Studies in French Cinema Volume 5 Number 1 2005 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfci.5.1.

5/1

From nude to metteuse-en-scne: Isabelle Huppert, image and desire in La Dentellire (Goretta, 1977) and La Pianiste (Haneke, 2001)
Bridget Birchall University of Exeter Abstract
Isabelle Hupperts career has yet to be critically examined. This article begins an investigation of Hupperts work, and considers her performance in La Dentellire (Goretta, 1977) and La Pianiste (Haneke, 2001). The terms nude and metteuse-en-scne are used as an analytical framework. They reveal that in her earlier films, such as La Dentellire, Huppert became associated with passivity. The article suggests that in more recent films Huppert moves away from this passivity towards a more controlled performance. The article argues that in La Pianiste, the containing frame of Hupperts body is traversed, and that the hermeneutic seal of the nude is broken. Finally, the article questions to what extent Hupperts challenge to the objectification of the female body is successful and whether La Pianiste correlates with contemporaneous developments in the representation of female desire in French cinema.

Keywords
Isabelle Huppert nude metteuse-en-scne image boundary desire

Her fresh scrubbed face conceals the soul of a streetwalker

(Jean-Luc Godard in OToole 1980: 47)

Godards observation underlines the contradictions that are at the heart of Isabelle Hupperts image on- and off-screen. She is not only one of the most important and prolific French actresses of her generation, but she has also come to embody the contradictory identity of women living in post-1968 France. Despite her importance she remains an underexamined icon of the French film industry. Documentation of Hupperts work is largely restricted to interviews and hagiography, and little critical reflection on her body of work has taken place.1 This study proposes an analysis of her work using the examples of La Dentellire/The Lacemaker (Goretta, 1977) and La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Haneke, 2001). It considers recent changes in representations of female sexuality in French film. It will be argued that the two films under consideration mark a shift from the female form represented as mute portrait or nude,2 to a more complex, yet still problematic, concept of the woman as a metteuse-en-scne 3 of her image and desire. Let us consider what we mean by the nude portrait. The following is an analysis of the nude made by Lynda Nead:

For an example of the work that has been published on Huppert see Ruscart (1989). This study is influenced by Barbara Halpern Martineaus observation that in The Lacemaker Hupperts character is defined almost exclusively by the film in visual terms, as a physical presence, as a nude (Halpern Martineau 1977: 13). Arguably, the term metteuse-en-scne better describes the putting together of a scene, or in the case of our study, putting together ones image and desires, than the term director.

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Huppert also uses this term in her commentary (in French) on The Piano Teacher on the Artificial Eye DVD (2002).

Subjectivity is articulated in terms of spaces and boundaries, of a fixing of the limits of corporeality. [...] The female nude can almost be seen as a metaphor for these processes of separation and ordering, for the formation of self and the spaces of the other. If the female body is defined as lacking containment and issuing filth and pollution from its faltering outlines and broken surface, then the classical forms of art perform a kind of magical regulation of the female body, containing it and momentarily repairing the orifices and tears.
(Nead 1992: 7)

As we shall see this definition of the nude portrait can be applied to Hupperts image in La Dentellire. In contrast with this regulated image, the term metteuse-en-scne will be used to explore her later career and her role in La Pianiste. Huppert herself uses the term metteuse-en-scne to describe her role in La Pianiste. Here she explains her reasons for its use:
In the case of La Pianiste, Michael Haneke talks about control and loss of control, and he was filming a woman who I felt was more identified with the situation of the director. This is a woman who controls her desire, exactly as the director controls his desire and the audiences desire. In the film the woman is not the object of desire, she is the one who wants to control her desire. That is why as a film - Im not even talking about the story - as a film it is interesting because he has changed the status of the actress in the film. That is why the sexual scenes were easier for me to do because I am not set up in the usual situation of being an object of a mans desire, I am the one who controls the desire of the man.
(Observer 2001)

Here Huppert identifies herself with the director, and suggests that she is the author of her desire in La Pianiste. The purpose of this study is, then, to ask if La Pianiste moves away from the classical representations of the female form and desire that feature in La Dentellire, towards a more empowered image of woman as the author of desire. However, as I shall argue, within Hupperts body of work, the womans trajectory from objectof-image to director-of-image has not yet been achieved, and that her status as subject, as manifest in La Pianiste, remains frustratingly problematic. La Dentellire represents her first major success and is largely considered, both by critics and Huppert herself, as a pivotal moment in her career (Ruscart 1989: 52; De Comes and Marmin 1985: 148; Garbarz and Tobin 2002: 41). The film follows Batrice (Huppert), an innocent 19year-old who works in a Parisian hairdressers. On a seaside holiday to Normandy with her older, more extrovert friend Marylne (Florence Giorgetti), she meets Franois (Yves Beneyton). Franois is an uppermiddle-class student from Paris who represents all that Batrice is not. They are separated by gender, class and education. Despite this, they move in together, but Franois soon becomes frustrated with their differences and ends the relationship. Unable to cope with her loss, Batrice falls apart and is placed in a mental institution.

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Arguably, La Pianiste has had an equal, yet contrastive, impact on Hupperts career. La Pianiste revolves around the frustrated desires of Erika (Huppert), a piano teacher in Viennas conservatoire. Erika lives with her mother (Annie Girardot), and is suffocated by their claustrophobic relationship. Secretly, Erika consumes pornography and engages in voyeuristic pleasures. She embarks upon an affair with one of her students, Walter (Benot Magimel), but he is reluctant to comply with her masochistic desires. The relationship soon spirals violently out of control, damaging both parties. La Pianiste caused enormous controversy when it opened the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. The controversy originated in the films portrayal of self-mutilation, rape, pornography and battery. Despite their obvious differences, La Pianiste and La Dentellire do, however, share similar themes. These themes are represented in contrasting ways by Hupperts performance and by the films respective directors. They also reveal the contradictions inherent to Hupperts work, her on-screen sexuality, and the progression she has made as an actress, contradictions which we will now investigate. The portrayal of Hupperts body in the two films can be read as a power struggle between Huppert as object and Huppert as metteuse-en-scene of her image. This power struggle is identifiable in the way in which the two directors choose to frame Huppert. The close-up (and to a certain extent the medium shot) manifests this struggle. In certain contexts, these shots can be considered as forms of portraiture, and can therefore be seen as a development of our argument for portraiture as a means of controlling the image. It is worth considering ORawes definition of the close-up in order to contextualize this point:
[The] Close-up is traditionally regarded in film theory as both framing the star, and as giving an illusion of unmediated access to the characters emotions, an effect of transparency, of congruence between image and essence. Richard Dyer refers to it as disclosing for us the stars face, the intimate, transparent window to the soul.
(ORawe 2003: 17)

Barthes has discussed the myth of Garbo with particular reference to her facial features (Barthes 1993: 56-57).

The close-up can therefore enforce a subjective reading of the stars image and identity, thus diminishing the stars capacity to control the image themselves. Furthermore, it enables the film-maker to naturalize the image, whereby spectators are duped into thinking that they are seeing the essence of the actress. The use of the close-up can, therefore, be read as a means of containing and mythologizing 4 the actress, and, in its control, pertains to a classical notion of the nude portrait. In La Dentellire, it will be argued, the close-up expresses the previously mentioned power struggle between actress and director. The close-up is used repeatedly by Goretta and allows him to remain in control of Hupperts image. However, other arguments have been put forward regarding Gorettas choice of framing. Parker suggests in her review of La Dentellire that Gorettas use of the close-up subverts traditional representations of the woman:

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Goretta focuses on her face in a number of close-ups [...] and captures its opaque quality: her expression is private, unlike Marilyns succession of flashing signs [...] The film respects her opacity, and for once we see a woman on the screen who is not engaged in presenting a series of conventional signs [...] which [...] reinforce the depressing assumption that a woman exists only in relation to others, having less a character than a series of codes.
(Parker 1978: 52)

Although Parkers assessment of traditional narrative cinemas portrayal of the woman is an accurate assertion, it underplays how didactic Gorettas close-up is, particularly when implemented with the opaque quality manifested by Huppert in this sequence. In reality, Gorettas choice of shots renders Huppert and her character simultaneously mythic and controlled, therefore perpetuating myths that surround the images of women. If we follow Mulveys analysis of the portrayal of women in film, it could be argued that Gorettas close-up acts as a fetishistic image. We could argue that via the close-up Goretta attempts to demystify Huppert (by fixing/posing the look). Moreover, by repeating this choice of shot, in the words of Laura Mulvey, he turns the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence overvaluation, the cult of the female star) (Mulvey 1990: 35). The closing shot of La Dentellire is the most pertinent example of this means of control. As Batrice sits knitting in the sanatorium, she turns and looks directly at the camera for a sustained period. It is of course important to note that Huppert is at this moment returning the gaze of the camera and therefore arguably the gaze of the spectator. However, any power that her gaze might have is emptied by the obvious mental and physical instability of the character, and more importantly by the fact that we do not see what she is looking at. Furthermore, it is ultimately Goretta who enunciates the image with his postscript. We are left with the following words that act as a critical comment on those who ignore the likes of Batrice, therefore revering Gorettas position as the all-seeing auteur:
He passed her by, very close without seeing her. Because she was one of those souls who makes no sign, but who must be patiently sought, whom one must know how to see. In bygone days an artist would have seen her as the subject of a genre painting. She would have been a seamstress, a water carrier or a lacemaker.

The emphasis on looking (the French phrase used is poser le regard, meaning to place or to apply the look) is telling. Instead of choosing to listen to Batrice and the people he maintains are ignored by society, Goretta implies that Batrices value, her meaning, can only be ascertained by looking. What this does is inscribe Batrice as object of the gaze, of a look; it refuses the idea of a fluid image and renders her inanimate. The phrase poser le regard connotes voyeurism and regulation via the gaze; another means of controlling the image (the woman) (Mulvey 1990: 35). Lastly, it locates Batrice within the medium of painting and portrai-

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ture. This idea is synthesized by an earlier sequence where an artist sketches Franois and Batrice, as they sit in a locale that Franois compares to a Renoir painting. Though the painter chooses to paint them both, we are given the impression that the incident resonates more with Batrice, since this scene is followed by Batrice contemplating her image in the mirror in juxtaposition with the sketch. It is implied here that by recognizing her face in the sketch, she thus recognizes her own image in the mirror. Consequently, the painter (observer and placer of the look) becomes the enunciator of her image. It is equally important to note that Batrice chooses the picture with both her and Franoiss image, therefore aligning her recognition of her identity with her union with him. The look that Huppert (or more pertinently Goretta) assumes in the final shot of the film has become emblematic of Hupperts early film career. She became associated with opaque and passive performances reminiscent of La Dentellire (De Comes and Marmin 1985: 148). In Cactus (Cox, 1986), Cox repeatedly uses close-up shots of Huppert. He films her examining her scarred face in the mirror, a device that duplicates Hupperts image and creates a mise en abyme of her star persona. The replication of Hupperts image justifies Coxs choice of image to the spectator. We notice that there are never any point-of-view shots of Huppert looking at her reflection, and that the camera is generally positioned behind her shoulder. This distances her from the enunciation of her image, but asserts the power of the director and the spectators vision of Huppert as object-image (the mirror frames Huppert so that the spectator can enjoy the framed image/portrait). Huppert herself admitted in an interview in 1994 that this image followed her career for many years, underlining how an actor/actress can become typecast:
For a long time, you are followed by the first image, by the first role that brought you success and it hangs like a weight around your neck for years. For me it was in effect The Lacemaker. After that I had to do three or four films in a certain mode of interior expression and about silence, hardly anything more [...]. Before, I emitted an enormous amount of passivity which the directors took advantage of completely. I have gone towards something more rebellious, and I now wish to express this revolt in my compositions.
(Parra 1995: 18)

Through her film Coup de foudre/At first sight (Kurys, 1984) Diane Kurys also expressed her desire to implement a change in Hupperts passive performances, having been troubled by Hupperts image in La Dentellire. The film allowed Huppert to begin to break away from previous roles. Kurys stated that I was bothered by the weak, closed, suffering Isabelle of The Lacemaker [...]. It was time for her to change and she was conscious of that and happy to accept the role (Yakir 1984: 66).

