It was 1993 when photographer Carole Bellaïche met Isabelle Huppert for the first time. She was on a Cahiers du Cinéma assignment and she travelled to Lausanne, where Huppert was rehearsing for the play Orlando, directed by Bob Wilson. “The very first photo I took of Isabelle Huppert, actress, was the on-stage photo of a very handsome man, in Bob Wilson’s geometric light of absolute precision – she was Orlando. A man at first who magically becomes a woman, a disturbing character who straddles reality and time. Like her, in a way.”
It was the following year that Carole Bellaïche and Isabelle Huppert came to know each other. Isabelle asked Carole to photograph her as Marlène Dietrich, because Louis Malle wanted to make a film about the Hollywood star. “The project was ultimately abandoned, but we had our photos. That’s when our long romance began.”
The photographer found in Isabelle “the ideal model: complicit, playful and extremely present. A great actress, of a rare singularity, who never tires of these moments of shooting, with whom everything is possible, and who by a strange faculty changes without really changing. Her face, which is so familiar to me now, always surprises me, seduces me, fulfills me in this permanent and obsessive search for the ideal, and for beauty.” With each moment and each photo, we see her in perpetual transformation and yet wonderfully familiar. A complete actor. A fearless talent. Always reinventing herself. You can feel her arresting presence in a photograph just as if you were watching her on screen. You can not escape her intensity, be that her edgy grace, her sharp glare or her moral complexity. The more you watch her, the more of an enigma she becomes. You can not look away.
The book Isabelle Huppert par Carole Bellaïche follows Isabelle to Brazil, Cambodia, China, Cannes, accompanies her in so many experiences and special moments, and ultimately tells the story of the photographer-model relationship, but also of the rise of a star. And of a complicity in creating stories. Because each photo is a story in itself; they tell us so much, and yet they leave so much unsaid, to be discovered, to wonder about, to be fascinated by. The story of “a myth, a model woman, a muse for many, and a heroine of our times.”
”She knows, I think, that she holds some kind of truth.”
Read instead… in print is about a good book about cinema or filmmakers. No discursive, pretentious analyses, no verbose scrutiny. Because the idea is to invite you to read the book, not read about it here. But instead of using social media, I use my journal. Back to basics. Take it as a wish to break free of over-reliance on social media (even if it’s just for posting a photo of a good book) for presenting my work, cultural finds and interests. These are things to be enjoyed as stand-alone pieces in a more substantial and meaningful way than showing them in the black hole of Instagram thronged with an audience with a short attention span. This is also a look through my voluminous collection of books about film that I use as research in my adamant decision to rely less and less on the online and more on more on print materials.
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