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Simone De Beauvoir and Visual Pleasure

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Simone De Beauvoir and Visual Pleasure 140 Simone de Beauvoir Studies Volume 14 1997 SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND VISUAL PLEASURE SYLVIE BLUM-REID Simone de Beauvoir’s interest in cinema is well documented throughout her various writings and spans her entire life. Her familiarity with film has been somewhat obscured by the more frequent analyses of Sartre’s ventures in film.1 This paper will concentrate on Beauvoir’s trajectory as a spectator and critic. As an individual coming of age in the late 1920s, Beauvoir is a valuable witness to an era that is characterized as the Golden Age of French cinema, the period beginning with the transition from silent films to talkies in 1929 and continuing into the late fifties with what François Truffaut, who was to be so prominent in the New Wave movement, qualified derogatorily in his seminal 1954 article published in Cahiers du Cinéma as the “tradition de qualité.” This study will consider Beauvoir as a filmgoer and fascinated spectator in the transitional periods of the late twenties and the forties; her trip to America and what appears to be her first attempt to question films and to formulate an analysis of images in the post-war period of the late forties; and her work as a cultural critic in Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, written in 1959. As a French woman writer, philosopher, and social critic, Simone de Beauvoir is a compelling witness who helps us understand the society in which she lived and the film habits of a certain class of people in that society. She is not a mere spectator and witness of her times; she is deeply interested in “spectacles” and comments extensively on filmic images and cultural icons. Beauvoir adopts Sartre’s passion for images when she analyzes her filmgoing habits and indicates that she values cinema as highly as literature as a mode of expression. Aware of the sociological importance of cinema, she observes that it was at first despised by the upper-middle class as “un divertissement de bonniches” (FA 60) or an art form for the uncultured masses, a view definitely shared by her parents. Andrea Vannini records Beauvoir’s recollection that her parents considered the movies a vulgar kind of entertainment and Charlie Chaplin too childish even for children.2 Colin Crisp and more recently Dudley Andrew have documented the evolution of cinema in the thirties. Films were substantially more accessible to the working class audience than were theaters and opera. The increasing popularity of the movies during this decade may help to explain the impact of the Popular Front in France.3 Beauvoir and her friends, on the other hand, belonged to an elite circle of Parisian intellectuals who would frequently attend film screenings and avidly discuss and dissect them afterwards. Such passion for film is reminiscent of André Breton’s fascination for the chiaroscuro of cinema houses which he recounts in Nadja. Beauvoir’s interest in film is strongly reflected in her autobiographical Simone de Beauvoir and Visual Pleasure 141 works, where the reader can find passages that follow the chronology of all the technical changes that occurred in filmmaking from silent movies to the advent of sound to the use of color. In 1929, Beauvoir attended the screening of one the most important avant-garde independent films of the time, Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou A She reveals in The Prime of Life that after watching the Bunuel film, she found the Hollywood fare she was accustomed to rather insipid by comparison. (FA 60). David Caute lists the titles of a number of the first Soviet films shown in Paris to which Beauvoir took her friend and fellow writer Paul Nizan between 1928 and 1930.5 In her memoirs, Beauvoir recaps the debate that was raging at the time about the transition to sound. She relates that she eventually resigned herself to sound films, her resistance overcome after she had seen Vidor’s musical Hallelujah and Marlene Dietrich’s performance in The Blue Angel (FA 60). She mentions articles by many filmmakers and critics, a majority of them resisting progress and favoring silent films over sound (FA 61). * * * Simone de Beauvoir discovered America in 1947 and began writing about her trip at about the same time that she was working on Le Deuxième Sexe. Essays gathered from her diary entries appeared first in 1948 in Les Temps Modernes, the journal she and Sartre launched in 1945. They were subsequently published in book form in L’Amérique au jour le jour, which follows a four-month itinerary across the American landscape of the 1940s and presents a stimulating travelogue and discussion of the differences between America and France. Although Beauvoir was visiting the country for the first time, she claimed to have an intimate knowledge of America. This knowledge came, of course, from the movies. She had seen many American films before World War II and was then dismayed to find them banned during the Nazi Occupation.6 At the beginning of her stay in America, she found that the images culled from American pictures that she had stored in her mind did not correspond to the reality with which she was confronted. She tried to reinforce these images by going to the movies in America, but remarked in a January 30, 1947 journal entry: “Near the hotel they were showing Henry V with Laurence Olivier. I went there. I liked the picture; but when I left I did not feel satisfied; this Technicolor film told me nothing of America”!ADD 24-25). Beauvoir was both disappointed and bothered by the vast discrepancy between what she thought she knew about America from the movies and what she experienced first hand during her trip: “I felt deceived again ... the movies had so long conjured up America for me” (ADD 25). While in New York, she figuratively binged on movies, going to movie theaters three times a day and succumbing to a trance-like state created by the darkness there. This hypnotic experience is quite similar to the one Roland Barthes describes as a “situation de cinéma” which leads spectators to lose themselves in the darkness of the movie theatre: .
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