The Barbara hypothesis: performance and spectatorship in the musical biopic

ABSTRACT The author examines the mise en scène of performance in Barbara (Mathieu Amalric, 2017) in the context of the problematic yet pervasive cultural re-inscription of the musical biopic in French cinema, and its remediation of the traditions of chanson française and variété through the body of the female performer. Featuring Jeanne Balibar as ‘Brigitte’, an actress playing the eponymous singer-composer, Barbara unfolds as a ‘film-about-filmmaking’ that presents the iconic Barbara as a hypothesis. The article looks at performance in terms of approximation rather than imitation and considers the ways in which the film extends its investigation on the chanteuse to the spectator-in-the-text played by Amalric himself. As a biopic, Barbara stands against the fetishisation of the absent (i.e. dead) performer. Instead, it engages with the rhetorical authenticity that makes for the basis of the genre by producing the female performer’s presence as cinematic event. Furthermore, the article discusses the connection between performer and spectator through affective intimacy and redefines the space of performance as a nomadic cinematic form, which hypothesises a postnational cinematic aesthetic that weakens the alignment of the female musical performer with the Frenchness of the biopic.

In a radio interview for a music podcast series recorded in September 2021, Mathieu Amalric declares his fascination with musicians as film subjects, and his love for filming musicians during rehearsals.The actor-director describes this intense rapport with musicians as more than observation or enjoyment of their production: 'musicians vampirise me,' he claims (Amalric 2021). 1 What makes the act of making music particularly cinematic?Barbara (2017) gives form to this question, which Amalric has pursued in two fiction features (Barbara and the earlier Tournée/On Tour [2010]) and three short documentary films made around this period, including C'est presque au bout du monde ('It's Almost at the End of the World') (2015) and Music Is Music (2017), both studies of soprano/ conductor Barbara Hannigan in rehearsals.Barbara was marketed as a screen biography, prominently featuring actor-singer Jeanne Balibar stepping into the shoes of the eponymous singer-songwriter and key figure in the history of chanson française, an enduring tradition in francophone popular music of the mid-twentieth century that foregrounds the expressive presence of the singer-composer.While pursuing the authenticity that characterises the chanson performer, Barbara is overtly experimental.It does not feature explicit markers of historical re-enactment, draw the spectator into the private life of an iconic performer or stage the milestones of her musical career in the way we have come to expect from biopics and celebrity image culture at large.Amalric's film boldly departs from popular screen narratives on the female artist to better interrogate the experience of watching the female musical performer, which makes for the enduring appeal of the musical biopic.
In what follows, I frame Barbara as a hypothesis in three parts: first, as a reparative biopic which refuses the mechanical resuscitation of the dead icon and claims instead its status as 'approximation' (Bruzzi 2020).Secondly, as a dramatisation of the relationship between the desiring spectator and the fantasised musical performer which places this relationship at the core of the act of biographical remediation.Thirdly, Barbara engages with a French tradition of the (gendered) corps chantant [the singing body] ( Lebrun 2012, 13-15) to interrogate this from a postnational perspective.As a biopic, Barbara refuses to pin its central character down to a narrative of identity (who is, or was, Barbara?), preferring instead to build on elements of a national musical tradition -the use of the French language and the dramatic staging of gesture and voice in chanson française performance -to explore the affordances of cinema to construct a space of intimacy between spectator and performer.In Barbara, musical performance becomes key to a search for a dialectic and nomadic cinematic form, giving the measure of the film's ambition and limitations, as well as its pleasures.

The body of the chanteuse in the French musical biopic
The international success of the Edith Piaf biopic La Môme/La Vie en Rose (Olivier Dahan, 2007) re-booted the genre of biographical screen narratives in French cinema and helped usher the term 'biopic' into everyday language (Moine 2017, 17). 2 Although later films on francophone transnational music stars have failed to meet box-office success at the same level, the musical biopic has become naturalised in the landscape of national film/television production.Phil Powrie and Marie Cadalanu have identified 11 musical biopics and films which make prominent use of the French genres of variété and chanson made since the 1990s (Powrie and Cadalanu 2020, 235-236).The use of popular music provides a bridge between national memory and transnational themes in films such as Django (Étienne Comar, 2017), which places manouche jazz player Django Reinhardt against the backdrop of the Occupation, or Aline (Valérie Lemercier, 2020), which exploits the bilingual repertoire and 1990s retro aesthetics of Québécois pop diva Céline Dion.The recurrence of the format in French screen production speaks to the progressive globalisation of French musical culture as well as to its uneasy hybridisation with the Anglophone media sphere; a symptom of this uneasiness may be the temporal bifurcation in the role of songs identified by Powrie in his study of the cinematic 'crystalsong', with English-language songs giving French cinema a premium of contemporariness -even working as a 'future-facing device' -which relegates the French-language song to a mode of affect anchored in 'pastness and passingness' and thus inevitably consigned to nostalgia (Powrie 2017, 154).Nevertheless, the nostalgia layering the cinematic remediation of the French-language song in the musical biopic re-inscribes the historicity of popular music in complex ways.On the one hand, by dint of their commercial circulation, biopics such as the made-for-television Brassens, la mauvaise réputation ('Brassens, or the Bad Reputation') (Gérard Marx, 2011) and Cloclo/My Way (Florent-Emilio Siri, 2012) render indistinct the histories of chanson française (often called chanson d'auteur [authored song] or chanson à texte [song with text]) and the sounds of variété.Whereas the former showcases the French language and live performance, the latter has long been considered a derivative adaptation of popular Anglo-American music genres in contrast with the connoted authenticity of chanson performers and the middlebrow appeal of chanson as a form (Looseley in Marc 2017).On the other, this lack of distinction harks back to an earlier moment in French media culture in which both the intellectual aura of the ACI (auteur-compositeur-interprète) of French chanson and the Americanophilia promoted by the youth yéyé icons of variété became part of the same celebrity culture, as artists were showcased in radio and television shows from the end of the 1950s onwards (Cordier 2014, 145).This rich media archive has been re-circulated (as well as re-purposed) in a variety of narrative audiovisual formats, whether in features, TV films or mini-series, which in turn have generated new anxieties about cultural heritage and seriality [formatage] (De Bruyn 2008) in an era of medium convergence (Soulez 2015, 103-106).
