Sex Is Metaphysical: Catherine Breillat's Pornographic Films Troy
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Sex is Metaphysical: Catherine Breillat’s Pornographic Films Troy Bordun Abstract Pornographic genre codes are appropriated by engaging their senses, Breillat transmits her Breillat and then seemingly misrepresented to message. She accomplishes this cinematic produce a particular message: the shame of brilliance – treading a line which is feminine sexuality under patriarchy. In this pornographic yet not erotic and causing a article I argue she must be pornographic if sensation in the viewer which is not arousal – some element of truth in obscenity is to be by frustrating habituated viewing, challenging recovered. I situate Breillat within a style of the common film-experience of identifying cinematic pornography, recuperating the term with characters or symbolically recognizing from otherwise hostile definitions. the genre. With her misuse of pornography Breillat’s films achieve their social and I first consider how her pornography is unlike political function. the erotic. Sexual encounters within her films are rife with dissatisfaction and misery and therefore far from the definition of viewing erotic art as a composed spectator’s aesthetic appreciation. Second, I articulate the difference between Breillat’s films and a pornography designed to titillate a male viewer. The sensation Breillat produces in spectators is a narrative displeasure. With this Keywords: Catherine Breillat, Pornography, method of sensorial provocation, calling the Linda Williams, Christian Metz, Laura viewer to ethically respond to the work by Mulvey, Feminism, Sexuality, Genre. 34 Introduction Catherine Breillat’s stark and often obtrusive criticize particular films, trends, or engagements with sexuality at any age has movements. My contention is that this sparked some debate around the pornographic apparent stability of genre is an inaccurate in her work. Yet most debates and studies have characterization for much of filmmaking and insufficiently accounted for the director’s also for spectators’ experience of non-genre proximity to or distance from body genres.1 specific films. Spectators’ assembly of images The codes of horror, melodrama, and and sounds often do not conform to the pornography are appropriated by Breillat and identifiable genres with which theorists and then seemingly misrepresented to produce a critics maintain. As Stanley Cavell put it, what particular message or meaning about sexual we see in the film, the objects and persons, are relations: the shame of feminine sexuality those things which “matter to us.”4 under patriarchy. Breillat, however, is not a genre filmmaker, particularly if we take genre The following article highlights the porous theorists and critics seriously in their quality of genre and the insufficiency of definitions. Leo Braudy, for instance, observes generalized or universal accounts of film that genres are closed off places with “pre- genres which suppose a predetermined existing motifs, plot turns, actors, and relationship for spectators to the images and situations… [that are] a respite from the more sounds. Altman identified this predetermined confusing and complicating worlds outside.”2 relationship as genre films’ attempt to turn For Rick Altman, semantic and syntactic spectators into a “single homogenous block.”5 elements of a genre – a genre’s “building Film critics and theorists have differently blocks” and the “structures into which they are noted that extreme cinema, a production trend arranged” – are mutually agreed upon to Breillat has been associated with, is without greater and lesser degrees by a “generic generic codes; although, the directors community” made of up producers, critics, and associated with the trend appropriate these spectators,3 and this approach works both as a codes for their own artistic ends.6 While many marketing strategy and as a lens to study or theorists of extreme cinema are content to note 35 the associated filmmakers’ ties to pornography industry as it currently stands than it does with and horror, and Linda Williams goes as far as developing “broader conceptualizations of establishing extreme cinema as a subgenre of porn[ography],” an undertaking similar to that pornography, naming it “hard core art”7 – a of Helen Hester in Beyond Explicit.11 Unlike term that never quite “caught on” – few wish Hester who demonstrates that the term to study the production trend from the pornographic no longer only applies to perspective of genre.8 This essay proposes a sexually explicit displays and therefore we reading of an extreme filmmaker from the lens should do away with the notion of porn as a of one genre in particular: pornography. genre, I demonstrate the genre’s shifting terrain and the merits of included Breillat If extreme cinema is simultaneously within it. pornographic and horrific while also displaying a disregard for these genres, I maintain the use of genre because most perhaps extreme cinema has much to offer spectators know what pornography is today genre theory. I will argue that Breillat’s films and because of this seemingly ubiquitous play with the semantic and syntactic