The films of Céline Sciamma: a cinema of youth and desire

In December 2022, Sight and Sound published their list of the 100 ‘Best Films of All Time’ comprising works suggested by hundreds of academics, film critics, programmers, archivists, curators and filmmakers across the globe (BFI 2022). To the surprise of many commentators, the top spot was taken by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), the first film directed by a woman to attain this position, putting an end to the enduring tussle between Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). While Akerman’s film made a huge leap from position 36 in just ten years, Céline Sciamma (1978-) claims the accolade of the highestplaced new entry in the poll with Portrait de la jeune fille en feu/Portrait of a Lady on Fire ((hereafter Portrait, 2019) at number 30. As Ginette Vincendeau points out, given that Sciamma’s career had barely begun in 2012 when the last poll was taken, her success and rise in critical standing have been nothing short of ‘meteoric’ (2022, 58). The inclusion of Sciamma and Akerman alike in this hitherto male-dominated and selfproclaimed canonical list speaks to the growing (re)valorisation of female filmmakers, as well as to an increased focus on the diversity of those making their choices on the poll itself. The period between 2012 and 2022 has seen the rise of the #MeToo wave of online activism, whose obvious results include the conviction and imprisonment of the producer Harvey Weinstein and, as a corollary, the now commonplace inclusion of intimacy coordinators on set, ensuring that actors have informed consent to the actions required of them, especially during sex scenes. Sciamma, whose work engages with questions of queer identity and female desire, has surely benefitted from such a public focus on the politics of desire on and off screen, even if the reception of #MeToo in France has been decidedly more nuanced, combining a disdain for Anglophone puritanism with an increased visibility of feminist activism such as through the movements #BalanceTonPorc and ‘5050 by 2020’, which was spearheaded by Sciamma herself. The articles in this special double issue of French Screen Studies collectively address the place of Sciamma in contemporary French and global art cinema. As Emma Wilson has argued in her book-length analysis of the director’s work, Sciamma has very quickly become the ‘most visible, most important feminist and lesbian director in international filmmaking’, let alone French cinema (2021, 1). Her status as a filmmaker is the result of the consistent quality of her output and its distinctiveness. However, it is clear that Sciamma’s persona as a public figure, whose face has become widely known across and beyond the sphere of art cinema, has been a significant feature of her success. These articles, principally developed from papers delivered at the 2020 Contemporary Directors Symposium at the University of Sussex, affirm the complexity and vibrancy of Sciamma’s film oeuvre, and her increasing currency as a celebrity filmmaker. Sciamma’s rapid inculcation into the international art cinema elite began at l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l’Image et du Son otherwise known as La Fémis, FRENCH SCREEN STUDIES 2023, VOL. 23, NOS. 2–3, 115–119 https://doi.org/10.1080/26438941.2023.2213013