Thought We Had Banished This Crap 20 Years Ago
The writer-director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma, is still grinding her ax about an issue that the intersectional social justice identity warriors have long since moved on from on Twitter, but that people like her need to maintain to get your kids indoctrinated.
And she believes Wonder Woman helps her do this successfully.
Along with her own critically lauded work, of course.
From the trades:
Céline Sciamma is in the midst of enjoying the best reviews of her career thanks to “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” which on top of rave reviews has grossed over $2 million and counting at the U.S. box office. The French writer-director often challenges the male gaze in her films, which is why it’s not too surprising to hear Sciamma is a big fan of Patty Jenkins’ superhero blockbuster “Wonder Woman.”
She’s a big fan. A big fan. And I quote:
“It’s about feeling seen as a viewer,” Sciamma says. “’Wonder Woman’ is thinking about me. It’s thinking about my pleasure, about my sisters, about the history of cinema and women’s representation. It gives us joy but also rage. Like, ‘Why do I not get this more often?’ Now, we get it more and more, because there’s new writing for women, but it’s an addictive feeling. Once you know it, you want it.”
Where’s Camille Paglia When You Need Her
The feminist writer and author, Camille Paglia, smashed all this crap about thirty years ago now in her books, but apparently, even two generations later, you can’t keep a good French director down.
From the trades, yet again:
The director says that removing male characters from the screen is an important creative choice that allows all viewers to break down privilege. Sciamma says men are “unaware of their privilege” because “90% of what we look at is the male gaze. They don’t see themselves anymore.” By removing or lessening male characters, films such as “Portrait” and “Wonder Woman” force men to re-contextualize their relationship to women characters.
In case you want to see two opposing viewpoints from Paglia and Christine Hoff Summers on all of this, check out the clip below:
And this clip below:
What Are We To Make of All of This?
“Force men to re-contextualize their relationship to women characters?”
This is claptrap of the highest degree and if that “re-contextualization” hadn’t been done better by any more competent male directors in the past, Sciamma would know it.
But see, that’s the problem.
She doesn’t know it.
She doesn’t know world history, literary history, or film history.
She doesn’t know about the interlocking dynamics of social, political, and economic thinking and struggling that have gotten us to where we are in the West over the last 1,000 years.
She doesn’t know mythology, legend, or even understand the power of stories.
Shes’ a hard-left ideologue with an ax to grind against competent men who have overshadowed her lack of talent, lack of focus, and lack of “voice” over the years.
Since she can’t get to those men who she thinks held her down in the past, she casting about desperately in her own work and the work of others, for any confirmation of her worldview.
And so do the enabling journalists who support her, review her work favorably, and eventually, get streaming services to carry her work to give it legitimacy.
Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire only grossed $2 million. Wonder Woman grossed close to $1 billion.
And I quote, one last time:
Sciamma remembers recording commentary for the “Portrait” DVD release with a male sound engineer who was audibly surprised when a male hand appears onscreen in “Portrait” hours into the runtime. “He said, ‘I looked at my hand, because that’s the hand of a man,’” Sciamma says. “That’s what I wanted to do — there’s no man in the film, not as some kind of punishment, but as a way for them to go through someone else’s journey. You’ve been looking only at women and suddenly it feels different, weird. And that’s cinema, you know?”
Remember the point is to get your kids though.
And if the radical hard leftists can do it through education, entertainment, or even via manipulating the weak-minded, like Sciamma, they will.
