“The Women At The Keyhole”
The text of Dorothy Arzner’s signature comprises a variety of interconnecting factors—a foregrounding of female friendship and references to marginal women in her films, and the assumption of a style that suggests both “masculinity” and lesbianism. Arzner’s importance in contemporary feminist film theory may seem to lie exclusively at the level of a textual practice isolated from the woman’s life and style. But the fact that Arzner has also functioned so consistently as an image for feminist film theorists suggests the significance of the difference embodied in that image. The fact that this image has been largely untheorized suggests a set of questions insufficiently addressed. The ironic lesbian signature finds a contemporary echo in two films which, while more explicit in their representation of lesbianism, also elaborate on the strategies present in the simultaneous and ironic evocation of female friendship and lesbian marginality in Arzner’s films.
Writing about the complex ways in which the lesbian styles of butch and fem have appropriated heterosexual culture, Joan Nestle notes that “it is easy to confuse an innovative or resisting style with a mere replica of the prevailing custom.” The confusion of which Nestle speaks has been one of the most challenging areas of feminist analysis, since contradiction is far more difficult to theorize than either pure recuperation or absolute novelty. But much contemporary feminist theory takes contradiction as its point of departure and return, particularly since the limitations of totalizing discourses—woman as either absolute victim or innocent exile—have become abundantly clear. Lesbian representation highlights contradiction in particularly strong ways, for lesbianism is both lure and threat for patriarchal culture as well as for feminism, and it challenges a model of signification in which masculinity and activity, femininity and passivity, are always symmetrically balanced. Nestle suggests that “lesbians should be mistresses of discrepancies, knowing that resistance lies in the change of context.”1 It is just such a “change of context” that characterizes the irony of Arzner’s signature.
The two contemporary women’s films to which I turn in this chapter both cite and disturb the heterosexual codes of cinema, and offer quite stunning demonstrations—even exhibitions—of the female authorial signature. While neither film takes butch and fem relationships as its point of departure, both exemplify the “discrepancies” to which Nestle refers. In Chantal Akerman’s 1974 film Je tu il elle, heterosexual and lesbian attachment are baldly juxtaposed in relation to an “I” whose speaking self is somewhat detached from her corporeal self, a bodily presence marked by the intertwining activities of eating and writing. Ulrike Ottinger’s 1979 film Bildnis einer Trinkerin [Ticket of No Return] traces the itinerary of a woman who comes to Berlin with the intention of performing a drinker’s tour of the city. Her primary encounters are with women, while the few men who do appear in the film function primarily to evoke and quickly dismiss clichés of male spectatorial desire. In these films, the change of context to which Nestle refers engages controversial material, for both films tap not only heterosexual codes but also dominant stereotypes of lesbianism.
These films are concerned, in different yet interrelating ways, with the elaboration of the relationship between the act of self-representation and the vicissitudes of desire between women. These are not in any obvious or self-evident way lesbian films, as that term would be relevant to the films of Barbara Hammer, for instance, which appropriate the language of experimental cinema to the representation of the lesbian body, or to a recent film such as Desert Hearts which adapts the romantic codes of the Hollywood cinema to lesbian ends.2 Je tu il elle and Ticket of No Return are less concerned with affirmative representations of lesbian experience than with explorations of the simultaneous ambivalence and pressure of lesbianism with regard to the polarities of agency and gender. This could of course be taken to mean that Akerman’s and Ottinger’s films are, because less “explicitly” lesbian in their focus, less lesbian, period. But these films do not reflect the tendency visible in some women’s films to allude to lesbianism from within the securely defined boundaries of female bonding and friendship.
That tendency is quite pronounced in Diane Kurys’s films, particularly in Coup de foudre [Entre nous (1983)], in which two women, Lena (played by Isabelle Huppert) and Madeleine (played by Miou-Miou), living in post-World War II provincial France, discover an attraction for each other (an attraction that is definitely erotic though never explicitly sexual) and eventually leave their husbands to live together.3 As was widely publicized at the time of the film’s release, the friendship of the two women has a strong autobiographical significance, for it corresponds to the experience of Kurys’s own mother. At the conclusion of the film, when Lena (Kurys’s mother) asks Michel (Kurys’s father, played by Guy Marchand) to leave, their daughter—i.e., the fictional representation of Kurys herself—is seen watching them. Over the final shot of the film, of Madeleine walking with the children on the beach, a title appears, a very literal authorial signature: “My father left at dawn. He never saw my mother again. It’s now been two years since Madeleine died. I dedicate this film to the three of them.”4
All of Kurys’s films are marked by the connection between storytelling and a female bond that wavers between the homosocial and the homoerotic. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, that connection is most strongly marked in what appears to be, on the surface, the film that departs the most sharply from the distinctly female world central to Kurys’s other films. In A Man in Love (Un Homme amoureux [1987]), the plot centers upon a young actress, Jane (played by Greta Scacchi), whose affair with a narcissistic American movie star, Steve Elliot (played by Peter Coyote), is interwoven with her relationship with her mother (played by Claudia Cardinale), who suffers from and eventually dies of cancer. While the film follows Jane as its central protagonist, it is not until approximately two-thirds of the way through that her voice emerges, quite literally, as the voice of the film, through voice-over commentary. The voice-over is the major component of the film’s mise-en-abyme; in the concluding scenes, Jane begins writing—“A Man in Love.” The first appearance of the voice-over occurs immediately after a scene in which Jane, in bed with her lover, Steve, speaks—seemingly at his behest—a fantasy of lesbian lovemaking.
Hence, the conditions of the emergence of the female narrator’s voice are bound up, narratively, with the lesbian fantasy, a fantasy which offers, within the logic of the film, the possibility of combining two spheres otherwise separate—heterosexual passion, on the one hand, and the maternal bond, on the other. The association of the female narrator in A Man in Love with a lesbian fantasy suggests the kind of connection between lesbianism and cinematic representation that is explored in Je tu il elle and Ticket of No Return, not from the point of view of the heterosexual woman (A Man in Love) or the child (Entre Nous) but from the point of view of a female author whose desire for other women is central to her work. Kurys’s films also make for interesting counterpoints to the narrational and authorial strategies in Akerman’s and Ottinger’s films. The self-representation of Kurys herself (in Peppermint Soda and Entre Nous in particular) is wrapped in a fiction of the author that is totally compatible with the fictions of narrative cinema. In Je tu il elle and Ticket of No Return, however, Akerman and Ottinger both appear in ways that expose and undermine those fictions, not only because of the explicit lesbian desire which defines the relationship of both authors to their film texts, but more specifically because of how that desire is represented, through the exposition of pain, narcissism, infantilism, and neediness.
Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle consists of three parts, each of which turns centrally on the separation between the woman as a narrating subject and as object. The first section of the film begins with an image of a young woman—portrayed by Akerman herself—seated in a room surrounded by a bed and furniture, over which we hear Akerman’s voice (“ . . . et je suis partie”/“ . . . and I left”). Akerman’s voice and body are discontinuous—that is, she speaks only in the disembodied, nonsynchronized voice on the sound track. During the course of the first section, the woman strips the room of its furniture until only her mattress remains. She writes, and she eats powdered sugar from a paper bag. Much of her writing consists of a letter addressed to a person, a lover one assumes, whose gender is unspecified; but given so-called normal viewing expectations, one assumes the indirect object of unspecified gender, “lui,” to be a man. She takes off her clothes, submitting her body to the same process of unmasking as the room.
There is a ritual quality to this section of the film, an almost meditative tone of quiet contemplation that characterizes Akerman’s movements and the fit between her voice and her gestures. Yet there is, simultaneously, undeniable obsessiveness as well, particularly insofar as the compulsive eating of the sugar is concerned. The scene suggests both calm and torment, peaceful solitude and turbulence. As a result, here as throughout Je tu il elle there is an unsettling quality, a sense that the film is torn between conflicting moods and emotions. Aside from the young woman, the only other human presences during this section of the film are children’s voices heard from outside the windowed door to the apartment, and a passerby in a raincoat—one assumes it is a man, although the face is not visible—who peers into her room while Akerman lies naked on the mattress. The voice-over continues throughout the sequence, and while it ostensibly provides a running commentary on her activities, more frequently it alludes to what is seen on the image track without necessarily describing accurately what we see. Also, the voice-over is often out of sync with the image track, and as a result, events are alluded to on a delayed basis.
