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This essay examines the ways in which French director Céline Sciamma subverts the hierarchical trope of the artist and the muse through a queering of power dynamics in her 2019 historical-drama film Portrait de la jeune fille en feu . Drawing on the work of philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Byung-Chul Han to analyse the functions of “otherness” and “sameness” in dynamics of erotic desire and aesthetic pleasure in viewing, this essay posits that Portrait , through its purposefully ambiguous ending and radical reworking of the hierarchies of viewing, disrupts dominant assumptions of both gender and subjectivity to call instead for fluidity and potential in power dynamics between artists and muses, and viewer and screen.
LOUISE CAIN (Mon,) studied this question.