The balcony (pdf) by jean genet (ebook) pages: 96 In the back brothel and asked. We did not food was all, my point. We weren't put off that what, you you. The production directed the uniformly solid cast non. The chief justice all the crows nest either marc barbezat's company l'arbalte published in modern. THE BALCONY (1956) The House of Illusions The Balcony is the third of the five plays written by Jean Genet. The balcony of the title is a brothel which its proprietress Madame Irma calls The Grand Balco' and also 'the most decent house of illusions.' (A house of illusions is the traditional French name for brothel.). The balcony Item Preview. The balcony by Genet, Jean, 1910-1986. Publication date 1962 Publisher. Borrow this book to access EPUB and PDF files. IN COLLECTIONS. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content. The Structure of Illusion in Genet's The Balcony CAROL ROSEN Although in fact a brothel is more likely to resemble a nondescript roominghouse than an ornate pleasure dome, popular literature favors fancy rather than reality. Jean Genet (French: ʒɑ̃ ʒənɛ; 19 December 1910 – 15 April 1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist.Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later took to writing. SCENE EIGHT The scene is the balcony itself, which projects beyond the far;ade of the brothel. The shutters, which face the audience, are closed. Suddenly, all the shutters open by themselves.
Angelique Rockas as Carmen with Okon Jones in The Balcony, at Internationalist Theatre, London (1981)
The Balcony (French: Le Balcon) is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. It is set in an unnamed city that is experiencing a revolutionary uprising in the streets; most of the action takes place in an upmarket brothel that functions as a microcosm of the regime of the establishment under threat outside.[1]
Since Peter Zadek directed the first English-language production at the Arts Theatre Club in London in 1957, the play has been revived frequently (in various versions) and has attracted many prominent directors, including Peter Brook, Erwin Piscator, Roger Blin, Giorgio Strehler, and JoAnne Akalaitis.[2] It has also been adapted as a film and given operatic treatment. The play's dramatic structure integrates Genet's concern with meta-theatricality and role-playing, and consists of two central strands: a political conflict between revolution and counter-revolution and a philosophical one between reality and illusion.[3] Genet suggested that the play should be performed as a 'glorification of the Image and the Reflection.'[4]
Genet's biographer Edmund White wrote that with The Balcony, along with The Blacks (1959), Genet re-invented modern theatre.[5] The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described the play as the rebirth of the spirit of the classical Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes, while the philosopher Lucien Goldmann argued that despite its 'entirely different world view' it constitutes 'the first great Brechtian play in French literature.'[6]Martin Esslin has called The Balcony 'one of the masterpieces of our time.'[7]
Plot synopsis[edit]
Most of the action takes place in an upmarket brothel in which its madam, Irma, 'casts, directs, and co-ordinates performances in a house of infinite mirrors and theaters.'[8] Genet uses this setting to explore roles of power in society; in the first few scenes patrons assume the roles of a bishop who forgives a penitent, a judge who punishes a thief, and a general who rides his horse. Meanwhile, a revolution is progressing outside in the city and the occupants of the brothel anxiously await the arrival of the Chief of Police. Chantal, one of the prostitutes, has quit the brothel to become the embodiment of the spirit of the revolution. An Envoy from the Queen arrives and reveals that the pillars of society (the Chief Justice, the Bishop, the General, etc.) have all been killed in the uprising. Using the costumes and props in Irma's 'house of illusions' (the traditional French name for a brothel), the patrons' roles are realised when they pose in public as the figures of authority in a counter-revolutionary effort to restore order and the status quo.[9]
Characters[edit]
Textual history[edit]