The first section of the film concludes when Akerman, after examining herself in the reflection of the windowed door, dresses and leaves the apartment with the door slightly ajar. The second section begins with an abrupt change from the enclosed space of the room, for here we see Akerman in a high angle shot on a highway, as her voice-over describes getting a ride from a trucker. There are alternations between the interior of the truck cab, shot in very grainy, often hand-held close-ups, and the restaurants and bars where the two stop to eat. Akerman sleeps occasionally in the rear of the cab. Akerman’s voice is heard less frequently here; rather, it is the truck driver who offers extensive monologues, ranging from instructions for the hand job that Akerman gives him (she is located off screen when this occurs) to a description of his wife and children. His meditations alternate with images accompanied by noise—the sounds of television, radio, music—rather than by human speech. In several instances these background sounds are drawn from American television and radio, hence giving this section of the film—and perhaps the entire film by extension—the feel of being rooted in no specific place, that is, neither the United States (for every person in the film is French-speaking) nor Europe. While the trucker does most of the talking, there is very definitely a strong communicative bond between the two, but I do not think it entirely accurate to describe that bond as conventionally sexual. Rather, their mutual fascination is conveyed most strongly in those scenes where no words are spoken—their somewhat awkward avoidance of eye contact during a long scene in a restaurant, for instance, or Akerman’s fascination with the male rituals of shaving and urinating in a restroom.
The final section of the film begins when Akerman arrives at the apartment building of her woman lover. The woman announces immediately that Akerman cannot stay, and the first part of this section of the film is a ritual of the two women’s simultaneous attraction to and distance from each other, as Akerman puts on her coat and stands next to the elevator, seemingly waiting for her lover to tell her to stay. Throughout Je tu il elle, food plays a crucial role, and here food marks the transition from speechless communication to sexual encounter. Akerman delays her departure by announcing that she is hungry, and proceeds to eat, fairly voraciously, the sandwich the woman prepares for her. She asks for more, and once the woman has prepared yet more food, Akerman pushes it away and reaches for her. The two women make love, and during the three lengthy shots that represent their lovemaking, there is a sense of a return to the room in which the film began.
The three shots reflect in miniature the three-part structure of the film. And as in Je tu il elle as a whole, there is little linearity in the progression of the scene. In the first shot, the two women roll around energetically; in the second shot, their faces are isolated as they kiss. Finally, in what one might assume to be the climactic shot, the lover separates Akerman’s legs to engage in oral sex. However, throughout all three of these shots, little separates the initiator from the recipient; little, that is, isolates active subject from passive object. The representation of the lovemaking departs absolutely from the codes of pornography, so that there is no cutting from “subject” to “object,” no isolation of a breast or genitalia as the fetishized object, no simulation of sexual frenzy.5 If neither Akerman nor the lover can be situated neatly within the pole of subject or object, in other words, neither is there a clearly marked place for the spectator.6 In the concluding scene of the film, Akerman leaves her lover’s bed and exits the apartment. The film concludes with a children’s song sung by a female voice with a children’s chorus.
Figure 20. Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle (World Artists)
There is hardly a single moment in Je tu il elle when Akerman’s presence is not marked, either by her literal presence on screen or by the presence of her voice. Indeed, one could hardly find a contemporary woman’s film more saturated with authorial signature than Je tu il elle. What are we to make of this extensive presence of Akerman in the film, a presence that seems at times to achieve a kind of narcissistic frenzy? The “je” of the film traces the difficult encounter between female subjectivity and cinematic authorship. If, for the female “I” of the film, there is a fundamental connection between orality and self-expression, the marks of cinematic authorship indicate simultaneously the divisions within female identity and possible realignments of those divisions, both within the female subject and between her and others.7 Hence the separation of voice and body in the representation of Akerman.
Perhaps the most telling scene in this context is the single instance in the film where Akerman is absent from the frame—where, that is, her fictional persona and her role as filmmaker “behind” the camera are fused. This is when Akerman, located offscreen, gives the truck driver a hand job. After he has ejaculated, he looks briefly and somewhat self-consciously at the camera. Aside from the obvious function of breaking the illusion of cinematic distance, which is not particularly notable in a film that has persistently departed from any of the conventional modes of representing distance, this brief glance at the camera is an explicit acknowledgment of what we know, that the fictional character within the film is identical to the filmmaker. Akerman as the female subject of Je tu il elle occupies, in this scene, the same metaphorical position, behind the camera as it were, as the cinematic author.
It is somewhat curious that this acknowledgment, this fusion of character and author, should occur during a scene of sexual servicing of the man, particularly in a film that concludes with lesbian lovemaking. Indeed, the contrast between the two sexual encounters is striking. The two participants are separate in the one, and quite enmeshed, to the point that it is not always clear which body is which (and this despite the difference in coloring and body type between the two women), in the other; a close-up is used in one, medium shots in the other; speech dominates the one and is totally absent from the other; a clear linear movement toward climax structures the one, whereas such movement is absent from the other. And in contrast to the scene with the man, where Akerman appears to occupy positions on both sides of the camera simultaneously, in the scene with the woman she is quite definitely situated within the frame.8
The separation between Akerman as subject and Akerman as object is achieved in the most obvious way by the distance between the voice-over and the images and sounds that appear on screen. This distance is most marked in the first section of the film, where the voice at times describes actions that have not been seen on screen, or in some cases that could not be “seen” even if they were shown (at the beginning of the film, the voice announces that she repainted all the furniture blue . . . and then announces that she painted it all again, but green; the film is in black and white). The separation occurs in other ways as well. There is a preoccupation in Je tu il elle with space, with the relationship between interior and exterior space, and in particular with thresholds, with moments of connection or obstruction between connecting spheres. Again, this is most apparent in the first section of the film, where the space outside the room is associated with sounds—the sounds of the highway, or of children playing—or with the intrusion of the gaze of a passerby. The windowed door to the apartment serves a complex function in this respect, for it is both a literal mirror into which Akerman gazes at herself, and the passageway outside the room.9
The spatial opposition between inside and outside is maintained throughout Je tu il elle, though with different configurations from what is seen in the room at the beginning of the film. I have noted that in the second section of the film, the interior of the truck cab is set off from the space surrounding it by the graininess of the image. While the truck cab could hardly be said to occupy the same function as the private space of the room in the first part of the film, it does acquire some of the attributes of Akerman’s room, particularly given that Akerman is seen a number of times sleeping in the back of the cab. In this section of the film, however, it becomes more difficult to distinguish between what is part of Akerman’s spoken reality—that is, the reality created through her gestures in the room and her voice-over commentary—and what is more properly associated with the realm of a separate, public sphere. Divisions are maintained with the passage from the first to the second parts of the film, but they are broken down simultaneously. In the last section, this spatial opposition seems to dissolve. Except for the children’s song—which is purely extradiegetic, in contrast to the children’s voices heard in part one, which one assumes to be at least spatially contingent—the world inhabited by the two women is initially very self-enclosed. Yet the spatial opposition does not so much disappear as it becomes displaced, for in the encounter with the woman the precarious balance between one’s position as subject and as object, between the inner and outer worlds, is affirmed.
Akerman is defined both as contained by—and occasionally even imprisoned by—the space that surrounds her, and as a powerful controller of that space. There is a difference in this context between the first and last sections of the film, for in the first Akerman seems more contained by her surroundings, and in the last she exercises more control over them. In the second section of the film, her position is somewhere between the two extremes, for she is both a passive recipient of the driver’s speech and an active observer of his actions and gestures.10 To be sure, one of the most important ways in which the film maintains the distinction between the woman as subject and the woman as object is by virtue of the fact that the young woman is played by Akerman herself.
Je tu il elle is a significant film in terms of female and lesbian authorship in the cinema, not merely because Akerman functions so centrally as its narrative and visual center, but also because of the specific way in which her role materializes. For Akerman’s role is staging and restaging of the components of female cinematic authorship. The process traced in Je tu il elle is one of the very conditions of representation and representability for the female subject. I use the term subject advisedly, for what is affirmed in Akerman’s film is a position for the female subject vis-à-vis the cinema that affirms her visibility and her readability in terms irreducible to—and perhaps even independent of—the overlapping paradigms of gender and agency. This affirmation of female subjectivity in the cinema occurs in several ways: through the connections between different forms of orality (eating, speech, sex), and between the literal and the figurative; through a movement back and forth from the positions of spectator to actor to writer; and through a series of resonances whereby the desire of the woman is linked to those of the child and the adult, to the desire to see and to be seen, to the desire to speak and to write.
