b. 1967, Forbach, Lorraine
Singer
A remarkably mature blues singer for someone of her age, Patricia Kaas is one of the rising stars of the world of French popular music. Already a very successful stage performer (in France and abroad), whose successes include Mademoiselle chante le blues (The Young Lady Sings the Blues) and I Wanna be Loved by You, Kaas has already been drawn to Hollywood and to a possible film career.
IAN PICKUP
See also: jazz; song/chanson
b. 1959, Paris
Singer
The pure product of beur culture, Kacel has created a singular synthesis of all the musical styles he has exposed himself to: jazz, classical, rock, funk and soul. Classified at first as the voice of the suburbs (banlieue), as in his well-known song, Banlieues on his 1984 album, Gens qui rient, gens qui pleurent (Laughing People, Crying People), this charismatic performer is becoming a legend in the French pop landscape.
GÉRARD POULET
See also: beur music; beurs; rock and pop; song/chanson
b. 1936, Brussels;
d. 1981, Brussels
Playwright
Kalisky was a Belgian writer of structured texts during the 1970s, when the mood was generally against text-based theatre and towards collective creation. These include Skandalon, La Passion selon Pier Paolo Pasolini (Passion According to Pier Paolo Pasolini), and Dave au bord de mer (Dave at the Seaside), directed by Vitez in 1979.
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: francophone performing arts: Belgium; theatre
b. 1940, Copenhagen, Denmark
Actor
Karina was Godard’s obsessive muse for six years (the time they were married) and seven films, in all of which she is the love object for his camera in one of the great director-actor relationships. Pierrot le fou of 1965—among other things a ‘documentary’ on the end of their marriage—features her most remarkable performance, though as the prostitute in 1962’s Vivre sa vie she is also deeply affecting. Her non-Godardian career, with the possible exception of Rivette’s La Religieuse (1966), was never so successful, and her one attempt at direction (Vivre ensemble of 1973) misfired.
KEITH READER
See also: cinema
b. 1960, Oran
Singer
A paradox of the French pop scene, and known as le king du raï, Cheb Khaled exports his rock version of modern raï to the rest of the world from France. His big band was in the USA and UK in 1994. He sings in Arabic, but his message is not fundamentalist and reflects a wider human experience of wine, women and song.
GÉRARD POULET
See also: beur music; francophone popular music: North Africa; rock and pop
b. 1941, Warsaw;
d. 1996, Paris
Director
A Polish film director, whose last and most commercially successful films—La Double Vie de Véronique (1991) and the Trois Couleurs trilogy: Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge (1993–4) were produced in France, Kieslowski first gained international prominence in 1988 with Dekalog (The Decalogue), ten short television dramas, two of which were expanded and released as feature films—A Short Film About Love and A Short Film About Killing, both 1988. A graduate of the state-run Lodz film school in Poland, he spent the first part of his career making documentaries that were critical of the Communist-led government in his native country. His abandonment of documentary for feature films marked his disillusionment with political struggle and a turn inward to emotional and spiritual questions.
The interlocking themes of freedom and responsibility, as well as a quasi-mystical sense of fate, subtend Kieslowski’s later films. In Dekalog, which is based on the Ten Commandments, he depicted the crisis of morality in modern life, in which human passions are thwarted by a highly rationalized—if not always rational—world. The Trois Couleurs trilogy interprets the French ideals of liberté, égalité and fraternité respectively, in a context that is more personal than political. In Bleu, a woman must face her new-found ‘freedom’ after suffering the loss of her husband and child in a car accident. She embarks on a new life steeped in sorrow, but free of the responsibility and restrictions brought by emotional attachments. The film seems to question the value of such freedom, which the protagonist ultimately rejects as she comes to accept a new set of familial commitments. Blanc, set in both Poland and France (like La Double Vie de Véronique), depicts the corruption of egalitarian ideals in post-Communist Poland, where power differentials—once the privileged domain of politics—are expressed in terms of financial and personal relationships. The theme of imprisonment appears in parallel scenes, in which the protagonist gazes up at his beloved from below. In one scene, it is scorn that denies him access to her bedroom, while in the later one, an emotional reversal has taken place, as the overwhelming attachment she has developed for him leads her literally into prison. Rouge, the final film in the trilogy, explores the idea of fraternity as it ponders where one life ends and another begins, and the extent to which people’s lives affect one another. As in Dekalog, many characters reappear briefly from one film to the next in the Trois Couleurs trilogy, undermining the conventional assumption that a film must depict a self-contained diegetic universe. In a culmination of this practice, the final scene in Rouge unites the protagonists from all three films, giving the sense of a larger community that transcends the lives of individuals.