The Balcony exists in three distinct versions, published in French in 1956, 1960, and 1962.[10] The first version consists of two acts of fifteen scenes and includes a dream sequence in which Irma's dream of three wounded young men—who personify blood, tears, and sperm—is enacted immediately before Arthur returns to the brothel and is abruptly shot.[11] The second version is the longest and most political.[11] The third version is shorter and reduces the political content of the scene with the café revolutionaries.[11] Bernard Frechtman's first English translation (published in 1958) was based on Genet's second version, while Frechtman's second, revised English translation (published in 1966) was based on Genet's third version.[11] A translation by Barbara Wright and Terry Hands, which the RSC used in its 1987 production, incorporates scenes and elements from all three versions.[12]
Genet wrote the first version of the play between January and September 1955, during which time he also wrote The Blacks and re-worked his screenplay The Penal Colony.[13] Immediately afterwards, in October and November the same year, he wrote Her, a posthumously published one-act play about the Pope, which is related to The Balcony.[14] Genet took his initial inspiration for The Balcony from Franco's Spain, explaining in a 1957 article that:
Genet was particularly interested at the time in newspaper reports of two projects for massive tombs: the Caudillo's own colossal memorial near Madrid, the Valle de los Caídos ('Valley of the Fallen'), where he was buried in 1975, and the projected mausoleum of Aga Khan III in Aswan, Egypt.[16] They provided the source for the Chief of Police's longing for a great mausoleum and the founding of a funerary cult around him in the play.[16] The meditations on the contrast between Being and Doing that the Bishop articulates in the first scene recall the 'two irreducible systems of values' that Jean-Paul Sartre suggested in Saint Genet (1952) Genet 'uses simultaneously to think about the world.'[17]
Marc Barbezat's company L'Arbalète published the first version of The Balcony in June 1956; the artist Alberto Giacometti created several lithographs based on the play that appeared on its cover (including a tall, dignified Irma, the Bishop who was made to resemble Genet, and the General with his whip).[18] Genet dedicated this version to Pierre Joly, a young actor and Genet's lover at the time.[19] Genet began to re-write the play in late October 1959 and again in May 1960, the latter prompted by its recent production under the direction of Peter Brook.[20] He worked on the third version between April and October 1961, during which time he also read Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872), a work of dramatic theory that was to become one of Genet's favourite books and a formative influence on his ideas about the role of myth and ritual in post-realisttheatre.[21]
Production history[edit]1950s[edit]
In a note of 1962, Genet writes that: 'In London, at the Arts Theatre, I saw for myself that The Balcony was badly acted. It was equally badly acted in New York, Berlin and Paris – so I was told.'[22] The play received its world première in London on 22 April 1957, in a production directed by Peter Zadek at the Arts Theatre Club, a 'private theatre club' that enabled the production to circumvent the Lord Chamberlain's ban on public performances of the play (though the censor still insisted that what he considered to be blasphemous references to Christ, the Virgin, the Immaculate Conception and Saint Theresa be cut, along with the failed revolutionary Roger's castration near the end of the play).[23] It featured Selma Vaz Dias as Irma and Hazel Penwarden as Chantal.[24] Genet himself participated in the theatrics during the opening-night performance when he accused Zadek of the 'attempted murder' of his play and attempted to obstruct the performance physically, though police officers prevented him from entering the theatre.[25] Genet objected to what he called its 'Folies Bergère'-style mise en scène.[11] The production was well-received for the most part.[11] Two years later in 1959 the play was produced at the Schlosspark-Theater in Berlin under the direction of Hans Lietzau.[11] This production utilised a colour TV set for Irma's surveillance and switchboard machine.[11]
1960s[edit]
The first New York production opened Off-Broadway in a theatre in the round production at the Circle in the Square Theatre on 3 March 1960.[26] This production was directed by José Quintero, who shortened the text considerably, and featured Nancy Marchand as Irma (who was later replaced by Grayson Hall), Roy Poole as the Chief of Police, Betty Miller as Carmen, Jock Livingston as the Envoy, Arthur Malet as the Judge, Sylvia Miles as Marlyse, and Salome Jens as Elyane.[27] The production was very well-received and won the 1960 Obie Awards for Genet for Best Foreign Play, for David Hays for its scenic design, and a Distinguished Performance award for both Livingston and Marchand; the production became what was at the time the longest-running Off-Broadway play in history, with 672 performances.[26]