I have said that this is not a film that sits comfortably withn the category of the “lesbian film,” that is, that Je tu il elle does not take as its obvious point of departure the address to a lesbian audience or the direct affirmation of lesbian identity. The film does affirm sexual desire between women as a complex source of creativity and as a difficult—difficult in the productive rather than prohibitive sense—question of representation. The structure of Je tu il elle is not linear, so that it is quite difficult to read the film as a progression from part one, where the woman is seated alone, sealed within the hermetic space of her own narcissism just as she is contained within her room, to the woman in part two who becomes a sexual being through her interactions with the trucker, to part three, where the woman arrives finally at a more satisfactory, more complete, more successful sexual identity with her woman lover. Je tu il elle brackets heterosexuality in the sense that it is not accorded the privileged status that one has come to expect after decades of films, classical or otherwise, which take as their unquestionable assumptions variations on the boy-meets-girl story. Rather, the heterosexual dialogue—which in this film is undoubtedly more accurately described as a male monologue—is represented as one possible configuration of the pronouns that compose the film’s title.
However, there is no lesbian triumphalism in the film, and little sense in which the lovemaking with which the film concludes is posited as the culmination of that configuration of pronouns. To be sure, there is more passion in the lovemaking between the two women than there is between the truck driver and the young woman as she gives him a hand job. But the encounter with the truck driver is not at all represented as the negative alternative, but rather as an alternative way of engaging critically with the heterosexual formula of cinematic representation, without falling ino the trap of “heterosexual = bad, lesbian = good,” the trap, that is, of reversing the duality without questioning it. Rather, the heterosexual encounter of the second part of the film is represented as a series of observations. Given Akerman’s departure at the conclusion of the film, and the first words uttered by her voice in the first section of the film (“ . . . et je suis partie” [“ . . . and I left”]), it is tempting, rather, to see the process of departure, isolation, and return as the trajectory of desire that the film inscribes.11
However, some elements of Je tu il elle do evoke the radical otherness of lesbian identity and lesbian sexuality. Throughout the film, an emphasis is placed on orality in a very literal sense, as a desire for food. Akerman’s obsessive ingestion of powdered sugar in the first section has all the contours of an eating disorder. During the second section the hunger disappears—Akerman gives food from her plate to the trucker—and only thirst remains, although the way in which she drinks evokes little of the compulsive eating seen in the first section of the film. Only in the last section of Je tu il elle, when Akerman has arrived at her lover’s apartment, does the hunger reappear, now appeased temporarily by the sandwich that her lover prepares for her and which Akerman devours, and the thirst as well, quenched when the lover brings her a bottle of wine. After asking for more food, Akerman pushes it away and reaches for her lover, stressing the obvious link between orality and sexuality. More specifically, the link created in the film between food and sex evokes clinical diagnoses of homosexuality as regressive, as arrested development, as the desire—for women—to fuse with the maternal object. In virtually all of Akerman’s films, maternal identification is central, from the dislocated yet enormously profound conversation between mother and daughter in News from Home to the patient observation of the mother’s rebellion in Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.12 In Je tu il elle, Akerman affirms the significance of “regressive” orality as informative of, rather than working against, female representation and creativity—whether these take the form of writing a letter or making a film.
I seem to be arguing myself into a corner as far as Je tu il elle is concerned. I have said that it does not inhabit comfortably the category of “lesbian film.” The problem of naming Je tu il elle is difficult, and compounded by the fact that naming is—as the very title of the film suggests—central to its direction and structure. It may well be that what Je tu il elle works with and through is precisely the difficulty of naming, and my own reluctance to categorize the film may be less a function of the film’s own resistance to naming than a reflection of the fact that there exist, in the taxonomy of film types, no categories which adequately describe what Je tu il elle is. The film’s title is, then, an appropriate place from which to consider how lesbian representation inhabits the processes of naming and of cinematic address. The “je,” the “il”, and the “elle” of the title have obvious designations in the film—“je” is Akerman herself, “il” is the trucker, and “elle” the woman lover. That “il” and “elle” are intended to have some kind of symmetrical balance in their status as third-person pronouns is indicated by how the title of the film appears: each word is handwritten, appearing consecutively down the left side of the screen, until “elle” appears on the right side of the screen, alongside “il.” Yet the “elle” could be read in the opposite way as well, for however symmetrically it might sit with the “il” alongside it, the “elle” creates an imbalance between the two columns, strains the linear rectitude of pronouns.
The “tu” of the film’s title is decidedly more ambiguous, which is most obvious in the fact that virtually all of the subjects in the film, including Akerman herself, occupy the position of “tu” at one point or another. In the first section of the film, there is only one literal reference to “tu.” Akerman’s voice-over says, “When I lifted my head suddenly, there were people walking in the street. I still waited for them to leave or for something to happen. For me to believe in God or for you [tu] to send me a pair of gloves so I could go out in the cold”.13 One assumes, of course, that this “tu” is the same person addressed in the letters, a “tu” who remains unspecified.
The word tu lends itself to other ambiguities aside from those concerning the actual person to whom Akerman addresses her thoughts and her letters. The past tense of the verb taire (to render silent) is tu, and Akerman’s voice-over refers at one point to her silencing of herself: “The eighth or ninth day, I started the second letter over again, and I ate a lot of powdered sugar for eight pages. And I crossed out . . . marked out . . . a few lines remained. I stopped eating and kept quiet [je me suis tu].”14 And if tu is the second-person singular, it is also, at least phonetically, the singular form of the verb tuer, to kill (je tue, tu tues, il/elle tue), and it has been suggested that the title of Akerman’s film could also be read (ungrammatically) as “je tue il, elle.”15 While Akerman is present during the entire film, it is only at the conclusion, with the appearance of the final credits, that she is given a fictional name—Julie. Interestingly, the name Julie appears by itself, along with the names of the actors who play the roles of the truck driver and the lover. The first syllable of “Julie” suggests, of course, both “je” and “tu,” and the name contains “il” and even “elle” (or “el”) in reverse. This combination of pronouns occurs only in the written name; as a speaking subject, Akerman/Julie is divided across the pronouns of the film’s title.
As “Julie,” as “je” and “tu” and “il” and “elle” simultaneously and concurrently, Akerman attempts nothing less than the rewriting of the cinematic scenario that prescribes formulaic relations between those terms along the lines of heterosexual symmetry. Akerman shares with Monique Wittig an insistence upon pronouns as stubborn knots both contained by and resistant to patriarchal logic, and the “I” of Je tu il elle is quite suggestive of the divided “I,” the “j/e” of Wittig’s The Lesbian Body,16 But while there is an obvious connection to be made between Akerman and Wittig’s work, Akerman’s “je” is shaped by tensions which pull in several directions, one of which is embodied in Wittig’s practice. Elaine Marks has described the project of The Lesbian Body in the following terms:
The physical exchange between J/e and Tu is reminiscent at times of a pas de deux, at times of a boxing match, at times of a surgical operation. But destruction of one order of language and sensibility implies creation of a new order. The J/e of Le Corps lesbien is the most powerful lesbian in literature because as a lesbianfeminist she reexamines and redesigns the universe. Starting with the female body she recreates through anecdote and proper names a new aqueous female space and a new female time in which the past is abolished.17
The divided, utopian lesbian subject of Wittig’s novel is a horizon for Akerman’s film, but the “new order” of the film addresses the female subject as both within and outside patriarchal culture. Je tu il elle explores the possibilities of rewriting the relationship between the female subject, sexuality, and representation, by reformulating the pronouns in relation to other kinds of desire.
Like Akerman’s protagonist (at least until the final credits), the central woman character in Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return is unnamed. The film follows the journey of the woman (portrayed by Tabea Blumenschein) through the city of Berlin. It begins with her arrival at the airport, and a female voice-over describes the woman’s desire to perform a drinker’s tour of the city, to “live her passion undisturbed—live to drink, drink to live, a drunken life, life as a drunk.” The young woman is an embodiment of the clichés of female beauty, for she exhibits the kind of preoccupation with self-presentation and masquerade commonly associated with the most stereotypical definitions of femininity. As in Akerman’s film, there is a disjuncture between the bodily presence of the woman and her voice. She rarely speaks, and when she does there is a disruption of the fit between body and voice.
At the beginning of the film, for example, we see the woman’s hands at a desk as she purchases her plane ticket. When the male clerk asks her what kind of ticket she wants, a female voice which we presume to be Blumenschein’s responds “aller, jamais retour” (“ticket of no return,” the name given to the film in English); however, there is no simultaneous image of her face to ground the voice. But whereas in Akerman’s film the division between voice and body, between sound and image, occurs primarily within the single female protagonist, in Ticket of No Return that division occurs, rather, across a multiplicity of female figures. The female voice-over at the beginning of the film, for instance, is in no way assumed to be the voice of Blumenschein; rather, it is a voice that adopts a kind of free indirect style of referring to Blumenschein in the third person.
Although I have specified that neither Je tu il elle nor Ticket of No Return functions obviously as a “lesbian film,” I suspect that my discussion of Ottinger’s film within the context of lesbian representation will be seen by some as requiring more “justification.” The lesbian lovemaking at the conclusion of Je tu il elle may not provide a simple resolution to the film, but it does validate a lesbian reading—as if the feminist insistence on the distinction between sexuality and sexual act had not yet sunk in. In contrast, Ticket of No Return offers even fewer clearly marked guideposts to authorize a reading of lesbian representation. Ottinger’s film is concerned just as centrally as Je tu il elle with the connections between authorship, thresholds, and desire between women. But the focus is somewhat different, emphasizing the erotic connections between women more than explicitly sexual ones.
The plot and structure of Ticket of No Return follow the woman’s movements through the city as her desire to drink leads to some obvious sites—bars and clubs—as well as to some not-so-obvious ones—a skating rink, a subway station. The entire social landscape is seen as a function of her fantasies, her desires. There are occasional shifts in the film, from a realistic city scene to more fantastically inspired scenes, including an enchanted garden. However, when seen as components in the journey of the woman, these shifts seem less abrupt and more a function of her own narcissism, whereby little distinguishes the world of her fantasies from the world outside them. Indeed, much of what occurs in Ticket of No Return is an attendant breaking down of the boundaries between self and other. This disintegration occurs on one level within the character portrayed by Blumenschein herself. As she first appears in the film, she is a prototype of the woman-as-object as theorized by feminist film theory: she has no voice of her own (there are some rare exceptions to this rule later in the film, but they are so stylized as to problematize the fusion of body and voice), she embodies the fetishism of clothing and costuming to an extreme degree, and her narcissism is defined quite literally in the unquenchable thirst and oral rage of her alcoholism.
Yet however much she embodies the woman-as-object, the polarity of the quintessential subject/object division of the cinema, Blumenschein’s drinker is also the subject of the film, even if in sometimes indirect and fractured ways. Ticket of No Return explores, then, the possiblity of the woman-object as woman-subject, with the polarities of subject and object interwoven and interdependent. Blumenschein’s drinker may follow from the categories of woman as constructed by patriarchy, but Ticket of No Return explores how woman, and women, function as objects for each other. This exploration does not always sit comfortably with feminism, however, for Ticket of No Return’s woman drinker is no female hero, and the interdependence of subject and object explored in the film postulates as much pain as pleasure, and female agency emerges as a contradictory entity. If Blumenschein’s drinker figures the desire to be subject and object simultaneously, to see and to be seen, that desire leads to her own self-destruction.
The woman drinker functions on another level as a catalyst to break down other oppositions particularly relevant to women. Throughout the film, Blumenschein’s drinker encounters three women, the “houndstooth ladies,” named individually as “Social Question,” “Common Sense,” and “Accurate Statistics.” Ostensibly in Berlin to attend a conference, these women are first seen at the airport at the beginning of the film. Whereas Tabea Blumenschein’s heroine is a most unusual tourist with an equally unusual itinerary, these women are tourists in the most conventional sense. Their movements through the city intersect constantly with those of the woman drinker. The three ladies seem initially to be in total opposition to the woman. To be sure, their coordinated houndstooth costumes are as stunning in their way as Blumenschein’s own, but they are nonetheless uniforms. Where Blumenschein’s heroine does not speak, these women talk incessantly, and what they say mirrors in a narrow sense the names they are given. The houndstooth ladies can be read as caricatured superegos to the woman drinker as id, as comic reality principles that collide with the fantasy principle embodied in the woman drinker.
Blumenschein also has repeated encounters in the film with a bag lady, Lutze. Their first meeting occurs when Lutze cleans the windshield of the car in which the woman drinker is riding, hoping, one assumes, for a small tip. The woman drinker is captivated by Lutze from the outset; she stares at the bag lady with fascination. Lutze becomes a companion to Blumenschein, as she joins her on her drinking expedition and engages in a relationship with her that is at times playful, at times childish, and at times erotic.
If Ticket of No Return is shaped by the woman drinker’s tour of the city of Berlin, then her itinerary is shaped in turn by a universe defined primarily by women. Put another way, Ticket of No Return is concerned with positions of desire and agency, subject and object, looking and being looked at, as they exist between and among women. This is not to say that men or figures of masculinity are totally absent from the film; rather, they are afforded only a marginal status. One of the clubs where the woman drinker and Lutze stop on an evening’s outing, for instance, features punk performer Nina Hagen, perched on a piano, singing a song in a characteristically screechy voice. With her extreme make-up (white skin and black lipstick), Hagen stretches the limits of the woman-as-object-of-spectacle beyond conventional notions of beauty. So does Ottinger’s portrayal of her, with a low camera angle and lighting that make her blend into her surroundings. This sequence is one of the rare occasions in the film where attention is drawn to the male spectator, here portrayed in terms just as excessive as Hagen herself is. We see a series of close-up, extremely low angle shots of male spectators, some of whom look directly into the camera. I do not think it would be incorrect to say that there is a certain reversal operative here—that, in other words, the female performer exercises a much more powerful gaze than do the male onlookers, whose spectatorial positions seem as fragmented as women’s bodies often are in the traditional cinema. Much more crucial is the bracketing, not only of the conventional male gaze but also of men.
There is, however, one male figure who functions centrally in the film—the midget who appears at the airport at the beginning of the film, and reappears to facilitate passages into a more clearly demarcated world of fantasy, such as the exotic garden or the fountain to which he leads the woman drinker. Narratively and visually, however, this man has a function that is distinct from the more conventional male positions alluded to in the scene described above. While he is a man, the midget has none of the attributes of male power or authority. Rather—and perhaps somewhat ironically—the man is an extension of the woman drinker herself; he is a kind of master of ceremonies for the staging of her own desires. Principles of contrast—social as well as narrative and visual—are applied, rather, to the female figures in the film.
Ticket of No Return thus upsets the conventional wisdom that the opposition between masculine and feminine is collapsed into the difference between men and women as the most pervasive denominator of cinematic narrative. To be sure, there is plenty of opposition in Ottinger’s film. Ticket of No Return delights in the complicated trajectories of collision, tension, and difference, but with the crucial qualification that virtually all of the oppositions occur among women. In the case of the woman drinker and the houndstooth ladies, the drinker represents a kind of literal return of the repressed, for she is an embodiment of the “problem” of female alcoholism to which they refer in terms of statistics and clichés. The woman drinker embodies what is repressed by those facts and figures—the possibility that the woman disdained is also the woman desired.
The opposition between Blumenschein’s woman drinker and Lutze is, on the most obvious level, an opposition of social class. Tabea Blumenschein’s character may exaggerate the conventions of femininity, but the excess remains within the boundaries of socially acceptable exoticism. Lutze, however, is unquestionably marginal, her initial bedraggled appearance in total contrast to that of the woman drinker. If the woman drinker figures for what is repressed in the three houndstooth ladies, Lutze embodies a kind of otherness which the woman drinker embraces with great enthusiasm. The woman drinker eventually dresses Lutze, if not exactly in her own image then at least as an imitiation of her.
Figure 21. Lutze and Tabea Blumenschein in Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return (Museum of Modern Art)
On the one hand, then, the encounters between Lutze and the woman drinker are marked by the transgression of boundaries, an alliance forged in a love for alcohol and a common fascination for each other. On the other, the encounters between the woman drinker and the three houndstooth ladies are charcterized by more distance, more objectification. A recurrent motif in Ticket of No Return is the breakdown of distance, the transgression of boundaries, particularly insofar as the relation between the three ladies and the woman drinker is concerned. The words uttered by the three ladies function to keep the woman drinker set apart as an other, a symptom of social disintegration. But visually, the relationship between them and the woman suggests something else. Early in the film, for instance, we see Blumenschein in a café, shot frontally through the window, as she orders drink after drink and moves her lips as if speaking to an (invisible) interlocutor. When the three houndstooth ladies enter the café, we are given a broader and more comprehensive sense of the space of the café, as if to reflect the equation between these women and a kind of reality principle. When Blumenschein is in the frame, the space of the café functions only as a backdrop. From the moment they enter the café, the three ladies occupy a position which in the conventional language of the cinema would be occupied by a man.
The woman drinker listens to the houndstooth ladies as they expound upon the dangers of alcoholism while indulging in huge sundaelike concoctions. She sees Lutze outside the café, and gestures to her to come in. The woman drinker is shot in such a way that her reflection is visible in the café window, and when Lutze first approaches, she assumes the place of that reflection. Lutze and the woman drinker drink, while the chatter of the houndstooth ladies continues in the background. The visual uniformity of the three houndstooth ladies in their almost identical outfits stands in opposition to the strong visual contrast between Blumenschein, dressed in a coordinated yellow outfit, and the bag lady, dressed in rags. Also, two different kinds of orality are contrasted. The houndstooth ladies talk and eat, their obvious relish in devouring their sundaes standing in sharp contrast to the coded vocabulary of social control that charcterizes their speech. In other words, they consume their food with a passion that is regulated in their speech.
The orality of Lutze and the woman drinker possesses no such division; they drink, laugh, and gesture, their bodies totally immersed in the pleasures of consumption. The staging of contrasts between the two groups of women is interrupted when a man and a woman arrive on the scene. Like the male spectators whose bracketed function I referred to earlier, this heterosexual couple has a brief, intrusive function before they evaporate into the margins of the film. As if on cue, Blumenschein throws her drink on the glass window of the café, a gesture quickly imitated by Lutze. The couple, armed with cameras, proceed to take photographs of the scene, while the three ladies gape and stare. A waiter throws the woman drinker and Lutze out of the café, leaving the three houndstooth ladies to their food and platitudes on the shamefulness of women who get drunk in public.
The gesture which attracts the cameras of the heterosexual couple and which gets Lutze and the woman drinker thrown out of the café is a trope in Ticket of No Return, repeated at key moments of desire and recognition. The clear liquid streaked on the window does not, in any substantial way, interfere with the visibility of what lies beyond the window. However, it does call attention to the window as a surface that mediates between the viewer and the object of vision.18 This trope is first introduced in Ticket of No Return when the woman drinker arrives at the airport. The male midget’s path crosses hers in the airport terminal, and somewhat eerie music commences, suggesting a shift from the ostensibly “realistic” space of the airport to the space of the woman drinker’s fantasies. She proceeds through sliding doors, and we next see her behind a glass window, in medium shot, looking somewhat perplexed. She places her gloved hand on the glass. Another hand enters the screen, and squeezes water over the glass, apparently “liquefying” the image of Blumenschein. In a reverse shot, we see the back of Blumenschein’s head in the foreground of the image, and an elderly cleaning woman, her head wrapped in a black scarf, laughing as she continues to wash the glass. As the series of alternating images continues, Blumenschein does not really establish eye contact with the woman, but looks dreamily off into space.
It is not altogether clear whether the woman drinker’s fascination has to do with the cleaning woman herself, or with the fact of being looked at by the cleaning woman. In any case, virtually all of the cinematic elements used here—the sound track, the editing, the framing—suggest the enormous significance of the encounter, and it is one of the rare scenes in the film where the conventional shot-reverse shot is used. The encounter with the cleaning woman as it is represented at the airport introduces two themes, one narrative and one visual, that will recur throughout the film. First, there is the encounter with otherness, with a woman separated from the woman drinker by her age, her appearance, her demeanor, and her social class. Second, the water-streaked glass suggests transparence and surface at the same time. The woman drinker’s first encounter with Lutze (when Lutze attempts to clean the windshield of the car) is a replay of this scene, with Blumenschein’s fascination expressed with the same dreamy look, and the liquid on the car window a repetition of the imagery. The café scene replays the scene as well.
In a more general way, the encounter with the cleaning woman prefigures the preoccupation in Ticket of No Return with women as both like and unlike each other, with separation and desire, projection and distance as the forces that determine women’s relationships to each other. The woman drinker appears to live entirely and exclusively within the narcissistic world of her own regressive fantasies, but female figures of social marginality function, however briefly and tangentially, as marks of otherness and signs of fascination. On the other end of the social spectrum, the film is equally taken up with how Blumenschein’s woman drinker tantalizes and even challenges the less obviously narcissistic but equally self-enclosed world of the three houndstooth ladies. Lutze fascinates the woman drinker in some of the same ways that the woman drinker fascinates the three houndstooth ladies, with the significant difference that the woman drinker, located on the brink between subject and object, is much more susceptible to crossing over those boundaries than the houndstooth trio.
Yet one important example of the transgression of the boundary separating the woman drinker and the three ladies draws on the same elements as the encounter between the woman drinker and the cleaning woman. A section of Ticket of No Return is devoted to the acting out of the woman drinker’s “professional fantasies,” including acting in Hamlet and performing a daredevil car stunt. She also performs a brief stint as an office worker, during which time she drinks excessively and is berated by her boss, played by Kurt Raab. The three ladies peer through a frosted window to attempt to see what is going on, and their hands press against the window in an imitation of the woman drinker’s gestures at the beginning of the film. Their faces are somewhat distorted against the opaque glass, and while the distance marked is considerably greater than that offered by the glass streaking the window in the earlier scene, the effect is quite similar. Between the various denominations of “woman” in Ticket of No Return, then, there are a variety of screens, thresholds, and passages, and it is a major goal of this film to explore and define just how those various conduits operate.
Unlike Akerman’s Je tu il elle, Ottinger’s film does not inscribe its fantasies of the complexities of relations between women within the literal representation of lesbian lovemaking. This is not, of course, to say that lesbian representation occurs only in those films that are explicitly sexual, but rather to point out that in Ticket of No Return, lesbian representation functions somewhat differently than in Akerman’s film. A key scene in Ticket of No Return does take place in a lesbian bar, where the paths of the woman drinker, Lutze, and the three houndstooth ladies cross once again. While the woman drinker drinks and Lutze dances, the three ladies pontificate about the gay subculture, animal experiments, and varying attitudes toward homosexuals. Their pronouncements are interrupted by a woman in black leather who asks one of the ladies to dance. This lesbian flirtation—to which “Exact Statistics” responds in a delighted fashion, while her two companions look on somewhat dumbfounded—is structurally similar to the companionship between the woman drinker and Lutze that intruded on the ladies in the earlier café scene. Here, however, there is a distinct difference, in that the intrusion is welcome.
The bar scene suggests that desire between women is both complicitous with and in sharp distinction from patriarchal culture; the women’s interchanges are not unlike the rituals of heterosexual dating, but the flush of discovery that the invitation to dance inspires in the houndstooth lady is connected to a forbidden eroticism. However, the significance of lesbian representation in Ottinger’s film has less to do with the explicit frame of reference elicited by the lesbian bar, and more to do with the eroticizing of the thresholds and boundaries that exist among women, the contemplation of which is the dominant movement in the film. Like Je tu il elle, Ticket of No Return explores the relationship between female desire and the polarities of agency and objectification.
But what of lesbian authorship? I have suggested that Chantal Akerman’s display in Je tu il elle as “Julie,” as je/tu, il/elle simultaneously, inscribes female cinematic authorship as a complex writing and rewriting of cinematic narration. Ulrike Ottinger also appears in Ticket of No Return, and while her self-representation is quite different from Akerman’s—Ottinger appears only briefly in the film, for instance—the effects are similar. Ottinger makes her appearance at a crucial moment of transition, near the conclusion of the film. The woman drinker’s last appearance in a bar occurs when she and Lutze go to a bar that the woman drinker had visited alone earlier in the film. The bartender repeats his original lines practically word for word during the second visit. The next scene shows Ottinger seated on a street bench at night, drinking from a bottle and reading aloud from a book she holds. The text she reads is from a “sketchbook” by Austrian writer Peter Rosei, a fragment entitled “Drinkers,” which alludes to the pleasure and pain of drinking, and to self-destruction and self-hatred:
In as far as drinkers are known to me, they do not want to drink, but die. What a wondrous plan: To so heighten a pleasure that it leads, by way of tortures, to death. Lately I spoke with a friend about this. He believed: Our addictions are merely the Eumenides in the Theatre of Cruelty. I said: Then we hate ourselves. Yes said the friend, it is not that bad.19
Ottinger’s recitation of the text is interrupted by a car screeching to a halt, from which a male transvestite is thrown. He screams, crawls toward Ottinger, and drinks from her bottle. Ottinger gets up and walks away, leaving the book on the bench. Thus begins a chain of recitations, as the book is passed from the transvestite to the woman drinker, who passes by accompanied by Lutze, from the woman drinker to a washroom attendant, and from the woman drinker again to a passerby. The fragments of text recited aloud by these passersby all allude to the destruction and ruin of alcoholism, yet the text itself is fragmented and sometimes dreamlike. It has little in common, for example, with the self-serving, sociological discourse of the three ladies, a contrast emphasized by the alternation between the recited fragments from the book introduced by Ottinger and the departing observations of the houndstooth ladies on alcoholism and ritual in today’s society.
