There is just one point of view about sex, and it is pornographic … what I must do is show images that are not showable.1
– Catherine Breillat
From outrageous images of vaginas, erections, ejaculation and bloody secretions to provocative scenes that involve masturbation, masochism and bondage, Catherine Breillat’s cinema is obsessed with sex. In that respect, her work would seem perfectly suited to a volume exploring cult traditions of the erotic. However, rather than conforming to any existing notion of a porno aesthetic, Breillat’s visceral creations are concerned with dismantling the peep show aesthetic to reveal the ‘truth’ about women’s bodies, sexuality and desire; that which is ‘not showable’. By profiling Breillat’s controversial career and taking a closer look at two of her most explicit productions, Romance (1999) and Anatomie de l’Enfer (Anatomy of Hell (2004)), I aim to show that her filmmaking presents a greater challenge to the viewer than the usual approach to watching sex, shock and gore. Breillat documents women’s dissatisfaction and discontent with sex and in doing so provides a welcome intervention into the flurry of critical enquiry into sex on screen and the recent academic trend for ‘porn studies’. Furthermore, her challenge to the dominant discourse on sex, sexuality and desire resurrects and re-visions feminist debates on pornography, in a manner reminiscent of Adrienne Rich’s call to re-vision, to adopt the revolutionary potential of ‘the act of looking back … of entering an old text from a new critical direction’.2
FIGURE 3.1 Confrontational carnality: Breillat’s cinema of agitation
CATHERINE BREILLAT: THE OTHER FRENCH REVOLUTION
By way of introduction, a brief overview of Breillat and her body of work proves useful to any discussion of her as a hard-core agitator. Born in France in 1948, Catherine Breillat began her career as a writer, and wrote L’Homme Facile (1968) at the age of seventeen (although it was not published until three years later); she would not have been legally permitted to buy her first novel because of its explicitness. This irony was not lost on Breillat who, when questioned about her provocative work and feminist influence, said:
It is a discourse that should make men run away but the purpose is the opposite: to retain him … It’s a feminist cinema because it is from the point of view of women since there are certain things that are forbidden for women. I want to show these things, explore them beyond their limits … Is the provocation in my films intentional? … I started writing when I was 17. I wrote a book that was prohibited for people of less than 18 years. I was forbidden to read the same book I had written. If you consider that this is a provocation, this is what I do.3
Breillat’s film career spans three decades, originating in the 1970s when a re-emerging women’s movement questioned the representation of women’s sexuality and subjectivity, and challenged patriarchal norms and modes of representation. This was also a time when the social and political popular discourse of post-1968 France called for the disturbance or destruction of hierarchy and redistribution of power, the regaining of power and control of language by those traditionally without access to the power of speech, and the recognition that the dominant structures of political and economic systems extend into cultural and sexual relations, the home and the workplace.4 As Breillat has since recalled however, filmmakers, critics and theorists at the time were mostly gender blind in their approach:
Women were totally excluded from the ’68 revolution, just as we were excluded from the French Revolution itself … ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’ … the term ‘brotherhood’ explicitly highlights the collusion of men in subordinating women. So if nothing else, May ’68 made it clear to women that in this revolution, as in the first, they had been cheated.5
Breillat’s response was to launch her own literary and cinematic revolution. After writing several novels and screenplays, and briefly pursuing acting – she played a supporting role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972) – Breillat made her feature directorial debut with Une Vraie Jeune Fille (A Real Young Girl, 1976), an adaptation of her fourth novel, Le Soupirail (1974). The film explores the sexual awakening and desires of fourteen-year-old Alice, played by Charlotte Alexandra (who in 1974 had starred in Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales, and went on to appear in Goodbye Emmanuelle in 1977). Breillat’s transformative vision is presented through confrontation with the abject, which indicates the pending rupture in Alice’s sexual identity. Corpses, animal entrails, flies buzzing around waste and refuse, smashed egg yolks and bodily fluids – blood, urine, vomit, earwax, semen – dominate the mise-en-scène as Alice becomes fascinated not only with her bodily excretions but also with the slimy, smelly debris she discovers in nature.