Peter Brook had originally planned to direct the play in 1958 at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris, until he was forced to postpone when the theatre's artistic director, Simone Berriau, was threatened by the Parisian police. Brook recounts:
Brook eventually directed the play's French première two years later, which opened on 18 May 1960 at the Théâtre du Gymnase in Paris.[29] The production featured Marie Bell as Irma, Loleh Bellon as Carmen, and Roger Blin as the Envoy.[11] Brook designed the sets, which used a revolve for the first few scenes in the brothel.[11] The scene in the café with the revolutionaries was cut and many of Genet's cruder words were omitted because the actresses refused to speak them; Genet objected to both decisions, as well as the use of a revolve.[30] Public reaction to Brook's production was mixed.[20]Lucien Goldmann thought that Brook's naturalistic decor and acting style (with the exception of Blin and Muselli's performances) obscured the play's 'symbolic, universal character' (which an epicdesign, he suggests via a comparison with Mother Courage and Her Children, and defamiliarised mode of acting would have foregrounded), while Brook's decision to transform the set only once (dividing the play into a period of order and one of disorder) distorted the play's tripartite structure (of order, disorder, and the re-establishment of order).[31] The production prompted Genet to re-write the play.[20]
Leon Epp directed a production in 1961 at the Volkstheater in Vienna, which subsequently transferred to Paris.[32]Erwin Piscator directed a production at the Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt, which opened on 31 March 1962 with scenic design by Johannes Waltz and music by Aleida Montijn.[33] A production opened in Boston in November 1966, while Roger Blin, who had played the Envoy in Brook's 1960 production, directed the play in Rotterdam in April 1967.[34] In Britain, the Oxford Playhouse also produced the play in 1967, under the direction of Minos Volanakis, a friend of Genet's who, working under a pseudonym, also designed the sets.[35] His scenic design utilised Melinex to create a 'a revolving labyrinth of silver foil mirrors.'[36]
Victor Garcia directed a production at the Ruth Escobar Theatre in São Paulo in 1969, which Genet saw in July 1970.[37] The production was staged under the new regime of Brazil's military dictatorGeneral Garrastazu Médici; the actress who played Chantal, Nilda Maria, was arrested for anti-government activities and her children were sent to Public Welfare, prompting Genet to petition the wife of the city's governor for their release.[38] In Garcia's production, the audience observed the action from vertiginous balconies overlooking a pierced 65' plastic and steel tunnel; the actors performed on platforms within the tunnel, or clinging to its sides, or on the metal ladders that led from one platform to another, creating the impression of animals driven insane within the cages of a zoo.[38] The aim, Garcia explained, was to make the public feel as though it was suspended in a void, with 'nothing in front of it nor behind it, only precipices.'[38] It won 13 critics' awards in the country and ran for 20 months.[38] As already mentioned, Garcia's boldness and endeavour led to the arrival of Jean Genet to Brazil in 1970, that considered this production the best montage of his text — making it an international reference to the genetians studies.[39]
Antoine Bourseiller directed the play twice, in Marseilles in 1969 and Paris in 1975.[40] Genet saw Bourseiller's first production in February 1969, which set the scenes with the revolutionaries inside Irma's brothel and cast non-actors in the leading roles, including Bourseiller's wife, Chantal Darget, as Irma.[41] Writing to the cast, Genet advised: 'You can break it [the play] into pieces and then glue them back together, but make sure that it holds together.'[42] Genet wrote many letters at that time to Bourseiller about the art of acting.[42]
1970s[edit]
The Royal Shakespeare Company staged the play at the Aldwych Theatre, London, opening on 25 November 1971 with Brenda Bruce as Irma, Estelle Kohler as Carmen, and Barry Stanton as the Chief of Police; its director was Terry Hands and its designer was Farrah.[43] The RSC premièred another production, with the same director and designer, on 9 July 1987 at the Barbican Theatre, in a translation by Barbara Wright and Terry Hands. Dilys Laye played Irma, Kathryn Pogson played Carmen, and Joe Melia played the Chief of Police in this production.[44] On both occasions the RSC performed a version of the play that incorporated scenes and elements from Genet's texts of 1956 and 1960 that do not appear in the French edition of 1962.[12] This version was also used in a production at the Abbey Theatre in New York, which opened on 4 December 1976 and featured Karen Sunde as Irma, Ara Watson as Carmen (later replaced by Carol Fleming), Tom Donaldson as the Chief of Police, and Christopher Martin as the Envoy.[45]
