Femmes écrivains

In Femmes écrivains, one of the three reports Guy Gilles produced for the television program Pour le plaisir broadcast between 1964 and 1969, writer, editor, and screenwriter Monique Lange converses with four “women writers”—or “autrices,” as we would say today in French—about their relationship to writing and literature. And indeed, the very expression femmes écrivains, in that it resists the feminization of professional titles now widely adopted, itself signals one of the points of interest contained in this fourfold portrait. Listening to Françoise Mallet-Joris, Clara Malraux, Henriette Jelinek, and Françoise Sagan discuss their connection to the materiality of writing inevitably invites comparison and allows us to situate, within our present-day awareness, certain advances, standstills, or even setbacks of feminism, depending on the perspective of today’s viewer. But beyond this historiographic effect of reading, one delights in Femmes écrivains at the candor of the testimonies and the gems of language that emerge, thanks to direct-cinema techniques—that influenced docufiction and televised reportage—that Gilles gently reshapes. There is also the question of “coming to writing,” to borrow Hélène Cixous’s phrase, which runs through Monique Lange’s questionnaire and captures our full attention, under Gilles’s empathetic gaze, so attuned to the faces and expressions of each participant, and to the meaningful objects chosen for cutaway shots.

One must also see the faces as the writers answer the questions: Why do you write? — “To be loved” (Clara Malraux); “Out of habit” (Françoise Mallet-Joris). What triggers writing in you? — “Writing itself” (Henriette Jelinek). If you had to give a definition or an image of literature, what would you say? — “A gigantic testament” (Françoise Sagan).

Maude Trottier
Editor-in-Chief, Hors champ magazine