Analysis of the films, performance art and music of director Sally Potter.

This survey of Sally Potter’s work explores her cinematic development from the feminist reworking of La Bohème in Thriller to the provocative contemplation of romantic relationships after 9/11 in Yes. Catherine Fowler traces a clear trajectory of developing themes and preoccupations and shows how Potter uses song, dance, performance, and poetry to expand our experience of cinema beyond the audiovisual. Potter has relentlessly struggled against predictability and safe options. Again and again, her works grapple with the complexities of being a woman in charge. Instead of the quest to find a romantic partner that drives mainstream cinema, Potter’s films feature characters seeking answers to questions about their sexual, gendered, social, cultural, and ethnic identities. They find answers by retelling stories, investigating mysteries, and traveling and interacting with people. At the heart of Potter’s work is a concern with the ways narrative circumscribes women's ability to act, speak, look, desire, and think for themselves. Her first two films, Thriller and The Gold Diggers, largely deconstruct found stories, clichés, and images. By contrast, later films like Orlando and The Tango Lesson create new and original narratives that place female acts, voices, looks, desires, and thoughts at their center. Fowler’s analysis is supplemented by a detailed filmography, bibliography, and an extensive interview with the director.

Sally Potter has been renowned for her rapport with actors, and for the luminous performances she works with them to produce. Now she strips bare the art and craft of directing actors for the camera, from casting a film to the moment of first screening when the work goes public. A brilliant writer for the screen, here Potter shows herself to be expert at translating the experience of film directing to the page. She addresses us in prose that is both unsentimental and inspired, tracing the energies that pass between actor, director and audience; shaping for the reader the acts of transmission and imagination, performance and witness, the sum of which make up a film. In addition to the core text, the book contains interviews with actors with whom Sally Potter has worked, whose voices will counterpoint Sally Potter's, and will inform and illuminate the reader's sense of her work. Those interviewed include: Julie Christie, Jude Law, Judi Dench, Simon Abkarian, Annette Benning, Timothy Spall, Steve Buscemi, Riz Ahmed, Elle Fanning, Alessandro Nivola, and Lily Cole.

The subtleties and the nuances of our experience. And I think that verse is a kind of structure that allows us to explore language in a more interesting, more heightened way, then we tend to in everyday conversation."

Since Pearl's grandmother's became seriously ill, Pearl's world view has changed, causing her to feel like an island in school, isolated and alone, especially when her teacher keeps asking for poems that rhyme and Pearl's somehow, seldom do.

The City in the Developing World is a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to urbanisation in developing countries. The goal of this text is to place an understanding of the developing world city in its wider global context. First, this is done by developing the concept of social surplus product as a key to understanding the character of the contemporary Third World city. Second, throughout this text, the city in developing areas is centrally placed in the context of global, social, economic, political and cultural change. Thus, the important themes of globalisation, modernity and postmodernity are examined both in relation to the structure of sets of towns and cities which make up the national or regional urban system, and in respect of ideas and concepts dealing with the morphology, structure and social patterning of individual urban areas. The City in the Developing World is a core text for second and third year undergraduates in the fields of geography, development studies, planning, economics and the social sciences, taking options which deal with development issues, development theory, gender and development and Third World development.

A screenplay by the writer/director of Orlando. A female film-maker, struggling with the writing of her new film, gradually abandons herself to the physical world of the tango, under the tutelage of an Argentinian living and performing in Paris. They fall in love and strike a bargain.