Catherine Breillat paper for Theories of Media
Isn’t it Romantic?
Using film to explore female sexuality in Romance
Catherine Breillat is a provocative French filmmaker who has received much attention in the press in the past five years for a string of increasingly polemical and explicit films exploring various pathologies of female sexuality. She made her acting debut in the infamous Last Tango in Paris, though her literary debut was rather more shocking: at seventeen, Breillat published her first novel, A man for the asking, which was deemed an adult novel, so ironically she was unable to buy her own book. She continues to write both novels and screenplays, though now her practice is to write a novel in order to raise enough money to film the screenplay version of the same story. And though her novels have sold millions of copies, it is for her films that she is most well-known and considered controversial. Why is it the medium of film, then, that causes such a stir around Breillat, when her novels are just as “pornographic” by the same standards of explicitly representing sexuality? The answer seems to lie in the extensively problematic relationship between female sexuality and its representation in film, and the dialectical approach Breillat adopts when confronting such issues of the gaze, sexuality as spectacle, and the subjectivity of female sexuality. It is paradoxically through the medium of film-considered by classic film theorist André Bazin to be ontologically more capable of realism and objectivity than any other medium-that Breillat attempts to find some sort of subjective exploration of female sexuality.
In order to theoretically explore Breillat’s oeuvre, it is beneficial to contextualize her work within French cinema and feminist film theory, but first it is necessary to highlight an essay by Bazin, considered by many to be the first true film theorist. Bazin states that photography has an “essentially objective character” (Bazin 13) and interestingly the translator notes that in French the word for “lens” is “objectif.” This character “confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space.” Later on, he adds that “the cinema is objectivity in time.” (Bazin 14) As a highly influential theorist and one of the founders of Cahiers du cinéma, Bazin introduced, in simple terms, the idea of essentialism and realism-even if we disagree with what we see, we know that it exists, because in order to be filmed it had to have existed. We also know that it was not tampered with (though this is complicated by a technology he could not have predicted, CGI, luckily Breillat does not make use of it) because photography, and therefore cinema, unlike painting or drawing, does not rely on the artist to create the image. Instead it relies on a mechanical, chemical process unmediated by human subjectivity. The relationship between objectivity and subjectivity in cinema is thus a much more complicated one than subjectivity within the novel or painting.
Coming of age in the 1960s and beginning her career as a filmmaker in the 1970s, Breillat's films bear the distinct markings of French New Wave and Italian Neorealism in the form of philosophical voice-overs and long, emotionally charged takes, sometimes the length of entire scenes. She is also unfortunately situated within the generalization of “erotic French cinema,” erroneous due to the fact that her films are decidedly un-erotic, clinical and detached, with sex as often as not turning into rape or revealing the complicated excess of emotion tied to all sexual acts. Breillat’s oeuvre is also, in many ways, a commentary on and complication of the feminist film theory that grew out of Laura Mulvey’s seminal 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
Mulvey attacks the patriarchal mode of looking that constructs the male as voyeur and the woman as spectacle, object-of-the-gaze. Such a dominant mode of viewing is sadly still quite present in much of Hollywood and international cinema. Mulvey argues quite convincingly that the dominant mode of the gaze “implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen” (Mulvey 32). Mulvey concludes her essay with the mission for feminist filmmakers: “The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions […] is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment.” (Mulvey 39) Breillat redefines Mulvey’s conclusion as erotic detachment but preserves that essential dialectic in Romance.
