About the event
by Emma Wilson
In 2024, Céline Sciamma made a short film, This Is How a Child Becomes a Poet, in the apartment of Italian poet Patricia Cavalli shortly after her passing. She shows Cavalli’s habitat ‘before it’s all gone’.
In this seminar, I will talk about houses and apartments, about paintings, photographs and interiors, in the work of French women filmmakers. Drawing on words on home and place by Marguerite Duras and work on the house in cinema by John David Rhodes, I explore real interiors in film and their relation to intimacy.
Psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle’s writings on secrecy echo here, while Louise Bourgeois’s Femme Maison series also returns. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s film about her mother Jane Birkin, Jane par Charlotte (2021), follows Agnès Varda’s collaboration with Jane in Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988). Charlotte films her mother’s house before it is sold. She also shows herself and her mother entering the house of her father, Serge Gainsbourg, now a house-museum.
In their films about houses and apartments, I argue that French women filmmakers are opening questions about lived experience and legacy, but also about childhood memories, sometimes disquieting, hidden and shared.
About the speaker
Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Corpus Christi College.
Her most recent monographs are The Reclining Nude: Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat and Nan Goldin (LUP 2019) and Céline Sciamma: Portraits(EUP 2021).
She collaborated with Marion Schmid (Professor of French Literature and Film, University of Edinburgh) on a book of essays on Chantal Akerman (Legenda 2019). Professor Wilson is currently working on a book on Chantal Akerman, Alice Diop and Justine Triet, titled After La notte: Contemporary Women Directors and Italy.
How to attend
This event is open to all, and free to attend. You can reserve your spot on Eventbrite.
