Classical Hollywood Cinema: Point of View and Communication 0719083346, 9780719083341

Table of contents :
Title page
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: point of view and communication
1 Point of view, consciousness and interaction
2 Distance, representation and criticism
3 Communication, love and death
Conclusion: categories and conversations
Postscript: education, communication and film studies
Select bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Classical Hollywood cinema

Classical Hollywood cinema Point of view and communication

James Zborowski

Manchester University Press

Copyright © James Zborowski 2016 The right of James Zborowski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 0 7190 8334 1  hardback First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

Contents

Preface vi Acknowledgements xi Introduction: point of view and communication

1

1 Point of view, consciousness and interaction

7

2 Distance, representation and criticism

44

3 Communication, love and death

85

Conclusion: categories and conversations

111

Postscript: education, communication and film studies

115

Select bibliography 131 Index 135

Preface

In the pursuit of its principal aims of engaging closely and critically with six masterpieces of the classical Hollywood cinema and metacritically with the phenomenon of filmic point of view, this book brings together and attempts to synthesise a range of material that does not often appear together in public. I have sought to make clear what I take to be the connections between these sources, and in certain of my notes, especially those in Chapter 1, I offer further justifications for the connections I make, to which the sceptical or interested reader is here directed. The success or failure of this attempt will need to be judged as it appears, by each reader. Nevertheless, it seems worthwhile for me to offer a brief account of the writing of this book as a biographical form of explanation to accompany (without being offered as a substitute for) the intellectual justification that is intended to be built into its main body. I trust that what follows avoids the purely personal, but some readers may still prefer to skip forward to the introduction. This book has been written over a period of more than five years. Initially, it was conceived of as a study of filmic point of view, with a particular focus on fictional characters, adopting as its case studies five classical Hollywood directors (all the directors of the principal case study films in the account as it stands, minus John Ford). This was in turn a development of my doctoral dissertation, a comparative account of three directors which took as its point of departure Robin Wood’s suggestion that, ‘Equally removed from the audience-participation techniques of Hitchcock and the clinical objectivity and detachment of Preminger, Ophuls’s camera-work achieves a perfect balance – in terms of the spectator’s involvement – between sympathy and detachment.’1 The scholarship I engaged with during the first phase of the book’s writing comprised criticism, metacriticism, narratology and studies of

Preface  vii

point of view from within film studies and, secondarily, literary studies. A turning point came as a result of my taking up a lecturing post whose responsibilities necessitated that I immerse myself more deeply in media studies than I had until then. What seemed at first to be at best a parallel path of teaching obligations very soon revealed itself as a source of new and exciting ways of approaching the book, which had the dual effect of deepening and diversifying my thinking on the topics I was already concerned with – point of view and distance – and suggesting to me that the addition of the topic of communication was what was required to complete and draw together the project. It is ­communication studies (of a particular kind) rather than media studies (in so far as such a ­distinction holds) that constitutes an important element of what follows. The link between the two, and a decisive encounter, came in my reading of Paddy Scannell’s Media and Communication (2007)2 as part of my teaching preparation. My most direct debts to that book in what follows are its deepenings of my acquaintances with the work of the Frankfurt School (including Jürgen Habermas) and the Toronto School, but it has permeated my thought in numerous other important ways. My other principal debt to Scannell is that elsewhere, he presents an engagement with Martin Heidegger that is not only comprehensible to someone like me not blessed, to quote The Awful Truth (McCarey, 1937), with ‘a continental mind’, but also made me see why Heidegger matters as much as he does.3 My second decisive encounter, resulting (to the best of my recollection) from reading Media and Communication, was with John Durham Peters’s Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999).4 As Peters makes clear early in his account, his history of communication is a broadly construed and far-reaching one: [S]uch figures as Socrates and Jesus … or Augustine and John Locke … might not have a demonstrable role in the history of the semantics of ‘communication’, but they are good to think with. With brilliance and articulateness, they lay out arguments and concerns that in current thinking are often muffled at best. Such thinkers as these make our own thoughts more fluent … [T]he philosophically richest thinking about communication, taken as the problem of intersubjectivity or breakdowns in mutual understanding, is often found in those who make little use of the word.5

Peters’s influence on what follows is most apparent in the final chapter and the postscript, but again permeates the entire book.

viii  Preface

A few further comments about the evolution of the purpose and the structure of this book over the course of its writing might be helpful to certain readers – that is, depending on the expectations they bring to the book, and what they hope to receive from it. The first complete draft of this book addressed one director in each of its main chapters, and those chapters were organised around an exploration of the particular use of film style of the director in question. As my focus became more conceptual and metacritical, there came a point where my aims were better served by a structure in which each main chapter placed two of my case study directors and (more specifically) one of their films each alongside one another (a structure I discuss a little further in the introduction). Style is no longer one of the key explicit terms or structuring concepts of my account, but it remains fundamental to what follows. For someone who takes it as axiomatic, as I do, that style is not the icing on the cake of an artwork, but one name we might give to its meaningful organisation, it could not be otherwise. One reader of a near-final version of the manuscript, whilst appreciative of the close readings offered in the book’s main chapters, declared himself less convinced of the vitality and virtues of some of the material that frames the main chapters, and some within those chapters where I chance my arm offering thumbnail readings of philosophers and other thinkers – that is, much of the material that is the newest and therefore the most exciting to me personally – often unburdened by the libraries-full of discussion and critique that many of them carry in their wake. It is true that I still know Hitchcock much better than I know Heidegger, and while I offer my book in the hope of bringing readers to new insights about the films and directors I explore, I do not expect to achieve the same effect with respect to many of the philosophers and theorists I discuss, whom others will know, along with the disciplinary conversations that surround them, much better than I. I am not able, nor would I wish, to control which parts of what follows any given reader takes as more or less valuable; a book’s communicative mode of dissemination does not allow for such control, and readers (especially academic readers) hardly need to be invited to take what they find most useful and disregard the rest. And, like any writer, I am probably not the best judge of the distribution of strength and value in what I have written. I can only declare that everything I include here warrants its place for one reason or another. Some of the material in Chapter 1 especially is offered as a way of acknowledging a debt or rehearsing a train of thought that furnished me with particular ways of thinking or vocabularies, or delivered me to

Preface  ix

certain destinations. Perhaps I should have simply pulled the ladder up behind me and stowed it away, but perhaps also there are other readers who would benefit from being offered the same ladder. One further comment about the book’s content and remit seems to be in order. Although it appears in the title, the phrase ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ is not used much in the text, nor explicitly reflected upon as a category. Given that, if we employ a suitably broad (but still, I think, meaningful) definition of the term, all of my case study films constitute instances of ‘classical Hollywood cinema’, it seemed more informative, and more honest, to indicate this in the book’s title, rather than call it, say, Point of view and communication in film. This said, I would maintain nevertheless that the points I make are for the most part applicable to the broader sub-category of film which we might term the ‘narrative fiction film’ (perhaps prefacing that label with the term ‘mainstream’ or ‘realist’ if we feel so inclined). I would not wish to downplay the singularity or what I see as the near-magical achievements that belong particularly to classical Hollywood cinema, but, for the purposes of this project, such things do not, it seems to me, demand to become a matter of sustained scrutiny. Having said this, I acknowledge that the extension of my corpus beyond the classical Hollywood cinema might steer the conversation in different directions. If I were called upon to defend the limits of my corpus, I do not think I could do so more eloquently than George M. Wilson does in a book which makes no reference to classical Hollywood cinema in its title but focuses exclusively on films belonging to that category (and covers a historical span very similar to mine): It is essential that we cultivate a lively sense of the subtlety, complexity, and variety which classical narrative and narrational strategies allow … [I]f we lack a satisfactory conception of the possibilities that the more conventional forms allow, we are likely to become disoriented when theory is supposed to encompass narrative and quasi-narrative films that overtly make a sharp break with established canons of exposition in film … It is hard to make out the premises of an alternative mode of narration if the assumptions it means to repudiate are themselves not understood.6

Rather than place the classical Hollywood cinema as a zero-degree style whose outworn principles and staid conventions other filmmaking styles heroically bend or break, I have let the close reading of a handful of the great achievements of whatever we want to call this era of filmmaking7 fill my entire account, so that a minute fraction of its richness and ­diversity is what is demonstrated.

x  Preface

Notes 1 R. Wood, Personal Views: Explorations in Film (London: Gordon Fraser, 1976), p. 126. 2 P. Scannell, Media and Communication (London: Sage, 2007). 3 Scannell’s first lengthy engagement with Heidegger is in Radio, Television and Modern Life: A Phenomenological Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). A second book-length engagement is offered in Television and the Meaning of Live: An Enquiry into the Human Situation (Cambridge: Polity, 2014). 4 J. D. Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 5 Peters, Speaking into the Air, pp. 4–7. 6 G. M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 11–12. 7 For two critiques of the label ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ (aimed specifically at David Bordwell), see D. Pye, ‘Bordwell and Hollywood’, Movie 33 (1989), p. 46 and A. Britton, Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. B. K. Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), pp. 451–7.

Acknowledgements

Many of a writer’s principal debts will be owed to other writers he or she has never met. I will allow the conventions of academic referencing to take care of most of these debts, but I wish to pay particular tribute to Robin Wood (1931–2009), who, as already mentioned, provided in his writing the point of departure for the earlier project out of which this book emerges, and who stands as a model of engaged, humanistic criticism, and of beautiful writing. Even though he lived in Canada and I live in the UK, I always expected that I would one day meet him, and I am sad that this never occurred. The doctoral research which preceded this book and the master’s study which preceded that was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to whom I am extremely grateful. Before that I was supported in a much more comprehensive manner by my parents, Andrew and Joanne Zborowski. I cannot thank them enough. Throughout my undergraduate, taught postgraduate and doctoral studies, I enjoyed the privilege of being guided by the wonderful staff of the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. That department possesses all the vigour one would expect of such a prestigious unit, but also creates the room for creativity and individual attention and nurture that are all too rare in contemporary higher education. Before I proceed to thank individual members, I would like to thank all the staff, both academic and administrative, and all of the students with whom I interacted during my time there. Victor Perkins supervised the first year of my doctoral research. Beyond this, his presence in the department and his great generosity with his time and intellectual resources have been of immeasurable help to me. Victor provides a constant and formidable model of critical writing. A second, equally formidable model for me has been Charlotte Brunsdon.

xii  Acknowledgements

From no other teacher have I learned as much about the importance of methodology and reflection upon it. Ed Gallafent supervised my doctoral research in its second and third years. Ed’s engagement with my thinking and writing, besides being a model of thoroughness, was always insightful, and often unpredictable (in the best possible way). During his doctoral supervision, our shared teaching commitments, and beyond, Ed was unfailingly generous, intuitive and supportive. Catherine Constable did more than anyone else to guide me in what I needed to do as I emerged, blinking, into the post-Ph.D. world. She prodded and guided me through procedures including book proposals and job applications. Every post-postgraduate should have a career mentor who is so generous with her time and attention, and so direct in her guidance. Fellow film studies postgraduates I would especially like to acknowledge are Paul Cuff, Stuart Henderson, Tom Hughes, Claire Jenkins, Wujung Ju, Chris Meir, Michael Pigott, Nicolas Pillai, Laura Sava, Jaakko Seppälä, Jason Simpkins, Anna C. Sloan, Tom Steward and Timotheus Vermeulen. At the University of Hull, I have benefited from the collegiality of my most immediate teaching colleagues, past and present: James Aston, Alan Burton, Denise Carter, Charlie Cordeaux, Amy Davis, David Eldridge, Barnaby Haran, Athina Karatzogianni, Iris Kleinecke-Bates, Jo Metcalf, John Osborne, Jenel Virden and Simon Willmetts. Thank you to Amy for being my most reliable interlocutor, and to Athina for all her provocations and stimulations. Various colleagues at Hull, past and present, read versions of this book at different stages in its development: Alan Burton, Ann Heilmann, John Osborne and Neil Sinyard. John in particular provided detailed and direct comments which prompted valuable revisions. Further afield, Andrew Klevan, although he only read a small portion of a near-final version of the manuscript, offered comments that led to significant redrafting. He also, at an earlier stage, recommended Gilbert Ryle to me at exactly the right time. Thanks also to Lucy Fife Donaldson, John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, who all influenced the thinking and work that led to this book in important ways. Thank you to all the staff at Manchester University Press for their commitment to the book throughout its various versions, and to the anonymous readers they employed, each of whom offered helpful advice and feedback. For intellectual stimulation and companionship beyond the academy, thanks to Richard George, Rachel Mann, Leo Robson and Pete Thomas. Pete Falconer became a great friend, a stunning source of cultural knowledge and an indispensable intellectual companion to me during

Acknowledgements  xiii

my postgraduate studies, and he has remained so. In Pete’s company one feels acutely and in a particular way one of the key tenets of this book: that conversation is a form of education. James MacDowell, another fellow Warwick film studies postgraduate, is the one person with whom I have lived and talked film studies the most, and with his help I have arrived at clearer or deeper articulations and understandings of various works of film studies, and of film art. James has also been this book’s most steadfast champion (at times defending its value even in the face of its author’s doubts and dismissals), and has attended to and helped to shape its development and details more than any other reader, by scrutinising multiple drafts and engaging in long, long exchanges about the words and arguments on the page. The imagined or implied interlocutor at various points in what follows often started life as the real-life James MacDowell. My wife Louise Zborowski has lived with the contents of this book for well over half the time that she has lived with me, and has through all that time been a source of conversation, inspiration and love, as well as much-needed distraction and perspective. And in the time that it has taken me to produce one book, we have produced two children, Lyra and Rufus (the former fact, of course, not being entirely independent of the latter!). Infants do not help the book-writing process in obvious ways, but there is nothing like them to focus the mind (at first, in terror!), and also to renew one’s perception of the world more thoroughly than any artwork can hope to. This book is dedicated to four people, for the individual reasons given above, and because together they comprise my University of Warwick ‘Hollywood cinema’ collective: Catherine Constable, Pete Falconer, Ed Gallafent and James MacDowell.

