Address by Aurélie Filippetti, Minister of Culture and Communication, on the occasion of the presentation of the insignia of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters to Emmanuelle Béart, and of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters to Ang Lee

We no longer present the huge actress you are, who, to repeat
Camus, «born and died on fifty square meters of boards» and
which, the space of a film, of a play, goes to the end of a path that
the man on the ground takes his whole life to travel». «Enter the most in
before possible in lives that are not his own”, “to lose oneself
to find ourselves better», this is the lot of any actor tells us the author of the
Myth of Sisyphus.

So many women with lives intensely lived, so many fates
exceptional that you wear, on stage, in the cinema or on television.

You are the Manon de Manon of the sources of Claude Berri; the beautiful
noiseuse in the eponymous film of Jacques Rivette; Nelly in Nelly and
Mr Arnaud by Claude Sautet; the French Woman by Régis
Wargnier; one of the 8 women of François Ozon; Marie in the History of
Marie and Julien by Jacques Rivette; Nathalie for Anne Fontaine. Des
titles roles that pop the screen, as many nominations and awards
of interpretation. We also think of these women with memorable destiny,
those that literature has immortalized, the Elvire de Molière, the Camille de
Musset or the Milady of Dumas, those whose name remains in history, Marie-
Antoinette, and all the others, those unforgettable characters that seem
beyond the space and time they were born.

We would like to ask you if these roles accompany you a little
your life and if there remains in you a gesture of Ingrid, a thrill of Camille, a
sigh of Sonia or a smile of Sarah. We dare not risk it because we
understand that what matters most to you is the woman you
are, the mother, the committed actress, the ambassador of noble causes,
The voice of the voiceless.

Commitment is second nature to you. Very early on, your mother
inspires in you a sense of citizenship and humanitarian action, justice
and activism are the pillars of your childhood. In 1996, you
work with the undocumented of St Bernard’s Church. Ambassador of
UNICEF for ten years, you shed light on the fate of
Rwandan children, you denounce indifference to the ravages of AIDS.

You also signed in 2007 a vitriol tribune on the Thénardiers de la
street of the Bank with always the same pugnacity. Taking advantage of the
your person and the media attention you
attract to bear witness to realities otherwise doomed to silence and oblivion,
you are much more than a spokesperson. You give time, you
give your soul to those causes which are at your heart.

On stage, on the screen but also, above all, in your commitment to
of others, you illustrate this "fruitful truth" dear to Camus,
always, that there is no boundary between what a man wants to be and what
that he is”. You are a brave woman, a fair woman, a beautiful
of those we like to distinguish. So it’s with a
great joy that I address to you, dear Emmanuelle Béart, the tributes
of the Republic.

Dear Emmanuelle Béart, on behalf of the French Republic,
Let’s become an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Cher Ang Lee
You represent a cinema-world where the cinematographic object shakes the
certainties and common places to become an emancipatory force. Your
films strike by their universality which, far from the uniformity of a culture
is the claim of difference, the affirmation of a
identity pending creation, because the characters you film are
always at the crossroads of themselves and others.

Born in Taiwan that history has faced Chinese influences,
Japanese and Western, your professional itinerary also places you
at the confluence of gender and cultural heritage. You leave Taipei
for the United States to continue your film studies
Illinois and then New York.

Filmmaker of the cultural mix and the revelation of otherness, you marry
the Hollywood aesthetic canons to the cinematic tradition
in an uninterrupted dialogue between East and West, in
crossing of several continents. You quickly know the success
public and critical thanks to your trilogy imagined around the figure
authoritarian and traditional father who takes the features of an old
teacher of Tai Chi, retired general or art maestro
Chinese cuisine, all struggling with modernity.

You then grasp the founding myths of the Anglosaxon world
to draw its universal essence: Victorian England where the
as a romantic character in Raison et
Sentiments, adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel; the scandal of
Watergate with the portrait of a family that decomposes to the rhythm of
disenchantment of Nixon’s America in Ice Storm; civil war
fratricide in Riding with the Devil but also the fantasized figure
superhero in Hulk. With the highly acclaimed Brokeback Secret
Mountain, which is worth you, among others, four Golden Globes and three
Oscars, including that of the best director, you present an image
poetic and subversive of the Great West, a pastoral of love
homosexual, tinged with lyricism and melancholy. More recently, you
film American counter-culture at its peak and innocence for a
time found in Woodstock, with the same desire to
give to see the constantly renewed struggle between conventions and desire
emancipation.

However, you never stray from your origins: in 2000, the
Fabulous Tiger and Dragon, is part of the purest tradition of the art film
Chinese martial and becomes, from its release, the biggest success ever
made by a film foreign to the American box office. In the setting of the
Shanghai cosmopolitan of the 1940s then under Japanese occupation,
you turn Lust Caution which seduces the jury of the Venice Mostra by its
subtle and dangerous game of love and war. Your film receives the Lion
d'Or in 2007.

By adapting this year’s novel by Yann Martel, you are mixing again
once the genera offering a double variation on the robinsonnade and
the biblical episode of Noah’s Ark. Pi’s Odyssey allows you to reconnect
dramatically, in 3D, with aesthetic and mystical experience
who, in your youth, had so moved you at Bergman in
The Source.

Dear Ang Lee, the French public has loved you since the beginning
film festivals throughout France have made you their
darling child. You were not mistaken since for your last
film, you are shooting Gérard Depardieu, one of the sacred monsters of
our film heritage. It’s my turn to distinguish you
in the name of all the lovers of the 7th art who recognized in you a
undisputed master of the confluence and emergence of otherness.

Dear Ang Lee, on behalf of the French Republic,
Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters.