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"Le Zen dans l'art de la tartine. Un geste qui se répète."
-Gorodish (Richard Bohringer), Diva
"La signification filmique est successive elle aussi, mais elle s'organise au moyen des images. Or une image est déjà par elle-même un tout."
-Jean Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma."1
When the film Diva2 first appeared in 1981, a great deal of criticism was launched against its "ciné-pub" quality: like French television commercials, it had bright colors and rapid montage. But what was labeled flashy and trendy, in fact, surmounted this initial stereotype to show its originality in the beauty and complexity of its images and in its introspective nature. The mise en abyme (image within the image) of the cinematic art and of all other types of representational art are carefully scrutinized by Jean-Jacques Beineix, the director, and are imbricated in patterns of filmic reality and meta-filmic reality. The filmic images derive their meaning from a structure which consists of two levels. These levels, even though they are distinct from each other, depend upon one another for meaning. The filmic "reality" (diegetic reality) determines the first level of meaning. The progression of the filmic time, of the intertwining plots, and the portrayal of characters take place in the diegesis. In addition, the temporal forces of the filmic present dominate in the diegetic reality. However, the second level (meta-filmic reality) is directly linked to this first level, the diegesis, by its modification of the "real" filmic images. It introduces the "real" in the form of Other and will be called for the purpose of this paper the representation. This representation can be any kind of reproduction of a "real" image or a voice which exists diegetically, and in Diva, usually it is a painting, a photograph, or a recording and invariably it represents women. In this way, the spectator can appropriate meaning from both levels of the film's structure. Yet it seems that the women being depicted as Other are assigned to this position by the dominant male gaze of the filmic present, and by the filmic discourse that tends to build a confidence with the male spectator in relation to the young hero, Jules (Frédéric Andrei). I cannot say that this excludes the female spectator, but there is...