Introduction
Catherine Breillat’s stark and often obtrusive engagements with sexuality at any age has sparked some debate around the pornographic in her work. Yet most debates and studies have insufficiently accounted for the director’s proximity to or distance from body genres. [1] The codes of horror, melodrama, and pornography are appropriated by Breillat and then seemingly misrepresented to produce a particular message or meaning about sexual relations: the shame of feminine sexuality under patriarchy. Breillat, however, is not a genre filmmaker, particularly if we take genre theorists and critics seriously in their definitions. Leo Braudy, for instance, observes that genres are closed off places with “pre-existing motifs, plot turns, actors, and situations… [that are] a respite from the more confusing and complicating worlds outside.” [2] For Rick Altman, semantic and syntactic elements of a genre – a genre’s “building blocks” and the “structures into which they are arranged” – are mutually agreed upon to greater and lesser degrees by a “generic community” made of up producers, critics, and spectators, [3] and this approach works both as a marketing strategy and as a lens to study or criticize particular films, trends, or movements. My contention is that this apparent stability of genre is an inaccurate characterization for much of filmmaking and also for spectators’ experience of non-genre specific films. Spectators’ assembly of images and sounds often do not conform to the identifiable genres with which theorists and critics maintain. As Stanley Cavell put it, what we see in the film, the objects and persons, are those things which “matter to us.” [4]
The following article highlights the porous quality of genre and the insufficiency of generalized or universal accounts of film genres which suppose a predetermined relationship for spectators to the images and sounds. Rick Altman identified this predetermined relationship as genre films’ attempt to turn spectators into a “single homogenous block.” [5] Film critics and theorists have differently noted that extreme cinema, a production trend Breillat has been associated with, is without generic codes; although, the directors associated with the trend appropriate these codes for their own artistic ends. [6] While many theorists of extreme cinema are content to note the associated filmmakers’ ties to pornography and horror, and Linda Williams goes as far as establishing extreme cinema as a subgenre of pornography, naming it “hard core art” [7] – a term that never quite “caught on” – few wish to study the production trend from the perspective of genre. [8] This essay proposes a reading of an extreme filmmaker from the lens of one genre in particular: pornography.
If extreme cinema is simultaneously pornographic and horrific while also displaying a disregard for these genres, perhaps extreme cinema has much to offer genre theory. I will argue that Breillat’s films play with the semantic and syntactic components of pornography. [9] My semantic and syntactic analysis would then make possible a study of extreme cinema from a pragmatic approach, the next stage of analysis in Altman’s proposed reading of genres (semantic/syntactic/pragmatic). A pragmatic study of genre would consider one user group and place them alongside competing user groups to thereby accomplish what Altman terms “a broader process-oriented and interactive analysis.” [10] Indeed, my approach has less to do with the adult entertainment industry as it currently stands than it does with developing “broader conceptualizations of porn[ography],” an undertaking similar to that of Helen Hester in Beyond Explicit. [11] Unlike Hester who demonstrates that the term pornographic no longer only applies to sexually explicit displays and therefore we should do away with the notion of porn as a genre, I demonstrate the genre’s shifting terrain and the merits of included Breillat within it.
I maintain the use of genre because most spectators know what pornography is today and because of this seemingly ubiquitous knowledge, according to Williams, they are quick to confuse sexually explicit displays with hard-core porn. Williams thus considers an analysis of sexually explicit art cinema, in light of the pornography genre, a valuable endeavour. [12] As an auteur in the extreme cinema trend, Breillat is worth examining from the perspective of genre and pornography. When one user group attends to the sex scenes in Breillat’s films, her works are in direct competition with their preconceived ideas and habitual responses to pornography. A definition of pornography, similar to other genres, is arrived at via individual spectators’ processes of interpretation and prior knowledge of it (and of course that knowledge is derived from film production, distribution, exhibition, consumption, criticism, and theory), but this does not mean that the films viewed by the critical spectator are not without form and style. Breillat’s films, by aiming to elicit spectators’ processes of interpretation in regards to pornography and the pornographic, opens a path for viewers to grasp her message regarding the status of women’s desire and sexuality in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
First, I will assess Breillat’s distance from erotica and pornography traditionally associated with and for a male viewer, and argue that she overturns the laws of that genre and its pre-established film experience. Breillat’s films, according to my reading, are exemplary objects to trace just how a filmmaker can work against positioning pornography as a stable and universally agreed upon category. Indeed, there are a number of moving-image pornographies and many theorists have made the case that pornography does constitute a genre, beginning of course with Williams’s canonical volume Hard Core. [13] Breillat’s pornography is one type among many, thus my intervention in genre studies is to expand the horizon of possibility for this filmmaker’s inclusion within the generic community of pornography cinephiles and scholars. Second, I will lay out the problem of the imaginary (identification) and its relation to the exchange of looks I locate in Breillat’s films. Since Breillat places the burden of sense-making and organization on spectators, however, there is a chance that the transmission of her message may misfire or be blocked by spectatorial aversion to pornography or their heightened arousal of the profilmic event (the real bodies of the performers). At the same time her message can be transmitted only by taking this risk. Truth is in making an obscenity, not as in a moral outrage, but through disrupting the practices of genre filmmaking and habituated patterns of spectatorship.
Erotic and/or Pornographic
To think through Breillat’s films, we must make a distinction between erotica and pornography first, then follow with definitions of two versions of pornography, call them classical or common sense and non-pornographic. I use non-pornographic as a descriptor of Breillat’s work to retain her films’ status as explicit displays of bodies while also marking a clear separation between her version of fictionalized sexual acts and those found in classic and contemporary pornography. Williams also argues we should maintain this distinction in our studies of cinematic sex. In films such as Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2, Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013), Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac, Alain Guiraudie, 2013), and Nymph()maniac (Lars Von Trier, 2014), she names the sexual scenes “relatively explicit sex.” [14] In the following pages we shall see how this dichotomy operates.
