v^ual Pleasure and Narrate =j v Cinema* • Written m coi her I INTRODUCTION (a) A Political Use of Psychoanalysis tu- r intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and hou S'asdnation of film is reinforced by pre-existing; patterns of fascination ^adv at work within the individual subject and the social formation, that have moulded him. It takes as its starting-point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretatior of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form. The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated women to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as linchpin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies. Recent writing in Screen about psychoanalysis and the cinema has not sufficiently brought out the importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolic order m which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else ulcT™™ defly: the function of woman in forming the patriarchal ^^1^^ She symbolises the castration threat by symboUc on- u S and secondly hereby raises her child into the ^ an end ItdLl ^ achi^d, her meaning in the process* cna. it does not last inf« *i_______t * ,, .9 r —„t as of th"t,phlai*). Wrl , posite<< on n»T ^ "Vernal plenitude and into the sienifier of her o*> P (the condition, she imagines, of entry in* 14 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema ymbolic). Hither she must gracefully give way to the word, the name i the father and the law, or else struggle to keep her child down with er in the half-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal ulture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in hich man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic immatul by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to or place as bearer, not maker, of meaning. There is an obvious interest in this analysis for feminists, a beauty in its exact rendering of the frustration experienced under the phallocentric order. It gets us nearer to the roots of our oppression, it brings closer ,111 .irtuul.ition of the problem, it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed critically .it the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within the language of the patriarchy? There is no way in which we can produce .in alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is nut the only but an important one. We are still separated by a great gap from important issues for the female unconscious which are scarcely relevant to phallocentric theory: the sexing of the female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the sexually mature woman as non-mother, maternity outside the signification of the phallus, the vagina. But, at this point, psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught, (b) Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions about the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. Cinema has changed over the last few decades. It is no longer the monolithic system based on large capital investment exemplified at its best by Hollywood in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Technological advances (16mm and so on) have changed the economic conditions of cinematic production, which can now be artisanal as well as capitalist Thus it has been possible for an alternative cinema to develop. However self-conscious and ironic Hollywood managed to be, it always restricted itself to a formal mise en sc«*w reflecting the dominant ideological concept of the cinema. The alternative cinema provides a space for the birth of a cinema which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic Mmimptiona of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moralistically, but to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupa-liniiH reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it ■'•ui, further, to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically • „, and assumptions. A politically «inst these obsession8*" jbIe/ bu, lt can still 0n|l is ^ jading aga-ns'ecinemaIS now 1 ^ aesthetically avant q[ rf| ^ fc w£h iX** its sphere ot*^ ^ satisfying manipulation p —■ «™*t. from its ;____fi)m coded the erolJC jm b T£ Sam to coded the erotic int0 J ^ dere,oped J the language of through these codes hat the alienated Hollywood cinema it was o. j' b a sense of loss, by the terror u subject, torn ir.ne near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction of potential ackin fantasy, his formative obsessions of that erotic pleasure in fil, { TSnL and, in particular, the central place of the image of woman. ■ It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the c intention of this article. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the egc f that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked, ( Not in favour of a reconstructed new pleasure, which cannot exist in i the abstract, nor of intellectualised unpleasure, but to make way for i 1 total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film 1 The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind < without simply rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive tonus, M and daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire. II PLEASURE IN LOOKING/FASCINATION Willi THE HUMAN ■ FORM A The (pleasureTn*™ IT"1*' oi V°"M* pleasures. One is scopophilia a source of pleasure iust ?rcumsta,»«*s in which looking itself is j» being looked at Ori^n" the.teverse formation, there is pleasure ^«P^,S[; his Th™ £ss«yS an Sexuality, Freud «wt as drives quite ind < V „ ™™F*nent instincts of sexuality which fc^ At this point 8^»nhe„ nSllC ac,iv"ies chin "U P"rtici,lar e*amPles cen"e ^^&^«"rt*kuTte ,heir **ire to see and make ?*WUUy 2/**« the Prim,l V °r a^-»tv ol tin- ,vnis a«J Beni^.u„„ . mi"rVol.w—.'™!">lts and Tlv.ir v; .;....:....£«■ FreuJ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 17 is transferred to others. There is a close working here of the relationship between the active instinct and its further development in a narcissistic form.) Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for leasure in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it can ecome fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and eeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, an active controlling sense, an objectified other. At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen on the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy. Moreover the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer. B The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world. Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognises its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego. Several aspects of this analysis are relevant here. The mirror phase occurs at a time when children's physical ambitions outstrip their motor capacity, with the result that their recognition of themselves is joyous in that they imagine their mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than they experience in their own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition: the image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, hut its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, prepares the way for identification with others in the future. This mirror moment predates language for the child. . f rt tbat it is an '™*%e that constitut*s ^ ImpoitantforthisarHcte^f ignition and identjfe^ Jtroftheimaginary;of^ ^ ^ of subjectlv,ty, j am„d hence of the ft** with looking (at the mother's faQ moment when an 0,der s with the initial inklings of SeIf for an obvious examP'e' ^ q( the ]0ng love affair/despair betwee, awareness. Hence it is tne rf ^ intensity 0f expression ir tmage and self-image wh*h ^ Q^ film and such W™"?^ between screen and mirror (the framin, from the extraneous sirmlanftes Wl™ instance) the cinema hi of the human form in its surroundings, for instance;, tne cinema structures o fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of cgc while simultaneously reinforcing it, The sense of forgetting the work as the ego has come to perceive it (I forgot who I am and where I was is nostalgically reminiscent of that pre-subjective moment of image recognition. While at the same time, the cinema has distinguished itse in the production of ego ideals, through the star system for instance Stars provide a focus or centre both to screen space and screen story where they act out a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the ordinary), C Sections A and B have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation. The first scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophiha), the other demands identification of the ego with the objecl l^^rVr°Ugh the sP^rts fascination with and recognition libl Thf« PI* 3 fUnCd°n °f the sexual insti^s, the second of S-Si^S each tension between both ^fi^^T^ - *™ ot Pleasure, M themselves thev havP n , aniSms with°u* intrinsic meaning. ^ Both pursue aims in i^ft *tl0n'unless attached to an idealisation-eroticised phantas™ll„ l"![ence to Perceptual reality, and motivate ^to^^T,*11* affect subject's perception of ** ,^ngitsh™^/^ fusion of reality in J^wu S€ems to h*™ evolved a particular h** found a beautiful 7 ? Contradi<*ion between libido and f world of the entaty fanta*y world> In mm ' ^iinSdnasa"didS « SUbjeCt to the ,aw ^"ich produces i sy^bohc order which arhcuf ^ Pr°^SSes have * meaning within *< ^hculates desire. Desire, born with tongue but of bee = tan fil th TTi no de er> co Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema Vi allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallises this paradox. Ill WOMAN AS IMAGE, MAN AS BEARER OF THE LOOK A In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combines spectacle and narrative. (Note, however, how in the musical song-and-dance numbers interrupt the flow of the diegesis.) The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it: What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance. {A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this problem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell has called the 'buddy movie', in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without distraction.) Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the device of the show-girl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative; the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the Vo-/ (mi OOtr Ptae""* 20 ^,Hme and space. Thus Marilyr Monk's «»«appearance "J1"*""* ^ventional close-ups of le. * song, in To H«* ** *Nl!"^^",«rate into the narrative ■ (Di&ch. for instance) or a f~ <^/a^p„ented body destro, a' different mode of eroticism. On* pan o o- the n am)tn ,he Rena^nce^ the ilhwon fc7wM*tud. £ j. gives flatness, the quality o( a cut-out or icon, rawer „ to the screen. B An active/passive heterosexual division of << controlled narrative structure. According to the I 3 woman as main protagonist y Phen°>"enon seriously here would take n I b T Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 21 too far afield. Pam Cook and Claire Johnston's study of The Revolt of Mamie Stover in Phil Hardy (ed.), Raoul Walsh (Edinburgh, 1974), shows in a striking case how the strength of this female protagonist is more apparent than real.) CI Sections III A and B have set out a tension between a mode of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis. Each is associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment (connoting male fantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This tension and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a single text. Thus both in Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and Have Not, the film opens with the woman as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.) But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the visually ascertainable absence of the penis, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence overvaluation, the cult of the fCTh!s second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something The Lt avenue, voyeurism, on the ^ntraryf .ss^Uons with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately assorted with Visual and Other Pleasures rtrrol and subjugating the guilty person t},r(l!| tration), asserting con ^ side fits in wcl] with naJw v ^ punishment *^ edepends on making something happen, Um the. Sadism demands a story, ^ of wi]1 and slrengih, victory/d* f, Into a change in another pe«, ^ fl beginning and an end. Fetish,,,,, *ft« all occurring in a "m*a hand/ can exist outside linear time a8 t}> ■ scotophilia, on tfteo ^ ^ ^ g]one TheS€ contradictk)m ^ « erotic instinct is^ocu ^ s-mply by using works by Hitches lW ambiguities can De iii ^ ^ fhe {Qok ajmost as the contcp( ^ and Sternberg, Dotn ^ Hitchcock is the more comph "^"^ffiton.. Sternberg's work, on the other hand ^ r the feti C2 Sternberg once said he would welcome his films being projects vo, upside-down so that story and character involvement would not inters tht with the spectator's undiluted appreciation of the screen image. Thi pa statement is revealing but ingenuous: ingenuous in that his filmn d tht demand that the figure of the woman (Dietrich, in the cycle of film; to with her, as the ultimate example) should be identifiable; but reveal in, wc in that it emphasises the fact that for him the pictorial space enclosed rig by the frame is paramount, rather than narrative or identificatiui Pfl processes. While Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism a 1 Sternberg produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the °* powerful look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional ld narrative film) is broken in favour of the image in direct erotic rapport P* with the spectator. The beauty of the woman as object and the screen hl space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product. J whose body stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the d: film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look. U to be^^-dT iHU9i0n °( SCreen d*Pth- hia ten* b ^-^3^ ~ ***** <* * of the look through^^^!