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Racine in 1769 and 1910, or Racine
‘à l’usage de ceux qui voient’
BEGINNING in the mid-eighteenth century, French theatre underwent a
shift from a predominantly verbal to a predominantly visual aesthetic.
Influenced by Lockean sensationalism, writers on aesthetics such as Du
Bos argued that drama should appeal to sight as the most persuasive of
the senses, and in their linguistic theories, figures such as Condillac and
Rousseau argued that the communication of feeling was most effectively
and affectingly achieved not verbally but through gesture. These ideas
coincide also with a revival of interest in the ancient art of pantomime
and a growing appeal of popular forms of theatre which made extensive
use of non-verbal signs. 1 As Pierre Frantz has shown, in addition to the
redesigning of the architecture of theatrical space and a new emphasis on
costume and scenery, these ideas and developments led to the translation
of re´cits into visual tableaux and the supplementing (and on occasion
replacement) of speech by gesture. 2 In the second of Diderot’s Entretiens
sur Le Fils naturel, Dorval declares: ‘nous parlons trop dans nos drames, et
conséquemment nos acteurs ne jouent pas assez’, 3 and he calls for the
theatre to be made more like painting with the creation of tableaux on
stage: ‘si un ouvrage dramatique était bien fait et bien représenté, la scène
offrirait au spectateur autant de tableaux réels qu’il y aurait dans l’action
de moments favorables au peintre’. 4 And the new aesthetic is perhaps
most clearly illustrated by Diderot’s own well-known performance as a
member of the audience:
Aussitôt que la toile était levée, et le moment venu où tous les autres spectateurs
se disposaient à écouter, moi, je mettais mes doigts dans mes oreilles, non sans
quelque étonnement de la part de ceux qui m’environnaient, et qui, ne me
comprenant pas, me regardaient presque comme un insensé qui ne venait à la
comédie que pour ne la pas entendre. Je m’embarrassais fort peu des jugements,
et je me tenais opiniâtrement les oreilles bouchées, tant que l’action et le jeu de
l’acteur me paraissaient d’accord avec le discours que je me rappelais. Je
1. See Angelica Goodden, ‘Actio’ and persuasion: dramatic performance in eighteenth-century
France (Oxford 1986).
2. Pierre Frantz, L’Esthe´tique du tableau dans le the´âtre du XVIII e sie`cle (Paris 1998).
3. Denis Diderot, Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel, in Œuvres comple`tes, ed. Jules Assézat et
Maurice Tourneux, 20 vols (Paris 1875-1877), vii.84-168, p.107. All references are to this
edition.
4. Diderot, Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel, vii.95.
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n’écoutais que quand j’étais dérouté par les gestes, ou que je croyais l’être. [...]
Mais j’aime [...] vous parler de la nouvelle surprise où l’on ne manquait pas de
tomber autour de moi, lorsqu’on me voyait répandre des larmes dans les endroits
pathétiques, et toujours les oreilles bouchées. 5
But what place could be found for Racine in the new visual, gestural and
pictorialist aesthetic?
The prevalent view of Racine as a poet rather than as a dramatist, a
view which privileges his words over his theatrical sense, has its roots
in the eighteenth century. 6 Racine was thought to embody verbal theatre
at its purest: ‘un modèle d’élocution et d’une versification que nous
n’avions pas encore; que peu de nos écrivains pourront atteindre; que nul
ne pourra surpasser’, wrote Batteux. 7 And it was the centrality of the
word to Racine’s theatre which led some to question the extent to which
his plays were fit for theatrical performance: Voltaire remarked of Esther
that ‘la diction, la beauté continue des vers sont pour la lecture. Esther est
divinement écrite, et ne peut être jouée’, 8 and D’Alembert stated: ‘j’ai
toujours regardé Athalie comme un chef d’œuvre de la versification, et
comme une très belle tragédie de collège; je n’y trouve ni action, ni
intérêt. [...] Je crois en général (et je vais peut-être dire un blasphème)
que c’est plutôt l’art de la versification que celui du théâtre qu’il faut
apprendre chez Racine.’ 9 Yet rather than abandoning Racine’s plays, the
eighteenth century attempted to adapt them in a number of ways to the
new aesthetic. The first part of this essay considers one of these, Iphige´nie,
as it was staged at the Comédie-Française in 1769. 10
A more extreme example of an attempt to adapt Racine to a visual
aesthetic is to be found in the early years of the twentieth century, this
time in the context of another art form: film. The mismatch between
Racine and early film is far more radical of course than that between
Racine and the emerging visual aesthetic of eighteenth-century theatre,
since early film was silent, using images rather than words and communicating in gesture, body movements and facial expressions, by necessity
rather than by aesthetic choice. Racinian theatre would seem utterly alien
in such a context: not only can silent film find little place for Racine’s
words, 11 but insofar as silent film has any roots in the theatre, they lie in
popular forms such as the music hall, the café-concert and the the´âtre de la
5. Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, i.359.
6. For a critique of this dominant view of Racine, see David Maskell, Racine: a theatrical
reading (Oxford 1991).
7. Charles Batteux, ‘Observations sur l’Hippolyte d’Euripide et sur la Phe`dre de Racine’,
in Histoire de l’Acade´mie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Paris, L’Imprimerie Royale, 1786),
xlii.452-72, p.471. I am grateful to Russell Goulbourne for this reference.
8. Letter to Chabanon of 13 January 1766 (D13108).
9. Letter to Voltaire of 11 December 1769 (D16037).
10. See also, in this volume, Nicholas Cronk, ‘L’Iphige´nie de Saint-Foix et l’esthétique du
tableau: réécrire Racine en 1769’, p.133-44.
