“The Women At The Keyhole”
Black Widow demonstrates the difficulty of reconciling the demands of resolution in the classical Hollywood cinema with figures of ambivalence. Most significantly, Black Widow demonstrates the radically different stakes of ambivalence when the subject is a woman. In this chapter, I will examine four contemporary films by women directors which might seem, initially to have little in common—Helke Sander’s The All-Round Reduced Personality (Redupers) (West Germany, 1977), Julie Dash’s Illusions (U.S., 1982), Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (Canada, 1987), and Yvonne Rainer’s The Man Who Envied Women (U.S., 1986). As the different sites of geographical origin suggest, these films respond to quite different cultural contexts, and even the two films from the U.S. are radically different in this sense. There is, however, a thematic relationship between the four films, in that they take as their central premise the relationship between women and image-making: the female protagonists of Redupers and I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing are still photographers; Illusions is about two women who work in the film industry, one as an executive and the other as a “dub” singer; and The Man Who Envied Women, while less invested than the other films in the conventions of plot and protagonists, focuses as well on the relationship between women and image-making. In other words, these films share a preoccupation with the difficulty and complexity of the relationship between women and cinematic representation.
These four films explore the particular instances of that relationship, through women’s “alternatives” to the bureacracy of both the state and the art world (Redupers), race and racism in relation to the commercial cinema (Illusions), sexual identity and the commercialization of art (I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing), and intellectual discourse and gentrification (The Man Who Envied Women). All of the films discussed in this book are preoccupied with the relationship between female subjectivity and the cinema; what makes this group of films distinct is, first, their attention to the institutionalized forces that shape any attempts to create female alternatives to patriarchal cinema. This is not to say that this group of films is more “political” than others to be discussed in subsequent chapters; rather, these four films are particularly attentive to the pressures of institutions insofar as they regulate the very possibility of alternative networks and representations.
These films negotiate the tensions between ambivalence and contradiction, on the one hand, and the political institutions which tend to render ambivalence moot, on the other. They articulate a pointed ambiguity about the relationship between the mainstream and the margins, an ambivalence which takes the form of a narrative structure that simultaneously acknowledges and critiques the conventions of the classical cinema. Such an impressive body of feminist literature has been devoted to the exploration of how women filmmakers have reread, deconstructed, or otherwise put into question the codes and conventions of the classical Hollywood cinema, that it might seem a bit disingenuous to isolate these particular films as doing something which, as some feminist critics might put it, is the most basic definition of any alternative women’s cinema.
The most dominant critical assumption operative in feminist readings of the classical cinema has been that if the Hollywood cinema is structured upon the hierarchy of the gaze, then women filmmakers will “return” the gaze. But feminist criticism that focuses primarily on the “return of the gaze” runs directly into the limitations of the assumption that the classical cinema is governed exclusively by the sexual hierarchy of the look. As I have suggested in the previous chapter, the lure of film spectacle is not simply the possession of the image, but rather the simultaneity of mastery and the breakdown of the oppositions upon which mastery is based, of merging and disavowal, of passage and obstruction. Figures of the screen in Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show, The Cheat, and The Big Sleep portray this tension, the contradictory ways in which film spectacle operates. Finally, then, what connects the four films I will discuss in this chapter is the trope of the ambivalent screen surface. Redupers, Illusions, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, and The Man Who Envied Women differ in their inquiries into the convergence and nonconvergence of women and the classical cinema, but in each of these films, the figure of the screen emerges as the embodiment of ambivalence, as the site at which cinema both resists and gives support to the representation of female agency and female desire.
There is another common structure in each of these films, and that is the foregrounding of the female voice as it embodies the complexities of female narration. In Illusions and I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, the voice is identified with the female protagonist, whereas in Redupers the female voice-over is anonymous, thus implicitly affiliated not only with the heroine of the film but with a variety of other sources as well. The Man Who Envied Women is undoubtedly the most radical experimentation to date of the female voice in relation to female narration, since the voice is quite literally disembodied. Recently, long-overdue critical attention has been paid to the function of the voice in film, and in women’s cinema in particular.1 In this group of films, the female voice does destabilize the conventional symmetry whereby the register of vocal authority is presumed to be male, the realm of the visible, female; but more significant are the narrative strategies created in these films in which the female voice functions in relationship to the figure of the screen.
Redupers tells the story of Edda Chiemnijewski (portrayed by Helke Sander herself), a resident of West Berlin, the mother of a young daughter, a free-lance photographer, and a member of a women’s photography group. As a free-lance photographer, Edda is expected to produce photojournalism. Early in the film we see her as she photographs a state-sponsored party for elderly citizens. She stands on a stage, and in her “official” capacity photographs a speaker who mouths platitudes about “one big, happy family,” while spectators look on. So much for the kind of photographs Edda is paid to produce. Within her professional work, Edda looks for other possibilities that depart from the official, professional routes. And so, in the next shot, we see her talking to the elderly women, conversing with them about the social rituals of parties. In her official capacity, Edda conveys official trivia, performing a rote gesture that is of a piece with the passive audience response. But in the space which she manages to open up a bit, Edda comes down off the stage to have a chat with the women. This juxtaposition of images suggests the possibility of the everyday mode of narration embodied in chitchat to ironize the official spectacle of taking care of the elderly—in other words, narrative problematizes spectacle.
Redupers opens with a lengthy tracking shot of the city of Berlin, showing us the wall, buildings, and passersby. The movement slows down at some points, and rounds a corner, making clear that we are observing the city as if from the vantage point of a car in motion. We hear a variety of urban noises, including airplanes and automobiles, and we hear bits and pieces of radio programs in a variety of languages. The beginning of the film introduces us, then, to the public sphere of Berlin, a public sphere made up of detached voices speaking in different tongues, a wall that was (at the time the film was made) as naturalized a part of the urban environment as office buildings and graffiti, and the constantly moving perspective of a car in motion. For the moment, the spectator is transported by the camera, afforded no depth but only lateral and continuous movement. Similar tracking shots of the city reappear throughout the film, and the public sphere of the city is evoked throughout as well by the radios which are a continuous element of the sound track. Of particular importance to Redupers is the continuous return to the space of the city, and the attendant desire to read that urban public sphere in a critical way.
When the tracking shots are repeated in the course of the film, they are most frequently accompanied by the voice of a female narrator. This narrator’s voice is as unanchored in time and space as the numerous radio voices heard throughout the film. Radio voices insinuate themselves into the spaces and cracks between everyday activities; the radio allows you to go about your business and still listen to the news. The voice of the female narrator also insinuates itself into the cracks of everyday life. But the narrator differs from the radio voices in that she functions to articulate both private and public voices. The female voice-over personalizes the tracking shots of the city, describing the history of the women’s group and the strategies the women have to use to get their project funded. The voice also functions as a narrator in the strictest sense of the term when it introduces and summarizes scenes. At an antirape demonstration, for example, the voice explains that Edda does not think that enough of her socially conscious photographs are purchased, and thus in this context the voice functions as a third-person narrator, perceiving events from an unspecified, external vantage point.
Yet at the same time, the female voice seems to narrate from “inside,” and frequently the female voice slides between the registers of objectivity and subjectivity. Over a series of still photographs of a conference that Edda is photographing, for instance, the voice says: “For years Edda had been struck by the following: that the aesthetic imagination was the passion for things alien. The sorrows and fortunes of others, the fate of a leather ball. Passion for that without meaning. One should at least be able to choose freely those things alien.” Here the voice articulates fantasies and desires that are repressed within the single image. And the voice also articulates the kind of facts that are repressed within the image as well, for in the same sequence, it describes in detail Edda’s monthly income and expenses. The female voice in Redupers does not provide authoritative commentary, however; rather, the voice emphasizes shifting perspective and a plurality of vantage points.
While the female voice-over is one of the most important elements in Redupers, its function is better assessed in relationship to the larger preoccupation in the film with permeability and connection. Redupers is concerned primarily, not with the female voice as the most appropriate metaphor for a feminist definition of image-making and representation, but rather with the metaphor of the screen, both in the sense of a frame of vision and as the common denominator of the various barriers—sonoric, visual, ideological—that determine patterns of meaning and opposition. In this sense, of course, the encounter between a group of women artists and the city of Berlin becomes quite emblematic. Edda’s group got money for a photographic project, the female narrator’s voice explains, because there was pressure on the government to prove its interest in women’s issues, but also—and primarily—because this group applied for less money than any other.
At a meeting of the women’s group, Edda shows a series of photographs that illustrate the similarities between East and West Berlin: an owner’s pride in his car, a subway, graffiti. In each pairing of images, there is in fact little to distinguish the capitalist from the socialist public sphere. Although the question is asked in the film (somewhat ironically) whether the worker’s state changes much in the status of women, it would be mistaken to see Redupers as a film that seeks to underscore hopeless similarities between capitalism and socialism. The point, rather, is that the Berlin Wall creates a false dichotomy between two entities united by their urban common denominator. For Edda, the wall is ideological to the extent that it is symptomatic of a mode of consciousness in which slashes and divisions mark absolute and hierarchical differences. “Where does the wall have openings?” Edda asks, and she holds up a photograph of two apartment buildings on either side of the wall between which “full eye-contact is still possible.”
The two major projects which Edda’s group executes in the course of the film are, precisely, attempts to “screen” the Berlin Wall, to shake it free of its obstinate permanence, to transform a rigidified “image” into a surface which functions in complex and contradictory ways, rather than as a purely referential structure of one-dimensional meaning. Their projects evolve from their perception of “chinks” in the Berlin Wall. They take a huge mounted photograph of the wall, with a single car parked next to it, to a variety of places in the city, and finally to the site photographed, creating a peculiar mise-en-abyme effect (see Figure 7). The women also set up a curtain on one of the platforms from which West Berliners can gaze onto the East. The opening of the curtain enhances the act of seeing, as if the sight of East Berlin were indeed a spectacle to be eagerly consumed by the West.
