In the mean time I have decided to post this article, which has been co-written by a contributor from France, Mathieu Pilars and myself. So special thanks to him for sending me his original which I edited and added some of my own research/images to (enough that we decided to call it a joint article). I do not plan to have contributors as a regular feature of the blog (though I have not ruled out the idea entirely if something substantive comes along) so please do not spend a lot of time writing something and sending it to me as I will probably not publish it.
Anyway, here is the article that covers a fair bit of the French side of things but obviously not all of it, I hope you find it interesting (it is quite long so I might have missed the odd typo/error, just let me know if you come across anything worth fixing):
By Mathieu Pilars and Benjamin Singleton
In this article I will try to expose some quickly-done research about celebrities in France that share mind-control symbolism with their US and UK counterparts.
I will only be covering recent french celebrities, but an extensive search could be done around the first pioneers of the Lolita archetype in France. Everything really starts with Serge Gainsbourg's muses: France Gall (in 1965, in her song written by Gainsbourg, called "wax puppet" she tells us: "My records are like a mirror where everybody can see me, I’m everywhere at the same time, broken in a thousand pieces of voice"), Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin (daughter of Royal Navy commander/WWII intelligence operative, distant relative of British King and Mason Edward VIII's mistress), Vanessa Paradis ("Paradise it’s hell" - spoken at the end of the symbolic video for Tandem) or even his own daughter Charlotte (abusing her on a ritual altar in their "Lemon Incest" video)...
France Gall above, on the right after performing and winning at Eurovision with Wax Doll/puppet in 1965, the left image is a promo photo from her Der Computer Nr. 3 single. Serge with Vanessa Paradis below, Serge nicknamed her "Lolycéenne" meaning "Lolita schoolgirl" according to the linked bio.
Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin in a domestic violence/abuse themed shoot, below her 'lolita go home' cover with Birkin in handcuffs (from an infamous bondage themed nude photo shoot for Lui magazine).
Birkin and Gainsbourg's offspring was of course Charlotte (one of whose recent tracks, Master's Hands, featured in my previous post), here are a couple of screen captures from the 'Lemon Incest' video, note the triangular ritual altar-platforms the bed is on, which goes from black to white (duality) and the general cave/underground evokes a Hell-like setting. She was 13 at the time of recording the song.
An extract from a Telegraph interview article for the release of 'Antichrist': "She slumps forward in her chair like a marionette whose strings have been cut, and the tips of her long hair brush across her knees. “If he were still here I think I would only work with him,” she says, firmly. Is that because she felt he understood her better than anyone? “Oh, no. No, I don’t think he understood me. I don’t think that was his goal, to get into other people’s personalities, or souls. My experience was that you were not in control: he told you when to smile, when to breathe, and then little accidents would occur and that was what he was looking for. You were like a puppet for him; he pulled the strings. In that sense, he was like a film director.”
Charlotte's first album, 'Charlotte For Ever' was also released under the name 'Lemon Incest' internationally (cover of the single above; apparently the song was a play on words for 'Lemon Zest' but obviously there is more to it than that, and it is pretty overt), with all the songs written by Serge such as 'Oh Daddy Oh' and 'Don't forget to forget me' and probably other suggestive ones I cannot understand as my (Ben) French is very poor.
Charlotte's first album, 'Charlotte For Ever' was also released under the name 'Lemon Incest' internationally (cover of the single above; apparently the song was a play on words for 'Lemon Zest' but obviously there is more to it than that, and it is pretty overt), with all the songs written by Serge such as 'Oh Daddy Oh' and 'Don't forget to forget me' and probably other suggestive ones I cannot understand as my (Ben) French is very poor.
Serge's film 'Charlotte For Ever', directed by himself, is extremely suggestive and mirrors his own life: "Stan, screenplay writer, had his time of glory in Hollywood. Today, alcoholic with a certain envy for suicide, his only link to life is his daughter, Charlotte." as he himself ended up dying, arguably a washed up alcoholic. She must have been at the most only 15 years of age when this was filmed, here is a trailer, and directing your own daughter in scenes like this is clearly perverse (unless you buy into the whole naive cliché "oh it's just how the French do things").
I began by doing a standard survey of the most well known female singers in France and then launched a Google Images search on each one, sometimes adding "disque" to have only their records' covers, looking for blatant symbols or references to mind-control or occult symbolism. I was quickly amazed as I am now 40-something and am not following the mainstream pop-culture anymore. I knew their names, but not their current marketing stuff. I was amazed.
We will be covering here: Alizée, Lorie, Ophelie Winter, Jenifer Bartoli, Nolwenn Leroy and Loana. If you're French and have children, you may well have one of these girls' posters stuck on the wall of your daughter's room.
Alizée’s early promo material. Note that in french, a bow-tie is spelled "butterfly knot".