Introduction: point of view and communication

This book engages closely with six masterpieces of the classical Hollywood cinema under three large topic headings. The films are (in chronological order, rather than as ordered in this book): Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Capra, 1936), Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks, 1939), Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls, 1948), Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, 1962). The topics are point of view, distance and communication. I offer what follows as a work of criticism and metacriticism – a word I choose in preference to ‘theory’. To put it another way, I offer analyses of particular films (which also constitute evaluations of some of their achievements), and reflections upon how this activity of analysis proceeds, or might proceed. I invite the reader to share a particular series of ways of looking with me, and to consider what value there is in these ways of looking. It seems to me that any attempt to engage critically with narrative fiction, and narrative fiction film as a species of that larger category, necessarily entails engagement with matters of point of view, distance and communication. That is, anyone who treats narrative fiction films as meaningful objects always already thinks and writes, critically if not also metacritically, in relation to these concepts. (I should immediately add that I am not so arrogant as to suppose that my ways of writing about these concepts are the only or the best ways of doing so.) The principal scholarly territory that this account operates within, and holds itself accountable to, is that of the study of point of view within the larger field of narratology. My book’s particular contribution to this area is to bring a (somewhat eclectic) range of scholarly work which can be accommodated under the broad umbrella of ‘communication studies’ to bear upon existing approaches to and problems within studies of

2  Classical Hollywood cinema

filmic point of view, in an attempt to offer alternative ways of looking at and writing about film, and films. If point of view is this book’s alpha, communication is its omega. Point of view is the grounding concept and point of departure for each chapter; communication emerges in each as the most fundamental concern (a structure that is replicated in the ­larger-scale organisation of the book). Existing accounts have demonstrated that to explore an artwork’s handling of point of view very often provides a powerful way of accounting both for the artwork’s overall achievements, and for detailed matters of organisation within it (the former, of course, usually arising from the latter). To study point of view also provides an excellent opportunity to bring together the conceptual and the critical. As Douglas Pye has noted: Close analysis seems an essential test of any approach to point of view, because it is in our engagement with the texture of a film that our relationship with the characters and their world is negotiated moment by moment, scene by scene, and that the categories and assumptions which we bring with us are most likely to be challenged.1

A blending of conceptual summary and detailed critical analysis is one of the main methodological features of this account. I am also deeply invested, as every critic should be, in trying to find exactly the right words to describe my experiences of particular film moments. As a general critical principle, this ought to go without saying, but it becomes a matter of particular importance at points during the first two main chapters (during my discussion of Vertigo, aided by Gilbert Ryle, and Anatomy of a Murder, aided by Bertolt Brecht). It also seems worth stating that this aim to find exactly the right words is not the same as (and is in some ways the opposite of) striving to generate categories that account for a film’s organisation and effects. I discuss this matter further in the book’s conclusion. Two key strands run through this account. The first is an exploration of the critical tools we have at our disposal to describe the experiences of characters in film – more specifically, the representation of what we might call character consciousness, and what we can call character interaction. I argue (with the help of a range of philosophers who can be thought of as communication theorists) that our ability to account, in our acts of criticism, for both of these dimensions of character experience is compromised by the ways of conceptualising human experience and film form that we often bring to our encounters with films. This argument is presented in Chapter 1, and the exploration of the filmic

Introduction  3

representation of character interaction is resumed and developed in Chapter 3. The second key strand is a consideration of what can be added to our understanding of the qualities and possibilities of filmic point of view by attention to the aesthetically and historically specific features of film – and the narrative fiction film in particular – as a medium not only of expression but also of communication. I argue that film’s relationship to publicness and privacy is in many respects more akin to the novel than to, say, television, because of the communicative properties film shares with the novel (and in spite of the greater closeness of some of its formal properties to other ‘visual’ or ‘screen’ media). This argument is first presented in Chapter 2, and developed further in the book’s postscript. (A  more detailed breakdown of the main chapters is offered after the following paragraph.) Within the bounds of a printed publication (a dissemination), ­dialogue is something that I try to retain in a variety of ways. The most pervasive structural feature of the book that fulfils this purpose is my use in each of my three main chapters of a pair of case study films. Part of what I am doing in each of those chapters is staging a conversation between two films, so that each draws the other out, as it were, in ­dialogue, a process which allows felicitous and instructive connections to appear, and the particular qualities of each film to emerge more clearly. I also try to treat the relationship between the films and the various kinds of ‘­secondary’, written material I draw upon dialogically – that is, granting equal ­conversational rights, as it were, to both kinds of texts. Chapter 1, ‘Point of view, consciousness and interaction’ begins by revisiting a question that some narratologists have declared settled. Seymour Chatman, for example, comparing literary and filmic narration, takes ‘the greater facility of literary narrative for rendering the mental life of characters’2 as a given. I seek to redraw, or at least trouble, the boundary between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ upon which a judgement like Chatman’s rests. To this end, I put my two case study films, Vertigo and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, in dialogue with the work of a range of critics and philosophers, the most prominent voices in the latter category being those of Martin Heidegger, Matthew Ratcliffe, Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein. A crucial part of my argument in this first chapter is that building our critical activities on a theoretical distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ prevents us from doing full justice to many of the central achievements and concerns of narrative fiction film, including, crucially, its representation of human interaction. I offer an alternative view which

4  Classical Hollywood cinema

seeks to do greater justice to the ‘being-in-the-world’ of humans, and I try to begin to demonstrate through close analyses of a series of passages from my case study films the contribution such a perspective might make to film criticism and metacriticism, and to accounts of filmic point of view. I end by suggesting that the existing inner–outer distinction has been encouraged not only by accounts of literary point of view, but perhaps also by the central place of Hitchcock, and the particular qualities of his films, in discussions of filmic point of view. Chapter 2, ‘Distance, representation and criticism’ begins with an exploration of distance as a variable formal property of narrative fiction films, and so continues the discussion of point of view begun in Chapter  1. It proceeds to a consideration of distance as a variable property of media of communication (as opposed to what we might call ‘expression’) in general, and the particular communicative and expressive affordances of film in this regard. The two main sets of thinkers outside of film and literary studies engaged with in the chapter’s exploration of distance and communication are some of those who fall within the orbit of the Frankurt School – principally Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Jürgen Habermas – and one of the primary representatives of what has sometimes, though less commonly, been termed the Toronto School, Harold Adams Innis.3 (The chapter also engages with Hannah Arendt.) The two case study films are Anatomy of a Murder, directed by Otto Preminger, whose handling of point of view is recognised by David Bordwell,4 V. F. Perkins5 and Robin Wood6 alike as residing at the opposite pole of what we might term a spectrum of distance from his fellow classical Hollywood filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, directed by John Ford, who has been championed by Jean-Marie Straub and Gilberto Perez as ‘the most Brechtian of all filmmakers’.7 It is in fact Anatomy of a Murder that I place in most sustained dialogue with Brecht, offering the film’s courtroom drama as a metacritical reflection upon criticism, and upon the role that the point of view adopted during the act of sustained aesthetic contemplation might have to play in socially oriented criticism. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is offered principally as a reflection upon the consequences of, to use Innis’s distinctions, the replacement of an oral and time-binding culture with a literate and space-binding one. ‘The social’ emerges as a common thread in my two discussions, and with the help of Arendt and in dialogue with Habermas, I explore the delineation of the public, the private and the social achieved by these two films in particular, and by film more generally.

Introduction  5

Chapter 3, ‘Communication, love and death’ uses the topic of communication as a lens through which to view two films, one of whose handlings of point of view has attracted what is collectively almost certainly the richest body of film criticism devoted to any single film, Letter from an Unknown Woman. Much of that criticism has focused, ­appropriately, on the failures of communication and understanding between the film’s romantic pair, rendered with sympathetic irony by Ophuls. I acknowledge this dimension of their relationship, but concentrate more attention upon Lisa/Joan Fontaine and Stefan/Louis Jourdan’s brief but successful creation of a shared world on their enchanted evening together, and upon the letter itself as a communicative encounter which is in many ways more suited to each party’s needs and desires than their face-to-face interactions. The counterpoint to Letter from an Unknown Woman is provided by Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings. Despite the differences in sensibility and filmic construction that separate these two films and their directors, a similar communicative ­blockage (­accompanied by a similarly different orientation towards time and experience) exists between Only Angels Have Wings’s romantic pair as it does between Lisa and Stefan. Bonnie/Jean Arthur prepares to leave at the end of the film because Geoff/Cary Grant has not asked her to stay. The couple’s final act of communication, fortunately, manages to bring chance, commitment and fate, the said and the unsaid, and the place of the everyday, or what we might call the intimate, and the place of the romantic, into happier alignments than are achieved in Letter from an Unknown Woman. Only Angels Have Wings also offers us the salutary reminder of the virtues of not communicating (and that this can itself sometimes constitute a form of communication). The chapter, for the most part, adopts (to use the distinction proposed by James Carey) a ‘ritual’ rather than a ‘transmission’ view of communication.8 I use the conclusion as an opportunity to reflect upon and defend the value of the method adopted in the book, which I offer as one which embraces the cultivation of conversation and largely eschews the proposing of categories (one of the most common features of accounts of point of view). The book’s postscript retains the rest of the book’s focus on communication (and, to a lesser extent, point of view), but takes a step back to explore broader issues relating to humanistic study in higher education and to defend such study as a form of communication with particular, and vital, virtues.

6  Classical Hollywood cinema

Notes 1 D. Pye, ‘Movies and point of view’, Movie 36 (2000), p. 15. 2 S. Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 3. 3 I hope that the pertinence of bringing together these two bodies of thought will be at least sufficiently apparent in the chapter itself, but the interested reader is directed towards J. Stamps, Unthinking Modernity: Innis, McLuhan, and the Frankfurt School (London: McGill-Queens University Press, 1995). 4 D. Bordwell, J. Staiger and K. Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 79. 5 V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 129–30. 6 R. Wood, Personal Views: Explorations in Film (London: Gordon Fraser, 1976), p. 126. 7 G. Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 250. See also G. Perez, ‘House of miscegenation’, London Review of Books 32:22 (2010), p. 24. 8 J. W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Revised Edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. 11–28.

1 Point of view, consciousness and interaction

The study of point of view in fiction is the study of the endless possibilities of the relationship between a fiction’s story-world, including the entities within that world, and the way that story-world is presented to (in fact, and at the same time, created for) the reader or viewer. This broad definition allows us to see that accounts of point of view concern themselves with issues beyond those to do with fictional characters but also helps to explain why characters, as among the most important elements of a fictional story-world, are almost always afforded a very important place within such accounts. There is no sustained discussion of literary or filmic point of view that does not refer extensively to characters. Unfortunately, as this chapter seeks to demonstrate, prevailing models of filmic point of view do not place us in the best position to describe and explain the representation of characters’ experiences in narrative fiction films. In what follows, I explore first the representation of c­haracter ­consciousness, and then the representation of character interaction, in an attempt to highlight what I take to be the key problems within ­existing theoretical accounts of filmic point of view with respect to these areas of concern, and in order to propose an alternative way of seeing and ­proceeding. My principal method is to interrogate the terms and (­therefore) the underlying assumptions that are available in our attempts to account, in our acts of theory and criticism, for the representation of these dimensions of character experience, and to test these terms and assumptions against the experiences offered by narrative fiction films (and my case study films in particular).

8  Classical Hollywood cinema

Representing character consciousness in novels and films The ability of prose narration to represent human consciousness is one important topic within studies of literary point of view. So successful and subtle are novelistic representations of human consciousness that critics and theorists who compare novels and films often find the latter markedly inferior in this regard. George Bluestone, in his book Novels into Film (1966), suggests that ‘The rendition of mental states – memory, dream, imagination – cannot be as adequately represented by film as by language. If the film has difficulty presenting streams of consciousness, it has even more difficulty presenting states of mind which are defined precisely by the absence of them in the visible world.’1 In his book Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (1990) Seymour Chatman cites (and does not fundamentally challenge) the above passage, after having claimed in his introduction that ‘the greater facility of literary narrative [than filmic] for rendering the mental life of characters’ is one example of ‘issues that seems reasonably settled’ and can therefore be ‘skip[ped] over’.2 In a chapter from his book Consciousness and the Novel (2002) entitled ‘Henry James and the movies’, David Lodge (who, it is worth noting, has adapted literary texts, including one of his own novels for television) echoes Bluestone: Consciousness was [Henry James’s] subject … how the minds of sensitive, intelligent individuals are forever analysing, interpreting, anticipating, suspecting, and questioning their own motives and those of others. And consciousness of this kind, which is self-consciousness, is precisely what film as a medium finds most difficult to represent, because it is not visible. If you make the characters put their thoughts into speech, you destroy the essential feature of consciousness in James’s world-picture – its private, secret nature; if you have the characters articulate their thoughts in voice-over monologue, you go against the grain of the medium and produce an artificial, intrusive effect. Facial expression, body language, visual imagery, and music can all be powerfully expressive, but they lack precision and discrimination. They deal in broad basic emotions: fear, desire, joy. James’s fiction, by contrast, is full of the finest, subtlest psychological discriminations.3

In this chapter I seek an enlarged understanding of how films represent characters as thinking and feeling beings-in-the-world, which I hope will make the medium seem less impoverished in this respect than Bluestone, Chatman, Lodge and many others claim. Before proceeding further, I think it is worth stating that I will not attempt to address the question of how far a character can become a filmic narrator. Humans

