Tag: French Cinema

Sisterhood with a Capital “S”: ‘The Triplets of Belleville’

Sisterhood is powerful, magical, and resilient: that’s the sororal message in the celebrated 2003 animated film… Character distinction between the sisters as individuals is not a major focus for writer/director Sylvain Chomet, although each Triplet has different functions/feelings at specific times. The bond of the sisters as a more monolithic force is depicted instead: Chomet presents the unity of sisterhood. … The agency of older women, including the eponymous trio, is vital to ‘The Triplets of Belleville.’

The Triplets of Belleville

This guest post written by Laura Shamas appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.

Sisterhood is powerful, magical, and resilient: that’s the sororal message in the celebrated 2003 animated film The Triplets of Belleville (Les Triplettes de Belleville), written and directed by Sylvain Chomet. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards in 2004 in the categories of Best Animated Film and Best Music/Best Original Song (for “Belleville Rendez-vous”), and won many other awards.

Initially presented in nostalgic sepia and white tones, the fictional city of “Belleville” is a combination of Paris and New York. When the film begins, the youthful Triplets are a singing jazz sensation, part of a smashing show at the “Swinging Belleville Rendez-vous,” featuring Josephine Baker, Django Reinhardt, and Fred Astaire, whose own shoes devour him.

Chomet’s film is nearly dialogue-free, and the repeated chorus of the sisters’ hit song underscores the importance of engine motion to the women, and to the film: “Swinging Belleville rendez-vous/Marathon dancing doop dee doop/Vaudou Cancan balais taboo/Au Belleville swinging rendez-vous.” In a 2004 interview, Chomet said the lyrics are onomatopoeic, without meaning, and drawn from English and French. So the music “swings,” and evokes a train and train whistle; there’s a suggestion of movement in it musically and lyrically.

The Triplets of Belleville

The story then shifts to the older woman Madame Souza and her melancholy toddler grandson Champion, who watch the famous Triplets sing on television; the “present” is depicted by a shift to color in the animation. Widowed Souza, who raises orphaned Champion, nurtures the boy’s love of cycling and devotes herself to training him, most notably by blowing a loud whistle as she trails along behind him. She also gives him a puppy named Bruno. When we first see their little home, it’s in the middle of farmland, a pastoral setting. But after Champion and Bruno mature, trains run right next to their home, and Bruno barks at them all day long. “Progress” has arrived.

As “mother,” trainer, and de facto mechanic, Souza balances the wheels of Champion’s bicycle each evening, after she gives him a post-workout rubdown with a vacuum cleaner. She spins a tire wheel at the dinner table — an image that evokes a spinning “wheel of fortune” or perhaps the classical image of the Fates, who were depicted with a spinning loom as they decided an individual’s future by cutting the Mother thread of Life.

At a remote mountaintop, Champion is kidnapped from his Tour de France race by the mafia, and forced onto a huge ship along with two other cyclists in the race. Souza, Bruno, and a driver find Champion’s abandoned bike on the peak — the only clue to his disappearance. The grandmother and dog paddle across the ocean in a small rented boat, and track the ship to Belleville. Bruno sniffs the way, detecting Champion’s scent. Eventually, Souza and Bruno find themselves down and out at night in Belleville, sitting around a lonely fire in a deserted part of town, unsure of Champion’s location. A forlorn Souza spins her wheel rhythmically in a back alley, as a full moon rises.

The Triplets of Belleville

The Triplets of Belleville suddenly appear and perform their hit song to the percussion of Madame Souza’s wheel. Much older, they still sound great. The trio kindly takes in Madame Souza and Bruno.

The three eccentric women live together in one-bedroom apartment near a train track, decorated with posters from their former glory days. At home, the trio let down their long silver hair, brushing it out, in one case. When the Triplets start to make supper, hungry Souza and Bruno anticipate a traditional meal. Instead, one of the Triplets goes into a nearby marsh and collects frogs to boil, via a stick grenade thrown into a pond that propels frogs into the air. She catches them with a net. The five then feast on frogs, prepared in a large pot.

Afterwards, Souza offers to help clean up the kitchen, but discovers that the fridge is completely empty; a Triplet indicates that the appliance mustn’t be touched. Likewise, the vacuum cleaner is puzzlingly off-limits to Souza, too; a newspaper must not be read or tossed, either. The sisters soon retire to their one bed, which they share; they watch an old bicycle race on television and laugh. The grandmother and Bruno sleep in the other room, with Souza on the couch.

The three sisters are presented in two different eras in the film: young, when they are big stars at the Rendez-vous club, and then, at this later point, as elders. In fairy tale terms, they appear in the second part of the film as “crone” characters, related to witches. They show up at night; they eat boiled frogs from a cauldron-like pot. Their work is “nocturnal,” as they still have music gigs, and there are three of them, like William Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters in Macbeth. But even though the Triplets are no longer in their heyday, they have stayed together as a collective, and seem content. They are still experimental musicians with regular gigs in Belleville.

Character distinction between the sisters as individuals is not a major focus for Chomet, although each Triplet has different functions/feelings at specific times. The bond of the sisters as a more monolithic force is depicted instead: Chomet presents the unity of sisterhood.

The Triplets of Belleville

The Triplets invite Souza to join them onstage at a restaurant, playing her spinning bike wheel so that it sounds like a xylophone; they instantly become a quartet. As experimental music-makers, the three sisters subvert traditional tools of domesticity; they play the unused refrigerator, the vacuum cleaner, and the newspaper as musical instruments in an avant-garde performance. This is also part of the sisters’ special powers; they transform everyday objects by finding new functions for them, and in the process, they create something brilliant together, not as individuals.

Members of the mafia come to this venue to dine; Bruno and Souza track the criminals later, and surmise that Champion and two other cyclists are being used as part of a bizarre underground betting scheme. Three chained, exhausted bikers pedal to power a movie projector that displays an open road on film. Bets are placed on their never-ending race by a shouting unruly mob, maintained by the mafia. The four women, with Bruno, formulate a plan to free Champion. The Triplets and Souza maneuver their way into the rowdy betting arena, dressed as one of the syndicate guys (who, throughout, have been visually distinctive as black square “suits”).

One exhausted cyclist is shot. In a scuffle, Madame Souza and the sisters manage to free the pedaling platform, throw another stick grenade, and escape together to the road. One sister steps onto the vacated empty bicycle and they bravely pedal the platform into Belleville’s streets. Pursued by the mafia, Souza and the sisters block incoming bullets with a frying pan — again, subverting a tool of domesticity into something else. In the chase scene, a train intercedes to slow the bad guys down, and finally, on a steep hill, Souza trips one remaining foe with her big clog. The Triplets, Souza, Bruno, Champion, and the other cyclist all pedal away up a hill into the nighttime, with the film of an open road still projecting on a screen in front of them.

The film concludes with Champion, now an old man, watching this very film on television. He turns and answers a question posed by Souza at the very beginning: “Is that it, then? Is it over? What do you think?” Champion: “I think that’s probably it. It’s over, Grandma.”

The Triplets of Belleville

The agency of older women, including the eponymous trio, is vital to Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville. Familial sisterhood becomes “Sisterhood” with a capital S in this film. Chomet’s Sisterhood is inclusive, because it’s not just the Triplets; by the end, Souza’s in it, too. One foreshadowing of their symbolic Sisterhood is Souza’s early use of a vacuum cleaner as a post-workout rubdown tool; like the Triplets, Souza, subverts a domestic tool for another purpose.

The idea of engine/wheel motion, prevalent throughout the film in “swinging” music, trains, bicycles, and separate wheels, is also part of this powerful Sisterhood. It represents the agency Sisters have to go places and do things; they solve mysteries and bring down the mafia, all while making their music. Spinning wheels also represent a connection to a wheel of Fortune and Fate/the Fates: these Sisters know how to work with it. The Triplets fearlessly “swing,” have a train whistle motif in their anthem, and live by a train track. Souza, too, lives by a train, manages a cyclist, and balances a spinning wheel each night, which she eventually turns into a musical instrument.

When they hit hard times, the Sisters are resilient and resourceful. They always find a way. They use domestic tools for music (the Triplets), or post-workout massages (Souza), or as shields (as in the final mafia chase). Magical sisters stick together and get things done; one elderly sister is magical enough to be able to pedal along with Champion and the other outstanding cyclist in the final sequence.

Sisterhood is long-lasting: Chomet opens with the Triplets as young stars, and ends with them as heroines in their dotage, with a new Sister in Souza. The ending is happy, as we see the long-term results of their adventure: Champion has lived into old age, and is grateful to them. He honors their story by watching it with us.

Laura Shamas is a writer, myth lover, and a film consultant. For more of her writing on the topic of female trios: We Three: The Mythology of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters. Her website is LauraShamas.com.

Evolution in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’ and ‘Chicken With Plums’

In a similar way to Marji (‘Persepolis’), Nasser (‘Chicken with Plums’) must be sent far away to have his journey of becoming. There is something in him — talent — that requires he must go beyond his home. But whereas in Marji’s case she must go away to protect herself, Nasser must go away so he can grow, get bigger and fuller and richer.

