In Which We Would Do Anything For That Woman

Man and Woman

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Camille Claudel was only 18 when she met the greatest sculptor who ever lived. Auguste Rodin was 24 years her elder, and it was the first time she had ever been to Paris.

As a means of attracting students, Rodin visited a group of young artists at the rue Notre Dame des Champs. At the time, he could barely make his rent, and often had to beg his contracted students to pay their bills. Under Rodin's instruction Camille excelled as both a model and an artist. He was especially attracted to her limbs; casts of hands and feet were often the first things he showed his apprentices. He began consulting his new muse about every aspect of his work. The two would go on to collaborate on a number of projects that would bear Rodin's name alone.

By 1885 Rodin was completely obsessed with his young assistant: her feminine form, her unfamiliar accent, the mere scent of her. Initially, their affair was kept quiet, as Rodin continued his asexual, 20-year relationship with a woman who he also sculpted, Rose Beuret. Several biographies of Rodin exclude Camille altogether; one calls her "la belle artiste." She still lived with her parents, and her lack of accessibility was a major part of her charm for the older man.

in the studio

Rodin was a help and a hindrance in Camille's quest to finding herself as a young woman. In a questionnaire offered in a playful journal titled "An Album of Confessions to Record Thoughts, Feelings, Etc", she wrote the following:

Your favorite virtue
I don't have any, they are all boring.

Your favorite qualities in a man
To obey his wife

Your favorite qualities in a woman
To make her husband fret

Your favorite occupation
To do nothing

Your chief characteristic
Caprice and inconstancy

Your idea of happiness
To marry general Boulanger

Your idea of misery
To be the mother of many children

Your favorite color and flower
The most changing color and the flower which does not change

If not yourself, who would you be?
A hackney horse in Paris

Isabelle Adjani as Camille

Your favorite poet
One who does not write verses

Your favorite painters and composers
Myself

Your favorite heroes in real life
Pranzini or Truppman

Your favorite heroines in real life
Louise Michel

Your favorite heroes in fiction
Richard III

Your favorite heroines in fiction
Lady Macbeth

Your favorite food and drink
De la cuisine de Merlatti (love and fresh water)

Your favorite names
Abdonide, Josephyr, Alphee, Boulang

Your pet aversion
Maids, hackney drivers, and models

What characters in history do you most dislike?
They are all disagreeable.

What is your present state of mind?
It is too difficult to tell.

For what faults have you most tolerance?
I tolerate all my faults but not at all other people's

Your favorite motto.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Camille Claudel

The first time Camille left their cozy arrangement in Paris was a vacation to the Isle of Wight with her best friend. Free of her life in Paris and her intrusive family, she was on her own for the first time. She told her friends, "I have never had so much fun in my entire life."

Left to his own devices, Rodin was lovesick and upset, and he did not find his girlfriend's letters at all reassuring. He told her, "Don't let me be hurt like this by waiting too long." Their principal disagreement was over other women - Rodin's obsession with the female gender was all consuming. His friend Octave Mirbeau once said of him that "he could do anything, even a crime, for a woman." Once at a dinner with Monet he stared so forcefully at his host's daughters that they all left the table.

Unfortunately for Rodin, Camille decided to postpone her return to present one of her sculptures in Nottingham. She wrote him a savage letter that began, "You can believe I am not very happy here; it seems that I am so far away from you. There is always something missing tormenting me." This kind of behavior naturally only intensified Rodin's desire for her. In one of his typical lovesick letters, he wrote,

My poor head is very sick, and I can't get up any more this morning. Last night, I wandered (for hours) in our favorite places without finding you, how sweet death would be and how long is my agony. Why didn't you wait for me at the atelier? Where are you going? To what suffering have I been destined? During moments of amnesia, I suffer less, but today even the relentless pain remains. Camille my beloved in spite of everything, in spite of the madness which I feel impending and which will be your doing, if this continues. Why don't you believe me?

I abandon my Salon and sculpture. If I could go anywhere, to a country where I would forget, but there isn't any. Frankly, there are times when I believe I will forget you. But, in an instant, I feel your terrible power. Have pity, cruel girl. I can't go on, I can't spend another day without seeing you. Otherwise the atrocious madness. It is over, I don't work any more, malevolent goddess, and yet I love furiously.

My Camille be assured that I feel love for no other woman, and that my soul belongs to you.

I can't convince you and my arguments are powerless. You don't believe my suffering. I weep and you question it. I have not laughed in so long. I don't sing anymore everything is dull and indifferent to me. I am already a dead man and I don't understand the trouble I went through for things which are now indifferent to me. Let me see you every day; it will be a generous action and maybe I will get better, because you alone can save me through your kindness.

