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The effects of the appeal to this poem are subject to the work of over-
determination Freud isolated in the text of the dream. The sheer prolif-
eration of heads and hats (and hence, through a metonymic slippage,
minds), which are presumed to have confronted this intimidating riddle
before Freud, confers on his discourse the weight of an intellectual
history, of a tradition of interrogation. Furthermore, the image of hiero-
glyphics strengthens the association made between femininity and the
enigmatic, the undecipherable, that which is 'other'. And yet Freud
practices a slight deception here, concealing what is elided by removing
the lines from their context, castrating, as it were, the stanza. For the
question over which Heine's heads brood is not the same as Freud's-it
is not 'What is Woman?', but instead, ' . . . what signifies Alan?' The
quote is taken from the seventh section (entitled 'Questions') of the 75
3
second cycle of The North Sea. The full stanza, presented as the words of Heinrich Heine,
The North Sea,
'a young man,/ His breast full of sorrow, his head full of doubt', ceads as trans Vernon
follows: Watkins, New
York, New
Direction Books,
O solve me the riddle of life, 1951, p 77.
The teasingly time-old riddle,
Over which many heads already have brooded,
Heads in hats of hieroglyphics,
Turbaued heads and heads in black skull-caps,
Heads in perrukes and a thousand other
Poor, perspiring human heads
If it is true of all desire that it depends on the infinite pursuit of its absent
1
ibid, p 61. object, voyeuristic desire, along with certain forms of sadism, is the only
desire whose principle of distance symbolically and spatially evokes this
fundamental rent.13
Yet even this status as meta-desire does not fully characterise the cinema
for it is a feature shared by other arts as well (painting, theatre, opera,
etc.). Metz thus adds another reinscription of this necessary distance.
What specifies the cinema is a further re-duplication of the lack which
prompts desire. The cinema is characterised by an illusory sensory pleni-
tude (there is 'so much to see') and yet haunted by the absence of those
very objects which are there to be seen. Absence is an absolute and
irrecoverable distance. In other words, Noel Burch is quite right in
aligning spectatorial desire with a certain spatial configuration. The
viewer must not sit either too close or too far from the screen. The result
of both would be the same-he would lose the image of his desire.
It is precisely this opposition between proximity and distance, control
of the image and its loss, which locates the possibilities of spectatorship
within the problematic of sexual difference. For the female spectator
there is a certain over-presence of the image-she is the image. Given the
closeness of this relationship, the female spectator's desire can be
described only in terms of a kind of narcissism-the female look
demands a becoming. It thus appears to negate the very distance or gap
specified by Metz and Burch as the essential precondition for voyeurism.
From this perspective, it is important to note the constant recurrence of
the motif of proximity in feminist theories (especially those labelled 'new
French feminisms') which purport to describe a feminine specificity.
For Luce Irigaray, female anatomy is readable as a constant relation of
the self to itself, as an autoeroticism based on the embrace of the two lips
which allow the woman to touch herself without mediation. Further-
more, the very notion of property, and hence possession of something
which can be constituted as other, is antithetical to the woman: 'Nearness
however, is not foreign to woman, a nearness so close that any identifi-
cation of one or the other, and therefore any form of property, is impos-
sible. Woman enjoys a closeness with the other that is so near she cannot
possess it any more than she can possess herself.'14 Or, in the case of female 14 79
Luce Irigaray,
madness or delirium,"... women do not manage to articulate their mad- 'This Sex Which
ness: they suffer it directly in their b o d y . . . ' . " The distance necessary to Is Not One', New
detach the signifiers of madness from the body in the construction of French Feminisms,
even a discourse which exceeds the boundaries of sense is lacking. In the ed Elaine Marks
and Isabelle de
words of Helene Cixous, 'More so than men who are coaxed toward Courtivron,
16
social success, toward sublimation, women are body.' Amherst, The
University of
This theme of the overwhelming presence-to-itself of the female body Massachusetts
is elaborated by Sarah Kofman and Michele Montrelay as well. Kofman Press, 1980, pp
describes how Freudian psychoanalysis outlines a scenario whereby the 104-105.
subject's passage from the mother to the father is simultaneous with a
passage from the senses to reason, nostalgia for the mother henceforth ''Irigaray,
The masculine can partly look at itself, speculate about itself, represent itself
and describe itself for whatsit is, whilst the feminine can try to speak to itself
through a new language, but cannot describe itself from outside or informal
terms, except by identifying itself with the masculine, thus by losing itself.2i
Irigaray goes even further: the woman always has a problematic relation
to the visible, to form, to structures of seeing. She is much more comfort-
able with, closer to, the sense of touch.
