Lesbian legibility and queer legacy in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019)

ABSTRACT As a story of painting – an artist falling in love with the subject of her portrait – Portrait de la jeune fille en feu/Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a film about representation itself, about the intensified spectatorship that comes with a sustained diegetic attention to the gaze. This article argues that rather than fulfilling the mainstream demands of the period romance to reveal lost histories of lesbianism, Sciamma’s film draws on her radical visual vocabulary to capture desire’s precariousness. This is the site of Portrait de la jeune fille en feu’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 ‘queerness’ in ‘a specific spectatorial dynamic between the artist and the historical archive’, we can find queerness in Sciamma’s relationship to the visual archive of lesbian film history. This article argues that by reminding us of desire’s precariousness, Sciamma’s film demonstrates its own negotiations with ‘lesbian’ cinema whilst opening up ways to read a visual map of queer possibility.

inadvertently been uncovered from storage by one of the students. The painting and its troubling grip on Marianne signal the start of our admission into her interiority: the camera zooms in to the painting and then zooms in to Marianne, absorbing or even consuming her image as it draws closer.
For much of the film to come, Marianne will not be the object of the artist's gaze but its subject. As a film about female artistry, Portrait gestures at a shift from the male to the female gaze, the substitution of objectification for something else. But whilst Sciamma's film confronts the complicated gendered hierarchies and significations of the relationship between painter and muse, it never fully sheds them. This article thinks with queer film history, via Sciamma's own oeuvre, to understand a recent turn to imagining lesbian representability through the period drama. By focusing on painting as the site of the recognition of desire, the article considers the conventions of the lesbian (non-)image and how Sciamma enfolds this history into her work as an erotic provocation rather than an impediment. The article argues, however, that rather than shoring up a lesbian sensibility that resides in the past, or making promises for the representational possibilities of the present or future, Sciamma's work investigates the precariousness of desire. She draws us into moments in which we are left in an exquisite state of yearning and wonder, even as we anticipate loss or regret. Sciamma illustrates how filmic representation erodes, rather than affirms, our certainty in desire's fulfilment..
In the first scene after the prelude described above, we enter a prolonged flashback. The exact number of elapsed years is withheld. Marianne carries a crate, slung across her shoulder, to the household of her new employer, a mansion on an island off the coast of Brittany. Cold from a tumultuous journey by boat, Marianne warms herself naked against the fire. As she does so, she dries out the canvas that has become saturated with water (never so clearly is the canvas a vehicle for objectification as when it is seen as object, when it is boxed up in a crate, and even more so when it must be rescued from a rocky sea en route). Bathed in the glow of firelight, the bent figure of Marianne's naked body almost looks to be projecting its own shadow, ready to fill the blank space of the canvas (see Figure 1). The doubling of the two blank canvases anticipates already a narrative turn; there will be more than one way to paint this portrait.
Marianne has found her way to this remote coastal mansion in order to paint Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a young noblewoman due to be married off to a suitor. Her portrait will be presented to him in lieu of a first meeting. Héloïse, we discover, expects the same fate as her own mother, the Countess (Valeria Golino), who is first introduced to us via a portrait hanging on a wall. Later, the Countess, who remains nameless, tells us that once upon a time she, newly married, arrived at her new home to find that this very portrait had beaten her to it. She found her painted face staring back at her, already privy to the mysteries of household life. The experiences of both Héloïse and her mother demonstrate that marriage and the patriarchal expectations attached to it are visually and verbally consigned to the image. But for her part, Héloïse will not play along. As the Countess explains of the failure of painters so far to capture her daughter's portrait: 'she refused to pose [. . .] she refuses this marriage'. 3 Marianne will have to paint her in secret.
