Xim

You’ve known love. Yes. What does it feel like?

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (2019) | dir. Céline Sciamma

One of the most touching things about the film is how you deal with memory in a love story.

It’s a bit the same dynamic: that a love that is lived is a love that’s received. That’s why often in love stories, it’s necessary that relationships end so that we can bring them with us and not leave them in the theater. In the end, the frozen image of a couple walking towards the horizon doesn’t leave us with much. So, it’s the idea that what has been lived can be looked at and can nourish our future loves. I really believe in that, in memory as a dynamic.

- Painting Love: Céline Sciamma Reveals Her Philosophy of Love in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

When you’re observing me, who do you think I’m observing?

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) — dir. Céline Sciamma, cinematography by Claire Mathon

And I’d have told you I was lonely too.

Céline Sciamma and Claire Mathon talk about the bonfire scene 

(Those beautiful Gifs were made by the one and only @bereaving !)

Céline : “This is obviously one of the biggest dreamed scenes of the film, one of the biggest structuring scenes.”

Claire : “I didn’t want to be too realistic, too subjected to the flames. This sequence takes place entirely around the fire but we only see it a little. We put it at the beginning and then we kept this image for the shot of the portrait of the lady on fire. I wanted to make the background exist, to feel the vegetation by giving depth to the image, lighting up the mist. It also allowed me to be less monochromatic, to keep nuances in colors. It was really important for me to keep the warmth without losing nuances in the skin and the costumes.”

“For the light, it is a mix of artificial lights and the light of the fire. The fire was often replaced by gas burners to control the flames. These artificial sources allowed me again to choose the direction of the light on the faces, to keep the softness. Because a flame is a harsh light and created a variation of the light. The flickering of the flames was very present, too present, and prevailed over the expressions of the face.”

Céline : “The first musical scene of the film, a song composed for the film and which would like to be its anthem, and maybe the anthem of something else. The request was polyphony, polyrhythm, a very high BPM that evokes trance. The scene begins in a regular space, and with the idea that ultimately women who gather around a fire to drink and chat is friendship. And that maybe this is what we called witches. And then we summon this imaginary through this field and with the tools of cinema. We really start with a realistic sound, and by the way, these singers sang on set. But quickly too, we are going into a sound mix that is bigger than the scene, and we are not afraid to go there. Because this collective scene also becomes a love stake, and the song of these women accompanies them in the first smile, the first exchange of smile between the two characters after 1 hour and 10 minutes of film.”

“These words are from Latin, it’s a rough translation of Nietzsche that says «The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly » .”

“A desired image, an eponymous image: to literally set the character on fire.”

Claire : “I remember the moment when I felt how much a painting is not a photograph of the moment, but a much freer interpretation despite its realism.”

Click here to see more translated parts of the DVD commentary

from an interview with Céline Sciamma

One of the most touching things about the film is how you deal with memory in a love story.

It’s a bit the same dynamic: that a love that is lived is a love that’s received. That’s why often in love stories, it’s necessary that relationships end so that we can bring them with us and not leave them in the theater. In the end, the frozen image of a couple walking towards the horizon doesn’t leave us with much. So, it’s the idea that what has been lived can be looked at and can nourish our future loves. I really believe in that, in memory as a dynamic.

- Painting Love: Céline Sciamma Reveals Her Philosophy of Love in Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Painter: she put a dirty joke in her portrait just for me! I like getting fingered and I cannot lie/you other sisters

Paintee: oh my god, this orpheus opera is JUST like when I had my first orgasm

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) dir. Céline Sciamma

Take time to look at me. See how my arms are placed… my hands.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) dir. Céline Sciamma

Water Lilies (2008) dir. Céline Sciamma

So then when you decided [to set the lady on fire according to the title]–and it’s crazy because that image that was like really initial and that was like kind of a compass–you still have to make it happen and in a good way, you know. Not like, Oh, I’m cooking now–brrrrrrp!–Oh, I’m on fire! So I had to craft a scene that would involve the fact that she would be set on fire and that it would be about passion, and also that it would be troubling, because in a way it’s also an image of death, because she’s on fire and she’s totally calm and she’s looking like she’s saying, I could go all the way with this fire, which means consume myself for you, but also die. And so there’s a tension that is sentimental, erotic, but also morbid. I wanted that image very badly… - Céline Sciamma, writer/director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, at the Arclight, February 12, 2020

Céline on filming desire in the “look at me” scene. 

(Yo @bereaving​ is the best just sayin’) 

“The film finally sees its central figure, its dreamed figure around which it was articulated and thought: the shot/reverse shot between the model and the painter.”

“The movie plays with the paradox that it’s the painter who says “look at me” and decides to film desire. The desire, the materiality of desire, the confusion, the blow in the stomach.”

“We use cinema to film desire before love.”

Click here to see more translated parts of the DVD commentary

Céline Sciamma bts Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Greta Gerwig bts Lady Bird

Ava DuVernay bts Selma

Lulu Wang bts The Farewell

Nadine Labaki bts Capernaum

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Central to the film is a reclamation of the Orpheus myth, a version of which the three young women read aloud together one night. Sophie registers distress at Orpheus’s fatal, selfish incompetence in looking back at Eurydice when he was told not to, and Marianne suggests he may have done it on purpose, preferring to lose the woman and savor, instead, the romance of his grief, making not “the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.” But it’s Héloïse who removes, for once, the fixation on Orpheus, his failings, and his loss. What if, she says to Marianne with an edge of defiance, it was Eurydice herself who chose art over staying together, who rather than leave the underworld with Orpheus, stopped and called out “Turn around,” preferring to remain down there and be preserved in poetry. A kind of freedom and a kind of permanence, rather than, as eighteenth-century marriage looks to be, an unwilling exchange of one for the other. —  In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Love is a Work of Art