Chocolat and Black Venus: body, identity and memory

Abstract

This article analyses the possible discursive developments around the female body in movies, using Chocolat (Claire Denis, 1998) and Black Venus (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2010); bearing in mind this body as an object of desire, a space of resistance, a cultural and ethnical frontier, or even as a vestige of history and memory. Through theoretical, esthetical and political articulations about these images, and through the analysis of these films, we will attempt to understand how intercultural cinema – which is able to create new images from the memory of the senses, since it possesses tactile and contagious qualities, with which the spectator is confronted as if he was connecting with another body (Marks, 2000) – becomes an instrument of representation of a possible cultural history and memory, precisely by means of the role that bodies – removed from their original environment – play in the construction of this cultural history and memory.