It is tempting to read Ottinger’s intervention as a narrative device that is neither the self-destruction of the woman drinker nor the smug detachment of the three ladies, and thus is a strategy that opens a space for seeing and telling beyond the either/or of narcissistic self-destruction (the woman drinker) or facile judgment (the houndstooth ladies). Yet Ottinger’s appearance suggests something of both extremes: Ottinger herself seems to be quite drunk, yet the text she reads assumes a vantage point on alcohol that wavers between clinical observation and passionate consumption. The authorial fiction that Ottinger writes into the film thus situates the woman filmmaker as both subject and object of her text.
What remains a matter of some curiosity, however, is that Ottinger appears in order to recite the text of another author—and a male one, at that. Even in a German context, Peter Rosei hardly has the factor of recognition that other quotations in the film possess—such as those by Gertrude Stein or Oscar Wilde. Nor is there any specific frame to even indicate that what Ottinger reads is a text authored by someone else. There is, however, a fit between Rosei’s text and the drinker’s itinerary in the film. Portions of the text recited by two passersby in the train station, for instance, are most evocative of the woman drinker’s journey:
Whosoever wakes up in the morning, of sound mind, strong, in good health and says: I am the most superfluous person in the world, is ripe for drinking. He should get dressed, board public transport, travel into town. There he should enter a wine bar, a stand-up beer kiosk or, as I saw lately in a film, beer heaven. Everything else will take care of itself.
It is above all that certain element of automation, of things-taking-care-of-themselves that is the beauty of drinking. Drinkers are travelers. They are moved without moving themselves. You lift them up, transport them Do you see the galaxy, I say.20
The familiar and somewhat fragmented quality of the text is also in keeping with the tone of the film. Yet Ottinger’s quotation of the text also exemplifies the extent to which she is a “mistress of discrepancy,” since the personal, individualistic quality of the text is situated in a public sphere where its “I” is assumed by a number of anonymous strangers, and its universe of men assumed by one populated primarily by women. The trope of the liquid-streaked glass, the primary visual means by which a relationship is established between two women in the film, occurs here as well: when the woman drinker goes into the public restroom, the attendant (also a “reader” of the Rosei text) stands behind her in front of a mirror as the woman drinker spits water onto the glass. The strategy is not just one of appropriation of “male” discourse, however, but rather the fantasy of dissolution of the boundaries of gender, if not those of sex.
Ottinger’s brief appearance in the film also foregrounds the relationship between her and Tabea Blumenschein. Once lovers, the two women have collaborated on several films, and Blumenschein herself designed the incredible costumes in this and other films directed by Ottinger. Their relationship is not staged in Ticket of No Return in quite the same foregrounded way it is in the earlier film Madame X: An Absolute Ruler (1977), where Blumenschein plays the title role of the mistress of the ship Orlando (as well as the ship’s figurehead!), and Ottinger appears in a flashback as Madame X’s lost lover, Orlando.21 If both Madame X and Ticket of No Return are “monuments” to Ottinger and Blumenschein’s relationship, as Sabine Hake suggests, the monument constructed in the later film takes the relationship between female author and female character as one of both identification and objectification.22 It is a relationship, in other words, of female subject and object in which desire is a condition of both connection and separation.
Figure 22. Tabea Blumenschein in Ticket of No Return (Museum of Modern Art)
Ottinger’s appearance in the film occurs at precisely the moment when the dissolution of boundaries, the crossing of thresholds, cease; the fiction of the film resolves into the oppositions of speaking subjects (the three ladies) and spoken objects (the drinker, Lutze) who are no more than figures in the landscape of social observation. Ottinger’s appearance thus opens up another threshold at precisely the moment that the film closes down its own process of display and fascination with otherness. That threshold is, precisely, a threshold of desire, an inscription of authorial investment that absorbs the fascination with differences among women, which defines the cinematic author as another woman drinker whose portrait the film has traced to the extent that Tabea Blumenschein’s woman drinker stands as both her mirror self and her desired object.
Ottinger’s self-presentation is ironic in that her position of creation is identified simultaneously within the conventions of traditional femininity and outside them; like the transvestite who takes the book from her, that desire is both a mockery of sexual stereotyping and an imitation of it. In dress and appearance, Ottinger is neither the woman drinker nor Lutze nor the houndstooth ladies, yet a connection persists between her and them. Ottinger’s appearance in Ticket of No Return resembles a “cameo,” just long enough to allow her to be recognized as the film director for those familiar with her looks (for those not so familiar, but attentive, Ottinger’s appearance matches the Polaroid snapshot of her that appears during the opening credits of the film). While one could cite a venerable history of such cameos, Ottinger’s appearance in Ticket of No Return is best assessed, I think, in relationship to the fascination with “the other woman” that runs throughout the film.
Ticket of No Return contains a wealth of quotations.23 There are many quotations of literary sources—Oscar Wilde’s influence is particularly strong, given the very title of the film (in German, Bildnis einer Trinkerin, Portrait of a Woman Drinker, suggesting The Picture of Dorian Gray), the themes of narcissism and social meandering, and most obvious of all, the gay connection. Ottinger also shares with Wilde a fascination with excess and decadence. There are many cinematic quotations as well; a circus scene evokes Fellini, for instance.
Of particular importance is the influence of several films directed by Josef Von Sternberg featuring Marlene Dietrich. The most obvious quotation is of Von Sternberg’s 1930 film Morocco. The “aller jamais retour” line uttered early in the film, and used as its English title, is drawn from Morocco, in which Dietrich plays Amy Jolly, a woman who is described at the beginning of the film, as she makes the ship voyage to Morocco, as a “one way ticket.” Morocco traces the development of a passionate attachment between Jolly, a club performer, and a soldier played by Gary Cooper. At the conclusion of Morocco, Amy Jolly joins the group of women, most of them Moroccan, who follow their men in the French foreign legion from outpost to outpost. Dietrich removes her high-heeled shoes as she walks off into the desert. The concluding scenes of Ticket of No Return show somewhat different effects of passion, for Blumenschein’s woman drinker stumbles on the stairway of a station and dies. The last image of the film cites Morocco once again, and shows Blumenschein’s legs as she walks away from the camera in a passageway lined with mirrors. As she walks, her high heels break the mirrors. The final image of the film is detached from the narrative conclusion that occurs with the woman drinker’s final demise.24
Ticket of No Return explores both women’s investment in the pleasures of voyeurism and fetishism and the possibilities of new forms of visual pleasure that take as their point of departure the erotic connections between women. This desire for the reinvention of voyeurism and fetishism inspires a particularly interesting writing of yet another Von Sternberg/Dietrich collaboration into Ticket of No Return. I am referring here to The Blue Angel, the 1930 film which initiated Dietrich and Von Sternberg’s collaboration, and which is the founding myth of Dietrich’s persona. The Blue Angel is usually read as a film about Dietrich as a femme fatale in her incarnation as Lola Lola, the cabaret performer who inspires fatal passion in the schoolmaster, Herr Rath, who is mesmerized by Lola, and who eventually marries her and is destroyed and humiliated by his love for her. The Blue Angel offers a fairly obvious example of the woman who is—according to many feminist film theorists—fetishized so as to assuage the threat that she represents to the male protagonist and, by extension, the male spectator.25 However, there is another dimension to The Blue Angel that has less to do with the relationship between Lola and Herr Rath, and more to do with relations between and among women, particularly as they are dramatized in the different modes of performance that are presented in the film.26
When Herr Rath first visits the club, performance is represented as a carnivalesque mode of reversal. A group of women performers sit together on stage, and there is little to set the stage off clearly from the spectators in the nightclub. While Lola is the featured performer, she is not isolated from the other women but rather is a part of a group. Only as the film progresses does Lola become an object of the gaze, and of the male gaze in particular, as the mode of performance associated with her begins to focus on her exclusively, to separate quite clearly the stage from the spectators, and the central object of performance from the background. One of the decisive turning points in this production of spectacle within the film occurs when Lola performs what is undoubtedly the most famous scene in The Blue Angel. After Rath has returned to the club, and is seated in a loge as a guest of honor, Lola sings “Falling in Love Again,” and the shot-reverse shot alternations between performer and onlooker isolate the man who is falling in love and the woman who is the object of his attraction.
