Spaces of Women’s Cinema: Space, Place and Genre in Contemporary Women’s Filmmaking 9781844579129, 9781844579112, 9781911239185, 9781911239178

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SPACES OF WOMEN’S CINEMA

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SPACES OF WOMEN’S CINEMA Space, Place and Genre in Contemporary Women’s Filmmaking

Sue Thornham

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 by Bloomsbury on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Sue Thornham, 2019 Sue Thornham has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image: Winter’s Bone © Roadside Attractions, courtesy Everett Collection/Mary Evans. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thornham, Sue, author. | British Film Institute. Title: Spaces of women’s cinema : space, place and genre in contemporary women’s filmmaking / Sue Thornham. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury on behalf of the British Film Institute, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018030407 | ISBN 9781844579129 (hb) | ISBN 9781844579112 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Space and time in motion pictures. | Women in motion pictures. | Women motion picture producers and directors. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.S668 T48 2019 | DDC 791.43/095–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030407 ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-8445-7912-9 978-1-8445-7911-2 978-1-9112-3917-8 978-1-8445-7914-3

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CONTENTS

List of Figures  vi Acknowledgements  x

Introduction: Space and Women’s Cinema  1 1 Wilderness Spaces  17 2 City Spaces  51 3 Interior Spaces  89 4 Border Spaces  127 5 Doubled Spaces: The Landscapes of Adaptation  159 Afterword  195 Bibliography  197 Filmography  215 Index  217

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 W. H. D. Koerner, Madonna of the Prairie (1921). Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming, USA  20 1.2 Emily threatens Meek. Meek’s Cutoff directed by Kelly Reichardt © Oscilloscope Laboratories 2010. All rights reserved  28 1.3 The Native American walks away. Meek’s Cutoff directed by Kelly Reichardt © Oscilloscope Laboratories 2010. All rights reserved  30 1.4 Jo’s transformation. The Ballad of Little Jo directed by Maggie Greenwald © Fine Line Features 1993. All rights reserved  34 1.5 Jo rides across the landscape. The Ballad of Little Jo directed by Maggie Greenwald © Fine Line Features 1993. All rights reserved  36 1.6 Ree crosses the broken landscape. Winter’s Bone by Debra Granik © Roadside Attractions/Lionsgate 2010. All rights reserved  41 1.7 The film’s ending. Winter’s Bone by Debra Granik © Roadside Attractions/Lionsgate 2010. All rights reserved  46

2.1 Megan and Tracy. Blue Steel directed by Kathryn Bigelow © MGM 1990. All rights reserved  63 2.2 Megan as child. Blue Steel directed by Kathryn Bigelow © MGM 1990. All rights reserved  66 2.3 Jackie at work. Red Road directed by Andrea Arnold © Verve Pictures 2006. All rights reserved  70 2.4 Looking down on the city. Red Road directed by Andrea Arnold © Verve Pictures 2006. All rights reserved  72 2.5 Noémie/Malika as Medusa. Chaos directed by Coline Serreau © StudioCanal 2001. All rights reserved  82 2.6 The green world? Chaos directed by Coline Serreau © StudioCanal 2001. All rights reserved  84 3.1 The first recital. Amour Fou directed by Jessica Hausner © Coproduction Office 2014. All rights reserved  97 3.2 The hypnosis. Amour Fou directed by Jessica Hausner © Coproduction Office 2014. All rights reserved  99 3.3 Reflection and real. The Falling directed by Carol Morley © Metrodome 2015. All rights reserved  110 3.4 Hysterical disruption. The Falling directed by Carol Morley © Metrodome 2015. All rights reserved  111 3.5 Nogreh descends the palace steps. At Five in the Afternoon by Samira Makhmalbaf © Artificial Eye 2003. All rights reserved  118 LIST OF FIGURES

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3.6 Nogreh encounters her image. At Five in the Afternoon by Samira Makhmalbaf © Artificial Eye 2003. All rights reserved  119 4.1 A tiny figure in the landscape. White Material directed by Claire Denis © Artificial Eye 2009. All rights reserved  135 4.2 Clinging to the bus. White Material directed by Claire Denis © Artificial Eye 2009. All rights reserved  136 4.3 Ally in the water. High Tide directed by Gillian Armstrong © Umbrella Entertainment 1987, 2010. All rights reserved  142 4.4 Lilli on the beach. High Tide directed by Gillian Armstrong © Umbrella Entertainment 1987, 2010. All rights reserved  143 4.5 Nana’s hands. Daughters of the Dust directed by Julie Dash © Kino International 1991. All rights reserved  150 4.6 Eli on the water. Daughters of the Dust directed by Julie Dash © Kino International 1991. All rights reserved  152 5.1 The scene of writing. Mansfield Park directed by Patricia Rozema © Miramax 1999. All rights reserved  167 5.2 Fanny’s look to camera. Mansfield Park directed by Patricia Rozema © Miramax 1999. All rights reserved  172 viii

LIST OF FIGURES

5.3 Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway/Virginia Woolf. Mrs Dalloway directed by Marleen Gorris © Artificial Eye/ First Look Pictures 1997. All rights reserved  175 5.4 The kiss. Mrs Dalloway directed by Marleen Gorris © Artificial Eye/First Look Pictures 1997. All rights reserved  177 5.5 The child Janet. An Angel at My Table directed by Jane Campion © Artificial Eye/First Line Features 1990. All rights reserved  187 5.6 In front of the mirror. An Angel at My Table directed by Jane Campion © Artificial Eye/First Line Features 1990. All rights reserved  189

LIST OF FIGURES

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank the University of Sussex for granting me leave to write this book, and the many students of my courses on feminism and film whose ideas and challenges have helped its development. Many thanks go to Helen, who is always willing to debate my arguments, and who forms the other half of the Thornham feminist mother-and-daughter double-act, and to all of my family, who have helped me keep going over the past two years. Finally, I’d like to acknowledge here the love and support of Mike, during whose final illness this book was completed.

INTRODUCTION: SPACE AND WOMEN’S CINEMA

Time is a man, Space is a woman (William Blake 1810/1988: 563) In What if I Had Been the Hero? (2012), I explored questions of narrative and authorship in women’s filmmaking. As the book developed, one of the key themes to emerge was the use(s) of landscape in women’s films. Heroes, after all, establish their status as heroes – and as men – through their penetration and conquest of a feminized space and landscape. If women are to establish an identity as subject, or hero, then this relationship must in some way be challenged. The arguments upon which I drew there, about the relations between narrative, time, space and gender, received their most elegant and influential formulation in the work of Teresa de Lauretis. De Lauretis links theories of narrative structure to Laura Mulvey’s work on the structures of the cinematic gaze, suggesting that, at least in respect of the narratives with which we are culturally familiar, the qualities ‘male-hero-human’ are positioned ‘on the side of the subject’, in opposition to the qualities ‘female-obstacle-boundary-space’ (1984: 121). Narratives, she argues, are predicated on the single figure of the hero who crosses the boundary and penetrates the other space. In so doing 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. (ibid.: 119) The term ‘women’s cinema’, as Patricia White has recently observed (2015: 3–4), remains a contested term. In a ‘post-feminist cultural climate’, she writes, it is often identified with the ‘industry-produced chick flicks’, films for women, which are the successors to the ‘women’s films’ (Doane 1987) of the 1940s. Like White, however, and like Alison Butler (2002), I use it here in the sense first introduced by Claire Johnston in 1973, to refer to films made – directed, and with a visible signature – by women. White’s Introduction to Women’s Cinema, World Cinema provides a more detailed history of the term, as well as a powerful argument for its reclamation.

It is a powerful analysis, but one which renders extremely problematic, if not impossible, the notion of a narrative journey centred on, and authored by, a female subject. In that book, I suggested that the difficulties of rendering such a journey are frequently mapped in spatial terms, and sought to examine a number of ways in which landscapes have functioned for women filmmakers, for whom representing a different journey and a different relationship to place and landscape becomes a central and very practical concern. But the questions raised by de Lauretis have continued to trouble me. Clearly, we need to think past the dualism she constructs if we are to imagine the possibilities for, and discuss the realities of, women’s filmmaking, but to do so also involves re-thinking the cultural construction of space and place, and the ways in which these gendered concepts are opposed to those of time and narrative – something I only began to do in that book. Such re-thinking has been taking place, however, especially in feminist philosophy and cultural geography, in what has been called the ‘spatial turn’ in social theorizing (Massey 2005: 128). But it is a re-thinking only patchily applied to, and often uneasy with, the idea of representation. Indeed, for cultural geographer Doreen Massey, on whose re-visioning of space I draw throughout this book, representation is a gender-neutral but negative process, ‘fixing’ into text the complexities of space. And yet, difficult as it is, it seems to me important to think through such re-visioning in terms of the space-time of representation itself, as well as the space-time that is represented. It is not enough to simply say, as Massey does, that ‘a text … is just like the rest of the world’ (2005: 54). We must examine its specific processes. This book, then, constitutes a working through of these questions: questions about space itself and the way it has been gendered, about how representation functions in relation to space-time, about how this, too, is gendered, and about how these questions might be considered in relation to women’s filmmaking. In it, I attempt both to think through recent insights into the gendered nature of space in relation to women’s filmmaking practice and to suggest how such practice might in turn contribute to our theoretical understanding.

Dépaysement: Space, time and fantasy In her memoir of the sixties, Promise of a Dream, Sheila Rowbotham, searching for an account that might render with sufficient precision her own teenage experience, turns to Judith Okely’s biography of Simone de Beauvoir. Okely, she writes, relates how as a young girl de Beauvoir would read books as a means of translating herself into other worlds, employing ‘the word dépayser (to change scenery or disorientate) to describe what they did for her’. (Rowbotham 2001: 8) This, comments Rowbotham, describes exactly her own experience, with a precision not afforded by the English language. The passage she cites, from a 2

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section that Okely calls ‘Space, Gender and Nature’, is worth quoting at more length. Part of de Beauvoir’s escape from domestic space, writes Okely, was to travel in the mind. … Impatient over petty tasks, she preferred ‘to call up the past, illuminate the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and encircle the moon’1 … When she opened her English books, she felt that she was ‘leaving on a journey’ … Books were a liberation from confinement in time and space; she even used the word dépayser (to change scenery or disorientate) to describe what they did for her: books displaced her from her known territory. (Okely 1986: 45) As Rowbotham’s reference suggests, de Beauvoir’s account resonates with the remembered experiences of many women.2 Patricia Mellencamp, for example, describes a similar response to the restrictions of 1950s American girlhood. ‘Boys moved through space’, she writes; ‘Girls stayed in place’ (1995: 1). Her response, like de Beauvoir’s, was to live ‘two lives’, finding ‘dreams of adventure and freedom’ in books, and later in cinema (ibid.: 292, 2). It is this sense of displacement or dislocation that Mellencamp comes to identify with what she calls ‘film feminism’ – the passionate engagement of feminism with film not only intellectually and emotionally but through filmmaking. Here, such dislocations might be refigured, so that in place of escape they force a transformation of ‘the known territory’ Okely describes. Seeing ‘women through women’s eyes, telling stories from women’s point of view’ and engaging audiences in such visions, these films can, argues Mellencamp, produce crucial shifts in memory, experience and knowledge, and thus destabilize the ‘known territory’ of history and the everyday (ibid.: xi, 257). It is a process that enacts what Judith Butler calls the ‘critical promise of fantasy’ – for film, like the books that effected the imaginary liberation of the young de Beauvoir and Mellencamp, is, as Elizabeth Cowie reminds us, one of ‘our public, published forms of fantasy’ (1997: 7). In spatial and temporal terms that echo those of Okely and Rowbotham, Butler describes fantasy as moving us ‘beyond what is merely actual and present into a realm of possibility …. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere’. But like Mellencamp she adds that ‘when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home’ (2004: 28–9). In what follows, I would like to reflect further on Okely’s account of this internal (self) displacement, and the sense of space it constructs, relating it to other, more recent conceptualizations of gendered space. I shall then consider ways in which it might be thought to function within ‘film feminism’ and ask whether, and in what ways, the critical shifts suggested by Mellencamp and Butler might be said to occur.

Gendering displacement For Rowbotham, it is Okely/de Beauvoir’s use of the term dépayser that provides the precision she is seeking. It is a curious term, lacking the overtones of possession/ INTRODUCTION: SPACE AND WOMEN’S CINEMA

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ownership that haunt the critically popular ‘deterritorialisation’,3 but retaining within itself the notions of place and belonging (we possess territory but belong to a country/pays), even as it performs a rejection of them. The sense of mobility it implies is one of dislocation or fracture rather than the flow or fluidity emphasized within contemporary cultural theory (Kaplan 1996). Its use, then, is a specifically gendered one. We can note the uneasy deployment of ‘territory’ in Okely’s description, at odds with the sense of passivity in the rest of the account, where de Beauvoir is ‘confined’ in time and space, and ‘displaced’ through her reading. The tension evoked by the term, between passivity and activity, locatedness and a dissolution of spatial boundaries, is one, Okely argues, that runs throughout de Beauvoir’s account of her childhood dreams of freedom.4 Its specifically gendered nature becomes clear if we contrast it with what seems at first sight to be a very similar account of imaginary travel and return in Jean Baudrillard’s Cool Memories (1990), which carries very different assumptions about power, possession and territory. ‘The local is a shabby thing’, writes Baudrillard. ‘There’s nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face’ (1990: 110). For Baudrillard, territory is unequivocally possessed (unless the owner chooses to renounce such possession), and (in its ‘radiant promiscuity’) gendered female. But as Jeff Fort reminds us, dépaysement can also be translated as ‘the uncanny’. Translating philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay ‘Paysage avec Dépaysement’ as ‘Uncanny Landscape’, Fort comments that dépaysement is a term with no English equivalent. Evoking ‘the anxiety and disorientation of being away from one’s “country” and in an unfamiliar place’, it does, however, correspond closely to ‘the German Unheimlichkeit’ (2005a: 150). The unheimlich (or uncanny), in its bestknown, Freudian formulation, is ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (Freud 2001a: 219–20). Double-edged, it is both that which undermines and that which is the heimlich – the homely or familiar. It is, for Freud, the female as place. There is ‘something uncanny about the female genital organs’, he writes: they are an ‘unheimlich place’ which is at the same time ‘the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings’ (ibid.: 245). For Freud’s male subject, as for Baudrillard’s exilic traveller, woman is equated with home and place (and, Freud adds, ‘country’), and with emotions comprised ambivalently of horror and nostalgic longing.5 The doubleness of de Beauvoir’s dépaysement is rather different. My Oxford French dictionary tells me that ‘une promesse de dépaysement’ means a promise of exotic new surroundings, and that se dépayser is to effect a (positive) change of scene, but that dépaysement also means disorientation and a sense of being ‘out of place’. This is not, then, the ambivalence evoked by Freud’s return home, but its reverse: the ambivalence experienced in the move away. I am reminded of Ann Henley’s comment in ‘Space for Herself ’ that the interdependence of place and identity assumed so often within male-authored philosophy is for women highly problematic. It is, she writes, the loss of place that most frequently propels 4

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the protagonist of women’s writing towards self-actualization. For a woman, she concludes, ‘“being” is made possible not by belonging to but by being free from place’ (1992: 81–2). Giuliana Bruno draws a similar conclusion in her work on the female traveller. Freud’s ‘recurrent male fantasy’, she writes, ‘returns in the travel and theoretical writing of (often) white males’. But the sense of possession implicit in Freud’s fantasy of ‘origin, separation, and loss’ does not correspond to the experience of the female subject. It is the ambivalence of dislocation, not that of Freud’s nostalgia, which defines her journey across space (2002: 86). To return to Rowbotham’s remembered sense of dépaysement, then, it was this doubleness – the ‘profound disorientation’ of placelessness, coupled with the freedom of ‘seeing what had never been seen’ – that was for her so compelling (2001: 8). Perhaps, in its evocation of both desire and a profound sense of discomfort, de Beauvoir’s term might be seen as providing a female/feminist equivalent of the Freudian uncanny: one that effects a relocation of its double affective charge of desire and fear into an imagined movement away from rather than towards place/home.

Space and time Okely’s account makes it clear that this spatial dislocation also effects a dislocation in temporality, a movement that is echoed, once again, by Rowbotham, who writes that her dreams were not only of an elsewhere to her native Yorkshire but of living in a ‘heightened state of becoming’ (ibid.). It is this co-implication of time and space, as well as narrative – for dépayser also implies a journey and hence a story – that provides a link between Okely/de Beauvoir’s account and the writing of cultural geographer Doreen Massey. Massey is critical of what she sees as the elevation of the figure of the nomad or ‘migrant’ into ‘the iconic figure of our times’, in the work of Baudrillard and other contemporary cultural theorists. She points out the deeply embedded gender politics in both the romance of travel and exile and the attachment to (an always lost) home that characterizes such thinking. Both depend, she argues, on a gendered opposition between time and space, in which time, the masculine principle, implies ‘change, movement, history, dynamism’, and space is identified with stasis and the absence of change (1994: 256). Her critique draws on the work of Caren Kaplan, who finds in Baudrillard’s theoretical nomadism an ‘exilic, melancholic romance with “distance” [that] belies a strong attachment to its opposite – a metaphysics of presence’ (1996: 73). Baudrillard’s ‘nomadism’, writes Kaplan, constructs its ‘poetics of space … through and against Others – the other gender, other races, and other nations and cultures’ (ibid.: 74). In it, ‘woman’ functions both as ‘landscape’ or ‘desert’ and as that which is rejected/lost in ‘home’ (1996: 73–4). Kaplan makes a similar criticism of what has been perhaps the most influential model for a revised conception of time-space: the concept of INTRODUCTION: SPACE AND WOMEN’S CINEMA

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‘deterritorialization’ proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This model, she writes, ‘stresses the freedom of disconnection and the pleasures of interstitial subjectivity. Yet deterritorialization itself cannot escape colonial discourse’. It ‘colonizes, appropriates, even raids other spaces …. Deterritorialization is always reterritorialization, an increase of territory, an imperialization’ (ibid.: 89, original emphasis). What underlies both this and Baudrillard’s conception of nomadism, she argues, is the assumption that space, the feminine, is always and simply there – immanent, static, to be travelled over, lost and (re)found. Instead, she proposes viewing ‘location as part of travel, as entailing movement or multiplicity rather than stasis or singularity’, arguing that ‘[i]mbuing space with time leads to spatializing via the production of histories’ (ibid.: 168). This struggle to articulate ‘a different temporality’ (Morris 1998: xv) which is also a groundedness in space, place and the body, and to insist on a ‘multiplicity’ of stories rather than a singular narrative, is one that has characterized feminist cultural theory, despite its occasional forays into dreams of nomadism or cyborg identities. I should like to suggest that it is also a useful way of thinking about women’s filmmaking. If space, as Kaplan suggests, is conceptualized as stasis/ surface/that which is to be travelled over, then, as de Lauretis and others have argued (1984: 119), it is also always gendered female,6 so that to travel, to cross over space – and thus become the subject of narrative – is to be gendered – or to masquerade as – male. But to engage with space (or space-time, in Massey’s terms) is to effect a very different relationship, one which must also change narrative – no longer ‘overarching’ but ‘simultaneous’, a ‘meeting up of histories’ (Massey 2005: 4).

Rethinking space In Massey’s Space, Place and Gender she makes three further arguments that I should like to draw out here. The first is that all of this matters. The ‘metaphors of constant flow, distributed causation, and complexity’ that characterize contemporary cultural theory, argues Massey, do not necessarily point towards an emancipatory politics.7 Laclau and Jameson, as well as Baudrillard and Deleuze/Guattari, build their theoretical arguments on profoundly gendered metaphorical structures. Thus where Kaplan analyses the metaphors of flow, nomadism and ‘deterritorialization’ in the writing of Baudrillard and Deleuze and Guattari, Massey examines the binary opposition between space and time in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Fredric Jameson.8 While the two writers differ in the characteristics they attribute to space – for Laclau space is stasis whereas for Jameson it is chaos – in both, space is coded female. Thus, time is defined by such things as change, movement, history, dynamism; while space … is simply the absence of these things. … With time are aligned 6

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History, Progress, Civilization, Science, Politics and Reason …. With space on the other hand are aligned the other poles of these concepts: stasis, (‘simple’) reproduction, nostalgia, emotion, aesthetics, the body. (1994: 256–7) Two further arguments follow from this. The first, and more familiar, is that space/the feminine becomes once more the realm of immanence, and time/the masculine that of transcendence. This, as Massey points out, is the dichotomy with which de Beauvoir wrestled and which she failed to resolve in The Second Sex (1988/1949), a struggle foreshadowed by the ‘lucid distress’ (le Doeuff 1991: 172) of the girl she describes in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (2001/1958), as caught between locatedness and placelessness, the confines of suburban femininity and the imaginary dépaysement of her reading. The second is that space, as Massey argues, becomes ‘the sphere of the lack of politics’ (1994: 250). In this formulation, space is imbued with a kind of temporality: that of cyclical time, the ‘woman’s time’ described by Julia Kristeva as characterized by ‘repetition and eternity’ (1986: 191, original emphasis). Here, in this time outside history, which is really space, ‘things may change yet without really changing’ (Massey 1994: 252). Here might perhaps also be found the temporality of memory, in which the past inserts itself into the present as a kind of ‘haunting’ (Plate 2011: 122). But what all of these lack, indeed are opposed to, is genuine dynamic change; this belongs to time, the sphere of history, politics and action – and to masculinity. What Massey offers in place of this is not, however, a straightforward re-valorizing of space. If de Beauvoir’s theory, unlike her imagination, could not escape the twin, gendered dualisms of immanence/transcendence and space/time, Massey argues that it is ‘the very formulation of space/time in terms of this kind of dichotomy’ that must be overcome (1994: 260). Like Kaplan, she proposes a rethinking of space as itself ‘imbued with temporality’ (Massey 2011). In place of the gendered opposition of movement/stasis, time/space and journey (or story)/landscape, culture/nature, she proposes a landscape (or space) that is not only always in movement but is itself a ‘dynamic simultaneity’, a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’ (ibid.). Landscape, then, ceases to be ‘something we travel across’ (Massey 2006: 46) in our journey towards becoming (human, or subject, or hero), but becomes itself the intersection of different stories, different temporalities. Our own journey, with its ‘overarching narrative’, is ‘actually the fact of intersecting with a multiplicity of other stories’ (Massey 2011).

Space, time and cinema The terms of this description suggest links with theories of narrative or the text. In For Space (2005), however, where many of these ideas are developed most fully, Massey is reluctant to engage with such connections. The stories with which she is concerned are the metanarratives of modernity – the ‘story INTRODUCTION: SPACE AND WOMEN’S CINEMA

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of globalization’ (2005: 62), ‘the “story” of capitalist modernity’ (ibid.: 63), ‘the story of “the West”’ (ibid.: 10) – or the smaller narratives of historical change. Indeed, she is careful to clarify that while ‘story’ brings with it ‘connotations of something told, of an interpreted history’, what she means by the term is ‘simply the history, change, movement, of things themselves’ (ibid.: 12). In fact, of course, the stories she describes are interpretations, ones that are clearly imaginative and fictional as well as ones that purport to be factual and historical. She is uneasy, however, with the idea of representation, seeing it as a process of mapping or fixing: it applies closure to notions of space, ‘taming’ it, so that the problem in re-imagining space is not space itself but its representation. Here, the imaginative or fictional representation is conflated with its ‘scientific’ counterpart; the representations of ‘science’, in its broadest sense, are the ones with which she is centrally concerned. Of those theories of the text that insist on its lack of closure – she cites in particular those of Derrida – she writes that in them texts remain ‘two-dimensional structures; horizontal coherences/ integrities which can be shown, through deconstruction, not to be coherent at all’. This emphasis on the ‘horizontal’ nature of the text means in turn that there is in such theories ‘too little recognition of the multiple trajectories of which that “horizontality” is the momentary, passing result’ (ibid.: 50–1). In Massey’s analysis, movement and narrative are to be found outside the text; the text itself merely fixes them, to be in turn ‘unfixed’ by the analyst.9 The notion of the text that Massey offers here is limited, but it is also familiar. With its processes of ‘taming’ and ‘closing’, it echoes Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni’s account of the ‘closed circuit’ of cinematic meaning-production, in which ‘the established system of depicting reality’ merely fixes meaning within the dominant ideology (1976: 26). It echoes, too, Colin MacCabe’s concept of the ‘classic realist text’, in which the text fixes not only ‘the truth’ about the events it depicts but also the ideological positioning of the spectator, whose notion of ‘how things really are’ it confirms (1981: 220). Both of these formulations are concerned with the ways in which the unruly and contradictory nature of the real is tamed and ‘closed’ in mainstream texts, and both describe this process in spatial terms – as, in Massey’s terms, a spatialization of time. In MacCabe’s essay this is particularly noticeable: ‘discourse’, which is language in process, and is bound up with history, politics and change, is subject to containment within a ‘hierarchy’ which fixes and spatializes it. For neither Comolli/Narboni nor MacCabe is this the only possible model of the text. But like the cultural theorists cited by Massey, they identify the possibilities for change/progression with the irruption of time into the closed processes of representation. In Comolli and Narboni’s typology, the most potentially progressive films (those in their category ‘e’) are described in terms of temporal disruption. These films ‘throw up obstacles in the way of the ideology, causing it to swerve and get off course’, disrupting the spatial: the film becomes ‘riddled with cracks: it is splitting under an internal tension’ (1976: 8

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27). For MacCabe, too, it is the breaking of a spatialized hierarchy through the eruption of temporalities – ‘moments’ of disorder ‘which escape the dominant discourse’ – that signals the impossibility of ever finally fixing the text into a static order (1981: 227, original emphasis). Other cinematic theories of the text have concerned themselves more with the relations between movement and stasis, narrative and image, process and reflection, desire and order. For Stephen Heath, who writes, in terms that prefigure those of Deleuze and Guattari, of film’s ‘multiple intensities of image and sound’ (1981: 116), this is a particular concern. He writes: On the one hand, the film opens up a flow and circulation, is a symbolic production in which unity and position are ever slipping away, lacking – deferred and lost in the gap of the present …. On the other, the film is figured out by its narrative as a totality … of fictions of wholeness … the representation of unity and the unity of representation. (ibid.: 118) Heath here sets narrative (time) against ‘memory-spectacle’ (space), an implicitly gendered ordering which Laura Mulvey famously makes explicit in her argument that in mainstream film woman’s ‘visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation’, while man’s role is ‘the active one of advancing the story’ (1989a: 19–20). Woman in these films, that is, is fixed on the side of description, or space, while to man is given the temporal flow of narration. Heath’s process is more dynamic than that described by Comolli/Narboni or MacCabe: these two ‘moments’ – of ‘subject-process’ [narrative flow] and ‘subject-reflection’ [imagined order or unity] – are in a process of ‘constant shifting … a recurrent balancing out’, he writes. Yet the opposition he proposes – between ‘flow and circulation’/‘a certain mobility’ and ‘an imaginary order of wholeness’/‘the bind of a coherence of vision’ – both privileges the temporal and privileges it as masculine. The first, he writes, is equivalent to a ‘play of castration known and denied’, while the second is linked to ‘the fascination of the “scene”’ and ‘the image of “the Woman”’ (1981: 118–23). Heath’s gendering of the distinction between narrative (time) and description or image (space) is far from alone in theorizations of narrative cinema. Both Seymour Chatman, who is concerned with ‘What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)’, and Tom Gunning, whose interest is specifically in the narrative discourse of cinema, for example, draw on Gérard Genette’s division of storytelling into ‘narration and description’. The former, for Genette, is concerned with ‘pure processes’, and the ‘temporal, dramatic aspect of the narrative’, while the latter serves to ‘suspend the course of time and to contribute to spreading the narrative in space’ (1982: 136). For Chatman, this implies the inherent superiority of the literary text, which as a temporal art is able to master such spatiality – selecting, asserting and interpreting. Cinema, he argues, possesses no such mastery. It is caught up in the spatiality INTRODUCTION: SPACE AND WOMEN’S CINEMA

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it depicts, unable to discriminate, its ‘plenitude of visual details’ constituting an ‘excessive particularity’ (1981: 122). For Gunning, on the other hand, cinema’s ‘inherent photographic tendency towards mimesis’ (or showing) can be ‘bent’ to narrative purposes (or telling), overcoming the ‘resistance’ of film’s ‘photographic material’ through its processes of selection (2004: 474). In both cases, however, the division proposed is inherently unequal and implicitly gendered. For Western literary theory, argues W. J. T. Mitchell, space is ‘static, visual, external, empty, corporeal, and dead. … it must be pushed into motion, temporalized, internalized, filled up, or brought to life by time and consciousness’ (1989: 93–4). Theorists of cinema have worked within the same framework of oppositions. Yet none of the processes they propose is in fact simply temporal; in all, time and space are co-implicated. Memory is spatial as well as temporal, events occur in time-space, and telling involves space as well as time, just as showing involves time as well as space. In film, the camera is always at once agent of description and agent of narration. Film, that is, works through space-time together. The image is never static and never fully contained by the discourse in which it is positioned. It always, as Lucy Fischer points out, looks back, at previous uses in earlier texts, with whose ‘taint’ it is ‘saturated’. Simultaneously, it points forward, ‘to its reception by readers and writers’ (1989: 303). It stretches out, then, in time. At the same time, as Michèle le Doeuff has argued, images have a ‘horizontal’ reach: circulating ‘between different groups, fields, practices and knowledges’, and carrying the traces of each (2002: 4). Narrative, too, both seeks to contain, through what Heath calls its ‘fictions of wholeness’, and flings us forward; it compresses, expands and disrupts time, and is itself both disruptive of and disrupted by space.

Women’s texts In For Space, Massey’s discussion of space and gender is chiefly focused on women’s exclusion from the places where knowledge is produced. ‘Over and over again’, she writes, ‘the establishment of these places was bound up with the distinction of genders and the expulsion of women’ (2005: 144). If the terms echo Virginia Woolf ’s famous account in A Room of One’s Own (1929) of her own expulsion from the male preserves of knowledge at Cambridge (‘he was a Beadle; I was a woman. … Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here’ [1993/1929: 5]), Massey does not go on to suggest the kinds of representation that women thus excluded or marginalized might produce, questions with which Woolf herself struggled.10 Yet it seems to me that these are issues that haunt her work. If time and space are gendered, then what kinds of subjectivity, what kinds of narrative and space-time relations, might be constructed in the work of women who (like Massey herself) usurp the position of author? 10

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There is, however, one point in For Space where Massey does suggest ways in which these issues might be re-thought, when she draws on the work of Elizabeth Grosz to connect the opposition time/space (or movement/stasis) to that of interiority/exteriority. In the history of philosophy (and in myth and religion), writes Grosz, ‘space is conceived as a mode … of exteriority, and time as the mode of interiority’. This may explain, she continues, why ‘time is conceived as masculine (proper to a subject, a being with an interior) and space is associated with femininity …. Woman is/provides space for man, but occupies none herself ’ (1995: 98–9). As Massey points out, such an opposition not only assigns subjectivity to man but conceives of it in a particular way: as singular, interior, non-relational, and as established through penetration and mastery. It is a construction that has farreaching implications within Western thought. It underpins, for example, notions of the sublime (Battersby 2007), from which women have been excluded (theirs is the realm of the merely beautiful). In the encounter with the sublime – conceived as a spatial otherness powerful enough to threaten the unity of the self – the masculine self is ultimately confirmed through mastery (Battersby 2007: 139). In a now familiar move, space (the other, the feminine) is mastered by time (reason, the masculine). Grosz’s arguments extend Massey’s concern with space (and time) not only to questions of subjectivity but also to those of authorship. Both, argues Grosz, continue to be identified with interiority/time and thus the masculine subject, so that even in ‘the era of the self-knowing subject’ there is ‘little or no room for female self-representations, and the creation of maps and models of space and time based on projections of women’s experiences’ (1995: 100). It is not clear, she adds, what a specifically female space-time framework might look like. One thing, however, is clear: if we are to understand ‘the kinds of active interrelations possible between (lived) representations of the body and (theoretical) representations of space and time’ we need to imagine such a possibility. In order to transform representations of female corporeality, and the narratives within which they are produced, she concludes, ‘the overarching context of space-time, within which bodies function and are conceived … needs serious revision’ (ibid.). It is in the context of such ideas that this book is written. Such re-visioning does occur, I argue, in the work of women filmmakers, for whom the transformation of representations and narratives – and hence the creation of a different ‘space-time framework’ in which bodies might interact and their narratives unfold – is not a theoretical but an urgent practical necessity. It is a slippery task, of course, to seek to identify the precise nature of such gendered differences. In her own essay on ‘Sexual Signatures’, in Space, Time and Perversion, Grosz struggles to determine the relation between the externally powerful markers of authorship, which have so often served to exclude or marginalize women in the spheres of production, circulation and reception, and the kinds of textual re-visioning that she proposes elsewhere. There is no straightforward relationship, she concludes, between the person producing the text and what as readers we find within the text; there is no way of determining what a specifically female, or feminist, content might be; INTRODUCTION: SPACE AND WOMEN’S CINEMA

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and a specifically female, or feminist, style is as impossible to determine, and as restrictive a notion, as a female or feminist content. The text’s signature, she concludes, ‘never ties [it] to its origin nor provides it with a definite destination, a fixed and settled context or a controllable audience’ (1995: 23). Yet she also draws two further conclusions. First, the text’s signature is important, not as signalling an absolute difference, but rather as marking the possibility – indeed the insistence – that the text will be read differently. Film is a collaborative medium, but it is notable that the insistence of women filmmakers such as Jane Campion on a signature,11 even as she acknowledges that collaboration, draws her films into a different discursive sphere and ensures a reading that is ‘marked’, alert to differences. Second, Grosz argues that there are ‘ways in which the sexuality and corporeality of the subject leave their traces or marks on the texts produced’ (ibid.: 21). This may be through the position the text constructs for its implied reader/viewer; it may be through the position of enunciation, the point from which the story is told – both temporally and spatially, and in relation to both subject matter and implied reader. Such a point is always – and again, despite collaboration and perhaps contestation in production – an embodied, and hence gendered, position. It may be, as this book tries to suggest, through the film’s organization of space, or space-time. It will lead, argues Grosz, not only to a critical challenge to existing norms but to the production of ‘new and perhaps unknown, unthought discursive spaces’ (ibid.: 23).

Space-time frameworks [I]s there any place that no man has ever occupied? (le Doeuff 1991: 103) In some ways, my arguments here echo those of Alison Butler, who draws on an essay by Meaghan Morris (1998) to suggest that women’s cinema can be seen as a form of ‘minor cinema’, in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari use the term in describing the work of Franz Kafka as ‘minor literature’. ‘Minor’ here is not an evaluative term, but describes ‘the literature of a minority or marginalized group, written, not in a minor language, but in a major one’. Seen in this way, writes Butler, women’s cinema ‘is not “at home” in any of the host cinematic or national discourses it inhabits’ because ‘it is always an inflected mode, incorporating, reworking and contesting the conventions of established traditions’ (2002: 19, 22). Despite its resignification, however, I am not altogether happy with the term ‘minor’ and want, in the chapters that follow, to claim something both more ambitious and more specific, in line with the shift in ‘space-time framework’ that Grosz demands. Yet, as le Doeuff reminds us, the spaces and places of cinema have already been occupied; they are, in Fischer’s words, ‘saturated’ with the ‘taint’ of previous uses. In particular, they are co-implicated with film genres, for, as Giuliana Bruno points out, ‘landscape writes genres’ (2002: 28), so that specific spatial explorations, delimitations and boundaries are bound up with different genres. 12

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Accordingly, the chapters that follow deal both with the exploration of specific spaces and places by women filmmakers and with their use and contestation of the genres with which those spaces and places have been identified. In each case, the films discussed are analysed in detail, and I am conscious that in subjecting them to close analysis in this way, I am also limiting the number of films discussed. Inevitably, this fails to do justice to the increasing wealth of films by women now being produced. The films I have chosen range across countries and continents, though the majority are from Europe and the USA. Importantly, I feel, all are accessible to the interested reader. The chapters’ themes, however, range much more widely, and I hope that readers will also find their own cinematic points of interaction and connection. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with spaces usually identified as masculine, the wilderness and the city. The wilderness spaces of the American West, where the narrative journey of the frontiersman as hero defines both himself and his nation, find their genre in the Western, and it is women filmmakers’ re-workings of this perhaps most hostile of genres that are the subject of Chapter 1. The urban detective has been seen as the frontiersman’s descendant, patrolling the narrative space of the modern city, and the re-imagining of this generic space forms part of Chapter 2. But the city has been the setting for other genres too, and the chapter also explores women filmmakers’ re-visioning of the British social realist film and the urban comedy. In contrast, the third chapter examines spaces much more easily identified with women: the closed and constricted interior spaces of the ‘woman’s film’, redolent at once of the nurturing and maternal and of enclosure and imprisonment. It is the critical engagement of women filmmakers with such spaces and their generic mapping, in some ways a more difficult task than a re-visioning of the wilderness or the city precisely because these are conceived as ‘women’s spaces’, that is the subject of Chapter 3. Chapters 4 and 5 return more directly to the questions raised in this Introduction. Chapter 4, Border Spaces, deals with the complex relationship between land(scape) and its representation, between ‘framed’ or narrative space and the ‘space-off ’ that it conventionally uses and denies, which emerges when women filmmakers take as their subject matter the borders that divide both geographic and cinematic spaces. The liminal or transitional spaces depicted in the films discussed here both refuse conventional spatial and generic mapping and point to the possibilities for other ways of occupying and viewing space. Chapter 5 explores the doubled spaces that are created when women filmmakers adapt the work of female authors. If the ‘personal landscapes’ of women writers enact a refusal of the feminization of literary space, and its re-appropriation for different narratives, as Ellen Moers (1986) suggests, then the re-imagining of these landscapes by women filmmakers constitutes a different kind of doubling to that usually performed by adaptation. The authority of the prior literary text, I argue, gives way to the creation of a shared space in which temporal distance is replaced by joined collaboration. INTRODUCTION: SPACE AND WOMEN’S CINEMA

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A number of key themes and ideas return throughout the book. One, which I had not expected when I began, but should have, is the extent to which cinematic space is bound up with genre, so that a history of a specific space, or kind of space, becomes also a history of its associated genre(s), and a re-imagining of that space becomes also an intervention into genre. Three of the chapters, accordingly, deal with this interrelationship and its importance for women’s filmmaking. A second recurrent theme concerns the concept of dépaysement and its relationship to the Freudian Unheimlichkeit, or uncanny. If the work of women filmmakers, like the writing of Bruno’s female traveller, is marked by a sense of dislocation and displacement, in which ‘spatial attachment does not become a desire to possess’ (2002: 86), and it is the move away, not that of return, that is invested with both fear and desire, then the Freudian uncanny, so powerful a force in so many cinematic genres, must be both contested and re-worked. The ways in which women filmmakers have done this are traced throughout the book. A final question, posed most strongly in the final two chapters, concerns the extent to which I can be said to be tracing continuities here and, if I am, in what these continuities consist. I am not, as I have commented, altogether happy with the idea of women’s filmmaking as a ‘minor’ filmmaking – that is, as the work ‘of a minority or marginalized group, written, not in a minor language, but in a major one’ (Butler 2002: 19). It reminds me too much of earlier moves to recover ‘lost’ women writers or artists and to construct from these recoveries a separate, but inevitably ‘minor’ tradition. ‘Minor’ can so easily mean ‘marginal’. The term does not capture, either, the elements of contestation, challenge and re-vision in the films I discuss, a contestation and re-vision that is as much of ways of seeing, of embodying or of theorizing (the uncanny, for example, or authorship or the sublime) as it is of narrative or genre. I return, then, to Elizabeth Grosz, and her argument that making space for (and, I would add, in) women’s self-representations involves ‘the creation of maps and models of space and time based on projections of women’s experiences’ (1995: 100), and this in turn implies the possibility of a different space-time framework. It is in this idea that I think we can see the basis for the continuities traced here. There is, then, no separate, linear history. The mother, as Mary Jacobus writes of attempts to trace specifically female literary histories, ‘is always lost’, the subject forever ‘in a foreign land’ (1988: 105). But neither is there stasis or repetition – ‘the specular structure of frozen resemblance’ which for Jacobus characterizes conventional histories of women’s writing (1987: 281). ‘[T]his is a different way of representing space’, commented Doreen Massey on the paintings of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt12 (1994: 236). It is a comment she develops only briefly, and one at odds with many of her other, more negative comments on representation. The differences she glimpses, however, form the basis of this book and the continuities it traces. In it, spaces are opened, and re-visioned. And in the final chapter in particular I hope to show that if, as Jacobus states, ‘the mother is always lost’, then the spaces that she and her stories have occupied can be traced, and shared. 14

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Notes   1 The quotations are from Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille Rangée (1958). It is worth noting, however, that de Beauvoir does not use the term ‘dépayser’ at this point, and I have been unable to find the reference Okely cites.   2 Tehri Rantanen, for example, searching for a term that might convey the effects of news on its readers/viewers, also quotes Okely’s account of de Beauvoir’s dépaysement (2009: 81).   3 Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 347) define ‘territory’ as follows:

‘A territory borrows from all the milieus; it bites into them, seizes them bodily (although it remains vulnerable to intrusions)…. It has the interior zone of a residence or shelter, the exterior zone of its domain, more or less retractable limits or membranes, intermediary or even neutralized zones, and energy reserves or annexes.’

  4 See, for example, the following description in the Memoirs: ‘the wind whirled around the poplars; it came from elsewhere, from everywhere, it turned space around and I swirled, immobile, right to the ends of the earth’ (quoted in Okely 1986: 46).   5 ‘I have to assume’, writes Baudrillard at the beginning of Cool Memories, ‘that I have come across – once in my life – the most beautiful place I shall ever see. It is just as reasonable to suppose that I have also met the woman whose beauty stunned me most and whose loss stunned me most’ (1990: 3).   6 Massey (1994: 257–8) explores ways in which male theorists – here Laclau and Jameson – can conceptualize space in entirely opposite ways but are consistent in gendering it female, while time/history are aligned with masculinity.   7 She points out elsewhere that they also ‘accurately capture some of the most devastating characteristics of neoliberal capitalism’ (2006: 37).   8 And elsewhere Bergson and de Certeau. See Massey (2011).   9 In some of Massey’s later writing, she does seek to explore a more complex vision of how space-time might function within representation. In ‘Landscape/Space/ Politics’ (2011), she uses Patrick Keiller’s film, Robinson in Ruins (2010), on which she was a collaborator, to argue that representation does not necessarily constitute a spatialization of time, and thus a containment. Although the film assembles ‘pieces of film in a spatial sequence’, she writes, its form ‘evokes space/place/landscape as alive with temporalities … at each point we are in the midst of an ongoing story’. She writes of the film’s ‘long concentrations’, which ‘force me to submit, to the foxglove’s implacable otherness, to its … utter indifference to us – to the camera, to the person behind the camera, to us watching the film’. These techniques, she argues, give us ‘a certain stillness. … They are about duration. They tell us of “becoming”, in place’. But it is clear that she remains uneasy with the idea that it is the film itself that performs such processes. These stories ‘shoot out of the soil’, we ‘stumble across’ them; they are not cinematic constructions. And in depicting space, the camera is merely passive; it is space itself, not its cinematic representation, that is ‘open and in the making’. 10 See Thornham (2012). 11 See, for example, the interviews collected in Wexman (1999). 12 Writing of paintings by women artists during the modernist period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and drawing on the work of Griselda Pollock, Massey argues that they differ from those of their male contemporaries

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in the spatial organization and spatial relations constructed by and within representation. These paintings by women, she writes, ‘may be organized in such a way that the viewer is drawn more into the picture itself, reducing the feeling of the detachment of the spectator, and reducing also thereby the authority of the spectator’s gaze’. This refocusing, she writes, constitutes ‘a clear disruption of standard Enlightenment notions of perspective’ and is ‘a different way of representing space’. Finally, she suggests that the sense of closeness thus produced brings into play ‘the senses other than vision, thus deprioritizing at least a little vision in relation to the other senses’ (1994: 236). These arguments will recur at different points throughout this book.

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1  WILDERNESS SPACES

‘Is it possible that landscape … is integrally connected with imperialism?’ asks W. J. T. Mitchell (2002a: 9). It is of course a rhetorical question. Mitchell’s essay inescapably links landscape – defined both as the visual representation of natural space and as the space thus represented (Mitchell points out the ambiguity in our use of the term) – with the violent exploitation of empire. It is not, he writes, a straightforward relationship, and despite claims that landscape art is ‘in its “pure” form a western European and modern phenomenon’ which emerges in the seventeenth and reaches its peak in the nineteenth century, its connections with imperialism stretch much further than the European empires of that period (ibid.: 7). The relationship of landscape to imperialism operates, suggests Mitchell, something like Freud’s ‘dreamwork’. Landscape, that is, visualizes, aestheticizes, harmonizes and finally narrativizes1 the uneasy combination of utopian fantasies and unresolved ambivalences and resistances in the imperial desire for mastery. Its seemingly untroubled gaze turns space into an ‘emblem of national and imperial identity’ (ibid.: 10, 17), veiling and naturalizing the violence that has produced it. It is as precisely such an emblem that Rebecca Solnit views the ‘wilderness’ spaces depicted in American landscape art. But while Mitchell’s essay suggests, but does not state, the gendered nature of these imaginings, for Solnit it is central. Like Anne McClintock, who writes of British imperial narratives, Solnit emphasizes the centrality of the ‘myth of the virgin land’ to imperial fantasy – for her, fantasies of conquest of the American West. Its narratives, as McClintock argues, eroticize this ‘virgin’ space, so that territorial appropriation becomes sexual conquest. If the land is virgin, then ‘white male patrimony is violently assured as the sexual and military insemination of an interior void’ (1995: 30). For Solnit, it is this vision that characterizes Western landscape art, and in particular the paintings, photographs and cinematic depictions of the American West of which she writes. The wilderness spaces that they depict – virgin, blank, to be penetrated by civilization – are the subject of this chapter.

Imperial conquest That American narratives of the conquest of its western frontier constitute a form of imperial fantasy is not a new idea. The writings of Frederick Jackson Turner, so influential in their insistence on the importance of the ‘frontier’ in the construction of American national identity, saw the United States as ‘an empire, a collection of potential nations, rather than a single nation’ (2014/1920). His vision of the frontier as ‘the meeting point between savagery and civilization’, of American history as the story of ‘the colonization of the great West’, and of the pioneer frontiersman, ‘fired with the ideal of subduing the wilderness’, who fights his way across the continent, ‘masterful and wasteful, preparing the way by seeking the immediate thing, rejoicing in rude strength and willful achievement’ (ibid.), is a vision of imperial conquest. It is Rudyard Kipling’s poetry Turner cites in his depiction of American character traits. Echoing McClintock’s analysis of British imperialism, then, Solnit describes American imaginings of its Western landscape in the same terms. This too, ‘the United States’ favorite story’, is a story of a virgin wilderness, ‘waiting to be deflowered, inscribed’ (2003: 94, 91). In spite of his ‘rude, gross nature’, Turner’s Western man is ‘an idealist …. He dreamed dreams and beheld visions’, and had ‘unbounded confidence in his ability to make his dreams come true’. He was in short, a believer in ‘the manifest destiny of his country’ (Turner 2014/1920). The term Manifest Destiny is one whose origin is identified with American columnist and editor John L. O’Sullivan, whose series of articles from 1839 to the mid-1840s insisted that it was America’s ‘manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’ (1845). It would be, he wrote, fulfilment of both God’s will and of ‘nature’s eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect’ (1839). Like other forms of empire, then, America’s conquest and exploitation of its western spaces is seen as a religious quest, the search for a Promised Land, but it also has the force and inevitability of nature. Uniting the two is the concept of Manifest Destiny, which, though much contested and shifting in meaning, will be central to America’s national creation narrative and the cultural forms through which it will be imagined.2 Such conquest is a masculine exercise. ‘Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontiers’, writes Sandra Myres, ‘were devoid of women’ (1982: 8). Women, however, did appear in popular frontier fiction and illustrations, and in her study of ‘westering women’ of the nineteenth century, Myres details the dominant images of women to be found there, images that will later reappear in the cinematic Western. The first of these is ‘the refined lady of a sensitive and emotional nature’, who is ‘wrenched from home and hearth and dragged off into the terrible West’, where she is ‘condemned to a life of lonely terror among savage beasts and rapine Indians’ (ibid.: 1). Depictions of idealized white women, suffering, passive and noble, captured by savage ‘Indians’3 and sometimes rescued by heroic frontiersmen or saved by the intervention of a noble chief, were popular from the late eighteenth century (Luft 1982). 18

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Myres’s second image is that of the ‘sturdy helpmate and civilizer of the frontier’. This figure, ‘her face wreathed in a sunbonnet, baby at breast, rifle at the ready, bravely awaited unknown dangers, and dedicated herself to removing wilderness from both man and land’ (1982: 2). She is competent, courageous and uncomplaining, but she is also a threat, since her presence destroys the homosocial environment in which frontiersman and ‘Indian’ could find a common bond in the ‘second paradise’ of the wilderness. Her arrival, with its imposition of domesticity and order, according to one historian meant the destruction of ‘something male in the race’ (in Myres 1982: 4). Defined in opposition to the first two, the final image, that of the ‘bad woman’, encompassed a range of ‘deviant’ femininities: the masculinized wild woman, the ‘fallen’ sexualized woman, and the ‘foreign’ woman, often Spanish or Mexican, adept at ‘love, cooking, and often … gambling as well’. In contrast, black women were ‘almost invisible’ within popular fiction of the West, and ‘Indian women’ were simply ‘part of the wilderness that must be conquered and civilized’ (ibid.: 5). Underpinning all three images, writes Myres, lay the dominant ideal of femininity of the early to mid-nineteenth century: the cult of True Womanhood. According to Barbara Welter’s influential definition,4 the attributes of True Womanhood comprised the ‘four cardinal virtues – piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife – woman’ (Welter 1966: 152). Though focused initially on the northern white middle-class woman, representations of this idealized femininity circulated much more widely (Hewitt 2002: 159). We can see it in the figure of the saintly white woman – virgin or Madonna – captured by ‘Indians’, which was so common in popular fiction. In art it was realized in the figure of the ‘Madonna of the prairie’, most famously depicted in Koerner’s painting of 1921, in which the arc of the covered wagon forms a halo above the head of the young woman holding its reins, as she gazes out towards the Western frontier.5 As Myres’s account makes clear, however, such stereotyped depictions struggled to contain a changing economic, social and cultural situation that was far more complex and contested. Jane Tompkins, indeed, has argued that what she calls the ‘deauthorization of women’ (1992: 42) that characterizes the Western myth should be seen as a response not to women’s absence but to their increasing power, not only as moral guardians within the home – in line with ideals of ‘True Womanhood’ – but also outside it. Historically, 1848 marked the end of the Mexican-American War, the resulting annexation of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado, and the apparent fulfilment of O’Sullivan’s ‘manifest destiny’ claims. But 1848 is also the year of the first women’s rights convention and the resulting Seneca Falls Declaration, which urged ‘zealous and untiring efforts … for the securing to women an equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce’ (in Schneir 1972: 82).6 The first state to grant voting rights to women was Wyoming, and it did so in 1869.7 From their beginning, then, the images of ‘westering women’ that Myres describes, and the ideal of ‘true womanhood’ on which they were based, were both powerful and contested. WILDERNESS SPACES

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FIGURE 1.1  W. H. D. Koerner, Madonna of the Prairie (1921).

Landscape and the Western Two genres, argues Solnit, have been crucial in shaping the popular imagination of the American West: ‘nature photography and Western movies’ (ibid.: 99). Her own topic is the first of these, and she recounts the way in which the West was ‘invented’ through nineteenth-century landscape photography, much of it in the service of government surveys. The Western desert is, she writes, a ‘place without language, to some extent unnamed, unmapped, unfamiliar’ (ibid.: 75). On it has 20

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been imposed a religious narrative, so that if the East is ‘where history, God and religion come from, the West is where they are supposed to go, a place always lying ahead, the territory of what is yet to come’ (ibid.: 69). Its landscape becomes both a Promised Land and an Eden: a paradise which offers both a return to the ‘unspoiled innocence’ of a mythical past and the setting for a future heroic exploitation whose profit will derive, precisely, from the violation of that innocence. Joel Snyder, like Solnit, traces this vision through the landscape photography of the mid-nineteenth century, but he also points out that this new medium fed the expectations of an audience already exposed to ‘stories and pictures romanticizing the frontier and inflating the promise of wealth and self-sufficiency that lay just beyond the frontier’ (2002: 190). If, then, as Solnit writes, ‘the West became the first region a culture will know largely through the photographic’ (2003: 70), the images through which it was represented, with their combination of ‘gardenlike grace and breathtaking grandeur’ (Snyder 2002: 185), were composed according to the romantic fantasies of early American novelists and travellers, whose tales would be used to lure potential westward migrants. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, which pit the solitary frontiersman Natty Bumppo against the ‘civilizing’ forces of westward exploration and its destruction of the ‘virgin’ wilderness that is also what attracts it, were published between 1823 and 1841. Like the contemporary paintings described by Martha Levy Luft, the second of the novels, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), features the capture of white girls by ‘Indians’. By 1847, Francis Parkman’s influential The Oregon Trail; being sketches of prairie and Rocky Mountain Life was being published, with its descriptions of ‘fine athletic’ frontiersmen, vast and strange landscapes, and exotic ‘savage Indians’, but its descriptions had been preceded by those of gazetteers and guidebooks, newspaper and magazine articles, and popular fiction. Landscape, writes Annette Kolodny, ‘is the most immediate medium through which we attempt to convert culturally shared dreams into palpable realities’ (1984: xii), and the stuff of these dreams concerned ‘the productivity of the soil, the luxuriant forests, and rich mineral resources of the Western lands’ – once the ‘Great American Desert’ had been crossed (Myres 1982: 15–16). But it is through ‘the scenery that flashes by in thousands of Hollywood Westerns’ that more recent audiences are familiar with this landscape (Mitchell 2002b: 268), and with the dreams it embodies of ‘the nation’s infinite possibilities and limitless vistas’ (Schatz 1981: 46). The Western, as Tom Conley writes (2006: 293), is ‘a spatial genre par excellence’. Through its invocation of landscape, the Western continues the ideological themes of nineteenth-century American popular culture, with its repeated working through of a national creation narrative. For Thomas Schatz, these repeated mythic narratives, like the popular fiction and photography before them, operate to ‘“naturalize” American policies of Western expansion and Manifest Destiny’ (ibid.: 47), presenting a ‘purified form of the national narrative’ (Campbell 2013: 21). Its narratives constantly replay Frederick WILDERNESS SPACES

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Jackson Turner’s vision of the nation-making process of internal colonization. Their logic is clear: from ‘the “blank spaces” of the western lands was created, forged, and inscribed a grid of human inhabitation, settlement, and narrative’ (ibid.: 11). This idea of the Western landscape as a ‘blank space’ is developed by Jane Tompkins. ‘The typical Western’, she writes, ‘opens with a landscape shot’: of a blank horizon above prairie or desert, sometimes with solitary rider or wagon train in the distance. ‘All there is’, she continues, ‘is space, pure and absolute’ (1992: 69–70). It is a landscape, she argues, that ‘reflects the Old Testament sense of the world at creation’. Above all, it is ‘a land defined by absence: of trees, of greenery, of houses, of the signs of civilization, above all, absence of water and shade’ (ibid.: 71). In the wagon train stories this is the desert to be crossed on the journey to the fertile valley; in other narratives it is simply the space of trial, where the hero proves his manhood and from which he perhaps rescues the white woman.8 Its openness, she writes, ‘flatters the human figure by making it seem dominant and unique, dark against light, vertical against horizontal, solid against plane, detail against blankness’ (ibid.: 74). It thus appears not only as empty space but as stage. On it the hero performs masculine power: he ‘can conquer it by traversing it, know it by standing on it’ (ibid: 75). This is, of course, a rhetorical strategy, one that functions to naturalize the code of values that the Western celebrates. In fact, ‘the desert is no more blank or empty than the northeastern forests were when Europeans came. It is full of living things, … and inhabited by people’ (ibid.: 76). Its constructed blankness invites both domination and the writing, on its tabula rasa, of the story of a hero and a nation. This blankness and passivity position the Western landscape as feminine, as Solnit and Kolodny also suggest: the hero ‘courts it, struggles with it, defies it, conquers it, and lies with it at night’ (ibid.: 81). But Tompkins also argues that its function is to displace the ‘feminine’ values of civilization that the hero rejects, substituting for them the struggle with a desert that represents a transcendent asceticism rather than a feminine embrace. Women themselves, she argues, are repressed in the Western, as are the ‘Indians’ with which we identify it: as people, both are absent. Women provide the motive for male activity, but the values they represent – love, forgiveness and home – are associated with weakness and excessive verbalization. In John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), it is the rape and murder of women that are being avenged, and, as in the popular fiction of a century before, the rescue of a white girl that is the object of the quest, but when the mother of one of the young men argues against vengeance she is simply ignored by the protagonist Ethan Edwards (John Wayne). At the same time it is made clear that the desert is the backdrop for a quest that preceded the search’s ostensible motivation and will continue beyond it: for a timeless white masculine selfhood and code of values. Women babble nervously and pointlessly, they preach forgiveness when revenge is the answer, and ‘when push comes to shove, as it always does, they crumble’ (Tompkins 1992: 61). 22

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‘Never take no cutoffs’: Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010) This warning comes in a letter of 1847 from Virginia E. B. Reed to her cousin, in which she describes the disastrous consequences of being persuaded to take a ‘cutoff ’ route on the overland trail to Oregon and California. Two years earlier, Betsy Bayley had survived a similar experience: on her own ‘pilgrimage to Oregon territory’, she wrote, her party ‘had splendid times until we took what is called “Meek’s cut-off ”’. ‘You have no doubt heard’, she adds, ‘of the terrible suffering the people endured on that road’ (Holmes 1995: 35). This is the historical context for Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010). Stephen Meek, a trapper and wagon train guide, was a historical figure whose more famous brother, Joe, also mentioned in the film, was a fellow trapper and later politician in the Oregon Territory. The story of Meek’s Cut-off, the disastrous new route devised by Meek to take emigrants through the central Oregon desert to the Columbia River, is recorded in a number of pioneer journals and letters. It is also the stuff of legend, with reports of a child finding lumps of gold along the way.9 Among the 200 or so wagons which followed Meek in 1845 on his ‘cut-off ’ route, which he claimed would be both shorter than the established trail and free of hostile ‘Indians’, were those of Solomon Tetherow and William White, both of whom appear as characters in Reichardt’s film. The journals report increasing loss of confidence in Meek’s leadership as it became clear that he was lost, and even threats to kill him. After the company split, the group of wagons led by Tetherow, as he records, was finally guided to water by a Native American man: An Indian came to us, pointed out the course to [The Dalles] to which he said it was 5 days journey, and so far from refusing to follow the advise of the Indian, at my request he was employed by Mr. Meek to pilot us to Crooked river, which he did for a blanket.10 If the historical journals, and particularly those of women pioneers, provide one context for the film, a second is provided by the Western genre itself. The early Oregon Trail crossings provide one of the Western’s core narratives, including John Ford’s Wagon Master (1950), which follows the journey of a group of Mormons led by a pair of young horse traders across desert and mountains to the ‘valley reserved for us by the Lord’. It is a film, suggests Tompkins, whose human characters seem somehow inadequate to the suggestions of ‘the sweep of history and the grandeur of nature’ that are suggested by its panoramic shots (1992: 90). Nevertheless, it is the idea of community that is celebrated: all except the wicked are embraced in the overcoming of obstacles and ritual celebrations. The final sequences take us from religious vision of the Promised Land ahead, as the pioneers gaze down into the fertile valley below, to a celebratory square dance, before ending with the still-moving wagons, led by the film’s three male protagonists – ‘rolling’, as the final song tells us, ‘rolling west’. WILDERNESS SPACES

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Perhaps the most explicit in its ideological message, however, is the earlier The Big Trail (1930), directed by Raoul Walsh and shot in an early form of widescreen, in which the young John Wayne makes his first starring appearance. The film is dedicated, states the first of the intertitles that punctuate the film, ‘to the men and women who planted civilization in the wilderness and courage in the blood of their children’. Its scenes juxtapose sequences of organized communal activity – women washing their hair, men bartering, loading barrels or sawing wood, covered oxendrawn wagons moving in formation, a circle of wagons behind which men fire at attacking ‘Indians’ while women crouch behind them reloading their rifles – with those in which the physical hardships of fording a river, lowering wagons down a mountainside or making camp in a blizzard are powerfully realized. Wayne plays the buckskin-wearing scout Breck Coleman, who leads the wagon train as it encounters desert, mountains, extremes of heat and cold, and both ‘renegade whites’ and ‘Indians’. The latter are divided into two groups: those who, though unpredictable, are friendly, protective and at the command of Coleman, who speaks their language(s), and those at war: hostile defenders of a still disputed land. The female lead, Ruth Cameron (Marguerite Churchill), the orphaned daughter of a southern colonel, explicitly rejects the life of a southern lady for the life of a ‘sturdy pioneer’, and she and Coleman settle in the Willamette Valley at the close of the film. Throughout, intertitles emphasize the biblical parallels – the desert is a ‘fiery furnace of despair’ and the land to be crossed a ‘savage wilderness’ – and reinforce both the heroism of the pioneers (‘crossed with hickory and bred from granite rock’) and their Manifest Destiny: ‘the conquest of the west’. Like Wagon Master, the final success of this journey is marked by a shot of the pioneers gazing down at the fertile valley, and celebrated with prayer. Towards the close of the film, when the pioneers are lost amid snow blizzards and, in the temporary absence of Coleman, talk of turning back, the message of the intertitles becomes voiced – and embodied – by the returning Coleman/Wayne. ‘We can’t turn back’, he says, in a speech to the assembled pioneers: We’re blazing a trail that started in England. Not even the storms at sea could stop those first settlers. And they carried it on further. They blazed it on through the wilderness of Kentucky. Famine, hunger, not even massacres could stop them. And now we’ve picked up the trail again. And nothing can stop us – not even the snows of winter nor the peaks of the highest mountains. We’re building a nation and we’ve got to suffer. … And you’ve got to fight. That’s life. And when you stop fighting, that’s death. That ‘fighting’ includes not only battling the elements but, for the hero, obeying the masculine code of ‘frontier justice’ is made clear in the final sequences of the film. Coleman will not join the community and Ruth until he has fulfilled his duty to track down and kill the men who murdered his friend. ‘You are the breed of man that will follow a trail to the end’, says the pioneer elder, anticipating later characterisations of the Wayne persona.11 ‘The thing has to be done’, says the 24

