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Rehovot Women's Film Festival Day 4 Postsciptum: Sex is Tragedy
by Netalie Braun
"If men can't desire liberated women, then tough. Does it mean they can only desire a slave? Men need to question the roots of their own desire. Why is it that historically men have this need to deny women to be able to desire them?" Catherine Breillat.
One cannot discuss the representation of desire in cinema without referring to Catherine Breillat. All of her films deal with the desire (or lack of) between men and women, and with exposing those mechanisms of power of which desire is constructed.
Breillat's sensational films – which include casting porn stars and spotlighting the male sex organ, an organ rarely flaunted on screen – have earned her the reputation of a scandalous and provocative director; portions of her films are censored in certain countries. In Israel, for example, three years ago, two scenes of her film Anatomy of Hell (2004), were censored. In one of these censored scenes, the heroine of the film serves a glass of water to her partner in bed, while in the water is a bloody tampon. The man drinks the woman's blood thirstily. In Israel, this concoction was not appreciated, and the scene was removed from the film. Strange. In recent years films containing extreme violence, as well as films with explicit sex, bordering on pornography, are screened with no intervention in movie theatres throughout the country. What is it then, about menstrual blood that is so horrifying? Why is this scene so absolutely unbearable that it is sentenced to expulsion? Ironically, the politics of censorship merely strengthen Breillat's fundamental claim: that misogyny (the hatred of women) has not passed from the world.
We mulled over which of Breillat's films we would screen in the framework of the program; each one contemplates the issue of desire from a different perspective. Finally, since the declared goal of the Festival is to encourage women's films, to nurture women directors, and to change the reality in which the majority of the directors of fiction films are men, we thought it fitting to select a film in which the heroine herself is a director.
In Sex is Comedy the director, Jeanne, has to cope with lead actors who despise one another and who are supposed to be playing a young couple in love. Jeanne employs every possible manipulation in order to draw them closer together, since time is running out and the sex scene that she aspires to is close at hand. Breillat molds Jeanne's character upon the myth of the male director. We are accustomed to her gestures, those familiar to us through well-known representations of the character of the director. The most famous of these, engraved in our memories by Fellini in 8 1\2, who places the sexist director Guido (played by Marcello Mastroianni) at the heart of the film. Jeanne, a controlling and capricious director, flirts incessantly with the main actor and with her assistant. In one scene, in which she complains about the lead actor, one of the crew members comments that Jeanne consistently casts actors towards which she feels attraction, and then during the shooting, tires of them. This small, but significant inversion (director-woman, sex object-man) undermines the myth, making it ridiculous and parodic.
The object of Jeanne's film culminates in a "first time" sex scene. The heroine, a virgin, is in love with her partner, and even desires him; but she hesitates and recoils in the face of his erupting passion, a passion that leaves no room for her. Suspense builds up as the awaited scene nears – will it be a victory or a failure? Why is this scene so critical to Jeanne, and to Catherine Breillat? The scene, placed at the end of the film, is the catharsis, and within it lies the code for the decryption of the entire film. The filming is approaching its end; Jeanne must execute the scene despite the difficult conditions. The lead actor dons an artificial sex organ and Jeanne inspects it. He is embarrassed. Since in the scene his dick is supposed to be erect, Jeanne takes no chances and prefers to enhance the existing equipment along lines of own taste and imagination. The actor asks to don a sizable prosthesis, and Jeanne grants his request. The actor prances around the set like a child, entertaining those present, his artificial member dangling out his robe. Jeanne – oscillating from the need to keep him happy and devoted to the acting, to self-directed anger at being so dependent upon him – is satisfied. She has subdued him. He is hers. But what about the actress? Behind stage, as in the movie being filmed, as in reality according to Breillat, the woman is pushed to the sidelines. The actor demands Jeanne's exclusive and undivided attention while the actress sullenly observes their relationship growing closer. The more he struts, his stature upright and his fake dick taut, the more the actress shrinks.
Jeanne wants to film the entire scene in one shot. The crew is on edge. Jeanne is focused, fastened to the monitor. The camera rolls. The actress lies on the bed, her face frozen. He enters the room, lies down beside her. Cut. He is fabulous, but she. She's not there. Jeanne disengages from the monitor and goes to her, looking into her eyes, "Let me feel that my gaze is an invasion… that I have no right to watch this scene…" The assistant director points to his watch and signals to Jeanne to hurry. Jeanne embraces the actress and asks her to scream. The actress screams. "Harder," requests Jeanne. The actress screams. "Harder." The actress screams and her eyes become red. Jeanne lets go of her. They attempt to shoot the scene once again. Jeanne is stressed; there is something unclear to her. The crew takes aim; the actress takes a last look at Jeanne. Action. She is lying on the bed when he enters the room. He takes his shirt off and is left with only an undershirt. His organ is raised. He spreads her legs, that were crossed hard, and lies on top of her. She turns, her back towards him. He strokes her shoulder and strips her of her dress. "If you were nice…," he whispers. She repeats his words like an echo. "All girls take it from behind…" Jeanne braces herself. Something startles her. Before her very eyes occurs something that rarely happens on set: it is only now that has she understood the scene; only now has its meaning become fully apparent to her; Jeanne is horrified. The actress' face is racked with pain. The first-time sex scene becomes a rape scene. Silence overcomes the set; the crew is in shock. The "cut" barely escapes Jeanne's lips. She runs to the actress and holds her. They both weep.