Erotic art, defined as either soft-core or the display of female nudes, has been traditionally associated with an embodied male viewer. John Berger, writing on the history of European painting of nudes, locates “the real subject” of the canvas outside the object of art: “He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man…. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity.” [15]
Breillat echoes this position on erotic art, stating the erotic “is a mysterious woman in suspenders, spreading her legs, turning men on.” [16] I suggest that eroticism contains an idea of a composed viewer’s aesthetic appreciation additionally, a kind of admiration or awe at the sight of the nude woman. We can find this in extreme cinema from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saló (1975) to Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty (2011). Similar to Justice William Brennan, who in 1957 said hard-core pornography only has one ‘idea’, namely that “there is pleasure in sexual gratification,” [17], erotic art in my definition here has only one idea – the pleasures of viewing the unclothed woman. Contemporary erotic literature by contrast, according to Susanna Paasonen’s research on the website Literotica, establishes that “character motivation, desire, and sexual buildup are central, and characters may have insecurities and traumas.” [18] Indeed, erotica can be judged and assessed based on the criteria of plot and character development, style, “complexity, and non-explicit elements.” [19]
Cinematic pornography is something different from erotic art and literary erotica, although, as Justice Potter Stewart would have it, we all know it when we see it. Williams’s rudimentary definition of pornography, in her inaugural study Hard Core, is what most of us would expect to find in a pornographic film: “the visual (and sometimes aural) representation of living, moving bodies engaged in explicit, usually un-faked, sexual acts with a primary intent of arousing viewers.” [20] However, there is more to pornography than this semantic dimension. Williams also writes that in pornography from Eadweard Muybridge to contemporary DVDs, there is an attempt to find the truth of female bodies, pleasures, and sex generally – a kind of science through plot, maximum visibility, and the money shot. [21] Furthermore, aligning pornography with the musical, she contends that “in cinematic hard core we encounter a profoundly ‘escapist’ genre that distracts audiences from the deeper social or political causes of the disturbed relations between the sexes.” [22] Pornography, then, has at least two functions as opposed to erotic art’s singular aim: to really move the viewer, arousal or otherwise as I will argue, and to develop and posit some form of escape but also, paradoxically, some versions of truth. In Breillat’s case, more paradoxical still, she attempts to undermine popular conceptions about what a pornographic film is while also attempting to transmit a particular vision of contemporary heterosexual romance.
The line between erotica and pornography is what Paasonen would term “leaky” – the boundaries are blurry at best. [23] Paasonen contends that rather than semantic or syntactic elements distinguishing the two, the affective dimension highlights an individual’s definition (and experience) of the genre. She neatly summarizes this difference as follows, clearly at odds with Breillat’s distinction between pornography and the erotic: “The affective power of pornography depends on the detailed yet hyperbolic depictions of sexual arousal, scenarios, acts, and sensations aiming to turn the reader on, whereas the affective power of erotica revolves around desire and emotional realism.” [24] The director suggests the reverse is true for her art. Given such a reversal of our generic terminology, Martin Crowley contends that it is appropriate to state that Breillat’s directorial brilliance is that she treads a path that is pornographic yet not erotic, [25] but it is perhaps more appropriate to work with Paasonen’s above definition. Breillat blends the affective power of pornographic depictions with an emotional realism to produce multiple and perhaps conflicting effects for the spectator. In fact, such an experience is how some women use porn. Clarissa Smith’s 2012 qualitative research suggests that the interplay between a viewer’s sexual arousal and her emotional and critical reception of a film, such as critiquing plot, performance, cinematography, and violent sexualities, is common. [26] I therefore situate Breillat within a style of pornography that recuperates the term from otherwise hostile or dismissive definitions; I contend that she must be pornographic, and explicit, if some element of truth in obscenity is to be found.
In my proposed reading of Breillat, her films find a generic home in Williams’s critical evaluation of the body genres, films capable of producing intense sensations in the spectator. [27] The sensation received from Breillat’s films is not the satisfying discharge of the “scratch” identified by Williams in the experience of watching a porno chic film like Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972).; Conversely, Breillat would perhaps want viewers to feel an “itch… that ‘seeks nothing better than its own prolongation, even its own intensification,’” similar to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972). [28] We can additionally state that Breillat’s films produce a cinematic displeasure, oftentimes a shock to moral sentiments, and it is this method of moving spectators which allows her to articulate her message regarding women’s shame, desire, and sexuality. Unlike the pornographic features Williams outlines in her book-length study, sexuality as shot and enacted in Breillat’s films “is no longer any fun” for the fictional characters; [29]; encounters are rife with dissatisfaction, distaste, and misery, and therefore a radical departure from the arousing quality of erotic images or mainstream porn designed to titillate a specifically male viewer. “Pornography is ugly,” the director states, “and I prefer ugly.” [30]
In Romance (1999), Marie (Caroline Ducey) appears indifferent to performing and receiving oral sex, cries during bondage, and thinks more about sex and the relations between the sexes than enjoying the act. Elena (Roxane Mesquida), in Fat Girl (À ma soeur!, 2001), is immobile and in tears while nude; she moans in agony rather than sexual ecstasy when the man finally conquers her:
Catherine Breillat’s stark and often obtrusive engagements with sexuality at any age has sparked some debate around the pornographic in her work. Yet most debates and studies have insufficiently accounted for the director’s proximity to or distance from body genres. [1] The codes of horror, melodrama, and pornography are appropriated by Breillat and then seemingly misrepresented to produce a particular message or meaning about sexual relations: the shame of feminine sexuality under patriarchy. Breillat, however, is not a genre filmmaker, particularly if we take genre theorists and critics seriously in their definitions. Leo Braudy, for instance, observes that genres are closed off places with “pre-existing motifs, plot turns, actors, and situations… [that are] a respite from the more confusing and complicating worlds outside.” [2] For Rick Altman, semantic and syntactic elements of a genre – a genre’s “building blocks” and the “structures into which they are arranged” – are mutually agreed upon to greater and lesser degrees by a “generic community” made of up producers, critics, and spectators, [3] and this approach works both as a marketing strategy and as a lens to study or criticize particular films, trends, or movements. My contention is that this apparent stability of genre is an inaccurate characterization for much of filmmaking and also for spectators’ experience of non-genre specific films. Spectators’ assembly of images and sounds often do not conform to the identifiable genres with which theorists and critics maintain. As Stanley Cavell put it, what we see in the film, the objects and persons, are those things which “matter to us.” [4]
The following article highlights the porous quality of genre and the insufficiency of generalized or universal accounts of film genres which suppose a predetermined relationship for spectators to the images and sounds. Rick Altman identified this predetermined relationship as genre films’ attempt to turn spectators into a “single homogenous block.” [5] Film critics and theorists have differently noted that extreme cinema, a production trend Breillat has been associated with, is without generic codes; although, the directors associated with the trend appropriate these codes for their own artistic ends. [6] While many theorists of extreme cinema are content to note the associated filmmakers’ ties to pornography and horror, and Linda Williams goes as far as establishing extreme cinema as a subgenre of pornography, naming it “hard core art” [7] – a term that never quite “caught on” – few wish to study the production trend from the perspective of genre. [8] This essay proposes a reading of an extreme filmmaker from the lens of one genre in particular: pornography.
