Adèle Haenel has retired.

You’re just as committed to replying to me as I am to you in this thread, so it seems like you care at least a little bit. And even if you didn’t, my pointing out the grotesque cynicism of your opinion on the issue isn’t only meant for your acknowledgment, but also anyone else reading the thread (there are of course many smart people on this board who probably already came to that conclusion on their own… though it doesn’t hurt to have a pointed critique to draw the reader’s attention!). If it seems like I’m comically committed to your feelings on this topic in particular, it’s because - again - you’re the only one in this thread condemning her behavior. Not sure why it’s confusing to receive pushback on a message board for posting wacky opinions…

It's very weird to frame her behavior as walking away because “she didn’t get her exact way” - as if she’s an entitled child - for simply having a lower threshold for tolerating social inequality in the industry than you might have. You insist that her issues with the industry should have led to her producing films on her own with her resources as a way to “fight” – first of all, as others in this thread have already pointed out, “she hasn’t ruled out making films with fellow activists like Gisèle Vienne and Céline Sciamma”… but even if she didn’t do that, she’s not a phony for making that choice. Making your own art isn’t the only honorable form of rebellion in this situation. It might be the most “heroic” course of action, but suggesting that it’s the only acceptable thing for Haenel to do is treating the act of creating art too much in the abstract, and ignores the specific person that exists behind the art they may or may not want to create. It’s easy to say she should direct/produce her own films, but obviously that’s a whole other career commitment that not every actor desires, has room for in their life, or even sees themselves successfully pursuing artistically. And even if she did consider going that route, she’d still be fighting against what she might perceive to be a disproportionate number of politically shitty films still being produced in the industry, and you can’t know how exhausting, demoralizing, and emotionally draining that might be for any individual filmmaker (especially a gay woman)….

Well would you look at that, we’ve again circled back to my original point a few posts back about not sharing her life experience. You wonder why I repeat myself, because it sometimes seems like you breeze right past certain things in my posts without really considering them carefully (probably because it reads to you like more Woke Lecturing nonsense, am I right?).

And saying that her comments regarding Dumont were unprofessional and crass is an opinion, not factual. Is there anyone in the industry defending the project of his that Haenel mentions?

I know, I thought it was obvious that I was partly responding to that (also wrongheaded) post as well.

That's true, I'm glad you mentioned that because I'm very curious about their thoughts as well. But whatever, it's fine if they don't feel compelled to post them.
Fair enough.

I'm not familiar with the Farber essay, but it sounds interesting, so I'll have to check it out...

Update:

She has not started a new movie in almost 5 years now (October 2018 started filming - Portrait of a Lady on Fire) not attached to any upcoming films........here she was just a few days ago at a union worker / factory protest:

All the more power to her but that haircut  

She's no longer interested in acting in films. Stage work only . She's also strongly opposed to Emmanuel Macron's policies and has given moral and financial support to strikers.

From the (once) great (former) actress - being her usual very subtle self

Below are some key excerpts from Haenel’s open letter, translated from French:


“I’ve decided to politicize my retreat from the film industry to denounce its generalized complacency toward sexual aggressors.”

“Let’s say it clearly: As the biodiversity collapses, the militarization of Europe is taking off and hunger and misery keep spreading, why is the film world — collegially gathered at the Cesar Awards to promote their films — obsessively eager to stay ‘lighthearted’? To make sure they talk about ‘nothing.'”

“In a context of historic social movement, we’re awaiting to see if the big players of the film industry are expecting — like the sponsors from the luxury industry — police forces to make sure everything happens as usual on the red carpet of the Cannes Film Festival.”

“Meanwhile they all join hands to save the face of Depardieu, Polanski and Boutonnat. It unnerves them and disturbs them that victims make too much noise; they would prefer it if we continued to disappear and die in silence. They’re ready to do anything to defend their rapist chiefs, those who are so rich that they believe they belong to a superior species, those who make a show of this superiority by..... objectifying women and subordinates.”

