3Visual Pleasure and NarrativeCinema*

I Introduction

(a) Apolitical use of psychoanalysis

This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how thefascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascinationalready at work within the individual subject and the social formationsthat have moulded him. It takes as its starting-point the way film reflects,reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established Interpretationof sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking andspectacle. It is heipful to understand what the cinema has been, how itsmagic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practicewhich will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanaiytic theory isthus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way theunconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it

depends on the image of the castrated women to give order and meaningto its world. An ideaof woman stands as linchpin to the system: it isherlack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire tomake good the iack that the phallus signifies. Recent writing in Screenabout psychoanalysis and the cinema has not sufficiently brought outthe importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolicorder in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else.To summarise briefly: the function of woman in forming the patriarchalunconscious is twofold: she firstly symbolises the castration threat byher real lack of a penis and secondly thereby raises her child into thesymbolIc. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is atan end. It does not last into the world of law and language except as a

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema lS

memory, which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude andmemory of lack. Both are posited on nature (or on anatomy in Freud'sfamous phrase). Woman's desire is subjugated to her image as bearer ofthe bleeding wound; she can exist only in relation to castration and can-not transcend it. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desireto possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the sym-bolic). E!ther she must gracefully give way to the word, the name of thefather and the law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in thehalf-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal culture asa signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which mancan live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command byimposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place asbearer,not maker, of meaning.There is an obvious interest in this analysis for feminists, a beauty in

its exact rendering of the frustration experienced under the phallocen-tric order. Itgets us nearer to the roots of our oppression, it brings closeran articulation of the problem, it faces us with the ultimate challenge:how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed criti-cally at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within thelanguage of the patriarchy? There is no way in which we can produce analternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by exam-ining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis isnot the only but an important one. We are still separated by a great gapfromimportant issues for the female unconscious which are scarcely rel-evant to phallocentric theory: the sexing of the female infant and herrelationship to the symbolic, the sexually mature woman asnon-mother,materrtity outside the signification of the phallus, the vagina. But, at thispoint, psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance ourunderstanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we areCaught.

..Written in 1973 and published in 1975 in Screen.

14

(b) Destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon

Asanadvanced representation system, the cinema poses questions aboutthe ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structuresWaysof seeing and pleasure in looking. Cinema has changed over the lastfew decades. It is no longer the monolithic system based on large capi-tal investment exemplified at its best by Hollywood in the 1930s, 1940sand 1950s. Technological advances (16mm and so on) have changedthe economic conditions of cinematic production, which can now beartisanal as well as capitalist. Thus it has been possible for an alternative

]6 Visual and Other Pleasures

cinema to develop. However self-conscious and ironic Hollywood man-aged to be, it always restricted itself to a formal mise en scene reflectingthe dominant ideologica.l concept of the cinema. The alternative cin-ema provides a space for the birth of a cinema which is radical in botha political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptionsof the mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moralistically,but to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflectthe psychical obsessions of the society which produced it and, further,to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically by reactingagainst these obsessions and assumptions. A politically and aestheti-cally avant-garde cinema is now possible, but it can still only exist as acounterpoint.The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema

which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but inone important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation ofvisual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic intothe language of the dominant patriarchal order. In the highly developedHollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the alienatedsubject, torn in his imaginary memory by asense of loss, by the terrorofpotential lack in fantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction:through its formal beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions.This article 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 analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the inten-tion of this article. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego thatrepresent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked. Notin favour of a reconstructed new pleasure, which cannot exist in theabstract, nor of intellectualised unpJeasure, but to make way for a totalnegation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film. Thealternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind withoutsimply rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, and dar-ing to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceivea new language of desire.

" Pleasure in looking/fascination with the human form

A The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia(pleasure In lookmg). There arecircumstances in which looking itself isa source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 17

in being looked at. Originally, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud iso-lated scopophllia as one of the component instincts of sexuality whichexist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this pointhe associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjectingthem to a controlling and curious gaze. His particular examples centreon the voyeuristic activities of children, their desire to see and makesure of the private and forbidden (curiosity about other people's gen-ital and bodily functions, about the presence or absence of the penisand, retrospectively, about the primal scene). In this analysis scopophiliais essentially active. (Later, in 'Instincts and Their Vicissitudes', Freuddeveloped his theory of scopophilia further, attaching it initially to pre-genital auto-eroticism, after which, by analogy, the pleasure of the lookis transferred to others. There is a close working here of the relationshipbetween the active instinct and its further development in a narcissisticform.) Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in particularthe constitution of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis forpleasure in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it canbecome fixated into aperversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peep-ingToms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in anactive controlling sense, an objectified other.At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the under-

COverworld of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing andunWilling victim. What is seen on the screen is so manifestly shown.But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within whichit has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world whichunWinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, pro-ducing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristicfantasy. Moreover the extreme contrast between the darkness in the audi-torium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and thebrilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helpsto promote the i1iusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film isreallybeing shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narra-tive conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a privateWorld. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinemais blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection ofthe repressed desire onto the performer.

B, The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, butit also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. Theconventions 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 recogm-tion: the human face, the human body, the relationship between thehuman form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person inthe world. Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a childrecognises its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitutionof the ego. Several aspects of this analysis are relevant here. The mir-ror phase occurs at a time when children's physical ambitions outstriptheir motor capacity, with the result that their recognition of thems-elvesis joyous in that they imagine their mirror image to be more complete,more perfect than they experience in their own body. Recognition is thusoverlaid with misrecognition: the image recognised is conceived as thereflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projectsthis body outside itseLf as an ideal ego, the alienated subject which,re-introjected as an ego ideal, prepares the way for identification withothers in the future. This mirror moment predates language for the child.Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes

the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition!misrecognition and identi-fication, and hence of the first articulation of the I, of subjectivity. Thisis a moment when an older fascination with looking (at the mother'sface, for an obvious exampLe) collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness. Hence it is the birth of the long love affair/despair betweenimage and self-image which has found such intensity of expression infilm and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience. Quite apartfrom the extraneous similarities between screen and mirror (the framingof the human form in its surroundings, for instance), the cinema hasstr~ctu~esof fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of egowhile SImultaneously reinforcing it. The sense of forgetting the world asthe ego has come to perceive it (I forgot who 1am and where 1was) isn~~talgical1~reminiscent of that pre-subjective moment of image recog-nition. Whl.le at the same time, the cinema has distinguished itself inthe ~rOductionof ego ideals, through the star system for instance. Starsprovide a focus or centre both to screen space and screen story wherethey act out a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorousImpersonates the ordinary).

18 Visual and Other Pleasures

C Sections A and Bhave set t tw .au a contradictory aspects of the plea-surab~estructures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation.The first scopophilic a' fl'

• ' . r nses rom p easure III using another person asan object of sexual stimuiation through sight. The second developedthrough narcissism and th " ' ..'. e constitution of the ego, comes from identIft·

cation WIth the image seen TI . f. 1US, III 11mterms, one implies a separation

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 19

of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (activescopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the objecton the screen through the spectator's fascination with and recognitionof his like. The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of egolibido. This dichotomy was crucial for Freud. Although he saw the two asinteracting and overlaying each other, the tension between instinctualdrives and self-preservation polarises in terms of pleasure. But both areformative structures, mechanisms without intrinsic meaning. In them-selves they have no signification, unless attached to an idealisation. Bothpursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, and motivate eroticisedphantasmagoria that affect the subject's perception of the world to makea mockery of empirical objectivity.During its history, the cinema seems to have evolved a particular illu-

sion of reality in which this contradiction between libido and ego hasfound a beautifully complementary fantasy world. In reality the fan-tasy world of the screen is subject to the Lawwhich produces it. Sexualinstincts and identification processes have a meaning within the sym-bolic order which articulates desire. Desire, born with Language, allowsthe possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but itspoint of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of itsbirth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, canbe threatening in content, and it is woman as representation!image thatcrystallises this paradox.

