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Ginette Vincendeau the MISE-EN-SCENE of SUFFERING

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Ginette Vincendeau the MISE-EN-SCENE of SUFFERING new formations NUMBER 3 WINTER 1987 Ginette Vincendeau THE MISE-EN-SCENE OF SUFFERING FRENCH CHANTEUSES REALISTES Popular music is one area in which postmodern appropriation successfully meets retro fashion; 1960s rock, for example, is being recycled both as a dubious gloss over that decade's events and also in the music of the latest bands. In this process, the sounds are increasingly bound to visual images, inventing a posteriori a gigantic video clip of the past. This is a phenomenon which affects primarily Anglo-Saxon pop. Popular music that is culturally different from this model, unless (like reggae) it is oppositional or militant, becomes commodified as pure nostalgia. This has been the fate of French chanson. Whereas 1960s rock ends up connoting a quasi-universal past, the process is rather different in the case of nationally specific music. French chanson, as it has become known internationally through Edith Piaf, evokes a very narrow image of France, a nostalgic - sometimes debased - notion of Frenchness, that embraces cobbled streets, the accordion, berets, and baguettes. It is also a cultural and historical representation, closely bound up with a precise iconography. A picture of France - in fact Paris1 - comes to mind, seemingly straight out of the 1930s 'poetic realist' films of Carne, Clair, Renoir - a picture which is firmly anchored as 'French', regardless of its representativeness of actual French culture and social relations. It proposes a city of working-class faubourgs, rainy streets, and tall buildings - Des murs quie se lezardent Un escalier etroit Une vieille mansarde Et me voila chez mois ('De l'autre cote de la rue': Piaf)2 - in which proletariat and underworld, pimps and prostitutes, enact a scenario of crime and doomed passion. But if the dominant image conjured up is that of a male working-class hero (archetypally Jean Gabin), the voice that accompanies it is feminine - it is that of the chanteuses realistes: Edith Piaf, of course, but before her many others: Yvonne George, Damia, Maria Dubas, Lys Gauty, Berthe Sylva, and the sublime Frehel. How these women came to be so closely associated with a particular image of French culture is the subject of this article, which I will discuss with particular reference to Frehel and Piaf. Piaf was arguably the last 'genuine' representative of the chanson realiste, a genre 107 which was born in the 1880s and had its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, and which would be more accurately described as populist, focusing on working- class milieux and the underworld, in a melodramatic, pessimistic, and nostalgic mode. Its privileged topography is that of Paris - evident already in song titles: 'Elle frequentait la rue Pigalle', 'Entre St Ouen et Clignancourt' (Piaf), 'A Paris dans chaque faubourg', 'Boulevard des Filles du Calvaire' (Gauty), 'La Chanson des Fortifs' (Frehel), and so on. Areas such as the 'zone' (the originally uninhabited belt around Paris) and the 'fortifs' (fortifications) are mythologized, as well as certain neighbourhoods: Pigalle and Montmartre - On s'est mis en menage, dans le faubourg St Denis Hotel du Beau Rivage, ga sentait bon Paris ('C'etait un jour de fete': Piaf)3 - but also Belleville, Menilmontant, Montparnasse, the banks of the canal Saint- Martin - as they are in the French populist literature of the 1920s and 1930s, the works of Eugene Dabit (whose most famous novel, Hotel du Nord, was adapted by Carne), Pierre Mac Orlan or Francis Carco. These were all writers who, in the words of Carco, displayed a profound and natural. taste for the poetry of night and rain, of absurd and dangerous lives, in a word, for a certain kind of plaintive romanticism where exoticism mingles with the merveilleux, though with a touch of humour and disenchantment.4 These works, like Brassai's photographs of Paris in the 1930s and, before them, the melodramas and naturalist novels of the nineteenth century (often adapted to silent film), are testimonies to a voyeuristic obsession with the capital and in particular with the lives of its 'lower classes' in which proletariat and underworld mingle - classes laborieuses, classes dangereuses5 - a prurient drive to know and to see, echoed for instance in 'La Guinguette a ferme ses volets' (Damia): On voit comme sur un ecran Les profils inquietants dont les ombres s'amusent, On voudrait bien voir et savoir, oui mais, La guinguette a ferme ses volets.6 Paris, then, is the background on which these fantasies are projected: but it is a Paris which always belongs to the past, either that of the narrator of the song, or that of the historical city. One of Piafs most evocative early songs, 'Entre St Ouen et