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taciturn hero to the weeping Ruth, again foreshadowing many future Westerns. ‘It’s a job I’ve got to finish’. The ‘typical Western’ opens, writes Tompkins, with a wide landscape shot in which we are presented with ‘space, pure and absolute, materialized in the desert landscape’ (1992: 70). The opening of Meek’s Cutoff reverses these expectations. We begin with sound, first a single drawn-out note described by one reviewer as ‘unnerving, anxious … like strings on guitar played backwards’ (Ponsoldt 2011), over a title – ‘Meek’s Cutoff, Oregon 1845’ – that seems to be stitched on to sacking. It is followed by the rising sound of rushing water over a black screen. When vision comes, it is not a wide empty landscape that we see. Instead, we are in the midst of both landscape and slow, difficult movement. We cannot see the sky, or the land beyond: only river and the hilly scrubland above it. A man leads oxen pulling a covered wagon and tethered horse across our screen, slowly and in a single long take crossing the river until he is almost submerged. A second shot shows us, across the river, a family slowly gathering together their possessions for the river crossing, and a third holds as three women slowly cross, baskets on their heads. The second woman, towards the left of our frame, pauses until the third comes into view and crosses in her turn. Only towards the end of each crossing can we see a glimpse of sky, and in each case it is cut off by the following shot: the men at the edge of the river, close-up shots of filling a bucket at the stream, washing pots, loading a mule. Throughout, no-one has spoken, and the sound of water dominates. The sequence has lasted almost five minutes. In the final shot of the sequence, the screen is filled by a bleached and fallen tree, onto which a man slowly carves the word, ‘Lost’. It is clear, then, that if landscape dominates in this film, it is in a very different way from its usual prominence in the Western. Here we are close in, the texture and sound of its detail overwhelming the human effort. People move slowly, on foot; their tasks – gendered, but in each case mundane – demand physical effort. Three aspects of the opening sequence will recur continually in the film. The first is the closed-in quality of the landscape. Reichardt shot the film using a square frame rather than widescreen, a choice that has been linked to the restricted view of her female protagonists, whose long bonnets prevent a wider vision. Like her contemporary Andrea Arnold, however, whose Wuthering Heights (2010) similarly rendered landscape through a square frame, she also uses the frame to draw us in, to insist on immanence rather than transcendence, on a landscape which is immense but also claustrophobic and bewildering, and to render the tactile and often unexpected detail of the filled screen. Even when the landscape does stretch forward into the distance, it presses in on us at the sides, and the extreme close-ups of hands kneading dough, or scooping a cup of water from inside a barrel, fill the screen as they fill the characters’ world. This is not a landscape that the hero can ride over; it encloses, baffles, throws up obstacles. The film’s female protagonists – cooking, mending, collecting firewood – live in it and with it. The second aspect of the sequence to note is its use of sound. As the sound of water dominates the early shots, so other sounds from outside the frame seep WILDERNESS SPACES

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into later shots: the squeal of wagon wheels and the insistent cheeping of Millie’s (Zoe Kazan) pet canary – so that we will also ‘hear’ the bird’s absence in the later part of the film. Most of all, voices are dislocated from the shots of speakers. Men dominate speech in this film, but the camera stays on the women; we see the men only in the distance as they discuss matters of importance, and, like the women, we have to strain to catch their words. One of the most vocal of the characters is the Native American man, and yet we have no way of interpreting what he says. Between men and women translation is also necessary; Emily (Michelle Williams) acts as relay and interpreter for the women of the discussions of the men. Other than Emily’s questioning of her husband, there is little speech between men and women. Elsewhere, voices float across the camp, their origin sometimes uncertain. The first voice that we hear is that of Jimmy, reciting from the bible. The text he reads is Genesis 3, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, until thou return into the ground, for out of it wast thou taken. For dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return’. If the reading recalls the Western search for ‘a second Eden’, then, spoken by a child and only faintly heard, it is overwhelmed by its context. Again and again we must strain to hear language, and to interpret it through visual signs. The final distinctive aspect of the opening sequence comes at its end. As the small wagon train, now leaving the river, exits our view, the camera does not move. For ten seconds we simply see the now undisturbed landscape. As we are compelled to scan it, searching for movement, a ghostly figure on horseback finally appears on a distant ridge. Here, at last, is a more familiar Western scene. But the shot slowly resolves into a dissolve; it is the same group, and what seems at first to be a purposeful ride across an empty land becomes instead evidence of circularity – the same land, the same slow movement across the screen. This use of ‘unmotivated’ landscape shots, held until we must begin anxiously searching for movement and meaning, is a frequent feature of the film. Sometimes these emphasize the futility of human claims to possession, as when Gately (Paul Dano) creates a makeshift sign with broken tree branch and scarf to mark the place where gold has been found, and the camera pulls back to show its tiny insignificance in the landscape. Sometimes they echo ironically more familiar shots. The Searchers begins and ends with shots of the desert framed by the doorway of the settler cabin, dividing home from wilderness and inviting the wanderer in. In other films we see the landscape from the back of a covered wagon12 – a less certain division, but one which promises a future home. Here, we see a shot from Emily’s wagon as she discards the items representing home: Solomon’s (Will Patton) mother’s clock and their rocking chair.13 The resulting littered landscape foreshadows the photographs of Richard Misrach, with their images of human detritus littering the vast western desert and salt flats.14 Sometimes, too, these shots simply show the land’s vastness: desert, prairie or mud flat, it fills the screen, with the sky at times absent, at times barely visible. Upon this landscape men impose their stories. The biblical story is the first one we hear, but it is Meek’s stories of the West that dominate. Meek (Bruce 26

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Greenwood), the buckskin-clad scout, is the only figure we see in classic Western pose: as a lone horseman on a ridge, or emerging from his tent to stretch expansively before a landscape that spreads out before him. His stories, told mainly to Jimmy, are of killing bears and ‘Indians’, of naming hills, and of riding sure-footed over the land: ‘I never slip, I never stumble. I can follow a trail in the dark and never stray off the path’. To the Gatelys he offers the promise of a capitalist paradise: ‘If it’s riches you’re after, there’s riches a-plenty. The land you’re headed for [the Willamette Valley] is a regular second Eden. You won’t want for riches someday. You just plunge your hands into the ground’. The archetypal Western man, he is not, however, the ‘silent conqueror’ that Tompkins (1992: 60) describes. Instead, he is a garrulous and self-conscious performer of the Western myth, already playing to his audience and spinning the stories that will quickly become the stuff of Wild West shows, novels and films. That his stories are empty is very quickly established – he is lost and, far from living ‘with the land’, as he claims, he seems bewildered by it. But it is also clear that he needs a response from his audience: when Emily fails to provide one he is lost. To these stories of religious destiny and heroic masculine conquest the film adds, more subtly, the other elements of the Manifest Destiny myth: capitalism and whiteness. Gately exemplifies the first of these, with his claiming of the gold that Jimmy (Tommy Nelson) finds, hunger for riches, and attempts to conquer the resistance of the captured Native American man by trade: ‘Now there’s the law of the land, Mr Meek’, he says triumphantly. ‘Barter’. But his vision is to some extent shared by all the emigrants: in Emily’s own attempt to persuade the Native American to co-operate, she says, ‘You can’t even imagine the things we’ve done. The cities we’ve built’. Whiteness is assumed in the use of the term as a compliment (‘That’s mighty white of you’), in the reference to the Native American as a ‘manchild’ and Meek’s repeated statement that ‘Hell’s full of Indians’, and in the casual comment that seeks to separate the settlers from the lives they are actually living: that they are ‘working like niggers once again’. That these are men’s stories is clear in the contrast between Emily’s claim to inclusion in their grandeur – ‘cities we’ve built’ – and her actual exclusion. Men may have built cities, but her own contribution is to mend with her needle the Native American’s moccasin shoe – to keep things going, hold them together. It is on this action that the camera focuses as she makes her grand claim. Elsewhere, the women are excluded from decision-making and voting; as they gather wood, they must strain to hear the men’s arguments. The women, like the men, appear to conform to the stereotypes of the classic Western narrative. Emily is the ‘sturdy pioneer’ of Myres’s description, Millie, with her caged canary and hysterical outbursts, is the ‘refined lady of a sensitive and emotional nature’, and Glory (Shirley Henderson) is the ‘Madonna of the trail’, mother to a son and pregnant with a second child.15 But the classic binary opposition through which Tompkins characterizes the gendered world of the Western is reversed. It is men who depend for their self-validation, and their public power, on the stories they tell, and it is WILDERNESS SPACES

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women – in the figure of Emily – who, once freed from the constraints of such narratives by the extremity of their situation, can change and develop, and act decisively. In a scene that echoes, ironically, The Searchers, it is Emily who, alone, comes across the Native American. In Ford’s film the child Debbie (Natalie Wood) crouches by the gravestone of her grandmother as a shadow falls across her. She looks up and, as the camera follows her gaze, we see Scar (Henry Brandon), bare-chested, with war paint, jewellery, and feathers – in Joan Dagle’s words, ‘an exotic and erotically charged body’, who then, in a gesture ‘celebrating his obvious “phallic power,” … raises an animal horn to his lips and blows as the shot fades’ (2001: 124). Here Emily, too, is crouched, gathering firewood, and the camera is at ground level as she sees the Native American’s foot. But instead of cutting to his face it follows Emily as she stands, and the Native American – who also bears a scar, on his shoulder – flees. As Emily fires the rifle to alert the men – the only shot fired in the film – we see just how difficult, mundane, and slow such an action is. Later, in an act that inverts the hierarchy of Ford’s film, and Ethan’s wordless dismissal of the woman who urges a rejection of vengeance, Emily takes up the rifle again to prevent Meek from killing the Native American. Meek’s most striking speech is a response to Emily’s disparaging comment, ‘You don’t know much about women, do you, Stephen Meek’. In reply, he proclaims the essential difference between men and women: ‘Women are created on the principle of chaos, the chaos of creation, disorder, bringing new things

FIGURE 1.2  Emily threatens Meek. (Meek’s Cutoff, 2010) 28

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into the world. Men are created on the principle of destruction. It’s like cleansing – ordering, destruction.’ Meek’s description of woman is not new. It echoes the portrait of woman constructed, as Michèle le Doeuff argues, within centuries of philosophical writing: that of ‘a power of disorder, … a sphinx of dissolution, an abyss of the unintelligible, … a place where all forms dissolve’ (2002: 113). But its usual masculine opposite is the principle of order, unity, logic. In identifying this principle of order with destruction, Meek conflates reason with violence, order with Freud’s ‘death instinct’: ‘the instinct for mastery, or the will to power’ (Freud 1991b: 418). Strikingly, as he gives his speech the camera remains on the women as they sit, calmly knitting: ordered, logical, appraising. Men may impose their stories upon it, but the landscape of Meek’s Cutoff is not only undisturbed by them – full, but irretrievably other, in the long shots when the settlers are absent. It is also far from empty. Throughout, we see traces of a culture that the pioneers simply cannot read, but of whose off-screen presence we are made constantly aware: through the rock drawings, the pile of stones they pass, and the Native American’s own words, signs and gestures. The land itself invites, and frustrates, a reading; during the long shots in which we gaze at it, we, like the group, struggle to distinguish markers, direction, signs of water. At other moments, however, we see beyond the group of settlers to the landscape in movement: in the river whose energy dominates the early shots, and in the clouds that roll or surge across the screen at night, and the moving lights beyond them. It does not invite us into forward movement, to penetrate the space; instead the camera lingers, so that time becomes circular, or perhaps irrelevant, and is supplanted by the fullness, and movement, of space. If the opening of the film reverses expectations – we are not at the start but in the middle of the journey, and we cannot see over the landscape – then the ending is equally inconclusive. The tree that the settlers find teases in its biblical suggestions: if, as Jimmy says, ‘a tree can’t live without water’, this one seems half living and half dead. ‘We are close’, says Gately, ‘but we don’t know what to’. There is no shot of the valley beyond the desert, only the figure of the Native American as he walks into the distance, and the return of the disturbing score and black screen of the opening. It is clear, however, that some things have changed. As Meek acknowledges, Emily is now the leader of the group, a shift marked, after her defence of the Native American, when Solomon, for the first time, consults her judgement. As Emily and the Native American exchange looks, before he turns to walk ahead, we also have the suggestion of a possible alliance beyond the stories of the white men, and a reminder of those other struggles being fought by women at this time.16 And for the first time, we can see beyond the desert to the mountains ahead. This, we are reminded, is a moment before the land was American. It is, in the words of Ellen Moers, in her description of the ‘personal landscapes’ created by women writers, ‘not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made’ (1986: 263). It could be other. But this ‘what if ’ is juxtaposed, once again, with the dominant WILDERNESS SPACES

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FIGURE 1.3  The Native American walks away. (Meek’s Cutoff, 2010)

story of the West. The final shot of Meek sees him on horseback, against the sky, the camera looking up at him, as he speaks now without bombast. ‘We’re all just playing our parts, I’d say’, he says, reminding us both of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and of a history beyond the film – of those stories which will in fact come to structure our understanding of the West and its colonization. ‘This was written long before we got here’.

‘Improper to your sex’: The Ballad of Little Jo (Maggie Greenwald, 1993) A more linear narrative is presented in Maggie Greenwald’s The Ballad of Little Jo (1993). It begins as Josephine Monaghan (Suzy Amis), having narrowly escaped rape by two ex-Union soldiers, takes refuge in a rural store in the American West. As she contemplates the men’s clothing for sale (there are no ready-made dresses – women are expected to make their own), the disapproving middle-aged woman behind the counter warns, ‘It’s against the law to dress improper to your sex’. Josephine’s transformation into Little Jo has begun. The shopkeeper’s comment finds an unlikely echo in W. J. T. Mitchell’s (1984) essay on space, time and the politics of genre in Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoon 30

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(1766). Mitchell is discussing Lessing’s influential distinction between the genres of poetry and painting. The two, writes Mitchell, are described by Lessing in terms of opposing attributes. Painting is identified with imitation, the body, the external, silence, beauty and the eye. Poetry, in contrast, is identified with expression, the mind, the internal, eloquence, sublimity and the ear. Above all, painting is identified with space and gendered feminine, while poetry’s sphere is time and the masculine. ‘Paintings’, comments Mitchell, ‘like women, are ideally silent, beautiful creatures designed for the gratification of the eye, in contrast to the sublime eloquence proper to the manly art of poetry’ (1984: 109). In constructing these distinctions, he adds, Lessing is far from alone. He has powerful allies in both Edmund Burke, whose ‘essay on the sublime and beautiful [1757] … made quite unmistakable the connection between poetry, sublimity, and masculinity on the one hand, and painting, beauty and femininity on the other’ (ibid.), and Immanuel Kant, for whom space, the feminine, ‘is the basis of our perception of external objects, but the [masculine] category of time is the basis of all perception of both internal and external objects’ (ibid: 107). Lessing, argues Mitchell, grounds his conclusions ostensibly in ‘the abstract categories of space and time’, but underlying them is a powerful fear of the violation of what Lessing claims are the ‘natural laws of gender and genre’. Lessing, adds Mitchell, is far more influenced than he admits not only by Burke, whose ideas and examples he borrows, but also by his own father, a man ‘who wrote a Latin thesis at Wittenberg entitled de non commutando sexus habitu – “on the impropriety … of women wearing men’s clothes and men women’s”’ (ibid.: 110– 11). To return to Ballad’s shopkeeper, then, there is, Mitchell’s arguments suggest, rather more at stake in her comment than we might at first think. The acts of exclusion and appropriation that constitute genres,17 writes Mitchell, are ‘subject to versions of the laws, taboos, and rituals that regulate social forms of life’ (ibid.: 112). The same ideological values underpin both, and both are deeply gendered. In depicting an act of cross-dressing that violates both social and generic laws, The Ballad of Little Jo disturbs not only the relationship between gender and genre but also the Western’s usual relationship to space and time. The wilderness is no longer, in Jane Tompkins’s words, ‘a space to be filled … a stage on which to perform and a territory to master’ (1992: 74), and time can no longer be rendered as the narrative of conquest and possession through which the genre repetitively presents as history the ideology of Manifest Destiny.

Cross-dressing Greenwald’s film is based on the story of the ‘real’ Jo Monaghan, as told in the newspaper article published at her death. Josephine Monaghan, recounts Greenwald, was a ‘society girl who had a child out of wedlock’ (Modleski and Greenwald 1995–6: 7), which her sister then cared for. Jo herself was banished WILDERNESS SPACES

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by her family and travelled West, assuming the identity of a man and eventually owning her own homestead. Her identity as a woman remained undiscovered until her death. Jo’s story is in many ways typical of those described as ‘progress narratives’ by Marjorie Garber. In these stories, whether fictional or ‘true’, she writes, crossdressers are ‘“compelled” by social and economic forces to disguise [themselves] in order to get a job, escape repression, or gain artistic or political “freedom”’ (1992: 70). In both fiction and biography, the ‘scene of discovery’ is frequently the bed – in fiction the scene of a sexual encounter and in biography the deathbed, with the doctor or mortician rather than the lover as agent of discovery. In both instances, she comments, the site is indicative of the cultural anxieties surrounding the ‘crime’ of cross-dressing. In fictional narratives, however, the disruptive potential of the transvestite as an ‘agent of destabilization, desire and fantasy’ (ibid.: 71) is recuperated by a narrative which, as in Laura Mulvey’s account of the ‘tomboy’ figure in film (1989b), ‘restores’ the female-to-male cross-dresser to her ‘proper’ place. As in the Freudian account of the journey to femininity, on which Mulvey draws for her analysis, this active, desiring figure represents, in Garber’s words, ‘a stage that girls pass through on their way to becoming women’ (Garber 1992: 71). Mature femininity will mean passivity, repression and the move from being subject to object of desire.18 It will also mean the adoption of ‘proper’ dress, as we see in another film based on an actual Western cross-dresser, Calamity Jane (1953),19 one of Myres’s stereotypical ‘bad women’. Here the transformation of Calam (Doris Day) from tomboy into potential object of romantic desire is effected in a ‘magical’ transformation scene,20 where she is taught femininity by Chicago ‘actress’ Katie (Allyn Ann McLerie),21 a process which involves acquiring proper dress, habits of domestic service, a softer and higher voice, and a passivity and containment of movement and gesture which are the ‘natural’ outcome of her new feminine clothing. In The Ballad of Little Jo, however, there is no reversion to femininity, nor is femininity naturalized in relation to Jo. As Stella Bruzzi has observed (1997: 184), she looks as uncomfortable in the trappings of femininity that mark the ‘society girl’ as she does in her initial adoption of masculinity. In the one scene in which, considering returning East, she reverts to ‘proper’ feminine clothing and attempts domestic service for her Chinese lover, Tinman (David Chung), both are uneasy with this role reversal, and her physical gestures of coyness jar with the Jo we have come to know. Tinman’s angry outburst stresses the reversal’s impossibility. ‘What kind of a girl could you be somewhere else?’ he demands. Earlier, after they have made love and Jo has shown him the photograph of herself as a young woman, he does not recognize her. ‘This white girl would never do this with me’, he says. Their relationship, of an equality founded on gender transgression, depends on Jo’s cross-dressing, and both are illegal:22 if discovered, both would be brutally killed. What begins as masquerade, as a masculinity consciously adopted through imitation – as, for example, when we see Jo observe then adopt the way of eating of the men surrounding her in the saloon – becomes a mode of bodily existence 32

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which is comfortably inhabited and lived. In the scenes in which she rides across the Western landscape or tends her sheep, we see a bodily ease that comes from a relationship with the world around her. Elsewhere, however, Jo can adopt the exaggerated masculinity of the Western hero, as when she engages in a shooting competition at Mary’s (Heather Graham) wedding or confronts the owner of the Western Cattle Company, slowly drawing back her jacket to reveal the revolver in her waistband. The effect is a critique, not of Jo but of the masculinity that surrounds her: equally performative and hollow, its violence and brutal heterosexuality mask a fear of otherness, and repression of a potentially homoerotic desire. Jo’s initial transformation, as Bruzzi notes (1997: 180), emphasizes the dismantling – or tearing apart – of her femininity, rather than the acquisition of masculinity. Shots of her prising apart her clothing and strands of plaited hair, hacking off her long hair with a razor, and ripping open her face to produce a scar, are intercut with the narrative of her seduction by the photographer who produces the image of her as ‘society girl’. What is notable about the flashback sequence is its focus on images: the photographer’s studio is crammed with mirrors, backcloths and props. But Jo fits uneasily the pose of dutiful daughter in the family photograph just as she does that of the demure girl of her portrait. In a key shot of the flashback, we see her partially naked and facing the camera, with the photographer lying in the bed behind her. She is smiling: caught, it would seem, by the image of herself with which she has just been presented, and the illusion of sexual power that it has given her. By contrast, her transformation is brutal, and accompanied by silent tears. But neither ‘self ’ is naturalized. As Jo gazes at herself in the shopkeeper’s full-length mirror, her image is split into three: her body is divided at the waist, her upper body wearing a dress, while the lower is covered by the trousers she holds against herself. Her head, however, is framed separately: by a different, smaller, superimposed mirror. To the right of the frame a third mirror shows us the disapproving shopkeeper; it is the fragmentation, the absence of a ‘proper’ identity, of which she seems to disapprove. In the penultimate shot of the transformation sequence Jo is once again framed, this time by the glass of a window; the image of her naked body is blurred and doubled. Although there is no reversion to femininity in the film, there is, in Garber’s terms, a ‘bed scene’, where Jo and Tinman discover each other’s bodies for the first time. It is not, however, the ‘discovery scene’ of Garber’s ‘progress narrative’ – Tinman has already realized that Jo is not ‘Mister Jo’. Instead, what is emphasized is a mutual tenderness and slow uncovering that is based both on a recognition of difference – each caresses the other’s skin, exploring through touch, as the camera captures contours and texture – and on similarity. Bruzzi has pointed to the sameness of the underwear they wear, both have scars, and it is Tinman’s long hair on which the camera briefly lingers after they have made love. The scene contrasts pointedly with that in which we see Percy (Ian McKellen), wearing only the same all-in-one underwear, after he has slashed the face of the prostitute who ‘wouldn’t put it in her mouth’. Gun in hand, underwear unbuttoned below the WILDERNESS SPACES

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FIGURE 1.4  Jo’s transformation. (The Ballad of Little Jo, 1993)

navel, and with blood on the crotch, Percy is both a figure of brutal masculinity and a curiously feminized one, his confusion unacknowledged (it is Jo who has ‘something wrong’ he says, as she attempts to disarm him), and unremarked in this unseeing masculine world.

Generic reversals At the beginning of her chapter on landscape in the Western, Jane Tompkins describes the opening shots of nine typical Westerns. I shall select three here. The first is The Searchers, which opens with a shot of the desert framed by the opening door of a settler’s house. As a woman walks out through the doorway, the landscape opens out before her, and we see a solitary rider, Ethan Edwards, ride into view. The second is Winchester ’73 (Anthony Mann, 1950), where the opening shot presents two horsemen slowly riding across the screen, silhouetted against the horizon; the foreground is filled with empty scrubland. Finally, in High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1972) the landscape is shimmering and ethereal; a solitary figure emerges from it and rides towards us. In these opening shots where ‘[a]ll there is is space’, nature is at once transcendent, ‘the one thing larger than man’ (ibid.: 72), and empty, inviting domination: ‘There is nothing to stop the horseman’s free movement across the terrain. He can conquer it by traversing it, know it by standing on it …. The man can go, in any direction, as far as he can go. The possibilities are infinite’ (ibid.: 75). That this is a profoundly gendered vision is apparent from the beginning of Ballad. Here, over the Western banjo music, the opening shot is detailed and looking down – to the mud underfoot. As we continue to look down, a lace parasol 34

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comes into view, filling the screen. Like the riders of the Westerns above, Jo is caught in movement, but she is on foot, and moves with difficulty. Above her tower the male riders and buckboard drivers who travel past, jostling and inspecting her. This is an occupied landscape, its male dominance emphasized not only by the two soldiers who first harass and later attempt to rape her, but also by the apparently kindly travelling salesman who offers her a ride and then sells her. This is a road made for men and horses; Jo is an obstacle, out of place and vulnerable. Once Jo has adopted masculinity, the film’s visual strategy shifts. Throughout the film we find shots which function as intertextual generic references, beginning with a low-angle shot of a rider picking their way through brushland and then entering a mining camp, where the angle shifts so that we look down over the rider’s shoulder at the camp’s activities and the men’s wary responses as s/he rides by: the man with no name. The film, it seems, has begun again, as a Western. The sequence is the first of a series of generic references: the settler party being led by a single horseman across the horizon; the hoedown in the saloon; the solitary rider crossing the wilderness in winter, then again in spring; two horsemen, Jo and Frank Badger (Bo Hopkins), crossing a stream and riding into town, to be confronted by masked killers who appear, guns drawn, above the horizon; the shooting competition, in which Jo ‘proves’ her manhood; the grave statement, ‘Sheep and cattle don’t mix’ with which Jo greets the news of the encroachment of the Western Cattle Company.23 Some of these function as critique of the Western’s naturalization of the performance of a specific white American masculinity. The gun, so obviously a symbol of phallic power, can here be appropriated by anyone; Jo cannot compete in terms of physical strength, but she can defeat Percy, Frank and the murderous Western Cattle Company with her gun. Jo guides the settlers because the man who preceded her as line camp shepherd could not stand its isolation. The hoedown, a signifier of community in Ford’s Westerns, is here a dangerous male ritual, fuelled by alcohol and sexual frustration, and leading to the exploitation and ultimate maiming of a prostitute. Other scenes, however, suggest how precarious, nevertheless, is Jo’s appropriation of masculinity. The shooting competition is followed by Percy’s revelation that he knows her identity, and his attempted rape; a shot of the solitary rider across the landscape is followed by the discovery of the burning and murder of the Russian homesteaders, which Jo is powerless to prevent. This, then, is a film which, as Greenwald has said, ‘is about stereotypes’ (Modleski and Greenwald 1995–6: 9, emphasis added), and through them we are offered a critique not only of the conventions of the Western but of the ideological assumptions on which it is based. The Western Cattle Company which is the stuff of Western myth24 is here the capitalist enterprise of an Eastern businessman, while the myth that it embodies – of wilderness conquest and territorial expansion – is embodied not in the makeshift constructions of the Western mining camp but in the photographer’s backcloth of mountains against which the Monaghan family pose, and the wolfskin and bearskin rugs with which he adorns his studio. Jo herself WILDERNESS SPACES

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FIGURE 1.5  Jo rides across the landscape. (The Ballad of Little Jo, 1993)

embodies the qualities through which Pam Cook25 defines the Western hero: ‘solitary, asexual and taciturn’ (1988: 242), and her story, as Greenwald has said, is ‘a classic Western story’ of a ‘rugged individualist’ who rides into town, overcomes opposition, and carves out a successful place in the American West26 (Modleski and Greenwald 1995–6: 7). But it is also a profound critique of that myth. That Jo’s story is an impossible one is made clear at the end of the film, when Frank, faced with the truth, can only celebrate Jo’s life by reconstituting her as male: tied on her horse and photographed there in her male clothing, an image to counter the early ‘society girl’ portrait. The Western, Conley suggests, is concerned with a way of seeing, its landscape a perspectival space that ‘opens onto the unknown’, in which the hero, like those of ancient Greece, gains insight by ‘learning to see’ (2006: 291, 295, 310). The Ballad of Little Jo, however, suggests, first, that its gaze is in fact, a surveillant one. Everything in this Big Country is visible, so that Jo cannot ride or shoot as a woman, and Tinman cannot ride at all. Men’s eyes have the power, above all, to turn difference into victimhood. Second, this gaze is also peculiarly blind. These surveillant Westerners cannot see their own misogyny, repression, fear of difference, or destructive violence. Above all, they cannot – because it is ideologically impossible – see the difference in their midst.

Time and space In his discussion of the function of landscape in the Western, Conley writes of its debt to landscape painting, a genre which owes its success, he argues, to ‘the way it blends the visible and the invisible’. Sky and earth stretch out ‘beyond the limits of our sight’, and in doing so, inspire ‘imaginary voyages’ in their viewers (ibid.: 294). 36

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The narratives of the Western, he writes, textualize these landscapes, so that their viewers ‘live a virtual adventure of space and place that resembles what we imagine when we follow the tracks of heroic personages roaming about the Mediterranean in the Iliad or the Odyssey’ (ibid.: 291, original emphasis). Like Lessing’s poetry, then, the Western’s narrative form incorporates space into time. In so doing it also, argues Conley, stages a confrontation with the sublime, at those points at which action is suspended and the landscape itself, immense and unreadable, becomes central to our gaze. Like its viewers, the genre’s protagonists seek both ‘to perceive and to decipher the spaces through which they pass’ (ibid.: 299). Time itself, in the genre, is both historical – dates, events and historical personages are referenced – and mythical. As Conley’s analogies suggest, its American West is a place where the hero can seek to resolve both his Oedipal conflicts and wider anxieties around American masculine identity. This is the structure that is both echoed and critiqued in Ballad. It too begins and ends with a precision about dates – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, from which Jo reads, was published in 1852 and the roaming Union soldiers date the opening events to the mid-1860s, while the newspaper article with which the film closes is dated 1893. But it is also a ballad, a mythologizing popular form. Its mythical journey, however, is neither the feminine journey outlined by de Lauretis27 and performed by Doris Day’s Calam, nor – though it makes explicit the stages of such a story – the masculine journey to maturity. It is Jo’s failure to complete this journey – to marry and occupy a prominent place in the increasingly settled town – that so bewilders and angers Frank Badger. Instead, against and within the ‘time’ of the old West – the arrival of homesteaders, the conflict between East and West, the establishment of Law, the shift from wilderness to garden – is set a very different sense of time: marked by the cycles of seasons and by the everyday, by duration rather than change, its major events those of childbirth, love and illness/ death. If at the end of the film Jo can only enter history as a man – photographed after death with horse and gun for the local newspaper – the inadequacy of this reliance on the visual is emphasized. Jo both is and is not ‘Rancher Jo’, captured neither here nor in the feminine society portrait that is printed beside it. As Stella Bruzzi suggests (1997: 184), the play of visibility/invisibility which for Conley marks the encounter with landscape and the sublime in the Western, is here used to signal the fluidity and ambiguities of gender. Asked about Jo’s relationship to landscape in the film, Greenwald commented that she does not conquer the land: she ‘learns to use [it] to survive; she learns to co-exist with it’. Greenwald chose, she says, not to use CinemaScope for the film because the ‘hugeness of the landscape comes through anyway’, and she wanted to retain the story’s intimacy (Modleski and Greenwald 1995–6: 8). The film’s landscape shots are many: in some there is no human presence; in others Jo rides across the screen like so many lone horsemen in so many Westerns. But this is not an unchanging or empty landscape, and Jo does not cross it in pursuit of a heroic quest, or as a patrolling of territory. Instead, the film marks the passing of seasons WILDERNESS SPACES

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and Jo’s increasing sense of ease in the presence of a landscape that she does not possess. One of the decisive events in the film, when the murder of the Russian homesteaders makes Jo feel the failure of her masquerade of masculinity and she decides to sell her ranch, is preceded by, intercut with and closed by landscape shots. In them, we see the beauty of the mountains and the water, but we also see the detail of the wild flowers through which Jo rides, and of the ripe seedheads by the water. This is not a landscape coextensive with the protagonist, nor do we feel the ‘sublime force of the landscape emerging into visibility’, the two ways in which Conley describes the Western landscape (2006: 302, 295). It is the space in which Jo has found that she can live – always precariously, as the murder of the Russians shows – but a space which is itself alive and ever-changing, both its otherness and its cycles of life unaffected by the territorial conflicts enacted upon it. For Tania Modleski, however, what Ballad offers viewers is ‘precisely a relation to the sublime in nature’ (1999a: 173), a rebuttal of assertions that such an experience is exclusively masculine. It is a claim that is worth examining. If it is correct, this cannot be the sublime of Lessing, Burke or Kant, with its subordination of space to time. Nor can it be that of the Romantics, where the writer’s initial yielding to ‘mighty nature’ gives way to its eventual mastery. In both of these, as in Conley’s account of the Western, the male ego is threatened but ultimately strengthened by ‘the encounter with, and the mastery of, an infinite or indefinite otherness powerful enough to annihilate the I’ (Battersby 2007: 139). We might identify it, perhaps, with the ‘feminine sublime’ advocated by Barbara Freeman, in which ‘the self neither possesses nor merges with the other but attests to a relation with it’ (1995: 9). But this conception, too, involves the encounter with ‘a radical alterity that remains unassimilable to representation’ (ibid.: 11), and so fails to capture another quality of the film of which Modleski writes: its detailed fascination ‘with things in themselves’ (1999a: 159). This is a film that renders us acutely aware of the texture of surfaces, living things and bodies, from the awkward weight of sheep to the rough texture of men’s clothing on skin, and the fluidity and touch of water. Finally, we could think of it in terms of Christine Battersby’s rather elusive concept of an embodied ‘female sublime’, in which difference is not beyond but within, and in which the subject that encounters it, rather than being a ‘strong ego reasserting its identity in face of threat or overwhelming infinity’, is a self that is ‘relational, fragile and dependent’ (2007: 189, 139–40). I am not sure, however, that this would not be better thought of as a rejection of the concept of the sublime itself, via its radical historical contextualization, and it is this rather than the sublime itself, I think, that Ballad invites us to contemplate.28 It is no accident that Jo’s seducer is a photographer, and his preferred backcloth that of the ‘sublime’ mountains of the West. The vision that can elevate this landscape in imagination can also exploit and, in the form of the ‘Western’ Cattle Company, murder in the pursuit of possession. We might speculate that notions of the sublime, as much as claims to territorial possession, evince a fear of what Massey calls a ‘natural world that will not stay still’ (2005: 131). Both also rely on claims 38

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to visual mastery. In Ballad, these claims are made by a dominant masculinity. Frank’s regular riding out to the boundaries of Jo’s land may be benevolent, but his watchful gaze is as dangerous to Jo and Tinman as that of the Eastern speculators. Jo may find her peace within and with the natural world but her own homestead exists in a precarious border space: between the land owned by Frank and the vast territories of the Western Cattle Company, and overlooked by both. It is significant that the water that marks the boundary of her homestead – an in-between space of constant change and multiple reflections – is also the site of the re-awakening of her desire and Tinman’s return to health, as well as of her own death and – in the form of the river by which she escapes her attackers – her ‘birth’ as a man. In The Ballad of Little Jo it is not confrontation with a sublime Western landscape that is centralized and eroticized,29 though its grandeur is both acknowledged and experienced. Instead, the film both critiques and displaces such displays, relocating both the Western’s play of visibility/invisibility and its erotic charge from a relationship with an immensity beyond to the spaces within and between.

Way down in Missouri: Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) Way down in Missouri when I heard this melody, When I was just a little baby on my mama’s knee, The old folks were humming, the banjos were strumming So sweet and low. Hushabye my baby, go to sleep on mama’s knee. Journey back to these old hills in dreams again with me. It seems like your mama was there once again And the old folks were strumming that same old refrain. Way down in Missouri where I heard this lullaby, When the stars were blinking and the moon was shining high, and I hear mama calling as in days long ago, Singing hushabye. ‘The Missouri Waltz’, the official state song of Missouri since 1949, opens Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010). Performed30 by Ozark singer and journalist Marideth Sisco, who also appears in the film, its presence signals immediately something of the complexity of Granik’s use of its Missouri setting. This is a film which recounts a dreamlike ‘journey back to these old hills’, it is a film in which the mother, as well as the father, is lost, and in it the banjo signals both community and family inheritance. The opening title shows us the moon, its light diffused through the silhouetted branches of leafless winter trees. But Sisco’s recording also introduces a montage of scenes that reverse the song’s nostalgic assumptions. The opening shot is of scrubland. Wooded hills are in the background; in the foreground are WILDERNESS SPACES

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scattered caravans, trailers and cars, some overturned or burnt out, all apparently abandoned. When we cut to scenes of seventeen-year-old protagonist Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) and her family, they are scenes of rural poverty: littered machines, toys, wire netting, tyres and paint cans surround the trampoline on which the children play, and the inside of the log cabin is a clutter of animals, bedclothes and household goods. It is Ree herself who must maintain the family’s survival, caring for her mother as she does for her brother and sister. This, then, is not the Western landscape of Meek’s Cutoff or The Ballad of Little Jo but its contemporary equivalent: a land beyond official boundary lines with its own patriarchal frontier codes, where the homestead is still the most important possession. References to the world of the Western abound in the film, from the cattle market which is the scene of Ree’s failed confrontation with patriarch Thump Milton (Ronnie Hall), to Thump’s costume of Stetson, leather waistcoat and military insignia, and Ree’s Uncle Teardrop’s (John Hawkes) standoff, guns drawn, with the sheriff: ‘Is this gonna be our time?’ he demands, like any Western outlaw. Most notable is the image in the photograph album that we see when Ree is clearing the house in preparation for the family’s forced move. In it are pictured the two brothers Teardrop and Jessup as toddlers, dressed in identical cowboy outfits, facing us with guns drawn. The image is at once touchingly absurd and telling. The men’s code of honour – later betrayed by Jessup – is the code of Western masculinity, the ‘frontier justice’ of Wagon Master’s Breck Coleman, a code that will doom Teardrop at the end of the film, as it caused Jessup’s death. Here, in this world at once outside and at the heart of contemporary America, are the inheritors of Meek’s pride in masculine destruction and of the shanty town that is Ruby City in The Ballad of Little Jo. At the close of Greenwald’s film Ruby City is no longer a settlement patched together out of whatever can be found, but a town which has entered history: a successful embodiment, it would seem, of the dream of Manifest Destiny – though its female photographer, like Greenwald herself, chronicles its blindnesses and contradictions. In the world of Winter’s Bone, however, there has been no linear progress. A century later, masculine honour and masculine menace still dominate and the patchedtogether shanty houses remain, while the dream of a Promised Land of territorial conquest is now glimpsed only in the army recruitment drives that promise both an escape from and a continuation of Ozark values. If the Western is one reference point for Winter’s Bone, however, a second, as both critics and Granik herself have pointed out, is the folktale. Her hero, Ree, is ‘a tough western hero in a girl’s body’, Granik is reported as saying (Jenkins 2011), ‘solitary, asexual and taciturn’ in Pam Cook’s words (Cook 1988: 242), and the film itself has been described as a ‘classic Western frontier drama’ (Macaulay 2011). But the story is also, says Granik, ‘a little like a German or Scandinavian fairy tale, … one of those old stories where a person ventures deep into the woods to retrieve an emblem of their courage’ (Jenkins ibid.). This, then, is the story of a wilderness quest, but it is not, like the Western quest, a journey across open desert spaces where, as Tompkins writes, 40

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‘the horizon recedes forever beneath the sky’ (1992: 85). It does not, like the remake of True Grit by the Coen brothers in the same year, with which it was often compared, see its teenage protagonist cross the vast Western landscape in a quest to avenge the father, to be finally rescued, unconscious, by the representative of an ageing masculinity, so that her quest becomes subsumed into his: to redeem the code of masculinity which she has challenged. It is, instead, a journey into the depths of the forest, a landscape of scrubland, forest, clearings and lakes. There are no vast spaces to cross. As Ree makes her way on foot, the shots are low angle, so that the foreground is filled with the rough ground she must cross, and the background by trees, some hacked or felled, and broken timber shacks, often empty and decayed. It is a wilderness that is full of boundaries and fences, and crisscrossed by paths and electricity pylons. At the mid-point of the film, when Ree, walking in the woods with her mother, has tried and failed to get her advice, her introspective gaze is followed by three landscape shots. The first looks upwards through the trees, the second beyond, to the forested hills and the dark rolling clouds above, and the third takes the eye across an expanse of wooded hills and into the distance. A single pulsing note overlays the natural sounds of the woods. This is the world that Ree will lose if her father’s bond is not redeemed, but it is also dark and menacing. Her journey across it is marked by the homesteads she encounters, each subtly different from the others – that of Floyd (Cody Brown) neater and closer to the orderliness of town, while Little Arthur’s (Kevin Breznahan) is more isolated and more decayed, so that Ree must pick her way through the hulks of broken cars and rusted barrels and machines. At its end, in the heart of the forest, Thump’s home is larger and more imposing than the rest, but equally patched together and equally a site scarred by the rusted detritus of modernity.

FIGURE 1.6  Ree crosses the broken landscape. (Winter’s Bone, 2010) WILDERNESS SPACES

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This is a landscape, then, that is temporally and spatially specific, a borderland31 where the signs of modernity are sporadic and often broken, and the means of survival those of the frontier. With its repetitiveness and menacing, dreamlike quality, however, it is also the space of myth and fairytale, where the quest looks not forwards, to ‘the territory of what is yet to come’ (Solnit: 69), as in the settler narrative, but back, towards memory and loss, and its landscape invites not territorial possession and knowledge, but immersion in the unknown.32 Here, the forest is not land to be tamed and owned but autonomously and often frighteningly alive.33As Jack Zipes states, ‘No one ever gains power over the forest’ (2002: 65). Such an opposition is one staged elsewhere in women’s filmmaking. Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), for example, enacts a confrontation between the territorial desires of Stewart (Sam Neill), to conquer the New Zealand wilderness, and the mythical forest into which Ada (Holly Hunter) descends. In Granik’s film, the film’s landscape is the unseen other of American modernity. At its limits the mobile representatives of Law patrol, guns at hand, but both sheriff and bondsman are wary of entering its interior space. As she ventures ‘deep into the woods’, Ree, like the hero of myth and folktale,34 is both guided and opposed by a series of mirrored character pairs, with each encounter occasioning both a gift (a drink, money, a ‘doobie’) and a warning. Woman after woman first opposes and then helps and guides Ree, and man after man is characterized by unpredictability and threat. The final encounter, in the heart of the forest, is with a woman older than the rest, who like the others acts as gatekeeper, this time forbidding access to the man within. As Ree sits and waits for the audience that will not be granted, she – and we – glimpse strange white objects hidden among the waste, which catch the light. A carefully constructed model of a butterfly hanging from a fence, a marble statue of a pair of cherubic children playing on a slide, signal ambiguously hope, or threat. When, disregarding warnings, she returns, it is at dusk, and her approach to the dark house in the forest is accompanied by menacing notes on the soundtrack. As she is attacked and then captured in the barn, Thump’s approach, like that of any ogre, is marked by the sound of his heavy footsteps (though when he enters it is through an electrically operated garage door).

The mythic journey Ree’s journey, indeed, is a close echo of the heroic ‘monomyth’35 described by Joseph Campbell. The ‘mythological hero’, he writes, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark …. Beyond the threshold … 42

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the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythical round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward …. At the return threshold … the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread …. The boon that he brings restores the world. (1993: 245–6) For Ree, having experienced both threats and aid from the members of the ‘unfamiliar yet strangely intimate’ extended family that she encounters, the ‘supreme ordeal’ takes place in the lake at the heart of the forest darkness, where she must cut off her father’s hands as proof of his death, in order to lift the threat to her family home. At the film’s close, the home and its surrounding ‘100-year-old woods’ are secure, and renewal is signalled by the birdsong that we hear, the chicks that Teardrop brings as a gift and the spring sunshine that plays on the family’s faces. Yet Ree’s cannot be quite the journey Campbell describes. For Campbell the hero is male. Within myth, he writes, ‘the woman is life, the hero its knower and master’. At the end of his ordeal, the hero ‘knows that he and the father are one: he is in the father’s place’ (ibid.: 120–1).36 That Ree’s quest, to discover the truth despite all opposition and save her home, should be a masculine one is made clear by Merab (Dale Dickey) in the film. Leaving Ree in order to relay her request for an audience with Thump, she suddenly turns back and demands: ‘Ain’t you got no man to do this?’ Later, when she has been beaten up and is challenged by Thump to state her case, Ree’s speech is that of an Oedipal hero, the conscious bearer of masculine codes: I got two kids who can’t feed themselves yet. My mom is sick, and she’s always gonna be sick. Pretty soon the laws are coming and taking our house and throwing us out to live in the field like dogs. If Dad has done wrong, Dad has paid. And whoever killed him, I don’t need to know all that. But I can’t forever carry them kids, and my mom – not without that house. Yet though she might echo it, Ree, like Little Jo, cannot complete this Oedipal journey. At the close of the film her ‘re-emergence’ is into the maternal position she occupied at its start, pegging out washing with her sister, as her brother plays on his skateboard. Like that of Meek’s Cutoff, it is an ambiguous ending: although Ree denies to her brother Sonny (Isaiah Stone) that she has any desire to escape, her gaze is outwards, beyond the film’s frame, as it has been throughout. How, then, should we understand her journey? It is not the feminine journey described by de Lauretis and Doane. For de Lauretis, as we have seen, the heroine’s story is of a journey to passivity, to the place where the Oedipal hero will find her (1984: 133). To this Mary Ann Doane, in her account of the ‘woman’s film’ of the 1940s, adds that when the woman’s journey is active, when she becomes WILDERNESS SPACES

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the investigator, ‘penetrating space alone’, it is the house as female space that she investigates, and herself as potential victim that she, like the heroine of Bluebeard, finds there (1984: 72). The home or house, writes Doane, ‘connotes not only the familiar but also what is secret, concealed, hidden from sight’. It is, following Freud, both heimlich (homely, familiar) and unheimlich (strange, uncanny) (ibid.: 73). For Freud the female connotations of the term are unequivocal: the ‘unheimlich place … is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, … the place where all of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning’ (2001a: 245). Doane’s female investigator, then, can only discover herself as absence, as space, at the climax of her investigation. For the female spectator of such a narrative the outcome, concludes Doane, is masochistic fantasy and a denial rather than an endorsement of subjectivity. For Paul Ricoeur, myth is characterized by an intertwining of two qualities of time which are also qualities of space: ‘the circularity of … imaginary travel and the linearity of the quest as such’ (1981: 181). The first takes the ‘hero or heroine back into a primordial space and time that is more akin to the realm of dreams than to the sphere of action’ (ibid., original emphasis), and is circular; the second is linear, progressive and episodic. The first of these dimensions echoes Doane’s psychoanalytic account, though Ricoeur does not explicitly identify it with the maternal: it is a ‘travel toward the origin’ which ‘has the character of an immersion and confinement in the midst of dark powers’. It is the second, however, which finally triumphs, through an ‘act of rupture’ by which ‘the world of action emerges from the land of dreams’ (ibid.). With the success of the hero’s quest, circularity gives way to linearity, and space to time, history and progress. In Winter’s Bone, the space of the Ozarks and Ree’s extended family has the ‘timeless’ quality of Ricoeur’s ‘realm of dreams’. Cut off from the world of history – we glimpse this recognizable world only twice, in the sheriff ’s office and the recruiting station – its occupations are at once those of the frontier and, in Ricoeur’s terms, ‘primordial’. Ree teaches her brother and sister how to hunt, skin, and cook squirrel. Nextdoor, her cousin Blond Milton (William White) and Sonya (Shelley Waggener) strip the flesh from a recently killed deer, which then becomes the substance of a gift of food to Ree and her family – a gift accompanied once again by a warning. The ‘timber acres’ that surround the clearings provide both food and fuel, and chickens, dogs, horses and ferrets share the homesteads with humans. When Ree dreams that the timberland is being destroyed by machines, it is with the animals and birds of the forest that she identifies. Contact with the world outside is troubled, characterized by wariness, distrust and secrecy. As in Ricoeur’s account, too, Ree’s journey is repetitive, until it is ended by a final ‘act of rupture’ as visceral as Ricoeur’s own example, the woodcutter’s ‘breaking open the belly of the wolf with an axe in “Little Red Riding Hood”’ (ibid.). This is the moonlit scene promised by the film’s opening; in it Ree must travel to the depths of the lake, accompanied by Merab and her sisters, to sever her father’s hands. 44

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In a number of ways, however, Granik’s film problematizes all these accounts. What Ree encounters on her quest is patriarchal power. It is not, however, a public and institutionalized power like that of the external forces of law that we glimpse in the film, but is instead hidden and secretive, its location the home’s interior. As Ree journeys from homestead to homestead, she finds each house guarded by a woman, but occupied by a man. As they do in the Western, men, as Ree’s visit to her friend Gail (Lauren Sweetser) makes clear, control the means to mobility in the film – at least up to the ‘boundary line’ with Arkansas – but the space of their power is the hidden inside of the buildings that we see. From the burntout shack where meth ‘cooking’ took place, to the heavily masculine territory of Thump’s house and barn, with its iron chains and anvils, and to the neat rows of boots and clothing which mark her father’s absence at the heart of Ree’s home, patriarchal power is to be found in the dark interiors of this world. Women live on the margins – the kitchen, the porch – and their status is determined by the male hierarchy. At the dark centre of the lake, too, though Ree’s image seems for a moment to be doubled by its reflection in the water, it is neither herself nor her mother that she confronts. The hands that seem to reach towards her own from the water’s depths are her father’s, and are firmly severed by the ambiguous maternal figure of Merab. It is Merab who warned and then beat her, but who has also rescued Ree and now both saves and comforts her, wrapping her coat around Ree’s shoulders. Throughout the film the mirroring of the two figures has been emphasized by their clothing.37 Now, the unheimlich nature of this dreamlike place is identified with its paternal, not any maternal connotations, just as, throughout the film, it is men who have inhabited the interior depths of the home. Indeed, it is clear at the end of the film that it is the masculinity of this world that renders it repetitive and circular. In his final visit to Ree’s home Teardrop tells her that he knows who murdered Jessup. The knowledge, which he has tried to avoid, will, he has said, doom him: ‘Knowing that would just mean I’d be toes up myself pretty soon’. As he drives away, leaving behind Jessup’s banjo and the baby chicks he has brought, we assume his fate will be a futile and repetitive act of vengeance. It is Ree whose actions – not only finding her father but also negotiating with the world outside – have redeemed the home and provided money for the future. At the end of the film she returns to the site of her father’s absence in the home, and removes the banjo from among his clothing. Although at first she tries to give it to Teardrop, it is her young sister, Ashlee (Ashlee Thompson), who claims it. The film’s ending, with Ashlee strumming, is a reminder of its opening, and of the female-dominated folk music scene that we see briefly during Ree’s quest. In this deeply patriarchal world it is women who provide not only the continuity but also the heroism, and the hope for a final ‘emerg[ence] from the land of dreams’. Throughout the film Ree’s gaze has been one of her defining characteristics. Although the camera does not follow her look, or her thoughts, the film is WILDERNESS SPACES

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punctuated by moments of stillness in which we see her gaze beyond the characters and situations she encounters. Sometimes this gaze seems directed inwards, towards memory or reflection; at other times it points us out, beyond the frame. The end of the film sees her seated between Sonny and Ashlee, and holding one of the chicks Teardrop has left, but still gazing outwards. It is an ending that points to the limitations not only in Campbell’s account of the heroic quest, but also in Ricoeur’s, when we seek to apply them to the female hero. Ree’s re-emergence from the ‘land of dreams’ may, as Ricoeur suggests, inaugurate a new beginning, but she cannot, as with Campbell’s male hero, ‘restore the world’. The patriarchal world beyond the Ozarks remains intact: the only options it has offered Ree have been deeply gendered: the masculine world of the army or the feminine world of babies and childcare. Within her own world, Sonny, the film has suggested, will follow the masculine code of his relatives, and Ree’s own role remains maternal. If her journey, like the quest narratives outlined by Ricoeur, has represented an ‘interplay between being able to act and being bound to the world order’ (1981: 172–3), the world order that she re-enters is patriarchal, and largely unchanged. At seventeen, her future may still be that of Megan (Casey Maclaren) or Merab. As Ricoeur reminds us, however, all narratives stretch both forwards and back, involving both the backward move of memory and the forwards movement of action and change. The film’s moments of stillness, when Ree seems to gaze beyond the frame, have always suggested both movements and, despite its qualifications, it is on one of these moments – and the suggestion, in Ashlee, of a specifically female inheritance – that the film ends. Granik’s film, like those of Reichardt and Greenwald, has reversed the emphasis of the Western genre it references, overturning its relentless linear drive and substituting a sense of space as at once immense and intensely, and tactilely, lived.

FIGURE 1.7  The film’s ending. (Winter’s Bone, 2010) 46

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Notes   1 For Freud’s concept of ‘dream work’ see Freud 1976/1900, pp. 381–51.   2 See, for example, Campbell (2013) on the ‘post-Western’.   3 Terminology in this area is extremely problematic. I use ‘Indian’ wherever this is the term employed in my sources, usually in quotation marks. Elsewhere I use Native American, though this term, too, is sometimes seen as problematic.   4 Welter’s definition is drawn from a study of magazines, sermons, cookbooks, gift books and novels published between 1820 and 1860.   5 This figure was particularly popular in the late 1920s and 1930s, when a number of statues were erected in her honour. In his comments on the unveiling of one of these in 1930, President Herbert Hoover celebrated frontier women as vessels of ‘moral refinement’. See Casey (2010: 94).   6 From 1848, women’s rights conventions were held annually until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, all in the Eastern states but with an influence that spread more broadly. See Wellman (2004).   7 McCammon and Campbell (2001) point out that the first states to grant votes to women were almost all Western, a fact they attribute to a combination of the activist strategies of the Western suffrage movements and the political and gendered opportunities existing there.   8 Jim Kitses argues that the Western’s paradigmatic narrative arc is ‘the movement of a god-like figure into the demonic wasteland, the death and resurrection, the return to a paradisal garden’ (1969: 20).   9 See http://www.oregonhistorictrailsfund.org/trails/meek-cutoff-1845/. 10 Quoted by the Oregon Historical Trails fund. See http://www. oregonhistorictrailsfund.org/trails/meek-cutoff-1845/. 11 In The Searchers it is this quality of Wayne’s character, Ethan Edwards, that is constantly emphasized, and one that distinguishes him from both the settlers and the Indians. 12 This shot appears in both Wagon Master and The Big Trail. 13 In The Searchers the rocking chair is the symbol of the home that is restored at the end of the film. 14 See Solnit (2003). 15 This is how the pioneer mother was represented in the statues of the 1920s and 30s. See n4. above. 16 Many of the nineteenth-century American feminists began their activism within the anti-slavery movement. See Schneir (1972). 17 Mitchell is using ‘genre’ here to distinguish between poetry and painting, the temporal and the spatial arts, but I am extending his argument to include the contemporary use of the term to mean a category within an art or entertainment form. 18 See Freud, ‘Femininity’ (1991a/1933). See also Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire (1987), and Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t (1984, especially pp. 131–4) for commentaries on the Freudian journey to femininity. 19 See Garber (1992: 189). WILDERNESS SPACES

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20 The scene is played out to the song ‘A Woman’s Touch’, which asserts the magical power of femininity to transform a cabin into a home. With this transformation, however, we also see that of Calam, transformed in a series of dissolves from a buckskin-wearing, gun-toting figure who performs masculine tasks (wielding saw and hammer) into a seated feminine drinker of tea who has learned that ‘the pies and cakes/that a woman bakes/can make a fella/ tell her/ that he loves her very much’. 21 Katie is in fact a maid whom Calam mistakes for the famous actress/singer for whom she works. 22 Peggy Pascoe (1999) writes that ‘the first western miscegenation law was passed by Texas in 1837, the last more than a century later, by Utah in 1939’ (1999: 217). Such laws, she adds, were specific in prohibiting only ‘marriages between groups designated as “white” and groups designated, in effect, as not “white”’ (ibid.: 224 n4). 23 In the interestingly named The Ballad of Josie (1967), in which Doris Day plays a widow who sets up a sheep farm in ‘cattle country’, the statement is made repeatedly by the male characters, where it is given its more usual symbolic associations. Sheep are feminine; cattle, more demanding, are masculine. At the end of the film, after many proclamations of independence, Day gives up both her sheep farm and her blue jeans in favour of a dress and marriage. 24 See, for example, Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948). 25 Pam Cook is describing The Searchers’ Ethan Edwards. 26 As Stella Bruzzi has pointed out (1997: 184), Jo’s image – now encapsulated on the film’s DVD cover – bears a striking resemblance to that of Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter (1972): same coat, same stance, gun in hand, same colours and same gaze into the distance from beneath the Western hat. 27 The ‘end of the girl’s journey, if successful, will bring her to the place where the boy will find her, like Sleeping Beauty, awaiting him, Prince Charming. For the boy has been promised, by the social contract he has entered into at his Oedipal phase, that he will find woman waiting at the end of his journey.’ (De Lauretis, 1984: 133) 28 Battersby herself, in the course of seeking to radically re-think the sublime, asks, ‘Should the sublime have a future?’ (2007: 14), a question that she does not quite answer. 29 Conley cites psychoanalyst Guy Rosolato to claim that the ‘sublime force of the landscape is built on an erotic, maternal object emerging into visibility and perception’ (2006: 295). 30 Sisco reports that she also modified the song. Asked to record it for the film, she agreed provided that she could change its racist lyrics. See Silverman (2011). 31 Michael Moon and Colin Talley, in their review of the film (2010), refer to its area as a ‘shatter zone’, a term which originates in geology but by analogy is extended here to mean out-of-the-way and unstable border areas largely outside state rule. 32 The argument that this journey is also a journey into the unconscious is one that is frequently made. See for example Zipes (1986). 33 See, for example, the description of the sea witch’s forest in Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’:

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The bushes and trees looked like gigantic polyps that were half plant and half animal. They looked like snakes with hundreds of heads, but they grew out of the ground. Their branches were long slimy arms, and they had fingers as supple

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as worms; every limb was in constant motion from the root to the utmost point. Everything they could reach they grasped, and never let go of it again. (1995: 160) 34 Both the distinctions and the relations between myth and folktale are complex and contested, as Robert Scholes, James Phelan and Robert Kellogg (2006), in their study of narrative, point out. Insofar as both arise from oral tradition and feature centrally the quest narrative, I am not distinguishing between them here. 35 Barbara Creed (2007) has proposed the existence of an alternative female version of Campbell’s monomyth – the ‘neomyth’ – in which the female hero confronts the ‘paternal symbolic order’ and in so doing acquires a new identity, which may in turn place her outside patriarchal society: an ideal model might be Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991). The model, however, is extremely broad and seems more concerned to recuperate mainstream cinematic journeys than to analyse women’s alternative representations. 36 A more open account of the archetypal quest narrative is provided by Northrop Frye’s description of romance. It is characterized, he writes, by the pattern of descent and return, but its theme is ‘the discovery of the real relation between the chief characters and their parents’ (1976: 122). In it, the relationship between fathers and daughters is central. In his (1987) essay on Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing (1972), Charles Berryman has argued that its narrative, in which a daughter journeys back into the Canadian wilderness in search of her father, is a variant on the romance narrative as described by Frye. Finally finding his corpse at the bottom of a lake, Atwood’s protagonist is released, able to return to the city with her unborn child, with a renewed ability to love and trust. Yet, though suggestive, this too is not quite Ree’s journey, or its ending. 37 In their confrontation in the barn it is this mirroring – the two women wear identical plaid shirts – that most clearly signals Merab’s conflicted loyalties.

