‘Why has Céline Sciamma become so iconic?’: The auteure as celebrity

ABSTRACT This article explores the public articulations of Céline Sciamma’s authorial persona and the media construction of her image (including her own self-presentation), arguing that her high visibility, combined with her ability to crystallise socially relevant values on and off screen, has broadened her cultural impact from the elite cinephile culture of her films to the larger terrain of stardom and celebrity culture. Under examination is how Sciamma strategically deploys different discourses to address diverse constituencies, from a reaffirmation of aesthetics bringing cultural legitimacy in the French cinephile milieu to feminist militancy aimed at the film industry and a broad left-wing political agenda as well as an iconic presence in the queer community, turning her into a ‘standard-bearer’ for a new generation of auteures. Considering the filmmaker through the prism of star and celebrity studies helps understand how such apparent contradictions are both intrinsic to the construction of her persona as a celebrity and inherent to the complex cultural context of early twenty-first-century gender politics in France.

Additionally, the director's personality is 'revealed by sources other than his films' (129) as well as the importance of their looks (135). I propose to consider Sciamma in this light, pursuing Smith's work in two ways: first, by redressing the gender imbalance she points to and second, by enfolding Sciamma's stardom within celebrity culture. This acknowledges the marketing practices filmmakers must adhere to in the digital age (Corrigan 1990;Harris 2020), reaching beyond the cinema into the world of politicians, artists and intellectuals in France (Gaffney and Holmes 2007;Dakhlia 2012;Matonti 2017). Under examination is how Sciamma's image mobilises a particular model of authorship, which enables her to negotiate both traditional French cinephile culture and the politics of identity, notably in the area of gender and sexuality.

Declensions of authorship
Céline Sciamma's first feature film Naissance (2007) was a resounding critical success, gleaning awards from Athens, Cabourg and Turin film festivals and the prestigious Louis Delluc prize. 1 The film, which deals with awakening female sexuality among a group of teenage synchronised swimmers, was based on Sciamma's end of film school project at the Fémis, from which she graduated in 2005, at the age of 27, in the scriptwriting section. For a while Sciamma would be routinely referred to as part of a 'Fémis generation', 2 an association which brings its own auteurist credentials, the Fémis being one of the foremost institutions maintaining auteur cinema at the core of post-war French cinema's national identity.
The politique des auteurs inherited from critical texts of the late 1940s and 1950s (Graham and Vincendeau 2022), despite challenges in the late 1960s and 1970s (see Naremore 2003), continues to animate cinephile film journals such as Positif or Cahiers du cinéma and dominates film reviews in elite cultural publications such as Le Monde, Libération, Les Inrockuptibles, L'Obs and Télérama. It continues to be the focus of an important tranche of French scholarship on French cinema: see Jean-Michel Frodon (1995), Claude-Marie Trémois (1997), René Prédal (2002), David Vasse (2008), Michel Serceau (2016) and Philippe Blanchon et al. (2021), not to mention a continuous avalanche of works on individual directors. Definitions of what constitutes an auteur are changing and often subjective, but core values include a deep personal investment in and control over one's film, the subversion of mainstream genre conventions and the presence of stylistic and/or thematic consistencies. These features converge to create a singular creative vision, often termed un regard [a gaze]. In its recruiting video, the Fémis indicates that what the school looks for in future students is 'artistic talent, strong personalities and people who possess un regard' ("Fondation Culture et Diversité"; my emphasis).
Sciamma, who writes her own scripts as well as some for other directors, from the start fitted the bill. Naissance was, significantly, part of the 'Un certain regard' selection at Cannes, and her authorial status was immediately proclaimed: '[she] undeniably has un regard' (Lalanne 2007). Equally, the film was deemed to 'blast away all the tired clichés of teen movies' (Théate 2007). 3 As soon as Sciamma made her second film, consistencies were detected: 'Tomboy is a film about learning cruelty, as was her first opus, Naissance des pieuvres' (Douin 2011). 4 From then on, discussion of recurring motifs has endured in the media and in scholarship; typical traits picked out include childhood, adolescence, coming of age and lesbian desire (Wilson 2017;Chevalier 2019;Smith 2020), but also stylistic signatures such as minimalism (Palmer 2011, 34), the use of music (McNeill 2018;Edney 2020;Pember 2020), the circulation of objects (Johnston 2021) or the queering of space (Pelling 2021).
Detractors of the politique des auteurs have long pointed out the ideological bias of its essentially formalist agenda, expressed in the privileging of mise en scène over narrative (Hess 1974;Sellier 2008). Yet French critics routinely ascribe questions of history, politics and gender in films to 'sociology', seeing such matters as radically divorced from the supremacy of aesthetics. Le Monde film critic Muriel Joudet, for example, summed up her selection of the best works of 2021 thus: 'You could say that about all great films, every year: the topic is always mise en scène' (Joudet 2021). 5 Sciamma is on record as supporting this view, stating: 'For me, the issue of commitment, of a committed film, is on the side of mise en scène, much less to do with the topic' (Atelier de Rencontre 2016). 6 This insistence on privileging the aesthetic over the social extends to the director's ambivalent attitude to being considered a 'woman director'. This is a notoriously common position in France, despite the relatively high percentage of women directors, male-female parity at the Fémis and the world's longest-running annual women's film festival, the Festival International de Films de Femmes in Créteil, near Paris, since 1979 (for more details about the historic reluctance of French women directors to embrace a group identity, see Vincendeau 1987;Tarr and Rollet 2001). Asked to comment on this question in 2016, Sciamma said, 'The presence of women directors is a determining factor [but] I do not consider the cinema as absolutely gendered', citing the classic objection of creating a ghetto: 'You feel that in some reviews you are considered as a woman or a lesbian' (Atelier de Rencontre 2016). 7 Sciamma's attachment to artistic individualism thus accords with the French critical orthodoxy, which brings cultural legitimacy in cinephile circles, with a concomitant suspicion of 'communities' within the ideology of Republicanism (Scott 2007, 16), and yet in other contexts she has placed gender politics at the core of her public image. Surrounding herself with a largely female team (producer, casting director, distributor), she has vigorously fought for parity in the film industry. In February 2018 she co-founded the 'Collectif 50/50 pour 2020' with a mission to reach gender parity by 2020. At the time of writing, the percentage of women directors in France still reaches only about 30%. Nevertheless, Collectif 50/50 led to several measures aimed at redressing inequality, such as special funds for women and the enforcement of transparency regarding membership of selection committees (Fabre 2018). This was deemed 'a revolution that has, in 3 years, done more for parity and the cause of the second sex than any other activity since the Lumière brothers' (Grassin and Groussard 2021). 8 Sciamma's militancy in this area reached international visibility when she was photographed at the May 2018 Cannes festival with Agnès Varda, Ava DuVernay and Cate Blanchett leading a group of 82 women up the red carpet to protest against the historically paltry presence of women's work at the festival. The high profile of the event apparently did not stop Thierry Frémaux, director of the Cannes festival, from making sexist jokes at its launch, showing continued resistance to gender equality in the film world (Harrison 2018). Nevertheless, the following year, four women including Sciamma had films in competition.
Sciamma's militancy for gender equality dovetails with other humanitarian causes, placing her within a long tradition of public interventions by left-wing French artists and intellectuals (Dakhlia 2012, 12) while adding to her 'altruistic capital', a notion Pam Cook sees as bolstering stars' and celebrities' authenticity (Cook 2012, 110). Sciamma's name frequently appears as a signatory of petitions, and she is seen on marches defending progressive causes ranging from the PACS (legal union between people of whatever sex), gay marriage and ecology to demonstrations against police racism, femicides and the treatment of migrants in Calais. She contributed to a short film about undocumented migrants, Les 18 du 57, Boulevard de Strasbourg (2014) and directed one about women's football, La Coupe Bernard Tapine (2018). She fought to improve independent filmmakers' working conditions as a member and for a time president of the SRF, the association of independent filmmakers (Fabre 2013a). 9 While her energetic campaigning has been commended, it has at times produced conflicts of interest. On the board of SRF she worked closely with the filmmaker Christophe Ruggia, knowing he was about to be indicted for sexually abusing Adèle Haenel, her companion at the time, but she chose not to divulge it within the association (Nivelle 2020). She has also been accused of using the Collectif 50/50 to promote her own work (Dryef 2019). Militancy has therefore become a key component of Sciamma's media image (see Figure 1). This dimension is viewed on the whole positively, yet not without some underlying stereotyping, as reflected in the language routinely used to describe her: la battante (the fighter), la meneuse (the leader), la cheffe de bande (the head of the gang), la femme puissante (the powerful woman); her joint interview with writer Annie Ernaux in the first issue of the feminist journal La Déferlante is entitled 'Soeurs de combat' [Sisters in combat] (Geoffroy and Josse 2021, 6).
Sciamma's declensions of authorship can thus be seen as strategically deploying different discourses to address different constituencies, from a reaffirmation of aesthetics for the French cinephile milieu to feminist militancy aimed at the film industry and a leftwing, queer agenda on the political scene. The visibility of her gender militancy was further enhanced when two of her films, Tomboy and Portrait, proved remarkably in tune with societal changes.

The auteure in dialogue with her times
With auspicious timing, Sciamma's work both coincided with and in turn had an impact on major social and cultural developments regarding gender, sexuality and representation in France in the second decade of the twenty-first century, or, as she put it, 'was in dialogue with its time' (in Regnier 2014). 11 This concerns, in particular, the legalisation of same-sex marriage, the moral panic over 'gender theory', the aftermath of the #MeToo campaign and the so-called 'discovery' of the female gaze.
Sciamma's second film Tomboy -seen both as the story of a 10-year-old girl crossdressing as a boy and as the representation of a trans child -came out in April 2011. Made on a tiny budget, it was received enthusiastically by critics across the board as 'a very personal work on the world of childhood' (Martinez 2011). While a few critics noted a 'discreet reflection on identity' (Douin 2011), the French reception focused on how this second opus confirmed Sciamma's mastery of mise en scène: pared-down visuals, ironic distance, ambiguity -in stark contrast to the overtly gendered accolades the film received internationally, including the Teddy Award at Berlin and awards at LGBTQ+ festivals in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Turin. Two years later, however, the film's gendered agenda came back with a vengeance to the French scene when a petition gathering more than 15,000 signatures asked for Tomboy to be removed from a selection of films shown to schoolchildren aged 9 to 11 in the context of the 'École et cinéma' project (Fabre 2013b). 12 The film's inclusion in the project in Autumn 2012 coincided with the foundation of the 'Manif pour tous' ['demonstration for all'], a populist movement rooted in right-wing, Catholic milieux, created to combat the legalisation of marriage and adoption for same-sex couples, known as the 'Mariage pour tous' [marriage for all]. There were counter-demonstrations through the spring of 2013 to defend the latter, in which Sciamma took part, and the law was passed on 17 May. Subsequently, resorting to dubious 'post-truth' techniques (Harsin 2018), the 'Manif pour tous' continued its crusade against initiatives such as the 'ABCD de l'égalité' ['ABCD of equality'] aimed at dismantling gender stereotypes among schoolchildren. Sciamma's film was directly implicated in these heated debates, and, at the time of writing, Tomboy still figures as one of the '11 documents that prove the existence of Gender Theory' on the website of the 'Observatoire de la Théorie du Genre', where a pamphlet warns parents that Tomboy is 'a militant film that has no place at school!'. 13 Similarly, the ultra-right Catholic organisation Civitas tried (in vain) to bar the programming of the film on the Franco-German television channel Arte in February 2014. The episode clearly illustrates the chasm between conservative and grassroots milieux and the cosmopolitan, left-libertarian elite. Not coincidentally, Sciamma's targeting by the Observatoire de la Théorie du Genre coincided with her growing iconic status in international and French gay media. The Tomboy controversies also signalled a grudging recognition of the political significance of a filmmaker's gender and sexuality.
Sciamma's third film, Bande in 2014, continued to cement her reputation in respect of her mise en scène, applauded as variously beautiful, organic and dazzling, including 'her sense of framing and remarkable direction of actors' (Lacomme 2014). 14 At the same time this story of an adolescent joining a gang of teenage girls in a strongly racialised Parisian banlieue was deemed in some quarters to be outside the director's cultural competence: Cahiers du cinéma denounced the 'fracture between this falsely militant auteur cinema and what it still imagines to be unknown territory' (Malausa 2014). 15 For his part, Régis Dubois (2014) condemned a film 'where everything rang false [. . .] for the race and class dimensions, you'll have to try again'. 16 Possibly as a result of this critical drubbing, for her next film, Portrait, the director turned to a story set in the past and detached from precise historical moorings.
Sciamma's first costume film, set in a remote island in Brittany in the late eighteenth century, traces the growing passion between two women, a painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and her model, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), in an oppressively patriarchal context. French critics saluted the film as both exquisitely beautiful and daring in its topic, with notable exceptions: L'Obs judged it 'laboured' and overly 'didactic' (Schaller 2019), and Cahiers du cinéma derided it as a 'poor television film' (Tessé 2019). These discordant notes did not prevent Portrait from having not only a brilliant international career but also an extraordinary impact on French culture. The film gathered a plethora of prizes, including the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay awards at Cannes and others at numerous international festivals from Chicago to Rio de Janeiro, and it generated much traffic on social media (Arbrun 2021). Testifying obliquely to Sciamma's global celebrity, on 27 May 2020, the American stand-up comedian Amy Schumer posted a parody of Héloïse running to the sea on Twitter, and in April 2021 the US comedy troupe Saturday Night Live produced a mock trailer for a film called Lesbian Period Drama, an amalgam of Portrait and Ammonite (Francis Lee, 2020). 17 As the Saturday Night Live title suggests, Portrait had reached cult status as a lesbian love story, a point I will come back to.
In France, Portrait resonated in the culture in different yet far-reaching ways. The film impacted theoretical approaches to the cinema as the perfect illustration of a seemingly 'new' concept, the female gaze (alongside its only slightly more familiar counterpart, the male gaze) -both terms often referred to as such in English, signalling their 'foreignness'. On Wednesday 18 September 2019, the day Sciamma's film was released on French screens, the daily newspaper Libération, in addition to a review of the film, included a feature about the origins and manifestations of the male gaze (Daumas 2019a) and one on Laura Mulvey as a pioneer of the concept (Daumas 2019b). Although Mulvey's celebrated article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema ' (1975) and other seminal feminist film theory texts had been available in French translation much earlier (Reynaud and Vincendeau 1993), resistance to the application of feminist tools to film analysis stubbornly remained a French characteristic (Sellier 2009). But in the late 2010s, as if a dam had broken, feminist discourse suddenly proliferated in France in and beyond academia, with inter alia philosopher Sandra Laugier reviewing films in Libération (Laugier 2019), feminist stand-up comics such as Caroline Vigneaux and Blanche Gardin gaining celebrity and Iris Brey popularising feminist approaches to television series (Sex and the Series, Brey 2018) and the cinema (Le Regard féminin, Brey 2021). In the latter book, Brey celebrates Sciamma's female gaze as an aesthetics of equality, 'a revolutionary gesture [that] considers that desire can blossom without domination, without humiliation, without power relations' (Brey 2021, 63). 18 Concurrently, a new French translation of Mulvey's work came out (Mulvey 2019). Addressing a wider cultural remit, Manon Garcia's On ne nait pas soumise, on le devient (Garcia 2018), published in English as We Are Not Born Submissive: How Patriarchy Shapes Women's Lives (2021), and Mona Chollet's feminist essays Sorcières (Chollet 2018) and Réinventer l'amour, comment le patriarcat sabote les relations hétérosexuelles (Chollet 2021) have proved hugely successful. Thus, in France Portrait both encapsulated the concept of the female gaze and was in sync with a much wider intellectual and cultural movement, placing Sciamma at the vanguard of a 'revolution' in gendered representations.
These changes were themselves indebted to the seismic impact of the Harvey Weinstein affair two years earlier in October 2017 and the #MeToo movement that followed, with its French version #Balancetonporc -movements with which, again, Sciamma became associated. The revelations of Weinstein's repeated sexual abuse of women as part of his working practice did not go unnoticed in France, especially after the 2011 scandal in which socialist politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn was prosecuted for 'non-consensual forced sexual acts' perpetrated on hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo in a New York hotel, an episode which marked a watershed in terms of the mediatisation of public figures' sexual behaviour in France (Dakhlia 2012, 116;Matonti 2017, 189-233). Yet at first, the impact of the Weinstein scandal on the French film industry was muted. A few actresses, such as Noémie Kocher and Sand Van Roy, have denounced similar practices, though, as Sciamma herself observed, 'were they listened to? [. . .] The enquiry was broadcast on several American media channels, but very little in France' (Geoffroy and Josse 2021, 17). 19 Unlike their Hollywood counterparts, major French stars remained silent or testified, like Juliette Binoche (2017), that they were aware of such practices but had not themselves been victims, while, in an infamous open letter in Le Monde signed among others by Catherine Deneuve, a large group of women argued for men's right to importuner (harass) women in the name of sexual freedom (Alévêque 2018). Two events placed Sciamma centre stage within these debates, via her connection to Haenel. First, in November 2019, the online site Mediapart posted a filmed interview detailing Haenel's claims of sexual harassment by director Christophe Ruggia during the making of his 2002 film Les Diables/The Devils, when Haenel was aged 12 to 15 (Turchi 2019). 20 The French media overwhelmingly supported Haenel and a song condemning violence against women, written by Jeanne Cherhal and sung by Julien Clerc, entitled 'Portrait de la jeune fille en feu', drove home the connection between Haenel's predicament and Sciamma's work.
A few months later, during the 2020 Césars ceremony on 28 February, Haenel ostentatiously stormed out of the auditorium, followed by Sciamma, when it was announced that Roman Polanski had won the best director award for J'Accuse/An Officer and a Spy (2020).
Many endorsed Haenel and Sciamma, including the writer Virginie Despentes (2020), who published a caustic and much-reproduced feminist analysis of the episode in Libération. All expressed their shock at the number of nominations (12) and prizes (three) awarded to Polanski that night and the continued celebration of the director, despite multiple rape accusations. 21 Two years earlier, in October-November 2017, the Polanski retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française had provoked feminist outrage. But it was Haenel and Sciamma's flamboyant departure from the Césars ceremony that crystallised the seachange in attitudes to sexual violence against women in the French film industry, foregrounding even more the actress and filmmaker's solidarity with feminist struggles. The Césars fracas thus confirmed Sciamma as 'standard-bearer of a new generation of auteures' (Grassin and Groussard 2021). 22 Her status and iconic presence in the media, however, were not limited to her identity as a woman or her feminist militancy, as increasingly her queer sexuality became openly constitutive of her celebrity status.  (Figure 2). Asked in April 2021, along with a few other personalities, to comment on 'her' M cover, Sciamma rejoices in the visibility given, through her, to women directors and points out that her relationship to the photographer (Alexandre Guirkinger) 'truly echoes the film I was promoting at the time, Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, which talks precisely about the relationship between an artist and her model'. 23 She also, revealingly, links herself to the US director Kathryn Bigelow, who had featured on a 2017 cover of the same magazine 'in a black suit, triumphant' (Sciamma 2021). 24 To be sure, on the 22 September 2017 cover of M, the very tall Bigelow stands proudly in a dark trouser suit with her head high, legs apart, her feet in white trainers firmly on the ground (Figure 2). Here the caption designates 'une femme d'action' [a woman of action], while the article inside more aggressively celebrates 'une guerrière à Hollywood' [a warrior in Hollywood] (Blumenfeld 2017); the article is part of the promotion for Bigelow's film Detroit, which recreates the violent race riots in that city in 1967. In making this link, Sciamma may also have had in mind a widely reproduced image of Bigelow as part of a 2019-20 advertising campaign for the luxury watches brand Rolex. In one such image, Bigelow sits, similarly garbed in dark trouser suit, on a high stool, a pose which resembles even more closely Sciamma's own.

Queer icon
Whether worn by queer or straight women, the trouser suit signals both feminist struggles and queer fashion. In this respect, Sciamma could also look towards earlier French models, in particular the bisexual writer Colette, whom she credits as one of her first queer role models (Cojean 2021). In the early twentieth century, at the time of the publication of her Claudine book series, Colette posed for many photographs in a trouser suit, a gesture seen as de facto political by feminist historian Christine Bard (2010, 189).
Notable too are the nineteenth-century writer George Sand and the painter Rosa Bonheur, both known for wearing trousers in defiance of patriarchal conventions and for which they required police permission because a law passed in 1800 (and curiously abrogated only in 2013) stipulated that women needed a police and medical permit to wear trousers, seen as a dangerous 'male disguise'. Closer to us, Caroline Vigneaux, a former lawyer, has built comic sketches around this issue, reprised in her film Flashback (2021). The trouser suit worn by Sciamma, Bigelow, Colette or George Sand thus clearly acts as a signifier of women's social emancipation and professional ambition. The pictures offer other clues: whether standing or sitting, the women all address a direct gaze at the camera. When sitting their posture is relaxed but firm, while the flat shoes connote practicality and stability (Colette's smoking, in the context of the early twentiethcentury context, adds to the defiant aura, something eschewed by Bigelow and Sciamma according to twenty-first-century mores). The message is clear: these are confident women in control, women who 'mean business'.
The relationship of trouser wearing to sexuality, however, is more complex, especially in the twenty-first century, when the garment has become ubiquitous for both sexes. Nevertheless, as Judith Mayne demonstrated in relation to the Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner, the wearing of trousers can function as a visual shortcut to a lesbian identity that for a long time could not be articulated in writing (Mayne 1995;see also Gaines 1992). 26 The feature on Sciamma in the M issue by contrast leaves no doubt as to her sexuality, as it discusses several instances of her belonging to lesbian-identified groups, interrogates her on her 'coming out' as an adolescent and refers explicitly to her affair with Haenel: More generally, Sciamma's evolving sartorial choices, over the years, act as visual codes for the growing acceptability of queer sexuality in public figures in France. Early appearances, for instance when attending screenings of her first film Naissance, see Sciamma, with glasses, wearing a 'little black dress' and court shoes. This 'studious' look, with hornrimmed glasses and straight medium-long hair, is still in evidence at the time of her presentation of Tomboy, matched, occasionally, with black jeans, jackets and T-shirts. With the success of these two films, Sciamma's media visibility intensified, while, as if in reverse, her chromatic palette became increasingly muted, limited to blocks of plain, low-key colours: white, beige, grey-green [echoing her eyes], black, the occasional faded denim. In 2014, for the release of Bande, a journalist commented on her deliberately 'bland' outlook, close to 'Normcore', seeing it as 'allow [ing] her to melt into any group like a chameleon' (Regnier 2014). 28 Sciamma's colour range also arguably echoes the pared-down aesthetics of her films. By the time of the 2019 M cover, her style had become more androgynous, with the trouser suits, heavier shoes and the hair severely swept back. In 2021, the photographs accompanying her interview with Ernaux in La Déferlante show her similarly garbed. This careful elaboration of an androgynous 'brand image', feeding into her queer auteure status, has been noticed. In the Moroccan magazine TelQuel she is described in terms of her 'feminine dandyism, evoking Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray character [with her] short hair and fag in mouth' (Hatim 2018). 29 As one would expect, Sciamma figures prominently in the (still marginal) lesbianidentified sector of the French media. She adorns the cover of the first issue of the lesbian magazine Well, Well, Well (September 2014) and features several times in the online Jeanne Magazine, including a long interview about Portrait where the cult status of the film among lesbians is intensely debated (Delon 2019). 30 A particular focus is the fact that 'page 28' (a page in a book held by Heloïse in a portrait which acts as a secret signal to Marianne) has become a rallying point for the lesbian community, with some women having it tattooed on their bodies and various derived products being available for purchase (Figures 3 and 4).
It would, at the same time, be premature to see the fact that Sciamma is officially 'out' in mainstream cultural media such as Le Monde in addition to lesbian publications as indicating that queer sexuality has become totally uncontroversial in France. In her book Le Génie lesbien, Alice Coffin quotes Sciamma as confidently asserting 'je suis lesbienne' [I am a lesbian] (Bard 2010, 218), and in Le Monde Virginie Despentes claims: 'She has long been an icon in the queer milieu' (Dryef 2019). 33 Yet the word 'lesbian' by contrast rarely appears in the numerous interviews and features about the director. For Coffin, this is because the word is still a 'problem' in the French Republican context: The coming out of a personality is perceived as an obscenity because it is a spectacular gesture, the mise en scène of a personal history in the name, and to the benefit of a group, a collective, a community. Everything French culture detests or does not know how to do. 34 (Coffin 2020, 83) According to Coffin too (Coffin 2020, 137-142), the routine recourse to Anglophone expressions such as 'gay ', 'queer' and 'LGBT' in the French context is a way of avoiding language plainly denoting lesbian sexuality; it is basically a form of censorship. Sciamma's personal 'coming out' in her own liberal family appears to have been unproblematic (Dryef 2019), but significantly she came out in the film world via a US gay magazine, The Advocate: 'Hey, I'm gay,' says Sciamma, sitting outdoors at Cannes with a pack of Benson & Hedges close at hand. 'I don't know if I should say this,' she says laughing, then pauses before deciding to go on. 'I always . . . resent the people who are gay, who could say it, and they don't. So I'm not going to do that. I have to be logical.' (Giltz 2007) Without necessarily going as far as 'censorship', the recourse to English terms -queer, gay, LGBT -as in male gaze and female gaze, is significant because it acknowledges both the 'foreignness' of the concepts and the liberation they offer to members of the queer community from specifically French, restrictive, cultural mores. Sciamma's ability to negotiate the complex manifestations of being 'out' as a queer woman and to address a wider audience with queer issues through her work offers another understanding of the cultural significance of her stardom.  This article has shown how different facets of Sciamma's public identity at times differ from, or even contradict, each other: authorial vs. gendered, French vs. international, professional vs. personal, queer vs. lesbian. Seeing the filmmaker through the prism of star and celebrity studies helps understand such apparent contradictions as both inherent to her evolving cultural context and intrinsic to the construction of her star image. In fact, the unstable and contradictory nature of stardom has long been recognised, deriving from the variety of sources that make it up as well as the diversity of audiences a single personality may address simultaneously (Geraghty 2000;Staiger 2005;Cook 2012). If the concept of celebrity is itself ancient, as explored notably by Fred Inglis (2010), Chris Rojek (2001), Graeme Turner (2004) and Antoine Lilti (2014), with the advent of the mechanical reproduction of images came the need for the famous person to build and maintain what Nathalie Heinich calls their 'capital of visibility' (Heinich 2012, 49), an issue only multiplied since 2008 by the proliferation of social media. Although Sciamma belongs to what Rojek names 'achieved celebrity' (Rojek 2001, 17-20), meaning that her fame is primarily derived from her work, she has had to develop multiplatform activities and perform a constant 'authorial marketing and branding' (Harris 2020, 34). At the release of Petite maman in June 2021, Sciamma's celebrity was taken as beyond doubt when the online women's magazine Terrafemina asked, 'Why has Céline Sciamma become so iconic?', answering its own question precisely in terms of multimedia visibility: 'From [film] festivals to feminist demonstrations, round tables and screenings to marches against police violence, Céline Sciamma has entered public space with great fanfare [. . .] She carries within herself an intersectional struggle' (Arbrun 2021). 35 Sciamma's rise to celebrity is indeed impressive, and in this respect she shows that the gender bias pointed out by Smith, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, is finally shifting. At the same time, the promise of intersectionality is yet to be achieved. The sociologist Olivier Alexandre perceptively commented on the fact that the welcome feminisation (and, I would add, queering) of the French film milieu left unanswered other failures of diversity: 'The privileged, Parisians, the white and the bourgeois continue to dominate film production' (Alexandre 2015). 36 But we can still rejoice in the fact that, barely 15 years after Sciamma graduated from the Fémis, the head of the school declared her 'an inspiring figure' for young recruits who want her as a tutor because 'She incarnates the hope of changing norms' (Grassin and Groussard 2021). 37 As Alison Smith (2007, 147)