Celluloid is Sticky: Sex, Death, Materiality, Metaphysics (in Some Films by Catherine Breillat)

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Quoted in David J. Hogan, Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1986, epigraph. 2. Catherine Breillat, Robert Sklar, ‘A Woman's Vision of Shame and Desire: An Interview with Catherine Breillat’, Cinéaste 25/1, 1999, pp. 24–38. 3. Quoted in Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Romance’, Sight and Sound, November 1999, available at www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/244 (viewed 4 May 2006). 4. See, for example, Adrian Martin, “X” Marks the Spot: Classifying Romance’, Senses of Cinema (online journal) 4, March 2000, at www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/4/romance.html (viewed 4 May 2006). 5. Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. from the French by John Howe, London: Verso, 1995, pp. 77–8. 6. Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. from the French by Brian Singer, New York: St Martin's Press, 1979, pp. 28–9. 7. André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in A. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. from the French by Hugh Gray, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967, p. 14. 8. See Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 184–99. 9. Catherine Breillat, interview with Rhiannon Brown, Arts Today with Michael Cathcart, broadcast on ABC Radio National, Australia, 31 January 2000, transcript available at www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/atoday/stories/s101866.htm (viewed 4 May 2006). 10. Chris Wiegand, ‘A Quick Chat with Catherine Breillat’, kamera.co.uk, 2001, at www.kamera.co.uk/interviews/catherinebreillat.html (viewed 4 May 2006). 11. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 56. 12. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 52. 13. Quoted in Augé, Non-places, p. 79. See also Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. from the French by Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 14. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. from the French by Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 144–5. 15. ‘How the Directors and Critics Voted. Catherine Breillat: Top Ten’, Sight and Sound, 2002, available at www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/poll/voter.php?forename = Catherine&surname = Breillat (viewed 4 May 2006). 16. Quoted in Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, p. 67. 17. Catherine Millet, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., trans. from the French by Adriana Hunter, New York: Grove Press, 2002, p. 96. 18. For an interesting mention of absence as presence in Breillat's films in the very different context of Sartre's theorization of response and the gaze, see Liz Constable, ‘Unbecoming Sexual Desires for Women Becoming Sexual Subjects: Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Catherine Breillat (1999)’, MLN 119, 2004, pp. 672–95. Although this article ignores the question of the ontology of/and the image in Breillat's work and argues for a theory of ‘shame-as-stasis’ (687) that is at odds with my characterization of the materiality of movement in Breillat's work, it is a very compelling piece and one of the few serious treatments in English of Breillat's philosophy. 19. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. from the French by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 99. 20. Lev Kuleshov, a member of the Soviet school in the 1920s, led a series of famous experiments in which he alternated the same photograph of a man's blank face with intercut images of horror, pleasure, silliness etc. He argued that it was juxtaposition that produced a reading of the man's face (audiences saw, at times, him joyous, him mournful) more than any intrinsic properties of the image. 21. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. from the French by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 167. 22. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation, trans. from the French and intro. by Daniel W. Smith, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. xxix. 23. Wiegand, ‘A Quick Chat with Catherine Breillat’. 24. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p. xxix. 25. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p. xxix. 26. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p. 19. 27. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p. 51. 28. Catherine Breillat, interview with Rhiannon Brown. 29. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p. 34. 30. Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, p. 35.