The Origins of Celebrity Culture

Modern celebrity culture began not with Hollywood, nor with the Internet, but in the 18th century, when the modern meanings of the words “celebrity” and “star” first became widespread. Famous people have existed for millennia, but the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome sought eternal renown, while medieval saints attained their canonical status only after death. Celebrities are people known during their lifetimes to more people than could possibly know one another. For many centuries, rulers and conquerors were the primary celebrities.

Only in the 18th century did publics begin to take a strong interest in a large number of living authors, artists, performers, scientists, and politicians. In 1782, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau published an autobiography in which he confessed to spanking fantasies, then complained that everyone was gossiping about him. After basing an 1812 poem on his own life, Lord Byron woke up to find himself famous. By the 18th century, a host of performers and authors had stalkers and groupies; by the 19th, many received hundreds of letters yearly requesting autographs. 19th-century celebrity chef Alexis Soyer, a French cook based in London, sold his own brand of bottled sauces and put pictures of himself wearing his trademark red beret on the labels. A century before the rise of radio and television commercials, celebrities endorsed wigs, face creams, powders, pianos, and bottled water. Well in advance of charity telethons and stadium concerts such as Live Aid, celebrities held benefits for victims of res, earthquakes, and yellow fever.

Why did modern celebrity culture emerge when it did? As literacy expanded dramatically among all classes in North America and Europe, so too did the number of those able to read about celebrities. As leisure time increased, more people had more time to visit the theaters, opera houses, and lecture halls where they saw celebrities in person. Even more fundamentally, democratic movements in England, France, and the United States gave rise to a new emphasis on individuality. The Romantic cult of genius that ushered in the 19th century led to the fin de siècle worship of personality exemplified by Oscar Wilde. In 1911, a theater producer explicitly speculated that the star system loomed so large in the United States because Americans were what he called “an individual-loving people.” New visual media catered to that affection. In the 1860s, affordable, compact photographs of celebrities became widely available in shops and via mail order. In the 1890s, heavily illustrated niche magazines devoted to stage stars began to flourish, anticipating the movie magazines that became popular in the 1910s.

Most importantly, democratization made people eager to track current events that they saw themselves as shaping. Celebrity culture would not have taken off without newspapers, but far from imposing curiosity about famous individuals on the public, newspapers used an already existing fascination with celebrities to attract more readers. Until the 1830s, newspapers in England, France, and the United States were costly publications, sponsored by wealthy patrons and read by a small, select group of subscribers who received their papers by mail. In the 1830s, the news became more commercial. To increase circulation, publishers began to charge readers only a penny instead of the traditional six cents, and began to rely on advertisements, subscriptions, and daily sales, including street sales, to turn a profit. Instead of targeting a select group of insiders willing to pay handsomely for exclusive, specialized information, the new penny press appealed to general interests in an effort to reach the largest number of readers possible.

Newspapers were so identified with celebrities that in 1841, when one of the most successful new penny papers purchased its own steamship in order to deliver news from across the Atlantic at record speeds, the publisher named it the Fanny Elssler, after a world-famous Austrian ballet dancer who had just toured the United States. Steamships and newspapers helped celebrities to expand their fame; in turn, celebrities helped to attract publics to those novel forms of transport and communication.

As the number of commercial papers grew and competition for readers increased, newspapers found that they could not limit themselves to influencing readers; they also needed to please them. Articles about celebrities, especially when illustrated with lithographs and engravings, were a reliable way to boost circulation. An 1862 issue of the Illustrated London News covering the Prince of Wales’s marriage sold 930,000 copies, more than three times the magazine’s usual circulation rate. Addressing journalism students in 1912, a US newspaperman explained, “In publishing a newspaper you endeavor to print what the people want to read.” The people wanted to read about celebrities. In turn, celebrities themselves became aware of the power of the press, even arguing with editors about their coverage. In 1829, for example, two popular actors sent a letter to a London newspaper, addressed “To the Publick,” in which they accused the publication of misrepresenting them. The editor published their letter to demonstrate his fairness and to avoid a libel suit, but he also published it because the actors were leading figures in London’s theater scene, and celebrity sells.

At the very moment that newspapers first came to depend on publics for their success, technological changes in paper production and printing were making those publics larger than ever before. In the 18th century, the most successful newspapers had circulations in the low thousands and information still took weeks to travel between capital cities and the provinces. By 1825, a top-selling Parisian newspaper was reaching 16,000 subscribers; by 1880, the leading Paris daily had more than 500,000 readers. Steamships and railways began to deliver newspapers to readers around the world with unprecedented speed. By the 1860s, transoceanic telegraph cables enabled news to travel around many parts of the world almost instantaneously. By the 1880s, a famous actress could get married in London and have the news published in Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Chattanooga within a week.

