Visions of Eurydice in Céline Sciamma's film 'Portrait of a Lady ..., Exercises of Painting

Download Visions of Eurydice in Céline Sciamma's film 'Portrait of a Lady ... and more Exercises Painting in PDF only on Docsity! Visions of Eurydice in Céline Sciamma’s film ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ is a love story framed around looking. It shows us how it feels to look and be looked at, to fall in love and to have love fade into memory. The film tells a story that radically redefines the gaze. The key element, in my opinion, to the film’s success is writer and director Céline Sciamma’s use of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The myth both centres the story in the past and transforms the present. The film is set in 18th century France and follows Marianne (Noémie Merlant), a painter, who is invited to an isolated aristocratic household in Brittany, to paint the portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). Héloïse is newly betrothed to a Milanese nobleman whom she has never met and she is unhappy with the prospect of her marriage. So, in way of rebellion, she is refusing to pose for her portrait, and managed to exhaust the first painter who tried. So, when Marianne is brought to Heloise, she is introduced to her as a walking companion. Marianne must paint Héloïse in secret, using fleeting memories to patch together a portrait. The two women slowly form a connection, and this connection blooms into love. Their love story mimics the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which becomes an explicit metaphor for their relationship just over half-way through the film, when Héloïse, Marianne and the serving girl Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) read and discuss Ovid’s version of Orpheus’ journey to and from the underworld, and his failure to save Eurydice. Sciamma has said that the idea of including this myth came to her late in her script-writing process1 but when the thought came to her, it was “an epiphany2”. She initially included it because she wanted a scene where the characters would have an intellectual debate with each other, but as the idea grew in her mind, it became the key to tying the two threads of the narrative together. The first thread being Marianne in the present, reflecting on her love affair with Héloïse, and the second thread being the past in which Héloïse and Marianne met, bonded and fell in love. In fact, the relationship of Héloïse and Marianne does not just mimic that of Orpheus and Eurydice, it reinvents it I. Looking is Dangerous In the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, to turn and look can be the same as to kill. In his ‘Metamorphoses’, Ovid writes “[Orpheus] turned, and at once [Eurydice] sank back into the dark...she died for the second time3.” To put it simply, looking is dangerous. Sciamma says one of the reasons that she chose this myth was because “it is the myth of the male gaze, [and] how the male gaze kills4.” In ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’, the look or the gaze is first harnessed to tell the story. In the beginning, Marianne steals glances at Héloïse, trying to commit her features to memory so that she can complete the portrait in secret. Héloïse stares back at her, defiant. But their looks lack coordination, when Héloïse looks at Marianne, Marianne turns away. There is a sense that it is forbidden - in a way, it is. Héloïse has rejected being looked at by refusing to pose for the previous painter. She has rejected objectification, and when she finds out that Marianne has been painting her in secret all this time, she feels betrayed. “Is this how you see me?” she asks incredulously, hurt plain in her voice. So, here as in the myth, looking is equated with danger and gives possibilities of betrayal and violation. Marianne must learn to truly see Héloïse before she can capture her likeness in paint. The ‘Male Gaze’ was a term first coined by film critic Laura Mulvey in her seminal essay ‘Visual 1 TIFF Talks. (2019, September 6). PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE Cast and Crew Q&A | TIFF 2019 [Video]. YouTube. 2 Sciamma, C. (2020). Portrait of a Lady on Fire [DVD]. The Criterion Collection. 3 Ovid, Raeburn, D. A., & Feeney, D. C. (2004). Metamorphoses : A new verse translation. London. 4 Sciamma, C. (2020). Portrait of a Lady on Fire [DVD]. The Criterion Collection. Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Her theory is that that viewers of media are assumed to be heterosexual men, and so a heterosexual, masculine perspective is imposed on female characters (this is also because the creators of media are mainly heterosexual men). Camera angles seem almost phallic in the way they fragment women’s bodies, unnecessarily including sensuous close-ups of lips, thighs, breasts, etc. This creates an erotic atmosphere around female characters despite not being relevant to a scene. Mulvey writes “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly5.” This idea of the active/male and passive/female is not just seen in film but in all visual culture and literature. In Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus is active as he leads Eurydice out of the underworld, and he is active when he turns back to look at her. Eurydice remains passive and obedient. In Ovid’s telling of the myth, she is not even angry that Orpheus turned - “what could she complain of, except that he’d loved her6?” Sciamma also tackles the male gaze in art history by tying together the objectification of women in film, with objectification of women in art. This is done through the protagonist of Marianne being an 18th century painter. Sciamma gets to use film as her medium, but also explore ideas about how women are and have been captured in painted portraits. It is pertinent