Today of course she would immediately post that on tumblr.

Mere expressions of love alone would not be enough to win Camille over. She was not involved enough to give herself over to a womanizer without some assurances. Eventually, Rodin was moved to draw up the following bizarre contract.

In the future and starting from today 12 October 1886, I will have for a student only Mademoiselle Camille Claudel and I will protect her alone through all the means I have at my disposal through my friends who will be hers especially through my influential friends.

I will accept no other students so that no other rival talent could be produced by chance, although I suppose that one rarely meets artists as naturally gifted.

At the exhibition, I will do everything I can for the placement and the newspapers.

Under no pretext will I go to Mme.... to whom I will not teach sculpture anymore. After the exhibition in May we will go to Italy and and will live there communally for at least six months of an indissouble liasion after which Mademoiselle Camille will be my wife. I will be very happy to offer a marble figurine if Mademoiselle Camille wishes to accept it within four or five months.

From now until May I will have no other woman otherwise the conditions of this contract are broken.

If my Chilean commission comes through, we will go to Chile instead of Italy.

I will take none of the models I have known.

We will have a photograph taken by Carjat in the outfit worn by Mademoiselle Camille at the Academie, day clothes and possibly evening clothes.

Mademoiselle Camille will stay in Paris until May.

Mademoiselle Camille promises to welcome me to her atelier four times a month until May.

Rodin

After the contract was signed, the momentum of the relationship shifted. Having agreed to her master's wishes, he possessed all the power. Camille deeply feared Rodin taking other women into his bed, especially the models that posed for him. Things were further complicated by the fact that Beuret, the mother of Rodin's son, found out about his concubine and began to loathe Camille. In response, he moved his mistress into an apartment near the Eiffel Tower.

The affair slowly fell apart after that. The last straw was Claudel's miscarriage; paranoid about the promises her lover had broken, the next decade found her destroying her own artwork and tearing down the presumably yellow wallpaper of her apartment. Although doctors would argue she did not belong there, at her brother's request she would spend the last thirty years of her life in an asylum five miles from Avignon.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about Battleship.

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In Which Jean Renoir Keeps The Aspidistra Flying

Renoir & Bazin & Godard & Truffaut

by ALEX CARNEVALE

There is a special and essential cachet attached to unfinished books. Despite their incomplete nature, the tomes naturally have an affinity with puzzles or codes, and because of this the texts themselves are often subject to more than one reading. Also because they are not whole, other individuals feel more assertive about adding or subtracting writing from the original, under the supposition that they are putting together the work the way the author imagined. It is this way with Andre Bazin's seemingly innocent 1971 appreciation of his favorite filmmaker, Jean Renoir.

Even Truffaut's introduction to the volume he edited completely obfuscates the book itself. He writes,

No one should expect me to introduce this book with caution, detachment or equanimity. Andre Bazin and Jean Renoir have meant too much for me to be able to speak of them dispassionately. Thus it is quite natural that I should feel that Jean Renoir by Andre Bazin is the best book on the cinema, written by best critic, about the best director.

Andre Bazin, whose health deteriorated year after year, found the strength to look at films and to comment on them until his last day. The day before his death he wrote one of his best essays — the long analysis of The Crime of M. Lange — having watched the film on television from his bed.

Renoir's work excited Bazin more than any other. He was working on this study of his favorite director when he died. His fragmentary manuscript has been reconstructed and completed by his friends with the assistance of his wife, Janine Bazin.

I am responsible for the final organization of the work, for its division into ten chapters approximating the chronological development of Renoir's work. Obviously Bazin would have done it differently if he had had time. I think he intended to devote a chapter to the themes treated by Renoir, another to his work with actors, another to the adaptation of novels.

In one of his last letters, Bazin wrote me,

I am circling around Renoir by reading the life of Augustus, the novels of Zola: La Bete Humaine and Nana, Maupassant... I will eventually have to approach him more directly but I am now at a point where I know either too much or not enough. Too much to be satisfied with approximations, not yet enough to fill in all the variables of his equations.

I am not far from thinking that the work of Jean Renoir is the work of an infallible filmmaker. To be less extravagant, I will say that Renoir's work has always been guided by a philosophy of life which expresses itself with the aid of something much like a trade secret: sympathy.

Before Bazin's book even begins, Jean Renoir weighs in with a foreword of his own:

The more I travel through life, the more I am convinced that masks are proliferating. I have difficulty finding a woman whose face looks as it really is. Our age is a triumph of make-up. And not only for faces, but more important, for the mind as well.

