French filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s lesbian historical drama film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (French: Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) (2019) rests on a single theme: looking back. Sciamma’s film allows us to look back into the deep past, whereby a lesbian relationship can be envisioned in a particular historical context via the lens/framing of the contemporary camera, in the cinematic space of the now. As most lesbians (myself included) would know, the possibility of a lesbian/sapphic relationship in the past—especially in late eighteenth-century France, where the diegesis of Sciamma’s film is set—is a highly precarious one. One is reminded of what Adrienne Rich writes in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980):
The fact is that women in every culture and throughout history have undertaken the task of independent, nonheterosexual, woman-connected existence, to the extent made possible by their context, often in the belief that they were the “only ones” ever to have done so. They have undertaken it even though few women have been in an economic position to resist marriage altogether . . . (635)
This fragment of Rich’s polemic echoes in the lenses of Sciamma’s camera: lesbian existence in the past, even if it expressed itself despite the sheer trappings of compulsory heterosexuality imposed on all women, even if lesbians cannot evade the masculine economics of marriage and kinship (as Héloïse in the film was unable to), is ultimately a lonely and private affair. It is this intense privatisation of most, if not all, lesbian relationships throughout history which nearly erases lesbian existence from historical records.
It is at this point that Rich offers us an orientation in the wake of the violence of compulsory heterosexuality: to “re-vision,” again, to look back. In her essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1972), Rich elucidates:
Re-vision–the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction
. . . it is an act of survival . . . And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society (18).
Film, as a form of literature that inscribes through recording via the gaze of the camera, can be construed as the most literal medium of writing as re-vision and looking back. Film hence possesses a kind of poetics via the inscription of the looking lens. And for a film that re-visions through a historical fictional lesbian relationship, of its difficulties and erasure, we are reminded of what Audre Lorde wrote in “Poetry is Not a Luxury” (1985) regarding poetry/poetics: “It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought” (37). The language of film in fact, provides an extension of poetics from mere poetry alone, placing words, ideas, and action all within a cinematic frame. Therefore, Sciamma’s film, in its re-visionings of lesbian existence, is likewise a lesbian poetics of necessity for lesbian survival, to provide a voice to what has been lost in history, due to the organisation of historical societies under the structure of compulsory heterosexuality.
I argue how Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire employs filmic techniques to enact the necessity of a lesbian poetics of re-visioning in three ways: the literal action of looking back, of a “looking back” in terms of memory/flashbacks, and likewise of a “looking (at) back” in a cinematographic sense. These techniques serve to highlight the necessity of such a poetics, in reminding us of lesbian possibilities despite compulsory heterosexual contingencies in the past.
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The Act of Looking Back
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The very literal act of looking back at someone, in simple terms, is to check back (and usually to do so again), in one’s own line of sight, for the presence of that person. To read this action alongside Rich’s re-vision, again it is an “act of survival,” for “self-knowledge,” to refuse the “self-destructiveness of male-dominated society” (18). Throughout the film, we see some instances of looking back, an act of re-acknowledging another’s presence.
Fig. 1
Héloïse looks back at Marianne for the first time.
In the scene where the painter Marianne first takes a walk to the cliffs with Héloïse, a young lady of the French gentry, “looking back” culminates in Héloïse running towards the edge of the cliff, and stopping right at the precipice. We are offered a full-body shot of Héloïse as she runs to the very edge and stops just in time, with the camera jittery until it cuts to Marianne, stabilising and zooming into a medium shot of her relieved expression. This quickly cuts back to a more stable frame of Héloïse, zoomed in further in a close-up shot, where she turns and looks back for the very first time (see Fig. 1), announcing that “I’ve dreamt of that for years.” Sciamma cuts back to a medium shot of Marianne, who responds with “Dying?” before cutting back again to Héloïse, still in a close-up shot, who corrects Marianne, answering with “Running.” Sciamma’s decreasing of the shot distance of Héloïse between her running to her stopping and looking back at Marianne is an act of acknowledging Marianne’s presence on her part, an immediate closing of their distance as strangers to that of a blossoming intimacy. Héloïse stares directly at the camera, which is framed as the point-of-view (POV) of Marianne, and while directly acknowledging Marianne’s presence, Héloïse begins with a declaration of her dreams—of what could be possible that has not been realised. Not death or suicide, but to run, the act of egress and escape, which is made possible by the reciprocal engagement and acknowledgment of each other’s existence between the two women.
