A Blue Movie? Representations of Homosexuality: A Case Study of Blue is the Warmest Color.

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A MOVIE

Representations of Homosexuality

A Case Study of Blue is the Warmest Color

Thesis supervisor: dr. Maryn Wilkinson Second reader: dr. Eef Masson

MA Film Studies November 27, 2015 Author: Sarah Famke Oortgijsen

Student number: 5806011 sf_o@live.nl 0612511289

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A Blue Movie

“movies that give you boners when you watch them, but you’re in the theatre so you can’t do anything about it unless you want to become a peewee hermon.”

- Urban Dictionary

Blue /blu:/ adj

1 a color intermediate between green and violet, as of the sky or sea on a sunny day: ‘the clear blue sky’, ‘a blue silk shirt’, ‘deep blue eyes’ 2 melancholy, sad, or depressed: ‘he’s feeling blue’

3 having sexual or pornographic content: ‘a blue movie’

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1: INTRODUCTION

1.1: A Much Discussed Film

At the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, one film in particular caught public attention: Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adèle – chapitres 1 et 2;

Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013). This film, about two girls who fall in love, discover each other and their selves and eventually fall apart, won the prestigious Palme d’Or, which the official jury unconventionally awarded to both the director and the lead actresses (with them, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux, becoming the only female performers to have ever won the award). The multiple minutes-long graphic sex scenes that appear in the nearly three-hour story caused a wave of commotion, with lyrical reviews and a wide variety of prizes and nominations on one side1 to scathing critiques on the other2_{. The critics’}

responses to the film can be roughly divided into two camps: excessively said those who applaud it for

being ‘art’ (e.g. Rich, Gleiberman) and those who refute it for being ‘porn’ (e.g. Dargis, Moore). It is this on-going debate, which I will discuss later in much more detail, which makes Blue is the Warmest Color an interesting topic for this thesis. In-depth research will expose how female homosexuality is constructed in this film and, to a broader extent, demonstrate how cinematic representations (re)produce images of

1_{Apart from winning the 2013 Palme d’Or, the film was also nominated in 2014 for a Golden Globe and a}

BAFTA Award. A full list of awards and nominations can be found on IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2278871/awards

2_{It even received the doubtful honor of a Hall of Shame Award at the 2013 Women Film Critics Circle}

Awards. The jury declared: "I went in knowing almost nothing except general buzz but I hated the sex scenes which were way too long and midway through I couldn't wait to flee the theater. Coming out I read how many takes Kechiche required and I was thoroughly repulsed. Who was this for? Then I read the graphic novel and discovered that critical plot points were deleted. Like the fact that Adele's parents find her in bed with Emma which is why she has to move out – and I was enraged. A three-hour movie and Kechiche is so busy salivating over his actresses that he can't bother telling a coherent story! Hype for this film makes me nauseous." (https://wfcc.wordpress.com/women-film-critics-circle-awards-2013)

Image 1.1: The official movie poster for the French release of Blue is the Warmest Color.

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sexuality and gender identity. Blue is the Warmest Color says a lot about where we stand today; in popular culture and film studies, but inherently also in everyday life.

New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis formulated the first major critique on the film immediately after it premiered in Cannes. In her festival report (2013a, 3) she noted that “the movie feels far more about Mr. Kechiche’s desires than anything else,” and in a later review (2013b, 4) she accused him (among other male directors) of creating a troubled depiction of female sexuality on screen: she states that “the way it frames, with scrutinizing closeness, the female body”

is problematic. Julie Maroh, author of the graphic novel Le bleu est une couleur chaude (international title Blue Angel, but literally meaning ‘blue is a warm color’) on which the film is based, stated in a blog post on her website3 that as a writer, she found that “what [Kechiche] developed is coherent, justified and fluid. It’s a master stroke,” but also that “As a

lesbian… It appears to me that this was what was missing on the set: lesbians. […] Because -except for a few passages- this is all that it brings to my mind: a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and made me feel very ill at ease” (2013, 1). On top of that, the lead actresses openly excoriated Kechiche’s methods and accused him of making them play the same physically and mentally exhausting scenes over and over again.4

These critiques touch broader issues of representations of homosexuality on screen, which are often problematic. Although a little out-dated today, the

documentary The Celluloid Closet (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 1996), based on

3_{The original post by Julie Maroh can be found here:}

http://sd-4.archive-host.com/membres/up/204771422545612119/Adele_blue.pdf

4_{In an interview with}_{The Daily Beast}_{, both actresses declared they would never work with Kechiche}

again

(http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/01/the-stars-of-blue-is-the-warmest-color-on-Image 1.2: The cover of the graphic novel Le

bleu est une couleur chaude by Julie Maroh,

on which Blue is the Warmest Color is based and from which the international title of the film by Kechiche derives.

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the same named book (1981) by Vitto Russo, one of the founders of GLAAD5_{, illustrates}

how problematic the role of homosexuality has always been in movies. The documentary illustrates that Hollywood has never quite known what to do with homosexuals in its movies: the characters are unreliable, sadistic or pictured as a giggling sissy with a purse; subordinate and inferior positions. When films did depict homosexuals, they were often targeted at a gay audience (Russo 1981, 189). However, there are lots of examples of recent mainstream films and series with homosexual characters, like Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013), The Kids are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010), Faking It (MTV, 2014), and Orphan Black (BBC America, 2013). These are not necessarily targeted only at a gay audience anymore, as their big

successes illustrate. In films and series that depict homosexuality, there seems to have been a shift from posing the gay element as main storyline, in which the characters have to overcome their struggle with themselves being gay (e.g. Fucking Åmål (Lukas Moodysson, 1998), Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)), to a more unconcerned way of adapting homosexuality, by making it a side topic to the main story and not the primary focus of the film (Orphan Black, Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011)). Films like Weekend, Stranger by the Lake (L’Inconnu du Lac; Alain Guiraudie, 2013) and Les Amours Imaginaires (Xavier Dolan, 2010) have won prestigious prizes at prominent, major film festivals, meanwhile blurring the line between arthouse and mainstream films. Blue is the Warmest Color fits this list perfectly: the main actors come across ‘normal’ problems that every couple potentially has to deal with, whether they are hetero- or homosexual. Their struggles can be viewed as paramount for all people and therefore do not necessarily only speak to a gay audience.

Still, the controversial minutes-long sex scenes depicting the girls in all kinds of sex acts encouraged critics to speak out against it. Some (e.g. Maroh) because they found it pornographic, a point of view that even led to prohibition of the movie in

5_{The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) publishes an annual report which analyzes}

the overall diversity of primetime scripted series regulars on broadcast networks and looks at the number of LGBT characters on cable networks (‘Where We Are On TV’,

http://www.glaad.org/whereweareontv14/), as well as an annual study of Hollywood studio content which maps the quality, quantity and diversity of LGBT characters in films released by the major motion picture studios (‘Studio Responsibility Index’, http://www.glaad.org/sri/2014).

