Black Venus

Saartjie Baartman is taken from South Africa to London and exhibited in a show: put in a cage, the shape of her body sold to spectators, made to play the savage. Then she moves to Paris. There the show degrades further, and in the end scientists queue up to measure her. The subject is not the history of racism but the act of looking. The film puts the viewer in the place of the crowd watching Baartman and forces them to look for as long as that crowd did; the discomfort is deliberate and part of the method. The form is long and repetitive. The exhibition scenes run almost without cuts and the same show is repeated again and again; the narrative does not advance, it only wears down. The film rests on a real person. Baartman died in Paris in 1815 and parts of her body were displayed in a museum for many years; her remains were only returned to South Africa in 2002 and buried there. Abdellatif Kechiche took the film into competition at Venice in 2010, and its method, exposing the audience to the duration of the display, was argued about then too. Yahima Torres plays Baartman and Olivier Gourmet the man exhibiting her. Who it is for: viewers who want difficult, formally insistent political cinema. Who it is not for: anyone unable to endure long scenes of humiliation; the film is deliberately exhausting and runs over two and a half hours.