TY - JOUR
AU - Helm-Grovas, Nicolas
AB - In section two of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s 1977 film Riddles of the Sphinx, entitled ‘Laura speaking’, Mulvey is filmed in a static shot, sitting on a white chair in front of a black background, at a desk covered in objects, facing the camera (Fig. 1). It is a kind of self-portrait, elaborated with Wollen and the film’s crew. The objects include technologies of recording and playback (a microphone and a tape recorder), of reading and writing (a felt-tip pen, a highlighter, notebooks, and a pencil sharpener shaped like a tiny globe), and of vision (a pair of glasses). The mise en scène seems designed to be read, a space of signification, and is suggestive of Wollen’s earlier interest in iconography.1 In this modest – one might say austere, if it wasn’t slightly curious and playful – scenography, periodically meeting the viewer’s gaze, Mulvey delivers a monologue. Her lecture analyses the Oedipus myth, arguing that the sphinx represents a repressed figure associated with motherhood and resistance to patriarchy. She draws attention to Riddles of the Sphinx’s composition from different sections and the use it will make of the sphinx as an ‘imaginary narrator’, a female ‘voice off’. Although the section makes Mulvey present and visible, this is far from the fetishised spectacle of the female body that her writing of the period criticises. By contrast, images of woman-as-sphinx, sphinx-as-woman, are intercut with this shot (Gustave Moreau’s 1864 Oedipus and the Sphinx, a photomontage of Greta Garbo as a sphinx), their rendering of women’s bodies as sites of enigma demystified by Mulvey’s lecture. If there is a pleasure here for the viewer, it is in puzzling out the significance of the scenography and following the lecture. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, 16mm film. Courtesy of Laura Mulvey. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, 16mm film. Courtesy of Laura Mulvey. As Catherine Grant describes, this is a ‘scene of the woman film-maker’ in which Mulvey is ‘a calm presenter of historical fantasy, fantasies that continue into the present’, articulating the film’s ‘proposal’.2 As Grant indicates, Mulvey speaks here primarily in two capacities. She is a representative of the filmmakers, describing the film’s logic in the first-person plural. And she is a feminist intellectual, a confident analyst speaking in an even tone. Certainly, Mulvey is also performing here – one should be wary of entirely identifying the on-screen ‘Laura’ with Laura Mulvey; moreover, the manner of presentation subtly questions the speaker’s truth claims: the various small ‘props’ imply ‘an ironic presentation of authority’.3 Nevertheless, Mulvey’s presence – like Wollen’s similar appearance in section two of Penthesilea, Queeen of the Amazons (1974), their previous film – apparently aims to clarify the film’s intellectual and political stakes and its form. One might therefore think of this as a moment of ‘discourse’ rather than ‘history’, to use Émile Benveniste’s terminology: the film acknowledges itself as enunciation.4 Rather than surreptitiously advancing a position, the filmmakers’ argument is made explicit, becoming available for the viewer to grasp, analyse, and dispute. Indeed, Riddles of the Sphinx, like Penthesilea, goes to great lengths to make its theoretical claims and artistic strategies visible, starting from the very beginning when the film lists its seven sections in a contents page. The aforementioned objects on the table could be a presentation of the cinema apparatus, the film’s means of production and exhibition. Much, it seems, is laid on the table here for the viewer’s inspection. Yet some of these objects on the table – the felt-tip pen, the toy-like pencil-sharpener, the ‘child’s mug’5 – connote domesticity and childcare as well as the instruments of the filmmaker and lecturer. Might the apparently transparent positioning of Mulvey as filmmaker and intellectual in ‘Laura speaking’ leave other pertinent roles unstated or only codedly pointed to? In particular, in this film about how ‘the place of the mother is suppressed’, I am thinking of Mulvey herself as a mother, something that is not alluded to in her speech to camera. As Mandy Merck points out, ‘mother’ is one of a number of identities of the author of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, as well as worker and feminist activist.6 All three connect to the middle and longest section of the film, ‘Louise’s story told in thirteen shots’, which narrates the tale of a woman – a mother, centrally, but also a feminist activist and a worker (undertaking waged work outside the home, and unwaged housework and childcare). Is it fair to say that there is something biographical about Louise’s story, something personal though only indirectly acknowledged, suggested by the fact that there is not too much distance between the names ‘Laura’ and ‘Louise’? Does the fact that the flowery blouse Mulvey wears is also draped on the back of Louise’s chair in the twelfth circular panning shot obliquely signal a connection between them (Fig. 2)? What might be the significance of not stating these investments directly? Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, 16mm film. Courtesy of Laura Mulvey. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, 16mm film. Courtesy of Laura Mulvey. In this essay, I propose that what is described above can be understood as an example of ‘passionate detachment’, a term I draw from Mulvey’s 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, from its demand ‘to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment’.7 Although the phrase is much quoted, it is not defined by Mulvey. On my understanding, ‘passionate detachment’ is a position of simultaneous investment and critical distance. In the above example, it relates to the complex methodological issue of the feminist filmmaker’s biography: the danger of obscuring its importance versus the risk of making it overly determinant. More centrally though, ‘passionate detachment’, in my argument, is a spectatorial position. I attempt to clarify this by placing Mulvey’s 1970s writings on melodrama alongside ‘Visual Pleasure’. My approach is both historical and speculative. Historical because based on close reading of film theory texts from a particular era; speculative because it is an imaginative reconstruction of the meaning of a term Mulvey doesn’t define, but which I argue crystallises a key aspect of her theory and practice in this period. I take Riddles of the Sphinx as a key example of the attempt to produce this in the viewer, yet I also trace it in a work by a figure Mulvey and Wollen were in close dialogue with, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–1979), proposing that ‘passionate detachment’ is a productive way of reading certain feminist art practices of the 1970s, widening the scope beyond film. Finally, I return to the term in a speculative manner once more, arguing that this positioning of the spectator echoes the tension between the passionate attachment associated with the fan and the dispassionate detachment associated with the critic, noting the relationship of passionate detachment to ‘dialectics’ suggested in Mulvey’s essay, and suggesting that one can be passionately attached to detachment itself; that is, deeply invested in a theory and practice of spectatorial distance. Identification and Anti-Identification The term ‘passionate detachment’ has been frequently redeployed without definition. Mine is not the first text, nor even the second, with this title.8 In general, the noun in the phrase has been much more legible to commentators on ‘Visual Pleasure’ than its modifying adjective.9 That this should be the case is unsurprising, given the overdetermined critique of identification and valorisation of spectatorial distance in post-1968 Anglophone film theory. This, as has been frequently described, combines a Lacanian critique of the subject’s misrecognition of themselves in the mirror stage; an Althusserian development of this in the idea of interpellation, individuals recognising themselves as the subject of ideology’s address; and an interpretation of Brecht’s critique of spectatorial identification. All of these inform, explicitly or implicitly, ‘Visual Pleasure’, where they are reworked through the anti-objectification politics of the women’s movement. Attacking the way the fetishistic image of women in narrative film ‘freezes the look, fixates the spectator and prevents him from achieving any distance from the image’, Mulvey does indeed demand ‘a distancing awareness in the audience’ and ‘the critical reading of the spectator’ as a counter.10 Nevertheless, I wish to question the tendency to simply assimilate Mulvey to this wider field of ‘Screen theory’ or ‘political modernism’, emblematised by Tania Modleski’s criticism of ‘certain Marxist/psychoanalytical film theories’, which by uncritically endorsing ‘distanciation’ and detachment (however ‘passionate’ this detachment is said to be) as the ‘proper’ – i.e. politically correct – mode of spectatorship, … to some extent participate in the repression of the feminine typical of the ‘semiotic system’ known as classic narrative cinema.11 Here, ‘passionate’ is invoked only to be quickly