Gonzalo de Lucas Translated by Alejandra Rosenberg

TOWARDS A COMPARATIVE MONTAGE OF THE FEMALE PORTRAIT. THE THEATRE OF THE BODY: FICTIONAL TEARS AND REAL TEARS

One of the many ways of approach- a more realistic image, thereby eroding ing film history—and probably one the distant, ideal image constructed in of the most neglected— is to examine the studio: a transition from an iconic how filmmakers portray actresses: the image to an indexical image, in which distances, relationships, and stories the effects of reality and the passing of which, behind the main plot, are cap- time on the body are made visible. In tured between the one filming and the the 1960s, filmmakers such as Bergman one being filmed. In cinema, unlike lit- or Cassavetes would take these signs to erature or painting, a character is not the absolute extreme, stripping the ac- only an imaginary being, but also a real tress of all but her condition as a per- person who inscribes his or her voice, son or a mask. gestures and gazes into the experience An actress usually portrays cry- of the film; this occurs “in the world ing as a fictitious and depersonalised and with the world, with real creatures dramatic moment of her private life. as raw material, before the intervention However, when modern filmmakers of language” (Bergala, 2006: 8). transformed the cinematic forms of In this article, I will explore this the female portrait, in an effort to ex- work with corporeal matter, the signs pand the limits of everyday realism, inscribed as real presences, through they sought to make tears evoke or the tears of actresses in performances reveal something that belonged to the filmed by D. W. Griffith, Josef von performer’s private world and made Sternberg, Nicholas Ray, John Cas- visible a personal or autobiographical savetes and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. emotion. In this respect, it is important As is well known, in modern cinema to differentiate real tears from fictional actresses have abandoned or at least tears: between the two manifestations moved away from the figure of the a tension will often occur in what is movie star in the interests of presenting visible, between the artifice (feigned

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A Day in the Country (Partie de campagne, Stromboli (Stromboli, terra di Dio, Her life to live (Vivre sa vie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1962) Jean Renoir, 1936) Roberto Rossellini, 1949) / Courtesy of Regia Films tears) and a presumed transparency most meaningful moments in modern the construction of her image as an (uncontrollable tears that fall beyond cinema are those showing an actress’s icon or as a real body. our will). Since we learn to use tears tears: Sylvia Bataille, after the roman- and understand what they represent, tic encounter in A Day in the Country Fictional tears many dramatic scenes suggest a char- (Partie de Campagne, Jean Renoir, The portrayal of suffering in the female acter’s doubt about the truth or the 1936), Ingrid Bergman on the volcano face emerged very early in film history, motivations of another character who island in Stromboli, (Stromboli, terra thanks to the possibilities of the close- cries. Film, in general, follows the clas- de Dio, Roberto Rossellini, 1949), or up and its way of enlarging the small- sical perspective in which tears belong when she sees the burnt bodies of two est and almost imperceptible details of to the realm of emotion and not of feel- lovers in Journey to Italy (Viaggio in the face, thus exploring exhaustively ing, as the neurologist Antonio Dama- Italia, Roberto Rossellini, 1953), or as all of the actress’s expressive and fa- sio observed: “emotions play out in the Anna Karina in My Life to Live (Vivre cial dynamics at close range, turning theatre of the body, while feelings play sa vie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1962), or while her face into a theatrical stage. The out in the theatre of the mind” (Dama- watching the theatrical tears of Fal- film actress’s portrayal of emotions has sio, 2005: 32). In this sense, in scenes conetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (La surely never been as central as it was in in which tears are portrayed, the body passion de Jeanne d’Arc, Carl T. Dreyer, Griffith’s films: every emotion seemed acts as a theatre or a depiction in which 1928). In this essay, I will compare dif- to correspond to a gesture, and Lillian there is a friction between the iconic ferent film scenes from the perspective Gish’s mastery consisted of her ability and the indexical image. It is thus of the formal ideas exchanged between to play these performative notes at an hardly coincidental that some of the filmmaker and actress, according to extremely quick tempo. It was a rhythm

Way Down East (David Wark Griffith, 1920)

