Catherine Breillat

Catherine Breillat’s explicit engagement with female sexuality across her corpus is illumined through discussion of her return to images of nudity and reclining in European painting, as witnessed in particular in her work from Romance forwards. Romance and Anatomy of Hell draw on the forms, colours, affects, and sensations of paintings by Georges de la Tour, Ingres, Manet, and others, but the closest point of contact for Breillat with painting is with Courbet’s The Origin of the World. If attention to artistic influence allows apprehension of the formal beauty, luxury, and sensuality of Breillat’s works, her moves through Courbet, and her choreographing of the bodies of her actresses as they adopt recumbent and horizontal poses, speaks further of the animality, savagery, and mortification of being knocked off a vertical axis, and laid out on a bed, as on a butcher’s slab. Beyond Varda, Breillat pushes towards the annihilation of the subject foreshadowed and figured in images of reclining.

Nan Goldin

Focusing on two projects first mounted in Paris, an installation about Goldin’s sister Barbara, Sisters, Saints and Sibyls and a projection and grid pictures inspired by images in the Louvre Museum, Scopophilia, this chapter looks at the melancholy and sensuality of the European phase of Goldin’s work. It looks in particular at her attention to women (cisgender and occasionally trans). She moves from images of prostration, lying down to die on railway tracks, being struck down by piercing grief, being tied down in a hospital bed, to images of radiant beauty, exposure, and female eroticism. Through the expansive range of feelings conjured by her photographs, Goldin vindicates female pleasure in looking, and further explores the contestatory power in images of indolence, languishing, and inactivity. The chapter engages closely with Goldin’s statements about her art. It offers, like the book as a whole, an exultant apprehension of new engagements with intimacy and eroticism, and new visions of a feminist, resistant passivity.

Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda studied art history and photography, and the influence of the visual arts in her filmmaking has long been remarked. This discussion is the first to close in on the figure of the reclining nude which appears in her work in the form of tableaux vivants from the early film, L’Opéra Mouffe, and returns extensively in her portrait film Jane B. par Agnès V. In this film, together with cinematographer Nurith Aviv, Varda creates an cinematic reclining nude in a very slow, sensual pan across the prone naked body of Jane Birkin, from her feet to her smiling face. Here, and in another film from the 1980s, Documenteur, Varda explores reclining figures as part of her filmic experiments with emotion and rêverie, the reclining figure drawing and expressing feelings of erotic pleasure, repose, delay, melancholy, and depression. Her interest in still visual precedents in her work coalesces with her career-long feminist attention to states of female feeling and being.

India Song

In Duras’s film India Song (1975) there is a scene showing Anne-Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig) in black satin reclining, her torso bare. Light touches her skin and its surface is iridescent. The infinite softness of the breast, like a hothouse flower, its moisture as Seyrig sweats, dissolve feeling, disarm. The breast’s fragility in the night air, its sensitivity, are apparent as Duras films breath, breathing. The shot gathers meanings about those liminal states between waking and sleeping, the agony and horror of a colonial world....

The Reclining Nude

Opening with a reflection on the woman rolling in the waves in Maya Deren’s At Land, this chapter draws out a series of thoughts on reclining. From the tradition of the reclining nude and the female figure in sensual repose, images of loved and exposed women, it moves to figures of anatomical investigation, proneness, horizontality, and animality. Figures of sleep, dream, and near death gesture to the issues of unknowability and vicariousness the figure conjures. Female voices, Louise Bourgeois, Marguerite Duras, Tilda Swinton, Adriana Cavarero, return in the chapter to allow a stretching of the range of meanings in the figure of the reclining nude, and a new imagining of her evocative presence, and the strange valuing of passivity, indolent resistance, in the work of female-identified artists.

shoreline

At Land (Maya Deren, 1946) opens with shots of the sea. In the surge of liquid a woman’s body is visible. There is the sensual curve of her dark dress, and the line of her neck. Her cool pale skin, the sheen of the cloth, the salt water offer a stretch of sensations. In a cascade of shots, the film cuts to her shoulders, her long neck, a reclining head. The sweep of the camera shows the rush of water over her body, how her image is deformed in the flow, how the form dissolves in the waves. Her body re-emerges. Her head is cast back, the water rinsing through her long hair. Her mouth is open in rapture. The image seems at first one of drowning. Her body recedes and returns in the frame, moved in the water, her flesh unworldly, morbid, and fragile. The sequence effects a metamorphosis, a sleight of hand. She is there, alive, born. The sea recedes before the film cuts to the woman on the shore. Her eyes are open. Her dark pupils are peculiarly animate....