im_online wrote: Fri May 22, 2026 7:16 pm
Centre Pompidou is hosting a career retrospective of her films, including new versions of Girlhood and Tomboy. Will also be showing a new short film, Tutti Frutti and a conversation with Adèle Haenel about acting
These "new versions" of Girlhood and Tomboy appear to be cases of self-censorship. Not sure exactly why, but Sciamma cut 25 minutes from Girlhood, and maybe doesn't want the longer version shown anymore?
Mr Sausage wrote: Wed Jun 03, 2026 10:50 pm
I know there was some controversy about the girls in Girlhood engaging in violence, supposedly because this reinforces stereotypes about black people. I’m betting Sciama cut all the scenes with fighting.
Reminded of the "that one friend who's *too* woke" meme
I agree with her (from the profile quoted by DarkImbecile a few years ago) about her misgivings about those two films and their insistence on conflict only for plot’s sake. But reshaping one’s early work once you figure out how you best make movies seems at least a little misguided, and even in best case scenario is a poor substitute for her applying that mature sensibility to an actual new movie. Petite Maman is an all-time fave, I’m not really asking for Tomboy to be pushed 10% closer to it. At least Water Lilies, my favorite of those first three, didn’t get tinkered with.
I worry Sciamma is chasing ideological purity. If you see your work as building blocks in the revolution, then of course altering them to fit the party line is an obvious choice.
Wong Kar-Wai now sees his films the way I suspect he experiences his sense of self, as being created anew each moment--so physically changing a film is no different from a film and its viewers' endless transience in time. I know most people found his reasoning obnoxious (in addition to rightly hating how he's suppressed previous versions), but for me it's a least an artistic conception. I can respect that even as I dislike the outcomes.
With Sciamma there's the risk of her political commitments doing what political commitments often do: obscure an artist's aesthetic sense, make them think in terms of arguments over expression, social forces over creative ones. That profile quoted on the previous page is dense with political language. She calls her earlier films a " collaboration" with the patriarchy, and I'd love to ask her: how does one collaborate with an abstraction? It's odd, this need to think of herself as a collaborationist, but maybe this is her way of crafting for herself a political rebirth narrative. Maybe it does a lot for her a person, but what has any of it to do with art?
I haven't seen Petite Maman, but I did rewatch Portrait of a Lady on Fire in theatres last month and it was just a wonderful experience. If we can expect work like that from her political awakening, there's nothing to worry about. But this going back to alter her previous work shakes my confidence in her.
