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French postmodern cinema: Desire in question

Philibert, Céline Lydia Germaine, Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1992

UMI 300 N. ZeebRd Ann Arbor, MI 48106

FRENCH POSTMODERN CINEMA;

DESIRE IN QUESTION

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of the Ohio State University

By

Céline, Lydia, Germaine Philibert, B.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1992

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

M. Besnard

E. Holland

J. Mayne Adviser Department of French and Italian To my grand-mothers, Celine and Henriette, mother, Francine and sister, Brigitte.

11 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Judith Mayne who initiated in me a great interest for feminism and the cinema. Her

guidance and insight throughout the research have been

invaluable towards completion of my doctoral thesis. My

thanks go to the other members of my advisory committee.

Drs. Micheline Besnard and Eugene Holland.

I would like to thank my friends Denise Carroll for

the long distance phone conversations on psychoanalytical

discourse and Hélène Lowe-Dupas who helped me with her

technical expertise in Wordperfect 5.1. My last thanks go

to Danielle and Thomas who have been very supportive of my work.

Xll VITA

October 6, 1956 ...... Born - Avignon, France

1978 ...... L.E.A., Dijon University, Dijon, France

1978-1980...... M.B.A. Candidate Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

1980-1982 ...... Assistant to the director ODIFI, software company Valence, France

1984 ...... M.A. in French Literature The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1984-1988 ...... The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1988-1990 ...... Assistant Professor of French De Paul University Chicago, Illinois

1990-present ...... Assistant Professor of French S.U.N.Y. Potsdam, New York

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: French and Italian.

Studies in Feminism and Cinema: Dr. Judith Mayne 19th and 20th centuries: Dr. Micheline Besnard Critical theory: Dr. Eugene Holland.

IV TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... ü i

VITA ...... iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Notes to introduction ...... 24

CHAPTER PAGE

I. DESIRE IN NARRATIVE: FROM A REALISTIC TO AN UNCONSTRAINED NARRATIVE ...... 26

Notes to chapter I ...... 62

II. FILM THEORY AND DESIRE: FROM AN ONTOLOGICAL TO A PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEW OF CINEMA ..... 65

Notes to chapter II ...... 102

III. PSYCHOANALYTIC NARRATIVE : DE/CONSTRUCTION OF THE FEMALE/MALE SPEAKING SUBJECT AND DESIRE ...... 106

Notes to chapter III ...... 133

IV. POSTMODERN CINEMA: THE FEMININE FABRIC .... 135

Notes to chapter IV ...... 165

V. SANS TOIT NI LOI: FRAGMENTATION AND DESIRE . 168

Notes to chapter V ...... 201

VI. 3702 LE MATIN: HYSTERICAL NARRATIVE : MONSTER IMAGE/WORD NARRATIVE AND A DIFFERENT CHARACTER ...... 202

Notes to chapter VI ...... 234

V VII. CHOCOLAT; THE NARRATIVE OF A WOMAN'S DESIRE ...... 235

Notes to chapter VII ...... 266

CONCLUSION ...... 267

Notes to conclusion ...... 277

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 278

vx INTRODUCTION

Twenty years ago, in a comparison of the cinema with other art media, Noël Burch announced in Theory of Film

Practice the end of the dependence of cinema upon literature ;

The contemporary film narrative is gradually liberating itself from the constraints of the literary or pseudo-literary forms that played a large part in bringing out the 'zero point of cinematic style' that reigned supreme during the 1930's and 1940's and still remains in a position of some strength today. ^

In claiming that the progressive separation of film from literary narrative contributed to the development of the cinema, Burch has failed to account for the concomitant development of literature and cinema and thus has failed to incorporate the alteration of Western thinking modes in his analysis of the cinema with other art-forms.

In adapting literary works to the screen, the cinema has found itself deeply entrenched in routine and comfortable cinematic habits and has thus prioritized a realistic narrative. Such narrative structures have responded to the demands of commercial cinema whose popularization depends upon standardized and repetitive cinematic forms. Yet, these narrative structures have hampered the development of the cinema as a full-fledged art form. i 2

Although the French cinema of the 20's and 30's has

proven to be quite innovative and different (by the works

of such different film-directors as L'Herbier, Gance,

Vigo, Renoir, Dulac), it has maintained a certain link to

literature, painting, dance and music. In the mid fifties

and in the sixties, writing and cinema have merged into a

novel relationship as the text was viewed more as a

perception forming its identity in the relationship

between the film and the spectator. Fulfilling Alexandre

Astruc's dream that the cinema would function as a

substitute for the pen,^ a group of young Parisian

students engaged a discussion on fundamental questions

germane to the cinema, narrative and their relationship with spectator and author. Intellectual reflections and

passion for the cinema led them into a different

conception of the cinema. Drawing on the nascent

linguistic and semiotic theories on systems of

representation, they considered the cinema to have an

identity of its own and to belong to the spectator.

Propagated in ciné-clubs and magazines (especially Cahiers

du cinéma) these "New Wave ideas" became popular and

contributed to a novel perception of narrative and cinema

as they established new "open" forms -self reflection

within the film, play with genres, via the use of

innovative film techniques and existing exterior decors.

These new open forms have become organic to the cinema 3 of the eighties. In that respect, contemporary French film narrative departs from the narrative of marginal or experimental cinema, the realism of the thirties and forties, and also the New Wave. No longer rebellious toward its long standing position as a photographic machine of reality, and abandoning its constant urge to discover cinematic possibilities, the cinema has turned toward the subject's relationship with society and narrative in an abandonment of traditionally-defined character.

In conventional cinema, the character emerges from crises shown or depicted by the film-narrative.

Defined in a perceptual rapport with the world, via sounds and colours, traditional characters stand out in contrast to or in unity with surrounding objects and/or secondary characters. Their identities are apprehended via differential presentations. For instance, some characters embody values or precise traits of personality because they are presented in relation with other characters who may or may not be part of society, or may embody a

confrontation of values such as education, morals and

faith.

As contemporary society experiences a loss of

traditional values (embodied by historical masculinity),

the cinema presents no longer a character whose values validate his/her identity. The character dissolves into 4 the socio-political environmental structures (infra and superstructural factors) that are in turmoil. In that respect, cinematic characters expose different personalities. The fe/male subject is reconsidered in that the character embodies onscreen societal structural changes. Characters emerge out of a mixture of traditional (narrative base) and modern (primacy of the image) styles, cinematic genres (the documentary and the fiction film), and a play between historical consciousness and self-consciousness. They lose their positions as main central agents in contemporary narrative: they do not lead the spectator towards a well-defined meaning but create in him/her a set of complex feelings. Unlike the social, political, economic and historical spacings of a conventional narrative that used to shape moral judgments

in the spectator, the contemporary cinematic spacings produce a kaleidoscope of impressions in the spectator.

Transcending the author's opinions and style that have prevailed during the New Wave era, film-narrative provides today a site that exceeds well-defined political, moral

and social spacings. It focuses on the aesthetic and political power of the image: it becomes a visual

spectacle.

The cinema occupies a significant position in Western

society since a high priority has been placed on

technological progress and the image. Such a posture has 5 furthered the dissemination of information across all institutions and domains and has made the image the privileged vehicle of that diffusion.

Embracing the specific socio-political concerns of the current turn of the century (the redefinition of the family unit, the repositioning of gender roles, the questioning of history in the experience of the collapse of ideological and political constructs), the cinema, video and television have become the primary representative media of our technological society. In that sense, they have also grown to be critical tools: they constitute a focal point for reflection and discussion about contemporary society and perceptual and conceptual modes. As plastic visual arts, they prioritize the idea of desire which finds its birthplace in the

image, at the intersection between the subject, language,

spectator and author. Finally, they tie aesthetics and

politics in an ever fluctuating notion of the subject whose "libidinal economy" ^ reshuffles and redistributes

the game cards between time and space, making both content

and form, aesthetics and politics a whole cinematic form.

Such an evolution of French cinema has taken place in

a political and aesthetic context permeated by literary,

linguistic, psychoanalytic, feminist and sociological

inquiries. These psychoanalytic, semiotic and cinematic

texts will identify the many contexts that situate 6 postmodern French cinema. Common to these many contexts is a preoccupation with the subject. The past twenty years have witnessed an enormous amount of interdisciplinary research on the subject. From a notion of man as a rational being, the definition has turned toward a notion of subject -i.e. a human being who is not solely defined by conscious actions but also by the unconscious and the surrounding environment which exert control on him/her.

Thus, my reflection will start with a review of the intricate web of theories on narrative and the subject and will point to their intertextual contributions to the cinema. The notion of desire is of significance in my study. Film narrative has traditionally focused on libidinal economy via a certain control of desire which has been elucidated by Laura Mu Ivey. * Indeed, she has argued that desire has been customarily and predominantly associated with woman whose body is generously displayed to the camera and/or narrationally used in order to please the male viewer. This situation has undoubtedly been the result of the establishment of a commonplace equation between the female body and narration -i.e., the female body as object of narration. It has also been argued among literary critics that this common practice is rooted in systems of representation in which a male narrative/desire is at work. 7

Film and literary narratives have thus carried on a male literary tradition that has considered woman as a source of inspiration and desire for man. From classic texts (Rabelais' works Pantagruel and Gargantua) that openly play with male or female corporeal elements, literature has witnessed a multitude of texts that have focused upon, prioritized and eroticized the female body.

Male writing has textualized the female body in that body parts have been purposefully covered or veiled as if censored, and their biological functions displaced. It is in this context that "body" has become a metaphor for text and woman a metaphor for desire. Roland Barthes has himself enmeshed body and text with his notion of

"jouissance." "Tout corps est une citation, du déjà-

écrit. L'origine du désir est la statue, le tableau, le livre." ® Unfortunately, the statue, painting and book have been perceived/written, for the most part, via a male sight/desire.

As the title of my study Postmodern French Cinema;

Desire in Question indicates, desire is an essential part of postmodernism since the dominant breaks of different disciplines demand a reconsideration of the construction of desire. I intend to show the ways in which film narrative has developed from a well-structured narrative of desire that has mainly relied on realism and its narrative structures, to a postmodern narrative in which 8 desire is constructed differently subsequent to the breaking down of theories of knowledge. Postmodern film narrative interfaces with what constitutes "the feminine,"

i.e. what has been named the repressed of the text, the

lack or excess of signifying processes. "Feminine" is the

term I choose to define the aesthetic discourse that

pervades contemporary film and literary narrative.

"Feminist" will qualify the political feminine discourse with its intent to critique and resist phallocentricism -

understood as the traditional male-constructed society.

The subject's environment has developed and has

reached a current condition which has been qualified as

"postmodern." ® In crisis, the speaking subject is being

relocated/redefined in the world and toward otherness.

The notion of "otherness" includes the non-self with its

various representative perceptual codes and systems. In

that condition, woman has emerged as one of the

fundamental ways of perceiving difference. She has stood

at man's side, although on the margins of society, looking

on (to use Mary Ann Doane's phrase).

Most sociologists and scholars have considered the

woman's economic autonomy, in her wish to enter society,

as the prodding factor for a break in the traditional

conception of the family. Because her economic autonomy

has finally been established, the traditional conception

of the family has been shaken up and the core constructs 9 of male identity (man traditionally identified in the public domain and woman in the private domain) have been imperiled.

Feminist scholars have identified the following points among such interdisciplinary research: a definition of the subject entails socio-political parameters that have been part of and validated by our patriarchal (male perceived and constructed) society. As the secret presence within such a definition, woman's desire has been repressed through the lenses of the male gaze which, in objectifying her, have kept her in a position necessary for the validation of his own identity. Consequently, woman has been considered and represented as "mysterious" and "magic" (Simone de Beauvoir) and more recently woman has been occupying an unarticulated space, a "topos"

(Teresa de Lauretis and several Anglo-American feminists. )

Within a distinctly Western separation of space and time, woman has been consistently associated with space and the private world, in opposition to man who has been traditionally seen along the time axis and in the public world. Such binarism, which has opposed space to time and inside to outside, has firmly marked and engraved set differences both in our modes of conceptualization and in our gender representations.

The films I have selected for the analysis of a postmodern narrative free woman from an objectifying 10 position, that is, woman as the nexus for a male narrative of desire. They exemplify a postmodern posture in that the relations between the spectator and film characters are multiple and exist at different levels, and the society and subject's sense of confusion is represented via an explosion of images. The cinematic spectacle is now presented as something to decipher and view. The spectator is drawn into a movement of images: the power of discourse of the image exceeds the representation of the particulars which were shown in great detail by traditional realistic film narrative. The subject's environment is no longer viewed as an infra and superstructural model, an economic, political or cultural phenomenon constructed by patriarchy. No longer defined according to a strict delineation of space and time, narrative does not respond to a need for specificity (as in the marginal cinema of the 20s) and its aesthetics do not meet a pre-set goal (the New Wave cinema was intent on freeing film narrative from constraining realistic discourse and ways of filming) . In the cinema of the eighties a sense of freedom emerges in the narrative movement and in a postmodern transgression of the thinking self. In its disruptive relation with classic representation, postmodern narrative speaks sexual difference differently while it simultaneously repositions desire. 11

The first four chapters will identify desire in the cinema as a notion of flux, movement and rhythm, drawing on the notion of the semiotic that French psychoanalyst and semiotician Julia Kristeva has developed at length in her works ranging from La revolution du langage poétique to more recent texts such as Pouvoirs de 1 ' horreur and

Histoires d'^amour. ’’ Kristeva's texts will help me to bridge different methods of talking about both the subject, meaning, and representation. To that end, I will examine various literary, cinematic, psychoanalytic and feminist theories of desire. The following chapters will examine postmodern film narrative in three films of the eighties. The analysis of these films will lead to the identification of the characteristics of postmodern cinema.

The opening chapter examines desire as it emerges from the context of structuralist and poststructuralist texts, as a narrative movement. Structuralists have created a totalizing structural model and applied a grid of conventions and rules to narrative; yet, they have elucidated movement in the text to be generated by the constant confrontation between difference and similarity.

Post-structuralists went one step further. Abandoning binarism, they have emphasized plurality and have rendered movement heterogeneous. Thus were born the notions of 12 text and textual movement. I will use these notions to initially approach a definition of desire.

Both literature and cinema have been the sites of theories on the relations between textuality and desire.

The point of departure of my study will be the analysis of the image of woman in Jean Renoir's realistic film narrative. La Bête humaine, ® which illustrates how the narrative use of woman, both in literature and cinema, testifies to the traditional structures that derive from a male perception and desire.

Film and literary narratives have grown from a classical form that privileges the development of fictive characters in a framework of cause and effect, and spatial and temporal relations, to a new and challenging form which prioritizes a decentering of the main character in a disrupted narrative. This new and challenging form has entailed a redefinition of desire and has pulverized the traditionally constructed male desire. From a process that has essentially depended on "realism" via the inscription of male desire on a female body, narrative has moved towards a downplay of realism, a criss-crossing of gender representations, another desire. The second part of the chapter will put forth a tentative definition of desire: narrative movement as a tantalizing flow (named

"desire") that relies on the play between metaphors and metonymies, presence and absence, time and space. 13

A review of classic film theories, in chapter two, will allow me to identify the elements that illustrate both the development of contemporary thought and cinema.

Given that reality is the very issue of cinema and that it is rooted in human perceptions and depends primarily upon them, the film must please the spectator's senses. In that respect it must bring the spectator close to an identification with the character and his/her environment, and provide the spectator with meaning and pleasure.

Aiming at identifying its object, the cinema, since its inception, has embraced and struggled with a set of preoccupations concerning the relationship between the cinema and reality.

Early film theorists do not preoccupy themselves with desire per se, yet their theories lend themselves to an implicit articulation of desire. In addressing the question "Qu'est-ce que le cinéma ?" Sergei Eisenstein,

André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer's answers entail and presuppose an ontology of film narrative. Their theories deal primarily with the significance of images in the representation of reality and the position of man as an intrinsic element of reality. The montage technique is for Russian theorist Eisenstein the best representation of reality. Bazin opposes this confrontation of differences in montage with the mise-en-scène which privileges the reality of images. Combining Eisenstein and Bazin's 14 theories, Kracauer envisages the cinema to be the

"redemption of reality."

In the wake of post-structuralism and on the threshold of postmodernism, French film maker and critic

Jean-Luc Godard raises provocatively the issues of sign and language in cinema. A key figure in the development of film making and criticism, Godard stresses the presence of wo/man in a society of signs and symbols and shows how the cinema owes its existence to language and systems of representation. In so doing, Godard deconstructs the cinema, narrative and desire. Later on, following his initiative, Christian Metz, in France, and Stephen Heath, in England, refine film theory in light of new writings in critical theory, especially in psychoanalysis and deconstruction. After considering the cinema as a language system made of codes and subcodes, Metz views the cinema as a production and the subject as central to his theories. Bridging the distance between Kracauer's and

Metz's interests in questioning the signification of reality. Heath turns towards film movement and production as he asks more fundamental questions related to the functioning of reality in cinema. He thus elicits desire to be the energy of contradiction in the film text. With a redefinition of spectatorship as the experience of reading rather than consuming a product, Metz and Heath's works have joined Godard's challenge to the spectator's 15 position in film viewing and have led film theory towards a psychoanalytic understanding of cinema. More specifically. Heath has joined the North American feminist film theorists who are attempting to reinvent the cinema.

The incorporation of sexual difference in film theory marks the most recent development in film studies as it has already pervaded so many other disciplines.

Chapter three addresses Sigmund Freud's and Jacques

Lacan's theories of desire and a derived theory by Julia

Kristeva. Besides offering linguistic-semiotic insights for a theory of the subject, psychoanalysis facilitates an understanding of the relations that have contributed to the construction of the male subject and as such, provides ways to articulate a different notion of desire which eventually represents the feminine spacings.

Psychoanalysis has institutionalized the construction of the subject according to fixed gender identity and has been challenged by feminists. The subsequent de/construction of male identity has given women the possibility to define their space: they have voiced the failings of structuralist positions by providing new critical and aesthetic theories of their own. By involving a link between aesthetics and politics, and in questioning the dualities and contradictions of a male discourse, women's works interface with postmodern productions. 16

Kristeva's theory of the semiotic offers an alternate direction for the conceptualization of the subject. Her notion of the semiotic accounts for the subject's drives

and their articulations in the text. Representing a key point for contemporary thought, her work blends various

disciplines and modes of conceptualization and points to what characterizes postmodernism: a constant state of

crisis and destabilization. With the inscription of

convergent thinking modes in discourse, Kristeva provides

an articulation of a feminine discourse in postmodernism.

Chapter four considers postmodernism to be the coming

of age of conceptual modes and also the juncture of

different disciplines and thoughts that converge and

pervade the practical world where the border between

practice and theory effaces itself. In that respect, the

development of literary criticism as well as the

ineluctable development of our information society

testifies to the merging of Western modes of

conceptualization.

In today's socio-political condition representation

has acquired new modes: following a period of time when

reliance on set beliefs and legitimation were the norms,

representation now explores an infinite set of intertwined

games between space and time (and an indiscernible blend

between fe/male subjects). Jean-Francois Lyotard has

identified such a situation as "postmodern," that is, a 17 condition in which "grand” narratives break into an array of iiTiall narratives whose legitimation is acquired via games. ® The postmodern era is thus viewed as a crisis of meaning in which traditional knowledge (embedded in great narratives) no longer has primacy and in which the subject always resides out there, outside all existing conceptual frames. Postmodern narrative is characterized by a loss of the referent in the plethora of signifiers and by the dissolution of the subject (here, the character) into language (in narrative).

The concluding chapters will examine three contemporary French films in which a postmodern narrative is at work. These films distinguish themselves by their cine-narratives and texts that convey the characteristics of our society; the crisis of Western thought and cultural authority and the questioning of the male subject which has nearly always stood unitary and centered. Postmodern

French cinema offers new ways of looking; a different character bears witness to both the precarious primacy of the male point of view and the fragile presence of woman in a narrative which is engrossed in its own object, that of a visual spectacle.

Thus, the identification of the spectator with the character functions differently via a different narrative.

Postmodern film-narrative calls for an active spectatorship while it bears the marks of an elusive 18 narrative. Indeed, it divulges what has been so far repressed and simultaneously dissolves itself into movement, frequency and rhythm. Narrative no longer involves a historical subject who is a victim or responsible agent, nor does it bear a consciousness which conveys meaning and identity. It conveys, in Kristeva's words, a "poetic language" in which the "semiotic" is set free by the " symbolic " which is in crisis."

Subsequently, the subject emerges as a movement and archaic rhythm and positions itself at the threshold of its origins, between biology and language. Narrative becomes elusive, operating in a structure of repetition and an absence of meaning, in the space of all-mighty desire.

I have arbitrarily limited my study to the French cinema of the eighties. The eighties are marked by a novel representation in which characters and their environment suggest a distinct contemporary experience.

Different from the cinematic characteristics of say, the

Avant-Garde and the New-Wave of the sixties or seventies, postmodern films do not claim any new ways of telling stories and do not show a definite abandonment of linearity in film narrative. Rather, they seek in a different notion of character the borders between the feminine and masculine, life and death, and subject and text. The fabric of postmodern film narrative is 19 interwoven with in-different small narratives which create different cinematic spaces. Previously subjected to the author and/or main character's perception, central/traditional meaning is now transgressed.

Contemporary film embraces new spacings in the production and reiteration of slick cinematic images.

Agnès Varda's Sans toit ni loi examines the position of the female subject in and toward society and language, and brings forth the idea that wether used or unused, language leads to insignificance. Woman is positioned between knowledge and society, insignificance and self. A close examination of the film's structures will reveal the play between the multiple intricate small narratives. They decenter the main character and lead the spectator to indifference.

The film is about the fatal story of a young female drifter told via an image narrative and word narrative set up by witnesses. It is structured on the basis of a repetition of physical (images) and semantic (words) death, and the production of a discontinuous enunciation.

The tensions created between the diegetic (the story) and

extra-diegetic (the story-telling) levels and the narrative ' s images and words maintain the discontinuity of the enunciation. The intersection of the woman's story

told in images with the woman's story told via the other characters' words, produces an impression of emptiness and 20 insignificance to her death in the spectator. In the destruction of meaning, the narrative, fraught with metaphors and metonymies, releases energy and desire in the sub-relations between words and images.

The second film, Jean-Jacques Beineix's 37o2 le matin, explores the feminine voice within the crumbling structures of the male discourse and narrative, via a male hysterical text. 37Q2 le matin is a love-story between two young people who, in different ways, question our patriarchal society. Their marginalization is presented via insanity and hysteria which simultaneously enter their lives and pervade the cine-text. In adhering to a contemporary notion of culture and space, 3702 le matin has been extremely popular among young viewers who, although influenced by patriarchal French society, are experiencing its breaks and ruptures simultaneously with a nascent notion of contemporary society. The film reproduces a state of confusion in France's socio-economic and political envisonment with a great combination of humor, sadness, visual beauty and love. Within a narration of sexual difference the film explores the overlapping of gender definitions, not so much within a socio-political transformation of actions or attitudes, but through a different engagement of the reader/spectator with hysteria and film narrative. The use of colours

(primary colours), sounds (voices and music) and camera 21 angles (which defy their assigned conventional functions) becomes characteristic of postmodern cinema. Contemporary

film narrative refines its photographic contours and thus produces onscreen a hyper-realistic society-

In Chocolat Claire Denis explores in a very

compelling way the notions of society and culture, time

and space, via a woman's narrative/desire. Expressed on

different levels and from multiple points of view, desire

emerges out of an intricate rapport between the socio­

economic fabric of Africa and the woman's experience.

The film evokes the story of a young woman who

travels back to Cameroun, the place where she grew up, in

order to find her origins. She searches for such a site

through her memories while traveling with an Afro-American

man who gave her a ride. Via a female gaze (established

from the outset, the young girl's gaze transforms itself

into the mother's gaze), the young woman rediscovers the

African country in a blend of sounds and images. Memories

contribute to the construction of desire; remembering

Africa not only as a precise place defined by specific

socio-political circumstances but as a locus that brings

sensuality, human experiences and objects together.

In addressing a different notion of character, these

films exemplify what I call postmodern French cinema.

These films evoke a certain disenchantment, a social mood

of resignation and a breakdown of any organized entity. 22

All these elements create a social climate that positions the character differently; the notion of character embraces a redefinition of sexual differences and relationships between wo/man and society, the subject and representation, and finally desire and narrative.

Differences between masculine and feminine discourse, male and female desire, are discussed in a new articulation of the relationship between man and woman which has been created by our society in crisis.

Woman is displaced from the ensnaring grip of images to the decentered, opened flow of images in a narrative which does not territorialize her and in which the sacrosanct male point of view gives way to another undefined point of view. These films exemplify an articulation of desire that transgresses the boundaries of male identity, in a movement towards a new challenging narrative in which the fe/male spectator participates, engaging similarly with its narrative structures. Woman in a postmodern narrative is no longer alienated by the story and the objectifying gaze of the camera. These three movies enhance the challenging work of the postmodern narrative which presents a decentered character within collapsing social structures. The female character emerges from new cinematic spacings which used to define male identity-his neurosis, and society. She is on the road, between society and nature, between the public and 23

the private, among mother and/or father and lovers. She

situates herself also on the threshold of what constitutes

reality and fantasy, reason and madness.

Postmodern French cinema asserts differences: a

different construction of the object, a different mode of

organizing meaning and a different language of desire.

These differences are embodied in a different character, whose self-consciousness plays with the historical

consciousness of the narrative. Both male and female

spectators are addressed within a different narrative. 24

Notes to Introduction

1. Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969, p.15.

2. Alexandre Astruc was a young film-maker and critic who fought in 1948 for a total freedom of the cinema. His famous theory "la camera stylo" was to appeal to a whole generation of film directors and film critics who believed too that the cinema as a means of writing would become as flexible and subtle as the written language.

3. "Libidinal economy" is the term used by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in, respectively. Economie libidinale, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1974 and L'anti-Oedioe, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972. The expression refers to a system which blends the sexual and the environment. Deleuze and Guattari concretized such a process into the "machine désirante."

4. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen, vol. 16, nO. 3 (autumn 1975), pp.6-18 and "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Inspired by Duel in the Sun," Framework. nOs. 15, 16, 17 (1981), pp. 12-15, reprinted in Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989.

5. See Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973.

6. Postmodernism will be discussed in chapter IV.

7. See Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974, Pouvoirs de 1'horreur. Editions du Seuil, 1980 and Histoires d 'amour. Editions Denoël, 1983. 25

8. Jean Renoir, La Bête humaine, adapted from Emile Zola's novel, produced by Paris Film Production -Robert Hakim, released in 1938, with Jean Gabin, Simone Simon and Fernand Ledoux.

9. Jean-Francois Lyotard defines postmodernism in his major work La condition postmoderne; rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979.

10. See Julia Kristeva, "Sémiotique et symbolique". La révolution du langage poétique. Editions du Seuil, 1974, pp.17-100.

11. Agnès Varda, Sans toit ni loi, written by Agnès Varda, music by Joanna Bruzdowicz, photography by Patrick Blossier, produced by Ciné-Tamaris, released in 1985, with Sandrine Bonnaire, Macha Méril, Stéphane Freiss, Yolande Moreau, Yakiaoui Assouna and Marthe Jarnias.

12. Jean-Jacques Beineix, 3702 le matin, adapted from the novel by Philippe Djian, Editions Bernard Barrault, music by Gabriel Yared, photography by Jean-Francois Robin, produced by Claudie Ossard and Jean-Jacques Beineix, released in 1987, with Jean -Luc Anglade, Béatrice Dalle, Gérard Darmon and Consuelo de Haviland.

13. Claire Denis, Chocolat, written by Claire Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau, music by Abdullah Ibrahim, photography by Robert Alazrahi, produced by MK2 Marin Karmitz, released in 1986, with Isaach de Banhole, Giulia Boschi, Emmanuelle Chaulet and Francois Clouzet. CHAPTER I

Desire in Narrative:

from a realist to an unconstrained narrative.

Subsequent to the extensive research which has been conducted in various disciplines, the nature of desire is seen today as intricately linked to language, meaning, and subjectivity and is thus difficult to isolate. Common to language, meaning and subjectivity is narrative, the point of departure for an examination of the construction of desire.

Phenomenologically, as a moment of conflation between telling and interpretation, narrative establishes a link between knowledge and telling. As such, it positions and links the subject with otherness -i.e. the non-self.

Psychoanalytically, as a rapport between the private and public domains, narrative sets up a link between the subject's unconscious and consciousness. It embodies all relations created by the position of the subject in the world while it maintains a definition of space and time and the subject. Sociologically, as both the vernacular of social constructs and the essential formative tool of

26 27 the subject's identity, narrative is an ineluctable expression and communicative mode. As such, it invests in the economic, political, historical and cultural determinations of the subject and, simultaneously, creates an order that releases both intelligibility and significance.

Such an order is established by the logico-linguistic coherence of text that relies on the repetition of narrative structures and the subject's familiarity with them. Emerging from this coherence, a hermeneutic meaning has, in Peter Brook's words, "contained desire to the realm of family romance or domestic drama" ^ and has, in feminist terms, maintained phallocentricism (male- perceived reality) in systems of representation.

In the first part of the chapter, the image will be identified as the necessary place for the construction of male desire in a traditional narrative. An examination of

Jean Renoir's film narrative La Bête humaine (1938) will provide insights for a discussion of the rapport between telling/showing and interpretation, and the significance of images as they guide the construction of male and female identities. In light of feminist arguments, I will examine how in a realist film-narrative, a definition of the male character depends upon his actions whereas the definition of the female character is largely dependent upon the search for male identity and the framing of the 28 woman in space. Examining the mapping of desire in the structures of tales and thus, mythology, Teresa de

Lauretis declares in her challenging work Alice Doesn't that:

....the hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter. ^

An analysis of the history of gender representation has made visible an distinctive sexual separation. Socio­ economic relations as well as set differences between time and space determine the position of male and female characters and the narrative form. Plotted along the time axis, the male character becomes the main narrative agent whereas, plotted in space, the female character offers her body to textualize the male desire.

In the second part of the chapter desire will be defined, using the arguments of Tzvetan Todorov and Roland

Barthes' theories on narrative and text. I will select the play between similarities and differences and thus, metaphor and metonymy, to characterize a desire/narrative

freed from the structuring constraints exerted by realistic conventions.

Telling and interpretation depend upon the readability and deciphering of a text. This readability

is subject to the logico-linguistic coherence of the 29 written text in literature, and the image and word text in cinema. Because the series of images that compose a film

is put together in a way similar to language, thus

acquiring a certain syntax and greunmar while ordering the

sequence of images, film narrative has been systematically compared with literary narrative. However, although there

is an apparently equal sign function between image and word, images differ quite significantly from words.

First, an image has a greater and more global impact on the reader than a word because it is immediately memorized via the recording power of the retina. Second, while the word has in itself a fixed signified and signifier (many words are needed to express a distinct meaning), the image

relies on a group of details to generate a meaning. More

direct, and thus more precise (because visual), meaning

from an image is narrowly linked to ideology. The image

is a powerful contributing factor to the perception of

reality: it permits an instant capture of time and space

as it immediately reproduces what is seen and known.

Spatio-temporal elements in the text recreate our physical

reality and establish an order that sets cause and effect

relations and determines knowledge and truth via narrative

points of view which are established by cinematic

techniques such as shot reverse shot, close-up, deep

focus, camera angle and voice-over. More specifically,

spatio-temporal elements determine the position of main 30 and secondary characters at the narrational level (story) and, at the narrative level (discourse), that of the reader/viewer who, because of repetition of and familiarity with narrative structures, identifies with characters.

Although spatio-temporal elements contribute to the structure of narrative, they may be constraining to narrative. Simultaneously directing the image-flow and shaping the reading process, spatio-temporal elements place constraints on the relationship between the spectator and cine-text; they lead the spectator to read on a continuum, in an uninterrupted amount of time limited to the film length. In creating movement and therefore pressure on the reader who does not have time to see, the image-flow controls the spectator's viewing process. In that respect, the writer and film-director adopt different approaches to text production. In cinema a lavish use of details is prevented because the film-image already offers the spectator so much at a time. Unlike the word, the image does not limit itself to a definite object but captures & whole group of objects and details within the camera frame. Since each shot is primarily a photographic registration of "reality," the film-director, unlike the writer, does not completely control the set of details comprised in the image reality. Seized from "reality," details invade the space of the image. In order to 31 captivate the spectator's look and underline a meaning, the camera focuses on certain details so that a specific meaning is produced in the spectator's mind and a certain impression is created on the spectator's feelings. To that goal, details that constitute crucial images or scenes may be focused on, or images may be deprived of their background so that one or two elements which

"realistically" compose them are singled out. Alfred

Hitchcock's cinema illustrates the former alternative in that, in momentous scenes, it forfeits an abundance of details and focuses on one particular object so that this detail is anchored in the spectator's memory. Films such as Alain Cavalier's film Thérèse (1986) illustrate the latter in which the technique is efficiently and beautifully used to convey the modesty and austerity of the targeted subject-matter; the life of a nun in a monastery. The produced "reality" in the first example is sustained by a traditional notion of understanding whereas the created "realistic" feeling of the second example is obtained via a non-realistic spatio-temporal frame.

Pillars of the construction of meanings, spatio- temporal elements establish relations between a particular image and other images. The complexity of the image comes from the fact that the image is made of relations between its own text and the cine-text as well as relations between the narrator/camera who tells and the spectator 32 who interprets. These relations are embedded in denotative and connotative meanings that convey ideology and simultaneously create the sense of repetition and familiarity experienced by the reader/viewer. These meanings constitute the point of encounter of the viewer's opinions with the ideology that pervades the text.

Indeed, the spectator is trained to "understand" the image, that is, to establish relations between what is said/shown and what is known through subjectivity, the subject's historical past and background. Via the spectator's subjectivity and fcimiliarity with narrative structures, the image transmits a whole ideology: in its connotations it tells more than it denotatively or explicitly says. Roland Barthes's analysis of the image of a young black soldier in front of the French flag in

Mythologies (1957), ^and Jean-Luc Godard's study of Jane

Fonda's photograph taken during her post-war visit to

Hanoi in Letter to Jane (1972), * are very convincing in wrenching a hidden ideology out of the numerous connotations transmitted by an image. These two examples show the complexity and the different levels of the semiotic system. An initial reading might start from the particular details of these two pictures and spin off towards a larger meaning brought forward step-by-step within the limits of our socio-historical background and ideology. 33

Because of the structures of repetition that enable the reader to experience familiarity, narrative has traditionally been viewed as a mimesis. However, narrative cannot account for the world in its totality since a comprehension of the world remains idealistic.

The scientific perception of our world and ourselves is improving every day and our adaptation capabilities are incessantly refined, but also limited. Therefore, as a means of representation of our world, narrative operates solely as an approximate totalization of the subject. The human drive for totality seduces the reader/narrator into a fleeting and alluring affair which has so far territorialized desire to the female body and has instilled a male production that is materialized and objectified by a male discourse/ideology.

Jean Renoir's cine-narrative. La Bête humaine. exemplifies pertinently the power of the image and the use of woman in a "comprehensive" narrative. The examination of this narrative will show how, within the constructs of a realistic cinematic discourse, in de Lauretis's words,

"woman is both absent and captive; she is absent as theoretical subject and captive as historical subject." ® 34

La Bête humaine; a study of the image of woman within a traditional narrative.

Jean Renoir's adaptation of Emile Zola's naturalistic work. La bête humaine,* provides a compelling illustration of the cinematic use of literary realistic conventions.

These realistic conventions produce a male identity via the recounting of the character's actions and a female identity via the framing of her body. In its entirety La bête humaine deals with and stages sexual difference by keeping the woman captive and narrating a male desire that guides and "comprehends" the film narrative.

