“The Women At The Keyhole”
In this chapter, I will discuss three different contexts of women’s filmmaking where explorations of the “primitive” both cite the example of early film and examine relationships between different meanings of the term primitive. The first context includes two films, Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (codirected with Alexander Hammid, 1943) and Suzan Pitt’s Asparagus (1974), in which the style of “primitive” filmmaking is appropriated. While these two films are closest to the kind of avant-garde filmmaking influenced by early film that Tom Gunning discusses, they take as their primary point of departure not just the “primitive” style of filmmaking, but also and especially the “primitive” representation of the female body and its relationship to other definitions of the so-called primitive. While both of these films excavate “primitive” narration—and the “primitive” narrator, in Pitt’s film—the second group of films is more specifically concerned with the narrative implications of the “primitive” in terms of early cinema, of gender, and—in the case of Akerman’s film—of psychoanalysis.
In Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet (La Souriante Madame Beudet [1922]), Agnès Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 (Clèo de 5 à 7 [1962]), and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), a form of “primitive” narration is associated specifically with a female character, and the narration of the films both incorporates and distances itself from it. In each case, “primitive” narration evokes simultaneously the realm of early filmmaking and the realm of traditional female activities. That all three of these films are in the French language is suggestive, as well, of a shared tradition, one split between their connections with the movements with which they are associated (impressionism in the case of Dulac, the New Wave in the case of Varda; less specifically defined, in the case of Akerman, is the contemporary European narrative film) and with each other.
Finally, the third context involves the relationship between women, a “primitive” mode of representation, and the cultural meanings of “primitivism” in an anthropological sense. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage (1982) and Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon (1985) are meditations upon the construction of otherness, and their evocations of the “primitive” range across documentary cinema and anthropology, as well as the modernist appropriation of primitivism and the cinematic avant-garde. Both of these films were made by women who quite literally have crossed thresholds separating “West” and “East”; Trinh T. Minh-ha is a Vietnamese woman who works in the U.S., and Jayamanne, born in Sri Lanka, now works in Australia.
Tom Gunning’s discussion of the relationship between early cinema and the avant-garde does not focus exclusively on male filmmakers; Maya Deren is mentioned as one filmmaker influenced by Méliès, and a scene in Meshes of the Afternoon, where a group of Maya Derens sit around a dining table, is cited as influenced by Méliès’s preoccupation with multiplications of his own body.1 The reverberations of the “primitive” in Deren’s work provide an excellent example of the relationship between early cinema and the context of gender and female identity. Deren’s relationship to different configurations of the “primitive” involves, at one point at least, an inquiry into exhibitionism which, while quite different from the context in which Gunning uses the term, nonetheless suggests a similar preoccupation with alterity.
In the 1947 notebooks describing her most ambitious and never-realized project, a film which would compare the rituals and gestures of various non-Western cultures, Deren described the sense of “otherness” she encountered in examining footage of Balinese dance made available to her by the anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Noting the “complete lack of identification between audience and performer” in Balinese dance, Deren writes: “In our culture the tension between exhibitionist and spectator is one of identification: the spectator either would like to be capable of the acts of the performer or identifies himself temporarily, and this enviable and envied ‘model’ role is the incentive for the performer.” Deren goes on to question whether the polarities of exhibitionist and onlooker are even pertinent to Balinese dance: “A condition of exhibitionism is an acute consciousness of exhibiting oneself, and this the little girls in amnesic trance certainly are not. Nor do they have ‘memories’ of their moments of glory, so to speak—trunks of souvenirs, or the dress they performed in the night the Prince of Wales sat in the right box. No—exhibitionism is the wrong word.”2
Deren’s fascination with Balinese dance, like her well-known interest in Haitian culture, is characterized by a questioning of some of the oppositions which form the very basis of Western identity, and a preoccupation with the logocentric dualities of Western consciousness runs throughout her work. The relationship between performer and spectator is one such opposition, and much of Deren’s attraction to non-Western cultures had to do with the possibilities of other formulations of difference. She notes with glee that “Freud wouldn’t do so well in Bali. Hooray for the Balinese.”3 That Freud has done fairly well within feminist film theory suggests, perhaps, at least one of the reasons why Maya Deren’s film work has not received the sustained critical attention one might expect within feminist film studies, particularly given her status in the history of the American avant-garde.4 Deren’s work is informed by a utopian sensibility, a desire not just to rethink the categories of opposition but to discard and surpass them, and in this sense her work has much in common with those films that have been central in feminist writing on film. Yet her rethinking of opposition focused more explicitly on cultural differences and less on sexual ones. Thus, Deren explored so-called primitive cultures. Her film project on comparative rituals was never completed. Perhaps Western dualities are so integral to the cinema that the radical otherness which Deren hoped to capture and explore was virtually unrepresentable on film. However, that desire does inform virtually all of the films that Deren did complete, as well as many of her writings on film.
Indeed, it is in the category of the “primitive,” and particularly in the cross-referencing between different meanings of the “primitive,” that Deren’s work occupies a difficult and challenging area of inquiry for feminist film theory. For the notion of the “primitive” foregrounds the often unacknowledged connections between the feminine and the culturally exotic, and unless those connections are explored, feminist film theory risks perpetuating a female subject fully consonant with white, Western notions of the self. Now the immediate temptation, in Deren’s case, is to characterize her outright celebration of the “primitive,” her distrust of Western rationality, and her attention to the spiritual side of creation as “essentialist.” Such a categorization and implicit dismissal obscure, however, the extent to which her work involves a significant inquiry into cultural and historical difference. Although Deren herself does not often refer specifically to a female (or much less feminist) investment in such an inquiry, such connections are suggested in some of her writing and certainly in her films.
Deren’s interest in “primitive” cultures is charcterized by a criticism of those who have adopted “primitivism” as a way of describing art work that in fact shares little with the cultures in question, as well as a frustration with the lack of attention to the larger cultural context that shapes “primitive” art and rituals. A section of her 1946 pamphlet An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film, for instance, is devoted to just such a criticism:
I am certain that thoughtful critics do not use the term “primitive” without definition and modification. But its general usage, and as a category title for exhibits, reveals a comparative ideal based on the superficial similarity between the skilled simplicity of artists whose culture was limited in information and crude in equipment; and the crude simplifications of artists whose culture is rich in information and refined in its equipment.”5
In an earlier essay, Deren compares the trance state characteristic of ritual dance in “primitive” cultures with hysteria.6 Noting that both are motivated by “psychic conflicts and insults” and characterized by “suggestibility and hypnotism, and hypnoid trances,” she observes as well that “hysteria, as possession also, occurs only within social context, when there are one or more witnesses to the scene. In other words, the role of the community as a necessary frame of reference may include an audience function similar to that of the audience in cases of hysteria.” This comparison between possession and hysteria should not be read as a simple equation, since Deren is again careful to stress the radical difference in social context, and the fact that they are “parallel, rather than identical phenomena.”7 What Deren does not foreground is the common association between women and hysteria, and the therefore implicit assumption that the cultural conditions for the production of hysteria and the subsequent parallelism with possession and trance states are particularly relevant to women.
Given the extent to which Deren’s films focus on the dreams and anxieties and perceptions of women, however, one might extend the comparison she makes in more gender-specific terms. Some of Deren’s film work—like the never-completed film on Balinese dance referred to above—explores quite literally the affiliation with “primitive” cultures. In her better-known films, including Meshes of the Afternoon, another, quite different affiliation with the “primitive” emerges, one more along the lines of the relationship Gunning explores between early film and the avant-garde. Meshes of the Afternoon is structured by the repetition of a series of scenes. A woman, played by Deren herself, sees a figure go around the bend of a street, as she is heading toward a flight of stairs to her home. As she is about to unlock the door to her house, she drops the key. When at last she enters the house, she sees a table with two chairs, a loaf of bread with a knife, a telephone with its receiver off the hook. The woman goes up a flight of stairs to a bedroom, returns downstairs, and sits in a chair. She strokes herself gently, and as her eye appears in extreme close-up, the film begins to tell the same story again. Each retelling of the pursuit of the unknown figure and entry into the house—there are three such retellings in all—is initiated by Deren’s gaze through the window. In each of the three repetitions, different elements are foregrounded. In one version, for instance, the mysterious figure on the road enters the house, and reveals a mirror in the place of a face; in another, the passage from the first floor to the upstairs of the house is made only with great turbulence and difficulty.
Figure 29. Maya Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon (Museum of Modern Art)
Narration itself is foregrounded in Meshes of the Afternoon, particularly insofar as the film turns further and further inward with each recasting of the story’s “meshes,” until there are four Maya Derens. In addition, the two most central repeated elements in the film are the quintessential narrative components of pursuing an other (the androgynous figure which disappears down the road) and crossing a threshold. Narration is also fragmented in the film, most obviously in the way Deren is presented initially. At the very beginning of the film, the only parts of her body visible are her feet and her hands, with the sense of her presence connoted rather by the shadows she casts as she moves down the road, and up the stairway to the house. There is a split vision from the outset, between what Deren sees and what we see of Deren. With the repetition of the initial event of Meshes of the Afternoon, Deren is designated simultaneously as narrator and as enigma, as subject and object of narration, but the elusive figure walking down the road remains unnamed, unidentified—specifically, remains unsexed. The objects foregrounded in the film, like the knife and the key, signal passage, the crossing of a threshold, whether the space separating inside and outside or the boundary between self and other.
The trajectory of the woman in Meshes of the Afternoon evokes a wide range of complex psychic questions, and the shape of the trajectory evokes much of the spirit and style of the “primitive” era of filmmaking. Deren herself is identified as both a dreamer and conjuror in a way that recalls two of the most common frames of the early cinema—the dreamer who awakens only to be confronted with a reality that contrasts brutally with the dream, and the conjuror who makes objects, including his own body, appear and disappear at will. The use of double exposure in the film to represent the multiplied personae of Maya Deren is also evocative, as Gunning suggests, of “primitive” filmmaking, and captures a sense of awe and wonder in the very representability of the woman’s interior life. This evocation of the early cinema in Meshes of the Afternoon acquires a very specific gendered component, for the dream/fantasy frame of the film is interrupted twice by the man, played by Hammid. When the third Maya Deren approaches the sleeping woman, about to stab her, the woman awakens to find Hammid awaking her. Hence the appearance of the man seems to redraw the line separating dream and waking. If the pursuit of the ambiguous figure, as well as the constant folding of the event, suggests a threshold space, then the appearance of Hammid seems to mark the closing down of that threshold, and the attendant emergence of duality.