Both studies show that visibility of LGBT characters is roughly, but not strongly, increasing through the years: e.g. 16,7% in 2014 against 13,8% in 2013.

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some countries.6_{Others, like Dargis (2013b), felt there was fetishism hidden in the way}

the lesbian relationship is portrayed, and accused Kechiche of reflecting his own male heterosexual desires. After the film’s theatrical release, the term ‘sex’ turned out to be the most searched query in Google combined with the title of the movie7_.

1.2: Research Questions

All added up, it made me wonder whether the relationship between the two girls was above all constructed to be satisfactory for heterosexual men. Did the director perhaps, subconscious or aware, put his own desires in this film? My research questions derive from these contemplations, the main question being: How is the relationship of the lesbian couple in Blue is the Warmest Color constructed? To formulate an answer to this rather broad question, I will explore secondary questions like:

- Does the construction of Mulvey’s male gaze hold? If so, in whose service? - Does the film only meet masculine desires or does it allow for women to have

visual pleasure too?

- Does the film uphold Hollywood conventions?

- Does the film contain a dominant discourse (on gender and sexuality) that is imposed on the spectator?

- How is homosexuality represented in Blue is the Warmest Color?

- To what degree is the fact that the relationship is homosexual emphasized? - To what extent do the depicted sex acts and the choices of frames and shots

resemble the classic conventions used in pornography?

- How do the narrative and the stylistic choices relate to those in the graphic novel?

- Are the lead characters fetishized?

6_{In Russia, the movie was prevented from being screened by the League for Safe Internet due to}

‘pedophilia’ (http://itar-tass.com/en/russia/725514) and in the USA, the movie was rated NC-17 by the Motion Picture Association of America, meaning ‘No One 17 and Under Admitted’, which lead a lot of movie theaters to not show it at all.

7_{The top Google search related to Abdellatif Kechiche’s}_{Blue is the Warmest Color}_{is ‘blue is the warmest}

color sex’. The word ‘sex’ turns up as the first suggestion when the title of the movie is typed into Google’s search bar. Google Trends provides data of the search history of the term and also shows that related queries are ‘blue sex scene’ and ‘lesbian sex scene’

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1.3: Corpus

Accounts on queer female identities on screen have mostly looked at lesbian independent films or lesbian-themed films, as I will discuss in the review of the literature. Although this research will not specifically be a genre study, I will position Blue is the Warmest Color in a landscape of queer romance films. Benshoff and Griffin (2006) have proposed five characteristics to define what a queer film is: it deals with characters that are queer; via its authorship; via spectatorship; it is a ‘queer’ genre (such as horror); and/or the very act of experiencing films (the psychological process as queer). Of course these features often don’t stand by themselves and tend to overlap and blur together. To provide context to the queer romance genre, in the analysis of Blue is the Warmest Color a number of other films will also be discussed; some classic, like Lost and Delirious (Léa Pool, 2001) and some contemporary, like The Kids Are All Right and Room in Rome (Julio Medem, 2010). Like Blue is the Warmest Color, these films are about lesbian relationships and can thus be categorized as queer films, but they differ in their degree of problematizing homosexuality. Whereas Room in Rome is about a short escapade between the four walls of a hotel room of two women that barely know each other, Lost and Delirious narrates the story of two girls at a boarding school where their relation can’t be publicly known of, which tears them apart. However, what Blue is the Warmest Color differentiates from most other queer romance genre movies is that it’s not about homosexuality but rather about universal love. While most theory on queer films can be applied to films such as mentioned here, most of these theories don’t seem to get a grip on Blue is the Warmest Color. This makes it an interesting subject for analysis.

I also find it necessary to distinguish between classical Hollywood films (mainstream cinema) and foreign and independent films (arthouse cinema), because the conventions of the depictions of sex are very different in both traditions of

filmmaking. It has to be noted here that Blue is the Warmest Color can be categorized as European arthouse cinema, which has quite a different tradition from classical Hollywood cinema when it comes to sex and/or prudishness on screen. Arthouse cinema has a longer history of displaying homosexuality as well as explicit sex acts, while the struggles with homosexuality on screen, as highlighted in the

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its ways- overarching. The graphic sex scenes in Blue is the Warmest Color have to be analyzed with that in mind.

The most notable comparison I will make however, will be between the film and the graphic novel on which it is based, Le bleu est une couleur chaude, now internationally known as Blue Angel, as both the graphic novel and the film contain pretty explicit sex acts. Although Blue is the Warmest Color is not really an adaptation but merely loosely based on the graphic novel, the comparison is very interesting, especially when it comes to these sex scenes. The presumed difference in sex acts in mainstream cinema versus pornography is that in the latter the images are designed to elicit sexual arousal. A question I will seek to answer is whether the sex acts in Blue is the Warmest Color also meet these ‘requirements’ of porn: are the explicit sex scenes so called ‘money shots’? I will do a close reading of these images (e.g. the type of shot, the framing, etc.) and make a comparison with the stylistic devices used within conventional pornographic movies. I will add the graphic novel by Julie Maroh to this comparison, because the way the bodies are framed in the film encountered a lot of aversion, but some of those frames are precisely as in the drawings in Blue Angel, for example when Emma slaps on Adèle’s behind. By comparing stylistic choices and levels of explicitness in both mediums I will explore how much fidelity the film adaptation has to the original story. If the framing in the movie resembles that of the graphic novel, the claims that Kechiche intentionally made porn-like scenes may not be as valid as they seem.

1.4: Review of the Literature

1.4.1: The Male Gaze and the (Straight) Spectator

My starting point for this research project will be the ‘gaze’ as formulated by Laura Mulvey. Her article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) exposes the power structures of looking. Following Freud’s notion of scopophilia (pleasure in looking), Mulvey argued that film is pre-eminently a voyeuristic medium. Using concepts provided by Freud and Lacan, she reveals the unconscious patriarchal structures of sexual difference in classical cinema and shows how unfavorable these are for women:

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they generally function as an erotic subject that is there just to be looked at. This is what she calls ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’:

The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. (9)

According to Mulvey, the pleasure of watching a classical Hollywood film is thus only meant for the heterosexual male gaze. This is an interesting claim to use as a starting point for analyzing Blue is the Warmest Color, because the previously discussed reactions evoked by the film contain the same claim, namely that the sex scenes stand in function of male desire and that the female actors are just ‘to be looked at’. To investigate the gazes in Blue is the Warmest Color and to analyze to whose service they operate, I will examine the scenes using the three ways in which the gaze manifests itself according to Mulvey: first, the look of the camera (usually operated by a man) looking at women as objects; second, the look of male actors within the film, which is structured to make their gaze powerful; and third, the gaze of the spectator, who is presumed to be male, voyeuristically identifying with the camera and the male actor, gazing at women represented in fetishistic and stereotypical ways (17). If the women in the film function as an erotic object for other characters in the film as well as the spectators in the cinema, and the women are objectified from a male point of view, voyeuristic pleasure would, following Mulvey’s logic, only be available to men. However, this logic blindly assumes a heterosexual framework. E. Ann Kaplan, who was among the first self-proclaimed feminists that called for action within film studies and, like Mulvey, focused on representative examples of a mainstream misogyny argued, even before the publication of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, that Mulvey’s dominance / submission model need not be tied to gender because women, like men, can fantasize across the sexual binary (1974, 5). Moreover, Mulvey’s notion of the spectator is a construct rather than a real person; the female spectator is addressed as a ‘subject-position’ evoked by the film text. But the idea that the graphic sex scenes

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in Blue is the Warmest Color meet masculine desires does not necessarily mean that women are not allowed to make pleasurable meaning out of it too.

