A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film

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A Feminine Cinematics Luce Irigaray, Women and Film

Caroline Bainbridge

A Feminine Cinematics

Also by Caroline Bainbridge CULTURE AND THE UNCONSCIOUS (co-edited with S. Radstone, M. Rustin and C. Yates, 2007) THE CINEMA OF LARS VON TRIER: Authenticity and Artifice (2007)

A Feminine Cinematics Luce Irigaray, Women and Film

Caroline Bainbridge Reader in Visual Culture, Roehampton University, London, UK

© Caroline Bainbridge 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–55348–4 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–55348–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bainbridge, Caroline, 1970– A feminine cinematics : Luce Irigaray, women and film / Caroline Bainbridge. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–55348–4 (alk. paper) 1. Women and motion pictures. 2. Women in motion pictures. 3. Feminist films – History and criticism. 4. Feminist film criticism. 5. Irigaray, Luce – Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1995.9.W6B295 2009 791.43082—dc22 2008024576 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

This book is for my parents, Mary and Ed, and in memory of Edie, Eddie and Dave, with love

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1 Reading the Feminine with Irigaray

8

2 Spectatorship, Cinematic Strategy and Mediation

32

3 Practising the Feminine: Contexts of Production, Direction and Reception

61

4 Fantasy and the Feminine: Female Perversions and Under the Skin

77

5 Screening Parler Femme: Silences of the Palace, Antonia’s Line and Faithless

99

6 Orlando and the Maze of Gender

125

7 Riddles of the Feminine in The Piano

155

8 Impossible Differences: Slippages and Auguries

184

Notes

197

Filmography

206

Bibliography

207

Index

217

vii


Acknowledgements This book has evolved over many years and has moved with me between institutions. I am grateful to colleagues at the Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies at the University of Sheffield, where many of the ideas underpinning this book were conceived. Special thanks are due to Prof. Sue Vice, whose teaching, friendship and support have been unstinting, and also to Dr Deborah Marks and Prof. Bob Young. Subsequently, I have received support and encouragement from colleagues in Arts and Media at BCUC, Psychosocial Studies at UEL, and the School of Arts at Roehampton University. I am especially grateful to the School of Arts at Roehampton and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the research leave which enabled this book to be completed. Parts of Chapters 2 and 5 appear in a different form in an article published in Paragraph, vol. 25, no. 3 (2002). I am grateful to Edinburgh University Press for permission to reproduce some of that material here. I owe many thanks to numerous friends for convivial fun and frolics during the long period of time that this book has been taking shape. Special thanks to Dr Anita Biressi, Dr Heather Nunn and Dr Candida Yates whose spirit, collegiality, laughter and friendship have given me heart. I must also thank Dr Richard Carmichael, Freddy Hamilton, Jonty Hayes, Dr Ashley Morgan, Katharine Pincham, Glenn Shadbolt, and Sarah Smith for many years of dinner, drinks and silly fun. Dr Andrea Esser, Dr Deborah Jermyn and Dr Paul Rixon have also been good friends as this book has come to an end, as has Tim Charlton. Lastly, I must thank my family, especially my parents, Mary and Ed Bainbridge, and my sister, brother-in-law and nephew, Nicki, Ed and Ewan Chacksfield. They have always been there for me, no matter what, and their love and support has been crucial. Thank you. The Publishers wish to state that they have made every effort to contact the copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

ix


Introduction

Luce Irigaray’s extensive work has recently enjoyed something of a renaissance with a smattering of translations of her most recent work appearing in English (1983/1999; 1994/2000; 1994/2001; 1999/2002a; 2002b; 1985/2002c) and a number of monographs sketching the ongoing interest her work holds for feminists interested in the politics and philosophy of the feminine (Deutscher, 2002; Ives, 2003; Krappala, 2000; Martin, 2000; Stone, 2006), as well as a special issue of Paragraph: A Journal for Modern Critical Theory arising from a conference in the UK dedicated to Irigaray’s work, in which Irigaray herself participated (Irigaray (ed.), 2002). This more extensive availability of Irigaray’s thought inevitably leads to a deeper interest in how engagements with culture (in all its forms) might profit from taking on board the politics of her philosophy. This book sets out to do this in relation to women’s cinema. Irigaray’s elaboration of the difficulties and potentialities of the feminine and a politics of sexual difference seems very pertinent to discussions around the status of women in film, and this book makes a specific link to a series of woman-directed films that appeared during the 1990s in which the cultural politics of gender was placed centre-frame. This book takes as its starting point an engagement with recent work done in film theory on the question of gender and spectatorship and attempts to signal how Irigaray’s work opens up new possibilities for thinking through issues of representation, spectatorship and authorship. This book, then, is an attempt to set out the textual-political value of Irigaray’s work and also to signal how this work provides a useful insight into the broader context of women’s film-making. This seems particularly important in the current theoretical moment of film theory, when debates about the ‘auteur’ are resurfacing with particular reference to women’s film-making (see, for example, Ramanathan, 2006). 1

2

A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women & Film

This book diverges from the contemporary scene of feminist film theory by attempting to rethink feminist approaches to cinema through the work of a philosopher who is frequently misread and misrepresented. Many titles in feminist film theory engage with a notion of the feminine that is predicated on absence and/or lack. This is especially true of film texts that use psychoanalytic theory as a paradigm for the analysis of gender and difference more widely. Consequently, many of the key texts on women and film might be seen to neglect the specificity of women and the feminine. A recent article in Screen by Alison Butler (2000) highlights the incongruent aspects of such feminist approaches to film at the turn of the century and urges feminist film theorists to seek out new methods of engaging with film. She draws attention to the large number of films released during the 1990s that were made by female directors and pitched at and enjoyed by (predominantly) female audiences. The shift in approach advocated by Butler has parallels with the project being set out here. Irigaray has been a key figure in feminist literary theory, yet her work has not been used extensively in relation to film. Irigaray is often discussed under the heading of ‘French feminism’ or ‘écriture féminine’ despite the very clear-cut differences between her work and that of others such as Julia Kristeva, Michelle Montrelay, Michelle Le Doeuff and Hélène Cixous. In particular, Irigaray’s work focuses on the specificity of the feminine and how symbolic discourses of gender and sexuality traditionally diminish this through their insistence on repressing and disavowing the feminine in culture, language and subjectivity. The focus of her work has its basis in sexual difference as a defining category of subjectivity. She argues extensively for the specificity of the feminine and a sexual/textual/psychical/philosophical/spiritual economy in which the feminine is defined in and for itself. Irigaray does not argue for a writing of the female body (despite the claims made by some literary theorists); she argues for the need to speak the feminine, to articulate it and to give it room for enunciation. Cinema arguably provides a cultural arena in which to begin to explore these ideas and to put them into practice. Irigaray’s work thus becomes apposite to the challenge laid down by Butler to find new ways of approaching the seemingly vexed question of the relationship between women, the feminine and cinema. This focus here, then, is on the relevance of the work of Luce Irigaray to feminist film theory and criticism. The chapters that follow take up the question of what it is possible to understand by the term ‘feminine subjectivity’ and how this finds new avenues of expression and reception through recent films by women. The book sets out to address

Introduction 3

both narrative content and film-form to highlight the importance of reconceptualizing the theorization of the feminine in cinema. It also raises important questions about the specificity of women’s political engagement with film, considering this in relation to contexts of direction, production and reception. While the opening chapter briefly discusses the phenomenon of ‘girl power’ and its impact on recent cinema seen in the release of films such as Tank Girl (Rachel Talalay, US, 1995), the majority of this book is structured around detailed readings of eight independent films, each of which is directed by a woman. Chapter 2 considers the historical and contemporary backdrop of feminist film theory while Chapter 3 examines the contextual elements of these films’ production in more depth. Chapter 4 examines Female Perversions (Susan Streitfeld, US, 1995) and Under the Skin (Carine Adler, UK, 1997) in the context of fantasy, while Chapter 5 centres on how cinema might be seen to speak (as) woman in Silences of the Palace (Saimt el Qusur) (Moufida Tlatli, Tunisia, 1994), Antonia’s Line (Marleen Gorris, Netherlands, 1995) and Faithless (Trolösa) (Liv Ullmann, Sweden, 2000). There are very detailed readings of Orlando (Sally Potter, UK, 1993) and The Piano (Jane Campion, NZ, 1993) in subsequent chapters that point toward the richness of reading cinema through an Irigarayan lens. Some of the pitfalls of an exclusively sexual emphasis on the importance of difference in women’s culture and politics are set out in the closing chapter, where there is further discussion of Silences of the Palace as well as a brief examination of work emerging from the Iranian context in the form of The Apple (Sib) (Samira Makhmalbaf, Iran, 1998). The choice of these film texts relates, in the first instance, to thematic concerns around aspects of gender. The feminine and the specificity of women constitute important aspects of plot and narrative in each of these films. Irigaray’s work calls for cultural critics to take on the challenge of seeking out texts that grapple with issues of the feminine, and it seems to me that these texts foreground how this might be done. There are very specific aspects of the feminine which are of interest to Irigaray and which (coincidentally) are represented within the film texts examined here. These include notions of female genealogy and the female imaginary; the question of woman’s association with nature and/or with madness; the difficulty of language and discourse; the cultural determination of what constitutes the feminine; masquerade and mimesis; structures of enunciation and subjectivity; sexuality and mediation. The broader question of the gaze combines with issues of desire and subjectivity within each of these film texts and their effect on the spectator.

4


Secondly, several of the directors discussed here are women who have had extensive involvement in feminist film-making (Potter, Gorris and Campion). The films under scrutiny in this book represent a shift in the film-making objectives of these women, involving as they do a move toward the mainstream. Spectatorial and narrative pleasures become central here, because these films reached a wider audience as a result of their more mainstream focus. How does this impact on their effectiveness? Are the film-makers compromised in their politics due to this shift, or is it rather the case that the films become more political because they reach wider audiences? Other directors examined here make specific reference to feminism: in Female Perversions, Streitfeld draws on Louise Kaplan’s monograph of the same title (Kaplan, 1991); Tlatli’s interest in women’s liberation in Tunisia is fundamental to the genesis of the film; Adler’s work on sisterhood, relations between mothers and daughters and notions of female sexuality, madness and violence clearly relates to a number of key feminist ideas and Adler acknowledges Estela V. Welldon’s work (1988) as a key source for her writing; Ullmann is known for her work as a prominent actor on the art house scene (working especially with Ingmar Bergman) and has turned to film as a mode of reflection and commentary on the role of women in cinema and within the imaginations and fantasies of men; more recently, Samira Makhmalbaf has emerged in the context of a swathe of Iranian films, many of which foreground gender in their narratives. Working under the auspices of her father’s company, Makhmalbaf has acknowledged the formative experience of the restrictions and limitations imposed on women in Iranian society and the effect that this has had on her work. Each of the films discussed here has its roots in feminism and/or independent cinema. It is interesting that these films emerged during and shortly after the 1990s as popular accounts of feminism begin to use terms such as ‘post-feminist’ and ideas about ‘new feminism’ began to be promulgated by writers such as Natasha Walter (1999). The films provide a snapshot of the socio-political mood in relation to feminism as a movement in this context. This book also offers a number of theoretical perspectives on Irigaray’s writings, theories of spectatorship and questions of textuality in the cinema. The chapters are organized around key themes in Irigaray’s extensive work. Chapter 1 sets out a theoretical overview of Irigaray’s work, situating and contextualizing it in relation to feminist film theory more broadly. Key concepts and themes are defined and explored in an effort to show their relevance to engagements with cinema. Of crucial

Introduction 5

importance here is the move made by Irigaray from critique to politics/ praxis. In a way, this move provides a model for the structure of the book as a whole, with the opening chapter interrogating traditional representations of the feminine and focusing on films that parody these. Subsequent chapters grapple with films that are motivated in more starkly political ways, foregrounding the scope of Irigaray’s work for thinking through cinema. Chapter 2 analyses a number of theoretical aspects of film. Setting out an overview of the debates around female spectatorship and women in film more broadly, it then seeks to build on work done by Mayne (1993) on how it might be possible to take forward ideas about active female spectatorship. Irigaray’s work on mediation broadly refers to the need to construct an interval or ‘between space’ in which it is possible to locate the other in its own right. For film theory, it is argued, this has a bearing on theories of spectatorship. Film theory has (like other theories) tended to couch discussions of femininity in terms of otherness. Irigaray’s work on ethics and the importance of mediation raises a number of critical questions about the effects of alterity for the female subject. This chapter uses Irigaray’s ideas to counter the tendency in film theory to discuss the female spectator in terms of otherness and to articulate readings of the feminine that are premised on lack and absence. By formulating a mode of spectatorship which might be understood as ‘osmotic’ in structure, this chapter moves toward the fundamental role played by the notion of mediation in Irigaray’s recent work on ethics with the aim of reconsidering ideas about the female spectator. Chapter 3 sets off from a different perspective, setting out ways of conceptualizing the contextual elements of film and the importance of these for understanding how cinema is able to open up challenging new spaces for theory and criticism. Here, the focus is on the contexts of direction, production and reception, and the chapter draws on Irigaray’s work on gesture and on the need to establish spaces for a woman-towoman sociality in order to move beyond the restrictive confines of symbolic cultural practices. In tandem with the previous two chapters, this discussion sets the ground for the chapters that follow. In Chapter 4, the focus is on the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy and its importance in debates about the representation of women in film. Irigaray’s critique of symbolic discourses of the feminine forms the basis for a detailed analysis Female Perversions and Under the Skin. Through theoretical and critical analysis, the discussion here tries to demonstrate the formal propensity of film to elucidate and articulate female sexuality. The distinction drawn by Irigaray between masquerade and mimesis is

6


crucial in this context and the chapter sets out some of the ways that this distinction intersects with the play on unconscious fantasy in Irigaray’s formulation of the female imaginary. Connections between cinema and fantasy are also explored with a view to illustrating how the cinematic apparatus may lend itself to a radical revisioning of the feminine through the specificity of its own properties. Chapter 5 is driven by Irigaray’s notion of parler femme (often translated as ‘speaking (as) woman’). The central contention here is that women can profit by exchange amongst themselves. Language and processes of enunciation are crucial to Irigaray’s theory and relate very clearly to psychoanalytic theories of the subject. The key film texts in this chapter are Antonia’s Line, Silences of the Palace and Faithless. The intersection of fantasy and the feminine in these films combines with the processes of exchange to produce a distinctively feminine subject. The importance of flashback narrative devices and cinematic structures of enunciation also begin to be examined here, forming the basis for the readings in subsequent chapters. Chapters 6 and 7 extend the scope of the potential of an Irigarayan approach to film by presenting detailed readings of Orlando and The Piano. In my reading of Orlando, there is a focus on space and time, concepts which have played a central role in the history of philosophy and which are essential to cinema. My reading attempts to forge links between film theoretical work on the spectator and the cinematic practice of editing. It also engages with the narrative structure of the film to show how cinema as an institution is a useful forum in which to rework traditional perspectives on gender. Similarly, in my discussion of The Piano, my aim is to structure a detailed analysis of a film text that draws together the key ideas laid out throughout the book. By reading the narrative through fantasy, parler femme, and mediation, and by reading the film-form through space and time, this chapter reads against the grain in an effort to show how feminist film theory can combine critique with politics by highlighting the specificity of the feminine. Key themes here are desire, language and enunciation, and Irigaray’s theorization of the death drive. The latter relates back to pleasure in the cinema, as well as to identification and thus to notions of spectatorship. The closing chapter elaborates the prospective shifts enabled by the readings set out here. It also addresses some of the pitfalls in Irigaray’s work around modalities of difference other than the sexual. Through a return to Silences of the Palace and a brief discussion of The Apple, this chapter shows how differences between women are rather eclipsed in Irigaray’s focus on an economy of sexual difference. In some of her

Introduction 7

most recent writing (1999/2002a), Irigaray suggests that sexual difference provides a basis for thinking through other experiences of difference. This chapter asks whether this claim, which is based in an acceptance of multiculturalism, stands up to scrutiny, drawing attention to how the textual-political elements of women’s film-making often set out to foreground the experience of difference in terms of ethnicity and class as the ultimate terrain for political scrutiny.

1 Reading the Feminine with Irigaray

Luce Irigaray is a theorist whose work has been examined from many different perspectives in the last thirty years. Her work has both been scrutinized by feminists sympathetic to her writings and by those who are more hostile to her engagement with philosophy and psychoanalysis. There is a panoply of views around her work that defies attempts to categorize them. There are three key positions that are commonly held in relation to Irigaray’s work. Certain feminists have challenged Irigaray’s work as (biologically) essentialist. Critics such as Moi (1985), Plaza (1978), Sayers (1982) and Segal (1987) argue that Irigaray’s work is based on a notion of feminine specificity that is somehow grounded in the psychic or material female body. There are, of course, many shortcomings in this approach to Irigaray’s work, perhaps the most important of which is that such analyses miss the very point of Irigaray’s engagement with the monolithic and monological texts of philosophy and psychoanalysis. Important responses to this criticism of Irigaray are made by Fuss (1989), Whitford (1991), Braidotti (2002), Deutscher (2002) and Stone (2006). The critique of essentialism in Irigaray’s work does not take account of the very radical attempts made throughout her work to posit a critique of patriarchy that makes possible a mode of change that has ramifications for notions of gendered subjectivity. In claiming that Irigaray’s work is ahistorical and non-materialist, such accounts reveal the extent to which Irigaray’s work has been dismissed on the basis of misreadings of her earliest texts. As Schor has pointed out, Irigaray is not interested in defining ‘woman’, but is, rather, committed to theorizing feminine specificity in terms that give due consideration to questions of sexual difference (Burke, Schor and whitford, 1994: 66). Secondly, further studies suggest that Irigaray’s work is anti-feminist because of her insistence on the alterity of the feminine within symbolic 8

Reading the Feminine with Irigaray

9

practice. This is, perhaps, most clearly seen in the Lacanian critique which argues that Irigaray attempts to misrepresent Lacan’s teachings (Ragland Sullivan, 1986). This work focuses on the imaginary-centred perspective on Irigaray’s elaboration of the feminine. Taking Lacanian ideas about the non-existence of ‘the the woman’ at face value, such accounts diminish the importance of Irigaray’s ironic and critical engagement with Lacanian thought, taking it rather literally. Thirdly, some feminist commentators have been more willing to engage with the deconstructionist element of Irigaray’s work and use it to uncover the repressive mechanisms used within socio-symbolic praxis to disavow the feminine (Braidotti, 1991; Burke, Schor and Whitford, 1994; Connor, 1992; Deutscher, 2002; Fuss, 1989; Gallop, 1982; Grosz, 1989; Stephenson, 1991; Schwab, 1991; Stone, 2006; and Whitford, 1991). These critics advocate engaging with Irigaray’s thought and discursive style in order to re-vision her work as a ‘philosophy of change’. Most notably, in this respect, feminists such as Grosz, Stone and Whitford have made important arguments in favour of reading Irigaray on her own terms. Whitford has stated that to ask whether Irigaray herself is speaking a masculine or feminine discourse would be to hypostatize a process. To attempt to mine her writing for models of parler femme would be, I think, to miss the point which is that she is initiating a possible dialogue between herself and her readers. ... Her work is offered as an object, a discourse, for women to exchange among themselves, a sort of commodity, so that women themselves do not have to function as the commodity, or as the sacrifice on which sociality is built. (1991: 51–2) Many of Irigaray’s critics have wrestled with her often difficult and challenging work in an attempt to produce an understanding of her objectives that is accessible to feminists struggling for women’s rights and for female subjectivity. The ways in which this has been done are myriad and complex and there are already several overviews of the debate about Irigaray’s work. A number of textual theoreticians have made use of Irigaray for textual/political purposes. The large majority of this work situates Irigaray (often alongside Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous) in the context of écriture féminine (Apter, 1990; Jones, 1981, 1985; Simpson-Zinn, 1985; Worsham, 1991). Yet, as Whitford has pointed out, [t]his reading blurs the differences, both theoretical and political, between the three women. But it also reduces the complexity of

10 A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women & Film

Irigaray’s work to the simplicity of a formula – ‘writing the body’, and conveniently ignores that Irigaray’s brief comments on women and writing in This Sex Which Is Not One have been made to represent more or less the totality of her work. (Whitford (ed.), 1991: 2–3) Many of the critics who label Irigaray as a proponent of écriture féminine do so for two reasons. Firstly, they highlight the very complex stylistic processes at play in Irigaray’s work as an example of ‘writing the body’. Secondly, there is a tendency to seize upon her focus on the question of language and the way it pervades her work as a whole. One of the central tenets of Irigaray’s work is the distinction between the Saussurean categories of langage, langue and parole. In this context, langage refers to the process of language, to the linguistic systems that perpetuate current linguistic practice; langue might be thought of as the actual language available to the speaker at any time (French, English, Swahili); parole refers to language as it is actually used, to speech itself as a material category (Saussure, 1931/1974). Irigaray’s thought appears to centre on the notion of langage, which might be understood as the process of language or the idea of language as a whole. Moreover, it is clear from Irigaray’s work that her interest lies not so much in the logocentric or writing-focused elements of language, but rather in the process of speech itself, of énonciation in the sense elaborated by Benveniste (1966/1971). Enonciation is a term that is best understood in relation to its counterpart, the énoncé. The énoncé refers to the statement itself, what is actually said, to the language itself. Enonciation, by contrast, refers to the process that produces the statement, to how something is said or how the position from which it emanates might be understood.1 The emphasis on questions of énonciation underscores the view that Irigaray does not set out to elaborate a technique of female or feminine writing. Her project does not attempt to address the question of feminine desire through the written text, but rather focuses on the importance of insinuating the feminine into language as a speaking subject-position. For Irigaray, writing constitutes a constraining mechanism. She comments that one of the means through which thought is communicated in the late twentieth century is alphabetical writing. So I use it to communicate even though I think that it is a means that constitutes a limit on what I have to say, particularly as a woman. (Jardine and Menke, 1991: 97–8)


11

It seems strange, then, that Irigaray is so frequently situated as a proponent of écriture féminine when a key aspect of her position argues that written language traps the feminine in a system of phallogocentrism. It therefore prohibits the representation of the feminine as anything other than virgin/mother/whore or ‘the dark continent’, the unseen and unspeakable buried aspect of symbolic practice.2 Irigaray’s work consists of much more than an attempt to ‘write the body’ or merely to inscribe feminine desire onto the discursive body. Her extensive and rigorous critique of western philosophies is far-reaching and effective. Irigaray’s deconstructive approach to the defining texts of the symbolic order exposes masculinist phallogocentric practices and their mechanism for the exclusion of what she calls ‘the feminine’. Irigaray’s work is at once a philosophical tract and a scathing critique of the discourses that form the bedrock of the socio-cultural order (which we might understand in terms of a masculine economy of the same). There is a clear insistence throughout her work on the need to root out some form of what she calls parler femme. Parler femme, for Irigaray is closely linked to the necessity for a female genealogy. It can be understood as the horizontal axis of female relations to the vertical axis of the genealogical relation. It should be understood in terms of the relation of women to other women as women with non-maternally-based feminine identities. For Irigaray, implementing some form of parler femme is as essential to attempts to articulate the feminine as the need to root out the archaeology of the mother–daughter relationship. The reason behind this insistence seems to be that if women can establish a form of their own genealogy and a horizontal relation, then, the representation of the feminine becomes possible. The importance of parler femme in this respect seems to be connected to questions of language and enunciation. The centrality of parler femme to Irigaray’s work as a whole precludes attempts to situate her work within the general sphere of écriture féminine, then.3 Rather, the insistence on the need to formulate a means of speaking (as) woman4 reflects a desire to rework traditional patterns of sexed subjectivity in order to produce the feminine in language. Irigaray is a psychoanalyst, a philosopher and a linguist whose aims centre on the importance of the (un)spoken gendered subject-position. Her work on philosophy, on psychoanalysis and on linguistics finds a common theme in its evocation of those elements of the feminine that are excluded from subjectivity by the very discourses she interrogates. Rather than setting out a model for a form of écriture feminine, the focus is on speaking (as) woman. What, then, are the implications of this for feminists interested in using Irigaray for textual/political practice?

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Questions of representation for Irigaray are bound up with issues of genealogy and subjectivity, as well as with her critique of the dominant metaphysics of presence which focuses on the privileging of the visual and the logocentric within the symbolic order and its discursive and representational systems. Irigaray’s critique of phallogocentrism and her attempts to evoke a feminine imaginary depend on our symbolic notions of what representation is and how it can be constituted. There is a clear concern in her work for the importance of textual practice and praxis, yet there is also, paradoxically, a distinct attempt to escape from the emphasis accorded to the written word, the logos, which is represented as a masculine notion throughout her work. Irigaray is useful for textual politics in this respect, but it seems essential to seek out texts which do not privilege the status of the logos alone. The focus of this discussion in this book will be the filmic text, as well as its contexts of production, direction and consumption, and it argues that this is important for understanding how women’s cinema works to open up spaces for this to be done. The cinematic text is, arguably, a version of a (written) screenplay that is transposed to the screen by use of images, camera-work and sound and by the manipulation of conventional notions of time and space. The cinema as an institution raises questions about the availability of subject-positions, as apparatus theory has demonstrated (see Chapter 2 for a detailed discussion of this work). Cinema and its textuality offer the textual theorist a great deal of scope for using the whole breadth of Irigaray’s vast interrogations of symbolic practice. What is more, the cinema does not privilege the written/logocentric and visual senses alone, in the way that literary texts might be seen to do. Cinema does not depend solely on its visuality: other diegetic factors such as the soundtrack, the editing/camera-positioning and the way diegetic time and space are represented also contribute to the construction of a film’s textuality. The cinematic text is ultimately a representation of other texts (the screenplay; the story board; the source of adaptation, etc.) which are its antecedents.5 It is often the case that the visual becomes ironized and is interrogated by the transposition of these other texts to the cinematic screen. For example, consider the highly stylized art direction in Orlando (Sally Potter, UK, 1993) and how the ‘text’ of the film is interrupted and disturbed by the inclusion of inter-titles and looks-to-camera, amongst other things. Film becomes a non-linear and non-logocentric textual arena in these contexts, and the possibilities for reworking symbolic patterns of representation correspondingly seem to be greater. Cinema,


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then, provides a complex and nuanced form of textuality which is often informed by its contexts of production and reception. Irigaray’s thought decentres the logos in a way that resonates here very clearly. The emphasis on issues around space and time in her work, together with the attention she calls to questions of the voice/possibility of speaking the feminine, echo those qualities of the cinematic text that decentre the visual realm as the primary locus of textual meaning. Moreover, Irigaray herself has engaged in a certain degree of film analysis. At the beginning of This Sex Which Is Not One, in the section appropriately entitled ‘The Looking Glass, from the Other Side’ (1977/1985b: 9–22), Irigaray gives an extensive, multilayered, intertextual reading of The Surveyors (Michael Soutter, Switzerland, 1972). Interestingly, it is in this section of the book that Irigaray gives one of her very few references to a citation. Her language and style flow between both the content and form of the film and they are interspersed with her own interjections. Irigaray’s reading of the film shows that it is possible to read a film in terms of the feminine and that it is possible to engage with it as a medium in ways that are not limited by the visual aspects of film and cinema. There have been some attempts to link Irigaray to feminist film theory. Most of these have been efforts to harness parts of Irigaray’s work for feminist film theory as the analysis below suggests (Bolton, 2006; Doane, 1991; Gentile, 1985; Gillett, 1995; Holmlund, 1989; Kuhn, 1994; Rose, 1986; and Silverman, 1988). Mary Ann Doane, Mary Gentile, Annette Kuhn and Jacqueline Rose use Irigaray at a purely theoretical level, while others link her thought to specific films. Each of these engagements with Irigaray in relation to cinema appropriates selected parts of her writings for feminist cinematic theory. Doane, Gentile, Kuhn and Rose each make reference to the work of Irigaray in their writings on feminist film theory. Doane uses Irigaray’s ideas about proximity and nearness in her consideration of female/feminine spectatorship (1991: 24). Gentile highlights the idea that feminist film should provide opportunities for the development of multiple perspectives on the question of ‘Woman’. She draws on Irigaray (along with Cixous and Mary Daly) to show the value of elaborating a multiplicitous feminine style in the effort to develop a means of critical subjectivity (1985: 71). Kuhn uses Irigaray to interrogate the notion of a feminine text and the usefulness of this notion to feminist film theorists (1994: 63). Similarly, Rose refers to Irigaray in her discussion of the elision of sexual difference as a defining category in contemporary (psychoanalytic) film theory (1986: 202 and 209). None of these theorists uses Irigaray in connection with any specific film analysis.

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By contrast, the work done by Lucy Bolton, Catherine Constable, Sue Gillett, Chris Holmlund and Kaja Silverman does focus upon the analysis of films. Bolton, Gillett and Holmlund link Irigaray to mainstream/ crossover films, and Constable refers to both classical and contemporary cinema texts, while Silverman uses Irigaray in relation to feminist experimental cinema. Silverman’s analysis aims to juxtapose five experimental feminist films with Irigaray’s arguments for what she calls ‘embodied’ speech or writing. She also sets out to confront Irigaray’s notion of the feminine in order to develop her own thought on the negative Oedipus complex and the ramifications that this has for female subjectivity. Silverman’s analysis focuses on the critical dimension of Irigaray’s thought and its usefulness in enabling a representation of the female voice as disembodied (in the widest, cultural sense). Silverman uses Irigaray’s analysis of phallogocentric practices to suggest that the feminine is excluded from positions of discursive power both inside and outside of classical film diegesis. Woman, she argues, is little more than a constructed body in Hollywood cinema. Silverman’s use of Irigaray tends to question the value of Irigaray’s attempts to evoke the feminine by reference to female morphology. For Silverman, Irigaray provides an interesting framework in which to rethink the positioning of the feminine within symbolic practices of representation at play in avant-garde film-making (1988: 141–86). Holmlund draws on Irigaray’s deconstructions of Freudian psychoanalysis in her analysis of Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, US, 1987). Her article uses Irigaray’s exposure of Freud’s theory as sexually ‘indifferent’ to structure a reading of Fatal Attraction and the responses generated by the film in a way that centralizes the figure of the lesbian. Holmlund’s work draws very specifically on Irigaray’s thoughts about mimesis and masquerade (1989: 105–23). Holmlund is keen to appropriate Irigaray’s thought for a lesbian textual politics, yet this approach arguably places limitations on how Irigaray’s thought might be mobilized. Irigaray’s more recent writings, which tend to focus on the couple as a site for the renegotiation of sexual difference, highlight the importance of interrogating the heterosexual relation in order that the woman-to-woman relation may become more available. Holmlund’s analysis of Fatal Attraction usefully signals Irigaray as potentially useful for cinematic textual analysis premised on a psychoanalytic approach. Similarly, Gillett’s work on Irigaray and The Piano (Jane Campion, NZ, 1993) situates Irigaray as useful for analysing the processes of exchange in the film and also for discussing the validity of the view that Ada is raped in the film by Baines. Gillett uses Irigaray in two ways: firstly, she


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evokes Irigaray’s poetic style at the beginning and end of the article in an attempt to capture something of the essence of the film’s narrative; secondly, she uses Irigaray to structure her critique of feminists who received Jane Campion’s film with dismay because of the bargaining scenes which take place between George Baines and Ada McGrath (1995: 277–87). For Gillett, Irigaray’s work provides a useful means of evoking certain narrative perspectives on the film. More recently, Lucy Bolton has written on how the camera can be seen as a kind of speculum in Lost in Translation (Sophia Ford Coppola, US, 2003), showing how camera-work can be used to represent the interiority of the subject (Bolton, 2006). In a more philosophical vein, Catherine Constable has made an important intervention into these debates by linking the work of Irigaray to that of Michelle Le Doeuff to apply a notion of the philosophical imaginary to visual images of women such as Marlene Dietrich in cinema (Constable, 2005). This book draws on Irigaray’s extensive writing in an attempt to signal how it can be used to show how the feminine can be glimpsed in the cinema. It focuses not just on the textual elements of film, but also on its contextual elements with the aim of illuminating what is often heralded as the disavowed bedrock of symbolic practices of representation. In her early work, such as Speculum of the Other Woman (1974/1985a) and This Sex Which Is Not One (1977/1985b), Irigaray employed a disruptive and highly critical style to engage with the theories that structure symbolic notions of sex and gender. Latterly, her work has come to focus more centrally on the need to implement mechanisms to ensure access to a programme of civil and legal rights for women (and men) that is rooted in the recognition of sexual difference. Her work has edged away from ideas about the alterity of woman as category and the need to reclaim and rework symbolic notions of how this category is constituted, in favour of attempting to theorize loving relations between the (heterosexual) couple as the only conceivable means of constructing a feminine position of enunciation. Yet such an appraisal of Irigaray’s work fails to recognize that it has a very distinct developmental aspect: it is impossible to read the recent, apparently more accessible, volumes of her oeuvre without referring back to readings of her earliest work. As Burke points out, for the reader who has not followed her trajectory – that ‘passing from one to the other’ – her thought may appear deceptively straightforward. ... I am tempted to conclude that Irigaray’s message is best served when both aspects of her style are present and engaged in

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dialogue with each other – and with the reader. (Burke, Schor and Whitford, 1994: 257) The reader of Irigaray’s work needs to engage with both her thoughts and her slippery style in order to produce meaning for her often elusive writing. Irigaray’s texts operate as a site for a transferential relationship between reader and text, and in so doing, they become powerfully political in potential. The response of the reader to Irigaray’s work is of the utmost importance. Irigaray clearly avoids prescriptive measures in her work. Rather, she attempts to evoke the feminine (especially in the earlier texts), to make the gaps of what she is able to articulate resonate with meaning for the feminist readers engaging with her thought. Despite the change of style in her more recent publications, Irigaray’s work remains highly complex and multilayered. Her apparently more accessible recent work remains deeply inscribed with the processes of critique and disruption that characterize the earlier writings. As Whitford has commented, her later work is in some ways as difficult to understand as her earlier work, for the simplified statements cannot be taken at face value. Their meaning depends on the complex analysis and infrastructure of the earlier work. (Whitford (ed.), 1991: 11–12) The discussion that follows offers a brief overview of some of the key ideas in Irigaray’s work. This is intended to provide a theoretical backdrop for the textual and contextual analysis that follows later in the book, although many of the ideas will be further scrutinized in the contexts of specific film texts, as required. Whilst tying Irigaray down to concrete images and modes of representation might seem to undo the very paradoxes at the heart of her work, the approach taken here opens up an arena in which it is possible to test out her ideas in relation to processes of representation.

The critique of phallogocentrism Irigaray’s critique of the phallogocentric symbolic order consists, on the whole, of her attacks on the mechanisms employed by psychoanalytic and philosophical theories to exclude a notion of the feminine based on and in the specificity of the female body.6 Irigaray (1974/1985a and 1977/1985b) lays out a resounding critique of the psychoanalytic account of the acquisition of gender and also of how processes of


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‘specula(riza)tion’ structure the definition of the symbolic category of ‘Woman’. Irigaray shows how philosophy accounts for the subject in terms of the masculine alone. She uses the tools of deconstruction and psychoanalysis to turn these monolithic theories inside out to demonstrate how the feminine is permanently excluded from the symbolic processes at play in traditional systems of discourse and representation. For Irigaray, phallogocentric philosophical discourse has always excluded the feminine from its parameters, with the result that female subjectivity cannot be represented adequately. By setting out to disrupt these discursive and representational practices, Irigaray creates a form of language that allows for a perception of the feminine that goes beyond its definition in relation to masculine subjectivity.

Sexual difference What I want, in fact, is not to create a theory of woman, but to secure a place for the feminine within sexual difference. (Irigaray, 1977/1985b: 159) Throughout Irigaray’s work, sexual difference functions as a yardstick for the analysis of socio-cultural relations. Irigaray gives no consideration to modes of difference based on class or race, for example. She states without doubt, the most appropriate content for the universal is sexual difference. Indeed, this content is both real and universal. Sexual difference is an immediate and natural given and it is a real and irreducible component of the universal. The whole of human kind is composed of women and men and of nothing else. The problem of race is, in fact, a secondary problem – except from a geographical point of view? – which means we cannot see the wood for the trees, and the same goes for other cultural diversities – religious, economic and political ones. Sexual difference probably represents the most universal question we can address. Our era is faced with the task of dealing with this issue, because, across the whole world, there are, there are only, men and women. (1992/1996: 47) While this comment is deeply problematic and open to criticism from both within and without feminist theories, these remarks delineate a


mode of engagement which it seems necessary to take up in order to work with Irigarayan thought. Whilst I do not wish to condone Irigaray’s dismissal of other modes of difference, it seems that there is potentially a strategic value in agreeing to read her on her own terms. Just as Irigaray criticizes the monolithic status of masculinist theories of subjectivity, it would be mistaken to reify Irigaray’s own theoretical moments of absolutism. Yet it also seems that agreeing to work with Irigaray on her own terms may open up strategies for attempts to encounter other modes of difference on their own terms. After all, difference is constituted in diversity, and it would be a mistake to attempt to impose theories of one given mode of difference onto other forms of diversity that operate and are repressed in different ways. For Irigaray, symbolic patterns of representation deny the relevance of sexual difference to how human subjects relate to issues surrounding corporeality and (re-) production. She claims that phallocentrism has a vested interest in subverting difference and denying its existence insofar as it maintains a logic that is rooted in an a priori of the same. Subjectivity and meaning are affected by this denial of difference which accounts for the hierarchical nature of many social relations. For Irigaray, woman is specularized and commodified by symbolic patterns of discourse and representation.

Specula(riza)tion Irigaray’s notion of ‘specula(riza)tion’ is founded on her belief that the feminine has been trapped within a mirroring function within phallocentrism. Women have come to represent the reflection of the masculine to the masculine subject so that women and the feminine are defined, not in their own terms, but rather in relation to specifically masculine attributes such as the phallus. In these terms, women serve only to reflect back an image of the male subject to himself. The repercussion of this is that women never see a reflection of themselves. Representations of femininity depict elements of the feminine that reinforce notions of the masculine. Irigaray shows that there is an a priori logic of the same that dominates patterns of discourse and representation, and that this constructs a fragile but highly supported masculine subject, and the apparently monolithic theories of sociosymbolic practice reinforce his position. The mirroring function of femininity is shown to be analogous to Lévi-Strauss’s formulation of ‘woman’ as commodity. Irigaray suggests that the masculine subject is constructed to produce and exchange and


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that commodities and patterns of exchange are designed to confirm his status. This shows how women are trapped by their commodification in a system of exchange that denies their specificity. Women become commodities who maintain systems of exchange by participating unquestioningly in the processes involved. Irigaray comments that ‘the production of women, signs and commodities is always referred back to men’ (1977/1985b: 171) and develops this point to show how, for the commodity, there is no reflection available to it. In other words, for the commodity, there is no mirror that copies it so that it may be at once itself and its ‘own’ reflection. One commodity cannot be mirrored in another, as man is mirrored in his fellow man. For when we are dealing with commodities the self-same, mirrored, is not ‘its’ own likeness, contains nothing of its properties, its qualities, its ‘skin and hair’. The likeness here is only a measure expressing the fabricated character of the commodity, its trans-formation by man’s (social, symbolic) ‘labor’. The mirror that envelops and paralyzes the commodity specularizes, speculates (on) man’s ‘labor’. Commodities, women, are a mirror of value of and for man. (1977/1985b: 176; italics in original) Woman, the feminine, thus becomes a ‘specular’ other used to speculate and act as a kind of gold standard for the masculine subject (1977/1985b: 176). The reflective function is bound up with the exchange function with the result that participation in a society requires that the body submit itself to a specularization, a speculation, that transforms it into a value-bearing object, a standardized sign, an exchangeable signifier, a ‘likeness’ with reference to an authoritative model [the masculine]. (1977/1985b: 174–5) Under the terms of what Irigaray refers to as ‘specula(riza)tion’ then, women are prohibited from being agents of exchange and are limited to acting as objects of it. Under these terms there can be no exchange between men and women because men make commerce of women not with them. Women are circulated as signs and serve to differentiate meaning without having any meaning of their own. The dominant ‘specular’ economy is thus punningly described by Irigaray as a ‘hom(m) osexual’ economy – homosexual because of the logic of the same that perpetuates it and the pun in French on the word homme (man). This is

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a masculinist economy that depends for its very masculinity on a logic of sameness that excludes the feminine from its parameters, thus denying any importance to the notion of sexual difference.7 Locating the feminine Throughout the early texts, Irigaray uses playful linguistic mechanisms to show how the feminine is constituted as excess and plurality. For her, the feminine is closely bound to ideas about fluidity (1977/2985b: 106–18). She uses the textuality of her work as a mode of enactment of both the feminine and its impossibility. Her efforts to recuperate the feminine from symbolic practices centre on a reworking of notions of masquerade and mimesis.8 Masquerade is the term used to describe an alienated version of femininity which originates in a woman’s awareness of a man’s desire for her to be his other. The femininity of the masquerade is constructed by and for masculine desire, and thus does not allow woman to experience desire in her own right. Within masquerade, woman is permitted only to experience desire when man’s desire permits (1977/1985b: 220). Irigaray’s response to the alienation of masquerade is mimicry or mimesis. Masquerade describes how women construct themselves/are constructed by their relation to masculine desire; mimicry takes this construction of the feminine to its very extreme to reveal how discourse exploits women and the feminine. Mimicry becomes an ‘interim strategy’ available to women seeking to experience their own desire in their own right. It is a strategy that enables woman to deal with the realm of discourse where the speaking subject is designated as masculine. In mimicry, woman deliberately takes on the feminine style and posture attributed to her within dominant discourse in order to reveal the mechanisms of her oppression and exploitation (1977/1985b: 220). Woman is then able to use these mechanisms to disrupt discursive coherence by deliberately taking on the role ascribed to the feminine to draw attention to the flimsiness of its construction within dominant discourse, and thus to seduce dominant discourse into revealing its repressed foundation. Irigaray’s style is highly complex and allusive. She makes few references to sources for her ‘citations’ and she writes in a very slippery manner. Many of her texts are richly poetic in style and depend upon a manipulation of typographical conventions to disrupt the traditional flow of reading. The extreme style of Irigaray’s writing may be interpreted as an attempt to represent the excess of the feminine, the excess that goes beyond the boundaries of representation. Irigaray makes use


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of stylistic devices to represent this metaphorically, a strategy that can be used in the analysis of cinema by considering the importance of style, camera-work and editing patters in the construction of spaces for the feminine, as later chapters will suggest. Irigaray deliberately takes on the role of the hysteric in an attempt to reveal the specificity of the feminine and of female subjectivity. Mimicry, then, is a form of deliberate hysteria which offers women a form of representation on their own terms. In mimicry, women constitute themselves in a way which is impossible in masquerade. Irigaray’s use of (hysterical) mimicry in her analysis of philosophy and psychoanalysis thus amounts to an attempt to represent discursively repressed aspects of the feminine that are concealed within the gaps of discourse.

Language and the question of enunciation Irigaray’s work is intricately bound up with linguistic theories. It centralizes the role of language in the formation of subjectivity, and focuses on the way the feminine is written out of language. Her analysis of how language and syntax are used by men and women demonstrates the extent of her interest in language and discourse as foundational elements of symbolic practice (Irigaray, 1985/2002). For Irigaray, the symbolic division of the subject is made in language, but she is critical of the fact that subjectivity is consequently relegated to the realm of masculinity in this context. By drawing on psychoanalytic ideas about the constitution of the subject at the moment of recognition of the Lawof-the-Father, which comes with the revelation of castration in the psychoanalytic account, Irigaray shows how the specificity of the female body is consistently disavowed in theories of subjectivity. She draws on psychoanalysis and linguistic theory to emphasize the problematic positioning of the feminine outside symbolic discourse. For Irigaray, the most important area in which to begin to renegotiate feminine subjectivity is in relation to the question of enunciation. In her analysis of language, Irigaray starts with a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity as constituted in language by the taking up of a sexualized position within the symbolic order. Stephenson has commented that Irigaray concentrates her analysis of specific discourse on the enunciation. In the act of enunciation, that is, of producing an utterance, the enunciator actualizes her or his vision of the world, traces of which remain in the utterance. By focusing on these traces of subjectivity

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located within, and operating as the every condition of, every act of communication, Irigaray reveals that what is at stake in a continued denial and repression of the sexual marking of discourse is the very possibility of an ethical social order. (1991: 223) Indeed, Irigaray herself makes clear the importance of enunciation in her work: Its project is to reveal who is speaking, to whom, about what, with what means. In technical terms, this means that it is a matter of uncovering the dynamics of the utterance [énonciation] underlying the statements [énoncés] produced. Beneath what is being said, it is possible to discover the subject, the subject’s economy, potential energy, relations with the other and the world. The subject may be masked, bogged down, buried, covered up, paralyzed, or may be engendered, generated, may become, and grow through speech [en parlant]. (Whitford (ed.), 1991: 147) In Irigaray’s early work, the emphasis on language and the question of enunciation centres on her notion of parler femme. Parler femme Parler femme is one of the most controversial aspects of Irigaray’s work. Her comment that what a feminine syntax might be is not simple or easy to state, because in that ‘syntax’ there would no longer be either subject or object, ‘oneness’ would no longer be privileged, there would be no proper meanings, proper names, ‘proper’ attributes ... Instead, that ‘syntax’ would involve nearness, proximity, but in such an extreme form that it would preclude any distinction of identities, any establishment of ownership, thus any form of appropriation. (1977/1985b: 134) seems almost to undo all notions of what syntax is. Despite this, however, it seems important to draw out the implications of Irigaray’s thought on parler femme as it is central to any attempt to enunciate the feminine. Parler femme is intended to work on a range of levels: firstly, it provides a means of articulating the alterity of feminine desire by speaking through and for the position(s) of woman; secondly, it raises the issue of where to locate the feminine speaking subject: it opens up the field of enunciation to include what gets excluded by masculinist


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patterns of discourse and representation; thirdly, it reveals the necessity of female genealogies for the production of the feminine as a position of enunciation and representation. Parler femme works in a very ethereal way. The apparent utopianism of Irigaray’s attempts to evoke the conditions necessary for parler femme to become possible serves the familiar dual purpose of effecting both a critique of and a way out of the restraining boundaries of symbolic practices. Parler femme is a metonymic mode of language9 designed to insinuate the feminine back into the mechanisms of the production of linguistic and cultural practice. Another apparently utopian ‘technique’ used by Irigaray to evoke the feminine relates to her attempts to formulate a female genealogy. Closely imbricated in the process of parler femme, the notion of female genealogy helps to locate the feminine in its own terms rather than within the constricted and constricting discursive accounts of histories that predominate under the rule of the phallic signifier.

Female genealogy The feminine, which may be thought of in terms of the relation between mothers and daughters, has always been little more than the ‘dark continent of psychoanalysis’, to paraphrase Freud in his work on femininity. Irigaray makes it clear throughout her writings that the debt owed to the maternal by socio-symbolic signifying practices and patterns of representation is repressed, unacknowledged. Woman and the feminine become buried alive in the symbolic order in this context, just as Antigone is buried alive by Creon. It is worth remembering here that Antigone’s mother, Jocasta, was both mother and wife to Oedipus. The significance of this is that the boundaries between the maternal and the nuptial roles become blurred, with the result that the wife simply comes to take the place of the mother, thus making any type of maternal genealogy impossible. Woman becomes the constructed other of the masculine within patriarchy, and outside this role, as we have seen, she has no meaning of her own or in her own right. This burial of the feminine has a devastating impact on mother– daughter or woman-to-woman relations, according to Irigaray. With no means of autonomous self-definition, the mother is consumed by the maternal role. Little girls have no image of the feminine with which to identify. The mother is subjected to the Law-of-the-Father and to patterns of exchange; she gives up her father’s name in order to take her husband’s name: she has no name/identity of her own. Her role and


function within culture and society becomes little more than reproductive. Woman is barred from the processes of production; her mirroring function relegates her to the realm of reproducing patriarchal phallocentric practices, despite the fact that she has no effect on how those practices moderate her existence/desire/identity. Irigaray claims that because of the way women and the feminine have been constructed within phallocentrism, women have no access to a history of their own. Women have no space-time of their own and thus no possibility of a future. Irigaray’s call for a maternal genealogy may appear to be utterly utopian in its aim, but the very fact that Irigaray is able to reveal the processes involved in this eclipse of feminine identity show that strategic methodologies could help to make such a dream more tangible. More recently, the focus of Irigaray’s work has tended to relate more to the ethical relationship and status of the couple than to issues of individual subjectivity. Yet it remains the case that, for Irigaray, a truly ethical relationship depends on the ‘recognition’ (her term from i love to you) of the repressed nature of the feminine within phallocentric representational and discursive practices, and on the renegotiation of female subjectivity in these terms. In Irigaray’s later texts, the emphasis shifts away from a deconstructive critical revelatory perspective in favour of a more concerted attempt to formulate ideas about how sexual difference could be insinuated into symbolic practices. There is considerable emphasis on the importance of establishing a female genealogy, on space-time and on the importance of mediation.

An ethics of sexual difference In her apparently more utopian later work, Irigaray outlines a version of a future in which women would be adequately represented at the discursive and representational levels, just as men are within the symbolic order as it is at present. She delineates an ethics of sexual difference which envisions a world inhabited by at least two sexed identities, each of which would respect the radical alterity of the other/Other and each of which would admire the irreducible difference that such an other would embody. For Irigaray, an ethical relationship between the sexes would affect symbolic practice, not only at the level of morality, but also in terms of how civil rights are codified and implemented; hence the very large degree of emphasis on the place of women in legal and civil terms (1987/1993c; 1990/1993b). According to Irigaray, these are the only conditions under which the feminine could exist alongside


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the masculine on its own terms with access to its own identity and desire.

Space-time Irigaray has also focused on the problematic aspects of space-time in relation to sexual difference (1984/1993a). For Irigaray, woman is little more than a space by reference to and in which man is able to locate himself as a subject. Woman is trapped in the realm of the maternal in this respect. She embodies the place of origin for the masculine subject and, consequently, has no access to her own space of origin, nor indeed to any space of her own outside the maternal realm. In order to have access to a space of her own, woman would have to re-envelop herself with herself, and do so at least twice: as a woman and as a mother. Which would presuppose a change in the whole economy of space-time. (Irigaray, 1984/1993a: 11) Irigaray’s focus on the difficulties of space-time for the feminine in particular, reflects her efforts to insinuate sexual difference into the symbolic mechanisms of representation. But, as Whitford has pointed out, ‘it is not clear that there is any genre or style available to her to express the female imaginary; it is necessary to create a new style, as she frequently points out’ (1991: 159). This emphasis on the need to create a new style for the feminine imaginary refers, of course, to the need to implement a mode of parler femme, a means of representation for the feminine which exceeds phallogocentric discursive limits. If we take as a starting point Irigaray’s complex arguments about space and time in relation to gendered subjectivity, it is at first difficult to see how any new style might begin to be created. Yet space and time are clearly the most elemental and organizational aspects of representational systems. Indeed, space and time are foundational for modes of textual representation such as those elaborated in cinematic texts. How might it be possible to begin to rework Irigaray’s work on space-time into a mould for a feminine (textual?) imaginary? In order to begin to do this, it is necessary to seek out accounts of the formative roles played by space and time in the creation of representational systems. By adopting the Irigarayan strategy of interrogating texts that work with notions of space and time, it may be possible to insinuate into them the structures of sexual difference. This is explored in more detail in Chapter 6 in relation to Sally Potter’s Orlando.


Irigaray’s thoughts on gendered space-time are closely related to her highly theoretical forays into the realm of the divine which are made accessible by reference to figures of mediation. Whilst the ‘messagebearing’ mode of her work on mediation might seem to trap Irigaray’s thought into a mode of self-affirming, iconoclastic utopianism, when it is read in conjunction with her thought on the necessity of gendered space-time, her point seems more in keeping with her project as a whole.

Mediation The trope of mediation has become extremely important in Irigaray’s recent work. Since the publication of An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray has consistently alluded to the importance of mediation for the construction of an interval or between space in which it may be possible to situate the other as subject in its own right. For Irigaray, mediation, in the form of angels, or thresholds, or love, or the placenta, is the necessary foundation upon which to build an ethical relation between the sexes. Schwab has commented that ‘mediation, a certain type of nonoedipal, nontriangular mediation, becomes the possibility of the symbolic order’ (Burke, Schor and Whitford (eds), 1994: 367). The mediating angel, or love, as it has come to be defined in i love to you as the recognition of the other (1992/1996), constitutes an attempt by Irigaray to reconceptualize symbolic modes of exchange. The mediating forces she refers to help to undo dualistic systems and attempt to posit a new modality of subjectivity that is grounded in the recognition of (sexual) difference. The tropes of mediation reveal a space in-between that is traditionally disavowed in symbolic accounts of subjectivity and exchange. As Whitford has commented, ‘the between is a way of rethinking this space-time organization which detaches it from the spatio-temporality of the phallus’ (1991: 163). Mediation becomes closely bound to those other utopian areas of Irigaray’s work which seem to function only at the level of theory. Attempting to combine ideas about how representational genres are constituted within symbolic practices, however, and efforts to furnish the feminine with metaphors and images that are already existent within the symbolic frame, show how it is possible to begin to work with Irigaray’s thought. Irigaray’s work on mediation, and especially on angels, is closely related to her concept of the divine and its significance in understanding the techniques of symbolic organisation that persistently disable female subjectivity. Irigaray argues that women need


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access to a divine form of their own creation in order to have a sense of their own finitude and mortality. In many ways, it is possible to read Irigaray’s work on the divine in relation to her work on the difficulty of the death drives within symbolic practice. Irigaray comments that as long as woman lacks a divine made in her image she cannot establish her subjectivity or achieve a goal of her own. She lacks an ideal that would be her goal or path in becoming. ‘Woman scatters and becomes an agent of destruction and annihilation because she has no other of her own that she can become’ (1987/1993c: 64). In order to become a subject in her own right, woman needs to create a divine image that allows her to relate to a mode of otherness and (in)finitude that does not reside within her own body. Woman, in other words, needs access to an organization of the death drives that does not locate her outside their symbolism as a locus of destruction and death.