If extreme cinema is simultaneously pornographic and horrific while also displaying a disregard for these genres, perhaps extreme cinema has much to offer genre theory. I will argue that Breillat’s films play with the semantic and syntactic components of pornography. [9] My semantic and syntactic analysis would then make possible a study of extreme cinema from a pragmatic approach, the next stage of analysis in Altman’s proposed reading of genres (semantic/syntactic/pragmatic). A pragmatic study of genre would consider one user group and place them alongside competing user groups to thereby accomplish what Altman terms “a broader process-oriented and interactive analysis.” [10] Indeed, my approach has less to do with the adult entertainment industry as it currently stands than it does with developing “broader conceptualizations of porn[ography],” an undertaking similar to that of Helen Hester in Beyond Explicit. [11] Unlike Hester who demonstrates that the term pornographic no longer only applies to sexually explicit displays and therefore we should do away with the notion of porn as a genre, I demonstrate the genre’s shifting terrain and the merits of included Breillat within it.
I maintain the use of genre because most spectators know what pornography is today and because of this seemingly ubiquitous knowledge, according to Williams, they are quick to confuse sexually explicit displays with hard-core porn. Williams thus considers an analysis of sexually explicit art cinema, in light of the pornography genre, a valuable endeavour. [12] As an auteur in the extreme cinema trend, Breillat is worth examining from the perspective of genre and pornography. When one user group attends to the sex scenes in Breillat’s films, her works are in direct competition with their preconceived ideas and habitual responses to pornography. A definition of pornography, similar to other genres, is arrived at via individual spectators’ processes of interpretation and prior knowledge of it (and of course that knowledge is derived from film production, distribution, exhibition, consumption, criticism, and theory), but this does not mean that the films viewed by the critical spectator are not without form and style. Breillat’s films, by aiming to elicit spectators’ processes of interpretation in regards to pornography and the pornographic, opens a path for viewers to grasp her message regarding the status of women’s desire and sexuality in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
First, I will assess Breillat’s distance from erotica and pornography traditionally associated with and for a male viewer, and argue that she overturns the laws of that genre and its pre-established film experience. Breillat’s films, according to my reading, are exemplary objects to trace just how a filmmaker can work against positioning pornography as a stable and universally agreed upon category. Indeed, there are a number of moving-image pornographies and many theorists have made the case that pornography does constitute a genre, beginning of course with Williams’s canonical volume Hard Core. [13] Breillat’s pornography is one type among many, thus my intervention in genre studies is to expand the horizon of possibility for this filmmaker’s inclusion within the generic community of pornography cinephiles and scholars. Second, I will lay out the problem of the imaginary (identification) and its relation to the exchange of looks I locate in Breillat’s films. Since Breillat places the burden of sense-making and organization on spectators, however, there is a chance that the transmission of her message may misfire or be blocked by spectatorial aversion to pornography or their heightened arousal of the profilmic event (the real bodies of the performers). At the same time her message can be transmitted only by taking this risk. Truth is in making an obscenity, not as in a moral outrage, but through disrupting the practices of genre filmmaking and habituated patterns of spectatorship.
Erotic and/or Pornographic
To think through Breillat’s films, we must make a distinction between erotica and pornography first, then follow with definitions of two versions of pornography, call them classical or common sense and non-pornographic. I use non-pornographic as a descriptor of Breillat’s work to retain her films’ status as explicit displays of bodies while also marking a clear separation between her version of fictionalized sexual acts and those found in classic and contemporary pornography. Williams also argues we should maintain this distinction in our studies of cinematic sex. In films such as Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adèle, Chapitres 1 et 2, Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013), Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac, Alain Guiraudie, 2013), and Nymph()maniac (Lars Von Trier, 2014), she names the sexual scenes “relatively explicit sex.” [14] In the following pages we shall see how this dichotomy operates.
Erotic art, defined as either soft-core or the display of female nudes, has been traditionally associated with an embodied male viewer. John Berger, writing on the history of European painting of nudes, locates “the real subject” of the canvas outside the object of art: “He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man…. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity.” [15]
Breillat echoes this position on erotic art, stating the erotic “is a mysterious woman in suspenders, spreading her legs, turning men on.” [16] I suggest that eroticism contains an idea of a composed viewer’s aesthetic appreciation additionally, a kind of admiration or awe at the sight of the nude woman. We can find this in extreme cinema from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saló (1975) to Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty (2011). Similar to Justice William Brennan, who in 1957 said hard-core pornography only has one ‘idea’, namely that “there is pleasure in sexual gratification,” [17], erotic art in my definition here has only one idea – the pleasures of viewing the unclothed woman. Contemporary erotic literature by contrast, according to Susanna Paasonen’s research on the website Literotica, establishes that “character motivation, desire, and sexual buildup are central, and characters may have insecurities and traumas.” [18] Indeed, erotica can be judged and assessed based on the criteria of plot and character development, style, “complexity, and non-explicit elements.” [19]
Cinematic pornography is something different from erotic art and literary erotica, although, as Justice Potter Stewart would have it, we all know it when we see it. Williams’s rudimentary definition of pornography, in her inaugural study Hard Core, is what most of us would expect to find in a pornographic film: “the visual (and sometimes aural) representation of living, moving bodies engaged in explicit, usually un-faked, sexual acts with a primary intent of arousing viewers.” [20] However, there is more to pornography than this semantic dimension. Williams also writes that in pornography from Eadweard Muybridge to contemporary DVDs, there is an attempt to find the truth of female bodies, pleasures, and sex generally – a kind of science through plot, maximum visibility, and the money shot. [21] Furthermore, aligning pornography with the musical, she contends that “in cinematic hard core we encounter a profoundly ‘escapist’ genre that distracts audiences from the deeper social or political causes of the disturbed relations between the sexes.” [22] Pornography, then, has at least two functions as opposed to erotic art’s singular aim: to really move the viewer, arousal or otherwise as I will argue, and to develop and posit some form of escape but also, paradoxically, some versions of truth. In Breillat’s case, more paradoxical still, she attempts to undermine popular conceptions about what a pornographic film is while also attempting to transmit a particular vision of contemporary heterosexual romance.