sidelined. Yet if what is signalled by the term is only critical distance, why should detachment be specified as passionate? Mulvey herself returns to the passionate detachment passage of ‘Visual Pleasure’ some thirty years later, arguing that the technologically enabled ability to pause, rewind, and fast-forward moving images has transformed the spectator’s look in the direction of the earlier model – a pensive, deciphering spectator experiencing new kinds of ‘pleasure, fascination and reflection’.12 Yet a better clue for my reading of the term comes from its perhaps unexpected take-up by Donna Haraway. Haraway, who draws it from Annette Kuhn rather than from Mulvey directly, uses it as a description of the stance of feminist and other ‘situated knowledges’. This is an attempt to negotiate between ‘two poles of a tempting dichotomy on the question of objectivity’, which ‘feminists have both selectively and flexibly used and been trapped by’: between the desire to demonstrate the partiality of analyses and discourses, recognising the way epistemological claims are necessarily implicated in positions associated with particular historical, collective subjects; and the desire to retain a realist, rather than relativist, epistemology in order to ground a leftist and feminist political practice.13 Although intervening in a different debate about postmodernism and science, Haraway’s usage grasps the two-sidedness that I am interested in, and suggests the wider affinity of the notion with other intellectual activity and cultural production emerging from the women’s movement. This two-sidedness can best be thought, I suggest, by placing the familiar anti-identification positions recapped above alongside the quite opposing stance laid out in Mulvey’s writing on classical Hollywood melodrama, specifically the films of Douglas Sirk, in the 1970s. For what is significant here is that the longest of these, ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’ from 1977, is staged precisely as a critique of the Bertolt Brecht-influenced reading of Sirk by male film theorists in the early 1970s. In writings by Jon Halliday and Paul Willemen, for example, Sirk’s historical ties to Brecht are underscored, such as the former’s staging of The Threepenny Opera in 1929.14 These buttress an understanding of Sirk as someone whose films, in Willemen’s words, ‘by altering the rhetoric of bourgeois melodrama … distanciate themselves from the bourgeois ideology’.15 Willemen’s position – the standard one for validating a classical director in Screen at this time – consists in seeing the director as a transgressor of the rules of the classic realist text, manipulating formal devices (irony, deliberate use of cliché, parody) to produce ideological contradiction through textual work. Willemen and Halliday share the notion that Sirk overcomes the melodramatic content of his films. Both highlight the way Sirk’s plots and subject matter were imposed by studios rather than freely chosen. Referring to Imitation of Life (1960), for instance, Halliday speaks of Sirk having to ‘transform the awful story’.16 As Christine Gledhill has shown, there is a problematic equation here of Sirk’s supposed critique of bourgeois ideology with his alleged surmounting of melodrama’s subject matter, given the historic gendering of the latter: The designation of the family as a bourgeois institution, the perceived materialisation of bourgeois ideology in these films in a sphere conventionally assigned to women – the home, family relations, domestic trivia, consumption, fantasy and romance, sentiment – all imply equivalence between the ‘feminine’ and bourgeois ideology.17 Discussing All that Heaven Allows (1956), for example, Halliday describes it as, on the surface, ‘a standard women’s magazine weepie – mawkish, mindless and reactionary’.18 Willemen too refers, with implicit disparagement, to ‘the stories in women’s weeklies’ whose characteristic devices Sirk made use of.19 The valorisation of the male auteur’s distancing of bourgeois ideology is achieved here on the basis of the reduction of the ‘female’ genre, with its denigrated associations with the domestic, motherhood, and female desire. More significant for my argument is the outworking of this in terms of the spectator. For despite the leftist political impetus behind Halliday and Willemen’s claims – which praise Sirk’s American films for their ability to subtly undermine the complacencies of the Eisenhower-era society they might otherwise be seen to endorse – in opposing a level of reactionary, self-evident content, to another of subversive formal strategies requiring decipherment, Willemen and Halliday postulate two audiences attuned to each level in a way that encodes class and gender. Willemen suggests, for example, ‘that there appears to be a discrepancy between the audience Sirk is aiming at and the audience which he knows will come to see his films’,20 and that ‘[a]lthough the films were products of, for, and about Eisenhower-America, they were misunderstood at that time. Sirk explained this in terms of the American audience’s failure to recognise irony … and the lack of a genuine film culture based on a theory of aesthetics’.21 They counterpose a naïve mass audience, exemplifying the invested spectatorship commonly thought to attend to melodrama, watching and misunderstanding these films in the 1950s, to a critical, analytical spectator, in the form of the radical critic, who arrives belatedly to watch and understand them in the 1970s.22 As Gledhill notes, the devalued mass audience, ‘which is implicated, identified and weeps’, is assumed to be female.23 Unlike Halliday and Willemen, Mulvey’s argument, determined to a large extent by her background in the women’s movement, is that the political potential of melodrama resides in the very reason for its historical neglect, its association with ‘women’s domain’, and, following from this, in the possibility of the female spectator’s recognition of her own lived ideological contradictions in what is represented on screen. Sirk is not played off against the genre here (even if he is seen as Hollywood melodrama’s zenith, his work is exemplary, not exceptional), nor is a cinematic critique of ideology understood as something to be deciphered by the critic, since ideological contradiction, far from being hidden in the genre, is its explicit subject matter, according to Mulvey.24 If, negatively, melodrama can work as an ideological ‘safety-valve’, a controlled release of pent-up anger and frustration produced by exploitation and oppression that ultimately strengthens bourgeois, patriarchal ideology through a cinematic working-through of problems pertaining to the family, gender, sexuality, and so on, it can also, positively, because it picks up on subject matter usually ignored or repressed and plays out contradiction as lived by characters, stimulate the spectator’s recognition in a valuable way. ‘The workings of patriarchy, the mould of feminine unconscious it produces, have left women largely without a voice, gagged and deprived of outlets’, Mulvey argues: In the absence of any coherent culture of oppression, the simple fact of recognition has aesthetic and political importance; there is a dizzy satisfaction in witnessing the way that sexual difference under patriarchy is fraught, explosive, and erupts dramatically into violence in its own private stamping ground, the family.25 For this reason, Mulvey values female point-of-view melodramas such as All That Heaven Allows, ‘coloured by a female protagonist’s point of view which provides a focus for identification’.26 ‘If the melodrama offers a fantasy escape for the identifying women in the audience’, Mulvey concludes, ‘the illusion is so strongly marked by recognisable, real and familiar traps that escape is closer to a day-dream than to fairy story.’27 It should be noted that Mulvey’s text does not mention factors that might counteract this identification, notably race. As bell hooks puts it, ‘white womanhood was the racialized sexual difference occupying the place of stardom in mainstream narrative film’, something she argues has historically made identifying with such images of women more problematic for black female spectators.28 hooks’s point applies not merely to the women as object of the gaze analysed in ‘Visual Pleasure’, but also problematises any implication that identification with the overwhelmingly white protagonists of melodrama valorised by Mulvey is universal. Nevertheless, Mulvey grants here a decisive political function to the possibility of female spectators’ identification with the protagonist and recognition of familiar situations on screen, even if this is always qualified and inflected by other aspects of a spectator’s identity. This is far from endorsing what Willemen means by ‘distanciation’ (an external, judging gaze on a particular society). The relationships to Brecht here are complicated and cannot simply be reduced to ‘Brechtian’ or ‘anti-Brechtian’. Willemen’s position picks up on Brecht’s frequent attacks on empathy, such as his claim that his ‘dramaturgy does not make use of the “identification” of the spectator with the play’, or the way the epic theatre spectator ‘stands on the opposite side’ and ‘studies’.29 Mulvey’s spectator, by contrast, is implicated, emotionally involved, sharing feelings and circumstances with the protagonist. Yet her position would seem more compatible with Brecht’s characterisation of epic theatre as a place where ‘emotions … are turned into insights’.30 Recognition, unlike the viewer’s identification with an imaginary other in the allegory of the mirror stage for spectatorial dynamics in ‘Visual Pleasure’, is not coded simply as misrecognition here. Identification is politically important because the normally repressed material and ideological contradictions these films put on view, for instance in the conflict between a particular woman’s desires and middle-class, patriarchal propriety in All that Heaven Allows, may already be lived by spectators. There is the possibility of an incipient, not yet quite conscious, politicisation of the personal. In a sense, I am proposing a variant of something apprehended by feminist film theorists of the late 1970s and 1980s – that the thesis of ‘Visual Pleasure’ is closely related to the feminist reappropriation of melodrama that Mulvey initiates. Closely related, because they describe opposite poles of a structure of gendered spectatorship: the female address and audience of melodrama make it a counter example to the male gaze identified in dominant narrative cinema.31 What I am suggesting is that the simultaneous validation by Mulvey, across these writings, of spectatorial distance and emotional investment is held together in the phrase ‘passionate detachment’. Moreover, it is played out artistically in Riddles of the Sphinx, released the same year as ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’. For if ‘Visual Pleasure’ points to avant-garde forms as a privileged counter-strategy, and ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’ forwards the political potentials of the female point-of-view melodrama, Riddles of the Sphinx brings these together in an avant-garde melodrama. Riddles of the Sphinx In an interview with Scott MacDonald, Mulvey says of Riddles of the Sphinx that ‘[w]e were interested in trying to make a movie in which form and structure were clearly visible but which would also have a space for feeling and emotion’.32 The central, narrative section of the film is the one I am most interested in here, specifically its melodramatic characteristics. ‘Louise’s story’ bears similarities to classical Hollywood maternal melodramas. Like Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945), it tells the story of a woman (played by Dinah Stabb) who separates from her husband, enters a public sphere of waged work, begins to raise her daughter as a single mother, and meets a woman who becomes a close friend (or romantic partner, depending on the viewer’s interpretation). Like Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), its central drama is the separation or increasing distance between mother and daughter. (However, the campaign around childcare that Louise will eventually participate in is far from the petty-bourgeois entrepreneurship of Mildred Pierce’s title character, and Riddles of the Sphinx’s narration of the weakening of the maternal bond is very different from its rendering in Stella Dallas, which is indicative of the way the film politicises these plot structures.) The melodramatic applies to Riddles of the Sphinx’s mise en scène as well as its subject matter, in its Sirk-influenced visual motifs of flowers and mirrors, and its expressive use of colour, props, and furniture. The kitchen and the bedroom of Louise’s daughter Anna (Rhiannon Tise) in the first two scenes, for instance, are neatly cluttered with household items. There is a wealth – even an excess – of pattern and detail, often at a miniature, childlike scale, while flower imagery, common in Sirk’s films, recurs across clothes, tea towels, aprons, curtains (Fig. 3). Warm, primary colours predominate, especially blue and yellow – on Louise’s clothes as well as objects. This harmony is broken, briefly, by the appearance of Louise’s husband Chris (Clive Merrison) at the end of the first scene, bringing with him a different colour scheme of brown and red. In contrast, the hallway in the third scene, the setting for Chris’s removal of his possessions due to the couple’s separation, is characterised by cold whites and dull browns, dead flowers and sparse furnishings (Fig. 4). In scenes five and six, we are presented with images of Louise’s workplace and its canteen: clothes and chairs in subdued colours; dreary, standardised furniture; what appear to be plastic flowers; empty space and hard, shiny surfaces that cause voices and switchboard and cutlery sounds to echo. By inhabiting the melodramatic genre, the recognising, identifying spectator Mulvey associates with it seems to be solicited. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, 16mm film. Courtesy of Laura Mulvey. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, 16mm film. Courtesy of Laura Mulvey. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, 16mm film. Courtesy of Laura Mulvey. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, 16mm film. Courtesy of Laura Mulvey. Yet in various ways the film encourages a distanced, detached perspective on ‘Louise’s story’. First, as Mulvey’s remark to MacDonald indicates, this is achieved through a deliberate and overt formalism. The film calls attention to its construction, as I noted in my introduction. Its seven segments are arranged symmetrically, framing the narrative portion at the centre: sections one and seven, two and six, and three and five correspond to one another. ‘Louise’s story’ is filmed in thirteen circular pans. Particularly in the kitchen and bedroom, intimate markers and actions – a teddy bear, birthday cards, the daughter held close against the mother’s body – are scanned in an impersonal way, as the camera rotates predictably, neutrally, and apparently automatically.33 These signifiers of domestic, familial intimacy are flattened uniformly into the rest of the space: in panning shots, as Volker Pantenburg observes, ‘visual attention is distributed evenly’.34 Second, the film encourages the viewer to take up a position of studying the mise en scène. In ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, Mulvey argues that the spectator of melodrama already takes an interpreting stance towards the mise en scène, since what is unspoken or repressed is projected onto staging, lighting, props, camera movement, and provides ‘a central point of orientation for the spectator’.35 But Riddles of the Sphinx amplifies this. For these Sirkian and more broadly melodramatic motifs are consciously taken as a rhetoric, an inventory of visual devices. A cinematic vocabulary is appropriated from a quite different kind of cinematic production – Hollywood of the 1950s – and inserted into a British independent film of the 1970s. Its devices are stylised, heavy with intended meaning, as in the striking yellow and blue colour coordination in the kitchen. Paradoxically, the use of melodramatic rhetoric distances the viewer, since it is legible as a rhetoric, and the spectator is encouraged to become a conscious reader of signs, a decoder of a pictographic script – something that is reflexively staged in the final pan over sarcophagi covered in hieroglyphs in the British Museum (Fig. 5). This is doubled by the camera’s panning motion. As Pantenburg again points out, pans have a privileged connection to the ‘landscape film’, mapping a terrain and making it available for the viewer to interpret. What is background becomes the primary material under investigation.36 Although most of Riddles of the Sphinx focuses the viewer’s attention not on landscape as traditionally conceived but on interiors, the viewer similarly deciphers the semiotic territory brought into view by panning: the floral patterns that run across Anna’s clothes and the soft furnishings of the house, indicating the close association of child and home, for example, or the significance of Louise reading the feminist magazine Spare Rib while supervising Anna on a climbing frame. The sense that this is a kind of reading is encouraged by the fact that, as Pantenburg notes, all but the last three move left-to-right, the same direction as reading and writing in English.37 Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, 16mm film. Courtesy of Laura Mulvey. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, 16mm film. Courtesy of Laura Mulvey. Third, the film sets up a number of anti-identification strategies. The repeated pans circumvent the anthropomorphic gaze castigated in ‘Visual Pleasure’.38 Louise’s story is told episodically, and each pan is preceded by a fragment of text that starts and ends abruptly. There are gaps in the narrative that obstruct the viewer being carried along unimpeded. Although identification is not ruled out, the work clearly aims to reduce the extent to which the spectator engages with the fictional world in terms of identification and the Lacanian imaginary. The central section of Riddles of the Sphinx is, we might say, a Brechtian melodrama: Louise’s is a ‘typical’ story, told non-psychologically in a kind of fable, laid out as a series of exemplary moments or tasks (cooking, childcare, separation from a husband, paid work outside the home, political organising, shopping, perhaps a lesbian romance). In fact, affinities between Brecht and melodrama are brought out here, as the emphasis in the latter on the gestural, frequently read by radical critics as ciphers of social meanings, can be read onto Brecht’s notion of ‘social gestus’, the gesture that crystallises social relations.39 In the kitchen, the camera is low and close to the characters’ bodies, meaning that while Anna’s face is visible, the focus for the adult characters is on their hands, shown near enough to view their significant movements. After seeing Louise’s hands hold Anna, clean her face, give her food, whisk eggs and wash up, the action of Chris’s hand casually reaching for the crusts Louise is cutting off toast takes on a social weight (Fig. 6). Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, 16mm film. Courtesy of Laura Mulvey. Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, 16mm film. Courtesy of Laura Mulvey. In my introduction, I noted that Mulvey was positioned as a filmmaker and theorist in section two, leaving out of the equation the fact of her also being a mother and a possible parallel with the character of Louise. In the twelfth pan of ‘Louise’s story’, however, the figure of the artist and theorist who is also a mother is explicitly brought into the film. In a scene set in an editing suite in which Chris works, he, Louise and Maxine (Merdelle Jordine) watch footage relating to Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document: film of the artwork itself on display, specifically the section ‘Documentation III: Analysed Markings and Diary-perspective Schema’; film of Kelly reading aloud diary entries that appear in the same section; and video of Kelly dressing her son. As Sandy Flitterman and Jacquelyn Suter argue, Kelly here enunciates motherhood in its simultaneous ‘theoretical, practical and emotional’ dimensions.40 The first images present work produced by an artist; the second the artist herself providing what Wollen calls ‘some elements of a metalanguage’,41 a frame of psychoanalytic theory for understanding the experience of motherhood; the third the same woman at work caring for her child. The figure of the mother–artist–theorist, when she appears in Riddles of the Sphinx, does so in mediated fashion, not in Mulvey but via another artwork and artist. Furthermore, this figure is held at another remove since Kelly and Post-Partum Document are displaced, in a mise en abyme, onto another representational plane: viewed projected and playing on a monitor by the film’s characters, they are a second order representation for the viewer. Elsewhere, the autobiographical does enter into ‘Louise’s story’ directly – literally, in fact, in the bodies of particular people. But it is in a more or less disguised fashion: Mulvey and Wollen’s son Chad is a distant figure in the seventh pan at a roundabout, for example, walking over a bridge with the artist Tina Keane, but this is impossible to tell only from the film; Wollen’s mother plays Louise’s mother; Louise’s daughter is played by the daughter of the cinematographer, Diane Tammes.42 Passionate Detachment, Art, and the Women’s Movement The central section of Riddles of the Sphinx, then, is variously melodramatic, intimate, biographical and affective. Yet these materials and devices are often carefully masked, held at a remove or countered within ‘Louise’s story’. Moreover, by being preceded by Mulvey’s lecture described earlier, they are placed in the context of a wider historical, political, and theoretical framework. Riddles of the Sphinx invites the viewer to be both identifying and analytical. Such spectatorship is what I have argued is suggested by the term ‘passionate detachment’.43 As my reference to Haraway above implies, ‘passionate detachment’ should be understood in relation to the most famous slogan of the women’s movement – ‘the personal is political’. It is a way of engaging and valorising the felt, lived, experiential investments of the viewer, while retaining and fostering activities of critical scrutiny and allowing enough distance to be able to view these investments as part of a larger social and political terrain. As Martha Rosler describes it in 1980, the personal is political ‘if it is understood to be so, and if one brings the consciousness of a larger, collective struggle to bear on questions of personal life, in the sense of regarding the two spheres as both dialectically opposed and unitary’, and ‘if one exposes to view the socially constrained elements within the supposed realm of freedom – namely, “the personal”’.44 Riddles of the Sphinx encourages the making of connections between the social and psychological, the family and capitalism, and – when shown in the context of the women’s movement – for the viewer to relate these to her own experience. Precisely because ‘passionate detachment’ can be understood as a theoretical and artistic working out of ‘the personal is political’, similar arguments can be discerned in the writings of other feminist film theorists and art historians in the same period. Gledhill, for example, while admitting the necessity of aspects of the anti-identification polemic of 1970s film theory and counter-cinema, draws attention in 1978 to the countervailing pressure dictated by feminist politics. The women’s movement, she argues, ‘has set great store on the interrogation of personal experience and consciousness-raising as a form of work aimed at uncovering the personal and creating new identifications for individual women where the recognition of a gender position in terms of the category women, as opposed to the patriarchal abstractions of “woman,” “the eternal feminine,” etc., is precisely to leave behind an individual identification and begin to recast the self in terms of a group membership’.45 In this perspective, identification and recognition cannot be abandoned, but must be reworked. Mulvey and Gledhill’s positions here are closely related to the way the categories of ‘expression’ and ‘authorship’ were frequently negotiated in the same context. On the one hand there was the critique or erasure of the author or artist in anti-humanist theory, minimalist and conceptual art, and structural film, from which a significant amount of feminist writing on art and film took its bearings. On the other hand, as writers like Pam Cook and Lisa Tickner pointed out, the attack on the author had different stakes for women, who were virtually excluded from this privileged authorial position in the first place, and for whom less public forms of self-expression – such as the diary or correspondence – had been historically important.46 Some place for expression and the role of the artist, author or director would therefore seem to require retention, although without falling back into an ideology of the artwork as the direct expression of an individual’s subjectivity.47 It is with this tension in mind that we can further interpret ‘Laura speaking’ and the autobiographical elements I delineated above – a way of acknowledging the position of the woman filmmaker while mitigating the chances of the film being seen as the mere expression of the director’s subjectivity (or directors’ subjectivities, in this jointly-made work). They exemplify the complex way in which, as Tickner puts it, ‘the preconditions for [the woman’s artist’s] artistic practice and the determinations on it’ can be made visible by a film – as with the objects laid out on the table in ‘Laura speaking’, for example – and how the woman artist’s position is ‘repressed, refracted, or revealed in her work’.48 As such, ‘passionate detachment’ is exemplary of what Siona Wilson calls ‘a shift at the level of aesthetic form – an emergent political aesthetic’ generated by the women’s movement, ‘a way to unpack the complex social changes and conflicts embedded in that simple slogan “The personal is the political”’.49 For this reason, I wish to indicate the concept’s validity beyond the films of Mulvey and Wollen by using it to discuss Kelly’s Post-Partum Document. While other works might have been chosen here – obvious candidates would be Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975) or Lives of Performers (Yvonne Rainer, 1972) – I focus on Post-Partum Document because of Kelly’s close connections with Mulvey and because it allows a discussion extending beyond cinema.50 An installation composed of six sections and an introduction, Post-Partum Document documents Kelly’s own experience of motherhood. It centres on the period of early childhood, telling it from the perspective of the mother, with the father as a peripheral character. Its drama is that of the child’s growth and acquisition of language, the mother’s labour of care, and the emotions that accompany the child going out into the world beyond the home. Its narrative, then, like Riddles of the Sphinx, is that of the maternal melodrama, with Kelly playing the lead role. Indeed, the work manifests all the components B. Ruby Rich identifies as making up women-centred film melodramas: ‘the presence of a woman at the center of the film; a domestic setting, usually the site of domestic conflict; an ellipsis of time to allow the development of emotion, always central to the drama; extreme verbalization, which replaces physical action as the means of communication for the now interior movement; and finally, the woman’s ultimate decision to release her emotions.’51 That is, except for the last of these, since the work does not conclude in a moment of catharsis. Rather, Post-Partum Document maintains throughout a simultaneous ‘proximity and distance’, in Griselda Pollock’s words.52 Displayed across the different parts of Post-Partum Document are familiar, fetishised objects, things that the child, Kelly Barrie, has touched or that bear the imprint of his body: pieces of paper with scribbles or attempts at writing on them, casts of his small fist, used nappy liners. These are things – with the probable exception of the nappy liners – that a parent might keep as a trace of their child’s infancy. Yet the emotional associations of these objects and events are countered via an ‘aesthetic of administration’:53 transcribed onto index cards or framed on entomological pinning blocks, they are ordered, taxonomised, catalogued, annotated, and analysed, often with the help of scientific or quasi-scientific regimes (often parodied) such as linguistics, psychoanalysis, botany, or zoology. Post-Partum Document is thus characterised by what Margaret Iversen describes as a ‘juxtaposition of private traces and theoretical discourse’ in which the ‘intimacy of the index’ is intertwined with a ‘hypertrophy of the symbolic’.54 Or, as Eve Meltzer similarly describes the ‘Introduction’, it ‘oscillates between the sterility of a specimen and the affective charge of a memento, between the alienation of information and the longing of a document’.55 The determinations and desired effects of this are crystallised in separate statements by Kelly. On the one hand, Post-Partum Document ‘argues against the supposed self-sufficiency of lived experience and for a theoretical elaboration of the social relations in which femininity is formed’,56 which might suggest the priority of the analytical moment; on the other, ‘it’s absolutely crucial that this kind of pleasure in the text, in the objects themselves, should engage the viewer, because there’s no point at which it can become a deconstructed critical engagement if the viewer is not first – immediately and affectively – drawn into the work.’57 The result is something like what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls ‘critical intimacy’ – a critical investigation from within.58 This is exemplified in the use in Post-Partum Document, like in Riddles of the Sphinx’s ‘voice off’, of what Roman Jakobson calls ‘shifters’: grammatical units whose meaning depends on what position they are uttered from, including pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘he’ and ‘her’.59 These are present, for instance, in the phrases written onto Lacanian figures that close each section: ‘(WHY IS HE/SHE LIKE THAT?)’, ‘(WHAT HAVE I DONE WRONG?)’, and so on (Fig. 7). Such shifters produce a neutral, anonymous field, since ‘I’ can be anyone, everyone, and no-one. Yet at the same time, it is precisely because ‘I’ can be anyone that the viewer can situate themselves in the geometry of utterances as much as any fictional character or biographical figure – they can be drawn into the work. Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Mary Kelly, Study for Post-Partum Document: Algorithms, 1974, Perspex frame, typewrite ink on paper, 8 units, 28 x 35.5 cm. Courtesy of Pippy Houldsworth, London. Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Mary Kelly, Study for Post-Partum Document: Algorithms, 1974, Perspex frame, typewrite ink on paper, 8 units, 28 x 35.5 cm. Courtesy of Pippy Houldsworth, London. In its combination of indexicality and narration, Post-Partum Document is film-like. As Amy Tobin has described, radical cinema, in the form of works such as Othon (Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, 1969) and Riddles of the Sphinx, had an important impact on Kelly’s practice in the mid-1970s, traceable in the formal strategies of her works.60 In a 1983 conversation with Mulvey at the ICA in London, Kelly speaks of the influence of another film by Mulvey and Wollen: in fact it was the context of feminist film theory that actually gave more impetus to the way the ideas developed in my work than perhaps the fine art context. I was thinking in particular of Penthesilea, the film based on Kleist’s version of the Amazon myth, that you and Peter (Wollen) made in 1974. I remember how it was divided into sequences and I thought at the time, why can’t you expect that much from an artwork? Why can’t an artwork be like a film, why can’t it be drawn out, perhaps serialized, and the spectator be drawn into it in a way that creates the space for a critical reading?61 Like a cinema spectator, the viewer is pulled through Post-Partum Document in a linear manner, following a story unfolding in narrative time as well as gallery space, the seriality of the elements within each section evoking the frames of a film, the larger parts suggesting the blocks of film in the works of Huillet and Straub or Mulvey and Wollen. When Mulvey responds by suggesting this is a form of montage, Kelly clarifies that it is more closely allied with the long take and duration. Again linking Mulvey and Wollen’s work with Huillet and Straub’s Othon, she states that ‘[w]hat fascinated about their film and yours was the way the long take could be so emotionally appealing and at the same time analytical. This was an effect that I attempted to get by dividing the document into sections, that is, to create a kind of expectation of narrative development, but one that’s never resolved.’62 While resemblance between Post-Partum Document and Riddles of the Sphinx can be traced across the works as a whole, ‘Documentation V: Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index’ can be taken as an example here (Fig. 8).63 The materials displayed in this section date from summer 1976 to autumn 1977, roughly the time of Riddles of the Sphinx’s production and release. ‘Documentation V’ is made up of 36 Perspex units, most of which are arranged in groups of three. Each of these trios begins with a plant or invertebrate specimen on a pinning block, accompanied by data regarding its nature and collection. This is followed by a unit containing a reproduction of the specimen on a grid, and a transcribed fragment of conversation involving Kelly’s son. The third units in each group include a square fragment of a single diagram of a full-term pregnancy, and beneath an index of related scientific terms, in alphabetical order. The square acts something like a film frame, cutting out different (though sometimes overlapping) sections of the original drawing each time, scanning this body across eleven different images in ‘Documentation V’. In particular, the last four images – labelled ‘Fig. 8b’ to ‘Fig. 11b’ – move down the right side of the body a little at a time, functioning like a rostrum camera, tracking shot, tilt or vertical pan in cinema. Whether the original drawing derives from a scientific textbook or pregnancy manual, implying two very different audiences, is unclear. Meanwhile, each index’s re-presentation of pregnancy-related words draws out the poetic quality of a medical discourse, a pregnant subject’s stream-of-consciousness seemingly enunciated through clinical language: ‘PAIN-IN-THE-HANDS, PAIN-IN-THE-LEGS, PELVIC CAVITY, PELVIC EXAMINATION’. Its verbal forms recall the Sphinx’s ‘voice off’: ‘Make love. Make grieve. Marries. Mother’s and another’s. Mysteries.’ Complicated here, then, are questions of who is speaking, who is being addressed, and what mode of engagement is being solicited. Fig. 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index, 1977, Perspex units, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 3 of 36 units, 13 x 18 cm each. Courtesy of Generali Foundation, Vienna. Fig. 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index, 1977, Perspex units, white card, wood, paper, ink, mixed media, 3 of 36 units, 13 x 18 cm each. Courtesy of Generali Foundation, Vienna. In important respects, Post-Partum Document and Riddles of the Sphinx differ from one another. Post-Partum Document is stoic in its mourning of the inevitable loss of the child’s accession to the symbolic, concentrated, and pared down in its form. Riddles of the Sphinx is, despite its austere moments, frequently sensuous and warm, its music and colours making visual pleasures available to the viewer, centrifugal in its numerous references to other films, playful in its formal games. Yet each recruits and refashions the melodramatic genre in the context of the women’s movement: central to both is a narrative structured around a mother’s desires, in which the viewer’s emotional engagement, identification, and recognition are checked by a distancing produced through theoretical discourse and rigorous organisational structures, encouraging the viewer to maintain an analytical perspective and follow the social threads through and out of the works. This passionate detachment is exemplary of a desire to produce the conditions for the spectator to read the personal politically. Disavowed Cinephilia and Dialectics Although I have set the term ‘passionate detachment’ in the context of the women’s movement, before concluding I want to open up two further issues. First, the term’s exemplification of the contradictory affect of the cinephile-turned-theorist, most