that Sciamma uses the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as a tool for reframing the gaze. This is because in the past, classical mythology has been used not as a tool for the liberation of women, but as a tool for their objectification. We have, for example, the classical statues of men and woman to compare. ‘Crouching Aphrodite’ shows the goddess Aphrodite, bathing herself. This could be portrayed as a fairly mundane task – bathing is after all a routine activity - but instead there is an implied male viewer. Aphrodite looks upwards, with a surprised expression, and uses her arms to protect her modesty, creating a sense of shame around female nudity. And yet, her arms do not obscure the viewer’s gaze as her breasts are still visible, so her protective gesture does more to draw attention to her nakedness than to deter it. Compare this to ‘Discobolus’, another Greek sculpture, but this time of a man. The differences are stark. The man depicted is nude, yet no attention is drawn to his nudity, it is not questioned by the viewer or shamed, it is just accepted. He is in the dynamic pose of a discus thrower, showing the clear divide of the active/male, passive/female. The man is in motion, whilst Aphrodite, the woman is the static object of an active male gaze. In the renaissance period and beyond, the male gaze remains omnipresent, especially in paintings depicting scenes from classical mythology. For these artists, antiquity represented an exotic, pagan existence, one exempted from the moral restrictions of their Christian society. In short, classical mythology became an opportunity and excuse to paint nude women. This can be seen in the copies of the now lost 1508 painting ‘Leda and the Swan’ by Leonardo Da Vinci. Leda is nude, her body twisted into an anatomically awkward contrapposto position, to show off all parts of her body. The Swan, a disguised Zeus, wraps his wing around her hips and thigh, emphasising the sinuous curve of her body. Leda’s smile makes this a particularly insulting depiction – in this myth, Zeus rapes Leda. The artist has chosen to ignore the trauma and violence associated with this story. Instead he displays her idealised naked body to the viewer, sexualising and objectifying her. Similarly, this can be seen in Peter Paul Ruben’s 1636 painting ‘The Judgement of Paris’. Rubens uses his classical setting as an opportunity to paint the nude female 5 Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6-18. 6 Ovid, Raeburn, D. & Feeney, D. (2004). Metamorphoses : A new verse translation. London. ‘Crouching Aphrodite’ in the British Museum ‘Discobolus’ in the National Roman Museum The Judgement of Paris by Peter Paul Rubens Leda and the Swan, copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s original, by Cesare da Sesto not be allowed to continue in a world that is built against them. In their last few days together, they discuss what they will remember about each other. Marianne draws a small portrait of Héloïse so that she can keep a small image of her. At Héloïse’s request she opens Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ and draws a self-portrait inside for Héloïse to keep. This drawing, done on page 28, the end of Orpheus’ chapter, becomes a secret symbol of their relationship. When later in life Marianne comes across a portrait of Héloïse, she smiles to see that whilst Héloïse is depicted with a daughter, she is also holding a book, her thumb opening it on page 28. This is a symbol of all the queer women throughout history. We might not know their stories but that does not mean that they did not exist, just as to the unknowing viewer, this portrait is of just a mother and her daughter, but to Marianne it is a message of love and desire. The re-enactment of the myth is brought to an end in their goodbye scene. Marianne goes to Héloïse’s room where Héloïse is trying on her wedding dress. Struggling to keep her composure, Marianne hugs Héloïse in farewell, then leaves the room abruptly, trying not to look back. She runs down the stairs and makes it to the front door of the house. She opens the door, flooding the corridor with light and steps outside, but before she leaves, she hears Héloïse’s voice behind her. “Turn around,” Héloïse commands and Marianne turns; she sees a luminous Heloise standing there, in her white wedding dress. A second later the door slams and Héloïse fades into the darkness. The main body of the film focuses on Héloïse and Marianne’s relationship as it unfolds, but this story is framed as being in the past. In fact, the film opens with Marianne seeing an old painting of Héloïse. This painting triggers memories of the past, and the audience is taken through the story of them meeting. We are shown that Marianne is haunted by her memories of Héloïse. In two seperate scenes we see Marianne walking through the dark. Héloïse appears behind her in her glowing wedding dress, looking just as she did in their parting scene. Each time Marianne turns around, only to see Héloïse fade into darkness, just as Eurydice fell back into the abyss. Clearly, the poet’s choice is not an easy option, memories can be sweet, but they can also be painful. After we see their farewell scene, we are taken back to Marianne’s near-present. We see her in an exhibition, standing by her own painting, which depicts the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The allusions are clear: Eurydice wears a bright white dress, mirroring Héloïse’s wedding dress, and Orpheus wears a blue robe, the same blue that Marianne wears as she stands in front of the painting. The cliffy background evokes the coastal setting of Brittany, where their love affair took place. A man walks by and compliments the painting, “usually [Orpheus] is portrayed before he turns or after, as Eurydice dies. Here, they seem to be saying goodbye.” This line shows that Sciamma is aware that she is reinventing the myth, making it new. In an interview she said, “it’s about reinventing and revisiting the myth, and from a feminine perspective13.” IV. Conclusion The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has been persistent in popular culture for millenia. We see it referred to in older paintings, classical music, and operas but now also in modern musicals, songs, and films14. In French culture, the myth has been particularly pervasive with Jean Cocteau’s ‘Orphic trilogy’ 13 TIFF Talks. (2019). PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE Cast and Crew Q&A | TIFF 2019 [Video]. YouTube. 