| |
Responsive Eyes and Crossing Lines: |
I’m a little dizzy and my eyes are
very stimulated after watching it.
– actress Pamela Tiffin, responding to Op Art exhibition, The Responsive Eye, at Museum of Modern Art (New York), February 1965; interviewed in Brian De Palma’s 1966 documentary of the same name. |
|
Brigitte Bardot rehearsing scene in Les femmes (Jean Aurel, 1969), on location in Italy (Image source: AFP). |
Episode 1: Campus of Regional Australian University, February 1973
The Students’ Representative
Council (SRC) has arranged a stripper to entertain the new students for
Orientation Week, initiating them into the ways in which boys will be boys –
and girls will come to be regarded by them in a liberated society. Although
this is the first year of the abolition of university fees in Australia, and
36% of students are female, the figure of the undergraduate is still predominantly male and it is his gaze that is
addressed and entertained. (1) In these innocent years before anti-discrimination and affirmative action legislation takes the fun (although it was never fun for everyone) out of these apparently innocent entertainments in
the name of social improvement and gender equity, student politics is still decidedly
masculine – and under threat.
|
1. Between 1960 and 1975, university student numbers in Australia trebled. See Higher Education Students: Time Series Tables – Selected Higher Education Statistics, 2000 (DETYA, 2001). |
She arrives in a new HQ Monaro GTS350 Coupe with body stripe ornamentation – considered at the time one of the best looking body designs to come from an Australian producer. (2) This fact is later used as evidence that she is not an exploited worker, but rather an economically independent woman who has freely chosen the occupation of stripper. How else could a female worker in 1973 expect to own a new car in her own right? (3) The on-campus Women’s Liberation group I’m involved in plans to intervene in the proceedings, objecting to the objectification of women; the open-air stage is surrounded by students, packed-in tightly – to get what used to be called ‘a good look’ (before feminist film theory challenged the innocence of the activity). The show begins, and Elizabeth (let’s call her this) has barely removed her first glove, when the action suddenly stops. The feminists have seized control of the power point and turned off the music. A flick of a switch soon rectifies the situation but, before long, the music stops again, and does so several times more before a few hefty guards are posted next to the plug to keep the feminists away.
The momentum of the performance is
lost by this time, and the student crowd is howling for naked flesh. Meanwhile,
the feminists, having been forcibly prevented from spoiling the fun, decide
upon another line of attack. They, too, want to see naked flesh, and want to
register – by the manner in which they insist upon having their naked flesh –
their view of the coercion that they believe is involved in the practices of spectacularising
women. A group of them locates the hippy entrepreneur/SRC organiser of the
event in the middle of the crowd, where he is watching Elizabeth and clearly
enjoying the sight. They set upon him, beginning to remove his clothes;
although he is widely known as a campus stud not averse to the use of a little
force of persuasion when a girl doesn’t know what she wants, he is sure that he
knows what he doesn’t want.
|
2. On
the topic of women and cars, see Margaret Dodd’s short film This Woman is Not a Car (Australia, 1982).
3. Although
women were granted the vote in Australia in 1901, female
basic wages were set at 54% of male wages at the beginning of Federation, and
male rates were set at a level thought to be sufficient to support a wife and
three children. In 1973, women earned 70% on average of men’s wages; the full
flow-on effect of the Federal Arbitration Commission’s 1969, 1972 and 1974
decisions on equal pay for work of equal value had not yet occurred.
|
Suddenly terrified that a fate worse
than death awaits him, he calls in reinforcements; his honour is quickly defended
by a group of friends from the rugby club who intervene to beat off the
feminists. The altercation provides another interruption to the rhythm of
Elizabeth’s performance, a distraction from the main attraction, which
consequently becomes somewhat desultory. When it is over and the job is done,
she wastes little time sliding into her Monaro and driving away. For several
weeks after the event, the feminists involved report stories of harassment and
physical violence directed towards them on the campus. But, subsequently,
strippers cease to be scheduled for Orientation Week activities and student
politics becomes more serious.
***
|
|
Rosalie
Bognor and Merle Thornton chained to public bar, Regatta Hotel, Brisbane, 1965.
|
Episode 2: Masonic
Club, Regional City, Australia 1974
|
I’m speechless.
