CENSORSHIP HISTORY

* was originally rated NC-17 in the USA for graphic sexuality and nudity (meaning newspapers would refuse to advertise it) but re-rated R on appeal

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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)

NOTE: THIS FILM WAS PROTESTED ON THE BASIS OF HISTORICAL INACCURACY

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Feminism & the Renaissance

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.

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Independence and the Repression of Female Liberation

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.

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The Symbiosis of Female Sexual Awakening, Art & Pornography

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.

This link between art and pornography provides an apt subtext.  An apprentice artist otherwise rather irrelevant to the plot draws and sells pornographic pictures to a rich male clientele.  His purchaser says that it is good that this young man continues to draw pornographic pictures because their appeal does not last, unlike true art.  His drawings are thus paralleled to an early stage in Artemisia’s own development, for comparison and contrast.  There lies the film’s crucial distinction between art and pornography – that art lasts over time but a pornographic image has only a temporary appeal before another image is required to replace it rather than evolve from it.  The pornographic imagination is bound in the moment but when properly harnessed and expressed can spur one to artistic greatness.  Thus, pornography arguably has a purpose in art as a reflection of a form of sexual liberation, however coded for the male gaze it may have originated.  The desire to see sex precipitates a desire to participate in sex and can transform said desires into artistic achievement.  The link between sexual expression and artistic endeavour is common in film but the subtext exploring pornography’s potential role as a stage in freeing the imagination is a problematic for the feminist era. 

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The Rigid Inflexibility of Papal Morality

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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The Controversy Deepens Upon US Release

US distributor Miramax described the film as a "true story". However, it is not. Indeed, it takes such a-historical libertieswith the character Tassi (who in reality raped Artemisia and attempted to brand her a "slut" during the trial) that art historian Mary gerrard and feminist Gloria Steinem launched a protest against the film's campaign of historical mis-information. They established a website and on the film's New York April 28th premiere distributed a "fact sheet" to the audience members. Miramax retracted their claim that the film was based on a true story, while Gerrard and Steinem insisted that they were not arguing with the filmmaker's creative license, only presenting the genuine facts of the case. The fact sheet included the following description:

"NOW THAT YOU'VE SEEN THE FILM, MEET THE REAL ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI...
THE RAPE: In the film, Artemisia Gentileschi and Agostino Tassi are presented as voluntary and passionate lovers. When her father (Orazio Gentileschi) brings Tassi to trial on the charge of rape (to protect his own reputation), Artemisia testifies even when tortured that Tassi did not rape her. Tassi is presented first as a reluctant lover, then as a flawed but noble character who protects Artemisia by accepting the false charge of rape. HISTORY: In the fully documented trial of 1612, Agostino Tassi was charged with and convicted of the rape of Artemisia Gentileschi. He never confessed to the crime, and on the contrary, tried to accuse Artemisia's father of having deflowered her, and to insist she had also written love letters to other men—though she could barely write at the time. Artemisia testified repeatedly under oath and torture that she had been raped by Tassi. She described the event in explicit and graphic detail, and her own resistance to the point of wounding him with a knife. After the rape, Agostino promised to marry Artemisia, which would have been the only socially acceptable remedy in 17th century Italy for a woman who had become "damaged property." She evidently believed him at first (though she came to doubt his intentions) and had reluctant sexual relations with her assailant: "What I was doing with him, I did only so that, as he had dishonored me, he would marry me" (from her rape trial testimony). In reality, Tassi was known as what might now be called a multiple sex offender. He had been sued for raping and impregnating his sister-in-law, equated with incest, and there was testimony at the trial that he had arranged and paid for the murder of his own wife, whom he had also acquired by rape.
THE ARTIST: The theme of the film is that Artemisia's sexual awakening, initiated by Tassi, launched her artistic creativity. Tassi is cast as a guiding creative spirit, whose ability to visualize landscape inspired Artemisia's art. His work is also portrayed as rivaling that of Artemisia's father, Orazio Gentileschi.
HISTORY: Tassi is known for technical skill in perspective and for conventional marine landscapes. Artemisia's art had nothing to do with landscape (she hired other artists to paint the landscape backgrounds in her pictures). Contrary to the film, she never drew or painted independent images of the nude male body. There was no known effect of Tassi's "teaching" on her art, and Tassi's own art is judged to be second rank, no rival for that of Artemisia or her father. Every detail of the historical story has been inverted to produce a romanticized narrative of "true love" between Artemisia and Agostino Tassi, her rapist.... Those who study women's history, who know how fragile the truth about women in history always is, and how vulnerable it is to conflation with female stereotypes, have been and will be outraged by the latest injustice to Artemisia Gentileschi, who has repeatedly been subjected to sexualized explanations of her life and career success."

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USA - DVD PURCHASE Artemisia
UK - DVD PURCHASE Artemisia [2004] [DVD]

NOT CURRENTLY AVAILABLE ON BLU-RAY

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UPDATED: July 28, 2011 8:12 PM