The line between erotica and pornography is what Paasonen would term “leaky” – the boundaries are blurry at best. [23] Paasonen contends that rather than semantic or syntactic elements distinguishing the two, the affective dimension highlights an individual’s definition (and experience) of the genre. She neatly summarizes this difference as follows, clearly at odds with Breillat’s distinction between pornography and the erotic: “The affective power of pornography depends on the detailed yet hyperbolic depictions of sexual arousal, scenarios, acts, and sensations aiming to turn the reader on, whereas the affective power of erotica revolves around desire and emotional realism.” [24] The director suggests the reverse is true for her art. Given such a reversal of our generic terminology, Martin Crowley contends that it is appropriate to state that Breillat’s directorial brilliance is that she treads a path that is pornographic yet not erotic, [25] but it is perhaps more appropriate to work with Paasonen’s above definition. Breillat blends the affective power of pornographic depictions with an emotional realism to produce multiple and perhaps conflicting effects for the spectator. In fact, such an experience is how some women use porn. Clarissa Smith’s 2012 qualitative research suggests that the interplay between a viewer’s sexual arousal and her emotional and critical reception of a film, such as critiquing plot, performance, cinematography, and violent sexualities, is common. [26] I therefore situate Breillat within a style of pornography that recuperates the term from otherwise hostile or dismissive definitions; I contend that she must be pornographic, and explicit, if some element of truth in obscenity is to be found.
In my proposed reading of Breillat, her films find a generic home in Williams’s critical evaluation of the body genres, films capable of producing intense sensations in the spectator. [27] The sensation received from Breillat’s films is not the satisfying discharge of the “scratch” identified by Williams in the experience of watching a porno chic film like Deep Throat (Gerard Damiano, 1972).; Conversely, Breillat would perhaps want viewers to feel an “itch… that ‘seeks nothing better than its own prolongation, even its own intensification,’” similar to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972). [28] We can additionally state that Breillat’s films produce a cinematic displeasure, oftentimes a shock to moral sentiments, and it is this method of moving spectators which allows her to articulate her message regarding women’s shame, desire, and sexuality. Unlike the pornographic features Williams outlines in her book-length study, sexuality as shot and enacted in Breillat’s films “is no longer any fun” for the fictional characters; [29]; encounters are rife with dissatisfaction, distaste, and misery, and therefore a radical departure from the arousing quality of erotic images or mainstream porn designed to titillate a specifically male viewer. “Pornography is ugly,” the director states, “and I prefer ugly.” [30]
In Romance (1999), Marie (Caroline Ducey) appears indifferent to performing and receiving oral sex, cries during bondage, and thinks more about sex and the relations between the sexes than enjoying the act. Elena (Roxane Mesquida), in Fat Girl (À ma soeur!, 2001), is immobile and in tears while nude; she moans in agony rather than sexual ecstasy when the man finally conquers her:
The unnamed woman (Amira Cesar) in Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer, 2004) bleeds from her wrists, menstruates, and is depressive. The sex in Breillat’s films, although resembling the acts we would see in porn, i.e., nude men and women engaging in sexual intercourse, is as dissatisfying for the characters as for viewers.
It would greatly miss the point of Breillat’s pornographic work if we were to suggest she is creating a piece of erotic art, e.g., feminists who want eroticism as a product of and for women’s sexuality and as an opposition to male-centered pornography. “To be honest, I don’t think there is such a thing as erotic art. Art compromises you,” the director mentions in an interview. “It’s subversive. So it can’t be erotic.” [31] Neither would it be helpful to assimilate Breillat into established definitions of porn: “I’m opposed to the porn industry’s confiscation of the representation of sex. For me, the X-rated film industry … signifies the indignity of the female sex.” [32] However, she also states that pornography can retain respect, integrity, and dignity if the performer’s sexual acts are indeed what the woman wants to do. [33] Given these preliminary analyses and remarks from the director, and following Eugenie Brinkema in her essay on the director, I name the dominant genre at work in Breillat’s oeuvre non-pornographic pornography. A non-pornographic pornography would be a sexually graphic film crafted in such a manner to convey not just arousal – or better, no arousal at all – but to operate as a challenge to existing sexual relations and the power dynamics therein, both onscreen and off. This is a reconceptualising of the genre’s syntax.
At a cursory glance, the common sense use of the term pornography can be applied to Breillat’s narratives about feminine sexuality and patriarchy in contemporary times. But without the rhythm of the sexual numbers and narrative, maximum visibility, the money shot, etc., those semantic elements of the genre so well identified by Williams and others, Breillat displaces or puts sex somewhere else, outside of eroticism and sexual arousal, and into critical thought. She uses long takes, close-ups of faces instead of genitals, no moans or groans except during the male orgasm as a counterpoint to the silence of the woman, and highlights the frequent inactivity of the female character, always immobile and often in tears while the man has his pleasure. Breillat’s female characters are at first glance intentionally passive in the sense described by Laura Mulvey in her famous essay, but what is active in the film experience is not the male spectator or his scopophilia; it is rather his critical engagement with the message through style, content, and narrative. According to Brinkema, the director’s tactics work together to show that “the teleology of sex is clearly meant to ‘lead to’ something nonsexual – … contemplation, thought, a gesture of aesthetic or political engagement that is not located solely in the lower enclaves of the body.” [34] Brinkema further suggests the affected spectator is split between her arousal which is present, because of the sexualized bodies onscreen, and the ideas Breillat is trying to convey through these bodies.
Like the women separated by the partition in the brothel scene of Romance, this partition which symbolizes the irreconcilability of mind and body or love and desire for women who still unfortunately live under the oppressiveness of male desire and fantasy, viewers too should be split. Spectators are split between, first, their call to arousal, the s/m images onscreen in this instance habitually linked to porn they have seen before or have seen in their imaginations when one says “Imagine s/m porn,” and second, the viewer’s forced entry into the realm of critical judgment. By the end of the scene, concluding with a rapidly cut money shot onto the abdomen of an unidentified woman, a number of filmic, cinematic, and social and political ideas call our attention: our visual, aural, and cognitive engagement is ignited due to the out-of-place-ness of this fantasy within an otherwise realist narrative, the strangeness of the setting, the length of the shot, no cuts to maximum visibility, and the dismal lighting. To do justice to this sequence of the film spectators must examine and assess why it found its way into the feature: what is its power, its fascination, and why, if we saw it under different circumstances, say without the view of the upper halves, would it be pleasurable.
