The queer circulation of objects in the films of Céline Sciamma

Abstract

The ground-breaking director Céline Sciamma observes that her films are often obsessed with the circulation of objects. This article analyses the forms this circulation takes across Sciamma’s first four films (Naissance des pieuvres, Tomboy, Bande de filles and Portrait de la jeune fille en feu), as well as the significance of the objects themselves. Building on insights offered by scholars who have examined Sciamma’s work as an example of a cinema of feminist embodiment and materiality, this article charts new territory by examining the queer ethics of Sciamma’s cinema not through analysis of bodies and embodiment but through the objects that enable, facilitate and nurture the ‘being-in-the-world’ of those bodies and embodiments. From apple cores to green dresses, chewing gum to necklaces, this article will centre on forms of circulation, transmission and exchange of objects, not as detached, inanimate, post-human things in the world but as objects whose presence and whose circulation between characters serve to bring together marginalised bodies in solidaristic relationships fostered through queer economies of exchange.