Persepolis

Written by Colleen Clemens as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

I have been teaching Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel and film Persepolis for years. I love introducing the young Marji to my students and giving them the opportunity to think about how growing up in Iran may actually share many elements of growing up in the U.S.: jeans, boy troubles, music your parents cannot stand, coming to terms with one’s body.

I was eager to see Satrapi’s second film (co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud): a non-animated work, Chicken with Plums, also based on a graphic novel. In the film, the main character, Nasser Ali, is dying. The film counts down the last days of his life and relies on flashbacks to help the viewer understand why Ali is choosing to starve himself to death.

I sat in the dark theater on the last night of the week’s run at the local art house cinema and took notes. But I didn’t leave feeling like I had connected with the film; I didn’t feel like the film offered as much to think about as I had first thought.

And then I realized why I had felt funny about the second film: that in it, he is becoming something — an artist — while the first film deals only with becoming a woman.

There are several reasons why I think it is fair to compare the films even though they look so different. Satrapi wrote both screenplays both based on her graphic novels. Both films deal with a protagonist who is fighting for survival — in the case of Persepolis, how to survive as a woman in an autocratic theocracy and coming of age in a country not of one’s origin and away from one’s family — and the story of Nasser Ali who is spending the entire film dying because he has lost his art because his jealous wife destroyed his violin, the one given to him by his master, whom we will meet later.

In an interview with Mother Jones, Satrapi was asked how she relates to this male protagonist. She replied:

“As soon as I draw a female, I know everybody is going to relate it to me. So even unconsciously there are things that I won’t say. When I create a male character, they wouldn’t know it’s me, so I could just say much more.”

I am interested in the fact that Satrapi finds the freedom to use a male character to investigate becoming something, in this case an artist, a freedom she does not feel when writing a female character that will be conflated with her own self. To summarize this ease, Satrapi told French Culture:

“I said that his hurt musician was the character who was closest to me; because, as he’s a man, I can hide behind me much more easily.”

In an effort to investigate these two main characters, both of which Satrapi admits are autobiographical, we can look more closely at the scenes that deal directly with the main characters coming of age with the guidance of a mentor, in the case of Marji her grandmother, and Nasser Ali, his mentor Agha Mozaffar.

Marji has a close bond with her grandmother, a woman whom has seen her share of revolutions and pain, as members of her family were jailed and killed. She is a tough character who laughs when Marji announces later in the film that she will be getting a divorce and who scolds Marji for using her gender as protection and selling out an innocent man. The two key scenes with the grandmother come at moments where Marji is on the cusp of change. The first is the night Marji is about to leave. A young girl about to go through puberty, Marji is sent to Europe by her parents out of fear for their bright and resistant daughter. In this scene, Marji is spending her last night in Iran with her grandmother.

persepolis-jasmine-bra

She has to leave Iran to learn what she is to learn in the film: how to become a woman. Marji’s lesson is focused on maintaining her breasts, a signifier of her femininity. Most of what Marji is to learn in this film deals with her gender and her body’s relation to her gender.

The second scene is when the film is ending. Marji has left Iran for good. She is never to return upon her mother’s orders. The last scene hearkens back to the first scene I showed in which Marji learns about her grandmother’s trick to preserve her breasts. We know that the grandmother has died, that she will no longer be there to teach Marji more lessons about being a woman.  The film ends with the same flowers drifting imagery, closing the film with a reminder of the grandmother’s femininity.

The grandmother character is used to usher Marji into womanhood. There is no mention of what Marji will do when she is older, just that she will be a woman. Here are several lessons that Marji learns about being a woman: through the story of Nilofaur, Marji learns about sexual violence; through two boyfriends, she learns about sexuality; and through her mother, Marji learns that in order to find freedom as a woman, she cannot stay in Iran. The film spends a great deal of its energy showing how challenging it is for Marji to become a woman, be that an independent woman, but still we don’t see Marji creating anything or doing anything in this bildungsroman.

In contrast we have Nasser Ali, whose gender is also an impediment, but only in that women try to get in the way of him being what he is meant to be: an artist. His mother wants him to settle down and his wife destroys his violin. This film also features a mentorship relationship: that of Nasser with Agha.

In a similar way to Marji, Nasser must be sent far away to have his journey of becoming. There is something in him — talent — that requires he must go beyond his home. But whereas in Marji’s case she must go away to protect herself, Nasser must go away so he can grow, get bigger and fuller and richer.

In the first scene, Nasser meets withs Agha Mozaffa in the faraway place that one must have to work to get to. Even the depiction of this place is mystical, magical, not for everyone. As a young man — and one who’s becoming a man is not a focus of the film — he goes to come of age by learning about love and art.

In the final scene, Nasser comes of age as an artist because he had learned about losing love. In this scene, he will get the tool that he will use to be an artist, just as Marji was given the flower trick by her grandmother, the image that ends the film. Again, the mentor is no longer of use to the student: the lesson is complete and now the character can go out into the world.

But there’s a difference between the world Marji enters and the world Nasser enters: the latter is off to jetset as an acclaimed artist. Marji is in the confines of a cab in the place she doesn’t want to be. She does claim to be from Iran at the end, which in a film about conflicts about identity matters greatly, but she is Iranian and a woman. She is not an artist (though we know that she does become a great one).

I love both of these films for different reasons, but I am concerned that in looking at them as major elements of Satrapi’s body of film work that they mirror the idea Kingsley Browne on The Daily Show stated: “Girls become women by getting older, boys become men by accomplishing something.” Watching Nasser become an artist is satisfying in a way that I don’t necessarily feel when watching Persepolis, even if I do love the work that film does to show the difficulty of forming one’s gender and national identity.

Colleen Clemens is a Bitch Flicks staff writer and assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her two-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.

The Sacred Heart of ‘Amélie’

Whether or not it was the intent of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Amélie can be seen as the female representation of a Christ figure in a modern tragedy. … Amélie’s love, like that of Christ, is selfless and knows no boundaries. … Amélie is altruistic and doesn’t hesitate to help other people.

Amelie

This guest post is written by Giselle Defares.

The idea of love, chance and destiny – the cause and effect relationship – are themes that frequently occur in our cinematic history. For most of us, love is the strongest emotion that we know, an emotion that can entail powerful forces. In Amélie, love and happiness are hidden in the mundane things of life. Or in the case of Amélie, it’s putting the tip of her spoon on the caramelized layer of sugar on her crème brûlée.

“To ask one of these kinds of newspapers in Paris to love Amélie is like asking the Pope to put on a condom. They hate these kinds of movies.” This quote from the French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, reflects the controversy, at that time, surrounding Amélie. This extravagant romantic film was loved around the world except within the French film establishment. The interview took place in May 2001 and it appears Jeunet’s comments possessed a kernel of truth because the Cannes Film Festival refused to put Amélie in the official selection.

The self-taught director Jeunet is known for his astonishing visuals – see also his specific mise-en-scène, heavy use of color, CGI and voice-over narration. He took a light-hearted approach with Amélie instead of the inaccessible and often gloomy atmosphere of his earlier films such as Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. It starts with the opening scene where you’re bombarded with trivia and funny facts. Jeunet’s style is reminiscent of the prologue of Paul T. Anderson’s Magnolia or Tom Twykers’ Run Lola Run. Amélie became a worldwide box office success and also earned five Oscar nominations.

Amelie

Amélie centers around Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou), a sensitive young woman, who after the death of her mother has withdrawn into her own fragile world, where the smallest pleasures of life are her priority. She works as a waitress in a corner bistro, until the day that Princess Diana dies in a car crash and everything changes. The shock of the news causes Amélie to drop a bottle cap, which unlocks a stone in the wall of her apartment, which leads her to discover a very old box in which a young boy used to hoard his treasures. Amélie tracks the boy – now an older man – down, and in returning his old, rusty box, Amélie finds her reason to live. She will make people happy in extraordinary ways.

Most of the scenes are shown in chronological order but there are several smaller storylines and flashbacks interwoven. Jeunet has an interesting way of playing with dialogue in the film. Amélie often loses the ability to properly communicate in important moments. The overarching role of the omniscient narrator — the key link between various scenes and sequences — becomes more important. The narrator continuously informs the viewer of Amélie’s personal thoughts and feelings.

Whether or not it was the intent of Jeunet, Amélie can be seen as the female representation of a Christ figure in a modern tragedy. In Bible and Cinema: Fifty Key Films, Adele Reinhartz gives two basic criteria that a movie character must meet in order to be seen as a Christ figure:

“That there be some direct and specific resemblance to Christ (though a full replication in every detail is not essential); and that the fundamental message associated with the possible Christ-figure has to be consistent with the life and work of Christ, and not contrary to his message about liberation and love.”

