Le montage dans les albums : une esthétique engagée

Abstract

Four albums will be discussed : Martine petite maman [Martine little mother] by Gilbert Delahaye and Marcel Marlier (Casterman, 1968), Histoire de Julie qui avait une ombre de garçon [The story of Julie the girl with a boy’s shadow] by Christian Bruel, Anne Bozellec and Anne Galland (Le Sourire qui mord, 1976), Salut poupée [Hi Dolly] by Adela Turin and Margherita Saccaro (Les éditions des femmes, 1978) and Mes années 70 [My 1970s] by Claudine Desmarteau (Panama, 2008). If I have brought together Martine, Julie, Marie and Claudine, the protagonists of these books, it is because these four little girls were all growing up at the same time, and they shared (or didn’t) ways of being and acting that relates to (or didn’t) the ideological context of the 1960s and 1970s, a time of great social change. By analysing selected images and significant sequences from each picturebook, I will seek to understand how the artists, commissioned by the publishing houses, challenged the conventions (or didn’t) of the relatively staid and conservative world of children’s picturebooks, in particular when representing little girls. My observations, without seeking to be exhaustive, will focus on the editing process, in the cinematographic sense of the term, which is to say on the rhythm generated by the turning of the pages. Thus, an examination of the repetitive scenes that make up the day of an obedient, model little girl or the more energetic rhythms that drive the more rebellious girls, used by the authors to provide their readers with insights into the very different lives of their heroines. Such aesthetic choices are by no means accidental, of course, and this is what I will be thinking about for this conference paper.

Keywords

• gender role
• illustration
• picture book
• girl
• rhythm