Mutilating and Mutilated Bodies: Women’s Takes on “Extreme” French Cinema

Abstract

Of all the countries bordering the Mediterranean, France has not only the biggest film industry but also the highest number and proportion of women filmmakers (Tarr with Rollet 2001, Audé 2002). However, since the 1990s, few of these filmmakers have explicitly claimed to make films from a feminist perspective or opted for an alternative feminist counter-cinema, feminist discourses having been effectively marginalized in a postfeminist France.¹ Rather, they have elected to develop and consolidate their relatively strong position within the French film industry where they have been able to mainstream representations of female subjectivity and issues affecting women’s lives, not only through auteur films but also through the appropriation of popular genres such as comedy, costume drama, crime fiction, and the road movie, evident in box office successes such as Nicole Garcia’s Place Vendôme (1998), Tonie Marshall’s Venus Beauty (1999), and Agnès Jaoui’s Look at Me (2004).