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Woman and the City: The Semiotics of Embodiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Sarah Bryant-Bertail
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Extract

C'est toujours cela que j'ai voulu donner sur scene: faire voir la force violente des idees, comment elles ploient et tourmentent les corps.

Antoine Vitez

Two years ago, a philosophy professor friend remarked that he would never forget Jules and Jim and the sense of walking with Jeanne Moreau through the beautiful French countryside in spring with its colours in full bloom. When reminded that the film was shot in black and white, he replied that it must have impressed him so much that his imagination had added colour to it. To remember a walk through the landscape of another country and time, to insert one's own colours into a scene: does this occur in theatre as in film? And if the landscape can be transformed, what becomes of Jeanne Moreau? More specifically, what happens when such a star is imported onto the stage as a legend of woman incarnate? What happens semiotically when the ‘incarnate’ legendary woman confronts the material presence of the actress? These questions had already begun to emerge a year earlier, when I saw Moreau in person at Avignon, first on a performance on the open-air stage of the Com d'honneui in the fourteenth-century Palais des Papes, and then at a public discussion just outside the palace wall.

In Antoine Vitez's 1989 production of La Célestine, Jeanne Moreau played the mercurial, irascible procuress Célestine, the first picara, a larger-than-life character popular in Spain for four centuries. The play was written in 1499 by Fernando de Rojas, who coined the term tragicomedy to describe it.

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Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , Summer 1994 , pp. 99 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1994

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References

Notes

1. ‘This is what I always wanted to show on stage: the violent force of ideas, how they ply and torment the bodies.’ Vitez, Antoine, preface to Le Théâtre des Idées, eds. Danièle, Sallenave and Georges, Banu (Paris: Gallimard, 1991)Google Scholar, a posthumous anthology containing essays, interviews, rehearsal and programme notes extending over Vitez's forty-year career. All translations from the French sources are mine, unless otherwise noted.

2. Fernando de Rojas' La Célestine, Couf d'honneur of the Palais des Papes, 43rd Festival of Avignon, 11–22 July 1989. French translation: Florence Delay (Paris: Gallimard, 1989); director: Antoine Vitez; set and costumes: Yannis Kokkos; original music: Georges Aperghis; lighting: Patrice Trottier. Co-production of the Comédie-Françcaise, the Théatre National de l'Odéon, and the Opéra Municipal de Clermont-Ferrand. Also presented in Barcelona and at the Comédie-Française in Paris.

3. Fernando de Rojas, Le Celestina, 1499. First titled La Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea. English versions of The Celestina include: Simpson, Lesley Byrd (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955)Google Scholar; and Hartnoll, Phyllis (Cambridge: Everyman's Library, 1959). An excellent serial publication in English and Spanish is Celestinesca, ed. Snow, Joseph T..Google Scholar See also my article ‘Space/Time as Historical Sign: Essay on La Célestine in Memory of Antoine Vitez’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Spring 1991), pp. 101–20, an analysis of the spatial and temporal sign systems in the text and performance.

4. Although it concerns photographic rather than theatrical spatio-temporality, Roland Barthes’ essay ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ elucidates the same process in which the signifier—here a photo of objects posed in a Panzani advertisement—is taken as the ‘presemiotic’ or ‘natural’ spatio-temporal base for the ‘artificial’ or ‘cultural’ signified—the printed caption and connoted messages persuading one to buy this product. Yet as Barthes shows, even without a caption the picture alone is already semiotic, a thoroughly cultural ‘text’. In short it is an ideological landscape. ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen, Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp. 32–51.Google Scholar Original French version of the essay: ‘Rhétorique de l'image’, Communications 4, 1964.Google Scholar

5. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (NY and London: Routledge, 1990), 130.Google Scholar Butler is quoting Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1969), 115, 121.Google Scholar Douglas states further: ‘Any kind of unregulated permeability constitutes a site of pollution and endangerment’. Another useful source is the recent anthology Sexuality and Space, first volume of the series Princeton Papers on Architecture, ed. Beatriz, Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992).Google Scholar See especially essays by Grosz, Elizabeth, ‘Bodies-Cities’ (pp. 241–154)Google Scholar; Wigley, Mark, ‘Untitled: The Housing of Gender’ (pp. 327–89)Google Scholar; and Mulvey, Laura, ‘Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity’ (pp. 53–72).Google Scholar

6. Butler, 130. Butler also draws an example from Kafka's Penal Colony of the instrument of torture writing on the prisoner's body, and thus destroying it. She further paraphases Foucault's The History of Sexuality: ‘The body is always under siege, suffering destruction by the very terms of history. And history is the creation of values and meanings by a signifying practice that requires the subjection of the body’.

