Art cinema has its share of controversial depictions of sexuality authored by women: Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s real-sex road movie, Baise-moi (2000), Ana Kokkinos’s rape-revenge film, The Book of Revelation (2006) and Urszula Antoniak’s transgressive Code Blue (2011), to name only a few from the post-millennium period. Sex, particularly women’s sexuality, is a subject with rich potential for shocking critics and audiences alike. Indeed, the term ‘provocation’ is itself closely tethered to sex – while it broadly means ‘to elicit a reaction’, provocation can also describe an act that titillates and arouses. In keeping with this association, literature and the visual arts sustain well-established traditions of female, and often feminist, intervention in the representation of women’s sexuality, from the experimental films of Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Rubin and Barbara Hammer to the photography of Nan Goldin and the fiction writing of Virginie Despentes and Kathy Acker. The question of how women filmmakers provoke through sex in their chosen medium is thus at the forefront of any investigation into filmic provocation.

In the space of narrative art cinema, the most notorious practitioner of sexual provocation is undoubtedly French filmmaker Catherine Breillat. Breillat is a multidisciplinary artist and has worked as a film director, screenwriter and novelist. Described sensationally as ‘the auteur of porn’ by scholars and the press alike, her films are distinguished by their candid and explicit narratives about heterosexual women’s experience. Although her film work is diverse and includes comedies and costume dramas, she is particularly renowned for her ‘décalogue’ of dramatic films about sexuality: A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille, 1976), Nocturnal Uproar (Tapage nocturne, 1979), Virgin (36 fillette, 1988), Dirty Like an Angel (Sale comme un ange, 1991), Perfect Love (Parfait amour!, 1996), Romance (1999), Fat Girl (À ma sœur!, 2001), Brief Crossing (Brève traversée, 2001), Sex Is Comedy (2002) and Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer, 2004). These films are frank explorations of the sexual economy – as Brian Price succinctly puts it: ‘The central preoccupation of Catherine Breillat’s work is the sexuality of women.’