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UniversiV M icixîilm s International 300 N. Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Ml 48106

8426465

Roof, Judith Ann

OEDIPUS IN THE CAVE: METAPHORS OF SEEING IN MODERN DRAMA AND FILM

The Ohio State University Ph.D. 1984

University Microfilms I nternâtiOnâi so o n . ZeeO Road, Ann Arbor,M l48106

Copyright 1984

by

Roof, Judith Ann

AN Rights Reserved

OEDIPUS IN THE CAVE:

METAPHORS OF SEEING IN MODERN DRAMA AND FILM

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Judith A. Roof, B.A., M.A., J.D.

*****

The Ohio State University 1984

Reading Committee : Approved By

Katherine H. Burkman Mark S . Auburn J. Ronald Green ^ Advisor Department of English Copyright by Judith A. Roof 1984 Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Professor Katherine H. Burkman, who, sitting in that little room so long ago opened the world of drama for me and who since has aided me with care­ ful reading, astute criticism, and a large measure of the spirit of scholarship, inquiry, and humanity. I also thank

Professor Mark S. Auburn for suggesting that I continue and for the scrutiny and humor that forced me to consider even more carefully anything I said. I am also grateful to

Professor Ron Green for his helpful commentary and re­ sources as well as for his open mind.

I would like to thank Michelle Citron for talking to me about her film and for explaining its genesis. I ap­ preciate the care and time of my other "readers" Professor

Les Tannenbaum, Marianne Conroy, and Diane Shoos, and the support of my friends Pamela Maggied and Anne Marie Drew.

Finally, I am grateful to Brenda Adams for her typing and help.

11 Vita

August 28, 1951. , Born - Columbus, Ohio

1972 ...... B.A., The Ohio State University

1973 ...... M.A., University of Toronto

1973-197 5...... Teaching Associate, Department of Romance Languages, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1974-1974 ...... Research Associate, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1979 ...... J.D., The Ohio State University

1980 ...... M.A., The Ohio State University

1979-1984...... Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

Publications

"Speaking From the Body : Godard's British Sounds," Helicon, 7, No. 1 (1982), pp. 55-59.

Fields of Study

Major Field : English Studies in Drama. Professor Katherine H. Burkman Studies in Film. Professor J. Ronald Green.

Ill TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENT...... i i

VITA...... iii

INTRODUCTION...... 1

CHAPTER

1. Play...... 20

2. La Chinoise...... 64

3. The Killer...... 112

4. B l o w - U p ...... 158

5. Betrayal...... 186

6. Daughter R i t e ...... 225

7. Conclusion...... 253

NOTES ...... 267

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 282

IV Introduction

The metaphor of Oedipus in the cave is a conflation of two models of perception. The figure of Oedipus, whose tragic predicament in Sophocles’ play was identified by

Sigmund Freud as the pattern of the conflict which he also called Oedipal, is a figure who represents the process of perceiving the self. He is both an archetypal dramatic figure and the prototypical son in the psychological processes outlined by Freud and Jacques Lacan. Plato's cave is a model for the relationship between human percep­ tion and reality; its emphasis on the structure and arrangement of the cave, an arrangement uncannily like the apparatus of cinema, suggests the barrier the apparatus of cinema or theatre places between the spectators and their perception of reality. The point of conjunction of these two models is the process of coming to perceive the self.

The metaphor of Oedipus in the cave also suggests the pos­ sibility that drama and film borrow from each other and come closer to the same vision since the figure of Oedipus is associated, though not exclusively, with drama and the cave with cinema. Both are concerned with the search for self and both manifest an awareness of their own apparatus and have begun to borrow the apparatus of the other as a way of explaining their own process. The apparatus sug­ gested by the cave model becomes both the barrier and the means by which the self is perceived in modern drama and film.

The first half of the metaphor, the figure of Oedipus, functions as the model for self-perception. Oedipus, the tragic king-son who killed his father and married his mother in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, has lent his name not only to Aristotle's idea of tragedy, but also to some of the infantile psychological processes of the male child delineated by Sigmund Freud and by Jacques Lacan. Oedipus' cultural accretions, from the "purpose, passion, percep­ tion" pattern identified in Oedipus Rex by Francis

Fergusson in The Idea of a Theater^ to the infant male's desire for the mother curtailed by his fear of castration in Freud's analysis of the Oedipus complex, to Lacan's situating of the infant male's Oedipal process in the structure of the "minor stage," reflect the importance of perception, of coming to see self.

The character Oedipus in Oedipus Rex is one who de­ mands to know the identity of the murderer whose presence in Thebes threatens the well-being of the community. The play presents the paradoxical revelation of Oedipus'

identity as that of the murderer, a revelation which

simultaneously solves the question, relieves the threat to

the city, and reveals to Oedipus his own real identity.

From a fabric of circumstances and ignorance, Oedipus is

forced to recognize that he himself is the incestuous

murderer. He comes to see self.^

As a character, Oedipus has become the archetype of a

tragic figure, and perhaps by extension the archetype of

drama. As Francis Fergusson states : "I suppose there can

be little doubt that Oedipus Rex is a crucial instance of

drama, if not the play which best exemplifies this art in

its essential nature and its completeness. Oedipus Rex

embodies the "spiritual" struggle of drama. As Fergusson

later states: "The spiritual content of the play is the

tragic action which Sophocles directly presents; and this

action is in its essence zweideutig: triumph and destruc­

tion, darkness and enlightenment, mourning and rejoicing,

at any moment we care to consider. Fergusson also

emphasizes the importance of Oedipus Rex as a ritual:

". . . the element which distinguishes this theater, giving

it its unique directness and depth, is the ritual ex­ pectancy which Sophocles assumed in his audience. Freud's characterization of the psychological develop­ ment of the infant male is based upon a family configura­ tion which recreates the original Oedipus predicament. The figure of Oedipus represents the repressed desire of the son to kill his father who prevents any union with the mother by means of a threat of castration and the son's wish to possess the mother. In the Oedipus complex the son is trapped in a conflict whose only resolution is the re­ moval of the threat of the son either by his castration or by his ejection from the triangle. The son's ejection from the triangle, accomplished by the threat of castration, re­ sults in the son's assumption of an identity separate from that of either the mother or the father ; in the dissolution of the triangle, the son, like Oedipus, finds an identity.®

Jacques Lacan situates this Oedipal finding of iden­ tity within the visual metaphor of the mirror. To Lacan, the Oedipal conflict can begin only after the infant, look­ ing in a mirror, recognizes a separate other gazing back.

To an infant who has existed as fragmented and indiscern­ able from his mother, the symbolic discovery of the pos­ sibility of an integrated other, different and separate from himself is an inauguration into a world of Oedipal conflict with these others, a conflict which is resolved with the infant's acquisition of a separate identity.^ It is at the point of Lacan's mirror that the figure of Oedipus in his quest for self-discovery becomes con­ flated with the metaphor of our relation to reality represented by Plato's cave parable. The quest for self, though not exclusive to drama, becomes intertwined with the quest to see anew or to see apart from the apparatus, and the apparatus described by Plato becomes synonymous with the mechanical, ideological, and formal apparatus of both drama and film.

Plato's cave is the founding parable or metaphor for the "cinematographic apparatus," or the relationship that cinema has with objective reality. Plato's description of the image is as follows :

Next, said I, here is a parable to illustrate the degrees in which our nature may be enlightened or unenlightened. Imagine the condition of men living in a sort of cavernous chamber underground, with an entrance open to the light and a long passage all down the cave. Here they have been from childhood, chained by the leg and also by the neck, so that they cannot move and can only see what is in front of them, because the chains will not let them turn their heads. At some distance higher up is the light of a fire burning behind them; and between the prisoners and the fire is a track, with a parapet built along it, like the screen at a puppet show, which hides the performers while they show their puppets over the top.

I see, said he.

Now, behind this parapet imagine persons carrying along various artificial objects, Including figures of men and animals in wood or stone or other materials, which project above the parapet. Naturally, some of these persons will be talking, others silent.

It is a strange picture, he said, and a strange sort of prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; for in the first place prisoners so confined would have seen nothing of themselves or of one another, except the shadows thrown by the fire-light on the wall of the cave facing them, would they?

Not if all their lives they had been prevented from moving their heads.

And they would have seen as little of the objects carried past.

Of course.

Now, if they could talk to one another, would they not suppose that their words referred only to those passing shadows which they saw?

Necessarily.

And suppose their prison had an echo from the wall facing them? When one of the people crossing behind them spoke; they could only suppose that the sound came from the shadows passing before their eyes.

No doubt.

In every way, then, such prisoners would recognize as reality nothing but the shadows of those artificial objects.

Plato, The Republic, vii, 514® In its analysis of the relationship between our per­ ception and reality, the parable relies on two basic activities: the act of seeing of the prisoners, and the production of the shadow show cast by the fire-light. The prisoners face the wall of the cave with their backs to the door, presenting the protype of the position of the specta­ tor in the movie theatre. In his analysis of the "cinema­ tographic apparatus," Jean-Louis Baudry compares the para­ ble of the cave with the operation of cinema, noting the similarities between the creation of the shadow images in the parable and the projection of images on a screen, and the immobility of the prisoners with the dark, immobility of the cinema spectator.® In its mechanical arrangement, the parable of the cave is an uncanny precurser to cinema which suggests not only the relationship of film images to reality, but which also stresses the intervention of the apparatus and its unseen and unsuspected operation.

The operation of the cinematographic apparatus, like the operation of the mechanism of Plato’s cave, is invisi­ ble to the spectator, and therefore, must be analyzed in order to be seen. Baudry’s definition of the cinemato­ graphic apparatus is a dissection of the technological,

ideological, and psychological processes that transform ob­ jective reality into a consumed, projected film. The 8

projected image on the movie screen is the product of a process which begins with decoupage, the selection of an

objective reality to be filmed. The image of this objec­

tive reality is fixed on film by a movie camera in the form

of a series of still images each differing, but differing

only slightly from the last. The film is then assembled in

the process of montage; the finished film or commodity is

consumed by a spectator as a continuous moving image recon­ stituted by means of its projection on a screen. Each

stage in this process is informed by an ideological bias which situates the subject in identification with the camera eye, which effaces differences and discontinuities created by the filming and editing processes, and which ef­ fectively erases all traces of the transformation of objec­ tive reality into a narrative which is both a product and a reflection of the dominant ideology.

Beginning his analysis with the technological appara­ tus, Baudry observes that the use of camera equipment is not neutral as our myth of the objectivity of science pre­ supposes. The use of optical apparatus creates effects that are in part determined by a dominant ideology which situates the eye in the approximate perspective construc­ tion of the Renaissance. Reproducing monocular perspec­ tive, the optical apparatus places the subject at the center of all composition rather than reproducing a multiple view or placing the subject off-center.

The operation of selecting shots, or decoupage, is just as obviously an operation of an ideology working ac­ cording to the notion of the primacy and centrality of the subject/spectator and according to a narrative ideology which determines which slices of reality constitute a nar­ rative. Thus, framing, composition, content, camera angle, type of lens, film stock, even the duration of a shot are determined by the bias and limitations inherent in the use of optical equipment and by the needs of narrative.

In shaping the narrative order of film, montage is in­ formed by a notion of narrative ideology which locates shots within a narrative framework and by a montage tech­ nique based on concepts of editing biased by theories of dialectic or continuity. Montage techniques make invisible discontinuities caused by the recombination of discontinu­ ous slices of reality by either codifying the recombination of images by means of a fade, a wipe, a title, or a black­ out, or by erasing ruptures through the illusion of con­ tinuity created by continuity editing.

The projection process effaces the discontinuities created by the optical apparatus and reconstitutes the camera eye as transcendent human eye. The circumstances 10

of film projection and viewing reproduce what Baudry de­ scribes as "the mise-en-scène" of Plato's cave and reconstruct two conditions necessary to the release of

Lacan's "mirror stage": the predominance of the visual and an immature power of mobility. The suggestion of the mirror stage enables a kind of regression in which in the face of the screen/mirror, the movie spectator relives an imaginary constitution of a narcissistic self through an identification with the character portrayed on the screen.

But as the screen world is already endowed with meaning, the identification shifts through repetition to a trans­ cendental subject who organizes meaning projected onto the screen in a primary identification with the camera.

However, the cinematographic apparatus both enables and traps us into seeing the images on the screen as a kind of reality. The apparatus prevents us from seeing any objective reality because of the technological, ideological, and psychological mechanisms of its intervention. Thus, in order to come to any perception of reality, the apparatus must be removed or seen for what it is so that we can no longer be seduced by the product of its operation, but in­ stead learn to see beyond the product to the constitution of self. 11

Baudry's analysis of the psychological consumption of

cinema situates the movie screen as a mirror, the apparatus

adopted by Jacques Lacan to explain the process of the con­

struction of the imaginary self at the beginning of the

Oedipus complex. The mirror or apparatus is inserted pre­

cisely at the moment the individual is able to perceive him

or herself as separate, at the moment of entry into lan­

guage, and at the moment of the discovery of the "Other."

It is the same moment encountered by the character Oedipus when he is informed that the presence of a murderer en­

dangers Thebes.

The connection between Lacan's mirror, the Oedipus

complex, and the apparatus of the cave suggests a relation­

ship between the means by which we see and the discovery of

identity and self. The mirror by which we come to the sym­ bolic knowledge of otherness in Lacan's model is also the movie screen and the stage. The apparatus is what we must use and reject in order to come to knowledge of identity and self. The dramatic moment of self-discovery of

Oedipus Rex is joined with a pre-occupation with the ap­ paratus of theatre and film.

This image of an intervening apparatus is also an im­ age of the mask, of blindness, of the false sight of

Oedipus which was based on a false notion of origin and 12

identity. The illusions created by the theatre, itself a

kind of apparatus like cinema, are erabued with ideologies

that must be deconstructed in order that the idea of thea­

tre itself can be understood. The parable of Plato's cave, then is not only a parable about the act of seeing, it also

leads us to a discovery of the location of the reality of the outside sun through its dissection of the manufacture of the images taken to be reality. The centrality of the mirror/screen in the parable of Plato's cave, in the cine­ matographic apparatus, and in Lacan's construction of the entry into the Oedipal conflict conjoins the model of the act of seeing implicit in the parable of Plato's cave and

Oedipus' act of self-perception.

In modern cinematic and dramatic practice, a con­ sciousness of these proto-typical models or at least a consciousness of the processes they represent has on the one hand contributed to a self-conscious analysis of the means of production or apparatus of the work within the work and on the other, an exploration of the possibility of sight or perception through drama and film. The self- consciousness, long a part of the art of the theatre, has become not only a consciousness of the act of playing, but a consciousness of the theatrical vehicle as an apparatus like that of cinema. Part of this self-consciousness occurs 13

as analysis of the apparatus which in drama might occur in terms borrowed from cinema and in cinema in terms borrowed from drama. The preoccupation with the possibility of per­ ception has become situated as a battle to remove the apparatus which perjures one's ability to see truly yet which paradoxically provides the very apparatus whose destruction through analysis permits the mask to be lifted and the self to be seen.

This self-reflective dismemberment of the apparatus of cinema and theatre distanciates spectators while simulta­ neously drawing them into the process by which they are distanced. Analyzing the apparatus of film or theatre causes it to be seen as an apparatus, a vehicle, a fact which alienates spectators from the illusion the apparatus normally operates to create. The process of analyzing the apparatus is substituted for the normal creation of an illusion of a reality, and thus becomes its own kind of reality distanced from its own production yet still its own product.

Sometimes this self-reflective analysis is instructive or intended to be so, not only about the nature of drama or film, but as a didactic tool designed to stimulate an analysis of the situations represented as well as of the ways in which they are represented. Bertolt Brecht, who 14

desired that theatre be a didactic, political tool, under­ stood the implications of a theatre in which the audience was distanced or alienated from any possible illusion that might be created by production. Brecht’s writings advocate

"a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.

"Insights" are more possible in theatre if the audi­ ence finds it difficult to identify with the characters.

For that reason Brecht segmented the narrative line, lest its ethos or pathos become too compelling:

We cannot invite the audience to fling itself into the story as if it were a river and let itself be carried vaguely hither and thither. The individual episodes have to be knotted together in such a way that the knots are easily noticed. The episodes must not succeed one another indistinguishably but must give us a chance to interpose out judgment. °

This lack of opportunity for mindless identification and subsequent distanciation is further augmented by

Brecht's concept of acting. His "alienation effect" which allows us to recognize its subject at the same time that it makes it seem unfamiliar" is in part the result of a style of acting modelled on that of the Chinese which maintains 15

and even emphasizes the distinction between actor and the role he or she is playing.

Brecht's theatre and his idea of alienation and dis­ tanciation are social and political tools which substitute consciousness for ritual and illusion. Though Brecht per­ ceived that distanciation provokes consciousness, the con­ sciousness he intends to provoke is a social and political consciousness, rather than the coming to see self provoked by lifting the mask of apparatus.

The metaphor of Oedipus in the cave offers some inter­ pretation of self-conscious and self-reflective theatre and film as well as the function of distanciation in both. The search for self, so prominent a theme in modern literature, may encourage the appearance of both Oedipal themes and self-conscious and self-reflective forms. At the same time, the alienation of the individual and the adaptation of Marxist concepts of the role of art in political change by modern drama and film also require a self-reflective, distanced art.

These mechanisms of self-reflectiveness and distanci­ ation in both modern drama and film are achieved in similar ways : by means of the conscious exposition of the apparatus of production. In both modern drama and film the apparatus creates a visual form, consumed in a public 16

setting with other people. The anxiety in both is pre­ cisely about the ability to see: the ability of the pro­ duction apparatus to create a consumable artifact, the ability of the spectator to see and understand that arti­ fact, and within the work itself, the ability of the protagonist to see himself.

Since the advent of photography, the anxiety about the ability to see has become more acute. Because photography can recreate reality, other visual art had to seek new ways of representing the same vision. Even though the cinema could recreate a realistic vision, it sought narrative forms to shape that reality into a cohesive world on the screen. As drama and film coexisted, any intentional copy­ ing was almost entirely discouraged. Cinema, with the in­ security of a new form, sought to be a completely distinct form. Drama dared not compete with the realism of cinema and sought other styles of representation.

Yet in its self-dissection, drama borrows from cinema and cinema from drama. Though still entrapped in the ap­ paratus as the prisoners are in Plato's cave, meta-theatric and meta-filmic works simultaneously erect and break down the barrier of the apparatus by making its dissection a conscious part of what the work represents. Such self- reflective works as Samuel Beckett's Play (1963) and 17

Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (1968) attempt to dissect the apparatus, an apparatus which defines the relationship be­ tween the medium and one's ability to perceive by means of that medium and the relationship between drama and film.

In order to dissect itself, Beckett's Play appropriates the cinematographic apparatus, and La Chinoise makes a

Brechtian definition of theatre central to its analysis of film.

In other words the anxiety about perception is re­ solved when the protagonist breaks through the apparatus of the medium in order to see more clearly and in order to find self as in Eugène Ionesco's The Killer (1959) and

Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966). The protagonists

Bérenger and Thomas are caught in an Oedipal conflict and overtly use the apparatus of drama and film in order to establish their own relationships to reality and to self.

The barrier of the apparatus is overcome by the protago­ nist, but is ironically still intact for the spectators who are still entrapped in the cave.

In Harold Pinter's Betrayal (1978) and Michelle

Citron's Daughter Rite (1978), the apparatus of the medium is used as a means of forcing the spectator into a process of self-discovery and into a ritual. The apparatus of dra­ ma and film has come together; perception belongs not only 18

to the characters, but to the audience as well. The self-

reflective dissection of and entrapment within the ap­

paratus of Play and La Chinoise has become the starting

point for the use of the apparatus as means of perceiving

self in The Killer and Blow-Up and for the use of the ap­

paratus as a means of breaking down the barriers between

the stage, the screen, and the audience.

The six works discussed, infra, represent permutations

of the combination of the figure of Oedipus and the parable

of Plato's cave. The first two, Play and La Chinoise dis­

sect and define the apparatus of both drama and film. The

Killer and Blow-Up situate the apparatus as a barrier to

real vision and in both, the barrier must be dissolved in

order for the protagonist to see rightly. The last two.

Betrayal and Daughter Rite deconstruct the apparatus that

has become common to both drama and film as a way to in­

volve the audience in the ritual process of the characters

as they come to see self. In all, theatre and film show

the marks of one another; from the projector-light of Play to the photographs in The Killer to the cinema-like images

in Betrayal and from the importance of the idea of theatre

to Guillaume in La Chinoise to the mimed tennis game at the 19

end of Blow-Up to the Brechtian episodes and community ritual of Daughter Rite, drama and film have become in­ creasingly intertwined and necessary to one another. Play

(Hamm stirs. He yawns under the handkerchief, He removes the handkerchief from his face. Black glasses.) Hamm: Me— (tæ yawns)— to play. (He holds the handkerchief spread out before him.)

Samuel Beckett Endgame!

In his English drama Play (1963) Samuel Beckett bor­ rows the metaphor of the optical apparatus of cinema as a way of defining the process of drama.% The three players on the stage, M, Wl, and W2, are trapped in urns, in the vagaries of the projector-like light, and within a construct not unlike Plato's cave in which what they see and tell of themselves is dependent entirely on the mechanisms of theatre and film. In Play, the relationship between the stage images and the audience is deconstructed for the audience; however, the characters in Play are still caught both in the Oedipal triangle of their history which they attempt to relate when the light permits and within the meta-cinematic and meta-theatric structures of the play.

Framed in an essentially cyclic structure. Play presents

20 21

theatre as a metaphor for the relationship between the con­ scious and the unconscious (the subject and the "Other" in

Lacanian terms). At the same time, the relationship be­ tween the unconscious and the conscious defined by the meta-cinematic screen/mirror of the faces in the urns is a pattern for the process of drama.

Play consists of the twice-repeated narratives of three participants in a love triangle. Trapped in urns which obscure all but their faces, the characters, simply designated as Ml, Wl and W2, are able to narrate their ex­ periences of the love triangle only when a spotlight, mounted on the stage, lights their faces. Moving according to some indeterminable and highly irregular instinct of its own, the light interrupts and selects narrators, each of whom tells the story of the love triangle from his or her point of view.3

Play is repeated twice exactly. Each repetition con­ sists of two discrete parts separated by choruses— a period of time during which the light shines at half-intensity on all three faces simultaneously and the characters speak their separate lines together at half-volume. The first half of Play is literary and matter-of-fact. The characters each tell a version of the affair— the wife's discovery, the husband's denial, the wife's visit to the 22

mistress, the husband returning to the wife. Their nar­ ratives are interrupted by a chorus after which the characters become more aware of their position as inter­ viewees and begin to address the light almost as actors addressing a camera. However, their speeches are not often voluntary— the light acts almost as an inquisitor forcing speech from the characters when they would rather be silent. In the second section the characters become more and more obsessed with their inability to hide from the light and become uncomfortable in the "agony of perceived- ness" that 0 suffers in Film.

Central in Beckett's opus. Play embodies all that is peculiarly Beckett— the uncertain locus, the disembodied faces, the play of light and dark, the two-part structure, and the transformation of the merely banal to a banalness significant in its banality®— in short, it epitomizes all that preceded it in Beckett's dramatic work and begins a

"concern with aesthetic form" that characterizes his later, short, more experimental dramas.® Like Waiting For Godot

(1954), Endgame (1958), Art Without Words II (1960), and

Happy Days (1961), all plays written earlier, the structure of Play depends upon the alternation between light and dark as the light "inquisitor" flashes on and off each of the characters. This alternation is similar to the days and 23

unseen nights of Waiting For Godot and Happy Days and is perhaps even more like A and B ’s experience of light and dark in Act Without Words II. As in these plays, the alternation of light and dark is perceptable mainly to the characters; the audience perceives only a briefly inter­ rupted flow of light.

Structurally, Play. like Waiting For Godot and Happy

Days is divided into two discrete segments, but Play is in some ways more formal and more literal than its predecessors: its two parts repeat one another exactly in a fugue-like composition directed by a spotlight, though the French edition. Comédie, provides an alternative second repeat which permits the light to fade and all run down.?

Its structure is cyclic rather than episodic. Unlike the earlier two-part dramas in which one day follows another, but is not an identical repeat of the previous "day," Play cycles itself, repeating itself exactly.

Play also marks the beginning of Beckett's shift from an emphasis on alternation to a concern with circularity accompanied by his switch to three characters from two to four. Composed after Happy Days, and contemporary with

Film, Play precedes Cascando, Comment C'est, and

Come and Go. all plays which use three characters (or parts as in Cascando). The alternation between two different 24

characters epitomized by the alternation between A and B in

Act Without Words II, is altered in Play and in works after

Play to a different, more intricate rhythm dependent on the tensions created among three characters. Rather than the dialectical tugging of a Vladimir and an Estragon, a Nagg and a Nell, a Hamm and a Clov, a Winnie and a Willie,

Krapp's past and Krapp’s present, Play, and those dramas which follow, stretch the dialectic into a more obviously circular interplay which is more controlled and less predictable.

Play continues Beckett's preoccupation with memory and narrated experience seen in Hamm's stories in Endgame,

Krapp's taped diaries in Krapp's Last Tape, and Winnie's

"exquisite hours" in Happy Days. The characters of Play are literally trapped in their urns like Nagg and Nell in their ash cans, or Winnie in her hillock; they exist in an uncertain realm of unnatural light like Hamm and Clov,

Krapp, and Winnie. The characters, no longer concerned with the angst of passing time, exist on stage in urns probed by the light, "mere eye," repeating the same lines in three spotlight-orchestrated, intercut monologues. In

Play the light is described as either "faint spots" in the half-light sections, or spotlight "full on the face" which contrasts with the black of the stage. In Krapp's Last 25

Tape, the light is described: "Table and immediately adjacent area in strong white light. Rest of stage in darkness" (p. 18). In Happy Days, the light is "blazing light" (p. 7).

One of the main critical disputes concerns Play's locus, some critics positing that the characters are dead and buried in urns, others interpreting the urns as

Dantesque devices that imply purgatory, or others declaring that the endless repetition imposed by the play is a

"Protestant Hell."® Yet others suggest that the characters are neither dead nor alive, but caught somewhere in between.® However, the meta-theatric and meta-cinematic structure of Play suggests that the characters are located in the juncture of reality and illusion that exists on a movie screen, a screen which functions as a metaphor for the juncture between the unconscious and the conscious and for the possibility of the recognition of a separate and independent self as Baudry situates the screen as the mirror in Lacan's mirror stage.

Continuing Vladimir and Estragon's need to pass time,

Hamm and Clov's consciousness of playing in a play, and

Winnie's constant acknowledgment of "her day," Play is indeed self-conscious theatre. Though the three characters appear to be the heads and voices of participants in a 26

love-triangle long since passed, but still discussed, or at

least narrated in soliloquy, as Play progresses, the

characters become increasingly cognizant of the light

itself, and of their painful process of remembering and

narrating. The characters begin to address the light using

an ambiguous "you" which often seems to refer to the

audience or to M as well as to the light, an ambiguity which heightens the play's self-reflective quality. Like many of Beckett's earlier plays. Play is self-reflective;

however, the characters in Play are not overtly aware of

the vehicle of the play as Winnie or Hamm and Clov have

been. Trapped, rather, within the apparatus, M, Wl, and

W2 are aware only of the light and of the act of telling.

Like Plato's prisoners they are caught within a construct.

The three characters, M, Wl, and W2, appear to be the heads and voices of participants in a love-triangle long since passed, but still discussed, or at least narrated in soliloquy. In the characters' monologues, they are aware of themselves as remembering and as narrating that memory.

Their pseudo-literary style, which occasionally lapses into a more vivid, colloquial parlance, characterizes the story consciously told, but pocked by lapses into more polite,

formulaic conversation. M begins his narrative: "We were not long together when she smelled the rat" (p. 47). The 27

speech of W2, the mistress, is perhaps even more a parody of a literary style:

Fearing she was about to offer me violence I rang for Erskine and had her shown out. Her parting words, as he could testify, if he is still alive, and has not forgotten, coming and going on earth, letting people in, showing people out, were to the effect that she would settle my hash. I confess this did alarm me a little, at the time. (p. 47-48)

Wl, who tends to be more homogeneously literary, indulges herself with a larger measure of the ingenuously nasty.

First: "When I was satisfied it was all over I went to have a gloat. Just a common tart. What he could have found in her when he had me— " (p. 58). Her next speech is wholeheartedly colloquial: "Pudding face, puffy, spots, blubber mouth, jowls, no neck, dugs you could— " (p. 58).

The mixture of literary and colloquial approaches parody;

W2's speech is at least self-conscious of the styling of its telling. The characters all seem to be consciously working at telling their stories.

While their narrative style is self-conscious and the play is itself self-reflective insofar as it is a vehicle for such conscious telling, the characters' ever-increasing awareness of the light, their anxiety about ending their narratives (or not ending), even their puns on the word

"play," create a consciousness of the duration and method 28

of the theatrical vehicle itself, a consciousness that augments the self-reflective style of the play, but which still ironically emphasizes the characters' ignorance of their own entrapment in the apparatus of theatre. After their history is told and the single monologues are broken by another bout of half-light chorus, the characters begin to address the light using the ambiguous "you." The entire last section of Play is a reverie upon and rebellion against the play itself as embodied by the light. M says, "Have I lost . . . the thing you want? Why go out? Why go— "

(p. 58). W2 is also conscious of the light: "When you go out— and I go out. Some day you will tire of me and go out . . . for good" (p. 53). Wl is even more insistent:

"Get off me! (vehement.) Get off me!" (p. 53). They seem anxious for the play, for the need to tell, to end. M says,

"Down, all going down, into the dark, peace is coming, I thought, after all, at last, I was right, after all, thank

God, when first this change" (p. 53). "This change" refers, at least formally, to the new section occurring after the half-strength chorus, indicating a self-reflective aware­ ness of the structure of the play. It may also refer, again self-consciously, to the literal change from memory and narration to introspection and anxiety about the light that occurs after the second half-light chorus. It may also 29

refer to the change from adulterous triangle to the isola­

tion which marks the characters' current situation in Play.

M sees, or hopes he sees, an end, a darkness which promises

peace, a relief from the necessity of telling, yet at the

same time he envinces a kind of melancholic hope that the

time for telling is not yet over, for in telling M can fan­

tasize: "A little dinghy on the river, I resting my oars,

they lolling on air-cushions in the stern . . . sheets.

Drifting. Such fantasies" (p. 68). Immediately before the

last chorus which precedes the repeat, M wonders if he is

". . . as much as . . . being seen?" (p. 61), a line which

crystallizes both the self-conscious process of the play

and the hopes and anxiety, both literal and psychological,

of the characters. W2 is also conscious of the nature and

form of their narrative task: "Like dragging a great roller, on a scorching day. The strain . . . to get it moving, momentum coming— " (p. 57). Then, "Kill it and strain again" (p. 57), a speech descriptive of the entire process of the play with its light probe and repetition.

Wl is perhaps even more anxious: "Is it that I do not tell the truth, is that it, that some day somehow I may tell the truth at last and then no more light at last, for the truth?" (p. 54). All of the characters are aware of their telling and all wonder whether their recitals are "seen." 30

The self-reflective nature of Play is apparent parti­ cularly in its title which refers variously to the drama

itself, to acting, to the earlier adulterous affair, to the physical act of playing like a record on a phonograph which can be played only when a switch is turned on, to life itself as a trivialized affair. However, in Play, the apparatus, the vehicle of the play is self-conscious rather than the characters who are paradoxically aware only of the necessity to tell. M summarizes these views in the last section, saying, "I know now, all that was just . . . play.

And all this? When will all this— " (p. 54). And later, he says, "All this, when will all this have been . . . just play?" (p. 54). He merges the various levels of meaning— the past life, the present vehicle, the current performance, even the particular incidence (first time or repeat) of Play in the instant performance.

The repetition of Play underlines the play's self- reflective qualities as well, for how can life be repeated so exactly unless written, memorized, unless directed and controlled and ultimately non-spontaneous? The fact of the repetition functions in several ways to emphasize the play- ness of the play. Rather than being "a day just like any other day," that Hamm and Clov experience in the shelter in

Endgame, this play is a play just like itself. The audience 31

having heard the somewhat confusing interplay of versions

the first time, hears echoes, is forewarned and begins to

see the subtleties and the humor of the light's gymnastics

in the repeat. Unlike Hamm and Clov's days (of which we see only one in Endgame), or Winnie's progressive burial which of necessity alters her daily ritual in Happy Days,

Play is clearly not a "day," but a performance, a regulated montage of monologues, repeated as if memorized by note, as

if there is no longer meaning to the ritual, but the form, the recognition that play is form, that it is a construct; and if life is a play, life, too, is a construct.

But Play's self-reflective quality differs from the self-reflective quality of Beckett's earlier plays, since the characters themselves are mere instruments, unaware of the play's play-like nature (with the possible exception of

M). Instead, the characters in Play are conscious only of the light; they are unable to see the ensemble. The formal structure of Play evades the characters' scrutiny: they are trapped in a blind consciousness of self rather than in the confines of the formal necessities of the play. Their isolation is in part mechanical— the effect of form— rather than existential— the perception of one's situation in re­ lation to the universe— as it arguably is with Winnie in

Happy Days or Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape. If the light is 32

conscious of its own task, if it is in fact an anthropomorphized entity, it cannot or does not communicate that consciousness to the audience. Only the audience is privileged to see the formal outlines of Play and only the audience can juxtapose the first experience of the text with the second and see two different "plays."

Play'8 self-reflective quality and its presentation in a rigid structure suggests both self-analysis and an analysis of theatre in general. The light-character re­ lationship deconstructs the process of drama, separating the play into discrete actions of playing and making to play. The characters' speech is ". . . provoked by a spotlight projected on faces alone." In the same way the

"thinking eye, E" in Beckett's Film pursues "0, object," the spotlight in Play pursues the urned trio's various

"truths," "poking and pecking" until the characters, having spilled their respective versions of the affair, address the light itself, initially and somewhat ambiguously as a kind of persona with motive, then finally as a mechanical agent, albeit still metonymically human— "Mere eye." However, the identity established by

Beckett in Film between the eye, E, pursuer, and the object, 0, pursued, is never established in Play, but re­ mains one of a number of possible characterizations of the 33

relationship between the light and the characters. The

activity of pursuit (hope of seeing) and flight (seeking

immunity from being seen) in Film is reduced in Play to the action of the probing spotlight, turning off and on each immobile "witness," extracting intermittent bits of impression and self-justification from each, then leaving each "immune" and "silent" in the darkness where darkness and silence are equal, as Wl says, "They being one"

(p. 59). Like Winnie, subject to the vagaries of the bell, or A and B, probed to life by the literal goad in

Act Without Words II, the characters in Play inhabit a world of alternating light and dark; they are like the prisoners in Plato's cave with a sight controlled by an entity outside of their own control.

