Transparent Cinema
“The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling … The erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation.” - Audre Lorde❋
“I perceive the world as vast and overwhelming: each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. What saves this from becoming a vast, undifferentiated mass of data and situation is one’s ability to make distinctions… The experience of feeling overwhelmed by undifferentiated material is like claustrophobia. One feels panicky, closed in. The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating. It is the form that opens it, in that case.” Heijinian Lyn, a poet and author who worked to continue the revolutionary threads of the late ‘60, delivered this full text, The Rejection of Closure, in San Francisco in 1983.
Closed language causes pressure for those who are aware of the “undifferentiated mass” behind our “interpretation” of the world that we create. For those who are open to feeling everything. This mass is a void of pure sensation, which women inherently have a portal to, a black hole. Being aware of it without making peace can be felt as the ultimate forces of both creation and destruction; silence and dadaism; remembering and forgetting; binging and restricting; mania and depression.
Susan Sontag defines “transparence” as “experiencing the luminous-ness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” Transparence in daily life is the awareness of “undifferentiated mass” beyond our physical bodies and our mental filter through which we live. Being aware of these filters as transparent layers instead of Real Life, opens a new world for artmaking which leaves room to any expressive forms beyond realism as being equal in value. Art that values sensation as truth.
In Against Interpretation, Sontag suggests that it is possible to escape interpreters of art, by making work who’s formal illusion is so unified and harmonious that the work can be just what it is. She says that film has potential for this harmony. “This is why cinema is the most alive, the most exciting, the most important of all art forms right now.”
There is a class of female filmmakers following the feminist upheaval of the late ‘60s that have uncovered these ways of working with transparent forms. Who have found truth in formal techniques like Chytilová’s play with collage in Daisies, mirror motifs used by Agnes Varda, and Chantal Akerman’s subtextual dialog. An illusion with an awareness of itself as an illusion, which is exactly why it resonates.
French filmmaker Germaine Dulac, a central organ of the early avant-garde silent film scene, was making films with this in mind as early as the 1920s. Dulac believed in the cinema as capable of bringing a “participative experience” to a viewer. She used images of dream and nature as both a metaphor and as interluding elements in the rhythm of a story as a way to guide the viewer through the illusion being created. To “latch onto suggestive impression and expression … because it envelop(s) the viewer in a network, not of events to follow, but of sensations to experience and to feel.”
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In an interview from 2004, Věra Chytilová, director of the 1966 Czech New Wave film Daisies, discusses politics and her lost dog with the same hopeless anger. “We don't have enough time to do what we'd like to accomplish... I don't know how to say it…” She tells a story of how one time she left her dog on the street and it got lost. “He didn't make it home. I get cramps in my guts when I think about it because I left him there alone. That's just one example. These things are so destructive to me… or children, when they have to face a misunderstanding or some brutality of this world… the world seems to be brutal. Very brutal.” (Buchar)
She remembers fighting for her work with ignorant politicians and producers in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Even threatening to jump out of a window when she was barred from working. “That's how I survived, doing these kinds of things. But it was really seizures of rage, seizures where I didn't care about anything.” Later, when asked about her recent life, Chytilová talks about finding joy in gardening and other grounded hobbies. “When I feel badly, I have plenty of other interests to help me feel better. I go to my garden and plant something. There are plenty of things to do and never enough time to do everything I would like to. I'm horrified by the fact that I can't read all the books I bought!” (Buchar) She feels every wound of the world along with every flower she plants.
The film opens as Marie and Marie sit stiffly together in black and white checkered bikinis. As they move, their joints creak like wood. They declare that the world has gone bad, so they’re going bad too. They decide not to care anymore. Suddenly in a full-color field of wildflowers, they clumsily dance together and pick from an apple tree. In the very next scene, Marie 1, blonde, bobbed, and crowned with a garland, is casually attempting suicide with gas from the stovetop.
“Their creativity and destructiveness are two sides of the same coin,” Chytilova said during the 2002 Prague Film Festival in London.
The intended message of Daisies is notoriously hard to analyze. The film was banned twice, by the Czech government and the Soviet Union, for depictions of food waste and for anarchist themes. Chytilová, as expressed through Marie 1 and Marie 2 in the film, is living in an oppressive, masculine, Soviet world that can’t comprehend the guttural energy of young women. So, through the Maries, she reacts as the dadaists did to the horrors of WW1. Reacts to the metal cogs in the title sequence and the archival footage of bombs with “seizures of rage.” The Maries lay in bed, cutting off the ends of sausages and bananas while they light their ceiling on fire. They ask each other, not infrequently, how they know they exist. “Because I can see you,” the other says. They only have each other as a reference point of their existence in a world that doesn’t understand them.
