The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love

A new book by Sophie Mayer on the work of Sally Potter is about to be published by Wallflower Press. Here is what they say about the book:

“Clever, exciting, moving – Sophie Mayer’s eloquent prose is a great match for Sally Potter’s elegant filmmaking. This deeply personal yet learned study brings out the passion, the poetry and the politics of Potter’s cinema in its many manifestations. Mayer is intellectually at ease writing about a range of forms, and is perfectly equipped to give us a vivid sense of the subtle, collaborative ‘performer’ Potter is. The book shows us how Potter’s work combines the sensual and the intellectual, the physical and the metaphysical, the spiritual and the emotional. This is a must read for anyone who has ever seen a Sally Potter film – or hasn’t, and should.” Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto

Sally Potter has always been Britain’s most independent director: as a feminist filmmaker, a leading light of the BFI Production Board generation, an Academy Award-nominated British filmmaker and a pioneer of digital cinema. Drawing on exclusive access to archival materials and in-depth interviews, The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love opens up vivid historical, political and cultural vistas to give the first full account of an extraordinary career. From Thriller, which galvanized the new feminist cinema in 1979, to Rage (2009), a digital docu-fiction about information in the age of globalisation, Potter has refashioned cinematic looking and listening through her attention to what dominant culture neglects and suppresses: labour, performance, beauty, poetry, listening and the spirit of place. This volume argues that, by putting the unseen on screen, Potter’s films fill the viewer with wonder and desire, enacting the possibilities of cinema as love.

Sophie Mayer has taught at the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge, where she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. She writes on alternative cinemas for various journals and is the author of a collection of film poetry, Her Various Scalpels, and co-editor of There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond. Find out more at www.sophiemayer.net