PART THREE

SUBJECTIVITY

In the previous chapter, I showed how Franҫois Truffaut struggled with the inheritance of his predecessor Cocteau, as he suffered and profited from the latter’s influence. It is not by chance that the “anxiety of influence” is presented by Harold Bloom in exclusively masculine terms. The discourse of literature has, in the past at least, been an overwhelmingly masculine one. In film as well, the arranger is assumed to be male unless there are strongly marked indications to the contrary.

The tacit assumption that the source of a film story stems from a male enunciator exerts a subtle bias on cinematic narratives. Women characters are often portrayed as stages to be passed through, or as spaces to be invaded and conquered. The man’s adventures become the dominant focus. Fortunately, however, this “patriarchal” slant in film narratives, even in films made by men, has not been monolithic.

Cinema was perceived by its first audiences as photography in motion. Projected publicly for the first time by the Lumiere brothers in 1895 at the Grand Café in Paris, its fascination lay in realism. The audience is said to have jumped at the sight of the oncoming train in “L’Arrivée d’un train dans la gare de Ciotat” (“The Arrival of a train in the Ciotat station”). Apocryphal or not, the story underscores the point that the objective representation of motion, to the degree that a photograph of an object could be mistaken for the real thing, was the original impulse behind the creation of cinema.

But the end of the nineteenth century also marked a turn toward the subjective. The birth of cinema is contemporary with that of psychoanalysis. It wasn’t long before filmmakers began to use film’s apparent realism to portray fantasy and fiction. The Frenchman Georges Méliès staged a trip to the moon and to the North Pole. As early as 1906, Edwin S. Porter portrayed a world distorted by the subjective perception of a character. His “Dream of a Rarebit Fiend” portrays the perception and imagination of a man under the influence of alcohol.

Despite this promising beginning, the story of subjectivity has been onesided in films. Although our culture traditionally considers men more “objective” and women more “subjective,” the subjective thoughts of women characters are rarely emphasized in the films made by men. The camera almost never identifies with the point of view of the woman character, so that the spectators are also denied the option of identifying with her. Thus the technological apparatus of cinema itself often reinforces women’s subordinate role in the narrative. The representation of women’s subjectivity has had a complex history.

The first chapter of this section considers some exceptional instances in films made by men where the woman character participates in the telling of her own story. I describe how the literary technique of “dual narration” has been used in film to allow the fusion of the camera narrator with a woman character. Metadiegesis (the assumption of the storytelling function by a character in the story) is another way of marking a narrative as feminine. I analyze Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (written by Marguerite Duras) as one film which successfully presents the thoughts and feelings of the woman protagonist through metadiegesis. Unless the images and sound are presented consistently from the point of view of the woman character, however, the subjective quality is lost.

All of the strategies described may be used to open up points of resistance in the text to conventional storytelling. Of course, they they are not necessarily used that way; there is no intrinsically “progressive” film language.

Because film is a visual medium, space is an important area of cinematic expressiveness. This includes not only the two-dimensional “screen space” that gives a film its particular look, but also the three-dimensional “diegetic space.” Diegetic space can be mediated through a character, through the point-of-view shot which is clearly attributable to the character’s act of looking. As was the case with dual narration, the use of point-of-view shots lends importance to the character thus highlighted, whose perception becomes a link between the spectator and the story. The failure in film to mediate information about the diegetic space through women characters leads to the serious consequence of reinforcing a social fact of life: the cutting off of women from the full exploration of space. This not only reinforces cinematic stereotypes, but also conditions women as spectators and as actors in their real life roles.

In the second chapter, I deal with the relation between different types of film space and women protagonists. In a first section, I show how the relation between the woman character and the mise-en-scène of the film can become a metaphor for the character’s state of mind. Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen have both used these elements in their portrayal of the subjective thoughts and feelings of women protagonists. In their films, however, the women function principally as stand-ins for the director’s male artistic persona. To some extent, they claim for themselves the capacity to embrace a feminine perspective. Against these models, Agnes Varda stands out as a director who employs some of the same techniques in order to explore what has historically been women’s experience of space.

In some films, the woman character mentally resists the spaces that constrict her. By constructing a new relationship to space, she changes her self-image. In the end, I propose the new term “performative space” based on philospher J. L. Austin’s concept of “performative utterances” in language. Women who take control of the spaces surrounding them, I suggest, both recreate themselves and influence the shape of the landscape that surrounds them. In turn, the films that represent this changed relation between a woman character and her surrounding space can be said to “perform” the possibility of a new construction of the self through language (in this instance, film language). Significantly, the two films that best exhibit this were made by literary authors: Peter Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman and Marguerite Duras’s Nathalie Granger.

The chapters in this section take their inspiration from feminist film criticism. Like some of the recent influential books in the field—Annette Kuhn’s Women’s Pictures, E. Ann Kaplan’s Women and the Cinema, Teresa de Lauretis’s Alice Doesn’t, Mary Ann Doane’s The Desire to Desire, and Lucy Fischer’s Shot/Countershot—they attempt to develop a general view of women in the cinema that is based on the analysis of specific film texts.