The death drive My death is inside your own. We shall die together if you do not let me go outside your sameness. (Irigaray, 1982/1992:14) For Irigaray, the death drive is something of a double-edged sword in relation to the feminine. During the disruptive moments of her early work, she launched a fierce attack on the ways in which women are prohibited any access to death drives within symbolic practice: ‘in psycho-analytic parlance, the death drives can only be worked out by man, never, under any circumstances by woman. She merely “services” the work of the death instincts. Of man’ (1974/1985a: 53). Irigaray draws very forceful parallels between the way woman is forced to embody the death drive for men without having access to any form of stasis of her own, and the way she is defined within the symbolic order in terms of reproduction alone, that is, in terms of the maternal function. The female body becomes the locus of death and reproduction here. Paradoxically, the woman-mother is charged with the embodiment of nourishment and life-giving energies whilst simultaneously sustaining death for the masculine subject. Furthermore, her status as the castrated figure of psychoanalytic thought produces a horror of woman’s body that serves to reduplicate these functions once again: So ‘woman’ can function as place – evanescent beyond, point of discharge – as well as time – eternal return, temporal detour – for the sublimation and, if possible, mastery of the work of death.

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She will also be the representative-representation (VorstellungRepräsentanz), in other words, of the death drives that cannot (or theoretically could not) be perceived without horror, that the eye (of) consciousness refuses to recognize. In a protective misprision that cannot be put aside without the failure of a certain gaze: which is the whole point of castration. (1974/1985a: 54–5) More recently, Irigaray has moved away from focusing on the death drive as a target of her critique in favour of using the idea to denote symptomatically the crisis of civilization. She appears to applaud the fact that women are not forcibly bound to the economy of the death drives precisely because they are excluded from them: women are consequently more able to begin to renegotiate their relation to the symbolic organization as a result. Moreover, Irigaray’s recent turn to the importance of love for the renegotiation of symbolic subjectivities highlights how her work has begun to move away from an emphasis on critique and disruption towards an attempt to engage otherwise with the systems she formerly found so problematic. In an extremely helpful article on the death drive in Irigaray’s work, Whitford has commented that ‘the question Irigaray negotiates is the tension between death drive as destructive and death drive as creative, or between eros as thanatos and thanatos as eros’ (Burke, Schor and Whitford, 1994: 394). Whilst this technique of working with notions of love and death is far from unproblematic, as Whitford notes, as a strategic measure, it enables a move to be made that helps in thinking through the implications of Irigaray’s thought on the feminine.

Linking theory to analysis In trying to think through the ways in which Irigaray’s work can be used for textual political ends, it is important to consider whether it is possible to re-vision the contemporary scene of theory in relation to the role of women in film. Over the past two decades, cultural notions of gender and gender roles have shifted in the context of postmodernism and popular culture. Increasingly, there are spaces in which gender comes to be performed and, thus, arguably perceived as ever more fluid and potentially multiplicitous. Cinema is one such space. The last twenty years have seen a cultural turn toward discourses of ‘girl power’ and post-feminism which have been manifest in several modes of popular culture. Mainstream cinema has embraced this shift, producing an array of films including the woman-directed Tank Girl


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(Rachel Talalay, US, 1995). Such films offer up a number of readings of the feminine, most of which need to be structured and analysed through the lens of postmodernism. Irigaray’s work is very useful in formulating an understanding of the appeal and historical context of such films in that it provides us with a model of reading that relates the phenomenon of ‘girl power’ to the linguistic and socio-symbolic practices that tend to relegate the feminine to the status of object. Yet, as the following discussion will show, such films are inevitably recuperated by symbolic discourse and stripped of any political weight. In Talalay’s Hollywood adaptation of the comic book heroine Tank Girl, there is a distinctly postmodern discourse of sexuality and gender that surfaces in many guises throughout the film. Tank Girl, otherwise known as Rebecca (Lori Pretty), is construed as a non-archetypal blonde, diminutive in stature but whose status as an iconic version of ‘scary’ (read postmodern) femininity is writ large through her costume, her language and her relation to material objects traditionally associated with power and masculinity such as tanks, guns and beer. Her sexuality is thrown into disarray at several points in the text: she witnesses her boyfriend being killed by the Water & Power agents of violence; she ‘rescues’ Jet (Naomi Watts) from unwanted sexual advances by a Water & Power flight officer by kissing her and asking what he wants with her girlfriend; the narrative strain of the scenes with Kesslee (Malcolm MacDowell), the loathsome evil chief of Water & Power, is written in a generic rom-com style, highlighting the apparently repressed and unspoken desire that underpins their conflict until, in the final scenes, she manages to dispose of him by melting his body and turning it into the most highly valued commodity of the on-screen world, water, by turning his own weapon on him and draining his body of the lifesustaining water it contains. Meanwhile, Rebecca also embarks on a sexual adventure with Booga (Jeff Kober), the Ripper human/kangaroo hybrid soldier. Here is a clearly multiplicitous and pluralistic sexual subject whose play with symbolic discourse and the body seems to be authored through her own desire. Importantly, though, the most important and defining attribute of Rebecca’s personality is her maternal concern for her presumed daughter, Sam (Stacy Linn Ramsower). Here, we have a kick-ass representation of girl power that seems laughingly to mock notions of the phallic mother. Rebecca is a comic book figure, larger than life and, at the surface, she is designed to appeal to post-feminist ideals with her concern for her own desire and subjective status at the expense of everything other than her daughter. (The suggestion here that the maternal role somehow functions as a warrant


of success in a girl power-led world seems to run across post-feminist media representations despite its very clear-cut connections with traditional socio-symbolic gestures of maintaining a definition of the feminine in relation to the maternal function.) Yet, the apparently phallic power of Tank Girl as mother is written entirely through a highly eroticized body that operates most clearly throughout the narrative as an object of male desire. From the scene near the beginning of the film when Rebecca erotically cuts holes in her stockings, assuming (mistakenly) that the booted male approaching her while she is on guard in the trench outside her house must be her lover, through to the end of the film, we are subjected to endless representations of Rebecca undergoing bodily and costume alterations designed to enhance her fetishized role in the film. Represented as marginally perverse in her desires from the outset of the film, when she holds her boyfriend at gunpoint and orders him to strip and ‘salute’ her, Rebecca’s apparent control of her sexuality marks her out as problematic and difficult to contain. The characterization of her desire, however, fits the mould of male fantasies of female availability as she willingly switches between perverse performances of fetishizing her own body for the benefit of the male gaze, before indulging in mock lesbian seduction, a high-kicking performance of available sexual potency in the nightclub scene and a scenario of seduction by Booga that marks hers out as the ultimate object of desire, as her body magically becomes transformed through her sexual engagement with the hybrid Booga so that her breasts become comically enlarged by the addition of ballistic missiles to her costume. Her body is comically exaggerated and manipulated throughout this film and this is also emphasized by Pretty’s performance: Rebecca’s girlish voice infantilizes an otherwise aggressive and independent character, highlighting her playfulness but also ensuring that she conforms to a model of desirability determined by masculinist values. In many ways then, far from being a successful icon of post-feminist, gender-bending fluidity, Rebecca becomes a highly defined object of the male gaze. The camera technique and framing throughout the film underscore this. It is difficult to suggest that her use of costume and her body is parodic or mimetic rather than masquerading, as she does not appear to be resistant to the objectives of such constructions of femininity – sexual success. Her safety is guaranteed for the spectator by her maternal role – she will always be made safe and less potently phallic by her responsibility to the child. This is a pattern of representation that contains and restrains the potency of discourses of multiplicity,


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and the endless pursuit of such guises of femininity in a Hollywood context points to the inevitability of the recuperative gesture at play with patriarchal systems. ‘Girl power’, then, is reduced to a kind of postmodern lapse of feminist values, and lends itself to a perpetuation of the masquerade of femininity that underpins the Irigarayan critique of its logic. It would appear, then, that the Hollywood appropriation of post-feminist girl power is to be understood as a recuperative move, designed to offset the threat of femininity in control of itself to its discursive values and systems of representation. It would seem that mainstream movies for the masses, designed for entertainment, insist on the maintenance of the sexual status quo. Irigaray has argued that ‘sometimes a space for wonder is left to works of art’ (1984/1993a: 13). It is in this light that the rest of this book will turn away from mainstream movie entertainment to the domain of arthouse/independent film. The exposition of Irigaray’s work in this chapter forms the basis for the textual readings that follow. Throughout Irigaray’s work there is a redoubled mechanism of simultaneous critique and production. Her work seeks not only to make clear how the feminine is disavowed and excluded from symbolic systems, but also to make space for engagement with it. The double-edged movement of Irigaray’s work is invaluable in relation to the interrogation of texts, as the rest of this book sets out to show. In the chapters that follow, each of these theoretical areas is drawn out in relation to the form and content of the selected films. This theoretical approach also provides a framework for the analysis of film theory. There is a focus on the question of spectatorship underlying much of the textual analysis, and the final chapter returns to this issue directly. The relation between the theoretical explorations that form the opening chapter and the textual analyses is highly dialogical: it is difficult to separate them out. For reasons of space, it has not been possible to expand this theoretical discussion into a larger consideration of Irigaray’s complex thought. However, I hope that the readings that follow demonstrate how my engagement with Irigaray’s thought forms the basis for my analysis of the relationship between the feminine and the cinematic.

2 Spectatorship, Cinematic Strategy and Mediation

A significant proportion of feminist engagement with film theory has taken as its starting point the question of spectatorship and its relationship to pleasure and gender. This chapter will outline some of the key points of this debate in order to signal how questions of sexual difference and the specificity of the feminine have yet to be addressed adequately and it will suggest that Irigaray’s work on mediation can be used to formulate a new approach in relation to the films made by women under discussion in this book. Theories of film spectatorship are many and varied, ranging from those which situate the spectator as entirely constructed by the mechanisms of the cinematic institution to those which claim that such theories deny the importance of the actual film viewer. What, then, are we to understand by ‘spectatorship’? Judith Mayne has suggested that Spectatorship is not only the act of watching a film, but also the way one takes pleasure in the experience, or not; the means by which watching movies becomes a passion, or a leisure-time activity like any other. Spectatorship refers to how film-going and the consumption of movies and their myths are symbolic activities, culturally significant events. (1993: 1) What we understand by the term ‘spectator’ varies with the particular type of theory we are working with, and might therefore be considered as a malleable concept analogous to the notion of the subject-in-process or constant flux. Psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity have been used by film theorists working on spectatorship in various ways. During the 1970s, apparatus theory drew on psychoanalysis to suggest that the 32

Spectatorship, Cinematic Strategy and Mediation

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spectator is constructed by the machinery of cinema and through the architecture of the gaze. In subsequent work, provoked as a response especially to the work of Laura Mulvey, feminist theorists have presented a range of perspectives on how it may be possible to theorize a female gaze and/or to understand the specific formations of pleasure made available to women by cinema.

Apparatus theory Much of the work on spectatorship in film theory owes a debt to the ‘apparatus theory’ produced during the 1970s. This work examined the cinematic institution as an ideological apparatus and was informed by the psychoanalytic work of both Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan as well as that of Louis Althusser on ideological apparatuses (1971). Theorists such as Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry and Laura Mulvey situated the spectator as a purely ideological effect. By shifting the emphasis away from viewing practices and by focusing instead on the constructed and constructive properties of the cinematic apparatus itself, they claimed that the spectator-subject was little more than a cinematic effect, and as such was unable to escape the lure of (classical Hollywood) cinema with its economy of desire. Accounting for the attraction of cinema by resorting to the Lacanian notion of desire as something which can never be satisfied within the parameters of the socio-symbolic order, apparatus theorists asserted the view that the characteristics of cinema encourage Oedipal desire and, in so doing, perpetuate the dominant ideology. Christian Metz suggested that spectators are wholly constructed by their relation to the screen. Spectator-fish, taking in everything with their eyes, nothing with their bodies: the institution of the cinema requires a silent motionless spectator, a vacant spectator, constantly in a sub-motor and hyper-perceptive state, a spectator at once alienated and happy, acrobatically hooked up to himself by the invisible thread of sight, a spectator who only catches up with himself at the last minute, by a paradoxical identification with his own self, a self filtered out into pure vision. We are not referring here to the spectator’s identification with the characters of the film (which is secondary), but to his preliminary identification with the (invisible) seeing agency of the film itself as discourse, as the agency which puts forward the story and shows it to us. (1982: 305)

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For Metz, the cinematic institution is a technique of the imaginary that is peculiar to capitalism and to industrial civilization. Drawing on Lacan’s model of the mirror stage, Metz argues that the imaginary is reactivated by the mirror of the cinematic screen.1 However, he goes on to suggest that the cinematic institution is not merely the cinema industry but also the ‘mental machinery’ which conditions spectators to become accustomed to cinema and to internalize it historically – a process which in turn leads to an increasing desire to consume films. Any identification made with a character from the film or with an actor in the film is purely secondary because the spectator primarily identifies with himself [sic], as if reflected in a mirror, as an act of perception. The spectator becomes an all-perceiving constitutive instance of the cinematic identifier by claiming that ‘I know I am perceiving something imaginary ... and I know that is I who am perceiving it’. The spectator thus identifies with the camera, which has looked earlier, and with the projector as a substitute for the camera. For Jean-Louis Baudry, conditions of representation are fundamental to the spectator’s identification with character(s) in the film and the projection situation creates a position for the spectator-subject which reactivates myths about the transcendental subject (1970, 1975). This raises questions about whether the instruments of the cinematic apparatus produce specific ideological effects and whether they are determined by the dominant ideology. Baudry maintains that the concealment of the technical base in classical Hollywood cinema has inevitable ideological effects. For Baudry then, the spectator is a transcendental subject whose perspective is inherently imbued with ideology. In this respect, the cinema produces a distinctly ideological position through its mechanics of representation. This is perhaps most clearly and most problematically illustrated by the work of Laura Mulvey on visual pleasure and on the structuring of the cinematic gaze as male. Mulvey’s article on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) is a seminal work in film theory. It has helped to define the field over the past thirty years. Mulvey posits three looks in the cinema. Firstly, she highlights the look of the camera in the situation being filmed, claiming that this is an inherently voyeuristic look and one that is usually male. Secondly, Mulvey argues that the look of men within film narrative usually positions women as objects of the look. Finally, she notes that the look of the male spectator imitates and necessarily occupies the same positions as the two other forms of the look. In Mulvey’s account, the look itself appears to be always already masculine. By claiming that men do not simply look, and that their gaze carries with it a certain


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element of power, and by citing the objectification and sexualization of women in classical Hollywood cinema as a form of fetishization whose purpose is to eliminate the threat posed by women to the male unconscious, Mulvey suggests that the spectator is always deemed to be male. Whilst she herself makes no mention of the female spectator or indeed about the possibilities of a female gaze, this article prompted many feminists (and, later on, Mulvey herself) to take up these and similar issues in an attempt to theorize the female spectator. Apparatus theory is useful to the current project because of the attention it draws to the construction of viewing pleasures, firstly, as grounded in dominant ideology, secondly, as inherently masculinist and thirdly, as dependent on structures that can be understood as Oedipal and/or patriarchal. The emphasis placed on the mirror in this work is also useful and it is clear that Irigaray’s critique of symbolic practices of representation can be extended to problematize the assumptions inherent in this approach to the cinematic spectator. Apparatus theory falls into the trap of theorizing a masculine spectator-subject precisely because the inescapable lure of symbolic practice prohibits it from doing otherwise. Metz’s notion of cinematic pleasure as the ultimate goal of all classical Hollywood cinema allows for masculine pleasure alone, because the consuming symbolic subject is necessarily masculine and it is only from the masculine subject position that pleasure can be enjoyed. Pleasure is a necessary product to ensure the continuing process of exchange which dominates the cinematic institution, as Metz has pointed out. In the midst of all of this, there is, nevertheless, an important focus on the place of the screen and its mirroring function, and, in the work of Mulvey in particular, this is linked to gendered pleasure. As Chapter 1 explored, the mirror is a key symbol for Irigaray and one that needs to be reclaimed (perhaps in the new form of the speculum) in order to grapple with issues arising around the struggle for representation of the feminine.

The screen as mirror Thinking of the screen as a mirror serves a dual purpose in an Irigarayan approach to cinema. On the one hand, with regard to dominant cinematic practices, elements of Irigaray’s critique of symbolic systems help to articulate a feminist deconstruction of the place of women in cinema. Irigaray has written extensively on the mirroring function of the commodified woman within patriarchy. By arguing that patriarchal


systems operate within an a priori logic of the same, Irigaray shows that the role of femininity and of the maternal feminine is reflective. The masculine subject is constructed to produce and exchange (women, signs, matter), and these commodities confirm the status of the masculine within the symbolic order. Commodities are used as mirrors to reflect back to the masculine subject an image of himself. As we have seen, Irigaray suggests that for the commodity, there is no mirror that copies it so that it may be at once itself and its own reflection (1977/1985b: 176–7). For Irigaray, woman functions only as a standardized sign of an exchange process that limits her to nothing more than a value-bearing role, a mirror to the masculine subject. Clearly, this critique can usefully be applied to classical cinematic processes and can be used to augment and supplement the work of theorists such as Mulvey. This perspective on the screen as a mirror opens up space for understanding the fetishization of woman in cinema, and it also clarifies how narrative structures appear to be trapped in the myth of the Oedipal relation. Apparatus theory links the construction of the spectator to notions of the screen as mirror, locating it in terms of presence and absence, especially in relation to what Metz describes as the ‘mental machinery’. This reflects psychoanalytic theories of the realization of sexual difference during the Oedipal moment. By suggesting that the socio-symbolic order demands a theory of sexual difference which proscribes the feminine, Irigaray shows that the construction of the masculine subject is extremely fragile despite the overwhelming apparently monolithic support it finds in all forms of socio-symbolic practice. The problematic nature of the Oedipus complex is well documented by feminists and, indeed, it seems relevant to this analysis to show that issues of gender and sexual difference need to be considered in depth if feminist theory is to be able to theorize the female (spectator-)subject2 within the narrow boundaries of the symbolic order. Irigaray would argue that the Oedipus complex needs to be reconsidered with regard to female sexuality and feminine specificity if we are to spot the gaps which might afford us access to a more adequate model of sexual difference. This would allow for the existence of two different sexes, each on its own terms and each respecting the irreducible difference of the other. As Anthony Elliott has pointed out, ‘as a reading of social and sexual reproduction, the child’s resolution of the Oedipus complex designates the unconscious reproduction of patriarchal culture’ (1992: 34). According to the psychoanalytic approach, the Oedipus complex structures our notions of looking and the sexualization of the gaze,


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especially in relation to cinematic processes. Freud bases the castration complex, which is key to the little boy’s resolution of the Oedipus complex, on the boy’s recognition of the implications of the little girl’s lack of a penis. By the same stroke, however, the castration complex also means that the little girl is not capable of escaping the implications of the Oedipus complex. She never resolves it fully according to Freudian theory. The ramifications of this have been widely documented and criticized by feminists because, within the Freudian model, it is difficult to see how the little girl can ever accede to some level of autonomous subjectivity. In many ways, the difficulties facing the little girl in the Freudian Oedipus complex presuppose and affirm the experience of the actual (viewing) female spectator in the cinematic process (and vice versa). In order to sustain any level of pleasure in this account of spectatorship, the female spectator must occupy the masculine subject position, just as the speaking subject is always deemed to be masculine within the parameters of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Moreover, there is an analogical relation between the screen as mirror and the notion of woman as mirror to the male subject as discussed above. If the screen is seen as a mirror, the inescapable logic of the same will always apply. This model seemingly excludes woman from the realm of subjectivity in cinema, which seems pessimistic and restrictive. There is, however, an alternative perspective on the screen as a mirror that can be read through an Irigarayan lens. In order to turn to this more constructive scene of theory, it is necessary to consider how feminists have responded to the work of Mulvey and the other apparatus theorists to debate the question of female pleasure in cinema. Feminist film theorists have taken issue with the location of the female spectator in the masculine subject position, and feminist film theory has set out to show how women experience pleasure on their own terms in cinema. Particular reference has been made to the woman’s film, to the question of the gender of the gaze and to the possibility of multiple positions of identity that are available to spectators regardless of gender. Key moments in this debate are discussed in the following sections.

Masquerade: Approaching the problem of the spectator’s fetish Mulvey’s assertion that the gaze in cinema is a male one led to a period of sustained debate about the question of woman’s pleasure in cinema. The psychoanalytic notion of the masquerade became a key component

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of this debate and is perhaps most clearly seen in the work of Mary Ann Doane. Doane’s early work uses the idea of masquerade to construct a female alternative to the masculine fetishism identified by Mulvey (Doane, 1991: 17–32). She argues that there is a certain over-presence of the image for the female spectator in classical cinema which entails a renegotiation of her desire in terms of narcissism. Doane’s argument draws on the theories of Metz and Baudry about the distance between the spectator and the image which is an essential element of voyeuristic pleasure in the cinema. According to Metz, this gap represents the distance between the spectator’s desire and its object (1975: 61). Moreover, for Metz, this distance is doubly inscribed in the cinematic process by the sense of illusory sensory plenitude that characterizes the spectator’s experience of the cinema. The plethora of images and representations clearly marks the absence of the desired objects in the cinematic process. Doane responds to the importance accorded to distance in the theorization of the male spectator by highlighting the importance of issues of proximity in contemporary (and especially French) feminist thought which tends to theorize female specificity with reference to it.3 Drawing on this material, Doane’s suggestion is that woman is so close to herself as image that she is prevented from assuming an active spectator position. Doane’s argument is that masquerade can be used to ‘flaunt femininity’, to ‘hold it at a distance’ (1991: 25) and hence to destabilize the image. The masquerade, then, can be exploited to confound masculine structures of the look as defined in the early work of Mulvey. Following Mulvey’s conclusions in the 1975 essay, Doane contends that there are two possibilities for the female spectator in classical film: she must either indulge in the masochism of over-identification or she must engage with the narcissism of becoming one’s own object of desire. Masquerade helps to position the female spectator more adequately in that it manufactures a distance from the image and enables women to manipulate the image so that it becomes possible to reread the image under the sign of sexual difference. Femininity thus comes to take up a position in the system of power relations that structure patterns of identification and spectatorship in the cinema. Masquerade becomes a way of appropriating the distance necessary for active spectatorship. Women are able to deploy the masquerade in an attempt to read femininity differently. There are echoes here of Irigaray’s thought on turning masquerade into mimicry in an attempt to ‘jam the theoretical machinery’ of (masculinist) patterns of discourse and representation.


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Like Mulvey, Doane later returns to her early thoughts on masquerade in an article written in response to criticisms levelled at her work by Tania Modleski and others. Here, she addresses the problems raised by attempting to align masquerade with female spectatorship. She argues that, despite the fact that masquerade might seem more relevant to a study of how woman functions as spectacle than it is to providing an understanding of how female spectatorship works, it is those elements of the masquerade that designate the impossibility of a stable subject position which offer a theoretical basis for theorizing the female spectator. Masquerade in this context becomes an alternative to the masculine fetishism outlined in Mulvey’s essay. The problems bound up with ideas about using masquerade to focus on issues of female spectatorship reflect many of the central questions posed by feminism in relation to reading, pleasure and feminist interpretation. Masquerade functions like fetishism in Mulvey’s account of spectatorship in that both concepts theorize subjectivity as constituted both spatially and temporally by a gap or distance; but fetishism does so through a scenario which is dependent upon the presence-in-absence of the phallus. While masquerade ... is also haunted by a masculine standard, masculinity as measure is not internal to the concept itself (the masquerade designates the distance between the woman and the image of femininity; the fetish is the substitute maternal phallus). (Doane, 1991: 39) Masquerade designates a distance between woman and the image of femininity. Woman becomes a surface, image or screen in this respect. In other words, woman is cinema in traditional approaches to how femininity is inscribed in cinematic practice. Doane’s arguments about masquerade enable feminists to take a necessary step back from this position and to see the importance of strategic methods of film-viewing for the ways in which the female spectator might be constructed.

Gender and the gaze Doane has also done important work on the female gaze (1987). In her study of the woman’s film, she argues that fantasies associated with the feminine structure the possibility of a female gaze in cinema. She highlights the masochism, hysteria and paranoia that form the basis for the modes of address in the woman’s film. Doane’s investigation of the woman’s film reveals the limitations of apparatus theory, and opens up


possibilities for theorizing the female spectator, yet, like Mulvey’s work, Doane’s theoretical forays into the cinematic representation of the feminine have enabled feminist film theorists to do important work on the importance of sexual difference in film studies. The work of Mulvey and Doane has prompted other feminist film theorists to contemplate the question of the maleness of the gaze in ways which try to circumvent the limitations of the theories elaborated on the basis of fetishism, voyeuristic pleasure and the masquerade. E. Ann Kaplan responds to Doane’s suggestion that the female spectator is denied agency or desire in the woman’s film because she is encouraged to identify with a pattern of femininity that traps her into performing the spectacle of femininity. Kaplan asks pertinent questions about the gender of the gaze and questions attempts to restructure patterns of viewing in order to inscribe femininity into the matrix of the look. For Kaplan, the important question is whether, when women occupy a position of dominance in the cinematic process, they necessarily occupy a masculine position (1983: 24–5). Kaplan asks many germane questions about the availability of a female position of dominance in symbolic systems of exchange, and, in so doing, she posits a new theoretical position which is premised on the hypothesis that it is possible for both genders to occupy the positions outlined in the work of Mulvey and Doane as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. She suggests that ‘the gaze is not necessarily male (literally), but to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconscious, is to be in the “masculine” position’ (1983: 30). She justifies this position in terms of the feminist argument that psychoanalytic theory offers feminists a chance to change patriarchal practices and their situation of the feminine: once we have fully understood our placing and the way that both language and psychoanalytic processes, inherent in our particular form of nuclear family, have constructed it, we have to think about strategies for changing discourse, since these changes would, in turn, affect the structuring of our lives in society. (1983: 34)

Sexual difference and/in representation The problematic nature of this theoretical position is outlined most clearly in the work of Jacqueline Rose (1986). Rose approaches the question of sexuality in cinema by highlighting the fact that the cinematic image is


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both a model of and a term for the process of representation itself, and that sexual difference is constructed and maintained through that very process of representation. The question of the image in cinema (and of woman as the image in cinema) is therefore directly bound up with issues surrounding the representability of sexual difference. Yet, paradoxically, attempts to theorize cinema as an apparatus draw on aspects of psychoanalytic theory without considering the importance of sexual difference in psychoanalytic theory itself. Rose’s work centres on the difficulty of the issues that this insight entails (1986: 199–200). Rose suggests that the question of woman and/in cinema should be posed in conjunction with the problematization of cinema more generally (1986: 213). She stresses the significance of insinuating the question of sexual difference back into the way cinema is theorized so that the question of woman and/in cinema should be investigated in terms of the problematics of cinema’s constitution of femininity as an image structured around the phallus or as the ‘dark continent’ or other. Theoretical work on gender and cinema should address the attempts to imbue the female body as spectacle with notions of sexuality and should also try to theorize how and why woman as image becomes the object of phallic desire or identification. Constance Penley describes Rose’s attempts to insinuate sexual difference into questions of spectatorship as an effort ‘to counter the bachelor tendencies of the apparatus’ (1989: 67). She compares Rose’s project to use psychoanalysis in a more sophisticated manner than that advocated by the apparatus theorists with Joan Copjec’s attempts to incorporate Derridean principles into the way sexual difference may be related to spectatorship (Copjec, 1982). Penley advocates these positions as attempting to recover what is important to the feminist project of insinuating sexual difference into the theorization of cinema. This focus on the importance of sexual difference for the feminist project of explicating female pleasure in cinema is important in the context of the aims of this book. In recent years, several commentators have returned to this question, as the following section explores. This provides a useful foundation for any effort to rework positions on sexual difference in relation to films made by women which take as their focus the experience of femininity.

Shifting spectator positions In response to the important and significant debates raised in the work of Rose and Kaplan, feminists more recently have shifted their attention

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away from the question of woman as the image towards the notion of the spectator as subject. Positions of desire in film are characterized in this approach as potential viewing positions for the spectator-subject or, more precisely, for the almost mythical non-gender-specific subject of the viewing process. The notion of the spectator-subject represents an attempt to theorize spectatorship at the level of conscious and unconscious processes that take place in the cinematic exchange. The spectator is recognized as a subject who may or may not be marked by difference in terms of gender, race and/or class, and who is able to identify with a wide range of subject positions that are made available by the text. The spectator-subject is theorized in terms which mark out a clear distinction between the spectator-as-subject in the sense elaborated here, and the actual viewing spectator. Teresa de Lauretis pursues feminist thought on the contradiction between woman as a category that is framed by patriarchal investments in desire and processes of exchange, and real women who exist as historical subjects in the systems shaped by patriarchy (1984). She chooses to theorize the female viewer as a spectator-subject rather than in terms of a construct. De Lauretis’s work displaces the focus on the role of woman as image. She emphasizes the fact that female spectators are doubly bound by analyses of spectatorship that call upon her directly as the site of desire and voyeuristic pleasure. For de Lauretis, the female spectator is usually forced into a position of complicity in the production of her womanliness. This means that spectatorship cannot adequately be theorized by recourse to traditional questions about the relationship of woman to the image on the screen. De Lauretis calls for feminists to read against the grain of classical cinema in an attempt to show how narrative and ideology trap women into the functions prescribed for them by patriarchal systems of representation and the exchange of desire (1987b). Narrative becomes an important aspect of politicized cinema for de Lauretis: Narrative and narrativity, because of their capacity to inscribe desire and to direct, sustain, or undercut identification (in all the senses of the term), are mechanisms to be deployed strategically and tactically in the effort to construct other forms of coherence, to shift the terms of representation, to produce the conditions of representability of another – and gendered – social subject. (1987b: 109) This kind of approach foregrounds the importance of the spectator in making meaning for the films that they view. It also signals the potential


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for cinema to begin to circumvent the terms of the feminist debate of the 1970s and early 1980s which centred on the problem of the category of ‘Woman’ as defined with reference to patriarchal assumptions. There is room here in which femininity can be newly thought through, with cinema offering a means of interpellating the female spectator in ways that might allow for new articulations of sexual difference and therefore for a reconfiguring of the idea of the screen as a mirror. More recently, Judith Mayne has written extensively on the implications of rethinking spectatorship in contemporary theory (1993). Summarizing the historical development of theories of spectatorship, Mayne suggests that the gap between address and reception has structured many approaches to how the spectator is constructed. For Mayne, it is important to differentiate between the spectator as the addressee of cinema and the spectator as someone who responds to images. This helps to distinguish the ‘ideal’ viewer from the ‘real’ one. Mayne suggests that the distance between what texts construct as the view of the spectator and how texts are actually read is essential to an understanding of what the institution of cinema valorizes. Her appraisal of notions of spectatorship based on apparatus theories is that they are incomplete rather than wrong. Like de Lauretis, she argues for the importance of seeing the cinematic apparatus as flexible and adaptable. The ultimate challenge of spectatorship is to understand how the meanings of the cinematic image are both assigned and created (1993: 80–6). For Mayne, these problems can be addressed through a process of negotiation. The suggestion here is that different texts should be used/ interpreted/appropriated in different ways because the ‘diversity of the negotiated position’ can be used to challenge the power of the institution and its unspoken textual modalities. Mayne’s aim here is to escape the seemingly endless cycle of defining and redefining what precisely may be understood as spectatorship in light of the many theories that have arisen since the 1970s (1993: 102). By contextualizing Mayne’s argument amidst the current climate of contemporary feminist thought on sexual difference, it seems possible to renegotiate what is understood by the term ‘spectatorship’ in general, and by ‘female spectatorship’ more specifically. These issues have more recently been addressed by Anneke Smelik in her work on feminist cinema of the 1980s. Drawing on the work of de Lauretis, Smelik argues that ‘the historical context of feminism allows both the position of the female filmmaker and that of the female spectator to become enacted and empowered as conscious and self-reflexive subject positions’ (1998: 1). According to Smelik, feminist films of the 1980s proffer new approaches to notions of ‘femininity’ and ‘woman’

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but they do so without compromising on the importance of visual and narrative pleasure. Like de Lauretis, Smelik sees this as fundamental to any attempt to represent female subjectivity on the screen. The importance of sexual difference is foregrounded as an important element of how representational practices might be reworked: The consciousness of sexual difference may in some cases encourage the female subject to change her own conditions and those of other women. The experience can be both productive of and conducive to political agency ... In the case of feminist filmmaking the question becomes how a director processes her daily experience of belonging to the social and historical gendered category of women, so as to change mainstream cultural representations of sexual difference, more specifically of female subjectivity. The equivalent question for the spectator is what kind of empowerment follows from the reception of these texts. (Smelik, 1998: 3) For Smelik, the effect of this renewed focus on subjectivity in the feminist films produced during the 1980s4 is akin to shattering the view of the screen as a mirror that had hitherto pervaded feminist engagements with film. This has the effect of opening up ‘new fields of vision: to different angles, points of view; positions, images and representations’ (6) and therefore helps to express new modalities of female subjectivity. The image of the cracked mirror is important here, and signals the need for a shift in feminist conceptualizations of the potential of cinema for feminist (and feminine) politics and pleasure. This point has also been made by Alison Butler, whose comments on the state of feminism in relation to film formed a key contribution to the debate around the future of film studies and film theory published at the turn of the millennium in Screen (Butler, 2000). Citing some of the films discussed in chapters that come later in this book, Butler argues that during the 1990s, a number of significant women’s films have engaged with historical situations in meticulous, sensuous and rigorous ways. ... each attempts to express what it means to be interpellated as a woman in a particular historical moment, drawing on the resources of cinema for appropriate modalities of narration, relations of the look and mise-en-scène. (Butler, 2000: 76–7) For Butler, it is important that contemporary screen media should pay attention to women’s reality and thereby to referentiality. In other words,


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a semiotic approach to the feminine needs to be anchored in relation to the historical lived experience of contemporary femininity (as well as in relation to the dialectic between fantasy and reality). Like de Lauretis and Smelik, Butler argues that analyses of the cinematic image of femininity need to pay heed to the social category of women in order to enact a shift in the concerns of feminist film culture and in order to open up space for reconsidering the political potential of film for feminism. It is in the context of these observations that the next section turns back to Irigaray in pursuit of new models of thinking about the role of the screen and its structuring of the spectatorial relation.

The screen as membrane: Remodelling spectatorship Following the recent developments in feminist film theory discussed above, it seems necessary to seek out a new analogical model for the screen. Indeed, Mayne has discussed the value of reading the screen in terms of the Derridean hymen. A central object of inquiry in what is commonly referred to as ‘French theory’, and specifically that French theory which articulates what Alice Jardine calls ‘gynesis’, the valorization of the feminine, is those in-between spaces, tentative boundaries that put into question the very possibility of demarcation. One well-known figure of that in-between is the hymen, which in its very etymology articulates contradictory meanings of marriage (archaically) and vaginal membrane – of, that is, both union and separation. (1990: 45) Mayne’s discussion of the screen as hymen is related to Derrida’s appropriation of the concept in his work on Mallarmé, and she comments that it should be the female membrane which embodies and disembodies simultaneously suggests what has become by now a familiar feminist discomfort with the celebration of the feminine in Derrida’s writing – the suspicion that the body of the woman supplies the metaphor for the male subject’s indecidability [sic], with women’s bodies left once again subjected to the cold speculum of the male theorist. But perhaps, insofar as the screen in classical cinema is concerned, there is room for both the female membrane as ‘read’ by a male subject, and the feminist discomfort with the reading. (1990: 46)

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Mayne argues that Irigaray’s description of symbolic practices as ‘hom(m)osexual’ need not clash with such a reading of the screen because of the ambivalent relationship that women have to it in classical cinema. I would counter this argument by saying that it seems rather an insubstantial move to locate female spectatorship only in terms of woman’s ambivalent relationship to the screen and its articulation. Female pleasure in spectatorship seems to remain untheorized in this model. However, the notion of the screen as a membrane is of use to feminist theorists if it is extrapolated from masculinist appropriations of the female body. It is important to forge new models of thinking through the specific pleasures of cinema and cinematic narrative for women, as Smelik in particular has argued. How might it be possible to consider the female spectator’s relationship to the screen in ways that allow for such an analysis to be made? Essentially, the view of the screen as a membrane implies that the spectatorial process is mediative in nature, that is, that the spectator actively participates in this process, rather than being constructed passively. In this respect, the cinema screen proffers a means of establishing the importance of forms of mediation for the female subject as illustrated in Irigaray’s work.

Irigaray and mediation In her more recent work, the trope of mediation has become increasingly central to Irigaray’s thinking. Linked to other notions in her work such as the entre (the ‘between’) and the interval, mediation emphasizes the need for spaces of thinking and exchange in reformulating any inter-subjective relation. For Irigaray, such a process is irretrievably bound up with an ethical relation premised on a respect for the radical irreducible difference of the other. She argues that in order for an ethics of sexual difference to come into being, we must constitute a possible place for each sex, body and flesh to inhabit. Which presupposes a memory of the past, a hope for the future, memory bridging the present and disconcerting the mirror symmetry that annihilates the difference of identity. (1984/1993a: 17–18) Mediation, then, aims to construct an interval or ‘between space’ in which it is possible to locate the other in its own right. Irigaray often gestures toward cultural tropes of mediation such as the threshold, the mucous and the angel in order to articulate the non-symbolic structure


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of such a space of mediation, highlighting the slippery difficulties associated with attempting to inhabit such a space. Unlike Derrida, she resists the metaphor of the specifically female body in formulating ways of thinking through mediation as a process, although she does seize on the mucous as an embodied modality of it. Mediation, for Irigaray, is associated with attempting to forge a space of horizontal engagement between women rather than relations structured through genealogies. In this respect, then, mediation opens up a space in which differences between women might also be explored. In much of the writing on mediation, there is at play a certain interrogative style that works toward producing openings onto such spaces. For example, in her analysis of Plato’s discourse on Diotima’s speech in the Symposium, Irigaray stresses, firstly, Diotima’s absence from the conversation with Socrates: her contribution to the debate is reported through Socrates (1984/1993a: 20). Yet, it is also the case, argues Irigaray, that Diotima’s teaching doesn’t use opposition to make the first term pass into the second in order to achieve a synthesis of the two, as Hegel does. From the outset, she establishes an intermediary that will never be abandoned as a means or path. ... She presents, uncovers, unveils the insistence of a third term that is already there and that permits progression. ... This mediating role is indicated as part of the theme, but it is also perpetually at issue, on stage, in the exposition of the theme. (1984/1993a: 20–1) In her laughter in response to Socrates, Diotima dissipates ‘the tension between opposites’ (22) and ‘ceaselessly examines Socrates on his positions but without positing authoritative, already constituted truths. Instead, she teaches the renunciation of already established truths. And each time Socrates thinks he can take something as certain, she undoes his certainty’ (22). Diotima, then, becomes an exemplar of the process of mediation. In her undoing of certainties and expectations, Diotima gestures toward the fixities of symbolic discourse and representation, and, in so doing, calls them into question, thereby opening up a space for thinking through and in difference. Mediation, for Irigaray, would facilitate just such a gesture toward a socio-cultural discursive arena for thinking differently. Crucially, too, mediation conjures up the possibility of an ethical relation to the other which is couched in terms of respect for the radical irreducibility of the other. For Irigaray, such a relation prompts a sense of wonderment and

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awe at the difference of the other, and enables an ethical love of the other to begin to formulate itself. Wonderment, awe and admiration in the sense elaborated by Irigaray in her discussions of an ethics of sexual difference are premised on the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza (1984/1993a). For Irigaray then, an ethical relation with the other, forged through processes of mediation and love, is the source of joy and embodied subjectivity that is grounded in the specificity of difference. How does this work on mediation and ethics lend itself to the discussion of cinema and spectatorship being undertaken here?

Mediating spectatorship and enunciation In taking up the challenges of recent feminist interventions on film, which focus on finding a mode of negotiation for the cinematic spectator (Mayne, 1993) and preserving the importance of the visual and narrative pleasures of cinema (de Lauretis, 1987b &1990; Smelik, 1998), the trope of the screen as a membrane seems to hold promise. This lends itself well to the concerns with mediation discussed in the previous section. Arguably, certain types of cinema challenge the limitations of symbolic discursive systems by opening up new thresholds onto spaces for thinking through what it means to be a spectator-subject. By adding the notion of mediation to the efforts to theorize active and gendered modalities of spectator-subjectivity, theories of the cinematic spectator begin to take into account the actual viewing subject who is able to move more or less freely between a variety of subject positions. Such an approach makes the spectator-screen relationship an inter-subjective relation, a transferential relation and allows the spectator to permeate the text through the gaps in its discourse and modes of representation. The implications of this model are highly relevant to Irigaray’s work on the need to expose the mechanisms of patriarchal socio-symbolic practices in order to be able to insinuate the subject into the gaps which conceal the feminine. Such a model allows the spectator-subject to begin to renegotiate his or her relation to the text. Such a model need not function only in relation to the feminine. A mere reversal of the sexualization of socio-symbolic processes makes no detectable difference to the way the symbolic order is conceived and organized. The mediative model of spectatorship relies on the active participation of the spectator-subject, but also would allow for an active refusal to participate in the process of entering into the gaps of the membrane. A wide variety of subject positions thus becomes possible within this model, and this would include a spectrum of gendered


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positions. In other words, such a model may also help to account for male viewing pleasures in cinema, although this is outside the remit of the discussion underway in this book. This mediative model of spectatorship is analogous to the process of reading that occurs with Irigaray’s texts. Irigaray’s texts can be seen as experiments in conceptual and representational practice. The wide variety of writing styles combines with the textual organization of the work to confound and puzzle the reader, and this puzzlement is an important essence in her work. Echoing her thoughts on the need to avoid freezing interlocutors in any given, fixed position in an effort to shift the subject of enunciation and to blur the boundaries between subject and object positions, I would like to suggest that this is the way her texts should be approached. Irigaray’s work is far from prescriptive and is, rather, evocative and engaging. The aim is to elicit a response. Irigaray cannot determine the nature of this response, but she has no need to do so; it is the nature of the response that forms the attitudes that will be taken to her work; this presents one way to begin to consider the mechanics of signification and representation. The political impetus of Irigaray’s work depends entirely on how the reader interacts with her textual material. The cunning and playful use of punctuation, puns and the combination of words shows that her work relies on its status as a textual commodity. Her deconstructive, metaphorical approach to writing demands a response from the reader, a response which has more importance on a political level than the texts themselves. The inter-subjective relation is of the utmost importance in Irigaray’s work. Such an approach can usefully serve as a model for a feminist approach to the feminine as evoked within Irigaray’s work. The mediative approach to spectatorship also incorporates a demand for the active and inter-subjective participation of the spectator-subject in the rooting out of meaning and signification in the cinematic process. If this approach allows feminists to access the feminine within the gaps of the membrane-screen (and membrane-text), then, perhaps this is a way of applying Irigaray’s rather utopian ideas to a process which survives on the perpetuation of fantasy, amongst other things. Furthermore, this model opens up space for thinking through what we mean by the female spectator in ways that avoid the tendency to discuss her in the context of otherness and/or in terms of lack and absence. This model of spectatorship is particularly illuminating in texts that work beyond the strict confines of classical cinematic editing, such as those considered in other chapters of this book. The spectator’s relation


to the screen/text is also contrived in relation to contextual issues, as the work of Butler in particular has made clear (2000). The use of cinematic strategies such as the close-up, the look-to-camera, the flashback, inter-titles, the voice-over and the signification of interiority, complements and works in tandem with the socio-historical moment of the film’s reception and consumption. Increasingly, films are promoted in the press through the use of interviews with directors and producers, as the next chapter will explore in greater detail. The contextual elements of cinema work with its textual components to produce the screen as a membrane through which the spectator can begin to explore her subjectivity. The remainder of this chapter examines how this can be seen to be at work in the texts selected for analysis in this book. The focus is on enunciative structures and strategies and on the role of mediation in forging both pleasure and meaning for the spectator and the link between the textuality of cinema and the sense of subjectivity it can help to produce.

Mediation and the membranous text The textuality of cinema provides one entry point into understanding how mediation works to produce spectatorial subjectivity through the construction of pleasure and meaning. In Faithless, for example, mediation seems crucial to both the narrative structure and the filmic form. As we shall see in Chapter 5, much of the narrative has its base in fantasy and in what might be perceived as a version of the female imaginary. It is the recourse to fantasy that arguably opens up a space of mediation in the film between Bergman (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Lena Endre). Throughout the film, the narrative is sustained by repeated retreats to the present-day scenario of ageing director, Bergman, in conversation with a woman who may or may not be Marianne. The woman may or may not be a figment of his imagination, a figure from his past, a figure of reality or a figure of fiction. Despite the uncertainty about her provenance, it is the woman who articulates the experience of Marianne, who enunciates her story for us, embodying her feelings and states of being. In occupying such a role, she appears to transcend her own identity in order to mediate the experiences of an other. Indeed, for Bergman, it seems that this source of enunciation, coming from a disembodied source external to him, enables the production of a manuscript that grows as the film progresses. For Bergman then, the source of the enunciation is creatively enabling, and this is arguably due to the mediative role played by the other in recounting a version of events too painful for him to consider.


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Throughout the sequences set in the present, the woman, ‘Marianne’, has most of the dialogue, yet Bergman’s role in this film seems to be structured through a need to hear, or perhaps, to witness, this tale of jealousy and love in which he himself seems so closely imbricated, through the experience of the other. His response to the tale he hears unfold is highly embodied and almost unutterable in quality. We see his emotional and affective responses predominantly through the use of close-up, and the close-up framing of his face inscribed with wonder and awe at the intensity of the feelings evoked by Marianne’s tale is linked to the scenario of fantasy he has constructed. The importance of fantasy in this film is irretrievably linked to the filmic enunciative mechanisms of the text. Through the enunciation, this film sets up a meta-discursive space of exchange between the protagonists of the drama that links to processes of mediation. In this exchange between a man and woman, the film captures the ethereal process of mediation as defined in Irigaray’s work in that it returns to a memory of a past in order to think through ways of being in relation to past events and their effect on present-day senses of subjectivity. For both Bergman and Marianne, there is something cathartic about this return to the past that allows a re-articulation of the specificities of experience. In Marianne’s case, this re-articulation is a literal one in that she finds a way of speaking her specificity in ways that circumvent the categories of maternity, marriage and adultery. In telling her story, Marianne appears to find a new way of thinking through her experience as a woman in- and for-herself. There is emphasis on her enjoyment of the ease of living ‘with two men’ in her life, on the sense of herself as a woman that was somehow rooted in this experience. Yet Marianne, it seems, is also now dead. Can she thus only mediate this experience from her position of death? For Bergman, by contrast, the re-articulation of his past produces affect. He sets out the parameters of this reworking of the past, his past, in order to try to gain a sense of subjectivity in response to it. He manages this by writing extensively and by losing himself in memory, while finding himself mired in regret. At the end of the film, we surmise that our feelings about Bergman’s identity – that perhaps, after all, he is the ageing David (Krister Henriksson) of the story that Marianne tells – are somehow grounded in truth. The camera reveals to us photographs of Marianne and her daughter, faces familiar to us only from the scenes of Marianne’s remembering, together with a guidebook on Paris. In a sense then, Marianne’s return from the dead to mediate a space for thinking, remembering and feeling for Bergman opens up new

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perspectives on their story, much as Diotima’s challenges to Socrates inflect our reading of their exchanges as a result of Irigaray’s rereading. What Faithless reveals is the potency of the cinematic apparatus in relation to seeking out spaces for mediation. The camera work in the present-day scenes inside Bergman’s study enables the spectator to look onto the world of Marianne’s memories as if they somehow occupy a space in between fact and fantasy, memory and history, and as a result, as spectators we are able to permeate the story, to let it wash over us with all its inconsistencies and slippages. Its mystery enthrals us and inscribes us as witnesses to events that crumble as we try to speak their truth. We are left with an overwhelming sense of responsibility at the end of this film in terms of trying to understand the implications of what we have seen unfold as a story. It is important, in this context, that the story is mediated through the figure of woman. As Irigaray suggests, women are expected to function as mediators of masculine subjectivity in the symbolic order. Yet here, in this film, Marianne mediates her own experience and enables Bergman/David to review his own role in forging that experience of femininity, and to experience regret at his actions and inaction in not preserving the right of Marianne to a mode of feminine subjectivity. If Marianne is only permitted to mediate this particular story from the place of death, then this is indicative of how symbolic systems of representation insist on disavowing the feminine in life. In this respect, Faithless seems to mirror symbolic discourses and yet also to offer a glimpse beyond it. The role of the spectator is key in such a reading, in that s/he is required to think beyond the parameters of the story and plot in order to comprehend the interrelation of filmic structure and narrative. In acknowledging the impossibility of teasing these aspects of the film apart, the spectator allows herself to be hailed as a witness to the process of mediation being played out. This is arguably a move toward seeing cinema as a space of political impact. It constructs a narrative enunciated from a position that we might designate feminine and which therefore constructs its spectator positions in a similar guise. The cinematic structure of story-telling then, is central to efforts to seek out cinematic examples of mediation. In Antonia’s Line, this is borne out through the filmic play with notions of magical realism. This chronicle of a woman’s life is structured through female genealogical relations. Central to the narrative structure is the mother–daughter relation, and, it is interesting that it is this particular relation that is


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most heavily inflected with notes of magical realism. As Chapter 5 will suggest, the moments of magical realism in the film constitute a mode of parler femme. However, they also work to reconfigure the spectator’s relation to the events on screen, highlighting the fantastical elements at play in the story, and structuring our response to the film through pleasure and comic effect as a result. In this pastoral fairy tale, Marleen Gorris sets out to tell a tale that is indelibly marked with the feminine. In her construction of this chronicle of Antonia’s life, Gorris sets her narrative against the backdrop of the tradition of fairy tales in the formation of cultural allegory. As Karen Rowe has suggested, ‘traditional fairy tales fuse morality with romantic fantasy in order to portray cultural ideals for human relationships’ (1979: 237). Fairy tales play on structures of romance and symbolic discourses of gender and mythologies to reinforce socio-cultural expectations of gender roles and functions. In Antonia’s Line, however, the play of cultural expectations in magical tales is inflected with tropes of gender that set out to defy and reshape cultural expectations and norms. Gorris’s tale then, belongs to the genre of feminist fairy tales in which popular cultural mythologies are reread and rewritten in order to posit gender as a place of political resistance (the work of Angela Carter comes to mind here). The film calls upon our knowledge of the language of fairy tales but reconstructs our expectations in its treatment of themes of enchantment, communal rites and rituals and the expectation of nuptials as a trope of future happiness. The film sets out its fascination with enchantment early on, with its use of magical realism in relation to Danielle’s (Els Dottermans) visions. Inscribed with feminist wit, the scenes of magical realism (which are discussed at greater length in Chapter 5) play an important role in constructing the enunciative patterns of the film. Offering us humorous and unexpectedly comical reinventions of certain truths (Antonia’s mother (Dora van der Groen) is dead; stone statues of angels are inanimate etc), the film disrupts our expectations of realism in fiction and invites us as spectators to relish the fantasies that underpin the narrative. Humour is foregrounded as a strategy and the cinematic enunciation appears playful as a result. When Danielle sees Lara (Elsie de Brauw) for the first time, her vision is highly comical, depicting her as a version of Botticelli’s Venus, constructing her as a sublime incarnation of beauty for Danielle. This humorous enunciation of Danielle’s desire reminds us as spectators that desire between women is not easily made visible in narrative cinema. Danielle’s visions thus foreground the potential of fantasy as a tool for making visible that which is apparently unspeakable/unrepresentable.

