The first thing you see in Alice Diop’s new short film, Fragments for Venus, is a shot of Ingres’s famous Grande Odalisque, the controversial portrait of a concubine from 1814 that sits in the hallowed halls of the Louvre. Then, a series of other Old Master paintings—by Leonardo, Rembrandt, Veronese—appear, many recognisable from museums around the world, and we begin to follow a viewer walking through the halls of this mysterious institution. At one point, the actress Kayije Kagame pauses in front of an empty frame, as if hinting that she may one day have her likeness memorialised on these walls.
Even more striking than the masterpieces of art history you see cycling across the screen, however, is what you can hear: a voice reciting a French translation of the powerful Voyage of the Sable Venus by the American poet Robin Coste Lewis, in which she lists, in the poet’s own words, the “titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present.” Suddenly, the narrative shifts to contemporary Brooklyn, where a kindly, observant woman takes in scenes from a New York summer with a sense of wonderment and joy: a woman playing in a basketball court, a woman painting on an easel in the park, a woman listening to music on the subway.
Unveiled at Venice Film Festival as part of the Miu Miu Women’s Tales series, the short serves as an affecting, meditative portrait of Black selfhood and of the women that have existed at the margins of art history—and history more broadly. It represents the same blend of personal experience and political subtext that has made Diop such a formidable voice in the world of French cinema: first, with a series of award-winning documentaries focusing on marginalised communities within contemporary Paris; then, more recently, with her extraordinary debut feature film Saint Omer in 2022. A riveting, and often devastating, legal drama based on a real-life court case in which a Senegalese woman was accused of murdering her own 15-month-old child, the film won the Grand Jury Prize at that year’s Venice Film Festival and went on to be shortlisted for best international film at the Oscars.
Diop is warm and open about the profoundly personal nature of the new film when I meet her at her hotel in Venice the day before the premiere, clad in a brown Miu Miu bomber jacket and sculptural gold earrings. “Many of the women involved in this series of films are among the most important artists and those who have inspired me the most,” she says, with a smile, of joining the Italian fashion house’s illustrious Women’s Tales roster. “So I was very honoured to be asked to join.” Here, Diop talks to Vogue about the story behind the film, the fluidity between her work in documentaries and feature films, and how the process of making the short led her to discover a new blend of the personal and the political.
Tell me a little bit about how this came about. How did you first get connected with Miu Miu and what about the project excited you?
So I met Verde Visconti [Prada and Miu Miu’s long-time PR director] about two years ago, after Saint Omer was presented here in Venice, and she offered me to join the prestigious team of Women’s Tales filmmakers. Many of the women involved in this series of films are among the most important artists and those who have inspired me the most. So I was very honoured to be asked to join. But two or three years ago, I didn’t have a precise idea in mind for this. For me, a commission is not really enough. I need a creative necessity in order to mobilise the energy and effort that it’s going to require to make a film.
When Verde came back to me—and I want to pay tribute to her perseverance—but when she came back to me recently, that was really the perfect moment. I was teaching at Harvard, which meant that I had time. But more important than time was the fact I had discovered the work of the American poet Robin Coste Lewis. I’m also going to adapt the epilogue of her collection of poetry Voyage of the Sable Venus for a stage performance in Paris, in fact. And the work I was doing around Robin Coste Lewis gave me this idea of giving cinematic form to it in a way that would perfectly meet the requirements of Miu Miu’s commissions. So the stars aligned, and it was really a tremendous pleasure to be able to work with them on this.
As a filmmaker who has worked across both documentary and fiction, where does this film sit within that spectrum for you?
The film doesn’t really situate itself. It’s in its own place. It’s a film that borrows so much material from so many places. There is a completely documentary shoot, but there’s also this very political and philosophical casting of two women, one of whom is in a museum that embodies the history of art. On the one hand, it’s a very specific museum, but it could be all the museums. It’s such a political and philosophical idea that it’s beyond documentary and fiction. Then there’s the second part, which is really based on very private experience. I filmed most of the women that you see, and then I placed Sephora, the actress, to see these women that I had filmed. So the film is a mix of theoretical and philosophical ideas of these women who are found in the street. The counter shot of Sephora’s gaze, it’s really quite hard to situate. I think the fact that it’s hard to situate in terms of fiction and documentary is what gives the film strength.
