Thriller (1979) and The Gold Diggers (1983) by Sally Potter and The Man Who Envied Women (1986) by Yvonne Rainer “fiction politics” within the “historical truth” of personal experience and the “political reality” of feminist film theory. Unlike the makers of much of the previous work I have analyzed, these artists—dancers, performers turned directors—influenced by the history of avant-garde work, grappled directly with contemporary theory, one overt frame for their films. Their participation in the theory debates was literal: for personal example, Thriller was shown and discussed by Potter in 1980 at “Cinema and Film: Conditions of Presence”; Rainer delivered a version of the script for The Man Who Envied Women at “Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices II.”

While the styles of these films are different, they are united through the common thread of female subjectivity invoked by enunciation which is theoretical, personal, multiple. Unlike the simple binarism which sets avant-garde films against commercial narrative films, these films weave the tenets of avant-garde into a dialectic with classical and modernist conventions of representation. Because this work is simultaneously highly theoretical and deeply personal, I will digress to the biographical.

On an Aeroflot flight from Tblisi to Moscow, Potter and I discovered a common history in avant-garde film, performance, and the movies.³ In different contexts, across the theory-practice divide and two continents, we had been influenced by the same work—an eclectic, asystematic mix of mass culture, art, and theory, from the Marx Brothers to Snow, Godard, and Freud.

Potter left school at fifteen, having known at fourteen, through making super 8mm films, that she wanted to be a film director. With her mother and grandmother, a music hall performer, she had attended films at a revival house, Everyman’s Cinema, seeing hundreds of films ranging from Duck Soup to Last Year at Marienbad. (An aside: at this point in our conversation, Delphine Seyrig, who had also attended the congress and was sitting across the aisle, looked over, materializing the signifier, the imaginary woman as real activist.) Potter attended St. Martins for one year, studying performance, not film, where she was influenced by Tom Osborne’s Group Event, a “happenings” group which was improvisational, minimalist. She took classes in dance at night, “learning to be, think, act, synchronously, in the present,” learning to recognize the difference between truth and artifice in performance, learning, in essence, how to direct as well as perform. When she was eighteen, she saw the films of Snow, Warhol, Wieland, and others made by the U.S. and Canadian avant-garde at the Drury Lane, a tiny theater with mattresses and a movie screen. At a Cine-Club in Bristol, she saw early Soviet cinema and surrealist films, and particularly remembers her first screening of Un Chien Andalou.

She joined the London Filmmaker’s Cooperative; although there were very few women, she was not then conscious of its “male-centeredness.” She was interested in “expanded cinema” with multiple projections and live performance. Along with seeing classical opera, ballet, and theatre, she attended the National Film Theatre and Underground Film Festivals, watching German pornography on the same bill with Kubelka’s films (pornography and avant-garde were strangely elided in the 1960s). Two of her performances which included film, live action, and split screens were The Building and Play; she also performed in others’ work and toured.

Potter continued to study dance and choreography—appreciating the discipline, the physical labor, the absolute standards after the previous chaos of her life. For her, dance was about gaining strength, learning to take risks, exposing oneself to humiliation, embarrassment. To be exposed, one needed strength and flexibility, of mind and body. The means of production were simple, and she could produce much work. However, she pointed out that London was not as supportive of dance performance as New York; there were no critics like Jill Johnston and few funding sources, to say nothing of artistic respectability. The conditions of performers or musicians like Meredith Monk in New York were missing in London. Emergent from this conversation were Potter’s resourcefulness, her self-taught determination, her physical and intellectual strength—refusing the position of victim or defeatism. For her, anything is possible; there is great pleasure in making something from limited resources, in circumventing constraints.

In 1970, she attended her first women’s meeting at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and became “totally excited” about reading Germaine Greer, The Second Sex, and Freud, “which all, immediately, made sense.” During this time, she also performed and toured with FIG, a Feminist Improvising Group which was “very professional, playing major jazz festivals around Europe” with Lindsay Cooper, her collaborator. She continued to stage performances, and began her collaboration with Rose English. In 1976, she attended weekend film conferences which had begun to engage issues of theory: Brecht and realism, psychoanalysis, ideology, and feminism. Although having read psychoanalysis sporadically, she was an active and resourceful participant. Her knowledge and study of theory were eclectic, self-taught, her motto being “the primacy of thought rather than theory,” discovering ideas through work rather than the work merely replicating theory.

One significant means of discovery for Potter is what she calls “political psychotherapy”; “psychotherapeutic counseling” is peer counseling, informed by psychoanalysis, in which the roles of analyst and analysand continue to reverse and function without hierarchy. In her group, they paid attention to emotions, gender, race, class, as well as the politics of family—very different concerns from classical Freudian psychoanalysis (in practice and in film theory), a hierarchically structured one-way street. Perhaps because of this group logic of shared expertise, Thriller outruns even feminist theory in 1979. The rhetorical strategy of Thriller, its shifting enunciation in which participants are both analyst and analysand, critic and performer, is rather like group therapy, which is a collective process of role traversals and mutual identifications. Another explanation for the acuity of the film’s insight is Potter’s intense and constant scrutiny of herself and her experiences, looking within the “personal historical” for social answers.

In 1976 and 1977, she became involved in the politics of housing. She had moved to a building in Holburn that was formerly a sweat shop, and had received a grant of three thousand pounds from the British Arts Council for her on-site, ambitious, spectacular performances, which attracted quite a following. Potter has lived on her art since 1974, holding no other jobs but struggling with many separate roles, a plethora of talents—musician, dancer, choreographer, director, activist, entertainer, and theorist. Thriller brought all the strands together. In many ways, it summarizes her intellectual and artistic concerns—avant-garde film, commercial cinema, classical ballet and modern dance, classical and “new” music, acting and performance, psychoanalysis in film theory and in group therapy, and, critically, the women’s movement and feminist theory. While Potter’s history is linked to the avant-garde, she also sees herself as an entertainer, identifying with the history and forms of show business. As she says, “nothing less than everything will do.”

Thriller was funded with an Arts Council grant for one thousand pounds; it was shot in the Holburn attic while she lived on the floor below, illegally—the building was the site of history and of her present politics. Potter did everything, with her friends and collaborators, Rose English, Lindsay Cooper, and Collette Laffont, shooting on odd days over a two-week period and editing for six months on what she describes as a chaotic system that would have baffled a professional. The voice-over was added near the end; after the initial screening in London, the film was substantially re-edited for Edinburgh, where it was a huge success.

Thriller, informed by “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Claire Johnston’s writing, and other feminist texts, begins where Meshes and La Boheme end: the screen is black, Mimi is already dead, and we hear the deathly, beautiful aria from La Boheme; Thriller opens with the opera’s climax. After a shot of Collette Laffont in a loft, reading a book and laughing, she sits in medium to close-up in front of a mirror in freeze frame—two recurring scenes which question the validity of theory for women—and poses the critical question in voice-over—a voice which is, however, with and for the audience, in a dialogue: “I’m trying to remember, to understand. There were some bodies on the floor. One of them is mine. Did I die? Was I murdered? If so . . . who killed me and why?” Like Ariadne, Potter gently and archly lays out a guiding thread, or better, takes our hand, leading us through the film’s meticulously crafted argument. Laffont looks in the mirror, at herself, at other women, at La Boheme, and at women’s history for an answer.

