This past week Hulu announced an early digital release for Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” which topped my list of 2019 films, and the release is a great reason to explore the recently published e-book from Seventh Cinema, titled “Portraits of Resistance: The Cinema of Céline Sciamma”. The book is the first focused examination of Sciamma’s work and comes at a time when the need for more scholarship on female directors could not be more essential. The subject of resistance in these precarious social and political times seems especially apt and even as Sciamma’s work – emphatically focused on micro-social developments – doesn’t immediately cry out for macro-levels of resistance, the volume edited by Alex Heeney and Orla Smith presents a thoughtful examination of the ways that Sciamma’s work as a contemporary filmmaker bring her in line with current socio-cultural concerns.
In “Portraits of Resistance,” Heeney and Smith convincingly put forward the text as something of a beginner’s guide to Sciamma in many ways. Rather than a complex volume examining hidden themes and references, the volume offers an easily accessible guide to thinking on Sciamma’s four feature-length films. Central to the essays is the way that Sciamma’s preoccupation with expressions of female identity and sexuality have defined her work in a film environment that does not always give much credence to women’s issues. Even though the word “feminist” only appears twice, the thread running through the essays and interviews is one that thoughtfully argues for a film culture that recognises the complexity of women on screen, and behind the screen.
“Portraits of Resistance” is an empathetic assessment of a beloved filmmaker as Seventh Row offers a tender assessment of Sciamma’s work that’s marked by their respect and appreciation for her meticulous craft. The volume occasionally lacks the comprehensiveness of a longer volume – her four films are not examined equally, and her screenwriting work is only mentioned in passing. Instead, the full-length essays are spread across individual thematic looks at specific films and more general trends in her filmography, punctuated by interviews – some recent, some older – with the director, and her collaborators on her most recent film “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” Although the interviews occasionally seem interrupt the development of the critical focus of the essays, they offer some welcome perspectives on the filmmaking process – especially in the dual interviews with Sciamma. A repurposed 2015 interview with Sciamma on loneliness as inherent to cinema, offers a thoughtful alignment with film critics Stanley Cavell and Robert Kolker as Sciamma explains the rationale behind her interest in women, freedom and agency in her film.
In this way, the best essays in the collection are the ones that go most in depth on these issues – Alex Heeney’s assessment of temporary utopia’s in Sciamma’s works and Angelo Muredda on unlearning the male gaze in “Portrait,” seem especially keyed into the ways that resistance for Sciamma is not just a thematic concern but a formal and stylistic preoccupation. Muredda’s piece in particular centres the feminist inclinations of Sciamma’s work, placing it within the context of contemporary character studies that immediately articulate the significance of the volume’s title.
Unusually, the book ends not on Sciamma but on an interview with Adèle Haenel, Sciamma’s former partner and actor in two of her features. In some ways Haenel’s interview offers little in the way of illuminating Sciamma’s cinema of resistance, but asked to explain why working with Sciamma is so important she nods to the director’s willingness to “rely on what I was doing”. It’s an aside that speaks to larger conventions of Sciamma’s work – a director keyed into the humanity of her female characters, whose place in contemporary cinema is marked by shrewd intuitiveness and skills of observations. It’s likely that “Portraits of Resistance” will not be the last volume on Sciamma, but it is a welcome and thoughtful first-entry on this critical director.
“Portraits of Resistance” is available at sciammabook.com and is one of the recent film volumes published by the Canadian Non-Profit publication that releases four volumes a year on cinema.
