“Breaking the Frame”
Rarely, in films made by men, do we get to know what the women characters are thinking and feeling. Having made that provocative statement, let me at once mention two exceptions. Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, 1952) portrays the unlucky existence of a well-born girl in seventeeth-century Japan, who in the course of a lifetime goes from court society to prostitution and begging (Figs. 19-21). In one of the pivotal shots of the film, Oharu has just been bought back by her parents from being a Shimabara courtesan. Stopping with her mother near a temple on the way home, she is drawn to the song of a beggar-woman who plays outside. Oharu, who has lived both at the Imperial Court and the palace of the Matsudaira Clan, recognizes the song as a court song, and learns that the beggar-woman shares a fate similar to her own—she also used to be a famous courtesan. In a beautifully framed shot, Mizoguchi shows Oharu reflecting on this coincidence. In the foreground, the beggar-woman sits with her back against a pillar of the temple. Slightly to the left of her, Oharu stands against the same pillar, which, with its companion off to screen left, also serves to frame her mother in the background.
In this one shot Mizoguchi sums up Oharu’s life, past, present, and future; what is more, he shows us Oharu’s realization of the meaning of her past and foreboding of the future. For Oharu has been a mother—she was sold to the Matsudaira Clan as a concubine in order to produce an heir—and like her own mother, she is cut off from her child. As it happens, this is to be the last time mother and daughter are together until they are both old women. And Oharu will be a beggar; it is as a beggar that she later gets the first glimpse of her child, now ten years old, who happens to stop in front of the temple where she is playing music. Mizoguchi’s striking shot turns both forward and back, binding the film into a coherent statement about Oharu as individual and as type—as woman—whose fate is shared by others. But most importantly of all, in portraying Oharu’s sympathy for the figure she will soon become, Mizoguchi encourages the spectator’s identification with Oharu by using Oharu herself as surrogate for that spectator. In this shot, narrator and character speak as one.
Cut to Imperial Vienna, near the turn of the century. In Letter from an Unknown Woman (1958), Max Ophuls has created a mise-en-scène in which a man, on the eve of fighting a duel with the wronged husband of one of his mistresses, comes home to discover a letter from the woman in question. In reading the letter, he comes to see his whole life in a new light. Lisa outlines for him her childhood years, when she lived downstairs from him (Fig. 22), and two nights when he made love to her, once as a young woman, and later as a married woman. He had never recognized her as the same woman, and had never known the son she bore him. For Sebastian to read this letter, however, is to lose his life: reading it prevents him from getting away on time and thus avoiding the fatal duel with her husband (Fig. 23). Never has the compelling power of story-telling been more strongly stated! Lisa is a death-dealing Scheherazade who is in the position of telling her lover the unknown story of his own life. And, like Oharu, Lisa has been unable to speak out against the male world which has decreed her own lack of self-determination.
What is the story, from her point of view? Like Mizoguchi’s, Ophuls’s story turns on a pivotal shot in which character and narrator are fused into a compelling picture of past and future. As a young girl, Lisa was forced by her mother’s remarriage to move to Graz, away from the Vienna flat which was just one floor away from Sebastian’s. The impending departure brings to a crisis all her unavowed feelings for him, so she escapes from the train station where her mother and stepfather are waiting and runs back to hide on the stairs just above his flat and await his return. But when he does return, it is in the company of another woman. From her position on the stairway, she is the agonized witness of his progress up the winding staircase with the woman who blocks her from breaking her silence. As spectators, we know that she wishes herself in that woman’s place.
When she reaches a marriageable age, Lisa returns to Vienna and posts herself outside the building Sebastian occupies until he finally notices her. She is careful not to tell him too much about herself, and she knows him well enough to hope that he will call up the usual script and take her home this time. This is in fact what happens; Sebastian calls off his rehearsal and his rendezvous with another woman to escort his new conquest first to dinner, then to a fairgrounds (Fig. 24) and dance hall, and finally to his flat. As Lisa and Sebastian ascend the stairs, the camera watches from the very position where young Lisa stood in agony a few years before. Again, the perspective of the third-person camera narrator and the character are fused as the spectator realizes that Lisa’s alter ego also watches from that position, triumphing in her success. Yet, although able on the one hand to identify with Lisa’s happiness, the spectator also identifies with the third-person narrator and knows that she is no different from the others, as far as Sebastian is concerned.1 In a future moment, Lisa will again ascend the staircase to find herself betrayed by herself, as Sebastian tries to seduce her without recognizing her as the woman he has known before (yet ironically, each time he meets her he uses the same line: “I feel I’ve seen you somewhere before”).