“I have no other weapon than my body and my integrity. Cancel culture in the primary sense: you have the money, the strength and the money, you bask in it, but you won’t have me as your spectator. I cancel you from my world. I depart, I go on strike, I join my comrades, whose quest for meaning and dignity rules over that of money and power.”

variety.com/2023/film/global/adele-haenel-open-letter-french-film-industry-sexual-aggressors-polanski-depardieus-1235607305/

I've already said I think Haenel is ridiculous with her position / statements on "retirement"....... but I also said she was the Huppert of her generation as an actress too.......Huppert when asked about Haenel gives her own POV on things......would be a shame if they never interact tbh:

I mention Portrait of a Girl on Fire’s Adèle Haenel, who recently quit cinema, saying she could no longer work within a corrupt and abusive system. What does Huppert think of her stance? She sounds irritated: “I’m here to talk about the film I’ve made. If every time we do an interview these days, we have to go over everything in the news, then we’ll never talk about cinema.” But doesn’t cinema exist in relation to daily life? Isn’t Haenel’s position an interesting one? “All positions are interesting,” she says, with a curt laugh. “They always tell you something. Luckily, we all have different positions.”

Hers is that it is still worth working in the film industry. “Obviously, because otherwise, I wouldn’t continue. I’m not going to quit making films overnight, that’s for sure. Cinema still seems to me like a place where we try to say things with a certain faith, a certain ethic. I still want to be part of it. I certainly don’t want to exclude myself from it and condemn the whole of it. I can condemn small parts, but not all of it.”


www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jun/23/isabelle-huppert-when-youre-an-actor-you-keep-secrets

On the one hand she's acting again - fnck yeah!........on the other hand it's not in movies - and she's still quite tiresome with this stuff and fighting the Endless Revolution All The Time.......

Also she might as well just be wearing a trashbag nowadays - nice hat ....but......um....... acting......sure....fnck yeah.......


23 - Oct 14, 2023 | Chatham, NY | 7 p.m. PS21. L'Étang (The Pond) id Gisèle Vienne's adaptation of Robert Walser's bitter family drama, with Pina Bausch dancer Julie Shanahan and César winner Adèle Haenel, who play all ten roles, and music by doom metal band Sunn O))) frontman Stephen O'Malley

****************

The passion of Adèle Haenel, an artist of fierce political conviction


Adèle Haenel on the grounds of PS21 in Chatham, N.Y., Oct. 14, 2023. Haenel, working with the choreographer-director Gisèle Vienne in “L’Étang,” is trying to “pierce through the surface of things.” (Lauren Lancaster/The New York Times)

by Elisabeth Vincentelli


CHATHAM, NY.- Adèle Haenel bristled when asked what drew her to radical art and politics. “The term ‘radical’ is used as a way to discredit protest discourse,” said Haenel, an actress who is best known in the United States for the 2019 art-house hit “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” That was also one of the last feature films she worked on. Since then, she has opted to dramatically alter the course of her life and career.

Over the past few years, Haenel, 34, has become one of the most visible and committed faces of the #MeToo movement in France. In May, she wrote an open letter published in the influential French culture weekly Télérama to explain her absence from movie screens: “I decided to politicize my retirement from cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession toward sexual aggressors and more generally the way in which this sphere collaborates with the mortal, ecocidal, racist order of the world such as it is.”

She has, she told me, “a political understanding of the world, and my actions are consistent with it as much as possible. Calling someone radical is a way to say ‘She’s hysterical, she’s angry.’ I prefer coherent to radical.”

I said that I had used the word in a positive way — to suggest bold choices that steered clear of the artistic mainstream. “I’m not annoyed with you,” Haenel said. “I’m reacting strongly, but it’s just to make myself clear.”

Making herself clear is important to Haenel, who has an intense focus and frequently looked to the side as we talked, as if to better organize her thoughts away from an interlocutor’s gaze. She sometimes wrote down points she wanted to come back to later — and she did return to them.

We were talking in a house on the bucolic campus of PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, in Chatham, where Haenel was appearing in director-choreographer Gisèle Vienne’s show “L’Étang.” The show comes next to New York City for performances at New York Live Arts, Saturday through Monday, as part of the Dance Reflections festival.