ELIZABETH EZRA
See also: cinema
Kieslowski, K. (1993) Kieslowski on Kieslowski, ed. D.Stok, London: Faber and Faber.
Kieslowski, K. and Piesiewicz, K. (1991) Decalogue: The Ten Commandments, trans. P.Cavendish and S.Bluh, London: Faber and Faber.
Positif (1989) December (special section on Kieslowski).
Sight and Sound (1996) May (special section on Kieslowski).
b. 1928, Nice;
d. 1962, Paris
Artist
As an artist, Yves Klein resists all classification, despite his involvement with Nouveau Réalisme. Without a formal art education himself, he was raised among painters. His father was a landscape artist and his mother a painter of the art informel school. In his own art work Klein could be said to have transcended the opposition between the abstract and the figurative his parents represented: his almost fanatical devotion to Rosicrucianism and the Christian mystical teachings of its sacred text, the Cosmogonie, played a crucial role in the development of his artistic theories and practice. These beliefs were complemented by his practice of the spiritual disciplines associated with the art of judo, which he taught for much of his adult life.
In 1955, his monochrome painting Expression de l’univers de la couleur mine orange was rejected by the Salon des Réalités through a failure to understand Klein’s intentions. These were to awaken in the viewer, through contemplation of the luminous intensity and immateriality of the single colour, the pictorial sensibility (la sensibilité picturale), which seems to equate to some kind of cosmic consciousness. It was the critic Pierre Restany who took on the role of interpreting and promoting Klein’s work, beginning with the 1959 exhibition ‘Yves: propositions monochromes’. The highly saturated luminous blue which Klein developed and patented as International Klein Blue (IKB) was used in his 1957 Milan exhibition in which eleven similar-sized blue monochromes were shown. Klein had priced each differently in an attempt to show that the painting’s value resided not in its physical appearance but in its immateriality. It was an attempt to bring his art into line with the teachings of the Cosmogonie, which prophesied that the end of the age of physical matter and ego consciousness would herald an era of ‘pure spirit’, the immaterial.
The spiritual quality Klein saw in the colour blue was given further expression in his exhibition ‘Pigment pur’, which displayed a variety of objects impregnated with blue pigment, and an ‘aerostatic sculpture’ consisting of 1,001 blue balloons suspended over Paris could be regarded as an early Happening, prefiguring those of the 1960s.
Thanks to his 1958 exhibition ‘Le Vide’. Klein has been seen as a precursor of Minimalism. The empty interior and bare white walls of Iris Clert’s gallery represented an attempt to raise cosmic awareness by presenting the immateriality of the void itself as an object of contemplation. The void as a theme reappeared in 1965, when Klein published a one-off newspaper featuring a photomontage of himself flying in space with the caption ‘Le peintre de l’espace se jette dans le vide’ (‘The painter of space flings himself into the void’). This use of the media for artistic ends also identifies him as an early Pop artist.
In 1959, he used the female body as a ‘living paintbrush’, orchestrating the application of blue paint to the model and producing imprints on paper fixed to a wall. Dubbed Anthropométries de l’époque bleue by Pierre Restany, these body prints represented for Klein a concentration of ‘vital energy’, while others now see them merely as early examples of body art or performance art.