There are some traces of the mode of performance presented earlier in the film—other women are seen on stage with Lola, for instance, and a female statue in the same frame as Herr Rath occasionally draws attention away from his adoring gaze. But for the most part, this scene, as well as the remainder of the film, is marked by the repression and displacement of those carnivalesque elements of performance introduced earlier. In the universe created in Von Sternberg’s film, these two distinct modes of performance are opposed in sexual terms—the one, defined by a breaking down of boundaries, is associated with a world of women; the other, defined by a demarcation of a distinct space separating performer and onlooker, is associated with the division of male spectator and female object.
In Ticket of No Return, Ottinger rereads these conflicting modes of performance, and reverses the process that occurs in The Blue Angel. For in Ottinger’s film, the mode of performance—and, by implication, of identification—associated with the budding relationship between Rath and Lola is bracketed and parodied from the outset. Instead of Rath, we have a midget, who is a projection of the woman drinker, or a group of anonymous male spectators witnessing the mockery of seductive performance in Nina Hagen’s act, or yet other anonymous men who fall over themselves at the sight of the woman drinker. Ticket of No Return extends the world of performance inhabited by the women at the beginning of The Blue Angel. The way in which the female body is first represented on stage in The Blue Angel suggests a fascination with the differences between women—differences in size (virtually all of the women, aside from Dietrich, are quite large), differences in age, and by extension differences in social class. One of the most interesting aspects of the Marlene Dietrich persona, as it is developed both in The Blue Angel and in later films, is its flirtation with differences between women, from the well-dressed and presumably upper-class woman kissed by her in Morocco to the grotesque disguise adopted in Witness for the Prosecution. In these films, the flirtation is eventually channeled to serve the aims of the heterosexual love story. In Ticket of No Return, however, a reversal is affected, so that what is by and large repressed in the Dietrich persona here becomes the very substance of the film.
My case for the importance of The Blue Angel as an intertext for Ticket of No Return seems thus far to be based on somewhat general thematic evidence. One might argue that the development of a mode of performance in Ticket of No Return has only as much relevance to The Blue Angel as to several hundred other films in which one finds similar evidence of a repression of female performance. However, what I have identified as a dominant trope in Ticket of No Return—the liquid-streaked glass—is drawn precisely from The Blue Angel. The woman drinker’s encounter with the cleaning woman at the airport, during which the motif of the liquid-streaked window is introduced, cites the first scene in The Blue Angel. After the introduction of the small town in which the film begins, we see a cleaning woman throw a bucket of water on a glass window, behind which there is a poster of Lola Lola, her hips thrust forward in the provocative pose for which Dietrich is famous. The woman pauses to briefly imitate the pose, and the film quickly moves on to Herr Rath’s apartment and the schoolroom, where photographs of Lola cause a commotion.
From the outset of The Blue Angel, a sharp distinction is drawn between the female and the male spectator in relationship to the image of Lola, for the woman spectator imitates Lola’s pose, while the male spectator desires Lola. In The Blue Angel, there is no question that the male spectator provides the necessary catalyst to tell a story. In comparison to the image of the cleaning woman, which is flat and fairly transparent, the images of the schoolboys admiring Lola’s photograph are defined by secrecy and delayed gratification. Ticket of No Return suggests, however, that The Blue Angel has not had the final word on the significance of the washerwoman and the image, and that there is plenty more to be said not only about female mimicry of the image, but also about the narrative and visual desires that the female look, through a glass streaked with liquid, inspires.
In both Je tu il elle and Ticket of No Return, the inscription of female authorship is identified within the context of lesbian desire and its relationship to the cinema. As I have suggested, this does not mean that either Akerman’s or Ottinger’s film is a “lesbian text” in any simple or straightforward sense of the word. Both films demonstrate, rather, the extent to which the pleasures of the cinema draw upon lesbian eroticism.27 At the same time the films demonstrate a strategy of female authorship in which lesbian desire is foregrounded, and not simply demonstrated as the return of the repressed of the heterosexual codes of dominant cinema. While Je tu il elle and Ticket of No Return are far removed from Arzner’s work, there is a shared preoccupation with disrupting the easy fit in classical cinema between activity and masculinity, passivity and femininity, and with an irony that juxtaposes two different readings of lesbianism—the one foregrounding female friendships and communities of women as connected to yet distant from the institutions of the family and the male-female couple, the other emphasizing, rather, lesbianism as marginal to those institutions, and therefore incompatible with them.
If, however, the evocation of lesbian marginality acquires only the shape of an inflection in Arzner’s work, Akerman’s and Ottinger’s films are concerned precisely to elaborate that marginality into a visual and narrative momentum of its own. In so doing, the films engage with what has been one of the most controversial and confusing arenas in contemporary feminist inquiry. The realm of female activity and desire in both films is that of bodily gesture and orality, and the access to speech and social communication occurs either with great difficulty (in Je tu il elle) or virtually not at all (in Ticket of No Return). Both films evoke, then, a female world that exists prior to or outside the realm of the symbolic order, an order determined by the regulation of the body and the simultaneous economy of the family and the word. In contemporary feminist theory, particularly psychoanalytic theory and its attendant appropriation by literary critics, this presymbolic realm has been read as a privileged site for the understanding of the specificities of female development in patriarchal culture. For this presymbolic is the pre-oedipal realm to which Freud entertained a most ambiguous relationship, both acknowledging and retreating from the difference that the mother-child (and especially mother-daughter) bond might accentuate, thus threatening the equation of the oedipal scenario (and its subsequent lining up of identifications along the lines of active-male, passive-female) with cultural coherence and significance.
Crucial to both Je tu il elle and Ticket of No Return is the connection between that so-called pre-oedipal realm and lesbian desire. While both films could be read as evoking some standard homophobic definitions of lesbianism—“arrested development,” oral rage, maternal identification, for instance—there is no position of patriarchal or heterosexual authority in the films to ground such definitions. Far more important in this respect is the way both films respond to a common repression of lesbianism in feminist discussions of the pre-oedipal, presymbolic realm. In the American context, Nancy Chodorow, in The Reproduction of Mothering, analyzes how female development is more influenced by the pre-oedipal phase than male development, and how that influence accounts to a large extent for the increased relational capacity of women as they are socialized in our culture. Yet there are some disturbing implications in Chodorow’s account, for throughout her book one senses that however much the rigid dualities of pre-oedipal, relational, female values versus oedipal, individuational, male values are challenged, there remains a desire to rescue heterosexual symmetry and family life.
Jacqueline Rose has commented of Chodorow’s work that the unconsicous is lost amidst assumptions that models of how men and women are “supposed” to act work with great efficiency.28 Yet as Adrienne Rich has suggested, there is a curious contradictory quality to Chodorow’s work, the sense that however great the desire to maintain what Rich calls “heterocentrism,” the possibility of strong erotic bonds between women is posed constantly at the edge of the text. In an oft-quoted passage from The Reproduction of Mothering, the appeal to majority rule seems weak indeed: “However, deep affective relationships to women are hard to come by on a routine, daily, ongoing basis for many women. Lesbian relationships do tend to recreate mother daughter emotions and connections, but most women are heterosexual.”29 The affirmation of heterosexuality rejoins Rose’s point, for in no way is it defined as permeable or contradictory. However, as Rich points out, “on the basis of her own findings, Chodorow leads us implicitly to conclude that heterosexuality is not a ‘preference’ for women, that, for one thing, it fragments the erotic from the emotional in a way that women find impoverishing and painful.”30
Chodorow’s exploration of relational patterns and the pre-oedipal in women simultaneously evokes and dismisses the specter of lesbianism. It is just that specter which informs insistently the representation of the female body and desire in Je tu il elle and Ticket of No Return. However, the specter thus evoked is a far cry from the idealized view of lesbianism described by Rich, which promises a release and refuge from fragmentation, separation, or pain. If these films tap the realm of the pre-oedipal, it is not in order to confront the institutions of heterosexuality with a utopian and coherent other scene. To the contrary, the narration of “Julie” and the itinerary of the woman drinker insist upon lesbian desire as shaped by the pre-oedipal, certainly, but the pre-oedipal realm thus evoked offers neither the comforting blanket of a realm beyond patriarchy, nor the supposed immature and undifferentiated need of infantile desire.