In 1970 Pennsylvania, Barbara Loden directed and starred in Wanda, a crushing portrait of a female drifter who has completely given up caring about herself, and her husband and children who she abandons in the very first scene. Loden, acting, fits the documentary style that she and her skeleton crew had aimed for because of her identification with her role. “In my opinion, Wanda is right and everyone around her is wrong,” she said. Loden was described as insecure and quiet, having trouble expressing herself, and at times relying on the attention of men for career opportunities. “I have a lot of pain and suppressed anger in me, just like Wanda,” she said. (Reynaud)
“I didn’t do anything.” Barbara Loden, as Wanda, sits trapped in the passenger seat between roadside wilderness, and Michael Higgins, as Mr. Dennis, in the driver’s seat, threatening to abandon her there.
The scene begins when Wanda is reading aloud an article in the paper about Mr. Dennis’ murder, leaning over the carseat, facing back. Unaware of herself, she does not move with the “grace” that women on screen often accentuate, similar to Marie and Marie in Daisies. We watch as she realizes her situation, through jerky glances at Mr. Dennis, and a long pause after she says, “What are you trying to get me into…” We cut to Mr. Dennis, who is looking forward at the road, and then, with an aggressive jerk, turns his head to her, back and forth, twice, while we hear Wanda’s “Huh?” Then again, “Huh?” We see her, now getting anxious, turn and sit forward as Mr. Dennis is pulling over suddenly. He reaches over her suddenly and pushes open her door, saying, “Get out.” When we cut back to Wanda, we see her from Mr. Dennis’ perspective. She looks into the camera, then turns to look at the wall of wilderness outside the car, then back. Then she says the line that defines her character, “I didn’t do anything.”
She doesn’t do anything to help herself out of her situation, now, or ever. Having rejected the only life society admits her, she has gained her freedom, and is still trapped. Wanda’s character has restricted herself from life. She lives in “a world of flattened affect,” becoming an “ascetic who aspires to feel nothing,” in the context of Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic. “The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation.” (Lorde)
Coming back to the Maries in Daisies, they represent the opposing reaction to oppression, but one that still neglects feeling. “To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.” (Lorde)
In the last half of Daisies, The Maries rock back and forth on a docked boat, chanting, “Why, I wonder? Why is there a river? Why? Why am I cold? Why?” We cut to a closeup of the flowing river. Then to another full-body shot of Marie 2, unsteadily standing with her black bangs over her eyes, facing the camera, and Marie 1 twisting around from behind her, saying, “there you are.” “We do exist,” she adds, and we cut to a closeup of the corn husks they’ve strewn on the cobbled streets. They know they exist because they’ve made a mess.
When Chytilová speaks of seizures of rage, she is articulating this mistaken response to her own “destructive,” feelings when she sees the brutality of the world. A reaction that comes from this “refusal to be conscious of what we are feeling.” (Lorde) Because the world has hurt her many times; a world of cruel producers who went out of their way to not only ignore her, but destroy her reputation and bar her from her passion. Through Daisies, she depicts seizures of extreme binging as one possible response to that suppression.
Loden faced similar suppression, specifically in her marriage to Kazan, who she alluded to Mr. Dennis being based on. Loden’s suppression was represented physically in an anecdote from Kazan’s autobiography from 1988:
Kazan went to a psychoanalyst about a pain under his rib cage, which he was told was “a great lump of unreleased anger” (Kazan). Later, writing about the experience, he reflected on a time that Barbara had fought back against a casting director, and how she was different from him because she was able to express anger. “That was what I admired about the girl… Barbara had no lump… I envied [her].” Later, Kazan wrote about Loden beginning to struggle with cancer. “One day she stood naked before me, took my hand, and put it on her left breast. ‘Do you feel it?’ she asked. I found a lump there.” (Kazan). The cancer continued to develop in Loden, reaching her liver. “I looked at Barbara. No reaction, her face masked as ever, guarded. Later she told me she [had been told] that her problem was the liver, not her breast… ‘Yes,’ she said to me, ‘all my anger is stored there’” (Kazan).
