Download e´tat pre´sent contemporary french women

French Studies, Vol. LIX, No. 2, 217 – 223
doi:10.1093/fs/kni132
ÉTAT PRÉSENT
CONTEMPORARY FRENCH WOMEN FILMMAKERS
EMMA WILSON
At the 2004 Unifrance ‘Rendez-vous du cinéma français’ (the major
international sales event for French cinema), of the fifty or more films
screened, six were features in French by women directors: Les Sentiments
by Noémie Lvovsky, Mister V. by Émilie Deleuze, France Boutique by
Tonie Marshall, Demain on de´me´nage by Chantal Akerman, Je reste
by Diane Kurys, and Nathalie by Anne Fontaine. Films in production or
post-production included new works by Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis
and Agnès Jaoui. Although works by women directors still make up only
a small proportion of the domestic and international market, it is the case
that women directors have never before been in such a strong position
within the French film industry. From the 1990s onwards, the recognition
of a number of important female auteurs and the increasing numbers of
first films and lower budget (often digital video) projects by women
directors suggest that the gender configuration of French cinema is
shifting and that studies of the field will need to chart this drift.
In his 1996 volume, 50 ans de cine´ma français,1 René Prédal includes a list
of one hundred filmmakers. Only three women figure: Duras, Varda and
Denis. Prédal contends minimally with the emergence of female directors,
drawing attention only to the 1980s as a time of change (in 1986, features
by women figured prominently in the ‘Perspectives du cinéma français’
at Cannes; the FEMIS accepted equal numbers of female and male
students). More political than Prédal, Jill Forbes reminds readers that the
tradition of women making films stretches back to the silent period.2
She too focuses on Varda and Duras, but with more positive attention to
questions of making a film ‘as a woman’. Guy Austin also discusses Varda,
Duras and Denis.3 With the advantage of a later perspective, he draws
in some newer directors: Diane Kurys, Coline Serreau, Claire Devers
and Martine Dugowson. (Austin notes too the greater representation of
women directors in France than in any other national cinema and the
importance of the Créteil film festival in encouraging work by women.)
Prédal’s subsequent volume implies more about the moment of change.4
By 2002, Prédal no longer conceives a particular section about the work
50 ans de cine´ma français : 1945 – 1995 (Paris, Nathan, 1996).
The Cinema in France after the New Wave (London, BFI, 1992).
Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction (Manchester University Press, 1996).
4
Le Jeune cine´ma français (Paris, Nathan, 2002).
1
2
3
# The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French
Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]
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of women but includes wider discussion of films by, amongst others,
Breillat, Lvovsky, Denis, Laetitia Masson, Claire Simon, Pascale Ferran,
Sandrine Veysset and Dominique Cabrera. Claude Trémois also moves to
consider women directors alongside their male counterparts, including
discussion of films by Ferran, Simon, Lvovsky, Tonie Marshall and
Marion Vernoux.5 This approach could suggest that women directors
are so prominent within the industry they no longer should be considered
a category apart. Yet there are risks with such gender-blindness within an
industry which has been until so recently dominated by men and entrenched
in masculinist perspectives. Prédal refutes the notion of ‘films de femmes’,
but acknowledges that films by women directors have offered ‘des études
de femmes conçues par des femmes dont le regard donne des œuvres
personnelles au ton parfois éloigné de celui des cinéastes masculins’.6 He
notes too the ‘individualité très forte’ of certain directors, and the specificity
of the exploration of ‘portraits de femmes’, ‘filles en fuite’, ‘agressivité
adolescente’ and ‘confessions sexuelles’7 in their work. Such comments
call for more gender-specific analysis.
Questions of individuality, and auteur status, have productively
dominated the developing critical response to women directors. Phil
Powrie shows that in the last thirty years in the UK eleven theses have
been devoted to Duras and five to Varda (with five also on Dulac and
four on Akerman).8 The Manchester University Press French Film
Directors series has led the way in expanding the number of women
treated as auteurs, listing volumes on Duras and Varda, but also on
Serreau, Kurys and Denis (another volume on Denis, by Judith Mayne,
is promised from Illinois University Press).9 In France, Breillat too has
gained auteur status, as confirmed by her popularity with Cahiers du
cine´ma: in 2004 two volumes appeared on her work.10 The ascension of
certain female auteurs is significant in an industry which has offered
validity to the director. Yet such an approach alone does little to tackle
the specificity of women directors’ (plural) situation within French cinema.
There have been precious few studies specifically of women directors.
Those which have appeared have been faced with the (encyclopaedic) task
of naming and representing the diversity of films created by women in
France. Françoise Audé, author of one of the earliest studies of the field,
Les Enfants de la liberte´: le jeune cine´ma français des anne´es 90 (Paris, Seuil 1997).