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50

2  CITY SPACES

‘Women’, writes Deborah Parsons, ‘are rarely present in the city of myth; rather they are personified as the mythic city itself, a landscape for the hero to explore and conquer’ (2000: 222). In Western thought, as Elizabeth Wilson argues, the idea of the city constitutes one half of a structural pairing. ‘The very possibility of the city implies its contrast to nature, rural life or the wilderness’, she writes; the city ‘cannot exist without its opposite’. The structure she outlines is a familiar one. The space of Nature – pure, innocent, beautiful, uncharted, but also primitive, wild and uncivilized – is set against the place of Culture – rational, civilized, industrialized, mapped, but also complex and subject to temptation and excess. It is, adds Wilson, a profoundly gendered structure: ‘mapped on to the opposition of city and country, culture and nature, is male and female: man is culture and woman is the earth’ (1991: 16–17). As Wilson and others have made clear, however, it is not quite a simple opposition. The city itself, as both space and concept, is riven by internal oppositions, and its relationship to the wilderness is not only one of ambivalence but one in which continuities as well as contrasts can be traced. The city, then, is conceived as a male space, one that in the period of accelerated urbanization that characterized nineteenth-century modernity came to be identified with a sophisticated urban consciousness. Its public sphere of work, politics, citizenship and urban leisure pursuits is a masculine one, increasingly separated in modernity from the privatized feminine domestic sphere where men find relaxation and in which women are contained (Wolff 1985; Fraser 1989a). This, however, is the constructed city, and its masculine identifications are complicated by two factors. The first is that as space the city as much as the wilderness is identified with the feminine. Sue Best, drawing on the work of Elizabeth Grosz, has pointed to the persistent identification of individual cities with the sexualized female body: now veiled, as in Benjamin’s description of Paris (1978: 156); now openly sexual, as in Baudrillard’s New York (2010: 14–15); now a simulacrum of the white female body, as in Jean-François Lyotard’s Los Angeles (1989: 64). It is an argument developed by Elizabeth Mahoney. ‘The persistence and currency of these contradictory representations of femininity in (and as) the

city’, she writes (1997: 173), have their origins in the philosophical conceptions of time and space which spatialize the feminine, and particularly the maternal body, as, in Grosz’s words, ‘an abyss, as unfathomable, lacking, enigmatic, veiled, seductive, voracious, dangerous and disruptive’ (1995: 124). In what Andrew Thacker (2003: 6) calls ‘the great triad of modernism, the metropolis and imperialism’, the constructed order of the modern city, with its architectural, economic and social ambitions, is erected upon, and paradoxically dependent on, those other, feminized spaces of the city – disordered, disruptive and dangerous – which it seeks to repress, banish or marginalize. This double aspect of the city is the subject of Richard Sennett’s history of the body and the city in Western civilization, Flesh and Stone, though he does not gender it as Mahoney does. The city, he writes, ‘has served as a site of power, its spaces made coherent and whole in the image of man himself ’. But he adds that the city ‘has also served as the space in which these master images have cracked apart’ (1996: 25). His analysis echoes the terminology of Michel Foucault, who was to have been a collaborator on the book, but where Sennett traces the architectural constructions which were the agents of that coherence, Foucault’s analysis links these architectural shifts to regimes of seeing, to the shift to what Foucault calls ‘un régime panoptique’. Jeremy Bentham’s (1791) device of the panopticon, in which an unseen viewer exercises surveillant power over a number of confined and controlled subjects, became Foucault’s model for the disciplinary society of modernity. Bentham, writes Foucault, ‘invented a technology of power designed to solve the problems of surveillance’. His panopticon served ‘the dream of a transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness, … zones of disorder’ (1980: 148, 152). Power was invested in the surveillant gaze, discipline internalized through the imagined exposure to external scrutiny. Sennett’s ‘coherent city’ is for Foucault achieved through (the fantasy of) an omnipotent voyeuristic gaze and effected through the architecture of the modern city, the control of urban space. There is, writes Foucault, a ‘whole history remain[ing] to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be a history of powers … – institutional architecture from the classroom to the design of hospitals’ (ibid.: 149). For Michel de Certeau, writing of the late twentieth-century city, this coherent city is the ‘Concept-city’, ‘simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity’ (1984: 95). A version of Henri Lefebvre’s ‘abstract space’,1 it is the city viewed from above – de Certeau describes the view of Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center – a perspective anticipated in the work of mediaeval or Renaissance painters. Whereas their ‘totalizing eye … created gods’, however, today the same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing … the utopia that yesterday was only painted. The 1370 foot high tower that serves 52

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as a prow for Manhattan continues to construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its unique mobility in a transparent text. (ibid.: 92) This city, he writes, is characterized by three operations: by the production of ‘une espace propre’ (its own space/a clean and proper space); by the flattening out of tradition into synchronicity; and by the creation of the idea of city as subject – a universalizing subject which rejects as ‘waste’ everything that cannot be incorporated into its functionalist identity. Against this ‘Concept-city’ de Certeau sets ‘the lived space, … the disquieting familiarity’ of the city (ibid.: 96). Here we find ‘a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places’ (ibid.: 103). This other city is encountered at ground level, through walking, or wandering, not gazing. De Certeau distinguishes between place, which he sees as ‘proper’, distinguishable, stable – a part of the Concept-city – and space, defined as ‘a practiced place’: mobile, multiple and complex. Whereas place, in this definition, is delineated by the map, the view from above, space is experienced, and narrativized, as a ‘tour’. Space, the tour, is the ‘condition of possibility’ of the map, but the map, like the city ‘a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together’, wins out; it ‘colonizes space’ (ibid.: 117–21). Against this colonization, de Certeau’s own emphasis is on the walker or wanderer and their subversive reappropriation of space; on ‘the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline”’ (ibid.: xiv–xv); on the tour, not the plan, of the city. De Certeau’s postmodern city walker does, however, mobilize another kind of gaze: the distracted and localized gaze of the ‘window shopper’ (ibid.: 97). In this, his wanderer is heir to the archetypal figure of urban modernity, the flâneur. Benjamin’s flâneur, central to his vision of nineteenth-century Paris as the city of modernity, and exemplified for him in the work of Charles Baudelaire, was not quite the tactician of the everyday that de Certeau describes. Like de Certeau’s walker, however, he is a mobile figure of the streets: the ‘crowd is his element. … amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite’ (Baudelaire 1995: 9). He too, as Parsons writes, is a ‘moving observer, indeed more specifically a walking observer’ (2000: 224). A ‘window shopper’, watching and browsing and then moving on, his interactions with others are fleeting and fragmentary. He is also, as Janet Wolff (1985) and others have pointed out, quite clearly male, his freedom to move, unobserved, around the city marking his masculinity. To be a female streetwalker, a public woman, is to be a prostitute; though she too walks the streets, she does so, as Benjamin writes, as ‘saleswoman and wares in one’ (1978: 157). Thus when Benjamin uses the image of the prostitute as emblematic of the city, it is as a figure available to the flâneur – for consumption or contemplation – not as his like. The flâneur, writes Parsons, ‘eroticizes and fetishizes both woman and city’ (2000: 77): CITY SPACES

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Baudelaire’s woman of the streets has ‘eyes like shops to lure their trade’; she is a commodity whose power is ‘borrowed’ (quoted in Friedberg 1993: 34). To return, therefore, to the factors that complicate the city’s masculine identifications, if the first is the feminization of the city as space, the second is the fact that, as the comparison with the shop window begins to suggest, and as de Certeau’s account of the postmodern street walker has uneasily to acknowledge,2 the urban window shopper is not exclusively male. If, as Wilson writes, ‘in the discussion of urban life … it almost seems as though to be a woman – an individual, not part of a family or kin group – in the city, is to become a prostitute’ (1991: 8), then she and others have also pointed to the fact that women were in reality increasingly present in the nineteenth-century city, as workers3 and as shoppers. The department store can be dated from virtually the same moment (the 1850s) as the great exhibitions described by Benjamin, part of the same expansion of public space and spectacle. Built as ‘fantasy palaces’, with ‘open staircases and galleries, ornate iron work, huge areas of glass in domed roofs and display windows, mirrored and marble walls’ (Nava 1997: 66), the department stores drew on the conventions of theatre and exhibitions and were visited as tourist attractions. Anonymous yet acceptable public spaces, they ‘opened up for women a range of new opportunities and pleasures – for independence, fantasy, unsupervised social encounters, even transgression’ (ibid.: 69). Thus if the flâneur can be seen as the prototype for the urban consumer, the rise of the consumer creates the possibility of a specifically female flânerie. Women and the feminine have, then, a complex relationship to the idea of the city. As nature, they are its opposite. As custodians (and prisoners) of the private sphere, they must be excluded from it as protection from its dangers. As space, they are that which it is built upon and against, and which it must conquer. As principle of disorder and seduction, they represent that which the built city cannot include – what it represses, renders abject, marginalizes – but which it cannot expel. In the modern city they are its crowds – Parsons quotes Le Bon’s assertion that ‘crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics’ (2000: 45) – and masses, the hysterical, emotional multitude against which the rational, observant flâneur can be contrasted. They are its commodities, its temptations, its seductions and its diseases. Nineteenth-century London, writes Wilson, was seen as ‘cesspool city’, its unhealthy overcrowding merging with the threats of prostitution and crime to create the idea of a ‘moral miasma’ (1991: 39). In the Western imagination, she writes, ‘women have become an irruption in the city, a symptom of disorder and a problem: the Sphinx in the city’ (ibid.: 9). Yet, as both Wilson and Parsons make clear, women were present in modernity’s city as observers, as well as workers and shoppers. If the city is ‘a place of growing threat and paranoia to men’, writes Wilson, it ‘might be a place of liberation for women’ (ibid.: 7). Parsons is more specific, charting women’s ‘increasingly autonomous and observing presence’ (2000: 43) in the writing of novelists such as Amy Levy, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf. Woolf, for example, writes 54

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of the ‘adventure’ of ‘street haunting’: ‘the greatest pleasure of town life in winter – rambling the streets of London’ (1969: 155). All of these novelists, argues Parsons, ‘wrote as flâneuses, for whom the city was irresistible’ (ibid: 223). All of them walked the city streets, ‘moving observers’ for whom the city, with its crowds, its fluidity and its fragmentation, provided both exhilaration and concealment: ‘As an elusive figure in the crowd, the woman can deny voyeuristic objectification – what seems threatening and disconcertingly unclassifiable to the observing male … is protective and usefully concealing for the urban woman’ (ibid.: 226).

City and cinema The department store, the space of new opportunities and pleasures for the nineteenth-century woman, was nevertheless an ambiguous space, ‘neither wholly a public nor quite a private realm’ (Wilson 1985: 144). If the presence of women in the urban street represented a threat, a fear that ‘every woman in the new, disordered world of the city … [might be] a public woman and thus a prostitute’ (Wilson 1992: 93), this fear was countered by rendering the department store a ‘home from home’. The stores provided restrooms and tearooms so that women could spend the day there, and were organized, as Rachel Bowlby notes, like ‘a large, well-ordered domestic establishment’ (1987: 191), with shop assistants trained to behave like deferential domestic servants. Thus not only were women in the public space of the city ambiguously positioned as both consumer and potential object of consumption; while they entered the public arena of the department store as consumers of the spectacle it offered, their window-shopping was carried out in an environment that seemed constantly to return them to the domestic. A similar ambiguity characterized the public spectacle machines that were the forerunners of the cinema. The nineteenth-century, writes Giuliana Bruno, ‘witnessed the proliferation of spectacles offering simulated travel experiences’ (2002: 161). The panorama and diorama, part of the ‘frenzy of the visible’ that for Jean-Louis Comolli (1980: 122) characterizes urban modernity, brought landscape and exotic travel into the city. In the panorama, writes Benjamin, the city itself ‘dilates to become landscape’ (1978: 150). Installed in public viewing sites, these new devices allowed their audiences to become viewers of, and imaginary travellers through, both city and foreign land. If, as Ann Henley suggests, women achieve identity ‘not by belonging to but by being free from place’ (1992: 81–2), then these new spectacular machines, whose audiences were often dominated by women (Bruno 2002: 161), allowed them, at least in imagination, to become voyageuses, and in so doing acquire freedom, mobility and autonomous selfhood. This freedom, however, no less than the liberation represented by the department store, was ambiguous. For if these new devices promised to transport their spectators, writes Anne Friedberg, they were also dependent on these spectators’ relative immobility. Indeed CITY SPACES

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as the ‘mobility’ of the gaze became more ‘virtual’ – as techniques were developed to paint (and then to photograph) realistic images, as mobility was implied by changes in lighting (and then cinematography) – the observer became more immobile, passive, ready to receive the constructions of a virtual reality placed in front of his or her unmoving body. (1993: 28) For Benjamin, panoramic viewers resembled the flâneur in their observation of the city (1978: 150), a suggestion that Bruno echoes. Whereas the flâneur is himself mobile, however – Susan Sontag suggests that his true heir is the street photographer (1977: 55) – the panoramic spectator is offered only the illusion of mobility. Both Friedberg and Bruno are of course anticipating cinema in their accounts, and their difference of emphasis reflects the extent to which they find liberatory potential for women in the act of cinematic viewing. For Bruno, ‘the anatomy of movement that early film engendered is particularly linked to notions of flânerie, urban “streetwalking”’, so that early film viewing ‘became an imaginary form of flânerie, an activity that was … fully open to women’ (2002: 17). Friedberg, however, is less sanguine. As successor to nineteenth-century panoramic devices, she writes, ‘it is this notion of the confined place combined with a notion of journey that is present simultaneously in cinematic spectation’ (1993: 29). Today, the successors to the panorama and the department store, the ‘multiplex cinema and the shopping mall’, similarly ‘sell the pleasures of imaginary mobility as psychic transformation’ (ibid.: xi, my emphasis). Whereas Benjamin emphasizes continuity, and Bruno the possibilities for women that cinema’s ‘tour’ – a haptic as well as optical visual journey – can provide, for Friedberg it is the contradictory and ambivalent nature of both cinema and the city that is most apparent. If cinema spectatorship is marked ‘from the start’ by ‘the production of a virtual elsewhere and elsewhen’, she writes, then it is equally marked by ‘the commodification of a gaze that is mobilized in both time and space’ (ibid.: 179). The history of the city is also a history of cinematic spectatorship, and both are marked by ambivalence. The ‘spectator-shopper’ can not only fulfil the desire for temporal and spatial mobility, but can try on identities, including gender identities. But this is a privatized dream-world. In the material space of the city, the mall shopperspectator, strolling through ‘a phantasmagoric array of commodified images and experiences’, still finds that ‘parking [is] a necessary physical prerequisite to the imaginary mobilities of such flânerie’ (ibid.: xi, my emphasis).

The city in film It is not surprising that these contradictions and ambiguities are played out in cinematic representations. Colin McArthur has mapped the pattern of oppositions that marks such representations, while emphasizing the shifting meanings and 56

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values with which they can be invested. There are ‘few more useful structures’ for understanding the ways in which cities have been represented in film, he writes, ‘than the historically far-reaching city/country opposition’ (1997: 40). It dominates American cinema, he argues, with the country persistently invested with moral worth against the corruption of the city – although ‘country’ may be represented by the small rural town or village as much as by the wilderness. Women commonly stand in for both sets of values, sometimes explicitly, as when the innocent ‘country girl’ is contrasted with the eroticized ‘city girl’, and sometimes implicitly, in the nostalgic longing for an absent rural ‘home’, or the threat of city corruption embodied in an individual. If, as Bruno suggests (2002: 28), specific film genres map particular types of space, then the American ‘urban scenography’ finds its mapping in the gangster film and its related genres, the detective film and film noir, though its nightmare qualities may also be figured in the science-fiction or horror film. The action of the gangster film, writes McArthur, ‘is played out within circumscribed urban milieux: dark streets, dingy rooming houses and office blocks; bars and nightclubs; precinct stations; and luxury penthouses’ (1997: 29). Other national cinemas may play out this opposition differently, but for McArthur the structural opposition that is ideologically hegemonic in American cinema is also replayed in European and non-European cinemas. In British cinema, for example, forms of social realism have characterized the urban film, while ‘country’ values are often depicted in the ‘heritage’ film, with its reaching towards imaginary pre-urban, pre-modern values and ways of life. Both, writes Andrew Higson, are informed by the myth of ‘pastoralism’, with its accompanying sense of home, community and nation. Whereas the heritage film mobilizes this through an imagined unchanging – and rural – national past, however, the ‘documentary realist’ film foregrounds the contemporary and the urban (1995: 274). Antony Easthope has suggested that in Western cinema – he is writing of the 1960s but it is clear that his argument can be extended – we find three possible attitudes towards the represented city. In the first, the city is ‘just there’, naturalized as backdrop; in the second, we find a celebratory or utopian view of the city; in the third, the city becomes a ‘sign and realization of dystopia’ (1997: 131). Not surprisingly, given the structuring oppositions he outlines, for McArthur it is the last of these that dominates. In this vision, the city ideal of modernity has collapsed, become oppressive – like de Certeau’s Concept-city – or become corrupted. Inhuman, fractured, dominated by the ‘abject zones’ (McClintock 1995) that were modernity’s other, this city can no longer sustain belief in ‘une espace propre’. As cinematic space, suggests Easthope, it might be similarly disordered, the conventions of narrative space4 disturbed. For McArthur its opposite, the utopian vision of the city, is far rarer – he can find it in American genre film only in the musical – whereas Easthope locates a more dominant version in the technological city of the 1960s spy thriller, with its vision of scientific mastery. In both dystopian and utopian visions, the woman figures as signifier. In the technological city she stands in for that which the hero will master, the exotic and CITY SPACES

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erotic global ‘city-space’. In the dystopian vision, from the noir city of the gangster to the futuristic city of science-fiction, she is both the lure of the disordered and dangerously sexualized city and the domesticated figure who might be rescued from, or positioned outside, its corruption. In the case of more ‘feminized’ genres – McArthur’s example of the musical, as well as the romantic comedy,5 and its successor, the ‘chick flick’ – the city as utopian space may be identified with its characterization, in an echo of Wilson’s argument, as a space of freedom for women. McArthur describes the way in which, in Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952) the ‘bleak, rainsoaked streets of the film noir’ become a space of freedom and joy (1997: 33). Both Katharine Hepburn’s romantic comedies and those of Doris Day in the late 1950s and early 1960s depict their stars as independent career women, at home in the city (Haskell 1987; Bingham 2006). More recently we can find in the postfeminist ‘chick flick’ a vision of the city that, in Jane Arthurs’s words, has ‘lost the danger of a sadistic or reproving masculine gaze’ but is instead ‘shown to be a place of freedom and safety’ for the genre’s female protagonists (2003: 93). In each case, however, these utopian visions are marked as fantasy, and their female protagonists – as Diane Negra (2009) notes in the case of the ‘chick flicks’ of the 1990s and 2000s – returned ‘home’: to romance, to marriage, and frequently to the ‘hometown’ which is the city’s opposite.

Dark, slick city streets: Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990) At the end of Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), the ‘good girl’, Anne Grayle (Anne Shirley) announces that she hates ‘all men’. But, she adds, ‘I hate their women too … all bubble bath and dewy morning and sunlight. And inside blue steel – cold’. Men, in her tirade, can be of different types (‘Old men, young men, beautiful young men who use rose water, and almost-heels who are private detectives’), but women are duplicitous, their ‘feminine’ innocence masking a ‘masculine’ ruthlessness. Forty-five years later, Kathryn Bigelow’s film both literalizes and inverts this film noir metaphor. Its blue steel is external, not hidden, the phallic femininity it implies a performance not an essence, and its gender ambivalences and transgressions are the subject matter, not the dénouement, of the film. Bigelow’s film is set in New York, where newly graduated cop Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis), on patrol in the streets, shoots and kills an armed supermarket robber. The perpetrator’s gun is stolen by commodities trader Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), one of the shoppers, and, with the gun missing, Megan is suspended for excessive use of force. When the gun is then found to have been used in a series of murders, and Megan’s name to be inscribed on the bullets, she is temporarily reinstated as a detective. Eugene’s obsession with Megan leads him both to 58

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emulate her action in his killings, and at the same time to date her, and this double entanglement, in which Megan is first unknowing and then knowing object of desire, and at the same time investigator/avenger, structures the later parts of the film. The noir world is, famously, the lawless city: below its vertiginous skyscrapers are dark, mean, rain-soaked streets, and behind its grand façades are dingy nightclubs and bars, offices and precinct stations, as well as corrupt and decadent luxury mansions and penthouses. This city is, writes Frank Krutnik, ‘a shadow realm of crime and dislocation in which benighted individuals do battle with implacable threats and temptations’ (1997: 84). Its visual architecture is vertical, contrasting with the wide horizontal spaces of the Western (Schrader 1986: 175), but it is nevertheless, as Krutnik writes, another sort of frontier for the American hero: ‘like the old frontier of the West, it is a readymade venue for spinning out romanticized fictions of male adventure’ (ibid.: 89). Its detective hero is, however, no longer torn between ‘the familial community and the wilderness’ like the hero of the Western; he is a ‘privatized hero’ (ibid.), honourable but detached, fighting corruption but ultimately leaving the city’s lawlessness unchanged. As Krutnik describes him, he is the American heir to the modernist flâneur, a ‘perpetually liminal self who can move freely among the diverse social worlds thrown up by the city, while existing on their margins’ (ibid.: 90). But though his city is still a place of excitement and sexual adventure, it is a darker and more violent place than Benjamin would have recognized. From film noir to Blue Steel is a journey characterized by Linda Ruth Williams as a ‘fluid mutation’: from ‘noir into neo-noir into the erotic thriller, an interconnected chain of categories which, through the 1980s and 1990s, fed in and out of each other’ (2005: 21). Thus Blue Steel has been seen by critics and reviewers as a ‘traditional noir’ (Kutner 2006), as a cross between Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) and Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987) (Ferguson 2008), both themselves characterized elsewhere as ‘classical’ or ‘key’ noirs (Kutner ibid.), and as a ‘Dirty Harriet’ film (Kaplan 1993). For Williams it is part of the post-1980 erotic thriller genre, whose ‘female investigative heroine’ is ‘a hybrid figure, part noirish detective woman, part horror final-girl, dominating the film’s primary point of view and eliciting sympathies appropriate to both hero and quester’ (2005: 127–8). Williams also points to a second line of descent for the genre – as successor not only to the film noir of the 1940s and 50s but also to the female Gothic of the same period. It is in these ‘Paranoid Woman’s Films’ (Doane 1987) that we see the forerunners of the erotic thriller’s homme fatal, and a female protagonist whose exercise of the investigative function, as Doane writes, is often ‘simultaneous with her own victimization’ (1987: 136). The spaces which these earlier ‘victim-heroines’ (Williams 2005: 125) investigate, however, are the dark, hidden spaces of the home. The home or house, writes Doane, borrowing from Freud, ‘connotes not only the familiar but also what is secret, concealed, hidden from sight’ (1984: 73). Mapped onto the iconography CITY SPACES

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of the female body, this investigation of the place of ‘home’ is invested with horror: the woman investigates herself and finds, in Bluebeard fashion, the bloody horror of an abject victimhood. Michael Walker describes this as the ‘home as the noir world’ (1992: 18, my emphasis), and contrasts it with the female protagonist’s forays into the city in the ‘Woman’s Film’, where, as in The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls,1949), the city she encounters is an alien and frightening masculine world whose ‘dark enticements’ (Krutnik 1997: 88) contaminate the woman’s world of home and family. In Blue Steel, however, it is the city and its public and private spaces that constitute the film’s mise en scène. It is not, as in film noir, a labyrinthine city (Dyer 1977; Cawelti 1986), in which the film’s structural complexity is echoed in the web of dark streets through which the hero’s quest leads him. There, it is connections that are emphasized, the threads that link the bars and gambling joints that are the haunts of gangsters and small-time criminals to the homes of the wealthy and powerful at the heart of the corrupt city. In Blue Steel, however, we find a dystopian vision of the split and doubled city of de Certeau. As Eugene takes Megan for a helicopter ride above the city (‘Want to get higher?’), it is de Certeau’s Concept-city that we view. As the helicopter glides above the city at night, we have a vision of order – its rows of lights, its vertical and horizontal grids – and of (phallic)6 power. With the Twin Towers in the distance, we circle slowly round the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, and our journey – and the blue light in which all are bathed – links both, in this elegant aerial dance, to that symbol of the American ideal, the Statue of Liberty. To look down in this way, writes de Certeau, is to possess a ‘totalizing vision’, to be ‘lifted out of the city’s grasp’: One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed … by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic. … His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. … It allows one … to be a solar eye, looking down like a god. (1984: 92) In this pleasure of ‘seeing the whole’, he writes, the ‘fiction of knowledge’ is identified with an erotics of seeing, a ‘lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more’ (ibid.). In Bigelow’s film the point is underscored by the blue steel of the helicopter’s whirring blades, which, like the spinning gun loader of the title sequence, resembles a turning reel of film (Mizejewski 1993: 15–16). This ‘panorama-city’, writes de Certeau, ‘is a “theoretical” (that is visual) simulacrum, in short a picture’ (ibid.: 93), a picture shot through with the erotics of phallic power. ‘Must one finally fall back’, asks de Certeau, ‘into the dark space where crowds move back and forth … ?’ (ibid.: 92). It is this space that forms the under-side of the Concept-city in Blue Steel, and indeed Megan wakes from a nightmare in which she is falling from the helicopter’s ordered heights. Unlike in de Certeau’s vision, however, in which this ‘ground level’ is a world 60

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of ‘everyday practices, … lived space, … intertwined paths’ in which is enacted ‘the plural mobility of goals and desires’ (ibid.: 96–7, xxii), the ‘dark space’ of Blue Steel is one of gridlock and disorder, where access to mobility is stifled, and fear and violence characterize its crowds. In a pair of rhyming sequences at the beginning and end of the film, we move through the streets with Megan, the camera at ground level. What we see are littered pavements and lurid shop windows, snatches of arguments between street gangs, loitering hooded youths and hurrying, fearful passers-by. The supermarket, which for de Certeau is a space in which ‘the housewife confronts heterogeneous and mobile data’ and, in making a ‘tactical’ decision, ‘seizes’ the ‘opportunity’ they offer (ibid.: xix), is here one of fear and threatened violence, so that Megan’s ‘excessive’ reaction to the gunman’s threat – firing six bullets into him and blowing him through the shop’s plate-glass window – can seem to Eugene to represent a transcendence of the street’s threatening disorder. In this disordered world, de Certeau’s self-empowered street walker, heir to Benjamin’s flâneur, is not the hard-boiled detective but the killer, Eugene. It is Eugene who walks the streets, who, like the flâneur, ‘eroticizes and fetishizes both woman and city’ (Parsons 2000: 77), who is approached by prostitutes, who fades into the crowds in the face of Megan’s pursuit. Megan, in contrast, can only walk the streets with freedom when cross-dressed in her cop’s uniform. When, dispossessed of her badge and uniform, she walks down the street as a woman, she is buffeted by passers-by and splashed by the spray from a passing truck, our view of her repeatedly blocked by passing cars. This, then, is a film in which the gendered limitations of de Certeau’s model are made clear. Both Eugene and Megan, at the beginning of the film, work within institutions whose symbolic power within the Concept-city is emphasized. A vertical pan up the Corinthian columns of the neo-classical façade of the New York Stock Exchange building begins with the American flag and ends with the iconic statue of the female figure of Integrity on its marble pediment. Inside, a high-angle shot reveals a red strip of carpet stretching away to the blue and white vertical stripes of window blinds. The carpet strip, however, is littered with paper, and on either side, and blurring its clear lines, is a disorderly crush of rows of male figures. Eugene, when we see him, wears a numbered badge and, wedged in a press of other male traders, shouts aggressively to make his bids. The scene provides a parallel to one of the opening sequences of the film. Here, another strip of red carpet divides the ranks of identical graduating police cadets, as a chorus of male voices repeats the pledge to ‘uphold the constitution of the United States’. Later, a low-angle shot of the interior of the police station reveals another press of anonymous male bodies in a crowded space shot through with blue light. Both Eugene and Megan are anonymous figures within institutions whose exalted façade offers, in de Certeau’s words, to make the city, and the nation it represents, ‘readable’, but whose ‘condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices’ (1984: 93). CITY SPACES

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The gendered city If, however, Megan and Eugene are linked through their positioning as isolated and anonymous figures within institutions of the Concept-city, they are divided both by class – Eugene’s luxury fifteenth floor apartment is contrasted with both Megan’s own tiny apartment and the lower-class suburban house of her parents – and, most crucially, by gender. The transgressive complexities of Megan’s ‘out-of-placeness’ as a female cop, and its cultural and cinematic meanings, are signalled, as critics have pointed out, in the film’s succession of ambivalent opening sequences. In the first, a hand-held camera first anticipates then follows Megan through the narrow, dark corridor of a run-down apartment building as she bursts in upon a scene of domestic violence. In what we discover at its close to be a police training exercise, she ‘shoots’ the husband who is holding a gun to his wife’s head, only to have the wife reach into her bag for a gun and ‘shoot’ Megan, in a move which, in its slow speed and close-up focus, anticipates Eugene’s later appropriation of the robber’s gun. For Cora Kaplan, this simulated scene both reminds us of the fictive nature of film and presents us with a ‘brutal primal scene’7 which Megan, positioned as the Freudian child, ‘misreads’. More than this, her resulting action provokes, as it will in the film’s own narrative, the ensuing violent retribution. But the script for this training exercise, Kaplan reminds us, is ‘written by a police department whose own institutional misogyny will be elaborated later in the film’ (1993: 57). As we discover in the scene in which detective Nick Mann (Clancy Brown) tells his superior a joke about a hooker who, having bitten off a man’s penis in a taxi, ‘sews it on backwards’, a scene in which Megan is present but pointedly excluded, it is male anxiety that produces this notion that women, not men, are the danger to be feared. The scene prepares us for the struggle over vision and the control of looking that we find in the rest of the film, a struggle in which de Certeau’s opposition between the voyeurism of the ‘totalizing eye’ and the casual, tactile glance of the passer-by is replaced by a gendered struggle over what it means to act, and to see, in the city below. Megan is triply positioned in this opening scene. As child, as Kaplan points out, her response is ‘overdetermined by a family history which contains an abusing father and a victimized, passively collusive mother’ (ibid.). She wants to rescue the/her mother. As police officer she performs masculinity (‘Police. Drop it’, says Megan. ‘Help me, officer’ responds the wife). As woman (‘Die, bitch!’ says the husband, as he turns his gun on Megan), her performance is illegitimate and an inevitable failure, while at the same time it renders her, as in Doane’s account of the Paranoid Woman’s Film, and as it will in the remainder of the film, potential victim. In the remaining three of the quartet of opening sequences, this ambivalence of identity and of vision is further displayed. The credit sequence itself has been much discussed. In it, as Kaplan writes, ‘the camera dismembers the gun, caressing the weapon’s rounded surfaces and hollows in a parody of an artily shot sex scene’, at once fetishizing the gun and refusing its exclusively phallic 62

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signification, ‘constructing it as androgyne and cyborg, male and female, body and machine’ (ibid.: 60). In its reference to a spinning reel of film, it reminds us of the constructed nature – and the lure – of all such fetishized images. The sequence ends with the gun being firmly pushed into its holster, to be replaced as gendertransgressive fetish by Megan’s fragmented body – lacy bra under tight-fitting police shirt. If the sequence insists on this equivalence, however – it is Megan’s gun that is fetishized, not the leather-handled Magnum 44 which Eugene appropriates – it also offers a quite different meaning to Megan’s masquerade of masculinity, in her own cross-dressing pleasure. It is a pleasure that Kaplan describes as ‘jouissance … the diffuse erotics of the cross-dressed body’ (1993: 62). As the intercutting of the graduation ceremony with the family snaps of its participants emphasizes, Megan cannot be one of the boys, a cop like the others. In her own photographs, her ‘family’ is borrowed, her position in it ambivalently Oedipal (she plays both ‘son’ and ‘husband’). But her performance is self-consciously playful, her pleasure in it evident. Told by Tracy (Elizabeth Peña) to ‘Act like a cop’ for the photograph of the two of them taken by Tracy’s husband, she adopts the pose of the ‘husband’ of the training exercise, her arm around Tracy’s neck, her hand mimicking the gun to her head. The pleasure of both women in this cross-dressing play is clear, and as Linda Mizejewski comments, the image, with its lesbian nuances, ‘clearly disrupts what otherwise seems to be the picturing of a masculinist, heterosexual institution’ (1993: 16). The last of the four opening sequences introduces us to the New York streets. A montage of shots emphasizes their masculinity – gridlocked cars, old men playing chess, young men playing basketball and the blurred figures of passers-by who are largely male. Here for the only time in the film, Megan, dressed in her uniform, is a flâneur, her pleasure in her swaggering possession of the street evident. When the

FIGURE 2.1  Megan and Tracy. (Blue Steel, 1990) CITY SPACES

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camera focuses on two young women who stop to give her admiring looks, they become passantes – the women of the crowd encountered fleetingly in the street by Benjamin’s flâneur, who bring to the ‘urban poet’ a ‘moment of enchantment’ (1999b: 166). The moment, however, is short-lived. As the janitor greets her with ‘Look at you … Very, er, you know’, we are returned to the quality of masquerade in her performance, to her own ambivalent ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, and, as she enters her apartment, takes off her hat, and listens to the message from her mother, to the identity of child as well as woman that lies beneath it. The city streets of New York are characterized by two qualities: the threatening masculine possession of their space, and the isolation of the film’s protagonist within them. Detective Nick Mann, characterizing the city, says that what he loves about this ‘town’ is that ‘You could throw a stick up in the air and it would come down on a taxi or an ambulance’. For him the taxi, as we saw from his earlier joke, is a space of anonymous and mobile sex. For Megan, however, it is isolating and potentially dangerous. Repeatedly, as we see her in a taxi with Eugene, or in a car alone or with Nick, the crowds that in the earlier sequence provided the admiring passantes now blur into an anonymous, rain-streaked backcloth, leaving her, in the words of Cynthia Fuchs (undated), ‘entombed’. If the urban streets carry a masculine threat for Megan as woman/child, then the suburbs, their traditional opposite and home to both Megan’s parents and to Tracy and her family, are also unsafe. Tracy’s outdoor party is the one sequence shot in bright light and full colour. Here Megan dresses in skirt and bobby socks, and it is her identity as cop that is out of place, unspeakable. To potential boyfriend Howard, such an identity is at once impossible (‘You’re a good looking woman. Beautiful in fact. Why would you want to become a cop?’) and, perhaps, alarmingly concealed, like her gun, beneath her feminine clothing. But the scenes with Megan’s parents make it clear that here, too, is the threat of male violence, hidden behind doors no less than in the city apartment of the training exercise. It is this scenario – her father’s abuse of her mother – that is the origin of Megan’s decision to become a cop. When she is asked for the third time in the film her reasons for doing so, her reply – her only serious response – is ‘Him’, an answer which conflates her father and Eugene, while also ranging far more widely. But it is equally clear that her Oedipal solution cannot work. Its impossibility is expressed in her father’s incredulous ‘I’ve got a goddam cop for a daughter’, in which the two terms are clearly incommensurable. She cannot arrest her father – when he weakens she takes him home – and his absence from the home permits its penetration by Eugene. As Eugene performs for her mother the role of eligible suitor, the man that Megan cannot be, Megan herself, as at Tracy’s party, must be a girl. Her assumed masculinity is operational only in the city. In the city it is at first only with Eugene that we see Megan perform femininity. To be feminine, however, is to be weak, and Megan is once more infantilized in this role. Cajoling her out of the rain into a taxi, in a standard romantic move, Eugene sees her first as child – she is ‘Dorothy’, caught in the storm – and then, 64

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in a further diminution: ‘You were wet, cold. You reminded me of a cat I used to have. I couldn’t resist’. When, later, we see the third instance of the pose we saw performed earlier – gunman with his arm round a woman’s throat – we are reminded just how victimizing femininity can be. This time Megan’s role is not that of the masculine cop/gunman; it is she who is seized and held. Thus feminized, she can save neither herself nor Tracy, the unambiguously feminine victim. Later, when Megan’s feminine passivity returns, this time with Nick, the result is Nick’s near-fatal shooting and her own rape. It is not, however, with Megan as woman/girl that Eugene is obsessed. It is her transcendence of divisions between ‘androgyne and cyborg, male and female, body and machine’ that constitutes for him her ‘brightness’, and which he wants to both mirror and, in a further transcendence, be. It is a transcendence in which the power of the gun is also the power of seeing. ‘You shot him without blinking an eye’, says Eugene, as he reveals his obsession. For him, the power of the ‘celestial eye’ (de Certeau 1984: 92) is one with the narrowed vision of the gun sights, and it is a power he both wants to share with Megan, as he shares the helicopter’s totalizing view, and, in seeing her, possess. As Laura Rascaroli (1997: 241) points out, Eugene begins the sentence, ‘The first time I saw you … ’ twice, claiming possession of her ‘brightness’ – it becomes his brightness, his ‘radiance’ – through that act of perception. The film, as critics have argued (Kaplan 1993; Rascaroli 1997; Ferguson 2008) becomes a struggle for control of vision, both at the level of narrative – Megan and Eugene oscillate between the roles of subject and object of vision, subject and object of the gun – and more broadly, in cinematic terms. Since both gun and helicopter, as we have seen, are identified with the camera/ film reel, this conflict is also one between generic conventions and their gendered transgression. What is seen through these conflicting structures of vision is the city. As Concept-city Eugene identifies with it but fails to be the ‘voyeur-god’ that de Certeau’s ‘panorama-city’ implies. As disordered noir city, he is its flâneur. Megan, however, can walk the city only as a man, and her attempts to see into its dark spaces are persistently compromised by her femininity. She is continually returned to the status of object of vision, by Nick, who wants to position her with ‘high visibility’ and who constantly watches her, as well as by Eugene. In the masculine logic of both characters and genre, it is Megan, the woman in the city, who unleashes Eugene’s violence. Megan’s alternative reading, that violence is precipitated by men, is at once delegitimized, as we saw in the training exercise, and, in the film, confirmed. The final sequences of the film see Megan, once more in uniform, again empowered to walk the city’s streets. In an echo of the post-credits sequence, we view her body once again as fragmented, as she puts on uniform and gun. This time, however, the clothes are stolen and the effect different. As she pulls on the too-large uniform, the camera blurs with the speed of her actions; it is the activity of this body, not its fetishized eroticism, which is emphasized. In her unblinking focus, she has become the masculinized ‘final girl’ of the slasher movie.8 Now, as CITY SPACES

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she walks the streets, Megan has the ‘eyes in the back of your head’ demanded from her in the training sequence – she senses Eugene behind her, turns, and fires. Her borrowed masculinity empowers her to control the space of the streets, and restores to her an appearance of wholeness. It is clear, however, that this is an ultimately untenable masquerade. In the sequence that precedes her appropriation of the uniform, we see her in hospital gown, curled up like a child and dwarfed by the hospital apparatus, her face and body split by the shadow that falls across them. The oversized clothes, writes Kaplan, both ‘emphasize her femininity’ and ‘make her look like a child dressing up’ (1993: 65): the uniform is completed with scuffed white sneakers, not dress shoes. Her subsequent performance is also, as Kaplan points out, an endorsement of Eugene’s vision of her. In the chase sequences, a series of shots – of the subway train, of a car bonnet and car window – echo the horizontal blue and silver lines of the credit sequence. As the camera blurs Megan’s face and body, reducing our vision of her to her gun, she becomes the destructive ‘brightness’ of Eugene’s fantasizing gaze. In the film’s closing shots, the diffuse blue light that has characterized the police sequences circles around Megan, once more isolating her. The gun, which we see fall in slow motion once again, this time unclaimed, is removed, and Megan herself is led away, part helpless child, part prisoner – to be punished, we assume, for her excessive performance of masculinity. Blue Steel presents us with a female hero who, in seeking to claim the self-empowerment within urban space of the flâneur, transgresses generic and cultural boundaries. The result is a bravura and eroticized cross-gendered performance which insists on the performativity of both gender and genre. Her rebellion, however, is only possible within and against the dominant structures of seeing embodied in everything condensed within Megan’s casual ‘Him’. Like the noir hero, she leaves unchanged the city’s institutional structures and its street violence – though both are now clearly identified with an

FIGURE 2.2  Megan as child. (Blue Steel, 1990) 66

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oppressive masculinity. But, infantilized in the final shots, Megan’s fate suggests that the price a woman pays for such a ‘reckless’ (Kaplan 1993: 65) appropriation of the city’s masculinity is the loss of a legible identity.

Looking at the city: Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006) In ‘Space, Place, Spectacle’ (1984), his exploration of the importance of ‘place’ in British social realist cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Andrew Higson writes of the ‘country/city distinction’ which permeates these films. Their protagonists, he writes, ‘are all metaphorically imprisoned in the “squalid” city, and long for the “freedom” and “open space” of the countryside’ (1984: 12). Against the urban context of factories, terraced streets and alleyways, canals and dockyards which dominates the films, are set brief scenes of pleasure achieved through escape into ‘a countryside invested with a sense of romance’ (ibid.: 13). The films are thus structured according to a set of oppositions – between urban and rural, imprisonment and escape, the everyday and romance. But this ‘system of differences’ is also, suggests Higson, mapped onto another, more implicit, set of oppositions: between a particularly British cinematic realism characterized by location shooting and an emphasis on the contemporary and the social, and its other, the escapism of Hollywood. Each successive realist movement in British cinema, he writes elsewhere, has been characterized in this way by a ‘commitment to the exploration of contemporary social problems, and for its working out of those problems in relation to “realistic” landscapes and characters’ (1986: 95). Higson traces this tradition back to the naturalist writing of the late nineteenth century described by Raymond Williams (1973), and it is on Williams’s influential definition of realism that he draws for his account. Realism, writes Williams, is a particularly slippery term. In part this is because, in cultural production, realism can describe both intention – ‘to show things as they really are’ – and method (1976: 258–62). In his ‘Lecture on Realism’, Williams argues that in this latter sense realism has come to have four defining characteristics. The first three – an emphasis on the secular, on the contemporary and on the ‘socially extended’ – he dates back to the eighteenth century, and the development of ‘rationalism, of the scientific attitude, [and] of historical attitudes towards society’ (1977: 64). The fourth is more recent, and emerges with the commitment to ‘social extension’ – now identified with representation of the working classes. Realism, he writes, and in particular British social realism, has been characterized by its ‘progressive’ political intent. As Higson argues, this emphasis on social realism is bound up with a particular concept of British national identity. British cinema from the 1930s onwards was seen as serious, socially responsible and engaged, in opposition to the irresponsible CITY SPACES

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cinema of spectacle and escapism that threatened from America, and its focus on the urban working class was, in successive waves of realism, an attempt to deal with the state of the nation. Thus the ‘new wave’ films of the late 1950s and 60s drew, in both form and content, on Richard Hoggart’s argument in The Uses of Literacy (1957) that in post-war industrial Britain ‘we are moving towards’ the creation of an Americanized ‘mass culture; that the remnants of what was at least in part an urban culture “of the people” are being destroyed; that the new mass culture is in some important ways less healthy than the often crude culture it is replacing’ (1958: 24). Their working-class male heroes, representatives of a moment of economic, social and cultural change, struggle to escape their urban imprisonment, in a restless movement that is ambiguously caught, like Hoggart’s own response, between a striving for a new individualism identified with social mobility (Hoggart was himself a scholarship boy) and nostalgia for a lost ‘wholeness’: the unity of a now-disappearing urban working-class culture. John Hill, in a series of books and essays, tracks this identification from the 1960s through to the 1990s. In the 1990s, he argues, the idea of working-class community continues to be ‘mobilised … as a metaphor for the state of the nation’ and to ‘give voice to a certain yearning for “national wholeness”’ (2000: 183–4), now in response to the divisions and deindustrialization of the Thatcher years. Both Higson and Hill emphasize the importance of place in the British social realist films of the 1950s and 60s. It is, writes Hill, ‘place rather than action which assumes importance’ in these films (1986: 131). It is also in their representations of place that, for Higson, we can most clearly see the films’ ambivalence towards the urban working-class world they depict. He identifies ‘three sets of shots’ that are important in relation to the city/country oppositions they set up. The first are ‘shots within the city’: exterior shots of streets, canals, the workplace or the pub. The second group is of rural settings – the spaces of imagined escape. The final group, and the most important for Higson’s argument, is one he calls, following a contemporary review, ‘That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill’. This is ‘a sort of in-between stage’, where we, with the protagonist, are ‘above the city’, looking down on a cityscape which, with distance, has become beautiful (1984: 13). It is a shot whose self-conscious poeticism points to the ambivalence of the films’ perspective. While their working-class protagonists are returned to an environment whose lost ‘wholeness’ is lamented, the perspective of these shots is not theirs but that of a distanced observer, one who has escaped: it is, after all, ‘only from a class position outside the city that the city can appear beautiful’ (ibid.: 18). Adapting de Certeau, we might add that it is only from this lofty position that the city can be a ‘Concept-city’ – that it can come to stand in for ‘the state of the nation’. These are, however, exclusively masculine conflicts. As Terry Lovell points out, the street, the workplace and the pub are ‘masculine spaces’. The domestic spaces with which women are identified represent a lure and a threat for the male protagonist – the lure of sexuality and the double threat of domestication and 68

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consumerism. When these films do feature a female protagonist, as in A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961), she fits uneasily into a structure of oppositions which function to deny her the position of subject.9 Her journey becomes a cyclical one, repeating, like the women in the other ‘new wave’ films, the pattern established by her mother. In her essay ‘Landscapes and Stories in 1960s British Realism’ (1990), Lovell points out that the viewer best placed to occupy the position of distanced contemplation described by Higson is ‘Hoggart’s scholarship boy: the adult working-class male looking back with nostalgia at a remembered childhood landscape’ (1990: 370). As her title suggests, Lovell’s point of contrast is Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1986), an autobiographical ‘case-study’ that positions itself against the dominant cultural narratives of Hoggart and Williams, with their representative claims. The flattened out urban landscape that is viewed from ‘That Hill’ is a landscape, in Steedman’s words, ‘made by men’. Women ‘could not be heroines of the conventional narratives of escape’ (1986: 14– 15). The life that she herself recounts, that of her working-class mother, cannot, in its specificity and complexity, be fitted to such a narrative. Existing ‘in tension’ with this ‘more central’ story, it is ‘both its disruption and its essential counterpoint’ (ibid.: 22). If women are to ‘step into the landscape and see ourselves’ (ibid.: 24), writes Steedman, then other, less straightforward stories must be told. There are, concludes Charlotte Brunsdon, in what can be seen as a continuation of Lovell’s argument, ‘real equivocations in the fit between being a woman and representing Britishness’ (2000: 170). Brunsdon is writing about British films of the 1990s, but unlike the films analysed by Hill, whose male protagonists still carry a representative function, those she describes are the work of female directors and feature ‘desperate girls’ rather than ‘angry young men’. Their realist cinematography, too, is ‘rendered … rather more fragile and likely to be disrupted’ (2000: 174). Brunsdon does not elaborate the point, but it is clear that if, as Higson and Hill argue, the city in British social realist cinema functions – as concrete, historical place – primarily to authenticate a certain kind of masculine narrative, a diagnosis of ‘the state of the nation’, then it is vital to those claims that women remain as aspects of that place. Once they ‘step into the landscape’ as embodied subjects, their desires, and their lives, will operate, like the desires and life of Steedman’s mother, as ‘disruption and … essential counterpoint’ to the dominant narrative. The films which Brunsdon describes, she argues, both ‘address and contest’ the British social realist tradition in which they are grounded (ibid.: 168, my emphasis).

Red Road and social realism Andrea Arnold’s Red Road is, for Brunsdon, such a film: one, like Carine Adler’s Under the Skin (1996) and Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002), which features a ‘fucked-up’ heroine (2012: 462) who is too ‘local, awkward and complex’ to stand in for the state of the nation. Arnold’s first feature, and winner of the Jury prize CITY SPACES

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at Cannes,10 it tells the story of Jackie (Kate Dickie), a Glasgow CCTV operative who, we discover towards the end of the film, has lost her husband and daughter in a car crash. When, on the CCTV screens at work, she sees Clyde (Tony Curran), the man who was imprisoned for causing their deaths, she begins, obsessively, to track him, both on-screen and by following him into the Red Road flats,11 concrete high-rise slabs which are now used to house ex-prisoners. The confrontations and partial resolutions that result form the narrative of the film. Arnold’s film has been seen as part of the British social realist tradition,12 most notably by Paul Dave, for whom the film’s focus on the personal is ‘part of a necessary re-focusing’ of the social realist tradition ‘in the context of neoliberalism’, a re-focusing ‘on the crisis of the social’ (2011: 18). ‘Ultimately’, he writes, ‘Red Road seeks grounds of commonality’, producing in its final sequences ‘an invitation to public space rather than a sense of alienation within a landscape haunted by decay, abandonment and the non being of deprivation’ (ibid.: 52). But critics and reviewers have also been uneasy in making this designation. Andrew Burke, while emphasizing the film’s realist elements, writes of the ‘intense feeling of the uncanny’ which accompanies Jackie’s move from behind the cameras into the space which we have hitherto seen only on the bank of screens before her (2007: 185). Jessica Lake describes this moment as a ‘surreal feeling of having entered a previous prohibited terrain, of becoming lost on the wrong side of the screen’ (2010: 236). In perhaps the most complex account of the film’s characteristics, Michael Stewart attributes to it a ‘traductive realism’ – a form that pushes ‘narrative realism closer to the avant-garde and bring[s] it more fully into abjection’ (2012: 550) – as well as aligning it with the maternal melodrama, the ‘paranoid woman’s film’ and the figure of the ‘border crosser … in postcolonial feminist theory and in some women’s films’ (ibid.: 565).13 For the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw (2006), the film is

FIGURE 2.3  Jackie at work. (Red Road, 2006) 70

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a ‘tough and superbly intelligent surveillance thriller’ which also demonstrates ‘the poetic priorities of Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher or Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl’. Its realism, in which ‘the grim unending wind hoists swirling scraps of garbage into the sky’, creates, he writes, ‘a harsh, almost lunar alienation’. What is being described here is a realism that is constantly disrupted. It is a disruption that is partly one of form, in which the film’s doubled viewing structure, with the CCTV screen now within and separate from, now one with the cinematic screen, sees the protagonist, Jackie, move between being subject and (knowing) object of that doubled vision. Partly, it is a disruption caused by the film’s intense focus on a level of corporeal detail that approximates touch. Lake writes of its ‘corporeal, haptic, close experience of inhabiting spaces and transgressing boundaries’ (2010: 236), an experience that persistently disturbs the distanced voyeurism that we identify with surveillance. But if Red Road disrupts realism, it also, in Brunsdon’s words, addresses it, and with it a British social realist tradition that uses the city-as-place to authenticate a masculine construction of subjectivity and nation. In Arnold’s film we can find all three types of shot that Higson identifies with the British ‘new wave’ films, but none functions in the way he describes. The exterior shots of streets, the pub, waste ground, abandoned industrial buildings are the stuff of Jackie’s tracking cameras, but they do not provide context for a single, male protagonist. Instead, they glimpse, briefly, intensely, and – through Jackie’s responses – with empathy, the affective lives of a range of the city’s inhabitants: the cleaner whose moods of elation and despair we follow in fragments; the solitary dog-walker whose old dog dies; April (Natalie Press), the girl from London who is abandoned at a deserted garage and is then taken home by Clyde’s (Tony Curran) flatmate Stevie (Martin Compston); the schoolgirl who is stabbed by, it seems, her friends. Against these scenes, viewed on the CCTV screens, are set shots of the countryside, as Jackie, like the ‘new wave’ protagonists, takes a brief journey out of the city. But this is not a rural idyll – or even a fantasy of romance. It is the scene of a joyless coupling between Jackie and her married lover. Only the man’s dog roams freely – the couple stay inside Jackie’s lover’s van. At the close of the film, when Jackie has finally decided to scatter the ashes of her husband and daughter in the countryside around Loch Lomond, the camera shows us an intensely blue sky, with birds whose flight we track across the screen. But their descent reveals, not the Scottish countryside but a row of industrial buildings. This is not a fantasy of escape, but an insistence on the city as space of (the possibility of) life. Towards the end of the film we also see two instances of That Long Shot …. Jackie’s two final meetings with Clyde both see her looking down a hill, the first at Clyde as he emerges from prison and the second as she stands with him looking down at the place where his car killed her husband and child. Although we can see in the background the city spread out before them, the background is blurred; that is not our focus. It is on details of Clyde’s rejected touch, on Jackie’s bruised and grieving face, and, finally, on her tentative forgiveness of him. CITY SPACES

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FIGURE 2.4  Looking down on the city. (Red Road, 2006)

Generic disturbance Despite Dave’s attempt to construct it in this way, then, this is not social realism as representation of ‘the state of a nation’. Hannah McGill (2006), in yet another characterization of the film, describes Red Road as ‘an urban sexual revenge drama’, arguing that Jackie ‘suggests a number of archetypes: stalker, spurned lover, vigilante avenger’. This places the film in a rather different tradition, that of Blue Steel and, more recently, Neil Jordan’s The Brave One (2007), its near contemporary. As with the science-fiction feel of the opening sequence and the ‘surreal’ effects noted by critics, it is a referencing that disrupts a dominant social realism. Like both Megan Turner and The Brave One’s Erica Bain (Jodie Foster), Jackie is a female investigator and avenger; as with Megan, this pursuit involves the threat of rape. Like Erica, her job is to construct a mediated vision of the city: Erica through her New York radio programme Street Walk which tells ‘stories of a city’, and Jackie in a process of tracking, zooming and editing that recall the work of the filmmaker. Like Megan, as official voyeur/investigator she wears a police uniform that masks, or denies, her femininity. Jackie’s Glasgow, however, is not a place of random, inexplicable violence, and to be embodied female is not to be an automatic victim. Jackie’s search for revenge does not, like that of Megan and Erica, involve masculinization and with it generic conformity. Rather, like Frannie’s (Meg Ryan) quest in Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003), with which Arnold’s film shares a number of similarities, Jackie’s is an investigation of, and conducted through, her own embodied sexuality and desire. Through Jackie’s quest, and via the CCTV screens’ grainy tracking of the urban ‘real’ through which that quest is in part constructed, the film also, like Campion’s, mounts an investigation of the genre 72

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within which it seems to be positioned. Unlike Bigelow’s film, Red Road does not, through a final genre conformity, cede the city to the masculine. Instead, it asks what it might mean for a woman to live in the city, and how the city might be revisioned to accommodate this female subject. The film’s opening establishes this complex relationship. We begin with a blur of lights against darkness, a disembodied robotic voice, and the sustained, ethereal sound that will recur throughout the film. As the camera pans right to left we see a series of blurred and luminous screens, before a sudden jolt of focus settles on one, and we see its image judder, slip and fragment. When the camera returns to the screens after the title image, however, they are clear – a bank of thirty-five CCTV screens – but our focus is no longer on them. Instead, it is on Jackie’s hands, and on her eyes and face as she watches the screens. As we see her hand manoeuvre the joystick to focus on the people she recognizes, and later stroke it in unconscious mimicry as she watches the waste ground sex scene that she has followed because she thought the young woman was in danger, her body moves with the screen images: now closer, now open and relaxed. This is vision as mimesis, as it is described by Vivian Sobchack (2004) and Laura U. Marks (2000). Mimesis, writes Marks, is a form of ‘tactile epistemology’ which functions ‘not through abstraction from the world but compassionate involvement in it’ (2000: 141). If Jackie’s screens position her above and outside the city, perfectly placed for ‘That Long Shot …’, then her use of those screens is very different, seeking always to approximate the intensity of touch, with an empathy that is enacted through her body.14 When, after her sister-in-law’s wedding, she walks home through the streets she usually views on screen, for a moment we seem to see the disordered city of Blue Steel. But we pause, with Jackie, next to one of her screen familiars, the man with the ailing dog, and as she stands next to him and, glancing sideways at his face, follows his gaze to the shop window in front, bending to see more clearly, the effect once more is of empathy, a desire for touch, and a shared pain.

Corporeality and desire Abandoning her uniform and screens, Jackie’s pursuit of Clyde leads her to cross the border between safety and potential danger, panoptic observation and corporeal engagement. In contrast to the continuing impassivity of her face, this (re)immersion in touch is registered in two ways: by the focus on tactile detail, and through the suffusion of the screen with the colour of sensation: red. Three scenes in particular, those of Jackie’s visits to the Red Road flat, play on this shifting relationship between vision and touch. In the first, when Jackie gatecrashes Clyde’s party, the focus is at first on her investigative gaze as she watches through doorways, her body seemingly effaced and the camera shots clear and distanced. When Clyde sees her, however, she is no longer the observer but the sexually seen and sensed, and as the scene develops we experience first a tension between her continued CITY SPACES

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unblinking gaze and the hazy red intense close-ups of hands, lips and skin, and then, as she repeatedly closes her eyes, the domination of the latter. When we return to Jackie’s point of view, the shot is of a room now unfocused and suffused with red. Suddenly breaking away, she rushes from the flat and, in the cold clear space of the graffiti-covered lift, vomits. In the second scene, we return home with Jackie after a visit to Clyde’s flat; with Clyde absent, Stevie’s parting words are that Clyde had called her ‘a bird with a nice arse’. Two shots on Jackie’s journey, both noted by Stewart, signal Jackie’s ensuing disorientation. Neither is shot from her point of view and the shots are discontinuous, the first bathing the flats in a ghostly twilight and the second seeing them softly lit against the night sky. Both are ethereal and neither is accompanied by diegetic sound – the soundscape of the second is that of the ‘ghostly uncanny’ (Stewart 2012: 564) that we find elsewhere in the film. For Stewart these disconnected shots are non-synchronous ‘memory traces’, but it seems more useful to see them as a foreshadowing of the scene to come, in which Jackie, arrived home, strips off before the mirror, gazing intently, before turning and touching her buttocks with her hands, trying to align vision and touch, her own sense of self and the newly sexualized body discovered through Clyde. In Jackie’s third visit to Clyde’s flat she is again at once investigator, avenger and object of touch. Here too there is an intense focus on texture, touch and sound: on the wood that Clyde carves, on his hands caressing Jackie’s ankles, on nipples, lips and skin as he brings her to orgasm. Here too there are three disconnected and strange shots of the city at night, all of them overlain with the colour of the room’s red lava lamp. The last of them, at the climax of the sexual act, is wholly suffused with red and accompanied by the haunting cry of foxes. Stewart sees these scenes as Jackie’s, and the film’s, encounter with the abject, and in Julia Kristeva’s sense of the abject that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ (1982: 4), that can be said to be true. It is not, however, an encounter with defilement and the ‘radically excluded’ (ibid.: 2), though Jackie’s response to her first visit frames it in that way. Rather, it seems to be the disorientation that Marks identifies with ‘haptic visuality’ (2000: 178–81), in which vision approximates to touch, and it is the materiality and texture of the image on which we focus. This view of the city is not, despite its height and distance, totalizing and panoramic; merging inside and outside, it draws us in, to seek to touch, and to inhabit it. If Jackie’s investigation is primarily of her own corporeality and desire, it leads her also to an engagement with masculinity. Viewed from close-in, Clyde is neither simply the ‘fucking animal’ he is accused of being15 nor a monster. Like her he seeks re-connection with a lost daughter, and he is capable of tenderness and care. As with the other human stories that we glimpse throughout the film, his small world of intimacy and concern belies the impersonality and distance of the CCTV screen. It is this recognition, together with the awakening of her ability to touch and hence to mourn, that leads Jackie to drop her invented charge of rape against him. 74

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From mourning to flânerie In Laleen Jayamanne’s discussion of Campion’s The Piano, she writes of Ada’s ‘unspeakable loss’, of which her abandonment of voice is ‘an index, not a symptom’ (2001: 31). Ada has refused the norms of femininity, substituting what Judith Butler, in her description of the melancholic subject, calls an internalized psychic state for the social world in which she lives (Butler 1997: 179). Locked in this internalized world, Ada’s playing of the piano, writes Jayamanne, constitutes both ‘a work of mourning for an unspeakable loss’ (2001: 32) and an eroticization of that loss. Jackie’s world, silenced and mediated by the bank of CCTV screens, is one which is similarly internalized. In her intensely tactile encounters with Clyde we can find a corresponding ambivalence, in which her ‘unspeakable’ loss is both mourned and eroticized. When, afterwards, she mutilates her face in front of the mirror, her act, in excess of the revenge motive which in theory it serves,16 seems to be self-punishment for an intensity of corporeal response that might destroy the melancholic state with which she has protected herself. When we next see her naked body, in the shower following her reporting of Clyde’s ‘rape’, it is shorn of the erotic. For Freud, melancholy is what Jayamanne calls ‘the unperformability of sadness’ (2001: 256) and the melancholy subject one who, unable to name her loss, and so mourn, instead internalizes it, identifying with the lost object (Freud 2005: 209). Identifying the photograph of her daughter to Stevie, and releasing Clyde into his relationship with his own daughter, Jackie is finally able to replace melancholy by a due mourning. In this process, the lost object is first externalized, as she stuffs her dead daughter’s clothes to create a tacile substitute which she hugs to herself, and then, at the end of the film, afforded its appropriate recognition and mourning. The close of the film sees Jackie once more walking the city streets. Having released Clyde and arranged to scatter the ashes of her husband and child, she walks in daylight, stopping now to gaze in a shop window, now to greet the dogwalker and his new dog. As he walks away, she pauses briefly to look past him and, following her eyeline, we see the cleaner whose story she had followed on screen, and who also greets the dog-walker. Jackie has moved from panoptic observer to streetwalker, a flâneuse whose life touches that of those she meets. The final shot of the film returns us to the panoptic gaze of the CCTV camera, but with two differences. Jackie is now on screen, one of the many inhabitants of the city streets, and the shot itself, though still high angle, stretches out before us and, drenched in sunlight, is tinged with red. The film’s tracking of Jackie’s journey has also entailed a revisioning of the city. It is neither a space of abstract order – the grid-like ‘Concept-city’ to which the Red Road flats were intended as a contribution – nor a sordid wasteland, place of inexplicable disorder and violence. Dave describes this final shot as the ‘redemption’ of the city (2011: 52), but it seems rather that it is simply seen differently. From Jackie’s viewpoint, this has always been a city of small stories of warmth and generosity, as well as of pain and loss, though earlier CITY SPACES

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she could not touch them. Rather than the ‘invitation to public space’ and an engagement with the ‘underclass’ that Dave describes, an invitation that would place Red Road in the tradition of politically driven British social realist films, the invitation in this final shot seems to be to a difference of view, one that disrupts and critiques this tradition. Self-consciously presented as both realist and filmed – it is clearly framed as a CCTV shot – its perspective is equally clearly female. Jackie herself, finally, in Steedman’s words, ‘stepping into the landscape’ and entering the city’s life, becomes de Certeau’s streetwalker re-imagined as woman: a redefined flâneuse.

The Disordered City: Chaos (Coline Serreau, 2001) ‘What is unique in Baudelaire’s poetry’, writes Benjamin, ‘is that the images of women and death are permeated by a third, that of Paris’ (1978: 157). Paris, as we have seen, has served as the emblematic city of modernity. For Benjamin, it was ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’ – the centre of modern life, as Wilson writes, ‘in terms of pleasure, excitement and consumption’. Above all, continues Wilson, ‘Paris was the city sexualised’. Whether seen as queen or – more often – as prostitute, it was ‘inescapably female’ (1991: 47). Writing of Baudelaire, Benjamin describes the ambiguous and seductive promise of Paris as epitomized in three images, all three of them forms of spectacle, inhuman fetishes whose utopian ‘dream images’ conjure for the city’s flâneur a ‘moment of enchantment’ (1999b: 166) which leads towards death. These images are of the commodity, of the arcades,17 and of the prostitute, who is ‘saleswoman and wares in one’ (1978: 157) – the place, as Susan Hayward writes, where ‘capitalism and sex unite’ (2000: 25). For the French capital’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentators, the prostitute, in Wilson’s words, lay at the ‘heart of the city’s meaning’: the embodiment, in her uncontrolled sexuality and potential for disease, of the disorder beneath the surface of its erotic and consumerist spectacle. To this ‘erotic public woman’, Hayward adds a further image of female corporeal excess characteristic of these writings: that of the ‘political public woman’ (ibid.: 24–5, original emphasis). This ‘undesired revolutionary body’, representative of the feminized mob and threat to the order of the masculine public sphere, she writes, ‘becomes typified as an unruly and blood-excreting female body’ (ibid.: 25). Finally, and perhaps most disturbing of all, in the disorientating anonymity of the modern city, where women have become more accepted and more visible, this ambivalent and dangerous body could avoid detection. Clad in ‘the right costume’, writes Wilson, she might ‘escape into a new identity’ (1991: 50–7). In ‘The City as Narrative’ (2000), Hayward traces a continuity between this sexualized literary image of Paris and its later cinematic representations. In the latter, she writes, it is the camera that becomes the flâneur – the ‘detached 76

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observer that strolls (for the most part unnoticed) around the city streets by day or night’. Like her predecessors, the woman in the Paris of French cinema is for the most part depicted as ‘“deviant” (temptress, whore, fallen woman, liar, cheat, murderer)’ or as ‘in distress (suicidal – possibly mad – so still deviant really)’ (2000: 26–8). In both instances she is voiceless and without subjectivity. The price of ‘embodying the city’, concludes Hayward, ‘is that the woman within the city is without an authenticated voice, without agency, therefore silenced’ (ibid.: 27, original emphasis). Meanwhile, while the camera-as-flâneur continues to construct and contain this city-as-female, those other bodies which circulate in the contemporary city – bodies characterized by Hayward as ‘the queer body, the dying/ailing body, the raced body’ (ibid.: 26) – become invisible, pushed to the abject margins of what Hayward calls ‘the unified logical city of capital’ (ibid.: 32), and de Certeau the Concept-city. One of the films that Hayward cites as an example of women’s silencing in the Paris of French cinema is Coline Serreau’s Trois Hommes et un Couffin (1985), famously re-made by Hollywood as Three Men and a Baby (1987). This film, which followed Serreau’s far more political work of the 1970s, was the first of her generically hybrid social comedies set in Paris. Like other feminist writers,18 Hayward is critical of its focus on men, although Serreau herself has described the film as feminist, an indictment of the destructiveness of patriarchal values (Rollet 1998: 138; Abeel 2003). Released sixteen years later, Chaos, the film I shall focus on here, is also a Paris-set social comedy, and like two of Serreau’s earlier films features Vincent Lindon, an actor Serreau describes as able to embody ‘with wit’ the ‘typical middle-class white bourgeois’: the ‘kind of guy who’s leading the world’ (Abeel 2003). Here, however, he is not the central character: the focus is – to borrow Hayward’s terms – firmly on women in Paris. In this film Serreau’s habitual generic mixing is far more unsettling, for its themes can be seen to represent a return to the anger of Serreau’s first film, the feminist documentary Mais Qu’est Qu’elles Veulent? (1975–7). Chaos begins with bourgeois couple Hélène (Catherine Frot) and Paul (Vincent Lindon), rushed and uncommunicative, leaving for a dinner party. On the way, they become witnesses to the savage beating of a young girl by three thugs. Faced with her frantic pleas for help, Paul locks the car doors, then wipes her blood from his windscreen and drives away. ‘Quelle fille?’ he says when Hélène suggests calling an ambulance. Later, however, Hélène traces the girl, a prostitute called Noémie (Rachida Brakni), to a local hospital and stays with her, taking time off work, until Noémie has recovered. She rescues her when the attackers return and takes her to the country cottage of Paul’s mother, Mamie (Line Renaud). Fleeing once more, this time from the police, the three women drive to the coast, where Noémie – whose real name is Malika19 – tells Hélène of her history, a history the film tells in flashback, with Malika’s voice-over. The child of an Algerian mother and much older French-Algerian father, she escaped being sold by her father to an elderly Algerian suitor only to become the prisoner of a prostitution ring. The CITY SPACES

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final section of the film sees Malika plan and then, with Hélène’s aid, execute her revenge and rescue her younger sister, Zora (Hajar Nouma), from another forced marriage. At the close of the film we see the four women – Hélène, Malika, Zora and Mamie – sitting on a bench in the grounds of the house Malika has bought, looking out at the sea. Anglo-American critics responded to Chaos with a sort of bewildered fascination, describing it as ‘wildly careening between crime drama, French farce, and woman’s picture’ (Schager 2003), as a ‘compelling, estrogen-enriched comedydrama-thriller’ (O’Sullivan 2003), as a ‘sort of female action/revenge fantasy whose knives are sheathed in amusement’ (Butler 2005). ‘[P]art thriller, comedy, revenge tale, and feminist drama’, commented one, it ‘defies categorization’ (Dermansky 2003). The descriptions here suggest the film’s complex generic hybridity, but also the terms on which its feminist politics can be rendered acceptable. It is a comedy, and therefore its feminist revenge narrative becomes the plot of a ‘woman’s picture’ – one whose (rather wayward) femininity is signalled by metaphors of embodied excess: it ‘careens’ wildly; it threatens to ‘split at the seams’ (Schager 2003). Above all, the film is entertaining: a ‘comedy-drama-thriller’ whose ‘estrogen-enriched’ energy adds to its novelty, and whose ‘knives’ are safely ‘sheathed’. In France the reviews were more mixed. As Claude-Marie Trémois comments in her considered account of the film and its reception, ‘Mélanger les genres, en France, on n’aime pas beaucoup ça’ [In France we don’t much like it when genres are mixed]. Serreau, she writes, ‘n’a jamais cessé d’être le témoin de son temps. Seulement, voilà, Coline Sereau ne fait pas sérieux. Parce qu’elle a trop de cordes de son arc. Parce qu’elle privilégie la spectacle. Parce qu’elle a remporté des success populaires’ [Serreau has never ceased to act as witness to her age. But the problem is that Coline Serreau is not seen as serious. Because she has too many strings to her bow. Because she privileges spectacle. Because she has had popular success](2001: 197). Trémois’ own verdict is that the film is ‘[u]n cri de rage et une immense bouffée d’espoir’ [a cry of rage and an immense breath of hope] (ibid.: 199). Elsewhere, Georgiana Colvile has called it ‘le plus féroce des films de Serreau’ (2007: 241).