Two moments in two films, both depending on repetition to give us the feeling of being simultaneously inside and outside a character; on the one hand this repetition links us with her past, showing the present through her eyes, the eyes of one already experienced with the world; on the other hand it looks toward her future, so that we know more than she does about the pattern being insidiously woven around her.
The two shots described above are instances of the “dual narrative mode” in which the authority of the film narrator is for a moment suspended; the narrator says what the character means.2 This is one technique film directors have at their disposal to let us know what a character thinks and feels.3
DUAL NARRATION
Like literary narratives, film fictions are told. Because the overall story of a film includes sounds, music, and dialogue as well as images, I have said that it is convenient to think of the storyteller as an “arranger,” that is as the agency responsible for the final arrangement of all these elements into the whole. On both the image and sound tracks, the arranger is responsible for what is seen and heard and how the images and sounds are put together.4
Having said this, I should note that the similarity between literary and film narratives, particularly in the area of the portrayal of a character’s subjective thoughts and feelings, is in some dispute. In Novels into Film, George Bluestone comments: “With the abandonment of language as its sole and primary element, the film necessarily leaves behind those characteristic contents of thought which only language can approximate, tropes, dreams, memories, conceptual consciousness.”5 Christian Metz has asserted that the cinema “lags behind verbal language in portraying interiority, dislocations in point of view, temporal ellipses, the capacity to abstract, metaphor, the range of more or less figurative meanings, etc., and finally in the ability to analyze proper.”6
The problem, as Siegfried Kracauer notes, is to find physical correspondences for the mental continuum.7 The peculiarity of film language is that our understanding arises out of our perception of sounds and images. The editing may guide this understanding to some degree; but the selection of sounds and images by the arranger does so also. A fiction film does not denote except by connotation, because it presents a “pseudo-world” especially created to produce an effect on the spectator. There are no fixed meanings to the images and sounds of a film; they are organized for the spectator according to strategies of coherence.
One of those strategies is that of controlling point of view. As the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet astutely noted, the film shot always implies a point of view: it must always be taken from somewhere.8 This means that, in addition to the arranger, we must posit a narrator whose point of view, in most instances, is revealed by the camera.
In film, the narrator-presence is revealed by the point of view from which the story is being presented at any one moment of the narrative. Some literary parameters apply also to film. For instance, Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out that the literary narrator knows either more, less, or as much as his or her character(s). Todorov calls these three positions unfocalized, externally focalized, and internally focalized, respectively.9 The film narrator can assume any of these three positions. In the dual mode, the narrator temporarily suspends omniscience in order to limit itself to the character’s thoughts, perceptions, or feelings, while at the same time maintaining an ironic distance from the character; while saying more than the character knows, the narrator implies what the character thinks, thus partially identifying with the point of view of the character.
The dual narrative mode is an important means of encouraging the spectator’s identification with the character, since the tendency of point-of-view shots to determine our sympathy and identification is so strong that it is almost impossible to resist on intellectual grounds. To cite a recent example, in Wolfgang Peterson’s Das Boot (1982), we identify with the Germans who are trying to slip through the English defenses at Gibraltar because the camera espouses the point of view of the Germans inside the ship; the spectator is made to feel his or her way into the space of the German submarine. Thus our sympathies are all on the German side while watching the film, even if objectively we don’t wish that Germany had won World War II.
An example from a literary work may serve to clarify how instances of dual narration can be identified. In the following passage from Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, I have italicized the passage presented in the dual mode (in order to avoid confusion, the term “amour propre” in the second sentence is set in Roman type rather than the author’s italics):
By the time he reached the Palace the sun had set. In spite of his amour propre he immediately regretted having come. The broken pink pillars, in the half-light, might have been waiting to fall down on him: the pool, covered with green scum, its steps torn away and hanging by one rotting clamp, to close over his head. The shattered evil-smelling chapel, overgrown with weeds, the crumbling walls, splashed with urine, on which scorpions lurked—wrecked entablature, sad archivolt, slippery stones covered with excreta—this place, where love had once brooded, seemed part of a nightmare. And Laruelle was tired of nightmares. 10
In literature, the first-person can be substituted for the third-person pronoun in a passage written in the dual mode without any loss of coherence. In order for the dual situation to be perceived in cinema, a film must first set up a norm and then depart from it in a way that makes it clear the departure is occasioned by the perceptual or emotional input of the character. Hollywood films as well as “art cinema” films have used this technique in order to portray the feelings of their characters.
In classical Hollywood narrative, the spatial cues are carefully delineated so that the spectator is never disoriented. The narrator is effaced in the sense that the spectator is invited to imagine him or herself into the diegetic space and to forget that the story is actually happening on a two-dimensional screen and being presented from a limited point of view.11 The dual narrative situation is relatively rare because it breaks with the third-person, omniscient narration that is characteristic of this style. Hitchcock is one director who uses the technique occasionally to heighten the spectator’s identification with a character in a dangerous situation. In a sequence of North by Northwest (1959), for instance, Hitchcock moves his camera slightly to the left of the cornfield where Cary Grant is hiding from the attack plane, and somewhat closer to the ground than in the previous shots. Even though the shot in question is not strictly from Grant’s point of view (the shot is not from within the cornfield), the low angle shows us how he feels about the attack because the plane, from this angle, bears down menacingly. Because of this shot we identify with Grant rather than with the pilot, whose thoughts and feelings are not conveyed to us.
An understanding of how the dual narrative mode functions can simplify some apparently complicated moments in classical cinema. In a well-known article about Stagecoach (1939), Nick Browne focuses on the scene in which Dallas, the prostitute who has been run out of town, finds herself seated uncomfortably at table with Lucy, a respectable married woman. Browne argues that all the shots in the sequence can either be attributed to Lucy’s point of view (“series A”) or to an objective respresentation of Lucy’s social dominance and formal privilege (“series B”). Yet he notes that while Lucy is established as the center of spatial legibility in the sequence, the spectator, surprisingly, identifies with Dallas rather than Lucy. Accounting for this forces Browne to postulate a divided consciousness in the spectator (“evidently, a spectator is several places at once—with the fictional viewer, with the viewed, and at the same time in a position to evaluate and respond to the claims of each”).12
Matters can be greatly simplified by reading the “series B” shots as instances of dual narration that represents a fusion of Dallas’s sensibility with that of the narrator. The identification of the viewer with the narrating voice is thereby maintained. The shots of “series B” that are taken from a position that Dallas could not literally occupy function in the same way as similar shots in North by Northwest; they show how the Dallas character feels about Lucy’s disdain for her. Positing the dual narrative mode removes the necessity for Browne’s questionable claim that in this sequence we manage to identify with the characters rather than with the point of view of the camera.
The dual narrative mode is frequent in European art-cinema narration. Here the conditions are ideal because of the presence of a strongly defined camera narrator. Directors such as Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni, and François Truffaut, for example, eschew the self-effacement of the classical Hollywood style. At the same time, art cinema films place an emphasis on character and individual experience.13 With both halves of the dual narrative situation so clearly marked, the technique is relatively easy to achieve. Buñuel uses it in Tristana to strengthen our identification with the heroine, by allowing us to supply a subjective thought which is not spelled out in the narration.
Tristana is divided into four parts, each of which is separated in diegetic time by a period of two years. From one part to the next, the relationship between the narrator and the main character changes. Overall, the movement is from unfocalized (part one) to internally focalized (part two) to externally focalized (parts three and four) and back to internally focalized narration (end of part four). Dual narration is strongest in part two and at the end of part four.
The narrator’s self-dramatization makes it possible to identify the dual narrative situations that occur later. The opening shot of Toledo shows the belltower of a church in the background, prefiguring a dream that the heroine has later. Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) and her maid Saturna are shown walking toward the camera; at the end of the film they will walk away from the camera in a continuation of the same sequence. Thus the narrator announces its presence by framing the story within a single sequence. The narrator’s presence is also foregrounded in the way that the principal male character is introduced. Don Lope (played by Fernando Rey) is mentioned in a conversation on the playing field, whereupon the camera cuts to a brief scene where he is discovered flirting with a young woman.
Throughout the first part of the film, Tristana is kept at a distance. At the same time, one-half of the scenes end with the focus on the heroine. For instance, when she has a nightmare, Don Lope comes in to see what is the matter. As he leaves, the camera remains with Tristana who watches him walk away. A visit to the bell tower focuses on Tristana’s look as she ascends the stairs (Fig. 25). A dinner scene where she inexplicably cries while Don Lope and Saturna talk about her ends with the camera focused on her; even the sequence of Don Lope talking to his male friends in the café ends with a shot of Tristana. By the end of part one, she has become the focal character of the film. Yet the narrator still retains its superiority and distance—it knows more than she does. This is shown in the very scene which would appear most subjective: the heroine’s dream, in which Don Lope’s head appears swinging in the bell of the belltower just mentioned. The dream prefigures her ultimate revolt against this relative who turns her into his mistress. At this stage the heroine does not yet understand the meaning of her own unconscious thoughts.