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that left the spectator amazed, as cin- original, unharmed state without any ema seemed able to capture whole marks or signs of a real experience. stages of an emotional life in just a few This conception of the face that seconds (from laughter to mourning, kept its beauty unchanged projected from pain to joy, from passion to fear): the iconic dimension and force of the “Granted that the person has a moving- star, like Dietrich or Garbo: a being im- camera face–that is, a person who pho- pervious to the effects of time, able to tographs well–the first thing needed go from one film to the next with her is ‘soul’ […] For principals I must have image intact, with no signs of the cor- people with souls, people who know rosion of time, a sort of mask or ideal and feel their parts and who express beauty, frozen and imperishable. every single feeling in the entire gamut For Josef von Sternberg, the face was of emotions with their muscles” (Grif- a landscape: “The camera has been used fith, 1971: 50-51). to explore the human figure and to con- In Way Down East (D. W. Griffith, centrate on its face […] Monstrously en- 1920), when the male seducer con- larged as it is on the screen, the human fesses his unfaithfulness to Lillian Gish, face should be treated like a landscape. she crosses the full emotional arc that It is to be viewed as if the eyes were from tears to laughter in just a few sec- lakes, the nose a hill, the cheeks broad onds: there is not a single frame with- meadows, the mouth a flower patch, out a complete expressive gesture; that the forehead sky, and the hair clouds. is, not a single expressive gesture is Values must be altered as in an actual prolonged, because what matters is its landscape by investing it with lights dynamic energy, the maximum force and shadows” (Sternberg, 1973: 323). of expression and facial mimicry. On This was a task in which the film- the other hand, this iconic composi- maker needed to find beauty under the tion of the face in transformation illus- explicit or ordinary layers and masks to Josef von Sternberg, een retrospektieve trates a conception of time (the flash, reveal it in its ideal form: “The camera (Harry Kümel, 1969). the ephemeral vibration) that contrasts by itself is a destructive instrument and with the drawn out depiction of the ex- the men behind it need a lot of time pression to the point of emotional emp- and effort to tame it. It has its own con- to become a mere surface or a piece of tiness in Warhol’s or Garrel’s starkly cept of beauty and it dramatizes what it clay for the filmmaker to shape: “Tell real actresses. In Griffith, the gestures sees; it cuts, deforms and flattens mass. her not to think, to forget everything. accentuate the expression because of The term beauty describes the most There is nobody here, except me” or the extreme use of their performative nebulous concept of all” (Sternberg, “When I finish with an actor he is ex- and dramatic potentiality, and are per- 1973). hausted. He doesn’t know what he fect analogies (representations of our There is a valuable document of wants: and that is what I want.” During idea of panic or excessive emotion) as Sternberg filming a close-up included shooting, Dorothée Blanck, the actress, icons of suffering or visible forms of in Josef von Sternberg, een retrospek- bursts into tears: “Why is she crying? the poetic idea of suffering. In Broken tieve [Josef von Sternberg, a retrospec- Is it my fault? Tell her that in this busi- Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919), the fa- tive] (Harry Kümel, 1969). In this piece ness, we work with our heads, not with ther of Lillian Gish’s character asks for television, made at a time when the our hearts. An actor doesn’t cry. If he her to smile. The expression would be filmmaker had not shot a film in fif- cries, the audience won’t cry. Our job very different, as would also be seen teen years and shortly before his death, is to pretend, not to be real. My actors in Cassavetes’s films, where the face is Sternberg prepares the shot by moving never know what to do.” Sternberg, on pushed to its limits and shows signs of the lights with his own hands, man- this point, seems to share Diderot’s real suffering. But in the history of the aging areas of shadow and subjecting theory in The Paradox of Acting: taking landscape of the face, Lillian Gish was the actress to the directives of the only up Horace’s precept for drama and all virgin territory that the filmmaker had shot possible, with a single angle and literature in Ars Poetica, line 102, “si vis yet to conquer. She kept her purity in- lighting. me flere primum dolendum est ipsi tibi” tact because pain could still be depicted During the preparation of the shot, (“if you wish me to weep, you yourself through mimicry and the actress could Sternberg explains some of his aes- must first feel grief”), Diderot argues be freed (or purified) from it by em- thetic doctrines, based on the suppres- for a distance or mental coldness on bodying it. Her face could return to its sion of the will of the actress, who has the part of the actor in relation to the

