MISE-EN-SCÈNE AS METAPHOR

In some films the world presented by the arranger is colored by the mind of a character, so that the whole film or significant portions of it can be read as the equivalent of a state of mind. When the character is a woman, the film often manages to say something important about what has historically been women’s experience. Here, for once, the arranger seems female rather than male.

Agnes Varda uses the technique in Sans toit ni loi. Even though the narrative takes the form of interviews with those who have known the heroine Mona, the wintery landscape and the camera’s insistence on filming signs of decay—the peeling paint of a garage or badly maintained chateau, rotting plane trees, barren vineyards, abandoned buildings and people wearing rags—add up to a statement about the inner vacuousness of the main character. However, they legitimize her aimless wandering by showing that the people who perceive her as marginal are in fact as infected as she is. She has owned up to the fact; they haven’t.

The narration itself is decentered in space, as the anchor of the interviews in realistic diegetic time or space is purposefully called into question. Many of the interviews do not presuppose a listening Other, but seem like voiced thoughts. We are never shown anyone actually interviewing the characters. One of Mona’s lovers speaks from the platform of a freight train as it pulls away, while another friend, Yolande, addresses the camera directly without any prompting on the part of an interviewer. A woman who gives Mona water expresses a wish to be free, like Mona—again, she seems to be talking to herself. Others are blocked by a physical separation from any interviewer—the garage owner speaks from behind a glass pane. One couple, a foreman and his wife, is merely overheard discussing Mona while watching television.

Through the lack of point-of-view shots Varda has distanced herself from the norms of art cinema narration in order to underscore a philosophical point.

On the other hand Varda uses some of those norms for her own ends. Throughout the film, the camera-narrator seems to have its own agenda, following a little girl dressed in red down the street after Mona has already entered the bakery, and otherwise “indulging” in the exploration of pictorial space. The color red becomes a kind of theme. A red scarf is abandoned on the sacks of grain; a woman comes out of the shower draped in a red towel. Rhyming shots are used to open and close the film. In the film’s opening shot, two poplar trees standing near the ditch where Mona dies are prominently featured; when her ride lets her off near the same trees toward the end, we know that the moment of narrative closure is coming. Varda also repeats the mirror shots and shots through glass which already marked her style in Cleo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7, 1962). The end result of Varda’s filmmaking style is to force us to identify Mona’s state of mind with the bleak landscape she traverses, while her alienation is underscored by the remoteness and distance of the interviewees from the narrator.

In films made by men, the strategy of presenting the world as an extension of a female personality is often used as a metaphor for the filmmaker’s artistic persona. Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen both exemplify this practice; in Persona and Interiors they are simultaneously exploring some of the problems of the artistic mind through female characters and making statements about femininity. In both films, however, women are shown in very traditional terms.

In Interiors (1978), Woody Allen manages to express the mother’s psychotic depression in the pale pastels and whites of her interior decorating, while her daughter Renata’s anxiety neurosis is mirrored in the outside world. As Renata (Diane Keaton) goes through the crisis of not being able to write her poem, the camera cuts to the gnarled and tangled branches of a barren, wintery tree outside. Later on in the film, a shot of Renata staring at the ocean is followed by a shot in which the ocean waves comes forward toward her in a threatening way. If we identify with Renata, we are bound to feel an overwhelming sensation of anxiety at this point. If, in addition, we recall the recurrent theme of the artist’s anxiety in Allen’s other films, this scene reads as a portrayal of his own artistic problems.

In the wintery scene where Renata and Joey walk together with their mother, Renata’s lack of an empathic connection with her sister is echoed in the lack of color which repeats in nature the type of interior their mother has continually subjected them to. In contrast, the woman their father wants to marry wears a red dress which the daughters find loud and vulgar.

The remoteness between the characters also finds expression in the framing of the camera. In the opening sequence of the film, the camera shows three shots of the mother’s “interior,” her empty beach house. In the fourth shot, Joey appears in a mirror. Three more shots frame her progress through the first floor and her ascent up the stairs until she comes to rest on screen right in a medium close-up next to a window. A point-of-view shot shows three little girls playing on the beach below—a scene from the girls’ childhood. The camera returns to Joey, still at screen right, then cuts to Renata on screen left, with her hand against the window, as though she is trying to touch or reach something through it. The sisters’ psychological isolation from one another is conveyed by their separation on opposite sides of the screen in these two successive shots. The next shot is a rear shot of the father who begins to speak about his marriage with Eve. Again, psychological distance is indicated by the shift in diegetic space: the father speaks against the background of city skyscrapers. This introductory section concludes with a restatement of each character’s physical and mental isolation: a shot of the three little girls on the beach, the shot of Joey on screen right, the shot of Renata on screen left, the father with his back to the camera.