Both Jackie Stacey and Mary Ann Doane, following on from Mulvey,

investigated female spectatorship with the conception in the back of their minds that women too can have a pleasurable viewing experience, but they theorized it in different ways. Mary Ann Doane wrote in “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator” (1982) that the female viewer is unable to keep the same distance from film texts as the male viewer, so that he is allowed to the process of voyeurism whereas she can only identify with the image, which leads to either masochism (of over-identification) or narcissism (by becoming one’s own object of desire)(24). Doane theorized a new position for the female spectator of the film, with the concept of feminine masquerade: a mechanism by which women can achieve the necessary distance from the image to not lose themselves in it and thus successfully engage in film spectatorship. This concept of masquerade is interesting for research on Blue is the Warmest Color because it touches the question whether women can find pleasure in watching the graphic sex scenes or that pleasure in watching these scenes is only reserved for men. It is not even only a question of gender; what about gay women? Do they find themselves forced to masquerade, too?

Jackie Stacey treated the spectator as an empirical spectator (a real person in the audience) rather than a construction of a textual spectator (a concept, not a person), thereby changing the discourse of the spectator within psychoanalytic and semiotic frameworks. Mulvey, and to some extent Doane, argued that women look at themselves through the eyes of men, whereas Stacey conducted field research to let those women speak for themselves. She came to conclude that “female spectatorship might be seen as a process of negotiating the dominant meanings of Hollywood cinema, rather than one of being passively positioned by it” (1994, 13). In this thesis, however, I will approach the spectator as a theoretical concept and investigate in which ways meaning is imposed on them by the ideology of the film text, but I will not deny (and in fact emphasize) the fact that spectators can make their own meaning out of watching the movie.

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1.4.2: Other Gazes

Throughout the years, the initial ‘male gaze’ as introduced by Mulvey not only has had to endure a lot of criticism, but it has also gotten a lot of additives by other academics. To illustrate this I will discuss the ones that expanded the concept in ways that are useful for analyzing Blue is the Warmest Color and also explain why these expansions are yet not sufficient for this complicated film.

E. Ann Kaplan added a racial concern to the gaze. She started the critique that the gaze as posed by Mulvey was invented from a white perspective (white privilege) and introduced the ‘imperial gaze’ to illustrate the self-centered way of looking at other cultures: “The imperial gaze reflects the assumption that the white western subject is central, much as the male gaze assumes the centrality of the male subject” (2012, 78). The assumed centrality of the white, western subject is interesting for research on Blue is the Warmest Color, considering the fact that Kechiche is of

Tunisian origin; even more because throughout the movie, Adèle is seduced by men of ethnic origin several times. As the main focus of this thesis is on sexuality I will not deeply elaborate this, but it might be interesting for further research.

From considering the male gaze, the possibility of an analogous female gaze also arose. Mulvey argued that “the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like” (1975, 27-28) – moreover implying a white, straight male with this observation; food for Kaplan’s critique. And of course, by looking at women’s/teen magazines and their objectified, sometimes sexually explicit, photographs of men, one might plea for the existence of a female gaze, but conversely one could also say that this is a manifestation of an

internalized male gaze, with the looking women assuming the male gazer role. Richard Dyer strengthened the idea of the male being looked at in ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1982), by examining the male pin-up. He commented on differences in the direction of the gaze of pin-up models depending on their sex. He focused on the gaze of males in images aimed at women and compared these with images of women:

[W]here the female model typically averts her eyes, expressing modesty, patience and a lack of interest in anything else, the male model looks either off or up. […] Indeed, it barely acknowledges the viewer, whereas the woman’s averted eyes do just that – they are averted from the viewer. [The male model]

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might be there for his face and body to be gazed at, but his mind is on higher things, and it is this upward striving that is most supposed to please. It may be, as is often said, that male pin-ups more often than not do not look at the viewer […]. When they do, what is crucial is the kind of look it is […]. When the female pin-up returns the viewer’s gaze, it is usually some kind of smile, inviting. The male pin-up, even at it’s most benign, still stares at the viewer. […] Since Freud, it is common to describe such a look as ‘castrating’ or ‘penetrating’.” (63-66)

Dyer found that men too could be depicted mainly to be looked at, as receivers of the gaze. Nevertheless, the conventions that make males dominant continue to be at work, as is illustrated by the way the pictured men do or do not look at the spectator. Their superficial yet powerful appearance as opposed to the submissive presence of the female model exemplifies the binary relationship. What I will take from this is the idea that the embodiment of a certain gender goes beyond the sexual binary: as men can be depicted to be looked at (an inferior position) but nevertheless eradiate masculinity, so could one half of the female couple in Blue is the Warmest Color impersonate male characteristics (because heteronormative conventions are imposed on them) while still being subject to the male (and perhaps female) gaze.

To my knowledge, a thorough research on a possible ‘gay gaze’ in cinema has not been conducted to date. There is an account by Brian Pronger on a gay gaze, but he has written about the way gay men look at other men in daily life:

“Gay men are able to subtly communicate their shared worldview by a special gaze that seems to be unique to them. […] Most gay men develop a canny ability to instantly discern from the returned look of another man whether or not he is gay. […] Almost everyone I interviewed said that they could tell who was gay by the presence or absence of this look.” (1990, 235) However, this concept of a gay gaze is not of use for textual research and merely

describes a social code of looking in a cultural context. I think it would be useful to add another definition of gay gaze, along the lines of the ‘male gaze’ and the ‘imperial gaze’, to the theoretical toolkit with gazes that can be used for textual research,

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because it would make sense to argue that homosexuals look at people of their own sex with a different gaze than heterosexuals do.