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Johnny, for good. Give him a chance to no longer has to hide her tears. Stern- forget you. That’s the only way you can berg conceives these moments as an be a good mother to him now”, Stern- emotional combination: he apparently berg shows a close-up of Marlene Di- distances us from the figure in the wide etrich, a tree branch blocking our view shots, although his composition shows of her left eye, which almost seems to her loneliness and abandonment, in a be drawing the tears she sheds onto kind of identification through distanc- her face. The aesthetics of the charac- ing —she is sitting on a bench wait- ter —and the actress— are identified ing for her son to board the train and the contention of the cinematographic leave— which is reinforced by a shot style, as the emotion in the distant shot from her point of view. In the first is that of a body that suppresses its shots, we move progressively closer to tears. Later in the film, when her son Marlene Dietrich to see the moment says goodbye to her, her hat discreetly when she can no longer contain her The Scarlet Empress hides her face, leaving it to us to imag- tears, and to feel the depth from which (Josef von Sternberg, 1934) ine her pain. It is, of course, a rhetorical they come and the silent pain they re- device: although we see that she is cov- veal, reinforced by the sound of the emotion in order to “transfer to the the- ering her gaze, it is really only covered departing train: first, her hat covers atrical and the literary the ambiguity of to us, because in the actual reverse shot one eye; then, we see the first tear; and all moral characterisations” (Valverde, her son can see her eyes. finally, two uncovered watering eyes. 1999: 166). After this scene, when the son leaves When a tear appears in Sternberg’s cin- At the end of the film shoot, when with his father on the train, the actress ema, it is but a brief flash. the lights are already set, Sternberg gives only one instruction to the ac- Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg, 1932) tress: “Look at my hand.” Throughout the seven films he made with Marlene Dietrich, his marionette (as he refers to her in his memoirs), Sternberg main- tained the idea that tears should be kept veiled, barely intuited or glimpsed, rather than made explicit, so that the spectator could be brought closer to the drama and its emotion. The beauty of his style lies in the way he sublimates tears through visual motifs that are able to contain or express the inner potentiality of weeping. For instance, in The Scarlett Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934), the flame of a candle which, placed in front of the actress’s iris, reveals the emotion in her eyes, in the theatre of the body, without any theatrical performance by the actress, who acts here as cold matter sculpted by the filmmaker: as her pupils grow moist, a tear wells up. On the other hand, in the scene of Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg, 1932) where Marlene Dietrich is un- fairly forced to give up her child, Stern- berg elegantly shows the modesty and the discretion —in this case, forced rather than proud— of her tears. After her husband tells her: “Stay away from

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Finally, his way of filming the Hol- lywood star begins to take the form of an approach towards a portrait of inti- macy, either through the actress’ posi- tion or through body gestures in close- ups, with an intimacy that is shared or constructed only for the spectator: for instance, in Shanghai Express (Jo- sef von Sternberg, 1932), in the scene where Shanghai Lily (Marlene Dietrich) weeps alone after deciding to give her- Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932) Les Hautes solitudes (Philippe Garrel, 1974) self up to Chang to save her former lover, Captain Harvey (Clive Brook). This scene has the appearance of a shot for Sternberg a tear is an ideal form sion of the star, which ultimately re- filmed in the privacy of a studio, an in- that we compose in our minds. Thus, vealed the signs of the passage of time timate portrait that anticipates Jean Se- the spectator constructs the scene and in the faces filmed, to the point of berg’s shots in Les hautes solitudes [The makes the mental comparison between showing them in their depletion and High Solitudes] (Philippe Garrel, 1974). the little tear, real, filmed or suggested, evanescence. In this history of forms, In short, it is a contained and dis- and its ideal or dramatic form in our filmmakers established their ideas on creet beauty that reveals (in art and imagination: an iconic presence, the the ontology of film. art theory) the difficulty faced by the unreal way in which we feel the vibra- In his distinction between symbols, actress in portraying crying (in front tion of beauty. icons and indexes, Pierce placed pho- of the spectator, other characters, and tographic images in the last category: the camera) when she should not or Real tears “Photographs, especially instantaneous does not want to cry, and the difficulty In La Rampe, Serge Daney suggests photographs, are very instructive, be- faced by the filmmaker who wants to that what made Garbo or Dietrich stars cause we know that they are in certain film the deep, inner emotion of tears, “was their way of looking at something respects exactly like the objects they not merely their outer manifestation: far away that wasn’t even imaginable. represent. But this resemblance is due “To know what to reveal and what to Modernism began when the photo of to the photographs having been pro- conceal,” wrote Sternberg, “and in what Bergman’s Monika transfixed a whole duced under such circumstances that degrees to do this is all there is to art” generation of cinephiles without mak- they were physically forced to corre- (Sternberg, 1973: 311-312). And in a let- ing a star of Harriet Andersson” (Daney, spond point by point to nature. In that ter, he wrote: “All art is an exploration 2004, 81-82). aspect, then, they belong to the second of an unreal world […] it comes from In modern cinema, many films (by class of signs, those by physical connec- the search for abstraction that doesn’t Rossellini, Bergman, Godard or Anto- tion [index]” (Dubois, 1986: 67). normally appear in things as they are” nioni) composed a documentary layer In his essay on the photographic act, (Merigeau, 1983: 36). Sternberg’s po- beneath or underlying the fiction: sen- Philippe Dubois comments on some etics of the portrait depends on safe- timental chronicles of the filmmaker of the implications of the conception guarding the beauty of the icon from filming his wife or lover, in a sort of of photography as index: “in typologi- the irruptions of reality while at the intimate diary or portrait which was at cal terms, this means that photography same time finding the distance at which the same time a self-portrait. This way the invisible and the abstract can be of filming the other gave importance to embodied dramatically in the human how to show the tension between the figure. What do we see in the scenes real woman and her condition of ac- In that same period discussed here? Nothing that does not tress, and at the same time established in Hollywood, arise from our own projections and a form of activating the visual corre- from the mechanisms through which, spondence (or reverse shot) of the char- Nicholas Ray, using from our distance as spectators, make acter/actress/woman from the position us feel close to the image of the actress. of the camera, off-camera, towards the an autobiographical In contrast to Rossellini, for whom a filmmaker, instead of towards the fic- background, created tear will always be a tear (according to tional male character. It was a tempo- his famous idea that if things are there, ral relationship that generated a move another approach to they don’t have to be manipulated), towards to the filmed body, or a move the intimate portrait the index or trace of a real presence, away from the mythical and iconic vi-

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ing mechanism of the camera, in an ef- able from the mask of the woman, in fect of dramatisation of time, or where a recognition of the impossibility of the camera close-up maximizes the po- unravelling a truth concealed behind rosity of their faces, revealing its filmic the appearance: the truth is the appear- gesture and desire through imperfect, ance, which in its objectivity reveals out-of-focus images, in aggressive mis- that what characterises Ingrid Bergman frames. is precisely that she is an actress. When It is a very well-known fact that Ros- the actress tries to detach herself from sellini’s films with Ingrid Bergman her mask she realizes it is impossible were among the founding moments because her mask has become or is now of this decline of the female portrait. her face. Here, the Hollywood actress, instead In that same period in Hollywood, of losing her star status Nicholas Ray, using an autobiographi- through contact with real- cal background, created another ap- ity and the ordinary world, proach to the intimate portrait. His ends up exposing her mask. relationship with Gloria Grahame was Placed in natural settings shorter and much less intense than that assault her figure, and Rossellini and Bergman’s: it started faced with the vision of the during the shooting of A Woman’s Se- real, full of uncertainty, the cret (Nicholas Ray, 1949) and ended a actress moves, turns on her- year later, during the shooting of In a self and is forced into a state

of alienation —her famous Arriba. Stromboli (Stromboli, foreignness— which makes terra di Dio, Roberto Rossellini, 1949) her confront herself, as if Abajo. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950) she were seeing her image mentally, but abrasively, in Arriba. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) Abajo. Husbands (John Cassavetes, 1970) a mirror, with her status of Hollywood actress, while try- ing to fake naturalness or a is related to that category of signs in performative realism. In the morning which we also find smoke (index of a at the end of Stromboli, in the images fire), a shadow (index of a presence), a of her serene tears, we witness a mo- scar (index of a wound), a ruin (vestige ment of weakness in the actress, who of something that was once there), the had spent the shooting of the film cry- symptom (of an illness), or the foot- ing —and perhaps her tears provoked print. All these signs share the fact Rossellini’s need to film them— over of ‘being really affected by its object’ the consequences of her love for the (Pierce, 2,248), of maintaining a rela- filmmaker, for whom she had aban- tionship of ‘physical connection’ with doned her daughter and become the it (3,361). In this sense, it is radically object of stern criticism in the United different from an icon (which is de- States: “I cried so much that I thought fined only by its similarity) and from there wouldn’t be any tears left [...] symbols (which, like words from a lan- (Roberto) had seen all the tears I’d cried guage, define their object by a general on Stromboli… People thought I was convention)” (Dubois, 1986: 47). having such a marvellous time being in Smoke, shadow, scar, ruin, symptom, love, when all I did was cry because the footprint: images and metaphors that real guilt of my offence was grinding characterise a new way of filming the me down” (Bergman, 1981: 294). Thus, face. Consider the films of Rossellini, the image documents the depression Bergman, Godard, Warhol, Cassavetes, and exhaustion of the actress, who no Pialat, Garrel or Dwoskin, in which ac- longer forces a naturalist expression or tresses must hold their gaze in the face an artificial act of weeping, and where of the violence of the recording or film- the mask of the actress is indistinguish-

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Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950). Nev- train of thought of the writer” (Ray, ertheless, in this sorrowful film we find quoted in Erice: 1986, 84). a quality similar to Rossellini’s, as Erice The camera as a microscope or as pointed out: “The almost documentary a supplement to vision has entailed a use of the Humphrey Bogart-Gloria Gra- new emotional perception of corporeal hame couple, very much a reflection matter: for instance, the enlarged tear of the relationship between Ray him- as a mark, a trace, a fluid matter that self and the actress (to whom he was dramatises the skin and decomposes married and from whom he separated the expression of the face or makes its during the shooting), gave In a Lonely make-up run is an essential motif in Place an almost autobiographical tone, John Cassavetes’ poetics. In his films, whose only parallel in Europe was Ros- which avoid any decorative stylisation, sellini’s films with Ingrid Bergman. the scenes are filled with off-centre In a Lonely Place was filmed at Ray’s and overexposed shots, where the film- first home in Hollywood and the last maker pushes the limits of the sensibil- scene —improvised on the set— must ity of the film with different emulsions have been quite a faithful reproduction that expose the filmic matter (its granu- of his own breakup with the actress” larity) and, at the same time, add a sort (Erice, 1986: 128). of tactile vibration to the image, as if In Gloria Grahame’s last scene in the the camera were caressing, stroking, film, when she says goodbye to Dixon or even hitting the actress in the film- (the screenwriter played by Bogart), a maker’s rage or desire to film/touch tear falls slowly down her left cheek, the other. Hence the jarring violence of leaving a mark in its wake, while she Cassavetes’s style in fragmenting the says: “I lived a few weeks while you figure, filming until he finds something loved me. Goodbye, Dix.” In this shot, painful in the form of traces and marks real life or a real separation seems on the cheekbones, the cheeks, the eyes, to have left a painful residue, a scar the face, as seen in the close-ups in on the fiction. If we compare these Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968), in which real tears to some previous ones in Lynn Carlin’s tears appear enlarged af- the film, which are clearly fictitious, ter her suicide attempt, with her face such as the scene where Laurel com- distorted and almost asphyxiated by forts herself with Dixon’s agent and the borders of the frame. The tearful Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968) expresses her discomfort, we can see scenes of Cassavetes’s wife, Gena Row- that she is an acting body, a body pre- lands, in Minnie and Moskovitz (John tending, while in the final scene her Cassavetes, 1968), the tears of a girl af- disconnected from reality, fill the faces face is the index of a separation that is ter her boyfriend’s rejection in Shadows with emotions, making them overflow, happening at that moment and whose (John Cassavetes, 1959), or the tears of always to the limits of breakdown, only final outcome is as yet unknown: a young Chinese woman in a long, out- then to regain control of themselves. this final scene is left open, without of-frame and then out-of-focus shot in Cassavetes’s relentless camera hunts a narrative closure, and escapes the Husbands (John Cassavetes, 1970): the them down, makes off with them and controlled limits of the fiction. What concentration of time shared, com- draws them out in prolonged close-ups, mattered to Ray was the melody of the pacted and lived out in those faces has magnified all the more by the texture eyes, and the way cinema was able to such an intensity that it becomes dif- of the swollen 16mm print. They are capture the thoughts or the emotion ficult to distinguish where artifice ends shown as passive prey to all that passes flowing between filmmaker and ac- and reality begins. The intimate pain through them, all that flows and spills, tress: “«The camera is an instrument, that Ray exposes in Gloria Grahame’s tears, words, emotions” (Aumont, 1986: it’s the microscope which allows you tears has exploded, leaving only the ef- 161). to detect the melody of the look. It’s a fects of its devastation. As Jacques Au- Alongside this energetic dramatisa- wonderful instrument because its mi- mont would say: “the face could not go tion of the flow of time and emotions, croscopic power is for me the equiva- through all of this, the apocalypse and other filmmakers started working on lent of introspection in a writer, and the hardships, without being marked shots of suspended, abrasive dura- the unrolling of the film in the cam- by it. […] Long scenes of wordy conver- tion, the violence of prolonged film- era corresponds, in my opinion, to the sation, performed in a state of empathy ing, in which the actress is immersed

