Anaïs Nin is more famous for her personal life - particularly the sexual aspect of it - than for her writing, though of course, it can be difficult in her case to separate the two since her most read works are her diaries. They're heavily expurgated, but nevertheless frank and, unsurprisingly, it was her intense love affair with Henry Miller and his wife June that Philip Kaufman chose to make the theme of his biographical film. The focus on Nin as a sexual figure tends to overshadow all but the sexual aspects of her writing, not all of which was confessional narration of her sex life or erotica. In fact, her collections of erotica were published posthumously and, although the volumes of her continuous novel, Cities of the Interior, are certainly not lacking in intensely sensual scenes of sex and desire, I am struck every time I read her work by the delicacy of the way she describes music, interiority, the body as it dances or walks down a street, the oddity and eccentricity of people. Nin's lightning-strike poems and stories have little in common with Kaufman's film, which runs well over two hours, and wears its lengthy runtime rather obviously. It's safe to say that Nin, always experimenting literarily, sexually, and intellectually, would prefer an evening of experimental short films than a slog of a film that, despite Kaufman's long shots and copper-tinged lighting, isn't very sexy. Here are seven to start with:
At Land (1944)
Nin actually worked with avant-garde director and scholar of dance Maya Deren on another of her films, Ritual in Transfigured Time. The two women had many obsessions in common, from dance to psychoanalysis, poetry, women's interiority and the dream. Deren wrote, directed, and starred in At Land, an elliptical oneiric journey that begins with a woman washed up on a beach. Though not as erotically charged as Meshes of the Afternoon or her dance-centric shorts, At Land dives deep in what Nin would have termed a woman's cities of the interior.
The House Is Black (1963)
Forough Farrokhzad's documentary about a leper colony is actually a film about beauty that breaks the heart. Farrokhzad narrates her only film with her own poems and passages from the Koran and the Bible, her lilting voice carrying us through scenes that could be horrifying if she didn't waft us as lightly as a feather through them. The eye of her camera refuses to see ugliness, capturing instead as beauty's opposite the suffering of those afflicted.
The Man with the Suitcase (1983)
Like Deren and Farrokhzad, Chantal Akerman also appears in her film, as a fictional version of herself, a writer who finds she cannot manage to work because the presence of a house guest completely upsets her usual routine. Each time she sits down to write, she is assailed by the knowledge that the man staying with her might come in or go out; she tries to sneak into the bathroom unseen and scarf down breakfast before he wakes up. Whether one sees an allegory of the anxiety of literary creation or the coexistence of women with unwanted men, this film is remarkably funny!
Mermaid (Rusalka) (1997)
Nin's obsession with aquatic metaphors, with images of oceans, waves, and mermaids, would be satisfied by this gorgeous and astounding adaptation of the Slavic fairy tale of Rusalka, created by Aleksandr Petrov. Petrov is a magician whose films are animated by filming the transformation of oil paint as it dries on panes of glass. Visually exquisite, Mermaid dramatizes the tragedy of love spurned, chains of broken hearts drowning one after the other as each takes its revenge.
La P'tite Lili (1927)
Director Alberto Cavalcanti's collaboration with a very young Jean Renoir, acting opposite his then-wife and muse Catherine Hessling, is in a deplorable state and possibly past the point of being properly restored. Even so, this adaptation of the popular song (with the score arranged by modernist composer Darius Milhaud) is oodles of horror-tinged fun, jauntily telling us the story of the p'tite Lili, a bow-mouthed orphan who becomes a fallen woman and meets a nasty end.
Remembrance of Things to Come (2001)
Though often described as a documentary, Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon's impressionistic telling of French history through photographs taken by Denise Bellon, the latter's mother, throughout her life, has such a prismatic and specific to the point of eccentric approach to its subjects that it ought to be placed in its own realm: it shows us the truth, but it's a truth that is slippery and personal and contingent. This is history as diary - Denise Bellon's visions of her France show the country transforming, but they do not let us slip into a universalized, totalized mode of historical thinking.
Themes and Variations (1928)
Today, Germaine Dulac's reputation rests on her groundbreaking film, The Smiling Madame Beudet, which is widely regarded as the first feminist film, but Dulac was a prolific, professional filmmaker and was constantly experimenting. I adored this exercise in montage and rhythm, cutting between a ballerina's limbs and the pistons of a metallic machine. Themes and Variations mesmerizes the viewer, who comes to actually hear phantom music through the silent film's manipulation of rhythmic editing.
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