The plot is announced, worked through and concluded by means of a series of actions performed exclusively by men: Roubaud (Fernand Ledoux), the assistant station- master, discovers that Séverine (Simone Simon), his wife, has been seduced at an early age by Grandmorin (Jacques

Berlioz), an industrial tycoon and landowner, who continues to "take care of her." Roubaud decides to kill

Grandmorin and forces Séverine to be his accomplice. On the night of the crime, Lantier (Jean Gabin), a locomotive engineer who is on his way to see his aunt Phasie

(Charlotte Clasis), accidentally meets Séverine aboard the train bound for Amiens: he notices her as she leaves the scene of the crime. In order to dissipate all suspicion he may have, she engages in small talk with him in the car corridor. Following this first encounter, they meet on 35 many occasions and end up falling in love. Yielding to her plea for an unrestricted love, Lantier sets his mind to kill Roubaud. On the night he is to commit the murder, he is caught in a frantic rage of depression and kills her instead. The next morning, he throws himself off his cherished locomotive.

In addition to actions, realistic conventions demand, according to Philippe Hamon's study on realism, that the protagonist's identity be constructed according to a well- defined milieu and historical past and that a narrative voice grant authority to the protagonist. ’’ Lantier's

actions take place in a socio-historico-geographical

environment (the railway industry, the thirties, north of

Paris) and are explained by Emile Zola's prefatory

remarks, cited in the film's credits. Marked by the

Rougon-Macquarts' atavism, the protagonist owes his

"identity" to the fatal bond he holds with his ancestors who have relayed an alcoholic dependency from generation

to generation.

To be added to Hamon's characteristics of a realistic

narrative are of course the link between the male subject with actions (time) and the female subject with emotions

(space), which are constructive of sexual identities. La

Bête humaine "met en scène" (puts into play) a man,

Lantier, who is defined in relation to female characters;

Séverine, Flore (Blanchette Brunoy), his cousin and. 36

Phasie, his godmother. These women function as social markers in that they determine the male's origins and as emotional supports. Lantier is also defined in relation to his fireman Pecqueux (Julien Carette) and his locomotive, la Lison, who function as determinants of his socio-economic environment. Finally, alcoholism defines his psychological condition, and explains his hysterical behavior.

As for the woman, she is put on stage ("mise sur scène") to display her beauty. As the object of the look, the access to her own identity is thus barred.

Characteristic of a realistic narrative, the woman functions in La Bête humaine as a sign. Camera-framed, her feminine looks imprison and silence her as she becomes the object of the male character's and spectator's gaze.

Narratively, she is incarcerated within the boundaries set by a realistic discourse: she articulates both the development of the film problem and the potential directions of the narrative process. Via her limited speech and seductive looks, Séverine becomes the focal point towards which male characters ' attention is directed and thus, is able to seal the fatal bond she establishes with them. As a sign, she is circulated between men.

Handed over between men (from Grandmorin to Roubaud and

Lantier) the woman serves as the narrative interface of different socio-economic and environmental worlds. As 37 such, she constitutes the juncture between the world of hard work in the railway industry (represented by Roubaud and Lantier) and the world of money generated by the railway industry, symbol of the capitalistic development

(represented by Grandmorin). Deprived of an identity, the woman is depicted solely as the holder of a visible yet silent position.

The development of the main character, Lantier, pivots on a silent and despondent personality. Indeed, he keeps silent about the murder and pursues his affair with

Séverine. He has recourse to unexplainably violent actions at unexpected moments. For instance, while kissing Flore, he has to fight against a destructive impulse which seems to overtake him at the blaring sound of a passing train. Later on, he reiterates similar violence toward Séverine as she talks about her past relationship with Grandmorin. The substitution of a body for a verbal language can be explained in two ways: according to Zola's prefatory words, alcoholism has marked the Rougon-Macquarts and, in an attendant reading, train machinery has had an impact on Lantier. Indeed, Charcot, the rcknown Salpétrière doctor with whom Freud studied, established a correlation between railway accidents and their consequent traumatic neuroses: "spine and brain shocking accidents constituted a specific manifestation of male hysteria." ® 38

The words granted to the woman have a specific function: they explicitly or implicitly lead male characters into action. Séverine narrates men's physical abuse and ill-treatment; male sexual desire is ignited and vengeance is expected. First, Roubaud is outraged by

Sévérine's spoken words that disclose her incestuous relationship with Grandmorin and consequently plans to kill him. Second, Grandmorin is set up by her written words that establish a rendez-vous to meet her aboard the

Amiens train. Finally, taken in by her small talk and seduced by her eyes, Lantier keeps silent about the murder. Later on in the film, solicited by her words,

Lantier attempts to murder Roubaud.

Falling for her looks and words, the male characters become the woman's victims-Grandmorin is killed by

Roubaud; Roubaud disintegrates after the murder; Lantier commits suicide. Séverine is portrayed as a woman with physical beauty and no morals: she innocently goes back to her godfather, unfeelingly encourages Lantier to kill

Roubaud, and when Lantier turns out to be incapable of doing it, she turns her seduction towards her husband's young colleague. Thus a moral dimension is added to the dyad of sex and money to emphasize the abjection that

Séverine is to produce in the spectator. In a crucial scene, Séverine replaces Roubaud as the evil character.

Framed in the background, Séverine catches sight of the 39 foregrounded Roubaud who is cherishing the watch and money of murdered Grandmorin. Although portrayed as a lost cause person, Roubaud's murder has set the tone for the film: an immoral action is punished. Like the godfather who disappears because he has seduced a young girl, the young girl disappears because she has no morals. Such an action reiterates the logic of the monotheist point of view.

Yet, Sévérine's character is not developed by the narrative: she is captured by men with whom she bonds and upon whom she depends. Grandmorin represents the classic sugar daddy on whom the woman relies to satisfy her caprices. It seems as if Séverine fell in love with

Lantier in order to escape the bond she had unwillingly sealed with her husband. In an attempt to free herself from the marriage bond, and in order to solidify her relationship with Lantier, she asks him to kill her husband.

As a topos, the woman embodies a desire/energy which is male-specific in that it is characterized by, on the one hand, sexual male fantasy for the unattainable woman

(she belongs to somebody else) and on the other hand, the expression of a male "lack-in-being." It is in a visual contrast between the woman and the railway environment that the woman's unattainability is first addressed. The difference between how the woman looks and the "look" of 40 the environment ostracizes Séverine. Indeed, framed by the window of their small apartment, her precious looks stand out against the male realm: the apartment overlooks the grimy premises of the station that are busy and noisy with workers and machines. Such physical differences are maintained throughout the film: the male environment is characterized by a world of machines and is depicted as noisy, dusty, and rough and the female realm (represented by Séverine, Flore and Phasie) is defined as clean, elegant, natural and thus extremely tantalizing in that it functions as an escape from the alienating mechanical world.

Second, the unattainability of the woman is illustrated in the classic portrayal of feminine appearance: Sévérine's clothes, make-up and mannerisms give her a sophisticated and precious look, and the young kitten that she holds in her arms makes her look fragile and vulnerable. ® Female beauty and vulnerability are later suggested in the shot at a lake, when a couple of young men lustily look at Flore who is dipping her feet in the water. In the following scene, she is assaulted by

Lantier himself. Embracing her, he becomes confused at the blaring horn of a train, loses control as he attempts to strangle her.

The link between money and sex constitutes in La Bête humaine the trigger for the development of a male- 41 dominated narrative and is concretized in the cinematic image of the woman: she is present on the screen to please the male spectator's eye. The narrative shows the spectator that most male characters work at the station whereas Sévérine's protector, Grandmorin, does not. As a successful landowner, he has taken care of Séverine, the daughter of one of his employees. Such a statement underscores a link between money and sex: Grandmorin's financial success authorizes him the purchase of woman, in that he is the money-provider and Séverine the sex- provider. The woman belongs by birth to the working class, yet she is sexually associated with the financial world. In that respect, she crosses the boundaries between socio-economic classes. Symbolically, the woman represents the merger and confrontation of these two

socio-economic worlds. Roubaud and Lantier willingly and unwillingly act against the world of money to capture

Sévérine.

Imprisoned between signs, Sévérine remains unattainable to the reader/spectator; she is placed between two socio-economic signs, marriage (represented by

Roubaud) and money (Grandmorin). Having no access to love

(Lantier), she remains unattainable and only a sign and an object of the gaze: she is introduced by the camera as an

object of the gaze and she leaves the screen via a final 42 frame of her dead body to the sound of a song praising her physical beauty.

As an historical woman, the female character is captive: without ancestors, family ties (with the exception of Grandmorin who functions as a godfather), defining actions, and without attachment to a site or milieu, she has nothing to offer to the camera other than her body. She becomes prisoner of the socio-historico- economic constructs generated by a male perception and desire that have confined the woman to a position of object. As a theoretical woman, that is woman outside specific historical settings, she is deprived of her own identity and she is absent. Barred from signification and identity, she is used to establish a hermeneutic meaning that contributes to the exploration of the male's identity through the expression of his desire. Via a conventional notion of beauty, woman is exploited by what I call a constraining narrative.

By territorializing its own elements and coding its

"desiring productions" via the mediation of woman, such narrative hampers the flow of these very desiring productions. Constraints are announced right at the beginning of the film: in a single image Sévérine is forced on to the spectator to capture potential energies that lay there with the audience and to channel them into a constructed male desire. Similar to the initial belief 43 held by Taine and Zola that milieu, race and origin shape human beings' identities, the narrative makes us believe that the woman is prisoner of men in the sense that she depends exclusively upon them. There is no scene showing

Sévérine on her own or in company of others than her lovers. Woman is depicted as being dependent upon men and their milieu.

Like the opening of the film the closure reiterates the narrative constraints. Film narrative creates a movement by which the viewer conflates social and sexual differences towards the narrative end. The final "order" characterizes the best traditional narrative: Sévérine and

Grandmorin ' s disappearance solves the narrative problem in that it is justified by their extra-ordinary presence in a film which focuses on a world of work and machinery and, second, by their incestuous mating. Grandmorin has violated the symbolic position he holds as a father figure. The denouement of the film, Sévérine's murder and

Lantier's suicide, first asserts the significance of a system in which everything is linked and can be explained in cause and effect relationships. Second, it illustrates the woman's position: by separating Sévérine and Lantier and thus depriving the woman of love, the narrative ends without offering her the possibility to situate herself outside a designated role of object. As a sign, she is 44 subject to an ideological exploitation that captivates and constructs her as a desirable object for men.

Thus, La Bête humaine epitomizes the relations of a system in which society and reality are viewed in a unitarily centered way: everything has an explanation and man controls the intersection of money and scopic pleasure through the use and representation of woman. The ways in which the female character is presented and re-presented problematize her identity in that she is shown as the embodiment of social differences and the site where they are confronted. There is no solution concerning her own conflict as she is never given the opportunity to come to terms with it but only the occasion to stage it. It is in the enactment of these conflicts that textual gaps are created. However, released energy from these gaps is swiftly channelled by a phallocentric narrative which resolves the problem along the lines of a male desire and in the name of his Law. If it is true that the protagonist's actions and identity are characterized by the madness engendered by both the alienation of the world of automation and the impact of the genetically transmitted family past, it is also true that an abnormal representation of sexual difference leaves woman out, in that she is offered to the male gaze and is bound to be and remain appropriated. 45

The other narrative; desire as a free plav between similarities and differences, metaphors and metonymies.

Although film and literary narratives have been the object of constant inquiries expressed in many different forms, they have developed more open and flexible structures between the two world wars. They have enhanced the irony of "reality" by reflecting on their own object and have revealed the underlying relations between the text as a production process and the spectator as a cooperative producer of meaning. A definite cinematic turning point was established in 1928 with Luis Bunuel and

Salvadore Dali's film narrative of Un chien Andalou.

Radically challenging traditional narrative construction, the film brought to the screen the whole spectrum of human dreams and anxieties by resisting closure and dispersing its unity. The search for identity was no longer monolithic in that characters did not exclusively support the protagonist's central position. Marguerite Duras,

Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard's films are other noteworthy post world war illustrations of such a reconsideration of narrative and cinematic character.

They have given priority to an inner human language and have explored its encounter with the narrative in the many facets of image construction.

Despite alterations brought to the identification of the character, the textual and linguistic coherence of 46 narrative along with the construction of a coherent meaning or meanings remain present. With modernism, the work of the signifier has been revealed to the spectator as the emphasis in cinema and literature was placed on the process of story-telling. The work of the signifier consists in directing and shaping film narrative by tying together shots and sequences in an order which is tightly linked to a system of representation. Rooted in social constructs, all systems of representation establish resemblance between what is represented and what is representable. With its capacity of synchronizing or de-synchronizing images and sounds within spatial (screen boundaries) and temporal limits (film duration), the cinema creates a close resemblance to the world we see, and yet, at the same time, differs from it, because the presence of the signifier is irretrievably affirmed in the breaks of the narrative's image and sound tracks.

In order to minimize the visibility of these breaks, the signifier ties all images together so that the marks of discourse do not show, the illusion of reality is safeguarded and the spectator is pleased and satisfied in being transported to fantasy. As Noël Burch puts it:

For the mass of filmgoers, after all, what is in focus is, indeed, the diegesis, the illusory "world-experience" of a film. The work of the signifier, however sophisticated so long as it "keeps a low profile," so long as it does not draw a curtain of semantic noise between that 47

"world beyond the screen" and the "average spectator", is invariably so out of focus as to be indeed quite invisible.

The magic and the attraction of the cinema lie precisely in a presentation of "this world-experience" which effaces the existence of its very agent; the signifier. The cinema narrows a rapport between film-product and spectator-subject, building up a close bond between the subject and its world environment and, finally, indulges itself in the production of words and images to establish a link between the human being and the world.

Longing for the resolution of the narrative, the spectator's attention is funnelled towards the narrative signifying moment: the end which brings a denouement to the plot. In that process, the plot controls the spectator's attention towards the final resolution, holding back his/her potential energy and the Barthesian pleasure which could take place in the reading process.

A constrained narrative routes desire (the spectator's interest as well as his/her reading process) along a construction obtained by the "order" attributed to the flow of images and sounds.

Subsequent to the downplay of realism and the emergence of a different cinema, the disappearance, or at least, the effacement of a constraining narrative, has indeed opened the door to a different representation of desire. Desire becomes an unfettered play which frees the 48

spectator's energy by calling into question his/her perceptual capability and reading knowledge, bringing

criticism and practice together. With the use of novel

narrative techniques (breaks in linear narrative,

different representations of time, use of narrative voice,

play with narrative itself), story-telling has challenged

interpretation.

Characteristic of a traditional narrative, the

anticipation for a sequence of actions or an escalation of

emotions has given way to a different narrative, to

something that exists outside narrative structures and is

inherent to the narrative process, that is desire itself.

No longer a sole function of aesthetics as mimesis,

narrative is also a function of the non-narrated (the un­

said) that becomes visible through the mediation of the

loosening of the control of the cinematic signifier. I

turn to excimination of such narrative via a focus on the

Saussurean and Todorovean theories of similarities and

differences and their Barthesian theoretical developments.

Over the last several decades, literary criticism has

developed from a hermeneutic perspective, in which a

meaning hidden behind symbols is revealed, to a more

ontological approach in which the articulation of desire

becomes central. Thus, a definition of desire involves

both an initial structuralist approach to meaning and a

further study of semiotic development by 49 poststructuralists. In both approaches language, as a system of codes, determines the specificity of these approaches.

The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure conceived of closed systems built upon implicit consensus (in that sense, they converge differences), and owing their existence to the interplay of the signifier (word/object) and the signified (concept) which is culture-engineered.

Systems are set up in order to grasp the signification of signs in languages. With the mediation of words, meanings are attributed to objects and analogously, the subject finds its meaning. Thus, the subject is tied to

"reality."

Structuralists have essentially focused on logical structures and their transformations in order to establish the articulation of signifying systems. In other words, signification is not placed on the events of the subject but on the structural relations of the system and on the autonomy of language depending exclusively on words and structure which are constitutive of narrative form and grammar.

In Poétique de la prose. Tzvetan Todorov distances himself from De Saussure by considering the functioning of the narrative to be governed by two categories; difference and resemblance. According to him "le texte constitue un système qui ne doit pas s'identifier au sytème 50

linguistique mais qui doit être mis en rapport; un rapport de contiguité et de ressemblance." Todorovean

narrative is made up of sequences of stability and

instability which reflect the passage from one state to

another. Two functions articulate the play between

similarities and differences - the descriptive function

covers passages of change and the denominative function

covers stability and instability sequences. These two

functions contribute to the constitution of a universal

grammar which is the language of all signifying systems

and gives a definition to man himself. "Elle est

universelle non seulement parce qu'elle informe toutes les

langues de l'univers, mais parce qu'elle coïncide à la

structure de l'univers lui-même."

Narrative instability generates movement and produces

a series of actions. Traditionally prodded by the first

absence of causality, the presence of the veil that is

lifted little by little off a mystery (act or character)

or the sudden demasking, movement is also maintained by

the partial explanations given as testimony by secondary

narratives or characters. In so doing, Todorov underlines

that if only one element of the two (difference and

resemblance) exists, a traditional story cannot take

place :

La simple relation de faits successifs ne constitue pas un récit: il faut que ces faits soient organisés, c'est-à-dire, en fin de compte, qu'ils 51

aient des éléments en commun. Mais si tous les éléments sont communs, il n'y a plus rien à raconter. Or la transformation représente justement une synthèse de différence et de ressemblance, elle relie deux faits sans que ceux-ci puissent s'identifier. Plutôt qu'"unité à deux faces", elle est une opération à double sens: elle affirme à la fois la ressemblance et la différence; elle enclenche le temps et le suspend, d'un seul mouvement; elle permet au discours d'acquérir un sens sans que celui-ci devienne pure information; en un mot: elle rend possible le récit et nous livre sa définition même.

Language has retained linguists ' and anthropologists ' attention as the site of production of meaning.

Phenomenologically, meaning necessitates the consideration of the subject's utterance. To that effect, language alone does not suffice; speech and discourse need to be considered. While linguists target the sentence or utterance, semiologists search for meaning in the consideration of the utterance "I" and underlying codes and relations.

The pioneers of rhetoric (Plato and Aristotle) envisaged that meaning/truth could be apprehended in the sentence and word order. In order to discover this meaning, they defined a certain number of figures that would link "reality" (what can be seen and experienced) to an abstract notion of reality. Subsequent to De

Saussure's work in linguistics, Roman Jakobson has considered that discourse orders itself according to two axes: metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor is a figure of discourse that entails resemblance by placing the 52 figurative meaning of a word in place of the literal meaning, and metonymy is a figure of discourse which entails contiguity.

Emerging from the friction created between difference and resemblance, narrative movement is embedded in metaphors and metonymies. These two tropes work in a parallel way since they both deal with association, one on a substitution and the other on a contiguity basis. Not bringing forth any new information about reality, they cannot be assimilated to the emotive functions of discourse. In fact, they possess more than an emotive power; they have the advantage of reducing the distance of two contradictions or differences; they thus prod the movement forward and initiate desire, understood as narrative movement. Dissimilar elements are brought together and hence, produce a new meaningful relation.

Among the two figures, metaphor has been studied the most. The reason is certainly due to the closeness of metaphor and "reality" via the power of sight. As

Jakobson puts it:

Nous avons tendance à réifier les signes visuels, à les relier à des objets, à attribuer de la mimesis à de tels signes et à les considérer comme des éléments d'un "art imitatif". A toutes les époques, des peintres ont projeté des éclaboussures ou des taches d'encre ou de couleur, et ont essayé de les visualiser comme des visages, des paysages ou des natures mortes. Combien de fois des brindilles cassées des rainures dans des pierres ou d'autres sinuosités naturelles des courbes et des taches, ne sont pas prises pour des représentations d'objets ou d'êtres. 53

In an inquisitive post-structuralist gesture, the second approach to meaning engages with codes and referents and underlines "process" while it debunks

"system." In the heyday of structuralism, Roland Barthes set forth the limitations of reducing everything to a system and in so doing, led the way towards post­ structuralism. The notion of "écriture" that he developed in Le degré zéro de l'écriture derives from the fact that the text is built on a "trace" and a kind of verbal memory, and that the writer is the prisoner of someone else's words. "Ecriture" rejects the idea that narrative is transparent and natural and adheres to a theory of movement. In "L'analyse structurale des récits" Barthes starts off with a notion of system and introduces what might be called his pre-post-structural gesture: a notion of production and movement. He identifies two categories constitutive of narrative and functioning similarly to metonymies and metaphors. Functions are unities which distribute details throughout narrative and indices are truly semantic unities that refer to a concept in the narrative. Barthes establishes a definite homology between language and narrative:

Fonctions et indices recouvrent donc une autre distinction classique : les fonctions impliquent des relata métonymiques les indices des relata métaphoriques, les unes correspondent à une fonctionnalité du faire, les autres à une fonctionnalité de l'être. 54

Such a distinction works in tandem with that of Todorov although the latter aims specifically at determining grammatical categories and the former at establishing a

link between the subject and semantics. Metonymic relations link an object to a subject, underscore the

significant absence of the subject and at the same time

stress the "fonctionnalité du faire." Intertwined in this continuum, metaphoric relations emphasize the alternation

of places, objects and people around whom the story and

narrative unfold and stress the affect more than the

action. This constitutes a corollary to Todorovean periods of stability in which no action takes place and

emotion is prédominent.

Finally, among the five codes that structure

narrative, Barthes identifies in S/Z the hermeneutic and proairetic codes to stress movement. The hermeneutic code

is determined by the series of unities that articulate a

question, its answer and all the intermediate events and

actions that prepare the answer. The proairetic code

deals with the series of sequences through which

comportments are organized.

Although metaphors and metonymies have been

considered as two distinct tropes that guide language and

two axes that guide narrative, Ricoeur and Genette differ

from this position. In the creation of movement, Ricoeur

says that metaphor alters the discourse and changes our 55 sense of the referent. However, according to him, it is impossible to incorporate the surplus of meaning of metaphors into the domain of semantics. Metaphor constitutes an event within which the psyche and the linguistic sign adjust to one another. Gérard Genette shares Ricoeur's point of view although he considers metonymy and metaphor as evolving together. In Figures

III, he claims that spatial and temporal proximity commands or guarantees resemblance. Metaphor playfully finds its support and its motivation in metonymy.

Genette notes that sometimes a metaphor is not only contained as a fundamental figure but also is crystallized in a metonymic relationship. Narrative entails an imbrication of time and space relations on paper and expressed in words and structures which, in turn, reveal the articulation of the writer/narrator's thoughts and psyche. In the example of the Proustian description of

Méséglise and Saint-Mars-le-Vetu, the two narrations account for similar objective characteristics although they reveal two different church spires. The reason the narrator speaks of these churches in this particular fashion is that he is influenced by the spatial, temporal and psychological proximity of another element which comes to interfere in the objective description of the environment. I see in this analysis yet another expression of resemblance and difference. Obviously, the 56 two churches are different. The narrator, in Ricoeur's terms, appropriates his environment by making them similar. In this manner, the character's undertaking ties different elements together to create a unique, similar environment which, in turn, will engage the reader. This constitutes the bond between the narrator and the reader and between similarity and difference. Genette concludes his article with the following words: "Ici donc, ici seulement - par la métaphore, mais dans la métonymie -, ici, commence le Récit."

Film-theorist Jean Mitry, who has shown a great deal of interest in the study of metaphor and metonymy, argues that metaphor is substitutive within a verbal discourse but not in film discourse. Metaphor in film is

"essentiellement comparative ou associative, ce qui revient à dire qu'en fait, ce n'est rien d'autre qu'une métonymie - tout au moins quant à sa structure."

Metaphor is constituted of two terms that are very often

juxtaposed to each other. Meaning goes from one to the other; it is equivalent to a transfer which is equivalent to a substitution. This transfer, however, operates in the spectator's psyche: "Autrement dit, la métaphore

filmique n'existe pas comme telle, c'est le spectateur qui

la crée à partir d'une structure métonymique."

The notion of meaning has been strongly attached to

a central and unified idea of comprehension for as long as 57 monolithic systems and unified knowledge have been the rule. In a postmodern condition (which I will define later on in this study), the reader/spectator understands rather than comprehends. Comprehension conveys the idea that everything is explained altogether and that a totality is at work. On the contrary, understanding remains a way of appropriating what is common to all, although not recognized as such. As Paul Ricoeur states in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences:

To understand is not to project oneself into the text; it is to receive an enlarged self from the apprehension of proposed worlds which are the genuine object of interpretation.

The activities of novel-reading and film-viewing and their subsequent "understandings" take place under the guidance of hidden relational structures which map out and encode similarities and differences. When the reader/spectator understands the text, Ricoeur's "proposed worlds" converge towards a certain unity of the looking-self via the existing sub-relations of text and "reality." The very acts of opening a book or sitting in front of the screen make the reader embrace these hidden structures and simultaneously decipher codes. The reading process enhances the underlying relata that exist in codes and also justifies the energy invested in these actions in order to apprehend otherness, i.e., to distance oneself from the non-self. This amount of energy, which I will name desire, establishes these relata. 58

I will consider desire as a process of simultaneous similarity and difference. Movie-goers have always used the cinema as a way to escape from their own alienating human condition, their own reality. In their migration to the promised land of the movie-theatre, they manifest their drive to see and to experience what is ouside their own experienced world. This otherness, however, is not completely other. It is both different and similar to what the subject has experienced or may experience. That which is different assumes that which is similar. Indeed, the distance between what can be similar to and also different from the reader/spectator prods the desire and movement to experience that object.

Specific to the activities of speaking, viewing and reading that converge into narrative by converting differences into similarities, desire is an energizing

force generated by the friction of differences. Desire is that thrust which sets off sequentiality (diachrony), whets the reader/spectator's appetite, and turns differences into similarities. While speaking, the

subject sets up differences and similarities. An illusion

is created in that the gap existing between the self and

the world (i.e. the non-self) is bridged. More

specifically, as the first tension which anticipates

story-telling, desire becomes the very motor of narrative

and its dynamic principle. Desire is both the revelation 59 of emptiness and the manifestation of the absence of a reality. It is the endless route to get to a final

"approximation." Its point of departure is the infinite distance from its object, absence.

Today, as a combination of structuralist and post­ structuralist theories, semiotics has gained enormous credibility, allowing the examination of systems of representation in a close study of codes and the subject.

However, the link between the linguistics of the sentence and the semiotics of the work remains difficult to establish. Thus, the theoretical debate on meaning has centered on the semantic and the referential domain of language (cf: Ricoeur's hermeneutics). It has thus focused on meaning as produced by metaphors and metonymies which are more and more considered in the realm of semiology, psychoanalysis and philosophy. The difficulty in linking the semantic and the referential domains resides, perhaps in a definition of desire as the link between the subject and his/her signifying production.

Desire has been determined by gender polarity in narrative. As a work of semiosis, the cinema operates by means of socio-cultural images conveyed by metaphors and metonymies. Thus far, woman has been the metaphor of these socio-cultural images and visions because metaphysical rules have formed a comprehensive and 60

"meaningful" aggregate of elements which have been used to legitimate the male position. My analysis of the realistic narrative La Bête humaine demonstrates this.

With the demise of these metaphysical "rules" that used to

sustain narrative and comprehension, woman may be on her way to be more genuinely represented, outside the confines of an ideological system that has been so far legitimated by a realistic discourse. Today, text and cinetext become more and more "femininized" since desire is no longer so narrowly linked to the classic metaphor woman/desire.

Transformation remains the fundamental articulation of narrative and meaning the fundamental occupation of the

spectator. Contemporary narrative articulates an oscillation and play between similarities and differences, metaphors and metonymies and produces meanings which are constantly escaping strict borders. Despite the enormous

literature that attempts to provide a better account of

signification via the notion of the subject, the integration of the notion of subject in narrative remains puzzling. Signification is not produced in a uniform way but according to plurality and with the complicity of the reader/viewer (the subject). The challenge remains in our ability to talk both about meaning and signification, and the subject. This challenge has been partly met with psychoanalysis. Remaining the energy of the development of the narrative, desire is constructed differently when 61 narrative is transformed from a realistic to an unconstrained narrative (that I will call postmodern). 62

Notes to Chapter I

1. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imaginationt Balzac> Henri James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976, and Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage, 1985.

2. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 119.

3. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957, in "Le mythe aujourd'hui" pp. 215-268.

4. Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, Letter to Jane, produced by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, released in 1972. It analyses a photograph of Jane Fonda taken in Hanoï, which was printed in L'Express (07/31/72).

5. Teresa de Lauretis, "Through the looking-glass: woman, cinema and language" in Alice Doesn't. Feminism. Semiotics and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 14.

6. Jean Renoir, La Bête humaine, adapted from Emile Zola's novel, music by Joseph Kosma, photography by Curt Courant, produced by Paris Film Production, released in 1938, with Jean Gabin, Simone Simon, Fernand Ledoux and Julien Carette.

7. See Philippe Hamon, "Un discours contraint" in Littérature et réalité. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982, pp. 119-168.

8. See Parveen Adams, Kaja Silverman and Tania Modleski's articles about male hysteria in Camera Obscura. nO 17, May 1988. 63

9. Women have traditionally been associated with cats in a great number of scenes-to name only a few, in Ettore Scola's Passion of Love, when the young male protagonist sees his mistress for the last time and in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), in the famous scene which shows Anita Ekberg in an evening dress in a Roma's fountain, and in this very scene that introduces Sévérine to the spectator.

10. Terminology used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in L'anti-Oedipe; capitalisme et schizophrénie, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972. Their work questions psychoanalysis which has, according to them, confined desiring productions to the family, while the unconscious is the site of desiring machines which encompasses the investment of the socio-historic field.

11. Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969, p. viii.

12. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, 3rd éd., Payot, Paris, 1967.

13. Tzvetan Todorov, Poétique de la prose. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971, p. 240.

14. Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du Décaméron, The Hague: Mouton, 1969, p. 15.

15. Tzvetan Todorov, Poétique de le prose. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971, p. 253.

16. See Roman Jakobson, "Two aspects of Language and two types of aphasie disturbance" in Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.

17. Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistigue générale, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963, p. 107.

18. Roland Barthes, "L'introduction à l'analyse structurale du récit" in Poétigue du récit, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977, p. 9.

19. Gérard Genette, Figure III. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972, p. 45.

20. Ibid., p. 63. 64

21. Jean Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma. 1. Les structures. Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1963.

22. Ibid., p. 45.

23. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on language, action and interpretation, ed. and trans. by John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 278. CHAPTER II

Film Theory and Desire:

from an ontological to a psychoanalytic view of cinema.

Si mettre en scène est un regard, monter est un battement de coeur. Jean-Luc Godard "Montage, mon beau souci."

I developed in the preceding chapter the idea that desire is the energy which constitutes the motivation and the dynamic of narrative and that a realistic discourse hampers the flow of that energy by catalyzing it via constraining structures. In this chapter, I will examine desire in the relationship between film-narrative and spectatorship. Film narrative is the locus of the encounter of the spectator and the film via the construction of desire. To that effect, I will review the major cinematic preoccupations that range from the initial controversial debate between reality and fantasy, to

Sergei Eisenstein and André Bazin's theories of the cinema

on the one hand, and to those of Jean-Luc Godard, Stephen

Heath, Jean-Louis Baudry, and Christian Metz on the other.

The feminist point of view will conclude this review as it

integrates sexual difference in a woman's inquiry of film theory.

65 66

Desire is manifest in cinema both as a site and a process. As a site, the cinema places the spectator in a physical dream-like state. In the darkness and silence of the theater, the spectator's body loosens up and becomes extremely sensitive to exterior visual and auditory stimuli. This amorphic situation makes the spectator incapable of distancing perception from representation and places him/her in a situation of need. Via the spectator's perceptual power, his/her energy is mobilized toward the screen, site of the representation process and of the human reenactment of the primal metonymic scene which places the spectator before the screen, in a relation of need similar to the child at the mother's breast. ^ As a process, the cinema via the production of

images generates a flow of energy between reality and

fantasy. Routing and channeling the spectator's energy,

film narrative appears to be the "main agent" of the

construction of desire and as such has been studied in

film theory. Reality consists of the spectator's physical condition coupled with his/her perceptual power, defined

by his/her sensual apparatus, as well as the materiality

of the cinematic apparatus, and fantasy exists where the

spectator encounters images.

Bearer of the link between the cinema as a system of

representation and the spectator, film narrative insures

the tie between fantasy and reality. The flow of images 67 and the rhythm of sounds transport the spectator from his/her material existence to an "other" situation, thus creating fantasy. The indissociable bond between reality and fantasy has given the cinema its specificity and, at the same time, has generated controversial debates among film specialists, from the founding fathers to the most contemporary film-theorists. The Lumière brothers advocated realism in the image whereas Georges Méliès believed fantasy to be the reality of the art medium.

Later on, André Bazin and Sergei Eisenstein refined this initial opposition. Film theory developed around the notions of mise-en-scène and montage which came out of a specific use of cinema techniques. Man was kept at the center of cinematic reflections. Only in the early sixties were different notions of narrative and desire sketched. The controversy of reality versus fantasy beccime a duality for Christian Metz and Stephen Heath who turned film theory to a definition of the subject (the spectator's participation in the film). Cinematic meaning emerged as the result of psychoanalytic and semi otic reflections on the relations between spectator and representation. Psychoanalysis reconciles the opposition between "reality" and "re/presentation" in that it integrates the subject in the examination of cinematic content and form. Sigmund Freud's dream analysis consolidates the triadic relationship: images, words and 68 the subject. Semiotics offers a framework to study modes

of representation as " systems." Roland Barthes's reading

sets up another triadic relationship of text, ideology and meaning. Film theory reached its apex and opened new directions when French film director and theorist Jean-Luc

Godard introduced a "counter-cinema." His answer to the

Bazinian question "Qu'est-ce que le cinéma ?" was to put traditional film-narrative on trial by discussing the

semiotics of cinema in images and words.

As a post-World War II film critic and theorist,

André Bazin finds the relation between matter and spirit

as well as form and content in the cinematic image.

"Ontologie et langage," the first of the four volumes of

Qu'est-ce cue le cinéma ? accounts for his basic film

theory: reality is found in the photographic registration

of the image. A strong believer of the adage that the

human face is the mirror of man's soul, Bazin attributes

an ontology to the image in its double feature: presence

(interiority being given by the image) and absence of man

(no intervention of man in capturing "reality"). Indeed,

the cinematic process reveals nature/reality and unlike

other arts, foregoes man while it reconstitutes nature at

its best. The cinema is an expression of space and time

that man integrates in a notion of content. In this

respect, Bazin goes further than Siegfried Kracauer who

considers the cinema solely as an extension of photography 69 and a means of recording and revealing physical reality.

For Kracauer, the cinema emphasizes the visible world and thus can stop time: "The cinema responds to the human need to freeze the transient material life, to frame the ephemeral and to freeze time and movement." ^ Contrary to

Kracauer, Bazin envisions the cinematic process as a way to link materiality and spirituality, through the endless movement of time: as an art form, the cinema functions as a human defense against time and this is the fundamental need in human psychology.

