Entre Nous, Female Eroticism, and the Narrative of Jewish Erasure

References

• Shale, Richard, 1993. The academy awards index: The Complete Categorical and Chronological Record. London and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press; 1993. p. 642, One of its three running competitors was the Hungarian Holocaust film, The Revolt of Job (dir. Imre Gyongyossi and Barna Kabay, 1983). The winner was Fanny and Alexander (dir. Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1983). See.
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• Bergan, Ronald, et al., 1994. Academy Award Winners. London: Prion; 1994. p. 681, Prior to Entre Nous, only one female-directed film had received this degree of formal acclaim: in 1976, The Seven Beauties (dir. Léna Wertmüller, Italy), a Holocaust film, was nominated for both Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film. To date, only one female-directed film has actually received an Academy Award -Antonia's Line (dir. Marleen Gorris, Belgium/Netherlands/UK, 1995) in the Best Foreign Language Film category; and only one woman has been nominated for a Best Director award -Jane Campion for The Piano (Australia/France, 1993), which lost to Steven Spielberg for his Schindler's List (a Holocaust film par excellence). Not incidentally, Antonia's Line is a self-consciously post-Holocaust film and, like Entre Nous, both it and The Piano were concerned, inter alia, with the politics of gender and sexuality. Shale ibid., p. 287.
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• , Typifying the negative side of the debate was the review by Carole Corbeil, film critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, for whom Entre Nous ‘female bond epitomized the superficiality and elitism of Euroamerican art cinema, as well as its social evasiveness. For her, There is nothing particularly endearing in having the beautiful Miou Miou and Miss Huppert run around in beautiful and imaginative retro dresses while bemoaning the stupidity of their husbands. It all seems redundant, somehow, as if a pretty-pretty French art director had thrown a bell-jar over the proceedings … [The film] is unbearably coy, incidentally, on the subject of just how physical this friendship gets. In France, the movie was called Coup De FoudreEntre Nous, the title of the North American release, desexualizes the friendship … What could have been authentic -and there is no doubt in my mind that many spirited women used fashion in the fifties as a springboard to independence, becomes too self-consciously aesthetic. (‘Star Quality Burdens Entre Nous,’ Toronto Globe and Mail 17 Feb. 1984: E9) Pauline Kael's review appears sweeping and all-encompassing and yet, in its frankness, must also be counted as the most politically pointed of the Entre Nous critiques: [Entre Nous] has a political commitment to women's friendship, and it comes very close to having a political commitment to lesbian sex … but Kurys doesn't develop that. She just keeps it lurking in the air, though the film's title in France was Coup de foudre-love at first sight … Léna and Madeleine are what used to be called soul mates; Entre Nous is about spiritual lesbianism … sexual politics without sex. (“The Current Cinema,” The New Yorker 3 May 1984: 133–4) For other examples of reviews involved in the debate over the sexual orientation of Entre Nous ‘female bond, see David Ansen, ‘More than good friends,’ Newsweek 6 Feb. 1984: 81; Molly Haskell, ‘Women's Friendships: Two Films Move Beyond the Clichés,’ Ms. Dec. 1983: 23, 25; David Hughes, ‘A Subtle Hymn to Women's Love,’ The Sunday Times (London) 9 Oct. 1983: 39; David Sterritt, ‘Building Bonds of Friendship and a Filmmaker's Career,’ Christian Science Monitor 3 Aug. 1984: 21–2; David Denby, ‘Les Girls,’ New York Magazine 23 Jan. 1984: 57–9; Playboy Feb. 1984: 28, Rev. of Entre Nous; Gary Arnold, ‘Notions of Love: “Entre Nous”: Men and Women Apart,’ Washington Post 24 Feb. 1984: B1–2; Maureen Peterson, “‘Coup” Strikes Blow for Female Friendship,’ Montréal Gazette 10 Sept. 1983: C-4; Patricia Bosworth, ‘Some Secret Worlds Revealed,’ Working Woman Oct. 1983: 202–4; Andrea Weiss, ‘Passionate Friends,’ New York Native 13–26 Feb. 1984: 34–5; Peter Wilson, ‘What Exactly Is This Film Trying To Say?’ Vancouver Sun 24 Feb. 1984: B1; Stanley Kaufmann, ‘All For Love,’ The New Republic 27 Feb. 1984: 22–4; John Simon, ‘Dishonesty Recompensed,’ National Review 4 May 1984: 54–6; John Gillett, Monthly Film Bulletin Nov. 1983: 301; Leo Seligsohn, Newsday 25 Jan. 1984: 51; Rex Reed, New York Post 25 Jan. 1984: 19; Richard Corliss, Time 30 Jan. 1984: 78; Vincent Canby, New York Times 25 Jan. 1984: C17; and New York Times 4 Feb. 1993: C20.
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• , At most, popular press engagement with the Holocaust-oriented aspects of Entre Nous was limited to the provision of background information on the film's plot, by which only the most abbreviated commentary was made possible on the social problematicity of this issue. The only review even to have hinted at the specific questions of antisemitism and the ‘Jewish’ was that of a French critic, Marie Cardinal, in Le Nouvel Observateur (22 April 1983: 96).
