St Andrews Film Studies Speaker Series - Dr Clara Bradbury-Rance

Department of Film Studies, St Andrews

Dr Clara Bradbury-Rance will be discussing her brilliant work on lesbian legibility, queer cinema, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

The Department of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews is thrilled to welcome Dr Clara Bradbury-Rance to discuss her fantastic work on lesbian legibility in the cinema.Lesbian legibility and queer legacy in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)In her first three films, Céline Sciamma coerced ambivalent identifications with both the idealisations and frustrations of adolescent desire. Rarely premised on romantic satisfaction, these films reveal desire’s potential rather than its achievement. By contrast, Sciamma’s latest directorial feature has been received very differently: as a celebrated lesbian love story. As a story of painting – an artist falling in love with the subject of her portrait – Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film about representation itself, about the intensified spectatorship that comes with the sustained diegetic attention to the gaze. In several scenes, the painter Marianne closes her eyes in recollection, then rubs against the charcoal with her fingers, as if to touch her lover’s face through the image. But might the film also be playing a trick on us? To leave us wondering: was Heloise always, only ever, an image in a portrait? This paper argues that rather than securing the mainstream demands of the period romance to reveal lost histories of lesbianism, Portrait of a Lady on Fire draws on Sciamma’s radical visual vocabulary to capture desire’s precarity. This is articulated by Sciamma’s attention to the history of the lesbian (non-)image, encapsulated in references to films such as Rebecca and Persona. Citing the past with a distorted chronology, a plot device, a ghostly apparition or a mise en abyme, films such as Mulholland Drive, Carol and The Handmaiden have also threatened to make lesbianism but a misrecognition. This, I argue, is the site of Portrait’s queerness - not (just) the explicit representation of a lesbian love story but rather a reckoning with cinema’s own role in making prohibited desires legible on-screen. Just as Gayatri Gopinath locates the ‘queerness’ of the corpus of her book Unruly Visions in ‘a specific spectatorial dynamic between the artist and the historical archive’ (2018: 14), I find queerness in Sciamma’s – and our – relationship to the visual archive of lesbian film history. This paper argues that by reminding us of desire’s precarity, Sciamma’s film virtuosically demonstrates its own negotiations with ‘lesbian’ cinema, whilst opening up ways to read a visual map of queer possibility.Speaker bio: Clara Bradbury-Rance is a Lecturer in the Department of Liberal Arts at King’s College London. Clara publishes widely on contemporary queer and feminist cinema and popular culture. Her book Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory was published by Edinburgh University Press and translated into Spanish by Osífragos (both 2019). Clara is on the board of MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture and edited its special issue Feminist Pedagogies (2020). She is the co-Chair of the SCMS Queer and Trans Caucus and on the steering committee of Queer@King’s. Clara has published in journals such as Feminist Theory and Feminist Media Studies and has articles forthcoming in New Review of Film and Television Studies and Camera Obscura.

St Andrews Film Studies Speaker Series - Dr Clara Bradbury-Rance

More events from Department of Film Studies, St Andrews

Discover more events from Department of Film Studies, St Andrews, from Film & Media to other experiences you might love.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.

St Andrews Film Studies Speaker Series - Dr Clara Bradbury-Rance

More events from Department of Film Studies, St Andrews

Discover more events from Department of Film Studies, St Andrews, from Film & Media to other experiences you might love.

You might also like...

Browse more events with different dates, prices, and formats to find your next great experience.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.