Widening the scope of cinema, Bazin's preoccupation with a notion of interiority is displaced from the individual image to an integral grouping of images which becomes language. Justifying such an evolution, he renames his early essay "En defense d'un cinéma mixte" to

"L'évolution du langage cinématographique." Yet, his notion of language is very unclear: as a conclusion to

"Ontologie et langage" he announces very briefly that

"d'autre part, le cinéma est un langage" ^ without studying what actually makes it a language. His chronological review of film directors' works appears to equate "langage" with a purely metaphorical expression of an auteur. Such a gesture reveals in fact Bazin's strong support of the "politique des auteurs" which considers film to be a product of the film-director who is a human engineer. 70

The evolution of Bazin's theories parallels the technical development of the cinema. At first, the use of deep-focus, depth-of-field and the close-up are advocated to reveal human interiority in the image. Indeed, the depth of the image gives a natural/realistic aspect to the art-medium. Then, as a result of the advent of sound, the shot-in-depth coupled with synchronous sound becomes a crucial advance towards what Bazin calls "un cinéma total." His theories develop also with the integration of

Eisenstein's notion of montage which, by means of the confrontation of two shots, emphasizes the production of meanings. Bazin's view of film content is subject to the image-track where there is no human intervention, and little by little it encompasses the construction of fantasy. Bazin thinks that montage prohibits the realistic perception of the image, yet, he considers breaks, confrontations and oppositions necessary to the film fabric in order to bring out the realism of the image. Not only does montage insure the realism of the image, it transforms the nature of the image;

D'autre part, l'abstraction logique que le montage introduit dans l'utilisation de l'image modifie la valeur de celle-ci: elle est moins désormais enregistrement et reproduction que signification et relation. <

From reproduction and recording, film theory was, thus, developing towards meaning, signification, relations, and the individual, in that an ontology was central to film 71 theories. Bazin's ontological views of the cinema arose from his intellectual environment. In his significant study of Bazin, Dudley Andrew mentions, among others,

André Malraux and Emmanuel Mounter's works which contributed to Bazin's theoretical foundation as well as to his interest in the image. "Ontologie et langage" reveals Malraux's theories about art, in that man can transgress his materiality and rise to another plane.

Pervading his theories and personal life. Mounter's personalism claims that the nature of reality is found in the identity and free activity of personality which undermines all idea of collectivity. Collectivity implies constraining social structures that impoverish personal

relations by insuring continuity via repetition.

Considering montage as a conveyor of repetitive social

relations and ideological manipulation, Bazin fought

against the technique. Personalism encourages a rebellion

against human aggregation and to that goal, promotes a

different education. Bazin's claim for a different

education was a personal cinema that he defended, in

Dudley Andrew's words, as "the aesthetical and ethical

expression of what is human in an undefined mysterious

world, " ^ and an active participation in the

popularization of cinema. On the one hand, as an

incredibly enthusiastic organizer, he dedicated his energy

to create and guide "Travail et Culture" -an association 72 for a popular cinema. The cinema was for him an inevitable means of acculturation of the populace and it was with great enthusiasm that he presented and discussed films in ciné-clubs, schools, "comités d'entreprise" and churches. On the other hand, as an outstanding film critic, he contributed immensely to film theory by authoring numerous articles and co-founding (with Jacques

Doniol Valcroze) the well-known magazine Les cahiers du cinéma.

Excessively proccupied with the defense of the ontology of the photogaphic image, and influenced by his existentialist views and his priority to determine man's place within the world, Bazin was unable to fully accept montage. As a result, it became impossible for him to examine how the image and montage work together in the production of a cinematic language which ties together

space and time and fully integrates the subject and/or

spectator. Film study was confined, in his view, to the realm of cinema and reality. Indeed, his accomplishments

have always remained in tune with his personal and

personalist beliefs that prioritize a realistic perception

of cinema. Dudley Andrew sums up the situation in the

following words;

The objectivity axiom and the whole of Bazin's film theory consequently needs to be considered in relation to the personalist approach to the "mysterious otherness" of external reality. ® 73

Film theory blossomed as it made a quantum leap from image to language, from no intervention to the inclusion of man. Language ’ had been Sergei Eisenstein's main concern during both his experience as a Soviet film-maker and his years of film-teaching at the Moscow State

Institute of Cinematography. Unlike Bazin who believes that reality is found primarily in the image and that there is no need for man's intervention, Eisenstein argues that reality is rooted essentially in language, and as

such, has to be constructed and shaped by man. Believing that reality comes from an inner speech that is generated in a cinematic language, he set his task to find the inner words that correspond with the visual images. This gesture can be assimilated with a semiotic or psychoanalytic process and in that respect, makes

Eisenstein the most significant precursor of contemporary

film theory.

His film theory combines reflections on the notions

of space and time which he integrates in his definition of cinema as a writing process. In The Film Sense (1942) he

examines how lines, shapes and structures are incorporated

into movement and how particular colors exert specific

influences on the spectator. He sees in the spectator the

representation of a pre-logical state and an expression of

sensuality that have to be kindled. The stimulation of

sensation and affect among spectators constitutes his aim 74 at generating a language. The montage technique responds to this thrust and becomes the articulation of this very

language.

In opposition to the image which gives us essentially a notion of space, one can say that montage produces an

impression of time. The montage technique creates movement while depth of field captures whatever is visible

in one image. In 1928, with the advent of sound, the

Soviet theorist propounded the thesis that the combination

of visual and auditory images must be artificially motivated. Thus had developed an unprecedented cinema.

Rich in its form and its social function, this cinema was

to transgress the classic borders of perception and

sensations by means of affective visual, auditive and

biomechanical stimuli and could now convey ideological

debates on the screen in a very sensual manner. The

fragmentation and conflict of images is created through

such technical devices as photographic composition,

filming, montage, sound, acting and style. Not only does

Eisenstein break the continuity of the image but he

juxtaposes, as a writer would, for example, moments of

crisis (momentums, screams) after amplifying them.

Such a definition of montage is very present today in

the views of contemporary theorists. Jurij Lotman

considers montage to be one of the most widespread methods

for forming artistic meanings, a juxtaposition that uses 75 contrast and integration of heterogeneous elements. As he says in Semiotics of Cinema, "in art, the sequence of structural elements is constructed differently than it is in non-art. Elements may unfold differently from what is expected, and thus create unpredictability." ® The oscillation between two sets of elements, either characters' parts or elements exterior to man, translated into metaphors and metonymies in narrative, lead to the targeted higher semantic whole. Lotman adds that

"splicing bits of film and integrating them into a higher

semantic whole is the most obvious and explicit form of montage." ’ Contemporary theorists share similar ideas.

Gilles Deleuze says:

Le montage est cette operation qui porte sur les images mouvement pour en dégager un tout, l'idée, c'est-à-dire l'image du temps.

Jean Mitry remarks:

Le montage est l'art d'exprimer et de signifier par le rapport de deux plans juxtaposés, de telle sorte que cette juxtaposition fasse naitre une idée ou exprime quelque chose qui n'est contenu dans aucun des deux plans pris séparément.

and Jean-Luc Godard more radically declares that montage

is:

Faire ressortir l'âme sous l'esprit, la passion derrière la machination, faire prévaloir le coeur sur l'intelligence en détruisant la notion d'espace au profit de celle du temps. “

In a post-structuralist context, time does not

supplant or dominate but rather works interdependently

with space. Two shots work together because a third 76 dimension (the spectator) is added. The subject, through the position of spectator, transforms the film structure into desire and energy. Therefore, montage per se does not simply emphasize a theoretical temporal notion to representation but needs to be considered with the viewer, in a notion of space where the spectator reattributes temporal and spatial notions through desire.

From his engineering and architectural studies,

Eisenstein nourished a passion for lines and structure, and from his love for the theater, he strived to create pathos and ecstasy among audiences. Indeed, images and their composition are treated as a specific form of stimulus and effect and the concepts of ecstasy and organization are of great necessity for the production of pathos in his audience.

He says in The Film Senset

The strength of montage resides in this, that it includes in the creative process the emotions and mind of the spectator. The spectator is compelled to proceed along that self-same creative road that the author travelled in creating the image. The spectator not only sees the represented elements of the finished work, but also experiences the dynamic process of the emergence and assembly of the image just as it was experienced by the author.

Analogous to the interdependence of metaphors and metonymies, the image and montage are essential to the

film process. As Lotman puts it: "they operate only under

conditions of mutual struggle and thus need each other. 77

The crucial debate, in cinema, resides in how form and content as well as aesthetics and politics can be successfully integrated. This debate has been illuminated by semiology, the object of which is the study of sign systems. The image, as a sign-system, both denotes and connotes. Via denotation, the visible world that we see is re-presented. This gives us a notion of reality as traditionally perceived via the image. Connotation transmits meaning in an association of images and an

interrelation of signs, thus, reality perceived via

language or montage. Bazin and a few other film theorists have implicitly argued the central issue of the subject and desire by foreseeing the articulation of form and content, although the necessary critical tools were not yet fully developed. Constantly claiming that form and content may not be examined separately, Bazin fought

essentially for the significance and the primacy of the power of the image that, in his view, fully accounts for content and form. Thus, Bazin touched on the basic human

conflict of space and time but did not work out its

implications. We will have to wait until the early

sixties to see the New Wave adherents recuperate this

fundamental combination/opposition and articulate it

onscreen. Francois Truffaut, in Jules et Jim (1963),

creates a beautiful and efficient combination of time and

space which embraces images, words and music. Different 78 locations are blended together in images which are presented in a circular movement, to the rhythm of

Catherine's song "Comme un tourbillon" which accompanies the triangular love between Catherine, Jules and Jim.

Jean-Luc Godard, in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (1966), articulates time and space politically and aesthetically. He combines multiple systems, producers of meanings, in depicting a female character who evolves in Paris "en l'espace d'un jour." Thus, Bazin's concept of the image will be replaced twenty years later by Stephen Heath's critical notion of "space." Space is the site and the discourse where the spectator's implications find a nexus between form and content in participating in the film-process. At last, the cinema was to become a complete art form which, in Raymond

Bellour's words, "lacks neither representation nor words

(as music does) nor discursive temporality (as painting does) . "

Christian Metz 's semiotic analysis of the cinema made three major contributions to film theory. Although

Metz's work has been associated with a linguistic approach to cinema, it shows both the benefits and limits of such a linguistic approach. First, in "Le cinéma: langue ou langage" (1964) he frees the cinema from structural analyses by suggesting that it is a language without a language system. Thus the cinema does not communicate but 79 expresses. Second, in Langage et cinéma (1973) he establishes the cinema as a multi-channel and multi-code system made of links between sequences and shots that he calls the "grande syntagmatique. " In examining paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, he concludes that the cinema lacks signs and is characterized by a poverty of paradigms. Indeed, because the image is so close to reality, there is always one meaningful possibility and in that respect, the image is a pure analogy of reality.

Thus, the cinema becomes for Metz a set of syntagmatic relations in which the signs are more or less motivated.

It has become also, in Roland Barthes's terminology, an

"écriture" in that it includes a set of accepted social conventions of articulating reality. Such reality operates as a mediation and therefore is considered a

"deformation."

Third, in Le signifiant imaginaire (1984) Metz claims that the spectator is positioned in front of a "real" perception to a paradoxically absent object of perception.

Via psychoanalytic reflections, the filmic process is

envisaged to be based on a fantasmatic relation distinct

from real relations to real objects. Relying heavily on

Lacanian theory of the identification of the subject, Metz

sees the same relation between the cinematic apparatus and

the spectator as the child in front of a mirror. Using

the basic Freudian framework, he says that the ceimera 80 takes on a fetishistic value, similar to the fetish of the phallus, and that the cinema is structured on the notion of lack which is assimilated to the notion of castration.

Castration has been used initially by Freud to signify the threat that the little boy experiences as he realizes that the mother belongs to the father and that in his rivalry with the father for the love of the mother, he may be punished by the father. Castration functions as a symbolic trauma that the phallus embodies to account for all the lacks, real and imaginary, that the child has already experienced. In a reiteration of the power of the gaze in cinema, the Lacanian concept of "pulsion invocante" and Freudian scopophilia inform Metz's theory.

Using these two concepts, Metz sees the cinema as the story of missed encounters, of the "failure to meet of the voyeur and the exhibitionist whose approaches no longer coincide."

Rather than examining the cinema as an ontology or a

language, Stephen Heath discusses it as text. His approach derives directly from a reading of Barthesian

notions of textuality and the death of the author. The

cinematic language becomes an "écriture", even if that

écriture is, "in the 'realism' of the cinema, naturalized

abstract as writing, received as reality."

Heath starts his analysis of the cinema with a

critique of Christian Metz's work in which he raises the 81 issue of the functioning of cinematic reality and the process of the production of that "impression of reality."

He argues that the truth of cinema is to be interrogated in its formation and that semiotics should have as its object this interrogation (what he calls cinesemiotics).

No longer a linguistic separation of "langue" et

"langage," it is an investigation of the system of relations and differences that Saussure elaborated. What becomes crucial is the area of the fabrication of sense, of signification, where relations and differences operate.

In that operation. Heath fixes "process" to semiotics as he describes it as "the mode of the refusal of some fixed and stable, immediately meaningful" operation.Thus

Heath, in a Barthesian way, considers expression as a process of production of meanings. In an attempt to free the cinema from its cast of images duplicating reality,

(what Christian Metz developed in his initial work Essais sur la signification au cinema), the film is presented in its disarticulation. At that point, the spectator is no longer placed in the position of the consumption of a representation, but in an experience of reading.

Heath has raised many interesting issues unaddressed by Christian Metz, particularly, the lack of consideration of social influences in Metz's analyses. He thus articulates differently the Saussurean distinction between langue and language that Metz applies to cinema. 82

In Heath's work, cinema and language are examined more as symbolic-imaginary productions of subjectivity and producers of ideology. Thus, incorporating psychoanalytic and Marxist theories with semiology. Heath reflects on the significance of language as applied to film. Although his point of departure is the issue of reality, he claims that reality remains impossible to define as it is a shifting concept in which representation, the subject and ideology are intricately interrelated.

Taking the Pasolinian tenet that the cinema is "a function of the explosion of a love of reality" (in that it is a non-conventional and non-symbolic language unlike written or spoken language). Heath says that "this kind of explosive love sets the cinema as expression against language as articulation of reading, the cinetext as a production of meaning."

While establishing a link between cinema and literature, images and text, and images and language.

Heath expresses the regret that the cinema is "currently jammed as in literature in a naturalism that tends to repress all consciousness of cinema as process of consciousness, as articulation of the real, as real articulation." Yet, he recognizes that "it is today that the reality of this break between film and text is beginning, hesitantly, to be felt as radical experience of cinema." 83

Significant for the development of film theory, desire emerges for Heath from narrative and spectatorship.

"Narrative Space" in Questions of cinema (1981) underlines the narrative work as the appropriation of space by events. Space is constructed as a series of effects

(impacts) from the spectator's point of view and looks that shape film-narrative. The spectator's investment in the space between her/himself and the film as well as the exchange/movement between them constitutes desire which simultaneously is film-narrative. Thus, Heath locates narrative cinema in the transformation of space into place, a dynamic space, structured, organized by the plot which is unfolding and affectively invested by the spectator.

More precisely, as previously mentioned, a film is made out of a multitude of codes which reflect numerous constraints. Film comes out of a playful articulation of these various codes, and constitutes a system of unification and intelligibility. According to Heath, what

"makes" the filmic system is the transition from one code to another; and this transition is called desire.

However, desire remains undefined since the investment is always different.

Jean-Luc Godard's discourse about the cinema constitutes the juncture between Metz's "leurre

fondamental du cinéma" and Heath's "radical experience of 84 cinema"; as previously seen, the image is considered a deformation and narrative is an ironic gesture of traditional narrative. Yet Godard claims, in a reiteration of Bazin's words, that the cinema reproduces a world which corresponds to our desires: "Le monde substitue à notre regard un monde qui s'accorde à nos désirs." Focusing on the function of the image and narrative, Godard seeks to show the articulation between images, pictures and what is behind them and also, in a wider scope, to reveal in James Monaco's words, "the relations between consciousness and the unconscious, between images and words, between the possessor and the possessed, the one who sees and the one who is seen, the

one who is talked about and the one who is silenced."

To that end, Godard subverts the structures of traditional

narrative, modifies space, transforms framing, searches

for new paths and fixes voices. The result is that

process replaces achievement, questions substitute for

answers, and attempts replace accomplishments. The cinema

has become a writing process and offers a path for a

simultaneous understanding of society and the cinema.

This writing process entails the revolutionary necessity

to "get back to zero." In a double gesture, Godard

abandons conventional language and aesthetics and

questions traditional construction of the cinema. He 85 articulates and disarticulates the cinema in the image and sound tracks of the film.

Godard's first feature, A bout de souffle (1959) is the classic example of the critical dialectical consideration of a genre. In deconstructing the film noir into a reverse film language and in a patchwork of various subtexts, Godard combines high and popular art. He was hailed as the leader of the "Nouvelle Vague" while the

"French quality cinema" was becoming breathless by the end of the fifties.

Meanings are essential to Godard's cinema; his films are obsessed with language and his cinema is engrossed with redefinitions. What interests him the most is the relationship between "reality" and abstraction, signifier and signified, self and others, human being and world, or in other terms, what constitutes meaning. Narrative becomes his focus in order to emphasize cinematic form and

film content becomes the opening up of social and cultural discourses.

As a film theorist and film-director, Godard has been the propagandist for political considerations of the cinema. He foresees a cinema which situates itself beyond capitalism and avant-gardism. Such a revolutionary

affiliation can be traced back to Brechtian theories about

representation in theater. Domination is produced by a

certain signifying structure that is imposed on the 86 spectator; recognition of domination foments a rebellion against this type of narrative. Godard theorizes such a rebellion in his early articles. In order to actually

show the artificiality of the "reality" of film, he disarticulates the dominating structure of film in its

form as much as its content. The direct way to break down

this filmic reality is to deconstruct the cine-narrative by suppressing the diegesis. Une femme mariée (1964) or

La Chinoise (1967) exemplify Godard's steps in this

direction.

Godard's post-1968 cinema distances itself even more

from narrative. Although he was influenced by Brechtian

theories of distanciation, Godard rejects the necessity of

a certain "clarity" and symbolism created by characters

representing different social classes because they are

"directive." Unlike Eisenstein's montage which involves

a directive form, Godard sides with Dziga Vertov who

stands for a non-directive form that the spectator can

freely read, drawing from a succession of conflictuel

images, meanings and pleasures. Thus, like Vertov, Godard

engages in undermining the values of codes and in finding

new links between sounds and images. He says;

On ne cherche pas des formes nouvelles, mais des rapports nouveaux; ca consiste d'abord à détruire les anciens rapports ne fut-ce que sur le plan formel, c'est que cette forme naît de certaines conditions d'existence sociale et de travail en commun qui impliquent des luttes de contraires, donc un travail politique. 87

These new links between sounds and images challenge conventional narrative codes and subcodes. The spectator distances her/himself from the cine-text because there is no longer any recognizable structures which generate the sense of familiarity experienced by the spectator, neither with the diegetic construction of narrative nor with the characters. Such an approach inscribes itself within the framework of a modernist gesture and places Godard in a position of rupture vis-à-vis the former narrative and its codes. This approach simultaneously exemplifies the

Brechtian-Vertovian movement and reveals the socio-political environment of the period in which

"collective" elements prevailed over "individual" ones.

Even the notion of "film director" ("metteur-en-scene") was discarded at the same time traditional codes were undermined.

Films of this period reveal Godard's inner reflections upon life and society which translate onto the screen in the form of semiological and political dialogues. Started in early 58, Le gai savoir opens up with a dialogue between Jean-Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto who question the relation between images and sounds. Made during the events of May and June 68, Un film comme les autres presents an unprecedented political dialogue between two workers from the Renault company and three

students from Nanterre. Most of his films of that period. 88 such as British sounds (1969), Vent d'est (1969) (based on a text written by Daniel Cohn-Bendit) and Pravda (1969), deal with a Marxist-Leninist approach.

Along with the coimnon theatralization of the taboos of death, violence and sex, Godard shows their disarticulation and discusses politically the notion of

spectacle via the image of the woman. In doing so, he demonstrates an incredible creativity in showing the cinema as composed of a spectrum of discursive layers.

Yet, he loses his appeal to feminists when he victimizes women, making them central to the sexual-political

alienation of society. Woman beomes the metaphor for the

alienation of the cinema by a capitalist society and of

the society by consumerism. Repetitively and familiarly

he uses the woman as part of a system of representation.

She is the metatext of sub-texts that represent onscreen various ideological discourses constitutive of the social

fabric. Godard deconstructs the ideological domination of

the objectifying male look.

Deux ou trois choses que ~ie sais d'elle (1966) and Je

vous salue Marie (1983) successfully "speak" the woman within a dis/articulation of society as system of

representation. In Deux ou trois choses que ~ie sais

d'elle. Juliet Janson (Marina Vlady) is followed across

Paris during a day. Similar to the exploitation of the

Parisian region which is dressed up with signs, the 89 spectator witnesses the exploitation of the woman, her

"mise en signes," or, in other words, Juliet's prostitution.

Speech, which has been men's privilege in cinema, is deconstructed: it questions the relation between the signifier and signified and the arbitrariness of language.

In a common reiteration of Godard's concern for communication, the initial discussion between the young man and his would-be lover in a café presents an impossible communication. Throughout the film, Juliet's speech is elliptical while the film narrative is fragmented. Other women's voices join Juliet's to further fragment her own narrative, constructing a non-linear narrative and narration. Speech, smell, touch, hearing and sight are part of Juliet's language: in the scene where she prostitutes herself to the young worker, she expresses her social and emotional condition in the following words: "Je pouvais sentir tout le poids de mon bras en voulant enlever son sexe." Juliet's judgment is not expressed in a cause and effect rapport but via a body language. The weight of her own arm is relative to the sexual exploitation she submits herself to.

Godard gives us a scientific narrative of the elliptical narrative about couples ("performative", to use a post-modern term) which tries to identify the human being and simultaneously his/her relationship to the 90 world. Godard makes a lavish use of the narrative through, for example, a professor's words which explain the birth of the world and the beginning of humanity. The questioning of truth and proofs of that truth, as well as the society's need for knowledge, are examined.

Modernity as rendered by the use of images produced by the filmic apparatus in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle is reiterated in Je vous salue Marie, this time via speech. The Virgin Mary of our society is the daughter of a gas-station owner in Switzerland. While continuing the theme exposed in the preceding film, this

film translates the demise of modern society and its narrative through the demise of one great narrative, that of Mary and Joseph.

Marie's speech is exorbitant in that it transgresses the family discourse. She reads to Joseph a text which is profuse with elements associated with nature: "soeur pluie, frère feu." Questioning family ties, Marie

attributes animal connections to the word body: "corps,

frère âne." Negating a male definition of body, Marie communicates a certain desire to enter the social sphere, via language, and at the same time, questions it: "nous parlons et nous parlons de la parole."

The last part of the film functions as a follow up to the scene at the doctor's where Marie says that her belly

is aching while she is being examined. The director shows 91 us the spectacle which is produced by the woman's hysteria; in bed, Marie experiences cramps and pains; her body arches and becomes very tense; once again it speaks.

She says: "c'est une histoire de dégoût." Following the birth of the baby, the final scene shows Marie via a car window, lipstick close to her lips. She tells us that her horoscope is the virgin and that she did not want her child. In a final decisive gesture Marie paints her lips.

The film ends on a close-up of an open mouth lined with lipstick. This shot is daring in that it closes a narrative with the woman's mouth offering a black hole from which the voice emerges. Marie's open mouth functions as a sexual symbol (supported by the function of the lipstick), but also connotes oppression and totalitarianism, pain and hysteria. Woman is not liberated; she is alienated and repressed by the materialism that overwhelms Western society of the twentieth century. Woman becomes hysterical in that her expression overbrims the limits or boundaries set by the masculine framework. Godard kept her in such a position

so that he could assert his own power : that of an analyst.

That is exactly what Monaco considers him to be. "His job has been to explain, to criticize, to abstract. Perhaps it must be left to others to build, to create."

Yet, such a view falls short of Godard's art since he is the predecessor of what the postmoderns would claim to 92 be creation: the combination of politics and aesthetics in

an association of genres. By destroying old patterns of

thought, he has revealed on screen what many critics have written in theory. Isn't Godardian cinema the true

representation of what a counter film-narrative is ? If

narrative is desire, doesn't Godard prove that another

articulation of desire exists ?

Desire per se was never Godard's preoccupation. A

few times he was asked about passion, especially with the

1982 release of his film Passion. Being very closely knit

with narrative, passion and desire are apprehended via

expression. Godard said that all comes down to a politics

of experience. Reality is still at the core of the

debate. Reality is articulated and mediated (linear

causality is no longer sufficient; we comprehend reality

not primarily through our own eyes and ears, but through

technological media which change reality as they transmit

it). In Gorin's words "it is a process of deformation as

well as information."

Godard's definition of the cinema via a use of woman,

via the deconstruction of systems, offers a pertinent link

with feminist theories about the cinema. In the

seventies, drawing on semiology, American and British

feminists gave increasing attention to the production of

meaning in films as the cinema was considered to be the

perfect place for an analysis of the encounter between the 93 gaze, ideology and desire. Marxist and psychoanalytic theories were merged in the theorization of the woman's

oppression in cinema.

Laura MuIvey opened the debate by focusing on

identification, subjectivity and spectatorship. She claims in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" that the male gaze objectifies the woman. As a sex symbol, woman

has been eroticized through three looks: the look of the

camera (the pro-filmic event) , the look of male characters within narrative, and the look of the male spectator.

Woman is the object of the fixation and obsession of the male spectator whose gaze carries with it the power of

action and possession which is lacking in the female gaze.

Responding to the main objections that the male

spectator is not restricted to a single, dominant

position, and that men at the movies may also be feminine,

passive and masochistic and that the spectator as female

is supposedly non-existent, she suggests in "Afterthoughts

on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" that there is a

kind of film in which "a woman central protagonist is

shown to be unable to achieve a stable sexual identity,

torn between the deep blue sea of passive femininity and

the devil of regressive masculinity." Mulvey thus

points to Freud's theories of femininity, according to

which the young girl first goes through an active 94 masculine phase before attaining the "correct" feminine position.

Following this groundbreaking article, American and

British feminist film critics have shown that classical

Hollywood cinema has deprived woman of a gaze and

subjectivity, and has kept her as the object of the masculine scopophiliac desire. The dominating male gaze

carries with it social, political and economic as well as

sexual power and relegates women to absence, silence and

marginality. The films of Hitchcock, in particular, have

been central to the formulation of feminist film theory

and to the practice of feminist film criticism. Oedipal

processes have been largely used to describe film

narrative. It has been shown that the psychoanalytic and

realistic discourses share some basic constants: both

justify the woman's position as silent, absent, and

marginal and both turn out to be constraining.

Central to feminist film research is the

investigation of the woman's discontent as spectator of

current productions. Scholars have explored the ways in

which the woman spectator engages with narrative

processes. Following Mulvey's initial step in the

definition of spectatorship, a double desire has been

claimed to characterize women at the movies. Within the

framework of voyeurism and fetishism, female spectatorship

has been shown to oscillate between a passive feminine 95 position and a regressive but active masculine position that enables the female spectator's engagement with narrative mechanisms. Referring to Tania Modleski's article on Rebecca (1982) which states that the woman

spectator is inclined to become masochistic, Teresa de

Lauretis in Alice Doesn't (1984) considers the whole issue to be not so simple: "far from being simply masochistic, the female spectator is always caught up in a double desire, identifying at one and the same time not only with the passive (female) object but with the active (usually male) subject." She explains that each "reader, male

or female, is constrained and defined within the two positions of a sexual difference thus conceived: male-hero-human, on the side of the subject, and

female-obstacle-boundary-space, on the other."

Relying on Freudian and Lacanian as well as feminist

spectatorship theories, Mary Ann Doane argues that the woman is deprived of subjectivity and desire: "Freudian-

Lacanian theories have depossessed woman of desire while they have unconditionally granted it to man as a privileged possession." Thus she points to the problematic notion of female desire in The Desire to

Desire (1987) and concludes that what's left to woman is

only the desire to desire:

Subjectivity in its psychoanalytic formulation is always a desiring subjectivity. Desire is a form of disengagement - from need, from the referent, from the object - which is crucial to the 96

assumption of the position of speaking sub ject - Distance from the "origin" (the maternal) is the prerequisite to desire. Insofar as desire is defined as the excess of demand over a need aligned with the maternal figure, the woman is left behind. 38

Although the theorization of woman's oppression seems

sometimes to lead us to a point of no return, it has

offered us possibilities to construct a different

conceptual frame. On the one hand, the theories of the male gaze offer textual space for feminine theorization.

Ann Kaplan argues in Women and Film; Both Sides of the

Camera (1983) that in defining woman as erotic object, the

male gaze manages to repress the relations of woman in her

place as mother-leaving a gap not "colonized" by man,

through which, hopefully, woman can begin to create a

discourse, a voice, a place for herself as subject. On

the other hand, the theorization of woman's oppression

allows feminists to question the processes of

narrativization. Teresa de Lauretis in "Desire in

Narrative" incriminates structuralists' attitudes that

convey a total oblivion of sexual politics. According to

her, more compatible with processes of narrativization

than the female figure, man comfortably adopts "natural"

poses of activity and agency, while the "plotting" of the

female body is more difficult.

Solutions to these problems of narrativization reside

in the act of rethinking cinematic theories via 97 resistance, difference, excess, and ruptures. Indeed, cinematic theory must, in De Lauretis's words, "displace the question of representation and subject construction

from the proscrutean bed of phallic signification" and

feminist theorists have "the task to seek other ways of mapping the terrain in which meanings are produced."

Judith Mayne in The Woman at the Keyhole (1990)

judiciously abandons the current theoretical feminist

framework to explore a domain which has been excessively

ignored: the screen. As a way to reinvent the cinema, she

examines what is specific to women film-makers in studying

techniques, themes and images of both mainstream and

avant-garde cinema. The screen works in her analysis as

the framework which resists the sexual hierarchy that has

been established in film theory. Within this framework,

Mayne succeeds in articulating a new rapport between

female spectatorship and film.

Desire is at work regardless of sexual identities.

The differences between films made for women and films

made for men are not so clear-cut, and to me, are only

based on a socialization of cinema through a constraining

narrative. The spectator's identification with characters

can occur either way. The films which cancel this

potential are disturbing and annoying. They do so through

a certain narrative structure that nourishes a gender gap

or at least maintains it. 98

What is left to be studied is the notion of character and its theoretical development. Theoretical discourse being interdependent with practical experience -as subjectivity insures the link- the following chapter will address the contemporary crises in Western culture and will examine how "character" has evolved and how it has allowed the possibilitity of being the "space," to use

Heath's word, from where spectatorship and identification have been implicated.

There is a socio-politico-economic context that promotes American film theorists' point of view. Limits come from the fact that trying to separate and analyze how women read or see will not narrow the gender gap but on the contrary, widen it and consequently provoke a male retrenchment, and also maintain the validity of psychoanalytic codes and narrative. Psychoanalysis has nourished a false separation between man and woman and has institutionalized a ridiculous marginalization of woman.

Now that psychoanalytic contradictions have been explored, feminist work should move on and undertake semiotics differently or study the process of signification within the global context of Western culture which is in crisis.

Although this concluding statement might sound pessimistic or rather fatalist, it nevertheless displaces the focus of the feminist argumentation towards a wider place where the context supplants the sexual boundaries. Julia Kristeva, 99 in an interview published in Polvloaue (1977), says that

"Une femme ne peut pas être...une pratique de femme ne peut être que négative... femme c'est ce qui ne se représente pas, ce qui ne se dit pas, ce qui reste en dehors des nominations et des idéologies." As women, our voice and point of view are always outside the system and in that respect, give us a vantage point to analyze and criticize but unfortunately make impossible the construction of a female subjectivity as it remains impossible to fix a male subjectivity. Therefore, desire can only be studied as a movement, a force, with no object.

Film theory has developed from an initial debate on reality/fantasy and its simultaneous association of form and content, to an encompassing of the duality between reality and fantasy, into the notion of the subject as spectator. Bazin and Eisenstein's debate on the use of the deep-focus or montage techniques accounts for a significant reflection on the subject. Indeed, the relations between the film and the spectator form the film content and the notion of desire.

The articulation of cinematic meaning relies heavily on semiotic and psychoanalytic theories for Heath and

Metz. Content and form are examined together as a definition of the subject is undertaken: with images. 100 words and the subject and, text, ideology and meaning,

Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes' theories have respectively constituted the locus of all systems of representation.

Film theory has also grown from an initial preoccupation with the image to a notion of language and finally text. New issues have been addressed: the functioning of reality, narrative as "articulation of the transformation of space into place" (in Heath's words) and the writing process which deconstructs cinematic relations.

As a system of representation, film narrative has been articulated and disarticulated via woman by Godard.

Unfortunately, even in a Godardian discourse, the woman is confined to a system of production in which efficiency and reasonable discourse prevail (via the director's voice over in Deux ou trois choses que ie sais d'elle, and his position of authority generated by a scientific discourse).

Feminist film theorists have meticuously analyzed woman's oppression: they have isolated the male gaze and thus the social constructs that shape perception to be the cause. The only way to get out of this dead end is actually to deconstruct the processes of narrativization or to construct another conceptual framework. Jean-Luc

Godard has certainly initiated this enterprise. He 101 remains in my view the most important film theorist since he has succeeded in debunking the underlying socio­ political constructs and, in that respect, has prepared the theoretical ground for a postmodern cinema. As a woman's voice Julia Kristeva sounds lonely in the analysis of postmodern thinking. 102

Notes to Chapter II

1. See Jean-Louis Baudry in Apparatus ; Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings. Ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. New York: Taneun, 1980.

2. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film. London, Oxford, New York; Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 52.

3. André Bazin, "Ontologie et langage" in Ou'est-ce que le cinéma. Volume 1. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1958, p. 18.

4. Ibid., p. 22.

5. Andrew Dudley, André Bazin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 24.

6. Ibid., pp. 105-106.

7. In Questions of Cinema. London: Macmillan, 1981, Heath clarifies that although Eisenstein may talk about language, he does not use the term, p. 156.

8. Jurij Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema. Trans. Mark Suino. Ann Harbor; University of Michigan, 1976, p. 48.

9. Ibid., p. 59.

10. Gilles Deleuze, Image-mouvement. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1983, p. 46.

11. Jean-Pierre Delange, "Le montage d'attractions" in Eisenstein par Jean Mitrv, Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1978, p. 46.

12. Jean-Luc Godard, "Mon beau souci" in Cahiers du cinéma. nO 65, Décembre 1956, p. 30.

13. Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense. Trans, and Ed. by Jay Leyda, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947, p. 32. 103

14. Jurij Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema. Ann Harbor: University of Michigan, 1976, p. 59.

15. Francois Truffaut, Jules et Jim, adapted from Henri -Pierre Roche's novel, released in 1962, with Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Sème and Marie Dubois.

16. Jean-Luc Godard, Deux ou trois choses que ie sais d'elle, screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard adapted from a survey by Catherine Vimenet in Le nouvel observateur, photography by Raoul Coutard, produced by Anouchka Films, Argos Films, Les Films du Carrosse, Parc Film, released in 1966, with Marina Vlady, Anny Duperey, Roger Montsoret, Raoul Levy, and Jean Narboni.

17. See Stephen Heath, "Narrative Space" in Questions of Cinema. London: Macmillan, 1981.

18. Raymond Bellour, "Thierry Kuntzel et le retour de l'écriture" Cahiers du cinéma. nO 321, Mars 81.

19. Metz's article "Le cinéma: langue ou langage" became part of Essais sur la signification au cinéma. Volume I, Paris: Klincksieck, 1968, 2e éd. 1971.

20. Christian Metz, Le signifiant imaginaire: psvchanalvse et cinéma. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1977, p. 63.

21. Christian Metz, Le signifiant imaginaire. Paris: Christian Editeur, 1984, p. 250.

22. Stephen Heath, "Film, Cinetext, Text," Screen. December 1970, pp. 102-125, p. 118.

23. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

24. Stephen Heath, "Film, Cinetext, Text," Screen. December 1970, pp. 102-125, p. 102.

25. Ibid., p. 104.

26. Ibid., p. 123.

27. Jean-Luc Douin, Jean-Luc Godard. Paris: Editions Rivages, 1989, p. 86.

28. James Monaco, The New Wave. New York: Qxford University Press, 1976, p. 45. 104

29. Jean-Luc Godard, Godard par Godard; les années Karina. Editions de l'étoile, 1985, p. 47.

30. Jean-Luc Godard, Je vous salue Marie, screenplay by Jean-Luc Godard, music: Bach, Dvorak, Coltrane, photography by Jean-Bernard Menoud and Jacques Firmann, produced by Pégase Films, SSR, JLG Films, Sara Films, Channel Four, released in 1983, avec Myriem Roussel, Thierry Rode and Philippe Lacoste.

31. James Monaco, The New Wave. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 169.

32. Gorin in an interview with les Cahiers du cinéma.

33. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, pp. 14-26.

34. Laura Mulvey, "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun" in Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, pp. 29-38.

35. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism. Semiotics. Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 52.

36. Ibid., p. 121.

37. Mary-Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, p. 6.

38. Ibid., pp. 11-12.

39. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Methuen, 1983.

40. See Teresa de Lauretis, "Desire in Narrative" in Alice Doesn't: Feminism.Semiotics. Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 103-157.

41. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism. Semiotics. Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 33.

42. Judith Mayne, The Woman at the kevhole: Feminism and Women's Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 105

43. Julia Kristeva, Polvloaue. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977, p. 519. CHAPTER III

Psychoanalytic Narrative: de/construction of the fe/male speaking subject and desire.

By distinguishing between structuralism and poststructuralism, theories of the subject move towards an inclusion of the subject into narrative. They facilitate an understanding of the current theorization of society and culture in their complex systems of representation.

As an essential addition to the scope of study provided by structuralism and semiotics, psychoanalysis offers significant insights into a simultaneous construction and deconstruction of the subject and desire.

These two elements have unfailingly become the characteristics of Western theorization of society and the

subject.

Contemporary psychoanalytic theory has developed from

Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Challenging the

Cartesian construct that has tied man's identity to reason

and consciousness, Freud defined the human being as being

governed both by conscious and unconscious actions. The

construction of the psyche as a reservoir of energies and

forces allowed a link to be made between inherent human

biological characteristics and the "outside world." This

106 107 link, in turn, constitutes a bridging of the existing gap between the self and "otherness"-whatever constitutes what is not the self. In Freud's footsteps, Jacques Lacan has refined psychoanalysis: language has become the primary signifier in the subject's development and the image has been defined as the necessary step to bridge the distance between objects and words (Freud) and the gap between the

"self" and the "other" (Lacan).

Essential to the interface of feminism and postmodernism is the fact that these theories simultaneously provide a "biological" construction of the subject and a "social" demise of the speaking subject.

Feminine discourse articulates itself upon the biological/social duality that characterizes the human being, and postmodernism describes the juncture or the oscillation between construction and deconstruction and the incessant wavering between structure and process/flow.

Chief among the numerous questions that have arisen from a feminist reading of Freudian-Lacanian texts is the concern for the woman's place in the construction of the subject and desire. Such a preoccupation allows further inquiry into image narrative and the delineation of desire within film-narrative.

The 1900 publication of Sigmund Freud's

Interpretation of Dreams marks the start of a new interest 108 in human identity and constitutes the starting point for a theory of the subject. Freud's early preoccupation was to understand the present behavior of female hysterics in terms of their past and more specifically, mental phenomena that were, in his words, "the outcome of the interplay of environmental experiences and of the biological development of the psycho-sexual structure." ^

The study of these mental phenomena led him to the construction of the psyche. The unconscious is conceived as the site of interaction between what forms the human being inherently (biologically) and also by acquisition

(socially). The "libido" constitutes a major source of psychic energy.

In a further step, Freud crystallizes his research in the two volume publication (1917 and 1933) of Introductory

Lectures on Psychoanalysis. His initial work on dreams is thus substantiated while the scope of psychoanalysis is widened to a study of the subject's relationship with society and art, and in ancient and modern civilization, and also a history of the psychoanalytic movement. His liminary work of the unconscious was thus refined into a two phase development. With an emphasis on the work of memory, the unconscious and the preconscious, he describes how from an identity of perception, the subject reaches an identity of thought. The object-presentation is retained in the unconscious via primary processes while the word- 109 presentation is attained in the pre-preconscious via secondary processes under the governing of the reality principle. Freezing this initial division into three static and general categories, the second topography becomes the id, superego and ego. The id is "everything that is inherited, that is present at birth, that is laid down in the constitution -above all, therefore the instincts which originate from the somatic organization and find a first psychical expression here in forms unknown to us." ^ The superego is reality as it is constructed by society through the mediation of the internalization of a parental figure who is himself/herself the conveyor of social constructs.

Finally, the ego is an intermediary between the id and the external world which, aiming at self-preservation, uses memory, adaptation, and activity towards pleasure and away

from displeasure. Thus, Freud's constructions are linked with a theory of the instincts which draw the subject towards love (Eros) and towards death (Thanatos).

The issue at stake in such a classification of psychic components is how Freud has constructed his own

desire. In the treatment of hysterics, the participation,

explanation and understanding of the dialogue between the psychoanalyst and analysand led Freud to develop a set of principles and codes that defined a psychoanalytic

narrative. Aiming at establishing a science, the 110 psychoanalytic narrative remains in many aspects literary,

and as such embeds Freud's own desire.

Freudian narrative rests upon a definite male- centered structure. Indeed, among the three different

structures which have been singled out by Roy Schafer, two

have been identified as "scientific": the primary one is

that of the infant and young child viewed as a beast (the

id) that is tamed by society (the ego and the superego).

The other structure compares the psyche to a machine which

is characterized by inertia and works whenever it is moved

by force -the organism's instinctual drives. This machine

operates as a closed system in that the amount of energy

is fixed. ^ In addition to these two structures, a

literary narrative relies on Sophocles' "great narrative"

Oedipus Rex in which the male protagonist kills his father

and unknowingly sleeps with his mother. These three

structures are controlled by a male/Hegelian frame of

reference: they derive from a male-specific environment

that is based on a notion of identity founded upon

destruction, containment, mastery and progress.

A similar foundation constitutes the premise of the

Freudian analysis of human behavior. This analysis can be

summarized in the following manner. The identity of the

subject depends upon the triadic relations operating

between Oedipus, his father and mother. The little boy

grows up with an attachment to and love for the mother. Ill and jealousy and hatred for the father because the mother cannot be shared. The little girl develops with a strong attachment to the mother and a love-affair for the father as she wishes to have him and then, hatred for the mother for having the father. Characterized by love and hatred, such a love-triangle constitutes what Freud calls the

Oedipal complex.

Crucial in this theory is the castration threat because it inscribes male identity and constructs "sexual difference." Relying on destruction and mastery, the castration threat leads the little boy to give up his love for the mother. According to Freud, emulating the father, the little boy exits the love triangle as he looks for a fourth person, a woman. Unlike the little boy, the little girl is not led into action by fear of castration and thus, does not leave the love triangle as early as the boy. Thus she maintains a close relationship with the mother. Because of this situation, Freud considers the woman to experience resulting psychological problems.

Not efficient in theory because it leaves the girl out of the raport between mother, father, son and daughter, such a castration scenario is however very efficient in relation to the reader/listener. It relies on the subject's iconic and conceptual capabilities that are guided by the sense of tragedy experienced in the anguish of dismemberment and death (and an end to spatial 112 and temporal elements). At the representational level, the castration scenario, in that it marks a closure as well as power and transformation, points to the efficiency of narrative in its symbolization, representation and reiteration of the social constructs and the power structure that characterize phallocentric societies.

A phallocentric point of view is reiterated in

Freud's constructions of the sexual development of human beings. The five well-known stages-oral, anal, phallic, latent and genital-describe a similar development for boys and girls up to the point when the presence of the penis is recognized. The sexuality of early childhood then differs. Both boys and girls begin "to put their intellectual activity at the service of sexual researches; both start off from the premiss of the universal presence of the penis. " * While privileging the penis and the subsequent fear of castration, Freud concludes his explanatory story by endowing man with a pivotal position and depossessing woman of identity. Dissatisfied, troubled and perplexed at the difficulty of theorizing femininity, he proposes, right from the outset of his 33rd lecture devoted to femininity, to scientifically "bring forward nothing but observed facts." His argumentation reveals many deficiencies and his methodology remains fallacious. He observes that both sexes are functionally different; yet, he has recourse to analogies and 113 comparisons. A series of socially acquired relations and positions compels him to ascertain that first woman possesses a "small" and "stunted" male attribute and second, social customs force women into passive situations. Perceiving his own statements to be somehow invalid, Freud ventures a scientific proof: in an examination of the comportment of sex-cells during intercourse, he claims that they adopt similar attitudes to woman's and man's. Feminine cells are passive while masculine ones are active. His contention reveals a total absence of questioning of either society as it was, or the social establishment of male constructs.

Re-reading Freudian theories, French psychiatrist

Jacques Lacan has made language acquisition a crucial point in the definition of the subject. Although Lacan started to write in the 1930s, his seminars were first published in 1966 under the title Ecrits. Among them, "Le stade du miroir" whose gestation period dates back to

1936, marked a significant step in the formation of the self upon its 1949 publication as an article. Subsequent to the Freudian pre-oedipal period of unity between mother and child, the mirror phase brings about a distance between the recognized ideal sexual image that the child sees in the mirror and its own identity. Giving the child the perception of its own image, that is, its body as a whole, the mirror puts an end to the panic that the infant 114 experiences of a chopped and dismembered body by integrating it in a dialectic which constitutes the subject. The mirror phase constitutes the experience of a fundamental identification and also the conquest of an image of the body which structures the I before the subject commits him/herself to the dialectical identification with the "other" through the mediation of language. Thus, for Lacan, the power of the sight replaces fear in the scopic field and the power of language, whereas for Freud, the power of the sight brings about fear (of castration).

Unlike Freudian theory that simultaneously stresses fear and the power/fragility of the penis, Lacanian theory emphasizes the image as the reassuring element in the fear of dismemberment. Yet, similar to Freud who bases his theory of the child's development on lack or fear of loss

(of the penis), Lacan considers lack to be the motor of the development of the subject. Upon leaving the mother's womb, the baby first experiences a biological lack, then a culturally-engineered lack in which, through the care-taking person, it sexually differentiates itself from the Other, and finally, lack which is inherent to the formation of the "self."

The essential Lacanian contribution to postmodernism resides in the notion of the pre-existence of language: man is not the master of the order of signification, but 115 rather, this order constitutes him. Language alienates the subject because the latter is always decentered in a world which constantly escapes comprehension and constitutes desire:

II n'y a pas un inconscient parce qu'il y aurait un désir inconscient, obtus, lourd, caliban, voire animal, désir inconscient levé des profondeurs, qui serait primitif et aurait à s'élever au niveau supérieur du conscient. Bien au contraire, il y a un désir parce qu'il y a de l'inconscient, c'est-à-dire du language qui échappe au sujet dans sa structure et ses effets, et qu'il y a toujours au niveau du language quelque chose qui est au-delà de la conscience et c'est là que peut se situer la fonction du désir. ®

Both Lacan and Freud consider the Oedipus complex as

the turning point in the formation of subjectivity while

they recognize the complexity of female development.

Women have problems entering the symbolic order because of

the primacy of the phallus and because of the value

ascribed to the pre-oedipal. In addition to the late

triangle, the girl encounters another obstacle in her

development: the ignorance of the vagina. Freud says that

in order for her to solve her problems:

... the first object-cathexes occur in attachment to the satisfaction of the major and simple vital needs. A girl has to make a switch, to get away from the object-cathex and from her clitoris to the vagina. ®

Later on, he claims that the resolution of the girl's

problem occurs when:

... the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby, if, that is, a baby takes the place of a 116

penis in accordance with an ancient symbolic equivalence. ’

Within the conceptual framework of knowledge as verifiability and comparison based on "reality" and visibility, desire, as energy or force, exists because of

the object and this object has to be isolated. Freud

claims that everything which surrounds the human being has

to become an "object." The concept of love-object for the

father and mother is needed so that he can succesfully

conclude the operations in his theory of instincts. Thus,

essential to both Freudian and Lacanian theories, sight

generates a notion of "object" and brings about knowledge.

Linking the notion of desire to the human scopic power,

Lacan emphasizes that sight functions as a lack because at

that level, it is no longer demand that is dealt with but

only desire, in a relation to the Other:

D'une façon générale, le rapport du regard à ce qu'on veut voir est un rapport de leurre. Le sujet se présente comme autre qu'il n'est, et ce qu'on lui donne à voir, n'est pas ce qu'il veut voir. C'est par là que l'oeil peut fonctionner comme objet a, c'est-à-dire au niveau du manque. ®

By means of the scene of the little boy and girl's

voyeurism and that of the infant catching sight of its

body in the reflection of the mirror, Freud and Lacan

consider sight to be the primary determinant of knowledge,

before speech. However, similar to speech that implies an

excess, the gaze creates a gap between the world around us 117 and knowledge. Thus, in John Berger's words "the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled." ®

A questioning of knowledge is the crucial issue in such argumentation. Do we know because we see? Knowledge is closely tied to sight and verifiability. Freudian presentation is not verifiable since he has established an analogy with the behavior of sex cells. His presentation

solely resides on the power of narrative. Because of existing multiple interpretations and the psychoanalyst's

authoritative position, psychoanalytic narrative becomes controversial.

Fraught with many implications, Freudian narrative has been controversial in terms of sexual difference.

Based on tentative and unverifiable theoretical positions,

it was bound to fall under a close female examination.

Noteworthy is the fact that for Freud, the lack of knowledge which has derived from the lack of sight determines the problem for the woman, thus disregarding any other type of knowledge. In offering a tentative woman's identity based on an analysis of sexual functions,

Freud is trapped between biological and cultural

parameters. He is imprisoned in a system which privileges

a type of knowledge, based primarily on sight, and because

he makes an abstraction of the socio-political constraints

involved in the definition of the subject. 118

Despite its controversial aspects, psychoanalysis remains an essential step towards a more precise definition of desire. Freudian desire is sexual and depends on the family triangle. The law of the interdiction of incest, insofar as it functions in the unconscious as a castration law, determines the access to genital desire or to the object and becomes the key term in the reality principle. Lacanian desire is constituted by the original separation from the mother and from the phallus which becomes the primary signifier. It can be undestood as whatever is left once the need is substracted from demand. The separation and entrance into language provokes a persistent and ineffaçable process of desire.

Thus, human beings experience a constant process of going back to the mother, to the imaginary order, to the realm of non-signification and finally to the primary origin.

The symbolic order, in that it is a "manque-à-être, " represents the relation between the human being and language and at the same time, determines desire. To be human involves the entry into language and simultaneously, the access to desiring productions.

Literary narrative structure has imprisoned both

Freud and Lacan and has exposed their theories to harsh criticism, especially from the point of view of feminism.

A female voice started to be heard in the 1920s with Karen

Horney who contended that Freud's principles and codes 119 have institutionalized the penis, and the primacy of man over woman, and later in the 1940s when Lacan's theories institutionalized the phallus as being the primary signifier, therefore barring woman from access to signification. The 1960s and 1970s saw an eruption of the combined theorization of marxism and psychoanalysis.

Femininity had become the potential space for a theorization of the deficiencies brought about by these two philosophies of doubt. The Marxian critique of ideology had offered grounds for a female point of view to be developed. In a capitalist system, woman has been considered as the dominated figure, as a product of consumption and man has been equated with the dominant

figure of the capitalist system. Being the reason for man's identity, woman has been impossible to define or has been defined in relation to the construction of the male

subject. The struggle between the sexes has been

initially theorized in relation to woman's oppression.

Woman has been considered as kept in a position that gives

stability and control to male identity: woman has remained

"an ahistorical, eternal feminine essence and a closeness

to nature that served to keep women in "their" place."

With the collapse of monotheism and the male subject,

a new space has been opened for a critique of Western

social constructs. Julia Kristeva is perhaps the lone

voice on the other side of the Atlantic to try to define 120 a new ethics amidst the crises of the Western male subject.

Previous to this recent feminist movement, Simone de

Beauvoir's work. Le deuxième sexe (1949), discussed the woman's place in a man's world. Her text remains the base-line in France and abroad from which other works either explicitly or implicitly depart. Influenced by her existentialist surroundings. De Beauvoir does not grant a significant role to the unconscious and consequently underplays the role of sexuality. She contends that Freud refused to justify philosophically his system because his discipline, which would like to be claimed a science, exempts him from all metaphysical attack. Indeed, scientific research is always considered outside the luring and soporific power of narrative and therefore stands as true knowledge.

In her critique of the Freudian theorization of woman, de Beauvoir argues that woman is the "supreme other" against which man defines himself as subject and that woman is always object for the man's subjecthood.

Such a male position exerts a psychic oppression on woman and, as the archetype of the oppressed consciousness, woman becomes the "second sex." Woman's biological characteristics have been exploited so that she has become the receptacle for the alienation all men must feel; she 121 contains man's otherness and, in doing so, is denied her own humanity.

Echoing this ground-breaking text, women's voices attempted to articulate a woman's definition outside the dependence on man. Both in France and North America women writers have articulated an interface between their feminine perspective and narrative space. In France, Luce

Irigaray and Hélène Cixous claim that feminine language works in a close bond with the body and similarly that the body is the source of writing and language.

Displacing the notion of the "éternel féminin" and looking for a new kind of woman, Hélène Cixous and

Catherine Clément in La jeune née (1937) establish a link between feminine writing and textual production. Women are encouraged to free themselves from the imaginary through writing because a libidinal economy should attract them into writing and simultaneous "jouissance." Because female discourse is never simple, linear or logical, feminine writing must remain ex/orbitant. In Speculum de l'autre femme (1974) Irigaray examines Plato's and Freud's texts through a deconstructive gender reading by which she undermines the logic, the grammar and the rules of a phallocentric system. Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (1977) places masculine sexual desire in the foreground in order to excimine female desire which is defined by a multiplicity of sexual pleasures and places. In addition 122 to deconstructing phallocentricism, Irigaray shows that women's writing is an anti-language in that it is fluid and breaks the syntax, knowing neither a subject nor an object.

In North America, Nancy Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) integrates object relations theory with feminism. She points out that the development of the child in Freudian-Lacanian theory is based on individualism which is derived from independence and separateness. In fact, individuality is a balance of separation and connectedness. This has been supported by most feminist psychoanalytic theorists. Juliet Mitchell in Psvchoanalvsis and Feminism: Freud. Reich. Lainq and women (1974) argues that the phallus is the representative of the principle of individuation, and as such defines desire.

Following these feminist psychoanalytic analyses of

Freud's and Lacan's theories, there was a second wave of women writers who used these critiques in order to rethink

sexual identities and sexual difference in textual productions (to name only a few, Nancy Miller, Shoshana

Felman, Naomi Schor and Barbara Johnson).

These women's positions reflect the existence of mirror images across the borders between European and

North American woman writers despite their different cultural and socio-politico-economic environments. Their 123 writings suggest the common concern for the implications of psychoanalysis for feminism. The Europeans inscribe woman's differences in their writings in order to produce a new language. The Americans argue that a woman's language exists in the inscription of women's oppression and that a non-ideological language is needed.

Defying the structuralism of the Freudian signifying process and theory of the unconscious, Julia Kristeva elaborates a notion of the "hétérogène" to characterize signifying processes. Her work reveals a merger of the philosophical and linguistic discourses towards a new approach to the subject. Her definition of the signifying process derives from a comparison of general theories of meaning, language and of the subject. This signifying practice illuminates and informs my notion of desire in film narrative.

Following her first work. Recherches pour une sémanalvse (1969), in which she develops her theory of

"semanalyse," her second significant work. La révolution du langage poétique (1974) is a study of 19th century

French literary texts which serve as examples of how her

"sémanalyse" can help us locate networks of phantasies.

Kristeva proposes to investigate the workings of "le langage poétique" as a signifying practice which accompanies crises within social structures and 124 institutions-the moments of their mutation, evolution, revolution, or disarray.

In attempting to articulate an analytical discourse on signifying systems which would take into account these crises of meaning, subject, and structure, Kristeva positions herself within postmodernism. Indeed, she considers crises as being inherent in the signifying

function and consequently in sociality. In a postmodern gesture, Kristeva links the libidinal economy and the economy of language with the political economy. The political extremes of our century and its responses to the crises of monological Western thought (fascism and

Stalinism, and thus inevitably anti-Semitism) are rooted

in the psychic mechanisms of the human subject and are

laid bare in the psychic traces of the radically poetic

text.

She integrates biological and social/linguistic

elements into her notion of the "shattering of discourse."

Links between linguistic changes and changes in the status

of the subject (its relation to the body, to others, and

to objects) are revealed. This shattering surpasses

linguistic and ideological norms to integrate their

process by displaying the productive basis of subjective

and ideological signifying formations, which primitive

societies call "sacred" and modernity has rejected as

"schizophrenia." Pointing to the very process of 125 significance, the fragmentary phenomena show the marks of a discourse which is useful and attest also to what it represses; the process that exceeds the subject and his communicative structures. "Signifiance" then, is:

cet engendrement illimité et jamais clos, ce fonctionnement sans arrêt des pulsions vers, dans et à travers le langage vers, dans et à travers l'échange et ses protagonistes: le sujet et ses institutions.

Called "heterogeneous," this process is a structuring and de-structuring practice, a passage to the outer boundaries

of the subject and society. For Kristeva two inseparable modalities constitute the same signifying process: the

semiotic and the symbolic. Characteristic of the semiotic

is the semiotic chora which orders the subject's drives.

"Semiotic" means mark or trace and "chora" is a

nonexpressive unity formed and articulated by the

subject's drives (that I defined as "energy"). Kristeva's

theory of the semiotic is contrasted to what she calls

"the thetic." The thetic takes on a significant role in

that it is defined as a break which produces the positing

of signification. All enunciation, whether of a word or

of a sentence, is thetic as it requires an identification:

in other words, the subject must separate from and through

its image, from and through its objects. The thetic phase

of the signifying process is the "deepest structure" of

the possibility of enunciation, of signification. There

exists only one signification. that of the thetic phase. 126 which contains the object as well as the proposition, and the complicity between them.

The heterogeneity of meaning and signification is

found in children's echolalias. The research conducted on

the impact of the voice in the pre-oedipal led Kristeva to prioritize voice over language. Neither phonems or

lexeme or sounds, echolalias are rhythms and intonations

that are reenacted, according to Kristeva, in a psychotic

discourse. Sounds such as grunts, sobs, coughs and moans

are not part of verbal language, although they are

expressive and fall within the field of semiology as

paralinguistic phenomena; called "semiotic chora," they

constitute a pre-linguistic and pre-symbolic means of

expression which does not depend on the "thetic process"

by which a subject of discourse is created. They

represent also the ultimate support to the speaking

subject who is threatened by the collapse of signifying

processes.

Departing from most feminists, Kristeva has never

aimed at liberating woman from patriarchy but has rather

examined man as subject. In La traversée des signes

(1975) she examines other cultures and in Polvloque (1977)

she explores language before it signifies and

communicates, meaning and language at the point where it

is losing or has lost meaning; that is, language

acquisition and psychosis. Subsequent to her own 127 professional work on the study of psychotic discourse,

Kristeva examines the kind of new truth that modern men

seem to be desperately searching for and can't seem to

find. Composed of three words, le vrai, le réel (in

Lacan's sense) and elle, the "vréel" represents the explosion of new languages - both liberating and destructive, obsessed with the feminine psychic spaces that have been repressed by Western history. Pouvoirs de

l'horreur; Essai sur l'abiection (1980) explores the

abjection that she sees as the fundamental condition of

late twentieth century man. Abjection designates the psychic state of the borderline subject who is no longer

a subject and who no longer is sure of an object or can't

find one. Such a subject is fascinated with the

boundaries between subject and object, with the ambiguous,

the mixed, the in-between.

Although systems and discourse have tried to fix

subjectivity, the historical subject (defined as social

and subjective) has showed that crises occur in every mode

of production. It is precisely in this postmodern era

that the crisis of modes of production occurs:

Le mode de production capitaliste produit, écarte, mais en même temps exploite, pour s'en regénérer, un des éclatements les plus spectaculaires du discours, lequel, étant un éclatement du sujet et de ses limites idéologiques provoque un triple effet.

Unlike most feminists, Kristeva links her linguistic-

philosophical considerations to Freudian-Lacanian 128 psychoanalytic foundations: the mirror stage and castration. The mirror stage constitutes the spatial intuition (it is actually the heart of the functioning of signification) in signs and in sentences and positions, along with the castration complex, the subject as absent from the signifier. Captation of the image and the drive investment in this image, which institute primary narcissism, permits the constitution of objects detached from the semiotic chora. According to Kristeva, since the semiotic chora has been separated from the "subject

"object" continuum, the signifying process posits an object or a denotation. The thetic becomes then the precondition for both enunciation and denotation.

Le thétique pose l'objet signifiable: il pose la signification comme une dénotation (d'objet) et comme une énonciation (de la part d'un sujet décalé, absent de la position signifiée et signifiante) .

Kristeva states that the "flow" exists only through

language, appropriating and displacing the signifier to practice within it, the heterogeneous generating of the

"desiring machine." This flow is considered also outside

language structures, as an excess. Excess or lack depends

only on the perception of the subject who speaks, and it

points again and again to the binarism of our language.

From La révolution du langage poétique to Pouvoirs de

1'horreur. Julia Kristeva has explored a space which 129 actually parallels the feminine. In Polvloaue. she worked out this space of the maternal inscription in the pre- oedipal stage that she calls the chora, and in Pouvoirs de 1'horreur, abjection redefines the signifying space.

The emergence of the subject marks the place of inscription and thus the possibility of signification, similarly to Lacan. Signification depends on identification. For Lacan, this identification is performed through the mirror stage, via a primary identification, whereas for Kristeva, this identification is effected in the pre-oedipal, in a space outside a time reference.

Oedipus not only represents trauma in human life, but also a structure according to which desire unfolds as an

effect of the rapport of the human being with society and

language. While achieving the construction of the

Unconscious as a psychic apparatus, Freud developed new

critical tools for an understanding of the subject. He

linked the object to the word through the image and

developed a psychoanalytic narrative. Freudian narrative

articulates a notion of desire/energy that essentially

emanates from a scientific mind, thus causing problems

because of the rigidity of narrative, bound up with

limits, definitions and closure. Lacanian theory 130 articulates desire in the identification of the speaking, thus desiring, human being.

The major Freudian-Lacanian contribution to contemporary thought has been the emphasis upon Lack (of knowledge for Freud and distance for Lacan) whenever the subject speaks. Indeed, the subject cannot both signify itself and efficiently signify its own action of signification. Desire reduces itself to a search for satisfaction in a world where the subject objectifies everything s/he sees for lack of better grasp on the distance between the self and otherness, between the individual and the world. Distance/lack prods desire.

Psychoanalytic and semiological tools have enabled women to unlock patriarchal culture as expressed in dominant representations. Julia Kristeva has attempted to provide new directions for an understanding of signifying processes. Her theory of the semiotic offers a way to understand the de/construction of phallocentricism and at the same time a new articulation of desire as she links the representable and the non-representable in a closeness to the maternal which actually pervades signifying processes in the rupture between the subject and the object, and in that respect links the feminine to postmodernism (the collapse of male institutions and constructs). 131

Feminist film critics have embraced a semiological method that deconstructs film as a signifying system in which woman functions as a "sign." They have also

produced various ways to rethink representation in

signifying processes. In a world where theory and

practice, politics and aesthetics converge, which is the

subject matter of my next chapter, male cinema no longer

appears monolithic and therefore does not emerge as

invincible. As the state of crisis endemic to modernity,

postmodernism reveals the femininization of social texts.

Man's world is crumbling with the breakdown of traditional

narrative and the hystericization of texts that manifest

the pulverization of phallocentricism.

The feminist theorization of the woman's position in

society is an extreme leap forward, especially when this

theorization links two spheres of thought: semiology and

psychoanalysis. These two systems have been thought out

by men; yet, they have offered space for a theorization of

the feminine condition. As Doane points out in the

introduction to The Desire to Desire "women would seem to

be perfect spectators, culturally, positioned as they are

outside the arena of history, politics, production."

Women are "looking on" and moving on towards

postmodernism. As spectators, too, women take on the

traditional male position which has always been that of

the spectator and consequently the leading actor. 132 possessor of the global vision, of the gaze from a distance. 133

Notes to Chapter III

1. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, Trans, and ed. by James Strachey, New York and London: Norton and Company, 1969, p. 2.

2. Ibid., p. 2.

3. See Roy Schafer, "Narration in the psychoanalytic dialogue" in On Narrative, Ed. by W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.

4. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, Trans, and ed. by James Strachey, New York and London: Norton and Company, 1969, p. 11.

5. Jacques Lacan, quoted in Ou'est-ce cue le structuralisme, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968, Oswald Ducrot, Tzvetan Todorov, Dan Sperber, Moustafa Safouan et Francois Wahl, "Psychoanalyse et Médecine" in "Lettres de l'Ecole Freudienne" nO 31, p. 45.

6. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1966, p. 282.

7. Ibid., p. 285.

8. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966, p. 98.

9. John Berger, Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972, cover page.

10. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 4.

11. Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974, p. 15. 134

12. Speculating about the vocal equivalent of the Lacanian mirror phase, French psycho-phonetician Micheline Veaux has conducted empirical studies that show infants recognizing the specific voice of their biological mothers, well before any "knowledge" of language.

13. Julia Kristeva, La revolution du langage poétique, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974, p. 13.

14. Ibid., p. 53.

15. Julia Kristeva, Polvloaue, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970, p. 57.

16. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940's. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987, p. 2. CHAPTER IV

Postmodern Cinema: the feminine fabric.

Le cinéma est fasciné par lui-même comme objet perdu tout comme il (et nous) sommes fascinés par le réel comme référentiel en perdition. Jean Baudrillard.

As an example of contemporary cultural entities, the cinema has been, since the twenties, rapidly pervading our socio-economic and cultural organization. Fast-moving, our society is driven forward by a state-of-the-art technology which disrupts our traditional perception of time and space and thus produces a different moment. A rupture with the past has brought to the fore the questioning of history with all its implications about traditional theories of knowledge and meaning as well as the fundamental and ever-present notion of the subject.

Western productions manifest this rupture. Works of art, institutions, laws and narratives have turned out to be fragmented, diversified and plural. No longer supported by a monolithic logic and homogeneous belief, they have been subsequently characterized by gaps, breaks, indeterminacies and oscillations. The authority of the work of art no longer represents an authentic

135 136 vision of the world, as modernism had claimed.

Postmodernism involves a deconstructive thrust: the vision of the world has decomposed into a multitude of facets that bring forth elements of understanding. Gaps, breaks, indeterminacies and oscillations reveal, in fact, the desperate human attempt to theorize the subject in and towards society and culture.

In the midst of a disbelief of modernism (destruction

of the old for the new) and in the incredible experience

of the overwhelming power of the media, the cinema and

television appear to be the art forms which best account

for the postmodern condition. Dominant narratives of the twentieth century, the cinema, and in certain aspects the

television of the eighties, articulate in theory and practice what most French literary theorists have named

"le féminin du texte", ^ that is to say. Western society's

experience of the text's breaks and gaps. Via sighting ^

and putting-into-signs (which constitutes the work of

systems of representation), film-narrative today reveals

a constant instability/stability in both form and content

via the repositioning of a libidinal economy.

The historical development of French cinema, the

evolution of the role of woman in society, as well as the

development of critical theory show how the cinema of the

eighties has become postmodern. The cine-text is fraught with images as it is freed from the violence of 137 signifiers— the cinematographic apparatus and phallocentric conceptual modes.

"Postmodernism" in the United States and Europe accounts for the practices that determine the current philosophical state of affairs. Unable to "comprehend" what is going on, scholars feel more at ease debating

semantics. The word postmodernism implies a notion of historical end, and as such, provokes passionate and

controversial debates. Problematic as it is,

"postmodernism" demands first and foremost a brief review

of the various definitions the use of the word has

generated. However different and convincing these

definitions may be, they all concur with a state of

affairs which can be defined in Jurgens Habermas's words

as the simultaneous experience of "a self-disseminating

culture and a self-homogeneizing society." ^

The very discussion of postmodernism as a radical

break with a dominant culture and aesthetic is the thrust

of Jean-Francois Lyotard's key text on postmodernism. La

condition postmoderne (1979). In a report on the

situation of contemporary knowledge, Lyotard assesses the

state of our culture following transformations which have

altered scientific, literary and artistic discourses. He

argues that the Western world is witnessing a massive

delegitimation of mastercodes in society and a demise of 138 metanarratives. Metanarratives are the narratives which

have defined modernism; development of reason and liberty,

progressive emancipation of labor, betterment of humanity

as a whole through the development of capitalist

technological sciences and Christianity. Such a breakdown

of "les grands récits" favors "les petites histoires"

which preserve the heterogeneity of language games. In

crisis, narrative produces a gap. Lyotard identifies two

different positions towards society: the society is either

viewed as unified and homogeneous from functional

perspectives or divided and heterogeneous from critical

perspectives. This gap contributes to a deligitimation of

our society. In postmodern culture, legitimacy is

mediated by the "para-logic," which is a kind of logic

which valorizes the incomplete short stories, historically

embedded and hidden within so-called scientific or

"objective" discourse.

Commonly understood as a rupture from traditional

narrative and meaning, modernism distorted temporal and

spatial notions by emphasizing space over time, or time

over space. For instance, the authors of the New Novel,

rebelling against the traditional representation of time,

spatialized the text by giving considerable attention to

space and objects. The cinema has not been exempt from

such criticism. Looking back to the development of the

French cinema, one notices that the "avant-garde" cinema 139 of the twenties used to privilege time, movement and rhythm.

The notions of time and space which are equally and

simultaneously integrated by the human body and mind may either be challenged by the constraints that narrative and language place on the subject, thus producing a male logic, or, kept in balance, engaging the subject into dualities: sameness and difference, unity and rupture,

filiation and revolt. The seemingly binary oppositions that develop through representation are essential for our

simultaneous perception of time and space to maintain a constant energy and stability.

The current situation of the subject is accounted for by a culture in which technology and knowledge are rapidly bridging the gap between time and space. The subject is overwhelmed and destabilized. In order to situate her/himself, s/he desperately attempts to maintain a certain distance between time and space. Operating in this distance and via narrative power, systems of representation alter the inherent existing stability between time and space, while they promote monotheism by

freezing time and/or spatializing the text.

In theorizing the socio-political development that has led to a postmodern condition, numerous authors have argued that the best way to "see clearly" is to set boundaries separating modernism and post-modernism. If 140 one concluding point of view is to prevail, it is that postmodernism is too large and plural a concept to fall within the borders of semantics and definitions. In that respect, postmodernism contributes to the denial of comprehension. Postmodernism is generally understood as a rupture from modernism and a break with the aesthetic field of modernism. In modernism, the cinematic image was only an image— the referent was present, or at least was alluded to. Modernism claims the revelation of the signifying process while postmodernism not only underlines the process but shows a kaleidoscope of images whose referent is left to the spectator to be constructed.

Postmodernism describes also the period of time which follows the fall of modern myths of progress and mastery, and a new "schizophrenic" mode of space and time.

While modernism has pervaded all centuries— according to Habermas, with the advent of Christianity over Judaism and paganism, the fifth century marks the beginning of modernism— postmodernism describes the crisis of the current turn of century. Postmodernism goes beyond the disenchantment and rebellion expressed by modernism.

Modernism expresses a rebellion against culture. An excess of energy is generated and recuperated in a gesture of spiritual salvation. In postmodernism an abundance of playful signifiers is produced. Indeed, postmodern narrative divulges what is repressed by the modern gesture 141 and simultaneously dissolves itself into movement, frequency and rhythm. It conveys what I have already discussed and what Kristeva encompasses with her notion of

"poetic language" in which the "semiotic" is set free by the "symbolic" which is in crisis. Subsequently, the subject emerges from these productions as a movement and archaic rhythm and positions itself at the threshold of its origins, between biology and language/society.

Narrative becomes elusive, operating in a structure of repetition and an absence of meaning, in the production of aesthetical images, in the space of all-mighty desire.

Among the authors who have attempted a definition of postmodernism, Ihab Hassan has been the most acknowledged in the United States because he has given the word the widest and the earliest coverage. Although he admits that the word sounds "awkward" and "uncouth" as it does not allow a clear distinction between modernism and postmodernism. Hassan adds that postmodernism "evokes what it wishes to surpass or suppress, modernism itself." *

Indeed, alluding to a conception of "period" in terms of both continuity and discontinuity, the word encompasses modernism and whatever comes after.

Introducing a compilation of essays on postmodern culture, Hal Foster, in The Anti-Aesthetic. considers postmodernism as a gesture of return towards the traditions that modernism has lost. The postmodern 142 gesture is associated, in his words, with "the surviving

humanist tradition in that the postmodernist elides both pre- and post-modern elements." ® Embracing a definition which privileges a different form of aesthetic, Foster proposes the word "anti-aesthetic" as a different name to

describe the current gesture;

Anti-Aesthetic also signals that the very notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas, is in question here: the idea that aesthetic experience exists apart, without "purpose", all but beyond history, or that art can now effect a world at once (inter) subjective, concrete and universal - a symbolic totality. Like "postmodernism", then, anti-aesthetic" marks a cultural position on the present... ®

A few authors associate postmodernism with post­

structuralism. Naomi Schor, for instance, considers the

question of the subject to be the most salient binding

element between post-structuralism and postmodernism. She

suggests that "by putting an end to the structuralist

movement, post-structuralism has brought to the fore the

notion of the subject." ’ In a psychoanalytical gesture,

post-structuralism and post-modernism, in the name of the

subject, engage with the repressed past.

Unlike modernism then, which is characterized by a gesture of rupture, a rejection of the old and an embracing of the new in the name of progress, postmodernism is marked by a less spectacular return of the repressed of modernism, a sense of recovery of the usable past unencumbered by nostalgia. ®

Aware of the problematic discussion generated by the use

of the prefix "post," Schor adds that "contrary to what 143 the prefix post would suggest, postmodernism in all its multiple manifestations, is a movement in and of modernism." ®

Differently from Schor, Habermas, the critic of repute on modernity, suggests that the prefix "post" alludes to the modernist failure in reconciling the subject with society:

Si la modernité a échoué c'est en laissant la totalité de la vie se briser en spécialités indépendantes abandonnées à la compétence étroite des experts, cependant que l'individu concret vit le "sens désublimé" et la "forme déstructurée" non pas comme une libération, mais sur le mode de cet immense ennui que Baudelaire écrivait il y a plus d'un siècle.

The word "failure" is sometimes evoked and a sentiment of pessimism is manifest as the resulting perception/judgment of modernism. Jean-Francois Lyotard develops his theory on the very grounds that the incredible amount of expertise generated by our modern society has led to such a failure. Like Habermas, Lyotard conceives of an equally negative and positive difference between modernism and postmodernism. He suggests that modernism is a negatively motivated rupture with tradition and that postmodernism is the affirmative exposition of new propositions in which traditions no longer play the role of those which one rebels against.

Fredric Jameson in "Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural

Logic of Late Capitalism" and "Postmodernism and Consumer

Society" contends that modernism and postmodernism remain 144 utterly distinct in their meaning and social function.

"Postmodernism occurs in the economic system of late capital and beyond that, to the transformation of the very sphere of culture in contemporary society." " With the powerful development of the media, human beings are experiencing a new culture of the image or simulacrum. A new depthlessness accompanies the abusive use of images and thus contributes to the weakening of historicity in contemporary "theory" and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum. Depth is replaced by multiple surfaces, often commonly called intertextuality, which I call "fabric." Human beings are led to experience a new type of private temporality whose "schizophrenic" structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts.

Following his first work La Phénoménologie (1954) , in which Lyotard pursued an early philosophical interest.

Economie libidinale (1974) departed from traditional philosophy and aesthetics to embrace psychoanalysis.

Close to Gilles Deleuze's psychoanalytical work and distant from that of Sigmund Freud, his libidinal economy corresponds to a flow of energy and affects which operates within the human body, between bodies and between objects and bodies. Libidinal drives connect the human being to the world objects, people and structures of political 145 power. In that respect. Economie libidinale combines

Lyotard's political and aesthetic views. Art, in its most libidinal form — post-modernism— tackles political structures and offers what Lyotard calls

"experimentation." Experimentation is a philosophical means of moving beyond the traditional Hegelian strive for meaning and "transcendency." Following Habermas' recommendation, the arts constitute the only bridge between different discourses; "les arts dans l'expérience qu'ils procurent doivent jeter un pont au-dessus de l'abîme qui sépare le discours de la connaissance, celui de l'éthique et celui de la politique et frayer ainsi un passage à une unité de l'expérience." Lyotard considers experimentation as the only aesthetic solution to bridge the existing gap between different discourses.

According to him, libidinal economies operate both in spatiality and temporality. Indeed, while examining the figurai presentation of new post-modern experiments, he discovers in the instance of Daniel Buren's columns that the spatiality of libidinal economies repositions desire in a displacement of the sign and by figurai presentations. In a similar fashion. Récits tremblants

(1977) are composed of a fragmented narrative and an assemblage of graphic images which present scenes of rupture, such as earthquakes and jig-saw puzzle disassemblages. 146

In "L'inconscient comme mise-en-scène" and "Acinéma",

Lyotard develops a theory of "excess" of visual dynamics.

"Acinéma" suggests that the avant-garde cinema is created by either understating or exaggerating the economy of moving images that one finds in traditional narrative film. The lack of camera movement characteristic of some avant-garde films holds on the fixed frame longer than is allowed in other films, making the spectator aware of the image frame and concentrating attention on events and space within that fixed freime. These events can themselves be sparse and image space can be defined as abstract imagery or images which are the "lack of imagery", since they do not correspond to traditional images in that they have lost their referents.

Tying semiotics, psychoanalysis and Marxism together,

Lyotard underlines the significance of image and narrative. In Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (1986) he addresses their double inquiry and the co-existence of modernism and postmodernism; "quelle place occupe le postmoderne ou n'occupe-t-il pas dans le travail vertigineux des questions lancées aux règles de l'image et du récit ? Il fait assurément partie du moderne. .. Une oeuvre ne peut devenir "moderne" que si elle est d'abord postmoderne." Cautioning his readers against the latent force which, potentially channelled by narrative and image, can lead towards terror, Lyotard exhorts: 147

"Guerre au tout, témoignons de l'imprésentable, activons les différends, sauvons l'honneur du nom."

Postmodern knowledge represents for Lyotard a tool that "aiguise notre sensibilité aux différences et renforce notre abilité à tolérer l'incommensurable."

It has been prepared at the turn-of-the-century by

Nietzsche's writings in the field of metaphysics, those of

Freud which constitute a critique of self-presence, and those of Heidegger which challenge metaphysics. These three thinkers have contributed to a de-centering of the

subject by means of different crises of legitimation which

have put a distance between culture and nature/matter.

Postmodern knowledge has been produced in other words, by

four deaths/losses; the deaths of God (Nietzche), the

author (Barthes), the father and the speaking subject

(Lacan and Kristeva). Our culture has subsequently lost

mastery over itself. Traditional legitimation as a crisis

of authority vested in Western European culture and its

institutions has taken place.

The symptoms of this crisis may be summed up in

Habermas's words as "a desublimation of meaning within a

destructured form" or may be assimilated to a

femininization of culture, read through Roland Barthes'

and Julia Kristeva's critical writings. Indeed, with

Barthes's notions of "texte", "écriture” and "pluralité"

as well as Kristeva's notion of "langage poétique". 148 postmodernism concurs with feminism, sharing the discourse of the end of unicity and centrality.

The subject of representation has been put on trial by Barthes' and Kristeva's introduction of heterogeneity, discontinuity and rhythms. Barthes' famous "mort de l'auteur" has championed the plurality of the text. His concept of "écriture" promotes movement and production and rejects the idea of natural and transparent reading. His text of pleasure invites the reader to join in the play of the text which dismantles itself through an excess of signifiers or a commutable signified. Critical deconstruction makes the text itself collaborate in denouncing the author as subject and his intentions as author. "Ecriture" leads to the ideal text in which privileges are abolished. Barthes starts with a study of myths while Kristeva looks back to antiquity. Interested in the analysis of diverse symbolizing processes, Kristeva focuses on the constitution of language, discourse, linguistics, painting and literature. Motivated by a better understanding of the subject, she establishes relations between drives and life, society and history, in the flaws and dissolutions of symbolizing processes. Her analysis of the development of the sign points to the

start of our modern organization and sciences as both are equated. She says: "Les sciences ont remplacé la 149 philosophie en remplaçant l'idée de Platon par le signe des Stoïques."

Although my study relies strongly on French critical theories which do not always use the term "postmodern," I plan to use the word "postmodern" instead of "modern."

Very informative for an understanding of post-modernism,

chapter three of Alice Jardine's book Gvnesis offers a valuable review of the main French contemporary thinkers.

More than evaluating the critical situation in France,

Jardine places the woman at the crisscrossing of two

cultures and two concepts, modernity and postmodernism.

In raising pertinent questions about the interface of

feminism and postmodernism. Jardine does not isolate woman

from society and contemporary thought, but on the

contrary, examines her place by means of interrelations

and crossings of texts, images and thoughts.

In attempting an interface between woman and theories

of doubt, many authors relegate feminism and/or a certain

femininization of our society to a second position. For

instance, Hal Foster assimilates feminist practice with

one form of communication. He says;

More locally, "anti-aesthetic" also signals a practice, cross-disciplinary in nature, that is sensitive to cultural forms engaged in a politic (e.g. feminist art) or rooted in a vernacular - that is, to forms that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm. In an analogous way, Craig Owens, who is one of the

rare male critics who have given much thought to the 150 relation between feminism and postmodernism, gives justice to feminism but moderates its impact. He says: "The crisis in Western representation is announced by marginal or repressed discourses among which feminism stands as the most significant." And finally, Ihab Hassan considers feminism as a "more benevolent" form of subversion.

"Subversion may take other more benevolent forms such as minority movements or the femininization of culture."

Postmodernism is commonly treated as a crisis of cultural authority, specifically of the authority vested in Western European culture and its institutions. The single prevailing vision was that of the male subject, centered, unitary and masculine. It is insufficient to say that the postmodernist work attempts to upset the reassuring stability of that mastering position, as Owens puts it. It is essential to underline the nascent break and crisis of the conceptual modes that inscribe themselves in the modern text, because as Kristeva points out, semiotic processes manifest themselves openly.

Being simply denied all legitimacy in representation, women are used in representation as a figure for a

"representation of the irrepresentable" such as nature, truth and the sublime. Within such a framework, Owens sees an apparent crossing of the feminist critique of patriarchy and the postmodernist critique of representation. However, his article falls short of 151 convincing arguments or pertinent questions. For instance, attempting to introduce the issue of sexual difference into the modernism/postmodernism debate— " a debate which has until now been scandalously in-different"- he proposes that "women's insistence on difference and incommensurability (through the insistence of the presence and the loudness of the feminist voice) is an instance of postmodern thought." His choice of words does not truly respond to the immense work done by women both in theory and practice. It is not the woman's voice as a socio-political voice that matters here. It is the fact that without a political statement as traditionally understood via the symbolic, the woman, the semiotic processes are present and revealed because the symbolic signifying systems are "hors-jeu." I would reformulate Owens'statement and say that the woman's voice

- such as exemplified by Luce Irigaray's Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un - is postmodern. Feminism in Lyotard's theory of experimentation combines theory and practice in an incredible artistic and experimental moment, emphasizing heterogeneity and plurality. The cinema has proven how exceedingly different women's productions have been: on their own or with the collaboration of male directors, women film-makers have given a different representation to time and space. A few illustrative names are Chantai

Akerman, Marguerite Duras or Agnès Varda. Indeed, these 152 women filmmakers have defined through their cinema a new cinematic space, a space most appropriate to a woman's expression, a space which complies with the postmodern condition. From a redefinition of the voice in cinema

(Marguerite Duras and Chantai Akerman), which parallels a different representation of space and time, to a repositioning of the woman character in cinema, these filmmakers have immensely contributed to challenging traditional patriarchal film narrative.

A post-modern cinema; another avant-garde ?

The abovementioned film-makers may constitute a certain avant-garde cinema, thus a mere repetition of what has been previously done in the avant-garde movements of the twenties and late 50s and early 60s. However, their films transcend the socio-political goals of the French avant-garde of the twenties. At that time, this cinema was referred to as "experimental", "avant-garde" as well as "genuine", "integral" and "abstract". The term

"experimental cinema" was used more specifically in

England and the United States and accounted for a style or certain mannerisms. Abstract film was used for the first time to designate Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy's film

Le ballet mécanique; yet, this denomination has been questioned by Jacques Brunuis:

Aucune dénomination n'est plus impropre. Cette bande remarquable était beaucoup moins abstraite 153

même que la peinture de Léger. L'élément humain y prédominait, soit par sa représentation directe, grâce à des gros plans de visages ou de fragments de visage et des scènes jouées, soit indirectement, par le truchement d'outils de cuisine gracieusement balancés dans l'espace, casseroles privées de leur signification utilitaire, certes mais reconnaissables et inexorablement concrètes.

The development of what was called the French avant-garde

is instructive. The French cinema had since 1905 remained

in fact in a state of mediocrity. 1917 was the year of the

invasion of American films: The Cheat. Intolerance, and

The Birth of a Nation. Subsequent to an economic weakening of its situation, the cinema was viewed in 1918

as a new toy and, as such, generated incredible enthusiasm

among audiences. However, the cinema, like photography was progressively shunned by literary authors.

The development of the avant-garde was prodded by the

simultaneous development of film criticism. As the cinema

was becoming influential on other art forms, critical

articles appeared as early as 1913. Indeed, various

articles written by Jean Cocteau, Paul Morand, Blaise

Cendrars, and Mark Jacob mentioned or referred the reader

to films or film-images; Benjamin Péret and Philippe

Soupault's poems appeared in scenario form in Littérature

and in 1919 cinematic criticism became authentic with

Louis Delluc's publications of a series of periodicals on

cinematic aesthetics and film criticism. In addition to

written criticism. Le Club des Amis du Septième Art was 154 founded and was the place of interaction between many celebrities from 1920 to 1925: Louis Delluc, Riciutto

Canudo, René Clair, Robert Desnos, Jean Tédesco, Pierre

Henry, Jean Mitry, Emile Vuillermos and Lucien Wahl, to name only a few.

In establishing comparisons between the cinema and other art-forms, film criticism gave an identity to the cinema. First, the cinema was compared with photography, then with the theater— although most of the time it was considered as a bad imitation of theater. Then the cinema embraced the modern tendencies that existed in poetry and painting. (This was the time of the pre-war era when Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Expressionism,

Constructivism, Purism, Orphism, Futurism, abstract painting blossomed.) Post-war French cinema embraced the theory of the absurd: young French people were growing up reading Lafcadio's "acte gratuit" and rereading Rimbaud,

Apollinaire and Dada's poetry. With its "image-temps" and

"image-mouvement," the cinema could assert itself as a unique art which could represent rhythm, something no other art-medium could allow.

Technically, starting with documentaries and newsreels, French cinema defined itself with photographic reproductions of life and nature. Then, it became fiction film, shot in studios as film-makers were striving to create a marvellous novelty and reconstitute movement. 155

Méliês's use of truquages justifies this preoccupation.

By means of a widening len, the spectator could see a full

screen face and the psychological dimension was added to

the cinema. Then, via a focus on objects, inanimate

things were integrated to actions and subjective value was

revealed via movement and changes of camera angles. All

these elements finally granted the cinema its autonomy.

By 1924, the discreet improvisations of the pianist were

replaced by the striking sounds of an orchestra. Further

freed from the theater mold, the cinema was compared with

painting. "Le cinéma est la peinture en mouvement" was

Louis Delluc's motto; "le cinéma, c'est la musique de la

lumière" and "plutôt la mimique que le théâtre" were Abel

Gance's. Then, the cinema beccime "le cinéma contre l'art"

with Marcel L'Herbier. All these elements forged a

liberating movement. By 1925 the cinema had achieved its

position as a full-fledge art medium. Now questions were

raised about the influence of the cinema on the other

arts. Thus, the goal of the Avant-Garde was to give the

cinema its autonomy, to make it an art, to emphasize what

the cinema could bring to drama, since the documentary

value was already accepted. The extreme power of images

was viewed as poetic because images alluded to a meaning,

to a constructed narrative about the human being and

society. The cinema had developed within the period of

the avant-garde from being a political tool to astonish 156 the establishment or the bourgeoisie to a way to place the spectator face to face with himself/herself.

Postmodern cinema or a feminine discourse

1958 marks a significant turning point: the socio-political malaise due to the difficult Algerian war brought the Fourth Republic to its knees and Charles de

Gaulle back to power. In the midst of post-colonialism and political difficulties, the cinema was witnessing a resurgence of life and talent with the congregation of the young directors of the Nouvelle Vague. 1958 corresponds also to the emergence of a different image of the woman and Jean-Luc Godard's fame. The open discussion about all aspects of society led to the subsequent fundamental political gender discourse.

In Ciné-modèles, cinéma d'elles. Françoise Audé considers the 1956-57 cinematic season to be the key period for such a change. She sees Roger Vadim's film Et

Dieu créa la femme as the film which finally gave woman the opportunity to freely express her sexuality and sensuality. The season opened with controversial reactions. Brigitte Bardot appeared and acted feline, animalistic, and portrayed an irresponsible person oscillating between the woman and child's roles. We may grant to Audé that truly, for the first time, a woman was expressing her sexuality, yet such sexuality was 157 represented in order to satisfy a male fantasy. The introductory shot of Bardot speaks for itself ( she is shot laying naked) ! . Although the woman teases male sexuality, she chooses her partner according to her desire. However, she remains prisoner between three men and appears to be the object of the game of two of the three male characters of the film, including the sugar-daddy portrayed by Curt

Jurgens. Thus, promoting sexual freedom and choice, the woman certainly shocked tremendously the deep-rooted bourgeois French morality, but also remained within the game of the phallocentric point of view of traditional cinema.

Unlike this film which portrayed certain elements of the modern woman in French society, another film marked the path for women's claims and has stood definitely as a feminine text. Presented at the 1959 Cannes Festival,

Hiroshima mon amour. directed by Alain Resnais from a scenario written by Marguerite Duras, is without doubt the first feminine/postmodern film. More than a documentary on the horror which took place in Hiroshima, the feminine voice is brought to the screen via an incredible love story. Hiroshima mon amour is certainly the first film which, on the one hand, does not distort or deny masculine and feminine feelings, and on the other hand, which respects the notions of time and space and succeeds in their representation. The text reveals a plurality of 158 stories and an intertextuality, and shows an oscillation between reality and fantasy. It pulverizes knowledge and transgresses itself as the oppositions man/woman, spectator/actress and pain/pleasure are transcended. The female character played by Emmanuelle Riva is a flesh and blood human being with emotions and subjectivity who unites with the other - here, her sexual partner - and questions the socio-political spatial and temporal barriers.

1959 was also the year of Jean-Luc Godard's first feature film A bout de souffle. It is essential to mention Godard in the development of cinema and the representation of woman in cinema. Indeed, Godard was the first film director to open the impossible man/woman dialogue within the dialogue of society and the individual. Dialogue embodies Godard's cinematic politics and aesthetics. The questioning of issues via language and society is performed in the deconstruction of traditional film narrative and the questioning of the definition of cinema.

Thus, from the post-war years to 1968, the French cinema has progressively allowed women to express themselves. They have become, little by little, more autonomous, responsible and liberated. Yet, most of the time, they have remained in man's hands, completely or partially, depending on the level of their collaboration. 159

Although the New Wave brought fresh air to the cinema, it

has not given enough space for women to affirm their

identities. Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc

Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, despite their

technical new approach to the cinema, have remained, in

the sixties and seventies, very condescending to the woman. She has remained mainly the object of their

fantasies or the escape from their anxieties.

A true representation of the woman has taken place

only when women have started to trade places with male

film-directors. Yet, these women have remained and worked within the confines set by patriarchal domination. In

cinema their level of freedom depends largely upon their

financial needs.

While woman is no longer the passive and flattering mirror of man, the male is left aside as his own judge.

As Françoise Audé puts it:

La femme n'est plus le miroir passif et flatteur de l'homme qui, livré à lui-même, est obligé d'être son propre juge. Il fait l'expérience de l'autonomie réelle, celle qui n'est pas relative à un faire valoir complaisant ou à une présence maternante. Il a perdu la sécurité des situations traditionnelles. Il a gagné la dimension de sa liberté.

Despite a new representation of female identity, men cling

to what used to legitimate their identities: the woman.

Thus, we still have in France what can be considered an

exploitative and uninteresting cinema which exists in the 160 name of fully misogynous directors. Such directors (such as Bertrand Blier) try desperately to ascertain their identities via the use of women. Their gesture might appear, hopefully, as the last manifestation of the destabilization of the male position in society. Today, the spectator witnesses the idea of masculinity as both theoretically and historically troubled. With the pressure of feminism and gay politics, the demands of advanced capitalism for new kinds of workers, men are being asked to respond as men in new and different ways: de-industrialized and hi-tech white collar workers, and at home, no longer "heads of households." Women, homosexuals and marginals claim today their differences. In that respect, they contribute to a new economy of desire through the representation of sex, violence and death.

The AIDS crisis and its political and cultural representations are provoking a reexamination of constructions of masculinity in relation to identity, couple relationships, work and family.

A different kind of male character has been created in that his image seems particularly organized around hysteria and masochism. As a type of neurosis, hysteria is revealed by bodily symptoms which symbolically express a psychic conflict which is rooted in the infantile story of the subject. Traditional film narrative used to consider hysteria as, in Heath's terms, "enabling the 161 construction of normalcy." Indeed, man has defined himself via a position of control in narrative, witnessing the woman's hysteria. Today, however, the same male character is adopting an hysterical or schizophrenic attitude. The monster's body is no longer only the female body, but has become the body of the cine-text itself. A series of images constitute the postmodern film narrative which are searching for their lost referent. A meaning behind the images becomes impossible. What's left? - the plastic beauty of images which produce a hyper-realist narrative. Jean-Jacques Beineix 's 3702 le matin will illustrate a certain formalism in such an aesthetics. Luc

Besson is another film-director who overuses the beauty of the artifact, abandoning the beauty of the vision of the film, which used to be produced with framing techniques.

Today, the spectator watches a film, but his/her gaze remains at the film surface. The postmodern character does not allow the spectator to watch and understand in that his/her position in the narrative is decentered and is quite indifferent to the other characters' positions

(Agnès Varda's Sans toit ni loi will exemplify this second point) . An idea for a film is more important than the notion of mise-en-scène. Thus, a decor or a landscape become more significant than a presentation or a scene.

Claire Denis' Chocolat demonstrates this third point.

Postmodern cinema no longer consists of establishing a 162 central point of view or meaning. It is a cinema which prioritizes a kaleidoscope of images that leave the spectactor with a complex feeling, at the end of the film.

In that respect, postmodern cinema challenges traditional cine-narrative. It calls for an active spectatorship while it bears the marks of an elusive narrative. Film narrative no longer involves a historical subject/character who is a victim or a responsible agent, nor does it bears a consciousness which conveys meaning and identity.

Postmodernism qualifies a cultural condition that is currently at a standstill: all discourses have been questioned and none can be totally comprehended, none can legitimize. In a society in which technology has gone way beyond the comprehension of the ordinary man, an amount of time will be necessary to adjust to the situation. With the demise of metaphysics, religion, the Law, and confronted with the magnitude of scientific development, we are searching for our origin, indulging ourselves in a certain nostalgia. Work is no longer considered as a source of liberation and reason and liberty have become obsolete.

In the twentieth century. Western thought has been forced to explore that unknown, the unthought, that

"other" than itself, intimately, in different ways than 163 before. Plurality, indeterminacy and oscillation have become common tropes to represent the widening gap created by technological knowledge and information between a more and more unitary society and a self-disseminating culture.

While modernity has alluded to but has not articulated narrative crisis, post-modernism via its new modes has embraced this crisis through experimentation.

Experimentation entails a particular attitude which is to

enjoy the momentary and the eclectic. The cinema has become the site of such experimentation as it addresses the masses and reproduces the crises which characterize contemporary society. One may say that the cinema has done little to subvert the hierarchy and nature of

society, as Philippe Maareck points out in his book De mai 68... aux films X ;

Le cinéma s'est contenté de se joindre au mouvement de relâchement de la cellule familiale, peu nuisible à court terme, à la société dominante, et n'a fait qu'affleurer la question de la remise en cause des rapports de l'homme et de son travail, restant même en deca de l'évolution sociale.

Yet, the cinema has been and is today the perfect site of

representation of the position of the subject in society:

decentered, losing its historicity as origins seem to be

lost, and engaging with a multitude of texts that

correspond to the diversity of narratives/stories of the

postmodern condition. With contemporary French cinema we

are faced with a different expression of desire as it has

departed from traditional male narrative. The following 164 chapters will explore the postmodern film-narrative under the direction of two women: Agnès Varda and Claire Denis and one man: Jean-Jacques Beineix. 165

Notes to Chapter IV

1. "Le féminin du texte" has been extensively examined by Tel Quel authors.

2. Jane Gallop in Reading Lacan. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985 and The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psvchoanalvsis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.

3. Jurgens Habermas as quoted in Jean-Francois Lyotard, Le postmodernisme expligué aux enfants, Paris: Editions Galilée, 1986, p. 15.

4. Ihab Hassan, "The Culture of Postmodernism" in The Culture of Post-Modernism, Challenges and Perspectives. Editors: Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones and Albert Wachtel, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986, pp. 304-323, p. 308.

5. Hal Foster, "Postmodernism: A Preface" in The Anti- Aesthetic: Essavs on Postmodern Culture, Ed. by Hal Foster, Port Townsend: Washington Bay Press, 1983, p. XV.

6. Ibid., p. xi.

7. Naomi Schor and Majewski, Flaubert's Presuppositions: Flaubert and Postmodernism, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984, p. xii.

8. Ibid., p. xii.

9. Ibid., p. xi.

10. Jurgens Habermas, as quoted by Jean-Francois Lyotard in Le postmodernisme expligué aux enfants, Paris: Editions Galilée, 1986, p. 15.

11. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne ou le rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979. 166

12. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism" New Left Review, nO 146, pp. 53-92, July and August 1984, Oxford: GB at the Alden press, August 1984, p. 57.

13. See Jean-Francois Lyotard, Le postmodernisme expliqué aux enfants. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1986.

14. Maureen Turim, "Desire in Art and Politics: the Theories of Jean-Francois Lyotard" in Camera Obscura Journal of Feminism and Film Theory, no 12, 1984, p. 103.

15. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Le postmodernisme expliqué aux enfants. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1986, p. 30.

16. Ibid., p. 33.

17. Ibid., p. 38.

18. Julia Kristeva, "D'une identité l'autre" in Tel Quel nO 62, Summer 1975, pp.149-172. This article has been reprinted in Polvloque. Paris: Seuil, 1977.

19. Hal Foster, "Postmodernism: a Preface" in The Anti- Aesthetic; Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend: Washington Bay Press, 1983, p. xv.

20. Craig Owens, "The discourse of others: Feminists and Postmodernism" in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend: Washington Bay Press, 1983, p. 59.

21. Ihab Hassan, "The Culture of Postmodernism" in The Culture of Postmodernism: Challenqes and Perspectives. Editors: Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones and Albert Wachtel, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986, pp. 304-323.

22. Craig Owens, "The discouse of others: Feminists and Postmodernism" in The Anti-Aesthetic; Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend: Washington Bay Press, 1983, p. 61.

23. Jacques B. Brunuis, En marqe du cinéma français. Lausanne: Editions L'Age d 'Homme, 1987, p. 33.

24. Françoise Audé, Ciné-modèles, ciné d'elles, Paris: L'Age d 'Homme, 1981, p. 74. 167

25. See the introduction to Camera Obscura, nO 17, May 1988.

26. Hysteria as defined by J. Laplanche et J.B.Pontalis in their Vocabulaire de la pvchanalvse, Paris, P.U.F., 1967.

27. Stephen Heath, in his seminar at The Ohio State University, Spring 1987.

28. Philippe Maareck, De mai 68...aux films X . Paris, Editions Dujarric, 1979, p. 82. CHAPTER V

Sans toit ni loi

Fragmentation and Desire.

With Sans toit ni loi (1983) Agnès Varda engages with the issue of woman in society and produces another unique film in which fiction and documentary interract beautifully. Her passion for interviews and the construction of meanings pervades her cinema, trajectory of which is marked by three key films: her first film La pointe courte (1954) presents a discursive alternation between a couple's life and a Mississipi flood; Cleo de cinq à sept (1961) recounts Cleo (Corinne Marchand)'s fragmented day when she learns about her incurable cancer

(the division of the day into temporal segments suggests her despair); Sans toit ni loi represents Varda's most recent challenge to film-making. A complex narrative structure redefines the position of woman within narrative and meaning. Postmodern, this film decenters the female character in a narrative which produces a monotonous rhythm and a complex feeling; the woman is set totally

free against a backdrop of insignificant comments from an indifferent society.

168 169

In To Desire Differently; Feminism and the French

Cinema Sandy Flitterman-Lewis sees Sans tolt ni loi "as part a social investigation and part a feminist inquiry" and "a film about looking." ^ My reading of the film will show that the film is not a social investigation but remains a feminist inquiry conducted in a feminine discourse. In deconstructing looking and meaning, Varda offers a feminine narrative of desire.

My analysis of Varda's film will center upon the articulation of the film narrative in order to elucidate the theme of fragmentation in which desire is displaced from the woman onto the narrative's body. This study will be two-fold. On the one hand, I will show how language manifests the hesitation between the biological and the social limits of the self as a resistance against both attraction to and rejection of death and culture. Indeed, the self of the young female protagonist emerges from a state of indecisiveness and instability which characterizes both the film structures and language.

Symptomatic of our postmodern condition, the identity of the female character and that of society struggle in the dissolution and absorption of culture, in a structuring and destructive language and in the subsequently waning social roles and determinations. On the other hand, I will analyze how the numerous tiny movements of language prepare the dialogue and lead the spectator to the end of 170 the film and to silence in a movement/desire. It is with a "pronounced" language that the film evolves through its meaningless content. A fragmented narrative pairs itself with a sub-narrative of " c a u s e r i e , creating its cinematic dialogue in the ever-presence of desire.

Sans toit ni loi follows the wanderings of a young woman in her late teens across a barren region of

South-East France, in winter. Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) is a run-away who hitch-hikes against a backdrop of images of different human lives. The film starts with the discovery of her body in a desolate area and finishes at the same place where she tumbles and dies out of exhaustion. In between these two moments of death, the film adopts a reportage structure, similar to that of a police story, composed of shots which show Mona in motion and interspersed with shots which imprison the reporting witnesses.

The film narrative develops along Mona's survival journey which leads her from place to place, outside villages and cities, in flat and empty land where she camps. The satisfaction of her needs for water, bread, camp-sites, and odd jobs makes her meet local people. A few of these people are framed in close-ups as witnesses; their reports punctuate Mona's story. They are used to spin off adjacent stories that center specifically around 171

Yolande (Yolande Moreau), the young woman who takes care of old Tante Lydie (Marthe Jarnias); David (Patrick

Lepczynski), Mona's first road companion; the goatherd, a

former hiker who has re-entered society; Madame Landier

(Macha Méril), a plane-tree professor and her young

assistant, Jean-Pierre (Stéphane Freiss), the agronomist, who devote their time to the treatment of contaminated plane-trees; and Assoun (Yahiaoui Assouna), the Tunisian who works diligently in the vinyard to save money for his

family back home.

Structured upon lack and tensions. Sans toit ni loi

brings the film to death, emptiness and indifference, and

eliminates any possible spectator's passionate detachment

from the film. A notion of death and an identification of

lack will lead to the examination of the structural

tensions which will in turn, allow the determination of

the position of the young female character.

While death traditionally justifies passion, revolt

or war within a narrative, it constitutes, in this film,

the very fabric of the cine-narrative. The sound-track

consists of a few flat and monotonous sentences

intertwined with silence and lamenting or discordant music

which produces a morbid feeling. Deprived of enthusiasm

and energy, the witnesses offer the spectator brief

testimonies in toneless voices. The image-track is

impregnated with death from the opening scene that depicts 172 the silent discovery of the young woman's body in a ditch, to the last shot that shows Mona's actual death as she trips over an irrigation pipe and falls flat on her face in the ditch. Mona's story is surrounded by a death-like environment. The protagonist's physical reality is presented in an absence of life and warmth: the scenery is bleak, the weather is cold and the southern region of

France is still and bland.

The story is told through diegetic and extra-diegetic narratives. Constituted of images, the diegetic narrative shows and narrates Mona's voyage towards death. The extra-diegetic narrative is composed of words (the word- narrative) uttered by the narrator, at the beginning of the film, and the witnesses who have interacted with Mona in the course of the image-narrative. The film diegesis is a lengthy journey towards death landmarked by images, signs and words that imply danger or imminent death; the cemetery where late at night Mona pitches her tent, the police car which motivates her to hide, and the nuns' invitation to come back for food while the door is closed on her. Reminders of danger, the street signs are systematically framed when Mona hitch-hikes. The sign

"stop ahead" appears early in the film as Mona resumes her journey after bathing in the sea. Another sign warns of the proximity of a school exit and is slanted, others indicate "private property, no trespassing." 173

Metonymically^ fire signifies the imminent destruction through a slow consuming process: the small wood fire at the construction site is kindled at the end of the film into a significant fire which destroys an entire house.

Although water is associated both with comfort {suggestive of freedom and space, conducive to reverie) and with salvation (it extinguishes fire), it also represents fright and danger (depths of oceans and seas, uncontrollable force, and electricity conductor, thus, destruction). Indeed, following the scene in which the prostitute talks about the pleasure of taking a bath,

Madame Landier is framed in her bath-tub and next she experiences an electrocution shock. Connoting mystery,

Mona is associated with the sea, and thus, remains a secret to the spectator and narrator. The narrator's statement "Elle venait de la mer..." underlines the lack of origins, thus her mystery. Associated with fluidity, vastness, unfathomable depths rich with hidden treasures,

Mona could have come from the sea. The sea in its infinity announces the depths where Mona is to fall asleep for ever. The grape juice is metaphorically associated with blood by colour and metonymically, in the rapid shots in which it is washed off from the buildings and streets, underlines the persistence of danger and the possibility of lethal occurences. 174

In the depiction and narration of death, lack emerges as a significant element in the construction of the narrative. Biologically, Mona needs food, water and shelter and socially, she lacks an identity. She has no name, family, friends, home or morals (the title Sans toit ni loi literally means without a roof and without law).

The satisfaction of Mona's primary physical needs motivates her into action and thus, maintains the story­ telling: she hitch-hikes from place to place, asking for food, water and camp-sites. Symbolized by the voyage, her quest for life maintains the narrative movement all the way to the end of the film and to her final destination: the ditch from where the film starts and where it ends.

Whereas Mona's actions are prompted by her biological lack, her social lack initiates other people's actions in that they attempt to bring the vagabond back to society.

