INTRODUCTION
Director Celine Sciamma is a modern cinematic
vanguard of Feminist French filmmaking. Her inspiring work consistently
challenges the parameters of the patriarchal mechanism of masculine
moviemaking. This boundary pushing has given us a coming-of-age trilogy, a film
centered around motherhood, and another that epitomizes the phrase “love lies
longing”. In this, albeit still short filmography, Sciamma not only challenges
the audience with what they should be looking at, but why they should care. In
the confection of cinema, Sciamma creamily marbles together theme, story, and
dialogue unlike anyone else, taking additional care in incorporating intricate flavors
of allegorical political complexity that are refreshingly at the forefront of
the palette, while making the audience dreamily contemplative before they
swallow. It is because of this longingly nostalgic meditation, that Celine
Sciamma is the next subject in my
director deep dives; covering
all her auteur films.[1]
BACKGROUND
Born in Nov 1978, Celine
Sciamma was introduced to film by her grandmother and her love of old
Hollywood. By the time that she was a teenager, she was going to her local
theater three times a week, clearly part of cinema’s cult. Sciamma originally
envisioned herself as either a screenwriter or a critic, but not a director,
stating: “Directing
just seemed like too precarious a profession, too much a male-only preserve.” This changed when she got a chance to direct
her first film, the one she originally wrote after Grad school at La Femis.
Sciamma has always been
mesmerized and confident in the power of cinema to capture an audience and
reflect culture in different ways. In a 2021 interview with The Observer,
Sciamma extrapolates on the power of film to be endlessly interpreted;
believing that because the audience changes, films are different each time we
go back to them. She recounts the
interpretation of a sex scene in Water Lillies, and she is struck by two
things: One, through a more contemporary lens she considers what she shot now,
a rape, rather than the feminine universality of “first time bad sexual
encounters”. Secondly, that the female aggression that follows is more widely accepted
and embraced now than when it was originally shot.
Recognizing the power of cinema
to be a political tool, Sciamma became a founding member of the 50/50 by 2020
movement, a group of French filmmakers and industry professionals advocating
for gender parity by 2020. While this mission is sadly still ongoing, Sciamma
and others that uphold this disparity in egalitarian common sense as a blight
upon the industry, have helped to develop intimacy coordinator positions, assisted
women on contract negotiations and the implementation of inclusion riders.
“Cinema is always political” Sciamma states “And women making films about women
is a political act. (Oumano 2011).
This political conviction
carries through to her criticism of the industry itself. In 2018, she and
acting muse Adele Haenel walked out of the 45th Cesar Awards, an
award she previously won for Water Lillies in 2014, because the award
was given to Roman Polanski; a director in American exile because he
faces sexual assault charges of a minor in Los Angeles.
Sciamma and Haenel shouting “Bravo pedophilia” as they left. This criticism of
terrible men is continued in the thematic messaging of her overall work.
THEMES
Having
a foundation in Feminist scholarship, a majority of political and social
principles are woven into Sciamma’s cinematic tapestry. One of the strongest
threads that is carried through her work is that of “The female gaze.” The
female Gaze is a response to the literary criticism of “The male Gaze”. An
example of the normalization of maleness and masculinity within a patriarchal
system, “the male gaze” is the assumption that the lens of the camera is always
gendered male, and will, by default, present the male perspective as the lens
by which the audience will experience the story. This cisgendered masculine
focus is also often heteronormative and objectively sexist when women are the
subject of its regard. Sciamma regularly employs its opposite. She not only presents
the narrative proscenium through a female perspective, but one that provides
and presents women having agency, acceptance and nuance. One that is character
forward in orientation.
More
broadly however, “The female gaze” is unfortunately not framed as Sciamma and
others of her ilk have presented. The
term’s larger breadth is simplistically understood as “The view a female
filmmaker brings to the process that is different than their male counterpart.”