In this context, casting and performance are key to the biopic's engagement with medium and memory, helping popular film reconcile generic storytelling with the cultural specificity of francophone song. 3Contemporary debates about the intertextuality of the biopic have pivoted on questions of acting, notably explored by James Naremore (2012) and Lucy Fife Donaldson (2014).For Fife Donaldson, the dramatisation of physical processes through scenes of practice and rehearsal in biopics about actors or musicians brings with it an awareness of performativity, underpinned not only by visible bodily transformation but also by ostensive gesture, a mode of embodiment that 'negotiates shadows of mimesis' (Fife Donaldson 2014, 106).In bringing to life the historical image, performance in the popular musical biopic mediates between a diffuse awareness of the celebrity figure that is often generationally transmitted, and the availability of archival images and audio recordings that depend on already coded narrative tropes for their legibility by new communities of spectators, within and beyond the nation.
Raphaëlle Moine has connected the rise of the popular biopic in France with a crisis point in the representation of collectivity: if the heritage film embeds the star in the mise en scène of social worlds, the biopic puts a new emphasis on individual performance as the gravitational centre of meaning (Moine 2017, 125-126).Thus, Marion Cotillard's breakout stardom became the immediate sign of the global success of La Môme, with the transformation of the 30-year-old actor into the embodiment of the frail and prematurely aged Edith Piaf becoming the film's main talking point. 4The opening unveils Piaf at a point when the singer appears in decline and exhausted, straining her body to perform in front of a live audience as an ambulance waits at the door.Piaf collapses on stage, and the non-diegetic voiceover by Cotillard, in character, operates a miraculous intervention.With a tremulous pitch underscored by a music-box melody playing the first bars of 'L'Hymne à l'amour', Piaf prays: 'I still want to live.Bring me back to life.' 5 A fade-out then introduces the first of various flashbacks to Piaf's deprived childhood and rise to fame.This opening brings the biopic into focus as a literal act of resuscitation.The emphasis on bodily exertion is the centrepiece of La Môme, showcasing the actor's body in a way that brings out what Naremore calls the paradoxical effect of impersonation: 'the more perfect it is, the more conscious we are of the performer who accomplishes it ' (2012, 38).If Piaf's historical performance style derives her emotional connection with the audience from the illusion of autobiographical authenticity, which became part of her stage persona -that is, from the assumption that the chanteuse réaliste had lived the songs (see Conway 2004, 9;Vincendeau 1987, 116) -in La Môme authenticity becomes displaced onto the actor's effortful re-enactment (see Figure 1).
Cotillard's hunched shoulders, tilted head, hands over hips, closed eyes and parted lips reanimate the coded gestures of live acting in chanson réaliste, yet these are ostensive moments of musical performance made of temporally disjointed pieces, which include Cotillard lip-synching to two different recorded voices (Piaf's records, and American singer Jill Aigrot's new studio recordings).Noily Beyler sharply observes that this move conceals the sound apparatus, creating a precarious sonic coherence sutured by a narrative that consistently presents 'a one-dimensional Edith as a heroine crucified by her art' (2011,(231)(232)).Cotillard's performance is made up of a series of imitative moments that replace an original, but the truthfulness of the performance emerges from the blending of cultural and generic verisimilitude in death as much as in life.Death bookends La Môme, giving a linear cohesiveness to the complex temporality of impersonation.Does this turn the biopic into a sadistic contraption for mechanical resuscitation?The stress on suffering and death prompted an unkind reviewer to note 'there's nothing about Marion Cotillard that resembles la Môme, rather, she is the mummy -reanimated by means of a mise en scène electroshock' (Dubois 2007). 6 Echoes of this performance reappear in Dalida (Lisa Azuelos, 2017), where a predetermined plot of love troubles leading to a tragic ending is served by a belaboured central performance of emotional transparency and physical exertion.In the titular role as the variété icon, Sveva Alviti deploys a repertoire of expansive gestures through the reconstruction of the varied musical (and fashion) styles that shaped the singer's career.Alviti's body, like Dalida's voice, are forcefully projected, occupying the entirety of the frame/stage space (Chabot-Canet 2012, 29).The framing confines the star to the tight shallow close-ups and long shots that rigidly centre her, and her gestures are fragmented and enhanced by the editing.Alviti's expressive lip-synching to Dalida's signature torch songs is key to the melodramatic pleasures delivered by this popular music biopic, and yet the spatial empowerment of the performer is mired in familiar contradictions.Dalida champions the resilience of the central female character but once more is bookended by her suffering and death (by suicide), stressing the cautionary tale of a woman's public rise to fame topped by personal loss (Bingham 2010, 213-222) -a narrative that the film's sublimates via Alviti's/Dalida's climactic performance of Serge Lama's 1973 song 'Je suis malade' (literally, 'I am sick') (see Figure 2).The biopic ends with a suicide note and closes with a non-diegetic long shot of Dalida's figurative ascension to the supra-terrestrial level of timeless pop diva (see Figure 3).As Cynthia Hanson writes, tragic death works as a regressive device to disavow the manufactured character of the star, leaving the viewer 'to carve out a relationship with the performer that seems participatory: that of keeping the memory alive' (Hanson 1988, 23;italics in original).Barbara reflects on this process and deviates from it.Self-consciously eschewing the call for a linear narrative of re-animation and death, Barbara spotlights the work (and the gaps) of performance in the biopic but also the role of the spectator in the process of memorialisation.