The steamships and railways that delivered the news also delivered celebrities themselves. Many performers, authors, and reformers took advantage of the new mode of travel, crossing the Atlantic to conduct readings and deliver lectures that were 19th-century versions of 21st-century TED talks. Best-selling British novelist Charles Dickens visited the United States in 1842; in 1845, abolitionist Frederick Douglass traveled to England. Three decades later, extensive railway networks enabled celebrities to easily visit both a nation’s major cities and its more obscure nooks and crannies. In the 1880s, star actors Edwin Booth (1833–1893) and Helena Modjeska (1840–1909) could perform in world theater capitals such as Paris, London, Berlin, Warsaw, and New York and in small towns ranging from Davenport, Iowa, to Zanesville, Ohio. Performers spent so much time traveling that actor Maude Adams (1872–1953) had sliding scenery installed on her customized train car so that she and her troupe could rehearse between stops.

Cheap postage rates, photography, the penny press, telegraphic news agencies, and steam and train travel all provided channels through which celebrities, publics, journalists, and photographers could interact with one another. They did so long before the rise of the Hollywood studio system. Far from creating modern celebrity culture, movie studios simply adapted one that the theater had invented decades earlier. “Star” was a 19th-century term coined in English, along with “étoile” and “vedette” in French, to designate a theatrical troupe’s most compelling lead actors. In 1855, a young middle-class woman living in Glasgow announced, “Unless there is some Star in the theatre we do not go.” In the 21st century, live theater has become a niche form of entertainment, albeit one still able to generate blockbusters such as Hamilton.

But before the advent of film, millions of people regularly attended the theater each year. In 1865, London shows attracted almost twelve million viewers a year; in 1905, New York City alone had eighteen million theatergoers, with Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago all competing to host equally vibrant theater scenes. In 1886, the United States had almost 300 touring theater companies. By 1900, Paris and London each had over a hundred playhouses, many seating around 3,000 people. Theatrical networks were global: a hit play might open in London, then travel through the United States; make the rounds of the British Empire; or start out in Paris, then be adapted for performance in Berlin, Stockholm, and New York.

Not surprisingly, given the depth and breadth of the theatrical celebrity system, early film producers used stage stars to lure people to the new medium of cinema. The famous 1896 Thomas Edison film now known as “The Kiss” was originally billed “The May Irwin Kiss,” because it featured famous theater performer May Irwin in a popular scene from her hit play The Widow Jones. The very term “movie star” existed precisely because stars were presumed to belong to the theater. Many of the most famous early lm producers, directors, and performers, including Lillian Gish, D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Barbara Stanwyck, started on the stage, and some shuttled between Hollywood and Broadway for years.

Though Hollywood did not invent stardom, it did briefly change celebrity culture in one important way. 19th-century theatrical celebrities exercised significant autonomy. They had the power to choose their roles, control their schedules, select supporting casts, design costumes and sets, lease and manage theaters, and craft their public personae. From the 1930s through the 1950s, at the height of the studio system, a few freelance film stars, such as Carole Lombard and James Stewart, retained some of the independence enjoyed by their theatrical predecessors. But most lm moguls effectively used restrictive contracts, well-oiled publicity departments, and their influence over the press to control what movie stars could do and what the public could learn about them. During the decades when notoriously dictatorial studio heads Louis B. Mayer, the Warner Brothers, and Harry Cohn reigned supreme, many stars received orders about what roles to play, whom to date, and how to dress. In exchange, they received the support of a powerful, integrated entertainment industry. Stars who balked, such as Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, often found themselves subject to retaliation, lawsuits, smear campaigns, and periods of unemployment.

The critics who produced the first serious analyses of celebrity in the 1930s and 1940s had two reference points: the authoritarian Hollywood studio system and the fascist, propaganda-driven personality cults formed around Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Not surprisingly, given those contexts, those who first theorized celebrity culture had little good to say about it. In 1944, Leo Lowenthal built on Adorno’s writings to suggest that 19th-century “heroes of production” renowned for their great deeds had devolved into 20th-century “idols of consumption” best known for the cars they drove and the soaps they bought. Lowenthal got his history wrong—celebrity culture had always included heroes of production and idols of consumption—but his audience right. Intellectuals have been decrying the ills of celebrity culture ever since. Although towering figures such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall argued for popular culture’s utopian, redemptive potential, few have applied those more optimistic frameworks to celebrity culture. In 1977, when Richard Dyer established celebrity studies as an academic field, he took the studio system as paradigmatic of the many other forms of celebrity that preceded, followed, and coexisted alongside it.

Taking 1940s Hollywood as the norm has distorted our understanding of how celebrity culture works by making it seem inevitable that a concentrated power exploits and manipulates both celebrities and publics alike. Not only did Hollywood not invent celebrity, its version of celebrity culture was an aberration. The decline of the lm studios in the 1960s, the breakdown of broadcast television that began in the 1980s, and the rise of the Internet since the 1990s have returned celebrity culture to its more anarchic 19th-century roots. Today, the fact that no single medium or industry controls stars or stardom has made more visible how strongly publics and celebrities have always influenced the course of celebrity culture and how their moves have been crucial to keeping it alive.

  

Excerpted from The Drama of Celebrity.

On the 18th-Century Origins of Celebrity Worship. By  Sharon Marcus.  LitHub , June 10, 2019.

PrincetonUniversity Press

Why do so many people care so much about celebrities? Just as each generation believes it invented sex, so each thinks it created celebrity. Ask someone born in the 21st century what defines celebrity culture, and they will likely single out the digital media that allow anyone with a cell phone to ‘like’, retweet and comment on a Kim Kardashian post in seconds.

The mid-century cultural critics Theodor Adorno and Daniel Boorstin had a more paranoid view: they believed that the media imposed stars on a mindless public. Then in the 1980s and ’90s, the scholars Jackie Stacey and Henry Jenkins saw the public as in charge, making or breaking stars. In prosperous times, celebrity biographies tend to attribute stardom to talent, luck and hard work. In precarious times, we hear more about icons who self-destruct.

All these views assign power to one and only one element in the equation: the media, the public or the stars. All of them are wrong – because all of them are right. No single group has the power to make or break a star. Three equally powerful groups collude and compete to define celebrities: media producers, members of the public and celebrities themselves. None has decisive power, and none is powerless.

The three-way effort to create, define and undo celebrities is tireless. To become famous, the American rapper Cardi B had to do more than record catchy tunes. She had to promote them effectively to people who liked them. She had to be outrageous and self-revealing enough to garner a huge following on Instagram. She had to collaborate with a celebrity band, Maroon 5, and feud with the already established star rapper Nicki Minaj. (Don’t know who these people are? Many 12-year old girls will be happy to enlighten you.)

In January 2019, Cardi B won an online battle with Donald Trump when she posted an Instagram video calling his government shutdown ‘crazy’. The Twitter-mad president signalled his defeat with an uncharacteristic response: silence. A month later, Instagram trolls attacked Cardi B for not deserving her Grammy. She left the platform, only to return two days later. The story continues.

Social media amplifies and speeds up interactions between audiences, media and stars, but YouTube and Twitter did not invent modern celebrity culture. That happened more than 150 years ago, thanks to the popular press, commercial photography, railways and steamships, and national postal systems.

Consider Edwin Booth (1833-93), one of the most famous American actors of the 19th century. Remembered today, if at all, as a brother of the man who assassinated president Abraham Lincoln, Booth became known in his time for playing Hamlet, Richard III and Brutus in Julius Caesar. His acting yielded enough money for him to buy several theatres and a Gramercy Park mansion in New York City that he turned into an all-male club, the Players, where actors could rub shoulders with elites. He lived on the building’s top floor, surrounded by books, theatrical memorabilia and the hundreds of letters he received between the 1860s and ’90s and chose to save.

Booth’s fanmail attests to the many links connecting 19th-century audiences, media and stars. Thanks to steamships, he had performed in Europe and received letters from England and Germany. Thanks to railways, his US audiences included major cities and smaller locales from Akron to Zanesville.

Some of the letters that Booth preserved were ‘mash notes’ soliciting assignations. Others begged for money, jobs or free acting lessons. Some plied him with quack medical remedies or tried to convert him. Dozens sent the actor long poems combining all of the above.

Many letters lavished Booth with praise but quite a few offered unsparing criticism worthy of any Twitter troll. One correspondent in 1866 advised Booth how to be a better Richard III. ‘Your appearance was not sufficiently stern and sombre,’ the writer complained. ‘You might … have a larger hump on the back & a more infirm gait as you move on the stage.’ Other critiques were less polite. ‘Shakespear No 2’ offered pungent advice in a scrawl that grew larger with each line: ‘Mr Booth Your Hamlet is overdone. Your constant contortions render your part monotonous. Some parts are well done but in others where you should act like a rational man you act more like a maniac.’

One correspondent ranked Booth’s critics. A journalist who had reviewed Booth’s Charleston appearances sent clippings for the actor’s perusal. A woman who requested an edition of Booth’s most frequently performed plays used a colour code to distinguish the six different occasions she had seen him as Hamlet.

The French opera singer Pauline Viardot received and kept a similar set of letters, as did the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. To be sure, 19th-century print publics were less visible to one another than digital publics are today. But the continuities between celebrity cultures past and present are real, and offer a telling clue to what really intrigues people about celebrity culture.