My preliminary assessment is that the money shot does not “‘fix’ the exact moment of the sexual act’s involuntary convulsion of pleasure”. [35] In Romance it transmits what Breillat considers to be a truth, namely that the orgasm is on the side of the man while the woman’s mind is occupied elsewhere. Breillat’s other films provide additional evidence for my experience of this scene. I find this truth in 36 fillette (1988), in Fat Girl, and in Brief Crossing (Brève traversée, 2001): Lili’s (Delphine Zentout) first sexual intercourse is not about her pleasure but ridding herself of the virgin stigma; Elena is hyperconscious of whether Fernando (Libero de Rienzo) loves her during her first time; and Alice (Sarah Pratt) has sex with her young man (Gilles Guillain), then quickly dismisses him, as payback for the harms done to her by men from her past.
In “Celluloid is Sticky: Sex, Death, Materiality, Metaphysics (in Some Films by Catherine Breillat),” Brinkema observes the complexities associated with positing the director within a tradition of pornography whose products are on the one hand easily verifiable to any consumer of media, and on the other, so frequently impossible to convincingly limit, define, and categorize. [36] In Breillat there is something new produced within a field of pornographic work, what Brinkema calls a non-pornographic body, and Breillat herself has named pornocracy. [37] Etymologically the term opposes pornography, the writing about prostitutes, and suggests something new about art and sexuality. Etymologically the term means the strength of the prostitute. [38] In my work here we can identify a non-pornographic body as, first, a subject in her conditions or situation, in Breillat’s view a situation still quite horrible under the visible and invisible forces of patriarchy. Second, a body can be non-pornographic when feminine interiority is fully explored, a subjectivity on display and narrated, exemplified most powerfully in Marie’s voiceovers in Romance, Alice’s critical reflections on relations between the sexes in Brief Crossing, and Elena in Fat Girl through the extended use of medium close-ups of her face. In this film we do not need an internal monologue; Elena’s tears, stillness, and resistance to sexual advances are enough for us to see beneath the skin. James Hansen writes with reference to Anatomy of Hell but equally applicable to Fat Girl, “the visibility of explicit sex, violence, and characters’ varying responses to them ‘allows the body to become a symbol of power, pleasure, and weakness, capable of communication, emotion, and psychological depth – three abilities of the body that could not be made evident through dialogue.’” [39]
Marie asserts, “Sex is metaphysical,” a claim which posits an outside and beyond what is presented onscreen, and not for a moment does Breillat cease to remind us of this in any one of her films. This is also a reminder to be attentive to the manner in which bodies are framed and shots are organized, as well as to give critical consideration to the depicted acts and events within their respective contexts, stories, and prior and succeeding plot elements. For Breillat the concealed reality of woman’s shame under patriarchy is revealed in and through the appropriation of and experimentation with the pornographic genre; her films function as alternatives to generic stylistic and plot devices in an effort to generate new ideas about the genre as well the heterosexual romantic situation, both diegetically and in the world as lived by (Western) individuals.
We are now in a position to more carefully assess the film experience itself.
Looking-at Breillat’s Films
Hard-core pornography is a thoroughly fictional representation, an appearance of what an actual sexual act might look like (thus the concerns and fears that the genre is also a guide to sexuality). This is something porn actors and actresses consistently remind us of, e.g., as seen and heard in Bryce Wagoner’s interviews with retired porn performers. [40] I put forward a rather Platonic account of pornography here, [41], what the painting is to a real object hard-core pornography is to real sex – the former is by many degrees separated from the latter. In Breillat’s films there is instead a fictional act that is also a living inscription of sexuality; there is a reality presented onscreen, re-presented to viewers as the presence of something really occurring, which is quite different from a representation of something, i.e., what it could be like or containing an objective correlate outside of the film. André Bazin saw in photography the tracing or mummification of things as such, and furthermore, this mummification in cinema is not the static image but of duration and space. He writes, with cinema “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.” [42] It is not a direct presentation, but the really existing thing is presented, set before us, as a fact of reality.
In this now naïve view I nevertheless maintain that the depiction of sexual relations in Breillat’s films is fictionally re-presented, not as the image or imaginary of sexuality, but the immediate, onscreen presence of sex itself as Breillat defines it, an experience of watching something real – or, if we like, Breillat gives us the fact of her view of sexuality, a fictionalized view of a lived reality seen through her eyes. Through critical engagement with that reality re-presented we should gain valid concepts and ideas about the director’s position on contemporary sexual relations. Arguably this is part of the formal and narrative techniques employed as I noted above, but she also works through classical definitions of pornography and spectators’ associations with the genre. Her films then challenge us to organize our film experience not as a series of images which titillate or arouse, but through her unappealing and unpleasurable reality of sex in a given film, and through this re-presentation, move us to dissect if not accept her view. Thus my deployment of the term non-pornography.
To tease out what this means for the spectator and how Breillat wills us into an active engagement with her work, we can think of Christian Metz’s and Mulvey’s theories of the gaze. Breillat seems keenly aware of their brand of universalizing spectatorship theories to then make us aware of the power cinema has to foster multiple kinds of viewing. If cinema is the unobstructed perception of a cinematic reality, the apparatus masked by various stylistic and narrative devices (Metz), and the perception of that reality through those devices consequently produces an objectification of women, or women are taken as a spectacle for an active male viewer (Mulvey), Breillat and other contemporary auteurs of hard-core art, according to Williams, [43] create films which point to the limitations of these respective modes of engaging both filmmaking and the film experience.
Metz and Mulvey suggest spectators identify with the camera and/or with character as an extension of themselves. [44] Spectators perceive an imaginary world into which they are wholly immersed. The film experience is standardized in the Metz/Mulvey account and this attempt to universalize the spectator has brought forth a strong critique. Sarah Cooper states that Metz’s position is ultimately “blind to the differences between human beings, their bodies, and their psyches,” leading to a homogenizing of the spectator, namely as “the white male of a predominantly heterosexual society.” [45] Mulvey, though attempting to reconcile gender and sexual differences at the cinema, similarly posits a male spectator at the expense of other viewing positions. According to Michele Aaron, Mulvey denies the possibility of the man as object of the gaze and further, sought to do away with narrative filmmaking altogether because of its explicit and implicit ties to patriarchal society. [46]
The position I develop, in contrast to Metz’s and Mulvey’s, resonates with Tom Gunning’s critique of Metz. According to Gunning, Metz provocatively argued that modern cinema audiences want to believe that early cinema audiences were terrified by the apparent reality of moving-images. These modern spectators are to early spectators as an adult’s laughter is to a child’s belief in Santa Claus. [47] Yet, Metz claims, the modern audience is subject to the same psychic responses as the prior one: “No longer a historical spectator in the Grand Café in 1895, the naïve spectator ‘is still seated beneath the incredulous one, or in his heart.’” [48] We see Metz trying to bridge the historical gap between the misinterpreted early film experiences – as terror in the aisles – and the illusion of reality presented in classical narrative cinema; regardless of historical situatedness the spectator remains constant. Contrary to Metz, Gunning’s insight that cinema does not operate as a medium of “illusionistic absorption” parallels my own project, namely, Breillat’s films “continually remind… the spectator of the act of watching by a succession of sensual assaults.” [49] The key to the critique of Metz and Mulvey is that the cinema does, in fact, open up a multiplicity of viewing positions.
