Synopsis Look at the video

Synopsis: Look at the video / Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1973)

In this Synopsis I will compare my film: Look at the video with Laura Mulvey's essay: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

Notes:

Woman, stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

Destruction of Pleasure as a Radical Weapon

The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born that is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moralistically, but to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect the physical obsessions of the society that produced it, and further, to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and assumptions.

The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema that fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. In the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack in fantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction: through its formal beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions.

This essay will discuss the interweaving of that erotic pleasure in film, its meaning, and in particular the central place of the image of woman. It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this essay. The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.

Scopophilia: The obtaining of sexual pleasure by looking at nude bodies, erotic photographs, etc.

The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia. There are circumstances in which looking itself is with a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at.

Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality that exists as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze.

Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.

At first glance the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen of the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world that unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of seperation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy.

Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer.

The cinema satisfies a promordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia is its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world.

Two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation:

1. Scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. 2. Developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen.

The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, creating the imagized, eroticized concept of the world that forms the perception of the subject and makes a mockery of empirical objectivity.

Sexual instincts and identification processes have a meaning within the symbolic order that articulates desire. Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary. The look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallizes this paradox.

Woman as image, Man as bearer of the look,

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Women displayed as sexual object is the leitmotiv of erotic spectacle: from pinups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative.

The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative.

As Budd Boetticher has put it:

What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.

Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen.

Showgirl: For a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a no-man's-land outside its own time and space. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs or a face integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative; it gives flatness, the quality of a cutout or icon rather than verisimilitude to the screen.

An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the physical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like.

The man forwards the narrative - Active - Bearer of the look of the spectator
Woman - Passive / Icon - Spectacle

This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can indentify. The power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincide with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.

Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisible editing (demanded by realism), all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action.

Tension between a mode of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis. Each is associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment (connoting male fantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis.

Fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt, asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occuring in a linear time with a beginning and an end. Fetishistic scopophilia on the other hand can exist, outside linear time at the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone.

These contradictions and ambiguities can be illustrated more simply by using works by Hitchcock and von Sternberg, both of whom take the look almost as the content or subject matter of many of their films. Hitchcock is more complex, as he uses both mechanisms. Von Sternberg's work, on the other hand, provides many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia.

It is well known that von Sternberg once said he would welcome his films being projected upside down so that story and character involvement would not interfere with the spectator's undiluted appreciation of the screen image. This statement is revealing but ingenuous. Ingenuous in that his films do demand that the figure of the woman (Dietrich, in the cycle of films with her, as the ultimate example) should be identifiable. But revealing in that it emphasizes the fact that for him the pictorial space enclosed by the frame is paramount rather than narrative or identification processes. Whereas Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism, von Sternberg produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film) is broken in favor of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator.

The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylized and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look. Von Sternberg plays down the illusion of screen depth; his screen tends to be one-dimensional, as light and shade, lace, steam, foliage, net, streamers, etc., reduce the visual field. There is little or no mediation of the look through the eyes of the male protagonist.

Despite von Sternberg's insistence that his stories are irrelevant, it is significant that they are concerned with situation, not suspense, and cyclical rather than linear time, while plot complications revolve around misunderstanding rather than conflict. The most important absence is that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene. The high point of emotional drama in the most typical Dietrich films, her supreme moments of erotic meaning, take place in the absence of the man she loves in the fiction. There are other witnesses, other spectators, watching her on the screen; their gaze is one with, not standing in for, that of the audience.

The erotic impact, sanctified by death, is displayed as a spectacle for the audience. The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not see.

In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely what the audience sees. However, in the films I shall discuss here, he takes fascination with an image through scopophilic eroticism as subject of the film. Moreover, in these cases the hero portrays the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator. In Vertigo in particular, but also in Marnie and Rear Window, the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination. As a twist, a further manipulation of the normal viewing process, which in some sense reveals it, Hitchcock uses the process of identification normally associated with ideological correctness and the recognition of established morality and shows up its perverted side.

Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and noncinematic. His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law-a policeman (Vertigo), a dominant male possessing money and power (Marnie)-but their erotic drives lead them into compromised situations. The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman. True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness - the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong.

Hitchcock's skillful use of identification processes and liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share this uneasy gaze. The audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegesis that parodies his own in the cinema.

In Vertigo, erotic involvement with the look is disorienting: the spectator's fascination is turned against him as the narrative carries him through and entwines him with the processes that he is himself exercising. The Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed within the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal superego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a false sense of security by the apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds himself exposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking. Far from being simply an aside on the perversion of the police, Vertigo focuses on the implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in term of sexual difference and the power of the male symbolic encapsulated in the hero. Marnie, too, performs for Mark Ruthland's gaze and masquerades as the perfect to-be-looked-at image. He, too, is on the side of the law until, drawn in by obsession with her guilt, her secret, he longs to see her in the act of committing a crime, make her confess and thus save her. So he, too, becomes complicit as he acts out the implications of his power. He controls money and words, he can have his cake and eat it.

