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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] 218 EMMA WILSON 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). 220 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 222 EMMA WILSON 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