‘Free women,’ experiential aesthetics, and embodied spectatorship in Malgorzata Szumowska’s Elles (2011)

Abstract

In her 2011 feature-length film, Elles, Malgorzata Szumowska demonstrates how cinematic auteurs may effectively establish a multisensory intersubjectivity between filmmaker, film text, and spectator that challenges traditional ways of looking and seeing. She effectively activates an ‘experiential gaze’ throughout the film and film-viewing experience that opens up new considerations concerning long-standing views on prostitution, victimization, power, sexuality, and agency in cinema and society. Aided by the iconic French actress Juliette Binoche’s sensuous performance, Szumowska materializes in the film’s aesthetics the experiential qualities of the senses to present new representations of femininity as ‘free’ and to question the relationships between subjects and their objective worlds.