29. Woody Allen’s intertext: Persona. (Ingmar Bergman, Persona)

When Renata raises her hand against the glass in the opening scene, Woody Allen is quoting a similar shot in the prologue sequence of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1967), when the young boy rubs his palm against an opaque glass screen on which the images of Alma and Elizabeth alternately come in and out of focus (Fig. 29). Although ostensibly focusing on female characters, Bergman, like Allen, constructs a compelling psychological portrait of the artist. At one moment in the film, his character Elizabeth turns to look at the spectator and points her camera at us (Fig. 30). The women in these films become to some extent the vehicles for the expression of the (male) director’s problems. It is as though the director identified his persona as artist with a feminine side of himself, a conception of the artist that Freud seems to have shared.

In Persona, the actress Elizabeth’s refusal to speak, which necessitates her departure for a rest cure on the coast in the company of her nurse Alma, stands for Bergman’s sense of the futility of film language. Viewed in this perspective, the opening prologue with its series of disjointed images (many of them from Bergman’s earlier films) reads as a visual “writer’s block.” The trajectory of the film is a voyage through the apparatus of cinema, which is consistently thematized. At the end of the film, it is not just Elizabeth but film language itself that begins to “speak” again.²

30. Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann) photographing the film spectator. (Ingmar Bergman, Persona)

31. The mirror shot in Alma’s (Bibi Anderson) imaginary or dream sequence. (Ingmar Bergman, Persona)

In the film’s greatest moment of crisis, the two strands of the narrative coalesce as Alma sets a piece of glass in the path where Elizabeth is sure to step on it with her bare feet. Her cruelty is motivated by her reading of Elizabeth’s letter to the doctor, in which she expresses her ironic distance toward Alma. At the moment when Elizabeth steps on the glass, her reaction of pain is supplemented by a shot of celluloid film burning. Bergman’s script states that the spectator should feel the film has broken. In the overall metalinguistic allegory of the film, it is possible to read Alma’s cutting of Elizabeth as a statement that language must assault its audience to remain alive. The French surrealist Antonin Artaud had expressed a similar idea in his writings, where he argued that theater should use a language of objects that translates mental anguish into real, physical pain. In the “First Manifesto on the Theater of Cruelty,” first published in 1932, he writes that “The theater will never find itself again . . . except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior.”³ Alma’s repeated acts of violence, physical and verbal, against Elizabeth are exteriorizations of her patient’s own violent feelings. By giving them physical expression, she paves the way for Elizabeth’s reintegration into reality. Bergman makes this into a statement about his relationship to film art as well.

As part of his critical examination of the cinematic apparatus, Bergman questions the mechanisms of identification. Alma is the spectator’s stand-in, a member of the audience who suddenly finds herself in the privileged position of talking back to the actress. (Alma says to Elizabeth: “I saw you in your last film. I thought I could become you—inside.”) This statement prepares the spectator for a series of images in which Alma and Elizabeth become interchangeable.

In the first of these, Elizabeth gets up during the night and walks through Alma’s room. A shot in which she is shown framed in the doorway is followed by one in which she looks out with Alma toward the spectator, or at a mirror that is not shown in the diegetic space. Wordlessly, Elizabeth draws Alma’s hair away from her forehead, similar to the way she wears her own. The film spectator is made to feel that Elizabeth is suggesting a physical resemblance between herself and Alma. Both women stand looking at the “mirror,” which occupies the position of the film spectator. In the morning, Elizabeth denies having come to see Alma during the night, so that we don’t know whether the scene was a fantasy or a dream of Alma’s. The “mirror” in the shot, which enables the spectator to look at the women looking at themselves (Fig. 31), intensifies the impression that Alma seeing herself as Elizabeth is a surrogate for the spectator’s identification with Alma and Elizabeth. After the resolution of Elizabeth’s crisis, this “mirror” shot reappears: as Alma prepares to leave the cottage, she reimagines that scene while looking in a mirror that, this time, is represented in the diegetic space. With her right hand, Alma pulls back her hair from her forehead; Elizabeth’s remembered gesture is then superimposed on the mirror image.