Comedy and the city Writing of Marleen Gorris’s A Question of Silence (1982), another feminist film whose laughter is ‘féroce’, Kathleen Rowe opens with questions posed by Luce Irigaray: ‘Isn’t laughter the first form of liberation from a secular oppression? Isn’t the phallic tantamount to the seriousness of meaning? Perhaps woman, and the sexual relation, transcend it “first” in laughter?’ (Irigaray 1985: 163, original emphasis). The laughter at the close of A Question of Silence, writes Rowe, is liberating in this way, containing ‘both life and death, enacting the destruction that necessarily precedes the birth of a new order and creating the solidarity on which such an order must be built’ (1995: 3). Its unruliness, she adds, links the 78

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women who thus transgress traditions of proper femininity with carnival, with the grotesque, with feminine disguise and masquerade, and with the mythological figure of the Medusa, who for Freud (2001b/1922) signalled the threat of castration but who for Hélène Cixous20 is merely beautiful – and laughing. Rowe is drawing on Mary Russo’s re-reading of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival. For Bakhtin, mediaeval carnival ‘celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order’. It was ‘the feast of becoming, change, and renewal’, representing for the oppressed a ‘utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance’ (1994a: 199). Its spaces were the streets and marketplace, not the institutional, hierarchical spaces of church, palace or private home, its people were the disorganized crowds, and its bodies were grotesque – ‘open, protruding, extended, secreting’ (Russo 1988: 219). These bodies were also, as Russo points out, typically female – and she sees in this fact – one not emphasized by Bakhtin – and in these bodies’ accompanying characteristics of ‘performance, imposture, and masquerade’, the possibility of a new cultural politics for women (1994b: 213). Here, then, is Hayward’s ‘unruly and blood-excreting female body’, a Medusan figure whose transgression into the city’s public space can be rendered liberatory through the deployment of what Rowe calls ‘the genres of laughter’. In these genres, which emphasize ‘transgression and inversion, disguise and masquerade, sexual reversals, the deflation of ideals, and the leveling of hierarchies’ (1995: 9), excess can be celebrated and a body which elsewhere is the archetype of abjection21 can overturn established order. Rowe points out comedy’s persistent ‘attack on the Law of the Father’, contrasting it, following Schatz, to those ‘genres of order’ such as the Western and the detective film, whose focus is on male dominance and the individual hero. But if comedy, like the musical and the romance, is a ‘feminine’ genre, and one which emphasizes the collective over the individual, it is also, as Rowe accepts, traditionally a ‘genre of integration’ (ibid.: 100–1). Its transgressions, that is, are ultimately contained, its unruly women put back in place, and the dominant order regenerated not overturned. The position of the grotesque may be liberating for women, but it is also dangerous; it can very quickly become once more the abject and monstrous. For Northrop Frye, whose influential definitions Rowe cites in her mapping of romantic comedy’s utopian dimension, comedy is indeed an attack on the established social order represented by the Father. But its hero is Oedipus, the son, and its ‘main theme … the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice’ (2002: 102). Unlike in the comedy of carnival, where it is the public space of street and marketplace that is the site of temporary reversal, in the Shakespearian comedies that Frye describes transformation is achieved by the construction of a space other to that of the ‘normal world’ – pastoral rather than urban, magical rather than socially ‘real’, and feminine rather than masculine. It is a space that functions like the ‘open space’ of the countryside in social realist films, as a space of imagined freedom and romance, and it is here, CITY SPACES

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in this ‘other’ space, that rules are overturned and ‘the feminine’ can dominate. At the close of the narrative, the characters, armed with the self-knowledge thus acquired, can return to the social and the urban, now regenerated by the influence of the magical ‘green world’ (ibid.: 108–9), to take up their ‘rightful’ positions. Andrew Horton, in his introduction to Comedy/Cinema/Theory, universalizes this narrative journey and gives it a thoroughly Oedipal slant. Both comedy and tragedy, he writes, ‘are about “growing up”: we view the movement from the biological and emotional connections with the mother to the socialized world of the father (the realm of the symbolic)’ (1991: 19). Although Rowe emphasizes comedy’s liberatory potential, then, she also notes its habitual misogyny.

Chaos, the city and comedy Critics have positioned Chaos within Frye’s binary spatial structure. Mariah Devereux Herbeck writes that its protagonists ‘flee urban social tension for pastoral tranquility’ (2012: 904), and Michelle Royer that ‘the main spatial opposition in Chaos is between the urban and natural environment. While women are constantly harassed in urban spaces, peace is found in natural settings … The countryside is constructed as a maternal feminine refuge, away from men’ (2007: 149). This seems, however, to wilfully misread the film, for if the countryside is the site of Mamie’s cottage, with its home-grown vegetables and linen sheets, it is also where Malika suffers the most extreme abuse. ‘One day, he took me to a house in the country’, she says to Hélène as she narrates her life story. ‘He’ is the pimp Touki (Ivan Franek), and the house a ‘maison dressage’ (schooling house), where she is raped, beaten and hooked on heroin, before being ‘kitted out’ as Noémie for the streets of Marseilles, ‘so wasted [that] God knows how many tricks I turned’. The refuge that Hélène and Malika take with Mamie is no more than temporary – they are pursued there by the police – and if the four women end the film seated in a garden, it is not the garden that is important but the sea towards which they face. In Serreau’s first film, the documentary Mais Qu’est Qu’elles Veulent?, a repeated shot of waves crashing against rocks serves to link the various sequences in which very different women – rural wives, factory workers, a bourgeois wife, a porn actress, an anorexic, a (forcibly retired) Church minister and a recent widow – describe their lives and their desires. An obviously feminine symbol, it is also an image of rage: at times, the sound of the waves ‘speaks’ against the antiliberation comments of the male factory manager or bourgeois wife; at times the shot reinforces the women’s words. As the film progresses, the shot increases in length and volume, to be joined at its close by a woman’s voice singing the soprano recitative to Bach’s ‘Cantata no. 51’. Only at one point in the film – at roughly the mid-point – does the sea’s disruptive power seem threatened. The bourgeois wife finishes speaking, and we see brief close-ups of one of the factory workers 80

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and her male boss, who seem to be listening to the increasing sound of the sea. We then see the waves once more break over the rocks and become still, before a zoom out reveals the last shot to have been a dissolve. We are looking at the bathwater of the male director of pornographic films, who will proclaim himself to be in favour of women’s liberation while humiliating and exploiting the actresses we see at work. The film ends on a celebration of women’s strength – ‘Why not a vast demonstration by women, one of these days?’ asks the final speaker – but this dissolve remains unsettling, a blackly comic reminder that this vast disruptive power can be made, in the words of the porn actress, ‘submissive to men’. The opening of Chaos provides an echo of this sequence. Faced with Malika’s blood on its windscreen, Paul puts his car through a carwash. As the rushing water fills the screen, we seem to be engulfed by the sight and sound of crashing waves, and the film’s title appears. Finally the screen clears and we see the car emerge. Paul and Hélène sit facing us: unspeaking, apparently intact. Here again the water’s force is ignored, tamed, used. Here too it is identified with the disruptively female – it is Malika’s blood that must be erased. But here the coldly exploitative patriarch is not the extreme figure of the pornographer but the middle-class Everyman: the ‘kind of guy who’s leading the world’. That Noémie/Malika embodies this chaotic force is clear. Colvile has pointed out that her appearance in the film’s first scene – ‘visage sanglant aux yeux exorbités, entouré de l’abondance serpentine de sa chevelure’ [bleeding face and staring eyes, surrounded by the mass of her snake-like hair] – recalls the head of the Medusa as imagined by Caravaggio or Rubens (2007: 245). It is her disruption to the city’s order, with its separation of classes, races and institutional spaces, which terrifies Paul. For Colvile she represents ‘l’irruption du féminin’ (ibid.: 243). Later, when she has reclaimed both her body and her voice, she will embody all the tropes identified by Rowe and Hayward. She is the ‘unruly and blood-excreting female body’, prostitute and shape-shifter, deploying techniques of ‘performance, imposture, and masquerade’ to escape into a new identity. She has two names and two passports, and we see her as street prostitute Noémie, as bookish teenager Malika, as high-class escort and thief, and disguised as a boy. As her vengeance unrolls, the city streets, where she is at first abused and beaten, become the site of her revenge. At the end of the film the dying Touki, now himself an object of spectacle with bleeding face and staring eyes, will look up to see her – separated from the street by a glass screen, as Paul was at the film’s opening – gazing down at him. Hélène, the white post-feminist woman who ‘has it all’ – possessor of a businessman husband and student son, a profession as a lawyer, and a perfectly ordered apartment and social life – seems at first insulated from this ‘irruption’. But as she leaves her apartment and job to care for Malika and becomes herself placeless, she too becomes a shape-shifter, employing performance and disguise to defeat the thugs who return to threaten her charge. Colvile describes the speededup comedy of these action sequences as ‘un humour grinçant, … faisant d’Hélène CITY SPACES

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FIGURE 2.5  Noémie/Malika as Medusa. (Chaos, 2001)

une sorte d’héroïne de dessin animé’ [a dry/bitter comedy, … which makes Hélène into a sort of comic-strip heroine] (ibid.). Disorder and transformation, however, come not merely from without. As Paul and Hélène crisscross their apartment in the opening scene, the camera lingers briefly on a drawing in their hallway. It is of the head of a woman by da Vinci, and the camera will return to it throughout the film. The face is demure – chin tilted downwards, eyes lowered – but the half-smile is unreadable and the hair is disordered. The possibility of Hélène’s revolt, it seems, was always there. It is not merely her encounter with Malika that inspires this revolt. It is Hélène’s self-identification not only with Malika but also with Paul’s mother, Mamie. Mamie, we learn, comes to Paris twice a year to visit Paul, but is ignored and patronized. Hélène, initially complicit in this rejection – when Mamie comes to the apartment Hélène lies, telling her that Paul has left – finds herself, in a mirroring scene, treated identically by her own son, Fabrice (Aurelien Wiik), and his girlfriend. Throughout the film, scenes are mirrored in this way. Later, Fabrice’s words when he rejects his mother’s cooking will be repeated word for word by one of Malika’s brothers, in a parallel rejection; Paul’s ‘Ah!’ of dismissal when Hélène tries to talk to him is repeated by Fabrice; and the shots that depict Zora’s forced travel to Marseilles echo those of Malika’s earlier journey. Most tellingly, Paul, like Malika’s father, wipes away her blood in a bid to preserve appearances, and the established order. Patterns of exploitation are repeated across divisions of age, class and race, in ways that link all the women. In particular, it is clear that for each of the women the home – the space of the personal – is a site of oppression. The imprisoning and isolating rooms of the ‘house in the country’ are the most extreme example – Malika estimates that there must have been seven women there, but we, and she, only hear their cries. But all of the film’s interior spaces – apartments, hotel and 82

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hospital rooms – render women similarly vulnerable to male power. Outside, in the public streets, men move freely while women can be displayed, abused, beaten and ignored. Malika is as invisible when she flees from her father through the public spaces of Marseilles as when, as Noémie, she is chased through the streets of Paris, and Mamie is similarly ignored. In the liminal spaces of the city, however – its stairwells, alleyways, hotel foyers and subways – women’s invisibility can become a source of power. Seeing without being seen, and employing techniques of masquerade and performance, they can disrupt and overturn established power structures. In the final revenge sequence, Malika and Hélène, once more invisible, gaze down on the confused and violent street confrontation between police and pimps. Elsewhere, abandoned in the apartments where they have wielded domestic power, Paul and Fabrice find themselves silenced and marginalized. In effecting this reversal, it is Noémie/Malika’s journey that is foregrounded. In the early sequences she is in control of neither her body – she is paralyzed – nor her voice. Hélène speaks both to and for her as she supports, feeds and dresses, defends, and finally rescues the younger woman. Although the signs of her resistance are soon evident – she signals her dislike of Hélène’s choice of food and clothes through facial expression – it is in the long flashback account of Malika’s life that her voice and identity are established, and the final revenge and rescue plan is hers. This is, however, a journey in common across age, class and race, and it is the women’s solidarity on which the film ends. Though Noémie/Malika, as one critic has argued, achieves victory through her ability to exploit techniques of ‘individualism and capitalism’ (Henschel 2003: 60), they are deployed in the service of this vision of an alternative family of women. Against this, the men constitute three Oedipal father-son pairings: Paul and Fabrice, Malika’s father and brothers, the pimps Pali (Wojciech Pszoniak) and Touki. At the close of the film it is they who are silenced and immobilized: stripped, as Colvile writes, of ‘la parole, leur function paternelle et symbolique traditionelle’ [speech, their traditional paternal and symbolic function] (2007: 246). As the film ends the four women sit, safe, facing the sea; as in Mais Qu’est Qu’elles Veulent?, we hear the music of Bach, this time the Goldberg Variations played on piano. Only Mamie, however, for whom the sea and this rebuilt family truly constitute a liberation, is seen to smile. The others look pensive, troubled; Malika has tears in her eyes. The sea, whose triumphant turbulence closed the earlier film, is calm, but distant. No more than in Shakespearian comedy, this ending suggests, can the peace of this ‘green world’ be a final answer. But we do not know whether, or how, Hélène could resume her life – ‘There is no pardon,’ she has said, ‘No possible peace to be made’ – or Zora her education, in the world of the urban ‘real’. In the case of Malika, two exchanges establish the damage that she, the film’s most forceful and unruly figure, has suffered. In a long speech to Zora, she condemns her father and brothers for their failure to truly rebel against the colonial system that has exploited them; ‘They want to use it, not change it’, she says. ‘You’re full of hate’, responds Zora, taken aback. In the second, earlier exchange, Hélène asks: ‘Do CITY SPACES

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you think you could ever love anyone?’. ‘Love, or fuck [baiser]?’ responds Malika. ‘I don’t know,’ answers Hélène. This Medusa sees clearly but, as Colvile comments, she is not laughing. The comedic form is important to Chaos, then, but not because, as critics suggested, it functions to ‘sheathe’ the film’s attack. Humour, Serreau has argued, is itself ‘the strongest and most dangerous weapon … artists have’ (Abeel 2003). Elsewhere, she has said that ‘Mon comique vient du désespoir, de la conscience aigue de ce qui ne va pas. Il part toujours de situations graves’ [My comedy comes from despair, from an acute sense of what is not working. It always springs from serious situations](in Weber-Fève 2010: 135). In Chaos she uses the structures of comedy to invert its conclusions. Two instances can demonstrate this. In the age of the resurgent rom-com chick flick, the long-legged prostitute Noémie, with her wild hair, bears a distinct – and ironic – resemblance to Julia Roberts’s Vivian in Pretty Woman ten years earlier. Like Vivian, she begins the film on an encounter with a car driven by a powerful man who will fall for her. Like Vivian, she leaves money for her less rebellious colleague at a hotel’s front desk; like Vivian, she transforms her appearance and learns the manners of the rich and powerful so that she can pass for one of them. Here, however, there is no romantic conclusion but its refusal and subversion. Noémie/Malika humiliates and then leaves Paul. In the second instance, we see the film toy once again with this dominant postfeminist form. Fabrice, who has two girlfriends already, is introduced by Hélène to Noémie and covertly uses the introduction to set up an assignation. The meeting takes place at twilight, and is shot in soft-focus close-up, to the accompaniment of a gentle musical score. Fabrice is enchanted by Noémie’s silence and mystery, and, in an echo of earlier Oedipal comic plots, will tell his father – who has also fallen for Noémie – that he is in love. As we watch the young couple, yet another visual echo sees Noémie/Malika’s face mirror that

FIGURE 2.6  The green world? (Chaos, 2001) 84

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of the da Vinci portrait glimpsed earlier in Hélène’s apartment. Malika’s eyes, however, are wide open, and she gazes out from the frame, past Fabrice. When she later calls at the apartment, causing her identity to be revealed to both men, it is in search not of Fabrice, but of Hélène. In 1978 Serreau was asked why she had focused on both the social and the sexual exploitation of women in Mais Qu’est Qu’elles Veulent?. They were, she responded, fundamentally the same: ‘la même exploitation, les mêmes interdits, les mêmes profits pour les mêmes personnes’ [the same exploitation, the same prohibitions, the same profits for the same people] (Maupin 1978: 27, cited in Rollet 1998: 62). Twenty-five years later, her analysis is unchanged. The class that Paul embodies has both economic and sexual power – he describes to Fabrice the ‘list of girls’ at his disposal: ‘nice, unemotional girls who vanish by dawn’. It is an exploitation that is repeated in the prostitution and drugs ring run by his near namesake, Pali, and internalized by the Algerian men condemned by Malika. In Chaos, the structures of comedy permit reversals that see the city’s central spaces occupied by those bodies that Hayward describes as marginalized in the ‘unified logical city of capital’ (2000: 26). Noémie/Malika, the unruly, shape-shifting, excessive woman whose triumph this is, is both the erotic and the political public woman of Hayward’s analysis. She provokes, as Colvile has suggested, the ‘irruption du féminin’ signalled by the film’s title. The title, however, also carries another significance. Twenty years earlier, Serreau had said that the aim of her work was to show ‘le refus violent d’une organisation du travail, et des rapports humains, où le chaos et le gaspillage sont la règle’ [the violent refusal of a structure of work, and of human relations, in which chaos and waste are the rule] (cited in Rollet 1998: 64). Returning us to the city as emblem of modernity, ordered, powerful and masculine, with which this chapter began, a city now bound up with a global corporatism, Serreau’s film suggests that it is here that chaos truly lies. It is the operations of capital itself that are chaotic, their waste and exploitation laid bare by the (‘violent’) female refusal that her film enacts.

Notes 1

‘Abstract space’, writes Lefebvre, ‘is not homogeneous’ but it has homogeneity as ‘its goal, its orientation, its “lens”. And indeed it renders homogeneous’ (1991: 287).

2

De Certeau includes the housewife in the supermarket as an example of the ‘tactician’ of the everyday (1984: xix). For the most part, however, his city walker who is free to wander, and who deploys ‘time’ to circumvent ‘space’, is implicitly male.

3

Nava points to the increasing numbers of middle-class women who were active in the city as either paid officials or voluntary workers (1997: 61).

4

See Chapter 4 for a discussion of this concept.

5

In addition to the musical, McArthur offers the work of Woody Allen as a site for an American vision of the utopian city. I suggest that this can be broadened to romantic comedy more generally. CITY SPACES

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  6 De Certeau’s ‘Concept-city’ draws on Lefebvre’s notion of ‘abstract space’, whose promise of homogeneity is effected through its spectacles of ‘phallic verticality’. See Lefebvre (1991: 36, 286–7).   7 Kaplan writes: ‘What we, and Megan, seem to see is a dramatic literalization of what psychoanalysis poses as the child’s mistaken reading of the sexual act between parents as an interaction in which the father hurts the mother’ (1993: 56). This, for Freud, is the ‘primal scene’ of fantasy (1973a: 416–18).   8 The term is Carol Clover’s. See Clover (1992).   9 In Ken Loach’s Poor Cow (1967), this is even more pronounced. Its protagonist, Joy, is not only hapless victim, but peculiarly characterless, an embodiment of disconnected but stereotypical ‘feminine’ character traits – passivity, unreliability, consumerism, narcissism and maternal love. 10 It was intended to be the first of three from The Advance Party, an enterprise produced and developed by Glasgow’s Sigma Films and Danish production company Zentropa. All were to be set in Scotland, and each of the three first-time writerdirectors was to feature the same nine actors playing the same characters. The second film, Donkeys, directed by Morag McKinnon, was released in 2010. The third, to be directed by Mikkel Nørgaard, has not yet appeared. 11 Constructed in the late 1960s, the Red Road towers, at thirty-one storeys, were the tallest residential structures in Europe, built to accommodate 4,700 residents. The project, like similar projects in other British cities, was designed as a solution to the city’s post-war housing crisis. At the time Red Road was being filmed, they were scheduled for demolition. 12 The release of Arnold’s Fish Tank in 2009 produced a debate in Sight & Sound, which was then picked up in the New York Times, about whether Arnold’s films truly qualified for the social realist designation. See Sight & Sound (October 2009), followed by letters in November, December and January 2010, and Graham Fuller in the New York Times (14 January 2010): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/ movies/17fish.html. 13 Stewart also seems to see this ‘border crossing’ quality of the film as particularly disturbing. In a curious move in his essay, he describes Jackie as ‘a sphinx, a dangerous riddle which Clyde tries to solve’ (560), thus positioning Clyde as investigator-protagonist and aligning Jackie with Wilson’s figure of disorder in the male imagination: the ‘Sphinx in the City’. 14 In a similar way, when Stevie opens the window in the Red Road flat, it is not the view that we focus on, but the danger of the open window and the feel of the wind. 15 The accusation comes from a waitress whose flirting with Clyde is followed by his licking of his now empty plate, in an act that foreshadows the later sex scene with Jackie. Jonathan Murray argues that the accusation ‘contains within it a truth that Jackie is ultimately compelled to (re)acknowledge in relation to herself…. Individuals crave and carve out visceral physical and emotional ties with others because those bonds constitute a powerful way to anchor the vagaries of existence’ (2015: 101). 16 Dave also describes this act as ‘excessive’, but sees it as involving a ‘self-sacrificial logic’. ‘As well as seeking vengeance’, he writes, ‘she is also giving up the dead to whom it is offered’ (2011: 49). 17 Benjamin describes the Paris arcades as the ‘precursors of the department stores… the first establishments to keep large stocks of goods on their premises… a center of trade in luxury goods’ (1978: 146). 86

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18 See Modleski (1988); Fischer (1991). Trois Hommes et un Couffin was followed by Romuald et Juliette (1989), La Crise (1992) and the fantasy-based La Belle Verte (1996). 19 In the following analysis, I use Malika to identify the character, Noémie to identify her persona, and Noémie/Malika when describing her shifting identity. 20 See Cixous (1981: 255). 21 See Kristeva (1982). Like the carnivalesque, the abject, according to Kristeva, is that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules’ (1982: 4). Identified with the feminine, and above all the maternal body, it is also repulsive, unclean, loathsome and shameful.

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3  INTERIOR SPACES

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in … (Woolf 1993a: 21) In her essay on ‘The Geographical Imagination’ (1993), Gillian Rose distinguishes between ‘space’, which is extended, public, to be tamed and known, and ‘place’, which is localized, lived in and bounded. Though both, she argues, are gendered female, it is place, with its connotations of the nurturing and maternal, that is more evidently so. Woman, that is, is place – the home, room or cave, which is source both of comfort and of suffocating threat to man – but she is also, as Virginia Woolf points out, confined to place: to the domestic, the private, the (en)closed. For Freud, it seemed ‘likely that a room became the symbol of a woman as being the space which encloses human beings’. ‘House’, he adds, is ‘used in a similar sense’ (1973b: 197). The comment comes in Freud’s tenth Introductory Lecture, on dream symbolism. ‘The female genitals’, he adds, ‘are symbolically represented by all such objects as share their characteristic of enclosing a hollow space which can take something into itself: by pits, cavities and hollows, for instance, by vessels and bottles, by receptacles, boxes, trunks, cases, chests, pockets, and so on’ (1973a/1916: 189, original emphasis). A moment later, however, he hesitates: perhaps it is the uterus – for Freud another empty space whose function is to enclose – that is being symbolized. Of these symbols, it is that of the room to which he draws particular attention. But ‘room’, he writes, can become ‘house’ or ‘hearth’, or, by extension, ‘city’, ‘citadel’ or ‘fortress’. The slippage we see here, in which female sexuality cannot be thought outside its function as the maternal, and the maternal is at once nurturing and imprisoning, is repeated elsewhere in Freud’s work, in less sanguine accounts. In the brief ‘Medusa’s Head’ of 1922 we find a description of the goddess Athene as a woman who is ‘unapproachable and repels all sexual desires’ because she displays ‘the terrifying genitals of the Mother’ (2001b: 273–4). But Freud’s longest exploration of the troubling emotions aroused by this equation of room/ house with female genitalia/the maternal comes in ‘The Uncanny’ of 1919.

The uncanny, writes Freud, ‘arouses dread and horror’; more specifically, it is ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (2001a: 219–20). This paradox – ‘unheimlich’ (uncanny) is the opposite of ‘heimlich’ (familiar, homely) but also, since an alternative sense of ‘heimlich’ is ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’, uncomfortably close to it in meaning – is what exercises Freud in the essay. The unheimlich, we learn, is bound up with doubling, with madness, with the fear of being buried alive and with repression: it is ‘something repressed which recurs’; that ‘which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light’ (ibid.: 241, original emphasis). Finally, towards the end of the essay, the paradox is explained. In another slippage between the sexual and the maternal, we learn that ‘there is something uncanny about the female genital organs’. They are an ‘unheimlich place’ which is at the same time ‘the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning’ (ibid.: 245). It is a formulation that not only equates woman with home and place (and, Freud adds, ‘country’), and with the arousal of emotions comprised ambivalently of horror and nostalgic longing, but also, in its use of ‘once upon a time and in the beginning’, suggests the functioning of such an encounter within the narratives of myth and folklore. Echoing Freud (though Freud is not mentioned), Soviet semiotician Jurij M. Lotman describes such narratives. ‘The elementary sequence of events in myth’, he writes, can be reduced to a chain: entry into closed space – emergence from it …. Inasmuch as closed space can be interpreted as ‘a cave,’ ‘the grave,’ ‘a house,’ ‘woman,’ (and, correspondingly, be allotted the features of darkness, warmth, dampness) …, entry into it is interpreted on various levels as ‘death,’ ‘conception,’ ‘return home’ and so on; moreover all these acts are thought of as mutually identical. (1979: 168) For Teresa de Lauretis, who draws on Lotman’s work in her account of ‘Desire in Narrative’, in Alice Doesn’t (1984), the sequence he outlines means that the narrative’s hero must be male: he ‘crosses the boundary and penetrates the other space’; she is ‘womb’, place, territory – a ‘personified obstacle’ (1984: 133). The problem, then, becomes how to conceive of female subjectivity in such circumstances. For de Lauretis, this process by which ‘a human child’ – a subject – becomes ‘a womb’ – an object/place – is recounted in Freud’s story of female development, in which the female child must forego not only her primary attachment to the mother but also desire itself1 if she is to acquire ‘normal femininity’ (Freud 1991a: 160). Like Snow White, Freud’s maturing girl becomes desirable only as object lying ‘peacefully in her [glass] case’ (Grimm 1984: 258), the ultimate outcome of her period of rebellion. Saved by the Prince, she finds her glass case replaced by ‘the castle of the King his father’, a move to which she ‘consent[s]’ (ibid.). It is a story, writes de Lauretis, which is essentially sadistic. Women ‘must either consent or be seduced’ into such femininity, but this ‘seduction’ may take the form of ‘rape and economic 90

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coercion’ as well as ‘the more subtle and lasting effects of ideology, representation and identification’ (1984: 134, original emphasis). De Lauretis’s analysis points to the internal contradictions in Freud’s account. The woman who is place becomes so only by being confined to and in place, and, as a subject, becomes so only uneasily. Women, writes Freud, may not become ‘normally’ feminine. They may become neurotic, hysterical, or they may become ‘masculine’ – active and desiring. The question not only of how to understand ‘the specific contradiction of the female subject’ in the cultural narrative generated by the Freudian scenario (ibid.: 157), but of how to tell the story differently, thus becomes key for de Lauretis, as for other feminist theorists. It is central to the work of Luce Irigaray, for whom psychoanalysis is merely a recent incarnation of a Western philosophical tradition stretching back to Plato, and to that of Elizabeth Grosz, who draws on Irigaray in her reflections on architecture. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray explores the problem of woman’s identification with place. Woman, she writes, ‘represents place for man’, ‘a thing’. She functions as ‘envelope, a container’ (2004: 11, original emphasis), that which, in Grosz’s words, ‘surrounds and marks the limit of man’s identity’ (2001: 158), enabling the production of masculine subjectivity, ideas, stories. As place, she therefore has no place; she is ‘assigned to be place without occupying a place’ (Irigaray 2004: 45). What follows is ‘a perverse exchange’ (Grosz 2001: 158): he buys her a house, even shuts her up in it, places limits on her …. He contains or envelops her with walls while enveloping himself and his things with her flesh. The nature of these envelopes is not the same: on the one hand, invisibly alive, but with barely perceivable limits; on the other, visibly limiting or sheltering, but at the risk of being prison-like or murderous if the threshold is not left open. (Irigaray 2004: 12) As it is for de Lauretis, Freud’s ‘normal femininity’ here becomes coercion and perversity. Those items that for Freud represent woman – ‘home, clothes, jewels’ – are here ‘things he constructs for her, or at least for his image of her, that allow him to continue his spatial appropriations’ (Grosz 2001: 158, my emphasis). And like de Lauretis, Irigaray also suggests that woman’s very placelessness – her designation as place – becomes a source of disturbance and threat. Lacking her own place, writes Irigaray, ‘she continuously undoes his work – distinguishing herself from both the envelope and the thing, ceaselessly creating there some interval, play, something in motion and un-limited which disturbs his perspective, his world, and his/its limits’ (2004: 11). Irigaray’s work is suggestive for a feminist analysis of both socio-economic structures – the gendered division into public and private spheres and the subordination of the latter to the former – and, as we shall see, the stories that women themselves have told. Grosz has applied it to architectural theory, arguing that Irigaray’s history of Western philosophy is also a history of Western architectural building, with its repeated impulses to contain an excess conceived of INTERIOR SPACES

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as feminine, and its separation of the civic – the space through which men move – from the domestic – the place in which women are contained. But Irigaray’s proposed solution, of ‘a change in our perception and conception of space-time, the inhabiting of places, and of containers, or envelopes of identity’ (ibid.: 9, original emphasis), remains frustratingly undefined, an aspect of what Nancy Fraser calls the ‘utopian side’ (Fraser 1989b: 4) of her writing.2 For Dorothy Leland, for example, Irigaray’s ‘excessively abstract’ analysis fails as ‘an adequate political psychology’ because it offers no programme for change. Insufficiently grounded in a social and economic analysis, she writes, it cannot specify the conditions under which women’s ‘internalized oppression’ might be transcended (1989: 82).3 Without such grounding, she concludes, this oppression can come to seem inescapable.

‘[E]nclosed within that form, she dies’ (Irigaray 1992: 54) The most ambitious and uncompromising attempt to apply Freud’s identification of woman with house, room and cave to women’s own cultural production remains Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, first published in 1979. Women, they write, have been imagined as houses, caves, rooms: enclosures that, like Plato’s cave – itself a ‘womb-shaped enclosure, a house of earth’ – must be repeatedly explained by men (2000: 96). The mythical Snow White, apparent protagonist of her own story, is not only confined within the ‘glass coffin’ that renders her desirable; she is that coffin. Monster as well as prisoner, as subject she is internally split. It is this doubleness, argue Gilbert and Gubar, that characterizes the work of the nineteenth-century women writers they discuss. In these novels and poems, houses repeatedly become ‘symbols of women’s imprisonment’ – as do ‘veils and costumes, mirrors, paintings, statues, locked cabinets, drawers, trunks, strongboxes, and other domestic furnishing’ (ibid.: 85). Women, that is, describe themselves not as but as confined to/in place; yet their work is also haunted by a sense of the monstrousness they refuse. Thus split, female authors ‘dramatize their own self-division, their desire to both accept the strictures of patriarchal society and to reject them’ (ibid.: 78). Insofar as they articulate a rejection of confinement, their work, unsurprisingly, exhibits all the features of Freud’s rebellious woman; their protagonists may be neurotic, hysterical, but they are also active and desiring. But this is work, too, in which Freud’s ‘uncanny’ is both confronted and embraced. Its protagonists are ‘buried alive’ but enact their ‘raging desire to escape’ (ibid.: 85) through the figure of the mad, monstrous, hysterical double. The titular instance of this double in Gilbert and Gubar’s book is Rochester’s mad wife Bertha in Jane Eyre, confined to the attic at Thornfield, whom Jane must face in the novel’s central confrontation, in ‘an encounter … with her own imprisoned “hunger, rebellion, and rage”’ (ibid.: 339). But it is another of 92

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their paradigmatic examples that I want to briefly discuss here. Published fortyfive years after Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper (2015/1892) enacts a similar story of imprisonment, madness and fantasized escape, but in a narrative that more clearly identifies the monstrous female figure – the imagined woman imprisoned ‘behind’ the wallpaper – with the female narrator-protagonist, and the imprisoning agent with both husband and physician.4 Like Gilman herself, the narrator has been prescribed a ‘rest cure’. Suffering, says her husband, from ‘temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency’ (Gilman 2015: 2), she is forbidden to ‘work’ and ordered to rest in her room. Thus confined, she is increasingly haunted by a female figure ‘stooping down and creeping about’ behind the room’s yellow wallpaper (ibid.: 13), shaking its patterned bars. ‘Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind’, writes the narrator, ‘They get through, and then the pattern strangles them’. But as the imprisoned figure, helped by the narrator, seeks to make her escape – ‘I have watched her sometimes away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind’ – the narrator herself, now one with the figure behind the wallpaper, embraces her own incarceration: ‘I know well enough that a step like that is improper … I don’t like to look out of the windows even … you don’t get me out in the road there!’ (ibid.: 20, 21, 24, original emphasis). Here, then, is Freud’s uncanny: bound up with doubling, with madness, with the fear of being buried alive and with repression; arousing emotions comprised ambivalently of horror and nostalgic longing. But the subject of this narrative is female, enacting what philosopher Susan Bordo, writing of contemporary women’s body anxieties, calls ‘the pathologies of female protest’. These psychopathologies – hysteria, agoraphobia, anorexia – operate ambivalently, writes Bordo, as they do in Gilman’s story. Written on and through the body, and enacted through a complex mix of containment and display, they function paradoxically, enacting ‘resistance and rebellion’ but at the same time deeply conformist in their attempts to embody a standardized ideal of femininity (1993: 177). How, then, might the female subject avoid the self-division of which Bordo, like Gilbert and Gubar, writes? The answer, suggests Bordo, is to shift our perspective and embrace an embodied subjectivity whose doubleness is, to the masculine imagination, monstrous.5 In this sense, female identity/subjectivity must always ‘negotiate the monstrous’,6 for it is an identity that always contains the possibility, in pregnancy, of ‘hous[ing] “otherness” within the self ’ (ibid.: 96).

Spectacular crises The ambivalent relationship between containment and display that is played out in both the nineteenth century literature described by Gilbert and Gubar and the twentieth-century female bodies analysed by Bordo, is a central feature of INTERIOR SPACES

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women’s identification with place. In The Female Malady (1987), Elaine Showalter discusses the work of Freud’s mentor,7 Jean-Martin Charcot, at his Paris clinic at La Salpêtrière. By the end of the nineteenth century, she writes, it was the asylum not the attic that was ‘identified as the madwoman’s appropriate space’ (1987: 17). It is a shift that we see famously depicted in Brouillet’s painting of 1887, with its representation of an audience of attentive and formally dressed men to whom the psychiatrist/neurologist Charcot exhibits ‘a swooning and half-undressed young woman’, the female hysteric (ibid.: 149). Confined in the hospital, Charcot’s patients became performers: they were displayed and photographed, and the photographs later ‘arranged in sequences, a still silent film, a catalogue of gestures’ (Heath 1982: 37). When their performances exceeded Charcot’s demands – when they rebelled, perhaps violently, against his regime – they would find themselves further incarcerated and ‘anaesthetized with ether or chloroform’ (Showalter 1987: 154). These were voiceless women, their voices not silent but unheard, and their performances embodied the ambivalence identified by Bordo. Women who ‘[made] a spectacle of themselves’, they were, in Mary Russo’s term ‘unruly’ (1988: 213–14), but because their rebellion was confined, not ‘set loose within the public sphere’ (ibid.), it remained self-absorbed.8 ‘Hysteria is tolerated’, comments Showalter, ‘because in fact it has no power to effect cultural change; it is much safer for the patriarchal order to encourage and allow discontented women to express their wrongs through psychosomatic illness than to have them agitating for economic and legal rights’ (1987: 161). Both Heath and Showalter point to the similarity of the Salpêtrière photographs not only to existing paintings (Heath) and the ‘exaggerated gestures’ of French classical theatre (Showalter), but to cinema. Freud, writes Heath, banished ‘cinema’ from his own consultations, substituting ‘a private room, the patient immobile on the couch, a voice starting and stopping … ’ (1982: 38), but the Salpêtrièrian scenario – a confined female protagonist caught between conformity and revolt, her ambiguous rebellion written on her body but never verbally articulated – was repeatedly re-enacted not only in silent cinema but in female-centred melodrama – the ‘woman’s film’ – of the later twentieth century. Female genres, writes Modleski, are ‘claustral’ – they deal with women who, however rebellious, are ‘trapped in their world’ (1999b: 10). In two paradigmatic ‘women’s films’, Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) and Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), for example, ‘the house becomes the analogue of the human body’ (Doane 1984: 72). Confined to/within the house, the protagonists Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) and Stella Dallas (Barbara Stanwyck) enact a self-limiting female rebellion through bodily excess: Charlotte is ‘overweight’; Stella adds an excessive self-adornment. In the two possible endings permitted to such hysterical rebellions, the close of Now, Voyager finds Charlotte ‘cured’: discovering a maternal, non-spectacular identity, she finds ‘freedom’ within the house. Stella, however, who has refused to relinquish her performative excess, must be punished. Barred from the house, and stripped of adornment, she is deprived of identity. 94

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The ‘woman’s film’ is of course a genre produced for but largely not by women. It is a subgenre of melodrama, a form – or mode – that, whatever its slipperiness as a term (Gledhill 1987), has been persistently identified as ‘feminine’, a designation that invokes some very familiar characteristics. Melodrama’s settings, writes Doane, are domestic and claustrophobic, its characters defined by their familial roles (mother, daughter, son), its emotions excessive and externalized – in music, gesture, mise en scène (1987: 71–85). Its focus is on pathos not tragedy, on the passive rather than active protagonist, on powerlessness not power and/or its loss. Its paradigmatic protagonist is therefore female, and it invites an identification with her that is ‘overinvolved’: marked by ‘[p]roximity rather than distance, passivity, overinvolvement and over-identification’ (ibid.: 2). Like the maternal, with which it is closely identified, it persistently emphasizes ‘presence, immediacy, readability’ (ibid.: 84). These are definitions that return us once more to the identification of woman with place. In terms that closely echo Doane’s account, Grosz9 describes the feminine both as that which is fundamentally spatial and as that which deranges or unhinges the smooth mapping and representation of space, a space that is too self-proximate, too self-enclosed to provide the neutrality, the coordinates, of self-distancing, to produce and sustain a homogeneous, abstract space. (2001: 157) Grosz’s concern here is architecture, and the possibilities for its transformation into ‘a different kind of space’ (ibid.: 156), one that might enable women to move across and within the places that at present enclose and fix them. But her questions could equally concern filmmaking, and the difficulties here of constructing a different conception of the relationship of women to place. Doane, whose analysis of the ‘woman’s film’ I cite above, produces her own solution to the problem of how female subjects might evade the position of ‘overinvolvement’ that she describes. Women, she argues, can adopt femininity as a form of ‘masquerade’.10 ‘Womanliness is a mask which can be worn or removed’, she writes, enabling the female subject to play with the feminine position of over-identification. In this way she creates the distance that the film, like other forms of cultural production, seeks to deny her, refusing by her very performance the definition of ‘femininity as closeness, as presence-to-itself, as … imagistic’ (1991: 25, my emphases). Doane’s solution, however, is a solution for the female spectator. It makes no assumptions of change in filmmaking itself. Contemporary women filmmakers are not the confined Victorian writers described by Gilbert and Gubar, but they too must confront definitions of the female that align it with place, embodiment, hysteria, the monstrous, and find a form that will permit the ‘self-distancing’ of which Grosz writes. In Massey’s ambitious reconceptualization of space, she writes that ‘even for those who … remain “in place”, place is always different’ (2005: 162). The challenge is to see that difference. INTERIOR SPACES

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Enclosed worlds: Amour Fou (Jessica Hausner, 2014) Amour Fou, Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s fourth feature film, contains all the plot ingredients of melodrama, or the ‘woman’s film’. The story of German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist’s (Christian Friedel) suicide pact with the married Henriette Vogel (Birte Schnoink), its focus is on Henriette, whose world is confined to the domestic interiors of upper-middle-class Berlin life in the early nineteenth century. We follow her from her initial admiration for von Kleist’s work, to his disturbing suicide proposal which she first rejects and then, when she is diagnosed with a terminal illness, accepts, and finally to the double suicide itself, and its aftermath. Reviewers noted the ‘swoony and melodramatic’ (Roddick 2014) nature of the film’s material, and invoked comparisons with the ‘lushly emotional, fantastically hyperbolic sob stories’ of Douglas Sirk’s 1940s ‘women’s films’ (Dargis 2015). This, however, is ‘a melodrama in theory but not in practice’, as Abbey Bender remarks (2015). It is our distancing from this material that is the film’s most notable characteristic; it does not, writes Manohla Dargis, ‘pull[…] you in’ like Sirk’s films. For reviewer Keith Uhlich (2015), who also notes the ‘swoony’ character of the film’s subject matter, its stylistic antecedent is Chantal Akerman’s ‘rigorous, radically feminist’ Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Like Akerman’s film, Amour Fou takes place within ‘the frozen perimeters of domestic space’, whose ‘stifling domesticity’ is ‘traversed by the familiar signs of custom’ (Flitterman-Lewis 2003: 28). Like Akerman’s film, too, its movement is contained and repetitive, and its framing distanced, formal, geometric.

Closed interiors What Hausner sought for her film,11 she has said, was ‘that feeling of the huis clos, of the closed interior. There is no way out’ (Lawson 2015). As reviewers noted, its framings echo Vermeer’s domestic interiors, with their doorways opening onto tableaux of domestic life, their draped curtains that half obscure our view, their geometric floor tiles which lead us into an inside room but only as far as the facing wall, and their figures centrally placed but often with their backs to us, refusing the intimacy that the painting’s domesticity seems to invite. The first of the film’s three music recitals is characteristic. At the right-hand side of the frame are four men arranged in a vertical pattern against the wall, in a line that recedes into the corner of the room. At the left-hand side a group of four women and a man sit around an oval table. All face out towards the camera and slightly left, their faces politely attentive. In the space between the two groups a dog poses with a solemnity equal to that of the two groups, and behind it in the diamond-patterned wallpaper we see the suggestion of a concealed door.12 96

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It is an arrangement that David Bordwell has called planimetric, following art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. The planimetric image, writes Bordwell, ‘often carries the connotations of a posed photograph’. Its ‘sense of stiff ceremony’ and ‘static, geometrical frame’, he adds, ‘can evoke a deadpan comic quality’ though it can suggest ‘something more oppressive too’13 (Bordwell 2007). In her movements between these internal spaces, Henriette follows tightly choreographed lines, but often she is still – writing letters, arranging flowers, embroidering – and she is never alone. As the camera pulls out or reverses our view, we see her daughter Pauline (Paraschiva Dragus) or the maid always present. Frequently we see her wedged within the angle of two walls that meet at 45 degrees within the frame. On one such occasion, as she speaks to von Kleist of her illness, she seems pushed increasingly towards the room’s corner; the reverse shot shows him in the open doorway, with its access to light and freedom. Only when she takes control, in the first abortive suicide ‘excursion’, are these positions reversed. First in his room, where it is Henriette who now stands in the open doorway, and then at the dinner table, we see von Kleist similarly trapped, while Henriette can move away. Henriette’s world, then, is that of the ‘closed interior’. The film has only three outside locations: two of these, the external courtyard and the riverside meadow, are as enclosed and formal as the film’s interiors; only the forest is uncomfortably asymmetric, and here the protagonists stumble uncertainly. The effect, as Bordwell suggests, is both oppressive and bleakly comic, an effect underlined by the constant presence of the Vogels’ dog, a Weimaraner, which mirrors its owners’ actions14 and is like the maid both ignored and silently acknowledged. Providing the only physical contact for its human owners, it points to just how much is repressed in this well-ordered household.

FIGURE 3.1  The first recital. (Amour Fou, 2014) INTERIOR SPACES

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Male discussion in this world is political, speaking of a world outside, but equally circular. ‘I wanted … to show a whole society’, Hausner has said (Lawson 2015), and the representatives of this society, defeated by Napoleon and facing the loss of privileges in the wake of French pressure to greater egalitarianism, defend its traditions in philosophical terms, while drinking tea. ‘What they call equality is really injustice, and what they call freedom is really a trick’, says Adam Müller (Peter Jordan).15 The feudal state, he adds, with a dramatic irony that finds its mark in all such claims to the ‘naturalness’ of a particular political system, ‘has developed in Prussia over centuries and represents the natural order’.16 That Henriette’s domestic sphere is not separate from but an aspect of this patriarchal feudal structure is clear from her sole contribution to the discussion. Responding to von Kleist’s romantic claim that ‘I would rather be free to face my downfall than remain in bondage’, she says: ‘I would not. I am my husband’s property, and I should never dare to demand freedom’. Vogel (Stephan Grossmann) is a generous master – he will not, he later says, stand in her way if she prefers von Kleist – but the terms he uses when he offers to take her to a doctor in Paris17 reveal the extent to which he, too, regards her as his possession: ‘You have always been loyal to me. Now it’s my turn … I will try everything to keep you’. Two symbols in particular define this enclosed world. The first is noted by reviewer Keith Uhlich: ‘Even the wallpaper in Henriette’s drawing room seems as if it might come to life and swallow the characters whole’, he writes (2015). Though not quite yellow, and far more geometric than the ‘uncertain … flamboyant’ pattern described in Gilman’s story, here is a version of her imprisoning wallpaper. Its pattern and muted colours are echoed in the domestic clothing of both Henriette and Pauline, so that they seem to fade into its walls as it entraps them there, while its opaque, concealed doorway has an un/heimlich quality: the suggestion of something unknown, hidden, disconcerting in the very fabric of the home. Yet when we finally see the door opened – the moment at which Henriette is reading von Kleist’s letter with its renewed suicide proposal – what is revealed is as frustrating as the flat interiors of the rooms themselves. What we see is not a passageway but a closet, whose contents are the banal stuff of everyday domestic life. Like the wallpaper, the film’s flowers are both ordinary and disturbing. Our first sight of Henriette is of a figure largely obscured by the huge flower arrangement she is completing. A little later, in another of the film’s planimetric shots, these flowers stand between Henriette and von Kleist, separating them during their first exchange about her attraction to his fictional figure of the Marquise of O – a woman who is ‘impregnated’ while unconscious by a man with whom she then falls in love, but whom she must reject when she discovers his identity. ‘I try to describe what engenders fear, and perhaps also desire’, says von Kleist. Henriette’s response is to reject both fear and desire, proclaiming a stoicism that is reiterated several times in these opening scenes. Pushed to explain why she nevertheless finds the Marquise ‘appealing’, she responds uneasily that people often ‘say one thing but also feel another’. 98

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FIGURE 3.2  The hypnosis. (Amour Fou, 2014)

Later, in another echo of feminist writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Henriette is hypnotized in an attempt to cure her ‘spiritual’ illness. The scene is based on Mesmer’s treatments of the late eighteenth century, but anticipates those of both Charcot and Freud.18 It shows her lying back in a darkened room with eyes closed, but also, as with Charcot’s patients, exposed to a politely expectant male audience – here her husband and the doctor. Under hypnosis she describes her feelings of fear/anxiety.19 ‘It’s the flowers’, she says. ‘They frighten me. … I can’t bear to see their sweet beauty. It reminds me of the fact that they will fade. … They strike me as menacing, and an undefined fear rises within me, which causes me to see the world and everything in it with a terrible doubt: what if all this was a mistake?’ Henriette’s fear is as ambiguous as the flowers themselves. Most obviously, they provide a recurring image of her own decorative confinement, and her fear is both for them (they will fade) and of them (they threaten to engulf her, suggesting that her life, and the social order it represents, may be ‘a mistake’). But the alternative she has been offered by von Kleist, with its romantic, and masochistic, mix of fear and desire, is also associated with flowers. Most significantly, it finds its embodiment in the ‘sweet beauty’ of ‘The Violet’, subject of the song by Goethe which we see performed twice in the film, which dies violently – but gladly – under the feet of its beloved.

Heterosexuality without women Anne Callahan’s Writing the Voice of Pleasure (2001), from which the above phrase is taken, traces the history of romantic love in Western culture, arguing that the apparent celebration of heterosexual desire that this tradition represents is in fact INTERIOR SPACES

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a form of narcissism. The imaginary feminine ideal constructed by male writers from the twelfth century onwards is a version of the male self; the erotics created is an erotics of self-difference. ‘The couple in the romance’, she writes, ‘is a chimera. There is no couple. There is only the feminized male and his imaginary Other’ (2001: 4). The ideal of feminine beauty that is the object of the poet’s desiring gaze is ‘a mirror image in the feminine’, and the female voice that appears to speak of its own pleasure an impersonation (ibid.: 47). Such a construction, writes Callahan, is at its height in the Romantic era, when philosophy and literature merge in the search for a Self which would achieve full realization through fusion with an other. This other, the ‘Not I’, finds its representation in the figure of ‘a woman who both is and is not the poet himself ’ (ibid.: 98). But for the female subject who seeks to find her own identity in such figures, no identification is possible. The masquerade of femininity that is presented offers her no subject position to occupy and no voice with which to speak (ibid.: 58). In Amour Fou we find an example of such Romantic ‘linguistic transvestism’ (ibid.: 100) in Goethe’s ‘Das Veilchen’ (‘The Violet’), performed once by a female professional singer and then by Henriette herself. In this poem, the voice of the poet is that of the ‘poor little violet’, whose beauty is ‘sweet’ and whose ‘humble brow’ is ‘demure and good’. It is a doubling which not only produces a masochistic, feminized aspect of the poet’s ideal self in the way that Callahan describes – the violet dies when trampled underfoot – but which, when performed by its two female voices, also becomes the articulation of an ideal position for the feminine. Goethe, model for German Romantic writers, is, the film suggests, von Kleist’s rival and his ideal. ‘I really prefer Goethe’, declares Henriette’s mother (Barbara Schnitzler), in her dismissal of The Marquise of O as ‘useless hypochondria’. Later, as von Kleist awaits an audience with the aristocratic Frau von Massow (Marie-Paule von Roesgen), who will tell him that his first choice of suicide partner, his cousin Marie (Sandra Hüller), is engaged to a Frenchman, a (slightly anachronistic) bust of Goethe gazes back at him with apparent disdain. Von Kleist’s suicide proposal, the film makes clear, is entirely narcissistic. When Henriette accepts, having been told that she is dying, he is taken aback at her reason, and at her assumption of control. ‘Forgive me Henriette’, he says, ‘I had hoped you would take this step for my sake. Because you accept my sorrow as your own and love me for it’. He seeks no physical contact with her, and is deeply uncomfortable when he sees her not quite fully clothed on the evening before their planned suicide. On the eve of their second, successful attempt, he reads her a hyperbolic letter extolling her virtues, of which she is the apparent addressee, but will not allow her to speak. The letter begins conventionally: ‘My little dove’ (a term Vogel also uses), ‘my life, light of my life’. The beloved then becomes a possession – ‘My castles and fields, my meadows and vineyards’ – before briefly becoming other, that which is beyond the writer: ‘Oh sun, moon and stars, heaven and earth, past and future’. Finally, however, she becomes first his body – ‘My 100

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heart’s blood, my bowels’ – and then his self: ‘Oh you are my second, better self, my virtues, my merits, my hope’. That this construction is wholly a self-projection, in the manner described by Callahan, is evident. Henriette’s total absence from this description – her absorption first as possession but then as aspects of von Kleist himself – functions to confirm his self-identity and wholeness. For von Kleist, her passivity confirms him as active, her lack of self confirms his subjectivity as the only subjectivity, and her willing self-sacrifice confirms his overarching worth. But if this masochistic ideal is the vision of herself offered to Henriette as a romantic alternative to her constricted life, the film also makes it clear that von Kleist is as representative a product of his society as its more conservative characters. In a voice-over monologue that drowns out Henriette’s singing voice, he proclaims that he will ‘free her from this … narrow-minded life’ in which ‘people do not know themselves at all and behave like puppets, moving to a fixed choreography’.20 The analysis accurately describes the film’s ‘minuet-like rhythms’ (Roddick 2014), and will be repeated later by Henriette, when she tells Vogel that she feels ‘as if I were a puppet in a puppet theatre’. But von Kleist’s movements are no less choreographed and his self-knowledge no greater. His romantic melancholy is an intrinsic aspect of this self-congratulatory haut bourgeois society. From the fifteenth through to the twentieth century, writes Juliana Schiesari, ‘melancholia appears as a specific representational form for male creativity’ (1992: 8), a quality of the romantic (male) writer. Von Kleist’s romantic discontent is merely the obverse of Müller’s political conservatism. Both are threatened by the moves towards social equality identified with France. Von Kleist’s contribution is as integral a part of the ritualized salon discussions as the viewpoints he opposes; his demands for a shared suicide, like claims for the naturalness of the feudal order, are punctuated by the taking of tea.

Unheimlichkeit for women It is, says Henriette to von Kleist shortly after her first fainting fit, ‘unheimlich to have an illness which nobody knows or understands’. Later she calls this ‘illness that may not be one’ ‘strange’ (seltsam): ‘a figment of the imagination which is as real as reality’. Both comments recall her description of the flowers, those ‘banal’ items that have now become strange, filling her with ‘an undefined fear’. In his study of the uncanny, Nicholas Royle writes: The uncanny involves feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the reality of who one is and what is being experienced. … The uncanny is a crisis of the proper …. It is a crisis of the natural, touching upon everything that one might have thought was ‘part of nature’: one’s own nature, human nature, the nature of reality and the world. … The uncanny has to do with a strangeness of framing and borders, an experience of liminality. (2003: 1–2) INTERIOR SPACES

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It may be frightening, he adds, but ‘[a]t the same time, the uncanny is never far from something comic’ (ibid.). In Amour Fou, unheimlichkeit is not, as Freud would suggest, a quality embodied in the woman but one experienced by her. The crisis of ‘framing and borders’, of uncertainty about ‘the nature of reality and the world’, that Royle describes, is one experienced by Henriette throughout the film, but one of which she herself becomes only slowly, and falteringly, aware. It is, the film suggests, a specifically female form of unheimlichkeit, the liminality that comes with an inability – or refusal – to find one’s place within definitions of ‘proper’ femininity. Henriette’s ‘framing’ has been constructed by men: by the social order that renders her Vogel’s compliant possession, a position that at the start of the film she declares is ‘enough for me’; by the domestic hierarchy and routines that order her everyday life; by the medical establishment that first declares her illness to be the result of a ‘spiritual disturbance’ and then pronounces it physical and terminal; and finally by the alternative, romantic vision of herself as a lonely and alienated outsider that von Kleist proffers. Faced with her illness, she is caught between framings, seeking to find, and assert, a subjectivity for which no articulation is possible outside the definitions she has been offered. When, having been declared terminally ill, she accepts the vision that von Kleist constructs as his own mirror image, she declares, ‘It’s as if I see clearly now’. But, tellingly, she adds, ‘I have become the woman you saw in me earlier. I am yours now.’ Henriette’s actions throughout the film embody at once a restless but inarticulate search for subjectivity and its repeated containment. As she begins to suffer from an illness whose physical manifestation consists of spasms and sudden faints, she becomes the classic hysteric – the devalued female equivalent, Schiesari (1992) suggests, of the melancholic man. We see an early instance of the repressed unruliness that this embodies in her response to the professional singer who first performs ‘Das Veilchen’. This woman, dressed in a low-cut red dress – a colour Henriette will adopt when she decides to accept von Kleist’s proposal – performs with restraint, but with a display of movement and emotion absent from her impassive guests. Afterwards, Henriette says to Vogel, ‘I’m sorry for her’. It must be terrible, she explains, to be ‘exposed to the opinion of the public’ like that. She herself, she insists, will risk neither admiration nor rejection. Yet, as her identification with von Kleist’s Marquise has already shown, she is clearly drawn to such display, with its performance of a passion otherwise repressed. Later she herself performs both Goethe’s song and Beethoven’s ‘Wo die Berge so blau’ (Where the Mountains So Blue), with its expression of longing for an escape which is also stillness and perhaps death. In the scene of her hypnosis we witness a performance that, as with Charcot’s hysteric patients, though in far more restrained fashion, is at once the expression of rebellion and its containment. ‘What did I say?’ she asks afterwards, when told that the hypnotized patient ‘utters things that she would never say in a waking state’. ‘Nothing important’, responds Vogel. 102

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Melodrama in theory The ending of the film presents us once more with ‘melodrama in theory but not in practice’. The ‘woman’s film’, writes Doane, is obsessively structured around ‘just-missed moments, recognitions which occur “too late,” and blockages of communication which might have been avoided’ (1987: 90). Offered the chance of treatment in Paris, Henriette suggests to von Kleist, who has arrived with his pistol case ready for their second suicide attempt, that their journey might be delayed, but is overruled by Vogel: ‘an excursion would do you good’, he insists. Later, she attempts to interrupt von Kleist’s self-absorbed reading of endearments, only to be silenced by his ‘I’m sorry I ever doubted you’. Finally, in the forest, facing the camera with von Kleist a blurred figure behind her, she seems, after several long moments, to find her voice. Turning, she says, ‘Heinrich, what I wanted to say was … ’, and von Kleist shoots her. In a further ‘recognition which comes too late’, the autopsy reveals that she was suffering from no physical illness. ‘It must have been love after all’, says Vogel in yet another misreading. The closing scene returns the film to its beginning. Here is yet another political salon discussion, its terms and participants unchanged (though it is clear that Prussia is now sliding towards bankruptcy), followed by another female music recital. Pauline now performs the song by Beethoven that her mother sang earlier, while the maid once more turns the pages of her score. Pauline pounds the clavichord discordantly, and the maid’s face suggests incipient tears, but neither disturbs the progress of the recital or the impassivity of the listeners. At its close Pauline bows to us, the audience; she is, like her mother, a passively compliant female figure. In an interview following the release of Lourdes, Hausner said that, faced with their growing realization of the ‘hollow core’ (noyau creux) of masculine power, her female protagonists are plunged into ‘a sort of emptiness’ (une sorte de vide) within which they are ‘désemparées’ (helpless, distraught)(Hausner 2011). In Amour Fou, her film of the ‘closed interior’, there is, as she suggests, ‘no way out’. Like the ‘woman’s film’, it gives us a circular structure, a trapped female protagonist whose hysterical body provides the only expression of an otherwise unarticulated and ambiguous revolt, and an ending which is the tragic outcome of recognitions that occur too late. But it does not, as Doane suggests of the ‘woman’s film’, draw us into a position of over-identification. Instead, it constructs for us the distanced standpoint that for Doane is available only through mimicry or masquerade. We look through doorways or past curtains, at characters trapped against walls or arranged in tableaux. We struggle to interpret a protagonist whose understanding seems always partial. Positioned in this way, however, we are invited to read not only the protagonist herself, with her moments of unacknowledged rebellion and sense of unheimlichkeit, but also the male traditions of painting, poetry, philosophy and filmmaking that have repeatedly framed her for us. For her, and for her daughter, perhaps, there is ‘no way out’. But we, the female audience, are positioned outside. INTERIOR SPACES

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‘The daughter’s disease’: The Falling (Carol Morley, 2015) Like Amour Fou, Carol Morley’s The Falling presents us with enclosed female spaces – here the home and the all-girls’ school – and as in Hausner’s film its female protagonist suffers from that most female of maladies: the hysterical fainting fit. But as with Amour Fou, if The Falling’s world is that of the melodrama or ‘woman’s film’, it does not construct its female spectator as herself a hysteric, a woman too close to the images of female pathology on the screen, as Doane (1987: 67) suggests of the ‘woman’s film’. Here, however, the distance constructed for the spectator is not effected through a framing which is distanced, formal and ironic. Instead, its closed, feminine world is constantly disrupted by flash-frame images of the natural, the visceral and the traumatic: images that – excessive and unreadable – repeatedly disturb its linear realist narrative. This is not a measured view from elsewhere, but a constant breaking of the film’s surface with images – and sounds – that seem both familiar (many are repeated and others are seen, less rapidly inserted, elsewhere in the film) and, in the rapidity of their movement, elusive, ungraspable. Its invitation is not to a critical distance but to a disorientating recognition of disruption and disorder. Set in 1969, in an Oxfordshire girls’ school, the film centres on close friends Abbie (Florence Pugh) and Lydia (Maisie Williams), who lives with her brother Kenneth (Joe Cole), a dabbler in the occult, and her agoraphobic mother, Eileen (Maxine Peake). Suspecting she is pregnant, Abbie begins to have fainting fits, followed by a seizure during which she dies. Afterwards, Lydia too begins to suffer from fainting fits, followed by her friends, other girls in the school and a young (pregnant) teacher. After a mass fainting disrupts an assembly, the girls are hospitalized and the school shut down. After psychological examination, they are released with a diagnosis of ‘hysterical contagion’ and the school reopened. Lydia, expelled, confronts her mother and, when Eileen tells her that she is the product of rape, runs from the house to the oak tree where she and Abbie carved their initials, and climbs it. Eileen follows and when Lydia leaps from the tree into the lake at its foot, Eileen cradles her daughter until Lydia revives.

Saints and nuns, continent women and well-brought-up children This, Freud and Breuer’s parenthetical list of the presumed sufferers from ‘hysterical deliria’ (1974: 61) is their only mention, in Studies on Hysteria, of ‘mass hysteria’ or, as it is labelled in The Falling, ‘hysterical contagion’. It is clear from their list, however, that this, like other forms of hysteria, is a ‘woman’s disease’. In her history of the gendering of hysteria, Showalter traces successive definitions of hysteria as ‘a feminine disorder, or a disturbance of femininity’ and, conversely, of women as 104

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essentially hysterical. The hysterical seizure, she writes, ‘was regarded as an acting out of female sexual experience, a “spasm of hyper-femininity, mimicking … both childbirth and the female orgasm”’.21 More than this, however, all women have been assumed to be hysterical: in the words of British analyst Gregorio Kohon, ‘A woman at heart always remains a hysteric’ (Showalter 1993: 287).22 Like G. S. Rousseau, who traces the history of hysteria between 1500 and 1800, Showalter sees this as ‘essentially a social history’ (Rousseau 1993: 182). For Rousseau, it is a narrative that charts the ‘“his-story” of male fear’ of ‘an invasive and irrepressible female sexuality’ (ibid.: 93), manifest to the Greeks in ‘an overheated, labile, voracious, and raging uterus’ – the ‘wandering womb’ of Hippocrates – and to Freud’s immediate predecessor Charcot in ‘a sexually diseased and morally debauched imagination’ (ibid.: 185). As a condition consistently identified with women, but with symptoms and presumed origins that have shifted constantly across the centuries, hysteria, he argues, is ‘par excellence the barometer … of the cultural stresses weighing on sexual relations and gender formations’ (ibid.: 106). Showalter traces its reappearance in nineteenth-century Europe and America at a time when the emergence of ‘feminism, the New Woman, and a crisis in gender’ meant that ‘patriarchal culture felt itself to be under attack by its rebellious daughters’ (1993: 305). Feminism and hysteria, writes Lisa Tickner in her study of the British suffrage movement, were ‘for half a century and more … readily mapped onto each other as forms of irregularity, disorder, and excess’, so that ‘the claim that the women’s movement was made up of hysterical females was one of the principal means by which it was popularly discredited’ (1988: 194). As Showalter suggests, the association continued into the period of second-wave feminism and after, from press complaints about the ‘hysterical demands’ of 1970s protesters (Barr 1977: 75) to accusations in the 1990s of ‘feminist hysteria’ in debates about rape (Rhode 1995: 703), and more recent headlines – here plucked at random from online journals – which proclaim ‘Feminist Hysteria’ (Schow 2014) or the ‘Hysterical Rage’ of ‘Modern Feminism’ (French 2014). For Doane, as we have seen, the symptoms that Freud regards as characteristic of the female hysteric can also be used to describe the melodramatic ‘woman’s film’.23 The female hysteric, she writes, ‘her symptoms inscribed on her body, is denied any access to a desiring subjectivity’, in much the same way as the protagonist of the ‘woman’s film’. Here, too, ‘it is ultimately the symptoms of the female body which “speak” while the woman as subject of discourse is inevitably absent’, and the female spectator, invited to over-identify with this bodily excess, becomes in turn ‘in some sense, constituted as a hysteric’ (1987: 67). Doane’s analysis of the ‘woman’s film’, and her struggle to identify a specifically female viewing position which is not over-identified with and over-invested in this on-screen figure and her melodramatic narrative, speak in turn to the ambivalent relationship between feminist analysis and hysteria. Juliet Mitchell identified hysteria as ‘the daughter’s disease’ (1984: 308), the simultaneous acceptance and refusal of femininity as it is defined within patriarchal discourse. For her the mass hysteria evident in INTERIOR SPACES

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European witchcraft from the ninth to the early seventeenth century should be seen as a form of ‘unconscious’ or ‘pre-political feminism’ (ibid.: 117), and feminism itself as in some sense conscious or politicized hysteria. For Gallop, too, ‘the hysteric may be a protofeminist’ (1983, quoted in Showalter 1993: 288), and for Dianne Hunter ‘feminism is transformed hysteria, or more precisely, … hysteria is feminism lacking a social network in the outer world’ (1983: 485). Carol Morley’s own short film, The Madness of the Dance (2006), echoes these definitions and identifications. Her buttoned-up and anxious (presumably feminist) professor (Maxine Peake), tracing the history of mass hysteria, tells us that such outbreaks should be seen as ‘a reaction to the stresses of the time’, before finally abandoning her academic stance to join the assembled actors in a dance that celebrates hysteria as expressive and subversive performance. The ‘romanticization and appropriation of the hysteric’ (Showalter 1993: 334), which is so tempting a response to the persistent identification of feminism as hysteria, has also been seen as problematic, however. Hysterical symptoms, insists Catherine Clément, are ‘ephemeral and enigmatic. They constitute a language only by analogy’ (1996: 9). Thus marginalized, the female hysteric, as with other forms of excessive and spectacular femininity, serves not to subvert but to strengthen existing social structures. If she is to ‘affect the symbolic order, or the material world’, the hysteric, in Showalter’s words, ‘must somehow break through her private language and act’ (1993: 332). For Mary Jacobus, whose interest is in the hysteric as female writer, the problem is rather different. In being so eager to see the literary hysteric as feminist heroine, she writes, we are tempted into over-simplistic readings. Thus Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ becomes an emblematic tale of female confinement under patriarchy, of medical misreadings, and of a final escape into a madness that is ‘a kind of sanity’ (Jacobus 1986: 233). What is lost in such an account – however accurate – she writes, is the powerful sense of the uncanny that makes this example of female Gothic more than a coded feminist protest. In ‘tracing the repression whereby the female body itself becomes a figure for the uncanny’ (ibid.: 235), the story also plays to and with male anxieties about the ‘horror’ of the feminine. And in refusing the kind of readability that later critics have imposed, it insists on a strangeness, an unaccountability that exceeds meaning, which disrupts realist, rationalist readings, whether patriarchal or feminist.

English places It makes me think of English places that you read about, for there are hedges and walls and gates that lock … (Gilman 2015: 2) In Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’, the Englishness of the house in which the narrator is confined signifies its orderliness – the ‘hedges and walls’ and ‘box106

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bordered paths’ of this ‘colonial mansion’ (ibid.: 1–2). But it also suggests the decay of such order (‘the place has been empty for years’), and even, paradoxically, its subversion: ‘there is something strange about the house’ (ibid.: 3). The location for Morley’s The Falling, the abandoned Carmel College in Oxfordshire, evokes a similar ambivalence. The Victorian brick mansion that we see at the start of the film, with its population of excited teenage girls in strict uniform of blazers, shirts and ties, is peculiarly English. Its 1969 setting recalls those other 1960s English schoolgirl settings of St. Trinians: The Great St. Trinian’s Train Robbery (Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder, 1966) and Carry On Camping (Gerald Thomas, 1969). The latter, made in the year of the ‘summer of love’ and worldwide student protest, signalled the final unsustainability of a comedy series whose dependence on an enclosed, repressed world of Englishness could not survive a new sexual openness.24 But this peculiarly ‘English’ setting also has darker antecedents. Morley herself has cited Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975), The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971) and Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994), where the Victorian Girls’ High School provides the initial setting for its intense relationship between teenage girls. The Falling’s ‘closeted, nunnery-like setting, psycho-sexual machinations and off-kilter theatrical inflections’ (Kermode 2015) have also suggested Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947). This story of English nuns overwhelmed by the ‘air’ in the strange and exotic setting of Mopu, India, with its doubling of convent and harem, repressed Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) and sexualized Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), England and India, has been seen as embodying both the hysteria of melodrama and the demonic ‘return of the repressed’ of the Gothic and horror genres (Walker 1978/9; Moor 2005). When Susan (Anna Burnett), who will later seek to turn herself into ‘Susie’, a double of the sexual Abbie, rings the huge bell in the school courtyard at the start of The Falling, she repeats the actions in the earlier film of Sister Ruth, the demonic double of the Sister Superior, Clodagh, who will die falling to her death from the bell rope. Like Amour Fou, then, The Falling deals with the unheimlich: with that ‘which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light’ and its relationship to the female body, the domestic, and the enclosed. Before turning to the film in more detail, it is worth mentioning briefly one further film which Morley cited in her list of the films which influenced her own (Morley 2015). Jane Campion’s Sweetie (1989), unlike those other influences, is ‘a feminist recasting’ of the Gothic genre (Smelik 2001: 140–1). It features a doubling – of sisters Kay (Karen Colston) and Dawn (Sweetie) (Geneviève Lemon) – and a vision of the familial and domestic as oppressive and suffocating, a world rendered strange by a visual style that is decentred, fractured and intercut by fantasized and dream images. Against its offcentre world of the everyday is set the uncontrollability of plant life, embodied in the trees which Kay imagines ‘crawling, crawling right under the house’ like Gilman’s ‘creeping’ female figures, splitting the concrete of yard and pavement ‘like they have hidden powers’. These trees, which for Kay are identified with fear INTERIOR SPACES

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of unrestrained sexuality and reproduction, are Sweetie’s element. Naked and smeared in mud, at the end of the film she presides in her tree-house, until she falls to a death which marks her body with a single spot of blood; her coffin is invaded by tree roots as it is lowered. For Anneke Smelik, on whose analysis I have drawn here, Sweetie’s sense of the uncanny is carried by its visual style, whose excess refuses both realism and explanation. A similar account is offered by Sue Gillett, who writes of the importance of surface in the film: ‘surface and subject become intertwined’, she argues (2004: 17), so that objects and plants resist both interpretation and narrative flow, but invite an intense affective scrutiny which gestures ‘towards an imagined off-screen space’ (ibid.: 24). The Falling, I would suggest, invites a similar sense of frustration, refusing the readings that its narrative seems to offer. Like Sweetie, however, which ends with Kay’s recognition of Sweetie, it does suggest a – tentative – way forward.

School, home and woods It is the school that presents us with the first of the film’s enclosed spaces. Its restrictions – the lines of uniformed girls, the rules about skirt length, punctuality, obedience, restraint (‘Try not to be quite so emphatic, Abigail’), the efforts towards domestic training – are at once the stuff of everyday female experience for teenagers of the 1960s and the markers of a curiously cut-off world.25 Its female staff gaze out of windows or into mirrors, seeing only reflections, or memories, in the manner of the female protagonists of the ‘woman’s film’. Its pupils, though they stretch and deform its rules, are never seen out of uniform in the film. Even Abbie, the school’s most rebellious pupil, continues to wear her school shirt when, otherwise naked, she sings and plays guitar for Kenneth.26 Its inner rooms are protected by doors and grilles – at one point, Lydia, barred from the school’s ‘communal areas’, gazes in at the school assembly through the metal grille in its closed doors. But this enclosed world is neither safe nor stable. These communal areas – the corridors, toilets and refectory – are from the beginning places where the female body cannot be contained. Early in the film we see Abbie picking at the crumbling plaster of the toilet wall – a gesture Lydia will later repeat – while explaining to Lydia how to insert a tampon. Toilets, corridors and classrooms all become scenes of vomiting, fainting or death. A minute into the film, as we hear Abbie’s voice recite Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’, the back of Miss Mantel’s (Greta Scacchi) head fills the screen, as her hands arrange her neat, tight coil of hair. The film cuts to Lydia, looking right, and as it pans across to the object of her gaze we see, not Miss Mantel but a second head of neat, tight hair, this time that of Lydia’s mother, Eileen, who proceeds to fix her beehive style with hairspray. The home, then, parallels the school as a place of stiffness and restraint. Eileen, we learn, has not left the house for years, and she, like 108

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Miss Mantel, is seen in repeated images gazing through windows or into mirrors, silent and static. Here, too, there are enclosed inner spaces: inside her bedroom Lydia folds herself into the refuge of a tiny space in her wardrobe, amid the detritus of childhood. Here, too, however, bodies cannot be contained. Kenneth’s bedroom is the scene of sex with Abbie, and then with Lydia. This last is interrupted by Eileen, whose use of hair scissors as a weapon threatens to repeat the vengeance of an earlier entrapped woman, Jeanne Dielman, when, like Eileen, she is stirred out of a self-protective numbness by an emotional response.27 Above all, Eileen’s home, as Sophie Mayer writes, ‘contains (in both senses) the rape by which she conceived Lydia’ and the ‘traumatic loss of her husband’ that followed (2016: 157). It is a place of repression not safety, but it is not alone in this. In an early montage of sequences, we get brief glimpses of the lives of the other members of the Alternative School Orchestra, the friends of Abbie and Lydia. As we see Connie (Katie Ann Knight), in uniform, seated in silence at dinner with, presumably, her mother and sister, her sister suddenly reaches for her knife and drives it into the table. Moments later, Gwen (Lauren McCrostie) pushes two fingers down her throat and vomits over her family newspaper. Surrounding and linking these two interior spaces is the natural world, again distinctively English, with its oak woodland, lake and swans, but overgrown, excessive and made strange. The opening two shots of the film show a painterly, autumnal scene of trees and water, in which the camera slowly pans up from watery reflection to the woodland itself, followed by a slow pan across and down an oak tree’s branches, leaves and trunk. They are succeeded by a close-up of Abbie’s hair, shot with the same soft-focus intensity by the slowly moving camera. It is a style characteristic of the film’s cinematographer, Agnès Godard, more usually associated with Claire Denis, a style that has been described as a tracing of ‘new material forms and contours’ through a ‘combing and teasing out [of] the Real’ (Williams 2014: 93). Often these forms are seen in close-up, as in the bark of the oak tree or the algae on the surface of the lake; elsewhere they are seen only in reflection, as if in motion. In one extraordinary shot, as the five remaining girls circle the oak it seems to stand both at the edge of and inside the water, as reflection blurs into the real. As in Denis’ films, the images fill the screen, refusing to function as context or background, and resisting reading. When we see Miss Mantel for the first time gaze out of a school window, the shot is preceded, not followed, by another gentle pan over the reflection of tree branches in water, shot through by shafts of light. It is as if the natural world beyond the school summons, but is not captured by, the gaze of the women within. As in Sweetie, the natural world in The Falling threatens to overwhelm the contained structures that have been erected against it. As the girls file through the school doors, the camera lingers on the red Virginia creeper that covers the outside wall, its leaves blurring the line between wall and stone floor and its tendrils snaking over the noticeboard and towards the doors. When the girls enter, the camera does not follow them but pans away, towards the trees and water that lie INTERIOR SPACES

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FIGURE 3.3  Reflection and real. (The Falling, 2015)

just beyond the building, so that the swaying red leaves seem only the most visible manifestation of an invasion that, like Sweetie’s trees, is ‘crawling right under the house’. Elsewhere, we see images of the moss that grows up between and fractures the paving slabs of the school courtyard, and fragments of stones and bricks now overgrown and buried. This is not, however, an abject world, ‘violent and alien’ (Smelik 2001: 148), whose uncontrollability is the site of horror – despite the marketing of the film as ‘a fantastical horror’.28 As we saw from the opening shots, the camera examines the faces and bodies of its human subjects with the same soft tactile gaze that it affords trees and water. As the girls begin their epidemic of fainting, the choreography of their falling echoes the rhythms of the camera’s movement as it explores the shapes and textures of their bodies, in the same way that it explores those of the natural world.29 It is a connection, however, that is not straightforwardly allegorical. The trees and water do not stand in for the sexuality of the teenage girls,30 a sexuality which, at the end of the 1960s, The Falling’s restrictive world of home and school can no longer contain – though the film teases us with this as with other possible readings.31 Although Lydia identifies Abbie with the oak tree on which she carved their initials, the tree remains as unreadable to her gaze as it is to ours: a presence beyond the characters in the film.

Hysterical disruption As Mayer notes, the film leaves ambiguous the cause of the attack of ‘hysterical contagion’ at its centre, ‘invoking grief, desire, rage, historical change, ley lines, hormones, performance and suggestibility’ (2016: 150). At its height it is a 110

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communal action, evoking sexual and religious ecstasy: the girls’ eyes are closed and their lips parted as they fall, their bodies writhing and entwined, and Lydia is carried aloft by her schoolmates in crucifix pose. Its lecture setting – head teacher Miss Alvaro (Monica Dolan) stands at a raised lectern wearing her academic gown, her fellow teachers seated behind her – also recalls the famous painting by Brouillet of Charcot’s lectures on hysteria, but here the swooning hysterical body disrupts rather than illustrating the lecture. The outburst fractures the repressive order of school and home, forcing the school to close and its teachers, and Lydia’s mother, to confront their own buried desires, grief and rage. Yet, though Mayer accurately diagnoses the epidemic as ‘patriarchal affective disorder’ (ibid.), these disruptions are of the borrowed patriarchal authority of the female-led girls’ school and fatherless home. When the girls are transferred to the hospital, it is an authoritative male voice that we hear questioning the girls – a voice given embodiment only when Lydia challenges its authority. When the psychiatrist answers Lydia’s ‘This is real’ with ‘What’s important here is that it’s real to you’, it is clear that patriarchal power is being reasserted: Lydia’s ‘reality’, emotional and/or fantasized, produces a diagnosis of hysteria. This diegetic disturbance is of course not the only form of disruption in The Falling. How, then, are we to read the sequences of flash images which disrupt the film’s linear narrative? These inserts comprise single frames carrying images from elsewhere in the film – of Abbie and Lydia, Kenneth’s ley lines and hexagram, the oak tree, bark and lake, the plaster crack and red creeper on the wall – but also repeated images of Abbie’s hands covered in blood, and of the assault on Lydia’s mother. Morley has said that she wanted them ‘to feel like you were inside somebody’s mind losing it a little bit’, but also that they should be seen as ‘fracturing the story’, ‘disrupting [the] film text’, creating a sort of ‘magical realism’ (Humphrey 2015; Jenkins 2015; Risker 2015). In Fredric Jameson’s account of

FIGURE 3.4  Hysterical disruption. (The Falling, 2015) INTERIOR SPACES

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‘Magic Realism in Film’, he writes of ‘the pulsation of such discontinuous intensities’ as both disrupting narrative realism and ‘de-psychologizing’ or ‘depersonalizing’ the film’s narrative subjects (1992: 142–3). In The Falling, unlike in Sweetie where similar though less fractured inserts are also used, the images are not specific to a particular character. If they speak of the unconscious of repressed memory, it is of an unconscious shared by the major characters, and by the film itself. The longest such sequence comes at the start of the film, where it is preceded by a shot of Lydia’s thoughtful face (she is reading a book titled Philosophy) and the sound of Abbie’s voice reciting Wordsworth: ‘The things which I have seen I now can see no more’. But Abbie’s bloody hands also appear in the flashes that interrupt the glance between Gwen and Susan as they fall to the floor, in Miss Mantel’s near collapse as she hints to art teacher Miss Charron (Morfydd Clark) of her own abortion, and in Eileen’s fearful stumbling through the dark after Lydia. The shots of Eileen’s rape occur in all but the sequence with Miss Mantel. This unconscious, then, is ‘depersonalized’, its repressions common to the women in the film, resurfacing in the connections made between them – between Abbie and Lydia, Gwen and Susan, Miss Martel and Miss Charron, Eileen and Lydia. Disturbing consciousness, its hysterical irruptions also disturb realism’s linear narrative, spatializing its temporal order. In flashes we glimpse the film’s images disordered and re-ordered into a kind of simultaneity, with the suggestion of other possible narratives existing just beyond our vision. The effect is to evoke Freud’s concept of the uncanny – the term is used in a number of reviews – playing with male anxieties about the ‘horror’ of the ‘fallen’ feminine. What is glimpsed here, however, is not the horror of the maternal or sexualized female body but the violence done to it. Like ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’, The Falling traces ‘the repression whereby the female body itself becomes a figure for the uncanny’. But its other images, of the unreadable natural world, as frequent in the flash inserts as the suggestions of trauma, remind us of the inadequacy and absurdity of such ideological constructions.

A melodramatic ending ‘Does the hysteric change the Real?’ ask Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément (1996: 147). At the end of The Falling, the medical diagnosis breaks the girls’ collective action, and Lydia, challenging the head teacher, discovers her own powerlessness: she is expelled. Her response is to politicize the epidemic, to render conscious the unconscious rebellion it signified. ‘Are you not going to fight for the truth?’ she demands of the assembled school. ‘To be free you must be conscious.32 Kill the system! It’s killing you.’ This time, however, the other girls do not join her – she is forced from the school hall by the prefects – and the final scenes of the film return us to the domestic world and mother-daughter relations of melodrama. They are scenes that have been described as ‘a morass of melodramatic incident’ 112

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(Felperin 2014): Lydia’s attempted sex with her brother; her confrontation of Eileen and the revelation of Eileen’s rape; and the final flight, fall and embrace of mother and daughter. But in returning us to melodrama, the film also returns us to the question posed by Cixous and Clément above. Attractive though its vision of the anarchic power of teenage hysterical contagion is, its political potential is unrealized. Returning us to the home, The Falling evokes but reverses the ending of the maternal melodrama: this mother, no longer tied to the home, saves, and is saved by, her ‘resurrected’ daughter. It is an ending that invokes a different kind of politics from the grand gestures of the assembly hall: one that will begin (it is 1969) by exploding the closed, feminine world of the home.

Living in the ruins: At Five in the Afternoon (Samira Makhmalbaf, 2003) The films of Samira Makhmalbaf are usually discussed in the context of the ‘New Iranian Cinema’ (Tapper 2006) or, more specifically, of the ‘house style’ (McGill 2004) of its most prestigious exponents, the Makhmalbaf Film House, the production company and film school established in 1996 by Samira’s father, Mohsen. Alternatively, they have been seen as examples of ‘transnational women’s filmmaking’ (Sumer 2007), exhibiting many of the thematic and stylistic features attributed by Hamid Naficy to ‘accented cinema’ (Naficy 2001). These have been productive approaches, and all can be applied to Makhmalbaf ’s third feature film. Like other recent Iranian films, it follows ‘a “quest” through a realist location’, but a quest that ‘becomes a meandering circular itinerary’, so that precise location ‘breaks down into disconnected spaces’ (Chaudhuri and Finn 2003: 47) and its journeys have ‘no origin and no destination’ (Eleftheriotis 2010: 152). Like other films of the Makhmalbaf Film School, it deploys a distanced aesthetic that combines documentary realism with elements of the surreal, to construct ‘an extraordinarily physical sense of characters mired in or moving through particular environments and contexts’ (Danks 2002). The ‘conscious politicisation of personal narratives’ that characterize the Makhmalbaf School, the ‘poetic symbolism that privileges fleeting moments and physical details’ (McGill 2004), the emphasis on non-professional performers – all are features of the film. As Asuman Sumer has argued in relation to Makhmalbaf ’s second feature film, Blackboards (1999), too, the film contains many of the features attributed by Naficy to ‘accented cinema’: in particular the focus on ‘wandering, continual displacement, homelessness’, and the use of a cyclical temporal structure (Naficy 2001: 290–1). Yet, with its focus on a young woman’s desire to escape a history of patriarchal oppression and domestic enclosure, At Five in the Afternoon is also a woman’s film, and it is in this context that I shall discuss it here. Although its cyclical structure of repetition and return is mapped on to the poverty, dispossession and lostness associated by Naficy with accented cinema, this sense of linear time giving way to INTERIOR SPACES

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a feeling of time ‘indissociable from space’ is also, as Modleski among others33 has noted (1987: 330), a key characteristic of the domestic melodrama, or ‘woman’s film’. These films, writes Modleski, are ‘peopled by … women possessed by an overwhelming desire to express themselves, to make themselves known, but continually confronting the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of realizing this desire’. Their narratives ‘give the impression of a ceaseless returning to a prior state’, as if ‘each time you reach a destination, you discover that it is the place that you never really left’. Their female protagonists, like Freud’s hysterics, are silenced – it is the experience and acceptance of loss, writes Modleski, that is at the heart of the woman’s film – but the desires thus repressed return through music or mise en scène, through fantasies of ‘events that do not happen’, or through bodily performance and excess (ibid.: 327–35).34 But while Modleski’s analysis of the Hollywood melodrama suggests something inherent to female experience in these characteristics – what she terms ‘another relationship to time and space, desire and memory’ (ibid.: 336, original emphasis) – Makhmalbaf ’s film works very differently, to politicize them. Its ‘woman’s world’ is temporally and geographically specific: ‘We won’t wear burqas forever’, says Mina (Mina Anis), the film’s most articulate character; ‘A brave and intelligent girl can make her own decisions’. But if this implies hope – women do not have to be, as Modleski sometimes seems to suggest, outside history and linear time – the film’s own political analysis is more complex than Mina’s statement allows. It shows us not only the ‘country in ruins’ that is Afghanistan, a country in which Mina’s statement leads to her death, but also brief visions of its would-be liberators, the US-led International Security Assistance Force. To a Western viewer, these scenes afford glimpses of a world that is far more familiar but no less disturbing. It is a world in which democracy is proclaimed but not understood, or perhaps even practised, and in which the price for the public visibility sought by Nogreh (Agheleh Rezaie), Makhmalbaf ’s protagonist, is submission to a sexualizing male gaze which, as Modleski argues, can produce only ‘the repression of the woman’ (ibid.: 329).

Shut up in their houses At Five in the Afternoon, the first feature film to be shot in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, focuses on a young Afghan woman, Nogreh, who lives with her father and sister-in-law Leylomah (Marzieh Amiri) in the ruins of Kabul, a space now overwhelmed by the truckloads of refugees returning from Pakistan after the US-led invasion of 2001. Secretly attending a girls’ school while her father thinks she is studying the Quran, Nogreh volunteers to stand for president in the school’s mock election, taking as her model Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto. Helped by a young poet (Razi Mohebi) who is among the refugees, she begins preparing a campaign. Her father’s (Abdolgani Yousefrazi) restless search for shelter away from the 114

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refugees and from the ‘blasphemy’ that he sees as afflicting Kabul, however, is intensified when he learns of the death of his son, and he leads the family into the desert. Here, the family burns its few possessions for warmth, and Leylomah’s baby son dies and is buried by his grandfather. The film ends as the two women continue the search for water. Here, then, is a society in which the boundaries between inside and outside, private and public space, feminine and masculine domains, are rigid, reinforced by a patriarchal interpretation of Islamic law (the lines from the Quran that we hear chanted in the Islamic ‘school’ all invoke male superiority and female obedience), and by clothing restrictions that require women to be fully covered by the burqa when they enter public space. We see few female figures in the market places of Kabul. Women are enclosed, static, immobile, moved passively from place to place by the horses and carts that are a male domain, while men crisscross the city or decide to leave it. It is a world in which men simply do not speak to women, and women approach the men of their family with deference. For Nogreh’s father, whose son is missing and whose grandson is a baby, the only possible confidant is his horse. It is the horse, not his daughter, to whom he confesses his despair over his country (‘Blasphemy is everywhere. … Many have been killed. The country lies in ruins’), reveals his capacity for compassion (‘Are you cold? Let me cover you. If you catch cold I’ll feel responsible’), and discloses his grief over the death of his son. To his daughter and daughter-in-law he denies the water that might bathe his grandson, and knowledge of his son’s, and later his grandson’s, death. In this world, the all-girls’ school that in The Falling was a closed, repressive place, becomes a space of relative liberation. Its young women can debate the possibility of a female president for Afghanistan, and mount feminist arguments. ‘Haven’t you ever studied women’s history?’ demands one of the presidential candidates, Mina. ‘Kabul has been beset by troubles. Was it the fault of the Afghan women? They wanted to go to school but were forbidden to study. They were shut up in their houses.’ It is a freedom, however, that is both limited – it can be maintained only inside the school building and comes with its own restrictions (Nogreh is criticized for not wearing the correct uniform) – and dangerous. Mina is killed on the street outside the school by a bomb that seems aimed at her – or perhaps at all the girls who attend school. The Kabul that we see, however, is a place of ruins. When at the start of the film we follow Nogreh and her father as he drives his cart into the city, the hill behind them fills the frame. As Dimitris Eleftheriotis notes of Blackboards (2010: 154), we see little sky, with the result that the landscape becomes, not the setting for the characters’ narrative mobility, but an uncertain and enveloping space. Here, the harsh light renders the desert hills and the ruins of low houses on their slopes indistinguishable, so that the city seems to be dissolving back into the landscape. Amid such ruins, the boundary between inside and outside has collapsed, and with it the restraints that kept women ‘shut up in their houses’. It is this collapse that, for Nogreh’s father, and for the other old men that we encounter, renders the INTERIOR SPACES

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ruination of Kabul apocalyptic. ‘The country lies in ruins’, says Nogreh’s father as he feeds his horse; ‘Blasphemy is everywhere. … Look at the women without veils’. In this situation, the walls that should have confined women have fallen, and the boundary they signified no longer has meaning. All of the places to which Nogreh’s father leads his family – the ruined house, the broken shell of an aeroplane, the half destroyed and empty palace – are ambiguously positioned between inside and outside. All are permeable; none can be held secure. When Leylomah, who attempts throughout the film to preserve the place to which, as home, her husband will one day return, finds this space invaded by refugees, her protests – ‘I can’t share this room with you. … We don’t know each other’ – are ignored. Men and women together occupy roofless rooms whose boundaries are marked only by carpets slung across ropes, but whether these represent inside or outside spaces is unclear. As a result, the rules of veiling become similarly uncertain. When Nogreh first greets an arriving group of refugees, she is not veiled; later, questioning a second group, she wears the burqa. The old men for whom the sight of a woman’s unveiled face is a sin now find that it is they who must turn their eyes to the wall. ‘Don’t trade your life for a place in Hell’, says Nogreh’s father to the two teenage girls who ride in his cart, but they ignore his instructions to cover their faces, and, ordered to ‘put a finger in your mouth to disguise your voice, so that it doesn’t sound feminine’, they giggle and playfully, mockingly, experiment. His response is to evict them from the cart. We see them run across the featureless desert, their burqas billowing behind them, seeming to dance to the extra-diegetic music that we will hear again at the close of the film, in clear riposte to the chanted refrain of earlier: ‘And women should refrain from dancing’. The shot, held for almost a minute as the figures of the young women become smaller and smaller within the frame, provides an example of the ‘open image’ described by Chaudhuri and Finn (2003) as characteristic of the New Iranian Cinema, in which action is suspended in favour of a dreamlike image whose meaning is ambiguous. Here, however, this ambiguity is anchored in the film’s narrative. In the actions of the young women we can read a careless joy, in both their freedom of movement and the rebellion it signifies. But like Nogreh’s earlier journey, it is movement without a horizon, and apparently without direction. The vast desert landscape seems to swallow their rebellion, as it will later swallow the figures of their visual doubles, Nogreh and Leylomah. When we hear the dance music again, it echoes ironically, and with a sense of loss.

If I become president If the collapse of boundaries in Kabul means blasphemy for Nogreh’s father, and the loss of the domestic for Leylomah, for Nogreh it means freedom. We see her negotiate the passage between inside and outside, darkness and light, using the anonymity of the burqa to escape identification as she leaves the Islamic ‘school’, 116

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and replacing veil with parasol as she walks confidently through the streets. It is the white court shoes with which she replaces her dusty black plimsolls that most symbolize this move. Wearing them she is taller, and her presence heralded by the sound that they make. Suddenly she is a figure with a destination, clearly in command. Walking towards the light in the vast deserted hall of the palace, her steps are measured and deliberate. When she stamps her feet it is in defiance of the Quranic verse heard earlier, which commands that ‘women stamp not their feet on the ground, lest their hidden beauties become evident’.35 The desire for a move from private to public space that the shoes symbolize, however, is neither as straightforward nor, in its identification with Westernization, as unambiguous as Nogreh assumes. Her model as president, Benazir Bhutto, is to the male photographer who saw her reviewing the army a ridiculous figure – ‘She was followed by nannies. … Everyone laughed’. To Nogreh’s fellow student she exemplifies the corruption of power: ‘Although she was a woman, Benazir Bhutto favoured the Taliban’, she says, ‘an anti-woman regime that destroyed Afghanistan’.36 And in two linked sequences in particular we see played out the complex relationship between public and private, visibility and invisibility, that Nogreh’s transgressive desire to be president produces. The first is Nogreh’s encounter with the French soldier who is patrolling the road below the ruined palace in which her family has taken refuge. Our first view of Nogreh is a low-angle shot as she stands outside the palace door, her burqa billowing behind her. As she raises her parasol and surveys the scene below, we get the reverse shot: of steep stone steps leading to a paved pathway along which the tiny figure of the soldier walks. As the camera pulls back and we see that the palace is in ruins, Nogreh descends the staircase. For a brief time, she seems to possess the palace behind her, emerging confidently from the ruins of the power it represents. She pauses, and puts on her white shoes, so that the sound of her footsteps matches those of his boots, and begins to ask the soldier about his president. It is a conversation in which she dominates: both speak in halting English, but she is calm as she stands above him and the questions are hers. As they talk, we see the poet arrive, and the relationship becomes triangular, with both men gazing up at Nogreh. The poet offers himself as translator, but it is a translation that is also a gesture of possession. It is he who answers Nogreh’s question about the democratic process – the soldier stumbles incoherently in his response – and he uses his position as translator to persuade Nogreh to have her photograph taken. When he asks the soldier, ‘Why are you here?’ and receives the puzzled response, ‘Because of you’, followed by ‘Why are you here?’, his response is ‘Me? Because of her.’ It is a statement immediately followed by ‘She is next president of Afghanistan’, the soldier’s respectful clicking of heels, and Nogreh’s answering salute. But its tone and the poet’s lingering gaze recall his mother’s earlier words, ‘He helps the girls he likes’. Unlike Nogreh’s journeys, those of the poet are shot against the horizon, like the brief shots that follow of the convoy of Western jeeps, emphasizing a freedom of mobility denied her.37 He follows her against her will, and his support INTERIOR SPACES

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FIGURE 3.5  Nogreh descends the palace steps. (At Five in the Afternoon, 2003)

for her ambition is less than straightforward. Asked to find her a speech by any presidential candidate so long as it is a woman, he brings her one by Hamid Karzai, and the poem that he suggests that she read aloud as practice for her speeches, and which gives the film its title, is by a male poet lamenting the death of a bullfighter.38 It seems, then, that to perform the role of president is to perform masculinity – and a task that, despite the poet’s apparent openness, is not so very different from that demanded by Nogreh’s father of his young passengers: to disguise their voices, so that they don’t ‘sound feminine’. It is Nogreh’s white shoes that become the symbol of her desire for, and growing confidence in, an acknowledged presence in public space.39 Described by reviewer Sally Vincent (2004) as ‘white patent-leather pumps with bows on top’, they are, writes Vincent, ‘important shoes’, in which a woman would ‘take her first steps to freedom’, a freedom suggested as Nogreh descends the palace steps. Yet the woman descending a staircase is a familiar cinematic trope, and the shoes are ambiguous symbols, more easily aligned to Western myths of femininity than to the masculine authority that Nogreh seems to borrow when she steps slowly and deliberately across the palace floors. The girl who achieves success when she steps into a dazzling pair of shoes in which she can dance is, after all, the stuff of fairytale narrative, but it is a narrative that either rewards its heroine with marriage (‘Cinderella’) or punishes her for her ambition (‘The Red Shoes’).

Look at the camera It is the issue of visibility that dominates in the second sequence I want to discuss. As the poet and his photographer friend take pictures of Nogreh – the only female 118

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customer in a city square full of photographers – the attitude of the two men is contrasted. For the photographer, ‘a woman should stay at home. She should do the cooking, look after the house.’ His preferred pose for Nogreh, in which she sits fully covered by her burqa, produces, in its image of anonymous Afghan femininity, a portrait photograph whose very purpose – the affirmation of individual identity – is denied. The poet, however, insists on multiple poses. ‘In Afghanistan we don’t know what people will vote for’, he says, but his personal pleasure in the extended sequence in which Nogreh is repeatedly framed and photographed is clear. Later, when Nogreh re-enters the palace after a search for water, she finds herself walking past a series of stone pillars on each of which is displayed a photograph of herself. The effect is oddly disorienting. Displayed in a space that was once public and is now private, the images form a regressive gallery, reflecting not Nogreh herself – her purposeful activity as she walks past contrasts with the passivity of their poses – so much as the poet’s ambiguous desire. When he hands her a hand-written copy of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem to read aloud, it is inscribed on the back of a copy of the portrait of Nogreh as veiled Afghan woman. As she turns the sheet of paper in her hands, it is not clear whether the two sides represent alternative or complementary demands. This sequence follows two earlier scenes featuring images of women that together emphasize their ambiguous significance. The first comes when the family has taken refuge in the aeroplane shell. As the plane begins to rock, Nogreh’s father peers out through a window space, to see men posting sexualized images of Westernized young women on the aircraft’s tail, in an action that foreshadows the poet’s similarly unauthorized posting of Nogreh’s portrait. As the camera pulls back we see that its hull is already plastered with such images. In the second, very different scene, it is copies of Mina’s portrait that we see, displayed at her funeral

FIGURE 3.6  Nogreh encounters her image. (At Five in the Afternoon, 2003) INTERIOR SPACES

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service. Black and white, the image captures the directness of her gaze and address. As Nogreh lifts her veil, alone among the sea of burqa-clad women, the image of Mina fills the screen, and seems to return Nogreh’s gaze. It was Mina who, having lost her family to ‘a regime run by men, not by women’, argued most forcefully for women’s education, freedom from the burqa, and access to the public sphere. Without these images her individuality would have no public acknowledgement. But if this scene emphasizes the need for women’s visibility in the public sphere, the earlier one reminds us of the dangers that come with the identification of such visibility with Westernization. When Nogreh confronts the gallery of portraits of herself, therefore, the meaning of these unanchored and recursive images is far from clear. They bring the promise of a public presence. Yet, the product of a doubled male gaze, part hostile and part possessive, and displayed without her consent, they remind us of the dangers as well as the possibilities of such visibility.

No need to cover yourselves At the end of the film we see the family, led by Nogreh’s father, trudge further into the featureless desert. On this journey without destination and without landmarks, they meet an old man who has stopped moving and, with his donkey, awaits death. In the encounter between the old man and Nogreh’s father we see the futility of the linear journey that both have attempted. The old man struggles to remember his intended destination; it is, he eventually says, Kandahar, his purpose to see Mollah Omar and the ‘council of wise men’ convened to decide whether to release Osama Bin Laden to the USA. But, as Nogreh’s father tells him, he is far too late: ‘America has invaded Afghanistan! Bin Laden and Mollah Omar have fled’. For these old men, and the others who have left Kabul in search of ‘a real Islamic city’,40 the vast desert is all-enveloping: ‘There was no water. No villages. Where is the road?’ says the old man. Their search for a lost, purer homeland is, as with other exilic journeys, futile. Linear time, the time of history, is present in this scene, but it belongs to the Western planes and helicopters that fly overhead, crossing the desert and writing history in their image. For Nogreh, the journey brings a final loss of all confining interior spaces – the cart and its contents, like the coop that has enclosed the family’s chickens, is burnt. When they see a figure in the desert, the rules of veiling are abandoned: ‘No need to cover yourselves’, says Nogreh’s father, ‘He’s an old man.’ But it means, too, the loss of hope and ambition. The film’s final image is of the two women, Leylomah leading the horse with the family’s chickens on its back and Nogreh carrying the yoke and buckets with which we first saw her. Like the earlier image of the two girls running into the desert, the shot is held for over half a minute and is accompanied by the traditional music that will run on into the credit sequence. This time, however, as the two women walk away from us over the crest of a hill indistinguishable from the featureless desert that fills the screen, the desert seems 120

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to swallow them. But as they disappear, we continue to hear Nogreh whisper the lines of Lorca’s poem. This is the shot, in reverse, that opened the film, where we saw the two women walk up the hill towards us, and heard Nogreh’s whispered recitation. It is a circular framing that returns us to definitions of the ‘woman’s film’, with their emphasis on ‘repetition and return’ (Modleski 1987: 336). But this is not quite the ‘feminine relation to time … defined in terms – repetition, waiting, duration – which resist any notion of progression’ described by Doane (1987: 109). Rather, it is defeat and destruction that is resisted through this circularity, in Makhmalbaf ’s politicization of the structures of the women’s film.

Cinematic commentary? In his article on At Five in the Afternoon and Joy of Madness (2003), the documentary by Samira’s younger sister Hana about the making of Samira’s film, Haim Bresheeth argues that while both films are ‘cinematic commentaries on a topic barely covered in film history: Afghan womanhood, femininity and the changing situation faced by women over decades of foreign and local conquest and domination by both colonial and patriarchal regimes’ (2010: 29), Hana’s is the more successful. Samira’s fiction film, he writes, ‘fails to deal with the reality which the documentary painfully maintains’ (ibid.: 38). It is a conclusion in line with Sumer’s reminder that ‘third-world women’s texts’ are often ‘viewed primarily as sociological accounts granting Western readers a glimpse into the “oppression” of third-world women’. Muslim women artists, in particular, she writes, ‘are expected to testify’ to this condition (2007: 65–6). For Sumer herself, Makhmalbaf ’s films instead articulate ‘a “transnational imaginary”’, directing our attention to ‘the interconnectedness between what appear to be very local and specific conditions of living and global power relations’ (ibid.: 54). Like the other films discussed in this chapter, then, At Five in the Afternoon deals with women’s confinement to and as place, with silencing, and with a rebellion written on and contained through the body. Like them, it draws on the structures of the ‘woman’s film’ to do this, but through techniques that subject them to critical questioning. Far from being locally specific testimony, its reach is, as Sumer suggests, global. Frustrating ‘the Western desire to reveal the “truth” of the Middle Eastern woman’ (ibid.: 68), it refers the complexity of her position back to our own.

Notes 1

Freud writes that during this process ‘there is to be observed a marked lowering of the active sexual impulses and a rise of the passive ones’ (1977b: 387).

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  2 Given the immensity of the task that Irigaray proposes, it is perhaps not surprising that other feminist theorists have sought instead to reclaim women’s identification with space and place. Jessica Benjamin, for example, has argued for a female ‘inner space’. Such space, she argues, is not merely a ‘receptacle’, but rather a space of relationship and desire, and as such is ‘full rather than empty’ (1988: 95, 97).   3 Feminist political theorists sought to offer the specificity that Leland demands. Iris Marion Young’s ‘Throwing like a Girl’ (1980), for example, draws on the empirical observation that when girls throw, unlike boys they remain relatively immobile, failing to make full use of the body’s ‘spatial and lateral potentialities’. Within a patriarchal culture, she argues, women are ‘physically inhibited, confined, positioned, and objectified’ (1980: 142, 140). This sense of constriction results from women’s doubled sense of themselves, as both subjects (who can act upon and change the world) and objects (our bodies are ‘things’). If women are, as she writes, ‘rooted in place’ (ibid.: 148, original emphasis), then they are so ambivalently, as the verb suggests: caught between the position of passive object and that of (unwilling) subject.   4 The physician whose ‘rest cure’ is referenced is neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, whose work was recognized by Freud and Charcot and applied not only to Gilman herself but later to Virginia Woolf (Bassuk 1985).   5 Gilbert and Gubar also argue that ‘from a female point of view the monster woman is simply a woman who seeks the power of self-articulation’. The monster that they propose for women’s self-identification is the Sphinx, ‘whose indecipherable message is the key to existence’ (2000: 79).   6 The phrase comes from Christine Battersby (1998: 39) who, like Bordo, argues that to assume a female subject involves reconceptualizing our model of subjectivity.   7 Freud attended Charcot’s lectures between October 1885 and February 1886, and offered to translate Charcot’s latest book into German (Heath 1982: 38–9).   8 Individuals, however, did escape. Showalter points to one of Charcot’s most photographed patients, ‘Augustine’, who, after a fruitless rebellion, deployed her theatrical skills to disguise herself as a man and escape.   9 Grosz is drawing here on Irigaray’s arguments in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. 10 Doane draws on psychoanalyst Joan Riviere’s ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ (1986/1929), in which Riviere describes the adoption of femininity as a ‘mask’ by the ‘intellectual woman’, in order to deflect possible reprisals for the threat that she poses. 11 This is also true of Hausner’s earlier films. Speaking of her third feature film, Lourdes (2009), she has said:

Je cherche pour chaque film à trouver un lieu unique, fermé, isolé, qui m’aide à développer une narration. J’ai besoin d’un huis clos mais aussi de vêtements particuliers car ils m’aident à construire l’histoire…. Je m’efforce de rendre les personnages moins individualisés, les concevant plutôt comme des prototypes formant un système social ou religieux. Je suis personnellement consciente de vivre à l’intérieur d’un système et que cela influence en partie mon caractère. Je fais ou je ne fais pas ce qu’on attend de moi et cela définit qui je suis. Je fais partie de la société et j’y joue mon rôle…. Dans mon film, j’essaie de décrire un tel système dans lequel chacun joue son role. (Hausner 2011)



[For each film I search for a single place, closed, isolated, which will help me to develop the narrative. I need a huis clos but also specific clothing because it helps me to construct the story. I try to render my characters less individualised,

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to conceive of them rather as prototypes forming a social or religious system. I am myself conscious of living inside a system and that this in part influences my character. I do or do not do what people expect of me, and that defines who I am. I am part of society and I play my role there. In my film, I try to describe just such a system in which each one plays their role. (my translation)]

12 These ‘jib’ doors were usually servants’ doors. We see the Vogels’ maid silently emerge and retreat from such a door throughout the film. 13 Catherine Wheatley draws on Bordwell’s account in her discussion of Hausner’s third feature film, Lourdes. See Wheatley (2016). 14 The dog recalls the Weimaraners of photographer William Wegman, which also perform human actions and invite us to speculate on what they might make of these. See: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2015/10/16/youll-neverunderstand-william-wegmans-weimaraners-but-you-should-still-see-this-museumexhibit/#7c43052c12c5. 15 Müller, unusual in the film in being named, was a political economist and theorist of the state who had co-edited a periodical with von Kleist. 16 The claim suggests Stuart Hall’s definition of ideology as a set of social understandings which ‘have the whole social order embedded in them’ (1980: 134), but which make this structure of domination and oppression appear natural. 17 In 1811 the neurologist in charge of the Salpêtrière in Paris was Philippe Pinel, a forerunner of Charcot who is depicted in a painting of 1887 which closely resembles that by Brouillet of his successor. In ‘Pinel Freeing the Insane’ by Robert-Fleury, the ‘insane’ are all female, their liberators and judges male. At the centre of the painting, as in that of Charcot, stands a partially clothed young woman who is being both displayed and inspected by Pinel. See Showalter (1987: 1–4) for a fuller discussion of the painting. 18 In interview Hausner commented: ‘at that time, the end of the 18th century, this sort of hypnosis, this mesmerism – Mesmer was actually an Austrian doctor and he used this sort of treatment for the first time. He believed in a sort of animal magnetism, that the body has magnetic lines, and if he does this, he cleans the magnetism of a body. That was very popular at the time, and it did have some effect. It’s like a predecessor of the hypnosis and psychotherapy that Freud and the others used at the end of the 19th century’ (Lawson 2015). 19 Henriette’s term is ‘Angst’, which can mean fear, anxiety or dread. 20 The simile references von Kleist’s essay ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ of 1810, in which he argues, following Kant, that it is human consciousness and capacity for reflection that distinguishes human beings from animals and puppets. 21 Freud writes that ‘a hysterical attack is the reflex mechanism of the act of coition’ (1979: 102). 22 Showalter is citing first Mark S. Micale (1989), and then Kohon’s ‘Reflections on Dora: The Case of Hysteria’ (1984). 23 Doane is, of course, not alone in making this identification. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, for example, writes that the mechanism which operates in melodrama, whereby the ‘undischarged emotion which cannot be accommodated within the action… is traditionally expressed in music and… certain elements of the mise en scène’ are ‘strikingly similar to that of the psychopathology of hysteria’, where ‘the energy attached to an idea that has been repressed returns converted into a bodily symptom’ (1987: 73). Doane, however, goes further in identifying this with a more general hystericization of the female spectator, and hence of femininity as a whole. INTERIOR SPACES

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24 In his account of the Carry On films Andy Medhurst argues that it is this film that marks the point of decline of the series, its sexual directness putting an end to ‘the very traditions of innuendo that had sustained [the series] for so long’ (1986: 183). 25 It is as if, wrote one reviewer, the school exists ‘in a fairy-tale enclave, separate from the rest of the world’ (Prospero [N.B.] 2015). 26 The only exception to this is when the girls are in hospital. Here, however, they wear another sort of uniform: the full-length, heavy floral nightdresses that seem to render them Victorian children. 27 In Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the protagonist, whose flowered domestic overall is almost identical to that worn by Eileen in The Falling, uses similar scissors to commit murder when her emotional numbness is broken. 28 This quotation on the cover of the DVD comes from ScFi Now, which also notes the ‘extremely sinister’ nature of its advertising poster. While the magazine’s review does state that the film is ‘steeped in British folk horror tradition’, however, it also identifies it with ‘period drama’ and ‘darkly comic kitchen sink-realism’ (Hatfull 2015). 29 Godard has said,

I don’t like feeling a voyeur. The most inexhaustible landscapes for me remain faces and bodies: I like to look at people, to look at them in order to love them. It’s like dancing with someone, except with a camera you don’t touch them. I just want to tell them that I’d like to put my hand on them.



(Vincentelli 2000, original emphasis)

30 Mayer offers such a reading: ‘Girls, suggests the film, are still waters beneath whose reflective surfaces are dark depths’ (2016: 150). 31 Kenneth’s talk of ‘magick’ and ‘ley-lines’, and the linking of strands of Abbie’s hair with the shape of the ley-lines he draws, seem to suggest a magical connection between female sexuality, pregnancy and the earth. The film’s poster suggests a darker, abject version of this connection. In it Lydia and Abbie, sexualized and knowing children in school uniform, hold hands as they walk through a forest, with the feet and legs of their fallen friends visible at the edges of the frame. 32 The film attributes this saying to Ouspensky. It also echoes Clément’s argument that the hysteric has ‘only a fictive independence’ because her protest remains at the level of the unconscious, or Imaginary (1996: 8–9). 33 See also Doane (1987: 109), ‘A feminine relation to time… is defined in terms – repetition, waiting, duration – which resist any notion of progression’. 34 The film that has been most discussed in these terms is Stella Dallas, where Stella’s rebellion against the ideal of maternal femininity that she is expected to maintain is effected through the ‘excessive presence of [her] body and dress’ (Williams 1987: 311, original emphasis). 35 I am reliant on Mehrabi (2003) and Clarke (2009: 74) for this translation. 36 Later events reinforce the dangers of such a move. Returning from exile in 2007, Bhutto was assassinated while standing again for election. 37 The only exception is when the poet carries Nogreh to and from the city on his bicycle, and we see their silhouetted figures against the horizon. 38 The poet tells her that it is about ‘the death of a cow’, a discrepancy that has puzzled reviewers and which has been suggested as Makhmalbaf ’s error (Mehrabi 2003). 124

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39 Nogreh’s feeling of despair at Mina’s death is marked by her kicking aside of the white shoes. We see her put them on, then walk deliberately across the palace floor, pausing to stamp her feet with increasing force. Then she stops, kicks off the shoes and throws aside her umbrella, and hops across an imaginary hopscotch court, a child again. 40 The words are spoken by another old man who is removing his family from Kabul, and whose description of Kabul (‘The city is overrun with blasphemy. Women no longer wear their veils’) echoes that of Nogreh’s father.

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Spatial mapping In an essay on early cinema’s ‘phantom rides’ – those early films in which a camera was mounted on the front of a moving train – Tom Gunning writes of their relationship to landscape painting, and to the popular lantern slide travel lectures and panoramas that were the immediate forerunners of cinema. Landscape, he writes, is characterized by a double aspect: a ‘frame that organizes a composition geometrically, while simultaneously opening a view into a depth’ (2010: 33). It is a relationship of tension, between framing and illusionistic depth, contemplation and movement, unity and the suggestion of its dissolution. The ‘ideal landscapes’ of the seventeenth to the nineteenth century invite a ‘magisterial gaze’, while at the same time soliciting ‘a voyage of both eye and body into the depth of the scene, inviting spectator fantasies of entrance and exploration’ into landscape’s bounded space (ibid.: 35). In the case of American landscapes, this fantasy of penetration, coupled with a ‘view from a height’, took on a national imperative, of ‘spatial expansion and historical progress’ (ibid.: 39). Between these ‘ideal landscapes’ and cinema came the lantern slide show and the panorama. The panorama was a vast painted canvas which surrounded its spectators, who viewed from a specially constructed observation platform, or, less usually, was mounted on rollers to unfold before them. Here, too, the view was contained, by the lantern slide’s frame or the panorama’s architectural structure, but the sense of exploration and movement – the feeling of entering and ‘seizing’ the landscape – was expanded. The result, however, was once again contradictory. The sense of immersion produced by the panoramic spectacle created a sense of physical disorientation, while at the same time, argues Gunning, the apparatus of viewing induced a sense of self-aware distance in the spectator. This double sense, of on the one hand ‘visual and physical mastery’ and on the other ‘a feeling of being physically overwhelmed’ (ibid.: 50) links the panorama not only with theories of the sublime and the landscape painting they inspired, but also with early cinema. The ‘phantom rides’ that Gunning describes produce, he argues,

a similar double sense. On the one hand, with ‘their front-on viewpoint, [they] provide a unique realization of the fantasy of penetrating a landscape’, promising the fulfilment of dreams of mastery; on the other, as spectators we become ‘the point at which everything converges and then disappears’, converting our sense of mastery into one of loss (ibid.: pp. 57, 59). Gunning’s description of early cinema’s ‘most powerful landscape form’ looks not only back to landscape painting and its popular successors, but also forward to theorizations of narrative cinema and narrative space. Gunning himself refers to Noel Burch’s (1981) theory of the cinematic spectator ‘around whom all space is organized – the coherent subject of ideology sutured into a continuous narrative of illusory domination’ (ibid.: 59), arguing that in the case of the phantom rides, this is only part of the truth. In stressing the illusion of mastery, Burch misses the sense of vertigo that the phantom ride also produced. A closer match to Gunning’s account is that of Stephen Heath. For Heath cinema is characterized by the constant play between movement and its regulation through framing, as ‘off-screen space becomes on-screen space and is replaced in turn by the space it holds off ’ (1981: 45). The film thus ‘ceaselessly poses an absence, a lack, which is ceaselessly recaptured’ (ibid.: 52). What performs this crucial act of containment is narrative: it is ‘narrative significance that at any moment sets the space of the frame to be followed and “read”’. Through narrative, space is ‘regulated, orientated, continued, reconstituted’ (ibid.), so that ‘frame space’ becomes ‘narrative space’. In this process ‘space becomes place’ – the scene of action, ‘composed, centred, narrated’ (ibid.: 36–7). Like Gunning, then, Heath emphasizes cinema’s ceaseless play between movement, and the threat of disturbance it represents, and the containment produced by framing. The ‘ghostly dance of presence and absence, sensation and distance’ that Gunning (2010: 64) discerns in early cinema’s ‘phantom rides’, is for Heath regulated and contained in narrative cinema through the functioning of narrative space. The fiction film, he writes, ceaselessly fragments and reconstructs space ‘in order to construct a unity that will bind spectator and film in its fiction’ (1981: 56). What is notable in this analysis is that the potential for disruption of film’s narrative and ideological framing – its ‘fictions of wholeness’ (ibid.: 118) – comes from an intensity of movement, and through it the opening up of ‘heterogeneity … difference, contradiction’ (ibid.: 115). Disruption, in other words, comes from an eruption of time or history into the ‘smooth stability’ of cinema’s constructed world (ibid.: 49). In contrast, the possibility that a similar radical disturbance might be effected by the sense of ‘a presence of space …, the space that is there, distinct’ (ibid.: 61, my emphasis) is considered only briefly, in a section on Ozu’s films, and dismissed. Such a move might be formally disruptive, writes Heath, but it could not disturb film’s ideological operation. It would be a mere stylistic rearrangement. Despite his commitment to a political analysis of cinema, then, for Heath space is essentially passive, and feminine.1 The gendered opposition between ‘change, movement, history, dynamism’ and a concept of 128

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space ‘defined by absence, by lack’ that Doreen Massey notes elsewhere in cultural thinking (1994: 257), is here transposed into film theory. A rather different perspective to that of Gunning on the nineteenth-century precursors of cinema is provided by Giuliana Bruno. She too traces early cinema’s links with the panorama, the diorama and the magic lantern of the explorer’s lectures, but her interest is in their function as modes of spatial and gendered exploration. Like them, she writes, early film became ‘a geographical tool for mapping and traversing sites’, a means of voyaging through far-off lands. Like them, it ‘“discovered” otherness, made it exotic’, and so ‘often acted as agent of an imperialist obsession’ (2002: 77). In so doing, it mapped not only cultural and geographic difference in the service of a colonial discourse, but also sexual difference. Like the early atlases that preceded them, these new forms of spatial mapping feminized the terrain they charted, fusing sexual and racial codes in the narrative of exploration, and inscribing ‘codes of domination into the power relations between the sexes’ (ibid.: 121). And yet, she points out, women too were travellers, explorers, and presenters of illustrated travel lectures. They, and the women travel writers who were their contemporaries, thus found themselves in a complex and uneasy position in relation to the imperial discourse in which they were participants. They were, in their very participation, disruptive of its gender conventions, so that the struggle for the female traveller became the struggle to present a difference of look, one that would not make claims to possession and territory, and hence to masculinity. ‘Discovery for the female traveler, who struggled to assert herself on the margins of imperial culture’, comments Bruno, ‘was not necessarily an act of conquest’ (ibid.: 121). She struggled to find a subject position within a colonial discourse that aligned women with the personal and domestic, and reserved the role of adventurer for men. The ‘anxiety of self-definition and self-inscription was written in many ways in women’s voyages’ (ibid.: 119), writes Bruno, and the object of investigation for the female traveller was often herself as much as, and in relation to, the landscape itself. Thus one female explorer, Esther Lyons, began her slide show with an image of herself seated in front of a mirror, the object of her own investigative gaze and self-construction. This quest, to fashion the self ‘in, and as, space’ (ibid.: 114) is one Bruno tracks through into the work of women filmmakers, who also explore the self as they explore space. In some ways, Bruno echoes the double sense of film’s operation proposed by Gunning and Heath. Cinema, she writes, is like a map: a ‘two-dimensional text that can create the illusion of other spatial dimensions, including depth’. Like a map or atlas, it can offer ‘the dislocating pleasure of such imaginary explorations’ (ibid.: 276–7) as well as the security of the cartographic frame. Her terminology here makes reference to that of Michel de Certeau, though she rejects his argument. For de Certeau the map is a tool of ordering and constraint: it ‘colonizes space’ (1984: 121), and in so doing effects a victory ‘of space over time’ (ibid.: xix). He contrasts it to the ‘tour’, conceived as a journey through, or story about, space: what ‘the map cut up, the story cuts across’ (ibid.: 129). Like Heath, then, de BORDER SPACES

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Certeau contrasts mobility, or time, with stasis, or space, though unlike Heath he identifies this mobility – seen as creative or transgressive – with the movement of narrative itself. For Bruno, however, de Certeau’s opposition between map and tour is artificial. Both chart movements; indeed, the two are inseparable. The map, like film, is, she writes, a ‘configuration of forces’ (2002: 272), able to generate visual imagery for the viewer, linking memory, perception and fantasy. What is refused in her account is the separation of time and space, with its identification of space with stasis and constraint. In a formulation that comes close to Massey’s attempt to reconceptualize space itself, she writes that filmic space is ‘a terrain of shifting positions – the product of multiple, incorporated, and mobile viewpoints’ (ibid.: 178).

Travelling women To return to the women travellers whose difficult relationship to space and their own positioning within it is charted by Bruno, we find this complexity explored elsewhere, too, in accounts of women’s colonial (travel) writing. In her analysis of the travel writing of Mary Kingsley at the end of the nineteenth century, Alison Blunt outlines the ambivalent and shifting authorial and spatial positions that Kingsley adopts. In a letter of 1896 Kingsley refuses, for example, to produce a map which will delineate ‘where I have been – or rather where I say I have been’ (quoted in Blunt 1994: 51), a refusal that points, argues Blunt, to the ‘spatial ambivalence of her identity as a white woman traveling in the context of imperialism’ (ibid.: 52). Maps, write Blunt and Rose (1994: 8), are ‘central to colonial and postcolonial projects’, and Kingsley cannot claim the authority over landscape, or territory, that her male counterparts can. Instead, writes Blunt, she occupies a shifting position in relation to her travel. Sometimes she claims the authority of science, an impersonal authority in which she as explorer does not figure – it is not her map. Sometimes she adopts a masculine persona, so that she can be the hero of her own adventures. Most frequently, however, she occupies a position both inside and outside this masculine tradition of writing. She describes the landscape, in what Blunt calls a kind of ‘textual mapping’, but pictures herself in it, becoming part of it, describing the immediate sounds and sense of her surroundings rather than distant sights. She climbs Mount Cameroon but, in an account characterized by ironic selfawareness, describes finding at its summit not a panoramic view displayed for her surveillance, but thick mist which obscures her vision. Perhaps most strikingly, she describes a landscape which is beyond her and defies any notion of penetration: it is, she writes, ‘like being shut up in a library whose books you cannot read’ (Kingsley 1986: 102). Kingsley, comments Blunt, is ambivalently located both textually and spatially: ‘both inside and outside a masculine, imperialist tradition of exploration, conquest and surveillance’ (1994: 67). Her position as a woman leaves her marginalized, close to rather than in possession of the landscape, but 130

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her ability both to travel and to write is the product of an imperialism ‘grounded in constructions of racial difference’ (ibid.: 68). If, then, we pursue the comparison with film proposed by Bruno, Blunt’s account suggests a more ambivalent positioning of the woman filmmaker than Bruno presents. Kingsley’s ‘textual mapping’ provides a more open, tactile and imaginatively rich form of the map than the linear version she rejects. But those more authoritative versions retain their power, as de Certeau suggests, and her relationship to them is ambivalent. It is not simply that she seeks to ‘fashion a self ’ through her travels, as does Bruno’s female explorer or filmmaker, although clearly this is part of her quest. The positions that she can occupy, traced spatially through her relationship to landscape, are bound up with power structures in which she is implicated as white colonial as well as female subject, and which shape her desires and her blindnesses as well as her difference of view. Anne McClintock’s study of the life and writing of Olive Schreiner depicts a ‘daughter of empire’ who is rather differently positioned in relation to the Africa she describes. Born ‘of colonial stock’, the daughter of poor and unsuccessful missionary parents, Schreiner’s position was, writes McClintock, that of ‘colonial intruder in a foreign land’ (1995: 265), a settler not an explorer. The displacement she felt was not that of Kingsley’s female imperial traveller, but that of an exile: from the Britain of her mother’s girlhood, and where she published The Story of an African Farm in 1883; from the Afrikaner nationalism that had become dominant in South Africa; from the domestic colonialism for which she was destined as a woman; and from the Africans all around her. For McClintock, Schreiner’s writing is marked by contradiction and a fracturing of voice. I shall focus on two aspects here. The first is her preoccupation with thresholds and boundaries. The ‘cult of domesticity’, writes McClintock, charged colonial women with ‘the maintenance of boundaries between private and public, domesticity and empire’, so that the verandah of the colonial house became ‘the threshold between domesticity and empire’ (ibid.: 263). It was of course an impossible boundary: domestic servants, as Sara Mills (2005) notes, worked within the domestic space, rendering public the most private of spaces. In Schreiner’s conflicted writing, states McClintock, ‘boundary images preside’ (ibid.). Doorsteps and windows provide dominant images, and it is African women who serve as ‘boundary markers’, presented not within but at the margins of the colonial home: standing ‘at thresholds, windows and walls, opening and shutting doors’ (ibid.: 268). Refusing to acknowledge the complexity of this intimate internal space, and the powerful presence of black women within it, Schreiner’s writing nevertheless reveals the colonial home as ‘a contest zone of acute ambivalence’ (ibid.: 271). The second aspect of the ambivalence that McClintock presents concerns Schreiner’s relation to the African landscape. The vast veld was, she writes, a place of fantasized liberation for Schreiner; in the ‘immense, hot country of cactus and red sand, flat rocks and aromatic thorn trees’, she could wander alone. It became, argues McClintock, a place of ‘mystical faith’. But her efforts to give intelligible BORDER SPACES

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form to the colonial landscape were frustrated by the land itself. As a ‘colonial intruder’, writes McClintock, Schreiner cannot ‘find words to fit the landscape’. It remains ‘unspeakable’ because it resists framing within the history that is her own colonial past. Seeking to imbue its immensity with a sense of transparency and universality, she fails to see ‘the very real history of colonial plunder’ that gives her privileged access to it (ibid.: 281, 266).