Instead of characters conscious of the vehicle of the play, the audience occupies a privileged position, able to see the motion of the spotlight, each character's ex­ perience of the light, and the dark unseen presence of characters as they are unlit and silent. The audience witnesses the unwrapping of the mechanism of theatre as it is expressed in terms of cinema. As witnesses to what is provoked by the light as well as the process of the light's provocation, the audience of Play is distanced in a Brechtian sense. 34

The distancing implicit in Brecht's theory of theatre and the distancing achieved by Beckett by means of the structure and style of Play both remain within the ap­ paratus of theatre. Rather than challenging or attempting to remove the apparatus, both Brecht and Beckett use the apparatus as a way to explore the nature of theatre

(Beckett) or as a didactic tool (Brecht). Though, as

Enoch Brater suggests, "the relationship between Brecht and Beckett is a study of correspondences rather than of influence or ready imitation, Beckett's inclusion of both the product (the characters' speeches) and the agent which provokes the product (action of the light) creates a structure which embodies a number of emphases attributed by Brecht to the "epic" theatre.Play is "narrative" as opposed to plot; it "turns the spectator into an observer," rather than implicating "the spectator in a stage situation." "The spectator stands' outside, studies,"

"rather than sharing the experience"; "the human being is the object of the inquiry" rather than one who is taken for granted.At the same time Play contradicts other of

Brecht's criteria. It certainly does not arouse the audience's "capacity for action," nor does it persuade the audience to "take decisions," nor is it an "argument," nor 14 are the characters "alterable and able to alter." 35

The ways in which the structure of Play seems to

agree with Brecht's notions are the result of its form

(its inclusion of both the product and the means of production) and the style in which its characters' narratives are presented, but the presence of these

Brechtian attributes results more from Beckett's cutting

across Brechtian notions of the correspondence of form and content. Admittedly, their purposes seem to be different:

Brecht exhorting to action and change, Beckett questioning the possibility and utility of action at all; and they purport to exist in totally different spheres, Brecht in the theatre qua theatre and Beckett in a theatre that pre­ sents a grey reduced world that has just emerged from the darkness and is soon to return. But the totality of

Brecht's socially didactic purpose collides with the totality of Beckett's vision of the individual. Brecht's

insistence on the audience's consciousness of the theatrical vehicle was for the purpose of provoking thought and preventing mindless identification and escape, a style that complemented the social content of his plays.

Beckett's presentation of the means of production in Play, rather than complementing the content of the characters' narratives, is antagonistic to their orderly recital, further frustrating players already literally entrapped in 36

urns. The audience's consciousness of the means of

production in Play enhances the feeling of isolation and

alienation already inherent in the vision of the urns and

the narratives of the players and at the same time is

itself totally incongruous to the kinds of tragedy or

romanticism we might have experienced in an orderly ex­ position of the characters' narratives.

Like the prisoners in Plato's cave, the characters in

Play are figures in a larger metaphor: that of the mechanical process of being on stage; they are themselves a part of the apparatus of theatre. Their histories are

an analysis of "playing," of acting, of blocking and lines

gone awry, orchestrated by the demanding and impersonal

light, creating a theatre in which the characters become

aware of their own act of telling, of their own position

locked on stage probed by the light. Unlike the con­

sciousness of acting in the framed plays of Shakespeare's

Hamlet or Villiers' The Rehearsal, the characters in Play only gradually awaken to a consciousness and anxiety about

the probing nature of the light and the possibility of

their "being seen." The mechanical light literally di­

rects their playing. Outside them and beyond, the light

is the director as well as the lighting designer, the set designer and the sound controller. 37

The characters are unable to play off of one another

(we are not even certain whether or not they can even hear one another) in the same way the cave's prisoners cannot see other prisoners. The interplay that exists is ac­ complished instead by the mechanical intermediary, the light, which cuts and arranges the characters' speeches in such a way as to create almost inadvertent plays on words, unless we wish to anthropomorphize the light even further by attributing a sense of humor to it. The characters project their anxieties upon the light instead of upon one another, dissecting the intercourse that might be antici­ pated in a realist or psychological drama, dissecting the interplay that is a normal part of the apparatus of the theatre. At the end of the play, they are done playing, they have no more lines, and the light, like a cruel orchestra conductor, continues to make them play until it is time to repeat for the coda. Rather than being a 15 "victim of its own inquisition," the light becomes the subject of its own play, continuing to elicit and inter­ rupt the characters' quasi-hysterical observations on the nature of their relationship to the light.

As meta-theatre. Play is more a dissection and analysis of theatre than a mere consciousness of the act of playing in a play. Unlike Endgame's Hamm and Clov who 38

are constantly aware of the "thing," or the "day" and who seem to have some control over when to begin and where to end ("I'm warming up for my last soliloquy"), the man and two women in Play are subject and object at once without control and without a consciousness of the total theatrical vehicle. They are parts of a whole that only the audience can see. In Play theatre becomes less a metaphor for life than simply a metaphor for itself— or life has been re­ duced to the mechanical forms of this theatre, which rather than being larger than life ("all the world is a stage"), has become a detached objectified vehicle.

Play's meta-theatrical analysis is reflected in the structural relationship between the light inquisitor and the urned characters. The light-character relationship is suspiciously like that of the projector-image relationship in cinema. Since the characters in Play seem literally to speak because of the light shining upon them, the relation­ ship between the light as a source and the players as products or results of the working of that source is analogous to the relationship between a motion picture pro­ jector and the images it projects upon a screen. If the relationship projector-screen-image may be called the mechanical apparatus of film (as opposed to the

"cinematographic apparatus"), the structure of Play 39

contains, in the relationship between the light, the characters, and the devolution of the narrative, a metaphor for the mechanical apparatus of film. The analogy between the process and structure of Play and that of film in general is also suggested by the impersonal and flat

"toneless" quality of the players in Play, by the montage, or intercutting of the players' speeches, by the disjunc­ tion of what is actually seen in Play and what is described by the characters, by Play's exact repetition, and by the somewhat unusual position of the audience as witness not only to the result of theatrical direction (the narratives) but also to the process of that direction itself.

The mechanical apparatus of film (projector-screen- image) metaphor of Play is very simply represented by the light and the characters in the urns. The light in Play is described by Beckett in the end notes to the play as,

"single," "not situated outside ideal space (stage) occupied by its victims," is optimally "at the centre of the footlights," the "faces lit at close quarters and from below," by a "single spot swiveling at maximum speed from one face to another." Though Beckett denominates the light an "inquisitor," its other attributes are curiously like a film projector. Its single source is like the bulb which shines through the moving film at close quarters if 40

not from below. The "swiveling at maximum speed" results in an almost instantaneous cut like those made in film from one scene to another.

Though the projector bulb is seen during a film only by implication (as the only way the images could reach the screen), the light source has been used as a part of the diegesis (the world represented by the film) of several films. Ingmar Bergman's Persona begins with an image of the projector arc as the projector begins to run and pro­ ject the film itself. Mfeliës' The Magic Lantern, is a vaudeville which dissects the means of projection

(lantern). Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera begins with the projector arc and the theatre filling for the projec­ tion of the film to be seen. In all of these films the source of image and perhaps even of meaning is the flicker­ ing light of the p r o j e c t o r . 16

The other part of the mechanical apparatus of film, the screen, is represented in Play by the faces in the urns which function as both the image projected by the projector light, and as the screen upon which the play of images de­ volves. What is seen in Play is the light shining on faces, "so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of urns" (p. 45). The image that appears to have been projected by the light is sometimes one, sometimes three 41

faces. However, without characteristic or expression and as parts of urns which are "touching one another,"

"identical grey," and "one yard high," the faces and urns create a rectangular space similar to a movie screen. The faces and urns are also literally the planes upon which the play of images created by the narrative take place. The words of the narrative create the only real play of visual imagery in Play. What is seen in Play is the memories constituted by the narrative of the past as told by three grey faces.

The dual function of the faces and urns as both pro­ jected image and screen upon which images are projected is not inconsistent with the function of the screen in cinema.

In viewing any film, the spectator sees not only the image cast by the projector, but also the screen as the frame, the space within which that image is projected. Film comprehends and uses that screen space, shifting the composition of the image within it, as if it were literally the frame to a painting, or referring to the space outside of it or off-screen, and hence referring to the limitation of the screen space.The faces and urns in Play function in much the same way. Serving constantly as a point of reference for the present situation of the narrators and of the play itself, they, like the screen, delimit the 42

sphere of action. References to the past are quite literally "off-screen," and point to the current limita­ tions of the urn denizens.

The images in Play other than that of the urn/screen itself, are created by the players' narratives which are replete with visual imagery. W2 begins her speeches by evoking the scene of her encounter with Wl: "One morning as I was sitting stitching by the open window she burst in and flew at me" (p. 46). W2 also refers in this speech to the photographs she had seen of Wl as if the photographs are a past fact that do not correspond to the reality of

Wl's image: "Her photographs were kind to her" (p. 47).

In the rest of her speeches W2 often describes the physical actions of Wl and M. She describes the second meeting with

Wl: "She came again. Just strolled in. All honey.

Licking her lips. Poor thing. I was doing my nails, by the open window" (p. 49). W2's description of mannerism evokes the visual and creates a visual context for the dialogue she relates. W2 describes her reaction to M's desertion in visual terms as well: "I made a bundle of his things and burnt them. It was November and the bonfire was going. All night I smelt them smouldering" (p. 52).

Wl, a bit more self-centered than W2, litters her derogations of W2 with adjectives that evoke the visual. 43

"Pudding face, puffy, spots, blubber mouth, jowls, no neck, dugs you could— " (p. 50). Her reaction to M's apparent desertion is as visual as that of W2: "Before I could do anything he disappeared. That meant she had won. That slut.' I couldn't credit it. I lay stricken for weeks.

Then I drove over to her place. It was all bolted and barred. All grey with frozen dew" (p. 51). Wl's descrip­ tion of M are still visual, but not nearly so vituperative.

Of M she says, "He was looking pale" (p. 49), and "What a male!" (p. 48).

M, instead of creating a visual context for the dialogues he relates, situates them in the context of his own feelings. His speeches are less descriptive of events, but perhaps more colorful in their appeal to the mundane.

He states, "We were not long together when she smelled the rat" (p. 47). "She put a bloodhound on me, but I had a little talk with him. He was glad of the extra money"

(p. 48). M's matter-of-fact recital of the affair which occurs in the first half of Play is augmented by his very visual fantasy of what could have been in the second half :

"Never woke together, on a May morning, the first to wake to wake the other two. Then in a little dinghy— " (p. 59).

Then: "A little dinghy, on the river, I resting on my 44

oars, they lolling on air cushions in the stern . . . sheets. Drifting. Such fantasies" (p. 60).

M's switch from the matter-of-fact to fantasy is characteristic of all of the characters. In the first half of Play the characters attempt to describe, to situate the affair in the sensual world. In the second half, they create imaginary images such as Wl's imagination of W2:

"Perhaps she is sitting somewhere, by the open window, her hands folded in her lap, gazing down out over the olives— "

(p. 58), or W2's preoccupation with the light: "No doubt

I make the same mistake as when it was the sun that shone, of looking for sense where possibly there is none" (p. 55).

Like W2, all become preoccupied with the light in the second half, describing the phenomenon being witnessed by the audience, becoming increasingly self-reflective.

Though there is nothing unusual about the characters' descriptions which appeal essentially to the senses there is something unique about the context of these speeches which makes their sensual appeal more than usually focal.

Because of the sensual poverty of the urns and faces, the images evoked by the speeches become what is "seen" in the play.18 The words are the raw material of the action

"seen" and remembered by the characters and through them 45

by the audience. The telling of the narratives in Play is

an attempt to picture, to make seen, and because of this the characters' narratives are analogous to film images.

Concepts of film editing and the role of the image as the raw material of film inform the light's jumps from one narrator to another. The interrupted and rearranged nar­ ratives are similar to edited film sequences; the action of the light creates an ensemble like a filmic montage.

The dialectic between shot and montage is the basic structural tension in Play. A shot, regarded by Sergei

Eisenstein as a "montage cell," is defined by Bazin as

"straightforward photographic respect for the unity of s p a c e . "19 In Play, this "shot" corresponds to each player's narration of that portion of the story that occurred in a single space. Each story would, thus, be composed of several shots. That the same story is told three times offers shots from three different points-of- view or camera angles.

This cinematic analysis would not be very revealing if the light in Play moved in a strictly metrical progres­ sion from player to player in the same order and for the same length of time on each face. However, since the light moves irregularly, the effects of its cutting and 46

interrupting create conflict and tension from one inter­ rupted narrative to another resulting in contradictions, puns, repetition, and echoes of one narrative in another.

The types of conflict created by the light's cutting from player to player correspond to the effects and principles of editing as defined by Eisenstein.20 Though the light's editing is always "intellectual" since what is being edited are always words and ideas, its editing is also sometimes "rhythmic" ("movement within the frame which impels movement from frame to frame"), sometimes

"tonal" (movement from frame to frame based on emotional and "dominant" "tone" of a shot), sometimes "overtonal"

(montage based on overall secondary tone), and sometimes

"intellectual" ("conflict-juxtaposition of accompanying intellectual effects").

An example of "rhythmic" montage in Play would be:

Wl: Then I began to smell her off him again. Yes. Spot from Wl to W 2 . W2: When he stopped coming I was prepared. More or less. Spot from W2 to M . M: Finally it was all too much. I simply could no longer— (p. 51)

The rhythmic editing results from the fact that the speeches are cut when their ideas are complete. The ideas are simple, briefly expressed and the shot in each is brief. In other words, the length of the "shot" reflects 47

its content. The cut at the end of M's speech is a "tonal"

cut, since the placement of the cut at a point which inter­

rupts corresponds to the dominant idea expressed— "no

longer . "

Other examples of this "tonal" montage occur at the

end of Play, when the characters' self-reflective speeches

seem themselves to direct the light's movement. Wl says

"I can't. The mind won't have it. It would have to go.

Yes" (p. 57), and the light does, cutting to M. A few

lines later M says: "Am I hiding something? Have I

lost " (p. 57), and he loses the light which cuts to Wl.

Later W2 says: "Like dragging a great roller, or a scorch­

ing day. The strain . . . to get it moving, momentum

coming— Spot off W2. Blackout. Three Seconds. Spot on

W2. W2: Kill it and strain again" (p. 57) which the

light has done here and throughout the last portion of the piece.

If "tonal montage" is the primary method of the latter part of Play, then "overtonal" and "intellectual" montage characterize the first part. "Overtonal" montage is the principle behind the juxtaposition of the following speeches :

M: We were not long together when she smelled the rat. Give up that whore, she said, or I'll cut my throat— (hiccup) pardon— so help me God. I knew she could 48

have no proof. So I told her I did not know what she was talking about. (p. 47) followed by:

W2: What are you talking about? I said, stitching away. Someone yours? Give up whom? I smell you off him, she screamed, he stinks of bitch. (p. 47) followed by:

W2: Though I had him dogged for months by a first-rate man, no shadow of proof was forthcoming. And there was no deny­ ing that he continued as . . . assiduous as ever. This, and his horror of the merely Platonic thing, made me sometimes wonder if I were not accusing him un­ justly. Yes. (p. 47)

The dominant theme in these three speeches is the idea of adultery and discovery. The overtones: the idea of smelling (" . . . she smelled the rat”), ("he stinks of bitch"), and the animal imagery ('' . . . she smelled the rat"), ("he stinks of bitch"), ("I had him dogged for months"), and the pretense of ignorance on the part of M and W2 ("I told her I did not know what she was talking about"), ("Someone yours? Give up whom?") tie the speeches together. In addition the editing is intellectual. The denials of the first two speeches lead to doubt in the third. The cut on "talking about" in M's speech is echoed by W2's first line, "What are you talking about?" 49

The puns and echoes occur throughout Play and are primarily intellectual montage.

Though the light's cuts seem to simulate film edit­

ing, the result of the process is not a film; rather the

result is a record of the process of editing. The light,

like Hamm telling his stories in Endgame, or Clov trying to leave the shelter, or Krapp composing his memories on tape, is "trying," and the result is not a finished product, but the record of the process of trying. It is the deconstruction of the process of montage. The light acts as a film editor, reviewing each speech, skipping from one to another, sometimes viewing them in an ensemble

"establishment" shot as a kind of reorientation to the whole picture. The final product (the play) is more like

a documentary of three people telling their versions of an adulterous love triangle than a fiction film of the affair. The speeches are not edited in parallel; that is, during the speech witnessed, the other two do not proceed on their own in the dark and are not rejoined at the point

in the story they would have gotten to if they had con­ tinued to tell during the duration of the speech seen.

Rather, the speeches are edited on to one another as if nothing can be told in the absence of the light, as if the characters must be seen in order to tell. 50

The attempt at editing made by the light is an analysis or even a parody of the editing process, but it is also a product, a completed work of art that carries significance in the fact that it appears to be a process rather than the result of that process. In the editing process the light undertakes in Play, the long-shot, the pp Bazinian ideal, is frustrated. Seldom is a character permitted to narrate more than a short part of the story.

Play appears to be the product of an overzealous and almost literal use of Eisenstein's theories of montage.

If, as Eisenstein asserted, the essence of film is montage, then Play certainly embodies the essence of film, but it is a film like those of Godard which frustrate the narrative in favor of an exposition of the process of its own making.

The cinematic metaphor particularizes the meta- theatric analysis of structure and informs the play's deconstruction of the act of playing. The montage process creates a play in which the characters, controlled by what seems to be an outside agent, interrupt and frustrate each other's narratives in an attempt to assert their own egoes, their own stories. Their inability to finish their narratives, the inability to totally justify their actions and their anxiety about the light is an anxiety about the 51

termination of the possibility to project or to remove the source of failure and guilt to a locus outside of them­ selves. It is also an anxiety about whether it is possible for them to achieve personal integration and justification and establish their pre-eminence within the triangle, once and for all, or even to reestablish the triangle. Neither woman succeeds in establishing herself as premier mate, and the male fails in his fantasy. The opportunity to tell afforded by the light is an opportunity to integrate and justify the self, to confess and "cure." But just as the light provides opportunity, it frustrates it, matching the fragmentation that appears to have been a part of the three characters’ experience. What happens in Play, then, is quite literally a psychological projection of each character's anxieties and fantasies. The light, though it seems to project the images on the facial screens of the characters, is itself the object of the characters’ pro­ jection, becoming the culprit, the focus of each character’s inability to tell, to confess, and hence finally to integrate, justify, and gain pre-eminence over the others.

In this context. Play’s meta-cinematic qualities pro­ vide almost a pun for the psychological processes of the play. The light is projected obstacle, the characters are 52

projected narratives, the past is projected words prompted by the light. In the midst of all this projection, there is the play of reality and illusion that is remarkably and conveniently like the play of reality/illusion in film.

The basis for this psychological battle becomes more evident when the metaphor for the mechanical apparatus of cinema in Play is posited as shaping and defining the process of viewing Play. The cinema metaphor defines the relationships between the light, the characters, their words, and the audience as elements in the process of viewing film, a process which involves the same psychologi­ cal principles as those governing the behavior of the characters. An analysis of the functions and relationships among the faces in urns (screen), the light (projector), and the viewing audience provides another way to determine where the characters are located, what their narratives mean and how they function, and what place the audience occupies in this process. Questions raised by film theoreticians: where is what is on the screen? How does the projector/camera shape what is seen? In what ways does the audience identify with what appears on the screen? are all useful in determining the process and meaning of

Play. 53

In the cinematographic apparatus defined by Baudry, the image cast on the screen by the projector (or the end product of the process of making film), embodies the as­ sumptions and codes of its production; and the use of these implanted codes and assumptions requires that the viewer identify with the projected image in certain de­ fined ways. Thus, what is ultimately seen on the screen is in a sense the sum total of the processes of its production and of its viewing. The processes of viewing, i.e., the ways in which the screen images create narrative and invite audience identification, are dependent upon human psychology; for the codes and assumptions of produc­ tion to be successful, they must utilize this same psychology. The result is that the product, film, is only comprehensible within a viewing process that is defined by the way that the process and product of film production incorporate psychological mechanisms of the construction of the subject. The use of the cinema metaphor in Play suggests that Play is subject to these same mechanisms.

If the urns and faces in Play are analogous to the screen in the cinema model, they function in much the same way as the screen does as the locus of the image and as

Lacan's mirror. "The screen is the projection of the film frame which holds and grounds (hence the urgency of the 54

OO need to fix the position, to forbid the other side)."

The screen is necessary to make sense of the light; nothing could be comprehended if we looked straight into the pro­ jector. We see the images on the screen after a moments' reflection as we see (and hear) the characters in Play a second after the light is shone in their faces. Our ex­ perience of Play is distanced by this reflective second; the characters' experience of the light is immediate. We see the reflection, the characters see the light.

It is by means of the light projected on faces in the urns that the love triangle is seen. The faces and urns are distanced from the audience by means of the light

(doubly distanced since we see also the process of selection of the light, i.e., the mode of production as well as the product). At the same time, there is meaning inherent in their very screeness: they are subject, reflection, projection of their own inner vision as well as in the eye of the audience.

Their position as screen also places the urns and faces within a cinematic structure of reality and illusion.

As Bazin states;

The screen is not a frame like that of a picture, but a mask which allows only a part of the action to be seen. When a character moves off screen, we accept the fact that he is out of sight, but he 55

continues to exist in his own capacity at some other place in the decor which is hidden from us. There are no wings to the screen. There could not be without destroying its specific illusion, which is to make of a revolver or of a face the very center of the u n i v e r s e . 24

In Play, the mixture of cinema and theatre creates this same phenomenon. The character whose face is lit is literally at the center. Because the rest of the stage is dark, there is little if any sense of a geographical set as there is in a regular stage play. The characters who are in darkness are out of sight, but not in the wings.

They are merely masked by darkness.

What is present on the faces and urns/screens is in large part a result of the discerning function of the light/projector. Again, as Stephen Heath has said; "In so far as it is grounded in the photograph, cinema . . . will bring with it monocular perspective, the positioning of the spectator-subject in an identification with the camera as the point of a sure and centrally embracing view."^®

In cinema, the projector reproduces what the camera eye

"sees"; thus, in Play the audience is positioned in iden­ tification with the light/projector, i.e., still within the cave (though it is at the same time distanced from the light because the process of the light is revealed as part of the play). During those times when the audience 56

identifies with the light, the light in Play becomes a

camera eye, an eye which Stephen Heath describes as "an eye free from the body, outside process, purely

looking . . . the eye in cinema is the perfect eye, the steady and ubiquitous control of the scene passed from director to spectator by virtue of the cinematic apparatus . . . While the audience is recipient of the characters' speeches, the narrative products of the

light, it is also aware of the light's process in combin­ ing those speeches, in its "constant scanning movements to bring the different parts of whatever is observed to the fovea . . . ,"^7 thus when the audience sees the light in its role as the subject, identification with the light

is broken, and the audience becomes the camera eye record­ ing the process of the cinematographic apparatus, i.e., outside the cave.

In Play, our ability to see the characters is facilitated and mediated by the light as is our ability to see film images. The light in Play produces movement among the characters, so that while the live actors are present and three-dimensional, they are a presence with the illusion of a reality different than that of a present performer just as the play of images on the screen creates a reality different from that of a movie screen in a 57

theatre. Like film, Play * s reality fools us; there is in

film according to Christian Metz "on the one hand, the

impression of reality produced by the diegesis, the universe of fiction, what is represented . . . and on the other hand, the reality of the vehicle of representa­ tion . . . In addition. Play, unlike most theatre,

lends a strong impression of a reality different than the reality of the stage, because as Metz further states:

The impression of reality we get from film does not depend at all upon the strong presence of an actor but, rather, on the low degree of existence possessed by those ghostly creatures moving on the screen, and they are, therefore, unable to resist our constant impulse to invest them with the 'reality' of fiction (the concept of diegesis), a reality that comes only from within us, from the projections and identifications that are mixed in with our perceptions of the film.29

Given the function of the screen and the light, the characters in Play are situated in a locus entirely defined by Play's structure and process. They are entrapped within the apparatus, unable to find themselves or to even work out their Oedipal conflicts. Though their appearance may be cadaverous, and though they may evoke images of hell or limbo, their location is precisely that of the screen in the cinematic model. They are present in three forms simultaneously: they are in real time in a real space on 58

a real stage (a location necessarily evoked by the self- conscious quality of Play); they are an illusion of characters on a screen; and they are the reality of that illusion within the more complex process of identification invoked by their position as subject of the process of the light. In sum, they are as present and alive as images on a screen.

The audience's impulse to invest characters on a cinema screen with their own projections and identifica­ tions in Play is a mirror of the characters’ projections.

In Play the audience is dissociated from the characters because of the visible activity of the light, but at the same time because the activity of the light is not in­ visible, but overtly recognized by the characters, the audience identifies with the experience of the characters

o n in the light. It is as if the audience of Play were simultaneously fooled by the apparatus and aware of its operation. Play’s audience is both behind and in front of the light, identifying with the characters in their battle with the light, participating with the light in its relentless sweep. The experience of the characters in being seen is the mirror of the experience of the audience in seeing them. The light is always the mediator. 59

This mirror structure is created by the imposition of a cinema model on theatre as well as by the distanciation implicit in the simultaneous exposition of process and product. Because Play is theatre and because it is dis­ tanced, operations of identification in cinema, such as suture, do not function since in Play there is never any qi "absence." Instead the cinema metaphor in Play is overt; it is visibly part of the process of Play. Play is not cinema; in some ways it is like cinema, and this likeness is a resonance of meta-theatre as well as of the meanings of the characters' narratives.

As the cinema model (projector-screen-image) shapes the viewing of Play and accords additional significance to a structure which is already meta-theatrical, it provides the final analogy which leads back to the psychological drama of the characters in Play. This same cinema model has been used in one form or another by both Freud and

Lacan, Freud as an analogy for the relationship between the unconscious and the conscious and Lacan as the govern­ ing figure in the "mirror stage."

Freud uses the analogy of the camera obscura as a way of explaining how mental processes pass from the un­ conscious to the conscious, "just as a photographic picture begins as a negative and only becomes a picture after being 60

turned into a p o s i t i v e . The light in Play or camera acts in the same way as does Freud's "watchman":

The impulses in the entrance hall of the unconscious are out of sight of the con­ scious, which is in the other room; to begin with they must remain unconscious. If they have already pushed their way forward to the threshold and have been turned back by the watchman, then they are inadmissible to consciousness; we speak of them as repressed. But even the impulses which the watchman has allowed to cross the threshold are not on that account necessarily conscious as well; they can only become so if they succeed in catching the eye of con­ sciousness. We are therefore justified in calling this second room the system of the preconscious.33

Stephen Heath describes this process as a "camera obscura" with a "series of chambers with negatives and positives, movements and repressions, screenings for and from the eye of consciousness."^'^

By Freud's description, the psychological battle in

Play is precisely this process of catching the eye of con­ sciousness or being seen. The characters in their darkness wait in the anteroom of the preconscious. The light as watchman selects what is permitted to become conscious.

The characters are light and dark, "negative and positive."

The light of consciousness moves and represses so that Play is finally an exposition of the process of the preconscious becoming the conscious. Since the audience of Play's sight 61

of the characters mirrors their being seen, it could be said that the audience of Play and the characters come to consciousness by the same process: the selective move­ ments of the light; however, the audience participates as both watchman and character.

Lacan's characterization of the relationship between the conscious, the unconscious, and the facility of speech further illuminates the process of Play. It is Lacan's theory that the unconscious is structured like language: the unconscious is the discourse of the "Other." The cinema screen represented by the urns functions as the mirror in Lacan's mirror stage. In the face of this mirror the infant recognizes that he is a separate individual; that there are o t h e r s .^5 The recognition of difference is necessary for the acquisition of language and the uncon­ scious. As the mother, the primary object of desire is recognized as different, the infant is thrust into the

Oedipal conflict, the resolution of which will enable him to gain his own real identity and be truly separate.

The diegetic Play, or that which occurs only on stage, illustrates the mechanism of the subject's question to the unconscious discourse of the Other. The stage with its light and urns is the entire apparatus. The urns function as mirror, and through it the discourse of the unconscious. 62

The light is the conscious subject, playing out the desire

of the Other like an orchestra conductor, revealing in turn

different strings of an unconscious trapped in an unresolv-

able Oedipal conflict. In this sense. Play is literally

the bringing to light of that unconscious spoken by the

Other and repressed again in an endless repetition as the

light passes on.

The characters' narratives in Play are essentially recollections of what might be termed a variation of the

Oedipal triangle, narratives which correspond closely to the implications of the play's meta-cinematic structure.

The male seeks the forbidden, the other woman, and is halted by the "law," the stricture of marriage. His

fantasy is to possess the wife and the forbidden, to change

the "law." The women both seek the male; both desire an

exclusive relationship and are thus in competition with one

another for the father. Wl's fantasies reflect her desire

for order; she envisions the other two together and hopes

herself to disappear. W2 is vaguely hysterical. She is

against the law and is also self-destructive. None of the

characters has resolved the dilemma; they merely replay it

again and again. 63

If we are distanced from the diegetic play and are made conscious of the play's structure and process, that

is if we step back and shift mirrors, it is possible to see the entire theatre in which Play is played as the

Lacanian subject in a similar construct. If the entire theatre is the apparatus, the light and urns combine as the mirror/screen. The audience is the conscious subject whose unconscious drama is unfolded by the phallic signifier of the swinging light. In this sense. Play is a metaphor for the process of a ritual theatre that goes back to Oedipus Rex. Its use of the cinematic metaphor empha­ sizes a distanciation which paradoxically and insidiously arrives at a most basic conflict. The juncture of meta­ theatre and meta-cinema is instrumental in providing a model for the revelation of hidden conflicts and their sub­ sequent repression. It is only through this distanciation, this discourse of the Other, that our own unconscious dis­ course is revealed. Thus, Play, meta-theatric and meta- cinematic, is at the juncture of reality and illusion, of the unconscious and the conscious in the frozen moment of endless transition. La Chinoise

I turn myself around, suddenly— irresistable— the question confronts me: what if these several words which I've read in my maladroit, blind fashion, were nothing else but fragments of a huge, unknown play happening inside myself— me, a worker in the theatre of the world— their sense still unknown . . . That's why I speak.

Jean-Luc Godard La Chinoise!

Unlike the taciturn Beckett whose intentions we can

only infer from his work, Jean-Luc Godard has always will­

ingly, if not aggressively, revealed the aims of his films,

Though Beckett may ask his actors in the stage directions

of Play to adopt a style of delivery that has the effect

of distancing the audience in a style reminiscent of that

suggested by Brecht, we can only speculate that the

effect of this style of acting is audience distanciation.%

Play itself suggests a logical context for the

characters' unnatural delivery of their lines. Although through our analysis Beckett may seem to adopt a meta- cinematic formula for the arrangement of the light and the

64 65

characters on the stage, our interpretation of this arrangement requires the enlistment of yet other critical schema analogous to the structure we have determined to be meta-cinematic. Hence, the act of interpreting Play be­ comes an act of accreting analogies, each one interpreting the previous, until Beckett’s Play lies buried but still uncracked within layers of analogies that illuminate but do not explicate the play.

Godard’s La Chinoise (1968), self-consciously explores the nature of film, the nature of political action, and the relationship between film and revolution. As Véronique, the student, demonstrates to Guillaume, the actor, film, like its revolutionary characters, ’’does two things at once.” In La Chinoise, Godard is loquacious where Beckett was silent. As Guillaume, another student, and Véronique say at the beginning of the film: ”We are the discourse of others,” recalling the similarity between their position on the screen and the position of the characters in Play on the stage as well as the Lacanian implications of such a position.

Like Beckett’s Play, La Chinoise makes use of the relationship among the means of production, the actors, and the audience. As in Play, that which is seen by a 66

second audience is meta-theatric and meta-cinematic. The process of watching the process draws attention to form and process. However, when the audience becomes an active part of the equation, self-reflection becomes the reflec­ tion of the self. In Play the audience faces the discourse of the other in a representation of its own unconscious.

La Chinoise, beginning with a suspiciously Lacanian play on words, defines film as a process of unmasking which results in the final equation of self/other in a more political context.

Segmented into Brechtian episodes clearly labelled

"dialogues," and again into "movements," La Chinoise pre­ sents the activities of five Marxist-Leninist student revolutionaries who are spending the summer living in a

"cell." The students come from different social classes and hold differing views on the process of revolution, another segmentation which echoes the formal structure of the film and which is clearly emphasized by corresponding spacial divisions created by the camera while it tracks from balcony window to balcony window recording the process of the students' lecture/discussions. The lecture/ discussions which constitute the cell's main activity is commingled with interviews with four of the students and 67

with political posters, slogans, and bits of guerilla theatre. The cell decides (with one dissident) that one of them must assassinate a visiting Soviet emissary, and after having chosen lots by reading from Mao, véronique goes to shoot him at his hotel. Ironically, Véronique, in reading the emissary's room number upside-down, mis- transposes it and murders the wrong man. Realizing her mistake, she returns and kills the correct one. After signing a confession, Kirilov, the cell's Russian artist, kills himself. At the end of the summer, the cell dis­ solves and life goes on.

La Chinoise, made before the events of May, 1968, is uncannily prophetic. The social and ideological upheaval that characterized many of the issues of the student/worker movement are present in the activities of the student cell.

Sylvia Harvey describes the tenor of the time as a period in which there was:

suspicion of all organisation, all hierarchy, and of the traditional Left (in particular the PCF); and an at once powerful and confused equation of social and sexual repression. This critique of the university which led to the critique of the whole mode of social organisation tended towards the affirmation of spontaneous action and self-expression, the validating of direct democracy in 68

place of mechanisms of representation and delegation, an emphasis on sexual liberation, notions of creativity and the work of imagination and desire.3

The critique made by the students in La Chinoise is the critique of the students of Nanterre; it is only the mode of production and form of the film that Godard would soon reject in favor of the ideals of the Dziga-Vertov group which he describes as the desire "to make politically a political cinema" and ". . .to make a concrete analysis of a concrete situation . . . to understand the laws of the objective world in order to actively transform that world . . . to know one's place in the process of produc­ tion in order then to change it. La Chinoise still takes place within the world of cinema rather than in the world of the concrete; it is filmic rather than objective.

Baudry's idea of the cinematographic apparatus can be re­ shaped for revolution.

