IRRESISTIBLY FRENCH: FEMALE STARDOM AND FRENCHNESS
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the
Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Nicoleta Bazgan, M.A.
*****
The Ohio State University
2008
Dissertation Committee:
Approved by
Professor JUDITH MAYNE, Advisor
Professor EUGENE HOLLAND
Professor KARLIS RACEVSKIS
_________________________________
Advisor
Graduate Program in French and Italian
Copyright by
Nicoleta Bazgan
2008
ABSTRACT
French actresses have exerted an endless fascination on film audiences
worldwide. Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche, and, more recently,
Amelie’s star Audrey Tautou epitomize the lasting appeal of the glamorous French star
system, inviting a critical exploration of their prominent star images and of the bridges of
desire that connect them to national and global audiences.
French female stars cross the boundaries of popular and auteur cinema, and their
mythical star text is refracted across both material and discursive practices, pointing to
their status as French cinema icons, national treasures, and objects of consumption. On
the one hand, French female stardom is represented as an elusive essence, a self-made
myth inspired by a reputable tradition of cinematic and artistic excellence, its allure
residing in the infamous je ne sais quoi that refuses easy consumption. On the other hand,
stars as icons of femininity are the objects of an intense scrutiny that invites consumption
through various practices, as the glamorous French actresses are exclusively faithful to
the national industries of tourism, perfume, cosmetics, and fashion.
My research also reveals that the various cultural products related to French
female stars initiate a dynamic and visionary mode of transnational cultural exchanges.
Contrary to a French cultural tradition turned inward to protect its national authenticity,
the cultural products related to French female stars are open to export their Frenchness in
ii
a global market. Consequently, despite the construction of French cinema split between a
commercial and an art sector with less popular appeal, female stars contribute to its
perpetuation as art, industry, and commerce, providing a vital link in the negotiations
between feminine identities, cinema, nation, and (inter)national consumption.
iii
To my mother, Eli
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research project was enabled by the professional advice, intellectual
guidance, and moral support of several scholars, colleagues, and friends.
First, I am deeply indebted to my dissertation advisor, Professor Judith Mayne. In
every possible way, Professor Mayne was the perfect advisor for this dissertation and an
inspiring model for both scholarship and teaching. Her breath and depth of knowledge,
passion for teaching cinema, intellectual generosity, and critical enthusiasm shaped and
inspired my entire education and research. Through several film courses, numerous
discussions concerning many facets of this project, and generous comments, Professor
Mayne encouraged me to develop my passion for French cinema and to grow
intellectually during my graduate years.
I am grateful to the other members of my committee, Professor Karlis Racevskis
and Professor Eugene Holland for their generous comments and incisive observations at
various stages in the development of this dissertation. I am thankful to Professor Danielle
Marx-Scouras for her unwavering support of this project from its incipient stages and for
her inspiring passion for popular culture. During the later stages of the dissertation,
Professor Wynne Wong and Professor Dana Renga have provided me with constant and
very generous academic guidance and moral support.
This project would have not been possible without two grants for conducting
research abroad: the Coca-Cola Critical Difference for Women Research Grant on
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Gender & Gender Studies and The Ohio State Alumni Grant for Graduate Research and
Scholarship. The materials consulted in the Bibliothèque du Film and Inathèque were
significant resources for my research.
I would like to extend my thanks to numerous friends for their advice and support:
Wendy and Florin, who put their time and energy in reading parts of my dissertation, as
well as Adela, Andrei, Ioana, Iulian, Mirela, and Simona, who constantly supported me
through numerous conversations and kind gestures. I am particularly grateful to Laura
Hetel. I was fortunate enough to have in her an intellectual companion and a dear friend
who made my graduate journey infinitely richer. Laura and I were undergraduate and
graduate students, teaching assistants and resident directors for study abroad programs,
good friends and enthusiastic travelers. In addition, she was a careful reader of this
dissertation, offering me insightful comments and much-needed reassurance at critical
moments during the writing process. A very special and heartfelt thank you goes to
Konstantin for ink tanks, positive spirit, and invaluable friendship. The last, and surely
the most, I want to thank my family for their support.
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VITA
2001 – 2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Combined undergraduate / graduate program
The Ohio State University
B.A., Summa cum laude
Majors: Political Science
World Business & Economy
M.A., French
2001 – 2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Teaching Assistant
The Ohio State University
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: French Studies
French Film Studies, Twentieth Century French Literature and Culture
Popular Culture and Advertising
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
Dedication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Vita . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
x
Introduction.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1. The Star as Icon of Cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.1. French Female Stars and the Divide Between Art and Popular Cinema. . . . . . . . 19
1.2. Paradoxical Female Stars: The French Star and Anti-Star System. . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.3. The French Female Star, the Pygmalion Myth and Artistic Collaboration . . . . . 33
1.4. French Privacy Laws and Artistic Labor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
1.5 A Cinematic History of Pygmalion Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
2. Icons of the Nation: Female Stars and Frenchness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
2.1. The Feminine Star, Cinema and the Nation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
2.2. Resistance and Decolonization: Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve . . . . . . 75
3. Paris is a Movie Star: Parisian Women and Iconic Urban Femininity . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
3.1. The Myth of Parisian Women. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
viii
3.2. Parisian Women: Representations and Difference. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .99
3.3. On-Screen Representations: Icons, Flâneuses and Voyageuses. . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
3.4. Gamines and Maps of Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
3.5. Parisian Female Stars in Extra-Cinematographic Discourses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
4. Icons of Feminine Consumption: On How to Become a French Female Star. . . . . . 134
4.1. On How To Become a French Woman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .138
4.2. Fashionable Mariannes: Stars and Cultural Product Industries. . . . . . . . . . . . . .143
5. Audrey Hepburn: A Gamine With a French Twist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .158
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .187
Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .192
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LIST OF FIGURES
1.1.
Laetitia Casta. Studio Harcourt, 2006 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.2.
Final shot in 8 Femmes (2001) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
2.1.
Germaine Lefebvre. Marianne, 1951. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
2.2.
Busts of Marianne. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64
2.3.
Poster for Charles de Gaulle’s electoral campaign, 1965. . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
2.4.
Figure 2.4. Poster for Babette s’en va-t-en guerre. (1959). . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.1.
Laetitia Casta by Jean Paul Goude for Galeries Lafayette, 2001. . . . . . . 89
3.2.
Willy Ronnis. Place Vendôme, 1947 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . .92
3.3.
Galeries Lafayette advertisement by Jean Paul Goude, 2001. . . . . . . . . . 97
3.4.
Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria. (1960) . . . . . . . . . . . 98
3.5.
Poster for Une Parisienne. (1957) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
3.6.
Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
3.7.
Paul Moreau-Vauthier, Paris Welcoming Her Guests, 1900 . . . . . . . . . 125
4.1.
Laetitia Casta by Jean-Paul Goude for Galeries Lafayette, 2001. . . . . . 134
4.2.
Diane Vreeland. Boots by Roger Vivier.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .145
4.3.
Le Rouge. Film by Bettina Rheims for Chanel Rouge Allure, 2007. . . .154
5.1.
Audrey Hepburn. Gap Advertisement. 2006. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
5.2.
Posters for Charade (1963) and How to Steal a Million (1966) . . . . . . .181
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INTRODUCTION
French female stars have intrigued and allured audiences worldwide. Free-spirited
gamines, sophisticated Parisian women, and magnetic femmes fatales populate the screen
of French cinema, radiating the celebrated and mythic quality of French femininity and of
its star system. Jeanne Moreau’s defiant laughter disguised as a newsboy with plaid cap
and penciled-on moustache racing on the wooden railroad bridge in Jules et Jim. Brigitte
Bardot’s adulated beauty and irrepressible sexuality revealed with Et Dieu . . . créa la
femme. Catherine Deneuve’s charismatic passion and majestic coolness. Juliette
Binoche’s mysterious and subtle blue aura, sophisticated and expressive, bold and
contained. Isabelle Adjani’s immaculate fierceness and captivating fragility. Emmanuelle
Béart’s liberating sensuality and passionate dignity. Audrey Tautou’s impish gamine look
and magic innocent charm. These different facets of the glamorous French star system
epitomize the fascination that French actresses have always exerted on film audiences
worldwide.
The proliferation of discourses that surround French stars and the types they
embody acknowledges this magnetism. Best-sellers such as Entre Nous: a Woman’s
Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl, photographic albums like Parisienne(s), a BBC
documentary investigating French feminine charm, French Beauty (2005), François
Ozon’s homage to French actresses in 8 Femmes (2002) as well as countless other
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magazines and movies, all point to the je ne sais quoi of beauty, freedom, glamour, and
style that is at the heart of the French feminine and constitutes its appeal.
A central impetus of this study is the systematic examination of female stardom to
explore the ways in which the French female star system occupies a unique place in the
global market. To do this, I set out to examine how cinematic narratives and extracinematic discourses signify French female stardom. These star texts constantly construct
and, in turn, are determined by, representations of femininity, Frenchness, and celebrity.
To account for this complex process, I advance a model that reads female stars with the
aim of explaining the myth of the French feminine and its capacity for seduction.
Encompassing film narratives as well as extra-cinematic narratives of stardom, this study
of stars regards them as complex discourses elaborated through diverse sources: their
roles and characters, publicity, multiple media discourses, such as specialized film
magazines and newspapers, critical reviews, (auto)biographies, but also fanzines and
women’s magazines. Through this critical lens, I read the myth of French female stars as
a tri-faceted prism that enables them to signify as icons of cinema, of the nation, and of
feminine consumption.
To explore the ways in which the myth of Frenchness is circulated by and through
French female stars, I examine in-depth their triple iconicity. As icons of cinema, French
female stars negotiate the tension between art and popular cinema and differentiate
themselves from their Hollywoodian counterparts through their signification practices. As
icons of the nation, French female stars crystallize a certain idea of Frenchness embodied
in specific types such as Marianne, the gamine, and the Parisian woman. Finally, as icons
of feminine consumption, they bridge the gap between national and international
2
audiences through the promotion of Frenchness as a desirable and paradoxically
acquirable trait. I argue that the synergies of these three facets of French stars construct
their mythical status as icons of feminine Frenchness.
I will first proceed with an in-depth look at the component parts of this model and
with a discussion of the theoretical tools I use, demythologization and contradiction, in
order to analyze the signifying power of movie stars. Subsequently, I will employ this
analytic model to elucidate the discursive power of French female stardom both in
cinematic and extra-cinematic texts and to illuminate the ways in which the French star
system functions in an international and national context.
The most basic concept on which I rely to address critically French female
stardom is iconicity. The term “icon” carries the imprint of its etymology. Derived from
the Greek eikon “likeness, image, portrait” and related to eikenai “be like, look like,”
icons are images that bear a distinct resemblance to their model, according to the Online
Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. When analyzing the relation between
objects and signs, Charles S. Pierce used this very quality of resemblance to draw a
distinction between icons and symbols:
Icons are completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished
from them. A diagram indeed, as far as it has a general signification, is not a pure
icon; but in the middle part of our reasoning, we forget that abstractness in great
measure, and the diagram for us is the very thing. So contemplating a painting,
there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing, the
distinction of the real and the copy disappears, and it is for the moment a pure
dream, – not any particular existence, and yet not general. At that moment we are
contemplating an icon. (163)
The necessary characteristic of an iconic representation is the resemblance to its
model. However, the signification of the term “icon” greatly changed in a ubiquitous
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contemporary usage. To clarify this shift in meaning, I use Philip J. Ethington’s and
Vanessa R. Schwartz’s analysis for an online project concerning urban icons,
“Introduction: an Atlas of the Urban Icons Project,” which offers an insightful definition
of icons that I adopt to investigate French female stardom:
All Icons:
(1) Are graphic simplifications and condensations of meaning. They distill a range
of ideas into a single representation and act metonymically as a substitute for a
multi-faceted whole.
(2) Circulate across semiotic forms and across media.
(3) Are both singular and repeated.
(4) Function as visual clichés, despite variation. (13)
With these insights in mind, I will henceforth consider icons as metonymical
representations that acquire high visibility through both their uniqueness and repetition in
cinematic as well as extra-cinematic texts. I examine this appeal, engendered and exerted
by French female stars, by using a Barthesian demythologizing approach and the notion
of contradiction, a central concept in stardom studies.
In order to scrutinize French female stars and their capacity for seduction, I
employ the notion of contradiction central to both Edgar Morin’s and Richard Dyer’s
work on stars. In 1957, Edgar Morin initiated a critical approach in the analysis of stars
through his pioneering work The Stars. Morin traces the destiny of Hollywood movie
stars from their status as gods to their decline in the more familiar realm of the mortals at
the crossroads of the 1930s. In Morin’s view, the star is manufactured at the intersection
of desire and love (65). Although he does not specifically address the idea of
contradiction, Morin mentions it on numerous occasions in his star analyses when he
notes that stars reconcile tensions between leisure and labor (27), are “like gods made of
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everything and nothing” (106), “rare as gold and common as bread,” and “goddess and
merchandise” (141).
Stars lose their divinity aura and unexplainable appeal even more in 1979 when
Richard Dyer’s influential work Stars contributed to the establishment of star studies as a
critical field of investigation. Dyer theorizes the previously opaque fascination with stars
and reads them as complex networks of signs. He develops a twofold critical approach
where semiotic reading needs to be accompanied by sociological interpretation, thus
equally emphasizing the stars’ capacity of producing meaning and their function within a
specific cultural-historical context. Within these two research fields, Dyer develops a
formalized and organized methodology to investigate stars and addresses contradiction as
an essential element of their charisma.
To analyze star texts, Dyer introduces the concept of “structured polysemy,”
which he defines as: "the finite multiplicity of meanings and affects they [stars] embody
and the attempt to structure them so that some meanings and affects are foregrounded and
others are masked or displaced” (3). The polysemy of star texts illustrates their capacity
of embodying a finite multiplicity of meanings as well as the process of being structured
around contradictions. As Dyer explains: “In some cases, the various elements of
signification may reinforce one another. . . . In other cases the elements may be to some
degree in opposition or contradiction, in which case a star’s image is characterized by
attempts to negotiate, reconcile or mask the difference between the elements, or else
simply hold them in tension” (1979:63). Consequently, contradiction is the core concept
of star text analysis for Dyer and, contrary to Morin, he reads it within the allencompassing discourse of ideology:
5
I would generalise from this the notion of the star’s image being related to
contradictions within the dominant ideology, or between it and other
subordinated/revolutionary ideologies. The relation may be one of displacement,
or the suppression of one half of the contradiction and the foregrounding of the
other, or else it may be that the star effects a ‘magic’ reconciliation of the
apparently incompatible terms. (1979: 26)
Stars therefore are not simply or directly reproducing dominant ideology, but they
negotiate contradictory significations relevant to their historical and social context.
Nevertheless, in Dyer’s view, they remain ideological stars.
Even though the illustrations Dyer uses refer mainly to Hollywood cinema, the
critic suggests that his theoretical apparatus is to be regarded as universally valid if one
takes into account additional national characteristics: “the specificities of these other
places where stars are to be found would always have to be respected, although at the
level of theorisation and methodology I believe most of what is elaborated here in
relation to Hollywood film stars is broadly applicable to these kinds of stars” (1979: 3).
Following Dyer’s advice, scholars such as Susan Hayward, Ginette Vincendeau, and Guy
Austin have recently investigated the French star system along these lines. 1 At stake in
these various authors’ works is the deliberate attempt to anchor star images and their
contradictions in the historical and cultural conditions of the French society that produced
them.
A close reading of these French star analyses reveals that the charismatic
contradictions central to stardom are more accentuated in French cinema due to its
artisanal quality and to the fact that French female stars need to signify in multiple
discourses (i.e. popular and auteur film, theatre, music, advertisement) in order to counter
the “instability of film production” (Vincendeau 2000:13). In other words, due to the
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specific conditions of production, the notion of contradiction is highly accentuated at the
level of French female stars, which renders Judith Mayne’s reading of the appeal of
stardom as “the constant reinvention, the dissolution of contraries, the embrace of widely
opposing terms” (1993:138) a useful tool for my theoretical model of French stardom.
Mayne’s view situates the contradictory elements embodied by stars as a characteristic of
cinema itself and matches my analysis of the paradoxical dimension of French female
stars that relentlessly negotiate among iconic aspects of cinema, nation, and femininity.
To analyze the myth of female stars and Frenchness, I work in the light of Roland
Barthes’s tradition of demythology. From this perspective, I view the French female
stars’ iconicity as condensing and reiterating a set of connotations that reflects and
constructs Frenchness as a myth. Emerging from the three iconic facets of French
feminine, these connotations engender constant contradictory tensions between their
significations while, at the same time, constitute the mythical appeal of French female
stars. Although the divisions of this study reproduce the three sides of the stardom model,
I frequently focus on the interaction and paradoxical convergences among these three
facets rather than on their individual characteristics.
Certainly, this process includes the perpetuation of some visual clichés or
connotations at the cost of others, but thinking in terms of the contiguity between myth
and mask – a well-traveled metaphor present both in Roland Barthes’s Mythololgies
(1957) and in Edgard Morin’s The Stars (1957) – is productive here. As Claude LéviStrauss puts it: “Like a myth, a mask denies as much as it affirms. It is not made solely of
what it says or thinks it is saying but of what it excludes” (144). My work will address
how certain signs of Frenchness are foregrounded at the expense of others since this
7
visibility, this mask of feminine Frenchness is based upon exclusion. Nevertheless, these
bracketed elements can, in the long run, also function as a resource pool that serves to
reinvent female Frenchness within the innovative parameters of modern stardom.
In the first chapter, I look at the complex ways in which French female stars
question the generic distinction between popular and auteur cinema. This tension equally
establishes the limits and direction of the present study since my star analyses gravitate
around two poles: on the one hand around the mid-1950s and early 1960s and, on the
other hand, around the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Uruguay round,
culminating in 1993. The first period illustrates the growing schism between popular and
art cinema initiated by the young writers of the Cahiers de Cinéma through their criticism
of popular cinema in its tradition de qualité. This period equally marks the debut of the
consumerism era in France and thus the beginning of the inherent tensions between
national difference and the threat of an outside, uniformly Americanized, excessive
consumption. The second period, centered on the 1993 GATT agreement, relaunches the
same debate around French cinema and, implicitly, French stars. This time, however, the
national difference, marked by the dispute between commercial objects and artistic
creations, is staged in front of a global forum at the World Trade Organization. These two
gravitational centers problematize the uneasy cohabitation of economy and culture in the
images of French female stars that also construct Frenchness as a site of alluring
significations for (inter)national audiences.
Subsequently in this first chapter, I analyze extra-cinematographic discourses
constructing paradoxical star and anti-star systems that reflect the duality of popular and
auteur cinema bridged by female stars. While discussing the construction of French
8
female stars in terms of artistic labor, I look at how extra-cinematographic celebrity texts
construct the relationship between high-profile female stars and directors in terms of an
artistic inventive process through which French actresses and directors as creative agents
make an essential contribution to the strength and success of French national cinema.
Consequently, not only does French stardom refuse easy consumption through a
Pygmalion model and strict privacy laws, but it also constructs distinctiveness through its
vital role in circulating artistic creation in the national institution of French cinema,
therefore distancing itself from the Hollywood star-system. The highly visible off-screen
discourses that circulate artistic creation through the images of French stars either in the
form of the Pygmalion myth or the individual artistic creator reveal a parallel on-screen
representation. I conclude, therefore, on the tradition of movies reflecting upon the role of
female stars, as illustrated by François Ozon’s meta-commentary in 8 Femmes (2001).
My study of French female actresses shifts the critical discussion away from both
a history of postwar cinema in terms of crisis and movie production and a politique des
auteurs (politics of film authorship). Instead, I look at a politique des femmes stars
(politics of female stars) in order to analyze how French female stars circulate in
cinematic, national, and commercial discourses. In doing so, I argue that French female
stars, through their paradoxical qualities, are more prone to exports that their masculine
counterparts who are caught on the side of the elite culture as auteurs, cultural
policymakers, and defenders of national culture. In fact, the stars’ femininity as a
construct enables them to transgress the problematic barrier between art and popular
cinema, between cultural and commercial products. 2
9
Chapter 2 focuses on the role of French female stars as icons of the nation. Within
this framework, female star texts cluster signs of Frenchness through the incarnation of a
long lineage of French historical and literary heroines, their association with the symbol
of the French republic, Marianne, their significant presence in iconic French, and
especially Parisian, public spaces. I work at the intersection of gender and national
imaginary studies to illuminate the strong connection between French female star bodies,
on the one side, and cinematic and political discourses, on the other.
In Chapter 3, I analyze the link between the star images of French actresses, the
city of Paris, and the construction as well as the mapping of female subjectivities. I
examine the strong metonymical relationship between Paris and its female inhabitants in
cinematographic and extra-cinematographic texts in order to reveal the construction of
Parisian women as modern urban icons. To this purpose, I greatly rely on Tom Conley’s
theoretical tools developed in Cartographic Cinema and Giuliana Bruno’s voyageuse
concept laid out in Atlas of Emotion to reassess the representation of women in urban
spaces. I argue that the symbiosis between women and the city of Paris opens up new
readings of the place(s) of women in the city and allows for a better understanding of
their positions and roles in public spaces. I show how readings of objectification and
fetishization of the Parisian women and gamines are intertwined with readings that point
to their influence on the urban space and interpretations that position female spectators as
voyageuses. Moreover, I argue, that French female stars on- and off-screen map the city
of Paris in terms of their feminine subjectivities. I end with Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie
Poulain (2001) since this movie holds in perfect tension the objective and subjective
filmic representations of the gamine and the city of Paris.
10
French female stars function at a level of idealization that reaches the discourse of
the archetype, of the myth, while, at the same time, they are anchored in the national and
historical context. In this sense, my goal is to illuminate how feminine stardom bridges
the national specific and the ideal archetype of femininity through cultural consumption.
Therefore, in Chapter 4, I argue that this construction of French actresses as icons of
consumption facilitates exports of cinema and of the related national industries of
fashion, perfume, and cosmetics. Female stars need to convey an iconic image of
Frenchness while functioning as merchandise for a niche, created by their difference, in a
global market. Their Frenchness is perpetuated through high-end cultural products and
their connotations of exclusivity and cultural elitism. Nevertheless, female stars’ images
as merchandise will be inflected by their status as French cinematic icons. Despite the
fact that representations of French women operate in a particular national dimension, they
also signify as archetypes of femininity and thus as acquirable models of the eternal
feminine. This contradictory tension between the national and the universal is unique to
the representations of French women and allows them to signify in national or
international contexts.
I devote Chapter 5 to Audrey Hepburn, a Hollywood star and a gamine with a
French twist and I apply to her star image the three-faceted model of French female
stardom to scrutinize her long-lasting appeal. Through her capacity of connoting
Frenchness, her roles of Parisian gamines, and her association with haute couture fashion
designer Hubert de Givenchy, Hepburn offers a rare successful example of constructing
Frenchness on the Hollywood silver screen.
11
This tri-faceted model of cinematic, national, and consumption iconicities can
equally explain how, if French actresses signify in only one of these three dimensions,
their charisma at an (inter)national level decreases. For instance, if French actresses do
not reconcile both the art and popular dimension of French cinema, their stardom
becomes unilateral and only functions at one circumscribed level. Hence, French popular
stars such as Martine Carol, Françoise Arnoul and Valérie Lemercier are to be analyzed
in the socio-historical context of popular and national stardom. Conversely, French auteur
stars such as Delphine Seyrig, Marina Vlady, Sandrine Bonnaire achieve iconic status
exclusively in limited art-house audiences and therefore lack high visibility.
When contrasting French female stardom with French stars as sole icons of
consumption, Dyer’s distinction between a type and a stereotype becomes a useful tool
for illustrating this decrease in visible iconicity. Dyer defines a type as “any simple,
vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognized characterization in which a few
traits are foregrounded and change or ‘development’ is kept to a minimum (1980: 28-9)”.
Stereotypes reduce, freeze, and exclude differences. He also argues that the distinction
between types and stereotypes is most visible in relation to plot. Whereas social types
have a high flexibility and can assume different roles, stereotypes “always carry within
their very representation an implicit narrative” (Dyer 1993a: 14). Consequently, if French
stars signify only as icons of consumption in a cinematic text, they move from
embodying types to incarnating stereotypes as their Frenchness is consumed exclusively
as an exotic, highly sexualized type of beauty. In this case, French female stars freeze
into stereotypes because they shift from the multidimensionality of the type to the
unidimensional nature of the stereotype. In their first status as types, they reconcile
12
Frenchness, cultural cinematic aura, and consumption whereas in their second role as
stereotypes, they are exclusively destined to consumption. As an illustration,
Hollywood’s casting of French actresses in roles of French seductresses is symptomatic
of this stereotyping process, as Emmanuelle Béart’s appearance in Mission Impossible
(1996), Isabelle Adjani’s part in the remake of the Diabolique (1996), Juliette Binoche’s
typecast in Chocolat (2000), and Marillon Cottilard’s role in A Good Year (2006)
illustrate. When it came to explaining the difficulties in exporting French actresses to
Hollywood, language was thought to be the main barrier to the international promotion of
French stars (Finney 1997, Vincendeau 2000). However, another important element that
contributed to recurrent failures of French female stars in Hollywood is their stereotyping
as seductresses. These one-dimensional representations of French femininity are
uttermost reductive and fail to reflect the tri-parted iconicity of French stardom by
ignoring the other two synergy generating dimensions. Moreover, the stereotype of the
exotic sexualized woman does not mark a significant difference from a reputable
competition of other variations of exoticism such as those of Hispanic, Italian or Asian
female stars. This final point raises another issue on which I wish to conclude, the
concept of distinctiveness.
Only a few national cinemas challenge the dominance of the Hollywood star
system in the global market. Alongside Bollywood, French cinema stands out through the
production and construction of a constant collection of stars. Within the framework of
constructing national difference, the French star system is situated in a perpetual
conversation with its Hollywoodian gigantic counterpart. Illuminating the viability of
cultural products in a global market, Allan J. Scott writes that copying Hollywood-type
13
movies as in the case of Luc Bessons’ Fifth Element (1997) is not a productive strategy
since the construction of uniqueness in the market is paramount:
Over and above questions of authenticity and standards of cultural
judgment, this remark can be justified by invoking the general theory of industrial
districts, which suggests that because of increasing returns effects, the long-term
survival of any industrial agglomeration is more likely to be secured by
meaningful differentiation from a dominant competitor that it is by imitation.
(109-10)
Therefore, as cultural products, French female stars have to construct themselves
as significantly different from their Hollywood counterparts if they want to maintain a
presence in a competitive global market in the long run. 3 Concurrently, their star texts
have to be readable for and fascinating to both national and international audiences. This
marketable difference arising from the triple iconicity of French female stars warrants
their visibility and survival in an international cinematic arena.
I argue that the fusion between national representations, cinematic icons, and
feminine consumption constitutes the heart of French stars’ widespread appeal and allows
them not only to function both as artistic subjects and objects of consumption, but also to
tell significant stories to global audiences through their universal charisma. I conclude
that, at the confluence of the national imaginary and feminine gender representation, a
new form of cultural exchange emerges in the media texts surrounding French female
stars. Films revolving around a masculine star, be they auteur cinema or popular heritage
cinema, turn inward and mobilize all signifying resources to protect the national filmic
industry. In opposition, French female stars shift the perspective to a cultural difference
open to the world and ready to be exported in a global market. But what exactly
constitutes their global appeal and what significant stories do they tell? Ultimately,
within this framework, my study is about the fascination that representations of French
14
femininity engender, their inspirational quality, and the bridges of desire that connect
them to worldwide audiences.
1
See Ginette Vincendeau and Claude Gauteur Jean Gabin. L’Anatomie d’un mythe, Guy Austin Stars in
Modern French Film, and Susan Hayward Simone Signoret: The Star as Cultural Sign. Several articles on
the topic of French stardom are regularly published in French Cinema Studies, to quote only a few: Fiona
Handyside “Stardom and Nationality: the Strange Case of Jean Seberg,” Sarah Leahy 'The Matter of Myth:
Brigitte Bardot,” Jacqueline Nacache “Group Portrait with A Star: Jeanne Balibar and French ‘jeune’
cinema,” Ginette Vincendeau “Juliette Binoche: From Gamine to Femme,” and Isabelle Vanderschelden,
“Jamel Debbouze: A new popular French star?”
2
The studies of gender in French cinema have followed different filiations centered mainly on filmmakers
and gender representations. Sandy Flitterman’s study To desire differently: feminism and French cinema
(1990) addresses female authorship in French cinema. The author analyzes the productive interactions
between authors’ personal histories and visions (such as Germaine Dulac, Marie Epstein, Agnès Varda) and
historical contexts (Avant-Garde, Poetical Realism, New Wave) to argue that these interactions create the
possibility of a feminine filmic enunciation in French cinema. Cinema and the second sex: women's
filmmaking in France in the 1980s and 1990s is Brigitte Rollet’s and Carrie Tarr’s contribution to the
histories of French women directors. Although the authors include contribution of women other than
directors (i.e. actresses, producers, screenwriters), they mainly focus in their analysis on an overview of
films made by women directors in France. These two studies make an important contribution to shedding
light on women’s filmmaking both as cultural producers and objects of critical scholarship. Finally, Gender
and French Cinema, edited by Alex Hughes and James S. Williams contributes to the gender literature in
French cinema with a project of reading gender representations in a comprehensive panorama of French
cinema. In terms of female stars, two tendencies are to be found. First, there are studies providing
biographies, filmographies, and memorable photographs of the French female stars such as Françoise
Ducout, Séductrices du cinéma français (1978) or, Herny Jean Servat. Vénus de mélos: les belles actrices
du cinéma français des années 60 (1987). The second trend, offering in-depth analyses of Female stars in
socio-historical contexts, as previously mentioned, is reflected by Ginette Vincendeau’s studies of Brigitte
Bardot, Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche, Susan Hayward’s study of Simone Signoret and Guy
Austin’s study of Emmanuelle Béart, to name only a few.
3
I adopt Scott’s definition of cultural products: “outputs consist of artifacts imbued with imaginative
aesthetic and semiotic content – sometimes even at high levels of artistic accomplishments – while at the
same time they are subjects to the discipline of profitability criteria and market signals (i.e. they are
produced in commodity form)” (33).
15
CHAPTER 1
THE STAR AS ICON OF CINEMA
In 1957, the socio-economic and cultural changes brought about by the
consumerism era became highly evident in the critical discourses scrutinizing French
society. It was during this year, for instance, that Roland Barthes published Mythologies,
Edgar Morin wrote Les Stars, and France was still under the fascination of the Brigitte
Bardot phenomenon since she had erupted the previous year in Et Dieu . . . créa la
femme.
Barthes, one of France’s most prolific philosophers and literary critics, was
intrigued by the life of cultural objects in the Coty republic and launched a critical
attempt to understand the functions of an emerging commodity culture. 1 Political,
economic, domestic, and commercial objects became the target of Barthes’s intellectual
curiosity and demythologizing efforts. In Mythologies, one by one, toys, Romans in
movies, Abbé Pierre, detergents, bifteck and frites, wine, Greta Garbo’s face, the Tour de
France, the ornamental cuisine of Elle magazine, and the new Citroën parade in front of
the reader while Barthes deciphers each of them and exposes their capacity to condense
multiple layers of significations. In the theoretical chapter following these case analyses,
Barthes coins the mythology of cultural objects as a second order of signification serving
16
“to naturalize the cultural.” Subsequently, he recommends the uncovering and
demystification of cultural myths through semiotic analysis (1957: 181-233).
Preoccupied by a different but related mythology, the sociologist Edgar Morin
directs his critical interest towards the phenomenon of stars and their role in
contemporary cultural life. He observes a “secularization” process, a metamorphosis of
stars from gods to mortals as a consequence of transformations in cinema itself, which
was screening more realistic, “more psychological and cheerful movies” after 1930 (16,
23). As a result, Morin argues, the star becomes more “familiar and familial” and inhabits
the daily contemporary life without losing its mythical quality (32). Although the
author’s argument is mainly based on Hollywood stars, a highly visible French star, “the
sexiest of the baby stars, and the babiest of the sexy stars,” Brigitte Bardot becomes the
target of his critical attention:
Her kitten-like face simultaneously expresses the infantile and the feline: the long
hair falling down her back is the very symbol of lascivious undress, the proferred
nudity, yet a deceptively disordered row of bangs across her forehead reminds us
of the little high-school girl. Her tiny roguish nose accentuates both her gaminerie
and her animality; her fleshy lower lip is pursed into a baby’s pout as often as into
a provocation to be kissed. The little cleft in her chin adds the final touch to the
charming gaminerie of this face, of which it would be libelous to say it has only
one expression – it has two: eroticism and childishness. (31)
When contrasted with Barthes’s tribute to Greta Garbo, Morin’s description of Bardot’s
face reveals the gap between eternal universal gods and mortal French girls:
C’est sans doute un admirable visage-objet . . . le fard a l’épaisseur neigeuse d’un
masque; ce n’est pas un visage peint, c’est un visage plâtré, défendu par la surface
de la couleur et non par ses lignes; dans toute cette neige à la fois fragile et
compacte, les yeux seuls, noirs comme une pulpe bizarre, mais nullement
expressifs, sont deux meurtrissures un peu tremblantes. Même dans l’extrême
beauté ce visage, non pas dessiné, mais plutôt sculpté dans le lisse et le friable
c’est-à-dire à la fois parfait et éphémère, rejoint la face farineuse de Charlot, ses
yeux de végétal sombre, son visage de totem. (65-66)
17
I use these two descriptions as illustrative of a pair of elements that I employ as tools in
my analysis of French stars. On the one hand, Barthes sees in Garbo’s face the mask of
the actress that, through artistic labor, incarnates the “archetype,” “the essential beauty”
(66). Morin, on the other hand, overwhelms the reader with his detailed description of
Bardot’s physical and sexualized persona. While Barthes looks at the inscrutable image
of the cinema actress, Morin takes pleasure in describing Bardot’s star beauty. This
opposition between mythical actress and star, I argue, is at the heart of the phenomenon
of French female stars, since it engenders their
inner structure and charisma as icons of cinema
in on-screen and off-screen discourses. Studio
Harcourt, the unquestionable photographic art
institution of French stardom, is a persuasive
illustration of the perpetuation of a mythical star
image up to the contemporary era. The
photographic technique promoted by the studio
Figure 1.1. Laetitia Casta.
Studio Harcourt, 2006.
connotes eternity and sublime luxury (Baqué
10). Barthes dedicated an essay in Mythologies
to it, remarking that the Harcourt studio is the ultimate confirmation of stardom: “En
France, on n’est pas acteur si on n’a pas été photographié par les Studios d’Harcourt.
L’acteur d’Harcourt est un dieu; il ne fait jamais rien: il est saisi au repos” (1957: 23).
Even after seventy years of existence, as Laetitia Casta’s recent portrait shows, the
Harcourt aesthetics remained the same: the three quarter profile focusing the attention on
the face and, in particular, on the eyes as well as the cinematic lighting that dramatizes
18
the use of contrast between light and dark, contributing to the overall aura effect. In brief,
the visual approach of the studio Harcourt recalls Barthes’s description of the mask, as
Dominique Baqué and Françoise Denoyelle notice: “L’esthétique Harcourt élabore un
idéalisme des apparences forgé par l’artifice, promet la beauté canonique de l’acteur dont
le visage fardé, retouché, rejoint le hiératisme sacré du masque, devient un type idéal.
L’essence même du visage” (18). Laetitia Casta thus epitomizes the glamour of the
mythical and archetypal actress as well as both the modern French Republic as Marianne
– to be discussed in Chapter 2 – and the contemporary fashion and cinema star.
Equally important, a Pygmalion model constructed in cinematic and extracinematic texts channels artistry discourses and reveals the capacity of French female
stars to impact their future roles. While the recurrent Pygmalion model and the mythical
actress discourse mark a difference from Hollywoodian stardom, the star image offers
pleasurable and recognizable anchor points for (inter)national consumption. I will
analyze this model in both movies that stage star images, such as Et Dieu . . . créa femme
and movies that reflect upon them as, for instance, 8 Femmes.
1.1. French Female Stars and the Divide Between Art and Popular Cinema
The 1950s debuted with numerous representations of French femininity that
flooded the silver screen: Jacqueline Audry’s Gigi (1949), Minne l’ingénue libertine
(1950), and Olivia (1951), Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or (1951), Max Ophüls’s Madame
19
de . . . (1953), Jean Renoir’s French Cancan (1954) as well as René Clair’s Les Grandes
manoeuvres (1955). Looking at this prolific film production, Geneviève Sellier identified
fifty films between 1945 and 1959 that she has labeled as Belle Époque genre films, out
of which twenty-seven tell the story of a female protagonist. Contrasting the
psychological drama tradition, Black Realism, dominated by masculinity with the Belle
Epoque genre staging femininity, Sellier argues that, through situating the feminine in a
distant past, this type of movie served as a “protective disguise to deal with the burning
questions of the time,” that is, the emancipation of women (2003: 53).
These genre movies created, nevertheless, a record box-office success. René
Prédal cites 1957 as a landmark of the highest number of French film spectators since the
end of the war (1991: 68). Central to this period is Martine Carol’s stardom reflecting the
quality of cinema as “popular spectacle” before the schism between art and popular
cinema (Prédal, 1991: 72). Carol nourished numerous extra-cinematic discourses
surrounding her persona, texts that scrutinized and reported her affairs, marriages, and
private life. Her on-screen performances polarized public opinion but her impact on
audiences was tremendous, as André Bazin’s 1954 article titled “De la Carolisation de la
France” illustrates. In this piece of virulent criticism, Bazin starts by noting that Caroline
Chérie starring Martine Carol represents the contemporary French feminine myth.
Immediately after this remark, the illustrious film critic harshly condemns the tradition of
quality films as mindless copies of Hollywood’s blockbusters: “A l’âpre et rouge Scarlett
confondant le démon de l’ambition et celui de la chair, Cécil Saint Laurent [scriptwriter]
substituait une sorte de putain ingénue traversant les périls d’une époque trouble avec une
innocente perversité” (298).
20
Bazin’s comments show that popular stardom and Belle Époque genre movies
generated a wave of negative contemporary art criticism. In 1953, Jean de Baroncelli
claims to have coined a formula for popular films staging women while analyzing
Femmes de Paris: Bt+ 20 FN+VI+m (3AS). It can be simply read as “bon titre,” “femmes
nues,” “vedettes internationals,” “attractions sensationnelles.” This type of critique
resonates with the tone of the subsequent 1954 article of François Truffaut “Une certaine
tendance du cinéma français.” Truffaut marked a clean break with the past as he and the
young writers and filmmakers of the Cahiers du cinéma deepened the gulf between
cinematic and commercial movies through their insatiable critique of contemporary
commercial cinema. 2 The word “crisis” becomes a recurrent occurrence in the
entanglements and feuds between economic trade and artistic quality.