The rape is twofold: the concrete rape, transpiring in the bed, and the metaphorical rape occuring on the set, in which the entire crew, lead by the director, pushes the actress to unbearable extremities, all the while watching her through the monitor. The scene that Breillat has created is a dense and precise micro-cosmos, simultaneously encompassing her world view and a piercing critique of the power relations existing within the filmmaking industry.
One may read Sex is Comedy as a film of initiation. Jeanne the director plays the role of Catherine Breillat and the actress of Jeanne's film plays Jeanne. Perhaps through them, Breillat attempts to provide a complex answer to the question of what women's cinema is. Jeanne adopts the existing male codes of directing films, but the road paved for her is wreaked once encountering another woman, the actress. From this encounter stems a novel understanding previously hidden from Jeanne, but that had also troubled her. Throughout the film Jeanne reiterates her anxiety to the assistant director. She complains about the discrepancy between the screenplay and the actual film, and about her lack of knowledge. In the final scene we watch Jeanne watching the face of the actress. The transformation occurs on Jeanne's face. Suddenly she comprehends. And before her urgent rush towards the actress, for several seconds, she is paralyzed.
After viewing Carl Dreyer's 1928 masterpiece, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) for the first time, I decided to make films. Maria Falconneti's unforgettable face surmounted any intended imagery. Her countenance expressed genuine testimony, true pain. Before shooting my first short film, I innocently screened Dreyer's film for the lead actress, and my only instruction as a director to this doubting actress was: this is it. Like her. The film was an undisputed failure, but strangely enough, a few years later in 2004, I attended a master class with Catherine Breillat. She was asked how she directs her actors. To my great surprise she replied that she shows her actresses La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, and that's it, more or less.
Who is this Jeanne d'Arc, who has become a symbol for so many women?
In 1431, when Jeanne d'Arc was nineteen, she was tried and convicted by the Catholic Church of heresy and fraud and was burned as a witch. Until her imprisonment, Jeanne was a military strategist, a warrior, and the one who lay the groundwork for the rise of the French nation. Andrea Dworkin, in her book "Intercourse", attributes considerable, symbolic weight to the fact that Jeanne d'Arc was a virgin. Dworkin maintains that Jeanne's virginity was an integral part of her self definition and independence. In opposition to the virginity of sworn nuns, Jeanne's preservation of her virginity was a rebellion, a breach of the forceful control of men over women. She strove to deviate from her lowly status as a woman, a position related to the fact that she is penetrable.
"In as much as she has found a way to circumvent male desire, Jeanne's story enlightens and clarifies the extent to which male desire determines the possibilities that a woman has in her life: to what distance, at what rate, where, when, and how she is allowed to move... the degree to which her physical liberty will be curbed... Jeanne was put to death because of the freedom she claimed for herself, because of the status that she purloined, because of her defiance of the constraints of her gender. In her heresy towards her female status, she blasphemed against the life held hostage by male sexual desire" (Dworkin, Intercourse).
In most of Breillat's films, the protagonists are nameless; so too in Sex is Comedy, the actors remain unnammed, and their sexual encounter embodies the fundamental relationship between every man and every woman. The director is the only character with a name (first name only), and her name is, of course - Jeanne.
On the surface it seems that the actress is afraid of losing her virginity and of displaying her desire because of motives involving conservatism and a conception of lust as sinful. Jeanne constructs her relationship with the lead actor using familiar gestures of chaser - chasee. But at the end of the film the predictable, romantic path of an adolescent girl is wholly altered. The girl does not overcome her fears, nor does she discover what passion is while progressing from the protected, exclusively feminine and virginal world to the world of adulthood. She does not transform from girl into woman.
She is raped.
Did Jeanne know that the sex scene would become a scene of rape? Did the actress know the portended future? Catherine Breillat conceals this knowledge from both of them, allowing it to crystallize only through the meeting of the two, a meeting that leads to a sudden and complete recognition. Breillat's choice to direct a sex scene as a rape scene is devastating, and its implication, from the cradle of civilization unto this day, is tragic.
Netalie Braun is a filmmaker and poet. She is the editor of the International Women's film Festival catalogue. Source: iwff.net
"If men can't desire liberated women, then tough. Does it mean they can only desire a slave? Men need to question the roots of their own desire. Why is it that historically men have this need to deny women to be able to desire them?" Catherine Breillat.
One cannot discuss the representation of desire in cinema without referring to Catherine Breillat. All of her films deal with the desire (or lack of) between men and women, and with exposing those mechanisms of power of which desire is constructed.
Breillat's sensational films – which include casting porn stars and spotlighting the male sex organ, an organ rarely flaunted on screen – have earned her the reputation of a scandalous and provocative director; portions of her films are censored in certain countries. In Israel, for example, three years ago, two scenes of her film Anatomy of Hell (2004), were censored. In one of these censored scenes, the heroine of the film serves a glass of water to her partner in bed, while in the water is a bloody tampon. The man drinks the woman's blood thirstily. In Israel, this concoction was not appreciated, and the scene was removed from the film. Strange. In recent years films containing extreme violence, as well as films with explicit sex, bordering on pornography, are screened with no intervention in movie theatres throughout the country. What is it then, about menstrual blood that is so horrifying? Why is this scene so absolutely unbearable that it is sentenced to expulsion? Ironically, the politics of censorship merely strengthen Breillat's fundamental claim: that misogyny (the hatred of women) has not passed from the world.
We mulled over which of Breillat's films we would screen in the framework of the program; each one contemplates the issue of desire from a different perspective. Finally, since the declared goal of the Festival is to encourage women's films, to nurture women directors, and to change the reality in which the majority of the directors of fiction films are men, we thought it fitting to select a film in which the heroine herself is a director.
In Sex is Comedy the director, Jeanne, has to cope with lead actors who despise one another and who are supposed to be playing a young couple in love. Jeanne employs every possible manipulation in order to draw them closer together, since time is running out and the sex scene that she aspires to is close at hand. Breillat molds Jeanne's character upon the myth of the male director. We are accustomed to her gestures, those familiar to us through well-known representations of the character of the director. The most famous of these, engraved in our memories by Fellini in 8 1\2, who places the sexist director Guido (played by Marcello Mastroianni) at the heart of the film. Jeanne, a controlling and capricious director, flirts incessantly with the main actor and with her assistant. In one scene, in which she complains about the lead actor, one of the crew members comments that Jeanne consistently casts actors towards which she feels attraction, and then during the shooting, tires of them. This small, but significant inversion (director-woman, sex object-man) undermines the myth, making it ridiculous and parodic.
The object of Jeanne's film culminates in a "first time" sex scene. The heroine, a virgin, is in love with her partner, and even desires him; but she hesitates and recoils in the face of his erupting passion, a passion that leaves no room for her. Suspense builds up as the awaited scene nears – will it be a victory or a failure? Why is this scene so critical to Jeanne, and to Catherine Breillat? The scene, placed at the end of the film, is the catharsis, and within it lies the code for the decryption of the entire film. The filming is approaching its end; Jeanne must execute the scene despite the difficult conditions. The lead actor dons an artificial sex organ and Jeanne inspects it. He is embarrassed. Since in the scene his dick is supposed to be erect, Jeanne takes no chances and prefers to enhance the existing equipment along lines of own taste and imagination. The actor asks to don a sizable prosthesis, and Jeanne grants his request. The actor prances around the set like a child, entertaining those present, his artificial member dangling out his robe. Jeanne – oscillating from the need to keep him happy and devoted to the acting, to self-directed anger at being so dependent upon him – is satisfied. She has subdued him. He is hers. But what about the actress? Behind stage, as in the movie being filmed, as in reality according to Breillat, the woman is pushed to the sidelines. The actor demands Jeanne's exclusive and undivided attention while the actress sullenly observes their relationship growing closer. The more he struts, his stature upright and his fake dick taut, the more the actress shrinks.
Jeanne wants to film the entire scene in one shot. The crew is on edge. Jeanne is focused, fastened to the monitor. The camera rolls. The actress lies on the bed, her face frozen. He enters the room, lies down beside her. Cut. He is fabulous, but she. She's not there. Jeanne disengages from the monitor and goes to her, looking into her eyes, "Let me feel that my gaze is an invasion… that I have no right to watch this scene…" The assistant director points to his watch and signals to Jeanne to hurry. Jeanne embraces the actress and asks her to scream. The actress screams. "Harder," requests Jeanne. The actress screams. "Harder." The actress screams and her eyes become red. Jeanne lets go of her. They attempt to shoot the scene once again. Jeanne is stressed; there is something unclear to her. The crew takes aim; the actress takes a last look at Jeanne. Action. She is lying on the bed when he enters the room. He takes his shirt off and is left with only an undershirt. His organ is raised. He spreads her legs, that were crossed hard, and lies on top of her. She turns, her back towards him. He strokes her shoulder and strips her of her dress. "If you were nice…," he whispers. She repeats his words like an echo. "All girls take it from behind…" Jeanne braces herself. Something startles her. Before her very eyes occurs something that rarely happens on set: it is only now that has she understood the scene; only now has its meaning become fully apparent to her; Jeanne is horrified. The actress' face is racked with pain. The first-time sex scene becomes a rape scene. Silence overcomes the set; the crew is in shock. The "cut" barely escapes Jeanne's lips. She runs to the actress and holds her. They both weep.