11. Intertitles quoting lines from Racine are used in Britannicus (1912).
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foire. Yet from 1908, silent filmmakers began to look to classical theatre,
borrowing its actors and staging techniques as well as its plots, 12 and so to
Racine. The phenomenon of Racine on silent film has received virtually
no serious attention, probably owing to the dominant view of Racine as a
verbal artist, 13 and yet between 1908 and 1912, a number of such films
were made – Britannicus (Film d’Art, 1908), Andromaque (Film d’Art,
1909), Athalie (Pathé, 1910) and Britannicus (Films Valetta, 1912). Some of
the questions they raise regarding adaptation bear comparison with those
of the eighteenth century. As a number of scholars have shown, silent
cinema revives the eighteenth-century semiotics of the body. 14 Silent film
actors might even be thought of in terms of eighteenth-century natural
man, expressing his feelings in gesture: ‘Les personnages du cinéma muet
semblent appartenir à une humanité disparue, pour qui l’émotion avait
plus d’importance que le langage. Une humanité qui ne pouvait aimer
qu’en se pâmant et pleurer en se tordant les mains, qui voulait de grands
yeux furibonds et mourait avec de grands gestes.’ 15 Moreover, early narrative films used the screen much as Diderot and others used the stage: to
create tableaux. The second part of this study explores one of the films,
Athalie (1910), focusing on a tableau and the adaptation of the dream re´cit.
Overall this essay proposes a comparative study of the mid-eighteenth
and early twentieth-century visual aesthetics as they are brought to bear
on Racine, focusing on some of the effects of adaptation. In converting
word into image, re´cit into action, events are placed before the spectators’
eyes as they unfold. A ‘mise en action’ of a re´cit is thus also a ‘mise au présent’;
its retrospective nature is lost. The retrospective aspect of re´cits makes a
powerful contribution to the sense in which the events of Racine’s plays
are perceived as tragic, conferring a sense of inevitability or at least
unalterability on events; when such events are witnessed as they occur, in
open-ended sequence, this sense may be lost and the fatalism of the tragic
universe may be replaced by the possibility of an alternative outcome, one
shaped by the actions of the characters concerned. Tragedy may thus
move into drame. The question of genre is also at stake in silent film
adaptation. Peter Brooks has said of the eighteenth-century ‘aesthetic of
12. Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to cinema: stage pictorialism and the early feature
film (Oxford 1997).
13. It is interesting to note that the ‘parallel’ phenomenon of Shakespeare on silent film
has been the subject of much critical consideration since the 1960s; see Robert Hamilton
Ball, Shakespeare on silent film: a strange eventful history (London 1968). The British Film
Institute has recently released a video entitled Silent Shakespeare. For an analysis of the silent
Racine corpus, see Kate E. Tunstall, ‘Word meets image: Racine on silent film’, Word and
image 19:4 (2003), p.247-60.
14. Peter Brooks, ‘Melodrama, body, revolution’, in Melodrama. Stage, picture, screen, ed.
Jack Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill (London 1994), p.11-24.
15. Gérard Macé, L’Art sans paroles (Paris 1998), p.39. The international successes of
many silent films might be said to realise the eighteenth-century’s utopian vision of a
universal language.
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muteness’ that it is inherently melodramatic, for emotion is not only
expressed on the body, but is also instantly legible and unambiguous. 16
Certainly much silent film drew on a melodramatic mode of expression,
with characters tending to be unambiguously villainous or virtuous, communicating in clear gestures guaranteed to ensure their intelligibility.
Yet for Brooks such a link between silent cinema and melodrama is
necessary rather than historical; it is for him a ‘simple truism’ that ‘silent
cinema must use the body in expressionistic ways, as the vehicle of
meanings that cannot otherwise be conveyed [...] and reaches out to
melodrama for the stylistic features that allow meanings to be conveyed
without words’. 17 If such a view were accurate, it would clearly have
problematic consequences for the idea of Racine on silent film, suggesting
that adaptation would necessarily entail the disambiguation of character
and situation, the creation of ‘monstres nés’ in place of Racinian ‘monstres naissants’. The analysis which follows considers the extent to which
Pathé’s silent Athalie offers a melodramatisation of Racine’s play and
the extent to which a more ambiguous moral universe may be evoked.
Overall, this study of Iphige´nie in 1769 and Athalie in 1910 offers a new
perspective in the history of the performance of Racine in which he is –
rather unexpectedly – located at a crossroads of word and image, elocutio
and actio, high culture and popular entertainment, tragedy, drame and
melodrama.
i. Racine in 1769:
‘Il faut des actions, et non pas des paroles’ 18
One of the places in which Racine’s plays or scenes from them are likely to
have been performed with an emphasis on actio was at the foire. Such
performances were clearly parodic: during the feuds between the established theatres and the foire when the police silenced the forains, it is
probable that Racine’s plays were among those mimed for comic effect. 19
In his Me´moires pour servir à l’histoire des spectacles de la foire, the actor
Claude Parfaict reports that in 1709 at the foire de Saint Laurent:
les forains contrefaisaient les meilleurs acteurs de la Comédie Française. Ils les
faisaient reconnaı̂tre non seulement par les caractères qu’ils représentaient
au théâtre, mais encore en copiant leurs gestes et les sons de leurs voix. Cette
dernière manière de les peindre se faisait en prononçant d’un ton tragique des
mots sans aucun sens, mais qui se mesuraient comme des vers alexandrins. Ce
16. See, for example, Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic imagination: Balzac, Henry James,
melodrama and the mode of excess (1976; New Haven, CT 1995).
17. Brooks, ‘Melodrama, body, revolution’, p.11.
18. Racine, Iphige´nie, line 1078.
19. There were a number of parodies, burlesques and satires of Racine throughout the
eighteenth century, see Valleria Belt Grammis, Dramatic parody in eighteenth-century France
(New York 1931), p.206-27.
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bouffonnage fit un tel effet, que pendant plusieurs foires, il n’y paraissait point de
pièces qu’on n’y introduisı̂t ce genre de jargon. 20
Silenced or reduced to nonsense, the forains had recourse to the written
word to clarify the message of their silent representations:
comme le public s’était plaint à la précédente foire de l’obscurité de beaucoup
d’endroits de ces pièces, causée par l’impossibilité où les acteurs étaient d’exprimer par des gestes, des choses qui n’étaient pas susceptibles: on imagina l’usage
des cartons, sur lesquels on imprima en gros caractères, et en prose très laconique,
tout ce que le jeu des acteurs ne pouvait rendre. Ces cartons étaient roulés, et
chaque acteur en avait dans sa poche droite le nombre qui lui était nécessaire
pour son rôle; et à mesure qu’il avait besoin d’un carton, il le tirait, et l’exposait
aux yeux des spectateurs, et ensuite le mettait dans sa poche gauche. 21
Serious silent adaptation was provided however by painters, and by midcentury the practice of turning re´cits into paintings in the grand genre was a
feature of the training of promising young artists. 22 The texts of Racine’s
plays had been illustrated from the very first editions, often depicting
those scenes which were not shown on stage – the first edition of Phe`dre,
for example, shows Hippolyte’s death with a sea monster in the background – and this practice increased in the eighteenth century. 23 Moreover, the actual text of Racine’s work was adapted by his eighteenthcentury editors with an eye to visual effects. In 1736, the editors of the
Œuvres de Racine remarked with reference to Athalie that the some description of ‘le jeu des acteurs’ should be included in the printed version so
as readers could better imagine the play: ‘il faut, autant qu’il est possible, épargner aux lecteurs l’embarras de chercher le rapport qu’il doit y
avoir entre les paroles, et les actions des auteurs’. 24 In the final act, they
inserted stage directions at a number of points, in particular in the final
act when the curtain is drawn back to reveal Joas to Athalie. In so doing,
the editors produced a text more akin to a performance text than a
dramatic poem. The concern for visual and pictorial effects crystallised in
the mid-1760s around one play in particular, Iphige´nie, and specifically the
sacrifice of the eponymous heroine. This moment from the ancient myth
had been given successful pictorial representation by Van Loo in his Le
Sacrifice d’Iphige´nie of 1759, and a number of other sacrifice scenes were
exhibited at the salons to great acclaim, Fragonard’s Le Grand Preˆtre Core´sus
s’immole pour sauver Callirhoe´ (1765) being perhaps the best example. It is
20. Claude Parfaict, Me´moires pour servir à l’histoire des spectacles de la foire par un acteur
forain, 2 vols (Paris, Briasson, 1743), i.100-101.
21. C. Parfaict, Me´moires pour servir à l’histoire des spectacles, i.109.
22. See Jean Locquin, La Peinture d’histoire en France de 1747 à 1785: e´tude sur l’e´volution des
ide´es artistiques dans la seconde moitie´ du XVIIIe sie`cle (Paris 1912), p.88.
23. See Noëlle Guibert, ‘L’iconographie de Racine à la Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal’,
Cahiers raciniens 27 (1970), and Michael Hawcroft, ‘Racine through pictures’, in Racine ou le
classicisme, ed. Ronald W. Tobin (Tübingen 2001), p.275-307.
24. ‘Avertissement’, in Œuvres de Racine (Paris, chez Quilleau, 1736), p.xxxi.
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not surprising then to find Bricaire de La Dixmerie, author of Lettre sur
l’e´tat pre´sent de nos spectacles (1765), and Luneau de Boisjermain, editor of
the 1768 Œuvres de Jean Racine, calling for a ‘mise en action’ of the final
scenes of Racine’s play.
The way in which both men view such a ‘mise en action’ is particularly
interesting: it was not to be an adaptation of the play, but rather a kind of
realisation of Racine’s potential. Bricaire de La Dixmerie claimed that the
lack of action on stage was proof that Racine had been constrained by the
reserve of his century: ‘on n’osait presque rien, en fait d’action tragique,
du temps de Racine, ou du moins lorsqu’il composait Iphige´nie. Il est à
croire que s’il eût composée de nos jours, il eût osé davantage.’ 25 And
Luneau de Boisjermain took Racine’s use of re´cit not as a deliberate
aesthetic choice, but rather as the necessary but unfortunate result of the
limitations of the pre-1759 stage with its restricted space for movement
and action: ‘Nous n’avons qu’un regret à former, c’est que Racine n’ait
point composé sa pièce dans un temps où le théâtre fût, comme
aujourd’hui, dégagé de la foule des spectateurs qui inondaient autrefois le
lieu de la scène; ce poète n’aurait pas manqué de mettre en action la
catastrophe qu’il n’a mise qu’en récit.’ 26 Viewed in this way, there seemed
to be no reason why eighteenth-century writers might not fulfil Racine’s
potential for him: ‘Le dirais-je, Monsieur? je voudrais qu’une habile main
y suppléât’, wrote Bricaire de La Dixmerie. 27 The hand to pick up the
challenge would be that of Saint-Foix, a comic dramatist, most famous for
his one-act play L’Oracle. On 31 July 1769 at the Comédie Française, he
staged an Iphige´nie ‘en action’. Before judging how ‘habile’ a staging it
was, it is important to look first at the nature of those final scenes and at
the response to the idea of a ‘mise en action’ from a more experienced
tragic dramatist, Voltaire. 28
In act V, scenes iv and v, Racine does indeed create a striking verbal
tableau. The first elements are provided by Clytemnestre (lines 1694-96):
De festons odieux ma fille couronnée
Tend la gorge aux couteaux, par son père apprêtés.
