PREMIO MIKELDI DE HONOR
JEANNE MOREAU
The human voice
In one of the sequences in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, Los abrazos rotos (Broken embraces), Mateo, the blind film director, expresses his desire to listen once again to Jeanne Moreau’s voice in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, (Lift to the scaffold) the film that Louis Malle directed in 1958 when the Nouvelle vague had still not crashed against the dykes formed by the ciné de papa (mainstream cinema), and was eager to open up a new way of thinking about the relationship between images and sounds. The thing is that what can be seen in Almodóvar’s film, as well as being a dual tribute to the actress and the director and an element that is directly linked to the character’s blindness, has even deeper repercussions, because one of the aspects that have given a unique character to absolutely all Jeanne Moreau’s film roles is directly linked with what Roland Barthes called the grain of the voice.
This is because there are actors whose image is definitively etched on our minds by the way in which they are able to make any character their own. However there are others who, without neglecting this, give precedence in their relationship with their audience to an ability to show empathy that makes their screen presence not so much a dramatic change of masks but the establishment of a contract of trust based on the idea of a reunion, re-established again and again with a body whose mere presence becomes the pretext for a euphoric renewal of what is a contract for communication on stage and screen. A select group of these would finally still have the possibility of transmitting all the material qualities of the body through their voices. This is a voice that in Jeanne Moreau’s case is deep and husky, and seems to make use of not just her vocal chords but also goes beyond the spoken text to leave traces of all the power of what underlies the words, and provides them with a unique denseness.
There can be absolutely no doubt that this ability that the actress has, which is not just restricted to her talent to project herself in a wide variety of characters, but that also in each of her gestures and each of the words that she makes her own seems to leave in its wake the traces of a lifetime of experience, lies behind the fascination exerted by Jeanne Moreau over not only filmmakers (from Louis Malle to François Truffaut, from Orson Welles to Joseph Losey, from Luis Buñuel to Marguerite Duras, from Michelangelo Antonioni to Elia Kazan) but also over theatre directors (let’s just mention her memorable old whore in La Celestina in Antoine Vitez’s production at the Avignon Festival in 1989).
It is this unique ability that is only within the reach of a privileged few, that has enabled her to maintain an exemplary relationship with her audience throughout a career that has developed over six decades. That is why these lines in the unforgettable song Le tourbillon, that Jeanne Moreau sang in Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1963) perfectly define this relationship:
On s’est connus, on s’est reconnus,
On s’est perdus de vue, on s’est retrouvés
Dans le tourbillon… du cinéma.
(We met, we recognised each other,
We lost sight of each other, we met again,
In the hustle and bustle …of cinema)
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