• Une Vraie Jeune Fille

• 36 Fillette

• Fat Girl

• Bluebeard

• La Belle Endormie

• Sexual awakening in the arms of the Romany girl - queer love, sex and desire is liberating.

• Anastasia dispenses with Prince Charming - sex with him lacks eroticism and his love his limiting, also Johan later abandons her.

Catherine Breillat - Sophie Bélot

• intimacy underpins female sexual be(com)ing

• fairytales form part of a socialisation process which effects girls' psycho-sexual formation.

• Cinema obsessed with intimacy, or, the self-other and the self-self relation.

• 'Breillat demythologizes the utopian notion of intimacy by revealing its privatization'. ???

  -> Hegemonically intimacy is considered as something which should remain private and is thus connected to te inner self.

  ->In the West sexuality is private but under public control does she subvert this? ... women's sexuality is intimate, which results in the control and regulation of themselves. 'By revealing women's intimacy, she also brings to the fore their be(com)ing'.

Alex Bellemare

• L'identité et sexualité vont de pair

• subverts sexual roles - nb Anastasia's father ''la nature a décidé autrement''

• le corps passe du l'intime au social - part of growing up - as we have sex?

• nighttime riual - dictionary search - puberté - le mot

  she craves knowing, gender identity and sexual roles lead her to this - in bed with Peter?

• Johan asks Anastasia at the end of the film if she still loves him as before, she says she does, but now it's ''after'', 'after her solitary reentry into an utterly different world than that of her dreams.'

• Women's encounters with Others allow them to learn about the ways of the world.

• Their encounters with other women, allow them to delve into their own nature - what it means to be.

• Breillat's fairytale aesthetic overturns male iconography

• The evolution of the bed - imagery

• Young girls' first desire is to be, not to be married. She makes her way into adulthood by herself, her baby is only hers. She has no mother.

• Young girls exist but do not yet exist - simultaneously. They know not who they are going to become.

  
  

• Vladimir - she wants to be a tomboy, to be fearless, she is courageous.

• Most young girls are afraid of male desire, Anastasia is not afraid.

Catherine Breillat - Sophie Bélot

• She subverts the patriarchal symbolical order which reigns in Walt Disney's adaptations, and is underpinned by rigid conceptualisations of gender and sexuality.

• She foregrounds female sexual agency and autonomy

  NB but what about ending?

Bellemare

• the end of her sleep which isn't passive doesn't require a forced kiss - she is an active subject

• Sleep is a a space of invention et de réalisation de soi.

NB Fellini

• we recognise ourselves onscreen

• Anastasia's dream

Catherine Breillat - Sophie Bélot

• Mental images created in reading creates a 'reality effect' which impacts and is transformed by the reality of lived experiences in the real world.

• Readers tease out new meanings.

• Dreams are passive and active acts here, the dream world is where gender identities and behaviours are challenged. (NB verb - to dream up)

• represented by the Romany gypsies

Catherine Breillat - Sophie Bélot

• At the time of the film's release gypsies were being expelled from France. Breillat parallels gypsies and girls (all shaped by cultural, social, and political ideologies)

• The gypsies' freedom and mobility contrasting to Anastasia's limited world dictated y gender expectations.

• The Snow Queen is a tale of initiation, of the passage from childhood to adulthood.

• Peter represents this passage for Anastasia.

• Perhaps this could apply to L'abus de faiblesse?...

  • The man is not really a beast, but what the woman is afraid of.

  • When she is no longer afraid, her gaze will transfigure him into an object of desire.

  • The female gaze (of desire) changes men, albeit sometimes temporarily.

• Through re-forming texts, Breillat addresses female self-formation.

• She recreates the text by framing them through acts of reading and dreaming by contemporary protagonists.

  -> Reading and dreaming are the mechanisms by which repetition (or oral tales) becomes transformative - a space is opened for gender conventions to be challenged.

• She depicts female sexual be(com)ing from an authorial POV.

  -> The reading and dreaming framing make the female protagonists the active authors of the films

• Through drawing upon intertextualities.

• Through showing and undertaking transformations.