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  9

are prodigious producers of words and tellers of stories, so it is not difficult for us to imagine a fictional character to be the (fictional) source of prose narration; conversely, to entertain the notion that a character is responsible for producing filmic images is much more difficult. I believe therefore that to propose or seek out a homodiegetic filmic narrator (to use Gérard Genette’s term)4 is an uphill struggle that will end in failure. I will not attempt to argue the case any further here;5 I will simply declare that my attention and efforts lie elsewhere. Henry James (to continue a moment longer with Lodge’s example) used characters not as narrators but as ‘filters’ (to use Chatman’s term)6 or as loci of ‘focalisation’ (to use Genette’s).7 To employ Genette’s distinctions: we ‘see’ through the ‘eyes’ of a particular character, but that character is not the one who ‘speaks’.8 When the method of ‘the Master’ (as Henry James has been labelled) is described this way, one’s mind may already be turning to another medium, film and another ‘master’, Alfred Hitchcock – perhaps especially his Vertigo, a film whose protagonist John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson/James Stewart spends a lot of screen time silently watching another person – seeing without speaking, we might say. In James’s novels and in Hitchcock’s films, we are not given access to the story-world by any narrating activity by the protagonist, yet the presentation of the story-world exhibits elements that we understand to relate to that character’s consciousness and experience. Take, for example, the famous restaurant scene near the beginning of Vertigo. Scottie, a retired police detective, has been persuaded to shadow the wife of an old college acquaintance (Gavin Elster/Tom Helmore) to get to the root of the strange behaviour he claims she has been exhibiting. Scottie agrees to go to Ernie’s restaurant so that he can see Madeleine there (dining with her husband) without himself being seen. The scene begins with a shot of Scottie in medium close-up at the bar, looking over his shoulder. ‘The obvious way to develop this would be to satisfy our curiosity by cutting at once to [Scottie’s] point of view, and an image of Madeleine’, suggests Charles Barr.9 What in fact follows, as Robin Wood notes, ‘is not (cannot possibly be) a point-of-view shot, yet it has the effect of linking us intimately to the movement of Scottie’s consciousness’.10 The camera does not cut, but pans left, allowing the viewer to take in the opulent dining area, then slowly tracks forward. In the background of the frame we see Elster sitting at a table with a woman (Kim Novak) whose back is to the camera, and who must be Madeleine. Neil Potts elaborates upon Wood’s assertion that this first shot of the scene connects the viewer to the movement of Scottie’s consciousness,

10  Classical Hollywood cinema

and suggests that the camera ‘strikes a fine balance between declaring fascination and practising caution’.11 Barr’s hypothetical option of cutting immediately to an optical POV shot would, in comparison to this, feel brash, and would not achieve the effects Potts describes: ‘The shot’s perceptible “jostling”, its slow pacing and its resting at some distance from Madeleine all express the nervously attentive, surreptitious vigil maintained by Scottie.’12 Even this brief sketch of a single shot from a single film begins to suggest that the medium’s ability to represent consciousness might not be quite so dire as Lodge suggests. And the descriptions above focus on only one element of the scene, albeit a vital element of film art (and one which, significantly, does not appear in Lodge’s brief list of film’s ‘powerfully expressive’ features): camera movement. The other element of this particular scene that probably commands, and has indeed received, most attention is Herrmann’s score. In the restaurant scene, as in much of the rest of the film, the music communicates desire, but it does so in such a way that it communicates more than just a ‘broad basic emotion’. The pull between fascination and caution that Potts sees expressed in the scene’s camera movements is also suggested by David Cooper in his analysis of the film’s score, which he notes ‘avoid[s] the resolution of [dissonant melodic notes] on strong beats and [shuns] obvious and predictable harmonic progressions’.13 Describing Herrmann’s ‘convoluted route’ to resolution, Cooper adds that ‘the expected fulfilment is initially frustrated, but the gratification engendered at the point of final resolution is greater than it would have been had the dissonance been resolved immediately’.14 One could continue indefinitely in this vein: letting novels and their critics and theorists set the standards and terms of debate, and seeing how far film might measure up. However, I will now turn to the larger task of arguing that if we are going to do justice to the possibilities and the achievements of film, then the terms of debate need to be broadened significantly. What is called thinking?15 In fact, the problem is larger still. Although literary criticism is an important site for the discussion of consciousness, inner lives, introspection, mental states, and so on, such language hardly belongs to literary criticism exclusively. The phenomena these terms point towards are key ingredients of modern identity. ‘Our modern notion of the self is related

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  11

to, one might say constituted by, a certain sense … of inwardness.’16 So begins the long section on ‘Inwardness’ in Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1989). Taylor outlines the historical formation (via figures including Plato, Augustine, René Descartes and John Locke) of the widely held contemporary sense of identity as a thing possessing a crucial ‘inner’ and private dimension. This model of identity and subjectivity, which distinguishes between an inner realm of thought and feeling and an outer realm of things, and which in philosophy tends to go by the name of ‘dualism’ – or ‘Cartesian dualism’, when it is traced back to Descartes – is so pervasive that it seems redundant to offer general examples of it (though I will in the next section offer examples of the model at work within film studies). It is, Taylor correctly observes, ‘a mode of thought we easily fall into. The onus of argument, the effort, falls to those who want to overcome dualism.’17 An even remotely thorough account of the key figures who have sought to overcome dualism is not on the cards here. Even if I were in a position to provide it (which I am not), the main business of this chapter is to suggest how approaches to filmic characters and point of view that harbour dualistic assumptions have led us astray or not put us in the best position to articulate some of film’s properties, possibilities and achievements, and how an alternative approach might do better. That said, it does seem appropriate to introduce, or rehearse, a few key tenets and proponents of anti-dualist thinking, and in so doing disclose some of the key sources that have informed my own thinking. Lee Braver observes that ‘digging up Descartes in order to kill him off yet again has been a rather popular pastime among philosophers for some time now’,18 but from the ranks of such philosophers he presents Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein for special attention.19 Heidegger’s existential phenomenology wants to draw attention to the fundamentality of humans’ ‘being-in-the-world’20 with others. That is to say, according to Heidegger, the place we begin, and the place philosophy should likewise begin, is not with an individual perceiving subject, which through coming to know and understand itself can then understand others. Rather, the reverse is the case: our being (our Dasein) is inextricable from our being-in-the-world, and it is this shared context that forms the basis of our understandings of ourselves and our interactions with others.21 For Heidegger, ‘“Empathy” does not first constitute being-with, but is first possible on its basis.’22 Heidegger’s view of communication as a worldly matter has affinities with Wittgenstein’s view of meaning as a public matter. Often, meaning

12  Classical Hollywood cinema

and understanding reside in and are expressed through shared conventions and systems (which might constitute, for example, a language, or a game), and our deployment of them during interactions. Sometimes, Wittgenstein wants to go so far as to eliminate ‘inner’ processes from the picture entirely: ‘If we say to someone “I should be delighted to see you” and mean it, does a conscious process run alongside these words, a process which could itself be translated into spoken words? This will hardly ever be the case.’23 This impulse to eliminate the inner was shared by Gilbert Ryle, who in his The Concept of Mind (1949) seeks to refute ‘a doctrine about the nature and place of minds which is so prevalent among theorists and even among laymen that it deserves to be described as the official theory’,24 a doctrine which he traces back to Descartes, and which he goes on to label ‘the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’.25 As A. J. Ayer noted shortly after the book’s publication, for Ryle’s refutation to succeed he would have to demonstrate ‘that all our talk about mental states and processes can be reformulated in such a way as to eliminate any reference to an inner life’.26 Ayer’s fair estimation (shared by another contemporary and prestigious reviewer, J. L. Austin)27 was that Ryle failed in this task, but that he corrected ‘a tendency among philosophers to assume that everything that commonly passes for the work of mind consists in, or at least essentially involves, some inner process’,28 and thus ‘reduce[d] the empire of the mind over a considerable area’.29 Ryle devotes a lot of space, and examples, to his attempt to dislodge the inner process– outer behaviour presumption we saw Wittgenstein also challenge above. ‘When I do something intelligently, i.e. thinking what I am doing’, Ryle argues, ‘I am doing one thing and not two.’30 In one of his examples, he describes a clown’s skill at feigning clumsiness: ‘Tripping on purpose is both a bodily and a mental process, but it is not two processes, such as one process of purposing to trip and, as an effect, another process of tripping.’31 As part of his (not entirely convincing but nonetheless instructive) attempt to address the challenge to his thesis of what we might call our interior monologues or streams of consciousness, Ryle tries to reduce the differences between thinking silently and thinking aloud to ‘differences of social and personal convenience, of celerity, and of facility’.32 Even if this is not entirely convincing, it can be seen to point back to Heidegger’s reminder that we learn to talk to others before we learn to talk to ourselves, and not vice versa, and to John Dewey’s assertion that ‘Soliloquy is the product and reflex of converse with others; social communication not an effect of soliloquy. If we had not talked with others

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  13

and they with us, we should never talk to and with ourselves.’33 After quoting the first of these two sentences, John Durham Peters adds: ‘Thus solipsism would be the luxury of already socialized individuals who had forgotten their histories.’34 Ryle and Wittgenstein invite us, repeatedly, to think again about what we mean when we make mental states parts of our accounts of human activity. Such an invitation has especial relevance for the business of film theory and criticism, in so far as those activities seek to offer accounts of what filmic characters do. To respond to this invitation is not necessarily (to recall Ayer’s words) to go so far as to try to eliminate all references to characters’ inner lives from our descriptions, but it is to think again about when recourse to mental states is necessary. The broad church of phenomenology seems to me to offer some of the best positive alternative accounts of how we might conceive of and describe much human activity, including human activity as it appears on film. In the same year that his most famous work The Phenomenology of Perception was published (1945), Maurice Merleau-Ponty delivered a lecture entitled ‘Film and the new psychology’, in which he expounded enthusiastically on the affinities between the phenomenological ­world-view and some prominent features of the film medium: [T]he movies … do not give us [man’s] thoughts, as novels have done for so long, but his conduct or behaviour. They directly present to us that special way of being in the world, of dealing with things and other people, which we can see in the sign language of gesture and gaze and which clearly defines each person we know … For the movies as for modern psychology dizziness, pleasure, grief, love, and hate are ways of behaving. This psychology shares with contemporary philosophies the common feature of presenting consciousness thrown into the world, subject to the gaze of others and learning from them what it is … [T]he movies are peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in the other.35

Within contemporary film studies there is distinguished phenomenological work – perhaps most significantly that of Allan Casebier, Daniel Frampton, Vivian Sobchack and Daniel Yacavone.36 However, it seems fair to say (leaving aside differences in sensibility and style that will by now be obvious to anyone familiar with these works) that the questions and concerns that drive these writers are not the ones that drive the present account. In an overview entitled ‘Phenomenology and film’, David Sorfa offers, I believe, an accurate picture when he suggests that

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‘When we speak of a phenomenological approach to film we can mean two things. First, we can mean the experience we have when we watch a film, and second, although this is less often discussed, we could also mean the relationship that film has to the reality which forms its basis.’37 Neither of these two options – engaging with a viewer’s perceptual experience on the one hand, and grappling with the epistemological and ontological status of film as a medium on the other – quite captures the way that I wish to use phenomenology. What I am doing is drawing upon phenomenology, among other approaches, to ground an account of how we might better describe and explain human activity, behaviour and thought in a way that tries to avoid over or underrating either ‘the mind’ on the one hand or ‘the world’ on the other, and then using that account to explore how we might better describe and explain the activity, behaviour and thoughts of fictional characters, and how films represent these things. That this commits me to what might be termed a ‘realist’ view of film and our experience of it is a fact that I not only concede but embrace. When one’s primary focus is fictional characters, as mine is here, it seems that such a stance is near unavoidable. As Murray Smith notes, with characteristic acuity: to admit a notion of character at all is to acknowledge an element of narrative texts which is analogous to the human agent, and it is thus in the positing of a notion of character that a mimetic relationship is assumed to obtain between fictional narratives and the world. From this point on, the argument can only be about what psychology, or theory of the human agent, we model character on.38

I realise, nevertheless, that this may make my work appear naive, or perhaps even primitive, when read alongside other contemporary film theory.39 However, while the issues explored by Sobchack and other film phenomenologists are clearly important, so too are the issues I am exploring here, and, moreover, in the interests of not trying to do everything at the same time, it is legitimate, perhaps even necessary, to bracket one set of concerns while exploring another. These comments can also stand as an explanation for why, in the course of thinking through the issues at stake in this chapter, many of the works that have had the deepest influence on me have been unconnected to film studies. One book in particular demands prominent acknowledgement as an articulate, thorough and devastating critique, which has done more than any other work to shape my thinking, and to introduce me to other relevant writing: Matthew Ratcliffe’s Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  15

of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (2007),40 which uses phenomenology in the way I wish to, that is, as an important element of a wider approach, presented in a way to render it accessible to readers not necessarily inducted into its often tortuous forms of expression. Within film studies, the critic and theorist who most closely and often embodies the perspective I want to adopt here is V. F. Perkins. In his article ‘Must we say what they mean? Film criticism and interpretation’, a (very) critical review of Making Meaning,41 David Bordwell’s book-length critique of the self-fulfilling banalities of ‘Interpretation, Inc’,42 Perkins (after presenting an illustrative analysis of a moment from Caught (Ophuls, 1948)) presents a very Wittgensteinean view of meaning and interpretation: I suggest that a prime task of interpretation is to articulate in the medium of prose some aspects of what artists have made perfectly and precisely clear in the medium of film. The meanings I have discussed in the Caught fragment are neither stated nor in any special sense implied. They are filmed. Whatever else that means (which it is a purpose of criticism and theory to explore) it means that they are not hidden in or behind the movie, and that my interpretation is not an attempt to clarify what the picture has obscured. I have written about things that I believe to be in the film for all to see, and to see the sense of.43

In a later article, ‘Where is the world? The horizon of events in movie fiction’, Perkins seeks to demonstrate ‘some of the ways in which it matters that a fictional world is a world’.44 As a challenge to approaches that ‘can confine us in a mechanistic view … of human affairs’, he asserts that ‘Why a cause should be understood as a cause, and why an effect should count as an effect, are matters that can be assessed only within a world.’45 In his declaration of the importance, even the primacy, of worlds to our processes of understanding, I would suggest it is legitimate to detect an echo of Heidegger. Dualist language in accounts of filmic point of view Reference to the mental or inner lives or states of characters is frequent and widespread in accounts of filmic point of view. We have already read Bluestone’s reference to ‘mental states’ and ‘states of mind which are defined precisely by the absence of them in the visible world’, and Chatman’s reference to ‘the mental life of characters’. In his book-length account of filmic point of view, George M. Wilson asserts that ‘we think

