There is always something absent...

The other day researching something about Rodin

I got sidetracked by Camille Claudel. She'd seemed to disappear in history.

Truth to tell she fascinated me more. Camille was a sculptress, Rodin's student, muse, lover and then spurned lover. Or she left him, it depends on which accounts one reads.

Her brother the poet Paul Claudel seems the real villain in her life.
Though the papers say she 'voluntarily committed' herself, only Paul Claudel and the doctor's signature are on the admitting records of a mental asylum in the north at the beginning of WW1. She'd become paranoid, was diagnosed as schizophrenic.  As WWI was fought in nearby battlefields, the authorities moved Camille and the other inmates down South near Avignon.

 Rodin never visited Camille.  Nor did Camille's mother. Her brother Paul forbade anyone to write her but himself. On Rodin's death bed, one account says Rodin asked for his wife, the long suffering Rose Bueret, his mistress and housekeeper who he'd finally married. When Rose appeared Rodin said 'no, the other one.' Which many take to mean Camille Claudel. Camille's mother died, her brother visited her maybe three times.

Numerous accounts from the asylum staff over the years say repeatedly Camille was no danger to herself, or others and suitable for discharge. But for Paul Claudel, it was easier and cheaper to keep a high strung, individualistic sister who made social gaffes out of the way. Then the Germans invaded again, occupied France and another war had come. Camille Claudel had been committed in 1913 before the first war and lived to see through most of the second World War. 
After thirty years in the asylum she died in 1943 in Montdevergues Asylum outside Avignon. No family came and she was buried in a communal grave.
This stunned me. I had no clue that Camille lived that long. What a sad loss. I tried to imagine if she'd been released and the art she would have created. It seems amazing she lived and no one else took up her cause for release. How she'd been forgotten for so long.
But on Ile St. Louis in Paris in a courtyard there is this plaque in front of what had once been Camille's atelier where she lived and worked. In her time the atelier - on the ground floor - would have cheap, damp, freezing in the winter, next to the horses and by the carriage house. Now it's expensive, chic and home to the elite. Camille lived her until she was committed.
At the bottom it reads: there is always something absent that torments me.
I wish Camille had gotten a chance in her life behind walls to find it.
But at least she's remembered.

Cara - Tuesday

WW2 reckoning, Occupation

Last night, by accident, I watched a French film 'Nina's House' on TV5, the French cable channel. It took me a moment to realize this subtle, incredible film dealt with an exhibition I saw in May at the Mairie of the 3rd Arrondissement in Paris. The exhibit showed photos, documentations of 'Houses of Hope' set up in France during the Occupation but in full steam at Liberation and into the 60's. These 'houses of hope', many in old abandoned chateau, were run for French and Jewish orphans. After the war France accepted many Jewish children (Polish, Rumanian, Russian) freed from the camps who'd lost their families. Some later found them, many didn't. One of them was Elie Wiesel.

But it explored something I've always wondered about...WW2's aftermath - the diaspora, the displaced and the orphans.


Here's more about the film
In the waning days of World War II, as the Nazis were pushed east and Jews began to emerge from hiding, the French government established "houses of hope" to care for Jewish children until their parents could be located. "Nina's Home ," dramatizes a year in the life of one such house, and in the process becomes a deeply affecting meditation on cultural identity. What does it mean to be a Jew when you're 9 and your people have been reduced to ash? How much is owed to the past and how much to the future?

The present is a limbo freighted with sorrow and possibility. The film opens in September 1944, when most of the children hold out hope their parents will return from Germany, where they have been sent "to work." The Allies control western France and a contingent of Nazi POWs labor on the grounds, a vivid reminder of recently conquered conquerors who some of the children can't resist tormenting. "The Krauts did plenty worse to us," reasons one boy, to which Nina soberly replies, "Do you want to be like them?"

Nothing connects these kids except their heritage and their suffering. One little girl, obviously hidden by Catholics, crosses herself before each meal. Others are ardent communists. By and large they're secular and cosmopolitan, atheists because they see no reason for God's existence and much evidence to the contrary.


The liberation of the death camps in Poland in early 1945 knocks another leg out from under them; the older children read the newspapers and silently understand they're orphans.

Like Nina herself, "Nina's Home" makes room for them all, searching for common ground. It's the work of writer-director Richard Dembo (he won a foreign language Oscar for 1984's "Dangerous Moves "), who died during post-production, yet the film survives its maker as a stark, cohesive experience.

The director follows the children's individual stories with straightforward style, making each narrative thread clear, always circling back to Jaoui's wearily compassionate Nina and to the future coming into focus. Small moments of joy intrude: a visit by the painter Marc Chagall , bearing a milk-cow, leads to an impromptu mural on the wall of a shed.
Here's one of those orphan today



But moving to the present after more than 65 years the French government announced
EVERY police document from France's time under Nazi occupation is to be digitised and published online.

Thousands of cardboard boxes of documents currently stored in a basement in the Musée de la Police in Paris are to be scanned and uploaded to a website.

They include every police daybook from the period under German occupation, from 1940 to 1944, plus details of arrests, fines, notes from questioning and official reports.

The documents will shed further light on the Gestapo's work in France and the role of the Brigade Spéciale, the force responsible for tracking down resistance workers, dissidents and Jews.

The archives also include full records from the épuration légale, the wave of official trials for collaborators following the fall of the Vichy regime in 1944.

The Paris préfecture de police will begin the major operation to digitise the records in the coming weeks.

It will take several years and the scanned documents will be published in batches from 2015, as they are legally protected for 75 years.

The final batch should therefore be ready by late 2019, to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of France.

As well as improving transparency, the project will also help preserve the archive - the paper used by the police during the Occupation was of a poor quality and some of the documents are beginning to fade.

Cara - Tuesday