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The film repeatedly capitalizes on its humorous strategies and motifs to encourage us as spectators to rework our expectations of cinema and its play with fantasy. Many of the magical realist scenes are defined and constructed in terms of feminist sensibilities. The film’s treatment of communal rites and rituals associated with fairy tales are fashioned in relation to the domination of Antonia, the matriarch (Willeke van Ammelrooy) and her specifically feminine perspective on domesticity, work, family, justice and society. The humour of the enunciative structures in this film addresses the spectator in political terms, recalling the work of de Lauretis. It is as if the magical realist gaze constructed for us attempts to extend itself through the narrative in order to reach the ‘limits’ of gender and its representation. We are invited to see the film as fantasy by identifying with and taking pleasure in the magical realist look it proffers. Such a way of looking inflects the structuration of meaning in the film, suggesting that this elaborate nod to the realm of the magical is politically inflected and aimed at reconstructing patterns of viewing, identification and meaning-making. Antonia’s Line displays an extraordinary manipulation of cinematic practice in its reworking of notions of truth and fantasy through the cinematic enunciative structure. As spectators, we are called upon to read the film through fantasies that centralize the importance of the feminine. The magical realist gaze constructed in Antonia’s Line might be seen then, as a direct address5 to the female spectator, interpellating her into a structure of looking that is clearly inscribed as feminine. Where Antonia’s Line mediates the feminine through comic lyricism, Carine Adler’s Under the Skin depends much more on evoking psychic states of being through a cinematic poetics that is intended to evoke the protagonist’s state of mind. A central concern of the film is Iris’s (Samantha Morton) experience of subjectivity in flux. The cinematic technique of the film, with its self-conscious play with ideas of realism and fantasy, functions metonymically in relaying the intensity of the protagonist’s state of mind by drawing on a range of filmic strategies. These include the use of jump cuts and slow-motion; framing and lighting are frequently expressionistic in style; and the mise-en-scène is structured through its use of colour, setting, and costume, in particular, to emphasize the affective qualities of the narrative and its exposition. In the context of a film that has the look of a British realist film, this play with emotion and fantasy is striking.6 This focus at the level of technique on the emotional and affective aspects of Iris’s reaction to her mother’s death is designed to focus the spectator’s attention on the experience of gender in this portrayal of a search for sexual and sexuate


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subjectivity. As discussed in Chapter 4, Iris’s identity is intimately bound up with her relation to her mother (Rita Tushingham) and the filmic strategies of the text work to articulate this through the cinematic enunciation in ways that build toward a narrative resolution which is superficially concerned with tying up the loose ends of the story but which simultaneously ‘leaves us with a sense of regeneration, of possibilities opened up by painful, gut-wrenching experiences, and new life tentatively emerging from dark despair’ (Cook, 1997: 56). Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions works in a similar way to Under the Skin, not just at the level of the theme of sibling rivalry, but also in terms of the centrality of fantasy and the struggle to discover a sense of identity, a way of being female. Unlike Under the Skin, however, Female Perversions exaggerates the distance between the spectator and the onscreen figures, many of whom are remarkably unsympathetic. As an adaptation of a non-fiction book based on clinical case histories,7 it is, perhaps, unsurprising that the characterization in the film appears to be fixed in a discourse of the difficulty of femininity. At the level of cinematic strategy, this film disrupts and challenges the spectator’s desire for identification, repeatedly seeking to alienate us from the potential for pleasure in the film, and thereby situating us in terms of the alienation that inscribes the characters on screen. Formally, the film switches between the dream-like fantasy sequences that mark out the difficulties of the psychological terrain inhabited by the protagonist, Eve Stephens (Tilda Swinton), and the day-to-day reality of the lived experience of femininity defined through ideology. At a number of points in the film, stark maxims stare out at us in the auditorium, reminding us that this is a cinematic construction and that we are watching a film: ‘Perversions are not all that they seem’; ‘In a perversion, there is no freedom, only a right to a rigid conformity to a gender stereotype’. This is a film that demands that we scrutinize our relation to it relentlessly, disrupting our tendency toward the suspension of disbelief and identification. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the scene near the beginning of the film in which we witness Eve at work in the courtroom inscribes these disruptions in our viewing practice in terms of feminist resistance to patriarchal structures of looking. Nevertheless, it produces a sense of knowing pleasure as we recognize the objectifying looks of the men in the courtroom and identify with Eve’s excruciating experience. In terms of mediation then, Streitfeld’s film constructs its spectator in terms of the politics underpinning its narrative concerns. By constantly disrupting our desire to look and identify through its perpetual use of


distancing strategies, Female Perversions underscores the way femininity is inscribed in patriarchy and tries to shake us out of forging identifications with it. It does so, paradoxically, by enabling us to take pleasure in recognizing its strategies and by forging a representation of the experience of femininity with which many contemporary women are able to identify. On screen then, we have a range of female characters, each of whom conforms in different ways to discourses of femininity and ‘Woman’. Eve’s narcissism helps to construct her as surface, as an embodiment of ‘Woman’ that privileges the masquerade; the scenes concerned with shopping and make-up emphasize this, with special attention to the slippage between the external surface of perfection and the psychological doubt that permeates Eve’s experience of her body. The disgust she feels at her narcissistic display is mapped symptomatically in the film, manifesting itself as voices of criticism and rejection that speak a version of ‘Woman’ grounded in the horror of the female body as perceived in patriarchy. We are reminded here of how Irigaray makes use of parodic figures of philosophical truths in her scrutiny of what it means to be a woman in patriarchy (1974/1985a; 1977/1985b). It is as though Eve is constituted as a woman according to the socio-cultural definitions of femininity whilst simultaneously being thrown into neurosis as a result of these trappings. The other women in the film function in similar ways: Maddy (Amy Madigan) displaces her neurosis about penis-envy and rivalry with the father on to a mania for shoplifting and illicit thrill-seeking in crime. She is pathologized throughout the film, especially by Eve. It is as though women have only the tools of patriarchy with which to make sense of their lived experience of femininity and that neurosis and pathology are inevitable as a result. Edwina (Dale Shuger) is an adolescent girl, riven with guilt about the loss of her ‘babies’ in menstruation and the concurrent onset of mature femininity. She resists the flimsy masquerade of femininity couched in terms of romantic fiction and submissive desire for a married man that is proffered to her by her mother. She seems rather more open to alternative versions of femininity embodied by the intellectual facet of Maddy’s life and by her aunt’s obsessive, knowing incarnation of femininity as a construct of male desire. Ed has no respite from the versions of femininity on offer to her and so she resorts to cutting herself in order to inscribe her alienation from her gendered identity on the body. Femininity, then, is set up as a construct of patriarchal systems and is flagged as the source of alienation and isolation throughout the film.


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The cinematic strategies of the film work to displace our tendency toward identification in order to make us feel uncomfortable about the representations of women that we see on screen, and yet, paradoxically, this enables women to take pleasure in the text’s forthright representations of these aspects of a woman’s experience. The cinematic structure and strategy, then, mediate an unspeakable response to the strangulating versions of femininity represented in cinema. Close analysis of the courtroom scene serves to exemplify the strategies at play, in this respect. The cinematic strategies of this sequence appear, at first, to collaborate in the cinematic construction of the female body as an object of the gaze/desire. Our gaze is matched with that of the camera and the court officials as they shamelessly rove across Eve’s body as she successfully wields her power as a lawyer in a courtroom scenario populated by men. The camera lingers on her body, fetishizing body parts and pieces of clothing and cuts to reverse shots of the men in the courtroom gazing at Eve. The excess of Mulveyan ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (1975) is immediately striking and the movement of the camera is foregrounded throughout the scene. The marks of cinematic enunciation are made clear to us and are reinforced by the reverse shots that put the male gaze centreframe. The ostensibly obedient camera work reveals its motivation through excess, and the spectator is repelled/distanced by the gaze in which the camera seeks to trap her. The disruption of the visual is matched on the soundtrack as we watch the security guard turn off his hearing aid. The moment of enunciation is constructed through the disgust of the spectator who is forced to watch a scene of wilful objectification of the female form. The tone of the narrative couples with the strategies of the mise-en-scène and film form to produce a text replete with distancing mechanisms and ironic parody. As spectators, then, we are positioned as questioning. The exploitation of mainstream cinematic practice around the representation of the female form demands a response. We are either left with no means of identification (through refusal of the strategies as repellent), or we must seek to rework the text in an effort to suture ourselves inside it on our own terms. The spectator here is structured as a knowing spectator, as one who enunciates, as one who reads against the grain to produce a modality of meaning that remains grounded in symbolic practice but which simultaneously refuses it. The dynamics of the film form in this respect mediate a space for thinking through the socio-symbolic politics of femininity, eliciting a response that somehow attests to the political value of shaking up the spectator in this way with a view to


privileging a glimpse of those aspects of femininity that more traditionally remain buried and obscured in systems of representation. This provides a new space of pleasure for women who are able to see represented a facet of their lived experience that usually goes unarticulated and remains apparently unspeakable. The political disgust invoked by the attitudes of the men in the courtroom is arguably accompanied by a sense of indignation undercut by pleasure at seeing the discomforting elements of female experience so succinctly spoken through the images on the screen. The relationship between pleasure and indignation here is dependent upon the formal strategies of the sequence and this is important in understanding how spaces of mediation begin to be opened up. It is also at the level of film form and cinematic strategy that Moufida Tlalti’s The Silences of the Palace works in terms of mediation. As in Antonia’s Line, the cinematic motif of the flashback plays an important role in establishing the heroine, Alia (Hend Sabri/Ghalia Lacroix), as the film’s protagonist and in clarifying the status of much of the film as memories of her past. The film moves between the diegetic present of the mid-1960s and the remembered events of 1956, the year in which Tunisia won its independence from France. For the director, Tlatli, the film interrogates the fate of women in the Arab world by scrutinizing individual fate (Anonymous, 1994: 10). The film can be seen, according to this account, as a cry; a work by a woman for women (1994a: 10) that is designed to shake up ways of thinking. The structure of the flashbacks is very interesting in this film, as it focuses not on the voice, as is often the case with an evocation of past time or memory in cinema, nor on the use of visual effects such as the dissolve to mark the movement in time. Instead, this movement in time is structured through a gaze of longing onto the spaces formerly inhabited by Alia and her mother, Khedija (Amel Hedhili), during Alia’s childhood. The film switches between Alia’s memories and her presentday visit to the palace of the Beys, and her memories are very clearly evoked through association with domestic spaces and a modality of experience that was structured very clearly in relation to a woman-towoman sociality, as discussed in Chapter 5. In constructing this movement between the diegetic past and the diegetic present, the film centralizes the experience of its protagonist, Alia, presenting her as a channel for cultural memory grounded in gender. The specificity of Alia’s subjectivity is multiply marked throughout the film, as it is inscribed through a mode of becoming that is clearly marked as feminine. Simultaneously, however, Alia is depicted as being able to


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avoid the trappings of servitude by reason of her presumed provenance and the preference that is accorded to her as a result. The unspoken knowledge of Alia’s parentage is mediated to us through the mother– daughter relation and the way this relationship is troubled as a result of the silences it seeks to preserve. Silence is supremely important throughout the film, attesting to the unspeakable status of the female subjectivity it seeks to illustrate, as well as highlighting the class politics of the palace structure and how this structure is maintained through gender hierarchy. The Silences of the Palace makes extensive use of point of view shots, aligning the spectatorial gaze with Alia’s gaze onto the spaces and memories of her past. This prompts us to identify with her and to read the messages in the silences of the film itself through the eyes she appears to lend us. These brief discussions of mediation point to how films made by women seem to adapt and re-articulate cinematic language and technique. This shows how the language of cinema lends itself well to the mediation of a discourse of the feminine that moves beyond the restrictive practices of mainstream cinema in its representation of women. It is also clear that there is an interrelation between film form and narrative content in the films under discussion here and that this can be understood in relation to processes of mediation and the opening up of spaces for thinking. In each of the examples discussed here, the screen becomes a kind of membrane, requiring the spectator to weave herself into the production of meaning and subjectivity. In this respect, the process of mediation through film form and narrative content calls on the spectator not to resist its strategies and helps to reconfigure what we understand as the female spectator. Many of the films scrutinized here take aspects of femininity and make them integral to their workings. More normative (and, perhaps, passive?) structures of spectatorship are thus thrown into disarray as the spectator is repeatedly challenged actively to work to make meaning in these films. The textual-political potential of this process becomes tangible in such a context and Irigaray’s work on mediation helps to make this clear. In the chapters that follow, these themes will be elaborated further. In Chapter 4, the place of fantasy in representing the feminine will be examined. In Chapter 5, the focus is on how such strategies of enunciation and spectatorship work together in formulating a modality of articulation for relations between women as a source of the feminine. In the subsequent chapters, it is argued that mediation of the feminine is clearly seen in two films: Sally Potter’s Orlando and Jane Campion’s The Piano. Through detailed scrutiny of these films, these chapters will present

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perspectives on these films that bring together the many different facets of a feminine cinematics that this book explores. Before moving onto the closer analysis of the textuality of the films under discussion, however, it is important to consider how the contextual elements of cinema contribute to the production of spaces for a feminine cinematics. This is the focus of the next chapter.

3 Practising the Feminine: Contexts of Production, Direction and Reception

Any discussion of a range of films made by women cannot be limited to analysis of the textual content of the work, as recent developments in the field of film theory have begun to make clear. As Angela Martin has suggested, a film is produced in a context of dialogue within which the filmmaker, the context and the reader/spectator all participate and from which they all produce meanings that will at least overlap if not necessarily agree. We need to find a way of recognizing this kind of conceptual and aesthetic work around the production of a film. (Martin in Levitin et al. (eds), 2003: 35) In order to chart a feminine cinematics then, it seems essential to consider how elements of women’s films are constructed in the context of their production and direction and how, following on from these processes of mediation, they are deciphered in the contexts of reception and consumption. In order to think this through further, this chapter draws on Irigaray’s discussions of gesture and ‘the scene’ or ‘setting’ of psychoanalysis (‘la praticable’) and the importance of these for revisioning the relationship between theory and practice. It also draws on interview and review material relating to the films under discussion in this book in an effort to set out specific examples of how a newly feminine mode of production helps to define the shape of a feminine cinematics and its mode of interrogation and commentary.

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Setting the scene for a feminine cinematics Throughout her work on language, enunciation and structures of discourse, Irigaray foregrounds the importance of interlocutors in forging routes into the domain of the feminine. This ideal is described in a range of ways, encompassing the notions of parler femme (which must be doubly heard as par les femmes) and female genealogy, as well as marking the discussion of ‘the radical irreducibility of the other’ that inflects an ethics of sexual difference. Much of the theory underpinning discussions in other chapters of this book relates these ideas to films in an effort to show how cinema is able to ‘speak’ apparently unrepresentable elements of the feminine as it is conceived in Irigaray’s work. However, it is important to bear in mind the fact that film is also about practice. The filmic text depends upon extensive (and often, in narrative cinema, obscured) processes of production, including approaches to direction. What is more, its eventual reception depends upon structures of distribution. The relation between theory and practice then, needs some excavation in order to grapple with the ‘scene’ of contemporary women’s filmmaking. Irigaray has also written on this relationship between theory and practice, and it is to this work that this chapter will now turn. In a number of short pieces1 on the ‘setting’ or ‘scene’ of psychoanalysis as a talking, therapeutic process, Irigaray draws attention to the importance of gendered subjectivity, gesture and the structuring of practice. As Elizabeth Hirsh suggests, Irigaray’s reading of the praticable proposes a new relation between theory and practice, and between theory and history, that can help feminists negotiate some recurring impasses of feminist theory ... It does this not simply by displacing the question of theoretical legitimacy onto the field of practice or history, nor by a substitution of therapeutic for theoretical ‘force’, but by proposing new and different criteria of theoretical legitimacy derived from an understanding of the relation between theory and therapy in psychoanalysis. ... The praticable ... constructs a means and a mode – of theorizing, intepretating [sic], writing, speaking – usable by and for diverse women. (Hirsh in Burke, Schor & Whitford (eds), 1994: 300) In her account of the psychoanalytic setting, Irigaray draws attention to the importance of gestures, which often accompany the utterances of the analysand and which sometimes originate outside the scene itself.

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In other words, the external framework of subjectivity experienced by the analysand can be observed within the process of analysis itself and is as much a part of the process as anything that is simply said or stated. For Irigaray, gestures are particularly important in understanding the dramatic nature of the psychoanalytic scene and they play an important role in understanding how the analytic scene is always inherently a gendered one. This is illustrated through a detailed analysis of the role of the fort-da game played by Ernst and described by Freud in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920). Irigaray considers the structure of Ernst’s game, which consists in throwing a cotton reel away from his bed (and uttering the sound ‘o-o-o’, aligned by Freud with the word ‘fort’ [far]) and then retrieving it again with the sound ‘a-a-a’ (aligned with the word ‘da’ [near]). She discusses Freud’s suggestion that this game is ‘an action designed to master the absence of his mother’ through which he is therefore able to enter the symbolic universe (1987/1993c: 96). By contrast, Irigaray argues, A girl does not do the same things when her mother goes away. She does not play with a string and a reel that symbolize her mother, because her mother is of the same sex as she is and cannot have the object status of a reel. The mother is of the same subjective identity as she is. (97) The implication here is that the Freudian psychoanalytic account fails to recognize the specificity of the little girl’s relationship to her mother (and therefore to her absences). Following Freud’s observation of Ernst’s game, Irigaray suggests that the gestural play of the girl is just as significant in forging an understanding of how she manages the loss of her mother. For the girl, it is not a question of being able to master the experience of difference, because her specificity as a subject is shared in common with the mother and ‘the mother always remains too familiar and too close’ (98). Instead, the little girl uses gesture differently in order to stage her sense of loss (which is not inflected with difference). Irigaray suggests that specific gestures are made: the girl might throw herself to the ground, becoming hysterical, losing the will to live and/ or to eat; alternatively, she might use doll play as a means of organizing symbolic space and managing the sense of separation; she might whirl around dancing, making circular movements that protect her from a sense of abandonment and loss, and simultaneously help her to attract; finally, she might also use the voice in song or in a rhythmic melody, expressing emotions such as tenderness and anger (97–8). What is

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important here is that the specificity of the girl’s relationship to the mother is observed in the detail of these gestures and, for Irigaray, this is an important element affecting the way the analytic process unfolds. The gendered subjectivity of both analyst and analysand becomes crucial to the understanding of any means of practice and process in this sense. Hilary Robinson has drawn on this work to suggest that Irigaray’s notion of gesture in the analytic setting helps to illuminate the practice of women artists (Robinson, 2006). She suggests that ideas about doll play and the re-inscription of symbolic space can be linked to the process of making an artwork for women. The idea of play with materials can be read in terms of subjective status; the object of play becomes a means of mediating subjectivity to oneself and others; the doll being played with is not an object in the normal sense. In addition, the whirling dance of the little girl provides a model for understanding performative aspects of women’s art practices, offering a means of understanding the actual processes of making and doing, the place of gesture in the studio and the physical negotiation with any given work that takes place between the artist and the artwork as well as between the artwork and the viewer (Robinson, 2006: 128–9). As she goes on to suggest, through the structure in Irigaray’s argument we can propose for the subjects, women, a potential relation to the artworks they make that is both gendered and yet variable among women. It is a relation which could be manifested materially in particular practices. The practices of play (their processes and effects) are embedded in and understandable through social processes. (Robinson, 2006: 128) Robinson’s suggestions here are very pertinent to any consideration of filmmaking as a gendered practice and it is clear that Irigaray’s ideas on gesture and the scene of (psychoanalysis as) a practice can be used instructively to think about the scene of women’s creative practices more broadly. In the context of cinema, as previous chapters have already begun to make clear, the role of women has been inscribed with reference to assumptions about structures of subjectivity that depend on a masculinist worldview. In mainstream cinema, women have largely been represented by men, constructed as objects of the gaze and left with little room for a sense of specificity in the pleasures that cinema can provide. As women progressively began to engage with film as a mode of practice, a range of experimental and avant-garde approaches


was adopted, producing a diverse array of films that might be perceived as having limited appeal to an audience of scholars and activists for whom the issues at stake were already not in question. In the context of narrative cinema, things are rather less clear cut. Traditionally, opportunities for women to participate in and structure the process of filmmaking have been limited. As Zoe Dirse suggests, The film industry is a very closed and guarded old boys’ club because of its glamour, its mystique ... and its high-wage potential. Those of any other ethnicity, class or gender who dare to break into the ranks must either persevere in the face of rejection, abuse and intolerance or search out like-minded directors and producers in order to progress in their field. Thus, it is common to find women working on women’s films, or minorities working with minorities. (Dirse in Levitin et al. (eds), 2003: 437) The question of how women have begun to make inroads into the practice of narrative filmmaking is an important one then, and one which bears more detailed scrutiny in order to try to establish how filmmaking as a mode of practice can be read as specifically feminine. In what follows, the films selected for analysis in this book are examined in terms of their contexts of production, direction and distribution in an effort to set out an overview of the context of their emergence. The aim of the following sections is to illuminate what might be understood as ‘la praticable’ of women’s filmmaking and the space it makes for specifically feminine gestures.

Examining contexts of production and distribution Feminist critical commentary on narrative cinema and its political significance tends to focus on the textuality of films and on the pleasures and unpleasures that this conjures up for the spectator as previous chapters have discussed. However, as Roy Stafford has argued, the relationships between producers, distributors, exhibitors and audiences are ‘linked via the films themselves’ (2007: 7). In this regard, it is important to consider the broad backdrop of issues related to the production, distribution and consumption of films in order to sustain proper insight into the cultural significance of any particular text(s). This seems especially pertinent given that the selection of films under analysis in this book emerged during a definable period of time in the context of

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an apparently expanding horizon of potential for independently produced cinema. How, then, are such issues seen to be at play in relation to the films selected for analysis? This is a complex question and one which cannot be easily unpacked. The films under analysis here share in common a number of factors: they are directed by women, produced independently of Hollywood studios and share a concern with matters of feminine subjectivity. Each film was made on a very constrained and moderate budget2 and enjoyed relatively small box-office success3. However, there are also a number of important differences between them. A clear distinction can be drawn between those films produced in the context of the Anglophone and European industrial contexts (Orlando; The Piano; Antonia’s Line; Female Perversions; Under the Skin; and Faithless) and those made within the much more politically and culturally constrained industrial contexts of Tunisia (The Silences of the Palace) and Iran (The Apple), where issues of difference are not simply inscribed through gender first and foremost. What is more, in some of these examples, such as Orlando, The Piano and Antonia’s Line, the directors all have well-documented backgrounds in overtly politicized feminist filmmaking.4 This experience inevitably impacts on the contexts of their work on the films examined here. By contrast, Liv Ullmann, director of Faithless, is better known as an actor, although she had previously directed two feature films.5 Moufida Tlalti, director of The Silences of the Palace, had amassed considerable experience as a respected film editor before directing this film (Armatage, 1995). Here then, we see examples of how women can move between different roles and domains within the scene of cinematic practice. For Carine Adler, Samira Makhmalbaf and Susan Streitfeld, the films under scrutiny here were first features. The important differences between their cultural contexts shows through when we take into account that Adler had been trained at the UK National Film and Television School and had successfully directed a short film before making Under the Skin (Felperin, 1997), whereas Streitfeld’s involvement in the film industry had been in her prior career as an agent working within the Hollywood system (Huisman, 1997: 10). For Makhmalbaf, aged only 17 when she directed The Apple, the importance of her relationship to her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, with his extensive experience in Iranian film as a successful director, cannot be overlooked. The speed of her access to the Naderi family around whom the narrative of The Apple is built was largely due to the fact that Makhmalbaf’s father had been on the waiting list for a camera for two years and was at that very moment preparing to go to Tajikistan to make a film and so was able to make the equipment


available to his daughter, for whom he also acted as adviser (Najvan, 1999: 102). The contexts of production for these films are very different. However, it is interesting to consider the extent to which they have aspects in common. For example, interview material documents extensively the struggle faced by women directors in terms of raising film finance. Sally Potter reportedly worked on Orlando for some eight years and described the process of raising money for the project as ‘something “beyond Kafka” ’ (Francke, 1993: 5). Reviews of the film signal the difficulties negotiated by Potter quite extensively, detailing the fact that ‘she approached every possible producer and source of film finance in Britain, from the BBC and Channel 4 to the Rank Organisation and David Puttnam’ (Summers, 1993: 17) and that ‘financing the project required patience, nerve and a global reach’ (Brown, 1993: 35), eventually driving Potter to the former USSR in search of possible funding structures that would work. Finally, after a series of disappointments related to the possibilities of perestroika enabling a deal with MosFilm to be carried through, Potter and her producer, Christopher Shepherd, finally negotiated a European co-funding structure that brought together financing from Italy, France, Holland, Russia and Britain. Similarly, the production context for Antonia’s Line depended on a collaborative European funding structure, which combined production expertise from Belgium and Holland with funding from British Screen, despite the lack of any overt British interest in the film, in order to help the film to qualify for funding from the Council of Europe Eurimages Fund (Anonymous, 1996: 4).6 On The Piano, funding eventually came from a uniquely positioned investor (CiBy 2000), a wealthy building contractor who wished to fund film projects with minimum intervention because of a sense of belief in the filmmaker concerned (as detailed by producer Jan Chapman in an interview on the special edition DVD). Interestingly, on The Silences of the Palace, funding came from France despite the fact that the narrative is largely critical of the former colonizer of Tunisia. As a review in The Asian Age documents, Much of the finance for Silences of the Palace has come from France. A bizarre contradiction that a film which celebrates Tunisia’s independence was reliant on this former colonial power for funds. But Tunisia is in the same situation as many other countries in the region with governments unable or unwilling to supply large amounts of money for filmmaking. Because of this situation, Tlatli

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said, directors are forced to look elsewhere. ‘The fact that France is prepared to fund such a film which is essentially anti-French is perhaps remarkable’. But as Tlatli noted, ‘Maybe the French are making up for the sins of the past but at least they realise that they couldn’t just cut themselves off from Francophone countries’. (Anonymous, 1995: 14) The contexts of production for these filmmakers are clearly rather diverse. However, it is interesting to see the extent to which collaborative gestures are essential to the eventual success of bringing projects such as Orlando and Antonia’s Line to the screen. There is a sense here that traditional boundaries of working practices are being troubled and reinvented in the practices of thwarting rigid structures of funding and in bringing together apparently incongruous groupings (seen especially in relation to The Silences of the Palace). Interviews with the women directors of these films repeatedly foreground the struggles that they face with regard to sourcing funding opportunities. In this context, they seek creative and collaborative solutions to apparently insurmountable problems. It can be argued that this experience is far from unusual for professional women and that working within traditionally masculine structures requires self-conscious refusal of all constraints and dogged determination to find ways of progressing. Irigaray’s notion of the whirling dance of the little girl comes to mind as an evocative metaphor here. It is as though women seeking to make films they believe in need to describe their own circles of possibility, creating their own uniquely defined spaces for engagement with the machineries of cinema in order to articulate their work. The processes at play here involve close scrutiny of the loopholes and opportunities for reworking traditional working practices in order to reinscribe the possibilities for feminine filmmaking. It is as though the female filmmaker is ‘playing with the borders that give access to the territory where she stands’ (Irigaray, 1987/1993c: 98). Inscribed as she is within the dominant paradigm of filmmaking, the female director must work from within to trouble perceptions and assumptions, and to disrupt the normative practices of the industry. This moves beyond a mere theoretical jamming of the machinery and takes the form of an embodied re-articulation of it. As such, it draws attention to the ‘praticable’ of the scene of filmmaking and helps to inscribe specifically feminine gestures within it. Of course, the ‘praticable’ of cinema extends beyond the actual frameworks of film production. In order for films to have meaning and become


available to the public, they also require distribution. The distribution details for the films explored in this book are given in the notes.7 With the exception of The Piano, none of the films has enjoyed an industrystandard mode of distribution, relying instead on smaller companies in specific territories, and building on the success of festival visibility. In this regard, it is well worth noting that both The Piano and Antonia’s Line are unique in having won American Academy Awards (Oscars) for female directors of a feature film (though in Campion’s case, this award was for the screenplay which she penned). In addition, Jane Campion is the only female director ever to have won the Palme D’Or prize at Cannes. Each of the films explored in this book has achieved recognition on the festival and prize-giving circuits, and this has undoubtedly impacted on the opportunities for global distribution.8 On the whole, however, these films have depended upon distribution companies that deal with offbeat, independent films. For example, as Kay Armatage has noted, The Silences of the Palace was handled for world sales by Fortissimo Film Sales, a company which describes itself as ‘an international film, television and video sales organization specializing in the production, presentation, promotion and distribution of unique, award winning and innovative feature films from independent film makers from all over the world’ (http://www.fortissimo.nl/), and in the US by Zeitgeist, ‘a discerning small company which has had considerable success with niche marketing of films by Yvonne Rainer, Todd Haines, Atom Egoyan and Derek Jarman’ (Armatage, 1995: 27). Even in the case of The Piano, the principal distribution arm, Miramax, was well-known for its sales of independent films from the global market before its acquisition by the Disney Corporation in 1993. What this suggests is that despite being regarded as ‘niche’ because of their lowbudget status as independent productions, women’s films frequently profit from visible participation in the festival circuit. The extensive achievement of the films under analysis here of prizes on this circuit is testimony to the value of such spaces of screening for women, and this is significant for the extent of distribution opportunities that follow on. For example, Female Perversions is, perhaps, the least successful of the films under analysis in this book, having won no major awards. It is instructive to bear this in mind when considering the box-office information for this film. Its relatively limited release and correspondingly low box-office receipts are especially notable because this is an American film. By contrast, The Silences of the Palace, which fared even less well in the US context, arguably suffered from a very limited release and could never have been expected to do well in the US context.


This is underscored by the view of Amy Taubin, writing in Village Voice about the consequences of a failure to be adequately picked up for distribution for this film: More proof that our local film culture is, how do I put it, a bit retarded: Eighteen months after Moufida Tlatli’s stunning The Silences of the Palace received a standing ovation at the New York Film Festival, it’s finally found a theatre willing to play it – at least for a limited run. And that’s after opening to rave reviews in Paris and London and making several 1994 top 10 lists. I mean, why did it take so long? Set in Tunisia, both during and after French rule, The Silences of the Palace is largely a story about mothers and daughters. (Oh, is that why?). (Taubin, 1996: 78) The connection made here by Taubin between the film’s narrative content and the reason for its refusal on the American cinema circuit is insightful. Outside the framework of traditional film industrial contexts, women’s cinema seems to fare better. The European context, with its peripheral status in terms of income generation and profitability, allows spaces for less predictable narrative cinema to have its moment. The value of this should not be underestimated, as it goes a significant way toward ensuring that spaces for a feminine cinematics can be found after all. It changes the scene of the ‘praticable’ of women’s filmmaking in important ways.

Examining contexts of direction As we have already begun to see, the contexts of a film’s making contribute to the construction of a feminine cinematics. In particular, the context of production and distribution shows how gestures of collaboration and a certain troubling of conventional processes help to alter the scene of women’s filmmaking. The making of any film, however, depends to a large extent on the approach of the director. This section sets out to explore how the context of directing can help to shape a specifically feminine mode of filmmaking at play in a feminine cinematics. Interviews are a useful means of gauging the varying approaches of specific directors to their work. In relation to the work of directors under scrutiny here, it is interesting to note the emergence of common


themes. Many of the directors specifically foreground their attempts to articulate the interiority of feminine subjectivity in their work, signalling how film becomes a means of grappling with notions of Woman. For example, Moufida Tlalti makes an explicit connection between her shift from the field of film editing into direction and the lived experience of her relationship to her mother. As Taubin details, she felt impelled to make a film of her own after nursing her mother through the last five years of her life. When her mother became ill, she stopped speaking and her silence continued until her death. The Silences of the Palace was a way of investigating the conditions of her mother’s life and of coming to terms with her own guilt, resentment and pain in the face of her mother’s refusal to speak. (1996: 78; see also Anonymous, 1995: 14) The specificity of the mother–daughter and female genealogical relationships shows through here and is a theme that runs through the work of other directors too. Sally Potter’s Orlando is dedicated to the memory of her grandmother who died during its making (Dargis, 1993: 43). Carine Adler frequently discusses the importance of female family relations in interviews around Under the Skin, mentioning her sisters and her mother and suggesting that she functioned as a mother-figure herself for Samantha Morton who plays Iris (O’Sullivan, 1997: 21). Jane Campion also dedicates The Piano to her mother, and she discusses her influence on the choice of the kind of story underpinning the film, again mentioning her mother as an important figure driving the attitudes of both her and her sister, despite their inherent sense of difference from her and despite the fact that Campion has not always been ‘comfortable’ with her mother’s attitudes (Bilbrough, 1993: 11). For Marleen Gorris, too, the importance of female characters and the experience of femininity is spelt out clearly (Roth, 1996). The substance of the female genealogical relation runs through the determination of material and narrative concerns in a feminine cinematics then. The interiority of women’s experience of the feminine is another clear concern. Seen perhaps most fully in films such as Under the Skin and Female Perversions, this is manifest in the attention paid to the problematic of how to articulate a sense of feminine subjectivity creatively. For both Susan Streitfeld and Carine Adler, the influence of academic tracts on female identity is significant. Streitfeld’s film is an adaptation of Louise Kaplan’s theoretical explorations in Female Perversions (1991), while Adler not only drew on Estela Welldon’s work in Mother, Madonna,


Whore, a psychoanalytic overview of the ambivalence associated with motherhood in contemporary culture and society, but also invited her on set to act as an adviser. Issues of interiority also abound in Orlando, The Piano and Faithless, and this is seen in the director’s decisions to use devices such as the voiceover and the look-to-camera to forge links between the spectator and the protagonists. Again, such an approach is also at play in the use of magical realism and fantasy in Antonia’s Line and Female Perversions. The use of flashbacks, freeze-frames and the blurring of boundaries between documentary and fiction seen in The Apple and The Silences of the Palace also work to foreground the importance of female subjectivity and its inscription within the spaces of interiority. Another theme that emerges clearly from interview material is the question of whether being a female director makes a difference for these directors. It is striking that for several directors overtly refuse the ‘feminist’ label, drawing attention to the fact that their work is not to be seen in terms of any kind of gender-based political action. Potter, for instance, claims in an interview available on the special edition of the DVD version of Orlando, that when she is working she feels neither like a woman nor like a man. Instead, she states that I only start to feel like a ‘woman’ when maybe I have a difficulty or a struggle to raise some money, or I feel people aren’t seeing me clearly as an artist, they’re seeing me as a female figure and that’s stopping them from seeing something else that I’m wanting to give. Here, Potter makes clear one of the reasons that she and directors such as Campion might be fixed on either refusing the label of ‘feminism’ or disputing the relevance of their gender for the films as a whole and this relates to the broader cultural perception of what it means to claim gender issues as a starting point for the work. For Potter, in particular, previous critical disdain about her overtly feminist work must surely play a role in this. She comments that ‘people do tend to say that pictures that have a central female role are slight’ before smiling ‘lethally’ (Feay, 1993: 18), indicating that despite her dismissal of the feminist label, for Potter, concerns with femininity remain central. Similarly, Jane Campion remarks that It is hard to say if the film is made from a specifically female point of view. Of course I’m a woman, but I have a masculine side as well – just like anyone. It’s not a political feminist thing; it’s just me as a


person making a film. I guess that includes the fact that I’m a woman, talking about love. (Andrew, 1993: 26) The thread here seems to focus on a conscious refusal of a particular mode of femininity defined with reference to a feminism that seems threatening and all-encompassing. What comes through in such comments is noteworthy with regard to the desire for the films to merit respect from men as well as from women. There is a sense here of aspiring to a normative mode of femininity that is able to speak itself without suffering the burden of an overtly politicized set of expectations. For Gorris, too, the lack of a direct address to a feminist sensibility is important: ‘She attributes part of the film’s success to the fact that she doesn’t let her clearly feminist message get in the way of her story, but lets it present itself in the process of storytelling’ (Roth, 1996: 14). The impetus in these perspectives takes as its focus the notion that femininity exceeds expectations that are narrowly defined in terms of feminism. This is very much in the spirit of Irigaray’s work, helping to draw attention to the importance of elaborating sexual specificity and focusing this through a lens of difference rather than forging overly feminist positions of critique. In this spirit too, the emphasis on collaborative modes of working expressed by the directors under analysis here is also important. As we have already seen, the extensive collaboration between Streitfeld and Adler with the writers of their source texts is central to the narrative construction of their films. For Liv Ullmann, director of Faithless, the importance of the ‘special connection’ she felt to female members of the crew is made clear in an interview included on the DVD version of the film. She characterizes these relationships in terms of longevity, excitement, sharing the same special phrases and the joy of communicating without speech. These values are echoed in the well-documented close relationship between Campion and producer Jan Chapman on The Piano. Campion frequently comments on their ‘great friendship’ and clearly delights in the closeness of their working relationship. Similarly, Chapman herself talks extensively about the importance of respect within the director/producer relationship, suggesting that this is at the heart of a successful collaboration. Tlatli too makes connections between her experience of filmmaking and the emergent state of ‘a real emancipation of women’ (Anonymous, 1995: 14). The theme here is one of femininity providing the ground for new structures of working within cinema, allowing women directors to transcend the perceived constraints of femininity in order to produce work that evokes a certain


sensibility of female subjectivity inscribed through collaborative and respectful modalities of working that avoid the pitfalls of politically defined cinema in order to express something more fundamental. Something more feminine perhaps.

Examining contexts of reception A short chapter such as this cannot really do justice to the extent of critical reception of these films. However, as note 8 below makes clear, the range of films under exploration in this book has garnered an impressive array of awards and critical recognition. In order to examine how the critical reception of such films might feed into the notion of a feminine cinematics, this section explores reviews from a range of press outlets. As we have already seen in previous sections, many of the reviews draw on interview material with the directors, and this is helpful in terms of presenting a perspective on working practices and approaches that might be defined as feminine. What are the other key themes that emerge in the critical reception of these films and how do they enhance the sense of feminine specificity which seems to surround the work, thereby contributing to a critical response to the ‘praticable’ of women’s narrative filmmaking? One of the most striking features of the reviews considered here is the keenness of reviewers to make links between different films. For example, in discussions of The Piano, there is frequently reference to Orlando (which is perhaps not too surprising given that the films were released in the same year). Potter herself has noted that she has frequently been asked about The Piano in relation to her film, and Vikki Riley makes extensive comparison between the roles of Ada and the female Orlando in her appraisal of The Piano (Riley, 1995: 63). Wally Hammond links The Piano to the work of Tlatli in his review of The Silences of the Palace, suggesting that the films share a concern with ‘the complex relationships between mothers and daughters suffering the distortions of injustice’ (1995: 65). Similarly, many of the reviews of Potter’s work in particular attempt to point out comparisons to male directors. Potter is frequently aligned with Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman and Orlando is discussed with reference to Merchant Ivory costume dramas. This insistence on defining the achievements of women directors through reference to men is seen very overtly in reviews of Faithless. Because the script for this film was written by Ingmar Bergman, with whom Liv Ullmann once had a love affair, many of the reviews focus on the influence of Bergman on the film’s


narrative despite the fact that Ullmann makes it very clear that she alone is responsible for changing the structure of the film in the course of its production so that it no longer took the shape of a monologue, and paid due attention to the issue of the child in the story. Philip French, writing in The Observer, even goes so far as to review the film with no substantial mention of Ullmann as director. For him, this is a Bergman film through and through (French, 2001: 7). There is a sense in these tendencies of not quite knowing where to place women’s filmmaking on its own terms. It is clear, for example, that Potter objects to being aligned with the likes of Greenaway and Jarman, preferring to distance herself from their philosophical underpinnings and emotional resonances which she sees as very different to her own (Feay, 1993: 18). The insistence on aligning the accomplishments of women with the work of men is perhaps writ most large in reviews of The Apple. Given the precocious age of the director and the fact that her father acted as editor and scriptwriter, this is perhaps not surprising. However, Charlotte O’Sullivan suggests that ‘The suspicion among many critics is that he did all the work’ (1998: 7). After extended commentary on Samira Makhmalbaf in which she is rather infantilized, O’Sullivan concludes the review with a comment that ‘however helpful her father may have been, it is her film’. This thematic of Samira’s dependency on her father belies the experience she documents herself – her father was not on set and the motivation for making the film was entirely her own. Her juvenile status seems to have compromised the response of the reviewers, who nevertheless agree that the work is a consummate film that beautifully evokes the sense of freedom experienced by the sisters in the narrative. A closer reading of the reviews and interviews with Samira Makhmalbaf foregrounds a concern on her part for the rights of these young women and also to try to grapple with issues of cultural belief and difference in ways that provide food for thought. This is a remarkably mature film, in this sense, and the interview material in particular suggests that Makhmalbaf is well aware of the importance of the specificity of the girls for the narrative of her film as a whole. In terms of the reviews of films made by women then, it is interesting to note that there are attempts to foreground the experience of women in making their work and sometimes to try to categorize the work in terms of frameworks of reference defined by male directors. This goes some way toward articulating the difficulty of trying to critically evaluate films made by women. It is as though they are so few and far between that reviewers struggle to see them in and of themselves. While, on the one hand this echoes some of the difficulties examined in Irigaray’s work around spaces for feminine practice, the fact that the


work of women is given attention in popular cultural contexts, often as a result of its prize-winning festival success, indicates the importance of a specifically feminine ‘practicable’ for women’s cinema. In the struggles undertaken by women film directors such as those examined here to establish funding and workable contexts of production and direction, we begin to see how women are able to work within apparently constrictive industrial frameworks despite the apparent obstacles to their doing so. By troubling the perceived restrictions of filmmaking practices and by using collaborative, self-referential structures of working that draw on individual emotionally driven, subjective experience, women are able to insinuate elements of femininity into their practice. By participating in their own clearly defined models of practice, women are often simultaneously working within the industrial context and from beyond it. The movement here is doubly inflected because women need simultaneously to bear in mind the apparent impasses of the industrial context for women whilst working against/ around them. The relationship to practice is thus a dialogical one that helps to inscribe a new sense of the feminine through the gestures it produces. The gestural positions of any scene of practice help to shape the conditions for newly emergent speaking positions. In the work of the filmmakers under analysis here, the newly wrought ‘praticable’ of the scene of women’s filmmaking helps to make space for the articulation of a uniquely feminine approach to cinema. As Sharon Todd has suggested, the ‘praticable is that which subverts [the] systems of representation while producing new ones – and ... it does so on its own terms, in ways that involve the vicissitudes of the subjects who participate’ (Todd, 1995: 12). The practice of the women filmmakers under examination in this book fit this remit very well. By rearticulating the terms of the ‘praticable’ of their filmmaking practice, they help to thwart theories that maintain that woman is the object of cinema rather than its subject, and thereby help to shape the domain of what might be understood as a feminine cinematics. Elements of the ‘praticable’ also find their expression in the textuality of the films made in this setting. Elements of the text such as the use of freeze-frames to draw a narrative to a close, the depiction of states of interiority thorough the use of flashbacks, voiceovers and scenes of fantasy help to enunciate the importance of the gesture in reworking the scene of practice. The next chapter turns to the idea of fantasy in cinema in order to explore this in more depth.

4 Fantasy and the Feminine: Female Perversions and Under the Skin

Fantasy is central to psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity and has become important also in the context of film theory, particularly in relation to efforts to theorize the cinematic treatment of gender. Some considerations of fantasy in relation to film focus on the fantasy genre and suggest that fantasy can be used to make sense of the cinematic experience as a means of escape from everyday life. However, for the concerns of this book, the most pertinent ideas about fantasy and cinema stem from the monolithic claims of apparatus theory discussed in Chapter 2. As we saw there, the main tenet of the argument was that classical cinema is structured according to male desire and fantasy. Subsequent feminist interventions have resulted in attempts to reformulate the importance of fantasy for cinema as this chapter will discuss. In order to make links to an Irigarayan perspective on fantasy and film, this chapter will then examine Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions and Carine Adler’s Under the Skin.

Feminist film theory and the return to fantasy In the work of Metz and Baudry, the play of fantasy in cinema is related to the regression they deem to take place psychically in the act of watching a film. Fantasy becomes bound up with notions of the imaginary as elaborated in the Lacanian account of subjectivity here, and is, therefore, irrevocably tied to the primacy of the phallus and masculinity. In Mulvey’s work, fantasy is similarly structured in terms of fantasies associated with the male Oedipal scenario, such as fetishism and voyeurism. In much of this work, fantasy is related to the traditional 77

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Freudian Oedipal complex, in which the little boy’s sexuality develops in accordance with hetero-socio-sexual norms. Such an approach complies unquestioningly with assumptions about the centrality of masculinity to accounts of the formation of subjectivity typically to be found within the discourse of psychoanalysis. However, as much of the feminist work on fantasy makes clear, the psychoanalytic account also offers other perspectives on the importance of fantasy for subjectivity. Several film theorists use Freud to signal how psychoanalysis enables us to differentiate between conscious and unconscious fantasy and they emphasize that this allows film theory to articulate much more clearly a notion of shifting and/or multiple subject-positions in cinema (see Chapter 2 for specific analysis of some of these accounts). However, much of the feminist engagement with fantasy moves away from this Lacanian-oriented approach by turning to an important article by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis entitled ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’ (Burgin, Donald & Kaplan (eds), 1986: 5–34). In this important essay, Laplanche and Pontalis suggest that it is less the division between conscious and unconscious fantasy and more the division between primary and secondary fantasy that is of crucial importance in understanding the psychoanalytic account of the origins of sexuality. Here, the emphasis is on the function of fantasy in staging scenarios of desire. Fantasy acts as a channel through which desire is able to make itself manifest. For Laplanche and Pontalis, all secondary fantasies must be understood as having their roots in the primal fantasies, of which there are three: firstly, the primal scene, which stages the fantasy of origin; secondly, fantasies of seduction which relate to the origin of sexuality; thirdly, castration fantasies, in which the origin of sexual difference is staged. Fantasy, then, for Laplanche and Pontalis might be understood as a kind of scene or arrangement of desire. In a hugely useful assessment of the value of this work for film theory, Elizabeth Cowie suggests that fantasy amounts to ‘a mise-en-scène of desire’ (1997: 135). This enables us to ask all sorts of questions about the implications of such a mise-en-scène for notions of spectatorship. If fantasy is to be understood as setting the scene of desire, whose desire is it that is being staged? The slipperiness of subjectivity in the context of fantasy scenes shows how we are able to take up multiple and fluid identificatory positions in relation to what is being staged. As spectators, then, we become able to shift the patterns of our desire in order to articulate it differently. As Cowie suggests, sexual difference insists in

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such a context (1997: 163–5). Similarly, Constance Penley argues that fantasy, in this definition, presents us with an alternative to ‘the bachelor machines’ of apparatus theory in that, in its account of the staging and imaging of the subject and desire, Laplanche and Pontalis’s definition of fantasy offers an alternative model to apparatus theory in which the structure of the subject’s relation to the fantasmatic cinematic image can be understood from a position which does not assume masculinity (Penley, 1985). Judith Mayne suggests that Laplanche’s and Pontalis’s reading of fantasy has three crucial uses in film theory: firstly, it shows that fantasy is more useful for its implications than its representations; secondly, that this reading of fantasy makes clear how the subject is able to move across a range of positions so that it no longer becomes possible to assume an unshifting relationship between the masculinity of a scene and the gender of the subject looking on to it: in other words, sex/gender boundaries become resolutely unfixed; and, lastly, that fantasy in cinema cannot just be assumed to be that of the protagonist but is also that of the spectator (Mayne, 1993: 86–91). Mayne also elaborates an important argument about the opportunity offered by this notion of fantasy to avoid what she sees as ‘the compulsory heterosexuality’ of film theory. Drawing on Cowie’s observation about the inscription of sexual difference in fantasy, Mayne argues that this offers a rich seam for the undoing of a tendency in film theory to stress the importance of reading both with and against the grain of a series of ideological positions that work to perpetuate socio-cultural hegemonies of the heterosexual matrix. (Of course, psychoanalysis is one such ideology, and Mayne’s point here is to suggest that fantasy as a structuring mechanism could be used to interrogate the socio-symbolic discourses that unquestioningly reinforce the matrix of their assumptions about the nature of desire and subjectivity.) In the account advanced by Laplanche and Pontalis, then, subjectivity is forged in relation to fantasy, playing a structuring role in its formation. In Irigaray’s work, the aim is to advance a set of conditions in which a shift in what is understood as femininity can take place. How might fantasy in this formulation contribute to such a project?

Irigaray, fantasy and the feminine In Irigaray’s formulation, the feminine subject does not yet exist. In order for it to begin to do so, as we have already seen, there needs to be

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a shift in symbolic structures and their insistence on the repression and disavowal of the feminine. Irigaray, writing in 1977, asks ‘Can I sketch the content of what that other unconscious, woman’s might be?’ No, of course not, since that presupposes disconnecting the feminine from the present-day economy of the unconscious. To do so would be to anticipate a certain historical process. (1977/1985b: 124) Nevertheless, she advocates a constant striving toward embarking on this historical process, in order to try tentatively to test out the possibilities of an alternative mode of feminine subjectivity. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, much of this is couched in terms of the maternal relation, which is so fundamental to the realm of the imaginary and its formative influence on the construction of subjectivity. Irigaray consistently argues against Lacan’s insistence that subjectivity is forged only in relation to a symbolic order grounded in masculinist language. Like Melanie Klein, Irigaray advocates the importance of the maternal relation in the structuring of subjectivity. Irigaray’s work on the importance of separation from the mother is doubly inflected to represent, firstly, how a masculinist symbolic perspective suggests that the maternal relation is a source of the déréliction of the feminine, in that it becomes mired in a discourse of loss and lack, but, secondly, that it also presents an opportunity for thinking through the feminine differently. The maternal relation, for Irigaray, is crucial for women in that it provides them with an alternative relation to sexual difference and sameness. While mothers and daughters are of the same sex, they are proscribed from the discourses of sameness that are reified in masculinist structures of subjectivity because they are paradoxically marked by difference. As Rosi Braidotti has noted, ‘the maternal body provides both the site of destitution and of recovery for female feminist subjectivity, understood as a virtual reality of a collectively renegotiated referential bond. It is the seed of the virtual feminine’ (2002: 49). In the psychoanalytic account, the imaginary relation with the mother is characterized as plenitudinous, and framed through fantasy. As a space for the generation of alternative subjectivities, then, it is replete with potential. Given the stress on the formative function of fantasy outlined in the work of Laplanche and Pontalis, it is in the context of the maternal relation that fantasies of what Braidotti terms ‘female feminist subjectivity’ might unfurl. The imaginary realm is


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also inscribed with the experience of narcissism, in both its primary and secondary forms. Femininity, of course, is heavily culturally inscribed and inflected with countless forms of secondary narcissistic behaviour (vanity, the obsession with image and style, fashion, the control of the body, notions of beauty, etc.). In an interesting counterpoint, Braidotti suggests that what it missing from symbolic discourses of femininity is a healthy form of primary narcissism, in which love for one’s sex is seen as central to self-esteem, suggesting that primary narcissism becomes ‘some fundamental threshold of sustainability that allows a female subject to undertake first the process of self-assertion and then of transformation’ (2002: 60). In this account, then, primary narcissism and the model of love for the same that typifies the female imaginary relation with the mother provides a perspective on female homosexual desire. For Braidotti, this is crucial to Irigaray’s larger project (which she describes as a project of ‘radical heterosexuality’ (27)) of establishing the conditions in which alternative feminine subjectivities might emerge. It is not that female homosexual desire becomes the aim of Irigaray’s project, but rather that it provides a model of love for the feminine that acts as a stepping stone towards conditions of existence in which newly nuanced notions of feminine subjectivity might materialize. Central to the terms of this negotiation is the potential of fantasy. It offers a space of thinking difference through formations and structures that are able to slide across the slippages of sexual difference. Cinema, as we have already seen, lends itself well here, especially as it constitutes a space of public fantasy, as Cowie has argued (Cowie, 1997). As Steve Neale has asserted, this is not to suggest that cinema provides a simply motivated apparatus for the exploration of sexual difference, yet it nevertheless allows for the play of identifications and subject-positions in relation to the fantasies portrayed on screen (Neale, 1986). As we have seen, one of the areas in which fantasy is most readily seen to be at play in relation to femininity is the area of narcissism. Psychoanalytic discourses of femininity have traditionally aligned femininity with secondary narcissism as made manifest through the masquerade, to the extent that ‘womanliness’ has famously been defined as masquerade (Rivière, 1929). Irigaray takes issue with this account of femininity, however, suggesting that it perpetuates masculinist notions of femininity, framing it in terms of male desire and dissociating any possibility of feminine desire, and arguing that a re-articulation of the feminine needs to turn the masquerade into a form of political mimesis.


Masquerade: The psychoanalytic perspective ‘Womanliness’ was first described in terms of the masquerade by Joan Riviere (1929). In a frequently cited passage describing one of her patients who was deemed to have a masculinity complex, Riviere claimed that womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it – much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove he has not stolen the goods. The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade’. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference, whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing. (1929: 38) Riviere’s claim that there is no difference between ‘womanliness’ and the masquerade has prompted work by some feminist theorists to show how ‘womanliness’ or femininity is constructed as masquerade by and for the masculine and, indeed, does not construe itself at all. Femininity becomes little more than the mimicry it is confined to within these conditions, as Stephen Heath has pointed out: In the masquerade the woman mimics an authentic – genuinewomanliness but then authentic genuine womanliness is such a mimicry, is the masquerade ... to be a woman is to dissimulate a fundamental masculinity, femininity is that dissimulation. (Burgin, Donald & Kaplan (eds), 1986: 49) Femininity becomes nothing more than a dissimulation of a fundamental masculinity. Yet pointing this out as a construct of phallogocentric systems is in itself is also problematic. Irigaray has shown that femininity is unnecessarily premised upon masculinity and upon ideas about how it comes about as a result of the (masculine) Oedipus complex. In a scathing attack on Freudian ideas about femininity, she comments that [i]n the beginning ... the little girl was (only) a little boy. In other words THERE NEVER IS (OR WILL BE) A LITTLE GIRL. All that remains is to assign her sexual function to this ‘little boy’ with no penis, or at least no penis of any recognized value. Inevitably, the


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trial of ‘castration’ must be undergone. This ‘little boy,’ who was, in all innocence and ignorance of sexual difference, phallic, notices how ridiculous ‘his’ sex organ looks. ‘He’ sees the disadvantages for which ‘he’ is anatomically destined: ‘he’ has only a tiny little sex organ, no sex organ at all, really, an almost invisible sex organ. The almost imperceptible clitoris. The humiliation of being so badly equipped, of cutting such a poor figure, in comparison with the penis, with the sex organ can only lead to a desire to ‘have something like it too,’ and Freud claims that this desire will form the basis for ‘normal womanhood’. (Capitalization in original; 1974/1985a: 48–9)

The masquerade/mimesis distinction Irigaray’s work has shown that femininity, as understood within the symbolic order (that is, effectively, as Heath points out, as masquerade), is a masculinist construct that privileges phallogocentric ideas about gender and the production of desire. Irigaray argues that such a view of femininity traps women within a ‘hom(m)o-sexual’ specular economy of the same; women are relegated to the status of the other, and as such can not inscribe their own sexed identities within the symbolic order. This constitutes what Irigaray understands as the masquerade. In This Sex Which Is Not One, there is a series of notes on selected terms (1977/1985b: 219–22). The following note is made in relation to Irigaray’s use of the term ‘masquerade’: [a]n alienated or false version of femininity arising from the woman’s awareness of the man’s desire for her to be his other, the masquerade permits woman to experience desire not in her own right but as the man’s desire situates her. (1977/1985b: 220) This is a concept that stands in opposition to her notion of ‘mimesis’, which the notes define as follows: [a]n interim strategy for dealing with the realm of discourse (where the speaking subject is posited as masculine), in which the woman deliberately assumes the feminine style and posture assigned to her within its discourse in order to uncover the mechanisms by which it exploits her. (1977/1985b: 220)


Naomi Schor has usefully distinguished between these ideas by suggesting that the first amounts to little more than parroting the masquerade, while the second would imply parodying it (Burke, Schor & Whitford (eds), 1994: 67). Seen in these terms, masquerade reproduces the confinement of women to masculinist ideas of femininity, while mimesis sets out to expose the mechanisms of women’s oppression and confinement within the symbolic order, by calling attention to the processes involved. The aim is to jam the theoretical and representational machineries so that those aspects of the feminine that have been buried by and within the socio-symbolic order might be accessed and exposed. How, then, does this help us in our attempts to unravel the uses of masquerade in cinema? How does it function in the context of cinema in terms of Irigaray’s call to use mimicry as a strategic tool against symbolic practices?