Le Jeune cine´ma français, p. 141.
7
Ibid., pp. 141 – 150.
8
‘Thirty Years of Doctoral Theses on French Cinema’, Studies in French Cinema, 3 (2003), 199 – 203.
9
Renate Günther, Marguerite Duras (Manchester University Press, 2002); Alison Smith, Agne`s Varda
(Manchester University Press, 1998); Brigitte Rollet, Coline Serreau (Manchester University Press,
1998); Carrie Tarr, Diane Kurys (Manchester University Press, 1999); Martine Beugnet, Claire Denis
(Manchester University Press, 2004).
10
David Vasse, Catherine Breillat: un cine´ma du rite et de la transgression (Paris, Complexe/Arte editions,
2004), and Claire Clouzot, Catherine Breillat (Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, 2004).
5
6
ÉTAT PRÉSENT: CONTEMPORARY FRENCH WOMEN FILMMAKERS
219
11
has recently published a sequel. She takes stock of the changes women
have effected in the French film industry, writing: ‘d’une manière décisive
elles ont participé au renouvellement d’un cinéma dont elles ont déplacé
et élargi les limites’. Despite many women filmmakers’ reluctance to be
classified as such, Audé is clear: ‘qu’elles le veuillent ou pas, les réalisatrices
n’échappent pas à la question de l’identité’.12 Identifying female auteurs,
Audé chooses Breillat, Cabrera, Denis, Labrune, Masson, Veysset and
Varda. Quoting the latter (on the occasion of the release of Les Glaneurs
et la glaneuse ), Audé hazards an interpretation of what it means to be a
female (and feminist) filmmaker: ‘c’est [. . .] sortir de son miroir et de
l’image que la société vous propose d’être, sortir de la cuisine, aller
dehors, regarder les autres, choisir et composer avec les difficultés et les
contradictions’.13
In the UK, work by French women directors has been foregrounded by
such pioneers in the field as Ginette Vincendeau (who also introduced
anglophone feminist film theory in France) and Susan Hayward. The
most important single volume on the subject in English is Carrie Tarr
and Brigitte Rollet’s Cinema and the Second Sex.14 Authoritative and
inclusive, Tarr and Rollet provide an excellent resource. They distinguish
films by women from ‘women’s films’ per se, also taking stock of the
widespread reluctance of women directors to categorize themselves as
such. The very writing and arrangement of the volume speak volubly,
however, of certain specificities in the work of women directors: Part I
addresses representations of growing up, the age of possibilities, couples,
families, work, art and citizenship; Part II looks at genre films. Tarr’s
work in instantiating a new perspective on films by women was
witnessed also at the conference ‘Focalizing the Body: Contemporary
Women’s Writing and Film-making in France’ held at the Institute of
Romance Studies in October 2003 (and co-organized with Gill Rye).
Baise-moi (2000) by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi was
screened; there were also paper on films by Denis, Breillat, Sophie Calle,
Cabrera, Patricia Mazuy, Veysset and Yamina Benguigui.
Clearly questions about women’s visibility and presence within the
industry are being addressed. Armed with volumes such as those of Audé
and Tarr, the moment has come for critics to reflect on new ways of
accounting for the specificity of women’s contribution to French cinema.
Critical here is detachment from arguments about inherent gender difference. Whether or not women’s film-making may be gender-marked in
11
See Françoise Audé, Cine´-mode`les, cine´ma d’elles (Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 1981); Cine´ma d’elles:
1981– 2001 (Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 2002).
12
Cine´ma d’elles: 1981 – 2001, p. 10.
13
Cine´ma d’elles: 1981 –2001, p. 11 (citing Agnès Varda in an interview in Studio, no. 154 (March 2000)).
14
Cinema and the Second Sex: Women’s Film-making in France in the 1980s and 1990s (New York — London,
Continuum, 2001).
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EMMA WILSON
style and content, it is arguably affected to some degree by women’s latecoming and marginal status within the industry. Exclusion may indeed
have enabled difference and differentiation, witnessed in the creation of
different trajectories and opportunities, different influences and different
modes of attention. Identification of such differences may allow scholars
to move beyond auteurist studies and more thematic and genre-based
approaches to women’s film-making (crucial though these have been to
date), and still account for such film-making as distinct.
Engaging with issues relating to the industry as well as its forms of representation, criticism might be alive to the specific networks of (personal)
relations which apparently foster cinema by women. Cinema by women
has been seen, familiarly, to open up representations of intimacy, of the
family, of interpersonal relations. Family relations also subtend many
women’s cinema projects more materially. Prominent are certain family
dynasties in cinema: Micheline Presle acts in her daughter Tonie
Marshall’s Ve´nus Beaute´ Institut (1999) and France Boutique (2003); Nadine
and Marie Trintignant have worked together and most recently, before
Marie’s death, in their co-written television films about Colette; Varda,
Jane Birkin and their children have variously collaborated. In smaller
budget projects too, collaboration between women seems generative.
Mariana Otero’s remarkable Histoire d’un secret (2003) shows the
filmmaker in deeply felt examination of her mother’s death (after an
illegal abortion). Kept hidden from her small daughters, this death is a
gap in their lives which Otero seeks to expose. Particularly moving are
dialogues between Otero and her sister Isabel (herself an actress). At one
moment, Otero seeks to merge the identities of missing mother and
actress sister, seeming to ask Isabel to put on their mother’s dress. The
camera catches Isabel’s unguarded response. The dress is suddenly untouchable as the film registers the mother, her death, her material remains, as not
merely precious but taboo. Such film-making depends on trust and
exposure, on the conviction that to turn intimacy into spectacle is not to
inflict damage. This impulse is witnessed too, in another emotive context,
in Natacha Samuel’s Pola à 27 ans (2003) where the young documentary
maker films her grandmother’s belated return to Warsaw and
Auschwitz.15 Despite its attention to the grandmother, the film seems unsettling in its willingness to follow her closely until she falters and loses her
way. The film’s aesthetic is close to that of Julie Bertucelli’s feature film
Depuis qu’Otar est parti (2003), with its exploration of three generations of
women and the unsettling of their roles. This film, like Pola à 27 ans, also
stretches to know a relation to questions about loss, exile and cultural
15
I am grateful to Isabelle McNeill for first drawing my attention to this film and for discussing
it with me.
ÉTAT PRÉSENT: CONTEMPORARY FRENCH WOMEN FILMMAKERS
221
memory (imaging fantasies of Paris conjured in Eastern Europe). Attention
to intimate others is part of a broader tendency to experiment with the
impact of the camera and the contact it captures, both within the family
and beyond, at home and abroad, in recording real events and a more
traumatic real at the limits of representation.
Beyond literal networks of family relations, French women directors
(developing a trend in auteur cinema) have worked to create an imagined
family in their film-making in the return of certain actors, both objects of
desire and alter egos (Grégoire Colin in the films of Denis, for example,
Sylvie Testud in Akerman’s La Captive (2000) and Demain on de´me´nage
(2004)). Tightening the links between the works of women directors,
certain actors are also seen to return in different female-authored works
(Karin Viard, for example, in Catherine Corsini’s La Nouvelle Ève (1999),
Vernoux’s Reines d’un jour (2001) and Marshall’s France Boutique, Emmanuelle Béart in Corsini’s La Re´pe´tition (2001) and in Fontaine’s Nathalie
(2003), Nathalie Baye in Marshall’s Venus Beaute´ Institut (1999) and
Lvovsky’s Les Sentiments (2003)). Such actors appear in many other films
as well; the interest here is in the ways in which their return to work
with women is allowing a body of work (contact and collaboration)
between female directors and actors to emerge. Within these new
contracts, the opening of roles for women of different ages can be
witnessed and the expansion of the range of images of physical beauty.
A film such as La Re´pe´tition rehearses problems of identification and individuation in the friendship between two women (one an actress), merging
the amorous and the murderous. Such shifting, uncertain relations, in some
lines of thought the very remnants of mother/daughter love, recall the
family networks identified in and behind work by women directors. They
also say something of other identity demarcations which are more blurred
in cinema by women. In particular in France, there has been a trend
for female actors to become directors. Brigitte Rouän, who stars as
the bereaved mother in Agnieszka Holland’s Olivier, Olivier (1992), has
claimed that she took up directing in response to the lack of interesting
parts for female actors. She went on to direct, and play the leading role,
in Post Coitum Animal Triste (1997). Nicole Garcia, while continuing an
acting career (starring for example in Rouän’s Outremer (1990)), has
directed such films as Place Vendoˆme (1998) and L’Adversaire (2002).
Established directors like Kurys and Marshall first began work as actors.