All of us, even those who ignore celebrities, are part of a story whose outcome we can influence but never fully predict. Celebrities are neither pawns nor gods. Every time Cardi B releases a new song, poses for a magazine cover or posts on social media, she can gain or lose status. Members of the public are neither passive consumers nor omnipotent creators. They argue among themselves, and each individual’s decision to engage or ignore celebrities helps to make or break stars. Journalists use celebrity coverage to get the public’s attention. Some criticise celebrities; others cater to them.

The resulting pandemonium is celebrity culture – a drama that many help to script but that no-one fully controls. If we knew for certain how the story ended, we might lose interest. If we had no role to play in the outcome, we might be less intrigued. The moral of this tale: celebrity culture is neither all good nor all bad. But if you don’t like celebrity culture, don’t blame the internet. Blame everyone.

The pandemonium of modern celebrity began in 19th-century theatre. By  Sharon Marcus.

Aeon , June 11, 2019.

As part of the 2017–2018 Fellows' Presentation Series at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Sharon Marcus RI '18 shares material from her soon-to-be-completed book, in which she addresses such questions as "What is a celebrity?" "Have they always existed?" "And why do so many people care about them?"

Marcus teaches at Columbia University, where she is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature, specializing in 19th-century British and French culture. She is the 2017–2018 Elizabeth S. and Richard M. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Video of a lecture, April 12, 2018. The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. 

The legendary actress, international superstar and shrewd self-promoter Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) was the “godmother of modern celebrity culture,” and is the central figure of this inventive, stimulating book by the Columbia professor Sharon Marcus. Bernhardt used the media to publicize her sexual daring and make even her flaws iconic. When she was caricatured as “skeleton Sara,” she flaunted her fashionable thinness and extravagant costumes. Her nasal voice, sinuous movements and angular poses made her recognizable and electrifying even to audiences who did not know French. Reporters were fascinated with rumors of her exotic menagerie, the satin-lined coffin in her bedroom, her ride in a hot-air balloon, her adventurous world tours. Henry James called her “the muse of the newspaper.” Even amputation added to her allure. After her leg was removed in 1915, Bernhardt kept on performing, “prone, on a litter”; the Shubert press office suggested a “Post-Amputation Tour” and it sold out across the country. The Divine Sarah was the most famous amputee since Captain Ahab.

By highlighting Bernhardt’s agency and stamina, Marcus aims to overturn the elite intellectual position that the media is largely responsible for creating celebrities who are mere commodities; she wants to challenge the perception that 21st-century celebrity is “synonymous with an empty renown that has no basis in merit or achievement.” Gender plays a role in this disdain; in the mid-19th century, when most celebrities were male, the term was “strongly associated with merit.” Now that female stardom is accepted, bias is displaced to the gender of the fans: “The more feminized the fan base, the less seriously the press takes the star.” Nonetheless, she argues, “celebrity culture is a drama involving three equally powerful groups: media producers, members of the public and celebrities themselves.”

Moreover, fans, as she richly documents, have always set out their own standards and judgments. Marcus looks at scrapbooks, playbills, diaries recording dramatic performances, and fan mail that combines “adoration with assessment.” Long before cinema, fans compared and rated the performances of touring stars. Great actors had signature roles, such as Phèdre and Camille for Bernhardt, which enabled the evaluation of technique. A Bernhardt could be compared to historical figures, like Rachel Félix; stars sometimes alternated leading roles in a well-known play.

It seems indisputable that Bernhardt anticipated many of the strategies of celebrity self-promotion, and Marcus is a brilliant theorist and analyst of theater history. But equating celebrity with the stage actor, and generalizing about public influence from the memorabilia of 19th-century devotees, can’t account for the contemporary cultural situation. The drama of celebrity goes far beyond the dwindling niche market of theater.

Marcus maintains that the internet has not significantly changed the triangular balance of celebrity culture. Yet she also shows the historical importance of the fan. In the past, fans were more likely to curate than create, to celebrate than compete. Today online fan fiction has changed that dynamic, and both stars and media compete with the bloggers, vloggers, podcast makers and tweeters of celebrity 2.0. Fans now have the power to punish and destroy celebrities, as Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey and Roseanne Barr discovered. While 15 minutes of fame may not be possible for everyone, reality TV, talent shows and social media influencers have greatly expanded the pool of celebrity candidates. A celebrity today is as likely to be Stormy Daniels or Sarah Sanders as Sarah Bernhardt.

A Star Is Born? Try Manufactured, a New Book Argues. By  By Elaine Showalter. The New York Times , May 31 , 2019.

