Muse

The Parisienne is often described as muse, not only to painters, poets and writers, but also fashion designers, musicians and filmmakers. This chapter argues that films treating the Parisienne type as muse reveal that the type exists between representation and reality, inhabiting an interstitial space between art and life. Parisienne muses share recognisable iconographical motifs. They are: fashionable; elusive, insofar as they are not able to be possessed by any man or adequately rendered by any artist; highly constructed aesthetic objects, the result of multiple depictions in painting and literature; and self-fashioning, mainly through attention to costume and gesture. While she inspires male artists, the Parisienne muse cannot be reduced to the modern or Romantic conception of the muse as passive object of male desire or artistic construction. Rather, she conforms more to the classical ideal of the muse as active in relation to the artist as passive receptor of inspiration. This chapter looks at these motifs as they are taken up in three films: Jean Renoir’s Elena et les hommes (1956), Raúl Ruiz’s Klimt (2006), and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2010).