NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.” Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 35.

2. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape (New York: Penguin, 1973), p. 155.

3. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), chapter 3.

4. For discussions of Stella Dallas which raise crucial issues concerning feminism and the woman’s film, see Doane, The Desire to Desire, pp. 74—78; E. Ann Kaplan, “The Case of the Missing Mother: Maternal Issues in Vidor’s Stella Dallas,” Heresies, no. 16 (1983), 81-85; and Linda Williams, “ ‘Something Else besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama,” Cinema Journal 24, no. 1 (Fall 1984), 2-27.

5. Doane, The Desire to Desire, chapter 2.

6. Ibid., p. 13.

7. The first section of Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), trans. Gillian C. Gill, is entitled “The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry.”

8. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988); Lucy Fischer, Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women’s Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

9. Doane, The Desire to Desire, p. 13.

10. Haskell, From Reverence to Rape, p. 155.

11. Kaja Silverman, “Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects: Film Theory’s Structuring Lack,” Wide Angle 7, no. 1-2 (1985), 25.

12. Joan DeJean, “Female Voyeurism: Sappho and Lafayette,” Rivista di Letterature moderne e comparate XL, no. 3 (August-September 1987), 201-205; Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), chapter 7; Naomi Schor, “Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand,” in Susan Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 363-72.

13. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 15.

14. “It is wrong to conclude, as some have, that because there may be no objective truth possible, there are not objective lies.” See Linda Gordon, “What’s New in Women’s History?” in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 22.

15. See Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 64-65, 123-25.

1. SPECTACLE, NARRATIVE, AND SCREEN

1. Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (1967; rpt. Paris: Editions champ libre, 1971), p. 9.

2. Charles Eckert, “The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3, no. 1 (Winter 1978), 21. For an excellent case study of tie-ins which extends the parallel between film screen and display window, see Jane Gaines, “The Queen Christina Tie-ups: Convergence of Show Window and Screen,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11, no. 1 (1989), 35-60.

3. Jean Baudrillard, La Société de consommation: Ses mythes, ses structures (Paris: Denoel, 1970), pp. 309-310.

4. Dana Polan, “ ‘Above all else to make you see’: Cinema and the Ideology of Spectacle,” boundary 2 11, no. 1-2 (Fall-Winter 1982-83), 133-34.

5. See Andre Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in Hugh Gray, ed. and trans., What is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 17—22; Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” Camera Obscura, no. 1 (Fall 1976), 104—126.

6. See Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), especially chapter 2 (“Spectators and Spectacles”).

7. For discussions and analyses of suture in film, see Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 76-112; Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 194-236.

8. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975), 6-18.

9. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972; rpt. New York: Viking Press, 1973), pp. 47, 64.

10. For feminist critiques of Baudry, see Constance Penley, “Feminism, Film Theory, and the Bachelor Machines,” m/f, no. 10 (1985), 39-59; Joan Copjec, “The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine,” October, no. 23 (Winter 1982), 43-59; and Jacqueline Rose, “The Cinematic Apparatus: Problems in Current Theory,” in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), pp. 172-86.

11. “. . . feminism is not a new ghetto where women are confined to concerning ourselves about only a select list of topics separated from the overall social and economic context of our lives. Similarly, feminism is not just ‘add women and stir’ into existing institutions, ideologies, or political parties.” See Charlotte Bunch, “Prospects for Global Feminism” (1981), in Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action, Essays, 1968-1986 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 302.

12. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 23.

13. E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York: Methuen, 1983), pp. 23-35.

14. See, for example, David Rodowick, “The Difficulty of Difference,” Wide Angle 5, no. 1 (1982), 4-15; Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), chapter 5; Miriam Hansen, “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship,” Cinema Journal 25, no. 4 (Summer 1986), 6-32.

15. Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946),” Framework, no. 15-16-17 (1981), 12-15; Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23, no. 3-4 (September-October 1982), 74-87.

16. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, pp. 143, 144.

17. The journal Camera Obscura has been the most important source for translations of Bellour’s work and positive assessments of its importance; for a lucid critique of Bellour’s assumptions, see Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York: Methuen, 1988).

18. Raymond Bellour, “The Obvious and the Code,” Screen 15 (1974), 15.

19. Cited in Roger Shatzkin, “Who Cares Who Killed Owen Taylor?” in Gerald Peary and Roger Shatzkin, ed., The Modern American Novel and the Movies (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978), p. 81. But Annette Kuhn has observed that while virtually all critics cite the same anecdote concerning the difficulty of the plot of The Big Sleep, the plot is not really that hard to follow. “Close study,” writes Kuhn, “suggests that at the level of narrative, the film’s renowned confusion is more apparent than real.” See “ The Big Sleep: Censorship, Film Text, and Sexuality,” in The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 77.

20. For a discussion of the significance of Shaun Regan’s role in the film (in the novel his name is Rusty Regan), see Shatzkin, “Who Cares Who Killed Owen Taylor?” pp. 80-94.

21. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” p. 11.

22. In this respect, the film recalls Pam Cook’s discussion of Mildred Pierce (1945) in terms of its articulation of a women’s sphere which in the course of the film will be demolished; “the project of the film is to re-present the violent overthrow of mother-right in favour of father-right through the symbolic use of film lighting and the organisation of its narrative structure.” See “Duplicity in Mildred Pierce .” in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (London: British Film Institute, 1978), pp. 68-82.

23. Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” Screen Reader, no. 1 (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1977), 7.

24. Ibid.

25. For a lucid reevaluation of the notion of the “progressive text,” specifically in relationship to genre, see Barbara Klinger, “ ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’ Revisited: The Progressive Text,” Screen 25, no. 1 (January-February 1984), 30-44.

26. Lucy Fischer, Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women’s Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 9.

27. See, for example, Constance Penley: “And when someone like Raymond Bellour says ‘all Hollywood film is about marriage,’ I think he is saying that the problem of Hollywood film is how by the end of the film the narrative system gives you a definition of femininity and of masculinity such that they are utterly complementary. We know from numerous studies of films, from textual analysis, that it is a highly perfected system, it works, it is homogeneous, there is closure or at least there is the sensation of homogeneity and closure. The feminists are not trying to discount that. But, on the other hand, what they want to try to say is that there is always something amiss, there is always something that isn’t quite sealed over at the end. The problem is how do you talk about that without once again falling back into saying that femininity is always already a rupture.” See “Discussion,” recorded from the 1984 m/f conference presentation of her paper “Feminism, Film Theory, and the Bachelor Machines,” p. 59. See also Janet Bergstrom, “Enunciation and Sexual Difference (Part I),” Camera Obscura, no. 3-4 (1979), 32-65.

28. “. . . this is an organized system whose meaning is regulated by paradigms and units of value that are in turn determined by male subjects. Therefore, the feminine must be deciphered as inter-dict: within the signs or between them, between the realized meanings, between the lines . . . and as a function of the (re)productive necessities of an intentionally phallic currency, which, for lack of the collaboration of a (potentially female) other, can immediately be assumed to need its other, a sort of inverted or negative alter ego—‘black’ too, like a photographic negative.” See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (1974; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 22.

29. Kuhn, “ The Big Sleep: Censorship, Film Text, and Sexuality,” pp. 91, 95.

30. Ibid., p. 90.

31. What I am calling “homotextual” is what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick would describe as “homosocial.” Although Sedgwick makes a convincing case for the difference between “homosocial” and “homosexual,” the case of The Big Sleep, with male homosexuality rendered “invisible” in such a striking way in the movement from novel to film, calls for a term that suggests both the sexual and its erasure. See the introduction to Sedgwick’s Between Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 1-5.

32. Describing Jones as Marlowe’s double, who represents “the passive, ‘female’ side of the protagonist’s nature,” Christopher Orr argues that Marlowe is complicitous in Jones’s murder: “Marlowe’s loss of his position as the film’s perceptual center, its enunciator, further establishes his ambivalence and complicity. He is unable to intervene because he desires the murder of his double—the ultimate repression.” See “The Trouble with Harry: On the Hawks Version of The Big Sleep,” Wide Angle 5, no. 2 (1982), 70.

33. Annette Kuhn points out that most of the rewrites of the film’s screenplay, as well as the eventual reshooting of some scenes and addition of others, were “devoted to the further enhancement of the Marlowe-Vivian romance. . . .” Before the final revisions of the film were completed, Bogart and Bacall were married; thus “the film became something of a celebration of their real-life romance.” See “The Big Sleep: Censorship, Film Text, and Sexuality,” p. 83.

34. See Noël Burch, pamphlet accompanying his film Correction Please, or How We Got into Pictures (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979).

35. For a discussion of how Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show and other films of the primitive era articulate a relationship between private and public spheres, see my Private Novels, Public Films (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), chapter 3.