Bruno Dumont on Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc and Live Cinema

Dustin Chang : It does make sense that you would tackle Joan of arc story since you have made films about pure faith before. But I never would’ve thought it would be a musical comedy. Did you conceive the film as musical to begin with?

 Bruno Dumont :  Yes of course. I would never have conceived doing Péguy without music because Péguy without music is inconceivable. I like musical comedies very much. I was looking for a subject that needed that balance, that needed the music. I was looking for a text that would be pertinent to use music.

Some texts don’t need music because they are very clear as they are. Péguy is a complicated, complex writer and my hope was that music would give access to him. That we don’t have to give up on Péguy because he is too hard to get into. It’s like we don’t throw away a rose because it has thorns- the idea is to keep the thorns but somehow pacify things with music.

So in most musical plays, they mostly turn to poets to complete their work so there is nice relationship, one could even call it, a friendship between poetry and music. A companionship.

 DC : There is a repetitive rhythmic quality almost like Philip Glass in the text when they sing.

 BD : Absolutely you are right.

DC : Why portray the childhood of Joan?

BD : Once I had the music and the rhythm, I needed the subject. Joan of Arc is major French myth. But the fact is the subject is secondary, since we have the music. So the subject should be not too complicated. Joan of Arc is very well known. I needed to combine that with this new kind of experience in cinema. It happens that her childhood is not very well known that Péguy brings us luckily for us. So we have a known element Joan of Arc and not too well known – her childhood. So combining all these things together, I wanted to make something interesting. It’s more like a composer looking for a book for his next opera. But for me the subject herself was not that important.

DC : One could not think of Joan of Arc story without the close ups of Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Is there any correlation between your Jeannette and Dreyer’s Jeanne?

BD : Not immediately. The fact that I was dealing with the childhood, it created sharp break. So I didn’t have to deal with this major figure of Dreyer, who is always lurking around. The fact I am dealing with the nine year-old, means that I am, perhaps naively, cutting that influence.

DC : Tell me about the work you’ve done for this movie with the choreographer Philippe Decouflé.

BD: Dance is a way of expressing Péguy’s mysticism- it’s the way of embodying it. So for example, the little girl would say to me, “I don’t  understand this part.” Then, I would say, “ Well, then dance.” Dance becomes another way of expressing the inexpressible. There are a lot we don’t understand in Péguy's texts. What we have in there is the rhythm, and that’s where the correspondence is.

Like the headbanging. There is not explanation for that. It’s a form of expressing grace. In a Heavy Metal concert, there is that absolute grace in that energy. So when we came to the part we didn’t understand, we’d go, “Girls, go ahead. Headbang!”

What we are looking for is harmony. It’s the dance, the shots, in the editing… it’s the effigy of harmony, whether it’s in the words, in the movements. It’s the formal thing that is an absolute quest and the meaning doesn’t matter. We are looking for beauty, we are looking for the shots to be happy between themselves.

DC : So it doesn’t really matter to you whether they are real singers or not.  Or they sing well.

                                                                       

BD : They shouldn’t be real singers. It mustn’t be sung well. There is something inhuman, something false about perfection. We need the flaws in the little girl. You know she has to go down so she can go up. She has to sing badly, so that when she sings well, it’s something special. It’s not interesting to hear someone sing well all the time.

It’s like listening to the record and listening to the concert. It’s powerful to hear a singer in concert because you hear the flaws in their voices. It has to be a live spectacle, live sound. Records in perfect dolby sound, I don’t listen to them anymore. It’s boring. My cinema is live.

DC : How did you cast the young actresses? What quality were you looking for?

BD : I was looking for the heart of Joan of arc. The part was an effigy of all little girls. I was looking for the process from sowing to blossoming of all the hearts of little girls. It’s an extraordinary thing. If you put a little girl in Péguy’s texts, you just watch her grow. You water her a little bit and she blossoms.

She is intelligent, gracious and peculiar – she was herself. She had her own ways and when you put some Péguy, then you really hear Joan of arc.

It’s the contrary to idealization. It’s not believing in the idea of Joan of Arc but making a regular little girl and it’s the regularity that will take us to the thing I am looking for.

DC : So you didn’t have to convince them about what Joan of Arc has decide to do?  That she wanted to save the damned? that she wanted to be more savoir than jesus?

BD : Yes. She did learn the texts. She had questions and we accompanied her. But the real questions were them as a musical interpreter- how they are going to sing. She was more interested in how to sing than what the text means.

DC : Nicolas Leclaire, who plays Jeannette’s uncle, how did you find him? He is hilarious.

One of the main criteria for our casting was looking for someone who could sing, obviously. So I met this young man who’s a rapper. The music composer didn’t want him. He said, “What do I do with him? He’s a rapper.”

