Sex is Metaphysical: ’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.

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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

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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

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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

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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. insecurities and traumas.”18 Indeed, erotica can

John Berger, writing on the history of be judged and assessed based on the criteria of

European painting of nudes, locates “the real plot and character development, style, subject” of the canvas outside the object of art: “complexity, and non-explicit elements.”19

“He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man…. It is for him that Cinematic pornography is something different the figures have assumed their nudity.”15 from erotic art and literary erotica, although,

as Justice Potter Stewart would have it, we all

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know it when we see it. Williams’s attempts to undermine popular conceptions rudimentary definition of pornography, in her about what a is while also inaugural study Hard Core, is what most of us attempting to transmit a particular vision of would expect to find in a pornographic film: contemporary heterosexual romance.

“the visual (and sometimes aural) representation of living, moving bodies The line between erotica and pornography is engaged in explicit, usually un-faked, sexual what Paasonen would term “leaky” – the acts with a primary intent of arousing boundaries are blurry at best.23 Paasonen viewers.”20 However, there is more to contends that rather than semantic or syntactic pornography than this semantic dimension. elements distinguishing the two, the affective

Williams also writes that in pornography from dimension highlights an individual’s definition

Eadweard Muybridge to contemporary DVDs, (and experience) of the genre. She neatly there is an attempt to find the truth of female summarizes this difference as follows, clearly bodies, pleasures, and sex generally – a kind of at odds with Breillat’s distinction between science through plot, maximum visibility, and pornography and the erotic: “The affective the money shot.21 Furthermore, aligning power of pornography depends on the detailed pornography with the musical, she contends yet hyperbolic depictions of sexual arousal, that “in cinematic hard core we encounter a scenarios, acts, and sensations aiming to turn profoundly ‘escapist’ genre that distracts the reader on, whereas the affective power of audiences from the deeper social or political erotica revolves around desire and emotional causes of the disturbed relations between the realism.”24 The director suggests the reverse is sexes.”22 Pornography, then, has at least two true for her art. Given such a reversal of our functions as opposed to erotic art’s singular generic terminology, Martin Crowley contends aim: to really move the viewer, arousal or that it is appropriate to state that Breillat’s otherwise as I will argue, and to develop and directorial brilliance is that she treads a path posit some form of escape but also, that is pornographic yet not erotic,25 but it is paradoxically, some versions of truth. In perhaps more appropriate to work with

Breillat’s case, more paradoxical still, she Paasonen’s above definition. Breillat blends

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the affective power of pornographic depictions prolongation, even its own intensification,’” with an emotional realism to produce multiple similar to ’s Last Tango in and perhaps conflicting effects for the Paris (1972).28 We can additionally state that spectator. In fact, such an experience is how Breillat’s films produce a cinematic some women use porn. Clarissa Smith’s 2012 displeasure, oftentimes a shock to moral qualitative research suggests that the interplay sentiments, and it is this method of moving between a viewer’s sexual arousal and her spectators which allows her to articulate her emotional and critical reception of a film, such message regarding women’s shame, desire, as critiquing plot, performance, and sexuality. Unlike the pornographic cinematography, and violent sexualities, is features Williams outlines in her book-length common.26 I therefore situate Breillat within a study, sexuality as shot and enacted in style of pornography that recuperates the term Breillat’s films “is no longer any fun” for the from otherwise hostile or dismissive fictional characters;29 encounters are rife with definitions; I contend that she must be dissatisfaction, distaste, and misery, and pornographic, and explicit, if some element of therefore a radical departure from the arousing truth in obscenity is to be found. quality of erotic images or mainstream porn

designed to titillate a specifically male viewer.