It was lovely to see Kayije Kagama from Saint Omer make an appearance here. Has she become a sort of muse to you? Do you believe in the idea of muses?
No! Kayije would hate the idea that she’s my muse. [Laughs.] She’s far too powerful to be a muse. She’s a creator in her own right. She invents things in the way she collaborates with me in creating my images. It was simply a pleasure to come together with her again, just as it was an immense pleasure to meet Sephora Pondi and work with her again. I hope to make other films with her, just as I hope to make films with Guslagie [Malanda, from Saint Omer] again. These are meetings in life. They’re not simply about a part to be played. These are women who help me to think and who help me to create.
The second half of the film, set in New York, I read was almost like a self-portrait—or at least semi-autobiographical about your experiences of visiting the city and spending time in Brooklyn. You mentioned feeling like you could occupy the streets there in a way you couldn’t necessarily in Paris, and I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about that feeling, and how you brought it to the screen?
Once again, it’s about the distinction between forms, documentary and fiction, and this film comes from such a mix of things. The film comes both from a very specific experience of being a Black woman wandering in the streets of New York, of Brooklyn, and feeling like I can claim space, like the women who are there see me and allow me to be seen, which is very different from France, where the idea of community is rather stigmatised. I was raised with the idea of trying to blend into the crowd, almost of disappearing—this idea of really conforming to certain norms that had a very big impact on me growing up in France. But the film also comes from a more general idea, which is the beginning of the film, in which we see where we come from in terms of art history, and how art history has marginalised and fetishised Black women. Today these women are seen by me, a filmmaker, but also by a sculptor, a photographer, all these artists who we see on my mood board [the film concludes with a series of portraits of Black women from the 20th and 21st centuries, many of them created by Black women artists], artists who are contributing to repairing forms of representation that are stigmatising. So there’s both a part in this film that was inspired by my personal experience, but we go beyond that in a political way to show this is where we are at today with representation, in contrast to the part in the museum.
You also described the film as a sort of scrapbook, and I was interested in how you took that idea of the scrapbook—which is such a physical, tangible thing—and translated it into the medium of film.
It’s funny, because at the very beginning, the working title for this film was Scrapbook for Venus. It was the idea of the notebook of a filmmaker at work, that it would be a compilation of all the artworks that inspire me, that put me to work, that make me think. I like the idea that that remains throughout the film without the title actually revealing it. This film is nourished by all of that, by all these artworks, by all these texts that I had the opportunity to discover through my time in the United States, by the time that I spent wandering around in Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn, all the films that I made before. For instance, there’s a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, La Belle Ferronnière, which really determined the framing in Saint Omer. There’s also a painting by Rembrandt, which is one of my favourite images, that has really influenced how I film. And so, in a sense, this film is a collage of all these different images that have inspired me.
As a director, you have a wonderful eye for costume and its power as a storytelling device. What was your process in terms of integrating the Miu Miu clothes into the film? It felt very organic, but was it a challenge at all?
It wasn’t a challenge at all. For me, fashion is serious business. It’s political business, it’s aesthetic business, it’s cultural business—to dress Sephora in these clothes, a woman who does not have a normative body; to put Kayije basically inside a painting, The Wedding at Cana, through working on the colour tones of her costumes. It was really interesting to look at Kayije’s clothes through that lens. These are philosophical and political questions, and playing with the costumes in that regard was really a pleasure, not a challenge. Really, it was at the root of the film as a political question. Questioning the beauty of clothing on a body like Sephora’s is, in my eyes, practically a political statement.
Are you excited to show the film in Venice? Is there anything in particular that you hope viewers will take away from it?
For me, a film is not a message. These are thoughts that are addressed in the hope that people will appropriate them and feel expanded and renewed by them. This particular film feels simple, but I think it’s a lot more complex. It’s certainly bigger than a message. Speaking personally, when I read Robin Coste Lewis’s text, it really helped me rethink what was obvious. It allowed me to look at the history of western art in a different way than how I had been taught to look at it. And so, to take that idea and give it a filmic expression in the most poetic way possible, and in the hope that it somehow has filtered through and infused the film… I hope that people will be able to approach the film and take something from it in the same way that Robin Coste Lewis’s text affected me.
This story was originally published on Vogue.com.