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Likewise, this act of looking back and recognising another’s existence as a woman, is a necessity of lesbian poetics. As Lorde would say, “We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it” (37-38). For Héloïse, it is the language of running and dreams, the agency that comes with the act of looking back at Marianne, the poetics of which is what she first shares with her, even prior to becoming lovers. Shortly afterwards, we are presented with close-ups of the oblique faces of both Marianne and Héloïse, side-by-side watching the sea. Marianne’s side profile initially dominates the frame, obscuring Héloïse’s, until she turns to her side to look at her, it is where both Marianne and the spectator are exposed to (and thus able to acknowledge) Héloïse’s presence. From the spectator’s POV, the turning of Marianne’s head reveals the back of her head, and is thus readable as an act of Marianne looking back at Héloïse, who returns the gesture twice, startling Marianne. In both this act of reciprocity of looking back at, and for, one another’s existence, is not merely an act of knowledge, but likewise of intimacy, a necessary re-vision of another woman in a non-heterosexual kinship, and the possibility of a lesbian relationship.
“Looking Back” as Memory
Aside from representing the act of looking back as recognition, and one that is reciprocal, Sciamma’s film is peppered with a “looking back” that is specific to memory and remembrance. To remember, to even try to recall and imagine a period where lesbian relationships were erased by patriarchal heterosexuality, is perhaps what Rich meant when she wrote, “But there is also a difficult and dangerous walking on the ice, as we try to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into, and with little in the past to support us” (19). Memory becomes another mode of inscription for the present to recall a past that had been erased, through the medium of film—especially so in a past where there are fewer avenues of inscription that can be made public, given compulsory heterosexuality. Thus, the only inscription possible is deeply private writing that is the realm of memory.
Fig. 2
Marianne’s students look back at the portrait of Héloïse on fire.
We return to the first few scenes of Portrait: the uncovering of the titular painting itself by Marianne’s visual art students, the Portrait de la jeune fille en feu. The frame is initially blurred in the background, where two of her students in the foreground question her whether she painted it, with the camera in the POV of Marianne (she sits in front of her students, posing as a model for reference) (see Fig. 2). Within the diegesis but out of frame, Marianne admits that she painted it, and the two do look back into the canvas, with the camera sharpening focus, zooming in on the painting. It depicts the back of Héloïse, her dress on fire on a dark plain underneath the moonlit clouds: a reference to the climax of the film where, in a community of women singing around a bonfire, Marianne witnesses the burning of Héloïse’s dress as caught by the bonfire. The Portrait itself at this point is no longer in the background, but dominates the frame as the sole mise-en-scène. When Marianne’s student asks her what the painting is titled, the film cuts to Marianne reciting it, before cutting straight into a flashback of Marianne recalling her entire memory of Brittany: of painting Héloïse, becoming her lover, and being separated from her, the flashback that constitutes most of the film itself. The title “Portrait de la jeune fille en feu” refers to both the looking back and a recalling of late eighteenth-century France in the imagination of Sciamma. The form of the film is both this fictional flashback of a historical lesbian relationship, and also the titular painting in the diegesis of the film. It is in itself a memory of the character Marianne, of her love with Héloïse that can find no literal public expression, only possible in memory or in art that symbolises the act of looking back as memory.
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We are reminded of the scene midway in the film where Marianne, Héloïse, and her maid Sophie discuss the Grecian mythical tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, where Sophie protests Orpheus’ impulse to look back at Eurydice, thus forever losing his chance to be with her outside Hades. Marianne explains that Orpheus makes a choice: “He chooses the memory of her. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.” But therein lies the irony for Marianne and Héloïse, if we read the separation in parallel to Orpheus and Eurydice, memory for the former is no choice. As Lorde puts it: “But as we come into touch with . . . living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power where true knowledge [and] lasting action comes” (37). Thus, a poetics of memory, as a private inscription of re-visioning for both Marianne and Héloïse, becomes necessary as the only manner to preserve, to cherish the knowledge of their love, given the conditions of late eighteenth-century France.
“Looking (at) Back”
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Leaving off from the poetics of memory in Portrait, we return to the scene of the titular painting, where it dominates the frame of the shot, with the back of Héloïse on fire located in the centre. Much of the film also falls into this very logic of looking back, in terms of “looking (at) back,” of gazing at someone’s back, as an organising visual principle. If earlier on we saw that the act of looking back is to acknowledge and reciprocate the existence of another, and how “looking back” can also be in the form of memory/remembrance, then “looking (at) back” collapses both acknowledgment of another and memory together, but it also becomes the very representational limit of what is possible, and it haunts the entirety of the brief expression of romance between Marianne and Héloïse in Brittany. Taking off from the scene of the Portrait itself, when Marianne and Héloïse first go for a walk together, we are offered Marianne’s POV in the camera, a gaze that follows the visuality of Héloïse’s cloaked back, which slowly uncovers and exposes her blonde hair as Héloïse walks. When they return from the walk, Marianne is once again looking at her back, studying the shades and shape of her ear and neck to inscribe into her memory as a painting reference. The image of the back of another, is what marks the beginning of their relationship together, but as Portrait, the painting in the film’s diegesis, foreshadows, inscribed within the image of Héloïse’s back is likewise both the beginning and the end of their relationship.
Figs. 3-4
Marianne looks back at Héloïse in a wedding dress.
By the scene in which Marianne leaves the house in Brittany, having finished painting the frontal portraiture of Héloïse, after the two embrace for an intense visual moment, the scene abruptly cuts to Marianne’s back storming down the stairway, presumably in the POV and gaze of Héloïse (see Figs. 3-4). Like Marianne (in a palindromic manner), this time it is Héloïse following the visuality of Marianne’s back. Of course, this is where Héloïse commands Marianne to make the “poet’s choice” as with Orpheus and Eurydice—this non-choice for Marianne to turn around and look back at the front of someone (Héloïse in a wedding dress, married to the Italian male gentry), is to acknowledge both the memory of their lesbian relationship, but also the fatalistic logic of it, how it can never be further expressed or actualised due to compulsory heterosexuality and the historical period. To “look (at) back” is hence a poetics of survival contained within the representational quality of a lover’s back, of the necessity of acknowledging a memory, an inscription of re-visioning of what happened in both art and memory, in spite of the impossibility of actualisation, and the fatal logic of what is not meant to be.
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Conclusion
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We end with one more quote by Lorde, where she concludes: “For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive . . . But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We felt them all already” (39). Both Marianne and Héloïse make the poet’s choice together: the poetics of looking back at a lesbian love that once happened, in the inscriptions of memory and art, can only be a necessary one, where masculine heterosexual structures prevent it from becoming actualised. Céline Sciamma in Portrait reminds us of how, in a world where women are still pressured to conform to heterosexuality, still caught up in the kinship trappings of masculine organisation, a lesbian poetics is one that is crucially of survival and endurance.
Works Cited
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 5, no. 4, 1980, pp. 631-60., https://doi.org/10.1086/493756.
———. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” College English, vol. 34, no. 1, 1972, pp. 18-30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/375215. Accessed 20 Apr. 2021.
Sciamma, Céline, director. Portrait De La Jeune Fille En Feu. Lilies Films, 2019.