7. Quinn, Michael article ‘Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting’, New Theatre Quarterly (Vol. VI No. 22, May 1990)Google Scholar, notes that the star's presence offers theatre spectators both a set of character traits and a history of performances, thus both a synchronic and diachronic context with which they can pattern their desire and orient their judgment of a particular work. ‘A celebrity is “somebody” in the concrete—like the ancient hero, a stable signifier that continues to pattern the subsequent meanings of desire… [T]he apparent stability of the star provides a landmark against which the unfolding scenes of the drama can be judged’, (pp. 158–9).

8. Barthes, Roland, ‘The Harcourt Actor’, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard, Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1979. pp. 19–20.Google Scholar This article originally appeared in Barthes, , Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957).Google Scholar

9. Barthes, p. 19.

10. Barthes, p. 20.

11. Barthes, p. 20. It should be remarked that in classic Hollywood films, legs were often concealed to disguise the real height (or lack of stature) of stars. Cagney, Tracy and Alan Ladd's shortness was concealed from fans by perching them on boxes to be on the same level as their female co-stars.

12. Wlaschin, Ken, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the World's Great Movie Stars and Their Films. (New York: Harmony Books, 1979), p. 205.Google Scholar

13. Insdorf, Annette, Françcois Truffaut (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 119.Google Scholar In the chapter ‘Are Women Magic?’ Insdorf writes on The Bride Wore Black: ‘Julie Kohler slices the painting of her face—an eloquent image of the self-destruction that characterizes numerous Truffaut heroines’. Insdorf blames Julie for destroying this painting done by a man, not entertaining the possibility that by slicing up his image of her, Julie may be attempting to save rather than destroy herself, (pp. 108–9).

14. Haskell, Molly, ‘La Lumière’.Google Scholar Interview with Moreau, Jeanne, Film Comment (March/April, 1990), pp. 20–6.Google Scholar

15. Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard, Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 40.Google Scholar Original French version: La Chambre claire (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1980).Google Scholar

16. de Lauretis, Teresa, Alice Doesn't. Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 12.Google Scholar Quoting Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities, trans. William, Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 52.Google Scholar

17. ‘a great work, emblematic and enigmatic… one of those “sphinx-works” that ask questions and do not give answers’. Vitez, Antoine, interview with Salino, Brigitte and Garcin, Jérôme, ‘Moreau retrouve Avignon’, L'Événement du jeudi (6 to 12 July 1989), p. 81.Google Scholar

18. See de Lauretis, Teresa discussion of the Sphinx, Alice Doesn't, pp. 109–14.Google Scholar De Lauretis comments on the Sphinx in connection with the Oedipus narrative and Freud's thought.

19. ‘A mythic actress is needed. That is why I offered the role to Jeanne Moreau… Jeanne has that depth, that poetry of a woman who transports with her a whole past’. Vitez, interview with Bernard, René, ‘Antoine Vitez: la cour, prends garde’, L'Express, 14 July 1989], p. 97.Google Scholar

20. ‘The celebrated player moves us beyond her own art, by the memory one has of her, of her whole life. The actress brings onto the stage all the characters she has played, that one knows, that one will recognize, since the role of Célestine is that of metamorphoses’. Vitez, Antoine, ‘Quelques notes sur la Célestine’, Programme, p. 15.Google Scholar

21. ‘Jeanne Moreau incarnates that ancient whore, a masterful woman given to pleasures; all the images of her old and young that are superimposed in us. A living myth for a mythic character’. Gresh, Sylvaine, ‘la passion selon Wilson’, Révolution no. 490, 21 July 1989). p. 38.Google Scholar

22. Holy Bible, King James Version, 1611; and the New International Version, 1973, Revelation VII: 3, 5.

23. Wright, Ernst, in Biblical Archeology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960)Google Scholar states that in Egypt this mother-goddess or sacred prostitute, is depicted as ‘a nude woman, standing on a lion, with… lilies in one hand (symbolizing her charm …) and a serpent… (symbolizing fecundity) in the other’, (p. 13). She is linked to Anath, Baal's wife, ‘a goddess of love and war, whom the Egyptians depicted as a naked woman on a galloping horse, brandishing shield and lance’, (p. 9). The similarity of this goddess and the Sphinx is striking: the Sphinx and the Whore of Babylon are connected to animals, and become ‘mysteries’ dangerous to the patriarchal state. Both are ‘solved’ and killed off by masculine agents. (See note 18.)

24. Two verses later in Revelation, an angel (‘he’) solves the woman's mystery: she stands for the ‘Great City’ of ‘peoples, multitudes, nations, and languages’ ruled by kings of the earth who will fight a losing battle with Christ and his forces.

25. ‘The great prostitute who rules the earth is surely, for St. John, the power of Rome, thus designated so that it can be combated and torn down, so that at least the conquered Jewish people can resist… But … if woman is the great city, then that great city is a woman, and I see the procuress Célestine, mistress of the human race—thanks to whom, through permanent copulation, we continue to exist—irredeemably stigmatized with the sin of lust. … From the city our imagination returns to the woman. I see her: a golden cup in her hand, drunk from the blood of the saints. Thus our own Célestine reigns over the derisory orgy of valets and whores.’ (italics mine) Vitez, ‘Quelques notes sur la Célestine”, Programme, p. 15.

