"I
continue to live off my name, a first name-my only role-Emmanuelle. In
this use of me there is a mistake, an abuse, a total and violent
conflict with who I am. I may smile, may act carefree and consenting,
may continue speaking up for sexual freedom and asserting that in Nordic
countries nudity is considered normal. But none of this erotic
universe is in the least bit natural to me. I draw on inspiration, on
my imagination, on other people's desire, but not on my own experience.
I continue being cast against type, telling myself that I have no
choice."
-
Sylvia Kristel,
Undressing Emmanuelle: A Memoir-
The news of Sylvia Kristel's passing came to me this morning as I was
sitting in my living room, drinking my early-morning black coffee, and
feeling the cool Autumn air blowing in through an open window. Even
though the news was expected, due to Sylvia's tragic health issues, I
was still filled with an unbelievable sense of sadness and loss...and
regret...regret that I hadn't done more to celebrate one of my favorite
actors and film icons. Even with
my tribute site and all my posts
on her great, relatively unseen, films I feel like I could have done
more to pay tribute to one of modern cinema's great undervalued poets.
Sylvia Kristel was indeed a poet..a remarkable actress and performer who
projected more with her body and movement than most of our 'great'
actors could ever hope to. Sylvia was also a prisoner to her most
famous role and this morning as the news is being reported all over the
world it is the name 'Emmanuelle' that keeps being mentioned. I suppose
it is fair that almost all of the focus is on the character that Sylvia
Kristel played for the first time in 1974, as it is one of the most
famous characters in film history, but the career and life of such a
fascinating woman was so much more than just this one character.
While her life was filled with much tragedy and her film career
eventually collapsed in on itself due to an ill-advised bid to
Hollywood, Sylvia Kristel will ultimately be remembered as one of the
great icons and figures of the seventies. I have harbored the hope as
well that eventually the remarkable string of films she made in Europe
between 1974 and 1978 will someday get their due. For a brief period,
Kristel became the great muse to several of modern cinema's greatest
auteurs and it is the work she did in films like
La Marge, Une Femme Fidele, Alice or the Last Escapade and
Rene the Cane that stand as her greatest legacy.
Shy, reserved and haunted by a powerful loneliness all of her life,
Sylvia Kristel came alive on the screen...her stillness, the way she
used her body, the penetrating gaze of her stare broke through all of
the self doubt and isolation she felt in her daily life. It was this
daring confidence she managed to project on the screen that made Kristel
such an important figure in the sexual revolution and that persona that
came through in the first two
Emmanuelle films, as well as Just Jaeckin's supremely undervalued adaptation of
Lady Chatterley's Lover, remains
so incredibly resonate. Kristel was a spearhead to the modern pro-sex
feminist movement and her life and career are deserving of so much more
attention and study than they have ever been granted.
As the news of Sylvia's passing spread this morning I was contacted by
several kind friends on Facebook offering some words of comfort, as I
have never made my great admiration for this woman a secret. One friend
asked me if I had ever met her and I had to sadly answer no, although I
have been told that she was aware of my tribute site and I have long
suspected that she read, and possibly commented, on my review of her book.
A great actress, an accomplished painter, an acclaimed author, an
award-winning filmmaker and a great cultural icon, Sylvia Kristel was a
really special artist and, by all accounts, a kind and generous human
being. I absolutely adored this woman and will continue to feel, to my
core, that I knew her even though our paths never crossed.
Sylvia Kristel in Black and White