16  Classical Hollywood cinema

of much animal and human behaviour as an expression of an agent’s inner beliefs, desires, intentions, and feelings’.46 During the course of his extended exploration of filmic point of view, Douglas Pye suggests that ‘In any narrative, access to … the interior lives of characters (thoughts, feelings, motivations) is carefully controlled.’47 In his Engaging Characters (1995), during the course of outlining his notion of ‘subjective access’, Murray Smith makes reference to characters’ ‘inner lives’ and ‘mental states’.48 Smith’s concept of ‘subjective access’ is similar to Bordwell’s notion of the ‘depth’ of a narration’s ‘knowledgability’, which ‘may present the whole of a character’s mental life’, or, at the other end of the scale, ‘may eschew any but behavioral indications of psychological states; it may even minimize those’.49 The list could be greatly extended. Pye suggests that ‘Films vary in the ways in which they deal with the relationship between external action and interior life’,50 and he is surely correct, but I would suggest that we ought to add that often, ‘a clear division between observable behaviour and unobservable mental states is … an artificial and misleading imposition on our understanding of action, gesture and expression’.51 Pye goes on to say that ‘It is common for certain moments (often when characters are alone or viewed in a privileged way) to be signalled as offering “authentic” access to thought or feeling, but it is open to directors to limit such moments, so that we struggle to infer characters’ inner lives from the faces they present to others.’52 Again, this is true, but, again, I would want to make the supplementary assertion that during many interpersonal interactions, including the ones represented to us in film fiction, one ‘experiences a thinking, feeling person, who is fully present in the experience, rather than a mechanism behind which lurks a mind that cannot be experienced’.53 The time has come to turn to this chapter’s case study films, in order to demonstrate that, and how, our presumptions about how various species of human activity should be described and explained matter to those particular human activities of film theory and criticism. My two case studies are Vertigo and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The distinction and complexity of the former’s handling of point of view have long been recognised. My reasons for choosing the latter, and for pairing it with Vertigo, will emerge during the course of what follows. Following a train of thought Let us pick up Vertigo at the beginning of the scene that follows the restaurant scene discussed earlier. From that scene we dissolve to Scottie

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  17

waiting for Madeleine to emerge from her apartment building. Barr highlights the eloquence of the ellipsis: ‘He has, then, taken the job, and we don’t need to be told that he has done so, or why.’54 (I cannot resist here a brief dialogue with an imagined interlocutor, in the style of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.)55 How do we know Scottie is waiting? Because he is sitting in his parked car (cars are for travelling in, not just sitting in), and he can’t keep his eyes on his newspaper for more than a few seconds without looking out of his window; plus, we can tell from the point of view shot from his perspective, which, with a slightly meandering upward tilt, performs a brief survey of an apartment building, that he is on the lookout for someone who lives there. Is waiting a mental activity? Perhaps, in so far as it constitutes expectation. However, it need not, and almost certainly does not, involve the person waiting saying to her or himself ‘I am waiting’, or anything similar. The experience of waiting is remaining in one place, being alert to and expectant of the arrival of that for which one is waiting, and, possibly, having an activity or an object which one is using, more or less successfully, to pass the time. These are all orientations towards things in the world. Once one has described these things, one has satisfactorily described waiting. This is the beginning of the film’s first and longest ‘following’ sequence, in which Scottie trails Madeleine around San Francisco as she visits a flower shop, the Mission Dolores church and graveyard, an art gallery at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the McKittrick Hotel. It is a mesmerising series of scenes, crucial to the securing of the film’s tone and its emotional effect. It is also one of the passages within Hitchcock’s entire body of work that, save the absence of the ingredient of ‘immobilisation’, most closely and sustainedly approximates his description of ‘pure cinema’: ‘You have an immobilized man looking out. That’s one part of the film. The second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts.’56 Barr offers very detailed shot breakdowns for the ‘following’ sequence, confirming that often there is ‘pure alternation’57 between shots of Scottie and optical POV shots from ‘the exact position which we have just been shown that Scottie occupies’.58 This pattern, he argues, ‘seals us firmly within Scottie’s eyes and mind’.59 The question I want to ask, which the chapter until now should have prepared the reader for, is ‘What does it mean to claim that such an alternating shot pattern places us within Scottie’s mind?’ (Barr’s claim, of course, is a specific instance of a type of claim that has been made by innumerable film critics and theorists about characters in innumerable films.)

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First, I will replicate Lodge’s strategy of placing a passage from a novel alongside its nearest equivalent in its film adaptation in order to compare their representations of consciousness. Lodge stacks the deck by choosing a long paragraph from Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) (that is, a mature work of a great novelist), which is ‘an extraordinarily subtle analysis of the games unhappily married people play when they talk to each other’,60 and by proceeding to compare it not even with the passage’s realisation on screen, but with the film’s61 screenplay, which eliminates the narrator’s insights, retaining only an unexpanded version of the few words spoken between the two characters in the novel. Perhaps I need not worry too much, then, about similarly stacking the deck by comparing Vertigo (a mature work of a great filmmaker) with the novel upon which it is ‘based’, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejec’s D’Entre les morts,62 first published in 1954 and set in Paris during the Second World War. There is a passage in D’Entre les morts in which, when he first begins trailing Madeleine, Flavières, who becomes Vertigo’s Scottie, waits outside her apartment – although in the novel he is on foot rather than in a car. The detail of the newspaper, however, is shared by novel and film: ‘He took a newspaper out of his pocket and glanced at it idly as he wandered on. Sometimes he actually read a paragraph – a reconnaissance plane shot down in Alsace, reinforcements for Narvik. What did he care? He was on holiday.’63 Does this passage put us ‘in the mind’ of the protagonist more than its equivalent in Vertigo? The references to a reconnaissance plane and reinforcements are part of the novel’s attention to its wartime setting. I would not want to say that our understanding of Scottie’s experience of waiting, and the role that the newspaper plays within it, is made lesser than our understanding of Flavières’s by the fact that, unlike in Flavières’s case, we do not learn anything of the content of Scottie’s newspaper. In fact, to show us particular items would be less successful than the sequence as it exists in conveying Scottie’s lack of interest in the newspaper. The final two sentences of the passage from D’Entre les morts quoted above employ free indirect style (accurately described by James Wood as ‘the most habitual of all the codes of standard realist [prose] narrative’):64 the narrator’s words blend with the character’s thoughts, without a clear dividing line between them. It is, potentially at least, an endlessly flexible and subtle technique. One might also note that it softens the artificiality that would often be felt were the thoughts to be returned, unfiltered by a non-character narrator, to their supposed source: ‘What do I care?

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  19

I’m on holiday.’ Rather than having to be exactly the words Flavières is consciously (but silently) saying to himself at a given moment, they can take on an edge of ventriloquism, and hover slightly above him, identifying something that he may be thinking without putting into words. A few paragraphs later (by which time Flavières has installed himself in a suitably located café to await Madeleine’s emergence), we get a more sustained passage of free indirect style: He gulped down the scalding hot coffee, smiling at himself. How did he know she would be coming out this afternoon? Was there any reason why she should? … Yes, there was. She’d come all right. Because of the sunshine, because of the tender green leaves, because of those fluffy seeds floating past on the balmy spring air. Lastly, she’d come because he was waiting for her!65

Should we, as Lodge does in the example referred to earlier, mourn all that has been lost in adaptation; should we assume that human lives continuously and necessarily possess species of contemplation and inner soliloquy of the kind captured here by Boileau and Narcejec, and that although films cannot capture them as successfully as novels, we ought nevertheless to assume them to be occurring at all times within filmic characters, just without our being able to hear them? I do not think so. When I watch (and re-watch) the few seconds of Scottie waiting outside Madeleine’s apartment, I do not feel the lack of an inner soliloquy. Just as I recognise Boileau and Narcejec’s rendering of an important and real dimension of human experience (albeit through a somewhat stilted use of a habitual literary technique), I recognise Vertigo’s ­filmmakers’ rendering of the silent outward-lookingness that can accompany absorption in certain tasks. What is more, I would not accede to a straightforward hierarchy which posited Flavières’s experience as ‘deeper’ or in other ways more authentic or valuable than Scottie’s, or to one which posited D’Entre les morts’s – or literature’s – representation of human experience as ‘deeper’ or in other ways more valuable than Vertigo’s – or film’s. Nor would I want simply to say that the novel gives us thought (inner states) while the film gives us behaviour (outer states). We do not ‘infer’ Scottie’s ‘inner state’ from what we see here. Such a formulation misrepresents Scottie’s experience: his waiting is the way he is behaving. To paraphrase Ryle, he is doing one thing (waiting), not two (or three: glancing at a newspaper and looking at Madeleine’s apartment building, and having a mental experience of ‘waiting’).

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Optical POV shots, consciousness and experience During his discussion of optical POV shots, Smith challenges the ‘conflation of sight and subjectivity’, stating that ‘the mind is not always consumed by what the eyes see, and what the eyes see does not itself tell us what the mind thinks’.66 Later, he argues: POV shots simply represent the field of vision of a character in the story world at a particular moment in the story. We are not ‘put in the position’ of a character by virtue of a new and deeper access to the character’s subjectivity, but by knowing (or rather seeing) no more than the character does. It is an alignment characterized by an identical limitation of knowledge, by what is withheld rather than what is given.67

This highlights something important about Vertigo’s ‘following’ sequences. On a first viewing, at least,68 Madeleine is, during these sequences, about as mysterious and remote to us as she is to Scottie, by virtue of the distance that Scottie must observe her from, a distance Hitchcock for the most part makes us share. Smith also argues for the importance of ‘reaction shots’ (the third part of Hitchcock’s recipe for ‘pure cinema’) within point-of-view editing: ‘the more a film attempts to render in a literal fashion the subjectivity of a character through the adoption of optical POV, the more it surrenders the power to evoke the full range of a character’s mental states, through the powerful mechanism of facial expression.’69 In his discussion of point-of-view editing, Noël Carroll makes the related suggestion that there is a ‘reciprocal’ relationship between ‘point/glance’ shots (shot of a character looking) and ‘point/object’ shots (optical POV shots): The point/glance sets out a global range of emotions that broadly characterizes the neighborhood of affective states that the character could be in. The point/object shot, then, delivers the object or cause of the emotion, thereby enabling us to focus on the particular emotion within the broad categories of the affective range made available by the point/glance shot.70

In Carroll’s account, the objects of point/object shots are objects of ­emotion for characters: emotions are characteristically marked by intentionality. That is, they are directed, or, to speak more technically, they have objects. One is not simply angry; one is angry at someone or something … And with respect to pointof-view editing I would hazard the guess that the particular object of the character’s emotion is generally a cause of the emotion.71

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Carroll’s view here is of a mind peering out into the world and having emotions about the things it sees: the mind and the world affect each other, but remain separate. Furthermore, Carroll, argues, in ‘movies’ (by which he means something like popular narrative screen fiction), ‘the emotions portrayed [in point/glance shots] are standardly quite basic’.72 The ‘very broad, generally reliable information about … emotional states’ provided by ‘the human face’ is then made ‘more fine-grained’ by showing ‘the object or cause of the emotion in question’.73 By such an account, although a film can delineate richly specific objects in the world that elicit emotional responses from characters, when it comes to specifying the brain-stuff of a character’s inner life, if presented with a character’s face then we might be able to apply a ballpark label, of disgust, fear, joy or shame, say (and perhaps describe physiognomy), but we are still woefully far from Henry James. Carroll is helpfully explicit about how he conceptualises the relationship between characters and their worlds, and how he sees point-of-view editing as constituting a formal corollary of this relationship, but the same view is implicit, to at least some degree, in Barr and Smith (to remain for now with the authors I have cited). For it to make sense to describe the viewer as ‘seal[ed] firmly within Scottie’s eyes and mind’,74 is it not necessary to assume that it is appropriate to describe Scottie as similarly sealed? To make this assumption misrepresents the human way of being-in-the-world, and underrates film’s ability to represent it. When Madeleine leads Scottie to the church graveyard, for example, and he surreptitiously observes her, do we want to say that he is ‘within his mind’, or that the shots of Scottie give us his emotions or mental states, and the shots from his optical POV give us the objects of those emotions or mental states? Such phrasings feel to me like an imposition. I would rather say that Scottie is immersed in an experience of carefully following a beautiful woman through a series of locations (‘all of them beautiful and almost all of them empty’)75 and trying to detect a pattern in her actions, and that these things together constitute Scottie’s experience. More specifically, in the twenty-four shots of the graveyard sequence, what is conveyed through spatial relations and point-of-view editing is the balance between what Potts described with reference to the restaurant scene as Scottie’s caution and his fascination. Haven’t you just made reference to two mental states? I would want to emphasise, with MerleauPonty, that these things here are ways of behaving. Scottie is of course disposed to be cautious, but his actions are not pale shadows or mere