Figure 7. Helke Sander’s Redupers (Museum of Modern Art)
On one level, these projects correspond to a kind of feminist aesthetics of everyday life. Thus the city of Berlin becomes a huge apartment in need of tasteful decoration, and billboards become picture frames containing the city’s equivalent of family photographs. Curtains transform the gaping space of a platform into a window, so that looking from West to East imitates the conditions of looking from inside to outside. There is a moment in the film when Edda is seen in her apartment pulling back large curtains to look outside; the match between this “domestic” image and the mise-en-scene on the Berlin Wall is unmistakable.
The risk of a feminist aesthetics of the everyday is in romanticizing, rather than contesting, the conditions of female servitude and the attendant split between the private and the public; it is the risk, in other words, of failing to address the problem of recuperation. But in Redupers, there is no sense in which the women triumph in a radical new vision of the wall or the city; theirs is no “alternative” vision in any simple sense. Rather, the risk of co-optation is ominously present. The women move the billboard from one site to another out of frustration, not out of commitment to a shifting signifier, and while the women want to execute the billboard project on a much larger scale, they worry at the same time that their images will be dwarfed and contained by the proliferation of billboard advertising. Similarly, there is something about the curtained platform that reiterates, rather than challenges, the division between West and East Berlin, with the attendant implication alluded to above—the East as a spectacle to be consumed by the West.
Despite all of the evidence that the film offers of the ways in which the wall is less absolute a dividing line than it might appear, Redupers does not suggest that the desired chinks, eye contact, or analogies are in any way easy or simplistic alternatives. Far from compromising the feminist visions offered by the film, this is, it seems to me, one of its most compelling features. For Redupers is informed by the recognition that fantasies of interconnectedness and permeability exist within a context where such fantasies can easily have unintended results, where they can backfire. I have suggested that in the group of films discussed in the previous chapter, the screen emerges as a figure that embodies simultaneously the possibility of separation and connection, of obstacle and threshold. The Berlin Wall functions in these terms in Redupers, but as a critical figure of ambivalence. The film itself articulates that ambivalence in one of its preferred techniques, the tracking shot of the city and in particular of the wall, a tracking shot that embodies both distance and contemplation.
The preoccupation with the Berlin Wall in Redupers suggests a feminist desire for a representation of the contradictory movements embodied in the screen. In one of the most unusual scenes in the film, this desire extends beyond the specific social and cultural connotations of the Berlin Wall. Throughout Redupers, there are citations from a variety of sources, and the writings of Christa Wolf are particularly significant and privileged texts. However, the most unusual quotation in the film occurs when three small screens appear, one after the other, over the image of a newspaper. In each screen we see a segment from a contemporary woman’s film: a close-up of a woman from Ursula Reuter-Christiansen’s The Executioner (Denmark, 1972); the beach scene from Yvonne Rainer’s Film about a Woman Who . . . (U.S., 1974), in which a man, a woman, and a child rearrange themselves as if for a series of snapshots; and a kitchen scene from Valie Export’s Invisible Adversaries (West Germany, 1976), in which a woman cuts up a fish and insects and opens a refrigerator to reveal a baby inside.
These films are concerned not only with the juncture between the rituals of everyday life and female subjectivity, but also with an examination of the cinematic and cultural codes through which such a juncture can be examined. The only sound heard during the segment is the female voice-over which announces: “Obsessed by daily life as other women see it.” The voice continues, quoting a letter from “Aunt Kate Chiemnijewski.” The letter contains the kind of fragmented logic sometimes typical of letters, suggesting quite strongly a foregrounded link between this particular narration of everyday life and the language of dreams. Like the previous sequence, in which Edda works on photographs while she listens to the radio, this scene juxtaposes the “news” (though the newspaper here is distanced, “cited,” far more than the radio is) with women’s images (similarly, they are much more cited in a very literal sense, as they are drawn from outside the immediate context of the film). The newspaper becomes an object quite literally read between the lines, but more important, it is transformed into a surface, a screen, while the miniature movie screens recall the billboards which the women want to cover with their photographs of the city.
It does not require too much imagination to see photography and the cinema as interchangeable insofar as the film’s interrogation of women and image-making is concerned, particularly since Redupers features Helke Sander herself in the role of Edda. Yet while the image track, in this particular scene of quotation, draws attention to a contemporary context for women’s filmmaking, the sound track emphasizes further the “fiction” of the film, but in a letter that “could be” the filmmaker’s own. On one level, the film draws connections between the sophisticated, experimental film practice of the three directors who are cited, and the everyday narration of the fictional aunt. But on another level, the film steps out of its fictional context in this scene more obviously than at any other point.
This may seem a peculiar assertion about a film that is so caught up in the interchange between the fictive and the real, particularly insofar as Sander’s own identity as a feminist filmmaker and critic is concerned; but it is in this scene that the sharpest break, the most abrupt shift, in the film occurs. True, Redupers is characterized overall by a sense of fragmentation, but its various pieces and fragments cohere around the cityscape of Berlin and the women’s desire to speculate on the connections between East and West. The films cited here have no visible or apparent connection with either the cityscape or the women’s activities—except in the larger sense that all are concerned with the artifice of cinematic conventions (particularly marked in the segment from Yvonne Rainer’s film) and their relationship to female activities. This scene is, as well, the portion of the film that stands apart for its visual experimentation; that is, the citation of women’s cinema inspires another mise-en-scène, another scene, another representation of image and text.
Visually, the quotations are most striking in terms of the aesthetics of the screen surface: the newspaper itself becomes a screen (emphasized in particular by the disappearance of the three miniature screens at the scene’s close, leaving the newspaper as the surface of the image, with a subsequent fade to a dark, blank screen), and the appearance of the three screens dramatizes the definition of the cinema as the illusion of depth and pure surface simultaneously. That three screens appear makes for a somewhat asymmetrical structure. It is tempting to assume that the blank space which one expects to be occupied by a fourth screen functions as a space of projection for the viewer. Yet it is a space which, by virtue of its blankness, emphasizes all the more that contradictory nature of the cinema.2
This citation of three women’s films implies a feminist desire for affiliation. Yet the nature of the citation suggests simultaneously that this desire can never be a one-dimensional connectedness, an affirmation of a sororal model of cinematic cross-referencing to substitute as a simple alternative for the presumably patriarchal model of oedipal rivalry and claims for originality.3 For the citation is as difficult to “read” as the newsprint that forms the background for the individual screens, so that the fact of allusion becomes more significant than the specific genealogy drawn. Put another way, the style of the citation is most significant, for it is “thick” in several senses of the term—in the obvious sense that there are several levels to the citation, but also in the sense that the very tissue of the citation is the screen surface that both reflects and obscures. This scene condenses the preoccupation with the difficulty of threshold space evidenced throughout Redupers.
Particularly significant in this respect are the quotations of the writings of Christa Wolf, not only because Wolf herself is so preoccupied with the difficulty and the necessity of connection, but also because the cinema has functioned, in Wolf’s writing, as an emblematic form of a reified consciousness. In “The Reader and the Writer,” Wolf says: “We seem to need the help and approval of the imagination in our lives; it means playing with the possibilities open to us. But something else goes on inside us at the same time, daily, hourly, a furtive process hard to avoid, a hardening, petrifying, habituation, that attacks the memory in particular.” Wolf speaks of “miniatures,” the easily summoned bits and pieces of past experience which we have arranged in our minds as if on shelves, and film belongs to the realm of miniatures. Writing, however, is a “strenuous movement” requiring an active engagement with the past rather than the observation of miniatures. Wolf writes: “Prose should try to be unfilmable. It should give up the dangerous work of circulating miniatures and putting finished pieces together. It should be incorruptible in its insistence on the one and only experience and not violate the experiences of others; but it should give them the courage of their own experiences.”4
It is tempting to see Wolf’s “miniatures” as corresponding to the classical, dominant cinema, but in Sander’s appropriation of Wolf’s writing, the tendency toward “miniatures” seems to be constantly negotiated, and this is a part of alternative cinema as well. The women in the photography group are wary of co-optation; they are concerned that their photographs will also become yet another means of “circulating miniatures.” Even the citation of other women filmmakers resists ironically the miniaturization of film, by a proliferation of miniatures. The dialogue with Christa Wolf that is entertained in Redupers is a crucial component of the film’s screen metaphor. At the film’s conclusion, we see an image of Edda walking into the distance. The female voice-over reads from an essay by Christa Wolf on diaries:
I don’t want to go any further. Anyone who asks about a person’s diary must accept the fact more is concealed than said. It was not possible to speak about plans, clearly set forth in the diary, that have arisen, been changed, dropped again, come to nothing, or were carried out, unexpectedly suddenly there, complete. And it wasn’t possible to bring into focus through strenuous thought the stuff of life that was very near in time. Or the mistakes made in trying to do this. And, of course, no mention of the names that appear once or more often in the diary.5
Sander’s film can be read on one level as an attempt to replicate the diary form of which Wolf speaks—its hesitation, its attention to questions rather than “exclamation marks,” its function as “training, a means to remain active, to resist the temptation to drift into mere consumption.”6 Yet the very nature of the citation of Wolf—here as in the earlier scene of the quotation of women’s films—acknowledges simultaneously the difficulty of any simple correlation between different texts and different art forms. Put another way, then, Sander’s film cites Christa Wolf but at the same makes such citation “difficult,” or in Wolf’s words “unfilmable.”
In the publicity poster for Redupers, the elements constituting the screen narrative of the film are condensed. Sander’s face, with a wry expression, is shown in close-up. To the left of her face is the Berlin Wall, with a curtain running its entire length (evoking the women’s curtain project). To the right of her face is an apartment building, suggesting one of the buildings referred to in the film where eye contact between West and East is still possible. A small piece of sky is visible, as if emanating from the crown of Sander’s head. The Berlin Wall and the building would meet at an invisible vanishing point obscured by Sander’s head.7 At the conclusion of Redupers, there is the suggestion of depth, with Edda’s disappearance into the background; but in this poster, the illusion of depth is obstructed, just as in the film there is a constant evocation of ambivalence.
