It’s a timely release. The Eventa French feature film by Audrey Diwan adapted from the eponymous novel by Annie Ernaux, has been broadcast since Friday May 6 in theaters in the United States, while the right to abortion is strongly threatened there.
“This French abortion drama has just become the most timely film of the year”, headlined the magazine. variety three days earlier. The day before, POLITICO had revealed that the American Supreme Court, with a conservative majority since the mandate of Donald Trump, planned to overturn the judgment Roe vs. Wade. Issued in 1973, it stipulates that recourse to abortion falls under the right to privacy, protected by the Constitution.
“When I started thinking about making a film about abortion, everyone asked me why I wanted to do it at that time. Now everyone tells me how topical it is,” said Audrey Diwan, the director of The Event to variety. His film takes place in 1963 and follows Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei), a brilliant student from the working class, who becomes pregnant and tries to have an abortion while abortion is illegal and those around her do not support her. The Event is important for the way it shows a clandestine abortion process, without improper modesty.
Artifice or taboo
Because “although it has concerned women for centuries, the subject [de l’avortement] remains taboo”, estimated Iris Brey, specialist in the genre in cinema and in the series, questioned by Telerama last november. When it is represented, abortion is above all a dramatic moment or a screenplay artifice aimed at creating tension. The stories of unwanted pregnancies on the screens end more often by a decision to have a child, with or without adoption, or by a miscarriage, than by an abortion.
In study published in 2014three researchers from the University of California examined stories of abortion on television and in American cinema between 1916 and 2013. They noted the great disparity between fiction and reality: for example, they were 9% fictional women to die as a result of an abortion, when the real risk in the United States was 0% and something. Abortion remains shown as more dangerous than it is actually, according to the latest studies of the research program Onscreen Abortion.
In France, “before the adoption of the Veil law in 1975, abortion was presented as a reprehensible, decadent practice, or films focused on the very difficult conditions in which it took place”, explained to Telerama Bérengère Sabourin, co-editor of a report on the representation of abortion on screen. In the United States, broaching the subject of abortion has long been prohibited by the Hayes Code of film censorship. The screen presence of this theme increased by at least 31% after the Roe vs. Wade shutdown.
Varda before Veil
In France, the representation of abortion in the cinema experienced a turning point in 1977. “Some directors literally accompanied [la] legalization [de l’avortement] through their works,” said Bérengère Sabourin to Telerama. One sings the other does not is a very beautiful feature film by Agnès Varda released in theaters in 1977, only two years after the promulgation of the Veil law. It explores the journeys of two friends over two decades. In 1962, Pauline, a 17-year-old student who dreams of being a singer, lies to her parents to obtain the money which helps Suzanne, mother of two children, to abort an unwanted third child. The two women meet again ten years later, in 1972, at the so-called “Bobigny” trial of a teenager who had an illegal abortion after a rape, and the women who helped her.
Later, Pauline had an abortion herself, during an organized trip to Amsterdam, and sang the “nanaborts” on a boat in the canals. “What really counted was my tenderness for the women who were there with me, like me. I see their eyes again. I thought back (…) to you who had known, alone, this bad moment. (…) I was relieved to be in a group,” she told Suzanne. One sings the other does not looks at clandestine abortion by celebrating sisterhood, an important treatment as this act can isolate.
Baby and an abortion
In the United States, it is a cult film that will mark an entire generation around a story of abortion and class struggle: dirty dancing. This musical film centers on Baby (Jennifer Grey), who spends the summer of 1963 in a boarding house with her wealthy New York parents. There she meets Johnny (Patrick Swayze), a dance teacher for old ladies by day, a fiery mambo dancer by night. Baby must learn, without his parents knowing it, a complex choreography in order to replace Penny (Cynthia Rhodes), Johnny’s partner, during a performance. And this so that she can have an abortion, with the money Baby borrowed from her doctor father. The young girl will also end up calling him for help when Penny is injured in a botched abortion carried out “with a dirty knife and a folding table”. Later, when Baby’s father gets mad at her, it’s because of her lying and dating – but he never judges Penny’s actions.
American news brought to light abortion treatment dirty dancingreleased at a time when less than 40% of Americans believed abortion should be legal, reminds Quartz. In an interview at VICE in 2017, the screenwriter of the film Eleanor Bergman explained that she had ensured the realism of a clandestine abortion. Despite the reluctance of the studios, she clung to this story, in a premonitory way: “When I made the film in 1987, about 1963, (…) everyone said to me “Why? There was Roe vs Wade – what are you doing this for? I said, “Well, I don’t know if we’ll always have Roe vs. Wade ». »
The gaze of “the young girl on fire”
More recently, it is a “period film”, Portrait of the girl on fire, which allowed a new look at the subject. At the end of the 18th century, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), painter, travels to a Breton island to paint the portrait of Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), engaged to an Italian nobleman. The two women fall in love while Héloïse’s mother is away, leaving them alone in the house with Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), the maid. This one learns that she is pregnant, does not want a child; she aborts. After several artisanal attempts, the three women go to the herbalist, in a comfortable house.
The scene takes place on the screen, the camera centered on Sophie’s face. She starts to cry, a laughing baby lying next to her makes her smile. “Sciamma unequivocally shows us what a baby is: the life form next to Sophie, not the imaginary baby put forward by anti-choices to try to shame people who have abortions,” wrote the American magazine. Bitch Media in March 2020. Later, back home, the three women recreate Sophie’s abortion, which Marianne paints. With this powerful mise-en-abîme, Céline Sciamma questions the invisibilization of experiences such as that of abortion.
2020: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always
Since the 2014 study, the representation of abortion has thus improved, despite blind spots, for example on abortions performed by non-white women. “What we’re seeing right now…is trying to tell different kinds of stories for different kinds of women, so there’s a wider range of characters having abortions across a wider range of genres. [cinématographiques] », claimed in 2020 at TIME sociologist Gretchen Sisson, co-author of the 2014 study and member of the Abortion Onscreen program.
Thus, the screens have seen a significant increase in medical abortions, but also the emergence of a new category: the “abortion road trip”. Never Rarely Sometimes Always, by Eliza Hittmann tells the story of Autumn, a teenager from Pennsylvania seeking an abortion. She first goes to a “fake clinic”, where they try to discourage her. Then, the laws of the state where she lives not allowing her to have an abortion without parental authorization, she goes to New York, to Family Planning, with her cousin. The proliferation of these “abortion road trips” is directly in line with the weakening of the right to abortion in the United States. “An ‘abortion road trip’ is not so much a cliché as it is a grim reality of the American healthcare system,” wrote the feminist webzine Refinery29 in 2020. And these films have rarely been so topical.