In 1960, Klein produced his triptych IKB, Monopink, Monogold, the triad of colours observable at the centre of a flame. Fire as a symbol of the life force was celebrated in his fire-sculptures and tamed in the fire-paintings made by holding sheets of paper to the flames. The process involved in creating these is comparable to that involved not only in his Anthropométries but also in his Cosmogonies de la pluie, in which rain was allowed to leave its mark on a painted blue canvas.This subordination of the painter’s skills to the single creative act arguably prefigures conceptual art of the 1970s.
Klein’s ability to anticipate so many later trends is not confined to the field of art. Many of the features of Rosicrucianism that informed his artistic production are reminiscent of the New Age thinking that arose in the decade following his premature death from a heart attack. His eccentric and grandiose plans for a provisional world government led by artists, scientists and the spiritually enlightened were grounded in the same belief system that fuelled his art. For Klein, art and life were one.
CAROL WILCOX
See also: sculpture
Klein, Y. (1983) Yves Klein, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou (articles by Pierre Restany et al., with good reproductions of Klein’s work).
Stich, S. (1995) Yves Klein, London: Hayward Gallery (gives useful and detailed documentation on the beliefs and values that inform his art).
Weitemeier, H. (1995) Yves Klein 1928–1962, Cologne: Benedikt Taschen (a comprehensive account of his art and life).
b. 1934, Paris;
d. 1995, Paris
Philosopher
A disciple of Derrida, Kofman wrote widely on his work and that of Freud and Nietzsche. Key thematic preoccupations of her work are aesthetics as read by and within psychoanalytic theory, and female sexuality in the psychoanalytic context. The latter is the focus of Kofman’s 1980 publication, The Enigma of Woman (L’Énigme de la femme: la femme dans les textes de Freud). This work explores Freud’s accounts of female sexuality, and critically deconstructs their ambiguities, obscurities and contradications. Kofman also wrote two autobiographical texts, Rue Labat, rue Ordener and Paroles suffoquées (Suffocated Words).
ALEX HUGHES
See also: psychoanalysis
b. 1944, Athens
Stage designer
A political exile in France since 1963, and designer of sets for plays, operas and musicals. Kokkos’s numerous collaborations with Vitez at the Théâtre National de Chaillot (1981–8) include the acclaimed The Satin Slipper (Le Soulier de Satin) by Claudel. He also worked on Lassalle’s productions of Vinaver’s work.
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: theatre
Kokkos, Y. (1989) Le Scénographe et le Léon, Paris: Actes Sud.
b. 1948, Metz;
d. 1989, Paris
Playwright
Despite admitting that he detested theatre, Koltès is nevertheless mostly remembered for his theatre works, and since his death from AIDS in 1989 he has continued to be one of the most regularly performed contemporary playwrights in French theatre. His works deal with issues topical in modern-day France, ranging from homelessness to inter-family relationships, with varied settings and an admirable command of both language and structure.
Koltès avoids political comment in general, whatever his own views, and links personal life to a series of social and political gestures. All relationships are reduced to the idea of the deal, epitomized in his play Dans la solitude des champs de coton (In the Solitude of the Cotton Fields), the tension in buyer-seller negotiations symbolizing individual and ideological, class and cultural struggle.
Koltès was born to a Catholic family in Alsace, although his soldier father was away for much of the 1950s, fighting in Algeria a war which was to influence his later work. After studying journalism in Strasbourg, and rejecting a career as a professional pianist, Koltès’s eyes were opened to new possibilities by travel to the United States: New York became a key influence, appearing as the setting for his later play, Quai ouest (Western Docks). While subsidizing his passion for cinema with funds from temporary jobs, Koltès also wrote six theatre plays in four years. He performed four of these in Strasbourg with friends, attracting the attention of Herbart Gignoux at the Strasbourg National Drama School. Koltès took the place offered to him there, while continuing to write: influential figures such as Lucien Attoun (who broadcast two of his plays on national radio) and director Patrice Chéreau thus became aware of Koltès’s works.