Calchas va dans son sang.
As her words trail off, Iphigénie’s fate remains in the balance. A few lines
later, Arcas builds on the suspended image sketched by Clytemnestre
(lines 1703-10):
25. Bricaire de La Dixmerie, Lettre sur l’e´tat pre´sent de nos spectacles (Paris, Duchesne,
1765), p.13.
26. Œuvres de Jean Racine, 7 vols (Paris, Louis Cellot, 1768), iv.209. It is interesting to
note that the scene is not illustrated in this edition.
27. Bricaire de La Dixmerie, Lettre sur l’e´tat pre´sent de nos spectacles, p.14.
28. Diderot also discusses the possibility of adapting the re´cit, see Œuvres comple`tes,
vii.147-48).
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Achille est à l’autel. Calchas est éperdu.
Le fatal sacrifice est encor suspendu.
On se menace, on court, l’air gémit, le fer brille.
Achille fait ranger autour de votre fille
Tous ses amis, pour lui prêts à se dévouer.
Le triste Agamemnon, qui n’ose l’avouer,
Pour détourner ses yeux des meutres qu’il présage,
Ou pour cacher ses pleurs, s’est voilé le visage.
Iphigénie’s fate is still poised here conferring on Racine’s lines a
tableau-esque quality which recalls Timanthes’s painting of the sacrifice of
Iphigenia, described by numerous writers in antiquity. 29 With the arrival
of Ulysse, we are informed that Iphigénie has been spared, but the suspended image is summoned once again by him in his re´cit – ‘ce spectacle
affreux’ (line 1737) – and her neck thus remains poised to receive the
knife until the end of his report of Calchas’s long speech (line 1760). Yet
to view a ‘mise en action’ of this re´cit as a simple realisation of Racine is to
mistake an aesthetic choice for a practical one and moreover to mistake
the power of the word in Racine’s play. If Luneau de Boisjermain and
Bricaire de La Dixmerie seem unaware of this, Voltaire hints at the
problematic effects of such an adaptation.
In ‘Art dramatique’ in Questions sur l’Encyclope´die, he wrote:
Cette idée paraı̂t plausible au premier coup d’œil. C’est en effet le sujet d’un très
beau tableau, parce que dans le tableau on ne peint qu’un instant; mais il serait
bien difficile que, sur le théâtre, cette action, qui doit durer quelques moments, ne
devı̂nt froide et ridicule. Il m’a toujours paru évident que le violent Achille, l’épée
nue et ne se battant point, vingt héros dans la même attitude, comme des personnages de tapisserie, Agamemnon, roi des rois, n’imposant à personne, immobile dans le tumulte, formeraient un spectacle assez semblable au cercle de la
reine en cire colorée par Benoı̂t. 30
Voltaire is not resistant to tableaux as such, for his own works make frequent use of such visual effects, a feature to which we will return shortly,
but here he draws out the difficulty of converting Racine’s re´cit into a picture. While a history painting freezes a single moment from a dramatic action, the tableau created here would require the actors to hold a pose whilst
Calchas delivers his oracle. His speech is lengthy with the result that
Achille and Agamemnon would be frozen in attitudes – ‘l’épée nue et ne
se battant point’ and ‘roi des rois, n’imposant à personne’ – which would
render them ridiculous. Voltaire’s observation also brings into focus a
more fundamental difficulty involved in such a ‘mise en action’: Iphigénie
29. This painting is the subject of a vast amount of critical literature, much of it focusing
on Timanthes’s decision to veil Agamemnon’s face. For an overview of the debates and
their relevance in the eighteenth century, see Michel Delon, ‘Le regard détourné ou
les limites de la représentation’, in Le Regard et l’objet, ed. Michel Delon and Wolfgang
Dorst (Heidelberg 1989), p.35-53, and my ‘Le récit est un voile: esthétique et lumières’, in
Qu’est-ce que les Lumie`res?, ed. Jean Salem, Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert and Kate
E. Tunstall (forthcoming in SVEC).
30. Voltaire, Questions sur l’Encyclope´die, 9 vols (Geneva, Cramer, 1770-1772), ii.225-26.
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is saved by words, indeed by the Word – by Calchas’s oracle, the word of
the Gods mediated by the voice of the high priest – rather than by
dramatic human action. The scenes cannot therefore be converted
into a successful history tableau, according to which Achille would be
suspended at the moment just before he springs into heroic action; instead
he is simply paralysed and ultimately deprived of heroism. The centrality
of the word/Word to the Racinian aesthetic is revealed starkly here, since
even if the re´cit were adapted into action, a long speech remains at the
centre of the action, a speech which is itself action. 31
Saint-Foix’s staging in fact manages to avoid the problem of frozen
heroes feared by Voltaire, but in so doing it reworks the tableau in such a
way that power is taken away from the divine word and relocated in
human action. Where Racine has Iphigénie led off stage, Saint-Foix has
her led to an altar on stage and a tableau is created as parts of Arcas’s
description of the scene become stage directions:
Calchas vient se placer à l’autel; il est suivi d’Agamemnon qui se couvre le visage
de ses mains. Eryphile et sa confidente sont assez pres de lui.
CLYTEMNESTRE
Hélas! je me consume en d’impuissans efforts,
Et rentre au trouble affreux dont à peine je sors.