Thus neither Metz’s nor Mulvey’s angle will be sufficient to account for the actual film experience, as I noted with Cavell, an experience which is determined by the spectator for him or herself. Breillat’s cinema offers numerous vantage points from which to be affected. Her camera itself does not lead us to the truth of the sexual situation, such as the fact of the sexual act through maximum visibility, but rather to a technologically-mediated presence of the scene of sexual relations, i.e., the power dynamics, desires, and feelings of shame. If a spectator is prone to identify with a male protagonist, take up his perception of a passive woman, for example, this is not the case for Breillat’s most discussed film. There is not a clear-cut identification with the body of Rocco Siffredi in Romance, whose presence next to Ducey is nearly absent as the camera focuses instead on the actress’s face, and the sounds are of voiceover rather than the sex act. Efforts are made on Breillat’s part to not “reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception,” [50], e.g., a look which resituates itself to get the best point of view. What I do not have difficulty with, as Metz says, is encountering myself, not in the film (producing ego ideals through the star system) or as the all-perceiving subject– for Breillat does not give us such freedom – but as body and social body. Unlike the mirror, Metz writes, the cinema does not return (an image of) our body, but I argue Breillat does return the spectator to his body.
Conscious memory (contra unconscious structures, or repressed moments of infancy and childhood) provides spectators a source for finding themselves in and with the characters and events onscreen, or in other words, an identification that fosters the production of thought and ideas. John Phillips sees this in Romance, Marie’s voiceover lending men and women alike a sense of identification through psychological interiority, and Martin Barker’s audience research on Fat Girl drives this argument home. [51] Women find themselves in Elena and, against Breillat’s claim that men cannot identify with the male characters, surveyed respondents successfully identified Fernando’s seduction and coercion tactics in their own romantic pasts. Breillat’s men are not ideals but types we recognize.
This identification is possible not because, as Bazin simply claimed, reality is exhibited as such through the passive lens of the camera. It is more accurate to say with Cavell that we see neither humans nor imaginary signifiers onscreen but “human somethings.” [52]We see a thing that is both there – we know it is a real person – but also absent – he is not there in our presence. In our knowledge that there exists a real person who becomes a star for the camera, we watch his performance of a role through “his physical and temperamental endowment.” He is therefore not the character authored by the screen or story-writer – the star is the kind of character “real people are: a type.” [53] These somethings onscreen are human precisely because we know ourselves and others as a certain type. I can speculate that the same identification experienced in Romance and Fat Girl holds true for Anatomy of Hell’s male viewers; as Asbjørn Grønstad puts it about the unnamed man in the film, men abhor “the truths of the female body.” [54] The unnamed man of that film is of a certain type – the intellectual misogynist. But Breillat counters Mulvey’s claims then as the male protagonist, with whom we would identify as ideal ego, does not have the kind of freedom of the stage exhibited in other narrative features. The unnamed woman is in control of his movements, his look, his sex. In this way he does not become a “screen surrogate” for the male spectator’s “ideal ego.” Contrary to Mulvey’s observations about the men often depicted in the cinema, iIn Romance and Anatomy Siffredi is not “more perfect, more complete, more powerful” [55] than the man in the audience because, in the former, the actor/character is barely present onscreen (in frame, through dialogue, or narrative importance), and neither does he appear omnipotent in either feature as his sexuality, strength, and “manliness” is at best questionable.
We can further distance ourselves from the look of Metz’s and Mulvey’s ideal spectator if we return to Breillat’s women characters who exhibit heightened indifference, passiveness, and lack of enthusiasm for sex. Paul Willemen and Slavoj Žižek note the power of the fourth look in porn, the seductive look back at the spectator by the performer, which both situates the performer onscreen as “to-be-looked-at” and throws the experience of film off-kilter as the absent performer seems to be made aware of the spectator who, in seeing the fourth look, now experiences the “to-be-looked-at-ness” himself. [57] But the actresses and characters in Breillat’s films are often not there to be looked at by other characters, nor there for what Mulvey would view as spectators’ scopophilia or narcissistic ego, and neither do they make us aware of their absent presence by the fourth look. No one part of the body is emphasized in Romance, Phillips argues, and efforts are made in Fat Girl to conceal rather than reveal both Elena’s and Anaïs’s bodies (although Alice Haylett Bryan, in her contribution to this issue, thoroughly disagrees with claims such as Phillips’s – noting the power of the mirror in Breillat’s films to fragment women’s bodies in an effort to critique patriarchy). Moreover, through the twist at the end of this latter film, Breillat unveils the story’s revelatory power by concealing her message. This message requires viewers to decode it, i.e., use their cognitive faculties to make sense of it.
Further countering the position Metz and Mulvey outline as specific to the cinema, i.e., the to-be-looked-at-ness of women characters/actresses, Phillips notes that Marie is a “searcher” in that she “looks for” men in the narrative. [58] Similarly Elena and Anaïs in Fat Girl are searching for their seducers, and in the two very different forms of rape that take place in the film, Breillat may force us to look away from the screen rather than receive pleasure from it. We see how Breillat again counters the kind of gaze posited by Mulvey, namely, that the woman is there onscreen “to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation [for the male character/viewer].” [59] The women of her films push ahead the action or drama and do not remain static for us to contemplate. The thesis of Anatomy of Hell, for instance, is evinced by a series of looks: in order to feel adequate, whole, or whatever psychological interpretation we want to provide, an unnamed woman asks a strange and unnamed man to watch her where she is “unwatchable” (or “unlookable” as translated by Paul Buck and Catherine Petit in the source material for the film) [60] i.e., a gaze without patriarchal oppression. Ultimately this request is left unfulfilled as the pair spend four nights together dissecting patriarchy, masculinity, femininity, and sexuality with no real progress or purpose. Adrienne Angelo has suggested (2010: 51) of Anatomy of Hell additionally that the look as producer of knowledge is halted by the impossible to “reciprocate gaze” of the unnamed man on the one hand, and on the other, the impossibility of him to fully see the woman where she is “unwatchable.” [61] Thus the film ends much like real life – in aporia.