The modern world is founded on the ever increasing production of material goods. One must keep producing or die. But this process is like the labor of Sisyphus. Forgetting Lavoisier's dictum, "In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost; everything is transformed," we convince ourselves that our earthly machines will succeed in catching up with eternity. But to maintain the level of production on which our daily bread depends, we must ever renew and expand our enterprises.

It turns out that Renoir does not know Bazin very well, other than by his little French beret. He struggles with the same problem the author of Jean Renoir has — knowing too much or too little about his subject. For the final version of Jean Renoir is as much an obliteration of its subject as a celebration.

Almost every section of Jean Renoir contains the same blandishment about the director. Each section begins, "Renoir is the greatest living French director" or "Renoir is unmatched" in such-and-such field. This kind of repetition would be the first accessory sacrificed if the author had been alive to revise his work; here they serve as eerie reminders that the admiration is rehearsed.

Nana The second part of Jean Renoir amounts to lame defenses of The River and Paris Does Strange Things, two films that for various reasons seem to have offended Bazin's sense of the cinema in some way. He waves aside his own objections and Truffaut replaces them, in the book's third section, with Renoir's own autobiographical reminiscences of his days as a young, inexperienced directors, film treatments, and interviews.

Renoir writes,

What I know is that I am beginning to understand how one should work. I know that I am French and that I must work in an absolutely national vein. I know also that in doing this, and only in doing this, can I reach people from other nations and act for international understanding.

I know that the American cinema will collapse because it is no longer American. I know too that we must not spurn the foreigners who come to us with their knowledge and talent; we must absorb them. It is a practice which has served us rather well from Leonardo da Vinci all the way to Picasso. I believe that the cinema is not so much an industry as people would have us believe and that the fat men with their money, their graphs, and green felt tables are going to fall on their faces.

Jean Renoir never made another film after Jean Renoir was published. No one would give him the money.

The best part of Jean Renoir is the book's filmography, an appendix in which Renoir's various projects are taken up by a variety of critics and directors. (Truffaut himself writes the majority of them.) These short discussions of the films innovated the concept of a "recap," for they prove that simply describing a cinematic plot reveals vast differences in character and perception. This is most evident in Truffaut's rundown of The Rules of the Game:

The nine principal characters of The Rules of the Game have a sentimental problem to resolve, and since the film shows them on the eve of a crisis, we will see them behave at their worst. The only sincere person — the pilot Andre Jurieu — awkward in an unfamiliar milieu, unleashes a tragicomedy in which he is the only victim, precisely because he has not followed the rules of the game.

Ludicrous skeletons, the characters of The Rules of the Game, viewed at a critical moment in their decay, forsake the farandole ("It's nice but it's a little old-fashioned") for a danse macabre which assaults the senses. For the ostensible purpose of a party, they are led to disguise themselves, which is to say, to take off their masks. The shadows of the masters and servants mingle and merge in an image of a sybaritic life style which cannot last: man is imperfect, he is a born liar, and besides, "If love is endowed with wings, is it not to flutter?" The Rules of the Game is a profoundly pessimistic film, a bitter and prophetic carnival in which friendship itself is exposed as just another empty game.

The word game is used over 200 times in Truffaut's two page description.

game

At some point in any hagiography, the idolatry itself becomes absurd. In Jean Renoir, there is no evidence of insincerity on the part of Jean Renoir's admirers. No doubt he was their very favorite, the person whose artistic work can be credited in part for giving birth to their own, whether it be new movies or essay-length film criticism. But there is also a movement just as strong away from what Renoir has accomplished; it equates to the difference between the sympathy they admire in Renoir and true empathy.

Admiration, especially the deeply ingrained kind, eventually distances the ardor from its subject. The act of writing a book in celebration of their cinematic hero feels like filing him away in history. None of their work would exist without Renoir, Bazin & Godard & Truffaut find themselves admitting, and having said this, they have finished with the man, eight years before he died in Beverly Hills. As Eric Rohmer puts it in his review of Renoir's Madame Bovary, "the roads that lead to art and truth are different, and it is the point where they cross which has always fascinated Renoir. Each perspective is true, each is false. They complement one another."   