At the institutional level, the identical tension between culture and economy was
in the spotlight as well. André Malraux, named head of the newly founded ministry of
Cultural Affairs, brought under one roof education, architecture, historical monuments,
and archives, as well as the CNC (Centre National de la Cinématographie) that was
transferred from the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. In fact, Malraux himself
identified with uncanny accuracy this tension between art and merchandise through the
phrase – noted in his Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinema (1946) – on which numerous
variations were played: “Par ailleurs, le cinéma est une industrie.”
An institution that also bears this contradiction at heart is Unifrance. Founded in
1949 under the supervision of the CNC, Unifrance’s role is to export French film around
the globe. In the 1950s, its creator, film executive Robert Cravenne, was part of a
delegation that met with American executives of its counterpart organization, the Motion
21
Picture Export Association of America, in an effort to capture broader American
audiences. The consensus of the meeting was that more popular genres will generate
more success in international terms (Seagrave 114-5). Stars were central to this approach,
and the French Film Office in New York organized United States tours of French stars
such as Martine Carol, Gérard Philippe, Françoise Arnoul, and Micheline Presle. The
program of Unifrance marked the promotion of stars abroad as part of its publicity and
propaganda plans. Cravenne’s words reflect this approach that emphasizes the paramount
importance of stars in exporting movies: “On saisira et suscitera toutes occasions
d’assurer la présence de nos vedettes à l’étranger principalement à l’occasion de la sortie
de leurs films” (95). Unifrance also promoted assiduously a potential star, Brigitte
Bardot, from the early 1950s until she became the embodiment of its successful
promotion model (Schwartz 118, 123). As an international star, Bardot was the epitome
of a popular highly sexualized model of youth combined with what Schwarz has termed
to be the ultimate Frenchness cliché of the “gaieté française, the Belle Époque Can-Can
girl, and the decadent world of Moulin Rouge” (121). Accordingly, Time magazine noted
the success of European movies in the United States in an article “In the Meantime,”
attributing it to the shift from an art house trend to a more popular appeal caused by the
Bardot phenomenon:
Hundreds of independent theater owners have decided that U.S. moviegoers will
gladly jump the language barrier if they are promised plenty of sex on the other
side. “Frankly carnal!” shout the extra-column ads. “Passion-driven . . . she
married the father to seduce the son!" And God . . . Created Woman (“but the
Devil invented Brigitte Bardot”) will probably be booked into no fewer than
4,000 U.S. movie houses – largely on the strength of the heroine's moral
weakness.
22
This highly sexualized brand of French, and more inclusive European femininity waned
in the global market by the end of the decade under the criticism of “too artsy before, too
sexy now” (Seagrave 141). However, this phenomenon illustrates the destabilizing
oscillations between art and popular cultural product that are visible in the international
marketing techniques of French movies.
Malraux’s tenets of democratization of culture and preservation of heritage
became the focus of Jack Lang’s cultural policy during his two mandates as Minister of
Culture (1981-1986 and 1988-1993). He continued the conservation of heritage (le
patrimoine) and aimed at breathing new life into contemporary art through its diffusion to
a broader audience at home and internationally. In his view, Malraux’s juxtaposition of
“art and industry” becomes reconciled through the notion of the “tout culturel”: “Il peut y
avoir autant acte de culture dans le dessin d’une robe, le design d’un objet ou
l’élaboration d’un film annonce-publicitaire que dans l’écriture musicale, l’art graphique
ou l’architecture” (qtd. in Loosely 127).
The Lang cinematic years mark the appearance of a new cinematic genre, the
heritage film. Constructed according to a technique of the film-événement, with big
budgets and highly visible stars, heritage films dominated the 1980s and 1990s aiming at
popularizing national culture through French historic or literary adaptations.
Consequently, they are inherently introspective, scrutinizing and screening a coherent
national story when a sense of economic decline and growing disillusionment with the
powers of the political government dominated French society. 3 As Guy Austin remarks,
Lang’s plans were to link the heritage movie to a golden age of the popular cinema which
resembles the Poetic Realism movement of the 1930s (1996: 142-3). The minister of
23
culture envisioned heritage film as a redoubtable concurrence against Hollywood in the
global market. Most importantly for our purposes, they screen a “crisis of masculinity,”
which, in Powrie’s terms, is as a social phenomenon that also places the male spectator in
a masochist position in terms of primary identification (1997: 11, 26). Guy Austin, again,
points out a discrepancy between the goals of the heritage film – “the democratization of
high-culture” and the celebration of “cultural industry and popular forms” – and its
results in 1993. The outcome is reversed, he argues, as the divide between the popular
and the cultural grew deeper given that Lang’s policy artificially favored heritage films
over successful popular genre movies such as comedies (Austin 1998: 279, 295).
Both Malraux’s and Lang’s cultural actions illustrate the fact that culture becomes
a state matter, and also the implication that, as Cravenne puts it, cultural defense becomes
a matter of state defense (20). 4 With a reputable tradition in France, the defensive
movement against Hollywood entails a description of French cinema in terms of crisis. 5
From the New Wave to the French cultural exception, from the notion of auteur to the
defense against the Hollywood economic machine, the critical and filmic debates have
been conducted predominantly in terms of the masculine.6 The combination between star,
Gérard Depardieu, director, Claude Berri, and movie, Germinal, central to the GATT
cultural exception dispute is highly revealing in this sense. 7
I will use the comments of Daniel Toscan du Plantier – president of Unifrance
from 1998 up to his death in 2003 – to illustrate my point. When explaining the
marketing of French films to international audiences, he argues that French movies
should be a “collection haute-couture cinématographique,” an epitome of luxury, elitism,
and refinement:
24
Dans les pays riches, le cinéma français doit être vendu comme un produit haut de
gamme: c’est le seul cinéma international non américain du monde, la seule
alternative au cinéma américain dont il est complémentaire comme le produit de
luxe est complémentaire du produit de consommation courante. De la même façon
que l’on propose la collection d’automne de la Haute Couture ou un cru de
Château Margaux, il faut proposer les nouveaux films français. (qtd. in Cravenne
154)
In his optics, if French cinema desires to gain visibility in a global scene, it needs to
market and promote itself by reinforcing cultural connotations of Frenchness. The results
of Du Plantier’s strategies were very successful as reflected by the high figures of movie
sales in 2002, including Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, 8 Femmes, Le Pacte des
loups, and Ma Femme est une actrice. 8 For the purpose of this study, Du Plantier’s term
of “haute couture cinématographique” reinforces the notion of difference, of an elite
cinema that has to be sold as commercial product in a global market. The images of
French female stars connote ideals of sophistication associated with French cinematic
culture and, at the same time, they meet the expectations of popular stardom. Through
their capacity of reconciling art and mass culture, they embody a refined and unique type
of femininity circulating the popular connotation of Frenchness while also functioning as
exportable high-end products.
1.2. Paradoxical Female Stars: The French Star and Anti-Star System
Colin Crisp’s study The Classic French Cinema 1930-1960 makes an argument
that there is no star system in French cinema. Looking at cinema as an industrial system
and focusing on its mode of production, Crisp argues that France did not have the
25
necessary degree of industrial organization in order to develop and maintain a star
system:
The relative absence of a star system in France is due primarily to the distinctive
nature of its production system and to the less developed form of capitalism of
which that in turn was a symptom. A fully developed star system requires a
conjunction of textual, industrial, and socioeconomic factors which simply did not
exist in France. (224-5)
In Crisp’s view, French cinema was lacking essential resources to build a viable star
system such as a well-functioning publicity machine, fan clubs, fan magazines, film
production stability, a stable pool of scenarists to create roles accommodating a star
image, and a studio base that would have an interest in promoting stars (1993: 225). Guy
Austin points to the time limitations of Crisp’s study and claims that by the beginning of
the 1960s a fully developed star system emerged in France when the economic conditions
necessary to the emergence of a star system were met (2003: 6). Despite its time
constraints, Crisp’s analysis reveals an important distinction between Hollywood cinema
and French cinema in terms of modes of production: “The French studio system was
frozen in an artisanal mode of production, and it is arguable that a full-fledged industrial
capitalism such as existed in Hollywood is necessary to support the merchandising of
actors central to the star system” (1993: 226). Consequently, Crisp argues not so much
against the existence of a French star system but against the presence of a Hollywoodtype star system in France. The artisanal quality of French cinema marked its star system
in a singular manner, rendering it highly different from Hollywood.
Turning to the definition of a star, Vincendeau identifies the star as “a celebrated
film performer who develops a ‘persona’ or myth composed of an amalgam of their
screen image and private identities, which the audience recognizes and expects from film
26
to film and which in turn determines the parts they play” (2000: viii). French stars, in
order to be defined as stars, need a media apparatus to create extra-cinematic discourses
targeting both the professional and the private life of the performer. Furthermore, French
female stars, in Vincendeau’s terms, need roles constructed through and inflected by their
star image as well.
Taking into account national specificity, Ginette Vincendeau demonstrates that
extensive filmographies and extra-cinematic discourses surrounding actors and actresses
are a viable proof of a long-lasting and well-operating French star system. Additionally,
she mentions the international recognition of French actors as another staple dimension of
their stardom, the order of her observations also revealing that French stars achieve
stardom first within the Hexagon and subsequently at an international level:
France has a star system by virtue of the number of major film stars in activity,
the length of their filmographies and the discursive production that exists around
them: press, radio and television coverage, award ceremonies (the Césars) and
festivals, especially Cannes. Yes, also, in terms of the glamour internationally
associated with French stars – from Max Linder to Juliette Binoche – who
frequently function as ambassadors of French cinema and French culture abroad.
(2000:1)
While investigating the state of European cinema, Angus Finney explains that
France has a unique star system in European cinema. As opposed to Britain where
stardom is mainly reliant on Hollywood, France offers the alternative of an independent
star system. According to him, the privileged centrality of cinema in France’s cultural
and daily life generates mass media discourses in newspapers, in magazines, and on
television, actively promoting public awareness of French stars (63).
The Cannes festival is certainly one of the most visible cinematic events in France
functioning both as an artistic and commercial event where stars and unknown actors
27
have an equal chance of winning the highest prize, La Palme D’Or, under the aegis of
international cinematic competition. However, the Cannes festival has also been
criticized for a too excessive exposure of its participating stars and their
commercialization. Pierre Billard notes the underlying tension between the commercial
and political dimension of the Cannes Film festival:
Les deux préoccupations essentielles – économique avec le tourisme et politique
avec le prestige national – qui ont présidé aux origines du Festival vont imprimer
leur marque à cette grande fête internationale, ponctuée de feux d’artifices et
d’incidents de frontière, et de fixer son image de kermesse aux étoiles, de
croisière de luxe pour VIP et beautiful people. (14)
In Billard’s comments, the Anglicisms “beautiful people” and “VIP” recall
Hollywoodian discourses, clearly indicating this problematic cohabitation of commerce,
national politics, and stars. In her overview of the Cannes festival, Vanessa R. Schwartz
emphasizes two other structural aspects of the festival: its declared cosmopolitanism
meant to accommodate both independent auteur and popular movies as well as the duality
between the official photo shoots and the more spontaneous stars at the beach (2007: 66,
78). These distinctive features of the festival distance it from overt Hollywood
consumption and serve to release tensions among commerce, national politics, and stars.
However, only the word “star” itself is a trace of the Hollywood system from
which the French cinema needs to differentiate itself. The existence of a star system thus
becomes an uninvited sign of Americanization, as in René Prédal’s explanation that :
“Alors qu’on aime le dire moribond à Hollywood (ce qui est d’ailleurs tout à fait faux), le
star-system triomphe en effet en France selon l’habitude qui veut que l’on imite chez
nous avec cinquante ans de retard ce qui s’est fait de plus mauvais aux Etats-Unis: le
vedettariat comme le système d’éducation, la drogue ou le Coca-Cola” (1991: 333). In
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Prédal’s view France does have a star system, but it only expresses the trade-off between
the star and the artistic quality of movies: the more glamorous the star, the less artistic the
movie. For instance: “Catherine Deneuve . . . tend alors à devenir, après Brigitte Bardot,
une authentique star à l’américaine, c’est-à-dire une curieuse figure occupant tellement
la « une » de l’actualité que les spectateurs ne se croient plus obligés d’aller, en plus, la
voir dans ses films” (1991: 333). In Prédal’s depreciative examination, if Bardot is a star,
she can be only a Hollywood star since French actresses have to serve and attend to the
artistic career of their movies.
Both Prédal’s and Billard’s comments reveal a surprising consistency with the
tone of the debate launched by Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” as these two authors allude to the diminishing artistic
aura and the suspicion looming over cultural objects in capitalist exchanges. In fact, in his
short collection of essays reflecting upon cinema, Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinema
(1946), André Malraux contributed to this idea, drawing a clear-cut dichotomy between
art cinema and popular cinema as mediums for great actress and stars respectively:
Une star n’est en aucune façon une actrice qui fait du cinéma. C’est une personne
capable d’un minimum de talent dramatique dont le visage exprime, symbolise,
incarne un instinct collectif. . . . Il en est si bien ainsi que les stars connaissent
obscurément les mythes qu’ils ou elles incarnent et exigent des scénarios capables
de les continuer. Le public, à cause des gros plans, les connaît comme il ne
connut jamais les acteurs de théâtre. Et la vie artistique des uns se développe en
sens inverse de celle des autres: une grande actrice est une femme capable
d’incarner un grand nombre de rôles dissemblables, une star est une femme
capable de faire naître un grand nombre de scénarios convergents. (N. pag.)
Malraux blatantly values artistic performances over female stardom and
distinguishes clearly between the minimum of talent required for stardom and the artistic
gift of the actress to incarnate various diverging roles rather than repetitive, converging
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characters. In a similar manner, a critique of Jeanne Moreau’s performance in Les Amants
holds in exclusive opposition the term “star” and the health of the French cinema:
Pour la première fois depuis de longues années, un film sur l’amour s’écartait de
la mythologie traditionnelle, et du “star-system.”. . . Bien que l’interprétation de
Jeanne Moreau soit un chef d’œuvre de tact, d’élégance, de métier consommé, on
n’a jamais avec Les Amants l’impression d’assister à l’écran à la tranche de vie
d’une star. Ce film-là n’est pas l’histoire d’un monstre sacré, ni l’exercice de
prouesse d’une vedette, Jeanne Moreau. . . . Mais ce défi au «star-system», ce cri
de santé du jeune cinéma français, ne furent entendus qu’à demi. (Chapier 23-4)
If the status of French actresses as artistic agents and depositories of a French
cinematic heritage is not at all problematic for their contribution to the cultural life of the
nation, their status as objects of consumption requires a definition that clearly
differentiates them from their Hollywoodian counterpart. In this perspective, French
female stars have to negotiate the tension between cinema actresses and stars, as both
dimensions are necessary for them to develop durable and viable careers. Vincendeau
reformulates this dichotomy when she asserts that French female stars develop dual-track
careers in both auteur cinema and popular cinema due to two reasons: the artisanal
quality of French cinema and its generic fluidity (2000: 24). I observe that the
polarization of this opposition between the star and cinema actress is highly visible in the
mid-1950-1960s and it becomes increasingly softened through the accumulation of
paradoxical discourses reinforcing both terms “star” and “cinema actress,” in the late
1980s and 1990s.
According to Louis Malle, the term “star” does not belong in the France of 1962.
In a radio interview, he argues that, since stars are mass culture products, essential
instruments for marketing, publicity, and promotion, the French have “anti-stars” while
Hollywood has “stars”:
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C’était le côté “anti-star” de Hollywood que représente . . . Brigitte; aspect
particulier du mythe Bardot . . . Ce n’est pas la fille dont l’enfance a été
malheureuse, qui a crevé la faim, qui a une revanche à prendre sur la vie. . . .
L’exemple type, n’est-ce pas est Marilyn : Brigitte c’est le contraire. On sait que
cette carrière, elle n’y tenait pas tellement. Elle aimait danser, elle aimait la
musique. . . . Cette attitude lui donnait une certaine assurance. (Malle qtd. in
Chapier 44)
The same discourse emerges at the release of Jules et Jim (1962) where Truffaut
states that he intended to offer Jeanne Moreau a role that would preserve her authenticity,
by sheltering her from stardom: “Je voulais faire du bien à Jeanne Moreau actrice, et il
m’a semblé que je devais l’empêcher de devenir prestigieuse, qu’il fallait lui épargner
toute exhibition.” (Truffaut qtd. in Frodon 128)
Accordingly, French actresses refuse the term “star” in different media texts
because they perceive it as echoing a Hollywood dimension and the exacerbated practice
of consumption accompanying it. For instance, in an interview with Yves Alion in Ecran
(1978), Catherine Deneuve contests the notion of a French female star on behalf of
actresses’ artistic freedom (23). French film critics generally echoed this tendency,
creatively avoiding the term “stars,” by devoting film journal issues to French actors and
actresses, interprètes or vedettes. Even though French actresses are not constructed by the
French media as stars, they are elevated to the status of royalty and divinity in the popular
press. As a consequence, Brigitte Bardot becomes “La Reine Bardot” (Cravenne 220). In
France Soir, Monique Pantel praises Juliette Binoche’s performance in the English
Patient (1997) under the title “Divine Juliette.” Along the same lines, Catherine Deneuve
becomes “la grande dame” of French cinema and “trésor national français” in the
September 1995 issue of French Vogue dedicated to the appeal of French women. More
recently, Le Monde’s “Amélie Poulain, un tour du monde en 17 millions d'entrées,” by
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Claudine Mulard and Thomas Sotinel, represented Audrey Tautou as a “fragile” and
“tiny” gamine in her Amélie role, fighting the gigantic Hollywood film machinery of
stardom and blockbusters.
On the other hand, the words “star” and “anti-star” came to inhabit the same
discourses in the case of established female stars with a reputable career in both popular
and art cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. For instance, in an article previewing an interview
with Deneuve, revealingly titled “Catherine Deneuve ou le triomphe de l'ambiguïté,”
Yves Alion states that the first ambiguity incarnated by Deneuve is the one between star
and anti-star: “Il n’y pas de stars en France nous dit Catherine Deneuve dans l’entretien
qui suit. Pourtant s’il ne reste qu’une star en France, Catherine est celle-là” (12). Agnès
Peck, dedicating a Dossier to Isabelle Adjani in Positif, illustrates in a similar manner the
contradictory concept of star/actrice at the heart of her image:”Isabelle Adjani est plus
qu’une remarquable actrice, plus qu’une star, que ce soit dans le sens ancien,
hollywoodien du terme, ou dans le sens actuel médiatique. Etre de fuites, véritable mythe
français résistant à toute réduction . . .” (25). Finally, Juliette Binoche reveals an anti-star
attitude in her own words: “Je suis actrice et je n’aime pas me faire remarquer. Star, c’est
quoi? Ce serait rester lumineux et humain en toutes circonstances. C’est une illusion, une
image fabriquée.” Thus, she directly critiques the star system in France. Nevertheless,
Richard Gianorio, the author of the interview, qualifies her as a star, granted a
contradictory one, in the interview title “Binoche, star paradoxale.”
French female stars incarnate and circulate desire therefore through a living
paradox that allows them to function as icons of cinema in their dual quality of starcommodities and mythical actresses. Recurrent and highly visible extra-cinematic
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discourses construct the paradoxical stardom of French female actresses, which
constitutes the first distinctive element of their French stardom. I will now turn to the
second element of Vincendeau’s definition of stardom, the set of roles that accommodate
and perpetuate the star image.
1.3. The French Female Star, the Pygmalion Myth, and Artistic Collaboration
The artisanal quality of French cinema underlined by Crisp triggers alternative
collaborative patterns in French cinema. Vincendeau mentions that a model based on
contractual deals involving a small number of films, in which a star and a producer
collaborate, has developed since the 1930s. Therefore, the relationship between stars and
the movie industry evolved in the form of theatrical troupes, couples, and friendships
(2000: 11). Artistic coupledom constructed between a movie director and a star fits
precisely in this mold and, at the same time, marks a difference from the Hollywood
model by constructing the cinematic couple as artistic agents rather than merchandise.
An illustrative example is to be found in the long-term collaboration between
Claude Chabrol and Isabelle Huppert. In her article for Die Zeit titled “Arming Juliette,”
Katja Nicodemus reflects on the impact that the artistic partnership between star and
director had on both their careers:
She has killed her daughter for him, her parents, an entire family and even herself.
In seven films, she has lied, betrayed, fired a gun and spread poison through the
world. For about 30 years, actress Isabelle Huppert has dragged director Claude
Chabrol with her into battle. She is the guerilla warrior of his cinema, his muse,
33
his accompanist and an ally with a flexible arsenal. She was armed with a pinch of
deadly powder in Violette Nozière, with a shotgun in La Cérémonie and now, as
an investigating magistrate in Chabrol's new film, Comedy of Power, her weapons
are the legal articles of a French judge. Sometimes Chabrol dreams of putting
Isabelle Huppert on the big screen with just a machine gun in her hands, letting
her mow everything down.
Through this brief summary of Huppert and Chabrol’s collaboration, it becomes
evident not only that director and star become one person, as Nicodemus argues, but also
that through this partnership, Huppert’s star image inflects her roles in a recognizable and
foreseeable manner for the audience. As Jacqueline Nacache puts it in her study L'acteur
de cinéma:
La collaboration passionnée d’un acteur et d’un cinéaste n’est pas seulement la
reproduction d’une formule efficace, mais garantit la permanence d’un regard sur
un visage. Elle efface toute limite entre les films, les construisant en un long
discours, visite guidée, interminable d’un être humain, allant jusqu’à l’inscrire en
creux dans les œuvres. (2003: 71)
Based on all these examples, I argue that a repetitive work pattern promoting a star image
across different movies contributes to the stardom of French actresses.
When Morin talks about the star system, he asserts that “The star adheres most
effectively to her screen character in the affairs of the heart. . . . It is preferable that a star
love a star” (52). He goes on to enumerate the celebrities situated at the star’s level:
kings, aristocrats, heavy weight champions, bullfighters, and band leaders. Morin’s
omission of the director as a suitable half of the star couple becomes understandable
when taking into account that he addresses exclusively the Hollywood star system. When
talking about French cinema, the director becomes a highly desirable (artistic) partner for
the star. In the documentary titled French Beauty (2005), the American film critic Kent
Jones observes that French stars think about their career in terms of directors, not mainly
34
in terms of roles as Hollywood actors do. Hence, a different artistic relation between
movie stars and directors is constructed in French cinema.
The Pygmalion myth in French cinema cannot be read in simple terms of an
exterior author (Pygmalion) modeling a star (Galatea). Neither does the active/passive
dichotomy work as Nicodemus’s analysis of the relationship between Chabrol and
Huppert shows. I keep in mind Dyer’s warning about the trap posed by the discussion of
authorship in terms of self-expression since “it cannot acknowledge that all language of
whatever kind ‘escapes’ its individual users to a greater or lesser extent and, secondly,
that it assumes a self that exists outside of and prior to language rather than one that is
formed in and through language” (1979: 158). Rather, through retracing the history of the
Pygmalion myth and observing where the focus of attention lies in extra-cinematic texts,
I examine its transformations since the mid-1950s. In addition, I analyze how star images
are revealed or disrupt filmic texts while circulating desire on screen.
I look at three French couples: Roger Vadim and Brigitte Bardot, Catherine
Deneuve and Francois Truffaut, and, more recently, Juliette Binoche and Leos Carax, to
analyze the recurrent Pygmalion model according to which notable celebrity couples in
French cinema have been constructed in extra-cinematographic discourses. I limit my
discussion to male directors and female actresses while illustrating, at the same time,
three different interactions within these artistic partnerships to see how they circulate
artistic creation and consumption within the institution of French national cinema.
Through this diachronic analysis, I show that the collaborative dynamics between
directors and stars valorizes progressively the artistic labor of French female stars,
culminating in an altered Pygmalion myth of artistic collaboration.
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The most controversial Pygmalion story in French cinema was probably Roger
Vadim’s 1956 feature Et Dieu . . . créa la femme starring his wife at the time, Brigitte
Bardot. It was Vadim’s directorial debut and Bardot’s seventeenth movie that finally
granted her star status as a new sex-symbol. After Bardot’s breakthrough performance in
the role of Juliette, texts addressed divergent notions of authorship related to her
performance. The conversation around this creative authority is especially captured by
the movie’s U.S. promotion tagline: “And God Created Woman . . . But the Devil Created
Bardot.” This overt emphasis on sexuality attracted a prompt reply from feminist critics
who viewed Bardot as the incarnation of modern feminine sexuality, re-launching the
debate in the form of the following terms “Et L’Homme créea la salope” (Hayward,
1993: 177). The critic Claude Mauriac in the Figaro Littéraire of 8 December 1956, uses
the same authorship pattern but conveys a different message. From a masculine viewer’s
perspective, Mauriac argues that too much exposure of Bardot’s body does not
communicate an effect of seduction, but quite to the contrary, a harmful exhibitionist
result, hence, the title of the article, “Où l’homme détruit la femme.”
In contrast, in one of his several autobiographies titled Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda,
Roger Vadim humbly tempers the claim of artistic authorship: “I did not invent Brigitte
Bardot. I simply helped her to blossom to learn her craft, while remaining true to herself.
. . . Above all I provided her with a role that was a perfect marriage between a fictional
character and the person she was in real life” (69). Extra-cinematic discourses
surrounding Bardot’s star image emphasize her naturalness as a vital feature in order to
create desire. Guy Austin quotes Paris Match to reinforce the text of spontaneity
constructing Bardot: “Elle est coiffée à la diable, à peine maquillée, vêtue comme
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n’importe quelle autre fille de son âge, et elle se comporte avec la même spontanéité qu’à
l’écran. . . . Des milliers de jeunes femmes s’identifient à elle, la copient” (2003 :12). In
addition, between Juliette’s character on-screen and Brigitte Bardot’s image off-screen
there is a “perfect fit” in Dyer’s terms (1979: 129). The naturalness of her image feeds
into infantilization. As Simone de Beauvoir observes:
The legend that has been built up around Brigitte Bardot by publicity has for a
long time identified her with this childlike and disturbing character. Vadim
presented her as a “phenomenon of nature.”. . . B.B is a lost, pathetic child who
needs a guide and protector. This cliché has proven its worth. It flatters masculine
vanity; it reassures mature and maturing women. (1959: 34)
Vadim could not have artificially fabricated Brigitte Bardot as this construction
went against the naturalness conveyed by her star image, so he presents himself as
guiding her feminine essence and revealing her to the world. However, once the exposure
happened in And God . . . Created Woman, it is notable that Vadim’s role ended
suddenly and the myth of Brigitte Bardot captured all the attention of the following
generations.
The star image of Brigitte Bardot is the site of numerous contradictions: the
infantile and the feline, the sexualized woman and the child, the emancipation and
objectification of women, mass culture and art cinema. I will briefly discuss the last two
oppositions as they directly address the social imaginary context and the relation of the
star to cinema. Brigitte Bardot became a text where the ambivalence towards a changing
femininity in modern French society surfaces (Vincendeau 92). An earlier history of the
changes in femininity in the social imaginary traced by Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier
in La Drôle de Guerre des sexes du cinéma français: 1930-1956 has offered a
comprehensive account of relations between the masculine and the feminine in French
37
cinema. If the law of the father dominated filmic representation in the cinema of the
1930s, the period of the Occupation (1940-1944) privileged the image of the heroic
mother, relegating a weak masculinity to the background in order to convey the figure of
the patriarchic failure. The Liberation of 1945 marks the return of patriarchy with a
vengeance as independent women are constantly demonized in the filmic imaginary.
Burch and Sellier’s study stops at reading the post-war emancipation discourses related to
female sexuality – of which Brigitte Bardot is the quintessential expression – as
deceiving:
L’arrivée massive des femmes de la classe moyenne sur le marché de travail pose
de façon aiguë la question de leur émancipation, le cinéma privilégie le thème de
la libération sexuelle, en proposant des figures féminines d’un érotisant sans
précédent, comme pour mieux détourner le spectateur (et surtout les spectatrices)
des autres dimensions de l’émancipation. (257)
But Bardot had an illustrious contemporary defender, Simone de Beauvoir. In
“Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome” written for Esquire magazine in 1959, de
Beauvoir argues that Bardot’s image, by bursting the strict delimitations of morality and
convention, becomes a form of emancipation, inaugurating the advent of a female “sexual
autonomy” (38). In addition, in Vincendeau’s view, not only does Bardot’s image crosses
moral and sexual boundaries, but also negotiates the new and the old in terms of cinema
itself through her roles in both mainstream and New Wave cinema (2000: 103).
Et Dieu . . . créea la femme shocks through the representation of the highly
sexualized femininity of the protagonist and also through Vadim’s disrespect for
cinematic conventions that was highly praised by the young critics of the Cahiers du
cinema. The movie’s plot, set in the small village of Saint-Tropez, stages the seductress
Juliette, played by Brigitte Bardot, as a focal point where the desires of three men
38
converge. Michel Tardieu (Jean-Louis Trintignant), her naïve husband is the first one,
followed by his brother Antoine Tardieu (Henri Vidal), Juliette’s previous lover who
abandoned her, and another wealthy older lover, Eric Carradine (Curd Jürgens). The plot
of the movie lacks depth but excels in glamorizing the free-spirited sexuality of its
protagonist, to the delight of the three male characters, of the movie director, Bardot’s
husband at the time, and of the audience. Roger Vadim’s experience as a photographer at
Paris Match is visible in the movie, as Brigitte Bardot is always framed in a photogenic
context. Numerous medium close-up shots focus the attention on Bardot’s face but also
her body posture. Further, long shots picturing Juliette in the savage and sensuous
scenery of the Riviera and immediate cuts to close-ups of her engender a repetitive
editing pattern that condenses the iconicity of the landscape juxtaposed to that of
Bardot’s body. Through a play on words, Hayward reads the movie as being more about
BB –Bardot’s Body and the Body Beautiful – than about the character Juliette and quotes
the final mambo scene, where Bardot accompanied by Latin American musicians
frenetically dances in front of the camera (1993: 177). The mambo sequence, although it
has been analyzed as an example of male voyeurism and fetishist gaze (Hayward 1993:
177), is also the point where the movie makes a statement about the stardom of its
protagonist: Bardot’s star image embodies a modern sexuality threatening two
generations of French males, Michel and Eric, sharing the same consternation when
watching her dance. In this sense, de Beauvoir’s insight is useful as she reads the episode
of the mambo as making the spectator “a voyeur in spite of himself, forced to watch a hot
performance cold-bloodedly” as Bardot is exhibiting her star image “famous, rich,
adulated, and completely inaccessible” (1959: 32). In a predictable manner, Bardot is
39
disciplined at the level of the narrative through Michel’s slap and, at the level of the
spectators, through violent contemporary critiques regarding her performance.
The fidelity to the Pygmalion model is central to François Truffaut’s films, since
most of them are structured as love stories revolving around his actresses from Françoise
Dorléac in La Peau douce (1964) to Fanny Ardant in La Femme d’à côté (1981). In 1969,
Truffaut casts a young star, Catherine Deneuve, as the on-screen lead in La Sirène du
Mississippi. After a cinematic separation of more than a decade, he directed Deneuve
again in Le Dernier Métro (1980) when she already was an established star. If the extracinematic discourses related to Truffaut’s filmic creation focus on the actress as a source
of inspiration, Deneuve, in return, presents her stardom as a laborious process of artistic
transformation. She addresses her relation with François Truffaut both on and off-screen
in terms of an essential change in her star persona. When evoking her movie Le Dernier
Métro (1980), Catherine Deneuve for the France Culture TV show Le Bon Plaisir
explained how François Truffaut pushed her on screen because he knew her in real life:
“He always thought that there was something of a Sleeping Beauty element in me which
offered and refused itself at the same time, and that had to be unlocked,” confesses
Deneuve (Simone and Vulser). The Pygmalion discourse evolves into a process of mutual
artistic inspiration and creation.
Set during the Occupation, Truffaut’s Le Dernier Métro tells the story of theater
director and actress Marion Steiner (Catherine Deneuve) and her attempts to rescue both
her Jewish husband Lucas (Heinz Bennent), hiding in the cellar, as well as her theatre,
under threats of closure. 9 While struggling through the grim daily life, she constructs an
amorous, artistic, and political triangle as she falls for Bernard Granger (Gérard
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Depardieu), an actor in the theatre's latest production and a member of the Resistance. It
is Deneuve’s star image that manages to solve the problematic conflict between duty and
passion through her aura of “ice and fire” (Vincendeau 2000: 204). As the recurrent pickup line used by Bernard in the film states, there are two women in Marion. The end of the
movie raises interesting questions about performance, directing, and stardom. When
Marion meets Bernard, wounded after the war, this last scene of reunification becomes in
fact the last scene of a theatrical play staged after the war by Steiner and he joins both the
actors on stage for the final round of applause. Higgins emphasizes this overall selfreflexivity of the movie when she writes that: “the pervasive use of mirrors, mises en
abymes, and autoreflexivity, together with the trick ending, suggest an infinite regress
into fictionality. Such procedures blur any referential dimension and cause the spectators
(and the characters) to lose sight of the boundaries between reality and fiction” (152).
However, this auto-referentiality brings to the fore Deneuve’s close-up, frequently
reflected in mirrors, as a twofold link. First, she enables the economic survival of the
theatre. Second, she assures the plot coherence through balancing a triangle both on a
personal and political narrative level, between husband and lover and, respectively,
passive and active forms of resistance. Finally, her star image points to its own
paradoxical construction in the last scene of the movie in which Marion is situated in an
impossible situation, in-between and holding hands with both her husband and her lover.
Her position embodies a physical connection that reconciles two opposing tendencies in a
utopian ending thus recalling the very paradoxical fabric of her star image around which
the filmic narrative, the director, and other star, Gérard Depardieu, gravitate.
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The last Pygmalion model reunites Juliette Binoche and Leos Carax through their
artistic collaboration in two movies: Mauvais sang (1986) and Les amants du Pont-Neuf
(1991), the latter being one of the most controversial films in French cinema in terms of
its costs and artistic audacity. Their private love story is filtered through the cinematic
screen and becomes the very essence of their movies, as Juliette Binoche testifies in the
documentary French Beauty: “I think that Bad Blood was the way to be loved by Leos
Carax. I became his imago for a while, his fantasy for this movie.” In Les amants du
Pont-Neuf, Carax turns to the marginal and dark side of Paris as contrasted to its onscreen iconicity. Michèle (Juliette Binoche) is an artist who suffers from a degenerative
eye disease that ultimately will lead to blindness. In her homeless journey, she is
accompanied by Alex, Carax’s transparent alter-ego, as a drug addict street performer and
Hans (Klaus-Michael Grüber), an old alcoholic widower. The three of them meet and live
on the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris and become connected through their inconsolable
losses. 10 By filming Binoche’s extreme physical performances, the movies reveal her
artistic legitimacy in terms of labor and, in particular, pushes the Pygmalion myth to a
different level. Binoche’s face filmed adoringly under multiple angles in Mauvais sang
becomes the raw material for a new piece of work in the movie as she portrays a
distraught, homeless, and sick character. In rags and wearing an eye patch, her degraded
complexion, ratty hair, and dry lips illustrate the female star body at work in an intense
transformation.
Throughout the movie, Binoche’s filmic image becomes a place for
concomitantly creating and destroying stardom. This process becomes highly visible in a
central episode of the movie that affects Michèle’s and Alex’s undisturbed happiness.
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Michèle’s family, having found out that her eye disease is curable, starts posting
announcements in a desperate attempt to find her. A tracking shot following Alex screens
a metro corridor where Binoche’s iconic image is glued on the walls in infinite
representations. Alex sets each of the images on fire and a close-up of Binoche’s face is
filmed at length while on fire. We subsequently cut to a long shot depicting an
apocalyptic view of all her images burning. However, soon after, Alex realizes that his
enterprise is futile as the missing person posters are all over the streets. This episode is to
be read as problematizing Binoche’s star image: her multiplied images are glued over the
usual commercial billboards of the Parisian metro revealing again this uneasy
cohabitation between an actress and a star image that, in turn, reflects the artisticeconomic duality of the movie itself. Nevertheless, through the glimpses at Binoche’s
star-face juxtaposed to that of her character Michèle in the movie, Carax also points to
the fascination and adoration of images, be they Rembrandt’s self-portrait that Michèle
admires at candlelight in an illicit night visit at the museum, or Binoche’s star
photographs duplicated ad infinitum.
In conclusion, from Bardot to Binoche, star images are disclosed in different ways
on-screen. Bardot as a star is put in the spotlight. In Deneuve’s case the cinematic
narrative gravitates around her star image. And finally, when it comes to Binoche, her
multiplied star images are lovingly set on fire in an ultimate attempt to resolve the
ambivalent tension that inhabits them. At the same time, extra-cinematic discourses
surrounding the three star couples – Vadim-Bardot, Truffaut-Deneuve and CaraxBinoche – illustrate different ways in which an uninterrupted circuit of artistic creation
flows between their protagonists, albeit in very different ways. Although Brigitte Bardot
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was “busy saving the French cinema,” according to Truffaut, through her nonchalant
performance achieving a Brechtian distanciation effect, she does so “without realizing it”
(qtd. in Crisp 364). The artistic agency increases in the case of Truffaut’s movie
directing, as extra-cinematic discourses focusing on the artistic collaboration between
Deneuve and Truffaut underline both their contributions. Finally, Juliette Binoche,
through the analysis of her deeply emotional and drastic physical performances, is
constructed as a legitimate creator. In these Pygmalion models, the more established the
star or the more paradoxical traits she negotiates, the more artistic legitimacy is
emphasized in extra-cinematic texts. Consequently, when Cahiers du cinéma, a film
magazine reputed for its ignorance of French stars and consistent interest in directors,
consecrated the issue of July-August 2007 to Binoche, the authors explicitly titled the
issue “Juliette Binoche: créature et créatrice.” As Binoche herself asserts, within films,
the interaction between movie director and actress is one where they both reinvent
themselves through the cinematic text: “Je n’en finis par tourner autour de cette relation
réalisateur-acteur, qui me fascine. C’est un rapport créature/créature, il n’y a pas de
créateur sans créature, mais la créature doit être créatrice. Sinon il n’y a pas
d’incarnation” (Banier 14). French stardom continues therefore to be created in a
distinctive manner at this fertile intersection between actresses and directors.
44
1.4. French Privacy Laws and Artistic Labor
The typical Pygmalion model in French cinema is not only a consequence of the
artisanal conditions of the national cinematic production, but also of another interrelated
factor, the stringent French privacy laws that deflect extra-cinematic discourses from the
private life of stars and orient them towards professional labor. In this way, the
Pygmalion structure marks a significant difference from the model of coupledom in
Hollywood cinema. The French newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur recounts the
providential encounter between actress Juliette Binoche and director Leos Carax.
Evoking the surrealist tradition of André Breton’s Nadja, the article chronicles their
initial meeting as follows:
Un soir, dans une rue de Grenoble, lors d’un festival de cinéma, un jeune homme
inquiet aperçoit sa silhouette. Juliette est seule, il la regarde. Il s’appelle Leos
Carax et il vient d’achever Boy meets Girl. Une autre histoire commence.