His appearance also signals a return to order, a designation of the space of the house as a dream space. That very polarity is again thrown into question when Deren reaches for the knife—now transformed from the flower, the object initially associated with the “other” in the first place—and stabs him. But “he” now is a mirror image, and the shattering of the mirror into fragments, dispersed on a beach, suggests the persistence of the narrative vision embodied by the woman—a narrative vision in which the polarities of self and other, of female and male, of dream and waking are fragile. The second ending of Meshes of the Afternoon tells another story. Now Hammid enacts the role of narrator, repeating the itinerary of Deren at the beginning of the film. His discovery of Deren in the house, with her throat slit and her body covered with seaweed, suggests the impossibility of that threshold space. As female and male, as the two sides of duality, then, Deren and Hammid enact, in these two endings to the film, two radically opposed narrative itineraries: the one which poses an endless movement between opposing poles, which opens up a threshold space between the dualities of self and other, and the other, certainly more “conventional,” which asserts those dualities.
In other films by Deren, the realm of the “primitive” is evoked in ways that evoke the intersection between the feminine, the archaic, and the cinematic. As the female subject of At Land (1944), for instance, Deren emerges from the sea at the beginning of the film, and eventually discovers a meeting in progress inside a mansion, at which she gazes with all of the wonder of an Uncle Josh discovering the cinema for the first time, or an indiscreet bathroom maid peeking at forbidden scenes. Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945–46) begins with two open doorways in a corridor, with Deren, now situated on the other side of the threshold, observed with awe by a woman in a scene that is quite evocative of “primitive” journeys down hotel corridors.8 The realm of the “primitive” is given a particularly strong inflection of traditional femininity here. Once the woman crosses the threshold, she holds a skein of yarn while Deren winds it into a ball, and the rhythm of their motions creates a pattern of connection between them.
That the woman is black suggests, perhaps, the desire to rewrite the racist stereotypes of a film such as What Happened in the Tunnel; but it can suggest—much more problematically—the assumption of a patronizing desire for “racial harmony” or the appropriation of image of “exotic” femininity on Deren’s part. While I do not think Deren’s fascination with racial difference, as evidenced in this and other films, as well as in her writings, can be equated with the disturbing appearance of racist cliches of performance in Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance, this does not mean her explorations of racial boundaries are not problematic in their own way.
Like most of Deren’s films, Ritual in Transfigured Time suggests the trancelike state which so fascinated her in the dances of “primitive” culture. She herself made the connection between “primitive” dance and hypnoid states. Here, the representation of the winding of the yarn suggests—despite Deren’s suspicions about Freud—another psychoanalytic association of the “primitive,” recalling Freud and Breuer’s assertion that “hypnoid states” often “grow out of the day-dreams which are so common even in healthy people and to which needlework and similar occupations render women especially prone.”9
Undoubtedly the most persistent figure of the “primitive” in these films is the threshold—between dream and waking and man and woman in Meshes of the Afternoon, between nature and culture in At Land, between white woman and black woman in Ritual in Transfigured Time. The representation of the threshold taps the “primitive” in several senses of the word—as a mode of filmmaking, as a dream world apart from the reality of waking and spatial stability, and—most controversially in feminist terms—as a cultural realm to which women, it would appear, have privileged access. The female narrator in these films embodies a desire, a fantasy of narrative as a persistent movement, the creation of a threshold space.
Figure 30. Suzan Pitt’s Asparagus (Museum of Modern Art)
Asparagus evokes those early films in which “primitive” narrators act out the pleasures of the cinema. Pitt’s animated film depicts different stages of a woman’s relation to a series of images, stages which take us from the interior of a house, to a city street, to a theater. The animation of the film creates a universe that is at once dreamlike, painterly, and childlike. The woman’s imaginary world is most graphically portrayed in the tableaulike garden panorama that unrolls at the window in her house early in the film. Lush floral imagery is juxtaposed with a barren and somewhat dismal-looking asparagus patch. It does not require too much imagination to see here a rather brutal juxtaposition of female and male imagery, a juxtaposition that becomes a kind of running joke in the film. The female narrator’s relationship to a world of dream, magic, and image-making suggests a reincarnation of the “primitive” narrator.
The psychoanalytic reference point is quite strong, since the process of narration in Asparagus draws upon the creation of dream images. The encounter of the female narrator of the film with a luscious world of imagery is like the transformation of dream thoughts into dream images in the dreamer, a process for which Freud used the term primitive (“All the linguistic instruments by which we express the subtler relations of thought—the conjunctions and prepositions, the changes in declension and conjugation—are dropped, because there are no means of representing them; just as in a ‘primitive’ language without any grammar, only the raw material of thought is expressed and abstract terms are taken back to the concrete ones that are at their basis”).10 In Deren’s films, there is also an evocation of the state of dreaming. But in Asparagus, the specific relationship of women to the activation of dreams and imagination does not rely on the “feminine” defined in terms of traditional domestic activities—for instance, the winding of yarn in Ritual in Transfigured Time—but rather in terms of traditional sexual ones.
In the second section of the film, the woman narrator journeys to a theater where a claymation audience watches a spectacle of amazing special effects. The woman goes backstage, where she opens up a Pandora’s box of images and sets them loose. The images float into the midst of the amazed audience; thus the woman transgresses the boundary line separating audience from spectacle. The world outside the theater is depicted as obsessed with sexual polarity, whether through phallic imagery (a gun shop, a sex store) or the storefront with two baby dolls, one on a pink blanket, the other on a blue one. The space of the theater thus becomes an other space, where the illusion of oscillation and fluidity is operative. In the concluding section of the film, the woman returns to the house, and the formerly resistant asparagus now not only yields to her caress but undergoes a series of fanciful transformations, from waterfall to colored sprinkles to stars. The images recall those images set loose in the theater. The narrator is certainly no longer an observer but an active participant, and a participant no longer concealed backstage, as in the theater.
The connection between the woman and the asparagus is overtly sexual, becoming a fanciful rendition of a blow job. Throughout most of the film, the woman has been portrayed either as faceless or as the impression left in a mask which she dons to enter into the world at large. But in this final section of the film, the woman acquires at least one facial attribute: extremely red lips. At the very beginning of the film, the first asparagus motif occurs when the woman defecates into a toilet bowl. In one of many of a series of magical transformations in the film, the turds become asparagus stalks. Given the mouth and the sexual act as the film’s conclusion, it would appear that one of the film’s many fantasies is the rereading of the very notion of a psychic or sexual stage, since the conclusion of the film could be read simultaneously as “regression” (to an oral stage) or “development” to something of a “phallic” stage. While I suppose the film could be read as informed by penis envy, the fantasy of incorporation evidenced at the conclusion suggests a refusal of the very divisions, the “stages,” that would make such a reading possible. The incorporation is quite literal, of course, but it is figurative as well, the sexual act becoming an exchange of the polarities of male and female imagery.
In other words, a fantasy of a threshold space informs Asparagus, and this fantasy of the threshold shares some similarities with the woman’s journey in Meshes of the Afternoon. The three sections of Asparagus can be seen as a progression toward the fantasy of the incorporation of male into female at the film’s conclusion, but the last two sections can also be read, along the lines of Meshes of the Afternoon, as a double ending. In other words, like Meshes of the Afternoon, Asparagus juxtaposes two narrative modes. The two endings of Meshes of the Afternoon suggest two different encounters between man and woman, as well as a juxtaposition of a conventional narrative resolution (the separation of dream and waking, male and female), with the persistence of narrative understood as a threshold space between opposing terms. In Asparagus, the two narrative modes are defined explicitly in terms of the position of the woman—in the one case a masked figure backstage who creates a different kind of spectacle, and in the other, a sexual being who becomes both active and passive, creator and recipient of sexual imagery.
The female narrator embodies a fantasy of movement, of transformation, whereby the imagery of “male” and “female” is interchangeable; thus it is a narration located in a hypothetical moment anterior to narration as a conquest of the other, evidenced in early films such as A Subject for the Rogue’s Gallery and What Happened on 23rd Street. Asparagus appropriates, then, the metaphoric figure of the female voyeur in films such as The Indiscreet Bathroom Maid. If a condition of female voyeurism in early film is the pleasure of crossing the threshold, but in ways fundamentally different from the imposition of the law (in A Search for Evidence) or the conquest of the female body (in A Subject for the Rogue’s Gallery), then the female narrator in Asparagus extends the possible fantasies of the threshold.
I turn now to three films in which it is not so much the representation of the female body per se that is central, but rather the narrative modes associated with traditional feminitity. That these films are part of the history of French cinema (Akerman’s film is Belgian, but is read largely within the context of French cinema defined in the broader terms of “French-speaking”) situates differently their inquiries into “primitive” representation. The distinction between dominant and avant-garde cinema does not hold quite the same currency in a French context as it has in the American context, particularly since the rejection of narrative so central to the American avant-garde has not been a defining characteristic of French film. To be sure, it has been a recurring characteristic of French cinema to reject or revise considerably the narrative conventions of the American cinema. But this search for alternative cinematic forms has not entailed the dismissal of narrative, but rather its reconceptualization. Throughout the history of French cinema, and particularly at moments of crisis and transition, filmmakers have paid homage to, probed, and explored the “primitive” era. At certain moments within French film history, women filmmakers have appropriated forms of “primitive” narration, and have explored the links between the “primitive” and the feminine by staging tensions between different narrative modes.
Like many other films associated with the development of impressionism in France in the 1920s, Germaine Dulac’s 1922 film The Smiling Madame Beudet attempts to convey inner, subjective states, in this case the inner frustration of a sensitive, musically inclined provincial woman who is trapped in a conventional marriage to a boorish husband.11 From the outset, Mme Beudet’s conflict with her husband is staged as a conflict of differing points of view: when they are invited to the opera, Monsieur Beudet conjures up an image of a group of happy singers, while Mme Beudet can only imagine an overbearing man bellowing to a woman crouched beneath him. While Dulac’s film is technically more sophisticated than many films of the 1920s, it is characterized by a selective, foregrounded use of “primitive” narration.12 For Mme Beudet fantasizes in a “primitive” mode. She is like the dreamers in early films who imagine fictional characters coming to life as they nod over a book, or like the conjuror in a Méliès film who makes threatening objects disappear—usually women, in Méliès’s case; her husband, in the case of Mme Beudet.
As a dreamer, a fantasizer, Mme Beudet is portrayed in a far more complex way than are her fantasies.13 In other words, a distance is created in the film between how the woman’s fantasy life is represented and how she is portrayed in relationship to it. The depiction of Mme Beudet taps a wide variety of angles, camera distances, and lighting effects. The style of her fantasies and dreams tends, however, to be quite similar: she reads a magazine and imagines a character coming to life, drawing upon the kinds of superimpositions quite common in early cinema. She reads a poem and imagines one image after another—each shot in the straightforward, frontal style characteristic of early film—with no connection between them.
In Dulac’s film, different narrative modes are juxtaposed with ironic effect.14 The most obvious irony results from the juxtaposition of Mme Beudet’s fantasy life with the equally “primitive,” but even more limited, fantasy life of her husband. More significant is the interplay between two different narratives that constitute the overall structure of the film. On one level is the “primitive” narration that characterizes the points of view of the characters, and especially Mme Beudet. On another level is the narration of the film in a larger sense, involving crisis and resolution around the film’s central event. Monsieur Beudet plays a “suicide game” in which he pulls an unloaded gun from his desk drawer and threatens to kill himself at moments of conflict and frustration. The turning point of the film is Mme Beudet’s decision to load the gun.15 Her plan misfires in more ways than one, however. For when Monsieur Beudet next pulls the gun from his drawer, he points it at her; and when he shoots it (harming no one), and discovers it was loaded, he foolishly assumes that his wife wanted to kill herself, and not him.
In a film so concerned with making visible the inner states of its characters, and of its heroine in particular, the absence of a shot actually showing Mme Beudet loading the gun—initiating some kind of narrative action—is particularly significant. The absence of such an image suggests a collision, within Mme Beudet, of two differing narrative modes—the “primitive” mode I have already described, and a more properly classical one, in the sense that the surreptitious “murder” of her husband requires the planning of just the kind of cause-and-effect actions that are central to the evolution of the classical mode of narration. The nonrepresentation of the significant action of loading the gun suggests the impossibility of Mme Beudet’s position within that classical narrative mode.
However, this is not to say that The Smiling Madame Beudet brackets classical narrative altogether. Rather, the film represents the conventions of narrative resolution in order to problematize them. In the final image, we see the couple in the street, and Monsieur Beudet nods to a priest who passes. The representation of the outdoors, of the public sphere of the town, indicates a division between Mme Beudet’s inner existence and the social universe that surrounds her. The film begins with standard “establishing shots” of the village in which the couple lives, although it becomes clear that there is no seamless fit between that social context and the inner world of Mme Beudet. Indeed, this is another dimension of Dulac’s ironic narrative style, for the few shots of the outside world that occur suggest all the more forcefully the increasing distance between Mme Beudet and her surroundings.16
The final image of the film is the first time that Mme Beudet is actually seen outdoors, and she is framed by two men, their exchange occurring across her body. The image “cites” the conventions of the classical cinema—husband and wife reunited, order restored—in what is undoubtedly the most far-reaching irony of the film. For the supposed integration of Mme Beudet into the institutions of provincial life requires the failure of any narrative of her own. Like the narrators of the early cinema, Mme Beudet can conjure and dream isolated images, but she cannot construct a narrative. But Dulac, of course, can.17 The Smiling Madame Beudet brings together a historical moment of the cinema with a particular mode of female consciousness, creating an encounter between the “primitive” cinema and the classical cinema, between a female imagination unable to break out of the duality of home versus public world, of isolated images versus complex narrative, and a more properly classical narrative which offers only the position of the obedient wife.18 It is in the ironic juxtaposition of these modes that female narration takes shape.
Figure 31. Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet (Museum of Modern Art)
Somewhat like filmmakers of the 1920s, the directors of the New Wave were interested in stretching the boundaries of narrative filmmaking, and they too entertained an ambiguous relationship to the conventions of the classical American cinema. Perhaps the most striking feature in the films of the directors associated with the New Wave was the consciousness of the history and theory of the medium that influenced their styles of filmmaking. Anecdotes of childhoods and adolescences spent at the Cinémathèque Française have become part of the standard histories of the period, and as is well known, the central group of filmmakers who formed the “core” of the Nouvelle Vague—Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette—all began their cinematic careers as writers and critics at Cahiers du cinéma.19 Virtually all of the films of the New Wave—and especially those of Jean-Luc Godard—are films about film, about the particular nature of cinema as a form of representation. In keeping with the ambiguous relationship with American cinema that has informed so much French film practice, New Wave films that reflect upon the classical American cinema have received the most attention. But an equally important dimension of the films of these and other filmmakers of the period involves citations of, and inquiries into, the early years of film history.
Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Les Carabiniers, for instance, depicts two naive men whose departure to do battle for their king initiates them into a world where image and referent are split. When the two men return from the war, they display a series of “title deeds”—postcards depicting a wide range of department stores, women, and tourist attractions. The film features a first visit to the movies by one of its protagonists that recalls Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show. The program which Michel-ange watches shows a train, a family meal, and a woman bathing, all with exaggerated sound effects. Like Uncle Josh, Michel-ange is tantalized by the image of woman on the screen. After his efforts at peeking around the sides of the screen to get a better look at the woman bathing are unsuccessful, he then proceeds to tear down the screen. There is no rear-projectionist to confront Michel-ange, but rather an exposed brick wall and the continued projection of the film images over his astonished face and body.
In a different yet related way, François Truffaut’s 1970 film The Wild Child (L’enfant sauvage) also cites the early cinema.20 Based on Jean Itard’s Memoire et rapport sur Victor de l’ Aveyron (1806), the film tells the story of the famous “wild child” found in the forest—his difficult access to the culture and civilization of France, and the role of his mentor, Itard, played by Truffaut himself. Throughout the film, Truffaut uses devices associated with the early cinema, such as iris shots, and eschews the use of techniques uncommon in the “primitive” era, such as close-ups; and he cites several “primitive” films, most notably the famous Repas de bébé, an early Lumière film showing Auguste Lumiere and his wife feeding their child. Most notably, Truffaut draws an analogy between two kinds of relationships—his own relationship to the early cinema, and Itard’s relationship to the zero degree of culture represented by Victor. Thus Victor is identified as “primitive” in both a cinematic and a cultural sense.
In both of these examples, the evocation of the early cinema serves to mark the passage of the individual—more specifically, the male individual—into realms of paternal authority, whether the comically defined (and never seen) “king” who distributes postcards as title deeds in Les Carabiniers, or the paternalistic figure of the physician who takes charge of Victor in The Wild Child. Agnès Varda’s 1962 film Cleo from 5 to 7 also “cites” the early cinema, in what appears—initially, at least—to be a gesture similarly engaged with “maturation,” but now of a female figure. The protagonist of Varda’s film is a mediocre but successful pop singer who embodies virtually all of the cliches of the stereotypical woman-as-object—she is narcissistic, childlike, and dependent on the reassuring images of those who surround her. The “5 to 7” of the film’s title refers to the temporal trajectory of the film (actually more like 5:00 to 6:30 P.M.), the time spent waiting for the results of a medical examination which will show whether Cléo has cancer or not. Indeed, there is an obsession with time in the film. Cléo is extremely conscious of the passage of time until the test results will be ready, and the film marks off time in a series of thirteen segments, ranging from three to fifteen minutes long, each identified in titles flashed onto the screen with the name of a character or groups of characters attached.
Figure 32. Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (Corinth)
It is tempting to describe the film in terms of Cléo’s transformation from object to subject. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, noting that in the film “relations of power are associated with vision,” reads Cléo in these terms: “In assuming a vision of her own, Cléo assumes the power to direct her life, and the power to construct her own image as well.”21 There is no question that Cléo’s passage in the film involves a literal discarding of many of the fictions of feminine identity—her blonde wig, her doll’s house of an apartment, the substitute family within which she is forever the child. However, the scenario to which Cléo accedes is that of classical film narrative. At the conclusion of the film, Cléo strikes up a friendship with a young solider about to leave for Algeria. While this is not exactly a typical Hollywood ending, it is nonetheless a girl-meets-boy, walk-off-into-the-horizon conclusion full of hope and optimism.
The threat of cancer is still real, but the fear has diminished; and the final segment of the film in which these changes occur offers the longest stretch of uninterrupted time. To be sure, it could be argued that the classical scenario is reproduced and defamiliarized simultaneously, through the representation of and insistence upon the woman’s relationship to it. But if Cleo from 5 to 7 develops a critical reading of the relationship between women and classical film narrative, it is a reading that has as much to do with the narration of the film as with Cléo’s transformation from female object into female subject. For underlying the apparently radical change in Cléo is a far more complex and contradictory process of narration, whereby two different kinds of narrating authorities intersect.
Like Dulac, Varda associates “primitive” narration with the traditionally female. It is not primarily Cléo who is designated a “primitive narrator,” however, but rather a woman fortune-teller in whose apartment the film begins. In the film’s “prologue,” the woman card reader lays out a series of cards and interprets them. The entire cast of characters of the film, as well as its central events, is displayed in a series of still, static images. The card reader brings to mind the early Méliès film Les cartes vivantes (The Living Playing Cards), in which a (male) conjuror brings a series of playing cards to magical life. In Varda’s film, however, the woman’s presence is identified as wavering between the narrative authority of the conjuror and a superstitious belief in a fatalistic narrative agency beyond her powers of interpretation. The universe she inhabits is enclosed and claustrophobic, reminiscent of the Beudet apartment in Dulac’s film (here, however, the husband is quite literally banished to the closet).
Given that Cléo’s superstitiousness seems to be part of the feminine identity that is shed in the course of the film, it is tempting to regard this unnamed (and untimed) narrator as a presence that the film disavows. Cléo’s superstitious nature is also revealed during a taxi ride later in the film, when another association of the “primitive” appears: a shop window reveals African masks, and a group of students—including one prominently displayed black man—surround the cab, terrifying Cléo. If the female fortune-teller is associated with “primitive” narration, the racial and racist stereotype here on display is an image with no narrative authority of its own. While it is tempting to assume that the stereotype emerges in order to indicate the limited state of Cléo’s consciousness, it is equally possible that the “Africa” thus evoked is an exotic other for the film as well as for its protagonist.
A more direct citation of the early cinema occurs later in the film when Cléo goes to the movies. Raoul, the character with whom this segment is identified in the subtitles, is a projectionist who shows a short silent film comedy. A young man (played by Jean-Luc Godard) watches his loved one (played by Anna Karina) depart down the steps of a quay. When he turns to put on sunglasses, his gaze shifts to the opposite stairway where, unbeknownst to him, a different young woman—but who he thinks is his lover—follows the same trajectory in a reverse field. A series of comic-tragic mishaps arrives, and the young man runs down the steps only to arrive too late to save his beloved. Back at the position at which the film began, he removes his sunglasses to wipe away a tear, and turns his head to discover that he had made a mistake, that because of his shift in position he had identified another woman’s actions as those of his girlfriend. His “real” beloved is continuing to walk down the opposite stairway. He runs after her, and they embrace in the requisite “happy ending.”
This re-created silent film is modern in very conspicuous ways, since it employs techniques of cutting, matching, and alternation of medium shots and close-ups that were quite alien to early filmmakers. That it is shown at sound speed increases the sense of “citation.” However, the film’s punchline relies on a use of time that is quite distinctly “primitive.” Sequential events are repeated with a disregard for what have been, since the 1910s, “rules” of linear temporality. When the young man turns to wipe a tear, a temporal “mistake” has occurred, for he watches his lover depart as if the other intervening events had not occurred, as if no time had elapsed since she first began walking down the stairs.
The most frequently cited example of temporal overlap in the early cinema occurs in Edwin S. Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1903). From the interior of a room in which a woman and her child have collapsed from the effects of a fire, we see a fireman rescue the woman, and then return to rescue the child. The same action is shown again, but from the exterior of the house. As Andre Gaudreault has suggested, the repetition of the action of rescue from outside the house allows the representation of a climax: “on reaching ground, the woman implores the fireman to rescue her child still trapped in the room. Perhaps Porter added the last shot with the intention of showing us the mother’s request.” The motivation for this temporal repetition is the possibility of representing multiple perspectives. As Gaudreault says, “the simple copresence of two different points of view toward one single event justifies their successive presentation, which produces a repetition of the action and finally a temporal overlap that today can only astonish.”22
In Varda’s scene, there does not initially appear to be a real change of point of view, since Godard’s young man is the focal point for both descents. The mistake in his perception occurs when he puts on dark glasses. The entire scene is filmed, it seems, as if shot through his dark glasses—the woman who departs down the stairs is black, for instance. But the filter of the dark glasses does not really determine the tint of the scene, since it is more properly described as an attempt to replicate a negative image—literally with costume and skin colors reversed, and figuratively with the heroine’s sudden death replacing the couple’s previous bliss. That race again emerges in the context of another kind of so-called primitivism, now one associated specifically with the history of cinema, makes it clear that race is central to the evocation of the “primitive” in the film.
But as with the racist stereotypes in Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance, there is little to suggest that race is evoked in order to explore its construction in a critical way. The temporal repetition that would be motivated by a change in point of view in the early cinema is here motivated, rather, by the dualities of white and black, happiness and misery. As Claudia Gorbman has said, the silent film “works as a metaphor for Cléo’s own dilemma of perception. Put dark glasses on (pessimism, superstition, anxiety) and you will see death, darkness, sadness; look by the light of day and you will find life, love, happiness.”23 But the allusion to early cinema provides a metaphor not just for Cléo’s own development, but for the narrative of the film as well. For this evocation of the “otherness” of the “primitive” cinema suggests a pull toward another mode of representation, an affinity between Varda’s own unorthodox use of temporality and the supposed “mistakes” of the “primitive” era. That pull, that affinity, complicate somewhat the seemingly smooth movement in Cleo from 5 to 7 toward self-knowledge and subjecthood.
In the concluding segment of the film, Cléo and her new friend Antoine encounter the doctor, who confirms that Cléo does indeed have cancer. The prediction of the fortune-teller at the beginning of the film is confirmed, but it seems as though the doctor, a narrative authority associated with science, reason, and, need I add, masculinity, has replaced the superstitious female “primitive” narrator of the film’s prologue. The diametrically opposed responses of Cléo appear to confirm this change: terrified and childlike at the beginning of the film, stoic and adult at the conclusion. However, there is a subtle irony in this apparent transformation, a suggestion that the enclosed, feminine world of superstition and “primitive” narration is not so easily separable from the bright light of science and the confident resolutions of classical narration.24
The force of the “primitive” narrator echoes not only in the actualization of her prediction, but also in a small gesture performed by the doctor. As he turns from Cléo and Antoine, he puts on his dark glasses in movements that echo very precisely Godard’s movements in the short film that we have seen with Cléo in the movie theater. Cleo from 5 to 7 is characterized by a considerably ironic narrative. The condition of Cléo’s transformation would appear to be entry into a cinematic order from which any vestiges of the “primitive” are banished, whether in the form of narrative structures or female narrators who create cinematic equivalents of “living playing cards.” However, the narrative of the film insists, rather, on the fold of the “primitive” into the classical, and the attendant impossibility of neatly separating the female object from the female subject. Yet while the film connects female subject and female object, the overlapping itineraries of the “scientific” (the doctor) and the “primitive” (the fortune-teller) suggest, just as forcefully, a distinctly unproblematized relation between black and white; indeed, the black remains as the unexamined projection of the white man’s sunglasses, or the spectacle of a “primitive” mask.
In contrast to the contexts for Dulac’s and Varda’s films, there is no “movement,” no “new Belgian cinema,” no shared alternative tradition, of which Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a part. No shared cinematic tradition, that is. Rather, one of the most important contexts for Jeanne Dielman is contemporary feminism. Akerman herself has said, “Jeanne Dielman, for instance, I wouldn’t have . . . made the film in that manner, the idea wouldn’t have been so clear, were it not for the women’s movement.”25 Akerman’s film responds more directly to a feminist context, one in which the notion of the “primitive” has surfaced in fairly controversial ways. From the resurrection of the pre-oedipal and the attendant child-mother bond in feminist psychoanalytic writing, to the insistence on the body in discourse in l’écriture féminine, to the conceptualization of a female aesthetic defined in so-called pre-aesthetic terms, contemporary feminism has been obsessed with the excavation of a space, an area, somehow prior to and therefore potentially resistant to the realm of the patriarchal symbolic. In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman taps this feminist preoccupation with the “presymbolic” and creates a dialogue between it and the supposedly “presymbolic” phase of the cinema, a dialogue that refuses any relegation of the feminine or of female desire to the status of the “pre-.” In feminist terms, then, the “primitive” surfaces in Jeanne Dielman through the preoccupation with the mother-child bond, as well as with the rituals of everyday life.
Jeanne Dielman, like Cleo from 5 to 7, is preoccupied with time, and in particular with duration, repetition, and ritual. Although it makes no effort to represent Jeanne Dielman’s states of consciousness and perception, as Dulac does with Mme Beudet, there is nonetheless a strong sense of lived duration in the film, an attempt to draw the spectator into the temporal framework of the protagonist. Jeanne Dielman is best known for its length—three hours and eighteen minutes—and its slow pace. For while the film does condense and elide time, it devotes extensive “real” time to the rituals of housework and everyday life. Most viewers watch Jeanne Dielman waiting for “something to happen.” And while a climax eventually does occur—in the last fifteen minutes of the film—Jeanne Dielman demands nothing less than a revision of what is meant by “something happening.” The film follows three days in the everyday routine of a Belgian widow in Brussels, played by Delphine Seyrig. Her routine includes prostitution, daily visits from regular male clients which are totally, obsessively integrated into the pattern of household chores. While documenting the gestures and rituals that make up Jeanne Dielman’s everyday life, the film spends more time in the kitchen and the living room than in the bedroom, and it is not until the conclusion that we see Jeanne Dielman in the bedroom with one of her clients. The scene revealed is not just a scene of sex, but one of death: after Jeanne experiences what appears to be sexual orgasm, she kills her client.26
It should not be surprising that given its obvious affiliations with feminism, this film has become—as much as any other film made in the last twenty years—a feminist classic. Two issues in particular have emerged in the considerably extensive feminist commentary available on Jeanne Dielman. First, the film develops an aesthetic form equal to the task of the examination of women and the cinema undertaken by feminist film theorists. B. Ruby Rich describes the “filming degree zero” of Akerman’s style, and Marsha Kinder emphasizes how Akerman “cultivates the unseen” and the “unheard.”27 That Jeanne Dielman can be read as a meditation on the very nature of the cinema has been noted by many critics, and of particular importance is the absence of the “reverse shot,” the refusal to construct a fictional space along the conventional lines of seer/seen.28 Hence, as Claire Johnston has argued, there is in Jeanne Dielman an “opening up of what suture attempts to fill.”29
This is not to say that Jeanne Dielman can be read, in feminist terms, uniquely through its formal structure; indeed, most feminists who have written about this film foreground consistently the challenge it represents to any purely formal notion of alternative cinema. Second, feminist critics have drawn attention to the strong ambivalence in the film, the sense throughout of competing levels of agency, identification, and pleasure. The most obvious embodiment of ambivalence is Jeanne herself. Jayne Loader is quite critical of the film precisely for the reason that Jeanne’s final action, the murder of the client, is presented so ambiguously.30
Others have found the ambiguous representation of Jeanne to be one of the greatest challenges of the film. Brenda Longfellow puts it this way: “Is she a hysteric or feminist revolutionary? Perhaps the only answer is both, and simultaneously so.”31 Laleen Jayamanne speaks in similar terms of the representation of housework in the film; noting Akerman’s self-described “loving acknowledgement” of women’s household tasks, Jayamanne says that those tasks are “lovingly viewed at a distance because they also signify woman’s absence; they are beautiful and lethal because they help her transcend her situation.”32 The ambivalence of Jeanne Dielman works in terms of its narrative structure as well. Janet Bergstrom has noted the split in the film between character and director, between two definitions of the feminine: “the feminine manquée, acculturated under patriarchy, and the feminist who is actively looking at the objective conditions of her oppression—her place in the family.”33 And Daniele Dubroux reads Jeanne Dielman in terms of the Freudian uncanny, with the film’s sense of women’s place rendered as both extremely familiar and extremely strange.34
Figure 33. Delphine Seyrig in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Babette Mangolte, cinematographer) (New Yorker Films)
This sense of ambivalence, of the uncanny, of the “beautiful and the lethal,” reverberates throughout the film. Virtually every gesture and event represented is composed of a complex itinerary of pleasure and control, desire and repression. The orgasm is particularly significant in this context, but it is one instance in a long series of losses of control. It becomes clear that something has gone wrong in Jeanne’s routine when, on the second day of the film, she leaves the cover off the soup tureen after putting the client’s fee in, leaves her hair uncombed, burns the potatoes. So much has the film created a rhythm around the precise order of Jeanne Dielman’s routine that these seemingly small disruptions are quite significant.
But what remains unspecified in the film is the exact source of the disruption. Perhaps the client on day two of the film stayed too long—but given the elliptical way in which the sexual encounters are shown, this is impossible to say with certainty. While day one of the film would appear to be the stable routine only disrupted on the following day, the letter from her sister Fernande in Canada seems to provoke disruption, particularly with Fernande’s suggestion that Jeanne should think of remarriage. The letter ends with mention of a birthday present for Jeanne, and after Jeanne reads the letter aloud to her son, she wonders what the present might be. Jeanne is unwrapping the belated birthday package from Fernande when the doorbell rings on the third day, announcing her client. As a result, the scissors are left in the bedroom where they don’t belong, soon to be grabbed as the murder weapon.
On the second day of the film, a neighbor of Jeanne’s drops off her baby, whom Jeanne tends to for a short while. The neighbor—played by Akerman herself—is never seen, but when she returns to pick up the baby, we hear her voice as she asks Jeanne what she is making for dinner. She then proceeds to tell a humorous story about her own inability to decide what to buy at the butcher’s. She decided to listen to what other women were ordering, but was uninspired, so when her own turn came she ordered what the woman before her had ordered. As a result, she was burdened with an expensive cut of veal, which her family doesn’t even like. She continues to talk of her husband and her children. A sense of randomness dominates the woman’s conversation, as she moves from one topic to another, and a sense below the surface of what she says of the enormous frustration of caring for her children and pleasing her husband.
Significantly, Jeanne stands at the door with her arm protecting the passage during the encounter, as if to ward off not only the possible intrusion of the neighbor but also the threat of randomness. When the neighbor asks Jeanne what she is making for dinner, Jeanne replies that on Wednesdays, she makes veal cutlets with peas and carrots. But later in the day, when the afternoon client leaves, he says he will see Jeanne next Thursday. One assumes that Jeanne regulates her clients with the same precision with which she regulates her choice of meals, so the mistake—if indeed it is a mistake—reads as one more possible cause for disruption. There may not be an exact and identifiable cause for the murder of Jeanne’s client, but the threat of randomness, of an interruption which is not immediately regulated and defined within cycles of repetition and ritual, looms over the film from the outset.
Jeanne Dielman begins in the kitchen in the middle of the first day. Jeanne’s routine is a model of synchronization: as the film begins, we see her preparing potatoes. The doorbell rings, and she greets a male client. Jeanne times her encounters precisely so that the potatoes that she and her teenage son will eat for dinner cook while she and her client are in the bedroom. After Jeanne shows her client out, she quickly and efficiently erases the traces of his presence. Here, as throughout the film, the camera occupies a stationary position, at approximately the same distance from Jeanne, in a medium-long shot. While the angles of the camera may change within each room, the shots are always paragons of symmetry, with Jeanne framed and defined very precisely by the objects that surround her.
There is little dialogue in the film, and what there is is usually conveyed in a stilted, stiff manner. Rather, it is the sounds of everyday life—water in the sink, heels clicking across the floor—which are exaggerated and which form the sonoric texture. While there are quite obviously cuts in the film, the individual shots are of long duration. Only the shots in the bedroom are significantly briefer than those of other rooms, thus emphasizing the somewhat forbidden quality of the room, even when it is a place to be cleaned up rather than occupied by sexual contact. Throughout Jeanne Dielman, virtually every shot focuses not only on how Jeanne is contained by her surroundings, but also on the passageways connecting and/or obstructing movements elsewhere—windows (through which only darkness is visible), archways, doors, curtains.
Put another way, the space of Jeanne Dielman is simultaneously claustrophobic and “open,” or at least defined by the possibility of passage. The representation of space continues, then, the ambivalent quality characteristic of the film as a whole. So, too, is the representation of control that dominates the film from the outset marked by ambivalence. Jeanne’s most obvious expression of control is the constant attention to switching lights on and off. Yet throughout the film, a neon light from the street outside flashes into the living room, its blue color and rhythmic flickering an intrusive presence in the space of Jeanne’s home. If the style of the film appears to be as controlled and controlling as Jeanne’s rituals, that style is disrupted as well.
Rooms are by and large represented with unchanging camera angles and distances, so as to create in the viewer a sense of the familiar not unlike that which characterizes Jeanne’s routine. But sometimes angles change, just enough to make a room appear slightly different in one shot than in another. Most significantly, there is a change in mise-en-scène in the kitchen. Sometimes there is one chair at the kitchen table, and sometimes two, with no motivation or explanation as to why the change has occurred.35 One is tempted to see in these “faux raccords,” or mismatches, an homage to Godard, for whom such mismatches and refusals of continuity were deliberate subversions of classical technique. In Jeanne Dielman, however, the joke remains subtle, never called attention to in the way that Godard, for instance, in Weekend, inserts a written title announcing “Faux raccord” into the fabric of the mismatch.
The ambivalence which characterizes the representation of space and of control in the film characterizes the representation of Jeanne Dielman as well. Certainly, the film traces the restrictive conditions of housework, the dehumanizing effects of continuous labor and servitude, while it portrays Jeanne as an unmistakable compulsive. Yet it also produces an equally unmistakable sense of pleasure in the rituals of everyday life. Jeanne Dielman is observed, in other words, as both a symptom and a gesture, as an object to be studied at a distance and as a subject engaged in the pleasure of process. Given the extent to which the character of Jeanne occupies screen time in the film, it is perhaps tempting to read the narration in terms uniquely of her activities. But as the game of the disappearing chairs indicates quite emphatically, the representation of Jeanne’s activities is only one part of the larger narrative of the film. The ambivalence of the narration acquires particular contours through the appropriation of “primitive” narration.
To be sure, the staging of “primitive” narration in Jeanne Dielman occurs, on one level, in the person of Jeanne Dielman herself. Silvia Bovenschen has used the term pre-aesthetic to describe the ways in which women’s aesthetic impulses have traditionally taken shape in the forms of domestic arts, such as quilting; or personal decoration, such as make-up and costume.36 In Jeanne Dielman, there is no object, pre-aesthetic or aesthetic, associated with Jeanne Dielman, but rather the gesture itself, constantly repeated and signifying both drudgery and a kind of meditative beauty. What is perhaps most strikingly “primitive” about the representation of the feminine in the film is that, like those gestures represented in the early cinema, they attach themselves to the devices of narrative closure only with great awkwardness and difficulty. In Jeanne Dielman, female narration is built precisely on that “difficulty,” understood not as a lack but as a difference.
On a second level, the narration of Jeanne Dielman, however controlled and precise, evokes the early cinema by virtue of the absence of camera movement, the duration of the shots, and the camera distance. Noël Burch has categorized Akerman’s rediscovery of the “primitive” mode of representation along the lines of contemporary film studies’ attention to the exploration of early cinema in works of the avant-garde. But Burch draws here on Peter Wollen’s well-known distinction between the two avant-gardes, one largely “formal” and resolutely antinarrative in orientation, and the other more directed toward political understandings of language and representation. As Burch puts it, the former is “outside” the institution, the latter on its “fringes.” Most avant-garde films for which an affiliation with the early cinema has been claimed belong to the first category, but Burch suggests that the “other avant-garde, mainly European, has incorporated into its critical arsenal strategies which clearly hark back to the Primitive era.”37
Jeanne Dielman exemplifies what Burch describes as the “Primitive camera stare,” in which the camera “typically remains staring into space, unable or unwilling to move, when a character goes out of shot. . . and finally returns only after a long absence. . . .”38 Noting that Jeanne Dielman incorporates the medium long shot and the front medium close-up central to the “primitive stare,” Burch describes the film as
one of the most distanced narrative films of recent years, recreating to a large extent the conditions of exteriority of the Primitive Mode (the sparseness of speech seems to be a further contributing factor here), positioning the spectator once again in his or her seat, hardly able because hardly enabled to embark upon that imaginary journey through diegetic space-time to which we are so accustomed, obliged ultimately to reflect on what is seen rather than merely experience it.39
Many critics have agreed with Burch’s assessment of Jeanne Dielman, if not because of the specific affiliation of the “primitive,” then at least because of the film’s documentation of the woman’s alienation. As I have suggested, however, I think that there is considerably more ambivalence in this film than claims to distance or alienation would suggest. The point is crucial not just in terms of the female narration of the film, but also in terms of the specific appropriation of the “primitive” that is performed. While I certainly agree that the film encourages one to “reflect on what is seen,” I do not think reflection is opposed to experience, as Burch suggests. Rather, the appropriation of “primitive” narration engages a rethinking of the opposition between distance and identification.
Part of what distinguishes the appropriation of the “primitive” in Jeanne Dielman is not just the simultaneous inquiry into the “primitive” as it applies to both a mode of filmmaking and a mode of traditional femininity, but also the reverberations of the “scene primitive,” the primal scene, in the film.40 In Jeanne Dielman the components of the primal scene are quite obviously (and almost parodically) in evidence—the forbidden space of the mother’s bedroom, and the accouterments of classical primal scene material, including drapes and thresholds. But there is a disjuncture between the visual components of the primal scene and its customary association with the male child. For Jeanne Dielman’s son speaks the language of oedipal and primal desire in terms that are flat, obvious, and completely detached from any signs of narrative fascination.
Near the conclusion of the first day of the film, when Sylvain is in bed reading, he asks his mother about her first meeting with his father. Like virtually all extended “stories” told by the characters within the film, Jeanne rapidly and in monotone recounts her meeting with her future husband after the end of World War II, his loss of money, her aunts’ (with whom she lived) initial enthusiasm and then opposition to their marriage. The questions which Sylvain poses suggest his own identification with his mother. He wonders how, if his father was ugly (as Jeanne’s aunts insisted), she could make love with him; whether she would marry again if she were to fall in love; and finally—in one of the most curious exchanges between mother and son in the film—he says that, if he were a woman, he could not make love with someone with whom he was not truly in love. Jeanne’s reply is one of many in the film that suggest repressed hostility: “How could you know? You are not a woman.”
On the second day of the film, the possibility that Sylvain’s emerging adolescence might be yet another source of disruption in Jeanne’s routine is suggested more strongly, but once again, Sylvain’s seeming identification with a woman’s point of view is apparent. In a replay of the earlier scene—Sylvain again in bed, and Jeanne bidding him goodnight—he tells his mother that his friend Yan is becoming interested in women. It is clear that Yan’s growing maturity (or Sylvain’s perception of it) is putting a strain on their friendship. In a condensed narrative of a number of cliches of male oedipal development, Sylvain describes Yan as the source of his knowledge about a variety of sexual topics, from the equivalence between a penis and a sword (to which Sylvian protested that swords cause pain), to the sexual activities of parents, both for pleasure and for procreation.
Sylvain tells his mother that once he knew about sex, he called his mother in the night so that his father couldn’t hurt her. Jeanne responds, in her typically laconic fashion, that he needn’t have worried. The tangled web of the primal scene is picked up again on the third day of the film, but now it is Jeanne who tells a shopkeeper some details about her family past. Many years before, her sister Fernande—who seems, on each successive day of the film, to be an ever-increasing source of anxiety—spent three months in Belgium with her son John, who was younger than Sylvain but still bigger and stronger. While Fernande and John slept on the couch—presumably the same one that now serves as Sylvain’s bed—Sylvain slept in the same bedroom as Jeanne and her husband.
Now it is crucial to remember that in the overall scheme of Jeanne Dielman, words and stories such as these are not given the foregrounded importance, as means of access to a privileged past, that they might be accorded in more classical films. Indeed, the process of flattening out speech and sound in the film stresses that the significance of everyday gestures is as great as if not greater than that of spoken language. Nonetheless, however downplayed the function of these lengthy narratives within the film, they are present, and are significant by virtue of their unconventional placement. Much of what is spoken in the film suggests a conventional psychoanalytic reading of the primal scene as an event, as a privileged cause, as the truth of a past. But there is something of a tease in this respect as well—significant details begin to be patched together, but never in a way that allows for a coherent scene to emerge. While Jeanne’s son is certainly coddled, his every physical need attended to, his presence in the film never quite achieves the centrality one might expect, particularly given the evocations of primal scene material. Alongside the mother-son relationship, and frequently displacing it from center stage, are suggestions of another kind of primal scene, one informed by the tangled web of connections that inform the family, desire, and identification. In this rendition of the primal scene, in other words, the son’s desire is displaced not only by the mother’s—as the increasing significance of Aunt Fernande in the various “narratives” would suggest—but by the daughter’s.
That Jeanne Dielman is a film made from the daughter’s point of view has been suggested many times, both by Akerman’s own comments and in critical readings of the film.41 Akerman’s literal signature (in the credits) to Jeanne Dielman is interesting in this respect. In Je tu il elle, Akerman’s fictional name, Julie, is not given until the final credits, and the name inscribes the differing pronouns that constitute the text and address of the film. In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman signs her name “Chantal Anne Akerman.” While there is no absolute rule for the use of middle names, they tend to signify—especially when they are not frequently used—family affiliation. But more obviously, the “Anne” is part of “Jeanne,” a quite literal writing of the authorship of Jeanne Dielman as connected to the figure of Jeanne herself.
In the context of the present discussion, it is particularly significant that the daughter’s perspective is not only a reversal—e.g., the daughter’s primal scene in place of the son’s—but also and especially a vantage point from which to revise substantially just what the primal scene is, both psychically and cinematically, for women. The most significant components of the primal scene that emerge in this context are, first, that the daughter’s vision is necessarily intertwined with that of the mother, that there is no moment of pure distance or separation. Second, there is nothing autonomous about the tableau of the primal scene; rather, the bits and pieces of primal scene material, visual as well as verbal, lead to an ever-expanding narrative and visual scene, rather than the shock of a single spectacular crisis.
Jeanne Dielman recuperates “primitive” narration on three distinct levels—the feminine, the cinematic, the psychoanalytic—and maintains them in unwavering tension. Never, in other words, does one register totally subsume the others. The final representation of this tension is the seven-minute shot at the film’s conclusion, during which Jeanne Dielman sits at the table in the living room, while the blue neon light continues to flash. During most of the film, and in keeping with the ambivalence that characterizes virtually every level, Jeanne wears a facial expression that sometimes seems to express compulsion and repression, and sometimes serenity and pleasure. The intrusion of randomness and the breakdown of her routine tilt the facial expression toward the former. But in the last shot of the film, more of the serenity has been recaptured.
It is impossible to draw a neat feminist conclusion, if by “conclusion” one means either a triumph over victimization or a condemnation of such an irrational solution as murder. To be sure, there is something in the way several threads are drawn together in the murder scene to suggest a resolution—the scissors, fetched to open the birthday present, are the female equivalent of the sword metaphorized as the penis by Sylvain and his friend; and if Sylvain imagines his father hurting his mother during sex, then Jeanne’s attack is a brutal reversal of the son’s imaginary scene. But the lengthy still shot at the film’s conclusion deflates any such consolidation of narrative elements. One is left, rather, with the overarching sense of things unresolved, of levels of tension that cannot and will not resolve into coherent ends, of an ironic juxtaposition of narrative modes.
In all three of the French films just discussed, differences among women are central to the construction of female narration. The women whose names provide the titles of the films are symptoms, stereotypical products of patriarchally defined womanhood (the housewife in The Smiling Madame Beudet, the sex object in Cleo from 5 to 7, and a somewhat peculiar combination of the two in Jeanne Dielman), and female narration is the simultaneous investment in and distance from these women’s activities. In other words, female narration in these films is a reexamination of the traditionally and stereotypically feminine, and an exploration of the position from which such a reexamination can take place without resurrecting the patriarchal dualities of repudiation or glorification.
In each of these films, the equation between “primitive” narration and female identity is largely a function of class: both Madame Beudet and Jeanne Dielman are bound by the rituals of domesticity as shaped by the expectations of a middle-class ethos, and Cléo’s encounter with a “primitive” narrator, the female card reader, is the first of several cross-class encounters—culminating in her relationship with the soldier, Antoine—which shape her change in consciousness. The last two films to which I turn explore differences among women in a larger, cultural sense, and draw upon the associations of the “primitive” as they apply to the feminine, certainly, but more specifically as those associations intersect with anthropological definitions of the so-called primitive other. Too often, the phrase “differences among women” assumes a logocentric relationship between “West” and “East,” or between “white” and “black,” where the first term remains the norm. These films do not simply reverse the duality, but challenge its very foundations.
Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage is an examination and critique of the anthropologist’s view of village life in Senegal. While the image track of the film “documents” the patterns and rituals of everyday life (with particular attention to the activities of women), there is no consistent or coherent narrative to emerge from the series of images. Rather, the filmmaker questions the very possibility of seizing the reality of Senegal through such a visual documentation. Hence, many of the images of the film are difficult to read. Close-ups of a human face, for instance, are placed in a discombobulating relationship to long, presumably “establishing” shots; other close-ups focus on a single body part—part of a face, or a breast—so that it is difficult to read the whole out of the part. Some images are deliberately out of focus; others are intercut with each other in such a way that any sense of continuity is disrupted. Documentary sound is also manipulated, with sound track and image track in a contrapuntal rather than synchronous relation. When rhythmic clapping sounds are heard, for instance, over an image of women pounding, they seem initially to be “natural,” direct sounds; quickly, however, the image and the sound tracks are revealed to be separate and nonsynchronous.
The most obvious way in which Reassemblage critiques the tradition of anthropological filmmaking is in the use of the voice-over, spoken by Trinh herself. In much documentary filmmaking, of course, the voice-over is the primary means by which a coherent and supposedly objective perspective is assumed. From the outset, Trinh’s voice functions as a self-conscious voice, one that questions constantly its own relationship to what is being shown and heard. Indeed, most of her comments are explorations of the significance of filming Senegalese life. It is an unexamined assumption of much anthropological filmmaking that the camera serves to document the “primitive” customs of “primitive peoples,” and the voice-over is perhaps the most obvious embodiment of that desire. In Reassemblage, however, the voice-over becomes an embodiment of another desire, not just to critique the conventions of anthropological filmmaking, but to explore the possible connections between the filmmaker and the patterns that emerge from her observations of Senegal.
In other words, Reassemblage does not just critique the anthropological construction of the “other,” for beyond that critique—or “near by,” to use Trinh’s words in the film (“I do not intend to speak about/Just speak near by”)—is a renarrativization of the relationship between she who speaks and she who is spoken about, between she who looks and she who is looked at, one that draws upon another appropriation of the “primitive.”42 If Reassemblage critiques the appropriation of the “primitive,” particularly insofar as the control of the “primitive” body relies on mechanisms similar to those used to represent the female body, it attempts simultaneously to read the “primitive” in a different, more complex way, resistant to the lure of an archaic femininity, a tribal past, or a one-dimensional “Third World” identity.
What I have described of the film thus far suggests that its “primitive” style has far more to do with a documentary tradition than with the early years of motion-picture history. For in documentary cinema, “primitive” technique can function as a marker of authenticity. As Trinh herself puts it, “It is, perhaps, precisely the claim to catch life in its motion and show it ‘as it is’ that has led a great number of ‘documentarians’ not only to present ‘bad shots,’ but also to make us believe that life is as dull as the images they project on the screen.”43 Much of the style of Reassemblage stretches the limits of anthropological observation, particularly through the relationship between the images and sounds of Senegal and the narrator’s voice. Images which in another context might be signs of “authentic” observation—sights captured on the sly, or on the run, as it were—here are presented rather as markers of the difficulty and impossibility of ever capturing another on film. A frequently used technique in the film is the jump cut, and as Trinh herself has commented, “Recurrent jump cuts within a single event may indicate a hesitation in selecting the ‘best’ framing. They may also serve as rhythmical devices that disrupt spatial and temporal continuity, and suggest a grasping of things in their instantaneousness, in their fragility.”44
Yet the technique of Reassemblage does evoke the “primitive” style in its historic as well as its generic dimension, particularly insofar as another recurrent technique is concerned—the use of stop motion, whereby a human or animal figure will suddenly disappear from the frame. This use of stop motion is far more evocative of the early trick film than of the authentic sloppiness of documentary cinema. A much-contested commonplace of film history is that the difference between documentary and fictional traditions can be traced back to the two lines of development suggested in France by the films of the Lumiere brothers on the one hand, and those of Georges Méliès on the other.45 The Lumiere films were documentations of scenes of everyday life, while Méliès’s films used the manipulative effects of the camera to create fantastic and supernatural effects. In Reassemblage, the sudden disappearance of human figures from the Senegalese landscape suggests an affinity between the magician in Méliès’s films and the narrator of Reassemblage—suggests, that is, a resurrection of the “primitive” style of early filmmaking in order to question and extend the accepted primitivism of documentary technique. Put another way, Trinh juxtaposes two kinds of “primitive” style, one which is readable within the tradition of documentary authenticity and one which is not. The “primitive” narration of the film seeks, then, not only to critique the conventions of the anthropological documentary, but also to reinvent another kind of narration, one which reconceptualizes the “magical” properties of the film medium.
Like most dualisms, the opposition between the “real life” subjects of the Lumières’ films and the manipulated, fantastic subjects of Méliès’s films masks a number of assumptions, particularly insofar as the truth-telling capacity of the cinema is concerned. Reassemblage does not assume the simple opposition of the Lumières and Méliès, of documentary and fiction, but rather seeks to inflect one notion of “primitive” filmmaking—“artless,” capturing life “unawares”—with its presumed opposite—manipulative, magical—thereby putting the very opposition itself into question. Now in the appearances and disappearances so central to Méliès’s magic films, it is a male magician who exercises his control and mastery over a world in which women tend more frequently than not to be the disappearing objects. If it is appropriate to describe Trinh’s voice as the primary narrative perspective of the film, and if that voice acquires—by virtue of the various visual strategies associated with it—the function of a magical “primitive” narrator as well as a deconstructed anthropological one, then how are we to assess the gendered dynamics of the film?
At several points in the film, the female narrator tells anecdotes about the compulsions of whites to assign meanings to the observed experiences of Africans, meanings which are, of course, determined by white, Western notions of coherence and order. The narrator tells of a man and child who are dismissed by a “catholic white sister” for coming to the dispensary on Sunday, the day it is closed according to Catholic religion and therefore when its potential clientele should not presume to be in need of medical attention. Still another anecdote tells of an ethnologist who does not bother to actually listen to the music and stories of the people he has come to observe, since his tape recorder is on. If these examples serve to stress the extent to which colonial narratives impose their own framework on the experiences of others, they also function—somewhat ironically—as the most immediately readable and accessible “stories” within the film—that is, for a viewer trained and conditioned by classical film narrative.
But this is not to say that Reassemblage opposes these stories of Western “logic” with randomly selected images and words, for there is a very obvious process of selection that takes place in the film. Most of the film focuses, for instance, on the women of Senegal, with men most obviously present only at the beginning and the end. And the images which are repeated, as leitmotifs, are virtually all associated with women. Near the beginning of the film, the narrator says, “A film about what? my friends ask. A film about Senegal; but what in Senegal?” As she speaks, we see an image of a fire, an image that reappears several shots later. After these images of fire, the narrator tells of the association between women and fire: “In numerous tales/Woman is depicted as the one who possessed the fire/Only she knew how to make fire/She kept it in diverse places/At the end of the stick she used to dig the ground with for example/In her nails or in her fingers.”46 As she speaks, the accompanying image track shows men for the most part. But several images and lines of commentary later, the narrator repeats several lines (“She kept it in diverse places/At the end of the stick she used to dig the ground with for example”), and we see a woman holding a stick, shooing away a chicken. Such examples of apparent and immediate unity between image and sound are unusual in the film, and for a brief moment, one might perhaps read the impossible into the image—that is, see fire instead of a chicken, see the magical myth alluded to by the narrator instead of the documented reality before one’s eyes.
Figure 34. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage (Women Make Movies)
A frequently repeated image in Reassemblage depicts women with sticks, whether digging, cleaning, or preparing food. Also repeated frequently are images of women’s breasts, sometimes with babies nearby and sometimes not, but still suggestive of women’s nourishing powers. The female body that emerges so centrally in Reassemblage is privileged to the extent that the entire film attempts simultaneously to question and to assume the maternal and nourishing properties of the female body. The film also examines the narrative modes irreducible to the traditions of either documentary or classical narrative filmmaking, modes which are associated with the rhythms and patterns of women’s everyday lives. But there is little in Reassemblage to suggest that such a search for alternative ways of storytelling is the same as romanticizing the female body as an originary plenitude, as a wholeness to substitute for the fragmentation of “Western” experience.
One of the anecdotes told by the narrator describes a “man attending a slide show on Africa [who] turns to his wife and says with guilt in his voice: ‘I have seen some pornography tonight.’ ” The images accompanying the voice show bare-breasted young women, and recall an earlier comment by the narrator: “Filming in Africa means for many of us/Colorful images, naked breast women, exotic dances and fearful rites.”47 But in both instances, something slips in the relationship between image and voice; the narrator uses the awkward phrase “naked breast women” (rather than “naked-breasted” or “women with naked breasts”) and pronounces “pornography” with the accent on the wrong syllable (por-no-graph’-y, rather than por-no’-graph-y). Similarly, the narrator’s voice assumes an affinity with those female voices whose words are repeated in the film in a kind of looping effect, thus assuming a rhythmic cadence. For Trinh’s voice is too inflected with an accent to function as the transparent, overarching, “neutral” voice of documentary. The accent is not one typically associated with African speakers of English; thus, throughout the film, the female voice speaks as one who is not a part of Senegalese or African culture, but who is not a part of the tradition of white anthropological filmmaking either. Any presumed unity of the “Third World” disintegrates in the film, but at the same time the very division between the voice and the image suggests the possibility of another kind of observation, one resistant to the dualities of “West” versus “Third World.”
The final section of Trinh’s book-length study of feminism and postcolonialism, Woman, Native, Other, is entitled “Grandma’s Story,” and explores the significance of oral traditions of storytelling for women writers of color. “She who works at un-learning the dominant language of ‘civilized’ missionaries also has to learn how to un-write and write anew,” she writes.48 Reassemblage is a stunning demonstration of that process of “un-writing” whereby colonial notions of the “primitive” are demystified, certainly, but also where the very notion of a “primitive” mode of storytelling is reexamined in another light. Reassemblage is subtitled From the Firelight to the Screen. One could read in this subtitle the desire for a connection between the fire (which signifies a variety of aspects of women’s lives in the film) and the cinema—for a cinema, that is, illuminated by the light of another experience. This is not to say that Reassemblage replicates the anthropological tradition it criticizes, but that it attempts another inflection, another pronunciation, whereby the “primitive” emerges not as the rigid duality of self and other but as the exploration of other modes of storytelling.
Like Reassemblage, Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon critiques anthropological views of the “primitive,” and takes the representation of the female body as its primary point of inquiry. But whereas Reassemblage refers to an entire tradition of anthropological filmmaking, A Song of Ceylon is much more specific in its reference to ethnographic definitions of the “primitive.” The title of the film cites Basil Wright’s 1935 British film The Song of Ceylon, which Jayamanne has described as “not pure ethnography [but] it has elements in common with an ethnographic enterprise, of rendering an ‘ancient culture’ visible as it enters the rapid transformations wrought by the colonial process of a plantation economy and international trade.”49 If Wright’s film romanticizes Ceylon, the citation of the title in Jayamanne’s film is an ironic displacement, both of a “name erased from the map of the world” and of the cinematic conventions which create the illusion of possession, whether of a culture, an experience, or a body.50 And possession, in many senses of the term, is central to A Song of Ceylon. A Song of Ceylon is a rereading, or more precisely a performance, of a case study of Gananath Obeyesekere of a Sri Lankan woman, called Somavati in the text, who is possessed by demon spirits. The case study is a “psychocultural exegesis” of the woman’s possession and subsequent exorcism. Obeyesekere’s text is an exploration of “primitivism” understood in an anthropological as well as a psychoanalytic sense—anthropological insofar as the possession exemplifies ostensibly “primitive” beliefs in the relationship between the human and the spiritual world, and psychoanalytic insofar as Somavati’s possession is also a function of her inability, or refusal, to contain infantile rage within the confines of “appropriate” female behavior.
