An interesting French graphic artist.
... The future that the French artist Chantal Montellier imagined in the 1970s and ’80s, when her dystopian comics ran in the magazine Métal Hurlant, is likewise ominous. Montellier envisioned a society in which the government requires loyalty oaths, culture is drenched in vulgarity, and women have lost their reproductive rights to gestational innovations. In this work, she explores French anxieties about the end of the trentes glorieuses (a period of unprecedented economic prosperity that lasted from 1945 to 1975), the rise of decadent consumerism, modern technology, and a new world order. Yet even in her bleak visions of the future, Montellier’s focus remains on her characters’ struggle for dignity and liberation.
Montellier is an unusual figure in French comics. Less famous than Claire Bretécher, who satirized bourgeois life in her widely popular
Agrippine comic strip, and Marjane Satrapi, whose memoir
Persepolis was adapted into a César-winning movie, Montellier is a politically engaged artist and a pioneer of the feminist movement in French comics. Born in 1947 near Saint-Étienne, she trained at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts but found the school stuffy and the students apathetic. After completing her degree, she began teaching visual arts at a high school in Haute-Savoie, a job that left her little time to pursue her passion—painting. She fell into comics in 1972, almost by chance, when a friend offered her a job as an editorial cartoonist for
Combat syndicaliste, an anarcho-syndicalist newspaper that covered the concerns and interests of French workers.
Over the next 50 years, Montellier produced an impressive and wide-ranging body of work: political cartoons, comic books, art portfolios, essays, novels, and collections of stories. She developed a reputation as a rebel, unafraid to call out misogyny and fearless in her commitment to her ideals.
Although some of her dystopian comic strips were released in the United States in the 1980s in the sci-fi magazine Heavy Metal, she remains largely unknown here. But US audiences may finally get to know her work this year, as three of her bandes dessinées, translated by Geoffrey Brock and collected under the title Social Fiction, have just been published by New York Review Books. ...
Social Fiction features three self-contained graphic novellas.
The first, Wonder City, begins with a splash page that shows a massive street poster, on which a glamorous couple is locked in an embrace, beneath repeated commands to “Love yourselves, love Wonder City.” In the background are the skyscrapers of a metropolis, while in the foreground, an armed policeman has raised his truncheon to strike unseen protesters. The symmetrical lines and juxtapositions of this visual quickly establish the themes that Montellier will set against each other in her story: state control and human rights.
An epidemic has just broken out in Wonder City, a state of emergency has been declared, and communications have been cut. These new restrictions come on the heels of mass censorship and the suspension of civil liberties. The only solace that city resident Freddy Foster has is live music, and it is while attending a jazz performance one night that he meets and falls in love with Angie Parker, a militant and musician. When the couple seek permission to have a child, they are denied it on the grounds that Angie’s tests show she is infertile. But is this denial based on her test results, or is Angie being punished for her activism? ...
Shelter, the second comic in
Social Fiction, originally appeared in
Métal Hurlant in 1978. In it, a bourgeois couple, Theresa and Jean, stop by a subterranean mall on their way to a dinner party and find themselves marooned inside it during a nuclear attack. “You have nothing to fear,” the mall director reassures the shoppers. “This shelter is designed to function perfectly autonomously and can support 15,000 occupants for one year.” Armed security officers shepherd the stunned patrons to the auditorium, where they receive orders to sign up for jobs that will ensure the survival of the community. (The premise will seem familiar to readers of Hugh Howey’s
Silo books, recently adapted into a series on AppleTV.)
The mall authorities provide everyone with not just food and shelter but also clothing, books, and movies—all for free. “To each according to his needs, in a way,” Theresa quips. She has been assigned the position of librarian, but in short order she notices that security officers show up with lists of books they borrow, only to never return. “Bookburning without fire,” she remarks to Jean. ...
The third section of Social Fiction is taken up by 1996, a series of comics set mostly in a future United States where people are subjected to lab experiments, women are shot for sport, and, even in death, white corpses are treated with greater dignity than nonwhite ones. Montellier told the comics journalist Paul Gravett that
1996 was inspired by the “visual shock” she felt after watching American movies like
THX 1138 and
Blade Runner, which gave her the impression of “something irredeemably ferocious, cruel, crass, violent and perverted.” A visit to New York in the 1980s apparently did nothing to change this view. ...
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/chantal-montellier-social-fictions/
(Copyright © 2023 Chantal Montellier; translation copyright © 2023 Geoffrey Brock; courtesy of New York Review Comics)
