INTRODUCTION

1. In my previous book, I explicated the relevance of frame theory to the study of surrealist texts. See Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 1983). The best summary of frame theory may be found in Mary Crawford and Roger Chaffin’s “The Reader’s Construction of Meaning: Cognitive Research on Gender and Comprehension,” in Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, eds., Gender and Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 4-10 and 26-27.

2. Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 152.

3. Whorf, 151.

4. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 41-45.

5. Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 13-14.

1. BREAKING THE FRAME

1. Louis Malle, in an interview with Yvonne Baby, Le Monde 27 Oct. 1960.

2. On this point, see Gerald Prince, “Queneau et L’Anti-roman,” Neophilologus 55 (1971): 33-40.

3. Nathalie Sarraute, The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel (New York: George Braziller, 1963), 65-68.

4. Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1972), 23.

5. Roland Barthes, Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 128.

6. Barthes, 131.

7. The term is from Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974).

8. The translation by Barbara Wright expertly manages to convey nearly all of these in their English equivalents: “Howcanaystinksotho” (phonetic puzzle), “Mamma couldn’t stomach Papa” (spoken English), “guidenappers” (kidnappers of a tourist guide). See Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro, trans. Barbara Wright (London: John Calder, 1982).

9. Julia Kristeva, Semeiotikè: Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 151.

10. An extended discussion of the surrealists’ activities and philosophy may be found in my Languages of Revolt: Dada and Surrealist Literature and Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 1983).

11. He complained that it lacked realism: “The film scintillated and amazed, but it lacked any real tempo, a natural respiration.” Jacques Mallecot, Louis Malle par Louis Malle (Artigues-pres-Bordeaux: Athanor, 1978), 59-60.

12. Dan Yakir, “Louis Malle: An Interview,” Film Quarterly 31.4 (1978): 8.

13. Georges Charensol, “Qu’est-ce-qui fait courir Zazie?” Les Nouvelles littéraires 3 Nov. 1960: 10.

14. Louis Malle, “Zazie dans le métro,” Avant-scène du cinema 104 (1970): 24.

15. “Man is brought into the world by a nothing, a nothing animates him, a nothing bears him away.”

16. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-74), vol. 8, 165: “The task of dream-formation is above all to overcome the inhibition from censorship; and it is precisely this task which is solved by the displacement of psychical energy within the material of the dream-thoughts.”

17. Queneau, trans. Wright, 100.

18. Louis Malle in Le Monde, 15.

19. André Labarthe, “Au pied de la lettre,” Cahiers du cinéma 114 (1960): 58-60.

20. Franҫois Mars, “L’autopsie du gag, 2” Cahiers du cinéma 116 (1961): 29. See his book Le Gag (Paris: Cerf, 1964).

21. Barthes, Essais, 127.

22. Christian Metz, Langage et cinéma, (Paris: Larousse, 1971), 132.

2. FILM WRITING AND
THE POETICS OF SILENCE

1. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 14.

2. Bazin, “On the politique des auteurs,” in Jim Hillier, ed., Cahiers du Cinéma. The 1950’s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 248-59.

3. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les Origines de la pensée grecque, 4th ed. ([1962] Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981).

4. My comments on the Greek texts were prepared with the assistance of Haun Saussy, who was my research assistant at Duke University.

5. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree ([1899] New York: Dover, 1956), 220. I have corrected the translation.

6. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. A. C. Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), line 25 of the commentary. The commentary by Aristophanes the Grammarian, reprinted in all the standard Oxford editions of the play in Greek, is not translated in any English language text that I have found.

7. See Derrida s discussion of Foucault’s Histoire de la folie in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 40: “either . . . The Socratic moment and its entire posterity immediately partake in the Greek logos that has no contrary . . . or . . . the Socratic moment and the victory over the Caliclesian hybris already are the marks of a deportation and an exile of logos from itself, the wounds left within it by a decision, a difference; and then the structure of exclusion that Foucault wishes to describe in his book could not have been born with classical reason. It would have to have been consummated and reassured and smoothed over throughout all the centuries of philosophy.”

8. Jean Anouilh, Antigone and Eurydice: Two Plays (London: Methuen, 1951), 93: “Rien n’est vrai que ce qu’on ne dit pas.”

9. The characters’ consciousness of role playing is foregrounded by Anouilh. For instance Creon says he has the bad role, Antigone the good one. Anouilh, 76.

10. Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1964).

11. See the analysis by Bruce Morissette in The Novels of Robbe-Grillet (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975).