In my proposed reading of Breillat, her films “Pornography is ugly,” the director states, “and find a generic home in Williams’s critical I prefer ugly.”30 evaluation of the body genres, films capable of producing intense sensations in the spectator.27 In Romance (1999), Marie (Caroline Ducey)

The sensation received from Breillat’s films is appears indifferent to performing and not the satisfying discharge of the “scratch” receiving oral sex, cries during bondage, and identified by Williams in the experience of thinks more about sex and the relations watching a porno chic film like Deep Throat between the sexes than enjoying the act. Elena

(Gerard Damiano, 1972). Conversely, Breillat (), in (À ma soeur!, would perhaps want viewers to feel an “itch… 2001), is immobile and in tears while nude; that ‘seeks nothing better than its own she moans in agony rather than sexual ecstasy

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when the man finally conquers her:

Marie’s (Ducey) tears after bondage in Romance

Elena (Mesquida) in tears after Fernando’s (de Rienzo) relentless attempts to coerce her into sex in Fat Girl

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The unnamed woman (Amira Cesar) in from the director, and following Eugenie

Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer, 2004) Brinkema in her essay on the director, I name bleeds from her wrists, menstruates, and is the dominant genre at work in Breillat’s oeuvre depressive. The sex in Breillat’s films, non-pornographic pornography. A non- although resembling the acts we would see in pornographic pornography would be a porn, i.e., nude men and women engaging in sexually graphic film crafted in such a manner sexual intercourse, is as dissatisfying for the to convey not just arousal – or better, no characters as for viewers. arousal at all – but to operate as a challenge to

existing sexual relations and the power

It would greatly miss the point of Breillat’s dynamics therein, both onscreen and off. This pornographic work if we were to suggest she is is a reconceptualising of the genre’s syntax. creating a piece of erotic art, e.g., feminists who want eroticism as a product of and for At a cursory glance, the common sense use of women’s sexuality and as an opposition to the term pornography can be applied to male-centered pornography. “To be honest, I Breillat’s narratives about feminine sexuality don’t think there is such a thing as erotic art. and patriarchy in contemporary times. But

Art compromises you,” the director mentions without the rhythm of the sexual numbers and in an interview. “It’s subversive. So it can’t be narrative, maximum visibility, the money shot, erotic.”31 Neither would it be helpful to etc., those semantic elements of the genre so assimilate Breillat into established definitions well identified by Williams and others, Breillat of porn: “I’m opposed to the porn industry’s displaces or puts sex somewhere else, outside confiscation of the representation of sex. For of eroticism and sexual arousal, and into me, the X-rated film industry … signifies the critical thought. She uses long takes, close-ups indignity of the female sex.”32 However, she of faces instead of genitals, no moans or also states that pornography can retain respect, groans except during the male orgasm as a integrity, and dignity if the performer’s sexual counterpoint to the silence of the woman, and acts are indeed what the woman wants to do.33 highlights the frequent inactivity of the female

Given these preliminary analyses and remarks character, always immobile and often in tears

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while the man has his pleasure. Breillat’s or political engagement that is not located female characters are at first glance solely in the lower enclaves of the body.”34 intentionally passive in the sense described by Brinkema further suggests the affected

Laura Mulvey in her famous essay, but what is spectator is split between her arousal which is active in the film experience is not the male present, because of the sexualized bodies spectator or his scopophilia; it is rather his onscreen, and the ideas Breillat is trying to critical engagement with the message through convey through these bodies. 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

Partition separating women’s heads from their lower halves in Romance

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In a comforting and clinical setting, women’s upper halves coddled by their lovers

Like the women separated by the partition in abdomen of an unidentified woman, a number the brothel scene of Romance, this partition of filmic, cinematic, and social and political which symbolizes the irreconcilability of mind ideas call our attention: our visual, aural, and and body or love and desire for women who cognitive engagement is ignited due to the out- still unfortunately live under the of-place-ness of this fantasy within an oppressiveness of male desire and fantasy, otherwise realist narrative, the strangeness of viewers too should be split. Spectators are split the setting, the length of the shot, no cuts to between, first, their call to arousal, the s/m maximum visibility, and the dismal lighting. images onscreen in this instance habitually To do justice to this sequence of the film linked to porn they have seen before or have spectators must examine and assess why it seen in their imaginations when one says found its way into the feature: what is its

“Imagine s/m porn,” and second, the viewer’s power, its fascination, and why, if we saw it forced entry into the realm of critical under different circumstances, say without the judgment. By the end of the scene, concluding view of the upper halves, would it be with a rapidly cut money shot onto the pleasurable.

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My preliminary assessment is that the money the other, so frequently impossible to shot does not “‘fix’ the exact moment of the convincingly limit, define, and categorize.36 In sexual act’s involuntary convulsion of Breillat there is something new produced pleasure” as Williams suggests.35 In Romance within a field of pornographic work, what it transmits what Breillat considers to be a Brinkema calls a non-pornographic body, and truth, namely that the orgasm is on the side of Breillat herself has named pornocracy.37 the man while the woman’s mind is occupied Etymologically the term opposes pornography, elsewhere. Breillat’s other films provide the writing about prostitutes, and suggests additional evidence for my experience of this something new about art and sexuality. scene. I find this truth in (1988), in Etymologically the term means the strength of

Fat Girl, and in (Brève the prostitute 38 In my work here we can traversée, 2001): Lili’s (Delphine Zentout) identify a non-pornographic body as, first, a first sexual intercourse is not about her subject in her conditions or situation, in pleasure but ridding herself of the virgin Breillat’s view a situation still quite horrible stigma; Elena is hyperconscious of whether under the visible and invisible forces of

Fernando (Libero de Rienzo) loves her during patriarchy. Second, a body can be non- her first time; and Alice (Sarah Pratt) has sex pornographic when feminine interiority is fully with her young man (Gilles Guillain), then explored, a subjectivity on display and quickly dismisses him, as payback for the narrated, exemplified most powerfully in harms done to her by men from her past. Marie’s voiceovers in Romance, Alice’s

critical reflections on relations between the

In “Celluloid is Sticky: Sex, Death, sexes in Brief Crossing, and Elena in Fat Girl

Materiality, Metaphysics (in Some Films by through the extended use of medium close-ups

Catherine Breillat),” Brinkema observes the of her face. In this film we do not need an complexities associated with positing the internal monologue; Elena’s tears, stillness, director within a tradition of pornography and resistance to sexual advances are enough whose products are on the one hand easily for us to see beneath the skin. James Hansen verifiable to any consumer of media, and on writes with reference to but

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equally applicable to Fat Girl, “the visibility (Western) individuals. of explicit sex, violence, and characters’ varying responses to them ‘allows the body to We are now in a position to more carefully become a symbol of power, pleasure, and assess the film experience itself. weakness, capable of communication, emotion, and psychological depth – three abilities of the body that could not be made Looking-at Breillat’s Films evident through dialogue.’”39 Hard-core pornography is a thoroughly

fictional representation, an appearance of what

Marie asserts, “Sex is metaphysical,” a claim an actual sexual act might look like (thus the which posits an outside and beyond what is concerns and fears that the genre is also a presented onscreen, and not for a moment does guide to sexuality). This is something porn

Breillat cease to remind us of this in any one actors and actresses consistently remind us of, of her films. This is also a reminder to be e.g., as seen and heard in Bryce Wagoner’s attentive to the manner in which bodies are interviews with retired porn performers.40 I put framed and shots are organized, as well as to forward a rather Platonic account of give critical consideration to the depicted acts pornography here,41 what the painting is to a and events within their respective contexts, real object hard-core pornography is to real stories, and prior and succeeding plot sex – the former is by many degrees separated elements. For Breillat the concealed reality of from the latter. In Breillat’s films there is woman’s shame under patriarchy is revealed in instead a fictional act that is also a living and through the appropriation of and inscription of sexuality; there is a reality experimentation with the pornographic genre; presented onscreen, re-presented to viewers as her films function as alternatives to generic the presence of something really occurring, stylistic and plot devices in an effort to which is quite different from a representation generate new ideas about the genre as well the of something, i.e., what it could be like or heterosexual romantic situation, both containing an objective correlate outside of the diegetically and in the world as lived by film. André Bazin saw in photography the

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tracing or mummification of things as such, associations with the genre. Her films then and furthermore, this mummification in challenge us to organize our film experience cinema is not the static image but of duration not as a series of images which titillate or and space. He writes, with cinema “we are arouse, but through her unappealing and forced to accept as real the existence of the unpleasurable reality of sex in a given film, object reproduced, actually re-presented, set and through this re-presentation, move us to before us, that is to say, in time and space.”42 It dissect if not accept her view. Thus my is not a direct presentation, but the really deployment of the term non-pornography. existing thing is presented, set before us, as a fact of reality. To tease out what this means for the spectator

and how Breillat wills us into an active

In this now naïve view I nevertheless maintain engagement with her work, we can think of that the depiction of sexual relations in Christian Metz’s and Mulvey’s theories of the

Breillat’s films is fictionally re-presented, not gaze. Breillat seems keenly aware of their as the image or imaginary of sexuality, but the brand of universalizing spectatorship theories immediate, onscreen presence of sex itself as to then make us aware of the power cinema

Breillat defines it, an experience of watching has to foster multiple kinds of viewing. If something real – or, if we like, Breillat gives cinema is the unobstructed perception of a us the fact of her view of sexuality, a cinematic reality, the apparatus masked by fictionalized view of a lived reality seen various stylistic and narrative devices (Metz), through her eyes. Through critical engagement and the perception of that reality through those with that reality re-presented we should gain devices consequently produces an valid concepts and ideas about the director’s objectification of women, or women are taken position on contemporary sexual relations. as a spectacle for an active male viewer

Arguably this is part of the formal and (Mulvey), Breillat and other contemporary narrative techniques employed as I noted auteurs of hard-core art, according to above, but she also works through classical Williams,43 create films which point to the definitions of pornography and spectators’ limitations of these respective modes of

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engaging both filmmaking and the film critique of Metz. According to Gunning, Metz experience. provocatively argued that modern cinema

audiences want to believe that early cinema

Metz and Mulvey suggest spectators identify audiences were terrified by the apparent reality with the camera and/or with character as an of moving-images. These modern spectators extension of themselves.44 Spectators perceive are to early spectators as an adult’s laughter is an imaginary world into which they are wholly to a child’s belief in Santa Claus.47 Yet, Metz immersed. The film experience is standardized claims, the modern audience is subject to the in the Metz/Mulvey account and this attempt same psychic responses as the prior one: “No to universalize the spectator has brought forth longer a historical spectator in the Grand Café a strong critique. Sarah Cooper states that in 1895, the naïve spectator ‘is still seated

Metz’s position is ultimately “blind to the beneath the incredulous one, or in his differences between human beings, their heart.’”48 We see Metz trying to bridge the bodies, and their psyches,” leading to a historical gap between the misinterpreted early homogenizing of the spectator, namely as “the film experiences – as terror in the aisles – and white male of a predominantly heterosexual the illusion of reality presented in classical society.”45 Mulvey, though attempting to narrative cinema; regardless of historical reconcile gender and sexual differences at the situatedness the spectator remains constant. cinema, similarly posits a male spectator at the Contrary to Metz, Gunning’s insight that expense of other viewing positions. According cinema does not operate as a medium of to Michele Aaron, Mulvey denies the “illusionistic absorption” parallels my own possibility of the man as object of the gaze and project, namely, Breillat’s films “continually further, sought to do away with narrative remind… the spectator of the act of watching filmmaking altogether because of its explicit by a succession of sensual assaults.”49 The key and implicit ties to patriarchal society.46 to the critique of Metz and Mulvey is that the

cinema does, in fact, open up a multiplicity of

The position I develop, in contrast to Metz’s viewing positions. and Mulvey’s, resonates with Tom Gunning’s

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Thus neither Metz’s nor Mulvey’s angle will film (producing ego ideals through the star be sufficient to account for the actual film system) or as the all-perceiving subject– for experience, as I noted with Cavell, an Breillat does not give us such freedom – but as experience which is determined by the body and social body. Unlike the mirror, Metz spectator for him or herself. Breillat’s cinema writes, the cinema does not return (an image offers numerous vantage points from which to of) our body, but I argue Breillat does return be affected. Her camera itself does not lead us the spectator to his body. to the truth of the sexual situation, such as the fact of the sexual act through maximum Conscious memory (contra unconscious visibility, but rather to a technologically- structures, or repressed moments of infancy mediated presence of the scene of sexual and childhood) provides spectators a source relations, i.e., the power dynamics, desires, for finding themselves in and with the and feelings of shame. If a spectator is prone characters and events onscreen, or in other to identify with a male protagonist, take up his words, an identification that fosters the perception of a passive woman, for example, production of thought and ideas. John Phillips this is not the case for Breillat’s most sees this in Romance, Marie’s voiceover discussed film. There is not a clear-cut lending men and women alike a sense of identification with the body of identification through psychological in Romance, whose presence next to Ducey is interiority, and Martin Barker’s audience nearly absent as the camera focuses instead on research on Fat Girl drives this argument the actress’s face, and the sounds are of home.51 Women find themselves in Elena and, voiceover rather than the sex act. Efforts are against Breillat’s claim that men cannot made on Breillat’s part to not “reproduce as identify with the male characters, surveyed accurately as possible the so-called natural respondents successfully identified Fernando’s conditions of human perception,”50 e.g., a look seduction and coercion tactics in their own which resituates itself to get the best point of romantic pasts. Breillat’s men are not ideals view. What I do not have difficulty with, as but types we recognize.