Sander’s “image” in this poster is as both character and film director. Her face and her look into the camera quite literally obstruct any possible meeting of the two edifices that frame the poster. Rather, the windows on the one side face onto the vast screen surface created by the curtains on the other. Redupers takes what has been one of the most persistent metaphors in classical film theory for the film screen, the “window on the world,” and subjects it to the scrutiny of a feminist aesthetics whose most significant feature is not simple reversal—whereby the domestic, traditionally female associations of “windows” would be teased out of official film theory—but rather the exploration of ambivalence through a screen surface which can function simultaneously as surface and frame, which can make “chinks” visible while dispelling at the same time the illusion of an image which is fully present to itself.
Julie Dash’s Illusions is a short (34 minutes) fiction film set in Hollywood in 1942. The date is significant, not only for its wartime setting but also because it is the year when the National Associaton for the Advancement of Colored People met in Hollywood, and many studio heads agreed that it was high time to include black people in greater numbers in roles both in front of and behind the camera.8 The central character of the film is Mignon Dupree (portrayed by Lonette McKee), an extremely light-skinned black woman who has worked her way up from a secretarial to an executive position at National Studios. Dupree is passing as a white woman to the extent that—as she explains to her mother on the telephone—“they didn’t ask me about it and I didn’t happen to mention it. . . .” At the outset of the film, Dupree argues for film stories that deal with the lives and struggles of people in everyday situations. The studio she works for, however, is more committed to films that distract and entertain.
The plot of Illusions thickens with the connection between two events. First, the consequences of Mignon’s position as a black woman in an industry that assumes she is white are explored in a variety of ways, primarily through the flirtatious advances of a white soldier. Her “private” life, and in particular her relationship with a black soldier overseas, are carefully hidden from view. The soldier who flirts (obnoxiously) with Mignon eventually discovers her “secret.” Second, Mignon encounters another black woman working in the industry, and whose position dramatizes her own. Ester Jeeter (played by Rosanne Katon) is a singer who dubs her voice for the voices of those actresses whose own singing talents leave something to be desired. A crisis erupts at the studio when it is revealed that footage of the blonde female star of the picture in production has been shot out of sync, and the star is unavailable to reshoot the scene. Ester is called upon to substitute her voice for that of the star. Mignon and Ester strike up a friendship (Ester immediately recognizes that Mignon is black), and Mignon’s recognition of herself in Ester leads her to speculate more clearly on the relationship between black women and the film industry. In a conversation with Ester near the conclusion of the film, Mignon expresses bitterness and frustration at the ways in which blacks are marginalized within the film industry. When she returns to her office, she finds the soldier looking through her personal mail; he has discovered that she is black. An angry confrontation follows, and Mignon’s frustration gives way to an affirmation of the necessity to engage with the “illusions” of film rather than walk away from them in despair.
On one level, then, Illusions is a meditation on the relationship between black women and the Hollywood cinema specifically, and in more general terms between black women and cinematic representation that challenges and entertains simultaneously. The film begins with a shot of a figurine spinning slowly against a black background. As the camera moves closer and closer, the object is revealed to be an Oscar, symbol of Hollywood at its glittering best. That image is immediately followed by a series of documentary images of World War II. If this juxtaposition of images suggests an opposition between the gloss of Hollywood film and the grit of documentary, it is an opposition somewhat undone by the development of the film. For later, when Mignon looks at a photograph of Julius (the man she hopes to marry) and his fellow soldiers, the predominantly black faces in that image contrast with the documentary images peopled by whites.
If Illusions thus underscores the marginalization of blacks characteristic of any film medium—documentary or fiction—it is not entirely clear just how Mignon’s own development in relationship to cinematic representation should be understood. At the beginning of the film, over the image of the Oscar, we hear a female voice—perhaps one assumed to be that of the filmmaker at this point, though later revealed to belong to Mignon—which separates action from illusion: “To direct an attack upon Hollywood would indeed be to confuse portrayal with action, the image with reality. In the beginning is not the shadow but the act, and the province of Hollywood is not action, but illusion.” In the discussion that eventually takes place between Mignon and Ester, Mignon continues the same line of reasoning, although with more frustration: “People make films about themselves, what they want, what they love, what they fear most. Here we’re nothing but props in their stories, musical props, or dancing props, or comic relief. I came into this world of moving shadows and I made this work for me. But I made what work? There isn’t anything here for me. There’s no joy in the seduction of images.”
Figure 8. Rosanne Katon as Ester Jeeter in Julie Dash’s Illusions (Women Make Movies)
Finally, after her angry encounter with the soldier at the film’s conclusion, Mignon does an about-face. After telling the soldier, “I want to do what you do,” Mignon speaks the last words of the film: “We would meet again, Ester Jeeter and I. For it was she who helped me see beyond the shadows dancing on a white wall, to define what I had already come to know. To take action without fearing. Yes . . . I wanted to use the power of the motion pictures. For there are many stories to be told, many battles to begin.”
Illusions dramatizes Julie Dash’s own relationship, as a black woman director, to the film medium, and it attempts to accomplish what remains for Mignon Dupree an aspiration more than a possibility. Given the somewhat triumphant conclusion of Illusions—that is, Mignon’s hopeful commitment to the possibilities of film to tell stories that had not been told before—it is perhaps tempting to read the film as arguing for the “positive images” approach that is so maligned in contemporary feminist and poststructuralist criticism. While I do not think that Illusions offers any simple formulation of the relationship between women, race, and the cinema, the film does take as its point of departure (“the province of Hollywood is not action, but illusion”) and conclusion (“I wanted to use the power of the motion pictures”) the gap between image and reality. All too often, the white feminist response to such a gap is to “make allowances” for this apparent plea for “better images,” a response which by arguing in the name of pluralism ends up being patronizing; or simply to “recognize” that for black women—and by extension, for women who have a “different relationship” to the dominant cinema (the list usually then goes on to include other minorities, lesbians, working-class women)—the outrageous stereotypes perpetrated by the classical cinema make its conquest that more urgent.
In both cases—whether through “making allowances” or “exceptional recognition”—a film such as Illusions is marginalized, relegated to the realm of the theoretically unsophisticated. I would argue, rather, that Illusions challenges a feminist theory that would displace prematurely the tension between action and illusion. Teresa de Lauretis has written of how there emerges in feminist writing a notion of identity which “is not the fragmented, or intermittent, identity of a subject constructed in division by language alone, an ‘I’ continuously prefigured and preempted in an unchangeable symbolic order.” Nor is it, de Lauretis continues,
the imaginary identity of the individualist, bourgeois subject, which is male and white; nor the “flickering” of the posthumanist Lacanian subject, which is too nearly white and at best (fe)male. What is emerging in feminist writings is, instead, the concept of a multiple, shifting, and often self-contradictory identity, a subject that is not divided in, but rather at odds with, language; an identity made up of heterogeneous and heteronomous representations of gender, race, and class. . . . 9
At the same time that Illusions can be seen as arguing for the appropriation of Hollywood film to tell “other stories,” the film questions that very assumption. The assumption is questioned, however, not in the name of the inherent corruption or inevitable co-optation of all film that tells a story, but rather in the name of the “concept of a multiple, shifting, and often self-contradictory identity” of which de Lauretis speaks.
The primary device whereby Illusions articulates the relationship between race, gender, and film representation is ironic juxtaposition—whether in the quotation of other films and film styles, the relationship between sound and image, or the framing of individual shots and scenes. At the beginning of the film, after Mignon’s voice-over about the difference between action and illusion, we hear another voice-over, now a male voice who speaks of “the industry’s broad war effort. . . . The fact that no other medium has so adapted to the task of building national morale on both the fighting and home fronts readily attests to the motion pictures’ essentiality.” The pontificatory tone is soon revealed to belong to the voice of the soldier who constantly comes on to Mignon; he is dictating a memo. The camera reveals the source of the voice-over after pausing on a black man cleaning the window of the film office, and women receptionists who answer the phones, thus opening up a space between his inflated rhetoric and the racist and sexist assumptions that make it possible.
Julie Dash has described Illusions as a film that “poses as one thing, while in fact it’s another. It intentionally mimics the form and conventions of Hollywood films of the thirties and forties. But by embedding certain foreign objects in the film—the protagonist Mignon, for example—I’ve attempted to throw the form into relief, hopefully making all of the sexist and racist assumptions of that form stick out.”10 Since Mignon is passing, Illusions takes as its most obvious point of departure films such as Imitation of Life, in which the black woman passing for white is a figure of pity; as Alile Sharon Larkin points out, Dash’s film redefines the stereotype of the “tragic mulatto.”11 Although the figure of the tragic mulatto is better known in literature than in film, the questions of visibility raised by the film medium make Dash’s exploration of the stereotype particularly relevant to what Hortense J. Spillers has described as the “spectacular and the specular” components of the mulatto subject: “In a very real sense, America’s historic mulatto subject plays out his/her character on the ground of a fiction made public and decisive by dimensions of the spectacular and the specular.”12
The situation that occasions the encounter between Mignon and Ester evokes Singin’ in the Rain (1952), in which a silent female film star with a horribly grating voice makes the transition to sound by having another woman’s voice dubbed for hers, as well as Inside Daisy Clover (1965), in which the film’s heroine, a movie star, cracks under the pressure of her success during a scene in which she must dub her own voice to footage of her in which the sound was improperly recorded. Indeed, the scene in the recording studio where Ester supplies the voice is quite reminiscent of the scene in Singin’ in the Rain where Debbie Reynolds supplies the voice. At the end of that film, in the optimistic tradition of the backstage musical, Debbie Reynolds becomes a star and gets her man. Illusions reveals what is repressed in a film such as Singin’ in the Rain— i.e., that for the black women who provided these voices there was no possibility of coming out from behind the curtain as Debbie Reynolds does.
