We have been graced by the film gods with the task of portraying one of their own on the silver screen—the prolific and transcendent Jeanne Moreau. It goes without saying that this is a monumental task that will require a dedication, and perhaps more than a little love from all of us. It is for this reason that I am writing this letter— I hope to show you how inspiring a figure Moreau is, so that you can let yourself be driven by her example, and so that we can all come together to make this piece a reflection of the great actor herself, and that Moreau might become a part of all of our legacies, as well as hers. I was fortunate enough to be able to take, during my formative undergraduate years, an entire seminar on the life and works of…show more content… The auteurist framework is incredibly pervasive, not only in film academia and criticism, but in popular culture as well—when most people ask themselves who the creator of a film is, they find themselves answering with the name of the director. However our professor, Professor Turk, began this class by suggesting an alternative framework—the framework of “acteurism”—in which we are able to examine actors and primary authors of their works, with distinct styles and characteristics that result in films that are recognizable as their works, and are quite comparable to one…show more content… More than half a century later, Catherine is still one Moreau’s most well-remembered roles. In 2003, nearly 40 years after the fact, Erica Abeel wrote of Moreau’s portrayal of Marguerite Duras “she’s simply an older edition of Catherine, slender, with champagne-colored hair, and the downturned mouth, snapping eyes and feminine allure imprinted in the minds of cinephiles the world.” The prototypical, women on the edge of sexual discovery, explored through Les Amants’ Jeanne Tournier echoes in Mademoiselle, and (albeit in a much younger and innocent form) in l’Adolescent (1979) , which Moreau, co-wrote, directed, but did not star in. These films are also all associate sexual discovery with natural imagery. The motif of the aging women is something she explored in both Bertrand Blier’s Going Places (1974) and her own directorial debut Lumière (1976), where she and several other woman portray several actresses, effectively meditating on the role of the actress at various stages of
