Thus, Ducournau was compelled to channel her twin passions of literature and cinema through both camera and pen, culminating in her first official short film, Junior, in 2011. “If I only wrote, I would feel my work was not completed” she told in 2017. Yet within her first year, Ducournau came to realise that in order for the essence of her work to translate onto the silver screen, she herself would have to direct the material.
After graduating from the Sorbonne, she attended France’s premier film school, La Fémis, to study screenwriting. With these literary infatuations present at an early age, it is not surprising that the young Ducournau initially embarked on a writing career. Titane in particular adapts the elemental and familial themes recurrent in these ancient texts, with Ducournau using Hesiod’s genealogy of primordial deities as a conceptual springboard for her metallic maternity narrative. The dark symbolism undulating throughout Poe can also be found in another of Ducournau’s key inspirations-the gruesome, violent epics of Greek mythology. “Reading Edgar Allan Poe… opened a space in my mind” she stated in a recent Guardian interview, indicating the origins of her gothic visual sensibility and thematic fixation with the macabre. At the heart of her work, however, lies a much more eclectic nucleus of influences. Unfortunately, since Cronenberg’s cinema is such an obvious point of comparison, Ducournau has repeatedly been branded with the same restrictive ‘body-horror’ label that the Canadian has borne since the 70s. In an echo of Cronenberg, Ducournau often paints the inner landscape of individual identity through the permutation and transformation of the outer skin.
Yet whilst these two sources may have provided the initial inspiration for her intense fascination with guts ‘n’ gore, they also seem to have embedded within Ducournau something much more valuable a keen understanding of the inextricable relationship between the corporeal and the spiritual. Of course, any mention of cinematic flesh must refer itself back to ‘Dave Deprave’ himself-David Cronenberg-who Ducournau also arguably draws from. Born in Paris to a dermatologist father and gynaecologist mother, it is well documented that Ducournau’s formative perceptions were profoundly influenced by her parents’ professions bodies, and in particular flesh, would become the defining visual hallmark of her work.
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