Quel tourment! quel horreur! ô mère infortunée!
De funèbres festons, ma fille couronnée,
Tend la gorge aux couteaux par son père apprétés...
C’est le pur sang des Dieux... inhumains, arrêtez... 32
Saint-Foix has the actors arranged as they were in Arcas’s speech, and the
final ellipsis suggests a pause in which the actors may have held a pose.
Yet the tableau differs in one key respect to that offered by Arcas: Achille is
absent and thus the problem of the paralysed hero raised by Voltaire is
avoided. In fact in Saint-Foix’s version, when Achille arrives, not only
does he reanimate the tableau, but he also resolves its tension by saving
Iphigénie:
[CLYTEMNESTRE]
Que vois-je! Achille accourt, ah! le sort se déclare.
ACHILLE
Fuyez, lâches bourreaux: tremble prêtre barbare.
31. See Michael Hawcroft, Word as action: Racine, rhetoric, and theatrical language (Oxford
1992).
32. Mercure de France, September 1769, p.167.
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Le fer à la main, suivi de cinq ou six des siens, il se pre´cipite sur les soldats qui emme`nent
Iphige´nie, les enfonce et leur arrache cette princesse; il la tient par la main; elle semble faire
quelque re´sistance pour le suivre.
IPHIGÉNIE
Seigneur...
CLYTEMNESTRE, allant à elle
C’est ton époux, c’est notre unique appui,
Achille est le seul Dieu qui nous reste aujourd’hui.
Il la place au milieu des ses Thessaliens qui se pressent d’arriver et qui se
rangent sur un côté du théâtre, tandis que les Grecs arrivent aussi du
côté opposé.
ACHILLE, aux Grecs
Venez me l’arracher. 33
In stark contrast to Racine’s play in which Iphigénie’s sacrifice is averted
by the Word, Saint-Foix has her saved by the actions of a heroic lover. In
this, it is clear that Saint-Foix’s ‘mise en action’ is no simple realisation of
Racine’s potential; it involves a significant adaptation of the play which
both converts word into action and transfers dramatic power away from
the divine word to human action and passion. 34 While Racine was
uncomfortable with the deus ex machina ending of the story in Euripides
and created Eriphile as a solution, Saint-Foix’s adaptation goes as far as
to offer a near secularisation of the ending in line with much eighteenthcentury dramaturgy.
Although critical of both the proposal of a ‘mise en action’ and SaintFoix’s actual staging, Voltaire was not hostile to the use of tableaux on
stage. In one of his own plays, Les Lois de Minos (1774), we encounter a
sacrifice tableau similar to that of Saint-Foix. The play depicts the
enlightened King of Crete, Teucer, attempting to prevent the barbaric
human sacrifice from taking place, and although he opposes it for
humanitarian reasons, he later discovers that the intended victim, Astérie,
was his long-lost daughter. 35 A tableau is created in act IV, scene iii, at the
33. Mercure de France, September 1769, p.167-68.
34. Eriphile’s self-sacrifice is rendered most problematic by Saint-Foix’s earlier resolution of Iphigénie’s fate: ‘comment ne s’est-on pas aperçu que le spectacle d’Eriphile se
sacrifiant ne pouvait faire aucun effet par la raison qu’Eriphile, n’étant qu’un personnage
épisodique et un peu odieux, ne pouvait intéresser? Il ne faut jamais tuer sur le théâtre que
les gens que l’on aime passionément’ (Voltaire to Chabanon, 7 August 1769 [D14819]).
Once Saint-Foix’s Iphigénie has been saved by her lover, Eriphile’s death becomes an
independent event and an overly spectacular one for a mere secondary character.
35. Explicit reference to the Iphigenia story is made early on in the play by Teucer:
‘Songez que de Calchas et de la Grèce unie / Le ciel n’accepta point le sang d’Iphigénie’
(I.ii).
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moment when Teucer rushes to the temple to save his daughter: ‘Il
enfonce la porte; le temple s’ouvre. On voit Pharès entouré de sacrificateurs. Astérie est à genoux aux pieds de l’autel; elle se tourne vers Pharès
en étendant la main; et en le regardant avec horreur; et Pharès, le glaive à
la main, est prêt à frapper’. 36 The drama of Voltaire’s tableau is akin to
that of Saint-Foix: the victim is saved not by the verbal intervention of
the divine, but by the active intervention of the human, here motivated
not by romantic but by paternal love.
This focus on human action is related to the concern for visual action
and for a dramatic pictorial moment. In the case of Saint-Foix’s Iphige´nie,
the translation of the re´cit into action also entailed the conversion of the
divine into the human, as the drama of the ending was shifted away from
Calchas’s speech. With this focus on human action, Racine’s play undergoes a generic adaptation: tragedy shifts over into drame.
The question of translating re´cit into action and its possible consequences for tragedy is also at stake in 1910 when France’s most important film company, Pathé, made a silent film of Athalie. In the analysis of
which follows, Brooks’ notion that the silent mode of expression would
result in melodramatisation will be shown to be unfounded; however,
the translation of the re´cits into visual action, in particular those of the
infanticide, the dream and the entrance into the temple, will be shown to
have significant effects on Racine’s tragic heroine.
ii. Racine ‘muet’ in 1910
While Saint-Foix’s ‘mise en action’ was motivated by a desire to fulfil
Racine’s visual potential for him, the ‘mise en action’ carried out by silent
filmmakers found its motivation in the desire to appropriate the cultural
capital of Racine and thus to attract the financial capital of the middle
classes to the new art form. The question as to what motivated the choice
of particular films from Racine’s œuvre is more difficult to answer, however.
In the case of Athalie, there is a certain visual appeal: as was mentioned
earlier, the dénouement had tended to be staged as a kind of tableau since
the eighteenth century, and more spectacularly, Athalie’s dream re´cit
would afford filmmakers the opportunity to use special effects. Just as
likely a motivation for the choice, however, lies in the fact that the
play was a standard text in quatrie`me at schools and would therefore have
been well known to the educated and more affluent spectators whom
the film d’art wished to attract. 37 Moreover, its Biblical pedigree may
also have been thought to make it suitable for a wider and even an
36. Voltaire, Œuvres, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols (Paris 1877-1885), vii.219.
37. See André Chervel, Les Auteurs franc¸ais, latins et grecs au programme de l’enseignement
secondaire de 1800 à nos jours (Paris 1986).
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international audience. 38 Whatever the reasons, it was an international
success. It opened as Athaliah, Queen of Judah in London in August 1910, 39
and transferred to Paris as Athalie in October to be shown at the Pathé
Omnia cinema on the grands boulevards. 40 The following year, it went to
America. 41 It was made by Albert Capellani, artistic director of Pathé’s
Société Cinématographique des Artistes et Gens de Lettres (SCAGL), 42
from a scenario based on Racine by Michel Carré. 43 The cast was over
one hundred strong with well-known actors in the titles roles – Jeanne
Delvair from the Comédie-Française played Athalie and Edouard de
Max was Joad – and the film was given much publicity before its release.
The poster went on sale three weeks in advance, 44 and Georges Fagot
announced it in Cine´-Journal as Pathé’s greatest achievement to date: ‘En
définitive, succès énorme, incontestable, qui sera le clou de la saison.’ 45
In general, the film shows events where Racine tells us about them, and
it shows these events in the order in which they occurred. For instance,
in Racine’s play, while Athalie’s desecration of the temple takes place
between acts one and two, we only hear about it from Zacharie after it has
happened (lines 384-96), and it is only after his account that we meet
Athalie herself, who then tells of her dream which led to her going to the
temple in the first place (lines 485-530). In Carré’s film, first we see
Athalie having her dream – indeed we even see the dream itself –, and
38. The Biblical source also made it easier to export the film. In England, for example,
no mention is made of Racine, though interestingly, it is not assumed that spectators would
know the Biblical story (see Bioscope, 25 August 1910, p.29).
39. It was shown in London at Pathé Frères on the Charing Cross Road in the week of
25 August 1910 (Bioscope, 25 August 1910, p.40).
40. In 1911, it was also shown at the Apollo in Geneva and the Lux in Lausanne, see
Freddy Buache and Jacques Rial, Les De´buts du cine´matographe à Gene`ve et à Lausanne, 18951914 (Lausanne 1964), p.52, 100. The film was also shown in Germany, as a version exists
with German intertitles in the Filmmuseum, Berlin.
41. See Moving picture world (1 April 1911, p.732). There is a fragment in the collection at
Georges Eastman House, Rochester.
42. Albert Capellani (1870-1931) was taken on by Ferdinand Zecca at Pathé in 1905,
where he made melodramas and féeries. When Pathé created SCAGL in 1908, he became
its artistic director and in 1909, he made what is considered to be France’s first feature film,
L’Assommoir (740 metres). A series of films adapted from nineteenth-century novels followed, among them Notre-Dame de Paris (1911), Les Myste`res de Paris (1912), Les Mise´rables
(1912), and Germinal (1913). As an adaptation from Racine, Athalie is exceptional in his
œuvre.
43. Michel Carré (1865-1945), son of the librettist of the same name. His first (rather
unsuccessful) film was L’Enfant prodigue (1907) and was based on his father’s three-act play
of the same title.
44. Cine´-Journal, 1 October 1910, p.28.
45. Cine´-Journal, 8 October 1910, p.21. The London Bioscope stated: ‘the film is wellstaged, and carefully treated, and the numerous sub-titles clearly explain the story’ (Bioscope, 25 August 1910, p.29). The American Moving picture world wrote: ‘the highest token
of praise belongs to ‘‘Athaliah’’, the gorgeously staged, splendidly acted and exquisitely
coloured tragedy-drama by Pathé Frères (France)’ (15 April 1911, p.817).
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then we see her entering the temple. This has a number of important
effects on the presentation of both events and characters.
In Racine’s play, the re´cit provides a way of creating conflicting points
of view on Athalie, such that our response to her is complex and the
partial nature of any judgement we make of her must be acknowledged.
The discrepancy between her behaviour as described by others and as
accounted for by Athalie herself is striking. To others, she inspires fear: in
the first scene, we are told that her rule is illegitimate and was established
by violence; 46 Abner describes her as still vengeful and angry; 47 and in the
following scene, Josabeth describes Athalie, dagger in hand, goading her
soldiers on in their infanticidal duty. 48 Yet when she appears on stage, she
inspires pity. She is troubled, in a feeble state and needs to sit down, and
she gives an alternative account of how she came to power which, while
not denying the bloodshed involved in her securing the throne of Judah,
suggests not only that she thought herself justified in behaving as she
did, but that a kind of retrospective justification for it might be found in
the fact that her reign has seen her country peaceful and prosperous. 49
Moreover, Athalie’s account of her entry into the temple is very different
to that given by Zacharie: it was not a premeditated attack, motivated by
hatred; instead, haunted by the prophetic images of her dream, she acted
on a kind of instinct, seeking to appease rather than attack the Jewish
God. 50 Athalie the infanticidal tyrant is, from another angle, Athalie the
reformed but troubled queen. These differing perspectives on the heroine
present a challenge to the silent filmmaker.