Let's begin with Alizée, who started in a reality show aired on M6 (know your enemy, this media group also has another TV channel named W9, M6 reversed). She was then spotted and coached directly by Mylene Farmer and her probable handler Laurent Boutonnat, who I’ll both introduce first:
Mylene Farmer is a popular 80's - 90's pop singer who popularized a Gothic/romantic genre, mixing aesthetics from the Marquis de Sade, sex abuse, vampires etc without using too explicitly satanic/occult stuff or whatever (looks like, you know, it's art). Mylene also became an icon for all the libertine clubs (partner swapping), bondage, fetish or transsexual "scene". One of her most recent singles, "Sextonic" is also the name of a sex toy she sells online. She is nonetheless a mainstream artist, often seen on TV, and recently invited at Nicolas Sarkozy’s palace for a party given for the coming of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (who likes her very much, like many Russians where she is popular).
Mylene's videos have predominantly been made by Laurent Boutonnat, who started his career at just 17 with a film called "Ballade de la Féconductrice", triple word-play around the words "fée" (fairy), "féconder" (fertilize) and "conductrice" (electrical conductor). The film begins with the fairy electrifying a boy in his bath, then follows emasculation, rape, etc... In Mylene’s videos or shows, he frequently uses occult and Nazi-style symbols and themes (the red/black/white motif is relatively common in his work). The main point here is that this guy basically used Mylene to create something, she is his art "thing", and he has clearly stated this many times.
An image from the first Laurent Boutonnat film - electric shocks, rape, mass extermination, controlling children like puppets; it's all here in 1979.
Anyway, this promising young man had the privilege to have this same movie shown at the Cannes film festival in 1979, the poster from Cannes is above. In 1984 he launched Mylene's career with 'Mum is wrong' featuring a child-abuse/psychiatric ambiance, starting with a Freud portrait.
'Sans Contrefaçon', a song in which she talks about a girl who thinks she is a man, the video’s plot being a "puppet-master" trying to make money with Mylene’s puppet/ventriloquist dummy (like Mylene was to Laurent), which then comes to life (a typical Pinocchio/Golem/etc theme).
But Mylene is not a puppet/kitten archetype anymore, in an occult way, she now looks more like a high priestess.
Image from her 'Mylenium Tour', held in 1999, and included a 9 meter-high animated statue of Isis, designed by HR Giger, about which she stated: "I chose Isis because she’s got many faces. I gave birth to a creature which is, for me, the mother of the living nature. She evokes the four elements, and she is the fifth."
One of her last videos "Degeneration" clearly shows what looks like a mind control Nazi experiment facility. It’s not just a movie set, though: the building where the video was filmed is the psychiatric institute of Prague-Bohnice, where "Beginning from 1937, insulin comas were performed, after the war electric shocks and lobotomy." I suppose we can call this choice a tribute, or is it just an artistic commitment to detail? The first lyrics can be understood easily "Sexy coma, sexy trauma".
You could go through all of her videos, but I (Ben) thought a few were worth adding in (I believe Mylene, and some also some others have been brought up in this blog's comments too). 'Comme j'ai mal' ('How much I suffer') explicitly references her Monarch programming, as it shows someone who is presumably supposed to be her father abusing a young girl (representing her; her dissociated childhood memories) with various symbolic shots of a doll, insects and such, as Mylene eventually is coccooned and turned into a butterfly:
And her video for 'Je te rends ton amour' ('I give back your love') has some very clear Satanic overtones.
In her video for 'California' she played a sex-kitten/prostitute in Hollywood (the kitten programming reinforced by the leopard print coat), standard MPD/MK (Mind Kontrol) symbolism as her celebrity/high society personality looks at herself from her car before attending an event; the hooker Mylene is killed, by her pimp/handler who is the same handler as the celebrity "boyfriend" (she kills him at the end of it after altering her clothes to be more like the prostitute).
Her video for 'My Soul is Slashed', directed by Luc Besson also has a few interesting themes (God as a business man sitting in a black inverted pyramid chair, Mylene as his angel sent down to Earth to find out what happened to 'love', she is soon seduced to the 'dark' side, the duality symbolized by her change from a white outfit to black).
Her video for 'My Soul is Slashed', directed by Luc Besson also has a few interesting themes (God as a business man sitting in a black inverted pyramid chair, Mylene as his angel sent down to Earth to find out what happened to 'love', she is soon seduced to the 'dark' side, the duality symbolized by her change from a white outfit to black).
Alizée's second record cover ('under the heel' of dissociatively huge shoe, like being shrunk in Alice in Wonderland; the name Alizée seems quite similar to Alice also, she originates from Corsica like Laetitia Casta by the way). The title: my electric currents (shocks). Below is a more recent live performance wearing a dress suggestive of her kitten programming.