Mulvey’s essay not only influenced much of point-of-view theory, which also arose in film theory of the 1970s and debated issues of subjectivity in a filmic context, but also sparked debates concerning eroticism and pornography. While most feminist film theorists have been on the anti-pornographic side of the debate, Catherine Breillat, as a feminist filmmaker, is difficult to place. In Romance, for example, she cast an Italian pornographic thespian, Rocco Siffredi, opposite the protagonist, and the sex throughout Romance is unsimulated-something never done before Romance, and a point that caused much controversy, as Romance is the first non-pornographic film, and certainly the first art house film, to have entirely unsimulated sex. Breillat, however, has polemically stated that “Pornography doesn’t exist. What exists is censorship which defines pornography and separates it from the rest of the film…Pornographic cinema does not exist-there’s no cinema in pornographic films.”[1] As a result, Breillat never feels that her female actors or female characters are debased by their acting experiences or sexual experiences-on the contrary, she says that in Romance “the sexual journey is in fact a revelation, a transcendence.”[2] In her taboo-breaking films which embrace both feminism (and female subjectivity) and an explicitness and sexual representation that has been heretofore considered within a cinematic context to be “pornographic” Breillat, in a way, fulfills the mission Mulvey described at the end of her essay, but rather than negating the male gaze or the representation of woman-as-spectacle, Breillat embraces a gaze which, though calm and detached, embraces the reactions and emotions of her female character and, in two rather intense scenes in Romance, Marie, the protagonist, is displayed in a kind of tableau vivant as she experiments in sadomasochism with her boss, but her objectivity is undercut by almost constant voiceover.
In fact, Romance constantly undercuts what might be seen as pornographic, objectifying, insulting representations of women and Marie in particular through voiceover and carefully orchestrated camera techniques. Marie’s voiceover is present-sometimes overwhelming-in almost every scene of the film. Like other filmmakers before her, Breillat uses orality and sexuality as a way of enforcing subjecthood over objecthood. In an analysis of Chantal Akerman’s film I, You, He, She, which Akerman directed, wrote, starred in, and further narrated through extensive voice-over, much similarly to Romance, Judith Mayne states that
“the process traced in Jet tu il elle is one of the very conditions of representation and representability for the female subject. I use the term subject advisedly, for what is affirmed in Akerman’s film is a position for the female subject vis-à-vis the cinema that affirms her visibility and her readability in terms irreducible to-and perhaps even independent of-the overlapping paradigms of gender and agency. This affirmation of female subjectivity in the cinema occurs in several ways: through the connections between different forms of orality (eating, speech, sex)…the desire to see and to be seen, to the desire to speak and to write. (Mayne 132)
Such an analysis could be adapted easily to Romance: Marie recklessly goes through various sexual situations in an attempt to find her sexuality and transcend the degradation she feels in her so-called “romantic” relationship which has become problematic because her boyfriend is no longer interested in sex. In a scene with her boss, Robert, the school principal (Marie is a teacher), he has invited her to his apartment and told her about the many women he’s had, over 10,000. He goes to his bookshelf and retrieves a book, telling her to read a passage to him. She looks at him for a moment, glances at the book, and replies, “I hate reading.” He subsequently reads the passage to her, but her statement has larger thematic implications in the movie. Marie hates reading but loves talking, talking during sex and about sex and talking in endless voiceovers to herself, constructing her subjectivity through speech which is literally voiced over and above the narrative situation and diegetic speech, superceding them in the hierarchy of narrative device. Leslie Felperin notes that, “For all its striking imagery the movie has a literary quality, emphasizing the word over the image.”[3]
However, her love of talking, and the film’s love of voiceover, is made ambivalent, like Marie’s own sexuality, by the sadomasochistic fantasies she plays out with Robert. In both situations shown in the film she is gagged, and rather enjoys it, and strangely enough, considering how much she analyzes everything else in the movie, does not analyze why she loves to be gagged, though the reason is evident: in using her sexuality to both negate her romantic relationship and find some sense of self, she stifles her voice in order to achieve greater sexual release. It is yet another moment where Marie undermines release through seeming restriction, yet in this case it is inverted-rather than stifling moments of sexual intimacy that might lead to her objectification with excessive voiceover, she has her voice gagged, sacrificing agency to achieve subjectivity. It is a complex turning point in the film for Marie.
In one scene with her boyfriend and his friend at the restaurant where Marie and her boyfriend usually eat, she speaks in voiceover throughout, and none of the diegetic conversation is heard above a murmur. The same technique is used to emphasize subjectivity in a particularly objectifying scene where Marie, who is now pregnant by an unsatisfying sexual encounter with her boyfriend, is being examined by “a bunch of pimply interns” as she says in her voiceover. As she is reduced to a “case study” she runs her fingers along her forehead, a gesture she repeats throughout the movie, and philosophizes about how this is her only sexual contact while she is pregnant, this completely disinterested scientific study to teach interns how to detect stages of pregnancy. Her character is extremely objectified in this situation and further objectified by a long take in which her body is surrounded by interns standing over her, yet her voice takes over the sound and reduces conversation, once again, to a murmur. Her voice demands subjectivity even as her body is objectified by the camera and the interns, a tension between word and image mirroring the tension between subjectivity and objectivity faced by the character and by the representation of female sexuality in cinema.
