TY - JOUR
T1 - Lesbian Legibility and Queer Legacy in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune fille en feu/Portrait of a Lady on Fire
AU - Bradbury Rance, Clara Frances
N1 - Funding Information:
Thank you to Frances Smith and Despoina Mantziari for organising the Sussex Sciamma symposium where I first shared this work, and to the audiences at the Edinburgh Queer Representation conference and the St Andrews Film Studies speaker series, at which I presented later versions. Additional thanks to Frances and to Mary Harrod, for your rigorous and incisive editing. Thank you to Fiona Handyside and Isabelle McNeill for both enjoyable and productive conversations about Sciamma’s work–virtually and IRL–and to Emma Spruce for reading everything, again and again.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2023/5/26
Y1 - 2023/5/26
N2 - As a story of painting–an artist falling in love with the subject of her portrait–Portrait de la jeune fille en feu/Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film about representation itself, about the intensified spectatorship that comes with a sustained diegetic attention to the gaze. This article argues that rather than fulfilling the mainstream demands of the period romance to reveal lost histories of lesbianism, Sciamma’s film draws on her radical visual vocabulary to capture desire’s precariousness. This is the site of Portrait de la jeune fille en feu’s queerness: not (just) the explicit representation of a lesbian love story but rather a reckoning with cinema’s own role in making prohibited desires legible on-screen. Just as Gayatri Gopinath locates ‘queerness’ in ‘a specific spectatorial dynamic between the artist and the historical archive’, we can find queerness in Sciamma’s relationship to the visual archive of lesbian film history. This article argues that by reminding us of desire’s precariousness, Sciamma’s film demonstrates its own negotiations with ‘lesbian’ cinema whilst opening up ways to read a visual map of queer possibility.
AB - As a story of painting–an artist falling in love with the subject of her portrait–Portrait de la jeune fille en feu/Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film about representation itself, about the intensified spectatorship that comes with a sustained diegetic attention to the gaze. This article argues that rather than fulfilling the mainstream demands of the period romance to reveal lost histories of lesbianism, Sciamma’s film draws on her radical visual vocabulary to capture desire’s precariousness. This is the site of Portrait de la jeune fille en feu’s queerness: not (just) the explicit representation of a lesbian love story but rather a reckoning with cinema’s own role in making prohibited desires legible on-screen. Just as Gayatri Gopinath locates ‘queerness’ in ‘a specific spectatorial dynamic between the artist and the historical archive’, we can find queerness in Sciamma’s relationship to the visual archive of lesbian film history. This article argues that by reminding us of desire’s precariousness, Sciamma’s film demonstrates its own negotiations with ‘lesbian’ cinema whilst opening up ways to read a visual map of queer possibility.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85144502019&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/26438941.2022.2148375
DO - 10.1080/26438941.2022.2148375
M3 - Article
SN - 2643-8941
VL - 23
SP - 172
EP - 184
JO - French Screen Studies
JF - French Screen Studies
IS - 2-3
ER -