Masquerade and women’s cinema According to Irigaray, women enjoy no sexual specificity in their own right. Their existence within the symbolic order is defined and restrained by the function phallogocentrism ascribes to them, namely to reflect back an image of the masculine subject and his desire to the masculine subject himself: Now woman, starting with this flat mirror alone, can only come into being as the inverted other of the masculine subject (his alter ego), or as the place of emergence and veiling of the cause of his (phallic) desire, or again as lack, since her sex for the most part – and the only historically valorized part – is not subject to specularization. (1977/1985b: 129) Moreover, for the commodity [woman], there is no mirror so that copies it so that it may be at once itself and its ‘own reflection. One commodity cannot be mirrored in another as man is mirrored in his fellow man. ... ommodities, women, are a mirror value of and for man. (1977/1985b: 176–7) Women and the feminine are trapped in this specular economy of the same by means of the masquerade. Woman and the feminine come to be defined within phallogocentrism as the surface, the image, the


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screen, the screen-mirror, as Irigaray’s ‘flat mirror’ (1977/1985b: 129; 154). The depths of femininity cannot be plumbed in this context because the over-presence of the image relegates woman to the status of image and nothing else, as discussed in Chapter 2. Feminine desire is thus circumscribed and prohibited within the symbolic order. Following Irigaray’s work on the importance of proximity, and especially morphological proximity, for woman as a category and for the exploration of those aspects of the feminine that are occluded by and within the symbolic order, Mary Ann Doane advocates a need to theorize female specificity in terms of spatial proximity. Doane has argued that the masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. Womanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed. The masquerade’s resistance to patriarchal positioning would therefore lie in its denial of the production of femininity as closeness, as presence-to-itself, as, precisely imagistic. The transvestite adopts the sexuality of the other – the woman becomes a man in order to attain the necessary distance from the image. Masquerade, on the other hand, involves a realignment of femininity, the recovery, or more accurately, simulation, of the missing gap or distance. To masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between oneself and one’s image. (1991: 25–6) As Chapter 2 suggested, the generation of distance is helpful in reconsidering what the feminine might be; however, masquerade alone does not appear to account for the full spectrum of subjectivity experienced by women. As I have argued above, the films under scrutiny in this book underline Irigaray’s insistence that women must be familiar with a masculine understanding of the feminine in order to question their own means of representation. This suggests that, in dealing with female subjectivity, film theory needs to find a means of moving beyond the masquerade to adopt a position more akin to mimesis. In this context, the metatextual patterns of masquerade, seen especially in Female Perversions (discussed below) and Orlando (discussed in Chapter 6), show that Doane’s position does not go quite far enough. It appears to trap women in terms of their proximity to the image. There is a need to draw attention to this so as to allow the emergence of a critical distance, and yet, there is simultaneously a need to insist on the femininity of this proximity, to take it to its extremes, in order to reveal aspects of the occluded or unconscious feminine. In the phallogocentric

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construction of femininity, woman is constructed as close to the image. If efforts are to be made to access the obscured elements of the feminine (in the Irigarayan sense), there is a clear need not only to acknowledge this, but also to develop a critical distance from this inscription of the feminine into the proximity of the image. There needs to be some kind of attempt to put a distance between the feminine and its cinematic image. This would allow an articulation of the unconscious, disavowed feminine that underpins notions of cinema and thus would permit a return to the close relation between the feminine and its proximity to the image on its own terms. This complex area is related to notions of woman as surface, mirror and screen. The feminine (in the Irigarayan sense) seems, as we saw earlier, to be analogous to the invisible tain of the mirror. Catherine Constable has suggested something similar. Discussing Irigaray’s commentary on Plato’s cave, Constable argues that For Irigaray, the metaphor of Plato’s cave silvers over the hystera, replacing it with a self-contained relay of mirrors, which create and sustain the new vanishing point of the eternal Ideas. In this analysis woman is positioned on the other side of the looking glass. She becomes the point beyond the vanishing point, an unacknowledged ground whose generative capacity is co-opted and suppressed by the system. (Constable, 2005: 48–9) In a feminine reconfiguring of the cinematic, the screen as a mirror depends not only upon its surface (woman as a mirror for the masculine, as a flat mirror for masculinist patterns of representation) but also upon its tain (the feminine). The screen of a feminine cinematics then, no longer corresponds to the ‘flat mirror’ of phallogocentrism but rather becomes a curved, multidimensional mirror in which sexual difference can be reflected in all its multiplicity. Irigaray’s comment that ‘the intervention of the speculum and of the concave mirror, which disturb the staging of representation according to too-exclusively male parameters’ (1977/1985b: 155) demonstrates the importance of situating the screen as a locus of difference in this respect. Feminine subjectivity then, is inevitably in process, in flux, in gestation: it is becoming, as Braidotti suggests, The subject is a process, made of constant shifts and negotiations between different levels of power and desire, constantly shifting between wilful choices and unconscious drives. Whatever semblance


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of unity there may be is no God-given essence, but rather the fictional choreography of many levels into one socially operational self. It implies that what sustains the entire process of becoming-subject is the will-to-know, the desire to say, the desire to speak, as a founding, primary, vital, necessary and therefore original desire to become. (2002: 75–6) The becoming of the feminine subject is grounded in political efforts to carve out a space for its very articulation. It is this becoming-subject that is at stake in many of the elaborations of the feminine under discussion in this book. Fantasy and the political reinterpretation of fantasies of femininity are essential tools here, providing models of thinking about the screen as a membrane, something that is permeable, offering new modes of interaction and the idea of the screen as tain. Constable suggests that, ultimately, Irigaray’s reading of Plato’s cave (which links the screen in the cave with the membrane at the back of the eye) silvers over the hystera (the womb), producing a ‘burning mirror’ that indicates the destruction of the specular economy of representation (2005: 50). However, the burning mirror can also be connected to Irigaray’s critique of the fantasy of the primal scene implicit in Plato’s position, especially with regard to its eradication of the mother and her removal beyond the scene itself to a position of representation. In marking the cave as a specular mirror, it is difficult not to recall the importance of the speculum in liberating women from the constraints of a masculinist economy of representation: Specularization ... allows for the relation of woman to ‘herself’ and to her like. Which presupposes a curved mirror, but also one which is folded back on itself, with its impossible reappropriation ‘on the inside’ of the mind, of thought, of subjectivity. Whence the intervention of the speculum and the concave mirror, which disturb the staging of representation according to too-exclusively male parameters. (Irigaray, 1974/1985a: 154–5) How, then, might we draw on the potential of fantasy, as discussed in the account of Laplanche and Pontalis and subsequent theorists, to inflect Irigaray’s account of the political potential of skewing the masquerade into mimesis? Feminine love for the same as a crucial building block in the pursuit of alternative notions of the feminine is important here. In the film analyses that follow, these ideas will be elaborated in relation to the importance of fantasy and masquerade/mimesis in women’s film for


opening up spaces of representation that usefully collide with strategies of enunciation to produce spectator positions irretrievably grounded in a relation to sexual difference, not merely as a constraining category of symbolic practice but also as a potentially liberatory tool in the project to forge a mode of textual/political praxis.

Fantasies of the feminine in Female Perversions Susan Streitfeld’s Female Perversions is an ambitious and unusual first feature. The film flags itself as an adaptation of the non-fictional monograph of the same name by psychoanalyst, Louise Kaplan. The book examines questions of perversion through the lens of deviancy and its clinical imbrication with pleasure. Kaplan argues that the stereotype of ‘normal’ femininity is, in itself, a perversion. By setting out a number of case histories examining the propensity of women to signify their sexuality and desire through masquerades, theft, mutilation and motherhood, Kaplan sketches a familiar terrain of femininity in patriarchy. Streitfeld’s narrative adaptation takes up some of these ‘perversions’, embodying them as characters in her film: the film focuses on the protagonist, Eve Stephens, a phenomenally successful lawyer who is about to become a judge and who invests heftily in narcissistic masquerades and in ‘kinky’ and lesbian sex; Eve has a brief and lustful relationship with Renée, a doctor who is new to town and who flees her feelings for Eve by saying ‘I’m really attracted to you, but I ... I don’t want this kind of relationship. I got frightened because this seems familiar to me. I mean, I know how to do this, I know how to do this, I’ve been doing it for years and I moved here to help myself ch ange – I ... I don’t want to be in this kind of relationship’; Eve’s sister, Maddy, is a graduate student with a compulsion for shoplifting; she rents a room from Emma (Laila Robins) whose daughter, Edwina, rejects all the accoutrements of femininity and cuts herself, and whose sister, Annunciata (Frances Fisher), elaborately indulges in exhibitionistic dancing and relentless narratives of the potential of women to manipulate men through their desire. Facets of femininity appear, at the surface, to be cut to the measure of the definition of femininity that prevails within patriarchal symbolic systems. However, the film, like the book, sets out to undermine such a static mode of femininity that merely services male desire. As Irigaray suggests, ‘the role of “femininity” ... prescribed by this masculine specula(riza)tion ... corresponds scarcely at all to woman’s desire, which may be recovered only in secret, in hiding, with anxiety and


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guilt’ (1977/1985b: 30). In this sense then, the film arguably sets out to deconstruct what is understood by femininity within such discourses and, as we saw in Chapter 2, it does so as much through cinematic strategy as through its treatment of characterization and narrative events. At the most obvious level, Female Perversions is full of fragmented fantasy sequences that reveal the centrality of (unconscious) fantasy to the construction of female sexuality. Interspersed between Eve’s various sexual encounters are sequences resembling dreams in which Eve is clothed in a toga, often bound with rope and attempting to walk a tight rope, which seems to symbolize her desire. There are several caryatids and classical theatrical figures with masks who appear to be non-gender specific involved in most of these scenes. There is a discernible line of narrative development that unfolds in these sequences. Eve’s relationship to the rope and the figures shifts according to her current sexual liaison and desire. Eventually, these dream fantasies coincide with the fantasy sequences that resemble memory flashes, in which her mother attempts to seduce her father and is violently rejected. At the point of their intersection, Eve’s rope breaks after Edwina has been slicing at it with a razor blade, and Eve finds herself tumbling into a cruciform pool below her, encouraged by figures who seem to be her parents. Once she has fallen into the water, she becomes trapped beneath its surface, drowning slowly. A final set of fantasies consists in Eve’s violent hallucinations of physical and verbal attacks on her for failing in her femininity. There are three key scenes of such fantasies: the first comes during a scene in a lingerie boutique, as Eve preens herself before a mirror, holding up flimsy garments while she fantasizes that the shop assistant is crudely insulting her body and sexual desirability. Subsequently, we see Eve in her office, playing at signing her name as ‘Judge Stephens’. In her fantasy she is mauled by a man who resembles her father and who mutters filthy insults in her ear as he gropes at her. The third sequence takes place in the courthouse outside town, just after Eve has tried to assert her urban sophistication and authority by demanding the release of her sister from prison. She hears voices belittling her and feels compelled to apologize for her own particularly phallic version of femininity in the scene. Eve’s fantasies are very closely bound up with her desires and repressed experiences surrounding her sexuality and her sexual identity. Littered with metaphorical symbolism, they highlight the sense of becoming that pervades the film as it moves to its resolution: the incidence of the daydream sequences diminishes as Eve moves further away from her sophisticated world of success; the


ropes that bind her physically at the outset fall away as she has sex with Renée; her rope is finally cut by Ed, for whom she experiences an emerging maternal concern as the film progresses. Similarly, the incidence of the memory flash fantasies increases as Eve moves closer toward an abandonment of rivalry with her sibling and thus toward an acceptance of her own specificity. Eve’s sexuality is, on the one hand, constructed as perverse precisely because she is depicted as taking masochistic pleasure defined by the extremes of a symbolically constrained notion of femininity. This is indicated in the masochism of her relationship with John, where we see that she is quite literally bound by the constraints in her fantasies. Yet in the cinematic space of these fantasies, overlaid as it is with connotations of the dark and unexplored territory of female desire, there is a clear sense in which representational and formal practices are skewed. Despite her excessively masochistic desire for John, Eve does appear to be on a journey of becoming. In this space, the perversity of Eve’s body, laden with desire, is able to be articulated. The space of cinematic fantasy allows us to construct a mode of representation for aspects of the feminine that are traditionally buried within discursive constructs. This is, perhaps, most clearly articulated in the scenes of lesbian desire. The myriad sequences of Eve’s fantasy world attest simultaneously to the constrained and restrictive aspects of the dominant notion of femininity and to the perversely liberating sense of the feminine that emerges from it when it is pushed to its very excessive limits. This is a typically Irigarayan strategy, and has parallels with her notion of mimesis. Throughout the early sequences of the film, Eve is depicted as profoundly narcissistic, exhibiting all manner of symptoms of secondary narcissism including vanity and obsession with her appearance and image. These sequences are markedly parodic in tone and, as spectators, we feel Eve’s discomfort as she grimaces at her appearance on television. Or discomfort increases as the film progresses and we see Eve make trite demands on her assistant (the ‘lucky suit’ must be sent to the drycleaner; torn images from a fashion magazine accompany an instruction to ‘find me these boots’ etc) and take ever more excessive pride in her bodily and intellectual perfection. This sense of perfection crumbles with the arrival of Langley, her replacement, who arrogantly discards the lipstick she discovers is also owned by Eve, and therefore not exclusive enough, and who invades and colonizes Eve’s professional space in ways that are visibly unbearable to her. Respite from the discomfort of these sequences comes firstly through the manipulation of cinematic strategy and formal conventions in order to construct a


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parodic distance for the spectator. Once this distance has been established, further respite comes at the level of narrative development once Eve has met and seduced Renée. The scenes of lesbian desire in Female Perversions are central to the shift in the film’s representation of femininity away from a set of discourses that seem trapped in the masculinist repression of femininity. As we have already seen in this chapter, female homosexual desire has been read by Braidotti as a fundamental staging post en route to Irigaray’s alternative, radical heterosexual mode of the feminine (Braidotti, 2002). A crucial aspect of female love of the same resides in the opportunity it provides to construct a kind of primary narcissism that leads to self-respect and self-esteem, and this enables political engagement with efforts to rework symbolic and imaginary notions of the feminine. In Irigaray’s alternative reading of the psychoanalytic genesis of femininity, love for the mother is seen to be part of a continuum with lesbian desire. Elizabeth Grosz delineates this very neatly in her claim that the corporeal relation of the mother-daughter bond ‘provides a model of homosexuality, not as a substitute for heterosexuality, but as its disavowed prerequisite. It makes explicit the intolerable threat of women’s desire within a culture founded on its denial’ (Burke, Schor & Whitford (eds), 1994: 338). Furthermore, as Braidotti emphasizes, the pre-Oedipal relation with the mother marks all human subjects indelibly with some trace of heterosexual desire. Arguing contra Judith Butler, in particular, Braidotti suggests that ‘the psychoanalytic scheme of triangulation of desire argues for the importance of the mother as the fantasmatic love-object for both homo and heterosexual love’ (2002: 47). Whereas Butler would claim that separation from the mother robs the lesbian subject of a same-sex love-object and thus marks her indelibly with a primordial sense of loss, Braidotti argues that through deconstructive mimesis and fantasy, it is possible for both sexes to retrace a path back to the pre-Oedipal mother in order to retrieve this loss from a seemingly inevitable melancholia. For Braidotti, this is politically more astute and facilitates the move toward becoming which is implicitly gestured throughout Irigaray’s work. In the context of Female Perversions, then, it is interesting that Eve’s encounter with Renée enables her to shed the ropes that literally constrain her in her fantasy world and begin to move toward the mother. The masked king figure in this particular sequence is suddenly revealed as female through the revelation of a breast beneath the costume. Implicit in this fantasy is a move directly toward the maternal breast. It is as though Eve begins to reconstitute herself through a fantasied relation to

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the mother in order to relinquish her incessant masquerade and thus escape the restrictive confines of her secondary narcissistic personality. This move at the level of the dream-like fantasy sequences prompts more frequent memory flashes in Eve, and there is a corresponding growth in her introspective scrutiny as she turns away from her relationships with Renée and John toward her sister and the women who surround her. In the sequences that take place in Fillmore, Eve is forced to take up a place in close-lived relation to a group of women, each of whom is equally marked by some mode of ‘perverse’ activity. Emma, Maddy’s landlady, is a seamstress, obsessed with a married man called Rick and masochistically indulging his every whim, including violence. Her sister, Annunciata, appears to look after Ed, Emma’s daughter, and engages in an elaborate display of femininity in its masculine definition, whilst proclaiming loudly that femininity is not something that comes naturally, as it has to be learnt. She flaunts her body in a self-conscious way, transforming her masquerade into a quite literal mimesis for her spectators (initially Ed alone, who takes photographs as Annunciata constructs herself as an object upon which to gaze, but later Eve and Emma appear and are subjected to the same set of performances). Paradoxically, however, Annunciata is intent on encouraging Edwina out of her tom-boyish refusal of femininity on the grounds that she is now menstruating and had therefore best learn how to be a woman. The masochism of the sequences that follow becomes painfully apparent to the spectator in this context, yet it is the film’s formal insistence on perpetually constructing a distance for the spectator from the events on screen that allows their parodic mimetic qualities to show through. Eve’s very obvious discomfort at this behaviour (it further reminds her of the attack on her mother by her father) marks out for us her increasing resistance to dominant discourses of femininity. We see her increasingly without make-up and in everyday clothes. She happens upon Ed as she is engaged in cutting herself and identifies with this, locking herself in Maddy’s bathroom and marking herself by cutting her breast with a razor. This amounts to a scene of symbolic castration in which Eve accepts the impossibility of the phallic discourse of femininity and desire, and moves toward a more normative sibling relationship with her sister and a maternally inflected concern for Edwina that is made manifest in the film’s closing scene. Eve chases Ed through the scrub to discover her neurotic habit of burying her menses as a mark of respect for the ‘lost babies’. We see that Ed has carved the word ‘love’ into her leg, though she tells us she had intended to write the word ‘hate’. The film closes, then, with an image of a girl seeking the kind of


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relationship that Eve has only latterly found in her fantasy world, a relationship premised on the love of the mother. It is this that seems to prompt Eve to take Ed’s head in her hands and to cradle it, nurturing the nascent sense of female-identified subjectivity that each of them is seeking and which the film has tried to construct for us as spectators. The sense of disturbing parody that emanates from the fantasy sequences and from distancing mechanisms of the film language employed by Streitfeld allows us to resituate our response as spectators to the representation of woman in this film, which runs the whole gamut of female stereotypes. By the end of the film, it becomes apparent that each of these notions of femininity may be regarded as a perversion, trapping female desire inside the bodily limits of its excess – the epitome, perhaps, of acceptable (and representable) female subjectivity. The perversity of the cinematic space allows us to see these representations of woman as constructs to be reworked through parody and excess and through the play with fantasy that marks this film so clearly. These themes also run through the narrative of Under the Skin, and again they are explored through the realm of fantasy. It is to this film that this chapter now turns.

Issues of masquerade and becoming woman in Under the Skin Carine Adler’s Under the Skin is a stark study of the impact of a mother’s death on a young woman, Iris. Struggling to assert her sense of identity, Iris is overwhelmed by her mother’s death and by her relationship with her sister, Rose, who, it appears, has a degree of security in her married life. The film is shot in a very distinctive style, drawing on traditions of British realism and cinematic discourses on class, yet the substance of the film is firmly grounded in the question of Iris’s subjectivity. The film thus inflects the conventions of realism on which it draws with a range of cinematic strategies designed to evoke the play of subjectivity and its exploration in the film. As Alison Butler has suggested, this is a film that ‘incorporates the tension between realism and fantasy in a single textual system’ (2000: 95). Butler’s essay offers an interesting perspective on how the film’s negotiation of this tension positions the British realist tradition in relation to feminism. She suggests that, in addressing this tension, Adler’s film manages to open up a dialogue between the radically opposed traditions of cinematic realism and feminism. Crucially, she observes that the film works on two levels: firstly, it exploits the codes


of realist cinema to insist on the reality of female subjectivity; secondly, in its use of fantasy, it critiques the realist cinema tradition from which accounts of female subjectivity are traditionally wholly absent (Butler, 2000). Under the Skin, then, is structured through a strategy of bringing the melodramatic to bear on the realist tradition. In Irigarayan terms, it focuses on how the imaginary inflects and reshapes the symbolic inscription of subjectivity. In its focus on the exploration of nascent female subjectivity, the film foregrounds imaginary structures that are central to the becoming of the feminine and the close relationship between such imaginary structures and the maternal relation. The film opens with a close-up on Iris’s naked stomach as she draws a stick figure and a heart shape on her belly. This is accompanied by a voiceover in which Iris declares the strength of her feeling for her mother: When I was small, my mother was everything to me. I thought she was beautiful, and I wanted to be like her. I used to try and smile, walk, and talk just like her. I even practiced laughing like she did. My mother loved flowers and her favourite flowers were roses, so she called my sister Rose ... right ... and she called me Iris. Iris is depicted from the outset as childlike, as a subject-in-process. Her relation to her mother is defined in terms of the very primary narcissism missing in Eve Stephens’ unconscious world in Female Perversions but which is nevertheless central to the articulation of an imaginary that privileges the feminine. Iris is a grown woman who is fixated in an imaginary relationship to the maternal. Throughout the film she is marked by a pre-Oedipal polymorphous perversity. She is androgynous and slight in build, with short-cropped hair and a propensity for dressing herself in clothes that suggest that she aspires to embodied forms of gendered subjectivity rather than experiencing it as lived sensation. Iris’s costumes alter and shift repeatedly between poles of the gender spectrum. At the outset of the film and towards its end, she is dressed in very masculine clothes, wearing vintage men’s trousers with braces and close-fitting t-shirts and an overcoat. In the central segments of the film, however, in which Iris experiences her grief and melancholia, her flight from reality, seeking refuge in the corporeality of her sexual appetite, Iris dresses in her mother’s garb, wearing her wig and her fur coat, donning her underwear as outerwear and elaborately making up her face to resemble a parody of feminine desirability. As her sister Rose puts it, she ‘look[s]


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like a slut’ in these sequences. It is not so much that Iris is performing gender according to her state of mind, here, but rather that her enforced separation from her mother has left her in a relation with the imaginary which is unbearable for her. Iris seems to be trapped, then, or perhaps indelibly marked with the loss of her mother, and unable to find a way of existing without her. This imaginary state constitutes itself in the abject melancholia that afflicts Iris. Immediately after the death of her mother, Iris has casual sex with a stranger in a sequence that is strangely intercut with images of her mother’s cremation and accompanied by a dispassionately graphic voiceover account of the sexual experience. This is a trope that is repeated throughout the film: each time that Iris has sex with an unknown man, an aural account of her experience is presented for the spectator. The filmic structure thus avows the impossibility of representing the sexual outside a framework of phallic systems of representation. The film resorts to the use of sound, and tries to allude to the impact of these experiences on Iris’s nascent subjectivity by requiring her to speak her desire (which is, of course, unspeakable as it can be read as an unconscious desire for a return of the plenitudinous imaginary relation with the mother). The sexual activity that Iris embarks on in response to the loss of her mother is resolutely bound up with her imaginary fixation and the seemingly immutable fact of her femininity, which is systematically disavowed within the symbolic structures of her heterosexual exploits. It is as though Iris lacks any form of symbolic castration which would enable her to find ways of approximating a mode of feminine subjectivity within the symbolic order.1 In the most generous account of what we might understand symbolic castration to be, the pain of separation from the mother required in the psychosexual and linguistic stages of development affects both sexes equally. However, Irigaray argues that ‘the little girl’s separation from her mother, and from her sex, cannot be worked through by mourning’ (1974/1985a: 67) and thus produces an intense melancholic reaction. In this account, then, the little girl is plunged into melancholia because of the loss of her relation to the mother, which by symbolic standards of discourse, is unable to be symbolized properly. For Iris, then, the depth of her melancholia helps to shift her beyond symbolic discourse in search of ways of symbolizing the maternal relation and the effects of its loss on the possibility of her becoming. The profoundly unbearable loss of her mother inhibits the possibility of symbolic castration for Iris. As Irigaray suggests, the role of symbolic castration in the psychoanalytic account of the formation of subjectivity is

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grounded in a set of discourses that subtend the phallic economy and hence do not represent the full spectrum of a feminine response to maternal loss. My reading of this film will attempt to mine the uncharted and unspoken relationship of Iris to her mother as it is represented through the use of mise-en-scène in order to show how a revised perspective on the maternal imaginary opens up opportunities for a kind of feminine symbolic castration that is essential to the becoming of female subjectivity. Immediately after her mother’s death, Iris returns to her job at the lingerie shop and we see her dressing a customer, helping her to try on bras. The customer stands bare-breasted and Iris claims ‘she was everywhere I looked’, staring at her customer’s breasts and walking out of the shop and a life in which the maternal breast incessantly makes itself (and therefore its absence) felt. In a telling prior scene, Iris is fitting the mannequin in the window with a bra, when she tilts it toward herself, resting her head momentarily on top of it, thus framing herself in relation to the feminine body. Butler suggests that this scene amounts to Iris trying on femininity. It is, however, a very specific form of femininity, one that is grounded in the symbolic association of the female body with the maternal function. In subsequent scenes, Iris increasingly feels the need to symbolize the maternal function for herself, as if she would be able to provide herself with the sustenance of this relation by incarnating herself in the guise of her mother. Iris, then, is in the throes of trying to work out her relationship to gender and embodied sexuality and subjectivity. She is trapped in what appears to be a pre-Oedipal space of polymorphous perversity in which she must vacillate between poles of masculinity (and rationality) and femininity (which is framed in terms of the mother/whore dichotomy and associated with uncontrollable and irrational bouts of madness inscribed in and through the lived relation to the body). As Irigaray has frequently suggested, the systematic disavowal of the mother–daughter relation as ‘unsymbolizable’ within the symbolic order is one of the key problems for women. In the symbolic realm, she suggests that ‘if we are to be desired and loved by men, we must abandon our mothers, substitute for them, eliminate them in order to be same’ (1984/1993a: 102). In annihilating herself by dressing in her mother’s clothes and constructing herself as an object for male sexual desire, Iris is simultaneously obliterating her memory of her mother and indulging in a version of the masquerade. She quite literally puts on the clothes of the maternal-feminine and undergoes a transformation in her sexual experience as a result. It is fascinating that the first of these scenes


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involves Iris sitting on the floor in her rented room, wearing her mother’s undergarments over her own clothes, and rummaging through the suitcase of her belongings until she happens upon a wig and a pair of sunglasses. The framing and lighting in this scene construct Iris as a child. She dons the wig and glasses and turns to look at herself in the mirror, pouting a little, and altering how she holds her head in a way that suggests the experience of sexualization as she stares at her reflection in the mirror and constructs herself as an object of desire. This is highly resonant with Irigaray’s description of the role of the feminine in the economy of the same as ‘specular’. This scene stands as a sharp example of what we might understand by Irigaray’s term ‘specula(riza) tion’: Iris puts on a guise of femininity designed to lure male desire for her body and, in so doing, she puts herself on the market for consumption by a series of men who each enter into differently abusive relations with her. Of course, on a different level, Iris’s masquerade is a laughable one. She looks patently absurd as she calls in at the travel agent to meet her sister, Rose. Her masquerade is criticized as excessive by Rose’s workmate and by Rose herself, who seems initially unperturbed by this huge shift in Iris’s behaviour. Her masquerade, then, can be read as a version of mimesis, as a form of excessive and deliberate exaggeration of the parameters of female sexuality. It is interesting that this slippage from masquerade to mimesis requires a woman-to-woman contextualization to make itself felt. It is as though the guise of femininity as constructed through masculine desire becomes redundant in relations between women. Rose’s spurious dismissal of Iris’s new image lightly disavows its function inside the economy of the same and makes it possible for us to discern the exaggerated edges of the masquerade and its political potential. This shift from the masquerade to mimesis also resonates with Braidotti’s position that mimesis enables the melancholic subject to chart a route to the imaginary pre-Oedipal relationship with the mother that somehow rescues the mother from her status as irrevocably ‘lost’ to the subject, thus enabling a path toward becoming to be discerned (2002). In Iris’s case, of course, the loss of her mother is a literal one and is metaphorized in the film when Iris takes a job at a lost property office and fantasizes that she sees her mother and speaks to her on a mobile telephone. These fantasies of a re-engagement with the mother seem to parallel Iris’s transformation of herself into a woman who willingly participates in her own objectification and subjugation in her sexual relations with men. Iris’s masquerade is increasingly exaggerated and excessive, leading to the loss of friends and a night of abject and fearful annihilation as Iris realizes, after being mugged and


losing her money and keys, that she is alone and unable to escape the fact of her mother’s death. The abusive structure of her life has already begun to crumble at this stage, and what might be seen as Iris’s efforts unconsciously to turn herself into a substitute for her mother begin to fall apart. Irigaray argues that efforts to substitute the mother are ‘unconsciously colo[u]red by hate’ (1984/1993a: 102). In order to accede to a mode of becoming, Iris needs to find a way to admit her love for her mother and to allow herself to accept her death and the symbolic castration it represents for her. Similarly, Iris’s relationship with Rose is initially characterized by interminable rivalry and bickering. As Irigaray comments, such ‘competition equally paralyzes love among sister-women’ (1984/1993a: 102). Yet, by the end of the film, once they are able to share the realization of their mother’s death and the profound effect it has had on them, they are both able to find a form of exchange and compromise between them. They share a joke and nurture each other: ‘such a love is possible only among women who are able to talk to each other’ (Irigaray, 1984/1993a: 104). It seems significant that the closing sequences of the film give an account of how Iris and Rose had shared together the birth of Rose’s baby; they have each moved toward a maternal function of their own in a sense. What this film seems to highlight is both the difficulty of the maternal relation and its status as an essential requirement in the forging of opportunities for a feminine becoming. This chapter has begun to touch on the centrality of the mother– daughter relation in seeking to elaborate any form of representation of the feminine in its own right and on its own terms. It is increasingly clear that the closely interwoven relation between the imaginary and the maternal relation and between the maternal relation and a notion of feminine desire and subjectivity is central to the project of this book. The following chapter builds on this one by examining the constitution of the notion of parler femme in relation to some of the issues set out here.

5 Screening Parler Femme: Silences of the Palace, Antonia’s Line and Faithless

As we saw in Chapter 1, the notion of parler femme has been central to much of Irigaray’s work, finding redefinition in the more recent writings as ‘the sexuation of discourse’. Parler femme is intricately bound up with the mother–daughter relation and with modalities of exchange between mothers and daughters that could be used to structure a feminine genealogical relation between them. The films scrutinized in this chapter are structured, to varying extents, through this relation between mothers and daughters. This chapter discusses how these films come to constitute spaces for the exploration of parler femme as it is set out in Irigaray’s writing. Before moving onto detailed scrutiny of the films, however, it seems appropriate to sketch a little more of the relation between parler femme and female genealogy.

Defining female genealogy Throughout Irigaray’s work, there is an insistence that within Western theory, woman has been defined either in terms of the maternal function or in terms of her reflective function within a masculine ‘hom(m)osexual’ economy of the same. Irigaray’s critique of western philosophical and psychoanalytic attempts to contain and repress the feminine has been well documented by commentators such as Margaret Whitford and Elizabeth Grosz. In her later work, Irigaray talks about woman’s déréliction in terms which relate directly to the need for a female genealogy. Whitford has pointed out that this use of the term 99


déréliction must be understood in its widest sense: this term, which is much stronger in French than in English, connotes for example the state of being abandoned by God or, in mythology, the state of Ariadne, abandoned on Naxos, left without hope, without help, without refuge. Women are abandoned outside the symbolic order; they lack mediation in the symbolic for the operations of sublimation. (1991: 77–8) The corollary of this exclusion of the feminine from symbolic signifying practices is that within the symbolic order there are very few representations of the mother–daughter relationship and virtually none of the feminine in its own right. Irigaray describes the surprise and delight she experienced upon finding a representation of the Virgin Mary depicted with her mother, Anne: in the museum there is a statue of a woman who resembles Mary, Jesus’s mother, sitting with the child before her on her knee, facing the observer. I was admiring this beautiful wooden sculpture when I noticed that this Jesus was a girl! That had a very significant effect on me, one of jubilation – mental and physical. I felt freed from the tensions of that cultural truth-imperative which is also practiced in art: a virgin-mother woman and her son depicted as the models of redemption we should believe in. Standing before this statue representing Mary and her mother, Anne, I felt once again at ease and joyous, in touch with my body, my emotions, and my history as a woman. I had before me an aesthetic and ethical figure that I need to be able to live without contempt for my incarnation, for that of my mother and other women. (1990/1993b: 25) Irigaray highlights the fact that within Western symbolic traditions there are many representations of women in the maternal role but that usually these are only positive representations if the child is male.1 There are very few representations of mothers and daughters that enable anything of the feminine as she defines it to be detected. Irigaray argues that it is necessary to go back to Greek mythology in order to find any modern representations of the mother–daughter relation. She is particularly fond of the Demeter-Persephone/Kore myth, for example. The need to trace a female or maternal genealogy is linked to the difficulty that Irigaray perceives in women acceding to subjective specificity on and in their own terms. She argues that women are trapped

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within the maternal function by the symbolic order and that this is partly due to the fact that they have no means of symbolizing the relationship between mothers and daughters. As a result of this, women become little more than a residue or a space for the masculine. Irigaray argues that traditional generalizations about women and their ‘natures’ can be accounted for by highlighting the lack of a female genealogy. Women are accused of being unable to differentiate, unable to individuate and of being incapable of achieving an identity that defines them in terms of their feminine specificity as well as in terms of their maternal role. She calls for a feminine entre-elles or parler femme in order to show the need for a reworking of traditional ideas about how women are perceived and perceive themselves. Whitford describes this relation of women to other women as a horizontal relation, as a kind of female sociality or social contract (1991: 78). In Irigaray’s account, female sociality is precluded within a masculinist symbolic economy. It is for this reason that she calls for more attention to be paid to the mother– daughter relation and its archaeology. Irigaray has commented at length on the need for mothers and daughters to manipulate their histories, to reclaim stories of the origin of the feminine, highlighting the need for ‘any individual, a woman or a man, [to] recreate his or her personal and collective history’ (1990/1993b: 28). In some of her more recent writings, Irigaray has begun to focus upon the archaeology of mythologies surrounding the mother–daughter relation and their exclusion from masculinist accounts of prehistory. According to Irigaray, the structuring mythologies of patriarchy, such as the theories of Freud and Marx are not adequate, because they remain bound to a patriarchal mythology which hardly ever questions itself as such. Patriarchy, like the phallocracy that goes with it, are in part myths which, because they don’t stand back to question themselves, take themselves to be the only order possible. That’s why we tend to think of myths as representing secondary realities rather than as one of the principal expressions that orders society at any given time. ... This disregard for what is termed, rather vaguely, Prehistory can be explained by the way in which patriarchy is mistaken for the only History possible. In examining Prehistory, specialists group very diverse facts and periods together and often reduce these historical expressions to the current function of myths (viewed as hidden in History) or that of fairy tales and legends. To consider the meaning of mythical representations of reality as merely incidental is concomitant to repressing and

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destroying certain cultural dimensions that relate to the economy of difference between the sexes. (1990/1993b: 23–4) If women can root out representations of their own genealogy, then it may be possible for them to realize their potential to undo and rework symbolic patterns of representation and discourse and, thus, later to achieve an identity based on their own female specificity. At stake in this chapter, then, is an effort to discern structures of a female genealogy in the context of films made by women, which work through a feminine mode of address. The films discussed below take the maternal relation seriously. However, it is not merely at the level of narrative or representation that these films articulate aspects of the feminine. Through their structures and emphasis on the mother– daughter relation, what we understand as parler femme also begins to be discernible at the level of enunciation as well.

Parler femme and cinematic enunciation The question of the feminine has long dominated critical approaches to cinema, with theorists concerning themselves with issues of representation, spectatorship and authorship. Central to discussions of female authorship in the field of film studies is the role of cinematic enunciation. For Irigaray, questions of enunciation are bound up with issues of language, as defined by Saussure, with an emphasis on the notion of langage rather than on the notions of langue or parole. For Irigaray, the project of her work on language and the sexuation of discourse is to uncover who speaks, to whom, about what, with what means. In technical terms this entails uncovering the dynamics of discourse that underlie individual utterances. Underneath what is said, we can uncover the subject, its economy, its relations with the world and the other, its potential energy. The subject is masked, engulfed, buried, covered over, paralyzed, or else it generates, engenders, becomes, develops, grows, while speaking. (1987/1993c: 176) Language, then, works either to trap the subject into modes of becoming that are regulated by traditional categories of discursive and representational practice, or to open up new possibilities for speaking subject positions that incorporate sexual difference into linguistic and representational systems.


We have to discover a language [langage] which does not replace the bodily encounter, as paternal language [langue] attempts to do, but which can go along with it, words which do not bar the corporeal, but which speak corporeal. (Irigaray in Whitford (ed.), 1991: 43) Irigaray’s emphasis on the use of psychoanalytic techniques to rework positions of enunciation structures her work on the need to elaborate a form of parler femme which would enable the feminine to be insinuated into a position of speaking subjectivity founded on the exchange of sexual difference.2 Parler femme, then, is forged in the context of exchange. At times, it seems that this exchange needs to take place between mothers and daughters, operating as a kind of symbol of a shift in the discursive configuring of this relation. At other times, however, the exchange is related to issues of the imaginary and might take place between men and women in order to show how language restricts ontological constructions of the subject in terms of sameness and difference. The notion of the female imaginary in Irigaray’s work is slippery, vacillating between a critique of masculinist symbolic systems and their relegation of the feminine to that which is unspeakable and unconscious and acting as a kind of pointer to an alternative imaginary based in the other of the other. Similarly, parler femme attempts to speak the symbolic constraints on what is understood as ‘woman’ and also to rework the structures underpinning this in order to speak (as) woman. Crucial to this process is a focus on the need for a modality of enunciation for the feminine. The emphasis running throughout Irigaray’s work on language foregrounds the question of enunciation in relation to the construction of subjectivity, as we have seen. In order for any dialogue to take place between two different subjects, the subject of enunciation must be shifted. Neither interlocutor should be frozen in one position: instead, each should respond to the other, seeking to provide a symbolic space of dwelling for the other, always being willing to move between subject and object positions. Enunciation is also a concept that is central to the understanding of cinematic narrative. Enunciation in the cinema defines the spectator as a textual construct, and as a crucial element of the cinematic process and its production of meaning through exchange. The cinematic text bears meaning only in the context of it being received: in other words, cinematic enunciation depends for its validity on the spectator believing that the fantasies relayed on-screen are products of their own desire. This, in turn, depends upon the suppression of marks of enunciation

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within the (classical mainstream) text: the camera remains invisible and attention is not drawn to its presence. This effect of this is to mystify the production of meaning. Metz (1982) suggests that mainstream cinematic narrative is story/history that is set in the past and that refuses an articulation of perspectives emanating from the discursive position of exchange between the first and second persons. He draws a distinction between discours and histoire3 in order to situate enunciation in the cinema as structured through the third person.4 Drawing on Irigaray’s thought, we might suggest that this is an inherently masculinist perspective on narrative cinema, privileging the ostensibly objective voice of sameness. As we have seen, Irigaray’s perspective on the project of enunciation centres on the dynamics of the utterance (1987/1993c: 147) and this allows us to suggest that Metz’s account of cinematic enunciation is a limited one that reinforces masculinist discourses of representation. This mirrors the insistence of some commentators that spectatorship is framed in terms of masculine desire alone. As Irigaray has observed: The rejection, the exclusion of a female imaginary certainly puts woman in the position of experiencing herself only fragmentarily, in the little structured margins of a dominant ideology, as waste, or excess, what is left of a mirror invested by the (masculine) ‘subject’, to reflect himself, to copy himself. Moreover, the role of ‘femininity’ is prescribed by this masculine specula(riza)tion and corresponds scarcely at all to woman’s desire, which may be recovered only in secret, in hiding, with anxiety and guilt. (1977/1985b: 30) We might be inspired by Irigaray’s perspective on enunciation to read against the grain of texts that work like this in order to seek out what is buried there. As a feminist modality of reading, this approach is politically pertinent. However, the films under scrutiny in this book promise greater potential in terms of articulating the moments of becoming that it is possible to discern in cinema. The cinema does not have to be read as a machine, as an apparatus of dominant discursive mechanisms. It can be read as a discursive space of exchange. As we saw in Chapter 4, the space and time of narrative cinema is frequently aligned with fantasy and imaginary identificatory processes. There is arguably space within narrative cinema made by women for a discursive framework that privileges the dyadic relation between the positions of ‘I’ and ‘you’ and this mirrors the relation of the spectator to the on-screen fantasy.


As Virginia Woolf has commented: Sometimes at the cinema in the midst of its immense dexterity and enormous technical proficiency, the curtain parts and we behold, far off, some unknown and unexpected beauty. But it is for a moment only. For a strange thing has happened – while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. (1965: 171) Cinema, then, can be seen to constitute a space of fantasy in which to construct playful interrogations of structures of enunciation. The site of women’s film-making is imbued with the potential to rework and rephrase received ideals about what it is possible to say about the perceived unspeakability of the feminine. In other words, the cinema can be seen as an ideal space in which to articulate Irigaray’s parler femme. For Irigaray, parler femme shows the need for a reworking of traditional ideas about how women are perceived and perceive themselves. Parler femme, then, is an effort to construct a feminine position of enunciation. It draws attention to the fact that women need to address their exclusion from language and systems of representation. In the context of a discussion of the feminine in cinema, this chapter asks whether films made by women speak (as) woman in ways that challenge our models of cinematic enunciation. If so, how, and with what effects?

The Silences of the Palace and female genealogy Some of the difficulties inherent in Irigaray’s articulation of parler femme are made tangible in Moufida Tlatli’s The Silences of the Palace. The plot centres on and is elaborated through a complex mother– daughter relationship between the film’s protagonist, Alia, and her mother, Khedija. Khedija and Alia live as servants amongst a large group of women in the palace of the Beys during the 1950s. It is made relatively clear to us from the outset that Alia’s father is Sidi Ali (Kamel Fazaa), one of the Bey’s sons, though this is never directly spoken as fact at any point in the film. The film uses the central silence around the identity of Alia’s father as the basis of a structure of silences surrounding the inscription of female subjectivity in the film, reflecting, perhaps, Irigaray’s critique of masculinist socio-symbolic signifying practices and discourses, but simultaneously opening up room to express this experience. By foregrounding

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the interrelation between the servant women in the palace and the corresponding refusal of relations with these women by the women upstairs (the wives of the Beys), the film outlines some of the difficulties inherent in attempting to break down the barriers between women that are artificially constructed by patriarchy. Moreover, by constructing the mother–daughter relation between Khedija and Alia as the structuring relation of both story and plot, the film stages the centrality of the maternal relation in thinking through Irigaray’s politics of the feminine. Film form is crucial, here, in that it seems that only by revisiting her past is Alia able to renegotiate her relationship and debt to her mother. This unfolds at a point in her own life when she finds herself manipulated and constrained by the demands of masculinist sociosymbolic practices and when her sense of subjectivity is foundering as a result. In effect, then, Alia’s becoming is motivated through her return to the palace upon the death of Sidi Ali and the memories this evokes for her of her mother and her relation to her. Formally, the film manipulates space and time to construct a series of intimate flashback sequences which parallel Alia’s memories in the present day (1960s) scenes and inflect our grasp of how she is reformulating her notion of the maternal through this experience in an effort to come to terms with her own potential to be a mother. The film is structured through a series of flashbacks from the scenes set in 1960s Tunisia when we first come across Alia as a grown woman, singing at a wedding and afterwards being collected by her lover, Lotfi (Sami Bouajila), who takes her home to rest because she has a headache. It quickly becomes clear that the relationship between Alia and Lotfi is an unhappy one. They are unmarried and the inference is that this is because of Alia’s illegitimacy and the fact that, despite the revolutionary leanings of the younger Lotfi, he now feels compelled to respect the social mores that dictate that Alia is not a suitable wife. Their unmarried status has resulted in a number of abortions for Alia and, during the opening sequence, it becomes clear that she finds herself pregnant again and reluctant to have the abortion that is scheduled for the next day. After some discussion with Lotfi, she agrees that she will go ahead with the abortion. It is then that Lotfi tells her of the death of Sidi Ali and the film journeys toward the palace of the Beys to unfold the substance of its narrative. In these opening sequences, it quickly becomes clear that Alia has escaped the palace and the drudgery of a life of servitude, but that she remains trapped by social and cultural discourses around femininity to the extent that she allows Lotfi to dictate that they will not marry and


that her repeated abortions are necessary. Despite the revolutionary ideals she had embraced with Lotfi in the past (which has yet to be revealed to the spectator), Alia is all too painfully aware of the apparent inevitability of her life. Very quickly, then, this films sets out a critical perspective on the failures of Mahgreb society adequately to deal with the liberation of women in the context of the political revolution that had taken place in Tunisia in 1956. Alia’s femininity is heavily circumscribed by Lotfi’s control over her. As a singer, she appears to work for him; as a lover, she silently accepts his failure to marry her and reluctantly agrees to repeated abortions as a means of contraception. Alia is ill, dependent on medication and trapped in a stultifying world cut to the measure of male desire and masculine subjectivity. Alia’s status as a woman is irretrievably connected to her parentage. She is forced to dissemble her unhappiness and rein in her desires in order to safeguard her relationship with Lotfi. In her role as an object of desire, she is represented as a commodity in ways that remind us of Irigaray’s early writing on the patriarchal insistence on the disavowal of the feminine. Alia has no discernible relation with her (now dead) mother at this stage in the film. It is clear, in these opening scenes, that Alia is at rock bottom, a literal substratum to the masculine world represented through Lotfi. She is expected to maintain a degree of silence around her own desires and wishes, and her failure to communicate to Lotfi her desire to keep her baby underscores how patriarchy proscribes the desires of women at every turn. Alia: I want to keep it. Lotfi: You’re crazy! I thought we’d discussed it enough. A child needs a name, a family, marriage. Alia: I’m not asking you to marry me. A failed singer ... Lotfi: Stop, Alia. You’re torturing yourself and me. You know I love you. You mean so much to me. Alia: You always have to win. Tomorrow I’ll have my abortion. My head is going to explode.5 Alia, then, is profoundly desubjectivized in these opening scenes. This is marked on and through her body with its symptoms of pain and illness and its dependency on medication. She is labelled by Lotfi as ‘crazy’ to want to keep the child, showing that she is pathologized in his masculinist world. It is only when she decides to return to the palace to pay her respects to the widow of Sidi Ali that we begin to see this alter.


Alia’s decision to return to the palace is marked in the film by the use of a voiceover which accompanies her as she leaves the flat where she lives with Lotfi and travels by car on a journey to the palace of the Beys and ‘the past [she] thought [she] had buried with her mother’. The voiceover does not return until the closing scenes of the film when we see a newly defined Alia, one who appears to be celebrating her relation with her mother rather than denigrating it. The voiceover comes to take the place of Alia’s bodily inscribed symptoms. It also conveys to us the interiority of the scenes that will follow and inscribes them for us as pertaining to her memories and her past history. Alia’s mother, Khedija, plays a central role in these recollections, as does Alia’s movement through the spaces of the palace. The flashbacks that reveal the memories are structured through this relation to space, and it is interesting that the memories are evoked only in the ‘below-stairs’ and garden spaces of the palace, suggesting a tie to class that will be scrutinized in the closing chapter of this book. One of the key ideas to emerge in the flashback sequences is that Alia’s relationship to her mother is profoundly complex and conflictual. Much of this is couched in terms of the questions around her mother’s servitude, her relation with the Beys and, crucially, with the identity of Alia’s father which marks out Alia as different from the other women below stairs, as somehow closer to the world of the Beys than the others. This is particularly emphasized through the relationship between Sarra (Khedija Ben Othman) and Alia. We shall return to this in the closing chapter. Khedija’s identity as a servant and sexual slave of the Beys is not in doubt. She it treated as a commodity throughout, with little respect being shown to her, even by Sidi Ali, despite his clear affection for her and for Alia. Khedija is little more than an object in this household, a fact that is underscored in the scene of her rape by Si Bechir (Hichem Rostom), which is silently witnessed by Alia. Khedija, then, is marked as an object, as a woman who is confined to an unquestioning life of servitude and objectification. For Alia, this seems to be the source of a sense of disrespect for her mother and her decision to remain in the palace. It is made clear from the earliest flashback sequences that the young Alia aspires to a rather different life, in that she spends her time with Sarra, aspiring to playing the lute, as she does, and seeking refuge from the confusions of her status within the palace in the attic, a space signalled by the film’s director as an intermediate space Alia has made for herself between the world of the servants and the world of the princes because of her discomfort with both these worlds. For


Tlatli, the space of the attic acts as a metaphor for Alia’s aspiration to the mind, which accompanies her relegation of the mother to the corporeal (Mulvey, 1995: 19). Alia is horrified by the rhythms of the female body, choosing to reject her mother at the onset of her menstruation and fleeing from the kitchen at the celebration of the loss of virginity upon marriage. Alia holds her mother responsible for the female body that seems to be the cause of her déréliction. This association of Khedija with female corporeality is made central in the scene when she discovers that she has become pregnant after being raped by Sidi Ali’s brother. Khedija emits a tortuous wail of grief and declares ‘I hate myself! Everything disgusts me, I hate my body’. For Alia, her mother embodies a function prescribed by the patriarchal interests of the Beys. To identify with Khedija would leave Alia firmly within this territory. As Irigaray asks, ‘how, as daughters, can we have a personal relationship with or construct a personal identity in relation to someone who is no more than a function?’ (Whitford (ed.), 1991: 50). The extraordinary level of silence between Alia and her mother underscores these difficulties. Alia’s retreat into silence after her mother’s rape is a clear example of this, and her flight to the palace gate to emit a silent scream structures our reading of it. As Irigaray suggests, as for us, the daughters, if our relationship with our mothers is a relationship with need, with no possible identity, and if we enter into desire by becoming objects of the desire of/for the father, what do we know about our identity and our desires? Nothing. That manifests itself in somatic pain, in screams and demands, and they are quite justified. (Whitford (ed.), 1991: 52) Alia is unable to challenge her mother’s state of being, yet she inscribes the silences that shape their relationship on her body until they cause her to become ill as an adult. The proscription of an adequate relationship with her mother because of the demands made on Khedija by the Beys is strangulating and oppressive for the young Alia. She is unable to articulate this directly, perhaps because language does not allow her to express it, though she immaturely tries to do so at certain stages in the film. Khedija tries her utmost to maintain the silences that structure her relationship with Alia in order to protect her. She tries to keep the fact of her rape from Alia, unaware that she has, in fact, witnessed the whole thing. She tries to keep the ensuing pregnancy and attempts at self-abortion from her, just as she tries to keep the identity of her father from her. Khedija

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repeatedly sacrifices herself for Alia, offering herself to the Beys when they request that Alia comes to serve them or, perhaps, dance for them. She tries to ensure that Alia’s aspirations to a life outside the parameters of servitude are vaguely realizable, though in the end, she is forced to allow Alia to sing for the Beys and to step into her shoes (quite literally). This scene is played out in front of a mirror in their shared room, as Khedija informs Alia that she is to sing for Sidi Ali and Alia takes a certain amount of glee in steeping into her mother’s place, using her make-up and dressing in her clothes. She does not seem to realize that she is becoming a substitute for her mother in this moment, nor that she is not gaining access to the world of princes in the way she might expect. The pain of this is writ large in Khedija’s facial expression, but, again, the silence between them is maintained. It is only when Alia confronts Khedija and demands to know why she continues to let herself be abused by the Beys that we hear this silence being interrupted. When Khedija speaks to Alia to say that she is to go away with the Beys in order to avoid the expected trouble associated with the uprising but that she must take care around the men, Alia insists that she does not wish to go as she is scared and that she cannot relax with the family. An argument ensues about the influence of Lotfi over the teenage Alia’s moods and over the parentage of Alia and the child her mother in now bearing. The argument comes to a head as Alia demands that they leave the palace: Khedija: Where to? I have no one. Alia: I’m scared. It’s a nightmare that keeps coming back. I’m tired of feeling lost. Where do you come from? Where are your parents? You always refused to tell me. Khedija lays her head on Alia’s shoulder. Khedija: They brought me here when I was 10. They sold me to the Beys. They promised to be back on Friday. Every Friday, I went to ask the gatekeeper. He laughed and I would come back numb. Khalti Hadda hid me. (She lifts her head and looks at Alia.) Don’t feel lost. I am your mother and your father. I can’t stand this any more. I have a lot of work to do. Alia: Don’t you be concerned about them. Just say ‘no’ for once! ‘No, I won’t wait on you! No, I don’t belong to you!’ Khedija: Who do I belong to? Understand ... I saw the light of day here, spent my life here. I’m afraid to leave. Where do you want me to go?


