Feminist influences on the work of Yannick Bellon in the 1970s

Abstract

Yannick Bellon is one of France's most commercially successful women directors, and is almost certainly the most successful woman film-maker of the 1970s. However, her work is little known abroad apart from the controversial rape movie, L'Amour violé (1977), and, with the exception of her early work in documentary, is usually dismissed by the French critical establishment as overly didactic. This paper traces through the different strands in her work in the 1970s, comparing her 'art films', Quelque part quelqu'un (1972) and Jamais plus toujours (1976) with the feminist-inspired ‘women's films’, La Femme de Jean (1973) and L'Amour violé, which gave her an entry into mainstream cinema (and which in turn gives way to the more postfeminist L'Amour nu at the beginning of the 1980s). It examines the strategies she uses to bring women's issues to a wide audience and assesses her achievements in the context of the debates about representations of women articulated by the MLF and feminist film theorists of the 1970s.