Studies in French Cinema Volume 5 Number 1 2005 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfci.5.1.

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The chaos of the organs: Isabelle Hupperts reverse Pygmalionism

Tony McKibbin University of Edinburgh Abstract
This article looks at the curious career of Isabelle Huppert, an actress drawn to characters that so often seem to lack underlying motivation. Instead she frequently plays characters who in conventionally cinematic terms would be called disturbed. But we suggest this notion of disturbance is not just a psychological trope, but instead an ontological exploration. It is a way for Huppert - who often works with exploratory auteurs - to try and define aspects of the human condition, aspects that demand close scrutiny of being over playing characters that move through a clearly constructed narrative. Boredom is a certain species of frustration, Susan Sontag famously once suggested. And we might wonder whether Isabelle Hupperts career has almost been a working through of such a statement. For these two words, boredom and frustration, may allow us to move towards unravelling the Huppert enigma. It may also help us to understand why La Pianiste/The Piano Teacher (Haneke, 2001) is not just a film that so obviously plays into the hands of abjection so central to French cinema in recent years, but also offers the most intense examination of Hupperts preoccupations as an actress. For as we look over her career, taking in Violette Nozire (Chabrol, 1977), Sauve qui peut/Slow Motion (Godard, 1980), Coup de torchon/Clean Slate (Tavernier, 1981), Madame Bovary (Chabrol, 1991), La Crmonie/A Judgement in Stone (Chabrol, 1995), and Merci pour le chocolat/Nightcap (Chabrol, 2000), we see the way that Huppert so often lacks motivation. We notice that a sense of purpose which could give ones life meaning is replaced by a bored, petulant gesture that undermines the lives of others. Take Coup de torchon, for example, where Hupperts character Rose thinks nothing of Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret) killing her husband, or La Crmonie, where as Jeanne she convinces housemaid Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) that they should kill the wealthy family Sophie has just been sacked by. Whether committing murder herself, as in Violette Nozire and Merci pour le chocolat, or expecting the crimes be committed by another, as in Coup de torchon, the lack of purpose remains the defining factor. There may be gains to be made in, say, Merci pour le chocolat, but Marie-Claire has killed her husbands previous wife, and intends to kill her husbands possible daughter Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis), not necessarily because of her husbands inheritance, but for a more abstract reason half revealed in her comments: Im nothing ... Instead of loving I say I love you, and people

Keywords
Isabelle Huppert stardom La Pianiste Merci pour le chocolat Madame Bovary

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believe me. Motive here becomes inexplicable; Marie-Claire does not know what she wants, so reason retreats simply because reason cannot explain itself. Here reason and purpose should be mutually attached: that MarieClaires reason for murder is an inheritance, and therein lies her purpose. But no such cause and effect is offered. Reason becomes so diffuse, it becomes reason in the plural, and so pluralized does reason become that it may resemble madness; the action seems to have no conceivable motive whatsoever. This madness, this irrationality may even be relevant when a Huppert character kills herself, as in Madame Bovary, where a listless realization of the inevitability of a provincial existence demands her own demise over suicide as an act of passion, in the wake of an affair; or as an act of guilt, in feeling overcome with remorse. The narrative question so often asked concerning Huppert is not how do I get what I want, but what is it that I want that I know how to get, or what is it that I want to destroy myself over? As she says at the end of Merci pour le chocolat, I have real power in my mind. I calculate everything. She might be able to get what she wants, but the bigger question remains beyond her ken: what that something is. At the end of Malina (Schroeter, 1991) she may decide to kill herself, but suggests in the process that somebody else is actually murdering her at one remove. As she takes her own life inexplicably, she looks as if the man she tells about her imminent suicide knows better than her the meaning of her action. Erika Kohut in La Pianiste is a mutant ... shes not a hysterical woman, to my mind, but a woman whos struggling - in a very maladroit way - to invent a new kind of woman, slightly male, Huppert said in an interview on the films release (Huppert 2001). But has there not been a mutant quality to many of Hupperts incarnations, and is this move towards murder, suicide and madness not often the result of a failed evolution? It is such a reading that can draw together Pomme from La Dentellire/The Lacemaker (Goretta, 1977) and Madame Bovary in Chabrols film, her character in Lcole de la Chair/The School of Flesh (Jacquot, 1998) and MarieClaire in Merci pour le chocolat. From this perspective, Hupperts career is an inversion of the Pygmalion myth, where a frustrated life leads to a fulfilling one; with Huppert any notion of social progress, sexual prowess or general assertiveness is often a move towards self-destruction or emotional collapse. Whether this takes the form of quiet despair and institutionalization in La Dentellire, after working-class Pomme is ditched by her bourgeois boyfriend, or the self-poisoning of Emma in Madame Bovary, after her ex-lover refuses to help her out of a financial mess, we might define Hupperts career by the degree to which hers is a failed evolution. It is as if Hupperts moves towards mutation lack underlying purpose; that her escape from frustration works not from underlying ambition or towards deep love but from a general lack of self to start with. This is partly what differentiates Huppert from the actress whom she in some ways superficially resembles, Isabelle Adjani: an actress whom she superficially resembles in the way they both so often play characters pushed to situational extremes. For while Adjani self-destructs as frequently as Huppert, the move towards incineration in Adjani rarely, if occasionally, stems simply from boredom. In LHistoire dAdle H./The Story

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of Adele H. (Truffaut, 1975), Camille Claudel (Nuytten, 1998) and La Reine Margot/Queen Margot (Chreau, 1998), the emotional impetus is a passionate flight from expectation, but there is in Adjani underlying the passion a notion of expectation. And so perhaps now we are moving closer to Hupperts significance as an actress, a significance hinted at when critic David Thomson - who saw Madame Bovary as an Adjani role - refers to the greatest surprise and failure in Hupperts career [...] she was not very good as Emma. In Chabrols lifeless Madame Bovary she seemed doomed from the outset (Thomson 1994: 357-58). Yet it is the very doomed nature of Hupperts characters that makes her persona so significantly perplexing. It is a perplexity especially pronounced in La Pianiste where she plays a Viennese piano teacher who has never developed an ego. Instead, what she has in Hanekes film is an overactive yet curiously muffled id and an overemphatic conscience. The overactive id revels in low culture, in porno bookshops and porno booths, where she sniffs used cum tissues while watching hardcore videos. The super-egotism of high culture comes with her job, as she teaches classical music and the pleasures and pains of Schumann and Schubert. But in fact the high/low cultural dichotomy also allows for Erika to toy with both abject masochism (or more specifically sado-masochism) and lordly sadism. The former manifests itself through low culture, through the porno booths and also a drive-in movie where Erika urinates whilst watching a young couple make love in a car. The sadism is a professional perk. In one scene she psychologically abuses a teenage boy whom she has seen looking at dirty magazines in a newsagent; she suggests his inadequate piano playing resides in the dirtiness of his mind. In another scene she pushes the abuse into the area of the physical: Erika puts broken glass into the jacket pocket of one of her irritating and mediocre students, waits for the student to return from a performance, and observes as the young woman puts her hand in the pocket and lets out a cry of pain. The masochism of the rampant id and the sadism of the castrating conscience leave a gaping hole no self appears to have occupied. It is as if whether sinking to the depths or attaining the perverse cultural heights eventually makes no difference, because Erika has never developed, it seems, a regulating principle between the two. Come the end of the film, when she drives a large kitchen knife into her shoulder blade, she looks like she has accepted the impossibility of continuing to separate the two poles, or of ever healthily unifying them. As she drives the blade into her shoulder there is something of the madness of Van Gogh here: the bungled gesture of self-annihiliation lacking a defined self to annihilate. But of course where a Van Gogh could find, whatever his frustrations, a unifying principle at least in his work, Erikas creativity is always at one remove, her skilful playing of Schubert a minor gift her mother insists she protects. As her mum says, she should be wary of training her pupils in case they become her equals or superiors. One draws the analogy with Van Gogh because the gesture would appear similar, but the purpose is very different. It was Adjani who played the Van Goghian Camille Claudel; Huppert has been more given to creative superficiality rather than creative depth. She has been more given to a

