Motifs
The condition of women
Women confronting the constraints of their time.
A woman slams the door of her house at the end of a play of 1879, and European theatre argues about it for twenty years. The motif crosses languages: a provincial wife who runs into debt to live the novels she has read, a woman tried for poisoning in the Landes, a Prussian aristocrat caught out by an old letter. Cinema extends the enquiry by filming domestic time itself, three days of a Brussels mother timed in her kitchen, or the face of an accused woman in extreme close-up.
works 10
- NovelJane EyreCharlotte Brontë · 1847A poor orphan without beauty tells her own life, from childhood to her position as a governess.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelMadame BovaryGustave Flaubert · 1857A provincial woman demands from life what her reading had promised her.LiteraturePublic domain
- TheatreA Doll's HouseEt dukkehjemHenrik Ibsen · 1879A play in which a pampered wife, who committed a forgery to save her husband, sees her secret catch up with her.Literature
- NovelEffi BriestTheodor Fontane · 1894A novel from the end of the nineteenth century, in which a young woman married at seventeen discovers a small Baltic town, a husband older than herself and a bottomless boredom.LiteraturePublic domain
- NovelThérèse DesqueyrouxFrançois Mauriac · 1927A woman of the landowning bourgeoisie of the Landes, married to unite two pine properties, tries to understand how she could have wanted her husband's death.Literature
- CinemaThe Passion of Joan of ArcLa Passion de Jeanne d'ArcCarl Th. Dreyer · 1928The trial of Joan of Arc reduced to faces: a French silent film, shot in Paris by a Dane.Cinema
- CinemaThe WomenGeorge Cukor · 1939The story shows no man: more than a hundred and thirty roles, all played by women, and the husbands exist only in what is said about them.Cinema
- CinemaThe Life of Oharu西鶴一代女Kenji Mizoguchi · 1952A film of 1952 in which an old woman looks back on a series of downfalls, in seventeenth-century Japan.Cinema
- CinemaJeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 BruxellesChantal Akerman · 1975Three days in the life of a Brussels widow, whose household gestures are filmed without cutting anything short.Cinema
- CinemaAutumn SonataHöstsonatenIngmar Bergman · 1978A pianist comes to see the daughter she had left behind, and it will take no more than one evening to stir everything up.Cinema