Hupperts comments exemplify the way that directors had previously propagated her passivity and controlled her image,5 and they suggest that her early images are comparable with the nude portrait, a form of image that is defined by its containment (Nead 1992: 6-7). However, in this quotation Huppert also expresses her desire to revolt. Hupperts use of the words compositions and revolt suggests that she now believes that she is actively involved in the framing or construction of her image, indeed a counter-image (revolt). Moreover, in this notion of composition she is clearly associating herself with the function of a director or metteuse-enscne.

From nude to metteuse-en-scne...

Halpern Martineau draws our attention to this scene in her analysis of the nude female body in The Lacemaker (1977: 13).

La Pianiste demonstrates Hupperts developing status as a metteuse-enscne. This next section will discuss the use of framing and the articulation of female desire within the film. In doing so, this discussion will assess how the portrayal of women as a fixed image has moved on (to an extent) from 1977. In the last scene of La Pianiste Erika is due to stand in for one of her pupils at a concert at the conservatoire. In a Hitchcockian sequence of suspense Erika attempts to take her own life and fails. The penultimate shot is of her grimacing face as she drives a knife into her chest. Instead of ending, as we might expect, with a close-up of her pained face, Haneke chooses to end the film on a more ambivalent note, with a wide-angled long shot of Erika leaving the concert hall. She moves awkwardly towards a destination that the spectator is not privy to, since the camera does not track her movement. Therefore, unlike the end of La Dentellire (and in the numerous instances in the film where Huppert is observed and tracked by the camera), the star escapes the frame and is not captured. Hupperts body escapes the frame in other ways too, further distancing her from the nude portraiture of La Dentellire. La Pianiste subverts the nude by rarely showing the female body in its naked form. Despite the verbally graphic content of the film, we rarely see explicit nudity. Any conventional source of pleasure is undermined by Hanekes portrayal of this nakedness. In the penultimate sequence of the film when Erika is raped, her beaten body is framed in a mid-shot. Hupperts beaten and bloody form is a stark contrast to the venerated nudity of La Dentellire. This scene is consistent with the films visual references to Erikas bodily functions (bleeding, urine, and vomit), thus breaking the seamlessness of the nude. By contrast, in La Dentellire Goretta presents Hupperts body in the same way a painter would a nude portrait. Her body is seamless, and white. This is illustrated when, towards the end of their relationship, Batrice offers herself sexually to Franois, only to be rejected. Batrice, who is naked, approaches Franois, who is standing clothed with his back to Batrice and the camera, looking out of the window of their studio. Batrices white body contrasts against the night sky and Franoiss dark clothes.6 The composition used by Goretta here recalls the paintings of the nineteenthcentury artist Edouard Manet. In Olympia (1865) and Le Djeuner sur lherbe/Picnic on the grass (1863), Manet uses dark backgrounds to contrast with the white female nude body. This is particularly clear in Le Djeuner sur lherbe where the male subjects of the painting are fully clothed in dark suits, whereas the women sit alongside them in pale nudity. In this scene then, Batrice is once again reduced to the corporeality of the nude. The fetishization of Batrices nude body is compounded by her lack of verbal expression. In La Pianiste, Haneke frequently uses the close-up (like Goretta) to express the agony of Erikas experience. However, unlike Goretta, Haneke uses this as a means of subverting the spectators identification with the stars image. Countering our expectations, Haneke regularly uses a closeup of the back of Hupperts head. The enunciation of the image relies less on the spectators image memory bank of learned knowledge related to Hupperts face, and more on the immediacy of her performance. When he does use a frontal shot, it is often through the use of a mid-shot and via