And so, the spectator watches Marianne as she watches, itemising body parts in a silent whisper to recreate them later. The two women, under the guise of companionship, develop a connection where looking is systematically made central to every encounter as an occupational necessity. And with our gaze focalised through Marianne's, we are, as Shameem Kabir ambivalently puts it in describing lesbian viewing practices, 'complicit with the values and operations of objectification ' (1998, 2). Does this insistent female gaze undercut, or rather underpin, a connection that develops from friendship to desire? 'It explains all your looks,' Héloïse laments when she finally discovers the truth. 4 Marianne's 'looks' threaten to be stripped of their meaning as evidence of desire. This is the ultimate closeted lesbian defence familiar to many of us (that's not what I said; I didn't mean it like that; you read too much into it) but with a twist. Héloïse has discovered that the woman she thought was her friend, the woman she thought might become a lover, was deceiving her. In a complication of standard discourses of the female gaze and the ambivalent pleasures of feminist voyeurism, this is revealed to be the true betrayal. Not that Marianne looked in secret, but that this looking was necessitated by duty rather than desire: not only that the gaze really did stand in for objectification, but worse, that it was for work and not for pleasure.
As Gayatri Gopinath writes, queerness can be found to 'resid[e] in multiple sources ' (2018, 14). Gopinath charts the queerness of the films and artworks that make up the corpus of her book Unruly Visions across three spheres: first, the text itself, its 'alternative vision bring[ing] to the fore the unruly embodiments and desires'; second, 'a specific spectatorial dynamic between the artist and the historical archive' that ignites the text's interest and motivation; and third, the 'particular affective investments of each of us as viewers', our 'own situated spectatorial gaze' (14). While Laura Mulvey (1975) famously used this trio of orientations to diagnose the objectifying power of the Hollywood gaze, here Gopinath explains how the space for queerness emerges across situated viewing practices and positions, yielding both individual and collective sites of recognition. As a story of an artist falling in love with her muse, and as a story of painting -including its labours as well as its pleasures -Portrait is a film about representation itself. An erotics of the gaze is generated and multiplied by the motivations and investments of character, filmmaker and viewer. But the queer and feminist politics of spectatorship situate and trouble these dynamics, rendering them ever more complex and revealing queerness's dispersal. Just as Gopinath locates a queer 'spectatorial dynamic between the artist and the historical archive ' (2018, 14), I locate in the next section a queerness in Sciamma's relationship (and my own) to the visual archive of lesbian film history.

Two: Looking
In her early films, Sciamma situated ambivalent representations of desire in the manipulations, traumas, frustrations and idealisations of adolescence. Hardly premised on the optimism of romantic satisfaction, these films 'reveal desire's potential but rarely its achievement' (Bradbury-Rance 2019, 79). In her first feature, Naissance des pieuvres/Water Lilies (hereafter Naissance) As discussed by Katharina Lindner (2017, 123), languid summertime scenes force viewers to linger in uncertainty. Naissance chimes with other narratives of the homosocial and homoerotic dynamics of adolescence, such as Apflickorna/She Monkeys (Lisa Aschan, 2011), that 'foreground processes of embodiment'. Sciamma's third film, Bande de filles/Girlhood (2014), which centres a young Black protagonist in the Parisian banlieues, foregrounds the classed and racialised logics of girlhood. Diverting her earlier explicit focus on gender and sexuality, the film's de-objectification of desire nevertheless offers in Isabelle McNeill's words the 'oblique pleasures and possibilities' of queerly ambiguous 'moments of contact ' (2017, 331).
Using the language of 'minor' cinema to discuss the adolescent protagonists of Mosquita y Mari/Mosquita and Mari (Aurora Guerrero, 2012), another tale of fraught friendship infused with erotic uncertainty, Gopinath argues that Guerrero's film 'exceeds a straightforward politics of visibility and the attendant stability of queer selfhood implied by the language of coming out ' (2018, 78). The effects of this instability are particularly evident in readings of Sciamma's second feature, Tomboy (2011), which has been claimed variously as a narrative of a trans boy's embodiment and experience and of the gender non-conformity of tomboyish girls. These critical differences reveal how gender and sexuality are formed in queer spaces of contestation, open to multiple and perhaps conflicting or converging identifications, as Jacob Breslow shows in his 'speculative' reading that makes space for 'exploration of', a 'momentary playfulness with', 'gendered attachments and refusals' (2021, 91).
