FRAGMENTS FOR VENUS, directed by the French filmmaker, Alice Diop, is the 30th commission from Miu Miu Women’s Tales. The acclaimed short-film series invites today’s most profound and original female directors to investigate vanity and femininity in the 21st century.
A black woman wanders through a museum, carefully examining each painting, searching for something. In the background, a voiceover recites titles, describes paintings, and gradually reveals the place that Western art has often reserved for black female bodies. Another black woman wanders through the streets of Brooklyn, looking in wonder at the black women around her, living incarnations of the new Venus.
Alice was introduced to — through her friend and translator Nicholas Elliott — the poem Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015) by American poet laureate, Robin Coste Lewis. The poem’s title references the slave trade to the West Indies, and its central section consists of titles, catalog entries or exhibit descriptions in Western art that depict the black female form going back to 38,000BC. “My time in America, especially my recent stay while teaching at Harvard University, nourished me,” says Alice, “and allowed me to question what it means to be a French, black woman in French society.” Her new Women’s Tales film is a “filmic gesture” and “tribute” to this experience, and to black American artists that inspire her — such as Robin Coste Lewis, Claudia Rankine, Saidiya Hartman etc. “And then there’s the bodies,” adds Alice excitedly, “the joy of seeing black women fill the streets of New York City.” She states that through their existence she feels herself exist and describes the joy of making this new film as “self-celebration, as a gesture of repair.”
Alice believes that although Fragments for Venus is just 21 minutes long, “it has the same importance as my feature, Saint Omer” and “there is calm in the way this short film proceeds, which is a political gesture.”
In many ways, Fragments for Venus, is a film about ways of looking at looking, which has been central to feminist film theory from the 1970s onwards. “We — black people — come from this history of painting,” Alice explains, “in which we have been marginalized, objectified.” Her film wants to show that “we — artists, writers, thinkers — are here now. It attests to the way in which we are now ready to express ourselves.”
