Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert

• Offers analytic frameworks for performance aesthetics in dialogue with critical theory
• Offers new readings of important films through the lens of Huppert’s acting
• Uses Huppert to theorise screen performance aesthetics in dialogue with debates in the humanities on negativity, affect, and gender

Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert argues that the career of this singular French actor—constituting a corpus of well over a hundred films—offers a unique testing ground for current approaches in film studies and affect studies.

Attention to Huppert’s performances can reframe recent discussions on the social and cultural dimensions of emotion and normativity through a compelling paradox: her roles tend to express grandiose and overwhelming conditions central to debates in the humanities—negativity, dispossession, trauma—but through elusive and at times resistant or diminutive forms of expression: what J. Hoberman once called her genius