Amélie’s love, like that of Christ, is selfless and knows no boundaries. A representation of this point can be seen when she appears in several scenes in a Zorro costume. She disguises herself in order to help the people in her community. This is evident when she intervenes in the bullying of Lucien, who is monoplegic, as well as helping a blind man crossing the street. In that sense, Amélie is altruistic and doesn’t hesitate to help other people.

Amelie_Zorro

Several religious references occur in the dialogue. Dominique Bretodeau, the man who’s reunited with his rusty box of childhood treasures, calls Amélie an “angel” and states that she must be his “guardian angel.” Throughout the film, Amélie’s actions are referred to as a miracle. It’s important to note that her actions often leave the person confused as if an “outside or divine force” has intervened in their lives.

The turning point in the film is the sequence where Amélie views a memorial broadcast of her own death on television where she’s shown as a nun, washing the feet of the blind man, next to the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. This is similar to the moment that Jesus washed the feet of his disciples – an act of love and humility. The narrator later calls her in that moment the “Madonna of the unloved.”

The memorial scene functions as a symbolic death, since Amélie is still alive afterwards. She was afraid that her life had no more meaning after she accomplished everything she wanted. The narrator then states, “As she went, she felt a stab of regret for letting her father die without trying to give his stifled life the breath of air she had given to so many others.” Thus, she’s revived again knowing that her task is far from fulfilled, and that others closest to her, such as her father, require help as well. This leads to the moment where Amélie visits her father’s house and takes his garden gnome, who she uses for her good deed towards him.

Amelie

Aforementioned, color plays an important role in the visual style of Jeunet and that’s certainly noticeable throughout the film. Jeunet manipulated and used various grading of color. The saturated color palette of the film – red, green and yellow are dominant – reflects the happy feelings of Amélie. Often colors clash when Jeunet chose sepia tones and black and white, which signals intrusion in the lives of the characters. The use of CGI is most noticeable when it comes to Amélie’s imagination – see the visualization of her loneliness via an animated crocodile or Amélie’s “sacred heart.”

In Jeunet’s portrayal of Amélie’s “sacred heart,” a clear parallel exists with Christian iconography. The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is a Catholic icon which represents the love of Jesus Christ. It’s often portrayed as a human heart surrounded by flames. Amélie’s heart is displayed in a bright yellow and orange glow which clearly draws on the connotation of the sacred heart of Jesus Christ. The cinematography in this particular scene is interesting since Jeunet breaks a shot – a reverse shot between Amélie and her crush, in order to show the heart of Amélie but resumes afterwards. Thus his cinematography breaks with what you would expect and leads the viewer’s gaze towards the heart.

Tautou is phenomenal in her role as Amélie and she deservedly received several award nominations (including a BAFTA Award and César Award) for her portrayal. She truly carries the film and has great chemistry with all the other characters. Admittedly, the storyline is quite thin and some characters feel like cardboard cutouts, but Tautou saves the film with her doe-eyed likeableness.

Initially it seems that Amélie is content in her role as anonymous benefactor, whilst secretly crushing on the shy Nino – who collects photos from automated photo booths people don’t want; as you do. Until, an old neighbor tells her: “You don’t have bones of glass. You can take life’s knocks. If you let this chance pass, eventually, your heart will become as dry and brittle as my skeleton.” The call to embrace life to its fullest is original, playful and engagingly filmed by Jeunet. A charming film with lots of heart, even the most stoic viewer would succumb to the magic of Amélie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrlQR_KH_nw

Giselle Defares comments on film, fashion (law) and American pop culture. See her blog here http://zilvertong.tumblr.com/ or follow her on twitter at @zilvertong.

Scavenging for Food and Art: Agnès Varda’s ‘The Gleaners and I’

The tools Varda employs are modest and made for the road. The handheld digital video camera she uses allows for both freedom and intimacy. She puts herself in front of the camera, filming, for example, her aged hands and thinning hair in candid close-up. Can you imagine a Hollywood director doing so? Varda rejects vanity and embraces vulnerability.

Varga and her digital camera
Varga and her digital camera

 

Written by Rachael Johnson.

Belgian-born French filmmaker Agnès Varda is nothing less than a cinematic treasure. Her career spans decades and she has gained critical acclaim for both her fiction and documentary films. Varda was, of course, a pioneering figure of the New Wave and Left Bank. In 1962, she directed the ground-breaking, feminist classic Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7). In 1985, her powerful, lyrical film about a young homeless woman, Sans Toi, Ni Loi (Vagabond), won the Golden Lion in Venice. This year Varda was awarded an honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes. She was the first woman to receive the tribute. At the beginning of the Millenium, Varda also directed the documentary Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000). It is one of the most fascinating ever made.

Poster for The Gleaners and I
Poster for The Gleaners and I

 

Varda begins her documentary by providing the historical, aesthetic and linguistic context of gleaning. We are given the Larousse dictionary definition: “To glean is to gather after the harvest.” The director tells us that it was a mostly female, collective activity in the old days. Today, both men and women glean, more often than not on their own. François Millet’s painting of les glaneuses provides the stimulating starting point for Varda’s creative, humanist journey. Marrying the past and the present, the documentary features interviews with men and women of rural and urban France in the new Millenium who practice various forms of gleaning. People gather everything from vegetables, fruit, and oysters to old dolls, fridges, and TVs. We encounter an impoverished single mother picking potatoes, and homeless young people dumpster-diving outside a supermarket. We also meet a chef scavenging for fruit because he prefers to know where his food comes from, as well as artist gleaners who scavenge for junk to use in their pieces. One of the most interesting people Varda meets is a man with a master’s degree who picks discarded fruit and bread from city markets in the morning and teaches French to immigrants from Mali and Senegal at night.

Recreating the act
Recreating the act

 

The Gleaners and I is not directly political but rather a thought-provoking, humanist study of people on the margins as well as those with reject capitalist norms of production and consumption. Issues of waste and sustainable development have become more and more critical, of course, since the film was made. Interestingly, in an effort to combat waste and food poverty, France introduced new laws this year banning supermarkets from dumping and destroying unsold food. They are now encouraged to give edible food to charities.

Millet's Les Glaneuses
Millet’s Les Glaneuses

 

The tools Varda employs are modest and made for the road. The handheld digital video camera she uses allows for both freedom and intimacy. She puts herself in front of the camera, filming, for example, her aged hands and thinning hair in candid close-up. Can you imagine a Hollywood director doing so? Varda rejects vanity and embraces vulnerability. Her presence is, also often playful. At the beginning of the film, she recreates the actions of the wheat-carrying glaneuse in Jules Breton’s painting of a solitary female gleaner, all the while fixing her eyes on the camera. Varda has the inquiring mind of all great artists. Her humanity and inventiveness are consistently on display in The Gleaners and I. The director seems entirely invested in the subject as well as entirely empathetic towards the people she meets. Varda indeed identifies herself as a glaneuse. She gleans both memories and images in her life and art. In truth, the documentary is not only a study of gleaning but also a beguiling self-portait of an artist as well as an imaginative self-reflexive study of the art and craft of filmmaking.

Villagers being interviewed about the tradition
Villagers being interviewed about the tradition

 

At once poetic and politically aware, The Gleaners and I offers a captivating portrait of the practice of scavenging. Both very French and very human, it’s a life-affirming film about how people survive and create. There are no subjects more important. The documentary is one of Varda’s essential works, as well as one of the most interesting and finest of all time.

 

Vintage Viewing: Germaine Dulac, Surrealist Theorist

While America was building its clout as the commercial center of the global film industry, it was France that became the center of film theory, driving experimentation. A key figure in that development was Germaine Dulac.

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

Germaine Dulac: auteur for sure
Germaine Dulac: auteur for sure

 

The career of Alice Guy, the original film director, straddles two continents. In America, where she made the bulk of her films, Guy mentored Lois Weber, triggering an unparalleled wave of female film directors. But her career began in France, and it was to France that Guy returned in 1922, lecturing on film there for many years. While America was building its clout as the commercial center of the global film industry, it was France that became the center of film theory, driving experimentation. A key figure in that development was Germaine Dulac. Beginning her career as a journalist and drama critic for feminist publications La Française and La Fronde, while exploring photography, the bisexual Dulac was introduced to cinema by her girlfriends, actress Stasia de Napierkowska and writer Irène Hillel-Erlanger, founding D.H. Films with Hillel-Erlanger in 1915. Women’s contributions are often erased within their collaborations with male lovers, but Dulac reminds us that sharing goals is a natural romantic development, that goes beyond gender. Like Alice Guy’s Pierrette’s Escapades, Dulac’s early films explore playful gender fluidity, filming a ballet of a crossdressing masked ball. Her lost collaboration with future husband Louis Delluc, Spanish Fiesta, is credited with kickstarting French Impressionist cinema. Her influential The Seashell and the Clergyman, often called the first surrealist film, was released the year before Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s more famous Un Chien Andalou.