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casual manipulation by others, or of others. Thus with Huppert we notice very few artists. Yes, she plays a Bront in Les Soeurs Bront/The Bront Sisters (Techin, 1979) - the least talented sister, Anne - and a writer in Malina, though one who must check the sales of her books to justify her status and value. But usually she plays teachers, older women to younger men, prostitute figures and murderesses: people for whom the notion of manipulation is less about oneself in relation to art and creativity (of attaining some semi-internal development), than oneself and the control of others. Here she differs greatly from, say, Juliette Binoche, where the creative act is central and often manifests itself as an act of conscientiousness. If for Adjani art is equated with passion, with Binoche - in, say, Les Amants du Pont Neuf/The Lovers of Pont Neuf (Carax, 1991), Alice et Martin (Tchin, 1998) and Trois Couleurs bleu/Three Colours Blue (Kieslowski, 1993), where in the former she retreats into homelessness after an eye injury, and in Trois Couleurs bleu where there is the suggestion she contributed to musical scores her husband is credited with - it is equated with integrity. Huppert, lacking Adjanis passion, nor possessed of Binoches conscientiousness, remains the least obviously creative, diegetically, but perhaps the most creative aesthetically, as an actress who searches out her characters interior life, an interior life that gives credence to Hupperts comment on Erika and mutancy. This demands a search beyond the relatively easy answers to character found in Adjani and Binoche. What Hupperts career offers is an intriguing mode of being, justified partly by Hupperts own claim in an interview referred to above, that cinema and psychoanalysis appeared at the same time. When one undertakes analysis one finds a strong resonance between analysis and cinema (Huppert 2001). And this need not be a superficial point, for there is something in Hupperts roles that begs interpretation maybe more than any other actress of her generation: as if she understands better than most the link between psychoanalysis and acting, and the way analysis can be applied to the performer herself. Of Erika she said: Perhaps shes so much part of me that I dont even need to shrug her off (Huppert 2001). In such an instance a performance is not given within the narrative, but a sub-textual narrative given within the performance. The character then becomes an extension not of the external persona - as often happens in a star vehicle - but the character an extension of an internal dilemma, of a preoccupation of the self that the actor works towards from film to film. This does not necessarily mean it is just psychoanalysis for the actor, of course - Huppert has often talked about the need for directorial rapport but also analysis for the director and for the audience. Here the inexplicable leads in the direction of, but never arrives at the explicable: the performers job is not to explicate clearly but communicate profoundly. Thus Jonathan Romneys comment that La Pianiste is not entirely successful partly because Haneke gives us more of Erika, less of the context that produced her, resulting in a brutal though oddly unaffecting case study (Romney 2001) seems to be asking for narrative explanation over the probing journey towards communication. It is the curtailing of narrative reasons that helps us move towards finding the profound

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reason in unreason. And is psychoanalysis, at its most searching, not the search for indefinable reason within apparent unreason? As Freud put it, psychoanalysiss intention is, indeed, to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can approach fresh portions of the id (Freud 1975: 112). What cinema then gives us is a kind of subjunctive psychoanalysis, a character problematic where the film collapses narrative for the apparent inexplicablity of personal motive. Perhaps one of the problems Michael Haneke believed he had with Binoche on his previous film Code inconnu: rcit incomplet de divers voyages/Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000) that he clearly did not have with Huppert here is this idea of motive and sense. Haneke couched it in terms of sympathy, that Huppert was more willing to play unsympathetic than Binoche. But of course what often lies within sympathy is reason. Is it not so often the way that one gains sympathy from an apparently unsympathetic perspective? Does the criminal in court not defend himself with reason, with his poor background, his need for self-respect etc. etc.? Is it not the lawyers job to find reasons for sympathy from the jury? It is this problem of a kind of physiological morality missing from the courts that the Deleuzian writer Philip Goodchild is getting at when he talks about the limitations of the law, of the relative absence of a kind of legal ontology. Hence he says: The actions of the mind [...] are also of the body. And these are actions of the body that fail to secure representation before judicial principles in the court of reason (Goodchild 1997: 39). Thus it is as if the withholding of sympathy - of justifying reasons leads to the possible revelation of unreason, and it is this that makes Huppert especially interesting. In such an instance reason would not become an explanation but an excuse. Thus for Mika/Huppert to have admitted that she wanted the inheritance at the end of Merci pour le chocolat, to kill herself because of a singular passion at the end of Madame Bovary, or to be jealous of her young lover Walters piano gift in La Pianiste, would be too categorical, and would in each instance only pass itself off as reason as alibi. If we must offer sympathy it should lie not so much in reasons provided but in reasons very absence: that there is something tragically inexplicable in the characters being. In this sense, Merci pour le chocolat succeeds where a film like Une affaire de femmes/Story of Women (Chabrol, 1988) fails. In the final thirty minutes of Une affaire de femmes Chabrol piles on the sociological reasons for Hupperts life as an abortionist and her death by execution through playing up her illiteracy and her desire to be middle class, and the disingenuousness of the Vichy government looking for a scapegoat. Here both society and the character are explained and sympathy is elicited. There is often in Hupperts films something more complicated going on. If we can talk at all of envy and greed, ambition and lust in Huppert we often have to look at the terms not in themselves but as by-products of a deeper malaise, or as terms requiring ambiguous deployment. This is clear in Malina, for example, where lust for her partner seems to be denial of herself, as she frets about her ability to cope without his presence

