The legacy of Baise-moi (2000): body, sensoriality and revenge in female cinema

The article aims to investigate the discursive and sensorial potentialities present in contemporary films’ aesthetics and relate them to the film Baise-Moi (2000) by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi - an important piece of revenge cinema directed by women through an approach that aims to understand how the image can affect the viewer sensorial and discursively express criticism of society and culture. I propose the creation of three genre categories based on analyzing these films: Moral Revenge, Violent Revenge, and Metaphorical Revenge. To this end, I propose an analysis based on the theories of communication and cinema by Vivian Sobchack (1992), Mariana Baltar (2019; 2023), and Eloisa Nos-Aldás (2019), among others, to discuss how we can think about the social and material dimensions of the image through the representations of the body in staging and audiovisual materiality. Thus, it is evident that cinema was responsible for creating gender stereotypes and that the films dealt with in this work are responsible for providing subversions of the cinematographic genre and indicating that the revenge narratives created by female filmmakers can provide new collective imaginaries around women in society - in a very different way from the one governed by the status quo and established in today’s contemporary society