From cinéma d'auteur to cinéma d'acteur: performance as event
Barbara takes a different route to the female star biopic by playing with the referential nature of the genre obliquely.Balibar plays Brigitte, an actress who prepares to play singer-composer Barbara in a film under the direction of Yves Zand (Amalric).The film goes into production, but Yves continues to research Barbara and work on the script, becoming transfixed by the spectacle of Brigitte turning into Barbara.The 'film-withinthe-film' is a time-honoured device enabling a reflection on filmmaking as creation under the pressure of material and temporal constraints; post-New Wave cinema has often  returned to this scenario, from the contemporary yet romanticised film sets of Le Mépris/ Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) and La Nuit américaine/Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973), to the more abstract reflections on life as performance in the austere late work of Jacques Rivette (the travelling circus in 36 Vues du Pic Saint-Loup/Around a Small Mountain [2009]) and Alain Resnais (the theatrical stage in Vous n'avez encore rien vu/You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet [2012]).These cinephilic references feed into Barbara intertextually and biographically, if we take on board Amalric's and Balibar's prior collaborations on the sets of Rivette and Resnais. 7Rémi Fontanel thus characterises Barbara as an auteur film where Barbara's musical legacy is not the motor of the biographical narrative but opens up a broader reflection on the act of artistic creation as process (Fontanel 2022, 188).
In this sense, Barbara belongs to an alternative line of reflexive screen biographies.Stanley Kwan's Center Stage (1991) and actor-director Maximilian Schell's Marlene (1984) both feature a male creator who investigates the traces left behind by an (almost) vanished female film star (respectively, Ruan Lingyu, tragically gone at age 25, played by Maggie Cheung in Kwan's film-within-the-film; and an elusive Marlene Dietrich in her twilight years, who won't allow Schell to film her in Marlene).Schell's authorial voiceover rhetorically asks: what is authentic?Not Dietrich's flat, he responds, since this had to be reconstructed from memory.But the magnetic tape (which bears the lengthy interview with the reclusive star) is.The search keeps looping the director back to the media (footage, photographs, sound recordings), a move which treasures the star's performance as an irremediable index of her absence.The primacy of le corps chantant over its mechanical reproduction in the preservation of the chanson star's aura, however, leads Amalric and Balibar down a different path.To return to Fontanel's notion of creation as process, I would like to establish more precisely how the mise en abyme of filmmaking fictionalises the transformation of performer into character and makes the director an oncamera stand-in for the spectator.In this regard, Barbara reflects on the star texts (even if the label 'star' needs some qualification) of Amalric and Balibar as 'cinéastes acteurs' (or acteurs auteurs) putting performance at the very centre of the film's aesthetic search. 8 Balibar's casting as Barbara taps into a rich reservoir of cinephilic memories, rather than approaching the role via imitation or physical transformation.Instead, Barbara is made to resemble Balibar.Brigitte is at one point provided with a prosthetic nose, only for this to be discarded mid-way through.Both performers wear their dark hair short, they are tall and have an angular physique, and cultivate an austere image and mannered gesturality.The film's poster reinforces these visual parallels, featuring a 'pop' portrait of Balibar in black and fuchsia wearing Barbara's signature long black dress and oversized sunglasses.The slow-paced neon opening-credit sequence in pink and purple alliterates the name of the artist (Barbara) and the surname of the performer (Balibar).Balibar's range as a stage and film actor and solo singer helped shaped the project.Though not a star in the popular sense, her strong image derives from her work as one of the key actors of the generation of the jeune cinéma français and collaborator of auteurs such as Olivier Assayas, Rivette (Va savoir/Who Knows?[2001]) and Pedro Costa.As a singer, Balibar has been filmed in Assayas's concert documentary Noise (2006) and is at the centre of Costa's stylised film portrait Ne change rien ('Don't Change a Thing') (2009), where Balibar is filmed on and off stage in static shots, composed in baroque high-contrast monochrome.A nine-minute long take in which Balibar's face peers out of the darkness in a dramatic close-up during a gruelling rehearsal of Jacques Offenbach's operetta La Périchole depicts music-making as a physically and intellectually demanding process, requiring the performer to self-discipline her instrument -her body.Costa's treatment of the frame as canvas puts the performer's body (the tensed throat muscles, the rounded mouth, the forward-pointing, sweaty brow) at the epicentre of the cinematic dispositif, erasing the distinction between practice and concert, recording and staging (Overhoff Ferreira 2016, 32) (see Figure 4).This affirmation of the body as the medium is also relevant to her performance in Amalric's film.