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Hupperts performance; our eye is often drawn away from her face to other parts of her body. At Walters audition, we watch Erikas increasing tension as she hears Walter play. Though her face appears somewhat tense, the most significant amount of tension can be read in Hupperts hand that she slowly opens and closes. The complexity of this performance moves away from the face-centric performances of her early career like Cactus and La Dentellire. A second example is worth exploring here. In an act of jealousy, Erika places broken glass in the coat pocket of one of her pupils whilst she rehearses upstairs in the conservatoire. Haneke uses the back-of-headshot to powerful effect. According to screen conventions, in a scene like this (one of enormous introspective tension and dilemma on the part of the character), the spectator expects a frontal close-up. Instead, the experience of the character is conveyed without the privilege of the frontal shot. On one level this asserts Hanekes status as an authorial force; as a director he is famous for his distancing techniques, exemplified in Funny Games (Haneke, 1997). However, if we take a closer look at Hupperts performance we see that a reading of this image is not as simple as it may first appear, and Hanekes status as the central producer of meaning becomes ambivalent, a point to which we shall return. Hupperts ability to perform introspective tension without the subjective use of close-up is exemplified in another scene where Haneke chooses to film her back instead of her face. As Erika awaits the arrival of Walter in the rehearsal room, she eats a sandwich. Despite the apparent anonymity of shooting an actress from the back, and the banality of the action, the spectator is given an overwhelming sense of the tension building inside Erika. Hupperts posture and her evident stiffness, reveal the complexity of her own performance technique (particularly when seen in contrast to Walter, who is apparently blas). This power, added to the already mentioned subversion of the close-up disturb Hupperts previous relationship with passive close-ups, and move her closer to the role of metteuse-en-scne. Within this context it is useful to consider Combss review of Hupperts acting in the film:
Isabelle Huppert, in probably Hanekes first star performance (Juliette Binoche in Code Unknown [2000] only partially excepted), now commands an extraordinary expressive range through features that seem as placid (passive?) as ever. In barely perceptible but frightening ways, they will tighten into a rictus, whether to dole out punishment to her pupils at the piano or to vent her ultimate anger on herself.
(Combs 2002: 27)

Though Combs notes here that her features seem as placid (passive?) as ever he recognizes that the powerful interpretation Huppert delivers in La Pianiste illustrates a development of performance style. Arguably, it is the complexity of this performance that troubles traditional representations of the female body. We have considered how her performance, combined with Hanekes choice of shots and composition, contravene conventional cinematic codes

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and work against the opacity of Hupperts performance in La Dentellire. It is now important to develop this further and question Hupperts assertion that, in the expression of desire, her role as an actress can be compared to that of a director. If this assertion proves valid then La Pianiste would represent a contravention of conventional representations of visual pleasure and female sexuality on screen. The principal visual pleasures of classical narrative cinema (scopophilia and narcissism) (Mulvey 1990: 30-32) are, to an extent, inverted in La Pianiste. First, the gaze is diverted away from the star image (Huppert), and instead fixated on others (often men). Erika, in ways we shall proceed to explore, identifies through her actions with the traditional role and agency of the male protagonist. She engages in a series of voyeuristic acts, and voyeurism is also implicit to her relationship with Walter. She follows him to the ice rink, and watches him play ice hockey from the sidelines. Furthermore, we frequently see her observing him whilst he plays the piano (the recital, the audition). In this scenario, the man becomes the performing spectacle (as opposed to the female star). Erika frequents a sex shop where she pays to watch pornographic images in a multi-screened viewing booth. This act allows her to do several things. First, it permits her to choose the image she watches (there are four screens). This aligns her not only with the male protagonist, but also with the director, who, through the mise-en-scne, chooses what we the spectators see. Moreover, it inverts the accepted link between womansex-money, since it is now the woman who pays (instead of being paid) to watch sex. Her use of pornography could be seen as a source of power in another way as well. Some critics have argued that pornography can be an empowering sexual experience for women. Informed by interviews she conducted with women who use pornography, Loach argues the following:
Pornography has its uses: it may reinforce traditional sexuality, but it apparently overturns it too. [...] It gave them [female pornography users] power; pornography wasnt in itself a means of gratification, but it was a necessary help towards it. By releasing themselves from what they described as taboos, they have become sexually erudite about things which for many still remain hidden as a set of disturbed, inchoate emotions.
(Loach 1993: 270)

Pornography, then, can arguably be seen as a means of access to sexual power structures previously off-limits to women. Thus, in La Pianiste we see that power structures, within and without the text, are destabilized, and Huppert is positioned more and more as the metteuse-en-scne of desire. The second incident of voyeurism that can be cited as an example of Erikas agency within the film occurs at the drive-in. Erika moves through the parked cars until she sees something that attracts her eye/gaze. She spots a couple having sex on the back seat of a car and urinates in order to arouse her self. She is spotted and runs off. The incident reveals two things. First, it once again positions Erika as the agent of the gaze. It is she

