“There's never been a movie director like Catherine Breillat, a fearless visionary and one hell of a woman.” – Manohla Dargis, LA Weekly
“The poet laureate of teenage sex.” – J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
“As a citizen, I pay attention to social problems, but as a filmmaker, they don’t interest me. Metaphysics, sentiment and passion are more important to me than the kinds of jobs people do. I don’t make films in order to present a realist vision of society, but rather to track down the truths we are not supposed to see. It’s not realism that interests me, but reality, truth, which is very incorporeal.” – Catherine Breillat
Catherine Breillat is one of the most polarizing figures in contemporary cinema. The French filmmaker and best-selling novelist has consistently walked a willfully precarious line between provocation and pornography, courting censorship and derision as much as she has praise and admiration. While her raunchy reputation rests on a few titles, such as the once-banned Fat Girl (2000) and the sexually explicit Romance (1999), Breillat’s filmography reveals an uncompromising visionary, whose cohesive body of work invariably bristles against societal norms by delving deep into the nether regions of female sexuality. This, Breillat’s first retrospective at the Cinematheque, is an overdue examination of one of the most compelling female filmmakers of our time; fittingly, it coincides with our series on Pasolini, a seminal dissenting voice who paved the way for artists like her to scoff at conformity and rise above their own unpopularity.
Controversial even by French standards, Catherine Breillat has recently declared herself “the pariah of French cinema.” “All true artists are hated,” she continued. “Only conformists are ever adored.” Armed with her outlandish bons mots and encyclopedic intelligence, Breillat has forever been forced to defend her art, almost to the point of exaggeration. Ferociously precocious, she wrote her first novel when she was seventeen-years-old, the lascivious L’Homme facile (A Man for the Taking), which, ironically, was banned to readers under the age of eighteen. Since, her prolific output has regularly shuttled between art forms, from novels and screenplays (for Federico Fellini, Maurice Pialat, Xavier Beauvois, among others) to films. She’s one of the
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