14 An example of a musical based on Orpheus and Eurydice is Hadestown, and in modern music we have for example Arcade fire’s album ‘Reflektor’ which has two songs dedicated to Orpheus and Eurydice, and was inspired by Marcel Camus’ 1959 film interpretation of the myth, ‘Black Orpheus’. Héloïse in one of Marianne’s visions Marianne, standing in front of her painting of Orpheus and Eurydice. and Maurice Blanchot’s essay ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’. Céline Sciamma’s ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire, should rightfully take its place among these iconic and influential interpretations. The classics have become a haven for queer and feminist stories; Luca Guadanino’s 2017 film ‘Call Me by Your Name’ uses a discussion about Greek and Roman male statues to symbolise a homosexual awakening; Ali Smith’s 2007 novel ‘Girl meets Boy’ uses stories from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ to explore gender-fluidity. These examples are just two out of a growing genre of counter-cultural expression that plays on classical heritage. “Key to the work of changing the world is changing the story15” says feminist writer Rebecca Solnit. Classicist Helen Morales adds to this, writing “myths are read selectively, re-created, adapted, cut and pasted, and they always have been, especially in antiquity. The different versions of the myths operated collectively as a kind of conversation, later versions responding to earlier, like contributions to a long-running debate…looking at myths with a ‘queer eye’ unlocks levels that would otherwise remain hidden16”. ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’, with its setting that evokes Sappho’s utopic Lesbos, a female-centric environment where lesbian love can be explored without consequence, and its exploration of Orpheus and Eurydice as a mutual, feminist tale, fits perfectly into this genre of classical subversion. Sciamma’s subversion lies in her vision of an empowered Eurydice through Héloïse. In Sciamma’s version, Eurydice has agency, she takes control of her fate and refuses to be passive. Any preconceived ideas of a muse are eroded, Héloïse is an artistic collaborator, not an object, just as Eurydice becomes an active part of Orpheus’ story, through Marianne, Héloïse, and Sophie’s commentary on the myth. Sciamma confronts the male gaze that permeates through classical reception, creating a story that focuses on the female, queer gaze using mythology as a tool for showing new perspectives. 15 Solnit, R. (2018). Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays). Haymarket Books. 16 Morales, H. (2020). Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths. Wildfire. Bibliography: Berger, John. (1972). Ways of Seeing. BBC. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1GI8mNU5Sg&list=PLn6KyJ4PmZsPhigNqPlWGEoCgBHJ bhib3&index=5 Bittencourt, Ela. (2020). Portrait of a Lady on Fire: Daring to See. The Criterion Collection. Retrieved from: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6991-portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire-daring-to-see Deschanel, Broey. (2020). What Portrait of a Lady on Fire Tells Us About “the Gaze” [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMUC584ppNQ&list=PL5hQZo2LpiopXOY8NXLytVXhgE 834PS-m&index=5 Duffy, Carol Ann. (2015). The world's wife (Vol. 6). Pan Macmillan. MacCormack, Luisa-Maria. (2020). FEMALE SEXUALITY AND THE MALE GAZE IN ART HISTORY [Video]. Retrieved from: http://www.londondrawinggroup.com/online-classes/female- sexuality-and-the-male-gaze-in-art-history MacCormack, Luisa-Maria. (2020). FEMALE SEXUALITY AND THE MALE GAZE IN THE MEDIA [Video]. Retrieved from: http://www.londondrawinggroup.com/online-classes/female- sexuality-and-the-male-gaze-in-the-media Morales, Helen. (2020). Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths. Wildfire. Morrow, Nicola. (2020). Eurydice looks back: a review of ‘Portrait of a lady on Fire’, by Nicola Morrow. Star Revue. Retrieved from: http://www.star-revue.com/eurydice-looks-back-a-review-of-portrait-of-a- lady-on-fire-by-nicola-morrow/ Mulvey, Laura. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6-18. Ovid, Raeburn, David. & Feeney, Denis. (2004). Metamorphoses : A new verse translation. London. Spikima Movies. (2020). How ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ Reveals its Secrets [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq09zsqgFOc&list=PL5hQZo2LpiopXOY8NXLytVXhgE834 PS-m&index=2&t=0s Solnit, Rebecca. (2018). Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays). Haymarket Books. TIFF Talks. (2019). PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE Cast and Crew Q&A | TIFF 2019 [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88L8pIEr1nk&list=PL5hQZo2LpiopXOY8NXLytVXhgE834 PS-m&index=2 VanDerWerff, Emily. (2020). Portrait of a Lady on Fire director Céline Sciamma on her ravishing romantic masterpiece. Vox. Retrieved from: https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/2/19/21137213/portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire-celine-sciamma- interview