BURNING GAZE
THE INVENTION OF SEXUALITY—THAT IS, THE NOTION that self-expression involves categorizing our desires—is only a little older than the technology of film, so recent are these now fundamental ways of understanding and depicting ourselves. Taking on both traditions, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire essentially reworks the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice as a queer feminist love story, using building blocks mined from the cultural bedrock. Received as both a historical drama and as a gay film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire won Best Screenplay at Cannes and was the first movie directed by a woman to be awarded the Queer Palm. Perhaps even more notable than its depiction of love between women is the film’s approach to women artists as seen by women artists, and its brilliance comes from the way it turns centuries-old Western cultural traditions inside out so that all the seams show. Queer stories are of course human stories, but this is art that teaches us that human stories have long been queer.
Like Maggie Nelson’s poetic memoir , Sciamma’s film deploys classical themes to trouble what we take for granted about art, personhood, and our most animal passions. Nelson’s title comes through Roland Barthes, for whom anyone “who utters the phrase ‘I love you’ is like ‘the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.’ Just as the ’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the , whenever the lover utters the phrase ‘I love you,’ its meaning must be renewed by each use, as over the course of the book, so that after reading it you see your beloveds, whoever they may be, in the light she shines on her queer ones.