The pervasiveness, in theories of the feminine, of descriptions of such
a claustrophobic closeness, a deficiency in relation to structures of seeing
and the visible, must clearly have consequences for attempts to theorise
female spectatorship. And, in fact, the result is a tendency to view the
female spectator as the site of an oscillation between a feminine position
and a masculine position, invoking the metaphor of the transvestite.
Given the structures of cinematic narrative, the woman who identifies
with a female character must adopt a passive or masochistic position,
while identification with the active hero necessarily entails an acceptance
of what Laura Mulvey refers to as a certain 'masculinisation' of specta-
torship.
The first scene in Now Voyager depicts the Bette Davis character as
repressed, unattractive and undesirable or, in her own words, as the
spinster aunt of the family. ('Every family has one.') She has heavy eye-
brows, keeps her hair bound tightly in a bun, and wears glasses, a drab
dress and heavy shoes. By the time of the shot discussed earlier, signal-
ling her transformation into beauty, the glasses have disappeared, along
with the other signifiers of unattractiveness. Between these two
moments there is a scene in which the doctor who cures her actually
confiscates her glasses (as a part of the cure). The woman who wears
glasses constitutes one of the most intense visual cliches of the cinema.
The image is a heavily marked condensation of motifs concerned with
repressed sexuality, knowledge, visability and vision, intellectuality, and
desire. The woman with glasses signifies simultaneously intellectuality
and undesirability; but the moment she removes her glasses (a moment
which, it seems, must almost always be shown and which is itself linked 83
30
with a certain sensual quality), she is transformed into spectacle, the very Linda Williams,
'When the Woman
picture of desire. Now, it must be remembered that the cliche is a heavily Looks...', in Re-
loaded moment of signification, a social knot of meaning. It is character- vision: Feminist
ised-by an effect of ease and naturalness. Yet, the cliche has a binding Essays in Film
Analysis, ed Mary
power so strong that it indicates a precise moment of ideological danger Ann Doane, Pat
or threat-in this case, the woman's appropriation of the gaze. Glasses Mellencamp and
worn by a woman in the cinema do not generally signify a deficiency in Linda Williams,
forthcoming.
seeing but an active looking, or even simply the fact of seeing as opposed
to being seen. The intellectual woman looks and analyses, and in usurp-
ing the gaze she poses a threat to an entire system of representation. It is
as if the woman had forcefully moved to the other side of the specular.
IV. Out of the Cinema and into the Streets: The Censorship
'Un Regard Oblique': a dirty joke at the expense of the woman's look.
This process of narrativising the negation of the female gaze in the classi-
cal Hollywood cinema finds its perfect encapsulation in a still photo-
graph taken in 1948 by Robert Doisneau, 'Un Regard Oblique'. Just as
the Hollywood narratives discussed above purport to centre a female
protagonist, the photograph appears to give a certain prominence to a
woman's look. Yet, both the title of the photograph and its organisation
of space indicate that the real site of scopophiliac power is on the margins
of the frame. The man is not centred; in fact, he occupies a very narrow
space on the extreme right of the picture. Nevertheless, it is his gaze
which defines the problematic of the photograph; it is his gaze which 85
effectively erases that of the woman. Indeed, as subject of the gaze, the
woman looks intently. But not only is the object of her look concealed
from the spectator, her gaze is encased by the two poles defining the
masculine axis of vision. Fascinated by nothing visible-a blankness or
void for the spectator -unanchored by a 'sight' (there is nothing 'proper'
to her vision-save, perhaps, the mirror), the female gaze is left free-
floating, vulnerable to subjection. The faint reflection in the shop
window of only the frame of the picture at which she is looking serves
merely to rearticulate, en abyme, the emptiness of her gaze, the absence
of her desire in representation.
CIRCL