Giorgio Strehler directed a production at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan in 1976.[32]Richard Schechner directed an 'updated' version with The Performance Group in New York in 1979.[32] He transformed the revolution into another fantasy staged in the brothel (as Bourseiller had done ten years earlier in Marseilles) and made Roger shoot Chantel when he realises that she still belongs to the brothel.[46]
1980s[edit]
In 1981 Internationalist Theatre performed The Balcony in London with a multi-racial and multi-national cast, which included Ellen Thomas, Jonathan Oliver, Yves Aubert, and Angelique Rockas.[47][48] Ann Morley Priestman of The Stage praises `The Balcony` not only for its `Taylormade` multi-national casting but also for its artistic merits,[49] The Internationalist Theatre production captured `an atmosphere of sleaze, a quality that eluded the last London production of The Balcony by the RSC {Royal Shakespeare Company}`, according to critic Michael Darvell,[50] and Madeleine Jay of the BBC French Service enthused ``s`ils sont aussi vivants et revelateurs de jeunes talents que .on ne peut que s`en rejouir.[51][52]
The Finnish Broadcasting Company's (YLE) television theatre produced a television adaptation of the Balcony in 1982, directed by Arto af Hällström and Janne Kuusi.[53]
The Balcony was the first play by Genet that the Comédie-Française staged, although he neither attended rehearsals nor saw it performed there; the production opened on 14 December 1985, under the direction of Georges Lavaudant.[54]
JoAnne Akalaitis directed the play in a translation by Jean-Claude van Itallie at the American Repertory Theater (on their Loeb Stage) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which opened on 15 January 1986, with choreography by Johanna Boyce, sets by George Tsypin and music by Rubén Blades.[55] Akalaitis set the play in a Central American republic and added a 'Marcos'-figure (played by Tim McDonough) as the leader of the revolutionaries.[56] Joan MacIntosh played Irma, Diane D'Aquila played Carmen, Harry S. Murphy played the Chief of Police, and Jeremy Geidt played the Envoy.[57]
1990s[edit]
Geoffrey Sherman directed a production at the Hudson Guild Theater in New York in 1990.[58] Angela Sargeant played Irma, Freda Foh Shen played Carmen, Sharon Washington played the Envoy, and Will Rhys played the Chief of Police, while Paul Wonsek designed the sets and lighting.[58] The Jean Cocteau Repertory company produced the play at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre in New York in 1999.[59] Eve Adamson directed and designed the lighting, while Robert Klingelhoffer designed the sets.[59] Elise Stone played Irma, Craig Smith played the Chief of Police, and Jason Crowl played the Envoy.[59]
2000s[edit]
Sébastien Rajon directed the play at the Théâtre de l'Athénée in Paris, opening on 11 May 2005.[60] Patrick Burnier designed the sets and Michel Fau played Irma, Frédéric Jessau played the Chief of Police, Xavier Couleau played the Envoy, and Marjorie de Larquier played Carmen. The director performed the role of the slave.[61]
Audiobook[edit]
An audiobook of the production with Patrick Magee, Cyril Cusack and Pamela Brown was recorded as an LP by conductor Howard Sackler in 1967.[62]
Analysis and criticism[edit]
The philosopherLucien Goldmann suggests that the themes of The Balcony may be divided between those that are essential and primary and those that are non-essential and secondary.[63] Those that we may recognise from Genet's earlier work—the double, the mirror, sexuality, dream-death vs. reality-impure life—belong to the secondary level, he argues, while the play's essential theme is a clear and comprehensible analysis of the transformation of industrial society into a technocracy.[64] Genet relates the experiences of his characters 'to the great political and social upheavals of the twentieth century,' Goldmann argues, particularly important among which is 'the collapse of the tremendous hopes for revolution.'[65] He discerns in the play's dramatic structure a balance of three equal movements—'established order, threat to order, and order again re-established.'[66] The first section of the play dramatises the way in which the prestigious images of the established order—the Bishop, the Judge, the General—belie the actual bearers of power in modern society:
Irma and the Chief of Police 'possess the real power,' Goldmann points out; they 'represent the two essential aspects of technocracy: the organization of an enterprise and the power of the State.'[68] Consequently, the Chief of Police's dilemma dramatises the historical process of 'the growth in prestige of the technicians of repression in the consciousness of the great masses of people.'[68]The subject of the play is the transformation by means of which 'the Chief of Police comes to be part of the fantasies of power of the people who do not possess it.'[68] This process is borne by Roger, the revolutionary leader whose downfall forms part of the third section:
To the extent that 'realism' is understood as 'the effort to bring to light the essential relationships that at a particular moment govern both the development of the whole of social relations and—through the latter—the development of individual destinies and the psychological life of individuals,' Goldmann argues that The Balcony has a realist structure and characterises Genet as 'a very great realist author':[69]
While Goldmann detects an 'extremely strong' Brechtian influence in The Balcony, Carol Rosen characterises Genet's dramaturgy as 'Artaudian.'[71] 'Just as Mme. Irma's brothel is the intangible shadow of a real social phenomenon,' she suggests, 'her closet dramas are the Artaudian double of their impotent bases in truth.'[72] Rosen reads Irma's brothel as 'a metaphysical construct in a discussion play about the value of mimeticritual, the transcendence possible in play, and the magical efficacy of the theater itself'; it is 'more than a naturalistically ordered stage brothel; it is more than real; it expresses conflicting ideas with the erotic nuances of a dream.'[73] In line with Genet's interest in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Rosen aligns the development of Irma's relationship to the audience with the mythic narrative of Dionysos toying with Pentheus in Euripides' tragedyThe Bacchae (405 BCE).[74] In contrast to Goldmann's analysis of the play as an epicdefamiliarisation of the historical rise of technocracy, Rosen sees The Balcony as a theatre of cruelty staging of 'a mythic dimension to the dark side of the human soul.'[75] Like Goldmann, J. L. Styan, too, detects the influence of Brechtian defamiliarisation in the play, which he reads as a 'political examination of how man chooses his role in society.'[76] Styan argues that—despite the symbolism of evil and the sensational, emotionally disturbing staging of the secret desires of its audience—there is in Genet's theatre 'a sharp intellectual edge, a shocking clear-headedness' that 'links him more with Pirandello than with Artaud.'[24]
Genet's theatre, the editors of Jean Genet: Performance and Politics argue, stages an interrogation and deconstruction of 'the value and status of the theatrical frame itself.'[77]Postmodern performance, though, provides the most appropriate frame of reference for understanding it, they suggest. They observe that, in common with his other late dramas, The Blacks (1959) and The Screens (1964), The Balcony's exploration of explosive political issues appears to contradict its author's calls for a 'non-historical, mythical stage.'[78] They interpret The Balcony as an examination of 'how revolutions are appropriated through mass-mediamanipulation.'[77] Taking their cue from Genet's note on the play from 1960, they conclude that Genet felt that 'conventional political theatre too often indulges the spectator by depicting the revolution as having already happened. Instead of encouraging the audience to change the world, it acts as a safety valve, and thus works to support the status quo.'[77] His is a form of political theatre that is 'neither didactic nor based on realism'; instead, it fuses the metaphysical or sacred and the political and constitutes the most successful articulation to date of 'post-modernist performance and Brechtian critical theatre.'[79] It 'shows us that performance is not divorced from reality,' they suggest, but rather that it is 'productive of reality.'[80]
Adaptations[edit]
In November 1961, Genet met the American film directorJoseph Strick, with whom he agreed to a cinematic adaption of the play.[81] The film version of The Balcony was released in 1963, directed by Strick. It starred Shelley Winters, Peter Falk, Lee Grant and Leonard Nimoy. The film garnered nominations for George J. Folsey for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography and for Ben Maddow for a Writers Guild of America Award.
