Isabelle Huppert, Modernist Performance

Isabelle Huppert’s modernist performance style illustrated through detailed readings of key films, demonstrating her immense social impact.

Isabelle Huppert’s oeuvre constitutes perhaps the most significant feminist body of work to have emerged in the wake of the second wave of the women’s movement, a period of intense social change. The emphasis on autonomy, or the ＂anti-victim,＂ which comes to define Huppert’s persona, is supported by a modernist style of performance. Huppert’s refusal to surrender herself to the viewer through a character one fully knows disrupts the expectations of identification, inviting a distinctive approach to her characters. By creating a character informed by who she is, Huppert signals a process usually kept invisible. Huppert’s performances invite an active form of critical reading, directing one to fill in gaps and consider the character in relation to the social world. The directors she works with welcome her collaboration; Huppert’s performance, in conjunction with the mise-en-scène, generic conventions, and the film in its totality, creates the ＂meaning＂ of the film. Thus, Isabelle Huppert, Modernist Performance demonstrates its premise through close readings considering how performance must be read in tandem with the whole.

Florence Jacobowitz is a scholar, film critic, and a founding editor and contributor to CineAction magazine. She has taught film studies at York University in Toronto, Canada; coedited a collection of essays titled Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust; and has contributed to several edited volumes on Hitchcock, feminist film criticism, and genre studies, including film noir, melodrama, and the Western.