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In the article, "Dirty Pictures, Mud Lust, and Abject Desire: Myths of Origin and the Cinematic Object" Susan Felleman discusses how art is represented as a product of sexual passion and desire. She uses the films "Artemesia" and "Camille Claudel" both artist biopics that chose to focus on the sexual relationships that involved the artists rather than look at their achievements and artistic talent. Both films essentially portray the artists as owing everything, their inspiration, their talent, and their ability to the men in their lives. The art that they produce is entirely related to their involvement with their male mentor's. "Art is shown as the progeny of sexual passion in these films-the child of the artistic parents." I believe that by depicting these women in a way that gives all the credit to men, the filmmakers are doing a great disservice to them and to their story. They are taking women that were empowered and talented and reducing them and their art to nothing but by-products of their relationship. "In each film a young woman artist is apprenticened to an older male, a relationship of power and gender."
In Artemisia, her talent is overshadowed by the arrival of the painter, Tassi, in her life. The man that would become her teacher and eventually her greatest downfall. Her talent and development of her art is overshadowed by the sexual relationship that is depicted in the film. It shows her through the lens of being a girl that is nothing but a slave to her passions. The moment in the film when it shifts from being about her art to her affair with Tassi, is when they are outside and he is teaching her perspective using a grid. This puts the viewer in the master's point of view and turns her into an object. " We join the seducer in effacing the spectacle of nature...and taking Artemisia herself as spectacle, objectifying her, as women are so often, objectified by the gaze of the painter, or the camera." We are not meant to see her as a painter, we are meant to see her as a looker. The film shows her in many different scene's looking at things that she is not supposed to see, sexual acts, and the male nude body. The film depicts her as someone that is obsessed with sexual acts. Her talent is forgotten, her ability to paint is forgotten, what Agnes Merlet wants us to see is a great painter that has been reduced down to nothing but a sexual figure. In doing this the film changes who she was and turns her into someone that she was not. We are not shown a powerful female figure but rather a sexual creature that is meant to be gazed at.
The film "Camille Claudel" uses the same techniques in order to depict her. She is painted as a sexual figure. "Art again is shown as the product of sexual passion." The first scene in the film demonstrates this, she is shown not as an artist that is searching for materials, but rather as an objectified woman that is at the hands of the male gaze. She is stared at by the men in the street that she passes, she is shown as engaging in "dirty, clandestine, criminal, or morally questionable activity." It is not until she meets Rodin that she is in a cleaner and more respected studio. She however stops being an artist and becomes a sexual object the moment that she poses for him. She lets her work fall by the wayside and focuses all her attention onto him and his work. Her work is then shown as a by-product of their relationship, something that was inspired because they are together. There works are sexually charged and appear to owe everything to the relationship. However though once their relationship is over she is the one that seems to lose everything and eventually has to be committed. The film shows that Camille as a sexual figure, owes everything to her relationship with Rodin and without him she would still be searching for mud in the dead of night in order to create.