The increasingly overt political statements of his films complement Godard's equal preoccupation with film's process of self-definition. La Chinoise is pre-eminently aware of its own process, constantly reminding the viewer that the process of the student revolutionaries is a product of film, and documenting the film's processes of becoming and being film. The connection between political 69

action and Godard's self-conscious, raeta-filmic film is a

result of Godard's own creative process. As Godard says,

"Instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but the

critical dimension is subsumed. I think of myself as an

essayist, producing essays in novel form, or novels in

essay form, only instead of writing, I film them."^ In his

later writing and interviews, the concept of meta-film re­ mains vaguely defined, and Godard seems, as Brian Henderson

has noted, "ambivalent" about it ; however, the purpose,

style, and structure of Godard's films made after

La Chinoise resolve that ambivalence, and clarify Godard's

critical priorities along lines advocated by the

Dziga-Vertov group.® Though Godard renounces his films up

to and including La Chinoise as "bourgeois,"? in his later

films, particularly those of the Dziga-Vertov group

(British Sounds. Pravda, Vent d'est. Struggle in Italy,

Vladimir and Rosa. Tout va bien , and Letter to Jane), he

continues his attempt to use film as a Brechtian mode for political change.®

La Chinoise equates the process of film and the process of revolution, and in so doing dissects the ap­ paratus of the metaphor of the cave using theories specific to both theatre and film.® The equation of film and 70

theatre, and film and revolution is, as Godard states "an essay" in which the process of film and the process of revolution are dissected and separated into their various elements. The dissection of film and of revolution re­ sults in a comparison of the processes of the two, a comparison which makes evident their similarity. The elements of film, image, language, and theatre are the same as the elements of revolution. Their meeting ground and connection is in the theatre contained in the film, a

Brechtian theatre defined by the character Guillaume in the first Dialogue. Since theatre has a potential for ritual transformation as well as a potential to provoke thought and ordered change, in La Chinoise theatre provides the model for both self-analysis and political action.

The title La Chinoise suggests the Brechtian methodology to be employed by Godard in order to convey this political content. Like Brecht, Godard uses the ap­ paratus of production to simultaneously dissect the apparatus of production, unwrapping the mechanism of the cave but leaving the characters trapped within it. La

Chinoise refers to the ardent female follower of Mao,

Véronique, and perhaps also to Brecht's Good Woman of

Szechwan. and finally to Brecht's appropriation of the 71

Chinese model of acting as the basis for his "alienation effect."^® Brecht's concept of alienation which forces thought is the ideal solution to the problem of conveying political content in a traditionally escapist medium. As

James Monaco suggests, in film there is . . an extra burden of separation (and identification) placed upon the artist. The burden is especially vital because film is not just another art like sculpture or painting but an entirely new medium which directly challenges the written and spoken language itself.Godard shoulders this additional burden by means of his self-conscious combination of image and its critique: "The commentary on the image forms part of the image . . . The criticism would be the dialogue of the film, with photographs and comments; the whole thing would comprise a critical analysis of film."

The dissection of film and of revolution in

La Chinoise is accomplished by means of the image and its accompanying commentary or perhaps to be more accurate, by commentary illustrated by its accompanying image. As in the series of lectures delivered by members of the cell and by special guest speakers, an issue such as art, classism, or imperialism is analyzed by statements reinforced by ex­ amples. The film itself is a series of statements and 72

reinforcing examples about its own process and about the process of film in general. The statements take film apart and divide it into basic elements and the examples show how these elements work together in various combinations to create film. Revolution is dissected by means of the same process except that the statements made about film are as­ serted by the film itself; in contrast, the students, as characters, diegetically most often make the statements about the nature of revolution.

La Chinoise is divided into an introduction and four dialogues. Though apparently segmented into episodes by the black titles which force an awareness of the film as film, each episode is a collage of lecture, discussion, interview, inserted image, and guerilla theatre. The film is marked by a Brechtian segmentation: the student characters represent different socio-economic classes and play different roles in the commune. Even philosophy is compartmentalized into units as discrete as the small, red books of Mao scattered throughout the apartment.

The introduction to the film and the first dialogue function as a matrix which defines not only the elements of film and their combinations, but which also establishes the film's self-conscious meta-cinematic style. In this 73

initial part Godard lays his cinematic cards on the table, using a five-minute interview with the character Guillaume to analyze the mechanisms of communication, to recombine them, and to suggest a tentative formula for the making of film. Because this segment deconstructs the ingredients of communication qua film, it serves as an analogue to the

layers of meaning and representation in the cinematographic

apparatus: Godard is dissecting the cave. When seen within the context of the political process content of the film, the opening segment becomes a tentative analysis of political action and of political action via the medium of film.

The words, "IL FAUT CONFRONTER LES IDEES VAGUES AVEC

DES IMAGES CLAIRES (It is necessary to confront vague ideas with clear images)," written on a wall of the students' apartment defines Godard's method of defining these basic filmic elements. The undefined idea of film is confronted

in this opening segment by a series of images of the con­ ceptual and mechanical elements of film. These images define many of the mechanisms available for communication via film and provide raw material for the equations Godard constructs for parts of the filmic process. This list of elements creates a kind of filmic atomic chart which 74

functions as a component list on two separate, but inter­ related grids: one grid is a series of examples of the basic mechanico-technical means of communication on film, and the other consists of tentative definitions of the con­ cepts language, image, theatre, and film. The statement and illustrative examples co-exist— the example equals its concept. There is no orderly combination or classification of mechanical elements which defines or comprises the con­ cepts, nor is there a suggestion that concepts can be broken into mechanical components. Instead, the coexist­ ence of the mechanical and the conceptual suggests an opalescent ambiguity: all is all and neither is exclusively either.

The film opens as Henri reads a statement. The film cuts to a title word, "Les" and then cuts to the image of two hands holding each other, shot against a wall. The voiceover to the image of the hands asks the question,

"What is a word?" The film then cuts to a blackout and then to the title "il faut confronter les idées vagues avec des images claires/it is necessary to confront vague ideas with clear images." A blackout is followed by a woman dusting as the voice of Radio Peking blares from the radio.

A second word is inserted: "impérialistes." The film cuts 75

to the Image of the bookshelves while the voiceover of a woman asks, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" and a male voice answers, "Because I don't exist." The film cuts to an image of Guillame, then to a picture of Fidel Castro, then to a long shot of the apartment wall on which is written, "Une minorité a la ligne révolutionnaire correcte n ’est plus une minorité / A minority who follows the cor­ rect revolutionary line is no longer a minority." During this shot, Henri enters, beaten in a fray with the PCF.

This introduction is followed by a dialogue with

Guillaume which begins with the title, "Un film en train de se faire / A film in the process of making itself." The list of basic film elements in these first two segments is presented by means of relatively straightforward images.

These images are defined according to the way they il­ lustrate elements of the filmic, a criterion imposed by the film's self-conscious titles. Though there is always the question of which units in film constitute discrete signi- fiers, in this case segmentation is made on the basis of how the combinations of shots construct distinct units of definition vis à vis film. The following are the basic shot units of the introductory matrix:

Image 1 Hands touching-spoken words Image 2 Written words on wall 76

"Il faut confronter les idées vagues avec des images claires" Image 3 Radio Image 4 Written words on wall "Une minorité a la ligne révolutionnaire correcte n'est plus une minorité." Image 5 bookshelves, denial of deity Image 6 Sub-title "Un film en train de se faire" Image 7 Léaud reads a description of a woman Image 8 Image of a woman Image 9a Actor as individual subject Image 9b Actor as narrator of theatre The story of the Chinese student Image 10 Pictograph Image 11 Images of Brecht and Shakespeare Image 12 Image of camera man Image 13 Actor further defines theatre "je me retourne..." Image 14 Image of sound and camera man, cut.

All of these images present some analysis of the kinds of communication available to film. Image 1 consists of the hands of Guillaume and Véronique touching, withdrawing, touching while the voices (presumably) of Véronique and

Guillaume seek to define what a word is and broach the question of the identity of Guillaume. This first image is an image of an attempt at tactile communication, a com­ plex issue in itself. The hands by themselves are also potential mechanisms of linguistic communication (i.e., sign language). The image of clasping hands which is at best ambiguous (are they seeking, consoling, discovering, titillating?) is confronted by a conversation which may or 77

may not accompany the gesture synchronously since we do not see the actors say the words. The two voices inquire as to the definition of the word "word," rather than narrate any context for the image of the hands. The narration defines

"word" as that which silences itself, an apparent contra­ diction and implied negation of the function of language as a means of communication. This first image presents at least five ingredients: the mechanism of touch as a means of communication, hands as carriers of meaning, the poten­ tial conflict between image and word, the relationship between language and action, and a tentative, if poten­ tially negating, definition of word.

As part of the voiceover conversation the female asks,

"Who are we?" to which they both reply," We are the dis­ course of others." This suggests how they are to be perceived as characters in a way that echoes Jacques

Lacan's assertion that the "unconscious is the discourse of the other." This theatre of hands and voices begins the film's preoccupation with theatre as definitive of the re­ lationship between work and audience, reality and illusion, relationships that are crucial to the success of the diadactic aims of the film. 78

Images 2 and 4 consist of slogans written on walls within the living space of the commune, introducing the concept of written language. Both slogans present language as a concept written in an environmental context, yet a context unexpected enough to remind one of Brecht's idea that alienation lies in placing the familiar in an un­ familiar context. Godard's recontextualization of writing in these two images encourages a critical assessment of writing as a mechanism for communication and suggests the altered position of such writing in the fabric of the lives of the revolutionaries. As wall paintings, the slogans are furnishings as well as ideas. Their location, their place in the montage of the film, their function as image, and the meaning they convey all function as types of possible filmic communication.

Image 3 is that of the radio playing Radio Peking as one of the student dusts. In this image, it is obvious that the sound is diegetic coming from the pictured radio, and is mechanically reproduced. The dusting situates the mechanical reproduction of sound as a normal event, but one which literally accompanies work. As film, it is one step into the technical. It suggests the detached mechanical apparatus necessary to bring sound to film. 79

Image 5, like Image 1 contrasts the image with the soundtrack. In this image of the bookshelves, the question of the existence of a god posed by the female is answered by the male, impersonating the deity whose existence he denies. The male voice affirms what he denies; his re­ sponse is sufficient to answer, but his subsequent state­ ment is an evasive lie. Or his answering is a false pose.

Image 5 presents the complex nature of ironic language which affirms in negativity and negates in affirmation and which depends on the identity of the speaker.

Image 6 is simply a sub-title, but because of its con­ text within the series of analyses, it becomes a non- environmental (or purely filmic) image of written language as carrier of meaning. Rather than graffiti, collage, or the carefully painted style of the wall slogans, "Un film en train de se faire" is accomplished in the glossy photo­ graphic style that has become a convention of film. As such it is a representative of writing in film, and unlike the slogans, is not located in an unfamiliar context, and hence, does not draw attention to itself as writing. Like other writing, this sub-title is intended to convey mean­ ing, and that function is more obvious in this image since the conventional graphic style of the writing nearly 80

renders invisible the fact that it is writing. We are so

accustomed to the convention that we cease to notice the means. In this image, the question is not why it is writ­

ing, but why it occurs at this point in the film, a

question of montage which goes beyond the simple analytical

function of this matrix to the episodic organization of the

entire film.

The seventh image begins a series of shots of the

actor Léaud/character Guillaume which demonstrate several ways image might relate to its accompanying sound track.

The first image is of the actor reading a description of

another character, perhaps participating in one of Brecht's

alienation exercises. The image is of the individual

Lëaud/Guillaume, not yet identified as actor or character, reading the description of a person not present. We see

Lëaud reading; we hear the description of someone else.

Thus, the content or meaning of the words he reads con­

flicts with the screen image of Lëaud. We do not see the

image created by the words he is reading; rather, we see him reading. There is in this film image both the sug­

gestion of a correspondence between image and sound, and the suggestion of conflict between them. Unlike Image 1

in which the sound track is not obviously synchronous with 81

the motions of the hands. Image 7 creates the obvious ex­ pectation of correlation and presents it. However, the visual correlation between image and sound is undermined by the meaning of the words. The issue is one of linguistic ambivalence— language has distinct levels which both do and do not match a given image. The action of Leaud/Guillaume also defines another form of communication, that of read­ ing aloud as opposed to talking, a half-way point between the written and the spoken.

The eighth image again explores the relationship be­ tween image and sound track. The image corresponds to the meaning of the voiceover narrative rather than synchroniz­ ing with the image, essentially a reversal of the process of the seventh image. Sound and image conflict on a literal level (she is not reading), but the image is the picture of the content of what the voiceover narrates. The image is that of a woman ; the accompanying voice is that of a man; and the implication of the montage is that the woman pictured in Image 8 is the woman whose description was read by Guillaume in Image 7. The filmic ingredients suggested by this are the possibility of a correlation of meaning and image as well as the possibility of a disjunction between image and sound track. 82

Images 7 and 8 present another basic mechanical

ingredient: the technique of foregrounding (or background­

ing) parts of the total framed image. Both Guillaume and

Yvonne are photographed in a medium shot against two separate backdrops which are both composed of collages of photographic images. In the image of Guillaume, the images in the background are much smaller then he, almost indis­ tinguishable, and in black and white. Guillaume's torso and head are the foregrounded, colored version of the many black and white images behind him. The relationship be­ tween Yvonne and her backdrop is similar to that of

Guillaume except her background photographs are in color.

She tends to blend with the background rather than being obviously foregrounded like Guillaume. The mechanism of foregrounding echoes the issue of form (Guillaume talking) and content (what he says) already implicit in the entire segment. The emphasized foreground (Guillaume) emphasizes form; whereas, the blending of foreground and background emphasizes content. What is important in Image 7 is that

Guillaume is reading. What is important in Image 8 is what he is reading about.

Images 9a and 9b present two additional means of communication: the interview (9a), and acting (9b).

Godard, off camera, asks Guillaume to discuss himself as 83

an actor in Image 9a. The interview is presumably unre­ hearsed and unwritten; and the actor/character appears to speak as himself rather than as a fictional character. The acting sequence (9b) involves the actor acting out an anecdote about the nature of theatre. Image 9a is super­ ficially a complete correlation of image and sound track.

What is disjunctive about Image 9a is not a conflict on a technical level— the actor says what he is pictured as saying; rather, the conflict exists within the complex interplay between the assumptions of documentary and fiction. The image is of Guillaume, an actor playing a character who is an actor playing an actor who discusses himself as an actor. The character portrayed is essen­ tially a fiction presented in a documentary context and style. The interplay is further complicated by the fact that Guillaume is himself a character played by Leaud, an actor; and the statements made by Leaud while acting as

Guillaume are statements that could have easily come from

Leaud himself, a fact disguised as fiction. So what seems to be documentary is documentary in so far as Leaud speaks for himself, and is not when Leaud is playing an actor in a scene stylized as documentary. The interview is at the same time fiction and non-fiction. 84

The mechanical correlation of image and sound track and the dialectic of fiction/documentary are an essential prologue to Guillaume's definition of theatre via theatre.

As certain assumptions about actor and identity are brought into question in Image 9a, analogous questions about ap­ pearance and reality are brought into question in Image 9b.

In 9b there is apparently a total correlation between act

(what he is doing), word (describing simultaneously what he is doing), and concept. In defining theatre, Guillaume narrates the story of a Chinese student in Moscow. As

Guillaume tells the story, quoting the Chinese student, he obscures his face with a bandage wound around his head, plays on the assumptions of the imaginary audience (there are three: the audience of photographers imagined in the acted gesture, the audience to whom he is talking in the film studio, and the film's audience) by suggesting that he has been injured to create the illusion of an underlying change in appearance, and he emerges physically unchanged to a disappointed audience of photographers who don't understand that it was all theatre. The reality of his condition conflicts with the audiences' expectation of in­ jury. This definition which is in fact a metaphor for

Brechtian theatre is the link between film and revolution. 85

Interrupting the documentary images of Guillaume is a pictograph. Image 10, which contains another definition of theatre. The image is a recombination of written language first seen in Images 2 and 4, and the image of the hand as a sign. The motif of hands begun in Image 1 recurs here as a frozen pointer whose signal function is immediately com­ prehensible as an indicator of emphasis and direction. The content of the pictograph contributes to the communication ingredient inventory in at least two ways. The pictograph states that, "le theatre est un laboratoire," suggesting a concept of theatre as experimental, but also as that by means of which things might be discovered or understood.

Its form, a combination of word and drawing, suggests the nature of conventional theatre as a collage of language and gesture. The appearance of the pictograph at this point in the segment suggests also that the entire segment is a theatrical laboratory, and the beginning and equation for a definition of film. Film equals theatrical laboratory which works to create and destroy illusion.

Guillaume's reappearance is interrupted again by the photographic images of Brecht and Shakespeare which emerge as symbols or icons. The sequence Lëaud-Brecht-Shakespeare creates a syntax of images based on the symbolic cultural content of the photographs. Guillaume looks slightly to 86

the left, and the film is cut to the picture of Brecht who

is also gazing in the same direction (and whom Leaud re­

sembles) and then cuts to Shakespeare. The similarity

between Leaud's and Brecht's visages implies a connection

and a continuity between Brecht and Guillaume. Brecht and

Shakespeare are acknowledged and connected in a reverse

historical continuum. Brecht, whose concept of theatre is

defined and utilized in the film, and Shakespeare, the most oft-filmed author, symbolically connect Guillaume and

the present film to the past traditions of theatre.

In this image Guillaume is in color and is fore­

grounded or contrasted to the two black and white

photographs that follow. Guillaume is in the film's present; the photos are from the past and refer back to the

initial black and white photo collage backdrop behind

Guillaume. It is as if two of the photos have been blown up, associating Guillaume to cultural history and to the

theoretical underpinnings of theatre.

Images 12 and 14 are dissections of the relationship

between image and word and the mechanical means of its

filmic reproduction. In Image 12 Guillaume has been at­

tributing his sincerity to the fact that he is being

filmed: "It's because there's a camera in front of me that

I'm sincere." Image 12 is a shot to the camera man who 87

interrupts and punctuates Guillaume's speech, presenting for the first time visually, the mechanical, authorial dimension of film. The image and its relation to Guillaume creates another complex analysis of communication. On a mechanical level, Léaud/Guillaume is being filmed, and we are made conscious of what we assume is that process by being shown an image of the equipment from Léaud's point of view. Image and sound track correlate, and Image 12 il­ lustrates the mechanical/technical content of what

Guillaume is saying. He says he is being filmed and what we see is the lens of a camera. Guillaume's claim of sincerity is rendered even more plausible by proof of the camera, but on another level his sincerity is undercut.

Without a consciousness of the process of filming,

Guillaume is simply a person being interviewed. When the consciousness of the filming process intervenes, all which has been an interview becomes the suspect product of film, a fact which forces a re-analysis of all that has preceded the overt consciousness of the film. Hands touching are no longer hands touching, but hands touching in front of a camera. The question of editing arises: why Brecht or

Shakespeare? Why that length of shot? Why in that order"

An entire complex of filmic issues erupts and spews forth 88

another layer of consciousness that Invites a total re-interpretation of the segment.

Image 14 raises the same issues as Image 12, but carries our consciousness of the filming process even fur­ ther by including more technicians, and by ending the segment with an overt demonstration of directorial control as Godard cuts the segment with a terse, "Very good."

Godard's words reduce the entire segment to a "take," some­ thing which may or may not have been totally manufactured, written, and directed, but something which does have an aesthetic existence of its own and which exists independ­ ently as an art form.

Between the two interruptions of the diegesis created by images of the camera is an image of Guillaume defining his position in theatre and in the world. Again, words equal actions equal content, or signifiers equal signifieds. As Guillaume turns suddenly around, he says,

"Je me retourne ..." and continues to regard himself:

"... suddenly— irresistible— the question confronts me: what if these several words which I've just read in my maladroit, blind fashion, were nothing else but fragments of a huge, unknown play happening inside myself— me, a worker in the theatre of the world— their sense still unknown . . . That's why I speak.The communication 89

has become personal; no longer reading, no longer acting,

Guillaume seems to speak from inside himself. But inside exists all that which goes on around him— the theatre. The pattern exists within as well as playing itself around.

Guillaume embodies both as Godard has stated, "the complex and its parts" which "must be described as both objects and subjects. What I mean is I cannot avoid the fact that all things exist from both the inside and the outside."14

The location of Guillaume's speech between two breaks in the diegesis of the film creates yet another level of consciousness in this segment. Guillaume speaks from within film for film. No longer merely an actor, he be­ comes the voice of the film itself, conscious of the "huge, unknown play" and seeing its theatre as "the world." Word, image, theatre, and film coalesce as film and begin to de­ fine their mission as the means of understanding film and as the means of using film to effect revolution.

Images 12, 13, and 14 together raise issues of context and interpretation, of the distinction between theatre and film, and reveal a new context in which all previous com­ munication has taken place. The introduction of the mechanical processes of film requires the reinterpretation of the entire segment as meta-film. All must be retro­ actively reinterpreted as filmic process rather than as 90

distinct modes of communication. The film's consciousness

of itself as film subsumes the independent mechanisms of

other art forms; they all become filmic and as such con­

tribute to our consciousness of filmic process.

As a matrix, this first segment serves a model for the

rest of the film by providing a structural pattern and by

establishing the various levels of consciousness that com­

prise both the process of the film and the political process the film attempts to begin. The Brechtian

segmentation of the matrix patterns the segmentation of the

rest of the film. Its collage style and apparent linear

disorganization enables the kind of dialectical analysis

and questioning which comprises much of the film's later

activity. The presentation in the matrix of what might be

termed "gestures" in a Brechtian sense, sets the style for

the probing gestures that follow. There is no difference

between Guillaume's demonstration of theatre and

véronique's demonstration that one can do two things at

once. Even the murder which takes place after much planning and analysis and whose error requires that the

students reassess their theoretical assumptions is analo­

gous to the first segment's revelation of the camera and the "cut" of the take which occur after much planning and

analysis and which also require a theoretical reassessment. 91

The first segment functions as a matrix also by introducing

the elements or building blocks of the film's narrative:

the words, pictures, theory, and characters that serve as motifs in the film.

The first principle of the film, illustrated by this matrix or cinematographic recipe is the concept that film

consumes all in its representation of itself and that all

action on all levels comprises both film and political

action. The raw materials of film, separated and defined

in the first segment, reveal and analyze the elements of

film, political action, and the relation of the spectator

to both.

In reviewing the ingredients presented in the first

segment, it is tempting to say that there is an evolution

from simple to complex. However, from the initial image,

the intrinsic complexity of the ingredients as mechanical

forms and as signifiers is apparent. The inventory is manifest: film makes itself via image, spoken word,

images as signs, written language, correspondence of image

and spoken word, conflict of image and spoken word, back­

ground and foreground, the form of the image equalling its

content, the form of the image in a dialectical relation­

ship with its content, the form of the image both 92

equalling and conflicting with its content, image as icon, the concept of representation (acting), the concept of documentary (speaking for oneself), the concept of theatre, the self-consciousness of cinema, and the concept of film as film. This inventory cuts across the elements of the cinematographic apparatus as defined by Baudry and focuses on the product/commodity of film, rather than on its production.

Coexistent with this list of ingredients is an exploration/definition of the concepts image, language, theatre, film. More than a collage, this level is a series of ordered equations. The conceptual ingredients are the product of equation, but in typical Godard fashion, the equations are a set of shifting dialectics in which the correlation between the filmic ingredient and a concept is neither constant nor absolute. The film's equations are at best mere suggestions of relationships which create more questions than they answer: the images are clearer than the ideas they represent. However, in order to understand how the act of filming equals political action and the re­ lation of the meta-filmic level to the parts of the film, it is necessary to understand how Godard creates film from these conceptual ingredients, and how those ingredients form different levels of consciousness in the film. 93

The concept "image" begins with the idea of the frozen image in photographs. Both Guillaume and Yvonne are pre­ sented against a backdrop of photographs (collages themselves). Guillaume's screen image is juxtaposed to the still photo of Brecht, equating for a moment the filmic and the photographic. The concept of image moves from the still to the screen image or series of stills, to the means of reproducing those images, i.e., the relationship between the object photographed and the act of photographing or filming. The progression is from one frame to another, constantly switching reference until we realize that out­ side of each frame is another frame, another context, another image. From the collage of tiny still images to the frame of the movie screen to the even larger mechanical apparatus outside that frame, images become larger, ever more inclusive, ever more complex. The ultimate concept of image in this segment is that it can never exist solely in itself; images must exist in a context that augments, colors, interprets or undermines any meanings such an image might have standing alone. To Godard, images never stand alone; they always imply the process of their creation.

Language is both spoken and written, but it is the written word which becomes the object of the image, and it is because of this objectification of the word that we 94

become aware of words as language and aware of images as language. At the beginning of the first segment, language is apparently negated ("Un mot, o'est se qui se tait.")

However, the prominence of written language, appearing on walls, in subtitles, and read by Guillaume culminates in its combination with image/symbol to form the pictograph.

In this sense, language = WORD + WRITING + SOUND + SYSTEM

+ IMAGE. Language, like image, is that which conveys meaning in a specific range of ways, but unlike image, language sometimes loses meaning outside its context and gains other meanings not normally associated with the function of language. The borders of language do not ex­ pand like those of image; rather, they shrink to the particulate, the phonetic, the morphological. Godard's equation for language closes in upon itself. The more precise it becomes, the more necessary its context and the less broad its range of meaning.

The concepts of language and image contribute directly to the concept of theatre presented in this first segment.

Words and images combine to make the pictograph which de­ fines theatre as a laboratory. Guillaume's anecdotal definition of theatre which is in fact a version of the figure of Oedipus relies upon language (what the Chinese student says) and image (how he appears) to create theatre. 95

It results in the revelation that what has been deduced

from appearances by the reporters is not literally true,

though it may be figuratively viable. Like Oedipus and

Bérenger, in The Killer, the reporters have been misled

by the "material" of theatre.

Godard's equation of theatre is expressed most clearly

in Guillaume's statement that true theatre is a "reflection

of reality." The reflection is analogous to the images

seen by the prisoners in Plato's cave, but theatre to

Guillaume is more analogous to Plato's description than any

image seen in the cave by a prisoner. Theatre relates to

reality, but copies reality rather than reproducing it.

Theatre is a reflection of reality so much so as to suggest

by means of form and content the "realities" it reflects.

Godard's concept of theatrical reflection means that by

definition theatre is distinct from the illusion of

reality, an illusion which promotes the acceptance of the

copy as real. The idea of a reflection suggests again the

cinema screen and Lacan's mirror both of which enable the

individual to perceive self or in this context, the truth

of the political order. In fact, Guillaume's presentation of the Chinese student's definition of theatre by means of

narration fulfills the requirement that theatre break its

own illusion and be distanced from its own acts in order to 96

present the reality of illusion instead of the illusion of reality. Theatre functions as the primary illustrative device throughout the rest of the film.

Film is language, image, and theatre, but language, image, and theatre photographed by equipment, arranged and edited, and participating in the complex structure of re­ lationships introduced with the image of the camera. Film is the result, the layering within which all coexists; and film is the process of revealing those layers one by one, to find that once assembled, film can never be completely dissected. The first segment, finally, does not define film; rather, film's inner workings, so attentively separated and listed, are film.

The fact that film as defined in the first segment is the process of recombining conceptual elements and mechani­ cal elements akin to Baudry's analysis means that it is also a process of relating layers of reality and layers of meaning which are generated by the combination of the var­ ious elements subsumed. Language, image, and theatre all relate to reality in various ways; film adds additional layers to those relationships. To analyze the relation of film to reality is to undo the process of film, to divide, and classify various filmic functions on the basis of their relationship to the reality of the real-life subject that 97

was reproduced as filmic image. As Thomas in Blow-Up dissects the photographic apparatus, Godard lays out the pieces again, only Godard's elements are conceptual rather than the analysis of a process. A layer of meaning in film refers to the complex of meanings, attitudes, theories, etc., which are used to render content. A layer of reality in film is normally consistent; that is, most films work only within a fictional narrative which has a consistent relationship to objective reality. The issue of the film's relationship to the objective reality of the images it represents is usually hidden in most films, as a result of the operation of the cinematographic apparatus. The first segment of La Chinoise is definitional because it sets forth all of the conceptual layers that intervene between objective reality and the film commodity.

Each image in the first segment can be analyzed as representative of both layers of objective reality and layers of the means of their transformation to film. It should suffice to analyze two of these images to see how the film analyzes its own layers. One central image is the image in which Guillaume defines theatre by relating the story of the Chinese student. The layers of reality in this shot may be broken down as follows : within the image

Guillaume progresses from a character who is an actor (much 98

like the actor who portrays the character) to an actor portraying a Chinese student who is acting out a definition of theatre. If we view the entire spectrum of possibili­ ties, we see that this particular image embodies a wide range of relationships with the real-life existence of

Léaud. This image contains at least four simultaneous layers.

The meaning of the image of the Chinese student does not change as it moves from layer to layer of reality. The interplay of these layers provides the pattern for acting and representation in the film. On the level of Leaud as

Leaud, the image is an interview. It is personal, ap­ parently honest, apparently literal. As Leaud becomes

Guillaume, what seems to be personal and honest becomes fictionalized, creating questions about the credibility of what Guillaume says, but at the same time rendering his personal/fictional statement a statement of general theory.

By removing the character from his non-filmed existence, what the character says as a character becomes depersonal­ ized (no longer the opinion of a non-character), and at the same time, generalized (theory rather than opinion). When

Guillaume represents and narrates the Chinese student, the generalized becomes a gesture— in this case a mixture of symbol, icon, and metatheory. The act of binding and 99

hiding the face is symbolic of the flirtation of reality and illusion, and representation and the meaning of absence, the layers Godard investigates in this first segment. The image becomes symbol. The statement that the narrative demonstrated the definition of theatre becomes a metatheory in the sense that the anecdotal representation subsumes the series of statements and problems defined by

Guillaume as a character.

Following the image of Guillaume as the Chinese stu­ dent come the images of still photographs of Brecht and

Shakespeare. These shots, one a photo and one a photo­ graphic representation of a drawing, are near the end of the continuum of the layers of film's relationship to reality. They pick up in this continuum where the image of

Guillaume stops. The layers of meaning within these shots of photographs are more important than the layers of reality. The images are artifacts and icons for the theatrical genius and creativity of two sources of theatre.

The images do nothing themselves, but occupy filmic space at a particular layer of reality, but the cultural, historical, and philosophical associations represented by these images imbue the entire sequence with a super­ symbolism. As progenitors of theatre, their juxtaposition 100

to Guillaume and his representation of theatre tends to

equate the two images. Brecht and Shakespeare are

represented; Guillaume represents; they all bear theatre.

As a product of its layers of reality created by the

first segment’s self-conscious exploration of the filmic, the segment functions as a structuring model. Film removes

itself from the reality of the subject filmed and proceeds to a rediscovery of the meaning of the subject’s reality.

Meaning becomes intensified, more theoretical, more general, signifying more until signifier and signified con­ verge. In this first segment, the pattern of removal and convergence occurs more than once. The pictograph (Image

10) is such a moment as are both images of the cameras

filming (Images 12 and 14). The camera images function as a final discovery that form and content equal process. The cameras are meta-symbols; not only do they reveal how all subjects have related to reality, but they also become the subject/object of their own process. The way meaning is represented becomes represented meaning. Cameras photo­ graphing themselves (an impossibility without mirrors or other intervention) represents the last layer, the final removal from reality and the simultaneous return to it.

As Brecht and Shakespeare are sources of theory, the camera

is the source of the image. The irony is that the camera 101

image in that position in the segment is the result of an

illusion created by editing. The camera images are not as they seem to be— images of the very same cameras filming

the very shots we see; they are simply images of cameras

shooting. Hence, the dialectic is still open. The camera

images are and are not a reality; film undermines itself.

The first segment takes place within the overall political context of the film. In the same way that image,

language, theatre, and film work to communicate concepts of themselves and of each other, they also communicate political ideology. The analysis of film and its reduction

and recombination are the same processes that the students

in the commune undergo. They remove words, elements, one by one as they erase the names of authors from a black­ board. Political action is in a constant state of self­

appraisal; its process is as important as the change it might evoke as aptly illustrated by the dissenting Henri.

Like the Chinese student, they are a theoretic minority,

narrating their progress of engagement in a world from which they are gradually disengaged. As political actors,

their self-analysis alienates them; at the same time, it

permits them to begin the process of questioning that is

crucial to political change. 102

Guillaume's perception of himself as an actor and playwright, and of the world as an unwritten play provides

the obvious connection between the process of theatre,

film, and political action. If as Brecht believed, the

stage is crucible for change, then Guillaume becomes an

actor in the world, living his concept of political action

in the same way he represented his concept of theatre.

As a matrix, the introduction and the first dialogue not only analyze the basic ingredients of film, but set forth what are also the basic ingredients of the students' revolution. The students' daily activities seem to consist of reading, lectures, and discussion, all language activities, interspersed with interviews in which they are questioned by Godard and filmed. The lectures and inter­ views are interrupted with images of political posters, slogans, and filmed images of the world. The language and

image components are combined both in the guerilla theatre segments which often interrupt the lectures and in véronique's eleven-minute discussion with the "guest philosopher" which takes place in front of the passing framed image of scenery in the train window.

The guerilla theatre episodes, like Leaud's recitation of the story of the Chinese student, combine language,

image, and theatre in such a way as to suggest a 103

possibility for understanding and change. These guerilla theatre or perhaps more accurately, didactic, theatre episodes take place both within the logic of the students' activities as in Guillaume's use of "flag" sunglasses to exemplify nationalism and blindness, and are edited into the film outside the geographic and chronological logic of the students' activities such as in the mock war in front of the Humble tiger or in the image of Yvonne covered by a sheet shouting, "Au secours, M. Kosygin." Other occur­ rences of this diegetical theatre are the students' morning exercises on the balcony, Véronique's explanation of how it is possible to do two things at once in which she tells Guillaume she no longer loves him while a record is playing, the erasure of the names of artists from the blackboard, Guillaume's dart game in which of many photo­ graphs and pictures, he hits Descartes, and finally in

Guillaume's real theatre "année zero" to which he goes after the cell dissolves. Extra-logical theatre includes the play war in several different versions— behind piled books of Mao, in front of the Humble tiger, with toy planes, with toy tanks and guns. In both environments, the theatre is illustrative, metaphoric, and engages the spectator differently than the rest of the film. 104

To understand the different functions of theatre in the film, it is useful to reexamine Léaud's definition of theatre in his story of the Chinese student. That the story is a metaphor for theatre is evident. Simply, as

Nisbet states, metaphor is ". . . a way of proceeding from the known to the unknown."^® It is, in I.A. Richards'

"interaction view," "two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction."^® The

"known" from which Guillaume's metaphor proceeds is the political situation in Moscow. The "unknown" at which he arrives is theatre. This theatre is the result of the interaction of many sets of pairs: actor/audience, reality/illusion, Chinese/Russian, Marxist/Maoist.

Implicit in the concept of metaphor is instruction proceeding from the "known to the unknown" implies some new understanding. Guillaume's metaphor is deliberately and appropriately didactic. Its purpose is to define theatre, but to define theatre in such a way as to make theatre as didactic as is metaphor. Not only is his definition a metaphor of theatre, it is a metaphor for a

Brechtian teaching theatre.

As the Chinese student whose face is bound, Guillaume goes from blindness to sight. His audience of 105

photographers and "paparazzi" go from an ignorant curiosity to a disappointed knowledge. Guillaume's "bandage" is a mask which recalls masks used in rituals in which the wearer is transformed into the animal whose mask he is wearing. It is also the metaphorical blindness of Oedipus.

The ritual involves a transformation of the wearer, who according to Victor Turner, goes from structure to a liminal anti-structure where he is transformed (changes states) and then re-emerges a changed being. 1 7

Guillaume's mask ritual is a ritual with a misplaced transformation: it is the audience who is transformed.