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who chooses what we see, and therefore controls the image (in the same way that a director would). Second, by showing a female urinating in this way, the image of the woman as pure and hermetically sealed, like the nude which regulates the female body through containment, is broken.7 Within La Pianiste the third incident that is pertinent to this question of agency, though not Erikas voyeurism, is her self-mutilation. As a form of misplaced control Erika, using a mirror, cuts her labia. However, unlike Gorettas use of the mirror in La Dentellire, the audience does not see her reflection. Huppert is the only one who sees the image, therefore privileging her gaze. Despite her apparent control, however, this scene highlights some of the problems that still exist with portrayals of female desire, and with the notion of Huppert as metteuse-en-scne. Though Huppert is not objectified in this scene, the composition of the frame is very much controlled by Haneke. By using a medium long shot of Huppert in this scene, Haneke distances the spectator from Hupperts star persona, and simultaneously positions the spectator in the role of voyeur. Consequently, the classical function of the cinematic gaze (male director as the all-seeing eye that we identify with) is reinscribed. The spectator is again positioned as voyeur during the ice-rink scene. In a desperate attempt to get back Walter, Erika performs fellatio with Walter on top of her in the changing room. Although we are clearly placed in the position of the controlling voyeur, our view is partially obscured by a coat rail, thus displacing our gaze. When Huppert gags and vomits, visual control is troubled further. The containment of the gaze and the supposed object (Hupperts body) is broken, destroying the illusion of the hermetically sealed female nude. Furthermore, the fixing of the female body, through the structure of gazes within classical narrative cinema is destabilized. The scene confirms, therefore, the absence of an all-powerful singular gaze within the film, since all three viewing positions coexist. The ice-rink scene demonstrates an apparent overvaluation of the phallus evident throughout the film. The sex scenes that occur between her and Walter are all focused on the penis and her desire to control and manipulate it. Her need or wish for the phallus reveals her wish to control her life.8 Her desire for the phallus arguably undermines Hupperts position as a female metteuse-en-scne of desire, and places her in the traditionally female position of lack (desiring what one does not have - the phallus). By emphasizing her lack, her difference is reinforced and the gender-subverting content of the rest of the film (her voyeurism, agency and use of pornography) is undermined. This aligns Hupperts role in La Pianiste with earlier films in her career, such as La Dentellire, where she is portrayed as submissive and other to the male. The desire for the phallus correlates with Erikas simultaneous desire for an abusive relationship, and the mutilation of her own sexual organ. It contradicts the possible agency offered by pornography in that through her fantasies she perpetuates the patriarchal power structure (of woman submissive to man) that exists within mainstream pornography. What we see therefore is not a woman in control, manipulating existing power structures and becoming a metteuse-en-scne of desire, but instead someone who falls victim to structures she cannot be a part of.

The representation of Erikas sexuality in these scenes can be situated within a wider trend of contemporary French cinema. Critics have observed that more and more films portray graphic sex scenes. Moreover, these films often activate the female gaze, as is the case in Catherine Breillats ma sur/Fat girl (Breillat, 2001). In Breillats film, like La Pianiste, voyeurism becomes an activity that the women engage in. For critical commentary of this trend see Vincendeau (2001), Phillips (2001) and James (2001). Phillips argues that in Romance (Breillat, 1999), the female protagonist is similarly (at least at the beginning of the film), desirous of the phallus: The camera, the spectator and Marie herself look for the missing phallus as antidote to the castration threat posed, above all, by her biological identity as a woman (Phillips 2001: 135).