Provided these examples, it seems that the spectator Metz and Mulvey posit is affirmed by Breillat to then present to us cinema’s power to control the four looks, and in this process of being made aware of the cinematic looks, her films are therefore aesthetically and politically charged. Mulvey succinctly summarizes her essay, “It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it…. It is... cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged.” [62] Cinema presents a spectacle to be sure, but it can also present ideas; bodies and narrative can be shot and organized, by director and spectator, to foster critical thinking about a particular subject.
The formalizing of the content of a film therefore provokes spectators to order and organize the images appropriately and not, as so many critics and internet message board participants have done, reduce the film to a series of images and sounds representing sex (for the individual viewer’s ego) and thereby dismissing the sexual act’s far-reaching consequences. What takes precedence in frame is up to the director however, as Breillat has commented:
An image exists only when you give it meaning, and that meaning depends on your vision, the way you look at things…. Cinema never films reality, it films only the director’s thoughts, the director’s vision, his/her way of looking at things. [63]
The way Breillat materializes sexual images is without representation, as in a painting which represents or stands in for the really existing thing, but a re-presentation of the body even if it is a powerful and intentional illusion, evinced by the aforementioned films and most poignantly in the preface and relevant scenes of Anatomy of Hell. [64] The re-presentation then, in Grønstad’s viewing of this 2004 film, is confronting the real and abject body with the “stock complacencies” of sexual images. [65] Grønstad’s claim clearly has to do with the collecting of images, some of which are pleasing to the senses, and replacing commonplace pornography with Breillat’s images which are, to say the least, unpleasant.
Breillat therefore takes an immense risk. Ultimately the subversive quality of art the director mentions – namely, that the aim of art is to provoke a reaction from its spectators, into some kind of thought about the conditions in which they live – is on the shoulders of the viewers. [66] If some assemble the sex scenes in Romance, Fat Girl, and Anatomy of Hell into a collage of nudity, or forcefully demand on message boards to know whether the actress “really had sex,” we may have the experience of eroticism and/or arousal in viewing the actresses’ bodies. Other spectators, e.g., critics who declare a film teen-porn, also miss their mark. If we collect the images and sounds in a manner befitting the critic or engaged spectator, through our attentiveness the images and sounds begin to matter to us on their own merits and not through their proximity to habituated viewing positions and definable genres. It is the task of the spectator-critic to remember, to re-collect, and assemble the images of a film to thereby “account for the frames of the film being what they are, in the order that they are in” [67] No more is this a necessary precondition for viewing than Breillat’s oeuvre. As Barker discovered, her films should turn us back on ourselves and our interpersonal, social, and cultural situation. We should see the difference, then, between the spectator of Breillat’s cinema and the universalized spectator of Metz and Mulvey: the former is granted the opportunity to reflect and engage critical ideas. Perhaps, with careful study, we can locate other directors who accomplish similar feats with their own specific methods and means.
A pornographic film can therefore be non-pornographic if it proceeds towards the unveiling of the director’s version of (a likely subversive or radical) truth – social, cultural, psychoanalytic, depending on what matters to us – and real insofar as spectator, critic, or theorist is touched by the images and assembles them not into a sequence likened to traditionally pornographic features in which arousal is a given, but into what they accomplish for other bodily sensations and, through the mediation of the body, produce in us thoughts and ideas about the oftentimes oppressive quality of heterosexual romance.
Breillat therefore takes an immense risk. Ultimately the subversive quality of art the director mentions – namely, that the aim of art is to provoke a reaction from its spectators, into some kind of thought about the conditions in which they live – is on the shoulders of the viewers. [66] If some assemble the sex scenes in Romance, Fat Girl, and Anatomy of Hell into a collage of nudity, or forcefully demand on message boards to know whether the actress “really had sex,” we may have the experience of eroticism and/or arousal in viewing the actresses’ bodies. Other spectators, e.g., critics who declare a film teen-porn, also miss their mark. If we collect the images and sounds in a manner befitting the critic or engaged spectator, through our attentiveness the images and sounds begin to matter to us on their own merits and not through their proximity to habituated viewing positions and definable genres. It is the task of the spectator-critic to remember, to re-collect, and assemble the images of a film to thereby “account for the frames of the film being what they are, in the order that they are in” [67] No more is this a necessary precondition for viewing than Breillat’s oeuvre. As Barker discovered, her films should turn us back on ourselves and our interpersonal, social, and cultural situation. We should see the difference, then, between the spectator of Breillat’s cinema and the universalized spectator of Metz and Mulvey: the former is granted the opportunity to reflect and engage critical ideas. Perhaps, with careful study, we can locate other directors who accomplish similar feats with their own specific methods and means.
A pornographic film can therefore be non-pornographic if it proceeds towards the unveiling of the director’s version of (a likely subversive or radical) truth – social, cultural, psychoanalytic, depending on what matters to us – and real insofar as spectator, critic, or theorist is touched by the images and assembles them not into a sequence likened to traditionally pornographic features in which arousal is a given, but into what they accomplish for other bodily sensations and, through the mediation of the body, produce in us thoughts and ideas about the oftentimes oppressive quality of heterosexual romance.
Footnotes
- Williams, L. (2009) “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”, in: Braudy, L. and Cohen, M. (eds.), Film Theory & Criticism: Introductory Readings. Seventh ed. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. 602-616.
- Braudy, L. (2009) “From The World in a Frame”, in: Film Theory & Criticism. 540.
- Altman, R. (1999) Film/Genre. London: BFI. For the definitions of semantic and syntactic elements, see 219; for a discussion of the generic community, see 156-164.
- Cavell, S. (2005) Cavell on Film. Rothman, W. (ed.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 9.
- Altman, R. Film/Genre. 151.
- Beugnet, M. (2007) Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press; Horeck, T. and Kendall, T. (eds.) (2011) The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Horeck, T. and Kendall, T. “The New Extremisms: Rethinking Extreme Cinema”, Cinephile 8 (2), 4-7. For an analysis of Breillat’s most recent extreme film, see Bordun, T. (2015) “Abuse of Weakness”, CineAction 96. 36-38.
