"My mind drifts to that time when Paris didn't resemble the USA at all"

December 16, 2018 9:56 AM

In "Nadja à Paris" (New York Review of Books, Apr. 29, 2015), Nadja Tesich offers an account of starring in Éric Rohmer's short film Nadja in Paris (1964; 13 mins., available in two parts): "Over the years it had become like an official version of my life, obliterating the rest. While real life was bigger, it was chaotic and shapeless. The film had a structure, and I could see myself." In an epilogue, Tesich says, "We were many things for each other ... but for [Éric] I was always 'Nadja' from André Breton's novel [PDF]." Filmmaker/theorist Richard Misek had briefly wondered about these issues in Rohmer in Paris (2013; 67 mins.), but his documentary remains of interest as a larger meditation on cinephilia, Paris, coincidence, and obsession.
posted by Wobbuffet (2 comments total)

Folks with the inline video player preference enabled may be experiencing an issue with Vimeo links that skip ahead some amount of time (it seems to convert a # to a &), so here's an unmodified link to Rohmer in Paris that should work for all.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:53 AM on December 16, 2018 [1 favorite]

So I read this and thought it very interesting - she makes the decision not to try to become a movie star because she likes neither the artificiality nor the gender politics of the scene, and fortunately her PhD is done and she gets a job in the US, so she just leaves, bam, the end.

Anyway, I noticed that she wrote several novels with sort of left-ish titles so I thought I'd look her up, and the first thing I found was - an obituary in Workers' World. She seems to have been involved with a thing called the International Action Center, founded by Ramsey Clark, who is much more left-wing than I'd thought. I also found that she has no wikipedia entry.
posted by Frowner at 6:26 AM on December 17, 2018 [4 favorites]