12. Claudio Guillén, Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 13.

13. Nathalie Sarraute, The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel, trans. Maria Jolles (New York: Braziller, 1963).

14. Stanley Cavell, “Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett’s Endgame in Must We Mean What We say? ([1969] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 126.

15. Cavell, 156.

16. Cavell, 155.

17. Cavell, 149.

18. Miriam Hansen, “Traces of Transgression in Apocalypse Now,” Social Text 3 (1980): 128.

19. See Hansen, 126.

20. Cavell, 160.

21. Cavell, 148-49.

3. FORMS OF REPRESENTATION IN
LA NUIT DE VARENNES

1. “All the interior lines of the painting, and above all those that come from the central reflection, point towards the very thing that is represented, but absent . . . in Classical thought, the personage for whom the representation exists, and who represents himself within it, recognizing himself therein as an image or reflection, he who ties together all the interlacing threads of the ‘representation in the form of a picture or table’—he is never to be found in the table himself.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 308.

2. “From the right, there streams in through an invisible window the pure volume of a light that renders all representation visible . . . we are observing ourselves being observed by the painter, and made visible to his eyes by the same light that enables us to see him.” Foucault, 6.

3. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Le Texte divisé: Essai sur l’écriture filmique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), 143-59.

4. Of course Scola is anticipating history, since he conveys, in the eighteenth century, a nostalgia for a form of storytelling that did not reach its apogee until the nineteenth. But then Roland Barthes has argued (persuasively, I think) that the mode of storytelling we call nineteenth century realism from the beginning conveyed a “nostalgic reality.” See Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Hill & Wang, 1985), 4.

5. Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

6. Since writing this I have had the opportunity of reading Elena Gascon-Vera’s typescript, “Giacomo Casonova and the Enlightenment of Women in the 18th Century,” which concurs with this view.

7. In his disarming memoirs, Casanova explains that even his famous wit is falsely ascribed to him; in Paris, he explains, his most celebrated rejoinders come from his insufficient knowledge of the language. Thus, when Madame de Pompadour makes a remark at the opera about a singer’s ugly legs, he unwittingly answers: “Whenever I examine the beauty of a woman, la première chose que j’écarte, ce sont les jambes.” Giacomo Casanova, The Life and Memoirs of Casanova , trans. Arthur Machen ([1929] New York: Da Capo, 1984), 250. The translator evidently found this witticism as untranslatable as I do (écarter in this context means both to set aside and to spread apart). Casanova’s disingenuousness is similar to that of the classical text: he conceals his artifice the better to seduce.

8. It may be significant that Casanova nods off in the stagecoach while trying to explain to the three women the most important element of love. The medium closeup shot that frames him is the only one that may be said to quote Alexandre Volkoff’s 1927 film Casanova; in Volkoff’s film that shot shows the hero in the bloom of manhood setting out for Russia in pursuit of a Venetian noblewoman.

9. Chambers, 51.

10. Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1974), 126.

11. From the manifesto: “What kind of office must that be in a government which requires for its execution neither experience nor ability? That may be abandoned to the desperate chance of birth, that may be filled by an idiot, a madman, a tyrant, with equal effect as by the good, the virtuous, and the wise?” Conway, 126.

12. Foucault, 304.

13. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 15-16.

14. Chambers, 13: “If readability (or interpretability) is the power literary texts have of producing meanings, a power achieved by virtue of the reification of literary discourse into ‘ text,’ then seduction is the inevitable means by which the alienated text achieves value by realizing its potential of readability. However, if this readerly quality of text is a function of textual alienation, then we need not be surprised to discover . . . that textual seductiveness relies in growing measure on techniques and conceptions of art that today we associate rather with the notion of the ‘ writerly.’ ”

15. Nicholas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne, Les Nuits de Paris ou le spectateur nocturne, 16 parts in 8 vols. (Paris: chez Merigot jeune, libraire, 1791-94), vol. 8, part 16, 292-97 and 306-308.

16. Restif de la Bretonne, 424-25.

17. Lucien Dällenbach, Le récit speculaire. Essai sur la mise en abyme (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 21.

4. TRUFFAUT AND COCTEAU

1. Jean Cocteau, Orphée, ed. E. Freeman (London: Blackwell, 1976), 103.

2. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 174: “Orpheus’s gaze is Orpheus’s ultimate gift to the work. It is a gift whereby he refuses, whereby he sacrifices the work, bearing himself toward the origin according to desire’s measureless movement.”

3. Franҫois Truffaut, La Chambre verte, in L’Avant-scène du cinéma 215 (1978): 41.

4. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 73.

5. Walter Benjamin, “Eine Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” [1931], in Gesammelte Schriften, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), vol. 2, 368-85.

6. Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), 26.

7. Kracauer, 26.

8. Kracauer, 32.

9. André Bazin, Le Cinéma de l’occupation et de la résistance (Paris, 1975), 20-21.

10. See Annette Insdorf, François Truffaut (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978).

11. The story, along with an excellent translation and notes by Eugene P. Walz, appears in Mosaic 16.1-2 (1983): 125-43.

12. Franҫois Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), vol. 1, 234-35.

13. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 154.

14. Franҫois Truffaut, The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 6.

15. Terrence Rafferty, “Reflections” The New Yorker (31 Dec. 1984), 39.

16. Bloom writes that “every poet begins (however “unconsciously”) by rebelling more strongly against the consciousness of death’s necessity than all other men and women do.” The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 10.

17. Bloom, 15-16.

18. Bloom, 147.

19. Bloom, 15: “The later poet . . . yields up part of his own human and imaginative endowment, so as to separate himself from others, including the precursor, and he does this in his poem by so stationing it in regard to the parent-poem as to make that poem undergo an askesis too; the precursor’s endowment is also truncated.”

20. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver ([1972] New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 109-10.

21. As a matter of fact de Chirico, whose “surrealist” paintings were done ten years before the movement was founded, was what Breton would later call a “surrealist in spite of himself.”

22. To continue the mise-en-abyme of these intertextual citations, it is probable that my own juxtaposition of Cocteau and de Chirico comes from reading Wallace Fowlie’s description of Cocteau’s work: “His personal genius is like the surrealist genius of Giorgio de Chirico, who in his paintings creates a magical world where a Greek temple may cohabit with a glass-covered wardrobe, where a perspective and trompe-l’oeil convert a familiar world into a mystery.” Wallace Fowlie, Age of Surrealism (1950; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), 123.

23. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 114.

24. As Chris Marker has brilliantly shown in his film La Jetée, that image is one that evokes our own death.

25. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (1984; New York: Random House, 1985), 96-112.

26. Brooks, 103.

27. André Bazin, What is Cinema? (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 17-22.

5. MEDIATED VISION

1. In Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), George M. Wilson argues against interpreting the second shot subjectively, saying that “[Lisa] is now merely the subject of our perception and is utterly removed from the perspective that earlier she had held” (103-104). Our disagreement points to the fact that the subtle art of dual narration is quite often a matter of interpretation. Elsewhere (87-88) the writer comes close to describing something like dual narration in his treatment of “reflected subjectivity.” Here, though, his typology is unable to distinguish between effects of mise-en-scene (attributable to the arranger) and effects of the camera narrator. Seymour Chatman touches briefly on dual narration when he describes the “odd phenomenon” of “a character who is both object and mediator of our vision.” See his Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 160.

2. Paul Hernadi, “Dual Perspective in Prose Fiction,” Comparative Literature 25 (1972): 32-43.

3. Tania Modleski has argued persuasively that the narrative of Letter from an Unknown Woman still revolves largely around the male character whose reading of the letter frames the woman’s story. See her essay “Time and Desire in the Woman’s Film,” Cinema Journal 23.3 (1984): 19-30. My analysis of dual narration in this text is an attempt to provide an answer to her questions, “How are we to begin attempting to locate a feminine voice in texts which repress it and which, as . . . in Letter from an Unknown Woman, grant possession of the Word only to men?” (22).

4. The term “arranger” was first proposed by David Hayman to describe the controlling consciousness of Ulysses, a text so polyphonic as to be decentered in its narrative point of view. See David Hayman, Ulysses: the Mechanics of Meaning (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 70: “I use the term ‘arranger’ to designate a figure who can be identified neither with the author nor with his narrators, but who exercises an increasing degree of overt control over his increasingly challenging materials.”

5. George Bluestone, Novels into Film (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 336.

6. Christian Metz, “Current Problems in Film Theory: Christian Metz on Jean Mitry’s L’Esthétique et pyschologie du cinéma, II,” Screen 14.1-2 (1973): 69.

7. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 232-44.

8. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Notes sur la localisation et les déplacements du point de vue dans la description romanesque,” Revue des lettres modernes 5.36-38 (1958): 257.

9. Tzvetan Todorov, “Les Catégories du récit littéraire,” Communications 8 (1966): 141-43.

10. Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano ([1947] Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1965), 14.

11. I take my description of the classical Hollywood narrative from David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). See especially pages 156-204.

12. Nick Browne, “The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach,” in The Rhetoric of Filmic Narration (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), 12.

13. Bordwell, 231: “Through an emphasis on ‘character,’ the cinema could now achieve the seriousness of contemporary literature and drama, insofar as the latter were thought to portray modern man’s confrontation with a mysterious cosmos.”

14. Luis Buñuel, Tristana (script) in Avant-scène du cinéma 110 (1971).

15. See John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin, 1972), 54: “In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity.”

16. Bal argues that the narrator, being “that agent which utters the linguistic signs which constitute the text,” is impersonal. See Mieke Bal, Narratology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 120.

17. Berger, 47. See also Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary, eds., Women and the Cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), 412-28.

18. For an analysis of this “duplicitous narrative,” see Kristin Thompson, “The Duplicitous Text: An Analysis of ‘Stage Fright,’ ” Film Reader 2 (1977): 52-64.

19. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, De la littérature au cinéma; genèse d’une écriture (Paris: A. Colin, 1970), 131-32.

6. WOMEN AND FILM SPACE

1. Claudine Hermann, Les Voleuses de langue (Paris: Editions des femmes, 1976), 150.

2. I agree with Bruce Kawin’s view, presented in Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First Person Film (Princeton University Press, 1978), that “Persona is about film—its ‘own’ . . . awareness of being a film and Bergman’s awareness that he is making a film—as much as it is about the relationship between Alma and Elizabeth” (105-106). Similarly Susan Sontag states that “in Persona it is precisely language . . . which is in question.” See “Persona: The Film in Depth,” in Leo Braudy and Morris Dickstein, eds., Great Film Directors (New York: Oxford, 1978), 84. Kawin argues (127) that the boy in the prologue represents the artist, an opinion echoed by Frank Gado in The Films of lngmar Bergman (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 326.

3. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 92.

4. Birgitta Steene argues against using feminist criteria in evaluating Bergman’s treatment of women, since he seeks to “create his own subjective landscape . . . and to project, through his women characters, his own personal mythos.” See “Bergman’s Portrait of Women: Sexism or Suggestive Metaphor?” in Patricia Erens, ed., Sexual Strategems: The World of Women in Film (New York: Horizon Press, 1972), 96. I think it is important, nevertheless, to signal the presence of gender stereotypes no matter what the artist’s alibi for using them.

5. Here I should signal two recent readings of Persona, which, though different from the one offered here, are in agreement with me on this point. P. Adams Sitney has suggested a reading whereby Alma is the patient and Elizabeth the silent analyst. This pair in turn is the fantasy of the male adult subject, fictively represented as a child or adolescent by Elizabeth’s son and by the young boy of the prologue. The film would be Bergman’s expression of his “fear of psychoanalysis as a threat to creativity.” See P. Adams Sitney, “The Analytic Text: A Reading of Persona,” October 38 (1986): 113-30. Lucy Fischer considers that the cinematic apparatus itself functions as the object of desire in the film: “Persona is not only a film that, on a dramatic level, sees woman as mother, and mother as quintessential actress, but one that creates an image to literalize the Oedipal perspective on narrative and associate woman’s body with the cinematic apparatus.” Lucy Fischer, Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women’s Cinema (Princeton University Press, 1989), 80.

6. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 94-95.

7. Edward Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema (The Hague: Mouton, 1985), 123.

8. Previous writing on this film has focused on the relationship between the main protagonist and her roommate, who moves out to get married (the “girlfriends” of the title). See Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and the Cinema (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982); Rebecca A. Bailin, “Girlfriends: No Celebration of Female Bonding, “Jump Cut 20 (May 1979): 3; and Lucy Fischer, Shot/Countershot, 232-49.

9. Fischer, 242.

10. Stephen Heath, “Questions of Property: Film and Nationhood,” Ciné-Tracts 1.4 (1978): 3.

11. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 64: “The narrative space of film is today not simply a theoretical and practical actuality but is a crucial and political avant-garde problem. . . . a politically consequent materialism in film is not to be expressed as veering contact past internal content in order to proceed with ‘film and film’ but rather as a work on the constructions and relations of meaning and subject in a specific signifying practice in a given socio-historical situation.”

12. Since developing this concept I have come across Tania Modleski’s concurrent view that feminist criticism as a whole can be seen as “performative.” See Tania Modleski, “Some Functions of Feminist Criticism, of the Scandal of the Mute Body,” October 49 (1989): 3-24.

13. E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York: Methuen, 1983), 96.

14. See Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 33-50: “The value of thinking the deployment of the voice in the cinema by means of its relation to the body (that of the character; that of the spectator) lies in an understanding of the cinema . . . as a series of spaces including that of the spectator. . . . Whatever the arrangement of interpenetration of the various spaces, they constitute a place where signification intrudes. The various techniques and strategies for the deployment of the voice contribute heavily to the definition of the form that ‘place’ takes” (50).

15. Peter Handke, The Left-Handed Woman, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 40.

16. See E. Ann Kaplan, 99.

17. Tania Modleski, October 49 (Summer 1989): 18.

7. SCRIPTING CHILDREN’S MINDS

1. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-74), vol. 18, 1-64.

2. Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 169ff.

3. I am using the definition by André Jolles, according to whom a myth is the attempt to answer a question: “When the universe is created unto man by question and answer, a form arises, which we will call myth.” See his Formes simples (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 77-101. This is a translation of the 1930 German edition Einfache Formen.

4. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 58-63.

5. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1984): “As well as having form, plots must generate force: the force that makes the connection of incidents powerful, that shapes the confused material of a life into an intentional structure that in turn generates new insights about how life can be told” (282-83).

6. Piaget, 172.

7. Lawrence Kohlberg, “The Young Child as a Philosopher,” in Child Psychology and Childhood Education, ed. Lawrence Kohlberg (New York and London: Longman, 1987), 17.

8. Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982).

9. Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 1977).

10. Michael Patrick Hearn, ed., The Wizard of Oz: The Screenplay (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1989), 128.

11. Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey ([1932] New York: Delacorte Press/S. Lawrence, 1975), 153; and Contributions to Psychoanalysis 1921-1945 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1948), 212: “From the early identification with the mother in which the anal-sadistic level so largely preponderates, the little girl derives jealousy and hatred and forms a cruel super-ego after the maternal imago. . . . But the more the identification with the mother becomes stablized on a genital basis, the more it will be characterized by the devoted kindness of a bountiful mother-ideal.” See also 220n: “In both sexes the turning away from the mother as an oral love-object results from the oral frustrations undergone through her . . . the mother who frustrates persists in the child’s life as the mother who is feared.”

12. This thought is not absent from the consciousness of boys; Klein even relates the dream of a boy in which the negative mother-imago appears as a witch (Klein, Psychoanalysis of Children, 56). But the identification with the father makes for less of a traumatic separation, so that the negative mother image is less severe.

13. In the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud has described a patient’s dream in which going to the theater stands as a metaphor for getting married (Freud, vol. 16, 225). Dorothy’s loss of innocence as she sees “behind the scenes” must be swiftly covered up.

14. There are two competent psychoanalytic essays on the film. In Harvey Greenberg’s essay, the film is seen as an emblem of Dorothy’s rite of passage, “the death of her child self and the rebirth of a newer, lovelier Dorothy.” The Movies on Your Mind (New York: Dutton, 1975), 30. Daniel Dervin, who describes the film as a journey through various phallic symbols (the tornado, the skyline of Oz, the organ the wizard plays, the witch’s broomstick, and the film image) and breast symbols (all the screens, including the crystal balls, the window of the house in the tornado, and the film screen) problematizes Dorothy’s position somewhat by allowing that the message is “not very liberated.” Through a Freudian Lens Deeply. A Psychoanalysis of Cinema (Lawrence Erlbaum: Analytic Press, 1975), 63.

15. Melanie Klein, “Some Reflections on the Oresteia,” in Our Adult World and Other Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 51.

16. In the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud uses the term “coquetry” in describing the little girl’s attempt to seduce the father: “An affectionate attachment to her father, a need to get rid of her mother as superfluous and to take her place, a coquetry which already employs the methods of later womanhood—these offer a charming picture, especially in small girls, which makes us forget the possibly grave consequences lying behind this infantile situation.” Freud, vol. 16, 333.

17. Several women have written convincingly on the masquerade as a defense. Joan Riviere states that “to masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between oneself and one’s image.” See “Womanliness as Masquerade,” in Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek, ed., Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality (New Haven: College and University Press, 1966), 82. In Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which is Not One (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), the masquerade is described as “an alienated or false version of femininity arising from the woman’s awareness of the man’s desire for her to be his other . . . the masquerade permits woman to experience desire not in her own right but as the man’s desire situates her.” (Publisher’s note on selected terms, 220). Mary Ann Doane explains that “the very fact that we can speak of a woman ‘using’ her sex or ‘using’ her body for particular gains is highly significant—it is not that a man cannot use his body in this way but that he doesn’t have to.” See “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23.3-4 (1982): 82. Freud also states that the physical vanity of women is due to the circumstance that “they are bound to value their charms more highly as a late compensation for sexual inferiority.” See Freud, vol. 22, 132.

18. For an analysis of Baum’s The Wizard of Oz as a political allegory see Henry M. Littlefield, “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism,” American Quarterly 16.1 (1964): 47-58.

19. New York Times, 28 July 1986, natl. ed.: A10; 25 Oct. 1986, natl. ed.:Al; and 26 Oct. 1986, natl. ed.: A30.

20. There is no doubt that Freud held a gloomy view of the relations between men and women. Women identify with their mothers and thus become attractive to men whose Oedipus attachment to their own mother is transferred onto them; but a woman really loves only her child, who represents the penis she lacks. Freud concludes that “a man’s love and a woman’s are a phase apart psychologically.” See the essay on “Femininity,” Freud, vol. 22, 134.

21. Jeffrey Drezner, “E.T.: An Odyssey of Loss,” Psychoanalytic Review 70.2 (1983): 272.

22. Kohlberg, 36.

23. As Umberto Eco has pointed out, the quotation is a complicated one which only an adult and visually literate filmgoer, perhaps, can fully appreciate: “Nobody can enjoy the scene if he does not share, at least, the following elements of intertextual competence: (1) he must know where the second character comes from (Spielberg citing Lucas); (2) he must know something about the links among the two directors; (3) he must know that both monsters have been designed by Rambaldi and that, consequently, they are linked by some form of brotherhood.” See Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 197-211.

24. I take my observations on romanticism from the following: Marthe Robert, Origins of the Novel, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch ([1972] Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1980), 64-80; and René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 128-98.

25. Marthe Robert on the romantic hero as foundling: “As always, he rewrites his life in paradise because he finds life on earth unendurable; as always, he compensates for his humble condition by constructing an ideal kingdom out of nothing; and as always, he believes what he wants to believe and, thanks to his all-powerful imagination, proves the world’s inadequacy” (65).

26. Freud, vol. 18, 65-144 (“Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”) and vol. 19, 1-59 (“The Ego and the Id”).

27. On this topic, see Edgar Morin, Les Stars (Paris: Seuil, 1972).

28. Metz, 61.

8. THE MYTH OF THE PERFECT WOMAN

1. New York Times, 1:3, 20 Oct. 1985.

2. Michel Serres, “C’etait avant l’exposition (universelle),” in Harald Szeemann, ed., Junggesellenmaschinen/Machines Célibataires (Venice: Alfieri, 1975), 68-69.

3. André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema, trans. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 and 1971), vol. 1, 17-22.

4. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 53-61.

5. Michel Carrouges, Les machines célibataires (Paris: Chêne, 1976), 24: “Le mythe des machines célibataires signifie de fagon evidente l’empire simultané du machinisme et du monde de la terreur. “

6. To some extent, Marx’s mechanistic model can be blamed for his failure to anticipate that the first socialist revolution would occur in Russia, rather than in the industrialized European nations. See Paul Sweezy, “The Communist Manifesto after 100 Years,” in The Present as History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1953), 3-29.

7. Albert Cook has written the best account of the sexual mechanics of Duchamp’s La Mariée... and their import for modernity. See Albert Cook, “Marcel Duchamp’s Modification of Surrealism,” Stanford Literature Review 9 (1985): 127-45. A portion of Duchamp’s notes may be found in Lucy Lippard, ed., Dadas on Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971).

8. Cook, 129.

9. Cook, 136.

10. This is especially the case for L’Eve future. See Edgar Morin, Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire (Paris: Minuit, 1956), 50; Andre Bazin, 25; Annette Michelson, “On the Eve of the Future: The Reasonable Facsimile and the Philosophical Toy,” October 28 (1984): 3-20; and Raymond Bellour, “Ideal Hadaly,” Camera Obscura 15 (1986): 112-34. Of the Jules Verne text, Michel Carrouges says that it has “nothing to do with an anticipation of cinema.” See Michel Carrouges, “Mode d’emploi” in Les Machines célibataires (Venice: Alfieri, 1975), 36. I will be arguing that Verne’s fiction anticipates aspects of film spectatorship; Carrouges’s remarks are directed at the cinematic apparatus.