36. Noël Burch writes of the pre-1906 cinema: “in many ways and on many levels these films seem to be acting out, at the level of narrative, of gesture, at the iconographic, scenographic levels, the symbolism of those fundamental strategies which were to develop over the next quarter of a century. . . .” See Correction Please, p. 14.

37. That Mulvey’s analysis is overly categorical insofar as relationships between men and the function of the male look are concerned has been suggested by several critics; see, in particular, Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema,” Screen 24, no. 6 (November-December 1983), 2-16.

38. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, pp. 134—35.

39. Melanie Klein, “Infant Analysis” (1923), in Contributions to Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), pp. 87-116; cited in Daniel Dervin, Through a Freudian Lens Deeply: A Psychoanalysis of Cinema (Hillsdale, N.J.: The Analytic Press, 1985), p. 10.

40. Ibid., p. 18.

41. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Ben Brewster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 64.

42. For criticisms of Metz in just these terms, see Mary Ann Doane, “Misrecognition and Identity,” Ciné-tracts 3, no. 3 (Fall 1980), 25-32; and “The Film’s Time and the Spectator’s Space,” in Stephen Heath and Patricia Mellencamp, eds., Cinema and Language, American Film Institute Monograph Series, vol. 1 (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, Inc., 1983), pp. 35-49.

43. Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, ed., Apparatus (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), trans. Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst, p. 56.

44. See Bertram Lewin, “Sleep, the Mouth, and the Dream Screen,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 15 (1946), 419-43, and “Inferences from the Dream Screen,” The Yearbook of Psychoanalysis 6 (1950), 104-117.

45. Robert T. Eberwein, Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 34.

46. For criticisms of Metz and Baudry’s models of the cinematic apparatus, see Penley, “Feminism, Film Theory, and the Bachelor Machines”; Copjec, “The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine”; Rose, “The Cinematic Apparatus: Problems in Current Theor-y”; Doane, “Misrecognition and Identity”; de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, chapter 5; Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), chapter 1.

47. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 37-38. In another essay, Heath observes: “It is also noteworthy in this respect that the very term itself is fixed from the start, with neither challenge nor fluctuation: the first official cinematographic usage of the word ecran occurs in the Lumiere programme-prospectus for the Grand Cafe shows (‘the apparatus permits the subsequent reproduction of the movements by projecting their images, life size, on a screen in front of a whole audience’).” See “Screen Images, Film Memory,” in Phil Hardy, Claire Johnston, and Paul Willemen, eds., Edinburgh Magazine: Psychoanalysis/Cinema/Avant-Garde (London: British Film Institute, 1976), pp. 33-42.

48. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, p. 143.

49. See Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, pp. 185-89; and The Acoustic Mirror, chapter 1.

50. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (1973; New York: Norton, 1981), pp. 107-108, 96.

51. Heath, Questions of Cinema, p. 15.

52. Jacques Lacan, Television (1973), trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, October, no. 40 (Spring 1987); Shoshana Felman, “Lacan’s Psychoanalysis, or The Figure in the Screen,” October, no. 45 (Summer 1988), 97.

53. Felman, “The Figure in the Screen,” p. 103.

54. Raymond Bellour, “Cine-Repetitions,” Screen 20, no. 2 (Summer 1979), 71.

55. In relationship specifically to this function of the screen, but also to the entire preceding discussion of the screen in Lacan, see Kaja Silverman, “Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look, and Image,” Camera Obscura, no. 19 (January 1989), 55-84. Reading Lacan on the screen, Silverman suggests (p. 75) that while the screen has a structuring role, “it might be possible for a subject who knows his or her necessary specularity to put ‘quotes’ around the screen through an Irigarayan mimicry, or even to hold out before him or herself a different screen. . . .”

56. Doane, The Desire to Desire, p. 169.

57. Of Mark’s “identification” with the images of his victims, Kaja Silverman says: “Far from maintaining the requisite distance from the image of woman-as-lack, Mark recognizes himself in that image, and tips over into it.” See The Acoustic Mirror, p. 35.

58. Kaja Silverman (ibid., p. 37) writes, “Due to the irony of Mrs. Stephens’ blindness, Mark is unable even to deploy his mirror, and is thus thrown back upon his own lack.”

59. Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, ed., Revisions (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, Inc., and the American Film Institute, 1984), p. 91.

60. Luce Irigaray, “Commodities among Themselves,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (1977; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 193.

61. Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

62. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Mimique,” cited in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (1972; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 175.

63. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 224. In an analysis of a text by Robert Desnos, Penalites de l’enfer ou Nouvelles Hebrides, in which a white screen figures prominently in a scene “at the movies,” David Wills suggests the relationship between the hymen and the film screen: “The screen is noted for its diaphanous effect, and when the curtain is opened it reveals yet another veil, as if ready to give way in turn to the real which supposedly exists behind it. If a form of stage is still in use, this does not serve the needs of optics, since projection would be possible on any part of a fourth wall; it seems rather to serve as a form of that paradoxical desire to venerate what is about to be disavowed. Whether this amounts then to a form of fetishization or to a material manifestation of differance, the function of the cinematic screen seems comparable to the hymen as discussed by Derrida.” See “Slit Screen,” Dada/Surrealism, no. 15 (1986), 92. The relationship between film screen and hymen is also suggested briefly in Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Daney, “L’ecran du fantasme,” Cahiers du cinema, no. 236-37 (March-April 1972), 33.

64. For lucid assessments of the difficult relationship between feminism and deconstruction, particularly in relationship to Derrida’s writing, see Alice Jardine, Gynesis, esp. chapter 9; and Gayatri Spivak, “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,” in Mark Krupnick, ed., Displacement: Derrida and After (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 169-95; “Love Me, Love My Ombre, Elle,” Diacritics 14, no. 4 (Winter 1984), 19-36.

65. Jardine, Gynesis, p. 191. Irigaray has developed something of a conceptual alternative to Derrida’s hymen in her postulation of the placenta as a more appropriate representation for the veil that both unites and separates mother and child. See “La Croyance meme,” in Sexes et Parentes (Paris: Minuit, 1987), pp. 35-65.

2. SCREEN TESTS

1. See in particular Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

2. In her discussion of the film, Mary Gentile suggest that this scene embodies the preoccupation evidenced throughout Redupers with multiple and shifting perspectives: “it is impossible to capture all the versions of reality, all the separate narratives that exist around any one event or at any one moment for all the individuals who experience it. . . . in this scene, we are offered pieces of experience in the films and in Aunt Kate’s letter that in themselves suggest several political and personal critiques; together, at any moment, these images and words also offer an interlocking sort of analysis. They reflect upon one another. And finally, even as we develop an analysis of the relation between a certain set of images and words, these images and words have slid past us and changed.” See Film Feminisms: Theory and Practice (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 128-29.

3. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar use the term affiliation complex to describe how women writers of the twentieth century engage with and identify themselves within the complicated web of familial metaphors for the creative process. “The idea of affiliation, as we propose to use it,” they write, “suggests an evasion of the inexorable lineage of the biological family even while it also implies a power of decision in two historical directions. One may imagine oneself as having been adopted, and thus legitimized, as a literary heiress, but one may also adopt, and thus sanction, others to carry on the tradition one has established. Unlike ‘influence,’ then, which connotes an influx or pouring-in of external power, and ‘authorship,’ which stands for an originatory primacy, the concept of affiliation carries with it possibilities of both choice and continuity. Choice: one may consciously or not decide with whom to affiliate—align or join—oneself. Continuity: one is thereby linked into a constructed genealogical order which has its own quasi-familial inevitability.” See No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1 (The War of the Words) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), chapter 4. As Helke Sander’s frequent citation of Christa Wolf indicates, the “affiliation complex” for the woman filmmaker involves not only the designation of allies within the field of filmmaking, but cross-disciplinary affiliations as well.

4. Christa Wolf, “The Reader and the Writer” (1968), in The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories (New York: International Publishers, 1977), trans. Joan Becker, pp. 190-93.

5. Christa Wolf, “The Diary: An Aid to Work and Memory,” in The Reader and the Writer, p. 75.

6. Ibid., p. 70.

7. In an essay which contains an earlier version of much of what is said here about Sander’s film, I read the poster in relationship to the poster for Jean-Luc Godard’s film Two or Three Things I Know about Her. See Judith Mayne, “Female Narration, Women’s Cinema: Helke Sander’s The All-Round Reduced Personality/Redupers,” New German Critique, no. 24-25 (Fall-Winter 1981-82), 155-71.

8. See Thomas Cripps, “Historical Overview,” in Black Images in Films, Stereotyping, and Self-perception as Viewed by Black Actresses, Proceedings of a conference sponsored by Afro-American Studies and American Studies (Boston: Boston University, 1974), p. 14. Virtually all of the examples of increased black visibility that Cripps mentions resulting from the convention are male.

9. Teresa de Lauretis, “Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts,” in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 9.

10. Kwasi Harris, “New Images: An Interview with Julie Dash and Alile Sharon Larkin,” The Independent 9, no. 10 (December 1986), 18.

11. Ibid. The mulatto character has a long history in literature that predates and coexists with the cinema: see, for example, Judith R. Berzon, Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1978). For discussions of the figure of the mulatto in the writings of black women, see Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), esp. pp. 88-91; and Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976) (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980).

12. Hortense J. Spillers, “Notes on an Alternative Model—Neither/Nor,” in Elizabeth Meese and Alice Parker, eds., The Difference Within: Feminism and Critical Theory (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1989), p. 167.

13. For an excellent discussion of The Bluest Eye and the significance of vision, see Madonne M. Miner, “Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in The Bluest Eye,” in Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, eds., Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 176-91.

14. For an analysis of cinema as a form of Platonic realism and its relationship to the novel, see Thomas H. Fick, “Toni Morrison’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’: Movies, Consumption, and Platonic Realism in The Bluest Eye,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 22, no. 1 (Spring 1989), 10-22.

15. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970; rpt. New York: Pocket Books, 1972), p. 97.

16. Toni Morrison, Sula (1973; rpt. New York: Bantam, 1975), pp. 43, 44.

17. Ibid., p. 44.

18. In his devastating critique of contemporary film theory, Noel Carroll makes an observation about Jean-Louis Baudry’s postulation of the film screen as breast/dream screen that is extremely relevant in this context: “Maybe some white people envision breasts as white and then go on to associate the latter with white screens. But not everyone is white.” See Mystifying Movies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 29. Carroll may confuse the realm of conscious and unconscious desire in his criticism, but the point is nonetheless well taken, especially in relation to Dash’s film.

19. Mulvey says: “As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror.” See “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” p. 12.

20. Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” Feminist Issues 1, no. 1 (Summer 1980), 110.

21. Cindy Fuchs reads I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing in terms of the progression from the “‘safety’ of anonymous spectatorship” to “a risky activity that brings with it consequences and responsibilities.” Of the “final” conclusion to the film, when Polly opens the door for Mary and Gabrielle onto the lush, golden forest, Fuchs writes that “Polly’s transgression of her observer status leads not to a conclusion but to a beginning. . . .” Fuchs’s review of the film appears in Cinéaste 16, no. 3 (1988), 54-55.

22. Kay Armatage, “ ‘All That Lovin’ Stuff’: Sexuality and Sexual Representation in Some Recent Films by Women,” Cine Action!, no. 10 (Fall 1987), 37.

23. Asked why she chose the line from T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me”) for the title of her film, Patricia Rozema replied: “Ever since I became caught by that line, I have been aware of the feeling—as is my character Polly, modeled on Prufrock—that there is something out there beautiful beyond belief and ethereal, and I will never be able to capture it or recreate it.” See Karen Jaehne, “ I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing: An Interview with Patricia Rozema,” Cineaste 16, no. 3 (1988), 22. When Polly first sees the painting at the Curator’s house, after a birthday party, there is in her reaction to it a sense of awe, close to what Rozema describes. But in other ways, the sentiment Rozema expresses here actually seems much closer to the character of Gabrielle, particularly when Gabrielle expresses her frustration to Polly about her own desires for artistic greatness, just before the fiction of the paintings is introduced. Polly may, as a spectator, embody a sense of the “beautiful beyond belief,” but insofar as artistic creation is concerned, she seems to create, as I have suggested, for the pure joy of it.

24. See Bruce F. Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

25. Yvonne Rainer, “Thoughts on Women’s Cinema: Eating Words, Voicing Struggles,” The Independent 10, no. 3 (April 1978), 16.

26. Lucy Fischer, Shot/Countershot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 327.

27. On The Man Who Envied Women and female spectatorship, see Teresa de Lauretis, “Strategies of Coherence: Narrative Cinema, Feminist Poetics, and Yvonne Rainer,” in Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 107-126; on feminist dialogic discourse in the film, see Fischer, Shot/Countershot, pp. 301-329; on space, see Peggy Phelan, “Spatial Envy: Yvonne Rainer’s The Man Who Envied Women” Motion Picture 1, no. 3 (Winter-Spring 1987), 16—19; on the impossibility of heterosexual relations, see Berenice Reynaud, “Impossible Projections,” Screen 28, no. 4 (Autumn 1987), 40-52; on language and the gaze, see Patricia Mellencamp. “Images of Languages and Indiscreet Dialogue: The Man Who Envied Women” Screen 28, no. 2 (Spring 1987).

28. There is a somewhat uncanny resemblance between The Man Who Envied Woman and I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing in this regard. Polly’s position vis-a-vis the video camera, in the first-person narration segments of the film, is almost identical to that of Jack Deller. In both cases the character does not address the audience directly but looks at a slight angle screen left. The white wall of Polly’s apartment in the background of the images of her is covered with her photographs, and while these are in no way identical to the screened film clips in the “therapy sessions” in The Man Who Envied Women, they evoke the similar problematics of the surface and the threshold in both films.

29. Lucy Fischer suggests that Jack “turns his back on the films, as though they were irrelevant to his concerns—just so much ‘feminine’ popular culture.” See Shot! Countershot, pp. 310-11.

30. This double sense of the “screen test” is a striking instance of Teresa de Lauretis’s thesis that The Man Who Envied Women “constructs the filmic terms, the filmic conditions of possibility, for women spectators to be asking the question, even as it denies the certainty of an answer.” See Technologies of Gender, p. 124.

31. Much of what Deller says in the “therapy sessions” is drawn from the writings of Raymond Chandler, and while the effect of citation runs throughout the film, in this context it is particularly striking, creating the sense that Deller quotes from an already written patriarchal text about women.

32. Rainer, “Thoughts on Woman’s Cinema,” pp. 14, 15.

33. I believe that this attention to threshold surfaces, to simultaneous separation and connection, is quite close to what Peggy Phelan calls Rainer’s “filmic architecture,” which “takes flexibility and flow as defining principles, and film’s inevitable failure to meet the desire to fix or possess space itself as its philosophic spine.” See “Spatial Envy,” p. 19.

34. Lucy Fischer, for instance, writes that “Trisha’s tableau is a microcosm of Rainer’s filmic style, which places disparate texts in radical juxtaposition.” See Shot/ Countershot, p. 322.

35. Unlike previous discussions of the collage, which were scripted, this commentary by Martha Rosier was more “direct.” See the script notes for The Man Who Envied Women, Women and Performance 3, no. 2 (1987-88), 144.

36. See Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980), 631-60.

37. Witness, for instance, the controversy provoked by Barbara Smith’s reading of the friendship between Nel and Sula in Toni Morrison’s novel Sula in lesbian terms. See “Toward A Black Feminist Criticism,” Conditions, no. 2 (1977), 25-44.

38. In her introduction to Between Men, Eve Kosofky Sedgwick distinguishes between women and men’s different relationships to the continuum of homosexual and homosocial desire: “the diacritical opposition between the ‘homosocial’ and the ‘homosexual’ seems to be much less thorough and dichotomous for women, in our society, than for men.” Sedgwick notes that for women, the “continuum is crisscrossed with deep discontinuities—with much homophobia, with conflicts of race and class—but its intelligibility seems now a matter of simple common sense.” I find the “common sense” of this “intelligibility” much more problematic. The “continuum” model may have always been an ideal of feminism, but like most ideals it conceals conflicts and tensions. See Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 2.

39. Yvonne Rainer, filmscript to The Man Who Envied Women, p. 158.

40. See de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, p. 126, n. 28; Fischer, Shot/ Counter shot pp. 317, 324.

41. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 7.

3. FEMALE AUTHORSHIP RECONSIDERED

1. See Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

2. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962; rpt. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 619.

3. Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. (1968; English trans. Christopher Middleton, New York: Delta, 1970), p. 4.

4. In her essay on the relation between feminism and Christa Wolf’s work, Myra Love analyzes the status of film as an image “used to evoke the connections among domination, manipulation and experiential impoverishment.” See “Christa Wolf and Feminism,” New German Critique 16 (Winter 1979), 36.

5. Wolf, The Quest for Christa T., p. 170.

6. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams, “Feminist Film Criticism: An Introduction,” in Doane, Mellencamp, and Williams, eds., Revision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (Frederick, Md.: The American Film Institute/ University Publications of America, 1984), p. 7. The editors are responding to a definition of feminist literary criticism by Elizabeth Abel, as the exploration of “distinctive features of female texts” and “lines of influence connecting women in a fertile and partially autonomous tradition.” Abel’s comments are drawn from “Editor’s Introduction,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 2 (Winter 1981), 173.