These intertexts and paratexts invite the spectator to find echoes between Balibar and Monique Andrée Serf/Barbara.Barbara's relationships with her entourage of musicians and assistants take a prominent place in the film in lieu of the (absent) conventional focus on the female artist's private life or public reputation as one of very few female singersongwriters in the misogynist post-war musical scene (Hawkins 2000, 14).Barbara Lebrun notes the importance of the poetic use of the French language in the national imaginary of le corps chantant.The intellectual aura of the ACI is valued over difference (in terms of physique, gender, race or even national origins), but the chanson genre puts unconventional bodies on display, valuing aspects such as awkwardness, imperfection and effort (Lebrun 2012, 13-14).Though this strongly gendered narrative tended to exclude women from the male-dominated sphere of chanson (Cordier 2014, 128), for both men and women it is the presence of the body in the voice -the grain of the voice, noted by Roland Barthes (1977, 188) -that gives the measure of authenticity in the performance (Cordier 2014, 125-128, 154;Frith 1996, 192).The showcasing of Balibar's atypical physique and own vocal work (the latter being noticeably different from Barbara's in pitch, range and phrasing) alongside photographs, footage and sound recordings of Barbara (rather than substituting them entirely) asserts Balibar's legitimacy as a contemporary interpreter of chanson without fully merging actor and biopic subject.The biopic provides a set-up for the observation of the female performer at work -less causal plot than a space where a fictional character, actor 'Brigitte' (only intermittently distinguishable from 'Balibar'), may become 'Barbara' in a series of fictional scenarios.
This fiction of becoming knowingly plays on the dialectic between presence and absence.Fontanel notes that Brigitte is first introduced via a mirror image (2022,3).The opening credits are scored to the spoken words and first bars of 'Chanson pour une absente (le 6 novembre)' (1973). 9Barbara's non-diegetic voice provides a sound bridge from the credits to a close-up of the reflection of Brigitte's face on the polished surface of a grand piano in Paris's Gare du Nord.A tilt moves from the instrument to her face, with another cut introducing an insert of Brigitte's hands playing the notes of the song to Barbara's voice, including her spoken introduction to the song's dramatic setting.The separation between image and voice highlights Barbara's absence, bringing Brigitte's hands and face into focus as the signifiers of the 'search' undertaken by the film.
Brigitte is promptly established as a jet-setting actress returning to France; strikingly dressed in an oversized golden bomber jacket and yellow high heels to match, she appears confident and in control of her persona.Her English-speaking agent advises her that the director 'rewrites all the time', to which she replies, 'that makes two of us'.When driven to her hotel, she insists on walking across the bridge; later, Zand and Barbara's biographer Jacques Tournier (Pierre Michon) also walk across the Pont au Change together after their first meeting at the historic cabaret bar l'Écluse.Tournier cites her words at her last concert: 'from l'Écluse to the Theâtre du Chatelet, I have only crossed the river Seine', alluding to the venues connected to her debut in 1958 and the end of her career in 1987 on either side of the river (Fontanel 2022, 189). 10Less interested in the mythologies of the icon's rise to fame than in these small acts of memorialisation (whether the actor's, the fan's or the biographer's), these acts of walking register the impact of Barbara across time and evoke her in the present tense/space.The casting of writer Pierre Michon as Tournier adds a layer of irony, considering Michon's exploration of biographical uncertainty in literary works such as Vies minuscules/Small Lives (1984) (Sacks 2013).While the director drowns in documentation (a static long shot depicts Yves comically dwarfed against a wall entirely covered with pictures of Barbara), Brigitte's gesture (choosing to walk) conveys her own quest.As Fontanel puts it, this is the story 'of a filmmaker and an actress, both fictional characters who search, track and probe, together and separately, a shared object' (2022, 189). 11And yet, this apparent symmetry is deceiving.The auteur recedes into the position of the spectator, piecing the story together through a mass of dispersed clues that refuse to coalesce into a linear whole.It is the female performer's presence (as opposed to the biographical subject's absence) that becomes the cinematic event.
Performance in Barbara exposes the constant push and pull between imitation and interpretation.This becomes apparent in the first sequence, in which Brigitte, alone in her rented apartment, appears to study Barbara's body language and characteristic gestures at the piano.On the wall, scenes from choreographer Maurice Béjart's dance film Je suis né à Venise ('I was born in Venice') (1977) are projected, as well as a segment from a television show (L'invité du dimanche, 11 May 1969) where Béjart introduces Barbara's number 'Du bout des lèvres'.Brigitte first juxtaposes her body to the moves of a masked Barbara in Je suis né à Venise; then, sitting at the piano, she imitates Barbara's hand gestures, raising her fingers to frame her own face for her televisual close-up.The multiple reflections of the black-and-white footage on the wall mirrors literalise the metaphorical play of mirrors the film seems to be entertaining (see Figure 5).However, adopting Brigitte's perspective, the scene communicates scepticism towards the notion of imitative performance, tantamount to an admission of defeat.Discouraged, Brigitte stops dancing and leans against the wall.The same medium shot registers the projected image of a majestic Barbara on the wall (in the frames of Je suis né à Venise) standing up behind Brigitte, as if leaving Brigitte's body -the copy haunted by the spectral trace of a lost original.The coercive power of the visual as a key element of the singer's communication with her audience is compounded by Béjart's introduction of Barbara in the 1969 television footage: 'first looking, then listening'. 12This incorporation of found footage into the film's mise en scène suggests the interdependence between re-enactment and the archive, looped into an endless validation of each other.It also visually alerts us to Barbara's work in selfpresentation.By breaking down and reproducing particular postures and gestures -for example, the arabesque as she lifts the arched index finger and thumb of her left hand to her temples -Brigitte interrogates Barbara's performance as performance.
Eschewing imitation as resuscitation, Barbara moves forward by such acts of approximation.Stella Bruzzi defines approximation as a performative practice at the crossroads between documentary and fact-based fiction, whereby a subject 'is evoked through bringing together contrasting versions and interlocking points of view' (Bruzzi 2020, 3).If archive and re-enactment are the twin pillars of approximation (5), their combined deployment in Barbara aims to capture the 'collision between images and versions of events' (5) in moments untethered from a linear logic of character progression.An on-set rehearsal, in which Brigitte livelily plays two songs by Harry Fragson and Georges Brassens at the piano as Yves and Aurore Clément (in character as Barbara's mother, Esther) watch on, acknowledges the derivative quality of Barbara's early musical repertoire as an interprète [interpreter], which is reinforced by Brigitte's self-conscious approximation also as interpreter of Barbara, the character at the centre of the biofiction ('other people's words,' Barbara/Brigitte utters with a sigh). 13The sequence closes with an exchange of glances between Brigitte and Marie (Fanny Imber), the shoot's production assistant (who doubles as Barbara's personal assistant in the film-within-the-film).Marie is transcribing a document from the historical archive: a recorded interview with Barbara, which she listens to through headphones as she types on her laptop.Suddenly, she notices Brigitte standing behind her, speaking Barbara's musings on music word for word, on perfect cue with the recording.This uncanny doubling suggests the ineffable relationship between the original and its interpretation (Fontanel 2022, 192), archive and re-enactment.Both moments depend on the subtle modulations in Balibar's performance, poised between Brigitte and Barbara, in scenes that cross over the boundaries between the different levels of fiction.Balibar's performance makes apparent the work of approximation, as per the 'interlocking viewpoints' described by Bruzzi or, in my original formulation, a hypothesis, left to the actor to flesh out and to the spectator to fill in.

Medium and spectatorship: intimacy and male tears
Barbara unfolds as a heterogeneous fictional space, somewhere between biographical fiction and a rehearsal/concert film (filmed as part of the diegesis) while never fully crossing over into a documentary, in the manner of Ne change rien.By building key scenes from and towards moments of musical performance, but freeing Balibar's renditions of 'Göttingen', 'Les Amours incestueuses', 'Nantes' or 'Chapeau bas' from ties to plot or chronology, Balibar's 'Barbara' exists in the present tense.The film-within-the-film (of which only a few rushes are shown) directs our attention to the labour of the film crew working away at the pre-production and production stages.Barbara thus interconnects the compartmentalised process of filmmaking, the episodic rhythm of touring and the fragmented nature of biography.Living and narrating a life are perpetually out of synch with each other, yet subject to the illusion of a continuous storyline with a beginning, middle and end.This de-dramatised approach is consistent with the film's dialogue with two key sources removed from the conventional basis on literary biography: the poetic essay by Tournier Barbara ou les parenthèses (1968), which Yves explicitly cites, and Gérard Vergez's 1973 television film Barbara ou ma plus belle histoire d'amour ('Barbara or, My Most Beautiful Love Story', a title that cites one of her most famous songs), a 16 mm colour documentary of Barbara on tour.Vergez's documentary captures, first-hand, the singercomposer's changing moods as she travels across named and unnamed French locations and prepares for each performance.As an intermedial layer in Barbara, the television documentary provides a point of reflection about the technologically mediated nature of performance and memory on film.Maurizio Corbella has explored the ways in which filmed musical performance constitutes an event with pointed rhetorical effects.For Corbella, the music biopic functions as a 'sensory remediator' of past performances, and particularly of their aura, which each remediation seeks to 'reactivate, authenticate and, in some cases, create anew ' (2017, 31), as he demonstrates about the 'updating' of the sound of country music in the neoclassical US biopic Walk The Line (James Mangold, 2006).This argument could also be probed in relation to the linear integration of voice soundtracks in La Môme, which Corbella cites as another instance of a 'memorable performance' (Piaf at the Olympia in 1960) being reinterpreted in the dramaturgy of the contemporary biopic (2017,31).Corbella demonstrates that while the texture of new remediations is predetermined by changing industry standards for sound recording, the confluence of technological affordances and political and ideological effects invariably re-signifies a historical performance for contemporary viewers, whether the authentication process is enhanced by the display of the actors' own vocals (as in Walk the Line) or not (as in La Môme) (2017,(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43); see also Marshall and Kongsgaard 2012, 357-358).
