Portrait of a lady on fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019): A vindictive re-reading of the role of women in History through the arts

Abstract

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, by French director Céline Sciamma (2019), represents the culmination of her career as a filmmaker. This is always framed under ideological and claim parameters raised from feminist and queer theories. In this work we will carry out a study that covers aspects such as the rewriting (Pérez Bowie, Pardo García, Chatman) that this film entails. We will see how history is reconstructed through a utopian reality that normalizes female empowerment, in response to the silence that female artists and independents have suffered for centuries. Thus, we will relate this female emancipation to the queer and radical feminist discourses of Butler and Wittig. In turn, we will analyze the intertexts that intervene in the cinematographic mechanisms of this work, whose analysis will establish its bases in the assumptions raised by Kristeva and Barthes and, ultimately, how this process is synthesized by the studies of De Lauretis. In short, we will demonstrate that Sciamma makes a film that manages to deconstruct established gender roles, in addition to making homosexual relationships visible and naturalizing and normalizing intrinsically feminine issues that are considered taboo even in today's society.