At the same time, Illusions displaces the formula of singer-gets-her-man with its staging of the recording scene as the encounter between two black women. The film screen becomes a central figure in this scene for that encounter, at times occupying the entire space of the frame, and at others seen through the glass of the recording booth, with Ester to one side as she records and the two (white, male) engineers and Mignon seen as ephemeral reflections in double. The film that is being “repaired,” so to speak, is a fluffy musical; one sequence shows two men and the blonde female star of the film as they sing and dance, and the scene that Ester dubs has the woman doing a solo. Ester is situated vis-a-vis the screen image in a position that is evocative both of Uncle Josh at the movies and of the rear-projectionist. While Ester is in no sense the naive spectator that Josh is, she occupies a relationship to the screen that evokes his simultaneous distance and investment.
Later in the film Ester tells Mignon that when she goes to the movies, she fantasizes while hearing her own voice in the theater, as if to suggest that Ester imagines herself into the alien world of (white) cinematic fantasy just as Josh literalizes the fiction of film. But Ester is also on the other side of the screen, in the position of the rear-projectionist, for it is her voice that supplies the illusion, and the disjunction between sound and image that creates the impression of a seamless flow. Ironically, however, the cuts to close-ups of Ester singing make it quite obvious that, whether this is the actress’s “real” voice or not, this source of the illusion is also a dubbed voice. When Mignon enters the sound-recording booth, she looks into the window to catch a glimpse of herself and adjust her hair. If the screen is both a passageway to glorious fantasy and a rigid obstacle separating black from white for Ester, then the glass surface of the recording booth takes on a similar contradictory function for Mignon. For through the glass, Mignon witnesses what is represented in the film as a crisis in conscience. Through the glass, Mignon sees herself reflected in Ester, a reflection paradoxically clarified by the distorted images of the two white men, one of whom had earlier made a racist comment to Mignon. Mignon’s relationship to the recording scene is not just identification with Ester, for Mignon becomes both observer and participant; the window and the screen become figures for her own contradictory and complex relationship to the apparatus of the cinema.
While Illusions does not contain specific citations of a literary source, like Helke Sander’s references to Christa Wolf in Redupers, the film’s emphasis on the significance of relationships between black women is evocative of a similar preoccupation in contemporary fiction by black women authors. The example of Toni Morrison is particularly relevant to Illusions, not only because of the thematics of female friendship in Morrison’s work, but also because of the significance of vision, sight, and the simultaneous difficulty and exhilaration of a kind of looking rooted in the connection between black women. In Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), the fate of Pecora Breedlove is traced through the intertwining relationships in a black community in Lorain, Ohio, particularly the relationship between two sisters, Frieda and Claudia, one of whom supplies the first-person narration with which the novel begins and ends.
Pecora embodies, in extreme form, the bitter desire for blue eyes, the symbol of whiteness which would allow her not only to assume a white identity and therefore become desirable in the eyes of others, but also to see the world through the eyes of white experience.13 The final result of that desire for Pecora is an internal dialogue with herself that speaks incoherence, rage, and the impossibility of meaningful connection with other human beings. Yet Pecora—whose name is suggestive of Peola, the light-skinned daughter in Fannie Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life—is not a character easily classified as “mad” or exceptional, to the extent that virtually every woman in the novel responds in some way to the seduction of blue eyes, to the standard of white “beauty.”
The women in The Bluest Eye live in a world where constant negotiation of the “blue eye,” both as a standard of beauty to which to aspire and as an alienating perspective from which to “survey” oneself, is necessary. The novel abounds in these metaphors of “blue eyes,” from a Shirley Temple cup, to a white doll, to the white girls in school. Not surprisingly, one such metaphor comes from the cinema.14 While she is pregnant, Pauline Breedlove, Pecora’s mother, finds in the movies a world of illusion both comforting and alien:
She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. There at last were the darkened woods, the lonely roads, the river banks, the gentle knowing eyes. There the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches. There death was dead, and people made every gesture in a cloud of music. There the black-and-white images came together, making a magnificient whole—all projected through the ray of light from above and behind.15
The two female protagonists of Morrison’s second novel, Sula, share a special friendship that is forged in part in their common fantasies, but more specifically in their desire to share their fantasies with another. Noting that “it was in dreams that the two girls had first met,” Morrison describes the special bond between Nel and Sula as follows:
They were solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling into Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a someone, who, quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream. When Nel, an only child, sat on the steps of her back porch surrounded by the high silence of her mother’s incredibly orderly house, feeling the neatness pointing at her back, she studied the poplars and fell easily into a picture of herself lying on a flowered bed, tangled in her own hair, waiting for some fiery prince. He approached but never quite arrived. But always, watching the dream along with her, were some smiling sympathetic eyes. Someone as interested as she herself in the flow of her imagined hair, the thickness of the mattress of flowers, the voile sleeves that closed below her elbows in gold-threaded cuffs.16
As the “Technicolor” quality of Nel’s fantasies suggests clearly, this is a dream-world made to the measure of Hollywood images. If this passage evokes Pauline Breedlove’s relationship to the movies in The Bluest Eye, however, something has changed as well. For instead of the “gentle knowing eyes” located firmly within the screen fantasies of the movies, and thus distanced from Pauline Breedlove, we have in Sula “some smiling sympathetic eyes,” now a function of a relationship to the screen, and most important, a relationship that is shared with another female observer. The female friendship central to Sula thus takes as one of its structuring principles a fantasy of black female spectatorship. Unlike the relationship between female spectator and screen in The Bluest Eye, which can function only to underline the black woman’s alienation from the ideals of white, patriarchal culture, in Sula the bond between the two dreamers emphasizes alienation and empowerment, simultaneously.
“Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.”17 While Morrison does not offer any easy or pat suggestions of what that “something else” may be, the model of female spectatorship, whereby the power of dominant representations is mitigated by the power of the bond between those doing the watching, represents a significant challenge to one-dimensional notions of acculturation or socialization structured by the dichotomies of activity and passivity. In Illusions, the relationship between Ester and Mignon continues the exploration of black female spectatorship that figures so strongly in these novels by Morrison. For the relationship between the two women is not a simple act of mirroring, where the extent of their relationship would be Mignon’s recognition of herself in Ester. Rather, the two women recognize in each other’s relationship to the cinema a shared fantasy that on one level acknowledges the white illusions of the film industry, but on another puts those illusions into question. That the staging of the decisive encounter between Mignon and Ester should take place around the foregrounded figure of the film screen accentuates that sense of discovery, through black female spectatorship, of the cinema as simultaneously resistant yet accessible to the desires and aspirations of black women.
In The Cheat, the screen surface becomes a sign of the space separating East and West. In Illusions, the surface of the screen is white in several senses of the word. Illusions is shot in black and white, and Dash frequently uses light and dark contrast to signify aesthetic and racial opposition simultaneously. Virtually all of the white women who appear in the film are extremely blonde, the point being not a regurgitation of the dark woman/light woman stereotype, but rather a process of defamiliarization whereby the blonde woman, symbol and symptom of the classical Hollywood cinema, becomes an embodiment of otherness, of the constructed standard of female beauty against which all other women, whether recognizably black (like Ester) or not (like Mignon), are measured. The juxtaposition of the white screen, looming centrally in the foreground, with the black woman who provides the voice that will correct the mismatch between sound and image, creates the possibility for the screen to function as a mirror undermining the illusion of a totally white universe rather than supporting it. The dislocation of image and sound matches the separation of the two reflective surfaces, the glass on the sound booth and the surface of the screen.
Initially, Mignon is quite literally caught between the reflected images of the two white men on the one hand, and the blonde actress whose image looms large on the screen. The connection between Mignon and Ester subverts that containment, not through direct communication between the two women but rather through a connection that undermines the equation between white culture and reflective surfaces.18 One of the unspoken assumptions of the figure of the screen surface in the films I have described is that boundaries can be transgressed, but within certain limits, and only The Cheat postulates those boundaries in terms of race. In that film, of course, the Asian man’s function as master narrator is demolished. In Illusions, the white of the screen and the white conventions of Hollywood are defamiliarized, and the possibility of black female narration is predicated on the relationship between one black woman who simultaneously creates and foregrounds the illusion, and another who watches and contemplates it. The ambivalence of Dash’s film involves, then, a relationship between seer and seen in which the overlapping boundaries between white and black, male and female, are explored in an affirmation of black woman’s cinema that acknowledges, simultaneously, the limitations of Hollywood representation.
Illusions foregrounds the whiteness of the screen in its overlapping associations of race, gender, and reflective capacities. In Patricia Rozema’s 1987 film I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, a screen surface emerges as a central figure in the female protagonist’s simultaneous fascination with the art world and lesbianism. In The Big Sleep, the frosted window which functions as a barrier between Marlowe and Harry Jones suggests something of an imbalance in the heterosexual symmetry so carefully established in other, similarly constructed scenes in the film. Indeed, a crucial component in this film, as well as in Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show and The Cheat, is the encounter of the male protagonist with his like. Although Laura Mulvey describes the relationship between the male spectator and the male protagonist of the Hollywood cinema as analogous to that between subject and ego ideal, the very establishment of that ego ideal often relies on a slippage between the male as subject and as object—on, that is, the possibility of homosexual desire as well as same-sex (and implicitly heterosexual) identification.19
While it is crucial, within the terms of what Monique Wittig calls the heterosexual contract, that such eruptions of male homoerotic desire remain isolated moments that can be superseded by the assumption of presumably “adult” heterosexual identification, it is not always clear that the hierarchy is articulated clearly or firmly.20 To be sure, Philip Marlowe and Vivian Rutledge are set up as the couple-emerging-victorious, but the very fact that the real-life personae of Bogart and Bacall contribute so significantly to this conclusion can be taken as a sign that within the particular narrative and visual configuration of this film, such extratextual mechanisms function not to affirm what is already there but to supply what otherwise might be lacking.
