Simone De Beauvoir: Un Film De Josee Dayan Et Malka Ribowska: a Portrait of the Author Through the Cinematic Lens

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SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR: UN FILM DE JOSEE DAYAN ET MALKA RIBOWSKA: A PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR THROUGH THE CINEMATIC LENS

CÉLINE PHILIBERT POTSDAM COLLEGE

Simone de Beauvoir’s justification of Josée Dayan and Malka Ribowska’s documentary film ’ brings to the fore the writer's preoccupation with vanity and desire for truth. In the opening frame, Beauvoir's answer to Claude Lanzmann’s question "Pourquoi tu l'as fait ce film ?" reveals that she has made the film "out of vanity" and "with a desire for truth." She further declares her intention "to rectify whatever has been dlstortedly said about her," hoping "to be recognized" and "to give the spectator a true portrait of herself." Beauvoir sounds quite convinced that her words and screen presence will contribute to the revelation of her self. Unfortunately, being interviewed by three life-long companions, Claude Lanzmann, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques-Laurent Bost, Beauvoir manifests tension and uneasiness in her verbal and body-language responses to the male interviewers' inquiries and thus produces a text that vacillates between exposure (desire for truth) and concealment (preoccupation with vanity). Shortly after responding to Lanzmann, Beauvoir trades positions with the interviewer, who temporarily becomes the interviewed. In such a position, and to the spectator's delight, Lanzmann reveals uneasiness when the woman's gaze falls on him. In so doing, Beauvoir proves, right from the outset, that the narrative ambivalence between exposure and concealment is mainly created by the face-to-face encounter between the interviewed and interviewer. Thus, in her attempt to present an image of herself truer than that which has been already constructed by her written texts, Beauvoir has deluded herself. A close examination of the narrative structure and Beauvoir's narrative position (through an analysis of the cinematic use of her voice and face, and I'entre-deux, whenever the voice and face are not in synchrony) elicits the ways in which the narrative ambivalence operates and shows the passage from the writer's attempted formation, to her de-formation. Put in other words, the documentary could be read as a passage from the identity of Beauvoir to a portrait of the author crystallized in a text-unrivaled image (unmatched by any text, the final image accounts for all meanings grasped via Beauvoir's voice and face, and the space beyond meanings, the sublime, via I'entre-deux). Such a passage can be read within a chronological presentation of the French and European socio-political environment and the writer's personal space landmarked by her familiar places and people. Forming the contexts of Beauvoir's biography, these narrative components allow the documentary to depict Beauvoir as a young bourgeois writer-to-be, a first-rate Sorbonne student who meets Jean-Paul Sartre, and finally, a burgeoning writer who becomes a well-known thinker. Although they map out her professional itinerary, and thus, partly, her identity, these contexts lend themselves to a skewed depiction of the woman's "true" portrait. Indeed, the conversations between Beauvoir and Lanzmann,

1 Simone de Beauvoir: un film de Josée Dayan et Malka Ribowska, photography by André Domage and Jean-Pierre Aliphat, montage by Anne Gigleux, music by Georges Delerue and Silvio Gualda, produced by the Témoins team and FR3, released in 1983, with the participation of Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lanzmann, Jacques-Laurent Bost and Alice Schwarzer. 43 -

Bost, and Sartre reinforce the realistic context visually foregrounded by the narrative insertion of newsreels and photographs, and delineate a narrative space that contains the woman’s identity/quest for truth within the male discursive space. Functioning as a public eye, the black and white newsreels remind the spectator of the socio-political background surrounding Sartre and Beauvoir's lives: the cafés, café- théâtre and celebrities that evoke the good times and "la joie de vivre,” as well as the political disturbances, demonstrations, rebellions, military intrusions, suggested territorial rapes and body deformation that represent the horror of those times, the human anguish and death. Functioning as a private eye, the black and white photographs lead the spectator into Beauvoir's privacy. Photographs possess a wonderful characteristic: they both generate time's passage, thus creating a certain continuity, and interrupt the film continuity and time's passage. It is discontinuity that captivates the attention of the spectator, who displays fascination for the photograph's subject matter. In freezing the subject in time, as well as suspending the chronological and narrative time, photographs enable the spectator to construct and seize meanings differently. Sensitive to the passage of images and therefore to the oscillation between time continuation and interruption, the spectator enters a state of fascination whenever additional time is spent on an individual shot. Thus, the use of black and white photographs prioritizes the interruption of the narrative movement, and the captivation of the spectator’s attention. The spectator's viewing and engagement with the signifying process can be further understood in light of the distinction that Roland Barthes makes between cinema and photography. 2 In its movement and presence, and in its representation of time, the cinema duplicates human life, and thus takes on its specificity: carried away by the fleeting image, the spectator believes in the created illusion. On the other hand, with the inscription of the past and absence, photography is immobility and, as such, represents the spectator's quest for hallucination: an image gives itself to the spectator who, in turn, gives himself/herself, transported by the aura of the wholeness of the image. In that movement, the spectator is drawn closer to emptiness - lack of a specific and whole meaning - and approaches death. A male presence prevails in Beauvoir's conversations with her friends. By conveying logical explanation, chronology and linearity, the male voice guides Beauvoir through her narrative about herself in a very discursive manner. The contexts, then, convey linguistic constraints and physical confinement. Central to the narrative, not only via the words in the interviews, but also via the images in the newsreels, Sartre occupies an essential socio-political position and provides a commanding presence. The philosopher's words invite Beauvoir to talk about her work as a political act and the male's critical eye leads her to give an account of her professional trajectory, which conforms with his literary judgment. Thus, in existentialist terms, Beauvoir's writing ranges along a continuous trajectory that spans from the novice to the celebrated writer, the non-feminist to the feminist woman, a distant writing process to a personal commitment and engagement with texts, and from a simple to a more sophisticated style that incorporates artifice, silence and the "non-dit" into her texts. Beauvoir’s words reveal an all-pervasive adoration for Sartre, and thus foreground the male's prevailing position: "la plus grande réussite pour moi, c’est Sartre, ...il a été premier, j'étais la seconde (at the Aggregation National Examination),... pour la première fois, je me trouvais dépassée par Sartre, ... il a une culture plus profonde, plus étendue." In addition, the images in the newsreels repetitively show Beauvoir in Sartre's footsteps as they distribute political pamphlets in the streets of Paris and participate in the heated debates of those postwar times. The images of the conversations place Beauvoir under the male viewer's scrutiny, thus guiding her along the male voice which conveys a discursiveness and locates itself at the point of an apparent textual origin. 2 See Roland Barthes in "La chambre claire," Cahiers du Cinéma, Gallimard, 1980, pp. 89-90.