Metz says, is encountering myself, not in the

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This identification is possible not because, as exhibited in other narrative features. The

Bazin simply claimed, reality is exhibited as unnamed woman is in control of his such through the passive lens of the camera. It movements, his look, his sex. In this way he is more accurate to say with Cavell that we see does not become a “screen surrogate” for the neither humans nor imaginary signifiers male spectator’s “ideal ego.” Contrary to onscreen but “human somethings.”52 We see a Mulvey’s observations about the men often thing that is both there – we know it is a real depicted in the cinema, in Romance and person – but also absent – he is not there in our Anatomy Siffredi is not “more perfect, more presence. In our knowledge that there exists a complete, more powerful”55 than the man in real person who becomes a star for the camera, the audience because, in the former, the we watch his performance of a role through actor/character is barely present onscreen (in

“his physical and temperamental endowment.” frame, through dialogue, or narrative

He is therefore not the character authored by importance), and neither does he appear the screen or story-writer – the star is the kind omnipotent in either feature as his sexuality, of character “real people are: a type.”53 These strength, and “manliness” is at best somethings onscreen are human precisely questionable. because we know ourselves and others as a certain type. I can speculate that the same We can further distance ourselves from the identification experienced in Romance and Fat look of Metz’s and Mulvey’s ideal spectator if

Girl holds true for Anatomy of Hell’s male we return to Breillat’s women characters who viewers; as Asbjørn Grønstad puts it about the exhibit heightened indifference, passiveness, unnamed man in the film, men abhor “the and lack of enthusiasm for sex. Paul Willemen truths of the female body.”54 The unnamed and Slavoj Žižek note the power of the fourth man of that film is of a certain type – the look in porn, the seductive look back at the intellectual misogynist. But Breillat counters spectator by the performer, which both situates

Mulvey’s claims then as the male protagonist, the performer onscreen as “to-be-looked-at” with whom we would identify as ideal ego, and throws the experience of film off-kilter as does not have the kind of freedom of the stage the absent performer seems to be made aware

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of the spectator who, in seeing the fourth look, the narrative.57 Similarly Elena and Anaïs in now experiences the “to-be-looked-at-ness” Fat Girl are searching for their seducers, and himself.56 But the actresses and characters in in the two very different forms of rape that

Breillat’s films are often not there to be looked take place in the film, Breillat may force us to at by other characters, nor there for what look away from the screen rather than receive

Mulvey would view as spectators’ scopophilia pleasure from it. We see how Breillat again or narcissistic ego, and neither do they make counters the kind of gaze posited by Mulvey, us aware of their absent presence by the fourth namely, that the woman is there onscreen “to look. No one part of the body is emphasized in freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic

Romance, Phillips argues, and efforts are made contemplation [for the male in Fat Girl to conceal rather than reveal both character/viewer].”58 The women of her films

Elena’s and Anaïs’s bodies (although Alice push ahead the action or drama and do not

Haylett Bryan, in her contribution to this issue, remain static for us to contemplate. The thesis thoroughly disagrees with claims such as of Anatomy of Hell, for instance, is evinced by

Phillips’s – noting the power of the mirror in a series of looks: in order to feel adequate,

Breillat’s films to fragment women’s bodies in whole, or whatever psychological an effort to critique patriarchy). Moreover, interpretation we want to provide, an unnamed through the twist at the end of this latter film, woman asks a strange and unnamed man to

Breillat unveils the story’s revelatory power by watch her where she is “unwatchable” (or concealing her message. This message requires “unlookable” as translated by Paul Buck and viewers to decode it, i.e., use their cognitive Catherine Petit in the source material for the faculties to make sense of it. film),59 i.e., a gaze without patriarchal

oppression. Ultimately this request is left

Further countering the position Metz and unfulfilled as the pair spend four nights

