French Folie: Memory and Madness in Buñuel’s Belle de Jour

Abstract

French Folic: Memory and Madness in BunueFs Belle de Jour Mary M. Wiles Historian Henry Rousso has proposed that the Liberation functioned as a screen memory (15) for the postwar French populace. It masked loss and internal conflict while effectively preventing the nation from mourning its traumas. During the postwar Gaullist period, collective amnesia fore- closed resolution and rendered meaningful commemoration impossible. As Rousso notes, Memory of the war would therefore develop largely outside this official framework [of Gaullist resistancialism], which had gained ac- ceptance only at the cost of distorting the realities (26). As historian Lynn Higgins points out, literature and film provided arenas where conflicting memories could be worked through, but usually under a self-imposed (when not official) censorship (182). Rousso's description of the Liberation and its attendant mythologies corresponds closely to the Bunuehan fantasmatic. In Belle de Jour, Buriuel captures the fictional character Severine just as her traumatic memories are beginning to resurface, and we can begin to witness the spectacle of violence quillity. and degradation behind the screen of glacial tran- Belle de Jour opens with a long shot of a carriage approaching, accom- panied by the unsourced sounds of bells. portrait of the professional A well-dressed French couple transported by carriage through the Bois de Bologne provides a compelling jeune cadre of the Gaullist regime. Yet the im- age simultaneously recalls a past to the moment, providing an historical allusion landscape of prerevolutionary France, where the decadent nobility traveled by carriage to remote country chateaux. The scene that follows displays the beating and rape of the character Severine, presided over by her carriage The coachmen pull Severine from the and proceed to drag her body across the ground. As Pierre tears the dress from her body, he threatens her, Don't scream or I'll kill you. The coachmen whip her violently. The final shot of the scene frames Severine in husband Pierre and the coachmen. close-up as she is kissed by the soundtrack in voice-off narration, a Severine? coachman who intends to rape her. On the man asks, What are you thinking about,