CHRISTINE ANGOT — A FAMILY
The American French Film Festival
UCLA Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies Conference
October and November 2024, Los Angeles
By Yann Perreau
In one of the most poignant scenes from her debut documentary A FAMILY, writer Christine Angot looks at a black and white photograph of herself as a teenager. “I remember this photo, this moment in my life. I wasn’t in good shape,” she confesses. One can see in her eyes how she is going back in time, remembering. This was the time when her father started raping her. Pierre Angot, an elegant and intelligent upper-class man, had divorced her working-class mother when she was pregnant. Years later, when Christine was barely a teenager, he had suddenly expressed an interest in seeing his daughter, with whom he had barely met. As Christine will discover, this reunion was clearly sexually motivated.
Angot has told this unbearable story in many of her books. To date, she has published twenty-three autobiographical works. As she told the audience at a recent UCLA Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies conference—held on the occasion of the Los Angeles premiere of A FAMILY at the American French Film Festival—she defines these works as “novels, because they are about life and characters.” Angot is a straightforward, unapologetic, sharp, flamboyant, truth-seeking, and ultimately compelling person. Her books are like her—they have the multifaceted literary qualities of Marguerite Duras, Maggie Nelson, Toni Morrison, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Her autofictions explore her childhood as well as her contemporary adult life, going in different directions (love stories, and so on) but ultimately returning to the same topic, the drama of her life: incest and its metastasis—how it affects, directly or indirectly, everyone around it.
Her first book, L’Inceste/Incest (published in 1999 in France, and in the United States in 2017 by Archipelago Books, translated by Tess Lewis), describes, in graphic detail, a girl’s incestuous relationship with her father, from when she was fourteen years old until she was nearly twenty. “I can’t stand writing about it,” she tells me when I question her at the UCLA conference. “I wish I could write about something else. But I don’t have the choice.” Things could have been different for Angot, who had the courage and tenacity it took her to write and publish her devastating life story. When she was twenty-eight, she decided to file charges against her father. The officer at the police station told her that too much time had passed since the crime was committed. In France at the time, a law prohibited victims of sexual abuse from filing charges against their perpetrators if twenty years had passed since the act. “The only thing worthwhile is literature,” she told a French journalist at the time. “Justice, the police, it’s nothing.”
For six years, Angot’s manuscript was returned by the publishers she sent it to, one after the other. She had to wait until she was almost forty to see her first book published. L’Inceste sold seventy thousand copies in the first three months of its release—a considerable number in France. But it remains despised by the literary establishment. Angot remembers “ten years of silence from the press,” and the harsh words of many literary critics who, finally paying attention to her books, would slam them as “obscene” or “voyeuristic.” The critics have reflected the discomfort and the hypocrisies of our society when anybody addresses this issue—especially the victims themselves. Things have progressed since the 1990s, and we should thank Angot for this. She has opened our eyes and provoked a national debate on the topic, inspiring a new generation of authors such as Camille Kouchner and Neige Sinno to write about incest in France. Since Angot, we can think about the topic differently—not with the easy pity for the victims typical of people who’d rather not deal with it, but by addressing our collective responsibility. Indeed, from the clichés and stereotypes sexualizing girls from a young age (and boys too, in a different way), to the patriarchal mindset, still prevalent, of which incest is ultimately an expression, we live in a culture of incest that nobody dares addressing or even recognizing for what it is.
“Incest is, of course, a sexual act, but it is ultimately an expression of someone’s power toward others,” Angot tells the students at UCLA. When someone is sexually abusing you, he/she is saying: I have power over you. Claude Lévi-Strauss famously stated that the universal incest taboo is the way human societies resolve the opposing dangers of excessive love and hatred. For Angot, the taboo seems to exist not against the act itself as much as against speaking about it. Many complex and fundamental reasons explain the reluctance, fear, and hatred sometimes expressed by most people when confronted with incest in their midst—especially by the direct entourage of an “incested” person such as Angot. The film addresses this complexity when Christine confronts, as she does in some of her books, the various protagonists of her story. At first her stepmother Elisabeth, who married her abusive father and remained with him even after knowing what had happened, would rather deny it. “I am on your side,” she tells Angot. She is trying to be sympathetic because the camera is there. But you can see she is not honest. Her hypocrisy, her cowardice, sweats from every part of her skin.
The writer, accompanied by a film crew, had to block the old woman’s door with her foot get into her house. She is back in the east of France, Nancy, the same city where she was raped. That’s how the film came along, she explains: “In late June 2021, in the final stages of editing the book Le Voyage dans l’Est, I received a call from the person who handles travel arrangements at my publishing company. I needed to confirm invitations in Nancy, Strasbourg, and Mulhouse. I thought I needed a camera to be there with me. A camera is something that accompanies, supports, and sees the same thing as oneself.” So Angot called a friend, renowned cinematographer Caroline Champetier, who agreed to accompany her on the trip and record her traumatic memories. Angot also describes her “naïve hope” of seeing her half-brother and half-sister there. “They would come to my book signing, and we would fall into each other’s arms, as in a Hollywood movie.” It did not happen.
Elisabeth is someone who chose not to listen to her stepdaughter, someone who stayed with the man who did this and continued to love him. Someone who separated the two kids she had with that man from their half-sister, who kept Christine far away from her as if she were dangerous. How much did she know or not know? The questions are too complex to answer here. Read Angot books to find out. “The drama of your life is that you never encountered the love of your dad,” Elisabeth tells Angot in the film. After telling her goodbye with a big smile, Elisabeth filled a complaint against Christine for privacy intrusion. Preparation for a trial is in process.
With her real mother, it’s also painfully difficult. “I realize something changed in your life when you were thirteen,” she tells Christine in the film, mentioning the distance between them but never mentioning the horror that her daughter was going through that she is partly responsible for. “Are you sure this is the problem, the “distance between you and me”?” asks Christine. “I am unable to speak about it,” admits her mother. Rather than addressing her daughter’s pain, she analyzes her own. “Writing became vital not to lose my mind,” Angot told the audience. “Psychoanalyses also saved my life.” In L’Inceste, the narrator suffers a manic-depressive breakdown. But it’s not as if you could “turn the page,” it’s not as if writing was some magical cure. Most of the time, Angot feels misunderstood. Alone. She jokes about people constantly asking her, “when will you write about something else?”
Nobody likes to read or hear about incest. Yet, we all should. “Nobody truly understood what happened to me,” she said. “And me neither!” Even after twenty-three books, it can still bear further explanation. Incest remains one of the biggest mysteries of human nature.
Philip K. Dick once wrote, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” In that respect, incest is the realest of all things. Truth is ultimately what Angot is seeking, what she calls “clarity” or to be “awake.” “It has to be a purpose, a passion, because it is painful to write about it. To live it again and again. This kind of truth will also damage your relationship with your family and people close to you.” And as she summarizes yet another tragic aspect of her life: “You cannot have at the same time a love for truth and a love of the people around you.” Like other memoir and autofiction writers before her, she has accepted the social cost of this truth. Ultimately, though, it’s not her books that have alienated her from her family. It is what her father has done to her.
Her books and this film are also an attempt to understand, a bet on a possible reconciliation. There are magical moments of family reunion in her film that only cinema can provoke. In a beautiful scene, she asks her ex-husband, Claude, what he felt when she finally got a prestigious literary prize for a book. “I felt that I had been right,” he answers, deeply moved. Claude was there for her twenty years ago, encouraging her and recomforting her when her manuscripts were returned by publishers. He has always admired and believed in her talent as a writer. You can see it in how he looks at her. They take each other’s hand. “We haven’t touched each other like this for twenty years,” Angot recalls. With the camera there, they say things to one another that they wouldn’t have said in other circumstances. She also tells her ex-husband the main reason why they split. Twenty years ago, after marrying Claude, Christine had contacted her father to tell him the big news. She hadn’t been speaking with him for a while, still traumatized by his sexual abuses. Still, she finds the courage to write him: “We should have normal relations.” He agrees and travels to meet the couple at their house. In the night, he goes to rape her daughter once again, an adult now, in the little room where she sleeps separately from Claude. Her then-husband hears the bed in another room making noises, yet he doesn’t do anything. “Why didn’t you react?” she asks him in the film. “I heard it, but I couldn’t do anything,” he admits. “You know what I did? I went to look at myself in a mirror.” Christine knows what Claude is talking about: he was also raped by a man, when he was 11 years old. “That’s the little boy you saw there, in that mirror,” she tells him. He nods in silence, then says he feels terrible, ashamed of his cowardice. “Claude, you shouldn’t be ashamed of yourself,” she reassures him. They are both incest survivors. Ultimately, Angot was right to do this film. It brings her—and us—hope, reconciliation, and forgiveness.
theamericanfrenchfilmfestival.org/a-family/
ucla.edu/event/christine-angot-visit
archipelagobooks.org/book/incest/
newyorker.com/the-challenge-of-incest-and-the-incest-diary
Christine Angot, Une famille / A Family (2024), images (5)—including the third from top photograph, which depicts Angot (left) and her daughter, Léonore Chastagner—courtesy and © the filmmaker, Le Bureau, and Rectangle Productions.
