Girlhood

30/11/2023

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   On The DVD Extras to Girlhood, director Celine Sciamma says that what she sought in the story was the universal, seeing it as a coming-of-age tale that everyone must go through. A cynic or a person sensitive to cultural specificities might say Sciamma would say that. Here she is a white woman making a work about an almost exclusively black experience, with about the only whites we see in the film a shop assistant insulted by the gang central character Marieme (Karidja Touré) has become involved with, a girl at school Marieme bullies into giving her cash, and a young woman on some steps at La Defence, harassed by Marieme’s sister and her sister’s friends. There is surely a lot more to black experience than interacting aggressively with whites, and we might wonder if some of the supporters of the various Le Pens and Eric Zemmours may look at the film and see their prejudices confirmed rather than contradicted. This we don’t doubt wouldn’t have been Sciamma’s intention, but that might potentially be the result.  

   In 1991, a mural was painted inside the French National Assembly which has, in recent years, started garnering disapproval, with filmmaker Mame-Fatou Niang and novelist Julien Suaudeau beginning an online petition to have it removed. They saw in it stereotypes generated by its white artist Herve di Rosa. Writing on the issue, Annette Joseph-Gabriel says, “this is not the only time that a white artist’s representation of black people in France has gone awry. A more recent and less immediately controversial work, Céline Sciamma’s 2014 film Bande de Filles (Girlhood), suffers from similar problems as Di Rosa’s mural. Both works deny that context matters and therefore reproduce stereotypes that fail to capture the people they claim to represent.” (Africa is a Country) “By Sciamma’s own admission,” Joseph-Gabriela says, “she did no research before writing her script but remains convinced that the film is a successful representation of the lives of black girls.” (‘Africa is a Country’) Sciamma’s admission was offered in none other than Le Figaro, a kind of French equivalent of the Daily Telegraph.

  It looks like we are building towards a strong argument: that Sciamma has made a film obliviously racist and astonishingly entitled. Here we have a white woman filmmaker believing she can take black female experience and reckons that no research is required — and thus stereotyping is the consequence. But our purpose isn’t to offer polemic but to try and comprehend the quality of the film as an aesthetic object and to muse over what sort of experiences a filmmaker can claim as their own. Some might believe that Sciamma’s insistence on the universal nature of growing up is just an excuse to avoid admitting that she has too little awareness of a black woman’s experience in a banlieue: a high-rise suburb. Yet Sciamma’s work has been consistently interested in youth: Water Lillies focused on fifteen-year-olds in a middle-class French suburb; Tomboy on the ten-year-old of the title; Petite Maman about an eight-year-old who befriends someone physically identical to her, and the most ‘grown-up’ of the lot, Portrait of an Artist on Fire, which nevertheless shows at its centre a young woman with little agency as she is expected to be married off to a Milanese nobleman. Sciamma’s interests as a director and also as a scriptwriter for others (including on the animated film My Life as a Courgette), is with pre-adolesence, adolescence and post-adolescence. From this perspective, Girlhood fits neatly into her preoccupations. It would seem unfair to say Sciamma would say she wanted to make a film of a universal stage of life since she has so often focused on that stage. It doesn’t sound just like an alibi justifying why she might not understand well enough the experience she investigates when it comes to black lives.

    However, Sciamma says, “the trouble with drama… is that it’s invariably built around ideas of conflict. It’s about rivals and enemies; resolution through violence” (Guardian) This is something her work has usually avoided but in Girlhood it is pronounced. There aren’t just the conflicts we have noticed where the black characters harass whites, there is also the aggression Marieme’s older brother frequently shows towards her, and especially evident when he grabs her by the throat after hearing she has slept with someone from the suburb, saying he thinks this dishonours him. We have too the slap she administers towards her younger sister at La Defense, the crushing of a woman’s hand as Marieme makes it clear she has no interest in working as a cleaner like her mother, and most especially two fights that take place. 