Yet, their actions will remain vain attempts. Instincts

(such as hunger) can be satisfied whereas "triebs" are difficult to satisfy. Instincts depend on an object which cannot be substituted whereas "triebs" can satisfy themselves via sublimation. Self-preservation cannot be repressed nor sublimated whereas sexual triebs are more accomodating (insists Freud), more radically perverse

(says Lacan). The narrative develops mainly upon the satisfaction of Mona's instincts. 175

Lack generates actions; yet, actions yield loss. By the end of the film, Mona's and the characters' actions turn out to be unsuccessful. Indeed, Mona shows signs of physical debility. She has previously hitch-hiked from place to place and has met people who, at least in the short run, have helped her out in satisfying her basic needs or in keeping her company— notably David and Assoun.

Counterbalancing Mona's previous successful quest for life, a series of negative experiences evokes a degraded social situation. The camera catches her asleep on a bench in the train station, then follows her while she groggily walks away. Drunk, high on drugs, and tired, she gets sick outside a telephone booth. In addition to being physically weakened, she is overpowered. A few scenes earlier, after Madame Landier drops her off, she is raped in the woods. Out of luck, as she splits from the group of druggies, she loses her backpack in the fire. At the train-station, she is thrown out of the bar subsequent to her social disturbance. She tries in vain to sell the teaspoons that she has stolen at Tante Lydie's. Finally, she is caught by playful wine-drenched youngsters who, in a pagan ritual, joyfully chase people in the streets. In a similar fashion, the other characters live through negative experiences. Yolande loses her job after Tante

Lydie is sent to a retirement-home and her property is sold. Spending the night in an abandoned house, Mona's 176 two road companions fight over stolen money and end up setting the house on fire. Madame Landier experiences a death-like moment in the scene of the electrocution shock.

After she voices her worries and regrets for not helping

Mona, she experience? an electrocution shock as her wet hand touches a light.

A complex web of narrative structures is created by a series of tensions which operate at different levels: between the diegetic and extra-diegetic narrative, Mona's and the characters' languages and Mona's dual language

(survival and salvation). These languages emphasize the contrast between individualism and sociality? they differentiate the extreme individualism of Mona's non-social life from the sociality which characterizes the other characters' social lives. Language tensions, between a non-competence language that corresponds to the non-social realm and a competence language that is associated with the social realm, are established in the opening images. The first scene crystallizes the opposition between work, competence and life on the one hand, characteristics that Assoun embodies and, on the other, lack of work, competence and life embodied by Mona.

The camera adjusts its focus from the distant frame of a cold, lifeless, isolated Provence scenery onto a farm-employee's work in the vineyards. The vineyard worker finds the dead body of a young woman in a ditch. Ill

Opposed to the farm-employee's activity is the image of the young woman's immobile and dead body. The second scene introduces the extra-diegetic (word-narrative) and its subsequent tension with the diegetic (image- narrative) . The two policemen who conduct a preliminary field investigation confirm the spectator's visual perception that the young woman has frozen to death and announce, in the absence of identification documents, that she is a vagabond. Their social position grants them authority and competence and simultaneously, authenticates them with truth. Thus is launched the diegetic narrative which is continued with the images of the chance meetings with Madame Landier, Jean-Pierre, the goatherd and

Yolande, who also use a language of competence. Madame

Landier is an expert in agricultural engineering and Jean-

Pierre is her assistant; both show competence in plane-tree salvation. The goatherd has authority and competence in that he is a cheese-producer and sheep-raiser, former hitch-hiker and also has a degree in philosophy which partly justifies the use of a philosophical language whenever he interacts with Mona.

Tending to old Tante Lydie, Yolande has acquired a language of competence. Thus, truth is conveyed by the characters ' social status and their language of competence within the diegesis. 178

Mona's language is strikingly opposed to Yolande's, the goatherd's or Madame Landier's language of competence in that, devoid of authority, it does not authenticate or legitimate. Mona's language is non-social, primarily biological and thus, non-defining. While it is turned towards herself (Mona is socially idle and is preoccupied with survival), that of the characters is turned towards

"others" (the characters are socially busy taking care of something or somebody else). Unlike Mona's language that asks for help, the characters' language provides help: the goatherd offers Mona a piece of land and the opportunity to work; Yolande provides her with a bed and a job; Madame

Landier, in addition to food, drinks and money, gives her the possibility to communicate and Assoun, the possibility to work.

Mona's dual language marks the oscillation between radical individualism and sociality. Although she does not possess a language of competence, she has acquired a certain expertise in hitch-hiking. Her language can be more specifically distinguished as "language of need" whenever she asks questions relevant to the satisfaction of her primary physical needs (for instance, her guests

for water, food, work, matches and cigarettes) and

"language of demand" whenever she answers questions and expresses herself. In that respect, she expresses desire as understood in Lacanian terms as the subtraction of need 179 from demand. Once she has eaten, drunk and is protected

(Madame Landier's car provides a roof over her head) Mona expresses herself momentarily.

The very tension between the diegetic and extra-diegetic narratives challenges the truth that is embedded in the image-narrative. Although Mona's absence of identity has been authoritatively confirmed by the police in the diegetic narrative, the extra-diegetic narrative provides information about her identity. A female voice takes over the early diegetic dialogue between the police and witnesses, and unlike the police, attributes an identity to the young woman: "Elle s'appelait Simone Bergeron." Although this enunciation provides information that substitutes for that presented by the police, its authority is dismissed right away with the following words: "Je ne savais que peu d'elle mais il me semblait qu'elle venait de la mer." By referring to the mystery of the sea, the narrator subverts her own authority and ascribes doubt and evasiveness to the extra-diegetic narrative.

Varda's use of a police-story structure is interesting in that by giving information, the director misleads the spectator and creates an indecisive narrative which does not ascertain a specific story and meaning.

Capitalizing on the spectator's expectation to be told the truth, the film opens with a police-investigation. Such 180 a scene triggers a search for Mona's identity and the reasons for her death. The telling starts with the end result, the discovery of the dead body, and progresses with the narration of facts as they are being gathered from the witnesses' testimonies which are supposed to contribute to the explanation of the death (via the establishment of cause and effect relations). Yet the witnesses in the extra-diegetic narrative pass judgments that do not explain Mona's death.

The language of the characters plays a significant role in Sans toit in loi in that it contributes to produce a monotony, a silence and an impression of death that characterize the narrative. Language does not provide meaning to the telling of Mona's story but silence.

Madame Landier and Jean-Pierre's language fades into murmurs, whispers, and sounds. Close to her death, Mona's words sink into indistinguishable sounds and finally, silence. Following the scene of the electrocution shock when Madame Landier flirts with death, her voice hesitates: she worries about what kind of deadly occurences could happen to Mona. A few shots later,

Jean-Pierre's voice evokes a similar alteration. In the telephone booth, speaking with his wife Eliane (Laurence

Cortadellas), frightened and repulsed by Mona, he whispers. By the end of the film, Mona's screams and sobs replace her absence of language. 181

Providing fragments of conversation, the witnesses' language sounds but does not mean. As such, it gives a rhythm to the extra-diegetic narrative. The random and intermittent visual appearance of the witnesses interrupts the linear development of the image-narrative and produces a general "causerie. " The bits and pieces of their conversation, part of the word-narrative, instead of shaping meaningful comments about Mona, contribute to the creation and maintenance of a tension between the image and word narratives. The witnesses' bits of conversation do not corroborate the facts produced by the image- narrative in that the spectator confers meaning to the image but not to the word-narrative. In toneless voices, indifferent utterances, and monotonous sentences, the characters either talk about the vagabond, make generalizations about "female drifters" or simply express commonplace feelings:

Elle dormait, elle n'entendait rien; des voisins ont vu une fille sale avec un sac sur le dos; elle avait l'air d'avoir froid; des filles qui vagabondent, c'est très rare; toutes des dragueuses; j'aimerais être libre; quand on est mal mariée, on est coincée.

They indulge themselves in such commonplaces as they stare at the camera/the spectator with blank looks on their faces. Deprived of intonation and inflection, their voices blend their human vocal differences into a common monotonous rhythm. 182

Thus, despite complex and intricate narrative structures, an equilibrium (constant return to Mona) and rhythm (dullness) are maintained throughout the entire film. From the first to the last scene, the narrative maintains a morbid movement despite the four episodes which give a few notes of joy to the film. The episodes which allow communication between Mona and respectively, the goatherd, Madame Landier, old Tante Lydie and Assoun, resuscitate our desire for something constructive and positive and thus, create hope. Yet, subsequent to these lively moments, the episode of the near-death of Madame

Landier reminds us, in the middle of the film, that Sans toit ni loi is a film about death and destruction, not construction, and also about total freedom, thus Mona's independence from the rest of the society. The narrative unfolds in a movement parallel to Mona's wandering and slows down a few times to allow the development of sub-narratives before regaining momentum by the end of the film, precipitating Mona's death in a series of negative experiences that take place in a train-station and its surroundings. This final destination, which is also a point of departure, represents the site of confluence of the sub-narratives (constructed around a few characters) with the main narrative (constructed around Mona).

In challenging truth right from the outset, the narrator's intercession both destabilizes the traditional 183 police-story narrative and stabilizes the film narrative in an equilibrium of dualities: freedom and imprisonment, and non-social and social. Mona, herself, hesitates at the intersection of two lethal roads: her present road leads to physical death and the other road, which entails the acquisition of a language of competence, leads to the demise of language and signifying systems.

Death is maintained throughout the film in the fragmentation of the cine-narrative. This fragmentation resides in the lack of cause and effect relations of the events between the witnesses' statements and Mona's actions. The film scenes are denominative: they have neither the function of setting up a story nor that of describing. They only transmit images analogously to the way Madame Landier sees a stream of her life-images pass through her mind in the course of the electric shock.

Mona's lacks and the narrative tensions lead to an unstable and hesitant narrative structure which is further exemplified by the very position of Mona between life and death, society and non-society, as well as by the role of the witnesses in the diegesis. In contributing to a certain knowledge about the female protagonist, Mona's languages of need and demand allow the narrative to move forward. Transgressing the boundaries set by her language of need, a language of demand gives her access to society and its systems of representation. Indeed, she 184 temporarily defines herself by expressing her likes and dislikes, disclosing her position in society and thus acquiring a past, present and future. In these rare moments, we actually learn that she has a family and that she has previously held a secretarial position. Her conversation with Madame Landier reveals a young girl full of attention and care for others beneath a scruffy appearance. Mona says that she would like to take care of people, children, watch-dogs, big houses. She loves food, cigarettes, music, radios and television; she dislikes crowds and "les petits chefs"; she admits her fatigue (she is tired of being on the road, and yearns for some tranquillity and comfort). Denying a certain apparent mediocrity and banality, she shows an attraction to magnitude: "il y a tellement de grandes maisons..." and earlier "ca fait 87000 lits vides." Preoccupied with numbers, she even asks the shepherd's wife how many sheep she takes care of. Despite these rare moments of comfort, happiness, and interest that occur because she uses a different language, Mona is back on the road and is indifferent again. She systematically refuses the job offers made by the characters and thus remains in the non-social realm, outside society which is accessible via a language of competence.

The very interruption of the diegesis secures the passage of the narrative from individuality (Mona) to 185 sociality (the witnesses.) It allows the sequence of the word-narrative initiated by the narrator's statements to take place and at the same time, directs the film into an apparent social reflection. Indeed, in their monologues, the witnesses seem to talk to themselves about actions undertaken in the image-narrative. They do not analyze

their actions although they seem to be preoccupied with

their past actions and words. For instance, the mechanic

talks about his dirty hands. We see his dirty hands: he

is a mechanic. Although we see him leave Mona's tent pulling up his pants, we do not see his dirty mores. The morality of the gesture is only connoted when he reports that Mona supposedly said to him that he had a dirty mind.

Jean-Pierre covers up his guilt for not fulfilling Madame

Landier's wish to find Mona. He admits to be afraid of

the revolting Mona. Such feelings are supported by the

image-narrative that contrasts Eliane's "clean and proper"

look with Mona's "dirty" appearance and that shows

Jean-Pierre being intimidated by Mona. In the scene when

Madame Landier sent him to her car to have a look at Mona,

claiming a dossier was left behind, Mona disconcerts him:

"Je vous fais peur ?" The characters express regrets but

do not tell why they were scared. The construction worker

says "Je l'ai vu arriver, j'osais pas lui parler, toute

seule comme ca, j'aurais du lui parler." 186

They seem to talk to themselves about particularities. Yet their comments fall into generalizations. As commonplaces, these comments become a causerie. A dialogue never takes place and the spectator shares the growing concern from the particular to the general, which in turn, produces a detachment from the character and insignificance of the story. The witnesses' commonplaces emphasize the indifference of social beings and stress the passage from the particular to the general. Yolande is envious of Mona for sleeping with David. The older woman passes judgment on marriage:

"Quand on est mal mariée, on est coincée pour la vie."

What is narrated is an ordinary fact that can be read in the local newspaper. No indictment is undertaken. The people who happen to have met Mona address the spectator in a hopeless, careless, and even fatalistic way. Their comments on Mona sound alike in that they could have been made about anybody or anything else. While the witnesses distance themselves from Mona, the young vagrant loses her uniqueness and becomes any other female run-away. The particular case of Mona's self-destruction turns into a general case. Thus, the spectator gleans the tiny emergences of the society's unconscious from the fragmentation of the witnesses' discourse. Indeed, their conversation snatches "sound" but do not mean in that they do not foreclose the main narrative, Mona's story. 187

Deprived of intonation and inflection, the witnesses' voices, in a common rhythm, efface the characters' differences into the release of a lamenting social voice.

Sans toit ni loi is not a social inquiry because no meaningful comments are contributing any specific

statement about Mona or women.

The film narrative structures illustrate a postmodern

narrative in which the character embodies an indecisive

position. Mona's fragile position between society and

non-society, language and lack of language is rooted in

the very naming process. Naming establishes linguistic

relations between the subject and the object, and entails

individual differentiation and imprisonment. To be named

means to be told. In order to be told, the individual's

story has to be determined along a series of actions which

assign him/her a social position. Naming anticipates a

repetition which guarantees legitimation and

authentication. The narrator names Mona in an

anticipation of the telling of Mona's story and the

fulfilment of the spectator's desire to listen and to

know. Mona is reiteratively told, first in images that

diegetically show her journey and second, extra-

diegetically, in words by the narrator's initial naming

and by the subsequent witnesses' reports. Yet, as

previously shown, scattered all through the narrative,

neither images nor words participate in the construction 188 of Mona's meaning— why was she a vagabond, what happened to her family ?. Banal images of Mona and characters ' indifferent testimonies render Mona's voyage dull and insignificant.

Sans toit ni loi is neither a film about Mona's story nor that of the characters. In a fragmented narrative which refuses a (traditionally-understood) meaningful content, the process of telling remains what routes the narrative. Subjective elements have sunk into an objective realm and particular aspects have turned towards general ideas. What is left to the spectator is an appreciation of a complex feeling about the cine-text. As

Jean-Luc Godard said in an interview about his film Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle;

C'eat-à-dire que la somme de la description objective de la description subjective doit amener à la découverte de certaines formes plus générales, doit permettre de dégager, non pas une vérité globale et générale, mais un certain "sentiment d'ensemble", quelque chose qui correspond sentimentalement aux lois qu'il faut trouver et appliquer pour vivre en société. (Le drame, justement, c'est que nous découvrons, non pas une société harmonieuse, mais une société trop inclinée vers, et à la consommation). ^

Godard's opinion that our society is characterized by a lack of harmony, due to an excessive love for consumer values, seems to be shared by Agnès Varda. Eliane covets

Jean-Pierre's family dwelling. Attracted to consumer items that he can't afford, Paulo, Yolande's fiancé, has recourse to theft. Love for consumer products causes 189 human beings to commit social iniquities. Such examples cannot only be ascribed to Varda's critique of modern society, but rather should be seen as corroborating a definition of language. Truth cannot be expressed in a world alienated by objects and via objectifying language.

Language, in this film, neither bridges the distance between the self and the other, nor accounts for the multiple relations established by signs. Consequently, as there is no ground for truth in Sans toit ni loi, truth remains only a complex feeling. The spectator constantly wavers between truth and absence of truth, meaning and lack of meaning.

As an aimless voyage, the film becomes insignificant in its structure of hesitation and repetition. The loss of meaning results from the destruction of traditional narrative as carrier of truth and from a repetitive

telling of death. Formally, the linear movement that is visually generated by the camera (Mona's wandering is

filmed in a leftward movement) is broken and a circular movement is set. The last image repeats the first one and

establishes a circuitous narrative. By tripping over a

pipe and falling in the ditch where the farm-employee

finds her, Mona returns to the place that she occupies at

the beginning of the film. The rupture of the linear

narrative by the testimonies and the image reiteration of

Mona's dead body underline the absence of Mona's story. 190 the lack of signified to her death and stress the story

itself. Mona's story and life as well as their narration

and language become banal. The spectator is left with the

telling of a news item which finds its meaning in ordinary

and popular aspects as well as rumors. The ordinary

inscribes itself in both Mona and the people's banal

actions. Instead of being meaningful, the film leaves us with parts of a report which has not yet been written.

Mona's story is told although Mona has not yet been

talked about and placed in the past. The spectator finds

it difficult to situate and define the woman as she is

positioned outside the social order. After all, does the

spectator know her name ? Mona escapes the spectator's

understanding because, as a vagabond, she is positioned

outside society, time and place. Indeed, the film offers

neither geographical nor temporal information although the

depiction of characters (old Tante Lydie), buildings

(Tante Lydie's dwelling) and plane-trees (the American

landing at the end of the war) reveals a certain sense of

time. Death in this film goes beyond physical decay, the

passage of time and human death. Preserved by the cold

weather, Mona's body does not even deteriorate. Despite

the physical presence of the body, there is an absence of

temporal passage. The film becomes a narration about

temporariness and elusiveness which find their support in

repetition. Repetition is produced by the image-narrative 191 which indulges itself in numerous frames of Mona and also produced by the witnesses' conversations which shape rumor in that they tell what has already been heard and invoke generalities and banalities.

Language in Sans toit ni loi performs Nathalie

Sarraute's numerous tiny movements which prepare the dialogue. Unstructured and fragmentary, language imitates our daily speech which is expressed in bits and pieces of conversation. Language is either that of Mona, that of the characters whom she has encountered along the road, or that of the narrator at the beginning of the film. Mona's language maintains the narrative movement. The language used by Yolande, the goatherd, Madame Landier and Assoun brings forth social determinations. The witnesses' language underlines the threat that repetition and rumor pose to language— it limits itself to commonplaces about hitch-hiking girls on their own, reiterative of social

judgments (danger is involved when actions take place outside society). Finally, the narrator's language, both

factual (attribution of identity) and poetic (use of the metaphor "il me semblait qu'elle venait de la mer"),

disrupts the stability of the narrative. The assemblage

of languages cancels a central meaning, fragments the

narrative and produces a cine-text which releases music,

sounds, and images. 192

Emerging from the fragmented narrative, desire is produced differently. Although Mona occupies the screen during most of the film, she is discarded by the spectator. There is no process of identification between

Mona or the characters and the spectator. The lack of self-recognition of the spectator in Mona's attitudes is due to the fact that the idea of character is not traditionally defined in this film. As previously demonstrated, the complex web of narrative structures and the techniques used by the film-director contribute to an understanding of this lack of identification. Varda has placed the woman outside the social order and has not allowed her to integrate with society by depicting her as a resolutely independent subject.

The film is shot like a "reportage" in that the camera consistently follows Mona and thus, never allows points of view. In the scene where Mona is aboard the truck, she mentions that the buildings look terrible. The camera does not open the view to the spectator; rather we are confined to Mona's face and words and, the inside of the truck. We are thus unable to see and verify what has been said. Another technique which cancels point of view is the use of tracking shots. This is a camera shot that pans sideways, does not stop on objects or characters and does not lead into a meaningful following shot. For instance, whenever Mona walks off screen, the camera, in 193 constant motion, continues to film whatever constitutes the backdrop of the shot. Many examples of these tracking shots are present in the cine-narrative: side view of the wall along the road or agricultural tools (plow, tractor) or the woods (in the scene of the garden and that of the rape) . This technique maintains diegetic continuity while lessening the centrality of the story of the character.

The shot reverse shot technique is rarely used in this film, except in the dialogue taking place in the car between Madame Landier and Mona (so that a dialogue can take place).

Varda challenges traditional narrative in that the narration is initiated by a language and a narrative which are, by tradition, male-dominated. The image-narrative opens up on a male-dominated world. Given that sight is masculine, Mona's body is discovered by a man, and the group of people around her during the police-investigation are all male. The next two scenes are voyeuristic: the scene which initiates the flash-back recounting Mona's story shows two young men who, from a distance (the road) catch sight of Mona's naked body after she has bathed in the sea. A second voyeuristic scene takes place at the garage site: the young male assistant observes the mechanic leaving Mona's tent. The shot of Madame Landier in her bath-tub constitutes the third voyeuristic scene.

Later in the film, aboard the truck, Mona exchanges a few 194 words with the truck-driver who insinuates that she could sleep with him. Yet, the fact that Mona bathes on a cold winter day and does not attempt to hide herself from the public eye (i.e., the male gaze which defines and transmits knowledge by means of a social language) is not innocently mentioned. Mona is set totally free, outside society, not under the gaze of (phallocentric) society.

Thus, prepared by a series of scenes and images, sexual and violent denotations converge into the encompassing movement towards death. From the scene with the prostitute, there is a cut to the inside of a house where an old couple sit in front of a television. Behind them, in a very Godardian manner, violence exerted on woman— represented by the image of prostitution, is framed in a poster which shows a woman with parted legs. Then, there is another cut to the television blasting with the voices of a fighting couple. The next scene shows Madame

Landier in her bath-tub, talking on the phone: she is framed in a medium close-up which shows her breasts. This scene works as a reminder of Macha Méril's iconicity. In

Jean-Luc Godard's Une femme mariée (1954), ^ Charlotte

(Macha Méril) 's body is systematically used by the camera.

It is fragmented in order to show the decomposition of

Charlotte's life once she learns that she is pregnant but does not know who the father is: her husband, Pierre

(Philippe Leroy), or her lover, Robert (Bernard Noël). 195

These images and scenes lead us to the final scene of the rape by "the violent man." The same violence colours the words of Mona's second road companion as he promises Mona a brilliant future in the prostitution business.

Parallel but inversely to the escalation of the aforementioned particulars which produce a climactic moment of sexual violence (the rape) against the woman, a regressive movement to infancy and origins is at work.

Along her rootless wandering, Mona experiences moments of rare harmony with men. For instance, she lives a few happy days with David, her road companion; she meets the shepherd who gives her advice in an intimate and friendly manner, and she works alongside Assoun. She communicates and laughs with women -Madame Landier and old Tante Lydie.

Then, near the moment of her death, Mona screams: "Si ma mère me voyait" which is the only actual pronounced reference to the mother, (the early alliteration "elle venait de la mer/mère" implies also the presence/absence of the mother). She expresses herself via her body: "ca caille." Then, at the moment of her death, losing the use of language, she screams and cries. With sounds replacing words, Mona has regressed to her biological origins.

Throughout the film, this origin has been suggested by the mediation of the mother (Madame Landier as a mother figure) and water (associated with birth and death).

Associated with origins and the mother, sea and water 196 punctuate the cine-text, reminding the spectator of Mona's search for the origin; Mona asks for water ("je peux avoir de l'eau") in her second communication with local people; the lady answers "y'a pas d'eau;" it rains while she camps outside the cemetery; she splashes water all about when she gets water from a pump; she uses water to wash cars when she works for the mechanic; the prostitute says to

Mona "tu as besoin d'un bain;" Madame Landier takes a bath and soon after, she describes the place where she dropped

Mona off as "c'était tout près d'un chateau d'eau;" finally Mona asks Assoun "je peux boire?" Close to death, she utters sounds that express in Kristeva's terms, the

"glossolalias" and "echolalias" of the archaic link with the mother and the maternal.

Interrupting the initial male narrative (established by the police-story and the male gaze), fragmentation erradicates the boundaries that have been traditionally placed on the woman's role. Mona's position (a woman living outside society, on her own, and on the road) highlights the role that social constructs play in the determination of the subject. Indeed, the witnesses do not support Mona's position: out of hesitation, they whisper their comments about such a female position.

Although they forestall imminent danger for this young vagrant, they do not admit that their language, environment and attitudes are threatened. The speaking 197 subject (that is society) reveals the fallible constructions of social language, in showing insecurity and hesitation about its own existence. Mona, for her part, shows hesitation between two different situations, accepting or rejecting a language of competence, remaining a vagabond or entering society. The tension between languages typifies this hesitation and marks the threshold between what is social and is not, and what is feminine and is not.

By positing her character between sociality and individualism, Varda questions language. She opposes a language of survival to that of salvation and also, images of woman/individualism with images of society/imprisonment. Narrative hesitates between affirmation and elusiveness and language oscillates between structuration and disintegration. By placing Mona outside society and depriving her of a language of competence, she questions woman's position in society and by silencing the witness-characters, she questions the process of socialization that defines woman.

Varda's inquiry expresses itself via a feminine narrative. With the telling of death, the film-director leads the spectator back to an archaic sense of "reality" determined by ancestral music and rhythm, produced by sounds, music and water. A dogged individualism confronted with social language has no other escape than 198 death and auto-destruction. Social commonplaces lead to destruction of language and absence of communication.

Death/end is the constant reminder that our society holds a precarious view of itself, imprisoned in its social constructs, and that the traditional way of telling and showing is "en procès."

Despite the attempt to attribute a name and origin to

Mona, Varda's film neither reaches truth, nor works out the reasons for her death. Mona's death remains unsolved.

Why has she withrawn from society to die in solitude ?

The film provides no answer as it maintains the separation between image and word narrative. Outside language and society, Mona enjoys genuine freedom in that she cannot be held responsible for any of her criminal acts (being outside language and society). Unattached to anything,

Mona is assimilated to movement and vagrancy. As such, she cannot be defined.

Sans toit ni loi is an austere film about self-destruction. More specifically, it is about the struggle of a young girl with "reality" (defined as the

Western way of looking at and speaking otherness) which is symbolized by a voyage towards death. The narrative develops along the confrontation between a strong individualism that rejects language and a sociality that casts a reflection upon its own socializing process. 199

Fragmented, the narrative hesitates between these two poles and gradually weakens its structure towards

insignificance and death. Narrative fragmentation and tension articulate desire in the space between

symbolization and language, and the subject.

Desire is in Lacan's account, what emerges from the

gaps created by the non-correspondance of a linguistic

definition (language of demand) with a biological

definition (language of need). It is expressed in this

film as an attraction to thanatos and in a movement

towards death. It develops according to a lack of

information and comfort offered to the spectator. The

spectator's desire to fill these gaps remains an

impossible entreprise. Only a complex feeling emerges

from a narrative which is aware of its own demise. As

spectators, we follow Mona's voyage while we anticipate

her death. We experience a true desire for the end of the

film as we do not expect too many things to happen to

Mona. The opening lines disclose that Mona Bergeron froze

to death and that she was alone and an outlaw. Our

interest in learning why Mona's life ended there in

Provence, that winter, becomes an urge to know, read and

watch on; yet the narrative does not satisfy our

curiosity.

Agnès Varda has written and directed a challenging

film. The position of the woman, in her drastic 200

individualism, comes out strongly and disturbingly.

Influenced by Nathalie Sarraute, Varda has centered on the notion of language understood as the tiny movements made towards a dialogue which never takes place. On the road, the female vagabond never accedes to communication as she

struggles between her biological and social being and between the languages of survival and salvation.

Central to this film is the articulation of the

temptation and hesitation between outside and inside the

social realm. This narrative oscillation determines new

spacings for women. Such spacings allow woman to be

discussed within the constructs of an-other narrative and

an-other desire. 201

Notes to Chapter V

1. See Sandy Flitterman-Lewis's last chapter "The impossible portrait of Femininity: Vagabond in To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema» Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 1990, pp. 285-315.

2. A reference to Nathalie Sarraute's works which privilege the ensnaring power of language is appropriate here, since Varda prefaces her film with the dedication "à Nathalie Sarraute." Sarraute considers language to agressively trap the auditor who becomes a consenting victim. Her works suggest that language dissolves into a "parlerie" which expresses "1'inauthentique." In Portrait d'un inconnu, obsessed with an old father and his daughter (who looks older than she might be), the narrator talks about this insignificant couple. He never knows what he is looking for and whom these people are. He does not discover anything or nearly nothing about them.

3. Jean-Luc Godard in an interview about "Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle" in Godard par Godard, les années Karina. Paris; Flcunmarion, 1985, p. 169.

4. Jean-Luc Godard, Une femme mariée, screenplay by Jean -Luc Godard, music by Philippe Dussard, photography by Raoul Coutard, released in 1964, with Macha Méril, Bernard Noël, Philippe Leroy and Roger Leenhardt. CHAPTER VI

3702 le matin

Hysterical Narrative: monster image/word narrative and a different cinematic character.

On reproche à Beineix de filmer les gens comme des montagnes, mais il faut être con pour filmer autrement, si c'est pour faire du tout plat, c'est pas la peine. Tous tes personnages, il faut que ce soit des montagnes, et même des chaînes de montagnes 1 Question de regard et de style. Philippe DJIAN %

Following Diva (1980) and La lune dans le caniveau

(1983), Jean-Jacques Beineix's third film, 37o2 le matin

(1987), has, according to some critics, finally unified form and content and to others, relied excessively on the photographic beauty of the image for lack of story line.^

Although controversially debated by film critics, 3702 le matin has gained wide appeal among French audiences. The film reached the top of the charts the year it was realeased and maintained its position for over a year. ^

With a "slick" image, a melodious musical composition, and

"dually sexualized" male and female characters, 37o le matin accounts for the current mood of the young population. The film appeals to spectators via an

202 203 identification with both female and male characters as they embody sex role characteristics interchangeably. Two young people live their lives as best as they can, within tumbling social structures.

Adapted from Philippe Djian's contemporary French novel ^ the film is about a love-story lived and narrated by Zorg (Jean-Luc Anglade), a young man who has been repressing his talents as a writer. Zorg's lover, Betty

(Beatrice Dalle), is a 20 year old woman who comes to him after she loses shelter and a waitress job. She dedicates her time to the upkeeping of Zorg's shack; she cooks for him and even helps him to paint the facades of the neighboring bungalows. One day, upon cleaning, she comes across Zorg's set of notebooks that she immediately decides to read. Convinced that he is a writer and that he should try it out, she sets the bungalow on fire. They head towards Paris. At Lisa's (Consuelo de Haviland),

Betty meticulously types the manuscript before sending it to all the publishers in town. Lisa comes back one night and announces that her new boyfriend Eddie (Gérard Darmon) will be living with them.

The relationship between Betty and Zorg deepens as

Betty's mental health deteriorates. A series of abnormal and violent reactions that occasionally turn into hysterical rages disrupts the life of the loving couple.

Upon the death of Eddie's mother, Betty and Zorg are 204 offered the opportunity to take care of the piano business of the deceased. There, in Les Causses, they live a tranquil and happy life. Upon the receipt of a negative pregnancy test, Betty enters the realm of insanity and ends up plucking one of her eyes out. Reduced to unconsciousness, she is sequestered in a mental institution. After raging against the physicians and the medical institution, Zorg sneaks into the hospital, straps

Betty on the bed and smothers her with a pillow. He goes back home, sits down and resumes his writing.

The present discussion will engage with the ways in which hysteria takes over Betty's life (image narrative) and Zorg's narrative (word narrative). As it has been defined by the psychoanalytic profession, hysteria places the subject before two alienating alternatives: identifying with the other gender or becoming the other gender's desire. In narrative, hysteria captures the excess of the narrative movement and represents a certain dissatisfaction towards contemporary social life. Despite an identification with the male position, Betty is depicted in a traditional female role and thus becomes the image object of Zorg's desire. Zorg identifies with the female position and yet appears in a traditional male role, thus becoming the object of Betty's desire. In the same fashion, as a vehicle for Zorg's narration, the cine- text is caught between its intent to tell as precisely as 205 possible, thus following a traditional cine-narrative, and

its impetus to tease the viewer in a playful game with

space and rhythm created onscreen in a wonderful combination of music, images and colours. The term hysteria was used by Sigmund Freud to account for the physical manifestations of the unconscious conflicts of

his male and female patients. Hysteria has traditionally been associated with woman in narrative. Thus, the

narrative use of the woman has been twofold: she is "the

problem" and she is the image. In that respect, her

representation has always been spectacular. From the

representation of hysteria as the manifestation of the

repressed in the woman, literary studies have turned to

the inscription of hysteria in the text. ^

Central to the present discussion is the premise that

traditional narrative controls and focuses on male

identity via female hysteria, whereas the effacement of

traditional narrative entails the destabilization of male

constructs. An hysterical text is produced. This text is

readable by both sexes in that characters embody both

masculine and feminine characteristics. 37o2 le matin

adopts a non-traditional narrative: the male and female

roles share the descriptive gender elements and the male

character's language accounts for the expression of a

destabilized male position. Although it has been claimed

by a few feminists— and more specifically de Lauretis, ® 206 that the reversal of gender roles does not suffice politically to produce a different narrative, I will argue that the repetition of a reversal of gender roles on both sides and the reiteration of a dual engendered character in cinema encourage the spectator to read contemporary narrative differently. A different way of telling and showing challenges the codes and sub-codes that are articulated upon a central character, while it frees woman from narrative constraints. At that point, a comparison of 3702 le matin with Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction

(1987)’ will enable me to differentiate the use of hysteria in traditional and non-traditional narratives.

Male and female characters in 3702 le matin have dual characteristics. Intertwined, sexual differences overlap with each other despite the fact that they are set, right from the outset, as traditionally defined gender roles.

Hysteria becomes the symptomatic form that the text espouses to talk about sexual difference in a postmodern condition. The masculine and feminine take on different forms, intermingle and overlap the strict confinement that social language imposes on genders.

Unlike a traditional definition that considers woman as passive, emotional and unreasonable, Betty is active, logical, determined and effective. She sees, reads, faces problems, judges and decides. Via sight, she gains knowledge and via performance, she asserts power. With 207 sight, reason and decision power, the female character assumes the characteristics that commonly describe man's social performance and identity. Betty knows how to undertake the publication of Zorg's book, acts towards that goal and in so doing, takes control. She is effective in that her determination and perseverance lead to the acknowledgment of Zorg's talents. At Lisa's home,

Betty types the manuscript and sends it to all the publishers in town. Despite her poor typing skills, but thanks to her conscientiousness and resolution, she manages to type Zorg's entire work.

Not only does she take control, she is also the initiator of actions. At the beginning of the film, in the course of an argument with Zorg, she decides to clean his shack and frantically sets herself to the task. In so doing, she comes across a box of written note-books and doggedly sets her mind to read them. After spending a whole night reading, she claims that her lover is talented and should be a writer. Initiating a social change for her lover, she sets his beach pad on fire and forces him to leave for Paris. Simultaneously to taking control over the man in the story, the woman becomes the narrative agent in that she secures the development of the story via her actions. Learning about the deal made between the landowner and her boyfriend— who is assigned to paint all the houses of the entire neighborhood so that Betty can 208 stay with him, Betty bursts into anger and frenziedly empties the house before setting it on fire. She thus forces Zorg, who was deeply attached to his pad on the beach, to leave.

