| Summary: | This essay examines the ways in which Céline Sciamma’s 2019 film <i>Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu</i> (<i>Portrait of a Lady on Fire</i>) looks to centralise onscreen homosexual experience through engagement with, and queering of, eighteenth-century art practices and the discourse surrounding them. From its reception of Ovid’s <i>Metamorphoses</i> to ideas espoused by the eighteenth-century art critic and philosopher Denis Diderot, <i>Portrait</i> looks to traditionally peripheral spaces, or edgelands, and the visual and embodied consequences of transcending them. Engaging closely with eighteenth-century processes of artmaking, the film transforms sketches on paper, paint applied to canvas and wood, miniatures held close to the body and erotica annotated in the margins into queer-coded sites used to reflect and document the developing relationship at its heart.
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