This merger of roles itself perhaps influences their relation to their actors
and the work which results. A director such as Breillat (who has a brief
filmography as actress) reflects on her own work with actors, casting
Anne Parillaud to take the part of a film director in Sex is Comedy (2002),
a film which is a metacommentary on the making of Breillat’s A ma sœur
(2001), with a returning actor (Roxane Mesquida) and the new injection
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of Grégoire Colin. For Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Breillat has made a film that
displays clearly the difficulties involved in female authorship’,16 in particular
in the filming of erotic intimacy. Despite some sense of stasis, the film
leads to an extraordinary moment in the filming of a sex scene where the
director is in close proximity with her male and female lead. The difficulties
that have beset the filming are suddenly overcome, and, beyond their
frustration and posturing, the desire the actors are representing inflects
and gives a rhythm to their relation to the director and her control of
their actions. A sense of collaborative engagement in a project, in the realization of a (creative) desire is glimpsed on screen. Breillat is notorious for
the eroticism or pornography of her film-making; she and other directors
have drawn the public eye through their exposure of sex acts. Yet such
acts, as Sex is Comedy signals, are part of a broader move in the work of
women directors to chart relations of ambiguity, of troubled boundaries
and unstable performance (Breillat, like Otero, depends on trust and
exposure).17
In writing about cinema and the haptic (the sense of touch), Laura Marks
notes that there is some temptation, following Irigaray, to understand
haptic visuality as a feminine kind of visuality. Marks counters: ‘I prefer
to see the haptic as a visual strategy that can be used to describe alternative
visual traditions, including women’s and feminist practices, rather than
a feminine quality in particular’.18 This sense that different modes of
representation and attention may be adopted strategically, not naturally, is
critical for thinking the questions of the family, of intimacy, of identity
merger, of the bodily in film-making by French women directors. Even
more than in the bodily exposures of Breillat, the viewer of Denis’s
films finds film-making which offers a new geography of the body, a new
reckoning with scale, perspective and, in particular, proximity, touch and
contact. In Trouble Every Day (2001), an animate camera, coinciding with
Béatrice Dalle’s monstrous gaze, seems to graze the body of the male
object of desire who will shortly be ingested. Bodies are stretched out in
Denis’s films like territories to be mapped. She has given us new representations of homoerotic communities, of male/male enmity and identification
(as does Devers in Les Marins perdus (2003) or Fontaine in Comment j’ai tue´
mon pe`re (2001)); such female attention to masculinity certainly deserves
further thought. Yet Denis works too, more radically, to explore the interlayering of body, surface and territory. It is in her move to think merger
16
‘What she wants’, Sight and Sound, 13:5 (May 2003), 20– 22 (p. 22).
The challenge to the viewer of Breillat’s films is explored in Lynsey Russell Watt’s doctoral thesis
(University of Cambridge, 2004).
18
The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (Durham, NC — London, Duke
University Press, 2000), p. 170.
17
ÉTAT PRÉSENT: CONTEMPORARY FRENCH WOMEN FILMMAKERS
223
and uncertain boundaries and textures that her films reflect the moves in
film by women evoked more broadly here.
At its most experimental, work by women directors pays new attention
to detail, substance, contact and indeed to texture and rhythm. It is
striking to note the number of films by women directors on which Agnès
Godard has worked as cinematographer; her collaboration with Denis
includes J’ai pas sommeil (1994), US Go Home (1994), Ne´nette et Boni
(1996), Beau Travail (1999), Trouble Every Day and Vendredi soir (2002); she
worked on Jacquot de Nantes (1991), La Nouvelle Ève (1999) and La Re´pe´tition.
Her work with Lvovsky in the telefilm Les Petites (1997) and the subsequent
feature film La Vie ne me fait pas peur (1999) is particularly innovative. An
ensemble piece, La Vie ne me fait pas peur lets a new, intimate aesthetic
emerge out of the interconnections, the rapid exchanges, the hysteria
and restlessness of four adolescent girls. Godard’s work looks towards
the creation of a kinetic force and rhythm connected with hand-held
camera work and attention to colour and texture.
Jaoui’s comedy Le Goût des autres (2000) draws together its threads
with an ensemble image of an amateur orchestra playing Je ne regrette rien.
At the end of Ferran’s L’Âge des possibles, characters sing ‘Rêves d’un
prince et d’une princesse’ from Peau d’âne (1970). Films by women
directors have sought out new modes of ensemble filming, of collaborative
work. Their comedies are cross-cut with scenes which pull on the emotions
and pull out echoes and different sets of relations (the same is true of
Lvovsky’s Les Sentiments which went on to win the Prix Louis-Delluc).
Intimacy and intricacy shape films by female directors, not specifically in
their subject matter which increasingly moves outwards into the world
(as Varda indicates), but in the enabling networks of relations which have
ensured the presence and proliferation of projects by women. There is
work to be done on the politics of such networks and their transformation
of the film industry. To say that there is a specificity to women’s filmmaking in France may be to say that women have known a different
relation to the industry and that they have produced that specificity strategically, lucidly, creatively, in a bid to make the industry begin to differ
internally, to begin to know a new relation to identification and merger,
contact, rhythm, damage (the issues I isolate here). Women directors are
set to cut to the quick in French cinema. Before their work is inserted
too quickly into the broader context of contemporary French filmmaking, criticism might seek to find means to track such films in their
moments of metamorphosis and rupture, their new transitory and transitional modes.
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE , CAMBRIDGE