All of Sciamma's first three films thus ask to be read not through a retrospective gaze of queer inevitability but rather through a striking politics of ambiguity. In my own work, I have taken Sciamma's oeuvre as an exemplary case study for the use of queer not as a synonym or umbrella category but as a methodological tool to push at what we think we know of gender and sexuality's visual representations. Through the lens of queerness, I have read desire in these films as emerging through fantasies, sensations, affects and identifications -that is, the modalities of psychic life that shape our viewing practices but might fail to reconcile with our identities. Still, many of the arguments about Sciamma's resistance to, rebellion against and playfulness with the terms of marginalised representation can be made in relation to her early films because of her attention to childhood and adolescence, a framing that allows for, or even demands, a disturbance of 'gendered forms of intelligibility' (Breslow 2021, 95). In contrast, the arrival of Portrait, which reached a more mainstream arthouse distribution than Sciamma's earlier films, seemed to promise (or was asked to provide) a kind of certainty. It was vibrantly hailed without equivocation as a 'lesbian love story' in many reviews (see for instance Anderson 2019; Syme 2020) and, in one, as a 'smouldering lesbian romance' (Omar 2020). Surely, here was a lesbian film that would offer at least the anticipation of a narrative guarantee, with the shape and journey of the period film's romance plot: a narrativisation, rather than just an aestheticisation, of desire. But perhaps that intelligibility was still at a remove; as I argue in this article, Portrait is closer than might first be imagined to the trademark ambiguities of Sciamma's first three films.
A few years before the release of Portrait, and well into the twenty-first century's unprecedented surge in lesbian representation, Todd Haynes's film Carol (2015) seemed to 'breach the logic of visibility's progression' by sending us back in time (Bradbury-Rance 2019, 123). Lesbian readers and viewers had long awaited the overdue adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1952 lesbian classic, originally written under a pseudonym with the title The Price of Salt, for the promises and satisfactions of a rare treat: a happy ending. But Haynes's film troubled this claim to positive representation and questioned the need for it. Carol displayed what I have called an 'intensified spectatorship', a sustained diegetic attention to the gaze premised on the role of the protagonist as photographer (Bradbury-Rance 2019, xiv). As Martha Perotto-Wills (2019) writes in the online journal Another Gaze, 'since Carol it's almost a truism to say that a lesbian film runs on the exchange of loaded glances'. This applies even more to, or at least is more evident in, the period drama, a genre that historicises the risks of touch.
As Danielle Bouchard and Jigna Desai argue, the pleasure of queer looking in Carol is itself premised on an uneven ability to 'gaze liberally ' (2022, 207). The freedom to look 'with desire and even queerly' (208) is bound up in gendered, classed and racialised logics. A recent wave of lesbian period dramas released since Carol, including Portrait, only serve to shore up the overwhelming whiteness of the genre, and any expression of satisfaction at lesbian cinema's 'arrival' within these parameters is itself a symptom of those same logics. This of course implicates the scholar-spectator too, who is responsible if not for film history then for film historiography, which has chronically centred white, straight and cisgendered male auteurs. What Barbara Klinger calls the 'affective power' of an image is shaped by fluctuating negotiations of other forms of power, making spectators' personal responses 'a composite of intertextual and social dynamics ' (2006, 21). And, as scholars of trans, critical race and disability studies have long argued, the fraught politics of even 'queer' spectatorship are structured by the 'trouble of visibility' (Gossett 2017). In short, visibility can be both empowering and exposing, producing both 'pleasure and threat' (Nataf 1995, 85). The pleasures and pains of looking and being looked at are never evenly spread.
For its part, as a film about women both looking at, and being looked at by, one another, Portrait promises to queer 'subject and object positions' (Wilson 2019, 5) by offering up a multitude of portraits, painters and sitters: a young woman on fire; sketches of Marianne by her students; Marianne's aborted draft and the final portrait to be sent abroad; a subsequent copy to be treasured. But (moving) images are 'highly fickle love objects', as Sarah Keller writes in Anxious Cinephilia: 'they have many admirers who are not you ' (2020, 28). Portrait demands that we reckon with this very fickleness. Narrative tension rides on uneasy reminders that the image was always created for another admirer, Marianne's brushstrokes designed to facilitate a distant suitor's desiring gaze. The portrait(s) thus provide(s) the visual vocabulary for capturing not just desire's possibility but its precariousness, functioning both to intensify the pleasure of spectatorship and to trouble it.