7. Maria LaPlace argues for Bette Davis’s significance as a creative force in her own right. See “Producing and Consuming the Woman’s Film: Discursive Struggle in Now, Voyager,” in Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), pp. 138-66.

8. An excellent survey of the most significant texts on cinematic authorship is John Caughie, ed., Theories of Authorship (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).

9. A useful survey and analysis of the different meanings that have been attached to the term auteurism can be found in Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), chapter 2.

10. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), trans. Richard Miller, p. 27.

11. Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La camera-stylo,” in P. Graham, ed., The New Wave (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1968), pp. 17-23. Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert begin their analysis of women writers with a query into the equivalence between pen and penis; see The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 3.

12. See Domna Stanton, “Language and Revolution: The Franco-American Disconnection,” in Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, eds., The Future of Difference (1980; rpt. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985), pp. 73-87.

13. For particularly lucid expositions of these two positions, as well as the problems involved in defining the positions as opposing in the first place, see Peggy Kamuf, “Replacing Feminist Criticism,” and Nancy Miller, “The Text’s Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions,” Diacritics 12, no. 2 (Summer 1982), 42-53.

14. Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-cinema,” in Claire Johnston, ed., Notes on Women’s Cinema (1973; rpt. London: British Film Institute, 1975), p. 26.

15. See Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, chapter 2.

16. Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-cinema,” p. 27. A comparison between Hawks and Ford as auteurs is also central in Wollen’s discussion of auteurism (Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, chapter 2).

17. One notable exception is Tania Modleski’s study of women and female spectatorship in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, although it is in no way a conventional “auteurist” study. See The Women Who Knew Too Much (New York: Methuen, 1988).

18. See Raymond Bellour, “Hitchcock the Enunciator,” Camera Obscura, no. 2 (Fall 1977), 66-91.

19. Nancy K. Miller, “Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader,” in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 104

20. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 209.

21. Ibid., pp. 212-17.

22. Ibid., p. 217.

23. This is suggested by de Lauretis herself: “the differences among women may be better understood as differences within women.” See “Feminist Studies/Critical Studies: Issues, Terms, and Contexts,” in de Lauretis, Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, p. 14.

24. Kaja Silverman refers to such a process as the “re-authoring” of a traditional text in feminist terms. See The Acoustic Mirror, p. 211.

25. For an insightful discussion of the ideology of auteurist critics in France, see John Hess, “La Politique des auteurs: Part One: World View as Aesthetic,” Jump Cut, no. 1 (1974), 19-22; and “La Politique des auteurs: Part Two: Truffaut’s Manifesto,” Jump Cut, no. 2 (1974), 20-22.

26. Andrew Britton, Katharine Hepburn: The Thirties and After (Newcastle upon Tyne: Tyneside Cinema, 1984), p. 74.

27. Jacquelyn Suter, “Feminine Discourse in Christopher Strong,” Camera Obscura, no. 3-4 (Summer 1979), 135-50.

28. Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), trans. Richard Miller, p. 8.

29. See the editors of Cahiers du cinéma’s collective text, “John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln,” Screen 13 (Autumn 1972), 5-44; on Mildred Pierce, see Joyce Nelson, “Mildred Pierce Reconsidered,” Film Reader, no. 2 (1977), 65-70; Pam Cook, “Duplicity in Mildred Pierce,” in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (London: British Film Institute, 1978), pp. 68-82; Janet Walker, “Feminist Critical Practice; Female Discourse in Mildred Pierce,” Film Reader, no. 5 (1982), 164-72; Judith Mayne, Private Novels, Public Films (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 142-54; and Linda Williams, “Feminist Film Theory: Mildred Pierce and the Second World War,” in Deidre Pribram, ed., Female Spectators: Loking at Film and Television (London and New York: Verso, 1988), pp. 12-30.

30. One of the best examples of this kind of analysis is Lea Jacobs, “ Now, Voyager:Some Problems of Enunciation and Sexual Difference,” Camera Obscura, no. 7 (1981), 89-109.

31. I am not arguing here, as Janet Bergstrom has done in her criticism of Johnston, that the problem is the ultimate recuperability of all forms of difference by the apparatus of the Hollywood cinema. Referring specifically to the work of Stephen Heath, and more generally to textual analyses by critics such as Raymond Bellour and Thierry Kuntzel, Bergstrom criticizes Johnston’s proto-feminist claims for elements which, she says, fit quite readily into classical narrative cinema. Bergstrom speaks of the “seemingly unlimited capacity for classical narrative film to create gaps, fissures, ruptures, generated most of all by its difficulty in containing sexual difference, only to recover them ultimately and to efface the memory, or at least the paths, of this heterogeneity. It is just this rupturing activity that is said to be characteristic of the classical text, and which, moreover, is thought to be the condition of a large part of its pleasure.” While I would agree with Bergstrom that Johnston makes somewhat extravagant claims for elements which may well be incorporated into the overall narrative and visual momentum of the individual film, the view of the Hollywood cinema put forth by those critics to whose work she points approvingly is no less monolithic in the articulation of oedipal scenarios and male heterosexual desire. And needless to say, if heterogeneity is effaced, then there is no room in which to speak of female authorship. See Janet Bergstrom, “Rereading the Work of Claire Johnston,” Camera Obscura, no. 3-4 (1979), 27.

32. “Interview—1974: Julia Kristeva and Psychanalyse et politique,” trans. Claire Pajaczkowska, m/f, no. 5-6 (1981), 166.

33. Claire Johnston, “Dorothy Arzner: Critical Strategies,” in Claire Johnson, ed., The Work of Dorothy Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1975), p. 6.

34. Lucy Fischer reads Dance, Girl, Dance in terms of this “resistance to fetishism.” See Shot/Countershot (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 148-54.

35. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary’s reading of the film, however, focuses much more centrally on women’s friendships and the rites of initiation. See “Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance,” in Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary, eds., Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1977), pp. 9-25.

36. Barbara Koenig Quart stresses the relationship between Judy and the secretary in her reading of the scene. See Women Directors: The Emergence of a New Cinema (New York and Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1988), p. 25.

37. Barbara Quart (ibid.) suggests a connection between Arzner’s career and the show-business world depicted in Dance, Girl, Dance: “Arzner is clearly ambivalent about the vital, glamorous vulgarity of Bubbles, the Lucille Ball showgirl—but the scorn for Hollywood implicit in the film, and for the need to be a flesh peddler to survive there, is doubtless something Arzner herself felt in no small part, in this next to last of her films, close to her retirement.”

38. Shoshana Felman, “To Open the Question,” Yale French Studies, no. 55-56 (1980), 8.

39. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review, no. 80 (1985), 65.

40. Johnston, “Dorothy Arzner: Critical Strategies,” p. 7.

41. The relationships of desire between women in Arzner’s films are developed at length in my book-length study of Arzner (forthcoming, Indiana University Press).

For an analysis of the secondary roles men play in Arzner’s films, see Melissa Sue Kort, “ ‘Spectacular Spinelessness’: The Men in Dorothy Arzner’s Films,” in Janet Todd, ed., Men by Women, Women and Literature (New Series), vol. 2 (1982), pp. 189-205.

42. Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Conditions, no. 2 (October 1977), 25-44; Interview with Toni Morrison in Claudia Tate, ed., Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1983), p. 118.

43. See, for example, Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 50.

44. Sharon O’Brien addresses these questions in her study of Willa Cather. Noting that the definition of “lesbianism” and “lesbian writer” has been important in recent feminist criticism, O’Brien says, “For good reason, genital sexual experience with women has been the least-used criterion. As several critics have observed, to adopt such a definition requires the unearthing of ‘proof’ we do not think necessary in defining writers as heterosexual—proof, moreover, that is usually unavailable. . . .” See Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 127.

45. Bonnie Zimmerman, “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism,” Feminist Studies 7, no. 3 (Fall 1981), 457.

46. Sarah Halprin, “Writing in the Margins (Review of E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera)” Jump Cut, no. 29 (1984), 32.

47. Russo, The Celluloid Closet, p. 50.

48. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary, “Interview with Dorothy Arzner,” in Johnston, The Work of Dorothy Arzner, pp. 25-26.

49. Jackie Stacey discusses female sexual attraction as a principle of identification in All about Eve and Desperately Seeking Susan; see “Desperately Seeking Difference,” Screen 28, no. 1 (Winter 1987), 48-61.

50. Constance Penley, ed., Feminism and Film Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1988). In Mary Ann Doane’s essay “ Caught and Rebecca: The Inscription of Femininity as Absence,” Julia Kristeva is cited on “female homosexuality” (p. 199), but in order to demonstrate the radical difference between male and female spectatorship.