Here, then, what Alia seems to demand is an account of her genealogy. She cajoles her mother into revealing her past and this acts as a spur for Alia to leave the palace with Lotfi. She chooses to do so on the night of Sarra’s wedding when she abuses her invitation to sing by choosing the hymn of the revolution. She refuses the safety of the palace at this point, unaware that her mother is dying in their room as a result of her selfinflicted abortion. The strangulating relationship between them is thus torn asunder by death and by politics and this is what leads Alia to the position in which we first see her at the beginning of the film. The content of the flashback sequences, then, shows a flawed and strangulated mother–daughter relation between Alia and Khedija. However, that this is a tale told in flashback is important in our understanding of the meaning we decipher for the film. The sequences discussed above are intercut with images of the adult Alia moving through the spaces of the palace, which help to evoke her memories. Now that her mother is dead, and Alia has the benefit of hindsight, she is able to see that her relationship with her mother was misinterpreted during her childhood. She creates distance that allows her to appreciate Khedija’s motivations for wishing to protect her daughter. This film centres on interiorized memory and its potency for a sense of identity and becoming. As spectators, we are constantly reminded of this by the repeated return to the scenes of the adult Alia’s exploration of the palace. In one sense, the palace operates as a landscape of Alia’s mind, allowing her to contemplate her unhappiness and sense of failed identity in ways that eventually facilitate her becoming. It is as though the flashback sequences allow Alia to re-imagine her relation with her mother, through a gaze which is marked as feminine. This is underscored by the fact that Khalti Hadda is now blind, functioning, perhaps, as a signifier for the spectator of to how to read the scenes in the flashback sequences. Through this re-imagining of her relation to the maternal, Alia comes to a new sense of who she is and where the route to a fulfilling sense of subjectivity might lie. By the end of the film, Alia is able to speak to the child in her womb, as she visits her mother’s grave and it is clear that she now intends to become a mother in her own right. The mechanism of the flashback then, enables Alia to relinquish a discourse of the mother– daughter relation that is couched in terms of the patriarchal restriction of its possibilities. Instead, Alia becomes rather more liberated as a result of thinking through her relationship to her mother. Irigaray suggests that In a sense we need to say goodbye to maternal omnipotence (the last refuge) and establish a woman-to-woman relationship of reciprocity

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with our mothers ... . In a word, liberate ourselves along with our mothers. That is an indispensable precondition for our emancipation from the authority of fathers. (Whitford (ed.), 1991: 50) It is precisely such a move that the flashback sequences appear to manoeuvre. Of course, central to these sequences is a secondary emphasis, not only on the vertical, genealogical relation but also on the horizontal relation, the relation between women. The Silences of the Palace and the Construction of a Woman-to-Woman Sociality Throughout these sequences, the relationship between young Alia and Khedija is grounded in the sociality of the women who serve the Beys and live below stairs. Many of the flashback scenes revolve around the kitchen, showing the women at work preparing food or showing them at rest, when they are often singing or making music. The use of music in the film hints at the unspeakability of the women’s experience. Stemming from melodrama, music in cinema is frequently used to enhance the expression of repressed emotion and desire. In The Silences of the Palace, this technique is put to useful purpose in scenes that take place both above and below stairs. It is in the scenes in the kitchen, however, that the scenes of music-making seem to act as a channel through which the women can express the bond between them. They frequently sing songs that metaphorize their experience, pointing to the slippages in their lives as female domestic servants who are exploited sexually and politically. The framing of these scenes is also interesting, with many being shot as long takes. Tlatli has emphasized the importance of the long takes in this film in terms of showing the slowness of the women’s day and their relation to the passing of time in terms of rhythm (Mulvey, 1995: 18). The long takes also enable us to take in the detail of the scenes in the kitchen. This is, perhaps, most notable in the scene following Khedija’s discovery that she is pregnant after her rape by Si Bechir. As Khedija screams out and decries her relationship to her body, the camera tracks around the kitchen, slowly revealing to us the pained and silently emotional responses of each of the other women to Khedija’s dilemma. We see a wealth of emotion in this scene, through the use of close-ups on the women as they work and silently reflect. The kitchen is a space marked by the women throughout the film. Men pop in and out to make requests or to inform the women of what is going on outside the palace. Like the women, we as spectators are also confined to life within the palace and we have to rely on the


male interlopers in the kitchen for our grasp of the political situation which is having a bearing on Tunisian society and on the dominion of the Beys. For the women, the kitchen is a place in which they are able to sustain a sense of identity. Many of the scenes that take place there are marked by laughter and merriment, though there are others that are more clearly inscribed with struggle and the effects of silence. What is most striking about the scenes in the kitchen is the silence of the women around their own lives and feelings. There is a great deal of emphasis on sharing moments of laughter and exchange in these sequences. Irigaray has suggested that there is an important ‘difference between archaic love of the mother and love for women-sisters. This love is necessary if we are not to remain the servants of the phallic cult, objects to be used and exchanged between men’ (Whitford (ed.), 1991: 44–5). In the scenes in the kitchen, it is as though this relation between women is playing itself out. While there is a sense, here, of what Irigaray terms the déréliction of women, who have no home of their own, no language with which to speak their specificity, there is also a sense that these women have carved out a space for the feminine in their lives, despite their ongoing subjugation, and that this is mediated through the exchange of song and poetry, laughter and silence. The rhythms of the female body are celebrated (in the scenes of ululation to mark the loss of virginity or the birth of a child, for example), and the exchange of looks is laden with melodramatic significance throughout the film. (Indeed, the exchange of looks between the young Alia and Khedija in the flashback scenes mirrors the diegetic look of the adult Alia in the 1960s scenes, prompting us to read her look as associative and interiorized and thereby marked as feminine.) As spectators, our look is frequently matched by the look that is exchanged between women in the film, suggesting that, as spectators, our gaze is mapped onto this feminine look and that we are thus imbricated in the structure of parler femme that dominates the filmic strategy. Despite the fact of their oppression, then, the women servants manage to salvage a sense of community between them in their shared inhabitation of the kitchen. Irigaray has argued that ‘in these places of women-among-themselves, something of a speaking (as) woman is heard’ (1977/1985b: 135) and she points to how the gestural codes of women’s bodies, their laughter and what they choose or ‘dare’ to do in their spaces when they are alone are significant in the construction of parler femme. As a cinematic example of parler femme, then, The Silences of the Palace is complex. It presents us with a detailed opportunity to think through the problematics of the male imaginary and its insistence on the

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continuing oppression of women and the repression of the feminine within culture, yet it simultaneously offers respite from this, through its marked cinematic strategies and its use of flashback to enable Alia’s reimagining of her relation with her mother. As a meditation on femininity in this historical and nationally specific context, The Silences of the Palace goes some way toward setting out a vision of the female imaginary in the sense elaborated by Irigaray.

Female genealogy in Antonia’s Line Like The Silences of the Palace, Antonia’s Line evokes both the vertical, genealogical relation between mothers and daughters and the horizontal relation of women-among-themselves. Antonia’s Line is a kind of pastoral, feminist fairy tale, ripe with strategies of magical realism and humour. The narrative is presented as the chronicle of Antonia’s life and central to its unfolding is the establishment of a distinctly female genealogical relation. In particular, the film foregrounds the relationships between its mothers and daughters, so that the story appears to be grounded in a markedly feminine perspective on subjectivity and history. The film presents to us a space of fantasy that is mediated through fertility; the maternal metaphor is celebrated and lauded; there is a huge emphasis placed on cycles of nature: births and deaths accompany the seasons and are endlessly relived. The passage of time as history is eclipsed in favour of an emphasis on its cyclical nature. For Irigaray, the feminine is partially defined in relation to women’s ‘natural temporality’ (1989/1994: 26). She highlights the complexity of women’s temporality and its specifically cyclical quality that links it to cosmic rhythms. This temporality is connected, for Irigaray, to the mythical history of women that has been eclipsed under patriarchy. Citing Græco-Roman figures of mythology such as Demeter and Kore/ Persephone, Clytemnestra and Iphigenia, and Jocasta and Antigone as archetypes of the mother–daughter relation, Irigaray suggests that ‘the mother-daughter relation was the guardian of the fertility of nature’ (1989/1994: 12) and that ‘this couple preserved the memory of the past, and thus the daughter respected her mother, her ancestry’ (13). This association of women and the cyclical temporality of nature with the mother–daughter relation and the need to present women with a mythical history of their femininity maps in astonishing ways onto the narrative of Antonia’s Line with its emphasis on Antonia’s ancestry and progeny and the space of their becoming, which is irrevocably tied to working the land in the production of food and privileging the


mother–daughter relation over all others. In this context, it is very striking that, throughout the film, Antonia is scrupulous about denying Farmer Bas (Jan Decleir), her suitor (later her lover), access to the feminine space of her home. We see Farmer Bas and his sons at picnics thrown in the gardens of the house, but we do not see them inside the home of Antonia and her daughters. It is as though Antonia and Danielle have worked to establish their home as defining a space of dwelling and becoming for the feminine as it is set out in Irigaray’s work. The film traces a matrilineal history of women and their relationships with one another so that the specificity of female experience is heightened. This is largely premised on the centrality of the mother–daughter relationship. In addition to the relationship between Antonia and Danielle, there are various other mother–daughter relationships such as those between Danielle and Therese (Carolien Spoor/Esther Vriesendorp/ Veerle van Overloop) and Therese and Sarah (Thyrza Revesteijn). Antonia herself also functions as a matriarch, playing the maternal role to myriad women such as Deedee (Marina de Graaf) and Lette (Wimie Wilhelm) as well as to sympathetic men such as Loony Lips (Jan Steen) and Farmer Bas and his family of sons. Irigaray has argued, controversially, for the need to put up ‘posters in all public places with beautiful pictures representing the mother-daughter couple’ (1989/1994: 9) because ‘the mother-daughter couple is always erased even where a mother-daughter couple is honoured’ (10). In one sense, films such as Antonia’s Line appear to fulfil such a function by offering a celebration of the mother–daughter relationship that is not framed in terms of patriarchal discourse. Irigaray has argued that In myths concerning mother-daughter relationships and myths about the goddess/lover and god couples, the story, the setting and interpretation were masked, disguised to varying degrees by the patriarchal culture that was growing up’. (1989/1994: 101) At the end of this essay, entitled ‘The Forgotten Mystery of Female Ancestry’, Irigaray claims that To make an ethics of sexual difference possible once again, the bond of female ancestries must be renewed. ... The daughter ... is potentially a mother and can live with her mother without destroying either one of them even prior to the mediation of specific objects. To them, nature is a preferred environment; the ever-fertile earth is

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their place, and mother and daughter co-exist happily there. They, like nature, are fertile and nurturing, but this does not prevent them from having a human relationship between them. This relationship depends upon the establishment of female lines of descent but not solely. (1989/1994: 109–11) Antonia’s Line, then, presents us with a version of this relation that seems remarkably pertinent to Irigaray’s project. Antonia and Danielle and Danielle and Therese live in precisely such a domestic arrangement, and they strive to establish the kind of matrilineal community where lines of female descent are foregrounded in their memory of the past and their hopes for the future. Throughout the film, there is a focus on a community that comes together around the central figure of Antonia and which is forged according to her social and familial values and mores. There is much emphasis in the film on Antonia’s role in carving out justice for the community: she rescues Loony Lips from the abusive sons of Farmer Daan (Jakob Beks); takes in Deedee after her brutal rape by Pitte (Filip Peeters), and ends up taking a rifle to Pitte in order to force him from the village once and for all after he has raped Therese. Irigaray emphasizes the need to establish the mother–daughter relationship alongside a struggle for legal and civic rights and access to justice for women (1989/1994). Antonia’s role as a mediator of just treatment and behaviour echoes the premises of Irigaray’s thought here. The community of Antonia’s Line then, is structured through a female genealogical relation. This is underscored in the procession to mark the advent of spring in which the names of saints being chanted are all female, pointing to the close relationship between the feminine and nature. The film constitutes a representation of parler femme in its association of the play of time and history with the female experience of maternity and desire in the context of a markedly female space of domesticity and work. The narrative of the film is witnessed through flashback, and this impacts on our reading of it. At the beginning of the film, we see Antonia as an elderly woman who knows that today will be her last. The spectator is encouraged to abandon any expectations of realism from the opening. Antonia stares wistfully through the window and we cut to a moment in her past when she and her daughter, Danielle, were called to the death bed of Antonia’s mother, Allegonde. The circular structure of the film is set up for us immediately, as it is with Antonia’s own death that the film will end. The spectator is left with a sound knowledge of the future to come. The female genealogy of the film,


then, is marked from the outset and frames our sense of the cinematic address to the spectator. Just as the female genealogy of the film rests not on patriarchally defined blood relations, but extends to friendship between women, so, arguably, the female spectator watching in the auditorium feels herself to be interpellated through the cinematic address and enunciation as part of this. In a sense, then, the film sets out an opportunity for what Whitford (1991) has called ‘a woman-towoman sociality’, a chance for spectators to be addressed in terms of the cinematic act of speaking (as) woman, and thus to reconstitute themselves through the act of attributing meaning to the film.6 Opportunities for identification in this film depend on the foregrounding of the feminine as it is mediated through the text. The emphasis is placed heavily on female experience and on the shared nature of this. This largely remains unspoken and is perhaps best illustrated through the moments of magical realism used to underscore the sense of the legacy that is passed down from mother to daughter.7 In the opening scenes of the film, Antonia shows her daughter around the town, which is her own place of birth. There is a sense here of going back to one’s roots, and yet, Antonia is neither overcome by nostalgia nor anxious to curtail her visit because of any sense of discomfort about returning after so much time. Instead she decides to return for good and sets about stamping her own identity on the way of life in the village inhabited by oddballs. She becomes a matriarchal figurehead in the small town, wielding moral imperatives and doling out justice on her own terms. That the village is inhabited by oddballs should not go unremarked. Antonia’s own oddity is marked by her palpable pleasure in her femininity and her willingness to flaunt this: Gorris is effectively reclaiming the terrain of associations between femininity and madness in this respect. Antonia’s inculcation of Danielle, her daughter, into life in the town goes almost unspoken. In fact, Danielle barely speaks throughout the film. Instead she sees parodic visions that make us laugh. The sense here is that somehow these visions are communicated to her by her mother: our laughter as Antonia comments that ‘that’s how things are around here’ just as her daughter has witnessed her grandmother coming to life in order to sing at her own funeral underscores this. There is a palpable exchange of femininity going on here. This takes place outside the domain of traditional symbolic practice, remaining unspoken and depending on moments of magical realism that are specified as feminine. The parodic scenes of exchange between mother and daughter remind us that the space of fantasy is associated with the

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imaginary and thus with the mother-daughter dyad. An Irigarayan modality of exchange between mothers and daughters finds a space for exploration here. The modality of enunciation here depends upon the relation of form (the integrated moments of magical realism that disrupt the realist text) and textual content. The cinematic strategies allow us to discern the feminine as a mode of becoming. This construction of meaning depends on our engagement with the text at the level of subjectivity and desire. The cinema as a space of fantasy at this point thus allows us a glimpse of feminine specificity, and this enables us to re-imagine the possibilities of female engagements with the cinematic image. The spectator is aligned with such moments through the play of the cinematic process. Moments of magical realism and flashback lend a mythic quality to the feminine, in that they contribute to a sense that there is a representable mother–daughter relation that is constituted through a shared relationship to the past. The moments of magical realism in Antonia’s Line begin, as we have seen, during the funeral scene in which Allegonde sits up in her coffin and sings along with the hymns. Antonia’s tacit acknowledgement of what has happened in response to Danielle’s astonishment suggests that she has also witnessed this scene, yet the rest of the congregation seems oblivious. Subsequently, the scene in the graveyard when a stone angel mounted over a gravestone moves its mighty wing to strike the curate comes just as Antonia is taking Danielle on a tour of the graveyard and explaining some of the ancestral relations in the village. Subsequent visions appear to Danielle as she falls in love. The sense throughout these sequences then, is that a shared, yet imaginary perspective on the world unfolds for these women in moments that seem markedly feminine. It is as though the visions work to create an instance of the female imaginary. In addition, the use of flashback to frame the narrative of the film, together with the use of voiceover, lends us a sense of history and this augments the mythical quality of the film, creating for the female spectator a sense of legacy and history, contributing to the film’s construction of parler femme. As Irigaray has suggested, ‘history as expressed in myth is much more closely related to female, matrilineal traditions’ (1989/1994: 101). Antonia’s Line, then, becomes an expression of the possibility of such a mythology because its cinematic technique and strategies open up a space in which to think this through. The play of enunciation in this film is also important for understanding how parler femme finds expression in the context of cinema. Another key example of this is seen in Liv Ullmann’s Faithless, as the next section explores.


Enunciation and the female imaginary in Faithless Liv Ullmann’s Faithless is a complex film, not least because it stages its narrative through an imaginary relation and it is difficult to ascertain whether the encounter at the heart of this staging is lived and real, or imaginary in its entirety. The plot centres on the encounter between an elderly screenwriter, named only as Bergman in the present-day scenes, and a woman who appears to be an actress, but who may be an apparition from his past life. The woman appears in Bergman’s study as he settles to begin the groundwork for a screenplay and she agrees to take on the role of Marianne. The present-day scenes in the study are initially staged, then, as if they are grounded in fantasy and role-playing. The scene is almost psychoanalytic in its setting. However, Marianne also appears to be drawing on a wealth of memory, stemming perhaps from her own life. The boundary between the woman we perceive as an actress in the opening scenes and the woman who emerges as Marianne herself in the flashback scenes blurs as soon as we are transported to the scenes of memory being played out as fantasy or biography through the tale she tells. As the narrative unfolds, the film frequently cuts away from the scenes of the past into the narrative present, and we witness Bergman and his response to Marianne’s story, his traumatic and highly affective response, most of which is mediated through the use of close-up on his face. His proportion of the dialogue is minimal and the performance he sustains is achieved largely through gesture, movement and expression. Marianne, on the other hand, mediates the structure of the film through her voiceover and through the flashbacks, which are associated with her memories. By the end of the film, it is far from certain what the status of Bergman and his actress/Marianne is in relation to the tale we have seen unfold. It seems to me that the camera’s framing of the photographs in Bergman’s desk drawer which are of the Marianne of the film’s tale and her daughter, Isabelle (Michelle Gylemo), suggests the factual historicity of the narrative events and even that Bergman is actually the David of the tale, albeit much more advanced in age. This would suggest that the actress is actually a vision of the dead Marianne of the tale, one conjured up by Bergman to help him make sense of his failed relationship with her and to aid him in the writing of his screenplay, as if Marianne were a kind of muse to him. At the surface level, then, this film lends itself to a reading through Irigaray’s critique of the structures of the imaginary made available within the symbolic order. As Whitford has suggested, Irigaray’s work on the female imaginary is certainly put to work in this way in much of


her early writing (1991: 53–74).8 However, understanding this rather elusive term, ‘the female imaginary’, is complex and difficult to pin down, not least because Irigaray herself moves through different perspectives on its political potential. In the earlier, more critiquefocused period of her writing, Irigaray made use of the term to show how the feminine is repeatedly disavowed in symbolic systems of knowledge. The imaginary, however, is rather to be understood, in Irigaray’s account, as inflecting the symbolic order, as leaving traces or marks of its insistence on and in practices that appear to disavow it. For Irigaray, then, the female imaginary is firstly a structure of critique, a way of drawing attention to the exclusion of the feminine from symbolic practice. Yet it also serves a dual function of sorts, as it points to the possibility inscribed in the insistence of the imaginary for an alternative mode of symbolic interaction. In order to access what we might understand as a female symbolic, a female imaginary is essential. The structure of the female imaginary is crucial to the politics of Irigaray’s work and its dualistic role enables those engaging with her work to try to seek out tools for articulating this. Yet this is far from a straightforward matter. Psychoanalytic accounts of the interrelation of the imaginary and symbolic realms suggest that they are so closely imbricated that the one could not exist without the other.9 The imaginary is only thinkable from within the symbolic. Without it, the symbolic would have little in the way of the structure of representation and fantasy. Subjectivity depends for its structure on the imaginary and this underpins Irigaray’s constant striving to articulate the possibility of the feminine, despite the charge of some critics that such an aim is overly utopian. If we return to the scenario of Faithless then, how do such insights afford us a way of making sense of the articulations of gender at play in the film? A surface reading of the film might foreground the way in which the actress/Marianne is summoned by Bergman to play a role in his fantasizing, providing a channel of mediation through which he is somehow able to access aspects of the mystery of love and desire. Bergman structures the scene of their fantasy play by outlining how ‘Marianne’ is to be created, describing her as ‘attractive’, ‘about 40, having left drama school seventeen years ago’, ‘married to a conductor named Markus with a nine year old daughter’ etc. The actress/Marianne takes on the masquerade of this identity and seemingly constitutes herself in ways that will appeal to a masculine structure of desire. She formulates a vision of Marianne’s dalliance with David that can be read as an archetypal male fantasy of femininity: the Marianne she constructs is a


woman who is defined in her desirability in terms of her maternal and wifely functions. Her work as an actor is little more than an escape from these roles and it is in these contexts of being a mother and being a wife/lover that Marianne appears to experience a sense of who she is and what she wants. Taking up an Irigarayan critical perspective on the female imaginary, one might argue that the Marianne we see constructed is a symptom of the western cultural imaginary in which women are ‘buried alive’ like Antigone. However, the substance of such a reading seems to miss crucial elements of this film in that it pays virtually no attention to the importance of the repeated cuts back to the present day and it takes little account of the structures of enunciation, which play a crucial part in the formation of the narrative. Nor does it consider the place of Isabelle in the narrative. The insistence throughout this film in returning to the present-day scene in Bergman’s study foregrounds the importance of these sequences in creating meaning in the film. It is very clear from the outset that the film seeks to play with structures of enunciation. Whose story is it that we see unfold? Whence is it emanating? As discussed earlier, toward the end of the film, the camera lingers over the contents of Bergman’s desk drawer, revealing photographs of Marianne and Isabelle. This shot is crucial to our sense that the film has been charting a relationship to the past, not only belonging to the female protagonist but also to the male. It combines with the rather strange shot that comes a little earlier when the David of Marianne’s tale finds himself sitting in Bergman’s study in the present-day sequences when Bergman is alone. Bergman reaches out and caresses David’s face. This appearance of a vision of David out of context lends credence to the idea that perhaps the figure of Marianne is also a figment of Bergman’s imagination and memory, a vision returned from the dead to help him to find closure in his love and desire for her. The photographs in the desk drawer point to a reading of Bergman as an older David, as I have already suggested. The story, then, appears to be that of Bergman as much as it is that of Marianne, yet its telling is firmly grounded in Marianne’s recollection of events. Thus, despite the fact that the opening sequence of the film implies that this is a tale constructed and enunciated by Bergman, the creative screenwriter, it is rather the case that the tale is woven for us from the perspective of Marianne. She becomes the source of its enunciation. The cinematic structure of this pattern of enunciation is elaborated through the use of flashback (to the psychic spaces of Marianne’s memories), Marianne’s voiceover (which underscores the fact that the narrative events we see unfold are narrated from her perspective), and


inter-cutting between past and present. The importance of the use of close-up on Bergman’s face during the present-day scenes to reflect his affective response to the story Marianne weaves is also crucial in the formation of this enunciative strategy.10 It is through Marianne’s memories and Marianne’s voice that this tale is recounted to both Bergman and the spectator. The cinematic enunciation, then, has its roots in the female voice of the tale. It speaks a feminine perspective on the shared history between Bergman/David and Marianne. It is worth noting that in Ullmann’s film, Marianne is not absent from the images she presents to us in order to be able to voice her experience. Instead, the voiceover segments of the film anchor the sequences from the past firmly for the spectator as emanating from Marianne’s psyche. Their status as truth or fantasy becomes irrelevant in this context, as it is the process of enunciation that comes to matter, both for the spectator and for David/Bergman. Marianne’s enunciative position arguably enables David/Bergman to rework his own repressed desires and feelings connected with the tale of love we see unfold. We have no access to his imaginary perspective in the film; as a factsheet on Ingmar Bergman (who wrote the screenplay for Faithless) produced by the Swedish Institute suggests, Bergman is ‘an ageing man who does not dare walk alone in certain places in the topography of his ego and in the landscape of his past, and therefore conjures up a female guide’.11 Yet we can see the effect that Marianne’s tale has on his sense of subjectivity and desire in the sequences where he looks so pained and in those sequences where he takes to the shoreline outside his house. On the one hand, then, Marianne might be read as a figment or structure of a male imaginary and its construction of femininity in terms of an a priori of the same. On the other, Marianne’s status as the enunciator of this story positions her in relation to a female imaginary in which femininity is inscribed through the specificity of her voice and her experience of the past. There is much in such a reading that is slippery, eluding the grasp of the reader, but this reflects the tension implicit in discussions of the female imaginary in Irigaray’s writing. The relationship between Marianne and Isabelle is also crucial to the construction of spectatorial affect in the film. Isabelle plays an important part in each of the relationships in which Marianne becomes embroiled. She is strangely silent and passive throughout. Because the memories we see unfold are spoken through Marianne’s voice, there is a sense that she is not properly able to articulate her daughter’s voice. However, it is also striking that the ethics of Marianne’s relations with


David and Markus (Thomas Hanzon) are channelled through her daughter as if somehow she is able to structure their mediation. For the spectator of Faithless, Isabelle plays a very important role in that she marks out the boundary of Marianne’s female imaginary. Isabelle is a strangely silent girl in Marianne’s imaginary. She inflects Marianne’s memories through her use of the look. She is often to be seen observing or overhearing conversations that directly affect her relationship to her parents and to David. Yet Isabelle’s subjectivity is not at stake in the narrative concerns of the film. Instead, it turns into a narrative device, designed to frame and inflect Marianne’s memories with a notion of the other. This is not couched in terms of sexual desire but rather points to the legacy of the maternal feminine that is buried by Marianne’s insistence on framing her tale through a discourse of desire. Isabelle, then, reminds us that parler femme requires a relation between mothers and daughters to be elaborated in and for itself and not merely in the context of the matrimonial relationship. For the spectator, Isabelle becomes a signifier of how parler femme is undermined in the film by Marianne’s inevitable death. Her daughter symbolizes the potency of formulating a female imaginary but also highlights the importance of the woman-to-woman relation in making this thinkable. Throughout this chapter, we have seen several instances of films made by women that seem to lay down openings and possibilities for thinking through the role of women in the male imaginary and the scope for an alternative female imaginary and its representation. The connection between parler femme and enunciation is central to the tension being explored here, and it is of crucial importance that cinema itself depends on enunciative structures for its systems of meaning. Cinematic enunciation then, constructs us in ways that are not possible on a lived experiential level. The cinematic suspension of disbelief allows us space and time in which to reconfigure our discursive positioning in terms that are usually left unspeakable. The process of exchange in cinema is mediated through engagement, not just with the image but also with the soundtrack and the revelation of narrative motivation and plot. The filmic examples discussed here suggest that the cinema has a dimension of fantasy that alludes to what Irigaray has called the feminine and thus offers what is seemingly unofferable in the context spelled out in the work of Metz. I would argue that, as cinematic spectators, we have a transferential relation to the text and this allows us to move beyond the parameters of narrative and discourse as they are traditionally framed. Irigaray has argued that ‘sometimes a space for wonder is left to works of art’ (1984/1993a: 33). I would suggest that the wonderment of cinema,


exemplified in the work of the directors I have mentioned here, offers us myriad opportunities to explore the becoming of the feminine in ways that shore up political ideals about the potential of female authorship, drawing attention to the way that cinema can be utilized for political ends in foregrounding questions of the feminine. The chapters that follow are structured around very detailed readings of two well-known and popular films directed by women during the 1990s, Orlando and The Piano. These readings build on much of the work and many of the themes set out in the first five chapters of this book, attempting to set out examples of the way that a feminine cinematics might be put to work in constructing detailed criticism and analysis of films. To this end, the extended readings of these films are intended to scrutinize the potentials and pitfalls of the approach elaborated in this book.

6 Orlando and the Maze of Gender

Gender as a structuring element of subjectivity is a key theme in Sally Potter’s film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. This film, perhaps more than any of the others under discussion in this book, foregrounds the problematic of gender in its playful narrative. However, it is not just the narrative of the film which is of interest here. The form of Potter’s film and its context of production are also important in understanding how the film grapples with issues of gender and its pleasures and confusions. (Potter’s background as a self-consciously and overtly feminist director shows through in this regard, as does her selection of Tilda Swinton to play the lead in the film, as discussed below.) Orlando presents us with a very useful cinematic text, enabling us to examine the potential of an Irigarayan feminine cinematics, as this chapter will explore. There is an array of key textual thematics in Orlando which this chapter will set out to examine in more depth. The film can be seen to engage critically with the perceived status quo of gender relations, and Irigaray’s critique of the psychoanalytic account of the acquisition of gendered identity provides a useful means of illuminating this. The film anchors its critique of formations of gender in its tropes of death and immortality, and I will draw on Irigaray’s rereading of the psychoanalytic account of the death drive to discuss this further. However, what is perhaps most interesting about Orlando is the way it does not choose to languish in pessimism; Potter’s film moves beyond simple critique to open up a space for the contemplation of alternative modalities of thinking. It achieves this firstly through its playful and humorous observations on the masquerade of gender (which, as we saw in Chapter 2, is theoretically linked to discussions of feminism and spectatorship). Importantly, however, it also achieves this by using film 125

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form to conjure up new spaces of fantasy (especially in the film’s ending, which deploys Jimmy Somerville as an angel floating in the sky). The film’s use of inter-titles, looks to camera, repetition and textual circularity come together to lead the spectator into an active position of engagement with the textuality of the story. Furthermore, the film’s play with ideas of space, time and history highlights the political dimension of the film-making. Space and time are fundamental attributes of the cinematic, as many theorists have begun to make clear (see, for example, Stam, 1989). Potter’s film sets these attributes of cinema centre-stage in the pivotal maze sequence, as this chapter will discuss in more depth below, and in so doing, it charts new territory for spectatorial pleasure, which I will suggest is uniquely feminine in the Irigarayan sense.

Death, gender and the question of subjectivity From the outset, Orlando marks itself out as a film concerned with the problematic of death and its inverse, immortality. In the opening sequence, we see the young male Orlando sitting under an oak tree, attempting to write poetry before the film swiftly cuts to the first of its series of inter-titles, ‘1600 Death’.1 Paradoxically, however, the remainder of this section of the film does not actually deal with death in itself. Rather, it presents us with an account of how Orlando acquires the immortality which sets him off on the journey we will follow through the story. For the spectator, however, the immediacy of the opening inter-title is an uncomfortable one, demanding closer scrutiny of the text for deathly metaphors that apparently counter the immortality which Orlando finds thrust upon him during an encounter with Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen (Quentin Crisp). Elizabeth summons Orlando to her chamber after bequeathing her house and property to him, but she qualifies her bequest with an imperative: ‘Do not fade, do not wither, do not grow old’ (Potter, 1993: 9). This imperative can be read on two levels. Firstly, it ensures the Queen’s own continued existence on a symbolic level. It is a gesture towards self-preservation in response to her own fear of imminent death; as the Virgin Queen, she has no heirs and therefore no way of perpetuating the myth and the importance of her life. Secondly, it forces Orlando into the protagonist’s role: he becomes a mythical subject whose trajectory through the text is defined by this narrative device. Psychoanalysis tells us that the death drive can be seen in each of these effects. The ego struggles against the inevitability of its mortality by attempting to ensure that life can be preserved against dissolution.

Orlando and the Maze of Gender

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The death drive is constructed by Freud as a theoretical concept to account for patterns of destruction, fragmentation and decay in relation to his theories of the psyche (Freud, 1920). In psychoanalytic theory, ideas about the death drive are related to notions of splitting or division, especially the division or fragmentation of the irrevocably split symbolic subject. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, division is fundamental to the creation of the speaking subject. The name-of-the-father intervenes in the imaginary mother–child relation and imposes language and sexual difference onto the newly formed subject (Lacan, 1951). This intervention constitutes a splitting or division of the binding unity of the mother–child relation in the imaginary order. Lacan suggests that such an intervention is essential for the entry into language, desire, and sexual difference. The division may be seen in terms of death and the desire of the speaking subject for imaginary wholeness. How, then, does this relate to the way we interpret the role of death within this particular film? Orlando’s struggle to write poetry at the beginning of the film suggests that he is unable to articulate his position within the symbolic realm. His actions and responses are structured by those around him (his father, the Queen, his father’s untimely death at the end of the sequence, the inheritance of the Queen’s property etc.).2 In claiming Orlando as her son, Elizabeth sets in motion a foreclosure of the nameof-the-father that structures the text as a whole. Orlando becomes heir to the Queen’s bequest of immortality and property and subsequently must live his/her life in relation to the effects of the Queen’s will alone. The name-of-the-father as a structuring element of symbolic subjectivity is thus overthrown by the Queen’s desire. Orlando is trapped by the terms of his dyadic relationship with the Queen and cannot relinquish the imaginary status that her bequest confers upon him. The possibility of his symbolic subjectivity is thus reinscribed by the Queen in a way that excludes the name-of-the-father from the process of acceding to subjectivity. In psychoanalytic terms, then, Orlando becomes trapped in an imaginary position as a result of the Queen’s bequest. This raises interesting questions about the acquisition of subjectivity, as the psychoanalytic account of subjectivity does not allow for the possibility of an imaginary subject, as Irigaray’s critique has made clear. In suspending the law-of-the-father, Elizabeth’s actions situate Orlando in an impossible position: he exists within the symbolic realm as a(n) (initially masculine) subject and yet is stripped of his right to subjectivity by the lack of any sense of inevitable death. In many ways this echoes Irigaray’s


critique of how the masculine traditionally locates death in the feminine. As she points out, in psychoanalytic parlance, the death drives can be worked out only by man, never, under any circumstances, by woman. She merely ‘services’ the work of the death instincts. Of man. (Irigaray, 1974/1985a: 53) For Irigaray, the position of women in relation to death is akin to that of Antigone: women are expected to function as ‘guardians of death’ yet they have no means of mediating their own relationships to it. Women are consequently ‘buried alive’ in the symbolic order in so far as they embody death for the masculine subject but have no access to the stasis that death involves. In a rather surprising way then, the Queen becomes an emblem of Irigarayan mechanisms of inverting and playing with symbolic systems in order to distort them and to evoke something of the feminine. For while it is difficult to see the Queen as an emblem of the feminine or of feminine desire, her role within the film certainly puts the agenda of the feminine clearly into the picture. Orlando, the text, seems to embody what Irigaray has termed ‘the process of becoming’ (1992/1996: 27). This is seen most clearly in the gender reversals in the performances of the actors playing the roles of Orlando and Queen Elizabeth. Both Tilda Swinton and Quentin Crisp, each of whom is cast in a role opposite to their bodily sex, fuel their performances with knowing irony, thereby foregrounding the social constructedness of gender and making it an obvious thematic for the spectator. The irony is also sign-posted through the opening voice-over of the film which declares that ‘there can be no doubt about his sex despite the feminine appearance that every young man of the period aspires to’ (Potter, 1993: 3). Orlando’s feminine appearance not only reveals the fact that the character is played by a female actress, but it also acts as a textual device that highlights the way the plot will develop. In a doubling action that evokes Irigaray’s style, Orlando’s feminine appearance enables the Queen to wrest his subjectivity away from him in the first place, and consequently it appears to be inevitable that Orlando’s gender identity should change later on. The death drive then, is formative for the plot of the film. It is also seen at play in the numerous repetitions that structure the film’s narrative. As Freud tells us, patterns of repetition and substitution are key mechanisms of the death drive (Freud, 1920: 35) and the film as a whole


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makes great play of the potential for rewriting Orlando’s experiences from differently gendered perspectives. Throughout the text, instances of repetition and substitution span Orlando’s change of sex. Orlando’s love relationships are numerous and, in many ways, can be seen as echoes of one another. The male Orlando’s love for Sasha (Charlotte Valandrey) is paralleled by the female Orlando’s love for Shelmerdine (Billy Zane); the absurdity of masculine claims on the feminine is doubly exposed, firstly when Orlando claims that Sasha is his because he adores her, and later when the Archduke Harry’s (John Wood) proposal to Orlando is rejected and he declares his disbelief at her rejection by making the same case. In Irigarayan terms, it is possible to make a double reading of these textual instances of repetition. As a fully fledged masculine subject in the symbolic realm, Orlando would be destined to repeat the pattern of his ancestry, yet, his immortality wrenches him away from masculine subjectivity as it is traditionally understood and situates him as a subject-in-process or as a becoming subject. In reality, Orlando has little hope of being able to repeat the pattern of his ancestry. As a becoming subject, Orlando needs to negotiate some kind of formative mirror stage in order to accede to speaking subjectivity, but for this to be possible, he needs to slip into the logic of sameness that the symbolic order perpetuates. His feminized state prevents him from doing this and he becomes trapped in a mode of becoming that reinforces the ‘femininity’ of his position. In this regard, the change of sex that comes later in the text is inevitable. As a becoming subject who is trapped in the imaginary realm, then, Orlando has no access to a death drive. In the psychoanalytic account, the desire of the subject depends upon the death drive. The death drive stems initially from the loss of the mother and of the wholeness of the maternal dyad. These losses constitute the subject’s relation to a primordial loss that makes desire possible. The life or sexual drives (eros) are brought into existence by this primordial loss, as both the Freudian and the Lacanian accounts of desire highlight. There is a dualism inherent in the death drive that makes (symbolic, desiring) subjectivity possible: the death drive is not merely related to the drive toward the reduction of tension in order to return to stasis, but also refers to the fragmentary force that makes binding the life drives, or the desire for the lost wholeness and plenitude of the maternal dyad, possible. The importance of the repetition compulsion in the death drive is similarly dualistic. Repetition constitutes firstly, an attempt to return to stasis and secondly, a force of fragmentation that is designed


to break up illusions of wholeness that trap the subject into stasis within life. The death drive is not merely an aggressive and destructive force but also plays an important role in the potential for creativity (Burke, Schor and Whitford (eds), 1994: 379–400). Orlando is effectively forced to negotiate the formative mirror stage only after his sex has changed, and it is interesting that this is when mirrors as tangible objects make their appearance in the text too.3 After the change of sex, Orlando is represented in a stereotypically ‘feminine’ guise. She is shown in her dressing room, elaborately made-up and being dressed by her maids as she contemplates her reflection in the three available mirrors (Potter, 1993: 41). Orlando’s choice of words after the disclosure of her sex in the keyhole-shaped mirror is extremely revealing and a typically Irigarayan moment. She looks at herself and declares ‘Same person, no difference at all. Just a different sex’ (Potter, 1993: 40). The revelation of a differently sexed identity enables Orlando to rethink her entrapment within the realm of the imaginary. As Irigaray has pointed out, Freudian and Lacanian theories of sexual difference relegate women and the feminine to the status of the imaginary. Irigaray seeks to claim that the feminine goes beyond the realm of the imaginary and functions as the repressed unconscious of the symbolic order. Women within Lacanian psychoanalytic theory are equated with death. ‘Woman’ as category is defined in terms of the male subject alone. Women within the symbolic order function to reflect back to the male subject an image of himself and of the phallocentric symbolic parameters that structure sexual difference in this way. Yet, as we have seen, for Irigaray, this is not simply about making a critique of the symbolic order and its signifying and representational practices. It also offers up a way of renegotiating the feminine in that it can be taken to a logical extreme to reveal the flaws and mechanisms at play in the phallocentric order of things. In this context, Orlando’s amorous adventures after her change of sex are important. The proposal of marriage offered to Orlando by the Archduke Harry echoes Orlando’s claims on Sasha and takes place after Orlando has been declared dead by the bailiffs who equate her femininity with death. Orlando’s questioning style in her response to the Archduke’s proposal is definitively Irigarayan. The questions Orlando poses make clear to the Archduke her intention of refusing his offer of marriage. Orlando’s femininity is important here. As a feminine subject relegated to the realm of the imaginary, she is permitted only to reflect an image of the male subject back to himself within the parameters of symbolic discourse. Orlando has no way of clearly articulating her refusal


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of the Archduke apart from drawing attention to the pointlessness and absurdity of his insistence. As we saw in Chapter 1, for Irigaray, one of the most important ways in which the feminine subject can make this point is through a mode of questioning and through other mechanisms such as mimicry of the masquerade. Orlando’s questioning style in this sequence highlights the difficulty inherent in attempting to articulate feminine subjectivity, but it also shows how questions can be used to expose the feminine, to point to its existence. The scene with the Archduke also evokes the earlier scene with Sasha, of course, and draws attention to the difference between Orlando, the masculine subject and Orlando, the feminine subject (Potter, 1993: 19, 49). Orlando’s questioning of the Archduke’s claim on her because of his adoration reveals the extent to which her gendered identity has evolved during the course of the film. The distinction between the Archduke’s claims on Orlando and Orlando’s refusal of those claims, and between the claims made by Orlando in relation to Sasha in the earlier sequence is one of sexual difference and is circumscribed by the availability of language and discourse to sexed subjects: they appear to be similar but are clearly nuanced in such a way as to make them rather distinct. As a masculine subject trapped within the imaginary realm, Orlando had no alternative but to implement some form of death in order to gain access to language and discourse. It is possible to interpret Orlando’s change of sex in this context: in becoming female, Orlando effectively dies, and yet it is also at this point that the inevitability of eventual birth as a speaking subject able to express difference becomes feasible. This is important for our interpretation of Orlando’s responses to questions of subjectivity. It is the possibility of the feminine that differentiates Orlando’s response to notions of ownership and marriage as a man and as a woman. Orlando’s refusal of the Archduke’s proposal situates her in a gendered position that cannot be articulated properly. This stands in stark contrast to the sequence when Orlando makes his claims on Sasha. An exposure to the perils and difficulties of the constructed feminine position enables Orlando to renegotiate her relationship to her gender identity by allowing her to rework her subjectivity in terms which respect the validity of sexual difference as a means of articulating symbolic exchanges. This reflects both the very heart of Irigaray’s thought and the apparent fulcrum of the cinematic text. Here we see a motivation for Orlando’s change of sex that might otherwise go unexplained. Orlando’s change of sex becomes a mechanism that enables her to observe the processes of the exchange in which she is implicated without functioning as the currency of it.


An awareness of sexual difference becomes the defining element of Orlando’s experience and enables a new relation to notions of gendered identity to be construed. At the beginning of the Archduke’s marriage proposal sequence, Orlando clashes with the bailiffs who arrive to inform her of the lawsuits which have been raised against her. The bailiff scene reads almost as an Irigarayan critique or mimesis of masculine symbolic practice, with the bailiffs declaring that she is ‘legally dead’ and also ‘female (which amounts to much the same thing)’ (Potter, 1993: 47). The dialogue reminds us of the difficulty of naming the feminine from within the boundaries of symbolic praxis and law and reveals the patriarchial construction of the feminine in terms of death. As Irigaray comments, man takes his orientation from his relation to his father insofar as his name and property are concerned ... But value, values, have been codified in the men’s camp; they are not appropriate to women, or not appropriated by them. The law has not been written to defend the life and property of women. (1987/1993c: 3–4) Orlando is prohibited from owning property due to her sexuate identity. In keeping with Irigaray’s critique of the law-of-the-father and its dominant status within the phallogocentric economy, Orlando is required to forfeit her right to the property in order properly to exist as a woman in symbolic terms. This forcible separation of Orlando from her property allows her firstly, to enter the symbolic realm as a female subject, and secondly, to renegotiate the relationship of the feminine to symbolic subjectivity by foregoing her immortality in order to hold onto what we might describe as the feminine, in Irigaray’s sense. The ending of the sequence of the Archduke’s proposal of marriage is interesting for the way it depicts Orlando’s experience of her gendered identity in this ‘female’ section of the film. After her refusal of the proposal, Orlando becomes the victim of a tirade of insults designed to force her into behaving as the Archduke would prefer. The onslaught provokes a panic attack in Orlando during which she is unable to breathe (Potter, 1993: 49). The thought content of people experiencing panic is frequently bound up with ideas about death, and particularly with a fear of death.4 As we have already seen, many of Irigaray’s ideas about how the feminine is constructed symbolically depend upon the masculine equation of death with femininity. Orlando’s moment of panic might be interpreted as a symbol of the strangulating nature of the symbolic order in relation to notions of the feminine that do not


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conform to symbolic categories. Orlando’s flight into the maze frees her from the trappings of the symbolic understanding of femininity and allows her to begin to define her own gender identity by attempting to thwart those facets of femininity that trap her in a death she does not wish to experience. We shall come back to the spatio-temporal importance of the maze below. Orlando’s love interests do not come to an end at this point, however, as, on her exit from the maze, she encounters Shelmerdine and embarks on a relationship with him that is established on the basis of this newfound sense of sexual difference. In the following section, I will argue that the relationship between Orlando and Shelmerdine contributes to moving the meaning of the film on from a position of critique by helping to address issues around the ethical relation and how it might be forged with reference to an understanding of sexual difference.

Love, ethics and sexual difference: An Overture to a Future5 The relationship between Orlando and Shelmerdine does have its parallels with the amorous involvements between Orlando, Sasha and the Archduke Harry. However, the context of their encounter is marked by these experiences and therefore differentiated from them. After escaping the Archduke by rushing through the maze, Orlando falls to the ground and declares herself to be the bride of nature, echoing the theoretical attachment of the sign of ‘nature’ to woman. Patriarchal notions of how femininity might be construed are, however, heavily ironized at this point in the text and Orland’s declaration should be read in these terms. It is as though Orlando has now understood that she is a representative of nature and death and she ironically reclaims this. The immediate cut to the next inter-title, ‘1850 Sex’ heralds the new opportunities that this acceptance (albeit an ironic one) presents for Orlando. She looks up at the sound of an approaching horse and marvels as Shelmerdine is thrown from it, landing face down on the ground in front of her. The ensuing conversation between them confirms the ironic self-positioning adopted by Orlando who appears to mimic the traditional position of femininity: Shelmerdine: You’re hurt, Ma’am? Orlando: I’m dead, sir! (Shelmerdine pauses, carefully scrutinizing Orlando’s expression.)


Shelmerdine: (Lightly) Dead? That’s serious. Can I help? Orlando: Will you marry me? Shelmerdine: Ma’am, I would gladly, but (Shelmerdine winces in pain as he tries to move. Orlando looks startled.) - erm, I ... I fear my ankle is twisted. (Potter, 1993: 52) Orlando’s desire for Shelmerdine is aroused by her realization of the symbolic position of women. Her invitation to marry reflects the constructedness of that position, because, as a symbolic woman, Orlando is trapped into a pattern of exchange. In order to have any status as a female subject within the symbolic realm, she is expected to conform to a certain set of symbolic expectations. Irigaray has claimed that ‘female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters’ (1977/1985b: 23). As commodities who serve to reflect back to the masculine subject an image of himself, women are trapped in a logic of desire that prohibits any manifestation of the feminine except for that which subtends the masculine desire for the same. Women serve both as representation of the value of the masculine for the masculine subject and as embodiment of the threat of death for him. Orlando, then, appears to struggle with the implications of her newfound femininity at this point in the text. Her claim that she ‘is dead’ reflects the way femininity is constructed by the masculine to function as little more than the ‘mirror image’ of the masculine or as the ‘remainder that melts into the depths of the mirror’ (Irigaray, 1974/1985a: 54). Orlando articulates the function ascribed to her by the masculine: that of embodying death. Moreover, woman is designated as the caretaker of nature, as the guardian of death in the work of psychoanalytic theorists, as we have seen, and it is only in this role that women can accede to some level of specular subjectivity. Shelmerdine’s refusal of Orlando’s invitation to marry ironizes these assumptions for the spectator, and this is important in enabling a new dimension of exchange between him and Orlando. In the following scene, set inside the house, the mood of irony has shifted into a more poetic modality of exchange in which Orlando and Shelmerdine seem to work out between them a more ethical relation that recalls Irigaray’s work in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984/1993a). Shelmerdine: (Low) You do not really want a husband. Orlando: (Ignoring him) I suppose your journeys to be hazardous at times? Shelmerdine: I think you want ... a lover.


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Orlando: You have fought, in battles, like a man? Shelmerdine: I have fought. Orlando: Blood? Shelmerdine: If necessary, yes. Freedom must be taken. Freedom must be won. (Orlando stares at Shelmerdine. He smiles back at her.) Orlando: (Tentatively) If I were a man ... Shelmerdine: You? Orlando: I might choose not to risk my life for an uncertain cause. I might think that freedom won by death was not worth having. In fact – Shelmerdine: (Shrugging) – you might choose not to be a real man at all ... say if I was a woman. Orlando: You? Shelmerdine: I might choose not to sacrifice my life caring for my children, nor my children’s children. Nor to drown anonymously in the milk of female kindness. But instead – say – to go abroad. Would I then be – (Orlando and Shelmerdine look at each other, and both smile in recognition.) Orlando:

– a real woman?

(Orlando slowly rises and draws Shelmerdine into her arms. She turns radiantly to the camera, clasping Shelmerdine to her breast.) (To camera) I think I’m going to faint. I’ve never felt better in my life. (Potter, 1993: 53–4) The jouissance that this exchange prompts in Orlando is resonant of the love that Irigaray attempts to describe as the consequence of a respect for the radical irreducibility of the other’s (sexual) difference (1984/1993a). The exchange exposes the constructed positions of masculinity and femininity within the symbolic order and makes a new form of intersubjectivity between the sexes possible. Questions of sexual difference in relation to symbolic subjectivity dominate here. Respect for the radical irreducibility and difference of the other allows Orlando to make her subjectivity manifest. This scene marks a clear-cut turning-point in the text. Orlando relinquishes constructed aspects of symbolic femininity in favour of defining her own relation to symbolic practice and questions of her sexed subjectivity. The jouissance of this moment in the text (‘I think I’m going to faint. I’ve never felt better in my life’) recalls the wonder of an Irigarayan effort to create an ethical relation between the


sexes premised on sexual difference. Orlando is finally able to articulate the words ‘a real woman’ with reference to a gendered identity that is apparently proscribed from the symbolic order. Irigaray’s notion of the feminine becomes almost tangible at this point in the text. However, Orlando’s entry into the symbolic order as a feminine subject entails her loss of all rights to the property she was left by Queen Elizabeth in the film’s opening sequence.6 Death now becomes available to Orlando in her new role as a disenfranchised woman without the implications of immortality resting upon her shoulders. In the subsequent sequence, we see Orlando stumbling across wartorn battlefields protectively clutching her stomach and we hear the sound of a heartbeat on the soundtrack. Orlando is now pregnant and we are not sure whether we hear the heartbeat of Orlando’s child or that of Orlando herself. What does become apparent is the fact that Orlando is about to ensure her own preservation by having a child of her own. The death drive has finally made itself manifest, and this is represented diegetically at the level of the soundtrack as well as metaphorically in the text. Orlando is finally able to be born as a subject in the scene that follows, which is suitably entitled ‘Birth’.

Becoming feminine: Maternal genealogy, the angel and thresholds Just as the opening section of Orlando established the text’s key thematics, the closing sequences set out another series of clues as to how this narrative should be decoded. The circularity of the text is made clear in this sequence and themes of the maternal relation, the angel and the threshold come to the fore. Each of these themes is a key element of an Irigarayan move toward the feminine. In this respect, drawing on Irigaray to make sense of Sally Potter’s use of the figure of the angel at the end of her film seems apposite as it certainly appears to open up a new form of space for spectatorial contemplation. At the end of the film, Orlando has had a daughter, and she takes her to the family seat of old. Orlando is clearly sexed as female in this sequence and is unmarried. We might see this visit with her daughter to the house she previously owned for hundreds of years as an attempt to trace her daughter’s maternal history, and this resonates with Irigaray’s work on the importance of maternal genealogy in the project to enunciate the sexuation of discourse: If we are not to be accomplices in the murder of the mother we also need to assert that there is a genealogy of women. Each of us has a


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female family tree: we have a mother, a maternal grandmother and great-grandmothers, we have daughters. Because we have been exiled into the house of our husbands, it is easy to forget the special quality of female genealogy; we might even come to deny it. Let us try to situate ourselves within that female genealogy so that we can win and hold on to our identity. Let us not forget, moreover, that we already have a history, that certain women, despite all the cultural obstacles, have made their mark upon their history and all too often have been forgotten by us. (1987/1993c: 19; my italics) The aptness of this quotation in relation to these closing scenes is extremely forceful. Orlando, a mother, returns with her daughter to her former house (in which, as a woman, she was exiled until the birth of her daughter, whereupon she was stripped of her rights to the property) in an effort to trace her history and to make a mark upon it. A more striking image of maternal genealogy is, perhaps, difficult to find. Orlando and her daughter visit the Great House as tourists along with several others (Potter, 1993: 61). The closing sequence of the film takes place in the same location as the opening sequence: Orlando sits beneath her favourite oak tree, contemplating, whilst her daughter chases around the field with her video camera. Orlando cries, symbolizing, perhaps, an ambiguous relation to the fact that she has now relinquished her immortality. Orlando may be crying through sorrow at the prospect of her own mortality, or she may be weeping with joy because at this point she is able to have access to a form of subjectivity that depends upon her sexuate identity. When her daughter asks why she is sad, she replies that she is happy before telling her daughter to ‘look up there’. The screen image switches to the view of the video camera7 held by Orlando’s daughter and we see a flickering image of an angel floating in the sky. This angel is half-human and half-divine; he bridges the divide between the divine and the human in body as well as in symbolic essence. Maggie Humm has drawn attention to the importance of the angel at the end of Potter’s Orlando in interpreting the relationship between surface and history (1997: 142–78). Citing Benjamin’s angel of history (Benjamin, 1970: 259–60) which looks towards the past and its scene of devastation, Humm draws on Sheila Rowbotham’s call to attack the fixities of history and on her remarks about the need to acknowledge that it is the past and not necessarily the future that needs to be scrutinized (Rowbotham, 1989 cited in Humm, 1997: 170), to show that Orlando’s daughter deflates history with her video camera. Irigaray’s work on the angel offers an interesting new perspective on these ideas.


Her work on sexual specificity, and the need for a maternal genealogy can be usefully understood in the context of her notions of the divine, and of the angel as a divine force, if we consider the value of the death drive and its relation to the concept of gendered history. The angel is central to Irigaray’s work on the divine. Her notion of the angel, as it is elaborated in ‘Belief Itself’ (1987/1993c: 23–54), revolves around her attempt to seek out a maternal divine. She sees the angel as an intermediary force that is able to articulate aspects of the beyond. According to Irigaray, ‘the angel is sent, or comes, from heaven, on a mission, to do a job’ (1987/1993c: 35). In contrast to Benjamin’s angel of history, which looks backwards, Irigaray’s angel simultaneously looks beyond the past, forwards and away from it, and articulates aspects of a possible future in the present. The angel offers what she calls an annunciation of more weight than any coded message, moving to and fro the first and last dwellings that are withheld from present visibility or readability, to be deciphered only in the next world. (1987/1993c: 36) This image of the angel hovering between the first and last dwellings is useful in that each of the dwellings may be interpreted as metaphors for the womb, or birth, and for the beyond of Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), or death, respectively.8 Potter’s angel thus goes beyond Benjamin’s image of an angel trapped by the past, and offers an Irigarayan vision of a possible future. For Irigaray, the angel is a form of mediation that enables us to envisage a mode of exchange that does not depend upon phallogocentric patterns. In this respect, angels herald a new and differently constructed means of elaborating sexual difference. Irigaray comments that ‘they come to herald the arrival of a new birth, a new morning’ (1984/1993a: 15). For Irigaray, the angel is a signifier of the possibility of a new future based in sexual difference and in respect for the radical irreducibility of the other. The angel at the end of this sequence enables feminists to resituate themselves in relation to the text as a whole and to rework the perspectives that are presented to the spectator of this text retrospectively over and again. In her attempt to negotiate a feminine form of the death drive, Irigaray goes beyond the destructive element of the death drive in search of its positive, constructive and creative aftermath. The destructive force of thanatos can, according to Irigaray be converted into eros.


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Benjamin’s angel who looks back onto a scene of destruction and devastation can thus be seized on by feminists in an attempt to show that creation can grow out of destruction. The fantasy-vision of the angel at the end of Potter’s text can be seen as a utopian form of the creative, regenerative force of thanatos in its relation to eros, and shows the importance of maintaining the tension that structures the relationship between these theoretical categories if changes in symbolic practices are to be made. The angel also serves as a metaphor for what happens to the body of the text at this point: the filmic narrative draws to a fantastical close, and opens up a new kind of space in which the spectator may interpret the meaning of the text. The spectator is effectively made to rethink her experience of the whole film in this context. The parallels between the opening and closing scenes draw attention to the fact that there is space within this text for a constant exchange or flux of gender and of genderpositions. The reader can make her own interpretations, just as the reader of Irigaray’s text creates her own meaning as a result of her interaction with the text itself.9 The angel is clearly nothing to do with reality, but must be read in terms of psychical reality and fantasy. The image of the angel at the end of the film can be interpreted as a representation of an imaginary or unconscious fantasy of feminine specificity, being inscribed into gendered symbolic subject positions, that is linked to the realization of the death drive. This can, perhaps, only be represented in the cinema due to all its associations with the realm of fantasy and the imaginary. Orlando’s subjectivity at the end of the film is beyond doubt. Her happiness reflects her entry into the symbolic order on her own terms. Her dyadic relation with her daughter reveals a representation of the feminine that has scarcely been allowed room for representation within the symbolic order. The scene of the angel is represented to us via the little girl’s medium of self-expression, yet it is pointed out to her by her mother. Irigaray defines a need for imaginary objects of desire that can be exchanged between mother and daughter to express their own subjectivity (Irigaray, 1990/1993b: 48). It is interesting that such objects of exchange, whether they are imaginary or symbolic, facilitate the circulation of (gendered) desire that does not depend upon a phallic signifier. In this respect, this exchange of objects between mother and daughter functions in a similar way to the angel in Irigaray’s work in that it allows for mediation in ways that depend upon sexual difference and sexual specificity. This closing scene of fantasy can be seen as just such an object of exchange between Orlando

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and her daughter in order to express their unconscious and subjective fantasies. The lyric of the angel’s song reinforces this. I am coming! I am coming! I am coming through! Coming across the divide to you In this moment of unity I’m feeling only an ecstasy To be here, to be now At last I am free Yes – at last, at last To be free of the past And of a future that beckons me. I am coming! I am coming! Here I am! Neither a woman nor a man We are joined, we are one With a human face We are joined, we are one With a human face I am on earth And I am in outer space I’m being born and I am dying I am on earth and I am in outer space I’m being born and I am dying. (Potter, 1993: 62) In this final sequence Orlando’s subjectivity appears to transcend the traditional boundaries of symbolic gender categories. She has been transformed into a ‘becoming’ subject who has escaped the confining phallocentric parameters of the socio-symbolic order. (The previous scene with the publisher reinforces such a reading.) At the end of the film, then, there opens up a new space in which to begin to rethink categories of gender and their relationship to patterns of representation and discourse. The angel acts as a kind of herald for this new space. For Irigaray, the angel functions as a mediating force. The angel, then, represents the possibility of a new form of representation and of the arena in which it might exist. In short, the angel acts as a filter of mediation that makes available a space for the representation of the feminine evoked by Orlando’s experiences. It is interesting that the film does this through the little girl’s video camera, which we might see as an updated version of the Woolfian pen.


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The element of fantasy at the end of Woolf’s text is echoed here in Potter’s adaptation: in the novel, after returning to her favourite oak tree once again, Orlando embarks on a journey of fantasy that propels her through the landscapes and characters of her lifetime at great pace. The fantasy culminates in Orlando calling out Shelmerdine’s name and watching as her words transform themselves into his person (Woolf, 1928: 313–4). The video camera becomes a 1990s version of Woolf’s pen; it further reinforces the importance of seeing the ending of the text in terms of the present moment and it mobilizes the discourse of cinema, with all it associations with fantasy in order to do so. The final sequence of Orlando echoes a number of Irigarayan ideals and throws into question assumptions about the nature of fantasy and the importance of fragmentation for the feminine and for subjectivity in general. It may be read as an attempt to symbolize the feminine death drive which has, according to Irigaray, remained, up until now, unrepresentable. The death drive finally allows Orlando to relinquish her past in a way that opens up the possibility of revisioning the future in more gendered terms. The tension between the apparent fantasy of the final image of the film and the utopian vision of a renegotiated form of speaking subjectivity is what Irigaray’s work strives towards. It offers us a form of representation that transcends the inscription of the feminine within present socio-symbolic parameters. There is an overwhelming sense of jouissance at the end of this film which undoes the permanence of the constructed past assigned to the feminine. This is resonant of the deconstructive strategies that Irigaray calls for in order to expose the mechanisms of symbolic practices so that the feminine can insinuate itself into its gaps in order better to understand itself. The possibility of rejecting the constructed past of the feminine depends ultimately upon the use of a feminine version of the death drive to destroy its apparent inevitability, and to allow the feminine some means of articulating a compulsion to repeat, and therefore to have access to a death drive of its own which would allow the feminine to exist in and on its own terms. The circularity of this particular text, in that its opening and closing locations and monologues share considerable similarity and, indeed amount to reworkings of the same ideas in terms of differently gendered perspectives, makes this abundantly clear. It is clear from Potter’s screenplay (1993: 62) that the image of the angel at the end of the film is always intended to bring the end of the story into the present moment. The spectator is meant to conceive of this final moment as the present moment, perhaps as Irigaray’s ‘here and now’ (1987/1993c: 36). This not only reflects the ending of Woolf’s

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novel, but also calls attention to the validity of the symbolic subject positions available to the spectator at the end of this text. This raises a number of important questions about the importance of the film’s form and its role in opening up new spaces for spectatorial contemplation, and it is to these questions that this chapter will now turn.

Film form, space-time, masquerade and spectatorship As already signalled above, Orlando is a complex cinematic text as it depends not only on its narrative schema for its interrogation of gender formations. The form of the film, its editing, the use of inter-titles and looks to camera, contribute to the work of the film by foregrounding questions about the gendered nature of space and time. This is, perhaps, most neatly encapsulated in the maze sequence, which is a pivotal scene for the text. This sequence makes great play of masquerade (which, as we have noted in Chapter 2 and elsewhere, is intricately related to feminist commentary on female pleasure in cinema). In the section that follows, I will suggest that this sequence can be usefully illuminated by the distinction drawn in Irigaray’s work between masquerade and mimesis. The link to questions of space and time will then be discussed. Masquerade/mimesis? The concept of masquerade in Potter’s Orlando is highly problematic, perhaps most clearly because the pivotal point of the text centres on Orlando’s change of literal sex. Orlando is played by a woman, Tilda Swinton, from the outset of the film, and this has a huge impact on the way issues of masquerade and gender identity can be understood. That Orlando is played by a woman is made clear to the spectator at the beginning of the film during the opening credits.10 Any reading of the film is immediately premised on the fact that, consciously or unconsciously, the spectator is aware of the implications of watching a female actor play a masculine role.11 In an interesting reversal of the processes claimed to be at play by most theoreticians of gender technologies and identities, Swinton dissembles her femininity in order to simulate masculinity, yet the text itself draws attention to its own hypocrisy in this matter. Here we have a woman masquerading as a man who will later apparently change sex and ‘become’ a woman. The levels of simulation and dissimulation at play here challenge our very notions of gender and the masquerade.


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Tilda Swinton’s representation of Orlando is a woman’s representation of a male Orlando. She adopts the guise of the masculine in order to pick it apart at the seams. Her representation of the male Orlando cannot be entirely convincing because of the way the opening sequence is edited. The spectator’s awareness of Swinton’s (obviously) duplicitous representation makes it possible to suspend disbelief later on in the film, when he changes sex and becomes female. The way Orlando is interpreted in terms of gender then, depends on how masquerade is made central to the text as a whole. The fairy-tale quality of the film’s narrative owes a considerable amount to this suspension of disbelief, and the irony of certain later scenes depends on this too. (I am thinking of Orlando’s discomfort at the misogyny displayed by the poets Addison, Pope and Swift, for example.) This feminized representation of the male Orlando is exemplified by the costumes and certain other diegetic elements of the text too. As we have already seen, the opening sequence of the text draws attention to the feminine appearance that most men of the time aspired to. It is, of course, interesting that the story of Orlando begins in a period of history famed for the accoutrements of male costume. Francette Pacteau has commented that ‘Orlando inhabits a world where it is possible to change gender by changing costume’ (Burgin, Donald & Kaplan (eds), 1986: 81). Swinton’s representation of the male Orlando, then, is helped by the story’s historical context. The notion of a woman, accustomed to all the attributes of the masquerade, being able to take on a masculine role set in a period that attributed the very same elements of the masquerade to standards of masculinity, loses something of its surprise element here. Just as Swinton portrays a feminized version of masculinity, Orlando depicts a masculinized and historicized version of the modern day understanding/construction of femininity (Irigaray’s masquerade). This exemplifies what Emily Apter has called ‘the masquerade’s circularity as a philosophical and psychoanalytical discourse’ (Wright (ed.), 1992: 243). The endlessly twisting pattern of gender roles and identities begins to break down our expectations and notions of gender boundaries, so that, by the end of the film, the traditional limits of the sexed body are transcended in a way that depends on a new vision of the feminine as a viable gender position. Throughout the course of the film, Orlando’s experiences as a man inform his masquerade in the feminine role to the extent that the masquerade becomes what Irigaray calls ‘mimesis’. In the scene entitled ‘1700 Society’, for example, Orlando’s appearance at the tea party with Addison, Pope and Swift reveals an extensive discomfort with the trappings of the female masquerade. Orlando moves with difficulty under

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the weight of her immensely high wig and in the very wide skirts of the period. She is unsure as to what is expected of her in this new world of the feminine and is dismayed by the poets’ misogyny. These responses to her newly gendered identity are not directly expressible, and we are forced to read Orlando’s response for ourselves. Her complicity with the spectator at this point is, perhaps, at its most obvious yet. The look into camera reveals disconcertedness overwritten with a sense of incredulity. Orlando is not permitted to respond in a way that would reveal the mechanisms at play in this particular scene because of the very fact of her femininity. The spectator has to locate the feminine response within the gaps of what is not said, within the proximity of Orlando’s look into camera. It is in this sense that Orlando’s experience as a woman constitutes the strategic response of mimesis called for in Irigaray’s work. Orlando is somehow able to tease out the feminine bedrock within her subjectivity because of her experience within the masculine realm. Orlando, the man, displayed an unmistakable ‘feminine’ quality (the unwillingness to fight in Uzbekistan and the concern for the enemy’s well-being, for example) (Potter, 1993: 37–40), whilst Orlando the woman is able to transcend these apparently predetermined notions of femininity and therefore to reveal the mechanisms that define symbolic notions of gender division. From the beginning of the film, Orlando is depicted in a variety of elaborate costumes, often designed to reflect ‘the feminine appearance that every young man of the time aspire[d] to’ (Potter, 1993: 3) and yet, it is only after the change of sex that she experiences any discomfort with the wigs and restrictive elements of such feminine costume. This lack of familiarity with the feminine is, I would suggest, due to the lack of distance, the overly close proximity that is involved in the masquerade. As Doane has noted, woman is ‘too close to herself, too entangled in her own enigma, she could not step back, could not achieve the necessary distance of a second look’ (1991: 19). This lack of distance, associated as it is with the masquerade, appears inescapable until the crucial point in the film when Orlando enters the maze and reworks her relationship to her gendered identity. The maze transports her through diegetic space and time and reconfigures her relation to the idea of gender at the same time. In this respect, the maze sequence foregrounds the interrelation between issues of space, time and gender, as the following sections will suggest. The maze sequence in Orlando is of pivotal importance within the text and structures our reading of the film as a whole. It has three main functions within the film apart from its immediate level within the


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film’s narrative development: firstly, it acts as a mechanism for moving through time within the film (Orlando enters the maze at the end of the eighteenth century and emerges in the Victorian era). There are a number of diegetic effects that depend on the maze sequence for their effect – the newly constructed mise-en-scène that follows, and the marked shift of tone in the latter sequences, for example. Secondly, there is a metaphorical and metatextual importance attached to this sequence that should be interpreted in relation to the film’s textual, narrative and formal properties. Finally, the maze functions as one of the most obvious and most important articulations of space-time in the text, drawing out the importance of these dimensions of the cinematic experience and marking out their close links with gender. The maze as narrative device The maze functions at its most literal level within the film as a historical signifier and as a mechanism for moving time forward within the story. Orlando enters the maze at the end of the eighteenth century in eighteenth-century dress and emerges, with a change of costume, some fifty years later rushing headlong into the industrial age and the Victorian era. This sequence is highly important for what it reveals about the film’s formal properties. The editing of Orlando’s journey through the maze is carefully undertaken and is important for the role of the whole sequence. It facilitates Orlando’s passage through time but it also has important implications for the spectator (as discussed below). This has many ramifications for any consideration of both real and fictional space/time. The maze as metaphor The maze can clearly be read as a simple metaphor for Orlando’s gendered identity and the confusion it has apparently generated within the text up until this point. Orlando enters the maze at a very important narrative point. She has just been informed of the loss of her rights to the property because of this new gender, a situation complicated by the Archduke’s proposal. This is a key moment of the text in that Orlando is finally separated from the property bequeathed to her by Queen Elizabeth in the opening scenes of the film and is thus, in effect, wrenched away from the immortality that was imposed on her at the same point. At this superficial level, then, Orlando’s headlong rush into the maze may be understood as her attempt to work her way through the labyrinth of her new experiences.

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In psychoanalytic terms, Orlando can be seen at this point as in the throes of an Oedipal rage brought about by the change in her gender identity and the ramifications it has for her own sense of self. As a metonymic representation of the turmoil of femininity, the maze becomes a heavily laden metaphor for the Oedipal problems faced by little girls, and for the problems that the psychoanalytic story creates for Orlando the woman. The maze constitutes a visual representation of Orlando’s state of mind/sense of turmoil that has been brought on by her change of sex and the effects it has had on her life. The sequence might be understood in terms of the little girl’s attempt to escape her ‘anatomical destiny’ by plunging headlong into this claustrophobic space that plays so much with our notions of time, especially as Orlando emerges as a historically constructed gendered subject at the end of it. It is, however, impossible to view the film at such a metaphorical level without taking account of the implications of this play with time, since an understanding of time and its relation to space can only reinforce the metaphorical interpretations available, especially if gender can be woven into the discussion. Irigaray’s work on space-time is bound up with her work on the divine and on the need to redress the imbalance between the sexes in relation to it. For women to enjoy any form of symbolic representation, it is essential that the feminine should be theorized in terms of its own construction of space-time. Irigaray distinguishes between the space-time of the (maternal-)feminine (constructed by and for the masculine subject) and the feminine that positions women as feminine subjects in their own right (that is, defined without relation to the maternal and/or to the masculine). The maternal-feminine remains the place separated from ‘its’ own place, deprived of ‘its’ place. She is or ceaselessly becomes the place of the other who cannot separate himself from it. Without her knowing or willing it, she is then threatening because of what she lacks: a ‘proper’ place. She would have to re-envelop herself with herself, and do so at least twice: as a woman and as a mother. Which would presuppose a change in the whole economy of space-time. (1984/1993a: 10–11) Questions of space and time are highly significant for cinema, a medium which manipulates both dimensions in order to perpetuate itself. The importance of space and time in cinema has been articulated by Robert Stam, who draws on the work of Russian theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, to argue that cinema constitutes a chronotope.


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Writing in relation to literature, Bakhtin suggests that he will ‘give the name chronotope (literally ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (Bakhtin, 1924: 84). For Bakhtin, the chronotope is the place in which all narrative meaning has its origin. Developing this work, Robert Stam has signalled the particular quality of the chronotope as inherently cinematic, showing that the chronotope is ideally suited to the analysis of film. Film, for Stam, forms the ideal textual site for the chronotope because whereas literature plays itself out within a virtual, lexical space, the cinematic chronotope is quite literal, splayed out concretely across a screen with specific dimensions and unfolding in literal time (usually 24 frames a second), quite apart from the fictive time/space specific films might construct (Stam, 1989: 11). This understanding of the place of time and space in the cinema is a compelling one. However, it leaves little room for the consideration of gender. What is more, it privileges the importance of time over space, which Irigaray has suggested is akin to privileging the masculine over the feminine. In Irigaray’s work on space-time, as we have already seen, gender is fundamental. The maze sequence in Orlando appears to bring issues of gender to bear on constructions of space and time, and therefore to offer a new (feminine) perspective on the spatio-temporality of cinema. Spatio-temporality is a key concern of the narrative as a whole, however. Orlando’s four hundred-year-long life is not represented yearby-year or even decade-by-decade or century-by-century. Rather, Orlando’s journey through space and time is represented on the basis of his/her individual experiences of note, and it is interesting to observe that during the first half of the film, while Orlando is male, the representation of the progression of time is, on the whole, more regular and linear than it is after Orlando’s change of sex.12 In the maze sequence, these concerns become concentrated, as the next section will explore. The spatio-temporality of the maze The maze with all its connotations of direction and solving a puzzle, represents much of what the film as a whole can be said to represent diegetically and formally. It also reveals a great deal about the formal properties of the text itself: consider, for example, the very close editing of the sequence and the need to force the film into some form of

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narrative closure/ending.13 The spatio-temporality of the maze is arguably key to understanding the film as a whole. In Irigaray’s work, time and space are closely related to issues of gender. She claims, after Kant, that within phallogocentrism, time is the interiority of the (masculine) subject and space is its exteriority (1984/1993a: 7). She questions where woman fits into this system, and shows that woman, in her function as mother, has been seen as a place for man with the result that she becomes little more than a thing. If traditionally, and as a mother, woman represents place for man, such a limit means that she becomes a thing, with some possibility of change from one historical period to another. She finds herself delineated as a thing. Moreover, the maternal feminine also serves as an envelope, a container, the starting point from which man delimits his things. (1984/1993a: 10) For Irigaray, then, space-time needs to be rejoiced and reworked in terms of sexual difference. Men’s space-time and that of women are necessarily different under the terms of sexual difference, partly because man is presently in a state of being whilst woman, according to Irigaray, is in a state of becoming. Man has been cut off from the mother, from his original home or space (woman) and the effects of this for woman are very far-reaching: insofar as she is designated as space for the masculine subject, the feminine subject cannot access time because the times of woman and the maternal are not the same. She cannot therefore become a woman in her own right, or gain access to her own feminine form or interiorized form of subjectivity. While man has dealt with this sense of being cut off from space by limiting woman to space alone, woman has no means by which to create a threshold of her own into time. This is why Irigaray calls for a feminine space-time. In Orlando, it is not insignificant that Orlando rushes into the maze after the exchange with the Archduke. The Archduke’s threat that noone else will have Orlando because of her ‘ambiguous sexuality’ acts as a rejoinder to the bailiffs’ comments that Orlando is legally dead and has no rights to the property whatsoever. The implications of Orlando’s ‘ambiguous sexuality’ are resolutely bound up with her economic position in terms of phallogocentric symbolic practices. Orlando’s lack of a husband and/or a definable (and acceptable) sexed identity places her at the margins of economic possibilities.14 Orlando’s response to these circumstances is one of anger and panic and the shift in her inner world is immediately palpable at the level of


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the text. In rushing into the maze, Orlando’s sense of space becomes very restricted (diegetically represented by the form of the high-edged maze). The restrictive elements of Orlando-the-woman’s role as space/ container/envelope15 are also very clearly represented by the maze with its high, clipped hedges. The spatial elements of the maze are compressed and contorted to show how trapped Orlando feels in this role as Woman. The temporal element of the maze is also given equal weight. Orlando’s passage through the maze takes us into the next century, the Victorian era, a period of innovation and attempts at reconstructing human subjectivity by elevating the achievements of the human race. The passage of time is also more clearly diegetically linked to Orlando’s change of dress in the middle of the maze sequence. The change of dress is an interesting emblem in that it quite clearly marks out a change in epoch but in a way that depends on notions of femininity and the elements of masquerade which, according to Irigaray, amount to woman’s attempt to envelop herself, to create a container for herself because ‘she cannot make use of the envelope that she is, and must create artificial ones’ (1984/1993a: 11; 65). The maze sequence, then, condenses Orlando’s relation to spatio-temporality and its inflection thorough her gendered subjectivity. How might these elements be interpreted? In her study of the relations between Irigaray’s work and that of Gilles Deleuze, Braidotti has suggested that Deleuze’s notions of molecular and molar time might be compared to philosophical notions of being and becoming, and thus, after Irigaray, masculinity and femininity. Her discussion suggests that the postmodern subject is spatially fragmented and disjointed and that the only form of unity available to her/ him is posited in terms of time (Burke, Schor and Whitford (eds), 1994: 119). Deleuze’s concept of chronos, or linear, recorded time, is equivalent to the molar or being or the masculine. Aion, on the other hand, which may be understood as cyclical, discontinuous time, is equivalent to becoming, to the molecular and to the feminine. As in Irigaray’s work, the feminine is deemed to be discontinuous and cyclical and in a state of becoming, and Braidotti argues that Irigaray rests on this analysis of the double structure of time her call for women’s sense of their own genealogies, based on a bond of grateful recognition of the maternal as site of origin. (119) Irigaray’s point is made very clearly by Braidotti: women must attempt some sort of becoming in order to set themselves off on the road to attaining it. Perhaps this is how we should understand Orlando’s


experience/journey in/through the spatio-temporal maze. If Orlando seems to be doing little other that drawing attention to her position within the constraints of society and apparently striving towards a masculine equivalent (this might explain why the attributes of the masquerade are not lost but only changed in the maze), then this might be understood in the following terms: Feminist women, at this point in history, are legitimate in pursuing ‘molar’ positions, claiming a woman-centred redefinition of their political subjectivity and identity. In this respect they cannot easily become ‘molecular’; maybe they cannot afford to undertake a fullscale deconstruction of their sex-specific identity. The feminist engagement with linear historical time, however, neither replaces nor encompasses women’s relationship to the discontinuous time of becoming (aion). (Braidotti in Burke, Schor and Whitford (eds), 1994: 120) Orlando’s movement through the maze constitutes a movement towards her own Irigarayan becoming. The whole of the maze sequence is a very Irigarayan episode within the text: Orlando’s attempts to get to grips with her subjectivity include a rejection of her constructed identity (defined in terms of the masquerade) in that she casts off her eighteenth-century garments and changes into Victorian dress. This echoes Irigaray’s call for women to undermine their constructed gender position by exaggerating the masquerade to produce mimesis, as discussed above. The maze sequence, however, is not merely a narrative device for the exploration of the gendered relation to space-time. The importance of its formal construction and the impact of this on the formation of spectator-positions are also significant, as the next section will show. The spectator’s maze The maze sequence upsets all cinematic norms of time and space, both textually, as we have seen, and in terms of the way the sequence is edited. The camera follows Orlando into the maze and shows her rushing off towards the distant corner. As she turns the corner, she turns and rushes into camera, towards it; at the next turn of the maze the camera takes Orlando’s viewpoint: the spectator does not see Orlando but sees what Orlando can see. The spectator’s position thus moves from being behind Orlando, to being ahead of her, to being in the position of Orlando herself. The metaphorical implications of this are


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manifold. The movement from the early eighteenth century into and through the maze is one towards the present day, the spatio-temporal situation of the film’s spectator. The implication of the cut to Orlando’s point of view is that the spectator has become identified with Orlando to the extent that the gaps between the spectator and screen, spectator and narrative space, diegetic and extra-diegetic configurations of time and place are thrown into disarray. The spectator is momentarily unsure of the historical time implied in this point of view shot as well as of who the protagonist of the story actually is. The distance between spectator and screen, spectator and narrative, spectator and image is eclipsed and manipulated to insinuate the spectator into the formal and narrative structure of the sequence. The screen, in this account, does not function as a mirror, but rather as a kind of membrane, allowing the spectator to interact with the text to produce a new position of spectatorship. Orlando’s change of costume half way through the sequence reflects the speeding up of time and the alterations of spatial norms too: the swirling mist identifies a new context, a new historical and historicized dimension within the text. The spectator comes to understand the implications of this journey through history, through the histories of one particular individual who has experienced a variety of gender identities in the course of the film. The immensity of the text and its historical quality become personalized in a way that allows for the transcendence of narrative norms of fantasy. This process of editing draws the spectator into the text, implicates her/him in a femininized spectator position and forces a consideration of the gendered dynamics of the final episodes of the film. In this respect, traditional cinematic spatio-temporality (what Stam refers to as the chronotope of cinema) is considerably undone and reworked. Stam has argued that the cinema functions chronotopically in that twenty four frames per second are projected onto a screen with specific dimensions, and that the images unfold in real or literal time as well as in fictional time and space (1989: 11). In the maze sequence of Orlando, the traditional cinematic chronotope is transcended. Spectatorial time and space become implicated in the fictional time and space because of the way the film is edited. The gap or distance of the traditionally defined cinematic spectator is momentarily closed. The spectator becomes Orlando, takes on her viewpoint and rushes headlong into the present moment, the temporal location of the viewing subject, as well as towards the narrative future. All considerations of reality are lost and the spectator is forced into a situation of fantasy, especially at the end of the film which follows on rapidly from this particular sequence.


The feminine makes itself felt in the way this is effected. The gap or distance that has traditionally alienated the feminine within cinema is transcended so that a newly gendered spectator-position comes into being. Perhaps we might see this as an instance of Irigaray’s notion of exposing what lies in the gaps of discourse and knowledge in order to expose the feminine? The maze sequence can be read as a textual representation of Orlando’s implied journey through the labyrinth of gender identity that is an important subtext throughout the film. It is a kind of mise-en-âbyme, a representation of the story itself. The new spatio-temporality established in the maze sequence continues to permeate the text as the narrative unfolds towards its ending. In the scene when Orlando and Shelmerdine spot a steam train in the distance and in the moment when an aeroplane swoops down across the battlefield Orlando stumbles across, space and time are collapsed into metonyms that lead the spectator more and more inevitably toward the present moment. In returning Orlando to the very space of our initial encounter with the character at the end of the film, the text signals to the spectator the importance of rethinking the journey they have made through the text. The textual circularity underscores this. The impact of this text on spectator-screen relations is fascinating and the next section explores this in more depth.

Spectator/screen relations in Orlando Orlando, as has already been suggested, needs to be read at both the formal and narrative levels. Potter’s text is richly scattered with selfconscious references to the cinematic process: the text itself is frequently disrupted by inter-titles and by looks to camera that posit cinema as a medium in which it is possible playfully to engage with the accepted norms of film-making. Potter’s decision to use inter-titles to segment the film, together with the use of looks to camera to forge a relationship between spectator and text, not only constitutes an attempt to transpose the episodic nature of Woolf’s novel, but also shows how cinematic praxis can be manipulated to produce meaning otherwise. Potter has commented that the speeches of Orlando to the audience took many forms during the writing, and during the shooting they were the hardest things to get right. The phrase I used to Tilda was ‘a golden thread’: we were trying to weave a golden thread between Orlando and the audience through the lens of the camera. ... Part of the idea was also that


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direct address would be an instrument of subversion, so that set against this historical pageant is a complicity with the audience about the kind of journey we’re on. (Donahue, 1993: 10) In a separate interview, Scott Macdonald notes that ‘it doesn’t matter who Orlando is looking at when she looks at the camera; anyone can make a connection with her/him’ (1995: 219). The looks to camera are clearly an important point of contact between the spectator and the text. They come at moments when the narrative is ironized. Potter has stated that her aim was to create ‘a state of connectedness’: ‘as soon as you look into the lens, you’re in the present. So it was trying to interweave the present and the apparent past through that look’ (Macdonald, 1995: 211). The effect of this is to overthrow the tyranny of the male gaze, as Macdonald points out in his interview (211). Potter has commented in yet a further interview that her aim is to connote a sense of ‘recognition’ for the spectator: ‘Recognition. That’s my intention, to create on screen that sense of recognition of the self, of the hidden or unspoken self, giving voice to something that’s been unspoken or suppressed in some way. Rendering visible’ (Florence, 1993: 282). Potter’s use of the term ‘recognition’ is resonant with Irigaray’s recent turn to it as a process whereby ethical relations between differently sexed subjects might begin to be negotiated. Irigaray points out that recognition is the act that could enable the hierarchical domination between the sexes to be overcome, which could restore woman and man, women and men, to their respective identity and dignity, and which should bring about relations that are cultured, spiritual and not merely natural; relations founded upon a form of indirection and intransitivity. (1992/1996: 101–2) Such a process of recognition is essential for the potentiality of what Irigaray elsewhere describes as ‘envelopes of identity’. In remarkably similar passages, both Irigaray and Virginia Woolf comment on the need to provide women with a means of enveloping their identities: Irigaray’s use of the notion of the envelope pervades An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1984/1993a), whilst Woolf, commenting upon the feminine style of Dorothy Richardson, remarks that she has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender. It is of a more elastic fibre than the

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old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes. (1923: 124) There is a discernible relation between these perspectives on the envelope of the feminine and Potter’s use of looks to camera in Orlando. The looks to camera help to stretch the notion of spectatorship to its extreme, enveloping a peculiar form of looking for what remains unspoken and, indeed, unspeakable, in a way that renders it visible. The process involved in drawing the spectator into the text depends upon a model of the screen as membrane, the screen as something which may be permeated and thus altered by even the vaguest of shapes (the female spectator). Swinton’s looks to camera work exactly in this way. The spectator of Orlando cannot fail to notice them and is, consequently, forced to react both alongside and within the film’s textuality. Cinematic norms of spectatorship are overridden in this sense, not only in terms of the relation to the screen, but also in terms of the manipulation of the actual spectator in the cinema auditorium. The spectator of Orlando participates in the text at both the formal and narrative levels, and this resituates spectatorship in terms which privilege the unspoken to such an extent that it is, to use Potter’s phrase, ‘rendered visible’. In more Irigarayan terms, the feminine becomes unspeakably representable.

7 Riddles of the Feminine in The Piano

Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) has garnered a great deal of both criticism and acclaim from commentators. The film is complex, dealing with issues of female desire, the maternal relation, post-colonialism and notions of language. The extensive critical engagement with this film suggests it is a key point of reference for anyone interested in women and cinema. Campion’s film is not a straightforward text – the duality of its ending alone makes for a complicated relationship between the spectator and the on-screen narrative, as I will discuss below. As this chapter will suggest, however, it is precisely this complexity that enables us to read the film as an exemplar of a feminine cinematics. In many ways, the film neatly encapsulates all that is most slippery around this concept, with many of the key ideas struggling to be articulated. This chapter will show how a feminine cinematics can be aligned with the feminist approach to ‘reading against the grain’. In order to do so, it will consider the structuring of the gaze within the film as well as key aspects of the narrative that relate to female genealogy and questions of parler femme.

Ada and the embodiment of the feminine Ada (Holly Hunter), the film’s protagonist, is a complex character who offers a very Irigarayan (and sometimes rather dualistic) representation of the feminine. As we have already seen, Irigaray’s work on the feminine can be divided between a critique of dominant symbolic practices and philosophical and psychoanalytic categories and a more ‘utopian’ approach which seeks to enunciate the feminine in and for itself. It is possible to read Ada in tandem with both modalities of thought here as she seems to embody both critique and refusal of symbolic categories of 155

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femininity and yet also to evoke the more utopian aspects of how the feminine might be envisioned. The Piano opens with a series of sequences set in Scotland accompanied by Ada’s voice-over explaining that her father has married her ‘to a man [she has] not yet met’ and that she has not spoken since she was six years old (Campion, 1993: 9). A traditional Oedipal reading of the film would show how Ada and her daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), are located within the patriarchal symbolic order. Ada has been effectively sold off by her father to an unknown man in an unknown part of the world. She functions as a commodity in this respect. She is mute, and quite literally has no voice of her own with which to articulate any sense of objection to this arrangement. At a more metaphorical level, this muteness represents the silencing of woman, the commodity, the other of man within sociosymbolic patterns of representation. Trapped by a symbolic order that depends on the exchange of women to maintain its sexual/economic/ symbolic authority and law, woman is unable to articulate her own desire, to exist on her own terms and in her own right. The fact that Ada has a daughter and yet is unmarried reduces her status as an exchangeable object and perhaps explains why she is sent away to a husband in New Zealand. However, the opening sequence of the film also reveals that Ada has an internal voice of her own and that there is no medical reason for her not having spoken since she was six years old. The textual device employed to convey these ideas is the voice-over, and this device alerts us as spectators to look out for Ada’s non-vocalized responses to those around her throughout the rest of the film. The film’s opening shot proffers a view of the palms of Ada’s hands covering her eyes – a point of view shot that forces an immediate identification with the (mute) protagonist. This shot reinforces the fact that the voice we are hearing is Ada’s and shows how hers is the story about to unfold. However, while this shot suggests that Ada is the subject of the film, many of the images that follow show her being increasingly objectified. After their arrival in New Zealand, Ada and Flora become the objects of an otherly gaze: the scene of the first meeting between Ada, Stewart (Sam Neill), Flora, Baines (Harvey Keitel) and the Maoris shows the extent of this as Stewart describes her as ‘stunted’ (Campion, 1993: 21–2). (This scene follows on from an earlier one in which we see Stewart using a picture of Ada as a makeshift mirror, checking on his appearance before his first meeting with her.) The scene on the beach shows Ada and Flora being mimicked by the Maoris and being appraised like objects by Baines and Stewart. Flora and Ada (more particularly) are situated from the outset then, as other, as something to be gazed upon

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and observed. Later, in the wedding photograph sequence, Stewart peeps through the camera lens at Ada in her bridal dress and the spectator is made aware of this by a close-up view of Stewart’s eye peering through the lens and then a view of the photographer’s eye in the same position. Subsequently, we see Stewart watching Ada and Flora signing to each other on several occasions (Campion, 1993: 32). Perhaps the most obvious scenes of Ada’s objectification involve the piano lesson sequences when Baines bargains with Ada for the removal of certain garments so that he can watch her as she plays the piano, and the scenes in which both Stewart and Flora spy on Ada as she embarks on her sexual liaison with Baines. Ada is very much singled out as the other of a strange and colonialist world inhabited by European Victorians and Maori indigenous peoples. She fits into neither paradigm: she is mute, headstrong and unable to fall into patterns of subservience, or happiness, or what might be labelled ‘normality’ (or, indeed, femininity as it is traditionally understood). Yet Ada, paradoxically, does seem to embody the essence of psychoanalytic descriptions of femininity. From the outset, she is represented in terms of symbolic castration, and her ‘feminine’, ‘castrated’ status is accentuated at several key junctures in the text: Ada’s voicelessness and her lack of choice in being married off to a man on the other side of the world indicate her status as symbolically castrated in the opening sequence of the film; Stewart describes Ada as ‘stunted’ – another synonym for her castration; later, Stewart’s removal of the piano from Ada’s possession without her consent amounts to an assertion of her position; finally, of course, Stewart literally chops off Ada’s finger and thereby marks her indelibly with the ‘fact’ of her castration. Despite these many signifiers of Ada’s status as the ‘castrated’ woman of the symbolic order, The Piano still seems to offer a representation of woman that goes beyond the practices that trap Ada into this role. The film plays with psychoanalytic notions of femininity in a way that recalls Irigaray’s advocation of mimesis, discussed in Chapters 2 and 5 (Irigaray, 1977/1985b: 76). In the bargaining scenes with Baines, for example, Ada clearly is not forced into any agreement. Rather, such is her strength of feeling for the piano that she enters into the arrangement with Baines of her own free will. At each juncture of this relationship, she sacrifices the sense of honour expected of her and allows herself to be touched by Baines, not because she has no choice, but because her desire to reclaim the piano as her own is so strong. In this respect we might say that Ada is bargaining with her own body for her own right to her own desire by creating


an economy of her own which centres on the piano which has been unjustly removed by her new husband in exchange for some land. Ada bargains with Baines alone, with no mediating force, and in so doing she manages to reclaim some sense of subjectivity. This is reinforced by her recovery of the piano, yet by this time, she has fallen in love with Baines and the piano is no longer enough. Ada has apparently discovered that her desire for the piano has become a desire for Baines. This desire may be seen as a feminine desire which explains why it is so difficult to articulate and why it becomes an impossible desire once Ada and Baines are given permission to take Flora to live in a family constellation of their own. At the end of the film, Ada has apparently gained all that she has desired since her arrival in New Zealand: she is rid of Stewart, she has regained possession of her piano and she has fallen in love with a man who awakened the possibility of her desire. Ada, as a woman, however, is situated beyond the realms of her own desire, as Irigaray’s writings show. Ada’s desire is unspeakable, and her voicelessness might be read as a metaphor for this. Irigaray shows how woman and the feminine have come to be silenced by symbolic practices of representation and discourse so that they are defined in terms of the masculine alone. Ada’s desire for Baines came about within the terms of the economy she created to win back her beloved piano, her emotive voice, the symbol of her desire. In agreeing to Baines’s sexual demands, Ada engages in a kind of mimetic stance against the way women’s bodies are traditionally used as commodities or articles of exchange. Ada’s economy of desire reveals to Baines how feminine desire and sexual specificity are manipulated by the masculine paradigms of the symbolic order with the result that Baines is eventually unable to continue with their bargain. Ada is ostensibly driven by a desire to reclaim her piano, yet by the time Baines has become aware of Ada’s apparent lack of desire for him, Ada has also circulated around her desire for the first time. Baines’s action in returning the piano to Ada at Stewart’s house symbolizes his recognition of this which enables her to reciprocate his feelings of love. Baines has been unable to use masculine practices to force Ada into a symbolic relationship of desire and so he rejects them. He recognizes the importance of Ada’s right to her own desire. The relationship between them immediately becomes unethical in Baines’s eyes which might explain why he turns Ada away from the house (Campion, 1993: 76–7). Baines is unable to understand why she has been willing to bargain with him for the piano but he recognizes the difference in the specificity of each of their driving desires. Irigaray shows how this recognition of


the difference in the specificity of the desire of the other is a precondition to any loving relations between the sexes: How can we mark this limit of a place, of place in general if not through sexual difference? But, in order for an ethics of sexual difference to come into being, we must constitute a possible place for each sex, body and flesh to inhabit. Which presupposes a memory of the past, a hope for the future, memory bridging the present and disconcerting the mirror symmetry that annihilates the difference of identity. (1984/1993a: 17–18) Perhaps this is why Ada is suddenly able to admit to feelings of love for Baines once the piano has been returned to her. It is as though it is necessary for Baines to work through his relations with Ada in terms of more traditional modes of exchange before he can abandon these mechanisms and recognize the alterity of her desire. Ada’s desire is located as the feminine which lies beyond the traditional boundaries of the symbolic order. As Irigaray suggests, if from her you want confirmation for your being, why don’t you let her explore its labyrinths? Why don’t you give her leave to speak? From the place where she sings the end of your becoming, let her be able to tell you: no. Still you wish to return into nothingness, alone it lures you on like your highest dream. Now begin again, come back to your becoming, and cease to take mine away from me. Let us be merry/marry together at last! (Irigaray, 1980/1991: 32) There is a clear need for the masculine to recognize that the feminine’s status beyond the realms of the symbolic order trap it in the mode of its own becoming. The feminine can never enter into being because of its function in affirming the end of the masculine subject’s own becoming – the masculine subject’s being. The feminine thus becomes trapped in a kind of metaphorical death without having any access to death drives of its own, a notion I explored in the previous chapter. Throughout The Piano, Ada is quite clearly situated as beyond the boundaries of the symbolic order. Her voicelessness confirms this, as does the importance she attaches to the piano as a means of symbolizing her feminine status, of representing the impossibility of speaking her specificity.1 The relations between Ada and Baines depend on a certain level of impossibility and a certain prohibition. Baines is an

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impossible love object for Ada who is already married to Stewart, yet the very impossibility of relations between them reinforces the impact of their desires. Ada is beyond the reach of Baines at several levels within the text: she is married to Alisdair Stewart; she does not use her voice; and, at a more metaphorical level, she is beyond the range of the symbolic practices available to Baines. To a certain degree, these are the very conditions necessary for the recognition of Ada as a different other with her own desire and specificity as a subject. As soon as any attempt is made to force this recognition into the parameters of symbolic practice, the feminine becomes obscured again. Stewart allows Ada and Flora to leave their life with him for a life with Baines in Nelson. Yet the family constellation that this evokes traps both Baines and Ada within patterns of representation that deny the very difference upon which their relationship is founded. This ending, of course, also requires Ada to move back into the maternal role, the role that she seemingly abandons in her pursuit of sexual subjectivity with Baines. During the many sequences of their love-making, we witness Flora being forced to wait outside, away from Baines’s house and we watch as she gradually turns against her mother to collude with Stewart in a very Oedipal turn of events. Ada’s exclusion of Flora indicates the extent to which she is embroiled in her quest for a desiring subjectivity of her own. She effectively sacrifices her maternal role in order to seek out a position for herself as woman. Ada’s bargain with Baines prohibits her from occupying the maternal role because she is attempting to participate in an economy that proscribes the traditional functions of femininity. In some ways, Ada’s rejection of the maternal role is necessary if she is to achieve some form of feminine subjectivity in her own right. Yet it is also clear that a rejection of the mother-daughter dyad is destructive. Irigaray’s work on the feminine advocates the need to celebrate and represent the mother– daughter relation in order to free women from the bind of the maternal role as it is represented within symbolic systems. The difficulty of this is made manifest by the development of the narrative in The Piano. Ada’s rejection of Flora inevitably leads to Flora’s betrayal of her mother in the sequences when, firstly, she tells Stewart about Ada’s relationship with Baines and, secondly, when she chooses to deliver the piano key inscribed with Ada’s message to Baines to Stewart instead of taking it to Baines as her mother requests. Ada, then, is relegated to an impossible position. In order to pursue her desire, she must abandon the maternal relation, but this in itself leads to the inevitable destruction of the possibility of her desire. The


impossibility of Ada’s position is indicative of the struggle at the heart of Irigaray’s writing on the conundrum of the feminine and trying to think beyond its symbolic boundaries. As a film, The Piano, manoeuvres around these questions, evoking the difficulty of thinking them through. In effect, the film mimics the symbolic category of ‘woman’ in order to undo it and rework it. Ada’s rejection of her roles as wife and mother is an effort to relinquish the symbolically acceptable aspects of ‘woman’ in order to try to glimpse repressed aspects of the feminine. It is only at the end of the film, when Ada throws herself over the edge of the boat and contemplates death, that all aspects of ‘woman’ can be reworked and integrated into a representation of the feminine on its own terms. The slipperiness of this representation highlights the difficulty involved in attempting to sustain it for any period and accounts, perhaps, for the provision of two (highly ambivalent) endings which offer no scene of closure in the traditional cinematic sense. The significance of the dual ending of this film is important in understanding how the film apparently encourages a distinctly feminist mode of ‘reading against the grain’ in order to produce meaning for the film. The next section will take up these questions and will draw on psychoanalytic ideas about the primal scene to suggest that the structuring of the gaze in The Piano is closely related the importance of fantasy in relation to the pleasures of looking.

The ambiguous ending as threshold: Fantasy, the primal scene and the feminine The Piano is a film which overtly foregrounds the mechanism of the gaze in cinema. In fact, it makes prominent the very mechanisms of cinema itself during the scenes of the play within the film and the way that both the camera movements and the mise-en-scène highlight issues surrounding the gaze. The structure of the film does much to evoke feminist perspectives on cinema and representation at a more theoretical level. The film’s playful engagement with issues around looking, and the experience of being gazed upon, set the scene for the most complex moment in the narrative structure: the provision of alternate, ambivalent endings that seemingly invite us as spectators to work through what the most appropriate ending might be, and/or, indeed, whether any ending could provide satisfactory narrative closure. The dual ending of The Piano is rather puzzling. The spectator is left with an overpowering sense of unresolved tension when faced with the choice of endings. Are we to consign Ada to a watery death, in which

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she floats, balloon-like, with her foot tethered to her beloved piano? Or do the rather saccharine soft-focus images of her life in Nelson with Baines and Flora, during which she is learning to speak again, provide more narrative substance as the film draws to a close? The choice is unsettling after the emotional turmoil evoked by the film. It leaves us with a narrative vacuum, with nowhere to go. How are we to make sense of this? Feminism has taught us to approach texts by reading against the grain in order to produce new meanings and political perspectives, and this dualistic ending offers an opportunity to revisit our interpretation of narrative events. As noted above, the opening scenes of the film encourage the spectator to identify with Ada, and, in the sequence when she throws herself off the boat, we are again sutured into the text and invited to choose the ending which seems most fitting. The endings on offer, however, amount to Hobson’s choice: should our heroine kill herself in order to preserve her feminine desire or should she sacrifice her desire in order to become properly symbolic, thereby abnegating all future possibility of a properly feminine subjectivity of her own? Is there any other option at this point in the text? The advantages and pitfalls of each ending stand in opposition to one another. In the ‘strange lullaby’ ending, Ada is consigned to death. In the Nelson ending, she is similarly trapped into the domain of symbolic femininity. We see her hidden beneath her veil, trying to learn to speak, and the symbolic castration of her axed finger is replenished by the fashioning of a metal finger tip which announces the very fact of her castrated status every time she plays the piano. Ada’s identity in this ending can no longer be described in terms of Irigaray’s feminine, but is a more familiar, traditional representation of femininity. The love relationship premised on difference to which she had aspired becomes impossible in this context. The Nelson ending can be read as a fantasy of a diegetically ironized ‘utopian’ life that Ada contemplates as her future as she throws herself overboard to experiment with the possibility of a more literal ‘death’ by drowning. The Nelson ending becomes a fantasy of the ‘utopian’ life that she and Baines were journeying towards. The impossibility of that utopia forces Ada to realize that to begin a new family existence with Baines in Nelson would amount to relegating herself to the status of affirming the ascendancy of the masculine once again. Her life would consist in embodying death for the masculine once more. Ada’s action in throwing herself into the sea then, may be interpreted as an attempt to defer the metaphorical death that her new ‘utopian’ existence would result in by abandoning herself to a death


created by and for herself. By plunging into the sea, Ada defers the action of her becoming so that she is endlessly in the realm of death. She is inscribed in the endlessly deferred moment of the feminine which is always becoming but which can never come into being on its own terms because of how masculinist symbolic practices manipulate it. The becoming of women is never over and done with, is always in gestation. ... The (male) ideal other has been imposed upon women by men. Man is supposedly woman’s more perfect other, her model, her essence. (Irigaray, 1987/1993c: 63) Ada’s dream image of herself floating above the piano is her ‘strange lullaby’ rather than an impossible nightmare because she manages to cling on to her own status as a desiring subject and thus manages momentarily to experience a death drive of her own on her own. For the spectator, the dualistic ending opens up a space for contemplation. How is Ada to preserve herself and her glimpse of feminine desire? Is it more satisfying to conjecture that Ada and Baines might find a way of preserving the uniqueness of their relationship once Ada gives up her voluntary muteness and once they have to live together as parents? Or is it somehow more poetic to imagine that Ada might sacrifice her life at a threshold onto the feminine? The dualistic ending creates a space of ambivalence for the spectator who needs to rework and refashion her relationship to the narrative in order to work out any opportunity for potential closure. In effect, this interpellates the spectator, drawing her into the text and its structure to contemplate the pleasures and unpleasures of the film itself. We are invited to read and reread the film, to weave our way into its depiction of desire in an effort to seek out some kind of threshold onto the feminine which it has seemingly been trying to evoke. This raises a number of questions about the cinematic representation of women, but also about the strategic value of reading against the grain. The liminality of a space for the representation of the feminine is illustrated here by the need constantly to rework events into a representation of the feminine. If the origin of the feminine lies beyond the parameters of the symbolic order, then it seems that a threshold onto a potential space of feminine representation is the best that can be construed within traditional representational systems. The sheer difficulty of attempting to argue this point is reflected, to an extent, by the psychoanalytic notion of the primal scene. The tenuous position that

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the primal scene holds in contemporary accounts of psychoanalysis2 and in feminist critiques of psychoanalytic theory, reveals the extent to which any attempt to articulate the beyond is fraught with difficulties. The primal scene is conspicuous by its rather striking absence from feminist perspectives on psychoanalytic theory. Very little has been written on the importance of the primal scene in the development of sexuality from a feminist perspective, and, more notably, there is very little in the literature about the impact of the primal scene on the development of female sexuality and femininity. That there is little feminist work done in relation to the primal scene seems remarkable when we consider that Freud’s notion is closely bound up with the idea of castration and with the development of infantile sexuality more generally. Freud develops his ideas on the primal scene as the structuring fantasy of origins in his study of the Wolf Man (Freud, 1918). It seems that the primal scene is disregarded by feminism because it is little more than a reconstructed fantasy of origins, a scene or scenario ‘witnessed’ by a (male) Oedipal child. Feminism tends to focus more on the specific problems raised by the Oedipus complex in an effort to show how psychoanalytic ideas about the constructive force of castration and the way it structures sexuality are necessarily phallocentric. However, the primal scene is a moment of pivotal importance in the development of psychoanalysis itself in that it enables Freud to persist in his insistence that the castration and Oedipus complexes are essential for the development of subjectivity and sexuality. Feminism has nothing to lose in interrogating the implications of the primal scene for the psychoanalytic account of femininity and female sexuality, and such an interrogation may offer new feminist perspectives on psychoanalytic categories such as masquerade, (symbolic) castration and gender identity. The difficulty of the primal scene is rooted in the notion of deferred action, or nachträglichkeit, which is, in itself, a rather complex concept. Ned Lukacher has commented that at its most elementary level, deferred action is a mode of temporal spacing through which the randomness of a later event triggers the memory of an earlier event or image, which might never have come to consciousness had the later event never occurred. (1986: 35) Deferred action, or nachträglichkeit, is central to Freud’s formulation of the primal scene and accounts for the distinction drawn by Freud between the recollection and the reconstruction of real or fantasied


events. Freud gives a detailed analysis of the primal scene in the case history of his work with the Wolf Man (1918). The Wolf Man reports a dream about seven white wolves in a tree which Freud analyses in terms of a (fantasied?) scene of intercourse which the Wolf Man experienced as a young child. The primal scene as it is elaborated in this case history can neither be said to be the cause of the Wolf Man’s dream nor the effect of it. It is simultaneously both and yet, paradoxically, neither. As we have seen, it is the triggering action of the primal scene that seems to be important for Freud. The temporal structure of the primal scene and its effects is also extremely hard to pin down, as we see in the case history when Freud attempts to set out the key events sequentially (1918: 45, n1). What are the implications of this for our reading of The Piano? Freud’s concept of nachträglichkeit is useful in relation to The Piano in attempting to make sense of the dualistic ending. The primal scene has no ‘nameable’ presence within its own narrative, yet it pervades Freud’s case history at every point. The primal scene, in short, is situated beyond the narrative itself, beyond the psychic reality of the analysand and beyond the history that structures the analysis. The primal scene might be understood as a sort of threshold to an unnameable space of uncertain representational status. In this account, at least, the primal scene seems to exist beyond the boundaries of the symbolic order and beyond traditional discursive and representational patterns. The idea of the primal scene has also been taken up by psychoanalytic film theorists. Metz has noted that the imaginary status of cinema depends on its parallels with the primal scene in psychoanalysis: For its spectator the film unfolds in that simultaneously very close and definitively inaccessible ‘elsewhere’ in which the child sees the amorous play of the parental couple, who are similarly ignorant of it and leave it alone, a pure onlooker whose participation is inconceivable. (Metz, 1982: 64) This emphasis on the way that cinema as an institution locates the spectator as the voyeuristic infant is represented by the play sequence in the film and has important consequences for the way the spectator of The Piano reads the foregrounding of the process of spectatorship itself by the text and its dualistic endings. There is a constant effort in The Piano to draw attention to the mechanisms of the gaze: the framing of Ada in the wedding photograph and the way both the photographer and Stewart peep through the lens at her set the tone for the film’s play with

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notions of the gaze and spectatorship. The play within the film incorporates shadow play, making references, perhaps, to the earliest form of cinema, and the content of the play marks out the schema of the filmic plot too. Just as Bluebeard attacks his wife with an axe, Alisdair Stewart will eventually chop off one of Ada’s fingers as punishment for her desire. The prevalence of veils and curtains and the flimsiness of many of the thresholds in the mise-en-scène also highlight the importance of the primal scene for the mode of representation used in the film. According to Freud, the primal scene is always partially obscured. In the play sequence of the film, the shadowy nature of cinema is explored: the story of Bluebeard is played out for us behind a backlit sheet and we see Aunt Morag peering through a peep-hole in it at the spectating audience (Campion, 1993: 65). As spectators in the cinema watching representations of spectators being watched, we are instantly implicated in the critique of the mechanics of the gaze being created. The dualistic endings bring this self-reflexivity to a head, demanding that we rework the themes of the film as if to defer their action and in order to find ways of creating closure for our engagement with the narrative. In this sense, then, the mechanism of nachträglichkeit means that the primal scene provides for a moment of imaginary revelation that defies symbolic patterns of representation. The primal scene offers a view of what lies beneath/beyond symbolic practice and of the way that might be articulated in terms of multiplicity, plurality and the availability of a range of gender positions that elaborate aspects of sexual difference that avoid the trappings of the (phallogocentric) symbolic order. The primal scene is a moment of imaginary revelation that defies symbolic representation as Lacan declares. According to Lacan, in the primal scene, ‘we find [ ... ] something like a unique and decisive revelation of the subject, in which an indefinite something that is unsayable is concentrated, in which the subject is lost for a moment, blown up’ (Lacan, 1988b: 176). This implies that the subject is so fragmented and undone by the experience of recollecting the primal scene that the gaps in the way that subjectivity is formed become exposed. The primal scene allows us to access the very locus of the formation of the subject, then, and opens up a space in which to negotiate the way (sexuate) subjectivity is constituted. In this respect, the mechanism of nachträglichkeit takes on a liminal aspect; it facilitates a view of the primal scene as a kind of threshold between an imaginary unbounded working out of gender and the symbolic domain of the phallus. Freud’s argument about the centrality of castration in the primal scene reflects, of course, the primacy he accords to castration in his


theories of infantile sexual development. Irigaray’s work has shown, however, that the whole notion of the little girl/woman as always and already castrated in the psychoanalytic account is very problematic. In the beginning ... the little girl was (only) a little boy. In other words THERE NEVER IS (OR WILL BE) A LITTLE GIRL. All that remains is to assign her sexual function to this ‘little boy’ with no penis, or at least no penis of any recognized value. Inevitably, the trial of ‘castration’ must be undergone. This ‘little boy’, who was, in all innocence and ignorance of sexual difference, phallic, notices how ridiculous ‘his’ sex organ looks. ‘He’ sees the disadvantages for which ‘he’ is anatomically destined: ‘he’ has only a tiny little sex organ, no sex organ at all, really, an almost invisible sex organ. The almost imperceptible clitoris. (1974/1985a: 48; capitalization in original) Similarly, Schor has pointed out that fetishism is testimony to the little boy’s uncertainty about maternal lack/castration. The mapping of a fetishized object onto the female body to represent the maternal phallus displays the impossibility and undecidability of two logically incompatible positions: the fact that woman both is and is not castrated (Wright (ed.), 1992: 114). The dual position of woman in the psychoanalytic account is problematic and fails to allow the feminine adequately to be theorized. To a certain extent, the paradoxical and double-edged nature of this ‘impossibility’ of the feminine is represented in The Piano via the dualistic ending. The primal scene is connected to the story of origins, as Freud points out. It seems important in this respect to comment on the way that the ending allows Ada to renegotiate her history and her own relation to origins. It is possible to see each of the possible endings as potential outcomes of Ada’s struggle to enunciate her femininity. On this reading, the dualistic ending allows Ada to idealize the love affair that gives her a history of her own. Her desire is thus able to be represented, and, as a consequence, Ada has access to a form of gendered identity that reflects her feminine status. As we have seen, the primal scene depends on the notion of deferred action. Nachträglichkeit enables the analysand retroactively to rework events in an effort to understand the roots of neurosis and subjectivity. In the case of The Piano, the argument about the dualistic ending outlined here allows a space of representation to be opened up at the very threshold of subjectivity. Notions of gender and sexuate subjectivity are undone at this threshold and, at this point of entry into the imaginary domain of identities, it becomes possible to rethink the basis of sexuate subjectivity

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in terms that reflect Irigaray’s ideas about the feminine. In this reading, then, the primal scene is the key to reading a highly ambivalent text in terms which not only locate the feminine very positively at certain points, but also demonstrate the very slippery and tenuous position that such a representation entails. The difficulty of explaining the primal scene as a mechanism reflects the difficulty of sustaining an argument that Ada is nothing other than a representation of Irigaray’s feminine. There are many points within the film when it seems that Ada is little more than a phallic mother who conforms to the masculinist notion of femininity as representable only in terms of virgin/mother/whore. Yet, Ada is clearly more than this. The way that the film as a whole centralizes debates around feminism and femininity in general makes this abundantly clear. The primal scene becomes a way of making sense of the often deeply split representation of woman in this film because it opens up a space in which to begin to discuss alternative forms of representation. What is more, the very fact that the film so clearly foregrounds the mechanisms of cinema in terms of the primal scene seems to highlight the need to play with the representations, to analyse them retroactively in ways that structure new possibilities for the feminist approach to film. The dual ending leaves the spectator without any form of narrative resolution. In order for Ada (and, indeed, woman more generally) to accede to any form of feminine subjectivity, it would be necessary to work through the many forms of representation of woman that bear currency in the symbolic order, unpicking them and pulling them apart at the seams in order to create new possibilities. Inevitably, this is a problematic exercise, yet it seems that the narrative space of film, with its rather special representational textual status, might be just the place in which to attempt to do this. It seems that The Piano may be interpreted as an example of how this might be done. The narrative structure of the film clearly has much to offer in terms of a feminine cinematics, and we have already seen how this works in tandem with narrative concerns. However, there are many other aspects of the narrative that resonate with issues relating to the feminine, as the next section will explore.