Like de Lauretis in “Desire in Narrative,” Potter investigates Oedipus—the myth of romanticism, the story of art staged by various classic texts: opera, ballet, cinema. The film breaks into that sacred narrative by interrupting the smooth flow of representation—halting it, freezing it, repeating it, returning to the scene of the crime. Potter creates an alternate memory, one that is not criminal or self-serving, by inscribing in the present what was missing from the past—women’s voice and point of view. She revises and then rewrites the classical text.

There are two scenes of the crime—one is classical, the other avant-garde; the first is staged and sung, the second improvised (performed) and danced: La Boheme is represented by still photographs of a London performance of the opera, with snatches of the score on the sound track; the remake or revision is a modern performance in a barren loft which shifts from freeze frames to briefly moving images of the modern performers, with bits of new music by Cooper and Bernard Herrmann’s score from Psycho. The voice-over of Laffont, as if looking at the scenes with us, interrogates the still photographs, wondering what went on in the artist’s garret of La Boheme, while the avant-garde restaging and historical photographs of old seamstresses are intercut in a dialectic of reconstruction. The avant-garde derails the classical in a tale told from Mimi’s point of view, which becomes ours. The dominant terms of vision and voice, of active and passive, of subject and object are reversed, granting another pleasure, forging another subjectivity—a tale told by, about, for, and with women. “What if I had been the hero?” is the central question.

Fiction and history merge. Representation and the real are intertwined. History is not divorced from the present, neither dead nor over but relevant and alive; and fiction has everything to do with history, including the history of the unconscious. The historical dilemmas of the old seamstress in Thriller or of Mimi in La Boheme are not unlike women’s struggles today in life or representation.

Laffont tells us the story of La Boheme, not presuming knowledge of art. The first telling is in the third person, a synopsis: “Act 1. Four male artists: Rudolpho the poet, Schaunard, the musician, Marcello, the painter, and Colline, the philosopher. . . . There is a knock at the door; it is Mimi, the seamstress and flower maker whose candle has gone out on the way up to her room. She comes in. They fall in love. . . . Act 3. Rudolpho has abandoned Mimi . . . because he cannot bear to see her ill.” This line elicits laughter from women in the audience. After recounting Mimi’s death, so many Camilles sacrificed to men’s desire and the great star turn for actresses, the voice shifts its pronominal register, transforming into “I” as Laffont merges with Mimi and wonders, “Is this the story of my life? Was that the story of my death?” The sounds of the screeching violins from Psycho (in the shower scene, Arbogast climbing the stairs, and the discovery of the skeletal mother, that oedipal nightmare) intermingle with the score of the opera. Freeze frames of the fragmented bodies of the performers suggest Hitchcock’s fragmented editing in murder scenes and avant-garde films like Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son.

As Laffont searches for clues in the mirror (including an impossible reverse shot from the mirror, a doubled look out or away from the mirror), an investigation of that Lacanian stage which refuses Lacan’s interpretation and the negative linkage of women to mirrors and vanity, she gradually begins to identify not only with Mimi, the good girl, but with Musetta, the other woman in both the opera and the modern performance. “Sitting in front of the mirror, she waits for a clue. . . . When she first looked, she recognized her self, as the other.” Rose English (as Musetta and sometimes Mimi), her collaborator, is held in arabesque, carried about by men, the female dancer limited in classical ballet space, immobile, dependent on men for movement. “For centuries, she has been jumping into his arms, over and over again.” In the opera, as the bad girl, she is outside the law of proper patriarchy, and not the heroine of the story; thus, her death would not have been the tragedy Mimi’s is.

The story is told again. The enunciation, which has already shifted from the third to the first person, now transforms into group identification, a process of discovery moving from “she” to “I” to “we” which incorporates the audience. The speaker, the voice-over, the investigator within the frame, Laffont, identifies with Mimi, Musetta, and seamstresses. The “ideal woman” transforms into “historical women”; primary, or narcissistic, identification becomes collective identification. This time, not only is the story told from Mimi’s point of view, but Mimi has been politicized and reveals what the history of art has repressed, the conditions of production, the conditions of industrial labor concealed by the commodity fetish—art and the romantic image of woman. History provides clues, erupts into the present; the past is inscribed in the loft, formerly a garment factory. “Somehow the cold and poverty they endure is different from mine. . . . Do they really suffer to create in the way I must suffer to produce? . . . Did they take part in my death?”

Like the good story Thriller is, it delays the answer. La Boheme’s narrative contract, which demands a woman’s death, is still baffling—as is our pity for the suffering hero and his anguish. “Would I have preferred to be the hero?” (The answer to this simple question seems so obviously “yes.” However, the few examples of female heroes suggest how arduous this assumption is.) And a bit later, “What if I had been the subject of this scenario, instead of its object?” (This is precisely what Laffont plays in The Gold Diggers.)

“Searching for an answer which would explain my life, my death,” Laffont again reads theory in French and English, from Tel Quel—Freud, Marx, Mallarme—three modern theories of revolution: “Was the truth of my death written in their texts? . . . by reading, she hoped to understand. Meanwhile that other woman was watching and listening.” She laughs. Then she looks for answers elsewhere, in the “other woman”—Musetta. “She was the eternal grisette, the bad girl, the one who didn’t die.” Only then, after positioning herself with rather than against women, does she unlock the mystery of the classical text, discover the answer, and solve women’s hermeneutic question.

She tells us the story of the opera for the third time. “Act 1. There is a knock at the door. It is Mimi, the seamstress and flower maker, sewing stale flowers that didn’t smell. . . . Often until the early hours working with the cold and a candle as companion. They produce stories to disguise how I must produce their goods.” She skips to Act 4, her death, the necessity of her death for story: “Perhaps being young, single and vulnerable, with a death that serves their desire to become heroes in the display of their grief. . . . We were set up as opposites, as complementary characters, and kept apart to serve our roles. . . . Yes. It was murder.”

In the end of Thriller; a genre called film noir dependent on women’s death and guilt whose style is a reference point and memory, the two women (Mimi and Musetta/Laffont and English) survive and embrace in a thrilling and logical conclusion. By shifting the point of view to the imaginary woman, the historical object of male desire, and by incorporating history, including the history of seamstresses and representation, the story has been radically revised. Oedipus, like the two men freeze-framed at the end, poised to leave the room, has been kicked out of the narrative.

By altering enunciation and enounced, granting women the intelligence of the voice along with the power of the look, in a shared, nonhierarchical process of collective and multiple rather than divisive (or masochistic) identification, the film unravels romanticism, the tales of singular men sacrificing themselves for their own desire (called art), a destructive sadism for which women, merely obstacles, often dead objects, must be grateful. (Whoever thought this up was a genius! I imagine two con artists, looking guilty: “But we’ll never get away with this! They’ll never believe this, will they?”)

For Potter, the answer or solution does not lie in men, or in men’s texts—leading us to the same dead ends. The answer lies within, between, and among women, Mimi and Musetta and “I,” white and black, historical and representational, social and personal—at the same time. The destructive division of women against each other and against themselves just will not do; neither shrew nor victim is acceptable. Thus, along with the investigation of the murder mystery of the Oedipus scenario, a triadic structure of jealousy which catches women in contradiction, Potter also challenges the dyad of envy—a structure and emotion used to keep woman apart and isolated, a tactic ironically overlooked by much feminist analysis. Rather than repudiate the mirror stage, the imaginary to which Lacanian theory holds women, outside language and the symbolic, Laffont/Potter take their stand in front of the mirror, looking to themselves and other women rather than male theorists for answers. The look is not one of narcissistic rage, directed against the self; nor is it a look of envy at other women. The divided subject is a white woman and a black woman who unite, in the end, crossing the barrier of race along with gender, history, class, and age, to which I return in the last chapter.⁴ Potter fashions and addresses a film spectatrix, not an unconscious labeled male, a spectator.

