Time, corporeality and breath: Audrey Diwan’s cinematic aesthetics of abortion in L’événement / Happening (Audrey Diwan, 2021)

This article critically analyses Audrey Diwan’s cinematic ‘aesthetics of abortion’ as affective sensations of sound and image in L’événement / Happening (2021). Engaging with breath in the film, the soundscape presents the voicelessness and disempowerment of the young female body. These sensations articulate the pressures placed upon young women against the contextual backdrop of the criminalisation of abortion in France in the 1960s. Combined with a proximate and immediate use of camera placement, the focus on the body presents a point of view where the spectator relates to the character of Anne as she experiences pain and suffering. Anne\ battles through this, advocating for the decriminalisation of abortion. The analysis of the sensations and the experiences—as communicated through the body and its breath—addresses individual experience as an ideological question posed to a nation that, at the time in which the film is set, holds conservative values at its core.