By combining the roles of critic and practising filmmaker, Dulac developed a theory of film that was uniquely coherent for its time, shaping the thinking of France’s cinematic avant-garde. Dulac was a firm believer in cinema as a director’s vision (Antonin Artaud fought publicly with Dulac over the liberties she took with his screenplay for The Seashell and the Clergyman). In a 1923 interview, Dulac declares: “cinema comes from palpable emotion… To be worth something and “bring” something, this emotion must come from one source only.” She explicitly demanded recognition as “author” (“auteure” – a term not then used of cinema) of The Seashell and the Clergyman, laying the foundation for the auteurism of the French New Wave in the 1950s. With the advent of sound, Dulac abandoned her impressionist and surrealist “visual symphonies” to become an artistic director and documentary filmmaker at Alice Guy’s old studio, Gaumont. She played a key role in nationalizing the French film industry in 1935, taught cinema at the Louis Lumière school and helped to establish the Cinémathèque Française, whose archives and program of organized screenings educated many of the French New Wave’s directors. After her death in 1942, a magazine apparently attempted to censor her obituary, out of discomfort with her “nonconformism”. Dulac’s historical significance has been marginalized, often limited to “the first feminist filmmaker” (a label which manages the impressive double whammy of limiting the scope of Dulac’s achievement while erasing Alice Guy, Lois Weber and Marion E. Wong). This marginalization resembles that of Agnès Varda, whose 1955 film La Pointe-Courte launched the French New Wave, before male directors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were allowed to dominate international coverage of the movement.

 

 

 The Smiling Madame Beudet – 1923

 

“Only by using ideas, lights, and the camera was I able, by the time I made my first film, to understand what cinema was, art of interior life and of sensation” – Germaine Dulac

Theatre struggles to stage inner worlds. We watch characters onstage as we watch people in life, from the outside. Traditionally, women suffered most from realist depictions, because women were expected to play passive roles, easily dismissed as decorations or overlooked altogether. In Dulac’s best-known film, her subject matter is passivity and suppression itself: a frustrated housewife who does not, actually, dramatically murder her husband. Dulac creates tension from this static premise, in the conflict between Madame Beudet’s outer passivity and her vibrant inner life. Cinematic effects of slow motion, distortion and superimposition allow easy shifting between reality and vivid fantasy, confirming cinema’s potential as Dulac’s “art of interior life.”

Opening on a tranquil small town’s facade, Dulac takes us first inside the house and then inside the head, as the sparkling lake in Madame Beudet’s mind mirrors the mood of the music she plays, establishing her sophistication and artistic appreciation in a few strokes. Isolated in a black vacuum, Madame Beudet fantasizes of escape by fast car, or a burly tennis player kidnapping her mocking and controlling husband, who emotionally blackmails her with faked suicides. He locks her piano to assert his power, anticipating Jane Campion’s The Piano. The older, married Madame Labas ogles magazine pictures of attractive sportsmen, while the housemaid’s inner smile, as she fantasizes of her lover, is contrasted with her outwardly dutiful expression, emphasizing that the passions of women are independent from their social value. A running conflict over the placing of a vase of flowers shows the banality of hellish incompatibility.

Madame Beudet’s own imaginary lover is blurred, a vague aspiration, while the grinning face of her grotesque husband is tauntingly clear, haunting her from every angle, hanging in mid-air, leaping in the window in slow motion and whizzing around the house speeded up. She loads his gun, dooming him to die if he pulls another fake suicide. While jokingly throttling a doll, Mr. Beudet clumsily breaks it, because “a doll is fragile, like a woman.” Careless ignorance does as much damage as deliberate spite. In the end, Madame Beudet is only human, and shrieks when her husband seems about to really shoot himself. Can the impulse be judged, when not acted on? In her husband’s crushing embrace, “together by habitude,” the Beudets walk the streets of their small town’s picturesque façades. Traditional womanhood is an iceberg: nine tenths lie beneath the surface. La Souriante Madame Beudet is a classic feminist work, not because it depicts what should be, but because it clarifies the stifling frustration of what is.

 

 [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKiyxv88CKE”]

 

 Invitation to the Voyage – 1927

 

“the intellectuals and the filmmakers should develop a closer kinship to one another, for it is only nuances between words that irremediably keep them apart” – Germaine Dulac

From the popularity of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Ruses to the paintings of Henri Matisse, Orientalism saturated early 20th century Paris. Edward Said has criticized its distortions and stereotypes but, under the pretext of representing real cultures, the “Orient” allowed Parisians to role-play alternative social values, as scifi and fantasy worlds do today. In particular, the Persian homoerotic poetry of Abu Nuwas, Omar Khayyam and Rumi made Orientalism an important codifier of gay identity. Novelist Lucie Delarue-Mardrus and dancer Ida Rubinstein led a heavily orientalized lesbian counterculture in Dulac’s Paris, while Dulac’s own lover, Stasia de Napierkowska, played Cleopatra on film and danced with the Ballets Ruses. Rather than disdaining popular Orientalism, Dulac explores it as an imaginary French creation, representing a striving for sexual liberation. In Dulac’s six-part serial, 1920’s Âmes de fous, a French heiress is liberated from her oppressive stepmother by adopting the persona of an Egyptian dancer while, in 1928’s Princesse Mandane, the Orient is the hero’s dream, where his rescued princess elopes with her female bodyguard, playfully thwarting his assumed entitlement to her. In Antonia Lant’s assessment, “it was the pleasure of the Islamic as a visual and cultural code, transformed through recyclings within contemporary French urban culture, that fascinated Dulac.”

Invitation to the Voyage was born as a poem by Charles Baudelaire, where the poet seeks “to love at leisure, love and die in a land that resembles you.” Dulac’s film makes the metaphorical nature of the voyage clear, by converting it into the theme of a bar that our inhibited heroine furtively enters. Veiled by her fur stole, her eyes devour the scene with enigmatic desires, though she flinches from sexual propositions. She pictures her home life, sewing wordlessly while her husband reads. Their child’s cot materializes between them – an obligation binding them? Clocks tick meaninglessly in her husband’s repeated absences on business (rendez vous d’affaires), echoing Madame Beudet’s stagnation. The heroine smiles hungrily at dancing couples, including fleetingly glimpsed interracial and lesbian pairings, then allows herself to join them. Rolling seascapes blend with her admirer, associating his sexual promise with escape, while Oriental musicians play. Yet, just as Madame Beudet fails to kill her husband, so the lonely wife returns home with dreams unconsummated.

Soundtrack suggestion: Billie Holiday’s The Best of Jazz Forever

 

 [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKzlYMkpxvI”]

 

 The Seashell and the Clergyman – 1928

 

“Lines and surfaces evolving according to the logic of their forms, and stripped of all meanings that are too human to better elevate themselves towards abstraction of sentiments, leaving more space for sensations and dreams: integral cinema.” – Germaine Dulac

 

The Seashell and the Clergyman, an impressionist portrait of a clergyman’s lustful desire for a general’s wife, shares many themes with Dulac’s earlier work. Repressive hypocrisy and stifling convention are represented by clerical celibacy, while the violent fantasies of Madame Beudet are recalled in the priest’s violent fantasy of throttling his rival, the general, until his head tears apart. As with Invitation to the Voyage, the sea suggests sexual release. However, Dulac’s imagery in this film is far more abstract, evolving an aesthetic of surrealism by empowering the viewer to make their own meanings. Dulac’s theories of “pure cinema” called for all the elements of film – the rhythm of camera movement and cutting, the shape of forms portrayed, the flow between movements – to combine in their own “visual symphony” beyond narrative logic. Through the possibilities of slow or speeded motion, running film backward and jump cuts, cinema allows for time itself to become another element to sculpt with. In her 1928 film Thèmes et variations, Dulac eliminates narrative altogether, playfully juxtaposing a ballerina and factory machinery, feminine and masculine, elite and working class, before allowing them to flow together in a pure poetry of motion. In The Seashell and the Clergyman, that sense of visual poetry combines with a fever dream of erotic repression, fantasy, possessiveness and conformity. Dulac’s clergyman  feels trapped as a disembodied head in a jar, surrounded by caretaking women, but ends up imaginatively trapping the woman in his place. This version is tinted and set to “The Dreams” by Delia Derbyshire (legendary electronica pioneer and composer of the Doctor Who theme tune).

 

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO60-cvUFmk”]

 

See also at Bitch Flicks: “It Seems to Me That She Came From the Sea”: A Review of Agnes Varda’s ‘Vagabond’

 

Germaine Dulac was hailed as the “first feminist filmmaker” for harnessing cinema to visualize the fantasies of women, but she was not the first to do so. In 1916, Chinese-American filmmaker Marion E. Wong wrote, directed and produced The Curse of Quon Gwon, featuring a fantasy sequence that uses dissolves and superimposition to visualize its heroine’s fears of marriage. The ethnographic films of Zora Neale Hurston are among the only other vintage footage online that is directed by a woman of color. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Zora Neale Hurston, Open Observer. Stay tuned!

 

Brigit McCone wishes she could pull off that sophisticated French look, but does not recommend you take up smoking. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and learning new things.