Resistant space For both Kingsley and Schreiner it is space rather than time that produces a resistance to an imperializing vision. In Imperial Leather, McClintock writes of the inherent contradiction of the colonial journey, in which ‘the journey is figured as proceeding forward in geographical space but backward in historical time, to what is figured as a prehistoric zone of racial and gender difference’ (1995: 30). Elsewhere, however, she writes of this discourse as subordinating space to time: whether traversed forward or backward, in the linear discourse of colonialism2 space, in all its multiplicity, becomes the singular movement of time (1992: 84). The idea implicit here, that it is space that can provide resistance to a universalizing linear or narrative logic, is one also found elsewhere in feminist writing. From Adrienne Rich’s ‘politics of location’ (1986) to the ‘situated knowledges’ of Donna Haraway (1991), feminist writers have invoked a ‘sense of space which refuses to be a claim to territory’ (Rose 1993: 150) – although it is a sense that has often hovered uneasily between, in Lefebvre’s terms (1991: 6), ‘real’ – that is, social or physical – space and ‘mental’ – imagined or metaphorical – space.3 To the extent that it is the former, however, its resistant power has two recurring elements. The first, as suggested in McClintock’s critique of Schreiner described above, is a focus on boundaries, borders or margins. Just as Schreiner’s domestic servants both occupied the white domestic space, maintaining its cult of domesticity, and found themselves expelled at night to inhabit the marginal spaces of the white compound, so, argue Blunt and Rose, are ‘the “others” of the master subject … marginalized and ignored in its gaze at space, but … also given their own places’ (1994: 16). The slum, the ghetto, the brothel, the compound: these are marginalized or boundary spaces, at once invisibly within and outside territorial space. Described by McClintock as ‘abject zones’, they are, she writes, ‘policed with vigor’ (1995: 72). But as liminal, or transitional, places, they are also potential spaces of disruption and as such have been re-appropriated by feminist, as by ‘post-colonial’4 writers. In perhaps the most influential example, Gloria Anzaldúa has written of the ‘borderlands’ between Mexico and the United States, a space which has ‘survived possession and ill-use by five countries’, but which suggests for her the possibility of a new, hybrid consciousness. As a mestiza,5 she writes, she has no country and no culture; she exists at ‘the crossroads’. The future, she writes, belongs to ‘the mestiza’ (1997: 774, 767). 132

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The second, related element is a refusal of what Blunt and Rose, following Lefebvre, call ‘the illusion of [spatial] transparency’. For Lefebvre, the illusion of transparency ‘goes hand in hand with a view of space as innocent’, so that ‘within the spatial realm the known and the transparent are one and the same thing’ (1991: 28). Blunt and Rose align this notion of ‘transparent space’ with the gaze of the colonial or ‘master subject’. Stable and ‘self-evident’, it is the product of a territorializing gaze which ‘both erases and depends upon marginal spaces and differences within itself ’. It is this notion of transparency, they write, that is disrupted by a ‘politics of location’, with its ‘more fragmented, complex and often contradictory notions of both space and subjectivity’ (1994: 19). The examples of disruptive strategies given by Blunt and Rose are drawn from feminist art. Two strategies are emphasized. The first is a focus on the detail and specificity of the everyday, together with the eruption into it of the visceral, so that a distanced gaze is disturbed, and the ‘transparency of transparent space [is] ruptured’ (ibid: 18). We cannot look through, or beyond, but must look at. The second, evidenced in the paintings by black women artists described by Blunt and Rose, and in the work of the Irish women artists discussed by Catherine Nash to which they refer, is perhaps best described as a refusal of the relationship between landscape and its representation. The landscapes of Kathy Prendergast described by Nash, for example, make visible the codes and mappings through which landscape has been constructed, while at the same time making landscape itself strange. Prendergast’s mountains, comments Nash, do not sit easily within their representational codings; they ‘move’ (1994: 243). In an argument that draws us back once more to film, Blunt and Rose link these strategies to de Lauretis’s notion of making present, and visible, ‘the blind spots, or the space-off ’ of ‘transparent’ space (Blunt and Rose 1994: 18). De Lauretis, drawing on the film theory of Heath and Burch, defines ‘space-off ’ – Heath’s ‘offscreen space’ – as ‘the space not visible in the frame but inferable from what the frame makes visible’ (1987: 26). For Heath, as we saw, the ceaseless pull of off-screen into on-screen space is what allows narrative cinema to contain and thus construct space as coherent and ‘transparent’6 – producing ‘the unity of place for vision’ (1981: 53). To refuse that pull but at the same time to make visible those ‘spaces-off ’ is to assign to space – as ‘a presence … the space that is there, distinct’ (ibid.: 61) – the disruptive force that Heath disallows. De Lauretis’s own examples of such disruptive presence come from avant-garde cinema, but we can discern their forerunners in those landscapes which, for Schreiner and Kingsley, resist a reading – resist, that is, the pull towards ‘transparency’ and narrative ordering. It is also, perhaps, to restore something of the ‘multiplicity’ with which Bruno imbues filmic space, and to return to it the presence – ironic and unstable but undoubtedly there – of her female explorer (and filmmaker). For Heath, (off-screen) space is the female body, waiting for ‘the camera … to impregnate [it] with the anticipation of action’ (ibid.: 42). To make visible that space, as I suggest the films discussed in this chapter do, is to force a separation between landscape and its feminization and to insist on the specificity of both women – in all their ideological complexity – and landscape. BORDER SPACES

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‘Being a Foreigner’: White Material (Claire Denis, 2009) Commenting on her own relationship to landscape, Claire Denis has said, ‘Do I have a landscape? … My own territory wasn’t in … France (where I was born), but in certain countries in Africa’ (Mayne 2005: 15). Elsewhere she adds, ‘In France, I don’t feel at all at home. … But in Africa, I felt myself to be a foreigner because when you are a little white child you understand well enough that you are not from/of this land’ (quoted in Beugnet 2004: 7).7 This double sense, of wanting to claim ‘a landscape’ and being at the same time inescapably ‘foreign’ within it, is what characterizes Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert), Denis’ protagonist in White Material, whose increasingly desperate attempts to rescue her coffee harvest in the face of a collapsing social order the film traces. Like Olive Schreiner, Maria is multiply exiled: from France, where, she says, she would have nowhere to go; from ownership of the coffee plantation which she was promised by her fatherin-law, the patriarch Henri (Michel Subor), but which was never conferred; from the marriage from which she has been ousted; and from the Africans around her whose situation she repeatedly insists she shares but who repeatedly reject the claim. Like Schreiner, too, Maria experiences an exhilarating sense of freedom alone in the immensity of the landscape. In the film’s first flashback we watch her as she moves at speed across a red dirt track on the plantation’s motorbike. Loosening her hair in the wind, closing her eyes and raising her arms to the trees and sky, she looks, commented one reviewer, ‘as radiant as a Renaissance saint’ (Johnson 2010). Over a century after Schreiner, however, Maria is a post-colonial settler. She does not claim ownership so much as belonging. ‘I don’t think she identifies herself with the country’, Denis has commented. ‘I think she identifies herself with a little piece of land’ (ibid.). She is, she says to one of the workers, rooted (plantée) there. She knows the names and families of each of the ragged band of soldiers who stop her at gunpoint at the makeshift roadblock. Above all, she works there. Throughout the film we see her in constant movement: recruiting, directing, cajoling, but also working alongside the African labourers as she transports, unloads and washes the coffee beans. It is a movement emphasized by the hand-held camera, as it, too, seems to be in ceaseless motion as it tracks her. The colonial interior that we glimpse, with its sheer curtains, rugs and sofas, its European floor lamp and African artefacts, is empty, only ever passed through by Maria as, with a swift change of clothes and application of lipstick, she switches roles between worker and ‘patron’. That she cannot be ‘rooted’ is, however, emphasized throughout by the Africans to whom she makes the claim. ‘It’s no longer safe here for someone like you’, says the Boxer (Isaach de Bankolé), the wounded rebel hero whom she feeds. The French military helicopter ‘came for you and your family’, says plantation foreman Maurice as he leaves, ‘not for us’. ‘For you it is not the same thing’, says the old man Jean-Marie; ‘Not at all’. It is Chérif (William Nadylam), the mayor with whom she has had or has dreamed of having an affair (the flashback may be memory or 134

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fantasy) and whose private army finally destroys the plantation, who, stroking her hair, tells her what the camera makes clear throughout: she may feel that she belongs there, but whiteness ‘is a form of misfortune (malheur). It is something one desires to destroy (saccager)’. Maria does not see that the power and opportunity she has, to run the plantation in place of her ineffectual ex-husband André (Christopher Lambert), to employ and direct, to, in her words, ‘show courage’, are the product of white privilege. She is scrupulously polite – the Africans she encounters address her as ‘tu’, while she employs the more formal ‘vous’ – but the habitual legacy of colonial possession is clear when she assumes precedence over André’s black second wife in her need for the truck, or when she shows the newly recruited workers to the compound’s bunkhouse where they will sleep. Dressed for business in the town, Maria is an out-of-place and curiously anachronistic figure. Her long hair, girlish dresses – lemon or pink with flared skirts – red lipstick, nails, sandals and handbag give her the air of a carefully costumed child: a white Alice who has strayed into an Africa scaled wrongly for her. Repeatedly we see her framed by doorways, always outside, or as a tiny figure against the immense landscape, lost within it. When, for example, she sets out to recruit new workers, a low-angle shot frames her against an expanse of red earth, huts and trees. As she walks uncertainly right to left until she is out of frame, the camera holds the shot, inviting us, like Maria, to try to read the vast and silent landscape. After several seconds she re-enters the frame and stands, marginal and unsure, before advancing tentatively towards one of the huts. In her review of the film, Amy Taubin (2011) comments that this girlish appearance masks a repressed ‘fear and rage’. Unusually for Denis’ films, she writes, in White Material, ‘love and even sexual desire are notable for their absence’. Yet when Maria fantasizes about Chérif, or when, towards the end of the film, she briefly collapses into the arms of a maternal black figure, we see glimpses of a more complex mix of desire and rage – a rage not against the Africa whose eroticization we briefly glimpse, but against a patriarchal colonial legacy which seemed to offer her liberation but which traps her in the role of privileged but exiled child.

FIGURE 4.1  A tiny figure in the landscape. (White Material, 2009) BORDER SPACES

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Borders Perhaps the most widely circulated image from the film on its release was that of Maria clinging to the ladder on the back of an African bus, sinews taut in the effort to hold on. It is an image that occurs early in the film when Maria, having been refused entry into the bus by its driver (‘It’s full’), herself rejects the proffered hand which might help her climb up onto its roof. Her marginalized position is, then, both forced – we later learn that she has been dispossessed of the Vial truck by the band of child soldiers – and chosen. The boundaries between inside and outside, belonging and not belonging that mark her existence are both self-constructed and imposed, but in both cases they have become dangerously unstable and precarious. The boundaries of the plantation are guarded, marked and labelled, protected by fences, manned gates and locks. Within, workers are separated from the Vial family, and the family itself split into its separate spaces; Maria knocks when she approaches the space of André ’s new family. Space, as Henrik Gustafsson (2014: 209) comments, is demarcated and domesticated. But these are borders that have already collapsed. The rebel child soldiers, unseen, penetrate all the spaces of the plantation and house, and the Boxer lies dying, first in an outbuilding, and then in the bedroom of Manuel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), Maria’s son. The interiors that we see are precarious, unsettled, constantly penetrated. Church, house, shop and school are first entered and then emptied of life. They become corridors rather than rooms, restlessly moved through rather than settled in. Only Chérif ’s magnificent post-colonial mansion seems secure and still behind its high walls, but as first Maria and then André gaze down upon the soldiers whose restless bodies are crammed into the compound behind the walls, we see that this, too, is not a still space. Its violence will explode outwards. Maria herself occupies none of these interior spaces; constantly in motion, she is briefly at rest only outside the house, in the transitional space between house and compound or compound and plantation.

FIGURE 4.2  Clinging to the bus. (White Material, 2009) 136

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When the bus driver refuses to stop for her at the boundary of the Vial plantation, we see how complete is the disintegration of these borders and the power they represent. As hierarchies break down in the film, comments Gustafsson, ‘borders at once rapidly collapse and multiply’ (2014: 211). Fences are torn, locks smashed and gates destroyed; meanwhile, the makeshift roadblock changes hands, the radio station is occupied and a new ‘cleansing’ regime proclaimed, and fresh checkpoints and armed guards appear. Signs and banners are everywhere, but their messages – like that of the destroyed church whose banner proclaims ‘God doesn’t give up’ or of Mayor Chérif ’s poster, ‘The mayor keeps his word’ – are hollow. We can distinguish government soldiers from child rebels, but Chérif ’s ruthless and smartly uniformed militia who possess territorial power at the close of the film could owe allegiance to anyone, or to no-one. According to the logic of borders, comments Gustafsson, ‘if you cross one, you are someplace else’ (ibid.: 209). Here, however, borders are ruthlessly policed, but arbitrary and precarious. Fluidity and the dissolving of boundaries, borderlands, a constant movement between centre and margins: these are the markers of an imagined post-colonial hybridity and deterritorialization. In White Material it is made clear, however, that such imaginings ignore both the lure of territorial possession and a colonial history based on white privilege. For Maria, there can be no hybridity, and there is no possibility of a politics of location; there are only multiple displacements. She cannot return to France, she tells the Boxer, because there she could not ‘show courage’, inscribing herself as hero in a post-colonial, post-patriarchal narrative. But that sense of liberatory agency has depended on the borders that ensure her privilege: it is within the bounds of the plantation that she makes her opening gesture of freedom. When Manuel, her son, pursues his own version of liberation, attempting to claim identity with the band of child soldiers, his mad motorcycle pursuit of them enacts an ironic echo of her initial liberatory gesture. The result for Manuel is not hybridity but, as Chérif states, something monstrous and ‘unfinished’. He remains white material, a ‘yellow dog’.

Landscape ‘White Material’, wrote Guardian interviewer Andrew Hussey (2010), ‘contains long stretches of images that have no apparent narrative purpose’. This characteristic of this and other films by Denis has been much remarked.8 Her landscape shots, as Gustafsson notes, do not ‘serve as establishing shots or transition shots’, and they are infrequently seen through a character’s eyes: tied ‘neither to an individual character nor to an omniscient narrator, it often remains uncertain where the images come from’ (2014: 209). Instead they interrupt, filling the screen, dense and unreadable, without sky or horizon, and often silent. Like her colonial predecessors Kingsley and Schreiner, Maria is confronted with a landscape which refuses to be read. Like her, we are invited by these still and dislocated landscape shots to try, and BORDER SPACES

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fail, to penetrate their density, to read for signs of human movement and meaning. Her claims to know, because she is rooted and not like those other ‘dirty whites’ who ‘can’t appreciate’ the land, are undercut again and again. Frequently, these still and extended shots are juxtaposed with hand-held close-ups of movement that also frustrate, because we cannot see beyond or past the characters to the wider space that would contextualize them. When we first see the Boxer, for example, a distance shot of the Vial plantation is held in silence for eight seconds, to be followed by a shot of earth so close that we can see an ant crawl over the pipe that is half-submerged within it. When the Boxer emerges from his hiding place in the pipe we have no means of connecting the two shots: their juxtaposition forces a separation of meaning. This then, although the film has been called a melodrama and/or a suspense thriller,9 is not Heath’s narrative space. Off-screen space is not ceaselessly drawn on-screen, to be reconstituted and re-arranged according to the needs of narrative. Absences are not ‘recaptured’, and space does not become ‘place’. Instead, space precedes and resists narrative, in what Saad Chakali (2005) calls ‘a disjuncture of shots which are susceptible to re-articulation only by leaving multi-dimensional faultlines’.10 For Chakali, it is the shots (les plans), rather than the narrative that come first with Denis. Put differently, it is space that is given precedence, but this is not a space divorced from narrative. In preceding and disturbing narrative it demands that we question narrative’s sufficiency – the ‘fullness’ that Heath describes – but it also teems with a profusion of other narratives. They too jostle for notice in this space, they too could have been followed, and no narrative either stands alone or encompasses the others. Each touches the others intensely, but momentarily. Thus the story of the Boxer seems rich in symbolic value. The hero of the rebel child soldiers, he enters the Vial plantation on horseback and draped in a priest’s robe.11 He is related to the oldest of Maria’s workmen, Jean-Marie, and he occupies first Jean-Marie’s space and then the space of Maria’s son, Manuel. At one point, in one of the film’s disorienting shots, he seems to sit alongside André’s second wife, Lucie, as she prepares to drive the truck. But most frequently in the film the weight of his presence is indicated by his absence: by recurring shots of the dark doorway of the room where he is lying, with its torn bead curtain, towards which Maria repeatedly glances but which she does not re-enter when there might be time to save him. In one of their brief exchanges their positions are paralleled: both are out of place and both in danger. But we know nothing of the Boxer beyond these few brief scenes, as we know nothing of the history of the child soldiers, of the girl who Maria finds wearing her dress and jewellery and who gazes so intensely at her, or of the albino boy glimpsed briefly at José’s school, facing Maria in the front row of the class and fidgeting with discomfort. In his essay on landscape in the film, Gustafsson cites the work of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, whose autobiographical essay inspired Denis’ film L’Intrus (2004) and who has himself commented on Denis’ films. If a land or country (pays) ‘designates … the place one comes from, where one was born, or where one lives’, 138

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writes Nancy, a landscape (paysage) is a representation not merely of that land but of our estrangement from it (2005c: 53, 57). Like other writers on landscape, Nancy writes of it as an opening up or onto, but for him this opening is not recuperated by the comfort of framing; like Gunning’s phantom rides, it remains disorienting, an opening onto absence and the unknown. Landscape, then, ‘estranges, it renders uncanny [le paysage dépayse]’; in it ‘nothing is given, nothing is played out in advance’ (ibid.: 61–2). As Gustafsson notes, Nancy’s comments on landscape find their echoes in Denis’ filmmaking. This is not a landscape that invites penetration. Human figures like Maria or Manuel are lost and isolated in it, or, like the child soldiers, they can seem to merge with it or appear from it. None of the human habitations seem substantial in the face of its immensity – apart from that of Chérif which is maintained through a destructive violence which will itself be temporary. In Nancy’s argument, this landscape of absence is the outcome of industrialization and alienation from the land, so that ‘a general estrangement occurs, in which pagans and peasants can find themselves unsettled, straying and lost’ (ibid.: 57). In Denis’ films, however, the formal ruptures and unreadability that are characteristic of her use of landscape are in Gustafsson’s view bound up with the films’ post-colonial critique. The fracturing of narrative is one with the fracturing of the world she depicts; ‘the arbitrary nature of borders is reflected in the arbitrary connections between the images’ (2014: 209). But her techniques also suggest other parallels. The refusal of a gaze through; the disturbance of the usual relationship between land(scape) and its representation; the making present and visible the blind spots or the space-off of ‘transparent’ space, while at the same time refusing its smooth transition into ‘framed’ or narrative space: all of these also link Denis’ work with other female-authored refusals of the feminization of space. Landscape in White Material may be disorientating or dépaysé but it is not, as Nancy would have it, an absence. Its presence, however, in what one critic has called its ‘intricate materiality’ (Martin 2006), resists the usual representational codings, and any filmic re-ordering as narrative space, as it resists attempts to claim possession. The allusive quality of Denis’ films, with their integral intertextual references, has been frequently remarked.12 In White Material we can find echoes of Joseph Conrad13 in Manuel’s madness and Maria’s blind insistence on completing the coffee harvest, as well as a response to the writings on Africa of Schreiner, Karen Blixen and, most obviously, Doris Lessing. In interview, Denis repeatedly traced the film’s origins to the suggestion of its star, Isabelle Huppert, that she and Denis adapt Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing (1950), and we see a photograph of Lessing in Maria’s bedroom. Equally prominent in interviews, however, was reference to Denis’ own childhood and relation to Africa. Recounting a research visit to Ghana with black co-writer Marie N’Diaye, Denis describes her double sense of familiarity and alienation. Her description of herself – ‘I’m in this naive position of the white person who grew up in Africa. You think you are the same. But you’re not perceived as the same’ (Calhoun 2010) – is very close to her description of BORDER SPACES

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Maria: ‘She was trying to save not only her pride, but her belief that she was not – a strange belief that she was accepted there. A belief that she was not home, but accepted’ (Wigon 2010). Most notably, in a joint interview with Huppert, we find the actor slipping between a description of Denis and of Maria: ‘Claire isn’t trying to possess something. Maria doesn’t even feel like the land is hers. She feels like she belongs to the land’ (Roxo 2010). Elsewhere, Huppert comments, ‘When we were doing the movie I clearly felt I was Claire, in a way’ (Johnson 2010). These references, then, are insistent. The ‘white material’ of the film’s title refers to the goods possessed by the white settlers, and to the settlers themselves, white people who believe, Denis says, ‘in the modern world, that all this bullshit – slavery, things – are gone, far away, colonialism, racism no more’ (Wigon 2010). We can note, however, that ‘material’ also denotes a film’s subject matter, and ‘white material’ can reference whiteness both as object (white subject matter) and as subject (subject matter of a white filmmaker). In facing us with the unreadability of the landscapes she presents, Denis inscribes the complexity of her own viewing position into the film rather as Bruno describes a similar self-inscription on the part of her Victorian female explorer who, in exploring space, also explores her own relation to it. ‘The experience of whites is always the same’, Denis is quoted as saying; ‘We approach, approach, approach, but we never quite reach the heart of Africa’ (quoted in Mayne 2005: 36). In White Material the landscape refuses its customary feminization, refuses its incorporation as narrative space. But it also refuses a reading by its white protagonist and director. The bleakness of the film’s ending has been remarked.14 Maria kills the white patriarch in whose shadow she has always lived, but the child soldiers (les intrépides petites marmailles) who might suggest a more positive future, and to whom the film is in part dedicated, are caught up in a purposeless cycle of slaughter and destruction. At the close of the film, only their leader has escaped Chérif ’s troops, fleeing on foot across the immense landscape, a tiny figure tracked by another low-angle shot. As we cut to a close-up, we see him pause for breath, clasping the Boxer’s red beret before setting off again. His is one of the many narratives the film has only suggested, and which remain ambiguous. When he leaves the frame the camera continues its gaze on the landscape, but the shot does not come into focus, as we expect. It remains a gaze that is blurred, out of focus, in Nancy’s words ‘in suspense’ (2005c: 61) – refusing once again to be read.

A sense of movement: High Tide (Gillian Armstrong, 1987) ‘A true landscape’, writes Tom Gunning, ‘maintains a certain distance from the viewer, an invisible barrier to actual penetration. … But the cinematic phantom rides dove straight into the landscape and presented this plunging point of view directly to the viewer’ (2010: 36, 55). In his essay on cinema’s ‘phantom rides’, 140

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Gunning sees the emergence of the phantom ride film as one outcome of the nineteenth century’s drive to penetrate and thus possess landscape, but one which has a paradoxical outcome. As the fixed perspective of the landscape picture gives way to movement and instability, what is produced is not a sense of mastery but a disconcerting sense of loss, ‘a crisis within the spectator’s relation to space and landscape’ which also brings with it ‘a heightened awareness of perception and consciousness itself ’ (2010: 59). Gunning contrasts this with the more conventional lateral view of a moving landscape – the view from a train or car window – where the window retains its framing and distancing function and the spectator their sense of control. For Gunning, this dialectic between loss and mastery becomes a new, technological instance of the sublime. Gunning’s spectator is ungendered, but the experience of the sublime, in which an encounter with ‘an infinite or indefinite otherness’ (Battersby 2007: 139) at first threatens the self and finally, through mastery, restores it, is, as we have seen, a peculiarly masculine experience.15 In this tense struggle between dissolution and control, femininity is either excluded or aligned with the forces that threaten dissolution. Yet it is precisely such a ‘plunging point of view’ that critics pointed to in High Tide. ‘Armstrong and cameraman Russell Boyd keep charging up the scenes with … swift, unexpected movement’, writes Michael Wilmington in a 1987 review. ‘They scoot the camera along the beaches like a crazed gull, and along the highways as if on a runaway car’. When, therefore, Armstrong’s film presents us with its own ‘phantom ride’, clearly something rather different is going on – especially since the film has been identified with that most conventional of feminine genres, the maternal melodrama.16 High Tide centres on Lilli (Judy Davis), a travelling singer, who gave up her baby on the death of her surfer husband. Fired from her job as backing singer to an Elvis impersonator, and with her car broken down, she encounters her now teenage daughter, Ally (Claudia Karvan), who lives with her paternal grandmother Bet (Jan Adele) in the caravan park of the coastal town where Lilli finds herself. The film traces the complex relationship between these characters as Ally discovers Lilli’s identity. It begins with the sound of crashing waves and gulls, over ribbons of shimmering blue light – as if the camera were moving rapidly over water or a road at night. A giddying left to right pan, however, reveals this to be a stage curtain, the backcloth to a performance by an Elvis impersonator and his female backing singers, one of which is the film’s protagonist, Lilli. Midway through the performance the camera reverses its opening pan, and the ribbons of light once again blur as we seem to race over their surface, before their shimmering becomes that of light on red rocks and we hear waves once again, mixed with the sound of a car engine. The camera pauses over a rock pool, and we see thirteen-year-old Ally lying in the pool, arms outstretched, her hand playing with the water and the light shimmering on the sea’s blue surface, before it speeds away again over rocks and sand that become finally the surface of a road. BORDER SPACES

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FIGURE 4.3  Ally in the water. (High Tide, 1987, 2010)

This restless, disorienting camera movement characterizes Armstrong’s film. As with Gunning’s rides, it means that we cannot securely ‘frame’ the landscape – that of ‘Eden’, the coastal resort in which the film is set. The movement is detached from character: we see it here seem to both link and separate Lilli and Ally; later it will follow Lilli, tracking over the wall of a toilet cubicle to catch her weeping inside, or race over the cliff top, to pause as if catching sight of Lilli’s parked car. As in Gunning’s account, what is produced is ‘a heightened awareness of perception and consciousness itself ’, but this is not accompanied by a sense of loss or dissolution. Rather, what we become aware of is a consciousness beyond that of Lilli and Ally, a restless questioning that both mirrors and distances us from that of its protagonists, and takes as its object cinematic maternity. If a framed landscape is framed for its male spectator, so that movement threatens always a loss of control, then that movement will function differently for a female subject, for whom framing means containment – with its limitations and securities – and movement its (perhaps) welcome disruption. High Tide sets containment against movement in ways that force questions about the relation of both to a specifically female subjectivity.

The beach The most evident border space in the film is the beach. ‘In an Armstrong film’, writes Felicity Collins, ‘water is a liminal space’, the marker of an ‘insistently female’ world, a characteristic it shares with ‘the paradoxical, solid-liquid qualities of glass’ (1999: 79–80).17 Both feature strongly in High Tide. Ally is first seen half-submerged, floating in the water, a shot that will be echoed twice more in 142

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the film. Initially called ‘Fishfeet’ by Lilli, she is a surfer, in constant movement across the beach and cliffs, and only fleetingly occupying inside spaces. As we track her down from the cliff-top in a single fluid shot as she runs to confront Lilli, Ally seems one with the sweeping movement of the camera, and we see the vast expanse of sand stretch out before her. Here as elsewhere, Ally’s movements have a sensuous directness that links her with the ocean waves. In contrast, Bet, the paternal grandmother with whom she lives, constantly moves inside, into the cramped spaces of the caravan, the club, the factory and the ice-cream van in which she patrols the cliff-top, shuttling back and forth along the narrow road that follows the cliff edge. It is Lilli, however, compelled to remain in Eden when she is fired by Lester and her car breaks down, who exemplifies the ambiguities of this border space, with its fluid landscape and open horizon, and its marginal lives. Twice we see her walk along the deserted beach, half absorbed by the sea. But she also reminds us of the poverty, ugliness and cramped quality of this run-down Eden, with its rusted buildings and vehicles, its seedy club, its oil storage tanks and factory, as she repeatedly tries to negotiate her own survival and escape. As she stands in a phone booth giving her temporary address – the Mermaid Caravan Park, Eden – to her disbelieving and unhelpful agent, the glass of the booth renders her distanced and insubstantial, a screen across which are traced the reflections of passing cars. As we continue to hear her now defeated voice, the camera pulls back from her tiny figure to track across the desolate fishing port. Against the openness of the beach are set the cramped but precarious interior spaces of the film – the places with which the resort’s residents protect themselves against instability. The space of the maternal melodrama, writes Doane, is the ‘constricting domestic sphere’ (1987: 73), in which intense maternal conflict is acted out by protagonists trapped within a suffocating closeness. In High Tide, the

FIGURE 4.4  Lilli on the beach. (High Tide, 1987, 2010) BORDER SPACES

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most intense interactions take place within confined spaces: the caravan where Ally confronts her grandmother; the toilet and shower block where Lilli and Ally accidentally meet; the hotel room where her would-be suitor Mick (Colin Friels) outlines his dream of domesticity to Lilli; and Lilli’s car, where she tries to explain to Ally her maternal desertion. In the caravan park launderette, we see the fierce claims to possession that such limitation produces, as Lilli is driven from a specific – but identical – machine by a resident who claims it as hers. As with the maternal melodrama, these are also spaces which are internally divided – by interior walls, doors, the netting of the seaside café – so that our view of the protagonists, and their view of each other, is frequently blocked. Windows, so important in the woman’s film (Doane 1987: 2), here too intensify both vulnerability and desire, as mother and daughter become both subject of and subject to the gaze of the other. As they do there, windows signify both entrapment and a thwarted desire to escape, as when Ally turns away from Lilli to press her face against the car window, or Lilli turns from Mick to stare at a hotel window whose surface the camera has rendered opaque. In High Tide, however, all of these spaces are temporary and precarious, as if held in suspension, as the camera circles, climbs, dances through and over their barriers, refusing to be fixed or to frame the film’s protagonists as trapped. Only Bet is finally fixed in the archetypal maternal pose, peering through the heavy plastic strip curtain of the factory entrance at the departing Ally, but even she is given choice – she chooses her lovers, her performances and where she will live. As Lilli leaves for her weekend with Mick, the camera first gives us the lateral view of a moving landscape described by Gunning, in which the window frames the blurred landscape for us. But this is the view from the driver’s window; when we turn to Lilli, it is to see the window opened, and Lilli leaning out, away from the intimate space of the car, to look forwards. As the car speeds away, the vast landscape opens out before us. As Nancy suggests, this landscape shot, held as the car disappears from view, unsettles and estranges – Lilli’s excitement, we can see, is forced and will be disappointed – but like the sea it represents also a space of possibility. Unlike the landscapes of White Material, those of High Tide are not unreadable in their opacity, but as they shift and blur as the camera now speeds, now pauses, moving unpredictably up, across or over, they too evade the pull of narrative containment.

Performance High Tide, write Jocelyn Robson and Beverley Zalcock, ‘is set at the edge of the land, full of shiny, wet surfaces’ (1997: 100). The first of these surfaces that we see, however, is not the sea at all, but the shimmering surface of a stage curtain. Armstrong’s films, as Collins suggests (1999: 78), centre on ‘public women’ – mobile women whose lives are lived in public spaces – and frequently these women 144

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are performers. From the public and private performances of Sybylla (Judy Davis) in My Brilliant Career (1979) to the ‘exotic’ dancing and ‘psychic powers’ of mother and daughter Mary (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Benji (Saoirse Ronan) in Death Defying Acts (2007), the space of performance, for Armstrong’s female subjects, is where tensions between freedom and containment, transgression and conformity are explored.18 Here, both Bet and Lilli are performers, while Ally has ambitions to achieve fame as a surfer, so that the film draws attention to the parallels between the border spaces of beach and stage. Both are ambivalent spaces, embodying the sense of both freedom and constraint that the notion of border or margin implies. For Lilli, the stage represents the ‘adventurous, brave sort of life’ that she imagined she was living, just as for Bet it represents dreams of glamour and control. It brings mobility, self-reinvention and ‘freedom’: asked by Ally where she lives, Lilli replies, ‘I live in Sydney when I have to, and when I don’t have to I travel’. But Lilli’s only unconstrained singing comes when she sings drunkenly to herself in the toilet block, and her most fluid movement is on the beach. On stage she is costumed tightly in sequined dresses, wig and make-up, and her movement is robotic – in sharp contrast to the extravagant gestures of Lester (Frankie J. Holden), the Elvis impersonator for whom she provides backing vocals, as he leaps from stage to audience. That her mobility has brought with it a loss of control – of freedom of movement – we see most clearly in the club manager’s matter-of-fact statement that to perform she will have to strip, and his later satisfied voyeurism. But we see it too in her exchanges with the garage mechanic and with Mick, where the exchange of sex for payment is a constant unspoken offer of last resort. In the manager’s parting comment, ‘After all, it’s all show business isn’t it’, we see the confident assumption that this is the core of all female performance. In this glittering border space, women’s desire for freedom and agency only places them more firmly within masculine control. In his analysis of cinematic voyeurism, Christian Metz uses the strip show as his example of ‘the fiction that stipulates that the object “agrees”’ – that the performance is the product of ‘active consent’ and hence a matter of exhibitionism. It is this fiction, he writes, that serves to authorize the male spectator’s voyeuristic pleasure (1982: 62–3).19 Like other self-reinventing female protagonists of Armstrong’s films, Lilli is trapped by the power of this fiction, as her attempts to escape fixity through performance are repeatedly co-opted to serve male fantasies. In her exchange with the club manager we see Metz’s authorizing fiction both assumed (she will of course agree to strip because ‘it’s all show business’) and exposed – it is clear that she has no choice. Her attempts at negotiation fail, and she can defend herself only by a mask of detachment. As the Elvis tribute act performs in Eden’s Fishermen’s Recreation Club, the camera pulls back to look down on audience as well as performers. Stretching out before us, with Lester in their midst, the seated audience at their tables seem caught between two framed scenes. On the left is the stage with its robotic female performers, while in front of us and of the diegetic audience, at right angles to BORDER SPACES

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the stage, is a framed seascape which fills an entire wall. Its colours recall those of the rock pool in which we first saw Ally, but what it depicts seems to be a male conquest of the sea. If the club is a space of male control, then, an instance of Metz’s illusion of (female) consent, it also functions as a stand-in for cinema itself, a fetishized space of absence (the absent sea is represented to excess in its paintings and stuffed fish), as well as presence. In it we see embodied in heightened form the tension between movement and containment that characterizes the film and its female protagonists. Juxtaposing its two spaces of mobility, it presents us with both as captured and framed. But what the film’s performance sequences also point us towards are those ‘blind spots’, or ‘spaces-off ’, which are not captured by this relationship between audience and performers/image.

Spaces-off Dividing the audience from the club’s bar is a green glass wall whose opaque thickness is filled with the swirls, shapes and textures of the sea, around which Ally twice peers to watch Lilli. On the first occasion Lilli is seated at a table, before being called to the spotlight when she wins a raffle prize. As Ally walks along the wall her fingers stroke its surface. Reaching its limit she pauses, and mirror tiles reflect back her face, as she looks at herself before observing Lilli. As Ally gazes, the angle of Lilli’s face is reflected in that of her own, now doubled by the mirror tiles. The second occasion is that of Lilli’s strip, and this time Ally is filmed through the glass wall, as if she emerges from the sea, an underwater space. This time there is no mirroring, and as the camera takes us behind the wall to rest on Ally, we see her gaze in detached fascination at Lilli’s performance, before leaving without protest at the manager’s command. Ally is, then, positioned outside this space of performance; she is the mobile and illicit spectator, and her desire is outside of, and unauthorized by, the club’s adult gendered performances. The gazes of mother at daughter, and of daughter at mother, frequently doubled through mirrors, are central to the maternal melodrama. Both confirm both likeness and a necessary separation. For the mother, whose excessive presence threatens the daughter’s progress towards the marriage that signifies adult femininity, the daughter must be given up, so that the maternal gaze becomes one that combines over-identification with enforced distance. For the daughter, the mother must be judged and rejected as part of this journey. High Tide reverses this process. For Lilli, it is presence that is most difficult, and from which she repeatedly tries to escape. But it is the gaze of Ally, who acts on her own desire and is not yet subject to the constraints of adult gendered performance, which is most at odds with these conventional structures. Her first gaze at Lilli is part of her own adolescent play with identity, and it is Lilli’s unconventionality and air of freedom that captures her. When the sequence is echoed in her later gaze at Lilli’s performance, however, although we see on her 146

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face a growing realization of the stripper’s identity, it does not result in a rejection: Ally will still choose her mother. Most importantly, both of these sequences, as well as Lilli’s first recognition of Bet, and her exchange with the bar manager, occur in the ‘spaces-off ’ of performance. As the camera follows Ally as she peers round the glass wall, pulls back to focus on the audience, rests on the smug smile of the manager and Ally’s retreating back, or, in the film’s opening sequence, dissolves the distance between performance and beach, its restless mobility pushes us beyond the limits of ‘transparent’ space. The ending of the film returns us once more to the idea of the glass screen and the camera’s mobility. The sequence – what Collins calls the film’s epilogue (1999: 46) – begins with the fixed curtain of the maternal melodrama. As the camera pulls away from Bet as she stands parting the factory’s strip curtain, we are reminded once more of the stage and its fixing of femininity. The camera, however, is once more mobile, first close to the road, racing away from Bet and Eden, then offering a lateral view as Lilli drives with the sleeping Ally, and finally looking forwards, as the car approaches the service station where they will stop. Once Lilli has left Ally to enter the toilet block – the camera here follows the forward movement of her feet – we track Ally as she enters the restaurant to sit in front of its glass window. As Collins argues, what is emphasized here, both by the side-on framing and by Ally’s words to the waitress, ‘I’m waiting for my mother’, is the absent place of Lilli, opposite Ally at the table. The camera cuts to a high-angle shot of Lilli emerging from the toilets and walking to her car, before observing her climb in and start the engine. As Lilli turns to look back at Ally, the glass of car and restaurant windows effects a double framing and separation. Here is the familiar maternal gaze of longing and renunciation, as Lilli watches the daughter whom she abandoned, and intends again to leave, because ‘I would have been bad for you’. But this is not the film’s ending. As the camera takes us once more inside the restaurant, circling with a now-familiar speed and fluidity around pillars and tables, its point-of-view seems once more independent and unmotivated. Whereas before its fluidity appeared to be associated with Ally’s youthful questioning, now its movement is revealed to be that of Lilli, as she enters the frame to put her hands over Ally’s eyes. As she takes her seat in a space which is now open and expansive, the hands of the two touch and clasp, echoing but moving beyond the play of hands of Ally and Bet earlier. In the ‘phantom ride’, writes Gunning, the moving vehicle, which remains offscreen, ‘embodies an unseen energy that compels the camera, the film and the viewer down the track’. Its speed diminishes our visual perception, ‘blurring the foreground, eliminating detail and abolishing the stasis of contemplation’ (2010: 58, 41). High Tide’s final shots return us to this motion, pulling away from the window of the service station, with its view of Lilli and Ally, as we pulled away from Bet, in a movement now detached from the film’s protagonists. As at the film’s beginning, we speed over the road, whose white lines blur and slip away from us. Unlike Gunning’s rides, this final movement is not one of penetration – it moves away not towards – but it remains one of speed, shimmering surfaces and a blurring BORDER SPACES

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of vision. As Collins writes, the final pairing of Ally and Lilli, as Lilli fills the vacant space opposite her daughter, gives us, however precariously, the possibility of the mother-daughter relationship not as one of maternal loss and renunciation, but as a ‘mutual recognition between two subjects’ (1999: 55). To achieve this the film has disrupted the cinematic space of the maternal melodrama, refusing the ‘transparency’ of the mother-child relation that Doane identifies as one of its characteristics – there is in Western culture, she writes, ‘something obvious about the maternal … (one only has to look and see)’ (1987: 70). This is produced partly through disruption of the melodrama’s diegetic space: these are mobile women, and their encounters take place in precarious and public border spaces. But it has also been effected through the production, in Gunning’s words, of ‘a heightened awareness of perception and consciousness itself ’, as we are made insistently aware of the camera as a mobile and questioning consciousness. Like White Material, High Tide disrupts any easy relationship between narrative space and its other, off-screen space. Unlike Denis’ film, it does not render its landscapes unreadable, refusing narrative absorption; instead, it rejects containment, whirling us past and beyond the narrative into space.

‘No land of milk and honey’: Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991) In ‘the conquest ideology of Whiteness’, writes Manthia Diawara, ‘White men drive time from the East to the West, conquering wilderness and removing obstacles out of time’s way’ (1993: 13). The terms of Diawara’s description of America’s national foundation narrative provide a striking echo of McClintock’s account of another imperial narrative, that of British colonialism. In the discourse of colonialism, she writes, ‘space is time, and history is shaped around … the “progress” forward of humanity’ (1992: 84). Space, in all its multiplicity, is subordinated to the singular, teleological movement of time. In the process, she writes, those others whom ‘industrial imperialism rejects but cannot do without’ are given their own places (the slum, the ghetto, the brothel, the colonial Bantustan): ‘abject zones’ which exist at the margins of industrial imperialism, outside the forward movement of modernity and empire. But these border zones which are static and ‘backward’ are also, she argues, at the heart of modernity. They are modernity’s ‘inner repudiation’, the ‘rejected from which one does not part’ (1995: 72). McClintock’s is a powerful account, but it is one that sees the border spaces of imperialism’s other only in terms of their functioning for White modernity. Diawara’s description, by contrast, is the introduction to a more radical vision: that of an alternative founding story, in which space, not time, is privileged. In Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, the history of White power and conquest that Diawara describes occurs off screen, though its effects are felt throughout the film. On screen, past, present and future are rendered as multiple and overlapping spatial 148

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embodiments, journeys between them are across space rather than time, and stories are concurrent and co-present. On-screen space is multiple, simultaneous and full of stories, while linear narrative and historical time has become off-screen spacetime. The result, writes Diawara, is that the space of Ibo Landing displaces the story of the American West, and it is the faces of Black women, not those of ‘John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and Gary Cooper’, with whom it is associated (1993: 19). Dash’s film begins with an apparent precision about both time and space. This is daybreak, 18 August 1902, and we are on the Sea Islands, off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, at Ibo Landing. The Islands, Dash tells us in her account of the film, were ‘the main drop-off point’ for the African slave trade, and hence ‘the Ellis Island for the Africans, the processing center for the forced immigration of millions’ (1992: 6). Ibo Landing – almost every Sea Island, says Dash (ibid.: 30), claims its own Ibo Landing – is the site of the myth of Ibo resistance to slavery, a myth recounted by the black American women writers on whom Dash draws20 but also having a much wider currency (Walters 1997). Here the disembarked slaves rejected their fate by walking, shackled together, back into the water. According to different versions of the story, they walked back to Africa across the sea, flew there or were drowned rather than accept being enslaved. Dash’s Ibo Landing is on the fictional Dahtaw (Daughter) Island, and the film follows the Peazant family over the period of a day, as they prepare a festive last supper to commemorate the departure of those in the family who will next day cross to the mainland in search of a new life. We see the arrival of returned family members – Yellow Mary (Barbara O), who has become a prostitute and returns with her light-skinned lover Trula (Trula Hoosier), and Viola (Cheryl Lynn Bruce), a Baptist missionary, who arrives with her invited companion Mr Snead (Tommy Redmond Hicks), who will make a photographic record of the ‘primitive’ and exotic Peazant family (Dash 1992: 38). We see conflict within the family, and partial resolutions. At the end of the film it is daybreak once more, and on 19 August, we are told, the departure occurs. Despite the contextual detail that appears as written text at the opening of the film, however, this is not, as Dash emphasizes (ibid.: 28), an ‘ethnographic’ historical narrative. Diawara writes that the film ‘stops time’ at 1902, to explore the elements – ‘slavery, the Middle Passage, African religions, Christianity, Islam, the print media, photography, moving pictures, and African-American folkways’ (1993: 14) – of an alternative foundation myth. It is an exploration, he argues, which is conducted through a form of ‘spatial narration’, in which ‘the past constantly interrupts the present, and repetitions and cyclicality define narration’ (ibid.: 13). In this ‘black feminist epic’ (Ramanathan 2006: 81), time is constantly displaced. The film’s opening image is of the hands of a black woman. Pictured against her dress of the same colour, red dusty soil blows through her fingers across the screen. As she opens her hands, a dissolve to a shot of Nana Peazant (Cora Lee Day) bathing in the river, fully clothed, momentarily cradles the 88 year-old Nana in the hands of what the repeated shot later in the film suggests to be her younger BORDER SPACES

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self. It is a move that will be echoed elsewhere, when a dissolve from Nana’s hands to the ring-and-line game of the girls on the beach seems to cradle them there, or when Eula (Alva Rogers), having recounted the story of Ibo Landing to her Unborn Child, holds out her hands, and a dissolve shows the head of the carved Ibo warrior nestling between them. Time, in these sequences, is compressed, its linearity disturbed, and what is emphasized is the simultaneity of touch.21 Later, the sacramental object that Nana will fashion from a mixture of traditional African and Christian symbolic elements will be called a ‘hand’. As Nana emerges from the water, further dissolves take us across the interior of a Peazant bedroom and then onto the water, where a boat with three black bargemen ferries a richly costumed and veiled woman across its expanse. Around her neck is a St Christopher which she fingers. Over the sequence we hear a woman’s voice utter the gnostic text ‘Thunder, Perfect Mind’: I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the barren one, and many are my daughters. I am the silence that you can not understand. I am the utterance of my name. As Ramanathan argues (ibid.: 82), it is a voice-over that claims for its female narrator both subjectivity (‘I am the utterance of my name’) and authority: as disembodied voice-over it speaks, in Kaja Silverman’s words, ‘from an inaccessible

FIGURE 4.5  Nana’s hands. (Daughters of the Dust, 1991) 150

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vantage point’ (1988: 51). But it is also an impossible voice – it speaks as silence and with the authority of a name we do not hear – and one which is multiple: it speaks for all the mothers and daughters we will see. Its words, like the film’s opening dissolve, disturb temporal order (‘the first and the last’), rendering it as spatial simultaneity. In the final disruptive element of this opening sequence, the Edwardian lady traveller we see at its close, performing what McClintock calls the colonial journey into ‘anachronistic space’ (1995: 30), is black. The self that she has fashioned (Bruno 2002: 114) is one unimaginable within the imperial discourse that her image recalls.

Border spaces Of the three films discussed in this chapter, Daughters of the Dust is closest to Anzaldúa’s vision of a border space which is at once the site of multiple occupation and colonization and a hybrid space of future possibilities. Peripheral to the American South, the terrain of slavery, the Sea Islands are neither Africa nor mainland America, but what Greg Tate calls a continuing ‘middle passage’. Living out ‘an identity that is neither African nor American’, he writes, ‘we crave for both shores to claim us’ (1992: 71). Positioned between two stretches of water, Ibo Landing reaches out across both: the beach is the site of all the film’s activities – its feasting, its games, its lessons, its conflicts and its ceremonies – and the surrounding water a place of both bathing and baptism. Land and sea blur as we see Eli (Adisa Anderson) walk on water, releasing the representative of his forebears, the carved African warrior which formed the figurehead of a former slave ship, from its imprisonment in the reeds and branches of the coastal swamp. Temporally, the film is positioned between two journeys, the last journey of the slaves from Africa and the first by their descendants to the mainland and the ‘north’. Tate’s continuing ‘middle passage’ is signalled too by numerous other borders and hybridities. There is the hybridity of language in the Gullah dialect with its African words; there are the games and rhymes which exhibit their origins in African counting systems and rituals; and there are the multiple religions – Catholic and Baptist Christianity, Islam and African faiths – whose relationship is one of both conflict and syncretism. A more powerful blurring is that of the boundary between death, birth and life, in the co-narrating figure of the Unborn Child. Perhaps the product of a white man’s rape of her mother, Eula, she is also sent by the ancestors, can be seen by the children in the present, and symbolizes the future. As we see her run across the screen, dipping her hand in the indigo well of the past, disrupting Mr Snead’s photograph in the present and viewing through the children’s stereoscope a cinematic representation of the bustling city of the Peazants’ future, we experience temporal separation as spatial journey and co-presence. As with Eli’s communion with the figurehead, we also find a blurring of boundaries between the historical and ‘real’ – costumes, BORDER SPACES

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FIGURE 4.6  Eli on the water. (Daughters of the Dust, 1991)

customs, historical references and dates are all accurate – and the magical. When Nana tells Eli that ‘You won’t ever have a baby that wasn’t sent to you’, we are aware both that Nana’s belief, that ‘the ancestors and the womb … they’re one, they’re the same’, is a way of claiming cultural and familial continuity in the face of oppression and rape, and – since we can see the Unborn Child – that her words are true.

Exile The border space of Ibo Landing is not only a space of hybrid possibility, however; it is also, more ambiguously, both a space-off and a space of exile. The pressure of what Diawara calls the temporal narrative of White conquest, the forward drive of Manifest Destiny, is felt throughout in the film as a presence just beyond our vision, off-screen. The terms of America’s national foundation narrative are suggested in Viola’s reference to Eden, and in Nana’s warning that the journey north will be to ‘no land of milk and honey’.22 Its historical effects are evidenced in the figure of St Julian Last Child, whose nation, the Cherokees, were driven from the islands to make way for plantation crops and slavery. They are touched on in the historical references in the men’s conversations: to the anti-lynching bill which would be unsuccessfully introduced in 1902 (Burns 2010), and to the appropriation of Seminole and Creek lands for white settlers at the turn of the century, under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. And they are felt most powerfully in Yellow Mary’s off-screen story and in Eula’s pregnancy, the result, perhaps, of white rape. Such rapes, comments Yellow Mary, are ‘as common as fish in the sea’, their perpetrators unnamed because ‘There’s enough uncertainty in life 152

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without having to sit at home wondering which tree your husband’s hanging from’. This history, however, remains at the film’s periphery, an absent presence against which the film’s spatial focus on mothers and daughters, on inherited stories and ‘scraps of memories’, enacts a form of resistance or refusal. As we look through the stereoscope with the Unborn Child, at the film footage of New York with its crowds, trams, and uniformed police, we see the usual relationship between material reality and screen image reversed: the urban and familiar has become the imagined and magical, the magical our felt reality. That Ibo Landing is a space of exile as well as possibility – a no-space that is not only magical but also marked by distance and loss – is suggested in Tate’s statement above, that ‘we crave for both shores to claim us’. It is an argument pursued by Catherine Cucinella and Renée R. Curry, who insist that ‘The Sea Islands are not Africa. The glorified Africa is unreachable’, so that it is the exilic state of ‘not belonging’ that characterizes Dash’s Peazant family (2001: 203, 198). All the women in the film, they suggest, are in some way exiled, in many instances from each other; even Nana, who insists so powerfully on connection with the past, has in doing so cut herself off from the present and the future. Despite the film’s rhythmic cross-cutting and its representation of the communal and syncretic, then, it ‘thwarts any idea of a unified home for the post-colonial African woman’ (ibid.: 199). It is in Eula’s final speech to the family assembled on the beach that arguments for inclusivity are most powerfully made, visually as well as verbally. Turning to the outcast Yellow Mary, Eula says, ‘If you love yourselves, then love Yellow Mary, because she’s a part of you … we’re all good women’, and in a series of choreographed movements she reaches to the women of the family in turn, drawing each one into the frame. Thus the speech acts as preparation for Nana’s final blessing of the community, with its ritual acts of benediction and synthesis of Christian and African sacramental objects. Yet the emphasis in Eula’s speech is on the failure of faith and self-belief and the power of White conquest (‘Deep inside, we believe that they ruined our mothers, and their mothers before them. And we live our lives always expecting the worst because we feel we don’t deserve any better’), and about the power of the past to inflict damage in the present: ‘We carry too many scars from the past. Our past owns us. … Our mother’s scars, our sister’s scars, our daughter’s scars’. The past, the ‘fold of old wounds’, must be left behind if the multiple possibilities of the future are to be embraced. Perhaps most telling for Cucinella and Curry’s argument, neither Eula’s speech nor Nana’s blessing is fully inclusive. Haagar, the daughter-in-law who speaks most forcefully for the ‘move into a new day’, refuses the blessing, while Trula, the light-skinned woman who is Yellow Mary’s lover, is both rejected and excluded. For Cucinella and Curry, Trula’s ‘overt silence and refulgent presence’ in the film represent ‘a gaping wound’ in its textual surface (ibid.: 198). Trula arrives with Yellow Mary, a conventional object of the gaze for the boatman who ferries the women to the island, and clearly Yellow Mary’s lover. She is silent throughout the film and we see her become increasingly marginalized, pictured initially BORDER SPACES

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with the children or with Yellow Mary and Eula, but later outside the group of women of which Yellow Mary has now become part, looking on with increasing distress as her lover tells Nana that she wishes to stay on the island. At the film’s close we see Trula leave with the departing family, while Yellow Mary remains behind, weeping silently, now shorn of her finery and wearing a simple work dress. Dash has said that Trula represents the audience, a ‘silent observer’ on the margins of the film.23 Yet her troubling presence is also a marker of what cannot be incorporated in this foundation narrative. Too much of the urban future – her one spoken sentence is the selection of items for her ‘wish list’ from the children’s Sears and Roebuck catalogue – and too similar to those dominant images which the film seeks to contest, she functions increasingly, argue Cucinella and Curry, as a ‘marker of Yellow Mary’s blackness and the “scapegoat” of Yellow Mary’s sexuality’ (ibid.: 206). Trula’s light skin, that is, ‘darkens’ Yellow Mary and permits her (re-) inclusion within the family. Pictured, sometimes fragmented, at the margins of the screen, and on the very edge of the island, she is an uncomfortable reminder that this foundation myth too has its abject spaces and unnarratable stories.

Landscape The visual beauty of both the film’s landscapes and the costumes of its female subjects has been emphasized by commentators. Jacquie Jones, for example, refers to the film’s ‘distracting’ ‘preoccupation with beauty’ (1993: 19), and Caroline Brown to the ‘lyricism of [its] cinematography that celebrates the beauty of the land and its haunting relationship to the sea’ (2003: 5). Dash herself has referred to the Sea Islands as an ‘island paradise’ that she felt it important to show ‘in all its beauty’.24 Here, too, the film counters dominant myths, of the poverty and ghettoization of black lives – the ‘abject zones’ of which McClintock writes. Instead, the camera tracks slowly over island beaches, coastal inlets and misty treetops at daybreak, or, in a series of lowangle shots, pictures its female protagonists against a beach and sea that fade into the skyline. Long takes, dissolves, a slowly panning camera, and the use of slow motion, often to the rhythm of the musical score and without synchronous sound, present us with a world in which time has become duration, a synchronicity of linked spaces. It is, as Ramanathan has written, an epic world in which the everyday – food preparation, hairbraiding, storytelling, games – is fused with the magical. It is a world, she writes, that is evoked by ‘images that do not get subsumed by the narrative’, reminiscent of those passages in the epic tale where ‘narrative propulsion is retarded by scenes of description’ (2006: 82–4). It is a curious comment, which suggests both that this is a different form of epic storytelling and, at the same time, that the film represents an interruption, a ‘retardation’, of the epic narrative, which is fundamentally concerned with time not space. Both, I think, are true. Like Claire Denis, Dash privileges space over time, using her landscape images to refuse a cinematic organization centred on narrative progression. Unlike Denis’ landscape, 154

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however, that of Denis does not render its human figures lost and isolated. Their relationship with the land is one of harmony, and what is estranged here is that other, more familiar epic narrative of White western wilderness conquest, whose absence is the condition for this film’s presence.

Ways of seeing Like the landscape of White Material, this is a space of multiple stories. Here, however, they are communal as well as individual, narrated almost wholly by women – unborn as well as living – and each given its moment of exposition and authority. Only Trula’s story remains untold, although it is notable that the stories told by men – Bilal’s story of his childhood passage into slavery, which includes a version of the Ibo story in which the shackled Ibo drown, and Daddy Mac’s conventional account of the Peazant history – remain firmly embodied, without the authority of the disembodied voice-over that is given to those of Nana, the Unborn Child, and Eula. Daddy Mac’s story, indeed, is interrupted a number of times, fading from our notice as the camera and Nana’s voice-over move our attention elsewhere. Of the men, only Mr. Snead, the light-skinned urban photographer who has come, in Dash’s words, ‘to document “them”’ (1992: 38), is given the authority of a shared vision, through the photographic poses that we see, but it is an authority hedged with qualifications. Daughters of the Dust, writes Joel Brouwer, is ‘a film about ways of seeing’ (1995: 11–12), and Mr. Snead is key in conveying this. Bringer of the kaleidoscope and stereoscope to the island, he introduces with them the notion of spatial play and magic, and in his photographs we see both the power and the limitations of the photographic image. His photographs are static, posed and conventional, cut off from the fluidity of movement that surrounds them. His subjects, seduced by the magic of technology (he uses dramatic but unnecessary flash powder), take up expected poses: as solemn (male) family elders, as protected children, as isolated matriarch, as hierarchical family group. It is a reminder, as critics have pointed out,25 of the limitations of the photograph as historical record and the cinematic frame as spatial truth. When, however, the Unborn Child interrupts Mr. Snead’s photograph of the Peazant men, interposing herself at the centre of this all-male group, we are given a reminder, too, of the difference of the film’s own vision. Magical, in constant movement, and embodied female, she represents at once an interruption – momentary, and easily brushed aside – to conventional historical record and the site of an alternative authority. Mr. Snead functions, suggests Brouwer, as Dash’s ‘double in the narrative’ (ibid.: 12), drawing attention to the limitations of any ‘way of seeing’. In this his function mirrors that of Trula; both are figures from an urban outside whose ‘frenzy of the visible’ (Comolli 1980: 122) is glimpsed only briefly in the film.26 But whereas Trula represents a hybridity which is beyond the embrace of the film’s focus on a communal past, Mr. Snead, as a BORDER SPACES

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representative, suggests Dash (1992: 38), of Du Bois’ ‘talented tenth’,27 signifies a view of history as linear progress that the film is concerned to reject. If the image, as Jean-Luc Nancy (2005b: 7) suggests, is detached from and cut out within a ground, then the figure of the Unborn Child refuses that separation, pointing to all that Mr. Snead’s photograph of ‘Salt Water Negroes’ excludes. The ending of the film completes its temporal cycle, as the boat departs carrying Peazant family members and Trula. The final shot silhouettes the figures of Eula, Yellow Mary and Nana as they walk in slow motion across a strip of beach between two stretches of water, their bodies ethereal against the shimmering of the setting sun on water. The figure of the Unborn Child follows, until she too has exited the frame and only the beach and water remain as the shot fades to darkness. Against these images, the voice-over of the Unborn Child offers us two explanations of why her parents decided to stay. The first is historical and male centred: Eli, it was said, had become too involved with the ‘anti-lynching issue’. The second is female-centred and matrilineal: Eula ‘saw too much of herself in Nana Peazant and wanted her children born on this island’. In decentring both (both are only possible; the Unborn Child will vouch for neither) and focusing instead on the unbroken shoreline, the final shot reminds us again of the way in which the film has, in Diawara’s words, ‘stopped time’, in favour of an expanded and mythical sense of space. Like the other films discussed in this chapter, Daughters of the Dust refuses conventional relationships between ‘framed’ or narrative space and the ‘space-off ’ that it conventionally uses and denies, focusing instead on a ‘border space’ which is at once temporal, geographic and cinematic. Like them, it refuses conventional spatial and generic mapping, pointing instead to the possibilities for other ways of occupying and viewing space.