51. For an excellent discussion of the very possibility of a feminist fetishism, see Jane Marcus, “The Asylums of Antaeus. Women, War, and Madness: Is There a Feminist Fetishism?” in Elizabeth Meese and Alice Parker, eds., The Difference Within: Feminism and Critical Theory (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1989), pp. 49-83. Marcus examines how feminists in the suffrage movement oscillated “between denial and recognition of rape as the common denominator of female experience” (p. 76). Naomi Schor has examined the possibility of female fetishism in the writings of George Sand; see “Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand,” in Susan Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 363-72.

52. See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), trans. Ben Brewster, pp. 69-80. A chapter of Octave Mannoni’s Clefs pour Vimaginaire ou I’autre scene (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969) is entitled “Je sais bien, mais quand même . . .” (“I know very well, but all the same . . .”).

53. Beverle Houston, “Missing in Action: Notes on Dorothy Arzner,” Wide Angle 6, no. 3 (1984), 27.

54. See Suter, “Feminine Discourse in Christopher Strong.”

55. The phrase “lesbian continuum” comes from Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980), 631-60.

56. Julia Lesage, “The Hegemonic Female Fantasy in An Unmarried Woman and Craig’s Wife,” Film Reader, no. 5 (1982), 91. In Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary’s interview, Arzner states that Kelley was angry at the changes in emphasis that were made.

57. Melissa Sue Kort also discusses Arzner’s reading of the Kelley play, noting that the “shift from play to film changes Harriet from villain to victim.” See her discussion of the film in “ ‘Spectacular Spinelessness,’ “ pp. 196-200.

58. See Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,” Signs 9, no. 4 (Summer 1984), 557-75. See also Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1981), esp. parts II and III.

59. Nancy K. Miller makes this observation about irony: “To the extent that the ethos (charcter, disposition) of feminism historically has refused the doubleness of ‘saying one thing while it tries to do another’ (the mark of classical femininity, one might argue), it may be that an ironic feminist discourse finds itself at odds both with itself (its identity to itself) and with the expectations its audience has of its position. If that is true, then irony, in the final analysis, may be a figure of limited effectiveness. On the other hand, since nonironic, single, sincere, hortatory feminism is becoming ineffectual, it may be worth the risk of trying out this kind of duplicity on the road.” See “Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing, and the Reader,” in de Lauretis, Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, p. 119, n. 18.

60. See the Camera Obscura Collective, “An Interrogation of the Cinematic Sign: Woman as Sexual Signifier in Jackie Raynal’s Deux fois,” Camera Obscura, no. 1 (Fall 1976), 11-26.

61. See David Rodowick, “The Difficulty of Difference,” Wide Angle 5, no. 1 (1982), 4—15; de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, chapter 5; Miriam Hansen, “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship,” Cinema Journal 25, no. 4 (Summer 1986), 6-32; Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). Mulvey herself has contributed to the discussion; see “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 29-38.

62. David Bordwell, in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 16.

63. Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” Feminist Issues 1, no. 1 (Summer 1980), 107.

64. Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 172

65. Irigaray, “Commodities among Themselves,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 194.

66. Jacqueline Rose, “Dora: Fragment of an Analysis,” in Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, eds., In Dora’s Case (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 135.

67. Sigmund Freud, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman (1920),” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 134. Subsequent page numbers will be indicated in parentheses in the text.

68. See Rose, “Dora: Fragment of an Analysis”; and Suzanne Gearhart, “The Scene of Psychoanalysis: The Unanswered Questions of Dora,” in In Dora’s Case, pp. 105-127.

69. Mandy Merck discusses the peculiar portrait of homosexuality in the case history, and notes in particular that there is a sharp break between the young woman’s homosexual and heterosexual pasts as described by Freud, suggesting that despite what Rose describes as a “nonneurotic” definition of homosexuality, there remains nonetheless the desire to read heterosexuality as the privileged source of all desire. See “The Train of Thought in Freud’s ‘Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,’ ” m/f, nos. 11-12 (1986), 37, 39.

70. I believe what I am describing as the desire for another representation of desire is quite close to Mandy Merck’s discussion of the young woman’s conflict about “masculine identification.” See “The Train of Thought,” p. 40.

71. Monique Wittig, “Paradigm,” in George Stambolian and Elaine Marks, eds., Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts/Critical Texts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 114.

72. Teresa de Lauretis, “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 2 (May 1988), 159.

4. MISTRESSES OF DISCREPANCY

1. Joan Nestle, “The Fem Question,” in Carole S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 235, 236.

2. For differing views of Barbara Hammer’s films, see Jacquelyn Zita, “The Films of Barbara Hammer: Counter-currencies of a Lesbian Iconography,” Jump Cut, no. 24—25 (March 1981), 26-30; and Andrea Weiss, “ Women I Love and Double Strength: Lesbian Cinema and Romantic Love,” Jump Cut, no. 24-25 (March 1981), 30. For a brief but lucid discussion of Desert Hearts and its relationship to classical cinema, see Teresa de Lauretis, “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 2 (May 1988), 173.

3. Whether Entre nous is appropriately described as a “lesbian film” has been a matter of some debate among lesbians. In a letter to the editors of Gossip, a British lesbian-feminist journal, Lynnette Mitchell criticizes two essays published in the journal which represent Entre Nous as “an unequivocally lesbian film.” Mitchell notes that in the film, “the two women are shown admiring each other’s bodies and at one point in the film they exchange a swift kiss, but this could just as easily be an expression of deep physical affection as erotic desire.” The two essays to which Mitchell responds are Sibyl Grundberg, “Deserted Hearts: Lesbians Making It in the Movies,” Gossip, no. 4 (n.d.), 27-39, and Lis Whitelaw, “Lesbians of the Mainscreen,” Gossip, no. 5 (n.d.), 37-46. Mitchell’s letter appears in Gossip, no. 6 (n.d.), 11-13.

4. “Mon père est parti au petit jour. II n’a plus jamais revu ma mere. Madeleine est morte il y a maintenant deux ans. A eux trois, je dédie ce film.”

5. Jean Narboni reads the third section of the film as being about “pornography and its ruin,” and notes the particular importance of the fact that one of the two women is played by Akerman herself, thus rupturing the male sexual fantasy of lesbianism. See “La quatrieme personne du singulier (Je tu il elle)” Cahiers du cinema, no. 276 (May 1977), 7.

6. Brenda Longfellow suggests that the “tu” of the film’s title “remains unassigned, addressed, perhaps, to the space of the spectator.” See “Love Letters to the Mother: The Work of Chantal Akerman,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 13, no. 1-2 (1989), 86.

7. Françoise Aude discusses the relationship between food, narcissism, and the self-other relationship that structures Je tu il elle, as well as other films by Akerman. This analysis is instructive for the overly “developmental” reading of Je tu il elle it provides, with more than a tinge of homophobia. The conclusion of the film “demonstrates,” according to Aude, the necessity for separation and departure, and only in a later film, Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, is there evidence of a maturation process. See “Le Cinema de Chantal Akerman, la nourriture, le narcissisme, l’exil,” in Jacqueline Aubenas, ed., Chantal Akerman (Brussels: Ateliers des Arts, Cahier no. 1, 1982), pp. 151-65.

8. In an interesting discussion of the film, Fabienne Worth reads its third section as a deconstruction of voyeurism and a disruption of the Freudian oedipal narrative. See “Je tu il elle: Three Moments toward Feminist Erotics,” paper presented at the Society for Cinema Studies/ Canadian Film Studies Association annual conference, Montreal, Canada, April 1987.

9. Jean Narboni describes the relationship between Akerman and the “strange mirror-door-windows” as simultaneously “narcissistic specular lure, psychotic passage through or beyond, and emancipatory accession to the realm of desire through departure and provocation of the look of the other.” See “La Quatrieme personne du singulier,” p. 13.

10. Fabienne Worth, in “Three Moments toward Feminist Erotics,” notes that in the second “moment” of the film, the man becomes the object of the female gaze, but without voyeurism or fetishism.

11. Jean Narboni remarks upon the cyclical structure of the film emphasized in particular by the opening words (in which one can hear, he says, the ellipses), and notes that the last shot of the film could easily precede the first. See “La Quatrieme personne du singulier,” p. 11.

12. Brenda Longfellow, noting that “it has long been an insight of feminism that lesbianism, the love of women, is profoundly connected to the archaic mother/daughter relation,” stresses the importance of recognizing the “narcissistic phantasm” of the mother central to such a hypothesis. Following Irigaray and Kaja Silverman, Longfellow suggests that in Akerman’s films, the “introduction of the third woman . . . re-negotiates the terms of the mother/daughter relation, provides both with a necessary mediating detour to the other which allows for the affirmation of self and other as sexal and desiring.” See “Love Letters to the Mother,” pp. 84, 85.

13. “Quand j’ai releve la tete brusquement il y avait des gens qui marchaient dans la rue. J’ai encore attendu que ga passe ou qu’il arrive quelque chose. Que je croie en Dieu ou que tu m’envoies une paire de gants pour sortir dans le froid.”

