Sunday 21 January 2024
From memory:
In the 1988 French film Camile Claudel, based on the real-life story of the artist and extra marital lover of Auguste Rodin, Camile Claudel (Isabelle Adjani) finds herself incarcerated in a 19th century mental asylum as a consequence of bourgeois patriarchal hatred of women. Incidentally, at one time the mental asylum was where many European women artists typically ended the last days of their lives. In one scene, Claudel is severely censured by Rodin (Gérard Depardieu) for a sculptural work she has produced. He refuses to interpret her work outside of his own familial and personal relationships, the work must be about his extra marital relationship with the artist, it must be something defamatory regarding him, her intentions are obviously to publicly shame him. He never once entertains, that despite the coincidence, Claudel might have her own meanings which have nothing to do with him. He subjugates her agency to create semantic relations by overbearing her work with his narrative. Rodin knows that the rest of society will feel the same way too. The prevalence of misogyny is so far reaching it means she is too far down the social ladder to be permitted better than this. In this instance, Claudel’s work is used by Rodin, through the conduit of spurious reasoning, to render himself as a victim and deny Claudel’s freedom to be an artist.