Robert DiDomenica composed an operatic version of the play in 1972, though it did not receive its première until Sarah Caldwell of the Opera Company of Boston produced it in 1990.[82] Having seen the New York production of the play in 1960, DiDomenica based his libretto on Bernard Frechtman's revised translation of 1966, though he did not acquire the rights to do so until shortly before Genet's death, in 1986.[82] A reviewer for The New York Times found the production 'a wonderfully intelligent construct, overlaid with a lyrical and dramatic sensibility that makes searing emotional contact at many crucial points.'[82]Mignon Dunn played Irma and Susan Larson played Carmen.[82]
In 2001/02, the Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös created an opera based on the French version of the play. It was staged for the first time at the Festival d'Aix en Provence on 5 July 2002. It was produced again in 2014 at the Théâtre de l'Athénée, in Paris by the orchestra le balcon.
Notes[edit]
Sources[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Balcony&oldid=905460798'
Jean Genet (French: [ʒɑ̃ ʒənɛ]; 19 December 1910 – 15 April 1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later took to writing. His major works include the novels The Thief's Journal and Our Lady of the Flowers, and the plays The Balcony, The Maids and The Screens.[1]
Biography[edit]Early life[edit]
Genet's mother was a prostitute who raised him for the first seven months of his life before placing him for adoption. Thereafter Genet was raised in the provincial town of Alligny-en-Morvan, in the Nièvre department of central France. His foster family was headed by a carpenter and, according to Edmund White's biography, was loving and attentive. While he received excellent grades in school, his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft.
After the death of his foster mother, Genet was placed with an elderly couple but remained with them less than two years. According to the wife, 'he was going out nights and also seemed to be wearing makeup.' On one occasion he squandered a considerable sum of money, which they had entrusted him for delivery elsewhere, on a visit to a local fair.
Detention and military service[edit]
For this and other misdemeanors, including repeated acts of vagrancy, he was sent at the age of 15 to Mettray Penal Colony where he was detained between 2 September 1926 and 1 March 1929. In Miracle of the Rose (1946), he gives an account of this period of detention, which ended at the age of 18 when he joined the Foreign Legion. He was eventually given a dishonorable discharge on grounds of indecency (having been caught engaged in a homosexual act) and spent a period as a vagabond, petty thief and prostitute across Europe—experiences he recounts in The Thief's Journal (1949).
Criminal career, prison, and prison writings[edit]
After returning to Paris, France in 1937, Genet was in and out of prison through a series of arrests for theft, use of false papers, vagabondage, lewd acts, and other offenses. In prison, Genet wrote his first poem, 'Le condamné à mort', which he had printed at his own cost, and the novel Our Lady of the Flowers (1944).
In Paris, Genet sought out and introduced himself to Jean Cocteau, who was impressed by his writing. Cocteau used his contacts to get Genet's novel published, and in 1949, when Genet was threatened with a life sentence after ten convictions, Cocteau and other prominent figures, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, successfully petitioned the French President to have the sentence set aside. Genet would never return to prison.
Writing and activism[edit]
By 1949, Genet had completed five novels, three plays, and numerous poems, many controversial for their explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality. Sartre wrote a long analysis of Genet's existential development (from vagrant to writer), entitled Saint Genet (1952), which was anonymously published as the first volume of Genet's complete works. Genet was strongly affected by Sartre's analysis and did not write for the next five years.
Between 1955 and 1961, Genet wrote three more plays as well as an essay called 'What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet', on which hinged Jacques Derrida's analysis of Genet in his seminal work Glas. During this time, Genet became emotionally attached to Abdallah Bentaga, a tightrope walker. However, following a number of accidents and his suicide in 1964, Genet entered a period of depression, and even attempted suicide himself.[2]
From the late 1960s, starting with an homage to Daniel Cohn-Bendit after the events of May 1968, Genet became politically active. He participated in demonstrations drawing attention to the living conditions of immigrants in France. Genet was censored in the United States in 1968 and later expelled when they refused him a visa. In an interview with Edward de Grazia, professor of law and First Amendment lawyer, Genet discusses the time he went through Canada for the Chicago congress. He entered without a visa and left with no issues.[3]
In 1970, the Black Panthers invited him to the United States, where he stayed for three months giving lectures, attended the trial of their leader, Huey Newton, and published articles in their journals. Later the same year he spent six months in Palestinianrefugee camps, secretly meeting Yasser Arafat near Amman. Profoundly moved by his experiences in the United States and Jordan, Genet wrote a final lengthy memoir about his experiences, Prisoner of Love, which would be published posthumously.