Kazan and Loden were introduced about twenty years earlier when he was directing Authur Miller’s play After the Fall, and cast Loden in the role of Maggie. “Maggie, the sexy, popular entertainer who inescapably [was] equated with [Miller's second wife], Marilyn Monroe” (New York Times, January 24, 1964) Kazan was sure of Loden in the role because he “knew her past in detail, and ... knew Marilyn’s personal history as well. They’d both been ‘floaters’ and come out of almost identical childhood experiences, which had left them neurotic, often desperate, and in passion difficult to control” (Kazan)
The 1961 American Western, The Misfits, was directed by Authur Miller, and starred Marilyn Monroe when they were in the middle of getting a divorce. Monroe, the icon of femininity, was said to be a planetary force to those who knew her in real life. In the film, she plays a city girl, Roslyn, who has found herself out in rural Nevada surrounded by three men, all infatuated with her. By the last scene, she has chosen Clark Gable, playing an old-fashioned cowboy, while Montgomery Clift, a young bull rider, and Eli Wallach, a fun but grieving pilot, dance around them, all orbiting her energy. The four have driven out to the middle of the desert to catch wild horses which will be sold for dog food.
The horses finally tied down, the men talk about how they’ll divide the money, when they hear Roslyn yell “Butchers!” and we cut to an extreme wide shot of Roslyn running through the vast desert, towards the distant mountains and massive sky. “Killers! Murders! You’re liars!” she screams as we cut to a shot of all three men staring. Clift is taking up frame left, closest to the camera so we can focus on his expression as the one who empathizes most with Roslyn at this moment, Gable stands head-on in the middle, and Wallach looks out from behind and frame right. “You’re only happy when you can see something die! Why don’t you kill yourselves and be happy? You and your God’s country. Freedom! I pity you! You’re three dear, sweet dead men!”
The moment is Hollywood. The shots are constructed like paintings. The brass band swells and wanes. Monroe is giving the epitome of a “performance.” Certain shots remind us of this filter, like a dramatized close-up of the horse's face, treating the horse like an actor and not an extension of the landscape. Despite this, the film is, at times, almost neoreal; it was filmed all on-location in Nevada, and in certain wide shots where the wild horses are in action, a shift towards documentary modes can be felt in the acting and camerawork out of necessity.
The film is also neoreal in its self-awareness. Monroe, when in close-up, is often shown through a blurry lens filter, making her seem even more ethereal, not of this world, which, in the context of the film, she isn’t. She essentially is playing herself; though she “acts,” there’s a level of realism that we understand as the audience because we’re watching Monroe play a character written for her by Miller “to make Marilyn feel good.” (Miller) And backstage, the film was notorious for Monroe’s breakdowns on set and overdoses during production. She was said to have been completely unable to act in moments. “She’s crazy,” Wallach says after her monologue in the desert.
Monroe as Roslyn is not integrated with the landscape. She is an “image” of life, a metaphor. As she was projected to be by men in her life off-screen. Monroe was an erotic force; erotic in the sense that Lorde spoke of, not just how she has been branded in pop culture. The erotic “has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation,” (Lorde).
“You have the gift of life Roslyn,” “Here’s to your life, Roslyn, we hope it goes on forever,” and similar lines are repeated by the three men who cling to Monroe’s image, all projecting onto her until she’s driven to madness. She screams at the three men in this final scene, she is enraged at their complete missing of the point of life itself, of their acts of killing.
Lyn Heijinian articulated this as “the rage to know,” a rage that comes from the inadequacy of any system claiming (like a closed text) to understand our vast and undifferentiated existence. We must allow room for remembering and acknowledging the truth, to be here with our bodies and each other, while working on creating our own forms of interpretation and distinction. “The struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world, and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it.” (Heijinian)
After the Maries’ wonderfully destructive banquet and manic fashion show in Daisies, we cut to water again, where the women are flailing in the ocean, drowning. “Is there any way to mend what’s been destroyed? Even if they had a chance, this is what it would look like,” is typed over the image. They feverishly clean up the desecrated dining hall. Shot in black-and-white, they’re wrapped in newspaper, echoing the checkered swimsuits in the very first shot. “If we’re good and hardworking, we’ll be happy,” they whisper.
“Say that we’re happy,” Marie 1 says, looking over at Marie 2. They lay on their backs on the table, its cloth still stained and wrinkled behind them. Marie 2 rises on her elbows. “Is this a game?” she asks, smiling playfully. “It isn’t.” Marie 1 answers. Marie 2 flops back down and pauses. We cut out to a full-body wide shot, where the table they lay on is now framed by chairs precisely placed on stained carpeting. Marie 1 beams. “We’re really happy!” A pause. Then suddenly, Marie 2: “But who cares?” Immediately, the chandelier, in full color, comes crashing down from above.
