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2021 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

6. From All About Eve (1950) to Clouds of Sils Maria (2014): Adapting a Classic Paradigm

Author : William H. Mooney

Published in: Adaptation and the New Art Film

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

In Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), Olivier Assayas develops a film about an “aging” actress according to the paradigm set by Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950). In Sils Maria, a stage and screen star (Juliette Binoche) are cast in the play that first made her famous in her youth, though she now plays an older character, lover of her younger self. As she rehearses with her assistant (Kristen Stewart), she suffers an identity crisis that is further aggravated by a shifting media landscape in which her celluloid-based star persona is fading. Assayas’s film tracks closely its unacknowledged model, with Binoche, like Bette Davis, creating a performance that similarly explores the existential question of where an actor’s performance ends and her authentic self begins.

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previous chapter Rewriting Roma città aperta (1945) as Das Leben der Anderen (2006)
next chapter Chantal Akerman, Marcel Proust, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)
Footnotes
1
Hiller, 13.
 
2
His father, under the name Jacques Remy, worked closely with Raoul Lévy, a producer riding the success of Et Dieu … Créa la femme (1956). Eventually Assayas would find internships on productions in France, Geneva, and at Pinewood Studios in England, all through his father’s “old buddies” [“chez des vieux copins”].
 
3
“…Je sortait pas mal, j’écrivais dans la presse branchée, en fait j’etais l’un des seul à faire le pont entre le cinéma and cette modernité.” Assayas, chapter 2, “Mai 68 et après.”
 
4
Among other contributions Assayas edited a special issue entitled Made in China: Taipei, Hong-Kong, Shanghai, Peking. He produced a long retrospective interview with Ingmar Bergman and later published an extended essay on Kenneth Anger.
 
5
Assayas.
 
6
In Cahiers 10, 1952, All About Eve is number five in a list of the best films of 1951—one through four are films by Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Vittorio De Sica, and Luis Buñuel. For an example of the Cahiers critics’ admiration of Mankiewicz, see Jean Domarchi, “Le Fer dans la plaie,” Cahiers du Cinéma 63, October 1956. (Hiller, 245–6)
 
7
Riefenstahl made her first screen appearance as the star of Fanck’s The Holy Mountain (1926), and Fanck edited The Blue Light (1932), the film that brought her to Hitler’s attention. Additionally, Sils Maria was the summer home of Friedrich Nietzsche during the last ten years of his life, where he explored the idea of an eternal return.
 
8
See for example Jon Frosch in The Atlantic, May 24, 2014, or John Powers in Vogue, April 9, 2015.
 
9
Lukenbill.
 
10
“I won’t be able to make the payment—circumstances between heaven and earth. … But to whom am I telling this? Hope you understand. I remain your friend, Petra von Kant.”
 
11
Mankiewicz has suggested that the casting of Baxter would allow him to take advantage of her similarity in appearance to Colbert, further underscoring the point of like replacing like: it “gave another dimension to the story,” he said. “We lost that shading.” Chandler, 185.
 
12
These never developed, according to Mankiewicz, who found her professional and delighted to be working with an excellent script. Carey, 86–7.
 
13
Joseph Mankiewicz has said that Davis was not originally offered the part because “throughout that period she was filming Payment on Demand [Curtis Bernhardt, 1951] and was therefore considered hopelessly unavailable.” Carey, 71–2.
 
14
Barbara Leaming’s interpretation represents the alternative to this, an insistence that Margo is a reversal of all Davis’s prior roles as an independent woman. “The most potent symbol of wartime female independence and self-sufficiency appeared suddenly to accept and even to recommend the retrograde sexual politics of the 1950s. Casting off the boldness and daring that Davis’s powerful female characters had once adamantly insisted upon, Margo Channing loudly declared herself unable to live without her man: a declaration rendered all the more astonishing by Margo’s vividly established sauciness and theatrically.” Leaming, 245.
 
15
We should remember that Assayas, like Mankiewicz, was first a screenwriter, and continued to see the importance of writing in the process of elaborating films, though he manages to marry that commitment to a process of working with actors that yields spontaneous performances.
 
16
From André Téchiné Rendez-vous (1985), through The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1991), Lovers on the Bridge (1991), Three Colors: Blue (1993), The English Patient (1996), Caché (2005), and even Godzilla (2014) the same year that she made Clouds of Sils Maria.
 
17
As in Irma Vep, where he had used Jean-Pierre Leaud and Maggie Cheung in ways that appealed respectively to audience knowledge of the French New Wave and to Cheung’s international stardom. Many similar instances throughout his body of work, if less easily identifiable by non-French audiences, are documented in Assayas par Assayas.
 
18
See Internet coverage of her affair with director Rupert Sanders and public apology to fellow Twilight star Robert Pattinson, or her affair with Alicia Cargile and public statements that she sees no need to define her sexuality.
 
Literature
All About Eve. Twentieth-Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2008. DVD.
Assayas, Olivier, and Jean-Michel Frodon. Assayas par Assayas: Des debuts aux Destinées sentimental. Paris: Stock, 2014. Kindle.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla, Irm Hermann. Filmverlag der Autoren, Tango Film, 1972. Film. Criterion, 2015. DVD.
Carey, Gary, with Joseph Mankiewicz. More about All About Eve. New York: Random House, 1972.
Chandler, Charlotte. The Girl Who Walked Home Alone: Bette Davis, a Personal Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
Clouds of Sils Maria. Dir. Olivier Assayas. Perf. Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz. CG Cinéma, 2014. Film. Paramount Pictures, 2015. DVD.
Hillier, Jim. Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s, Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Irma Vep. Dir. Olivier Assayas. Perf. Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard. Dacia Films, Canal +, 1996. Film. Fox Lorber. DVD.
Jones, Kent, ed. Olivier Assayas. Vienna: SYNEMA, 2012. Print.
Leaming, Barbara. Bette Davis. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2003.
Magny, Joël. “Sils Maria d’Olivier Assayas,” Les Fiches Cinéma. Encyclopaedia Universalis, 2016. Kindle.
Persona. Svensk Filmindustri, 1966. Film. Criterion, 2014. DVD.
Rendez-vous. Films A2, T. Films, 1985. Film. Home Vision Entertainment, 2005. DVD.
Summer Hours (L’heure d’été). MK2, France 3, Canal+, 2008. Film. Criterion, 2010. DVD.
Metadata
Title
From All About Eve (1950) to Clouds of Sils Maria (2014): Adapting a Classic Paradigm
Author
William H. Mooney
Copyright Year
2021
Book
Adaptation and the New Art Film

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62933-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-62934-2

Copyright Year: 2021

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_6