- Final words (in voice-over), The Responsive Eye (De Palma, 1966)
|
It was always easy to point to the
interdictory actions of feminists as evidence of humourlessness; and yet there
were many other occasions when men seemed to lack a sense of humour, with
no-one ever saying that they were
humourless.
***
|
Women were excluded from the public
bar at the local Masonic Club, which also served as the journalists’ club,
opposite the local newspaper’s main office. (4) She had gone to drink in the
lounge there with a group of journalist friends; in the course of the
conversation, they pointed towards a door, indicating that no woman had ever
entered the room that lay beyond. In those days, to be told such a thing was like
an offer that could not be refused: the space beyond the door seemed like the
New World for Christopher Columbus – to enter such a space, one felt like an
astronaut stepping outside a spacecraft. ‘Give me five dollars’, she said, ‘and
I’ll do it!’ Her friend never considered for a single moment that he stood a
chance of losing his money, because it was impossible for him to imagine that a
woman could walk through this door, this
impassable barrier that separated women and men, this barrier of difference
itself.
|
4. This
casual link between the media and a particular private club in a regional city
is part of a longer history of social networking in Australia that did not only
exclude women.
|
A door is a very ordinary thing:
if you turn the handle, it opens. But there are many doors that cannot be
opened, for various reasons, and at different times the reasons themselves
collapse and cease to be plausible. This was one of those occasions, at a time
when such lines were being crossed. Without too much hesitation, she walked to
the door, opened it and entered the sacred space where no woman had ever been
before.
She was not bathed in a beam of
light, angels did not sing; the room was just as banal as the door she had
opened and the lounge she had left. Men sat at the bar, or at tables, talking,
drinking; nothing secret or mysterious appeared to be happening in this room;
nor did the floor open up and swallow her for her evil deed. Nothing was happening. And yet she could
feel that something was amiss. The space had been violated. She was like a
stain on the carpet that had suddenly appeared, as if someone had smashed a
bottle of red wine. She went up to the bar and asked for a drink, but the
bartender pretended she wasn’t there; she approached a man she knew well and
began to speak to him, but he appeared not to see her.
|
It was as if she had entered a
foreign land and did not speak the language or, rather, she had fallen into a
space between languages. In the silence created by her presence – no-one said
anything, no-one told her she should not be there, no-one told her to leave –
it was as if she had walked naked into a room in which all the men’s tongues
had been cut out, so that they could not speak; although they could see her,
their eyes were somehow not working. In attempting to cross this invisible
line, it was as if her presence had caused a very strange paralysis, and she
had come face to face with the other side of striptease. She didn’t need Lacan
to state the bleeding obvious: ‘You never look at me from the place from which
I see you’. (5)
***
|
5.
Jacques Lacan (trans. Alan Sheridan), ‘The Line and Light’, in Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psycho-Analysis (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 96.
6.
Ibid., ‘Anamorphosis’, p. 81.
|
|
Episode 3: London,
November 1980
Some women wanted to reclaim the
night, to turn it into the cold hard light of day. Some of us were happy with
the night and we wanted it to stay.
***
When Brian De Palma’s movie Dressed to Kill was released in London
in autumn 1980, groups of feminists staged a campaign of terror against it, by
entering cinemas through the exits and spray-painting the screen with red
paint. These actions followed the lead of American groups, such as Women
Against Violence Against Women and Women Against Pornography, who had conducted
similar interventions in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco weeks
earlier.
|
Although
the actions directed against Dressed to
Kill could be represented as repressive in the non-official censorship they
seemed to imply, there was also a generative dimension to the energy released
in the protests. In his study of ‘citizen censorship’, Charles Lyons, for example,
argues that censorship can be a ‘strategy of empowerment’, allowing
historically marginalised groups to gain some control over the ways in which
they are represented. (7) Activist feminists were not, however, alone in their
attacks on De Palma at this time. Some prominent film journals supported the
anti-De Palma actions, with Jump Cut publishing a leaflet from the San Francisco-based group, Women Against Violence and Pornography in Media, that appeared the
same time as the British actions were occurring. Dressed to Kill was declared to be a ‘master work
of misogyny’, and, rising to the form of its activist leaflet style, it
concluded, IF THIS FILM SUCCEEDS, KILLING WOMEN MAY BECOME
THE GREATEST TURN-ON OF THE EIGHTIES. (8)
Some
critics were less concerned, seeing as much humour as horror in the film. For
example, Pauline Kael in The New Yorker wrote:
|
7. Charles Lyons, The New Censors: Movies and the Culture Wars (Temple University
Press, 1997), p. 55.
8. ‘Dressed to Kill protested’, Jump Cut, No. 23 (October 1980), p. 32. 9. Pauline Kael, ‘Master Spy, Master Seducer’, The New Yorker (August 4, 1980), cited
in Giovanna Asselle & Behroze Gandhy, ‘Dressed to Kill’, Screen, Vol 23 No 3/4 (1982), pp. 137-143.
Kael’s review is reprinted in her 1984 collection Taking It All In (New York: Henry Holt & Co.).
|
The De Palma controversy
intensified four years later with the release of Body Double (1984), which attracted another spate of protests – and
considered debate in Film Comment,
with a dozen different perspectives on De Palma and pornography (10), and a
provocative interview with De Palma himself (‘I don’t particularly want to chop
up women but it seems to work’). (11)
At the time of the Dressed to Kill protests, I was living
in a squat in Villa Rd, Brixton, and the street had become a centre of anti-De
Palma actions, in which all the women squatters were being encouraged to become
involved, in order to demonstrate their feminist credentials. Radicalism was
measured in these key performance indicators of one’s commitment.
The squatters were predominantly single
parents, unemployed, street kids, junkies, illegal immigrants, performers in
political theatre troupes, women who either worked in women’s refuges or had
themselves lived in them. And there were also households that were relatively
middle-class: people who held nine to five jobs in local councils or welfare
services and who, as anarchists, did not believe in private property.
Notwithstanding their anti-bourgeois ideals, their nine-to-five needs clashed
with the West Indians and Rastafarians in the street, who did not work and held
all-night raves through the week as well as the weekends. Complaints had been
made, to no apparent effect. The anti-De Palma activity was centred in one of the
militant lesbian-separatist households in the street; planning meetings and
discussions were held most evenings.
|
10.
Various, ‘Pornography: Love or Death?’, Film Comment (November/December 1984), pp. 29-49.
11. Marcia Pally, ‘Double Trouble’, Film Comment (September/October 1984), pp. 12-17; reprinted in Laurence F. Knapp (ed.), Brian De Palma: Interviews (University of Mississippi Press, 2003), pp. 92-107.
|
Before committing ourselves to
terroristic activities, a friend and I decided we should go to see Dressed to Kill, in case it turned out to
have something useful to say to us – in case it had some redeeming features. We
had some qualms about spray-painting cinema screens, since it seemed odd to
locate the point of activity of the film – a medium which, at this level at
least, has a certain transparency, a certain fleeting vapidity – in the screen. To fix it there, to
attempt to pin it down under the weight of layers of painted slogans and marks,
was either a futile (but romantic) gesture, or else a brilliant one which
identified the nature of cinematic reality far better than all the film theory
of the previous few years had been able to do.
Lacan speaks about the screen in
ways which maybe we could use to confirm the validity of the actions taken by
the screen terrorists:
|
|
12.
Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 96.
|
Of course, our screen terrorists
would not thank us for these remarks, nor would they need them; but it is
remarks like these that raise a doubt that apparently literal political actions can be easily dismissed. Maybe they were
on to something we had not seen.
We saw Dressed to Kill, fearing that we would be shocked and horrified,
and that we might come out convinced that screen terrorism was necessary.
Instead, we watched a film which seemed to say more about masculine anxiety
than about the fears that women were expressing in relation to the film. We
kept waiting for the horror – and when it came, we enjoyed it. We wondered if
we had seen the same film that people had been complaining about, so we went to
one of the street meetings to discuss our problems. We found out that, in fact,
none of the women had seen the film at all, and they did not want to hear our
opinions about it.
And this turned out to be a
general feature in every situation in which a ‘citizen censorship’ movement
called for the boycott of a film to which one group or another took offence,
whether it was feminists and gays objecting to a Brian De Palma film, or
Christians protesting the screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary (1985) five or six years later. It was exactly this
period of the ‘80s when some strands of feminism seemed indistinguishable from
right-wing Christian extremism in the anti-democratic gestures of, for example the
Dworkin-MacKinnon Anti-Pornography Civil Rights Ordinance (1983) – which,
fortunately, did not succeed. In any case, it was anti-pornography activism
that first drew my attention to Dressed
to Kill. And that is how I came to be a De Palma fan.