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the same image, depending on the film- maker’s perspective. In the different types of cinematic approaches to the tears of the actress we find, rather than different narrative forms, the ways in which different filmmakers build their ideas about time in working or in the work of the body.

Notes *The pictures that illustrate this article have Screen Test (Andy Warhol, 1964) The Mother and the Whore (La maman et la putain, Jean Eustache, 1972), been provided voluntarily by the author of the text; it is his responsibility to localize in an introspective image or an inner of Fassbinder or Werner Schroeter. But and to ask for the copyright to the owner. thought, as she starts to meditate or to while Schroeter starts with the iconic (Edition note.) search inside herself in response to be- face to take its indices to explosive ex- ing filmed without knowing what to do tremes, Fassbinder, who mythologises Bibliography or how to react. This is the device re- actresses in a different way, goes in Aprà, Adriano (1987). Roberto Rossellini. Il mio vealed in Ann Buchanan’s tears in her the opposite direction, starting with a metodo. Venice: Marsilio Editori. Screen Test (Andy Warhol, 1964). In the wounded, wrinkled face, with no make- Arnould, Dominique (1990). Le rire et les 1960s, starting with Tree Movie (Jack- up, to dream of filming an imaginary, larmes dans la littérature grecque d’Homère son Mac Low, 1960) and Warhol him- ideal face. This process is marked —un- à Platon. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. self, the spaces filmed highlighted their like the softness with which Schroeter duration as a major theme and compo- or Garrel filmed faces— by jealousy sitional rhythm, and cinema reached a and aggression. In Veronika Voss (Die level of poor or private realism where Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss, Rainer it had not yet been, a private bedroom, Werner Fassbinder, 1982), a film about the intimate space that would be the the decline of an actress in 1950s Ger- setting for some of the films of Garrel, many, the meeting with the journalist Akerman or Estauche. Having moved at the beginning of the film allows us to from the fifty-second reels used by the glimpse the almost abstract vestiges of Lumière to the ten-minute reels, the an old icon, of imaginary, ideal beauty. shot could now last longer and extend Veronika Voss is an old star, one who the synchrony between real time and could go from crying to laughter in a filmed time, at the same time broad- fraction of a second, who ends up con- ening the possibilities of the domestic sumed by drugs. In the end, on a film film and stretching the dramatic dura- set, she will be unable to express artifi- tion of the weeping to a more ordinary cial tears in a natural way and will have and realistic time, as in the final con- to use glycerine. Fassbinder films this fession of The Mother and the Whore scene as a psychological humiliation (La maman et la putain, Jean Eustache, and a visual corrosion. 1972), unsustainable precisely because These few fragments, which could of the sustained duration of the shot, be extended and problematised with utterly overwhelming and distressing. many others, at least point to the aes- Again, as we saw with Griffith or Stern- thetic tension generated in the sensibil- berg, the aesthetic of the filmmaker — ity of the film by the dual iconic and his desire for the shot— is identified indicial nature of the film portrait: with the aesthetic of the character — rather than separating by periods, what her emotion in the drama— through I wish to suggest here is that these two the rhymed time between life and its are the negative and the positive side of depiction. All of these questions on the forms of Veronika Voss the cinematic portrait were ultimately (Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss, turned into dramatic plots in the films Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)

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