Other lyrics evoking the traditional MK blurred personality in her first album can be spotted like Abracadabra: Mon humeur et moi / Changeons de peau à / Chaque fois (Me and my mood / change of skin / each time).Alizée's third record (come back after 3 years) "Psychédélices" (Psychedelics / Delicious) cover uses the multiple alters theme: a young collegian, presumably food-addict and a sexy kitten (Alizée is known to love her Louboutin shoes), apparently happy to see her alter-ego surrender to temptation - a butterfly is in the purple lettering. The green/pink/orange traffic lights possibly representing colour coded triggers for the alters (alter 'stops/waits/starts').
Alizée is also known to have a giant Tinkerbell tattoo on her back, here filmed on a national TV show.
Now an international brand (particularly in Japan and Mexico as well as France), she's moving to electronic music, using the hippest Parisian DJs, with a retro pop-art graphical setup. Her last video contains a fair amount of the standard MK symbolism: reflections/multiples of self, lost in an hotel corridor (quickly, at 0:32), and she now appears "grown up" and looks more like a presidential model than the child-woman Lolita she used to be.To finish with Alizée, there's an earlier video 'Fifty-Sixty' a tribute to Andy Warhol’s muse, Edie Sedgwick, which piles up all the MK'ed models attributes. It's quite full of various symbols, magic flying Louboutin shoes, butterfly-wings (evoking her Tinkerbell tattoo) in the bathroom (1:40). It also begins with a view of the Chrysler tower in NYC.
Adding to Alizée, there are a few other videos that I (Ben) feel are especially MK symbolic that deserve some attention.
'Mademoiselle Juliette' (single cover above, note the gilded/gold bird cage on a chain, pentagram/star shape, dog dehumanization etc), released in 2007 leads you to believe at the start that it is going to be a rehashing of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette, however it soon veers off in a whole other symbolic direction.
The dark masked Alizée leads the other into various scenes such as masked girls staring and standing motionless as if tranced (Alizée dances around them and lifts up one of the girls' arm and it drops down showing their depicted tranced/dissociative state) and a symbolic duality checkerboard floor room where two girls share a bath in suggestive/symbolic white liquid, the duality emphasized by the girls in black pouring the liquid and the black and white candles on the checkerboard floor.
Note she is led by a black chubby Mickey Mouse-like figure with a white skull and bones on it (within an eye shape), this is in a room where girls dressed in black are sitting around like statues smoking; contrasted with the first room that she enters room where girls in pink are indulging with treats, cake, guitars and such.
Note the Monarch butterflies added to the picture in this promo photo.
Alizee with prominent MK slave user Prince Albert of Monaco at the World Music Awards in Monaco.
In "Je vais vite" video, the universe shown is reminiscent of Luc Besson’s (another post to do about him and his films: Nikita ... etc) film 'The Fifth Element'. Note the fractured infinite mirror scene above also. [Ed: I have a bit on Besson and FE in a Milla Jovovich post I have half finished]
Lorie also was engaged for 3 years to Garou, a renowned Quebec French singer (in french loup-garou means werewolf, which is not his first name or surname), who was cited, among others, by the top-model Karen Mulder (Garou's previous "official" relationship) as being involved in top-model sex-slave brainwashing the day she tried to tell her story on French television. What she said had been cut, a fan filming the interview in the audience had his tape erased by security staff, but the story was revealed on the web. She claimed that Garou was fully aware that Ophelie Winter was a victim of MK. Click the Karen Mulder link for my post on the matter where I cover Ophelie also.
Ophélie Winter, another model and singer was invited on the talk show, Karen Mulder in her original testimony said she could confirm all she was telling. But Ophélie entered the TV studio only once, angry Karen had left, and made no comment at all and did her interview as if nothing had happened. Daughter of a dutch singer and a model, Ophélie, is a big sex-symbol in France, who now has her own "name sign" (a W in a O) like her master Prince, whom she worked with for a year. She is also seen very often in movies, talk-shows, etc. Mrs Winter has also been under arrest during a french inquire about a broad cocaine trafficking network. This fits as MK slaves are known to be used in this kind smuggling activity.
To get back to MK female singers in France, we then have Jenifer Bartoli and Nolwenn Leroy, both coming from the new fish pond for MK female candidates: reality shows.
Jenifer Bartoli, doing "just a cool gesture" on the picture above, was "discovered" in Star Academy, but also was in the other "Graines de Star" (Star Seeds) in 1997, with Alizée. Her third album is called 'Lunatic' (crazy/lunacy, has MK connotations) and has a Monarch symbolic butterfly-marked cover (below).
This photo shoot of Bartoli and the serpent is very typical, the same type of snake (yellow Python) Britney Spears and others have danced seductively with in this often repeated in the media psycho-sexual and esoteric scene (serpent: phallus, wisdom/loss of innocence/Garden of Eden/Satan).