***
|
|
13. Gilles Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs (New York: Zone
Books, 1991), p. 244.
|
***
|
|
14. Marcia Pally, ‘Object of the Game’, Film Comment, Vol 2 No 3 (June 1985), pp. 68-73. |
|
As is so often the case with
conferences that bring together criticism and culture, the second term is required to function as the entertainment, the
light relief from the high seriousness of the critical endeavour. I had been
invited to organise a film program (15) and forum at a conference on feminist
criticism and cultural production (16), but had not anticipated the pain that
would be caused by the selected feature film, Elfi Mikesch and Monika Treut’s Seduction: The Cruel Woman (Verführung: Die Grausame Frau, 1985).
During the evening screening of
the film, angry women stormed out while others gritted their teeth and
stoically stayed until the end. (17) The following day, women spoke of their
anger and pain; relatively few people were able to say that they enjoyed the
film. There were questions and demands. Why show such a film at such a
conference? It was always striking to find how reluctant feminist audiences
tended to be in embracing films that rose to the challenge of looking differently
– for all the calls to develop a new way of seeing. It was insufficient to
point out that Treut was a serious scholar, with a Ph.D. on de Sade’s Juliette and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (18), and had worked with
female-to-male transsexuals; or that the part of Wanda had been played by
Mechthild Grossmann, a principal dancer in Pina Bausch’s company.
In choosing to show Seduction: The Cruel Woman, it was a
question of countering simplistic feminist films, like Not a Love Story (Bonnie
Sherr Klein, 1981) and Broken Mirrors (Marlene Gorris, 1984),
that had presented a moralistic view of pornography and sex work. Seduction: The Cruel Woman possessed
some conventions of entertaining horror – not, admittedly of the more commercial
kind, like The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), Body
Double or David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) – but these would have been difficult choices at
the event, because they were directed by men. On the other hand, it is a much
better and much more intelligent film than something like The Slumber Party Massacre (1982, directed by Amy Holden Jones
– and written by Rita Mae Brown).
All of the works selected for the
program were about performance: the
question of acting, not only in a theatrical sense but also in a political
sense (and to acknowledge the links between politics and performance). Seduction: The Cruel Woman is entirely
lacking in sentimentality, unlike most feminist films (or most Australian
films) at the time. Its anti-sentimental quality provided a distance for
thinking about the image in itself,
and not simply questions of the ‘image of women’ – or power itself, rather than
the powerlessness of women. This was a film that had at its centre the
discomforting figure of ambivalent feminine (masculine?) power, the Phallic Woman
– an unwelcome presence, even at feminist conferences. So much for sisterhood.
|
15.
Films selected: Kathy Mueller’s video Finishing
Touches (1984, written by Lesley Stern), Laleen Jayamanne’s A Song of Ceylon (1985), and Elfi Mikesch & Monika Treut’s Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985).
16.
Forum participants: Felicity Collins, Laleen Jayamanne, Annette Kuhn and Lesley
Stern.
17.
The film also caused scandal and outrage at the Berlin Film Festival in 1985
and at Toronto in 1986. See Julia Knight, ‘The Meaning of Treut?’ In Tamsin
Wilton (ed.), Immortal, Invisible:
Lesbians and the Moving Image (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 34-51; and Catherine Saalfield, ‘The
Seduction of Monika’, Outweek , no. 21
(November 12, 1989), pp. 40-43.
18.
See Monika Treut, ‘Female Misbehavior’, in Laura Pietropaolo & Ada
Testaferri (eds), Feminisms
in the Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 106-124;
Gerfried Stocker & Christine Schöpf (eds), NEXT SEX: Sex in the Age of its Procreative Superfluousness. Sex im
Zeitalter seiner reproduktionstechnischen Überflüssigkeit (Vienna/New York: Ars Electronica/Springer,
2000).
|
It would be Very Nice if pleasure
could be found in the right places but, as it happens, it has to be seized
wherever it can be found, here and there, in places where you shouldn’t go if
you’re a nice girl. What are canonical texts if not delinquents that have been
whipped into shape within disciplinary fields hellbent on forcing submission?
(In what sense is Women’s Studies any different?) In retrospect, I had to
acknowledge that the screening was a failure, and I had misjudged the audience.
No amount of pointing out that Treut and Mikesch’s film had drawn on the
progressive aspects of Sacher-Masoch’s writings (19) would succeed in
convincing the critics at this Feminist Criticism and Cultural Production event
that these questions of image, performance and power might be productively
explored in such a cinematic form. Questions of gender performativity seemed at
this stage to be a more avant-garde concern – although, within four years,
everyone began to embrace performativity and the Rivierean idea of womanliness
as masquerade (20), refreshed via Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. (21)
***
We have
heard a rumour that a stripper is to do a performance and there is a certain
unease amongst the women in the crowd: will it be a man or a woman? If it is a
man, then this will place the women in an interesting situation because, here,
now, nearly twenty years later, these women have no interest and desire in seeing men cast as sex objects; but
curiously, after all this time, some of them may have an ambivalent desire to see women in this position. This is a
celebratory event all the more important because, in this period, death hangs
over the gay community constantly, although you wouldn’t necessarily know this,
just by looking; life, as a consequence, has come to have intense meaning.
|
19. ‘The work of Masoch draws on
all the forces of German Romanticism. In our opinion, no other writer has used
to such effect the resources of fantasy and suspense. He has a particular way
of “desexualizing” love and at the same time sexualizing the entire history of
humanity’. Deleuze, Masochism, p. 12.
20.
Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, no. 10 (1929), pp. 303–313.
21.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism
and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). The book’s title
alluded to another film, John Waters’ Female
Trouble (1974).
|
Drag
queens parade through the crowd, disappearing every so often to do another costume
change; the masquerade of womanliness takes considerable effort, even for drag
queens who embrace it with more passion than most women do. At this event,
however, such a masquerade is not one which women are required to perform; they
become voyeurs to the spectacle of a projection of femininity, while the activity of exhibitionism is taken on by men. Women
themselves may not even notice the performance of femininity by men that
surrounds them; instead, their eyes are fixed on other women in the crowd,
noticing what they are wearing, how they move, who they are with; everyone
looks constantly; the old opposition, the odd couple, voyeurism and exhibitionism
become the same thing, in an outrageous parody of all that earnest work about
the evils of the look. Everyone is having a good look.
The
Sinead O’Connor hit song ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ begins. There is a roar of
motorcycle engines – a gang of Dykes on Bikes rides across the stage, a long
line of bikes, with two women on each of them; the women are all in black
leather – some wear leather wrist bands, some wear nothing under their leather
vests. At first, the spectacle of the procession is derived from the presence
of so many women on bikes and the noise of the machines – no different from any
spectacle of bikies riding in packs. Everyone stops to look; there is a sense
of threat, which passes when the procession ends.
On this
occasion, however, the spectacle only begins when the procession has ended. The
passenger on the last bike is not wearing leather, but is noticeably more
femme; she is wearing a chiffon dress and a long, flowing scarf. The bike
pauses briefly as she dismounts and it roars off, as she looks longingly at its
rider, enacting a scenario of abandonment; the words of the song become the
speech of her actions. At first she is disconsolate; the mood of the song and
its desperate longing distracts the audience. It is like thousands of moments
we have seen in movies: someone leaves someone. Everyone in the audience has
been in this moment.
Before
anyone can slip into too deep a reverie, the woman’s body is animated by the
music, and she languidly sheds her clothes. There is little of the usual tease
of the audience with different items of clothing tossed into the crowd; when she
has divested herself, the audience is briefly disappointed. It is almost as if
the performer ignores her audience, performing for herself, in front of a
mirror.
On this
occasion, the line has been crossed before anyone notices it. The dancer is
entirely naked, her only prop the silk scarf she arrived with. She uses it,
twirling it round her body and in the air in front of the audience. A
spectacular dance begins in which the body of the performer, in its most
intimate detail, is displayed to the audience, as if it is an instrument of
apotropaic magic. She lithely moves around the stage; the performance could
simply be called dance or gymnastics but, at the same time, ‘erotic dancing’ is
too mild a term to describe it. By sex-show standards, this is not at all shocking.
But context is all and, even for this audience, the performance is a remarkable
scene that has the capacity to disrupt everything. Gay and lesbian identity
slips and slides as easily as the dancer slithers across the stage.
The
performance disrupts several orders of looking and seeing. Elizabeth, we later
learn, is straight and usually performs for straight men; in this context,
however, the performance falls on blind eyes, as it were; the performance is
not for the men. It is the women who respond ambivalently to the performance
and yet, as a straight woman, she is, in a sense, not performing for them; she
is performing for men who are absent from this event. The men who are present are uncertain of what is
required of them; some of them say that they feel outside of the proceedings.
Perhaps they feel as the women would feel if a male stripper had performed. But,
in both these responses, in a gay and lesbian context, something is revealed of
the nature of response to the body of the other, which is undoubtedly present in
all instances of striptease – an ambivalence, even horror, in the presence of
the other body.
Amongst
the women, there is considerable dispute about whether pleasure can be taken in
such a performance, in view of the history of the women’s movement. Some are
horrified and reject, on political grounds, the opportunity to take up an
active (voyeuristic) position; others, less ideologically sound, are delighted
at the opportunity, revelling in it. At the end of the performance, many of the
drag queens change into their civvies and go home – for once, they have been
upstaged; for once, they cannot compete.
Later we
talk to the performer, and learn that she is forty-three and has been
performing for twenty-five years; in the performance, age was overwhelmed by
the sheer frontality of body and movement, so that the revelation that the
performer is probably older than most of the audience is another source of
pleasure – an unusual kind of pleasure under the circumstances of so many
relatively young men dying. She has seen active service in more than one sense and,
in 1968, spent her twenty-first birthday in Vietnam, entertaining troops; her
war stories make our hair stand on end, since the battles she has fought (pack
rape by Australian soldiers, a story told dispassionately like the account of
any prisoner of war) in a particular front-line are of a different order than
the battles which were then being conducted by women in Australia, also in the
context of the Vietnam war.
Now, she
says, work is becoming harder to find; sex performers must keep up with the
demands of an industry requiring much riskier behaviour. The tameness of campus
striptease from the early 1970s seems innocuous by comparison with contemporary
sex and porn industry demands, she notes. And, in our conversations, it turns
out that it was the same Elizabeth who performed the university strip in the
first anecdote of this essay. The gap between that event and this one is the
distance travelled in thinking through some of these difficult questions of
subjects, objects and images.
***
|
|
Cover of 1965 exhibition catalogue, incorporating Bridget Riley, Current (1964, Emulsion on composition board, 148.3cm x 148.875cm), Museum of Modern Art. |
… but motion pictures are a kinetic art form; you’re
dealing with motion and sometimes that can be violent motion. There are very
few art forms that let you deal with things in motion …
Rapid motion,
percussive motion, emphatic motion may enliven the screen, but then there’s the
content. You can have an arching motion by itself and you can have that motion
be used to slash someone’s throat. You can use deep red and silver as a color
combination or you can have a razor cut someone’s face. Why do you choose the
violent content?
It interests me. I don’t know why. I’d have to be on the
couch a long time to figure it out. I seem to be attracted to it. (22)
|
22. Pally, ‘Double Trouble’.
|
In
February 1965, The Responsive Eye, an
exhibition of Op Art, opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, (23) its
quivering and throbbing style quickly impacting on popular culture and morphing
into psychedelic fabric designs, magazine and LP covers, movie posters and
music festival packaging, soon becoming ubiquitous. A twenty-four-year-old
Brian De Palma is at the exhibition opening, shooting a documentary (also
titled The Responsive Eye and
completed in 1966) featuring the artists, curators, celebrities and rich
collectors. (24) From the dynamic opening shots of people entering the Museum,
through the faceted light flashes of a revolving door, a striking vision is
already apparent. (25) Sight is mobilised by the art works which, in their
inevasible effect on the eyes, demand movement and action by the spectator. The
astutely responsive filmmaker grasps the very mobility of the image and its
experience. Perception is aroused, propelled out of passivity, as if the act of
seeing itself has become violent. The shock of time – certainly of this time –
becomes visceral. The mood of the
time becomes a way of seeing, shaping the vision of this Quaker-educated
filmmaker, son of an orthopedic surgeon, for whom medicine is less precise than
cinema.
