Ever since a couple of French guys wanting attention came up with the ridiculous prank they sold to the world known as the “auteur theory” it has been the director of a film whose influence outweighs all else. In reality, of course, no director on earth could come anywhere close to making their masterpiece written by someone else had that screenplay never been invented by a creative mind. It goes against the grain to even suggest such a thing, but the inescapable truth of filmmaking is that the influence of the director is only rarely of such that it defines every single second of the film.
Black Venus is such an film and whether desiring the credit or withstanding the blame, there is no escaping the truth for Abdellatif Kechiche: the influence here totally rests upon its direction. Things are complicated, of course, by the fact that Kechiche is already credited with writing the film, but one thing that must be understood about writer-directors is that they are not always as deserving of the writing credit as the directing credit. Whether that is true of Kechiche not only can’t be known, but is entirely beside the point. It is the direction of the film which makes the point.
The difficult of making a film on a subject like the Hottentot Venus is how do you show what was a horrific example of human depravity and commercial exploitation at its worst without the film itself also being exploitative? The answer, of course, is that you don’t. More precisely: you can’t. To portray the worst of humanity on film requires showing it, not shying away from it. Perhaps the most famous and widely-viewed example of this truism is Schindler’s List. To dramatize the brutal inhumanity of the Holocaust requires making the audience uncomfortable by showing in the most realistic fashion possible. Watching Schindler’s List as an example of cinematic artistry is a glorious experience, but it is also an extremely unpleasant one. Schindler’s List is not a fun movie to watch, and it is certainly exploitative, but so what? How else can you possibly recreate an exploitative experience of the worst imaginable sort without the portrayal itself also being—to an extent—exploitative?
Kechiche intuitively understands that the subject matter here present exactly the same Catch-22: trying to make a movie that denounces exploitation by recreating the exploitation without being exploitative. It can’t be done—well, it probably can’t be done and certainly probably can’t be done well. Therefore, the only real choice one has to dive in head-first and embrace the opportunity to exploit the audience’s emotions as well in the hope that, at the very least, you can make them feel something that the original audience did not. In other words, if an audience watching Schindler’s List is not horrified by the exploitative violence they are witnessing, then Spielberg has failed miserably. The divergence between those doing the exploitation and those watching a recreation of it is the locus of the intent. And in these cases, intent is everything.
The intent of the director of Black Venus is substantively different—a polar opposite—to the intent of those presenting her in real life. The exploitation in real life was done with the intent to titillate. The exploitation in the film is done with the intent to create nausea and shame. While there are always deviant exceptions to every rule, the reviews and criticism of the film suggest that Kechiche more than accomplished this goal. The intent was realized for almost all viewers: the culpability one inevitably feels in becoming exactly the same sort of spectator as those we watch with disgust fills most audience members with revulsion. And that is the difference between exploitation and condemning exploitation.