Although the woman is endowed with masculine traits, she is depicted as feminine. In addition to typing, other elements suggest femininity. Female biological elements are mentioned, such as menstruation (at the beginning of the film, Zorg excuses Betty's attitude: "elle doit avoir ses règles"), birth control, pregnancy tests, breast­ feeding (Annie [Clementine CelariéJ breast-feeds her new­ born baby). Female-defined occupations are present, such as cooking, housekeeping and child care, as well as compassion and love for others which have traditionally characterized women (Betty shows understanding and love to

"le petit Nicolas" when his father. Bob [Jacques Mathouj, punishes him for locking himself in the bathroom). More daringly, women's sexual frustration is also evoked. In the scene when Annie breast-feeds her new-born, she expresses her sexual fustration bodily and verbally. She attempts to seduce Zorg by leading his hand towards her breast and in the following shot, in the grocery store, she pulls his head towards her to have him perform cunnilingus. Such a grossly exaggerated action leads

Annie to break down and confess that Bob has been sexually ignoring her since their baby's birth. 209

In opposition to the active position of the woman,

Zorg is depicted as passive. His attachment to a beach spot characterizes him as immobile and his presence and solitude on the beach make him pensive. Neither a problem solver, nor a risk-taker, Zorg avoids conflicts. He escapes his social "reality" by attaching his life to a place that he cherishes and by avoiding problems. Despite the humiliation caused by the landowner's unreasonable demand to paint all the beach houses, Zorg remains willing to honor the request for fear of losing his spot.

Passive, impulsive, tender, fragile and somehow submissive, the male character embodies traditionally defined feminine personality traits. He appears to be a dreamer and a thinker: "à trente cinq ans, on commence à avoir une certaine expérience de la vie ... on apprécie de pouvoir souffler un peu." Impulsive, he buys an old yellow Mercedes and some land for Betty's birthday, although his future is not financially secure.

Zorg's lack of power during most of the film is produced by a lack of decision-making: his life with Betty is not the outcome of a long thinking process, but is the expression of a positive and instantaneous response to her appearance, one morning, at his door. A high camera angle shows Betty walking to Zorg's shack, suitcases in hand.

She stands at his doorstep, waiting; he silently brings her suitcases in. Zorg's lack of verbal expression evokes 210 a lack of power. Exerting no control over his life, Zorg experiences things in a fickle way. He does not mind trading places and expresses no regrets.

Unlike Betty who acquires knowledge through the mediation of sight, Zorg defines himself through other human senses. He thus challenges both the classic associations of masculinity with language, knowledge and sight, and femininity with feelings, senses and emotions.

He communicates with Betty via actions and body language.

Extremely beautiful and moving is the scene when Zorg responds to Betty's pain and disfigurement by covering his face with soup, replacing words with cries. In other intimate scenes, he communicates via touches, caresses and kisses.

In communication with nature, Zorg derives pleasure as he enjoys the beauty of the site and the power of the ocean. He likes to sit on the beach and day-dream, losing himself in the immense space that the ocean, sky and beach create. To touch and sight, the olfatory sense is added: at the beginning of the film, there is a cut from the scene of love-making to exhilarated Zorg driving his truck hurriedly, followed by another cut to his little beach house where something is cooking. He arrives at home in time to save his dish of chili. He picks up the dish and enjoys the aroma while he dances and hums around the room. 211

Because he has given priority to a communion of senses, Zorg has not developed a very acute sense of social perception. A lack of social language outcasts him: he is alone, has no friends, no family and no home.

His indecisiveness and doubts about his talents as a writer reveal a lack of self-confidence. Betty decides that his work should be published and acts accordingly.

Bereft of authority, he follows her lead and becomes dependent upon her. Zorg's indecisiveness suggests a male struggle to come to terms with a new social reality but also the youth's struggle with the crumbling pillars of a social life.

3702 le matin's narrative can be read as a conventional male authored structure. Zorg had written a historical novel a few years earlier and has, ever since, repressed his talents as a novelist. Betty becomes the instigator of the narrator's search for identity as she accidently discovers his hidden promising past. Like a muse, she leads Zorg into taking control over his life before disappearing at the end of the film as he resumes his writing. Such a reading is constructed according to a very distinctive pattern: from a well established male position, the character adopts a weak position, falling under the woman's lead, before regaining a strong position by the end of the film. The opening scene of love-making assigns Zorg a classic male position of control in that he 212 assumes the missionary position and experiences sexual climax. This scene is followed by a voice-over that foregrounds a male writing process and narrative. By the end of the film, he walks back to the hospital and kills

Betty.

The love-making and murder scenes correspond to each other. Reiterative of death, both scenes produce a shock effect on the spectator as they emphasize the powerful male position. The man gives death and thus controls.

The shock is produced by the opening scene which might disturb some spectators for its duration and the "reality" of the scene: the male on top of the female body are framed by a still camera for over a minute. The scene ends with Zorg's sexual climax (psychoanalytically understood as "little death"). At the end of the film

Zorg murders his lover. Yet, in between these two scenes, the male position is weak.

Characteristic of a postmodern cinema, the film narrative hesitates between the narration of Betty's hysteria and the narration of Zorg's search for identity.

This hesitation manifests itself in the different position of the female character. Contrary to the traditional plotting of woman in space, the female character in this narrative situates herself on the time axis. Mobile and unattached to a particular place, she is given the opportunity to challenge man's position as she becomes the 213 narrative agent whose actions and decisions give her power and help the narrative to develop.

While the image-narrative presents the development of

Betty's hysteria, the word-narrative suggests Zorg's hysteria. Images overtake narrative, keep Betty's ineluctable insanity and Zorg's powerless attitude for lack of sight and social language in balance, and produce

Betty's instability, while words describe Zorg's instability. Revealing Betty's hysteria, a series of actions takes on excessive proportions as her mental health deteriorates while Zorg's future brightens. Her actions become so obnoxious and violent that they destroy her; in Eddie's pizzeria where Zorg and she are waiting on clients, out of stress and fatigue, she stabs a fork in a patron's arm, bursting into uncontrollable screams. Then, upon the receipt of a negative and acerbic reply from a publisher, she fakes a visit to her gynecologist and asks

Zorg to come along. Once they are in the publisher's apartment, she scrapes the critic-editor's face with a hair-comb. Upon the death of Eddie's mother, Betty and

Zorg are given the opportunity to take care of the deceased's piano store. In Les Causses Betty's health problems worsen: she experiences moments of extreme withdrawal when she totally ignores Zorg's presence. For instance, she sits in front of the television, absorbed by the rhythm of Hindu music and dance and oblivious to the 214 rest of the world. Zorg shows verbally his irritation and slams the door on her. In response, she throws her fist through the glass window of the kitchen door and runs away. Another example of her excessive reaction to events is when, upon the receipt of a negative pregnancy test,

she tears apart the baby clothes that Zorg has given her,

savagely cuts her hair and outrageously mars her face with make-up. Her look is blank, her mind absent and she complains of hearing voices. The narration of her hysteria reaches its climax when, one afternoon, Zorg comes home and finds Bob quickly wiping blood off the wall

and floor: Betty has plucked one of her eyes out.

Both Zorg's narration and Beineix's cine-narrative

are composed of a language and a text that resemble the monstruous vision generated by the images that depict

Betty's actions. Zorg's language is hysterical in that it

is disrupted and disrupting. Incessantly punctuated with

Betty's name, Zorg's communication consists predominantly

of questions such as "Qu'est-ce qui se passe ? qu'est-ce

que tu fais ?" and repetitively echoes the premonition of

insanity, "Tu es folle." Reminiscent of a young boy's

call for his mother when scared and alone, Zorg's

disrupted language can be read also as the expression of

the male phobia of castration and of the uncontrollable

and undefined female identity. 215

As a danger, Betty has entered Zorg's life like a

hurricane that disturbs and wipes everything away before dangerously pursuing its route. Danger engulfs the entire

film as it takes on a crude, violent and blinding light

that manifests itself in intense primary colours: from the bright red of the fire at the beginning of the film, to

the dark red of blood and the icy blue colour which

colours the images in the second part of the film.

Such an analysis may lead the reader to assume that this

is a traditional male narrative, especially in that the

disappearance of the female sexual partner gives the power

of expression and rebellion (against the medical

institution) back to the male. Indeed, at the hospital,

refusing Betty's insanity, Zorg blames the medication and medical institution for her present condition and, out of

control, releases his rage and despair against the

psychiatrist. For the first time, he is forced to take a

stand and be critical of his environment. His rage is

directed against the medical institution. Thus, after

looming over the entire film, danger disappears with the

last film images and with the first page to be written.

Hurricane Betty has finally led Zorg into action and

social definition. Betty becomes the muse that the writer

sacrifices for his writing which textualizes Betty's body.

While danger dissipates and writing resumes, calmness and

tranquillity, symbolically represented by the presence of 216 a cat, re-enter Zorg's life. The kitten that has appeared in two previous scenes, on the window sill of the room where Zorg attempts to write and on Betty's bed where it stands as a guardian of her sleep, sits now at the corner of the table and asks Zorg with Betty's voice: "Tu écris?"

Zorg answers "Non, je réfléchissais..." Male identity is found when Zorg starts writing about the woman who has precipitatedly entered and left his life.

Yet, disturbing and presenting a narrative conflict, the two scenes that precede Betty's murder give a different turn to this apparent male-directed narrative.

The scene when a group of hospital-residents hastily throw him out of the hospital is reminiscent of the female hysteric who is being taken away to a psychiatric hospital. The second scene is surprising by its visual unexpectedness: Zorg comes back to the hospital, at night, dressed in Betty's clothes, so that he can enter the hospital room without being recognized.

The spectacle produced by the images of Betty's hysterical actions may render opaque a reading of Zorg's search for identity. Indeed, the loving attention Zorg gives Betty may make the spectator believe that he is living a love story. After all, perhaps Zorg makes pizzas, sells pianos, tears down walls and buys a house surrounded with fields, an old Mercedes and many other presents, only for Betty. Perhaps too, characteristic of 217 the current condition, Zorg accomplishes all these actions

in order to survive and to fill the emptiness of his life

at a time when everything around him crumbles, when there

is no hope to better either Betty's mental health or his

social position. His actions as much as his words convey

a male destabilization.

Zorg's words emphasize a male destabilization in that

they suggest a search for comfort and reassurance. The woman's body becomes man's reassuring factor. First of

all, he writes a few things about Betty although he does

not verbally communicate with her. He therefore

represents her in his writing, similar to the way he would

touch, hear, taste and smell her, that is to say, through

physical sensations experienced in a communication with

nature. He prefers to enter the realm of senses and

feelings, indulging himself in staring at the sea and

caressing Betty's body without thinking about the future

and saying "Je ne voulais pas d'explication."

In addition to physical comfort, which is mainly

secured by sexual activity, Zorg needs psychological

reassurance. For instance, when he decides to accompany

Betty to the gynecologist, he discloses that "ça tombe

bien, j'aime bien feuilleter les magazines des mois

passés, ça me rassure." By reading old magazines, Zorg

can bring back the past, feel comfortable with the present

and thus exercise power over the passage of time. Before 218 the quick passage of time and in the present physical condition, Zorg searches for any kind of reassurance and comfort.

Zorg's writing conveys fear and uncertainty about the future. Fraught with metaphors and metonymies which refer to a grotesque assemblage of diverse organic elements,

Zorg's text becomes monstruous. Physically, Betty takes the form of a beast. She is compared both to an animal and a flower. Yet, she remains human; she perceives, has a heart, compares and knows.

Elle m'a fait penser à une fleur étrange, mêlée d'antennes translucides et d'un coeur en skai.. et je ne connaissais pas trop de filles qui pouvaient se fringuer comme ca avec autant d 'insouciance.

In addition to being wild and strange, Betty is mobile and uncontrollable:

Betty était comme un cheval sauvage qui s'était tranché les jarrets en franchissant une barrière de silex. Ce qu'elle avait pris pour une prairie ensoleillée n'était qu'un enclos triste et sombre. Elle ne connaissait rien du tout à l'immobilité, elle ne savait rien de ga.

Continued further, this series of metaphors conveys sexual connotations. For instance, Betty's lUD is associated with a door swinging in the wind: "Son stérilet me paraissait comme une porte battante dans le vent."

Bearing a strong resemblance to the Celinian writing style, this metaphor emphasizes the elusiveness and vulgarisation of things. 219

Sexual and climactic elements pervade Zorg's text and make it sound montruous. Zorg's writing is very engrossed with denotative statements mixed with metaphors and metonynies that release a monster-text, half reality, half fantasy. Disrupted, the word narrative opens with the following: "Ca faisait une semaine que j'avais rencontré

Betty; on baisait tous les soirs. Ils avaient annoncé des orages pour le soir." Introducing his relationship with

Betty, Zorg's text breaks the continuity of his thought- process by inserting references to the weather forecast.

"Storms" metonymically announce the explosive relationship between Zorg and Betty. Prior to this metonymy, Zorg mentions their daily sexual activity and, following the metaphor of the flower, he comments on the manner in which women sometimes dress. Betty's image at that particular moment reveals man's perception of woman: "casually" dressed, read in this precise context as half naked,

sexual and provocative.

Destabilized, Zorg seems to be always caught between

stormy waters and gusts of wind. When Betty comes across

his writing, he finally reaches tranquillity as he shares

his secret and discloses his repressed talents. At that moment, his age is announced; relaxed, he addresses the

spectator:

Betty était la première personne à poser les yeux là-dessus. Le calme était revenu. A trente ans, on commence à avoir une assez bonne expérience de la 220

vie. On apprécie de pouvoir souffler un peu. and he adds:

Je ne m'étais pas installé dans ce bled pour écrire. Non écrire, ça m'était tombé dessus plus tard, sans doute parce que j'avais encore envie de bien me sentir.

These few words provide information about himself and his life and suggest the pain caused by Betty's death and the comfort found in resuming writing. Writing frees him from the burden and the evasiveness of life, from the pain caused by his lover's insanity and her death. Zorg's narrative has been written after Betty's death.

3702 le matin is a postmodern film: characters are decentered (in that their identities take on male and female characteristics and their actions do not lead to a central meaning) and the film adopts a particular rhythm.

Different from their traditionally engendered roles, the characters reveal their insecurity and despair in front of life. The reading and viewing process deviates from a central and enclosing meaning. The film reiterates a combination of beautiful images and melodious musical arrangements. Very particular to the film and constitutive of its sensuous fabric are music, luminosity and nudity. Gabriel Yared, who composed the music for La lune dans le caniveau, was assigned the creation of a theme prior to the actual shooting.® Following the film's rhythm generated by moments of drama and joy, Yared wrote 221 a musical piece that corresponds to the communication between Zorg and Betty. In order to match the film rhythm, Yared based the entire score on two different tempos responding to one another. These two rhythms function symbolically as a reminder of both characters' personalities: Betty is spontaneous, natural and full of grace, and Zorg is funny, moving and pathetic. The scene of the piano playing, at the store of Eddie's deceased mother, decomposes the musical pattern. Zorg plays a few notes that recall the tune used throughout most of the film. Across from him, at another piano, Betty strikes a few notes that sound like a response to Zorg's tempo.

This musical dialogue is introduced with a languid piece of music that accompanies the camera work which, from a high angle, focuses on Betty walking towards Zorg's house, suitcases in hand. The music stops as she stands there at the doorstep, tacitly begging for a place to stay. Zorg silently walks to the door and brings her suitcases in.

The music resumes with the next scene when outside, on the beach, a carousel is turning to the sound of a beautiful saxophone tune while Betty and Zorg drink tequilla on the porch of Zorg's beach house.

By a playful use of these two tempos, the entire cinetext is implicitly suffused with notions of harmony and unity. A non-verbal communication between the man and woman is reiterated by the musical piece. For instance. 222

Betty verbalizes her wishes that they stay together and

live happily, while Zorg limits his to the endless caresses of her backside. In addition, this repetition

familiarizes the spectator with the union between Betty and Zorg and identifies a communication between film and audience.

Characteristic of a postmodern cinema, the varied

rhythms of modern life are materialized into different but recurrent colours and tunes that suggest impressions and

a pleasurable experience to the spectator. The use of colours and camera angles give the film a vivid and beautiful texture. Primary colours are used both to produce an abbrasive look and to contrast the story's

expression of love and painful feelings. The blend of colours and music creates spaces for the two characters.

Beineix frames and foregrounds a few elements that

are part of Betty and Zorg's lives (for instance a low

camera angle offers the image of a pot of chili cooking on

the stove). The image reality is underlined by the sound

of the cooking and the view of hovering steaon. A new

dimension is given to space: objects are not presented in

close-ups because of their plot value but because of their

own existence. The scenery is decomposed so that each

element takes on a precise value. Beineix's emphasis on

the image is precisely what has been criticized in his

cinema. Serge Toubiana says in "Les Oripeaux du look" 223 that the depiction of an aura produces a cult effect.

Although Toubiana's comments do not support my reading,

they illustrate a few of the facets of the cinema of the

eighties:

II est facile de repérer dans 3702 le matin à la fois les intentions et le forcing des situations, le style à fleur de peau qui veut à tout prix séduire, le souci permanent de s'appuyer sur une musique pléonastique pour faire passer les sentiments, cette volonté infantile de tout dire, par la bouche des personnages ou la voix off bref de faire du film une oeuvre complète de cinéma, un manifeste de la "nouvelle image". Bref, une velléité trop forte, trop présente du cinéma, qui se retourne contre le film. ®

Beineix's treatment of nudity also emphasizes

communication and evokes the reconciliation of the opposed

representations of man and woman. Both characters are

filmed naked in a medium shot and are given equal

cinematic time and space. The cinema's double standard

regarding male and female nudity has fixed opposing modes

of sexual signification. Indeed, the woman's sexual

attributes have been institutionalized in cinema as

promoting eroticism and as "rewarding" the spectator.

Traditional cinema has been characterized by the visual

absence of the penis. Richard Dyer and Peter Lehman have

argued that the refusal to show the penis onscreen

prioritizes the signifying process of the phallus and thus

maintains a male signification in the cinema. ® Thus,

showing the male genitals supports my suggestion that the

film evokes the loss of traditional male identity. 224

Beineix has dealt with nudity in a very beautiful and discrete manner. He wanted the opening scene of his film

to be as real and natural as possible. The result is

quite convincing! Nudity in this film is rarely filmed in

an attempt to entice the spectator. Their naked bodies

are given equal space and time. Very originally and

candidly, Beineix turns nudity into comic scenes. The

sequence at night, when Betty decides that she cannot

sleep in the bed of the deceased mother, is quite comical.

After Zorg pulls the old mattress to the sidewalk, Betty

attempts to repair the old sofa with Zorg's assistance.

The scene turns out to be quite humorous as they are

working hard with no clothes on. The woman is no longer

undressed by the man because she has nothing to reveal

about her body, just as he has nothing to reveal about his

own.

The humor used in 3702 le matin functions as a subtle

mockery of the many social institutions. The characters

make fun of religion (in the scene at his mother's

funeral, Eddie has no other tie than one exhibiting a

naked pin-up), the police and the medical institution.

Such an attitude before the social institutions translates

as an awareness of the downfall of our meaningful

institutions. The hospital director appears grotesque and

not credible. Weak and paranoiac, the police, in a

playful gesture, reiterate a scene which has been seen so 225 many times on TV and at the movies. Two policemen catch

Zorg who is running after half-dressed Betty, subsequent

to a crisis. Assuming a marriage scene and a possible case of ill-treatment, the police act like buffoons. The

scene functions as a parody of the entrusted power of the

security forces. The two consecutive scenes that show

Zorg and Bob loading and transporting a piano to be

delivered are quite slapstick. In a farcical gesture. Bob

covers his face accidently by mistakenly pulling on the wrong button: multicoloured fluids spring from the truck.

Running late, Zorg speeds up. He is pulled over for

speeding. To justify his exhilaration, he announces his

future paternity; then, the policeman sings "Prends un

enfant par la main..." and lets Zorg go without a

citation. Parenting is also ridiculed; Bob punishes his

son by hanging him by his breeches to the wall and Annie

thinks about seducing Zorg while she is actually

breastfeeding her new-born. The film evokes ironically

many facets of contemporary social life and even includes

the two-couple social life. These scenes do not work as

an indictment of the institutions, but rather reveal a

joyful play with the small narratives that they are

expected to produce.

A comparison of 37Q2 le matin with the American film

Fatal Attraction, released the same year, will allow me to

establish similarities and differences between the 226 treatment of hysteria by two different narratives. In both films, woman embodies traditionally defined masculine

traits in that she acts to transform a given situation.

Yet, these two films do not belong to the same genre; in

order to present sensations. Fatal Attraction adopts a

conventional narrative that develops according to a matrix

of gender hierarchy, whereas 3702 le matin develops with

regard to an overlapping of gender roles and

characteristics.

Fatal Attraction is the story of a week-end long

extra-marital affair between two young professionals in

New York City. This short-lasting affair provokes the

woman's hysteria. Following a week-end of sex, Dan

Gallagher (Michael Douglas) does not respond to Alex

Forrester's (Glenn Close) incessant messages as he does

not want to endanger his marriage. Desperately trying to

talk with him, she reveals her obsession with him.

Becoming violent, Alex throws some acid onto his car,

kidnaps his daughter Ellen for one day, kills their

daughter's rabbit and finally breaks into their home,

intent on killing Dan's wife, Beth (Ann Archer). Her

hysteria is grossly revealed on the screen when the camera

frames her right hand holding a knife slashing her own

thigh. When she is to attack Beth, Dan steps in the

bathroom and throws himself at her. Fighting, he pushes

her into the bathtub and forces her head under the water: 227 she is drowning. In a grotesque ending that imitates the gory horror film, Alex emerges and lifts her knife to

Dan's back. Dan's wife appears at the doorstep of the bathroom and shoots the hysteric.

One first striking dissimilarity between the two

films is evidenced by the English translation given to

Beineix's film title. Bettv Blue reminds the spectator of the cartoon character "Betty Boop," thus underlining the

exploitation of the woman's body, and focuses the

spectator's attention on the blue colour and depressing

ambiance that colours and pervades the film. This title relies on metaphoric relations established via the power

of sight and the physical world. In contrast, the French title refers to a combination of weather and body

temperatures and works on a metonymic relation which sets

off a narrative direction. The title simultaneously

suggests weather temperature and time of day, and also the

temperature of a healthy body. In both films, as the

embodiment of the excess of signification, woman becomes monstruous. Outbursts of abnormal violence reveal woman's

rage; Alex against the daughter's rabbit, her lover Dan,

herself, and Betty against the landowner, the editor, the

pizzeria's customer and herself. However, a comparison

between the endings of the two films shows another

striking difference: in Fatal Attraction man's adultery is

forgiven by the wife and she kills the hysteric in 228 revenge. Traditional institutions which form the infrastructural and superstructural backdrop of the characters have not been questioned. After all, woman is harmoniously pictured at home as mother and wife, between child and husband and, with her own mother when she is away on the week-end of the extra-marital affair. Man's language and actions do not show, at any moment, hesitation or questioning. In 3702 le matin the woman is killed by Zorg in an act of love, so that she can be freed

from insanity and imprisonment. In that respect, Betty's death brings about a transformation; Zorg has cured himself. He writes as he faces what he has been repressing and communicates with Betty via his writing.

Fatal Attraction. on the contrary, offers no transformation. At the end of the film, the male character and the spectator are back to the situation at the beginning of the film. In this gesture, the narrative does not allow a genuine exploration of sexual difference.

Alex's actions are stopped at a certain point in the film by a male narrative which does not allow the woman to

upset the social order, although the male character has upset his personal fcunily order. Becoming so abnormal by

the end of the film, the woman now threatens to murder.

The imminent denouement that terminates the male narrative

has to be the destruction of the monster-woman. 229

Classic cine-narrative, either Hollywood or French

pre-New Wave cinema, deals with female hysteria in order

to maintain the male character's identity. This is not

the case with 3702 le matin. The monstruosity of the

woman does not warrant a pivotal position to the male. As we have previously seen, Zorg is fragile, hesitant,

socially undefined and closer to a traditional female

identity, and Betty, to a male identity. Besides, the

film shows a pertinent ending which reverses their roles.

Indeed, Zorg dresses in Betty's clothes and rebels against

social institutions (namely, the psychiatric hospital and

its staff). He takes on the woman's role when he is ready

to emulate Betty's reaction against society. In addition,

the scene where Zorg is taken away by a group of young

doctors dressed in white clothes reminds us of the classic

scene of the sequestration of insane women (as in Bernard

Nuytten's Camille Claudel [1988]).

With the presentation of two fragile beings, the

French film has turned the excess of narrative into

introspection, presenting the anguished subject

confronting life, whereas the American film has turned the

excess into abnormality. The excess has become

sensationalism and entertainment and has set aside the

despair that haunts every social being who is trapped in

so many irreconcilable differences. 230

The tragic resolution of the film's tension between the woman's hysteria and that of the man is brought to an important moment: in a destructive action, Betty puts an end to her capacity to see and at the same time to Zorg's possibility to escape in the woman's body. It is through a sexual communication with Betty that Zorg searches for his identity. Symbolically, as Betty represents both the mother and father figures to powerless Zorg, we can envisage Zorg in a struggle with his Oedipus complex. He makes love to his mother (Betty as the mother figure) and ends up killing his father (Betty as the social parental figure) . As Betty blinds herself, she transmits vision to the man. Now that Zorg sees/understands, he can write.

Moments of Betty's life of course appear at the beginning and end of the film in the voice over in the form of bits of story-telling, memories. Zorg remembers

Betty and his love for her. Definitely a male story, the novel does not prioritize the woman's insanity and death as it concludes unexpectedly with a second murder. Two buffoons come to Zorg after he has returned from the hospital. They complain that they have been looking for him since he fled on the night of a robbery a few years before. Henry, the older and the leader, brutally tosses around the young guy. The latter, trying to fight, manages at a certain moment to kill Henry. Zorg helps him to get rid of the body and then gets back to his 231

apartment. Thus, the reader learns by the end of the

novel that Zorg is a little ruffian who survives by

participating into bad deals.

Beineix has successfully adapted the book to the

cinema medium. From a grotesque account of a bandit's

life, 3702 le matin becomes the narrative of a beautiful

love story between two young people who try to live and

love as much as they can in a society which is

experiencing a demise of the main social pillars.

3702 le matin is a film about an intense love that

leads Zorg to kill Betty. The woman does not survive her

monstruous condition. This scenario may not grant the woman a satisfying position in the narrative. However,

the role reversal shows that today, man and woman share

feelings, attitudes and daily responsibilities and that

their roles cannot be determined the way they are, for

instance, in Fatal Attraction. Indeed, the American film

is constructed upon a traditional male narrative in which

desire is metaphorically linked with the woman and which

emphasizes the social constructs used to direct a male

desire, thus imprisoning the woman.

Despite the classic hystericization of the woman,

3702 le matin is a unique film in the sense that it

provides new ways of looking at sexual difference.

Feelings and actions are similar to both man and woman. 232

The woman does not hold her identity in an excess of feeling or essence. She is portrayed in a similar situation to that of the man. None is defined by particular social occupations as they crave to be happy together.

3702 le matin's success is due first to the feminization and eroticization of the male character in that he is passive, adopts feminine traits and reveals a will to submission and loss of mastery. Living in a postmodern condition, the hysteric Zorg situates himself between male emasculation and feminization. The female character is depicted as caught between her desire to be herself and to please the other gender. She takes care of and motivates her partner, cleans his house and prepares dinner. Motherhood is stressed by Betty's relation to

Nicolas and the young boy who comes to play the piano.

The film appeals to a new generation of men and women. The position of both gender roles is complicated as it destabilizes man's identity and questions traditional and modern female roles. The hystericization of woman and narrative reveals the effacement of a monolithic position of the male protagonist. Characters are dual and in that respect, they convey the dissemination of culture and the wavering between what constitutes social identities. In being dual, the characters allow the spectator to identify either with the 233 woman or the man. The spectator actually recognizes him/herself lost among these impressions of unity and estrangement that the subject experiences day after day.

3702 le matin has retained the original title of the book and has intelligently translated the novel's passionate, humorous, grotesque and tragic moments from the literary into the cinematic medium. It accomplishes its final goal: in its assemblage of music, images, colours, man and woman, the film narrates the momentary and the climactic in a set of images sounds and language that blend together into a kaleidoscope of impressions.

The film becomes pleasurable in its rhythm and movement.

Movement and time are impossible to stop, except perhaps when a love-story happens to freeze time into memories. 234

Notes to Chapter VI

1. Philippe Djian as quoted in the promotional pressbook for 3702 le matin. Paris; Distribution Gaumont, 1988, p. 2.

2. Serge Toubiana, "Les oripeaux du look" in Cahiers du cinema, nO 383-384, May 1986, pp. 79-80.

3. Radio programme on Parisian NRJ, December 1988.

4. Philippe Djian, 37o2 Le Matin, Paris: Editions Bernard Barrault, 1985.

5. See Sigmund Freud in his work The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, New York: W.W. Norton and Company,1966, or An Outline of Psycho -Analysis, ed. James Strachey, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1969. See Shoshana Felman, La folie et la chose littéraire, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978 for a discussion of woman and madness. Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984 Noami Schor in Breaking the chain and Reading in detail (1987).

6. Adrian Lyne, Fatal Attraction, screenplay by James Dearden, music by Maurice Jarre, photography by Howard Atherton, produced by Stanley R. Jaffe and Sharry Lansing, released in 1987, with Michael Douglas, Glenn Close and Anne Archer.

7. Interview with Gabriel Yared, N.R.J., Paris, December 1988.

8. Serge Toubiana, "Les oripeaux du look" in Cahiers du cinema, nO 383-384, May 1986, p. 80.

9. Richard Dyer, "Male Sexuality in the Media." in The Sexuality of Men, ed. Andy Metcalf and Martin Humpkines, London: Pluto Press, 1985, pp. 28-43. Chapter VII

Chocolat

The Narrative of a Woman's Desire: a Kristevan reading.

Chocolat ^ constitutes Claire Denis's quasi- autobiographical account of her life as a young girl in colonial Africa. The film is both a recollection of memories of colonial French life in Cameroun and the construction of a woman's desire. Involving a narrative play between the consciousness of a public sense of history (French colonialism in Cameroun) and the self- consciousness of the subject (the woman's search for her identity), the film text oscillates between the expression of racial and sexual difference. Interested in the issue of racial difference, Claire Denis has further explored the public and private sense of history in her most recent film S'en fout la mort (1991), in which she investigates the secret rituals of clandestine immigrants in France.

Desire in Chocolat is territorialized in two ways: on the one hand, it unveils itself in a patchwork of recounted experiences that reveals the socio-political tensions generated by the presence of European families in

Africa and on the other hand, it emerges from the

235 236 narration of a woman's attraction for her African servant.

The narrative is a signifying practice that involves the unconscious, subjective and social relations existing between the Europeans and the Africans, via the unveiling of a taboo desire. These relations compose the film text in which gestures of confrontation and appropriation, and destruction and construction operate. These gestures constitute the work of the young woman's remembrance and the process of her self consciousness.

In crisis, the female character loses her central position and dissolves herself within the image-narrative movement. The woman's desire accounts for the expression of the crisis of the subject in society and in signifying processes. I will read the crisis of the speaking subject via Julia Kristeva's notions of the semiotic and the abject. The position of the character in this film is decentered in a loss of central narrative meaning, in the convergence of the daughter with the mother's desire.

Chocolat's postmodern narrative reveals the shattering of the symbolic mode and the subsequent expression of the semiotic mode via the explosion of images and the play of archaic sounds.

A wide angle shot opens up the image-narrative; the camera tracks 180 degrees clockwise from the view of an

Afro-American man and a young boy playing in the ocean, to 237 that of a young woman who sits on the beach, listening to her walkman. The camera follows her as she walks away from the beach, along a palm-tree-lined road; the Afro-

American man offers her a ride to Limbé, the closest village. In the car, the young boy playfully identifies in his African dialect the different parts of his father's face. In the back of the car, the young woman, France

(Cécile Ducasse), looks away to the lush and verdant scenery, her hands clinching a travel journal.

Framed from the car window, the view of the luxurious landscape dissolves into that of a dried and scorched scenery that the family servant, Protée (Isaach de

Banhole), and a young girl, France (Emmanuelle Chaulet), see from the back of the pick-up truck driven by the father, Marc (Francois Clouzet) . The next shot shows the mother, Aimée (Guilia Boschi), pulling sandwiches out of a picnic basket. France takes one and runs to Protée who spreads the bread with live ants before trading it with her for a piece of fruit. Later on, Marc mentions to

Protée that he will have the road widened next year.

Upon their return to the property, Marc is off on an excursion across the land with a group of native employees. Aimée and France resume their daily occupations: Aimée tends to the estate, visits their

Norwegian neighbors, Martha and Nansen, and is visited by an old English friend, Jonathan. France plays by herself 238 or is seen in Protée and other servants' company.

Unexpected visitors stay at the estate after their plane has been forced to land in the nearby surroundings :

Captain Védrine, Courbesol, his co-pilot, Machinard and

Mireille, his recent wife and, Delpich, a coffee grower accompanied by Thérèse, his African "housewife." In order to build a runway, Marc's friend, Randall comes with his wife, Monique, and a group of workers for help.

Among these African workers is a young ex-seminarian,

Luc Segalen, who has chosen to live the African way; he works with them, eats, sleeps and takes showers in the servants' quarters. In the scene when Mireille is extremely sick, Segalen stirs up a confrontation between the Africans and Europeans. He verbally ill-treats

Prosper, the village doctor, who came to see the sick one, and thus encourages Machinard to vent his doubts about

African doctors' competence. A racial conflict is kindled: a personal tension mounts between Protée and

Segalen. Segalen's use of the servants' quarters and his further public disclosure of Aimée's desire for him seem to annoy Protée; yet, the latter does nothing about it.

Later on, that same day, Segalen provokes Protée into a fight by commanding him to vacate the porch where he is busy with house duties. Protée throws Segalen's sleeping set off the porch, then, comes to blows with him and ends up winning the fight before resuming his chores. 239

The camera lets us discover Aimée who sits on the floor, inside the house, near the glass-door. Standing close to her, Protée pulls the sitting-room door and draws the curtains close. She grabs and holds his ankle for a few seconds before letting him go as he continues his work, away from her. Then Protée comes back, squats in front of her, looks right in her eyes, and swiftly pulls her back to her feet before quickly leaving the room.

The next morning, Aimée announces Segalen's departure and asks her husband to assign Protée to a different work­ site. From now on, the servant will work in the garage.

France pays him a visit; she inquires about how hot the generator pipe is; Protée responds by grabbing it.

Imitating him, France burns her little palm. Protée steps back from the generator and the ceunera shows a close-up of his burned palm.

The group of stranded passengers are about to fly away. The camera follows the plane take-off and tracks across the superb scenery as a male voice is heard. The

Afro-American man of the opening scene discloses his name

(Mungo) and origins while France reveals her plans to travel to North Cameroun where the Dalens' estate is

located. Reading neither past nor future in France's

palms, Mungo recommends that she leave Africa as quickly

as possible. The film narrative ends at the airport, with

the view of three workers turning their backs to the 240 camera, looking on, towards the empty field as the Mossoon rains start.

Initiating the narration of a woman's desire, a flashback technique establishes France's search for her origin and account of her youth in Africa. Unlike a traditional flashback that operates via specific signs such as fading or dissolve techniques, and an accompanying voice-over, this flash-back presents itself in a very subtle way; the scenery that France (as a young woman) discovers from the car window transforms itself into the landscape that France (as a little girl) and Protée (the family's servant) enjoy from the back of a pick-up truck.

From very verdant Limbé in Cameroun, the narrator/spectator travels to Mindiff's dry and scorched territory. Operating a temporal bridge, the flashback technique conflates two different Cameroun locations into one -the site of the narrator's fantasy. It allows the spectator to accompany France on her imaginary journey from Limbé to her parents' estate. It thus allows both the protagonist and spectator to experience the character's past history and to live through a few fragments of French life in colonized Africa.

Carrying with it an element of truth, the flashback technique further reinforces the power of the gaze that has been previously granted to the woman. The opening 241 scene introduces France, a young French woman, as the possessor of the gaze. A panoramic movement of the camera offers the spectator a view of the ocean where a young

African man and a little boy play, and opens it to the beach where a young woman is looking. Thus, the opening scene identifies the woman as the viewer and two scenes later, the flashback technique positions her as the narrative agent. The woman is the one who looks and, transported to a different place and time, she is the one who narrates. From the simultaneous position of spectator, narrator and subject, a woman authors a narrative which follows the meanderings of the woman's memory/desire.

The postmodern narrative oscillates between two accounts: it is tempted to narrate the life of a European family in colonized Cameroun and to express a woman's desire. Thus, the narrative engages with a social and personal sense of history. Searching for her origin,

France's narration conflates her desire for Africa and the

African body with the distant mother's desire for the

Dalens' African servant. On the one hand, frail and unreliable, the memory process cannot restitute the family's true experience of Franco-African tensions. The narration of a true experience of their life is taken over by the narration of the daughter's own fantasy about

Africa. On the other hand, the search for the woman's 242 identity loses itself in the conflation of the daughter's with the mother's gaze. I will consider this conflation as the expression of Kristeva's "devouring mother" in the construction of France's identity/desire.

Chocolat recounts France's youth in Mindiff and presents historical fragments of colonial Africa. It reveals the paradoxes and problems created by the historical representation (the history of French colonialism) and self-representation (the construction of a woman's identity). The consciousness of the social relations between the Africans and Europeans grows via the establishment of relations between the various characters and the mother, father and servant.

Socio-economic tensions erupt with the intervention of intruders or foreigners into the Dalens' life. First,

Jonathan's visit occasions a surge of activity in and around the house among the servants, and gives the spectator the evidence of the Africans' social role in colonial epoch. The African servants are busy cooking, serving and tending to the guests. The after dinner talk between Aimée and Jonathan precipitates the disclosure of an individual African rebellion which took place against colonial oppression. Aimée reveals that the former owner of the house has been killed by one of his servants.

Second, the emergency landing of a plane with six

Europeans and an African on board generates additional 243

comments that testify to racial socio-economic relations

and tensions. Such tensions are presented in the scene which depicts the arrival of the plane-passengers at the

Dalens' plantation. Delpich carries a heavy trunk with

the help of his African female servant, Thérèse. At

night, Delpich goes to the kitchen to steal some leftover

for her who is not allowed to join the Europeans for

dinner and sleeps her master's bedroom on the floor, at

the foot of the bed.

Third, Segalen's appearance among the group of

African workers who come to work on the runaway attracts

the Europeans' attention and prods the Europeans'

curiosity as he turns down their invitation to join the

group. A few scenes later in the film, Segalen stages an

incomprehensible European's racist treatment of the

Africans. He insults and questions Prosper's medical

competence as he is about to leave the house after

visiting with the sick Mireille. Tensions are not only

created by a non-African individual. For instance, at the

village school, while Protée gets help from the

schoolteacher in corresponding with his parents, France,

from the top of her donkey, screams commandingly to Protée

"à la maison." The African schoolboys quickly mock him

chanting loudly "Protée à la maison."

The distinction between and separation of the races

is marked by the hiearachy that colonialism (capitalism) 244 imposes on the social organisation. The interaction between the European population and the African servants is limited to job relations. For instance, the communication between Aimée and Protée is confined to questions, demands and acceptances as she holds the role of the master and he that of the slave. Many scenes involving France and Protée evoke the respective positions of the dominant and the dominated. At lunchtime, Protée stands next to the table where France sits. Not particularly hungry, she orders him to eat as he squats down to the table level, in a submissive position.

The transgression of the race-determined socio- geographical realms is not permitted by the established socio-political structures. Yet, France and Segalen cross these boundaries. As a troublemaker, Segalen stirs up confrontation among the European population. He stands equivocally on both sides of the race issue and evolves in both geographical realms. He also generates an uneasy

situation by disclosing publicly that Protée secretly desires Aimée. France is allowed to cross the geographical boundaries between the Europeans' and

Africans' territories since she is being watched by the

servants. The child playfully joins the servants in their quarters.

Occupying an "in-between" position, France and

Segalen's characters function in the narrative as a link 245 between both cultures and bring information about these cultures to the spectator. France learns about African culture in company of Protée or a female servant. Her experiences of African mores range from food to geimes, from the oppressive African heat and the hyenas' nocturnal threat (Protée is called on to guard the entrance to the bedroom where the mother and daughter sleep) to vast scorched land areas. On several occasions, we see France eat the way Protée eats (for instance, live ants on a piece of bread), travel on his shoulders to the sound of

African war chants, and play with him, naming facial components in his African dialect. As for Segalen, he lives the African culture through experiences that are directly shared with the Africans. He works, eats and sleeps on their socio-geographical territory.

Coupled with the narration of the Europeans' lives in

Africa and the Dalens' life in Africa is the narration of the woman's search for identity and a woman's desire. The preliminary scenes read as the expression of the young

French woman's desire for the African continent. The desire for the African experience is mediated by the desire for the African male's body and coloured skin. The opening scene shows a handsome African man bathing in the sea with his son. The skin is emphasized and contrasted to the colour of the sea contouring the young boy's body in the following shot. 246

The mother's desire is expressed during the length of the flashback. Aimée's desire for Protée is structured in a very tantalizing way: from other women's gazes, the narrative webs relations towards the construction of

Aimée's gaze and the expression of her desire. In the course of women's conversations, one of the European women comments on Protée's looks: "tu sais, il est beau, ton boy." The camera high angle opens the view to Protée from a distance. Supporting these words, the next scene shows

Protée taking a shower. Various other comments suggest the mother's desire: "Au fond, Aimée, vous aimeriez bien

être à ma place, à vous frotter contre Protée. Allez venez, je vous fais une petite place" says Segalen. Brief comments and close-ups of Protée's face weave the construction of desire which is visually expressed in one shot. At that time, the spectator can see/read the shared desire between the European woman and the African servant.

On the night of Jonathan's visit, Aimée decides to dress up as the old British family friend wears a tuxido.

Protée is asked to help her with the dress. In a splendid scene which economizes a useless exchange of words, Protée stands behind Aimée and both face and stare at the camera for a few seconds as if they were looking at each other in a mirror. Then Aimée looks down while Protée stares on.

Within the specific historical context of colonialism, this scene functions as a forbidden act. Vulnerable, 247

Aimée does not sustain his gaze. This gesture can be read

as if they were not allowed to look at each other so

intensely and intimately.

The climactic scene of the expression of desire takes place subsequent to the scene of the fight between Protée

and Segalen. Resuming his work, Protée enters the

sitting-room as the camera lets us see Aimée seated on the

floor in a dark corner of the dining-room. The woman's

desire is expressed when Aimée grabs Protée's ankle. In

a swift gesture, Protée pulls her up back to her feet, and

as quickly as he made her stand up, leaves the room. This

gesture restores Aimée's "proper" position in a socio­

politico-economic environment which reminds her and the

spectator of the relations between the dominated and the

dominant that govern the social, human and sexual

relations. Aimée, the master, is not allowed to kneel in

front of a "slave" and her desire for an African is

socially unaccepted.

Following such an incredible and effective use of

images, desire reaches its final point when its expression

turns into physical pain. Relegated to work in the garage

and upon France's visit, Protée inflicts pain on himself.

In front of Aimée's ambiguous position (at the servant's

feet), Protée represses his desire for Aimée with pain,

signing with his blood (severe burns in his hand) the end 248 of a narrative of desire. Unveiled, his desire turns into pain, burns and blood.

Expressive of a postmodern narrative, the narration of the Europeans' lives in colonized Cameroun and that of

Aimée's desire do not sustain a central unified meaning.

The female character is not the central narrative agent in that she is not telling a complete story: her undefined desire merges with the impossible desire of the mother for the African servant. Such indeterminacy is underlined by the sense of fear and destruction that is conveyed by the

narrative: the French society living in Africa and

France's own fears in the shattering of the symbolic modality. This sense of fear and destruction suggests,

from a sociological point of view, tensions between France

(the mother country) and Cameroun (the daughter country),

and from a psychoanalytic point of view, the difficult

search for France's identity within the social and

conceptual modes that are in crisis. The narrative turns

out to be a fabric of tensions which are foregrounded in

images and sounds. The subject's biological drives are

expressed in the narrative by unexplainable images or

images which do not contribute to a central meaning.

France's inner drives are exposed in the film narrative

via her archaic link to the mother. These ancestral

relations to the mother are identified by Kristeva in the

"semiotic." Fear is first symbolically expressed in the 249 scene when Protée holds a rifle against his chest as he sits up at night, guarding Aimée's bedroom entrance. Then fear turns into destruction in the scene that presents the dismembered animals that have been attacked by hyenas.

During their visit to Nansen and Martha, France and Protée

stay outside the house and discover the dead and bloody donkey and livestock. Not only visually denoted, destruction is connoted via numerous comments. In a false

self-fulfilling prophecy, Aimée discloses that one of the

German family's servants who had previously lived in the house, killed the masters. The sense of destruction is derived from the socio-political structures imposed on

Africa. A few references are made to the oppressive

French colonial system and its subsequent explosive climate. The outcome of the tension created when Segalen, who is characterized as the instigator of the questioning of the recognized order, manipulates Protée into fighting, could be read as confirming the racist conception of the divide between the dominants and dominated which relies upon land distribution.

Fear is also produced within the construction of the

search for identity by the position of the mother. The mother is devouring in that her presence onscreen is

overpowering and the expression of her desire will take

over that of the daughter. Kristeva considers in

Histoires d'amour that the mother's ravaging thirst for 250 the child brings about a notion of destruction. The mother is the first person to take care of the baby and to satisfy its needs as there is no intervention from anybody else between the mother and the child. She is devouring as she has established since the earliest stage of life of the child a narrow relation with it:

Quand on sait qu'empiriquement c'est à la mère que s'adressent les premières affections, les premières imitations comme les premières vocalises, est-il besoin de souligner qu'une telle désignation du Père comme pôle de l'amour primaire, de l'identification primaire, n'est soutenable qu'à condition d'envisager l'identification toujours déjà dans l'orbe symbolique, sous l'emprise du langage. ^

Thus, the father's intervention between the mother and the child happens when the child enters the symbolic order.

In the meantime, the relations between the child and the mother are relations of "corps à corps" in that they exist through the mother's body and its elements.

One element among them is blood. Blood represents the archaic and ancestral relation with the mother. The mother owns an archaic power which is a power of domination or abandonment, differentiation of the "propre" and "impropre," of the possible and the impossible. Thus the mother has acquired a maternal authority. The relations between the maternal body and its elements and the subject represent the semiotic in Kristeva's work. As the precondition to language, the semiotic depends on meaning, but in a way which is other than that of the 251 linguisitic signs or the symbolic order that they establish.

Such a maternal authority distinguishes itself from the paternal laws within which, by means of the phallic phase and the acquisition of language, the construction of the subject is being made. Characteristic of the construction of France's identity, the symbolic modality is represented by the father and in his absence, Protée.

Marc and Protée function as the agents of the symbolic mode in the signifying process. Meaning is built via the objects that represent the symbolic. First, the travel journal constitutes an important factor in that the father expresses himself and his laws in written words. His writing instills in the daughter the desire for African nature and beauty. Such reading is visually transmitted by shots of the young girl's trip across the exotic, dry and scorched African landscape. Her imaginary trip is interspersed with the images of the father's journey; the camera inserts shots of the father crossing the same landscape. Despite the father's quasi absence, the narrative reminds us of his presence via his travel book.

France is attached to him by the mediation of his words written in a travel notebook or his words when he is physically present. His written words and communication with the daughter function as the symbolic legality and law. His written impressions about Africa are kept in the 252 journal that France keeps close to her heart. Announcing the scene of the emergency landing on their estate, the father corrects the daughter's belief that the plane fell behind the mountains: "1'avion a passé la ligne d'horizon." Little France is able to listen to the father's words that are read by another man, Luc Segalen, one afternoon to the mother and daughter.

She learns about the African culture directly by spending time with Protée: she memorizes a few words in

African dialect as she identifies Protée's facial features and listens to his war tribal chants. Protée participates in her joyful games and mediates her relation to the

African culture: in the introductory scene of the flashback, he asks France to solve a riddle before giving her the sandwich and, in the first scene taking place in the garage, he asks her to solve another riddle: "Une petite jeune fille charmante fait des enfants autour de son cou," to which she answers "un papayer."

The devouring mother is consistently present on the screen and/or via her voice. Substituting for the father's authority, Aimée becomes the "phallic mother," reifying the structures of domination that exist in the socio-economico-political context of colonialism. The mother's communication with her daughter is confined to commands ("travaille, toi"), recommendations ("ne t 'éloigne pas trop"), and corrections: in the scene when 253 she works on the plot behind the house, Aimée corrects her daughter's pronunciation of the German name she reads off the old wooden cross. Harsh and bossy, the mother is never shown playing with but always talking to her daughter in a commanding tone. This dictating attitude might translate unhappiness; indeed, life on the plantation is hard. The heat is oppressive, the soil is hard and dry and the place is infested with threatening wild animals. Yet, the mother's harsh voice can be read as one of the visual representations of the semiotic.

Other maternal elements such as blood (which evokes according to Kristeva the painful humanity) function in the film as the return of what has been repressed by monotheism. These elements establish the non-verbal and present themselves as the receptacle of a signifying modality which is closer to the primary processes, that is to say closer to objects and images.

The expression of the tension that the daughter feels towards the mother takes place in the scene of the blood covering the hen and donkey's dead bodies. These shots, which are not integrated into a global meaning, express

France's feeling of the abject. The other scene which produces a feeling of abject is when Protée places live ants on a piece of bread at the beginning of the film.

According to Kristeva, extreme elements such as excrements and corpses constantly remind the subject of the presence 254 of death. Thus, the subject constantly asserts its life by pushing away, by abjecting. In this process, the abject takes the subject back to a most personal archaic history, back to the most archaic attempts to distance itself from the mother and what she represents (the satisfaction of its needs), before it can exist, outside her, via the autonomy of language.

The mother's devouring presence impregnates so much of the text that France's desire conflates with that of the mother for Protée. The close presence of the mother is devouring the child to the point that France substitutes her own desire for that of the mother.

In the "corps à corps" between the mother and the child, the symbolic order that a third person brings to the dyadic relation helps the subject in continuing the war "à son corps défendant" with what will become abject.

Tying her theories of the semiotic and the abject together, Kristeva says that the abject is the revelation of the break between the symbolic and semiotic modalities.

Indeed,

II y a, dans 1 'abjection, une de ces violentes et obscures révoltes de l'être contre ce qui le menace et qui lui paraît venir d'un dehors ou d'un dedans exorbitant, jeté à côté du possible, du tolérable, du pensable. ^

Operating without a subject and object, the abject involves affects and thoughts that cannot be properly defined. It is not an object that can be named or 255 imagined. The abject expresses the crisis of the subject's identity.

Chocolat shows the narration of this subject in crisis. The expression of France's desire for Africa is prodded by the introductory relationship set up between the Afro-American man and his son who enjoy themselves in the ocean and two shots later, when they identify facial components in their African dialect. (The child represents the biological continuation of the parent's body.) The scene in the car represents the parallel relation between Protée and France with the man and his

son. Memory works with the archaic, ancient words in

another language and body parts. Indeed, the sounds of

this foreign language might resound as the archaic sounds

and music that France, as a little girl, could hear, or as

a baby, could feel through the mother's body. Visually

the scene announces or reminds France of the time when, as

a little girl, she used to reiterate with Protée the saime

gestures and words. The relationship between France and

Protée is suggested in the opening scene of the pick-up

truck and in a later scene, at table, while Protée watches

her at lunchtime. The relationship between the servant

and the daughter of the colonialist family is established

through actions, in the absence of words. It reifies the

existing master/slave and mother/daughter relations.

Functioning as an initial connection in the flashback, the 256 relationship between the mother and the daughter will be reiterated throughout the film. The mother's authority pervades the entire narrative.

Substituting for the mother's role towards the servant, France holds a master's position. She visits the servants' quarters and the garage where Protée works by the end of the film. She mimically acts out the mother's role, asking Protée to do things or demanding him that he eats. Thus, representing respectively Africa and France,

Protée's and France's characters are mediated by the mother/woman who channels human biological drives towards the object, the body and otherness. France also ends up burning her little palm, symbolically taking over the mother's position.

France's narrative might be read, in an analogy, as the expression of the Kristevan thetic (the pre-language

signifying structure) which exposes the break between the physical elements of Africa and the socio-economic factors that make up Africa's psyche and consciousness. Positing

signification and announcing the crisis of the subject, the thetic is both the denotation of the object (Africa) and France's enunciation. ® France is a displaced young

girl (she does not belong to Africa) who, similar to a vagabond, is absent from the signified (the historical

African consciousness) . Although she has been established 257 at the beginning of the film as the person who is going to relive her past and re-discover Africa, France finds herself positioned outside the signifying process. At the end of the flashback and by the end of the film, Mungo's words ostracize France from Africa; "Elle est drôle ta main, pas de passé et pas de futur. Repars vite, avant qu'on te mange." Yet, his words do not hold authority since the narrative offers no African point of view.

Athough Mungo might be considered part of the signifying process, his American nationality and language ostracize him also from the African space.

Displaced and decentered, France is neither part of the signified (the colonial experience), because she was too young when she was in Africa, nor is she part of the signifying process, since she has been substituted by the mother via the expression of desire. The object of

France's desire is only revealed at the end of the film when she tells Mungo that after spending two weeks in the area, she is heading towards Northern Cameroun where her parents' estate is located. In the same fashion, the object of the mother's desire is disclosed in the last part of the narrative, subsequent to Jonathan's and

Segalen's symbolic intervention, which bring fear and confrontation to the narration.

The last image reiterates the lack of a central meaning to this narrative: at the airport, three workers 258 are framed with their backs facing France and the spectator, to the sound of a melodious African musical arrangement, as it starts raining. France finds herself in the same position that she occupies at the beginning of the film; she is looking and observing. Similar to the first image, the Africans do not look at her; they show indifference. The woman's desire for the African servant has not been satisfied. Like Protée who turned down

Aimée's invitation to fulfill her desire, Mungo refuses

France's invitation for a drink, and by implication, the knowledge about Africa and its people and culture.

Refusing a traditional narrative closure, this final image depicts also the tantalizing moment for the spectator's desire to live on as s/he looks out, from a distance, through the heavy Monsoon curtain.

In a narrative of fear and destruction, where the devouring mother defines a semiotic space, Protée's character is central to the film not so much for bringing new information about Cameroun or France's youth in a colonized country but for symbolically presenting destruction. He represents the element that works out the narrative along the lines of tension and confrontation.

The scene that initiates the flashback introduces

Protée and announces a slight notion of destruction and death, via abjection: the servant prepares a sandwich 259 with live ants and trades it with France for a piece of

fruit. Kristeva says:

Celui par lequel l'abject existe est donc un jeté qui (se) place, (se) sépare, (se) situe et donc erre, au lieu de se reconnaître, de désirer, d'appartenir ou de refuser. Au lieu de s'interroger sur son "être", il s'interroge sur sa place "où suis-je ?" plutôt que "qui suis-je ?" *

With the demotion of a central meaning, France's

desire remains undefined. Similar to the postmodern

narrative movement France's desire conflates with her

parents' desire for the African body (the father's words

in regard to the skin colors and the mother's desire for

the servant). Neither an indictment of colonialism nor an

expression of France's identity, the film is a narrative

play between both and becomes a film texture.

Chocolat's narrative is made of a beautiful fabric which

testifies visually and verbally to the desire for the

African body. In a kaleidoscope of beautiful images of

human bodies (mainly male bodies) and scenery, the film

diffuses the expression of desire through the text.

Desire translates into the description of the African body

(not only scenery but also people, animals, sounds, and

biological parts). The image-narrative is suffused with

radiant images impregnated with vivid colours. From the

introductory shot of beautiful black bodies, we are

reminded of body shapes and skin colour throughout the

film. First, we see the young African's body lapped by 260 the ocean waves. Then the camera cuts to France's body in a bathing suit, then cuts back to the father and son's bodies, lying down on the beach, the water gently lapping their silhouettes, and finally cuts to a close-up of

France's sandy foot that her hand dries off. The sequential visual presentation of the skin-colour differences is suggested in the initial scene when Protée takes a shower in the servants' open quarters and the following one, when Segalen showers and offers his naked body to the woman's gaze. The visual representation of the body continues with repetitive close-ups of hands:

France's forearm on which Protée smears blood and, by the end of the film, the palm she burns on the generator pipe and the palms whose lines Mungo cannot read.

Supplementing the visual description given by images, words describe the African body. One afternoon, Segalen reads to Aimée and France who sits on her lap:

Au milieu des visages Africains d'un noir bronzé, la couleur blanche de la peau évoque décidément quelque chose de pareil à la mort. Moi même qui en 1891 quand après n'avoir vu pendant des mois que des gens de couleur, j'aperçus à nouveau près de la Bénoué, les premiers européens, je trouvais la peau blanche anti-naturelle à côté de la plénitude savoureuse de la noire. Peut-on alors blâmer les sauvages auchtotones de prendre l'homme blanc pour quelque chose de contre-nature, pour une créature surnaturelle, démoniaque.

The contrast between the white and black skin colours augments the visual dissimilarity and the jarring socio­ political presence of the Europeans on the African soil. 261

Yet, differences bring sensuality out of the film fabric sensuality. Traveling shots offer the spectator magnificent views of African sceneries and lands. In a traditional association of water with the mother, the opening scene shows the colourful blend of the ocean waves with the coloured skin of two male bodies. Such harmony constitutes France's initial attraction for the continent and her first encounter, as a young woman, with Africa and the Africans. The view of an handsome Afro-American man and his son sparks her memory process. Chocolat's fabric is interwoven with the mother's body in that she is always on the screen, the father's written "corps," and the

African body, via landscapes. The sounds are very powerful in this film. The opening scene is lengthy with the sound of the breaking of the waves. We hear the sound of the insects at night and the threatening screams of hyenas. These sounds mainly constitute the fabric of

Africa.

The musical arrangement contributes also to the harmony and sensuality of the film, especially in the scene when France arrives in Doualé (the radio is blasting with loud music). Although the African rhythm and music sends off a radical and rebellious edge, it suggests also comradeship (especially in the last shot of the film) and sensuality as much as grace, joy and energy that are lacking in words. 262

Thus, Chocolat''s narrative is characterized by a temptation to become a socio-political examination of colonialism (as a racial conflict looms over the film) and yet remains the attempt to express a woman's self- consciousness. Although a few comments on racism/colonialism are made in the film, they do not corroborate a critique of colonial life. They constitute the fragments of France's remembrance. No point of intersection exists between all the short stories of the people trapped in Africa. These small narratives evoke bits of critique and appear to function in segments, as parts of a mosaic which is to reassemble the puzzle of

France's youth. They constitute a patchwork of memories.

If there is a common thread to the fabric of this narrative, it is the African man's character. It constitutes the link between the daughter and the mother as he is the object of France's need for love and as he becomes the object of the mother's desire. In becoming the object of the woman's desire, he becomes also the main character. Although the first character to be seen on the screen is Mungo (through France's eyes), Protée will substitute for the Afro-American two scenes later when the flashback takes the spectator and the protagonist back to

Mindiff when France was a young girl.

Illustrative of the woman's position of looking and criticizing from a distance, the spectator has joined the 263 woman's position at the end of this postmodern narrative.

Although the spectator has not been given the traditional socio-political data to use a political discourse and be able to judge, s/he is placed by the narrative in a different position, experiencing an-other desire.

Chocolat's narrative constitutes a discourse which is not a mere depository of thin linguistic layers and structures or the testimony of a withdrawn body. Indeed, France's desire makes up the narrative fabric via the conflation with the mother's desire, and the visual expression of

Africa and the African body. The discourse is, instead, a signifying process which reveals the drives toward and through language, toward the exchange system and its protagonists— the subject and its institutions, France and her mother, father, the servants: the institutions such as the family, the church, colonialism, and the military.

The Kristevan signifying practice enlightens a notion of desire in postmodern narrative. France's travel constitutes a mode of production, a production of France's meaning, a production of her fragments of memory. The narrative is set up from the outset to be the telling of

France's experiences of African life. Yet, it turns out to be an image narrative of the African country, a series of impressions about Africa. With the failings of the memory process, the conflation of the desire of the mother 264 with that of the daughter suggest also the impossible contours of the woman's desire.

Constituted of a series of fragments, the film offers the spectator impressions and feelings about colonial life, a feeling for Africa via an ambiance (the atmosphere in Limbe is illustrative of African life, with the old bus loading in the center of the village while the radio is playing loudly).

Chocolat is about unrecovering France's past. The young French woman is on the road to find her past and her roots. Her remembrance journey transforms itself into the experience of the mother's desire. At the end of the film, France is where she was at the beginning of the narrative, off to Mindiff in Northern Cameroun where her parents' estate is located. The film expresses an unrevered and unresolved past.

The film narrative offers no unified signified but an expression of desire. Thirty some years after the decolonization movement, the representation of an historical period of time such as the African colonial epoch is blended with the expression of France's self- consciousness. As the narrative of a woman's desire.

Chocolat is a route to an authentic and political search

for roots (France's roots and also the search for African roots through the authentic cultural, archaic elements. 265

language and mores, elements of the African society). The

film is also the expression of the gender and racial gaze whose intricate workings have not really been explored by

feminist criticism. Denis's film is certainly an attempt

to show how gender intersects with race (male

dominance/female subordination), yet it is an example of

postmodern cinema in which there is a play between the

narrative direction of the social and the personal since

the film narrative exposes the demise of a central

meaningful story and an effacement of the main character

via an emphasis on the visual beauty of Africa. 266

Notes to Chapter VII

1. Claire Denis,Chocolat. written by Claire Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau, music by Abdullah Ibrahim, photography by Robert Alazradi, produced by MK2 Marin Karmitz, released in 1986, with Isaach de Banhole, Giulia Boschi, Francois Clouzet and Emmanuelle Chaulet.

2. Julia Kristeva, Histoires d*^amour. Paris; Editions Denoël, 1983, p. 39.

3. Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l'horreur: essai sur 1 'abjection. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980, p. 9.

4. Julia Kristeva, Histoires d'amour. Paris: Editions Denoël, 1983, p. 313.

5. See Julia Kristeva's theory of the semiotic in "Sémiotique et symbolique," La révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974.

6. Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l'horreur: Essai sur 1 'abjection. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983, p. 15. CONCLUSION

Contemporary thought is characterized by the postmodern generation's issues of knowledge and information. These issues have been complicated: different themes and texts intersect, pluralism is everpresent with the loss of dominant discourse (Lyotard), the demotion of the "central" and the promotion of the marginal (Jameson). Contemporary cinema accounts for the postmodern posture which entails a waning concern with the production of meaning and a growing preoccupation with the production of undecibility and seductive images.

I have attempted in the first four chapters to aggregate key theories and to show how film theory and film narrative demonstrate the preoccupation with the image-narrative and the loss of conventional character.

Postmodern narrative reveals crises: that of the traditional narrative (Lyotard), that of the speaking subject (Lacan and Kristeva), that of society. As a result, desire is expressed differently.

Unlike a traditionally-defined character who occupies a central position in the narrative and thus directs the narrative, the postmodern character loses its centrality and strong position around and along which the narrative

267 268 develops. A reconsideration of the notion of character revives the function of narration, defies the traditional organization of text and meaning, and involves a new discursive process and new identification between the spectator and the character.

The three films that I studied show how such productions are possible: the plurality of short narratives/stories within what seems to be the main significant story, the destruction of fixed time and space with non-realistic set-ups or circular narratives starting at one point and one time and coming back to these same places and times, a play between metaphors and metonymies which produces the kind of undefined anguish that occurs in contemporary culture.

Sans toit ni loi belies a complexity of narrative structures which brings the reader/spectator to the fine line between the expression of alienation and freedom.

Undecibility and oscillation emerge from the presentation of characters who similarly to the spectator, witness the life fragments of the female vagabond. An impossibility to judge or, by the same token, to know these characters is produced.

3702 le matin evokes the modern tendency to lose traditional textual meaning in images. To the story of the woman's hysteria produced in images corresponds the expression of the man's self-consciousness in an 269 hysterical text. Dual-engendered character allows the spectator to identify with the male or female character.

Chocolat constructs a female desire via the intertwined narratives carried on at two levels; memories which imprint the young girl's psyche with African experiences, and the continuous construction of the mother's desire for the African young servant. Such a woman's desire defies the socio-political constructs of

French society at the time of colonialism and imperialism.

Yet, the three main characters remain unknown to the viewer as they lose their hierachical rank (they are neither primary nor secondary).

The three film-narratives evolve according to a circular trajectory/movement: Sans toit ni loi develops from the time when Mona's body is discovered until the final moments of her death; narrated by the male character, 3702 le matin develops from "little death" to death, from nonidentity to identity via the writing process, from sensuality to pain and grief; Chocolat unrolls from the young girl's arrival in Limbe, Cameroun, to her departure from the same village.

Narrative in between these beginnings and ends follows a path of multiple adjacent stories which do not aim at a common intersection point, but lead to the production of undecidibility and the demotion of a central unity and meaning. 270

Events in these films are not central to the main logic. In Sans toit ni loi the alternate narrative segments that depict events which affect the witness- characters do not contribute to an understanding of Mona's life. In 3702 le matin the events experienced by the secondary characters have no impact on the relationship between Betty and Zorg, and do not cast light on Betty's hysteria. In Chocolat comments or actions performed by secondary characters do not perturb France, Aimée and

Marc's lives.

A lack of constraints produces undecibility. In Sans toit ni loi Mona does not end up her voyage with a message or a justification or proof that she obtained what she was looking for. In 3702 le matin. Zorg and Betty are not expressing what they would like to do in the future. They would rather enjoy every minute of their life together.

In Chocolat, France's memory process is entirely cancelled. By the end of the film, we discover that she has not left Limbe. The narration fades away just as her palms do not show any trace (the burn has effaced the palm lines: there is no trace of either her past or future).

The spectator is left with unresolved questions, an interweaving of interpretations and the impression of a plural and different context. These films are characterized by playful cinematic moves which encourage the spectator to engage critically with meaning, to 271 experience a diverse social tapestry via a multitude of images. Dominant narrative forms are challenged by a discursive process made of a mosaic of images which takes priority over the logocentric function of the narrative.

All events are purely recounted as part of a larger narrative which no longer attempts to centralize. This lack of centrality is produced by a play between the consciousness of the historical events and the self- consciousness of the character.

In the absence of realistic narrative constraints, the camera produces a kaleidoscope of images. The resulting effect on the spectator is that the image becomes overpowerful as it captures a blend of scenery, people, and permeates the temporal and spatial elements, conveying no fixed goal towards the end of the film.

In this patchwork of produced impressions, a political discursive process is at stake. More elements of the society pervade the text, yet, they are uncontrolled.

Each character and each image brings something new to the film, yet the narrative does not funnel those elements into a common path.

The centrality of the main characters, in their socio-economic-political constructs, diffuses itself into those of secondary characters; it transforms itself into an aesthetic fabric. Sans toit ni loi is not a socio­ political indictment of the young drifter or the social 272 community which cast a judgmental look on her and remain indecisive about their own ways of living their lives.

3702 le matin is not a traditional account of a great love-story. Betty and Zorg communicate their feelings differently. Zorg's pain and rebellion against the medical institution fail to indict the ways Betty's insanity has been treated. Chocolat is not a traditional socio-economic-political view of French colonialism.

Film narrative/desire accounts for differences between men and women, the society and the individual, between the text and the subject. The French cinema of the eighties engages a different textual structure and in that respect, expresses desire differently. In comparison with previous developments of the French cinema, a first reading will suggest that film-narrative is not that different. Yet, the structures and the depth of postmodern narrative are devoid of a central meaning.

What has been called the repressed, the excess or the lack surfaces in narrative and is often associated, in psychoanalytic terms, with the "imaginary," which in turn is associated with woman.

Not marked by narrative constraints, postmodern cinema is defined by the presence of images which evolve in a playful way. Temporal and spatial elements are not present to essentially define characters or make actions central to the film-narrative. Although they contribute 273 to the development of characters, they do not constrain the narrative flow and do not oversexualize characters in assigned male and female characteristics, and the respective roles.

Postmodern cinema exhibits a certain plasticity of the image (Beineix or Besson's cinema). These directors mask the lack of discovery of innocent new images. As scenes and images are reproduced again and again, each reproduction presents a loss of the referent. The latter becomes subsequently more and more specular.

Postmodern character comes back to the location of the origin, on the road to a certain self-consciousness.

A certain postmodern aura is created in the distance of the gaze of the camera. In Varda's film, the image of

Mona contributes to a haunting feeling of uneasiness in the spectator. In Beineix's film the image of Betty and

Zorg haunts the film celluloid. In Denis'film the image of Africa and its colours haunt the film.

It is particularly the power of the image which is at stake in postmodern cinema; while modernism claims the beauty of the image in the disclosure of the film-process, postmodernism presents the image as corrupted by the hyper-realist imagery of advertising: the image takes on a commercial value. Notable in this trend is the fact that the new generation of French film-directors either indulge themselves in the production of images "as 274 advertised” (Jean-Jacques Beineix and Jean-Luc Besson), or are directly issued from the advertising business; Etienne

Chatiliez or Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. With La vie est un long fleuve tranquille (1988) and Tatie

Danielle (1991) Chatiliez (who has worked 10 years in the

TV commercial business) and his female co-author Florence

Quentin are enjoying great popularity. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's Delicatessen (1991) gives a new refreshing allure to the French cinema which has been inspired by

American cinema these three past years.

I define postmodern French cinema as a feminine fabric. Although, from a politico-theoretical point of view, feminism, as the search for the ultimate good of the woman, seems to have no place in postmodernism, just as there is no longer a place for marxism as the ultimate good of the male state, from an aesthetic perpective, the collapsing dominating structures either in practical or theoretical contexts open a feminine space, or at least, a space which is accessible to the woman.

If we have used and re-used the phallocentric narrative, the discourse of tomorrow, certainly already started with French male literary critics or philosophers, will embrace the term "feminine" in an intricate play between genres, traditional and modern, popular and literary. Thus, postmodernism, in its different modes. 275 intersects with a feminine discourse and acquires the feminine voice. In chapters five, six and seven, I have attempted to incorporate the notion of desire and woman in three different films.

Western contemporary culture is defined by an aggregate of values which exceed the contours of a certain space and time. The discovery of new "spaces" does not mean that these spaces are new, but it is only today that they are perceived or recognized. We are facing a multi­ faceted world which demands new thinking processes that must be decentered as plural and fluctuating. We are no longer fighting against the machine, rather, we have integrated it, we have become "cyborgs." In Simians,

Cvboras. and Women. The Reinvention of Nature Donna

Haraway defines the term;

A cyborg is a hybrid creature, composed of organism and machine. Cyborgs are post-second world war hybrid entities made of first, ourselves and other organic creatures in our unchosen "high -technological" guise as information systems, texts, and ergonomically controlled labouring, desiring and reproducing systems. The second essential ingredient in cyborgs is machines in their guise, also, as communications systems, texts, and self-acting, ergonomically designed apparatuses. ^

With such a definition, Haraway suggests a new feminism which is certainly more able to remain attuned to specific historical and political positions and permanent partialities without abandoning the search for potent connections. 276

Characters in postmodern cinema become cyborgs who perform and enjoy small and intermittent pleasures. They appear on the screen in a narrative which presents beautiful images. As spectators, we are left with a politics of libidinal investments which are essentially matters of shifting relationships, whose content is not fixed and in which, as Frederic Jameson would say, "One can only make the fantasmatic representation ripple in echoes and retransmit the seduction." ^ And this seduction is bisexually constructed via a new definition of cinematic character. 277

Notes to Conclusion

1. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cvborqs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

2. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism." New left Review, no 146, July- August 1984, pp. 53-92, p. 91. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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