22  Classical Hollywood cinema

mechanical ‘outputs’ of the mental state: it is only through his actions that the disposition is realised. Scottie takes a route through the graveyard that keeps him clear of Madeleine’s eye line, with the result that in his optical POV shots, what we gain in proximity to Madeleine we lose in frontality, until eventually we are viewing her from behind. Scottie’s awareness of Madeleine is accompanied by his awareness of his own physical presence. After a series of optical POV shots where foliage and gravestones intervene between Scottie and Madeleine, Scottie emerges at the foot of a straight and relatively exposed pathway. The camera initially frames him in long shot, and we see him, in an attempt to mask the true purpose of his presence, feign an interest in the things he passes along the path, until he walks into a low-angle medium shot and looks to his right, towards Madeleine. A few shots later, from through the branches of a tree, we see Madeleine begin to walk away from the grave she has been standing at for the whole scene so far. At the start of the next shot, Scottie’s sense of being in danger of being seen is communicated, brilliantly, by his suddenly increased proximity to the camera. He quickly takes a step back from the path Madeleine is now walking down, and from the camera, and partly conceals himself beside a stone pillar. From his sidelong glance we cut to an optical POV shot, during which Madeleine obligingly pauses in profile, much as she did in Ernie’s restaurant, and closer to Scottie than she has been since that introduction. What we have been shown in this scene, as I stated at the beginning of the paragraph, is Scottie’s experience, not the external actions that accompany his mental states, or the external objects that give rise to inner emotions. Carrying oneself cautiously, glancing furtively, being acutely aware of one’s proximity and potential visibility to another person, standing motionless with breath drawn for fear of being noticed: these things are this experience of being cautious and fascinated, an experience which the medium of film is particularly well equipped to represent. There are a handful of very important shots in Vertigo that, even if one accepts my arguments above, one might still wish to describe as placing us ‘inside a character’s mind’, and which therefore should not go unmentioned. (I shall omit discussion of the dream sequence, which to my mind belongs to a different category again.) I am referring predominantly to the famous ‘vertigo’ shots, in which Scottie’s experience of vertigo is conveyed by the camera simultaneously tracking backwards and zooming forwards, with the result that the ground below appears to fall away. The shots in which Scottie beholds Madeleine seated before the portrait of Carlotta, and the camera, representing Scottie’s optical POV,

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  23

moves between, and thus connects, details of Madeleine’s appearance and details of the portrait, might also fall under this category. In such cases, we cannot say what Gilberto Perez suggests we can usually say about an optical POV shot, that ‘anybody else standing [in the same place] would see the same thing’.76 Does this make such shots ‘more subjective’ than ‘standard’ optical POV shots? One way of defeating such a claim would be to suggest that such ‘standard’ optical POV shots also show us how the character who is looking is perceiving the world: they are perceiving it ‘normally’, so no distortions or augmentations are necessary.77 However, as I hope is clear by now, what I am trying to do in this chapter is to question the validity and usefulness of categories like ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, and ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’, as they are typically applied to human consciousness and experience. Therefore, my first impulse and my starting point would be to reiterate that films allow us to understand characters’ experiences of being-in-the-world a lot more of the time and in more different ways than is usually acknowledged. From this perspective, then, ‘the perception shot’78 hardly constitutes one of the best and deepest ways of communicating character experience, but something closer to the effective-in-particular-contexts occasional ­practice that it tends, if mentioned at all, to be treated as. One more shot from Vertigo demands attention in this regard: the shot where, after Scottie has perfected Judy’s appearance, and thus recreated Madeleine, we are shown his hallucination. As Scottie and Judy embrace and kiss, the camera traces a fairly tight circle around them, and in the middle of this shot, and camera movement, the surroundings change from the hotel room to the livery stable of the San Juan Bautista that Scottie visited with Madeleine. The fact that Scottie looks up and around at this point, whilst Judy keeps her eyes closed, confirm that this is his hallucination, and not hers. From the point of view of this chapter, it is especially worthwhile to note that conveying Scottie’s hallucination this way rather than through the use of point-of-view editing more successfully conveys his sense of immersion in a world he feverishly imagines. He is not a perceiving entity looking out, but an experiencing person absorbed in (even if we surely take it that he is simultaneously aware that the experience is unreal). Segue: deception and knowledge Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Vertigo both hinge upon their protagonist being deceived by a female love interest and a man in pursuit of wealth.

24  Classical Hollywood cinema

In both films, the man conceals his motives, and the woman conceals her motives and assumes a false identity (in the case of Vertigo, the identity is stolen – from the man’s actual wife; in the case of Deeds, it is created). In Vertigo the man and the woman are working together, while in Deeds they are independent of one another. The most significant difference, for our purposes, is that in Deeds we are aware of these deceptions from near the beginning, whereas in Vertigo they are revealed at a significant distance into the film. We meet Deeds’s principal antagonist, John Cedar/Douglas Dumbrille, attorney and principal partner in Cedar, Cedar, Cedar and Budington, before we even meet Longfellow Deeds/Gary Cooper, although it is only after Cedar’s meeting with Deeds that the former’s intention to wrest power of attorney from the latter, who is heir to a multimillion fortune belonging to one of Cedar’s former clients, in order to plug a hole in the firm’s accounts, is revealed. When Cedar returns to New York after having visited Deeds in his small town home of Mandrake Falls (this is fewer than fifteen minutes into the film), this intention and the reason for it are established during a brief dialogue scene between the firm’s partners. One scene later, Jean Arthur’s character is introduced, and, again through a dialogue exchange, we learn her identity – star news reporter, Babe (her surname, Bennett, will be revealed slightly later) – and her motive for gaining Deeds’s trust: a month’s vacation, with pay. This gives us all we need in order to get started, and to read the behaviour of Cedar and of Babe in their ensuing interactions with Deeds. To use the phrase that he uses, Deeds does not know from their behaviour what is ‘on the minds’ of Cedar or Babe (though he is suspicious of Cedar from a very early stage, but not of Babe), but, according to the same meaning of that phrase, we the viewers do. This is not because we have ongoing access to an internal soliloquy belonging to either character in which we hear the cogs of villainy turn as they present friendly and helpful faces to Deeds. We do not need access to the relevant parts of their ‘inner lives’, because we have been given access to the relevant parts of their lives, simpliciter – one brief dialogue scene, in each case, in which each ­presents a semi-public face to an inner circle audience. This ought to make us pause before we simply state that in the case of Vertigo, we, like Scottie, are deceived by Judy pretending to be Madeleine Elster possessed by her dead great grandmother Carlotta Valdes, because we do not have access to the character’s ‘inner life’. In the ‘confession scene’, in which we are left alone with Judy just after Scottie has found her and been struck by her resemblance to the supposedly dead Madeleine,

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  25

we are, according to Smith, ‘given access to Judy’s thoughts (in the form of a visualized flashback with voiceover)’,79 but it is worth being more specific about the details of the scene in order to weigh the accuracy of such a description.80 The flashback which reveals that Judy played the part of Madeleine comprises chiefly a truncated version of a sequence of images we have already seen (which we might therefore want to describe as ‘belonging’ to the film, rather than to Judy), but culminates in new shots, which reveal that Elster was waiting for Judy at the top of the bell tower she ran up and that until now we had assumed she jumped from; upon her arrival, he throws the corpse of an identically dressed woman off the tower. It is the timing rather than the content of the flashback that might encourage us to describe it as subjective, or as belonging to the realm of Judy’s thoughts. The voice-over that follows the flashback is a verbal rendering of the letter that Judy sits down and writes to Scottie (but throws away almost immediately afterwards). The letter of course arises from and expresses thoughts, but it is an object in the world of the film that arises from an action. Here, as a way of talking to herself (of soliloquising), Judy imagines that she is talking to Scottie. When watching Deeds and re-watching Vertigo we see that sustained interaction with the male protagonist makes it increasingly difficult for the leading female to suppress her moral scruples and maintain a stance of deception and detachment. This leads us on to the most important topic of the chapter: the centrality of the representation of interpersonal interaction to film and many of its achievements, and the difficulty of doing justice to this feature using existing accounts of point of view. Beyond subjects and objects to interactions Barr astutely notes the division of Vertigo’s first movement into sequences characterised by little dialogue and lots of optical POV shots, and sequences characterised by plentiful dialogue and few ­optical POV shots.81 What this division might suggest is that sustained point-of-view editing – what we have seen called pure alternation and pure cinema – is best suited not to the representation of face-to-face interactions between characters, but to other types of encounters and experiences. What I want to suggest in turn is that to conceive of our way of seeing the world as comprising subjects (ourselves) and objects (­including other people) (a division that is related, as I have tried and will try again to ­demonstrate, to a putative division between inner states and outer things) is not an appropriate or effective way to understand

26  Classical Hollywood cinema

what ­happens during many of the most valuable forms of human interaction. Smith’s Engaging Characters is the most sustained model of point of view (though Smith seeks to distance himself from that term)82 whose theoretical focus is upon fictional characters. This combined with the clarity and insightfulness of Smith’s account makes it a particularly important model to engage with. Of Smith’s three major divisions of  his model of character engagement – recognition, alignment and allegiance – I will focus on alignment. This category is divided in turn into two sub-categories: ‘spatio-temporal attachment’ and ‘subjective access’.83 The comments I would wish to make in relation to the second category are more than sufficiently represented in earlier sections of this chapter, so I will focus now on ‘spatio-temporal attachment’, which Smith introduces as follows: A film like Suspicion [Alfred Hitchcock, 1941] exclusively attaches us to its protagonist; we follow her actions throughout the film, and witness the actions of other characters only when they are in proximity to her. By contrast, Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) and – to take a more extreme example – Miklós Janscó’s The Red and the White (1967) involve multiple attachments, in that in each case the narration successively traces the distinct spatio-temporal paths of many different characters.84

‘The purest form of exclusive attachment’, Smith continues shortly afterwards (echoing Hitchcock, and Barr) ‘is produced by a narration which intercuts only two kinds of shot: shots of a character, and eyeline match shots representing the objects of that character’s attention’.85 Smith’s initial definition of exclusive attachment is indifferent to ­matters of proximity. In Vertigo, many of the optical POV shots (a ­special category of eye-line match shots) are of Madeleine at a significant ­distance from Scottie, seemingly unaware that he is following her. A set-up such as this, or the spying on his neighbours from across the ­courtyard of L. B. Jefferies (James Stewart again) in Rear Window, seems to fit the phrase ‘exclusive attachment’ reasonably well, and in such instances, the lack of interaction occurring between the character looking and the character(s) being looked at makes it not unreasonable to describe the latter as ‘objects’ of the former’s attention. However, when what is represented is interaction rather than observation – or to put it another way, much of the time in most narrative fiction films – the terms ‘exclusive attachment’ and ‘objects of attention’ become more troublesome.

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  27

Ratcliffe, critiquing a methodological point of departure of ‘folk psychology’ (an influential strand within cognitive science and philosophy of mind, both disciplines which have influenced film studies in recent decades) in terms that irresistibly call to mind Vertigo, suggests that ‘people are not ordinarily understood as objects revealed to a detached voyeur’.86 He draws upon Alfred Schutz’s The Phenomenology of the Social World (1932)87 and its outlining of four ways in which two people might relate to one another: (a)  A and B observe each other. (b)  A observes B and B is unaware of A. (c)  A affects B while B observes A. (d)  A and B affect each other.88

Proponents of folk psychology, Ratcliffe argues, fail as a whole to ‘draw a distinction between interpreting a “he” or “she” and relating to another person as “you”’.89 ‘Relating to another person as “you”’ is an apt description of what Scottie fails to achieve, in various ways, for most of Vertigo. Madeleine, while she is being followed, is a ‘she’, and even when she becomes Scottie’s fellow ‘wanderer’, she retains a substantial measure of remoteness. Scottie’s predominant (and quite possibly preferred) way of being with Madeleine is looking at her from a distance; during his relationship with Judy, he may be in close physical proximity to her, but he often seems barely able to look at her at all. In the brief montage of the things Scottie does with Judy, which terminates in his marching her to a department store to buy her ‘those clothes’, one crucial thread is that he is not looking at her: as they stroll past a lake, his eyes are trained dead ahead; during their ballroom dancing, while other couples exchange words and smiles, Scottie keeps his jaw against Judy’s forehead with sufficient rigidity that we might imagine that his purpose is to avoid such intercourse; as Scottie buys a flower to pin on Judy, he is very slow to meet her gaze even while she earnestly seeks out his, trying to make this a moment of romance. When the couple get to the department store it becomes clear that Scottie does not want a reciprocal relationship, but wants to perfect the appearance of his doll. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Babe begins by regarding Deeds as a ‘he’, whom she plays (like an instrument, one might say – and by choosing to cast herself as a ‘woman in distress’, on the point of collapse after looking for work all day, Babe demonstrates herself to be at least equal to the ‘diabolical’, ‘intuitive’90 Elster in her ability to ‘push the buttons’ of the male

28  Classical Hollywood cinema

protagonist), while retaining an aloof, coolly appraising stance herself. However, she finds herself unable to maintain such a stance. The turning point, the scene in which we first see – to recall Schutz’s ­taxonomy – Babe and Deeds affect each other sustainedly, comes when they pay a night-time visit to a park. The scene can be interpreted as a brief version of what Stanley Cavell, following Northrop Frye, refers to as the move to ‘the green world’ in the comedy of remarriage, ‘a place in which perspective and renewal are to be achieved’.91 A medium two-shot of the couple sitting on a bench, which frames Deeds in profile and Babe frontally, is held for most of the first phase of the scene, as Deeds talks and Babe listens. Babe has turned to face Deeds, and her gaze rests on him. Deeds is facing forward, and must turn if he wishes to face Babe, which he does periodically. This encourages us to watch Babe watching Deeds, and her reactions are a key part of the significance of the sequence. At first, Babe is still toying with Deeds. When she asks him about his reference to a ‘lady in distress’ the previous night, and he looks away bashfully, we see her eye him as if he were prey. But as Deeds continues to talk – about the way that New York has grand palaces but lacks noblemen – and Babe continues to watch him, unwatched, we witness the dawning of her taking him seriously. (You have just described an outer, behavioural indication of an inner, mental state, haven’t you? Yes, I have.) Babe’s treatment of and engagement with Deeds continues to evolve as she talks about her home town. Warming to the subject and to Deeds, she leans forward towards him (and us). Over dinner the previous evening we saw her tell Deeds that she was from a small town, but when she says it again now, it is offered by her and responded to by Deeds as new information. We might have doubted the truthfulness of her claim last night, but are much less inclined to do so now, especially as she carries on talking, and describes her father. The scene acts as a re-introduction of the couple to one another. After their talk of childhood,92 the couple proceed to play together. But first, Arthur performs alone. She sings ‘Swanee River’, accompanying herself with a makeshift drum (a metal post next to the bench) and sticks (her father taught her to play, she tells Deeds). We have now cut to a new camera set-up. While playing and singing, Arthur faces the post, and Cooper looks over her shoulder. We can see both their faces, but neither of them can see the other’s. Deeds takes clear and sincere delight in Babe’s performance while it is occurring, but when she turns to him with a smile at the end, he puts on a show of being unimpressed. ‘Oh, I suppose you could do better’, Babe