Jean Genet The Balcony Pdf
Genet also supported Angela Davis and George Jackson, as well as Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert's Prison Information Group. He worked with Foucault and Sartre to protest police brutality against Algerians in Paris, a problem persisting since the Algerian War of Independence, when beaten bodies were to be found floating in the Seine. Genet expresses his solidarity with the Red Army Faction (RAF) of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, in the article 'Violence et brutalité', published in Le Monde, 1977.
In September 1982, Genet was in Beirut when the massacres took place in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. In response, Genet published 'Quatre heures à Chatila' ('Four Hours in Shatila'), an account of his visit to Shatila after the event. In one of his rare public appearances during the later period of his life, at the invitation of Austrian philosopher Hans Köchler, he read from his work during the inauguration of an exhibition on the massacre of Sabra and Shatila organized by the International Progress Organization in Vienna, Austria, on 19 December 1983.[4] Vegetarian recipes pdf free download.
Popular culture appearances[edit]
By proxy, Jean Genet even managed to make an unlikely appearance in the pop charts when in 1972, David Bowie released his popular hit single 'The Jean Genie'. In his book Moonage Daydream (2005), Bowie confirmed that the title '..was a clumsy pun upon Jean Genet'.[5] A later promo video combines a version of the song with a fast edit of Genet's 1950 movie Un Chant d'Amour (1950).
Dire Straits' Making Movies (released on 17 October 1980 by Vertigo Records internationally and by Warner Bros. Records in the United States.) refers to Jean Genet in 'Les Boys': Late at night when they've gone away/Les boys dream of Jean Genet/High heel shoes and a black beret/And the posters on the wall that say/Les boys do cabaret/Les boys are glad to be gay.
Jean Genet is mentioned twice in the lyrics to the song 'A Cocaine Christmas and an Alcoholic's New Year' which features on the second studio album, Suicide Songs (2016, Bella Union Records) by the English band Money: Like they're Marilyn Monroe at a cocktail party/I'm someone outrageous like Jean Genet..I am Marilyn Monroe I am a cocktail party/I'm someone ugly, beautiful like Jean Genet.
Death[edit]
Genet developed throat cancer and was found dead on 15 April 1986, in a hotel room in Paris. Genet may have fallen on the floor and fatally hit his head. He is buried in the Larache Christian Cemetery in Larache, Morocco.[6]
Genet's works[edit]Novels and autobiography[edit]
Throughout his five early novels, Genet works to subvert the traditional set of moral values of his assumed readership. He celebrates a beauty in evil, emphasizes his singularity, raises violent criminals to icons, and enjoys the specificity of gay gesture and coding and the depiction of scenes of betrayal. Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre Dame des Fleurs 1943) is a journey through the prison underworld, featuring a fictionalized alter-ego by the name of Divine, usually referred to in the feminine, at the center of a circle of tantes ('aunties' or 'queens') with colorful sobriquets such as Mimosa I, Mimosa II, First Communion and the Queen of Rumania. The two auto-fictional novels, Miracle of the Rose (Miracle de la rose 1946) and The Thief's Journal (Journal du voleur 1949), describe Genet's time in Mettray Penal Colony and his experiences as a vagabond and prostitute across Europe. Querelle de Brest (1947) is set in the midst of the port town of Brest, where sailors and the sea are associated with murder; and Funeral Rites (1949) is a story of love and betrayal across political divides, written this time for the narrator's lover, Jean Decarnin, killed by the Germans in WWII.
Prisoner of Love, published in 1986, after Genet's death, is a memoir of his encounters with Palestinian fighters and Black Panthers; it has, therefore, a more documentary tone than his fiction.