The film was culturally prohibited, considered visually illicit and suppressed on its completion, which was surprising given that it was a product of the same cultural time that produced and distributed Last Tango in Paris, Salo (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975), Histoire d’ O (Just Jaeckin, 1975) and Ai No Corrida (Nagisa Oshima, 1976). Evidently the world was not ready for a film made by a woman that pushed the boundaries of the adolescent coming-of-age genre, and that simultaneously exposed the confines of patriarchal oppression. It was only after the relative critical success of Romance that Une Vraie Jeune Fille was eventually given a limited theatrical and DVD release in 2000.
I have chosen Romance as one focus of my analysis, as it was with this vision of hardcore agitation that Breillat received significant international exposure. The film follows Marie’s (Caroline Ducey) journey in search of her sexual self, involving oral sex, intercourse, rape and bondage with a series of men, after being rejected by her lover Paul (Sagamore Stévenin). Romance was quickly followed by À Ma Soeur! (Fat Girl, 2000), a film renowned for its shocking and violent climax, about the relationship between two sisters, twelve-year-old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), and her flirtatious fifteen-year-old sister Elena (Roxane Mesquida), whose virginity is under siege by Italian law student Fernando (Libero de Rienzo). Sex is Comedy (2002), a semi-fictional film about filmmaking, was based on the experience of shooting the long sex scene central to the narrative of À Ma Soeur in which Fernando tries out various seduction techniques to force Elena to lose her virginity. The film exposes the sexual and power dynamics in relationships on- and offscreen as director Jeanne (Anne Parillaud) struggles to capture the sex scene between the Actor (Grégoire Colin) and the Actress (Roxane Mesquida). Anatomie de L’Enfer, a two-character film in which we see a Woman (Amira Casar) pay a Man (Rocco Siffredi) to ‘look’ at her over the course of four nights, is Breillat’s most controversial and graphic exploration of misogyny. Anatomie de L’Enfer concludes her decalogue – which includes Tapage Nocturne (Nocturnal Uproar, 1979), 36 Fillette (Virgin, 1988), Sale Comme Un Ange (Dirty Like An Angel, 1991), Parfait Amour! (Perfect Love!, 1996) and Brève Traversée (Brief Crossing, 2001) – because, Breillat states, she ‘couldn’t go any further, that the tenth would be the conclusion of a decalogue. The X of X-rated film.’6
Breillat’s subsequent production, Une Vieille Maîtresse (The Last Mistress, 2007), provides the departure she forewarned, although the production was delayed after the director suffered a severe stroke in 2004 and was hospitalised for five months. This is her first costume drama, in which Asia Argento plays Spanish courtesan La Vellini who entices young libertine Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Aït Aattou) from his virginal bride, the French aristocrat Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida). This is also Breillat’s first adaptation of another author’s work; that she chose this 1865 novel is unsurprising however, given that the eighteenth-century French author Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly is best known for his themes of violent sexuality.
DIRECTING SEX: ART IS THE THEORY, PORN IS THE PRACTICE?
Breillat’s work forms part of a well-documented trend in recent French ‘extreme’ cinema for explicit sex and violence, including Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy (2001), Léos Carax’s Pola X (1999), and Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-Moi (2000). Whilst the representation of sex in her films is important to their characterisation and visual style, Breillat insists she does not cross over into pornography. Her assertion that she takes sexuality ‘as the subject, not as the object’ of her work is where some of the controversy and challenge in Breillat’s work lies.7 Some might say she has deliberately courted this controversy by using explicit hard-core conventions and casting pornographic actor and producer Rocco Siffredi, infamous for his anal, and sometimes violent, porn films.
Siffredi, who appeared first in Romance and later in Anatomie de L’Enfer was cast because, Breillat said, ‘mainstream actors have refused to act in my films … he had the physical qualities I needed for the role’ and he was ‘something of a cult star of the porn industry’.8
Breillat’s use of a ‘meat merchant’ such as Siffredi in an arthouse production on the extreme limits of female desire pushes many of the buttons associated with the cult film text, both for its fusion of high/low cultural registers, as well as its problematic and challenging depictions of female sexuality. Breillat did not underestimate the impact casting Siffredi would have when shooting Romance, and reputedly withheld this information from cast and crew for as long as possible in order to keep them on board. Caroline Ducey was reportedly disturbed when she found out on the day of the shoot that she would be filming sex scenes with Siffredi. As Breillat recollects:
FIGURE 3.2 Cult casting: Breillat’s use of the infamous porn performer Rocco Siffredi
I felt that had I told anyone I was going to cast Rocco for the role, there would have been an uncontrollable reaction … It was very, very difficult … for Rocco, because there are so many biting tongues on the set [and] for Caroline … she bore it for hours … At 3 o’clock in the morning she couldn’t stand it anymore, it’s true. How could she be the only one to find it normal to film with Rocco when everybody else was appalled? … There was terror on the set when he arrived.9
Similarly Breillat recalls that the shoot for Anatomie de L’Enfer was also very difficult for cast and crew, and the relationship between Amira Casar and Siffredi was reportedly tense. Casar insisted a body double be used for intimate close-ups: the film’s laborious opening titles deliver Casar’s contractual disclaimer, stating ‘A film is an illusion, not reality-fiction or a happening: it is a true work of fiction. For the actress’s most intimate scenes, a body double was used. It’s not her body, it’s an extension of a fictional character.’ Siffredi recalls her first words to him were ‘Stay away two metres from me with your dick [sic.]’ although less widely reported was Siffredi’s objection to a scene involving him receiving a blowjob from another man, stating: ‘Catherine is much more liberal than me sexually … I’m supposed to receive a blow job from a boy, and I said – ‘What?’ She says ‘Rocco Siffredi gives me censorship on sex now? Get a blowjob from a man or girl, I don’t see the difference.’10
Despite such onset revelations, Breillat deliberately exploits her medium to show provocative sex, to reinforce the abjection seen on screen, to minimise the conventional entertainment value of the film and to shock the spectator. Since Romance Breillat has worked with cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis to achieve her characteristic slow pace, minimal set-ups, tight framing and long takes that rely on a gently panning or slow circular tracking camera, to convey an almost unbearable proximity, scrutiny and duration. This is often accompanied by deliberately choreographed performances, sometimes by nonprofessional actors, to hinder the spectator’s identification with the protagonist and to limit the voyeur’s space for the fantasy and pleasure traditionally available in hard-core porn.
Although labelled a ‘porn auteur’ because of her use of unsimulated sex, Breillat has vehemently refuted this characterisation of her work. Indeed her stated aim, in recognition that historically and culturally ‘pornography is written on every woman’s body’, is to explore ‘the nature of sex … to transcend the usual, horrible images that form the basis of the porno films’.11 Critics question, however, how liberating and challenging is it really to expose women’s flesh and to display explicit sex on screen to challenge porn and highlight women’s inequality?
SEX AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Linda Williams’ account of the history and generic features of pornography in Hard Core (1999) paved the way for the emergence of ‘porn studies’ as an academic discipline.12 Williams argued that the genre has moved away from its marginal and deviant origins being consumed exclusively by men, and that pornography offers women oscillating sexual identities with which to identify and enjoy. This position is expanded in Williams’ later anthology, Porn Studies (2004), which includes textual analyses of a diverse range of contemporary and historical ‘pornographies’, and explicitly calls for a shift from feminist debates that divided feminisms along the lines of sexist oppression versus sexual repression, to move beyond the ‘agonizing over sexual politics that characterised an earlier era in the study of pornography’.13
In her review of Porn Studies, Karen Boyle criticises its selective boundaries and focus on the ‘soft’ or the ‘marginal’; its lack of attention to mainstream heterosexual and violent pornography, and its analysis of texts that are not specifically produced, distributed or consumed as pornography.14 This blurring of the boundaries of pornography, and proliferation of pornographic images and practices being embraced in mainstream texts, has led to what Boyle calls the ‘birth of a new genre: a pornography-documentary hybrid – or ‘docuporn’ … a reality-based entertainment genre that takes pornography as its subject and offers sexual display and sexual talk as its key attractions’. This genre is not made and sold as pornography, but offers ‘a commentary on commercial sex’ in the mainstream, and facilitates its future consumption by focussing on the supply side, the ‘inside-view’ of women who sell sex.15
Similarly, Breillat’s work takes the representation of sex as its subject whilst using explicit sexual display and hard-core conventions in the process; it aims to expose the ‘truth’ about sex from women’s point of view; and is not made and sold as pornography. However, while the women interviewed naked in docuporn ‘talk repeatedly of their love of sex; and their bodily functions and responses are described in detail’,16 Breillat’s agitation is founded on her challenge to this postmodern pro-porn sensibility: her protagonists portray sex under patriarchy as particularly joyless and punitive. The stories they tell have more in common with anti-pornography feminism than critics have acknowledged, probably because to do so would assume an association with an anti-sex pro-censorship position, which Breillat’s reputation as a controversial filmmaker and anti-censorship campaigner evidently does not support.