1.4.3: Queer Accounts on Cinema

Opposite to Hollywood’s conservatism is the queer movement in cinema and

subsequent queer studies in the academic field. Queer studies has been involved with issues regarding sexuality in a broader spectrum. Queer theory rejects hetero/homo binary thinking and rather perceives sexuality as fluid. It includes -and troubles the gendered boundaries between- heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex people and cultures in its analytic framework, and challenges the social constructed categories of sexual identity.

Chris Straayer, who specializes in cinema and gender, added lesbianism to the discussion of gazes and desire. In her book ‘Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies’ (1996) she starts with posing that “feminist film theory based on sexual difference has much to gain from considering lesbian desire and sexuality” (9). However, she then goes on to deal with films that “do not depict lesbianism explicitly, but employ or provide sites for lesbian intervention” (9). Her interest is mainly in the lesbian spectator, and “how her relation to films with covert lesbian content resembles her position in society” (9). Therefore, she has more interest in surreptitious reading against the grain by lesbian spectators and the negotiation between texts and its viewers, than in the depiction of lesbian relationships in movies. Subsequent to Stacey’s concerns that women were thus far handled as theoretical subjects and not real persons in the audience, she proposed to not only include audience research but to also look at their attraction to other women (as opposed to only men) on screen. Straayer points out that much of the work on women’s film-viewing pleasure has “circumvented a crucial option in female spectatorship by avoiding the investigation of women viewers’ erotic attraction to and visual appreciation of women characters” (13). Although Straayer opened up a very relevant topic for this thesis - lesbian desire - the focus point is different, as the relationship between the two girls in Blue is the Warmest Color represents a ‘real’ relationship, whereas Straayer mainly concentrates on relationships that are not really there in the narrative, but rather wanted to be there by certain spectators. Straayer’s

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work therefore falls within the boundaries of queer theory, for it focuses on queer readings of texts.

1.4.4: Sex on Screen

And then there’s the part where most of the critique on Blue is the Warmest Color was about: the sex scenes. Some critics (e.g. Dargis and Maroh) even reproached Kechiche that these parts of the film are equivalent to porn. In order to be able to make valid claims about the depiction of sex acts, and what it implies, I will use Linda Williams to explain what pornography actually is and does. In her book ‘Hard Core: Power,

Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible’ (1989) she analyses hard-core film pornography as part of the (in the time of writing) contemporary discourse on sexuality. She breaks down the idea that porn is solely for masculine pleasure and puts the possibility of women using pornography for their own purposes and pleasures forward. She goes on to show how the form has begun to respond and react to changing gender relations. She also explores the role of a narrative in films that contain pornographic material. In her later publication ‘Screening Sex’ (2008) she investigates how sex acts have been represented on screen for more than a century and how we have watched and experienced those representations. Like Kaplan and Stacey, she includes spectator experiences in her account of sex on screen and like (among others) Dyer and Straayer, she acknowledges that men as well as women can be bearers of the gaze.

1.4.5: Recapitulation

Based on the review above one could argue that the gaze is still a relevant concept. It illustrates that in response to Mulvey’s manifesto about visual pleasure, in which she claims that women on screen are only ‘to be looked at’, there has been discussion about the male body as source of erotic pleasure for women, about (the absence of) the female or colored spectator, and also about homosexual viewers, but as far as I’m concerned these theories/discussions thus far haven’t been projected on

homosexuality in film texts. Therefore, the aim of this research is to address a gap in the literature by looking specifically (but not isolated) at if (and if so, how) the male gaze influences the way female-to-female desire is depicted and how the bearer of the gaze makes sense of it. Until now, much work in film studies has been concerned with

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questions of sexual difference and the ways in which femininity is the object of masculine desire; instead (or in addition), my interest is mainly on lesbianism. Thus, my focus here is on the depiction of the passion between the two main characters in Blue is the Warmest Color, and the way this depiction is -or is not- influenced by male gazes, driven by male desires and fantasies about ‘girl on girl action’.

1.5: Methodology

The key concepts of this thesis are sexuality, the gaze, porn, and performance of gender, and they are all embedded in or built on the concept of (visual) pleasure. This thesis is mainly going to be about desire and the way this may or may not -deliberately or subconscious- be captured by the director in the movie’s images and narrative. Since current film theories on (homo)sexuality don’t seem to grasp Blue is the Warmest Color, this thesis will also explore how these theories can be complemented to be more sufficient to analyze films such as this one. As has become clear in the review of available literature on the topic, there certainly is a gap in the research field when it comes to depictions of female homosexuality linked to male spectatorship. With this thesis, I hope to contribute new insights to (feminist and queer) film theory, especially about representations of (in particular female) homosexuality in contemporary film. To find answers to the research questions, I will make a textual analysis of Blue is the Warmest Color, doing so by taking a closer look at images and scenes from the film and the possible meanings that derive from them. The male gaze, as proposed by Laura Mulvey, will be the starting point. This means the theoretical framework is rooted in psychoanalysis, but I will also use a cultural studies approach because I will seek to understand how meaning is generated from a cultural phenomenon such as this film. Therefore I think a joint approach of both methodologies suits this research best: I will approach the spectator not only as an object that is subliminally molded by the film itself, but as a subject that consciously makes meaning of a film text as is usual within audience studies. However, this thesis includes mainly a textual analysis of Blue is the Warmest Color, addressing questions around sex and gender from a psycho-semiotic conceptual framework, meaning I draw conclusions about gender and sex mainly, but not exclusively, from the film text itself.

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1.6: Approach

The debate about the film basically comes down to two sides: they who find it art and they who find it porn. I will discuss both sides in detail and I would like to add a third dimension: that the movie is conservative and conventional. These three approaches will all be discussed, each in their own chapter.

In chapter two, ‘Gazes and (Male) Desire’, I will highlight the most conspicuous side of the debate by assessing how the film is conservative. I will go back to the early days of feminist film studies and look at the three kinds of gazes as distinguished by Mulvey: that of the camera, between the actors within the film, and the gaze of the spectator. I will analyze the troubling issues about the depiction of female sexuality on screen that the film raised.

In chapter three, ‘Subversion and Queer Identity’, I will assess how the film is progressive. I will discuss the film style, the way the spectator has access to the bodies of the actors, and the way the relationship between the girls is paramount for every other relationship, regardless of gender. An important part of this chapter is the division between European arthouse and Hollywood productions.

In chapter three, ‘Screening Sex’, I will dig further into visual pleasure and explore whether the movie is exploitative. I will do so by drawing further the collation between mainstream and arthouse film, and by adding pornography to the equation. I will analyze the sex scenes by conducting a close analysis on the movie’s images. This is also where a close comparison between the movie and the graphic novel is made.

In the conclusion the three preceding chapters come together to conclude that after all, “it’s complicated”. Blue is the Warmest Color is not a film that is easy to grasp in existing theory, but I will make some proposals for further research and suggest alternative ways to comprehend a complicated movie like this one.

