(Don’t) Look Back: Three Portraits of a Lady on Fire

This article explores the dialectical movement of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire ( Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, 2019) through close attention to three visual logics, or “portraits” painted by the film. That Portrait of a Lady on Fire offers a cinematic meditation on the “gaze” is self-evident: Marianne’s first painting of Héloïse is created according to an aesthetic logic already described by Laura Mulvey, while the second, co-created painting embodies Sciamma’s declaration that the film is a “manifesto about the female gaze” and inspires Iris Brey’s critical framework in Le regard féminin. To this, I will add a third logic, embodied in the cine-portrait painted by Sciamma/Mathon’s camera in the film’s final shot of Héloïse/Adèle Haenel. I will argue that the encounter with this shot’s duration necessitates a reconsideration of Portrait’s film-philosophical significance as an exploration of the “gaze”, leading us towards a Lacano-Hegelian paradigm. In short, my claim is that – through its modalities of the gaze – Sciamma’s film stages the drama of recognition and its failure described by Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit, and in doing so compels us to recognise its dialectical movement from self-consciousness to the absolute, with contradiction as its motor force.