famously encapsulated in Christian Metz’s phrase, in an essay published in the issue of Screen immediately preceding the one that carried ‘Visual Pleasure’, that ‘[t]o be a theoretician of the cinema, one should ideally no longer love the cinema and yet still love it’.64 In Metz’s metapsychological account, love for cinema is the motor force that pushes one to take up a theoretical relation to the object cinema, one that ultimately results in placing this love under suspicion in a reversal that Metz calls a ‘backward turn’. Yet this same cinephilia poses a constant threat to this theoretical relation, pulling one back down into the pre-critical mire.65 The theorist, Metz argues, should ‘not have lost sight of [the cinephile they once were], but be keeping an eye on him’, must ‘be him and not be him’.66 Both ‘Visual Pleasure’ and ‘The Imaginary Signifier’ exemplify the ‘“negative” or disavowed cinephilia’ that Thomas Elsaesser, among others, cites as one of the foundations of the critical film theory of the 1970s.67 This politicised theory emerged (in France in the late 1960s, and in Britain in the early 1970s) from a culture characterised by, in Elsaesser’s words, ‘more than a passion for going to the movies, and only a little less than an entire attitude to life’,68 a seemingly excessive love for and dedication to cinema-going, particularly influenced by the canon constructed by Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s and 1960s. But soon this good object was transformed into a bad one, as theory attempted to rigorously identify and eliminate irrational and nefarious dynamics in the film-text, the cinema apparatus and critical discourse. Mulvey has described her passionate cinephilia of the 1960s, tracking down films by illustrious directors in the newspaper and travelling across London to different cinemas; and the subsequent aiming of the instruments of psychoanalysis and semiotics at these films under the impetus of feminism in the 1970s.69 But if it is true that, as Chuck Kleinhans writes of the meticulous dissections of classical cinema by Raymond Bellour in this period, ‘the elation of cinephilia was replaced by the science of autopsy’,70 the ghost of the fan continued to haunt the theorist. For to subject the formerly loved object to criticism or the body of the film to autopsy allows the theorist to remain close to it.71 This is indicated, for example, by the continuation of a canon of classical auteurs – Alfred Hitchcock, Josef von Sternberg, Orson Welles – as the subjects of critical writing. As Serge Daney reflects, looking back on the trajectory of Cahiers du cinéma through the 1960s and 1970s, ‘[t]his criticism was obviously a last homage, more or less avowed, that we rendered to what we have always loved. We wanted to reread [John] Ford, not [John] Huston, to dissect [Robert] Bresson and not Rene Clair, to psychoanalyze [André] Bazin and not Pauline Kael.’72 Wollen writes similarly: ‘[m]y cinephilia, my obsessive love of the great old Hollywood films, never ever left me. … At some level, cinephilia simply transcended the politics of art or the aesthetics of the avant-garde’.73 ‘Passionate detachment’ then, also seems to sum up Mulvey’s intertwined personal, intellectual, and political histories, her ‘innocent’ love of classical Hollywood, its undercutting by a hermeneutics of suspicion, and her continued emotional investment in cinema despite this.74 It functions as an admission of layered, ambivalent affect towards cinema. Riddles of the Sphinx is, in part, fan-like, a love letter or homage: not only to Douglas Sirk and melodrama (which were spared the harsh critique of ‘Visual Pleasure’, as I have noted), but also to the fluid camera of Max Ophüls in its panning shots, to the Sternberg-like folds of curtains, netting, hanging beads, tassels, and creepers in Maxine’s bedroom,75 and more broadly to the potentials of mise en scène as a vehicle of meaning, as elucidated in Cahiers du cinéma in the 1960s.76 There is a continued cinephilic pleasure in allusion to other films, as in the way ‘Laura Speaking’ and ‘Laura Listening’ appear to cite Joy of Learning (Le Gai savoir, Jean-Luc Godard, 1969). These cinephilic impulses and references, though, are set to work in a critical context. The demand to free the spectator into ‘passionate detachment’ suggests a desire to turn the spectator into a theorist, as the need for the viewer’s ‘critical reading’ stated in ‘Visual Pleasure’ suggests; but this position of the theorist is ambivalent, unstable, underwritten in a contradictory way by obsession, pleasure, fascination. A tense position, surely, but also one that might be productive.77 Second is how ‘passionate detachment’ links with ‘dialectics’. In Mulvey’s text the two are separated by a comma, indicating an ambiguous, under-specified relation: are they synonymous, identical, overlapping, similar? (The version of ‘Visual Pleasure’ reprinted in Mulvey’s 1989 essay collection Visual and Other Pleasures apparently tightens up the meaning by turning the comma into an ‘and’, suggesting that they are not exactly the same thing.) In fact, Metz’s account of the tension between fan and theorist at certain points suggests a dialectical relation, for instance when he speaks of the need ‘[t]o have broken with [cinema], as certain relationships are broken, not in order to move on to something else, but in order to return to it at the next bend in the spiral’.78 Here, rejection enables a return at a higher level. One might therefore think ‘passionate detachment’ through the dialectical categories of contradiction and motion: the contradiction between the two terms, but also the spectator’s movement between them. If fetishism, in Mulvey’s account in ‘Visual Pleasure’, ‘freezes the look, fixates the spectator’, the counter-measure of dialectical spectatorship implies something in process, dynamic. Fredric Jameson contrasts the ‘objective apprehension of a merely external kind of totality’ in ‘various scientific disciplines’ where ‘the thinking mind itself remains cool and untouched, skilled but unselfconscious’, with dialectical thinking, which is ‘thought to the second power, a thought about thinking itself, in which the mind must deal with its own thought process just as much as with the material it works on, in which both the particular content involved and the style of thinking suited to it must be held together in the mind at the same time’.79 The thinking subject is itself implicated along with the material it thinks about, and thinking becomes, in that catchword of 1970s film theory, reflexive. On this model, dialectical spectatorship would be a spectatorship in which the viewer’s activities are forced to consciousness and become an object of apprehension along with the film itself. For Mulvey to speak of ‘dialectics’, of course, suggests another genealogy for ‘passionate detachment’ alongside that of feminism and disavowed cinephilia: radical cinema. Here I am thinking of filmmakers and theorists of the same period, such as Godard and Noël Burch,80 but also of an earlier moment of revolutionary filmmaking in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov particularly. But where Eisenstein, for example, talks a great deal about dialectical construction in film, he can hardly be understood as wanting to liberate the spectator as Mulvey does. In Eisenstein’s conception, as Dana Polan points out, the film can only succeed by ‘gripping’ the spectator, who must have ‘surrendered’ to its power, so that the emotions or ideas produced by montage can be communicated.81 If Mulvey’s invocation of dialectics suggests a kinship with the Soviet avant-garde, these ideas are reworked through arguments more contemporary to her, of figures such as Roland Barthes and Jean-Louis Baudry, in which the reader is understood to be a producer rather than consumer of meaning.82 Dialectics, in fact, is understood more expansively by Mulvey than Eisenstein – not merely within the film, but in the relationship between spectator and film also, as the viewer is encouraged, exhorted even – as in much film theoretical discourse of the period – to actively construct the film rather than merely passively contemplate it.83 Conclusion: Attached to Detachment Writing about Post-Partum Document, Eve Meltzer proposes that the work does not merely show how emotional materials can be formalised and intellectualised by filtering of maternal experience through psychoanalytic schema and conceptual forms. It does the reverse as well: what also becomes visible is Kelly’s own deeply felt investment in these apparently ‘dry and calculating’ modes of thinking and representing. These discourses of distancing are invested with an affect all of their own: ‘complexity itself, scientism itself, and hyperbolic cerebralism are themselves generative of affect’.84 Up to now, I have described ‘passionate detachment’ as a position in which impassioned engagement and critical detachment co-exist. Countervailing relations towards a third thing work upon and against one another in productive tension, as a consequence of political demands. But what if Meltzer’s reading of Post-Partum Document opens up a further possibility, that the object of passion is also detachment itself? Not just passion and detachment, in other words, but passion for detachment. First, there is the pleasure taken in the semiotic act of decoding, which Elin Diamond sums up in a phrase by Gertrude Stein: ‘I love to read the signs’.85 Mulvey herself speaks of the intellectual satisfaction of deciphering that emerged for her after the rejection of other pleasures in ‘Visual Pleasure’.86 Second, there is the deep investment in spectatorial distance and critical analysis as part of a larger project that is artistic, intellectual, and, ultimately, political. Hence the fervent, polemical style of ‘Visual Pleasure’, which is full of emotive language (‘stolen’, ‘attacked’, ‘destroys’), makes its points tersely, draws its lines sharply without pausing to add nuance or qualification, and deploys some of the bolder modal verbs – can, must, will – in its closing section. In invoking affect and emotion alongside distance and detachment my intention is not to contribute to a depoliticising defusing of critique represented by, say, Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique.87 I am not proposing affirmation against negation. Nor am I arguing that Mulvey’s work should not be considered Brecht-influenced or ‘Brechtian’ simply because there is a stress on passionate engagement. Brecht, after all, writes in a poem that ‘When I say what things are like/Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds’.88 I am proposing, though, that questions of identification, empathy, emotion, and personal investment are important to understanding a theory and practice that emerges from the women’s movement (and from cinephilia). Something is at stake here that precludes pure detachment of the kind represented by the scientific disciplines that Jameson describes as strangers to dialectical thought. Political and artistic projects such as those that Mulvey participates in and contributes to, however critical, are necessarily bound up with enthusiasm and dedication, even the apparently hyper-intellectual protocols of 1970s Anglophone film theory.89 They are permeated with thrill and desire: ‘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 to conceive a new language of desire.’90 Footnotes 1 The ‘Booklist’ at the end of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, first published in 1969, lists various texts on iconography, which connect with Wollen’s interest in semiotics. See Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, 5th ed. (London: BFI, 2013), pp. 249–51. 2 Catherine Grant, ‘Returning to Riddles’, in Lucy Reynolds (ed.), Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 62. 3 Grant, ‘Returning to Riddles’, p. 62. 4 Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 206–9. 5 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, ‘Riddles of the Sphinx: Script’, Screen, vol. 18, no. 2, Summer 1977, p. 61. 6 Mandy Merck, ‘Mulvey’s Manifesto’, Camera Obscura, vol. 66, September, 2007, p. 2. 7 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, Autumn 1975, p. 18. 8 See Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 1997); Amy Rust, Passionate Detachments: Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018). The term is also used as a chapter title in Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and the Cinema (London: Routledge, 1982). 9 For two recent examples, see Lutz Koepnick, ‘Laura Mulvey the Curious Cinephile’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, vol. 15, no. 4, 2017, pp. 442–3, and Anu Koivunen, ‘The Promise of Touch: Turns to Affect in Feminist Film Theory’, in Anna Backman Rogers and Laura Mulvey (eds), Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), pp. 100–1. John David Rhodes, however, points to the sentence as a whole’s ‘combination of passion, thought, form and politics’ in a way that speaks to this essay. John David Rhodes, ‘Introduction’, Screen, vol. 56, no. 4, Winter 2015, p. 472. 10 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, pp. 17–18. 11 Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Criticism (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 8–9. 12 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), pp. 190–1. 13 Donna J. Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 192, 183. 14 Paul Willemen, ‘Towards an Analysis of the Sirkian System’, Screen, vol. 13, no. 4, Winter 1972, p. 128; see also Jon Halliday (ed.), Sirk on Sirk (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), pp. 18–19, 23–4. 15 Paul Willemen, ‘Distanciation and Douglas Sirk’, Screen, vol. 12, no. 2, Summer 1971, p. 67. For other moments at which the ‘Brechtianism’ of this reading of Sirk is made explicit, see Jon Halliday, ‘Notes on Sirk’s German Films’, Screen, vol. 12, no. 2, Summer 1971, p. 11, and Willemen, ‘Towards an Analysis of the Sirkian System’, pp. 128–9. 16 Willemen, ‘Distanciation’, p. 64; Halliday (ed.), Sirk on Sirk, pp. 9, 10. 17 Christine Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’, in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: BFI, 1987), p. 12. 18 Halliday (ed.), Sirk on Sirk, p. 10. 19 Willemen, ‘Distanciation’, p. 66. 20 Willemen, ‘Distanciation’, p. 65. 21 Willemen, ‘Towards an Analysis of the Sirkian System’, p. 130. 22 Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field’, p. 11. 23 Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field’, p. 12. 24 Laura Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave, 2009), p. 41. Originally published in Movie, vol. 25, Winter 1977–8, pp. 53–6. 25 Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, pp. 41–2. 26 Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, pp. 42–3. 27 Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, p. 46. Mulvey’s argument is summarised in Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field’, p. 10. 28 As hooks notes (the essay was originally published in 1992), this has been reproduced at the level of theory, as ‘many feminist film theorists continue to structure their discourse as though it speaks about “women” when in actuality it speaks only about white women’. bell hooks, ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’, in Black Looks: Race and Representation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 122–3. For further discussion of black female spectators and melodrama, see Miriam Thaggert, ‘Divided Images: Black Female Spectatorship and John Stahl’s Imitation of Life’, African American Review, vol. 32, no. 3, Autumn 1998, pp. 481–91. Mulvey’s later writing on melodrama does take race as a significant axis: see, for instance, ‘Social Hieroglyphics: Reflections on Two Films by Douglas Sirk’, in Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 29–39. 29 Bertolt Brecht, ‘The German Drama: Pre-Hitler’, in Brecht on Theatre, ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 144; ‘Notes on the Opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’, in Brecht on Theatre, p. 74. 30 Brecht, ‘Notes on the Opera’, p. 74. 31 See, for example, Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 3, which itself quotes an earlier articulation of this idea by Pam Cook. 32 Laura Mulvey, interview in Scott MacDonald (ed.), A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), p. 334. 33 The movements are not produced by a machine, however, but manually. The different pans vary in length. 34 Volker Pantenburg, ‘Panoramique: Panning over Landscapes’, in Christophe Girot and Fred Truniger (eds), Landscape, Vision, Motion (Berlin: jovis, 2012), p. 129. 35 Mulvey, ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, p. 43. 36 Pantenburg, ‘Panoramique’, p. 122. 37 Pantenburg, ‘The Third Avant-Garde: Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen and the Theory-Film’, lecture at Whitechapel Gallery, London, 14 May 2016. 38 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 9. 39 Bertolt Brecht, ‘On Gestic Music’, in Brecht on Theatre, pp. 194–5. 40 Sandy Flitterman and Jacqueline Suter, ‘Textual Riddles: Woman as Enigma or Site of Social Meanings? An Interview with Laura Mulvey’, Discourse, vol. 1, Fall 1979, p. 96. 41 Peter Wollen, ‘The Field of Language in Film’, October, vol. 17, Summer 1981, p. 58. 42 Some of this information is given by Mulvey in the commentary to the BFI DVD/Blu-ray of the film. 43 It is this state of being ‘available for both analysis and identification’ that Elin Diamond views as characteristic of what she terms the ‘Brechtian-feminist paradigm’, which she associates with Mulvey’s ‘dialectics, passionate detachment’. Elin Diamond, ‘Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Towards a Gestic Feminist Criticism’, TDR, vol. 32, no. 1, Spring 1988, pp. 89–90. 44 Martha Rosler, ‘Well, is the Personal Political?’, statement for the conference ‘Questions on Women’s Art’, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 15–16 November 1980, in Hilary Robinson (ed.), Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology 1968–2014 (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), p. 69. 45 Christine Gledhill, ‘Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, 1978, p. 471. For a rendering of the issues I outline across this section, see Griselda Pollock, ‘Theory and Pleasure’, in Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (eds), Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–1985 (London: Pandora, 1987), pp. 244–8, originally published in the catalogue for the 1982 exhibition in Nottingham ‘Sense and Sensibility’. 