4 - Sonic Authorship 2: Sofia Coppola

Summary

Sofia Coppola is a female auteur who has managed to create a distinctive oeuvre over the course of her career. Disputes about Coppola’s privileged position in the industry – she is of course the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola – have tended to overshadow her actual achievements. Such negative dismissals of her advantaged position stem from sexist assumptions about worthiness; many male directors, for example, take advantage of certain privileges but these are rarely scrutinised in the same negative manner as Coppola’s have been. Her films have also been dismissed by some critics for their emptiness; for lingering on pretty images, for example, without any apparent ‘substance’. But as many defenders of Coppola have argued, her films are anything but empty, and have been perceived as comments ‘upon postfeminist concerns about consumption as a “feminine” ideal, and attempts to mirror and reverse macho tropes from the 1960s and 1970s male auteur movement, which includes her father’ (Kennedy 2010: 37). Pam Cook (2009: 36) has noted how her first three features focus on the female rite-of-passage, while Belinda Smaill (2013: 50) has stressed how Coppola tends to examine characters, both male and female, who are in stages of transition. Coppola’s films also tend to linger on experiential moments: while encased within narrative frameworks, they are less concerned with narrative drive than capturing subjective moods in a somewhat impressionistic manner. Her emphasis on mood and emotion is often linked to her visual style: her careful use of colours, framing, location and costume, and inspiration from photography and other visual arts have been noted frequently. In this chapter, however, I want to look at Coppola’s use of music, in particular her use of various indie/alternative music and how this informs her overall aesthetic.

Smaill (151) has drawn attention to Coppola’s ‘strong ties with the independent music scene’: she has directed music videos for acts such as The Flaming Lips and The White Stripes, is married to Thomas Mars, vocalist for French group Phoenix, and uses independent music frequently within her films. Smaill mentions how Coppola’s connections with, and use of, independent music imbues her films with subcultural appeal and contributes to the mood and tone of scenes.