14. “Le huitieme jour ou le neuvieme, j’ai recommence la deuxieme lettre, et j’ai mange beaucoup de sucre en poudre pendant huit pages. Et j’ai barre . . . rature . . . il y restait quelques lignes. J’ai arrete de manger et je me suis tu.”

15. Hadelin Trinon, cited in Françoise Collin, “Cadres, cadrages et encadrement,” in Aubenas, Chantal Akerman, p. 134.

16. Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body (New York: Avon, 1975), trans. David Le Vay.

17. Elaine Marks, “Lesbian Intertextuality,” in George Stambolian and Elaine Marks, eds., Homosexualities and French Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 376.

18. Noting the motif of constant movement (and Blumenschein’s clicking heels) in the film, Renate Fischetti says that “the adventures are but variations on one theme, the theme of going somewhere, but ultimately to a dead end, to a barrier. These barriers are mostly windows, sometimes combinations of doors and windows, or combinations of mirrors and windows.” Her analysis of the film focuses on the creation of L’écriture féminine, and the challenge to “woman as fetish.” See “Ecriture Féminine in the New German Cinema: Ulrike Ottinger’s Portrait of a Woman Drinker,” in Marianne Burkhard and Jeanette Clausen, eds., Women in German Yearbook, no. 4: Feminist Studies and German Culture (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988), pp. 60, 64.

19. Peter Rosei, “Trinker,” in Reise ohne Ende (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 107. English translation by Andy Spencer. The version of Rosei’s text quoted here is somewhat different from the obviously earlier version cited by Ottinger in the film, in that the individual identified as “a friend” in this version is referred to as “Lipsky” in the text read by Ottinger.

20. Ibid., pp. 108-109.

21. For two excellent readings of Madame X, see Patricia White, “Madame X of the China Seas,” Screen 28, no. 4 (Autumn 1987), 80-95; and Sabine Hake, “ ‘Gold, Love, Adventure’: The Postmodern Piracy of Madame X,” Discourse 17, no. 1 (Fall-Winter 1988-89), 88-110.

22. Hake, “ ‘Gold, Love, Adventure,’ “ p. 108, n. 8.

23. Karsten Witte discusses the strategy of citation in the film in Im Kino: Texte vom Sehen & Hören (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1985), pp. 63-65.

24. Miriam Hansen argues, “this collapse . . . is not the last word; it eludes narrative closure. Having taken an aesthetics of narcissism to the point of no return, the film offers an alternative in its final shot. The high heels are marching again, this time shattering the mirrors that reproduce the deceptive geometry of cinematic space.” See “Visual Pleasure, Fetishism, and the Problem of Feminine/Feminist Discourse: Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return,” New German Critique, no. 31 (Winter 1984), 103.

25. In fact, Von Sternberg serves, in Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” as exemplary of the way in which woman is fetishized in dominant cinema.

26. This discussion of The Blue Angel draws from my essay “Marlene Dietrich, The Blue Angel, and Female Performance,” in Dianne Hunter, ed., Seduction and Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 28-46.

27. In her analysis of female-to-female identification in All about Eve and Desperately Seeking Susan, Jackie Stacey, noting that “the pleasure of the woman spectator” has “hardly been addressed,” observes that “the specifically homosexual pleasures of female spectatorship have been ignored completely.” See “Desperately Seeking Difference,” Screen 28, no. 1 (winter 1987), 48.

28. Jacqueline Rose, “Feminnity and Its Discontents,” in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), p. 90.

29. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 200. A footnote is inserted in the middle of the second sentence (immediately after “Lesbian relationships do tend to recreate mother daughter emotions and connections”), enforcing a quite literal sense of the gap in Chodorow’s analysis. The footnote refers the reader to three texts on lesbianism, one of which is extremely homophobic (Helene Deutsch) and one of which is lesbian-feminist (by Adrienne Rich). This curious “assortment” of the relationship between lesbianism and the mother-daughter bond stresses also the difficult position of difference within Chodorow’s text.

30. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980), 636.

31. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in Histoires d’amour (Paris: Denoel, 1983), p. 325. An abridged English translation of the essay appears in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 99-118. The passage cited appears in the English translation on p. 116. I have translated from the original in order to preserve the relation of self-other so central to the passage (“le rapport a l’autre femme”) but translated as “the relationship of one woman to another.”

32. Kaja Silverman reads Kristeva’s “writing out of the maternal” as “a defensive mechanism, a way of safeguarding herself against the libidinal hold the mother exercises over much of her earlier writing.” See The Acoustic Mirror, p. 119.

33. Judith Butler, “The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva,” Hypatia 3, no. 3 (Winter 1989), 111, 112.

34. I cite from the English translation of “Stabat Mater,” p. 113. This essay seems to juxtapose two radically different modes of exploring the maternal: the one, “analytical,” in regular typeface occupying the bulk of the essay; the second, more “experimental” and attuned to the maternal as experience, in boldface type in separate columns. The passage cited previously is from the “analytical” mode; the passage cited here from the “experimental.” By the conclusion of the essay, there is little difference between the two columns, suggesting quite literally the force of the symbolic/analytic mode in incorporating the semiotic.

35. Teresa de Lauretis, “The Female Body and Heterosexual Presumption,” Semiotica 67, no. 3-4 (1987), 272.

36. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, p. 120.

37. Ibid., p. 123.

38. Ibid., p. 124.

39. See Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”

5. “PRIMITIVE” NARRATION

1. Noël Burch outlines these four traits of what he calls the “Primitive Mode of Representation” (in contrast to the Institutional Mode of Representation): the “ autarky and unicity of each frame;” the “noncentered quality” of the image; the unchanging use of medium long-shot; and nonclosure. See “Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes,” in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 486-88. For a more extensive discussion of nonclosure in the primitive cinema, see Burch, “Un mode de representation primitif?” Iris 2, no. 1 (1984), 113-23.

2. That the reexamination of the early cinema involves of necessity a reevaluation of the status of D. W. Griffith is suggested by the title of a particularly influential anthology, edited by John Fell: Film before Griffith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

3. Noël Burch, pamphlet to accompany his film Correction Please, or How We Got into Motion Pictures (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979), p. 14.

4. Tom Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film,” in Fell, Film before Griffith, p. 365.

5. Linda Williams, “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions,” Cine-tracts 3, no. 4 (Winter 1981). 19-35; Lucy Fischer, “The Lady Vanishes: Women, Magic, and the Movies,” Film Quarterly 33, no. 1 (Fall 1979), 30-40.

6. Lynne Kirby, “Male Hysteria and Early Cinema,” Camera Obscura, no. 17 (1988), 128.

7. In addition to Gunning’s “An Unseen Energy,” see Rod Stoneman, “Perspective Correction: Early Film to the Avant-Garde,” Afterimage, no. 8-9 (Spring 1981), 50-63; and Bart Testa with Charlie Keil, “The Avant-Garde and Primitive Cinema,” in Catalogue to accompany The Avant-Garde and the Primitive Cinema (Toronto: The Funnel, 1985), pp. 2-9.

8. Noël Burch offers a peculiarly ambivalent reading of the significance of the divided body in early film. On the one hand, he notes that the theme “derives no doubt in large part from the popular stage (where women were sawed in half by the villains of Grand Guignol and melodrama as gleefully as by the conjurors of the variety stage).” But given the remarkable prevalence of the theme, Burch suggests, on the other hand, that the transition from “infantile rippings and tearings” to “the mature Institutional dialectic between the part and the whole (through editing)” is “isomorphic” with the “stage in human psychic development,” theorized by Melanie Klein, whereby the child moves from a perception of the mother as a series of fragments to be possessed, to a perception of her as a whole object. What seems to get lost in the transition from devices of the popular stage to “human psychic development,” is any specificity insofar as sexual difference is concerned. This is not to say that the transition of which Klein speaks is male-specific, but rather that such fantasies of the mother’s body are fully consonant with a theory of psychosexual development that takes the development of the male as norm. See Correction Please, p. 18.

9. John Hagan, “Erotic Tendencies in Film, 1900-1906,” in Roger Holman, comp., Cinema, 1900/1906: An Analytic Study (Brussels: International Federation of Film Archives, 1982), pp. 234-35.

10. In Burch’s 1979 film Correction Please, A Subject for the Rogue’s Gallery is cited as just such an acting out of the function of the close-up.

11. See Andre Gaudreault, Du Litteraire au filmique: Systeme du recit (Paris: Meridiens-Klincksieck, 1988), esp. chapters 6-11. See also “Narration and Monstration in the Cinema,” Journal of Film and Video 39, no. 2 (Spring 1987), 29-36.

12. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, no. 3-4 (1986), 64, 66.

13. Ibid., p. 64.

14. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 95.

15. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975), 6-18.

16. Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction,” p. 65.

17. Edward Branigan retains the term narrator, but only after qualifying its use. Noting that the term tends to conflate narration with the real-life author of a text, Branigan says: “If the narrator is not a real-life author, then who is he or she? To state the question in this manner betrays the fact that we have not yet left traditional notions of persons, personalities, day-to-day reality. We cannot ask for a biological person; instead, we must seek a symbolic activity—the activity of narration. This activity of narrating (or, of reading) is a role or function—a particular relationship with respect to the symbolic process of the text. For convenience, however, I shall continue to use the terms ‘narrator’ and ‘activity of narration’ interchangeably, provided that it is understood that ‘narrator’ is a metaphor, an anthropomorphism.” See Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton, 1984), p. 40.

18. André Gaudreault, “Temporality and Narrativity in Early Cinema (1895-1908),” in Holman, comp., Cinema, 1900/1906: An Analytical Study, p. 205.

19. Tom Gunning, “Weaving a Narrative: Style and Economic Background in Griffith’s Biograph Films,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 6, no. 1 (Winter 1981), 24.

20. See Gaudreault, Du Litteraire au filmique, chapter 12.

21. In a survey on the status of film narrative in 1907, John Fell notes that “[a] very few films continue altogether to construct themselves in dream format, although the framing narrative varies. Fuzzing over the dream ‘entry’ serves to becloud the main story body in useful ambiguity, better to enlist spectator interest.” See “Motive, Mischief, and Melodrama: The State of Film Narrative in 1907,” in Fell, Film before Griffith, p. 275.

22. Both Gunning and Burch note that the difference between single-and multiple-shot voyeur films speaks to the difference between primitive cinema in what Gunning calls its “exhibitionist tendency” and “the creation of a fictional diegesis.” Burch says that in the multiple-shot, point-of-view voyeur film, “we are already dealing with a step towards the system of decoupage which was indeed ultimately to make of the spectator an invisible, ubiquitous voyeur. . . .” See Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction, p. 65; and Burch, Correction Please, p. 14.

23. In his analysis of A Search for Evidence, Tom Gunning assigns the film a transitional status, arguing that it is much closer to classical narrative than are other early voyeur films: “Rather than mischievous embodiments of the joy of forbidden curiosity, the detective and wife are embedded in an already initiated drama of deceit and transgression.” Noting that the series of views through the keyhole “follows a narrative trajectory,” Gunning sees in this film the attempt to “solve the narrative enigma. . . .” I am suggesting that the transitional status of A Search for Evidence needs to be seen not only in the structure of question-and-answer, but also within a narrative framework that establishes a difference in the gazes the man and the woman bring to bear upon the “evidence.” For Gunning’s analysis of the film, see “What I Saw from the Rear Window of the Hotel des Folies-Dramatiques, or The Story Point of View Films Told,” in Andre Gaudreault, ed., Ce que je vois de mon cine: La representation du regard dans le cinema des premiers temps (Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1988), pp. 39-40.

24. John Fell cites Terrible Ted as an example of how “fuzzing over the dream ‘entry’ serves to becloud the main story in useful ambiguity. . . .” See “Motive, Mischief, and Melodrama,” p. 275.

25. Fischer, “The Lady Vanishes,” p. 34.

26. Tom Gunning quotes Frank Woods, film reviewer for the New York Dramatic Mirror, who in 1910 wrote, “Facial remarks directed at the camera destroy the illusion of reality.” See Frank Woods, “The Spectator, in the New York Dramatic Mirror, April 10, 1910, cited in Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space,” p. 361.

27. Gunning notes that the individual “scenes” glimpsed in Scenes on Every Floor were sold as autonomous films. See “What I Saw from the Rear Window,” p. 37.

28. Janet Bergstrom, “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Raymond Bellour,” Camera Obscura, no. 3-4 (1979), 89.

29. I have explored the subject at length in my Private Novels, Public Films (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988).

30. Gunning, “What I Saw From the Rear Window,” pp. 37, 38.

31. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much (New York: Methuen, 1988), pp. 73-85.

32. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 63; cited in Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, p. 79.

33. See E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York: Methuen, 1983), pp. 49-59; Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), chapter 4; and Robin Wood, “Venus de Marlene,” Film Comment 14 (1978), 58-63.

34. I am grateful to Maria Minich Brewer, whose response to an earlier version of some of the ideas presented here was most helpful in my reading of Blonde Venus.

35. In his study of narrative in literature and film, for instance, Andre Gaudreault criticizes in passing the use of the word primitive to describe early cinema. See Du Litter aire au filmique, p. 17, n. 1.

36. Tom Gunning, “ ‘Primitive’ Cinema—A Frame-up? or The Trick’s on Us,” Cinema Journal 28, no. 2 (Winter 1989), 4.

37. Ibid. p. 10.

38. Kristin Thompson, in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 158.

39. The relationship between the “primitive” cinema and “primitivism” in modernism has been noted by other historians of the period as well. Tom Gunning compares the relationship between avant-garde and “primitive” cinemas to the relationship between modernist painting and “primitive” art; and Noël Burch, in claiming The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as the “first” avant-garde film to revive what he calls the “Primitive Mode of Representation,” says that it was “no accident” that it should be a film of expressionist inspiration to make this connection, since expressionism “had for nearly two decades been keenly attentive to ‘primitive’ art of all kinds: the sculptures of Africa and the folk woodcuts of Germany, as well as the creations of mental patients and children.” See Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space,” p. 356; and Burch, “Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes,” p. 495.

40. Lynne Kirby’s reading of Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show is extremely interesting in this regard. She discusses Uncle Josh in relationship to both a “primitive” spectator and a “modern, train-trained subject suffering traumatic neurosis a la railway brain. . . . In the confusion of the two in Uncle Josh, we can identify confusion or conflation of shocks that find a common center in the early film spectator, the hysterical, traumatized subject of both the railroad and film.” See “Male Hysteria and Early Cinema,” 122.

41. Michel Marie, “La Scene des fantasmes originaires,” in Gaudreault, ed., Ce que je vois de mon cine: La representation du regard dans le cinema des premiers temps (Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1988), p. 62.

42. See, for example, Mary Ann Doane, “Misrecognition and Identity,” Cine-tracts 3, no. 3 (Fall 1980), 25-32.

43. Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction,” p. 66. While it is beyond the scope of the present chapter, it would be intersting to read the claims for “exhibitionism” in the avant-garde cinema in relationship to Constance Penley’s interrogation of many of the assumptions that inform avant-garde filmmaking. See “The Avant-Garde and Its Imaginary,” Camera Obscura, no. 2 (Fall 1977), 3-33.

6. REVISING THE “PRIMITIVE”

1. Tom Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film,” in John Fell, ed., Film before Griffith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 357-58.

2. Maya Deren, “From the Notebook of 1947,” October, no. 14 (Fall 1980), 29, 30.

3. Ibid., p. 37.

4. The notable exception is VeVe A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography and Collected Works, vol. 1, pt. 1 (Signatures [1917-1942]) (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1985); vol. 1, pt. 2 (Chambers [1942-1947]) (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1988). The approach taken by the authors is distinctly different, however, from most of the work that has characterized feminist approaches to women’s cinema. See, for example, Lauren Rabinowitz’s review of the first volume in Wide Angle 8, no. 3-4 (1986), 131-33.

5. Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film (Yonkers: The Alicat Book Shop Press, 1946); reprinted in Clark, Hodson, and Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, vol. 1, pt. 2, p. 565.

6. P. Adams Sitney analyzes the category of the “trance film” as it applies both to Deren’s and Hammid’s work, and to their influence on the subsequent history of the avant-garde film. See Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-1978 (1974; 2nd ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) chapters 1 and 2.

7. Eleanora Deren, “Religious Possession in Dancing,” pt. 4 (previously unpublished), in Clark, Hodson, and Neiman, The Legend of Maya Deren, vol. 1, pt. 1, pp. 489-91. Parts 1-3 of the essay were published originally in Educational Dance, March-April, August-September 1942. The journal ceased publication before the last section was to appear.

8. P. Adams Sitney compares Ritual in Transfigured Time with Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poete (1930), which is—in ways more explicit than Deren’s film—a meditation on the primitive cinema, especially insofar as keyholes and hotel corridors are concerned. See Visionary Film, pp. 33-37.

9. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1893-95; New York: Pelican, 1974), p. 64.

10. Sigmund Freud, “Revision of the Theory of Dreams,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933; New York: Norton, 1964), trans. James Strachey, p. 18.

11. For a detailed examination of the stylistic components of cinematic impressionism, see David Bordwell, “French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style,” Dissertation, University of Iowa, 1974, chapter 4 (“A Paradigm of Impressionist Film Style”).