If the screen motif undermines the clear distinctions between subject and object, then a significant manifestation of that undermining is the simultaneous evocation of homosexual and heterosexual desire, an evocation in which the boundary lines between the “normal” and the “deviant” are not clear-cut. In the films discussed in the previous chapter, however, the boundaries are undermined only insofar as male sexuality is concerned. I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing explores the ramifications of such boundaries insofar as female sexual ambivalence is concerned.
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is told in a partial first-person point of view, at least to the extent that Polly, the female protagonist (played by Sheila McCarthy), narrates her story by speaking to a video camera set up in her apartment. The close-up, extremely grainy images of her narration alternate with the chronological representation of the events she introduces. Yet another, third level of the film is the representation of Polly’s fantasies, often further distinguished from the other two levels by the black-and-white, grainy image. Polly’s story, as she tells it, all began when she was hired to work as a temporary assistant at the Church Gallery. After a brief period of time, the elegant owner of the gallery, Gabrielle St. Pères (Paule Baillargeon), offers her a permanent position. For someone who has been described as “organizationally impaired,” the opportunity to work for Gabrielle is the highest of compliments.
Yet despite her clumsiness and her awkward persona at the workplace, Polly is depicted—particularly when she leaves work—as a creative, playful individual, and the representation of her fantasies often occurs in this context. She is a photographer (specifically) and a fanciful observer of the world around her (generally). An immediate link between Polly’s first-person narration, spoken directly to the video camera, and the events which, once introduced by her narration, are shown in a more conventional narrative style, is the camera. The still camera in Polly’s story, and the video camera in her narration, define how she quite literally “sees” the world.
The video camera is one of several figures deployed in the film to render Polly’s journey through the complicated intersections of art, power, and sexual desire. The camera is a surveillance device in the gallery, and early in the film we watch Polly and Gabrielle install it in its place, planted atop a mannikinlike female form. Through the video surveillance system, Polly engages in voyeuristic eavesdropping. Polly’s adoration of Gabrielle is established firmly from the outset of the film. Polly tells the camera, in one of the early first-person sections, “I just loved how she talked and wanted her to teach me everything.” Polly’s adoration extends to curiosity, particularly the first time a woman named Mary arrives at the gallery and asks for Gabrielle. The two women go into the gallery, which is separated from the office, and Polly cannot resist the urge to switch on the monitor and eavesdrop.
Figure 9. Sheila McCarthy as Polly in Patricia Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (Museum of Modern Art)
When the women’s intimate past is revealed to a perplexed Polly, it is not just lesbianism that provokes her curiosity, but rather the sheer facts of sexuality and personal life themselves, particularly insofar as Gabrielle is concerned. Indeed, this scene marks the first time in the film that Gabrielle’s cool, sophisticated exterior crumbles, and at the same time that Mary is revealed as her lover, so is there mention of another recent lover of Gabrielle, a man. In the scene immediately following this one, Polly is seen outdoors, with her still camera, following a heterosexual couple in the woods, attempting—unsuccessfully—to remain unnoticed. Here, too, she is defined as a voyeur, and in both cases, her position on the outside, looking in, is emphasized insofar as all sexual relations—and not just lesbian ones—are concerned.
Nonetheless, there is a significant difference between the two kinds of voyeurism, for the one, outdoors, involves the sanctioned if extremely awkwardly executed voyeurism of photographic expression, while the other, in the office, involves a far less sanctioned form of eavesdropping. In both cases, Polly assumes the position of voyeur with considerable discomfort; she dangles awkwardly from the tree in which she attempts to hide, and very much in the fashion of Uncle Josh in the early cinema, she stretches her head to the side of the monitor in the office when Gabrielle and Mary kiss just off camera, hopeful of seeing more. Again, however, there is a difference between the two scenes, for lesbian sexuality remains less representable in conventional terms than hetero-sexuality, so that the eavesdropping in the office, and the subsequent play on what is shown and what is concealed, speak much more forcefully to narrative and visual intrigue. Put another way, the interplay between display and secrecy central to narrative and visual momentum is engaged in the film in relationship to lesbian, rather than heterosexual, desire.
Polly is presented as a naive neophyte in a world of adults, and the plot of the film thickens as she develops a crush on Gabrielle which hovers between attraction and identification. Polly’s discovery of Gabrielle’s sexuality (bisexual or lesbian, but with the lesbianism definitely emphasized since the only lover of hers we see is a woman) is complicated and compounded by the delayed discovery that forms the climax to the intrigue of the film. Polly arrives late at a birthday party for Gabrielle, and finds the Curator drunk and sad. She speaks to Polly about her frustrated desire to create beautiful, immortal paintings, and tells her that even when she applied for admission to an adult art class, she was told that her work was “simple-minded.” Polly asks to see her paintings, and Gabrielle leads her to a small room where a series of luminous white panels are hung. Eventually, the paintings are revealed to be Mary’s work, not Gabrielle’s. Polly takes one painting home with her, and then to the gallery, where a critic sees it—all of this unbeknownst to Gabrielle. Once Gabrielle does discover what Polly has done, she does not exactly willfully conceal the truth, but neither does she dispel the illusion that has been created, particularly once Mary has insisted that they are partners in a “victimless crime.” Mary detests the art world in which Gabrielle moves so comfortably, and so she encourages Gabrielle to present her paintings as her own.
When Polly brings the painting home, she sets it against a wall in her apartment that is covered with her own photographs. Clearly inspired by Gabrielle’s simultaneous insecurity and confession, Polly decides to send some of her photographs, under a “pseudo-name,” to Gabrielle at the gallery. When Gabrielle receives the photographs, she does not respond as Polly had hoped, but rather exclaims on their deficiency: “She just doesn’t have it. . . . God, look at this—the trite made flesh.” Gabrielle uses the same phrase—“simple-minded”—to describe Polly’s photographs as the art teacher had used to describe her own work. Polly’s subsequent humiliation and misery lead her to burn her photographs and toss away her camera.
Polly discovers the truth when Gabrielle and Mary enter the gallery surreptitiously with more paintings, and Polly—unbenownst to them—is lying on one of the benches, somewhat drunk. This scene plays upon the mode of reversal common in the film, since Polly occupies the position of Gabrielle in the earlier scene when the paintings were first introduced. Polly overhears their conversation in which the ruse is revealed, and she peeks at the new paintings they have brought in, only to be stunned, even momentarily blinded, it would appear, by the bright light. The paintings are wrapped, not coincidentally, in a comforter which Polly had given Gabrielle as a birthday gift. Polly’s anger leads to an angry outburst, and she throws hot tea on Gabrielle’s face. Polly’s disillusionment with Gabrielle has less to do with the public fraud than with the personal one, that is, with the fact that Gabrielle let Polly assume that Mary’s paintings were her own.
The conclusion of this scene is the first of several conclusions that the film offers. Polly conducts an imaginary orchestra, and a slow zoom onto her as she triumphantly assumes the music transforms the painting into an ethereal background, no longer contained by its borders. It would appear, then, that Polly has switched sides, as it were, shifted from the position of adoring spectator of the painting to powerful creator in her own right, an equivalent of Uncle Josh tearing down the screen, and an assumption of the role of the rear-projectionist as well. That one critic described the screen/painting as the closest thing to music approximated in a painting contributes to the sense of the realization of a fantasy. Ultimately, the film would have Polly’s vision—buttressed by Mary, the “true” artist—win out, a vision, that is, based on the pure pleasure of creation rather than its exchange value. For Mary, like Polly, aspires not necessarily to artistic greatness and renown but to creation for its own sake, and significantly, Mary disputes Gabrielle’s opinion of Polly’s photographs (and without knowing that they are Polly’s).
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing has difficulty coming to a firm conclusion, evidenced in particular by the fact that the film provides a series of endings. After Polly has completed her “conductor” fantasy, she takes the video camera and leaves the gallery. The film returns to her first-person narration (the placement of the video camera in her apartment thus explained), and Polly says, “There it is. That’s what happened.” As she moves toward the camera—to shut it off, one assumes—the final credits are intercut with the images of her. But her narration continues as she shifts positions, both literally and figuratively. Having changed the position of the camera, she speaks, apparently to a different audience than previously, about practical matters—leaving town, renting her apartment. She hears a knock at the door; Gabrielle and Mary enter. Now it is Gabrielle’s (and Mary’s) turn to make a discovery—that the photographs sent anonymously were in fact Polly’s. The intercut credits images continue, over one of which Polly’s voice-over is heard, “C’mon, I’ll show you some more.” The next image shows Polly opening the door to a golden wonderland of trees, inviting Gabrielle and Mary to join her. Before going through the door herself, Polly leans over and turns off the camera. While this final image appears to be a continuation of Polly’s first-person narration, the image quality is like the more conventional narrative of the film. In fact, this final image is a fusion of the three narrative elements that have remained more or less separate in the film—Polly’s first-person narration to the camera, the “events” that led up to her narration, and her fantasy life (here suggested by the golden landscape).
While this difficulty of, or resistance to, closure could be read as a sign of open-endedness, it is also a sign of confusion, having to do in part with the strain between self-expression and the “public” function of art, which the film cannot resolve. When Gabrielle and Mary come to Polly’s apartment and see the display of her photographs, Polly is now identified in the role of teacher that Gabrielle previously held. When Polly informs her guests that she has many more images to show them, and opens the door to a wonderland of autumn foliage, the couple moves in awe, as if seeing the world for the first time.21 This conclusion does seem a bit idealistic, with its uncomplicated affirmation of Polly’s vision, its mode of simple reversal (in which Polly is now the “real artist,” Gabrielle the apprentice), and its neat tying together of all three narrative and visual modes of the film. At the same time, however, there is a strong sense in the film that the series of endings do not necessarily work so seamlessly in unison. In other words, a sense of the difficulty of resolution is presented in an extremely provocative and productive way—in a way, that is, that calls for a reading of the relationship between the ambivalence posed by the film and the necessity for closure.