Since Carré shows us events as they occur and not as they are recounted subsequently by different characters with their politico-religious points
of view, he must decide as to Athalie’s character. This could indeed turn
tragedy into melodrama: adapting the Jews’ perspective alone would
produce the narrative of a wicked, homicidal tyrant fighting against the
forces of good and God personified in Joad and Joas. Yet Carré in fact
46. ‘Une impie étrangère / Du sceptre de David usurpe tous les droits, / Se baigne
impunément dans le sang de nos rois, / Des enfants de son fils détestable homicide, / Et
même contre Dieu lève son bras perfide’ (lines 72-76).
47. ‘Je voyais ses yeux / Lancer sur le lieu saint des regards furieux [...] Croyez-moi, plus
j’y pense, moins je puis douter / Que sur vous son courroux ne soit prêt d’éclater, / Et que
de Jézabel la fille sanguinaire / Ne vienne attaquer Dieu jusqu’en son sanctuaire’ (lines 5253, 57-60).
48. ‘Un poignard à la main, l’implacable Athalie / Au carnage animait ses barbares
soldats’ (lines 244-45).
49. ‘Je ne veux point ici rappeler le passé, / Ni vous rendre raison du sang que j’ai versé.
/ Ce que j’ai fait, Abner, j’ai cru le devoir faire. / Je ne prends point pour un juge un peuple
téméraire. / Quoi que son insolence ait osé publier, / Le ciel même a pris soin de me
justifier. / Sur d’éclatants succès ma puissance établie / A fait jusqu’aux deux mers
respecter Athalie. / Par moi Jérusalem goûte un calme profond’ (lines 465-73).
50. ‘Dans le temple des Juifs un instinct m’a poussée, / Et d’apaiser leur Dieu j’ai conçu
la pensée; / J’ai cru que des présents calmeraient son courroux, / Que ce Dieu, quel qu’il
soit, en deviendrait plus doux’ (lines 527-30).
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attempts to preserve the ambiguities of Racine’s play, but in so doing, he
creates a heroine who behaves in oddly inconsistent ways. In the first
scene of the film, she looks at the temple with precisely the ‘regards
furieux’ described by Abner (line 53), and the brutality of her method of
ruling is established when her men violently clear a path for her, leaving
one man lying injured on the steps of the temple. In the next scene
however, we encounter a rather different woman: Athalie returns to her
private chambers, where she sits down, looking weary and troubled.
When Mathan tries to persuade her to attack the temple, she refuses. In
the first two scenes of the film, Carré thus attempts to translate the
various points of view on Athalie offered in the first two acts of Racine’s
play, offering a queen matching both the descriptions of her given by her
opponents and that given by Athalie herself: she really is angry and
vengeful in the first scene, and she is genuinely weary and unwilling to
take revenge in the second. While Racine’s queen is the subject of contradictory interpretations, Carré’s heroine simply behaves in contradictory ways.
The adaptation of the dream re´cit is the highlight of the film. The re´cit
provides ample material for visual spectacle, and Capellani uses the
technique of filming over the same piece of film twice to create shadowy
apparitions, dream images, such that we see Athalie having her dream
and the dream images themselves. Yet he not only makes the dream re´cit
present, he also modifies it. Carré offers a two-part dream sequence as in
the play, but the first of the two visions is not of Jézebel. This might be
thought a missed opportunity since early cinema specialised in ‘transformation’ effects which could have recreated the frightening spectacle of
Jézebel’s return to the dead. 51 The decision to omit Jézebel may be explained however by the fact that central to the first dream vision is a
speech – Jézebel’s prophesy that Athalie will also die at the hands of the
Jews 52 – and although it would be possible to convert it into images, it
would result in a potentially confusing proliferation of levels of unreality,
with dreamt events and dreamt prophesied ones. Moreover, Carré’s film
is as much concerned with coherent narrative as with spectacular effects,
and he chooses to replace Jézebel’s apparition, her return to the dead and
her prophesy, with the ‘mise en action’ of another re´cit: that of Josabeth in
act I, scene ii. Yet this modification of the dream involves an interpretation of Athalie’s character and a significant departure from Racine’s
play.
Whilst in the play, Josabeth’s re´cit of the infanticide creates a view of
Athalie in her absence as barbaric, in the film, Athalie is not only made to
witness her past actions but also to experience horror at them. The
51. See Georges Méliès, ‘Les vues cinématographiques’, in Annuaire ge´ne´ral et international
de la photographie (Paris 1907), p.362-92.
52. ‘Tremble, m’a-t-elle dit, fille digne de moi. / Le cruel Dieu des Juifs l’emporte aussi
sur toi. / Je te plains de tomber dans ses mains redoutables, / Ma fille’ (lines 497-500).
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intertitle reads: ‘Athaliah is stricken by remorse and haunted by a vision
of her crimes. Joash also appears to her.’ 53 She sees a heap of dead bodies
appear on the floor of her chamber, some with crowns on their heads; as
she examines them, a woman gets up from the floor with a child in her
arms; Athalie rushes over to them, dagger in hand, raised to kill the child,
but just as she is about to do so, they disappear. Athalie then seems to
wake up, and as she does so, she drops the dagger, looks in horror and
buries her face in her hands. The intertitle ensures that we read her look
of horror not as a response to Joas’s having escaped her knife, but as a
reaction to her own infanticidal desires. In contrast to the play in which
Athalie is haunted by her mother’s death, fears her own and feels no
remorse for her bloody rise to power, Pathé’s Athalie is haunted by a past
that she has come to view as morally culpable. Moreover, where in the
play Athalie believes the visions to be visited upon her by an angry Jewish
God, in the film they emanate from her guilty conscience. Pathé has thus
replaced word with image, and a verbal prophesy with a visible psychology.