In this respect Breillat’s films have proved difficult to categorise. Whilst their themes are not inherently shocking – for example they explore the violence and deceit of seduction and romantic love and the impact this has on women’s subjectivity, and the search for an autonomous female sexuality – it is the way Breillat’s female characters breach culturally prohibited feminine ways of looking and behaving that is transgressive. It is also easy to assume, after a cursory glance, that she presents masculinity and femininity as monolithic fixed identities. Yet gender as masquerade is a recurring Breillat motif, as is the doubling of characters to expose the construction of femininity and masculinity under patriarchy, of women being comprised of fractured parts of an incomplete whole; the dichotomy between the virginal ‘inaccessible woman up on a pedestal’ and the promiscuous other ‘in a brothel’.17 It is this complex and contradictory construction of her heroines that makes movies like Romance both memorable and misunderstood.
NOT A LOVE STORY?: BREILLAT’S ROMANCE
Romance will be greeted [with] a wall of hate, proportionate to this hell on earth that has been created for women.18
In Romance, Marie’s boyfriend Paul refuses to have sex with her, which instigates her exploratory sex with Paolo (Rocco Siffredi), a man she meets in a bar; masochistic performance with head-teacher Robert (François Berléand); and a street encounter with a man (Reza Habouhossein) who first pays to ‘eat’ her cunt before anally raping her. Following inconclusive sex with Paul she becomes pregnant; he takes her to a nightclub and humiliates her, and the film concludes with Marie’s graphic (re)birth and murder of Paul – described by Breillat as ‘the birth of a woman into a whole being … she no longer needs a man and a romance with a man to be complete … she’s the one who gives meaning to her life, by herself.’19
Romance is renowned for showing an erect penis and its ejaculate to mainstream audiences and for its scenes of female masochism. Yet, as Lisa Downing argues, it is not a pornographic film, more a ‘documentary account of … the quest of a heterosexual woman for self-discovery’. Whilst this nevertheless sounds like a typical premise for a porn narrative, what destabilises it are the techniques of ‘subtle de-eroticization’ that are common to Breillat’s films.20
In Romance, the staple pornographic shots of ejaculation, penetration and spread labia are suitably subverted. It is in Robert’s apartment, shot in an earthy red palette in contrast to the clinically white space most of the film inhabits, that we first evidence Marie’s sticky desire dripping from her vagina; the reimagined male cum shot. The image of a woman’s body as always accessible, always penetrable by men’s pricks is replaced by the pregnant Marie being violated by a team of medical students, who line up to take turns to thrust their fingers into her vagina. Romance culminates with a series of supposed fantasy sequences, including a controversial hard-core scene in which we see the upper bodies of pregnant women, Marie included, occupy a clinical space lying on hospital beds, comforted by hand-holding male partners; whilst a circular wall, like a guillotine, separates them from their lower bodies which lie, legs spread, in a cavernous brothel through which masturbating men roam and line up to penetrate these accessible yet anonymous vaginas. This sequence ends with a man ejaculating on a woman’s stomach, which is juxtaposed with ultrasound liquid being squirted on Marie’s pregnant stomach (the hard-core and ejaculation shot was cut for the Region 2 DVD release). Later, pornography’s typical ‘split beaver’ shot is replaced with an extreme close-up of a baby’s head emerging from an extended vagina. In these scenes, Breillat exposes the duality of the feminine in film, typified by ‘two extremes of [its] deformation … in pornography, on the one hand, and Hollywood on the other – ass and romance. Each in its own way caricatures, fetishises and exploits women.’21