Kay Armatage has described the video camera sculpture as “the pivotal visual object of the movement of narrative, signifying system, and sexual identity. . .” “The ‘woman’s look,’ ” says Armatage, “is thus technological, aesthetic, knowledge producing, and functional in the protagonist’s self-revelation.” For Armatage, the consolidation of a number of threads in the “clever conceit” of the video sculpture suggests the function of lesbianism in the film as idealized, romanticized, and unproblematically set forth as the decisive moment of passage for Polly. Describing the final scene of the film, Armatage refers to the “paradisaical bower of egalitarian bliss” evoked by the forest, with Polly’s smile at the camera a consolidation of “the movement . . . through representation to a vision of feminine sexuality in full possession of its own knowledge.”22
While the conclusion of the film does suggest romanticization, I do not think it is lesbianism that is being romanticized here, but rather the position of innocence that Polly embodies. This “final, really final ending” (as Armatage refers to it) seems to me quite different in tone and gesture from the way that Polly’s journey is conveyed in the film. If the development of I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing were shaped uniquely or primarily by the camera, particularly in the fusion of the fanciful observation of the still camera with the confessional of the video camera, then one might rightly criticize the film for a simplified access to fully adequate vision, complete unto itself. But the instruments of vision function in relationship to the figure of the screenlike surface which is just as central to the film’s narrative. The camera sculpture, as Armatage suggests, condenses a number of threads in the film, and taken on its own terms perhaps does suggest a kind of total assumption of knowledge, authority, and control. But the figure of the camera sculpture needs to be seen in relationship to the equally compelling figure of the painting, ostensibly executed by Gabrielle but really done by Mary, that is presented to Polly.
The painting, to which Polly responds with awe and wonder, is a luminous, white, almost quivering surface which becomes a metaphoric screen in the film, and acquires the functions of simultaneous passage and threshold. Indeed, Polly’s innocent fascination with the art world, with Gabrielle, and with lesbianism is evocative of Uncle Josh’s naive apprehension of the cinema screen. In Polly’s case, the video camera sculpture is—as Armatage says—appropriated and used, more integrated to Polly’s own vision and story than it is to the consumerist stereotype of female beauty upon whose neck it rests. But there is a split in Polly’s trajectory, between the camera which is appropriated and the painting, the screen surface, which remains at a distance, a mysterious object which inspires equally mystified awe. Unlike the camera, which Polly can take outside the gallery and adapt to her own storytelling ends, the painting inspires the opposite desire—the desire to put it on display, to engage in the very circuit of fetishized artifice which, on other levels, Polly resists.
I have mentioned the fantasy sequences which embody Polly’s vision and are set off from the rest of the film, whether through black-and-white imagery, extreme graininess, or unconventional relationships between sound and image. Sometimes these fantasies involve Polly in superhuman feats, such as scaling a building or flying through the city. Sometimes they suggest Polly’s simultaneous fascination with and fear of the world she discovers through Gabrielle and the art gallery. In one black-and-white sequence that occurs after Polly has learned of Gabrielle’s lesbianism, for instance, Polly and Gabrielle are dressed in old-fashioned frilly costumes, complete with wide-brimmed hats and parasols. Polly holds forth on sexuality and desire. “I believe that gender is irrelevant to matters of the heart,” she says, and goes on to cite the notion of polymorphous perversity. Gabrielle nods approvingly and deferentially throughout Polly’s exposition. If the series of endings of I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing speaks to an ambivalence about the relationship between art in its personal and public manifestations, the same might be said about the film’s relationship to lesbianism. While Gabrielle’s sexuality is part of Polly’s attraction to her, whether lesbianism constitutes a distinctly alternative sexuality is left open to question. Polly’s fantasy of polymorphous perversity suggests simultaneously a desire for a different sexuality and a desire for no sexuality at all.
After Polly has brought the white, screenlike painting home to her apartment, a black-and-white fantasy depicts her in the same type of somewhat old-fashioned clothing, riding in a bus to an isolated setting by the ocean. The sound track consists of a series of melodic female voices, laughing and singing—one of several instances in the film which are inflections of the singing mermaids of the film’s title.23 Polly gazes at the sky and the ocean with the same sense of wonder that characterized her response to the painting. A dissolve within the fantasy to a white screen creates, momentarily, a parallel between the screen surface of the film (more specifically, of Polly’s consciousness) and the luminous white painting which she had just previously discovered. The figure of the screen functions here as a quite literal foregrounding of what Bruce Kawin calls “mindscreen,” the representation of a character’s consciousness.24 The parallel between the painting and Polly’s “mindscreen” suggests further that in Polly’s mind, the painting captures both a feeling of connectedness to the natural world, and the essence of creation. At the same time, however, the very fact of the difference of the fantasy prevents the easy assumption that Polly’s fantasy life is fully and wholly of a piece with the rest of the film.
However, in the conclusions, Polly’s fantasy life does become integrated and connected with the other realms represented. When Polly conducts the imaginary orchestra in the gallery near the conclusion of the film, two different levels of the narration, the fantasy sequences and the recounting of the events leading up to the acquisition of the video camera, are fused. Polly, standing in front of the painting and framed by its aura, is nonetheless still situated within the fiction of the film, while the musicians, located in the reverse field of her vision, are portrayed in the black and white associated with her fantasies. That the final conclusion joins all three narrative levels (the two already “fused” in the orchestra fantasy, as well as the first-person narration) suggests a romantic vision of artistic completion, wherein the screen and the camera (whether still or video) have become equally joined in a fantasy of beauty, wholeness, and integrity.
Juxtaposed with the orchestra fantasy, however, is the acquisition of the video camera, which undoes somewhat the easy resolution of the music fantasy by recalling the position of voyeur that Polly has assumed throughout the film. In other words, the “conclusion” of the fantasy in relation to the screen is one that the film undermines, and with it any easy assumption of an unqualified position of authority. Through Polly, then, the relationship between Uncle Josh and the movie screen is not replicated with a female substitute, but rather is fundamentally rewritten in such a way that the very desire to “get inside the image,” to transgress the boundary separating screen and audience, is rethought. The look and the surface, the camera and the screen, here do not function as simple or self-evident supports for one another; rather, Polly’s wonder and awe in front of the luminous surface serve as counterpoint to her eager assumption of the voyeur’s role.
In an essay published in 1987, a year after the release of The Man Who Envied Women, Yvonne Rainer raises a series of questions concerning the devices and strategies appropriate to women’s cinema. She concludes with this question:
Should a film whose main project is to restore the voice and subjectivity of a previously ignored or suppressed person or segment of the population, should such a film contain argument, contradiction, or express the director’s ambivalence within the film either directly, through language, or indirectly, through stylistic intervention? Obviously, we can’t afford to be prescriptive about any of this.25
The films discussed in this chapter are concerned, precisely, with the difficult relationship between the politics of restoration (to use Rainer’s term) and ambivalence and contradiction. Yet, the films discussed thus far are quite different from The Man Who Envied Women, which is far more explicitly theoretical in its focus, and more concerned with the limits of language and representation in relationship to sexual politics. In no way, however, does The Man Who Envied Women establish a rigid distinction between the realm of the political and the artistic; it does not “abandon” the political for the sake of the avant-garde, nor does it affirm contradiction and ambiguity at the expense of political reflection.
Indeed, while virtually all of Rainer’s films prior to The Man Who Envied Women are concerned with questions central to feminist representation and theory, this film is nonetheless unique in the way it interweaves different levels of the political—from the politics of heterosexual relationships to gentrification in New York City to American intervention in Central America—with analyses and evaluations of sound and image, representation, and narrative. In feminist film studies, The Man Who Envied Women has acquired a privileged status; as Lucy Fischer says, Rainer’s film “constitutes a virtual catalogue of the major tendencies in feminist cinema and criticism of the 1970s and 1980s.”26 Thus many feminist film critics have found in the film crucial articulations of issues central to feminist film theory, including female spectatorship, dialogic discourse, space, the difficulty of heterosexual relations, and language and the gaze.27
The Man Who Envied Women creates a radical sexual division. Of the man and woman whose break-up initiates the soon-to-be-disrupted narrative thread of the film, one (the man) not only is excessively visible but is portrayed by two actors, and the other (the woman) exists primarily as a disembodied voice, performed by the choreographer and dancer Trisha Brown. Throughout the film, the figure of the screen embodies ambivalence and contradiction, not in opposition to the political but rather as a political question in its own right. The title of this chapter—“Screen Tests”—is borrowed from one of the most striking tropes in The Man Who Envied Women. The film begins as Jack Deller, the male protagonist, speaks, ostensibly to his psychiatrist, while a film screen behind his body displays the title “Screen Tests,” and shows the opening shots of Luis Bunuel’s and Salvador Dali’s film, Un Chien Andalou, in which preparations for the famous eye-slitting scene occur.28 Throughout the film, this psychoanalytic scene is repeated with a variety of film clips projected, the majority of them from classical Hollywood films, but with a small dose of avant-garde films as well. These screen images function most obviously as quite literal projections of the patriarchal imagination of Jack Deller.
