Film Features

"Portrait of a Lady on Fire" and the Creation of the Female Gaze

Sciamma seems to ask her audience why they've defined sensuality so rigidly when the possibilities are so vast.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire [Official Trailer] – In Theaters December 6, 2019

Céline Sciamma's period drama, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, starring Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant, is an answer to the question, "Can an erotic film about two women be made without an omnipresent male gaze?"

The answer is, definitively, yes.

As John Berger says in "Ways of Seeing"—his landmark essay that discusses the images of women in fine art—"the male gaze" refers to the way that women primarily exist in art as an object to be viewed by men. He says, "Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object–and most particularly an object of vision: a sight." But in this film Sciamma brings forth the notion that perhaps the male gaze can be escaped, not just in art but in life, and that maybe shaping a world seen through a female gaze is the way to save it.

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