Catherine Breillat's “Tapage nocturne”

Discomfort remains, within feminist film theory, with representations of women in degrading, humiliating, and submissive positions. For years, feminist film theorists contested these images on film as a sign of misogyny, and feminist film theory evolved in large part due to those battles. Laura Mulvey's influential claim, that male spectators derive pleasure (cinematic and otherwise) from adopting a dominant position and a sadistic behavior toward women on screen, was later on challenged by Gaylyn Studlar, who pointed out the primacy of the pleasure in submission over that of mastery. In her important book on the von Sternberg/Dietrich film cycle, Studlar affirmed the potentially subversive nature of a masochistic aesthetic in film. She, however - and along with many other theorists after her - sees this subversion in the reversal of traditional gender roles (woman as passive, man as active). It has been easy to praise the value of a work portraying women on top. When women end up on the bottom, however, the film is ideologically suspicious and accused of perpetuating stereotypes, if not of encouraging abuse against women. This paper looks at the work of French director Catherine Breillat to see how female masochism operates and what functions it plays for her female characters' identities. For our analysis, we will be looking at various conceptions of masochism, more particularly, those of Gilles Deleuze, Gaylyn Studlar and Emmanuel Ghent. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.