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2: GAZES AND (MALE) DESIRE

The aim of this chapter is to examine the film text for its social, cultural and

ideological conventions. I will assess how the are women filmed and edited; how their bodies are (re)presented to the camera and thus to the audience. As is discussed in the introduction, Blue is the Warmest Color raised troubling issues about the depiction of female sexuality on screen. With New York Times critic Manohla Dargis at the forefront, the film and its director have had to endure a big wave of criticism after the film

premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

Although mostly dealt with as merely entertainment, cinema is a conveyer of ideological messages: a film text inherently carries the ideological messages of both its authors and the culture that produced it. Abdellatif Kechiche, the director and

therefore auteur of Blue is the Warmest Color, indisputably encoded a dominant

meaning in the film, as a product of his internalized ideology. This dominant meaning, according to the critics, is a conservative, patriarchal and heteronormative one. In this chapter I will assess how so.

2.1: Mulvey’s Legacy

2.1.1: Visual Pleasure and the Gaze

As explained in the introduction, Laura Mulvey revealed unconscious patriarchal structures of sexual difference in cinema and showed how unfavorable these are for women. According to Mulvey, the women in films (and on television) are usually particularly on screen to be looked at by a male audience and hence the pleasure of watching a film is only reserved for heterosexual men. This claim, merely written as a manifesto than an academic piece of writing and now refuted by many scholars for being too simplistic, is still the basis of a lot of critique on ‘sexist’ media products, as is Mulvey’s notion of the male gaze. In the many critiques allocated to Blue is the

Warmest Color, the male gaze plays a prominent part.

Using a gendered concept such as the male gaze to make a claim about

sexuality may not seem appropriate but, as Benshoff and Griffin (2004, 229) point out: “many of the basic issues regarding the cinematic representation of gender can be

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modified and adapted into tools with which we might also investigate the cinematic representation of sexuality.” Therefore, I will broaden the concept of the initial male gaze. Is the heterosexual male privileged with the pleasure of watching, and if so, is this visual pleasure also accessible for the homosexual female gaze?

2.1.2: Gaze of the Camera

The gaze of the camera is implicitly the gaze of the director: what the camera films is what Kechiche wants to show the spectator and that means everything on screen has a reason to be shown. Even for someone who has seen Blue is the Warmest Color only once, Kechiche’s fascination for mouths and behinds cannot go unnoticed.

Throughout the film, many close-ups of buttocks and mouths, especially Adele’s, pass by. When Adele eats, she eats passionately (images 2.1-2.8). Kechiche spends an excessive amount of time on close ups of Adele’s face, and the long takes may seem extraneous at times, but they also allow the spectator to empathize with Adele.

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At the same time the spectator sees Adele from a more distant point of view: when Adele is filmed from afar or through her relationship with Emma, who, as a seasoned lesbian and art student, clearly has dominance over the more naïve and unexperienced Adele. The close up shots seem to function to make the spectator empathize and even identify with Adele, while the long shots literally make the spectator see her from a distance and sometimes, when the camera slides along her body, even make the spectator (feel like) a voyeur. When Adele lies on a bed, she lies facedown, showing her buttocks to the camera and therefore to the spectator (images 2.9-2.12).

Images 2.9-2.12: Adele lying in bed: face down, bottom up.

The focus on Adele’s behind already becomes clear within the first minute of the film. A long shot positions Adele in the middle of the screen, drawing the spectator’s attention to her behind as she leaves her house to catch the bus to school, conspicuously pulling up her pants, imposing extra focus on her buttocks while walking away from the camera and the spectator (images 2.13-2.14).

Images 2.13-2.14: Adele first walking and then running to the bus stop, drawing the spectator’s attention to her behind by keeping it at the same central position in the frame.

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Kechiche makes his appreciation of the female body not only clear by filming Adele; even the female forms of the sculptures and the paintings in the museum Adele and Emma are visiting are filmed from head to toe by panning the camera in close up over the man-made curves of the female representations in stone and paint (images 2.15-2.16). He also makes sure to show the spectator that Adele and Emma appreciate it too (images 2.17-2.18).

Images 2.15-2.16: Kechiche appreciates the female body in all forms and appearances.

Images 2.17-2.18: Emma shows Adele the beauty of the female body.

The reference to Freud’s oral and anal fixations and a psychoanalytic framework is easy to make. The oral phase (the first phase in psychosexual development) is about

satisfaction of needs, meaning that all actions of the subject are based on the pleasure principle. The anal phase (the second phase in psychosexual development) is about controlling these urges. This could be a metaphor for the phases Kechiche went through while making Blue is the Warmest Color, or the phases the spectator goes through while watching it: it fulfills desires but instincts need to be controlled.

2.1.3: Gaze of the Characters

Most shots in Blue is the Warmest Color are objective, which means they are not tied to a character’s point of view. However, subjective shots are used for the spectator to cast a glance in the world of the protagonist. This usually happens from Adele’s point of view, as the audience experiences the film through her. An example of a subtle subjective shot that is not a point of view shot is in Adele’s literature class. In the first

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scene, when the topic is love, both male and female classmates are shown close up in succession. But the next literature class, after a girl from school has kissed Adele, leaving her bewildered, the faces are all female. This is the gaze of the camera, because Adele is not literally looking at them, but it is affected by her perception.

The most important gaze in Blue is the Warmest Color, the gaze to which the narrative owes its existence, is when Adele and Emma lock eyes in the middle of the street (images 2.19-2.20). When Adele is on her way to a date with a boy from school, she sees blue-haired Emma cross her path. They both look at each other and Adele stands spellbound in the middle of the street after their eye contact (image 2.20).

Images 2.19-2.20: Emma and Adele lock eyes when they first run into each other in a busy street, leaving Adele behind with a puzzled look on her face.

Although they both turn their heads to have a better look at each other, Emma is clearly more in charge as she possesses the power to dazzle Adele with just her

appearance. This power relation (Emma as active and Adele as passive) does not change throughout the film: when Adele sees Emma again in the gay bar, her gaze is pulled towards her multiple times, but she doesn’t dare to keep looking at her, while Emma confidently stares back with an amused smile on her face, as if she is deliberately playing a game with the visibly uncomfortable Adele (images 2.21-2.22). Emma furthermore literally looks down on Adele, because she’s sitting at a table at the mezzanine and Adele is standing at the bar downstairs.

Images 2.21-2.22: Adele and Emma exchange glances in the gaybar, Emma literally looking down on Adele.