III Woman as image, man asbearer of the look

A In a world ordered by sexuaL imbalance, pleasure in looking has beenSplit between active/male and passive/female. The determining malegaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accord-ingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneouslylooked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visualand erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle:from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holdsthe look, and plays to and signIfies male desire. Mainstream film neatlyCombines spectacle and narrative. (Note, however, how in the musi-cal SOng-and-dance numbers interrupt the flow of the diegesis.) Thepresence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in nor-mal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against thedevelopment of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of

20 Visual and Other Pleasures

erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated intocohesion with the narrative. AsBudd Boetticher has put it:

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

(Arecent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this prob-lem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell has calledthe 'buddy movie', in which the active homosexual eroticism of thecentral male figures can carry the story without distraction.) TradItion-ally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic objectfor the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for thespectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between thelooks on either side of the screen. Forinstance, the device of the show-girl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any apparentbreak in the diegesis. Awoman performs within the narrative; the gazeof the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatlycombined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. Fora moment thesexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a no man'sland outside its own time and space. Thus Marilyn Monroe's first appear-ance in The River of No Return and Lauren Bacall's songs in To Have andHaveNot. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance)or a face (Garbo) integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroti-cism. One part of a fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, theillusion of depth demanded by the narrative; it gives flatness, the qualityof a cut-out or icon, rather than verisimilitude, to the screen.

B An active/passive heterosexual division of labour has similarly con-trolled narrative structure. According to the principles of the rulingIdeology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure can-not bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gazeat his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrativesupports the man's role as the active one of advancing the story makingth h 'mgs appen ..The man controls the film fantasy and also emerges asthe representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the lookof the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extra-dieg~tic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is madepossible through the processes set in motion by structuring the filmaround a main controlli fi . ,'"mg .gure With whom the spectator can identul·

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 21

As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projectshis look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the powerof the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the activepower 0'the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence.A male movie star's glamorous characteristics are thus not those of theerotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete,more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recogni-tion in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make thingshappen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as theimage in the mirror was more in control of motor co-ordination.In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal

of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corre-sponding to that of the mirror recognition, in which the alienated subjectinternalised his own representation of his imaginary existence. He is afigure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as accu-rateiy as possible the so-called natural conclitions of human perception.Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in particular) and earn-era movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combinedWith invisible editing (demanded by realism), all tend to blur the limitsof screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, astage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates theaction. (There are films with a woman as main protagonist, of course.Toanalyse this phenomenon seriously here would take me too far afield.Pam Cook and Claire Johnston's study of The Revolt of Mamie Stover inPhil Hardy (ed.), Raoul Walsh (Edinburgh, 1974), shows in a striking casehow the strength of this female protagonist is more apparent than real.)

C1 Sections IIIAand Bhave set out a tension between a mode of repre-sentation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis.Each is associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilicContact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment (connotingmale fantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image ofhis like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gainingControl and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This ten-sion and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a singletext. Thus both in Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and HaveNot, the film opens with the woman as object of the combined gaze ofSpectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glam-?rous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she fallsIn love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, los-mg her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuality, her

22 Visual and Other Pleasures

show-girl connotations; hereroticism is subjected to the male star alone.Bymeans of identification with him, through participation in his power,the spectator can indirectly possess her too.)But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem.

Shealso connotes something that the look continually circles around butdisavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and henceunpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, thevisually ascertainable absence of the penis, the material evidence onwhich is based the castration complex essential for the organisation ofentrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father.Thus thewomanas icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active con-trollers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originallysignified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from thiscastration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the originaltrauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counter-balanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty Object(an avenue typified by the concerns of the film nair); or else completedisavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turningthe represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuringrather than dangerous (hence overvaluation, the cult of the female star).This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physi-

cal beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying initself. The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associationswith sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associ-ated with castration), asserting control and subjugating the guilty personthrough punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well withnarrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something hap-pen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength,victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and anend. Fetishistic scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside lineartime as the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone. These contra-dictions and ambiguities can be illustrated more simply by using worksby Hitchcock and Sternberg, both of whom take the look almost as thecontent or subject matter of many of their films. Hitchcock is the morecomplex, as he uses both mechanisms. Sternberg's work, on the otherhand, provides many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia.

C2 . Sternberg once said he would welcome his films being projectedupside-down so that story and character involvement would not interferewith the spectator's undiluted appreciation of the screen image. Thisstatement is revealing but ingenuous: ingenuous in that his films do

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 23

demand that the figure of the woman (Dietrich, in the cycle of filmswith her, as the ultimate example) should be identifiable; but revealingin that it emphasises the fact that for him the pictorial space enclosed bythe frame isparamount, rather than narrative or identification processes.While Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism, Sternbergproduces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerfullook of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film)isbroken in favour of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator.Thebeauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce: she isno longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylisedand fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the filrn and the directrecipient of the spectator's look.Sternberg plays down the illusion of screen depth; his screen tends to

beone-dimensional, as light and shade, lace, steam, foliage, net, stream-ersand so on reduce the visual field. There is little or no mediation ofthe look through the eyes of the main male protagonist. On the con-trary,shadowy presences like LaBessiere in Morocco act as surrogates forthe director, detached as they are from audience identification. DespiteSternberg's insistence that his stories are irrelevant, it is significant thatthey areconcerned with situation, not suspense, and cyclical rather thanlinear time, while plot complications revolve around misunderstandingrather than conflict. The most important absence is that of the con-trolling male gaze within the screen scene. The high poin t of emotionaldramain the most typical Dietrich films, her supreme moments of eroticmeaning, 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. At theend of Morocco, Tom Brown has already disappeared into the desert whenAmyJolly kicks off her gold sandals and walks after him. At the end ofDishonoured, Kranau is indifferent to the fate of Magda. In both cases,the erotic impact, sanctified by death, is displayed as a spectacle for theaUdience. 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, although fascination with an image throughscopophilic eroticism can be the subject of the film, it is the role of theheroto portray the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spec-tator. In Vertigo in particular, but also in Mamie and Rear Window, thelook is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishis-tic fascination. Hitchcock has never conceaJed his interest in voyeurism,cinematic and non-cinematic. His heroes areexemplary of the symbolicorder and the law – a policeman (Vertigo), a dominant male possessing

24 Visualand OtherPleasures

money and power (Mamie) – but their erotic drives lead them into com-promised situations. The power to subject another person to the willsadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman asthe object of both, Power is backed by a certainty of iegal right and theestablished guilt of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanalyticallyspeaking), True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask ofideological correctness – the man is on the right side of the law, thewoman on the wrong. Hitchcock's skilful use of identification processesand liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the maleprotagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making themshare his uneasy gaze. The spectator is absorbed into a voyeuristic situa-tion within the screen scene and diegesis. which parodies his own In thecinema.In an analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor

for the cinema. Jeffriesisthe audience, the events in the apartment blockopposite correspond to the screen. As he watches, an erotic dimensionis added to his look, a central image to the drama, His girlfriend Lisahad been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so longas she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses the barrierbetween his room and the block opposite, their relationship is rebornerotically, He does not merely watch her through his lens, as a distantmeaningful image, he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dan-gerous man threatening her with punishment, and thus finally givinghim the opportunity to save her, Lisa's exhibitionism has already beenestablished by her obsessive interest in dress and style, in being a pas-sive image of visual perfection: Jeffries'svoyeurism and activity have alsobeen established through his work as a photo-journalist, a maker of sto-nes ~ndcaptor of images. However, his enforced inactivity, binding himto his seat as a spectator, puts him squarely in the fantasy position of thecmema audience.In V. ti b"er EgO, su jecttve camera predominates. Apart from one flashback

fromJudy'spoint of view, the narrative iswoven around what Scottie seesor fails to see. Theaudience fellows the growth of his erotic obsession and~ubsequent despair precisely from his point of view. Scottie's voyeurismIS blatant: he falls in love with awoman he follows and spies on withoutspeaking to, Its sadistic side is equally blatant: he has chosen (and freelychosen, for he had been a successful lawyer) to be a policeman, with allthe attendant po ibiliti ,

SSI 1 lies of pursutt and investigation. As a result, hefollows, watches and falls in love with a perfect image of female beautyand mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to breakher down and force her to t If b 'e y persistent cross-questioning.

