Céline Sciamma : «S’engager rend toujours vulnérable»
by Annick Cojean - Le Monde, June 6, 2021
I WOULDN’T HAVE GOTTEN HERE IF… The director looks back on her joyful and curious childhood and talks about how her encounter with cinema offered her a «vicarious life»
In four films, director Céline Sciamma, 42, has established herself as the representative of a new genre of sensitive and demanding auteur cinema. Her Cannes award-winning Portrait de la jeune fille en feu has been seen around the world, and was the first French film screened abroad in 2020 with 1.5 million admissions. She returns to theaters with Petite maman, a poetic tale, filmed from a child’s perspective.
I wouldn’t have gotten here if…
… If I hadn’t grown up with siblings. It’s the most constant and fundamental element in my life. Something essential. I say this with all the more conviction because I thought hard about your famous question! I’ve been wondering about the tipping points that have marked the course of my life, but without being able to distinguish a «decisive» moment or a «major» turning point. To unearth the truth, you have to go back in time as far as possible. And this is how my siblings line up: my sister, younger than me by three years, and my brother, the youngest child, by seven years. It’s the longest accompaniment in my life. And much more: the most unconditional support. At heart, it’s a primary alliance based on solidarity, trust, and caring for each other. And then the games!
Oh yes! What a laugh! We’re in touch daily and talking to them, even if it’s only for a few minutes on the phone, is a guarantee of laughter, even when we talk about serious things. My brother and sister are my confidants. We continue to grow together.
Have you always felt the strength of this bond?
My very first memory is of my sister’s birth. But I feel that it was when my brother was born that we instantly bonded as siblings. A trio emerged, much stronger than the duo. And from that moment on, we were a team. Our parents were very young because they had me at 21. I felt a real responsibility as the eldest: to be attentive, creative, a kind of role model. But it all happened through play: singing, dancing, playing sports. Our environment was conducive to it. We lived in Cergy-Pontoise, one of these new cities that fascinate me and which are places designed for children. You can cross the city without passing a car, and there is even a small wood. Can you imagine our freedom as kids, always outside? There was room for our respective games and passions. And a constant dynamic of humor. My brother actually became a comedian.
Joy and light of childhood…
Yes, but not just that. The little girl that I used to be always felt a sensation of marginalization and inadequacy. It was vague, confusing, inexpressible. But I had an early awareness of being out of step with the projections and the imaginings that society offered me. I dreamed of something else. I was not compliant. So the team of siblings did not preclude solitude and secrecy. Even though I was an energetic and happy child, I was still working on my lion’s wrinkle!
Were you what Nina Bouraoui calls a «homosexual child»?
I was very well aware who my heart was beating for! And there was a continuum of clues that made me feel some weird emotions that I quickly realized were forbidden. This was the early 1980s, a pre-Internet era, with no information or images to project onto. Homosexuality did not exist in the cultural space, lesbians even less so. You had to deal with this poorly identified feeling. It wasn’t really an affliction, but I wanted to grow up quickly to be free to choose my life and not always be waiting for it to start.
Did you talk about it with your parents?
Certainly not! I had a secret relationship with it. It wasn’t so much that it was difficult to talk about or a problem to «come clean» as it was the desire to protect the immense curiosity I had and the dream of a particular sentimental destiny. I wanted to cultivate this dream, not to counter it. It seemed to me to be a promise. But announcing it before actually living it was out of the question!
How did you nourish this curiosity?
A young English girl in the 1980s could find a whole shelf of lesbian literature in a bookshop or library. Impossible in French libraries where the classification is universal and not by genre. Unearthing a book in which I could find myself was something of a treasure hunt. I spent a lot of time in libraries, digging, scrutinizing, hoping. And then one day, it finally happened. You come across Colette. You come across Virginia Woolf. And you’re struck in the heart. You pull on one thread… And you realize that the great women authors have often had queer existences, in their lives or in their novels. And that by taking an interest in great feminine literature, therefore feminist, we end up meeting. And it’s an enormous emotion, completely aside from the work.
What feeling does this paucity of representation engender?
Today, I would call it exclusion. But back then, it made you doubt yourself and your intuition. You felt very alone, possibly the only one in the world. How can you explore your own feelings if you can’t relate them to the images, stories, behaviors visible in society? So, when by some miracle you recognize yourself, I assure you that you can’t miss it! It’s so strong, so overwhelming, that it is impossible to go back. If the desire survives its total erasure, and the emotional extortion often brought about to make it disappear, well I assure you that it empowers you with a hell of a lot of strength.
How did your encounter with cinema come about?
In much the same vein. Overnight, it took over from literature. From the age of 13 or 14, I went there three times a week. By myself. And I saw everything, thanks to the wonderful Utopia cinema in Cergy. My life was organized around that: earning money by babysitting to pay for my movie tickets.
Did someone introduce you to the 7th art?
My grandmother. My wonderful grandmother who passed away recently. A grandmother who had been a movie buff since her childhood in Cairo in the 1930s. A grandmother equipped with all the satellite channels, who meticulously chose the film that we would watch together in silence and who thus introduced me to Capra, Hitchcock, James Stewart, her favorite actor, but also to Spanish cinema, to all of Italian cinema… She had tons of film books, numerous encyclopedias, and she educated me, the dreamy teenager for whom the cinema offered a vicarious life. I was vibrating, pulsating, brimming with ideas. Everything was so intense that it became a goal. I dreamed of such powerful loves, even if it seemed impossible. Because not only did I not kiss anyone in real life, but I also never saw anyone, on the screen, kissing someone of the same sex. Which would have moved me so much and given me courage.
