Recentring Peripheral Queerness and Marginal Art in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Madeleine Pelling

doi:10.3390/h10020073

Abstract

This essay examines the ways in which Céline Sciamma’s 2019 film Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) looks to centralise onscreen homosexual experience through engagement with, and queering of, eighteenth-century art practices and the discourse surrounding them. From its reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to ideas espoused by the eighteenth-century art critic and philosopher Denis Diderot, Portrait looks to traditionally peripheral spaces, or edgelands, and the visual and embodied consequences of transcending them. Engaging closely with eighteenth-century processes of artmaking, the film transforms sketches on paper, paint applied to canvas and wood, miniatures held close to the body and erotica annotated in the margins into queer-coded sites used to reflect and document the developing relationship at its heart.

Highlights

Fille en Feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) looks to centralise onscreen homosexual experience through engagement with, and queering of, eighteenth-century art practices and the discourse surrounding them
Whenever the artist picks up his chalks and brushes, these limp phantoms revive and present themselves to him; they’re a perpetual distraction, and he who managed to exorcise them from his head would be a prodigy indeed1
In the Essai sur la peinture (Notes on Painting), an addendum to his 1765 Salon on the biennial art exhibition at the Louvre, Denis Diderot criticised the traditional training of painters, in which they drew from plaster casts and classical models

Summary

Uncanny

The processes processes and and spaces spaces of of artmaking artmaking are are notably notably messy messy in in Portrait, Portrait, and and the the vision vision of its practitioners open to corruption and compromise. The large canvas on which Marianne paints stands just feet from the bed she sleeps in, where she and Héloïse make love and where Sophie recovers from an abortion Within this space, artistic, bodily and elemental fluids combine. Sciamma uses a portrait of Héloïse’s mother, painted by Marianne’s father a generation earlier, to underscore the uncanny in replicating the unconsenting female body on the marriage market Of her own response to this work, Héloïse’s mother describes to Marianne the moment she was confronted with herself reproduced: ‘The portrait arrived here before me. Made using charcoal and pencils, rather than paint, these works are materially, spatially and visually set aside from the larger-scale formal and broadly heteronormative portraiture that leads the film’s narrative They are produced in the more intimate and complex spaces of the world Sciamma creates, most notably the bed Marianne occupies and shares with Héloïse.

Marianne

Conclusions