Language, representation and the mother–daughter relation in The Piano The Piano, as a text, is heavily laden with issues surrounding processes of communication and signification. Ada’s elective mutism immediately foregrounds these debates at the outset of the film. Moreover, the prominence of sign language and the Maori language locates the


question of language very centrally in the narrative space. Language, as we have seen, gives much of Luce Irigaray’s thought on the feminine its grounding.3 As she comments, language is a product of the sedimentations of languages of former eras. It conveys their methods of social communication. It’s neither universal, nor neutral, nor intangible. There are no universal linguistic structures in the brain of the speaking subject; rather, every era has its specific needs, creates its own ideals, and imposes them as such. (1990/1993b: 30) This work on the role of language in the formation of gendered subjectivity is useful in attempting to make sense of the often complex and multilayered perspectives on language in The Piano. In this film, issues of language are closely bound up with the diegetic relationship between Ada and Flora. The Piano presents us with one of the most intriguing representations of the mother–daughter relationship in recent cinema. It foregrounds the highly charged emotionality of their dyadic unity, but also highlights the importance of their moments of betrayal and distanciation. It is difficult at times to separate out the roles of these characters and yet it seems imperative to do so in order to avoid analysing their relationship in terms of what Irigaray calls ‘this distanceless proximity between women – between mother and daughter? – distanceless because no symbolic process allows us to account for it’ (in Whitford (ed.), 1991: 107). Irigaray’s critique of psychoanalytic theories of femininity demonstrates that the symbolic order has a vested interest in confining mothers and daughters to their traditionally understood roles. She comments that the mother–daughter relationship is subject to a double exclusion from patriarchal cultures because the woman is rejected from them as woman subject, and the daughter is not given equal recognition as girl subject. The values dominating our civilizations are those that show clearly they belong to the male gender. (1990/1993b: 47) Psychoanalytic notions of the thwarting, strangulating effect of the unmediated and unbroken mother–daughter relationship do not adequately account for how the relationship between Ada and Flora structures our reading of the film as a whole and appears to transcend ideas about the phallic mother and the negative Oedipus complex. Irigaray’s writings seem particularly relevant to attempts to read the film otherwise.


From the outset, Ada is represented as someone who does not symbolize and communicate in the traditional way. She depends on Flora to mediate her speech, as we see in the scene of their arrival in New Zealand: Seaman: It’s a little rough out there. Could be they can’t get through to you in this weather. Maybe they’ll come over land. Ada nods. Seaman:

Have you things for shelter?

Ada nods. Seaman:

What things have you?

Ada signs to her daughter. The little girl speaks clearly and loudly without emotion. Flora:

She says ‘thank you’.

Puzzled, the man walks off, then turns and comes back. Seaman: Does your mother prefer to come on with us to Nelson? Ada signs vigorously to Flora. Flora: She says, No. She says she’d rather be boiled alive by natives than get back in your [stinkin’] tub. Seaman: (Stunned.) You be damn fortuned I don’t smack your puppy gob, missy. Damn lucky. (Campion, 1993: 13–16) While Ada is situated outside the symbolic realm of language and discourse, her daughter Flora clearly is not. What is more, she is the only character able to understand her mother’s language, although both Baines and Stewart believe that they witness Ada attempting to communicate with them (Campion, 1993: 83 and 112–3). Neither Baines nor Stewart, however, is able to respond to Ada using her techniques of communication like Flora. Flora moves fluidly and with little difficulty between the imaginary realm of Ada’s silent system of communication and the traditional boundaries and linguistic systems of the symbolic order, as we see in the scene that takes place as they shelter under Ada’s crinoline hoops on the beach. Flora moves fluidly between signing and speaking to express her anxieties about forging a new relationship with Stewart (Campion, 1993: 17). Flora also mediates her mother’s efforts to communicate at key points in the film, and, in so doing, she performs an essential function within the narrative: without Flora as mediator, Ada’s language would


remain unrepresented and meaningless within the diegesis, and the processes of (non-) communication that structure the film and its plot would be impossible to represent. Flora’s role as mediator situates both her and Ada within a dyadic relationship of interdependence and support. Because of her role as mediator of her mother’s language, Flora is able to resist the all-consuming nature of the relationship with the mother as it is represented in psychoanalytic theories such as the Lacanian lawof-the-father which decrees that without the intervention of a third term (the father) in the mother–child relationship, symbolic subjectivity is impossible and psychosis would result. In The Piano, the mother– daughter relationship is mediated through a linguistic system that perpetuates their closeness of the relationship but which also allows a distance to be manufactured between them. The relationship between Flora and Ada, then, seems to overcome the difficulties of the allconsuming maternal dyad as it is represented within psychoanalysis. Because of this fact, the relationship between them can be read in terms of Irigaray’s notion of maternal genealogy. Flora and Ada interact together to produce a new model of the mother–daughter relationship that goes against traditional socio-symbolic patterns of representation. At the beginning of the film, we hear about Ada’s father effectively selling her off to a man on the other side of the world, yet there is no reference in the filmic text to her mother nor, indeed, to Flora’s father. The traditional patterns of genealogy are thus overridden from the start of the film. Flora is clearly aware of the story of her genesis. Indeed, she uses it as the source of a richly imaginative stream of stories about her origins during the first half of the film (Campion, 1993: 30–2) and she pleads with her mother to tell her about her father (50–1). Flora and Ada exchange versions of their histories between them in a way that precludes any reference to the ‘truth’ of their origins. In this respect, the mother–daughter relationship in The Piano appears to unpick the structuring mythologies of the symbolic order as emphasized by Irigaray (1987/1993c: 19; 1990/1993b: 23–4). Analysing The Piano in these terms, however, is not unproblematic and there are parallels here with some of the more controversial aspects of Irigaray’s work. Ada, outside the realm of language and representation and apparently limited to her maternal function at the beginning of the film, might be seen as a representation of that aspect of the female imaginary that many find dangerous and denigrating in Irigaray’s work. Irigaray’s call for a female imaginary is often caricatured as prohibiting woman’s access to the very symbolic systems she seeks to interrogate and rework. Lacanian critics such as Ellie Ragland-Sullivan argue that

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Irigaray fails to appreciate the implications of Lacan’s work on the symbolic subject in relation to the acquisition of language and the moment of symbolic castration. This critique of Irigaray’s work locates her notion of the feminine in the imaginary realm where language is not available. Consequently, the argument is that Irigaray’s desire to formulate a form of parler femme only reinforces the position outlined by Lacan: that the Woman does not exist in symbolic terms.4 Such an analysis, however, fails to acknowledge the doubleness that characterizes Irigaray’s thought. Her work often situates the critical alongside the utopian; her critiques of socio-symbolic practices are meant simultaneously to highlight the problematics of sexual difference and to open up potential spaces in which it may be possible to rethink its implications. As Irigaray herself comments, although I do avoid writing about and pointing to things that are wretched, ugly, I often have occasion to deal with painful realities. As far as I am able, I discuss them in a literary style, which I hope cushions the sense of dereliction these disclosures can lead to. I also strive to discover or define something positive at the same time I’m stating the negative. ... Personally, I rather regret having to show the negative, but the point of doing it, from a female perspective, is positive and necessary given that it reveals what was meant to remain hidden. (1990/1993b: 107–8) While Ada appears to embody those aspects of the feminine which limit the possibilities of woman’s subjectivity, the way she is represented throughout the film helps to pose many questions about the systems that trap her and about potential ways of subverting them. It is important to recognize that, as a result of her relationship with Flora, Ada evokes something of the fragmentary female imaginary that may be seized upon by feminists seeking to rework the processes of symbolic subject-formation. Flora is the essential term in this development. By highlighting Ada’s alienation from traditional symbolic practices, she demonstrates that Ada is representative of how the feminine has been defined within Western thought and particularly within psychoanalytic theory. By mediating Ada’s relation to the symbolic order that apparently alienates her, however, Flora enables us to view the flipside of the argument too. There is something that is quite literally unspoken by Ada in The Piano that is symbolized by Flora so that it becomes possible to rethink questions of alterity. It is this aspect of the relationship between


Ada and Flora that I would like to consider in terms of what Irigaray designates female genealogy.

The Piano’s Female Genealogy The importance of female genealogy in Irigaray’s work has already been discussed in Chapter 5. Clearly, The Piano also offers a marked example of the visibility of this theme in women’s cinema and this is best seen in the sequences of Ada and Flora going about their everyday life together. They can be reduced here to neither one nor two; Flora becomes a symbolic version of Ada who articulates many of her mother’s thoughts and reactions throughout the film. At certain points within the film, it even seems as though the mother and daughter roles have been exchanged between them; in the scenes during which Stewart traps them inside his house in order to stop Ada from escaping to continue her liaison with George Baines, for example, Flora takes on the role of the scolding mother, while Ada seems to embody the Oedipal guilt of a little girl (Campion, 1993: 87). We are reminded, in this context, of Irigaray’s description of ‘a woman-to-woman relationship of reciprocity with our mothers, in which they might possibly also feel themselves to be our daughters’ (in Whitford (ed.), 1991: 50). Flora wears similar clothes and carries herself in a similar way to Ada (especially in the scene when they persuade Baines to take them back to the beach where they landed) (Campion, 1993: 33). In this sense, Flora seems to be a symbolic extension of her mother’s unnameable identity. Flora symbolizes those aspects of Ada’s character that are effaced as a result of the fact that Ada cannot/will not speak. Such a reading of Flora’s role, however, returns us to the pitfalls of symbolic practice. To reduce Flora to little more than an embodiment of Ada’s silent voice is to deny her own subjective validity. The mutuality of their experiences need not necessarily confine Flora and Ada to the roles that such a reading defines. Flora’s acting out of her mother’s trapped Oedipal desire and guilt, together with her own (Oedipal) rebellion against it, leads to a blurring of the boundaries between their identities and creates a fluidity of identity that enables them to avoid inescapable fusion. Flora may represent to us the Oedipal guilt and desire that seem to structure Ada’s actions, but there is no doubt that her reactions are as much her own as Ada’s. In this respect, Flora and Ada become bound together in a horizontal relation as well as in a vertical one. It is interesting that we are presented with no representation of Ada’s own mother. Ada is defined in relation to her own motherhood from the very outset of the film. Her maternal role seems quite normative but

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with the important difference that she refuses the tool of spoken language. Her daughter is brought up to interact not only with her mother but also with others, making use of the linguistic skills that Ada refuses. Throughout the early sequences of the film, there are several exchanges between Ada and Flora that centre on their own personal histories, on their genealogy. Many of these sequences have a story-like quality to them and we are never sure of their status as truth or fiction. This is reinforced by Flora’s delight in relating tales of their past to other characters. This almost mythological approach to their genealogy extracts the exchanges of information between Ada and Flora from the realm of the conventional and situates it as rather unreal, uncertain and unmediated by symbolic practices of rationality. The spectator has no knowledge of the actual truth of Ada’s background beyond what Ada herself chooses to reveal and beyond what Flora relates in her stories. The shared nature of their fiction helps to symbolize aspects of the unknown and the unnameable. Ada and Flora create a mythology/ history/genealogy of their own that makes clear sense only to them, and in so doing, they manage to define their relationship to each other in their own terms. This enables Flora and Ada to symbolize their own subjectivities in more concrete terms within the symbolic order.

Signs and symbols in The Piano Ada’s use of sign language in The Piano raises interesting questions about the relationship between gendered subjectivity, and feminist and psychoanalytic accounts of language and semiotics. As an elective mute, Ada has at least three separate, yet co-dependent, means of communicating with others: she occasionally writes simple and meaningful messages on pieces of notepaper; she uses a sign language to communicate with her daughter Flora (which entails a reliance on Flora’s ability to ‘translate’ her language for the benefit of others); and she communicates aspects of her passion and identity via her piano-playing. In what follows, each of these patterns of communication will be examined in an attempt to show how Ada’s subjectivity is paradoxically both defined and enabled by the restrictive elements of these systems of communication and their potentially liberating qualities. Flora plays a key role in each of these areas, as will become apparent. Ada’s note-writing Ada writes notes to Stewart and Baines about her relation to the piano alone. She uses short, cursory comments to define her relation to it as an object of self-expression. These notes are the only concession that


Ada makes during the plot of the film to traditional methods of communication. She attempts to write her ownership of the piano, to convey its importance to her in the language of the male characters she entreats to reunite her with it. Yet this is all to no avail. At no point in the film do Ada’s notes help her to achieve her wishes, echoing her silenced position within the symbolic realm. For Irigaray, ‘alphabetical writing is historically linked to the civil and religious codification of patriarchal power’ and its continued use without reference to the sexuate nature of language and discourse ‘perpetuate[s] the pseudoneutrality of the laws of traditions that privilege masculine genealogies and their codes of logic’ (in Jardine & Menke (eds), 1991: 99). Ada remains doubly unheard in this context. She represents a position of marginality to the symbolic order in a way that echoes what Irigaray has to say about how woman and the feminine are denied in symbolic practices. She embodies those aspects of the feminine that are buried within the symbolic order: she is represented in terms of the traditional boundaries of the female subject position in that she is a mother; outside these boundaries, however, she becomes something unnameable and unspeakable. To a certain extent, this position of marginality is represented via her written attempts to communicate. Ada’s sign language Ada’s use of sign language is elective, as we have seen, and it is not used for any reason that might be ascribed to disability. In linguistic analyses of sign language use, it is common to distinguish between the sign languages used by the deaf and mute and those used in other circumstances: ‘primary sign languages’ are languages used by deaf people as their first or only language; ‘alternate sign languages are systems ... typically developed for use as an alternative to speech in circumstances where, for whatever reason, speech is not used’. Both these, of course, differ from ‘manually coded language ...’ developed by educators as a means of conveying spoken languages to the deaf by manual actions. (Kendon cited in Armstrong, Stokoe & Wilcox, 1995: 66) Ada’s sign language, then, is an alternate sign language. Rosen comments that Ada’s language is a ‘home sign’: It was decided that the signs from American Sign Language would not be appropriate for the character. Ada grew up in an isolated area

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in the hills of Scotland in the 1800s and then moved to New Zealand as an adult, where the main part of the film takes place. She probably would not have had exposure to a formal sign language. Any sign language used by her would have been a ‘home sign’ system developed on her own. (Rosen, 1994: 7)5 That Ada’s language is invented is interesting when we consider what has already been said about her marginality. It is as though Ada is so cut off from the possibilities of symbolic exchange that she has to forge a new mode of communication for herself. As an elective mute, Ada refuses the linguistic processes available to her. There are resonances in Ada’s behaviour of Irigaray’s call to seek out new ways of using and appropriating language in order to attempt to shape the feminine in symbolic terms as a mode of parler femme. The place where it [parler femme] could best be deciphered is in the gestural code of women’s bodies. But, since their gestures are often paralyzed, or part of the masquerade, in effect, they are often difficult to ‘read’. Except for what resists or subsists ‘beyond’. In suffering, but also in women’s laughter, and again: in what they ‘dare’ – do or say – when they are among themselves. (1977/1985b: 134) The resonance of this particular quotation for The Piano is clear. Ada uses gestural codes and she ‘dares’ to play the piano in an attempt to express her emotions, wishes and desire, yet she often finds that her desires are thwarted because of the paralysing nature of her attempts to communicate within symbolic systems of exchange and discourse. It is important also to understand that Ada’s sign language, although invented, constitutes a semiotic system in its own right replete with its own system of signifiers. This ‘alternate’ semiotic system has meaning within the film only by virtue of the fact that it is ‘translated’ for the benefit of protagonists and spectators either by means of subtitles or via the mediation of Flora. In this respect, Ada’s sign language exists within a kind of second order of semiotics: the system of signs, that is, signifiers and signifieds, is a valid system because it is represented as having meaning, yet there is a clear need to use conventional semiotic systems to represent the validity of the system itself. Flora plays a vital role in this process. She almost embodies the sign of her mother’s feminine identity, becoming a sign of her subjectivity and thereby enabling its representation. Flora’s body becomes the site of validation for Ada’s semiotic system. Flora mediates and translates her mother’s efforts at


communication, and in so doing, she enables Ada to maintain distance from discursive systems that trap her on the margins of symbolic existence. Flora’s mediation of Ada’s sign language neither prohibits Ada’s attempts to formulate her own systems of meaning nor forces Ada to relinquish indirect communication. In other words, Flora’s mediation of Ada’s signs depends on a relationship of intransitivity. Ada’s language cannot afford to become static, but must continually flow through a mediating body if it is to have meaning. There is a constant process of discursive exchange taking place between Ada and Flora that makes Ada’s language manageable. This process of constant exchange between Ada and Flora, and the mode of intransitivity on which it depends, is similar to Irigaray’s recent work on the importance of formulating a discursive mode that does not reduce the other to an object. Irigaray has commented that progress needs language. Not just the language of information, [ ... ] but the language of communication, too. What we particularly need is a syntax of communication. For communication amounts to establishing links, and that is a matter of syntax. (1992/1996: 113) We might suggest that Ada and Flora work together to establish links that give sense and validity to Ada’s language, thereby creating such a mode of syntax. This inevitably has ramifications for Ada’s subjectivity.

Symbolizing Ada’s feminine subjectivity The process of symbolizing the ‘feminine’ aspects of Ada’s subjectivity depends very much on reworking and reshaping traditional patterns of interpretation. Many of my claims about Ada’s status as a feminine subject depend to a certain degree on Flora’s role in representing her mother’s subjectivity. Flora’s role in helping to symbolize Ada’s feminine subjectivity can be thought through in terms of parler femme and female genealogy, as we have seen, but Flora’s function as a symbol of her mother’s identity is also important. Notions of the symbol, symbolizing and the symbolic in psychoanalytic thought are many and varied as Laplanche and Pontalis detail: the notion of symbolism is nowadays so closely tied to psychoanalysis, the words ‘symbolic’, ‘symbolize’ and ‘symbolization’ are


used so often – and so variously – and the problems surrounding symbolic thought and the creation and utilisation of symbols fall within the scope of so many disciplines (psychology, linguistics, epistemology, history of religions, anthropology, etc.), that it is particularly hard in this case to mark off a specifically psychoanalytic use of these terms and to distinguish their various senses. (1988: 442)6 In their definition of ‘symbolism’, Laplanche and Pontalis outline a ‘restricted sense’ of the term as follows: a mode of representation distinguished chiefly by the constancy of the relationship between the symbol and what it symbolizes in the unconscious. This constancy is found not only in the same individual and from one individual to the next, but also in the most varied spheres (myth, religion, folklore, language, etc.), and in the most widely separated cultures. (1988: 442) There is a remarkable parallel between this definition and Irigaray’s comments on the feminine as the buried, unconscious, unacknowledged bedrock of the symbolic order that manifests itself in the mythologies, concepts of divinity and linguistic and discursive practices which structure socio-symbolic praxis. It is helpful, in this context, to cite Laplanche and Pontalis once again: It will be noticed that in this sense symbolism embraces all forms of indirect representation, implying no further discrimination between particular mechanisms: it covers displacement, condensation, overdetermination and considerations of representability. In fact just as soon as we see that a piece of behaviour, say, has at least two meanings, one of which is standing for the other, both concealing and expressing it, then we may describe the relationship between them as a symbolic one. (1988: 443) It is in this sense that Flora and Ada have a symbolic relationship. The idea of symbolizing the feminine is rather a slippery one, yet Flora manages to keep its potential alive. In this respect, she appears to undo symbolic mechanisms yet simultaneously to reconstruct them under the signs of difference and alterity. Arguably, this is only achieved in the film through the complex articulation of the mother–daughter relationship.


Ada’s Piano That Ada’s instrument plays an important role in the diegesis of The Piano is made clear by the very choice of title for the film. Critics of the film have also highlighted the significance of the piano and what it ‘symbolizes’.7 Clearly, then, it is important to consider what exactly the role of the piano might be. The importance of the piano to Ada is made clear from the beginning of the film and is also diegetically represented through the sound track. In the opening sequences of the film, and up until the point when the piano becomes a bargaining tool between Baines and Ada, the sound of Ada’s piano-playing is heard only when Ada and Flora are alone, or when Ada feels herself to be alone. However, despite Ada’s claim that ‘I don’t think myself silent, that is, because of my piano’ (Campion, 1993: 9), it is difficult to interpret the piano as a symbol of Ada’s unspoken voice. On the contrary, Ada’s piano and her playing of it appear to be intricately bound up with those feminine aspects of her subjectivity that are ‘unrepresentable’ in terms of symbolic practice. It is significant that the piano music is heard during these opening sequences only when Ada’s need for her instrument has been disavowed and oppressed by the circumstances in which she finds herself. The first sound of Ada’s piano-playing comes as her voice-over explains: Ada: I don’t think myself silent, that is, because of my piano. I shall miss it on the journey. (Campion, 1993: 9) The long journey to New Zealand from Scotland by boat entails an extended period of time without her piano for Ada. As soon as she and Flora arrive, and while they are waiting for the arrival of Stewart, Ada plays softly to herself as she caresses Flora’s hair. Later, after the wedding scene, Ada stares longingly out of the window into the rain, thinking of her piano on the beach, as the cut to a view of it confirms for the spectator. However, these sequences do not seem to express anything fetishistic in quality but, rather, suggest the limitations that Ada experiences without her piano. She seems unable to function as a subject without it and this impression is underscored by repeated instances of her objectification during the early part of the film. For example, during the wedding scene, Ada is objectified twice over, firstly by the gaze of the photographer and secondly by Stewart’s look through the camera. The latter is represented to the spectator by a shot that represents his eye looking through the camera’s viewfinder.8 During this sequence, Ada appears to be longing for her piano and the sense of identity it instils in

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her. Irigaray’s comment that, ‘for women, there remain the so-called minor art-forms; cooking, knitting, sewing and embroidery; and in exceptional cases, poetry, painting and music’ (1984/1993a: 7) reflects the fact that women have different means of enunciating the feminine aspects of their subjectivity that are not valued by symbolic practices. We might see Ada’s piano-playing in this light. The piano and the pianoplaying act as signifiers of the feminine in that they represent a relation to it. What is more, the piano retains its status as a signifier of the feminine once it becomes the bargaining tool used by Baines and Ada. It seems that Baines deliberately acquires the piano from Stewart in order that he may begin to form a relationship with Ada. He knows how much the piano means to her in terms of how it allows her to express her specificity and desire in her own terms because he sees how Ada’s mood becomes liberated, carefree and ecstatic (in the sense that she appears to be liberated from the limited possibilities for the symbolic female embodied subject) when she is playing. The sequence at the beach when Baines has led Ada and Flora back to the place where the piano has been left illustrates this very well. Ada takes great delight in feeling her fingers on the keys again. her whole composition is altered. She is animated, joyful, excited. ... Baines views them with suspicion, yet he is magnetically drawn to the spectacle. He has never seen women behave with so much abandon. His attention fixes on Ada’s uninhibited, emotional playing, and as he watches he finds himself edging irresistibly closer. (Campion, 1993: 35) It is also interesting that, during the scene when Baines suggests the idea of a bargaining process between them for the first time, the emphasis is quite clearly on senses other than the visual. Irigaray has levelled a very far-reaching critique of how the visual register is privileged within the symbolic order, critiquing it as an ‘age-old oculocentrism’ (1974/1985a: 48). Irigaray attempts to deconstruct the importance of the visual by reference to the notion of female morphology and the importance of the proximity of the two lips in establishing the sexual specificity of the feminine. Irigaray stresses the importance of acknowledging the value of other sensory factors, such as touch, in the creation of subjectivity (1977/1985b: 26). During the bargaining sequences in The Piano, there is a clear attempt to highlight the eroticism of senses other than the visual.


Ada’s slim stockinged calves work the pedals; one of the stockings has a small hole through which her white skin shows. [Baines caresses the skin of Ada’s shin as she plays]. (Campion, 1993: 57) Baines draws his chair close. Gently he places his hand on the soft underpart of her forearm. Ada stiffens and pulls away. He grips the arm. Baines: Two keys. Ada continues to play. Slowly he moves his hand higher towards her shoulder [and caresses the back of her neck]. (Campion, 1993: 60) Baines [picks up Ada’s jacket and as she plays] he lifts it up and smells it. Ada turns around and stops playing, suddenly appalled by his odd sensual pleasure-taking. (Campion, 1993: 61) Baines, intoxicated by the smell and the presence of her skin, becomes soft and gentle. He kisses and touches her with feeling and affection. (Campion, 1993: 62) Baines is clearly moved by Ada’s piano-playing to appreciate that the realm of her desire does not function in oculocentric terms. Ada’s feminine subjectivity is what attracts Baines to her and it soon becomes clear to him that it is on these terms that their relationship must be founded, which accounts, perhaps, for why he eventually brings the bargaining to a halt. The piano serves a very important purpose in the schema of the bargain formulated by Baines and Ada. It allows a process of exchange to be created that does not depend upon phallogocentric praxis. The mechanism of this exchange (the bargain struck between them) has been the focus of many feminist attacks on The Piano. Sue Gillett documents the scathing attack by Lisa Sarmas on the film as promulgating rape and offers her own reading of the film in terms of why the bargain struck between Baines and Ada cannot be called rape by drawing upon Irigaray’s description of ‘the economy of desire – of exchange – [as] man’s business’ (Gillett, 1995: 282–3). Gillett argues that The Piano’s representation of the bargaining sequences between Baines and Ada ‘takes us through and beyond’ the economy described by Irigaray (283). Gillett’s argument is that the bargaining scenes do not only reveal how ‘economic relations ... order sexual relations’ or vice versa (283), but also that they open up a space in which ‘man and woman may be explored’ (285). Gillett’s argument, however, seems not to go far enough. It seems to me that the bargaining sequences in The Piano do more than open up a potential space for the renegotiation of the categories of gender in that

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they actually create a new type of economy for the exchange of desire that is represented in the way the exchange is orchestrated (reclaiming the value of the senses that are disavowed by the symbolic order), perpetuated (represented by the musical score), and suspended (on the grounds that Ada is being positioned in terms which forbid the emergence of the feminine despite the fact that the very conditions of the exchange make this emergence possible). The bargaining sequences are essential to the possibility of a space in which it is possible for Ada to articulate her subjectivity and specificity without reference to her piano, the signifier of the unspoken feminine that makes the possibility of exchange between Baines and Ada possible in the first place. The piano, with its emphasis on touch and hearing (and indeed on smell, as we see during the scene when the piano tuner comments that the piano smells of salt and scent), seems to rework traditional methods of exchange which are premised upon the mirroring reflective function of woman in the symbolic order. The piano enables a feminine economy of exchange and desire to be brought into existence, replacing the masculinist economy in which woman is trapped in the role of virgin/ mother/whore and enjoys no sexuate specificity of her own. The piano becomes a signifier of feminine desire and exchange by enabling what Irigaray describes as ‘a commerce without an object, without a society or an established order’ (1982/1992: 64) to take place between Baines and Ada. The apparent impossibility of such a signifier of the feminine is overcome by the double-edged nature of the exchange that is taking place. The slippery nature of a process of exchange that proceeds from a point that can be read as trapping Ada in the role of commodity or object is documented by feminist criticisms of Campion’s film. Yet the strength of the film comes from the fact that the signifier of the feminine (the piano) cannot actually signify the feminine in its own right; rather, it operates in terms of circulating subject positions so that the feminine may emerge. We might draw a parallel here with the extended discussion made within psychoanalytic textual analysis of the function of the letter in Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’.9 The letter in this account has been variously interpreted as a representative of the master signifier (the phallus), as the lack that constitutes the subject and as the representative of splitting and difference. In each of these accounts, Poe’s tale is read as an allegory for how symbolic exchange and subjectivity are made possible by the circulation of a signifier (the phallus) which can never be grasped or attained. Such an argument necessarily functions inside the very matrix of terms which


structure the debate. By comparison, the argument elaborated here in relation to the piano as a signifier of the possibility of the feminine, shows how gender can be manipulated in relation to language, syntax and processes of (linguistic) exchange with the effect of freeing up the elements of subjectivity and discourse that remain repressed in the Lacanian account. Once an interval or space in which it is possible to begin to articulate this has been created, the piano has served its purpose, and Ada feels able to dispense with it at the end of the film. The piano, then, becomes an intermediary signifier, akin to the angel in Irigaray’s work on the necessity for a feminine divine in efforts to enable the feminine to be represented as a subject position in its own right. The readings elaborated in this chapter show how any attempt to manipulate language and processes of exchange by reference to the feminine is deeply problematic. As with Irigaray’s thought, it often seems that attempting to draw out a schema for understanding this film in relation to the question of the feminine is always accompanied by a dangerous slippage that often traps such readings inside the very frameworks they seek to work against. How, then, can these questions be addressed? Is it possible to provide a framework for a feminine cinematics that is constructive for those interested in the possibilities of representing the feminine? Or is it rather the case that such approaches to textual forms and narratives inevitably only reinforce the impossibility of any position on the feminine? The next chapter will attempt to address these questions by setting out a fuller account of the advantages and pitfalls of the idea of a feminine cinematics and by scrutinizing its focus on sexual difference, perhaps at the expense of other facets of identity.

8 Impossible Differences: Slippages and Auguries

The attempts made throughout this book to outline ‘a feminine cinematics’ depend on a technique of film analysis that incorporates both formal and text-based criticism against a contextual background. In any interrogation of cultural artefacts, there is a need to construct a critique in terms of mode of production as well as content-based analyses, especially if the systems underpinning the means of production are also to be examined. Irigaray’s work makes it clear that analysing the commodities of symbolic exchange alone is not enough; feminist cultural theoreticians must also call into question the systems that are reflected in and perpetuated by it. Irigaray has commented that ‘no narrative, and no commentary on a narrative, is enough to bring about a change in discourse’ (1987/1993c: 177). Rather, it is necessary to disconcert the staging of representation according to exclusively ‘masculine’ parameters, that is, according to a phallocratic order. It is not a matter of toppling that order so as to replace it – that amounts to much the same thing in the end – but of disrupting and modifying it, starting from an ‘outside’ that is exempt, in part, from phallocratic law. (Irigaray, 1977/1985b: 68) A feminine analysis of cinematic texts therefore would have as its focus not only the narrative of the text, but also its formal strategies and mechanisms and its contexts of production, direction and reception. Moreover, as we have seen, it seeks to interrogate the texts in order to disrupt traditional discursive and representational systems. It does not, however, attempt to define and delimit what the feminine might be. As Irigaray has stated, 184

Impossible Differences: Slippages and Auguries

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it is useless ... to trap women in the exact definition of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so that it will be clear; they are already elsewhere in the discursive machinery where you expected to surprise them. (1977/1985b: 29) A feminine cinematics, then, attempts to show how there are techniques of analysis that reveal the feminine in various guises, ranging from the technical processes of production to moments of narrative development and contexts of critical reception. In other words, there is no set, prescriptive technique for such a feminine cinematics; it focuses on interdisciplinary engagements with texts so that the feminine aspects of them can be elucidated by reference to inter-textual pulls and the interstices of their production. The film analyses undertaken here point to several aspects of what we might understand a feminine cinematics to be. In many of the texts, there is a play with film form and plot structure that seems useful in highlighting how traditional cinematic strategies of film language contain the feminine, or structure it only according to dominant ideological paradigms. Many of the films examined here entail a reconsideration of past events and/or histories and this is relayed by a female voice, constructing a distinctly feminine mechanism for enunciative structures. This is, perhaps, seen most clearly in Orlando, a film that ironizes and playfully interrogates the cinematic treatment of history, but it is also clearly at play in The Piano, Silences of the Palace, Faithless, and Antonia’s Line. Similarly, many of the films examined here make important use of fantasy, both to reveal the cultural framework of the role of gender in the formation of subjectivity and to open up spaces for thinking through the implications of difference. There is a danger, here, of trapping Irigaray’s thought in a discourse of fantasy that seems only to insist on the imaginary locus of the feminine and its becoming. What use is there in attempting to formulate a form of cinematic analysis that depends on an overt structure of fantasy? Are there implications of this focus on fantasy that suggest that using Irigaray for film theory and criticism can only be successful in relation to a mode of film-making which might be regarded as ‘excessive’ in its heavy use of irony or in its fantasy narrative structures? To a certain extent, these questions miss the point. Irigaray’s thought seems to work well in relation to the film texts discussed here precisely because of such emphases. If, as some critics of Irigaray would suggest, the realm of the imaginary is the only space for thinking through the feminine, then films that make political play with images, narrative and notions

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of fantasy provide a rich seam of potential in terms of attempting to build a politics of the feminine through textuality. Cinema, in this sense, offers a space for experimentation and play with symbolic ideas, a space that is replete with potential for the articulation of that which more usually remains unspoken. Reading against the grain as a textual political strategy has long been advocated by critics engaging with feminist and/or queer film analysis with such an aim in mind. In films which take femininity as a political theme, it would seem even more appropriate to suggest that the mechanisms of cinematic expression also work in such a way. Cinema becomes a kind of space of consciousness in this respect. It offers a space with potential for exceeding the cultural boundaries of representation, especially as the films under analysis here take feminist concerns as a starting point, to varying degrees. In this respect, a feminine cinematics also collides usefully with debates around female authorship in cinema. How can films that turn cinema into a space of consciousness be seen as anything other than products of a mode of auteur production inscribed in and through difference? One of the problems with the notion of the feminine as it is sketched in Irigaray’s work is that it is both necessary to the project of sexual difference and yet impossible to attain. Her project of theorizing sexual difference seems to insist ‘that we must name sexual difference, and that we cannot name sexual difference’ (Deutscher, 2002: 176). The films scrutinized here offer glimpses of slippery signifiers of the feminine as it might be inscribed in the interstices of such a project. The feminine is often literally outside the frame in many of the scenes analysed, making itself felt through enunciative systems and through the construction of a mode of reading that works politically to reinscribe the spectator in terms of alternative modalities of the feminine. The gaps of the symbolic order seem to become visible, in a sense, and we are reminded that the notion of fantasy ‘derives through Latin from the Greek term meaning to “make visible” ’ (Cowie, 1997: 127). In some ways then, the films analysed here work as fantasies of the feminine. This is not to suggest that the feminine is a readily attainable position of subjectivity or representation; such a claim would miss the nuances of Irigaray’s project and her emphasis on the impossibility of what it is intended to evoke. Rather, the analysis I have tried to undertake attempts to show how both the positive, constructive elements of the feminine and the more negative aspects associated with the recuperative symbolic strategies of its disavowal can be detected and examined in the context of cinema and its potential as a space for politics. What I hope


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the analyses show is that through the blurring of boundaries between text, narrative and processes of production, direction, spectatorship and reception, a modality of disruptive textual politics can be seen to assist ‘the staging of representation’ to which Irigaray’s project aspires. Reading otherwise is intrinsic to the Irigarayan oeuvre and provides a political framework of sorts for feminist textual politics. In this respect, the emphasis on the maternal feminine that makes itself felt through much of my analysis provides the female spectator with a model for consuming films made by women: they offer a site for exchange, as it were, for debate and for the process of contemplating the possibilities of the feminine. Despite the claims made here, however, there are fundamental difficulties around the notion of difference as it is elaborated in Irigaray’s work. These relate to the assertion that sexual difference is the primary modality of difference in the construction of subjectivity. Claiming sexual difference as a universal, Irigaray has suggested that without doubt, the most appropriate content for the universal is sexual difference. Indeed, this content is both real and universal. Sexual difference is an immediate natural given and it is a real and irreducible component of the universal. The whole of human kind is composed of women and men and of nothing else. The problem of race is, in fact, a secondary problem ... and the same goes for other cultural diversities – religious, economic and political ones. (1992/1996: 47) This is clearly a politically suspect and exclusionary position, and, despite claims that it is necessary to read Irigaray strategically in order to foreground the specificity of the sexual, it is, nevertheless, difficult to remain sympathetic to a position that excludes differences between women as insignificant in terms of a perceived hierarchy of difference. More recently, Irigaray has sought to re-address this question in her turn to what she labels ‘the orient’, ‘the east’ or ‘India’ and its traditions, beliefs and ways of being. In Between East and West (1999/2002b), Irigaray suggests that while it is now appropriate to be working toward respect for cultural difference, sexual difference remains the mechanism by which this can be achieved, providing a means to an end in which all forms of difference will be culturally valued and respected. As Deutscher’s very useful overview of Irigaray’s later writings suggests, ‘Irigaray’s claim that sexual difference traverses all cultures and is the primary difference presupposes the translatability of sexual difference from one culture to

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another’ (2002: 176). As she also makes clear, Irigaray’s move in relation to cultural difference does not undertake the extensive scrutiny of the absences and aporia of western culture in relation to cultural difference as she has done with the question of sexual difference. This, combined with the rather reified approach to the superiority of eastern traditions around the breath, the divine and the body, appears to eclipse the very project undertaken by Irigaray over the past thirty years or so (Deutscher, 2002: 164–84). We might argue that the new emphasis on cultural difference presupposes a framework of sexual difference in which new ways of thinking difference become available. This does not, however, seem to sit happily with earlier claims that sexual difference is both crucial and unattainable. Irigaray’s aspirations to a mode of multiculturalism in which all others are regarded as irreducible to the same and experienced as a site of wonder and awe do not seem very attainable when the fundamentals of a culture of sexual difference are apparently still out of reach. Nevertheless, to read with Irigaray in her utopian mode, it would seem that she has at least turned her attention to the question of differences between women, between cultures and between traditions. I agree with Deutscher that this shift seems to have been made without due attention to the kind of philosophical methodology that might be required to implement a politics of cultural difference to parallel and complement the politics of sexual difference that underpins much of the discussion in this book. Yet as Spivak has argued, ‘in the long run, the most useful thing that a training in French feminism can give us is a politicized and critical examples of “symptomatic reading” ’ (1988: 149). Spivak and Deutscher both advocate a return to the question of alterity outside that defined in terms of the sexual alone in order to re-traverse symbolic discourses in search of its silences and impossibilities. This would help to make tangible a mode of becoming for cultural difference. How might such a project inflect the kind of feminine cinematics this book aspires to set out? As we have already seen, Moufida Tlatli’s The Silences of the Palace scrutinizes modes of difference other than the sexual: the very stuff of the narrative has at its heart a concern with the disparity between those who have wealth, the Beys, and those who do not (the servants). Within this structure, of course, women are further alienated from men in that the female servants are not permitted to leave the palace, while the male ones are. Similarly the wives of the Beys seem to live more restricted lives than the Beys themselves, who wield a very patriarchal power within the household. Economic difference then, maps onto sexual difference here with clear effects. Nevertheless, scrutiny of these modes


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of difference cannot be separated out from the specificity of ethnicity and the historical context of the narrative with which we are presented. In interviews, Tlatli maps history and tradition onto patriarchy and masculinity, while modernity and the potential for change are sketched in relation to the feminine. In doing so, however, she also points to the effect of colonialism in constructing these polarities. She suggests that at the time of the protectorate, men were trapped by the acts of the colonizers, and surmises that they tended toward the reproduction of the models of oppression under which they themselves suffered. The refinement of the ancient civilization of Tunisia and its culture of splendour thus reveal a flipside in which decadence, injustice and servitude become the norm (Anonymous, 1994: 8). The very close imbrication of culture, history, specificity and the treatment of difference here shows how it is frequently difficult to separate out modes of difference for special treatment. Tlatli argues for her belief that cinema can help to change things, stipulating that her aim is to put an end to silences and ensure that justice and equality are given due privilege amongst human beings regardless of their sex or race (Ecrans d’Afrique, 1994b: 11). As we saw in Chapter 5, however, it is also the case that while independence was won in Tunisia in 1956, the situation of women remained difficult and questions of sexuality, desire and the personal as political do not appear to have been addressed. As Alia’s experience reveals, independence and liberation relate as much to sexuate identity as to economic and ethnic subjectivities. The political is marked throughout the film as belonging to the personal as well as the public sphere. The Silences of the Palace marks out this constant overlap between modes of difference through its formal strategies in the first instance, and through the foregrounding of the relation between Alia and Sarra in the second. The structuring use of Alia’s gaze is central to an understanding of the female subjectivity at the heart of the film, as we have already seen. The structure of the look, however, is also importantly grounded in relation to the spaces of the palace. Alia’s movement through the palace prompts her recollections through association. Now strangely empty, the spaces below stairs seem central to the possibility of Alia’s recall of the events that enable her to re-imagine her relation to her mother. Alia, then, is marked in her adulthood by a formative connection with the domestic servitude associated with the below stairs spaces of the palace. Despite her aspirations to liberty and independence, to a cultured way of being more closely associated with the lifestyle of the Beys, and represented throughout the flashback sequences

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by her use of the attic as a secret space of imagination and her desire for a lute of her own, Alia is unable to escape the fact of her origin in a life marked and defined by servitude. It is in the spaces below stairs then, that Alia finds her memories of the maternal relation flood back. She becomes indelibly marked by class, in this respect, and as spectators we come to associate Alia’s heritage with the markedly unliberated status she seems to bear in her relationship with Lotfi and with contemporary society. The feminine, in this respect, seems incapable of escaping associations with class and oppression in quite the same way as the masculine. The camera’s movement through the below stairs spaces of the palace and its insistence on showing how Alia’s relation to her mother was always couched in terms of her mother’s role as a domestic and sexual servant, highlights for us the apparently inescapable legacy of subjugation that has historically been associated with Tunisian society and culture. Tlatli’s film foregrounds this problem in ways that articulate sympathy for the struggle against colonialism, but which also carve out space for thinking through the failure of independence adequately to address issues around the gap between the emancipation of men and that of women. In this sense, it seems to move beyond a mode of parler femme that draws attention only to sexual difference. In the culture of The Silences of the Palace, sexual difference is inscribed in and through other modes of difference and it is impossible to separate them out. The film metaphorizes this impossibility in terms of Alia’s use of the attic as a space within the palace that allows her to mediate her somewhat confused and confusing status in relation to the women below stairs and the family above them. Alia’s use of the attic becomes a kind of intermediary space in which she is able to contemplate ways of becoming that relate not only to her sexuate subjectivity, but also to her socio-economic identity. In the attic, we see Alia struggling with the corporeality of her female body; we see her singing and playing the lute she has temporarily borrowed from Sarra and we see her being gazed upon by Khedija (her servant mother) and by Sidi Ali (her presumed Bey father). Alia is interpellated, then, through a series of conflicting ideological structures and must struggle to find a way of reconciling them. The attic simultaneously provides a space in which to escape the constraints of such experience and to reflect upon it in a way that facilitates a sense of becoming for her nascent subjectivity. Parler femme, in this context, by necessity, must articulate the differences between women in order to speak the difference of women. This is, perhaps, most clearly seen in the film’s treatment of the relation between the women who live above stairs and those who live below.


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A central facet of the film’s indication of Alia’s multiply inscribed difference is the relationship she establishes with Sarra, the daughter of Si Bechir, who was born on the same night as Alia and who proffers a tempting vision of what Alia might aspire to if she had more confidence in her paternal origin. The social mores of the palace, of course, forbid any acknowledgement of Alia’s parentage in these terms, although there is a palpable sense of forbearance of Alia’s right to be treated differently that runs throughout the film. Alia and Sarra behave as sisters might. Alia is permitted to sit in on Sarra’s lute lessons and she is allowed to play with Sarra and to act as a companion to her at various parties and family events. The telling boundary of Alia’s exclusion makes itself felt in the family photograph scene in which Alia rushes unthinkingly to Sarra’s side to stand as part of the family. She is, of course, banished from this family record as not belonging to the strict genealogical relation being documented. The strangeness of Alia’s status is documented here by the confusion caused by her innocent rush to participate in the photograph. The Beys seem neither mortally offended nor incandescent with anger. They merely indicate the inappropriateness of Alia’s presence in the photograph. Alia seems hurt by this exclusion, rushing to her mother’s side but taking solace in the fact that Sidi Ali immediately calls her to have her photograph taken with him and Sarra after the family picture is over. The slippages of tradition and class are here made palpable and it becomes clear to us as spectators that Alia occupies a strangely transient position in relation to the structures of difference and tradition that regulate the lives of the other protagonists. Alia is situated in a kind of between-space. She is permitted to associate with Sarra and to play in her rooms with her despite the assertion of Sarra’s mother that Alia is to stay away from her daughter. Despite the will of the aristocratic mother, an accommodating blind eye is turned to Alia’s association with Sarra by the Beys themselves. Alia is permitted to adopt a transient way of being then, as a result of the Beys’ indulgence. It is the masculinist structure of life in the palace that allows Alia to take up the intermediary spaces she appears to occupy. As we have seen, however, this indulgence prohibits the young Alia from taking up her relation to her mother in terms that might facilitate a mode of female subjectivity. It is only as an adult that Alia is able to return to the palace and work through the strange experience of banishment to the non-spaces of the social structure of the palace to which she was left. The Silences of the Palace seems to find a way of articulating the unspeakable nature of this experience of exceeding the categories of subjectivity, specificity and difference. In so doing, it appears to push against the slippery structure of symbolic representation and discourse.

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The Silences of the Palace, then, points to how it is impossible to separate out aspects of cultural difference from the sexual. In the film’s historicizing treatment of the experiences of women in a particular period of cultural change, it calls attention to how culture and traditions overlook the specificity of the feminine. At the same time, however, it also calls attention to the way that culture and class inflect sexual difference and work to construct the specificity of the subject in relation to dominant cultural paradigms and traditions. This film shows how a feminine cinematics might try to draw on cinematic strategies and techniques to enunciate the complexity of the closely interwoven structures of difference that impact in such a context. As Touria Khannous suggests, this film is a good example of what Ella Shohat has referred to as a ‘cinematic counter-telling’ (Khannous, 2001: 49). A feminine cinematics grounded in countertelling tales of cultural specificity arguably begins to address the complex interrelation of modes of difference that inscribe themselves in, through and alongside gender. The intricacy of the interrelations between modes of difference forms the basis of the narrative in Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple. This film has been heralded as docu-drama, based as it is on the true life tale of two sisters in Tehran who were locked into their parents’ home for eleven years without any opportunity to attend school, play in the streets or live as ordinary children might be expected to do. The film is noteworthy also because the main roles are played by the real-life family members. They participate in Makhmalbaf’s scheme to re-enact their experiences. Beginning with the removal of the girls from their home by the Welfare Department, the film charts the development of Massoumeh and Zarah as they begin to learn to speak and socialize with other children in their new-found freedom. Meanwhile, their father, Ghorban Ali Nederi, discourses at length on questions of honour and tradition, showing himself readily able to blame his blind and rather abusive wife, Azizeh, for the former treatment of his daughters, but also revealing how he himself appears to be trapped by his beliefs. Issues of gender, class, and culture come to bear on the lives of the two young girls in ways that signal the complexity of ideas associated with difference upheld by the Islamic tradition. The film scrutinizes the structure of this tradition, making much metaphorical use of barred doors, locks and the use of the veil and the chador to symbolize the restrictions it places on femininity. Makhmalbaf has suggested that the apple itself is a symbol of how Satan lured Eve with an apple in order to save humanity by enabling people to come into the world and begin


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living (Lehrer, 1999). It is as though with this film she seeks to demonstrate how the liberation of the children can orchestrate and effect the liberation of a culture by constructing more liberal approaches to notions of difference. Throughout The Apple, it is clear that the deprivation suffered by Massoumeh and Zahra has been due to the fact of the femininity. Their father suggests that a girl is like a flower and the sun like a man who is a stranger. If the sun shines on the flower, the flower will wither. It’s the old story of the male and the female, the story of cotton and fire. If the fire gets to the cotton it will immediately make it go up in flame. (Makhmalbaf & Makhmalbaf, 1997: 23) The perspective on femininity he offers is couched in terms of his fundamentalist beliefs and yet he also seems to be aware that he has acted unfairly in maintaining his right to keep the girls locked up. The question of subjectivity, then, is inscribed in the film, firstly, by the foregrounding of the father’s dilemma. His beliefs are challenged, in the first place, by the community of his neighbours who call in the Welfare Department on the grounds of humanity. Secondly, his beliefs are sketched as outmoded and lacking contemporary perspective through the film’s treatment of the newspaper and media coverage of the case. The complexities of this are central to the film’s genesis, in fact, as the family itself appears in this reconstruction of events surrounding the case. This would suggest that the father has been able to take on board some of the criticisms levelled against him and that he is somehow willing to explore the contemporary world in order to overturn the habits that constrain him and his belief system. Thirdly, the film problematizes the unquestioning participation of women within fundamentalist systems by foregrounding the particular cultural resistances of the mother, for whom the release of her daughters seems almost unthinkable. It is made clear that cultural fundamentalism is not circumscribed by masculinity alone. The differences between women such as the girls’ mother and the contemporary women of Tehran who have signed a petition to empower the Welfare Department to intervene are made manifest from the outset. While the cinematic structures seem to comply with the objective rigour required of documentary film, it is nevertheless the case that Makhmalbaf’s political position makes itself clear throughout. This is, perhaps, most clearly the case in the film’s closing scenes in which even the mother ventures outside the

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walls of the family home, suggesting that freedom can be seized by all regardless of their experience and history. The rhetorical freeze-frame at the end of the film, as the mother grasps the apple, points to a politics of hope and possibility. The modes of difference inscribed in the narrative that unfolds in The Apple are manifold and difficult to tease apart. Despite its documentary aspirations, The Apple constructs a counter-telling of its own, seizing on a topical news item and claiming the right to re-stage its main events in order to foreground the most slippery aspects of the cultural politics underpinning its genesis. This mode of film-making is constructed in relation to the lived experience of difference and its manifestations in the (un-)making of subjectivity. Makhmalbaf emphasizes the fundamental disavowal of the feminine that lies at the heart of the narrative but also shows how tradition and culture impact on the tales that become available to cultural subjects. By moving from an opening sequence shot on video and seemingly documenting the actual removal of the girls from their home to a staged reconsideration of events that led up to this removal, the film moves seamlessly between fact and fiction; with the placement of props such as the apple and the icecreams, the film weaves an imaginary path to freedom for the girls that takes place as if in real life, documented by the film as unfolding before our very eyes. The film plays with our willingness to suspend disbelief in order to enable us to imagine the liberation of the girls as a kind of truth made possible through the mechanisms of the film itself. In this context, cinema masquerades as a means to an end. It purports to carry the promise of a narrative resolution that constitutes a political shift. It acts as a bearer of meaning and as a protagonist in the narrative it presents to us. In its seamless blurring of the boundaries between truth and fiction, between life and art, it structures a perspective on narrative events that demands a reading of its enunciative structure as grounded in the lived experience of difference. Cinema is proffered to us as a tool of change, a means of thinking anew in terms of difference and politics. In this sense, it works in terms of what has been analysed here as a feminine cinematics; it points to the way that cinema offers opportunities to restructure the cultural relation to difference by playing with the slippages between truths and fantasies in order to present glimpses of possibilities. The brief film analyses presented here point to how categories of difference broadly defined might be re-imagined by a culture in which sexual difference finds a way of articulating itself. This is not to claim that the specificities of difference are ultimately reducible to the structure of


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sexual difference, but rather to suggest that an acknowledgement of difference arguably makes it thinkable and speakable in ways that are not possible in terms of cultural norms of sameness. The argument presented throughout this book is that the pursuit of a pole of apparently unspeakable difference sets out possible parameters for its representation and thus helps to construct a means of thinking difference. The discussions of films made by women in which issues of the feminine are foregrounded suggests that a feminine cinematics of the sort proposed here acts as a strategic tool for the opening up of a space in which the feminine (and other modes of alterity which inflect it) can begin to be thought. Such films reconstruct our relation to the screen, allowing us as spectators to play an active role in the construction of meaning and political consciousness. They also forge a particularly feminine subject position for the spectator, maintaining patterns of enunciation and address that open up ways of thinking through the question of female spectatorship. A feminine cinematics, then, helps to establish that Irigaray’s work is extremely useful to feminist political attempts to rethink the symbolic category of woman. In feminist film theory, in particular, there is a clear effort to escape from the confines of film analysis and film theory as masculine constructs in which women have little or no opportunity to see themselves as anything other than reflections. Irigaray’s thought seems to represent an interface of sorts between cinema as a rhetorical construct of the symbolic order and the potentiality of cinema as a technology of gender. Irigaray’s critique of the symbolic category of woman draws extensively on the notion of woman’s body as reflective surface. There are clear connections here with the film theory of Mary Ann Doane and others, as we have seen. The flat screen/mirror of masculinist accounts of cinema does not allow for the sort of filmic depth and multi-layeredness that would enable a representation of the feminine to take place. The notion of the screen as a mirror traps women into the reflective function that forms the basis for the symbolic disavowal of the debt to the feminine. By reconceptualizing the screen as a membrane or as a kind of speculum or as the tain of the mirror, it is possible to begin to insinuate woman into the text on her own terms. Moreover, it is possible to rethink modes of reading so that films such as those analysed here can be read in terms of the potential of the feminine in systems of representation. Irigaray’s reading of Plato shows that the maternal feminine allows only for the production and reproduction of the feminine as double or as counterfeit. The analogous relation between Plato’s model of the cave and the cinematic

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situation can be reworked by reference to the strategies outlined in this book, with the result that it becomes possible to theorize the feminine in terms of difference and in different terms. A feminine cinematics may contribute to restoring possibilities for rethinking the feminine strategically. Its mode of reading otherwise is an attempt to show that there is a political validity in struggling with Irigaray’s work at the level of intertextuality in order to place difference at the heart of political engagements with culture.

