Hysteria nostalgia in contemporary French cinema

This article examines the renewed cultural fascination with hysteria through an analysis of two contemporary French films, Alice Winocour's Augustine (2012) and Mélanie Laurent's Le Bal des folles (2021), both set in the Salpêtrière, the nineteenth-century birthplace of medicalized hysteria and its visual blueprint. Drawing on Georges Didi-Huberman's theorization of spectacle as constrained agency, Leger Grindon's framework of spectacle in historical fiction film, and scholarship on postfeminist sensibility, the author argues that the shared historical setting illuminates tensions and shifts in mainstream feminism over the last 15 years. Winocour mobilizes postfeminist fantasies of sexual empowerment, positioning the doctor–patient power imbalance as a site of strategic feminine agency, while Laurent foregrounds institutional violence and the limits of individualized resistance, positioning collective solidarity as the only meaningful counter to patriarchal structures. The films reveal how nineteenth-century hysteria functions as a malleable cultural idiom for working through contemporary gender anxieties.