Art criticism[edit]
Genet wrote an essay on the work of the Swiss sculptor and artist Alberto Giacometti entitled L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti. It was highly praised by such major artists as Giacometti himself and Picasso. Genet wrote in an informal style, incorporating excerpts of conversations between himself and Giacometti. Genet's own biographer, Edmund White, said that, rather than write in the style of an art historian, Genet 'invented a whole new language for discussing' Giacometti, proposing 'that the statues of Giacometti should be offered to the dead, and that they should be buried.'[7]
Plays[edit]
Genet's plays present highly stylized depictions of ritualistic struggles between outcasts of various kinds and their oppressors.[8] Social identities are parodied and shown to involve complex layering through manipulation of the dramatic fiction and its inherent potential for theatricality and role-play; maids imitate one another and their mistress in The Maids (1947); or the clients of a brothel simulate roles of political power before, in a dramatic reversal, actually becoming those figures, all surrounded by mirrors that both reflect and conceal, in The Balcony (1957). Most strikingly, Genet offers a critical dramatisation of what Aimé Césaire called negritude in The Blacks (1959), presenting a violent assertion of Black identity and anti-white virulence framed in terms of mask-wearing and roles adopted and discarded. His most overtly political play is The Screens (1964), an epic account of the Algerian War of Independence. He also wrote another full-length drama, Splendid's, in 1948 and a one-act play, Her (Elle), in 1955, though neither was published or produced during Genet's lifetime.
The Blacks was, after The Balcony, the second of Genet's plays to be staged in New York. The production was the longest running Off-Broadway non-musical of the decade. Originally premiered in Paris in 1959, this 1961 New York production ran for 1,408 performances. The original cast featured James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Louis Gossett, Jr., Cicely Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, Maya Angelou and Charles Gordone.
Jean Genet The Balcony PdfFilm[edit]
In 1950, Genet directed Un Chant d'Amour, a 26-minute black-and-white film depicting the fantasies of a gay male prisoner and his prison warden.
Genet's work has also been adapted for film and produced by other filmmakers. In 1982, Rainer Werner Fassbinder released Querelle, his final film, which was based on Querelle of Brest. It starred Brad Davis, Jeanne Moreau and Franco Nero. Tony Richardson directed a film, Mademoiselle, which was based on a short story by Genet. It starred Jeanne Moreau with the screenplay written by Marguerite Duras. Todd Haynes' Poison was also based on the writings of Genet.
Several of Genet's plays were adapted into films. The Balcony (1963), directed by Joseph Strick, starred Shelley Winters as Madame Irma, Peter Falk, Lee Grant and Leonard Nimoy. The Maids was filmed in 1974 and starred Glenda Jackson, Susannah York and Vivien Merchant. Italian director Salvatore Samperi in 1986 directed another adaptation for film of the same play, La Bonne (Eng. Corruption), starring Florence Guerin and Katrine Michelsen.
List of works[edit]Novels and autobiography[edit]
Entries show: English-language translation of title (French-language title) [year written] / [year first published]
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Drama[edit]
Entries show: English-language translation of title (French-language title) [year written] / [year first published] / [year first performed]
Cinema[edit]
Poetry[edit]
Spitzer, Mark, trans. 2010. The Genet Translations: Poetry and Posthumous Plays. Polemic Press. See www.sptzr.net/genet_translations.htm
Two of Genet's poems, 'The Man Sentenced to Death' and 'The Fisherman of the Suquet' were adapted, respectively, as 'The Man Condemned to Death' and 'The Thief and the Night' and set to music for the album Feasting with Panthers, released in 2011 by Marc Almond and Michael Cashmore. Both poems were adapted and translated by Jeremy Reed.
Essays on art[edit]
Essays on politics[edit]
1960s
1970s
1980s
Correspondence[edit]
See also[edit]
References[edit]Notes[edit]
Sources[edit]Primary sources[edit]
Jean Genet The Balcony Pdf
Genet The Balcony Victor GarciaSecondary sources[edit]
External links[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean_Genet&oldid=915626872'
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