In La Môme, the continuity of sound in the re-mediated performance is made to match the seamlessness of the narrative set-up, creating a point of cognitive and emotional anchoring for the contemporary viewer.Barbara, in contrast, mobilises the archive (including sound) dialectically.Two sequences that play back to back in Vergez's film are re-shot with Balibar and interspersed with selected frames extracted from the documentary: Barbara being driven by car and filmed from the back seat, as she knits, hums the theme song from The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) and chatters about her relationship with the places where she performs; then, milling around the stage as she supervises preparations towards her next show.Her interactions with the technicians include an exchange with a local piano tuner that drifts into her experiences of hiding in the area, as a Jewish child escaping persecution during World War II.Though the editing is visually designed for continuity between the historical footage and its new reconstruction, the bleeding of the original sound into the new footage means that Barbara's voice carries across the cut, occasionally overlaying the image of Brigitte.Where the match-onaction sutures original and re-enactment, sound reinserts difference (see Figures 6 and 7).The status of these new sequences is unclear: are they part of Yves's film?Do they expose the biopic's remediation anxiety?Amalric has discussed this dissonance as instrumental in the 'consenting lie' [mensonge consenti] that seals the contract between his biopic and the spectator: we know Balibar is not Barbara, and yet we accept her temporarily as Barbara (Ferrari and Tobin 2017, 11).The biopic here functions as a medium that lays out its rules of approximation: paraphrasing Bruzzi's thoughts (2020, 7) on the closing credits reference to lip-synching in The Arbor (Clio Barnard, 2010), I argue that Barbara likewise apprises us of the principles of its re-enactment, making performance both 'real' (devoid of artifice) and 'readable' (an explicit act of interpretation).Like Yves, the spectator works to close the gap around an idea of 'Barbara' that keeps ever receding.The splintering of the documentary footage in the first half of the film (flashes of Barbara clicking her fingers  as she sings a waltz, ascending the stairs and nearly tripping over her long dress, lifting the index finger for emphasis in her speech) amounts to a dispersed repertoire of gestures, on and off stage, to which Balibar/Brigitte responds with others of her own creation.This dialectic turns the biopic into a map of traces, in the Derridean sense of deferral, rather than necrophilic reanimation.
This dialogue with the archive also matters in the sense that the film embraces technological mediation, not as a layer to be repressed but a visual and aural hook for the spectator's participatory memory.Barbara is ultimately less interested in the singularity of the female star and more in the star's imagined commonality with the audience.The documentary Le Regard de Charles/Aznavour by Charles (Marc di Domenico and Charles Aznavour, 2019), in which Charles Aznavour 'speaks' through the super-8 films he himself shot of the places he visited, turning his gaze upon the spectator ('I have also seen you'), is another such experiment, but the mainstream biopic has also spelt out its desire to gaze back at the desiring spectator.Whether through the loving gaze of Judy Garland's gay male fans, which features prominently in the private and public spaces of performance in Judy (Rupert Goold, 2019), or the class-coded scenario of Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (Paul McGuigan 2017), the spectator's attachment to the projected star shapes the narrative by having them literally in the picture (or directly taking over the plot, as in the homosocial bio-fantasy Jean-Philippe [Laurent Tuel, 2006]).Even when inserted in the heterosexual spaces of period romance, the fascinated gaze of the male fan makes for an asymmetrical scenario of reciprocity that all but accentuates the queer quality of the intimacy with the star across the divides of culture, age and sexuality.
Admittedly, Barbara is constructed from and around Amalric's/Yves's heterosexual gaze, leaving the relationship between the chanson diva and queer fandom untouched. 14 Yet the queerness of this link lingers in the comically sharp contrast between Brigitte's detached approach to her part and Yves's almost neurotic love for the elusive icon.The director becomes a placeholder for the spectator, seduced by the musician's incantation (Marc 2017, 18): an intersubjective experience that is overwhelming, bordering on the sublime.This experience is rendered in a scene in which Yves gazes at the cinema screen, mesmerised by the emphatic love scene between Léon (Jacques Brel) and Léonie (Barbara) in Brel's Franz (1972), a film which, stylistically, is the diametrical opposite of Barbara.It seems inevitable that in a later scene, Yves clumsily 'declares' his love to Brigitte by asking her to read the part of Barbara/Léonie, and then slipping into Brel's role himself.In their scenes together, Amalric's and Balibar's celebrity images (as former on-screen collaborators and off-screen partners) add another (delicious) layer of ambiguity to the already complex play of doublings and mise en abyme of the biographical fiction (Fontanel 2022, 191-192).
The richness of this scenario points to the way in which Barbara hypothesises the cinematic act of music making (and, by extension, films about musicians) as a form of intimacy in cinema.Thomas Elsaesser (2019) has theorised a contemporary 'cinema of intimacy' via the haptic qualities of the moving image but also the search for intimacy in cinema understood as 'the amorous, ambiguous, and fraught relation between screen and spectator' (Elsaesser 2019, 21).By intimacy, Elsaesser refers to a spectatorial position somewhere between identification and empathy, a gap that signifies loss but allows the spectator to be actively present: 'We are close, but know ourselves distant; we want to fuse and merge, but know there is an unbridgeable gap in both time and space between us and the screen' (2019,(22)(23).
