Celluloid is Sticky: Sex, Death, Materiality, Metaphysics (in Some Films by Catherine Breillat)

Brinkema examines the twin provocations of female sexuality and death in the films of notorious French filmmaker Catherine Breillat in order to argue that the effect of the staged encounter between erotics and erasure in her work is precisely what secures her metaphysics of sexuality. Though known as the 'auteur of porn', it is Breillat's particular relation to the materiality and hapticity of the body that produces a sensual horror and an ontological realism of the image that is always and uniquely centred on the sticky production of wet female desire. The taxonomy of Breillat's metaphysics of female desire is explored largely through an analysis of two of Breillat's best-known works, Romance (1999) and A ma soeur (Fat Girl) (2001), and one of her least-discussed films, her 1976 cinematic debut, Une Vraie Jeune Fille. It is the case in all of Breillat's films that the female body and body of the film flow into an affective relationship with each other rather than work towards a finite end. To the problem of female interiority characterized as a question of space, and of visibility, Breillat adds a temporal, material, depth model that is crucial for the mutual implications for cinema and theories of material female sex. Brinkema concludes by discussing the theories of violence, representation and sensation set forth in Gilles Deleuze's The Logic of Sensation to argue for the particular affective violence in Breillat's cinema.