Though Guillaume wears the mask of the injured, a mask which, in conjunction with language, creates the illusion that the Chinese student has been injured, Guillaume is not transformed (he does not change states). Rather, the audience, who has expected to see grave injury sees nothing. Their transformation occurs as they readjust to reality and in doing so possibly come to some compre­ hension of the nature of theatre. However, the real audience is not the audience in the story, but the audience who hears the story. That audience is more likely to understand the nature of theatre since they have seen the interplay of illusion and reality, and have seen the mistake the audience of photographers has made. 106

In this context, the definition of theatre conveyed

by Guillaume's metaphor is of a ritual theatre with a mis­ placed transformation. Since the change is in the

audience, this theatre is a rich teaching and political device. If the theatre defined by Guillaume transforms the audience and if Guillaume's theatre is as in the metaphor, a political theatre, then his theatre has great potential as a tool for political change. Guillaume's definition also suggests that theatre lies not in under­ going the transformation, but in seeing the process of transformation.

Thus, Guillaume's definition redefines the relation­ ship between reality/illusion, actor/audience, and perhaps even the theatre and the world. Guillaume's delivery of this metaphor was itself an example of the theatre he was defining. His constant reminder that he was telling a story; the disassociation of Guillaume from the character of the Chinese student; but the location of the story in the world rather than in a theatre on a stage indicate that Guillaume's theatre deals more in the reality of il­ lusion than in the illusion of reality. The metaphor in its rejection of illusion is above all Brechtian.

What is important in Guillaume's definition is not the result, i.e., the realization by the photographers 107

that they have been fooled, but the process by which they were tricked. The process is important not for the photo­ graphers (the first audience), but for the audience who sees the photographers misperceive. The process of the ritual masking and the misplaced transformation is what constitutes the didactic role of theatre, not the masking itself which does no more than play with reality. Seeing the process forces an alienation; removed once from the immediacy of the play of illusion and reality, the second audience is alienated, and hence, able to learn from it.

It is clear that the other examples of theatre in the film, particularly the theatre used by the characters to illustrate the points they are trying to make, have a didactic purpose. The theatre which occurs outside of the logic of the students' process is also didactic, but it is an example provided by the film rather than by the stu­ dents themselves. The audience to the process of the theatre used by the students is the other students. The audience of the film sees such lessons second-hand and, hence, has the same opportunity as the second audience to

Guillaume's Chinese student story to learn from the example of the interaction of the actor/teacher and the audience/ pupils. In the theatre apparently presented as a function of the film (i.e., intercut with no apparent connection to 108

the logical sequence of events immediately before and after), the audience of the film is in the same position as the photographers and the students hearing the lectures: we are the first audience. Like the students (rather than like the photographers) the film audience comprehends the import of the theatre examples. However, any critic of this film is in the position of a second audience and is able to see the entire lesson. If to the second audience the relationship between Guillaume's Chinese student and the photographers is theatre, then to the second audience of the film-generated theatre, the relationship between that theatre and its audience is film.

The idea that the film-generated bits of theatre really function as a metaphor of film is supported not only by the odd placement of those bits outside the normal logic of the film, but by their lack of visible motive or author.

Certainly the bits fit into the film's pattern of il­ lustrating statements with examples, and certainly they can be comprehended as coming from the same source as the cut-in pictures and scenes that are also from outside the logic of the students' actions. Because the film es­ tablishes these filmic "interruptions" as part of the process of the film, these interruptions are diegetic, but it is also for this reason that we comprehend these pieces 109

as essentially filmic— present as a result of the process

of making the film rather than as a result of actions by

the students. The theatrical bits are embedded, entrapped

in the film and within the cinematic apparatus in the same way the characters in Play are trapped within the meta-

cinematic apparatus of that play.

There is a difference as well in the way the first

audience perceives the play of illusion and reality. The

artifice of the war games in La Chinoise is apparent;

however, as first audience we instantly perceive both the

artifice and its symbolic quality. We are not, like the photographers, ever trapped in illusion. However, we do perceive the world of the war games as distinctly different

than the world of the students even though we can see the

thematic relationship between the two. The appearance of

the war games draws our attention back to the film as film

for only in film can the diegesis shift in this way.

At the same time the appearance of these war game

theatre bits presents what is perhaps an alternate diegesis

in which the film is less self-conscious. The theatre bits

are knots of film that are created by all of the elements

brought forth in the "other" diegesis. These knots carry

all the didactic and political potential of film. In see­

ing the war games, we see not the reality/illusion of 110

theatre, but a statement about the stupidity of war and about the clash of weapons and ideas. In film, we are not there to see the illusion of the real stage or to be dis­ tracted, as Metz has said, by the real presence of actors.18 Rather, we must grapple with the content of the action— its toys, its colors, its symbolism. In this way film can be didactic— in its combination of language, image, and theatre, and in the creation of its own metaphor, a metaphor in which all the elements of produc­ tion are masked merely to reveal themselves and transform the audience into an audience of students rather than photographers, of revolutionaries rather than reporters.

In La Chinoise, the relationship among production, actor, and audience is common to both theatre and film.

Film adds another layer of illusion, another mask of pro­ duction. Film alienates one time more and at the same time increases the possibility of escape and identifica­ tion. Play uses meta-cinema as a way to add an additional alienating layer, unmasked production, which increases

Play's self-consciousness while it permits the entire process of the light and the urns to be subsumed in a metaphor of the relationship between self and other which stands ultimately as a signifier of "other" vis a vis

Play's audience. Ill

In La Chinoise meta-theatre in Guillaume's definition of theatre becomes meta-cinema as the production process is unmasked. The additional layer of alienation, as in

Play, makes the process of theatre, so carefully defined, a metaphor of the relationship between illusion and reality and between actor and audience which also stands ultimately as a signifier of the discourse of the other.

In both Play and La Chinoise, the audience who has watched the process of actor/audience is transformed into a primary audience while the play/film becomes the actor, and the illusion becomes a reality. The Killer

The universe is certainly the story of a creator. Someone tells. Someone makes us see. It torments us with seeing as well. . . . I wanted to tell, and I wanted to talk, and I didn't want to do anything else and I had a horror of work. And I liked to see, I much less liked to listen. When I listen, I do not see. I am unhappy. I cannot do two things at one time: look at the world and listen to it. To look is to understand in a different way, to listen is to enter into the game of others, to allow oneself to be taken, to take oneself far away from the beginning, To be at once in the world and out of the world. To have still, to have always sufficient candor to be able to ask myself continuously: what is it? But what is all of that? Question without answer, question sufficient in itself, question which is like its own answer. In fact this question belongs to the spectator. From time to time I again become the spectator of the ensemble of the spectacle.

Eugène Ionesco Découvertes!

For Eugène Ionesco, the act of seeing is paramount, and theatre is the quintessential act of seeing. An archi­ tectural jungle of apparatus, Ionesco's theatre is close to the meaning of the Greek "theatron," "a seeing place where

O one comes to possess a new knowledge." Theatre is the

112 113

"revelation of something that was h i d d e n , knowledge of the unconscious, a knowledge of self seen once clearly as the play undoes itself. Ionesco's theatre in The Killer is the medium by which the self is discovered through the deconstruction of the apparatus of the medium itself. No longer trapped within the apparatus as the characters in

Play and La Chinoise, Bérenger, the protagonist in The

Killer, questions and dismantles the illusions of theatre and the mechanism of their production. Like Oedipus who in seeking the killer of Laius finds the killer is himself,

Bérenger in seeking the killer finds that the killer is his double.

Essentially visual, made of transposed dreams and images more true than language, Ionesco's theatre is the absent made present, illusion constructed of real players on a stage, and the reality of the figures cast by the firelight in Plato's cave which construct the play's il­ lusions of reality. Ionesco's theatre unmasks itself and in its unmasking and in the unmasking of the characters comes a new vision which nonetheless remains ambivalent.

The English couples in the Bald Soprano come full circle in their accumulated heaps of language; the old couple's final message in The Chairs remains a mystery; the vicious student-teacher relationship in The Lesson leads to an 114

ambivalent enlightenment; and the transformation to rhinoceri in Rhinoceros is the essence of the use of the mask in theatre.® For Ionesco, "moments of real theatre" are "true and false at the same time. „6

Ionesco's The Killer (1959),^ the first of his plays with the protagonist, Stronger, embodies Ionesco's preoc­ cupation with the protagonist's struggle with the material of the theatre which is simultaneously the material of his own self-delusion. Taken from Ionesco's short story,

"La photo du colonel,"® The Killer consists of Berenger's quest to track down the Killer, a quest which proceeds from the streets of the "radiant city" of Act One to his final rendezvous with the Killer in Act Three. In The Killer, we see first the total immersion of Bérenger's ability to per­ ceive in a mass of proliferating doubles and projections, then the gradual clarification of his vision as he emerges from the cave of constructed realities that are the material of theatre, leaving him to face the Killer in a final moment of clarity, ambivalence, and quintessential drama.

Ionesco's dialectic structures the stage world of The

Killer as well as of Bérenger's consciousness.® The light, timelessness, openness, and real emptiness of the radiant city in Act One form the extreme edge of the play, of 115

dramatic illusion, of Berenger’s memory and hopes, of the idealistic filter against which Berenger struggles and of the pre-Oedipal world he seeks to rejoin. The radiant city of Act One, created by stage lighting and Berenger's descriptions, is the utopia gone sour, the radiant scene of the fall. Accompanied by the Architect, who is Virgil,

Freud, and annoyed host in one, Berenger loses his vision of radiance when hé discovers that the community in which the skies are blue and flowers are watered from below is the scene of an unending series of murders committed by a determined and evasive killer who lures his victims to the pond with promises to show them the famed "photo of the colonel."

This radiant city of the Architect contrasts with the dark, closed, crowded, interior environment of Berenger's

9 apartment in Act Two. Occupied by the tubercular Edouard,

Bérenger's room is filled with objects, and is beset by noise and meaningless language. When Edouard's briefcase accidentally falls open, the apartment becomes the site for the burgeoning, proliferating objects Berenger removes from the briefcase: the suspect stores of trinkets, photographs

(including the photograph of the colonel), and even the diary and identification cards of the Killer. In the 116

gloomy interior, Berenger discovers a textual, "factual" reality in the Killer's documents.

The close, Dostoievskian interior of Berenger's room is again contrasted with the busy, surrealistic street of

Mother Peep and the traffic police in Act Three. Decorated by a large, red, setting sun which emits no light, the street is replete with Mother Peep, her followers, the traffic police, and army trucks which represent political and social ideologies and which impede Berenger's trip to the officials with his evidence of the Killer's identity and modus operandi. Escaping from the street, Berenger journeys to another empty space, but this time it is a dark, empty, narrow corridor with a killer at the end.

The transcendent light of Act One is replaced by a

"timeless half-light" (p. 94).

The dialectic of space is a dialectic of states of being. Ionesco states in Notes and Counternotes:

These basic states of consciousness are an awareness of evanescence and of solidity, of emptiness and of too much presence, of the unreal transparency of the world and its opacity, of light and of thick darkness.

The radiant city is Ionesco's vision of a paradise which exists, in Mircea Eliade's terms, in a sacred time out of time.^^ Ionesco recounts his first experience of the 117

radiant vision which captivates Bérenger as an experience of "enormous joy" in which he understood "something funda­ mental." Ionesco states elsewhere that:

. . . it was a kind of miraculous moment that lasted for three or four minutes. It seemed to me there was no longer such a thing as weight. I could walk with great steps, with huge leaps, without getting tired. And then suddenly, the world became itself again, and it still is, or almost. The washing that was drying in the yards of the little provincial houses no longer looked like banners, like pennants, but simply like old washing. The world had fallen back into a hole.

The light and transcendence of this vision is contrasted with the darkness and heaviness of Bérenger's room, of the interior vision, like that in The New Tenant in which the corpse and mushrooms grow and proliferate like the items in fedouard's briefcase.1^

At the end of Act Three, Bérenger has returned to timelessness from the profane world of time, but this time his vision has become cleared of that "material" which created the illusion of the radiant city and he expends his fund of language and rationalization in an attempt to remove what he perceives to be the last barrier to the unity of self and world, the Killer. Instead, his il­ lusions of language and reason exhausted, Bérenger bows to 118

the inevitable Other, resting finally in silence before the real architect of the play.^^

The Killer is a series of states of consciousness

"which'intensify, densify, and then d i s a p p e a r . This series of states is constructed in an almost geodesic architecture of dialectic, questions, and ever- proliferating objects and language which echo and reinforce one another.That the Architect opens the play as guide through Bérenger's radiant vision suggests that indeed the structure of the play is architectural and that the en­ vironment of the theatre is constructed rather than pre­ existent. Ionesco draws attention to the constructed nature of this play, opening the question of self- consciousness as Bérenger and the Architect define the mechanism of theatre by means of the metaphor of the radiant city.

Throughout the play, Bérenger is the interrogator, raising with his questions the smoothed down dust of the apparatus of theatre, and at the same time dissolving the successive illusions of the answers. Bérenger, however, is less the architect than the spectator, for he has no con­ trol over the answers given him. He simply seeks to understand that he sees what he sees and that he can be­ lieve in the illusion constructed before him. His 119

questions construct and deconstruct those illusions and he attempts to free the first radiant vision of the play of its spectre of death. At the beginning of the first Act,

Bérenger questions the authenticity of what he sees: "Real roses" (p. 12)"; "I don't suppose it ever rains in these houses? (p. 12)". Later in Act One he deconstructs the illusion: "Almost a little too restful, don't you think?

Why can't you see a single soul in the streets? (p. 30)"

If the construction of the radiant city is a metaphor for the theatre and its relation to the inner self, then

Bérenger is a metaphor for the role of spectator as analyst.

However, the metaphor of seeing based on the ap­ paratus of Plato's cave which is theatre is also a metaphor for the process of seeing inside oneself. While

The Killer suggests a self-conscious meta-theatre, it is more overtly a metaphoric journey in quest of self.^? As

Ionesco states: "It is in the nature of a dramatic master­ piece to provide a superior pattern of instruction: it reflects my own image, it is a mirror; it is soul- searching; it is history gazing beyond history toward the deepest truth.The "material" of the theatre in the process of its own undoing is also the material of masks or blinding apparatuses which delude Berenger and 120

ourselves into believing we are seeing an inner as well as a theatrical reality rather than the illusion the apparatus has constructed. Bérenger's journey is the journey of a spectator, who, like Ionesco himself, must pause and ques­ tion each vision. As the apparatus that creates each vision is stripped away, B&renger approaches the mirror image, the

Killer, the final apparatus who is and who is not there, that Lacanian Other whose encounter seals the certainty of mortality.

The identification between the mechanism of theatre and the search for self is expressed by Berenger in his analysis of the metaphor of the radiant city early in Act One as he is in the process of ascertaining the vision's trustworthi­ ness. For him the radiant city is:

. . . the projection, the continuation of the universe inside you. Only, to protect this universe within, some outside help is needed: some kind of material, physical light, a world that is relatively new. Gardens, blue sky, or the spring which corresponds to the universe inside and offers a chance of recognition, which is like a translation or an anticipation of that universe, or a mirror in which its own smile could be reflected . . . in which it can find itself again and say: that's what I am in reality and I'd forgotten, a smiling being in a smiling world . . . Come to think of it, it's quite wrong to talk of a world within and a world without, separate worlds; there's an initial impulse, of course, which 121

starts from us, and when it can't project itself, when it can't fulfill itself objectively, when there's not total agreement between myself inside and myself outside, then it's a catastrophe, a uni­ versal contradiction, a schism.

(p. 19)

In this speech, Berenger defines the relationship between the inner and outer man in terms of the mechanism of the apparatus of the theatre, and in particular, the mechanism of the apparatus of this play. That which is constructed as theatre reflects the inner man and requires, as he states, "some kind of material" that creates a world that is "objectively new." The "material" that creates this

"objectively new world" is the apparatus of theatre which constructs a projected inner world, resulting in a new vision in which Berenger and the audience can "find

(themselves) again."

However, this theatrical construction which functions quite literally as a projection of the inner man is always a translation, a removal from the self, or as in cinema projection, a removal by means of light of the image from the film. But as in cinema projection where the image re­ mains on the film at the same time it is being projected, so Bérenger's inner world projected by means of the material of the theatre is at the same time still both 122

his inner world and an objective, reflective outer world.

Unlike the characters of Play or La Chinoise, Berenger per­ ceives his place in the apparatus and is therefore, no longer completely entrapped. Instead, Bferenger seeks to join his vision and reality by working through and eliminating the barriers created by the apparatus and by society. Bérenger asserts that it is error to separate the two worlds: that when all is right, they are one and the same. That is, however, the real quest of Berenger in The

Killer : to remove the material separations between his inner world and the inner world projected upon the stage.

The theatre as vehicle for this quest is constructed so that it may be destroyed. The quest to undo the structure constructed as the play is a quest to see without the schism, to unify the self and the outside world again, to return to the Pre-Oedipal stage when the fragmented self is still not distinguishable from the world, to return, in

Lacanian terms, to the time before mortality, before law, before the father.

For Ionesco, theatre is confession:

I do nothing but make admissions (incompre­ hensible to the deaf, that is inevitable), for what else can I do? I try to project onto the stage an inner drama (incompre­ hensible to myself) and tell myself that 123

in any case, the microcosm being a small- scale reproduction of the macrocosm, it may happen that this tattered and disjointed inner world is in some way a reflection or a symbol of universal disruption.19

Bérenger in The Killer claims that while the inner and outer worlds should be in agreement, the inner universe projected by means of this "material" is seen objectively.

It is as if the inner world becomes new and strange by virtue of its projection outside; and since it is pro­ jected outside, it ceases to be the world i n s i d e . ^0

Bérenger is placed outside and distanced from his own inner world. Ionesco saw that theatre had to be alienated: "The theatre like all art, must serve no utilitarian purpose; the theatre is not engagement but dégagement; none the less, the "disengagement," this alienation, this forgetful­ ness of self, this violent separation from the utilitarian 21 world, is a usefulness without which we cannot live . . ."

The word "objective" used by Berenger to describe the ex­ perience of seeing this projected inner world delineates the position of the spectator vis a! vis the object seen; objective means precisely to throw away from or to throw in opposition to. What Bérenger suggests is that in order to see the inner universe, one must be placed outside of one­ self or the inside of oneself must be set outside and 124

effectively duplicated. However, this placement outside distorts; by means of the intervention of "material," the objective vision is filtered and altered. Even a mirror reverses.

Thus, Bérenger appears to have placed himself in a paradox: in the theatre in which his inner world is pro­ jected, he cannot see his inner world objectively because of the theatre and the mechanisms of philosophy, aesthetics, language, and theatrical convention which change this world and create the "schism" he seeks to erase. Bérenger's paradox is also the paradox of the audience: what inner life is projected on the stage is changed because it is on the stage. For both Bérenger and for the audience the task of theatre is to first distance and then to remove that distance and the stuff of which that distance is created and maintained.

The duplication created by the projection outside of the inner man is manifested in The Killer by Bérenger's three doubles, the Architect, Èdouard, and the Killer. The psychic conflict projected on stage in The Killer has prompted several critics to speculate upon the doubling of

Ionesco himself in his plays; but that doubling, crucial to the theory of Ionesco's theatre and its ultimate purpose, serves as a pattern for the function of the doubles in 125

The Killer.22 Bérenger's doubles both manifest his fragmentation and oppose him while B&renger appears to re­ main integrated and whole. As Robert Rogers states in

The Double in Literature, the splitting of a composite character such as Bérenger "tends to enhance the dramatic qualities" of the conflict within the character. He states further: "Inextricably linked with doubling for dramatic conflict is the function of representation." Doubling is also linked with distanction and distortion.^3 go function the doubles in The Killer, but as literal projections both distanced and distorted as Bérenger questions his repre­ sentation of the material of theatre and the authenticity of his pure vision of the radiant city.

The doubles serve as both catalysts ind foils to

Bérenger's progress in his quest to remove the schism be­ tween the inner and the outer man. Though each double manifests a different stage of Bérenger's psychological development, his developmental chronology is essentially undone as Berenger questions, analyzes, and rejects the

Architect and Èdouard only to be caught finally gazing at the unexpungeable double, the Killer. Though these characters are doubles for Berenger, they are also Berenger himself, so that Berenger, while audience, is also the author of his own play. Bérenger's reduplication, product 126

of the construction of theatre, also constitutes the

"material" that the play must tear down before Bérenger's psychological mask, which prevents him from seeing clearly, can be removed.

That the Architect, Èdouard, and the Killer are

Bérenger's doubles is suggested not only by Bérenger's identification with their function or position, but also by his constant questioning, a questioning which reveals more about Bérenger than the double he interrogates. In the same way that his questioning serves to deconstruct the illusion of the play, it enables Bérenger successively to shed the inner fragments presented by both the Architect and fedouard and to approach the Killer.

In Act One, the Architect, who is a kind of jack of all professions, is Bérenger's insidious parental double.

The callous voice of authority, the Architect appears to have created and now ineptly controls the radiant city.

At the beginning of Act One Bérenger questions the

Architect, asking him whether he's well paid, whether he is in fact the Architect, asking about the weather, asking whether he's come too late. Bérenger is like a child ask­ ing about the origins of the radiant city, and its workings, and attempting to establish himself in a new location physically and temporally. 127

Berenger begins his conversation with the Architect by comparing the conditions at his old flat (his former self) with the weather in the radiant city. He then attempts to situate himself in reality by establishing the reality of the radiant city (which is not there). Berenger's concern with reality and illusion is evident in his opening lines and indicates his inability to distinguish between the two and his anxiety about that inability. In his admira­ tion of the city, he states "The real thing is quite beyond imagination" (p. 10), and "Your radiant city is real" (p. 11).

The Architect is both guide and passive parent to

Berenger; with his briefcase and pocket telephone, the

Architect is a full adult working within a society in which he has a position of authority, but is powerless to change the status quo. Berenger leads us through the radiant city instead of the Architect, and it is only through the linguistic complicity of the Architect and

Bérenger that the radiant city exists. As Berenger questions the Architect, Bérenger gradually assumes the parental role, until disillusioned, he abandons the

Architect and sets out on his own to rectify the blemish in the vision. 128

The Architect and Bferenger as doubles share a kind of knowledge. Bérenger claims that he knew about the city without having been told: "I knew without knowing!"

(p. 11). The two share a vision, and the Architect is re­ sponsible for bringing the vision to life, though the

Architect remarks that it would have been better if

Bérenger had "... come sooner, come before ..."

(p. 15). Bérenger also remarks to the Architect:

But you must understand me perfectly, this light is in you too, it's the same as mine because (A broad gesture taking in empty space.) you have obviously recreated and materialized it. This radiant district must have sprung from you . . . You've given me back the forgotten light . . . almost. I'm terribly grateful to you. In my name and in the name of all who live here, I thank you.

(p. 25)

Bérenger credits the Architect with providing the world with the radiant city, the image by which he finds himself

He states: "Since this morning I'm a new man. I'm sure

I'm becoming myself again. The world's becoming itself

again; it's all thanks to your power. Your magic

light ..." (p. 15). The two even share a physical com­ plicity: the Architect knows Bérenger is too hot before

Bérenger demonstrates any symptoms. 129

The Architect not only understands all that Bferenger reveals in Act One, he is ironically complacent about

Bérenger's excited, naive idealism. Through inaction and passivity, the Architect permits the destruction of

Bérenger's radiant vision and changes the correlation be­ tween the outside world and Bérenger's inside world. Like the Killer whose story destroys the dream, the Architect's now-marred construction contains and destroys Bérenger's inner expansion. The schism between the inner world and the outer world, the schism Bérenger fears, is now created.

As the Architect leads Bérenger away from the city and from the Killer, Bérenger is transformed from a child in wonder to an outraged (but still naive) adult.

Abandoning the Architect double, Bérenger retreats to his old room, the vision of his former self to which he has compared the radiant city and becomes the parent to his other double, tldouard, a child in mourning for the lost vision and consumed by an illness that cannot be cured.

Êdouard is very much a part of that room and that vision.

Ensconced in Bérenger's room while Bérenger is out, he is not even seen until Bérenger enters and the lights are

9 turned on. Dressed in black, Edouard's withered arm and illness are symbolic echoes of the sickness of Bérenger's radiant city and the Architect's incapacity to remedy it. 130

In many ways fedouard is Berenger; he occupies his room so that even the concierge thinks Berenger is there; he has Bérenger's keys and Berenger doesn't even remember giving them to him, though fedouard reminds him that he gave them to him so that he could come to his flat when he liked and wait for him if he was out. Like the Architect, fedouard notices Bérenger's physical condition. He says to

Bérenger, "You seem so sad, you look worn out and anxious ..." (p. 59).

At the beginning of Act Two, Edouard, at home in

Bérenger's room, acts as the interrogator, asking Bérenger about his condition, his despair, and Dany. But in his anger, Bérenger nurtures the child, 'Edouard, who has asked for tea, and Bérenger unconsciously begins to pound fedouard on the back when he chokes, punishing the child as he cures him. But fedouard has known all along of the method of the Killer who has rendered Bérenger's vision a lie and is calm in the face of Bérenger's increased sense of purpose. When Edouard's briefcase opens and spills,

Bérenger becomes the interrogator, questioning a complacent and passive Edouard who asks simply "What can we do about it?" (p. 63).

Bérenger's discovery of the contents of the briefcase causes him momentarily to pause and consider whether 131

Edouard is in fact the Killer; but unable to assign re­ sponsibility, he accepts Edouard's rather weak explanations and pulls an impossible heap of artifacts from the brief­ case, including the famous photo of the colonel to which he gives only the briefest glance. Armed with mounds of evi­ dence, Bérenger is ready to go after the Killer. Edouard explains that the Killer's imagination ran away with him to which Bérenger replies "Literature can lead anywhere.

Didn't you know that?" (p. 71). Edouard admits his blind­ ness: "I'm sorry I didn't give it more thought and see the connection between these documents and what's been happening ..." (p. 71-72). Bérenger, however, believes that he now sees clearly: "And yet the connection is simply between the intention and the act, no more no less, it's clear as daylight." (p. 72).

Instead of leaving fedouard as he did the Architect, t Bérenger drags Edouard along in his Act Three pursuit of the Killer. However, the reduplication of briefcases, much like the reduplication of Berengers, wreaks a comedic but obfuscating havoc as the search for the right briefcase ensues. Discovering that the briefcase with the evidence has been left at the room, Berenger sends Êdouard back and continues alone, armed only with knowledge and the intent to inform the authorities before the Killer can kill more. 132

The Killer is described as "very small and puny, ill-

shaven, with a torn hat on his head and a shabby old

gaberdine; he has only one eye, which shines with a steely

glitter, and a set expression on his still face; his toes

are peeping out of the holes in his old shoes" (p. 97-98).

Bérenger, much larger than the Killer, begins his verbal

analysis of the Killer's action, an analysis which seems to

come from his identity with him. Speculating that the

Killer is unhappy, that the Killer believes the world is

doomed, that the Killer is simply cruel, that he hates uniforms, that he hates women, that the human race is

rotten, that he kills out of kindness, that he hates man­

kind, Berenger provides almost every possible rationaliza­

tion for the Killer's acts. Bérenger is obsessed with understanding, since as he says: "... You're a human

being, we're the same species, we've got to understand

each other, it's our duty, a few seconds later, I loved

you, or almost . . . because we're brothers, and if I hate you, I can't help hating myself . . ." (p. 102).

Bérenger confesses to the Killer that he has had all of the doubts and rationalizations that he has just at­

tributed to the Killer and finally accuses him of

"unconsciously" hiding from himself. At the Killer's

failure to respond in any way other than a chuckle. 133

Bérenger becomes angry and threatens force against this double who won't agree with Bérenger's own failure to take responsibility. In the face of the Killer Berenger is un­ able to fire his two pistols, and he is left, bowed, asking, "What can we do . . (p. 109) as the Killer approaches with his knife drawn.

Bérenger's reduplication in doubles is not simply the proliferation of Berengers or the splitting of his per­ sonality; rather, it is part of the "material" of the vision to which Bérenger refers in Act One. This pro­ jected "material" includes the other characters who echo, reverse, critique, and direct Bérenger and the rest of his projected world. The other characters, the play's objects, and its language form the fabric of the projection and the apparatus that constitutes Plato's cave, a veil of obfuscation which must be removed or destroyed in order to see clearly. Dany, Clochard, the Concierge, the old men.

Mother Peep, the policemen, the drunken man, and the soldier weave the structure of false-seeing through which

Bérenger must penetrate in order to dissolve the masklike material of the theatrical vehicle, of all of the apparatus of mechanical and ideological filters which prevent him from seeing what is really there. 134

The perspectives of romance, of literature, and of politics are suggested by the presence and characterization of the characters. Dany, Bérenger’s love object, appears to be an example of a romantic vision. Ostensibly, it is

Dany’s death at the end of Act One which serves as a catalyst for Bérenger’s decision to act, certainly a romantic pose. Dany’s rejection of mechanized authority represented by the Architect and her subsequent encounter with the Killer pre-figure Bérenger’s own confrontation with the Killer. The romantic urge represented by

Bérenger’s attitude toward Dany is the same romantic urge that causes Berenger to cast himself as a reformer and

"hero,” an urge that masks Bérenger’s fears for his own safety and his disappointment in the dissolution of the paradiso image of the radiant city. Bérenger’s attitude toward Dany herself— that she is a possession that was snatched from him— is subsumed by this ulterior romanticism and his dream of returning once again to the vision of the whole in which love was possible. Clochard's repetitive

"When I left the Merchant Navy / I got spliced to young

Octavie.” ’ (p. 38), echoes a sinister reversal of the re­ lationship between Dany and Bérenger: when she left the civil service she should have been spliced to Bérenger. 135

The concierge who later is transformed into Mother

Peep is the reflection of Bferenger's lust for power. Part of the impetus which motivates him to seek and destroy the

Killer may be romantic or philanthropic, but most of it derives from his wish to purify his vision, the pure pos­ session of which would make him immortal. The concierge controls the building (but ineptly) like the Architect controls the radiant city. She is manager of the interior which reflects the marred and spoiled exterior, an in­ terior Bérenger complains about to the Architect. The concierge beats her dog, she abuses visitors, she pretends to know the whereabouts of all of her tenants. Caretaking is a struggle for her, yet it is a control she enjoys; but like the Architect, her control is illusory. For the concierge and the Architect, language and position are all that constitute the appearance of their control; they are merely constructions of authority. Her position and poverty ironically dictate that only philosophy is economically available to her. Perhaps because of this she is a philosopher; "I know all about the philosophy of life" (p. 46).

While the concierge's practical philosophy purports to control the staircase and her dog— "We all have to find our own way out. If there was one, but there isn't" 136

(p. 46)— Mother Peep's political philosophy creates the

same illusion of control. Mother Peep's rhetoric en­

visions a kind of social architecture which admittedly and

openly "demystifies" by first mystifying (a process not unlike the theatre). According to Mother Peep, "to

demystify, you must first mystify" (p. 76). In its false

demystification. Mother Peep's linguistic and ideological

apparatus re-analyzes the process of theatre set forth by

Bérenger in Act One. Her philosophy is to replace one ap­ paratus with an equally false view which brings "the lie

to perfection" Cp. 76). Mother Peep's philosophies are

challenged by the drunken Man who states, reflecting

Bérenger's own romantic self-concept, "We need a hero I"

(p. 79). Both the drunken man and Mother Peep carry

briefcases, utilitarian containers for ideas and identity,

briefcases which are mistaken for fedouard's, linking them

all to the Architect and ultimately to Bérenger.

The police of Act Three are surreal extensions of the

Architect. Like the Architect, they control ineptly and

impersonally. Bérenger notices that they have "the

Superintendent's voice.' (p. 87)"; in fact, that they all

have the same voice and they wonder whether Bérenger is

not one of them. The police, like the concierge, are con­

trasted with Old Men who discuss what seem to be irrelevant 137

trivialities such as food and the location of the Danube.

They also conflict with the soldier whose flowers and at­ titude are inappropriate for the military, but whose attitude irritates Berenger because of his inaction.

"Haven^t you got anything better to do than play with that?" (p. 89).

These characters fall into two camps, the inept powerful and the wise weak, a dichotomy which reflects

Bérenger's own existential dilemma. Bérenger believes in his vision of the light and warmth, but the vision is a betrayal. What appears to be light and warm is a mani­ festation of the marred damp interior, an interior Berenger declaimes should match the exterior for the perfect unified vision. Bérenger's acceptance of the false vision prevents him from seeing the essential paradox of the "material" he so generously praises. As the concierge says:

When it's cold it's not hot. When it's hot it's because it's cold. When it's cold, it can't be hot I When it's hot, how can it be cold? What it then when it's cold? Cold as cold, and that's your lot I (p. 44)

Bérenger wants to see the radiant vision of the exterior as a radiant vision of his interior. If such a unity is established, if he succeeds in eliminating the blemish on the vision of exterior purity, then the interior will 138

likewise be cleansed and he will be immortal. Using Mother

Peep's methodology, Berenger has demystified death, and

created thereof a new mystification, one infinitely simpler

than the spectre of mortality.

Like the radiant city, the powerful characters in The

Killer are marred and inept; the Architect, the concierge.

Mother Peep, the policemen, and even Berenger only appear

to be in control.. The Architect may have created the il­

lusion of a radiant city, but it is only an illusion. He

is unable to clear it of its haunting menace of mortality,

even though he is architect, superintendent, surgeon, and

psychoanalyst. What the Architect has created with his

technology and his subversion of nature is not even there

on stage: it exists only in the mind's eye and in the pact

of theatrical convention which urges the audience to en­

vision the scene along with Bérenger. In a sense it is not

the Architect who creates the radiant city, it is Bérenger

whose description of it evokes not only the imaginary city,

but the way in which the city fills one with joy and

light. The radiant city is an illusion of language and

gesture, a language which evokes the additional illusion

of a technology capable of creating and maintaining such a

place. The Architect himself is endowed with his power by

Bérenger. He rather odiously concurs with Bérenger's 139

praise and modestly admits a success that is not there.

The Architect is less than human ; he does not listen and nor does he hear. He is half blind, having only one eye available for Bérenger. His pocket phone seems to be a technical marvel, but he is unable to communicate, unable to convince Dany to stay, even when her only choice is nearly certain death.

The concierge who seems to control the boarding house does not control at all. She does not even know whether

Bérenger is in and has no key to his room. She can accept telegrams by virtue of the fact that she cleans his windows, windows which are smeared and filthy. She is un­ able even to control her dog, named ironically, "Treasure."

In the same way that the concierge plies her "philosophy,"

Mother Peep plies meaningless promises and an insidous political philosophy which threatens to obscure even fur­ ther any clear or true vision of the world. Her mystifications and promises seduce in the same way as does the radiant city; her fairy-tale politics are designed to seduce the idealist but hide the rotten core of reality which necessitates their rhetoric.

While the powerful are weak, those characters who appear to be weak seem to have a better grasp of life.