Add It To Your Netflix Queue: ‘The Returned’

‘The Returned’ is not explicitly about male violence against women, but this is an unmistakable through-line for those who are watching for it. Violence against women is, perhaps, more normalized in our culture than death itself; yet in truth it is as damnably unnatural as the dead returning.

Written by Max Thornton.

Carol Ann Duffy, the British Poet Laureate, has a poem called “Mrs Lazarus,” a characteristically feminist and unsettling take on the biblical story of Jesus’ resuscitation of Lazarus. “I had grieved,” it begins, and the mourning process is definitively pluperfect, the dead man “dwindling … vanishing … Until he was memory.” The man’s revival is not exactly a source of joy:

He lived. I saw the horror on his face.
I heard his mother’s crazy song. I breathed
his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud,
moist and dishevelled from the grave’s slack chew,
croaking his cuckold name, disinherited, out of his time.

The French TV series The Returned (Les revenants) takes a similar approach to the question of the living dead. These are not the faceless, flesh-chomping hordes of popular lore, but individuals returned from the grave to reunite with family and friends who have moved on.

The-Returned

If you type “The Returned” into the Netflix search bar, you get two almost identical results. “The Returned (2013)” is a movie that takes a slightly more cerebral approach than many zombie films, but is still recognizably a zombie flick. “The Returned (2012)” is a tense, atmospheric French television series that acknowledges the z-word while maintaining its distance from it.

In a small French mountain town, the dead are returning. Whether days or years after their deaths, they return with no memory of dying and no knowledge that the intervening time has passed. Families who have completed all five stages of grief and found some sort of post-tragedy equilibrium, even a fragmented one, are suddenly reunited with loved ones who are, like Lazarus, “disinherited, out of [their] time.” The returned themselves find a world in which they no longer fit.

Each of the first seven episodes is named for a character, but the plot tends to be fairly evenly spread in focus across all the characters.

Fifteen-year-old Camille, killed in a bus crash, returns to a broken family and an identical twin who is now four years her senior.

Identical twins??
Identical twins??

Simon died on the morning of his wedding, and is now literally haunting his erstwhile fiancée, as she prepares to marry another man, and the daughter he never knew.

Julie survived a horrific serial killer attack seven years ago. She is followed home by the almost mute little boy whom she names Victor, a superbly unsettling instance of the creepy child trope.

Serge and Toni are brothers, Toni the manager of local watering hole The Lake Pub, Serge a revenant with a dark past.

Lucy, an employee of Toni’s, is violently attacked in an underpass late one night.

Adèle, Simon’s ex-fiancée, at first believes she is experiencing a resurgence of old nightmares and hallucinations.

There are, of course, significantly more characters than those named in episode titles, and their interlocking lives and intersecting pasts are elegantly unveiled over the course of the show’s eight hours.

There’s a lot to like about this show. It’s very French, slow and creeping, profoundly visual, wonderfully acted, beautifully directed, layered with meaning.

Julie is the BEST
Julie is the BEST

There’s also undeniably a focus on the abjection of the female body, women’s bodies as the site of violence and rupture. The violence against women on this show is never explicitly sexual, but there is a consistently sexual subtext to it: repeated stabbings, the biting of flesh, a mysterious wound opening up – it’s all a-quiver with invagination. Moreover, the water levels of the town’s reservoir are in flux, suggestive of the fluids of pregnancy, the grave birthing forth the dead back into life. As the normative cycle of reproduction is fissured, so there is also a challenge to (cis)sexist imaginings of the female body as the site of generativity and procreative sexuality. Motherhood is bestowed on Julie, whose uterus is surely rendered inoperative by the knife-blows that have scarred her lower abdomen, whose sexuality is shown only as queer. Unlike Simon, who is impotent and superfluous as a parental figure to the child he fathered from beyond the grave, Julie, the nurse, takes on the role of parent to the near-silent little boy who follows her home. The child chooses the parent; the grave rebirths the dead; barrenness is no impediment to parenthood and potency no guarantee of the same. Heterosexist logics of reproduction are disrupted, but so too are the bodies of women. Simply reversing the logic of reproduction is no guarantee of female bodily integrity. All the major male characters, including Adèle’s new fiancé and Camille and her sister’s father, sin against the women in their lives, committing betrayals that manifest as violence and/or controlling behavior.

The Returned is not explicitly about male violence against women, but this is an unmistakable through-line for those who are watching for it. Violence against women is, perhaps, more normalized in our culture than death itself; yet in truth it is as damnably unnatural as the dead returning.

_______________________________________

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. His friend Catherine told him to watch this show at least a year ago. Catherine, you were right.

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze

The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.

Written by Leigh Kolb as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

“… a person who can find the transfiguration of sex in her life is no longer a person who can be directed.”

– Catherine Breillat

French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has spent her career exploring female sexuality. She hasn’t done so in a comfortable, easy way. When The Woman says to The Man, “Watch me where I’m unwatchable” in Anatomy of Hell, this could very well be Breillat’s message to her audiences as she presents female desire in harsh, jarring narratives that completely subvert the male gaze.

Normally, if we talk about subverting the male gaze and focusing on the female gaze in film, it’s cause for celebration. Finally! We scream. We’re coming!

Breillat’s female gaze is different, though. It pushes us to places of complete discomfort and sometimes disgust, and forces and challenges us to think about the deeply twisted cultural expectations surrounding women and sex.

Sometimes a shock is what it takes to bring us to places of transfiguration. We can’t smoothly transition to the female gaze after centuries of being surrounded and objectified by the male gaze. Breillat delivers shock after shock that serve to transfigure how we see ourselves and our culture. This isn’t comfortable, but it’s powerful.

The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.

A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille)
A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille)

 

Breillat’s first film, based off her novel, Le Soupirail, was A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille). Produced in 1976, it was quickly banned and wasn’t released in France until 1999. The film centers around 14-year-old Alice, who is discovering and attempting to navigate her sexual awakening. A Real Young Girl is avant-garde puberty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FXxS9VevE”]

There are moments in the film that are confusing and grotesque (most notably one of her fantasies that involves barbed wire and a ripped-up earthworm). While I found some of these scenes disturbing, I like being disturbed. The worm scene horrified me at first, but then I realized that when I was in high school, the hit teen comedy involved a dude literally fucking a pie. Teenage sexuality is weird and when we are faced with a teen girl’s sexuality–something we are not used to seeing (unless she is a sexual object)–in all of its confusion and vacillation between intense desire and disgust, we are uncomfortable. Breillat wants us to be uncomfortable; she wants to push us to the edge to that visceral experience that will challenge how we see both female sexuality and film depictions of female sexuality.

Fat_Girl_poster
Fat Girl (À ma sœur!)

 

Fat Girl (À ma sœur!), released in 2001, follows two sisters–Elena, 15, and Anaïs, 12–as they vacation with their parents. Elena is conventionally beautiful, and while she likes boys and has experimented sexually, she wants to remain a virgin until she’s with someone who “loves” her. She quickly develops a relationship with a young man who is frustrated with her desire to not have sex. He pressures her into anal sex (which hurts her), tries to force her to have oral sex, and finally convinces her he loves her and she has sex with him. In all of these instances, Anaïs is in the room–feigning sleep, asking them to stop, or, when they finally have sex, crying.

Anaïs’s views on sex are very different than Elena’s. She is starting to feel sexual–she’s not a teenager yet, but she’s not a child. Her desires range from banana splits to having sex just to get it over with. She has sexual desires, and her responses to Elena’s sexual experiences show both naiveté and jealousy. Their ages, their exterior looks, their sexual experiences (or lack thereof) all inform Breillat’s treatment of the sisters’ relationship with one another, with their own burgeoning sexuality, and with a culture that insists on sexualizing Elena and ignoring Anaïs. Their desires–Elena as internalized (and then disappointed) object, Anaïs as frustrated subject–are common categories for adolescent girls to fall into.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHRJRbM2EAg”]

Fat Girl (read Breillat’s commentary on the title here) is disturbing in its depictions of some of Elena and Anaïs’s experiences. However, the end of the film is shocking and violent. After Elena and her mother are brutally killed at a rest stop, the murderer rapes Anaïs in the woods. The next morning, she tells the police she wasn’t raped, and she looks at the camera, in an ending that clearly reflects The 400 Blows. Like the Truffaut classic, we are saddened and disturbed at the life trajectory of our young protagonists, and have no idea where their lives will go from here. We just have a frozen young face staring at us, implicating us in their fate.

Anaïs, at the end, seems to embrace her rape (as her meaningless loss of virginity that she wanted) and deny its violence. This is made even more traumatic since her rapist murdered her mother and sister (her sister who had just become sexually active, and her mother who wanted to punish her for it).

The message here is that girls cannot win. A patriarchal culture–full of boys who think they’re entitled to sex and men who violently rape and kill women–cares little for female desire and agency. This world is a dangerous place for girls. This world treats pretty girls like objects, and unpretty girls like nothing. Their desires are complicated and real, but are eclipsed by toxic masculinity.

Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l'enfer)
Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer)

 

Released in 2004, Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie De L’Enfer) is a film that pulls together pornography, misogyny, and female sexuality in a way that shocks and disgusts (male reviewers in particular wrote scathing, condescending reviews of the film). The Woman visits a gay bar and attempts suicide in the bathroom–she is tired of being a woman and being hated by men, and surmises that gay men hate women the most. The Man, however, saves her and she offers to pay him to stay in her home for four days to “watch her where she is unwatchable.” What follows is, for some viewers, unwatchable.

The Woman is naked for most of the film (a body double is used for vaginal shots), and The Man is played by an Italian porn star. His homosexuality serves to completely upend the typical male gaze. He’s disgusted by much of what he’s seeing and experiencing, and the understanding that this primal, visceral, shocking female desire is at the focus of the film (and has absolutely nothing to do with male desire) reflects a culture that typically focuses only on the male gaze and male pleasure. In this culture, female sexuality isn’t a consideration.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbFSZiT2-a4″]

When The Man drinks a glass of water with a used-tampon teabag, certainly the audience is meant to feel disgust. Perhaps some audience members actually gagged at the sight. How many scenes, however, in porn (explicitly) or mainstream film (suggested), feature women swallowing male excretions? Do we blink? Or is it just part of what we expect it means to be a heterosexual woman?

Jamie Russell astutely observes at the BBC, “For all the shocks, though, this is a stoically serious movie: it’s anti-porn, a transgressive sex movie that’s not against pornography but against the (male-dominated) objectification of women’s bodies.”

Breillat’s complete oeuvre (which certainly demands our attention beyond these three films) delivers continually shocking treatment of female sexuality presented though the female gaze. She wants us to be uncomfortable and to be constantly questioning both representations of female desire and our responses to those representations, and how all of it is shaped by a religious, patriarchal culture.

In an interview with The Guardian, Breillat articulated that her female gaze should directly threaten the male gaze, and that men should examine their own sexuality in the face of female desire:

“It’s a joke – if men can’t desire liberated women, then tough. Does it mean they can only desire a slave? Men need to question the roots of their own desire. Why is it that historically men have this need to deny women to be able to desire them?”

The reporter points out that Breillat had said “that censorship was a male pre-occupation, and that the X certificate was linked to the X chromosome,” and Breillat goes on to discuss the religious and patriarchal reasons to censor female desire, which is directly connected to keeping power away from women.

Breillat’s 1999 Romance was originally given an X rating (or banned in some countries). At Senses of Cinema, Brian Price notes that “Breillat’s statement was echoed in the French poster for the film, which features a naked woman with her hand between her legs. A large red X is printed across the image, thus revealing the source of the trouble: a woman in touch with her own sense of sexual pleasure.”

Romance
Romance

 

And that’s always the problem, isn’t it? Breillat’s work pushes boundaries and forces us to live in the intense intimacy and discomfort of a female gaze that we are unused to due to social oppression of women and women’s sexuality (at the hands of patriarchal religious and government systems). The literal and figurative red X over Breillat’s work–and female sexuality–needs to be stripped away to reveal what’s underneath–which isn’t always pretty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpH-V6kkOwI”]

___________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

‘Oppressed Majority’ (‘Majorité Opprimée’)

Please take just 11 minutes out of your day to check out Eléonore Pourriat’s powerful short, ‘Oppressed Majority’ (‘Majorité Opprimée’). An inspired gender role reversal tale, it depicts the sexism, abuse and sexual violence women experience on a daily basis.

By Rachael Johnson 

Please take just 11 minutes out of your day to check out Eléonore Pourriat’s powerful short, Oppressed Majority (Majorité Opprimée). An inspired gender role reversal tale, it depicts the sexism, abuse and sexual violence women experience on a daily basis. Released in 2010, Oppressed Majority only went global this year. It is destined to become one of the viral hits of 2014. Again, please take a look at this smart, insightful–and disturbing–short film. In French, with subtitles.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4UWxlVvT1A”]

‘Inside’: French Pregnant Body Horror At Its Finest


Guest post written by Deirdre Crimmins for our theme week on Infertility, Miscarriage, and Infant Loss.

Content note: Discussion of violence directed at women and violent images ahead. Spoiler alert.

Horror films have a unique way of showcasing exactly what we fear, but they often do so in a subtle way. While is it goes without saying that ax-wielding maniacs are to be feared, these films often slyly expose the issues that our society is too shy to deal with head on. In the 2007 French horror film Inside (directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury), fertility, reproduction, and infant loss are dealt with in a refreshingly direct and uncompromisingly bloody outcome, with no room for subtlety.
The film takes place during the course of Sarah’s last night alone before having her child’s delivery induced the next morning. Sarah (Alysson Paradis) lost her husband in a terrible car accident just a few weeks earlier. The crash is shown multiple times through the film, which illustrates the haunting presence of the loss in every moment of her day-to-day life. We see the crash from the perspective of her child in utero as well, which also frames this unborn child as a character in the film.
With the circumstances of Sarah’s pregnancy she is denied the typical rituals of birthing. She has no partner to help her pick out the child’s name. The birth date is decided by her doctor in a cold and clinical office, removing the excitement and surprise of delivery. Rather than spending the night before the birth readying the nursery and enjoying their last night together as a childless couple, Sarah is all alone.
That is, Sarah is alone until she is stalked by a mysterious stranger who appears at her door. The stranger is a woman (played by Béatrice Dalle) dressed all in black who tries everything she can to get Sarah to open the door. After an initial creepy stand-off, the woman forces her way in to the home, and the horror begins. This nameless woman wants Sarah’s child, and she is not waiting around for the birth.
The next hour of the film is a bloody cat and mouse chase between Sarah and this woman. The film is smart, and incredibly gory. Neither of these women hold back on violent acts to get, or keep, what they want.

Sarah

To begin to examine a horror film, there are several questions that can aid in the dissection of its purpose. When looking at Inside it can be helpful to pose this question: Where is the horror? By looking at the source of horror in the film, we can better understand what we are to fear.

Clearly the first level of horror in Inside is in the intruder. Her bloodlust for Sarah’s unborn child drives her violence. Initially, it is this desire for the child that is problematic. We find out later in the film that not only was this woman pregnant recently, but that she lost her child in the same car accident that killed Sarah’s husband. This unveiling in the plot is what shows the complicated relationship that Inside has with infant loss.
With this we see that another dimension of the horror in the film lies in the intruder’s loss of her pregnancy. She was nearly full term, and we see the car accident from inside her womb. The well-developed, though unborn, child is distressed by the jolt the crash delivered, and reacts as the amniotic fluid clouds up with blood. One can only imagine the pain suffered by the loss of a pregnancy at this stage, however the emotional havoc she sustains cannot justify her attack on Sarah, can it? Sarah was driving the car, after all. Is it too much of a stretch to demand from Sarah what Sarah took from her? It obviously is too much to ask, however the logical leap is not a far one to make.
Outside of the blame for the lost child lies a classic example of body horror. Films that contain plenty of gore are often, though not exclusively, “body horror” films. Here it is the body itself that is the source of the horror. The pain, blood, dismemberment, and other organic fluids in the film are definite sources of horror in Inside. The fact that the intruder is treating Sarah like merely a vessel that holds a child, and treats Sarah’s body with so little respect that this is clear, is horrific. Sarah is chased, tortured, and ultimately given a non-consensual cesarean, all to the horror of the audience. This treatment of Sarah and the fact that her body, and in particular her pregnant body, is the source of much of the horror in the film, that makes this a body horror film.
Despite the horror of two women battling one another for an unborn child, the film is quite feminist. Both of these women are smart (deranged and depressed respectively, but both make choices to further their own agendas in constructive ways). Sarah does have men who show up to attempt to rescue her, but with each effort these rescuers are outsmarted and brutally killed by the woman in black. Also, neither Sarah nor the intruder are ever shown as weak due to their womanhood. Both are shown as strong, self-sufficient people who just so happen to disagree over who should get to keep Sarah’s child.
Woman in Black

Though Inside deals with the horrors of the body, and the emotional response to losing a child, it does not treat pregnancy with romanticism or nostalgia. Sarah and the intruder are treated as believable characters that are each reacting to the extreme situations that they have found themselves in. It is this even-handed treatment of pregnant women as still functioning members of society, and not dainty figurines that have no autonomy, which makes the film a horror that you can empathize with. By putting well rounded, relatable characters in (hopefully) unrelatable situations you can just sit back and watch the blood flow.

Deirdre Crimmins lives in Boston with her husband and two black cats. She wrote her Master’s thesis on George Romero and works too much.

Foreign Film Week: Growing Up Queer: ‘Water Lilies’ (2007) and ‘Tomboy’ (2011)

Written by Max Thornton, this review previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on June 26, 2012.
Céline Sciamma’s films are ever so French. Light on dialogue, they tend to rely on lingering shots of longing glances and exquisite mise-en-scène to reveal character; loosely plotted, they leave the impression less of a story than of a series of vignettes, of tiny moments freighted with great import.

