Silent Dialogue: One hundred faces of Isabelle Huppert

Isabelle Huppert never aims to please. For 30 years she has scorned the lovable and the easy roles, instead choosing the distressed, the complex and the cruel, from the young girl seduced and abandoned in The Lacemaker (1977) to the sadomasochistic “heroine” of The Piano Teacher (2001). Over the years, master photographers - from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Richard Avedon to Annie Leibovitz - have tried to capture something of that mystery. Four years ago, the Museum of Modern Art/P.S.1 in New York gathered these portraits into an exhibition, “Isabelle Huppert: Woman of Many Faces.” In June, Huppert will open the show in Beijing; it now includes portraits by Quentin Shih, Wen Fang and Yang Fudong. A book of the exhibition is being made available at the same time. Huppert spoke to the Beijinger by phone from France.

the Beijinger: How is a portrait a collaboration?

Isabelle Huppert: When someone films you or takes your portrait, there’s a kind of mute dialogue. The real core of the adventure is undertaken in silence. It’s something you feel – that’s what makes it exciting. And what you feel is that there is a person, someone who gives you a little bit of their soul, and tries to capture a bit of yours as well.

tbj: Is there one photograph you particularly like?

H: I particularly remember the moments I spent with [Edouard] Boubat and [Robert] Doisneau, because with them I spent a lot of time walking in the streets of Paris. They were like poets trying to capture a little bit of that world. We were walking and talking for hours, sometimes for days – it was so beautiful. There are people who work in movement and people who work still, and it creates a completely different kind of relationship.

tbj: Have any portraits of yourself ever made you feel something so strongly that you didn’t want to see them exhibited?

H: I was always happy with the collaborations, but of course there’s always a question mark. At the end sometimes you get a surprise, and sometimes it’s a bad surprise! It’s exciting, there’s something unknown – you never really know how it’s going to be.

A new edition of Isabelle Huppert: Woman of Many Faces will be published in association with the exhibition and will be available from UCCA (8459 9269).