Notes 1 Reading the Feminine with Irigaray 1. I shall return to these notions below in my consideration of the focus in Irigaray’s work on what she terms parler femme or, in later texts, ‘the sexuation of discourse’. 2. This certainly seems to be the case in her analyses of philosophy and psychoanalysis as examples of patriarchal discourse that disavows the specificity of the feminine (1974/1985a and 1977/1985b). 3. While Irigaray’s early texts might be interpreted as examples of écriture féminine because of the highly poetic style of writing used, it is difficult to see how more recent texts (1990/1993b and 1992/1996) could be categorized in this way. Irigaray’s work is fundamentally not about providing a blueprint for any kind of female/feminine writing. Rather, it outlines the way dominant discourses have repressed and excluded the feminine from any kind of subjective specificity. 4. This is the translation suggested by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke in their translation of This Sex Which Is Not One. 5. Sally Potter’s Orlando (UK, 1993), for example, is an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel (1928). Her screenplay is a representation of Woolf’s novel, just as Woolf’s novel is a fantastical representation of Vita Sackville-West’s life. Potter comments at length in her introduction to Orlando on the process of writing the screenplay for the film: I set about this in the usual ways: reading and re-reading the book, [Woolf’s] other novels and diaries – in fact anything pertaining to Orlando and its genesis (including Woolf’s own sources); then writing and rewriting the treatment, a step outline, and finally successive drafts of the screenplay. I made endless diagrammatic plots to help strip things back to the bone, find the guiding principles, and reconstruct the story from the inside out. ... In the last year of writing, on the advice of my story editor, Walter Donohue, I put the book away entirely and treated the script as something in its own right, as if the book had never existed. By that stage, I had to trust that I knew it well enough not to lean on it anymore; that to be slavish to the book would be a disservice to it; and that just as Virginia Woolf was a writer committed to writing and constantly exploring the form of the novel itself, so I now needed to dedicate myself to the energy of cinema. (Potter, 1993: x) 6. Irigaray’s work in this area has been subject to immense amounts of criticism that tends to focus on the question of essentialism. Schor’s is an excellent article on how such critiques fail to engage with Irigaray at the level of difference (Burke, Schor and Whitford (1994): 57–78). Similarly, Fuss has argued that Irigaray’s apparent essentialism may be seen as a strategic ploy which helps feminists to raise the question of sexual difference in a symbolic order which denies it so consistently (1989). There is not space in this chapter to elaborate my own critique of the grounds upon which Irigaray has been rejected by 197

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feminists. Rather I would prefer to locate my work as stemming from the important reconsiderations of Irigaray’s work and its impact made by theorists such as Burke, Butler, Grosz, Schor and Whitford, whose efforts to examine Irigaray’s work in terms which avoid the trappings of the essentialism debate have enabled feminists to move onto new ground via Irigaray’s thought (Burke, Schor and Whitford (1994); Butler (1990); Grosz (1989); and Whitford (1991)). 7. It is clear here how Irigaray immediately inteprets the paradoxical conclusion that the ‘same’ can only see itself if it has a ‘not-same’ with which to contrast. The masculine logic of the same depends on the existence of an unrecognized other in order to perpetuate its own logic. 8. Within the symbolic order of things, there is little else available to the feminine other than the masquerade. Thus Irigaray’s reappropriation of a term that traditionally delimits and restricts the possibilities of the feminine can be read as an anti-essentialist move: masquerade as the construction of femininity allows femininity to be reworked on its own terms and not by reference to the female body alone. 9. Here, ‘language’ is used in the sense of ‘langage’. As Whitford has made clear, ‘when Irigaray talks about a different language, it is langage she has in mind, a different utilization of the resources available, both lexical and syntactical’ (1991a: 42).

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1. Metz suggests that The cinema-subject is not a child ... Thus, what makes possible the spectator’s absence from the screen – or rather the intelligible unfolding of the film despite that absence – is the fact that the spectator has already known the experience of the mirror (of the true mirror), and is thus able to constitute a world of objects without first having to recognize himself within it. In this respect, the cinema is already on the side of the symbolic (which is only to be expected). (1975: 49) 2. The suggestion here is that the female spectator might be regarded as a concentrated form of the female subject. By using cinema as a microcosm of symbolic mechanisms in this way, it is possible to show how systems of representation and discourse structure gendered subjectivity, and, consequently, to begin to rework them. 3. Doane cites Irigaray (1977) ‘Women’s Exile’, Ideology and Consciousness, 1; Cixous ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ in Marks and De Courtivron (eds) (1980) New French Feminisms; Kofman (1980) ‘Ex: The Woman’s Enigma’, Enclitic, 4(2); and Montrelay (1978) ‘Inquiry into Femininity’, m/f, 1. 4. Smelik deals with a range of films released during the 1980s including A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, Netherlands, 1982); Broken Mirrors (Marleen Gorris, Netherlands, 1984); Dust (Marion Hänsel, Belgium/France, 1985); The Cruel Embrace (Marion Hänsel, Belgium/France, 1987); Bagdad Café (Percy Adlon, US, 1988); The Virgin Machine (Monika Treut, US/W Germany, 1988); and Sweetie (Jane Campion, Australia, 1989). 5. It is interesting, in this context, that the film’s first screening at the Cannes film festival was designated as a ‘women only’ event.

Notes 199 6. For an interesting reading of the film in the context of the British realist tradition, see Alison Butler (2000). 7. See Louise Kaplan,1993.

3 Practising the Feminine: Contexts of Production, Direction and Reception 1. Some of these essays are collected together in To Speak is Never Neutral (1985/2002a). See ‘The Utterance in Analysis’ (95–108); ‘The Setting in Psychoanalysis’ (193–204); ‘The Poverty of Psychoanalysis’ (205–26); and ‘The Limits of Transference’ (237–46). See also ‘The Gesture in Psychoanalysis’ in Sexes and Genealogies (1987/1993c: 91–104). 2. Accurate production budget figures are notoriously difficult to track down. The following information is available in the public domain. Orlando was made on a very limited budget, partially funded in hard currency and partially funded in roubles. The overall budget is estimated at £6.6 million (Wickham, 2001: 30). The Piano had an estimated budget of $7 million, as detailed in interviews available on the special edition DVD. Antonia’s Line was made for approximately £1.5 million (Wickham, 2001: 16). Under the Skin had a very modest budget of £655,000 (Felperin, 1997: 14). Information for The Silences of the Palace, Female Perversions, The Apple and Faithless was not available at the time of writing. 3. The following box-office figures are drawn from www.the-numbers.com and relate predominantly to US figures which are most easily accessible. Orlando grossed $5,289,000 over 164 days in a maximum of 24 theatres. It opened in two theatres, taking $29,462 on its opening weekend. The Piano grossed $40,157,856 over 150 days in a maximum of 523 theatres. It opened in 99 theatres, taking $1,761,691 in the first ten days. Antonia’s Line grossed $4,047,426 over 164 days in a maximum of 73 theatres. It opened in 15 theatres, taking $248,752 in its first ten days. Female Perversions grossed $883,973 over 94 days in a maximum of 33 theatres. It opened in 14 theatres, taking $118,114 in the first 17 days. The Apple grossed $116,758 over 129 days in a maximum of four theatres. It opened in four theatres, taking $15,207 on its opening weekend. Faithless grossed $734,597 in a maximum of 24 theatres. It opened in two theatres, taking $29,462 on its opening weekend. Figures are unavailable on this website for The Silences of the Palace and Under the Skin. BFI information suggests that Under the Skin had grossed £50,000 by May 2003 (Wickham, 2003). In considering these figures, it is essential to take into account that many of these films fared considerably better in Europe than they did in the United States. The Lumiere database of admissions in Europe indicates the number of admissions since 1996 in the 25 countries of the European Union as follows: Orlando – 5128 admissions; The Piano – 5537 admissions; The Silences of the Palace – 46,766 admissions; Antonia’s Line – 1,660,901 admissions; Female Perversions – 153,623 admissions; Under the Skin – 64,341 admissions; The Apple – 44,493 admissions; Faithless – 415,920 admissions. In this set of data, clearly admissions for The Piano and Orlando are not indicative, as these films were released three years before the database collection was initiated.

200 Notes 4. Previously, Sally Potter had made a number of feminist short films and one feature length film: Thriller (UK, 1979); London Story (UK, 1980); The Gold Diggers (UK, 1983); and I am an Ox, I am a Horse, I am a Man, I am a Woman (UK, 1988). Jane Campion had made a number of both short and feature length films: Peel (Aus., 1982); Passionless Moments (Aus., 1983); A Girl’s Own Story (Aus., 1984); After Hours (Aus., 1984); Sweetie (Aus., 1989); and An Angel At My Table (UK/Aus./NZ, 1990). Marleen Gorris is well known for her short films: De stilte rond Christine M. (A Question of Silence) (US, 1982) and Gebroken spiegels (Broken Mirrors) (Netherlands, 1984). She had also made a feature film prior to making Antonia’s Line: The Last Island (Netherlands, 1990). 5. These were Sofie (Denmark/Norway/Sweden, 1992) and Kristin Lavransdatter (Germany/Norway/Sweden, 1995). 6. British Screen was initially approached with a view to including Julie Christie in the lead role. However, concerns about language, dubbing and difficulties ensuing from such an international cast meant that this casting choice was abandoned. Eventually, British Screen agreed to provide funding as part of a reciprocal agreement with the Dutch Film Fund on the understanding that the latter would put an equivalent sum into British film at a future date, thereby ensuring that more than one film would be made (Anonymous, 1996: 4–5). 7. Orlando was distributed in the United States through Sony Picture Classics. It was also distributed in the United Kingdom (through Electric Pictures), Japan (Shibata Organization Inc.), the Netherlands (Concorde Films), Brazil (Europa Carat), Argentina (Film Arte) and Spain (JMM Invest SL). The Piano was distributed principally through Miramax, but also in Sweden (through Buena Vista International), Spain (Cinemussy), Japan (Shibata Organization Inc.) and Argentina (Transmundo Films). The Silences of the Palace was distributed through Capitol Films in both the United Kingdom and the United States, together with Zeitgeist, and in Holland (Fortissimo), France (Amorces Diffusion), Spain (Cine Company SA), the Netherlands (Cinemien) and Japan (Espace Sarou). Antonia’s Line was distributed through First Look International from the United States and also in Japan (Asmik Ace Entertainment), the Czech Republic (Asociace Ceských Filmových Klubu), Spain (Golem Distribución) and Argentina (Líder Films). Female Perversions was distributed through October Films and Lakeshore Entertainment in the United States and in Spain through Manga Films. Under the Skin was distributed in the United Kingdom through BFI Films and also in the United States (Arrow Entertainment), Argentina (Artkino Pictures), Italy (BIM Distribuzione), Germany (Kairos Filmverleih), France (MK2 Diffusion) and Canada (Mongrel Media). The Apple was distributed in the United Kingdom through Artificial Eye and in France (MK2 Diffusion), Germany (Kairos Filmverleih) and Argentina (Primer Plano Film Group SA). Finally, Faithless was distributed in the United States through IDP Distribution, Samuel Goldwyn Films, Bedford Entertainment Inc. and Fireworks Pictures, in Sweden (SF Film), Norway (SF Norge A/S), the Netherlands (C-Films), Argentina (Cine 3), Poland (Gutek Film), Spain (Manga Films, Sherlock Media SL and Tot Media SL) and France (Opening Distribution). 8. Amongst the most notable achievements for each of these films are the following: Orlando won the award for Best Young Film at the European Film Awards in 1993, as well as the Elvira Notari prize at the Venice Film Festival and a BAFTA for Best Make-Up Artist; The Piano won American Academy

Notes 201 Awards (Oscars) for Best Actress in a Leading Role, Best Actress in a Supporting Role and Best Screenplay, as well as numerous awards in a range of categories from BAFTA, the Australian Film Institute and the Golden Globe Awards amongst others. Campion also won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, becoming the only woman ever to do so. The Silences of the Palace was awarded the Sutherland Trophy by the British Film Institute (1995), as well as, in 1994, the Camera D’Or award at Cannes, the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Award at Toronto, and the Tanit D’Or at Carthage. Antonia’s Line won an American Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film, thereby making Marleen Gorris the only woman ever to have won an Oscar for directing a feature film, as well as numerous other awards at the Netherlands and Toronto Film Festivals. Female Perversions was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival. Under the Skin won the award for Best New British Feature Film at the Edinburgh Festival in 1997, as well as the FIPRESCI International Critics’ Award at Toronto. The Apple won The Sutherland Trophy awarded by the BFI in 1998, as well as the FIPRESCI prize at the Locarno International Film Festival and awards at Buenos Aires as well as elsewhere. Faithless was nominated for the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 2000 and won awards at a range of festivals including Uruguay, Saint Jordi, Norway and Flanders.

4 Fantasy and the Feminine: Female Perversions and Under the Skin 1. Symbolic castration, of course, in the psychoanalytic account of the emergence of subjectivity, is crucial to avoid psychosis.

5 Screening Parler Femme: Silences of the Palace, Antonia’s Line and Faithless 1. There are many examples of the mother–son relationship to be found within Western religious traditions. For example, the countless representations of the Virgin Mary with Jesus in Christianity. 2. For further discussion, see Chapter 1. 3. Discours is defined as a statement uttered in the first person in the present. In discours, the speaker is foregrounded. Histoire is a statement uttered as though it is in the past, in the third person. There is no sense of the presence of the storyteller. Metz refers to these terms in his discussion of voyeurism in the cinema. 4. For Metz, this lends authority to the spectatorial fantasy of the production of meaning. 5. The screenplay for this film is not yet published, and the transcription here is my own, based on the subtitles in the English version of the film. 6. See the discussion of this film in Chapter 2 on mediation for further discussion of this idea. 7. These moments function in a similar way to the angelic ending in Orlando, which is discussed in Chapter 6. 8. Whitford provides a very useful overview of the sources of Irigaray’s notion of the imaginary in this chapter, sketching the debts not only to Lacan and

202 Notes his mirror stage, but also to Freud’s work on the ego and narcissism, to the phenomenological philosophies of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, to notions of the elemental in Bachelard’s writings and to the social and political revisioning of the imaginary in the work of Althusser and Castoriadis. 9. Lacan, for instance, draws a parallel between the interrelation of the real, symbolic and imaginary orders and the geometrical problem of the Borromean knot (see Lacan, 1988c). The imaginary and the symbolic realms are intricately bound up with each other, in a way that is evoked by the metaphor of the magician’s rings: they cannot be separated one from the other but depend on the other for their wholeness. 10. The enunciation here inflects the way in which the film mediates a notion of an ethical relation between men and women. 11. See http://www.sweden.se/templates/FactSheet____4400.asp accessed 31 July 2003.

6


1. The full list of inter-titles is as follows: ‘1600 Death’; ‘1610 Love’; ‘1650 Poetry’; ‘1700 Politics’; ‘1750 Society’; ‘1850 Sex’; ‘Birth’. The inter-titles come at points within the film that represent the boundaries between historical periods. Yet, it seems important that the inter-titles are relevant to both the sequences of film that precede them and those that follow. The ramifications of this will be examined in relation to the spatio-temporal organization of the text below. 2. The ‘femininity’ of the position described here corresponds to the position to which the feminine is relegated by masculine theories of the same according to Irigaray. The feminine is defined in terms of the masculine in order to affirm the position of the masculine as the dominant sex. 3. Orlando’s change of sex is represented to us in a distinctly keyhole-shaped mirror. There are connections here to the notion of the primal scene. In the psychoanalytic account, the primal scene is often cast as the moment of realization of sexual difference and its implications. Usually the primal scene is experienced furtively. 4. Mental Health Net (http://www.cmhc.com/disorders) gives the following definition of a panic attack: A discrete period of intense fear or discomfort, in which four (or more) of the following symptoms develop abruptly and reach a peak within ten minutes: 1) palpitations, pounding heart, or accelerated heart rate; 2) sweating; 3) trembling or shaking; 4) sensations of shortness of breath or smothering; 5) feeling of choking; 6) chest pain or discomfort; 7) nausea or abdominal distress; 8) feeling dizzy, unsteady, light-headed, or faint; 9) derealization (feelings of unreality) or depersonalization (being detached from oneself); 10) fear of losing control or going crazy; 11) fear of dying; 12) paresthesis (numbness or tingling sensations); 13) chills or hot flushes. 5. Irigaray conjures up the notion of ‘an overture of a future’ in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1987/1993a: 19). 6. The implication is that a gain in one area entails a loss in another. Orlando gains a daughter and, as a result, loses her rights to the property. 7. That this image is the image seen through the daughter’s video camera is made clear by the screenplay. The image is only revealed to the spectator by means of the daughter’s point of view/phantasy.

Notes 203 8. Irigaray uses ‘Belief Itself’ to make a full deconstructive reading of Freud’s account of the fort-da game, in which she claims that the little boy’s game depicts a desire to return to the womb, to return to the other side of the veil of the bed (womb) (1987/1993c: 31). This may be seen as a kind of phantasied death in birth, as a desire to return to origins. 9. Irigaray’s texts are often very evocative and poetic in their style and this entails a readerly response that seeks to engage with what is written in an attempt to attribute and produce textual meanings in a process that seems to have a great deal in common with the psychoanalytic concept of the transference. The transferential relationship of Irigaray’s reader to her writings is a key element for the way the (often slippery) meanings of her texts can be drawn out. 10. The film’s opening sequence is edited as follows: ‘Title: ORLANDO; [cut to wide shot of Orlando pacing beneath an oak tree.] VOICEOVER: There can be no doubt about his sex – despite the feminine appearance that every young man of the time aspires to. And there can be no doubt about his upbringing. Good food, education, a nanny, loneliness and isolation. And because this is England [cut to close-up of ORLANDO] Orlando would therefore seem destined to have his portrait on the wall and his name in the history books. But when he – ORLANDO: -that is, I – VOICEOVER: came into the world, he was looking for something else. Though heir to a name which meant power, land and property, surely when Orlando was born, it wasn’t privilege he sought but company. [Cut to titles: starring TILDA SWINTON] (Potter, 1993: 3). (This transcription system is based on the screenplay for the film (Potter, 1993) and on my own transcription of the editing sequences of the film.) 11. It is during this opening sequence that Swinton’s looks to camera make their first appearance in the text. The implications of these looks to camera for the construction of patterns of identification and spectatorship in this text will be discussed below. 12. A slow but regular progression through 10-, 40- and 50-year intervals is evident from the inter-titles during the ‘masculine’ half of the film, whilst there is merely one leap across 100 years preceding a mighty leap into the present day depicted in the ‘feminine’ section of the film. 13. See the detailed discussion of the editing that follows. 14. This is made more apparent, of course, when the bailiffs return in the next section of the film to tell Orlando that she has no right to her property unless she has a son (Potter, 1993: 56). 15. See the discussion on envelopes that follows below. Irigaray argues that woman is often restricted within socio-symbolic practices to the role of vessel or container or envelope for the masculine and masculine desire. She argues that it is important for women to find a way of enveloping themselves in terms which do not depend on the status of the female body as receptacle.

7

Riddles of the Feminine in The Piano

1. Ada’s voicelessness and Stewart’s removal of her piano constitute instances of symbolic castration that appear to trap Ada within femininity as it is traditionally defined within psychoanalytic thought.

204

Notes

2. Laplanche and Pontalis dispute one of Freud’s central (and apparently) structuring arguments that the primal scene cannot be said to have definitely taken place and that it is the triggering action of the primal scene that is important for psychoanalytic investigation: in the analysis of the ‘Wolf Man’ ... Freud ... seeks to establish the reality of the scene of observation of parental intercourse by reconstituting it in its minutest detail. When his argument appears to have been shattered by Jung’s thesis that such scenes are merely phantasies constructed retrospectively by the adult subject, he still persists in maintaining that perception has furnished the child with clues and – even more important – he introduces the notion of primal phanatsy. (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988: 332) Also

3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

Should we look upon the primal scene as an actually experienced event or as a pure phantasy? Freud debated this problem with Jung, he debated it in his own mind, and it is raised at several points in the case history of the Wolf Man. However varied Freud’s proposed solutions may seem, they invariable fall within certain bounds. In the first version of The Wolf Man, where he is concerned to establish the reality of the primal scene, he is already laying stress on the fact that it is only through a deferred action (nachträglich) that it is grasped and interpreted by the child. At the other end of the scale, when he comes to emphasize the role of retrospective phantasies (Zurückphantasien), he still maintains that reality has at least provided certain clues (noises, animal, coitus etc.). (335) See also Laplanche and Pontalis, 1968. See chapter one for further discussion of the langage, langue, parole distinction and the debate around into which of these Irigaray’s parler-femme falls. See Ragland-Sullivan, 1986. I am grateful to Susanna at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and to Jim Swan at the University of Buffalo for drawing my attention to this article and for supplying me with copies. Later in this article, there is a detailed explanation of the way in which Ada’s sign language was constructed by Holly Hunter and her sign language trainer, Darlene Allen: Darlene said that it was at first difficult to get away from the influence of ASL signs, so she turned to books of sign language from Russia, China, Sweden , and other countries to begin the process. Using the syntax and rules of ASL as a basis, Darlene began to combine the handshapes and movements of these different sign languages together to form new signs for the film. ... Darlene also decided to use the British fingerspelling alphabet. For further discussion see this volume on ‘The Symbolic’: 439–41 and on ‘Symbolism’: 442–5. The piano has been variously described as a symbol for Ada’s physical being (Purkiss, 1995: 1); as the means by which Ada communicates and/or articulates her subjectivity (Purkiss, 1995: 3); as the source of the film’s ‘haunting images’, as a potent symbol of Victorian gentility and as a metonymic signifier of the sea and, hence, of the maternal unconscious (Izod, 1996: 123); as a fetishistic prop

Notes 205 to Ada’s self-identity, the object through which Ada interacts with the world, a mirror to Ada’s subjectivity, as a symbol of departure, as merely a fetishistic object, as a non-fetishistic vehicle for creative expression, as Baines’s fetishistic object, standing in for Ada’s body, as a model of attachment to an object that provides a defence against desire of/for the other, as one of a string of metonymic substitutions for Baines and as a ball and chain reminder of Ada’s lack (Allen, 1995); as a means of accessing a time of bliss, a symbol of nurturance and sustenance (by virtue of its apparent relation with the table as symbol of Ada’s mother), an externalized concrete representation of the heroine’s ‘false self’ and as a mediator between the self and the object-world (Eckman-Jadow, 1995); as a representative of Ada’s fierce resolve (Bruzzi, 1995: 266); and as a symbol of European bourgeois culture (Dyson, 1995: 268). Similarly, Ada’s music has been described as more than a signifier of verbal communication, as primarily linked with the erotic and as a moment in the process of communication (Purkiss, 1995); as a substitute for Ada’s voice and an effort to put herself in touch with her unconscious (Izod, 1996: 123); as an expression of the passage to places which cannot be seized upon or owned (Gillett, 1995: 285); and as a paradoxical representation of the speechlessness of its owner (Gordon, 1996: 201). 8. Interestingly, this scene is not described by the screenplay. 9. For a useful collection of readings on the meaning and status of the letter in this tale, see Muller and Richardson (eds), 1988.

Filmography Antonia’s Line (Antonia), dir. Marleen Gorris, prod. Antonia’s Line International, Netherlands/UK/Belgium, 1995, 102 minutes. The Apple (Sib), dir. Samira Makhmalbaf, prod. Hubert Bals Fund; MK2 Productions; Makhmalbaf Productions, Iran/France, 1998, 86 minutes. Faithless (Trolösa), dir. Liv Ullmann, prod. Classic SRL; Nordisk Film & TV-Fond; Norsk Rikskringkasting; Radiotelevisione Italiana; SVT Drama; Svensk Filmindustri; Swedish Film Institute; Yleisradio; Zweites Deutsches Ferhsehen, Sweden/Italy/Germany/Finland/Norway, 2000, 154 minutes. Female Perversions, dir. Susan Streitfeld, prod. Degeto Films; Kinowelt Film Production; Mindy Affrime; TransAtlantic Entertainment, USA/Germany, 1996, 119 minutes. Orlando, dir. Sally Potter, prod. Adventure Pictures; British Screen; Euro Script Fund; Lenfilm Studio; Mikado Films; Rio; Sigma, UK/Russia/France/Italy/ Netherlands, 1992, 93 minutes. The Piano, dir. Jane Campion, prod. Australian Film Commission; CiBy 2000; New South Wales Film and Television Office, Australia/New Zealand/France, 1993, 121 minutes. The Silences of the Palace (Saimt el Qusur), dir. Moufida Tlatli, prod. Cinétéléfilms; Mat Films, France/Tunisia, 1994, 116 minutes. Tank Girl, dir. Rachel Talalay, prod. MGM; Trilogy Entertainment Group; United Artists, USA, 1995, 104 minutes. Under the Skin, dir. Carine Adler, prod. British Film Institute; Channel 4 Films; Merseyside Film Production Fund; Rouge Films; Strange Dog Productions, UK, 1997, 82 minutes.

206

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Index Note: where ‘n.’ is signalled after a page number, it refers to the number of the relevant note absence, 2, 5, 36, 38, 47, 49, 63, 188 Adler, Carine, 3–4, 54, 66, 71, 73, 77, 93 alienation, 20, 55–6, 172 alterity, 5, 8, 15, 22, 24, 159, 172, 178, 188, 195 Althusser, Louis, 33, 202 n.9 angel, the, 26, 46, 53, 126, 136–41, 183 Antonia’s Line, 3, 6, 52–4, 58, 66–9, 72, 99, 114–18, 185, 199 n.2, 199 n.3, 200 n.4, 200 n.7, 201 n.8 The Apple, 3, 6, 66, 69, 72, 75, 192–4, 199 n.2, 199 n.3, 200 n.7, 201 n.8 artwork women’s, 64 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 146–7, see also chronotope Baudry, Jean-Louis, 33–4, 38, 77, see also film theory: apparatus theory becoming subject, 87, 129, 140 Benjamin, Walter, 137–9 body, female the, 2, 8, 10–11, 14, 16, 21, 27, 29–30, 41, 45–7, 56–7, 80–1, 89–92, 96–7, 107, 109, 112–13, 157, 167, 176, 190, 195, 198 n.8, 203 n.14, 205 n.7 Braidotti, Rosi, 8, 80–1, 86, 91, 97, 149 breast, the, 30, 91–2, 96 Butler, Alison, 2, 44–5, 50, 93–4, 96, 199 n.6 Butler, Judith, 91 Campion, Jane, 4, 15, 59, 69, 71–3, 155, 182, 201 n.8 capitalism, 34 castration, 21, 28, 37, 78, 83, 164, 166–7

symbolic, 92, 95–6, 98, 157, 162, 172, 201 n.1, 203 n.1 Chapman, Jan, 67, 73 chronotope, the, 146–7, 151 cinema as an apparatus, 6, 33–4, 41, 43, 52, 81, 104 camera-work, 12, 15, 30, 34, 51, 52, 57, 66, 104, 112, 119, 121, 137, 140–1, 150, 161, 179, 190 as chronotope, 146–7, 151 classical Hollywood, 33–5 consumption of, 12, 32, 50, 61, 65 costume, 29, 30, 54, 91, 94, 143–5, 151 diegesis, 12, 14, 58, 113, 136, 143–5, 147, 149, 151, 162, 169, 171, 179 direction, 3, 12, 61, 62, 70–4, 76, 184, 187 distribution, 62, 65–70, 200 n.7 editing, 6, 12, 21, 49, 66, 71, 142, 143, 145, 147, 150–1 experimental, 14, 64, 186 flashback, see separate entry framing, 30, 51, 54, 97, 112, 119, 165 freeze-frame ending, 72, 76, 194 Hollywood, 14, 29, 31, 66, see also cinema: classical Hollywood independent, 3, 4, 31, 66, 69 as an institution, 6, 12, 32–5, 43, 165 inter-titles, see separate entry jump cut, 54 lighting, 54, 97 screen, see separate entry soundtrack, 12, 57, 123, 136 as technology of gender, 195 voiceover, 72, 76, 94, 95, 108, 118, 119, 121, 122, 203 n.9 woman’s film, the, 37, 39–40

217

218 Index civil rights, 24 Cixous, Hélène, 2, 9, 13, 198 n.3 class, 7, 17, 42, 39, 65, 93, 108, 190–2 commodity, 9, 18–19, 29, 36, 49, 84, 107, 108, 156, 182 Constable, Catherine, 14, 15, 86–7 corporeality, 18, 91, 94, 103, 109, 190 death drive, the, 6, 27–8, 125–30, 136, 138–41, 159, 163 deconstruction, 9, 11, 14, 17, 24, 35, 49, 89, 91, 141, 150, 180, 203 n.7 de Lauretis, Teresa, 42–3, 54 Derrida, Jacques, 45, 47 desire, 3, 6, 24, 25, 29, 38, 42, 55, 78–9, 83, 86–7, 96, 103, 109, 112, 118, 120, 122–3, 127, 129, 139, 205 n.7 economy of, 33, 158, 181–2 female/feminine, 10, 11, 22, 81, 85, 88–90, 92, 93, 98, 116, 128, 155–60, 162, 163, 167, 176, 180–2, 189 lesbian, 53, 81, 88, 90, 91 male/masculine, 20, 30, 56, 77, 81, 88, 97, 104, 107, 120, 134, 203 n.14 Oedipal, 33, 173 Deutscher, Penelope, 8, 187–8 difference cultural, 187–8, 192 economic, 188, see also class irreducible, 17, 24, 36, 46, 187, 188 sexual, 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 13–15, 17–18, 20, 24–6, 32, 36, 38, 40–1, 43, 46, 48, 62, 78–83, 86, 88, 102–3, 115, 127, 130–6, 138–9, 148, 159, 166, 172, 183, 186–95, 197 n.6, 202 n.3 Diotima, 47, 52 disavowal, 2, 9, 15, 21, 26, 31, 52, 80, 86, 91, 95, 96, 97, 107, 120, 179, 182, 186, 194, 195 discourse, 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 17, 18, 20–3, 28–30, 33, 38, 40, 47, 48, 52, 53, 55, 56, 59, 62, 78–83, 89, 91–3, 95–6, 99, 102, 104–6, 111, 115, 123, 130, 131, 136, 140, 141, 143, 152, 158, 170, 175, 176, 183, 184, 188, 191, 197 n.1–3, 198 n.2

divine, the, 26–7, 137–8, 146, 183, 188 Doane, Mary Ann, 13, 38–40, 85, 144, 195, 198 n.3 écriture féminine, 2, 9–11, 197 n.3 enunciation, 2, 3, 6, 11, 15, 21–3, 48–57, 59, 62, 88, 102–5, 117–24, 195, 202 n.10 essentialism, 8, 197 n.6 ethics, 5, 22, 24, 26, 46–8, 62, 100, 115, 122, 133–6, 153, 158, 159, 202 n.10, see also Irigaray, Luce: An Ethics of Sexual Difference ethnicity, 7, 65, 189 exchange, 6, 9, 14, 18–19, 23, 26, 35, 36, 42, 46, 51, 98, 99, 103–4, 113, 117, 118, 123, 131, 134–9, 148, 156, 158–9, 171, 176–7, 181–3, 184, 187 fairy tale, 53–4, 101, 114, 143 Faithless, 3, 6, 50–2, 66, 72–4, 99, 119–24, 185, 199 n.2, 199 n.3, 200 n.7, 201 n.8 fantasy, 3, 6, 45, 49, 50–3, 55, 59, 72, 76, 79–81, 87, 89–93, 114, 117, 119–22, 139, 141, 151, 185–6 film and, 5, 6, 77–9, 94, 104–5, 118, 123, 126, 141, 151, 161, 186, 201 n.4 primal scene, 78, 87, 161–8, 202 n.3, 204 n.2 secondary, 78 seduction, 78 unconscious, 6, 78, 89, 139 female genealogy, 3, 11, 23–4, 62, 99–102, 105–18, 137, 155, 173–4, 177 female morphology, 14, 180 Female Perversions, 3, 4, 5, 55–8, 66, 69, 71, 72, 77, 85, 88–93, 94, 199 n.2, 199 n.3, 200 n.7, 201 n.8 feminine, the alterity of, 8, 19, 195 burial/disavowal of, 9, 11, 14, 16–17, 20, 23, 31, 48, 52, 80, 84, 90, 100, 107, 120, 172, 175, 178, 194 as death, 128, 132, 159 déréliction of, 80

Index 219 feminine, the – continued as envelope, 153–4 as excess, 20 fantasy and, 6, 45, 54, 59, 77–98, 123, 186 female genealogy and, 14, 23, 59, 101–2 gesture and, 76 and the imaginary, 9, 130, 172, 185 interiority of, 71 as lack, 2, 5 language and, 10–11 as mirror to the masculine, 17, 18, 134, 159 mother–daughter relation and, 23, 30, 59, 100, 139 as repressed, 21, 24, 99, 114, 158, 161, 178 space-time and, 25, 114, 146–9 specificity of, 2, 6, 16, 21, 32, 180, 192 as specular, 35, 84, 87, 97 as unspeakable, 62, 105, 132, 154 feminism, 4, 39, 43, 44, 45, 72, 73, 93, 125, 162, 164, 168 ‘girl power’, 3, 28–31 post-feminism, 4, 28–31 see also French feminism fetishism, 30, 38–40, 77, 167, 204 n.7, 205 n.7 film-form, 3, 6, 57–9, 106, 142, 185 filmmaking practice, 64, 67, 76 women’s, 44, 62, 65, 66, 68, 70, 73–5 film theory apparatus theory, 12, 32, 33–5, 36, 39, 77, 79 authorship, 1, 102, 124, 186 feminist, 2–4, 6, 13, 37, 45, 77–9, 195 the gaze, 3, 30, 33–40, 54, 57, 59, 64, 111, 153, 155, 161, 165–6, 179, 189 spectatorship, 1, 3–6, 13, 30, 32–60, 61, 65, 72, 78, 79, 88, 90–5, 102–4, 107, 111–13, 116–18, 122–6, 128, 134, 136, 138, 139, 141–5, 150–4, 155–7, 161–8, 174, 176, 179, 186, 187, 190,

191, 195, 198 n.1, 201, n.4, 202 n.6, 203 n.10 flashback, 6, 50, 58, 72, 76, 106, 108, 111–14, 116, 118, 119, 121, 189 French feminism, 2, 38, 188 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 23, 33, 37, 78, 82, 83, 101, 127, 128, 129, 130, 138, 202 n.8 fort-da game, 63, 203 n.7 The Wolf Man, 164–7, 204 n.2 see also fetishism; hysteria; Oedipus complex; primal scene; psychoanalysis gesture, 5, 47, 61–76, 119, 176, 199 n.1 Gorris, Marleen, 4, 53, 71, 73, 117, 200 n.4, 201 n.8 heterosexuality, 14, 15, 79, 91, 95 radical heterosexuality, 81, 91 homosexuality, 19, 81, 91, see also desire: lesbian; love: of the same hysteria, 21, 39, 63 identification cinematic, 6, 33, 34, 38, 41, 42, 54–7, 81, 117, 156, 203 n.10 ideology, 33–5, 42, 55, 79, 104 imaginary, the, 15, 34, 77, 80, 103, 113, 127, 129–31, 165–7, 172, 202 n.8, 202 n.9 female/feminine, 3, 6, 9, 12, 25, 50, 81, 91, 94–8, 103–4, 114, 118, 119–24, 139, 170–2, 185, 194, 201 n.8 interiority, 15, 50, 71, 72, 76, 108, 148 inter-titles, 12, 50, 126, 133, 142, 152, 202 n.1, 203 n.11 Irigaray, Luce Antigone, 23, 114, 121, 128 ‘Belief Itself’, 138, 203 n.7 Between East and West, 187 An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 26, 48, 62, 134, 153 hom(m)osexuality, 19, 46, 99 i love to you: Sketch for a Possible Felicity in History, 24, 26 interval, 5, 26, 46, 183 masquerade, see separate entry mediation, see separate entry

220

Index

Irigaray, Luce – continued mimesis, see separate entry morphology, 14, 180 parler femme (speaking (as) woman), see separate entry proximity, 13, 22, 38, 85–6, 144, 169, 180 recognition, 15, 24, 26, 153, 159 space-time, see separate entry specula(riza)tion, 17, 18–20, 88, 97, 104 Speculum of the Other Woman, 15 This Sex Which Is Not One, 10, 13, 15, 83, 197 n.4 two lips, the, 180 utopianism, 23, 24, 26, 49, 120, 155, 156, 172, 188 woman-to-woman relation, see woman wonder, 31, 47, 48, 51, 123, 135, 188 Islamic tradition, the, 192 jouissance, 135, 141 Kaplan, E. Ann, 40, 41 Kaplan, Louise, 4, 71, 88, 199 n.7 Kristeva, Julia, 2, 9 Lacan, Jacques, 8, 9, 33, 34, 77, 78, 80, 127, 129, 130, 166, 171, 172, 183, 201 n.8, 202 n.9 mirror stage, see psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan and the mirror stage language, 2, 3, 6, 10–13, 17, 21–3, 29, 40, 53, 59, 62, 80, 93, 102–5, 109, 113, 127, 131, 155, 168–73, 174–7, 178, 183, 185, 198 n.9 langage, 10, 102, 103, 198 n.9, 204 n.3 langue, 10, 102, 103, 204 n.3 parole, 10, 102, 204 n.3 semiotics, 45, 174, 176 syntax, 21, 22, 177, 183, 204 n.5 Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, Jean Bertrand, 78–80, 87, 177, 178, 204 n.2 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 18 logocentrism, see phallogocentrism

look-to-camera, 12, 50, 72, 126, 142, 152, 153, 154, 203 n.10 loss, 56, 63, 80, 91, 95–7, 109, 113, 129, 136, 145, 202 n.5 love, 26, 28, 48, 51, 73, 98, 133–6, 160, 162 of the same, 81, 87, 91, 113 madness, 3, 4, 96, 117 magical realism, 52–4, 72, 114, 117, 118 Makhmalbaf, Samira, 3, 4, 66, 75, 192–4 masculine, the, 17–19, 23, 25, 35–9, 82, 84, 86, 101, 107, 128, 131, 132, 134, 143, 144, 146–9, 158, 159, 162, 190, 198 n.7, 202 n.2, 203 n.14 masochism masquerade, 3, 5, 14, 20, 21, 31, 37–9, 40, 56, 81, 82–8, 92, 93–8, 120, 125, 131, 142–5, 149, 150, 164, 176, 194, 198 n.8, see also mimesis maternal, the, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 30, 36, 39, 80, 90, 91, 92, 94–102, 106, 111, 114, 115, 121, 123, 129, 136–8, 146, 148, 149, 155, 160, 167, 171, 173, 187, 190, 195, 204 n.7 Mayne, Judith, 5, 32, 43, 45, 46, 48, 79 mediation, 3, 5, 6, 24, 26, 32–60, 61, 100, 115, 120, 123, 138–40, 176, 177, 201 n.6 mucous, the, 46–7 melancholia, 91, 94–7 memory, 46, 51, 52, 58, 71, 89, 90, 92, 96, 111, 114, 116, 119, 121, 159, 164 menstruation, 56, 92, 109 Metz, Christian, 33–8, 77, 104, 123, 165, 198 n.1, 201 n.3, 201 n.4 mimesis, 3, 5, 14, 20, 81, 83–4, 85, 87, 90, 91, 92, 97, 132, 142–4, 150, 157, see also masquerade mirror, the, 19, 34, 35–7, 43, 44, 46, 84–7, 89, 97, 104, 110, 130, 134, 151, 156, 195, 198 n.1, 202 n.3, 205 n.7 feminine as tain, 86–7, 195

Index 221 mise-en-scène, 44, 54, 57, 78, 96, 145, 161, 166 mother, the, 4, 11, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30, 52–9, 63, 64, 70, 71, 72, 74, 80, 81, 88, 89, 91, 92–118, 121, 123, 127, 129, 136, 137, 139, 146, 148, 160, 161, 168, 182, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 201 n.1, 205 n.7 mother–daughter relation, the, 11, 23, 52, 59, 71, 91, 96, 99–106, 111, 114–18, 160, 168–83 multiculturalism, 7, 188 multiplicity, 13, 28–30, 86, 166 Mulvey, Laura, 33–40, 57, 77, 109, 112 mythology, 100, 101, 114, 118, 174 Antigone, see Irigaray, Luce: Antigone Clytemnestra, 114 Demeter and Persephone, 100, 114 Jocasta, 23, 114 nachträglichkeit, 164–7, see also primal scene: deferred action narcissism, 36, 56, 81, 202 n.8 primary, 81, 91, 94 secondary, 81, 90 Oedipus complex, the, 14, 23, 26, 33, 35–7, 77, 78, 82, 91, 94, 96, 97, 146, 156, 160, 164, 169, 173 Orlando, 3, 6, 12, 25, 59, 66, 67, 68, 71, 72, 74, 85, 124, 125–54, 185, 197 n.5, 199 n.2, 199 n.3, 200 n.7, 200 n.8, 201 n.7 other, the, 5, 22, 24, 26, 36, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 56, 62, 83, 85, 102, 103, 120, 123, 135, 138, 146, 156, 157, 159, 177, 178, 205 n.7 parler femme (speaking (as) woman), 6, 9, 11, 22, 23, 25, 53, 62, 98, 99–123, 155, 172, 176, 177, 190, 197 n.1, 204 n.3 parody, 5, 57, 84, 93, 94 patriarchy, 8, 23, 24, 31, 35, 36, 40, 42, 43, 48, 55, 56, 85, 88, 101, 106, 107, 109, 111, 114, 115, 117, 132, 133, 156, 169, 175, 188, 189, 197 n.2

phallic mother, 29, 168, 169 phallo(go)centrism, 11, 12, 16, 84, 86, 148 phallus, the, 18, 26, 39, 41, 77, 166, 167, 182 The Piano, 3, 6, 14, 59, 66, 67, 69, 71–4, 124, 155–83, 185, 199 n.2, 199 n.3, 200 n.7, 200 n.8 Plato, 47, 195 allegory of the cave, 86–7, 195 pleasure, 4, 6, 32, 33–46, 48–58, 63–5, 88, 90, 117, 125, 126, 138, 142, 161, 163, 181 unpleasure, 65, 163 plenitude, 38, 80, 95, 129 politics of the feminine, 106, 186 reading against the grain, 6, 42, 57, 79, 104, 155, 161–3, 186 textual, 1, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 28, 59, 88, 186, 187 post-feminism, see feminism postmodernism, 28, 29, 31, 149 Potter, Sally, 4, 25, 59, 67, 71, 72, 74, 75, 125, 126, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 152–4, 197 n.5, 200 n.4 praticable, la (the scene of psychoanalysis), 61, 62, 65, 68, 70, 74, 76, 199 n.1 primal scene, 78, 87, 161–8, 202 n.3, 204 n.2 deferred action, 164, 167, 204 n.2, see also nachträglichkeit proximity, see Irigaray, Luce: proximity psychoanalysis, 2, 5, 6, 8, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 21, 23, 27, 32, 33, 36, 37, 40, 41, 61–4, 72, 77–82, 88, 91, 95, 99, 103, 119, 120, 125–30, 134, 143, 146, 155, 157, 161, 163, 164, 165, 167, 169, 171, 172, 174, 177, 178, 182, 197 n.2, 199 n.1, 201 n.1, 202 n.3, 203 n.8, 203 n.1, 204 n.2, 204 n.5 castration, see separate entry ‘dark continent’ of, 11, 23, 41 death drive, see separate entry fantasy, see separate entry fetishism, see separate entry

222

Index

psychoanalysis – continued fort-da game, see Freud, Sigmund: fort-da game Lacan, Jacques: and the law of the father, 23, 127, 132; and the mirror stage, 34, 129, 130, 202 n.8; see also Lacan, Jacques Oedipus complex, see separate entry penis-envy, 56 polymorphous perversity, 94, 96 repression, see separate entry setting or ‘scene’ of, see la praticable unconscious, the, see separate entry voyeurism, 34, 38, 40, 42, 77, 165, 201 n.3 see also Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques realism, 54, 93–4, 116, 118, 199 n.6 magical, 52–4, 72, 114, 117, 118 representation, 1, 5, 11, 12, 14–18, 20–31, 34–5, 38, 40–2, 44, 47–9, 52, 54, 56–9, 76, 79, 84–8, 90, 91, 93, 95, 98, 100–2, 104, 105, 116, 120, 123, 130, 134, 139, 140, 141, 143, 146, 147, 152, 155–8, 160, 162–3, 165–9, 171, 173, 176, 178, 181, 184, 186, 187, 191, 195, 197 n.5, 198 n.2, 201 n.1, 205 n.7 repression, 2, 9, 18, 20–4, 29, 80, 89, 91, 99, 101, 112, 114, 122, 130, 161, 183, 197 n.3 Riviere, Joan, 82, see also masquerade sameness, 19–20, 27, 37, 80, 103, 104, 129, 134, 188, 195, 198 n.7, 202 n.2 a priori of the same, 18, 36, 122 economy of, 11, 83–4, 97, 99 see also love: of the same de Saussure, Ferdinand, 10, 102 screen, the, 12, 42–6, 48–50, 55, 58–9, 68, 85–7, 137, 151–4, 195, 198 n.1 as membrane, 45–50, 59, 87, 151, 154, 195 as mirror, 33–9, 43, 44, 151 self-harm, 56, 92

sexuality, 2, 3, 29, 40, 78, 79, 81, 85, 164 female, 4, 5, 29–30, 36, 41, 88–91, 96–7, 134, 148, 164, 189 see also desire; heterosexuality; homosexuality The Silences of the Palace, 3, 6, 58, 59, 66–72, 74, 105–14, 188–92, 199 n.2, 199 n.3, 200 n.7, 201 n.8 Socrates, 47, 52 space-time, 6, 13, 24, 25–6, 104, 106, 123, 126, 142–50, 152 speak (as) woman, see parler femme spectatorship, 1, 3, 4, 6, 30, 31, 32–60, 65, 72, 78–9, 88, 90–3, 95, 102, 103, 104, 107, 111–18, 123, 125, 126, 128, 134, 136, 138, 139, 142–54, 155–7, 161–8, 174, 176, 179, 186, 187, 190, 191, 195, 198 n.1, 201 n.4, 202 n.6, 203 n.10 active, 38, 46 female spectator, 5, 13, 35–46, 49, 50, 54, 59, 117, 118, 142–54, 187, 195, 198 n.2 male spectator, 30, 34–5, 37, 38, 57, 104, 153 as negotiation, 43, 48 ‘osmotic’ or mediative, 5, 46, 48–50 spectator-subject, 34–6, 42, 48 see also screen, the: as membrane Stam, Robert, 146–7, 151 Streitfeld, Susan, 4, 55, 66, 71, 73, 77, 88, 93 subject, the, 6, 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 26, 29, 35, 39, 42, 48, 49, 76, 79, 80, 91, 97, 102, 103, 126, 127, 130, 139, 142, 146, 149, 153, 160, 166, 172, 182, 192, 194 becoming subject or subject-inprocess, 32, 86–7, 94, 129, 140 female/feminine, 5, 6, 22, 27, 36, 44, 46, 63, 64, 79, 81, 91, 130, 131, 132, 134, 136, 146, 148, 163, 169, 175, 177, 179, 180, 189, 195, 198 n.2 male/masculine, 18–19, 25, 27, 36, 37, 45, 84, 104, 127–31, 134, 146, 148, 159

Index 223 subject, the – continued speaking, 10, 20, 37, 83, 102, 127, 129, 169 transcendental, 34 subjectivity, sexuate, 166, 167, 190 symbol, the, 35, 103, 132, 158, 177–9, 192, 204 n.7, 205 n.7 symbolic order, the, 11, 12, 16, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 33, 36, 48, 52, 80, 83, 84, 85, 95, 96, 100, 101, 119, 120, 128, 129, 130, 132, 135, 136, 139, 140, 156–9, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 178, 180, 182, 186, 195, 197 n.6, 198 n.8 symbolization, 63, 89, 95, 96, 101, 123, 137, 141, 158, 159, 170, 172–4, 177–9, 192 Tank Girl, 3, 28–30 theory-practice relation, 11, 12, 62–76 time, 6, 12, 13, 27, 58, 65, 112, 114, 116, 126, 145, 146, 148–52, 179 molar, 149 molecular, 149 see also chronotope; space-time Tlatli, Moufida, 3, 4, 58, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74, 105, 109, 112, 188–90 Ullmann, Liv, 3, 4, 66, 73, 74, 75, 118, 119, 122 unconscious, the, 6, 35, 36, 40, 42, 78, 80, 85, 86, 89, 94, 95, 98, 103, 130, 139, 140, 142, 178, 204 n.7, 205 n.7

Under the Skin, 3, 5, 54–5, 66, 71, 77, 93–8, 199 n.2, 199 n.3, 200 n.7, 201 n.8 voice, the, 13, 58, 104 female, 14, 30, 63, 122, 156–60, 173, 179, 185, 203 n.1, 205 n.7 voiceover, 50, 72, 76, 94, 95, 108, 118, 119, 121, 122, 128, 156, 179, 203 n.9 Welldon, Estela V., 4, 71 Whitford, Margaret, 8, 9, 16, 25, 26, 28, 99, 101, 117, 119, 198 n.9, 201 n.8 woman, women as category, 15, 17, 42–5, 85, 130, 161, 195 as ‘dark continent of psychoanalysis’, see psychoanalysis: ‘dark continent’ of as lack, 2, 5, 37, 49, 80, 84, 85, 95, 100, 146, 167, 182, 205 n.7 lesbian, 14, 30, 88, 90–1, see also desire; homosexuality and nature, 3, 114–16, 133–4 objectification of, 35, 55, 57, 97, 108, 156, 157, 179 representation of, 5, 59, 163 woman-to-woman relation, 14, 23, 97, 111, 112–14, 123, 173 womanliness, 42, 81, 82, 85 Woolf, Virginia, 105, 125, 140, 141, 152, 153, 197 n.5

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