Interpretation of art “makes [it] into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.” Susan Sontag writes in Against Interpretation. “Programmatic avant-gardism” - or maybe Dadaism - “which has meant, mostly, experiments with form at the expense of content, is not the only defense against the investigation of art by interpretations. At least, I hope not. For this would be to commit art to being perpetually on the run.”
The Maries are on the run. They’ve made themselves just as brutal and destructive as the brutal and destructive world they fight. Therefore they’re not really free from anything at all, they’ve only turned themselves into a reaction. They rock the boat, and, in the final act of the film, they’re doomed to drown in the ocean. They question war and their own nature with the same viciousness, killing themselves in the process.
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So, who cares?
“When, for example, we have a participative experience of a flower, we are not making a botanical observation or thinking of it as an object. If we did, the flower would pale into a mere instance of the appropriate scientific categories … In the participative experience, however, the concrete suchness of the object penetrates and permeates the participator’s consciousness to the point that consciousness is no longer self-conscious.” F. David Martin said of Heingger.
The women in both Wanda and Daisies are the opposite of self-conscious. They are unaware of themselves and of their position in the world. Wanda wears hair curlers for a lot of the film, and Marie and Marie wear garish black eyeliner to their trip to a cornfield. Roslyn in The Misfits, however, is aware of herself. She knows exactly what she is and holds power over everyone in her life whether she means to or not. Tragically, like Loden and Chytilová, Monroe’s guttural energy was a force too much for the world she lived in, and she was unable to find peace, but she knew her power.
The weaponization of self-awareness has been tool in the suppression of women, obviously and subtly. Diet culture and the obsession with an idea of what a perfect body should look like; the total identification with the mask applied with makeup causing self-estrangement, or the pressure women put on themselves to fit into rhythms of daily life that have been set up by men.
However, self-awareness is not an enemy to rebel against. The act of caring for one’s appearance is an act of making oneself just as beautiful as the world one knows to be true. Through a degree of self-consciousness, one can create an illusion so perfect that it can elude interpreters. Then, and only then, can we have true participative experiences like looking at Heingger’s flower.
Self-awareness, then, can be defined as not just an insecure obsession with the surface of how one is perceived by others, but a transparent layer that, when cared for, enhances what one can experience. “When we begin to live from within outward,” says Lorde, “in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense.” Light only penetrates through transparency.
Chytilová’s says, “I get cramps in my guts when I think about it,” and Loden says that her suppressed anger festers in her liver. These female artists are living with this kind of pure self-awareness and raw feeling that the masculine worlds that they lived in simply weren’t built to accommodate or understand. Through their films, they portrayed characters who react to this feeling within themselves in opposing ways. Lorde suggests that when we create worlds where we are safe to move beyond chronic self-awareness and can tap into our well of feeling, “we begin to give up … being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society.” (Lorde)
True freedom, for Chytilová at the end of her life, was in simply tending to her garden. “The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating. It is the form that opens it, in that case,” says Heijinian Lyn. Form, or craft - an act like gardening, putting on makeup, or making a film - is the only way to live while being in touch with the erotic. Looking to the future with this awareness, Susan Sontag writes, “what is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”
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Sources Cited
Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic : the Erotic as Power.” Distributed by the Crossing Press. 1978.
Chytilová, Věra. “Daisies.” Barrandov Film Studio, 1966.
Loden, Barbara. “Wanda.” Paramount Pictures. 1968.
Huston, John. “The Misfits.” Universal Pictures. 1960.
Buchar, Robert. “Věra Chytilová.” Czech New Wave Filmmakers in Interviews. North Carolina: McFarland, 51-72. 2004.
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” Against Interpretation. New York: Picador. 1964.
Hejinian, Lyn. “The Rejection of Closure.” Originally written as a talk and given at 544 Natoma Street, San Francisco, on April 17, 1983.
Dulac, Germaine. “The Avant-Garde Cinema.” In Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, Meta Mazaj. Boston Bedford/St.Martin’s. 2011.
Martin, F. David. “Heidegger’s Being of Things and Aesthetic Education.” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 8, no. 3. JSTOR. 1974.
Miller, Arthur. “The Mustangs.” Published in Esquire Magazine. Oct. 1957.
Kazan, Elia. “A Life.” Alfred Knopf. New York, 1988.