Liliane de Kermadec's first film was Le Temps d'Emma (1964), a biopic of the German-born, French nationalised 'naive' painter Emma Stern (1878-1970). This film too is a biopic of a artist: Aloïse Corbaz (1886-1964), the now famous Swiss Art brut painter, and Kermadec co-wrote the screenplay with André Téchiné.
The film charts the life of a once budding opera singer who spent some years in Germany as a governess, teaching the children French, until the First World War came and she was forced to leave. She was a vociferous campaigner against the war and after 1918 spent the rest of her life as a psychiatric patient, where she painted a large number of works and is recognised as an important creator of Art brut.
My only objection to this wonderfully austere, painful film is the very odd change of the 'young' Aloïse as Isabelle Huppert to the older Delphine Seyrig: couldn't Huppert have been artificially made older, or didn't the director want to risk using a still relatively unknown female actor?
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