Céline Sciamma is Wrong
About long films and other things too. Also, my take on de Sade's Justine in Chinese
[From Sciamma interview which was originally published in Spanish thus I shall not quote it directly]
Céline Sciamma has finally thrown her chthonic shade onto three-hour auteur Martin Scorcese. In this newsletter we have to shake our heads at Céline Sciamma, who knows not what she condemns (ie. a great filmmaker and preservation activist who has done more for the medium than she ever will). I used to nod along with the ninety-minute supremacists (ie. my dad) but actually my favourite interactions with narrative art have all been over two hours long. Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, still the greatest film of our current century, thrives on its own sense of prolonged space and time. Without the cushioning of however many extra minutes, it would lose its David-Hockney-in-Malibu vibe, as well as its twisty and incestuous conception of the larger Hollywood mythos.
Creating a compelling character is hard - maintaining and moulding the whole life of a compelling character is harder. The feat is achieved successfully over thousands of pages in Tolstoy and Hugo and most notably film-wise in the 1939 adaptation of Gone With the Wind, where Scarlett O’Hara, via hours and hours of epic trudging personal conflict, unwittingly becomes one of those textured female leads that everybody wants. It takes a rare sort of confidence to occupy this much scale on screen and then to draw it into its appropriate ending. People hated the montage finale of Chazelle’s gargantuan Babylon (2022), but I found myself moved to tears by its gravitas - a rare sign of self-belief in a landscape of filmmakers who think it’s fine to merely teeter off.
I did not like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, whose static, obvious visual metaphors would be better-suited to a graduate project in conceptual art than to a piece of immersive storytelling. We see bits of Altman’s fantastic Three Women and then skirt around them. Here’s the female gaze, as if that means anything. Sciamma kicks and kicks but does not leave the ground in any sense. My friend and I saw this film on its UK opening night and then I never thought about it ever again. I attribute its appearance on the 2022 Sight and Sound poll to a combination of recency bias and shockingly low standards for new gay cinema.
In Sciamma’s phrasing I do not see the spirit of someone who truly loves film as an art but rather one who loves it as a tool. Take the sentence both ways. As I’ve said before, it is in the flattening of art to a one-size-fits-all combo of education and activism that we see everything else die a real death. This is most visible in fiction written for children but it is starting to bleed outwards. Themes are interchangeable and so are plots, which have been reduced to a collection of collectible ‘tropes’. Here we do film maths - film art becomes a quantifiable thing (measure word 部) told in story-form by an individual person, and the more films there are, the better. Which films and which individual people? Nobody cares, least of all Sciamma. But she is constraining her own artistic practice so there can be more. She wants you to know this.
Here is one of the worst quirks of current politics - the martyrish yielding of ‘space’ to others, except the yielding itself is a performance and the yielder is, of course, its major star. I used to know a student in a university group chat who, upon the announcement of some social justice-related protest or party, would proclaim ‘Looks like this isn’t for me, everyone - I’ll sit this one out!’. Except there were hundreds of us in the chat and nobody cared. And she had already graduated and was doing a masters in a different city hours away so I have no idea why she was there in the first place.
It is in the yielding that the spirit of the female artist falls flat. This is why there are few female directors on festival circuits who display the knowing singularity of vision we see in Scorsese or Polanski. Contra Paglia, there is nothing inherent about femaleness that constrains art, but there does seem to be something about being a woman that leads to this sort of Sciammaian second guess. Sacrificing your own narrative is not admirable.* Nobody likes a martyr who is aware of their own martyrdom, and if you are aware of your own martyrdom then you probably haven’t martyred yourself properly, have you?
Justine (淑女的眼泪) by the Marquis de Sade (萨德侯爵) in Chinese
I have now read de Sade in Chinese but not in English. I enjoyed the novelty of this to start with but it wore off after probably the third whipping. De Sade in a second language is funny - the more egregious words have been learnt but their proper implications are yet to sink fully into my consciousness, and so the characters go about hitting each other for fun in a detached way, like in Looney Tunes or rugby. Justine, another extension of the Goeblin/Fassbinder Franz Bieberkopf character, emerges from a nunnery (= prison/women’s college/circus) and in this mad new world cannot help but get herself into scrapes which mostly involve voyeurism, bondage, and theft. She is set throughout the entire book on defending her own purity. Between every scrape she prays and argues painstakingly with characters whose politics, drawn up in imitation of Sade’s own, amount to a Watersian ‘Kill everyone now! Advocate first-degree murder!’. There is comedy in regularity, and also in trust, in others of which she has too much. She is the teenage girl in whom we all want to believe but can’t because her optimism is just slightly too bright and convenient and clearly configured as a foil to villainous adults - see Greta Thunberg, etc. Perhaps Franz has roots in the eighteenth century and did not come fully-formed from the modernist movement a la Venus in her shell.
*This is why Madonna, who has been subverting the mould for decades by sacrificing the narratives of OTHER people in favour of her own, is probably one of only two or three ‘great’ female artists not working in the medium of the novel (I’m planning a book on this). This is not a condemnation of womankind but rather an urge to study every aspect of history and then insert yourself very rudely into it. Yes you ARE Eva Peron!!!
As much as I enjoyed Portrait when I watched it I agree with you that the use of cinema as a tool for "education" and suchlike only results in simple, one dimensioned movies. It's disgraceful how frequent it is now for moviemakers (especially female ones) to boast about "what their movie teaches" or the "message" as if it was the most important part of a story.
Very interesting thoughts about yielding.
And I agree with you about Mulholland Drive being the best movie of this century AND on Babylon's glorious three hours ending in an equally glorious way.