• The cultural and social power of fairtyales (Bélot, Warner, Zipes)

• La reine des neiges (Andersen)

  La belle au bois dormant

  Alice au pays des merveilles

  Ugly Duckling

  Ali Baba

• Folk versions of sleeping beauty - sleeping princess is raped by a prince and finds a child born of this assault suckling from her - Madhubanti De

  and also article in Fr? on different sleeping beauties

  NB Breillat subverts this by creating a virgin birth(? name?)

• Childhood is boring, long waiting for adulthood, waiting passively for Prince Charming when conventional gender roles apply (the clocks around Anastasia's bed act as a reminder of this constraining time).

Madhubanti De

• Anastasia is not a victim of time, she asserts her dominance over it.

• NB she hides within a clock for 7 hours?! she is apparently still not a passive beauty trapped in frozen time.

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As before? - love quote

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Alex Bellemare

• le sommeil actif

• l'expérience du temps et l'usage des désirs sont deux filtres à travers lesquels l'individu s'invente et se définit

• le décalage et l'interversion du temps - sont des principes structurants - states and conditions are placed in parallel and in tension with one another.

  -> Sleep and birth are intertwined - the temporal condition of existence is ultimately presented.

Fairytales have a formative power - Bélot, and children/ readers write shape the stories themselves.

Reading of such tales is not a passive activity but an active one which demands imagination (and the unconscious?)

• Madhubanti De

  Children's bodies are not yet crystallied - ideal sites for contestation of structures of gender and 'natural' sex that are inscribed on bodies, opening up the very structures to question.

• 'Breillat explores women's sexuality and the shame that they have been compelled to feel under the male gaze' throughout her cinema.

Reference for shame? Liz Constable: Unbecoming Sexual Desires for Women Becomins Sexual Subjects: Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Catherine Breillat (1999)

• Struggles where women seek to gain a sense of self by discovering and claiming sexual desires.

• Struggles where women seek to gain a sense of self by discovering and claiming sexual desires

• Also seen in A ma soeur (= Fat Girl)

• Breillat speaks of this in interview - where??

  
  

  
  

• The first female filmmaker to adapt Barbe Bleue

• She documents a 'young woman's passionate desire to assert herself'. The tale is no longer about curiosity but asserting power.

• Explores rebellion over victimisation

• Monstrous serial killer - ironically depicted as an intellectual loner - almost incidental

• 'revolutionises the memetic tradition of bluebeard tales' - showing changed attitudes re women's roles.

  -> previously a cautionary tale about women's curiosity - is it still??? - misogynistic silence (literal and intellectual) - Marina Warner

  -> Also a warning about male serial killers - does it show they are still a threat or present them rather differently? Is it utopian??

• Marriage - subverted power - she refuses to have sex etc, demands own room... - Ruairi McCann

• Catherine (the 6-year-old storyteller - younger sister) and Marie-Catherine (who shares? Breillat's sister's name???) control the narratives of their own lives.

• Female narrator contests the dominant male narrative

• The female gaze over the male gaze - how shown??

• Breillat vs Perrault - check Perrault

• Self-assertive young sibling twists Perrault's tale to dominate and kill her sibling - is this unconscious desire?

  
  

• No frame narrative, but two similar narratives which the spectator compares.

  -> Harks to oral tradition

  -> framed by bluebeard discourse

  -> demonstrates perennity of issues I think

Does she show it's dangerous for the woman to be in power as she kills the man?!

• In Perrualt's classic, he suggests that power should always be held by men

  -> Connects to Lacan - the husband needing to seek reassurance re the whereabouts of the phallace.

  • Male unconscious fear of inferiority? create tales to humiliate women and assert hegemony of men - are thus compelled to depict women as fallible

• ... Breillat subverts this I think.

• read intertextualities - NB SECONDARY LIT

• Marie Catherine watches Barbe Bleue undressing from the door, unbeknownst to him.

• Intertextualities here - Salome (Oscar Wilde); The Bloody Chamber (Carter)

  -> desire relates to pleasurable disgust??

Sophie Bélot? when young Catherine walks into the bloody chamber it shows that in fairytales through reading you identify with the tale and it changes you???

• white dress marking her as perfect women - can be taken off.. she is no longer the blank (white screen) upon which male heterosexual desire is inscribed.

Shoes - Louboutins - Garcia book?

the bed - Garcia interview

are gendered and the phallic woman is a predatory figure

key etc

Numinous experiences

the ouroboros- nb in the tent in La belle endormie