Notes   1 He writes, for instance, of ‘the camera having… to impregnate space with the anticipation of action’ and, again, of the ‘pregnancy of space’ (Heath 1981: 42, 45).   2 For McClintock (1992: 85), this move also characterizes ‘postcolonialist’ discourses.   3 For the extent to which such spaces are metaphorical, see Thornham (2012).   4 The term ‘post-colonial’ has been much contested: see for example McClintock (1992), Shohat (1992), and Kaplan (1996). It has remained, however, the overarching term to describe a field of study. The second edition of Post-Colonial Studies: the Key Concepts (2007), for example, defends it in these terms. The ‘concept of boundaries and borders’, write the authors, has become ‘crucial to post-colonial studies’, as ‘the question of borders and borderlands has become more pressing’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2007: viii). Particularly influential has been Homi Bhabha’s use of the idea of the stairwell as a ‘liminal space’, whose ‘hither and thither’ movement prevents ‘identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities’ (1994: 4).   5 Woman of mixed race or culture.   6 Heath rejects the idea of cinematic ‘transparency’ as ‘a kind of absolute “realism” from which all signs of production have been effaced’ but his more complex notion 156

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of the filmic process as one of containment, regulation and orientation remains a process in the service of a ‘founding ideology of vision as truth’ (1981: 51, 44).   7 ‘En France, je ne me sense pas du tout chez moi…. Mais en Afrique, je me sentais étrangère parce qu’on comprend assez bien, quand on est un petit enfant blanc, qu’on est pas de cette terre-là’. The translation is mine.   8 See for example Murphy (2012), Martin (2006), and Beugnet (2004).   9 See Martin (2010) and Wigon (2010). 10 Une ‘dis-jointure des plans qui ne sont susceptibles d’une ré-articulation qu’à partir seulement des failles pluridimensionnelles’. 11 In a comment on religious references in L’Intrus (2004), Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us that ‘Christ is portrayed as an intruder, a disturbing presence bringing trouble and a fear of foreignness to the world’ (2014: 154). We could also speculate on his resemblance to the second rider of the Apocalypse, who seems to symbolize war. 12 See particularly Williams (2014), though for Williams White Material is notable among Denis’ films in its relative absence of ‘intertextual direction’ (2014: 93). 13 See Eyre (2010). 14 See for example Williams (2014). 15 See Chapter 1. 16 See Collins (1999), Schwartz (2001), Freiberg (2002), Felperin (undated). 17 See also my own reading of Armstrong’s (2007) Death Defying Acts (Thornham 2012: 113–17). 18 For a discussion of these see Thornham (2012). 19 Metz himself does not gender this spectator. For a discussion of this see Williams (1989), Thornham (1997). 20 See Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977). Dash took Eula’s account of the legend directly from Marshall. 21 Dash herself suggested that the opening shot of the young Nana’s hands can in fact be seen as the film’s present: ‘The scene is really in the present: the whole film is a flashforward’ (in Alexander 1993: 231). 22 The founding narrative to which Diawara refers saw the American West as both a Promised Land and an Eden (see Chapter 1). 23 Director’s DVD commentary. 24 Director’s DVD commentary. 25 See for example Brouwer (1995) and Gourdine (2004). 26 Dash’s short film Illusions (1983), set in 1940s Hollywood during World War II, also focuses on the denials and exclusions – of the black female body and voice – in mainstream images. There, the figure that cannot be accommodated in Daughters of the Dust, that of the light-skinned woman who can ‘pass’, is the central figure, possessed of the voice-over as well as the central narrative, and befriending the darker-skinned woman whose voice is dubbed for that of the white star. 27 Du Bois’ essay of that name was published in 1903. In it he wrote that the ‘Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men’. These, the ‘talented tenth’, must be educated to take on leadership roles. See http://teachingamericanhistory.org/ library/document/the-talented-tenth/

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5  DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

Adaptations, writes Linda Hutcheon, are ‘double – or multilaminated works’, and she uses the neologism ‘palimpsestuous’1 to characterize their ‘haunted’ quality – ‘haunted at all times by their adapted texts’ (2013: 6). The metaphor is spatial, a derivation from ‘palimpsest’ which emphasizes not the layers of this figure, which would be ‘palimpsestic’, but their entanglement. It describes, writes Sarah Dillon, a surface structure in which texts are ‘involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other’ (2005: 245). Hutcheon’s use of the term is, then, a refusal of traditional definitions of cinematic adaptation, with their appeal to an authority defined in temporal terms. Of these, Dudley Andrew’s definition, ‘adaptation is the appropriation of meaning from a prior text’ (1984: 97), provides a paradigmatic example, not only because Andrew emphasizes the ‘cultural status’ of the ‘prior’ text, but also in the definition’s less explicit suggestion that the ‘borrowing’ of both meaning and ‘prestige’ in cinematic adaptations is somehow both illicit and violent (ibid.: 96–8). If Hutcheon’s spatial metaphor refuses this appeal to temporal authority, however, it also bears traces of earlier, less positive definitions. Dillon points to the term’s ‘appropriate’ similarity to ‘incestuous’, with which it shares the suggestion of ‘relations where there … should be none’ (2005: 254), and this invocation of Freud’s ‘family romance’2 provides a reminder of the images on which definitions of adaptation have often drawn. James Naremore and Robert Stam have pointed to the sexualized and Oedipal language in which critics have described adaptation’s processes. Such writing, writes Stam, ‘has often deployed an elegiac discourse of loss’ (2005: 3), in which what is lost is ‘the word’, a term redolent of spirituality, abstraction, ‘a higher truth’ (Shohat 2006: 101). Film, its replacement, on the other hand, ‘offends through its inescapable materiality, … its carnality and visceral shocks to the nervous system’ (2005: 6). At times this offence is depicted through the image of a virginal literary text ‘despoiled’ by ‘a crude and lascivious’ predator (Naremore 2000: 9). More often, however, the relation between the two is seen as one of Oedipal rivalry, in which cinema, the bastard son, seeks to usurp the purer,

but less corporeally powerful father, while at the same time appropriating his name and reputation. The usurper – mass culture, the image, spectacle – is both inferior and, in film’s ‘unseemly “embodiedness”’ (ibid: 6), oddly feminized. Underpinning this ‘image-word prejudice’, writes Stam, is the ‘body-mind hierarchy’, so that the ‘embodied’ cinematic image ‘is seen to triumph over the logos of the symbolic written word, of which literature remains the most prestigious form’. ‘Film and other visual media’, he concludes, ‘seem to threaten the collapse of the symbolic order, the erosion of the powers of the literary fathers, patriarchal narrators, and consecrated arts’ (ibid.: 5). It is worth adding, too, that when film theory seeks to claim legitimacy and authority for cinematic texts, the terms of this claim – the film director as auteur, the camera-stylo, film-as-writing – often also constitute claims, as Ella Shohat points out (2006: 96), for cinema as logos rather than embodiment. For Stam, it is the word-image/mind-body dualism that is central in this critical construction of the cinematic adaptation. Underpinning this, however, are, it seems to me, two further dualisms. The first – most obviously – is that of gender, and the second that of time-space. In what follows, I shall explore a little further the linkage between these two pairings in the context of adaptation, before first asking how we might then understand adaptations in which both the ‘prior text’ and its cinematic adaptation are the work of women, and then exploring some instances in more detail.

Mastering space Seymour Chatman’s ‘What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)’ (1981) is, as critics have pointed out, an essay that, despite the parenthesis in its title, is primarily concerned with cinema’s limitations (Naremore 2000; Ray 2000). The essay compares Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country (1936) with the Guy de Maupassant short story of which it is an adaptation. For Chatman, description in the literary text is spatial – ‘blocks’ or ‘islands’ or ‘chunks’ which are essentially static – and narrative temporal. What happens in description, he writes, is that ‘the time line of the story is interrupted and frozen. Events are stopped, though our reading – or discourse – time continues, and we look at the characters and the setting elements as a tableau vivant’ (1981: 119). The account is strikingly similar to Mulvey’s description of the cinematic function of the female figure, whose ‘visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation’ (1989a: 19). It is a similarity which is the more striking when we consider the scene which Chatman chooses for detailed comparison, a description of the young Henriette Dufour (Sylvia Bataille) on a swing, her seductive combination of innocence and emergent sexuality displayed for the gaze of the male narrator (see Perez 2000: 135). For Chatman, the scene is an example of the power of literary discourse to master the spatiality of description (and the female body): selecting, asserting and interpreting. Cinema, however, 160

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possesses no such mastery. It is caught up in the spatiality it depicts, unable to discriminate, its ‘plenitude of visual details’ constituting an ‘excessive particularity’3 (1981: 122). In the case of the scene on the swing, the camera’s inability to present ambiguity and ‘verbal innuendo’ means that Renoir must suggest Mademoiselle Dufour’s innocent seductiveness through a point-of-view identification with the gaze of a male character (Rodolfe [Jacques B. Brunius]). Chatman’s account is fascinating in the effort it makes to deny the voyeurism of Maupassant’s text – Chatman’s own judgement, he insists, is a matter of ‘aesthetics’, not ‘ethics’ – while also justifying that of Renoir. Why, he demands, should ‘female members of Renoir’s audience’ have ‘difficulty participating in Rodolfe’s lecherous point of view’ when its intention is ‘to show Henriette as a woman eminently worth looking at’? (ibid.: 136). Most important for my purposes here, however, he attributes interiority – the mastery of space – to literature, while the camera’s gaze, in his view, is always external. Interiority, it seems, is a quality that must be imposed by Renoir on a resistant medium, via identification with his male characters. As Grosz reminds us (see Introduction), in Western philosophical traditions such exteriority is identified with space, while ‘time [is] the mode of interiority’. Time, she argues, is therefore ‘conceived as masculine (proper to a subject, a being with an interior) and space is associated with femininity (femininity being a form of externality to men)’. Thus, as we see in Chatman’s account, time and authorship belong to man, while woman ‘is/provides space for man’ (Grosz 1995: 99). Chatman draws for his analysis on Gérard Genette’s division of storytelling into ‘narration and description’, the former concerned with ‘pure processes’, and the ‘temporal, dramatic aspect of the narrative’, the latter serving to ‘suspend the course of time and to contribute to spreading the narrative in space’ (1982: 136). It is a division, as W. J. T. Mitchell reminds us (1989: 92), which is inherently unequal. Literature is a temporal (and interior/masculine) art, so that description is ‘quite naturally’ narration’s ‘ever-necessary, ever-submissive, never-emancipated slave’ (Genette 1982: 134). For Western literary theory, Mitchell suggests, space is ‘static, visual, external, empty, corporeal, and dead. It is only redeemed from these essential, natural conditions by some intervention or violence; it must be pushed into motion, temporalized, internalized, filled up, or brought to life by time and consciousness’ (1989: 93). Chatman’s vision of cinema sees it as always threatened by such corporeal emptiness, rescued only by the relentless ‘force of plot’ (1981: 126) or the conscious manipulations of a cinematic auteur like Renoir. This feminization of literary space, writes Mitchell, means that for the male poet it is the ‘enemy’, functioning ambiguously as both ‘feminine object of desire and violence’ and as ‘rival and competitor’ to the male poetic voice. Above all, it represents – Mitchell uses John Keats as his example – an ‘ambiguous eternity of desolation, perfection, and frustration’ which paralyses thought. In the sexual politics of literary space, concludes Mitchell, the ‘spatial object of desire’ may be treated by the male poet to ‘witty seduction, ambiguous praise, or frank acknowledgment as a sublime monstrosity’ (1989: 97). DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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Women’s space So what happens, asks Mitchell, when women appropriate literary space? In answer, he turns to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (2000/1979), an account of nineteenth-century women’s writing that seeks to construct a specifically female literary tradition. Mitchell points to Gilbert and Gubar’s comment that ‘anxieties about space sometimes seem to dominate’ the work of women writers, so that ‘spatial imagery of enclosure and escape, elaborated with what frequently becomes obsessive intensity’ is one of its characteristics (2000: 83). But Gilbert and Gubar also identify a more subversive use of space by women writers, who both ‘see meaning in what has previously been empty space’4 and construct their own imagined spaces – ‘untrammeled … free and fierce’ (ibid.: 75, 646). It is these ‘free and fierce’ spaces that are important in Gilbert and Gubar’s groundbreaking study, as they are in Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), and Ellen Moers’s Literary Women (1976), published at the same time. For Showalter these spaces, which are at once spatial, experiential and metaphysical, constitute a ‘wild zone’ in women’s writing (1986: 262), while for Moers they are ‘personal landscapes’, ‘natural and highly personal geographies’ (Moers 1986: 255, 262). They receive their fullest description in Moers’s Literary Women. Like other feminist literary critics of the 1970s, Moers was concerned to counter both the assumption that women’s spaces are domestic and interior – with women’s sexuality symbolized by Freud’s ‘boxes, chests, pockets, ships, churches … and jewel case(s)’ (ibid.: 253) – and the persistent reduction of women to landscape in the work of male writers. These other landscapes, she writes, are places of ‘solitary feminine assertion’, spaces of ‘freedom and tactile sensation’. They are ‘open lands … vegetated with crimped heather or wind-swept grasses’, ‘independent of administrative boundaries’ (ibid.: 260–3). They constitute, she writes, in a description taken from Willa Cather, ‘not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made’5 (ibid.: 259). Commenting on these ‘female landscapes’ described by Moers, Nancy K. Miller argues that in their focus on discours – the passages of description regarded by Genette as ‘ever-submissive, neveremancipated’ – they represent not simply an interruption of narrative, as Genette suggests, but ‘the iconography of a desire for a revision of story’, for ‘another logic of plot’ outside male-centred narrative structures (1988: 87). Responding perhaps to such suggestions, Mitchell concludes that ‘literary space takes on … a peculiarly subversive and utopian character in women’s writing’ (1989: 98).

Adapting women’s texts In Technologies of Gender, Teresa de Lauretis re-works the notion of ‘see[ing] meaning in what has previously been empty space’ originated by Showalter and quoted by Gilbert and Gubar, connecting it now to cinema. In Showalter’s 162

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description of this doubleness of view, she compares it to the ‘optical illusion’ in which we can see ‘either a goblet or two profiles’. The images, she writes, ‘oscillate in their tension before us’, so that the two figures are not layered but rather ‘engaged in … complex vibration’ (1975: 435). Her account strikingly prefigures Hutcheon’s ‘palimpsestuous’ figure, though Showalter is writing not of adaptation but of women’s writing and the re-visioned view of it that feminist criticism makes possible. De Lauretis adapts Showalter’s spatial image, connecting it to Stephen Heath’s concept of cinema’s ‘off-screen space’ – ‘the space not visible in the frame but inferable from what the frame makes visible’ (1987: 26). For Heath, as we saw in Chapter 4, the ceaseless pull of off-screen into on-screen space is what allows narrative cinema to contain and thus construct space as coherent and ‘transparent’, producing ‘the unity of place for vision’ (1981: 53). In response, de Lauretis proposes that a characteristic of women’s cultural production and criticism is the refusal of that ‘pull’, so that these feminized ‘spaces-off ’ become visible, as in Showalter’s doubled figure or Hutcheon’s palimpsest, not instead of but ‘concurrently and in contradiction’ with dominant narratives and their organization of space. It is a relationship, she writes, both of disruption (these are ‘counter-practices’) and entanglement – a ‘tension of contradiction’ and doubling (1987: 26). Women’s filmmaking, it seems, might also be ‘palimpsestuous’. Showalter’s use of an ‘entangled’ spatial image to describe feminist writing on women’s texts is also echoed in later critical work. Giuliana Bruno has emphasized ‘the spatial paradigm’ in her exploration of the early films of Italian filmmaker Elvira Notari. Bruno seeks to explore, she writes, the ‘intersubjective’ space ‘inbetween the filmic texts and the female spectator (and critic)’ (1993: 6). Her work therefore becomes a ‘game of two women’, an ‘interchangeable relation between mother/daughter’ which is a ‘joined collaboration, active and shared’. ‘Authorial space’ becomes shared, a space at once of a nurturing ‘“live presence” and [of] loss’, for the ‘original’ author can be recovered only in discourse (ibid.: 240).6 More recently, Jane Gaines has deployed the term ‘constellation’, borrowed from Walter Benjamin,7 to describe the relationship of the feminist film historian to her object of study. We are, argues Gaines (2014), ‘constellated’ together with the historical figures whose work we seek to retrieve, the two ‘nows’ of the work we recover and our attempt to (re)interpret it brought into ‘inextricable co-existence’.8 How, then, might we think of the adaptations by women filmmakers of the work of female writers, in light of these spatial metaphors? To return to Stam’s analysis of critical writing on adaptation, it is clear that these films cannot be seen as a feminizing debasement of an originary text. The threat to the ‘symbolic order, … literary fathers, patriarchal narrators, and consecrated arts’ that Stam describes as posed by adaptation is already there in the prior text. If we are to follow Stam’s psychoanalytic reference, indeed, we might want to propose that, as Freud suggested with some discomfort, this relationship between ‘daughter’ and ‘mother’ is not, like that between ‘literary fathers’ and their fleshly cinematic sons, Oedipally competitive.9 Instead, it is a matter of the shared space and DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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attachment that Freud sees as a ‘surprising’ continuation of the female ‘preOedipal’ relationship (1991a/1933: 153) into the adult lives of women, and later feminist revisionist psychoanalysts – and critical theorists – have seen as central to female subjectivity.10 It is no accident, I think, that both Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) and Marleen Gorris’s Antonia’s Line (1995), the first an adaptation and the second a matrilineal epic,11 work by collapsing time into space, and end with a vision of storytelling daughters – one a filmmaker, the other a cinematic narrator – who inhabit a shared, or doubled, space with the mothers whose stories they are revealed to be telling. Since the cinematic adaptation, as Hutcheon reminds us, is always an ‘openly announced’ – claimed – relationship with its source text, too, the adaptation’s usual borrowing of cultural authority from the originary author must alter, since women’s writing sits uneasily within a canonical tradition which constitutes the female author as the – perhaps subversive – exception.12 In such circumstances, I would argue, the uncomfortable relationship of the female writer to a literary tradition that has either appropriated or excluded her becomes a material aspect of the text to be adapted. It is part of what is claimed in the ‘announcement’ of the relationship between the adaptation and its source text: a shared context – a ‘constellation’ – that becomes folded into the ‘joined collaboration’ that is the work of adaptation. And as in Bruno’s search for the elusive films of Elvira Notari, and the filmmaker’s equally elusive presence in them, it brings a sense of both ‘live presence’ and loss. Describing women writers’ use of space, Kathleen Komar identifies two recurrent strategies. The first echoes Showalter and Moers in finding in such work a construction of ‘female spaces’ in the outside world.13 The second is more complex, and is suggestive for thinking about adaptation. Women writers, argues Komar, exploit an ‘interior space’ which is then ‘reexteriorized’ in the form of the literary text. Thus the published text itself becomes a ‘public space’, a ‘site of definition and affirmation of the female within and against a male-dominated social structure’ (1994: 90–1). Komar comments on the number of contemporary women writers who write about writers, arguing that in such work, as in the critical work described by Bruno and Gaines, what is created is a doubled consciousness, in which the female narrator and the woman writer who is her subject now separate, now merge. The text thus becomes a site for the joint exploration not only of ‘the self and a [female] other’ but also of ‘the essential interrelatedness of the two’ (ibid.: 103). In it the temporal distance between the female narrator/investigator and the woman writer she investigates is replaced by shared textual space. Komar’s concept of doubling or co-inhabiting, like Bruno’s ‘joined collaboration’ and Gaines’ ‘constellation’, is one that I think we can apply to women filmmakers’ adaptations of female-authored texts. The woman writer’s difficult relationship to cultural authority, which she stands in for but is also as a woman outside, a relationship which is embodied in her text as cultural object, is as important a part of what is to be re-imagined as is her text’s own ‘personal landscape’ or ‘wild zone’. 164

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That re-imagining, in turn, will incorporate the filmmaker’s own relationship to that authority and to its ‘spaces-off ’, to the social power that such authority inscribes, to the imagined (lost but present) writer and her ‘interior space’, as well as to the text as both public object and private world. More than other adaptations, then, these films may exemplify the entangled spatial relationship, in which texts are ‘intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other’, that Hutcheon describes. In the process, they re-imagine the figure of the author, famously pronounced dead by Roland Barthes and irrelevant by Michel Foucault,14 as female, composite and multi-vocal. In the conclusion to his Introduction to Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (2005), Stam proposes his own replacement for the ‘swamp-like profusion of metaphors for the adaptational process’ (2005: 2) outlined at the beginning of this chapter. Cinematic adaptations, he argues, transform their ‘source-novel hypotexts’ through processes of ‘selection, amplification, concretization, actualization, critique, extrapolation, popularization, reaccentuation, transculturalization’ (ibid.: 45). It is a list that removes the hierarchical ‘prejudices’ – of word over image, mind over body, of class and of gender – that underpinned earlier definitions. But it also removes these very real cultural hierarchies from our consideration. In a final Deleuzian flourish, Stam offers a partial return to the sexualized terms of those earlier accounts. Adaptations, he concludes, ‘redistribute energies and intensities, provoke flows and displacements; the linguistic energy of literary writing turns into the audiovisual-kinetic-performative energy of the adaptation, in an amorous exchange of textual fluids’ (ibid.: 46, my emphasis). Here, indeed, there are no ‘prejudices’, but in this ‘exchange of textual fluids’ there are also no bodies, and certainly no women writers and filmmakers positioned in relation to the gendered, social and cultural hierarchies that Stam abolishes. In what follows, I shall explore the ‘new and perhaps unknown, unthought discursive spaces’ (Grosz 1995: 23) that we might find if we do take these hierarchies and their consequences into account.

The scene of writing: Mansfield Park (Patricia Rozema, 1999) ‘I connected to her as a woman’, said Patricia Rozema of the protagonist of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price; ‘I connected to her rage about not being considered central to the real social story’ (in Moussa 2004: 257). Rozema’s Mansfield Park seems an appropriate text with which to begin, on two counts. First, Jane Austen’s novel, as its title indicates, and as critics have emphasized,15 foregrounds place and space, and it is to the novel’s spaces – those significantly absent as well as those present – that Rozema’s film responds. Second, the film’s most critically remarked device, the fusion of Mansfield Park’s protagonist Fanny Price with the persona of her creator, and the linking of both with the director’s own vision, foregrounds DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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both the process of writing and the positions of the (female) writer and director in adaptation.16 Rozema’s film was much criticized for its ‘infidelities’ on both counts – for its emphasis on the origins of the Bertram family’s wealth in its slave-owning sugar plantations in Antigua, as well as for its rewriting of Fanny.17 Such criticisms, Mireia Aragay suggests, are about ‘a struggle for possession of the author, namely Jane Austen’ (2003: 181, original emphasis). In so publicly re-visioning Mansfield Park, Rozema’s film asserts not only the visible presence of this author – ‘Jane Austen’ – within the public space of her text, but also that of the director (who also wrote the screenplay) as a co-authoring voice in its cinematic adaptation. In her essay on Christa Wolf ’s The Quest for Christa T. (1968), Komar suggests that ‘The text forms a metanarrative, a site for understanding not only the self and a [female] other but the essential interrelatedness of the two’ (1994: 103). The novel’s narrator, she writes, realizes as she begins her story that in constructing her subject’s identity through narrative she is also producing her own. The resulting text, argues Komar, ‘becomes a joint exploration of identities for two female characters who have reacted differently to the boundaries imposed on their actions and thoughts by a society they do not control’ (1994: 103). Rozema’s film, too, pits what Tim Watson calls the ‘immeasurable heaviness’18 of historical and social space (2005: 63) – the ‘boundaries imposed … by a society they do not control’ (Komar), ‘the real social story’ (Rozema) – against the liberatory possibilities of the space of the text, and explores the position of the woman writer/filmmaker in relation to these two counterposed forces. As elsewhere in Rozema’s films,19 Mansfield Park plays out the troubled and difficult relationship between the power of the text and the power of the social and historical world, through a protagonist whose identity is constructed in self-division across the two.

Material spaces The first space that we see in the film is the dark, warm, close space of the bed shared by the young Fanny (Hannah Taylor Gordon) and her sister Susie (Talya Gordon). As the texture of paper of the opening credits gives way to that of bedlinen and clothing, the camera gazes down on the two girls, picking them out as light against the surrounding darkness. The voice we hear with increasing distinctness is that of Fanny, telling Susie one of the stories taken from Austen’s Juvenilia. This enclosed interior space is, as critics from Moers onwards have pointed out, traditionally female. It is the space of female communion, tactile as well as verbal, site of a ‘bonding and resistance’, as Belén Vidal writes, ‘that is specifically feminine’ (2005: 272). Throughout the film Fanny’s room will be the space in which she tells her stories: privately to Susie, here and when she returns to Portsmouth, and, through writing and direct address to camera at Mansfield, to us, too. But, as critics have also reminded us, these safe interior spaces have traditionally also been spaces of female imprisonment. Gilbert and Gubar are typical in arguing 166

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that in the work of female authors, ‘the imagery of enclosure reflects the woman writer’s own discomfort, her sense of powerlessness’ (2000: 84). Here, Fanny’s powerlessness is immediately evident, as her storytelling is interrupted by her forced removal to Mansfield Park. But it is notable, too, that in Portsmouth her stories are oral – private, inventive and ephemeral. This emphasis on speech – she does of course continue to speak to us – gives Fanny’s letters and stories a performative force, and suggests the disruptive power of the female voice in ‘writing back’ (Plate 2011) against dominant histories.20 But it also emphasizes the material cost of the written word. Later in the film, when Fanny (Frances O’Connor) has returned to Portsmouth and seeks to continue her writing, her mother (Lindsay Duncan) will remind us of this cost – ‘Who is to pay for all this paper, Fanny?’.21 Only with the acquisition of a ‘room of her own’ at Mansfield, however cold and sparsely furnished, will Fanny be able to write. But this garret space, too, is a precarious possession, and vulnerable always to male intrusion. It is entered at will by Sir Thomas (Harold Pinter), whose power can dispense generosity – ‘You shall have a fire’ – or impose tyranny: ‘You will marry him.’ It is Edmund (Jonny Lee Miller) who ‘pays for’ her paper, just as he will later find her a publisher and select a title for her first book.22 Against these enclosed female spaces are set the bleak, echoing halls of the forbidding manor house that is Mansfield Park. Our first sight of it is through Fanny’s eyes, as the moving camera pans across its immense Gothic façade. Once inside, the camera swirls upwards around its vast hallways, then cuts between tilted low-angle shots that magnify the judgemental figures of Mrs Norris (Sheila Gish) and Sir Thomas and high angles that place the child Fanny as a tiny, fairytalelike23 figure within empty, cavernous spaces. When, her destination decided, Mrs Norris sweeps Fanny rapidly through the house, it is up cold, wide staircases and

FIGURE 5.1  The scene of writing. (Mansfield Park, 1999) DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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bare corridors. Glimpses of richly sumptuous rooms – ‘Sir Thomas’s extraordinary library’ and ‘Sir Thomas’s study … his personal sanctuary’ – are juxtaposed with shots of missing plaster and skirting boards, and of the decaying west wing ‘soon to be repaired’. As critics have pointed out, this is a house in visible disrepair,24 but it is also a place of patriarchal power. In it Fanny is excluded, silenced and stilled. Repeatedly in the film she is made to stand in silence, as others circle round her to threaten or seduce. Physical movement can be indulged only outside, but this too is regulated and controlled. As Fanny and Edmund set out for the stables, the camera shows us Sir Thomas’s surveillant gaze as he watches from an upper window. That this gaze is one of eroticized power becomes clear when Sir Thomas returns from Antigua to reassume control. His greeting emphasizes Fanny’s sexuality (‘Hello my dear, sweet girl. My word, you’ve grown in health and, I dare say, beauty’), and his embrace gives her vulnerability in the vast empty spaces of Mansfield Park a new emphasis. From this point on, it is Fanny’s body that is emphasized, commented on and fought over in this space, culminating in the ball in her honour and Henry Crawford’s (Alessandro Nivola) proposal. Critics have commented on Fanny’s own discovery of her sexuality during this period, and on the sense of empowerment it gives her (Johnson 1999; Monaghan 2007). The ball itself is filmed as a series of rhythmic, slow-motion sequences in which close-ups of faces, hands and bodies emphasize the eroticism of touch and glance. At its close, it is Fanny who is triumphant, watching from her window as Henry Crawford bows to her from the lawn outside, then extinguishing her candle when she chooses to be seen no longer. Later, when Crawford declares his love, Fanny is once again alone on Mansfield Park’s vast stone staircase, but this time she is in control, remaining several steps above Henry throughout the encounter, before finally dismissing him. That this empowerment is both temporary and illusory, however, we see through the parallels drawn between Crawford and Sir Thomas. Crawford seduces, but his offer of freedom (his pyrotechnic courtship display involves the knowing release of a flock of doves) is belied by both his assumptions of physical possession of Fanny, in his embraces, and, more importantly, by the economic power at his disposal, as he proposes to re-house and re-settle her family. It is Sir Thomas who articulates this power directly, holding the ball in order that ‘some young man of good standing’ will notice Fanny, and punishing her by returning her to poverty in Portsmouth – ‘A little abstinence from the elegance and luxuries of Mansfield Park might bring your mind into a more sober state’ – when she refuses Crawford. Her flirtation with Crawford is a flirtation with patriarchal power, the fantasy of self-empowerment through sexuality (the fairytale fantasy) an illusion. It is, after all, the route followed before her by her now utterly powerless and stupefied aunt, Lady Bertram (Lindsay Duncan). If Mansfield Park – vast, cold, forbidding and crumbling – signals the realities of domestic patriarchal power, it is the film’s absent space – Antigua – which 168

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embodies that power’s economic and social basis. We see the material traces of this dependence early in the film, in the ship bearing ‘black cargo’ that Fanny sees as she leaves Portsmouth, in the map of Antigua that fills one wall of Sir Thomas’s study, and in the statue of the liveried black servant which holds Lady Bertram’s laudanum as she listens to Maria (Victoria Hamilton) and Julia (Justine Waddell) play a duet. But it is with the return from Antigua of first Tom (James Purefoy) and then Sir Thomas that we see both its economic centrality (‘All the lovely people there paying for this party,’ says Tom) and the extent of the brutality enacted there. That this is an eroticized brutality we see even before the revelation of Tom’s sketches, with their mix of scenes of hanging and flagellation taken from William Blake’s engravings for Stedman’s Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam of 1796, and images of explicitly sexual exploitation involving Sir Thomas himself. Presiding over his reassembled family circle on his return, Sir Thomas speaks of the ‘well-shaped … mulattos’ of Antigua, who ‘strangely … like mules’ can ‘never have children’, silencing the objections of Fanny and Edmund. The women, he proclaims, are ‘especially well-featured. I have one – so easy and graceful in her movements and intelligent as well … I have a good mind to bring back one of them … ’. As he proceeds to praise Fanny – who has also been ‘brought back’ to Mansfield – in very similar terms (‘Your complexion is so improved … and your figure’), the effect is to make it clear that Mansfield Park, too, is a place of eroticized male power, engaged in the buying and selling of female bodies. ‘I will not be sold off like one of your father’s slaves’, says Fanny to Edmund as she attempts to escape its walls. Before turning to the textual space constructed in and through the film, I want to note one further way in which Rozema’s film mobilizes space. Critics have noted the film’s restless swooping, circling and soaring camera movements – Pamela Church-Gibson, for example, mentions its ‘lack of any continuous or fixed point of view … and multiplicity of gazes’ (2004: 55) – but have tended to identify this movement with Fanny’s perspective.25 This is a camera, however, that can swirl around Fanny as much as the other characters, zooming out to place her and distance us, tilting and switching angles. It can swoop ahead of and beyond Fanny, through windows, over landscape and across time. It is, in other words, conspicuously independent, drawing attention to a mobile vision which is not that of Fanny, or her alter ego ‘Jane Austen’, whose words remain tied to the social world in which she is anchored, but instead registers the presence of the director, whose view is ‘connected’ but different.

Textual space We see this movement in the film’s credit sequence, which establishes the importance of textual space in the film. It begins with a silhouette reflected in water, suddenly disturbed by the effect of a fresh drop of water. Thereafter we DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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see, in extreme close-up against a black background, a series of golden textures, ridged, layered, now viewed from the side, now from above. The effect, as David Monaghan has written, is of an expansive ‘golden landscape of ploughed fields’ against a glowing sky (2006: 63). As we discern feathers overlain by handwritten script, however, it becomes clear that the textures are of heavy, handmade paper and quill pen, and the buoyant baroque music gives way to Fanny’s whispering voice. Here we find both ‘the sensuous materiality of writing’ (Vidal 2005: 272) and the unlimited space of the imagination, which can make and unmake landscapes. As a space it is layered – palimpsestuous. Its materiality is that of Fanny’s world – later, when Edmund brings her paper for the first time, we will see her carefully smooth and cut the heavy paper in an echo of this opening sequence. But the writing floats elusively over and across this textured surface, reminding us that the Fanny who now speaks is not identical with the author of the written text. Finally, tracking across both is the camera, which is now still, as the letters move, and now mobile, as it glides across and through the writing. This then is the film’s ‘scene of writing’ (Vidal 2005). It is, as we have seen, a space of female ‘bonding and resistance’, and as material space it is both intimate and marginalized. Indeed, Fanny’s garret room and repeated self-admonition to ‘Run mad as often as you choose … ’ make her the ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ of Gilbert and Gubar’s influential book on the nineteenth-century woman writer. As textual space, however, it can be used to comment on characters and events in the voice of the novel’s narrator, a voice at once acerbic, witty and very funny. It is here that Sir Thomas’s accusation against Fanny of ‘wilfulness of temper, self-conceit and … independence of spirit’ is actually borne out,26 and, significantly, here that she finds the strength to refuse his direct order to marry Crawford. This is a space, too, in which both history – the ‘tiresome’ male narrative of ‘quarrels and wars’ – and the conventions governing feminine conduct and sentiment can be ridiculed and subverted. Breaking the surface of the film’s realism in Fanny’s direct address to camera, the film’s ‘space of writing’ also encompasses time, becoming, in Doreen Massey’s words, the ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’ (2005: 9). We are the recipients of Fanny’s letters, and of Jane Austen’s words, and the voice that speaks is a composite voice, at once within the film’s diegetic world and, as a consciousness beyond it, speaking as both Jane Austen’s youthful satirist and the novel’s mature narrator. In terms of the world of patriarchal power depicted by the film, this is the ‘space-off ’ described by Teresa de Lauretis, an ‘other space[.] both discursive and social’ which exists ‘concurrently and in contradiction’ to that world (1987: 26). Like de Lauretis’s feminist, Rozema’s Fanny moves between the two, in a ‘tension of contradiction’ that cannot be resolved. In making visible the ‘space [off] of writing’ in this way, Rozema’s film foregrounds this composite feminist voice. But in doing so, it also draws attention to the uncomfortable – impossible – relationship between these two kinds of space, the material and social space of history and the shared imaginative space of the female-authored text. The critique of Sir Thomas’s world, with its patriarchal 170

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power at home inextricably tied to a brutal racial and sexual exploitation abroad, comes from art, not only in the form of Fanny’s writing but through Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), whose description of the caged starling is read by Crawford and quoted by Maria Bertram: ‘I can’t get out’. Most powerfully, it is manifest in Tom’s sketches, with their clear invocation of William Blake. It is a critique, however, which is both powerless and complicit in the face of the ‘immeasurable heaviness’ of historical and social space. The sheer physical presence of Sir Thomas is emphasized in the film, not only by Harold Pinter’s performance but through the camera angles which render him huge and terrifying. As he circles Fanny, she is still and silenced. Her banishment to Portsmouth, which brings not only poverty but the domination of another patriarch whose attentions are more than paternal, is punishment for her assumption that, empowered by intelligence and self-possessed sexuality, she can act in this world. In Portsmouth she cannot write, but when she can, in her garret at Mansfield, the dangers of marginalization in such a space are evident in the film’s echoing of Gilbert and Gubar’s famous title, with its account of women writers literally ‘[e]nclosed in the architecture of a male-dominated society’ and figuratively ‘trapped’ by the conventions of existing writing (2000: xi). At the end of the film, Tom’s sketchbooks have been replaced by ledgers, as he joins his father, who has abandoned his Antiguan ventures, in the pursuit of ‘exciting new opportunities in Tobacco’, a crop equally dependent on plantation labour. Fanny, of course, marries Edmund, who earlier reminded her that ‘we all live off the profits’ of Sir Thomas’s ventures, ‘including you’. This uneasy complicity in the structure of the historical and social world reminds us that for the space of the text to become, in Komar’s words, a ‘public space’ able to intervene in the world, its imaginings must be actualized and its paper (and labour) paid for. As the film’s play on the idea of ‘acting’ makes clear,27 to use the text as a means of ‘acting’ in the world may release repressed feelings (as in the performance of the play Lovers Vows) or draw attention to social entrapment (as when Crawford reads, and then uses, Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, in his attempted seduction of Fanny), but it does not alter material power structures.

‘It could have all turned out differently … ’ The close of the film sees Rozema’s camera at its most virtuosic, sweeping over the countryside as it did during Fanny’s initial journey to Mansfield, then swooping in on its tableaux of characters, before soaring away into a sky filled with starlings. It is a movement that has been equated with the final merging of Fanny’s voice with that of Austen’s narrator, reproducing the distanced and ironic overview with which Austen ends her novel (Johnson 1999; Monaghan 2007).28 Fanny, it is argued, has become the omniscient narrator, effecting her escape from the world of Mansfield Park by turning it into fiction. Fanny’s final ironic look direct DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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to camera here, as she accepts Edmund’s proposal, would seem to confirm this, drawing us into a complicity of knowledge from which Edmund is excluded. But there remains a separation between the narrative voice, whose knowledge extends through time and across space, and the diegetic Fanny who remains complicit within the boundaries of the film’s social world. Breaking with realist narrativity in this way, Rozema’s film retains the doubleness of focus that has characterized it. The embodied Fanny that we see is not identical to the mature narrator who can cross time and space; their identities both merge and separate. There is also a third presence in this constellated textual space. As the camera soared ahead of the young Fanny in her journey from Portsmouth, to pause at the bay so that Fanny might see the slave ship, so here too it pauses, suspending the action of each of its tableaux before permitting its resumption, and speeding away. Its self-reflexivity marks the filmmaker’s presence, and control. The repeated words, ‘It could have all turned out differently, I suppose – but it didn’t’, which mark the suspension of action by the characters and then its resumption, thus carry both a shared authorship and a double sense. In echoing the cadences of Fanny/Austen’s earlier The History of England – ‘They should not have burnt her [Joan of Arc] – but they did’ – they attribute authorship to this composite figure and suggest the triumph of textual space. Fanny/Austen can decide the fate of her characters. As Monaghan, who reads the ending in this way, comments, ‘She might just as well have said, “because I chose that it didn’t.”’ (2007: 99). The History’s comment on Joan of Arc also suggests another reading, however.29 The protagonist-as-writer has not disturbed the ‘immeasurable heaviness’ of the historical structures within which she is bound: ‘It could have all turned out differently, I suppose – but it didn’t’. The freedoms of textual space remain imaginary in the face of the intractability of history, the social order and material power. The exploitations and destructions of capitalism continue (Mansfield Park’s

FIGURE 5.2  Fanny’s look to camera. (Mansfield Park, 1999) 172

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ruined west wing is being repaired at the close of the film, though the sun sets behind it), the rebel son can be co-opted, and the seducer will go unpunished. History, as Watson comments, ‘appears inescapable … and the damage done irreparable’ (2005: 63). Yet this, too, is not quite all that can be said of the film’s ending. If the womanas-writer cannot escape the ‘immeasurable heaviness’ of historical and social space, she also represents its space-off, the subversive and critical space that it cannot see. This is a shared space, with a sense of doubled consciousness and an address that crosses both time and space. It is not, however, a transparent space, rendering directly the consciousness of the film’s protagonist/narrator. Instead, in these final sequences, the camera’s restless virtuosity draws attention to the presence of the filmmaker, so that despite the emphasis on the intractability of history and the inevitable complicity of the writer in its structured inequalities, this is not where the film ends. ‘It could have all turned out differently … but it didn’t’, says Fanny/ Austen, but the camera’s soaring, self-reflexive movements continue to insist on another vision and other possibilities. Fanny herself may not have ‘gotten out at last’ by becoming the author of Mansfield Park, as Claudia Johnson suggests (2000: 10), but in the irresolvable conflict between textual and material space that the film enacts, the power of textual space remains in play.

Failed dreams of escape: Mrs. Dalloway (Marleen Gorris, 1997) For Virginia Woolf, as Jane Marcus observes, the ‘oppressive aspects of both race and gender are conceived in terms of space’ (ibid.: 176). As I have noted elsewhere (Thornham 2012: 125–6), it was in terms of space – the impossibility of crossing and occupying space as a woman – that Woolf expressed the difficulties in establishing female authorship and subjectivity, and it was in terms of an imaginary and personal landscape that she described the process of writing. This relationship, however, was far from straightforward. Woolf was fascinated, suggests Gillian Beer, with ‘the failed dreams of escape, the Daedelean claims of women’ (1990: 276). Such dreams, she writes, feature the imaginary crossing of space, and they are stories that end in failure. Beer’s example is Woolf ’s story of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister in A Room of One’s Own (1929), who ‘made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to London’. ‘[W]onderfully gifted’ like her brother, her fate could only be tragic. ‘[T]ortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts’, she must, suggests Woolf, have ‘lost her health and sanity’ and killed herself. Her fate is to be fixed in place: ‘buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop’ (1993/1929: 42–5). Like Beer, Jane Marcus writes of the ‘vacillation between safety and danger’ (1994: 182) that characterizes Woolf ’s writing. Woolf wrote of herself as a ‘street haunter’ (1969/1930) or flâneuse, but this claimed outsider status, suggests Marcus, DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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was always compromised, a product of privilege. Her ‘politics of trespass’ sought ‘safety while loving danger’ (ibid.: 173), and this ambivalence was expressed in the ‘room of one own’ that Woolf argued was so necessary for a writer’s freedom. Woolf ’s ‘room’, argues Marcus, is a space within, one bought and maintained by the ‘blood money’ of empire. It offers the freedom to write, and sanctuary, but its boundaries are also boundaries to the imagination, and its safety may be a form of imprisonment. The freedom sought, the space imagined, is, argues Marcus, merely a form of ‘privacy in confinement’: the freedom ‘to police one’s own prison as it were, not to stretch into space without boundaries’ (ibid.: 185). Mrs. Dalloway, published four years before A Room of One’s Own, is marked by a similar ambivalence. Its day-in-the-life of a society hostess who had first appeared as a minor and slightly comic character in The Voyage Out (1915), has been seen in very different ways by critics.30 Of feminist critics, Showalter, for example, emphasizes that the novel ‘demands our judgment of its heroine’, whom even Woolf found ‘too glittering and tinsely’31 (1992: xi). Readings which celebrate Clarissa Dalloway as ‘a great artist whose medium is parties’ are, she writes, simply not justified. Although the party which closes the novel celebrates life, it is, essentially, a ‘wake’, a hollow gathering of ‘the pompous, the frivolous, the narrowminded and the moribund’ of upper-class society in the 1920s (ibid.: xliv). For all her sensitivity to suffering, the portrait of Clarissa is essentially a critical one. For Phyllis Rose, however, ‘Mrs. Dalloway represents Woolf ’s fullest self-portrait as an artist’ (1986: 126). Clarissa’s creativity is that ‘of everyday feminine life. Its goal is connection, establishing relationships rather than making monuments’, and its embodiment in ‘a fragile, birdlike woman who gives parties’ emphasizes the fragility of the force of civilization that she embodies. The fashionable society that Showalter sees as trivial and moribund, Rose (and, she suggests, Woolf herself) sees as ‘a fragile skin stretched over chaos’, and Clarissa’s ‘ecstatic response’ to life she views as Woolf ’s own (ibid.: 128–32). The 1997 adaptation of the novel by Marleen Gorris was also greeted with ambivalence, one that in some ways echoes the reception of the novel. The film fails, wrote some critics, to capture either the novel’s radical politics or its aesthetic daring, becoming instead ‘a Merchant Ivory love story about courtship, chaste kisses, lost youth, old houses and dinner parties’ (Hankins 1999: 370).32 Mrs. Dalloway herself, as portrayed in the film (but not the novel), is characterized by a ‘trifling superficiality’ (Keough 1998). Others, however, saw it as capturing Woolf ’s novel, above all through the figure of Vanessa Redgrave who, ‘in her beaming, magisterial bearing, might well be the Platonic ideal of a Woolfish heroine’ (Schwartzbaum 1998). The ‘colour burning on a framework of steel’ that Leslie Hankins (1999: 368) sees as characteristic of Woolf ’s vision and as missing in the film, Andrew Sarris sees as present, produced by Redgrave’s performance. ‘Ultimately’, he writes, ‘it is Ms. Redgrave who weaves all the tangled strands of the narrative into a tapestry of bright colors’ (1998). In these readings, as Christine Geraghty suggests, the performance of Redgrave, who both looks like (our image 174

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of) Woolf and shares her feminist politics, becomes ‘the equivalent of Woolf ’s prose’ (2008: 63), and in so doing functions to merge author and protagonist. It is clear, however, that this fusion, which was such an important part of Mansfield Park, is far more uneasy in Gorris’s film. In interviews, Gorris played down the importance of the novel (Geraghty 2008: 58), emphasizing instead that the film was part of her own vision and development: ‘For me it was a sort of natural progression … I make the films that I want to make and the audience will see what they do. If they don’t like it, well that’s okay, they don’t’ (Palmer 1998). Like Woolf ’s writing, Gorris’s films have been read in terms of their use of space, both literal and metaphorical. Linda Williams (1988) has employed Showalter’s concept of the ‘wild zone’ of women’s experience under patriarchy – the space which does not overlap with the realm of male experience – in her discussion of Gorris’s first and best-known film, A Question of Silence (1982), and Anneke Smelik (2001), too, has emphasized the doubleness of Gorris’s use of space, at once realist location and metaphorical site. All of Gorris’s films, argues Smelik, employ traditional genres but use their conventional spatial codings as a source of critique. In A Question of Silence, then, we find traditionally gendered spaces: the prison, the courtroom, and the street are set against the home, the café, the shop. In all of them we see masculine power ritually reinforced through generic conventions. But set against these ‘realist’ spaces, argues Williams, are the ‘imaginary’ or ‘metaphysical’ spaces of women: felt but unrealized spaces glimpsed in hallucinatory flashbacks, fleeting touches and shared glances. Here, perhaps, is another ‘politics of trespass’, one in which patriarchal possession of space is rendered through realism and reinforced by genre, and female trespass enacted through the subversion of both. In Antonia’s Line (1995),33 the film that immediately preceded Mrs. Dalloway, this ‘imaginary’ space becomes the space of the film itself, as ‘real’, historical time-

FIGURE 5.3  Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway/Virginia Woolf. (Mrs Dalloway, 1997) DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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space is banished to the periphery of its narrative. Its fantasized matriarchal world becomes a space of community, fertility, inclusion, art and storytelling – a Utopian ‘space-off ’ to the historical ‘real’, with its public and personal traditions of male violence, that we glimpse on its margins. Although one reviewer evoked Woolf in stating that ‘Gorris’s unabashed Feminism … show[s] us how the matriarchal Antonia will carve out a realm of freedom in a farm of her own’ (Jaehne 1996: 28), this realm of freedom is in many ways the antithesis of the contained ‘room’ of Woolf ’s essay. In Mrs. Dalloway, Gorris returns to a world of patriarchal power, but a world in which women’s spaces – the home, the dance, the shop, the party – are both more expansive and accepted than in her earlier films, and at the same time more ambiguous and compromised. As the reviews suggested, her generic reference points this time are the heritage film, with its costumes and country houses, and the woman’s film, with its middle-aged women trapped in rooms and at windows, and its pervasive sense of frustration and loss. Here, conventional femininity is actively performed, but as in her early films its performance is set against a sense of unrealized space at once within and beyond its conventional locations.

Past and present spaces ‘[T]he public and the private worlds are inseparably connected’, wrote Woolf in Three Guineas; ‘the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other’ (1993/1938: 270). The film presents us with two locations, those of the country house of the 1890s, Bourton, and of the London town house, and its nearby streets and parks, of 1923, the present of Woolf ’s novel. Both are generically female: the country house34 with its dinners and dances and air of waiting (for the marriage proposal which will determine the future); and the town house with its flowers, polished silver, and party, and its turret bedroom, ‘the sheets stretched and the bed narrow’, which signals a woman’s loss of youth. But both are steeped in patriarchal power. Bourton is the possession of Clarissa’s father and will pass to her brother. Its men lead their lives largely elsewhere and its conventions echo Victorian double standards. Clarissa’s subversive relationship with Sally (Lena Headey) is bounded both by physical space – their rebellions take place only within the space of the house and its grounds – and by time. Marriage, the future, is ‘a catastrophe for women’ but it is also ‘inevitable’. It is bounded too by the men whose casual assumptions of dominance render it invalid. The kiss which signals the moment of its greatest intimacy and intensity is abruptly broken by Peter Walsh (Alan Cox) and Joseph Breitkopf (Rupert Baker), just as a similar moment of intimacy is interrupted in A Question of Silence.35 Although these scenes are marked by their energy,36 it is an energy without outcome: we constantly see the young Clarissa (Natascha McElhone) running, but her figure remains framed within the grounds of Bourton: there is no outside to escape to. 176

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FIGURE 5.4  The kiss. (Mrs Dalloway, 1997)

In the London of 1923 the signs of patriarchal power are ubiquitous, from the monumental buildings whose phallic proportions are highlighted by the camera’s low-angle pans, to the chimes of Big Ben which dictate the day, and the tall iron spikes and railings that repeatedly block our view and Clarissa’s progress through the streets. Her street walking, though joyous (‘What a lark! What a plunge!’), is both circular and rigidly bounded. This is a world whose governing classes have learned nothing from the recent war. Its pompous patriarchs still stroll to their weighty meetings and make judgments on the poor and powerless behind closed doors, while around them the streets are haunted by the presence of maimed exsoldiers in ragged uniforms. As Richard Dalloway (John Standing) and Hugh Whitbread (Oliver Ford Davies) stand at the window of an arcade jewellers, musing on the relative value of jewellery and flowers as presents for their wives, a ragged ex-soldier, invisible to them, walks slowly past, bisecting our view of the two men; as Richard buys the promised flowers and walks happily towards the camera, another, blind and begging, sits behind him, occupying half of the frame. Within the Dalloway house itself we find a division between its expansive public spaces, where Clarissa performs her expected feminine role as upper-class hostess and wife, and the narrow and private garret room reached by a staircase whose railings once more block our view, where the multiple mirrors, like the responses of others, reflect her lack of identity. Here, as in the streets, her voice-over tells us, she is ‘Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Dalloway … not even Clarissa any more. No more marrying, no more having children; just Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Richard Dalloway’ for whom “It’s all over”’. Later in the film we will see the young Clarissa and Peter argue over what marriage to Richard Dalloway will mean – for Clarissa it will ‘leave me room, room to breathe’, while Peter insists that Dalloway ‘will pamper you and keep you in a perfectly beautiful, safe prison’. In this early sequence, in which Clarissa reflects that, like an elderly Sleeping Beauty, she is to be left to DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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‘sleep undisturbed’ while others are ‘blackberrying in the sun’, it seems clear that the ‘room’ that she gained has, in the words of Marcus, consisted merely of ‘privacy in confinement’. Gorris’s film was criticized for the solidity of its sense of place – it seems, writes Hankins, ‘rooted to the ground’, without the dizzying temporal and spatial mobility of the novel’s narrative consciousness (1999: 371). Less critically, Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps write of the way in which the film ‘concretise[s] the past as a real set of events’ (2000: 123). Bourton, that is, is no longer the shifting product of memories but as solidly there as a specific social context as the London of 1923. It is also irretrievably gone, cut off from the world of the 1920s by the war that divides them: ‘Herbert has Bourton now,’ says Clarissa; ‘I never go there’. The effect of the rapid and unmarked intercutting of the two worlds, with their different groups of actors, is thus to create a sense of doubled but historically disconnected worlds, two cinematic presents in which ‘a loss … of connecting links’ (Cuddy-Keane 1998: 173) means both separation and a constant re-echoing. In both, Clarissa is trapped but in both she is also complicit, a complicity born of fear. ‘Life seems to me to be very dangerous,’ say both the young and the older Clarissa. The response of the young Clarissa is to reject the offer of ‘space without boundaries’ implicit in Sally’s kiss and signalled by the rapt but unseeing gaze beyond the frame that follows it (‘Star gazing?’ demands Peter as he interrupts them). The older Clarissa gazes at a sky now inscribed with an advertising slogan written in smoke by an aeroplane, and seems content with this diminution of her ‘Daedelean’ dreams.

Unrealized spaces In one of the later scenes at Bourton, the young people go boating. As Peter rows the boat containing Dalloway (Robert Portal) and Clarissa, she begins to sing. In the novel the scene is filtered through Peter’s memories, and recorded merely as ‘she laughed; she sang’ (Woolf 1992: 68). In the film, however, the young Clarissa wistfully sings the sea shanty, ‘The Rio Grande’, as she gazes skywards. The soft focus and the stillness and length of the scene seem to abstract it from time and place. As the film cuts to the older Clarissa swirling round her room with the dress she will wear to her party, the song continues softly. Like the ‘star gazing’ kiss, the scene disturbs the concreteness of the film’s sense of place, not only reminding us, like the references to Milan, India, Canada, of an elsewhere beyond this rigidly bounded world, but also suggesting the unrealized, but still felt ‘Daedelean claims of women’. In Gorris’s earlier films (A Question of Silence, Antonia’s Line) such moments, when the ‘imaginary’ or unrealized aspects of women’s experience disrupt the world of the everyday, are registered not only by a sense of stillness and abstraction but also by hallucinatory sequences. In Mrs. Dalloway such sequences are largely 178

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given to Septimus Smith (Rupert Graves), the young war veteran who at the end of the film throws himself out of the window and ‘impale[s] himself on the railings’, and whom Woolf conceived of as Clarissa’s ‘double’ (Showalter 1992: xxvii).37 In the film, Septimus’s flashbacks to his wartime experience, together with his treatment at the hands of the medical establishment, serve as powerful reminders of the brutal reality of the social structure which has kept Clarissa ‘safe’, if – as Roger Ebert suggests – ‘caged’ (1998). Two such sequences, however, are given to Clarissa. In the first, gazing out of the window of her room after her early walk to buy flowers, she sees Septimus, shocked and afraid, as he appeared before her through the window of the flower shop. In the second, as the Bradshaws (Robert Hardy and Richenda Carey) speak of Septimus’s death we see their faces and voices become monstrous and distorted, and Clarissa retreats once more to the window. This time, however, it is the spiked railings, not the image of Septimus, which she sees. The sequence is complex, serving at once to jolt Clarissa into a realization of the realities of death – in the earlier scene death was registered through the comforting words of Shakespeare, ‘Fear no more the heat of the day’38 – and to parallel her sense of entrapment with that of Septimus. Both are the logical outcome of a social order whose ‘tyrannies and servilities’ are manifest in both public and private realms. At the same time, however, and despite her fear that she has ‘lost the thing that mattered’, Clarissa continues both to value safety (‘Without Richard sitting there calmly reading the Times, while I crouched like a bird and gradually revived’39 she reflects, ‘I might have perished’) and to insist on those moments of ‘immeasurable delight’ in life that, despite such structures, continue to ‘surprise us’. In Gorris’s early films, such moments of insight and possibility were linked with the idea of an alternative, if unspoken, women’s community. In A Question of Silence and Broken Mirrors (1984) it is registered through the glances, touches and shared responses that disrupt both the closed spaces of women and the public spaces of men. In Antonia’s Line it becomes the fantasized space of the film. In Mrs. Dalloway there are glimpses of this possibility, most obviously in the early relationship of Clarissa and Sally, but also in the shared glances with other women, and in particular with the woman who faces Clarissa, in the window opposite, as she reflects on her life at the end of the film. As she speaks of those moments that ‘surprise us’, when ‘you want to say to each moment “Stay! Stay! Stay!”’, we see the two women exchange looks and smiles, before each returns inside. This is, however, a more ambiguous and compromised ‘imaginary’ space than those of Gorris’s early films. Clarissa speaks of her desire to ‘give people one night in which everything seems enchanted’, from which they will ‘go home thinking “Oh what fun it was! How good it is to be alive!”’ The recipients of her gift, however, members of the past and present ruling class, seem ill equipped to appreciate it. The men are pompous and narrow-minded, the women fearful – like Ellie Henderson (Kate Binchy) – or manipulative, like Lady Bruton (Margaret Tyzack). Clarissa herself, as Sally points out, gives ‘a performance’ – one that is both licensed, as DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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the correct behaviour of a political wife, and desperately anxious: ‘It’s a disaster, the party’s a disaster! I’m humiliated.’ When at the end of the film Clarissa returns to the party after her reflections on Septimus’s death, to greet Peter (Michael Kitchen) with ‘Here I am at last’, the self she offers seems no less performed and insubstantial than before. In the dance that follows, nothing is resolved, and it is clear that Elizabeth (Katie Carr), Clarissa’s daughter, will follow her mother’s path of token rebellion and marital safety, in the face of another war that we, unlike Woolf, know is to come. The freeze-frame on which the film ends, of the young Clarissa, Sally and Peter in the garden at Bourton, has been described as nostalgic (Higgins and Leps 2000: 123), but though Sally is smiling, both Clarissa and Peter look unhappily away.

Internalized splits If one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. (Woolf 1993/1929: 88) Commenting on this passage from A Room of One’s Own, Mary Jacobus writes that, ‘[a]t once within this culture and outside it, the woman writer experiences not only exclusion but an internalized split’ (1987: 38). This split runs throughout Woolf ’s novel, whose protagonist is at once a compromised and complicit society hostess and a figure who has been seen as a vehicle for Woolf ’s own reflections on life, loss and death. In the ninety years since Woolf wrote, however, her works have become ‘classics’, and, as Higgins and Leps note, ‘the truth regime which produces “classics”, which maintains essential and totalising categories’, is also that which keeps ‘women in their places and send[s] men off to wars’ (2000: 127). How then can we characterize the relationship of Gorris’s film to the ambiguities of both the novel and its writer’s status? The answer seems to me to lie in its use of two strategies. The first is its placing of Woolf ’s protagonist and her world. In situating Clarissa so firmly within the film’s two social worlds, and in constructing both in relation to the generic conventions through which they are so often represented, Gorris’s film both echoes Woolf ’s own deployment of such ‘accepted categories of common sense’ (Higgins and Leps 2000: 128) and frames the novel’s ambiguities in relation to the world which produced Woolf herself, and with which she had such an ambivalent relationship. The writer’s doubleness – as both ‘natural inheritor’ of Empire and critical feminist – can be acknowledged by the filmmaker. In registering the London of Woolf ’s present as so decisively now of the past, the film also suggests a further set of echoes and separations. In both of Clarissa’s two worlds she is at once compromised and trapped; in the world of the film’s own present we may be no less so. 180

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This third moment, the moment of the film’s own present, is registered in part through its generic references to the heritage film, whose self-consciously nostalgic vision of a more certain and gracious way of upper-middle-class life, now lost, offers pleasures which at the same time confirm for its viewers their own distance from this world (Higson 1993, 1996; Geraghty 2008). It is registered most clearly, however, in the performance of Vanessa Redgrave. As critics noted, Redgrave both is and is not Clarissa. Describing her fitness for the part, Ebert also notes her difference: ‘Redgrave of course seems the opposite of a woman like Clarissa Dalloway, and we assume she has few regrets. But we all wonder about choices not made … ’ (1998). Jack Kroll is more certain about this ambiguous identification: Redgrave’s ‘haunting performance’, he writes, ‘is a double incarnation. She is Mrs. Dalloway and she is Woolf, a gallant icon of a gracefully collapsing world’ (1998: 80). Redgrave, it is clear, stands in for both Clarissa and for her creator, and for the ambiguous relationship between the two; she is both, and neither. In constructing Clarissa/Woolf in this way, Gorris’s film invites an ambivalent response. This is not the straightforward fusion of protagonist and writer, and identification of both with the vision of the filmmaker, that we find in Rozema’s Mansfield Park. ‘Virginia Woolf ’, as Kroll suggests, is placed in her world, a world of Empire and class exploitation in which the writer with a room of her own can never be ‘innocent’. Nor, as Marcus points out, can ‘we who come after her in history … maintain the fiction of her (or our) innocence’ (1994: 173). Both Clarissa and Woolf are compromised, but so too are we, and Redgrave,40 as we register the ‘feminine’ cinematic pleasures of costume and setting. At the same time, however, the film also proffers a very different invitation: into the ‘imaginary’ and dangerous, felt but unrealized ‘spaces without boundaries’ of women, spaces that are glimpsed by the figure of Clarissa/Woolf, but never grasped.

Looking elsewhere: An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion 1990) Describing her own adolescent mode of seeing, Janet Frame writes: I had formed the habit of focusing in places not glanced at by others, of deliberately turning away from the main view, … looking elsewhere or, looking at the general view, seeing an uncommon sight. My memory of myself contains now myself looking outward and myself looking within from without … (Frame 1983: 208) It is a description that also echoes more widely. It might remind us of descriptions of Jane Campion’s filmmaking, from cameraman Stuart Dryburgh’s comment that in Campion’s films ‘[s]ometimes we go places that the camera can’t really go’ (Campion 1993: 141) to Kathleen McHugh’s statement that ‘Campion employs DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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cinematic techniques that both represent and blur objective and subjective narrative states’ (2007: 18), or Muriel Andrin’s argument that Campion ‘works within a notion of a permanent coexistence’ between ‘the dominant classical conception of cinematic representation’ and new and subversive modes of looking (2009: 28). Andrin, indeed, sees Campion’s filmmaking as the cinematic equivalent of the doubling described by Frame: a doubling not only of view but also of the language in which it is expressed. Frame, then, disturbs linguistic conventions to make us see differently – as, for example, when the insertion of a hyphen into the title of the first volume of her autobiographical trilogy To the Is-land, from which the above quotation is taken, forces us to reconsider both conventional linguistic usage and the nature of the journey enacted by autobiography. ‘Island’ is both left intact and made strange; the journey is both external, a matter of space, and internal, a matter of subjectivity and embodiment. In a similar way, argues Andrin, Campion’s films invite a doubleness of view, offering a ‘classical narrative structure within which narrative “breathing spaces” are … inserted’, so that the film’s linear progression is ‘interspersed with moments of stasis that impart a different rhythm to the narrative progression – often making it “strange”’ (ibid.). But Frame’s account of her own doubleness of view, of ‘looking elsewhere or, looking at the general view, seeing an uncommon sight’, also recalls the process of ‘see[ing] meaning in what has previously been empty space’ described by Showalter and discussed earlier in this chapter. Frame, it seems, is engaged in spatializing narrative in the way that Showalter and Miller describe, inserting that ‘other logic of plot’ identified by Miller. And in her adaptation of Frame’s work, Campion, whose own cinematic narratives are characterized by ‘breathing spaces’ that refuse the subordinate status assigned to them by critics such as Genette, to produce instead the ‘complex vibration’ between two modes of seeing of Showalter’s optical illusion, might in turn be said to be engaged in that ‘game of two women’ described by Bruno, in which authorship is shared, a ‘joined collaboration’ marked by both ‘live presence’ and loss.

