Now I Understand The Sorrow
Late at night. The house is quiet. You're feeling mellow. You switch on the TV. Cruising for something easy. Instead, I came across a 1989 movie by Director Bruno Nuytten, starring Isabelle Adjani and Gerard Depardiue. Camille Claudel plunges you into a whole world of emotion. For me, the movie is a masterpiece, like Ridley Scott's Blade Runner or Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso. The acting is sublime - how Isabelle Adjani didn't get an Academy Award for Best Actress is beyond me. I have read criticism of her performance on some websites - all pretentious bullshit; criticism for the sake of it.

Robert Ebert, in his review of the movie for the Chicago Sun Times in 1990, (see links hereunder for full review), describes Camille thus:

"She is above all a lonely woman, because she chooses to do with her life what her society says no decent woman should do. She chooses to love who she will, and she wants to be an artist - to create sculptures out of clay, just as if she were a man. It is hard to say which of her choices is the most offensive. And when she goes mad, it is impossible to say whether the seeds of madness were there from the beginning, or whether she was driven to madness by a society that could not accept a woman who lived for herself.

Camille Claudel has until now occupied only the footnotes of late 19th century art. She was one of the mistresses of Auguste Rodin, the wilful sculptor who is known to everyone, if only for "The Thinker." She was often his model, and for a time she worked as his collaborator. She left behind many sculptures, which can be seen here or there, not much remarked, while Rodin's work has been enshrined in the pantheon. She spent the last 30 years of her life in a madhouse."

The movie suggests her father was the only member of her family who supported and demonstrated any real love for her. Ominously, after her relationship with Rodin ended we are told she began to neglect herself and showed signs of paranoia. An artist in her own right, but now abandoned and betrayed by the man who had been the mainstay of her emotional life for 10 years, she struggled to hold her own in a world of men. She struggled to be herself and live her life the way she chose. Then her father died. We are told that as her illness developed she would create her sculptures in a state of euphoria, and destroy them when depressed. An embarrassment to her family, her fate was sealed when her brother - the poet and diplomat Paul Claudel, with his mother's support, had Camille committed to a lunatic asylum, where she remained confined for 30 years, until her death in 1943. She was not allowed to practise her art, and when the staff psychiatrists thought she has sufficiently recovered and wanted to release her into her family's custody, her mother absolutely refused to allow it.

Check out Camille Claudel: a Life by Odile Ayral-Clause or Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel (Pegasus Library) by J.A., gen Eisenwerth Schmoll at www.amazon.co.uk
Links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Claudel

Written by Con Meehan
© 2003 Lightning Bird Records Ltd.
℗ 2003 Lightning Bird Records Ltd.
All rights reserved.