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Subjective shots can encode powerful gender dynamics, for example when a man looks at a woman and after that a shot of the woman through the eyes of the man is shown: the woman is being looked at, the man is the bearer of the gaze. He shares this gaze with the audience, imposing a male gaze on the spectator. Although in Blue is the Warmest Color the audience experiences the narrative through Adele, Emma is mostly the bearer of the gaze and Adele the one being looked at. Some subjective shots are point of view shots from Adele, but these shots do not function to give her more power, as she literally looks up to Emma (image 2.23). Later in the film, when Adele and Emma have moved in together and are hosting a dinner party in their garden, Adele

constantly keeps an eye on Emma and is monitoring her every move (image 2.24), because Emma seems to be having a lot of fun with another girl (image 2.25). Emma, on the other hand, is merely ignoring Adele, being busy with her bourgeois art friends. Her not looking back signifies the balance of power in their relationship, as at this point they have already moved in together and Adele seems to be doing all the chores to support Emma’s artistic development, while Emma seems to be taking it all for granted for the sake of her career.

Image 2.23: Adele looks up to Emma (POV). Image 2.24: Adele keeps an eye on Emma…

Image 2.25: …while Emma is having fun. Image 2.26: Adele as Emma’s muse.

While time passes, Adele acquiesces to her role as Emma’s muse. A good example of this balance in their relationship is when Emma draws Adele (image 2.26), resembling a scene in Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) in which Jack makes a drawing of Rose. The camera pans across Adele’s body, from her feet to her head. This can connote Emma’s

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gaze, but when in one of the last scenes of the film Adele is in the shower by herself, her body is recorded the same way, close-up from toes to head, with nobody else around to be the bearer of this gaze. So after all, it seems that Kechiche is the one that does the looking.

2.1.4: Gaze of the Spectator

The gaze of the spectator is mostly drawn by the movements (and therefore gaze) of the camera and thus by what the director wants the audience to see. In the

aforementioned long shot in which we see Adele first walking and then running to the school bus (images 2.13-2.14), the audience cannot help but look at her behind,

because the spectator’s gaze is drawn to it in several ways: it is positioned in the middle of the screen, we watch her all the way walking and running down the street and while the camera pans with her movement and does not zoom, making Adele walk away from the audience, her behind stays in the exact same spot on the screen. To catch the spectator’s attention even more, Adele pulls her jeans up at the rear – flashy but not necessarily flattering. The gaze of the spectator is also drawn by repetitions: when Adèle yet again slurps her food down, as is illustrated by images 2.1-2.8, it starts to stand out and pulls the look of the audience.

Following Mulvey’s argument, the spectator is positioned as male. As pointed out by many academics, the assumed heterosexuality of the spectator in this claim does not hold because it does not take into account spectatorship that does not follow normative sexuality. However, it is true that the gaze of the spectator is drawn to female body parts very often. These shots, especially in the renowned sex scenes, are often close up shots or even extreme close up shots of (not necessarily but mostly private) body parts (images 2.27-2.28), which is also a hallmark of pornographic scenes, as will be discussed in chapter 4.

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As Blue is the Warmest Color is a film about two girls in love it seems legitimate that the women’s body is appreciated, but it can be argued that these shots are most pleasurable for heterosexual males and homosexual females, as they usually feel sexually attracted to the female body. That does of course not mean that for example a homosexual man or a heterosexual woman cannot appreciate the beauty of it.

2.1.5: The (Impossible) Position of the Female Spectator

Of course the statement above is a rather blunt one, given the fact that spectatorship is a much more complex topic. Especially the female spectator occupies a difficult

position in the academic field, because spectatorship is often theorized through de dominant position of the male spectator and/or within a heterosexual framework. Raymond Bellour for example, who argued that woman’s desire only appears on the screen to be punished and thus the female spectator’s pleasure is masochistic (1979, 97), ties female spectatorship to a biologically determined equivalence between male/female and masculine/feminine, which leaves no room for reading against the grain. Mulvey, in her ‘Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1981) states that the female spectator must adopt a masculine viewing position in order to be able to feel desire: “the female spectator’s fantasy of masculinization is always to some extent at cross purposes with itself, restless in transvestite clothes.” (15) This would mean that adapting masculinity is the only option for a female spectator to experience pleasure in watching. Mary Ann Doane took this further in her theory of femininity as ‘masquerade’. She argues that the necessary gap between the image and the self to enjoy voyeurism and fetishism is not part of the construction of femininity. The female spectator therefore cannot be a direct voyeur, since “for the female spectator, there’s a certain overpresence of the image – she is the image.” (1982, 78) However, by

masquerading, a distance between image and subject might be achievable. “The women’s sexuality as spectator must undergo a constant process of transformation. She must look, as if she were a man with the phallic power of the gaze, at a woman who would attract that gaze, in order to be that woman […] The convolutions involved here are analogous to those described by Julia Kristeva as ‘the double or triple twists of what we

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commonly call female homosexuality […] I am looking, as a man would, for a woman’” (1981, 77)

As Stacey (1994, 27) points out, psychoanalytic models as used by Mulvey and Doane remain problematic because they operate within a framework of binary oppositions that necessarily masculinize active female desire. Psychoanalytic frameworks collapse gender and sexuality into a binary of masculinity and femininity. This leaves the assumption of heterosexuality uncontested. And the problem with this psychoanalytic binarism is that female homoeroticism is seen in terms of masculinity, since it can only be conceptualized within the binary of masculinity and femininity (28). She therefore tried to address the possibility of female homoeroticism. However, she

disguises it as “one woman’s obsessive fascination with another, […] an idealized other” (28), meaning as much as looking up to someone / wanting to be (like) that person – a person she herself would like to be, and she ignores the option of love/erotic interest from the female spectator towards the female actor (she confuses desire with

identification). Nevertheless, she recognizes and addresses this problem within the dominant psychoanalytic framework: “because of [psychoanalytic’s] rigid adherence to the binarism of masculinity and femininity […], the specificity of any such desire between women is almost unthinkable.” (28) Stacey does recognize lesbian desire, she even refutes critics like De Lauretis (1991, 262) who blamed her for suggesting that “desire between women is not sexual”, but she leaves that up to future research because she herself is mainly interested in identification: “my intention is to broaden the definition of desire but not to deny its erotic meanings, and to explore the ways in which female identification contains forms of desire which include, though not exclusively, homoerotic pleasure.” (29)

Straayer (1996, 13) points out that much of the work on women’s film-viewing pleasure has “circumvented a crucial option in female spectatorship by avoiding the investigation of women viewers’ erotic attraction to and visual appreciation of women characters,” recognizing the possibility of a homosexual female spectator. Still, it can be argued that even a homosexual female spectator has to look through the eyes of a man. As Julia Kristeva, mentioned by Doane (1981, 77) points out, a lesbian spectator would have to look at a woman, as a man would. The fact that Blue is the Warmest

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Color is directed by a man, inherently means, at least according to Julie Maroh (who claimed that real lesbians were missing on the set), that the access to the female body is only possible through an adaptation of the male gaze.

2.2: Heteronormativity

2.2.1: Heterosexuality as Desirable Standard

In the first couple of minutes of the film, heteronormativity is already set as a standard: in Adele’s literature class a story about love between a man and a woman is being read, while the film shows a flirting couple – a boy and a girl. In the next scene, Adele and a slightly older boy from another class are exchanging glances. Adele is visibly flattered, which confirms dominant expectations about her being heterosexual. Later they go on a date, but on her way there a blue haired girl that crosses her path overwhelms Adele. The date goes well, but when Adele masturbates that night, it doesn’t work out until the blue haired girl shows up in her fantasies. Afterwards she clearly feels confused and bad about it, tears running down her cheeks. The message is clear: this is not how she is supposed to feel, because girls should fall for boys. To validate that thought she has sex with the boy on their next date, but it does not charm her and the day after she breaks up with him. When a couple of days later a girl kisses her at school, she feels ecstatic, to the point that her parents can tell she had a great day just by looking at her. But when she tries to kiss the same girl again the next day, the girl rejects her by saying it was just for fun. Perplexed and sad, Adele walks away. Days after Adele’s night out with openly gay friend Valentin, during which she saw Emma in a gay bar and talked to her, Emma waits for Adele outside of her high school. Witnessed by her friends, Adele walks with her. The next day she gets heavily interrogated by these friends, who are wondering why she would talk to such a ‘dyke’. When the news that she has also been to a gay bar with Valentin leaks, some of her closest friends get in an ugly fight with Adele, blaming her for being a lesbian, which she heavily denies. Further on in the film, when Adele and Emma are together, Adele brings Emma home to her parents, but they cannot know they are a couple. This indicates her parents are not okay with

homosexuality, as is very clear in the graphic novel but less manifested in the film. These examples illustrate how the film encodes white patriarchal capitalism, the ideological status quo of western society, as central and desirable. Adele has to

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overcome lots of struggles that had not been there had she fallen for the boy, which both her friends and her parents would have approved. But despite Adele’s attempts at heterosexual love, and later her hesitancy in labeling her sexuality, her true self is unavoidable. The romance affirms patriarchal heterosexuality as well as the undesirability of same-sex coupling. Of course, a female homosexual couple is the protagonist of this film, and in addition to that the man Adele cheats with is of non-Caucasian origin, which seems far from a white patriarchal capitalist status quo. But even so, it can be seen as a hegemonic negotiation within this ideology and not an inversion of it.

2.2.2: Heteronormativity as Construction

The way the lesbian relationship is constructed can be said to be heteronormative, with each of the two girls representing another side of the sexual binary: Emma as the male, being short-haired, self-assured and cheeky, and Adele as the female, looking and dressing more feminine and being more naïve and inexperienced. The

relationship between Adele and Emma fits the model of dominance and submission; they both play their assumed gender-based roles in the relationship, with Adele being the passive muse. This especially shows after they have moved in together; after a while, Adele finds herself doing all the household duties for Emma without much

appreciation. This division of roles seems to come naturally for Adele; she teaches children and cares for Emma with equal devotion. But after Emma’s garden party, during which Adele has taken care of everything, from cooking to washing the dishes, so that Emma could focus her attention to an important art dealer that might exhibit her work, Emma expresses disappointment with Adele’s contented submission to the role that she herself has gradually allocated to Adele. All of this signifies a classic, dominant idea of a heterosexual relationship. Their homosexuality can be seen as a commodification of heterosexuality, because it imposes the dominant ideology of a heterosexual relationship.

It can even be argued that Adele’s homosexuality is depicted as a phase; she starts out with a boyfriend and during her relationship with Emma she cheats with another man. At the end of the film it is still unclear whether Emma is the only girl she has ever fallen for. When they meet again after several years Adele mentions that she

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has had some escapades, but the gender of her flings remains unclear. And in the very last scene of the film, Adele visits Emma’s art exhibition, where she sees Samir, the guy she has already talked to at the garden party. When he excuses himself because he sees an acquaintance he needs to say hi to, Adele walks out, towards a next chapter in her life. Samir follows her, but it remains unclear whether he is able to track her and becomes a part of that next chapter, and so it also remains unclear what Adele’s further love life will look like.

2.3: Class Differences and Stereotyping

Films often draw upon pre-existing social and cultural stereotypes. Kechiche is also guilty of stereotyping, as Emma (confident in her skin as a lesbian) is the one with short, blue hair and baggy pants. Adele, who is clearly more in doubt about her sexuality and feels attracted to boys too, looks more girly: skinny jeans, heels, dresses and her long hair loose around her face. Kechiche has argued that Blue is the Warmest Color is more about overcoming class differences than about homosexuality. It is made very clear that Adele and Emma grew up with different social/economic

backgrounds. Adele lives in a suburb of Lille, while Emma lives in the city. She comes from a worldly and sophisticated family and seems amused by Adele’s naivety: she pushes Adele to expand her ‘simple’ ambitions. Exemplary for their different

backgrounds is that Adele’s working class parents serve spaghetti (image 2.29) and eat in front of the television, while Emma’s mother and stepfather embrace high culture and serve oysters (image 2.30).

Image 2.29: Spaghetti at Adele’s house. Image 2.30: Oysters at Emma’s house.

The differences in ambitions and expectations become clear when Adele and Emma are invited for diner at each other’s parents. At Emma’s house, Adele is accepted as

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Adele’s ambition to become a teacher is received with surprise. This family visibly has a high opinion on less practical ambitions and is very culturally engaged. Emma, on the other hand, encounters a lack of understanding from Adele’s parents, who by the way are not aware of the nature of the relationship between the girls. Adele’s father asks whether it is difficult to live as a painter, and emphasizes that it is important to have a ‘real’ job to make a living. While the film continues and the story develops, it is getting more and more clear that Adele’s and Emma’s different lifestyles are not a match, as can be illustrated by the aforementioned scenes. At Emma’s art exhibition in the final scene of the film, Adele seems to realize that their different social networks and the gap between their personal passions, ambitions and expectations for life have resulted in an inevitable breakup and have doomed their relationship long before Adele’s infidelity.

2.4: Recapitulation

As said in the introduction of this chapter, as a product of their internalized ideology, an author (and therefore a director) will always - aware or unaware - encode a

dominant meaning in a film. It is up to the spectator to decode the images and make his or her own meaning out of it after watching the film. In the case of Blue is the Warmest Color, the dominant meaning that Kechiche has given it is, according to the critics, a conservative, patriarchal and heteronormative one. In this chapter I have assessed this claim. When paying attention to the different kinds of gazes that occur in the film (that of the camera, that of the spectator and that of the characters), it is noticeable that most gazes are pulled towards female bodies or body parts, especially to the female behind. Within a heterosexual framework, and according to Mulvey’s theory, this would mean the women in the film are ‘just to be looked at’. However, in a film about lesbian desire, it is not striking that the female body is appreciated by the looks of the characters as well as the looks of the camera and the spectator. By means of the many close ups of Adele and some point of view shots from her perspective, the spectator emphasizes with her, while at the same time looking at her from a distance as she is an object of desire for Emma, the bearer of the dominant (and arguably male) gaze.