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• , Barbara Koenig Quart, Women Directors: The Emergence of a New Cinema (New York: Praeger, 1988) 3; Susan Hayward, French National Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 5; Chris Straayer, ‘The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine in Narrative Feature Film,’ in idem., Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies op cit., 4; and Hervé Wattelier, ‘Entre Nous: Gender Analyzed,’ Jump Cut 32 (April 1986): 8, 32, 37. Even Andrea Weiss' Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film (New York: Penguin, 1993), which discussed Entre Nous amply, oddly cited in relation thereto only texts whose central foci are films other than Entre Nous (123–24, 172n 27 & 28), and did so abstractly, as did Straayer, in formalist terms of the gaze. The very recent Guy Austin, Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996) simply mimics the Weissean perspective (88).
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• , Exceptions include Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust2nd ed. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 86, which notes Entre Nous ‘depiction of the Holocaust while denying bluntly its status as ‘Holocaust film’; and André Pierre Colombat, The Holocaust in French Film (Me-tuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993), 95.
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• , Examples of this proliferation of cultural discourse and contestation include Hollywood television's Holocaust (dir. Marvin Chomsky, NBC, 1978) and Playing for Time (dir. Daniel Mann, CBS, 1980), along with the 1970s Nazi rétro film phenomenon and the Holocaust historiography debates begun in France and continuing into Germany at the time of Entre Nous ‘release.
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• Fischer, Erica, 1995. McCown, Edna, ed. Aimée and Jaguar. New York: HarperCollins; 1995, For books on the Nazi persecution of lesbians, see; Claudia Schopp-mann, Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians During the Third Reich, trans. Allison Brown (New York and Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Günter Grau, Hidden Holocaust? Gay and Lesbian Persecution in Germany, 1933–45 (London and New York: Cassell, 1995).
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• , As Andrea Weiss has suggested, for instance, ‘Madeleine's and Léna's stories are intercut in such a way as to offer shrewd insight into how the war so profoundly shaped their adult lives and later their relationship with one another’ (‘Passionate Friends,’ 34); likewise Maureen Peterson notes that '[t]his tale of ‘love at first sight’ is inextricably linked to its time in history, the years from 1940–1954 … In essence these women might well have chosen other mates in other times … That fact is important enough to take on an almost symbolic significance’ (Peterson op cit.).
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• , Olivier Cohen and Diane Kurys, Coup de foudre: Le rêve des années 50 (Paris: Éditions Mazarine, 1983). For instance, in an interview she gave in Film Comment, Kurys makes explicit reference to the legacy of the Holocaust recounted in Coup de foudre‘s preface, and its effect on her understanding of the ‘Jewish’: ‘Our ambitiousness [that of children of survivors and, generally, the Wandering Jew] is a kind of revenge,’ but also a kind of protection against ever becoming the victims our parents were' (qtd. Marcia Pally, ‘World of Our Mothers,’ Film Comment 20.2 [1984]: 17).
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• Cohen, Arthur A., 1970. The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition. New York: Harper and Row; 1970, Mark Silk, ‘Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,’ American Quarterly 36 (Spring 1984): 65–85; and Robert Boston, Why the Religious Right Is Wrong: About Separation of Church and State in America (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1993).
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• Hasen-Roker, Galit, and Dundes, Alan, 1986. The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; 1986, esp. Hyam Maccoby, ‘The Wandering Jew as Sacred Executioner,’ 236–260.
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• Churchill, Ward, 1998. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights Books; 1998, William K. Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Washington, DC: Common Courage Press, 1995); and Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
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• Mayer, Arno, 1990. Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The ‘Final Solution’ in History, . New York: Pantheon; 1990, and Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The U.S., Israel, and the Palestinians (Boston: South End Press, 1983).
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• 1970. Art and Experience: A Phenomenological Aesthetics. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; 1970. pp. 234–80, A relevant example of such an appropriation is Eugene Kaelin's ontotheology of the ‘parabola,’ in ‘Poesis as Parabolic Expression: Heidegger on How a Poem Means,’.
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• Handelman, Susan, 1982. The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory. Albany: SUNY Press; 1982, For Talmudically-inflected and/or rabbinical readings of tanakh which are particularly attuned to the textual layering of its narrative logic, see, for example; Daniel Boyarin, Intertextual-ity and the Reading of Midrash (Indianapolis: IUP, 1990); and, from a theoretical perspective, Edmund Jabés, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion (Stanford, CA and London: Stanford University Press, 1996).
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• Neusner, Jacob, 1992. Talmudic Thinking: Language, Logic, Law. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press; 1992, For an example of this lay-out, see.
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• , For an elaboration of these practices, see Handelman op cit., 74; and Daniel Boyarin, ‘Dual Signs, Ambiguity, and the Dialectic of Intertextual Readings,’ Inter-textuality op cit., 57–78.
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• Irigaray, Luce, 1985. Porter, Catherine, and Burke, Carolyn, eds. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press; 1985. pp. 113–14.
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• , Hughes, op cit.; and David Robinson, ‘Richness of Moral Speculation,’ The London Times 14 Oct. 1983: 11.
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• Marks, Elaine, 1996. Marrano as Metaphor: The Jewish Presence in Writing. New York: Columbia University Press; 1996. pp. 143–53, Hence the phonetic likeness often foregrounded between ‘jouissance’ and ‘Jewishness,’ ‘jeu’ and ‘Jew.’ Cixous literalizes this phonetic slippage with her pun, juifemme, meaning ‘I am a Jewish woman,’ in La fiancée juive: de la tentation (Paris: Des Femmes/Antoinette Fouque, 1995). For a discussion of the usage and significance of juifemme, see; and idem., ‘Cendres juives: Jews Writing in French “after Auschwitz,”’ Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and “the Jewish Question in France” (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 35–46.
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