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  29

says, at once playing along and inviting him to play along with her. He instructs her to sing her song again, and tells her that he will perform ‘Humoresque’ along with it. He renders it by imitating the sound of a trombone, and executing the accompanying motions. Babe, who has up until this point viewed Deeds with detached superiority, and offered him up for ridicule in her newspaper articles, is now engaging in a reciprocal act (‘A and B affect each other’) of making music and sharing laughter, and trusting him sufficiently to allow herself to indulge in ­silliness with him. It is a beautiful moment. It makes little sense by the end of this scene, I would suggest, to ask, with Smith’s categories in mind, who we are ‘attached’ to, because by the end of the scene we do not, to recall Smith’s vocabulary, have characters executing actions in proximity to one another, but we have, more precisely, characters interacting. Even if we did want to hold onto the notion of attachment, this scene between Deeds and Babe would surely constitute what Smith calls ‘multiple and simultaneous attachment’.93 This being the case, it seems strange that Smith wants to reserve this species of attachment for when ‘certain technical possibilities’ of film, such as split-screen or ‘attaching us to one character on the soundtrack and one on the image track’,94 are deployed. Surely most scenes featuring interactions between two or more characters fit the bill. Scottie’s retreating from and Deeds’s being-in-the-world Having just discussed a pivotal passage from Deeds, let us discuss one from Vertigo. Madeleine has, it would seem, just committed suicide by jumping from the top of a bell tower, while Scottie, stricken by his vertigo, is stuck part-way up the tower’s staircase. He looks out of the aperture in the bell tower twice, and both times a shot from his optical POV is followed by a reaction shot. The first time, Scottie sees Madeleine’s body in its unnatural posture on the tiles of a roof below, and his reaction is one of anguish. The second time, he sees two nuns (for we are on the grounds of San Juan Bautista) hurrying towards the bell tower (having presumably heard the scream emitted moments earlier, and/or the thud that followed). When we cut back to Scottie, we see him reacting to the nuns’ approach. His eyes dart from side to side, and he raises a trembling hand to his mouth.95 In Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre at one point reflects upon the experience of shame.96 Ratcliffe, discussing this passage and using Sartre’s example of ‘peeping through a keyhole’, suggests that:

30  Classical Hollywood cinema when engrossed in such activities, one is not explicitly aware of one’s own body as an object … Registering the presence of another involves a change in one’s own orientation towards the world … The project of spying, in which one was previously absorbed, disintegrates. One is no longer a locus of practical projects but an entity that stands before somebody else, an object for them.97

Scottie spends a lot of Vertigo as a ‘locus of practical projects’ and therefore apparently unaware of his ‘own body as an object’. By the time of Madeleine’s death we have also already witnessed his keenness to avoid being ‘an entity that stands before somebody else’. When his college friend (and one-time fiancée) Midge/Barbara Bel Geddes tries to find out about Madeleine or Carlotta, or to visit Scottie’s intentions, she meets tetchy resistance: he cannot end the conversation quickly enough. Scottie’s gestures upon seeing the nuns, of looking from side to side (which, within the narrow, empty bell tower, has nothing to do with acquiring information) and of biting his hand dramatise very eloquently a sudden awareness of being ‘an entity that stands before somebody else’, and of ‘one’s own body as an object’. Scottie’s next action is to evade scrutiny by slipping away unseen. Vertigo, like Deeds, begins with a man’s sudden death, which precipitates a major change in its protagonist’s circumstances. The result, in Vertigo, is that Scottie moves further and further away from the social world and what Barr terms ‘everyday even-keel reality’.98 After watching helplessly while the policeman who tries to rescue him falls to his death, Scottie quits his job as detective and, being ‘a man of independent means’, declares his intention to ‘not … do anything for a while’. ‘The devil finds work for idle hands’ is one way Wood characterises the film’s representation of Scottie’s susceptibility to embroilment in Elster’s scheme.99 We can supplement this interpretation by noting that for long stretches of Vertigo, the social world recedes almost entirely. As James Harvey puts it the San Francisco the movie takes place in looks singularly unpopulated. Instead of the range and variety of people and types that a noir movie like Out of the Past [Jacques Tourneur, 1947] offers, here there are mostly places, all of them beautiful and almost all of them empty: a museum, a church, a graveyard, an ancient forest – Madeleine’s sort of place, carrying, as she does, not only associations of spirits and romantic legends, but of lines to eternity as well.100

Whereas Madeleine leads Scottie through an unpopulated and old San Francisco, Judy places herself firmly within the modern metropolis.

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  31

When Scottie arrives at her door, in search of his lost unique love, she asks if he is conducting a Gallup poll! Then, as part of an increasingly exasperated attempt to get him to accept that she is who and what she claims to be, Judy offers documents, dates, details and facts: Alright mister, my Kansas driver’s license. Judy Barton. Number zee twonine-six seven-nine-four. Four twenty-five Maple Avenue, Salina Kansas. See the address on this one? It’s this place right here. California license, issued May twenty-fifth of, of 1954. You wanna check my thumb prints, you satisfied?

Of course, these protestations take on an extra dimension when we learn, as we are shortly to do, that Judy is Madeleine. Nevertheless, there is a world of difference between the remote and ephemeral Madeleine, not quite of this world and its time, and Judy’s insistence on the facts of – and her way of describing – her identity. When Elster is first laying his trap for Scottie in his office, he describes Madeleine’s mysterious behaviour: She’ll be talking to me about something. Suddenly the words fade into silence. A cloud comes into her eyes and they go blank. She’s somewhere else, away from me, someone I don’t know … I followed her one day, watched her coming out of the apartment, someone I didn’t know. She even walked a different way.

When Scottie accompanies Madeleine to the San Juan Bautista we experience such moments ourselves. As she sits in a carriage in a livery stable and speaks of ‘her’ (that is, Carlotta’s) childhood, her prosody loses normal expressivity, and her eyes remain fixed in a middle distance stare. This is one source of Madeleine’s remoteness: her tendency to withdraw from the present world of social interaction to another plane. Madeleine’s carriage and posture are also crucial to this effect. Wood describes Madeleine’s movements as ‘dream-like’ ‘in their grace [and] their air of remoteness’.101 When Scottie follows Madeleine around San Francisco, he and we rarely see her interacting with another person (her brief exchange with the flower shop employee is the only exception). These sequences are also constructed so that much of the walking necessary for Madeleine to get to the places she is going (Carlotta’s grave, Carlotta’s portrait, Carlotta’s bedroom) is elided, for Scottie, for us (for example, we do not see Madeleine walk up the steps of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, but it is reasonable to assume that Scottie does), or for both. Sometimes, Madeleine’s ability to move through space is presented as uncanny, as

32  Classical Hollywood cinema

though she were indeed a dream, or a ghost (her disappearance from the McKittrick Hotel and the staging of the sequence among the sequoia trees being the key moments in this respect). When we do see Madeleine walk during the sequences where Scottie follows her, Wood’s description is apt. She maintains an upright posture and a light and even gait, and moves through the world seemingly almost untouched by it. When we and Scottie first see Judy, outside the flower shop, the effect is entirely different: unlike Madeleine, Judy is very much in-the-world, responsive to its other members, and physically present. She walks towards the camera along a busy sidewalk in the company of three friends: she is one of the crowd. Her hips swing slightly as she walks, and we see her tossing her head slightly as she converses. When she and her friends come to a stop in front of Scottie, Judy hunches her shoulders slightly, clutching a garment with one hand, and crossing her arm across her waist to clutch the strap of her bag with the other. We cut into a profile medium close-up and see Judy continue to talk, and gesture unselfconsciously with one of her hands. Truffaut’s description of Judy to Hitchcock is apt, and the details he emphasises are pertinent: ‘Very few American actresses are quite as carnal on the screen [as Kim Novak]. When you see Judy walking on the street, the tawny hair and make-up convey an animal-like sensuality. That quality is accentuated, I suppose, by the fact that she wears no brassière.’102 One of the most important aspects of Deeds’s being-in-the-world is his playing of, thinking about, and thinking with his tuba. Deeds’s tuba-playing and discussion of it recurs throughout Deeds, including at crucial narrative junctures. When Deeds is informed that he has inherited $20 million, he continues to test his new mouthpiece between verbal utterances. When he leaves his hometown Mandrake Falls shortly thereafter to travel to New York, he plays tuba in the band during the celebration thrown in his honour. Accounts of Deeds’s tuba playing form an important part of the testimony against him during a trial intended to determine Deeds’s sanity (and, more pointedly, his fitness to dispense his fortune, which by this point in the film he has made arrangements to give away to destitute farmers, much to the alarm of Cedar and his associates), and these accounts are the first point he responds to in the courtroom after he breaks his long silence. The playing of a musical instrument is a usefully graspable example of an activity clearly not best described as an external manifestation of an inner state. It is, to be sure, an activity that engages the mind, but what the mind is engaged in is the manipulation, more or less skilled, of an

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  33

object that is in some ways an invitation to creativity but in others recalcitrant and rule-bound (in these respects it is not dissimilar, by some accounts, to language). The fact that it is, of all instruments, a tuba that Deeds plays, and that he plays it in the town band, pushes the ‘worldly’ dimension of music even further into the realm of the social, where what is at stake is not the disclosure of consciousness but the fulfilment of a role. As Cavell notes, ‘the tuba is only very accidentally a medium of outstanding virtuosity but is almost inherently sociable and encouraging, keeping the rhythm going in early jazz bands, always forming the basis for celebratory marching bands’.103 When Deeds breaks his silence and tells the judge ‘I’d like to get in my two cents’ worth’, in order to ‘take the stand’, as he is invited to do, he must walk in front of psychiatrist Dr Von Hallor/Gustav von Seyffertitz’s diagram charting the mathematically precise mood swings of a manic depressive (his diagnosis of Deeds). We have just heard Dr Von Hallor explain to the courtroom how Deeds’s alternations between elation and despair are symptoms of a disease: outward manifestations of an internal process. When Deeds sits down he does not, as he might have (and as Babe has already), begin by arguing that his behaviour and moods are responses to the shabby treatment he has received at the hands of many people he has encountered in New York, but he does nevertheless reverse the direction of travel implied by Von Hallor: ‘About my playing the tuba … I play mine whenever I want to concentrate. That may sound funny to some people, but everybody does something silly when they’re thinking.’ The activity serves thought, rather than arising from it. Deeds proceeds to point out the analogous habits of others in the courtroom, including knuckle-cracking and nose-twitching, and the camera affirms his testimony by picking out the fidgeting gestures of many members of the courtroom (and, humorously, their vain attempts to control them). This appeal to the bodily dimension of what is called thinking104 is a crucial part of Deeds’s defence against the charge that he is insane. Cavell, who has returned to this scene several times,105 identifies it as an instance of film performing philosophy: ‘Descartes defines the human as a thing that thinks, and film retorts that it is an essentially restless body that thinks … [I]n directing the camera to provide this proof by way of the body, Deeds is simultaneously showing that film is thinking about ­thinking, that is, about what it is to be human.’106 This is not the only lesson about being-in-the-world that Deeds delivers: earlier in the film, we see an instance of Deeds’s appetite for seeking out experience (having already seen such an appetite on two occasions

34  Classical Hollywood cinema

take the form of chasing a fire engine). Deeds has just chased his valet Walter/Raymond Walburn out of his room because Walter disturbed his tuba-playing, and he continues to chase him down the mansion’s grand staircase. Noticing that his voice echoes in this large space, Deeds orders Walter and then the two butlers who emerge in their dressing gowns to deliver their own loud hoots. He then orchestrates a single hoot in unison from the group. What we see here is a character absorbed in and arrested by his bodily engagement with the physical world. To anticipate the concerns of a later chapter, we can also say that Deeds and his servants are here communicating, notwithstanding the absence of content, message and even language. ‘Communication’, Heidegger asserts, ‘is never anything like a conveying of experiences, for example, opinions and wishes, from the inside of one subject to the inside of another’.107 Peters, in a sentence that echoes nicely Deeds’s pitching of his voice here, glosses these words of Heidegger’s with the suggestion that ‘fundamentally, Mitteilung [communication] is the interpretive articulation of our “thrownness” into a world together with other people’.108 Deeds’s final words to his servants before he turns and walks away are ‘Let that be a lesson to you.’ It is a lesson that Scottie would do well to heed. Instead of embracing the world of other people, ‘available Ferguson’ is, as we have seen, persistently in flight from it. There is a passage in Deeds, too, where the protagonist can be said to withdraw from the world, and in a strikingly similar way to Scottie: Deeds and Scottie both fall silent for a significant period. However, the nature of their silences is different. Scottie’s is catatonic, but Deeds’s is a principled withdrawal from and reproach of the world. Deeds, impelled by Babe’s declaration of love for him, breaks his silence to defend himself before the court. In Vertigo, as one would expect from Hitchcock, there is no comparable moment of breakthrough, or passage of reaffirmation. Instead, a dissolve covers an unspecified period of time (the diagnosis of the sanatorium doctor in the previous scene encourages us to suppose that between six and twelve months have passed), and after a re-establishing shot of San Francisco, we see Scottie out, walking and talking, though hardly cured, since he is revisiting places he associates with Madeleine, and seeing in many of them her likeness in other women.109 He is, it seems, still foundered on ‘the reef of solipsism’.110 Conclusion: Hitchcock, Capra, point of view and film studies The ‘lessons’ that I have suggested Deeds (and Deeds) offers are of value not only to the fictional Scottie Ferguson, but also to the real-life pursuit