Visual Pleasureand Narrative Cinema 2S

In the second part of the film, he re-enacts his obsessive involve-ment with the image he loved to watch secretly, He reconstructs Judyas Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physicalappearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make heran ideal passive counterpart to Scottie's active sadistic voyeurism. Sheknows her part is to perform, and only by playing it through and thenreplaying it can she keep Scottie's erotic interest. But in the repetitionhe does break her down and succeeds in exposing her guilt, His curiositywins through; she is punished.Thus, in Vertigo, erotic involvement with the look boomerangs: the

spectator's own fascination is revealed as illicit voyeurism as the narrativecontent enacts the processes and pleasures that he is himself exercisingand enjoying. The Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed within the sym-bolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchalsuperego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a false sense of security by theapparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds himselfexposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking. Far frombeing simply an aside on the perversion of the police, Vertigo focuses onthe implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in termsof sexual difference and the power of the male symbolic encapsulated inthe hero. Marnie, too, performs for Mark Rutland's gaze and rnasquer-ades as the perfect to-be-looked-at image, He, too, is on the side of thelaw until, drawn in by obsession with her guilt, her secret, he longs tosee her in the act of committing a crime, make her confess and thus saveher.So he, too, becomes complicit as he acts out the implications of hispower. He controls money and words; he can have his cake and eat it.

'I

IV Summary

The psychoanalytic background that has been discussed in this articleis relevant to the pleasure and un pleasure offered by traditional narra-tive film, The scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another personasan erotic object) and, in contradistinction, ego libido (forming iden-tification processes) act as formations, mechanisms, which mould thisCinema's formal attributes. The actual image of woman as (passive) rawmaterial for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step fur-ther into the content and structure of representation, adding a furtherlayer of Ideological significance demanded by the patriarchal order inItsfavourite cinematic form – illusionistlc narrative film. The argumentmust return again to the psychoanalytic background: women in repre-sentation can signify castration, and activate voyeuristic or fetishistic

26 Visualand OtherPleasures

mechanisms to circumvent this threat. Although none of these Inter-acting layers is intrinsic to film, it is only in the film form that theycan reach a perfect and beautiful contradiction, thanks to the possfbil-Ity in the cinema of shifting the emphasis of the look. The place of thelook defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This iswhat makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say,striptease, theatre, shows and so on. Going far beyond highlighting awoman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be lookedat into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as con-trolling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controllingthe dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codescreate a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cutto the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their relation-ship to formative external structures that must be broken down beforemainstream 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 cam-era as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watchesthe final product, and that of the characters at each other within thescreen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two andsubordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to elimi-nate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness inthe audience. Without these two absences (the material existence ofthe recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictionaldrama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth. Nevertheless, asthis article has argued, the structure of looking in narrative fiction filmcon:ains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a cas-rratton threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and burststh~oughthe world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensionalfetish. Thus the two looks materially present In time and space are obses-sively subordmated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camerabeco~es the mechanism forproducing an illusion of Renaissance space,flowmg movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology ofreprese~tation that revolves around the perception of the subject; theca~era s Jook IS disavowed in order to create a convincing world inwhich the spectator's surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. Stmul-taneously the look of the a di . denl …

• • • 1 U renee IS enled an intrinsic force: as soon asfetishlstlc representation of the female image threatens to break the spellof llluston and the eron .

. . ' IC Image on the screen appears directly (withoutmediation] to the spectate th f f . . .r, e act 0 fetishisatlon, concealing as itdoes

Visual Pleasureand Narrative Cinema 27

castration fear, freezes the look, fixates the spectator and prevents himfrom 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 film-makers) Is to free the look of the cam-era into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audienceinto dialectics and passionate detachment. There Is no doubt that thisdestroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the 'invisible guest',and highlights the way film has depended on voyeuristic active/passivemechanisms. Women, whose Image has continually been stolen andused for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film formwith anything much more than sentimental regret.