La Parisienne in cinema

Between art and life

Felicity Chaplin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526109552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Chic, sophisticated, seductive, and enigmatic, the Parisienne possesses a je ne sais quoi which makes her difficult to define. Who or what is the Parisienne and how she is depicted in cinema is the subject of this new and exciting book. In the first book-length publication to explore la Parisienne in cinema, Chaplin expands on existing scholarship on the Parisienne type in fields such as art history, literature, and fashion history, and builds on scholarship on the films discussed to both enrich and offer new perspectives on these films.Accessible and wide-ranging, this interdisciplinary and lively work will be of immediate interest to students and researchers working in Film Studies and French Studies and the broader humanities as well as a general interest audience. It is also essential reading for cinephiles and Francophiles alike.

1

Muse

Paris est la ville artiste et poète par excellence; mais les plus grandes artistes et les plus grandes poètes de Paris, ce sont les Parisiennes. Pourquoi? Parce que les Parisiennes imaginent, achèvent, complètent à chaque instant une œuvre réelle et vivante, car elles se créant ellesmêmes. (Théodore de Banville, ‘Le Génie des Parisiennes’)

(Paris is the artist and poet city par excellence; but the greatest artists and the greatest poets of Paris are the Parisiennes. Why? Because the Parisiennes imagine, finish, complete at each moment a real and living masterpiece, because they create themselves.)

Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. (Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’)

Elena (Ingrid Bergman) pins a marguerite to her bodice, a talisman at the ready to offer her men. Enchanted by his latest muse, Klimt (John Malkovich) sketches from memory Léa de Castro (Saffron Burrows) performing her Cambodian dance. Already a muse to writers and artists in 1920s Paris, Adriana (Marion Cotillard) captures the attention of Degas, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge. Jean Renoir’s Elena et les hommes (1956), Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt (2006) and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011) all feature la Parisienne as muse and depict the complicated relationship between art and life.

Even where historical or ‘real-life’ Parisiennes are concerned, it is often difficult to discern where real life ends and representation begins. Joanna Richardson highlights this ambiguity in her discussion of Blanche d’Antigny, a Second Empire courtesan and stage actress who was also the inspiration for the title character of Zola’s Nana:

Zola’s L’Assommoir inspired Edouard Manet to paint Nana, and Manet’s painting in turn inspired Zola to write the sequel to the novel, in which Nana played the principal part. But when Zola talked to a bon viveur of the Second Empire, when he took notes on courtesans of the imperial age, Blanche d’Antigny and Nana became identified in his imagination. They became merged in a single creature, the prototype of the cocotte. (9)

The figure that emerges from this blurring of art and life is la Parisienne as muse. Many Parisiennes are described as muses not only to painters, poets and writers, but also fashion designers, musicians and filmmakers. Madame Sabatier, known as La Présidente, is perhaps the quintessential Parisienne muse of the nineteenth century and ‘directly responsible for some of the finest poems in the French language’ (Richardson 171). She was the inspiration for the courtesan Rosanette Bron, alias ‘The Marshal’, in Gustave Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale.

The blurring of art and life is integral to the type la Parisienne, an enigmatic figure whose existence is as much determined by art as art is a re-presentation of her material existence. Yet the real life or material existence of la Parisienne is already highly constructed or artificial. Tamar Garb argues that artifice is in fact the hallmark of la Parisienne, describing her as ‘the sophisticated product of modern tailoring, grooming and cosmetics’ (‘Painting’ 115). La Parisienne thus became an ideal woman for nineteenth-century artists who demonstrated a preference for the artificial over the natural. In ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, for example, Charles Baudelaire writes: ‘All things that adorn woman, all the things that go to enhance her beauty, are part of her self … . When he describes the pleasure caused by the sight of a beautiful woman, what poet would dare to distinguish between her and her apparel?’ (424). Baudelaire goes on to refute the popular Romantic idea that ‘nature embellishes beauty’ (424), claiming that everything natural is ugly and that beauty is found solely in artifice. La Parisienne emerged as the quintessential aesthetic archetype in the nineteenth century during a time in which there was a preoccupation with anti-nature and artifice. Oscar Wilde remarks: ‘Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to Art they must be translated into artistic conventions’ (239). The difference here is not between life and art in the sense of what is natural and what is artificial but rather between two different types of art, that of la Parisienne and that of her representation. It is the woman’s artifice and not her nature which inspires the artist.

In cinema, there are two further senses of this idea of between art and life by which the figure of la Parisienne can be considered: the intra-filmic and the extra-filmic. The intra-filmic deals with considerations pertaining to the film’s diegesis, but also with whether the Parisienne character exists on the same ontological level as other characters in a film (as she does in Elena et les hommes), or, on the contrary, if she exists in an interstitial space either as fantasy or hallucination or figment attributable to another character (as in Midnight in Paris and Klimt). The extra-filmic deals with considerations falling outside the film’s diegesis, which belong properly to the creation and production process, including the various sources, inspirations and texts which inform the creation of character. The extra-filmic is concerned with whether these Parisiennes are based on or inspired by real life or historical personages, as is the case in Klimt and Elena; or wholly fictional, or not based on anyone immediately identifiable, as is the case in Midnight in Paris. Both Midnight in Paris and Klimt represent the blurring of art and life quite literally. Allen does this temporally through the use of a fantasy sequence in which the hero Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is transported from the Paris of around 2010 back to Paris in the 1920s, the era of the so-called Lost Generation. It is here that he first encounters the Parisienne Adriana. Ruiz uses different media within the cinematic medium (painting, mirrors, sketches, shadow play, cinematograph) to achieve this effect.

In any Parisienne film there are three possible categories for the origin of the Parisienne character: directly based on a real-life Parisienne (the protagonist of a biopic or a minor character in a historical drama); loosely based on or inspired by one or more historical Parisiennes; or wholly fictitious yet having prefigurations in history, art and literature and the conscious or unconscious, intentional or unintentional, creation of the writer/director. This latter category makes up the bulk of films featuring the Parisienne type, primarily because every Parisienne character draws on an iconography derived from a diversity of sources, including history, art, literature, mass culture and cinema. In iconographical terms, there are three motifs associated with la Parisienne as muse: she is depicted as inhabiting an artistic milieu; she is the subject of portraiture; and she is sui generis or self-fashioning.

In her essay on Édouard Manet’s The Parisienne, Françoise Tétart-Vittu writes: ‘From Nina de Callias … to Valtesse de La Bigne and Méry Laurent, Parisiennes were fashionable, chic, and beautiful women who moved freely in the artistic circles of Paris’ (78). According to Vincent Cronin, during the Belle Époque Parisian women ‘played an influential role in intellectual, literary and artistic life’ (287). La Parisienne is also often found in an artistic milieu in literature and the visual arts. The protagonist of Colette’s novel La Vagabonde, Renée Néré, is the former wife and model of portrait artist Adolphe Taillandy who finds herself on the music-hall stage in the company of acrobats, mimes and dancers. In Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale Rosanette Bron has her portrait painted by Pellerain:

Il engagea donc Rosanette à se faire peindre, pour offrir son visage à son cher Arnoux. Elle accepta, car elle se voyait au milieu du Grand Salon, à la place d’honneur, avec une foule devant elle, et les journaux en parleraient, ce qui ‘la lancerait’ tout à coup. (171)

He accordingly urged Rosanette to have her portrait painted, so that she could present her likeness to her beloved Arnoux. She agreed, for she saw herself in the middle of the grand salon, in the place of honour, with a crowd in front of her and the newspapers talking about her, something which would immediately ‘launch her’. (Baldick 154)

In the visual arts, la Parisienne is depicted in such settings as the café-concert or the music hall, particularly in the works of Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, in the salon or artist’s studio, as in Vuillard’s painting Jeune Femme en rose dans le salon rue de Calais (1920), and in the theatre as in Mary Cassatt’s paintings In the Loge (1878) and Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge (1879). The very concept of the portrait implies the association of la Parisienne with painters and her presence in the studio, and many Parisiennes were artists’ models. For Julie Johnson, modelling was ‘not just a rite of passage for would-be artists but was also a serious profession for many Parisian women. The woman artist-as-model became a pervasive and provocative cultural image in the late nineteenth century, one that was discussed and described in the popular literature and fiction of the day’ (234). Indeed, an 1897 illustrated book, Autour d’elles, features Henri Boutet’s sketches of the artist’s model in Paris. Marie Lathers writes how in his Preface to the book Georges Montorgueil ‘revealed the interchangeability of the Parisienne and the model’ when he suggested that one of Boutet’s chapter titles ‘The Model in the Studio’ could become ‘The Parisienne in the Studio’ (40). Montorgueil writes:

How interesting it would be to follow, in their misleading movements, these Parisian models! Not a one who resembles another in this amiable flock; each has her type and story. Whereas the Trasteverine, statue in the flesh, earthly bronze, is one and indivisible, they are multiple in appearance, figure, sentiment, intellect, these girls of Paris who have come to Art as its eternal source of Beauty, brought by the most capricious twists of fate. (qtd in Lathers 40)

In the films discussed below, the protagonists are all depicted inhabiting an artistic milieu. In Midnight in Paris our introduction to Adriana takes place at Gertrude Stein’s apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus Montparnasse, an open house for writers and artists which functioned ‘as a kind of literary American embassy’ (Hussey 336). Adriana is depicted in the company of Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and Stein, as well as fictional American writer Gil Pender. In the 1920s Montparnasse replaced Montmartre as ‘the latest outpost for the avant-garde’ (Wiser 38). During the decade Paris was a ‘veritable palace of modernism’, with Montparnasse at the heart of artistic activity (Hussey 336). During the scene in Stein’s apartment, Adriana remarks to Gil that Paris is a ‘wonderful city for writers, artists’. She is shown attending a Surrealist wedding and, later in the film, at the Moulin Rouge in the company of Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and Gauguin. After enumerating her various liaisons with Braque, Modigliani and Picasso, Gil exclaims: ‘My God, you take art groupie to a whole new level!’

Elena et les hommes opens with an establishing shot of Elena seated at a piano beside an emerging young composer. As the camera pulls back, we see the walls of her apartment adorned with paintings which, given Elena’s poverty, suggest they were gifts from painter friends. Susan Hayward writes: ‘That she has some contemporary canvasses surrounding her points to her aesthetic acumen or her desire to support artists’ (‘Design’ 101). In Klimt, Léa de Castro is found in the company of Georges Méliès, Klimt and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

The second motif in the iconography of the Parisienne as muse is la Parisienne as the subject of portraiture. By the late nineteenth century la Parisienne had become the subject of many paintings, drawings and etchings. As well as portraits of the generic type, there are also many portraits of real-life Parisiennes, including Georges Clairin’s Sarah Bernhardt (1876), Giovanni Boldini’s Cléo de Mérode (1901), Jacques-Émile Blanche’s Colette (1905), Pierre Bonnard’s Misia (1908), Moise Kisling’s Arletty (1933) and Kees Van Dongen’s Bardot (1964). In Klimt, Léa de Castro has her portrait painted by both Whistler and Klimt. In Midnight in Paris, Picasso paints a portrait of Adriana which becomes a focal point of discussion in the film, particularly around the question of representation. While Elena is not a subject of a portrait in Elena et les hommes, the film as a whole can be considered a cinematic portrait of a complex or composite subject.

The third motif in the iconography of the Parisienne type as muse is la Parisienne as sui generis or self-fashioning. Lisa Tiersten remarks that ‘fashion and decorating were themselves art forms and the chic Parisienne an artistic creator in her own right’ (121). In Parisiennes de ce temps, Uzanne remarks that ‘[l]a toilette pour la femme moderne est le premier des arts, celui qui les contient tous. C’est, nous l’avons dit, son style caractéristique, c’est aussi sa palette harmonieuse, sa poésie rythmique, sa mise en scène élégante, son chant de triomphe, son apothéose en un mot’ (57–8) (the toilette is for the modern woman the highest of the arts, that which contains all others. It is, as we have said, her characteristic style; it is also her harmonious palette, her rhythmic poetry, her elegant mise en scène, her song of triumph, her apotheosis in a word). One of the defining features of la Parisienne is her desire to create an appearance. This self-fashioning motif often finds expression in depictions of the Parisienne at her toilette, or contemplating her image in a mirror. The term ‘toilette’ originates from the piece of fabric or toile upon which the accoutrements of the toilette were arranged. Joan DeJean traces the emergence of the toilette as an art form and spectacle back to the reign of Louis XIV and the Versailles era when ‘many aristocrats began to stage la toilette as still another scene in their highly theatricalised lives’ (252). By the end of the eighteenth century the dressing table and dressing room had been invented, as it was conceded that the ritual of the toilette warranted its very own space (DeJean 253). La Parisienne is often depicted in paintings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries composing her toilette: Auguste Toulmouche’s Vanity (1890), Alfred Stevens’s La Parisienne japonaise (1872), Manet’s Nana (1877), Kees Van Dongen’s Woman before a mirror (1908), Mary Cassatt’s Woman at her toilette (1909), Degas’s Woman combing her hair before a mirror (c. 1887), Jacques-Émile Blanche’s Désirée Manfred face à son Miroir (c. 1905) and Toulmouche’s La Toilette (1890).

In her discussion of Georges Seurat’s Young Woman Powdering Herself (1890), Garb remarks that the ‘application of make-up, itself a kind of painting, became the subject of high art and popular imagery alike’ (Bodies 115). Tiersten remarks that many writers ‘described the Parisienne as a combination of the artwork and the artist’ (144). Depicting la Parisienne before her mirror reinforces her self-fashioning aspect. Marie Double remarks that a woman is ‘the artist of her own beauty, composing her toilette as a painter colors his canvas, perfecting the details, arranging the nuances, high-lighting a feature, concealing a flaw … Woman, the Parisienne above all, has made herself her own creator’ (qtd in Tiersten 144–5). In a similar vein, Simon remarks that the ‘issue of make-up crystallized the movement which was tending to turn woman into an artist’ (132), a movement which finds its clearest expression in Théophile Gautier’s De La Mode (1858) and Baudelaire’s L’Éloge du maquillage (1863).

Elena, Adriana and Léa de Castro are all depicted as self-fashioning. Elena is shown seated at her toilette before a mirror, fixing her hair with the help of her maid. The shot, the position of the two women before the mirror (Elena seated and her maid standing behind her leaning in), evokes nineteenth-century paintings of Parisiennes at their toilette, particularly, in terms of composition, Eva Gonzalès’s Le Petit Lever (1875). In Klimt, this idea of self-fashioning is derived less from the character of Léa de Castro than from her real-life Parisienne inspiration Cléo de Mérode, whose greatest gift ‘lay in the art of self-fash-ioning’ (Garval 4). In Ruiz’s film the idea of self-fashioning is taken up more along the lines of Léa de Castro’s awareness of herself as an image and in the way that she partakes in the play of appearances. In Midnight in Paris, Adriana is depicted as self-fashioning through a selfconscious affectation of gesture. What underlines the fact that we are watching a performance rather than something natural is the innocent naivety of Allen’s hero Gil Pender and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘What’s she like?’
• 1 Muse
• 2 Cosmopolite
• 3 Icon of fashion
• 4 Femme fatale
• 5 Courtesan
• 6 Star
• Conclusion: ‘Look, let’s start all over again. What’s she like?’
• Films cited
• References
• Index