Two days
before the exhibition opens, Malcolm X is assassinated in New York; in the
course of the exhibition, Martin Luther King leads the Selma to Montgomery
march, three months after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and the US massively
escalates its involvement in Vietnam. Meanwhile at the movies, My Fair Lady (1964) and Mary Poppins (1964) scoop the Oscars,
but it is not enough to stop the revolution of perception and thought that is
occurring. Anti-war protests spread, draft cards are burned, Bob Dylan goes
electric; in June 1965, the first contingent of Australian troops arrives in
Vietnam, a year before Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt’s ‘All the way
with LBJ’ speech. The rest is, as they say ...
Godard’s
oft-cited claim that it is not a matter of ‘making political films, but rather
making films politically’ plays out in the specific politics of vision that De
Palma practices. He is explicit about this, in his intense awareness of what
cinema is and the double level of engagement both filmmakers and viewers have
in the presence of images.
|
23. The catalogue is available on the Ubuweb site.
25.
Contrast the energy of the De Palma film with conventional television news and
current affairs coverage at the time.
|
|
26. Richard Rubinstein, ‘The Making
of Sisters: An Interview with
Director Brian De Palma’, Filmmakers
Newsletter (September 1973), pp. 25-30; reprinted in Knapp, Brian De Palma: Interviews, p. 9.
|
After The Responsive Eye, De Palma’s films
of the ‘60s, though immature, are self-reflexive, fascinated with the
structures of looking and the artifice of cinema. From the Powell/Pressburger/Peeping Tom-influenced Murder a la Mod (1967), and the
Vietnam-draft-dodging masculine ambivalence of Greetings (1968), to the webcam-anticipating Hi Mom! (1970), De Palma’s focus on ‘catching every body in the
act’ succeeds in capturing the transparency of the act of watching in the
context of ‘60s art, experimental theatre and filmmaking in New York. This
context sets the tone for his ongoing explorations of voyeurism, less
interestingly as a peep-show activity in which men watch women undressing, more
as a process of the helplessness of the observer, in the repeated feature in
his films of characters unable to save someone.
The
framing factory’s main sales showroom was downtown, serving the thriving
business of painting in the city; the factory itself was a closed shop,
controlled by the Teamsters, whose leader, Jimmy Hoffa, was then in jail for
alleged embezzlement of union funds. The workers were mainly Puerto Rican or
Cuban illegal immigrants; between framing the kinds of optically stimulating
works that appeared in The Responsive Eye and successor styles like Pop and Minimalism, they spent their lunch hours
watching super-8 porno movies from Latin America.
A
collection of these works returned to Australia with the artist in 1977 and
were used in the late ‘70s in Sydney by a group of women, trying to understand
what the feminist anti-pornography movement was reacting to (29), in the
aftermath of horror and overreaction to the sexploitation movie, Snuff (a.k.a Slaughter and American
Cannibale, Michael and Roberta Findlay, Horacio Fredriksson, 1976). The
Findlays were part of the New York underground film scene; when the fake Snuff was released, the film’s
distributor allegedly hired actresses to portray lesbians protesting the film,
in order to create controversy around an otherwise irredeemable movie. (30)
Almost
immediately, publicity campaigns of this sort became unnecessary with the rise
of the Women Against Pornography movement. In the suspension of critical
consciousness that extreme emotive response involves, there is clearly no room
for distinctions between good and bad films, and no room for the kind of
Brechtian distanciation that De Palma had in mind: ‘I am constantly standing
outside and making people aware that they are always watching a film …’
Let
us now return to another space of watching: the art museum, a space that De
Palma eroticises with consummate force in Dressed
to Kill. In the film’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) sequence – the
interiors of which were actually, clandestinely filmed at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art – it is easy to see traces of the Op Art-stimulated ‘responsive
eye’, the active exchange of mobilised gazes, serving as an extension of the
earlier film’s energy. There, among the celebrity artists interviewed, Josef
Albers appears. Eight works by the artist, then in his late 70s, are included
in the exhibition; he enthuses about the show, since he has waited fifty years
for optical art to be recognised. Six works from his Homage to the Square, a virtually endless series begun in 1949, are
shown in what he calls his ‘Chapel’ of works in the show. (31)
Albers’
last executed work is the relief sculpture entitled ‘Wrestling’ on the Commonwealth
Bank building wall overlooking the square outside Sydney’s MLC Centre,
commissioned by the building’s architect, Harry Seidler – a former student of
Albers at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s. The influence on Seidler is
apparent in his own interest in ‘the effect of tensional opposites on the
apparatus of the eye’ and his commitment to the intensified effects of visual
phenomena – and ‘what turns the eye on’. (32)
The Homage to the Square series of paintings
and prints consists of subtle chromatic interactions between nested squares of
colour, frames within frames. If Seidler readily acknowledges the legacy of
Albers, perhaps we can also see the traces of influence on De Palma as well,
through his own first encounter with The
Responsive Eye.