11. Villiers de l’lsle Adam, Eve of the Future Eden, trans. Marilyn Gaddis Rose (Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, 1981).

12. A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (1950): 433-60.

13. Villiers, 227.

14. We should not forget that Edison devised his prototype as a means of saving men from the rapaciousness of real women who masquerade themselves in order to prey on respectable men (“The man whose passions they arouse is a prey given up to every kind of enslavement. The women are fatally, blindly obeying an obscure satiation principle of their malign essence,” 127).

15. Ross Chambers, “L’Ange et l’automate; variations sur le mythe de l’actrice de Nerval a Proust,” Archives des lettres modernes 128 (1971): 3-80.

16. Villiers, 183-4.

17. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-74), vol. 11, 198. For a thorough analysis of Freud’s writings on women, see Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

18. Excellent discussions of Freud’s view of the feminine are to be found in Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23.3-4 (1982): 74-87; and Sarah Kofman, “Freud’s ‘Rhapsodic Supplement’ on Femininity,” Discourse 4 (1981-82): 37-73. See also Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade” in Hendrik M. Ruitenbeek, Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality (New Haven: College and University Press, 1966), 209-20.

19. “Faire de l’actrice notre ‘Muse’ c’est . . . nous declarer distancés d’une culture où nous ne voyons plus qu’un univers de signes, que nous regardons par conséquent au lieu de la vivre.” Chambers, 21.

20. “L’assomption iubilatoire de son image spéculaire par l’être encore plongé dans Timpuissance motrice et la dépendance du nourissage qu est le petit homme à ce stade infans, nous paraîtra dès lors manifester en une situation exemplaire la matrice symbolique ou le je se précipite en une forme primordiale.” Jacques Lacan, “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je,” Ecrits I (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), 90. The translation by Alan Sheridan does not make clear Lacan’s insistence on the male gendered child. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 2.

21. A discussion which I find particularly helpful is Stephen Heath’s “Difference,” Screen 19.3 (Autumn 1978): 50-112. For a more extensive treatment by film theorists of Lacanian psychology, see Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 30-34, and Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 149-93.

22. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers ([1972] New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 56. I have slightly changed the translation where clarification was needed.

23. Chambers, 10.

24. See the essay “Living Dolls and ‘Real Women’ ” by Frances Borzello, Annette Kuhn, Jill Pack, and Cassandra Wedd in Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 9-18.

25. Harald Szeeman, “Les Machines célibataires,” in Les Machines célibataires, 10.

26. “Now, for the first time, Nathanael caught sight of Olympia’s beautifully formed face. Only her eyes appeared to him curiously fixed and dead. But as he stared more and more intently through the glasses it seemed as though humid moonbeams were beginning to shine in Olympia’s eyes. It was as though the power of sight were only now awakening, the flame of life flickering more and more brightly.” E. T. A. Hoffman, The Tales of Hoffman, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1963), 21.

27. I am greatly indebted to Professor Stanley Cavell for these remarks on The Sandman. He has pointed out how, in the Hollywood melodrama, woman is born of the man’s look. For instance, in Blonde Venus, it is the man’s look which marks the beginning of the heroine’s story as a woman.

28. “A single look from her heavenly eyes expresses more than any earthly language,’’ Hoffman, 28. Nathanael experiences the ecstasy of communion with self.

29. Enno Patalas, “Metropolis, Scene 103,” trans. Miriam Hansen, Camera Obscura 15 (1986): 171.

30. Freud, vol. 21, 147-58.

31. Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (1985): 87-88.

32. Bazin vol. 1, 15.

33. Readers familiar with feminist film theory will realize that in discussing fetishism and sadism I take my inspiration from Laura Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 6-18.

34. Heath, “Difference,” 92.

35. Miriam Hansen, “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship,” Cinema Journal 25: 4 (1986), 11.

36. Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks” in Mary Ann Doane, et al., ed., Re-Vision (Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1984), 83-99.

37. Mary Ann Doane, “The ‘Woman’s Film’: Possession and Address,” in Re-Vision 70. See also Mary Ann Doane, “The Clinical Eye: Medical Discourses in the ‘Women’s Film’ of the 1940’s,” in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 152-74.

38. This particularly apt expression is one that Professor Stanley Cavell used in his graduate seminar in philosophy at Harvard University in 1985. I am greatly indebted to Mr. Cavell and to the other members of the seminar for the opportunity to discuss some of the ideas presented here.

39. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 14-15.

40. Harvard and Radcliffe College Class of 1968; Fifteenth Anniversary Report (Ward Hill, Mass.: DBL Company, 1983), passim.

41. Umberto Eco tries to distinguish between “common frames” related to real world experiences and “intertextual frames” derived from previous experiences with texts. The common frame of a train robbery would differ, he argues, from the intertextual frame established in films (Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979], 21-22). But in fact, this amounts to what Jerome Bruner calls the “naive realist” position—the assumption that there is anything primary about “real” experience. See Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 98, and Nelson Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 37ff.

42. Roger C. Schank, The Cognitive Computer: On Language, Learning, and Artificial Intelligence (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1984), 114.

43. Serres, 69.

44. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 157.

45. Gertude Koch, “Why Women Go to Men’s Films,” in Gisela Ecker, ed., Feminist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 144-45.

46. “Comme, dans une apothéose de théâtre, un plissement de la robe de la fée, un tremblement de son petit doigt, denoncent la presence matérielle d’une actrice vivante, la ou nous étions incertains si nous n’avions pas devant les yeux une simple projection lumineuse.” Marcel Proust, A La Recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade Edition, 1954), vol. 1, 175. The translation is by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. See Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way ([1923] London: Chatto & Windus,. 1973), 241.

47. Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 10.

48. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). The relevant passages read: “Struck by the reality character of the resultant images, the spectator cannot help reacting to them as he would to the material aspects of nature in the raw which these photographic images reproduce. . . . It is as if they urged him through their sheer presence unthinkingly to assimilate their indeterminate and often amorphous patterns. . . . The film renders the world in motion . . . the sight of it seems to have a ‘resonance effect,’ provoking in the spectator such kinesthetic responses as muscular reflexes, motor impulses, or the like. In any case, objective movement acts as a physiological stimulus” (158).

49. I am indebted to Morgan Ryan, who was my student at Duke University in 1982, for the original concept of “tactile communication” in film. Ryan suggests that these shots constitute a “visual carving” of reality, a term that has an affinity with Kracauer’s “resonance effect.”

CONCLUSION

1. Philippe Sollers, Writing and the Experience of Limits, ed. David Hayman and trans. Philip Barnard with David Hayman (New York: Columbia, 1983), 200.

2. Norine Voss, “ ‘Saying the Unsayable’: An Introduction to Women’s Autobiography,” in Judith Specter, ed., Gender Studies: New Directions in Feminist Criticism (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986), 218-33.

3. Gertrud Koch, “Why Women Go to Men’s Films,” in Gisela Ecker, ed., Feminist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 112.

4. Mark Gerzon, A Choice of Heroes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).

5. Silvia Bovenshen, “Is There a Feminist Aesthetic?” in Feminist Aesthetic, 39.

6. Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), xxii.

7. On this point, see the discussion between Helen Fehervary, Claudia Lenssen, and Judith Mayne, “From Hitler to Hepburn: A Discussion of Women’s Film Production and Reception,” New German Critique 24-5 (1981-2): 172-85. As this book went to press, I became aware of Elfi Mikesch’s and Monika Treut’s The Virgin Machine (1988), a film that answers to many of the points I am raising here. Dorotee, an East German journalist who travels to the United States to research a story on romantic love, is permitted the full exploration of the film’s diegetic space. In San Francisco she falls victim to Ramona, the star of a “for women only” strip show, who performs in male drag. The strip scene wittily complicates cinematic voyeurism by showing the performer’s playful oscillation between her male impersonation and her female persona, and by portraying the reactions of the women spectators. The tryst between Ramona and Dorotee ends badly, as Ramona demands payment for the night they have spent together. The sexual politics of the “bachelor machine” is thus extended beyond its traditional heterosexual confines. On this topic, see also Celeste Fraser, “No Faking: New Feminist Works on Spectatorship, Pleasure, and the Female Body,” The Independent 13.6 (1990): 26-30.

8. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 138-39. See also Mary Crawford and Roger Chaffin, “Cognitive Research on Gender and Comprehension,” in Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, eds., Gender and Reading (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 3-30.

9. Joanne S. Frye, Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel of Contemporary Experience (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986), 197-98.

10. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 64.