Cerberus at the Gates: The Demonization of the French Female Concierge

Located at the threshold of modern Parisian apartment living, the concierge maintains the common spaces, delivers mail and, until 1957, pulled the cord to permit dwellers to enter the building at all hours of the night. Neither owner of nor renter in the building that she tends, the concierge occupies the first-floor loge – a liminal space that is neither entirely public nor truly private – where she simultaneously lives and works. In the nineteenth century, the concierge was often poor and uneducated, yet influential thanks in great part to her post at the front door: She was feared because of her intermediate position, straddling public and private, between tenants and landlords and at times in cahoots with the police, who turned to her whenever there was an incident and who sought to recruit her as a spy (Arlès et Duby 230).1 Her identity was so inextricably linked to her physical location at the entry to the building that she was often referred to as a portière. However, the concierge\u27s role of gatekeeper also earned her the far less flattering moniker of Cerberus – the mythological three-headed guard dog at the gates of hell. For instance, in his 1871 memoire, At Home in Paris: at Peace and at War, Jerrold Blanchard writes, Concierges\u27 boxes are usually gloomy; but that in which our Cerberus lived was in perpetual twilight (13),2 and even more recently, in José Benjamin\u27s La concierge est dans le cercueil (2008), the eponymous character\u27s loge is referred to as l\u27antre du cerbère (40)

Lost in Adaptation:The Silencing of the French Female Concierge

Fictional representations of the female concierge frequently underscore her negative attributes, above all her meddlesome discourse. The female concierge character in Georges Simenon\u27s 1933 novel, Les fiançailles de M. Hire, however, provides an exception to the rule as local law authorities give credence to her word and base their investigation on her testimony. However, in two filmic adaptations of the novel—Duvivier\u27s Panique (1946) and Patrice Leconte\u27s Monsieur Hire (1989)—the female concierge character is practically absent. This article demonstrates how, from page to screen, the concierge\u27s role is dissected, disembodied, and displaced in Duvivier\u27s and Leconte\u27s films, and finally reflects upon the significance of her silencing

(Re)casting the Concierge in Muriel Barbery\u27s\u3cem\u3e L\u27 Élégance du Hérisson\u3c/em\u3e

«Être maire de Paris, c\u27est aimer les concierges et les stars, parce que les concierges sont les stars de notre quotidien! (Greco). Before Anne Hidalgo aligned the commonplace French apartment caretaker with celebrated icons of the stage and screen during her 2014 Paris mayoral campaign, the Parisian concierge had never stood so high upon a pedestal. The closest the French concierge had come to such limelight was perhaps the fictionalized representation of the working-class figure in Muriel Barbery\u27s 2006 novel, L\u27 élégance du hérisson. The newspaper Libération described Barbery\u27 s novel as France\u27s surprise bestseller of the year (Lançon) with 346,000 copies sold in less than a year after its release. Further attesting to its popularity, the novel was promptly adapted for the big screen by Mona Achache as Le Hérisson in 2009. It has since experienced international acclaim with over 6,000,000 copies sold worldwide (Lichfield) and has established its academic cachet in the United States and Canada, turning up as required reading on various syllabi in a myriad of disciplines from (the obvious) French literature and culture courses to (somewhat more surprising) philosophy and English grammar courses

\u3cem\u3eThe Smiling Madame Beudet\u3c/em\u3e (1922) Gets a Facelift: Claire Denis’ Modern Portrayal of Female Desire in \u3cem\u3eFriday Night\u3c/em\u3e (2002)

Luce Irigaray explains in her seminal feminist work, This Sex Which Is Not One, that women experience desire differently from men: Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking, and her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: she is the beautiful object of contemplation. 1 Unlike men who enjoy gazing at the female form, Irigaray’s essentialist theory posits that women enjoy a pluri-dimensional experience activating the senses—especially touch. Visual art forms, like film, hence present a unique challenge to the expression of female desire. According to feminist film theory pioneers Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane and Teresa de Lauretis,2 hegemonic culture stems from a system of gazes objectifying the woman while affirming the male position of powerful and active subject. As Mulvey states, In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. 3 In other words, gender divisions of desire/power generate a creative conundrum that has long been the following: how can cinema, an inherently visual art form that traditionally appeals to the male gaze, convey the multiple and varied dimensions of feminine desire

Wandering Women in French Film and Literature: A Study of Narrative Drift

How and when can a narrative agent or voice be considered unreliable? What happens when narrative authority fails and, just as importantly, why does it? As a means to answering these questions, Wandering Women in French Film and Literature examines the phenomenon of \u27narrative drift\u27 through in-depth analysis of twentieth-century novels and films. Combining feminist theories and structural narratology, Devereux Herbeck illustrates the ways in which evidence and/or admissions of doubt by narrative entities in works featuring wandering women disrupt conventions of continuity, coherence, and authority and thereby forces the story in new, unexpected directions.https://scholarworks.boisestate.edu/fac_books/1372/thumbnail.jp