In a second dream or fantasy scene, Elizabeth’s face looms in the foreground while Alma plays Elizabeth to the actress’s husband (Fig. 32). Elizabeth is put in the position of “learning her lines” again from an understudy. Finally, the two women’s faces are merged as Alma recites in a voice-over Elizabeth’s difficulty in imagining herself as a mother (Fig. 33). It is obvious that in using motherhood as a mythological expression of womanhood, Bergman equates the feminine with nature.⁴

Through her identification with Elizabeth, Alma is able to exteriorize her patient’s inner state. The remarkable resolution of the crisis comes as Alma recites disconnected words, then tears at her own flesh so Elizabeth can drink her blood, a scene that once again recalls Artaud’s “theater of cruelty.”

The spectator in Persona actually passes through the projector and comes out on the other side; the first shot in the opening sequence shows an arc lamp connecting to begin the film projection, and the final shot is that of the lamp disconnecting again. As in Fellini’s 8½, the film being discussed in Persona is the very film we are seeing. The metafilmic dimension of Persona seems, in the end, more successful than Bergman’s attempt at portraying a woman’s state of mind. Like Woody Allen, he has managed to tell us a lot about himself as an artist but very little about women.⁵

IDENTIFICATION

In the previous chapter, I described the way in which the dual narrative mode can strengthen our identification with a character. The spectator will almost always identify with the character whose look authorizes a point-of-view shot. At the same time, as David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson point out, it is important to distinguish depth of identification; most point-of-view shots denote only perceptual subjectivity, not mental subjectivity.⁶ Edward Branigan distinguishes between projective point-of-view shots (which refer to a specific mental state of the character) and reflective shots (which reveal only the presence or normal awareness of the character).⁷ The dual narrative mode is built upon projective point-of-view shots, and encourages a stronger identification because we actually enter into the thoughts and feelings of the character. Yet even the reflective point-of-view shot can further our sense of identification because the character’s view of the diegetic space becomes the means of our own introduction to it. This is true even though a reflective shot may not be marked as subjective at all, but be part of the code of a given narrative style; an example is the shot-counter-shot used in filming conversation in classical narrative.

For example, Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends centers on the ambitions of a young woman photographer in New York, Sue Weinblatt.⁸ She has been trying to sell work for some time with little success. The key to a breakthrough is important contacts, and since she is not yet known she has none of these. This fact is dramatized for her and for us in a pivotal scene where she enters the “O. K. Harris Agency.” In the establishing shot for the scene, Sue comes down the corridor toward a woman who blocks the camera’s view in the foreground, just as she will try to block Sue’s access to the art agent, Mr. Karpel. This first shot is mediated not by Sue, but by an intrusive narrator who metaphorically closes off the diegetic space, giving the visual equivalent of the rejection Sue can expect. The next shots cut back and forth between Sue and the assistant, as we watch the woman simultaneously ignore her (she continues to work on her slides) and block her from taking another step in the direction of her future (“Mr. Karpel never sees anyone without an appointment”; “The secretary’s not here now to make an appointment”; “come back after lunch”; etc.). Because the camera has followed Sue from outside the agency, the viewer identifies with her desire to succeed in penetrating into Karpel’s office, to break out of the spatial confinement that threatens to stifle her career. There is no future for her unless she can reach the space of Mr. Karpel’s office.

32. Alma plays Elizabeth to the actress’s husband. (Ingmar Bergman, Persona)

33. The merging of identities. (Ingmar Bergman, Persona)

The camera now resumes a position behind the head of the assistant. Sue turns to go back down the corridor, but thinks better of it. Turning back toward the camera, she decides to claim (falsely) that she was sent by a famous person, recogizable to Karpel and the assistant. Her announcement is followed by a cut back to the assistant from Sue’s point of view, motioning her to go in.

The space Sue now enters is male-dominated and she is subjugated once more. She appears as a suppliant figure off to screen left while Karpel sits behind a huge desk. In the foreground, pictures leaning against the desk push him even further into remoteness. An enormous print of a nude female torso hangs behind his head. He is a modern version of the Wizard of Oz, surrounded by the apparatus of his trade. Karpel looks at Sue’s pictures—ironically, the closest look we ever have of them is from his point of view. Yet before she leaves, Sue is on the way back from alienation, because Karpel has found her a “fairy godmother” who will exhibit her work.

Girlfriends shows the value in having diegetic space explored by the mediating agency of a female protagonist; even perceptual point-of-view shots lend importance to the goals of female characters, creating what Lucy Fischer has called “positive identification.”⁹ Yet for the most part, film narratives are told from the point of view of the camera narrator while male characters get most of the point-of-view shots.

Even more rarely are women allowed projective point-of-view shots which allow the spectator to guess at their mental states. This is true even when the man and woman are equally important to the story. An example is François Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door (1981), which depicts the passionate and doomed love affair between two neighbors who are thrown together by chance after having separated violently some years before. On only two occasions do we see Mathilde Bauchard (Fanny Ardant) looking out the window at Bernard Coudray (Gérard Depardieu). A story about the fatal attraction between a man and a woman becomes the story of the man’s destruction by the woman, simply because Truffaut keeps us at a distance from her.

In Sans toit ni loi Agnes Varda uses Mona’s experience of the diegetic space to underscore the gradual alienation of the homeless woman, Mona. Initially the heroine’s refusal to tie herself down appears as an expression of freedom. But gradually her experience of space becomes more and more constricted. The exploration of diegetic space becomes closed to her as she is repeatedly shut out. Doors are always closing on her. Typically, this exclusion occurs from another character’s, or from the narrator’s point of view rather than from Mona’s: the convent door shuts Mona out while the camera remains on the inside; and the shepherd’s wife closes her door against Mona while the camera takes a neutral position. On her last trip to buy bread, Mona comes upon a village where everyone is shutting up doors and windows against the celebrants of the wine festival, who are capturing people and smearing them with the dregs. She becomes their sacrificial victim. Her two final refuges, a phone booth and a radish greenhouse, are both open (their walls are transparent) and thus leave her exposed. The wide open spaces of her exploration finally become a trap for her. On her way back from the village, she stumbles and falls into a ditch where she freezes to death.

PERFORMATIVE SPACE: FILM AS SPEECH ACT

In its orientation toward the spectator, my analysis of film space has tacitly assumed that he or she is implicated in what Stephen Heath has called “the there of the image.” The presence of the image calls forth the active mental construction of the viewer. Heath puts it this way: “Cinema is not a vision but a circuit of vision, the overlay in which the look of the camera and the look of the eye come together.”¹⁰

I have also stated, in the previous chapter, that the spectator will almost always identify with the position of the camera-narrator. Therefore, in order for a strong identification with a character to be felt, the camera must show the character’s reflective or projective point of view.

Finally, I brought up some of the complications arising from the reading of conventional narrative films by women spectators. I argued that women typically identify with three different foci in the narrative. In the first place, they are encouraged to identify with the female star as an idealized, and sexually desirable, version of themselves; secondly they identify with the male characters who carry the story line; and thirdly with the landscape through which the male protagonist pursues his goals (reiterating the classic position that women are “means to an end”). The powerlessness implicit in that third identification is one that, narratively, is often represented by the character’s silence: the silence of Oharu when scolded by the Matsudaira Clan for becoming a courtesan and prostitute, the silence of Lisa who dares not tell Sebastian Brandt who she is. Oharu and Lisa never break out of being part of the landscape that the male characters traverse as they pursue their life stories.

I want now to describe some situations where that silence becomes the site of a special resistance—a strength rather than a weakness. And, since I have linked it to a particular experience of the diegetic space in film—the passive identification with the landscape—I want to continue to explore that resistance in spatial terms. A few films have explored the idea of opening up the diegetic space itself to represent the site of women’s resistance to domination.

Borrowing a term from the philosopher J. L. Austin, we might call the use of film language in these instances “performative.” Austin used the term to describe utterances that, when spoken in appropriate circumstances, constitute acts (for instance, “I do” spoken in traditional marriage ceremonies, or “I christen you the Queen Elizabeth,” when breaking a champagne bottle against the prow of a new ship). In applying this term from Austin I am suggesting that the films themselves become part of a transforming discourse capapble of restructuring the relation of the female subject to the social space. In this way they fulfill the conditions for what Heath has called “politically consequent” films.¹¹ They help to forge this new relationship, to make it possible, by representing it. Because they mainly use the characters’ new relation to the diegetic space to make their point, I use the term performative space to describe their frame-breaking discourse.¹² In performative space the realistically portrayed diegetic space becomes the locus of the women characters’ subjectivity—not the subjectivity of dual narration, nor an objective correlative of how the characters feel (as in the examples by Bergman, Allen, and Varda given above), but the locus of a struggle for power. The victory of the women creates them as fully enfranchised individuals. In the two examples below, a film by Marguerite Duras and another by Peter Handke, the women characters retreat to the domestic space with which they have traditionally been identified. Yet they use that reclaimed space to mount an attack on the men who seek to dominate them.

In Marguerite Duras’s Nathalie Granger, Nathalie is a little girl who has been thrown out of school because of her violence toward the other children. The only shots of the film from outside the space of the house where Nathalie lives with her mother Isabelle, another woman, and her daughter Florence are shots of the interview between the school’s headmistress and the two mothers. During the course of the day, Isabelle Granger decides not to send her away to another school, but the decision is not reached through discussion. The narrator shows us the decision being made by the physical bonding of Nathalie and Isabelle as they stand together watching the other mother and daughter cleaning the pond; the mother moves slightly closer to her daughter in the film frame (Figs. 34-35). Even though they do not touch, the arrangement of the shot suggests the mother’s feeling her way into her daughter’s resistance. This moment of subjectivity is entirely presented in spatial terms—in the proximity of Nathalie and Isabelle, in their shared moment at the edge of the pond.

34-35. Mother-daughter bonding: moving closer in space. (Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Granger)

In another scene, the camera shifts between a hesitant washing machine salesman, who appears to forget his lines whenever the camera is turned on him, and the two women sitting opposite him. Here the spatial arrangement is confrontational; the narrator suggests that the women are sitting in judgment on the man (Figs. 36-37). He has gained entrance into their house (their space), but he proves unequal to dominate the situation. Their attention is entirely directed toward him, while he continues to recite the broken lines of his unsuccessful sales talk. Their final verdict, “You are not a traveling salesman,” represents their judgment that he has not played his male role in a believable fashion; retrospectively, his spatial position may be read as equivalent to an actor on a stage. The women refuse to “believe” in the man’s act; they refuse to acknowledge his right to represent anything. This is the cause of his subsequent psychological crisis: he later returns to the house and confesses the history of his professional and personal failures. It is as though the women have unmasked him.

Nathalie Granger manifests a diegetic space in which the women exist in complete integrity, outside the feminine masquerade that defines them in the world of men. As E. Ann Kaplan has said: “Duras’s camera emphasizes the separation of the female inner, and male outer, worlds; the house-versus-street polarity becomes a metaphor for the different modes of being that characterize women and men in current society.”¹³

The exploration of what I have called performative space is often mediated by sound; for sound, if used as an additional source of information and not just as a repetition of the image track, can do much to liberate the viewer’s experience of the film space from the strictures of classical narrative. Mary Ann Doane speaks of such sound as a “place” where alternative modes of representation might be explored.¹⁴ In Nathalie Granger, the women’s space is also defined by sounds: the sound of the two little girls playing the piano serves as a parallel for the interior, ludic space which the women know so well how to defend by their silence. Appeals from the outside world cannot violate it, since the women are prepared to defend it even against rationality; to get rid of a caller who has dialed a wrong number, one of them explains (over the telephone): “There is no telephone here.” Nathalie Granger uses the masculine voice of a radio announcer as a contrast to the space defined by the women as they perform their daily tasks about the house. The presentation of this space as being invaded by a male voice does much to underscore the female identity of the arranger. Even the radio story is the story of the capture of two escaped murderers. When the salesman physically invades the house somewhat later, his discourse is contrasted with their mute indifference. It is a strategy of resistance that leaves the spectator with the impression that he or she has intimately lived through several hours of these women’s lives by sharing their experience of space.

If Nathalie Granger shows a space which has already been won by women, Peter Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman exemplifies the struggle women must go through to find their space, turning the woman’s silence into a coherent statement about her position in a society dominated by language and by masculine presence. The mastery of language is equated with the body-language of oppression, as a passage occurring both in Handke’s novel and the film suggests: the father, explaining to his son how he achieves domination in business meetings, says: “First I make my victim sit in a corner, where he feels helpless. When I speak, I thrust my face right into his. If my caller is an elderly person, I speak very softly to make him think his hearing has suddenly failed him. It’s also important to wear a certain kind of shoes, with crepe soles, like these that I’m wearing: they’re power shoes. And they have to be polished until they glow. One has to emanate an aura of mystery. But the main thing is the intimidating face . . . this is my power stare, with the help of which I hope to become a member of the board soon.”¹⁵

36-37. Resistance to invasion: the women sit in judgment (Jeanne Moreau, Lucia Bose, and Gérard Depardieu). (Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Granger)

Against this intimidating presence, the person whom Handke’s narrator, throughout his novel, calls only “the woman” seeks to define her own space and existence. In the film version of The Left-Handed Woman he calls to his aid, in the definition of the woman’s alternate, autonomous space, a film language that speaks from outside the dominant Hollywood narrative mode, creating a film, as one critic puts it, “unthinkable in America.”

Handke’s tripartite grouping of his film into sequences titled “March-April-May” is consistent with this evolution, as is his insistence on mundane household tasks which are focused on for their ability to take up time. The spectator gets to know the heroine not through her decisions in moments of crisis (the Aristotelian indicator of character) but through her atypical ways of performing typical household duties. Her throwing away all the food in the refrigerator, dumping the typewriter on the floor, falling asleep at a silent Ozu film—all these become indices of her negativity, her withdrawal and refusal, at the beginning of her revolt, to continue employing the objects of the world in the traditional way. During the first part of the film when her husband returns from a trip, takes her out to dinner, and spends the night with her at a hotel, Handke does not even have her speak. The husband’s voice, the voice of presence, seeks to dominate: “I’ve never felt so united with you . . . I feel a magical power and I’m so happy.” Her first word is one of severance and denial: “I’ve suddenly had a strange idea . . . I suddenly had the illumination that you were going away from me. That you were going to leave me alone. Yes Bruno, that was it. Go away. Leave me alone. Forever.”

In this film the woman’s silence helps her to define a new relation to objects. Loneliness and withdrawal into self are conveyed by closeups of a dripping faucet, a bucket. In the isolation that follows her stripping away of her former life, these images reflect the complete stasis of her emotions—a sort of zero point that must be reached before the change can occur.

At the end of The Left-Handed Woman, a new reality begins to shape itself. In cinematic terms where the loss of language is translatable into a loss of sight, regaining language is the same as learning a new perception. “I’m starting to see again,” says one of the women guests at a party in the woman’s house. Like Riva in Hiroshima mon amour, the return to normality translates into a return to the sensory world. At the end of Handke’s novel, his heroine begins to draw; she has found a new visual language that absolves her from silence. His film heroine, also, reaches a realization of self that is expressed in more cinematic terms: “Haven’t you noticed that there is only space for the person who brings his [sic] own space with him?” Marianne, his heroine, is someone who conquers her own space and thus earns the right to exist in her own time.

Performative space allows a spectator experience that does not rely on the simple transposition of male to female roles; instead the full implications of the woman character’s experience of space are explored. For the male spectator, this has the effect of providing for him that double identification with the diegetic characters and with the diegetic space which heretofore has been the special province of women. These films speak for a kind of women’s experience that is not “for women only,” since any attempt to essentialize the historical experience of women as peculiarly “feminine” must be resisted. Simply, in taking these films seriously we can learn something about the experience of space which has often been the locus of women’s struggle.

In conclusion it should be noted that the independence achieved by the women characters in these films is not without ambiguity, since it is represented by the active reclaiming of domestic space, the traditional locus of the housewife.¹⁶ It is exciting to imagine a film in which the woman character would move outside the home, performatively creating her space as she moved through the narrative. This would be an extremely difficult film to make, since it would necessitate the construction of a new relation between the subject and her environment literally at every step. As Tania Modleski argues, “the performative and mimetic aspects of texts mutually reinforce each other, representation producing reality and reality affirming representation.”¹⁷ In performing a new relation between the character and her space, such a film would break the frames of our normal perception and ultimately have a positive influence on reality itself.