The psychoanalytic background that has been discussed in this essay is relevant to the pleasure and unpleasure offered by traditional narrative film. The scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object) and, in contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes) act as formations, mechanisms, which this cinema has played on. The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of men takes the argument a step further into the structure of representation, adding a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favorite cinematic form - illusionistic narrative film.

It is only in the film form that they can reach a perfect and beautiful contradiction, thanks to the possibility in the cinema of shifting the emphasis of the look. It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, striptease, theater, shows, etc. Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged.

To begin with (as an ending), the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the profilmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience. Without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth.

Simultaneously, the look of the audience is denied an intrinsic force: as soon as fetishistic representation of the female image threatens to break the spell of illusion, and the erotic image on the screen appears directly (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact of fetishization, freezes the look, fixates the spectator, and prevents him from achieving any distance from the image in front of him.

This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical filmmakers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment. There is no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the invisible guest, and highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms. Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret.

Synopsis: Look at the video / Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006)

In this Synopsis I will compare my film: Look at the Video with Laura Mulvey's book: Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image.

I will focus on chapter 9: The Possesive Spectator.

Notes:

Star performance is, not inevitably but very often, the source of screen movement, concentrating the spectator’s eye, localizing the development of the story and providing its latent energy. But the great achievement of star performance is an ability to maintain a fundamental contradiction in balance: the fusion of energy with a stillness of display. However energetic a star’s movement might seem to be, behind it lies an intensely controlled stillness and an ability to pose for the camera. Reminiscent, figuratively, of the way that the illusion of movement is derived from still frames, so star performance depends on pose, moments of almost invisible stillness, in which the body is displayed for the spectator’s visual pleasure through the mediation of the camera.

Pose allows time for the cinema to denaturalize the human body. While always remaining ‘the real thing’, the iconic figure of the star is ever on display, a vehicle for the aesthetic attributes of cinema, a focus for light and shade, framing and camera movement. The close-up has always provided a mechanism of delay, slowing cinema down into contemplation of the human face, allowing for a moment of possession in which the image is extracted, whatever the narrative rationalization may be, from the flow of a story. Furthermore, the close-up necessarily limits movement, not only due to the constricted space of the framing, but also due to the privileged lighting with which the star’s face is usually enhanced. Mary Ann Doane has pointed out that the closeup is a key figure for photogénie, the ecstatic contemplation of cinema in its uniqueness, and that the desire for the close-up has traditionally been marked by a rejection of narrative’s diachronic structure in favour of the synchronic moment itself.

The close-up is thus treated:

. . . as stasis, as a resistance to narrative linearity, as a vertical gateway to an almost irrecoverable depth behind the image. The discourse seems to exemplify a desire to stop the film, to grab hold of something that can be taken away, to transfer the relentless temporality of the narrative’s unfolding to a more manageable temporality of contemplation.

The star’s visual apotheosis is no more material than the light and shadow that enhance it so that the human figure as fetish fuses with the cinema as fetish, the fusion of fetishism and aesthetics that characterizes photogénie. Here the symbolic quality of film aesthetics, even ‘the more manageable temporality of contemplation’, leads towards its eternal, unavoidable, shadow, the psychodynamics of visual pleasure. The extraordinary significance of the human figure in cinema, the star, its iconic sexuality, raises the question of how desire and pleasure are reconfigured in delayed cinema, as stillness both within the moving image and within a changed power relation of spectatorship.

With the weakening of narrative and its effects, the aesthetic of the film begins to become ‘feminized’, with the shift in spectatorial power relations dwelling on pose, stillness, lighting and the choreography of character and camera. Or, rather, within the terms of the ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ model, the aesthetic pleasure of delayed cinema moves towards fetishistic scopophilia that, I suggested, characterized the films of Josef von Sternberg. These films, most particularly the Dietrich cycle, elevate the spectator’s look over that of the male protagonist and privilege the beauty of the screen and mystery of situation over suspense, conflict or linear development. The ‘fetishistic spectator’ becomes more fascinated by image than plot, returning compulsively to privileged moments, investing emotion and ‘visual pleasure’ in any slight gesture, a particular look or exchange taking place on the screen. Above all, as these privileged moments are paused or repeated, the cinema itself finds a new visibility that renders them special, meaningful and pleasurable, once again confusing photogénie and fetishism. In this reconfiguration of ‘fetishistic spectatorship’, the male figure is extracted from dominating the action and merges into the image. So doing, he, too, stops rather than drives the narrative, inevitably becoming an overt object of the spectator’s look, against which he had hitherto been defended. Stripped of the power to organize relations between movement, action and the drive of the plot, on which the whole culture of cinema categorized by Gilles Deleuze as the ‘action-image’ depends, the male star of a Hollywood film is exposed to the ‘feminization’ of the spectator’s gaze.

The fetishistic spectator controls the image to dissolve voyeurism and reconfigure the power relation between spectator, camera and screen, as well as male and female. The question that then arises is whether these new practices of spectatorship have effectively erased the difficulty of sexual difference and the representation of gender in Hollywood cinema. What might be the unconscious investment in the spectator’s newly acquired control over the cinematic image? In ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ I suggested that, as an active instinct, voyeurism found its narrative associate in sadism. ‘Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory / defeat, all occurring in linear time with a beginning and an end.’4 This premise was drawn directly from Freud’s equation of the active sexual instinct with masculinity and its opposite with femininity. Although it was crucial to his theory that the instincts were reversible, Hollywood cinema, as I understood it, by and large inscribed the binary opposition quite literally into both narrative and the visual codes that organized the spectator’s visual pleasure.

The possessive spectator commits an act of violence against the cohesion of a story, the aesthetic integrity that holds it together, and the vision of its creator. But, more specifically, the sadistic instinct is expressed through the possessive spectator’s desire for mastery and will to power. In the role reversal between the look of the spectator and the diegetic look of the male protagonist, the figure that had been all-powerful both on and off the screen is now subordinated to manipulation and possession. Film performance is transformed by repetition and actions begin to resemble mechanical, compulsive gestures. The cinema’s mechanisms take possession of the actor or star and, as their precise, repeated gestures become those of automata, the cinema’s uncanny fusion between the living and dead merges with the uncanny fusion between the organic and the inorganic, the human body and the machine.

Some years ago, I digitally re-edited a 30-second sequence of ‘Two Little Girls from Little Rock’, the opening number of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953), in order to analyse the precision of Marilyn Monroe’s dance movements and as a tribute to the perfection of her performance. In addition to the artificial, stylized persona, evocative of the beautiful automaton, her gestures are orchestrated around moments of pose. In this particular fragment, played to camera, she pulls up her shoulder strap in a performance of an almost sluttish disorder of dress that is completely at odds with the mechanical precision of this and each gesture. Even though the gesture was so self-consciously produced, it has, for me, something of Barthes’s punctum, and I found myself returning over and over again to these few seconds of film. In the re-edit, I repeated the fragment three times, freezing the image at the moments when Marilyn paused between movements. In addition to her own precise and controlled performance, dance itself demands a control of the body that pushes its natural humanity to the limits, also alternating between stillness and movement. The developed gesture unfolds until it finds a point of pose, just as the delayed cinema finds such moments through repetition and return. The 30-second sequence ends as Marilyn moved forward into close-up, throwing her head back and assuming the pose and expression of the essential Marilyn pin-up photograph. This paused image seems to be almost exactly the same as the Marilyns that Andy Warhol made after her death, in his silk-screened homage to the death-mask. The imaginary superimposition of the Warhol image onto the trace of the living Marilyn has a sense of deferred meaning, as though her death was already prefigured in this pose. An acute consciousness of her ‘then’, before her death, condenses with the image as death mask and the poignant presence of the index as the ‘this was now’.

The fetishistic spectator, driven by a desire to stop, to hold and to repeat these iconic images, especially as perfected in highly stylized cinema, can suddenly, unexpectedly, encounter the index. The time of the camera, its embalmed time, comes to the surface, shifting from the narrative ‘now’ to ‘then’. The time of the camera brings with it an ‘imaginary’ of the filming into the mind’s eye, the off-screen space of the crew and the apparatus, so that the fictional world changes into consciousness of the pro-filmic event. As fictional credibility declines, as disbelief is no longer suspended, ‘reality’ takes over the scene, affecting the iconic presence of the movie star.

Film subjected to repetition and return, when viewed on new technologies, suffers from the violence caused by extracting a fragment from the whole that, as in a body, ‘wounds’ its integrity. But in another metaphor, this process ‘unlocks’ the film fragment and opens it up to new kinds of relations and revelations. From this perspective, the automaton’s staccato, mechanical movements prefigure the hovering between movement and stillness that characterizes textual analysis and Bellour’s own pioneering work with film fragments. And she also acts as a figure for ‘the wavering and confusion between movement and stillness’ that characterize the interactive spectatorship enabled by new technologies. As it penetrates the film, this new way of looking emasculates the coherent whole of narrative structure, ‘wounding’ the surface. The figure of the automaton returns in a double sense, first as the site of castration anxiety, this time threatening the ‘body’ of the film itself, and secondly as metaphor for a fragmented, even feminized, aesthetic of cinema. With Barthes’s perception of the Casanova automaton and with Bellour’s interpretation of it, the Freudian uncanny of the mother’s body merges with the now ageing body of film.