'This brilliant and elegant study of director Mia Hansen-Løve - the first monograph on her films - draws attention to their ethical dimensions and radical rethinking of questions of vulnerability. Infinitely resourceful and illuminating, it looks across the six films and also considers Hansen-Løve's work as film critic. Kate Ince argues for the seriousness of the films, their commitment to cinema as a way to practice philosophy, and search for wisdom, the good and beauty.'
Emma Wilson, University of Cambridge
Since 2007 Mia Hansen-Løve has directed a series of meditative film dramas about families, love, vulnerability and growing up, all of them exceptionally attentive to film's ability to convey the passing of time, separation and loss. As the first book-length study of the films of Mia Hansen-Løve, this volume introduces her cinema to both an academic and a general readership. Exploring her move from acting, via criticism, to directing, the book first investigates the complexity of her situation as a female auteur based in France. With detailed readings of her films up to Maya (2018), it then examines the precariousness of their families, their emphasis on vulnerability, failure, adversity and resilience, the particular candour of Hansen-Løve's filming style, and the vital parts played by music and time in her cinema. It concludes that her cinema may best be regarded as a thoroughly contemporary one, distinguished by a tendency to transcendence that is both ethical and aesthetic.
Kate Ince is Professor of French and Visual Studies in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham.
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Kate Ince is Reader in French Film and Gender Studies at the University of Birmingham

List of figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Mia Hansen-Løve, Transnational Auteur

1. Fracture familiale

2. Vulnerable People

3. Adversity and Resilience: The Post-Secular Ethic of Vocation

4. Candid Camera, or an Aesthetic of Transcendence

5. Lost In Music

6. The Rivers of Time

Conclusion: Contemporaneity and the Ethic of Transcendence

Bibliography
Filmography
Index