Ten years ago, Elizabeth Lennard was reading a ghost story by Edith Wharton when she suddenly realized that the author must have lived in France. "I had always admired her novels," she explains, looking out at Notre-Dame from the window of a café on the Ile St-Louis. "As a photographer, I like the way she describes places and architecture; she has a very photographic way of describing objects in space." But she had no idea that this skillful chronicler of New York upper-class society had spent the last 30 years of her life in Paris. "I realized that she had a French voice in English literature," Lennard explains. Her interest eventually lead her to make "Edith Wharton: The Sense of Harmony," a one-hour documentary film which will premiere in Paris this month. Lennard and Wharton have a fair bit in common. Both were born in New York, but have lived much of their adult lives in Paris; Wharton from 1908 until her death in 1937, Lennard since the '70s. Wharton insisted that she was a cosmopolitan, not an expatriate (Henry James called her "the Pendulum Woman" because she crossed the Atlantic 66 times); asked if that description fits her as well, Lennard replies "absolument!" Wharton wrote more than 50 books, including novels (the best known are "Edith Frome" and "The Age of Innocence"), travelogues, verse, even works on Italian gardens and interior design. Lennard is similarly prolific and wide-ranging; her CV lists 23 individual shows, seven films, four books, and writing credits for a play about Sarah Bernhardt. Most of the funding for this film came from Bernard Rapp's TV series "Un siècle d'Ecrivains": "We proposed it to them, and two years later they said 'Yes'"! They shot footage in Wharton's various homes in Italy, Massachussets, and Paris, both on the rue de Varenne and in leafy St-Brice. Lennard brightens when she describes the months spent in archives, digging up the excellent period footage which makes the film so fascinating. Some, like the grainy images of Wharton nursing soldiers in a Paris hospital during WWI, have never been seen before. "I could have found more," she enthuses, "if only I had had more time." The English version of "Edith Wharton: The Sense of Harmony" will be screened at the American Library in Paris on February 17 at 8pm; the slightly shorter French version will be be broadcast on France 3 on April 7. |