   The first is between one of the other girls in the group, Lady and a member of a rival gang. Lady is both beaten and humiliated, her top ripped off her at the end of the fight and an image taken and posted online. In the second, Marieme seeks revenge, wins the fight and doesn’t only yank off the woman’s top but also, as her opponent lies on the ground, takes out a pen knife and snips at her bra. Both scenes are filmed with almost a classical sense of action-sequence competition. We have a shallow focus emphasis on the person we are identifying with in the fight, reaction shots to the onlookers, and numerous cuts into the action. The sequences aren’t at all presented at a distance, as though from a concerned onlooker, but from the perspective of victory being what matters. The second fight especially has the feel of a western showdown, or of a fighter entering the ring. As Marieme moves through the crowd, she comes out and faces her opponent. It is an encounter taking place in harsh light, a noonday duel, perhaps, and we are left wondering if Marieme can beat this woman who has already proved formidable in taking out the gang’s hardest member.  

    These are impressive action sequences from a director whose interest has usually been on modulated sensitivity, and maybe someone who reckons Sciamma shouldn’t be directing a film about blacks living in the banlieue, will add that in doing so she falls into not only stereotypical characterisation but also the standardised conflicts she says she wishes to avoid. However, another way of looking at it is that she wants to snapshot people’s lives, as though her work has always been interested in a visiting gaze, a cinema that doesn’t linger on a life but wants to capture just an aspect of it at a moment in time. “It’s always about a few days out of the world, where we can meet each other, love each other. Also it’s always about female characters because they can be themselves only in a private place where they can share their loneliness, their dreams, their attitudes, their ideas.” (Guardian) This may have to pass through aggression in this instance not because the characters are black but the environment is harsh. 

  In contrast with Boyhood, which came out the same year, Sciamma doesn’t seek immersion but impression. Richard Linklater’s film chose to grow up and grow old with the characters onscreen, a rare example of real-time and screen time matching quite precisely as it covered twelve years of the characters’ and the actors’ lives. Dramatically, Boyhood resembles Moonlight, as it follows a boy from his pre-teen years into adulthood, but while the latter employs three different actors to cover the period, Linklater’s film shows the growing pains happening gradually within the one actor as he films Ellar Coltrane over more than a decade. It was as though Linklater wished to invert and expand his Before trilogy by watching actors age over many years, by turning the one film into an epic, while the three films individually were very compact works. Before Sunrise captured a night in Vienna; Before Sunset an early evening in Paris, Before Midnight a few hours over dinner at Peloponnese. Yet whether offering radical dramatic unity or no less radical expansion, the films look like Linklater movies. 

  If we were to reject Sciamma’s film, it should be based perhaps less on cultural appropriation than aesthetic misapprehension. The problem with Scorsese’s Kundun isn’t just that the Italian-American had the audacity to make a film about the Dalai Lama, best left to someone with at least a nodding relation to Tibet. More, that there is nothing more antithetical to Scorsese’s cinema than stillness. Just as we have the notion of miscasting for actors; maybe it applies to directors too. We can see that logic at work in Linklater’s Trilogy and Boyhood. The latter doesn’t at all seem antithetical. Scorsese’s Kundun does.

    From this perspective, Girlhood doesn’t seem a directorial error but an intriguing expansion. Sciamma was brought up in Cergy-Pontoise, a north-western suburb that fellow inhabitant Annie Ernaux describes as “a city without a bourgeois heart”, a post-war new town built during France’s housing boom. “During this period from 1953 to 1973, an average of 300,000 housing units were constructed per year.” (The Routledge Companion to the Suburbs) Sciamma’s first film Water Lillies was shot there. Not all suburbs are equal of course and Girlhood’s setting in an estate in Bagnolet, in the east of the city, clearly marks it out as a slab of oppression. 

     But it is as though Sciamma wants to find new settings for ongoing themes. Ostensibly, the 18th-century upper-class Portrait of a Lady on Fire has nothing in common with Girlhood, yet from the perspective of a woman’s limited choices given the environment she is in, the similarities are manifest. Near the end of Girlhood, Marieme is sitting on the bed with her boyfriend and he proposes they get married, making a decent woman out of her. Ismael might be thinking that his offer helps her out of a difficult situation: that she needn’t fear her brother’s wrath as she wouldn’t thus be no longer living in sin with her partner. But what she sees for all Ismael’s sweetness is a variation of her brother’s beliefs and she reckons that whatever she seeks in life it won’t be marrying at a young age, just as in Portrait of a Lady on Fire the central character doesn’t wish to marry a count. Ironically, for all Marieme’s impoverishment, she might be the freer woman: at the end of Girlhood she walks away from Ishmael. At the end of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the character is a married woman despite her desires lying elsewhere.

