The Blind Heroine in Cinema History: Film and the Not-Visual
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The Blind Heroine in Cinema History: Film and the Not-Visual by Abigail Lauren Salerno Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Jane M. Gaines, Supervisor ___________________________ Jan Radway ___________________________ Negar Mottahedeh ___________________________ Priscilla Wald Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2007 v ABSTRACT The Blind Heroine In Cinema History: Film and the Not-Visual by Abigail Lauren Salerno Program in Literature Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Jane M. Gaines, Supervisor ___________________________ Jan Radway ___________________________ Negar Mottahedeh ___________________________ Priscilla Wald An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2007 Copyright by Abigail Lauren Salerno 2007 Abstract My dissertation explores non-visual experiences of film through a study of the recurring cinematic figure of the blind heroine in three periods of US cinema - late silent, classical, post- studio. My analysis of films, multi-sensory film “spectatorship” and film production critically depart from the readings offered by semiotic and psychoanalytic film theory, in favor of theories of cinematic perception and theories of genre, namely, melodrama and suspense. My approach reorients theories of film that have explained cinema as an exclusively visual culture towards a broader consideration of sensory perception and film experience. Attention to Helen Keller, as an author and a cinematic protagonist, and to the ability of the figure of the blind heroine to reorganize the structure of the films that address her frames my discussion of modern film form. Film has attempted to represent the spatial, tactile and aural experiences of gendered blind protagonists for sighted viewers – to visually produce non-visual experiences and to move beyond the limitations of its own technologies. In each of the technological periods I examine, film uses cinematography that addresses the body, sonic and visual attention to texture and movement, and narrative and affective structures of melodrama and suspense, to create the audience’s aesthetic experience. My work explores the ways in which cinema has been multi-sensory, embodied, and “not-visual” – that is, visual but also more than visual – through critical evaluation of the dominant arguments of film theory, formal analysis of films, and historical accounts of film production. Keller’s work and the films I examine offer a theory of the modern phenomenological subject – a subject whose senses are not, finally, located within the body of the individual but are shared with, and borrowed from, the world of human and cinematic bodies they encounter. iv Contents Abstract....................................................................................................................................iv Contents ....................................................................................................................................v List of Figures..........................................................................................................................vi Introduction: Three Perspectives on the Blind Heroine..........................................................1 Chapter 1: Classical Melodrama and Multi-Sensory Narrative............................................53 Chapter 2: Adapting The World I Live In ..............................................................................86 Chapter 3: Melodocudrama..................................................................................................138 Chapter 4: Live Television Drama and the history of The Miracle Worker.......................167 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................202 Works Cited..........................................................................................................................212 Biography..............................................................................................................................219 v List of Figures Figure 1: “The Invention of the Art of Drawing” (Joseph Benoît Suvée, 1791) ...............................28 Figure 2: Ann’s pointed stare (center), in Dark Victory.....................................................................61 Figure 3: Julie’s “red” dress, in Jezebel ..............................................................................................69 Figure 4: Douglas Sirk’s Helen, in the dark, in Magnificent Obsession............................................84 Figure 5: Blindness made visible through gesture, in Orphans of the Storm ..................................101 Figure 6: Holding a cup, pumping the well, in Deliverance ............................................................112 Figure 7: Teacher spells “W”.............................................................................................................114 Figure 8: Helen spells “A”.................................................................................................................114 Figure 9: Titles spell “Water”............................................................................................................114 Figure 10: Extraordinary Stunts, in Deliverance ..............................................................................146 Figure 11: “Blind Woman” (Paul Strand, 1916)...............................................................................160 Figure 12: Teacher locks the dining room door, Deliverance..........................................................175 Figure 13: Annie locks the dining room door, The Miracle Worker................................................175 Figure 14: Intense Phenomenology, in The Miracle Worker ...........................................................177 Figure 15: Her mother's horror, The Miracle Worker.......................................................................182 Figure 16: Helen as Zombie, The Miracle Worker ...........................................................................182 Figure 17: Heroine Pair, Wait Until Dark.........................................................................................196 Figure 18: Heroine Pair, The Haunting.............................................................................................198 Figure 19: Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, c. 1920........................................................................199 Figure 20: Heroine Pair, Persona......................................................................................................211 vi Introduction: Three Perspectives on the Blind Heroine In 1909, poor, blind Bertha wanders aimlessly at the edge of the frame, with no to dance with, in the closing scene of D.W. Griffith’s film adaptation of Charles Dickens’ story The Cricket on the Hearth. In 1967, a knife-wielding Audrey Hepburn flails her way across a cramped basement apartment to kill an intruder, in Wait Until Dark. Between the two is a long history of the modern cinema’s fascination with the blind heroine. When this figure appears, as she regularly does, in the Hollywood cinema, she marks cinema’s attempts to explore the not- visual – film’s multi-sensory appeals that, although they are made by its visual medium, are more than visual. Only rarely does the screen go blank (as it does at the climax of Wait Until Dark); more common is an elaborate combination of filmic effects: cinematography that addresses the movement of the blind heroine’s hands and body, sonic and visual attention to touch and texture, and narrative and affective structures of melodrama or suspense. This dissertation is a study of moments within the history of US cinema in which the representation of blindness offers a way for cinema to explore the limitations and possibilities of its visual technologies. My introduction will offer three perspectives on the recurrence of the blind heroine in US cinema history. The first is a survey of what I call “the perceptive other” within the discourse 20th century film theory, particularly in the work of Béla Balázs and Christian Metz. The perceptive other is a hyperbolic figure who has not yet learned to see the film properly, or to prioritize vision in the cinematic experience, and in so doing reveals the cultural, historical nature of the practice of film-going. My second approach is a study of the representation of blindness in Western visual art and the implication of the figure of the blind women in visual and literary discourses of sentiment, affect and melodrama. The third perspective is a re-evaluation of the role of phenomenology in film studies, in light of film studies’ “modernity thesis,” disability studies, and theories of perception developed within film studies. This last examines Vivian Sobchack’s 1 use of the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty for her theory of the film’s body, and asserts the possibility of a phenomenological experience of film-going that is historically and culturally specific, and attuned to experiences of gender and disability. All three of these surveys are explorations of intellectual trajectories that run through