Mulvey outline as specific to the cinema, i.e., together dissecting patriarchy, masculinity, the to-be-looked-at-ness of women femininity, and sexuality with no real progress characters/actresses, Phillips notes that Marie or purpose. Adrienne Angelo has suggested of is a “searcher” in that she “looks for” men in Anatomy of Hell additionally that the look as

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producer of knowledge is halted by the therefore provokes spectators to order and impossible to “reciprocate gaze” of the organize the images appropriately and not, as unnamed man on the one hand, and on the so many critics and internet message board other, the impossibility of him to fully see the participants have done, reduce the film to a woman where she is “unwatchable.”60 Thus series of images and sounds representing sex the film ends much like real life – in aporia. (for the individual viewer’s ego) and thereby

dismissing the sexual act’s far-reaching

Provided these examples, it seems that the consequences. What takes precedence in frame spectator Metz and Mulvey posit is affirmed is up to the director however, as Breillat has by Breillat to then present to us cinema’s commented: power to control the four looks, and in this An image exists only when you give it process of being made aware of the cinematic meaning, and that meaning depends on your vision, the way you look at things…. Cinema looks, her films are therefore aesthetically and never films reality, it films only the director’s thoughts, the director’s vision, his/her way of politically charged. Mulvey succinctly looking at things. 62 summarizes her essay, “It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of The way Breillat materializes sexual images is varying it and exposing it…. It is... cinematic without representation, as in a painting which codes and their relationship to formative represents or stands in for the really existing external structures that must be broken down thing, but a re-presentation of the body even if before mainstream film and the pleasure it it is a powerful and intentional illusion, provides can be challenged.”61 Cinema evinced by the aforementioned films and most presents a spectacle to be sure, but it can also poignantly in the preface and relevant scenes present ideas; bodies and narrative can be shot of Anatomy of Hell.63 The re-presentation then, and organized, by director and spectator, to in Grønstad’s viewing of this 2004 film, is foster critical thinking about a particular confronting the real and abject body with the subject. “stock complacencies” of sexual images.64

Grønstad’s claim clearly has to do with the The formalizing of the content of a film

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collecting of images, some of which are frames of the film being what they are, in the pleasing to the senses, and replacing order that they are in” 66 No more is this a commonplace pornography with Breillat’s necessary precondition for viewing than images which are, to say the least, unpleasant. Breillat’s oeuvre. As Barker discovered, her

films should turn us back on ourselves and our

Breillat therefore takes an immense risk. interpersonal, social, and cultural situation. We

Ultimately the subversive quality of art the should see the difference, then, between the director mentions – namely, that the aim of art spectator of Breillat’s cinema and the is to provoke a reaction from its spectators, universalized spectator of Metz and Mulvey: into some kind of thought about the conditions the former is granted the opportunity to reflect in which they live – is on the shoulders of the and engage critical ideas. Perhaps, with careful viewers.65 If some assemble the sex scenes in study, we can locate other directors who

Romance, Fat Girl, and Anatomy of Hell into a accomplish similar feats with their own collage of nudity, or forcefully demand on specific methods and means. message boards to know whether the actress A pornographic film can therefore be non-

“really had sex,” we may have the experience pornographic if it proceeds towards the of eroticism and/or arousal in viewing the unveiling of the director’s version of (a likely actresses’ bodies. Other spectators, e.g., critics subversive or radical) truth – social, cultural, who declare a film teen-porn, also miss their psychoanalytic, depending on what matters to mark. If we collect the images and sounds in a us – and real insofar as spectator, critic, or manner befitting the critic or engaged theorist is touched by the images and spectator, through our attentiveness the images assembles them not into a sequence likened to and sounds begin to matter to us on their own traditionally pornographic features in which merits and not through their proximity to arousal is a given, but into what they habituated viewing positions and definable accomplish for other bodily sensations and, genres. It is the task of the spectator-critic to through the mediation of the body, produce in remember, to re-collect, and assemble the us thoughts and ideas about the oftentimes images of a film to thereby “account for the oppressive quality of heterosexual romance.

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1 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. 2 Braudy, L. (2009) “From The World in a Frame”, in: Film Theory & Criticism. 540. 3 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. 4 Cavell, S. (2005) Cavell on Film. Rothman, W. (ed.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 9. 5 Altman, R. Film/Genre. 151. 6 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) “”, CineAction 96. 36-38. 7 Williams, L. (2008) Screening Sex. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 259. 8 Williams, L. (2014) “Cinema’s Sex Acts”, Film Quarterly 67 (4), 9-25. 9 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. 10 Altman, R. Film/Genre. 211. 11 Hester, H. (2014) Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. 13-14. 12 Williams, L. “Cinema’s Sex Acts”. 9. 13 Williams, L. (1999) Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 14 Williams, L. “Cinema’s Sex Acts”. 15. 15 Berger, J. cited in Williams, L. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. 59-60. 16 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. 17 Brennan, W. cited in Williams, L. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. 88. 18 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. 19 Paasonen, S. “Good Amateurs: Erotica Writing and Notions of Quality”. 144. 20 Williams, L. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. 30. 21 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. 22 Williams, L. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. 154. 23 Paasonen, S. “Good Amateurs: Erotica Writing and Notions of Quality”. 153-154. 24 Paasonen, S. “Good Amateurs: Erotica Writing and Notions of Quality”. 151. 25 Best, V. and Crowley, M. The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film. 60. 26 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. 27 Williams, L. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. 284-285. 28 Williams, L. Screening Sex. 46-48; Bersani, L. cited in Williams, L. Screening Sex. 112-113, italics mine. 29 Best, V. and Crowley, M. The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film. 10. 30 Breillat, C. cited in Best, V. and Crowley, M. The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film. 60. 31 Breillat, C. cited in Best, V. and Crowley, M. The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film. 59. 32 Breillat, C. cited in Keesey, D. (2009) Catherine Breillat. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 135. 33 Sklar, R. (1999) “A Woman’s Vision of Shame and Desire: An Interview with Catherine Breillat”, Cineaste, 25 (1), 24-26. 34 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. 35 Williams, L. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. 113.

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36 Brinkema, E. (2006b) “Celluloid is Sticky: Sex, Death, Materiality, Metaphysics (in Some Films by Catherine Breillat)”, Women: a cultural review, 17 (2), 147-170. 37 Breillat, C. (2008) Pornocracy. Buck, P. and Petit, C. (trans.), Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) 38 Angelo, A. (2010) “Sexual Cartographies: Mapping Subjectivity in the Cinema of Catherine Breillat”, Journal for Cultural Research, 14 (1), 50. 39 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. 40 Wagoner, B. (Director). (2010) After Porn Ends. 41 See Badiou, A. (2012) Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters. Spitzer, S. (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press. 316-322. 42 Bazin, A. (2005) What is Cinema? Volume 1. Gray, H. (ed. and trans.), Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. 13-14. 43 Williams, L. “Cinema’s Sex Acts.” 44 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. 45 Cooper, S. (2013) The Soul of Film Theory. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan. 104-105. 46 Aaron, M. (2007) Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On. London and New York: Wallflower Press. 34-35. 47 Gunning, T. (2009) “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator”, in: Film Theory & Criticism. 737. 48 Metz, C. cited in Gunning, T. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.” 738. 49 Gunning, T. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator”. 748, italics mine. 50 Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. 717. 51 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. 52 Cavell, S. (1979) The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged ed. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. 26. 53 Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. 29. 54 Grønstad, A. (2006) “Abject desire: Anatomie de l'enfer and the unwatchable”, Studies in French Cinema, 6 (3), 166. 55 Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. 716. 56 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. 57 Phillips, J. “Catherine Breillat’s Romance: Hard Core and the Female Gaze”, 134. 58 Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. 715, italics mine. 59 Breillat, C. Pornocracy. 29. 60 Angelo, A. “Sexual Cartographies: Mapping Subjectivity in the Cinema of Catherine Breillat”, 51. 61 Mulvey, L. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 721, italics mine. 62 Sklar, R. (1999) “A Woman’s Vision of Shame and Desire: An Interview with Catherine Breillat”. 25. 63 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.” 64 Grønstad, A. “Abject desire: Anatomie de l'enfer and the unwatchable”. 166. 65 I develop this line of inquiry further in 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. 66 Cavell, S. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. 6.

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