26. de Certeau, Michel, ‘Walking in the City’, (pp. 91–110)Google Scholar, The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. Steven, Rendall. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 93–4.Google Scholar Original French version: L'Invention du quotidien (Paris: 10/18 Editions, 1980).Google Scholar

27. Michel de Certeau, pp. 94–6.

28. ‘That construction, is it a city, a house? I would say rather that it is a castle, a tower, maybe one of the ones built by Pleberio [the shipping merchant, Melibée's father]. An island also, posed on the stage in the theatre, and which one may walk around, and it is thus that Célestine walks interminably, walks, walks, as if she were wrapping up the whole construction with her thread’. Vitez, ‘Quelques notes sur la Célestine', Programme, p. 16.

29. Michael Quinn, see quote in note 7.

30. ‘That tiny, immense woman who acts with her virtuoso voice, belongs to our dreams, to our chimeras. That is to say she is part of us. She has given us… the most intimate emotions. She has given us fantasies to share. Jeanne Moreau is much more than Jeanne Moreau: a kind of geometric space in the instant of a sigh, the memory we have of [all her past roles]… [She] is the witness of our life and reverie’. Jean-François Josselin, ‘Chere Jeanne..’., Le Nouvel Observateur (20–26 July 1989), p. 69. In the same issue: Guy Dumur, ‘Le soulier de Satan'; Also see ‘Arts, Spectacles, Avignon 89’, in Le Monde (6 July 1989), pp. 2–3. The Bibliothèque Centre-Pompidou has a large Dossier de Presse on La Célestine and other Vitez productions. The Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal also holds French and international press reviews of this staging.

31. Lauretis, De, in Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, writes: ‘…the mythical subject is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture… Female is what is… the womb, the earth, the space of his movement… She… is an element of plot space, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter’, (pp. 43–4).

32. ‘From up high the court looks small and round and far away—even with its 2000 spectators… I had to reduce Jeanne Moreau to her role. She was too large—I was paralysed by being with this legend… I had to increase myself with the role of Mélibée’. Dréville, Valérie, Interview, L'Avant-Scène, June 1989, in ‘Dossier de Presse La Célestine’, Bibliothèque Nationale des Arts et Spectacles à l'Arsenal, Paris.Google Scholar

33. By contrast, Moreau's own film La Lumière (literally, the light), depicts the everyday life of a film actress who does not view herself in legendary terms, but who juggles work, friendships, lovers, and family. Like Moreau herself, she feels bien dans sa peau. Molly Haskell [see note 14] writes: ‘One often feels that trapped inside the man-eating female is a cheerful, non voracious woman struggling to get out… The femme fatale is almost invariably a male invention, the projection—and prisoner—of a director's or writer's fears and fantasies, and probably a means of satisfying his own self-destructive urges. In return, she is flattered by being worshipped as a goddess… Yet even as femme fatale, [Moreau] seems more the architect of her own mystique. A pre-feminist symbol of liberation and sexual freedom…’

34. ‘The physical demand is enormous because everything is centred around walking, walking in rounds between hell and heaven. It's tiring and very liberating. To define a character is to kill it. We are always in movement. The creation of a character, it fluctuates, it escapes us, it is fluid. For the moment, I am in it, I see nothing’. Moreau, Jeanne, ‘Jeanne Moreau: “Ma vie n'est faite que de rencontres”.’ Interview with Thibaudat, Jean-Pierre, Programme of La Célestine, p. 19.Google Scholar

35. ‘It's like arriving in a city by aeroplane, a city of straight lines like Los Angeles or Chicago. From very high the city forms a whole. And then you land, get to your place of residence, and there, you are lost. You have to refer to a map of the city, you look for landmarks. That's it, the work of rehearsal’. Moreau, ‘Jeanne Moreau’, Programme, p. 19.

36. Vitez, ‘Quelques notes sur la Célestine’, Programme, p. 16.

37. ‘I am in fact a succession of women. If I'm shown a picture of that woman I was, and if I force my memory, I find again the thread to her… The dead, the ones I loved, I carry them in me. They are born daily in my memory. It doesn't bring tears, but pleasure. I live with the disappeared as much as with the living… I was a village at first, now I'm an international capital. My village has many inhabitants… I carry my past… but it doesn't bend me down. I am my past… The other actors [are] companions of the road … I'm not a voyager without baggage’, [italics mine.] Moreau, Jeanne, Interview, ‘Jeanne chez les Papes’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 July 1989, in ‘Dossier de Presse La Célestine’, Bibliothèque Nationale des Arts et Spectacles à l'Arsenal, Paris.Google Scholar