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around, and becomes not so much self-centred as disintegratingly selfcentral. It is also relevant in relation to ambitiousness, where material gain is offset by the apparent lack of pleasure to be found in acquisition so central to Merci pour le chocolat. Of course it could be argued behind every ambition lies insecurity; behind every passion lies an inability to love oneself. But in Huppert these issues do not seem to be the point. In Huppert there are not a priori assumptions sitting behind the narrative complexity; there is much more a problem of physiological despair, of feelings unable to attach themselves to a sense of self. From such a gaping hole we can see why it would make more sense to pursue misery over joy; if one does not trust oneself as an ongoing concern, it would be better to trust in the destruction of anothers self that seems so much more centred than ones own. This seems close to the envy Erika feels for young Walter in La Pianiste when she witnesses his recital as he auditions to get into the Viennese conservatoire. On one level, of course, it is a problem of conventional jealousy: clearly Walter is talented, and Erika may recall her mothers comment about protecting her own Schubertian turf. But it is also a problem of witnessing someone so grounded that he plays the piano with casual pleasure where Erika must play it with pained dutifulness. How far this pained dutifulness is expected to take her is hinted at earlier in the film when Walter and Erika first meet, and Erika talks about Adornos essay on Schumann and Schumanns descent into madness, and her own musician fathers mental decline. Anything less than absolute deference to the music is an affront, it would seem. And yet it is this lack of deference Erika seems to admire in Walter, but perhaps also this confidence that she wants to destroy. When they begin to make love in the toilet, she wants complete control, insisting that she masturbate him while he is not allowed to touch her; or perhaps she just wants complete loss of control on Walters part. We could say that to drive another person mad is the ultimate achievement of someone who herself lacks mental health. This is not a case of falling in love with another, but falling apart with another, as if Erika sees in Walter a mental health which is possible but that she herself is never allowed to move towards. Thus if mental health is personally impossible, better a shared abjection. It makes sense for her negative force, her accumulated resentment, to try and destroy anothers well-being. And it is this resentment, this accumulation of negative energy, that we can trace back to numerous other Huppert films. It is evident in La Crmonie, say, where a miserable family past and accumulated disappointment seems in Hupperts mind to give oblivious justification to slaying the bourgeois family to whom her friend has been housekeeper. Huppert may couch her vengeance in immediate terms, in insisting that Sophie/Bonnaire has been hard done by, but this seems just an excuse for accumulated resentfulness, a resentfulness that demands a release to which it finds an excuse. In Malina, Hupperts writer asks the Heideggerian question, what makes language more than chat, as if in apology for her own ontological desperation. As woman as haunted house, Huppert needs to let the skeletons out of the cupboard, but instead desperately tries to counter her own insecure being with the constant presence of a lover. It is as though the clingy

