The pandemic affecting our world in 2020 leads us to question a centuries-old socio-cultural practice, namely the wearing of masks, and to rethink their use in light of the current context. Depending on the civilizations and eras, masks have had various functions: religious, social and artistic. None of these functions corresponds, however, to the recent use of masks. Henri Michaux, Jean Starobinski, Michel Butor and Yves Bonnefoy will help us to answer these questions: How the wearing of masks does change our relation to identity? our relationship with others? Does not seeing the whole face make it possible to see others better?

The aim of this study is to question the links between Mask, Cinema and Europe. The five films selected are Three Colours: Blue from Kieślowski, Crazy Pierrot from Godard, Strada from Fellini, Death in Venice from Visconti, Wings of Desire from Wenders. These movies exhibit a particular type of mask: the mask without mask. Mask obtained by light or make-up, it seems to express the character’s aspiration for an elsewhere.

The masks in Documents should be read in a broad context, which goes beyond the columns of the journal to also embrace the birth of ethnology in France, the surrealist neighborhood but also the years to come, which will hardly see the development of ideas sketched in the magazine. At the same time, the presence of the masks highlights the disparate character of the journal itself, where the more or less ethnological texts devoted to the masks of traditional societies respond to much less academic articles in which the mask slips in the direction of the strange and monstrous. This allows to deconstruct Western aesthetics and, first and foremost, the human figure as its most codified and, therefore, most untouchable expression. The mask can even be considered as the embodiment of the concept of disparity which seems to govern the counter-aesthetic of the journal. Finally, the mask is emblematic of the internal gap in the journal, that between ethnologists and poets, or between academicism and subversion.

In Krysinska’s novel, La Force du Désir, which I consider a roman à clef, rich referentiality is a guarantee of authenticity. Spatial and cultural references build a world familiar to the reader who can easily decipher the prototypes of the presented characters. Moreover, Krysinska’s novel contains the philosophy of the mask, both explicitly and implicitly, within the characters’ behavior. This, however, does not exhaust the issue of the mask, because a roman à clef, on the generic level, is a mask of an esoteric novel.

In Search of Lost Time, the narrator is not the writer, and we can find out several models behind one character. In other words, Proust created a mask he put on reality to avoid criticism and problems with his family, but also to look for the essence of beings and things by focusing the truth. Pseudonyms are not a game but a real poetic of the Name. The recent publication of his Soixante-quinze Feuillets (Gallimard, 2021) shows how Proust transformed his autobiography into a fictional world. That preliminary version exposes the methods he used to hide himself and the way he was experimenting the powers of the imagination and composition. It is the writer’s laboratory, an important source for genetic study of Proust’s masterpiece.

In this paper we confront the issue of masquerade in chosen works of contemporary artists Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle. Referring to Joan Riviere's (1929) statement that femininity is a masquerade, we examine the fictional embodiments of the mentioned artists in which the mask not only conceals but also reveals reality. The artistic and literary corpus is composed as follows: Cindy Sherman (Untilted Film Stills 1977, Society portraits (2008) and Flappers (2016-18)); Sophie Calle (La filature (1981), Les histoires vraies (2002) and Prenez soin de vous (2007)). Following the analysis of the artists' projects and their autobiographical or semiautobiographical approaches, we come to reveal the reversal of the techniques used by the artists. It means that Sherman, like the film stills, captures a moment and immobilizes it; Calle, for her part, gives life to the events that she provokes. However, in both cases the masks they wear, the fictitious identities that the artists embody, contribute to revisit the codes of the time we live in.

The greatest star of the Parisian Tannhäuser’s performances in 1895 was Ernest Van Dyck in the title role. According to the Parisian press this production of Wagner’s work owed its success mainly to this Belgian tenor. However after his departure from Paris, and after some other changes of the cast that took place rather rapidly (still in the summer 1895), the performances’ artistic level hasn’t decreased in a significant way, and the work, played continuously until December 15th, 1913, was always highly appreciated by the French audience. Were the enthusiastic reactions of the Parisian public at the turn of the XIXth and XXth centuries to Wagner’s Tannhäuser and his other operas and musical dramas sincere and spontaneous? What was the part of the snobbery in Wagner’s reception in France during La Belle Époque? That was the question asked by some French journalists (Heugel, Maret, Doumic, Coppée and others). The author of the article recalls Georges Rodenbach’s Solomonic answer to this question presented in his text Tannhäuser et le snobisme.