Spectator; derived from the Latin spectare, “to behold,” “one who sees or beholds a given thing or event without taking an active part,” has the same etymology as spectacle: “something to look at usually . . . presented to view as extraordinary.” Taken together, as, for example, do Mulvey, de Lauretis, and Mary Ann Doane, these terms shift in a mutual tension between subject and object, between actant and object (obstacle or goal). In Webster’s, after spectatorship, “the act of spectating,” gender appears in the form of spectatress or spectatrix, defined as “a woman spectator,” a term which, as volumes of feminist textual and theoretical deconstructions have argued, reveals that spectator is a masculine construct, in need of an adjective to instate difference. I wonder why spectatrix has never been adopted—perhaps it suggests SM (as does the Freudian model); perhaps spectatress is too close to the subservience of mistress. Perhaps it would solidify a bipolarity which notions like audience or spectator cover up, smoothing over social, historical, racial, chronological, economic, cultural, and sexual differences which we hope will change. I rather like the thought of being a spectatrix; as Virginia Woolf, older and angrier, ironically and insistently wrote in Three Guineas, trained differently in mind and spirit as we are from men, we see the same world, but we see it with different eyes. (Spectacle also means “a pair of lenses . . . worn in front of the eyes to improve the sight or correct errors of refraction.” It would be nice if we could correct the refracted errors of male theorists with new optical prescriptions; at the least, I would urge women to take off their rose-colored glasses.)

While the film crosses many artificial divides—classical/avant-garde, narrative/experimental, still photograph/moving image, image track/sound track, dance/music, visual pleasure/aural pleasure, the past/the present, history/theory—the most enlightening and usually unnoticed division is that between women. Think of Lina Lamont and Kathy Selden in Singin’ in the Rain set against each other as good/bad, with Lamont’s public humiliation (at the hands of men raising the stage curtain revealing her bad voice) as the price of Selden’s fame and happiness—man and marriage. Imagine the feminist remake of Singin’ in the Rain in which Lamont and Selden form their own production company, hiring the asexual comic and idea man, Cosmo Brown, as their cohort. Or, perhaps the women go it alone, sharing top billing, and make a big (but modest) budget, feminist film on location with an all-female crew; this scenario would be The Gold Diggers.

Thriller chooses love, multiplicity, and unity over envy, division, and self-sacrifice. The film’s last words are “We never got to know each other. Perhaps we could have loved each other.” This last scene is the beginning and end of her feature length film, The Gold Diggers.

A digression: At a conference on feminism in Milwaukee, titled “The Reconstruction of Knowledge,” I led a discussion (if 150 passionate people can constitute a discussion) of Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames for an audience including women of color and older women.⁵ For me, the film joyously represented women within a matrix of differences which were cultural, linguistic, racial, and chronological as well as sexual. Difference emerged as a political promise and a pleasure for feminism rather than as a sexual, historical standard against which women have been measured and failed. I laughed and identified with the women in the film as they sang, worked, and talked together. There is no room in this film, as there is no room in our future, for tolerant patriarchy, even of the liberal, sensitive, Marxist kind. Thus, I was flabbergasted by the outcry against the film. Black women in the audience severely objected to the film’s representation of black women as anarchists and lesbians.

While the film’s embrace of lesbianism and violent action—blowing up the tower on top of the World Trade Center, bombing the bastion and trademark of capitalism and broadcasting and a symbolic explosion of the phallus—upset many viewers, I suspect that anger was also directed to what I and the two other panelists, Judith Mayne and Valie Export, seemed to represent—middle-class, white, intellectual feminism, a “branch” of feminism lampooned and “corrected” in the film. Moving from the film’s critique to us was rhetorically logical. We represented the theoretical model of feminism that has developed in film studies over the past fifteen years—a critical project influenced in the United States by continental philosophy and the film criticism of Johnston and Mulvey (in turn influenced by Mitchell). This work deconstructed (1) the representation of woman as fetishized object on her way to heterosexuality, marriage, or murder at the film’s ending, with woman as object of both the voyeuristic male gaze and narrative and (2) the spectatorial mechanisms operative in the audience; it was predicated on the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema and Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis.

While it is true that this critique picked up Freud’s obsession with sexual difference at the cost of differences of race, class, and age (making it a young white women’s project both on and off screen), and disdained experience as “essentialism” due to its linkages with biology, this was not true of my position or the film, a virtual carnival of heterogeneity—of characters, materials, and arguments. No matter; what I thought was not the critical issue. And while interpretation of the film was also at issue, this, too, was secondary. It was clear to me that evening that new social, vocal subjects of feminism were publicly at stake, that prescriptions from positions of privilege and safety—white heterosexuality, whether feminist or not—would no longer, like great theoretical models, suffice.

I will briefly digress from the public scene. The radical impetus of Johnston’s and Mulvey’s work, with real linkages to the politics of the women’s movement in Britain in the 1970s and real opposition to humanistic literary criticism, has almost vanished in the United States. Split from life, void of political commitment to action, the insights of these critics have become generic truisms, repeated ad nauseum, like the weather on TV, by symposia speakers and “art” critics. It staggers the mind to imagine the number of films which have been submitted to Mulvey’s principles by virtuous scholars. Using her now formulaic “system” means that the writer or speaker is a feminist sympathizer. While the political depletion of this work as it has migrated over time and cultural difference is depressing, the evacuation also suggests the pitfalls of ignoring context, including personal political experience, and specificity. Without history, pure, eternal theory can be extracted; the descent into cliched platitudes is not far behind. As Trisha Brown says in The Man Who Envied Woman regarding the displacement of the poor in Soho by artists’ lofts: “We saw the enemy and it was us.”

To return to the “discussion”: this moment, directed at me, was conducted in the gap between representation and experience—between the film and the audience, image and spectator, belief and action—that chasm which Eisenstein tried to cross via conflict, shock. Paradoxically, like the film which upset so many speakers, differences among (and within) women in the audience were additive, combative, and positive; difference was not to be feared; differences were productive.

Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers is poised on the edge of this shift within feminism: informed by psychoanalytic theory and alternative versions of difference and heterogeneity. Potter endorses what she calls “the paradoxical advantages of our situation”—the contradiction between women as historical subjects and “woman” as the ground of representation, between “fiction as it is lived and fiction as fiction . . . that fictive space has formed and shaped our unconscious. . . .”⁶ The film pushes the Freudian unconscious, taken into representation and “fictive space,” as far as these notions can be taken for women; the film is either the culmination or the conclusion of 1970s feminist film theory, a model stamped, for me (and the film), by the work of Metz, Comolli, and Heath, as well as Johnston and Mulvey.

The Gold Diggers embraces female desire by remaking film history, locating the heroic quest for female subjectivity in “primitive” and modernist cinema. The primal Freudian scene separating the daughter from the mother which structures the film is staged as “primitive” cinema, with allusions to its forebears—burlesque, music hall, vaudeville, and staged melodrama. Set within and alongside this turn-of-the-century classical history are formal concerns of avant-garde—performance art, new music, and narrative. The initiating female moment—the film’s trauma and memory—and its return repeat the narrative pattern of classical cinema which often posits a tragic, originary, male moment, as in Citizen Kane, which the film then remembers for us: for example, the boarding house Rosebud scene in the snow separating son and Pieta mother which haunts that film. The tragedy of Charles Foster Kane is that he never forgot—he never resolved this moment, he never made it to the warehouse where his mother’s Colorado possessions were stored; for Leland as an old, infirm man, formerly Kane’s superego, memory is man’s greatest curse. For the cinematic apparatus, memory is a blessing but a mixed one for women. The Gold Diggers could be interpreted as a feminist remake of Citizen Kane, a film which combined the oldest story of loss with the modernist special effects technology of RKO; eventually it might occupy a comparable place in the history of films by and for women and female subjectivity.