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attachment to a lover replaces the self-reflection that contains too many unwanted thoughts and memories. What Huppert so often shows is accumulated hauntedness manifesting itself as destructiveness, whether this be the curiously shallow self-annihilation of Madame Bovary, Malina or Erika, or the move towards murder based on abrupt yet somehow obscure motives in La Crmonie, Violette Nozire and Coup de torchon. But in each instance the shallow and the feeble mask the deep and the strong. Thus Hupperts suicide in Madame Bovary seems negligibly motivated within the context of her love affairs and social disgrace, but is profoundly motivated within the context of her entire life. The same can be said for the murders and suicides elsewhere. It is the boredom that suggests shallowness, but it is the depth of the boredom that alludes to profundity. Just as we might say reason dissolves into multiple reason because the annihilating force is stronger than any cause that appears to set it in motion, so we see here how the unmotivated is really the motivation that cannot speak its name. If we speak of boredom we speak of it not in its conventional shallowness, but instead as Sontag couches it: as a certain species of frustration, a genealogical frustration released in apparently arbitrary gestures. Thus the Heidegger question comes up again: what is it that makes language more than chat, or what moves one from the immediate to the wider context, from the shallow to the profound? Ontology, he says, is only possible as phenomenology. The phenomenological concept of phenomenon, as self-showing, means the Being of beings its meaning, modification and derivatives. This self-showing is nothing arbitrary (Heidegger 2000: 82). Yet with Huppert it appears there is something arbitrary about this self-showing because the action seems out of proportion to the motivation. In fact we should not think of arbitrariness of motive, but instead inevitability of release. If we think of Hupperts characters as people so often devoid of phenomenological release valves we begin to see where the motivation - motivation not as cause and effect reasoning, but as an impossible pressure demanding release - might be for suicide, murder, sadomasochism and sadism. This allows us to make sense of the ending of Merci pour le chocolat, where Marie-Claire, accepting her fate, seems to see her failed attempt at murder as the opportunity for confession, a confession her husband would presumably find inexplicable outside the context in which it is given. After all, after years of buttoned-up repression, how does one release ones emotions except through gestures so extreme that the phenomenological release must be taken seriously? It also helps make sense of the ending to La Pianiste, with Erika leaving the conservatoire with a knife wound in her chest. The subtle splicing of her own labia, and the severe wounding of the young womans hand clearly arent enough; whether inflicting pain to oneself or on another, the need to express still seems unsatisfied, still requires a further move towards selfshowing. This is a self-showing especially well-described in the Elfriede Jelinek novel upon which the film is based, when the narrator says:

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The woman must be hiding something crucial in that chaos of her organs. It is those concealments that induce Erika to look at ever newer, ever deeper, ever more prohibited things. She is always on the lookout for a new and incredible insight.
(Jelinek 1999: 108)

We might also now be closer to explaining why Huppert is a great actress of reverse Pygmalionism. It is because failed mutation and Pygmalionism serve two completely different functions. A Pygmalion movie usually works of course on the social surface: recent examples include Michelle Pfeiffer in Up Close and Personal (Avnet, 1996), Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich (Soderbergh, 2000). They are examples of amelioration rather than mutation: from the bad life to a better one. In Huppert mutation and here we might drop the term failed altogether - is chiefly psychoanalytic in the broadest sense of the term: the surface life is less significant than the possible internal release the surface incidentals can offer. Thus we often notice acts of apparent significance are curiously muffled: her casual announcement of an orgasm in Coup de torchon, being pushed around and slapped in Sauve qui peut (la vie), casually moving between two lovers in La Femme de mon pote/My Best Friends Girl (Blier, 1983). It takes something else to move Hupperts characters, and this movement demands a simultaneous rupturing of the external with the internal. We might then ask how does this happen; what allows someone to break into the glacial surface? It is often through a further extension into reverse Pygmalionism: through Huppert taking up with someone who does not enhance her self-esteem but is in danger of destroying it. This is relevant to her characters in Loulou (Pialat, 1980), Lcole de la chair, La Pianiste and Madame Bovary, for example, where in each instance she does not so much fall in love as risk falling out of whatever social self she believes she possesses. This is not about love as Shalumith Firestone once described it: Love is being psychically wide-open to one another. It is a situation of total emotional vulnerability. Therefore it must be not only the incorporation of selves, but an exchange of selves (Firestone 1972: 123), but perhaps its opposite. There is the scene in La Dame aux camlias/The Lady of the Camelias (Bolognini, 1981), for example, when Huppert talks about having a lover without rights. With you Im passionate; and in Madame Bovary she does not say to herself that she has fallen in love, but simply repeats twice to herself: I have a lover. In Hupperts work love is usually very different from that proposed by Firestone, with Huppert allowing the mutation to reveal a dissatisfaction with her life more readily than a satisfaction with a lover. In Loulou it is not enough for Huppert to accept that Loulou is a better lover than her wealthy partner; she has to tell the partner as well. In La Pianiste she is not so much looking for a surreptitious affair with the young man, but seems to be looking for an emotional release that can also unleash a new Erika upon the world. The last forty minutes of La Pianiste - often absurd by conventional dramatic standards - are all about this extreme reverse Pygmalionism; the way the more assertively Erika tries to form for herself a new being, the more collapsed she becomes. In La Sparation/The Separation (Vincent, 1994) it is as if she

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does not need a lover at all to express her dissatisfaction. The film focuses on her feelings for someone else who is not her lover but, more importantly, is not her partner: she does not need a new lover for pleasure, she needs the possibility of a new lover to express displeasure with her partner. Of course, what Huppert is ushering in here is a psychoanalysis very different from that proposed by Lang in The Secret Beyond the Door (Lang, 1947) and Hitchcock in Marnie (Hitchcock, 1964). It also seems to have little to do with the sleeping beauty cinema we find in Viaggio in Italia/Voyage in Italy (Rossellini, 1953), Gertrud (Dreyer, 1964), Il Deserto rosso/The Red Desert (Antonioni, 1964) and Le Vent de la nuit/The Wind of the Night (Garrel, 1999), and maybe differs slightly from the abject picaresque journeys to be found in vendre/For Sale (Masson, 1998), Romance (Breillat, 1999), Post cotum, animal triste/Post Coitum (Roan, 1997), all films about the process of self-revelation. What is central to Huppert is boredom accumulated out of years of frustration, and frustration unleashed as a gesture towards self-expression but without enough of a self to justify the self-revelation. If it is true that we are less individuals than multiple forces, and the sense of self based on the combination of these forces, it is as if whatever force boredom represents has overtaken all the other forces in many of Hupperts characters to the point that we should talk less of an individual than of an inertial feeling ontologically revealed. As Deleuze puts it: Fundamentally there is the impulse, which, by nature, is too strong for the character, whatever his personality (Deleuze 1992: 137). Perhaps a relatively grounded self harnesses these forces in such a way that one can sculpt a reasonably consistent being out of these many possibilities. And of course these often shallowly created selves proliferate in narrative cinema to the point where in our identification with characters we witness a stronger being than we could hope for from ourselves. Huppert, however, wants to show what happens when the self has little or no grounding, where the forces are so enigmatically organized they make extreme gestures but cannot hope to make sense. Such an approach simultaneously helps redefine cinema and life, so that we should not think of psychoanalysis and cinema - with the former superimposed on the latter - but of a psychoanalysis within cinema, using cinema to find selves and suggest new ones. Huppert, we might suggest, is absolutely central to this search. References
Deleuze, G. (1992), Cinema 1: The Movement Image, London: Athlone Press. Firestone, Shalumith (1972), The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Frogmore and St Albans: Paladin. Freud, S. (1975), New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, London: Pelican. Goodchild, P. (1997), Deleuzean Ethics, Theory, Culture and Society, 14: 2, pp. 30-50. Heidegger, M. (2000), Basic Writings, London: Routledge. Huppert, I. (2001), Isabelle Huppert: When the slave becomes the master, The Independent, 12 November, http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/interviews/story.jsp?story=104520. Accessed 29 September 2004.

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Jelinek, E. (1999), The Piano Teacher, London: Serpents Tail. Romney, J. (2001), The Piano Teacher (18): Its all a question of technique, The Independent, 12 November, http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/reviews/story.jsp?story=104527. Accessed 29 September 2004. Thomson, D. (1994), A Biographical Dictionary of Film, London: Andr Deutsch.Le

Suggested Citation
McKibbin, T. (2005), The chaos of the organs: Isabelle Hupperts reverse Pygmalionism, Studies in French Cinema 5: 1, pp. 1726, doi: 10.1386/sfci.5.1.17/1

Contributor Details
Tony McKibbin is an independent critic and teacher of film at Open Studies at Edinburgh University, who has published on world cinema for a number of years in the Scottish listings magazine The List. He has also published articles on British, European and Asian cinema in various periodicals worldwide. He also contributed an article on La Captive to a previous issue of Studies in French Cinema. Contact: E-mail: tonymckibbin@hotmail.com

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