By American theatrical standards, “L’Étang” (“The Pond”) is pretty close to radical, however. Based on a short play by Swiss-German writer Robert Walser, the dance-theater piece locks Haenel and Julie Shanahan, a longtime member of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble, in a helix of escalating tension performed in often excruciatingly slow motion, a tempo familiar to those who saw Vienne’s hypnotic “Crowd” last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Haenel takes on multiple roles, most notably that of Fritz, an adolescent who fakes suicide to attract his mother’s attention, and his two siblings; Shanahan plays their parents. The atmosphere is somewhat hallucinatory — Vienne has cited David Lynch among her influences — but it requires consummate precision, both physical and emotional.

“We worked a lot on trying to pierce through the surface of things, and that’s not something you can do alone,” Haenel said. “Among the people onstage, we tried to better understand what’s implied, to understand a person’s feelings. You start anticipating when a person is going to stop moving. That’s a kind of communication I feel very strongly with Julie. We don’t need to talk about it endlessly; I just feel how long she’s going to take to do something.”

For Vienne, effort is an integral part of the process. “What I do is very technical from a choreographic and interpretive standpoint,” she said in Chatham. “This virtuosity is the result of a long physical and theoretical training — sociology, philosophy and politics are important to understanding what we’re in the process of building, and the formal choices we make as we create the piece.”

This rigor and commitment suit Haenel, as she passionately pursues a path in which artistic goals are intertwined with politics and life, a dedication that coalesces in her work with Vienne.

The two met in 2018, when they were on the admissions committee for the National Theater of Brittany’s acting school. Haenel participated in a workshop with prospective students led by Vienne. “I loved it,” she said. “The improvisation was related to her show ‘Crowd’ and involved developing slow motion as a new sense, like seeing or hearing, that would allow you to live or experience things differently.”

The pair further explored that theme in “L’Étang,” which became their first official collaboration and, after a COVID-19-imposed delay, premiered in 2021. Over the course of our conversation, Haenel often circled back to what she referred to as de-hierarchization. In the show, for example, words, movement, music, sound and lighting all contribute to communicating information, feelings and emotions. This undermines the traditional place of text at the top of the theatrical pyramid, and makes us reconsider what carries meaning onstage.

And “L’Étang” subverts the usual link between the performers’ body language and the way text is delivered — especially since the voices are often electronically distorted. (Adrien Michel did the sophisticated sound design.)

“It’s about the friction between text and subtext,” Haenel said. She brought up an especially intense scene in which she and Shanahan are face to face. They barely move, but the effect is one of terrifying brutality. “Julie actually speaks very calmly, but for us it’s a crazy scene of aggression because there is a negation of the body language,” Haenel said, adding that something they explored with Vienne was dissociation. “We’ve achieved a level where we can have a body that looks almost stoned with a speeded-up voice.”

The impact is intended to be as much political as it is aesthetic. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang’ is the issue of violence,” Haenel said, “and this violence is not about saying tough things, but about turning someone else’s speech into silence.”

Haenel and Vienne’s partnership has bloomed since 2018. In August, they premiered a new show, “Extra Life,” also starring Theo Livesey and Katia Petrowick, at the prestigious Ruhrtriennale festival in Germany. They are also involved with public readings of work by Monique Wittig, a lesbian philosopher-activist who died in 2003 and has been enjoying a revival in France over the past few years. While in New York for “L’Étang,” Haenel was to participate in a Wittig event on Wednesday at the Albertine bookstore, which its organizers conceived in collaboration with Vienne.

“Talking about Monique Wittig is a political act of active memory creation,” said Haenel, who is trying to get new English translations of Wittig’s work off the ground. “I’d love to help her be read again in the United States, to be studied more.”

Digging deep with Vienne and championing Wittig are of a piece for Haenel. “I’ve always tried to engage in a thinking process,” she said. “The idea is not so much to become better, but not to become calcified in an antiquated relationship to the world. What’s at stake is not whether that relationship is truer or not — I find the idea of a criteria of truth super-problematic — but whether it’s more alive or not. At least for me.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.