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To further analyze in which ways the film can be considered conservative, I have looked at heteronormative patterns and habits. Emma is clearly depicted to resemble the ‘man’ in the relationship between Adele and Emma. Not only is she shorthaired - she also wears baggy clothes. Classical male characteristics such as self-assurance are assigned to her and within the active/passive binary, Emma is active and Adele is passive. It can thus be argued that even though the depicted relationship is between two girls, heteronormativity is imposed on it. It can also be argued that as a result of his internalized ideology, Kechiche encoded a conservative and

heteronormative dominant meaning in Blue is the Warmest Color.

I have showed that academics for long have not considered the possible homosexuality or erotic desire of the female spectator. But even if the film allows women to have visual pleasure, the critique that the actresses are filmed ‘to be looked at’ remains valid. But is it valid to state that the shots of the female bodies are made to arouse? That is further investigated in chapter 4. Chapter 3 digs deeper into queer readings of the film and challenges the critiques that have been pointed out in this chapter.

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3: SUBVERSION AND QUEER IDENTITY

This chapter explores in what ways Blue is the Warmest Color can be considered a ‘progressive’ movie. As mentioned in the introduction, it is first necessary to draw a line between the more conservative mode of filmmaking that is prevalent in the Hollywood tradition and the ‘looser’ way (European) arthouse deals with the same issues.

3.1: Hollywood versus European Arthouse Cinema

While Blue is the Warmest Color is a French movie, it is noticeable that the most as well as the hashest criticism came from US sources. Of course, at least one striking critique originated in the film’s homeland: that of Julie Maroh, the writer of the

graphic novel on which the film is based. However, her critique was not so much about the fact that there was sex on screen at all, but more about the lack of lesbians on set (and what this, according to her, did to the depiction of the actresses having sex: no good). Most criticism about the sex an sich came from overseas, with New York Times’ Manohla Dargis at the forefront. This may seem like a coincidence, but it alludes to a bigger picture; that of the differences between European Arthouse cinema and Hollywood cinema.

The term ‘Hollywood cinema’ usually refers to the films produced by famous filmmaking companies in and around Hollywood, like Warner Brothers, 20th_Century

Fox, Univeral, Paramount and MGM. Over the years the term ‘Hollywood’ has gone to symbolize not only the place of origin of these movies, but also a certain type of filmmaking and even a cultural institution. On the other side of the continuum are foreign or independent films (Benshoff and Griffin 2004, 24). At first sight Blue is the Warmest Color seems to be on that end, being categorized as European arthouse production. But as mentioned in the introduction, recent films such as Blue is the Warmest Color, Weekend and Les Amours Imaginaires challenge this overly strict division. However, the enormous, mostly critical media attention Blue is the Warmest Color received especially in the US, as opposed to the enthusiasm in Cannes, make it clear that there is still a distinction between the two traditions.

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3.2: Subversion

Linda Williams analyzes two films that have pushed the boundaries between arthouse and Hollywood tradition in her book ‘Screening Sex’, namely Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) and Brokeback Mountain. She concludes:

“we are not, and we can never be, on the same wave-length about the origins of desire, the meaning of castration, the real or fantasmatic witnessing of a primal scene. But in 2005 American audiences encountered a film that powerfully enacted these fantasies in ways that hit home to American audiences, and not just the art house crowd. This is what also happened in 1986 with Blue Velvet. Both Lynch’s small-town mystery of the severed ear and Lee’s vast wilderness of the West brought primal fantasies of sex home to American heartland.” (2008, 257)

Blue is the Warmest Color did just that in 2013, years after Williams wrote on the topic; though banned from most cinema’s, it brought primal fantasies of sex to American spectators. The film continues to push the boundaries between Hollywood and arthouse and is the latest example of the increasingly smaller gap between the two different filmmaking traditions and the way these are received by a bigger audience.

Blue is the Warmest Color’s subversion of those traditional distributions is not limited to the separation between classic Hollywood Cinema and European Arthouse Cinema; it also applies to the separation between Queer Cinema and ‘straight’ films (in other words: all other films that are not ‘queer’). Blue is the Warmest Color, as did Brokeback Mountain, made audiences around the world en masse visit a queer love story, thereby rejecting the idea that queer films are only to be enjoyed by queer audiences.

3.3: Construction of Time

Although Blue is the Warmest Color can be said to blur the boundaries between

Hollywood cinema and arthouse cinema, the film does not uphold classical Hollywood conventions. For example, the construction of time is not linear: in the first part of the film, when Adele is in the second last year of high school, each day seems to follow the previous day. But later on there are big time gaps, only signified by visual or casually

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spoken hints. When Emma shows up at Adele’s school and takes her to a park, Emma’s girlfriend Sabine, with whom she is together for two years, is mentioned. A couple of scenes later Adele and Emma have sex, but it is unclear whether Emma cheats on her girlfriend or already broke up with her. The next scene Adele and Emma are dancing at the gay pride, openly together. This signifies passing of time: Adele has accepted her attraction to a girl and their relationship is not a secret anymore, at least not in the save and accepting environment of the gay community. More leaps of time follow: Adele and Emma visit each other’s parents and Adele celebrates her 18th birthday in the garden of her parental home. The next time gap is signified by Emma’s hair: she is now blonde. Emma makes a drawing of Adele and it becomes clear that they now live together. Adele has become a teacher, so she must at least have finished high school. The further passing of time becomes clear with subtle hints: a dinner party in their garden, where Adele closely monitors Emma flirting with a girl named Lise, a voicemail from Emma to Adele saying she won’t be home until late because she’s working on a project with that same Lise, Adele being seduced and seeking appreciation for who she is by a male colleague. This accumulation of incidents is ultimately followed by a break-up scene in which Emma literally throws Adele out of their house. After that the last day of primary school is shown, Adele visits the seaside in her summer break, and then leaves are falling from the trees: all these scenes indicate the passing of time. Another big time gap follows; Emma and Adele meet at a café after not seeing each other for a very long time. Emma is now with Lise, who was pregnant at the dinner party in the garden but now has a son of three years old. Emma being with Lise hints at the idea that Emma was cheating on Adele all along and found an excuse to throw her out in Adele’s adultery with her male colleague.

And as opposed to Hollywood cinema the film provides no closure to the audience, as a lot of questions stay unanswered. Had it been a Hollywood movie, with an excessively linear storyline, Emma and Adele probably would have lived happily ever after, after working on and eventually overcoming the issues that made them fall apart.

3.4: Performance of Gender

Judith Butler considered gender a performance, not necessarily tied to one’s biological sex. Adele and Emma are both biologically female, but they perform their genders in