The film argues that women’s subjectivity is bound up with the history of representation in narrative which, like a man, exploits women, and like a melodrama takes daughters away from mothers and other women. These historical fictions, in which women are figured as sexual objects of the male gaze and desire and conscripted into “compulsive” heterosexuality, dwell in our unconscious. (And, I would argue, our real, everyday experiences.) This sexist (racist and ageist) “inevitability” of the classical or early twentieth- century text neatly meshes with psychoanalysis’ story. Like a dream (and the unconscious) or psychoanalysis, cinema is an apparatus of memories; unlike dreams, cinema’s remembrances are rarely our own. Thus, the struggle for women, like the pleasure of the spectatrix at the movies, is to remember. And our history—in cinema and psychoanalysis—must be revised after being remembered.

Potter uncovers memory and locates history in two general periods: (1) in primitive cinema—well before the 1927 coming of sound, or synchronized speech, to cinema (like women for theory, film’s accession to language and the symbolic was a problem of art and economics), and (2) after the “classical period” dated and analyzed by Metz, from around 1933 to 1955 (following Metz, the period invoked as the “base” of much feminist criticism and theory without acknowledgement of historical specificity),⁷ resulting in an intriguing move between “primitive” and “modern” or “art house” cinema—literally enacting the primitive as the “rupture” of modernism.⁸ That the development of early cinema as a discourse and narrative of the family is coincident with the writings of Freud, the family historian who deconstructed its sexual dynamics, and the ascendance of Marx, who critiqued the family’s economic base, is critical to the film’s structure: Julie Christie is linked to psychoanalysis, Collette Laffont to Marxism. The film’s “modern” scenes of women walking and being pursued in the city resemble “art” cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s—narratives which are coincident with Lacan’s and Althusser’s rereadings of Freud and Marx—a critical couple via, for example, the fetish, which was so central to film theory in the 1970s. Thus, Potter locates modernist theory in historical context, focusing on two periods which feminists and theorists usually ignore.

Potter: “It’s a cinematic pun, which means deep play with the language of film—a sort of semiotic shuffle.”⁹ Theory is literalized, concept becomes representation: for example, the landscape of Iceland is “woman” as the ground of representation, “virgin territory,” or “figure versus ground” distinctions of painting. The “subject” is really divided—a black woman and a white woman; and “she” is not lacking. The gold diggers are Klondike prospectors or modern accountants rather than the chorus girls of the 1933 film. “Formalism” is familiar to women: the gleeful women wear taffeta/net, ruffled formals at the ball; Christie wears her formal gown through much of the film. “When you’re trying to represent a system of representation, you’re dealing with this tantalising, just out of your grasp, phenomenon.”¹⁰

Freud’s fetish and Marx’s commodity fetish are conjoined through the figuration of the star. The symbolic as representation is made literal by depicting the star, Julie Christie, as a religious icon and carrying her in a procession to the deserted, cathedral/bank and depositing her along with the gold bars. Gender as masquerade is revealed as commodity fetishism; we see the labor of the actress, not merely the “star image.” “The star is often a manifestation of an ideal type and the part of Ruby, designed for Julie Christie, plays with these ideas.” Later in the interview: “The Julie Christie part has to do . . . with a certain kind of glamour and blondness and beauty. . . . In the process of the film she sheds that to an extent, it becomes evidently a form of disguise. What that does is open up a space somehow, a gap, which separates the accepted stereotype from the woman. That’s perhaps the kind of space in which the female can appear without colluding with voyeuristic abuse.”¹¹ Gender is both disguise and declaration, a costume which can be worn or shed, splitting person from actor, star, and character, producing a gap rather than creating a seamless movement among these various times and positions of identification. “So the costume changes are about the theme of disguise and also a comment on acting. The actress is not the same as her part. . . and it takes a great deal of skill. It’s part of the hidden labour of the actress.”¹²

“The star phenomenon is an actual form of investment. . . a circulation of the face. . . . Ruby herself is being circulated and displayed, and Celeste is helping to circulate money.”¹³ The film embodies the contradictions of celebrity and economics, exchange and use value. The female star becomes cinema itself as Ruby says: “I can project, I can repeat, I am repeated. . . . Investors take their place and I play my part.”¹⁴ And more specifically addressing the female spectator: “I must have been kept in the dark.” “Why?” “Because of the condition.” “Which condition?” “The necessary conditions of my existence.” “Only in the darkness are you visible. I know you intimately and you know me not at all.” “I can also remember very little.” “Why?” “Because I’ve been kept in the dark.” “Why?”¹⁵ To answer this question, Potter denaturalizes and materializes the gap between signfier and referent “which separates the accepted stereotype from the woman.”

By inscribing a formal system of women’s rather than men’s “looks,” the film denies the much analyzed male gaze any validity or potency; as a result, cinema’s (and theory’s) perpetuation of a visual system of sexual difference serving as the sign of male power and desire becomes irrelevant. The ludicrousness then of Freud’s (and other theorists’) uncanny linkage of vision with the “male organ” and fear of castration and/or death is exposed as the flash in the pan it has always been from women’s point of view. Our experience has little or nothing to do with fearing castration, after all. Thus, vision given over as the special prerogative of male characters is a catastrophe of the film, as are spectatorial mechanisms of sexual disavowal—the fetishist’s gap between belief and knowledge—and the distanced perversion, voyeurism. Among other things, women gain the power of looking.

Potter, Rose English, Lindsay Cooper, Babette Mangolte, and the production’s all-female crew thereby drop out Freud’s and cinema’s heterosexual contract which is at the base of all this “theory,” as well as upsetting the singular determinance of “sex” to difference and cinema. If the heterosexual contract—operated and legalized by the male gaze and male desire—is shattered, Oedipus is no longer the story against which all other tales of subjectivity are measured. Female subjectivity is dramatized, revealing that, indeed, one is not, as Freud declared, and Monique Wittig, after Simone de Beauvoir, inverted, a woman born, a biological explanation which “assumes that the basis of society . . . lies in heterosexuality.”¹⁶ By incorporating women’s relationships and by changing both subject and object of the gaze, women are presented as active subjects. Thus is the story of psychoanalysis reimagined, for women, by women. Yet, we do not escape it; the film remains within its parameters, as if it wanted to salvage psychoanalysis for women.

This relatively conservative stance might explain why this film was received with silence, at least to my knowledge¹⁷ when compared to the whoopla generated by Potter’s 1979 Thriller—a dissembling of the classical texts of cinema, opera, and ballet. The interview with Potter by Pam Cook in Framework suggests that debates within feminism might account for this academically cool reception.¹⁸

Just a general reminder of two divergent strains: in 1972-1973, Claire Johnston called for a reclamation of the terrain and pleasures of entertainment cinema; in 1975, Mulvey advocated that the “look” be freed into avant-garde practices. While Potter considers herself part of the tradition of narrative filmmaking, she is on the aesthetic side of the avant-garde. The film’s formalism, its reliance on performance art, particularly dance and music, might have troubled the receptive waters. Cook: “The film has a formal asceticism, some might say puritanism, reminiscent of avant garde minimalism.” Potter: “Where is the puritanism? . . . For me, there’s great passion in austerity . . . there’s everything right about wanting to make pleasure that isn’t causing somebody else pain. If that’s called puritanism, then I think puritanism is having a great time . . . there are a lot of scenes . . . which do a lot of playing and are about cinematic pleasure—that’s why I was a bit surprised when you said it was puritanical.”¹⁹ Film theory, as I have reiterated, has preferred the pleasure of classical texts. Like me, Potter seems defensive; Cook suggests the old opposition between formal, avant-garde films and narrative pleasure.

The film is rigorously formal and deeply pleasurable, aurally and visually. Julie Christie’s performance is austere, her presence quietly minimal, denying voyeurism, instituting distantiation rather than fetishization. (I must confess to desiring more of Christie; perhaps the female pleasure associated with female stars is too minimal.) In addition, it almost demands intellectual agreement. “The identificatory thread [I think of Ariadne and the labyrinth] is not along the lines of the human being providing a model that one can live vicariously through and with, but rather an identification with certain processes . . . arguments and ideas that run through the film that. . . provide an intellectual identification. . . .”²⁰ The film runs the risk of being rejected as argument.

Along with the problem (for me, a pleasure) of “intellectual identification” (or disagreement), and the distancing of Christie, auditory pleasure is a complex dilemma. Audiences have been historically less receptive to innovation with sound. In Thriller, the music from Puccini’s La Boheme and Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho provide substantial, familiar pleasure. The Gold Diggers’ musical score by Lindsay Cooper is minimal, experimental, without the usual hierarchy of intelligibility of voice over music, of words over instrumentation or effects. In addition, there is little “presence” track, fewer “fill” sounds, little familiarity, and virtually no climactic crescendoes.

Sound serves as an experimental treatise, declaring the authors’ intentions—with few clues to character, feelings, or mood, usually ascribed to music but equally applicable to the intonation of speech. Speech is analytical rather than emotive. Identification does not function through star or character or even narrative; nor do we identify with the “voice” of the artist as individual; we identify (or not) with ideas and situations. Thus, we don’t need to match our theoretical wits to the film, conquering it with knowledge, demonstrating our creative prowess and granting the artists more than their due. We don’t deconstruct this film—as Paul Willemen analyzes de- construction: “The real or claimed value of the reader’s competence was transmuted into the film’s value . . . the ‘high art’ value which is only the value of the consumer’s educational status delegated to the object.”²¹ Theory, like history and sexual politics, is in the film; the film is not about theory, nor is theory outside, waiting to be laid on; the film, including “the conditions of its production,” is theory informed by the history of representation.

We are asked to partake in a dialogical endeavor; the filmmakers presume our knowledge and virtually sit in the enunciative laps of the audience. There are no divisions between us and them; the pronouns shift—“I” becomes “you,” which turns into “we.” Ruby: “I’m born in a beam of light. I move continuously yet I’m still. I am larger than life yet do not breathe. Only in the darkness am I visible. You can see me but never touch me. I can speak to you but never hear you. You know me intimately and I know you not at all. We are strangers and yet you take me inside of you. What am I?” This first person riddle of the Sphinx and of the cinematic apparatus initiates a quest for Ruby, led by Celeste who switches the pronouns: “You were born in a beam of light. . . . I know you intimately and you know me not at all. We are strangers yet I take you inside of me. . . .” “I” and “you”—including the characters, the filmmakers, and the members of the audience—become a “we” as Potter cues the characters, addresses, and then joins the audience: “We have ninety minutes to find each other.” This simple declarative sentence has a powerful effect, signaling a collective, mutual quest: near the film’s end, during the ride out of the labyrinth, we hear: “I am changing what is there.” This presumption of inclusion and perhaps commonality, however, has caused irritation.

Perhaps more unsettling than “intellectual identification” might be the focus on women’s desire—”I take you inside of me.” While Thriller ends with the possibility of women loving each other as Mimi and Musetta embrace each other in freeze frame, The Gold Diggers begins and remains with women’s desire for each other, a desire not deflected by men who are only caricatures—farcical, expressionistic bureaucrats or prospectors. The film is a love story, and the love is lesbian—the repressed of the criticism I have read. The actresses are dressed as “femme” and “butch”—Christie as the Princess and Laffont as Prince Charming. The tale can be read as Ruby’s coming out, or coming into lesbian consciousness.

As Wittig argues, “woman” is a construct of “the ideology of gender”: “We have been compelled in our bodies and in our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us . . . distorted . . . deformed. . . .”²² Think of Christie’s ball gown, worn out of context. “For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man. . . .”²³ In Wittig’s polemical conclusion, survival “can only be accomplished by the destruction of heterosexuality as a social system which is based on the oppression of women by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference between the sexes to justify this oppression.”²⁴ The “doctrine of difference” is under siege in the film. Thus, it treads on sacred ground. However, while avid in her commitment to women, Potter is not as absolute as Wittig. She is not a separatist: “in cinematic history most of the filming has been done by men. I think of myself as a director and want that sense of colleagueship, of history and tradition. It gets dangerous to say that because you’re a woman you haven’t got a cultural history. That’s not true, that history is ours, too.”²⁵ Arguing her personal history as a director informed by the work of Godard, Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers, and Tati, Potter asserts her position in and out of film history.

The Gold Diggers, like its namesakes, the Warner Brothers films of 1933 and 1934, is a musical. Potter deploys Lacanian psychoanalysis as Busby Berkeley literalized “Freudian symbolism” so in vogue in Hollywood in the 1930s. However, in the 1983 remake, the mainstay of the musical is absent—the heterosexual couple coupling in song, dance, and marriage. “I see this film as a musical describing a female quest. . . about the connection between gold, money, and women; about the illusion of female powerlessness . . . about imagery in the unconscious and its relationship to the power of cinema . . . seeing the history of cinema itself as our collective memory of how we see ourselves.”²⁶ (I note that repression is also material and conscious. While the female unconscious needs to be reinvented, so do everyday realities. Also, we must begin to specify this “eternal” female spectator. I want to know more about her. Where does she live? How old is she? Who is she?)

Although not as severe as dropping both the male gaze and the heterosexual couple, the film inverts other conventions of the musical, including the film within the film, the relation between narrative and spectacle, the alternation of address and point of view, on and backstage performances, dream sequences, inscriptions of audiences and stages, and varieties of performance. This time the women behind the scenes, like the on-screen women in 1933 and 1934, are running the show. The film’s collaborative conditions of production by an all-female crew result in enunciation which does not conflate production and consumption, what Jane Feuer argues is a function of musicals which concealed labor: “the producing and consuming functions severed by the passage of musical entertainment from folk to popular to mass status are rejoined through the genre’s rhetoric.”²⁷ Christie described the experience: “My relationship with film directors was paternalistic, completely irresponsible in the way I put myself in their hands. That’s changed. . . . I’ve only worked with an all-women crew once, with Gold Diggers. . . . It was fantastic. There was almost no hierarchy. All the carpenters, sparks, and painters were women, which meant that they all had to have gone through the same political feminist struggle to get where they were. We were all paid the same. We didn’t even have to go through all the inevitable tricks and behavior that one sex puts on for the other, so it was a great relief and more restful. Women understand things men don’t, like Chantal Akerman with Jeanne Dielman. . . .”²⁸

Musicals celebrate the nonwork of song and dance and the effortless professionalism of amateurs, denying the work of actor and apparatus alike, producing numbers only in the Marxist sense of commodity fetish. Potter’s film inscribes the work of performers, sometimes witnessed in an awkwardness of gesture, overheard in a voice-over critique or pun, glimpsed in hesitancy that suggests a rehearsal. We think about the work of this production, the “alienated” consumption of women, ideas, and money, imagining the female crew in Iceland—although not directly inscribed in the film, their presence is almost palpable, their undertaking heroic. And, like Potter, I would call it entertainment. “But entertainment isn’t inherently reaction. In fact, pleasure is a prerequisite for learning.”²⁹ For Feuer, “to dare not to be entertaining is the ultimate transgression. . . . For to be unentertaining means to think about the base upon which mass entertainment itself is constructed.”³⁰ The Gold Diggers is a critique of “the base of entertainment”—which leads to a pleasure different from that of deconstruction, secured after the fact.

References, including shifts between forms of representation—cinema, theater, “performance,” and dance—create “layers in each scene” and are foregrounded. “The avant-garde’s rejection of purism and ontological preoccupations in favour of an insistence on problems of reference can be understood as necessary pre-conditions for the elaboration of an artistic practice capable of representing the complexity of historical processes.”³¹ Willemen’s analysis of “reference” (not the same as modernism’s reflexivity or postmodernism’s pastiche, where quotations float freely outside history, unmoored from time and context and hence without critique) is close to Potter’s “seeing the history of cinema itself as our collective memory.”³² She describes the film’s structure as a spiral “within which there are many genre references.”³³ For her, as for the Soviet constructivists, the spiral is a sturdy form which accommodates history, allows for re-evaluation, and incorporates re-visions unlike a linear, chronological model in which “there’s not a great deal of room to go back and change things that were wrong in the first place”³⁴—particularly the representation of women.

The film’s structure is labyrinthian—women escaping from the maze of dark city streets occupied by terrorist businessmen and bankers who chaotically run around in menacing pursuit, like corporate Keystone Cops. This cityscape—the stark counterpoint to the Iceland landscape—is negatively linked to masculine subjectivity: whether Greek, mannerist, or the modern rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari, it is a maze and challenge which women can master. The characters lead men down blind alleys of their own making. Via editing of discontiguous spaces and non-chronological times, and intricate camera movements, the film, like Celeste and Ruby, looks for a way through theoretical systems, including film history and psychoanalysis. Without discarding the past, the film refuses to be trapped in it. Equally, it refuses the position of victim.

To suggest the film’s complexity of structure and theory, never mind style, I will elaborate a central section, which is a journey into and out of the imaginary. Julie Christie as Ruby, wearing a detective/critic’s costume of an oversized coat, practical shoes, and hat, has left her room for the glistening, noir city streets. Collette Laffont, Potter’s “investigator in the frame,” the black protagonist of Thriller; who plays Celeste, also leaves. “Celeste and Ruby together make the “celestial ruby” or “philosopher’s stone”; their unity is in the alchemical secret. . . . one can identify with that dialectical process, the friendship of opposites.”³⁵ Both women are pursued in the shadowed darkness by squads of business-suited men and the exaggerated sound of their aggressive, echoing footsteps. As the two women lead their ominous pursuers on wild goose chases in this modern/primeval city, Cooper’s agitated music accentuates the chase. But the women trick the men and escape; women have mastered the labyrinthian space, as they have language, and find their respective ways out—a strategy emblematic of the film’s entire structure.

Celeste dodges her chasers via a fire escape (a spatial trick) and returns to her room, the women’s room, a central location of the film like the frozen landscape; this space is enclosed, warm, personal; the other, vast, cold, heroic. She falls asleep. Her dream of women is erotic and embodies what Potter might call the pleasure of Puritanism by intercutting three scenarios: a performance by androgynous female dancers and a drummer, initiated by an old woman opening the curtain on a small stage; images of Ruby near the sleeping Celeste, finally carrying her to bed; and a brief shot which returns at the film’s end, of women swimming in glistening, dark water to the bow of a huge ship, an allusion to Rosie the Riveter. Music signals that the dream is over, followed by cuts to the room, chair, and shoes of the dancing princess, rescued from the ball by her female prince on a white charger. One is reminded of Adrienne Rich’s poetry and Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own”; this space is erotic because it is shared. The room is a performance space reminiscent of the attic in Thriller, a place where two women discover each other through history and the body, with intellect and affect. Thus, cinema is a dream and the spectator a dreamer—with a substantial difference; this is a dream of female fantasy and desire for women.

The “representation,” the now more knowledgeable Christie, continues the investigation of her history. Ruby is chased into another anonymous building in the deserted cityscape. The building is a theater, and she sits, uncomfortably and self-consciously, in the balcony with the all-male audience of gazing businessmen/pursuers. This scene is a surreal, burlesque rendering of the male gaze of film theory. Behaving like automatons who turn their heads, clap, and look in unison—the male caricature of Busby Berkeley’s zombied women—the voyeurs (who resemble a modern matinee audience at a porno film) are watching a melodrama, a Griffith restaging of the film’s opening scene as vaudeville or “primitive” cinema. After cutting to a close-up of Ruby’s look from the audience (where she clearly doesn’t belong and is no safer than in the streets—a commentary on the risks of female spectatorship), she leaves, followed by the anonymous, identical men. Like Alice through the looking glass, she escapes through a door leading to the imaginary, her past as a young girl wearing a striped dress. She follows her past, her self/image through darkened corridors and doors, accompanied by sounds of faint piano music, like a child practicing a refrain of scales. Cinema refuses to allow her to age, or grow up, keeping her forever young, always an arrested image. At the same time, this is a search for mother.

This musical motif which begins the film and continually returns echoes silent cinema and its musical accompaniment, suggesting the score of the great male trauma film, Citizen Kane, music as the auditory clue to childhood memory and mother. In many ways, this film reverses that trauma of the little boy; Cooper’s musical refrain remembers and rewrites Bernard Herrmann’s score. The reference to Alice continues when Ruby encounters her reflection, her look, in a huge rehearsal mirror. A dancer is performing. Ruby watches. “Despite years of research, I reach a certain point and I freeze.” “Have you forgotten?. . . Live in the present, don’t dwell on the past.” Ruby tries to remember; the dancer is analytical: “It’s since I decided to go solo—the lifts are a little tricky.” The dancer forgets her steps when she faces the audience—reminiscent of Arzner’s Dance Girl, Dance. Abruptly, a stage manager enters, grabs Ruby with “You’re on!” gives her the little girl costume, and shoves her onstage, into film history, into vaudeville, into a melodrama of separation from her mother. Her personal trauma becomes a public spectacle. Thus the double bind of women—seeing themselves as others see them, trapped between the gaze of the audience and the image on the screen.

Ruby is wearing heavy theatrical makeup in the Mae Marsh, Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish look-alike style of early cinema and using exaggerated, coded silent gestures of bewilderment and anguish. She is too old for the eternal part of the little girl. Her makeup has become a Kabuki mask. The all-male audience applauds the prospector with the gold and boos Ruby, now alone and bereft on the stage, garish in her makeup. The little girl’s drama and the aging star are of no interest to the men in the audience just as they were of little concern to Freud. In an extreme closeup, like Laffont in Thriller when reading theory to explain her life and her death, Ruby silently and grotesquely laughs, mocking the hissing male audience.

