objectify women and glorify luxury brands with known environmental impact. The author clarifies that in times of environmental and capitalist crisis, the ethical implications of luxury fashion ads are inescapable.8 Therefore, intertextuality needs to be taken into account for an ethically and ideologically sound representation and critique. This kind of critical rigor runs throughout the book and helps elucidate the many contradictions that make up the director’s oeuvre. Thus, the volume’s contributors manage to elaborate on Ferriss’s assertion that “[Coppola’s] films are praised for their psychological depth and cultural critique by some, while charged as elitist, privileged and racially insensitive by others – or sometimes all at once.”9
7The latter brings us to another point that is often raised in the current volume: Coppola’s films tend to be ambiguous and a straightforward interpretation is no easy feat. In Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006) and The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola, 2013), for instance, critics have accused Coppola of glorifying luxury and celebrity lifestyles. Contributors to the current volume nevertheless underline the ambiguity of Coppola’s films and defend the director’s argument that in the excesses of luxury and celebrity displayed in her films lays a condemnation of those very notions. In The Bling Ring and Marie Antoinette, celebrity lifestyle is initially embraced and the characters revel in a world of excess accompanied by a pop soundtrack to enhance the pleasure of consumption and excess. Yet, The Bling Ring and Marie Antoinette bring into relief the vacuity of wealth and celebrity since the protagonists’ choices lead to their demise (a prison and death sentence respectively).
- 10 McNicol, Emma, Monaghan, Whitney, Russell, Grace, and Smaill, Belinda, “Sofia Coppola in the Curric (...)
8The methodological challenges posed by semantic ambiguity are masterfully addressed by Emma McNicol, Whitney Monaghan and Grace Russell in their fascinating chapter “Sofia Coppola in the Curriculum: Feminist Film Pedagogies.” The chapter outlines students’ “messy” and “unpredictable” reactions to female representation in The Virgin Suicides on the premise that “the classroom is a crucial space for extending our engagement with filmmakers and films we explore in our research.”10 The authors utilize Coppola’s debut film as a case study in their undergraduate class “Gender and Sexuality in Film and Television” asking students to tackle the problem of the male gaze. While some groups firmly argued that the story of the Lisbon sisters is told exclusively through the recollections and imagination of the boys, leaving little in terms of female agency, others—notably, female students—highlighted how the film embraces the girls’ vision to emphasize their lack of agency and entrapment in a patriarchal society. According to the latter group, the film thus does not reinforce a patriarchal outlook but exposes the unjust treatment of (young) women. Regardless though of these diametrically different observations in the classroom, having resorted to an ambiguous and nuanced case study, the authors successfully fostered autonomous critical thinking and layered reflection among students.
9To summarize, the Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola is not merely a series of articles on the films of Sofia Coppola, but a wide-arching and analytical exegesis of her entire cultural output. It maintains a celebratory tone by showcasing how prolific she is as a filmmaker and overall a visual artist who breaks new ground in other fields of expression like photography, music videos and TV advertising. While doing so, the collection simultaneously sets the foundations for a scholarly critique of the ethical pitfalls in Coppola’s work, namely the lack of diversity in her films and her links to consumer society through advertisements for global fashion brands that tend to objectify women. Thanks to its reader-friendly and diverse content, it is a valuable resource for students, scholars and the wider public interested in Coppola’s universe.
Notes
1 Ferriss, Suzanne, “Introduction,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, ed. Suzanne Ferriss (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 1.
2 Baron, Cynthis, Tzioumakis, Yannis, “Sofia Coppola, Indiewood, and Performance,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, ed. Suzanne Ferriss (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 255-277.
3 Pesce, Sara, “Sofia Coppola, Cosmopolitan Icon,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, ed. Suzanne Ferriss (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 418-433.
4 “Suntory Time, Suntory Whisky 100th Anniversary Tribute by Sofia Coppola,” The House of Suntory YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlzqmIWWEfI&ab_channel=TheHouseofSuntory
5 Bonde Korsgaard, Mathias, “’If you don’t have at least two careers, you don’t fit in’: Transmedia Authorship and the Music Videos of Sofia Coppola,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, ed. Suzanne Ferriss (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 126.
6 Pesce, Sara, “Sofia Coppola, Cosmopolitan Icon,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, ed. Suzanne Ferriss (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 418.
7 Rogers, Jamie-Ann, “Makin Whiteness: The Absent Presence of Race and Class in Sofia Coppola’s Films,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, ed. Suzanne Ferriss (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 339.
8 Simonson, Caryn, “Fashion Campaigns: Sofia Coppola’s ‘Mini-Films,’” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, ed. Suzanne Ferriss (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 182.
9 Ferriss, Suzanne, “Introduction,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, ed. Suzanne Ferriss (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 1.
10 McNicol, Emma, Monaghan, Whitney, Russell, Grace, and Smaill, Belinda, “Sofia Coppola in the Curriculum: Feminist Film Pedagogies,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, ed. Suzanne Ferriss (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 403.
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Electronic reference
Philip Edward Phillis, “Suzanne Ferriss, ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola (Bloomsbury, 2023)”, Film journal [Online], 10 | 2024, Online since 01 December 2024, connection on 08 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/filmj/1259; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/130uk
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