Graduate Researcher Series: an interview with Louise Cain
Louise Cain is a doctoral candidate in French Studies in the School of Languages and Linguistics. Her research explores the work of French film director Céline Sciamma from a queer, phenomological perspective.
Louise is also a writer and film critic, with published works in Overland, The Guardian, and Kill Your Darlings. She has participated in the Melbourne International Film Festival Critics Campus, an intensive mentor program designed for emerging Australian film critics.
Monica interviewed Louise about her research journey and her plans for the future.
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I wonder if you can start by telling us about your doctoral project.
My thesis is focused on the cinematic works of Céline Sciamma, who is one of the most prominent contemporary directors in Europe. Since her debut feature Water Lilies in 2007, Sciamma has created an oeuvre of films that focus predominately on queer female or gender non-conforming characters, subverting the heteropatriarchal norms of French cinematic culture. Using a queer phenomenological aproach, my thesis examines Sciamma’s work within the context of contemporary queer cinema, exploring dynamics of queer embodiment, coming-of-age, and desire, as well as what her reception in France says about French sociocultural attitudes towards queerness and feminism in film.
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How did you come to this research topic? I’d be interested in hearing about how your interest in film has interacted with your French studies.
As you can probably guess, I really love film, and French cinema has such a rich and fascinating history. Obviously there’s the dominant stereotype of the New Wave, and I love the films of that period, but I’m mostly interested in the cinematic voices of marginalised populations in France – films focused on queer/female/non-white experiences.
My Honours thesis was about commercial queer French cinema in the 1980s and the ways in which queerness was sanitised for broader market appeal. I really enjoyed researching that time period and the ways in which French cinematic culture has reacted to queer and feminist filmmakers. While I was working on that project, I was noticing this same dynamic of sanitisation in contemporary European queer film – this explosion in arthouse-mainstream movies like Call Me By Your Name and Blue Is The Warmest Colour portraying this very specific kind of queerness, tied to class, race, and male directorial input.
Sciamma’s cinematographic style and her whole ethos around filmmaking conveys this atmosphere of subtlety and generosity. Her work is very powerful, and my own experience of watching her films really contributed to my method of phenomenological analysis. It turns out you really can structure a whole doctoral project around the fact that Portrait of a Lady on Fire made you cry!
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I had the pleasure of attending your confirmation last year, which was fascinating. At that time, you were enrolled in a Masters degree. What motivated you to convert to a doctoral project instead?
Thank you! I’m in the process of converting from the Masters program to the PhD, mainly because I discovered very early in my research that my project was a lot larger than I first anticipated. There’s definitely a gap in the literature around Sciamma’s work, not only because she continues to make new films (one of the main disadvantages of studying a working director!) but also because my method of analysis is underrepresented in film studies at large. I really love research, and the more I delved into possible ideas, the more excited I became about the potential for new directions. The possibility of overseas research also motivated my choice to switch to the doctoral program.
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What’s next for your project? What kind of overseas travel plans do you have for your doctoral research?
Now that international travel is a possibility again, I’m hoping to do a cotutelle, a joint PhD between two universities during which the candidate spends at least one year at an overseas institution. My plan is to spend a considerable amount of time in Paris, not only because of the incredible archives available at the Bibliothèque du Film, but also because it would put me at the heart of contemporary French cinematic culture – and, of course, I’d be very close to Sciamma herself, so hopefully I can muster up the courage to arrange an interview!
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I think a lot of university students don’t necessarily realise that they can pursue (or discover) cultural, historical, and political interests through studying new languages. If you were trying to encourage university students to start and/or keep learning an additional language, what would you say?
Studying another language is one of the most rewarding experiences, and it opens up so many possibilities outside of academia. Learning about another culture and engaging with another language has so many benefits inside and outside the classroom. That moment when things first start to gel, when all of the hours of grammar exercises and writing tasks pay off and you can understand a film, read a newspaper, or have a conversation with someone in their native tongue – it’s so thrilling. Suddenly, whole worlds of culture – books, film, music – become available to you, and that can really motivate you to continue learning.
Honestly, pursuing French at Melbourne University has shaped my whole career. Taking Dr. Andrew McGregor’s French film class back when I was a second-year undergraduate student (and had never seen a Godard film) opened up this whole world of cinema to me and made me so excited about film studies.
I think the experience of learning a language at university can definitely be tough. The classes move pretty quickly and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But I’ve found those classes to be the most rewarding, because everyone is in the same boat, and you help each other out. I met some of my close friends in those classes, struggling to write exposés and muddling through the passé simple together. There are so many opportunities for travel and further study through language classes at Melbourne. Outside of that, I really think that learning another language can make you more empathetic. It can really change the way you think about the world, and it’s a skill you’ll have for life.