Colette and Autobiography: The Film Version

Women In French Studies Colette and Autobiography: The Film Version In 1950, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs engaged Yannick Bellon to make a short documentary film about the French writer, Colette. Thus, at the age of 77, Colette found herself once again involved in a cinematic project. Earlier in her career, she had assisted in the filming of several of her novels (Minne, La Vagabonde), had written original screenplays (La Flamme cachée, Divine), a film dialogue (Lac-aux-Dames), French subtitles for German and American films (Maedchen in Uniform, Papa Cohen), a brief manual for scenario writers (Petit manuel de l'aspirant scénariste), and finally, movie reviews for such publications as Le Matin, Excelsior, Le Film, and Filma. Colette was a staunch supporter and critic of the cinema from its infancy. She foresaw the potential of documentaries as an extraordinary learning tool, demanded that theater actors adapt their technique to the screen, and praised talented film actors with her incisive and witty commentary.1 Unlike her previous associations with film, however, in 1950, Colette herself became the subject ofBellon's cinematic enterprise entitled simply Colette.2 Given the author's lifelong interest and various experiences with the cinema, it is curious that few critics have included the Bellon film in their critical analyses of Colette's oeuvre.3 Perhaps because Colette could not control every aspect of the documentary as she had her books, critics consider that this cinematic production cannot be compared to her literary ones. According to Odette and Alain Virmaux, critics who have written the only book-length study devoted completely to Colette's participation in film making and film criticism, Bellon's documentary constitutes Colette's "apotheosis into a cultural object for the screen" (Movies 2). For them, Colette's collaboration with Bellon is minimal and the documentary reduces her to "a semi-passivity" in which she is simply "consumed" by the screen ("Colette au cinéma" 123; my translation). However, documentation reveals that, to the contrary, Colette played an active role in several aspects of the film's production. Following Yannick Bellon's general outline for the project, Colette actually wrote the long central monologue in which she intersperses excerpts from six of her previous works with transitional paragraphs written specifically for the film. In addition, not only did Colette portray herself in the opening and closing scenes filmed in her 67 Women In French Studies Palais Royal apartment, she also provided the extraordinarily sensitive narrative voice for the film's central monologue. Thus, while Colette's control over the documentary is by no means total, she defines and describes herself in her own words, with her own voice, and in her own improvisational way, much to Bellon's delight.4 The film begins in Colette's apartment at the Palais Royal with the camera first focusing on a curtained window that, when opened, reveals the sunlit garden below. The camera then pans the apartment, resting first on a vase filled with roses and subsequently on Colette's collections of butterflies, books and paperweights. Next the viewer sees Pauline, the housekeeper, bring Colette her breakfast tray. They chat briefly about the weather before Colette strikes her knife against her waterglass, a musical signal that summons her husband, Maurice Goudeket, to join her for breakfast. After morning greetings, a brief glance at the mail and a few words about the birds and children in the garden below, Goudeket and Colette discuss the film project proposed by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs that would be based on the houses in which Colette has lived and worked. Although Colette objects to the project for various reasons, she finally considers a possible scenario and launches into her tale. At this point, the viewer is transported from the Palais Royal apartment to Colette's childhood home in Saint-Sauveur. For this section of the film, Colette reads passages from both La Maison de Claudine and Sido in which she describes the house, the gardens, and the fullness and tranquility of her early family life. In a transitional section written for the film, Colette describes her lonely existence as a young married woman living on the Rue...