Clignancourt', nostalgically evokes the atmosphere of the zone which she (in the song) has left, and which she re-creates 'when she is blue', remembering the mingled smells of 'chips and lilac'. This area clearly exercised a great fascination, evident in songs such as 'La Chanson des fortifs' (Frehel): Que sont dev'nues les fortifications Et les p'tits bistrots des barrieres C'etait Vdecor de toutes nos chansons Des jolies chansons de naguere7 108 NEW FORMATIONS even if it was occasionally mocked, as in another of Frehel's songs, 'Tout change dans la vie': J'ai sur la zone une baraque C'est du sapin tres ancien Ety'a I'usine d'ammoniaque Qui I'embaume du soir au matin} The Paris celebrated by chanson realiste constantly deplores its own demise and does so with particular strength because the images associated with this vanished past are widely circulated in other media, especially the cinema. One film in which Frehel appears, L'Entraineuse (Albert Valentin, 1938), exemplifies this. Frehel, like the heroine of the film played by Michele Morgan, is a singer in a cabaret aptly named La Dame de coeur. The film is structured around a series of visual oppositions: Paris/Provence, night-club/hotel, night/sunlight, which echo the two sides of the heroine's life: her 'shady' past/her (illusory) future. Frehel here stands for the heroine's - inescapable - past, both metonymically (as a colleague) and metaphorically, through her song 'Sans lendemain', a ballad with the fatalism typical of chanson realiste. Jamais I'espoir d'un autre soir Bonjour, bonsoir Adieu I'amour, Sans lendemain, sans Hen qui dure Voila ma vie depuis toujours.9 Frehel's relationship to the film is also typical of the two-way process which takes place between the poetic-realist genre in film and the chanteuses. Most chanteuses realistes (Frehel, Gauty, Damia, Piaf) acted or appeared in films. Their songs evoke cinematic images: Piaf's 'Les Amants d'un jour' - Moi j'essuie les verres au fond du cafe10 - is reminiscent of countless cafe episodes in French films, and her 'Elle frequentait la rue Pigalle' features realistic street noises. Frehel's 'Sans lendemain' starts with an evocation of canals - Dans ce bistrot pres de Vecluse Je sers a boire aux mariniers11 - as does Gauty's 'Le Chaland qui passe', a cause celebre when it was added to Vigo's film L'Atalante after the director's death. Whatever one thinks of this juxtaposition aesthetically, it is a testimony to the closeness of imagery between films and songs of that period. A large number of songs are set also in guinguettes, those open-air restaurants on river banks much favoured in films of the time. Many, like Piaf's 'L'Accordeoniste' or Frehel's 'La Java bleue', (featured in the film Une Java) are self-referentially about singing and dancing, and evoke scenes of bals populaires. At the same time, the singers occupy a central part of 'poetic-realist' iconography. In L'Entraineuse, a poster bearing Frehel's face and name is one of the powerful emblems of the noir look of the film. 110 NEW FORMATIONS L'Entraineuse (1938): Frehel (left) and Michele Morgan (centre). Like the songs, French films of the 1930s and 1940s were predominantly set in Paris, and even if they were set elsewhere (usually in exotic locations), Paris remained the point of reference, the object of desire. Longing for Paris informs a particularly poignant performance by Frehel of 'Oil est-il done?' in Duvivier's film Pepe le Moko (1936). In this scene Frehel sits by an ancient gramophone and plays a record of her own voice while she sings along with it and cries. As 'Tania' in the film's narrative she is crying over what she has left behind in France (the film is set in Algiers): Paris and her friends. The lyrics also mirror the narrative as a whole: Pepe's (Jean Gabin's) overwhelming desire to go back to Paris and his feelings of being trapped in the Casbah.12 Furthermore, the spectator of 1936 was aware that he or she was watching the 'real' Frehel, crying over her past glory and lost beauty - the close community of friends evoked by the song also standing for her past popularity. From a lament for the good old days (eating chips out of paper bags, etc.), the song moves on to specific evocations of changing Montmartre as 'old houses are pulled down' and 'big banks are built to replace them'. The Montmartre of the song is not just an area of the 18th arrondissement of Paris though, it is the Montmartre of the early cafconc' and cabarets - in other words, this version of 'Ou est-il done?', recorded in 1936. looks back at an earlier period, before the First World War, when the song was first recorded (the time when Frehel was 'so successful at the Scala, boulevard de Strasbourg'). But the original song itself was already singing nostalgia for the late nineteenth century - for its own origins as an entertainment form.
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