The history of the silent female star, conscripted at the age of fourteen so that the slow film and harsh lights would not reveal the signs of age, the revelation of her identity and celebrity coincident with the economic rise of the film industry and the development of narrative, “feature” films, is invoked. Mary Pickford was the highest paid woman in the United States, with Adolph Zukor promising to pay her millions not to act in another studio’s films. She joined with three famous men to form United Artists, and with the advice of her mother, became a very powerful woman—only to have the variables of age and stereotype force her into retirement, to be mocked in Singin’ in the Rain. She became too old, like Christie here, to play “Little Mary,” and vanished from public view, enclosed in her mansion. These women were heroines, albeit melodramatic ones, enduring on-screen travails involving derring-do, including treacherous ice floe shots as Lillian Gish did in Way Down East. Yet, they had to remain sweet sixteen forever, a tragedy poignantly shown in Robert Altman’s soft-focus shot of Gish in The Wedding. From behind, bathed in gauze lighting, the image of Gish is the same. She turns toward the camera, she is old, her “image” a portrait of Dora Gray. For female stars, categorically unlike male stars, aging is the greatest tragedy.

Ruby’s journey through the history of representation and masquerade, from the real of film location to the imaginary of stage acting, now takes her back into the audience, watching herself—this time with critical awareness—as emblematic of cinema’s representation of women. She leaves the theater, returns to the magical door (the entrance to the unconscious), enters, and like Alice, Buster Keaton in Sherlock Junior, a scholar doing research, or the analysand in film analysis, goes back to the hut on the rocky, Icelandic terrain. The little girl runs around the hut, growing older with each turn, finally transforming into Christie/Ruby. The music stops, the curtain comes down, the image fades to white, and the camera pans down. The little girl has grown up; yet the film, like the daughter’s struggle to remember, understand, and control the terms of her own representation, is not over. In fact, this quest is just beginning; perhaps The Gold Diggers will become an early landmark, richly embracing the terrain of mother/daughter.

While disagreeing with Freud but still intrigued with “how, when and why does she detach herself from her mother,” the film is not even slightly interested in Freud’s second and, for him, most critical question: “how then does a little girl find her way to her father?”³⁶ Potter celebrates what for Freud would be a failure: “Indeed, one had to give due weight to the possibility that many a woman may remain arrested at the original mother-attachment and never properly achieve the change-over to men.”³⁷ For Freud “at the end of the girl’s development it is the man—the father—who must come to be the new love-object. . . .”³⁸ In a film which (1) transforms sexual objects into gendered subjects who love each other rather than into envious competitors, a “little woman jealous of her mother,” and (2) refuses to compromise by idealizing the preoedipal fantasy of maternal plentitude and leaving it at that, “father” would be an absurd ending, more fantastic than being rescued from representation and exploitation by a female prince on a white stallion and triumphantly riding off into the sunset—the ending of this film.

Yet, Freud’s prescription is the usual ending of narrative films—our accumulated history of passage into the arms of a man. Might this be why the men in the theater audience boo the little girl’s story? To illustrate how unsettling this film’s construction of female subjectivity is, let me cite a distinction absolutely critical to Freud: “Whereas in boys the Oedipus complex succumbs to the castration complex, in girls it is made possible and led up to by the castration complex.”³⁹ Girls have no motive to emerge from the Oedipus complex and thus can never surmount it—it is infinite, like the “rhizome,” fraught or blessed with interpretive possibilities and directions. One can delightfully imagine the entire film as an escape from women’s endless Oedipus complex by making a claim for the symbolic, a claim which refuses the resolution of heterosexuality, the family, and the individual. Thus, comparable to Mia Campioni and Elizabeth Gross’s brilliant critique via Foucault and feminism of Freud’s analysis of Little Hans (a case study which Deleuze and Guattari lambasted), Potter, perhaps in accord with Luce Iriga- ray, revises the Freudian interpretation of the mother-daughter relationship.

The insistent repetition and reworking of the primal scene of separation throughout the film argues that something critically different is going on. To his bewilderment but not ours, Freud is amazed by the strength of this original attachment: “Our insight into this early, pre-Oedipus phase in the little girl’s development comes to us as a surprise, comparable in another field with the effect of the discovery of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind that of Greece.”⁴⁰ In another passage, “Perhaps the real fact is that the attachment to the mother must inevitably perish just because it is the first and most intense, similarly to what we so often find in the first marriages of young women, entered into when they were passionately in love.”⁴¹

The scene in the film is traumatic rather than a fantasy of preoedipal maternal plentitude; it is a painful separation in which the father is the villain. Structurally, the triangulated scene erupts just before Ruby speaks, just before her entrance into language and the symbolic, voicing and staking her claim to speaking subject status and desire; it is an oedipal (talking pictures) tale rather than a preoedipal scene (silent cinema)—for women not an unimportant discovery. In a prologue before titles, the film deliberately pans over the highly contrasted, black and white landscape of Iceland, uncovering ruins buried in the snow, revealing a path leading to an infinite horizon; a silent woman—historical woman?—wearing a long dress walks down the path and picks up a toy horse. This memory is accompanied by Potter singing “Seeing Red”; “Went to the pictures for a break, thought I’d put my feet up have a bit of intake, but then a man with a gun came in through a door and when he kissed her I couldn’t take it anymore.” The chorus repeats: “Please give me back my pleasure . . . give me back my leisure time, I’ve got the pleasure time blues. . . .”⁴² The sound of wind amid the vast stillness of the unconquerable terrain—women’s pleasure, desire, history, and memory—is heard before the titles.

The second return occurs after Christie/Ruby analyzes her role as the historical heroine: “In the early days, I was often to be seen tied to tracks, hanging from cliffs. I managed to be feverish yet cool, passionate yet pure, aloof and yet totally available. We were all stranded.”⁴³ Christie as the history of her roles and characters in cinema also reminding us of the adventurous heroines who were her forebears, including Pauline and her perils. A granular image of mother, standing in the snow, laughing in silent, slowed motion (a “freeze” frame?) is followed by a shot of the isolated hut. This scene—intercut into the women’s room—is heroic, tragic. Unlike Little Hans and the construction of Oedipus, mother is a central position, not solely maternal yet valuing motherhood. Mother is not subordinate, not devalued, not property; she is defined more by her daughter than her relationship to men. The memory returns again in the third scene in the women’s room; it is spring, the blonde child is playing on the rocky land; Ruby is wearing her ball gown, standing in a corner: “I searched for the secret of transformations.” That is followed by an older girl called “Ruby” by her mother. Images of Iceland break in as memory, the unconscious, the sign of production as a quest; the search for mother is a quest for history, for identity.

Celeste is another version of subjectivity. Laffont has short, dark hair, is a black woman, and is dressed either in slacks, office clothes, or her Prince Charming garb—a critique of femininity and capitalism. Her knowing gaze as “the investigator within the frame” as well as her leading questions—“Do you know your history?”—are Ariadne’s threads guiding Ruby through the maze. She rescues the princess from the place of exploitation, leading her away from the imaginary into the symbolic, taking her to a new space of critical awareness. Celeste is the hero of the story: “I was born a genius. That’s a fact. I knew what was what right from the start. I am concerned with re-dressing the balance.” It is as if Laffont’s character from Thriller, who was searching for a theory which would explain her life, her death, concluding with “It was murder,” was fulfilling the promise of Thriller’s ending by taking action with and for women.

