Diva

For an unsuspecting viewer, one who is on the periphery of cinephile culture, Diva isn't something that can be grasped at first, even though the seduction of its images has a power that is unexpected and, at times, even enchanting. If that viewer was told they were about to see a French film from 1981, the case becomes even more encrypted. The common image of French cinema became indelibly associated with a certain existentialist aesthetic inherited from Sartre and his political commitment (engagement), with auteur cinema, and with names like Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, Rivette, Valcroze, among others—this was the Nouvelle Vague, emerging from the 1950s, underscored by the notoriety of the Cannes Film Festival and the authority of Cahiers du Cinéma (from 1951 with André Bazin until 1958), of film criticism, and of cine-clubs. Cinema was art: the seventh. Saying “French cinema” was like waving a powerful antidote against the commercial logic and film industry commanded by the sacred grove of Hollywood, its blockbusters, Oscars, and stars.

In 1981, the golden years of the Nouvelle Vague were already a distant memory, as was the hegemonic judgement of cinephilia. The influence of television, video recorders, and DVDs was growing, and the diversity of film criticism was already clear, as was the frequent rejection of films by audiences who were increasingly engaged in mass cultural consumption. The New Cinema hadn't disappeared, but the disconnect between the Nouvelle Vague and the public was deepening (incidentally, whenever Manoel de Oliveira was confronted with the lack of public attendance, he would quip with dry irony: “Public? Toilets are public!”).

The Hollywood machine was accelerating, as was the marginalisation of Gallic culture. From 1981 (the year Diva premiered), a French-style "socialism" was developing under François Mitterrand, with Jack Lang at the Ministry of Culture and a strong presidential interventionism in the Grand Travaux (1981–1995), which would change the face of Paris and its landmark cultural institutions, including the Grand Louvre, the Bastille Opera, the National Library, the Musée d'Orsay, the Cité de la Musique, and the Arab World Institute (on a different note, Eurodisney came in 1992). The times were agitated by major operations to boost box office numbers, so-called cultural tourism, and the spectacularization of Paris. In another cultural sphere, the importance of French thought and philosophy was growing: Barthes (b.1915), Lyotard (1924), Deleuze (1925), Foucault (1926), Baudrillard (1929), Derrida (1930), Guy Debord (1931), Guattari (1930), Bourdieu (1930), among others, who were labelled postmodernists and most of whom were highly prominent in the "French Theory" of the USA.

When Jean-Jacques Beineix premiered his first film, Diva, in 1981, the reaction from the system entrenched around the Nouvelle Vague was explosively haughty and crude. They labelled it Cinéma du Look (a curious name for cinema, the visual art par excellence), a pastiche, superficial, and other such endearments—F. Cuel (Cinematographe, 1981, 66) wrote: “they think they're watching a film but it's just a shop window.”

Diva employs a neo-baroque aesthetic that is consciously anti-naturalistic, with an exuberance of light and colour, movement, complex editing, and an emphasis on the studio and sophisticated technology. It features powerful, spectacular, and seductive ambiences, mixing the purest kitsch—from cartoons, advertising video clips, and pop, etc.—with high erudition. It's luxury junk laden with signs and fetishes, which at the same time corrodes its own referents through a game of humour, deconstruction, intertextualities (a Marilyn's fluttering skirt), absurdity, and incongruity. Fredric Jameson called it the first French postmodern film.

Amid the gale of images, the interwoven crossed stories, the chases, crime, violence, anti-heroes, and the games of mirrors that confuse characters and situations, Jules is an almost sphinx-like, rather silent character, as sophisticated as the loft where he lives. He is focused on the magic of the singing of Cynthia, the soprano, the Diva who refuses to record her voice. The artist only fully recognises the authenticity of her art in the magical moment of direct contact with the audience, hic et nunc. Despite her agent telling her that only through recording can her voice be eternalised, Cynthia resists and remains faithful to what W. Benjamin thought about The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (in another version, its technical reproducibility): its magical and ritual origin, the importance of its reception at an unrepeatable moment that produces the aura of its appearance. Reproduction banalises, turning what it represents into a commodity, a politically manipulable object or event, a superficial image. Film is the example of an art form whose character is, for the first time, entirely determined by its reproducibility (contrary to the unique moment of theatre and the physical co-presence of artists and audience: present bodies). Film is mise-en-scène, recording, framing angle, cutting, editing, special effects, mixing..., all made possible only by the artifice of devices, of technology, of the camera capable of fixing the optical unconscious just as psychoanalysis introduces us to the drive unconscious.

W. Benjamin said that film thus becomes “the most important object for that science of perception which the Greeks called aesthetics.” The totalitarian state manipulates and controls the masses through this aestheticization (as does capitalism). Cynthia says that the market should adapt to art, not the other way around—which is why she doesn't record to reproduce and sell. Jules tells her that his recording is also unique, and in this way, he maintains his high-fidelity to Cynthia's voice.

All the film's violence—the gangsters and the police—is driven by recordings which, when reproduced, have very different effects: one denounces criminals; another turns music into the music business. Neither Jules nor Cynthia see themselves in this; they retreat into their secrets and the unconfessable they share. The film is magnificent, and the only problem is that the critics and the power and legitimisation games that drove them probed it too deeply; they wanted it to be one thing against another, a banality against the sacredness of the Nouvelle Vague. Too much noise. They were wrong.