We took in what’s beautiful and marvelous about him. He was a bit off. But we accepted that and took that quality in him in. He was touching and also funny which is rare. He is never ridiculous. He has his own poetry and musicality. He couldn’t sing and only rapped. But we took that in and he was extraordinary. There was something very audacious about us taking Nicolas in, who didn’t fit at all in what we were trying to do. He had his own dance practices and our choreographer found a way to integrate him.

He was a counterweight to Peguy’s over seriousness and that’s where we found the balance.

DC : Speaking of overseriousness, I am a big fan of your serious dramas. I haven’t gotten accustomed to your comedies yet. (Dumont laughs)

DC : I think I understand what you are doing with these comedic films since P’tit Quinquin, that these are just a flipside of a coin to your more austere dramas it’s any serious dramas are always on the verge of becoming comedies. Would you plan to do more comedies or are you going back to serious dramas?

DC : I find balance in tragicomedies but not in outright comedies. I needed to go off from tragedy. I wanted to find balance. And I find it in tragicomedy. It’s like the presence of the uncle in Jeannette. Because Jeannette is too heavy. It becomes too pontificating. It’s just like what you find in the paintings of Bosch and Brueghel – you have these grotesque images but inside them there are humorous bits.

I think you can really express deep thoughts and feelings in comedies. You can go really profound in ways you can’t do in dramas. Funny is deep, rich and surprising. What counts is to surprise the viewer.

Screenanarchy, April 11, 2018.

       The Film Stage: In my research, I come across your great admiration for Péguy. You speak of him in very laudatory terms, the essential part his writing played here; but I think of Bruno Dumont as a very singular figure. So is there a sense of giving yourself over fully to an artist, or more than you’re used to?

Bruno Dumont: With Péguy, really, there’s a discovery that goes beyond the artist and poet. What really moves me most is the philosopher Péguy. It’s an extremely contemporary thought of the human condition, and there’s no correspondence among philosophers today. I really see his thought as a thought of the present, the instant, and grace which has no lineage in western philosophy, so he’s completely in the metaphysics of Bergson, but he’s also embodying philosophy in art – or art is the embodiment of philosophy. Bergson remains a philosopher, whereas Péguy takes this additional step – he’s the artist as philosopher, and he really describes, defines, cinema. Cinema is the overwhelming, lightning-like expression of the present through a heroic figure, and Joan of Arc is a heroic figure. The fact is, you can have the experience of God in cinema and in the location of the simulacram of cinema.

 The Film Stage : Do you share these ideas with your performers?

 BD : So, if I talk to the little one about all this stuff, she’s not going to understand anything. Once the director has the understanding, then the actor has the action. The actor is only in action. It’s an error to talk to the actor about thought. The actor is an interpreter. He’s not there to meditate; he’s only there to act, as in “do things.” Otherwise, it would be unbearable.

TFS : You said the young Joan, in auditions, was wild and impulsive. How do you know that will be good for a production?

                                                                                 

BD : In fact, I filmed the casting. I make my choices based on seeing the rushes of the casting; that’s when I say “yes.” It’s not the interview with the actor; that’s quite banal. “Cinegeny,” or whether someone reads well on film, is something that I see, and something that some people have and other people don’t. I don’t know why that is, but that’s what I see when I look at the rushes.

TFS : You described her recitation of the material as obscure. What are the specific pleasures of obscurity in performance?

BD : What’s obscure is the meaning; what is not obscure is the rhythm. The little girl understands the rhythm of Péguy’s text; she doesn’t understand the meaning. Myself, there are passages that I do not understand at all. Péguy’s poetry is rhythm. The meaning is not important. It’s a theologically obscure text, and what’s important is something that’s tonal, musical. There’s a kind of knowledge there that takes us towards a mystical, ecstatic level. It’s like when you listen to music there. There’s no meaning there; there’s something there that has nothing to do with thought, that has just purely to do with the domain of music. And I just want to correct something that I said earlier, for your tape: I said he’s tonal, music etc. It’s not that there’s a knowledge; there’s no knowledge, whereas there’s something mystical and ecstatic.

TFS : I’d like to know about the key differences between shootings on sets and locations.

BD : The huge advantage of shooting on location is that everything is there. It’s like the sheep: I don’t order up the sheep. I like these accidents, this happenstance. It’s like the sound of the trees, the birds, the wind. All these things are happenstance, and they’re very important. Because cinema is such an artificial form: you have to set up your camera, you have to set up your frame, you have to go in search of the happenstance; you have to go in search of the breath. The countryside has this breath, this spirit to it.

