‘Why has Céline Sciamma become so iconic?’: The auteure as celebrity

ABSTRACT This article explores the public articulations of Céline Sciamma’s authorial persona and the media construction of her image (including her own self-presentation), arguing that her high visibility, combined with her ability to crystallise socially relevant values on and off screen, has broadened her cultural impact from the elite cinephile culture of her films to the larger terrain of stardom and celebrity culture. Under examination is how Sciamma strategically deploys different discourses to address diverse constituencies, from a reaffirmation of aesthetics bringing cultural legitimacy in the French cinephile milieu to feminist militancy aimed at the film industry and a broad left-wing political agenda as well as an iconic presence in the queer community, turning her into a ‘standard-bearer’ for a new generation of auteures. Considering the filmmaker through the prism of star and celebrity studies helps understand how such apparent contradictions are both intrinsic to the construction of her persona as a celebrity and inherent to the complex cultural context of early twenty-first-century gender politics in France.