At the same time, the mise-en-scène operates a disjunction, since Deller entertains no direct engagement with the screen as either viewer or projectionist.29 The screen functions specifically, then, as a projection of a patriarchal unconscious about women, but it has a more active function in return, and as a result there is no simple, one-directional movement. Rather, the screen comments on Jack Deller as much as it reflects him. The notion of “screen tests” suggests, then, the conventional sense of a sample performance to be judged by standards of evaluation, but the object of the tests shifts between Jack Deller and the film clips. At the same time, of course, the questioning of the very notion of a “test,” of standards of evaluation that are fixed, knowable, and conventional, is central to The Man Who Envied Women. There is a deeper ambiguity and playfulness in the notion of “screen tests” that informs the film as well, since it is the screen itself, as the conventional ground and surface for film projection, that is “tested,” prodded, stretched, and foregrounded in a variety of ways.30
Jack Deller’s “therapy sessions” become one of the most significant threads in the film. There is virtually always a disjunction between what Deller says and what the screen shows, in the sense that his voice might be heard while the sound track is suppressed, or vice versa.31 From the outset, however, the film insists upon a direct relationship between the man and what is projected on the movie screen. At the very beginning, when the opening scenes of Un Chien Andalou are projected, for example, there is a symmetry between Jack Deller, puffing on a cigarette and facing screen left, and the figure of Luis Bunuel, similarly smoking (and facing screen right) as he prepares for the famous eye-slitting scene. Later, Jack comments on the absurdity of his female companion referring to herself as a “good girl,” after which the film which had been projected silently (Dark Victory) is accompanied with sound, and we hear a discussion between Bette Davis and George Brent in which she describes herself precisely as a “good girl.” The screen does not function simply as the projection of Jack Deller’s patriarchal fantasies, but rather becomes the site for the projection of the unconscious of the film.
In the essay cited earlier, Rainer observes that the distinction between political and avant-garde women’s films is one of many “useless oppositions” which serve to divide and conquer, and thus attempts to rethink the standard opposition between the conventional and the avant-garde in feminist thinking about film.32 This desire to reexamine conventional oppositions while simultaneously finding a place to represent contradictions and ambiguities is one of the most crucial principles of The Man Who Envied Women. The film clip from Dark Victory is interrupted, for instance, by a clip from Hollis Frampton’s Otherwise Unexplained Fires, and the camera zooms forward so that the projection screen fills up the entire frame. The “scene” of the avant-garde has the power to disrupt the (already disrupted) relationship between spectator and screen that the film has established.
Similarly, later in the film a clip from Michael Snow’s Wavelength appears, humorously inserted among images of New York lofts in various stages of repair. Again, the avant-garde cinema has the capacity to enter into the fabric of The Man Who Envied Women without the necessary “framing” of the psychoanalytic session. In the course of the film, however, any such opposition between the “uses” of the dominant and the avant-garde cinema are broken down. A clip from Gilda appears outside the confines of the therapy session, for instance, and several of the Hollywood films are subjected to formal interrogation. A scene from In a Lonely Place is projected at fast-forward speed, and then repeated at normal speed; and a scene from The Night of the Living Dead is repeated again and again, while the camera moves back to reveal Jack Deller sitting on a stage in a movie theater, with a group of spectators in front of him who become increasingly agitated as the film clips are repeated.
There is, however, one experimental film which does occupy a privileged place in The Man Who Envied Women. The therapy session that “climaxes” with the crowd reaction to Night of the Living Dead begins with a projection of Watermotor, by Trisha Brown and Babette Mangolte. The clip features Trisha Brown dancing in slow motion. Watermotor could be seen in relationship to the other films “quoted” in The Man Who Envied Women, in that like the Hollywood films it features a woman as the object of inquiry, and like the experimental films it features an unconventional use of the cinematic apparatus (here, the use of slow motion). Yet Watermotor is also unlike virtually every other film cited in Rainer’s film, since however experimental, it nonetheless focuses on the female form; since—unlike the Hollywood films—it focuses on a woman alone, undefined by the codes of Hollywood romance; and since it is the only film by women directors (and for that matter, the only codirected film) cited in the film.
This is the only time when we are afforded a “look” at Trisha Brown, whose voice provides the central narration of the film. (We presumably “see” Trisha early in the film as she departs from Jack’s apartment, but even this brief representation of Trisha is “performed,” since “she” is portrayed by someone else.) The appearance of Trisha Brown within the screen tests serves to reiterate the divided quality of female narration in the film. It is somewhat tempting to argue that as image, the female narrator becomes more exposed to the possibilities of co-optation and containment by the discourse of the male, since this is quite literally what happens during the session where Watermotor is projected. In a monologue that embodies most forcefully the “envy” of the film’s title, Jack describes himself, via the description of him by his former sister-in-law, as “the most wonderful husband a woman ever had.” Jack continues to speak of his love for “all gracious and tender women,” with Trisha’s obviously graceful and perhaps tender body serving as counterpoint in the background screen.
To be sure, the representation of Jack’s envy (“I suppose that a man who was married for almost twenty-one years to a woman he adored becomes in a sense a lover of all women, and is forever seeking, even though he doesn’t know it, for something he has lost”) is ironic; in no way could the match between sound and image be read as seamless. At the same time, there is a match, a symmetry, between the footage of Trisha and Jack’s commentary, like other parallels that have been drawn in the course of the film. It would be much too simple to argue, however, that as voice the female narration is assured a capacity for interrogation not available through the overdetermined quality of the image. Rather, The Man Who Envied Women creates female narration by a different relationship between woman as image and woman as voice, and not by the mere suppression of the woman as image. That an image of Trisha “returns” to the scene of the film, via the therapy session, via the screen, speaks to the necessity of such a reinterrogation, rather than the simple reversal of hierarchies.
Figure 10. Jack Deller (William Raymond) and Trisha Brown in Yvonne Rainer’s The Man Who Envied Women (courtesy of Yvonne Rainer)
The preoccupation with the screen in The Man Who Envied Women, and with attendant processes of repression, projection, and otherness, takes as its most obvious form the therapy scenes that recur in the film. At the same time, however, there is visible throughout the film a preoccupation with the liminal quality of screen surfaces, now in the sense of permeable surfaces, of threshold effects. From the very outset, “connection” in The Man Who Envied Women relies on surfaces which simultaneously block and open up. After the opening “therapy session” of the film, accompanied by Trisha’s voice-over, we cut to a reverse tracking shot in a coffee shop—another scene which is repeated several times. There is a pun on “cut” here, since the last image of the “therapy session” shows the close-up, in Un Chien Andalou, of an eye being slit open. The shot in the coffee shop begins on a metal surface, which is not polished enough to be a mirror but not dull enough to be read simply as a wall, and in its capacity as somewhere in between the two it also is suggestive of the surface of the screen.
The next scene is a tracking shot of a series of windows, all of which are so brightly lit that it is nearly, although not completely, impossible to see what lies beyond them—suggestive, again, of the translucent, threshold effect of the screen. The tracking shot concludes with a dark screen in place of the last window. The next shot shows a man peering from behind a screen—an image that will recur much later in the film, when Yvonne Rainer herself, during a dream sequence, peers from behind a doorway. Connecting these various introductions to The Man Who Envied Women, then, is a series of match cuts based on translucent boundaries, and visual continuity thus explores the borderlines of spatial division. Throughout the film, translucent surfaces are foregrounded, from the windows and glass bricks in the loft where Jack Deller delivers a pretentious lecture on theory, to the folding screen in his apartment, to the movie screen itself.33
At the same time that The Man Who Envied Women is preoccupied with these threshold spaces, with boundaries that are nonetheless permeable—or may be made to be so—another point of return suggests a rather different kind of preoccupation. A series of magazine articles and images are tacked to the white wall in Deller’s loft, and they are rearranged and commented upon throughout the film. Many critics have noted that the structure of Rainer’s film is a collage effect, quite like this collection of images and texts described as “Trisha’s art work” by Deller.34 The most sustained dialogues in the film occur around these images and texts—dialogues between Trisha and Jack, between Trisha and Yvonne Rainer, and between video artist and critic Martha Rosier and Rainer. The collage is first shown early in the film, shortly after the departure of the “woman” who will be known from here on in as a voice, and consists of four images: a Sunday New York Times Magazine cover of a man’s face, with the words “How I Was Broken by the KGB”; a page from the “About Men” section of the Times Sunday Magazine, with a drawing of a male figure with a tear on its cheek; a full-color cigar advertisement, with the legend “The Sweet Smell of Success,” and a photograph of a man in a country setting with two dogs; and a color photograph of decapitated corpses and severed heads, with a handwritten legend underneath it. The images are rearranged in a variety of ways throughout the film, whether literally, in their placement on the wall, or figuratively, through the conversations that are heard as the camera shows them. Eventually, another image is added, this one an advertisement from a medical journal for a hormone treatment for menopausal women, featuring a close-up of a woman’s face in obvious pain.
Figure 11. Yvonne Rainer’s The Man Who Envied Women (courtesy of Yvonne Rainer)
This collage is a surface which is the opposite of the screen in the therapy session, and the visual opposition parallels the opposition between the man’s voice and the woman’s voice. For the man’s voice, so dominant during the therapy sessions (literally in Jack Deller’s pronouncements, figuratively in the patriarchal “voice” that speaks in the representations of women), is muted during most of the conversations that take place around the series of images on the wall. To be sure, Jack Deller’s voice is heard discussing the images, but it carries much less narrative authority than in the therapy scenes in front of the screen. The collage is not so anchored to the consciousness of one individual man, as the movie screen is. Yet, at the same time, the two surfaces—the movie screen and the wall—have much in common. Both become screen surfaces through which some kind of opening is possible—the collage through conversation, the movie screen through ironic commentary.
Indeed, in the course of The Man Who Envied Women, ironic commentary becomes another form of conversation. But there is another difference between the two surfaces, in terms of what they show. The movie screen is largely a funcition of the patriarchal unconscious, and so the manipulation of the image, and its relationship to Jack Deller, become means for the female subject of disrupting patriarchal hegemony. There is another kind of return of the repressed in the collage: the horrible image of the corpses and severed heads, a brutal reminder of a political reality which may well be patriarchal, but in relationship to which the female voice-over is potentially complicit, to the extent that she is white, North American, and, even in her presumably marginal status as an artist, complicit with the gentrification of New York neighborhoods.