^Th«toHHIeorm»imrfi-^ contrary,shadowy^presenc^iik!i n ^ male Pro^gonist. On the for the director, detached a 1 Bessi*re in Morocco act as surrogate Despite Sternberg's insisted *tV *™ hom aud»ence identification significant that they are "?* hia stories a^ irrelevant, it * cyclical rather than linear nrnf^ ^ situa«°*V not suspense, and ^^^^troUli^^^^J^ The most important absence* [lcoon. There are other J *he at>sence of the man * Witnesses, other spectators watch"* Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 23 her on the screen, their gaze is one with, not standing in for, that of the audience. At the end of Morocco, Tom Brown has already disappeared into the desert when Amy Jolly kicks off her gold sandaJs and walks after him. At the end of Dishonoured, Kranau is indifferent to the fate of Magda. In both cases, the erotic impact, sanctified by death, is displayed as a spectacle for the audience. The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not see. In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely what the audience sees. However, although fascination with an image through scopophilic eroticism can be the subject of the film, it is the role of the hero to portray the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator. In Vertigo in particular, but also in Mamie and Rear Window, the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination. Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and non-cinematic. His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law - a policeman (Vertigo), a dominant male possessing money and power (Marnie) - but their erotic drives lead them into compromised situations. The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanalytically speaking). True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness - the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong. Hitchcock's skilful use of identification processes and liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share his uneasy gaze. The spectator is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegesis, which parodies his own in the cinema. In an analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema. Jeffries is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen. As he watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image to the drama. His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so long as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their relationship is reborn eroticalJy. He does not merely watch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful image, he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening her with punishment, and thus fmaJly giving him the opportunity to save her. Lisa's exhibitionism has already been established by her obsessive interest in dress and style, in being; a passive image of visual perfection; Jeffries'* voyeurism and actfvtt)'have also been established through his work as a P*?^^' of stories and captor of images. However, his enforced inactivity, ipectaWr, Pu« him " **" portion of .he **T ^ predominates. Apart from one flashbact T (n V ♦ ro here is fiTm,y p,aced within the i^^n^^^ H* has the attributes of lb security by th^p^^ MM into a false sense oi finds himself exposed fJ ^ ^S su™gate, sees through his look °f looking. Far from bet, ^ ™ the moral ambiguity th* Police, Vertigo focuses L^P? an *Side °n perversion d P^ive/looked-at epfc *™ *e '^cations of the active/looking. Jto pC rMc -nf TUu1 difference ™<* the power of ^Rutland's gaze aP^ W»the hero. Mamie, too, performs f* he ^ and th^l* fe ^ * the act of committing' il with crime as as ^ acts nnt jl and thus u X acT ot continuum Word^can ,hC ^Ho?J??te- So he- ^o, becomes comply ^^Wehiscakean^0^ power. He controls money ^ Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 25 IV SUMMARY The psychoanalytic background that has been discussed in this article is relevant to the pleasure and unpleasure offered by traditional narrative film. The scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object) and, in contradistinction, ego libido {forming identification processes) act as formations, mechanisms, which mould this cinema's formal attributes. The actual image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the content and structure of representation, adding a further layer of ideological significance demanded by the patriarchal order in its favourite cinematic form - illusionistic narrative film. The argument must return again to the psychoanalytic background: women in representation can signify castration, and activate voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent this threat. Although none of these interacting layers is intrinsic to film, it is only in the film form that they can reach a perfect and beautiful contradiction, thanks to the possibility in the cinema of shifting the emphasis of the look. The place of the look defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, striptease, theatre, shows and so on. Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged. To begin with (as an ending), the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience. Without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth. Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and and Other Pl*surtS ,rtrU of illusion — present in tim< «— ^t,^t ^rSSc^ of the ■^riSU ffar placing an illusion, intrusive, static, taak compatible with the human ey^ £.....ss.......*^*>**Zr£Z**l» *">und Perception , lh(. suhj,vt, the camera a look■» « can perf0rm with vensimihti* world in which the spectator «is ^ jg denied an intrinsic force:, s„milt.hh-.u.sly, the iook o 11 ^ femjj]e image threatens to br«ai won « utUhistic «P^"™" ic image on the screen appears direct), ,lk. „,,11 of illusion andthe fact of fetishisation, concealing (without mediation) to the spctato ^ >^ it dous Lustration fear, rrecze:. iv i r £m£ him torn achieving any distance from the .mage in front o, This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film convention* (already undertaken by radical film-makers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment. There is no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the 'invisible guest and highlights the way film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms. Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret.