Exploring the ‘Female Gaze’ in Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire
I’m not being dramatic when I say that the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, directed and written by Celine Sciamma, completely changed the way that I imagined women could move through art. I remember sitting in the theatre as the credits rolled, feeling full of possibility because Sciamma had created something that I didn’t know was achievable until I saw it in front of me.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire encompasses the dangerous beauty of queer love in all its colors and iterations through the container of a painter and her subject. The simplicity and effectiveness of the story is why the film has gotten such a following and why it is the ideal case study to begin a conversation around gaze and how it operates in the art we consume.
There’s a reason why so many philosophers and writers and artists have written about the idea of the “gaze”. The way we take things in around us and interpret them affects the things we are seeing themselves.
I know that probably feels like a vague idea that doesn’t really mean anything, so let me break it down like this. Portrait was written and directed by a lesbian French woman, and its portrayal of gaze is very different than let’s say, Wolf of Wall Street for example.
Why is that? Well one, Wolf of Wall Street is a project pretty much exclusively created by straight white men. Two, the holder of the gaze in both of these films operates in opposite ways. Wolf of Wall Street is not about a painter, but we are still able to think about how gaze operates in this film by examining who is gazing and who is gazed upon. For example, Margot Robbie’s only point in the film is to exist as a sex symbol for Leonardo DiCaprio’s character and, by proxy, for the audience to consume and desire. There is a hierarchy to the way gaze operates in this film because the women in it have been constructed for our consumption. All of this falls under the umbrella of what is called male gaze.
Male gaze is a lens through which Hollywood has operated under since its inception. The camera in movies has always had power over what our eyes are drawn to. Since Western society tends to emphasize male desire, the way women are depicted behind the camera is often from a male point of view. Think about how scenes with attractive women are shot differently than scenes with attractive men. With men, there may be a close up or two, and maybe some emphasis on their physique. In contrast, we are usually introduced to women’s bodies before we can even see their faces. It’s also not unusual for movies to include the classic pan up a woman's body, which literally encapsulates how men’s eyes move when they check a woman out.
Portrait completely subverts the ubiquitous use of male gaze by exploring a love story between a painter, Marianne, and her subject, Héloïse. Marianne has been commissioned to paint a portrait of Héloïse for her future husband and in the process of its creation, the two women fall in love. Marianne observes Héloïse with extreme patience and detail that is not sexual or domineering but comes from a place of generosity. What results is an extremely honest and stunning portrayal of queer love. We watch as these two women are filled with each other and the medium that they create this intimacy through is Marianne’s paintings. The film shows how gaze can be mutual and empowering rather than one person’s gazing holding the other.
The philosopher, Michel Foucault, would describe the way gaze operates in this film as the “observer and the observed [taking] part in a ceaseless exchange”. The element of “exchange” is what makes the gaze in this film an unoppressive force in their love story.
The Chicago School of Media Theory breaks down the way that philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre defined gaze by saying, “we become aware of our self as subject only when confronted with the gaze of the Other and become aware of our self as object.” To translate this theory speak, Sartre is getting at the fact that we define ourselves based on the ways we are perceived by outside eyes.
We have all experienced the out of body experience of watching ourselves in an attempt to see how other people might be seeing us. In a patriarchal society, the subject is more often than not a women or a femme-presenting person, and so the gaze that we are often catering towards or against is a male one. Films such as Wolf of Wall Street, where women are presented to the audience as objects rather than subjects, tell us all we need to know about the way men see us.
The male gaze defines the way women are costumed, the way that they are shot by the camera, the roles that they are able to play. It defines everything when we let it. In contrast, Portrait of a Lady on Fire feels like a brief moment of relief from the pervasiveness of the male gaze, because it is one of the few films I’ve seen portraying queer love without men in the conversation. Portrait invites us to experience what it means to gaze without projection of male desire. The love we see between Marianne and Héloïse has so many colors to it: softness, passion, rage, loss. If this film had centered the male gaze, then we would be missing out on the complexity of what blossoms between them.
Header Image: Adèle Haenel as Héloïse in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Mara Ahmed / Flickr
Written by Mya Ison