After a spell writing his first novel, The Flight on Horseback Far into the Town (La Fuite à cheval très loin dans la ville)—the 1970s were notoriously difficult times for playwrights— Koltès returned to the theatre, writing Sallinger and his dramatic monologue, The Night Just Before the Forests (La Nuit juste avant les forêts), performed in 1977. Travels in South America and Africa incited a particular interest in the plight of the oppressed—Struggle of the Dogs and the Black (Combat de nègre et de chiens) was one of the results of this. By now, Patrice Chéreau (whom Koltès admired greatly) was directing most of his work, and Chéreau directed all but one of his plays during Koltès’s lifetime. This certainly helped to promote Koltès’s career, but perhaps prevented him being performed as often as he might have been in France, for fear of comparison: abroad, his work was more regularly staged. Koltès continued to work on famous Chéreau productions at Nanterre during the 1980s, including Genet’s The Screens (Les Paravents) in 1983, and his translation of A Winter’s Tale. In the last year of his life, Koltès also wrote the figuratively autobiographical, anarchic (yet emotive) Roberta Zucco as a response to the incarceration imposed by his illness.
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: Algerian war; collective creation; gay writing; theatre
Bradby, D (ed.) (1996) ‘Introduction’, in Three Plays by B.-M.Koltès, London: Methuen (a general introduction to Koltès’s drama in English).
b. 1938, Metz
Actor, director and playwright
The founder of the Théâtre Populaire de Lorraine, and a proponent of the decentralization movement there until 1984, Kraemer has directed his own and others’ works in France and Germany. He is currently the director of the Théâtre de Chartres.
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: theatre
b. 1941, Bulgaria
Psychoanalyst, literacy theorist and semiotician
Kristeva is known for her work in semiotics, literary theory and psychoanalysis. Her work has received a mixed reception from feminists, some regarding her analysis as useful and others accusing her of betraying women.
With regard to literary theory, Kristeva is seen as a founder of the analysis of intertextuality, and of the claim that the text (like the human subject) is not structured (and therefore fixed), but always in a process of structuration. For Kristeva, intertextuality is a conflictual and dynamic process—the clashing of different codes as they cross the text. Kristeva develops the Lacanian and structuralist emphasis on language and on the linguistic construction of the subject in her focus on the disruptive or transgressive elements in the work of writers such as Lautréamont or Bataille, many of whom have become part of the new (largely male) canon of poststructuralism. She believes that no political revolution is possible without a transformation in the structure (or structuring) of the subject, that is to say in the structure of language—hence analyses of high cultural artefacts are not elitist but politically necessary.
Since she trained as a psychoanalyst, her work on literature (and on painting) has become ever more dependent on psychoanalysis, and vice versa. For instance, in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (Soleil noir: depression et mélancolie) she moves between case histories on the one hand and readings of Nerval or Holbein on the other. One of her major contributions to psychoanalysis has been her emphasis on the semiotic order, which she juxtaposes to a symbolic order. Kristeva’s symbolic cannot simply be mapped on to the Lacanian Symbolic, nor is her semiotic order to be understood as an order of signs (semes). For Kristeva, the semiotic may be developmentally described as a pre-Oedipal order dominated by the child’s preverbal communion with the mother. However, it is better understood structurally as a continuing stratum of interruptive rhythm, gesture or laughter which disturbs the ordered and logical symbolic order into which we enter at the time of the father’s interdiction (the Oedipus complex). That disturbance is evident, for example, in poetic writing. The mother’s unrepresentable (unsymbolizable) body is connoted by the chora, the locus of the drives underlying the semiotic.
