Search results
The opening scenes of Céline Sciamma’s four full-length films to date all tell the viewer how to watch what is to come, and especially how to consider relations between visuality and gender. Her first film, Naissance des pieuvres ( Water Lilies ) (2007), opens with the main character Marie coming to an indoor pool to watch a synchronized swimming performance by young
"What does queer signify in twenty-first-century French film? How are lesbian, gay, and trans* characters represented on screen? The book responds to these questions via the cinema of five emblematic directors: Jacques Martineau, Olivier Ducastel, Alain Guiraudie, Sébastien Lifshitz, and Céline Sciamma. From gay sex at a nudist beach to lesbian love at a high school swimming pool, from gay road trips across France to transgender journeys through time, the films treated in this study raise a host of key questions about queerness in this century. From award-winners such as Stranger by the Lake and Portrait of a Lady on Fire to the lesser-known Family Tree and Open Bodies, these productions gesture toward an optimistic future for LGBTQ characters and for the world in which they live, love, and desire. Comprehensive in scope, Queer cinema in contemporary France traces the development of queerness across the directors’ careers, from their earliest, often unknown works to their later, major films. Whether they are white, beur, or black, whether they are lesbian, gay, trans*, or queer, the characters open up oppressive notions of hetero- and cisnormativity to something new, something unexpected, and something oriented towards the future.
In French cinema, representations of girls have often been associated with films made by women, as demonstrated by Carrie Tarr with Brigitte Rollet (2001). They claim that the young girl is the major cinematographic topic for a woman’s first film, and names, such as Céline Sciamma in the late 2000s, Diane Kurys and Catherine Breillat in the 1970s, substantiate this position. However, Breillat’s A Real Young Girl was different, as it attracted critics’ acerbic reception and was subsequently banned for its open depiction of a young girl’s sexual experiences. It is argued that Breillat’s images of the young girl’s sexual initiation in the 1970s brings to the fore the significance of the idea of authenticity in relation to sex and cinema. Examining the representation of the ‘real young girl’ highlights the ideas of reflexivity and creativity attached to the existentialist notion of authenticity. This article aims to show that the young girl stands as a metaphor for Breillat’s auteurist approach to challenging existing filmic conventions.
her made-for-television documentary 9–3, mémoire d’un territoire (2007) and Céline Sciamma in the César-nominated feature Bande de filles (2014), to mine further this territory from the perspective of the post-colony, emphasising concerns that before the early 1980s had largely gone unaddressed in the French political arena and onscreen: questions of national belonging, participation and citizenship, and various forms of exclusion and discrimination based on markers of racial or ethnic identity. Such issues are made only more acute by the underlying territorial
We analyse two screenplays in more detail in this chapter, L’Esquive and Entre les murs , with a special focus on the dialogue-writing process. We also refer to La Faute à Voltaire/Blame it on Voltaire (Kechiche, 2000), La Graine et le mulet/Couscous (Kechiche, 2007), L’Atelier/ The Workshop (Cantet, 2017 ), and mention briefly Bande de filles/Girlhood (Céline Sciamma
. It is important to remember that la Parisienne is not a stereotype (e.g. white, middle class, European) but a type in the iconographical sense; that is, recognisable through certain recurring motifs, yet also constantly being reinvented. That la Parisienne MUP_Chaplin_Printer1.indd 14 21/05/2017 18:30 introduction 15 is ‘from anywhere and everywhere’ is one of the main arguments put forward in this book. This definition leaves room for Parisiennes from any number of national or ethnic backgrounds, as such films as Céline Sciamma’s Bande de filles (2014
and Jacques Martineau, Alain Guiraudie, Sébastien Lifshitz, and Céline Sciamma. Each of these directors has made a corpus of films that could, largely or entirely, be labelled ‘queer’. Though organized by director, this book does not assume strict coherence over time in any director’s corpus, nor does it assume full incoherence either. Rather, each directorial corpus of films is taken as a kind of
face is so often the quintessential body part through which to convey meaning in cinema. Many French filmmakers, among them Agnès Varda, Céline Sciamma and Jean-Luc Godard, have often employed long takes and close-up shots of characters’ faces. 2 By contrast, Audiard’s films are filled with intimate, lingering close-ups on less conventionally ‘legible’ parts of the body: legs
ailleurs’ (a little elsewhere) (Blottière 2012). She left the family home when Lvovsky was nine (see Balle 2017). 20 Céline Sciamma, another member of the ‘family’ (she graduated in the Fémis screenwriting cohort of 2005), also read drafts and made suggestions, such as including in the screenplay the mother