46 Pam Cook, ‘The Point of Expression in Avant-Garde Film’, in Catalogue: British Film Institute Productions 1977–78 (London: BFI, 1978), pp. 53–6; Lisa Tickner, ‘Feminism, Art History and Sexual Difference’, Genders, vol. 3, Fall 1988, pp. 101–2. 47 See also Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, ‘Fifteen Years of Feminist Action: From Practical Strategies to Strategic Practices’, in Parker and Pollock (eds), Framing Feminism, pp. 44–5. 48 Tickner, ‘Feminism, Art History and Sexual Difference’, p. 102. 49 Siona Wilson, ‘Structures of Feeling: Yvonne Rainer circa 1974’, October, vol. 152, Spring 2015, pp. 4–5, 25. 50 Jeanne Dielman is suggested by Kuhn as exemplifying Mulvey’s term, though Kuhn does not develop the idea: see Kuhn, Women’s Pictures, p. 169. The tension between empathy and minimalist coolness in Rainer’s film is the subject of Carrie Lambert-Beatty, ‘Lives of Performers and the Trouble with Empathy’, in Ted Perry (ed.), Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 297–322. In the 1970s, Kelly and Mulvey were both members of the History Group, a feminist study group, and wrote about each other’s work. See Mary Kelly, ‘Penthesilea’, Spare Rib, vol. 30, December 1974, p. 42, and Laura Mulvey, ‘Post-Partum Document’, Spare Rib, vol. 53, December 1976, p. 40, reprinted in Parker and Pollock (eds), Framing Feminism, p. 203. 51 B. Ruby Rich, ‘The Films of Yvonne Rainer’, in Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 139. 52 Griselda Pollock, ‘Still Working on the Subject: Feminist Poetics and its Avant-Garde Moment’, in Sabine Breitwieser (ed.), Rereading Post-Partum Document (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 1999), p. 252. 53 The term comes from Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’, in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 514–37. 54 Margaret Iversen, ‘‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Own Desire: Reading Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document’, in Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 208. 55 Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2013), p. 173. 56 Mary Kelly, ‘Notes on Reading the Post-Partum Document’, in Mignon Nixon (ed.), Mary Kelly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), pp. 1–2, first published in Control Magazine 10 (1977), pp. 10–12. 57 Quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, ‘Foreword’, in Kelly, Post-Partum Document, p. xiv. 58 ‘Critical Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 26 July 2016, <https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/critical-intimacy-interview-gayatri-chakravorty-spivak/> [accessed 12 December 2019]. 59 Roman Jakobson, ‘Shifters and Verbal Categories’, in On Language, ed. by Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 388–9. Mulvey mentions Jakobson’s term in the BFI DVD/blu-ray commentary to this section. Yvonne Rainer’s use of shifters, which is also extensive, is analysed in Wilson, ‘Structures of Feeling’, pp. 16–21. 60 Amy Tobin, ‘Women and Work’, Tate in Focus, forthcoming. 61 ‘Mary Kelly and Laura Mulvey in Conversation’, in Mary Kelly, Imaging Desire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 29. Originally published in the US publication Afterimage, vol. 8 (1986). 62 ‘Mary Kelly and Laura Mulvey in Conversation’, p. 29. 63 For the numerous parallels and shared context of the two works see Peter Wollen, ‘Thirteen Paragraphs’, in Judith Mastai (ed.), Social Process/Collaborative Action: Mary Kelly 1970–1975 (Vancouver: Charles H. Scott Gallery, 1997), pp. 25–31. 64 Christian Metz, ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 2, Summer 1975, p. 26. 65 Metz, ‘Imaginary Signifier’, p. 16. 66 Metz, ‘Imaginary Signifier’, p. 26. 67 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment’, in Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds), Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), p. 32. 68 Elsaesser, ‘Cinephilia or the Uses of Disenchantment’, p. 27. 69 Laura Mulvey, ‘Introduction to the Second Edition’, in Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. xiii–xv. 70 Chuck Kleinhans, ‘Young Mr. Lincoln and Ideological Analysis: A Reconsideration (with Many Asides)’, Jump Cut, vol. 55, Fall 2013, <https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc55.2013/KleinhansCahiersInContext/text.html> [accessed 3 July 2019]. 71 Despite his suspicion in his essay of the fan-relation, his desire to win cinema for the symbolic and wrest it away from the imaginary associated with the cinephile, for Metz the fan cannot, ultimately, be annihilated, since he or she is the paradoxical condition of existence of the theorist; nor can the affective currents in the theorist’s engagement with film ever be entirely erased. See ‘Imaginary Signifier’, pp. 16, 25. 72 Serge Daney, ‘Les Cahiers du Cinema 1968–1977’, trans. Bill Krohn, formerly online at <http://home.earthlink.net/∼steevee/Daney_1977.html> [accessed 13 November 2013], originally in The Thousand Eyes, vol. 2 (1977). 73 Wollen, Signs and Meaning, 5th ed., p. 237. 74 hooks suggests that ‘[w]atching movies from a feminist perspective, Mulvey arrived at the location of disaffection that is the starting point for many black women approaching cinema within the lived harsh reality of racism’. hooks, ‘The Oppositional Gaze’, p. 125. 75 See Mulvey’s description of Sternberg’s mise en scène in ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 14, itself derived from Wollen’s earlier writing on Sternberg. 76 See Jim Hillier, ‘Introduction: Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1960s’, in Jim Hillier (ed.), Cahiers du Cinéma, 1960–1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 2. 77 Although her emphases are somewhat different, analysing examples of artworks where the artist productively inhabits the position of the fan (notably through reenactment) and reflecting on the valences of fandom in relation to the object of second wave feminism, and stressing less tension between the roles of fan and art historian, I am influenced here by Catherine Grant’s attempt to revalue the fan in ‘Fans of Feminism’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 34, no. 2, 2011, pp. 265–86. Significantly, Grant’s essay concludes with a discussion of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, a 2006 work made jointly by Emma Hedditch and Laura Mulvey. 78 Metz, ‘Imaginary Signifier’, p. 26. 79 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 45. 80 See the invocation of dialectics in Jean-Luc Godard, ‘What is to be Done?’, Afterimage, no. 1, April 1970, n.p., and the section on dialectics in Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen R. Lane (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973). 81 Dana Polan, ‘Eisenstein as Theorist’, Cinema Journal, vol. 17, no. 1, Autumn 1977, pp. 22, 28n5. 82 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), pp. 4, 10; Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Writing, Fiction, Ideology’, trans. Diana Matias, Afterimage, vol. 5 (Spring, 1974), pp. 30–1. Such theories have an antecedent in Walter Benjamin, who speaks of the need to transform ‘readers or spectators into collaborators’ in ‘The Author as Producer’, in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anya Bostock (New York: Verso, 1998), p. 98. 83 As Polan notes (‘Eisenstein as Theorist’, p. 28n5), there is an attempt by Annette Michelson in the early 1970s to read Eisenstein as demanding spectatorial participation in a film’s meaning, in texts Mulvey may have been familiar with. See Annette Michelson, ‘Introduction’, in Burch, Theory of Film Practice, pp. v–xv. 84 Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved, pp. 175 and 177. 85 Diamond, ‘Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory’, p. 90. 86 See, for instance, Mulvey, ‘Introduction to the Second Edition’, p. xvi. 87 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 88 Bertolt Brecht, ‘And I Always Thought’, trans. Michael Hamburger, in Poems 1913–1956, ed. by John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981), p. 452. 89 Similar issues are traced in a different, 1950s context in Larne Abse Gogarty and Hannah Proctor, ‘Communist Feelings’, New Socialist, 13 March 2019, <https://newsocialist.org.uk/communist-feelings-lessing-gornick/?fbclid=IwAR0cA72G5risuWDlKv_XCKXIlr2FhAyDetoWaegr4_HwsWusrsCVIzCDD1w> [accessed 4 July 2019]. 90 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, p. 8. Acknowledgements James Clow, Lina Dzuverovic, Oliver Fuke, Catherine Grant, Tom Hastings, Anneke Kampman, Mandy Merck, Laura Mulvey, Amy Tobin. Some of the ideas in this article came from the conversation in my PhD viva with my examiners Esther Leslie and Lucy Reynolds. A section of the text was presented as a paper on the panel ‘Articulating Feminisms’ organised with Clarissa Jacob and Lucy Reynolds at the Screen Studies Conference 2019. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Passionate Detachment
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcaa031
DA - 2021-09-25
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/passionate-detachment-vsVXf0WnMz
SP - 47
EP - 66
VL - 44
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
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