Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema

A Beauvoirian Perspective

Jean-Pierre Boulé, Ursula Tidd, Jean-Pierre Boulé, Ursula Tidd

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857457301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Simone de Beauvoir's work has not often been associated with film studies, which appears paradoxical when it is recognized that she was the first feminist thinker to inaugurate the concept of the gendered 'othering' gaze. This book is an attempt to redress this balance and reopen the dialogue between Beauvoir's writings and film studies. The authors analyse a range of films, from directors including Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Lucille Hadzihalilovic, Sam Mendes, and Sally Potter, by drawing from Beauvoir's key works such as The Second Sex (1949), The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and Old Age (1970).

1

BEAUVOIR’S CHILDREN: GIRLHOOD IN INNOCENCE

Emma Wilson

The door shut behind him and I could hear his footsteps growing fainter as he walked off down the hall. I lay there alone in bed, feeling the black shadow creeping up the underside of the world like a flood tide. Nothing held, nothing was left. The silver airplanes and the blue capes all dissolved and vanished, wiped away like the crude drawings of a child in colored chalk from the colossal blackboard of the dark.

(Plath 1977: 166)

Ursula Tidd has argued that ‘Beauvoir’s philosophical interest in the experience of childhood is a feature that distinguishes her work from Sartre’s prior to 1950’ (Tidd 1999: 25).¹ I suggest that Beauvoir offers invaluable resources for contemplating the child as subject and the specificity of subjectivity in childhood; for thinking about that subjectivity as at once embodied, gendered and acculturated; and for thinking about the meanings which attach to childhood once we leave it behind, meanings invoking questions about innocence and loss. These questions are the basis for Beauvoir’s thinking about how one becomes a woman and assumes a position of alterity. They are also of interest in their own right as discussions of childhood, of child identities, and of the particular experiences of childhood known by young women. Contemporary women’s filmmaking in France has also paid attention to girlhood, as well as womanhood, in its attempts to open imaginings of embodied female subjectivity at different ages and stages of life.² It is the conjunction of Beauvoir’s interest in childhood, and the representations of young girls’ experiences found in female-authored films, which inspires this chapter. Taking Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence (2004), a film about an imagined girls’ school, as my object of enquiry, I explore the ways in which this contemporary film about girlhood is illumined by Beauvoir’s thinking and yet also opens her ideas to further questions.³ This chapter looks at Beauvoir’s account of childhood in passages from The Ethics of Ambiguity, The Second Sex, the first excised chapter from She Came to Stay, and the first section of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. In Innocence, I look at the drama of the middle child, Alice (Lea Bridarolli), a sequence of nine minutes in length enfolded in the centre of the film.

As this volume testifies, there has as yet been little attention to the rich resources for film analysis of Beauvoir’s work. Tarr and Rollet, naming their volume on French women filmmakers Cinema and the Second Sex, reference Beauvoir in thinking about the context of late twentieth-century France. They speak of the progress in the numbers of women entering the industry, and making films, yet note: ‘despite the heritage of Beauvoir’s work and the women’s movement of the 1970s, French women directors characteristically disclaim their gender as a significant factor in their filmmaking and their films lack a critical engagement with feminism and feminist film theory as it has developed in Britain, Germany and the United States over the last twenty years’ (2001: 1–2). While this is largely still the case ten years on, women filmmakers are finding the means through aesthetic choices, as well as alternative film narratives, to explore concerns about embodied subjectivity and, as discussed here, specifically about childhood that Beauvoir has foregrounded in her writing.

Childhood in Beauvoir’s Thought

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir discusses the situation of the child, not distinguishing at this point between the lived experience of the boy and the girl. This initial lack of distinction is apt given her recognition in The Second Sex that boys and girls arrive in the world with no differentiation of their relation to situation and culture. She argues: ‘The child’s situation is characterised by his finding himself cast into a universe which he has not helped to establish, which has been fashioned without him, and which appears to him as an absolute to which he can only submit’ (Beauvoir 2009: 35). The child’s situation is at once one of limit and of privilege. The child is effectively freed of the anguish of freedom and responsibility. Yet his or her relation to the world is in a certain way curtailed and contained. Beauvoir continues to explain:

In his child’s circle he feels that he can passionately pursue and joyfully attain goals which he has set up for himself. But if he fulfils this experience in all tranquillity, it is precisely because the domain open to his subjectivity seems insignificant and puerile in his own eyes. He feels himself happily irresponsible. The real world is that of adults where he is allowed only to respect and obey.

(Beauvoir 2009: 35)

Tidd sums up Beauvoir’s position: ‘The child is happily irresponsible because the parents play the role of divine beings to which she or he is subject. Yet the child’s world is metaphysically privileged because he or she escapes the anguish of freedom as a result of the existential unimportance of his or her actions’ (1999: 25). This recognition of the child’s world as metaphysically privileged has a particular bearing on the meanings ascribed to childhood in retrospect. Beauvoir is a perhaps surprising theorist of nostalgia for childhood. She does, however, see this nostalgia as a form of misfortune, writing: ‘the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him’; ‘all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know its exigencies’ (Beauvoir 2009: 40).

Beauvoir proposes a view of childhood as protected, as, in an illusory way, existentially secure. Childhood protection is made the more precious and the more desirable by threats to metaphysical privilege, to secure existence in a world of unimpeachable adults. Beauvoir charts with extraordinary prescience the emotions and sensations attaching to the growing realisation that the tranquillity of childhood is an illusion. At first, an inkling of a flaw or dent is carefully denied:

In his universe of definite and substantial things, beneath the sovereign eyes of grown-up persons, he [the child] thinks that he too has being in a definite and substantial way. … If something deep inside him belies his conviction, he conceals this imperfection. He consoles himself for an inconsistency which he attributes to his young age by pinning his hopes on the future.

(Beauvoir 2009: 36)

Yet such inconsistencies begin to be obtrusive. As soon as Beauvoir has established the security and tranquillity of childhood, she moves on to show the rupture of this intact world. She recognises: ‘it is very rare for the infantile world to maintain itself beyond adolescence. From childhood on, flaws begin to be revealed in it’ (2009: 38). Adolescence may be the time when, as Tidd puts it, ‘one discovers one’s own subjectivity and the subjectivity of others’ (1999: 26), yet this discovery is also breaking into childhood:

With astonishment, revolt and disrespect the child little by little asks himself, ‘Why must I act that way? What good is it? And what will happen if I act in another way?’. He discovers his subjectivity; he discovers that of others. And when he arrives at the age of adolescence he begins to vacillate because he notices the contradictions among adults as well as their hesitations and weaknesses.

(Beauvoir 2009: 38–39)

The recognition of flaws and questioning of absolutes begins in childhood in a manner which, arguably, makes childhood privileged as the era and age in which an intimation of loss and failure is first imagined, an era where blemishes and inequality are first seen to reign.

As we have seen, The Ethics of Ambiguity does not distinguish the experience of the boy and the girl. In her subsequent approaches to childhood, Beauvoir explores the further specificities of the situation of young girls who share the drama of concealment and loss described for all children, yet find this further complicated by the active construction and policing of their feminine identities. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter Beauvoir writes about her own experience of childhood peace in terms reminiscent of The Ethics of Ambiguity: ‘Few things could disturb my equanimity. I looked upon life as a happy adventure’ (1959: 48). Gender difference does not trouble her tranquillity, though she acknowledges that this is not because it does not actually inflect or affect her life. She writes: ‘I had no brother; there were no comparisons to make which would have revealed to me that certain liberties were not permitted me on the grounds of my sex; I attributed the restraints that were put upon me to my age. Being a child filled me with passionate resentment; my feminine gender, never’ (1959: 55–56).

In the section on childhood in The Second Sex, Beauvoir lays emphasis immediately on the body and its relation to subjectivity: ‘For girls and boys, the body is first the radiation of a subjectivity, the instrument that brings about the comprehension of the world: they apprehend the universe through their eyes and hands, and not through their sexual parts’ (2009: 293). While the focus in this description is the lack of distinction between male and female, her vision of infant exploration is different from that in The Ethics of Ambiguity in its emphasis on this prehensile, sensory engagement with the world. The child may be protected but is always already seeking knowledge and apprehension. This search for knowledge through fleshy engagement brings with it an early sense of flaw and failure, dating right to separation and individuation rather than to puberty and adolescence: ‘in a bodily form he discovers finitude, solitude and abandonment in an alien world’ (2009: 294).

From this vision of symmetry between the girl and boy, Beauvoir moves quickly to explore the different treatment of female children. She writes:

the little girl continues to be doted upon, she is allowed to hide behind her mother’s skirts, her father takes her on his knees and pats her hair; she is dressed in dresses as lovely as kisses, her tears and whims are treated indulgently, her hair is done carefully, her expressions and affectations amuse: physical contact and complaisant looks protect her against the anxiety of solitude.

(Beauvoir 2009: 296)

The description here interacts interestingly with the former comment on physical exploration and solitude. The female child is protected from her apprehension of solitude by being dressed up in compliments. Her masquerade of femininity distances her from awareness of the illusory tranquillity in which she exists. Given her emphasis on the flesh and subjectivity as embodied, Beauvoir’s focus here on garments and dress is telling. In this first evocation of a cradled, protected girlhood, baby girls’ clothes are seen as being as soft as kisses, their delicate and tactile fabrics almost confused with the parental affection, nurture, construction and approval they imply. Yet the guarantor of affection and security, the sensory fabric, becomes very quickly the constraining garb of femininity. The lovely fabrics impose different meanings: ‘she is dressed in uncomfortable and fancy clothes that she has to take care of, her hair is done in complicated styles, posture is imposed on her’ (2009: 306). The body, that instrument for discovering the word, is regulated in clothes of disarming fragility that require and impose particular codes of behaviour. Such garments further instantiate a constructed understanding of the meanings and capacities of the young girl’s body. Beauvoir writes: ‘The girl hates the idea that this body she identifies with may be perforated as one perforates leather, that it can be torn as one tears a piece of fabric. But the girl refuses more than the wound and the accompanying pain; she refuses that these be inflicted’ (2009: 346). In addition to the confusion of body and subjectivity comes the confusion of the body with the garments that clothe it. The young girl’s body is constructed as fragile through the fabrics that clothe it. The fabrics themselves are material manifestations of her parents’ hopes and dreams for her femininity. They are part of the web of acculturating images, words, compliments, fantasies, fairy tales, mirror reflections through which she finds her femininity inscribed and with which she becomes complicit. In this way, the female child becomes trapped: ‘She is treated like a living doll and freedom is denied her; thus a vicious circle is closed; for the less she exercises her freedom to understand, grasp and discover the world around her, the less she will dare to affirm herself as subject’ (2009: 305). It is clear that her relation to subjectivity, to freedom and to the protection of childhood, is different from that of the male child and that protection itself becomes bound closely with policing and control.⁴

Aligning the construction of identity, symbolic and literal images of materiality, and actual material, Beauvoir writes of the little girl:

She has to be white like an ermine, transparent like crystal, she is dressed in vaporous organdie, her room is decorated with candy-coloured hangings, people lower their voice when she approaches, she is prohibited from seeing indecent books; yet there is not one child on earth who does not relish ‘abominable’ images and desires.

(Beauvoir 2009: 347)

This disparity is one Beauvoir consciously explores in the first chapter of She Came to Stay, one of the two early chapters of the novel Beauvoir was advised to excise.⁵ The infant Françoise develops in stages that look forward to The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex. Her apprehension of the world is sensory and immediate, as she is seen feeling each movement in her hand, hearing the sounds around her, and responding to her environment. Her world is protected by sovereign parents who provide an identity for Françoise to take on: ‘“She’s a precocious child”, her father said with satisfaction; and her mother replies: “She has a good character and is very straightforward. She tells me everything”’ (Beauvoir 1979: 277).⁶ We see Françoise reflecting her parents’ approbation: ‘She was proud of her curls and of her good marks, and proud of being a precocious little girl with a good character’ (1979: 277). It is a source of her self-construction, as she regards herself: ‘This little girl was Françoise; she looked at her in the mirror with satisfaction, and she said to herself “That’s me!”’ (1979: 277). Yet at exactly the same point in the text Beauvoir illustrates too the ways in which this perfect, reflecting world also knows its own fissures and flaws. This is witnessed in the treatment she gives to the development of Françoise’s sexuality and her autoerotic pleasure. Beauvoir writes: ‘It’s a silly thing in bed at night to spend a long time tickling the place where the skin is all soft and sticky. Françoise told her mother everything, but silly things didn’t exist, they were nothing and there weren’t any words to speak about them’ (1979: 277). The transparency and trust her mother praises are shown to be more complicated. Françoise, touching herself, knows enough not to reveal this secret pleasure to her mother. By designating this act a silly thing she can categorise it as beneath her mother’s attention.⁷ She can therefore continue to take pleasure and yet leave apparently pristine her mother’s image of her as a pure, confiding child. This duplicity is shown as blithe. Beauvoir’s use of style indirect libre here belies the child’s happy self-justification (thus prefiguring Françoise’s later nurture of her own self-image through the novel).⁸ Beauvoir shows how the child may always already recognise, however secretly, his or her own autonomy. Flaws and dents may be hidden, yet the carefree protection of childhood is barely blemish-free. Beauvoir creates an Edenic image of Françoise, joyfully reared on Bluebeard and other fairy tales, making her way into the forest: ‘She begins to run into the woods, her heart beating: in the shade of the tall pine trees she was going to find once more the joy and anguish that she never knew in the garden that lay stretched out in the daylight for everyone to see’ (1979: 278). In her shady sylvan world, ‘she pealed the bark off a little wood branch and ge...