Reinterpreting Cinematic Utopia in Coline Serreau\u27s \u3cem\u3eChaos\u3c/em\u3e (2001)

In French filmmaker Coline Serreau’s Chaos, female characters flee the urban status quo, live through (and thrive in) moments of chaos, and finally end their travels in a pastoral seaside home. In depicting a cinematic trip to a seemingly feminine utopia, the film addresses a societal problem that remains under-represented in mainstream cinema: gender inequality and, in particular, transcultural gender inequality. In analyzing Serreau’s gendered approach to utopian fiction, I demonstrate how Chaos manipulates seemingly classic Hollywood narrative form and style to question the gendered status quo of modern Parisian society

André Breton’s Nadja: A \u3cem\u3eVagabonde\u3c/em\u3e in a \u3cem\u3eFemme Fatale’s\u3c/em\u3e Narrative

Through diverse styles of written and visual text (diary and pseudo-autobiographical narrative, drawings and photographs), André Breton—the narrative agent of Nadja (1928, revised by the author, 1962) who happens to share the author\u27s name—sets forth to recount his interactions with a mysterious âme errante whom he follows literally down a myriad of Parisian streets and figuratively to diverse avenues of self-understanding. However, if Breton initially finds himself intrigued—dare we say obsessed—by the eponymous Nadja, as the narrative progresses her aimless wandering, telepathic powers and free association speech eventually bore, unnerve and even frighten him. In fact, Nadja\u27s errant words and actions become so threatening for Breton that he ceases to see her in the best interest of his own wellbeing. At the work\u27s conclusion, Nadja\u27s wandering is put to an end when she is interned in an insane asylum; as if to underline his change of heart, Breton does nothing to free or even visit Nadja, preferring instead to pursue a far safer and less enigmatic love interest

La Mère Antillaise: Ouverture ou Obstacle à la Créolité?

La mère antillaise empêche-t-elle ou encourage-t-elle « la totale acceptation » de la créolité ? Dans Eloge de la Créolité (1989), Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau et Raphaël Confiant citent et rendent hommage aux grands auteurs antillais bien connus — dont Aimé Césaire et Edouard Glissant — et identifient « les auteurs créoles » dont ils font partie comme des « fils antillais », voire des « fils d\u27Aimé Césaire » (EC 18). Or, à la suite d\u27une lecture approfondie du manifeste, force est de remarquer l\u27absence frappante de figures féminines positives — qu\u27elles soient « filles » ou « mères » — et ce en dépit du fait qu\u27une écrivaine semble adhérer à plusieurs paramètres de la Créolité tels qu\u27ils sont définis dans Eloge de la Créolité: Simone Schwarz-Bart. D\u27une part, cette analyse visera à montrer comment un roman de celle-ci, Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, peut être lu comme un texte avant-coureur de la créolité selon les critères exposés par les auteurs d\u27Eloge de la Créolité. D\u27autre part, seront étudiées en fonction de la présentation des figures maternelles dans les deux textes les raisons pour lesquelles Bernabé, Chamoiseau et Confiant auraient négligé de citer le roman de Schwarz-Bart dans leur célèbre manifeste

Film, Foucault and the Fringe: Outcasts of Contemporary French Film

For me this space of radical openness is a margin—a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a \u27safe\u27 place. One is always at risk. —bell hooks Who determines what normal is? Can normalcy exist without abnormalcy? Who is positioned at the center and at the margins of a society? What, if any, system of power is put into question when the stories of characters at the margins are recounted and seemingly privileged over those of normal individuals at the center of society? What, if anything, is gained by rejecting normal society ? What is lost? More specifically, why in the last twenty-five years have so many French directors devoted films to characters marginalized by their socio-economic status, race, religion and / or gender? Finally, how can a theoretical text about eighteenth-century prisons better our understanding of power relations in modern society

Narrative Assault in Laetitia Masson\u27s À vendre

What happens when a detective confuses following with being the object of his search? As the narrative of Laetitia Masson\u27s 1998 film, À vendre, drifts from private investigator Luigi Primo\u27s search for France Robert, a runaway bride, to his own sordid relationships with women, traditions of narrative continuity and authority are violated. In offering a necessarily new take on the adage violence breeds violence, this article examines the extent to which Luigi\u27s violent disposition, as he searches for France within the narrative, is ultimately expressed as violence to the narrative itself