     If Sciamma’s work has consistently shown an interest in restrictive environments, then Girlhood is intriguing because it adopts an experience apparently very far from Sciamma’s own but doesn’t feel like a misapprehending of aesthetic intention, even if some might insist it is an appropriation of others’ material. This is where ethics meets aesthetics and there is a danger of insisting that the ethical must always trump the artistic, that creative work must be done within a limited purview. It leads to the possibility that someone can only make films about their milieu and risks the flip-side of cultural appropriation: the self-indulgent. Do we want Sciamma only to make films about lesbian life in artistic circles? Or do we wish that she consistently tries to find the further reaches of her concerns in arenas that expand her sensibility, and subsequently ours? Speaking of Petite Mama, which finds a way of exploring her mother’s life through a doppelganger theme as the daughter becomes her best friend, before revealing that she is actually her daughter coming from the future who has time-travelled into the past, Sciamma says: “We only meet our mothers politically when we grow up. We understand the decisions they made and the specific pressures they were under. The political system. The reproductive system. At some point we read the world the same as they did. But through fiction, through time travel, we can do it from a place of equality.” (Guardian) 

   It is this question of putting ourselves in other’s shoes rather than staying in the size and style that is deemed to fit that is central to aesthetic experience, for those creating it, and those responding to it. French writer Emmanuel Carrere tells a nice story about a child. “She had misbehaved and her mother was scolding her, saying, “But put yourself in other people’s position!” And the little girl answered, “But if I put myself in their position, where do they go?” (New York Times) This might seem like a wonderful retort to the dangers of appropriation but, perhaps if one does so without standing on anybody’s toes, the work is justified. After all, in perhaps Girlhood’s most beautiful scene, the girls are in a hotel room and they play Rihanna’s Diamonds in the Sky, dancing as though they don’t have a care in the world but that Rihanna might represent a place for them to aspire to in it. They put themselves in her shoes as they mime to the music, and Sciamma’s film captures their yearnings without assuming they need be that different from Sciamma’s own. Is it that question of yearning that matters, whatever the colour of one’s skin, and without quite saying that race, class and gender won’t be central to what one might be able to do in fulfilling that hope?

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Girlhood

   On The DVD Extras to Girlhood, director Celine Sciamma says that what she sought in the story was the universal, seeing it as a coming-of-age tale that everyone must go through. A cynic or a person sensitive to cultural specificities might say Sciamma would say that. Here she is a white woman making a work about an almost exclusively black experience, with about the only whites we see in the film a shop assistant insulted by the gang central character Marieme (Karidja Touré) has become involved with, a girl at school Marieme bullies into giving her cash, and a young woman on some steps at La Defence, harassed by Marieme’s sister and her sister’s friends. There is surely a lot more to black experience than interacting aggressively with whites, and we might wonder if some of the supporters of the various Le Pens and Eric Zemmours may look at the film and see their prejudices confirmed rather than contradicted. This we don’t doubt wouldn’t have been Sciamma’s intention, but that might potentially be the result.  

   In 1991, a mural was painted inside the French National Assembly which has, in recent years, started garnering disapproval, with filmmaker Mame-Fatou Niang and novelist Julien Suaudeau beginning an online petition to have it removed. They saw in it stereotypes generated by its white artist Herve di Rosa. Writing on the issue, Annette Joseph-Gabriel says, “this is not the only time that a white artist’s representation of black people in France has gone awry. A more recent and less immediately controversial work, Céline Sciamma’s 2014 film Bande de Filles (Girlhood), suffers from similar problems as Di Rosa’s mural. Both works deny that context matters and therefore reproduce stereotypes that fail to capture the people they claim to represent.” (Africa is a Country) “By Sciamma’s own admission,” Joseph-Gabriela says, “she did no research before writing her script but remains convinced that the film is a successful representation of the lives of black girls.” (‘Africa is a Country’) Sciamma’s admission was offered in none other than Le Figaro, a kind of French equivalent of the Daily Telegraph.