The Man Who Envied Women threatens at many moments to “break down”; that is, one of its most distinct characteristics is the disruption of any possibility of seamless flow. Nonetheless, there is one particularly crucial disruption in relationship to the “screen tests” performed by the film. The first conversation between Martha Rosier and Yvonne Rainer about the collage comes to a halt as Rosier comments on the photograph of decapitation (“It’s really hard to look at this picture. . . .It’s really awful . . .”).35 It is interesting in this context that the final spoken words of the film belong to Martha Rosier. In response to Yvonne Rainer’s question (spoken, of course, in voice-over) “If this were an art work, how would you critique it?” Rosier responds in a contradictory way. On the one hand, she says, she would feel manipulated by the progression of images, suggesting as they do that “the problems of daily life are only a veneer over the truth that the state destroys people.” What such a manipulation of images masks, says Rosier, is that “it is a matter of interest whether men are or are not presented as hard surfaces that exude the smell of success from their very physical appearance. . . .”On the other hand, however, the strength and horror of that one photograph are such that even Rosier’s own commentary about the problem of manipulation becomes hopelessly inadequate (“But this image is so strong that I can’t. . . I can only wince and it makes it really difficult to think about the other stuff once I get to this”).
The “screen tests” of The Man Who Envied Women function in several complex ways. The screen is a site for the projection of male fantasies about women, but also for various kneadings, pullings, proddings, and teasings about those fantasies that occur primarily through the female voice but also through the various manipulations of the images. In more general terms, the aesthetic preoccupation in the film with translucent surfaces speaks to the desire to see beyond the frame of immediate and visible projection, the desire for a kind of absent presence. Yet that desire for simultaneous separation and merging does not assume a position of “other” to patriarchal consciousness, and this is where the “conversation” in the film, between the screen and the collage, is so crucial.
For however much The Man Who Envied Women may focus on the difficulty, even on the impossibility, of relationships between men and women—on, that is, the various “screens” that separate them—the film articulates as well the alternative possibility of conversation among women as a privileged site of theoretical reflection. In some ways, the different choruses of women’s voices in Rainer’s film evoke the “citation” of women directors in Helke Sander’s Redupers, and as in Sander’s film, the women who are cited are part of a community of female artists. This is not to say that The Man Who Envied Women establishes an opposition between heterosexual and homosocial (if not homosexual) worlds—it resists such neat oppositions. Rather, the opposing fantasies of men and women (which are staged so hilariously and even somewhat poignantly in the extremely dense dialogue between Jack Deller and Jackie Raynal in the last section of the film) can be read, disentangled, although never quite dissected or dispensed with, only through a dialogue among women. Within that female dialogue reside the possibilities for rescreening the fictions of male and female desire.
All four of the films discussed in this chapter propose “screen tests” as visual and narrative figures for female narration. The figure of the screen ranges from the literal film screen foregrounded in Illusions and The Man Who Envied Women, to the more metaphoric evocations of the screen, through billboard photographs and curtains, in Redupers, or through the white painting in I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. The screen tests performed by these films embody a desire to engage ambivalence and contradiction, but to do so in a way that resists the dual traps of co-optation and recuperation, on the one hand, endless circulation within and attendant containment by the field of binary opposition, on the other. The signifying power of female-to-female bonds is central to all of the films. But unlike those to be discussed in the next two chapters, which are concerned with the relationship between female authorship and lesbian desire, the group of films discussed in this chapter do not take as their principal point of departure an erotics of female desire.
To be sure, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing brings lesbianism center stage in the relationships between women that it foregrounds, but sexual relationships between women are subordinate to how questions of power, authority, and desire are negotiated. Nonetheless, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing could be read, among these four films, as occupying one end of Adrienne Rich’s controversial lesbian continuum ranging from explicit and exclusive lesbianism to female friendship, with the other three located on other points of the continuum.36 Yet despite the different placements of these films on such a continuum, they share a bracketing of women’s relationships with men. Men appear only as stereotypes, absences, or afterthoughts in I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, Illusions (Mignon’s lover is in the service; the white soldier is a catalyst), and Redupers (Edda appears in only a few perfunctory scenes with her male lover); and while men are excessively visible in The Man Who Envied Women, what the film foregrounds first and foremost is precisely the ironic process of bracketing them.
In all of the films, communities of women—from the friendship between the two black women in Illusions to the trio in I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, from the women’s photography group in Redupers to the conversations among women in The Man Who Envied Women—are explored for their signifying capacities in both aesthetic and political terms. It has become too easy an assumption in feminist theory (particularly that theory desribing itself as “antiessentialist”) that such affirmations of female friendship and female communities entail of necessity an impossible and utopian return to the Lacanian imaginary, or a simple reversal of (male) oedipal priorities in favor of (female) pre-oedipal ones, or a romantic affirmation of the maternal as a refuge from the difficulties of the patriarchal, symbolic universe. I will not claim that the lure of female friendship as a retreat from patriarchy is totally absent, or refuted by these films. More significant is that they acknowledge that lure, and acknowledge simultaneously the irony that relationships between women are at once contained by the (false) symmetries of male/female, paternal/maternal, heterosexual/homosexual identities, and suggestive of other formulations of identity, relationships, and representation. Lesbianism may, of course, be one such formulation, but what characterizes the screen tests of these films is a tentativeness about the possibility of re-placement. A point of great difficulty in feminist theory has been the relationship between female communities and lesbianism.37 A disavowal of the relationship between the two, and of the necessarily erotic charge in any definition of community, smacks of homophobia; while an affirmation of the relationship can deny the very specific struggles of lesbians within female and feminist communities.38
To define lesbianism as the entire spectrum of connections between women, or to return to a phrase such as “women-identified women” (which had its political usefulness at a certain historical point within feminism), avoids the tension. At the conclusion of The Man Who Envied Women, Trisha articulates the necessity for another way to describe herself in these terms:
Lately I’ve been thinking yet again: I can’t live without men, but I can live without a man. I’ve had this thought before, but this time the idea is not colored by stigma, or despair, or finality. I know there will sometimes be excruciating sadness. But I also know something is different now. Something in the direction of unwomanliness. Not a new woman, not non-woman or misanthropist, or anti-woman, and not non-practicing Lesbian. Maybe unwoman is also the wrong term. A-woman is closer. A-womanly. A-womanliness.39
While these words evoke a number of tensions and conflicts, particularly interesting in the present context is the ironic fact that in dismissing “non-practicing Lesbian” as a potential name for herself, Trisha here evokes (as de Lauretis, Fischer, and Rainer herself have pointed out) Monique Wittig’s claim that “Lesbians are not women.”40 But Trisha’s “citation” of Wittig maintains a tension between “a-womanliness” as what is produced between the cracks of patriarchal discourse, on the one hand, and what has been barely nameable, on the other.
This group of films is thus weakest—or strongest, depending upon your point of view—in terms of closure. To be sure, these films are more oriented toward the “process” that has been celebrated in so many variations of contemporary theory and artistic practice; toward, that is, a notion of subject positioning that emphasizes production rather than product. The question of closure, however, seems to me most pertinent in these films, not in the standard opposition of competing notions of subjecthood but rather in terms of how those competing notions of subjecthood coexist within the subject. Put another way, the difficulty of closure in these films speaks, not to a fully coherent “patriarchal subject” against which the female subject is defined, but rather to how the female subject is both complicit with the fictions of patriarchy and resistant to them. This difference is crucial in order to resist facile praise of “open-endedness” as a value in its own right—or, for that matter, ambiguity and ambivalence as qualities to be pursued, whatever their points of reference, whatever their contexts.
Although the terms of the films are different, they share the preoccupation with ambivalence as simultaneously a refusal to prioritize and an inevitable component of female subjectivity under patriarchy. But rather than simply affirm this simulatenous impossibility and necessity, these films attempt to articulate ambivalence in a critical and potentially empowering way. There is nothing resembling an easy “solution,” no blueprint, no simple imposition of a Lacanian-inspired “third term” to contain ambivalence within the imaginary order and facilitate passage into the symbolic. That these films take the screen as such a significant figure marks the importance of a feminist practice of cinematic narration in which it is possible to speak simultaneously of what the classical cinema represents and what it represses. For however fractured the narratives of these films, and to whatever differing degrees, they share the desire to appropriate forms of narrative associated with the classical cinema to the representation of female desire.
In her discussion of contemporary women authors and their relationship to the codes of romantic fiction, specifically in relationship to “endings,” Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes: “An ending in which one part of a structuring dialectic is repressed is a way of reproducing in a text the sense of juridical or social limits for females of one class, when that class ideology encourages striving behavior for males. Yet when that closure is investigated, the repressed element is present in shadowy form.”41 Although the context to which I refer in this chapter is different, the aims are quite similar. For these “screen tests” explore the limits of the interface between spectacle and narrative, and in so doing seek to “investigate” the elements that are repressed, marginalized, or otherwise displaced in classical film narrative. The metaphor of the screen serves not to replace one sense of “screen” (what is made invisible) with another (the luminous, white space of consciousness) but to produce a kind of narration that can account for both. To “account for both” does not mean to establish a static duality, but rather to account for their interdependence and the tension between them.
Redupers affirms the subversive potential of women’s image-making in relationship to the divided city of Berlin, but the potential is held in check by the power of habit and institutions. In Julie Dash’s Illusions, the friendship between the two black women who share fantasies about the possibilities of motion pictures does not displace or in any way triumph over the politics of the white film industry; rather, it is only in the constant negotiation of both, the film suggests, that any kind of black women’s cinema is possible. Rozema’s I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing posits a female world of desire and image-making with specifically lesbian contours, not as an idyllic retreat from the world of men and power but as a complex set of relations of vision and power that exist both within that world and outside it. Rainer’s The Man Who Envied Women is a theoretical take on the process of appropriation and complicity, resistance and investment central to all of these films. The two kinds of screen surfaces in the film, the movie screen and the collage—like the contradictory meanings of the screen evoked in this group of films—are demonstrations of patriarchal fantasies of femininity, and are at the same time permeable, open to the effects of feminist interrogation.
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