There are certain reverent labels attached to great artists that have historically, in use and by association, foregrounded the work of men: the genius, the auteur, and – as argued in Dr Janice Loreck’s latest book – the provocateur. In Loreck’s formulation, the cinematic provocateur (or less generously, the “rabble-rouser”) is one whose work invites the spectatorial experience of provocation, an “author-recipient relation” characterised by unwanted negative emotions or affects (p. 5). A powerful response is goaded by what the audience perceives as an authorial action, leading to discomfort, shock, or disgust. The provocateur is a persona and a project: consider Luis Buñuel, Gaspar Noé, Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke.

Identifying an increased visibility of the provocateur figure following from the French New Extremity of the late 90s to early 2000s, Provocations in Women’s Filmmaking is concerned with the post-millennium narrative art cinema circuit. Here, Loreck argues the provocateur is frequently associated with “scopic offence” and obscenity in works that intentionally deny audience enjoyment, acting upon or challenging a “passive and therefore symbolically feminised spectator” (p. 3). Loreck argues that these culturally masculinised characteristics have typically excluded women from the provocateur label. Even when handling subversive material, women’s films are more likely to be evaluated by critics with descriptors like “tasteful” or “humanist,” thereby minimising the transgressive elements of their work. Proceeding from this observation, Provocations not only offers a list of provocative female directors but persuasively argues that prioritising the varied provocations of their works – the indecent, corrupt, or contentious – offers a productive framework for considering their larger artistic projects.

What makes Loreck’s project fascinating, however, is that she expresses no particular reverence for provocateurs as an authorial class, at least in a traditional sense. Loreck seems interested in such a cultural position insofar as the label’s obvious exclusions necessitate its expansion. The “provocateur” is a useful organising reference for the far more stimulating conversations to be had regarding the creation and reception of difficult, discomfiting films by women – how female directors’ public personas are co-constructed by film scholarship and criticism, the kinds of spectatorial experiences they incite, and the political considerations they demand. This is an enduring interest for Loreck, whose previous book, Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema,1 looked at aberrant femininity via representations of homicidal women.

At a time when much is being said about the sexlessness and risk-aversion of the modern film industry, Loreck’s exploration of confronting, divisive cinema is a welcome intervention. In line with art history scholars, Loreck’s introduction links provocation to avant-garde art; in sharp contrast to the uncomplicated pleasures associated with mass entertainment, avant-garde and provocative works often seek to offend dominant, bourgeois sensibilities by toying with extremity and taboo, disrupting notions of “good taste” or moral safety. In the specific realm of art cinema, Provocations does little to distinguish between the kinds of challenging works often embraced by prestige institutions such as major festivals – bourgeois spheres and sites of cultural legitimisation that they are2 – and those that might be deemed too confronting or unartful for their (presumed) discerning patrons. Though festival walkouts and outcries are noted in select case studies, it is largely the writings of critics and scholars, positive and negative, that locate controversy and the experience of provocation throughout the book.

Innocence

Loreck’s book is well-researched and often compellingly argued. Each of the six chapters takes up either a theme or filmmaker as a case study with which to present a new angle onto women’s techniques of provocation, often in direct contrast to those found in male-dominated scholarship. With an auteurist emphasis on the sensibilities and reception of each filmmaker, the book examines how they might play into or resist an inflammatory persona. Directors may employ more traditional “provocative” approaches like Catherine Breillat, Jennifer Kent and Isabella Eklöf; ambiguously sensuous aesthetics like Lisa Aschan, Lucile Hadžihalilović, and Claire Denis; or more heightened styles such as absurdity and (perceived) irony, as in the work of Athina Rachel Tsangari and Anna Biller respectively. Each chapter is also framed by its own distinct theoretical grounding, which reinforces the multitude of transgressive strategies at play and refuses a collapse into any generalised notion or understanding of “women’s filmmaking.” Loreck acknowledges the fraught nature of applying auteur theory here but defends its use by declaring that the audience of a provocation usually seeks an agitator to hold responsible for their displeasure; as a consequence, the director’s presence is constructed or implied in some part by the provocation itself (intentionally or otherwise).

Provocations’ case studies begin smartly with Breillat, the most renowned agitator in women’s art cinema. Placing the work of the French “art-porn” auteur in conversation with Aschan’s Apflickorna (She Monkeys, 2011), Loreck details two vastly different aesthetic approaches to depicting women’s sexuality on-screen: the realm of the obscene in Breillat, and that of the tonal and suggestive in Aschan. In Anatomie de l’enfer (Anatomy of Hell, 2004), Breillat’s strategies include integrating visual art references into explicit scenes of the female body, infusing “vulgar” images with highbrow resonances and thrusting them into view. Aschan, showing very little, instead draws the viewer into “sensuous identification” (p. 39) with her teenage female protagonists through a vividly tactile world. The girls’ relationship is an ambiguous mix of friendship, eroticism, and cruelty, and the audience becomes affectively entangled within this complicated dynamic such that experiences of queer desire become inextricable from pain and aggression.

The contrast Loreck provides between these two approaches to sexuality is apt, though the useful counterpoint of the examples also feels, at times, taken for granted. Loreck recognises that there seems to be no “art-porn provocateur of female queerness” (p. 37) on the narrative art cinema circuit engaged in a similar project to Breillat, that of “inoculating” the viewer with explicit sexual imagery. And yet, in our era of the restrained lesbian period drama (prevalent enough to be parodied on Saturday Night Live3), Loreck does not express much curiosity as to the kinds of industry and audience factors that might underpin such an absence, beyond a reference to “heteronormative economies of looking” (p. 40). Though the book’s reading of She Monkeys is strong, informed by existing analyses by Katharina Lindner4 and Clara Bradbury-Rance,5 one must also note the lack of queer theory cited in this section which nevertheless identifies Aschan’s formal approach as inherently queer. While Lindner and Bradbury-Rance’s own readings of the film are informed by queer theorists like Sarah Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, such frameworks are not named or added to in Provocations; it becomes analysis derived from other analysis, with central theories like Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology absorbed yet dislocated.

She Monkeys

A superb section follows, which links a B-plot of latent child sexuality in She Monkeys to Breillat’s protagonist, Anaïs, in À ma sœur (Fat Girl, 2001). Both films provocatively recognise these characters as marked by gendered sexuality despite their youth. Here, Loreck usefully coins the term “girl shame” (in conversation with Lisa French’s “girlshine”6) to describe the awkward pre-adolescent period in which girls feel both subject to the cultural codes of adult femininity yet simultaneously alienated from them – a disempowered corporeal position in which girls come to realise that their bodies and their symbolic meanings “are not their own to shape but are subject to the gaze, judgement, and shaming of others” (p. 45).

For the most part, the greatest pleasure of Provocations is Loreck’s close analysis, which is consistently detailed and evocative. This is no more evident than in the second chapter on “excessive” depictions of rape that “demand lengthy and intense witnessing” (p. 53) from audiences. A particularly astute description of the formal characteristics of such a sequence in Eklöf’s Holiday (2018), with its dual “affecting and estranging strategies” (p. 64), is contrasted with the more “anti-voyeuristic, empathetic positioning” (p. 69) of rape victims in Kent’s The Nightingale (2018). This is preceded by a thorough overview of different narrative and stylistic approaches to presenting rape on-screen, as Loreck recounts the various arguments for and against such depictions.

Loreck’s diplomatic manner of considering these debates, however, is slightly underwhelming. Loreck links Kent’s and Eklöf’s “unblinking” depictions of rape to “an ethics of authenticity and witnessing” (p. 54) and the common contention that presenting sexual violence from a woman’s perspective as victim encourages an empathetic (though emotionally complicated) response within the viewer. Whether this desired effect is realistic, Loreck concedes, “is up for debate” (p. 58) though her analysis of Kent and Eklöf’s works, which stresses such ethical strategies as sparse editing and an emphasis on facial expressions, would imply at least some level of buy-in to this theory. And yet in the chapter’s final moments, Loreck pulls away from providing her own stance on the possible ethical considerations encouraged by such scenes, writing: “While some may describe this as a naive and ultimately ineffectual project, it is, nonetheless, the goal” (p. 73). In one respect, Loreck’s own lack of moralising on the films she writes about is commendable, indicating a worthwhile refusal to resolve the difficulty of such provocative conversations. And yet this statement suggests an overly tactful distance from the highly divisive debates around depictions of sexual violence that, rather than offering measured consideration, has an almost neutralising effect.

Bastards

Provocations’ remaining four chapters look at the filmographies of individual filmmakers. Works by Hadžihalilović are read in terms of their “prettiness”,7 a historically devalued aesthetic category, where the director’s “lush and painterly visual style” and “uncanny, fairytale-like tone” (p. 79) alienate the spectator with visual pleasure rather than displeasure. Loreck eloquently examines how Hadžihalilović creates prettified fetish objects in her mise-en-scène as indicative of her child characters’ social rules and unspoken emotions, meanwhile invoking the threat of child abuse via ambiguous narrative set-ups. The following chapter on Denis, another highlight, seeks to interrogate the auteur’s reputation as a sensitive and subtle purveyor of forbidden desires and power structures, which has not extended to a reputation as a “provocateur” despite her persistent interest in the taboo – including, as Loreck examines in Les salauds (Bastards, 2013) and High Life (2018), incest. Loreck carefully draws out the transgressions folded into Denis’ sensuous visual style, which affectively implicate the viewer in “immoral” behaviours while withholding the relief of moral condemnation.

Loreck takes her most emphatic stance in Provocations’ fifth chapter, regarding the highly stylised, artisanal worlds of Anna Biller’s shorts and features. Parsing reactions to Biller’s A Visit from the Incubus (2001), Viva (2007), and The Love Witch (2016), Loreck identifies two dominant readings of Biller’s oeuvre, which situate her as either “an ironic filmmaker who champions a provocative, oppositional and paracinephilic style of cinema” or a “sincere feminist who is decidedly unironic about the style and themes of her work” (p. 122). The former reading, Loreck contends, overlooks the murkier ideas at the heart of Biller’s work, where “heterosexuality as it is internalised and performed […] is a darkness that cuts through the pleasure of her films” in irresolvable ways (p. 123). To understand Biller’s project, Loreck argues that the viewer must “look beyond irony.” Critical misinterpretations of her films, such as Mark Kermode’s review of The Love Witch8 – in which he acknowledges that the parodic pleasures he found in Biller’s film were contrary to her intent – are filed away as part of the 80% of critics that Biller alleges misread her work. Loreck’s own reading rather convincingly reorients discussions around the filmmaker to take seriously the sincerity of her ideas; the chapter complicates her films’ aesthetic pleasures to draw out what is, in Biller’s own (somewhat essentialist) description of The Love Witch, “the tragedy of gender difference.”9

But one can’t help feeling that Loreck’s correction simplifies the tension between irony and sincerity in Biller’s work, itself a kind of provocation: the viewer’s tendency to entangle the two rather than falling into one camp or the other.10 Beyond any particular qualities inherent to her filmography, Biller’s insistence on sincerity, particularly in The Love Witch, confounds and complicates the playful enjoyment spectators themselves seem to take in her work (relishing the affected performance styles, self-reflexive dialogue, the keen emphasis on surfaces). While Loreck recognises this, she prioritises Biller’s authorial intention almost to the exclusion of the affective relation integral to the spectator’s experience of provocation. With a John Waters movie, you’re usually either in on the joke or you’re not; with something like The Love Witch, as you try to reconcile style with content, you must actively ask whether what could read as a joke is, in fact, deadly serious. Of course, to entertain this interpretive muddiness more earnestly would be to entertain a known misreading, one that could be seen to call the seriousness of Biller’s authorship into question. Yet even if Biller’s intentions take precedence, embracing the ambivalent (not mutually exclusive) spectatorial experiences her films incite should only deepen our understanding of their provocative potential.

The Love Witch

Loreck’s final case study looks at subversive humour in Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010) and The Capsule (2012), arguing that the Greek director’s use of the absurd and uncanny denaturalise the viewer’s relationship to bodies, sex, and gender. Loreck displays an impressive grasp on yet another aesthetic and affective category and its attendant literature, highlighting humour’s relationship to avant-garde and surrealist movements, in which pre-existing sociocultural categories are forced into incongruity. In Attenberg, non-naturalistic performance styles and blunt, bizarre dialogue bind “amusement and discomfort” (p. 144) to subvert women’s coming-of-age narratives against the backdrop of Greece’s stunted prosperity; in The Capsule, Loreck discusses “girl-training narratives” and borrows from Freud’s theory of the uncanny to interrogate the ways Tsangari uses movement, animation, and costuming to make strange the performance of femininity.

As Provocations mightily contends, it is through the lens of women’s authorship and the provocative relation that deeper questions may be asked about spectatorship, cultural taboos, and the ethics of cinema as technology and artform. In her introduction, Loreck acknowledges that the experience of negative feelings in response to art, and the counterphobic impulse – borrowing from Tania Modleski11  – to seek such feelings out, can be incredibly valuable. One might desire the negative sensations of such cinematic encounters as proof of having met and survived their deepest fears. Or in the tradition of Antonin Artaud, these art-induced shocks to the senses might “reconnect the recipient with their profound sensibilities and feelings – an ultimately liberating process, but one requiring agitation and stimulation” (p. 7).

It follows that as Loreck identifies and studies new techniques of provocation, so too does she uncover new functions of the provocative. In certain chapters, such functions are made astoundingly clear. With the “obscene” sexualities of Breillat’s work, Loreck writes that spectators are made to wrestle with their disgust so that they can overcome it; as the obscenity of the image loses its power, dominant ideas around women’s bodies may be loosened and experienced less rigidly. Similarly, Denis’ works encourage disturbing sensations that make us more aware of the ways in which our desires have been socially inscribed by powers beyond us. In Hadžihalilović’s enigmatic worlds, Provocations suggests that the adult spectator is invited to identify with the emotional world of a child – a world in which they cannot totally comprehend their imperilled state and must therefore suspend any coherent or literal interpretation of events. This is a degraded and unnatural subject position; a provocation here is not something that is done to or presented for the viewer, but an invitation to inhabit a perilous, unsettling position in relation to the film-world.

It is the frequent irresolvability of the viewer’s affective response – their profoundly visceral, sometimes untraceable agitation – that characterises many of the provocations studied here. Yet Loreck’s auteurist lens also means that the provocative potential of these works rarely exceeds the direct grasp of their filmmakers. This might be related in part to the compartmentalised configuration of the book, which does not encourage much continuity between the provocations or their strategies. While Loreck offers a very strong sense of each director’s style and thematic preoccupations, there are moments where it begins to feel self-limiting, given the somewhat circular effect of the structure – arguments about provocative strategies are made to prove that female directors do indeed provoke, and in various, interesting ways. As opposed to interwoven arguments building from a core conceit, the impression is more of individual strains of thought looping back around to reaffirm the validity of the book’s primary idea. This is not in itself an issue, though where filmmakers and their themes are placed in sustained relationship with one another – particularly in the book’s first two chapters – one glimpses a more expansive, energising web of feminist aggravations.

To be clear, there is rarely an argument that rings false throughout Provocations. Loreck has done a fantastic job of considering women’s cinematic provocation from many worthwhile angles, and the depth and care with which she reads her chosen works garners significant insight. It is, perhaps naturally, the lingering questions posed by such studies that the book’s firm scope does not always satisfyingly account for. Yet Loreck admirably insists not just that films by women should be looked at in all their difficulty and prickliness, but that the women who make them be given credit for the myriad strange challenges they offer. To engage with a filmmaker and their work as sincerely as Loreck does is to agree to be made vulnerable by the shocks and ambiguities art has to offer, and to encourage readers to interrogate those shocks and ambiguities within their own spectatorship. Loreck’s emphasis on woman-authored films doesn’t just expand prevailing notions of how and why a filmmaker may provoke; it makes a case for recognising the rewards inherent in art that, more than simply acting ‘upon’ us, engages us in a complicated, destabilising relationship.

Janice Loreck, Provocation in Women’s Filmmaking: Authorship and Art Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024).

Endnotes

  1. Janice Loreck, Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
  2. Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, “Publics and Counterpublics: Rethinking Film Festivals as Public Spheres” in Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist, eds. (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 83-99.
  3. Lesbian Period Drama,” Saturday Night Live (NBC, 2021).
  4. Katharina Lindner, “Queer-ing Texture: Tactility, Spatiality, and Kinesthetic Empathy in She Monkeys,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Issue 32, Number 3 (December 2017): p. 125.
  5. Clara Bradbury-Rance, “In-Between Touch: Queer Potential in Water Lilies and She Monkeys” in Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), p. 78-96.
  6. Lisa French, “Centring the Female: The Articulation of Female Experience in the Films of Jane Campion,” PhD thesis (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 2007).
  7. Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
  8. Mark Kermode, “Loving The Witch,” Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review (15 March 2017): 4:36.
  9. Steve Macfarlane, “’I’m Actually Trying to Create a Film for Women’: Anna Biller on The Love Witch,Filmmaker Magazine (23 June 2016).
  10. For an example of this, see: Erin Harrington, “Satire, Sincerity and Pastiche: A Review of The Love Witch,” The Pantograph Punch, 27 July 2017.
  11. Tania Modleski, “Women’s Cinema as Counterphobic Cinema: Doris Wishman as the Last Auteur,” in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, Jeffrey Sconce ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 47-70.