Of course, what might straightforwardly be called lesbian invisibility in mainstream cinema of the last century can be powerfully reframed as a challenge to the notion of visibility tout court. Recall Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), in which another seaside household is held in the grip of a portrait. Rebecca, in which clothes take on the material burden of erotic competition and imitation, is seemingly alluded to in Portrait by the green dress Héloïse's mother chooses to adorn her painted image. Like in Hitchcock's film, the dress eerily takes on a life of its own; it obtains its own visual significance as it is caressed, styled, worn and painted before Héloise herself has even appeared (see Johnston 2021, 12). Even after we have met Héloïse, even after Marianne has fallen in love with her, even after they have replaced gaze with touch, nothing is certain. Was Héloïse always, only ever, an image in a portrait? A trick of the light? An apparition to haunt Marianne's waking dreams? When she first discovers that Marianne has been painting her in secret, Héloïse, seeing the painting, asks two questions in quick succession: 'Is it me? You see me like this?' 5 Already, being and seeing are becoming conflated. Héloïse risks being absorbed into her painted image. Then, in a late scene before they part for the last time, Marianne sketches Héloïse, sealing the memory of their love affair in a keepsake. 'You can reproduce that image to eternity,' says Héloïse: 'eventually you'll see her when you think of me'. 6 The image that Sciamma creates is one that both produces desire and threatens to reveal it as an illusion, an image and nothing more.
The precarious hovering between these two alternatives is what elicits both uneasiness and intrigue, which are central to the amorphous (non-)categorisation of queer cinema itself: in Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover's words, 'How do we know queer cinema when we see it? Will we always recognize queer films as queer? ' (2015, 8). As I will explore further in this article, such questions can be pleasurable to ask, even when -even because -we don't know the answers. Drawing on the observations I have made so far about the precarious representation of desire in Sciamma's oeuvre, and the pleasures that lie therein, in the remainder of this article I will think through the film's use of portraiture, with all its significations, complicities and objectifications, as a space of queer possibility.

Three: Touching
In Lesbianism, Cinema, Space, a masterclass in close reading, Lee Wallace writes that in late twentieth-century cinema, lesbianism found, out of necessity, inventive ways to 'disclose itself within the visual field ' (2009, 81). Cinema may have graduated from the very specific context of Hollywood censorship about which Wallace is writing, namely the Motion Picture Production Code and its aftermath (see also White 1999). But Sciamma's films still attempt to capture spaces that allow her to play with techniques of sexual disclosure. Sciamma creates a space of desire within the visual field but makes her viewers work for it. Naissance traces Marie's (Pauline Acquart) desire for Floriane (Adèle Haenel) physically despite the absence, for most of the film, of direct touch. An apple core, a kiss on the window, the water of a shower: one sense stands in for another, vicarious and teasing. In Portrait, the gaze becomes touch via the portrait-in-progress. As Marianne lays out her preliminary sketches in front of the fire, the glow of the flame brings them to life. On the beach, the camera lingers on Héloïse's hands as they lie clasped in her lap. Later, Marianne steals a moment to surreptitiously record the memory of this image -to touch these hands as they take form on paper.
Surely, there is little surprise when the first features to find their way onto Marianne's canvas, replicating flesh with paint, are first the face and then the hands. In several scenes, Marianne closes her eyes in recollection, then rubs against the charcoal with her fingers. Remembering Héloïse's trace, the charcoal works in her hand almost as a hand on a body might. The canvas becomes the scene both of recollection and of anticipation. As their intimacy deepens, Marianne's prefiguring of touch in the image becomes more audacious: look at me, she says without words, using her hand to gently nudge Héloïse's chin upwards before starting again with the charcoal between her fingers. The physicality of looking becomes apparent. With Marianne, we move back and forth between canvas and encounter, one taking on the erotic potential of the other.
In a chapter on Naissance, Emma Wilson writes that the film creates a 'sensorium' aligned with its protagonist's affective state (2021,26). In Portrait, Sciamma again creates a sensorium that intertwines sight, touch, taste and sound. In one interior scene, Marianne begins to play the harpsichord for Héloïse, the touch of her fingers upon the keyboard translating music where elsewhere it would translate sight. Senses shift one to another. But her hands, doing all the work, remain hidden beneath a sheet. Even when Héloïse lifts the sheet to gaze at Marianne's fingers, the frame impedes the spectator from sharing the same view. In the next scene, Marianne is in the kitchen hiding her paint-stained hand from Héloïse behind her back; it is proof -of betrayal, perhaps, or of desire.
In her cultural history of 'the lesbian hand', Mandy Merck argues that in the climactic scenes (a first kiss, a first embrace) of classic lesbian romances such as Desert Hearts (Donna Deitch, 1985) and Lianna (John Sayles, 1982), the hand is a crucial visual signifier of sexuality. In Merck's words, 'in Lianna, Ruth strokes Lianna's face with her hand as a preface to kissing her, while in Desert Hearts Kay holds the back of Vivian's head. Moreover, in the latter film Kay's hand acquires its visual centrality at the moment in which the spectator's view of the kiss itself is obscured ' (2000, 131). This moment in Desert Hearts, Merck argues, as the hand takes visual precedent over the kiss itself, creates a 'frustration of the gaze': paraphrasing Judith Roof, she argues that the hand in the erotic scene thus 'assumes its fetishistic function' (131). The hand and the gaze are intertwined, then, in expectations of lesbian sexual representability.
Moreover, this 'frustration' of the gaze might hold its own erotic potential. In Portrait, the hand on canvas is a stand-in for the touch of skin; as I've described, scene after scene shows the painting hand as a vicarious instrument of caress. But the hand is not all metaphor. Merck asks whether the hand might in fact 'be self-referential, representing the erotic potential that it threatens rather than the phallic endowment with which that threat is said to be averted? Suppose the woman's controlling hand is just a hand -and all the more menacing to the male spectator for being so ' (2000, 131-132). Reading Merck with Sciamma, we seem to have an answer: the hand is just a hand, as intensely evidenced by Portrait's penetration scene (discussed by Susan Potter in this special issue). In a 2019 interview at the British Film Institute, Sciamma recalled a set of responses to Portrait from critics who refused to see it as sexy, unable to discern in the film a scene that they could recognise as a 'sex scene'. Sciamma's response, as she tilted her own gaze from low to high, following with her fingers, went as follows: 'you know if it's not about [the] penis, or if it's not about "this" gaze, you're lost [. . .] some people can't read the image' (BFI, 2019).
Portrait is not of course the only French film of recent years to centre the lesbian relationship between painter and muse; in La Vie d'Adèle/Blue Is the Warmest Colour (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013), friends all but disappear from the scene once Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) has begun her visual and erotic immersion in a lesbian relationship with Emma (Léa Seydoux). Given its lasting reputation, any comparison with La Vie d'Adèle now inevitably sets up the parameters of conversations about sex in the visual field. In comparison with 10-minute-long sex scenes of naked, writhing bodies caught in a feat of endurance and an almost parodic performance of rapture, Sciamma's penetration scene (you know, the 'unreadable' one) is liable to be understood as all too timid, a turning back of the new paradigms of sexual representability. To pursue instead the ambiguous legibility of the scene shows a radical defiance. Here, the lesbian hand (the hand that is threatening precisely because it is 'just a hand') signifies more than artistry and craft, more than seduction and pleasure: it also unites desire with other affects of intimacy and relationality.
Indeed, Marianne and Héloïse first discover the pleasures of touch not in a closed-off, domestic scene of coupling but in an open, outdoor space of community. Helping their friend Sophie (Luàna Bajrami) to find someone who will perform an abortion for an unwanted pregnancy, they find themselves in a vibrant, noisy, communal space, where a group of women stand around a blazing bonfire singing. The camera lingers on their hands as they clap out a pulsing rhythm. In the film's sequencing of shots, this community of hands is the immediate prelude to touch: the would-be lovers Marianne and Héloïse clasp hands in the glow of the firelight and then a daylight scene immediately follows in which Marianne and Héloïse finally embrace. In these juxtapositions, the visual logic of the sequence suggests that the choir's percussive clapping beckons first Marianne and Héloïse's clasping of hands and then a series of erotic touches, each one more urgent than the last.
With their storylines thus intertwined, Sophie triangulates the relationship between Marianne and Héloïse. As the family's housekeeper, but also as friend and comrade, she deflects the erotic risks of the all-female household. In Wilson's words, it is Sophie's 'domestic labour [that] allows the existence in the manor to be pursued' (2021, 100). Does Sophie shield and distort, then, the erotic intensity of Marianne and Héloïse's intimacy -or does she act as a foil for it? Perhaps both. To me, it seems quite perfect that in the chorus scene around the bonfire, clapping as a visual and aural measure of community might also provide the possibility for the recognition of desire. That the film's triangulation is not heterosexual marriage as we might presume, as lesbian film history might tell us, but, in fact, friendship. That tenderness might -even confusingly, frustratingly -signify different things.
Later, after Marianne and Héloïse accompany Sophie to her abortion and she recovers at home with their help, all three women recline together in bed. Marianne insists on preserving the scene for posterity, having Héloïse crouch between Sophie's legs to replicate the real encounter as another gendered taboo takes form in paint. If such scenes risk deflating the women's sexual relationship (or even the signification of the painted image) to homosociality rather than homosexuality, it is perhaps evidence of what Sciamma is willing to do not only to portray many of desire's ambiguities but also to reflect on representational history and consider the multiple absences that are to be found there.

Four: Recollecting
If I have been at risk of distorting the film's chronology, moving back and forth between moments before and after the revelation, within and beyond the love affair, it is to give a sense of a set of repeated tableaux: shot after shot of the same rooms, objects, costumes, characters and locations. Sometimes, the film narratively enables such reproductions, as in the abortion scene and its later re-staging. At other moments, reproductions are left to the frame, the dress or the colour palette. This kind of visual repetition of domestic space, inspired by the likes of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080Bruxelles/Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080Brussels (Chantal Akerman, 1975, holds its own feminist potential in the close attention to the quotidian and with it, the intimate politics of the personal. But in this final section of the article, I think instead on the queer potential of these moments of spatial repetition as we engage with their curious temporality.
After all, might not one moment stand in for another, as a portrait stands in for a face? Such palimpsests obscure the film's chronology of desire. Repetition creates possibility. Finally, after the revelation, when Héloïse has agreed to pose, surreptitious gazes are made apparent and legitimate. Marianne still steals her glances, but they are now rewarded: Héloïse opens her eyes as her face takes shape on paper, charcoaled fingers now touching lips. Figure 2 shows two shots of the same space, framed in the same way, holding the same characters, but spaced apart by 25 minutes of screen time. In the first of these moving tableaux, just the sound of a longing breath is audible as Marianne departs the frame; in the next, a kiss. Might the kiss have always been there, proven by later visual evidence that there was desire for it all along? The temporal sequencing of desire falls away as spectators learn to read a visual map of queer possibility.
In one of the film's spoken acts of overwriting, Marianne and Héloïse together recall the first moments they desired one another. Marianne recollects a question asked of her by Héloïse as they helped Sophie abort her unwanted pregnancy: 'has it happened to you?' The answer to this question, 'yes', is then used by Héloïse to make another conclusion: 'you've known love' (vous avez connu l'amour). 7 'Amour' acts here as a euphemism for sex, and specifically the kind of sex that might result in pregnancy. But it becomes, in later recollection, 'amour' as in, simply, love: 'When you asked if I had known love, I could tell the answer was yes, and that it was now,' Marianne says. 8 In this scene in Portrait, the immediate implications of Marianne and Héloïse's original conversation(particular sexual acts; essentialised bodies; genital sexuality in general) end up being rather beside the point. A linguistic disorientation ('it was now' [c'était maintenant]) reflects a spatial one. Desire was located in that space then, and now.
In discussing her influences in making Portrait (see Erbland 2019), Sciamma cites Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), a quasi-period drama that gestures to the iconography of 1950s Hollywood without settling on its specific periodisation. Whilst perhaps an unexpected point of comparison for Sciamma's work, Mulholland Drive's explicit narrative meddling plays with the structuring of love across temporal bounds. Ambivalent and ambiguous desires are charted through recollection, as in Ingmar Bergman 's Persona (1966), which links Sciamma's and Lynch's films in their aesthetic and narrative strategies. In Portrait, the significance of narrative moments fades away as spectators become immersed in the circling, unsteady, unruly and yet sustaining affects of desire rather than its progression or momentum.
In the introduction to her book Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence, Annamarie Jagose writes that 'female homosexuality has been ambivalently constituted in relation to the logics of vision: it is less the subject of prohibition than of an incredulousness that would deny the space of its possibility ' (2002, 3). Even in contemporary films that have supposedly passed the threshold of visibility, the foregrounding of an intensified spectatorship leaves spectators beholden to an image that might reveal our perception of desire, and desire for desire, to be but a misrecognition (Bradbury-Rance 2019, 121). But this is also a possible site of 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. For Wilson, Portrait's 'acts of retrieval, and visionary imagining of a mythic time, are both part of a feminist impetus to show at once what was and what might have been ' (2021, 89). Wilson is writing, in this instance, about feminist art-making. The capturing of the abortion scene (in a portrait that will doubtless never form part of a dowry) is of course one such example of imagining what might have been, had women's experiences been part of (art) histories all along; in Gopinath's words, such a scene offers in a single image an 'alternative vision' of 'unruly embodiments' often shed by classed and racialised historical narratives (2018, 14). Wilson's conjuring of 'what was and might have been' might also be a play with tenses that tries to capture the representational possibilities, ambiguities and erasures of reading lesbianism in(to) the past. And this in fact is what we might wish to call the queerness of lesbian cinema.
In The New Cinephilia, Girish Shambu writes that film scholars should learn to embrace 'the occasional relinquishing of [film scholarship's] tone of mastery, an openness to uncertainty, an embracing of a tentativeness of approach ' (2020, 41). This seems to be particularly true for writing on queer cinema, where mastery -what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003, 123) might call paranoid reading -always seems to be the name of the game. As long as subtext overrides text as the critical object of choice, we are bound to seek the 'gotcha' moment of recognition. Sciamma's work, including Portrait, eludes such mastery, distorting rather than pursuing the agenda of 'queer' visibility and the signs of its progression. Did you see that? Did it really happen? Or did I misremember?
The watching and re-watching expected of contemporary film scholarship, made possible by the evolution of home viewing technologies, makes master readers of us all, always coming back for more detail, discovering more clues and more answers. When I began to write about Portrait, I found myself suddenly tempted to resist the pull of repetition, wanting instead to allow the film to reside in my memory just as it was when I saw it in the cinema. After all, Portrait was the last film that I, like many others I have spoken to, saw on the big screen before the first UK Covid-19 lockdown of 2020. Indeed, it was the last I saw for the next 15 months, a period when cinema-going was particularly associated with physical risk. As Shambu writes, cinephiles have always written about film as an act of preservation. In the 1960s for instance, an era 'when it was uncertain if or when a film would come around again, the cinephile's object was fleeting and precious ' (2020, 14). For me, Portrait's images became pinned to what Keller calls the 'placeness of spectatorship ' (2020, 19), sustaining an unexpectedly 'fleeting and precious' cinematic imaginary long beyond the film's running time. Recollecting Sciamma's film became a cinephile's negotiation of loss. Writing about Portrait in an exceptional period of time, between 2020 and 2022, I have been conscious of how to capture and hold onto something of the fleeting quality of the film's representations as well as the setting for my watching of them -for the sake of remembering and securing the space of the cinema as one of desire (see Klinger 2006, 19).
In this article, I have argued that, rather than fulfilling the mainstream demands of the period romance to reveal lost histories of lesbianism, Portrait draws on Sciamma's radical visual style to destabilise spectatorial investments in lesbian visibility and once again toy with us, gesturing at radical representations of queer love before pulling the rug from beneath our feet. Portrait is invested not in desire's confirmation but in its dispersal. If it can be called a film about lesbian representation, it is therefore (rather than nevertheless) a film about the legacies of representational impossibility. If it can be described as 'lesbian', it is also about intensified attachments to a category and experience that must continue to expand beyond its prior conceptual limits, moving its evidentiary base further beyond our grasp. 'Not everything is fleeting,' Héloïse insists, as if willing it to be so. 9 Portrait reminds us of the precariousness both of the desire for representation and of the representation of desire. After all, this is a film that knows its history.