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  35

of academic film studies. I began this chapter by suggesting that we may sometimes have been led astray by a model of character consciousness developed by literary studies, for literature, which privileges invisible introspection, perhaps best exemplified by the work of Henry James. I would like to end by suggesting that although perhaps no other single director is a more vivid exemplar of the possibilities of filmic point of view, the pre-eminence of Hitchcock in discussions of this topic may also skew our concepts, or at least sometimes serve to reinforce some of the conflations and limitations discussed above. In 1965, Wood asked ‘Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?’111 In 1998, in the face of the sheer ‘amount of critical and academic attention bestowed on him, well in excess of any other director’s share and giving no signs of diminution after many years and reams of articles and books’, Perez audaciously but calmly enquired, ‘Does Hitchcock deserve his reputation?’112 In 2012, a critic’s poll conducted by British film magazine Sight & Sound declared Vertigo the greatest film of all time, with the film appearing on the lists of 191 of the 846 critics who returned polls.113 Vertigo is an exceptional film, in the double sense that it stands apart both in terms of its level of achievement and in terms of its particular qualities. To invoke Murray Smith’s categories once more: ‘exclusive attachment’ is not a viable way of describing our relationship to a protagonist in most films, and it remains inaccurate even in the case of Vertigo, but in that film it is closer to the truth than it is in most. This is due to the distinction that is maintained for much of the film’s length between Scottie and the human foci of his attention, whom he objectifies. The maintenance of this distinction is both an aesthetic achievement on the part of Hitchcock and his ‘draftsmanship with the movie camera’,114 and a moral failure on the part of Scottie. Hitchcock’s films constitute the canonical instances of plots structured around deception and voyeurism. These prominent and justly celebrated features lend themselves – at least, to some degree115 – to parsing using the powerful but limited tools of folk psychology. One of Ratcliffe’s ways of describing the limits of folk psychology is his formulation of a foundational assumption of such an approach, that ‘interpersonal understanding is best construed in terms of the detached observation of person B by person A, rather than in terms of interaction between A and B’.116 Vertigo can and should be read as a warning of the consequences of adopting such a stance towards others. And of course, like all of Hitchcock’s films, Vertigo is far from devoid of instances of human interaction, however troubled many of those instances are. Nevertheless, these interactions

36  Classical Hollywood cinema

are perhaps not Vertigo’s most outstanding features, and within them, I would suggest that Scottie rarely moves from ‘detached observation’ to ‘interaction’, a fact that is central to the film’s uncompromising and clear-sighted critique, but also probably a large part of what makes the film feel, to at least one critic, ‘oddly heartless’.117 Whether or not it is true that when we watch films we relate to their characters as voyeurs (and I do not think that it is, at least not necessarily), the relationships between characters within films are too varied to be covered by such a model. To dramatise human interactions is one of the major tasks of a film director. The cinema has enjoyed many geniuses in this regard, one of whom was Capra. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Babe successfully completes the transition which Scottie fails to achieve: she moves from detached observation of Deeds to authentic interaction with him, a transition dramatised beautifully by the film. When seeking a modified point of view on how to approach point of view and character, then, Capra is as good a place to start as any. Notes 1 G. Bluestone, Novels into Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 47. 2 S. Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 3. Bluestone is quoted on p. 159. See also Chatman, ‘What novels can do that films can’t (and vice versa)’ (1980), in L. Braudy and M. Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 6th edn, 2004). 3 D. Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 202–3. 4 G. Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. J. E. Lewin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), pp. 243–52. 5 But the reader interested in pursuing this issue further may find the following useful places to start: B. Kawin, Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); D. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 61–2; Chatman, Coming to Terms, pp. 124–38; G. Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 260–80; G. M. Wilson, ‘Le Grand Imagier steps out: the primitive basis of film narration’, Philosophical Topics, 25:1 (1997). 6 S. Chatman, ‘Characters and narrators: filter, center, slant, and interest-­ focus’, Poetics Today 7:2 (1986).

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  37 7 Genette, Narrative Discourse, pp. 189–211. 8 ‘[T]o my mind most of the theoretical works on [point of view] (which are mainly classifications) suffer from a regrettable confusion between what I call here mood and voice, a confusion between the question who is the ­character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective? and the very ­different question who is the narrator? – or more simply, the question who sees? and the question who speaks?’ (Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 186; original italics). 9 C. Barr, Vertigo (London: BFI Publishing, 2002), p. 7. 10 R. Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, rev. edn, 2002), p. 384 (italics added). 11 N. Potts, ‘Character interiority: space, point of view and performance in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958)’, in J. Gibbs and D. Pye (eds), Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 89. 12 Potts, ‘Character interiority’, p. 89. 13 D. Cooper, Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001), p. 88. 14 Cooper, Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo, p. 89. 15 As some readers will be aware, this is an allusion to a published series of lectures by Heidegger. Lee Braver points out that an alternative translation of the original German title Was Heisst Denken is ‘What calls upon or for thinking?’ L. Braver, Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (London: MIT Press, 2012), p. 150. 16 C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 111. 17 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 189. 18 Braver, Groundless Grounds, p. 2. 19 Not only because both ‘remain leading contenders for the (dubious) title of “greatest philosopher of the twentieth century”’ (Groundless Grounds, pp. 1–2), but moreover because ‘they construct thorough alternatives which do not so much refute Cartesian ideas as prevent them from ­arising in the first place’ (p. 2). Starting with Heidegger and Wittgenstein grants one access to many of the major movements of twentieth-century p ­ hilosophy, more than one of which each of them founded (Groundless Grounds, p. 1). Although Wittgenstein’s writing constitutes (an albeit rather unusual example of) ‘analytic philosophy’ and Heidegger’s ‘­ continental philosophy’, Braver convincingly demonstrates that despite their very different styles – Heidegger’s ‘hyphenated neologisms’ on the one hand and Wittgenstein’s ‘diamond-dense numbered statements’ on the other (Groundless Grounds, p. 1) – the two thinkers converge on the same p ­ hilosophical problems, and

38  Classical Hollywood cinema offer strikingly similar solutions. Braver is not the first to compare Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and it may be of especial interest to note that Stanley Cavell repeatedly appeals to these two figures in close ­proximity during his arguments. From Cavell’s writing concerned particularly with film, see, for example, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p.  22, pp. 165–6; Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (London: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 38, pp. 271–2; Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 92–4; Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 314. 20 ‘Being-in-the-world’, as well as being one of Heidegger’s (many!) key (translated) phrase-ideas, is the title of a very famous commentary. H. L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (London: MIT Press, 1991). 21 ‘The world of Da-sein is a with-world. Being-in is being-with others.’ M.  Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit,  trans. J.  Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), p.  118  (original italics). Note that this and all subsequent page ­references to this book relate to the page numbers indicated in the outer margins of the ­translated text. 22 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 125. 23 L. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), p. 34. 24 G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Penguin Classics, 2000) p. 13. 25 Ryle, Concept of Mind, p. 17. 26 A. J. Ayer, ‘An honest ghost?’, in O. P. Wood and G. Pitcher (eds), Ryle (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 54–5. 27 J. L. Austin, ‘Intelligent behaviour: a critical review of The Concept of Mind’ (1950), in Wood and Pitcher, Ryle. Austin points to the danger of becoming one of ‘Those who … revolt against a dichotomy to which they have been once addicted [and] go over to maintain that only one of the alleged pair of opposites really exists at all’ (p. 47). 28 Ayer, ‘An honest ghost?’, p. 68. 29 Ayer, ‘An honest ghost?’, p. 74. 30 Ryle, Concept of Mind, p. 32. 31 Ryle, Concept of Mind, p. 34. 32 Ryle, Concept of Mind, p. 35. Earlier in the same paragraph (and on the same page), Ryle avers: ‘The sealing of the lips is no part of the definition of thinking.’

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  39 33 J. Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1929), p. 170. John Durham Peters suggests some interesting connections between Dewey and Heidegger (who were contemporaries but represented very different philosophical traditions). Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 16–19. 34 Peters, Speaking into the Air, p. 18. 35 M. Merleau-Ponty, ‘The film and the new psychology’ (1945), in MerleauPonty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. L. Dreyfus and P. A. Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 58. 36 Key works from these authors include: A. Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); D. Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower, 2006); V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992); D. Yacavone, ‘Towards a theory of film worlds’, Film-Philosophy 12:2 (2008). At the time of writing, several works from Yacavone which ­promise to be seminal remain forthcoming. One further and slightly e­ arlier work ­deserving mention is J. D. Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An  Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 242–53. 37 D. Sorfa, ‘Phenomenology and film’, in E. Branigan and W. Buckland (eds), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 353. 38 M. Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 34 (original italics). 39 The reviewer of the proposal for what would eventually become this book suggested that it had (I think, having since mislaid the review, that I am remembering the noun correctly) a ‘whiff’ of the 1970s about it, a compliment I was, and remain, happy to accept. 40 M. Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 41 D. Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (London: Harvard University Press, 1989). 42 Bordwell, Making Meaning, p. 21. 43 V. F. Perkins, ‘Must we say what they mean? Film criticism and interpretation’, Movie 34/35 (1990), p. 4. I would further suggest that Perkins views the act of criticism not as a deployment of a hermeneutics of suspicion but as, to put it in Heideggerean terms, a disclosure of the care structure of an artwork. The title of Perkins’s article is clearly an allusion to Stanley Cavell’s

40  Classical Hollywood cinema Must We Mean What We Say: A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). In the first chapter of that book, which shares its title with the book itself, Cavell discusses, among others, Ryle. Elsewhere in the book he engages at length with Wittgenstein. 44 V. F. Perkins, ‘Where is the world? The horizon of events in movie fiction’, in Gibbs and Pye, Style and Meaning, p. 16. 45 Perkins, ‘Where is the world? p. 22. 46 G. M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 83. 47 D. Pye, ‘Movies and point of view’, Movie 36 (2000), p. 10. 48 Smith, Engaging Characters, pp. 150–1. 49 Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 58. 50 Pye, ‘Movies and point of view’, p. 10. 51 Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology, p. 123. 52 Pye, ‘Movies and point of view’, p. 10. 53 Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology, p. 144. 54 Barr, Vertigo, p. 10. 55 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 3rd edn, 2001). 56 F. Truffaut, Hitchcock: Revised edition (London: Simon & Schuster, 1985), p. 214. Hitchcock offers this idea during his discussion with Truffaut of Rear Window (Hitchcock, 1954), whose protagonist is temporarily wheelchair-bound. 57 Barr, Vertigo, p. 41. 58 Barr, Vertigo, p. 40. 59 Barr, Vertigo, p. 41. Barr later repeats the same phrase, d ­ escribing a later sequence of following as ‘sealing us anew within Scottie’s eyes and mind’ (p. 61). 60 Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel, p. 204. 61 The Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion, 1996). 62 P. Boileau and T. Narcejec, D’Entre les morts, trans. G. Sainsbury (London: Bloomsbury, 1997). 63 Boileau and Narcejec, D’Entre les morts, p. 24. 64 J. Wood, How Fiction Works (London: Vintage, 2009), p. 9. 65 Boileau and Narcejec, D’Entre les morts, p. 24. 66 Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 157. 67 Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 163. 68 My experience is that when I re-watch or reread a work of fiction, ‘part of me’ will always adopt the stance of a first-time viewer or reader. Kendall Walton makes some interesting comments on this topic: Mimesis as

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  41 ­ ake-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: M Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 259–71. 69 Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 160. 70 N. Carroll, ‘Toward a theory of point-of-view editing’, Poetics Today 14:1 (1993), p. 135 (original italics). Carroll is employing terms coined in E. Branigan, ‘Formal permutations of the point-of-view shot’, Screen 16:3 (1975). Branigan’s article was published in the same issue of Screen as another ­seminal account of point of view, L. Mulvey, ‘Visual p ­ leasure and narrative cinema’. 71 Carroll, ‘Toward a theory of point-of-view editing’, p. 133. 72 Carroll, ‘Toward a theory of point-of-view editing’, p. 132. 73 Carroll, ‘Toward a theory of point-of-view editing’, p. 134. 74 Barr, Vertigo, p. 41. 75 J. Harvey, Movie Love in the Fifties (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2001), p. 34. 76 G. Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 75. 77 Branigan briefly presents such an argument, including a useful comment about the ideological element of defining perception as normal or abnormal, in Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), pp. 78–9. 78 Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema, p. 79. 79 Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 155. 80 I have written about this scene before. J. Zborowski, ‘Beyond the male gaze: departures from Scottie’s point of view in Vertigo’, CineAction 84 (2011), pp. 17–18. The remainder of the paragraph above borrows freely from this earlier account. 81 Barr, Vertigo, pp. 39–40. 82 Smith, Engaging Characters, pp. 4–5. See the conclusion to this book. 83 Smith, Engaging Characters, pp. 146–52. 84 Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 146. 85 Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 147. 86 Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology, p. 71. 87 A. Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967). 88 Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology, p. 79. 89 Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology, p. 82. 90 Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, p. 112. 91 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 49. 92 Childhood and the romantic couple’s sharing of childhood is a recurrent theme of Pursuits of Happiness (Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness).