These techniques are uniquely suited to the onscreen portrayal of adolescence. It almost seems churlish to complain that Water Lilies and Tomboy lack full structural coherence, because that’s arguably intentional. Growing up, after all, is not a tightly-plotted three-act hero’s journey with clear turning points, tidy linear progression through the successive stages of personal development, and a satisfying ending. It’s a messy and confusing struggle to find a place in the world, littered with incidents that may or may not ultimately be significant (with no way to tell the difference), and most of the time the morals make no sense.

Sciamma instinctively understands this, and the little stories she tells of growing up queer are given vivid life through her two greatest strengths as a filmmaker: her ability to coax marvelously deep and naturalistic performances out of her young actors, and her eye for a strikingly memorable little scene that perfectly encapsulates a moment of overpowering adolescent emotion – the normally boisterous Anne clutching at a lamppost and weeping in Water Lilies, for example, or Tomboy‘s Laure curling up on the couch, thumb in mouth, suddenly overwhelmed by an earlier humiliation.

Both films are carried on the remarkably expressive faces of their lead actresses. There are no voice-over monologues or expository conversations, but both Water Lilies and Tomboy present the inner life of their protagonists with stunning depth and rawness.

Movie poster for Water Lilies
The protagonist of Water Lilies is Pauline Acquart’s Marie, a quiet fifteen-year-old with a crush on Floriane, star of the local synchronized swimming team. Marie’s best friend Anne, meanwhile, has her eye on Floriane’s boyfriend François. So far, so Gossip Girl, but there is nothing over-dramatic or sensationalistic about the way this love quadrilateral plays out. Although the film’s primary focus is on the blossoming friendship between Marie and Floriane, there is a clear thematic through-line of what it is to grow up female in the patriarchy. Marie, Anne, and Floriane all embody different ways of being young women, and especially young women coming into their sexuality.

Anne, though less conventionally feminine than the other girls, is confidently heterosexual and determined to sleep with the boy she finds attractive. Marie is so eager to spend time with Floriane that she agrees to help her sneak out to meet François, and her yearnings for the lithe bodies slipping through the water are beautifully conveyed through moments such as the shot of Marie shifting, flustered, as Floriane unselfconsciously changes into a swimsuit right in front of her. Floriane herself, despite the reputation she cultivates (perhaps recognizing that denial would be futile – once branded a “slut,” a teenage girl is hopelessly trapped in a no-win morass of contradictory social pressures), eventually confesses to Marie that she has never actually had sex, and in fact is afraid to do so.

“If you don’t want to do it, don’t.”

“I have to.”

“Where did you read that?”

“All over my face, apparently. If he finds out I’m not a real slut, it’s over.”

Floriane recounts several instances of sexual harassment from men; when Marie has no similar stories to share, Floriane tells her, “You’re lucky… very lucky.” And perhaps to some extent she is. Perhaps, as Anne and Marie float fully-clothed in the pool at the end of the movie, while Floriane dances alone for the boys she’s not certain she even wants to be with, they are considering their good fortune: they, at least, are strong enough to defy the patriarchal dictates around female sexual behavior, to name and claim their desires (or lack thereof), to make mistakes and learn from them without being defined by them. Growing up female in this world is hard, but they know they will make it.
Movie poster Tomboy
Tomboy tells a very different story of growing up queer. Zoé Héran turns in a truly remarkable performance as androgynous ten-year-old Laure, who, on moving to a new neighborhood, is asked by the friendly Lisa, “T’es nouveau?” – “Are you new?” – in a way that genders Laure male. In that moment, Laure becomes Mikael, a boy who spends a happy summer among his new friends and his puppy-love girlfriend Lisa. For the duration of the summer, Laure is confined to home and family (well-meaning dad, heavily pregnant mom, hyper-femme little sister Jeanne), and Mikael is the face presented to the world.

Any ten-year-old lives in the present, and Mikael meets each challenge as it arises – sneaking away deep into the woods when the other boys casually take a pee break; snipping a girl’s swimsuit into a boy’s, and constructing a Play-Doh packer to fill it; swearing Jeanne to secrecy when Lisa unwittingly tells her about Mikael – even as it becomes increasingly clear to the viewer that eventually Laure’s parents must find out about Mikael. As loving as they are, they still exert some gender-policing of their oldest child: Mom’s delight at hearing that Laure has made a female friend (“You’re always hanging out with the boys”) might have been tempered if she’d remembered that “copine” can also mean girlfriend!

The relationships between the various children are superbly observed, and constitute reason enough to see Tomboy in themselves. The energetic activities of childish horseplay that give Mikael such joy in himself and in his body – dancing enthusiastically with Lisa, playing soccer shirtless, wrestling in swimsuits on the dock – are balanced by the many lovely domestic scenes demonstrating the closeness of Laure’s relationship with Jeanne. This is honestly one of the most moving and genuine cinematic portrayals of a sibling relationship in years, and after her initial shock Jeanne takes to the idea of Mikael like a duck to water, boasting to another child about her awesome big brother, and telling her parents that her favorite of Laure’s new friends is Mikael.

The parents themselves, unfortunately, are much less accepting of Mikael. The film’s ending is ambiguous, allowing for multiple readings of the exact nature of Laure’s queerness; indeed, the film has been criticized as “an appropriation of trans narratives by a cis filmmaker toward her own purposes”; but to me the ending is terribly unhappy. With deep breaths and with profound conflict on Héran’s preternaturally expressive face, the character is forced to claim “Laure,” the name and gender assigned at birth and not the ones of choice. The cissupremacy has won this round.

Though Tomboy is the better film, the two movies make excellent companion pieces. Between them they depict a range of queerness and explore a variety of strategies for growing up queer (and/or female) in a hostile world. And yet they offer no easy solutions, no cheap moralizing, no promise that it gets better. These films, and the characters they portray, simply are. And, in the end, isn’t that the one universal truth of queer people? There is no ur-narrative of queerness. There is no right or wrong way to be queer. We simply are.

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Max Thornton is a Bitch Flicks writer, blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Foreign Film Week: A Failed Attempt at Feminism Impedes ‘Rust and Bone’

Guest post written by Candice Frederick, originally published at Reel Talk. Cross-posted with permission.

At its core, there’s something very interesting about the small yet much buzzed about French film, De rouille et d’os, which is translated in English as Rust and Bone. Its off kilter premise, which follows the extraordinary love story of an amputated killer dolphin trainer and the lover she befriends during her recuperation, is fresh enough to attract audiences. The lead performances by Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts are both layered and beautiful to watch. But where it falters is the latter half of the story (written and directed by notable filmmaker Jacques Audiard of The Beat That My Heart Skipped fame), and the evolution (or lack thereof) of its protagonist and reluctantly drawn heroine.
It’s very easy to write a lead female character and call her a heroine, simply because she’s a woman and much of the plot revolves around her. But it’s another thing for her to actually be a heroine, a character someone can look up to or aspire to become. Stéphanie (Cotillard), a sexy wild animal trainer-turned-bewildered amputee, has all the potential to become that person. But instead her story inches its way toward progression only to become wilted and ultimately eclipsed by the neverending and somewhat unrequited compassion she has for her male counterpart, the weary absentee dad Alain (Schoenaerts).
Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) in Rust and Bone
When we first meet Stéphanie, she’s a fierce dolphin trainer who knows her way around a club and literally has to beat the guys off with a stick. She gets into a scuffle outside a club one night, and Alain (who’s a bouncer) intervenes and saves the day. He ends up driving her home and icing his now bruised hand. While there, he encounters who the audience could only presume as her live-in lover who shoos him away with his look of death. Right out the gate, Stéphanie’s fate is dependent on the men she keeps around her.

After the tragic on-the-job accident, which severed her legs and left her wheelchair-bound, we’re left to assume that at this point, by the way things have already been going with her, that she’d just crumble and spend the rest of the movie in tears. A once seductive woman who could get any guy she wanted (or needed) was left alone, crippled and seemingly half the person she once was.

Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) in Rust and Bone
That is, until she recalls her guy-on-retainer Alain, who’s moved on from his bouncer days to become a gym worker. That’s when Stéphanie’s story becomes essentially the betterment of his, which details a completely apathetic dad who’s inexplicably careless about his son and everything else in his life (including Stéphanie). He later haphazardly pursues a career as a street fighter. So of course she has to sign on to be his manager, securing herself in his life after several failed attempts to be his girlfriend. Meanwhile, throughout most the movie the audience is left in the dark about Alain’s feelings towards Stéphanie. His chemistry with her seems more mechanical and authoritative rather than her more needy desire.

Though Stéphanie’s new self-made job finally gives her purpose again, it comes off as another way to get closer to him and fit into his life. It just becomes an exhaustive attempt to create an empowered rehabilitated female character by counterbalancing her with the male character. It’s unfair for the character and counterproductive to the shrinking theme in the film — rebuilding a broken woman.