Intimacy can be understood as both a property of the performance of chanson and a sensory effect its of re-mediation.Balibar's take on Barbara's repertoire partakes in the mix of a confidential, almost confessional tone and a theatricalised femininity that sealed the complicity of the chanteuse with her audience (Hawkins 2000, 153-154;Klein 1991, 128).But the musical numbers do not illustrate episodes in the singer's life nor aim for a psychological portrait. 15They evoke feeling and mood, helping create intimacy cinematically as a non-verbal space of communication about the creative process.The first scene in which Brigitte plays Barbara, an opening shot of the clapboard signals we are about to attend the shooting of a take belonging to the film-within-the-film.However, this sixminute sequence positions the spectator as an invisible direct witness to Barbara's nocturnal creative activity.In the semi-darkness of her apartment, key lights envelop the slender, black-clad figure in pools of light and shadow, with Balibar's facial features expressively lit up and centring the shot, à la Dietrich (see Figure 8).She sits at the piano next to the sound recorder and a vacant armchair -a cutaway invites the spectator to occupy it, to become the invisible listener (in the next rehearsal sequence, Yves promptly sits in this chair).We are admitted into her privacy.Her face and hands are captured in close-up, as she hums and takes tentative notes, looking for the melody and the lyrics of 'Je ne sais pas dire', until the arrival of her mother interrupts her music-writing.The take comes to an end and the spell is broken: the set is dismantled by the crew, but the director remains nowhere to be seen.A mystified Brigitte finds him hiding away, in tears while sitting on Barbara's rocking chair -a domestic object that was part of the mise en scène of the singer's live concerts.
Why is the man on the verge of tears such a recurrent figure of intimacy in Barbara?Yves's attempts to re-capture the feelings experienced in his first encounter with Barbara -impulsively rushing to the other side of the camera to place himself amidst the fictional audience during Brigitte's number 'Les Amours incestueuses', or lining up as one more starry-eyed fan to have his copy of Tournier's book signed by her -prompt an unnerved Brigitte to ask 'are you making a film about Barbara or about yourself?' 'It's the same thing,' he retorts. 16This exchange goes to the core of the temporality of the biopic.The desire to preserve the  emotional experience of the star operates as a way of marking historical time (Yves is able to date his memory of receiving a kiss from Barbara on a chance encounter in 1993 because 'the right was already in power', referring to the second cohabitation government under prime minister Édouard Balladur). 17Simultaneously, in seeking to re-experience the intensity of affect involved in the performance of chansons, performance works as a memory box of emotions that can be reactivated out of their original context.In another night-time scene, Yves works on his script in a bar when suddenly another patron starts singing along to a music video of Barbara's most famous hit, 'L'Aigle noir' (1970), which randomly pops on the overhead television screen.The anonymous man sings the first two bars of the song a beat ahead of Barbara's voice and then breaks down sobbing, which prompts Yves to stop, in turn visibly moved by the spectacle of another man's tears (see Figure 9).The intensity of the reaction contrasts with the ordinariness of the setting; Isabelle Marc, quoting philosopher Peter Szendy (2008), refers to the power of the tube (or musical hit) to become a 'subjective hymn, both banal and absolutely intimate', a form of 'inthymnité' which, for the listener, 'transforms the banal into irreplaceable, and the collective into irreducible subjectivity' (Marc 2017, 6). 18And yet, this representation is also laced with irony.The reproducibility of the archive amounts to an admission on the part of the film that the original emotions of the composer-performer are irrecoverable.The meaning of Barbara's experience ('the black eagle' metaphor) is lost; Barbara is now the 'black eagle' for her listeners/spectators.While the psychodrama attributed to the song may have become undecodable, 19 the spectator's response to the performance can work as the basis for new stories.The familiarity that comes with remediation appeals to our sense of the collective.Barbara adheres to the truth-telling contract of the biopic (every character and piece of information have their counterpart in the actual world) while recognising that the musical biopic is bound to fail at fixing the 'truth' about the icon, on account of its technological mediation and the death-driven temporality of biography.However, as a hypothesis, it re-activates (and historicises) the affective memory attached to the performer in the present tense.

Conclusion: nomadic performances
Performance in Barbara registers a sense of place that is transient and provisional.In a scene that transposes a reported conversation in Tournier's essay (Tournier [1968] 2017, 56-57) into an on-screen dialogue between Barbara and her would-be biographer (a second 'fictional' Tournier, played by Pierre Léon), Barbara whimsically describes her house as just an image [cette maison, c'est une image].For the nomadic lives in Barbara, 'home' is another layer of fiction: a décor which, unceremoniously dismantled by the crew, vanishes in front of the biographer's eyes (Michon as the 'real' Tournier).The virtual idea of home in Barbara brings to the fore the instability of the cultural markers of origins that underwrite the biopic when confronted with the changing spaces of musical performance.As a form linked to the vernacular pleasures of language, the French chanson functions as a small narrative unit that provides an immersive fiction, foregrounding the referential function of the French language lyrics (Marc 2017, 7-8) and by extension its roots in a national imaginary.Recent biopics (for example, Dalida and Cloclo) have started to address the transnational and post-colonial identities of performers, mirroring the migration of variété across countries, languages and musical borders in the second half of the twentieth century.Dalida features tubes in Italian and French, a small sample of the multiple languages and styles populating the back catalogue of the Egypt-born icon; Claude François's 'Comme d'habitude' (1967) became the basis for Frank Sinatra's signature song 'My Way' (1968).The poetic basis of chanson, in contrast, makes it resistant to translation.Barbara unmoors performance instead: the idea of 'roots' as 'home' is not only disavowed by the Russian-Jewish origins of the singer, but questioned by virtue of the spaces where performance happens: hotel lobbies, parking lots, roadside cafés, sound stages and other non-places are the setting in which Balibar/Brigitte creates a stage where she 'becomes' Barbara.The reprise of 'Je ne sais pas dire' (1964) at the end of the second act is notable in this respect; in an empty sound stage, this musical sequence evokes the transformation mid-point through Cléo de 5 à 7/Cleo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda, 1962) (Ferrari and Tobin 2017, 12), a film contemporary to the song, to signal Brigitte's restless body and Barbara's voice merging for the first time, albeit as a virtual image -a perfect crystal-song (Powrie 2017, 1-35) in Yves's mind.