Somavati’s exorcism ritual is performed most literally in the spoken sound track to the film, which consists almost exclusively of citations from the case study. The inflection of the voice sets the components of the case study in a different relation to each other than is possible in the written text. To be sure, Obeyesekere includes in the case study lengthy quotations from the exorcism ritual, but these are always framed by his commentary. In the film, the different voices—and in particular the voice of Somavati, performed by Jayamanne herself—acquire more autonomy, and processes which remain subtle in the written text are more dramatically represented in the film. For instance, the first words spoken in the film are Somavati’s description of her “spirit attacks”: “My hands and feet grow cold; it is as if I don’t possess them. Then my body shivers—shivers, and the inside of my body seems to shake. . . . This goes on and on . . . and if I hear someone talk I get angry. My rage is such that I could even hit my father and mother . . . this is how the illness starts.”51
Somavati’s voice acts out the words shiver and rage, so that one can practically feel a chill in the former word and anger in latter. But this performance of the text is no simple attribution of agency or authority to Somavati, for her voice is also quite literally “possessed” from the outset—a male voice accompanies hers, sometimes echoing what she says, sometimes completing a phrase that she begins. An example of this strategy occurs later in the film, when one of the more memorable utterances of the exorcism ritual is spoken: “Do you think I am a woman, ha! Do you?”52 The female voice begins the phrase (“Do you think I am . . .”), but a male voice completes it (“ . . . a woman?”). Put another way, then, the voices of the film perform the contradictions of Obeyese-kere’s case study, on the one hand by identifying Somavati as a far more palpable, dynamic presence than she is in print, and on the other hand by embedding her speech within the speech of men.
If the spoken track to A Song of Ceylon performs and cites a specific ritual of possession, the image and music tracks explore other permutations of possession, and the film plays on “possession” in the collision of cultural meanings. More specifically, the Sri Lankan context of “possession” (i.e., spirit possession) finds its most striking “Western” echo in a series of poses, borrowed from film stills, denoting romantic possession. As Jayamanne explains, “the image track of the film is based on tableaux vivants constructed not from films but from looking at film stills of a selection of films. The film has tried to recreate certain classic postures and gestures of Western erotic and romantic possession taken from film stills.”53 These include poses of men and women in a series of romantic embraces, with an element of defamiliarization occurring through the stiff, tableaulike representations, or the casting of a transvestite in a woman’s role; and a black-and-white sequence of fragmented body parts and frozen poses which cites Jean-Luc Godard’s Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman).
However, A Song of Ceylon does not set up a simple opposition between the visual and the aural, or between “Western” and “Asian” possession. The final performance within the film is a recital, where Schubert’s “Litany for All Souls Day”—heard only in fragments previously in the film—is sung, in an example of what Jayamanne has described as “cultural hybridization.”54 For the participants in the recital, musicians as well as onlookers, are a combination of Western and Asian “types,” and even the music itself is at times performed in such a way that the boundaries between Western and Asian music become tenuous. Similarly, A Song of Ceylon probes and stretches the gender polarities of possession. Somavati’s desire to “play”—as uttered on the sound track—acquires a number of visual forms, particularly concerning various possibilities of rearranging the sexual hierarchy of male agent and female object. One of the most common motifs in the film is the “posing” sequence, in which the limbs of actors are manipulated by other actors (with often just an isolated arm visible), only to fall away in a kind of passive resistance to the gesture of control. The interchangeability of gendered roles here both amplifies and contradicts the play of voices on the sound track.
Figure 35. Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon (Women Make Movies)
A Song of Ceylon is shot almost exclusively in the static, tableaulike images characteristic of the early cinema, and in the rare instances that camera movement does appear, it is—again, as in the early cinema—quite visibly motivated. But if Trinh’s film critiques the way in which the “primitive” is captured on film in order to explore other possible formulations of “primitive” narration, A Song of Ceylon seems, rather, to eschew any such reappropriation. Put another way, one might argue that the “primitive” style of A Song of Ceylon has more to do with a postmodern mode of performance than with an exploration of the intersection between different associations of the “primitive.” However, both Reassemblage and A Song of Ceylon embody a desire, not to repossess what Jayamanne has called “pristine cultural identities,” but rather to redefine “primitive” narration as simultaneous connection with and distance from the female body.55
In A Song of Ceylon, the realm of the “primitive” is evoked by the disembodied voices which speak the tale of Sri Lankan possession, and by the visible bodies which may occasionally sing but which do not speak. The tale of possession collapses, in other words, into the tale of hysteria; “primitive” culture overlaps with the “primitive” body language of the hysteric. Indeed, Obeyesekere’s case study is quite evocative of Freud’s case history of Dora. Obeyesekere assumes, for instance, that if Somavati remained with her apparently sadistic husband, it is because she herself fits the profile of a masochist; in other words, if she is beaten by her husband she must like it—just as Dora, in Freud’s view, must have welcomed the sexual advances of Herr K.56 And like Dora, Somavati’s body acts out what it cannot or will not speak.
While an impressive body of feminist psychoanalytic criticism has read Freud, Dora, and hysteria symptomatically, Jayamanne’s approach is different, precisely to the extent that A Song of Ceylon performs the two registers of spirit possession and hysteria by insisting upon both their common denominator and their difference. This simultaneous connection and difference takes theatricalization, performance, and public spectacle as its central terms. Jayamanne describes part of her fascination with the case study as “the way in which ‘my culture’ dealt with hysteria in the form of a theatrical ritual, that is to say a public ceremony.”57 This is not to say, of course, that theatrical metaphors are alien to the description of hysteria; to the contrary. Josef Breuer’s famous patient, Anna O., described one of her hysterical symptoms as her “private theatre”: “While everyone thought she was attending, she was living through fairy tales in her imagination; but she was always on the spot when she was spoken to, so that no one was aware of it.”58
Central to A Song of Ceylon in this context are the competing roles of private and public spheres in defining possession and hysteria. The film addresses how notions of the private and the public shape the cinema, particularly insofar as spectatorship is concerned. Catherine Clément has described the cinema as the “institutionalization of hysteria.” In the context of the relationship between the cinema and the spheres of private and public life, this suggests a public spectacle far removed from the kind of public ritual Jayamanne describes, a spectacle—as Clément puts it—“without possible contagion.”59 But the relationship established in A Song of Ceylon between possession and hysteria inflects—and infects—one notion of a public sphere with the other.
In the different modes of performance in the film, the common denominator is virtually always the female body as “possessed,” as “hysterical.” When the elderly woman completes her song in the above-mentioned chamber-music scene, she collapses; the condition of performance is the inextricable connection between body and voice. “Primitive” narration in A Song of Ceylon is where possession and hysteria cross in the representation of the female body. If it is implied in Obeyesekere’s case study that hysteria is cross-cultural, that the price of social interdiction is the division of the woman, then how are we to read Jayamanne’s film, which itself returns constantly to the scene of possession as the scene of hysteria, and vice versa? In other words, is “cultural hybridization” just another name for psychocultural homogeneity? One of the key moments in the exorcism ritual as described by Obeyesekere is the chair episode. After Somavati and the two men performing the exorcism dance around a chair, one man “grabs Somavati by the hair and forces her down in front of the chair. He has a cane in his hand and with it directs the woman to crawl under the chair. She crawls under the chair on all fours. ‘Get up—get to the other side,’ says David. She crawls under the chair in the opposite direction. This is repeated several times.” Obeyesekere explains the significance of the chair episode as simultaneously the capitulation of the demons inhabiting Somavati to the superior gods represented by the men, and “Somavati’s self-abnegation; she literally grovels in the dust at the feet of the priests, and later of the deities. She is broken, humiliated, made abject, and made pliable psychologically.”60
The performance of this scene in the film displaces the resolution offered by the humiliation of Somavati. Instead, we see a body, dressed in a sari, wearing Cuban dancing shoes, dance atop the seat of a chair. The face and chest are invisible, and eventually the hands become a frenetic part of the dance. The dance itself begins as a rather mundane cha cha, but evolves into a most peculiar and disturbing sight, a frenzy of bodily gestures impossible to read—to “possess”—absolutely in cultural or psychoanalytic terms. At the same time, the dancer’s body is difficult to read in terms of gender—is this another man impersonating a woman? Or a woman caught up in the frenzy of bodily excess? The desire of the film is precisely there—to imagine a body, not so much “free” of gender as absolutely unreadable in either/or terms. The film does not rescue the “primitive” body of possession and/or hysteria, nor does it collapse the one kind of “primitivism” into the other. Rather, the film performs the “primitive,” sets the public and private verions of the body in tension with each other, and in so doing deinstitutionalizes cinematic possession and hysteria.
I began this chapter with two films which parallel the appropriation of early cinema by (male) avant-garde filmmakers, moved to three films which are more specifically narrative in their focus, and concluded with two films in which the very distinction between avant-garde and narrative is suspect, but more specifically which explore the cultural connotations of the “primitive” as what is repressed not only in patriarchal but also in some feminist notions of the subject. In other words, I have situated Trinh’s and Jayamanne’s films, if not as “last words” then at least as appropriate conclusions to the exploration of the “primitive” in the works of white, Western women filmmakers.
To regard Reassemblage and A Song of Ceylon as “continuations” of the projects central to the other films risks the flattening out of difference in the name of a “women’s cinema” that assumes too quickly a universal, shared set of concerns. But to separate these two films from the rest involves another kind of risk, by placing the burden of the demonstration of cultural and racial difference on those women filmmakers to whom the descriptions “women of color” or “Third World” apply. In other words, a discussion of the cultural connotations of the “primitive” in films such as Reassemblage and A Song of Ceylon can evolve—however unconsciously or unthinkingly—from the assumption that these ramifications of the “primitive” apply only to them, to the “other woman” of white, Western feminism. But as the fascination with cultural “otherness” in Maya Deren’s work or, even more problematically, the invocation of racial stereotypes in the context of “primitive” narration in Cleo from 5 to 7 demonstrates, the lure of the “primitive” in women’s cinema is also the lure of cultural constructions of the “other,” and there is no guarantee that the displacement of the male subject simultaneously displaces his white skin or his Western assumptions.
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