Bøger af Suzanne Ferriss

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola offers the first comprehensive overview of the director's impressive oeuvre. It includes individual chapters on her films, including The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), Somewhere (2010), The Bling Ring (2013), The Beguiled (2017), and On the Rocks (2020). While focused on her films, contributors also consider Coppola's shorter works for television, commercials and music videos, as well as explorations of the distinct elements of her signature style: cinematography, production/costume design, music, and editing. Additional chapters provide insights into the influences on her work, its popular and scholarly reception, and interpretations of key themes and issues.The international team of contributors includes leading scholars of film, music, fashion, celebrity and gender studies, visual and material culture, reception studies, as well as industry professionals. Their interdisciplinary insights capture the complexities of Coppola's work and its cultural significance.

Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) brings two Americans together in Tokyo, each experiencing a personal crisis. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a recent graduate in philosophy, faces an uncertain professional future, while Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an established celebrity, questions his choices at midlife. Both are distant - emotionally and spatially - from their spouses. They are lost until they develop an intimate connection. In the film's poignant, famously ambiguous closing scene, they find each other, only to separate. In this close look at the multi-award-winning film, Suzanne Ferriss mirrors Lost in Translation's structuring device of travel: her analysis takes the form of a trip, from planning to departure. She details the complexities of filming (a 27-day shoot with no permits in Tokyo), explores Coppola's allusions to fine art, subtle colour palette and use of music over words, and examines the characters' experiences of the Park Hyatt Tokyo and excursions outside, together and alone. She also re-evaluates the film in relation to Coppola's other features, as the product of an established director with a distinctive cinematic signature: 'Coppolism'. Fundamentally, Ferriss argues that Lost in Translation is not only a cinema classic, but classic Coppola too.

An Alternative History of Bicycles and Motorcycles: Two-Wheeled Transportation and Material Culture accounts for the nineteenth-century creation and development of two-wheeled vehicles, both human-powered and motorized. Specifically, the book focuses on the period from 1885 (which saw the appearance, simultaneously, of the Safety bicycle and the Einspur, the first motorcycle) to 1920, while exploring implications for later bicycling and motorcycling. We argue that invention of these vehicles, rather than the product of gifted individuals, should be seen as the consequence of a number of historical, economic, cultural and political forces that intersect so unpredictably that the notion of a genius inventor is reductive. The common evolutionary model of development from the bicycle to the motorcycle oversimplifies both the technology and its origins. Stripping the vehicles of all their material and cultural associations, such a model fails to advance our understanding of the devices, their creators, and their riders. Taking a contemporary vehicle and tracing its lineage creates a false sense of evolutionary necessity in its creation, and fails to account for the many possible developmental paths that were, for whatever reason, abandoned. By contrast, our book adopts a material culture approach, a form of inquiry that stresses the connections between artifacts and social relations. We consider not simply the bicycle and motorcycle as material objects but focus also on the complex socio-political and economic convergences that produced the materials, materials that in turn themselves shaped the vehicles' appearance, function, and adoption by riders.