If there’s one rule that everyone knows, it’s that the artificial is more real than reality. This paradox has proven true repeatedly and will continue to be the source of art, despite the current trend towards a sort of Western Social Realism in the arts dealing with issues of gender, race, climate change and other topical issues. “Once upon a time” is a far better way to start a tale, even one based upon historical realism, than with statistics dealing with what are supposed to be hard facts. Facts may shock or make us indignant, but they don’t emotionally move us. We cannot dream in the face of a fact, we can only accept it, and if it’s horrible enough, hope that it fades from our active consciousness as soon as possible.
The artificial creates space, it allows us to situate within its boundaries. It doesn’t dictate what we’re supposed to feel if we are right-minded people. If we hear a statistical fact—the number of slaves who died in transit from Africa to the USA, or the methods of extermination used at Treblinka concentration camp—how can we have any other reaction but horror? However, if we hear a story about a beautiful true-hearted damsel who must walk on knives to prove her love (which occurs in The Little Mermaid, in the original blood and guts Hans Christian Anderson version) we can place ourselves within the imagined context and have a fuller emotional experience.
I recently saw Eric Rohmer’s 2001 film L’Anglaise et le Duc (in English The Lady and The Duke). Based upon the Journal of My Life During the French Revolution by Grace Dalrymple Elliott, it tells the true story of an Scottish courtesan with Royalist sympathies who lived in Paris during the French Revolution. It has power as a film despite being purposely artificial. Watching it, one feels in contact with truth though all externals in the film would seem to contradict this. Unlike Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, in which he tried to recreate the historical setting based upon paintings within a realistic context, Rohmer’s film is shot entirely against paintings themselves. This decision creates a greater sense of realism than images of the real world.
We know the Revolutionary Period through engravings and paintings and to situate the film within that world is to place it within our collective visual memory. It’s more real than reality. Though based upon real events that took place during the first years of the Revolution, particularly during The Reign of Terror, the real subject of the film is the disappearance of a world with its codes, manners, tacit understandings and social hierarchy. This theme’s universal. Who hasn’t seen immutable realities pushed aside and forgotten?
We follow Grace as she moves from the certainty of her values, including the code of conduct developed over centuries, into someone who will do what’s needed to survive. At the film’s beginning she, believing the King will be restored and traditional values will return, ̶decides to stay in Paris despite warnings from her ex-lover and now best friend, the Duke of Orleans. She can’t imagine that her world’s doomed. But the new world violently enters her life, people she’d never have to deal with now control her destiny. By the end of the film she’s in a dungeon, most of her friends are dead, the King guillotined, her world’s gone forever.
The feeling of unreal reality is strengthened by the formal way the protagonists speak, a remnant of a disappearing world. Ex-lovers call each other Sir and Madame, even when under threat of immediate annihilation. This is opposed to the outside world of revenge-minded revolutionaries who are willing to kill anyone suspected of supporting the old order. They have codes too, no longer do we hear Sir and Madame, but the cold word of imagined equality, Citizen, barked out like an accusation.
The film was a box-office failure, earning less than 20 percent of its budget back. Rohmer was accused in France of having Royalist sympathies, ironic if one has seen the film. It suggests that the same rancor still exists between the antagonists that came during the revolution. If we move beyond our own experience of change (aging, cultural and political changes, etc.) and consider what happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the Hutu Tutsi massacres in Rwanda, the Armenian Genocide, these antagonisms may be as old as human society itself.