In a review of Romance, critic Georgy Katzarov considers the voice-over narration “a way, not of ‘pronouncing the film,’[4] but of stifling its matter, binding it in the ropes of its commentary, gagging the images, dominating them in every sense of the term.” He then goes on to remark that “Ordinarily a voiceover[5] serves to propel a narrative, yet here it resembles more of a theoretician than a narrator.”[6] As would suit Marie’s character, in an attempt to negate her romantic feelings for her boyfriend, who does not seem to share her love and is interested only in her as an accessory, and in an attempt to negate her need to tie sex to emotion by pursuing emotionless sexual encounters elsewhere, she makes frequent comments like “I don’t like the guys who screw me, I detest them”-said as she is having sex with Paolo, her first affair-or asking herself, “Why can’t I feel indifferent?” After her most harrowing encounter which turns into rape, she shouts after her rapist “I am not ashamed!” Her breath steadies, and she thinks to herself “I don’t want to sleep with men, I want to be opened up all the way, to show that all the mystique is nothing but innards […] maybe I just want to meet Jack the Ripper.” Her sardonic joke reveals how she uses her sarcastic inner commentary to negate the horrible encounters and her degrading relationship with her boyfriend, desperately rationalizing and philosophizing as a way of restoring some sense of self, intelligence, and consciousness to situations that leave her so dissatisfied. Though Katzarov meant his remarks negatively, it seems Breillat uses the voiceover in the same way that she uses the calm, un-erotic visuals-in order to demystify, depornografy, deobjectify sex and sexuality as normally represented, even in mainstream cinema. As Marie is unable to separate her overwhelming inner monologue from her interactions, we are unable to separate her emotional and intellectual turmoil from what we see on screen. In Romance, the voice is the emotion and connection and the image is a curious distancing from the narrative.
Just as Marie’s voiceover reveals her ambivalence and disgust toward sex and her sexuality, the visual element of Romance reveals an ambiguity as well-is Marie presented subjectively or objectively, especially in the series of tableaux vivants? Does Marie construct her sexuality or is she constructed? How does it complicate matters that the meta-constructor is a female director? In answer to the first question, one could argue that Marie is presented subjectively in that the camera does not split her body into commodified pieces, as it has in classical Hollywood movies (shots like Marlene Dietrich’s legs or fetishizations of Greta Garbo’s face are examples used by many feminist film theorists). In a short scene where Marie is masturbating in order to prove to herself that she does not need a man to satisfy her sexually, the camera pan is strikingly unconventional. Marie is lying on her back on her boyfriend’s bed, completely naked, and the camera begins by showing her feet, then moving up her body in a shot from directly above until it rests on her face. Visually, Breillat neither ignores nor emphasizes Marie’s nudity, never cuts to specific body parts, but logically ends the pan with Marie’s head, from which her voiceover emanates ad nauseum. Such matter-of-fact camera work is evident throughout the film, in the two extended tableaux vivants where Marie is tied up by her principal, in the scenes where she attempts to arouse her boyfriend but fails to even alter his bored expression, and in the scene where her darkest sexual encounter becomes rape-shot in one long take, hiding nothing but taking care to accentuate nothing-no cuts to faces or certain body parts, simply a visual telling of the incident, a succinct sentence saying “This happened.” Conversely, even the rape scene is smothered in the beginning and aftermath by Marie’s voiceover, quoted above.
