168 Marina ŢUPRAN

Marina ŢUPRAN

THE SEDUCTION OF THE GAZE. CASE STUDY: THEDA BARA, PHOTOGRAPH. THE FILM SIN, 1915

Abstract: The female character born with the birth The start of the 20th Century causes, of the photographic camera: the femme fatale. Focusing once the Great War commences its on a photograph of the actress Theda Bara, the author destruction, a powerful need in people to interprets the connection between two fundamental forget the immediate dramas and traumas. verbs of the visual culture, to see and to have, and their connection with the formation of the modern gaze. Using The film studios quickly notice this and The Medusa of Carravagio as counterpoint, the analysis start capitalizing on the demand, wishing follows the classical interpretation of Laura Mulvey, to supply something unsought of in showing how the dominant male gaze works from the very movies: a certain fascination, a mysterious beginning of the industries of photographic manipulation magnetism that they would identify with of visual pleasure. the intense gaze of a woman, which, just Key words: Gaze, femme fatale/vamp, semiotics, by looking at us, keeps us still, keeps us seduction. in awe. A new type of character is born on camera: the femme fatale, the vamp. The term becomes one with a new character, an actress who chooses to call herself Theda Bara, and with a certain movie: “A Fool There Was”, shot in the same year as the photograph in study, 1915. Right as the movie starts, the first lines of Kipling’s Marina ŢUPRAN poem, “The Vampire”, stand as a clue to University of Bucharest the storyline, the poem that had inspired E-mail: [email protected] a Broadway show not long before. It is the time for the “vamp” to come to life. The photo analysed here shows

EKPHRASIS, 1/2011 us Theda as a bird of prey that gains FEMININITY, FEMINISM AND FEMALE IDENTITY momentum before an attack. Dressed in IN VISUAL REPRESENTATIONS pp. 168-172 The Seduction of the Gaze 169 Case Study: Theda Bara, Photograph. The Film Sin, 1915 black and dark haired, Theda looks rather capture a social class, an era or a value, exposed, but her attitude, her firm traits rather than capture something contin- and her tensed body definitely signal an gent. This way it manages to remain offensive. Her gaze has a strong contour beyond the immediate meaning. So, the that enhances her concentration and frontal attitude and the fascinating gaze of her standing perfectly still, in a gesture Theda, the long and curly hair, scattered of frozen movement. She is ready to around her head, they referr all to the hypnotize the viewer. mythical image of Medusa of the Gorgon.

Caravaggio’s Medusa

She doesn’t turn anyone to stone, but she charms and manipulates the sight and Photograph of Theda Bara in the Film Sin emotions of the spectator. The irrational of the unknown, of love, of fears brings As Roland Barthes has stated (Camera the two images together and seduces the lucida 35), the great portraitists are great spectator, sweeping him off his feet, far mythologists. We might thus say that a away from reality. well made image can give birth or send to Keeping this similarity in mind, we certain mythologies. It will not send to the have to think of the tragic destiny of one that Hölderlin called “Der Einzige”, Medusa. She is a character of contrasts for that would be the case of a religious in the totality of her existence. Medusa icons, but rather to something more starts off as a beautiful desired woman, profound than itself, to an archetype or who chooses to be a priestess in Athena’s a mythological theme. A photograph can temple. But through a terrible curse of her signify, can indicate to a generality, it can own goddess she is turned into a hideous 170 Marina ŢUPRAN woman who can hurt and kill just by a specific character (the woman as child, looking. She hurts and fascinates no matter the woman as kitten). what she does: she breaks hearts when To take the analysis even further young and beautiful, she takes lives when before Garbo, is arrival Theda Bara is like damned and transformed. Our moving a rough, essential force, before it becomes pictures diva combines the physical a concept. She is like a natural element, attractiveness with the guilt of ruining the water or fire, unshaped, exaggerated, she destinies of men. Theda Bara’s character is an abstract force; in this case, she is a from the above mentioned movie is in its negative power. We see the transition from own right “efficient”: a former lover is in the basic element to the Idea of Beauty, jail, another had become a beggar, and a through the more complex construction third commits suicide. The vamp hurts of the character, to the specific difference, and fascinates no matter what she does, a certain woman. she intrigues and provokes the public. A direct part of the image, although It’s not only the character’s attitude that absent on the cinema frame, is the audi- manages to shock. There’s also another ence, tied by fascination to the objects phenomenon that helps build Theda’s on screen. As Lévi-Strauss says: “It is fame (Della Vacche 15): the anxiety of this avid and ambitious desire to take male Americans caused by the freedom possession of the object for the benefit that young immigrant women took for of the owner or even of the spectator themselves, a freedom that contrasted which seems to me to constitute one of with the decency expected from the young the outstandingly original features of the women of the time. art of Western civilization.” (qtd. in Berger In an article in it “Mythologies” 84). Different cinematic techniques help Barthes notices (56) the becoming of the enhance the relation between the spectator Hollywood diva and implicitly of her gaze. and the character, though placing the stars He analyses Greta Garbo’s face-object at considerable height. The protagonist in “Queen Christina” that seems to be a dominates almost every frame and mask, as the traits and the skin are almost their gaze is the center of attention. The sculptural. He then follows the transition subjective camera or long frames show from the idea of beauty in a platonic sense us in detail just how they breathe, how to the individualized beauty, that is to say, they exhale the cigarette smoke, how their from the heavy make-up and the intense eyes look around the room and we follow gaze of the archetypal female face, to the each gesture with an insatiable pleasure. approachable existence of beauty, the girl The relation between the character and next door. This is the difference between the public had already been created. Greta Garbo and Audrey Hepburn Theda’s photograph from 1915 comes to (Barthes, Mythologies 59); Garbo is the highlight it. The photograph keeps Theda Divine, while Hepburn is a certain woman, in her role, it confirms her as a vamp, and The Seduction of the Gaze 171 Case Study: Theda Bara, Photograph. The Film Sin, 1915 it records the moment and the intentions She argues that women are being objec- and offers them for keeping. tified on screen (take, for example, the The connection between to see and to movement of the camera that lingers on have is maybe the stake of the gaze. The traits or on parts of an actress’s body), tension, the polemos between the gaze they are thus immobilized and even and the glance is a battlefield for the two more, idealized. In the darkness of the forces involved. Who possesses whom? A auditorium, the spectator’s gaze acts like cult-image like that of Theda looks at us that of a voyeur, who gains pleasure by with intensity and fascinates us. Desire looking at another person as an objectified fascinates. On the one hand she steals us other. A similar relation is being developed away into her world, we get lost in her between the audience, unseen as a whole eyes, in the desires and hopes she stands and protected by darkness, separated one for. On the other hand, just by looking at from the other and what is manifest on her, we give her life and allow the world screen. of the image to open up, to exist; we are That precise image and the self image of the ones who allow it to seduce us. This is the spectator communicate and influence why we are entitled to ask what the exact each other, away from the subjective nature of this relation of force is, after all. “where” and “when”. The gaze of the For the Romans, to see is to want and also camera is enforced by that of the male to have. In this sense, “veni, vidi” is already public and of the other characters, who enough to signify victory – through sight, all display the woman as erotic object. entire distances are being annulled and This contributes to the existence of a clear conquered. Quignard (64) affirms that dominant in the relation between the one the erotic, hypnotizing, “thanatic” gaze is who is looked at and the one who gazes. nothing less than a gorgon gaze. The sight, What is more, the gaze itself constitutes an just as the Greeks had previously thought, aggressive medium of male domination remains the object of desire. Our diva is far that combines various elements like the away, deified on the heights of the screen, desire to see, curiosity, the fascination of and at the same time she is terribly close. identifying one’s self with the human form The vamp is in itself an image of the on screen and with their way of being in Other, who challenges, attracts, seduces. the world. The masculine gaze projects its Paraphrasing Dufrenne we might say subject phantasies onto the woman. that her image teaches us how to see. We From the narrative point of view, her see the Woman that is recreated before role is a relatively small one. She only us. But who is it that reinvents her? And is the triggering element for various who is looking at her? According to Laura situations, she contributes to the plot, Mulvey the dominant gaze in cinema is a she represents one thing or another, she masculine gaze, encouraged by the movie inspires, but she doesn’t necessarily do industry’s skilled manipulation of the anything throughout the story. Here we visual pleasure, referred to as scopophilia. can use Laura Mulvey’s discussion about 172 Marina ŢUPRAN the film noir genre, where the woman of nature, that attracts through its unusual not only complicates everything, but character. by the end of the story also gets “what The gaze of Theda goes beyond the she deserves”: as a guilty object, she is image. Once we confront her she steps devaluated, punished or saved. out of the photo and reaches us, convinces The woman falls in love and becomes and seduces us, hurts us and rises above property of the protagonist, but not our us. Like strong essences, the vamps and vamp. Defying the cultural expectations then the divas with their more complex of the “weaker sex”, Theda’s role outrages constitution, reach iconic value as new and defies: her sexuality can no longer faces able to distract us from mundane be tamed or manipulated. This woman problems. They give birth to mythologies sustains the male gaze and negotiates her or invoke cultural depths like archetypes own attributes: she is not passive, she is and legends. But the ever restless human not defined by an absence, and she is not curiosity soon went looking for other demystified. It is a refusal that confirms models and the studios came up with a through the reactions it seeks and waits new diva of the day. The attitude towards for the nature of the gaze that targets her. them was based on desire, on the pleasure The drama and the tension, or the relaxed of looking, manipulated in accordance amusement on account of the vamp’s with the perspective and expectations of victims are possible precisely because she the public. And the public always asked represents an exception, she is a wild force for more.

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