  It looks like we are building towards a strong argument: that Sciamma has made a film obliviously racist and astonishingly entitled. Here we have a white woman filmmaker believing she can take black female experience and reckons that no research is required — and thus stereotyping is the consequence. But our purpose isn’t to offer polemic but to try and comprehend the quality of the film as an aesthetic object and to muse over what sort of experiences a filmmaker can claim as their own. Some might believe that Sciamma’s insistence on the universal nature of growing up is just an excuse to avoid admitting that she has too little awareness of a black woman’s experience in a banlieue: a high-rise suburb. Yet Sciamma’s work has been consistently interested in youth: Water Lillies focused on fifteen-year-olds in a middle-class French suburb; Tomboy on the ten-year-old of the title; Petite Maman about an eight-year-old who befriends someone physically identical to her, and the most ‘grown-up’ of the lot, Portrait of an Artist on Fire, which nevertheless shows at its centre a young woman with little agency as she is expected to be married off to a Milanese nobleman. Sciamma’s interests as a director and also as a scriptwriter for others (including on the animated film My Life as a Courgette), is with pre-adolesence, adolescence and post-adolescence. From this perspective, Girlhood fits neatly into her preoccupations. It would seem unfair to say Sciamma would say she wanted to make a film of a universal stage of life since she has so often focused on that stage. It doesn’t sound just like an alibi justifying why she might not understand well enough the experience she investigates when it comes to black lives.

    However, Sciamma says, “the trouble with drama… is that it’s invariably built around ideas of conflict. It’s about rivals and enemies; resolution through violence” (Guardian) This is something her work has usually avoided but in Girlhood it is pronounced. There aren’t just the conflicts we have noticed where the black characters harass whites, there is also the aggression Marieme’s older brother frequently shows towards her, and especially evident when he grabs her by the throat after hearing she has slept with someone from the suburb, saying he thinks this dishonours him. We have too the slap she administers towards her younger sister at La Defense, the crushing of a woman’s hand as Marieme makes it clear she has no interest in working as a cleaner like her mother, and most especially two fights that take place. 

   The first is between one of the other girls in the group, Lady and a member of a rival gang. Lady is both beaten and humiliated, her top ripped off her at the end of the fight and an image taken and posted online. In the second, Marieme seeks revenge, wins the fight and doesn’t only yank off the woman’s top but also, as her opponent lies on the ground, takes out a pen knife and snips at her bra. Both scenes are filmed with almost a classical sense of action-sequence competition. We have a shallow focus emphasis on the person we are identifying with in the fight, reaction shots to the onlookers, and numerous cuts into the action. The sequences aren’t at all presented at a distance, as though from a concerned onlooker, but from the perspective of victory being what matters. The second fight especially has the feel of a western showdown, or of a fighter entering the ring. As Marieme moves through the crowd, she comes out and faces her opponent. It is an encounter taking place in harsh light, a noonday duel, perhaps, and we are left wondering if Marieme can beat this woman who has already proved formidable in taking out the gang’s hardest member.  

    These are impressive action sequences from a director whose interest has usually been on modulated sensitivity, and maybe someone who reckons Sciamma shouldn’t be directing a film about blacks living in the banlieue, will add that in doing so she falls into not only stereotypical characterisation but also the standardised conflicts she says she wishes to avoid. However, another way of looking at it is that she wants to snapshot people’s lives, as though her work has always been interested in a visiting gaze, a cinema that doesn’t linger on a life but wants to capture just an aspect of it at a moment in time. “It’s always about a few days out of the world, where we can meet each other, love each other. Also it’s always about female characters because they can be themselves only in a private place where they can share their loneliness, their dreams, their attitudes, their ideas.” (Guardian) This may have to pass through aggression in this instance not because the characters are black but the environment is harsh. 

  In contrast with Boyhood, which came out the same year, Sciamma doesn’t seek immersion but impression. Richard Linklater’s film chose to grow up and grow old with the characters onscreen, a rare example of real-time and screen time matching quite precisely as it covered twelve years of the characters’ and the actors’ lives. Dramatically, Boyhood resembles Moonlight, as it follows a boy from his pre-teen years into adulthood, but while the latter employs three different actors to cover the period, Linklater’s film shows the growing pains happening gradually within the one actor as he films Ellar Coltrane over more than a decade. It was as though Linklater wished to invert and expand his Before trilogy by watching actors age over many years, by turning the one film into an epic, while the three films individually were very compact works. Before Sunrise captured a night in Vienna; Before Sunset an early evening in Paris, Before Midnight a few hours over dinner at Peloponnese. Yet whether offering radical dramatic unity or no less radical expansion, the films look like Linklater movies. 

