Alice Diop’s new film opens with a stare: a woman, painted by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, lying in recline for his Grande Odalisque. Her gray eyes gaze blankly into the viewer’s. For the next eight minutes, the camera cuts from one porcelain-skinned woman to another, painted finely and even lovingly, their likenesses portrayed in beauty and perpetuity in the halls of the Louvre. Their images are meant for admiration. All the while, Diop’s voice recites a French translation of “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” by Robin Coste Lewis, a poem consisting entirely of “titles, catalogue entries, or exhibit descriptions of western art objects in which a Black female figure is present.”
The camera follows as actress Kayije Kagame wanders the halls of the hallowed museum, staring at these famed works of art in which she and women like her are yet to be found, at least until Diop cuts to Brooklyn. Here, she follows along as Black women and girls exist in their entirety: playing, laughing, basking in the sun. They are not painted into backdrops or misrepresented in exhibition descriptions — they are real and human and whole. Over the past two decades, Diop has become a prolific filmmaker, and in her new work with “Miu Miu Women’s Tales,” Fragments for Venus, she explores the chasm between degradation and celebration. She sat down with The Cut to discuss her filmmaking process and what womanhood means to her.
What themes have you found yourself gravitating toward exploring in your work?
For a long time, I worked on questions regarding the representation of minorities on the margins of French society, in which I grew up. But now that’s not what I would describe as a theme of my work. Each film responds to things that appear at that time, and I wouldn’t want to reduce my work to one or a handful of themes now. When I started making films 20 years ago, I was really concerned with this question of the visibility of parts of French society that had been silenced or trajectories that were not shown or kept invisible. But today, the films I make accompany the questions that arise for me as a woman and as a filmmaker.
In this specific film you did with Miu Miu, the beginning honestly made me tear up a little bit. At the end of the movie, you noted you were inspired by Robin Coste Lewis’s poem “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” which is entirely made up of titles of exhibitions or descriptions of western art objects featuring Black female figures. What was it about this poem that was so striking to you and made you want to explore it through film?
The poem shows what we didn’t know how to look at. Simply by listing titles, Robin Coste Lewis reveals the unconscious on which western art rests, and it’s something that perhaps images might not be able to do as effectively. What she does simply by enumerating titles is very strong. There are more images in titles, perhaps, than in images themselves, and so she found a highly poetic, highly experimental way to convey this. So the challenge for me, as a filmmaker, was to reveal this visual unconscious without showing the paintings that are actually being referred to. Because to show them would double the effect of the violence of that gaze.
How did you tackle that? How did you go about showing that feeling without explicitly showing the artwork that was being discussed?
We see, in the Louvre section of the film, we’re traversing all of western art history from the perspective of this Black woman’s body. And I think that says a lot about an absence. There’s the way that I filmed the actress in the museum that says something about the violence of this situation. There’s also my own voice, because it’s my voice that does the voice-over, that reveals something of the violence of art history and the fact that we — and when I say we, I mean Black women — are largely absent from that history. So I hope that there’s something fruitful that’s produced by this contrast or conflict. And then there’s the New York part of the film. To me, this is not a film in two parts. This is a continuity, and that New York part, I hope, compensates for the absence of our bodies in the artworks or perhaps a presence that is a deformed or marginal vision of ourselves. Black women are either not present in painting or they are reduced and degraded in it, and therefore these are marginal representations.
Something I did love about your film was it felt like an emotional crescendo, partially because in the beginning, there is that degradation of Black women, and there’s a sense of disappointment and sadness in witnessing that degradation. And then in the second half, set in New York, there’s a sense of quiet jubilation. It’s beautiful to see Black women happy and with friends and safe and whole. I was wondering how you felt during the filmmaking process and how you felt the first time you watched the finished product — what that emotional journey was like for you.
It’s a film that I made very fast but that was inspired by years and years of reflection — reflection that wasn’t simply theoretical but also very personal, intimate about how the lack of representation or the degradation in these representations have led me to perceive myself, led me to relate to others, to have trust or not. It was really nourished by these years of reflections that created my gaze as a filmmaker but also made me the woman that I am. So while the film was made in a very spontaneous gesture, it rests upon years, both of intimate reflection and theoretical reflection.
These have nourished my film practice and also the work of various African American women poets who I had the opportunity to discover by making, in recent years, numerous trips to the United States to promote my films. I spent a few months living in New York City, notably near Bed-Stuy, and that allowed me to realize how years of violence and degradation affect one’s sense of self, especially when living in France, which is a place where these questions are not spoken. Despite the fact that Bed-Stuy is threatened by gentrification, I think it’s still an epicenter of Afro-American culture and an heir to all these struggles. As a Black woman in France, it’s very difficult to assert oneself in that society. In contrast, in New York City, I had the impression in Brooklyn, and particularly in Bed-Stuy, that the Black women there were welcoming me and, in a sense, cleaning me of the violence of this gaze that’s created by the absence of representation.
I just showed this film at the New York Film Festival before an audience of Americans, and it really made me realize to what extent this is a French film — a film made by a Black French woman who’s looking at Black American women. And there’s nearly something exotic about the joy that I found in filming and being witness to the confidence to which they take or claim space. In France, perhaps with the young generation, this has shifted a lot, but certainly for my generation, there was something even a little bit intimidating at first and that really explained the lightness with which I filmed them, the joy and pleasure.
This film is so much about girlhood and womanhood and specifically Black womanhood. What does womanhood look or feel like to you?
I think I can answer you with one specific thing that happened to me last year. I was a visiting professor at Harvard University for one year, starting immediately after Trump was elected, and I admit that I felt very alone while I lived in Cambridge. I was down. I was depressed, overwhelmed by what I saw happening around me, and I was quite alone. And during that time, I was going back and forth to New York City a lot, doing location scouting for the film, and I had the great good luck to meet Simone Leigh, whose sculptures I had discovered some years previously and whose work had just simply staggered me. It turned out that she had seen my previous film and she’d liked it a great deal. And without my telling her about my distress regarding Cambridge, I think she sensed it, and she invited me to stay with her throughout the time that I was making the film in Bed-Stuy. And so there I was sheltering under this kind of oak-tree woman. And that, to me, is what sorority is, or womanhood: It’s this ability to shelter under the power of other women. And it’s the same thing that I experience with Robin Coste Lewis when I’m reading her, when I’m spending time with her, and also that I experienced with these women whose names I don’t know, who I met in the street: It’s the joy of being together and how that being together can bring us care, protection, and the possibility to do what we must do.
