writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

Anne Rivière, L’Interdite (The Forbidden), Camille Claudel, 1864‐1943 (1983, reprint 1987) Riviere
takes a strong position poignant and feminist.
Odile Ayral‐Clause, Camille Claudel 's life46 (2008). A professor, specialist in English women
artists, evokes the friendly roles played by Jesse Lipscomb and Florence Jeans.
Jean‐ Paul Morel, Camille Claudel: a Burial 47(2009) offers a dramatic view of her "fate." As the
sculptor said herself: "My life, a novel [...] even an epic, the Iliad and the Odyssey. It would need a
Homer to tell it, I won’t start on it today, and I don’t want to make you sad. I fell into an abyss. I live
in a world so curious, so strange. Dreams were my [real] life, this is a nightmare”” This is a sad and
common result of "ignorance, neglect and cowardice, misunderstandings and arbitrary decisions"
that made her "misfortune,” while creating the tragic myth. Declared “dead” in 1920, she doesn’t
really expire till 1943. She is sacrificed on the altar of convenience after 30 years of “entombment."
6.3. Biographies centering on the artist and her brother
Dominique Bona, Camille et Paul: La Passion Claudel (2006). The author perceives the marks left
on her work by CC’s body itself: “the imprint of fingers is still visible”.
Michèle Desbordes, Blue Dress (2004) offers a rather romanticized biography. This novel is the
"love story" of a woman in a psychiatric hospital who waits for a man .... for almost 30 years: her
younger brother Paul. An invented story” In this novel, she reconstructs the torn fabric of Camille’s
existence.”
6.4. Regarding the family:
Reine‐Marie Paris, Camille Claudel, Gallimard, 1984. This was written by a member of the Claudel
family. The author brings together the interventions of Professor of Neuropsychology and
psychiatrist specializing in emotional and behavioral disorders) who treats the “delusions of
persecution."
Hélène Pinet and Reine‐Marie Paris, will join Camille Claudel, genius is like a mirror, Paris,
Gallimard, 2003.
7. Cinema and theater
In addition, filmmakers and actors provide an image in motion.
7.1. Two filmmakers (Nuytten and Dumont) between them divide the life of CC into two distinct
episodes: one of the artist, and one of the incarcerated person expelled from her art. Neither one
connects these successive periods as if it were rationally unbearable to do so. One, Bruno Nuytten
(1988) depicts her in her creative phase, with a dazzling performance by Isabelle Adjani in full passion
of her great love. The other filmmaker, Bruno Dumont, evokes the artist after her psychiatric
misfortune, in his Camille Claudel 1915 (2013). Juliette Binoche plays Camille in the presence of other
internees. Prostrated, she lives buried in a destructive psychiatric universe. Only the widely spaced
visits of her brother give her a breathing space. These two faces of the artist are fascinating:
creatress, then destroyed; able to depict and create, then delirious and suffering, screaming in her
sculptures and then going in to silence.
7.2. The theater.
7.2.1. The actor Charles Gonzales plays Camille Claudel. “Above all, don’t deceive me," Camille
had written Rodin. Later in the asylum, she describes her confinement “in plain, rhythmic French,
sometimes even almost rhythmic and glad, as if aroused by the peasant turns of speech she heard
around her, mingled with humour.”
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