The Cinematheque

The July 11 screening of Last Summer included the following opening remarks by Shaun Inouye, The Cinematheque’s artistic director.

“Hello and welcome to The Cinematheque. I’m Shaun Inouye, the artist director here.

I’d first like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the unceded, ancestral homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. The Cinematheque honours the stewards of this shared territory and we are privileged to carry out our work here—and host screenings like this—on their traditional lands.

Thank you for joining us for opening night of ​“All True Artists Are Hated: The Transgressions of Catherine Breillat.” This is a 13-film retrospective—two films shy of being comprehensive, despite best efforts—devoted to the truly iconoclastic French auteur, who is celebrating her 75th birthday on Saturday. (Bon anni-versaire, Catherine!)

A Breillat retrospective has been on my Cinematheque wish list for years. Her consensus masterpiece Fat Girl (À ma soeur!) featured in my ​“Cinema of Cruelty” series back in 2016; that was, in fact, the last time a Breillat work graced, or sullied, our screen (depending on your persuasion). Our ability to mount this series now—with new restorations and North American distribution of long-unavailable titles—has largely been thanks to the revitalized interest in Breillat’s body of work following the release of Last Summer (L’été dernier), her first picture in a decade and, in my opinion, among her best and most provocative efforts to date. This despite the film circumventing the more sexually explicit aspects of her most controversial work, for which she’s earned praise and scorn in equal (sometimes unequal) measure. Though, it must be said, it is on the side of scorn that Breillat has emphatically planted her flag—scorn being the scarlet letter that she brandishes like a badge of integrity. Look no further than the title of our series, drawn from two Breillat quotes that I think distill her agenda quite succinctly.

The first comes from an essay penned by Breillat under the already tellingly titled ​“The Importance of Being Hated.” She writes: ​“Hatred is invigorating. All true artists are hated. Only the conformists are ever adored.” The other quote, which logically follows from the first: ​“It’s the role of the artist to transgress, to go beyond the limit.”

What Breillat has done so brilliantly over her nearly fifty-year career as a filmmaker—to say nothing of her similarly controversial literary career—is yes, to transgress, to push beyond boundaries. But she does so, and this is worth emphasizing, in order to interrogate the legitimacy of, or the prejudices that instill and uphold, these limits in the first place, particularly when it comes to the representation of female sexuality in art. And, for those unaware, female sexuality—and female identity and autonomy tied to sex—is Breillat’s signature dish, her perennial field of study. She is, as critic Kathleen Murphy once put it, the ​“connoisseur of carnality.”

Across her remarkable oeuvre, one can trace the crusade of an artist determined to destigmatize female desire onscreen and to de-fetishize the cisgendered female body. Hers is a cinema of feminist insurrection, which deliberately trades in ideas (and sometimes explicit imagery) that challenge the ​“proper codes” of female conduct. The heroines of her films serve as conduits for these trespasses, and their stories play out in bell-jar realities, closer to fable than to real life. ​“I’m not a realist,” she has said, ​“but I film the truth.” And the truth about sex, according to Breillat, is that it’s far more complicated—more cruel and contradictory and perverse and exploitative—than we’re accustomed to seeing, or have been afforded the liberty of seeing, in cinema. At least, with any degree of honesty.

Part of that honesty involves showing sex (the corporeal, physical act of sex) in really unsexy, uncensored, and, in a few instances, unsimulated ways. I think there’s no greater indignity to Breillat’s feminist project than to have her work accused of being ​“pornography” masquerading as art, since it is the pornographic representation of women, and the wider implications of a predatory, patriarchal gaze, that she is intentionally railing against.

Far from being vehicles for any kind of erotic escapism, her films wrestle with tough-to-face themes involving debased sexual awakenings of adolescent girls, women reckoning with their own internalized misogyny and sexual shame, and, in the case of Last Summer, abject desires and the abuse of power that sex can so often represents.

So, over the course of the next two months, over 13 films, I advise you steel yourself for a collection of fiercely intelligent and uncomfortable films by the singular Catherine Breillat.

Thank you.”