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about Peter Berg's Battleship. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

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In Which We Fight From A Position Of Strength

Death by Rihanna

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Battleship
dir. Peter Berg
131 minutes

To comprehend all of Rihanna's dialogue in Peter Berg's Battleship is like sorting through the tendrils of 8th century Chinese poetry — so much is said in so little. After spending the first hour of the film uttering such bon mots as "Come on" or "Yes sir," she really opens up when she, along with the otherwise all-male crew of the John Paul Jones, witnesses the unmasking of the first alien species in recorded history. She opens her mouth as if to sigh, and then utters the prophetic words: "My dad said they'd come. He said, we ain't alone." 

Out of sheer boredom Peter Berg turns Battleship into a Levi-Straussian jumble of signs and signifiers. It's sort of what watching Mozart try to play Kelly Clarkson's "Mr. Know It All" on a harmonica would be like. Shortly after the arrival of an alien race sophisticated enough to reach Earth from another galaxy, Rihanna enters into a serious physical confrontation with the organism. Screenings of Battleship in specific metro areas will feature the accompanying Greimas semiotic square explaining the event:

Watching Rihanna take a bloody lip from a disrespectful alien-machine amalgam and trying to enjoy it is very difficult, perhaps on the level of trying to the explain the work of Levi-Strauss at West Point. It is doubly disturbing that the alien lets her go with only that much violence, as if it was meant to stand in for something more. To address the issue of domestic abuse and minority empowerment in a film adapted from a board game stands as one of the definitive artistic achievements of this decade, if not of all time.

Battleship begins when the ne'er-do-well younger brother of a Navy captain named Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) is immersed in a series of monumental fuckups, all bearing a loose but explicit relation to the catastrophic results of American military might over the past decades. First he falls over himself trying to steal a chicken burrito to impress an ungainly blonde woman (Brooklyn Decker); this tragically ends when he is tasered in a moment akin to the savage losses of the Iran-Contra debacle. Appropriately the first ship he serves on is named the Ronald Reagan.

it was down to Taylor Kitsch and Donald Signifier for the role

In the very next scene Alex Hopper launches a climactic penalty kick over the head of a triumphant Japanese goalkeeper who strangely speaks perfect English (the ethnic confusion is merely an allegory for American racism, of course). And so on. Even the name of the actor portraying the film's protagonist is a grotesque joke on the military industrial complex.

Alex Hopper and Brooklyn Decker fall in love despite his mistakes, and he plans to marry her once he receives the permission of her father, Admiral Dickson Shane (Liam Neeson). The casting of Liam Neeson implies so much in Battleship. Something has been Taken, other questions are Unknown, and the approximate state of U.S. military power is in all likelihood Obi Wan Kenobi. "You've got skills," Neeson tells Hopper, "but I have never seen a man waste them like you."

Admiral Shane, you're wanted at the wet bar

He is not the only one disappointed by the exertion of careless American military might. Alex Hopper's brother (Alexander Skarsgård) is routinely upset by the way that his little brother's machinations reflect on his career. "Who do I call to teach you humility?" Eric Northman screams at Hopper, and the camera sails 450 feet in the air in a meaningful nod to the fact that powerful Hollywood executives refused to cast Alexander Skarsgård as Thor. This grave mistake is compounded by the fact that Skarsgård dies about a half hour into the movie in a symbolic nod to Steven Seagal's death in Executive Decision, which would be an ideal subtitle for the Battleship sequel. With all this symbolic nodding it's a wonder Berg didn't accidentally snap his neck.

plane of praxis

The aliens' plan is to drop a bubble shield around the island of Hawai'i, where they can use a powerful satellite uplink to relay a message to their homeworld that Earth is ripe for conquest. Their timing could not be worse, as the Navy is currently performing a series of fully armed wargames with multiple battleships in the region. The aliens themselves resemble humans with long blonde goatees that make them look like Kid Rock and eyelids that blink horizontally.

With biped movement and a similar skeletal structure, the aliens are undoubtedly derived from human stock. Possibly they are human visitors from the future, in which case talk of "an extinction-level event" would be completely impossible. Presumably the aliens originate from an ocean planet, because they seem rather awkward moving around on land, equipped as they are in massive metal suits, and all their spacecrafts are designed to be operated in a large body of water. Maybe they just wanted to drop in for a swim. Since none of this is ever outright stated, the subtlety is shocking in a film with a budget this large.

authentic learning

In the end Alex Hopper earns a silver star and the commendation of an entire nation, even though the idea that ends up saving the planet is entirely the work of a Japanese commander. Berg's point is that the sheer amount of money we spend on armament and war is only remotely justifiable if we are suddenly invaded by aliens who would never even know of our existence if we had not specifically requested they come and attempt to conquer us. If you're travelling among the stars, please, never say where you're from.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about the life of Victoria Woodhull. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

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