Transformation and reparation go hand in hand in the mise en scène.In an earlier scene, while Yves busies himself verifying the accuracy of props, such as the car to be used in the next scene, Brigitte spontaneously re-centres the frame packed with the hustle and bustle of the crew with her singing of 'Göttingen' in German, with the sole accompaniment of Roland's (Vincent Peirani) accordion.The song transforms the parking lot and the waiting time between takes into the setting for a melancholic plea for the beauty of a foreign city and its people; the choice of the German language to perform this theme of Franco-German post-war reconciliation contributes to the (attenuated) erasure of Barbara's 'Frenchness' (see Figure 10).Likewise, Brigitte's nocturnal sexual escapade with a male member of the crew (an episode lifted from Tournier's essay and edited with dream-like logic) leads to a performance of 'Nantes' in a roadside restaurant: a fiction covering another fiction.This nondescript public space turns into an intimate stage of private confessions -a woman's first-person's account of her failed last reunion with her father on his deathbed.Drawing on both the loose structure of Tournier's essay and the itinerant themes in Vergez's documentary, Barbara drives forward as a fiction of illusory spaces and non-places that weakens the alignment of the chanson performer with the spaces of Frenchness in the biopic.
I would argue that this aesthetics forms the basis to consider the politics of female performance in the postnational spaces of the biopic.In this regard, Barbara continues the study of female performers initiated by On Tour, another fiction film in which the work of mise en scėne invests the female performer with subjectivity and authority.Casting actresses belonging to the neo-burlesque cabaret scene under their own stage names, but placing them in a fictional scenario, grounds On Tour's storyline in the histories of their performing bodies and the originality of their stage acts.In both films, the female performer takes centre stage, but not as the fetishised body carved up by the cinematic apparatus.On Tour re-locates an American neo-burlesque female company to the sleepy port towns of northern France in a raucous and melancholic road film that remains highly attuned to the delicate interplay between identities made visible through spectacular performance yet adrift in scenarios of national and cultural dislocation.Any aesthetic analysis needs to take into consideration the actual limits to the authority that can be attributed to the female performer in a production set-up signed by a male director (Mathieu Amalric).And yet in both films a crisis in male creativity goes hand in hand with an assertion of women's ability to create and command their own performative space.Neither an object of the male gaze, nor a commodity, nor a suffering body (so commonly the fate of the female artist in the biopic), the female performer in On Tour and Barbara is an active agent of fantasy and transformation of the everyday spaces that she turns into her stage.
Barbara may altogether fail to answer the question of 'who' Barbara was, placing the biopic on a hypothetical plane.Conversely, by creating possible scenarios about what 'Barbara' may communicate on film, Amalric and Balibar expand the possibilities of the biographical screen genre across the boundaries between popular and art film, fiction and documentary.By reorienting the musical biopic to the spaces of performance, the film fuses the act of embodying the historical subject and music-making on screen, recasting the genre itself into a sensory experience which shifts the emphasis from authenticity to the search for intimacy between performer and spectator.Amalric has called Barbara not a biopic, but a 'bio-utopique' (Guichard 2017).Beyond the attempt to elude negative genre associations, this playful denomination may begin to suggest the possibilities of the biopic as an open-ended space able to forge new affective investments through performance whilst recognising the historicity of emotions.The film's modest admission of defeat (we can never know Barbara, only our fantasy projections of the star) is coupled not with a dismissal of the genre, but an ambitious call to rethink what the biopic can do within and beyond the cultural markers of French cinema.

Notes
assures her over the phone that she will not go to Tarbes (a reference to the town where the abuse took place for the first time, according to Barbara's memoir).This indirect, implicit approach to biographical incident puts the stress on reparative gestures rather than trauma, refusing the conventional binary of the female artist's private tragedy pitched against her public success.16. 'Vous faites un film sur Barbara, ou vous faites un film sur vous ?' / 'C'est pareil.' 17. 'Non, la droite était déjà passée au pouvoir.' 18. '[. . .]

Figure 7 .
Figure 7. Cut to: Barbara at the piano (footage extracted from Barbara ou ma plus belle histoire d'amour, 1973).'Consenting lie': imperfect suturing of Brigitte/Barbara in Barbara.