Women, autobiography, and Janet Frame Like Mansfield Park and Mrs. Dalloway, An Angel at My Table is an example of the ‘literary film’ (Vidal 2005). It adapts ‘one of the greatest autobiographies written [in the twentieth] century’,41 that of one of New Zealand’s most celebrated writers (Holroyd, in King 2001). Unlike the two adaptations already discussed in this chapter, however, its ‘classic’ status, though asserted by Campion and her producer Bridget Ikin in their bid for the television rights, was yet to be established. Indeed, Campion wrote to Frame seeking the rights before the publication of the autobiography’s second and third volumes.42 Unlike them, too, it is autobiography rather than fiction, so that the source text’s protagonist may be more straightforwardly identified with its author, and both the woman writer’s 182

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difficult relationship to cultural authority and her text’s ‘personal landscape’ may become more overtly the film’s subject matter. Yet neither the woman writer’s relationship to autobiography nor the non-fictional nature of Frame’s own text are quite as clear-cut as this distinction suggests. I shall begin with a brief discussion of some of the complexities of both. ‘Autobiography’, writes Annette Kuhn, ‘differs from fictional forms of storytelling in two main ways: events narrated make a claim to actuality (they “really” happened); and the narrator, the writing I, is set up in a relation of identity with the central protagonist, the written I’ (2000: 180). As both process (the narration of a self) and public act, autobiography is ‘an historically specific gesture’ (Swanson 2000: 111), bound up with the emergence of the modern subject, an autonomous, particular self whose self-identity is both assumed and constructed in the process of narration. As a literary genre it has therefore been aligned with ‘beliefs about the nature of selfhood and identity’ (L. Marcus 1994: 2), its model subjects characterized by self-knowledge and self-possession. Such models of exemplary individuality, as feminist critics have pointed out, have usually been male. As Cosslett, Lury and Summerfield write, the ‘traditional construction of the ideal autobiographer as a unified, transcendent subject, representative of the age, has favoured privileged white male writers’ (2000: 2). The autobiographical ‘I’ thus constructed is, however, as Laura Marcus points out, ‘a rhetorical figure’, its function to supply ‘the illusion of full identity’ (1987: 93). More recent, psychoanalytically-inflected accounts have emphasized both its constructedness and its instability. For Kuhn, it is a product of Freudian ‘secondary revision’. She writes that ‘in welding together the writing I and the written I – in producing narration, narrator and protagonist as indivisibly one – the conventional autobiography constructs a powerful organising ego for its own story’, (ibid.). But, she adds, memory itself, through which these two ‘I’s are assumed to be sutured (Radstone 2000: 205), is in fact fragmented, non-linear and fundamentally imagistic. In ‘memory texts’, those products of personal or collective reminiscence which do not claim the formal coherence of conventional autobiography, events are rooted in place, ‘pulled out of a linear time-frame’, imbued with fantasy, desire and loss, and unanchored in ‘real historical time’ (Kuhn 2000: 188–90). For women, therefore, autobiography can function as both lure and trap. Estella Tincknell’s statement that autobiography has ‘been central to the struggle to lay claim to a voice and to a fully formed subjectivity for women’ (2013: 84) is undoubtedly true. But it is a voice, a claim and a subjectivity with which women have also been uneasy. The fully self-identified subject of which Marcus writes may indeed be authorized to speak, but this is a subject to which self-division, desire, and sexual difference are alien and indeed threatening. Thus Carolyn Steedman’s hugely influential Landscape for a Good Woman (1986), for example, avoids any such claims, constructing its narrative(s) ‘in tension with’ dominant histories, and mixing social history, psychoanalytic case-study, memory, fantasy and dream. It is a claim, moreover, that is inherently precarious. Women’s writing has so often DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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been seen as symptom – subject, as Jacobus writes, to ‘the autobiographical “phallacy,” whereby male critics hold that women’s writing is somehow closer to their experience than men’s, that the female text is the author, or at any rate a dramatic extension of her unconscious’43 (1981: 520). The melancholic sensitivity that can secure the male author’s status as Western literary or philosophical subject becomes a radical instability centred on the body in his female equivalent (Schiesari 1992). It is in light of such issues that I think Janet Frame’s autobiographical trilogy can be read. Critics have found themselves disconcerted by the difference between Frame’s fiction, with its ‘multi-frame structures and shifting narrators’ and an autobiography in which ‘there are no narrative surprises, no hidden frames, no shifty narrators, no apparent narrative ambiguities, no apparent resistance to speaking authoritatively’ (Ash 1993: 22). The autobiography makes of Frame, writes Vanessa Finney, ‘an accessible, acceptable, readable subject’ (1993: 197), but this is, Finney insists, a deliberate rhetorical strategy. Frame, whose incarceration in mental hospitals was already a matter of public record, and whose fiction and poetry were so often seen as the direct expression of her mental instability, is ‘rewriting her public figure’, reclaiming what Foucault calls the ‘author function’ (1984: 107), and thus creating ‘a new context for the reading of all her texts’ (Finney 1993: 194). Against the idea of the trilogy as a ‘woman’s autobiography’ and therefore confessional – ‘a lesson’, as one reviewer wrote, ‘in how courage and the will to survive defeated the effects of a ghastly mistake’ (Adcock 1984, quoted in Finney 1993: 198) – critics like Ash, Finney and Gina Mercer have seen its writing as a ‘necessary strategy’. It counters, writes Mercer, the figure of the ‘madwoman in the attic’ through which Frame had been constructed (1993: 43), and repositions her as public figure, the acclaimed writer. For Susan Ash, then, Frame invites a reading of the autobiographies that assumes that the writing ‘I’ ‘knows’ and ‘reconstitutes’ the narrated ‘I’. ‘I wrote the story of my life’, Frame said in interview; ‘ … whatever comes out is ordinary me, without fiction or characters’ (quoted in Ash 1993: 22). Elsewhere, however, Frame provided a very different reading. ‘Autobiography’, she said, ‘is found fiction. … I look at everything from the point of view of fiction’ (ibid.). Like the male critics who were suspicious of the autobiographies as ‘no less a fiction’ than her novels, therefore – though for very different reasons – Mercer insists that we read the two together, reading back in to the autobiographies the ‘subversive power, complexity and disruptive energy’ (1993: 46) that lie just beneath their surface. A similar doubleness characterizes Jane Campion’s stated responses to the adaptation. ‘I feel I can really see myself in her story’, she has said (Wexman 1999: 74), but what she sees is less clear. ‘It was a simple story’, she says (ibid.: 65), and when pushed, talks about ‘memories of my childhood, … childhood in New Zealand … things, moments, sensations from my own childhood’ (ibid.: 63, 84). But it was Frame’s novel, Owls Do Cry (1957) that first attracted Campion to Frame, with its suggestion that ‘some ideas in the world can’t exist in tough 184

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storytelling, they have to exist in a more poetic form’ (ibid.: 59). Elsewhere, she has said of Frame that her past ‘exists for her as fiction.44 I am not interested’, she continues, ‘in the real Janet Frame but only in the literary character which she made of herself ’. And in the same interview, ‘My characters and their feelings are no substitute for anything but themselves’ (ibid.: 86, 88). Despite the source text’s status as autobiography, then, and Campion’s apparent willingness to offer an identification of protagonist, writer, and filmmaker, this identification is neither as straightforward nor as triumphant as that constructed in Rozema’s Mansfield Park. When, for example, the child Janet reads stories to her sisters in the enclosed female space of their shared bedroom, just as Fanny tells stories to Susie, a golden light picks up Janet and the book she is reading against the darkness of the room as it does in Rozema’s film. Here, too, the camera is mobile, tracking across the bedclothes and the faces of the listening girls. But this is not Janet’s own story, and her voice does not extend as commentary beyond the film’s diegetic world. It is a child’s uneven voice reading Grimm’s story of ‘The Dancing Princesses’ against the soundtrack of a tinkling music box. As the camera pans across the bed we see the children’s worn shoes, as they – and we – share the fantasy of escape into a fairytale world of secret dance. Later we will see them enact the fantasy, hands linked, at twilight in the New Zealand bush. If the world of stories, as in Rozema’s film, is a shared feminine space, an ‘other’ space whose fantasies are part embodied and part textual, these stories do not give us direct access to the narrator’s consciousness. They are more situated, more shared, and more compromised. They are the stuff of romantic fantasy as well as personal imagination, embodied performance as well as textual space, and they are bound up with the young Janet’s discovery of sex and sexualized performance45 as well as writing.

Primal scenes The opening scenes of Campion’s film have been the subject of much commentary. Amy Taubin writes that, alone in the film, they ‘bind image to interiority in the way we’ve come to expect of a Campion film’ (2005), and though her case is over-stated, they do provide the film’s most sustained example of the process of ‘making … “strange”’ described by Andrin. The first images – fragmentary, nonlinear, constructed in space not time, in the way that Kuhn characterizes ‘memory texts’ – alternate the perspective of the baby Janet, as she views her mother huge and dark against the clear blue sky, then blots out the advancing image with her hands, and that of the mother gazing down, then urging the now-toddler Janet in her first steps. The voice is that of the mother, urging the child into action and consciousness. The images are impossible in the sense described by cameraman Dryburgh – going places ‘that the camera can’t really go’ – and fragmented, presenting the subjectivity of an infant for whom subjectivity is relational – it DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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exists in the space between her and her mother – and composed alternately of desire and fear/refusal. We look both at and with the infant. The second, more extended sequence sees the child Janet walk towards us along a dirt road that bisects a lush, green landscape. Initially high above her, the camera pans down as the child nears, so that when she stops we gaze directly into her face. As she looks at us we hear the voice of the adult Janet: ‘This is the story of my childhood.’ As it continues – ‘In August 1924 I was born Janet Paterson Frame. My twin, who was never named, died two weeks later’ – the shot cuts to a close-up of Janet’s hand fingering the velvet material of her ‘beastie’ dress – the dress she will wear when enacting her fantasy scenarios. As the voice stops, we return to the original shot, to see the child look with increasing anxiety from side to side, before turning and running back the way she has come. Together, the sequence of images comprises the ‘self-authoring’ of which Kuhn writes. But this adult ‘I’ is not the same as the child we see; memory does not suture the gap between the two. We look at the child Janet, and as the camera descends and she faces us, returning our gaze, we become aware of its construction of the scene. As in the opening shots, she refuses this construction, fingering a sensuous fabric to whose touch we have no access, and turning away. We are aware, then, not only of the narrator’s voice but of the filmmaker’s gaze, but the latter’s establishing shot and metaphor of the road (the shot ‘cannot fail to recall the road movie’ writes one critic46) are subverted from within. We do not know the relationship between the narrating ‘I’ and the camera’s gaze (we share the camera’s look but have no access to the emotionless narrator), and we do not know whether the child’s flight is occasioned by the intrusive gaze, by the flat definition of her by the narrator who presumes to ‘know’, or by the content of that narration. The ‘twin’ referred to is mentioned in Frame’s autobiography, but as an undeveloped embryo, not a double. Here its (her) death47 becomes at once a loss that prefigures the later deaths of Frame’s sisters, a first instance of the doubling that characterizes ‘Janet Frame’ throughout the film (she is Jean/Janet/Nini/Topsy; she is ordinary/extraordinary, sane/insane), an absence that triggers that fusion of identification and desire which Kaja Silverman believes to be crucial in the formation of a resistant female speaking subject,48 and a reminder of the ‘haunted’ nature of the realism49 that the film will embrace. The last of the film’s opening sequences is a journey sequence, beginning with a shot of a train crossing the screen at night that will be repeated at the start of Part 2 of the film. As the scene shifts to the inside of a carriage, we see the Frame family huddled together in its cramped space. As the child Janet (Karen Fergusson), sitting on her mother’s knee, opens her eyes, we look in to see her face framed by the carriage window. From her point-of-view we then see Seacliff station, where, as one of the children comments, ‘all the loonies go’; her mother’s hands seek to block the sight, as those of the infant do in the film’s opening shot, but succeed only in framing it. As the camera shifts, it is Janet’s face that the hands frame, before an extended shot of the twisting face of a ‘loony’ is followed by Janet’s eyes 186

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FIGURE 5.5  The child Janet. (An Angle at My Table, 1990)

gazing. In this, Janet’s first encounter with an external authority, she is alternately subject and object of a distanced, appraising gaze.

Another logic of plot Together these early scenes (and I include here the ‘reading’ scene described above) give a sense of An Angel at My Table’s complex use of space. The ‘Seacliff ’ scene foreshadows the film’s treatment of institutional spaces, with a gaze often distant – McHugh calls it ‘sadistic’ (2007: 74) – seeming to pin Janet in place. It is a gaze that McHugh also terms ‘shaming’ (ibid.: 71), and one in which Janet, whose look, as we have seen, can also be distant and appraising, may be complicit as well as victimized. In these spaces, Janet’s body – awkward, unruly, visible, excessive – is always out of place. At school she fits neither with the giggling popular girls whose romantic fantasies she would like to share, nor with the earnest, political group in which she finds herself. She cannot enter social spaces – ‘Too shy to mix, too scared to enter the union building’, says her voice-over during her college days – and we see her eating in a lab-space cluttered with caged mice or, as a studentteacher, hiding in the classroom cupboard, unable to face the staff-room. Against these are set the close, intimate spaces that Janet shares with her sisters and friend Poppy (Carla Hedgeman). Here the camera is close-in, a participant in the space, its view often obstructed by doorways, furniture, or household objects, as for example when the Frame children huddle together as Myrtle (Melina Bernecker) is beaten for her sexual transgression, and the camera frames them nested together in a space cradled by trellis and branches, faces obscured but bodies connected by touch. In contrast, finally, are the vast landscape spaces in DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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which Janet, as in the early ‘road’ sequence, is shot against the immensity of green hills, sea or sky. Here she is usually alone, and it is the landscape that dominates the shot. None of these spaces, however, is straightforwardly either oppressive or liberatory, and all are shot through by a series of further contrasts. Spaces may be embodied, so that the body, as source of shame, awkwardness, or pleasure, is fully felt; they may be caught up in, and read through, the fantasies of romance; or they may become what Andrin calls ‘breathing spaces’ – spaces in which plot, and linear time, seem suspended and realism made strange. Institutional spaces, then, are sources of pleasure as well as shame: Janet wins prizes and is praised; her lecturer John Forrest tells her ‘You have a real talent for writing’ and encourages her to see herself as ‘Van Gogh or Hugo Wolf ’ even as he instigates her incarceration. For Janet, her diagnosis as schizophrenic becomes an alibi and a refuge as well as a punishment ‘equivalent in fear’, her voice-over tells us, ‘to an execution’. The cramped, enclosed spaces of the body both connect and isolate. Here, sexuality may be performed and its intimacies shared, but it is also a source of shame and punishment. The landscape’s vastness, as we saw in the ‘road’ sequence, suggests an otherness of view that may be both liberating and frightening. Across these spaces, it is Janet’s body, with its unruliness and awkwardness, that provides continuity. We recognize her hair, her movements, even her dress, across the three actresses (Karen Fergusson, Alexia Keogh and Kerry Fox) and the many locations of the film. When, in the film’s final section, we see her, once again awkward and out-of-place, in Ibiza, she wears a flowered dress and green cardigan that mirror exactly those worn by the child Janet in the film’s early school sequences. But these spaces of the body are not, as we might expect, set against those of writing. The cramped spaces in which Janet hides from her father’s violence, or where she later secretes empty sweet wrappers and used sanitary pads (in the drawer at Aunt Isobel’s or squeezed between the gravestones in the cemetery) are also the spaces in which, knees under chin, she writes. Writing, then, becomes both a material act and an assertion of embodied identity. Janet ‘authors’ herself and becomes a ‘writer’ when she becomes comfortable with her body.

Textual space Unlike Rozema’s Mansfield Park, Campion’s film gives us little access to its protagonist’s authored words. Apart from one childhood poem, and a very few brief voice-overs, what we see are material fragments of typed text and the embodied actions of writing, and what we hear are the – often declaimed – words of others. ‘Literature’, indeed, is seen as caught up in what for women are the dangerous illusions of romance. It is clear that Janet’s written account of her suicide attempt, which precipitates her first incarceration, is designed to fuel the 188

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fantasy of melancholic author which she feels will attract the (to her) movie-star figure of John Forrest. As she sits in front of the mirror after their encounter, she repeats his words. Slipping down her bra-strap and gazing seductively at herself, she plays both parts of her fantasy scenario, performing an identity in which seductress and writer are merged, and she is both object and subject of her gaze. In its internal contradictions, it is a move doomed to failure. The melancholy female writer, as the film shows and Schiesari (1992) argues, can only be a pathologized, not a Romantic figure. It is a move, however, that is repeated several times in the film, as Sue Gillett has pointed out (2004: 33–4). On each occasion, Janet performs an identity that is both sexualized and ‘literary’ (of the ‘poetic’ schoolgirl, and later of the attractive and successful woman writer), conflating writing and romance. Gina Mercer argues that Frame’s fiction, with its ‘subversive power, complexity and disruptive energy’, needs to be read along with the ‘simple everyday glass’ of her autobiographies, if the world of her writing is not to seem simply a lacuna within them (1993: 46). How, then, can this other Frame, whose haunting presence is signalled in the multiple perspectives of the film’s opening, and who first attracted Campion’s interest, be represented in the film? It seems to me that it is to be found in the film’s dislocations of time and space – moments when time is stilled or disturbed and we find instead an intense engagement with space and texture. In one such moment we see Janet’s attempted lesson give way to an intense and prolonged focus on the texture of fingers and chalk, and then, as she escapes the school, to a long, slow tracking of her walk, barefoot, through the woods. In another, we find the ‘impossible’ fantasy shot that Campion will employ elsewhere (in Flora’s story of her parents’ love affair in The Piano or Franny’s vision of her mother’s romance fantasy in In the Cut), here in the schoolgirl Janet’s vision of the sword Excalibur as her teacher (played, disturbingly, by Campion’s mother)

FIGURE 5.6  In front of the mirror. (An Angle at My Table, 1990) DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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declaims Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. In the film’s vast, framed landscape shots we find a further example, unanchored as they are in any temporal narrative flow. Gaston Bachelard has argued that both memory and imagination dislocate time, existing in ‘the space of elsewhere’ (1994: 184), a position echoed by Kuhn in her argument that ‘memory texts’ are ‘somehow pulled out of a linear timeframe’, imagistic and ‘invested in place’ (2000: 188–90). Her film, Campion has said, seeks to evoke the fragmentary nature of childhood memory (Wexman 199: 77). More than this, however, in its disturbance of cinematic temporality it suggests the possibility of another way of seeing and of being in the world, another ‘logic of plot’. Campion’s film, as we have seen, manifests a distrust of language, narrative, romance, and even images (Myrtle’s photograph can be manipulated to ‘produce’ her missing arm, the mirror registers only a performance of self). At the same time, however, the film works with and through all of these. In dislocating each, it suggests at once the ‘doubleness’ of Frame the writer, that of its own cinematic vision, and the relationship between the two. Campion’s film, I would argue, works to ‘see meaning in what has previously been empty space’, to make visible the ‘spaces-off ’ of narrative cinema, at the same time as it works within its conventions. As in Showalter’s doubled figure or Hutcheon’s palimpsest, with which this chapter began, the effect is of a ‘complex vibration’, a disturbance of the dominance of time over space, and a ‘radical alteration of our vision’ (Showalter 1975: 435).

Notes   1 Hutcheon ascribes the term to Michael Alexander, but Sarah Dillon (2005) provides an etymology that begins with Philippe Lejeune and Gérard Genette in the 1980s. Nicholas Royle (2003: 284) identifies it with the uncanny or phantom text.   2 Freud uses the term ‘family romance’ to describe the Oedipal fantasies in which the (male) child replaces his father with a more powerful figure and ascribes infidelity to the mother. See Freud (1977a/1909).   3 Chatman here echoes George Bluestone, whose 1957 Novels into Film argued that ‘the novel is a linguistic medium, the film essentially visual’. This means, he argues, that while the novel is concerned with ‘those characteristic contents of thought which only language can approximate: tropes, dreams, memories, conceptual consciousness’, film supplies merely ‘endless spatial variations, photographic images of physical reality, and the principles of montage and editing’ (1968: viii–ix).   4 Gilbert and Gubar are quoting from Elaine Showalter’s review essay of 1975, ‘Literary Criticism’. See Showalter (1975: 435). Showalter, however, attributes this doubleness not to the literary text itself but to the critic’s work on it.   5 Cather’s words remind us of Virginia Woolf ’s statement in Three Guineas (1938), ‘as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country’ (1993b: 234), and Woolf ’s persistent use of spatial metaphors to convey both her sense of confinement (by the ‘Angel in the House’) and the ‘politics of trespass’ that she advocates (J. Marcus 1994: 172). As I have commented elsewhere (Thornham 2012), it is women’s relationship 190

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to landscape, not their occupation of the contained space of ‘A Room of One’s Own’, which most frequently expresses for Woolf the difficult processes of female authorship and subjectivity.   6 Bruno is quoting Anna Banti, whose search for authorship in the paintings of Artemisia Gentileschi follows a similar pattern of loss and (re)creation.   7 See Benjamin (1999a): 255.   8 See also Monica Dall’asta and Jane M. Gaines 2015.   9 Freud sees the relationship as ‘ambivalent’, its ‘expression of bisexuality’ contributing to the ‘enigma of women’. He concludes – though ‘feminists are not pleased’ with his conclusion – that this continuing attachment results in women’s failure to develop the ‘strength and independence’ of the super-ego (1991a/1933: 163–5). 10 For an account of this work see Marianne Hirsch’s review essay, ‘Mothers and Daughters’ (1981). 11 See Thornham 2012: 147–53 for discussion of Antonia’s Line. 12 The term comes from Dale Spender, who describes her experience studying English Literature in terms which may still resonate:

I have no reason to suspect that my own university education was particularly biased or limited. On the contrary, it appears to have been fairly representative. Yet in the guise of presenting me with an overview of the literary heritage of the English-speaking world, my education provided me with… [an] introduction to the ‘greats’ [which] was (with the exception of the famous five women novelists) an introduction to the great men (1986: 115).

13 She also describes women’s use of traditionally ‘feminine’ enclosed and ‘womblike’ spaces to critique male domination and misuse of them. See Komar 1994: 90–1. 14 See Barthes (1977) and Foucault (1984). 15 See for example Watson (2005), and Minott-Ahl (2012). In his chapter on the novel in Culture and Imperialism, which inaugurated postcolonial critiques of Mansfield Park, Edward Said writes that is ‘precisely about a series of both small and large dislocations and relocations in space’. Prominent among these, he argues is Fanny’s relocation to Mansfield Park, as ‘a kind of transported commodity’, and Sir Thomas Bertram’s movement to and from his plantations in Antigua (Said 1994: 101–2). 16 Claudia L. Johnson argues that this makes Rozema’s film ‘more of an intervention than an adaptation’ (1999: 16). 17 See for example Wiltshire (2003), Fergus (2003), Shea (2006). 18 Watson is quoting political theorist Wendy Brown (1995). 19 It is most notable in I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987) and The White Room (1990). Both films feature characters who are split between the artist who creates and the public figure who acts in the world. 20 It also, as Vidal (2005) points out, breaks the narrative’s realist surface, facilitating an ‘ongoing dialogue between past and present’ (2005: 272). 21 Indeed, the first of Fanny’s words that we hear distinctly concern money – ‘Just as Eliza was majestically removing a fifty pound banknote [Fanny emphasizes the words] from the drawer to her own purse… ’. 22 The title comes from that inscribed on the inside cover of what was to become the third volume of Jane Austen’s youthful works, reputedly written by her father, George Austen (Le Faye 1989: 73). DOUBLED SPACES: THE LANDSCAPES OF ADAPTATION

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23 Fanny has been compared to Snow White (Gilbert and Gubar 2000: 165) and, most frequently, to Cinderella. See, for example, Harding (1940), Simpson (1987), Yeazell (1991), Pawl (2004). 24 The manor house chosen for the location was Kirby Hall, now uninhabited and partly in ruins (Johnson 2000). 25 See, for example, Johnson (1999 and 2000) and Monaghan (2006 and 2007). 26 His accusation is very close to the description of Austen’s narrative voice by Gilbert and Gubar, as ‘witty, assertive, spirited, independent, even… arrogant’ (2000: 168). 27 This is also a preoccupation of Austen’s novel, which, as Margaret Kirkham points out, is full of allusions to plays and the theatre and is constructed in a quasi-theatrical way, with a three-part structure plus an epilogue (1983: 107). 28 Rozema herself has said that her ending ‘was meant to embody that suddenly distant tone Austen takes when she sums everything up’ (Moussa 2004: 259). 29 A third possible reading of these words refers to the limits imposed on the filmmaker by the text that she adapts, limits that Rozema’s film both accepts, in these final sequences, and subverts. 30 Alex Zwerdling (1988) illustrates these contradictions. In a 2006 essay, Vereen Bell provides an extensive list of critical quotations to demonstrate how ‘after all these years’ both Clarissa Dalloway’s character and her meaning remain ‘ambiguous’. See Bell 2006: 93–4. 31 The quotation is from Woolf ’s diary of 15th October 1923. 32 Critics have noted that thanks are offered to Ismail Merchant and James Ivory in the film’s credits. 33 See Thornham (2012) for a discussion of this film. 34 In her review for the Times Literary Supplement Lindsay Duguid called the representation of Bourton ‘a commonplace of country-house cinema’ (1998: 20). 35 There is a similar moment, too, in Broken Mirrors (1984), when a moment of stillness and unspoken communication between the women in the brothel is abruptly broken by the doorbell which signals the arrival of male customer. 36 In interview Gorris said that she had originally wanted ‘to shoot the past with a 16mm camera, shot off the shoulder’, in order to convey this energy (Higgins and Leps 2000: 132). 37 In the film it seems to be Rezia (Amelia Bullmore), Septimus’s Italian wife, who functions as Clarissa’s double. It is she who ‘manages’ Septimus, and who tells his story to Sir William Bradshaw, and her creation of bright, beautiful hats despite her dislike of their wearers parallels Clarissa’s creation of her party. Her reaction when Septimus throws himself out of the window onto the railings below provides another long moment of stillness and loss, and prefigures Clarissa’s similar gaze out of her own window at the end of the film, as she thinks of Septimus. 38 The words are from Cymbeline, where the dirge is sung over the grave of ‘Fidele’, who is later revealed to be alive (Showalter 1992: 216). 39 The line is from Woolf ’s novel, but seventy years later it also recalls the scene from that archetypal British ‘woman’s film’, Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), where Laura similarly dreams and ‘gradually revive[s]’ while her husband, Fred, reads the Times. 192

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40 Redgrave was an influence on the making as well as the performance of the film. With Eileen Atkins she conceived the project, Atkins writing the script, and with Atkins invited Gorris to direct (Harper 1998: 168). 41 Holroyd’s review is widely cited, including by Frame’s biographer Michael King (2001), who dates it as 1990. It remains elusive, however, and I have been unable to track down the exact date. 42 To the Is-land, the first volume, was published in 1983. In a letter to Frame of 24 March 1984, Campion and Ikin wrote that they ‘consider the work to be a classic of New Zealand literature’. An Angel at My Table, the second volume, was published in May 1984, and the third volume, The Envoy from Mirror City, in June 1985 (Jones 2009: 78). 43 See also Donna Stanton in The Female Autograph (1987). The term ‘autobiographical’, she writes, has ‘negative connotations when imposed on women’s texts. It [has] been used… to affirm that women could not transcend, but only record, the concerns of the private self ’ (1987: 4). 44 Both Campion’s scriptwriter, Laura Jones, and her producer, Bridget Ikin, echoed this view. ‘My responsibility was to Janet’s version of her life, to what she calls the “fiction” of her life’, said Jones, while Ikin commented that ‘We’d always viewed the autobiographies as Janet’s personal fiction… as much fiction as any of the novels’ (quoted in Jones 2009: 80–1). 45 The scene of Janet’s reading is immediately followed by another scene in the woods, in which Janet’s older friend Poppy tells her how sex is performed before dancing away, followed by Janet. Scenes which emphasize Janet’s writing are then followed by that in which she and Poppy watch Janet’s older sister Myrtle and Poppy’s brother ‘doing it’ in the woods. 46 Moine 2009: 196. 47 In To the Is-land we read ‘I had a twin, which did not develop beyond a few weeks’ (1983: 18). Frame’s biographer Michael King confirms that ‘the embryonic twin had miscarried at an early stage of the pregnancy’. He adds that Janet ‘had been conceived and begun to develop as an identical twin’ (2000: 16, 400). 48 See Silverman 1988: 123, 150, and Thornham 2012:16–17. 49 The phrase is that of Patricia Ticineto Clough (1998). A ‘haunted realism’, she writes, is one that refuses the fiction of a unified subject identity assumed by realism.

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A FTERWORD

In this Afterword I want to return briefly to two of the issues with which this book began. The first concerns the importance of the concepts at its centre – why I think that these things matter. The gendering of time and space, as Elizabeth Grosz has shown, has profound implications for our understandings of history, of narrative, of authorship and of subjectivity. For women, who have been reduced to space, there is therefore something crucial at stake in using it differently: in deploying its opacities and intensities as a way of ripping open the smooth fabric of established narrative or genre; in refusing its assumed passivity and instead imbuing it with temporality; in re-visioning its identification with the uncanny or the sublime. In the films discussed in this book we can see elements of such contestation, challenge and re-vision. It is a contestation and re-vision that is always political: as much about ways of seeing, of embodying, or of theorizing (the uncanny, for example, or authorship, or the sublime) as it is about narrative or genre. It also insists on the connections between these apparently separate elements – the political, the theoretical, and the ‘merely’ cinematic. Grosz concludes that if we are to understand ‘the kinds of active interrelations possible’ between representations of the body and representations of space and time we need to imagine the possibility of different space-time frameworks (1995: 100). What she had in mind was theoretical not cinematic, and she is vague about the alternatives she proposes. In the work of women filmmakers, however, in the complex public fantasies that are cinematic fictions, we can see them at times enacted. The second issue I want to return to concerns authorship, in a double sense. In the Introduction I argued that although the question of authorship is an impossibly difficult one, since there is neither a straightforward relationship between the text’s origins and what as readers we find within it nor a specifically female or feminist content or style that might be fixed or determined, nevertheless the text’s signature remains important. This is the case not only because it produces a visibility for the female director and generates a reading that is ‘marked’, alert to differences, but also because there are ways in which differences of embodied positioning and vision leave their traces or marks on the texts produced, even in a collaborative medium like film. All of the films I discuss in this book bear signatures in both these senses: they both assert and bear the traces of female directorial authorship.

In the final chapter, however, I suggested a more complex relation of authorship in the case of adaptations of female-authored texts by women filmmakers. In making my arguments I drew on ideas of ‘joined collaboration’ (Bruno 1993) and ‘constellation’ (Gaines 2014) which were originally coined not in relation to adaptation, but to critical writing on women’s filmmaking. In the case of the investigations by both Giuliana Bruno and Jane Gaines, the films that they are tracing are at least partially lost, and have to be reconstructed through these imaginative connections. The resulting authorial process, writes Bruno, is one of desire and (fantasized) connection: such writing, she concludes, ‘ingrains a (double) authorial desire and libidinal exchange’ (1993: 236). But it is also one of loss, separation and misrecognition. The films I discuss in this book are not lost – indeed, I have chosen films that can, quite easily, be found by its reader – but I am conscious that the complex relationship Bruno describes also characterizes my own authorial journey. Through the collaborative relationship she has outlined, argues Bruno, ‘analysis designs a space and is itself conceived spatially’; it becomes a ‘transitional site’ (ibid.: 240). At worst, of course, such a space might become one of misreading and appropriation, even colonization. At best, however, it becomes ‘the locus of interaction’ (ibid.) between cinematic text, writer and reader: an opening out and sharing. I hope that this is what I have produced here.

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214

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FILMOGRAPHY

Amour Fou. Dir. Jessica Hausner, 2014 An Angel at My Table. Dir. Jane Campion, 1990 Antonia’s Line. Dir. Marleen Gorris, 1995 At Five in the Afternoon. Dir. Samira Makhmalbaf, 2003 The Ballad of Josie. Dir. Andrew V. McLaglen, 1967 The Ballad of Little Jo. Dir. Maggie Greenwald, 1993 La Belle Verte. Dir. Coline Serreau, 1996 The Big Trail. Dir. Raoul Walsh, 1930 Black Narcissus. Dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1947 Blackboards. Dir. Samira Makhmalbaf, 1999 Blue Steel. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 1990 The Brave One. Dir. Neil Jordan, 2007 Brief Encounter. Dir. David Lean, 1945 Broken Mirrors. Dir. Marleen Gorris, 1984 Calamity Jane. Dir. David Butler, 1953 Carry On Camping. Dir. Gerald Thomas, 1969 Chaos. Dir. Coline Serreau, 2001 La Crise. Dir. Coline Serreau, 1992 Daughters of the Dust. Dir. Julie Dash, 1992 A Day in the Country. Dir. Jean Renoir, 1936 Death Defying Acts. Dir. Gillian Armstrong, 2007 The Devils. Dir. Ken Russell, 1971 Dirty Harry. Dir. Don Siegel, 1971 Donkeys. Dir. Morag McKinnon, 2010 The Falling. Dir. Carol Morley, 2015 Fatal Attraction. Dir. Adrian Lyne, 1987 Fish Tank. Dir. Andrea Arnold, 2009 The Great St. Trinian’s Train Robbery. Dir. Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder, 1966 Heavenly Creatures. Dir. Peter Jackson, 1994 High Plains Drifter. Dir. Clint Eastwood, 1972 High Tide. Dir. Gillian Armstrong, 1987 The Holy Girl/La Nina Santa. Dir. Lucretia Martel, 2004 Illusions. Dir. Julie Dash, 1983 In the Cut. Dir. Jane Campion, 2003 L’Intrus. Dir. Claire Denis, 2004 I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. Dir. Patricia Rozema, 1987 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Dir. Chantal Akerman, 1975 Joy of Madness. Dir. Hana Makhmalbaf, 2003

Lourdes. Dir. Jessica Hausner, 2009 The Madness of the Dance. Dir. Carol Morley, 2006 Mais Qu’est Qu’elles Veulent?. Dir. Coline Serreau, 1975–7 Mansfield Park. Dir. Patricia Rozema, 1999 Meek’s Cutoff. Dir. Kelly Reichardt, 2010 Morvern Callar. Dir. Lynne Ramsay, 2002 Mrs. Dalloway. Dir. Marleen Gorris, 1997 Murder My Sweet. Dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1944 My Brilliant Career. Dir. Gillian Armstrong, 1979 Now, Voyager. Dir. Irving Rapper, 1942 The Piano. Dir. Jane Campion, 1993 Picnic at Hanging Rock. Dir. Peter Weir, 1975 Poor Cow. Dir. Ken Loach, 1967 Pretty Woman. Dir. Garry Marshall, 1991 A Question of Silence. Dir. Marleen Gorris, 1982 Ratcatcher. Dir. Lynne Ramsay, 1999 The Reckless Moment. Dir. Max Ophüls, 1949 Red River. Dir. Howard Hawks, 1948 Red Road. Dir. Andrea Arnold, 2006 Robinson in Ruins. Dir. Patrick Keiller, 2010 Romuald et Juliette. Dir. Coline Serreau, 1989 The Searchers. Dir. John Ford, 1956 Singin’ in the Rain. Dir. Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952 Stella Dallas. Dir. King Vidor, 1937 Sweetie. Dir. Jane Campion, 1989 A Taste of Honey. Dir. Tony Richardson, 1961 Thelma and Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott, 1991 Three Men and a Baby. Dir. Leonard Nimoy, 1987 Trois Hommes et un Couffin. Dir. Coline Serreau, 1985 True Grit. Dir. Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, 2010 Under the Skin. Dir. Carine Adler, 1996 Wagon Master. Dir. John Ford, 1950 White Material. Dir. Claire Denis, 2009 The White Room. Dir. Patricia Rozema, 1990 Winchester ’73. Dir. Anthony Mann, 1950 Winter’s Bone. Dir. Debra Granik, 2010 Wuthering Heights. Dir. Andrea Arnold, 2011

216

FILMOGRAPHY

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in bold indicate detailed analysis. Those in italic refer to illustrations. n = footnote/endnote. abject, concept of 74, 79, 87n21 ‘abject zones’ 57, 132, 148, 154 adaptation, processes of 159–61 of autobiography 182–5, 193nn43–4 female appropriation of 162–5, 196 Adele, Jan 114 Adler, Carine 69 Africa, colonial-era travels in 130–2 Akerman, Chantal 96, 124n27 Alexander, Michael 190n1 Allen, Woody 85n5 Amiri, Marzieh 114 Amis, Suzy 30, 34, 36 Amour Fou (2014) 96–103, 97, 99, 122–3nn11–20 critical responses 96 interior settings 96–9 as melodrama 96, 103 treatment of narcissism 99–101 Unheimlichkeit, theme of 101–2 Andersen, Hans Christian 48–9n33 Anderson, Adisa 151, 152 Andrew, Dudley 159 Andrin, Muriel 182, 185, 188 An Angel at My Table (1990) 181–90, 187, 189, 193nn41–9 and autobiography 182–5, 188–90 critical responses 181–2 opening sequences 185–7 treatment of space 187–8 Anis, Mina 114 Antonia’s Line (1995) 164, 175–6, 178, 179 Anzaldúa, Gloria 132, 151 Aragay, Mireia 166 Armstrong, Gillian 141–2, 144–5, 157n17

Arnold, Andrea 25, 67, 69–70, 71, 72, 86n12 Arthurs, Jean 58 Ash, Susan 184 asylums, conditions in 93–4 At Five in the Afternoon (2003) 113–21, 118, 119, 124–5nn35–40 cinematography 120–1 costume 118 critical commentary 121 gendered/political content 116–20 interior/exterior settings 114–16, 120–1 Atkins, Eileen 193n40 Atwood, Margaret 49n36 Austen, George 191n22 Austen, Jane 165–6, 169, 170, 171–2, 191n22, 192nn26–8 authorship 195–6 autobiography 182–5 Bach, Johann Sebastian 80, 83 Bachelard, Gaston 190 Baker, Rupert 176 Bakhtin, Mikhail 79 The Ballad of Josie (1967) 48n23 The Ballad of Little Jo (1993) 30–9, 34, 36, 40, 48n26 opening sequence 34–5 treatment of gender/dress 31–4, 35–6, 38–9 treatment of landscape 36–9 Bankolé, Isaach de 134 Banti, Anna 191n6 Barbara O 149

Barthes, Roland 165 Bataille, Sylvia 160 Battersby, Christine 11, 38, 48n28, 122n6 Baudelaire, Charles 53–4, 76 Baudrillard, Jean 5, 6, 51 Cool Memories 4, 15n4 Bayley, Betsy 23 Beauvoir, Simone de 2–5, 7, 15nn1–2 Beer, Gillian 173 Beethoven, Ludwig van 102, 103 Bell, Vereen 192n30 La Belle Verte (1996) 87n18 Bender, Abbey 96 Benjamin, Jessica 122n2 Benjamin, Walter 51, 53–4, 55–6, 59, 61, 76, 86n17, 163 Bentham, Jeremy 52 Bergson, Henri 15n8 Bernecker, Melina 187 Berryman, Charles 49n36 Best, Sue 51 Bhabha, Homi K. 156n4 Bhutto, Benazir 114, 117 The Big Trail (1930) 24–5, 47n12 Bigelow, Kathryn 58, 73 Binchy, Kate 179 Blackboards (2000) 115 Blake, William 1, 169, 171 Blue Steel (1990) 58–67, 63, 66, 72–3 antecedents/influences 58–60 gendered characterisation 62–7 treatment of city spaces 60–1, 63–5 Bluestone, George 190n3 Blunt, Alison 130–1, 132–3 border regions. See frontier(s) Bordo, Susan 93–4, 122n6 Bordwell, David 97, 123n13 Bowlby, Rachel 55 Boyd, Russell 141 Bradshaw, Peter 70–1 Brakni, Rachida 77 Brandon, Henry 28 The Brave One (2007) 72 Bresheeth, Haim 121 Breznahan, Kevin 41 Brief Encounter (1945) 192n39 British cinema, social realism in 67–9 Broken Mirrors (1984) 179, 192n35 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre 92–3 Brouillet, André 94, 111, 123n17 Brouwer, Joel 155 218

INDEX

Brown, Caroline 154 Brown, Clancy 62 Brown, Cody 41 Brown, Wendy 191n18 Bruce, Cheryl Lynn 149 Brunius, Jacques B. 116 Bruno, Giuliana 5, 12, 14, 55, 56–7, 129–31, 133, 140, 163, 164, 182, 191n6, 196 Brunsdon, Charlotte 69, 71 Bruzzi, Stella 32, 33, 37, 48n26 Bullmore, Amelia 192n37 Burch, Noel 128, 133 Burke, Andrew 70 Burke, Edmund 31, 38 Burnett, Susan 107 Butler, Alison 1n, 12, 14 Butler, Judith 3, 75, 78 Byron, Kathleen 107 Calamity Jane (1953) 32, 37, 48n20 Callahan, Anne 99–100, 101 Campbell, Joseph 42–3, 46, 47n1, 49n35 Campbell, Karen E. 47n7 Campion, Jane 12, 42, 72–3, 75, 107, 193n42 comments on own work/adaptation processes 184–5 critical commentary 181–2 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 81 Carey, Richenda 179 Carr, Katie 180 Carry On Camping (1969) 107, 124n24 Cassatt, Mary 14 Cather, Willa 162, 190–1n5 Certeau, Michel de 15n8, 52–4, 57, 60–2, 65, 68, 76, 77, 85n2, 86n6, 129–30, 131 Chakali, Saad 138 Chaos (2001) 76–85, 82, 84 critical responses 78 relationship with Serreau’s earlier work 77, 80–1, 83 use of comedy 81–2, 83–4 Charcot, Jean-Martin 94, 99, 102, 105, 111, 122n4, 122n7, 123n17 Chatman, Seymour 9–10, 160–1, 190n3 Chaudhuri, Shohini 116 Chung, David 32 Church-Gibson, Pamela 169 Churchill, Marguerite 24

cinema, precursors of 55–6, 127–8 city/ies as cinematic setting 56–8 early public spectacles 55–6 feminine presence 53–5 masculinisation of space 51–3, 82–3 utopian/dystopian visions 57–8 Cixous, Hélène 79, 87n20, 112–13 Clark, Morfydd 112 Clarke, Julie 124n35 Clément, Catherine 106, 112–13, 124n32 Clough, Patricia Ticineto 193n49 Clover, Carol 86n8 Coen, Joel/Ethan 41 Cole, Joe 104 Collins, Felicity 142, 144–5, 147–8 colonialism 131–2, 148 Colston, Karen 107 Colvile, Georgiana 78, 81–2, 84 Comolli, Jean-Louis 8–9, 55, 155 Compston, Martin 71 Conley, Tom 21, 36–7, 38, 48n29 Conrad, Joseph 139 Cook, Pam 35–6, 40, 48n25 Cooper, James Fenimore 21 Cosslett, Tess 183 Cowie, Elizabeth 3 Cox, Alan 176 La Crise (1992) 87n18 cross-dressing 31–4, 63 Cucinella, Catherine 152 Curran, Tony 69, 71 Curry, Renée R. 152 Curtis, Jamie Lee 58, 63, 66 Dagle, Joan 28 Dano, Paul 26 Dargis, Manohla 96 Dash, Julie 148–9 Daughters of the Dust (1992) 148–56, 150, 152, 157n21, 157n26 cinematography 149–50, 154–5 historical/mythical background 149 theme of exile 152–4 visual style 154 Dave, Paul 70, 72, 75–6, 86n16 Davies, Oliver Ford 177 da Vinci, Leonardo 82, 84–5 Davis, Bette 94 Davis, Judy 141, 145 Day, Cora Lee 149, 150

Day, Doris 32, 37, 48n20, 48n23, 58 A Day in the Country (1936) 160–1 de Lauretis, Teresa 1–2, 6, 37, 43, 90–1, 133, 162–3, 170 Alice Doesn’t 47n18, 48n27 Death Defying Acts (2007) 145, 157n17 Deleuze, Gilles 5–6, 9, 12, 15n3, 165 Denis, Claire 109, 134, 137, 154–5 comments on own work 134, 139–40, 157n7 department stores 55 dépaysement, concept of 2–4, 15nn1–2 Derrida, Jacques 8 Diawara, Manthia 148–9, 152, 156, 157n22 Dickey, Dale 43 Dickie, Kate 69 Dillon, Sarah 190n1 dioramas 55 Dirty Harry (1971) 59 Dmytyrk, Edward 58 Doane, Mary Ann 43–4, 59, 62, 95, 104, 105, 121, 122n10, 123n23, 124n33, 143–4, 148 The Desire to Desire 47n18 Dolan, Monica 111 Donen, Stanley 58 Donkeys (2010) 86n10 Dryburgh, Stuart 181, 185–6 Du Bois, W.E.B. 155–6, 157n27 Duguid, Lindsay 192n34 Duncan, Lindsay 167, 168 Duvauchelle, Nicolas 136 Easthope, Antony 57 Eastwood, Clint 34, 48n26 Ebert, Roger 179, 181 Eleftheriotis, Dimitris 115 fainting fits, as marker of personality 101, 104, 110 fairy tales 48–9n33, 90–1, 92, 118, 124n25, 185, 192n23 The Falling (2015) 103–13, 110, 111, 115, 124nn25–33 antecedents/influences 106–8 cinematography 109 locations 106–10 melodramatic elements 112–13 promotional material 124n28, 124n31 treatment of fainting/hysteria 104–6, 110–12 INDEX

219

Fatal Attraction (1987) 59 Fergusson, Karen 186, 187, 188 film noir 59, 66–7 Finn, Howard 116 Finney, Vanessa 184 Fischer, Lucy 10, 12, 87n18 Fish Tank (2009) 86n12 flâneur, figure of 53–4, 59, 61 camera as 76–7 female versions/alternatives 54–5, 56, 63–4, 75–6, 173–4 Ford, John 22, 23, 35 Foster, Jodie 72 Foucault, Michel 52, 165, 184 Fox, Kerry 188, 189 Frame, Janet An Angel at My Table 193n42 autobiographical/fictional writing, contrasted 184 biographical details 186, 188–9, 193n47 comments on own life/work 181 The Envoy from Mirror City 193n42 To the Is-land 182, 193n42, 193n47 Owls Do Cry 184–5 Franek, Ivan 80 Fraser, Nancy 92 Freeman, Barbara 38 Freud, Sigmund 4, 14, 17, 29, 44, 47n1, 59, 75, 79, 99, 112, 122n4, 122n7, 162, 183, 190n2 theories of feminine psychology 89–91, 93, 102, 104–5, 114, 121n1, 123n21, 163–4, 191n9 Friedberg, Anne 55–6 Friedel, Christian 96 frontier(s) ‘frontier justice’ 24–5, 40 ideal of femininity 19, 47n5 land/sea 142–4 man/Nature 13, 20–2, 131–2 national 132–3 transposition to city 13, 59 in US national identity/myth 13, 18–20 Frot, Catherine 77 Frye, Northrop 49n36, 79, 80 Fuller, Graham 86n12 Gaines, Jane 163, 164, 191n8, 196 Gallop, Jane 106 Garber, Marjorie 32, 33, 47n19 220

INDEX

Garcia Lorca, Federico 119, 121 Genette, Gérard 9, 161, 162, 182, 190n1 Gentileschi, Artemisia 191n6 Geraghty, Christine 174–5 Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic 92–3, 95, 122n5, 162, 166–7, 170–1, 190n4, 192n26 Gillett, Sue 108, 189 Gilliat, Sidney 107 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 122n4 The Yellow Wall-Paper 93, 98, 106–7, 112 Gish, Sheila 167 Godard, Agnès 109, 124n29 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 99, 100, 102 Gordon, Talya 166 Gorris, Marleen 78, 164, 174–6, 178–81, 193n40 comments on own work 175, 192n36 Graham, Heather 33 Granik, Debra 39, 40, 42, 45, 46 Graves, Rupert 178–9 The Great St. Trinian’s Train Robbery (1966) 107 Greenwald, Maggie 30, 31–2, 35–6, 37–8, 46 Greenwood, Bruce 26–7 Grimm, Jakob/Wilhelm 90, 185 Grossmann, Stephan 98 Grosz, Elizabeth 11–12, 14, 51–2, 91–2, 95, 162n9, 165, 195 Guattari, Félix 5–6, 9, 12, 15n3 Gubar, Susan. See Gilbert, Sandra M. Gunning, Tom 9–10, 127–8, 129, 139, 140–1, 142, 144, 147–8 Gustafsson, Henrik 136–7, 138–9 Hall, Ronnie 40 Hall, Stuart 123n16 Hamilton, Victoria 169 Hankins, Leslie 174, 178 Haraway, Donna 132 Hardy, Robert 179 Hausner, Jessica 96, 104 comments on own work 96, 98, 103, 122–3n11, 123n18 Hawkes, John 40 Hawks, Howard 48n24 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Blithedale Romance 37

Hayward, Susan 76–7, 79, 81, 85 Headey, Lena 176, 177 Heath, Stephen 9, 10, 94, 128–30, 133, 138, 156–7n6, 156n1, 163 Hedgeman, Carla 187 Henderson, Shirley 27 Henley, Ann 4–5, 55 Hepburn, Katharine 58 Herbeck, Mariah Devereux 80 ‘heritage film’ 181 Hicks, Tommy Redmond 149 Higgins, Lesley 178, 180 High Plains Drifter (1972) 34, 48n26 High Tide (1997) 140–8, 142, 143 beach settings 142–4 cinematography 141–2, 146–8 ending 147–8 offscreen spaces 146–8 performance, as theme 144–6 Higson, Andrew 57, 67–8, 69, 71 Hill, John 68, 69 Hippocrates 94, 105 Hirsh, Marianne 191n10 Hoggart, Richard 68, 69 Holden, Frankie J. 145 Holroyd, Michael 182, 193n41 The Holy Girl (2004) 71 Hoosier, Trula 149 Hoover, Herbert 47n5 Hopkins, Bo 35 Horton, Andrew 80 house/home, identification of woman with 89–92 Hüller, Sandra 100 Hunter, Dianne 106 Hunter, Holly 42 Huppert, Isabelle 134, 135, 136, 139–40 Hussey, Andrew 137 Hutcheon, Linda 163, 164, 165, 190 ‘hysteria’. See also under Freud, Sigmund mass 104–6, 110–12 medical theories of 91–4, 104–5 Ikin, Bridget 182, 193n42, 193n44 Illusions (1983) 157n26 In the Cut (2003) 72–3, 189 Iranian cinema 113, 116 Irigaray, Luce 78, 91–2, 122n2, 122n9, 162n9 Irish landscape/art 133

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987) 191n19 Ivory, James 192n32 Jackson, Peter 107 Jacobus, Mary 14, 106, 180, 184 Jameson, Frederic 6, 15n6, 111–12 Jayamanne, Laleen 75 Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) 96, 109, 124n27 Johnson, Claudia L. 173, 191n16 Johnston, Claire 1n Jones, Jacquie 154 Jones, Laura 193n44 Jordan, Neil 72 Jordan, Peter 98 Joy of Madness (2003) 121 Kafka, Franz 12 Kant, Immanuel 31, 38, 123n20 Kaplan, Caren 5–7, 156n4 Kaplan, Cora 62–3, 66, 86n7 Karvan, Claudia 141, 142 Karzai, Hamid 118 Kazan, Zoe 26 Keats, John 161 Keiller, Patrick 15n9 Kellogg, Robert 49n34 Kelly, Gene 58 Kerr, Deborah 107 King, Michael 193n41, 193n47 Kingsley, Mary 130–1, 132, 133, 137 Kipling, Rudyard 18 Kitchen, Michael 180 Kitses, Jim 47n8 Kleist, Heinrich von (historical character) 96, 123n15 Die Marquise von O. 98, 100, 102 ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ 123n20 Knight, Katie Ann 109 Koerner, W.H.D., Madonna of the Prairie 19, 20 Kohon, Gregorio 105, 123n22 Kolodny, Annette 21, 22 Komar, Kathleen 164, 166, 171, 191n14 Kristeva, Julia 7, 74, 87n21 Kroll, Jack 181 Krutnik, Frank 59 Kuhn, Annette 183, 185, 186, 190

INDEX

221

Laclau, Ernesto 6, 15n6 Lambert, Christophe(r) 135 landscape(s) as blank canvas 20–2, 127 and empire 17, 18, 127, 131–2, 148 protagonists’ relationship with 1–2 stereotypical female role in 18–19 Western 25, 26–7, 29–30, 34–5, 36–9, 41–2 Launder, Frank 107 Lawrence, Jennifer 40, 41, 46 Le Bon, Gustave 54 le Doeuff, Michèle 10, 12, 29 Lean, David 192n39 Lefebvre, Henri 52, 85n1, 86n6, 132, 133 Lejeune, Philippe 190n1 Leland, Dorothy 92, 122n3 Lemon, Geneviève 107 Leps, Marie-Christine 178, 180 Lessing, Doris 139–40 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 37, 38 Laocoon 30–1 Levy, Amy 54 Lindon, Vincent 77 L’Intrus (2004) 157n11 Loach, Ken 86n9 London female observers in 54–5 as film/social setting 176–7, 180 nineteenth-century conditions 54 Lotman, Jurij M. 90 Lovell, Terry 68–9 Luft, Martha Levy 21 Lury, Celia 183 Lyne, Adrian 59 Lyotard, Jean-François 51 MacCabe, Colin 8–9 Maclaren, Casey 46 The Madness of the Dance (2006) 106 Mahoney, Elizabeth 51–2 Mais Qu’est Qu’elles Veulent? (1975–7) 77, 80–1, 83 Makhmalbaf, Hana 121 Makhmalbaf, Mohsen 113 Makhmalbaf, Samira 113, 121, 124n38 ‘manifest destiny’, concept of 18, 30, 31, 40 Mann, Anthony 34 Mansfield Park (1999) 165–73, 167, 172, 175, 181, 182, 185, 188, 191– 2nn16–29 222

INDEX

cinematography 167–8, 169–70, 171–2 critical responses 166, 169 ending 171–3 interior/exterior spaces 166–9 sexual content 168, 169 theme of writing 169–71 treatment of slavery 168–9 Marcus, Jane 173–4, 178, 181 Marcus, Laura 183 Marks, Laura U. 73, 74 Marshall, Paule, Praisesong for the Widow 157n20 Martel, Lucrecia 71 Massey, Doreen 2, 5, 15n9, 38, 95, 128–9, 130, 170 For Space 7–8, 10–11 Space, Place and Gender 6–7, 14, 15n6, 15–16n12 Maupassant, Guy de 160–1 Mayer, Sophie 109, 110–11, 124n30 McArthur, Colin 56–8, 85n5 McCammon, Holly J. 47n7 McClintock, Anne 17, 18, 131–2, 148, 151, 154, 156n2, 156n4 McCrostie, Lauren 109 McElhone, Natascha 176, 177 McGill, Hannah 72 McHugh, Kathleen 181–2, 187 McKellen, Ian 33–4 McKinnon, Morag 86n10 McLerie, Allyn Ann 32 Medhurst, Andy 124n24 Medusa (mythical figure) 79, 81, 89 Meek, Joe 23 Meek, Stephen 23 Meek’s Cutoff (2010) 23–30, 28, 30, 40, 46 cinematography 25, 26, 29–30 gendered characterisation 26–9 reversal of Western stereotypes 27–30 soundtrack 25–6 treatment of landscape 25, 26–7, 29–30 Mehrabi, Massoud 124n35 Mellencamp, Patricia 3 melodrama 95, 96, 103, 112–13, 143–4 Mercer, Gina 184, 189 Mesmer, Franz 99, 123n23 Metz, Christian 145–6, 157n19 Mexican-American War (1846-8) 19 Micale, Mark S. 123n22 Miller, Jonny Lee 167 Miller, Nancy K. 162, 182

Minott-Ahl, Nicola 191n15 miscegenation laws 48n22 Misrach, Richard 26 Mitchell, Juliet 105–6 Mitchell, Silas Weir 122n4 Mitchell, W.J.T. 10, 17, 30–1, 47n17, 161–2 Modleski, Tania 38, 87n18, 94, 114, 121 Moers, Ellen 13, 29, 164, 166 Literary Women 162 Mohebi, Razi 114 Monaghan, David 170, 172 Monaghan, Josephine (historical character) 31–2 ‘monomyth’ 42–3, 49n35 Moon, Michael 48n31 Morisot, Berthe 14 Morley, Carol 104, 106, 107, 111 Morris, Meaghan 12 Morrison, Toni, Song of Solomon 157n20 Morvern Callar (2002) 69 Mrs Dalloway (1997) 173–81, 175, 177, 182, 192–3nn30–40 critical responses 174–5, 176, 181, 192n34 generic characteristics 181 imaginary/hallucinatory sequences 178–80 public/private spaces 176–8 social context 180–1 Müller, Adam 123n20 Mulvey, Laura 1, 9, 32, 160 Murder, My Sweet (1944) 58 Murray, Jonathan 86n12 My Brilliant Career (1979) 145 Myres, Sandra 18–19, 21, 27, 32 Nadylam, William 134 Naficy, Hamid 113–14 Nancy, Jean-Luc 4, 138–9, 140, 144, 157 Narboni, Jean 8–9 Naremore, James 159–60 Nash, Catherine 133 Nava, Mica 85n3 Negra, Diane 58 Neill, Sam 42 Nelson, Tommy 27 new wave (British) 69, 71 Nivola, Alessandro 168 Nørgaard, Mikkel 86n10 Notari, Elvira 163, 164 Nouma, Hajar 78

Now, Voyager (1942) 94 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 123n23 O’Connor, Frances 167, 167, 172 offscreen spaces 133, 146–8, 168–9 Okely, Judith 2–4, 5, 15n1, 15nn1–2 Ophüls, Max 60 Orlando (1992) 164 O’Sullivan, John L. 18, 19 Ozu, Yasujirō 128 panoramas 55, 127–8 Paris, literary/cinematic depictions 76–7, 86n17 Parkman, Francis 21 Parsons, Deborah 51, 53–5, 61 Pascoe, Peggy 48n22 Patton, Will 26 Peake, Maxine 104, 106 Peña, Elizabeth 63, 63 ‘phantom ride’ films 127–8, 139, 140–1, 147–8 Phelan, James 49n34 The Piano (1992) 42, 75, 189 Pinel, Philippe 123n17 Pinter, Harold 167, 171 Pollock, Griselda 15–16n12 Poor Cow (1967) 86n9 Portal, Robert 178 Potter, Sally 164 Powell, Michael 107 Prendergast, Kathy 133 Press, Natalie 71 Pressburger, Emeric 107 Pretty Woman (1990) 84 Pszoniak, Wojciech 83 Pugh, Florence 104, 111 Purefoy, James 169 A Question of Silence (1982) 78–9, 175, 176, 178, 179 Ramanathan, Geetha 150, 154 Ramsay, Lynne 69 Rantanen, Tehri 15n2 Rapper, Irving 94 Rascaroli, Laura 65 Ratcatcher (1999) 71 realism 67. See also social realist cinema The Reckless Moment (1949) 60 Redgrave, Vanessa 174–5, 175, 181, 193n40 INDEX

223

Red River (1948) 48n24 Red Road (2006) 67–76, 70, 72, 86nn10– 16 cinematography 73–4, 75–6 social realist elements 69–71 treatment of touch 73–4 Reed, Virginia E.B. 23 Reichardt, Kelly 23, 46 Renaud, Line 77 Renoir, Jean 160–1 Rezaie, Agheleh 114, 118 Rich, Adrienne 132 Richardson, Dorothy 54 Richardson, Tony 69 Ricoeur, Paul 44, 46 Riviere, Joan 122n10 Robert-Fleury, Tony 123n17 Roberts, Julia 84 Robinson in Ruins (2010) 15n9 Robson, Jocelyn 144 Roesgen, Marie-Paule von 100 Rogers, Alva 150 romantic comedy 58 Romuald et Juliette (1989) 87n18 Ronan, Saoirse 145 Roosevelt, Theodore 152 Rose, Gillian 89, 130, 132–3 Rose, Phyllis 174 Rosolato, Guy 48n29 Rousseau, G.S. 105 Rowbotham, Sheila, Promise of a Dream 2–4, 5 Rowe, Kathleen 78–80, 81 Royer, Michelle 80 Royle, Nicholas 101–2, 190n1 Rozema, Patricia 165–6, 169, 170, 171–2, 192n29 comments on own work 165, 192n28 Rubens, Peter Paul 81 Russell, Ken 107 Russo, Mary 79, 94 Ryan, Meg 72 Said, Edward 191n15 Sarris, Andrew 174 Scacchi, Greta 108 Schatz, Thomas 21, 79 Schiesari, Juliana 101, 189 Schnitzler, Barbara 100 Schnoink, Birte 96, 97

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Scholes, Robert 49n34 Schreiner, Olive 131–2, 133, 134, 137, 139 Scott, Ridley 49n35 The Searchers (1956) 22, 26, 28, 34, 47n11, 47n13, 48n25 Seneca Falls Declaration (1848) 19 Sennett, Richard 52 Serreau, Coline 78, 85 comments on own work 77, 84, 85 Shakespeare, William 173, 179 Cymbeline 192n38 Shirley, Anne 58 Shohat, Ella 156n4, 160 Showalter, Elaine 106, 122n8, 123n17, 123n22, 164, 174, 175, 182, 190, 190n4 The Female Malady 94, 104–5 A Literature of Their Own 162–3 Siegel, Don 59 Silver, Ron 58, 66 Silverman, Kaja 150–1, 186 Singin’ in the Rain (1952) 58 Sirk, Douglas 96 Sisco, Marideth 39, 48n30 slide shows 127–8 Smelik, Anneke 108, 175 Snyder, Joel 21 Sobchack, Vivian 73 social realist cinema 13, 67–9 gendering of space 68–9 Solnit, Rebecca 17, 18, 20–1, 22, 42, 47n14 Sontag, Susan 56 space, gendered relationships with 2–3, 195. See also city/ies; frontier(s); house/home; landscape(s); offscreen spaces Spender, Dale 191n12 Stam, Robert 159–60, 163, 165 Standing, John 177 Stanton, Donna 193n43 Stanwyck, Barbara 94 ‘state of the nation’ films 69, 72 Stedman, J.G. 169 Steedman, Carolyn, Landscape for a Good Woman 69, 76, 183 Stella Dallas (1937) 94, 124n34 Sterne, Laurence, A Sentimental Journey 171 Stewart, Michael 70, 74, 86n13 Stone, Isaiah 43, 46

Subor, Michel 134 Sumer, Asuman 113, 121 Summerfield, Penny 183 Sweetie (1989) 107–8, 109–10, 112 Sweetser, Lauren 45 Talley, Colin 48n31 A Taste of Honey (1961) 69 Tate, Greg 151 Taubin, Amy 135, 185 Taylor Gordon, Hannah 166 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, Idylls of the King 189–90 Tetherow, Solomon 23 Thacker, Andrew 52 Thelma and Louise (1991) 49n35 Thomas, Gerald 107 Thompson, Ashlee 45, 46 Three Men and a Baby (1987) 77 Tickner, Lisa 94 Tincknell, Estella 183 Tompkins, Jane 19, 22, 23, 25, 27–8, 31, 34, 40–1 Trémois, Claude-Marie 78 Trois Hommes et un Couffin (1985) 77, 87n18 True Grit (2010) 41 ‘True Womanhood’, cult of 19 Turner, Frederick Jackson 18, 21–2 Tyzack, Margaret 179 Uhlich, Keith 96, 98 ‘uncanny,’ concept of 4, 14, 44, 89–90, 93, 101–2, 112 Under the Skin (1996) 69 Vermeer, Jan van 96 Vidal, Belén 166, 170, 191n20 Vidor, King 94 Vincent, Sally 118 Vogel, Henriette (historical character) 96 Waddell, Justine 169 Waggener, Shelley 44 Wagon Master (1950) 23, 24, 47n12 Walker, Michael 60 Watson, Tim 166, 173, 191n15 Wayne, John 22, 24–5, 47n11 Wegman, William 123n14 Weir, Peter 107

Welter, Barbara 19, 47n4 Western (film genre) 17–46 male characterisation 24–5, 35–6, 42–3 opening shots 34–5 stereotypical female roles 18–19, 22, 27, 35–6 treatment of landscape 20–2, 25 Wexman, Virginia Wright 15n11 Wheatley, Catherine 123n13 White, Patricia 1n White, William (film actor) 44 White, William (historical pioneer) 23 White Material (2009) 135, 136, 134–40, 144 autobiographical elements 139–40 costume 135 critical commentary 135, 137 ending 140 fantasy/flashback sequences 134–5 The White Room (1990) 191n19 Wiik, Aurelien 82 Williams, James S. 157n12 Williams, Linda 124n34, 175 Williams, Linda Ruth 59 Williams, Maisie 104 Williams, Michelle 26, 28 Williams, Raymond 67, 69 Wilmington, Michael 141 Wilson, Elizabeth 51, 54, 55, 58, 76, 86n13 Winchester ’73 (1950) 34 Winter’s Bone (2010) 39–46, 41, 46, 48–9nn30–37 mythic elements 42–6 treatment of landscape 41–2 Wolf, Christa, The Quest for Christa T. 166 Wolff, Janet 53 Wölfflin, Heinrich 97 ‘women’s cinema’ departure from traditions of 104, 112–13 ‘paranoid’ 59–60, 62, 70 (problems of) definition 1n traditional characteristics 94–5, 105–6 Wood, Natalie 28 Woolf, Virginia 54–5, 89, 122n4, 180–1 Mrs Dalloway 173–4, 176, 192n30, 192n39 A Room of One’s Own 10, 173, 176, 180 Three Guineas 176, 190–1n5 The Voyage Out 174

INDEX

225

Wordsworth, William 108 Wuthering Heights (2010) 25 Young, Iris Marion 122n3 Yousefrazi, Abdolgani 114

226

INDEX

Zalcock, Beverley 144 Zeta-Jones, Catherine 145 Zipes, Jack 42, 48n32 Zwerdling, Alex 192n30

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