The Body at Close Range: Volume and the Unlistenable in Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell

Abstract

This chapter re-evaluates Catherine Breillat’s work, often explored through Asbjørn Grønstad’s concept of the ‘unwatchable’ (2012) and rethinks her approach in terms of the ‘unlistenable’. It argues that noise provides another sensory dimension through which to think about Breillat’s key relationship with the pornographic and her appeal to little noises and listening in spectatorship. In contrast to sound in pornography which generally represents female pleasure through loud, haptic sound - often collapsing spatial realism to provide a closer sense of contact with the body on screen - Breillat withholds the aural availability of her female protagonists and preserves a sense of Cartesian space by anchoring noise back to the body. I show how Breillat appeals to and constructs the spectator as a resonant body, an open channel that is ‘traversed by, fuses with and goes towards other resonating bodies’, creating an intimate relation with the film, as we are called upon to listen to the body on screen.