Amoureuse et passionnée. En 1986, ils tourneront ensemble Mauvais Sang. Leos
se tient derrière la caméra, Juliette joue Anna, un personnage que Leos a décrit
comme une fille dans une chambre avec des fenêtres ouvertes et plein de courants
d’air. La roue continue de tourner. (Géniès 60)
Using a similar story pattern, an article in Vanity Fair tells the beginning of the
romance between one of Hollywood’s most emblematic couples of the 1990s,
contemporary to Binoche and Carax, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman: ”They have been
together ever since they met on the set of Days of Thunder. ‘I thought he was the sexiest
man I’d ever seen in my life’, Kidman says. Even though she was just 23 when they got
married in a Christmas Eve Ceremony in the snows of Telluride, she harbored no doubt.”
Now the couple has a nomadic and cosmopolitan life, as Kidman asserts: “I mean
technically we live in L.A. and we have an apartment in New York and I just bought a
45
house in Australia, and we have a place in Colorado, but we travel all the time” (Bennets
68).
These two examples clearly illustrate star coupledom constructed according to
two different logics. On one hand, the extra-cinematic media texts surrounding French
star couples focus on the dimension of artistic work and the public role of the pair. In this
sense, the French film festival in Grenoble is a fitting background for the cinematic and
romantic partnership between Binoche and Carax, fueled by creative passion. On the
other hand, the Hollywood coupledom model targets the most visible commodities in the
cinematic industry, the actors and their private lives, in terms of love and leisure. Their
romances are consumed in private mansions and tell the myth of happiness through
luxurious consumption. In Dyer’s terms, the French star coupledom is constructed as
labor in contrast to the Hollywood star coupledom as leisure (1979: 39)
Besides some exceptions in Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif, stars in French
cinema are more readily present in news, film and TV magazines rather than popular
gossip revues such as Voici, mostly devoted to American stars or French TV reality stars.
This is a consequence of strict privacy laws that shift the focus from the stars’ private
lives to their professional careers as actors, privileging at the same time the artistic
creative text over the leisure and happiness text.
In terms of a diachronic history of French privacy laws, Brigitte Bardot invented
them, Catherine Deneuve applied them, and Juliette Binoche retrospectively benefited
from them. The French privacy law of 17 July 1970 was referred to as the law BB, named
after Brigitte Bardot who was constantly tracked by paparazzi and had already taken
numerous cases to court, accusing intrusions in her private life. Bardot argued against
46
those who asserted that star’s public life is extended to every public appearance, and she
claimed the right to her image, a concept unique to the French juridical system. It
basically states, that if a person does not perform a public duty, she or he cannot be
photographed and the photography cannot be subsequently circulated (Trouille 200).
Isabelle Adjani, for instance, is a French star who carefully uses this law to control
material and photographs related to her private life (Vincendeau 2000: 22). In a sense the
star becomes part of the creative process of her extra-cinematographic image, channeling
it towards professional discourses.
The privacy laws modified both the Criminal and Civil Code and emphasized
concepts such as the right to one’s image, the delimitation of private place, as well as the
inviolability of family and private relationships. They basically assert that sentimental
relationships are “private and family life” matters as are images of a person in a private
place (Trouille 204). Since 1970, the legislation is to be found in three different texts: the
Civil Code, the Criminal Code, and the European Convention on Human Rights. Further
concepts such as the right to one’s image (“le droit à l’image”), private place, and the
inviolability of family and private relationships (“l’inviolabilité des relations familiales et
sentimentales”) are operating tools in these sets of laws (Trouille 204). These concepts
are unique even in a European media setting and offer an important leverage to French
stars in the construction of their extra-cinematic image. In addition to asserting stars’
rights to their own image, they also exclude the private sphere, in particular, sentimental
affairs, from public discourses.
In terms of use of the privacy laws, Catherine Deneuve provides the primary
example of a prolific defense of her private life. Writing in Le Monde, Catherine Simone
47
and Nicole Vulser point out that since the end of the 1960s, Deneuve sued sixty-five
times even before the privacy law was adopted in July 1970. They also quote one
memorable episode in which Deneuve’s protection of her private life led her to take
juridical action against some passages published in a biography of François Truffaut by
Serge Toubiana and Antoine de Baeque in 1996. Based on Truffaut’s private letters
stored in the public archive of the Films du Carosse, the book mentions the affair between
Deneuve and Truffaut during the filming of La Sirène de Mississippi. Deneuve, however,
invoked intrusion in her private life and the court ruled in her favor (Simon and Vulser).
After her legal success, the artistic side of her relationship with Truffaut became a more
attractive and safer media topic. In this context, it becomes understandable how the
personal relationship between Leos Carax and Juliette Binoche is vaguely suggested by
the article recounting their adventure in professional terms.
The same discretion applies in the case of consumption techniques related to
French stars. If the status of French actresses as artistic muses is not at all problematic for
their contribution to the cultural life of the nation, their status as objects of consumption
requires a clear differentiation from their Hollywood counterparts. French stars
participate in different ways in the economy of cinema. First, they can directly contribute
to its financial success. In recurrent discourses, the myth of Brigitte Bardot was
associated with the notion of an exportable product of French cinema, such as Monique
Pantel’s article for France Soir shows:
Non content d’être le premier film du metteur en scène Vadim, il fut celui qui fit
de Brigitte Bardot un mythe et un symbole. La gentille Brigitte, qui avait joué
plusieurs films sans grand intérêt à part deux comédies d’ailleurs écrites par
Vadim Cette sacrée gamine et En effeuillant la marguerite devint du jour au
lendemain le produit français le plus exporté.
48
The female star image reconciles thus myth, symbol, and commercial product within the
discourse of cinematic consumption.
Second, French female stars also occupy official positions in the cinematic
industries and participate in the development of French cinema itself. For instance, the
Commission of the avances sur recette, one of the forms of governmental aid to French
cinema, was governed by actresses such as Danièle Delorme, Isabelle Adjani and Jeanne
Moreau (Gillian 259). French stars were presidents of the Cannes festival jury: Isabelle
Adjani in 1997, Jeanne Moreau – a unique exception in the Cannes festival – twice in
1995 and 1975, and Michèle Morgan in 1971. Other stars reinvest in cinema, either in the
position of directors, like Agnès Jaoui or Josiane Balasko, or of producers, as Isabelle
Adjani who owns a production company, Lilith Films.
However, outside the financial flow in the economy of cinema and other national
industries to be discussed in Chapter 4, French female stars are represented as remotely
acquainted with and distanced from excessive consumption. Isabelle Adjani, after starring
and producing the movie Camille Claudel is described in Le Point in the following terms:
Ni déesse, ni modèle, ni marchandise. Adjani est une star différente, moderne,
pour tout dire. D’où son énigme. « Ma vraie réussite, répète-t-elle, c’est d’être
inclassable, de déconcentrer. » En effet. Nulle moins qu’elle n’est dupée des
séductions du mythe de la star: la gloire, l’argent, elle prononce ses mots du bout
des lèvres. Ses appartements somptueux? Elle n’y reste jamais, trop consciente
« d’être de passage ». Son refus de la mondanité? Elle préfère ses amis, rêve
d’une vie simple avec le fils qu’elle a eu de Bruno Nuytten. (Ferrier 141)
The anti-star text is accompanied by a rhetoric of imperative dissociation from
consumption that becomes a constant in constructing French female stardom. Even in
Bardot’s case, after the great success of Et Dieu . . . créea la femme, Vadim carefully
constructs her image as unaffected by her financial success. In an interview conducted by
49
Pantel in France Soir, Vadim mentions that she still has modest tastes after achieving
stardom with Et Dieu . . . créea la femme and numbers her possessions: “un petit
apartement, une maison à Saint-Tropez, un petit chalet à Méribel.” Naturally, all her
properties are in the interior of the hexagon.
The extra-cinematic discourses surrounding Catherine Deneuve are more
enigmatic in matters of consumption. Although she commands one of the highest salaries
for a star in France and has starred in over one hundred movies, Deneuve’s only declared
possessions are her Parisian apartment and a domain in Normandy. In an interview cited
in Le Monde, she identifies herself to be an “extravagant cricket,” citing La Fontaine’s
fable, and as completely lacking financial discipline (Simone and Vulser). Nevertheless,
Deneuve’s star image is so strongly associated with haute couture designer Yves SaintLaurent that the implicit part of these discourses give the reader a pretty good idea where
Deneuve’s money is spent. Besides cinema, the national industries of fashion, cosmetics,
and perfume become territories of permissible consumption for French actresses since
these fields do not diminish their cultural aura through excessive consumption, as I will
argue in Chapter 4.
Even within industry and consumption discourses, the artistic aura of French
female stars remains untouched by excessive consumption. This characteristic generates a
significant difference from Hollywood’s stardom. The myth of artistic creation, promoted
in extra-cinematic discourses and strongly encouraged by severe privacy laws, equally
contributes to the difference. In this way, French directors and actresses in an interactive
Pygmalion model, construct a unique star coupledom model and have a vital role in
50
circulating stardom, artistic creation, and consumption within the national institution of
French cinema.
1.5. A Cinematic History of Pygmalion Myth
From Brigitte Bardot’s star image scrutinized by New Wave directors to François
Ozon’s homage to eight French stars in 8 Femmes, female stars remain central also to onscreen reflections about their role in the movies. Looking at Bardot’s case, Olivier
Assayas’s Irma Vep and Francois Ozon’s 8 Femmes, I show star images as constructing
bridges through conversations between popular and art cinema while providing an
insightful meta-commentary about the tensions between these two directions in French
cinema.
Brigitte Bardot was an object of fascination for the auteurs of the New Wave,
such as Louis Malle in La Vie privée (1962) and Jean-Luc Godard in Le Mépris (1963).
Henri-Georges Clouzot, directed Bardot in La Vérité (1960), but his movie is more
difficult to categorize because the director, as Mayne argues, renders problematic the
division between auteur and the ‘tradition of quality,’ films of the 1950s as his work
escapes both categories (2000: 57- 61). These three films equally reveal different
reflections in terms of morality, private life, and cinema on Bardot’s image as a star.
In “Gender, Modernism and Mass Culture in the New Wave,” Geneviève Sellier
sees the perpetuation of a romantic myth of auteur, the masculine creator, in films of the
51
New Wave that, consequently, through a oppositional movement, defines women in
terms of contingency and reproduction (128). This dichotomy constructs a perspective
that frames the female subject from the outside in numerous New Wave films. However,
Sellier reads another dichotomy activated by this masculine-feminine tension between
low-high culture, as mass culture is viewed as consumed and circulated by women in a
relation of dependency whereas the artistic, “authentic” culture is generated by men in an
autonomous posture (132). The division between art and popular cinema is thus to be
read along gender lines, where feminine stars are relegated either to be objects of
investigation in art cinema or subjects of consumption in popular culture.
Certainly, Bardot’s image can be read as an object of popular culture and the
filmic reflections on her star persona reveal uneasiness in dealing with Bardot’s star
image. Clouzot staged a completely de-glamorized version of Bardot in La Vérité.
Dominique Marceau, Bardot’s character, is an obvious condensation of her previous onscreen roles: amoral, idle, and lascivious, she is guided in life only by her instincts, love
for lust and an irrepressible passion for dance. Dominique has a dubious reputation and
wandering from man to man, she ends up stealing her sister’s lover, Gilbert Tellier (Sami
Frey). Their love is, however, impossible and their irreconcilable personalities trigger the
downward spiral of Gilbert’s murder and Dominique’s first failed and finally successful
suicide. The first time we see Brigitte’s character, she is in prison looking into a piece of
a broken mirror that distorts her iconic image. In a circular manner, the last appearance of
Bardot in the movie, dying in a hospital bed, screens her profile in a close-up. Bardot’s
star images are only present in flashbacks in the movie in a story of doomed love and
they constitute the investigative trial material of an overwhelming male audience that
52
tries to locate the truth of her persona through her representations. The movie thus shows
the uneasy cohabitation of Bardot as a star and Bardot as a person as contemporary extracinematic discourses tried to fossilize her through moral discourses.
Jean-Luc Godard’s reflection on Brigitte Bardot’s star image, however, is more
ambivalent. In the opening sequences of Le Mépris, Godard films Bardot’s naked body
since he was forced by the movie producer Joseph Levine to include some sexy images of
the star in the movie. Jacques Aumont revealingly describes the shot in the following
terms: “Godard added a long take of the naked star, but what might have been a
fetishistic reification of a body in box-office terms is instead an affectionate, almost
awestruck moment of contemplation” (176). The ambiguity of Bardot’s representation in
the movie is, as Sellier observed, reflected by the tension between the character of
Camille, a superficial image of femininity associated with commercial cinema, and
Bardot’s star image exploited visually by Godard as to achieve iconicity (Sellier 134-5).
Along these lines, the disenchantment at the level of the narrative – the death of cinema
and that of a sentimental relation – is interspersed with the fascination towards Bardot’s
star image always punctuated by the recurrent melancholic tune of George Delerue.
These shots are not so much representations of Bardot’s body for which high culture and
popular culture compete as Sellier argues (135), but rather they converge and point to the
possibility of re-enchantment in cinema through an iconic star image on which popular
and art texts are superimposed.
In 1996, Olivier Assayas launches again the conversation about inspiring
cinematic muses and the divide between popular and art cinema through Irma Vep
(1996). The story is that of a failed filmic project, a remake of Les Vampires, starring a
53
female star of Hong-Kong cinema, Maggie Cheung, playing herself, and René Vidal,
interpreted by Jean-Pierre Léaud, a transparent allusion to the New Wave generation.
Maggie Cheung’s image can be read as reconciling the old and the new by foregrounding
a “sense of temporal displacement” (Farmer 48) necessary for the production of the
movie.
I look at Assayas’s film in the light of the divide between popular and art cinema
and to examine how Maggie Cheung’s and Irma Vep’s filmic representations function as
reconciliatory images for this dichotomy. Musidora, the interpreter of Irma Vep, was a
popular actress whose memory was perpetuated through art history as she became an
inspirational image for Breton and his Surrealist group (Vincendeau 2000: 25). In a
parallel manner, Maggie Cheung is a popular action movie star from Hong-Kong capable
of incarnating a French high art icon. Two meta-texts in the movie problematize,
however, this duality. First, Maggie Cheung is interviewed by a young French journalist
highly critical of the tradition of French filmmaking. In this scene, Maggie Cheung’s
close-up becomes the site of the journalists’ negative monologue coining French cinema
as “artistic nombrilisme.” This unconstructive focus, thus, disables him to see actually the
possibility of conceiving a novel French cinema centered on female movie stars. As such,
he does not even listen to her answers and completely ignores her, reproducing the very
self-centeredness he criticizes. In fact, Maggie Cheung is forgotten or displaced on
numerous occasions in the movie and seems to function solely in the discussions with the
movie director, René Vidal, and in dream-like sequences in which she assumes the role of
Irma Vep but which are rather hallucinations than reality. The second meta-text follows,
as the failure of the filmic project is announced because of director René Vidal’s
54
psychological problems. The new director, José Murano, decides that Irma Vep belongs
to the Parisian underworld and working class and he deems Laure, Maggie’s French stunt
double, perfect for the role. The trade-off between a French art cinema criticized as
“nombrilistique” and a popular cinema defined exclusively in national terms becomes
visible.
Through the end of the movie, Assayas makes, however, an ambiguous statement
showing Vidal’s takes starring Maggie Cheung as Irma Vep. Against the iconic Parisian
rooftops, Irma Vep’s image is projected again but altered through digital technology.
Serpent-like lines and rigged scratches come out of Irma Vep’s eyes and mouth,
illustrating the Medusa-like, impalpable seduction that her star image exerts. Sharp noises
and scratched images mark an attempt to either capture or efface her illusory and
charismatic essence as both sound and image question and assert the enduring fascination
of Musidora and her contemporary alias, Maggie Cheung. Connotations of voyeurism,
hypnotism, and powerlessness are brought together by her star image and they offer a
brief glimpse of the (im)possible reconciliations of multiple dichotomies between
national/international, popular/ high art, and old/new cinema.
With François Ozon’s 8 Femmes, the French star system becomes the central
structure of the film. The star images of the eight French female stars of different
generations control the film as it becomes a reflection on French female stardom and,
more broadly, on cinema. Ozon’s cinephilia transgresses national boundaries as he
incorporates elements from the Hollywood glamour era of the 1950s. For the looks of his
stars, he employs thus iconic and pleasurable references: Catherine Deneuve is a
“mélange de glamour et vulnérabilité qui rend homage à Lana Turner et Marilyn
55
Monroe,” Fanny Ardant’s look is inspired by Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner, Virginie
Ledoyen plays Audrey Hepburn’s gamine role in Sabrina, Ludivine Sagnier’s muse is
Leslie Caron in An American in Paris because of “le pantalon, la coupe de cheveux et le
coté garçon manqué,” Emmanuelle Béart’s costume is designed after Jeanne Moreau’s Le
Journal d’une femme de chambre, Firmine Richard recalls Hattie Mc Daniel in Gone with
the Wind. And finally, Danielle Darrieux’s star muse is Constance Bennett, Lana
Turner’s mother-in-law in Madame X by David Lowell Rich (Lavoignat 86-87). With the
exception of Béart, the cinematic references are mainly targeted towards Hollywood,
offering satisfying anchor points for international audiences. Nevertheless, these metacinematic references activate a nostalgic taste as they refer to the glamorous Hollywood
era of the 1950s that was seen in 2001 as a contribution to the mythical iconicity of
actresses.
The Hollywood references are set in a huis clos of a French provincial house
where the eight women try to solve the mystery of the patriarch’s death. However, the
death of the family father is only a pretense to trigger the narrative and to draw a web in
between the most famous female stars in French cinema. In a snowy landscape
resembling a boule de neige, the interactions between the stars are staged mainly through
iconic close-ups. In addition, each star’s portrait is featured on the movie poster and all
eight of them are offered a song in the movie, the spotlight allowing their particular star
image to shine during the individual performance. Numerous filmic allusions included by
Ozon equally refer to their star images. Virgine Ledoyen’s pregnant ingénue part, for
instance, recalls her role in La Cérémonie (1995) directed by Claude Chabrol in which
she starred alongside Chabrol’s muse, Isabelle Huppert.
56
The movie also ends with a backward-tracking shot to include all the actresses
holding hands. The mise-en-scène, through the red carpet and the staircase behind the
stars, as well as the lighting technique, reveals a breathtaking image of the French star
system in its glamorous diversity of age, beauty, and type.
Figure 1.2. Final shot in 8 Femmes (2001).
Besides illustrating French female stardom, Ozon also channels desire and
inspiration on a different path through conversations betweens stars’ images. In two
particular scenes of the movie, he reveals a network of interdependence among his female
muses. In the first shot, Emannuelle Béart’s character accidentally drops a photo of one
of her former lovers. When Ozon cuts to the photograph, he uses Romy Schneider’s
image as both she and subsequently Béart were Claude Sautet’s inspirational actresses.
In the second scene, Ozon chooses a line for Deneuve’s character “Te (Vous) regarder est
une joie . . . c’est une joie et c’est une souffrance” that was uttered by both Belmondo in
La Sirène du Mississippi and Depardieu in Le Dernier Métro (Lavoignat 84). Ozon
immediately cuts to a close-up of Fanny Ardant’s face, Truffaut’s lead for his last two
57
films and also his real-life partner. Through these conversations between the muses Béart
– Schneider for Sautet or Ardant – Deneuve for Truffaut, the director invites a new
reflection. It would be productive, in this sense, to pursue this road and discuss how
desire and artistic inspiration is circulated through an altered Pygmalion relation,
constructed not between the cineaste and the star, but between two consecutive muses of
one film director as the physical connection among the stars in the final shot of the movie
illustrates.
Ozon’s film also raises the problematic of exposing iconicity exclusively through
the feminine, in both cinematic and musical discourses. On this note, Jean Marc Lalanne
noted in Cahiers du Cinéma that:
François Ozon a réalisé le film le plus délibérément méta du cinéma français. Et
lorsqu’on quitte les souvenirs de cinéphile c’est pour se retrouver au pays de la
variété. A chaque comédienne est attribuée le standard d’une chanteuse célèbre
(Nicoletta, Dalida, Sheila, Françoise Hardy), car la variété comme le cinéma se
cristallise ici uniquement sur des figures féminines. Dans cette relecture
personnelle des mythologies populaires de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, la
France ne serait pas le pays des pères sévères (comme pour Daney), mais celui
des mères indignes, à la fois glamour, folles et perverses.
The national mythology is necessarily expressed in feminine terms, as they have
the necessary flexibility to navigate between national and international references,
between popular and auteur commentaries as well as between mythical stars and
cinematic commodities.
As an homage to Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, Le Nouvel Observateur
dedicated a special issue, subsequently published as a book, to the France’s new
mythologies after 50 years, in 2007. Philippe Delerm wrote about the cellular phone,
Jean-Paul Dubois investigated sushi, Phillipe Sollers flipped the Euro to analyze both its
sides, and Marc Augé investigated the 20 heures news. Next to Kate Moss and Zidane,
58
only one new French film star dominates the contemporary mythologies: Emmanuelle
Béart. Photographed naked on the cover of the summer issue of Elle magazine,
Emmanuelle Béart’s star image is viewed by Jérôme Garcin as condensing a self-assured
and mature seduction: “Et Dieu créa la femme de 37 ans . . . Photographiée à l’île
Maurice, sans maquillage ni retouches, Emmanuelle Béart, 1,67 mètre, 50 kilos, évoque
la sauvage Deborah Kerr, la pulpeuse Brigitte Bardot mais aussi la vacancière ordinaire.
L’image tient du légendaire et du coutumier, du sacré en même temps que du profane”
(77-8).
The iconography of Elle’s cover plays on Béart’s two on-screen lead roles. On
the one hand, Béart recalls the part that launched her career in Manon des sources (1986).
Claude Berri’s movie, representative of the popular French heritage tradition, adapts a
story of land, legacy, vengeance, and family. Her seductive naturalness echoes Manon’s
spring baths in the sunny Provence landscape. Her nudity, however, also invites
comparisons to her role as Marianne in La Belle Noiseuse (1991), Rivette’s intense
meditation on the meaning of inspiration, art, relationships that places sacrifice at the
heart of the creative act. Due to Béart’s stardom, Rivette’s four-hour-long film had a
remarkable public success. Emmanuelle Béart’s star image, reconciling the divide
between art and popular cinema, holds in tension both its mythical and ordinary quality.
In addition, both of her roles as Manon and Marianne – the names are transparent
allusions to the nation – Elle magazine’s cover raise questions about place, French
territory, and national iconicity, which is the topic of the next chapter.
59
1
Between 1954 and 1958, René Coty was the last president of the Fourth Republic. In May 1958, President
Coty stepped out of office to favor the necessary intervention of Charles de Gaulle in the political turmoil
engendered by the Algerian crisis.
2
François Truffaut’s filmic career after the end of the New Wave movement followed a different path as he
reconciled both auteur and commercial cinema. Prédal argued that since his death in 1984 the two
tendencies that he closely connected in his films have been separated by an increasing gap. (1991: 395).
3
For a more comprehensive overview of Mitterand’s socialist government see: “Mitterand Years: Legacy
and Evaluation”, edited by Mairi Maclean.
4
See Marc Fumaroli’s L’Etat Culturel for a critique of the state’s involvement in the French cultural life.
An illustrative example is Francis Courtade’s Les malédictions du cinéma franc ais: une histoire du
cinéma franc ais parlant, 1928-1978, which is centered around the crisis of French cinema as it states
from its very first line: “Ce livre est l’histoire des crises que le cinéma français a vécues depuis le début du
parlant” (7).
5
6
A few exceptions are to be found in the movies of Agnès Varda and Isabelle Adjani’s heritage film
Camille Claudel (1988) which, although directed by Bruno Nuytten, was Adjani’s project.
Richard Bernstein, reporting from the 1990 Sarasota French Film Festival in Florida for the New York
Times, reproduces in Daniel Toscan du Plantier’s words, who was the head of Unifrance at that time, a
conversation with the United States Trade Representative, Carla Hill: “She told me: ‘Our movies are good,
so we export them. Your movies are not as good and that's why you don't export them as well.' She said it
was like cheese. ‘We eat your cheese,’ she said, ‘but you don't eat ours.’ I told her, ‘Our films are just as
good as our cheese.’” This discussion summarizes perfectly the disagreements encapsulated by the cultural
exception dispute between the clashing attitudes of the United States and France at the GATT negotiation
round in Uruguay. While the US representatives argued that the force of the markets and the demand
regulate film production, Jack Lang’s view distanced as much as possible the concepts of merchandise and
cultural objects, arguing that they should not be treated as simple commodities in a global market.
7
8
See Unifrance <en.unifrance.org> for box office data.
Lynn Higgins in her study, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of
History in Postwar France, argues that the theatricality of the movie and the focus on private stories
problematizes the relationship between fictional representation and reality (152). Leah D. Hewitt’s article
“From War Films to Films on War: Gendered Scenarios of National Identity – The Case of The Last
Metro” reads the Occupation period represented in Truffaut’s movie using Burch and Sellier’s model of the
“funny war of sexes in French cinema,” thus anchoring it in the social imaginary.
9
60
See Graeme Hayes’s article “Representation, Masculinity, Nation: The Crises of Les Amants du Pont
Neuf “ for a Lacanian analysis of this loss as a crisis both in terms of the national and the masculine
identity.
10
61
CHAPTER 2
ICONS OF THE NATION: FEMALE STARS AND FRENCHNESS
Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, and Laetitia Casta, all have incarnated the
image of Marianne, symbol of the French Republic and of popular France. Integral parts
of the French patrimony nowadays, these famous stars have been necessarily constructed
as national icons through their connection with
the institution of Marianne. This tradition of
associating Marianne and cinema actresses can
be traced to the beginning of the 1950s. Under
the headline “Marianne 1951,” Paris Match
portrayed
twenty-three-year-old
actress
Germaine Lefebvre as the incarnation of
Marianne on its front cover for the special
Figure 2.1. Germaine Lefebvre.
Marianne, 1951.
report on the June 1951 elections. 1 Her
youthful image wearing the Phrygian cap as a
symbol of liberty raises two important questions for our purposes. First, it addresses the
connotation of youth in the image of Marianne. Second, it points to the unique link of
Marianne – the allegorical emblem of the Republic – to film stars as the epitomes of ideal
womanhood.
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The journey of Marianne and of her various political representations has been
traced in detail by the celebrated French historian Maurice Agulhon in three volumes:
Marianne au combat: l'imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1789 à 1880 (1979),
Marianne au pouvoir: l'imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1880 à 1914 (1989),
and Les métamorphoses de Marianne: l'imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1914
à nos jours (2001). Through his work, the author connects the representations of the
French Republic to the collective imaginary of a specific epoch. In this sense, Agulhon
argues that the iconic images of Marianne are belligerent or traditional, effaced or on
display, wearing the Phrygian cap or not, incarnating the republic or popular France,
according to the socio-political values of the national environment.
The author begins the story of Marianne, situating her origins in the aftermath of
the French Revolution, and I will retrace it according to his in-depth study. 2 He remarks
that the statue of Liberty, as an allegorical representation, offered an incarnation vessel
for the newly found First Republic. During the Empire and the Restoration, Marianne
briefly exited the scene, only to appear as glamorous as ever, in the iconic Delacroix’s
painting La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830). The Second Republic, for the first time,
reproduced her image on stamps in 1849 . After a short eclipse during the Second
Empire, in the Third Republic, Marianne’s reproductions found their way into every town
hall in France and, for the first time, on coins. It is during this period that Marianne
became the most prominent depiction of the French Republic, providing Agulhon with an
important amount of research materials. The subsequent but antagonist Vichy
government effaced Marianne’s emblems and hid her busts in town hall attics and caves.
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Her comeback is marked by a shift in the Fourth and Fifth French Republics, when she
received a fresh makeover and was reinvented as a media icon of the nation.
Nowadays, she maintains the same high visibility. Since September 1999, the
Jospin government instituted, for the use of governmental institutions, a logo that bears
the white profile of Marianne on a tri-colored flag. 3 Another national institution, the
French Postal Services, regularly hosts popular contests for renewing the image of
Marianne on stamps, according to the shifts in its contemporary meanings. The most
recent drawing, selected in 2004 by Jacques Chirac and highly publicized by the French
Postal Services, depicts the profile of a young Marianne protective of the environment
and looking towards the skies in an ascendant movement consonant with the youthful
hope her image connotes. 4
In the postwar period, as Agulhon insightfully remarks, Marianne is less revered
as her status as the image of the
Republic shifts signification to a
more inclusive but also more
familiar notion of French people,
in general. This transformation,
he argues, is made possible
through a consensual process of
Figure 2.2. Busts of Marianne.
symbolic
retrogradation
as
Marianne’s abstract features are inflected by the traits of popular stars (Agulhon 2001:
190). From this point on, Marianne was incarnated by movie stars such as Brigitte Bardot
(1969), Catherine Deneuve (1986), and Laetitia Casta (1999), but also music stars, such
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as Mireille Mathieu (1978), and even television personalities, as the most recent
Marianne, Evelyne Thomas (2003) demonstrates. In their role as icons of the nation,
female stars have to negotiate, yet again, between a familiar popularity, as Marianne
represents the people of France, and an abstract incarnation of values. When the sculptor
Aslan challenged the solemnity of Marianne in 1969, reproducing her with Brigitte
Bardot’s features, Agulhon interrogates her symbolic aura of “joie de vivre,” hedonism,
and feminine emancipation, but he remarks that she gains prestige through her
contributions to the national cinematographic industry as well (2001: 186, 191). Bardot
and also Deneuve are able to maintain the equilibrium between the artistic aura
compatible with national iconicity and the modern French femininity associated with the
familiar and popular discourses. According to this model, it follows that in 1999, when
Laetitia Casta became the new Marianne of the French Republic, she was required to
negotiate between these two opposing tendencies. The face of L’Oréal and worldwide
famous top model, Casta’s fashionable appeal was mainly constructed in the realm of the
popular. Unsurprisingly, her career was inevitably redirected towards cinema as she
played her first role as Falbala in Astérix et Obélix contre César (1999) the very same
year of her election as Marianne. This cinematic adaptation draws on the highly
successful comic book series by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, which has been a
national phenomenon since it was first published in 1959. It corresponds thus to popular
national quality, on the one side, and to cinematic national prestige, on the other.
Agulhon did not have time to document the last election of Marianne, but, as he
wistfully predicted, the representation of Marianne witnessed a new symbolic
degradation. In 2003, Evelyne Thomas, a celebrated television personality and hostess of
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a popular afternoon talk-show “C’est mon choix,” became the new face of Marianne.
Nevertheless, the contemporary Marianne has never achieved the success of her
predecessors. Her appeal, too popular and not confirmed by a cinematic aura, has not
seduced the French population. As a result, France 2, in a television afternoon news
broadcast titled “Nouvelle Marianne anonyme,” on November 22, 2005 announced the
novel tendency of returning to an abstract Marianne in French city halls. 5
Besides this tension between the popular and the elite, which is ultimately
reflective of class divides, Agulhon mentions also the multi-ethnic difference effaced in
Marianne through her homogenous image and he rhetorically inquires how Marianne can
reflect a traditional Gallic type of beauty, “ blonde et rose,” without offending the
immigrant population (2001: 203-4). The unexpected response came from the women’s
association “Ni Putes, Ni Soumises.” Devoted to solving the problems of women living
in the immigrant suburbs, the association initiated an exhibit titled “Mariannes
d’aujourd’hui,” exposing portraits of ethnically diverse Mariannes on the façade of the
Bourbon Palace, the seat of the French National Assembly, for Bastille Day in 2003. The
exhibit was set under the sign of diversity as one of the posters quoting one of its
feminine models writes: “Marianne, j’espère qu’elle aura de plus en plus de visages
différents.” To this conversation between homogenous and diverse representations, in his
evaluation of British national cinema, Andrew Higson adds that: “the search for a stable
and coherent national identity can only be successful at the expense of repressing internal
differences, tensions, and contradictions-differences of class, race, gender, region, etc.”
(62). In this view, French female stars as icons of the nation constantly problematize the
trade-off between their construction as highly visible signs of a national film industry and
66
the effacement of too diverse elements at the expense of a multicultural and inclusive
representation of the nation.
2.1. The Feminine Star, Cinema and the Nation
Following this brief history of the Marianne phenomenon, I set out to analyze the
national, cinematic, and gender intersections where all these representations occur. In
doing so, I identify two types of femininity – the youthful gamine and the French woman
– that coexist and are alternatively foregrounded according to the historical and sociocultural environment. In this context, I will look at Brigitte Bardot’s and Catherine
Deneuve’s star images and their construction as national icons. The interaction between
the image of Marianne and the star body seems intimately interlocked as not only does
the actress transform the features of the Marianne statuary, but also Marianne seeps into
the filmic text, writing its narrative of the national star body. To this end, I will analyze
two films that problematize the image of the star as national icon: Claude-Jacque’s
Babette s’en va-t-en guerre (1959) and Régis Wargnier’s Indochine (1992). Besides
Brigitte Bardot, as the central star of the movie, my first film choice is motivated by the
fact that Claude-Jacque’s film belongs to French popular cinema. Vincendeau and Dyer
noticed in European Popular Cinema a strong tendency to overlook nations’ popular
cinematic cultures at the expense of art films. This trend is for the most part meant to
generate an opposition to Hollywood’s mass-culture and, at the same time, to attract
international audiences (1-2).
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My second film choice belongs to the tradition of the French heritage movies and
rests on the star image of Catherine Deneuve. Both actresses incarnated Marianne and the
two films deal with problematic national historic events, the Occupation and the process
of decolonization. My thread of analysis will, therefore, demythologize the homogenizing
iconicity of the nation inscribed in Bardot and Deneuve’s images and, simultaneously,
reveal the points in their images where problematic discourses of difference resurface. I
integrate my analysis in what Hayward has termed as ‘framing’ national cinema, that is,
reading national representation against the grain, “to delimit the structure of power and
knowledge that work behind the scene to assemble its scattered and dissembling
identities, its fractured subjectivities, and fragmented hegemonies which in their plurality
stage the myth of a singular and unified national cinema” (2000b: 88). With these
insights in mind, I analyze feminine star figures to reveal how their symbolic practices
construct the iconic myth of the nation while simultaneously problematizing it.
As the previous chapter showed, France’s cinema is profoundly marked by its
relation to the state and it becomes thus a favorite medium for articulating the myth of the
national and for negotiating its different representations. 6 In Susan Hayward’s words,
“the cinema speaks the nation and the nation speaks the cinema” (1993: x). She goes on
to note one other important feature of national cinemas: “a ‘national’ cinema – is
ineluctably ‘reduced’ to a series of enunciations that reverberate around two fundamental
concepts: identity and difference” (Hayward 1993: x). French cinema is always torn,
therefore, between these two drives. The first one relates to the establishment of a
coherent identity through inner homogenizing practices. The second one institutes
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Frenchness as a marker of difference from other national cinemas, in particular,
Hollywood.
Among the typologies for the enunciation of the national in French cinema –
narratives, genres, codes and conventions, gesturality and morphology, cinema of the
center and cinema of the periphery, cinema as the mobilizer of the nation’s myth and the
myth of the nation – Susan Hayward also includes stars as historical signs: “sign of the
indigenous cultural codes, institutional metonymy and site of the class war in its national
specificity, the signification of the star ‘naturally’ changes according to the social,
economic and political environment” (1993: 12).
Hayward also argues in “Framing national cinemas” that the female body is
closely identified with national discourses, especially in terms of motherhood and its
function in the realm of the imaginary (2000b: 96-8, 2000c: 112). In this tradition, the
feminine gender of the republic marks, according to Agulhon, a clean break from the
Ancien Régime and its royal lineage constructed on masculinities. In addition, the
feminization of the republic is foremost a question of etymology that was perpetuated
through a long-lasting allegorical lineage:
La Liberté, comme la France [ou bien comme la Justice, la Science, l’Agriculture
. . . , ou bien comme la Seine, la Loire ou la Garonne] s’énonce au féminin en
latin et en français et le genre grammatical entraîne naturellement le sexe de
l’allégorie. A qui s’interroge donc sur la raison profonde de la féminité de la
représentation qu’on baptisera Marianne, la réponse essentielle est que Marianne
est féminine parce qu’elle signifie République ou France, issue de l’antiquité, les
valeurs abstraites prennent le genre de leur nom. (Agulhon 1992: 14)
In addition to this allegorical tradition, France also has a heritage of female heroines
inextricably linked to the myth of nation. Feminist critic Michèle Sardé notices the
oscillation between allegories and specific historic female characters:
69
Dans la représentation collective des Français, une Française mythique émerge
comme figure emblématique de la France. A la fois gracieuse et guerrière, la
France éternelle se coule dans un statuaire féminine : tantôt personne collective
comme Marianne, la Marseillaise et toutes les représentations de la Liberté, la
Patrie, la Révolution, la République, la Civilisation, tantôt hommage à une
héroïne particulière comme Jeanne d’Arc, Jeanne Hachette ou sainte Geneviève,
qui toutes incarnent une idée patriotique de résistance et de combat. (Sardé 33)
But at the base structure of all these feminine representation lies, nevertheless, the idea of
objectification, hence the easy association between women and nation. I find that Nina
Yuval-Davis’s take on this issue is an extremely useful tool to understand the interplay
between femininity and nation. In her study Gender and Nation, she argues that, since
culture and ethnicity are dynamic, authenticity comes into play as it supposes
unchanging, essential and unitary constructs of cultures, identities and groupings. The
critic moves on to assert that women are often required to carry this authenticity, “this
burden of representation,” as they are constructed as the “symbolic bearers of the
collectivity identity and honor, both personally and collectively” (45). It is precisely at
the core of this tension French female stars as the icons of the nation function. They
embody an abstract, homogenizing, eternal and reassuring image as icons of the nation,
while, at the same time, they invoke notions of exclusion, heterogeneity and individuality
through their star images anchored in a concrete reality.
I would like to return at this point to the connotation of youth in Marianne’s
image. Agulhon recognizes two faces of Marianne, one “légaliste et l’autre combatant,”
variants that can be read in relation to the social-political environment (1992: 22). In
postwar history, I identify two other faces of Marianne, this time observing the age
variation. First, there is the youthful gamine image, which I argue dominated the 1950s
and 1960s, and found its perfect incarnation in Brigitte Bardot. Second, through the 1986
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election of Catherine Deneuve, a more established and mature femininity becomes the
representational core of Marianne. Her successor, top-model and actress Laetitia Casta
capitalizes on both images, through the playful association with the gamine in Jean-Paul
Goude’s advertising campaign for the Galeries Lafayette and her more established
cinematic roles, haute-couture shows, and image as the French ambassador of L’Oréal.
