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Camille Claudel 1915

Camille Claudel
Spoiler alert
Blog entry

Camille Claudel portrays events earlier in the French sculptor's life.

The films opens with Camille in a French asylum. (0:02)

A nurse tells the intern, ”Mademoiselle Claudel is allowed to prepare her food due to her fear of being poisoned.” Other inmates mock her. (0:05)

Camille’s letter to Henriette, “After an asylum near Paris I was brought here to Montdevergues near Avignon.” (0:26)

Camille tells the doctor, “They have a mania for persecuting me.” (0:36)

Inmate Mademoiselle Pierre walks in the garden in restraints. (0:39)

Her brother Paul writes in his diary about Camille, “Deep down I am convinced that like most cases of madness, hers is one of genuine possession. It is strange that almost the sole forms of it should be prilunaticde and terror, delusions of grandeur and persecution mania.” (1:02)

Camille tells Paul, “Since imagination, feeling, novelty, and the unexpected of a lively mind are an unknown land for those dull minds, nervous obtuse spirits, eternally shut off from the light... We use a lunatic to find our subjects... Let’s talk about your God who lets me rot away in an asylum.”
“That Huguenot Rodin has the dose administered to me because he hopes to inherit my studio.” (1:22)

The doctor tells Paul, “Mademoiselle your sister feels as persecuted as ever. The same old fear of being poisoned.” (1:29)

According to the credits actual residents from a French residential facility “played” the roles of most of the inmates in the film. Do we learn enough from observing each of them in the film to make provisional diagnoses? Were their appearances in the film unethical, harmful or disrespectful in any way?