Chodorow’s theory of female development is defined within a sociological framework that has little room for categories of deviance or rupture. Given how extensively Akerman’s and Ottinger’s films are preoccupied with the complex effects provoked by such deviance or rupture, French theories of representation that engage with a presymbolic realm, particularly those that take their inspiration from Lacan’s reading of the imaginary, might offer more useful comparisons. Julia Kristeva’s readings of the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic registers, and of how the semiotic—the realm of the body, of gesture, of rhythm, of sensual experience—exerts a pressure against the symbolic realm, would appear to be particularly relevant. It has been noted many times that Kristeva’s work is informed by a rigid sexual duality, whereby male poets have access to the semiotic through their writing, and women through pregnancy. The semiotic is defined simultaneously as the realm of the feminine and the realm of the disruptive. However unalike they may be in almost every other way, Kristeva’s semiotic and Chodorow’s pre-oedipal share a peculiarly similar preoccupation with an invisible yet implicit lesbianism. In Kristeva’s case, the preoccupation with mothering as the privileged realm of female productivity becomes unabashedly literal and essentialist, and the possibility that the preoedipal realm might be read, in relation to women’s desires, in terms other than maternity hovers constantly at the edges of Kristeva’s writing.
Particularly revealing in this context is “Stabat Mater,” in which a supposedly “new” relationship of women to the maternal is posed as the solution to the problem “posed massively to our culture for over a century,” the problem, that is, of “the relationship to the other woman,” and of the attendant “necessity to reformulate its [culture’s] representations of love and hate. . . .”31 The relationship “to the other woman” is identified by Kristéva as the mother-daughter bond. But one senses on more than one occasion in Kristéva’s writing that this relationship to the “other woman” poses a threat; that some relations to the “other woman” (like lesbianism) might threaten the symmetries of the semiotic and the symbolic, the maternal and the paternal, the feminine and the masculine.32
As Judith Butler has argued in an extremely lucid critique of Kristéva’s work, the “presumption . . . that, for women, heterosexuality and coherent selfhood are indissolubly linked” leads to the relegation of lesbianism to the realms of unintelligibility and psychosis.
The paternal law which protects [Kristéva] from this radical incoherence is precisely the mechanism that produces the construct of lesbianism as a site of irrationality. Significantly, this description of lesbian experience is effected from the outside, and tells us more about the fantasies that a fearful heteroseuxal culture produces to defend against its own homosexual possibilities than about lesbian experience itself.33
It comes as no surprise that Kristéva’s occasional forays into the realm of all-female communities pose an undifferentiated mass that can only be a function of psychosis and death:
Women no doubt reproduce between them the peculiar, forgotten forms of close combat in which they engaged with their mothers. Complicity in the non-said, connivance in the unsayable, the wink of an eye, the tone of voice, the gesture, the color, the smell: we live in such things, escapees from our identity cards and our names, loose in an ocean of detail, a data-bank of the unnameable.34
As Teresa de Lauretis has suggested, “The suggestion creeping about discreetly . . . that lesbianism may be the contemporary (postmodern and postfeminist) female disease, is raised by Kristéva to the status of a theoretical death sentence.”35
In most notions of the feminine as “pre-oedipal” or “presymbolic,” the desire to maintain the linearity and symmetry of cultural arrangements conflicts with the desire to put such arrangements into question. In both Chodorow’s and Kristéva’s work, the pre-oedipal and the semiotic are excavated as moments prior to the oedipal symbolic. Regardless of the attempts by both authors to challenge the monolithic quality of the symbolic order, there remains an unquestioned notion of heterosexual norm. The difficulty of any such neat positioning of the realm of “peculiar, forgotten forms of close combat in which they engaged with their mothers” informs the very structures of Je tu il elle and Ticket of No Return. The three-part structure of Akerman’s film shakes loose any conventional notion of development, for the encounter with the truck driver, more shaped by the codes of the cinematic symbolic than the other sections of the film, and clearly more evocative of heterosexual norms, dangles in the middle of the film, neither the simple other to be rejected in the name of a utopian lesbianism, nor the ostensibly mature symbolic realm to which the woman ascends. In Ticket of No Return, the sightseer’s itinerary has a built-in refusal of linearity, and even its classic conclusion in death confounds rather than confirms the narrative of passage or initiation.
Any definition of a pre-oedipal “stage” is immediately caught up in the implication that the stage needs to be surpassed. Kaja Silverman has addressed this problem by recasting the question of women’s relationship to the pre-oedipal into the terms of the negative Oedipus complex. Silverman notes that Freud conceptualized two versions of the Oedipus complex within which the subject is defined, “one of which is culturally promoted and works to align the subject smoothly with heterosexuality and the dominant values of the symbolic order, and the other of which is culturally disavowed and organizes subjectivity in fundamentally ‘perverse’ and homosexual ways. . . .”36 In Freud’s writing, this negotiation of two oedipal formulations—the one connecting to identification with the father, the other to identification with mother—would eventually be replaced by the formulation better known today.
In the case of female subjects, the “pre-oedipal” stage of maternal identification relegates to the developmental backwater the possibility of compromising or otherwise problematizing in any active way the woman’s paternal identification and the attendant acquisition of heterosexuality. Silverman’s insistence, in her rereading of Freud, that maternal identification remain within the realm of the oedipal—that is, within the realm of loss and absence—closes off, as she acknowledges, any simple definition of the pre-oedipal both as “an arena for resistance to the symbolic and as an erotic refuge.”37 However, such an inscription of the maternal within the oedipal, rather than prior to it, makes it possible, in Silverman’s words, “to speak for the first time about a genuinely oppositional desire—to speak about a desire which challenges dominance from within representation and meaning, rather than from the place of a mutely resistant biology or sexual ‘essence.’ ”38
The negative Oedipus complex in Silverman’s analysis casts a wide net, ranging from the explicit choice of a maternal love object in lesbian sexuality to the more diffuse mechanism whereby women take as a primary source of psychic energy their bonds with other women. Put another way, Silverman’s reading of the negative Oedipus complex brings to the realm of high theory the feminist notion of “women-identified women” popular in the 1970s. While they could not be more unalike in other ways, Silverman’s analysis of the negative Oedipus complex acquires some of the contours of the “lesbian continuum” proposed by Adrienne Rich as informing a wide spectrum of female relationships, from the lesbian who functions primarily within a separate women’s sphere at one end, to the heterosexual woman who forms strong friendships with women at the other.39 Silverman’s analysis represents a major contribution to feminist-psychoanalytic thought, since it offers the possibility of challenging and breaking down the rigid and often false barriers that separate lesbian and heterosexual women in many contexts. Yet I fear that such a framework can engender the opposite problem—a lack of attention to the specificity of differing modes on the continuum, to different formulations of the negative Oedipus complex.
The risk of the reconceptualization that Silverman offers of the relationship between women, the maternal body, and oedipal scenarios, is that the lesbian desire so central to the films under discussion in this chapter becomes unraveled in a continuum of desires, so that the challenge of lesbian representation to the institutionalization of heterosexual desire is potentially lost. In a spirit not unlike that which informs Silverman’s analysis, Akerman and Ottinger insist upon the lesbian body as it exists within scenarios of desire, within representation, within the cinematic apparatus. However, the lesbian signatures in their films also speak—and write—the marginality of lesbianism. For lesbian desire in these films insists simultaneously on the female body that wallows in inarticulate oral rage and is outside symbolic representation as it is conventionally understood, and the female body that informs the difficult connection between the body and language.
Silverman’s suspicions about any radical potential of a female body that is relegated to a prelinguistic state are well taken. But the very possibility of narration in Akerman’s and Ottinger’s films is predicated on the representation of such a female body, not in order to suggest some archaic female mode beyond patriarchy, but to pose lesbianism both as the projection of patriarchal—and feminist—fantasies, and as another register of desire altogether. The lesbian subjects in these films both assume the status of lesbianism as cultural “other” to phallocentric and heterosexist norms, and refuse it; indeed, the very possibility of the films is built on that simultaneous acknowledgment and refusal. Akerman’s and Ottinger’s signatures—the one, a body that is virtually constantly on display, the other, a “cameo” that reiterates the chain of female-to-female desire—embody the ironic juxtaposition of the relationship between lesbian desire and the cinema as both complicit with and radically other than the laws of narrative and visual pleasure.
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