12. For a remarkably detailed study of French film production in the 1920s, see Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

13. Richard Abel notes that the most significant difference between Dulac’s film and the play by Andre Obey and Denys Amiel upon which it was based is precisely the representation of Madame Beudet’s inner life. See French Cinema, p. 341.

14. Sandy Flitterman’s analysis of The Smiling Madame Beudet focuses on how Dulac creates a textual system that works against the system of classical representation; see “Montage/Discourse: Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet,” Wide Angle 4, no. 3 (1980), 54-59; and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), chapter 4.

15. For an extended analysis of the scenes leading up to Madame Beudet’s loading of the gun, see Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently, pp. 102-112.

16. Sandy Flitterman discusses the disjunction between the two kinds of images in “Montage/Discourse: Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet.”

17. For an analysis of Dulac’s identification with Madame Beudet, see Wendy Dozoretz, “Madame Beudet’s Smile: Feminine or Feminist?” Film Reader, no. 5 (1982), 41-46.

18. That Dulac’s film functions as a critique of the institution of marriage has been pointed out by Abel, Flitterman-Lewis, and Dozoretz. See also William Van Wert, “Germaine Dulac: First Feminist Filmmaker,” Women and Film 1, nos. 5-6 (1974), 55-57, 103; and Sandy Flitterman, “Heart of the Avant-Garde: Some Biographical Notes on Germaine Dulac,” Women and Film 1, nos. 5-6 (1974), 58-61, 103.

19. See James Monaco, The New Wave (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

20. See Natasa Durovicova, “Biograph as Biography: François Truffaut’s The Wild Child,” Wide Angle 7, nos. 1-2 (1985), 126-35.

21. Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently, p. 283.

22. Andre Gaudreault, “Temporality and Narrativity in Early Cinema, 1895-1908,” in Fell, Film before Griffith, p. 317.

23. Claudia Gorbman, “Cleo from 5 to 7: Music as Mirror,” Wide Angle 4, no. 4 (1981), 40. See also Roy Jay Nelson, “Reflections in a Broken Mirror: Varda’s Cleo de 5 a 7,” French Review 56, no. 5 (April 1983), 740: “The little film-within-the film, in which a man commits a grotesque error because he is wearing dark glasses, provides a first lesson: the costumes we don to protect ourselves from exterior harm change our own perception of the outside world.”

24. I believe this is quite close to Roy Jay Nelson’s observation that “superstition and medical science are two contexts from which to view reality, and the film gives them equal validity. Whether or not the fortune teller’s predictions ‘come true’ in the film depends upon the individual viewer’s interpretation of them, and that interpretation is a function of his or her own mind set, of the context in which the film is viewed.” See “Reflections in a Broken Mirror,” p. 738.

25. Daniele Dubroux, Therese Giraud, and Louis Skorecki, “Entretien avec Chantal Akerman,” Cahiers du cinema, no. 278 (July 1977), 35.

26. It has always seemed “obvious” to me that Jeanne’s response is unexpected orgasm. But Brenda Longfellow raises a question concerning Jeanne’s response: “How do we read her contorted expression: one of pleasure or of pain, orgasmic or disgusted?” Longfellow reports these interesting results of a “random survey” of women who had seen the film: “the readings seem to divide, interestingly enough, according to the sexual preference of the spectator. For the lesbian spectator, Jeanne’s response represents a flash of consciousness and a frightening recognition of her own alienation, her own status as sexual object. For the heterosexual female spectator, the movement of the head and arm connote sexual pleasure, an eruption of the disordering possibility of desire against which Jeanne reacts with a gesture of violent negation.” See “Love Letters to the Mother: The Work of Chantal Akerman,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 13, nos. 1-2 (1989), 84.

27. B. Ruby Rich, “Chantal Akerman’s Meta-cinema,” The Village Voice, March 29, 1983, p. 51; Marsha Kinder, “Reflections on Jeanne Dielman,” in Patricia Erens, ed., Sexual Stratagems (New York; Horizon Press, 1979), pp. 253, 255.

28. Ruth Perlmutter, “Feminine Absence: A Political Aesthetic in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 2 (Spring 1979). On the self-reflexivity of Jeanne Dielman and other films by Akerman, see Rich, “Akerman’s Meta-cinema.”

29. Claire Johnston, “Towards a Feminist Film Practice: Some Theses,” Edinburgh Magazine: Psychoanalysis/Cinema/Avant-Garde (1976), p. 58.

30. Jayne Loader, “ Jeanne Dielman: Death in Installments,” Jump Cut, no. 16 (1977), 10-12.

31. Brenda Longfellow, “Love Letters to the Mother: The Works of Chantal Akerman,” 84.

32. Laleen Jayamanne, “Modes of Performance in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” Australian Journal of Screen Theory, no. 8 (1981), 107.

33. Janet Bergstrom, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman,” Camera Obscura, no. 2 (Fall 1977), 117.

34. Danièle Dubroux, “Le familier inquiétant (Jeanne Dielman),” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 265 (March-April 1976), 17-20.

35. I confess that the first time I saw the film, I did not notice the “game” of the missing chair; and the second time I saw Jeanne Dielman, I “noticed” it but thought it to be my misperception. Having had the opportunity to see the film numerous times since, I am astounded that I did not notice it on first viewing. Is it possible that the creation of “order,” of such precise and seemingly controlled framing and mise-en-scene, is not only so strong but so seductive that blatantly disruptive details such as this pass unnoticed? In any case, in all of the writings that have appeared on Jeanne Dielman, I have seen only one reference to the missing chair. Laleen Jayamanne, in “Modes of Performance” (p. 110, n. 26), calls this a “visual joke,” and notes, “The pleasure of noticing this reflexive joke (or bad continuity according to the codes of Hollywood) took my attention away from Jeanne/Delphine’s actions and also served to denaturalise the naturalistic mise-en-scene.” Noting that Babette Mangolte was the cinematographer for Jeanne Dielman as well as for Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers, Jayamanne suggests that “the way in which objects like chairs and tables are photographed in both films, within the overall structure, makes one attentive to these mundane objects which are usually devoured by the realist text.”

36. Silvia Bovenschen, “Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?” New German Critique, no. 10 (Winter 1977), trans. Beth Weckmueller, 111-37.

37. Noël Burch, “Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes: A Dialectical Approach,” in Philip Rosen, ed Narrative/Apparatus/Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 503. The essay by Peter Wollen referred to by Burch is “Godard and Counter-cinema: Vent d’est,” Afterimage, no. 4 (1972).

38. Burch, “Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes,” p. 501. Burch’s specific point of reference for this definition of the “primitive stare” is Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls.

39. Ibid., p. 504.

40. For a discussion of how the style and structure of the film replicate the primal scene, see Perlmutter, “Feminine Absence,” p. 132.

41. See, for example, Perlmutter, “Feminine Absence,” and Longfellow, “Love Letters to the Mother.”

42. Trinh T. Minh-ha, “ Reassemblage—Sketch of a Sound Track,” Camera Obscura, no. 13-14 (1985), 105.

43. Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Mechanical Eye, Electronic Ear, and the Lure of Authenticity,” Wide Angle 6, no. 2 (1984), 63.

44. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, “Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha,” Camera Obscura, no. 13-14 (1985), 90.

45. The most influential formulation of the opposition can be found in Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 30-36. See also Roy Armes, Film and Reality: A Historical Survey (Baltimore and Middlesex: Penguin, 1974), pp. 22-29.

46. Trinh T. Minh-ha, “ Reassemblage—Sketch of a Sound Track,” p. 105.

47. Ibid., pp. 107-108.

48. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 148.

49. Laleen Jayamanne, “Do You Think I Am a Woman, Ha! Do You?” Discourse 11, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 1989), 49.

50. Ibid., p. 50.

51. Gananath Obeyesekere, “Psychocultural Exegesis of a Case of Spirit Possession in Sri Lanka,” in Vincent Crapanzano and Vivian Garrison, eds., Case Studies in Spirit Possession (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977), p. 249.

52. Ibid., p. 268.

53. Jayamanne, “Do You Think I Am a Woman?” p. 51.

54. “The visual dissonance is not only in the variety of clothes from different cultures worn by the actors but also in the juxtaposition of faces and bodies as they participate in a Western musical ritual. The ethnography here is one of cultural hybridization which if viewed negatively may be seen as one of dispossession of pristine cultural identities.” Ibid., pp. 51-52.

55. Ibid.

56. See Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905; New York: Macmillan, 1963). Describing Herr K.’s advances to Dora, Freud writes (p. 43): “This was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who had never before been approached.”

57. Jayamanne, “Do You Think I Am a Woman?” p. 52.

58. Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, p. 74.

59. Catherine Clement, in Catherine Clement and Helene Cixous, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 13.

60. Obeyesekere, “Psychocultural Exegesis,” pp. 276, 280.