Stars and the off-screen spectacle of film festivals: Charlotte Gainsbourg at Cannes

ABSTRACT

According to Richard Dyer, star images ‘are always extensive, multimedia, intertextual’. Film festivals are sites where the intertextuality or transmediality of star images are often brought into play. The Cannes Film Festival, in particular, is a case in point, and Charlotte Gainsbourg is one star whose star image is intimately connected to the iconic festival as an important locus or site of her celebrity. Gainsbourg’s celebrity is situated at the intersection of three texts or discourses: film, fashion, and press; with film serving largely to legitimate the presence of the star at the festival, the interest falling more commonly on the red carpet, interviews and press conferences, and associated scandals (most notably, for Gainsbourg, through her association with festival enfant terrible, Lars von Trier). Throughout her thirty-year career, Gainsbourg has attended Cannes in several guises: actor, presenter, jury member, prize winner, provocateur, red carpet style icon, and unwilling participant in one of the festival’s most controversial moments in its seventy-year history. Building on the scholarship of Pamela Church-Gibson on fashion, celebrity and film festivals, and Marijke de Valck on film festivals and stars, this article investigates how the Cannes Film Festival has both shaped and exploited Gainsbourg’s star image.

KEYWORDS:

• Charlotte Gainsbourg
• Cannes
• fashion
• scandal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is important to note that Gainsbourg’s persona has a dual aspect, at once local and international. Her local or ‘French’ stardom is based largely on her status as fille de or daughter of iconic couple Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, her appearances on French television, her music career, and the films she made with partner Yvan Attal. Her international stardom is grounded more on her roles in art house cinema, particularly her work with directors like von Trier, Wim Wenders, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Todd Haynes.

2. All translations from French are my own.

3. In 2018 von Trier was welcomed back to Cannes for the 71st Festival to present his latest film The House that Jack Built, indicating the reciprocal relationship between the film festival and its scandals.

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Notes on contributors

Felicity Chaplin

Felicity Chaplin is Scholarly Teaching Fellow in French Studies at Monash University. She is the author of La Parisienne in Cinema: Between Art and Life (Manchester University Press, 2017). Her work appears in Australian Journal of French Studies, Colloquy, Lola, Metro, Peephole, Screening the Past and Senses of Cinema. Her latest book is on the transnational and transmedial stardom of Charlotte Gainsbourg (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2020).