There is no other director who has so boldly and audaciously explored female sexuality on screen than Catherine Breillat. A notable novelist and screenwriter, cowriting films with contemporary Italian and French auteurs Liliana Cavani, Maurice Pialat, and Marco Bellocchio, as well as an acting career which began with Bertolucci’s legendarily incendiary "Last Tango in Paris", hers is a singular artistic and intellectual contribution to late 20th and early 21st century cinema. Exploring her influences in interview with Senses of Cinema "Hell’s Angels: An Interview with Catherine Breillat", the director exclaiming "I Love Blood. It's in All My Films", revealing an unexpected affinity with the body-as-subject seen in the films of David Cronenberg. Breillat's art also belongs to a brand of existentialism discussed in The Telegraph's "Catherine Breillat: 'All True Artists are Hated''", Senses of Cinema's "The Way We are Looked at Transforms Us", and "'To Be an Artist is To Be Alone'” for IndieWire, as well as asserting life through eruptive physicality, a theme which she shares with novelist Virginie Despentes and her contemporaries, Claire Denis, Marina de Van, Bruno Dumont, Diane Bertrand, Philippe Grandrieux, Leos Carax and François Ozon in the cinéma du corps movement. All of the above are considered offshoots from the larger New French Extremity of the late 1990s and millennial cusp, a term coined by James Quandt in his zeitgeist-channeling feature for Artforum, "Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema". Though they mixed and accentuated these through varied ways and perspectives, the work of the directors in this movement share the narrative commonality of psychological struggles with profound inner urges, that were bracketed by the implications, or lack of, behind sexual encounters. Taking the form of the destruction and subsequent construction of new identities through violent catharsis, which would often reveal a relationship to gender, political, or class roles, or constraints therein being unbound.
In both the New York Times, "Sex and Power: The Provocative Explorations of Catherine Breillat", and Film Comment's "A Matter of Skin: Catherine Breillat's Metaphysics of Film and Flesh", the director's uncommonly attuned pursuit of exploring questions of intimacy and desire are detailed, in which she remains one of the great provocateurs of modern cinema. On initial release her films were met with great controversy, and have found both new audiences and new opposition to her art in recent years. So it is a perspective that offers a bold vision of modern programming that would put together a retrospective like Lincoln Center's "Carnal Knowledge: The Films of Catherine Breillat" of earlier this summer. Following on the heels of the new restorations by Janus Films, Seattle's own The Grand Illusion Cinema has taken up the baton from Lincoln Center and assembled its own, "Un Bouquet de Breillat". The retrospective offers an ideal "bouquet" of selections spanning the 50 year career of an artist who's hypnotic and constantly surprising storytelling pushes cinema into the realm of sensorial philosophy. These works have unflinchingly, and unapologetically depicted, dissected and condemned the plight of their female subjects as they pull against the forces of societal and patriarchal control, on a trajectory towards liberty and profound self-actualization. Spanning decades of criticism and writing in Breillat's contribution to French cinema, Film Comment has also hosted some of her more significant interviews. Both from the last decade, "Power, Seduction, and Lies": Breillat speaks about Color, Love, and Working with Kool Shen in Abuse of Weakness", and more recently, "Love in the Afternoon": The French Filmmaker Discusses her Return to Cinema, the Productive Tension Between Realism and Expressionism, and the Art of the Sex Scene", as part of this year's retrospective and the US premiere of her newest film, "Last Summer". Which The New Yorker's Richard Brody called a "Ferocious Vision of Sexual Frenzy", and the director's long delayed return to work and artistic self-renewal.