- Williams, L. (2008) Screening Sex. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 259.
- Williams, L. (2014) “Cinema’s Sex Acts”, Film Quarterly 67 (4), 9-25.
- Butler, E. (2012) “Catherine Breillat: Anatomy of a Hard-Core Agitator”, in: Mendik, X. (ed.), Peep Shows: Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic. London and New York: Wallflower. 57-69. Butler reads Breillat against the genre of pornography. Despite our disagreements about Breillat’s status as a pornographer, Butler and I generate similar conclusions.
- Altman, R. Film/Genre. 211.
- Hester, H. (2014) Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 13-14.
- Williams, L. “Cinema’s Sex Acts”. 9.
- Williams, L. (1999) Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
- Williams, L. “Cinema’s Sex Acts”. 15.
- Berger, J. cited in Williams, L. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. 59-60.
- Breillat, C. cited in Best, V. and Crowley, M. (2007) The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 59.
- Brennan, W. cited in Williams, L. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. 88.
- Paasonen, S. (2010) “Good Amateurs: Erotica Writing and Notions of Quality”, in: Attwood, F. (ed.) porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography. New York: Peter Lang. 151.
- Paasonen, S. “Good Amateurs: Erotica Writing and Notions of Quality”. 144.
- Williams, L. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. 30.
- Williams, L. (1986) “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions”, in: Rosen, P. (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. 507-534; Williams, L. Screening Sex. On what Williams terms maximum visibility, see Screening Sex. 363n96.
- Williams, L. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. 154.
- Paasonen, S. “Good Amateurs: Erotica Writing and Notions of Quality”. 153-154.
- Paasonen, S. “Good Amateurs: Erotica Writing and Notions of Quality”. 151.
- Best, V. and Crowley, M. The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film. 60.
- Smith, C. (2012) “‘I Guess They Got Past Their Fear of Porn’: Women Viewing Porn Films”, in: Peep Shows: Cult Film and the Cine-Erotic. 155-167.
- Williams, L. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. 284-285.
- Williams, L. Screening Sex. 46-48; Bersani, L. cited in Williams, L. Screening Sex. 112-113, italics mine.
- Best, V. and Crowley, M. The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film. 10.
- Breillat, C. cited in Best, V. and Crowley, M. The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film. 60.
- Breillat, C. cited in Best, V. and Crowley, M. The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film. 59.
- Breillat, C. cited in Keesey, D. (2009) Catherine Breillat. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 135.
- Sklar, R. (1999) “A Woman’s Vision of Shame and Desire: An Interview with Catherine Breillat”, Cineaste, 25 (1), 24-26.
- Brinkema, E. (2006a) “A Title Does Not Ask, but Demands That You Make a Choice: On the Otherwise Films of Bruce LaBruce”, Criticism, 48 (1), 101.
- Williams, L. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. 113.
- Brinkema, E. (2006b) “Celluloid is Sticky: Sex, Death, Materiality, Metaphysics (in Some Films by Catherine Breillat)”, Women: a cultural review, 17 (2), 147-170.
- Breillat, C. (2008) Pornocracy. Buck, P. and Petit, C. (trans.), Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)
- Angelo, A. (2010) “Sexual Cartographies: Mapping Subjectivity in the Cinema of Catherine Breillat”, Journal for Cultural Research, 14 (1), 50.
- Hansen, L. cited in Dooley, K. (2014) “‘When you have your back to the wall, everything becomes easy’: performance and direction in the films of Catherine Breillat”, Studies in French Cinema, 14 (2), 116.
- Wagoner, B. (Director). (2010) After Porn Ends.
- See Badiou, A. (2012) Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters. Spitzer, S. (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press. 316-322.
- Bazin, A. (2005) What is Cinema? Volume 1. Gray, H. (ed. and trans.), Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. 13-14.
- Williams, L. “Cinema’s Sex Acts.”
- Metz, C. (2009) “From The Imaginary Signifier”, in: Film Theory & Criticism. 694-710; Mulvey, L. (2009) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, in: Film Theory & Criticism. 711-722.
- Cooper, S. (2013) The Soul of Film Theory. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan. 104-105.
- Aaron, M. (2007) Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On. London and New York: Wallflower Press. 34-35.
- Gunning, T. (2009) “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator”, in: Film Theory & Criticism. 737.
- Metz, C. cited in Gunning, T. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.” 738.
- Gunning, T. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator”. 748, italics mine.
- Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. 717.
- Phillips, J. (2001) “Catherine Breillat’s Romance: Hard Core and the Female Gaze”, Studies in French Cinema, 1 (3), 133-140; Barker, M. (2011) “Watching Rape, Enjoying Watching Rape…: How Does a Study of Audience Cha(lle)nge Mainstream Film Studies Approaches?”, in: The New Extremism in Cinema. 105-115.
- Cavell, S. (1979) The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged ed. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. 26.
- Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. 29.
- Grønstad, A. (2006) “Abject desire: Anatomie de l'enfer and the unwatchable”, Studies in French Cinema, 6 (3), 166.
- Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. 716.
- Willemen, P. (2006) “Letter to John”, in: Lehman P. (ed.), Pornography: Film and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ & London: Rutgers University Press. 48-59; Žižek, S. (1991) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge & London: The MIT Press.
- Phillips, J. “Catherine Breillat’s Romance: Hard Core and the Female Gaze”, 134.
- Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. 715, italics mine.
- Breillat, C. Pornocracy. 29.
- Angelo, A. “Sexual Cartographies: Mapping Subjectivity in the Cinema of Catherine Breillat”, 51.
- Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 721, italics mine.
- Sklar, R. (1999) “A Woman’s Vision of Shame and Desire: An Interview with Catherine Breillat”. 25.
- Preface to Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell: “Cinema is an illusion and is based not on ‘true stories’ or some kind of happening, but on the reality of the work. In this film, in the most intimate shots of the girl’s body, she is played by a body-double. In these scenes, there is no question of seeing the actress, but rather a fictional construct of the girl’s body.”
- Grønstad, A. “Abject desire: Anatomie de l'enfer and the unwatchable”. 166.
- Bordun, T. (2015) “Onscreen and off-screen flesh and blood: performance, affect and ethics in Catherine Breillat’s films”, Studies in European Cinema, 12 (2). 132-143.
- Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. 6.