And that i see a darkness: The stardom of kirsten dunst in collaboration with Sofia Coppola in three images

Abstract

Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst share a long-standing collaboration that has lasted from Dunst’s adolescence onwards and into mature womanhood. As a former child star, Dunst has grown up in front of Coppola’s camera and has come to be closely associated with the director’s rarefied and highly aestheticised cinematic world. I have argued elsewhere that a cardinal and abiding concern of Coppola’s oeuvre is how images come to be collectively and culturally understood; moreover, Coppola is especially concerned with how the (en)gendering of an image can either open up or foreclose sites of contestation. Coppola is positioned in contrast to readings of her work as strictly postfeminist. I argue that Coppola’s work is postfeminist to the extent that it exhibits an indebtedness to, in particular, second wave feminism, but I also contend that Coppola is concerned with critiquing the mores and norms of postfeminism from a resolutely feminist perspective.