That aside, however significant, Cotillard’s portrayal is steadfast and deliberate. Her aggressively passive aggressive approach to the character wrangles over some of the more minor flaws about the way she was written, leaving the end result that much more impressive. And Schoenaerts, as annoying a character as he plays, delivers a unapologetic performance that is punctuated by the movie’s single glimmer of nuance. Together the two elevate the disappointing story, but the remains of what they had to work with still permeate the rest of the film.

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Candice Frederick is a former Essence magazine editor and an NABJ award-winning journalist. She is also the co-host of “Cinema in Noir” and the film blogger for Reel Talk. Follow her on Twitter.

Foreign Film Week: Growing Up with ‘Les Demoiselles de Rochefort’

Les demoiselles de Rochefort (1967)

Guest post written by Lou Flandrin.

This masterpiece by Jacques Demy is definitely the most important movie of my childhood. Part of it is probably due to the hours I spent listening to the cheerful singing while going away on vacation with my family. Singing in the car is the best remedy to car sickness and boredom, and so the whole family would happily sing along these tunes about dreams, true love, and living life to the fullest.

While I love this movie because of the catchy lyrics, colourful clothes and the giddy state in which it turns me, I also appreciate its depiction of women’s lives and family bonds. I am grateful to have had these depictions to look up to when I was growing up, of sisters and friends who didn’t fight against each other, but worked together towards their dreams to have an artistic career and to find happiness.

The plot of the movie is quite simple: the main characters, Delphine and Solange, are twins who are tired of their provincial lives and decide to go to Paris to start their artistic career. As they plan their departure, the summer fair is settling in the beautiful city of Rochefort – which was painted in pastel colours for the movie – and fair workers, sailors and musicians will cross their path, webs of stories will get intertwined, resulting in a wonderful puzzle of emotions, songs, and choreographed happiness.

A Celebration of Love in All its States

While this movie is about soul mates finding each other, it is above all a celebration of love in general, love of life and of all the little things that makes the world so amazing. A perfect illustration of this is the song that the twins perform for the fair’s big show, “La Chanson d’un Jour d’été” which is all about loving life, and as they sing it: “loving the world in order to be happy.” This positive philosophy is a recurring leitmotif in the movie. Two fair workers – played by George Chakiris and Grover Dale – contribute to the theme by singing about the joys of travelling and living life to the fullest in every city they visit, “running from one happiness to the next.” With such a positive outlook, it’s no wonder this movie makes me want to smile and dance around like a maniac!

Being in love is obviously still a major theme, but it is presented as a complement to this love of life and freedom. Most of the characters are on a quest to find their true love in their own different ways. Yvonne, the twins’ mother, is longing for her lost love, whom she rejected years before because of his ridiculous last name. Andy, an American composer, is feeling incomplete after spending his whole life focusing on his musical career. Simon Dame, the dissed lover with a ridiculous name, is now back in Rochefort when he once was in love with Yvonne. Maxence, a young artist doing his military service in Rochefort, dreams about his feminine ideal, painting her portrait that looks eerily like Delphine.

Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) discovers Maxence’s painting

There is no distinction between a feminine or masculine depiction of love, as lovers’ voices share the same intensity, and their songs echo each other. Love “is the sole authority” and erases the discriminations of gender, social class or even moral virtue.

The twins have their own expectations about love. While it is no secret that they have had their share of lovers – as sung in their famous “Chanson des Jumelles,” they are now both looking for someone to share their lives with, and will take action towards this goal. At the beginning of the movie, Delphine dumps her phony and creepy boyfriend Lancien in an amazing break-up song, in which she reproaches him of treating her like “just another doll” and not understanding anything about her dreams. Lancien gets a few lines in the song as well, but he misses the point entirely. He mistakes his desire to own Delphine with love, and will try repeatedly to get her back, including with a poor attempt to convince her that she would need someone like him to look after her in Paris. But Delphine knows better than that, and replies that she never wants to see him again. Good riddance!

A Celebration of Friendship and Family Ties

What I like about this movie is that it’s not all about true love, as friends and family are shown as equally important parts of life. The two sisters live together in harmony, they confide in each other, share their joys and fears, and sing to each other about everything. Another interesting duo is that of the two girls who were supposed to sing and dance at the fair. After discussing it with each other, they decide to leave Etienne and Bill, the two fair workers, because they are tired of being exploited and want to live their own lives. Sure, they have their own superficial reasons (Bill doesn’t have blue eyes, sailors are better lovers…) but still, the message is out there, they want to free themselves and they do it together.

Guys are not excluded from this friendship pattern. Etienne and Bill have known each other for years, they travel together and share the same adventures and heartbreaks. They sing about their undying friendship, describing themselves as penniless knights with hearts of gold running from cities to cities. When the girls leave them for blue-eyed sailors, they echo their previous song about freedom, and leave the scene smiling at each other. Later on, when they very awkwardly ask the twins if they want to sleep with them and get rejected, they sing together about their bad luck with women.

True bros wear tight jeans and white boots, it is known. (George Chakiris and Grover Dale)

As for family ties, they are not limited to the sibling relationship between Delphine and Solange. Their mother Yvonne has raised three children on her own, sacrificing her life in order to help her family become well-read. She owns a café, and spends her days behind the counter. While she is at work all the time, in what she calls her “aquarium,” the café becomes the family home. The twins come and go to chat, Yvonne’s father spends his time in a corner constructing models, and Booboo, the youngest son, is always brought from the café to school and vice-versa.

A Celebration of Art

Art is what allows the characters to escape the mundanity of their daily lives, as when Maxence evades from the army barracks every night to paint in his studio. Art and love are pictured as complementary. While Andy is a successful composer, he feels a void, and realises that Solange might be the one who can fill it. They fall in love at first sight, and their idyll is written in F-sharp minor, just like Solange’s concerto that she accidentally drops on the ground when they meet, and that will further charm Andy.

Andy (Gene Kelly) singing about his love for Solange and her concerto

Art can be used negatively, for example in the case of Lancien, Delphine’s ex, who owns a gallery, and “creates” abstract paintings by shooting at balloons full of paint over white canvasses. Unlike the other characters, his art is depicted as destructive, and is echoed in his negative discourses on how he wants to own Delphine and control her life.

A Celebration of Freedom

What makes all the characters of this charming tale so unique is that they are all striving for freedom, and taking action to achieve their independence. Delphine doesn’t want to become Lancien’s doll and decides to leave to Paris to become famous on her own. While her reasons were questionable, Yvonne’s refusal to marry Simon can also be interpreted as a way to stay independent: she didn’t want to become Madame Dame, and chose to struggle on her own rather than becoming his wife.

Throughout the movie, the twins keep saying what comes to their mind, and doing what they want. When the fair workers come to the twins’ door to ask them to take part in their show, they imply that they need their help to go to Paris, which scandalises the sisters. They don’t want to be patronised and don’t want to be mere substitutes either, which is why they will participate to the show in their own way. Delphine buys revealing dresses that she thinks are beautiful, and Solange wonders: “Aren’t you afraid we might look slutty?” Delphine dismisses the comment, and they end up wearing those dresses on stage, showing everybody that they do not care about what people might think. Similarly, Solange couldn’t care less that her dress’ lining is showing, despite everybody insisting on reminding her. The twins’ indifference to other people’s judgement is also seen in their anthem, in which they proudly sing that they were born from an unknown father, and that they had lovers at a very young age.

Who doesn’t love characters who sing in the face of slut-shaming? (Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac)

Freedom is celebrated through the characters’ ability to travel the world to their fancy, like the fair workers who are happiest when they travel, or the sisters who decide to try their luck in Paris. Lack of freedom, for instance in Yvonne’s case, stuck in her “aquarium”, is depicted as the culmination of misery. She evades by dreaming of Pacific beaches, and will only be happy when she manages to get out of her café and find her former lover in front of Booboo’s school.

The musical has some darker notes, with the side story of a sadistic killer who killed a woman and cut her in little pieces because she refused his love for 40 years. Lancien’s obsession with Delphine echoes that of the killer, and we can only hope that he will not follow her to Paris to copycat the tragic event.

Paint Life in Pastel Tones

Haters will diss the cheesy dialogue, the ridiculous plots devices used to make characters miss or meet each other, and the overly cheerful singing. People might also argue that this movie is offering a false depiction of life, in which true love can always be found if one sings about with enough passion, and roams prettily the streets of France while dancing in colourful clothing.

But this very naivety is what makes Les Demoiselles de Rochefort so brilliant. Everything in the movie makes it clear that it is only a wonderful tale, far from reality. If you look at it that way, and decide to immerse yourself in Demy’s pastel singing city, you will end up happier and confident that while real life doesn’t have the same splendour, the ideals it promotes are very real.

Lou Flandrin is a French graduate in languages and international politics. Currently living in Chengdu (China), she is a volunteer translator and author at Global Voices Online, and sometimes tweets about Sichuanese food, robots, and other stuff.