The rape is twofold: the concrete rape, transpiring in the bed, and the metaphorical rape occuring on the set, in which the entire crew, lead by the director, pushes the actress to unbearable extremities, all the while watching her through the monitor. The scene that Breillat has created is a dense and precise micro-cosmos, simultaneously encompassing her world view and a piercing critique of the power relations existing within the filmmaking industry.
One may read Sex is Comedy as a film of initiation. Jeanne the director plays the role of Catherine Breillat and the actress of Jeanne's film plays Jeanne. Perhaps through them, Breillat attempts to provide a complex answer to the question of what women's cinema is. Jeanne adopts the existing male codes of directing films, but the road paved for her is wreaked once encountering another woman, the actress. From this encounter stems a novel understanding previously hidden from Jeanne, but that had also troubled her. Throughout the film Jeanne reiterates her anxiety to the assistant director. She complains about the discrepancy between the screenplay and the actual film, and about her lack of knowledge. In the final scene we watch Jeanne watching the face of the actress. The transformation occurs on Jeanne's face. Suddenly she comprehends. And before her urgent rush towards the actress, for several seconds, she is paralyzed.
After viewing Carl Dreyer's 1928 masterpiece, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) for the first time, I decided to make films. Maria Falconneti's unforgettable face surmounted any intended imagery. Her countenance expressed genuine testimony, true pain. Before shooting my first short film, I innocently screened Dreyer's film for the lead actress, and my only instruction as a director to this doubting actress was: this is it. Like her. The film was an undisputed failure, but strangely enough, a few years later in 2004, I attended a master class with Catherine Breillat. She was asked how she directs her actors. To my great surprise she replied that she shows her actresses La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, and that's it, more or less.
Who is this Jeanne d'Arc, who has become a symbol for so many women?
In 1431, when Jeanne d'Arc was nineteen, she was tried and convicted by the Catholic Church of heresy and fraud and was burned as a witch. Until her imprisonment, Jeanne was a military strategist, a warrior, and the one who lay the groundwork for the rise of the French nation. Andrea Dworkin, in her book "Intercourse", attributes considerable, symbolic weight to the fact that Jeanne d'Arc was a virgin. Dworkin maintains that Jeanne's virginity was an integral part of her self definition and independence. In opposition to the virginity of sworn nuns, Jeanne's preservation of her virginity was a rebellion, a breach of the forceful control of men over women. She strove to deviate from her lowly status as a woman, a position related to the fact that she is penetrable.
"In as much as she has found a way to circumvent male desire, Jeanne's story enlightens and clarifies the extent to which male desire determines the possibilities that a woman has in her life: to what distance, at what rate, where, when, and how she is allowed to move... the degree to which her physical liberty will be curbed... Jeanne was put to death because of the freedom she claimed for herself, because of the status that she purloined, because of her defiance of the constraints of her gender. In her heresy towards her female status, she blasphemed against the life held hostage by male sexual desire" (Dworkin, Intercourse).
In most of Breillat's films, the protagonists are nameless; so too in Sex is Comedy, the actors remain unnammed, and their sexual encounter embodies the fundamental relationship between every man and every woman. The director is the only character with a name (first name only), and her name is, of course - Jeanne.
On the surface it seems that the actress is afraid of losing her virginity and of displaying her desire because of motives involving conservatism and a conception of lust as sinful. Jeanne constructs her relationship with the lead actor using familiar gestures of chaser - chasee. But at the end of the film the predictable, romantic path of an adolescent girl is wholly altered. The girl does not overcome her fears, nor does she discover what passion is while progressing from the protected, exclusively feminine and virginal world to the world of adulthood. She does not transform from girl into woman.
She is raped.
Did Jeanne know that the sex scene would become a scene of rape? Did the actress know the portended future? Catherine Breillat conceals this knowledge from both of them, allowing it to crystallize only through the meeting of the two, a meeting that leads to a sudden and complete recognition. Breillat's choice to direct a sex scene as a rape scene is devastating, and its implication, from the cradle of civilization unto this day, is tragic.
Netalie Braun is a filmmaker and poet. She is the editor of the International Women's film Festival catalogue. Source: iwff.net
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