Another stylistic feature that reinforces the concern with fractured women is the female protagonist’s interior monologue that is spoken as voiceover throughout most of her films. This doesn’t enhance the potential for erotic pleasure but focuses on the sexual discontents of women. Breillat’s voiceovers reinforce her intent to distance the spectator from any sense of erotic pleasure with their ‘meandering stream of consciousness, mingling clichés with contradictory assessments [just as the] close-up images … do not yield the investigative, unveiling thrust that characterises the pornographic image.’22
Romance is an important prequel to Anatomie de L’Enfer. The former sets up stereotypes only to challenge and change their meaning, for example Marie’s performance of masochism with schoolteacher Robert is just that, whilst the film’s real masochism is located in her emotionally abusive relationship with partner Paul.
Normative heterosexual discourses of masculinity and femininity are also established as masquerade: in the opening scene Paul is being made-up as a matador for a photo shoot, the white powder invoking a feminised mask, as the photographer coaxes him to ‘stand like a man’. Later Paul’s phallic performance is again exposed when he fails to get an erection in bed with Marie. This challenge to the very nature of female masochism and gendered performance lays the groundwork for The Woman in Anatomie de L’Enfer to expose The Man to the truth about women, sex and desire.
FIGURE 3.3 Performing masochism: gender boundaries and binaries blurred in Romance
BEAVER TALKS: ANATOMIES OF DISGUST
I filmed a hairy horrifying/horrified vulva, like the face of the Medusa. It was not about a real sexual organ, but about this world-wide fantasy of the vulva as a horrifying thing.23
Anatomie de L’Enfer, based on Breillat’s novel Pornocratie (published in France in 2001 and translated into English as Pornocracy in 2006), was received with critical condemnation on its release, exemplified by Manohla Dargis’s review in the New York Times who called it ‘painfully foolish … a brutal self-parody of a filmmaker [with] nothing left to show’.24 The film opens in a nightclub full of men, uninterested in the solitary woman watching them. Breillat’s stated aim was to establish a separation between an autonomous male homosociality and the solitude and isolation of the female; the club is ‘an allegory’, she explains, a place where ‘men come together, men who don’t like the company of women … more than for desire, she is looking for her sexual identity, for her “self”.’25 The Woman’s isolation and self-loathing leads her to attempt suicide by cutting her wrists; the reason, she explains to The Man who finds her, is ‘because I am a woman’. The Woman then enters into a contract with The Man, paying him to sit with her over four nights to watch her where she is ‘unwatchable’.
The bedroom that provides the backdrop for the sacrificial sex and shameful secretions that follow is meticulously staged for inspection: a light hangs over a bed in the middle of a sparsely decorated room, behind which hangs a crucifix on the wall, which together with the bars on the imposing bedstead, symbolise confinement and the oppressive role of religion and the phallus in the subjugation of women. Although The Woman has set up the contractual relationship between them by paying him to watch her, the complexity of the gendered power dynamics involved when men or women buy access to the others’ body is exposed: this is The Man’s journey and it is his body that has feelings and who retains power and agency throughout the film; The Woman pays financially and with her life to enable his initiation. The Man, having determined that The Woman will ‘pay, for everything’, watches her undress and lie naked on the bed.
Breillat proceeds to tear down the patriarchal pillars of female beauty; constructing the narrative around those mechanisms – hair removal, cosmetics, tampons – that are commonly used to prohibit women from being who they really are. The Man criticises the woman’s unshaved body hair as contributing to her obscenity; ‘even if you removed the hair from your crack, you wouldn’t be rid of your obscene nature’. Fingering her vaginal secretion, he compares her genitals – the source of her impurity - to ‘pestilence’ and to a frog, noting ‘the sloppy shapeless aspects’ of her ‘hidden lips’. While The Woman sleeps, he outlines her labia, anus and mouth with dark red lipstick before penetrating her with his penis. This is a scene reminiscent of many described by Andrea Dworkin, in which women are dehumanised and turned into a target: ‘vaginal lips are painted purple for the consumer to clue him in as to where to focus his attention … our rectum are highlighted so that he knows where to push. Our mouths are used and our throats are used for deep penetration … red marks the spot where he’s supposed to get you.’26
The woman’s secretions are alien, slimy and the subject of curiosity combined with revulsion: when the man encounters them – he studies, touches, smells then tastes – he remarks that ‘the fragility of female flesh inspires disgust or brutality’; which forewarns his later ceremonious penetration of her anus with a three-pronged garden rake whilst she sleeps.
Her exposure of the revulsion that women’s bodies can incite is a characteristic shared with pornography and docuporn. According to Boyle, when women in docuporn films relay how often they have sex against a checklist of sexual performances (ranging from girl-on-girl, double and triple penetration, bukkake, BDSM, humiliation, strangulation and so on) this is not for the purpose of arousal but disgust, rendering women’s bodies and by implication their desire as increasingly freakish.27 As Breillat notes, commenting on the imagery in Anatomie de L’Enfer, male dominance is a political system, the more there is deliberate attribution of ‘obscenity and disgust with women’s bodies, the fewer rights they’ll have … it’s a tool used to dominate and subjugate women’.28 Her observation echoes Dworkin’s view of the practice of pornography: ‘its what men want us to be, think we are, make us into; how men use us, not because biologically they are men but because this is how their social power is organised’.29
Behind the woman’s seductive, passive façade lies the goriest of all taboos, one that invokes women’s impurity and threat to stable borders and rules. Menstruation – that signifier of monstrosity in religion, the sex industry and horror films – and female blood is a recurring motif in the film and also a motif that recurs throughout Breillat’s work.
The Man’s probing fingers, tongue and penis provide a commentary on the mystery of woman and how her blood stains everything she touches. The Woman offers him a drink of bloody water in which her used tampon is soaking, in an act of symbolic ritual – ‘don’t we drink the blood of our enemies?’– before she scorns the male preoccupation with vaginal orgasm by inserting a tampon, which occupies ‘the same space as most human penises’ and can be inserted ‘without feeling anything, no sensation of pleasure at all’. Later, in a scene reminiscent of Marie’s childbirth in Romance, she proceeds to expel a stone dildo from her bloody vagina, shot in extreme close-up. The image of a post-coital Rocco stroking his blood-drenched penis contrasts starkly with the expected eroticism of the image, and intertextually evokes the underlying normalised violence of heterosexual sex and seduction, which Breillat explores in earlier films.
FIGURE 3.4 Ritualistic examinations: the female body exposed in Anatomy of Hell
FIGURE 3.5 Anatomies of disgust: fears around female body fluids exposed
Inevitably The Man’s journey ends in The Woman’s death, during a fantasy sequence in which he pushes her off a cliff into the womb-like feminine space of the ocean. This is the price she pays for exposing herself, for showing him he cannot humiliate her, and for initiating him into a new way of seeing women’s bodies. Yet he cannot deal with this knowledge and in a bar full of men resorts to mundanely recounting his conquest, dehumanising The Woman in the process:
She was a queen of sluts … I reamed her pussy so hard, no one will want her again! … I made her crap her shit and wallow in her piss. That slut! She was a pigsty by the time I left. A human being wouldn’t let anyone use her as I did. But she always wanted more. I should have ripped her guts out and made her eat them! … I don’t even know her name.
Siffredi’s speech, above, not only illustrates the pornographic fantasy of the anonymous fuck, of women’s perpetual sexual availability, but also reveals the language and abusive homosociality often associated with pornography in which ‘the sharing of women among men … reinforce[es] the power of the male group vis-à-vis the degraded female “other”.’30 As Breillat says, ‘he describes sex in the ugly way it is presented in pornography – he says he fucked her, and then he turned her over and fucked her up the ass – with no emotion … it’s the way all men talk about sex, and also all the censors and religious creeds that teach us it’s an abominable act’.31
HARD-CORE AGITATION
There is no masculine psychology in my cinema. There is only the resentments and desires of women.32
Of all Breillat’s films, Romance and Anatomie de L’Enfer evidently provide a cinematic intervention into debates about pornography. And, at a time when ‘porn studies’ has effectively usurped feminist analyses of pornography, what Breillat contributes is significant. Linda Williams contends that Breillat has found ‘new ways of presenting and visually experiencing cinematic sex acts’; that with Romance, for example, the point was ‘never simply to show pleasure but, rather, to show how short-lived and difficult such “pure” desire is’.33 However, Breillat’s work is not necessarily a re-vision of the pornography Williams advocates in Hard Core, when she cites Candida Royalle’s Femme Productions as an early example of women reframing porn as entertainment for women.
Whilst Breillat’s work has been aligned with pornography and with third-wave feminist appropriation of female masochism and submission as ‘empowering’,34 Breillat denies her work is pornographic, and also refutes claims that she explores masochism as pleasurable for women. Talking about Romance for example, Breillat states:
On the contrary, the relationship that Marie has with her boyfriend is based on masochism and self-depreciation. On her journey she goes through scenes of masochism and learns to free herself – exactly the opposite of The Story of O, which posits the norm is pleasure through masochism and through being dominated. The headmaster in Romance doesn’t initiate her through masochism: on the contrary, he uses her masochism to take her to the other side and free her from masochism. He uses the fact that she is used to masochism, through her relationship with Paul, to take her somewhere else.35
It would seem that pain and pleasure co-exist in Breillat’s films only as a transformative stage for women and men to transcend, ‘a passage … once she’s reached that stage, it does not mean she’ll remain addicted … Quite the opposite – she’ll have left behind all her masochism … masochism is something that women have learned rather than were born with … so its pretty hard to get rid of.’36
Whilst Boyle and other anti-pornography feminists might disagree with Breillat’s means, their transformative vision is closer than it would initially seem. Breillat challenges the current trend towards ‘a peep show chic’, in which pornography’s codes and conventions become aligned with a sophisticated sex-positive sensibility. Breillat does not deny – as is currently fashionable – that feminism has no place in explorations of sexual relations and identity; nor does she ignore how a particular construction of women’s sexuality and sexualised violence has historically been deployed to reinforce social hierarchies of gender, class and race under patriarchy.
Breillat’s hard-core agitation is founded on showing what is really ‘not showable’ within an ever-expanding pornographic lens that frames popular culture. She exposes women’s dissatisfaction and discontent with the sex on offer and reminds us of the misogynistic roots of the dominant structures of patriarchy and religion, as she peels back the layers of hatred that men have held for women for centuries. By focusing on women’s subjectivity and discontents, Breillat provides a much-needed re-vision of, and update to, anti-pornography feminism, combining an anti-porn aesthetic with an anti-censorship sensibility to expose the gender inequality and exploitation, which typically structures the depiction of sex. Her position is clear: whilst she is against censorship – ‘one cannot forbid an image. If the image is masturbatory, then the film is an X-rated film because sex becomes an object rather than the subject’37 – Breillat also challenges the system of representation that associates women’s sexuality with shame and subordination, and attributes women’s bodies with obscenity and disgust, because ‘we’re shown things that are allowed in porn movies and we’re told that that’s the way we ought to behave. Girls are raised for that purpose, which induces a behaviour where you can find pleasure in shame.’38
At a time when mainstream pornography threatens to become increasingly more degrading, humiliating and violent, and when much popular feminist critique has become depoliticised and less able to resist it, Breillat’s deconstruction of how women are represented in relation to men is timely, and demands nothing less than the transcendence of dominant religious, cultural and patriarchal norms that reinforce women’s oppression, so that a new discourse of sex, sexuality and desire can begin.