Celeste critiques the Marx/Althusser commodity fetish and the circulation of money—like the image of woman, a representation: “I can see you but I can’t touch you,” and “To the bank with the beauty, to the bank with the gold. Both make money and neither grows old”—and language. She works for a male boss in an anonymous high tech corporation of computers. Seeking an explanation of gold and commodities, seeking “specificity,” she visits the “experts”—a performance of theater of the absurd as homage and critique of the historical avant-garde—who cannot explain money to her. The “performance” summons many discourses in miniature, including classical art: the bureaucrat leans against a Greek column prop and places an icon of Christie on his Doric pedestal; war: a miniature battleship in a tank of water, a special effect, sinks; and gold: it moves, like cinema, it is “a subject which must be brought up.” The constant punning, the literalism of abstract notions, renders them absurd. Men are drawn with their own ideas, they are farcical, comedic, George Grosz caricatures rather than characters. Although parodies of power, their smug pomposity is upsetting. They are dangerous in their bluff, blunder, generality, and stupidity.

Celeste’s second lengthy scene begins with Laffont watching men; her arms are crossed, she is knowing if not downright smug. “In the beginning, a man gave a bank note . . .” initiates the story of the circulation of money. An economic procession and chant begins as Ruby is taken to the bank/cathedral by the acolyte priests/bankers/street terrorists: “Freeze the assets, cut the supply, drastic measures, it’s do or die. . . .” Celeste rescues Ruby from the vault as she had earlier rescued her from the dance, from the places of her worship as the object of the spectacle, the commodity of exchange. They run away, together. Ruby: “I was framed.” In her song of capital performed on a small stage, Celeste connects the turn of the century gold diggers with the modern bankers: “Robbers and bandits, builders of nations, armed with a pick and ill-will, plundering digging. . . impatient until they’ve got their fill. . . . Commonwealth lies, May you crumble and sink!”⁴⁴

The ballroom scene, which holds on the historical image of women on staircases, is repeated, with a difference. Ruby descends, poses, smiles, and is passed from man to man who, this time, all swoon, helplessly falling to the floor; “Investors take their place and I play my part.” After Celeste again rescues Ruby, the other women recreate a joyous, private moment in movie musicals—a dance of women without men, gaily playing, partnering each other, sliding gleefully down the banister of propriety. The men awkwardly try to dance with each other. The all-male film audience coughs in unison (the little girl identifying with her mother’s cough in Freud, or Mimi’s cough in Thriller, finally transferred to men as “male feminists”?) After shots of the little girl, the hut, the landscape, the road, and sounds of the wind, all “identificatory threads, ideas, arguments,” the horse and rider move down a tunnel, rescuing women’s past and pointing to the future. The shot of water and Rosie the Riveter concludes the film’s visual track. The piano refrain, however, continues; unlike the Rosebud musical motif of nostalgia, loss and impossibility, this film concludes with history and possibility—of a new social subject. It’s as if the “split” protagonists, the “attraction of opposites,” have, by dialectically joining forces including racial differences, together outrun Oedipus, including analysts, prospectors, male spectators, and other concerned investors in women’s lives. It’s also not insignificant that Rosie was working on a real, big battleship while the experts were only playing with miniature, little model ships.

As is apparent, the film calls upon what Potter calls “identificatory threads” leading to collective identification—Freud’s third version of identification, dependent upon perception of shared commonality with a group rather than with an individual. Freud’s first instances of identification, being and having, are frequently sexual—involving a desire to have an object, for example, the mother, or be like someone, an ideal, perhaps the father—are bound up with individual scenarios, castration, and, of course, the inevitable Oedipus complex.⁴⁵ Thus, it is intriguing that film theory has depended primarily on the first two instances rather than developing the possibilities of group identification—so pertinent given the ritualistic, collective conditions of film viewing. Furthermore, the instances of having and being have been reinforced by film critics’ obsession with analyzing cinema’s “gaze” in terms of individual characters and the isolated spectator whereas little work has been devoted to inscribing the collective audience in the text.

Unfortunately, Freud illustrated collective identification for women by citing a cough shared with mother, or hysterical jealousy transmitted in a boarding school. Potter gives this symptom to the men in the audience, displacing and parodying Freud’s cough as their (and his) sign of disapproval. For other audiences of this film, group identification emerges in another way—as sound of recognition and approval signaled by laughter.

Perhaps as significant for women as invoking collective identification, and unlike Freud’s (and later, Lacan’s) analysis of identification which assumes an identity, and individuality, the film constructs identities which are historical, over time, which is history. In the second interchange in the women’s room, Laffont looks at Christie, a bit disheveled and out of place in her formal ball gown: “I am concerned with redressing the balance.” “Do you know your history?” Christie: “Tell me everything. . . . I’ve been kept in the dark, the conditions for my existence.” Identity depends on history. Subjectivity is not unified but contradictory, addressing process and depending on knowledge which can be shared.

Potter frequently uses spatial metaphors to describe women’s experience and the film suggesting an affinity with the psychoanalysis of Winnicott. For example, she refers to the “inner landscape of women,” which has “internalized sexism. . . . The men in the film occupy that interior space.”⁴⁶ As I mentioned, along with being this colonized, inner space which is still male, women’s desire is also frequently associated with a space, a place represented in the film by the women’s room and the landscape of Iceland. These frequently empty spaces suggest, as Willemen argues, that setting operates as “a text. . . where a different historical dynamic can be traced . . . with different historical rhythms and different dimensions of historical time. . . .”⁴⁷

Within Potter’s metaphysics of space is what she calls “the vast, imaginary space of mass cinema.” Her move to feature-length, independent films is an attempt to capture this space and reach a larger audience. “I think the concept of ‘breaking through’ was an internal device to try and escape the internalised forms of marginalisation . . . it’s a desire to occupy a big screen space. . . . Part of my job as a woman film-maker is to break out of the ghetto. However. . . that big screen space is occupied in such a way that my . . . desire, which is necessarily a revolutionary desire, is not quite going to fit in . . . maybe independent production meets thousands, rather than millions, but we’re overly apologetic . . . it’s more important... to acknowledge the ways in which independent film has changed things” (Cook, 28-30).

The crucial role of the space of history and subjectivity as “other texts” is accentuated by the cinematography of Babette Mangolte. In her film The Sky on Location (1982), she explores the American West: “The Sky is not about nature as backdrop, but more about the idea of wilderness, which I’ve discovered is so ingrained in American culture, but totally bewildering for Europeans . . . the discovery of that land was done by people like me, coming from Europe, people for whom that space was amazingly different. So I feel an element of identification with the first settlers.”⁴⁸ The analogy of discovery—being an immigrant in foreign lands, like Charlie Chaplin in his early films and indeed the westward migration of the film industry, largely run by Jewish immigrants, to California in the 1900s—is operative throughout the film. For Willemen, the contrast between landscape as tourism and “land as a crucial element in the relations of production” marks the contemporary avant-garde narrative.⁴⁹ For Potter and Cooper, who “had been to Iceland in our music group,” “it had all the connotations of virgin land and unexplored territory . . . the frozen self, the isolated self. . . the land is also a mutable element, a force. It’s part of the alchemical subtext.”⁵⁰

Potter wants everything: “It’s no good dwelling in the land of the victim . . . there’s a point of view which is extremely handy, which is to see the paradoxical advantages of our situation and to see our inner strength. . . . we’ve got to get out of the way this idea that anything we want to do is denied us. Nothing less than everything will do. If we want to ride in on white chargers and carry off our favourite film star, we can do that. . . .”⁵¹ While I’d rather be driving a Porsche, I’m with Potter. Nothing less than everything will do.