It is in part two that a type of dual narration occurs, bringing the spectator closer to the heroine’s thoughts and feelings. In one such sequence, Tristana is at a table in front of a plate of chickpeas. The script reads: “She picks up two of them and places them on the tablecloth. She looks from one to the other. We are made to understand tht she is trying to choose between them. Closeup shot of the two chickpeas. The hand of Tristana hesitates over one and then the other chickpea. In the end she takes one of them. Forward tracking shot toward Tristana. She chews it slowly with a certain satisfaction.”14 The possibility of conveying thought with this sequence has been prepared previously when Tristana says that she often amuses herself in trying to choose between things which look alike. This apparently insignificant subjective moment prepares us for Tristana’s later hesitation at calling the doctor after her uncle’s heart attack. She decides not to and he dies.
Jean-Luc Godard used the dual narative mode in Vivre sa vie in order to facilitate the viewer’s identification with his character Nana (Fig. 26). At one point Nana sits in a café writing a job application to a house of prostitution. The camera records in closeup the forming of each letter, intercut with one shot in which she sits thinking, and another where she stands up and measures herself. The dual situation arises from the intimate, closed space created by the subjective view of the letter she is writing; the spectator is literally “looking over her shoulder.” That space is suddenly invaded by Raoul’s hand, who covers the writing (Figs. 27-28). In the rest of the film, he will literally “blot her out.” What we have seen is her last moment of privacy.
The fact that dual narration plays such an important role in identification gives a clue as to why it so seldom occurs with women characters: for films seldom allow the spectator any depth of identification with a woman. Instead, the female star is most often offered to the spectator as an object to be looked at—her makeup, the lighting used to enhance her features, and even her traditionally passive role in the plot contribute to making her an object for visual consumption. This way of presenting women is a tradition of Western art and presupposes a male spectator.15 Films that conform to this tradition tacitly put into place both an arranger and a third-person camera narrator that the spectator assumes to be male. As I will show in the next chapter, some filmmakers have managed to make films that assume a female arranger. Consequently, I will use “he” or “she” when speaking of this narrating agency. For the cameranarrator, I prefer the impersonal “it” proposed by Mieke Bal.16
As the point and focus for the voyeuristic spectacle of cinema, the male spectator identifies with the cinematic apparatus that subjects the woman to its ideological deformation, thus reaffirming man’s traditional exercise of power over women, who become the bearers of his look. For the woman spectator, the glamorized presentation of the female star may release a desire to be the star, to take the place of the screen presence that receives the homage of the male viewer as well as that of the male characters in the story. As in the case of the male viewer, this process reflects a social reality: “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision—a sight. “17
In addition to the visual presentation of the character on film (something we might call the “screen character”), one can also speak of his or her actions in the narration; to this end, we might speak of the “diegetic character.” It is this diegetic character who may become the focus for dual narration. Because the “diegetic character” of the male star is more rounded, the man who identifies with his male counterpart will find his active, dominant role in society reinforced. If he mimics the star later in his daily life, it will make it easier for him to play the role traditionally assigned to him by society. By contrast, the “diegetic character” of the woman is often seriously underdeveloped: she is defined by what men think of her and how they treat her, the camera rarely espouses her point of view, and the narrator almost never shares the responsibility for telling the story with her in the dual narrative situation. A woman who identifies with and mimics a female star condemns herself to portraying a flat “screen character”—a visual spectacle without an active role. For this reason, the dual narrative mode, which does develop women as rounded “diegetic characters,” is an important device.
METADIEGESIS
Occasionally in film the story (or part of it) will be told by a woman character. Here, if anywhere, we might expect to see the world through a woman’s eyes. But in practice it is very hard to mark a narrative so that it remains subjective; careful reading usually reveals that in these so-called metadiegetic narratives many of the camera shots show things that the narrating character couldn’t have seen or couldn’t have perceived from that angle. Hitchcock plays on this in Stage Fright (1950), where he counts on the spectator’s forgetting that the initial story of the murder is in fact an alibi narrative, told (as it turns out) by the murderer himself.18 Letter from an Unknown Woman and The Life of Oharu are both stories that are marked at the outset as being told by women (through a letter and memories respectively), yet the subjective view is not maintained in the course of the film; indeed, this is what makes the use of the dual narrative mode possible.
The lack of film narratives that are clearly marked as stories told by women is striking, given the abundance, in mainstream twentieth century literature, of inner landscapes of the feminine psyche. I am thinking in particular of Faulkner’s (The Sound and the Fury), Joyce’s (Ulysses), and Woolf’s (Mrs. Dalloway). In film one of the few equivalent examples is Resnais’s and Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour.
Although the story in this film is not told consistently from the woman character’s point of view, significant metadiegetic portions are anchored in the woman character as narrator. Hiroshima mon amour portrays the love affair in Hiroshima between Riva, a French actress, and Okada, a Japanese architect. She has come to Hiroshima fourteen years after the war (the bomb) to act in a film on peace; she meets him the day before her departure, and in the few hours remaining to them they reach an understanding of themselves and of their historical past, both personal and national. One of Resnais’s recurrent themes is that history must be lived subjectively to be felt and remembered: Okada can thus reproach Riva with “You saw nothing at Hiroshima” even though she has visited the museums, the hospitals, and the war memorials. In this film, seeing becomes a metaphor for understanding; the status of the film image thereby becomes foregrounded, actively challenging the interpretive capacities of the film spectator.
The process of reaching understanding—of seeing—begins as Riva, who has gotten up and stands on the terrace of her hotel room, looks back at Okada lying on the bed. Abruptly the point-of-view shifts to a shot of Okada’s arm, followed by a subjective shot of the arm of Riva’s German lover of fourteen years before as he lay dying in a pool of blood. This lapse into metadiegetic narration lasts only for a brief moment—a moment that, however, initiates the double temporal strand of the film that will begin to unwind under the pressing questions of Okada.
For Riva, past and present come together in the bar where Okada stimulates her memory with alcohol and leading questions. As Riva delves deeper and deeper into her past all diegetic (realistic) sound from the bar is excluded, except for the sound of their voices. The soundtrack itself is presented from the point of view of Riva, whose concentration on her story blots out all surrounding noise. Gradually the voices of Riva and Okada become a voice-over for images from Riva’s past affair with the German soldier, presented first in flashes and then with increasing clarity. These images are clearly from her point of view, yet the sound of her narrating voice, and of Okada’s prompting, remains anchored in the present; the intrusion of sound from the past is limited to a single scream as she recounts coming home after being shorn of her hair by the village authorities. On the other hand the absence of other realistic sound from the bar where Riva sits telling her story and the fact that she addresses Okada as though he were her dead German lover (“I loved blood ever since I had tasted yours”) clearly establish Riva as the narrator. The third-person narrator takes over the story again at the point when Okada slaps her to wake her up from her immersion in the past. At this point the realistic sound from the bar returns. This recovery of sound perfectly corresponds to her own description of her recovery from madness during the war: “At six o’clock in the evening, the cathedral of St. Etienne rings, in summer as in winter. One day, it is true, I can hear it . . . I start to see again. I remember having been able to see before—while we were lovers, while we were happy.” This parallelism implicity suggests that her telling the story to Okada is a kind of cure.
Later, in her hotel room, Riva reproaches herself for having debased her love with the German soldier by putting it into narrative form. Riva looks at her reflection in the mirror; although her lips do not move, her voice accuses her in a metadiegetic voice-over: “I told our story. You see, it could be told.” Metadiegetic sound continues as she walks through the street, with Okada following a certain distance behind while the camera cuts between traveling shots down the streets of Hiroshima to traveling shots down the streets of Nevers. In a cadenced voice-over that anchors this cross-cutting to her internal thoughts, she makes the parallel between love and death that the two cities, Nevers and Hiroshima, have come to signify for her: “I was waiting for you calmly, with boundless impatience. Devour me. Deform me to your image so that no one else, after you, will understand at all the reason for so much desire. A time will come. In which we will no longer be capable of naming that which will unite us. The name will be effaced from our memory. And then, it will disappear altogether.”
By focusing on a woman protagonist, Hiroshima mon amour contributes much to our identification with the historical experience of women. We gain a greater understanding of what it means to be passive, in love as in war, to be the one who waits. Resnais has achieved this in part by a narrative structure that skillfully represents the heroine’s subjective experience of time. The French critic Marie-Claire Ropars has argued that this portrayal of “lived time” (temps vécu) brings cinema closer to the novel: “By observing the different ways in which people pass through time, we become witnesses to the different ways that time passes over them.”19 But Riva’s transgression is also a transgression of space. In Nevers, Riva’s appropriation of the space in which she meets her German lover is finally punished by the authorities for whom such freedom is a transgression. In Hiroshima, the streets become another labyrinth that echoes the imprisoning streets of Nevers. In the next chapter, some of the implications of that spatial transgression will be discussed in more detail.
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