The second vision follows: as in the play, Joas appears and as she goes
over to him, her arms outstretched, he pulls out a dagger; she clutches her
breast, cries out in pain, and he disappears. Yet Joas’s response to Athalie
is more shocking in the film than in the play. This is in part the result of
the film’s reordering of Racine’s narrative sequence. In the play, the
placing the re´cit of Athalie’s dream after her entry into the temple, though
the dream itself preceded it of course, ensures that Joas’s raised dagger
appears as a defensive response to a perceived act of aggression. The film
adaptation of the re´cit is both a ‘mise en action’ as well as a ‘mise au
présent’ and the dream therefore occurs before Athalie has gone to the
temple. The result is that Joas’s raised dagger appears more aggressive
than defensive, and moreover, since Pathé’s Athalie has just expressed
remorse for the infanticide in the past, it seems cruelly vengeful. And thus
when, following the dream, Pathé’s Athalie storms off to the temple, she
does so neither aggressively as Racine’s Zacharie claims nor in appeasement as his Athalie claims, but in self-defence.
The extent to which the film wishes to be seen as high art is most clearly
seen in scene v of the film, composed to suggest a late eighteenth- or
nineteenth-century history painting: with Joas kneeling to his right and a
man and woman holding a lamb to his left, Joad holds a dagger aloft
ready to bring it down on a lamb. This tableau is interrupted by Athalie
who arrives suddenly and prevents the sacrifice from taking place. The
scene has been created by adapting two re´cits: the details of the scene
come from that of Zacharie, 54 but the drama of Athalie’s entrance comes
53. I quote from the BFI copy as no print of the film has survived with French intertitles.
54. ‘Déjà, selon la loi, le grand Prêtre mon père, / Après avoir au Dieu qui nourrit les
humains / De la moisson nouvelle offert les premiers pains, / Lui présentait encore entre ses
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from her own account: ‘J’entre. Le peuple fuit; le sacrifice cesse’ (line
530). The combination of the two re´cits to create the tableau has a peculiar
effect however, in that since her entrance saves the lamb, it casts Athalie
in the role of saviour, bringing to mind a parallel with Achille in SaintFoix’s Iphige´nie and Teucer in Les Lois de Minos. Yet she fulfils the role
wholly unintentionally; there is no sense in which she stormed into the
temple with the aim of preventing the sacrifice. From a narrative
perspective, the tableau is thus rather awkward, yet its striking composition seems to demand that we take it seriously, perhaps read it symbolically. As such, the lamb might stand for Joas (who is in fact kneeling
in a similar position to the lamb on the other side of Joad), and the
dagger above the lamb’s head would symbolise the threat to Joas’s life
posed by Athalie. And yet it is Joad who wields the dagger here,
suggesting that the lamb might also stand for Athalie, her life under
threat from Joad and from Joas standing behind him. Parallels between
Athalie and Joad are suggested in the play – Athalie’s past infanticide is,
at some level, matched by Joad’s present bloodthirsty fanaticism 55 – and
the film can be seen to give visual expression to this in a gesture repeated throughout: Joad’s dagger raised above the lamb in the tableau echoes
Joas’s dagger raised over Athalie in the second dream vision, itself
echoing Athalie’s dagger raised above him as a baby in the first.
To conclude, Diderot would not have approved of Pathé’s visual and
pictorial adaptation in the sense that the relationship between word and
image, original and adaptation, is very loose: he could recite the lines of
the play in his head while watching the actors on stage – ‘je me tenais
opiniâtrement les oreilles bouchées, tant que l’action et le jeu de l’acteur
me paraissaient d’accord avec le discours que je me rappelais’ (my emphasis)
– while even if the film spectators were sufficiently familiar with the
original play, the extent of the reordering is too great for the mental
recitation of lines to be possible. And yet the concern for conveying a
narrative visually, pictorially and in gesture, offers echoes of an aesthetic
first elaborated in the eighteenth century.
Racine is substantially altered in both the adaptations considered here,
and a comparison between them and the originals brings Racine’s aesthetic into sharp focus. In the 1769 Iphige´nie, the ‘mise en action’ of the
re´cit strips both the word of its representational function and the Word of
its performative function, offering instead a visual narrative in which
mains sanglantes / Des victimes de paix les entrailles fumantes. / Debout à ses côtés le jeune
Eliacin / Comme moi le servait en long habit de lin, / Et cependant, du sang de la chair
immolée / Les Prêtres arrosaient l’Autel et l’assemblée. / Un bruit confus s’élève, et du
peuple surpris / Détourne tout à coup les yeux et les esprits. / Une Femme... Peut-on la
nommer sans blasphème! / Une Femme... C’était Athalie elle-même’ (lines 384-96).
55. For example, he calls the Jews to arms: ‘Dans l’infidèle sang baignez-vous sans
horreur; / Frappez, et Tyriens, et même Israëlites’ (lines 1360-61), and later refers to the
previous generations as ‘saintement homicides’ (line 1365).
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events are shaped by human actions and passions. Saint-Foix’s ‘mise en
action’ is a disenchanting of the Racinian aesthetic, a secularising project
as well as an aesthetic one. Pathé’s ‘mise en action’ of the dream re´cit has a
similarly secularising effect, replacing divine verbal prophesy with human
psychology and its visual imagery. And yet while no divine hand guides
events on screen, it might be said that the film images all emanate from
a mysterious, hidden source: perhaps the technical wizardry of the cinematograph re-enchanted Racine for the early twentieth century.
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