This unfortunately paints women as a singular monolith without the deeply
complex verisimilitude that intersectional feminism strives to maintain. This
“female gaze” then gets misinterpreted and thusly appropriated to promote the
patriarchy. This creates the same problematic gaze just with a different
subject: men. Girls and women are still socialized to their problematic sexist
messages of bodily focused male relationship centered validity, but through
this misconception this objectification becomes a “choice”. This is the result
of the continued effect of the focus on Randian Libertarian ideals of individuality
that distort the reality of systemic inequality by perceiving them through the
lens of “free and equal choice.” Without interrogating or even allowing the agency
they need to make that decision in the first place; this lack of
acknowledgement of cultural, social, and economic differences, and the
intersectionally compounding nature of their consequences, allows for the
dismantling of the social support latticework.
The
intentionally malformed system that teaches girls and women to celebrate “the
power” given to them by their patriarchal jailers, are crumbs from the feast on
the table of misogyny. Conditioning women to embrace the empowerment behind
their own objectification, is not just a mechanism of social control for them
but also promotes the active policing of [usually] heterosexual men on which
they typically exercise that power; thereby maintaining the status quo. To that
understanding, the essays in this series will be feminist forward in its
analysis; each film focusing on a variety of feminist scholars. Classical
scholars like Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks and Audre Lorde will lay the foundation
for a lot of arguments. While some films require more obscure resources like
Julia Kristeva, others need a more contemporary framework from the likes of Helana
Darwin, Peggy Orenstein, Roxanne Gay, Shanita Hubbard and Noelle McAfree.
Through
her coming-of-age trilogy (Water Lilies, Tom Boy, and Girlhood)
Sciamma evokes hooks (1996):
“Movies
remain the perfect vehicle for the introduction of certain ritual rites of
passage that come to stand for the quintessential border crossing for everyone
who wants to take a look at the difference and the different without to having
to experientially engage “the other”… Movies not only provide a narrative for
specific discourses of race, sex and class, they provide a shared experience, a
common starting point from which diverse audiences can dialogue about these
charged issues. (p2-3)
With added flairs of gender fluidity and sexual identity,
Sciamma’s teenage triptych centers “the other” from the ancillary, placing it subjectively
in the forefront from their perspective.
Audre
Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic” becomes important in the analysis of
Sciamma’s 2019 feature: A Portrait of a Lady on Fire. The way that Lorde
(2004) reframes the understanding of the term “erotic” as a source of lesbian
existent power speaks to the character motivations in the film. While using
Kristeva (2018), allows for the expanse of the film’s Greek tragedy allegory
through the myth of Orpheus. This leads to a dismantling of the sexual binary
through the evocation of Helana Darwin’s (2022) Redoing Gender, thereby broadening
the film’s messaging to a contemporary point, regardless of its period setting.
Finally, Petite Maman challenges and subverts gender norms akin to a Friedanian analysis. However, using the analysis provided by hooks, de Beauvoir, Orenstein and a few others, it illustrates a complexity that challenges the misogynistic roles of wives and mothers that women still find difficult to circumvent. Together, Sciamma’s Cinematic schema is one that not only teaches about feminism through a female gaze, it is a collective amalgamation of feminist theory “from margin to center” (hooks 2000:xv).
CONCLUSION
Celine
Sciamma’s work vacillates from being richly complex in its decadence, to
simplistically rustic in its direct and uncompromising frankness. Every frame
challenges the audience to contemplate the shot choice and give a reason as to
why they are seeing what she is showing them.
While other lesser filmmakers, made inert by the shackles of the male
gaze, continue to churn out misogynistic drivel that only lines the pockets of male
centered heterosexual prosecutors, Sciamma decides to give you another
perspective. She instead gives voice to the constantly silenced, and agency to
a variety of marginalized groups beyond the placating table scraps of the oppressors.
REFERENCES
Darwin,
Helana 2022. Redoing Gender: How Nonbinary Gender Contributes Toward Social
Change New York: Palgrave MacMillan
hooks,
bell 1996. Reel to Real: Race Class and Sex at the Movies New York:
Routledge
_________2000.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (2nd ed) Cambridge:
South End Press
Kristeva,
Julia 2018. Passions of our Time New York: Columbia University Press
Lorde,
Audre 2004. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches Berkeley Crossing Press
Oumano,
Elena 2011. Cinema Today: A Conversation with 39 Filmmakers Around the World
New York: Reuters University Press
