What Does (a Nasty) Woman Want?

Abstract

In this video essay I have juxtaposed material from three films about female desire – made by women at different historical moments in time, in different countries. These are: The Piano (1993) by Jane Campion, Fuga (2018) by Agnieszka Smoczynska and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) by Celine Sciamma. In the Polish context it is particularly important that these three films about female desire speak to each other, as Poland has been late in acknowledging its links to international feminism. The video essay and the text which accompanies it also evoke the recent Polish Nobel Prize Winner for Literature Olga Tokarczuk and Wislowa Szymborska, the Polish poet who also won the Nobel Prize in 1996. In terms of the films, it is the figure of Alicja, in Agnieszka Smoczynska’s film, who is the most radical of the three, despite Poland being the most conservative of the countries that produced the films.

Keywords

• Polish cinema
• feminism
• Agnieszka Smoczynska
• female desire