Epistle to the Filmmaker Céline Sciamma
Talia Beckhardt | Poetry, Fall 2024
Forgive me. I’d hate to be in your place.
We're in the same place. Exactly the same place.
— Marianne and Héloïse, Portrait of a Lady on Fire
You carve a holy circle
and we step inside. Marianne dives
into the gasping waves to rescue
her canvases, or to escape
the man striding the prow,
chin up, legs planted, or
to reach the rocky island
rising from the sea
like blood rushing
to her face, captured carefully
by your digital camera, your
inventions of light. If Eurydice
knows how the male
gaze can kill you,
then your worlds are blissfully dark,
your shadows tightly threaded,
impenetrable. I want to lounge
in your silences,
lower my body
gently into them
like a cool lake. I am
strung up in the cat’s cradle
of your gazes — Héloïse says:
If you look at me, who do I look at?
And yes, this, too,
is a kind of looking, a kind
of being seen. I trace the shape
of your new collaboration, three women
side by side in a kitchen, and—
Oh. I should have known
what this poem was really about.
Marianne, Héloïse, Sophie,
model, maid, artist,
three women in a closed circle,
equal in these reversals,
firelight shivering, ecstatic,
between them. But the curtain
is always pierced; one morning
she walks downstairs and there is a man
at the table, flooded with sun, and his gaze
strips her to the bone. You are right
that a love is not less for ending, that
in equality, there is emancipation,
but I am still Marianne, jumping
without doubt, clinging to the wood, believing—
love always has a future.
______________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“I wrote this poem in the spring of my first year of college for an ekphrastic poetry assignment in a workshop class. It stands as a marker in my memory as the first poem written after crossing a sort of barrier of understanding what it means to compose a poem — how to layer meanings and images to create a richly textured work. I was thinking a lot at this time about what it means to propose a new conceptualization of love, from the poetry of Sonnet L’Abbé to F. Douglas Brown, and Sciamma’s work provided an opportunity to consider this in relation to my own life. This poem also contains echoes of other traces in the fossil record: quotes from Sciamma are interspersed in italics, forming a foundation onto which I build my own interpretations of and connections to the films, like the cities on top of cities found in archaeological remnants.”
(Sciamma quotes sourced from Vox, IndieWire, The Guardian)
Talia Beckhardt is a Jewish and queer writer of poetry and short fiction. She is from Boston, Massachusetts and is currently an undergraduate student of English Language & Literature at Smith College. She can often be found reading overly complex, queer space operas or playing The Sims 4. Her main talent is knowing how most words are spelled.
Epistle to the Filmmaker Céline Sciamma
Talia Beckhardt | Poetry, Fall 2024
Forgive me. I’d hate to be in your place.
We're in the same place. Exactly the same place.
— Marianne and Héloïse, Portrait of a Lady on Fire
You carve a holy circle
and we step inside. Marianne dives
into the gasping waves to rescue
her canvases, or to escape
the man striding the prow,
chin up, legs planted, or
to reach the rocky island
rising from the sea
like blood rushing
to her face, captured carefully
by your digital camera, your
inventions of light. If Eurydice
knows how the male
gaze can kill you,
then your worlds are blissfully dark,
your shadows tightly threaded,
impenetrable. I want to lounge
in your silences,
lower my body
gently into them
like a cool lake. I am
strung up in the cat’s cradle
of your gazes — Héloïse says:
If you look at me, who do I look at?
And yes, this, too,
is a kind of looking, a kind
of being seen. I trace the shape
of your new collaboration, three women
side by side in a kitchen, and—
Oh. I should have known
what this poem was really about.
Marianne, Héloïse, Sophie,
model, maid, artist,
three women in a closed circle,
equal in these reversals,
firelight shivering, ecstatic,
between them. But the curtain
is always pierced; one morning
she walks downstairs and there is a man
at the table, flooded with sun, and his gaze
strips her to the bone. You are right
that a love is not less for ending, that
in equality, there is emancipation,
but I am still Marianne, jumping
without doubt, clinging to the wood, believing—
love always has a future.
____________________________________________________________________
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
“I wrote this poem in the spring of my first year of college for an ekphrastic poetry assignment in a workshop class. It stands as a marker in my memory as the first poem written after crossing a sort of barrier of understanding what it means to compose a poem — how to layer meanings and images to create a richly textured work. I was thinking a lot at this time about what it means to propose a new conceptualization of love, from the poetry of Sonnet L’Abbé to F. Douglas Brown, and Sciamma’s work provided an opportunity to consider this in relation to my own life. This poem also contains echoes of other traces in the fossil record: quotes from Sciamma are interspersed in italics, forming a foundation onto which I build my own interpretations of and connections to the films, like the cities on top of cities found in archaeological remnants.”
(Sciamma quotes sourced from Vox, IndieWire, The Guardian)
Talia Beckhardt is a Jewish and queer writer of poetry and short fiction. She is from Boston, Massachusetts and is currently an undergraduate student of English Language & Literature at Smith College. She can often be found reading overly complex, queer space operas or playing The Sims 4. Her main talent is knowing how most words are spelled.