  If we were to reject Sciamma’s film, it should be based perhaps less on cultural appropriation than aesthetic misapprehension. The problem with Scorsese’s Kundun isn’t just that the Italian-American had the audacity to make a film about the Dalai Lama, best left to someone with at least a nodding relation to Tibet. More, that there is nothing more antithetical to Scorsese’s cinema than stillness. Just as we have the notion of miscasting for actors; maybe it applies to directors too. We can see that logic at work in Linklater’s Trilogy and Boyhood. The latter doesn’t at all seem antithetical. Scorsese’s Kundun does.

    From this perspective, Girlhood doesn’t seem a directorial error but an intriguing expansion. Sciamma was brought up in Cergy-Pontoise, a north-western suburb that fellow inhabitant Annie Ernaux describes as “a city without a bourgeois heart”, a post-war new town built during France’s housing boom. “During this period from 1953 to 1973, an average of 300,000 housing units were constructed per year.” (The Routledge Companion to the Suburbs) Sciamma’s first film Water Lillies was shot there. Not all suburbs are equal of course and Girlhood’s setting in an estate in Bagnolet, in the east of the city, clearly marks it out as a slab of oppression. 

     But it is as though Sciamma wants to find new settings for ongoing themes. Ostensibly, the 18th-century upper-class Portrait of a Lady on Fire has nothing in common with Girlhood, yet from the perspective of a woman’s limited choices given the environment she is in, the similarities are manifest. Near the end of Girlhood, Marieme is sitting on the bed with her boyfriend and he proposes they get married, making a decent woman out of her. Ismael might be thinking that his offer helps her out of a difficult situation: that she needn’t fear her brother’s wrath as she wouldn’t thus be no longer living in sin with her partner. But what she sees for all Ismael’s sweetness is a variation of her brother’s beliefs and she reckons that whatever she seeks in life it won’t be marrying at a young age, just as in Portrait of a Lady on Fire the central character doesn’t wish to marry a count. Ironically, for all Marieme’s impoverishment, she might be the freer woman: at the end of Girlhood she walks away from Ishmael. At the end of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the character is a married woman despite her desires lying elsewhere.

     If Sciamma’s work has consistently shown an interest in restrictive environments, then Girlhood is intriguing because it adopts an experience apparently very far from Sciamma’s own but doesn’t feel like a misapprehending of aesthetic intention, even if some might insist it is an appropriation of others’ material. This is where ethics meets aesthetics and there is a danger of insisting that the ethical must always trump the artistic, that creative work must be done within a limited purview. It leads to the possibility that someone can only make films about their milieu and risks the flip-side of cultural appropriation: the self-indulgent. Do we want Sciamma only to make films about lesbian life in artistic circles? Or do we wish that she consistently tries to find the further reaches of her concerns in arenas that expand her sensibility, and subsequently ours? Speaking of Petite Mama, which finds a way of exploring her mother’s life through a doppelganger theme as the daughter becomes her best friend, before revealing that she is actually her daughter coming from the future who has time-travelled into the past, Sciamma says: “We only meet our mothers politically when we grow up. We understand the decisions they made and the specific pressures they were under. The political system. The reproductive system. At some point we read the world the same as they did. But through fiction, through time travel, we can do it from a place of equality.” (Guardian) 

   It is this question of putting ourselves in other’s shoes rather than staying in the size and style that is deemed to fit that is central to aesthetic experience, for those creating it, and those responding to it. French writer Emmanuel Carrere tells a nice story about a child. “She had misbehaved and her mother was scolding her, saying, “But put yourself in other people’s position!” And the little girl answered, “But if I put myself in their position, where do they go?” (New York Times) This might seem like a wonderful retort to the dangers of appropriation but, perhaps if one does so without standing on anybody’s toes, the work is justified. After all, in perhaps Girlhood’s most beautiful scene, the girls are in a hotel room and they play Rihanna’s Diamonds in the Sky, dancing as though they don’t have a care in the world but that Rihanna might represent a place for them to aspire to in it. They put themselves in her shoes as they mime to the music, and Sciamma’s film captures their yearnings without assuming they need be that different from Sciamma’s own. Is it that question of yearning that matters, whatever the colour of one’s skin, and without quite saying that race, class and gender won’t be central to what one might be able to do in fulfilling that hope?


© Tony McKibbin