The Future of an Illusion was first published in 1989. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The Future of an Illusion documents the pivotal role Constance Penley has played in the development of feminist film theory. Penley analyzes the primary movements that have shaped the field: the conjunction of feminism, film theory, and psychoanalysis, and the inherent debates surrounding the politics of women and representation. These debates center on the position of women in the classical Hollywood narrative, the construction of the spectator's desire in pornography and eroticism, and the implicitly male bias in psychoanalytically oriented film theory. Essential to anyone studying the sexual policies of representation, The Future of an Illusion ranges from avant-garde films to video, popular cinema, television, literature, and critical and cultural theory.

Constance Penley is associate professor of English and film studies at the University of Rochester. A co-editor of the journal Camera Obscura,she is the editor of Feminism and Film Theory.

'Traumatic Encounters' addresses the question of the relationship between psychoanalysis and film in a thoroughly original way, bringing together Lacanian theory and Italian cinema as a means to unravel the deepest kernel of repressed knowledge around which film narratives are constructed. The primary theoretical reference of the book is the Real, the most under-represented of the three Lacanian categories (Symbolic, Imaginary and Real), which designates the traumatic dimension of reality that cannot be integrated in the order of language and communication. Exploring the relationship between film and its unconscious underside, the author argues that only by locating the elusive “traces of the cinematic Real” can a given film narrative be reconstructed in its entirety. Like the Lacanian subject, film here appears as fundamentally split between a traumatic dimension beyond signification (the Real), and awareness of its fragile symbolic status.

Always stylistically innovative, thematically defiant and driven by a strong political agenda, Italian cinema lends itself particularly well to a critical investigation aimed at radicalising the impact of psychoanalysis on film. In doing exactly that, the book deliberately avoids the standard cultural and historical approaches to film. Instead, it moves freely amongst some of the most widely celebrated – as well as lesser-known – Italian films of the post-war period, discussing the ways in which they tackle such themes as desire, fantasy, sexuality, violence and the law, to mention but a few. The main focus is on the work of those directors who most effectively engage with the divisive nature of the moving image: Antonioni, Pasolini and Rossellini. In addition, the book provides ample and insightful references to films by Visconti, Bertolucci, Bellocchio, Moretti, Petri, Fellini, Ferreri, and many more.