The Old Men grapple with the essentials of living— food. 140

the Danube, the weather. Clochard and the Man in Act Three in their drunken stupors retain the only real belief in romance or tragedy, positions which are as misleading as they are insightful. Drugged, they ply their truths in the proliferation of illusions, but their truths are unpopular and regarded as the products of minds clouded with alcohol, old age, or illness. The Man in Act Three states that

"Penicillin and the fight against dypsoraania are worth more than politics and a change of government" (p. 82), a statement which results in the accusation that he is an

"Enemy of the people! Enemy of history!" (p. 82). fedouard, after having been forced to drink, says "We are all going to die. That's the only alienation that counts!" (p. 83). The weak see through their own veils, but their vision challenges the "truth" purveyed by the

"scientist" Architect, the philosopher concierge, and the politician Mother Peep.

Bérenger's own attempts to be effective are inept.

Like the powerful, he lacks control, but like the weak, he has the ability to savor and question each new vision.

Unlike any of the characters, he quests, rejecting all but the vision of the Killer which has marred his paradise.

It is not until he is weak that he becomes wise and sees the futility of resisting the Killer. Bérenger's strength 141

lies in his unceasing questions and in his anxiety about the relative reality of what he sees and experiences. His concern about the genuineness of his vision of the radiant city is reflected in his statements to the Architect. "But ingenuity like yours is worth its weight in gold. And what's more, I mean the price gold fetched before

1914 . . . the real thing" (p. 11), and "Genuinely enthusiastic, quite genuinely. I'm not the flattering kind, I can tell you" (p. 11). About the radiant city he says, "And yet, here I am. Your radiant city is real. No doubt of that. You can touch it with your fingers. The blue brilliance looks absolutely natural ..." (pp.

11-12), and "It's such a transformation I It's as though I was far away in the South, two or three thousand miles away. Another universe, a world transfigured 1 And just that very short journey to get here, a journey that isn't really, since you might say it takes place in the same place . . ." (p. 17). Bérenger's quest is in part to de­ termine the relative reliability of what is around him, an activity which complements his overall quest to remove all false vision and see clearly. Later in Act One, he says to the Architect, "In any case. I'm glad my memory is real 142

and I can feel it with my fingers" (p. 26). But he also

states: "Mirages . . . there's nothing more real than a mirage" (p. 18).

Even the images of the play reflect Berenger's search

for a clear vision and symbolize his entrapment in the il­

lusion of a world that exists between immortality and the

construction of illusory reality of the theatre. The briefcases, the keys, the name cards, the photos, and the nested boxes all appear to function to convey the truth— official documentation as to identity— and Berenger uses these devices as a way to ascertain the identity of the Killer. Yet all are false and contain nothing more than nested boxes containing nothing. Language and the

iconic reality of photographs have no substance, are blind alleys. The photo of the colonel is nothing more than the blind notion that representative reality does not contain any truer image of reality than the illusions and mirages that have already beset Berenger. Like the play itself, the photo is a product of the operation of ideologies which remain hidden until the truth is sought. Berenger knows no more about the Killer by seeing his photo than the Killer's victims know about the colonel (or reality) whose picture 143

lures them to their death, but all are seduced, the

Killer's victims by the illusion of reality and Bérenger by the idea that he can change reality.

Language in The Killer is another veil, embodying the cold/hot paradox of the concierge's song: langue obfuscates parole. Its statement negates its clarity. It is signifier without signified, radiant city without sun or rain, watered from the bottom.^4 in Bèrenger's attempts to state precisely the nature of the reality he ex­ periences, the very nature eludes him in its statement.

The fact of stating it makes it no longer real, distances it from Bèrenger's experience of it. To B&renger the statement of reality is not nearly so convincing as its tangibility: the evidence of his fingers is more reliable than the evidence of his eyes and mind.

Nature has also been perverted. In the radiant city there is no rain; the red sun on the horizen radiates no light; the soldier's red flowers are on an army truck.

The goose on Mother Peep's goose flag, like the photo of the colonel, leads to death, a drowning in rehtoric and false appearance. The landscape shifts; where nature is described in Act One, nothing is there. That which is

"natural" is so only because it is such a convincing il­ lusion. Stones thrown are harbingers of mortality. 144

All of this apparatus, this projection— the doubles, the images, the language— this intervening "material” which

is literally the "stuff" the play is made of is a false fabric like the fabric of the radiant city— a vision seductively impressive, credible only as a mirage. The filters, the apparatus that have created the visions ex­ perienced by Berenger— mirage, memory, illusion, tangible reality— and the conceptual superstructures which organize this apparatus into yet another layer of false perception— the illusion of science, idealism, romance, documentary reality, politics, theatre— like the radiant city or the nested boxes all lead to delusion, to the idea that they might contain a kernal of truth, if only the impairment, the obfuscating material, the cataract, that one layer of film covering their final beauty and clarity, were removed.

The intervention of this physical apparatus of the theatre and the ideological apparatus that organizes

Berenger's perception of the world creates the distancing reduplication of the projection of the individual in its myriad forms. It is nothing but a blinding veil or mask

like the mirror/screen or the wall of Plato's cave. Not only is B&renger misled by the successive illusions cast before him, the audience as well is blinded into believing 145

that the creating of the "thing," as Hamm calls the vehicle of the play in Endgame, is the creation of a text with meaning, or a referent with significance. But both the matter and its conceptual organization are only illusions of a truth or a reality much like the creation of a radiant city by means of language in Act One. To seek even to clear the vision, remove the Killer, is to be trapped in a hall of mirrors which reduplicate themselves until the re­ flections are the greatest reality present.

Bèrenger’s quest, which appears to be a quest to re­ instate his paradise vision by removing the blotch of the

Killer, is the most insidious illusion of all, for

Bérenger doesn’t seek to remove the blotch, he seeks to join it. The vision of the radiant city to which he is so existentially attached exists within him as it exists on stage. It is marred as he is marred; it is himself. To cleanse himself he must strip the mask of the radiant city from the visage of the play so that exterior meets interior without intervention. His first speech is correct: the interior must match the exterior. The question and quest are only to accept the accuracy of the first projection of the interior as an accurate image of self.

The conceptual superstructures, while misleading, ultimately lead Bferenger to his encounter with the Killer. 146

As in La Chinoise, both the ideological and mechanical mechanisms which constitute society must be broken down yet paradoxically within the very medium sought to be dis­ mantled. In La Chinoise this deconstruction is for the ultimate purpose of critiquing film itself and the role of film in revolution; the audience of the film learns rather than the characters. In The Killer, the apparatus is both the pathway and the barrier to self-perception. B&renger learns to see self as the audience learns to see theatre.

The first superstructure, the technical possibility of the radiant city created by means of the illusion of the theatre, appears not only as the crux of Bèrenger's ab origine sacred time as mentioned earlier, but also as the crux of his mortality or participation in a profane time that leads to death. The radiant city is obviously not real, but Bérenger appeals to a reality beyond the tangible, oddly evidenced by what Bérenger claims to be its immense tangibility. It is misleading in that its vision is created by a belief in the apparatus of technology, in the belief that nature can be subverted and curbed to the will of the scientific man, that any marvelous illusion can be more real than reality itself.

The illusion of romance in which Berenger is next en­ trapped is an illusion made possible, as B&renger states, 147

by his return to the time when all was light. "I can fall in love again ..." (p. 26). In fact his love is de­ stroyed by the same blot that has destroyed the purity of his vision. In his desire to regain the vision, an ambition couched now in terms of romance, he is again mis­ led. This is not the quest of the romantic young man to avenge his lover; it is the quest of the marred young man to hide his fault. There is no romance, only cold wet rooms, businessmen discussing the economics of employees' time to excrete, old men discussing food, and a sloppy concierge who beats her dog.

The reliability of documents is another ideological illusion. Berenger's struggle to locate and destroy the

Killer is facilitated by the timely discovery of pieces of documentary evidence. The identity cards which "prove" one's identity, used by the Architect to remember who

Berenger is and by the police to determine that he is who he says he is, the picture of the Killer, his diary, maps, all are useless signifiers which prove neither identity nor methodology. They are in fact deadly. Those whose curios­ ity about the documentary real leads them to the irresistable gaze upon the photo of the colonel die for their curiosity. Truth and reality do not exist in the seductive authority of the iconic. 148

The political vision of the play from the bureaucratic and incompetent Architect to Mother Peep's fascist diatribe is the most insidious illusion of all. Mother Peep's rhetoric in fact outlines the process of politics demysti­ fying to re-mystify, promising radiant cities when all that exist are Killers. To Ionesco, the political, didactic drama, represented best by the plays of Bertold Brecht, is a drama of limited vision:

When people say that the theatre should be purely social, do they not really mean that the theatre should be political, slanted, of course, in this or that direction? It is one thing to be social; to be "socialist" or "marxist" or "fascist" is another— this is the ex­ pression of a kind of stock-taking that does not go far enough: the more I see of Brecht's plays, the more I have the impression that time, and his own time, escape him; Brechtian man is shorn of one dimension, the writer's sense of period is actually falsified by his ideology, which narrows his field of vision; this is a fault common to ideologists and people stunted by fanaticism.25

Ionesco's distaste for Brecht's theatre, (a rhetoric and ideology whole-heartedly adopted by Godard in

La Chinoise) while a reaction against any kind of totali­ tarianism, also reflects a concern about the nature of theatre itself. Ionesco's use of the Mother Peep episode is not only a commentary on the ideological play, it is a critique of the rhetoric and methodology of the idealist 149

playwright. The greatest illusion of all is that didacticism has a place in theatre. Ionesco's main com­ plaint about Brecht is that his characters are incomplete and puppet-like:

I dislike Brecht because he is didactic and ideological. He is not primitive, he is elementary. He is not simple, he is simplistic. He does not give us matter for thought, he is himself the reflection and illustration of an ideology, he teaches me nothing, he is useless repetition. Brechtian man, moreover, is flat, he has only two dimensions, surface dimensions, he is merely social: what he lacks is dimension in depth, metaphysical dimension. Brechtian man is incomplete and often he is merely a puppet. . . . There is another side to us too, which goes beyond the social and gives us a certain freedom in relation to society. Whether it is really a question of freedom or a more complex conditioning of human beings is another problem. In any case, Brechtian man is crippled, for his author denies him his deepest inner reality; he is bogus, for he is alienated from what truly determines him. There is no theatre if no secret is revealed; there is no art without metaphysics, and there is no society away from its nonsocial context.26

The second illusion created by Mother Peep is that politics provide any clearer vision of reality than does art.

Ionesco states:

I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself. 150

or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding.27

The mystifications of Mother Peep are the final bar­ rier between Berenger and himself. Metaphor of the process of theatre itself, the political speeches of Mother Peep, reiterate Berenger's initial definition of the theatrical illusion. The "material" of the stage and of his vision is the mystification of Mother Peep. Berenger's final en­ counter with the Killer is the deadly new mystification.

But Berenger is the four-dimensional man, for his struggle is metaphysical and his final encounter reveals the secret that the Killer is himself.

As Berenger has wonderingly exclaimed in Act One, in order to project the universe within, "some outside help is needed: some kind of material, physical light, a world that is objectively new" (p. 19). This "material" is the illusion of the radiant city, an illusion created by means of the theatre. In the same speech, Berenger defines as

"catastrophe" that which occurs when "there's not total agreement" between himself inside and himself outside. The paradise mirage of the radiant city corresponds to the moment in Bèrenger's life when, as he states, "A song of triumph rose from the depths of my being: I was, I realized I always had been, that I was no longer going to 151

die" (p. 23). It is also the mirage which permits the con­ tinued flow of illusion, of fiction, and of romance, for as

Bérenger says: "In any case. I'm glad my memory is real and I can feel it with my fingers. I’m as young as I was a hundred years ago. I can fall in love again ..."

(p. 26).

However, a blot, a shadow is introduced into the mirage of the radiant city, the "material" of the new world, the exterior which has to this point so felicitously recreated what Bérenger would like his inner world to be.

Bérenger feels his loss, his catastrophe: "Oh dear, and I already felt I'd taken root in these surroundings! Now all the brilliance they offer is dead and they're nothing more than an empty frame . . . I feel shut out!" (p. 32). But this experience of losing the radiance is not new to

Bérenger who has experienced this loss before and who has imprinted upon his consciousness this same pattern. As he says :

And suddenly, or rather gradually . . . no, it was all at once, I don't know, I only know that everything went grey and pale and neutral again. Not really, of course, the sky was still pure, but it wasn't the same purity, it wasn't the same sun, the same morning, the same spring. It was like a conjuring trick. The light was the same as on any other day, ordinary daylight. 152

There was a kind of chaotic vacuum inside me, I was overcome with the immense sadness you feel at a moment of tragic and in­ tolerable separation.

(p. 24)

The darkness decried by Bérenger is attributed at first to the Architect, whom he accuses, in a repetition of the con­ juring trick ofhis earlier experience, of playing tricks, then to the actions of the uncontrollable Killer who haunts the vicinity, drowning people in the pond. Berenger re­ solves to remove the blot on the vision, on the "material” which had so closely reflected himself. He does not accept the Killer as part of the vision, but rather as an agent who destroys the vision's purity.

Bérenger sets out, so he believes, to remove the blot from the vision: "It can't go on I We must ^ something!

We must, we must, we must!" (p. 42). However, the blot, as an integral part of the vision is unexpungeable, but

Bdrenger, in his quest, must encounter all the projections of self, all that contribute to his construction of the image of the city and its loss. He must work through each projection, each way of seeing, through all of the material of the theatre before he can encounter and excise the

Killer. 153

From the beginning of the play Bérenger, like the characters in Play and La Chinoise, has been a character trapped in not simply one grand illusion, but within the myriad layers of illusion which contribute to the theatrical construct which is the play and to the sum total of being that is Bérenger in all of his settings and doubles. Bérenger is a character wrapped in the diegetic reality of the cinema screen, accepting as real illusion after illusion until finally he is able to turn and face the source of the images, the projector/camera itself.

His quest, his rite of passage, is from illusion to the mirror self-reflection he mentions in the speech in which he lauds the vision of the radiant city. The quest itself is a metaphor for the process of distanciation, of the discovery that illusion is nought but illusion. His quest carries him from a belief in the reality of illusion, even though he recognizes its creation by means of material from the very beginning, through his gradual divorce from illusion and image to his final encounter, a final sorting through the apparatus, "the material" of the theatre. In his encounter with the Killer comes a recognition that the

Killer, like the apparatus which has conveyed him to this final point, is intrinsic to his vision; and it is the 154

Killer who has destroyed the illusion, and brought him face-to-face with the death of illusion and the death of the apparatus which sustains that illusion, and with his own death.

The identification of the illusions of the radiant city and of the play as theatre with the "material" or ap­ paratus of illusion and theatre occurs by means of

Bèrenger's quest which begins in illusion and ends in reality. From illusion, we are seduced into the real stuff of which dreams are made. The loss of the radiant image, as Bferenger describes, results in an immersion in the grey mundane: "The old gossips came out of their courtyards and split my eardrums with their screeching voices, the dogs barked, and I felt lost among all those people, all those things ..." (p. 24-25). The mention of the Killer transforms the radiant vision into the dark interior of the cafe and of Bferenger^s room in Act Two, an environment

Bérenger had rued from the beginning. From the dark in­ terior, Bérenger proceeds to the death spectre of fascism of Mother Peep and the police. The suggestion of the blot of the Killer draws forth, in a dream logic, all of the apparatus representative of that which kills the image of light. 155

The hint of the Killer in Act One which disintegrates

Bèrenger’s radiant vision literally takes over and dis­ solves the material of that vision, supplanting it and forcing a recognition not only of the apparatus of the false ways of seeing, but also of the vehicle itself. The stage has unmasked itself. The real encounter between

Bérenger and the Killer can take place only after the material has been removed. The real encounter is finally silence as Berenger faces his reflection in the mirror, his Other, Stripped of the mask of theatre itself, the encounter still takes place in theatre, perhaps as quintessential theatre in Ionesco's terms.

For Ionesco, the idea of theatre manifests the same struggle as Berenger's struggle to join self with self through the mask of illusion.

I think I realize now that what worried me in the theatre was the presence of characters in flesh and blood on the stage. Their physical presence destroyed the imaginative illusion. It was as though there were two planes of reality, the con­ crete, physical, impoverished, empty and limited reality of these ordinary human beings living, moving and speaking on the stage, and the reality of imagination, face to face, overlapping, irreconcilable; two antagonistic worlds failing to come together and u n i t e . 28

Ionesco's purposeful evocation of the contrived nature of the illusion of theatre in Act One of The Killer, 156

Berenger's anxiety and quest to destroy the antagonist so that his worlds can reunite, and the deliberate atheatricality of Ionesco's use of stage space in The

Killer emphasize The Killer's meta-theatrical comment.

The end of The Killer is the end of the play, the end of illusion, the end of theatre, and at the same time the goal of the theatre: the encounter with the deepest truth of self. As Ionesco states, ". . . it reflects my own image, it is a mirror; it is soul searching; it is history gazing beyond history toward the deepest truth."29

The core of Ionesco's theatre is the act of seeing; seeing self, seeing illusion, seeing reality. The end of

The Killer rests on the psychological fulcrum of the act of seeing: the apparatus of Plato's cave has become

Lacan's mirror. The relationship between the production of illusion and reality has become for Berenger the re­ lationship between the pre-Oedipal and the post-Oedipal self. B&renger, like Lacan's baby, vacillates between his unity with the world and with a timeless paradise, and his separation and alienation from the world and his ultimate mortality. His discovery is made through his vision, through his coming face-to-face with the mirror image of self, through removing the masks and apparatus of illusion and self-delusion which have blinded him. He finds his 157

way out of the cave. Bèrenger's final moment of discovery

occurs when he can see, but can no longer speak. Vision

is truer than language.30 When he finally sees, he has no

further need to speak.

The universe is reduced to this amount. The sifting

and searching are the stuff of theatre; its essence is the

two antagonistic visions: the illusory radiant city and

the face of the Killer. The quest is to join them in a

unity which demands the destruction of the former, a de­

struction which layer by layer strips the material of

theatrical illusion and leaves bare the eyes in the mirror. Guillaume's mask in La Chinoise has become the

theatre. Berenger is both Guillaume and the audience,

consciously stripping the apparatus of illusion, not for

a Brechtian didacticism, not for a glimpse of reality, but

to find real eyes, to be able to perceive. Blow-Up

I wish to recreate reality in an abstract form . . . I put reality itself in question. This is an essential point with which the visual aspect of this film is concerned, given the fact that one of its principle themes is "to see rightly, or else not to see the true value of things."

Michelangelo Antonioni^

Like Berenger in The Killer, Thomas (David Hemmings), the photographer protagonist in Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow-Up (1 9 6 6 ),2 learns to distrust the image created by means of his own photographic apparatus. In Blow-Up

Thomas discovers that what is seen by the Plato's cave of photographic apparatus is an illusion dependent upon his position as spectator. Where in The Killer the doubles, the projections, the ideologies, and the structures and conventions of theatre constitute the apparatus which filters the act of seeing, in Blow-Up the apparatus is the many-layered complex of equipment and processes which con­ stitute the acts of making, viewing, and interpreting film, the "cinematographic apparatus" described by

Jean-Louis Baudry.^ Like Berenger, the fruits of Thomas'

158 159

quest for a true vision end in an image of death. Thomas' invasion of the love triangle he photographs results in a search for the truth of his own role in the triangle and in the subsequent murder.

In Blow-Up, Thomas, while wielding the mechanical ap­ paratus of photography in his quest for a documentary photographic art, becomes buried in the sediment of meta- cinematic and meta-critical analogies engendered by his own activities. While seeking a documentary reality in the blown-up depths of a picture, Thomas becomes further separated from the reality the image is presumed to r e p r e s e n t . 4 Thomas, the representative "mod" fashion photographer, formerly concerned with the photograph, the artifact of seeing, the cemented vision itself caught and reproduced on paper by yet other apparatus, learns that it is not the vision or its silver nitrate tracing that is important, it is the act of seeing itself which leads both to self-perception and to art.

Like Berenger, Thomas quests to complete his vision, to know, though in Blow-Up his vision is a book of photog­ raphy taken, not of the inhabitants of a radiant city, but of the denizens of flophouses. To complete his book,

Thomas, like a hunter, tracks and photographs a couple he sees in a park in the idyllic vision of love so sought by 160

Berenger. His female subject, Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), is inexplicably disturbed by his spying and demands the film which he refuses to give her. He returns instead to his studio; she follows him there; and in response to her desperate demand for the film, he attempts to discover the photographs' hidden significance by applying further ap­ paratus to the images he has captured.

In the blow-ups Thomas discovers a hand with a gun.

Thinking he has by photographic intervention prevented a murder in progress, much in the way Bferenger believes the evidence he discovers in fedouard's briefcase will finally enable them to capture and stop the Killer, Thomas cavorts with two pubescent model groupies. However, drawn back to the apparatus by the woman's frightened gaze, Thomas blows the photographs up even further to the realm of the abstract and sees therein a corpse. The documentary image has progressed from what appeared to be shots of a lovers' trist to the images of an elaborate seduction which re­ sults in death. Thomas rushes to the park to verify the evidence of the photographic document and comes across the staring corpse of a man. The apparatus has led him, not to the killer, the instrument of death analogous to the camera in its aiming and shooting, but to the corpse, the still, waxy, photo-like result of the act. 161

The evidence of his camera confirmed, Thomas returns

to find his studio ransacked and all but one abstract

blow-up stolen. Hoping to reaffirm the fruits of his

vision, Thomas seeks his friends in the tangled whirl of

music and drugs of the mod scene. Unable to convince his

friends to accompany him to the park, Thomas succumbs to

the apparatus of the party and awakening belatedly, goes

to the park only to find that the body has disappeared.

The imagery and structure of the film suggest that

the act of seeing and the veracity of photography itself

is at issue. The ubiquitous camera, the colored photo­ graphs which adorn the white walls of Thomas' studio, the

Guy Fawkes Day revelers who accost him at the beginning

and the end of the film, the modish models, even the

bric-a-brac of the antique shop create a rich visual en­

vironment full of contrast yet strangely devoid of obvious

connections.5 Though pictures of parachuting and the propeller have prompted some critics to connect them to

Thomas' desire for freedom,® the connection, if any, is

labored. The props and images primarily provide a visually compelling environment unimpaired by any obvious

symbolism in contrast to which Thomas' search through the grainy black and white world of the blow-ups seems unreal. 162

The film is constructed of framing layers of seductive

illusion which are in fact the invisible, but masking

layers of the "cinematographic apparatus." Thomas spends

the film literally trying to see, first by means of this

apparatus, then outside of it. At the beginning of the

film, he emerges from the depths of the flophouse,

voyeuristically pursues a couple in the park, then retires

and buries himself in the depths of the photos he has

taken. Thomas is seduced by what he doesn't see in the photographs of the lovers in the same way the man who be­

comes the corpse is seduced to his death by occupying the wrong (and fatal) position in relation to the lovers. The photographed kernal of the seduction repeats its lure as

Thomas struggles to discover the correct way to see the photographs, a struggle which leads him back through the

cinematographic apparatus in the same way Berenger unravels

the material of theatre. Thomas' attempts to see into the

depths of the photographs are in turn framed by an outside world hidden in costume and whiteface into which Thomas

emerges after his night in the flophouse and in which he ultimately immerses himself at the end. These layers of

seduction are finally framed by the fact of the film it­

self, another exercise of the cinematographic apparatus which masks itself in the unmasking of Thomas. 163

Thomas is ironically seduced by the notion that the photographs he takes contain reality. In his after-hours' quest for art, he is anxious to capture a documentary reality, but he becomes trapped in the maze of apparatus which paradoxically removes him from the reality of his images as it enables him to see their details. As Baudry demonstrated, the use of optical apparatus is in itself the operation of an ideology which places the camera eye in the

"approximate monocular perspective of the Renaissance."

The selection of which slices of reality to photograph is another operation which requires the intervention of an ideology, in this case a notion of romance coupled with cinema vérité.

In the process of enlargement, proportion and definition are traded for the grainy glimpse of the murder weapon and a corpse. His development and close scrutiny of the photographs illustrates his search for the right perspective, a search instigated by the obvious value of the photographs to the woman who follows him to retrieve them. Thomas attempts to shift his perspective through the re-use of optical apparatus, calling into play again the ideology which places the subject in the center. Re- centering himself as the perceiving subject, Thomas 164

arranges and edits the blown-up photographs in an attempt to discover some narrative continuity, another ideology.

What was the woman hiding?

Working through the layers of photography as Godard has worked through the layers of cinema in La Chinoise,

Thomas changes the photographic material to a dissection of itself. In reapplying the optical apparatus, the material has become visibly transformed; not only has

Thomas centered himself twice as the perceiving subject, he has by virtue of the magnification process greatly de­ creased his own stature relative to the proportions of the now-transformed material. The magnifications and editing reveal the image of a gun, leading Thomas in his subject- centered perception to believe that he has prevented a murder. By the reapplication of optical apparatus, the notion of documentary reality shifts as Thomas sifts the grains which are witness as direct physical reflections to the crime. But which crime? The murder of the lover se­ duced by the play-acting of Jane, or the crime of mistak­ ing documentary for truth?

Thomas' anxiety about seeing the details of his documentary photography is born of his familiarity with the tools of photographic illusion. In photographing his models he employs everything from mirrors and smoked glass 165

to automatic role-played sex in which Thomas captures the model's reactions to the illusion of intercourse. His fashion photography is the deliberate creation of illusion, the illusion of style and beauty derived from the grotesque unnaturalness of the models' zombie faces and contorted poses. The documentary project seems an escape from the artifice of commercial photography; and Thomac, following the best traditions of documentary license, spends the night among the poor and jobless in the il­ lusion that transient participation endows insight and a less exploitative truth to the photographic document.

Ironically, Thomas' documentary project is situated as art, an art which like film results from the strategic arrangement of bits of "reality." That Thomas would view the documentary reality of his photos as art and the deliberate illusion of the fashion photographs as meaning­ less and commercial indicates that Thomas is a disciple of

Bazin's theory that:

"The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process Of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model."7 166

For Thomas then, as for Bazin, art is true realism, "the

need . . . to give significant expression to the world

both concretely and in its essence, . . .", and not,

"... the pseudorealism of a deception aimed at fooling

the ye (or for that matter the mind); a pseudorealism

content . . . with illusory appearances."&

However, the issue of the relationship between art

and reality/illusion, often identified as the primary

«Î. theme of the film, is in fact symptomatic of a much greater

confusion.® Thomas* project in Blow-Up is perhaps the

"need to give significant expression to the world . . .,"

but his exploration of the context of that expression

happens not within the larger social context of the photo­

graphs he takes, but within the confines of the images

themselves. Though he might have captured a "real" moment

in his photographs, his inability to understand what he

has photographed renders illusory the "real" photograph,

and his search within the depths of the photograph elimi­

nates progressively larger portions of the photograph’s

context, removing it even further from reality.

In the enlargement process Thomas is seduced by the

illusions created by the partial picture. At first when

he spots the gun, he believes himself a savior, his photo­

graph having intervened to prevent a death. His arrival 167

at a final abstraction, the grainy image of a corpse, perceptively compared by his painter neighbor's wife to one of her husband's paintings, is the final illusion, one that Thomas must verify by seeking the tangible body. That

Thomas does find a corpse in the park seems to belie the notion that the body was an illusion, but it is only in thrusting away the photographic apparatus and its product that Thomas knows for certain.10 If his photography is art, and if the interpretation of that art leads Thomas to the belief that a man was murdered in the park, then

Thomas' discovery of the body is more a confirmation of an insight derived from the process of interpretation than a confirmation that the grainy, abstracted image in the photo is any more than the final symbol of the process of art and illusion that led him to the corpse.

Thomas' confusion of reality and illusion lies in his substitution of the product for the process which created it, a false metonymy which implies at the very least that the photograph of the park represents the sum total of the processes by which it was created. Further, such an equa­ tion implies that what is seen, the image, embodies in some direct way the way in which it was seen. Thus, the product of Thomas' progressive enlargement, the corpse, should carry all of the scars of the enlargement process, 168

and the image of the corpse should in some way implicate the way in which it was seen. In Blow-Up this is not the case. The enlargements, rather than documenting the process of enlargement, eliminate all traces, leaving only the blown-up centers so distorted that they retain none of their original clarity and context. The discovery of the corpse occurs as a result of the intervention of multiple processes which lead Thomas down a trail of illusion that can only be finally resolved by the tangible presence of the body in the park.

Certainly the relationship between reality and il­ lusion is at stake, not as a theoretical question about the nature of documentary photography, but rather as a function of the intervention of apparatus in the act of seeing. Paradoxically, the creation of art in a traditional sense requires the use of some intervening apparatus, in Thomas' case, a camera. The product of the camera, though possibly art, can never, despite Bazin's claims, either recreate reality or be more than a repre­ sentative of the artist's original act of seeing which created its framing, content, and composition. The splitting of the notions "truth" and "reality" causes the paradox: "truth" can be had as a result of illusion; whereas reality is the unphotographable raw material. 169

Thomas’ pictures, as their enlargement takes them further and further from reality, become less clear and more

"true." The simple lesson, then, should be that the inter­ vention of apparatus in the creation of art leads to truth verified in Thomas’ case by his discovery of the body in the park.

Thomas, in enlarging the photographs was not, however, creating art; he was attempting to discover the gap in his seeing between reality and truth, the gap paradoxically created by the apparatus by which he saw. Jane's advent in his studio informs him that he has indeed missed some­ thing. His own acuity as well as the accuracy of his documentary camera are at stake. His struggle to find the missing image is not a battle with illusion; it is the ef­ fort to parse, to detect, to dismantle his very act of seeing to find its flaw. He seeks to connect the photo to the larger context, a context that is missing in the photograph, and determines that the key to the photo’s context outside must be located inside the picture. That his initial efforts merely multiply the illusion indicate that his seeing is still flawed. Like a detective with a theory, he finds only evidence which supports his cause, in this case, the supremacy of photography and his status as a savior, a status reinforced by his placement of 170

himself as centered subject in his own photographs. Only

when he catches the terrified eye of the woman in the

photograph and essentially sees what she sees can he see

what is there. The enlargements are a crutch, the illusion

that he is seeing more acutely when in fact what he hasn't

seen was there all along.

The idea that he comes closer to the truth as he gets

further from reality is a fiction inherent in the equation

of truth and art, a fiction which is an integral ideologi­

cal feature of the application of the photographic/

cinematographic apparatus to objective reality. Yet the

apparatus which continually and invisibly situates Thomas

in the center leads him away from truth, but into an in­

vestigation of the products of the processes which comprise

the cinematographic apparatus, an investigation that is

fruitless until he discovers the bias of perspective.

The optical apparatus which intervenes between Thomas

and his photographs— his commodity and art— and between

Thomas and life is a photographic apparatus consisting of

the camera: lens, black box, and film situated in Thomas'

place, seeing from his perspective what he sees. Thomas

systematically uses the camera as a optical device, in­

serting it between himself and life, wearing it like a mask or screening himself with it. The camera is Thomas' 171

cave, his apparatus of illusion and his illusion of

reality. James F. Scott asserts that Thomas uses the

camera as a means of interpersonal control, obviating the necessity for any genuine personal interaction.H The power of the camera dictates that people interact with

Thomas as photographic objects, a power that endows Thomas with the right to arrange them and to see them as a camera

sees— out of special and temporal context as discontinous beings who exist only as image commodities. With the camera, Thomas' eye is the superior eye, the eye attached to the apparatus that will see and record the moment ac­

cording to Thomas' arrangement of it and his perspective.

Thomas' reliance on the photographic apparatus, the process of blowing-up and arranging the photos, magnifying

and blowing-up ever-smaller bits of the image, and the process of his interpretation of the blown-up images are meta-cinematic and meta-critical. His process is itself a dissection of the process of making film. At the same time Thomas' process constitutes the film, Blow-Up, in which his actions are subject to the cinematic apparatus which made the film. In this context, Blow-Up is self- reflective, as John Freccero describes, "a metalinguistic metaphor, a highly self-conscious and self-reflective meditation on its own process. 172

The meta-cinematic and meta-critical nature of Thomas' activities lies in the similarities between the purpose and method of his photographic work and the projects of both cinema and cinema criticism. Thomas' initial project in Blow-Up is the completion of the montage in his book of documentary photographs, a self-consciously artistic activity which is like the editing of film.13 The enlarge­ ment of the photographs in his studio and their arrangement on his walls is another type of editing; for in the en­ largements, Thomas seeks to discover and recreate the continuity of the events in the park. While scrutinizing the photographs, like a film critic, Thomas becomes lost in the task of interpretation, following the process al­ ready defined by his painter friend; "They don't mean anything when I do them— just a mess. Afterwards I find something to hang onto— like that— like— like . . . And then it sorts itself out. It adds up. It's like finding a clue in a detective story."1^ His scrutiny of the photographs is also the act of attempting to situate him­ self, to find himself within them, not only as a point of perspective, but also as the shaper, the creator. Thomas is able to find meaning only after critical scrutiny and the application of additional lenses and the selective choice of small portions of the photograph to magnify 173

further. In his interpretation of the photographs, Thomas arrives at several incorrect interpretations based on the erroneous relation of one detail to the whole, a danger inherent in criticism.

While the context of Thomas' photographic activity is meta-cinematic, the process by which Thomas discovers the body in the park is also a dissection of Jean-Louis

Baudry's concept of the "cinematographic apparatus."

Blow-Up makes visible the transforming steps of the opera­ tion of the cinematographic apparatus and in so doing dissects not only its own process in becoming a film, but the analogous psychological processes by which Thomas comes to an awareness of self and of his infertile relation to the apparatus. It also coincidentally dissects the lure and trap set by the lovers in the park, a parallel which suggests a relationship between the working of cinema and false seduction. What at first appears to be a simple flirtation reveals at closer scrutiny, a pointed gun, in­ dicating that the flirtation was intended to lure someone, then a corpse, indicating that by distracting the victim's attention to a meaningless action, the victim would not see the significant act which kills him. Like the victim and like Berenger, Thomas' attention is drawn to the wrong action. His attempts to decipher the representation and 174

to dissect the lure which attracted his voyeuristic

acquisition of the image only tempt him to gaze further until his photographs become the image of death, and until,

like Bferenger and Oedipus, he is forced to face himself and the fact of his own mortality.

However, the cinematographic apparatus breaks down.

Thomas has followed it to the logical product: a narrative which leads to the satisfying discovery that the process which began the narrative saved the life of an unknown person. This is indeed a mutation created by the apparatus and a mistake almost entirely due to the centering of the wrongly perceiving subject. The apparatus leads to that which pleases the perceiver, not to the truth.

Thomas' encounter with the adolescent groupies, which unlike the first sexual encounter in the film, occurs with­ out the intervening protection of the camera, leads Thomas to a reassessment of his product. He realizes that he is not the correct perceiving subject: the perceiving subject

is the woman in the last of the series of blow-ups who is

looking intently at the empty meadow. Thomas resituates himself as a perceiving subject in an identification with the woman and discovers the corpse. Distrusting this time the product of the apparatus, Thomas revisits the realm of the raw material of objective reality and finds there is a 175

dead body. His images of love in a park have led to the reality of death. It is only by a rejection of the in­ tervening apparatus that Thomas recontacts the engendering reality and participates without his camera.

It would seem that Antonioni is skeptical if not critical of the ability of the cinematic apparatus to con­ vey any germ of the reality it has transformed. Thomas' rejection of the apparatus is an act of fear and desperation, but also an act of frustration. He can no longer rely on the acuity of his self-endowed position as the central perceiving subject. The entire validity of his seeing is cast into doubt. If his seeing is fraught with such dangers of misinterpretation, what is the value of the product? What is the value of the product of cinema?

Of course, the dissected cinematic apparatus which constitutes Thomas' process also constitutes the content of the film Blow-Up, a film itself subject to the same operations as those performed by Thomas and outlined by

Godard in La Chinoise. While Thomas' mutation of the raw material of objective reality is visible to us, the trans­ formation of objective reality which occurs by operation of the cinematographic apparatus in the making of Blow-Up is invisible to us. Its only hint lies in our acceptance 176

of Thomas' process as the process by which Blow-Up was made. Blow-Up situates the perceiving subject (the

audience) in identification with the eye of the camera

that filmed Thomas' activities in centers different than

those occupied by Thomas in every instance except when

Thomas is making the photographs in the park. When we see the photographs later, we see them as Thomas first took

them. We watch and follow his successive resituations; we

don't understand what Thomas perceives until after he has perceived it. We do not share Thomas' process; we observe

it; for us it makes a marrative continuity which solves a mystery. Unlike Thomas, we are entrapped in the construc­

tion of the camera eye as the perceiving subject. When

Thomas sheds the apparatus, as Bferenger shed the successive

layers of illusion in The Killer, we follow him by means of

the constructions of the film.

Thomas' final participation in the mime tennis game

played by the Guy Fawkes revelers at the end of Blow-Up is

an enigma which presents us with the question of the re­

lationship between reality and illusion, but which

indicates that Thomas has in fact begun to exist in a new

order outside of the exigencies of the perceiving subject.

From the moment of perceptive identification in the park,

our paths have diverged until we can no longer see what 177

Thomas sees. In order to understand Thomas' last act of

retrieving the imaginary ball for the mime players, like

Thomas we must resituate ourselves as perceiving subjects;

we must realize that we have been seeing from the wrong

point of view.

Despite the unsettling mobility of Thomas as a per­

ceiving subject (though he embodies the capabilities of

the moving camera), and despite questions raised by the

end of the film about the efficacy of the film's construc­

tion of the location of the perceiving subject with whom

the audience identifies, the psychological process inherent

in the operations of the cinematographic apparatus func­

tions to create a series of identifications between Thomas

and the images in his photographs. The environment of film

projection, as Baudry points out, is the environment both

of Plato's cave and of the closed, captive environment of

Lacan's mirror stage. The audience's captivation, like

the infant's "immature powers of mobility" and the

audience's visual orientation and expectations, like the

infant's visual preocity, recreate the circumstances of

identification which occur at the mirror stage. The screen upon which the film is projected functions as the infant's 178

mirror in which the members of the audience, like the in­ fant, identify their own separateness by means of the image of a separate being seen in the mirror/screen.^®

In Blow-Up, Thomas is brought to the acute recognition of himself as perceiving subject as a result of the unre­ liability of the stances from which he attempts to see.

Though he is not the passive, literally trapped audience of the movie theatre or of Plato's Cave, he is figuratively entrapped in the limiting confines of his photos, in the limitations of his equipment, and the darkness in which he must work. Like Lacan's infant, Thomas scrutinizes the photographs, making no sense of them until he is able to recognize his own "imaginary integration of self" as per­ ceiving subject distinct from the optical and ideological apparatus by which he previously constructed himself as a misperceiving subject. When Thomas escapes from the tyranny of the camera eye which occurs when Thomas recognizes that he can be a perceiving subject distinct from the stance of the perceiving subject constructed by the camera, like the film audience, he is able to form a primary identification with the woman, to see as she sees.

No longer tangled in the quandry of misperception, Thomas accepts the representation of the photographs, identifies with Jane, and begins to perceive as she perceives since 179

that is the action of the character in the image. But as

he perceives in identification with her, his perception in

the mirror/screen is a corpse: the unified body in the

mirror is a dead body. Like Bérenger, Thomas' search ends

with the discovery of both the Killer and the killed and

they are both himself.

Perhaps what Thomas also sees in the blown-up photo­

graphs is the metaphor for his own acts as a photographer.

The camera, pointing like the gun, ends ultimately in a

lifeless image like the dead body. Thomas is the Killer;

and his victims, like the corpse in the park, are real, all

victims of the seduction of illusion in the way the

Killer's victims in The Killer are victims of the illusion

of reality of the photograph. The apparatus in its opera­

tion leads to death, or so one might conclude from Thomas'

experience. Certainly, the centralization and construction

of the perceiving subject, as Baudry states, reflect the

ideology of a dominant culture which requires the con­

struction of a single central subject around whose

perception narrative and meaning are o r g a n i z e d . 16 in

Blow-Up Thomas' experience ultimately subverts the notion

of the central perceiving subject, since its result for

Thomas is an image of death and the rejection of the ap­

paratus. Thomas' search for the correct way to see causes 180

him to shed the confining restraints of the cave and sends him into the light and the new light of the mime. The dis­ covery of the image of the corpse is the death of the apparatus and the death of the camera eye.

Thomas' rejection of the apparatus at first is not a rejection; rather it is an attempt to reaffirm that the identification process he stumbles through in his inter­ pretation of the photographs is reliable. His discovery of the body seems to vindicate the apparatus, though, paradoxically, the fact that Thomas checks the park to determine for certain indicates his distrust. He also attempts to save the apparatus by gaining community witness to the reality of what he discovered by means of the inter­ vention of the apparatus. In seeking the confirmation of his friends, Thomas seeks confirmation of the image of the body as spectacle, removing the real body and the image of the body from Thomas' personal mirror and making them the objective confirmation of the efficacy of documentary. No matter what he pleads to his friends, he is unable to shift himself from the dark and isolated conditions of cinema.

Unable to enlist the aid or interest of any of his friends, Thomas is left alone with a solitary image of a lonely death. The disappearance of the body and all but one of the blow-ups leaves Thomas the sole spectator, the 181

only witness, the solitary infant who recognizes his separateness in the face of death. However, Thomas' use of the apparatus dissects the apparatus and frees Thomas from his entrapment in the illusion of the reality of the images it produces. Like Berenger, Thomas has escaped the confines of the apparatus in which the characters of Play and La Chinoise are still trapped. He is able to use the apparatus to learn about both the apparatus and himself.

Thomas' gaze into the mirror is more a gaze into self, a self trapped in apparatus, seeing only shadows. What

Thomas sees in the photographs is the possibility of see­ ing more acutely without the apparatus, the possibility of leaving the cave.

The end of the film posits a new way of seeing for

Thomas. No longer isolated in the red light of the dark­ room or hidden behind a camera mask, Thomas participates in a mimed tennis game, seeing in effect, as does Berenger in Act One of The Killer, what literally isn't there, but what is constructed by the conventions of another ap­ paratus, the theatre. Theatre and its set of illusions momentarily divert Thomas who finally disappears in the intense green of the last frames. The appearance of the theatre in the film suggests its similarity as apparatus and mechanism for the production of illusion. Though 182

Thomas may not have made his way completely through the tunnel of obscuring apparatus, in participating in the mime both as a spectator and as one who retrieves the imaginary tennis ball, Thomas has ceased to be the isolated spectator in a dark movie house and has become a man who at least for a moment is a part of a community in which the suspension of disbelief is conscious and voluntary.

Though Thomas disappears, swallowed up in greenness, he has ceased to be the voyeur and has relinquished the con­ comitant powers endowed by the camera. Mask lifted,

Thomas can see, though we, the film's audience, can no longer see him, trapped as we are still in the cinematographic apparatus which Thomas has shed, but which continues to conspire as best it can to affirm the reality of the imaginary tennis game by providing the sound of the ball, a sound which jolts us finally from the position of perceiving subject by bringing into question what it is we perceive.

If Blow-Up is interpreted only as a film about a man who cannot distinguish reality from illusion, as it often is, then the final scene presents yet another image of

Thomas' confusion combined with a futile and trivial attempt to escape the dilemma altogether. Certainly, if one interprets the mod ambiance of the film as an 183

atmosphere which conveys artificiality, superficiality, and meaninglessness, then Thomas' escape is a fitting if unsatisfactory end. However, such a stance fails to account for the compelling meta-cinematic process of

Thomas' search for the significance of the photographs.

The mod world in fact is a world conceived upon apparatus, identified by fashion and style. The fashion and style are costumes, much like the Guy Fawkes revelers' whiteface, symbols of a rejection of the establishment order, and the substitution of an order which denies the covert hypocrisies of societal institutions which require consci­ entious sobriety and monogamy. Thomas is typical of this mod world; conforming to its style and behavior, he questions even the processes of photography. He learns as well to see the Guy Fawkes revelers whom he encounters at the beginning of the film, and in so doing begins to learn to see the "true value" of community by playing with them.

Blow-Up is a complex deconstruction of its own process as film. Thomas' meta-cinematic process provides a model for distrust of this film and of all cinema, yet curiously affirms film's ability to question itself. Blow-Up is an example of the ability of cinema to dissect and analyze its own process, even if that dissection is anti-cinematic in the same way that Ionesco's theatre has been called 184

anti-theatre.18 The dissection of cinema enables Thomas to understand the nature of his relation to and use of the photographic apparatus. Like Berenger, he learns he must seek further. Rejecting the cave, Thomas looks for the sun. He has seen the corpse and himself as the killer.

He has begun to learn that one sees best without the ap­ paratus, without the camera, and without the mirror. If

Blow-Up is, as Antonioni has said, an abstraction of reality, then the reality abstracted is the necessity to see the operations of the apparatus as it constructs the representation of that reality which Thomas seeks. The apparatus of the cave is the reality; "to see rightly" is

Thomas’ quest.

What Thomas sees is a new and independent self separated from the maternal lap of the apparatus through the eyes of which he had seen the world in fragmented pieces of shadows. Thomas has gained knowledge of self beyond the apparatus and beyond the monocular eye of the subject implicit in that apparatus. The self he en­ counters, like the self encountered by Berenger and

Oedipus, is a mortal self who has murdered. Killer and killed, the image beyond the mirror is the reality Thomas seeks. Like Berenger's quest, Thomas' quest to discover 185

the flaw in his vision is rewarded by the discovery of the fact that the representation of his own mortality is the flaw and that the mirror/screen through which he had seen the world is nothing more than a cave wall fraught with shadows of salvation. Betrayal

EMMA: What do you consider the subject to be? ROBERT: Betrayal. EMMA: No, it isn't. ROBERT: Isn't it? What is it then? EMMA: I haven't finished yet. I'll let you know.

(p. 78)1

Unlike The Killer or Blow-Up. in which the apparatus of theatre or film is a barrier to the character's self­ perception, Betrayal uses the apparatus of theatre and film to involve the spectator in the characters' search for per­ ception and in the act of coming to see. While the structure of Betrayal seems a self-conscious impediment, it is itself a way of seeing. The structure of Betrayal delves, dissects, and analyzes not cause and effect or motivation, but the process of coming to see. To the extent that process is dependent upon knowledge, that knowledge is revealed. To the extent that process is couched in the film-like images that form the gist of the characters' con­ versations, those images must be understood and seen in the proper way. The structure of Betrayal deconstructs

186 187

illusion, assumption, and theatrical vision, and sub­ stitutes distanciation and separation as a way of seeing free from both the apparatus and from the Oedipal triangle.

We come to see in the way Emma eventually learns to see in

Scene One as she is finally separated and distanced from the triangle and is able to see herself for what she really is: a woman with an unhappy marriage who has had affairs.

At first glance. Betrayal appears to be an elaborate gimmick, apparently reversing the order of events for the purpose of displacing time and dissecting a relationship.^

What seems to be a kind of extended flashback is actually a disruption of the temporal relations of cause and effect which tends to equate the events from scene to scene rather than placing them in the order of priority or causa­ tion, an equivalence which reflects the equal tension of the points of a triangle. Betrayal, however, is not simply one triangle composed of Emma, Robert, and Jerry; it is the artifact of an extended, interlocking set of triangles, submerged in off-screen time and space like the stories of the characters in Play. In Betrayal we see the battle of the triangle, both on-stage in the characters' encounters and off-screen, represented by the vocabulary of film-like images, such as the image of Jerry throwing Emma's daughter Charlotte up in the air, the image of Jerry 188

reading Yeats on the island of Torcello, or the image of the squash game recounted by the characters which in them­ selves reflect the triangle and which situate the characters in relation to one another.

The battle in Betrayal, like Thomas' quest in Blow-Up,

is the struggle for vision and knowledge, for distanciation rather than escapism or Bferenger's search for a pre-Oedipal

Utopia. In order to see, the characters must learn to see around each other and around the construct they have made of love. The "material of the theatre" which Berenger must collapse in order to face himself in The Killer has become conflated in Betrayal with the operation of the love triangle itself. The mirror/screen of the stage has be­ come incorporated in the triangle, becoming fragmented among the characters. Like the characters in Play, those in Betrayal are trapped in the triangle, but the charac­ ters in Betrayal control the apparatus and have the possibility of growing beyond and seeing themselves as th they were and are. The act of seeing in Betrayal is the audience's act of seeing: the operation of our memory and vision binds together the nine scenes. We construct the triangle from the parts we find and we are engaged in the construct as the characters are. The act of seeing is as 189

much the audience's as it is the characters. In Betrayal. the audience has become Bérenger, struggling to recon­ stitute a composite image of fragmented people despite their entrapment in the apparatus of the triangle.

The history of the love triangle of Emma, Robert and

Jerry in Betrayal. if reconstructed chronologically, be­ gins in the winter of 1968, when a drunken Jerry, the best man at Robert and Emma's wedding, makes advances to Emma in Robert and Emma's bedroom. Jerry and Emma conduct an affair from 1968 through 1975, during which time Robert and Jerry continue their friendship and their business re­ lationship as publisher and literary agent respectively.

In 1971 Emma tells Jerry she's pregnant, but the baby is

Robert's since it was conceived when Jerry was out of the country. In 1973 in Venice, Robert is given a letter from

Jerry to Emma, and Emma confesses their affair. In 1977, after the affair has been over, Emma finds out that Robert has been having affairs of his own, and she tells a sur­ prised Jerry not only about them, but that Robert now knows of their former affair. Jerry, then, concerned lest

Robert tell Judith, confronts Robert and is comforted by his assurances that he won't tell.

In Betrayal this history is told in nine scenes, be­ ginning in 1977 as Emma tells Jerry about Robert. Scene 190

Scene Two goes forward in thie to that evening when a worried Jerry confronts Robert about his affairs and ascertains that Robert is not going to tell Jerry's wife

Judith about Jerry and Emma's affair. Robert, however, informs Jerry that he has known of the affair since 1973.

Scene Three reverts to 1975 as Jerry and Emma are closing the flat in which they conducted their affair. Scene Four jumps back to autumn of the previous year at a social gathering of Jerry, Emma, and Robert who discuss Jerry's new discovery, Casey. Scene Five goes back to the summer of 1973 in Venice when Robert learns of Jerry and Emma's affair. Scene Six goes forward to after Robert and Emma have returned to England from Venice when Jerry and Emma are meeting in their flat and Emma doesn't tell Jerry that

Robert knows. Scene Seven goes forward again to Jerry and

Robert lunching in a restaurant and discussing Venice and

Torcello and Robert not telling Jerry that he knows.

Scene Eight goes back to the summer of 1971 with Emma and

Jerry in their flat and Emma suggesting to Jerry that his wife may be having an affair and telling him that she is pregnant with Ned. Scene Nine returns to the winter of

1968 when Jerry first approaches Emma in her bedroom.

These three characters whom we see meeting and talk­ ing over the space of years form what appears to be an 191

Oedipal triangle which plays itself out almost in the fashion of the Nemi ritual described by Sir James Frazier in which the keeper of the golden bough of the tree of

Diana must battle all challengers who wish themselves to possess the bough.^ Emma is the mother and wife of Robert.

Robert is the father, and Jerry the son who competes with the father for the mother. Jerry appears to win, supplant­ ing Robert and spending afternoons with Robert's wife for a period of years. However, Emma's affair with Jerry ends before the history related in the play; the last years seen in the play are devoted to the intimation of Emma's affair with Casey (Jerry's boy), Robert's separation and isolation, and Jerry's scrabbling in pre-Oedipal confusion.

The history ends and the play begins with Emma's perception that "It is all all over" (p. 30).

This "all" is actually a network of triangles in which the main characters play different roles. The triangle of

Emma, Robert, and Jerry intersects with the triangle of

Jerry, his wife Judith, and her doctor "admirer" in which

Jerry becomes the cuckolded husband. Robert and Jerry are in a sense both fathers to Casey who supplants them both with Emma. Robert and Emma form yet another unseen tri­ angle with all of Robert's lady friends and Emma is essentially rejected, not as a mother, but as a wife. All 192

of the characters until the beginning/end stay somewhat attached to one another, not truly separated cut caught in the construct of the triangle and in the conspiracy of knowledge. Betrayal is, thus, a series of challenges, usurpations, and separations, but the roles of the charac­ ters within these triangles are inconstant and incon­ sistent. Robert appears to be the husband and father, but he may in fact never be other than the post-Oedipal son, constantly challenging, but ever replaced by other men who are Emma's lovers. Jerry appears to supplant Robert, but he may never really be other than the pre-Oedipal son; fragmented and inseparable from the mother, he is unwill­ ing to see other males as challengers. Never within the combat zone and inseparable from the female, Jerry is supplanted quickly by his own "son" Casey, who rapidly outstrips him. Emma appears to be the mother and nurturer of artists, authors, and agents, but is ultimately ejected from the entire extended mess by the knowledge that she hasn't been what she thought she was. When she is finally able to see that she has been, both the mother and the wife, and that she is really neither, the escape from roles enables her to see.

The ambivalence of the characters in their roles is in part a reflection of the real complexity of this 193

underlying Oedipal scaffolding, but is also produced by the ways in which each character's shifting role is re­ vealed in the achronological structure of the play.

Betrayal becomes a question not of a character's actual position in the triangle, but of his or her knowledge of that position vis d vis the perceptions and positions of the other characters. Revelation is betrayal if the other characters have known previously. The only hope lies in being able to see the whole picture, in distanciation; and betrayal lies in the fact that all have really been dis­ tanced all along. The Oedipal struggle in Betrayal is really a struggle to see from outside of the tangled apparatus of the triangle in which each character mirrors one's own ignorance.

The random achronology of Betrayal is a strategy which emphasizes those moments when disparity of knowledge and distanciation among the characters is greatest.

Rather than the orderly exposition of an Oedipal struggle either chronologically or in flashback, the play's structure focuses upon and heightens precisely those moments when one character who knows more than the other uses that knowledge to see even more clearly. In Scene

Six, after Emma has returned from the confession in

Venice, she meets with Jerry, prevaricates about Torcello, 194

conceals the fact that Robert knows, but quizzes Jerry about his luncheon plans with Robert, asking "... why are you taking him to lunch?" (p. 95); and "What is the subject or point of your lunch?" (p. 95). She also asks him about Spinks, one of his author/clients, and finally asks whether she and Jerry will ever go to Venice to­ gether, which she answers with a "No, probably not"

(p. 99). The Venice question is a moment of enlightenment for Emma; knowing that Robert knows, she recognizes her relationship with Jerry as finite. Robert in Scene Seven also quizzes Jerry, but to ascertain that Jerry is in fact no real threat. He asks Jerry if modern literature gives

Emma a thrill to which Jerry responds: "How do I know?

She's your wife" (p. 116). Reassured, he affirms his marriage: "Emma and I are very good together" (p. 117).

He tests Jerry and warns him yet is most nostalgic in his description of his experience on Torcello.

At these moments the struggle of the triangle is the struggle to see one's way out of it. The achronological arrangement of the scenes in Betrayal is not a strict re­ versal. Scenes One, and Two; and Five, Six, and Seven proceed chronologically, tracing the characters' use of the revelations made in Scene One and Scene Five. At these times the triangle is out of equilibrium; revelation 195

and consequent knowledge appear to return the triangle to a cause and effect sequence. The mingling of forward and reverse, while tending to neutralize the temporal opera­ tion of cause and effect, actually recreates the overall movement of the triangle towards dissolution and separa­ tion. Thus, the end is in the beginning and in the middle and in each scene recreated anew.

The very lack of consistent pattern or direction in the temporal ordering of the scenes draws attention to the apparatus of chronology and exposition in drama, and is preeminently self-conscious. It is meta-cinematic as well as meta-theatric since it draws attention to discontinuity in the same way that meta-cinema reveals discontinuities normally effaced by the cinematographic apparatus, en­ couraging attention to the process and structure of the play rather than to its content.^ The care with which

Pinter dates and places each scene draws attention to the structure of the play itself in such a way as to pose a question about the relationship between the date and the action in each scene. The progression of the scenes in a semmingly random order forces the audience to make the connections between the scenes since they cannot rely on normal cause and effect and invites a consciousness of the fact that the connections must be made. The 196

self-consciousness is not meta-theatre— there is no sense of the play making a play— rather it shifts the con­ sciousness of play-making onto the audience, involving them in the process in such a way that the audience must, like the characters, use its own memory and knowledge to see the pattern. While the self-conscious structure dis­ tances the audience from the mimetic (or diegetic) world of the scenes themselves, it involves it all the more deeply in constructing the narrative.

The seductive mystery of the structure of Betrayal is almost a red herring, absorbing attention while the images and language of the play do their work. However, the ar­ rangement of the scenes does create a two-way dramatic irony as the audience and characters exchange privilege based on the shifting revelation of knowledge. What the audience knows by seeing the end, the characters know by having seen the beginning. Though perhaps it is "the arrangement of the scenes that makes the ironies accumu­ late and the drama as a whole p o s s i b l e , the distanciation created by the layers of irony is perhaps more crucial to learning to see the play as knowledge and knowledge of knowledge is revealed. While layers of irony construct the position of the audience as both knowing and not knowing at all, the play collapses into simple shreds 197

of evidence which can only be linked to one image or another in the continuing attempt to find order. Though the structure and ironies distance, the audience cannot really see the whole, until, like Emma, they have seen the entire play.

The arrangement of the scenes also suggests the temporal flexibility of the cinema, appropriating cinema's ability to flash forward or back, and, like a novel, nar­ rate a story out of chronological order.® The similarity to cinema is just that : a self-conscious similarity that works because in fact the structure of Betrayal is not like like cinema at all. In cinema, the temporal arrangement is not meant to be obtrusive; discontinuities are sup­ pressed. To work it must operate invisibly, and the order of the narrative must be understood. In Betrayal the temporal disorder is a continuing obvious fact, intruding visibly and seldom informative about the order and con­ tinuity of the underlying narrative. In Betrayal, the temporal jumps are preceded by no signal, connection, or explanation as they are in cinema when one image fades into another or when one situation obviously explains another. In Betrayal the scenes are separated, and though 198

it may seem that one scene explains the previous one, that assumption is based on our cinematic experience. The scenes in Betrayal don't explain; they accrue.

The co-existence of all of the processes of the triangle is implied not only by the arrangement of the scenes in Betrayal, but also by the fact that they are composed each of the same or similar small blocks or images that function as emblems or metaphors of the characters' interrelationship and in the position of each within the triangle. The image of Jerry throwing

Charlotte in the air in the kitchen, the squash game, that of reading Yeats on Torcello, Casey and Spinks, the con­ ception and birth of Ned, and the repeated lunches and drinks are all images which bind the play together through their repetition, but which are also impenetrable and ambiguous codemes similar, as Gay Cima has pointed out, to film images.? However, these images echo one another, re­ producing a codified past in the future like something we've already seen and can almost remember ; they are images not only specific to the characters in the play, but to our experience of the triangle. They comprise a language which itself tells the complex story of the tri­ angle and which mirrors the triangle's temporal 199

disintegration in another code, fixing on different, but equally significant times in the development and disinte­ gration of their relationships.

Like film images or perhaps shots, these images or shots are comparable to Christian Metz’ definition of a shot as ". . . a complete statement (of one or more sentences) . . . In addition to Metz's notion that these statements are arranged from infinite arrangements of the "pro-filmic spectacle" (in Betrayal the extended triangle) even though each recital of an image in Betrayal is barely changed from the last, if at all, the recited

"shots" are repeated like bits of film that can be copied and edited into the same film many times. Like film images their meaning is somewhat altered by their environ­ ment; as in Pudovkin's famous experiment in editing in which the same expression on one face is perceived dif­ ferently depending on what precedes it. Like a film,

Betrayal ". . .is made up of many images which derive their meaning in relation to each other in a whole inter­ play of reciprocal implications, symbols, ellipses, etc.

Thus the signifier and the signified are given a greater distance, and so there is indeed a 'cinematographic language'. 200

This "cinematographic language" is in Betrayal a cinemadramatic language. The difference between a cinema shot and the images in Betrayal lies, of course, in the fact that the cinematographic language is composed of images which are seen. The cinedramatic language, though functioning in much the same way, is seldom seen, but most often described by characters whom we see describing the images rather than seeing the images they describe. The result is that the cinedramatic images are removed yet another step from the sun in the metaphor of Plato's cave.

As in Play, the images are created by words rather than by pictures and constitute a kind of voiceover narration which both complements what we see of the actors as they speak and creates yet another world which we can only see in our minds. We don't see Jerry tossing Charlotte up in the air (in fact we never even see Charlotte); we can only imagine such an event and the image we imagine is as much an image of the play as what we see, but like the charac­ ters that image exists only in the mind. It is a part of that past for which we search through the characters and by means of the structure of the play.

In Betrayal, we move towards the source of memory by means of these images which must have occurred in the past.

We follow a habit of narrative expectation which has 201

accustomed us to expect the revelation of the source of

all mystery as in Oedipus Rex the answer to the cause of the plagues and the fulfillment of prophecy is revealed or as in The Killer we find the Killer. In Betrayal, how­ ever, the repetition of these images creates its own tale with a memory. We remember back to the first occurrence of the image and as we read, the images attach metaphori­ cally to both the supposed event in the past and to the circumstances in which such images are narrated by the characters. In this way, the images carry layers of mean­

ing from both pasts, the past of the play just performed and the past of the characters in the play. The images are midpoints or nexuses joining our experimental past and the imagined past of the characters. They insert their memories into ours so that each time the image recurs we have a vocabulary of associations that we soon discover,

like the triangles, are timeless mirrors of the whole.

Each of these images crystallizes a part of the tri­ angle struggle; each of the character's role(s) in the triangle is caught like a refrain and combined with the other images in a subtext which recreates the roles of the characters in the tension of the triangle. At the same time the images reinforce the ambivalence of the positions of the characters, deconstructing their roles as they are 202

constructed. The image of Jerry throwing Charlotte up in the air constructs Jerry as both supplanting husband to

Emma and as her son. Recounted by Emma in the first scene and by Jerry in the sixth, Jerry and Emma disagree both times about the location of the event, Jerry placing it in

Emma and Robert's kitchen and Emma remembering it in

Jerry's. In Scene One the episode is realted as follows:

EMMA: Yes. She's very . . . She's smashing. She's thirteen. Pause Do you remember that time . . . oh god it . . . when you picked her up and threw her up and caught her? JERRY : She was very light. EMMA: She remembers that, you know. JERRY: Really? EMMA: Mmnn. Being thrown up. JERRY: What a memory. Pause She doesn't know . . . about us, does she? EMMA: Of course not. She just remembers you, as an old friend. JERRY: That's right. Pause Yes, everyone was there that day, standing around, your husband, my wife, all the kids, I remember. EMMA: What day? JERRY : When I threw her up. It was in your kitchen. EMMA: It was in your kitchen. Silence

(p. 19-20) 203

In Scene Six after Emma’s return from Venice, the

episode is related differently:

JERRY: Listen. Do you remember, when was it, a few years ago, we were all in your kitchen, must have been Christmas or something, do you remember, all the kids were running about and suddenly I picked Charlotte up and lifted her high up, high up, and then down and up. Do you remember how she laughed? EMMA: Everyone laughed. JERRY: She was so light. And there was your husband and my wife and all the kids, all standing and laughing in your kitchen. I can't get rid of it. EMMA: It was your kitchen, actually.

(p. 100-101)

The first expression of the image is nostalgic, the second an affirmation. Almost ab original like Nell’s "Ah, yesterday" in Endgame, the image of Jerry tossing

Charlotte up in the air in Robert’s kitchen situates Jerry in the place of Robert, supplanting him in his own kitchen. Tossing the child up in the air is the act of a parent; it is both play and control. Relying upon and testing a child’s trust, it is a simultaneous acceptance and rejection. For Jerry it is a significant moment of ascendency both in Scene One and in Scene Six.

The fact that Charlotte looks like Emma, so much so that Jerry recognizes Charlotte by her likeness to her 204

mother, creates at the same time an Inversion of the mother/son relationship, placing Jerry in the position of son rather than lover. What Jerry sees as his past self tossing the child which looks like Emma is in fact an in­ version of the very real situation of the adult Emma tossing up the child Jerry. An expression of Jerry’s nostalgia to be in her control, the image of tossing replicates the alternate separation and immanent return of the pre-Oedipal child. Face to face with the mother,

Jerry is not separate, but fixed in a role of dependency.

He has in a sense supplanted the father, but as a child might so do, without battle and without the consciousness of any victory. If the image takes place as Emma remem­ bers in Jerry’s own kitchen, then it is an image of total dependency and ownership which denies Jerry’s relationship with his own wife, a denial echoed in Jerry’s inability to take his wife’s admirer as a serious challenger. At the end of the first scene Jerry acquiesces with Emma’s memory of the episode, saying: ’’But he’s my oldest friend. I mean, I picked his own daughter up in my own arms and threw her up and caught her, in my kitchen. He watched me do it” (p. 29). His adoption of Emma’s version of the 205

affair indicates either that he has finally seen what his real role was or he wishes to please Emma by conforming to her image of the past.

In the first scene, the image is crucial for Jerry because in a sense, he is still the pre-Oedipal child, at the end not understanding the separation, anxious because

Emma’s disclosure of Robert's knowledge might throw him prematurely into an Oedipal conflict with his wife’s lovers, a conflict long overdue. For Emma, the image re­ counted in the first scene is properly placed in Jerry’s own kitchen, since it is the image of Jerry as dependent child which she sees so clearly at the end. Jerry has never replaced Robert. An afternoon’s play is never an evening’s work. Jerry is no more than an innocuous ex- son, a family member, and never a threat. For Emma, speaking for Charlotte in Scene One, the image is distant,

"memory,” and she characterizes it and Jerry, as "an old friend" (p. 19).

Though we never see the image of Jerry tossing

Charlotte up in the air, and though only described three times in the play, its appearance in the scene of final separation and in one of the central scenes after Robert has found out about the affair places it at those moments of disparity of knowledge which enable Emma to gain 206

insight. In both circumstances, the image is the image of

Jerry's true ineffectuality. Though in Scene Six the image appears to affirm Jerry's precedence over Robert, at the same time Emma's failure to reveal to Jerry Robert's knowledge eliminates him from any competition and protects him as child. Jerry cannot know not only because he is a child but also because Emma perceives him as a child.

If Jerry perceives himself as a tosser, then Robert would like to be the squasher as he invites his male friends and competitors for games of squash. Squash, though an image of competition, is also an image of

Robert's ineffectuality and isolation. In Scenes Two,

Four, and Seven, Robert invites or speaks of inviting

Jerry or Casey to play squash. That appears to be the equivalent of a challenge, an attempt by Robert to secure his position with Emma. However, the challenge is issued by the already supplanted, not the holder of power or fresh challenger, and Jerry, consistent with his pre-

Oedipal state, refuses to play. Though Jerry appears to have played squash with Robert before, in the play he per­ ceives himself as weaker, with a "bug" (likely to be squashed), and without shame avoids the competition and perhaps even the perception that it is a competition be­ cause he doesn't know that Robert knows. 207

Robert's squash activities seem to be limited to

Casey, Jerry's "boy," and even those are somehow not only battles for Emma, but attempts to wrest Casey from Jerry's tutelage. The first occurrence, chronologically, of the squash challenge is in Scene Seven after Robert has re­ turned from Venice when Jerry in his pre-Oedipal unawareness refuses because of the "bug." The second oc­ currence of the squash image is in Scene Four, approxi­ mately a year after Venice. Robert asks Jerry when they are going to play, and mentions that Casey is a "brutally honest squash player" (p. 68). Jerry declines the invita­ tion saying that Robert is "too good," and Robert protests saying he is only "fitter." Jerry confesses that he

"hasn't played squash for years" (p. 70) and Robert an­ nounces that he has been playing squash with Casey regularly. In the last occurrence of the squash challenge in Scene Two, Robert tells Jerry that he thought Casey was having an affair with his wife, but that he hadn't played squash with Casey for years. He does however "bash" Emma around.

The game of squash, like the tossing of Charlotte in the air is never seen in the play. Though literally a competition, here it seems not a competition for Emma or for ascendency since Jerry is not a serious contender, but 208

Robert's way of salvaging his pride. Though he and Jerry have presumably been playing all along, it is not until he knows that Jerry has been having a long affair with his wife that we see the challenge in Scene Seven. At that point Robert knows significantly more than Jerry. The squash challenge seems to be a way of testing Jerry and convicing himself of his continuing virility. He plays with Casey as long as he doesn't know for certain about the affair, as if to fulfill a role as husband, but once he knows that Casey has Emma, he quits playing squash with him. It's as if his battle instinct is disjointed and out of whack or that once beaten in life, the squash game be­ comes simply a matter of form and male bonding— a way for

Robert to remain in the triangle while beaten or to escape real recognition of his defeat. Or perhaps under threat of castration from Casey, he is finally isolated and ejected from the triangle and seeks other women, though he has told Emma that he has had other women for years.

While squash appears to be an obvious symbol of the battle for the female, at the same time it is an image of isolation and male bonding. Squash players face a wall

(like the prisoners in Plato's cave?), compete by means of a third element, a ball, and are constricted by the rules. 209

In the game the players are isolated, meeting only through the mediation of the ball yet are bound by their common interest in it. Robert and Jerry, formerly bound as friends and even doubles cannot meet on the squash court, since the ball (Emma) is inseparable from Jerry. Robert and Casey play through the mediation of Jerry, echoing the agent/publisher relationship, but cease to play when it becomes apparent that the ball is really Emma. Because the indirect opposition of the squash court leads to bond­ ing, Robert and Jerry cannot play because Jerry is not yet really male; and Robert and Casey cease to play because

Casey is a "brutally honest squash player," meaning per­ haps that Casey refuses to bond with his competitor.

The image of reading Yeats on Torcello also con­ structs Robert's isolation and escapism as well as symbolizing the real disparity of knowledge that occurs in

Scenes Six and Seven. Occurring in Scenes Five and Seven in the center of the play, Torcello embodies Robert's physical isolation and escape from the triangle. In Scene

Seven Robert describes his trip to Torcello to Jerry:

ROBERT: I was alone for hours, as a matter of fact, on the island. Highpoint, actually, of the whole trip. JERRY : Was it? Well, it sounds marvellous. 210

ROBERT: Yes. I sat on the grass and read Yeats. JERRY: Yeats on Torcello? ROBERT: They went well together.

(p. 113)

The Yeats portion of the image suggests both escape in

literature and male bonding by means of a return to the

old symbol of one's identity. Robert read Yeats in his

halcyon college years, while his best friend and double,

Jerry, read Ford Madox Ford. Escaping to Torcello to read

Yeats on the grass is escaping the triangle to return to a more comfortable time of male bonding and identity. Yeats

is also a substitute vision, that of the author for self.

Upon discovering that Emma has had superior knowledge, both Robert and Jerry turn to Yeats, Robert in Scene Five

and Jerry in Scene Two. The fact that Emma doesn't go to

Torcello, though she has been there in the past, indicates her changed status and preserves the solitary and male character of the symbol. When she returns and tells Jerry

she hasn't been there, she is telling him that something has broken between her and Robert, an intimation Jerry

cannot perceive. When she lies and tells Jerry the speedboats were on strike she simultaneously attempts to conceal the break. When the falsehood is discovered in

Scene Seven, Jerry has cause to wonder, but the falsehood 211

appears only to have created an anxiety in him which is expressed in Scene Four, the next scene chronologically, when he and Robert discuss the trauma and the anxiety of male children as they leave the womb. In finding her lie,

Jerry is born into an anxious infancy, as Robert and Emma each try to prevent him from knowing and seeing as much as they. For Robert the prevarication is the real competi­ tion; for Emma it is like the Venetian tablecloth she brings back from Venice which covers the surface and smoothes the corners.

Casey, part of the extended off-screen triangle, is the unseen threat to both Robert and Jerry, though Jerry is not capable of seeing it. Posited as self-reflective, as the writer who writes about writers writing, Casey is

Jerry's "boy," following Jerry in Emma's favors, yet re­ flecting Robert's status as husband. Casey is the total mirror, reflecting even Emma's desire to collect the creative. A "brutally honest squash player," Casey is both brutal, supplanting both Robert and Jerry, and honest like a mirror, revealing to Robert his loss, and reflect­

ing himself several times over in his work. Robert's statement in Scene Two that Casey is "over the hill" is also a statement about himself as he sees himself in

Casey. Speculation is also open about whether Casey, like 212

Jerry, has been unaware of Robert's knowledge, or whether he, like Jerry, was treated to drinks by Emma and told.

As the play continues Casey becomes less important, fading into Spinks, the man satisfied with a furnished room,

Jerry's other boy, whom Robert refused to publish and who was never a competitor at all.

The image of Ned is another example of the disparity of knowledge and a practical example of Jerry's non­ usurpation of the father role. In Scene Eight, Emma tells

Jerry she is pregnant, but that the child is not his since it was conceived when he was in America. The announcement, while one time when Jerry ^ told something, also empha­ sizes the continuation of Emma and Robert's marital relation, replacing Jerry in the position of a son. The affirmation of Jerry's son-hood and his parallel with Ned in the announcement of Ned's future birth foreshadows

Jerry's symbolic birth in the knowledge that Emma has lied and is reflected later in Scene Four when Jerry's ques­ tions about the anxiety of males at birth is sparked in part by his solicitous concern for Ned as a child who has trouble sleeping.

The other two major images are seen rather than created through the characters' conversation and are the 213

literal locations of the scenes in the play, but both

lunching and drinking gain additional layers of meaning or

become codified as the significance of the activities as

occasions for revelation and vision becomes clearer

through our experience of them. Because Betrayal begins

with Jerry and Emma having drinks, we understand what

having drinks means, but like the other images, it does not

gain complexity until it becomes an abstracted invitation

and occasion for Jerry's wife Judith to meet his admirer

as disclosed in Scene Eight. Drinking precedes or ac­

companies almost all of the characters' interactions.

Jerry's first and last romantic encounters with Emma are

in a haze of alcohol: he drinks in Scene One and is

drunk in Scene Nine. The characters eat or drink in every

scene except Scenes Three and Five, moments of revelation

and separation, but even in those scenes they discuss past or future occasions of eating and drinking.

The activity of lunching gains significance as Robert

first invites Emma to lunch with him and Jerry in Scene

Five, then brutally denies her that opportunity in Scene

Four after he knows of the affair, a denial which epito­

mizes the notion of male bonding and exclusivity in a

speech which links lunch and drinks and squash and

publishing: 214

Well to be brutally honest, we wouldn't actually want a woman around, would we Jerry? I mean a game of squash isn't simply a game of squash, it's rather more than that. You see, first there's the game. And then there's the shower. And then there's the pint. And then there's lunch. After all, you've been at it. You've had your battle. What you want is your pint and your lunch. You really don't want a woman buying you lunch. You don't actually want a woman within a mile of the place, any of the places really. You don't want her in the squash court, you don't want her in the shower, or the pub, or the restaurant. You see, at lunch you want to talk about squash, or cricket, or books, or even women, with your friend, and be able to warm to your theme without fear of improper interruption. That's what it's all about. What do you think, Jerry?

(p. 69-70)

The lunch becomes simply the final point in the displaced, almost mock, battle for Emma, but a situation in which there is still some confusion about identity and position within the triangle:

JERRY: Is he the one who's always been here or is it his son? ROBERT : You mean has his son always been here? JERRY : No, is his son? I mean, is he the son of the one who's always been here? ROBERT: No, he's his father.

(p. 109) 215

Not only is the language confused and conflated, so are

appearances. There is very little difference between

father and son except one speaks "wonderful Italian" as

does Emma. There is very little difference between Robert

and Jerry except that Robert sees himself as separate and

Jerry sees only fragmented images of himself in the mirror. They are both rejected by Emma, but Robert as the

separate, post-Oedipal son, learns to reject back, enabl­

ing Emma to finally free herself completely from the triangle.

The lunches are opportunities to test and sort. They are the frames for the haunting off-screen images which shape and define the characters. The lunches are face-to- face like the image of Jerry tossing the child.

Opportunities for engagement, they are the situs of Jerry and Emma's love-making, their final separation, Jerry and

Robert's bonding and competition. Lunches are nourishing and stupifying, informative and obfuscating and the ulti­ mate model of the mirror as the characters construct one another in their own images.

These images, while constructing and representing the characters' relationships to one another and their positions in the Oedipal struggle, also construct the way in which the character is to be seen, not only by the 216

other characters, but also by the audience. The imaging

is a mirror mechanism, like the cinematic apparatus, in which one character forces another character into a con­

struction which in turn enables the first character to

construct an image of him or herself by implication in the

construction of another. In cinema the monocular perspec­ tive of the camera and the illusion of continuity created through the effacement of differences construct a subject

and audience whose characteristics are reflected in the mirror-like projection screen.10 Like the cinematic ap­ paratus, the mechanism in Betrayal both assumes a listener or witness and projects upon that witness a set of assumptions which define the witness as a complementary reflection of self. It is as if one character were to say to another: "I, speaker, assume that you, listener, occupy a certain position in relation to me and so I will speak to you as if you occupy that position, but my placing you in that position is a reflection of my assumptions about you and about myself rather than an image of you.

In fact, my assumptions about you enable me to reassure myself of my own identity." In Betrayal, as in cinema, this construction is ideological, an illusion made pos­ sible by the model of staged illusion and audience which is our notion of theatre. If the stage is a mirror and 217

the audience sees in it its own reflection, then in

Betrayal each conversation is a small theatre in which one character performs for the other.Thus, the mechanism reveals not the role and personality of a character, but the role and personality he or she would like to have. It is a solipsistic mirror which stultifies vision; it is a circular self-reflectiveness like that of Casey which grows only on itself and can only change if another, more persistent image intrudes.

This construction mechanism is practiced simultane­ ously by all characters in each scene as they construct one another, often aware of their roles and disturbed by the discontinuity caused by a revelation inconsistent with their construction. In Scene Eight, during one of Emma and Jerry's domestic afternoon trists, Emma constructs

Jerry as an admiring son (and by implication herself as the admired mother), and Jerry constructs Emma as the faithful serving wife/mother. When Jerry arrives, Emma performs the litany of the apologetic wife, apologizing for not getting the stew on sooner, chastizing Jerry when he attempts to kiss her, asking him what he had done that day. The circumstances are indeed domestic, but Emma is in control, placing Jerry in the position of dependent son and herself as independent and in control. Jerry, as the 218

admiring son, casts Emma as domestic and almost material:

"Then I got a taxi to Wessex Grove. Number 31. And I

climbed the steps and opened the front door and then

climbed the stairs and opened this door and found you in a new apron cooking stew" (p. 123). In constructing Emma as

admirable and domestic, he constructs himself as husband/ son.

As the scene is presumably one in a series, the con­ struction process has been continuous. Jerry begins, already constructed, in the role of admirer, admiring Emma and her apron. The roles are jolted by Emma's taking a drink, an act which Jerry questions, but one for which

Emma has prepared by constructing Jerry as dependent and herself as in control. The ensuing revelation of Judith's lunch date is a disturbing incongruity which increases

Emma's control, but which forces Jerry into the role of embattled husband even though the lunch date is a woman.

The discussion and construction of Judith is a metaphor for the construction of Emma, Jerry insisting upon her virtue, and Emma suggesting her freedom. It is also a reflection of their own luncheon roles. The discussion is centered on two parallel issues: whether Judith knows of

Jerry and Emma's affair, and the nature of Judith's re­ lationship with her "admirer." The image of Judith is 219

crucial to the maintenance of their own roles and their constructions of each other, since Emma and Judith both have lunches and admirers. As a reflection of Jerry,

Judith must not "know" of the affair, even though, as Emma insists, she is intelligent and must have noticed "clues."

Jerry denies her knowledge, describing her as ". . . too busy. At the hospital. And then the kids" (p. 126). If

Judith knows, then Jerry must also know about her relation­ ship with the doctor, something Jerry avoids. Emma insists upon raising the question of Judith's faithfulness, but the issue raises the question of her own faithfulness. By trapping Jerry into a stout defense of both his and

Judith's fidelity, Emma forces him to see the announcement of her own pregnancy not as faithlessness, but as the same fidelity enjoyed by himself and totally consonant with the reflection of himself he has constructed in her.

The entire process of Scene Eight is a process of construction and reflection. More than simple strategy, the characters' interactions rely upon the way in which characters can make other characters see themselves. It is both conscious and unconscious manipulation. The mechanism in Scene Eight deliberately nullifies the revelation as a possible way for Jerry to see beyond his role as son.

However, in Scenes Five and One revelation breaks the 220

mechanism, forcing the characters into new roles, yet for the moment they continue to act as they have always acted.

The players are conscious of their role-playing in Scenes

One and Five, but perhaps the discontinuity of the revelation is required to jolt them into self-consciousness.

The process is a visual act based on the notion of the other as mirror constructing self. Entrapment in the mirror apparatus, like the mask, prevents the character from seeing his or her real position. In Scene One Emma is finally able to escape the apparatus because Robert's revelation of his affairs with other women has jolted her out of the process altogether. What Emma perceives in

Scene One is herself, standing outside of all construc­ tions, outside admiration, and outside roles. She sees not only all of the complex inter-relationships "all all over," but that life itself will someday be "all all over." Emma sees her own vulnerability and mortality as did Berenger and Thomas.

In Scene One the conversation is awkward, and Jerry must remind her of her role, because she no longer sees by means of the mirror mechanism. Emma's separation and distanciation at the beginning of the play, then, is both ironic and instructive. Robert has learned to see himself ejected and isolated (on Torcello). In suggesting the 221

separation, he acknowledges Emma's affairs as well as his own. He is ready to leave home. Jerry is in many ways still the pre-Oedipal son, but at the end of Scene One there is a sign of his acceptance of Emma's version of the

Charlotte image that he can now see himself as a son, the first step towards the Oedipal. The unseen Casey, still in adult concert with Emma may in fact be the male who has won, artist of over agent and publisher, creativity over commerce.

In the same way that the characters construct one another, the play constructs the audience in such a way as to reflect the audience's assumptions and anxieties about form and its relation to the play and to involve it in the ritual of seeing that is the struggle of the triangle.

The division of the play into nine discrete scenes arranged achronologically situates the audience well outside the play. Almost slices-of-life, the scenes seem to ignore both the audience and any self-conscious recognition of the play as play.^^ At the same time, the play is con­ structed upon assumptions of a viewing audience that expects that what the characters refer to in the opening scenes has occurred somewhere in the characters' past and that events referred to will eventually happen in a kind of assumption of backshadowing (foreshadowing in reverse). 222

Assumptions about the casual relation of present and past lead to the assumption that the present will be enlightened by the past, if it is ever seen.

While situating the audience outside, the ways in which Betrayal plays on the audience's assumptions involve the audience more actively in the process of the play. The assumption that references will be illuminated later causes the cryptic images to become a conscious part of the viewer's memory; they are clues. As the play progresses, the future of the play is the past of the viewer, and the viewer searches forward for clues to the past (future) he has seen. The search for connections or a pattern on the part of the audience is, however, as much a process of construction as the characters' interpersonal constructions and projections occurring in the play. In the same way the constructions of the characters can be broken by an incon- gruent revelation, so can the audience's construction of patterns be disturbed by shifts from reverse to chronologi­ cal order. The construction of a pattern in the play, the selection of an image or a narrative strand, is exactly the construction of roles by the characters. In watching the play, the audience must mimic the apparatus of the play and become caught as well in the mechanism, losing 223

its distance and the perspicuity of its vision. Only in seeing the entire play, does it become evident that Emma's stance at the end in Scene One is the proper stance for watching the play and precisely because it has shed the apparatus, the cave, the mirror that has involved the audience and seen the naked and separate self.

Paradoxically, the images introduced at the beginning of Betrayal are never seen by the viewer. They are always off-stage, at a different time. The play jumps from reference to reference, but the only image that is seen is that of the lunch. The off-screen quality of these images makes them truly memory for us as well as for the characters. Though we assume an objective antecedent, the real first occurrence of the image of Jerry tossing

Charlotte up in the air is in Scene One at the beginning of the play. The beginning of the play is the past to which it refers.

Since Betrayal constructs the audience as the agent of memory and connection, it involves the audience in the ritual of coming to see. The conflation of the cinematic apparatus and the Oedipus triangle creates meta-cinematic play which is nonetheless unlike cinema and quintes- sentially theatrical. Yet it leaves its self-consciousness up to us: we are the play-makers. The fragments of 224

characters, mirror, patterns, and time pose us in the role of archeologist, paradoxically scientific enough to con­ struct a pattern, but humanist enough to empathize with the lives that have made the pattern. In Betrayal there is betrayal in both ways of seeing. In distance is synthesis; in involvement blindness. Betrayal is not only the betrayal of a lie or an extra-marital affair, it is the betrayal of our assumptions about how we see and how we see plays. The operation of seeing in Betrayal is directly dependent upon one's involvement in the apparatus of the Oedipal struggle, a struggle which lies at the juncture of the apparatus of theatre and film, and a struggle which joins vividly the literal act of seeing and its transcendent metaphor of understanding self. Daughter Rite

If women imitate men's battles they will become weaker and weaker. They must find new forms of struggle. This became evident in Hendave where women demonstrated against the death sentence in Spain. Some women shouted and clenched their fists, while others just hummed. They went "mmmmmm" with their lips pressed together, and moved forward in a row. That was a new way of demonstrating which can be a hundred times stronger than fists. We have had a virtual inflation of shouting with raised fists, and I, for one, simply walk by when I hear it. In film and in the arts we must also find a language which is appropriate to us, one which is neither black nor white.

Chantai Ackerman^

When Michelle Citron was twenty-eight, she took reels of super-8 home movie film left to her by her father when her parents were divorced, added a narrative voiceover, and combined them with pseudo-documentary cinema verite footage of staged encounters between two sisters in their mother's house.2 Of this mix was conceived the ritual that is

Daughter Rite.^

Like La Chinoise and Blow-Up, Daughter Rite dissects the elements of cinema and in their dissection reveals the

225 226

working of an otherwise invisible apparatus. By revealing

the operation of the apparatus, the film encourages us to

see through the apparatus and to understand how to see

film and how we see ourselves through film. Like Betrayal,

it deconstructs the ways in which we see, and in so doing,

it melds past and present, cause and effect, and forces the spectator into an active role in the reconstruction of the narrative. Itself instrument and document of the moment of separation of daughter from the mother,

Daughter Rite is a kind of female Oedipal rite which re­ produces on the screen the moment of separation and discovery of identity independent from that of the mother.4

Daughter Rite is both process and product in a self- reflective and circular way. The product is a series of ambivalent discussions of mother(s) by daughter(s). In

Daughter Rite the re-processed super-8 film of two little girls and their mother accompanied by an unrelated voice­ over narrative reading an autobiographical account of one woman's relationship with her mother generally alternates with sequences of two adult sisters talking about their mother. The super-8 and voiceover and the documentary sequences are each in themselves formally ambivalent, com­ bining what appear to be film conventions in such a way as 227

to bring the conventions and the combination of conventions

into question.5 The fact that each "line"— the super-8, the voiceover narrative, and the documentary— each discuss different mothers, though the illusion of a continuum is strongly suggested, thwarts what might be expected to be a unified narrative. The disjuncture of the narrative by inconsistent facts and three different sets of daughters and the unconventional combination of film genres invites a process of analysis which simultaneously involves the spectator in a construction of the film and removes the spectator from the normal position of centered subject.

The six segments that are filmed as documentary in a style like that of cinema vérité are at the same time both documentary and a play on our assumptions about docu­ mentary. Filmed with what appears to be a hand-held camera, these segments actually utilize several documentary tropes: the interview, the camera present but ignored by the characters, and an unseen and unacknowledged camera.

These sequences capture what appears to be the conversa­ tions of two grown sisters who have returned to their mother's house while she is in the hospital. In the first two documentary segments, the sisters talk to each other and to the person holding the camera. The conversation is in the form of an extended answer to a question about 228

mothers posed before the filmed sequence began. In the first documentary sequence the younger sister, Stephanie, discusses her hostility toward her mother during the labor and birth of her own daughter. The content of the scene is overtly ambivalent, if not hostile to the absent mother whose presence in the labor room increases her daughter's pain rather than relieving it. Stephanie is the main speaker; the sequence focuses on her as mother, and she is generally centered in the frame. However, the mobile camera shifts the frame to capture the interaction of the two sisters, creating a split in attention and subject which creates an ambiguity about who and what is the sub­ ject and raises a consciousness about the function of the camera person as arbiter and shaper of focus and subjec­ tivity.

In the second documentary sequence, the camera is still an acknowledged participant in the conversation, but in this sequence Maggie, the elder sister is the main speaker, talking from a daughter's point of view about her mother's invasions of her privacy. Maggie's comments about her mother reading her letters and searching for her diary reflect the same if not a greater ambivalence and hostility toward the absent mother than was demonstrated by Stephanie in the first documentary sequence. As it did 229

in the first sequence, the camera shifts, noting the sup­ portive interaction of the two sisters, creating the same shift of subject and the same awareness of the operation of the camera eye.

In the third and fourth documentary sequences, the camera is an unacknowledged participant which witnesses the sisters' conversation but which no longer takes the role of active listener and which is no longer acknowledged by the characters. In the third scene the sisters are making a fruit salad in the process of which the two sisters are characterized in their attitudes toward the world and toward each other. The elder sister is finicky, refusing celery, preferring whipped cream, and rejecting the salad they had made in exchange for an orange which turns out to be "dry." The younger sister is more flexible and positive, recovering and using the still edible center of some nearly rotten celery, urging the use of yogurt, acting maternally, and finally eating the rejected salad.

The camera constantly shifts, not only horizontally as it did in the first two segments, but zooming in and out of the scene, focusing on one or both sisters in turn, or fix­ ing on food, fragmented actions or empty space, roving independently of the action of the scene. Because the scene contains action, the movement of the camera is not 230

so obvious as the eye which fixes the point of

identification, but its movement is all the more an inter­ pretation and selection, a kind of decoupage which tends to characterize the sisters as much as do the characters' own words and actions.

The fourth documentary sequence watches the sisters sort through their mother's collection of record albums.

Like the camera in the third sequence this camera moves horizontally and zooms, but is much less active. The daughters discuss their mother's fiscal affairs and com­ pare the different ways she approaches each of them for money. Stephanie is approached directly and she is much more willing to understand the problem and lend the mother money. Maggie is cynical. Her mother's approach to her

is indirect, and Maggie does not trust the mother's good faith. Maggie is more torn by a concern for the well­ being of Stephanie than the fiscal health of her mother.

In the fifth documentary sequence, the camera is again an active listener, facing Stephanie almost like a mirror. In this sequence Stephanie relates the story of her rape by her stepfather, Henry, and her mother's in­ adequate and nervous avoidance of the fact. As Stephanie relates the story, the camera slowly and almost 231

imperceptably zooms in on Stephanie. At the end of the story, the camera pulls back and Maggie enters the frame in a closure of physical affection and support.

The sixth documentary sequence reflects the discussion of the second sequence in the sisters' determined search through their mother's drawers. Discovering a variety of objects from valium and speed to dirty books and money, the sisters not only expand their image of their mother, but also in a moment of self-conscious vision, see them­ selves as guilty of the same prying they have accused their mother of (and which with a slight leap we might accuse the camera of doing).

These documentary segments are only superficially documentary: they are filmed in the jerky, unfinished style of the hand-held camera, they utilize the interview and tolerated observer modes of documentary filmmaking, and they contain what seem to be normal slices of life.

They also carry the assumptions made about the documentary genre: that the observations of the camera are unbiased, that the scenes are spontaneous and "real" as opposed to staged and rehearsed, and that the characters are not characters, but real people who are who they say they are. 232

However, the credits at the end of the film undermine this

superficial documentary when it is revealed that the

sisters' parts are played by actresses.

The dissolution of the reliability of the superficial

documentary style of the film, apart from being a meta-

cinematic comment on the reliability of any documentary,

raises questions about the nature of documentary and the

nature of our assumptions about documentary, and con­

tributes to the deconstructive process initiated by the

film itself. However, the discovery that the scenes aren't

authentic documentary has little effect on their ultimate

credibility, because in fact the scenes are truly documen­

tary in another way, a way which challenges the structure

and function of the cinematographic apparatus. The scenes were developed by the director and the actresses from ex­ periences related by a number of different women.® Maggie

and Stephanie are individuals, yet representative charac­

ters who convey a community of experience which is "real."

Their fabrication as characters and the evolution of the

scenes, originally recorded on video tape, makes these

sequences a document not only of the experiences of a com­ munity of women, but the product of a community process 233

which is perhaps more truly a documentary since it is in a sense author and reflection of an entire community in a kind of group objectivity.

At the same time, the rehearsed and written quality of the scenes, though undermined to some extent by the actresses' camera consciousness which is an essential verisimilitude, is a consciously constructed narrative which not only shows the daughters' ambivalence and hostility toward the mother, but also indicates their similarity to her and their unconscious adoption of mother and daughter roles toward one another. Both sisters feel somehow betrayed by the mother, the elder perhaps more.

The lack of privacy, the failure to face the, reality of the daughters' personalities, the mother's escapism and desire to dominate haunt both daughters' voiced perceptions.

However, Stephanie's defense of the mother is constructed almost as an identity with her. Stephanie is also a mother and mothers Maggie in the salad making scene. Maggie func­ tions as an affectionate sister (perhaps the ideal mother), yet like a mother, chastizes Stephanie for lending the mother money.

The mother, who is only seen through the daughters' construction of her in the documentary segments, appears in the super-8 sections. Made from authentic super-8 234

footage of the director, the super-8 film has been re­ processed, the colors altered and intensified, the frames cut from the total context, and each image repeated enough times to make the action a jerky dissection of animation.

What began as documentary of those ceremonial moments

(taking home movies is always a ceremony, usually, however, premised on some party or special occasion) in family life captured by the father on film becomes the dreamlike se­ quences of repeated actions which function as symbols of the mother/daughter relationship. The eye of the father has been re-cut to the eye of the daughter, and the recutting and reprocessing reveals the daughter's ambivalence toward the mother.

The actions reproduced from the super-8 film are re­ peated patterns of the mother and daughters riding on an excursion boat, the three of them dressed in their best

(at several different ages) walking toward and away from the camera, footage of a spoon and egg race, snatches of birthday parties, a baby carriage parade, photographs of the mother and daughters in the park, a particularly dreamlike sequence of the mother getting out of a car and entering the house, footage of the children on a swing, the daughters doing the dishes, and sequences of the elder daughter's nurture and care for the younger. 235

The action in all of the sequences is repeated and

fixes on some aspect of the mother's physical attempt to

direct or control the daughters. The mother herds them

forward, pulls an arm to make them behave, fixes their

hair, repairs their decorated baby carriage, directs their

dishwashing activities, and is generally most self-

conscious in the eye of the camera. Only when the mother

is absent are the little girls self-conscious and then mainly in a scene in which they blow kisses at the camera.

The elder daughter in the segments tends to resist the mother's control, walking outside of the circumscribed

family group, pouting at parties, pulling away from the mother's grasp, playing with her ice cream, while the younger seems content to be mothered.

The purpose of the mother's attempts to control is to make the daughters presentable in the public (the father's

and eventually in their own) eye. Even in the dishwashing

scene, the little girls are wearing curlers. In all of the

scenes they are being taught the proper female role: dressing in pretty clothes, having babies, taking care of the home, and above all, being looked at. Only in the

scenes in the park which open and close the film does the preparation for spectacle cease. The daughters' resistance to the control is not a resistance to being filmed, for 236

they are much less self-conscious in the face of the camera than the mother. Their resistance is against the mother's attempts to mold them for consumption, to construct them in the way she would like them to be seen and by extension the way in which she would like to be seen. But the mother's efforts are not invisible; the film catches not the product or image the mother would like, but the process of achiev­ ing that image. The daughters become the spectacle in place of the mother in the eye of the father; they are the resisting sacrifice. They resist being molded into their mother's image of daughters; they attempt even at this point in their lives to escape from the constraints of the mother's image and run free as they do in the images of the park.

In the super-8 segments the images themselves are ambivalent. The hand which seeks to caress appears to stab. The mother who is fixing her daughter's hair seems to wrench the daughter's head back uncomfortably. The mother's arm which reaches down into the picture to help the daughter open a present takes the present away. The daughter who appears to be kissing her sister appears also to be strangling her.

The repetitious action reproduced in the super-8 segments exhibits both display and control. Though the 237

ultimate instrument of display and control is the camera, the mother is a metaphor for the camera, placing herself in the camera eye and seeing her daughters as filmed objects. Bringing the daughters into the gaze of the camera, the mother is the active agent of the specular, like the light in Play, objectifying the daughters in an ever-present caraera-eye. Re-cut, the super-8 sequences exacerbate this objectification, reducing motion into ominous repeated patterns that make the characters designs on the screen. The repeated back and forth patterns of the super-8 segments echo the control/resistance pattern of the mother/daughter relationship and are a metaphor for the daughters' ambivalence toward the mother. Like the characters in Play, the daughters seem trapped in the patterns created by the apparatus, yet there is some hope of a final escape from the camera gaze.

The super-8 sequences present a fragmented narrative of suburban mother/daughter relationships. Caught halfway between the private and the public eye, the mother pre­ pares the daughters to be little images of herself. These super-8 segments also interact with the voiceover narrative which accompanies them, but which tells a third, indepen­ dent story. The voiceover narrative, taken from dreams and diaries, is initially identified as the voice of the 238

filmmaker as she states, "When I was 28, I . . The use of the first person brings a personal, autobiographical voice to the film which contains the implied second person of the documentary camera, and the third person of the super-8 images.

The first-person narrator relates the series of events surrounding her mother's move to Hawaii, the inversion of the daughter's attempts to separate herself from the com­ plex ambivalence of the mother/daughter relationship. The series of events, the mother's silliness about money, her unwillingness to visit her daughter on the way to Hawaii, her desire to donate her organs when she dies, her giving her daughter pink silk pajamas from her trousseau on the daughter's visit to Hawaii, interspersed with the daughter's dreams provide a rich variety of images in the same way as the characters' narratives in Play.

The voiceover narration often credits the events which stimulated the narrated text; her narration is prompted by phone calls, photograph albums, visits, and dreams. This grounding in a line of facts as well as the diary-like style and confidential tone of the narration contribute to the feeling of authenticity of the voiceover.

(In fact it is, as Citron stated, "15% percent autobiog­ raphical, and 85% true.")? Like the super-8 segments. 239

the voiceover is an authentic document, but one which is simultaneously dream-like and symbolic.

The voiceover is the most overt expression of ambivalence. Speaking directly, the voiceover analyzes her hate and love for her mother and her identity with her.

During one of the super-8 sequences of walking (itself repetitive and ambivalent), the voiceover states, "I hate my weaknesses. My weaknesses are my mother. I hate the dark side of me— my evil, my bitchiness, my selfishness, that part, too, is my mother and in hating my mother, I hate myself." During one of the birthday party scenes, the voiceover, while describing a card that to her has be­ come the "significator" of mother, she says, "It is my mother: authority, power, fire like icicles, taming the leopard which is me, that stands under her hand, the leopard that is also a piece of her power."

Her dreams are equally ambivalent. Often seeing her­ self as a trapped victim, the voiceover sees herself strapped to a table and being asked to submit to an in­ jection by the mother, an injection she refuses. She dreams her sister has cancer of the jaw and wishes to be burned, so the mother burns her and watches her be consumed in flame. She also dreams that she finds her mother alone 240

in the restroom of a bar, crying, and the mother refuses

to talk about it.

The voiceover accompanies the super-8 segments (with the exception of the time it is accompanied by black

leader) and creates another level of interplay which

emphasizes ambivalence and which plays on assumptions about the voiceover in cinema. Though we might expect the voice­ over to somehow describe or comment upon the action on the super-8 segments whose cryptic nature cries out for some definition, the voiceover is instead completely independent, so that as we listen to one narrative, we must watch the patterns of another. However, though they are not the same narrative, they relate the same patterns so that the voiceover does comment upon the super-8 images, not on a literal level, but metaphorically. Though we learn to interpret the super-8 segments, for in a dream-like way they present the very images of our own childhood, we re­

interpret them according to the pattern of ambivalence established by the voiceover. There is both a tension and a compatability between the voiceover and the super-8, a tension which makes our consumption of these segments both uncomfortable and illuminating.

The combination of the super-8 and voiceover segments with the documentary segments creates contrast and 241

compatibility similar to that created in the relation of the voiceover to the super-8 segments, recreating on the formal level of the film the ambivalence of the narrators and of the individual images. The two visual tracks are not strictly alternated; rather, there is no clear pattern other than the fact that the super-8 segments are always separated from the documentary segments by a fade to black. The fade-out decreases the immediate contrast be- tweeen visual tracks but it heightens the sense of temporal and geographic displacement as the visual goes from the fuzzy images of little girls to the sharp images of women.

The fade-outs also create a pause between segments which is both relfective and anticipatory, and a Brechtian episodic quality which interrupts on one level the nar­ rative and prevents the development of a sustained narrative line.®

However, the visual tracks relate to one another in much the same way the voiceover relates to the super-8 segments; though stylistically different, the image of two daughters resisting the mother is so similar that it is tempting to believe that the two women in the documentary segments are the little girls of the super-8 grown-up.

The documentary segments integrate the voice and the image which are separated in the super-8 segments. 242

Daughter Rite parses the film product into two distinct visual tacks, and three separate narratives. The three distinct narrative tracks of Daughter Rite are unified by common images and themes. Apart from the general ambivalent quality of the images and conversation, all three tracks present images of birth, of nurturing, of death and sacrifice, and finally of the possibility of escape and separation through talking. These images are the foundation for the separation rite that is the film.

Identifying birth and nurturing with "motherness," and death and sacrifice with a daughterness that is simply a mirror of motherness, the film offers the third mediating alternative of analyzing and deconstructing the two other constructions and by means of that deconstruction, escaping from the mother/daughter patterns and separating into an independent self. The mirror structure created in the ambivalent reflection of birth/nurture/mother and death/ sacrifice/daughter is broken by this third alternative that cracks the identity of mother and daughter.

The voiceover narrator’s birth opens the film as the narrator describes the impetus for the film as a discomfort in her identity with her mother who, unlike the voiceover narrator, had married at twenty-eight and had her first child who was the narrator. In the first documentary 243

sequence the younger daughter describes her own labor. In a super-8 segment the daughters participate in a baby car­ riage parade, and as the documentary daughters look through their mother's record albums, they find that she has hundreds of Christmas albums, an interesting comment on the mother's emphasis on the time of celebration of birth.

The images of birth are related to the images of nurturing as a role is related to a status. In

Daughter Rite the mother's role is to nurture, to feed and to make presentable to the male eye. During the voiceover the narrator's exposition of the circumstances of making the film (i.e., her own birth), the super-8 sequence is of an egg and spoon race in which the mother and daughter alternate in carrying a spoon in their mouths with an egg in it. The image of the spoon and egg is the perfect symbol for the relationship between birth and food, mother­ hood and nurturing. Carrying sustenance on a spoon, the mother will force feed and devour the child, then pass the egg and spoon along to her. The ice cream at the birthday parties in the super-8 segments, the dream of the injection in which the grandmother bribes the daughter with walnuts

(also an ingredient of the fruit salad the daughters make), doing the dishes, even the discussion of the rape in which rather than listening or hearing about the assult the 244

mother offers as a substitute the description of the meal she had just eaten are all images in which eating and the role of mother are related.

The salad making scene further illustrates the re­ lationship between eating and being mothered. The elder daughter, Maggie, is picky, refusing nutritious food, com­ menting on the condition of the banana and the celery (all her mother's food in her mother's house), and finally re­ fusing to eat the fruit salad. The younger daughter salvages the center of the celery and eats the fruit salad, chastizing Maggie, and taking the role of the mother in lecturing her on the goodness of celery and yogurt and the decadence of whipped cream. The mother role eats and nurtures, the daughter role refuses the food.

Maggie's refusal of the salad echoes the voiceover narrator's refusal of the injection even when food is of­ fered as a bribe. The elder daughter refuses the nourishment, refuses the daughter role. The younger daughter, who is herself a mother, is more willing to sacrifice herself for the mother, to be a true daughter.

She is willing to lend the mother money. In the final dream sequence the younger daughter has cancer of the jaw and asks to be burned, the "total sacrificial act." As 245

the voiceover narrator says at one point about the mother,

"her idea of love was the total sacrificial act. My mother did it for her mother and she expects it from us."

The apparent dichotomy between mother and daughter is really a reflection; the daughters' fear of their identity with the mother motivates their criticism of her, their analysis, their pain, and their desire for a separate identity. The voiceover narrator during the super-8 se­ quence of the swing states her fear that she will be just like her mother, "making all the wrong choices," but unlike her mother having no cultural excuse. She identifies her dark side with her mother, the dark side that she hates.

She remembers with apprehension that her mother was once her size and fears that she will one day face the loneli­ ness that her mother now endures.

The documentary daughters exhibit both sides of the voiceover narrator's ambivalence. Themselves ambivalent, the daughters by talking to one another about the mother make a futile attempt to critique and analyze her, but end up in the sixth sequence simply reversing the roles, in­ vading her privacy as she invaded theirs. Maggie, the daughter who rejects sacrifice, is neither free nor separate from the mother, nor is Stephanie, the younger daughter, who follows in line. Like the little girls in 246

the super-8 segments, they resist their mother's ministrations, yet are still held. The pattern for the daughters is the same whether they resist or comply; they are part of the construction mother/daughter and cannot escape until like Oedipus or Berenger, they face not the

Sphinx, but themselves.

The mother/daughter roles in Daughter Rite are con­ structions in the same way the roles of the participants in the Oedipal triangle in Betrayal are constructed. The mirror reflection of mother and daughter, expressed in the oppositions birth/death, nurture/refusal, adult/child, conflates the structure self/other of the mirror stage and the pre-Oedipal inability to distinguish self and other.

As the characters in Play are poised on the border between the conscious and the unconscious, the images and nar­ rative of Daughter Rite appear to poise the daughters on the brink of separation from the mother. However, as in

Play, the ambivalent flicker between the conscious and the unconscious concept of self and immersion in the mother can be broken by distanciation. By seeing the mirror con­ struction, the subject is removed from it into the discovery of self-identity, made possible by means of the child's ejection from the Oedipal triangle. Daughter Rite

is the deliberate vision of the mirror construction; in 247

seeing the mirror and in deconstructing both the mirror and the way in which the mirror is seen, the daughter's rite of separation is accomplished.

Daughter Rite dissects the compenents of the mother/ daughter relationship as Godard dissects film in

La Chinoise. Interpolating past and present, the film sees the relationship from three different narrative stances which present not only three different points of view, but three different degrees of distance from the mother/ daughter subject matter. The combination of the children of the super-8 segments with the present documentary daughters and a narrator who is conscious that the film it­ self is the moment of separation from the mother suggests that the past and present of the daughters is all the same.

They have always been daughters and the mother has always been their mother. The daughters' reluctant identity with the mother suggests a circularity of cause and effect rather than a linear development. The daughters were always both mothers and daughters; it was a condition of their birth that they identify with that mother. There was no cause and no effect: mother/daughter is a status.

The three different points of view suggested by the film distance the spectator from the subject matter in varying degrees and constantly resituate the subject in 248

identification with different narrators and characters.

The voiceover narrator is a first person narrator, speak­ ing to the spectator in a confidential tone. Yet because she is never seen and because she theorizes, she is in many ways more removed from direct contact with the mother/ daughter relationship. Her view, though close to the spectator, is distanced from the mother/daughter relation­ ship. The film presents her speculations on and reactions to the mother rather than her actual encounters. However, this also suggests that the daughter's reaction to the mother is most important; the daughter must separate herself.

The documentary segments construct the spectator as a second person witness. The documentary daughters speak directly to the camera and through the camera to the audience. Their participation in the mother/daughter re­ lationship is more immediate, but the mother is absent.

They are one step from the spectator, but still one step from the relationship. The super-8 segments are third person; we witness the relationship between the mother and the daughters. They are furthest from the spectator, but at the same time brought nearer to us by the voiceover narrative. Like Thomas in Blow-Up we move in and out of the picture, constantly resituated as subjects, acquiring 249

multiple points of view instead of a monocular perspective.

We are thus able to distance and look critically at the re­ lationship and the film; the film forces us into the optimum position for participation in its rite.

To deconstruct the mother/daughter relationship

Daughter Rite must also deconstruct the cinematographic apparatus. Seeing the relationship is dependent upon see­ ing its deconstruction. Seeing its deconstruction is dependent upon the simultaneous deconstruction of the means of seeing it. The elements of Baudry's cinemato­ graphic apparatus are redefined in new terms in

Daughter Rite which alter the relationship between the spectator and the film.

Daughter Rite is overtly a product of an optical apparatus that has been tampered with. The home movies are altered in such a way as to resituate the camera eye according to an ideology different than that with which they were originally taken. The combination of the super-8 footage with the documentary segments gives a multiple rather than a monocular perspective. The multiple perspective is reinforced by the moving camera which shifts the perspective in the documentary segments from a

Renaissance perspective to a moving multiple-perspective eye. 250

The selection of shots is also obviously the product of a different ideology. The selection of which pieces of super-8 film to re-process was based not on the ultimate needs of narrative continuity, but rather on their ex­ pression of the ambivalence of their content. The montage of the film, rather than effacing differences and building a linear narrative, reinforces ambivalence and permits the existence of narrative ruptures. Though it is tempting to create a unified narrative based on an idea that the women in the documentary segments are the grown-up versions of the little girls in the super-8 segments because of their physical similarity and to further identify the elder sister as the voiceover narrator and director of the film, differences in names (Stephanie is the younger sister in the documentary segments and the voiceover narrator's sister is named Nancy) and in histories (the documentary sisters' mother is in the hospital, the voiceover nar­ rator's mother in Hawaii) prevent the construction of a unified narrative and force a different kind of participa­ tion. As in Betrayal the spectator must construct the narrative, but in Daughter Rite the impossibility of con­ structing a narrative suggests that the narrative should be seen not as a story, but as the collection of experience to which spectators may add their own. 251

The normal situation of the subject in identification

with the monocular camera eye and only secondarily with

the characters portrayed is also altered in Daughter Rite.

The lack of monocular perspective makes it more difficult

to identify with the camera, and correspondingly easier to

identify with a number of positions. The screen itself is

deconstructed as a mirror; no longer the recreation of the

mirror stage, what is on the screen becomes not an op­

position, but part of the group which also includes the

spectators. Like the original Oedipus Rex, Daughter Rite

is a community ritual which simultaneously removes the mask

of the apparatus and destroys the mirror. As the mask of

the cinema is unwound as Guillaume removed the bandage

from his eyes in La Chinoise, the possibility of identifi­

cation with the plight of the character shifts to a vision

of how the illusion was created. Product is exchanged for process. The mirror of identification with the character posed within the apparatus of illusion is shattered with

the removal of the apparatus.

The credits at the end of the film also destroy the mask of the apparatus. Any uncertainty about the identity of the documentary sisters with the little girls in the super-8 film is removed as well as the possibility that the director is the voiceover narrator. The revelation of 252

actresses and narrators is the final revelation of the cinematographic apparatus which requires a retroactive resituation of the spectator. It becomes apparent at the end of the film that what seemed to be documentary was not.

What is fiction is non-fiction, what non-fiction, fiction.

The genre lines are blurred and our assumptions about the nature of documentary and narrative are overturned.

The final line of the film is the voiceover narrator's relation of the occasion when she showed the film to her mother. Her mother's response (though Impossible since the anecdote is part of the film) is "why do you have to say all of this?" The saying and the seeing break the mother/ daughter construction. By saying this the daughter has found her own identity, not only as a filmmaker, but as a woman. The film is the document of a ritual, of the separation rite of this filmmaker from her real-life mother and of the relation of the spectators with their own mothers. By reproducing the multiple perspective, by re­ fusing narrative continuity and the assumptions of genre, and by replacing them with a community document which re­ fuses the construction of the screen as mirror.

Daughter Rite melds cinema and theatre. Conclusion

The three pairs of works. Play and La Chinoise,

The Killer and Blow-^TJp, and Betrayal and Daughter Rite

reflect three different metaphors of seeing or perception

which are each an expression of the metaphor of Oedipus in

the cave. Each metaphor defines a relationship between the

stage/screen and the audience, between the protagonist(s)

and the protagonist's true identity, and between illusion

and reality.

The first pair of works. Play and La Chinoise,

simultaneously construct and dissect the apparatus of drama

and film in a self-conscious attempt to define the barrier

of the apparatus which prevents us from seeing, yet by which we see. Play appropriates the metaphor of the

cinematic apparatus, the cave, as a way of defining the re­

lationship between the stage and the audience and as a way

of defining the relationship between the characters and

their own unconscious. The very obvious apparatus of the

play becomes its own subject; the light is as much a focus

as it focuses. The dissection of the apparatus is for the

253 254

benefit of the audience; each character is still entrapped

like an unwary Oedipus in the machinery of representation.

The characters of La Chinoise are also entrapped in

the apparatus of representation and are part of the mechanism by which Jean-Luc Godard self-consciously dis­

sects and defines film. Conscious only of the theatrical

apparatus which Godard uses to define film, the characters

are unknowingly caught not only in the eye of the camera,

but in the tangled structure of film and revolution. As

in Play, the definition of film is for the benefit of the

film's audience; the characters find death, or failure, or return, as does Guillaume, to the theatre.

The metaphor of seeing contained in Play and

La Chinoise is a metaphor in which Oedipus is still unaware that what he sees is the illusion produced by the mechanism of the cave, but in which the audience is privileged to see the mechanism of the cave and its relation to Oedipus. The metaphor explains not only the kind of blindness suffered by those trapped in illusion, but offers a cure for that blindness in the understanding and inter-relationship of the mechanisms of theatre and cinema.

In The Killer and Blow-Up, the protagonist does begin to understand and break down the apparatus of theatre and

film in an unconscious quest for identity. In The Killer, 255

Bérenger encounters his own mortality and his identify as a killer. No longer entrapped, Berenger battles the ap­ paratus to find the real vision and real identity that lies behind the machinery of illusion. Berenger fights not the theatre itself, but the material of theatre that is much like the cinematographic apparatus.

In Blow-Up, Thomas also discovers his own mortality and identity as a killer in his quest to understand the

Oedipal triangle he has become a part of by photographing it. Like Bérenger, Thomas’ understanding comes only after he has consciously battled the photographic apparatus by which he has seen but which prevents him from really understanding what has happened. Framed in the street theatre of the Guy Fawkes' Day revelers, Thomas emerges with an understanding of the apparatus, but he is still trapped in a frame of theatrical illusion and in the cinematographic apparatus of the film itself.

The metaphor of seeing in The Killer and Blow-Up is one in which the audience, by means of the apparatus of the cave, sees Oedipus comprehend and see beyond that ap­ paratus. The barrier of the apparatus is overcome by the protagonist, but paradoxically remains intact for the 256

spectator. Reality is very much the product of the illusion created by an apparatus which seems to deconstruct itself by means of the quest of the protagonist.

In the final pair, Betrayal and Daughter Rite, the apparatus of theatre and cinema becomes the means by which the spectators are invited into a process of self-discovery and ritual. The achronological structure of Betrayal forces the audience into an active reconstruction of the

Oedipal triangles which shift through time. In Betrayal. the Oedipal is the apparatus, the mirror of the mirror stage. Both the audience and Emma perceive the complex apparatus of the characters' relationships from which Emma ultimately frees herself. In Betrayal, theatre and film come together, no longer as borrowed definitions but as a conjoined apparatus which is freed from the necessity of explaining itself.

Daughter Rite is a community ritual- of separation from the mother. Like Betrayal, the apparatus of the film becomes the means by which the spectators are forced into a consideration of the relationship of illusion and reality in the film and in their own lives. As the concept of mother is deconstructed, the daughter sees more clearly 257

the illusion of the concept of daughter, and hence can see mother, daughter, and even the apparatus of film more

clearly.

Here, the apparatus of theatre and film has become a tool; the cave becomes the means by which the cave may be seen, but seen for what it is, enabling Oedipus to see be­ yond it into self. The apparatus is a mechanism for self­ perception, not an end in itself. The psychological and the metaphysical come together and lead to the ability to see self and to see self in relation to the apparatus.

The preoccupation of these metaphors of perception with the apparatus of theatre and film is perhaps a re­ flection of cultural anxieties about the relationship between humanity and machines, between the individual and society, and between reality and illusion. Though the metaphor of Plato's cave is ancient, the invention of the camera and the ability to supplant reality with illusion by means of photography did not occur until the nineteenth century. With an apparatus that could so easily reproduce reality, art, and particularly the theatre, developed other means of representing truth, means that departed from realism. As theatre became less realistic, it became less obviously an illusion and more apparently theatre. Its relationship to reality became more of a question since 258

the obvious correspondences were no longer always present.

As in Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck, the spectrum of realism, from photograph to stage is set against the spectrum of truth.^ The response of Ibsen and of theatre since has been that truth and reality are distinct from one another as are vision and insight. The realistic re­ production of reality is no more truth than Gregers Werle's insistence that the bare facts of the relationship of

Hjalmar Ekdal's wife and Haakon Werle and the true pedigree of Hedvig Ekdal are the entire truth. There is no question that the entire truth rather than simple reality must be seen.

With the ability to reproduce reality, art was in danger of subjugation to the machine by which such reality is reproduced. By denying the veracity and value of such reality, the artist takes control of the machine, although the continued preoccupation with the apparatus itself indi­ cates a continuing anxiety about human control over illusion, an anxiety precisely about what it is that one sees. When the illusion of reality is so easily produced, the human might be easily fooled. The only way to prevent such a mistake is constantly to remind the spectator that 259

the image seen is the product of the apparatus. One sees truth by seeing beyond reality; the fear is of being caught

in the web of illusion that prevents the perception of truth.

Thus, control of the apparatus is manifested by a constant awareness of the apparatus, an awareness omnipresent in self-reflective theatre and cinema. To control the illusion is to impart truth. At the same time to self-consciously control illusion by means of constant reference to the apparatus is to distance the spectator, to alienate, to erect an additional barrier between the spectator and the stage/screen, an alienation that in some ways suggests the alienation of the individual in modern society. The pre-emminence of the mechanical, the failure of language, the constant production of illusion in place of meaning in society is analogous in one way to the function of the apparatus in theatre and cinema. Cut off from an image openly admitted to be illusion, spectators are forced into themselves as the source of truth, a battle overtly fought in both The Killer and Blow-Up. However, theatre and film by means of this same apparatus offer a way to rediscover truth. The representation of the dis­ section of the apparatus as the mechanism of self-discovery 260

posits human over machine and truth over illusion as in

The Killer and Blow-Up. The resituation of the apparatus

as tool rather than barrier in Betrayal and Daughter Rite

confirms the ascendance of the artist.

As in Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of

an Author,2 the self-reflective dissection of the theatre

results in a theatre that is the subject of itself, but

which ironically substitutes self-reflectivity for mimesis,

a substitution which wrests control of the apparatus from

the spectator even as it appears to vest such control. In

the six works considered, supra, the apparatus has been

dissolved so that the apparatus can operate to create

truth rather than illusion. The three metaphors of per­

ception are all strategies for the control of the

apparatus, but they are simultaneously strategies for

understanding the apparatus and for understanding and perceiving self.

The appropriation of analogies derived from photo­

graphy and cinema by Freud and Lacan suggests that the

specular models of drama and film are somehow also crucial

to our understanding of self or at least to our compre­

hension of the mechanism of self-perception. The fact

that Freud identified and named the Oedipus conflict which

Lacan situated at the time when the individual first comes 261

to see himself as an individual provides an additional

significance to the metaphors of perception. The analogy

between the psychological apparatus and the apparatus of

stage and cinema situates the metaphors of perception of

drama and film within the individual, suggesting that the

metaphors of perception in art are perhaps no more than

relfections of the individual's battle to comprehend life,

self, and mortality.

Perhaps this is all an elaborate pun: the reflection

in Lacan's mirror which leads to the ability to comprehend

the idea of self is ultimately self-reflective in the same

way that modern drama and film are self-relfective. The

act of recognizing the possibility and the symbolic ex­

istence of other and through the idea of other the concept

of the separate self is the same for an individual as it

is for a play or a film. In the mirror stage, facing the

mirror, the infant does not yet recognize that the image

there is separate from the world; all is a part. Facing a

stage or a screen, once disbelief is suspended, we face a mirror in which the images are a part of the world we know.

Narrative film, in fact, ties us into the diegesis of the

film through such strategies as suture and continuity

editing. In realist drama the illusion of the world of the

stage is as real as possible to increase verisimilitude and 262

to minimize the separation of the stage from the world. At this stage, drama and film and Lacan's baby gazing in the mirror are all merely a reflection of a world indistin­ guishable from themselves.

At some point, stimulated only by a sufficiently matured visual acuity, the infant gazes into the mirror and sees not the world, but a being distinct from the world. The recognition of this image as a whole separate being enables the infant to comprehend himself as a whole separate being different from the being in the mirror. He comprehends the symbolic concepts of self and other. In modern drama and film the audience, prompted by a mirror/ screen which by some strategy draws attention to itself as separate from the world as in Play or La Chinoise, looks into the stage or screen and sees not the world, but a separate constructed world, a play or a film. As the idea of self in other is suddenly visible to the infant, so the idea of dramatic or cinematic form becomes visible to the spectator. Plays become plays and films become films.

The mirror stage begins the Oedipal process for the child, the process by which it develops language, an un­ conscious, and ultimately a separate identity. Self­ reflection in drama or film spurs the process by which the work is split into a conscious structure and art (and the 263

audience's consciousness of that structure and art) and the content expressed by that structure. Self-reflection enables us to see not only the "thing," but the "thingness" of the thing. As we see the structure, the apparatus of drama or film, like the child we gain a language by which the work may be defined, but we are also separate, dis­ tanced by our consciousness of the structure of the work and of its separation from the world.

Self-reflectivenss leads, thus, to distanciation, to alienation from the world and simultaneously to an in­ creased comprehension of self. The third term in this equation of the mirror stage and self-reflective drama and film is the content, the diegetic world of the drama or film itself. Even as the infant recognizes selfness from the recognition of selfness in the image in the mirror, so drama and film recognize selfness from their self­ reflection. Form reflects content, so that as the form increasingly recognizes itself as form, so the protago­ nistes) in the works themselves come to a mirror as do

Bérenger, Thomas, and Emma, the same mirror as the infant and learn (or fail to learn) to perceive self.

The circle is complete: the self-reflection of the form equals the self-reflection of the content which to­ gether provoke the process of the reflection of the 264

spectator. However, one of the virtues of self-reflective art is that the audience sees all processes at once— content, form, and self-reflection of form. The audience is doubly distanced; it sees not only into the mirror, it sees the entire process of looking into the mirror. The conspiracy of form and content and self­ reflection in film and drama is to teach, to entertain, or perhaps encourage the spectator in an identification with the action represented to come also to see self. Such process may be vicarious or may be the result of a ritual which involves the spectator as a part of the drama or film as in Betrayal and Daughter Rite.

The search for self may be as much a function of modern alienation as it is part of an elaborate apparatus of self-reflection, but the same anxieties and ideologies which have influenced the course of modern drama and film have also influenced the ways in which psychoanalytic theories are expressed. Thus, the determination of the influence of psychoanalysis or of art or philosophy upon one another is difficult to determine. The fact remains that they share common metaphors and seek to express the same fears and hopes.

The fixation on the apparatus, on the working of the mirror itself is one analogy. Control of the apparatus. 265

and hence of the process by which one finds identity, is accomplished by means of dissection, description, analysis, and demonstration. The fact that we see has become less important than the ways in which we see and the ways in which those ways of seeing function to enable us to see.

Perhaps when it is all taken apart we will see the whole, but what we create are the fragments the infant first sees in the mirror.

Seeing is accomplished only by removing the mask.

Instead of fixating on the mirror, the pieces of the mirror, or the idea of reflection, we see the self, not as a reflection, but as a reality. The characters in Play and La Chinoise still struggle with the apparatus, con­ trolled by it rather than seeing beyond it. Bérenger,

Thomas, and Emma succeed in brushing aside the mirror, a mirror made complex by dramatic and cinematographic ap­ paratus. Betrayal and Daughter Rite are rituals which extend the process of brushing aside the mirror to the audience, who in order to understand, must see the apparatus themselves, but who gain the reward of vision when the apparatus is cleared.

Oedipus' insight was accompanied by blindness. The prisoners in Plato's cave could only see the shadows of 266

artifice. In stripping the apparatus, the mirror, we open the possibility of a new vision, of a new way of seeing, so that perhaps our insight will be accompanied by the sun. Notes

Introduction

^Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater (Garden City:

Doubleday, 1953), p. 31.

^Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, trans. Albert Cook, in Ten

Greek Plays, ed. L. R. Lind (Boston: Riverside, 1957), pp. 111-153.

^Fergusson, p. 25.

^Fergusson, p. 30.

^Fergusson, p. 40.

®Sigmund Freud, "The Passing of the Oedipus Complex," trans. Joan Riviere, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Colliers, 1963), pp. 176-182.

Tjacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage," in Ecrits, trans.

Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 1-7.

Q Trans. Francis M. Cornford in Apparatus, ed. Theresa

Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam, 1980), p. 23.

^Jean-Louis Baudry, "The Apparatus," trans. Bertrand

Augst, in Apparatus, pp. 41-62; and Baudry, "Ideological

Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," trans.

Alan Williams, in Apparatus, pp. 25-37.

267 268

l^Baudry, "Ideological Effects," pp.

l^Baudry, "Ideological Effects," pp.

l^Baudry, "Ideological Effects," pp.

l^Baudry, "Ideological Effects," pp.

l^Baudry, "Ideological Effects," pp.

l^Bertolt Brecht. Brecht on Theatre,

Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 190.

16Brecht, p. 201.

l^Brecht, pp. 91-96.

Play

^Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press,

1958), p. 2.

^Play was written in English and was first produced

in German translation at Ulm-Donau in June, 1963. Its

first English production was in New York in January, 1964.

For additional production history see Lawrence Graver and

Raymond Federman, eds., Samuel Beckett: The Critical

Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegal Paul, 1979), pp.

273-274; James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the

Skull (London: John Calder 1979), p. 111.

^Beckett's instructions for the light state that "the

source of the light is single and must not be situated outside ideal space (stage) occupied by its victims," in 269

Play, in Cascando and Other Short Dramatic Pieces

(New York: Grove Press), p. 62. All subsequent references

are made from this edition.

^Beckett’s Film was first screened at the Venice Film

Festival in 1965 and appears in Cascando and Other Short

Dramatic Pieces (New York: Grove Press), pp. 73-88.

^Knowlson and Pilling, p. 111.

^Eugene Webb, The Plays of Samuel Beckett (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 1972), p. 133; Knowlson and

Pilling, p. 111.

^Samuel Beckett, Comédie in Comédie et actes divers

(Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1966), p. 34.

®The characters are considered to be dead by Alec

Reid, All I Can Manage. More Than I Could: An Approach to the Plays of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press,

1968), p. 36; and by Renée Riése Hubert, "Beckett's Play

Between Poetry and Performance," Modern Drama, 9 (1966-67), p. 339. Purgatory is suggested by Darko Suvin, "Beckett's

Purgatory of the Individual or the Three Laws of

Thermodynamics," The Drama Review, 11, No. 4 (1967), pp.

135-140; by James Knowlson and John Pilling, p. 112; by

Rosemary Poutney, "Samuel Beckett's Interest in Form:

Structural Patterning in Play," Modern Drama, 19 (1976), pp. 237-244; or in Belacqua's ante-purgatory as suggested 270

by John Fletcher and John Spurling, Beckett : A Study of

His Plays (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 108. The term "Protestant Hell" is used by Hugh Kenner in A

Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett (London: Thames and

Hudson, 1973), p. 153.

®The notion of hell as locus is advanced by Michael

Robinson, The Long Sonata of the Dead (London: Rupert

Hart-Davis, 1969), p. 295. Katherine Worth, Beckett the

Shape Changer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 200-205, believes that the characters are not cemented into place but have some possibility of improving their status if not their location.

l^Bernard F. Dukore, "Beckett's Play, Play,"

Educational Theatre Journal, 17 (1965), pp. 19-23, de­ scribes his experience of distanciation.

l^Enoch Brater, "Brecht's Alienated Actor in Beckett's

Theater," Comparative Drama. 9 (1975-76), p. 195.

l^Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. John

Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 74.

l^Brecht, p. 37.

l^Brecht, p. 37.

l^Knowlson and Pilling, p. 113.

^^Persona, directed by Ingmar Bergman was released in

1966. The works of Vertov (1928) and Melies (1914) are 271

early examples of films which revealed the means by which

they were produced. 1 7 The concept of off-screen space is discussed by

Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice (Princeton: Princeton

U.P., 1973), pp. 17-32; and by Stephen Heath, Questions of

Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1981), pp. 19-75.

l^Katherine Worth in Beckett the Shape Changer states

that the ". . . characters are all rather brilliant nar­

rators. They make us see their play as if they were going

through it in the flesh . . p. 201.

l^Andre Bazin, "The Virtues and Limitations of

Montage," in What is Cinema, Vol. I, ed. and trans. by

Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1967), p. 46.

^Ogergei Eisenstein, "Methods of Montage," in Film

Form, pp. 64-82.

^^André Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of the

Cinema," in What is Cinema, Vol. I, p. 36.

^^Heath, p. 10.

B^Bazin, "Theatre and Cinema— Part Two," in What is

Cinema, Vol. I, p. 105.

Beneath, p. 30.

2®Heath, p. 32.

2?Heath, p. 31. 272

^^Christian Metz, Film Language, trans. Michael Taylor

(New York: Oxford U.P., 1974), pp. 12-13.

B^Metz, p. 10.

S^Metz, p. 9.

S^Heath, pp. 76-112.

^^Heath, p. 2.

S^Heath, p. 3, also Sigmund Freud, Introductory

Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1916-1917), The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. xvi

(London: Hogarth Press, 1963), pp. 295-296.

S^Heath, p. 3.

Jacques Lacan, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,"

Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 292-326.

La Chinoise

^La Chinoise made in 1968 is the final film before

Godard's association with the Dziga-Vertov Group.

^Enoch Brater, "Brecht's Alienated Actor in Beckett's

Theatre," Comparative Drama, 9 (1975-76), pp. 198-199.

^Sylvia Harvey, May '68 and Film Culture (New York:

Zoetrope, 1980), p. 4.

^Harvey, p. 30. 273

^Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, ed. Jean Narboni and Torn Milne (New York: The Viking Press), p. 171. This quote originally appeared in Cahiers du Cinfema, 128

(December, 1962).

®Brian Henderson, A Critique of Film Theory (New York:

E.P. Dutton, 1980), p. 102.

?Kent Carroll, "Film and Revolution: Interview with the Dziga-Vertov Group," in Focus on Godard, ed. Royal S.

Brown (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p.

61. g Harvey, p. 31.

®James Monaco, The New Wave (New York: Oxford U.P.,

1976), pp. 129-130.

l^Brecht, p. 91.

l^Monaco, p. 129.

l^Godard on Godard, p. 230.

l^Monaco, p. 190.

l^Godard on Godard, p. 239.

l^Robert A. Nisbet cited in Victor Turner, Dramas,

Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1974), p. 25.

^®I.A. Richards, cited in Turner, p. 29.

l?Turner, pp. 23-57.

l^christian Metz, p. 10. 274

The Killer

^Eugène Ionesco, Découvertes (Geneva: Albert Skira,

1969), p. 73. (Translation by author).

^Robert W. Corrigan, "The Theatre of Ionesco: The

Ghost and Primal Dialogue," in The Dream and the Play :

Ionesco's Theatrical Quest, ed Moshe Lazar (Malibu:

Undema, 1982), p. 50.

^Corrigan, p. 50.

^Claude Bonnefoy, Conversations With Eugene Ionesco, trans. Jan Dawson (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,

1971), p. 10.

^Eugène Ionesco, The Bald Soprano in Four Plays, trans. Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1958), pp. 8-42; The Chairs, Four Plays, pp. 112-160; Rhinoceros and Other Plays, trans. Derek Prouse, (New York: Grove

Press, 1960).

^Bonnefoy, p. 98.

^Eugène Ionesco, The Killer and Other Plays, trans.

Donald Watson (New York: Grove Press, 1960). All subsequent citations from The Killer are from this edition.

^Eugene Ionesco, The Colonel's Photograph, trans.

Jean Stewart and John Russell (London: Faber and Faber,

1967). 275

^Mary Ann Witt, "Eugène Ionesco and the Dialectic of

Space," Modern Language Quarterly. 53, No. 3 (1972), pp.

312-313; and Martin Esslin, "Ionesco entre les conformismes," in Ionesco: Situation et Perspectives, ed.

Marie-France Ionesco and Paul Vernois (Paris : Pierre

Belfond, 1980), p. 43.

l^Eugéne Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes, trans.

Donald Watson (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 162.

l^Mircea Eliade, "Lumière at transcendance dans

1'oeuvre d'Eugène Ionesco," Ionesco: Situations et

Perspectives, pp. 117-127, and "La Nostalgie du Paradis," in The Two Faces of Ionesco, ed. Rosette C. Lament and

Melvin J. Friedman (Troy, New York: Whitston, 1978), pp. 21-30.

l^Bonnefoy, p. 32.

l^Eugène Ionesco, The New Tenant. trans. Donald

Watson (New York: Grove Press, 1958).

14jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage," Ecrits, trans.

Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 1-7.

l^ionesco. Notes and Counternotes, p. 48.

l^ionesco in Notes and Counternotes often refers to drama as architecture, i. e. p. 248. The idea is also elaborated by Yves Moraud, "Ionesco: un théâtre de l'exil et du rituel," Ionesco: Situations et Perspectives, p. 84. 276

l^Richard N. Coe, Eugène Ionesco (New York: Grove

Press, 1961), p. 69.

Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes, p. 32.

^®Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes, pp. 158-159. 20 David Grossvogel, "Ionesco: Symptom and Victim,"

The Dream and the Play, pp. 82-83.

21lonesco, Theatre et anti-theatre, p. 151.

B^Moshe Lazar, "The Psychodramatic Stage: Ionesco and his Doubles," The Dream and the Play, pp. 135-159;

Esslin, p. 52.

B^Robert Rogers, The Double in Literature (Detroit:

Wayne State University Press, 1970), pp. 172-173.

B^Moraud, p. 84; Rosette C. Lament, "Journey to the

Kingdom of the Dead: Ionesco's Gnostic Dream Play," The

Dream and the Play, p. 117.

B^ionesco, Notes and Counternotes, P- 29.

2®Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes, p. 134.

2?Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes, p. 91.

28ionesco, Notes and Counternotes, P- 162.

B^ionesco, Notes and Counternotes, p. 32.

^^Alexandre Rainof, "Ionesco and the Film of the

Twenties and Thirties From Goucho to Harpo," The Two Faces of Ionesco, pp. 65-73. Rainof states that Ionesco's 277

"theater . . . seeks a solution which appears to be, from play to play, a constantly greater emphasis on visual metaphors," p. 71.

Blow-Up

^Roy Huss, "Antonioni in the English Style: A Day on the Set," Focus on "Blow-Up," ed. Roy Huss (Englewood

Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 8. Huss quotes

Antonioni.

^Michelangelo Antonioni, dir., Blow-Up, with David

Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1966.

Sjean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the

Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," trans. Alan Williams in

Apparatus, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam

Press, 1980), pp. 25-37 and "The Apparatus," trans.

Jean Andrews and Bertrang Augst, in Apparatus, pp. 41-62.

4john Freccero, "Blow-Up : From the Word to the

Image," Focus on "Blow-Up." pp. 118-119.

^F.A. Macklin, "Blow-Up," Focus on "Blow-Up." p. 36.

®James F. Scott, "Blow-Up : Antonioni and the Mod

World," Focus on "Blow-Up." pp. 89-97.

^André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic

Image," in What is Cinema, Vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh

Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 14. 278

®Bazin, p. 12.

^Huss, Focus on "Blow-Up," p. 2; Andrew Barris, "No

Antoniennui," Focus on "Blow-Up." p. 34; Carey Harrison,

"Blow-Up," Focus on "Blow-Up," p. 39; Jean Clair, "The Road to Damascus: Blow-Up," Focus on "Blow-Up," pp. 60-61;

Scott, p. 91; Marsha Kinder, "Antonioni in Transit,"

Focus on "Blow-Up," p. 82.

l^F.A. Macklin, p. 37. Macklin claims the discovery of the body undermines the reality-illusion aspect of the film.

llScott, p. 93.

l^Freccero, p. 118.

l^Freccero, p. 119.

l^This and all subsequent excerpts are cited from

Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow-Up (London: Lorrimer

Publishing, 1971), p. 45.

l^Baudry, "Ideological Effects," pp. 25-37.

l^Baudry, "Ideological Effects," pp. 25-37.

l^Charles Thomas Samuels, "The Blow-Up: Sorting

Things Out," Focus on "Blow-Up," p. 20; Harrison, pp.

41-43; Stanley Kauffmann, "A Year With Blow-Up : Some

Notes," Focus on "Blow-Up," p. 75. IBRichard N. Coe, Eugdne Ionesco (New York: Grove

Press, 1961), p. 44. 279

Betrayal

^Harold Pinter, Betrayal (New York: Grove Press,

1978). This and all subsequent citations are from this edition.

^Noel King, "Pinter'sProgress," Modern Drama 23

(1980), pp. 246-247; and Enoch Brater, "Cinematic Fidelity and the Forms of Pinter's Betrayal," Modern Drama 24 (1981

(1981), pp. 503-513 both suggest that the temporal structure of Betrayal is cinematic.

^Silvio Gaggi, "Pinter'sBetrayal : Problems of

Language or Grand Metatheatre?" Theatre Journal 33

(1981), p. 513; Katherine Burkman, "Harold Pinter's

Betrayal : Life Before Death - And After," Theatre

Journal 34 (1982), pp. 512-513.

4jean-Louis Baudry, "The Ideological Effects of the

Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," trans. Alan Williams, in

Apparatus, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam,

1980), Ap. 29.

^Brater, p. 506.

^Brater, p. 507; Gay Gibson Cima, "Acting on the

Cutting Edge: Pinter and the Syntax of Cinema," Theatre

Journal 36 (1984), pp. 43-56.

?Cima, p. 44. 280

®Cima, p. 44; Christian Metz, Film Language, trans.

Michael Taylor (New York; Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 26.

®Metz, p. 43, cites Jean Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du Cinema, Vol I (Paris: Editions

Universitaires, 1963).

lOpaudry, p. 32.

l^Gaggi, p. 516.

l^cima, p. 45.

Daughter Rite

^Silvia Bovenschen, "Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?"

New German Critique, No. 10 (1977), p. 118.

^Personal interview with Michelle Citron, 29 June

1983.

^Michelle Citron, dir.. Daughter Rite, 1978.

^Letter received from Michelle Citron, 4 May 1983.

Gjane Feuer, "Daughter Rite: Living With Our Pain and Love," Jump C u t , 23 (1980), pp. 12-13.

^Letter received from Michelle Citron, 4 May 1983.

^Letter received from Michelle Citron, 4 May 1983.

^Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 172. 281

Conclusion

iHenrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck, trans. Michael Meyer, in Ghosts and Three Other Plays (New York: Doubleday,

1966).

^Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an

Author, trans. Edward Storer in Naked Masks, ed. Eric

Bentley (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1952), pp. 201-276. Bibliography

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