Love as the Emancipation of the Gaze
The article focuses on The Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, 2019) by Céline Sciamma, her first film not focusing on a coming-of-age story. It discusses how the director creates a universal love story by tackling its narrative about lesbian love with a radical female gaze and how the topics of women in art, solidarity among women and personal relations intertwine in it. It focuses on historicising abortion in the film and the autobiographical aspect of the narrative in relation to the thematising of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and on how the film avoids clichés often used in films with a similar plot.
The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!