Kristeva, Barthes’s ‘l’étrangère’, can be seen as marginal to the Parisian scene, as a woman born and brought up in Bulgaria. (It must be remembered, however, that several figures in the Parisian intellectual landscape of the time are ‘outsiders’ in some sense; for instance, both Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida are Jews born in Algeria.) This marginality is a positive quality according to Barthes’s or Kristeva’s own perspective. She expands upon this in About Chinese Women (Des Chinoises), in which she suggests that the double marginality of Chinese women enables her to get a more distanced analytical purchase on the dominant Western patriarchy. In the work, Kristeva advocates the adoption of a position of oscillation. The subject should oscillate between the Father and the Mother; between the symbolic, with its purchase on logic, on historical time, and on political action, and the semiotic which disturbs the rigidity and frigidity of the Word. For Kristeva, the dominant position is oppressive, but immersion in wordless jouissance or in absolute union with the mother leads to insanity. One of the controversial aspects of Des Chinoises is the Orientalism detected therein by Gayatri Spivak, among others. It could be argued that many left-wing Parisian intellectuals (not only the Tel Quel group who went on the trip to China with Kristeva) indulged in a kind of Orientalism, as Maoist China took over from the USSR (revealed as a locus of death camps and show trials) as a utopic revolutionary space. Admirers of Kristeva might respond that at least her book is highly self-conscious about its inability to do much more than use the material on Chinese women to draw conclusions about the West. Kristeva’s later fascination with the United States has also proved politically controversial—her status as outsider which, from one perspective gives her a positive vantage point, can equally be seen as encouraging a rather naive, not to say ignorant, enthusiasm.
One of the problems underlying much criticism of Kristeva is that any theory deriving from psychoanalysis tends to have a drive towards the universal. Even where Kristeva makes statements allowing for a degree of historical change, her historical and geographical sweep is vast. Those readers who do not reject her work utterly, but are uncomfortable with aspects of the universalism, often rewrite the theory creatively. Thus we find the argument that her theory of abjection applies only to the male subject.
However, abjection is a revolt of being against an exorbitant ‘something’ (not an object), which is neither quite inside nor outside the subject and which both fascinates and disgusts desire. Kristeva’s abstract formulation can be rewritten as the boy child’s simultaneously horrified and desiring response to his mother’s body. However, this Anglo-Saxon concretization does not quite fit the detail of Kristeva’s analyses. The abject may be fantasmatically projected by an individual or a society on to the female sex, but also on to the racial outsider. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva focuses on anti-semitism, but in later works she analyses a range of nationalisms.
JUDITH STILL
See also: Lacan, Jacques
Kristeva, J. (1974a) Des chinoises, Paris: Des femmes. Translated A.Barrows (1986) About Chinese Women, London: Marion Boyars.
——(1974b) La Révolution du langage poétique: l’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle, Lautréamont et Mallarmé, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. First part translated M.Waller (1984) Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University Press.
——(1980) Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Translated L.Roudiez (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press.
——(1987) Soleil noir: dépression et mélancolie, Paris: Gallimard. Translated L.Roudiez (1989) Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press.
——(1988) Étrangers à nous-mêmes, Paris: Fayard. Translated L.S.Roudiez, Strangers to Ourselves, New York: Columbia University Press.
Barthes, R. (1970) ‘L’étrangère‘, La Quinzaine littéraire 94.
Fletcher, J. and Benjamin, A. (eds) (1990) Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, London and New York: Routledge.
Lechte, J. (1990) Julia Kristeva, London and New York, Routledge (clear, accurate and interesting—focuses on Kristeva as semiologist).
Moi, T. (ed.) (1986) The Kristeva Reader, Oxford: Blackwell (a useful introduction).
Spivak, G. (1988) ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’, in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, London and New York: Routledge (a hostile reading of About Chinese Women and work by H.Cixous).
b. 1948, Lyon
Director, screenwriter and producer
Diane Kurys’s semi-autobiographical films use period reconstructions and close social observation to evoke childhood, adolescence and family breakdown from a female point of view. After eight years as an actress, in 1977 Kurys wrote and directed Peppermint Soda (Diabolo menthe) about growing up in the 1960s. Coup de foudre (1983) deals with ambivalent female friendship in postwar France, while 1990’s C’est la vie (La Baule Les Pins) reconstructs a family summer holiday. Although Kurys does not identify herself as a woman director, her films problematize women’s subjectivity through predominantly female- centred narratives. Her study of the modern (bourgeois) woman, Après l’amour (1992) was followed by a less successful venture into psychodrama, A la folie (1994).
CARRIE TARR
See also: cinema: women directors