Artemisia (1997)
Miramax DVD (region 1, 4)
d. Agnes Merlet; pr. Patrice Haddad; scr. Agnes Merlet, Christine Miller; ph. Benoit Delhomme; m. Krishna Levy; ed. Guy Lecorne, Danielle Sordoni; cast. Valentina Cervi, Michel Serrault, Miki Manojlovic, Frederic Pierrot (97 mins)
Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi lived from 1593 to 1653 although it was not until the 1970s that her career and artwork were raised to prominence.
Indeed since that period she has attained a high position in the feminist movement. Whatever arguments there are about her works she holds the official position as the first female artist. Although there were certainly other women who painted, Artemisia is the first to have seen financial reward through her art and to be a practicing, paid and commissioned artist the equal of her male peers, however much the Papal patriarchy of her age frowned on her achievements.
Although born in Italy and coming to prominence in the Baroque era, she traveled independently to England to pursue her career.
Her life is thus an example of female liberation in an era of severe, institutionalized male repression of women’s freedom. Director Agnes Merlet’s film biography of Artemisia attracted some controversy from historians who considered the film a distortion and fabrication of much of her early life, particularly her relationship with the painter Tassi, who was charged with raping her. Avoiding much representation of her professional career, the film concentrates on her early life.
In a convent, she peers at her own nude body and draws it, her life drawings angering the nuns but impressing her father, himself a painter, who takes her away to study with him. She becomes fascinated with her father’s partner, Tassi, a man her father considers debauched and amoral. Tassi recognizes her ability and her independence and tutors her, in the process falling in love with this Lolita-esque figure. Unknown to him, she is a virgin and in taking her maiden-head, he causes her pain and she leaves as he apologizes. She returns later and they become lovers. Her father discovers this and has Tassi arrested for rape. The subsequent trial threatens to ruin Artemisia’s independence and reputation.
The film of Artemisia parallels the artist’s emerging talent with her sexual awakening, starting with subtle suggestions of masturbation and ending with her repeated copulation with the libertarian Tassi as they examine drawings.
The aspiration to artistic greatness thus spills over into sexual desire and the liberation from repression. Thus, in feminist terms, it sees a woman’s sexual independence (and her fascination with pornography) as the first stage in her liberation from the dictates of a stern Patriarchy. Indeed, the Catholic Church alone forbade women to paint professionally and expressly forbade them to paint the nude male body – a decree that did not prevent Artemisia from doing so. Her passion for aesthetics and the technical aids to enrich her painting are juxtaposed with her sexual voyeurism as she peers through a brothel window to see the forbidden elements within, increasingly drawn to illicit underground pictures distributed as pornography. Tellingly, after seeing the debauchery of her soon to be mentor she returns home and draws explicit drawings as if the origins of her artistic imagination were a sort of innate pornographic flux.
Still, it is the male in Papal culture who also has the moral impetus and Tassi suffers for his actions when brought to trial. The film depicts a Papal society ultimately unenforceable except through torture.
Women are held as mere objects for the male gaze, naked models paraded before the artist so he can pick the best ones as if they were beasts of burden. In this society, where women are forbidden from expression beyond the sexual (and that hypocritically condemned), the film explores the father’s dilemma as a man who recognizes his daughter’s talents but is aware of the moral hierarchy surrounding her. He tries in vain to protect her, in the process becoming another repressive force. Artemisia must escape the law of the father if she is to thrive and the freedom of the sexual imagination is a necessary stage in the evolution that enables art to transcend social restrictions. The pornographic imagination can play a necessary role in that movement towards freedom and is a shame that the complexity of pornography’s role in the lives of its characters isn’t more prominent.
With a visual style directly evoking the chiaroscuro lighting of Baroque painting, Artemisia is an accomplished biopic which at times it seems to strive for the visual sensibility of Peter Greenaway, and indeed contains a scene where nuns examine the protagonist to determine if she is a virgin that evokes Greenaway’s The Baby of Macon. Sadly, Artemisia never attains the ornateness, daring and controversy necessary for its theme, despite ample nudity and brief brothel activities. It is too soft and lightly titillating. Nevertheless there are studied and telling uses of frames within frames, an interesting look at the development of a fresco, and a self-conscious examination of cinema’s ability to free compositional restrictions through the mobile camera. However, surprisingly little of Artemisia’s actual work features in the film.
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