Directed in 1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film All about Eve is undoubtedly the one that most brilliantly condenses what has made the filmmaker’s reputation: incisive dialogues, a quality interpretation, but also a real sense of construction, which handles flashbacks with ease, and elegance. The film entangles narrations – and subjectivities – in a particularly brilliant way. Also in this movie, several very famous actresses did an incredible performance which made the film even more legendary.
I will talk about the image of Eve in the movie. The mechanisms of the narrative are however at the service of the construction of an imaginary object. If All about Eve can appear as an investigation of a character whose essence one seeks to capture, this investigation is also, and perhaps above all, a construction; the character of Eve, as it is evoked by those who revolve around her, becomes a character in our eyes. In this patient and progressive construction, it is essentially a question of going beyond the image, of accessing what is beyond the appearances. This is what the subtle cinematographic use seems to confirm in the last sequences: the final speech of Eve, which she presents, with a hypocrisy that the whole audience now measures after what it has seen for two hours, appears as the mirror inverted of that, initial, of Addison DeWitt. Where the voice-over allowed DeWitt to express a sincerity – sometimes odious with cynicism and assurance, but real -, the voice, which, for Eve, could only be external and belong to the domain of appearing, cannot maybe associated with nothing but lying. The irony is measured here in particular by the discrepancy between the speech and the images which show us the faces of those Eve evokes with feigned emotion. The film seems to offer us an illustration of Eve’s speech, in that it follows the order of the characters mentioned. But this adhesion is belied by the expressions of the characters in question, who ostensibly display their incredulity, even their contempt for the one who seems to idolize them. This gap between image and speech, the first pretending to adhere to the second, constitutes a truly ironic mechanism. It seems to be at the service of the quest to go beyond appearance.
But Eve’s presence can only come about through the words of others. The figure that falls into place, summoned by memories that create an image before the viewer’s eyes, is a woman of fiction, who only exists through the stories that are made of her. It is made like the stars are made, those ideal or adored human beings who only exist through the fictions that stage them. It is here, without doubt, that the mise en scene is played with the most subtlety: by posing as being-seen, and which only exists as long as fictions elaborated by others bring her to life, Eve incarnates what is the fate of most of the stars, human beings made of fictions and fantasies, that only the staging can provide a semblance of existence.