|
27. Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects (New York Cultural Center, April 10–August 25, 1970); exhibition organised and
catalogue compiled by Donald Karshan. Artists: Joseph Kosuth, Frederick
Barthelme, On Kawara, Christine Kozlov, Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, David
Bainbridge, Harold Hurrell, Ian Burn, Roger Cutforth, Mel Ramsden, Bruce
Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Stephen Kaltenbach, Jan Dibbets, Douglas Huebler,
Iain Baxter, Robert Barry, Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, Bernar Venet, Ian WIlson,
Mel Bochner, Saul Ostrow, Lawrence Weiner, Ed Ruscha, Donald Burgy, James Lee
Byars, and Adrian Piper. See Helen Grace, ‘So I Joined the Teamsters’, in Ann Stephen (ed.), Artists Think: The Late Works of Ian Burn (Sydney: Power Publications, 1996). Burn died in 1993.
28. ‘A mirror enables us to experience ourselves in
a world of experiences, and as part of that world of appearances … with the
appearance of being a unified subject’. Burn, Looking at Seeing and Reading (Sydney: Ivan Dougherty
Gallery, 1993), unpaginated; see also Andrew McNamara, ‘Visual Acuity Is Not What It
Seems: On Ian Burn’s “Late” Reflections’, in Mirror Mirror: Then and Now (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art,
2010), and Ann Stephen, On Looking at
Looking: The Art and Politics of Ian Burn (Melbourne: Miegunyah
Press, 2006).
29.
Helen Grace and Ann Stephen, ‘Where
Do Positive Images Come From? (And What Does a Woman Want?)’, originally
published in Scarlet Woman, no. 12 (March 1981); revised
version published in Catriona Moore (ed.), Dissonance:
Feminism and the Arts 1970-1990 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin/Artspace, 1994).
30. The
distributor invented a group called the Dyke Tactics Squad: ‘I never knew real
fear until I saw them. Mean. Nasty. Wearing rhinestone jackets’. See Peter Birge
& Janet Maslin, ‘Getting Snuffed in Boston’, Film Comment (May/June 1976),
p. 35.
31. Oral history interview with Josef Albers, June 22-July 5 1968, Smithsonian Archives of American Art. 32. Antony Westwood, ‘Reflections on Harry Seidler’, I am grateful to Narelle Jubelin for drawing my attention to De Palma’s The Responsive Eye in her short digital video Albers Seidler Establishing Shots, (2012-3), exhibited in Plants and Plans (Fundaçåo Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 2013). |
|
When De Palma’s Obsession was shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1976, a writer in Edinburgh International Film
Festival News noted:
|
|
33. Edinburgh
International Film Festival News (August, 1976);
cited in Asselle & Gahdhy, ‘Dressed to Kill’,
p. 138 (emphasis mine).
|
|
The Edinburgh Film Festival that year
is perhaps much better remembered, by film scholars at least, for the
Psychoanalysis and Cinema Event that had such an impact on film studies (34); De
Palma was not yet so noticeable. But, in understanding the provocations of his
later works, the subtleties of Albers’ chromatic experiments suggest a
compositional inspiration that adds to the all-too-easy and obvious
identification of Hitchcock as primary influence. And while there may be
another obvious and simple explanation for a young man’s preference for
regarding art museums as higher quality pick-up spots in view of his belief in the ‘better yield potential at
MoMA than someone met huddling under a park bench in a rainstorm’ (35), it is
surely not too much to hope that men also grow up.
|
34.
For one eye-witness account, see Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘Regrouping: Reflections
on the Edinburgh Festival 1976’,.
35. Jared Martin – De Palma’s former
roommate at Columbia in the 1960s – cited in Jason Zinoman, ‘He Likes to Watch’, Shock
Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood,
and Invented Modern Horror (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. 151-174.
|
from Issue 4: Walks |
© Helen Grace and LOLA September 2013. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |
