Diva

Abstract

ABSTRACT Diva was a French film released to European audiences in 1981 and American ones in 1982. Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, this film comes from the 1970s cinéma du look movement that used striking imagery to portray social outsiders and express their alienation from society. This article summarizes the film, its characters, cinematography, and innovative musical score by Vladimir Cosma. Recurring motifs in the film emphasize a tenuous fragmentation that not only depicts life struggles for those who felt marginalized during the early 1980s, but also suggests an avant-garde possibility for conceptualizing the psyche. Rather than emphasizing static forms of identity, or identifying categories, Diva helps viewers appreciate the multiplicity of human experience and also its fragility. The author reviews Jung’s experimentation with mandalas and discusses his writings about them as illustrations of the psyche, in particular, the self trying to represent a kind of psychological order. Although Diva could be considered a type of film mandala, the author suggests that the term mosaic is more accurate—that it is a film mosaic. Further, he extends this interpretation to propose an updated view of human psyche as mosaic, a dynamic form with many disparate parts that we hope to hold together but often cannot.