Artemisia

Looking through Netflix, I came across an award winning foreign film, based on real events, that looked interesting to me. I didn't do any more research on the subject than what I got from their blurb and put it on my list. Last week we watched it. If you would rather not read a revealing review of the subtitled film, Artemisia, stop reading right now with one warning from me-- I do not recommend it to anybody.

 [Artemisia Gentileschi] was an Italian Baroque painter of the early 1600s. She is someone of whom I had never heard. Why would I? How good can a woman be? This one is, today, regarded as having been a very fine artist, one of the female artists who could do the work as well as any man. She was held back from attending the best fine art schools even though her father, a successful artist of the time, wanted her to have that training. She was just a woman after all.

The French film was not satisfied with telling her story as history tells it. It went to sexing it up with things I don't see how anybody could have known about her early life. It showed her fascinated with nudity, her own and that of males, enjoying watching debauchery, and eager for her own first sexual experience when she was still a teen. My theory on why, besides the desire to sensationalize, is the misapprehension that anyone who likes to paint, draw or sculpt nudes must be perverted in some way. Since I did the first three, without a desire to view debauchery, I know they are wrong.

The film turned what had been an accusation and conviction of rape into a romance of a sort; and if I had read more about it before I ordered it, I'd never have done it as I quit watching about half way through.

I didn't quit for all the nudity. There were plenty of beautiful nude bodies in sexual and artistic settings-- full frontal of men and women. That doesn't bother me at all in a film. I loved the Australian film Sirens which is another film about art, sexuality, and with full frontal nudity-- an interesting film about values in art.

Artemisia though is the story of a very talented woman artist, introduced to art by her father at a young age. She had a natural gift which led to her father letting her paint some of his commissions. The film depicts of how unfairly women were treated in being denied opportunities (yes we have come a long way) while it itself proceeds to objectify a woman by how it portrayed her (in some areas, we haven't come so far).

When I saw it going a way that made me uncomfortable is when I went over to my computer to look for a biography and found the fervent objection feminists had to the film. This film turned what historically has been considered a total rape into the story of a love affair (remember the oversexed parts earlier-- after all how could a female artist want to paint nudes without being oversexed, right???) between a much older man and a younger woman.

Right there, I quit watching as I had no interest in watching gratuitous sex (and there'd been plenty of that already-- with torture of a woman coming up.

What came next, which I read, was that the father discovered the sexual event or events (this is true historically also) and accused his friend of rape and there was a trial. Artemisia also had to be examined to be sure she had been a virgin as that was the real issue here- deflowering; and she was tortured by thumbscrews by the nuns. This appears to have been in the film and also historic. I tell you, the things women do to women sometimes make me more angry than what men do.

The movie leaves historic record because by all evidence, including her own art after it happened-- this was a brutal rape. In the film the writers/directors/producers show Artemisia being tortured by nuns to force her to admit it was rape when she says it was love. Finally the male artist sacrificially steps forward and lies to say it was rape to save her from the torture. Get it women being tortured (thumbs up in a film), it being done by women (more thumbs up).

I consider the film to be an abuse of women also. Oh I know a woman today could go to a top art school even if they won't ever get the career afterward that a man would have with equal talent; but they took the story of a gifted artist who was denied the fame and success she should have had and used it to create some kind of weird amalgamation of art and sex.

Although I don't call myself a feminist, I do see the ways women lose out when their work isn't regarded as serious. Also it's horrifying to me to take a story of rape and sex it up, turning the rapist into the hero and the woman into asking for it. Ack! It's a different kind of abuse, more subtle but equally damaging to women as a whole. I don't blame Gloria Steinem and others for protesting this film as once again it shows today's culture (and a female director) with misusing sexuality in women to sell films. Shame!

(Self portrait as the allegory of painting  by Artemisia Gentileschi was in Wikipedia.)