Were you aware that the cinema’s perspective was both masculine and hetero?
Not at all! I was in awe. And I absorbed the canon. Cinema is an art based on canon, and on the repetition of canon. An authoritarian canon with rules, norms, styles, archetypes. Cinema is very much inspired by cinema. It’s one of the arts where you can claim to have been inspired by your colleague, which I find very beautiful. But as a result, you lack distance. You immerse yourself in this standardized universe, you feed off it, you wallow in it. And then one day, you discover La vie ne me fait pas peur, by Noémie Lvovsky, the first film I saw with the knowledge that it was made by a woman. And I was in shock. Not only because a young director was showing me that this profession was accessible to a woman. But her film offered something different, touched a sensitive chord and literally shook me. From then on, I paid attention to the director, and not just to the film.
And you thought about studying film…
No. Not yet. I had a thirst for learning, I liked to study. A teacher talked to me about hypokhâgne. I’m in. Paris reaches out to me! Long live autonomy! In truth, I ended up in Neuilly in a nuns’ home. I worked like crazy but experienced life in a community with girls. And it was great! Friendly, supportive, festive. There was an amazing mix of backgrounds, girls from the provinces and the Parisian upper middle class, left-wing chicks and girls from the RPR [Rassemblement pour la République, founded by Jacques Chirac]. I was open to a lot of things and I loved this feminine everyday life. When I imagined the rest of my life, that was how I would like to live.
What do you mean by that?
In a friendly community. Among people who listen to each other, who understand each other and who simply love each other. It’s not just about couples or families! Friendship can also be a way of life. It already organizes and structures mine, including sharing care and services on a daily basis. I also have male friendships and would not exclude integrating boys into the community that I fantasize about. But I have to admit that a single-sex community is a refuge of unheard-of sweetness and freedom. The idea is not, as is often thought, to conspire or have secret discussions from which we would like to exclude others. The objective is much simpler: to be able to rest and relax. To spare ourselves certain conversations or behaviors. To live our individuality to the fullest.
The singularity of your regard and your style has been striking from your very first film, «Naissance des pieuvres», made right out of film school…
I enjoyed making it so much! So much joy at every step of the way, every encounter, every action. I rushed into it, very young, scrawny, without any experience, perfectly unaware, but with a political intuition and a radical approach to the staging that still moves me today. It’s true, I talked about the troubles of adolescence, when I was barely past it myself, and also about the injunctions and abuses to which girls are exposed. It was before #metoo, but I didn’t avoid violence. One of my characters even spit in the mouth of a boy in response to the violence he had done to her. At the time, some spectators expressed their disgust at this scene. Today, it’s become a triumphant image that people celebrate. And that was my intention. Anyway, the success of the film and the pleasure I took in it made me say: this is what I want to do! This is how I want to live. In this emotional intensity of collective creation. In this ephemeral fusion of filming.
I know how important cinema has been to my life as a young viewer. So my ambition is at that level. Cinema can save lives.
What films do you want to make?
Films that overwhelm, that disturb, that question. Films that make us grow. Films that make you feel infinitely alive and from which you leave with your heart beating. I would like to create beauty. And even poetry.
And have a political and social impact?
Obviously! But not by making a political pamphlet! Not with the codes of political cinema that piss everyone off. By offering experiences, rather than debates. By showing other faces, other attitudes, other relationships. By leaving behind the dramaturgy of conflict, which is ubiquitous in fiction. My films are not meant to create ripples in the pond. There is no object lesson, I don’t assert truths. I offer feelings that foster new ideas, that explore other ways of living and thinking. The opportunity to do so, in real life, doesn’t happen very frequently. I’m not addressing legislators! I am thinking only about the audience and their emotions. I dream that they take the film with them, that they complete it, fantasize about it, feed on it. You know, on the second day of shooting on Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, as we were filming the scene on the beach where the two heroines are kissing and crying because they have to separate, I turned to my cinematographer and said: «We’re going to change the world!»
So there it is, your ambition!
But of course! I take cinema very seriously. And that’s why I accompany my films with a political voice that I could spare myself. But I am committed. I bring up ideas. And receiving thousands of testimonies from fans and activists of all kinds and from all over the world saying that this love story has changed their lives blows me away. It’s a real community that’s been created. The bond with the film has become a bond between those who loved it. A bond of friendship, solidarity and mutual support. It makes me sentimental. And also vulnerable. Being committed always makes you vulnerable.
Did you think of the teenager from Cergy-Pontoise who never recognized herself in the films she was watching at the Utopia?
I made the film that would have reached out to her.
[Please don’t repost this anywhere, in part or in whole. Feel free to reblog, or at least cite your source and provide a link back here. Asking permission would be nice in an ideal world, but I’m a realist - I know far too well how easy it is to appropriate stuff on Tumblr. I would be the first to admit that my translations are not perfect - there are some words and phrases that simply do not drop neatly into an equivalent in English, and I constantly fix typos and make changes or corrections in older posts - but they do take a lot of work and time. Thanks for understanding. - C]
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