And I accept the happenstance; I need it. It gives the film texture, and that’s why I use direct sound: I take what happens, whatever comes. In those circumstances, what wasn’t planned for is part of what was planned for. I can always cut, after all. I have this little girl’s breath, I have her heartbeat, and these take me back to something that is non-thought, and is a kind of counter-balance to the artificiality. As I was saying earlier, there’s an equilibrium that needs to be found. If we did all these things inside a room, it would very quickly become unbearable. That is Bergson. That idea is Bergson.

TFS : It was recently announced that you’ll be doing a sequel to the film, titled Jeanne. This follows your upcoming sequel to Li’l Quinquin. Your movies often feel closed-off, singular, so what is your particular attraction to continuing narratives?

BD : I find the subjects so unimportant. It’s like in painting: you can make something grand, major, with just a little crossroads in the countryside. The subject is so unimportant. I was very interested in a series, to come back to something. So, in Quinquin, I come back to my characters four years later. So there’s the same actors, the same characters, then something else. That’s exactly what I think of cinema: it’s always the same director making another film, so there’s always some same and some other. I’m always making The Life of Jesus, actually. But my style has evolved, my sensibility has evolved, so now, when I see The Life of Jesus, I want to recut it. We continue making films because we evolve. There’s no reason to say “I’m going to stop” because we’re constantly evolving.

TFS : You’ll be making a film based on the period that we do know. What material, in particular, do you look at when going there? Are you particularly conscious of the many great filmmakers who have explored it?

BD : The second part is the battles. What I’m interested in is finding a way of renewing the battles, a new approach to the battles. We’ve seen lots of films that deal with the battles – most of them start there and then go to the trail – so what I’m looking for is renewing it, a new way of showing this part with a contemporary sensibility and make Joan of Arc felt today. I think I’ve found a new way to show these battles. I’m not going to shoot like Cecil B. DeMille, that’s for sure – but I do like Cecil B. DeMille.

TFS : Do you have a favorite of them?

BD : [Laughs] I really like Cecil B. DeMille. His Joan of Arc looks like she’s 40. That makes it very original, actually.

Bruno Dumont on the Rhythm of ‘Jeannette,’ Evolution of Style, and the Actor’s Interpretation,  The Film Stage , April 12, 2018  

       

Since canonization in 1920, Joan, one of France’s patron saints, has been played by some of film’s greatest icons (Maria Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman) as well as trendy Hollywood starlets (Milla Jovovich, Leelee Sobieski), but in each iteration it’s the spectacle of her martyrdom that dominates the story, not the humble nature of her origins. Dumont delights in the reverse approach. Jeannette is a gloriously shameless instance of art house eccentricity. Sans celebs, excessive scenery, or striking dancing talent, the film reads like a Judson School rejoinder to the Christian rock opera, a picturesque fable flying in the face of the sublime.

                                                 
     The film is also, in many ways, a trial of viewers’ attention spans. Once 16-year-old Jeanne (played by Jeanne Voisin) works up the nerve to flee her sheep, her friends, and laconic domus, one expects an intense adieu. Instead, Dumont cuts to an outdoor shot “before the end of the following winter,” with Jeanne calmly spinning wool and still waiting for time to head to the front. “We can leave in peace,” she tells her uncle (Gery De Poorter), a bumbling lad who seems more like a brother. “Like eight months ago?” he gibes. “This time for good,” she explains, her eyes never straying from her menial task.


Is Jeanne truly led by visions, or is she a bored-out-of-her-mind wunderkind trapped in the middle of nowhere? An exercise in patience, Jeannette suggests that it doesn’t matter. “If the soldiers refuse, I’ll gather the people,” she resolves, her horse chewing oats nearby. “And if they refuse, I’ll go alone.” Her decision segues into one last fevered dance, this time less loony than tragic. Denying us any whiff of the violence to come, Dumont celebrates the innocence — and banality — of a young saint’s life. We know what comes next for this girl, after all, and we ask if it is worth it.                 

Visions of Joan of Arc as a Dancing, Singing, Head-Banging Kid.  Hyperallergic , April 13, 2018

What Jeanette captures more than any other film I can think of is the strangeness of Christian faith even to its adherents. Any intimacy we experience with God is unpredictable. For the film’s Joan as for so many believers—even those whose earliest education was formed by faith—God breaks in from the outside. Jarring contrasts, like complex theology issuing from the mouth of a little child, have become almost predictable in art films. But by using these contrasts to depict genuine religious visions, Dumont both revitalizes art-film conventions and portrays, more than any other hagiographical film I know, the weirdness of the saints. (Dumont has praised Alain Cavalier, whose 1986 Thérèse is another unsettled, beautiful film that captures the strange currents of a girl-saint’s mind—though Cavalier worked in a much less aggressive mode.)