Nolwenn Leroy, also came from the Star Academy musical reality show, Jenifer won the first series, Nolwenn the second. In the above covers notice the owl, white/black rabbit (more Alice bits follow), cat and swan. On the above left cover note the peacock feather eye symbolism. Also on the above right, she has the cable of the mic around her foot, like a leash. This reminds me of one the best known French lolitas, which I have mentioned already, Vanessa Paradis (whose singing career started to grow at age 14). She's renowned for the Chanel video commercial where she's a bird in a cage (notice also the red rope around her ankle like a shackle/leash). Nolwenn also used this 'caged bird' theme in her portfolio (a few images down, from her single cover shoot for 'Nolwenn Ohwo!').
Nolwenn had the Monarch theme in her second record 'Histoire Naturelle' and it's single of the same name, with the music video showing her as a dead butterfly pinned in a museum box. The lyrics: "I'm a butterfly lost among the lions", "I like to fly in every direction", "the would-be Darwins want to undress, to dissect me without any emotion", "My story is the one about an appearing species".
In the video, the camera pans across some pinned butterflies in the nature museum setting, making sure to pan across a large Monarch butterfly, then we see her in a cocoon (transforming/metamorphosing into a butterfly, a common mind control motif/imagery used in Monarch programming) you can also see her as a spider (or Shiva's arms, as you like).
The first video from this record ('faut-il, faut-il pas': must I or not?) has a lot less symbols. The butterfly is just evoked on a lamp, at the right, at the very start of the song:
The lyrics are all about being controlled: "It's been a long time I've decided to not decide anything", "Why choose between Cancer or Cholera" , "He's tempting and attracting me without end". Another theme is duality with a balance, and two twins (black/white) going up and down as she can't choose, this theme goes on throughout the video (salt/pepper, apple/cake etc) as she can't make her mind up choosing between various polar opposites (duality/total confusion). The house is tipped from side to side like it is a dollhouse being shaken.
Here she is at a Paris premiere of the new Alice in Wonderland movie, with a fitting duality dress (black/white stripes; the checkerboard/duality was an extremely prominent symbolism/motif in the Disney/Burton film also) and Cheshire Cat necklace. Nolwenn is very popular in France, by the young and old alike.
Last one: an earlier 2003 Nolwenn music video for 'Follow a Star' (Suivre une étoile). At the start she appears to lay a tarot card on the table, it looks like a version of 'The Star' card which obviously fits with the 'Follow a Star' theme. An eight pointed star symbol is near-subliminally flashed at numerous times in the video. This symbol, while on the surface appears to represent the sun, it is more specifically the Sumerian/Babylonian star of Inanna/Ishtar (linked to Venus, the Morning Star which represents Lucifer the light bearer in the occult world), at 0:26 over the sun, at 1:40 as ripples in a pool of water, then engraved on a couple of rocks (one pictured below), on the sun's reflection in the lake 02:51. So you get the picture that this video is reasonably occult in nature as Nolwenn 'follows the star' of Ishtar (Venus/Morning Star/Lucifer) before ending up on water (probably due to the card's use of water).
Another early M6 (in Loft Story, the french version of Big Brother) doll made the news in recent years: Loana Petrucciani, an ex-gogo-dancer who played a provocative "big boobs - no brain" role in reality shows and helped launch the show in France. In 2009 she was found unconscious, beaten in her bathroom. The police found GBL in the house and, after telling them at first that her boyfriend/producer was involved, she later changed the story, telling in the media that she remembered nothing. She has attempted suicide multiple times since then, and has been forcibly taken to psychiatric hospitals on a couple of occasions. The first picture below was used in the news when this "accident" occurred, the second is from the video for a cover song of Brigitte Bardot she made.
During her recent troubles she had very limited public activity but in August of this year she was photographed (in probably one of those staged 'paparazzi' scenes) doing the usual thing with a serpent that they seem to always get them to do.
One more I'd like to add before we finish, who has also used the circus mind-kontrol theme in a video is French R&B singer Shy'm, who is relatively new. I am referring to her most recent video 'Je Suis Moi' (I am me) which contains a lot of pertinent symbolism (duality, checkerboards and black/white stripes are a constant) and the lyrics hinting at her confused identity/personality. Shy'm dances on a pedestal like a puppet on a string, as well as with two 'mimes' (alters), all wearing black and white duality stripes on one leg. She is spun around on a hypnotic black/white spiral as she is used in the circus knife throwing act (the knife throwing symbolic of trauma, the spiral and spinning symbolizing the dissociation). There is also a kitten programming reference (the woman in the cage where the lion used to be) in there which seems pretty out of place, but is very much in context with the rest of the video if you get the deeper meaning. I am sure some of her other videos also contain similar symbolism (there is certainly a lot of black/white duality in some of the clips I have seen).