The Black Female Body as an Identity Battlefield: Céline Sciamma's Girlhood

Abstract

Introduction and Objective. In October 2014, Girlhood, from the filmmaker and screenwiter Céline Sciamma, was released in its country of origin, France. The filmmaker’s third feature film poses a discourse, unusual in the contemporary Euro-American paradigm, on the ability of black women to assert themselves as subjects of desire, opposing head-on the common determinism in current film production. Methodology. Film Analysis and Cultural Studies, especially queer theory, serve to approach the cinematographic and philosophical keys of the film. Results. Through narrative and aesthetic strategies, and drawing on both identity politics and queer theory, Sciamma imagines a heroine, Mariem, capable of dismantling the different expectations that her family and society have placed on her. Conclusions and Contributions. In terms of filmmaking and editing, the way Sciamma chooses to film Mariem in different contexts of her life serves to question the genealogy of black colonial film representation and, at the same time, to imagine a politics of the female black body on screen, in opposition to the current paradigm in contemporary movies.