Histoire(s) du cinéma: photographs of women
The first nine images of Histoire(s) du cinéma 4A, 'Le Contrôle de l'univers', are photographs of famous women, some by famous photographers: Camille Claudel, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Leila Boubat, Virginia Woolf (by Gisèle Freund), Anne-Marie Miéville, Colette and Sarah Bernhardt (by Nadar). Leila Boubat stands out from this group as famous only because of the photographs taken by her husband Edouard Boubat, of which the one used by Godard is the best known.
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In Eloge de l'amour (2001), Boubat's photograph is shown in close-up, as an insert:
A character compares a woman from his past to the portrait of Leila, which he has in his room, framed like a family photograph:
Boubat's Leila had appeared in Marguerite Duras's India Song (1975), again framed as if it were a family photograph:
The series of famous women in Histoire(s) du cinéma 4A had been anticipated by a passage near the beginning of 2B, 'Fatale Beauté', grouping three portraits of women:
Like the portrait of Leila, these photographs are known because of the photographer. The first of them is a self-portrait from the mid-'70s by Nicole Métayer:
The second is 'La Femme au chapeau' by Robert Demachy, from 1902, and the third is an undated portrait of a child called Sabine by Breton photographer Michel Thersiquel:
Jean-Louis Leutrat had initiated a project to identify all of the elements used by Godard in the composition of Histoire(s) du cinéma, a project in which he involved me and which, with his friends and students, is being pursued still since his death in April 2011. I miss the pleasure we had in sharing our discoveries, and I can't ask him if he had already made these identifications. Jean-Louis was particularly keen to identify, where possible, the books in which Godard had found his materials. I found these three photographs today in Claude Nori's French Photography From its Origins to the Present, bought in a second-hand bookshop in Muswell Hill. The original French edition of this book is from 1978, and it seems to me very likely that Nori's La Photographie française is Godard's source. The book also includes, for good measure, Edouard Boubat's portrait of Leila.
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See here for the photographs by Gisèle Freund used in Histoire(s) du cinéma.