knowledge, according to Williams, they are components of pornography.9 My semantic quick to confuse sexually explicit displays and syntactic analysis would then make with hard-core porn. Williams thus considers possible a study of extreme cinema from a an analysis of sexually explicit art cinema, in pragmatic approach, the next stage of analysis light of the pornography genre, a valuable in Altman’s proposed reading of genres endeavour.12 As an auteur in the extreme (semantic/syntactic/pragmatic). A pragmatic cinema trend, Breillat is worth examining from study of genre would consider one user group the perspective of genre and pornography. and place them alongside competing user When one user group attends to the sex scenes groups to thereby accomplish what Altman in Breillat’s films, her works are in direct terms “a broader process-oriented and competition with their preconceived ideas and interactive analysis.”10 Indeed, my approach habitual responses to pornography. A has less to do with the adult entertainment definition of pornography, similar to other 36 genres, is arrived at via individual spectators’ with Williams’s canonical volume Hard processes of interpretation and prior Core.13 Breillat’s pornography is one type knowledge of it (and of course that knowledge among many, thus my intervention in genre is derived from film production, distribution, studies is to expand the horizon of possibility exhibition, consumption, criticism, and for this filmmaker’s inclusion within the theory), but this does not mean that the films generic community of pornography cinephiles viewed by the critical spectator are not without and scholars. Second, I will lay out the form and style. Breillat’s films, by aiming to problem of the imaginary (identification) and elicit spectators’ processes of interpretation in its relation to the exchange of looks I locate in regards to pornography and the pornographic, Breillat’s films. Since Breillat places the opens a path for viewers to grasp her message burden of sense-making and organization on regarding the status of women’s desire and spectators, however, there is a chance that the sexuality in the late 20th and early 21st transmission of her message may misfire or be centuries. blocked by spectatorial aversion to pornography or their heightened arousal of the First, I will assess Breillat’s distance from profilmic event (the real bodies of the erotica and pornography traditionally performers). At the same time her message can associated with and for a male viewer, and be transmitted only by taking this risk. Truth is argue that she overturns the laws of that genre in making an obscenity, not as in a moral and its pre-established film experience. outrage, but through disrupting the practices of Breillat’s films, according to my reading, are genre filmmaking and habituated patterns of exemplary objects to trace just how a spectatorship. filmmaker can work against positioning pornography as a stable and universally agreed Erotic and/or Pornographic upon category. Indeed, there are a number of To think through Breillat’s films, we must moving-image pornographies and many make a distinction between erotica and theorists have made the case that pornography pornography first, then follow with definitions does constitute a genre, beginning of course of two versions of pornography, call them 37 classical or common sense and non- Breillat echoes this position on erotic art, pornographic. I use non-pornographic as a stating the erotic “is a mysterious woman in descriptor of Breillat’s work to retain her suspenders, spreading her legs, turning men films’ status as explicit displays of bodies on.”16 I suggest that eroticism contains an idea while also marking a clear separation between of a composed viewer’s aesthetic appreciation her version of fictionalized sexual acts and additionally, a kind of admiration or awe at the those found in classic and contemporary sight of the nude woman. We can find this in pornography. Williams also argues we should extreme cinema from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s maintain this distinction in our studies of Saló (1975) to Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty cinematic sex. In films such as Blue is the (2011). Similar to Justice William Brennan, Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adèle, Chapitres 1 et who in 1957 said hard-core pornography only 2, Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013), Stranger by the has one ‘idea’, namely that “there is pleasure Lake (L’inconnu du lac, Alain Guiraudie, in sexual gratification,”17 erotic art in my 2013), and Nymph()maniac (Lars Von Trier, definition here has only one idea – the 2014), she names the sexual scenes “relatively pleasures of viewing the unclothed woman. explicit sex.”14 In the following pages we shall Contemporary erotic literature by contrast, see how this dichotomy operates. according to Susanna Paasonen’s research on the website Literotica, establishes that Erotic art, defined as either soft-core or the “character motivation, desire, and sexual display of female nudes, has been traditionally buildup are central, and characters may have associated with an embodied male viewer.