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Hupperts position is therefore contradictory: she may be engaged in a sadistic relationship with the phallus, yet her dependency on it undermines the idea that she has full agency. At the beginning of the film we see Erika as an individual agent attempting to enter the system of desire. At this stage she lives in a controlled, contained world manifested in the flat she shares with her mother, her teaching room and, although it is a completely different realm of desire, the pornography booth. At this point we can see that Erika is perhaps the metteuse-en-scne that Huppert describes. However, as she gradually lets Walter into her life, and enters into the patriarchal system of desire, she loses control. This is manifest in the changes to her costume and hair; as her relationship with Walter progresses her clothes become more and more garish and less and less restricted. The final rape scene cements her derailment when she is punished for her sexual deviance and her inability to treat a man, according to Walter, as he should be treated. Erikas inability to enter into this system of desire is then analogous with Batrices own inability to enter into the patriarchal system in La Dentellire. In both films, the mise-en-scne allows the respective directors to control Hupperts performance, and position her as lacking. However, as we have shown, Hupperts performance in La Pianiste allows her to achieve a more controlled position than her role in La Dentellire. As this study has attempted to demonstrate, Huppert emerges in the twenty-first century as a more powerful performer than that of the 1970s. The sophistication of her later performances and her contribution to the wave of films that attempt to push the boundaries of female sexuality, suggest a move towards this term metteuse-en-scne that she attempts to appropriate. However, as we have demonstrated in our analysis of La Pianiste, this appropriation is never complete, problematized by the contradictory implementation of the gaze and the concomitant authorial control exerted by Haneke. References
Barthes, R. (1993), Mythologies, London, Sydney, Auckland and Parktown: Vintage. Combs, R. (2002), Living in Never-Never Land, Film Comment, 38: 2, pp. 26-28. De Comes, P. and Marmin, M. (1985), Le Cinma Franais 1960-1985, Paris: ditions Atlas. Fraisse, P. (2002), Toutes nues!, Positif, 495, pp. 13-16. Garbarz, F. and Tobin, Y. (2002), Isabelle Huppert: le cinma: cest le rythme, Positif, 495, pp. 41-47. Halpern Martineau, B. (1977), The Lacemaker vs. Free Breathing, Jump Cut, 19, pp. 12-14. James, N. (2001), Interview with Catherine Breillat, Sight and Sound, 11: 12, p. 20. Loach, L. (1993), Bad Girls: women who use pornography, Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate (eds L. Segal and M. McIntosh), New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 266-74. Mulvey, L. (1990), Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema, Issues in Feminist Film Criticism (ed. P. Erens), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 28-40.

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Nead, L. (1992), Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, London and New York: Routledge. Observer, The (2001), Regus London Film Festival Interviews 2001: Isabelle Huppert, 11 November 2001, http://film.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4297640,00.html. Accessed 6 November 2002. ORawe, C. (2003), Pirandello, Garbo and Hollywood: from Come tu mi vuoi to As You Desire Me, paper given at the University of Exeters CRIFSs seminar, 7 March 2003. OToole, L. (1980), Huppert Girl, Film Comment, 16: 5, pp. 45-47. Parker, G. (1978), The Lacemaker, Film Quarterly, 32: 1, pp. 51-55. Parra, D. (1995), Isabelle Huppert...toujours changer..., Revue du Cinma, 404, pp. 17-20. Phillips, J. (2001), Catherine Breillats Romance: hard core and the female gaze, Studies in French Cinema, 1: 3, pp. 133-49. Ruscart, M. (1989), Isabelle vue par..., Quimper: Calligrammes. Tarr, C. (1999), Diane Kurys, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Vincendeau, G. (2001), Sisters, sex and sitcom, Sight and Sound, 11: 12, pp. 18-20. Yakir, D. (1984), Mlle Kurys, Film Comment, 20: 2, pp. 65-69.

Suggested Citation
Birchall, B. (2005), From nude to metteuse-en-scne: Isabelle Huppert, image and desire in La Dentellire (Goretta, 1977) and La Pianiste (Haneke, 2001), Studies in French Cinema 5: 1, pp. 515, doi: 10.1386/sfci.5.1.5/1

Contributor Details
Bridget Birchall is currently researching a Ph.D. on French film and the family between 1974 and 1981. She teaches French and European cinema at the University of Exeter. Contact: Film Studies, School of Modern Languages, University of Exeter, The Queens Building, The Queens Drive, Exeter, EX4 4QJ E-mail: b.m.birchall@ex.ac.uk.

From nude to metteuse-en-scne...

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