The tableaux vivants are the most problematic segments of the film in terms of subjectivity. She is literally placed before a male spectator and a man who is her superior at work, her principal, bound and gagged in an erotic spectacle. However, the film undercuts this spectacle by showing precisely and with deadpan humor the intricacy of its construction: every loop of rope is shown, every knot is tied, her dress is placed just so, and a shot is even added of the principal, Robert, bringing in a chair on which to tie her. Each ankle is tied and she is adjusted once again. Any chance for congratulatory contemplation by either Robert or the viewer after this construction of spectacle is then ruined by Marie herself, who gets a wild look in her eyes and, when ungagged, demands that she be untied because she cannot stand it anymore. Robert unties her, which takes almost as long as the tying and is shown in as much careful, detached detail. Then she is shown crying, almost hysterical after the strange calm of that sadistic tableau, and Robert becomes not spectator but empathetic interlocutor, comforting her and asking if there is anything he can do. Surprisingly, she agrees to another tableau. In the second shown tableau (with a hint that others have occurred between, and that a sense of humor and playfulness has crept into their relationship) Marie has an amused smile on her face as Robert tells a story of his most famous conquest-the tension has almost disappeared, though the tableau is shown being constructed as carefully and with as much attention to detail as before. Marie seems as much a participant as element of spectacle, because her usual voiceover is augmented with genuine humor and interaction, not passivity, on either side of the spectacle.
Hopefully, this analysis of the complexities and tensions between voiceover and detached cinematographic techniques in Romance has shed some light on the problematic dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity in the film and in the representation of sexuality in the medium of film. It is fascinating that Breillat’s novels, which are well-written and as explicit as her films, have never created quite the stir that movies like Romance, Fat Girl, and The Anatomy of Hell have. Her films strike a nerve among theatre goers and critics around the world. Romance has only a 38% approval rating on rottentomatoes.com, and Anatomy of Hell a mere 27%, though both films received rave reviews by Jonathan Rosenbaum, the local critic of The Chicago Reader. Fat Girl, on the other hand, has already been released on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection-highly prestigious for a filmmaker who is as often as not called rather snidely a “provocateur.” Her polemical status and the hype surrounding her movies suggests that something about showing sexual exploration and attempting subjective representation in the process is much more problematic for audiences than telling about sexual exploration in the form of the novel is for readers. The sight of two people actually having sex on screen in the supposed safety of an art house theatre has shaken audiences much more than reading about it in Breillat’s books. And the nudity, problematic rape scenes, and sexual pathologies explored in Breillat’s movies with such impassioned poetics and detached calm have aroused extreme emotion in critics as well, leading one critic to call Romance “A painfully simple-minded film” and say “its empty pomposity makes it play like a caricature of an art film”[7] while Rosenbaum makes some interesting arguments that “Americans are much more likely to regard this kind of talk [referring to the poetic voiceover] as pretentious, which may have something to do with a prevalent conviction in this country that mind and body are hopelessly at odds with each other-something that may also account in part for the rabid anti-intellectualism of American pop culture.” He goes on to add that he finds the “musical counterpoint” of the voiceover coupled with the explicit imagery yields “a sensuality of thought.”[8] In its ambivalent and polemical style, Romance never quite answers the question of whether it is using the medium of film to objectify, subjectify, or even positively portray female sexuality-but it certainly does spark a healthy amount of debate.
Works Cited
Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What is Cinema? Ed. and translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
Felperin, Leslie and Linda Ruth Williams. “The Edge of the Razor.” Sight and Sound October 1999. Accessed online 28 February 2006 .
Katzarov, Georgy. “Le fils de ‘la Femme’: à propos de Romance de Catherine Breillat.” Inventaire/Invention. Accessed online 9 March 2006 22/27.
Mayne, Judith. The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women’s Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Ed. Patricia Erens. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Sexual Healing.” The Chicago Reader 1999. Accessed online 10 March 2006 .
Turan, Kenneth. “Uneasy Bedfellows in Hard-Core Romance” Los Angeles Times 1 October 1999. Accessed online 10 March 2006 < http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-movie991001-7,0,4367739.story>.
[1] Breillat in an interview with Linda Ruth Williams in “The Edge of the Razor” Sight and Sound, Oct 1999.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Lisa Felperin in “The Edge of the Razor.”
[4] A reference to filmmaker Claire Denis.
[5] Interestingly, “voiceover” in French is “une voix off”-a voice from off screen rather than a voice heard over the diegetic sound and narrative.
[6] Georgy Katzarov, “Le fils de ‘la Femme’: à propos de Romance de Catherine Breillat,” 22/27.
[7] Kenneth Turan, “Uneasy Bedfellows in Hard-Core Romance.”
[8] Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Sexual Healing.”