Dumont’s film begins in what seems like an idyll: A nine-year-old girl is singing her prayers as she watches her sheep by the side of a winding river. But the prayers are not idyllic. Jeanette (Lise Leplatte Prudhomme) breaks off before she finishes, and begins to change her entreaties into challenges: “Your Name is so far from being hallowed and Your reign from coming,” she laments to God. Under a huge sky, in an expanse of pastoral beauty (this is a gorgeous film that didn’t spend its money on set dressing), Jeanette cries out her frustrations at France’s political divisions—and at the silent God who does not help. She sings fiercely, apocalyptically, “And there is nothing; there is never anything.”

She is so small. Sheep baa in a kind of farmland rimshot punctuating her prayers. She turns cartwheels, because she hasn’t learned to hold her body with adult reserve. She has intense theological arguments with her best friend, another little girl named Hauviette (Lucile Gauthier), both actresses speaking the complex lines with bizarrely credible conviction.

Eventually a nun appears, Madame Gervaise, to guide Jeanette. This sister is played by twin sisters (Aline and Elise Charles). Like all the film’s strange choices, it isn’t pointlessly edgy. When the nun speaks in chorus she is no longer an individual giving an opinion, but the voice of religious community; she is a community within herself, like the Trinity. She’s definitely weird, and there are hints here of the confrontational imagery of a horror movie—she appears out of nowhere, inexplicably doubled, a real person whom Jeanette’s friends know and yet also a vision. She chastises Jeanette (“You must suffer if you [want to] call God to account”). The two of them have a theological song battle, with a rock guitar backing, which rises to a high pitch of ecstasy when they suddenly begin head-banging—and the nun’s wimple falls as her hair, a woman’s glory, the sign that she and Jeanette are alone before God, streams down and whips across her face. It’s a stunning moment, feminine and aggressive all at once, joyous and strange. The mentor becomes young again, and the girl becomes a warrior working herself up before battle.

The visual vocabulary of Jeanette is simple: sky, sheep, river. Late scenes in Jeanette’s father’s hut are the film’s one concession to the idea that audiences might like the occasional change of scenery. The musical vocabulary is not so simple. The combination of unaccompanied singing and thrashing guitars suggests that Joan’s story links our time and her own. The music does not respect the barrier of time; it is as if the audience, like God—and like the saints, interceding in our lives from their vantage point in Heaven—can see and hear from the perspective of infinity. The distance between past and present dissolves in the ecstasy of experiencing the great “I AM.”

The film’s vocabulary of movement is similarly meaningful in its awkward strangeness. These actors delight in their bodies. The children’s bodies twist and stretch and turn upside-down, which is both realistic and perfectly in line with the movie’s portrayal of a world awry and overturned.

Jeanette’s explicit theological concerns include questions about whether one should wish to be damned to rescue others, whether she is called to suffer for the damned, and whether the existence of damned souls should cause her own soul to rebel. These questions, which bring sharp rebukes from Madame Gervaise that Jeanette does her best to accept, are unrelated to the mission the audience knows she will eventually receive. There is a long, incantatory passage about how we don’t know our own happiness—in the midst of our misery we have our happiness in Christ, even if we don’t believe—which, if anything, might suggest that there is no need for a dangerous military mission. Obviously a movie about Saint Joan will depict Christian faith, but Jeanette suggests that its heroine did not understand her own task in the same terms that we would.

Once Jeanette receives her mission, the film screeches to a halt, then meanders around for a while. Jeanette, now played by Jeanne Voisin, tries to find the Dauphin (which we don’t see, because Dauphins are far outside this film’s budget). She fails; she mopes. She ponders the morality of lying, and makes some startlingly bad justifications for it, which the film lets stand. There’s chicken-plucking and artsy dancing which can only be described as “Europeasant,” and the thrills of the movie’s early sections begin to fade.

Presumably it’s easier to give urgency to scenes of ecstatic religious vision than to scenes of everyday confusions and obstacles. Perhaps Dumont intends to depict Jeanette adrift, unguided now that her visionary companions have left her, trying to work out what they might want but struggling to make her own limited resources match her task. She becomes complicit in the usual human self-justifications (man is the rationalizing animal) and struggles to find the path forward. But the danger of form-follows-function is always that the audience will be as confused as the characters. It must be possible to depict frustration without being frustrating. In this final section, both the thinking and the filmmaking seem to slacken.

The final scene recaptures some of the early grandeur. It’s a surprisingly normal and intimate portrayal of the girl riding away from her home. It’s as if we are leaving behind the transforming, surreal inner experience of the childhood visionary, and entering the part of Joan’s life which can be communicated through dates and maps. She rides out of childhood, into adulthood; out of apocalypse, and into history.

Unless Ye Become as Little Children,  The American Interest , June 29, 2018.