Both the gamine and the French woman belong to a category of filmic types that
cluster Frenchness in an iconic manner. Ginette Vincendeau has insightfully pointed out
that the closeness of theatre and film had a marked influence on the performance of the
actors in the 1930s and 1940s since French theatrical performance was based on a strict
system of types or emplois (2000: 7-8). The issue of March 2002 of Positif dedicated to
French actresses reproduced the same observation: “Dans le cinéma français, peut-être en
raison d’une habitude issue du théâtre, les comédiennes ont longtemps répondu à des
emplois : l’ingénue, la garce, la femme fatale, la grande dame” (Ciment and Tobin 5). It
ensues that French feminine types gravitate around these highly conspicuous cinematic
emplois, whose visibility and recurrence is determined, in turn, by their function in the
socio-political context.
In this sense, Agulhon succinctly notes the difference between Bardot’s and
Deneuve’s femininity:
Chacun a pu observer qu’on peut lire sur le visage très type de BB (le dessin des
lèvres en particulier) des expressions qui peuvent aller de la joie enfantine à une
sorte de moue boudeuse. La beauté de Deneuve est plus classique, plus
harmonieuse, sans être pourtant banale, facilement grave mais sans aller jusqu’au
sévère – ce qui rejoignait en somme plus aisément les anciens critères de la
sculpture allégorique. (2001: 197)
Both Bardot and Deneuve were established cinema stars when their election as Marianne
occurred. While Bardot’s gamine image was still preserved in the sculpture lines through
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her pouting lips, Deneuve’s representation played on the classical perfection of her
features. In the French cinematic imaginary, female stars as gamines and seductive
French women types are inextricably intertwined as some of them – including Catherine
Deneuve, Sophie Marceau, Isabelle Adjani, Juliette Binoche and currently Audrey
Tautou – age gracefully in front of the French public. Nevertheless, the cinematic
spotlight can choose to emphasize one of these types, its choice being determined by the
socio-political backdrop. I will discuss more at length the image of the gamine in the next
chapter since, besides being a specific national type, it is also linked to Parisian urban
iconicity. Here I read Bardot’s image as a gamine in its national dimension, as a product
and reflection of the environment of the mid-1950s-1960s, connoting modern youth
culture and mobilizing societal optimism. In this critical vein, Vincendeau has
consecrated a chapter of her study to the subtext of youth that Bardot embodied,
remarking that it resonated with the rhetoric of the new that dominated the political
spheres of the Fifth Republic and also with the New Wave’s emphasis on rejuvenation in
cinematic terms (2000: 85).
In Enfants Terribles. Youth and Femininity in the Mass Media in France 19451968, Susan Weiner analyzes the recurrent image of the teenage girl as enfant terrible in
a wide range of materials, from magazines such as Elle and Mademoiselle to the celebrity
images of Françoise Sagan and Brigitte Bardot. She finds that these representations
exorcize societal anxieties such as the recent Nazi Occupation, the advent of
consumerism, and the on-going war in Algeria. The structured polysemy, to employ
Dyer’s term, functions in different ways as the emancipation of young women found its
reflection in these images of bad girls. The youth of the gamine, nevertheless, echoing
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that of the Fifth Republic, also connotes a certain fragility and vulnerability. To illustrate
this, one of the posters for Charles de Gaulle’s presidential campaign of 1965 has the title
“Laissez-moi grandir, j’ai 7 ans,” implying
the young age of Marianne, and that of the
French Fifth Republic. De Gaulle is pictured
as the “Father” of the nation, whereas
Marianne, wearing the identifiable Phrygian
cap and the tri-color cockade, is a little girl
that needs to be guided on the right path in
order to grow up. The extra-cinematic
discourses
Figure 2.3. Poster for Charles de
Gaulle’s electoral campaign, 1965.
persona
circulated
around
Bardot’s
the
two
opposing
youth:
the
turbulent,
reinforce
dimensions
of
revolutionary gamine and the more ingénue side in need of guidance and protection.
Following the new fashion of the gamines, the December 5, 1959 issue of Paris
Match announced the new trend of the “femmes-enfants” in an article commenting upon
the famous Philippe Halsman's “Jump” series depicting leaps of stars such as Brigitte
Bardot, Martine Carole, Audrey Hepburn, Gina Lollobrigida: “Finie l’ère des vamps: sex
idoles sont les femmes-enfants. Genoux pliés pour Martine, Brigitte et Lollo, en souvenir
du saut à la corde. Jambes tendues pour Sophia et Audrey. Elles se rebellent contre les
leçons de maintien d’autrefois (toujours les jambes serrées), et s’affirment comme des
grandes personnes indépendantes” (111). The connotations of rebellion, emancipation,
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and playfulness are reconciled across borders by the image of the gamine whose
innocence serves to efface the recent memories of the Second World War.
By 1985, however, the Fifth Republic had already developed a reputable tradition
and an honorable memory. And Catherine Deneuve, who succeeded as the second actress
to embody Marianne, reciprocated, her star image being fully established in consonance
with that of the Fifth Republic. In a synchronized movement, Deneuve’s bust, sculpted by
Marielle Polska, emphasizes her classical features and rebuilds harmonious ties with the
more traditional representations of Marianne.
The dialogue with the past artistic legacy in Deneuve’s statue echoes a wider
movement in French cinema – through the heritage genre – as well as an observable
tendency at a wider scale in French society in general. The seven volumes of the Lieux de
mémoire edited by Pierre Nora and published by Gallimard from 1984 to 1992 perfectly
illustrate this trend. In Nora’s view the cultural identity of the French nation is clustered
in the “lieux de mémoire.” As a result, various historians, scrutinizing their fields of
expertise, analyze sites of memory as diverse as symbols of the Republic (the flag, the
Marseillaise), monuments (Eiffel Tower), historical figures (Jeanne d’Arc), writers
(Descartes), places (Reims, Versailles), museums (Le Louvre) books (Marcel Proust’s A
la recherche du temps perdu).
This encyclopedic attempt is not unique when considering that since 1985, every
two years, French sociologist Gérard Mermet has scrutinized the social changes in the
French society and compiled its main trends in Francoscopie. The study’s title reveals the
intent of a comprehensive scan of French society in all of its facets: lifestyle, attitudes,
values, opinions, and ways of thinking. It also does provide summaries of past decades
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through sections labeled as “Rétroscopies.” Grouped in generic chapters such as the
individual, family, society, work, money, the thorough study of the state of French
society is based on empirical research supported by statistical data and surveys, revealing
a persistent inward look of the French society in order to define and preserve itself.
Resonating with this trend, Catherine Deneuve, in her quality as one of the most well
known French stars of all times, was appointed UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for the
Safeguarding of Film Heritage in 1994. Her work includes the restoration and
preservation of film heritage in developing countries. Based on the idea that film reflects
personal views but also the societal history, the international call for the preservation of
filmic material is revealingly titled “21st Century Memory.” Deneuve’s star image as the
grande dame of the French cinema, both through her reputable career and her numerous
roles incarnating French literary and historic heroines, imposes the perfect iconic
representation of history in general and of the history of the nation in particular.
2.2. Resistance and Decolonization: Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve
When discussing historic films in terms of gender representations, a frequently
employed dichotomy comes immediately to mind: national identity tends to be celebrated
through male active performances that establish actors as heroes of the narrative. Female
movie stars however, due to their ability to incarnate ambiguous discourses, function as
well as preferred narrative catalysts in controversial historical representations such as the
Occupation period or the wars of decolonization. Their impeccable beauty serves as a
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cathartic mechanism for restoring coherence at the level of the narrative, while at the
same time, incarnating conflicting significations. Both Bardot and Deneuve were
established stars when they made Babette s’en va-t-en guerre (1959) and Indochine
(1991), their star images enabling them to function as icons of the nation on- and offscreen.
Brigitte Bardot’s Babette s’en va-t-en guerre opens with Bardot’s walking
impassibly next to her bicycle while war destruction surrounds her. The first movie scene
quotes Et Dieu . . . créea la femme where Bardot was also depicted with a bicycle in the
iconic scenery of the Riviera. In the movie credits, the title capitalizes the letter B and
spells “BaBette” thus reproducing Bardot’s initials as it renders more transparent the
intent of the movie to revolve, yet again, around Brigitte Bardot’s star image. Leah
Hewitt observes that Bardot’s woman-child image was appropriately used to exorcize the
ambiguities of the Occupation period:
The star’s expressly child like demeanor at the beginning of this film matches her
initials (BB=bébé=baby), connoting the woman-child, and coincides with what
was to become a tradition in the last half of the twentieth century of turning
Marianne into a child. This ingénue’s down-to-earth resourcefulness (and
stunning looks) allow her to successfully incarnate a fighting, resisting France,
under the leadership of that major icon of the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle.
(2008: 20)
The action of the movie is set in June 1940. Babette, completely ignoring the
German invasion of her country, continues her daily routine. Looking for employment as
a cleaning lady, she gets trapped in an evacuation from Le Havre to England. Now a war
refugee, she resides at the Resistance headquarters in England and assumes the cleaning
and household chores. She soon changes careers and becomes a spy for the British
Intelligence because of her striking resemblance to a former mistress of General von
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Arenberg, a highly important official in the German plans to invade England. Sent back
to France, Babette gets separated from her mission partner and love-interest, Gérard de
Crécy, played by Jacques Charrier, and is captured by the Gestapo chief, Commandant
Schultz (Francis Blanche). Accidentally, he also wants to do away with von Arenberg, as
part of a larger paranoid plan of eliminating the military aristocracy surrounding Hitler.
He also is aware of Babette’s resemblance to von Arenberg’s mistress and, therefore,
decides to use her for his own purpose. But Babette has her own master plan and with
some innate expertise in strategies, many excellent theatrical skills and irresistible
seduction talents, she attracts von Arenberg in a trap, steals the invasion plans, and gets
everybody safely back to England.
For international and domestic audiences, the movie marked a shift in Bardot’s
career and it was marketed as a change in her star persona. The United States poster, for
instance, pictures two identical photos of Brigitte Bardot under the tag-line: “Can You
See the Difference in the New Brigitte Bardot? You will When You See Her Brilliant
Comic Talent In the Hilarious New Film Babette Goes to War, Co-Starring Jacques
Charrier, Proud Papa of BB's New Baby!” Bardot is publicized as a serious actress
capable of endorsing comic roles while giving up her sex-bomb image and keeping her
clothes on. 7
The French poster is more complex and allows for multiple readings. It depicts an
over-sized iconic image of Bardot in a sensuous and pensive pose that reflects the
numerous close-ups of Bardot’s face throughout the comic action of the movie. A cartoon
provides a second representation of Bardot with a parachute and a cleaning broom.
Reading the movie in the context of resistance but also in the context of the on-going
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process of Algerian decolonization, the connotations of impromptu rescue (the parachute)
and of cleaning the national body (the broom) are associated with a chic image of Bardot
turning even a soldier helmet into a fashionable
accessory. 8 The third image reproduces a shot
from the movie, where Gérard de Crécy plans
the French mission. The scene is revealing as to
how a gender dynamic is constructed in the
movie. At the headquarters of the French
Resistance in England, Brigitte soon becomes
indispensable in terms of domestic cleaning and
Figure 2.4. Poster for Babette s’en
va-t-en guerre. (1959)
chores. She even transgresses hierarchic ranks
by instituting an egalitarian system of cigarette
distribution, stealing from the higher ranked officers and supplying regular soldiers.
While men constantly share the same frame with maps – de Crécy plots on a French map
the houses of the French resistance, and captain Darcy is surrounded by maps in his
office – Brigitte, while she is depicted with maps, is, rather, absorbed by her love games,
trying to capture de Crécy’s attention. When she is about to be sent abroad for an
important mission, de Crécy warns the British Intelligence officers that Babette: “C’est
une toute petite tête, un tout petit pois.” The act of giving Babette agency and decision
power is depicted as dangerous, arousing anxieties from the part of her male mission
partners. Yet, it is her very naive charm and reckless attitude that ultimately offers her
agency as she as she infiltrates the heart of the Gestapo, in the hotel Continental, and
devises the plan that leads to the capture of von Arenberg.
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The comic genre, combined with Bardot’s stardom, achieve this edificatory power
where the national image, fissured and tormented, regains its imaginary homogeneity.
Under the spell of her icon, the haunting memory of the Vichy regime is effaced and
replaced with an image of a France unified in its fight against the German invaders.
When Babette first arrives in Querck-sur-mer seeking employment, the Madame in
charge of the brothel helps Babette to flee with the rest of prostitutes not because of her
generosity but because of her nationality: ”Je ne suis pas gentile. Je suis française et je ne
laisserais pas une autre Française aux mains des vainqueurs.” The Duchess de Crécy,
Gérard’s mother, expresses the reassuring solidarity between mother and son around the
resisting family-nation: “Je fais de la Résistance parce que mon fils fait de la Résistance.”
Most importantly, Gérard de Crécy’s resistance is woven into the narrative in the shadow
of Bardot’s star image. Crécy is not a typical war hero upon whom the movie is centered.
To the contrary, his masculine agency seeps discretely into the narrative as the boisterous
Babette gives orders to all males and steals the show during the mission. If Bardot’s
image serves as a unifying center for achieving solidarity in terms of resistance, she also
manages to reconcile class rifts across the nations. First, to seduce Ahrenberg, a
sophisticated aristocrat with classical music tastes and a pronounced affinity for
Shakespeare, Babette has to force herself to memorize bits of elite culture. Her comic
attitude, nevertheless, offers her the necessary distance from her part to protect her from
ridicule. Struggling to learn good manners and Shakespeare, Babette self-mockingly
asserts: “Je vais passer pour une enquiquineuse, moi.” The popular tone of her language,
poking fun at the dully aristocratic conversations, serves as a rallying point for mass
audiences.
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During her mission, therefore, we witness a sort of a literal mise-en-abyme where
we watch Brigitte Bardot playing Babette, a cleaning girl from the lower classes, who, in
turn, plays the role of an aristocratic young lady. This episode nevertheless points to the
performance of the feminine stars, introducing concepts of the feminine and masquerade
that expose the “very contradictions that the nations try to conceal” (Hayward 2000a:
111). In this sense, through this filmic meta-performance class divisions become
magically transgressed by Babette whereas they remain highly visible in terms of
masculinities. Babette navigates between the elitist Von Arenberg and the lower class
Gestapo chief Schultz and interacts with both of them with the same naturalness. On the
French side, she also infiltrates the aristocratic de Crécy family, pretending to be their
daughter while still remaining a devoted Resistance soldier and a simple housemaid.
Discourses threatening the homogenous image of the nation, repressed by
Bardot’s coherent image, emerge elsewhere in the filmic text. First, Babette’s profession
of a cleaning lady has, as previously mentioned, implications at the level of cleaning the
body of the nation. Second, the interaction between the Commandant Schulz is
constructed repetitively in terms of the dichotomy good/bad applied to the father and
daughter relationship. The source of comedy is situated thus at the intersection of the
ingénue attitudes of Babette and the perverted model of fatherhood represented by
commander of the Gestapo. Schultz daydreams about gigantic executions, has an
insatiable desire to shoot everybody and uses every occasion to do so. The uncovering of
plots against Hitler offers him, therefore, the opportunity to satisfy both his death drive
and paranoid fixations. When he thinks that Babette is a “good daughter” obeying his
orders, he overwhelms her with compliments as the “petit ange” serves his objectives.
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In the final scenes of the movie, however, just before the captive Babette manages
to escape, he also reveals his propensity for torture: “Chère petite Babette qui a voulu
faire de la peine à son bon vieux papa Schultz nous allons lui arracher les ongles, nous
allons lui brûler la langue, après nous lui cassons les dents. Et puis ensuite nous lui
trouvons quelque chose de plus amusant.” The physical weight of the threats is quite
unsettling when it is juxtaposed to the impeccable beauty and reassuring iconicity of
Bardot’s image. And it is also difficult not to read Papa Schultz’s comments in relation to
the contemporary French accusations of torture in the Algerian War. In a review of the
movie in France Observateur of 24 September 1959, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze ironically
identifies Babette as the Jeanne d’Arc of the Fifth Republic and reads the movie in light
of the contemporary decolonization struggles that France was facing:
Il est question de faire la première comédie conformiste de la Ve, . . . et de fournir
au peuple un opium tricolore qui l’induise à croire que la bataille de la Résistance
a été gagné comme on trousse un vaudeville bien agencé et que donc il n’a pas de
raison pour que la guerre d’Algérie ne se gagne avec des chansons et des
Kermesses aux Etoiles.
The Paris Match issue of January, 17 1959 reveals the same coordinates of the
reading above. In between sections devoted to Fidel Castro, to a visit of the Soviet
statesman Mikoyan to a United States supermarket, and to one of the prophets of the
Algerian insurrections and founder of the F. L. N., Messali Hadji, De Gaulle is
juxtaposed to Brigitte Bardot. The headline on the cover refers to the shift in power that
occurred due to the Algerian crisis: “Sur les Champs-Elysées la France dit ‘Merci
Monsieur Coty’ et crie: Vive de Gaulle!” and the corresponding article adopts an
interrogative tone vis-à-vis the Republic: “Que vaut la France no 5 ?” On the next pages,
to exorcise all contemporary anxieties, Brigitte Bardot is pictured in a close-up with her
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blond locks flowing out of the soldier helmet, wearing her typical charcoal eye-make up,
with a bright smile on her face, as captions recall her idyllic love story on and off-screen
with her fellow acting partner, Jacques Charrier. This contiguity recalls, in addition, one
of the most memorable comic scenes of the movie. Babette, as a clumsy telephone
operator, connects incorrectly one of the officers and we hear him say to de Gaulle: “Estce que tu es libre pour dîner, ce soir, ma poulette?” Next to Bardot’s star image, De
Gaulle is recuperated from the serious political realm into the comic popular one.
Bardot’s star image thus enables a humorous mood that magically reconciles problematic
histories of collaboration and resistance both in terms of the past Second World War and
the present Algerian war.
Another story of decolonization, this time set in Indochina, is told through
Catherine Deneuve’s star image. After almost thirty years, the mature Fifth Republic
finds its expression in the glamorous, established, and aesthetic perfection of Deneuve’s
persona suitable for a grandiose epic mode. In the 1992 film Indochine, Deneuve’s
character, Eliane Devries, is a transparent symbol of France. The backdrop of this
ambitious epic is the French Indochina of the 1930s in its historic journey until its
separation from France during the Geneva Conference in 1954. A rich owner of a rubber
plantation near Saigon, Eliane is the storyteller of the decolonization process in
Indochina, unfolding a personal story of family, love, and mourning. Devoted to the
plantation and her father, Eliane has strong roots in Indochina, a country which she has
never left. She adopts Camille (Linh Dan Pham), the daughter of a deceased Indochinese
couple, and raises her like her own French child. Eliane has a brief affair with a young
French soldier Jean-Baptiste Le Guen (Vincent Perez), but she returns to her daily duties
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as mother when Camille, her young girl, comes back home for an arranged marriage.
Caught in a street insurgency, Camille is saved by Jean-Baptiste and falls in love with
him, completing the triangle of desire. Camille escapes from home to rejoin her newly
found lover in the North and, because of the murder of a French officer, both she and
Jean-Baptiste become outcasts and find refuge with the marginalized Communists
insurgents. Soon after the birth of their son, the love story ends on a tragic note: JeanBaptiste is assassinated and Camille imprisoned. Eliane, as a devoted mother raises
Camille’s son Etienne who has equally been the listener of her unfolding story.
Vincendeau, in her review of the film, remarks that the movie is centered on the
notion of motherhood embodied flawlessly by Deneuve-Marianne:
Good colonialism, of course, is embodied by Eliane/Deneuve. The matrilineal
vision of history offered by the film enables it to represent French imperialism as
not only liberal, but natural. In the very obvious metaphor of the film Eliane France adopts Camille-Vietnam: she inherits Camille’s land through the
convenient disappearance of her parents. (1993b: 48)
Certainly, the movie is to be read as a nostalgic heritage work reflecting upon the
eminence of the French colonial rule in which the Deneuve’s beauty corresponds to the
iconic beauty of the Vietnamese scenery. 9 In Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial
Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature, Panivong Norindr focuses his critical
attention on how French colonial discourses circulated a mythical representation of
Indochina. Through his postcolonial theoretical lens, Norindr criticizes the problematic
use of Eliane as “colonial Marianne” (132). Norindr also remarks that the use of a female
protagonist leads to the screening of Indochina, the other culture, as feminized spectacle
(138). Lily V. Chin read the movie along similar critical lines, as perpetuating an
ideology of neo-colonialism through a dichotomy good/bad in terms of motherhood
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between Eliane and Camille, the monstrous mother (147). The focus of her reading,
however, becomes Camille as a subject, acquiring her own gaze and undermining the onscreen Orientalist eroticized image through her performance (Chin141-143).
Up to this point, it is difficult not to imagine the narrative collapsing into cliché
and Deneuve’s image into stereotype. It is precisely her star image, nevertheless, that
enables the narrative to function in a more complex ways, through her excellence in, as
Gaël Lépingle put it: “contenir les clivages, à les faire tenir ensemble sans les diminuer.”
The movie brings up this question of fissure right at the beginning: “C’est peut être ça la
jeunesse. Croire que le monde est fait des choses inséparables. Les hommes et les
femmes. Les montagnes et les plaines. Les humains et les dieux. L’Indochine et la
France.” Deneuve’s star image enables her to situate Eliane and the conjunction of these
oppositions, holding them together not through youthful hope but through mature
strength. By the time she filmed this movie, Deneuve was an established institution both
in terms of her role as elected Marianne but also as a celebrated actress with an
impressive career behind her. She played Marion in Truffaut’s Le Dernier Métro (1980),
an iconic role that linked her to the representation of French womanhood during the
Occupation. Leah D. Hewitt, looking at how wartime feminine identities become the
catalyst of heroic narrative in heritage movies, argues that these screenings reflect
contemporary societal contradictions, best embodied by “a strong female figure” as “the
emblem of political ambivalence in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-firstcentury France” (2002: 75). In a subsequent Deneuve movie, Place Vendôme (1998),
Nicole Garcia emphasizes the contradictions of the national text through the role of
Marianne Malivert. In a veritable tour de force that earned her the Best Actress Award at
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the Venice International Film Festival, Deneuve plays Marianne as the alcoholic and
newly widow of a diamond merchant. The glamorous settings of Place Vendôme are
impregnated with dark, deep undertones of past betrayals, dubious jewelry deals, and
silenced sufferance, elements with converge, yet again, on the quintessential French icon
that is Catherine Deneuve.
Recalling Greta Garbo’s and Grace Kelly’s star images, Deneuve’s beauty
belongs to the classic tradition of the statuary which she also shares with Marianne. As
Marie-Françoise Leclerc remarks during an interview with Deneuve for Le Point :
“Curieusement, au premier regard, elle semble disparaître dans la perfection de sa beauté,
dans la force du modèle de son visage, la régularité délicate des traits, la transparence du
teint. Beauté privilège, beauté piège” (95). Deneuve’s classic iconic beauty fascinates and
traps the sight. During the span of twenty-five years in which the epic unfolds, her beauty
is ageless, remains coherent and intact despite the losses and unfortunate events that
cloud her life. In this sense, Vincendeau remarked her “mask-like face and her
understated performance style, her glamour and aloofness” (1993a: 44). These elements
of her star image are however constantly undermined by a deep passion, profound
loneliness and need of protection. They pleasurably reiterate the “fire and ice” dichotomy
noted by Vincendeau in Deneuve’s star persona (2000: 210). These primordial elements
are, nevertheless, constantly contained by her self-possessed image. Even when she is
slapped by her lover Jean-Baptiste, she remains unruffled and utterly composed after he
publicly disgraces her. Madly in love with Jean-Baptiste, Elaine humiliates herself by
chasing him and seeks refuge and consolation in isolated opium houses. Yet, her filmic
image is never altered by these traumatic experiences, as her statuesque features
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constantly maintain their serenity. It is through these ambivalent qualities that Deneuve’s
star persona is able to convey the story of a glorious but also shameful colonial past of
the French Republic without falling either into cliché or into disgrace.
The filmic text reproduces this alternation as well. When Eliane is not represented
in the scenes, her presence is marked through the narrative voice-over. She is, for
instance, the traditional occidental narrator of Camille’s story. Her adoptive daughter,
named the Red Princess, became a living legend, as she followed her path to
independence both in political terms (the independence of her country, Vietnam) and in
personal terms (her love story with Jean-Baptiste). Alongside and in contrast to these
conventional orientalist filmic representations, Wargnier accomplishes striking effects
through juxtaposing Eliane’s point of view shots with iconic images of the Vietnamese
scenery. As Eliane, for instance, walks with Jean-Baptiste for the first time on her
plantation, the panning of the camera frames them in a typical exotic scenery. A sudden
cut, however, introduces a very fluid point of view shot from Eliane’s perspective and we
see two male workers looking directly in the camera. Consequently, the spectator, taking
Eliane’s place, becomes the object of their gaze. This unsettling shift problematizes both
the spectator’s location as well as the feminine and the exotic body as objects of the gaze.
The tension between these elements is accompanied by a blurring of gender categories.
Eliane, wearing male clothes, is positioned as both object of the gaze and master of her
coolies. Her star image is equally able to contain this gender cleavage, as the flattering
yet strange remark of Gérard Depardieu shows: “Catherine Deneuve est l’homme que
j’aurais aimé être” (Leclère 95). In fact not only does Eliane wear male clothes and
glamorous hats and Yves Saint-Laurent dresses, she frequently wears the local attire and
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she shares the frame as much with her Vietnamese workers and friends as much as with
her French countrymen. As the political relations between France and Indochine, mother
(Eliane) and daughter (Camille), woman (Eliane) and lover (Jean-Baptiste), masculine
and feminine, colonizer and colonized crumble, Deneuve’s image survives their collapse
through the very recycling of these antagonisms.
Indochine remains one of the few heritage films centered on a feminine
protagonist and on the filmic storytelling of decolonization. The heritage films staging
masculine protagonists illustrate a strong tendency of looking inward for inspiration and
recycling national literary or historic texts, such as Jean de la Florette (1986), Le
Hussard sur le toit (1995), and Germinal (2003). As Powrie has pointed out during the
1990s, the heritage tradition became more and more self-reflective, echoing
contemporary events and ultimately deconstructing itself (1999:3-5). The political
context also greatly changed reflecting anxieties aroused by the more evident processes
of globalization. In 2001, during the electoral process in France, a new filmic icon of
feminine Frenchness achieved prominence nationwide. It was a gamine, yet again, as the
socio-political environment circulated discourses about change and youth. Le Fabuleux
Destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001) was Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s stroke of genius as it reconciled
nostalgia with modernity, past traditions with optimist changes, high art-cinematic
tradition with popular comedy. And its heroine from Montmartre, the lighthearted gamine
Amélie, is unmistakably French, as she became the most recent iconic urban emblem of
Parisian femininity.
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1
Germaine Lefebvre, later during her career, adopted the name of Capucine. She became famous for her
roles in The Pink Panther (1963) and What’s new Pussycat (1965) and for her friendship with Audrey
Hepburn whom she met in the mid-1950s while working as a Givenchy model.
2
As Agulhon points out, the name of Marianne has obscure roots. It might have originated in an Occitan
song “La Garisou de Marianno.” Nevertheless, the popularity of the two names Maria and Anne in the 18th
century – bearing both popular and religious connotations – might have helped the establishment of the
name. Another hypothesis traces the origins of Marianne in Mariamné a Jewish Princess persecuted by
Herod. A highly popular tragedy during that time, written by Tristan l’Hermite, had Mariamné as a central
character (1992:18-9).
3
See the French government portal : <http://www.premier-ministre.gouv.fr>.
4
See the site of the French National Assembly for a brief history of the stamp representations of Marianne :
<http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/evenements/marianne.asp>.
5
For a more detailed analysis of Evelyne Thomas and the French press reactions to her election as a
Marianne, see Christian Le Bart’s article, “Evelyne Thomas en Marianne: polémiques autour d’une
incarnation” in La République en représentations. Autour de l’oeuvre de Maurice Agulhon.
6
It is highly difficult to address the notion of the nation without mentioning Benedict Anderson’s
influential study. I adopt his notion of nations as “an imagined political community-and imagined as both
inherently limited and sovereign” (6). In his view, nationality, nation-ness and nationalism are cultural
artifacts that were created towards the end of the 18th century. The cinematic contribution to the national
imaginary is a prolific critical topic. Susan Hayward discusses it in terms of production and modes of
enunciation in French National Cinema (2003) and Andrew Higson reconceptualizes the notion of national
cinema by emphasizing the role of national audiences in its construction (2002). For the purposes of the
present study, I limit my discussion of the national in the cinema to star images.
7
Sarah Leahy in “The Matter of Myth: Brigitte Bardot, Stardom and Sex” analyzes the role of maternity
and sexuality in Bardot’s star persona as she argues that they constantly undermine her on-screen
representations. Leahy reads Bardot’s body in Babette s’en va-t-en guerre as a surface, as a representation
of “blankness,” “a pure surface eradicating the stains the war had left on the female body” (77). In her
interpretation, Bardot’s on-screen body is rendered problematic by the off-screen discourses revealing her
excessive sexuality and ambiguous attitudes towards maternity.
8
For an analysis of the role of cleaning products and hygiene discourses associated with the contemporary
process of decolonization see Kristin Ross’s Fast Cars, Clean Bodies. Decolonization and the Reordering
of French Culture (1995).
9
See Michelle Bacholle’s article: “Camille et Mui ou du Vietnam dans Indochine et L’Odeur de la papaya
verte.”
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CHAPTER 3
PARIS IS A MOVIE STAR: PARISIAN WOMEN AND ICONIC URBAN
FEMININITY
The link between French female stars and Paris is so strong that stars have
become an integral and highly visible part of the urban landscape. In 2001, an advertising
campaign titled “The Adventures of Laetitia Casta at the Galeries Lafayette,” created by
photographer Jean Paul Goude, capitalized on Casta’s star image through highly
successful billboards for the famous French
department store. Over the next three years,
Goude imagined Laetitia Casta in more than
eighty representations marking both special sale
events and Parisian advertising space, from
metro walls to street-side billboards. Although
these posters had a limited existence in the
urban landscape, a Laetitia Casta advertisement
of the 2001 campaign is still preserved in the
city and on foldout Parisian tourist maps. The
name of Galeries Lafayette is inscribed on the
Figure 3.1. Laetitia Casta by Jean
Paul Goude for Galeries
Lafayette, 2001.
upper part of this advertisement and it has the
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double T shaped like the Eiffel Tower to plot on the map the two most visited places in
the city: the temple of Parisian consumerism and the icon of tourism. The image portrays
model and movie star Laetitia Casta wearing a black dress, emblematic of Parisian
elegance and glamour. On her head, she wears a red, minuscule heart-shaped hat as a
blatant reminder that Paris is also the city where both love and fashion desires come true.
From her stylish black-gloved hand a small gift box tied with a tricolor ribbon reminds
the viewers that cinema, fashion, and cosmetics are national affairs in France. In fact, not
only does the muse have strong ties with the national imaginary, but also the creator: Jean
Paul Goude, the director of this publicity campaign, was also the organizer of the parade
for the National Bicentennial Celebration of the French Revolution (Agulhon 2001: 2078).With Casta, Goude contributes again to the national industries of culture as he
conjugates the star as a national symbol, cinematic icon, and object of consumption.
Additionally, the persistence of this representation and its proximity to maps raise
questions about how star images not only productively guide consumption but also
interact with the Parisian space.
Analyzing the cultural geography of French cinema, Allen J. Scott noted that the
French film industry is characterized by a profound “locational agglomeration” since
production companies, film studios, and the casting agencies are all concentrated in Paris
(99-100). It is therefore natural that the capital city should become both the preferred and
practical setting for most French movies. As a consequence of this concentration of the
cinematic industry in the Paris metropolitan area, female stars as both labor and
commodities are or necessarily become Parisian.
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Paris holds a special place in the history of cinema from the seventh art’s very
beginnings at the Grand Café, Boulevard des Capucines. To illustrate Paris’s cinematic
destiny, René Jeanne and Charles Ford published Paris vu par le cinema (1969) and
argued that Paris has earned a place not only in the history of French cinema but of world
cinema (9). The constant preoccupation with this cinematic city is shown even more
recently, in 2006, when the city of Paris organized an exhibit at the Hôtel de Ville titled
“Paris au cinéma: La vie rêvée de la capitale de Méliès à Amélie Poulain” to celebrate the
strong bond between Paris, cinema, and its stars.
This strong connection, however, leads to some short circuits as the highly visible
cinematic Paris can be reinterpreted as modifying the city itself somewhat in Jean
Baudrillard’s tradition of going from the screen to the city. Baudrillard referred to the
cinematic screen’s precedence over the city in Amérique: ”La ville américaine semble
elle aussi issue vivante du cinéma. Il ne faut pas donc aller de la ville à l’écran, mais de
l’écran à la ville pour en saisir le secret. C’est là où le cinéma ne revêt pas de forme
exceptionnelle, mais où il investit la rue, la ville entière d’une ambiance mythique” (57).
The views of Paris seem equally tributary to the silver screen because of the city’s highly
frequent and visible close-ups in movies.
This argument was also made by Charles Perraton in his essay “Le cinéma pour
repenser la ville. Réinventer la ville en sortant du cinéma”:
Comment dans le contexte actuel de la mondialisation des villes, le cinéma peut-il
contribuer à réinventer la ville? De manière générale, la perception et l’expérience
sensible de la ville ne se sont-elles pas largement transformées sous l’influence du
cinéma? De sorte qu’il ne faudrait pas tant aller de la ville à l’écran que faire
l’inverse pour comprendre le poids des images et la portée des scénarios sur notre
manière d’habiter le monde. Ne faudrait-il donc pas partir du cinéma (partir de là,
mais en sortir ensuite) pour réinventer la ville? (32-3)
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Adopting Perraton’s proposed method, in this chapter I read French female star images in
relation to the city of Paris and analyze their transformative impact on the Parisian
landscape in both cinematic and extra-cinematic discourses.
French female stars have always had a privileged relationship to the city of Paris.
Extra-cinematic and cinematic discourses conflate the city and its women in the cultural
imaginary, in particular the condensed version of iconic femininity incarnated by the
movie star. Images of Jeanne Moreau and the Seine banks, Catherine Deneuve and Place
Vendôme, Juliette Binoche and the Pont-Neuf are strongly connected and illustrate the
quintessence of an urban feminine landscape. Truffaut captured this quality in Jules et
Jim (1962) when he filmed Catherine’s close-up (Jeanne Moreau) superimposed on the
idyllic
Austrian
landscape
to
illustrate
the
simultaneous layers of emotions that render the star
close-up indivisible from the scenery. Parisian
female stars wear the text of their urban iconicity on
their image, and, in turn, representations of Paris are
impregnated with their star close-ups. In “Place
Vendôme,” photographer Willy Ronis captured this
Figure 3.2. Willy Ronnis.
Place Vendôme, 1947.
simultaneity of Parisian women and monument
representations. In his picture, the Place Vendôme
Column is reflected in a rain puddle over which a woman crosses, the dynamism of her
movement being contrasted against the timeless and static quality of the monument.
Aesthetic beauty is thus the main coordinate on which a dual metonymical relation
between the city and its stars is constructed: the Parisiennes signify the architectural
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glory, fashionable elegance, and cultural heritage of the city. In return, Paris represents
the embodiment of feminine iconicity, modernity, and sophistication of its female stars.
This two-way path from stone to flesh is also facilitated by the image of Marianne
as a symbol of the nation. The easy substitution of the nation with its capital city triggers,
however, an indirectly proportional transfer. While the unique icon of the nation is
conceived through a condensation and uniformization process of national mythmaking,
the myth of the Parisienne shifts to a generous incorporation of all Parisian women, and,
in particular, of highly visible female movie stars.
This chapter is structured as follows. First, I will first investigate the myth of the
Parisienne and I will argue that its place in Parisian screenscapes is situated at the
intersection of two coordinates: mobility and modernity. At the core of this myth is the
star type of the gamine who embodies the quintessential expression of mobility since
Eponine, Victor Hugo’s gamine from Les Misérables. Even though Eponine has literary
filiations, her popularity in an international context is mostly due to the music-hall. The
term “gamine” is first recorded in the Dictionnaire de L'Académie française, 8th Edition
(1932-5): “Gamin, ine. n. Petit garçon, petite fille. Il se dit en particulier des Enfants qui
passent leur temps à jouer dans les rues. Un gamin des rues. Il se dit familièrement d'un
Enfant espiègle et hardi, petit garçon ou petite fille. Quel gamin! Quelle gamine! Il
s'emploie souvent en mauvaise part. Méchant gamin! qui est-ce qui m'a donné un gamin
comme ça?” (1:589). The popular background of the term and its ludic connotation are
present from the origins.
The gamine fluctuates between strict categories. The gender opposition
masculine/feminine is rendered problematic both at the level of etymology since the
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gamine is derived from the masculine form, as well as the level of signification through
clothing, style, and performance. The iconic Gavroche cap, short haircuts, and a
mischievous playfulness connote this problematization of gender. In this sense, the
gamine equally escapes the outward objectification of the Hollywood woman-child type
embodied by Mary Pickford. The gamine’s sexualization is never at the center of
attention as it is displaced by the assertion of her fluid subjectivity in search of an identity
mold. To this aim, the gamines reappropriate the public urban space to map different
feminine identities and affective journeys while interacting with the landscape. They
brush by their other feminine counterparts of the streets, the Parisian women, and through
their subjective projections, they construct the space according to their inner structure
through an iconic connotation of mobility and dynamism that avoids easy objectification.
Taking into account the image of the Parisian gamines and women at the
crossroads of mobility and modernity, I will analyze how female stars negotiate Parisian
space in both subjective and objective terms, how they create on- and off-screen maps
that reflect their own inner dual structure and therefore construct Paris both as cultural
and cinematic myth as well as merchandise. In doing so, I use Tom Conley’s critical lens
of cartography in cinema. Conley’s Cartographic Cinema (2007) offers a close reading
of a vast array of movies from the French New Wave to recent Hollywood box-office hits
in order to analyze the presence of maps in movies and to asses the relation between
cartography and cinema. In Conley’s view the two-sidedness between cinema and
cartography arises out of their similar projective mechanism of constructing space. The
presence of maps in movies exposes the codes of deciphering and reading filmic
sequences or even the movie holistically. In my analysis, I follow his approach and use
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maps as a way of reading cinema in order to illuminate how star images conflate with
screenscapes and how they map identities and consumption.
I will conclude on extra-cinematic discourses that highlight how Parisian women
recreate themselves constantly within the urban space. The process of becoming a
Parisienne has therefore become so codified that it can be applied to any woman with the
help of the popular “how to turn into a Parisienne” kits that reconcile the national and
universal tension in the image of the Parisian woman. Through these processes, I argue,
female stars promote Parisian identity as an urban iconic image of femininity.
3.1. The Myth of Parisian Women
The myth of the Parisian women has always had a reputable tradition and movies
have staged the pleasurable visual representations of Parisian femininity reinventing them
incessantly through the transitions from the boulevards to the stage and to the screen.
According to Alain Rustenholz, Parisian women had already acquired a mythical aura
under the rule of Louis XV due to their femininity on display during urban walks such as
the promenades of Longchamp (5). The Revolution only consolidated this female
imaginary of the city: Marianne, the icon of the Republic, has perpetuated a tradition of
feminine iconicity in representing national institutions. However, in the 19th century the
destiny of Paris as an imagined city becomes inextricably linked to the image of its
female inhabitants through both literary and artistic filiations of which Charles
Baudelaire’s poems and his contemporary Impressionist paintings of urban life are
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particularly representative. Susan Hayward, through a feminist lens, argued that the
representation of Paris during its Haussmannization was equated to the image of women
since they were “the site/sight where the contradictions of modernity got played out”
(2000a: 24). This ambivalence of the feminine urban imaginary served as a displacement
of the fear that the modern city inspired onto the female Other. According to Hayward,
recurrent images of attraction and fear exemplify this ambivalent phenomenon: the city as
Marianne, as the promise of the future, and as prostitute, a threat to the health of the
urban space (2000a: 24-5).
In 1953 still, critics were preoccupied with the feminine characteristics of the city
and the charm of its female residents. Frédéric Hoffet, for instance, published La
Psychanalyse de Paris and devoted an entire chapter of his study to Parisian femininity. 1
The author asserts that the feminine representation of Paris is due to the role that women
played in the social life and in the history of the city, not only in salons but also in music
halls, cabarets, all the “lieux de plaisirs.” Consequently, this omnipresent femininity
pervaded the private space affecting interior decorations through the supple lines of the
furniture and the omnipresence of mirrors. It also had a lasting impact on the Parisian
society and its salons, on its male population that became feminized, and even on the city
whose boulevards are pictured as boudoirs extended over kilometers (91).
To uphold the same tradition of the fascination for Parisian women, Pierre-Louis
Colin authored very recently a book titled Guide des jolies femmes de Paris (2008). In it,
Colin, speech-writer for the current French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, lists the
best Parisian sites not for sightseeing but for admiring women. He contributes therefore
to the Parisian women discourse through the recirculation of the flâneur / voyeur
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problematic – which I am going to address subsequently - as well as through the textual
construction of feminine beauty as one of the unique contemporary attractions of Paris.
The pure visual delight that Paris offers at each corner parallels the pleasures of
star gazing. 2 In this sense, close-ups of Parisian iconic monuments, the shimmering Eiffel
Tower recalling the magic glitter of movie stars, and its omnipresence in the French
movies, made the City of Lights a legitimate movie star. The strong metonymical
relationship
between
Paris
and
its
female
inhabitants is reflected at the level of stardom by
their mutual connections to an aesthetic tradition of
visual seduction through both their dual modernity
and ancient cultural heritage. The architectural
decoration of the city finds a natural correspondent
in the fashion adornment of its movie stars.
Figure 3.3. Jean Paul Goude
Galeries Lafayette Ad, 2001.
Representations of city and women become blurred
and the meandering Seine transforms itself into a
scarf, the iron beams of the Eiffel tower into patterns of silk stockings and dresses, the
wings of the Moulin Rouge into hats. Moreover, Parisian monuments themselves become
feminine accessories. In this sense, the Eiffel Tower is a preferred ornament of Parisian
taste in the form of pieces of jewelry or even high-heeled shoes. 3 Jean-Paul Goude
conceived an iconic advertisement in which his muse wears the Eiffel Tower, the symbol
of modernity, as a hat on her head, attached with a tricolor ribbon to illustrate again the
proximity of fashion, tourism, and cinematic stardom. 4
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From this perspective, Paris as a tourist attraction seems to obey the seduction
rules of a female star. Susan Hayward has noted that the fetishization of the corporeal city
through film makes it safe as the recognizable sights and sights represent of sum of
containable and reassuring elements (2000a: 25). Revelatory in this sense is the stage
performance of Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria (1960). In this star
vehicle, Louis Malle stages the two famous French stars of the sixties in a performance of
their Parisian femininity through the song “Ah, les petites femmes de Paris.”
Figure 3.4. Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria (1960)
During their stage act, miniatures of the Notre Dame cathedral and of the Eiffel
Tower are brought on the stage and share both spatially and symbolically the same space
of the spectacle. Metonymical representations of the city of Paris, the miniatures also
amplify the fetishizing gaze of the spectator that slides from the star-bodies undressed in
revealing can-can dresses to the iconic corporeal elements of the city. However, Malle
employs mirror games to multiply Bardot’s and Moreau’s images, uses dissolves to hide
them, and blurs the association of femininity with spectacle objectification, as men are
also at the center of the stage performing a dance and Bardot is wearing men’s clothing in
the grand finale. Therefore, we can safely assume that star and city can be read textually
in other ways than through the voyeuristic and fetishization reading glass. 5 And, most
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importantly, even placed in the Wild West, Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau are
unmistakably French.
3.2. Parisian Women: Representations and Difference
The connection of French feminine representations with the city of Paris on- and
off-screen is certainly unique and marks a distance from American cinema as they reveal
a privileged connection to urban space. Icons of the city, they are also flâneuses as they
stroll down Parisian streets, enter boutiques, antique shops, markets, and corner stores.
They seem to move freely throughout the city and its sweeping boulevards, lingering in
public spaces such as cafés and bistros, or touristy and historically charged sites.
The representations of the feminine in urban settings change significantly in
Hollywood cinema. Mona Domosh and Joni Seager in their study, Putting Women into
Place: Feminist Geographers make sense of the world, mention two recurrent filmic
images of women in urban space in Hollywood cinema and television. The first strand of
representations depicts the city as a site of constant threatening behavior especially for
women and particularly at night – Law and Order illustrates it perfectly. The second
depiction is a more recent one, exemplified by series such as Ally McBeal in which the
city is an exciting and fulfilling place for women in newly gentrified zones (Domosh and
Seager 67). Nevertheless, in both strands, the American urban screenscape remains
exterior to feminine identity when contrasted to French cinema in which Paris has a deep
metonymical relation with its female inhabitants. The difference is less marked in
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European cinema, as Pierre Sorlin observes in “Urban Space in European Cinema” when
he analyzes the specificity of European screenscapes. In contrast to other cinemas that
depict cities as autonomous entities, usually confronting them with their inhabitants,
European screenscapes do not exist by themselves but are developed through the relation
to their inhabitants (35). Even if this tight connection in European cinema between
inhabitants and cities could serve as a basis for the metonymical relation between Paris
and its female inhabitants, it cannot solely account for it, as the close relation between
women and city is not specific to any other European city than Paris.
However, this omnipresence of images of femininity and Paris raises suspicions
of objectification and of exclusion. Simone de Beauvoir noted this fact when looking at
the imbalance of feminine allegorical statues in Paris and statues consecrated to real
women:
Il est remarquable qu’à Paris, sur un millier de statues (si l’on excepte les reines
qui forment pour une raison purement architecturale la corbeille du Luxembourg)
il n’y a que dix élevés à des femmes. Trois sont consacrés à Jeanne d’Arc. Les
autres sont Mme de Ségur, George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt, Mme Boucicaut et la
baronne de Hirsh, Maria Deraismes, Rosa Bonheur. (1949: 221)
In the same critical framework, in an article titled “City as Narrative: Corporeal
Paris in Contemporary French Cinema (1950s-1990s),” Susan Hayward develops a
compelling argument that Paris is misrepresented as a woman, as objectification and
fetishization of the female and city body allow for both the control of the masculine order
and the exclusion of other bodies. In the reading of Paris as a corporeal city, Hayward’s
critique is that the idolatrization of Parisian women corresponds to a lack of their voice in
the city as Parisian women are typified in the roles of excessive femininity. 6
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Hayward reproduces at a cinematic level a boisterous dispute that originated in
the literary realm. Through “The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of
Modernity,” Janet Wolff launched the debate about the flâneuse. Scrutinizing the works
of Charles Baudelaire, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, the author cannot find a
feminine counterpart for the flâneur roaming in the streets of Paris. She argued, therefore,
that the flâneuse does not have a voice in the public urban experience of the modern life.
In a critical response to Wolff’s article, Elizabeth Wilson noticed that the woman
increasingly penetrated the public sphere in the 19th century and asks for incorporating
the female workers and shoppers as flâneuses as they were highly visible in department
stores, in cafés and on boulevards towards the end of the 19th century (1995:68). In
addition, Wilson argues, the flâneur himself is difficult to be read as part of the dominant
masculine patriarchic order, as he problematizes gender, “effaces himself, becomes
passive, feminine” and thus invisible (1995:75).
In The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women,
Wilson looks at both the feminine and the masculine in the metropolitan setting as she
situates the gender tension at the very heart of the urban space. The city is “masculine in
its ‘triumphal scale” and feminine in its “threatening mane” and she concludes that in
terms of exorcizing fear “at the hear of the urban labyrinth lurked not the Minotaur, a
bull-like male monster, but the female Sphinx, the ‘strangling one’”(1992: 7). The critic
devotes one chapter to Paris, “The City of the Floating World: Paris,” and remarks that
the imaginary city was feminized and sexualized: ”Poets sometimes likened Paris to a
prostitute, but more often sang her praises as a queen. Either way, the city was
inescapably feminine” (1992: 47). To illustrate this gendering of the Parisian space
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Wilson notes a trend starting during the French Revolution through which women were
assigned “a representational or symbolic role, which placed them firmly within a realm of
pleasure for the most part devoid of real power,” thus representing them as “grandiose
abstractions” and as signs of “sheer lust and hedonism” (2005: 49).
As previously mentioned, Susan Hayward reengaged this discussion in terms of
filmic representation and emphasized the dual objectification of Paris as a woman and of
women in Paris, remarking that in French cinema there are only a few flâneuse films out
of which only two come to mind immediately: Cléo de 5 à 7 and Ascenseur pour
l’échafaud (2000a: 27). Nevertheless, the interaction between female stars and Parisian
space can be read in more complex ways including subjective vision, but also the
metonymical relation between stars and the city as well as stars’ cartographies of
screenscapes in order to trace affective and consumption itineraries.
I start with an analysis of French female stars and their images to see how they
interact with those of the Parisian screenscapes. Their metonymical relation with Paris
enables them to project their subjectivities on filmic landscapes, mapping identity or
sentimental journeys in the city. I will read the on-screen feminine roles using also the
haptic framework of the voyageuse, in Giuliana Bruno’s terms. In her encyclopedic
study, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, Bruno advocates a
theoretical shift from the optic to the haptic, from the objectifying gaze to the traveling
emotion. In the passage from the optic to the haptic, the sight was replaced with siteseeing that enables the spectator to be “a voyageur, a passenger who traverses a haptic,
emotive terrain” (15). The optical implies separation from the medium whereas the haptic
allows for feeling the textures of film. Therefore, she advocates for a critical shift from
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“spectator-voyeur to a spectatrix-voyageuse,” dismantling equally the idea of an
immobilized, passive spectator and proposing the concept of a voyageuse: “She is a
physical entity, a moving spectator, a body making journeys in space” (157, 56). Central
to Bruno’s argument is La Carte du pays de Tendre, a map conceived by Madeleine de
Scudéry for her novel Clélie (1654). Mlle Scudéry’s illustration maps emotion through
movement. The cartographic journey is a sentimental voyage where towns, rivers, seas
illustrate a rich and highly codified sentimental vocabulary in order to trace different
affective journeys. Reading space in Bruno’s terms opens for a feminist strategy of the
haptic in which on-screen feminine travelers transformed the female spectator into a
traveler and implicitly into a flâneuse. Using her theoretical framework I adopt her haptic
strategy of reading space from the position of a film voyageuse in some of the subsequent
film readings concerning French female stars.
On-screen images of Parisian women have been constantly situated in a dialogue
with objectified/subjective representations of the city corresponding to the divide
between popular and art cinema. As popular cinema tended to portray an objectified
image of Parisian femininity in resonance with an iconic tourist city, the French art
cinema insisted on personal representations meant to reveal a more intimate and authentic
Paris. For instance, in 1957, in perfect opposition, Brigitte Bardot’s Une Parisienne and
Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud illustrate the conflicting star images of an
objectified and subjective Parisienne and her corresponding city. Four years later, Agnès
Varda employs these two images and illustrates the evolution from woman/Paris-as-an
image to woman/Paris-as-a subject through the inner journey of her protagonist in Cléo
de 5 à 7 (1962). Nevertheless, I will show that the appeal of the image of the Parisienne
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resides in the collusion of these two categories in on-screen representations or even in
extra-cinematic discourses where stars become flâneuses even as urban icons circulating
visual desire for the city and its products. Central to these negotiations between objective
image and subjective vision, between iconic and intimate Paris is the image of the gamine
whose modernity and mobility crosses boundaries with the typical nonchalance of her
age. Zazie dans le métro (1960), Chacun cherche son chat 1996), and Chaos (2001)
illustrate the disrespect of the gamine for established categories. Finally, I conclude on
the iconic image of Amélie Poulain, which, I argue, holds in perfect tension the iconic
visibility of the Paris/Amélie as a star and the Paris/Amélie as a subject of vision.
3.3. On-Screen Representations: Icons, Flâneuses and Voyageuses
In the tradition of constructing and exporting Parisian femininity, in 1957, after
the international success of And God Created Woman, Brigitte Bardot starred in Une
Parisienne. The poster for the film pictures Brigitte Bardot wearing a revealing
nightgown and literally sitting on a Parisian map. The see-through negligee is an open
invitation to the gaze of the spectator to look at Bardot’s body and at the Parisian map
that surrounds it. Moreover, the fabric of her negligee naturally flows into the Parisian
landscape marking a triple juxtaposition of flesh, stone, and cloth: the star female body,
Parisian architecture, and the fashion industry.
The map in the movie poster marks a significant departure from Michel-Etienne
Turgot’s famous 1739 Parisian map and its attempts at omniscient vision and control of
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urban space; quite on the contrary, the buildings reproduce the lines of Bardot’s body and
seem to surround her protectively. 7 Moreover, cartographic conventions are sacrificed at
the expense of iconicity. The buildings and streets are represented from multiple
perspectives, reproducing cliché images such as those of Sacré-Coeur and Moulin-Rouge.
The map captures the viewer’s sight and the message is clearly one of photogenic quality
that both star and city share as central features. However, the control imposed on city
space visible in Turgot’s map slips in the fetishization of Bardot’s Parisian body. It
ultimately foretells the extra-cinematic entrapment of her star body by paparazzi and
Bardot’s necessary evasion from the city to the secluded mansion at La Madrague in
order to regain control of her own image.
The poster markets Bardot as a
highly sexualized French woman copying a
familiar pin-up posture. Unlike her American
model, Bardot is pouting, not smiling, in a
gesture that became one of the trademarks of
her sexualized image. At the same time, her
irreverent pout reveals another element of her
star image observed by François Truffaut
when he analyzed the movie and remarked
Figure 3.5. Poster for Une Parisienne.
(1957)
that Bardot delivered a blow to a predictable
romantic
comedy
by
sophistication and refusal of conventions” (qtd. in Crisp, 1997: 364).
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her
“lack
of
In contrast to the immobility of the poster, the opening sequence of the movie
Une Parisienne shows Bardot speeding in a red convertible on the Champs-Elysées. Her
ingénue character is named Brigitte, a transparent equivalence, showing that the movie is
more about Bardot and her star image than about a fictional daughter of the French prime
minister. A police chase ensues since Brigitte is in a hurry, pursuing her future husband,
Michel Legrand, an ambitious aide to the Premier. In fact, the chase become a recurrent
motif in the movie, as the camera pans and tracks Bardot’s body all through the movie
while she runs after and hides from men.
In Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, Simone de Beauvoir explains that the
modernity of Bardot’s active sexuality was more suitable for the progressive tastes of
American men than for their French counterparts. Modernity and mobility are two
coordinates of Bardot’s image that are shared with the city of Paris. The movie maps
them carefully through mise-en-scene of modern cars and house interiors as well as
tracking shots, pans, and fast editing techniques that emphasize the dynamic aura of the
star. 8 The on-screen image of Paris responds, in turn, as the opening sequence of modern
urban traffic on Champs-Elysées shows. In addition, airplanes and airports, in which
Brigitte spends a lot of her time, undermine the image of a technologically backwards
France.
Nevertheless, the modern representations of the Orly airport and urban traffic
alternate with traditional iconic views of Paris, such as the panoramic Parisian view
dominated by the silhouette of the Eiffel Tower, the picturesque banks of Seine, and the
Champs-Elysées guarded by the Arc of Triumph. Even if Brigitte’s private apartment is
essentially modern, most of the public interiors in which she moves as the daughter and
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wife of a diplomat are aesthetically representative of the French cultural and architectural
heritage. This duality at the level of Brigitte Bardot’s star persona is captured by Ginette
Vincendeau as she argues that Bardot’s image reconciled a new type of femininity of the
1950s with traditional values:
Her spectacular youthful looks, her insolent wit, her blatant promiscuous lifestyle
and her outspokenness were unlike any other star of the time, in France or
elsewhere. Yet, at the same time, her appeal depended on the ‘old’ values: on
traditional myths of femininity and on the display of her body, though a body
repackaged for the times: nude, more ‘natural’, on location, in color and
Cinemascope. (2000: 84)
Brigitte illustrates accurately this reconciliation between a sexualized new
femininity and traditional values through the filmic narrative and its denouement.
Brigitte’s “modernity” and sexual desire have to be contained within the traditional form
of marriage. After achieving her goal of marrying Michel Legrand, a sort of French Don
Juan, Brigitte has to devise strategies to keep him faithful to her. In order to counter her
husband’s infidelity, she invents a fictional story of a “modern open marriage” she
conducts with her husband and she shares it with a royal guest of the French Republic,
Prince Charles, in order to keep Michel busy in jealousy. As the “slap in the face to
bourgeois morality” (Vincendeau 97) is not defined in male terms anymore, Brigitte is
literally slapped herself in the face when her husband finds out about her story. 9 We
quickly learn with Brigitte that modernity as sexual freedom is strictly and definitely
gender coded.
Brigitte’s dynamism and modernity finally prevail as she exits from the
development of a stereotypical comedy in a tangent. The protagonist has to lie about her
whereabouts one afternoon only to confirm her husband’s narrative. In order to render her
husband jealous, she elopes to Nice entertaining herself with the French royal guest
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Prince Charles, a Casanova himself. During her trip she discusses her life experiences,
dances in public, participates in a bar fight, and charms royalty, while realizing her
committed love for her husband. Since Brigitte’s action and voice does not have a place
in the fictional story, only the final clin d’oeil to the spectator – the close-up of her
fingers crossed while lying when she is summoned by her husband to tell the truth about
her whereabouts that afternoon – enables us to see her parallel narrative obscured by the
constant objectification of her body in the movie.
Released in the same year as Une Parisienne but situated in perfect contradictory
tension with it, Louis Malle’s Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud (1957) tells the intertwined
and doomed stories of two couples. The main narrative draws on a love triangle: Julien
Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) and Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau) decide to kill
Florence’s husband and Julien’s boss, a shady and wealthy businessman. After having
committed the murder, Julien returns to clear an incriminating piece of evidence and, due
to an accident, he remains trapped in the elevator for the entire night. During this time,
Florence wanders in the streets of Paris looking for her lost lover while the Parisian urban
representations echo directly her inner journey. The very same night, two adolescent
lovers steal Julien’s car, kill two German tourists, and unwillingly incriminate him for
these other crimes. Nevertheless, both justice and fatality intersect the next morning.
Julien is delivered from the crimes he did not commit but, at the same time, he is
unwillingly exposed by Florence through a lie meant to protect him, but which, in fact,
lead the police to identify Julien as the criminal.
Analyzing Malle’s debut in France-Observateur, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze
critiqued the movie for lacking stylistic unity, while acknowledging its brilliantly filmed
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but disconnected episodes. In the most famous one, Malle follows the sentimental
journey of his female protagonist throughout a nocturnal Paris. Florence enters bars,
roams in the streets and steps from one frame into the next looking for Julien. In the
beginning of Florence’s journey, the voice-off narration of the female protagonist is
mixed with urban sounds, contributing to a visual space literally impregnated with her
inner thoughts. In the latter scenes, the poignant music of Miles Davis accompanies
sinuous tracking shots and jump cuts that disorient the spectators in order to capture
Florence’s subjective voyage into the maze of urban seclusion. In an interview with
Philip French, Malle stated that he wanted to capture the modernity of Paris:
Traditionnellement, c’est le Paris de René Clair qu’on voyait dans les films et j’ai
tenu à montrer l’un des tout premiers buildings modernes de Paris. J’ai inventé un
motel – il n y en avait encore qu’un seul en France, et il n’était pas près de Paris,
et nous avons donc dû le tourner en Normandie. J’ai montré non pas un Paris
futuriste, mais tout au moins une ville moderne, dans un monde déjà
déshumanisé. (1993: 144)
Louis Malle shot Jeanne Moreau without either make-up or artificial lights and, likewise,
neither is the glamorous side of Paris portrayed. Recalling his work with Henri Decaë to
film this scene, Malle describes the full shock and rebellion of his technicians who were
horrified when seeing Jeanne Moreau without make-up and accused the director and
cameraman of ruining her image (Malle, 1993: 12).
The night scenes illuminated by neon lights and store windows are a pure
reflection of Florence’s subjective trajectory or an “atlas of emotions,” to borrow
Giuliana Bruno’s term. For Bruno, the undividable link between motion and emotion is to
be found, as previously mentioned, in La Carte du pays de Tendre. Used by Malle in his
next movie Les Amants (1958), the map asserts that movement entails emotion, which, in
turn, contains motion (Bruno 6). When Florence mistakenly thinks she sees her lover in
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the street, it is her pure passion that makes the camera pan hastily in a veritable
“emotion,” as Bruno labels it (207). Florence’s subjectivity is at the center of this
nocturnal Parisian roving and it dictates the movements of the camera and the editing
rhythm of the shots. It is precisely at this level that the constructed modernity of the city
is reflected in one of the most refreshingly new Parisian models of femininity. However,
her wanderings in Paris will also lead her straight to prison. At night, women walking in
the streets and women of the streets are easily confused and, therefore, Florence ends up
at the police station under suspicion of prostitution. The city of Paris in which Florence
traveled is seen through both movement and emotion and it established the coordinates
according to which Moreau’s status as iconic image of the New Wave will be
constructed: excessive passion and untamed mobility.
Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961) takes a deeper look at modern feminine
identity through the image of its star singer Cléo. The “cinq à sept” in the title is
misleading: the director will not stage a banal adulterous affair but she will follow, from
the first to the thirteenth arrondissements, the itinerary of a feminine protagonist who is
about to accomplish an inner journey. Cléo’s trajectory starts on the Rue de Rivoli and
ends on a bench at the Hôpital de la Salpétrière, where she arrives to find out the medical
results of her diagnosed cancer. The itinerary of the protagonist is frequently read in
terms of a progression from an objectified to a subjective femininity. Sandy-FlittermanLewis, for instance, retraces the itinerary of her protagonist as an empowered progression
from déesse (DS) or woman-as-image to idée (ID) or subject of vision (269) . The critic
uses a play of words, mentioned by Cléo and her friend Angèle in the movie, between
two Citroën models – Déesse and Idée – in order to account for this shift from vain self-
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absorption to self-discovery and the subsequent exploration of the city world. The critic
breaks down the film into two poles corresponding to the two Cléos. In the first part, she
notes the excessive narcissism present through the mise-en-scène emphasizing mirrors
and close-ups of Cléo. In the second part, through point-of-view shots from the
protagonist’s perspective, Cléo’s new subjectivity becomes manifest. Janice Mouton also
follows Varda’s protagonist from staging a feminine masquerade to becoming a flâneuse,
a female walker in urban Paris. She looks at the “cliché woman” represented by Cléo,
analyzes her as a decorative object, and follows her walks and human interactions, as she
becomes part of the city, a flâneuse in the tradition of Virginia Woolf and George Sand.
The card-reading sequence that opens the movie is to be read as Cléo’s attempt to
map her future. Her movements in the city are filmed through long takes at a slight high
angle allowing for a concomitant presence of the city of Paris. Naturally, the city
reciprocates her concerns, time and death, through symbolic store signs such as “Rivoli
Deuil,” “Bonne Santé,” or “L’Horlogerie du Pont Neuf.” Cléo also marks a journey from
the right bank’s commercial side to the left bank in acquiring her subjective vision. As a
consequence, the right bank with the Café “Ca va, ça vient” and the hat store “Chez
Francine” mark her narcissistic pauses in the city. Paris echoing Cléo is also spectacle on
the iconic Rue de Rivoli, through its street merchants, soldier parades, and windowed
shops. The taxi journey on the Pont Neuf marks the transition in both Paris and Cléo from
the consumerist pleasures of Rue de Rivoli to the left bank. As Cléo’s social
consciousness increases, Paris loses its iconicity and is screened in terms of authenticity
through a documentary quality of the shots. Varda, through fluid camera movement and
long tracking shots, captures on-screen the social diversity of Parisians: shots of old
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retired women in rue Delambre, street performers, immigrant families and artists in Le
Dôme, the sailors in the Gare Montparnasse, and a talkative soldier in the Parc
Montsouris, to mention only a few.
The use of the tracking shots illustrates Cléo’s subjective views of Paris as she
starts to become an integral part of the urban space. Varda works precisely at that
interface where Cléo through her “emotion,” to employ Bruno’s term, both traverses and
is traversed by Paris. Varda’s definition of cinécriture, or cinematic writing, is closely
related to the idea of the voyageuse. The movie director emphasizes the strong connection
between emotion and image in her cinema: “I have fought so much since I started, since
La Pointe Courte, for something that comes from emotion, from visual emotion, sound
emotion, feeling, and finding a shape for that, and a shape which has to do with cinema
and nothing else” (4). Consequently, Varda’s language of filmic shots illustrates the pure
emotion of her protagonist. For instance, at the end of the movie, the camera suddenly
leaves Cléo and Antoine in a fast backward- tracking shot, showing not only the
alienation at the impact of the doctor’s news that confirmed Cléo’s illness, but also an
emphasis on the open-ended quality of the final scene.
Another way of reading emotion in the filmic language is the contradiction
between subjective and objective time throughout the movie. When Cléo descends the
stairs from the card reader, Varda edited three identical and subsequent close-ups of her
anguished face in what looks like a technical mistake at a first glance. Time might have
stopped for Cléo, but as spectators we fear that the real projection time has stopped, too.
Likewise, when Cléo tries hats on in the store window or enters the sculpture atelier,
tracking shots slow down and an eerie silence accompanies the sense of weight of time.
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Cléo’s cinematic story is perhaps one of the perfect illustrations of the voyageuse haptic
experience, to reemploy Bruno’s terms, as it corresponds to Varda’s programmatic will of
finding a filmic language for emotion.
These three movies – Une Parisienne, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud and Cléo de 5 à
7 – illustrate thus the strong metonymical link between Paris as a screenscape and its
female stars. This particular relation has a strong impact on the filmic techniques and
representations through its specific shifts from fetishizing objectification to subjective
individuality in terms of both star and city.
3.4. Gamines and Maps of Paris
The gamines in Paris are travelers par excellence. They map their own journeys
through the city that reflect their child-woman identities: Paris becomes a map they
unfold and reinvent for their own travels: pleasurable games transform Paris to
playgrounds or Cartes de Tendre that map their amorous searches. Through their
mobility, they have a special place in the city: they run, play hide and seek games,
construct sentimental labyrinths, turn the iconic image of Paris upside down, deconstruct
it, and fall in love in and with its urban space. The camera movement is thus again one of
“emotion” as the camera tracks the gamines through the city.
For his third feature, Zazie dans le métro, Louis Malle employed a female
protagonist and, yet again, portrayed her emotions and movements. This time, it is one of
the most celebrated French gamine characters, Zazie, who takes Paris by storm, bursting
with emotion and running compulsively through the city for the two days she spends
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there with her uncle Gabriel. What Zazie does in terms of breaking open language while
using argot, Malle accomplishes with cinematographic techniques, demystifying an
iconic Paris. The camera follows Zazie’s childlike imagination and maps the city of Paris
as her immense playground. The movie is marked by numerous tracking shots as it
follows Zazie in Paris and rhymes with urban life in an uplifting and spontaneous flow.
The gamine is also closely linked to the Parisian space and to the idea of perpetual
movement in it. Uniquely Parisian, Louis Malle’s Zazie is significantly different than its
Hollywood counterpart, the child-woman. Malle himself defines Zazie as unique French
gamine, distinct from her corresponding types in American cinema:
she was a sort of anti-Shirley Temple […] She is so impossibly cute, whereas
Zazie is really this tough-talking restless little girl who objects to everything she’s
ordered to do. She terrorizes the adults, which is very funny. But the world she
discovers is so chaotic, there’s no sense of order or meaning, every character is
going through changes. So each time she thinks she understands what’s going on,
something happens and she realizes it’s become something else. (28)
Zazie does not allow for her easy objectification as a woman-child. Through her
mobility she maps Paris in liberating ways. She flounces through the arcades, the
privileged spaces where the male flâneur of the nineteenth century would stroll at his
leisure. A series of gags orchestrated by Zazie unfurl in Parisian streets and the banks of
the Seine, constructing a refreshing and liberating perspective of Paris. More importantly,
the movie medium itself becomes Zazie’s playing field as it is transposed back into its
childhood age. The multiplication of farces is very reminiscent of the comic silent movies
of the 1920s. In addition, Malle quotes and renders homage to two of the magicians of
French cinema: to Georges Méliès through the substitution splicing that simulates Zazie’s
sudden appearances and disappearances and to Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas through an
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iconic Parisian roof chase. The slapstick fantasy of the chases, the visual gags and stunts,
the cartoon references, and the fast and slow motion shots reflect Zazie’s inner frantic
and surrealistic view of the city.
The postcard objectification of Paris is critiqued by Louis Malle as soon as Zazie
sets foot in the city. When uncle Gabriel picks her up at the train station and they ride
home in a taxi, the church Saint-Vincent-de-Paul appears four times in four different
shots that are supposed to capture a continuous shot of the taxi ride. The church is
identified by uncle Gabriel as Le Panthéon, Les Invalides, La Madeleine in an obvious
critique rejecting the cultural commodified images of a historical Paris. In “Zazie dans
das Passagen-werk: Paris, the French Wave and the Cinematic City,” Thomas Kemper
reads this episode as a subversion of centralized cultural politics: “As a designated
emblem of official culture, the historical landmark stabilizes civil culture and identity:
Paris will always be Napoleon’s Tomb, the Eiffel Tower, and Notre Dame. Zazie turns
literally such logic on its head as the camera turns the Eiffel Tower upside down, and
mocks its linear rational engineering through fragmented editing” (162). The movie,
however, on several occasions, while subverting the iconicity of Paris, falls in love with
the city and constructs an alternate modality to look at it. A revealing example is the
Eiffel Tower episode that occurs during the second day of Zazie’s visit because of uncle
Gabriel’s compulsive desire to show the architectural wonder to his niece. She looks
above and not one eye-line-match shot, but nine differing viewpoints show the Eiffel
Tower from a low-angle perspective consistent with Zazie’s gaze. The affectionate
duplication of images recalls Zazie’s chaotic movement and her multiplications through
the city and, at the same time, adoringly proliferates the image of its icon. Subjective
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representation and fetishizing objectification collide on the image of the Eiffel Tower.
The shots of the tower visually answer the question of Uncle Gabriel: “I always
wondered why Paris is represented as a woman,” before he even asks it. The always
photogenic Eiffel Tower, and by extension Paris, can only be represented as feminine in
their iconic beauty. Nevertheless, the fact that the Eiffel Tower is shot from Zazie’s
perspective allows for writing feminine subjectivity on its iconic image.
That very evening, Zazie is wandering aimlessly in Place Pigalle by night. Zazie’s
roving in the chaotic city is marked by an accelerated speed of the projected images,
point-of-view shots from her perspective, and tracking shots following her in the frenzied
crowd. In these scenes through which Zazie re-imagines the city, Malle accomplished his
declared goal: “placer une petite fille droite et sereine, la seule qui ait toujours raison, qui
ne se laisse pas entamer, qui soit un regard” (Prédal, 1989: 50). Flâneuse and traveling
soul, Zazie does not need a map to visit Paris. She plans the city according to her
subjectivity and the city, in return, changes her irremediably as she confesses through the
laconic “J’ai vieilli” in the train station upon her departure from Paris.
In 1996, the iconic side of Paris is portrayed, yet again, in Cédric Klapisch’s
Chacun cherche son chat. Klapisch’s third feature was a relative success of the year both
in France and abroad, although audiences read it differently. For the French audiences,
the obsession with the nostalgia of the past and its safe community finds its illustration in
the movie. Illustrating this recurrent trend of deploring the forced modernization of the
city, movie director Jean Claude Guiguet wrote:
Où sont les amoureux et que sont devenus les faubourgs de Paris aujourd’hui dans
les années 80? Les lois cyniques du marché, la surenchère de la promotion
immobilière sont à l’œuvre pour le coup de grâce. Bien sûr on ne touche pas à
Notre Dame ou à la Place de Vosges, mais ce n’est pas une raison pour fermer les
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yeux sur ce qui se passe ailleurs . . . Les excavatrices ne respectent rien. Les
bulldozers non plus. (43)
For foreign audiences, the movie screened an iconic representation of the Parisian spirit
through the photogenic sites of the streets, traditional stores and markets, cafés, bistros,
and rooftops. 10
Set in the Bastille quarter, Klapisch’s film translates a vacillating and undecided
movement between modernity and tradition. The demolition of historic sites such as that
of the church Notre Dame de l’Esperance, as well as the process of gentrification that
drives older inhabitants out in favor of young professionals, owners of traditional stores
in favor of multinational businesses, and neighborhood bistros in favor of trendy tourist
cafés illustrate a process of change, a tension between tradition and transformation. The
main protagonist, Chloé, is lost in this transition, also torn between belonging to a young
and hip generation and to a safe and traditional community. Certainly, this problematic
opposition echoes others: communication versus non-communication, community versus
alienation, creative art versus fashionable art, empathy versus superficiality. 11
The narrative is centered on the idea of loss. Chloé entrusts her cat, Gris-gris, to
one of the old ladies, Madame Renée, a reputable cat sitter in the eleventh
arrondissement, as none of her own friends is willing to help her. When she comes home,
the cat is missing and Madame Renée mobilizes an army of retired women in the
neighborhood to help Chloé find her cat. Chloé and one of her new aides, Madame Clavo,
look at a map after a day of searching. The neon-lit Parisian map is an emblem of
modernity, an iconic tourist map laying out the city’s historic and cultural objectives. In
opposition to the use-value of the map, Madame Clavo and Chloé draw a personal
strategy on it, identifying the houses of the people in the neighborhood who are
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participating in the search for the missing cat. As the tourist map marks space only
selectively in terms of objects of sightseeing, Madame Clavo maps her own
neighborhood in detailed terms enriching its space: “C’est une aiguille dans une botte de
foin. Mais il est là, il est là, il n’est pas loin, il est près de nous, j’en suis sûre. Il ne peut
pas aller ailleurs.” Life outside the neighborhood and the community, thus, is unthinkable
for the older generation and their place(s) become juxtaposed to the tourist objectives of
the Parisian map to show both the reverse side of tourism, the authenticity of the
neighborhood life, and, simultaneously, its commodification. In this sense, the map
exposes the very functional mechanism and its organizing principle of the movie, as
Conley claimed: a cinematic representation of the traditional neighborhood to be
consumed by audiences worldwide.
Like Paris, Chloé does not quite know how to assume her modernity yet.
Attracted by modernity, as she is by the young musician in the area (Roman Duris), she is
also subsequently deceived by his empty promises that echo the superficial and deceiving
promises of urban modernization. Her attitude towards the helpful neighbor Djamel
(Zinedine Soulem) illustrates uneasiness and ambivalence, as Paris’s own attitude
towards its diverse ethnic population. At the same time, the promise of a new romance,
Bel Canto (Joël Brisso), her neighbor the painter, moves out of the city at the end of the
movie. While he leaves, the neighborhood community is in the bistro singing a song
eternalizing the association of Paris with a blonde woman and the seductive charms of the
Parisiennes: “Tous ceux qui nous connaissent, grisées par nos caresses, s’en vont, mais
reviennent toujours. Paris à nos amours. C’est ça Paris!” Chloé, however, starts running
in the streets to the accompaniment of the non-diegetic soundtrack of Portishead’s “Glory
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Box.” The end of the movie illustrates yet again the uneasy cohabitation of tradition and
modernity: the Parisienne as a seductress in the old song and the Parisienne “sick of
being a temptress,” trying, however, to redefine herself through love and femininity (“I
just want to be a woman”) in a modern tune and age.
The iconic objectification of Paris became a vocal debate in the French press in
2001 with the release of Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s
celebrated film and eponymous character. Amélie engendered a veritable phenomenon
and became an icon of Frenchness as she incarnated the typical Parisian gamine. Her
image is used on French textbook covers, clothing lines, and as a reference to French
cinema in general. 12 Its unexpected success took Jean-Pierre Jeunet by surprise and made
his creation one of the most iconic films of all times. French Film Guides, published by I.
B .Tauris, consecrated it an in-depth study by Isabelle Vanderschelden, and reputed film
scholars such as Ginette Vincendeau, Dudley Andrew, and Elizabeth Erza contributed to
the critical discourses reading of the movie as a commercial cliché or as an artistic
achievement. 13
In France Jeunet’s movie became quickly very controversial. An article in
Télérama titled “Amélie, Loana, Jean-Luc et moi” juxtaposes Jean-Luc Godard’s Eloge
de l’amour (2001), Loana, the protagonist of a highly popular French TV reality show
Loft Story, and Jeunet’s popular icon. The attitudes of the critics were highly polarized:
they either accused Jeunet of transforming Montmartre to Euro Disneyland or eulogized
his attempts at reviving French cinema through the rich intertext of the movie and its
quotations of Jean Renoir, Robert Doisneau, Jacques Prévert, and Marcel Carné. 14
Nevertheless, one media dispute is central to the polemic: Serge Kaganski’s articles on Le
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fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain – “Amélie, pas jolie,” “Pourquoi je n’aime pas Le
Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain,” and “Comment je me suis disputé à propos d’Amélie
Poulain” – have fiercely criticized the movie in particular in terms of its artificiality
opposed to an artistic authenticity. In “Pourquoi je n’aime pas Le Fabuleux destin
d’Amélie Poulain,” Kaganski rejected the artificial sense of nostalgia in the movie and its
effacement of ethnic diversity: “Amélie Poulain est un film formellement clos et visé (à
mon sens, de l’anti-cinéma), esthétiquement réactionnaire, passablement ennuyeux,
totalement anecdotique dans son propos et profondément rance et vieillot (pour rester
poli) dans la vision de la France et des Français qu’il véhicule.”
One of the more bitter critiques of Serge Kaganski illustrates the problematic of
condensing Paris into an iconic image. In “Amélie pas jolie,” the critic contends that the
film has been ethnically, sexually cleansed: “le Paris de Jeunet est soigneusement
“nettoyé” de toute sa polysémie ethnique, sociale, sexuelle et culturelle.” In order to
contrast this effacement, I will briefly refer to another movie that came out in 2001,
Chaos, which illustrates the problematic representation of the ethnic diversity in the city.
Directed by Colline Serreau, the movie begins with a car ride of a bourgeois couple, Paul
(Vincent Lindon) and Hélène (Catherine Frot). When at night in the ninth arrondissement
a young prostitute tries to get into their car to escape three men that are chasing her, Paul
locks the door of his car and removes himself from that outer world where the young
woman is beaten into unconsciousness. Cynically, he cleans the blood splashes on his car
with paper napkins and even goes to a car wash. As the credits of the movie start, the
male protagonist washes the blood of the witnessed violent act away as well as its
memory. However, his bourgeois wife does not want to “clean” her cowardly act and
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visits the abused girl Malika (Rachida Brakni) in the hospital. An adventurous story of
female friendship starts, as Hélène becomes more and more involved in her new friend’s
life.
Serreau’s movie discusses the not so glamorous side of Paris in which the
invisible traffic of exploited bodies in the city takes place. Malika’s is consigned to the
Parisian outer belt, to the banlieue apartments, and the dangerous nightlife in shady areas
of the city. In order to create a place for her and her sister in Paris, the protagonist needs
the help of Hélène, of middle-class Paris. The movie optimistically ends on the images of
four generation of women – Hélène’s mother-in-law, Hélène, Malika, and her younger
sister – illustrating the feminine reconciliations across age and ethnicity. In this sense, the
last scene captures the diversity of France that Amélie effaced in her iconic image.
As for Amélie, she is perfectly synchronized with the on-screen representation of
Paris. Her retro image corresponds to the nostalgic evocation of Paris in the fifties. The
ethnic non-representation of Montmartre on-screen is equally reflected in Amélie’s
luminous white skin digitally enhanced by the director in post-production. In fact, in an
interview with Jean-Marc Lalanne published in Libération, Jeunet admits that the Paris
he created is purely fictitious as he himself imagined it as a non-Parisian. Amélie
correspondingly daydreams silently and works creatively with fictional texts such as film
clips, photographs, and forged letters, exposing through a mise-en-abîme the very process
that Jeunet used to create his cinematic image of Paris.
The media phenomenon that Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s movie engendered raises
productive questions about the interaction of movies and identity maps in the Parisian
urban labyrinth. While still retaining the innocence and the playfulness of the gamine,
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Amélie initiates a game to direct her soul mate, Nino Quincampoix, to find her. Through
Amélie’s manipulations, the city of Paris becomes a huge labyrinth with complex
enigmas. For instance, in the episode at Sacré-Coeur, Amélie guides Nino to his lost
scrapbook through chalk markers drawn on the ground, a statue impersonator, and a
telescope to punctuate the proper order of discovery. The camera tracks Nino’s
movements from a low point close to the ground to high angle-shots reinforcing a strong
sensation of maze turns and movements.
The labyrinth as a sign is described by Wendy B. Faris in the following terms:
“Because the design of the labyrinth simultaneously represents a puzzle and a solution, a
journey, and an arrival, it embodies the way in which urban texts can be seen as both
maps and routes, as descriptions and projects, portraits of streets and guides within them.
Fictional urban labyrinths, symbolic or iconic, duplicate man’s experience of the city as
diachronic wandering and synchronic mapping” (38). Consequently, she argues that a
paradox is highly visible in the pattern of the labyrinth: it symbolizes confusion and, at
the same time, is represented by a formalized visual pattern. Amélie, therefore, is no mere
city walker; she is a mapmaker on a love quest. Through the dual image of the labyrinth,
she articulates space and disseminates clues in the Parisian landscape so that she
transforms chaos into fate and contingency into destiny. When Amélie discovers Nino’s
photo album, the crane camera movement is very complex illustrating the duality of the
labyrinth as a sign: its contingency through the representation of street and its ordering
impulse through a high-angle shot. It starts from a very low-angle shot almost close to
the ground and through a forward tracking shot to Amélie sitting on the stairs and
flipping the pages of the album. Simultaneously, the camera, through a tilt, gains height,
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turns in a 180 degree movement, and ends with a bird’s eye shot of Amélie with Paris as
a labyrinth in front of her.
Figure 3.6. Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001).
We discover with Amélie that, as Tom Conley puts it, ontology is a function of
geography: “figures in a topographic field are as they are because geography is destiny or
else, inversely, their destiny, is limited to the cartography of the film” (3). In this view, it
makes sense that with the initial appearance of a map in the movie, Amélie meets Nino,
her predestined lover. In the metro stop of Abbesses, Amélie’s image, as a cartoon-like
character, is visually superimposed on the map. In this moment, the iconic images of
both Paris and Amélie and the existential journeys they tell are held simultaneously in
tension.
If Amélie is examined through an “atlas of emotions” framework, the city reveals
itself as concrete texture. Amélie herself is depicted as having a strong preference for
tactile experiences (such as sticking her hand in a barrel of grain, cracking the sugar crust
on a crème brûlée or tossing stones on the canal Saint Martin). Relevant also is the
episode in which Amélie serves as a guide to the blind man in the rue Lamarck to the
double staircase of the metro stop Lamarck-Caulaincourt. Amélie becomes a flâneuse,
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describing to the blind men the sights of the rue Lamarck. She lists intimate and
affectionate details, such as the drum major’s widow who still wears her husband’s coat.
The gamine goes on to enumerate accidental and amusing elements, such as the missing
ear of horse statue in front of the horse butcher’s shop, the laughs of the passers-by,
melon smells, visual delights of the boulanger, the ice-cream parlor, the cheese and the
butcher’s shops, as well as the triangular desire between a child, a dog, and a roasted
chicken. The dynamic movement of the hand-held camera follows her enumeration and,
unsurprisingly, the blind man when left at the metro entrance has a complete haptic
experience, translated by the image of a sun, both warmth and visual delight, surrounding
him.
The movie, thus, is to be read in terms of both interiority and exteriority as
Amélie’s journey alternates the glorious objectification of iconic Parisian spaces, such as
Sacré-Coeur, Le Pont des Arts, the cafés and cobblestone streets with imagined inner
landscapes. Jeunet’s movie illustrates a very complex mode of creating desire through
opposite movements where objectivity and subjectivity, the visual and tactile, cliché and
inner screen-scapes are enmeshed in each other. Amélie, thus, holds in perfect tension the
indefinable myth of the Parisienne and the invitation to its consumption.
3.5 Parisian Female Stars in Extra-Cinematographic Discourses
In 1900 the Exposition Universelle opened its gates to visitors in Paris
showcasing industrial goods and cultural products from a wide array of countries from all
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over the world. A massive sculpture dominated the entry gate: La Parisienne by Paul
Moreau-Vauthier represented as an ancient goddess, but wearing a haute couture gown
by Madame Paquin. 15 At its feet, products of the
French fashion industry were on display. The
Parisienne, as emblem of the city, was irremediably
associated with its national fashion industry.
Subsequently, in the 1950s when female movie stars
became highly visible incarnations of the myth of
the Parisian woman, they equally became icons of
the national fashion industry.
Photographic albums such as Parisienne(s)
Figure 3.7. Paul MoreauVauthier, Paris Welcoming
Her Guests, 1900.
in 2001 by Alain Rustenholz and Parisiennes: A
Celebration of French Women, published in 2007
and containing articles written by Carole Bouquet among other Parisian celebrities,
illustrate this on-going fascination with Parisian women. On a regular basis, women’s
magazines such as Vogue, Paris Match, and Marie Claire run stories that feed into the
myth of the Parisienne as the epitome of modern and fashionable femininity. The
editorial of the French edition of Vogue of August 2006, “Le Point de vue de Vogue,”
illustrates this connection between the capital of fashion and its women:
Les grandes maisons ont transformé la capitale en plaque tournante de l’élégance
renouent depuis quelque saisons avec un langage de mode qui est en phase avec
l’air du temps. [...] tous rendent à la Parisienne son chic imbattable, son pimpant
insolent, son petit « je ne sais quoi » désarmant de séduction. « La Parisienne est
inspirante car elle mélange tout et sa créativité nourrit la notre », dit Karl
Lagerferd […] Idéal de Parisienne, Charlotte Gainsbourg l’est sans conteste: ligne
javelot, charme foudroyant, caractère trempé, classe naturelle, fibre internationale.
(48)
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The city and its women interact in a creative reciprocity concretized through
modernity in fashion and, as a regular pattern, a French female star is chosen, as to
incarnate graciously these discourses, in this case, Charlotte Gainsbourg, a French actress
and singer, daughter of famous French singer Serge Gainsbourg and of the British born
but Parisian actress, Jane Birkin.
Extra-cinematographic discourses surrounding French female stars construct the
fabric of their daily lives as inextricably linked to the city of Paris. Contrasted to their
Hollywood counterparts who spend their lives in remote Hollywood mansions, French
female stars live and spend their time in the city. Along these lines, Le Monde’s
journalists Catherine Simone and Nicole Vulser observe that despite the excessive
privacy surrounding Catherine Deneuve’s life, she resides in an apartment in the sixth
arrondissement, and has her initials listed on the intercom.
Frequently, French stars match perfectly the Parisian life of their screen
counterparts. In Télérama’s issue of March 2006, Frédéric Strauss comments that
Amélie’s star, Audrey Tautou, still lives in the Montmartre neighborhood paralleling her
on-screen heroine. In Dyer’s terms, the perfect “star image-character” fit serves to
authenticate the natural correspondence between her on-screen character and her offscreen image (1979: 129). In this way, the mythical connection between stars and the city
is perpetuated in off-screen space.
Recurrent discourses surrounding French stars also construct their reticence to
leave Paris for extended periods, especially to go work in Hollywood. In extreme cases,
French female stars refuse exorbitant Hollywood contracts since they find the separation
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from their city to be unbearable. According to Roger Vadim’s autobiography titled
Bardot. Deneuve. Fonda, Brigitte Bardot refused a unique opportunity of a Hollywood
contract, just because she did not want to leave Paris. In March 1958, Vadim convinced
Frank Sinatra to accept filming a musical with Bardot titled Paris by Night. The movie
would have been extremely beneficial to Bardot’s international career recently sparkled
by Et Dieu . . . créea la femme. However, the new star refused to go to Hollywood and
she ruined the project through her unrealistic demand that the film be exclusively shot on
location in Paris (Vadim 115).
Not only do extra-cinematic discourses reiterate this inseparable couple – Paris
and its female stars – they also offer ample opportunities for actresses to detail their
wanderings for the City of Lights, as Catherine Deneuve illustrates it in an interview
titled “Le Paris de Catherine Deneuve”:
C'est une si jolie ville... Plus je voyage et plus j'aime Paris. Je regarde toujours
Paris avec des yeux pleins de surprise. Quand je passe sur les quais et que je
regarde le Grand Palais, en fin de journée, quand le soleil vient taper dans cette
grande verrière, c'est extraordinaire […] Ce sont des visions de Paris dont je ne
me lasse pas. J'ai presque tous les jours un plaisir des yeux.
Female stars are also preferred flâneuses in the city as Catherine Deneuve’s
testimony shows. Paris is not a mere background for echoing star beauty, it is the actress
who frames her city under a feminine aegis of the pleasures of the visual.
Within advertising discourses, the consumption of stars entails a corresponding
consumption of urban spaces or vice versa. In a 2007 advertising campaign titled
“Journeys,” Louis Vuitton employed Catherine Deneuve’s star image to both advertise its
products and the city of Paris. Under the title “Sometimes home is just a feeling,”
Catherine Deneuve initiates a journey through her preferred places in Paris in eight
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chapters. The narrative movement is triggered by the words “J’aime” and the slideshow
of still photographs captures diverse images discussed by the actress. The immobility of
the pictures is contrasted against the richness of authentic sounds that accompany
Deneuve’s voice-over narration. The star images of Paris and Catherine Deneuve enable
fashion and tourist consumption while keeping intact and exploiting the aura of cultural
authenticity for both actress and the city. The city of Paris and its female stars reconcile
hedonist and cultural tourism, iconic stardom with authenticity, and modernity with a
millennial heritage.
Linked to and necessary for modernity, a second coordinate on which the image
of the Parisienne is constructed is movement. As Rustenholtz puts it : “La Parisienne
n’est pas une beauté parfaite, mais un mouvement, pas une plastique, mais une
expression, pas un corps, une allure. La Parisienne est frémissante. Son charme, ce sont
des traits animés par l’esprit. Disons, pour faire formule, qu’elle est silhouettée d’un trait
d’esprit” (8). Goude’s campaign for the Galeries Lafayette also capitalized on the
mobility of its protagonist as Laetitia Casta was portrayed numerous times jumping,
running, and falling. The Parisian woman is modern and dynamic and her transformative
quality is inclusive but strictly codified and guided through consumption. Movement is
also intimately linked to space and the journeys of the Parisiennes become inextricably
linked to consumption as Giuliana Bruno explains: “As in all forms of journey, space is
filmically consumed as a vast commodity. In film, architectural space becomes framed
for view and offers itself for consumption as traveled space that is available for further
traveling. Attracted to vistas, the spectator turns into a visitor. The film viewer is a
practitioner of viewing space – a tourist“ (62). In this sense, Amélie has already marked
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the Parisian landscape through special tourist routes or local tourist office maps
(Vanderschelden 89) as well as La Môme (2007) the biopic about Edith Piaf.
It is enough to live, travel to or spend time in Paris to become Parisian. Further, it
is enough to consume things Parisian in order to become a Parisienne. At the intersection
of modernity and movement, the Parisian woman reinvents herself and shares a narrative
space with the Pygmalion myth. Filmic texts certainly reiterate this capacity of Parisian
metamorphoses democratically available to all women. Sacha Guitry’s feature film, Ils
étaient neuf célibataires (1939), opens with a praise of the Parisian women. In a trendy
Parisian restaurant, a strikingly elegant woman, played by the Romanian actress Elvire
Popesco, makes her entrance in a frenetic movement. “Certainly, she is not French,”
Guitry’s companion remarks. He agrees, saying that she is “Polish, perhaps.
Nevertheless, Parisian.” 16 The process of becoming Parisian is, however, less democratic
than it seems at a first glance as consumption in the fashion, cosmetics and perfume
industries is heavily class coded through notions of Parisian exclusivity. Si Paris nous
était conté (1956) makes the same statement regarding Parisian women, while
emphasizing the importance of fashion in the creation of a Parisian feminine identity.
Madame Rose Bertin, one of the multiple characters in Guitry’s vignettes, was renowned
for transforming through fashion Marie-Antoinette into a French queen. She defines the
process of evolving into a Parisienne in the following terms: “être parisien ce n’est pas
être né à Paris, c’est y renaître. Être de Paris ce n’est pas fatalement y avoir vu le jourmais c’est y voir clair.” It becomes evident, therefore, that nationality becomes irrelevant,
as the process of becoming Parisian follows other norms dictated by fashion, aesthetic
pleasure, and coded behavior.
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A contemporary trend of popular books for female audiences continues this
tradition of creating maps to guide consumption so that one’s identity can be reinvented
as Parisian. A first category provides the reader with direct maps through an enumeration
of places of consumption as their titles indicate in a transparent manner, for instance,
Chic in Paris: Style Secrets and Best Addresses by Susan Tabak. The second order
derives more from the confessional autobiographical novel and is composed by
testimonies of successful transformations into a Parisienne and the mappings of these
journeys, which I will discuss at length in the next chapter.
In conclusion, the myth of the Parisienne reinvents itself on the glamorous surface
of female star images, understood as both artistic and mysterious, and yet attainable
through certain consumption codes. Icons of urban Parisian femininity, these star images
conjugate a metonymical relation to the city of Paris that allows them to map the city
according to their structure. Sometimes flâneuses, they are essentially voyageuses in their
city which responds with its on-screen iconic close-ups. Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte
Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, and Audrey Tautou are stars whose iconic images serve as
anchoring points in mapping feminine but also cultural and national identity, cinematic
desire, and consumption of both the city and its feminine stars.
Accordingly, when Time magazine declared French culture dead in November
2007, Maurice Druon of the French Academy looked for answers in the image of a
female movie star, in a counter-article published in Le Figaro. Time’s journalist Don
Morrison argued that despite vast state subsidies, French culture, in particular cinema, is
in a deplorable state, not producing any new Godards or Truffauts. However, the French
media agreed unanimously that French cinema does not look back nostalgically at the
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New Wave in order to define its contemporary identity, but at its new female star Marion
Cotillard, the protagonist of La Môme. Edith Piaf’s cinematographic biography, La
Môme, follows the tradition of the Parisienne, conjugating star image and the iconic
streets of Montmartre in a naturalistic depiction recalling Zola’s novelistic world, and the
authenticity of the French chanson. Piaf is addicted to Paris as her cinematic depiction on
tour in New York shows how much she misses Paris. In fact, she is a môme, a gamine of
the streets who incarnates popular Paris. Marion Cotillard certainly continues the
tradition of French female stardom and will be yet another illustration of the successful
exportation of the myth of the Parisian gamine.
1
The editor of the book, Bernard Grasset, harshly criticized it while publishing it. Although the
psychoanalytical value of the book is doubtful and out of date, my analysis uses the reproduction of
discourses surrounding Parisian femininity cited in his study.
2
Although I practice textual analysis, the choice of the term “star gazing” is meant to recall Jackie Stacie’s
Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship not through the critical lens of audience studies
but as a constant effort to regard visual pleasures not exclusively at the service of a patriarchic order.
3
Debra Olliver’s book, Entre Nous: a Woman’s Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl, illustrates this
trend. Its cover pictures a woman wearing high heels in the form of the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower is a
very versatile icon as it takes the shape of earrings, hats, necklace pendants and other female ornaments.
4
This Jean-Paul Goude advertisement had as much of an impact on urban space as the Laetitia Casta
billboard poster discussed in the initial analysis. These two advertisements still map the consumption
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journey in the city from the very arrival at the Charles de Gaulle airport. The advertisement is still currently
featured on the Galeries Lafayette’s website, www.galerieslafayette.fr.
5
I refer here to Laura Mulvey’s influential article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Reading
cinema through a psychoanalytic lens, Mulvey argues that female screen characters are notably coded
through the quality of “look-at-ness” that responds to a voyeuristic and a fetishistic gaze of the spectator
positioned as male.
6
An oppositional critique of this sexual promiscuity of the Parisienne is illustrated by the adopted Parisian
star Dalida’s duo with Alice Donna, La Parisienne, in 1985. Conceived as a conversation between the two
singers, the song illustrates Dalida’s desire to become a Parisian femme fatale and its consequent
impossibility: “Je ne suis pas nymphomane, ça me blâme, ça me blâme/Je ne suis pas travesti, ça me nuit,
ça me nuit/ Je ne suis pas masochiste, ça existe, ça existe/ Pour réussir mon destin, je vais voir le médecin.”
Finally, only after discovering a sexual obsession, she can become a real Parisienne: “Depuis je suis à la
mode, je me rode, je me rends/Dans les nuits de St Germain, c’est divin, c’est divin !/Je fais partie de
l’élite, ça va vite, ça va vite/Et je me donne avec joie en faisant du yoga.” The ironic play on the stereotype
of the Parisienne illustrates also the constant preoccupation with new Parisian trends, such as
psychoanalysis and yoga that combine the excessive sexuality with contemporary modernity.
7
Tom Conley mentions the Michel-Etienne Turgot’s great map of Paris as an epigraph for René Clair’s
first short movie, Pairs qui dort (1923). The bird’s eye perspective and the lack of motion, present in both
the map and Claire’s filmic representation of Paris, allow for an unobstructed and dominant gaze of the
viewer. Jean-Paul Goude equally uses it in a perfume advertisement for Yves Saint-Laurent’s Paris.
8
Vanessa Schwartz remarks that the modernity of her home is exemplified by the streamlined furniture and
wall-to-wall carpet (140). In addition to the red convertible car, modern airplanes and airports are equally
reminders of a technologically advanced France in the 1950s.
9
This is the second time Brigitte is slapped in the movie. The first time, her father is the patriarch who puts
his daugther in her place. After being discovered in Michel’s bed, Brigitte refuses to marry him, and her
father, publicly compromised, restores the order through forcing them both into marriage. It is a reminder
of the patriarchic order of the 1950s as an era where women were required to obey her husbands and fathers
(Audé 1981: 30).
10
See Mazon’s article, “Space, Place, Community in Chacun cherche son chat,” where she argues that the
success of the film in America was largely due to the fact that it corresponded to a notion of French life and
cinema (97).
11
Elizabeth Erza’s study “Cats in the 'Hood: The Unspeakable Truth about “Chacun Cherche son chat” and
Lucy Mazon’s article “Space, Place, Community in Chacun Cherche son chat” offer an insightful analysis
of the dynamics of these oppositions and how they are developed in the movie.
12
In May 2003 designer Lancel introduced an Amélie clothing line (Vanderschelden 90).
13
See for instance, Ginette Vincendeau “Café Society,” Elizabeth Ezra “The Death of an Icon: Le Fabuleux
Destin d’Amélie Poulain” and Dudley Andrew “Amélie, or Le Fabuleux Destin du Cinéma Français.”
14
In “Café Society,” Ginette Vincendeau mentions the influence of Jean Renoir’s French Can-Can (1955),
Marcel Carné’s Hôtel du Nord (1938), Robert Doisneau photographs, Poublot’s drawings and Raymond
Peynet’s of lovers in Paris, the novels of Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Marcel Aymé and Philippe
Delerm (22-4). Dudley Andrew adds Jacques Prévert’s poetry, Claude Maurier as Antoine Doinel’s mother
in the 400 Coups, and Serge Bourguignon’s Sundays and Cybèle (1962) (34-7).
15
See Shane Adler Davis’s article "Fine Cloths on the Altar”: The Commodification of Late-NineteenthCentury France” for an in-depth analysis of consumption linked to the Universal Exhibits in Paris.
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16
The narrative of Ils étaient neuf célibataires (1939) is illustrative in this sense. Due to a recent law, all
foreigners will be expulsed from France. Thus, taking advantage of the panic of the beautiful Parisiennes
without papers, Jean Lécuyer (played by Sacha Guitry) organizes a hotel where the old French bachelors
gather to marry foreign beauties in exchange for financial security. The same theme is encountered in the
1990 feature Green Card which stars Andie McDowel and Gerard Depardieu. This time, it is French
masculinity that is attracted by the prospective of an American green card.
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CHAPTER 4
ICONS OF FEMININE CONSUMPTION: ON HOW TO BECOME A FRENCH
FEMALE STAR
When it comes to feminine consumption, Jean-Paul Goude’s publicity campaign
for Galeries Lafayette offers, yet again, an illustrative example that nicely summarizes
how feminine Frenchness is constructed and marketed for consumption.
Under the imperative “Métamorphosez,” Goude imagines Laetitia Casta as an
enigmatic Sphinx reinventing the zoomorphic figure in its Greek variation. The haute
couture symbols condense the idea of bird wings through the black stylish jacket and the
talon-alike black gloves. The lower part of the body
illustrates the gracious feline quality of the leopard
while recalling the exclusive taste of expensive furs. Its
pattern is equally echoed in the negative on the dotted
jacket that Casta wears. Casta as a “Sphinx in the City,”
to employ Wilson’s title, sits on a marble column as a
Figure 4.1. Laetitia Casta
by Jean-Paul Goude for
Galeries Lafayette. 2001.
sign of a highly illustrious and consecrated tradition of
French fashion. The juxtaposition of the warmth of the
feline body to the coldness of the marble, the classic
tradition and modern innovation, the seductive yet highly exclusive image of Casta,
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familiar and enigmatic, show only a few of the many paradoxes that her image reconciles.
As the poster cleverly shows, the outer change entails an inner transformation, as fashion
and identity are intimately linked. Goude also alludes to how femininity reaches a
mythical level, connoting the realm of archetypes through the consumption of French
products at the Galeries Lafayette. The message is straightforward: every woman who
wants to undergo a similar makeover can do so by shopping at the Galeries Lafayette.
At the intersection of national and economic discourses, the advertisements of the
fashion, perfume, and cosmetic industries are media texts that tell stories about how
French femininity is constructed. My purpose in this chapter is to analyze how French
female stars function in the advertising discourses promoting national products. I
demonstrate that the status of French female stars as icons of feminine consumption
incarnates a living paradox since they have to reconcile a tension between the national
and the universal. Stars sell national products in a global market and, in addition to their
mythical Frenchness, they need to signify, a universal model of femininity acquirable
through the consumption of French products.
I will turn to Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements. Ideology and
Meaning in Advertising in order to elucidate how advertisements work. Although
Williamson refers mainly to American advertisements, she discusses at length a French
star in her study, Catherine Deneuve, who was highly visible in American women’s
magazines during a 1968-1978 campaign for Chanel No. 5. The critic looks closely at an
ad from the campaign that simply juxtaposes Catherine Deneuve’s face to the perfume
Chanel No. 5 and makes an argument that the publicity uses a translation mechanism
between two systems of meaning: the cinematic and the perfume industry. As a cinema
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icon, Catherine Deneuve signifies French beauty and glamour. Sharing the same frame
with the French star, the product, Chanel No. 5, implicitly contributes to her qualities as
well, “so that perfume can be substituted for Catherine Deneuve’s face and can also be
made to signify glamour and beauty” (Williamson 25). The reading that Williams
performs is equivalent to the Barthesian demythology process: the photographic image
denotes Catherine Deneuve and she, in turn, connotes an idea of French beauty
engendering a “referent system,” equivalent to the Barthesian mythology (Williamson
20). In addition to this reading indebted to Barthes, Williams underlines two important
concepts for advertisement reading: active spectatorship and differentiation.
The critic points out that one of the most important functions of advertisements is
to render the product unique through differentiation. To illustrate this process,
Williamson compares two perfume commercials: Catherine Deneuve for Chanel No. 5 to
Margaux Hemingway for Babe. She argues that Margaux Hemingway signifies “novelty,
youth, and ‘Tomboy’ style, which has value only in relation to the more typically
‘feminine’ style usually connected with modeling” as represented by Deneuve (26). In a
reciprocal manner, Deneuve and Chanel, representing tradition, fame, and femininity,
exist because of a system opposing them to Hemingway and the perfume Babe.
When performing a reading of the Chanel ad, the critic notes that there is no
obvious connection between the two levels of significations. The photography denotes
Catherine Deneuve and she becomes the signifier in a second chain of signification,
connoting chic and glamour. However, the two chains of signification are not linked and
the spectator’s knowledge connects them in a comprehensive reading (100). This
interaction of the spectator with the publicity text is essential: “one of the peculiar
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features of advertising is that we are drawn in it to fill that gap so that we become both
listener and speaker, subject and object” (Williamson 14). This active process of
involvement on the spectator’s part is vital in linking the object to the individual.
Building on this premise, Williamson adds that “advertisements work by a process in
which we are completely enmeshed . . . and invite us freely ‘to create’ ourselves in
accordance with the way in which they have already created us” (44). This connection
between advertised product and consumer enables a differentiation process that shifts
from the merchandise to the shopper: “We differentiate ourselves from other people by
what we buy . . . . In this process we become identified with the product that
differentiates us; and this is a kind of totemism” (46). In this perspective, by consuming
Chanel, the buyer expects to be distinct through the very glamour and beauty that
Catherine Deneuve connotes. Williamson concludes: “We are both product and
consumer, we consume, buy the product, yet we are the product. Thus our lives become
our own creations, through buying: an identikit of different images of ourselves, created
by different products” (70).
I draw on this symbiosis between product and individual and I will use Deneuve’s
example, to illustrate my argument. As Williamson mentions, Catherine Deneuve’s
image connotes chic, glamour, and beauty but also Frenchness (25, 100). Through the
consumption of Chanel No. 5, customers create a new identity reflective of these very
qualities, including Frenchness. Therefore, a reconciliation between the particularistic
national aspect and the universal consumption logic is essential. Encompassing notions of
glamour, beauty, chic, sophistication, and elegance, the myth of feminine Frenchness
seeps through the consumption process and becomes part of the newly acquired feminine
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identity of the consumer. The union of these contraries is revealed both through a rhetoric
of feminine transformation – how to become French – and through discourses that
emphasize a process of discovery where Frenchness is already interiorized in the form of
an archetype.
4.1. On How To Become a French Woman
I will use two examples to illustrate these trends of becoming French, their titles
speaking for themselves: Suzy Gershman’s autobiography C’est la Vie: An American
Conquers the City of Light, Begins a New Life, and Becomes Zut Alors!, Almost French
and Debra Ollivier’s study Entre Nous: a Woman’s Guide to Finding Her Inner French
Girl. Gershman, the author of Frommer’s Born to Shop books series, centers her
transformation narrative on a traumatic event, the death of her husband that triggers her
moving to France. As her story unfolds, it accumulates scattered references to the
practicalities of relocating to France: renting an apartment, buying furniture, and creating
a community of friends. Her conversion to French femininity is gradual and presented in
an implicit manner through the accumulation of events and French experiences. The book
ends on her becoming “almost French,” as the author reflects upon her newly acquired
inner peacefulness and self-sufficiency next to the glimmering lights of the Eiffel Tower.
Ollivier, on the other hand, is completely subjugated by the charm of the French woman
and she takes pleasure in investigating all the different facets that construct her into an
archetype:
She [the French woman] is a distillation of her culture’s complex and enduring
predilections: She is an essence, a way of being, a mindset – and she exists in us
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all. She is that part of us that is free – and not bound up by the joyless strings of
Puritan morality or guilt. She is more fundamentally that part of us that does not
want to live according to what other think she should be. She is her own woman,
entirely.
Transgressing national boundaries, the consumption of French femininity
becomes thus extremely inclusive and boundless while feminine travel narratives serve as
guides in the consumption process that offers the possibility of acquiring French
femininity. 1
These transformative narratives codify feminine Frenchness according to some
recurrent connotations perpetuated in both cinematographic and extra-cinematographic
industries. Edith Wharton devotes a chapter to French women in French Ways and Their
Meaning (1919). She underlines two interlocked characteristics that distinguish French
women from their foreign counterparts: maturity and a different relation to the exterior
world. First, Wharton argues that the stereotype of excessive femininity associated with
Frenchness – “more ‘coquettish’, or more ‘feminine,’ or more excitable, or more
emotional, or more immoral – is not sufficient to explain their different quality” (100).
2
What really distinguishes French women is their maturity: “Compared with women of
France the average American woman is still in the kindergarten” (100-1). In order to
support her assertion, Wharton argues that the social life of American women is
organized like a Montessori class, which favors individual development in an isolated
and artificial medium. Unlike her, the French woman conducts a “real living” process: “is
a deep and complex and slowly-developed thing, the outcome of an old and rich social
experience” (102). 3 However, even in 2003, this myth of “self-possession” of the French
woman was still appealing to foreign female audiences as Debra Ollivier shows:
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She [the French girl] is entirely, unequivocally self-contained. She is focused on
living her own full agenda and cultivating her actual self, rather than reinventing
herself or pining away to be someone she’s not. Throughout her life, she invests
herself in learning and experiencing, not to change who she is, but to become
more fundamentally and more fully who she truly is. (4)
Contrasted to the pin-up models and the Cinderella stories prevalent in
Hollywood cinema, the French girl’s voyage, according to Ollivier, is an inner one of
self-discovery and not one of self-conversion to fit perfectly a heterosexual order.
Through this mature constant contact to the exterior world, French women develop a new
approach to life: “As life is an art in France, so woman is an artist. She does not teach
man, she inspires him” (112). Popular feminine discourses thus equally construct an
altered Pygmalion model that enables women to be artists and creators of their own lives,
through inspirational material practices. The concept of “le plaisir,” associated with the
French, including French women, due to their aesthetic affinities, offers them a different
way of relating to the world:
The French possess the quality and have always claimed the privilege. And from
their freedom of view combined with their sensuous sensibility they have
extracted the sensation they call “le plaisir” which is something so much more
definite and more evocative than what we mean when we speak of pleasure. “Le
plaisir” stands for the frankly permitted, the freely taken, the delight of the senses,
the direct enjoyment of the fruit of the tree called golden. (Wharton 134)
Perpetuating this sensuality associated with Frenchness, Ollivier recalls a cinematic
example: “Remember Audrey Tautou in Amélie? She dips her hands into sacks of grain
just for the pleasure of how it feels. . . . Sensuality is so pervasive in her life that it is
almost transparent” (6). Bruno’s haptic voyageuse seems naturally welcomed by this type
of French femininity that finds tactile and sensual pleasures in mundane life. This quest
for pleasure imposes an additional selectiveness in terms of merchandise. It is here that
French women distance themselves from conspicuous consumption and definitely prefer
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(French) quality over mass quantity. So, excessive consumption is tempered as French
women follow different consumption rules:
Less is truly more as long as it’s an expression of quality and authenticity. She
[the French woman] resists the expendable, the disposable, the trendy, the faux . .
. . She invariably buys one perfect high-quality dress and not several less
satisfying on-sale ones. And she instinctively knows how to mix and match with
natural creativity. When you shop like a French girl, you buy one of anything –
and make sure it’s the best quality you can afford. (Ollivier 16-8)
Helena Frith Powell’s All You Need To Be Impossibly French. The Witty
Investigation Into the Lives, Lusts, and Little Secrets of French Women draws on the
same idea of self-discovery in terms of Frenchness, but this time with more precise
details in terms of fashion and cosmetics consumption. In all these feminine guides, stars
such as Catherine Deneuve, Carole Bouquet, as well as Audrey Hepburn and Josephine
Baker, are illustrations of the French glamorous style.
One important dimension of stardom that Morin discusses at length in Les Stars is
the paradoxical quality of stars that bridges their mythical aura and status as objects of
consumption:
The star is a specific product of capitalist civilization: at the same time she
satisfies profound anthropological needs which are expressed at the level of myth
and religion. The admirable coincidence of myth and capital, of goddess and
merchandise, is neither fortuitous nor contradictory. Star-goddess and starmerchandise are two faces of the same reality: the needs of man at the stage of the
twentieth-century capitalist civilization. (141)
In French cinema, however, there is a felt tension between the status of French
stars as icons of cinema and as icons of feminine consumption. In their attempt at
differentiation from the Hollywood market, as discussed in Chapter 1, French stars have
to distance themselves from the excessive consumption. The extra-cinematographic texts
focusing on their works as stars and the restricted discourses surrounding their private life
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function as a Poppaea’s veil, amplifying the seduction they exert. The feminine
consumption discourses in which French female stars function are thus necessarily linked
to the national industries of cinema, fashion, perfume, and cosmetics. If French female
stars are associated with these industries, their role as national icons is reactivated and
feminine consumption becomes both a favorable act for the nation and a necessarily
distinguished practice that does not diminish the cinematic value of the actresses.
In terms of the cinematic aura, advertising discourses for fashion, perfumes and
cosmetics attract French actresses and become a true exercise of style. The publicity field
is somewhat hazardous, as the mythical cinematographic image of actresses must not be
degraded by ordinary desires. Consequently, the national industries of cosmetics, fashion,
and perfumes that share a creative and artistic dimension with the cinema are preferred
spaces for French stars. The female stars’ presence in the minor genre of publicity reveals
their capacity for seduction that allows for a harmonious coexistence of their artistic aura
and their status as commercialized merchandise.
Advertisements have also an effect on stars and subsequently on cinema in
financial terms. In March 2001, Sandrine Bonnaire in an interview for Paris Match
highlighted the financial benefits of actresses who do advertisement work and remarked
that due to these profits, female stars have a greater liberty in choosing the cinematic
roles they prefer. When asked whether she had offers for product endorsements, Bonnaire
reveals the trade-off between the cinematic aura and the free-fall into commercial
discourse: “Oui, mais pour des produits pas très prestigieux. Du jambon par exemple. J’ai
dit non [Rires]. Moi, présenter du jambon? Franchement, c’est pas possible. Mais pour du
parfum ou du rouge à lèvres pas de problème” (Béglé 60). As long as the star image
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resonates with the artistic quality of the advertised products, the consumption of female
stars does not alter their cinematic aura.
4.2. Fashionable Mariannes: Stars and Cultural Products Industries
One of the central features of the star-system that Morin mentions is its inherent
feminization because female stardom is more prone to objectification, fetishization, and
abstraction:
This feminine preponderance gives the star system a feminine character.
‘Mythification’ is effected primarily upon female stars: they are the most
‘fabricated’, the most idealized, the least real and the most adored. In present-day
social conditions, woman is more of a star than a man. That is why we have
generally referred to the star as ‘she’. We have naturally feminized the star: in
French the word star itself is feminine. (103)
Women were also linked to fashion through the social phenomenon of “the great
masculine renunciation,” a term used by Flugel to explain a change in men’s fashion that
occurred during the late 18th and 19th centuries. He attributes this shift to the French
revolution since during this period the exhibition of male luxurious consumption was
associated with political corruption. Consequently, the signs of wealth were displaced on
women’s attire (111-2).Malcolm Barnard argues that since then this association of
women and fashion led to a confusion and a transfer of their characteristics through a
metaphorical work, the result is that “they [fashion and clothing] either are worshiped
unreasonably or dismissed as secondary” (209). According to this metaphorical shift
between women and fashion, French female stars will necessarily reflect Frenchness
through their association with the national industries of fashion and related commodities.
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French women also had an impact on the production of the manufactured goods
through consumption practices. In “‘To Triumph before Feminine Taste’: Bourgeois
Women’s Consumption and Hand Methods of Production in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century
Paris,” Whitney Walton explains that during the Second Empire, French women had a
direct impact on the production of hand manufactured goods because they demanded high
quality, artistic talent, and refined merchandise. Through an examination of the feminine
press, popular literature, iconography, and Parisian archives, the critic demonstrates that
“tasteful consumption” was part of bourgeois women’s attributions. Their roles as
“culture-bearers and arbiters of taste” within the family was sanctioned by philosopher
Paul Janet and art critic Léon de Laborde, who argued that the feminine taste is more
prone to artistic sensibility (546, 549). More important for our purposes is that Walton
establishes a causality link between French women’s demand of high-quality
manufactured products and the international fame of French fashion exports. The author
concludes that this role of the French woman as tasteful consumer became a staple of a
national identity whereby she distinguished herself from other national counterparts
(Walton 561). Through upholding high standards of art and taste, consumption of French
goods became a worthy enterprise for French women. The contiguity between the
manufactured goods and French women enables another transfer through which the high
artistic quality of the product is reflected upon its feminine consumer. French fashion
becomes not only an exclusive economic affair but a national endeavor: “Le « savoir
s’habiller » est une pièce maîtresse du savoir-vivre français. . . . L’élégance en milieu
blanc américain n’a que des connotations sociales ou économiques. Elle ne véhicule pas
de valeurs esthétiques ou surtout éthiques et morales comme en France” (Sardé 28-9).
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The fashion, perfume, and cosmetics industries are foremost national industries
and they are marketed as such because of the Frenchness connotations of a tradition in
sophistication, elegance, and aesthetic taste. Roger Vivier, the French shoemaker of the
stars, was recently remembered in The New York
Times by Horatio Silva. Vivier is most famous for
his invention of the stiletto heel and for the design
of the pilgrim-buckled shoes worn by Deneuve in
Belle de Jour. His collaborations with Christian
Dior and Yves Saint-Laurent made Vivier the
quintessential
shoemaker
of
stars
such
as
Mistinguett, Joséphine Baker, Brigitte Bardot, and
Figure 4.2. Diane Vreeland.
Boots by Roger Vivier.
Marlene Dietrich. To illustrate Vivier’s creations,
the article Joie de Vivier displays a photograph
portraying the infamous editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, Diane Vreeland, wearing a
pair of red python boots, an identifiable extravagance by Vivier. One has to wonder,
however, why the sculpture of Marianne is present in the photograph. In this humorous
mise-en-scène, the bust of Marianne is not on the pedestal but positioned on the red
carpet and the designer’s audacious boots capture her gaze. Marianne is present next to
Vreeland to emphasize that Vivier’s artistic creations are foremost part of a national
industry.
French female stars bear an important role as objects of cultural politics
constructing, advertising and circulating Frenchness in the global market through various
products. This association between a celebrity and a product originated in France during
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1880-1890. Sarah Bernhardt was the first celebrity to endorse not only cosmetics and
lingerie but also biscuits, candies, and alcohol (Lelieur and Badrolet 122-3). One of
Bernhardt’s most famous lithographic plates, by Jules Cheret, depicts the actress
promoting a cosmetic product, “La Diaphane, Poudre de Riz.” During the 1920s and
1930s celebrity dancers, writers, singers endorsed various products, such as writer Louise
de Vilmorin for Lanvin’s Arpège. While cinema’s prestige increased over the twentieth
century, female cinema stars were more in demand for various advertisements, as, for
instance, Danielle Darrieux, advertising the French hosiery Cornuel in 1939.
In an attempt to connect purposefully French stars to different national products,
Robert Cravenne, the former director of Unifrance, discusses some limited prints of
plaquettes, a luxurious variant of the brochures d’informations published by Unifrance in
the 1950s. While the latter were printed on a regular basis, mainly for informative
purposes, the former resemble more an exclusive advertisement material for French
cultural products. In one of them titled “Dix vedettes présentent la qualité française,”
Michèle Morgan presents fashion during the Givenchy fashion shows. As for Edwige
Feuillère, she displays the jewelry of René Sterlé. Fernandel advertises French wine in
the historic background of the Château du Clos-Vougeot and Gérard Philipe, French
literature. Additional stars promote other important French products: Martine Carol
endorses perfumes, Daniel Gélin supports the arts, Dany Robin publicizes champagne,
Robert Lamoureux supports gastronomy and Françoise Arnoul presents Parisian social
life (Cravenne 199). The gender divide is highly evident in this enumeration. While
actors are linked to cultural and territorial products such as wine, literature, and
gastronomy, actresses are associated with consumption of cultural products such as
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fashion, jewelry, perfumes, and, revealingly, with the gossip of Tout Paris. 4 Vincendeau
also mentions another Unifrance document of April 24, 1953 that illustrates the role of
French stars, such as Michèle Morgan, Gérard Philippe, Jean Marais, as urban
ambassadors. In order to promote the film industry abroad, the short movie French stars
Introduce You to Paris invites viewers to a form of cultural tourism through which stars
introduce different parts of the capital city and its implicit cultural heritage (2000:30). 5
French stars in these discourses reveal themselves as national commodities and
gain prestige through their contributions to the cultural-economic life of the nation. They
become French exportable items, enumerated alongside wine, tourism, and cultural
products. To illustrate this view of the actress as exportable merchandise, in “Brigitte
Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome,” Simone de Beauvoir cites the comparison between
Bardot’s and Renault automobiles’ revenues: “Receipts in the U.S.A. have come to
$4,000,000, the equivalent of the sale of 2,500 Dauphines. B.B. now deserves to be
considered an export product as important as Renault automobiles” (32). Quoting Vanity
Fair, the French magazine Vogue named Deneuve a “trésor national français,” because of
her contributions to the national industries of cinema, perfumes, and haute couture
(Azoulai 107). Another Marianne, Laetitia Casta, interviewed in Nouvel Observateur by
Alain Chouffan, reiterates her highly publicized discourse tracing a direct causal link
between her feminine breasts and her native French region, when she declared that “Mes
seins sont made in Normandie, nourris à la crème fraîche et au beurre.” Within this
discourse, frequently associated with the image of Laetitia Casta, the body of the actress
itself becomes a synonym of the nation and of its economic products. Contributing to
these extra-cinematic texts, Télé Observateur published an article titled “Tautou in the
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USA. La comédienne française la plus ‘frenchie’ est aussi la plus exportable,” which
praised her performance in the Da Vinci Code and presented her as a brilliant French
cinematic product:
Elle est la french girl par excellence: charming pour les uns, delicious pour les
autres, Audrey Tautou séduit les Américains. La dernière à leur avoir fait cet
effet-là, c’est Brigitte Bardot. . . . A New York, Los Angeles ou Chicago, elle est
désormais la plus exportable des actrices françaises. Elle figure en bonne place
avec les symboles tricolores: la baguette, le béret, Maurice Chevalier.
The above-mentioned texts illustrate the language of an international economy of
desire. The female star becomes an exportable commodity whose exchange value gains
prestige through the contribution to the economic life of the nation and of its
cinematographic industry. This contiguity between the artistic and the commercial
product resonates in the other national industries of fashion, cosmetics, and perfume. It is
not surprising that French actresses appear as favorite muses of the national fashion
creators. Actresses who incarnated Marianne are captivated by the French haute couture
on- and off-screen and, most importantly, they remain faithful to only one designer.
Cinematic collaboration naturally overflows in extra-cinematic images of the stars, such
as the illustrious example of the long-term partnership between Yves Saint-Laurent and
Catherine Deneuve since the famous bourgeois suits in Belle de Jour (1967). Jeanne
Moreau’s fidelity to Pierre Cardin and Brigitte Bardot’s to Louis Ferraud are remarkable
collaborative examples as well. Through these partnerships, a new Pygmalion model is
created, as film stars become inspiring muses not only for movie directors but also for
fashion creators.
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Within the extra-cinematic discourse of fashion, French female stars function as
familiar points of reference, especially through modeling or their presence on the red
carpet and in fashion magazines 6 :
Stars give brands a well-defined personality for a minimum of effort, and bring
with them a rich fantasy to which consumers aspire. In addition, consumers have
a ‘history’ with stars. Even though they have seen them on screen or in the pages
of the magazines, they form an ‘attachment ’to celebrities regarding them as
friendly faces and reliable arbiters of taste. Models, with their distant gazes and
alien bodies can’t compete (Tungate 120).
As Tungate points out, female stars are close to and familiar to the audiences. Because of
that, they enable fantasies of transformations into Frenchness according to the cinematic
roles that rendered them famous. In this sense, the red carpet at film festivals, such as
Cannes, proves to be the equivalent of a fashion parade. Women’s magazines equally
amplify these types of discourses in their pages through detailed descriptions of the stars’
dresses and through the obligatory mentioning of the brand. 7
In terms of haute couture fashion, a turning point was Christian Dior’s death in
1957. The creator of the New Look revitalized the French fashion industry after the
Second World War and claimed the supremacy of the Parisian fashion. He invented the
New Look for women, emphasizing their feminine silhouettes of “femmes-fleurs” (Steele
12). Dior’s style was criticized for imprisoning women, yet again, in corsets and in a
stereotyped vision of excessive femininity. As Elizabeth Wilson documents, Dior’s New
Look corresponded to a nostalgic romanticism echoed on screen:
The French in particular capitalized on the nineteenth century on a grand scale.
Madeleine Renaud and Edwige Feuillère, two of the best known stars of the
French stage and screen, launched the period figure and style, clad in the gowns
of Marcel Rochas and Pierre Balmain (along with Dior, the couturiers of the
moment) both in life and in their films” (2003: 100).
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What Wilson alludes to is the Belle Époque movie genre that was transposed in
contemporary romanticized fashion. Even the rebellious Brigitte Bardot, before becoming
a star, illustrated the New Look fashion in Les Grandes Manoeuvres (1955).
The void on the fashion scene engendered by Dior’s death left enough room for
Brigitte Bardot’s new look in fashion initiated with Et Dieu . . . créa la femme where
Bardot wore tight but simple dresses, connoting, as Vincendeau remarked, naturalness
either through their fabric or Bardot’s lack of sophisticated accessories (2000: 100). In an
article dedicated to the analysis of the star’s style, Vincendeau places her “at the
epicenter of the modernization of fashion” as Bardot’s clothes, although made by fashion
designers, appeared cheap and therefore could have been easily reproduced by the young
girls of the late 1950s (2005: 143). Bardot preferred young couture creators such as Louis
Féraud and Jacques Estérel whose collections were more accessible than the established
haute couture ones. As Vincendeau puts it, “ her [Bardot’s] sartorial challenge, which
echoed the move from aristocratic haute couture to democratized prêt-a-porter, served
the interests of the capitalist economy, while she took full advantage of the developing
mass media” (2005: 144-5). Nevertheless, the mass consumption of Bardot’s fashion
occurred within the national boundaries since she made French gingham fashionable
again at the expense of American nylon fiber (Vincendeau 2005: 143). In resonance with
Bardot’s fashion modernization and popularization, the French couture industry
developed more accessible prêt-à-porter lines paralleling the couture tradition.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, reflecting the heritage tradition in cinema, a nostalgic
retro trend is visible in haute couture fashion. The three important designers of the 1990s
era, John Galliano, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and Viviane Westwood, look for inspiration in the
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past, yet, at the same time, they modify the old according to a postmodern spirit of
juxtaposing ”incongruous objects, images and materials” (Steele 152). Deneuve, both as
Marianne and one of the most important actresses of the decade, illustrates this
fashionable trend as she was the embodiment of an famous artistic tradition of style.
Through Deneuve’s impressive fidelity on and off-screen to Yves Saint-Laurent, her star
image is strongly anchored in the exclusive tradition of haute couture. In 1992, Deneuve
signed a contract to launch Yves Saint Laurent’s new cosmetic line “Soins Yves Saint
Laurent.” The promotion film signed by Jean-Paul Mondiano is filmed as an interview
with Deneuve and is strongly inflected by her star image that combines glacial beauty
with ardent passions. The actress talks about her suicidal predispositions and even
teaches the journalist a classical etymology lesson concerning the word “care,” which
means “soin amoureux” in classical language. The fast editing, quick shot reverse shots,
mirrored reflections, and a highly mobile camera, amplify in a paradoxical way the closeup of Deneuve’s star image up to the point of intimidation. The short publicity film ends
with the journalist who is bitterly disappointed to have employed the anglicism “OK”
while talking to the star. Certainly, in front of the impressive and mysterious aura of the
grand actress, all anglicisms or other mass commercial reminders are effaced.
Deneuve herself carefully preserves her artistic aura in extra-cinematographic
discourses. When Larry King interviewed her on CNN in 2000, he asked the French star
whether she endorsed any products and she serenely denied it. Confronted with the fact
that she was the image of Chanel No. 5, Deneuve naturally asserted that perfume is not a
product, as it is not very concrete and has to do more with imagination than with
commerce. 8
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In 2001, terms of both fashion and cosmetics, Laetitia Casta illustrates a
reconciliation of the French haute couture with the more affordable prêt-à-porter
collections. A favorite model of the collections of haute couture, Casta was also the
iconic image of the department store Galeries Lafayette and long-time ambassador for the
popular cosmetic group L’Oréal. Her star image accommodates both levels, French
luxury as well as accessible fashion and cosmetic brands, illustrating a contemporary
trend of combining high-end and mid-market products. 9
L’Oréal, the world largest cosmetic group, is strongly linked to the French
cinematic industry as the official sponsor of the Cannes Festival. Serge Kaganski
critically remarked this strategic alliance of the cosmetic and perfume industries and the
seventh art in the documentary French Beauty:
Alors que la France est supposée être le pays de l’amour, de la romance, des
femmes sophistiquées et glamour, tous ces clichés existent dans le cinéma
français, mais ils viennent de l’extérieur du cinéma. Ils viennent des grands
couturiers, des parfums, un peu comme un paquet : Christian Dior, Guerlain,
Cardin, Lanvin. Ce sont tous des symboles de la France.
Kaganski is symptomatic for an entire tradition of film critics who see this
partnership between commercial products and artistic cinema as unnatural. Nevertheless,
besides L’Oréal’s presence on the red carpet at Cannes, its advertisements constantly
mark the back cover of illustrious cinema magazines such as Cahiers du Cinéma.
L’Oréal, on the other hand, names its spokeswomen “ambassadrices,” in order to recreate
an appropriate cultural aura of Frenchness around its product. The selection of global
ambassadors is done in terms of “talent, style, passion, engagement,” as its official
website states. The most recent French ambassador is Rachida Brakni, the main
protagonist of Coline Serreau’s Chaos, and the first woman of Algerian origins to
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represent L’Oréal. Her specialization is hair products and her motto is “Affichez vos
boucles.” It is difficult not to read the slogan as a reference to l’affaire du voile in France
and the laicity debate. In an interview posted on the L’Oréal website, Rachida tells the
story of becoming a muse for L’Oréal, tracing an integration story and a praise of
diversity in terms of feminine locks:
Quand j’étais gamine je passais beaucoup de temps à les tirer, parce que c’était
pas très apprécié finalement les cheveux bouclés. On a plutôt tendance à m’envier
Pourquoi effacer quelque chose que beaucoup d’hommes et de femmes trouvent
beau? Il y a une nouvelle matière de cheveux qui s’intègre aussi à toute une
palette qui est déjà représentée.
New models of feminine Frenchness are therefore marketed by L’Oréal,
committed to diversity not only on a global level through her ambassadors for all
continents, but also on an internal scale. The L’Oréal famous jingle “Parce que je le vaux
bien/Parce que vous le valez bien,” which was made an entry by Georges Vigarello in the
Nouvelles Mythologies, activates a mechanism of exclusive value, central to cosmetic
advertisements, which include nowadays all diverse types of femininity.
The perfume and cosmetic industries are linked to cinema in other ways than
through the financial circuit that links film stars to commercials. Next to the print
advertisements, another set of efficient marketing strategies includes short publicity
films. The advertising campaigns are preferred territory for either famous photographers
or movie directors. The publicity film, lasting around 20-30 seconds, needs to capture the
attention of the viewer in an immediate manner, and to have an immediate impact on the
spectator. Chanel, in this sense, is famous for creating publicity films. Some illustrious
examples come to mind, such as Catherine Deneuve’s famous commercials for Chanel
No. 5 emphasizing her mysterious aura, 10 the fairy tale Chanel No. 5 story “Le Loup”
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based on the Little Red Riding Hood theme, directed by Luc Besson and starring Estella
Warren, “Le Film”, the commercial directed by Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann,
starring Nicole Kidman. 11 I would like to analyze two specific Chanel advertisements
that reveal first, the meta-cinematic discourse of the advertisements, and, second, the
tension between national-universal level and the cinematic glamour reappropriated by the
cosmetic industry.
Chanel launched a publicity campaign for Rouge Allure in 2007 with a short
commercial directed by famous photographer Bettina Rheims. Titled “Le rouge selon
Chanel,” the short publicity film is directly inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris.
Brigitte Bardot’s role is played by Julie Ordon, model and actress. The mise-en-scène is
identical to that of the movie and the camera pans on Ordon’s naked body, in a similar
movement as Godard’s filmic technique. However, while Bardot was fragmenting her
body into parcels of desires, Ordon focuses only on the mouth, because of the product
promoted, and repeats only one of Bardot’s lines: “Et ma bouche, tu l’aimes, ma
bouche?” Rheims kept the haunting soundtrack of
Godard’s movie, orchestrated by Georges Delerue,
heavily impregnated with nostalgia in Godard’s
reflection upon the death of cinema.
The publicity film reveals the stunning
possibilities of artistic communication in between the
publicity film and the cinematic reference. The
Figure 4.3. Le Rouge by
Bettina Rheims. Chanel
Rouge Allure, 2007.
paradoxical charisma of the female star, Bardot, quoted
in the publicity, succeeds in reenacting its own
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economy of desire reconciling dual object of consumption and of cinematic art. In the
previous scene in the movie, Godard quoted Bazin’s statement: “Le cinéma substitue à
notre regard un monde qui s'accorde à nos désirs.” Chanel, operating in a similar manner,
substitutes one of the most celebrated scenes in auteur cinema, to sparkle the magic of
cinematic desire, and through it, to circulate the seduction of Chanel products.
The second Chanel commercial I discuss here plays also on the mechanism of
desire and seduction. Released in 1994, it was directed by Jean-Paul Goude and stars
Carole Bouquet, face of Chanel since 1987. Bouquet is positioned as a cinema spectator,
eating popcorn, and watching black and white images of Marilyn Monroe. From
Monroe’s image on the screen, Goude cuts to an identical reflection on Carole Bouquet’s
sunglasses. The abrupt cut and the identical framing traces the flow of desire between the
two stars and, under this spell, Bouquet starts to metamorphose gradually into a colorful
Marilyn Monroe holding an oversized Chanel bottle in her arms instead of the popcorn
bag. As Monroe, featured on the soundtrack, goes on singing “I want to be loved by you,”
her image reverts to Carole Bouquet, now filled with color and holding the same bottle of
Chanel. The story is mainly told through iconic close-ups and the juxtaposition of black
and white to color. Two fast zoom-outs to a high-angle shot offer, through the position of
the camera, a glimpse of the position of a mythical narrator linking past and present.
This mythical subject position operates an important reconciliation for our
purposes: the unification between the national and the international, between France’s
Carole Bouquet and Hollywood’s Marilyn Monroe. However, I argue that a different
process than the transformational narratives discussed at the beginning of the chapter is at
work. Marilyn Monroe is the quintessential embodiment of old Hollywood glamour,
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beauty, and sophistication. The myth of old Hollywood glamour shares with the myth of
Frenchness a vast connotational field and, therefore, the metamorphosis between Bouquet
and Monroe becomes possible. They convey the same cinematic glamour, perfect beauty,
and classy elegance. 8 Femmes, François Ozon’s movie discussed in chapter 1, illustrates
richly this correspondence between French actresses and Hollywood icons. 12 And these
shared connotations in cinematic terms enable, for instance, Audrey Hepburn, to be an
iconic Hollywood star but also a glamorous French gamine. The next chapter is devoted
therefore to Audrey Hepburn, a Hollywood gamine with a French twist.
1
Richard Stamelman revealingly describes the marketing techniques behind the perfume “Soir de Paris/
Evening in Paris.” Aimed at an American average middle-class female audience, the publicity of the
product took into account that in the 1920s Parisian travel for American women was highly unlikely, thus,
it reinforced a stereotypical image of Paris, more likely to arouse their interest. For instance, the author
describes the perfume box: “Under a crescent moon and in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower a man and
woman tango near a typical kiosk. Another couple dine at the café table, next to a violinist and a bassist
who are placed besides the Arc de Triomphe, while a painter stands at his easel painting a nude model.
Here is commonplace, everyday Paris elevated to myth, the myth of Frenchness which Soir de Paris
appropriates and intensifies for its stay-at-home American audience” (249). Thus, if traveling to Paris to
experience its glamorous love tradition was impossible for American women, they can have a sparkle of
that romantic and refined love story through the scent of the perfume.
2
French feminist Michèle Sardé reads the stereotypes that construct the French woman as archetypes as
well in the sense that French women are presented as a variation of excessive femininity, hypersexualized:
“Car, quelle que soient les formes que prennent les différents stéréotypes et lieux communs affectant
l’image de la Française en France et hors de France, le trait dominant est immuable: petite chatte, femme
enfant, femme fatale, prostituée, maîtresse, séduisante, élégante, expérimentée, sensuelle, sexy, amorale,
soumise. La Française est perçue comme une créature souvent charmante mais aussi un peu méprisable. La
métaphore de la femme en général”(24). This critical interpretation of the image of French women freezes
it into stereotype and caricature. Ollivier’s, Wharton’s, Gershman’s and Frith Powell’s books show a
different reading of French femininity in the popular realm, where the exacerbation of femininity led to a
concomitant freedom through a paradoxical self-sufficiency. In their view, French femininity is ‘different’
not because of excessive and liberated sexuality, but because of a drastically different relation with reality
that enables French women to highlight the importance of the mundane, of the domestic life, and of the
material practices surrounding them.
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3
Wharton omits to mention that the rich social experience of French women, their omnipresence in the
Parisian salons, for instance, obscures their lack of participation in political life as French women only
acquired the right to vote after the Second World War.
4
The balance between the star image and advertisements is a very delicate one and there needs to be a
continuity thread between the two. Sardé, for instance, recalls the example of Brigitte Bardot who
participated in a publicity campaign for the Office National du Tourisme Français. Since the publicity
targeted her cultural Frenchness and not her highly sexualized image prominent at the time, it proved to be
unsuccessful (26).
5
After the Second World War, feminine consumption industries remain visibly codified in terms of
Frenchness. However, as Christopher Pinet noted in “The French in American Television Commercials,
Part Two: As French As Smokey the Bear and Uncle Sam,” other industries efface Frenchness in their
marketing campaigns as the Michelin tire or Bic promotional ads. Masculine Frenchness does not resonate
well with connotations of security and efficiency. Feminine Frenchness, on the other hand, is a privileged
exportable product.
6
Magazines are essential in promoting products through print advertisements. Numerous magazines, such
as Elle, Paris Match, Première, Photo, in their French and foreign editions, are owned by a branch of the
French group Lagardère, Hachette Filipacchi Médias, the largest magazine publisher in the world.
7
For a analysis of fashion texts in women’s magazines, see Roland Barthes’s Le Système de la mode.
8
The CNN transcript of the conversation between Deneuve and King goes as follows: “K: And now you
are a product -- do you still have products in your name? D: Products? K: Yes, did you ever have skin
products or makeup products? D: No. K: But you did work for Chanel, right? D: No, no, I never. I never
worked for Chanel. I just did the publicity, the ad for the perfume, you know. And in my opinion, perfume
is not a product, you know. Perfume is the advantage of something very, very -- it is not concrete, you
know, it is something. It has so much to do imagination, and it is not a product for me, a perfume.” The
contradiction between star as a cinematic icon and as merchandise is highly visible in this conversation.
King names Deneuve a product, a definition that she completely rejects.
9
Using the revealing chapter title “When haute couture meets high street,” Tungate discusses the
partnership between the two divergent words of street style and haute couture. The critic mentions the
successful collaboration between Karl Lagerfeld of the Chanel Fashion House with H&M, the Swedish
inexpensive and popular clothes brand. This association only institutionalized a previous street trend of
combining inexpensive and luxurious items (40-5).
10
For a detailed analysis of the Chanel advertisements starring Deneuve, see Christopher Pinet’s article
"The French in American Television Commercials, Part One: Plus Ça Change."
11
For an in-depth analysis of several French perfume commercials, see Richard Howard Stamelman.
Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin: a Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present.
12
To support my argument, the old Hollywood glamour image is recurrent in French cosmetic or perfume
advertisements that use American stars. For instance, Nicole Kidman for Chanel, Charlize Theron and
Sharon Stone for Dior, Scarlett Johanson for L’Oréal, are insightful examples that illustrate this particular
use of Hollywood stars.
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CHAPTER 5
AUDREY HEPBURN: A GAMINE WITH A FRENCH TWIST
Celebrating Audrey Hepburn’s timeless appeal, clothing retailer GAP features an
innovative commercial campaign using in-store posters and original film footage from
the movie Funny face starring Audrey Hepburn in order to promote a new line of slim
black trousers. To introduce a contemporary flavor, the GAP promotional clip
manipulates Hepburn’s original movie dance using new
digital imaging technology, AC/DC’s song “Back in
black” and the tagline: “It's Back - The Skinny Black
Pant.” Audrey Hepburn’s star image in the GAP promotion
can be merely read as a commodified image of retro
chic; nevertheless, at every instant of it, Audrey Hepburn’s
energy, charm, and dazzling gamine chic irradiate through
Figure 5.1. Gap Ad,
2006.
the advertisement that in return adoringly multiplies her
dynamic representations in a kaleidoscopic mode. In a way
this clip, while capitalizing on Hepburn’s star allure, also raises questions about the
endurance of her fascination, about the link between her image and an atemporal notion
of style and, I would add, about that French je ne sais quoi that is at the center of her star
persona.
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Although Audrey Hepburn’s movies are concentrated in two decades – the
1950s and the 1960s – the appeal of her star image has proven to be timeless and
universal. Throughout her filmic career, she firmly established herself not only as a film
icon but also as an incarnation of quintessential style. Her gamine appeal, the lavish
Givenchy dresses, the simplicity of the Sabrina décolleté, the Parisian Left-Bank quality
of black turtlenecks, and her ageless slim black pants are unforgettable facets of a famous
“Audrey style.” Numerous biographers and film critics have investigated the allure of her
star persona, the filmic legacy she left, her representations as a beauty icon, and her
relationship to fashion.
Within this context, feminist film critic Molly Haskell situated Audrey Hepburn’s
appeal in her delicate and unique femininity: “as if she dropped out of the sky into the
fifties, half wood-nymph, half princess, and then disappeared . . . leaving no footprints . .
. a changeling of mysterious parentage, unidentifiable as to nationality or class” (248).
Richard Dyer remarks as well the difficulty in locating Hepburn’s image but argues that
her obscure origins mark her as a “displaced person, and yet she suffers no anguish from
this;” in his view, she is essentially “a serene misfit” (1993b: 59). Elizabeth Wilson notes
a more precise element, which anchors desire in her gamine figure, reminiscent of a style
“that seemed the embodiment of sophisticated, existentialist Europe, as opposed to the
overripe artificiality of Hollywood” (37). Consequently, scholarship investigating
Hepburn’s star persona has followed this road and mainly focused on her European
image. For instance, Dina M. Smith looks at the Cinderella motif present in numerous
Hepburn’s movies in the light of contemporary foreign policy discourses. In her reading
of Sabrina, Post-War Europe is a portrayed as a Cinderella waiting to be saved by
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American assistance. Along the same lines, Fiona Handyside analyzes how competing
American and European institutions collaborated to create Hepburn’s European star
image in Sabrina and Funny Face.
Audrey Hepburn’s universal dimension lies in her roles as idealized types of
femininity, such as Cinderella, princess, dancer, and socialite. In extra-cinematic texts,
Hepburn’s noble origins reinforce these types of femininity, as magazine articles and
biographies constantly recall her descent from an ancient family of Dutch nobility. 1
However, her origins are more elusive as her father, Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, was an
Anglo-Irish businessman, and Audrey Hepburn van Heemstra Ruston was born in
Belgium. In addition, Hepburn chose Switzerland as her home country and lived for
extended periods in European countries. These multiple reference points serve to channel
a more vague notion of “Europeaness” aura around Hepburn’s star persona. However,
this notion of “Europeaness” in her screen image, after being exploited in Roman
Holiday, I argue, is consistently channeled through strong associations with a youthful
breeze of French femininity.
With the notable exception of Roman Holiday set in Rome where Hepburn plays a
princess of an unidentified European country, the actress starred in numerous films set
partially or completely in France. Paris Match featured Hepburn on one of its covers in
September 1956, photographed by Willy Rizzo, officially stating a change in her star
persona: “La nouvelle Audrey a renoncé à la coiffure qu’elle avait lancée dans Vacances
Romanes et elle s’est fait un visage de Parisienne.” Ever since, Hepburn remained
French.
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From the movie that prompted her discovery, Nous irons à Monte Carlo (1952) to
Sabrina (1954), Funny Face (1957) Love in the Afternoon (1957), Charade (1963), Paris
when it sizzles (1964), How to Steal a Million (1966) and Two for the Road (1967),
Audrey Hepburn’s characters are strongly associated with France. Sabrina and “Funny
Face” Jo Stockton are transformed into icons of fashion and femininity in Paris. Her
characters from Charade and Paris when it sizzles had moved to and lived in France, and
in Two for the Road, Joanna’s journeys through love and life always lead to the French
Riviera. Hepburn incarnates French women as well in Love in the Afternoon and How to
Steal a Million. Nevertheless, critical studies investigating Hepburn’s star appeal do not
specifically address her relationship to France and Frenchness, as they constantly
subsume it to the broader category of European allure.
Interestingly enough, descriptions of Audrey Hepburn’s physique and appeal
inevitably recalled the word “gamine” or “gamine charm.” An article titled “Hollywood
Innocent,” published in People magazine in 1993, asserts that: “Audrey's central role was
that of the gamine eternal, however many variations she came to play upon it. She
emerged trim and lovely in Roman Holiday in 1953 and carved a splendid career that
effectively lasted for 15 years.” The impact of the gamine representation on Hepburn’s
star persona is specifically evident in a more mature stage of her career, when a thirty-six
year old Audrey Hepburn in How to steal a million continued to play this role. However,
her gamine image is a French invention that has less to do with Hollywood’s fascination
for child-women characters such as those embodied by Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish
than with the pleasures of multiple oppositions held in constant tension. It conveys not
only a paradoxical reconciliation between the masculine and the feminine – “gamine” is
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derived from the masculine gamin – but also a youthful rebellious mode of femininity
born on the barricades of revolutionary Paris, as discussed more in detail in Chapter 3.
Consequently, I will put under a magnifying glass Hepburn’s European star image, and I
will consider the different ways in which her gamine image epitomizes a certain notion of
Frenchness. I will analyze Audrey Hepburn’s roles, performances, and costumes to see
how a certain French twist is constantly perpetuated in her films. I argue it is an oblique
perspective of Frenchness, from Hollywood’s decentered viewpoint, nevertheless
constantly present. It is a Hollywood approach to what effects Frenchness elicits and
what a French woman signifies, but its semiological role prompts a conversation about
fascinating national representations for international audiences. Although Audrey
Hepburn was a Hollywood star, her strong association with France invites a reading
employing the tri-partite model of French female stardom. As an icon of Hollywood
cinema, Hepburn’s cinematic roles revolve around feminine Frenchness. Hepburn’s
gamine image and her long-lasting collaboration with French haute couture designer
Hubert de Givenchy circulate Frenchness in the construction of her star image as an
object of consumption. In addition, this oblique representation of French femininity
through Hepburn’s star persona opens up a new horizon situated in between a universal
dimension and a French difference, and I show that Hepburn’s appeal is situated precisely
at the core of this tension. In a sense, Colette captured this paradox when she described
her short-story Gigi as telling “the story of a French gamine, and all of us” (American
Weekly 4).
It is perhaps Cecil Beaton, the famous costume designer and photographer, who
summarized Audrey Hepburn’s Frenchness the best. In the Vogue issue of November
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1954, he described her as reincarnation of a “gamine,” an “urchin,” capturing the
changing essence of the after-war period. Although Beaton acknowledges her European
heritage (Dutch and Belgian), he specifically retraces her cultural lineage in the long line
of French revolutionary gamines, passing through Eponine of Les Misérables to the
existential young women of the Parisian Left bank:
No one can doubt that Audrey Hepburn’s appearance succeeds because it
embodies the spirit of today. She had, if you like, her prototypes in France –
Damina, Edith Piaf, or Juliette Gréco. But it took the rubble of Belgium, an
English accent, and an American success to launch the striking personality that
best exemplifies our new Zeitgeist. Nobody ever looked like her before World
War II; it is doubtful if anybody ever did, unless it be those wild children of the
French Revolution who stride in the foreground of romantic canvases. Yet, we
recognize the rightness of this appearance in relation to our historical needs. And
the proof is that thousand of imitations have appeared. The woods are full of
emaciated young ladies with rat-nibbled hair and moon-pale faces. (127)
In an era weary of the long lasting effects of a destructive war, the gamine
character gracefully arrives as a rejuvenating and uplifting figure, embodying a universal
desire of a new inspirational start. Still an ingénue, this childlike figure does not
remember the horrors of the two world wars; boyish, yet a girl, her playful approach to
life can set into motion the rusted and meaningless mechanisms of existence, so ravaged
by the burden of an irrational war. Nostalgically exploiting this feminine figure, Colette’s
novel Gigi, published in 1945, but written during the Occupation, is essentially an
escapist story of a gamine set in a Fin-de-siècle Paris. Following its instant success,
Jacqueline Audry’s movie Gigi (1948), starring Danièle Delorme, capitalized on this
rebellious type of the gamine who resonated with an inner chord in the French public. It
also inspired the idea of a stage version of Colette’s novel: Anita Loos had turned the
novel into a play, and soon the search for a Broadway Gigi began. It proved to be a
difficult task as Gilbert Miller, the producer of the play, asserts:
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With Miss Loos I combed the roster of Equity for a young American actress who
could meet the requirements – without result. We must have seen at least two
hundred girls in New York. For a time we considered the Italian actress Pier
Angeli, but her accent seemed too high a hurdle to surmount. Briefly we pondered
the potential of Leslie Caron, but Miss Caron was too French. (Theatre Arts 50)
In order to find the perfect combination of a universal appeal and the right amount of
Frenchness, Colette took the matter in her own hands and found her Gigi when she
encountered Audrey Hepburn on the set of Nous irons à Monte Carlo” (60). 2
Prior to Nous irons à Monte Carlo, Audrey Hepburn had starred in minor roles in
various British productions. According to one of her biographers, Barry Paris, Hepburn
asked her hairdresser for a different look in support of her first French role, and she
complied: “I said: you have the kind of face that needs a gamine haircut. I would almost
take the ends of your eyebrows off so that you have a quizzical look. You have the kind
of face for it – a pixie face. Let’s make it a pixie. So we did the eyebrows and I gave her a
gamine cut. It was that simple” (58). With this new French gamine look, Hepburn was
easily spotted by Colette and recognized as the perfect embodiment of Gigi. She
documented the episode of her now famous discovery of an unknown Audrey Hepburn as
an impulsive yet so accurate inspiration: “What author ever expects to see one of his
brain-children appear suddenly in the flesh? Not I, and yet, here it was! The young
unknown woman, English, I guessed, was my own thoroughly French Gigi come alive.
That afternoon I offered her the part in the Broadway play” (The American Weekly 13).
The rest is history: Audrey Hepburn, the gamine, conquered Broadway and enchanted
American audiences with her “French” charm.
Hepburn’s other famous stage role on Broadway follows the same French literary
heritage as she embodied Ondine on Broadway in 1954. Jean Giraudoux’s play was first
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staged at the Athénée theatre in Paris in 1939, but the beginning of the war abruptly
interrupted its success. Although inspired by a German fairy-tale written by Fréderic de la
Motte-Fouqué, Undine (1811), the story of the water sprite Ondine who falls in love with
a human, is closely linked to the Celtic myth of Mélusine and has therefore an important
place in the French theatrical heritage. On the French stage, Ondine’s role launched
Isabelle Adjani’s career at the Comédie Française in 1974, and Jacques Weber, casting
the French Marianne Laetita Casta, restaged the play in 2004. The portrayal of Hepburn
in the Broadway Playbill for Ondine is noteworthy: her face emerges only halfway from
the darkness and the look of the viewer converges on her pixie-like eyes: she represents
again both a universal mythological figure and a fragile, rebellious ingénue. While the
Gigi Broadway Playbill featured the name Gigi in quotation marks, advertising and
forwarding the name of the play associated with French writer Colette, Ondine is directly
equated with Hepburn’s image, thus attesting to both her capacity to signify her newfound stardom and one of the most intriguing feminine characters in the French theatre.
In Ondine, her French potential is not signified après la lettre as in Gigi, but she became
its very embodiment.
In the article “Audrey Hepburn – the girl, the gamin, and the star,” published in
Photoplay in 1954, Radie Harris uncovers the secrets of the sudden and stunning fame of
a delicate new young actress. The content of the article, which investigates Hepburn’s
love interests and private life, is less interesting than its title, which separates her image
into three distinct categories: the girl, the gamin and the star. The ambiguity of
masculine/feminine is thus connoted by the ambivalence between the girl/the gamin in
Audrey’s persona. As a star, she belongs to Hollywood and to its universal public;
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however, as a gamin, Audrey Hepburn reminds one of that French je ne sais quoi
constantly portrayed in her movies:
At home sitting on the floor in beautifully tailored slacks, turtleneck sweater, no
shoes, with her feet curled up under her, she has a gamin tomboy quality. In
public, at a first night or on the dance floor she looks every inch the real
counterpart of the reel princess in Roman Holiday. The key to her universal
appeal is that she conforms to no set mold. (Harris 100)
According to Radie Harris, the gamin quality is relegated to the private space.
Conversely, in the public sphere Audrey Hepburn is a star, a princess, essentially an
idealized type of femininity. Moreover, the girl and the star are perfect fits into a set
Hollywood mold. It is the gamin element that that renders Hepburn unique and distances
her from the voluptuous stars of the 1950s. Love in the afternoon offers an explanation of
Hepburn’s marked difference from Hollywood somewhat along the same lines. Ariane
Chavasse, the ingénue daughter of a French detective Claude Chavasse, falls in love with
Frank Flannagan, an unstoppable seducer. Complimented on her perfection by Gary
Cooper as Mr. Flannagan, Hepburn’s character has some complaints about her physique
that is very different than the contemporary ideal of femininity: “I am too thin, my ears
stick out and my teeth are crooked and my neck is much too long.” Frank Flannagan does
not deny all these imperfections but acknowledges their national charm: “It is that
Parisian thing you got, that certain quelque chose, as they say on the Left Bank, that
piquant soupçon of aperitif.” Moreover, Hepburn’s off-screen persona is constructed
along the same lines, as her distinct non-conformist beauty constantly becomes an object
of analysis as well as one of the identifiable sources of her appeal. Through his
photographer’s eye, Cecil Beaton captured her unique type of beauty: “She is like a
portrait by Modigliani where the various distortions are not only interesting but make a
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completely satisfying composition” (Vogue 129). And Modigliani’s women portraits
immortalized the fashionable beauties from Montmartre recalling a refined and enigmatic
French beauty. 3
Accordingly, Audrey Hepburn’s star image is constructed around this tension
between a Hollywood icon and a French gamine. Even if the plot lines of her movies
follow the Hollywood pattern, the lives of her characters are irreversibly marked by a
certain French twist. Frenchness becomes the horizon that attracts and alters Hepburn’s
roles and subsequently her star persona. Her film parts are touched by it, irremediably
transformed, carrying the “French” difference within them, and yet they remain familiar
and follow established narrative paths, according to a rigorous Hollywood structure.
Nevertheless, within these strictly regimented courses, there are explosions of
Frenchness, be they manifest in a boyish action, a quick elfin-like trait, a strange way of
dancing, a gamine impish attitude, or a supreme feminine elegance. Moreover, the
contradictory appeal of Frenchness moves deeper than skin or fashion and crystallizes in
a breeze of fresh independence, where feminine intelligence and desire echo each other,
dreams come true naturally because life and love become finally limpid, and the gap
between a woman and the world ceases to exist as she is able to enjoy relentlessly the
world.
Inspired by a French film by Julien Duvivier, La Fête à Henriette (1952), Paris
when it sizzles perfectly illustrates Audrey Hepburn’s double status through its filmwithin-the-film structure. She plays Gabrielle “Gaby” Simpson, a young lady working for
a typing bureau. Richard Benson (William Holden), a successful and alcoholic middleaged screenplay writer who has only three days left in Paris to write a script for his
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producer, hires her as a typist. As Benson begins to write, Gabrielle becomes also the
French heroine of his story “The Girl who stole the Eiffel Tower,” since she has the
requisite Frenchness and moved to Paris to enjoy life in a sort of perpetual hedonism.
First, her initiation to Frenchness begins by a “comprehensive study of depravity”
through the exploration of the Parisian nightlife for the last two years. During Bastille
day, only the little pleasures matter, for they make the French nation, as Gabrielle
confesses: “We start with breakfast at the same café we go to and then we are going to
dance from one end of Paris to the other. The Opera at five, then to the gardens for the
singing of the Marseillaise. Montmartre for the fireworks and then supper and
champagne, you know . . . live!” When her jaded interlocutor is stunned by her
enthusiasm for life, Gabrielle goes on: “Oh! Every morning when I wake up and I see
there's a whole new other day, I just go absolutely ape!” Paris is equated with absolute
leisure time, where each minute creates a state of instant delight and people exist with the
sole purpose of enjoying life.
Paris, as the city of love, is a pretty worn filmic cliché that never ceased however
to engender pleasurable representations. Hepburn’s characters always gravitate around
this prerequisite of becoming French: live, love, and blossom into an exquisite model of
femininity in Paris. Love in the afternoon (1957) exploits this romantic potential of the
Parisian setting, establishing a Hollywood postcard perspective from the first scene. The
first shot is a window view of an unmistakable Parisian cityscape signaled by the Eiffel
Tower and the chaotic Parisian roofs in the background. The window framing anticipates
the idea of a postcard and subsequently, a tracking shot shows different post card pictures
of Parisian landmarks: the Eiffel Tour, the Arc de Triomphe, the Seine, and the
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Alexandre III bridge. Once the picturesque quality of Paris is established, the second
reason for which Paris is famous is didactically recalled as the camera pans, and we see a
couple kissing in the street while a voice-over narration specifies:
This is the city Paris, France. It is just like any other big city, London, New York,
Tokyo. Except for two little things: In Paris people eat better, and in Paris people
make love, well, perhaps not better but certainly more often. They do it anytime,
anyplace. On the Left Bank, on the Right Bank and in between. They do it by day
and they do it by night. The butcher, the baker, and the friendly undertaker. They
do it in motion, they do it absolutely still. Poodles do it, tourists do it, once in a
while, even existentialists do it. There is young love, old love, married love, and
illicit love . . .”
A suite of shots portraying couples in iconic Parisian settings accompanies this
enumeration of inexhaustible types of love: Café de Flore, the Tuileries Garden, the Seine
and both of its banks, museums, Parisian streets, the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de
Triomphe, all parade in front of the viewer exposing frenetically a multi-faceted
representation of Paris as inextricably linked to love.
Funny Face, starring Audrey Hepburn and a seasoned Fred Astaire towards the
end of his career, also screens an initiatory trip to Paris. Fashion photographer Dick
Avery (Fred Astaire) and Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson) take the Greenwich
bookworm Jo Stockton, played by Hepburn, to Paris to start a innovative fashion
magazine while creating the necessary conditions for her femininity to bloom. When the
trio, Dick, Maggie Prescott and Jo, arrives in Paris a Frenchman offering a guided tour of
Paris approaches them. Since they came to Paris to work, they all are appalled to be
mistaken for those “tourists gaping around all day.” However, their resolution to work
only lasts until the very next scene, where the three characters celebrate the outrageous
claim of being a tourist in the song “Bonjour Paree.” The fetishization of urban Parisian
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space devoured by hungry tourist gazes recalls the fetishization and consumption of
French femininity.
Sabrina follows closely the Cinderella story but also adds a French twist to it: the
chauffeur’s daughter falls irremediably and hopelessly in love with David Larrabee, the
playboy son of her father’s employer. Her concerned father sends her away to Paris for
two years to forget her impossible love, but she only comes back more determined to
follow her heart. As love has its own ways, Sabrina, in the seduction process, discovers
herself once again when she falls for David Larrabee’s older brother, Linus Larrabee,
played by Humphrey Bogart. Before leaving Paris to return home, Sabrina writes a letter
to her father trying to capture the essence of her Parisian experience. Through her
window that frames a postcard décor, we get a glimpse of the illuminated Sacré-Coeur at
night and hear a nostalgic accordion playing La vie en rose. In this magical setting,
Sabrina’s main Parisian lesson has less to do with haute cuisine than with a certain art de
vivre, as her voice-over narration recounts:
I have learned so many things father, not just how to make vichyssoise, or calf’s
head with sauce vinaigrette, but a much more important recipe. I have learned
how to live; how to be in the world and of the world, and not just to stand aside
and watch. I will never again run away from life or from love either. (71)
Significantly, the French experiences changes Sabrina’s relation to both love and
life. Later in the film, she attributes the lack of romance in Linus Larrabee’s life to his
short stay in Paris: “Paris is not for changing planes, it is for changing your outlook,” she
insists. The City of Light thus activates the potential for love and genuine pleasures of
life in both Sabrina’s and Funny Face Jo’s characters.
However, female characters need to have an appropriate dosage of Frenchness for
a happy romance dénouement otherwise excessive passion or tragedy might ensue. The
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files of the French detective Claude Chavasse in Love in the afternoon prove it: the
majority of the love stories that this private investigator of illicit love examined turned
into catastrophic tragedies. The allusion to tragedy becomes blatant representation in
Funny Face. While Jo Stockton achieves the right balance of Frenchness, the parallel
portrayal of other French women is quite unsettling. The photographer Dick Avery has a
pretty good idea where Jo might be when she misses her first photo shot, as he starts
searching the existentialist bars of Montmartre. A low angle camera tracks him in a long
shot as he walks on narrow streets at night, where couples kiss shamelessly in the streets,
blocking pedestrian traffic. A chaotic feeling is established through sudden movements
within this tracking shot such as a bicycle passing him by and a small French car coming
from the opposite direction honking and almost knocking him over. When he arrives at
the Café de trois puces, the camera follows his perspective as he stops and looks at a
French couple seated at an outside table. The first French woman in the movie is
portrayed in an oblique perspective and is an obvious caricature of the Left-Bank
existentialist women dressed in black clothes hiding their faces behind dark and
untrimmed hair. Seized by an unpredictable access of rage, she starts yelling at her
partner: “Salaud, déguelasse, je vous déteste.” His prompt answer is a slap in her face,
which paradoxically has a magic reconciliatory effect, as the unknown French woman
adoringly sighs “Oh, Chéri.” For the American photographer, this is a pretty good clue
that he is in the right place since Jo was looking for an authentic French experience.
After entering the café, he is constantly harassed by French women, first Gigi,
then Mimi who, according to the Rimbauldian principle “Je est un autre,” confuse him by
referring to themselves as a subject of desire in the third person while they address him:
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”Gigi wants to dance.” Interestingly enough, the only witty reply Dick Avery can find to
this assertion of a feminine desire is a traditional model of domesticity, as he replies that
he is only there to pick up his wife and kids. His reaction triggers Jo’s anger against
“Stone Age” outmoded conventions since she completely identifies with the progressive
French women. Consequently, transformed into a complete anti-Sabrina, who could not
wait to go to the ball and dance, she follows: “Dance is a form of release. There is
nothing cute or formal about it. As I matter a fact, I rather feel like expressing myself
now and I could certainly use a release.” The release that follows is certainly one of the
most celebrated episodes of female dancing on screen. Audrey Hepburn dressed in her
black turtleneck, the slim black pants and white socks punctuating her movements,
comically reinvents herself in a unique dance performance. The distinctiveness of this
dance scene can be grasped as contrasted with Brigitte Bardot’s sensual mambo dance in
Et Dieu . . . créa la femme . Whereas Bardot incarnates an excessive French sexuality,
Hepburn’s dance scene reveals the unbalanced effect of one night’s too much
“existential” Frenchness. Although Jo connects with and identifies her inner feelings, as
every good French girl does, the gamine is only a developmental stage in the Hollywood
logic of iconic femininity. However, even though Sabrina and Jo, through their Paris
trips, activate an inner feminine essence to assure a smooth transition into a more adult
stage, the gamine figure is never effaced and subsists in tension with the joys of a more
adult femininity.
If Audrey Hepburn’s dance is juxtaposed with a subsequent performance of a
French woman, one can see how they function differently in the movie. In her act, Jo is
surrounded by Frenchmen, wearing striped shirts and punctuating an exterior Frenchness
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that obliquely influences her. This indirect reflection enables her character to have a
light-hearted approach to French existentialism and, at the same time, saves her from
ridicule by transposing her into a comic mode of representation. In contrast, in a different
episode when Dick Avery and the fashion magazine editor Maggie Prescott try to expose
Professor Flostre’s romantic interest in Jo and save her from his seductive pseudointellectual spell, they see an eerie female performance in his existentialist private club.
The camera tracks the main characters and the performance is viewed obliquely when we
are introduced to it. A French woman, singing a tragic love song, is portrayed decentered
in a medium shot, wearing a black turtleneck and a gray dress, playing the guitar in a
dehumanized outburst next to another woman who sobs empathically, following the
tenants of the famous philosophical current initiated by Professor Flostre. The mocking
distance between the Americans and the French woman’s song is constantly expressed
through opposition. While the other spectators confirm the heart-breaking quality of the
song, the magazine editor qualifies it as a bundle of laughs. The sense of ridicule is
reinforced at a visual level, through the juxtaposition of shots showing the magazine
editor ironically translating the song intercut with images of the French woman’s
performance. Maggie goes on explaining the meaning of the song: the French woman
stabbed her lover, but now that he is dead, she realizes her love for him. As the song
advances in intensity, the camera gets closer to her in a frontal close-up in which she
insightfully screams “Je suis complètement dérangée,” sarcastically translated by the
fashion editor as “this kid is a little confused.” Unsurprisingly, in the line of this French
pessimistic thought, only one remedy is left for this disturbed gamine: suicide. This
existential angoisse is further mocked by the subsequent American dancing performance
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of Dick and Maggie, where practical issues (how to get to Flostre’s room to save Jo from
his completely un-intellectual intentions) and optimism (“Remember trouble must be
treated just like rebel send ‘em to the devil”) become main themes.
When one looks directly in her face, the French woman has Medusa like qualities.
Therfore, an oblique perspective on her Frenchness is more suitable for the light-hearted
tone of Hepburn’s Hollywood romances set in Paris. In this sense, Hepburn’s gamines on
screen are marked by a French twist but her representations never become completely
French. Her filmic roles are only situated within a horizon of French femininity, which
sheds a different light on them and marks her as a unique gamine.
Even though in Sabrina or Funny Face, the gamine element activated in Paris
serves only to reveal a fundamental nature of the eternal feminine imagined to fit
Hollywood story patterns, it cannot be permanently effaced; it resurfaces, and cohabitates
with the icon of Hollywoodian femininity, constructing continuously Audrey’s appeal as
somewhat boyish, yet terribly feminine. This confusion is constantly illustrated on screen,
as, for instance, Mr. Flannegan identifies Ariane Chavasse as Adolphe, the thin girl. In
Funny Face, Paul Duval’s announces Jo’s stunning transformation from a lovely
caterpillar, not into a butterfly but a “bird of paradise,” from a waif, a gamine into a
fashion model. However, the conversion is incomplete, as Jo still manages to destroy
completely the fashion show introducing her as the new face of the Quality fashion
magazine to the world audience. Even Sabrina, after her Parisian remake, while in Linus
Larrabee’s office, spins into his director chair in her lovely black Givenchy dress, until
she gets dizzy and throws herself on the conference table: she is still a gamine,
nevertheless a very sophisticated one. The gamine figure never vanishes completely and
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it is precisely this coexistence between its rebellious boyish quality and an exquisite
feminine elegance that creates a focus of Hepburn’s appeal.
Not only is the gamine charming, but she also has brains. Elizabeth Wilson,
investigating Audrey Hepburn’s star persona, asserts that it reconciled two exclusive
terms in Hollywood cinema, intelligence and beauty:
She was described as ‘gamine’, but for me her charm lay not in the androgyny of
simple hair and a boyish figure, but in a style that seemed the embodiment of
sophisticated, existentialist Europe as opposed to the overripe artificiality of
Hollywood. She might look like Bambi, but her casual style signaled student, not
starlet: she proved that a woman could have brains and still be attractive. (36-7)
Accordingly, Hepburn’s characters have well defined professions. In Charade,
Regina "Reggie" Lambert works as a French-English interpreter, Gaby is a typist, Nicole
Bonnet, besides occasionally stealing artworks in How to steal a million, is an art expert,
and Ariane is a music student. Hepburn’s French native or naturalized characters work,
live, and actively discover their desires and life passions.
In Funny face, when Maggie Prescott, the fashionable magazine editor looked for
a woman who can be beautiful as well as intellectual for her “Think Pink” theme, she
cannot find one since the two models who could both think and looked beautiful are
unavailable: one is in jail, the other one on her honeymoon. This shortage is certainly not
flattering for New York models, especially since in Paris beautiful women wonder
relentlessly in the cafés of the Left Bank. Consequently, in New York, photographer Dick
Avery has to descend into dark bookstores to find in between dusty shelves a female
assistant whose femininity can only blossom in Paris.
Like Jo, who seduces her photographer through a stunning transformation from a
dusty and faded book clerk into an impeccable and remarkable model, Hepburn’s
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characters reinvent themselves, incorporating a French je ne sais quoi not only in love
plots and fashion, but also in active storytelling as they become the engine and the center
of the movie. In Paris when it sizzles, it is ultimately Gabrielle’s enthusiasm for the
Parisian way of life that sets Benson’s story in motion, as she becomes a fictional French
character. Arianne Chavasse, as a modern-day Scheherazade, constantly reinvents herself
using her father’s detective stories in order to conquer a cynical American gigolo. In
addition, Hepburn’s dynamic multi-faceted characters in both Charade and How to steal
a million change their personality as they change their Givenchy suits. They are
outrageously out of control and can be barely contained by the final surprise denouement
of the movie which rehabilitates their leading men.
A short, but relevant insight into Hepburn’s complex characters is Ariane’s room.
The first time we see her in Love in the afternoon she is playing the cello in her room and
a black dress is hanging from the ceiling sharing the foreground with her. Soon
afterwards, the camera tracks her character into the room, where books, flowers, a fish
bowl, a couple of snow globes but also photos, statues, clothes, drawings, and finally a
toilette cabinet filled with bottles, creams and perfumes create an enchanting universe.
The journey of self-discovery is situated at the intersection of the feminine, intellectual,
and infantine dimensions, a superposed image from which Audrey Hepburn’s star
persona acquires her unforgettable charm. In addition, another signifying element
distances itself in Ariane’s room. The little black dress that shares the foreground with
her: heavenly floating, hanging from the ceiling, it opens up another paramount
dimension of Hepburn’s persona: her relationship to fashion and her construction as one
of the persistent icons of beauty and style. Certainly, the same coordinates of feminine
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beauty, gamine innocence, and dynamic intelligence influence Hepburn’s relation to
fashion. 4
With Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn not only transformed the chauffeur’s daughter
into a sophisticated and elegant girl, but also she established her star persona as a new
style icon. This tremendous shift in her star image is in fact due to three pieces of
clothing that Hepburn purchased for Sabrina from the young designer Hubert de
Givenchy in 1953. The association of Hepburn and Givenchy is central for understanding
Hepburn’s star appeal and her relation to fashion, as the fabulous Audrey Hepburn look is
situated under the sign of a life-time collaboration on- and off-screen between the haute
couture creator Givenchy and his celebrated muse. Givenchy even created and dedicated
his first perfume to Audrey Hepburn in 1957. Unable to launch an advertisement
campaign, he asked the actress to use her image to promote the perfume L’interdit,
paving the way for other celebrated French actresses such as Catherine Deneuve, Carole
Bouquet, Juliette Binoche, and Sophie Marceau to appear in advertisements for couture
perfumes. The name of the perfume L’interdit alluded to a note of exclusivity, contiguous
to the association of haute couture to the uniqueness of art. 5 The on-screen fashion
collaboration accompanied by a real-life friendship between Givenchy and Hepburn,
gradually constructed her along the same lines as an unique object of art, an embodiment
of French chic and style. 6 Nevertheless, Audrey’s appeal also lies in her “ballerina”
outfits: the black turtleneck sweaters and the skinny pants. Within this context, Elizabeth
Wilson has read Hepburn’s appeal as a “gamine against the grain,” situated at the
contradiction between student clothes (Left Bank sweater, flat ballet shoes, stovepipe
pants) and haute couture, as the epitome of adult femininity. Through her analysis of the
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Cinderella story present in numerous Hepburn movies, Rachel Moseley adds another
critical layer and makes a strong argument that the transformation through clothes,
signifying both class transgression and limitation, plays an important part in Hepburn’s
appeal. I will argue here that her clothes, besides connoting class and gender
transgressions, also signify Frenchness in at least two different ways: through the
Givenchy imprint of the Parisian haute couture but also through the Left-Bank fashion
trends that recall the existentialist muse of Saint Germain, the black-clad Juliette Gréco.
After Sabrina, Hepburn appealed to Givenchy to create the costumes for her films
that had a contemporary setting. With the exception of Two for the Road, the legendary
star wore Givenchy clothes in all the movies that feature a French setting. The three
Givenchy pieces from Sabrina mainly announce the developments that her wardrobe will
follow throughout her next films. The step from traditional movie costumes to French
haute couture was unconventional in Hollywood and it impacted the filmic structure
accordingly. Stella Bruzzi in Undressing Cinema, while analyzing the rapport between
fashion and identity in films, highlights the difference between traditional costumes –
which are meant to complement, color, and authenticate the filmic narrative – and haute
couture, which is a spectacle in itself, creating pauses in the narrative through visual
diversions. The haute couture costumes are iconic in a Barthesian sense because they
carry an independent meaning that does not completely overlap with the purpose of the
filmic narrative. As Bruzzi puts it: “The essence of iconic clothes is that they have an
independent, prior meaning; they function as interjections or disruptions of the normative
reality of the text” (17). Consequently, when Sabrina is clothed in a couture costume, her
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image signifies foremost Parisian elegance, Givenchy haute couture, and stylistic
difference.
Three clothing items present in Sabrina announce the main fashion developments
in all other Hepburn’s movies. First, there is the suit at the Glen Cove station. Sabrina
instructs her father beforehand: “If you should have any difficulty in recognizing your
daughter, I shall be the most sophisticated woman at the Glen Cove station.” As the
dissolve ensues, the first shot presented is that of a poodle – Paris is known as the iconic
city of love, haute couture and small dogs – with a jeweled collar, a prerequisite for
Parisian chic. As Rachel Moseley insightfully notices, the camera pans up an elegant suit,
emphasizing the need to display the Parisian wardrobe first. Moreover, Sabrina’s
movements are coded as a fashion parade, as she walks away from the camera and then
returns in a movement, which according to Moseley, “offers the spectator a back view of
the cut, the tiny slit in the rear hemline and the ‘kitten-heel shoes’” (47). Besides the
poodle, the other accessories – the gray turban, golden earrings, and the white gloves –
achieve an exquisite balance of exotic mystery, French with Ottoman influences, and
classic elegance. In the 1960s, Hepburn’s perfectly tailored Givenchy suits, following a
classic elegant style and accessorized with white gloves and stylish hats, will become
emblematic in movies such as Charade or How to steal a million.
The Sabrina white ball dress is, as Clark Keogh puts it, “one of the best
Cinderella moments in cinematic history” (24). This episode reveals the second instance
in the movie when dress has more to do with fashion spectacle than with heterosexual
desire. 7 It also signifies the French haute couture as different and innovative. When
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compared to the other dresses worn by women at the Larrabee party, the Parisian white
organdy dress with black embroidery is the absolute center of attention.
The third Givenchy piece conforms to Coco Chanel’s commandments: the
infamous “little black dress,” which brought in the “décolleté bateau” renamed “décolleté
Sabrina” due to its tremendous success. Since Chanel introduced it in 1926, the little
black dress remains the personification of the ultimate French chic: simple, yet extremely
elegant, Hepburn’s character Sabrina wore it with exquisite gamine elegance during her
last date with Linus Larrabee.
It seems only natural that Audrey Hepburn’s next feature Funny Face directly
addresses her relation to fashion. The book lover Jo Stockton blossoms into an haute
couture fashion icon in Paris while modeling for a new line of clothes by the famous
French fashion designer, Paul Duval, an obvious on-screen substitute for Givenchy. The
character of Dick Avery becomes a reference to Richard Avedon, the real photographer
who accompanied Stanley Donen and Hepburn in Paris. Jo models in outdoor spaces, a
transparent pretense to show more iconic images of Paris; thus fashion and the city are
represented in the same frame in order to converge their signifying power where style
meets the weight of cultural and historical heritage, fashion elegance finds its
counterpoint in the architectural grace of the L’Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, color
finds its echo in the flower market of the Ile de la Cité, the exclusive taste of haute
couture in the elitist world of the Opera, and the artistry of fashion in the eternal treasures
of the Louvre. Nevertheless, there is a strong sense of movement associated with each of
these pictures, either through Hepburn’s movements or an element present in the picture.
To illustrate this dynamism, Jo releases a bouquet of balloons in front of the small Arc de
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Triomphe du Carrousel and she is surrounded by white doves in front of an illuminated
fountain in Paris by night. While modeling, she catches a fish in the Seine and is pictured
as a modern Anna Karenina in a wool travel suit with a wicker travel case sharing the
same frame with a train. In one shot Jo is pure movement, as she descends the beautiful
ornate Opera staircase and the “grand escalier” of the Louvre, spreading her arms
Figure 5.2. Posters for Charade (1963) and How to Steal a Million (1966)
in an imitation of the Winged Victory of Samothrace and yelling at the photographer:
“Take the shot, take the shot.”
This dynamism in relation to both fashion and life seems to be prolonged into her
movies set in Paris during the 1960s. In the two detective stories Charade and How to
steal a million, her characters run, walk and hide a lot in their tailored daytime
ensembles. The opening scene of How to steal a million is unforgettable in this sense,
picturing Nicole Bonnet driving at full speed a red car in her extravagant all white
ensemble – suit, sunglasses, a futuristic hat, and shoes. Moreover, the Charade posters
show the couple Hepburn and Cary Grant running or surrounded by a circular arrow
accentuating both the thriller component, but also a dynamic element. Similarly, the
poster for How to steal a million features an haute couture-clad Hepburn in a fashion
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runaway posture, as she seems to walk out of the frame. This dynamism constructs her as
independent, as if her active body constantly undermines the fetishizing power of clothes.
It also enables her in How to steal a million to “give Givenchy a night off,” as Simon
Dermott, the enamored fake burglar says, while they prepare to steal the counterfeit
Cellini Venus and Nicole Bonnet has to change clothes to adopt a more down-to-earth
style. This significant sense of movement present in Hepburn’s star persona is echoed by
the gamine image that is recurrently represented as striding across barricades, almost
floating, to lead the revolutionaries to their victory.
As Elizabeth Wilson recalls, in Funny Face Hepburn is also a “gamine against the
grain,” a black-clad student recalling another dark French gamine, Juliette Gréco. Her
Left-bank style impact was equally relevant and also had a tremendous impact especially
on women’s freedom of movement, as Moseley argues: ”Take the look with which she is
often associated – the ‘dancer’s black’ of slim black trousers, flat ballet-style pumps and
a fine black jersey as seen in Sabrina (1954) and Funny Face (1957). At that moment,
trousers were still not widely considered appropriate everyday wear for women, but they
did allow ease of movement” (87). She also popularized the gamine haircut, flat ballet
shoes, the turtleneck, slim Capri pants, extravagant dark glasses, cinched waists, threequarter sleeves and fitted shirts wrapped at the waist – clothing and fashion elements that
liberated female bodies (Clark Keogh 15).
Through her collaboration with Givenchy, Hepburn’s name is strongly entrenched
in the world of the French haute couture in a typical Pygmalion model constructed in the
world of cinematic and extra-cinematic fashion. To the extent that a French issue of
Vogue investigating “La femme française” mentions Audrey Hepburn next to Catherine
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Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Inès de la Fressange: “La beauté française type? Audrey
Hepburn aussi aurait très bien pu l’incarner. Ciel, une Américaine ? Pourquoi pas, si c’est
l’égérie de Givenchy” (110). Fashion has an innovative and inclusive logic and therefore
can creatively pinpoint the French feminine regardless of nationality.
However, it is not only Hepburn’s glamorous side that appeals to the French but
her dancer look. In “Cinéma et Destin de Femmes,” Verena Aebischer and Sonia DayanHerzbrun analyze the impact the stars had on the female French audience within the
process of social change that France was undergoing at the beginning of the 1960s.
Among the feminine models of the 1950s, Audrey Hepburn is cited as an identity model
for French girls and women along with Brigitte Bardot. As American stars seemed too
remote, Hepburn’s “positive gamine” image functioned as an identification model for
young French girls while still signifying Hollywood for French audiences (175).
Thirty years later in his homage to French female stars 8 Femmes, François Ozon
modeled the image of the gamine Suzon, played by Virginie Ledoyen, after Audrey
Hebpurn’s image. The director did not choose any of the glamorous outfits Givenchy
created for her. Instead, he uses Edith Head’s dress that Sabrina wore before her Paris
transformation. However, there is one major difference: Sabrina’s character is a
Hollywood gamine while Ozon’s duplicated type is only a pretense for staging a more
complex combination of innocence and perversity. French cinema equally reappropriates
Hepburn’s gamine image as being an epitome of French youthful femininity. Hepburn’s
star persona is placed under the sign of a tremendous capacity for change at the level of
her character’s subjectivity, nationality, and at the frivolous level of fashion. A nostalgic
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Roland Barthes observed it in passing while he was deploring the death of an icon, Greta
Garbo:
Le visage d’Audrey Hepburn, par exemple, est individualisé, non seulement par
sa thématique particulière (femme-enfant, femme-chatte), mais aussi par sa
personne, par une spécification à peu près unique du visage, qui n’a plus rien
d’essentiel, mais est constitue par une complexité infinie des fonctions
morphologiques. Comme langage, la singularité de Garbo était d’ordre
conceptuel, celle d’Audrey Hepburn est d’ordre substantiel. Le visage de Garbo
est Idée, celui de Hepburn est événement. (57)
Barthes associates Hepburn’s face with change in order to contrast it with the
archetypical beauty of Greta Garbo. Unlike Garbo’s face, Hepburn’s face has lost the
vertical correspondence with the platonic world of ideas. Garbo’s perfect mask face
enabled a circulation of meaning from essential to existential, from archetype to a mortal
figure. Instead, Hepburn incarnates a horizontal logic of charm: her movement within this
network circulates identity and difference. The mobility of her star persona enables her to
flow between different types of subjectivities on-screen: from a book loving clerk to a
model, from the chauffeur’s daughter to a Parisian chic gamine, from a enamored
adolescent to an experienced coquette, from a typist to a French heroine, from an
American women bored by provincial life to a French widow, or from the gamine to a
thief. A French twist usually is the center and the facilitator of these transformations. As
the identity of her character changes, a corresponding fashion transformation occurs and
Hepburn obliges, moving between a sophisticated icon of French haute couture and the
youthful independent fashion composed of black turtlenecks and skinny black pants.
Hepburn’s stardom, thus, lends itself to a reading through the three-faceted star
model. As icon of cinema, Audrey Hepburn benefited from the highest Hollywood
visibility. As a French gamine, she created a distinct niche in Hollywood stardom. And,
184
finally, as an icon of consumption, she is the personification of Givenchy’s style. In the
French related performances, Hepburn is not a “serene misfit” as Dyer saw her in her
American roles, as she seems to have found her home revolving around a certain type of
French femininity, reconciling the national divergences through a dynamic star persona
constructed as both a Hollywood icon and an eternal French gamine.
1
Audrey Hepburn’s noble heritage is a recurrent discourse associated with her image and constantly
present in articles or in her biographies. Radie Harris asserts that Hepburn’s “patrician beauty” and natural
grace is inherited from her mother, “the Baroness” (102). Ian Woodward in his biography even attempts to
draw her aristocrat lineage starting with her great-grandfather the dignified Baron van Heemstra, exGovernor of Surinam and popular figure at the Court of Queen Wilhelmina (11-16). Pamela Clarke Keogh
explains the popular occurrence of the adjective “regal” in Hepburn’s descriptions as natural, because of
her aristocratic heritage (49).
2
This celebrated encounter between the writer Colette and her Gigi, Audrey Hepburn, constantly
mentioned in her biographies, entails a discussion about the perfect fit between Hepburn’s on- and offscreen persona. Due to her aristocratic heritage, the Princess Ann role from Roman Holiday seems to
perfectly fit her. Pamela Clark Keogh underlines it in the case of Funny Face: “the part was so close to
Audrey that even her mother told screenwriter Leonard Gershe she could not believe it was written by
someone who didn’t know her daughter” (90). Discourses around her off-screen persona emphasize the
same qualities of her characters: fragile but strong, vulnerable and passionate, romantic but courageous.
There is a perfect echo between Hepburn’s characters and off-screen persona. The roles seem to have been
written for her and, reciprocally, the discourses about Hepburn’s life reflect her multiple screen alter-egos.
3
Cecil Beaton analyzes Audrey’s face in detailed photographic terms: “Audrey Hepburn has enormous
heron’s eyes and dark eyebrows slanted towards the Far East. Her facial features show character rather than
prettiness: the bridge of the nose seems almost too narrow to carry its length, which flares into a globular
tip with nostrils startling like a duck’s bill. Her mouth is wide, with a cleft under the lower lip too deep for
classical beauty, and the delicate chin appears even smaller by contrast with the exaggerated with of her
jaw bones. . . . Beneath this child-like head (as compact as a coconut with its cropped hair and wispy
monkey-fur fringe) is a long, incredibly slender and straight neck” (129). Evidently, Audrey’s beauty does
not conform to the established canons of Hollywood beauty. Harris also remarks that Audrey is not
beautiful by “the technical standards of perfect beauty”: “She once confessed to me that she used to be so
self-conscious about the unevenness of her front teeth that she would rarely smile” (100). In an off-screen
context, the biography of Sean Ferrer-Hepburn situates these imperfections under “what the French call
wisely a certain je ne sais quoi and interprets them as a sincere reflection of Audrey Hepburn’s personality:
“the speech of her heart and the inflection of pure intentions. She lived her life believing in the power of
simplicity” (87).
4
Gaylyn Studlar argues that the gamine image corresponded to the introduction of a youthful feminine
market for high fashion. In 1952 Vogue acknowledged this market of potential consumers through its
“young idea feature,” aimed at readers seventeen to twenty-five years old (168). Thus, the commodified
gamine image corresponded to a contemporary market trend.
185
5
In her study of the Givenchy style, Françoise Mohrt underlines the playful caprice around this notion of
exclusivity: “As the saying went: ‘Mais c’est mon parfum! C’est interdit!’ or in English: “But it’s my
perfume! No one else can have it!” And so it went around the world, until now L’Interdit remains, even
after all the subsequent new perfumes, a global success. A classic. In its cubic, typical 1950s flagon, issued
in a limited and numbered series, L’Interdit carries the Hepburn touch in its stopper, a huge square
cabochon straight out of Tiffany’s window” (88).
6
Sean Ferrer-Hepburn, besides underlining the extraordinary friendship between Givenchy and Audrey
Hepburn, emphasizes their professional collaboration as mutual involvement: “Together they created her
look, the externalization of her style. She saw the clothes he created as the beautiful vase that would
enhance a simple filed flower, whereas he viewed them as the vase that is kept simple so that nothing will
detract from the natural beauty of the flower itself” (152).
7
Stella Bruzzi analyzed this moment as one of pure spectacle where the gaze is captured by the dress and
desire is deflected from the body to clothes: “Fetishism thus encroaches on this rapport between fashion
and spectator as a contradictory impulse that de-eroticizes the body” (24).
186
CONCLUSION
In 2007, the French film director Pascale Ferran started a collaborative initiative
to organize a document evaluating the well-being of French cinema. “Le rapport Ferran”
is one of the latest attempts to measure the pulse of French filmmaking. Among other
problematic trends in contemporary French cinema, Ferran observes the bipolarization in
financial terms between big-budget films and auteur cinema. The film director also
remarks the decisional weight that film distributors recently acquired as box-office
success became a criterion for assigning value to a movie. Within this context, she
critically notes: “On continue à vivre sur l’idée que le cinéma est à la fois un art et une
industrie (puissance de la pensée de Malraux), alors qu’entre temps, il est devenu
essentiellement un commerce.”
Contemporary cinema has become first and foremost a commercial enterprise.
Allen J. Scott remarks the fierce competition of cultural products in the global scene,
arguing the necessity of collaboration through joint marketing efforts between the
national cultural product industries in order to assure their viability in the global scene
(109). Fitting into Scott’s framework, the French female star system has already acquired
a distinct characteristic in the global market. In terms of exports in the 1950s, Cravenne
envisioned stardom’s popularity and his vision found its expression in Bardot’s image. In
the late 1990s, Toscan du Plantier dreamed of it as an upmarket product capitalizing on
its Frenchness. French female stars who constantly bridge the popular and the art sides of
187
cinema are highly visible agents in exporting French cultural products, be they films,
clothes, cosmetics, or perfumes. In turn, they acquire a higher visibility and exposure
through all these various discourses reinforcing their paradoxical qualities.
In Chapter 1, I have shown that the dispute between popular and art cinema has
been perennial since the 1950s and that French female stars constantly cross this divide to
the extent that there are two paradoxical extra-cinematic networks of texts that create a
veritable star and anti-star system linked to their images. French female actresses
transform themselves easily to stars with a pronounced predilection for the star text when
it is time to shine in the global cinematic horizon against their Hollywood counterparts.
They are also anti-stars, mythical actresses, stars-as-labor who, in collaboration with
movie directors, play an important role in the Pygmalion model central to French cinema
and its stardom. Chapter 2 addressed the function of female stars as icons of the nation.
Female stars are preferred icons of Frenchness through their roles anchored in the
historical and literary national imaginary as well as through to their incarnation of
Marianne. The national types of the gamine or of the established French woman are
foregrounded according to the socio-political backdrop of the epoch. Bardot’s gamine
image resonated with the national discourses of the beginnings of the Fifth Republic,
whereas Deneuve fit the tradition of heritage through her classical and mature aesthetic
beauty. In addition, not only do French female stars incarnate a long lineage of literary
and historic iconic characters, but they also reconcile ambivalent historic representations
through their iconic image.
In Chapter 3, I looked at on-screen representations that construct the city of Paris
as a woman and I have argued that reading them through the lens of objectification and
188
fetishization reduces their capacity of signification. Jill Forbes, for instance, reads Cléo
de 5 à 7 as the story of a woman/city objectified as a prostitute. Cléo is, after all a demimondaine, and through her walks in the streets, she recalls urban prostitutes. Further,
Forbes draws a comparison between Cléo’s illness and the related imaginary of
pathologized prostitution. These critical readings, however, only scratch the surface of
the iconic French and Parisian women. Closer scrutiny reveals that this interpretation,
besides ignoring the possibility of Cléo being a flâneuse, does not take into account her
interaction with the city of Paris. The ways in which feminine on-screen representations
resonate with the urban space allows for a reassessment of their place(s) in the city. Onand off-screen women’s images map Parisian space according to their inner structure
through a strong metonymical relation to the city, their feminine and urban cartographies
reinforcing each other in an iconic text. In addition, these representations are an open
invitation to travel for female spectators as voyageuses and a transgression of artcommercial barriers through their functions in extra-cinematic discourses and practices
such as advertisements or movie tourism.
The paradoxical tension of French stars as national cultural icons and objects of
consumption seems to reside candidly at the heart of their images, as I show in Chapter 4.
They became thus more prone to exportation due to their aura that reconciles a nationaluniversal contradiction. Through short circuits in connotations, even the mythical
Hollywood cinematic aura becomes reconcilable with the aura of the French actress due
to some overlaps in subtexts. The mythologies, however, are not static and changed from
the 1950s to the 1990s. Barthes discussed Greta Garbo, opposing her to the new event,
Audrey Hepburn. In 2007, Garcin compared Béart to the mythical Deborah Kerr.
189
Through this shift, the classical period of Hollywood cinema, including Kerr and
Hepburn, became mythical territory for the French cinema of the new millennium.
As a Hollywood icon, Hepburn benefited from its economies of scale, and the ongoing fascination that her stardom exerts corresponds to the tri-partite French model of
stardom. Her star image is constructed at the intersection of Hollywood iconicity, of a
Parisian gamine type, and an icon of feminine consumption stylized by Givenchy. Since
Hepburn fit a familiar model of female stardom, even the French adopted her.
Bearing a distinct resemblance to Hepburn, a new French gamine, Audrey Tautou
dominated French and international screens after the resounding success of Le Fabuleux
Destin d’Amélie Poulain. In “Amélie, Loana, Jean-Luc et moi,” François Gorin, film
critic for Télérama, bitterly attacks Amélie because of a new superior form of art craft it
implies: “Le film de Jeunet semblait alors propice de quelque union sacrée autour d’une
certaine idée du cinéma ni trop ci ni trop ça, superbe objet feignant d’oublier à la fois l’art
et le commerce au profit d’une forme supérieure d’artisanat.” The reception of the film in
the 2001 electoral year rendered it highly problematic because of the “idéolgie du p’tit
bonheur,” as Gorin put it. Its effacement of ethnic diversity equally fed into the
difficulties of the French contemporary society dealing with its multi-cultural and multiethnical facets. Trends of diversity incorporation into the image of the Republic became
noticeable in 2003 with the exhibit “Les Nouvelles Mariannes” and, more recently, with
the L’Oréal ambassador, Rachida Brakni. Female stars, as icons of Frenchness, have thus
a resourceful pool to reinvent themselves in order to reflect, in a metonymical manner,
the contemporary feminine population of France.
190
At a polar opposite from Loana – the commodified and highly sexualized heroine
of the popular TV show Loft Story that dominated French screens during 2001– and
Jeunet’s movie, is Jean-Luc Godard’s Eloge de l’amour. Godard, a lonely traveler in art
cinema, reflects upon the role of narration in cinema and lingers on the problematic idea
of feminine representation as his camera refuses to frame into close-ups the female lead
character. Faithful to the auteur tradition, Godard distances himself from iconic stardom.
Jeunet, on the other hand, employs it, quoting high art cinema at the service of the
popular comedy, and manages to create an iconic character and star Amélie-Audrey
Tautou. Moreover, the Montmartre girl is strongly anchored in the national imaginary
through the type of the gamine. Her universal appeal, indicated by the tag-line of the
movie “Elle va vous changer la vie,” lies in defining transformation as the central engine
of the narrative, reconciling the universal-national tension through filmic and tourist
consumption. Jeunet’s movie is therefore a perfect synchronic illustration of what French
star images accomplish diachronically as the synergies of the three-faceted model of their
stardom – icons of cinema, nation, and consumption – enable them to export and to
perpetuate the glamorous French star system.
191
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