42  Classical Hollywood cinema 93 Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 147. 94 Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 147. 95 James Naremore highlights the recurrence of this gesture throughout Stewart’s career: ‘Inevitably at the point of his greatest trauma, he will raise a trembling hand to his open mouth, sometimes biting at the flesh.’ Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 65. 96 J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. H. E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 221–3. 97 Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology, p. 159. 98 Barr, Vertigo, p. 75. 99 Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, p. 382. 100 Harvey, Movie Love in the Fifties, p. 34 (original italics). 101 Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, p. 114. 102 Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 248. 103 Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 200. 104 Was Heisst Denken? is one of two works by Heidegger cited by Cavell during his critical account of Deeds in Cities of Words; the other is Being and Time, specifically, its fourth chapter and its discussion of Das Man. Cavell, Cities of Words, pp. 201–2. 105 In addition to the sources cited immediately above and below, see S. Cavell, ‘What photography calls thinking’, Raritan 4:4 (1985). 106 S. Cavell and A. Klevan, ‘“What becomes of thinking on film?” (Stanley Cavell in conversation with Andrew Klevan)’, in R. Read and J. Goodenough (eds), Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 187. 107 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 152. 108 Peters, Speaking into the Air, p. 16. 109 According to Bill Krohn, the two Madeleine-like figures we see were played by Novak in the initial long shots of them, with other performers being substituted for the closer shots. B. Krohn, Hitchcock at Work (London: Phaidon, 2000), p. 194. 110 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 223. 111 Wood, Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, p. 55. 112 Perez, Material Ghost, p. 9. I should probably note that on the same page, Perez first turns to Capra’s films as an alternative but equal example of film artistry: ‘the no less extraordinary cinematic dexterity of Frank Capra, for example, has received far less attention’. 113 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), which had commanded the top spot in several earlier polls by the magazine, was ranked second, having appeared on the lists of 157 critics. Vertigo came joint seventh (with Coppola’s 1972

Point of view, consciousness, interaction  43

114 115

116 117

film The Godfather) in the parallel directors’ poll. . Accessed 11 March 2013. Perez, Material Ghost, p. 9. J. Zborowski, ‘Hitchcock’s theory of mind: Dial M for Murder as false belief test’, 13 Film-Philosophy, King’s College London, Thursday 13 September 2012. Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology, p. 22. Harvey, Movie Love in the Fifties, p. 41.

2 Distance, representation and criticism

This chapter provides a link between the principal focus upon point of view in the previous chapter, and the principal focus upon communication in the chapter to follow. To treat artworks as comprising spectrums or axes of distance has been demonstrated, as we shall shortly see, to be a powerful way of conceptualising how point of view works within them. After a survey of a range of existing approaches to point of view and distance from within and beyond film studies, I explore the handling of point of view and distance in one film in particular: Anatomy of a Murder. Distance is also a crucial factor to consider when we contemplate media as media of communication as well as media of expression. Most media alter how we perceive and traverse distances, both spatial and temporal, alterations which have cultural and social implications. My exploration of this topic is interwoven with my exploration of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. These two main parts of the chapter are bracketed by more general discussions of matters of distance in relation to the medium of film – principally, narrative fiction film. Art, fiction, film The degree of distance that a viewer of a fiction film experiences depends on many things, only some of which fall under the control of the film’s makers. We might begin by observing that a measure of distance is a given of all fiction film art, because it is art, because it is fiction, and because it is film. Film, like all arts, has a history, and different phases in its ­stylistic history offer different dimensions of and opportunities for d ­ istance. Filmmakers working within these givens, both of fiction film art in ­general, and the governing stylistic conventions of their period and location in particular, still have a large amount

Distance, representation, criticism  45

of room to make decisions that will shape the degree of distance that a viewer experiences. In so far as they are offered and received as instances of the category of art, fiction films should be treated by their viewers as objects for contemplation. That is, an aesthetic relationship necessitates distance. As Northrop Frye points out, ‘[t]he phrase “aesthetic distance” is generally accepted now in criticism, but it is almost a tautology: wherever there is aesthetic apprehension there is emotional and intellectual detachment.’1 It has even been argued that art’s very raison d’être is to place objects of perception at a distance so that we might experience them anew: ‘art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony’.2 The fictionality of fiction films also has fundamental implications with respect to distance. If I witness the distant suffering of actual fellow members of my world via film or any other medium, the distance (­created, and spanned, by the medium) does not absolve me of the ­ethical responsibility to respond with action.3 In the case of the suffering of fictional beings, it is not only acceptable but appropriate to abstain from attempts to intervene; indeed, such attempts would be ludicrous. (A film or other artwork may inspire us to take action to alleviate the suffering of those in our world who are like the fictional characters who move us to pity, but that is another matter.) And yet, we still have e­motional responses to fictions and their characters, a fact that ­constitutes a standing point of discussion in the philosophy of aesthetics.4 Film is a late addition to the category of art, and as Walter Benjamin pointed out, its arrival (like that of photography) necessitated a redefinition of that category.5 Many of Benjamin’s reflections in ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ (1936) amount to reflections upon the types of distance that the medium of film creates. Benjamin contemplates the ability of the film apparatus to capture phenomenal reality; the effect of mechanical reproduction and all that it implies upon how works of art are apprehended by their audiences; and, standing between these two concerns just mentioned, the relationship that the medium establishes between the camera’s human subjects and film audiences. One way in which Benjamin views photography and cinema is as forms of transcription. The near instantaneity of the capturing of photographic images is what allows art, for the first time, to keep pace with life as it unfolds:

46  Classical Hollywood cinema [P]hotography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions … Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech … Just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography foreshadow the sound film.6

Benjamin thus emphasises the immediacy of photographic and cinematic capture, that is, the near elimination of those things (the hand that draws, the time it takes the hand to draw) that might separate the pictorial reproduction and the thing reproduced. André Bazin, in ‘The ontology of the photographic image’ (1945), emphasises the other side of the same coin. The pictorial reproduction moves closer to the thing reproduced but, in the same movement, further away from human agency.7 Much of Benjamin’s argument about the loss of the ‘aura’ and the change in the function of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction is presented as a consequence of reproducibility freeing artworks to move, in multiple copies, through space and time (here we see the intertwining of the histories of the overlapping categories of art and media). Artworks are transformed from unique objects ‘imbedded in the fabric of tradition’8 and functioning ‘in the service of ritual’9 to ‘reproductions [which] meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation’.10 Artworks move closer to everyday life, a reduction of distance that is not necessarily congenial to aesthetic appreciation (something touched upon by Benjamin during his discussion of ‘distraction’ towards the end of his essay, and the subject of much more extensive and impassioned discussion by a colleague of Benjamin’s who famously disagreed11 with much of ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, Theodor Adorno).12 Painting is, for Benjamin, photography and film’s predecessor in the realm of ‘pictorial reproduction’, and the emphasis in his discussion is often upon the increased immediacy achieved by the mechanical modes; when it comes to human performers ‘represent[ing themselves] to the public’13 (to use Benjamin’s formulation), the focus is predominantly upon film’s increased distance in relation to its predecessor in this realm, theatre. In a particularly intriguing passage, which anticipates the concerns of more than one strand of film theory that would follow several decades later, Benjamin suggests: [T]he film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the ­audience during his performance … This permits the audience to  take the  position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact

Distance, representation, criticism  47 with the  actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an ­identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing.14

Stylistic film history: systems, conventions and distance Although distance is a constitutive element of an aesthetic experience, the historically variable formal properties of an artistic medium contribute to the degree and type of distance experienced. Take, for example, the filmic system of continuity editing. The devices that comprise this system put the viewer in a very good position from which to observe the human interactions that most films offer. Indeed, they emerged and have endured largely for that reason. A device as simple and unremarkable as shot-reverse-shot editing combines a naturalistic spatial orientation of characters in relation to one another with an ‘analytical’ (sometimes used as an adjectival equivalent to ‘continuity’ in relation to editing) point of view that shows us, often in three-quarter framings that give us more information than a sustained profile view of both characters would, each character in turn.15 Continuity editing’s ability to guide the viewer’s attention, through composition, shot scale, shot sequencing and so on, mean that it is, on the whole, much better equipped to represent human drama than the typical staging of very early cinema, which shows us actors ‘arranged in a row and stand[ing] far away from us’.16 The distance created by style in the encounter between any given film and any given viewer will be partially determined by the coming together of two broad contexts: how the film stands in relation to the stylistic options available when (and where) it was made, and the ability of the viewer to apprehend that context. A viewer’s reaction to (and orientation towards) a film made in 2002 that conforms to some of the stylistic features of Hollywood melodrama of the 1940s and 1950s will be different from her or his reaction to a Hollywood melodrama of the 1940s or 1950s.17 Embracing archaism is one way of enacting and signalling distance from the prevailing filmmaking conventions of a given moment. This example can also serve to remind us that making judgements, even if they usually remain implicit, about the intentions of filmmakers is an important ingredient in how viewers apprehend style. If a viewer fails to recognise the stylistic debt of the 2002 film to 1950s Hollywood melodrama, then the style will not work for that viewer in the manner just described. Expanding the point: all things being equal, the fewer

48  Classical Hollywood cinema

­ ifferent kinds of film a viewer has seen, the more likely it is that the d next film he or she encounters, assuming it is different in some way from what he or she has seen before, will be received as delightfully novel or off-puttingly difficult to assimilate. I wanted to offer these general comments pertaining to stylistic film history and individual viewing histories before proceeding to other matters because although they cannot be my principal concerns here, these two elements combined form a fundamental dimension of the relationship of distance that I am exploring. It is just that for the most part they will remain an implicit informing context rather than a topic of explicit scrutiny. Distance and point of view A good place to begin a discussion of ways in which filmmakers might control and modulate the distance relationship in their artworks is with a consideration of point of view. In studies of literary narratology and point of view, distance has often been mapped onto the distinction between mimesis and diegesis, or their contemporary near synonyms, showing and telling.18 More accurately, we ought to refer to a spectrum rather than a distinction. As Genette points out, ‘in contrast to dramatic representation, no narrative can “show” or “imitate” the story it tells. All it can do is tell it in a manner which is detailed, precise, “alive,” and in that way give more or less the illusion of mimesis.’19 Following this logic, the more closely prose narration approximates ‘dramatisation’, ‘showing’, the less distance it possesses. Norman Friedman, in his ‘Point of view in fiction: the development of a critical concept’ (1955), offers as one of the four questions used to establish his typology of texts ‘At what distance does [the author] place the reader from the story?’20 Later passing comment reveals that Friedman conceives distance in a manner analogous to Genette.21 Thus, and given Friedman’s suggestion that ‘the history of [literature’s] aesthetic could in part be written in terms of’ a ‘fundamental tension’ between showing and telling,22 the article’s spectrum of modes, from ‘editorial omniscience’ (lots of telling) to ‘the camera’ (approaching pure showing) is not far from constituting a spectrum of distance. Films are of course endlessly inventive with regard to which events in their story-worlds are dramatised, lingered upon, elided, cut short, summarised through montage or voice-over, reported by characters, and so forth. However, most films, and the case studies in this book yet more

Distance, representation, criticism  49

so, comprise mainly sequences of dramatised scenes. Hence, distance in Genette and Friedman’s narratological sense cannot be at the centre of my approach. Similarly, the possible distance relationships between the various narrational entities posited by literary theory – most commonly, implied authors, narrators and characters – also do not offer the precise purchase in the case of film that they do in the case of literature. Wayne C. Booth, in addition to exploring possible permutations of the relationships between a novel’s implied author, narrator, characters and readers,23 makes two very useful sets of observations about distance that can be applied to all modes of fiction. Recognising that not only formal properties but also the ‘human properties’ a fiction makes part of its design have implications for distance, Booth notes that a fiction can generate greater or lesser distance along ‘any axis of value or judgment; moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and even physical’.24 In an absolutely salutary passage, Booth emphasises that ‘“Aesthetic distance” is in fact many different effects, some of them quite inappropriate to some kinds of works. More important, distance is never an end in itself; distance along one axis is sought for the sake of increasing the reader’s involvement on some other axis.’25 This recognition of what we might call the ‘aspectual’ nature of distance in fiction is crucial. The structure of Douglas Pye’s model of filmic point of view makes it a useful preliminary schema when analysing distance and point of view in particular films.26 Pye proposes five ‘axes’ of point of view: the ‘spatial axis’, the ‘temporal axis’, the ‘cognitive axis’, the ‘evaluative axis’ and ‘the axis of ideology’.27 One way in which the ‘axis’ metaphor is useful is that it suggests a process of measuring – or perhaps ‘gauging’ or ‘weighing’ would be better, as they avoid a possible implication of exactitude – the relationships that a film establishes among its various elements and (or perhaps ‘including’)28 the viewer. If one’s particular focus is upon character, one can even use Pye’s axes (or the first four at least) as ways of measuring different aspects of the closeness or distance between characters and the viewer (it should be added that Pye does not limit his categories in this way). When treated in this way, Pye’s axes overlap to a significant degree with elements of Murray Smith’s model of character engagement. The spatial and temporal axes function similarly to Smith’s notion of ‘spatio-temporal attachment’; the cognitive axis has affinities with Smith’s ‘subjective access’, and the evaluative axis is ­similar to Smith’s ‘allegiance’.29 In addition to its aspectual treatment of filmic point of view, and therefore also distance, another way in which Pye’s account does justice to

50  Classical Hollywood cinema

the complex and fine-grained nature of the operation of distance in film is through his attention to the way that distance is not only, as Booth notes, many different effects, but also a group of different (though interrelated) effects (or aspects) which vary across the course of a film, both at a moment-by-moment level (Pye’s particular focus), and as an element of a film’s larger-scale patterning. The larger-scale patterning of Vertigo, for example, with respect to distance has been the topic of a great deal of critical commentary, principally because Judy’s ‘confession’ scene functions as an epistemic ‘switch’. Until this point, our knowledge of Judy/Madeleine has been effectively identical to Scottie’s. The confession scene creates a crucial source of epistemic distance between the viewer and Scottie, which is only overcome when Scottie later deduces what we have been shown and told. Other of Pye’s axes can also be used to parse Vertigo’s large-scale patterning, revealing some of the interrelations of the dimensions of distance at work. Although the viewer’s spatial and temporal relationship to Scottie is not as consistently as close as is often argued or implied,30 Judy’s confession scene is by far the most sustained separation from Scottie along these axes. In the scenes that follow, from the revelation up until Judy’s make-over under Scottie’s direction, although our overall spatial and temporal alignment with Scottie returns, Barr suggests that ‘[i]f anything we are more inward with [Judy]’,31 because of both our overall epistemic position, and finer elements of spatial and epistemic texture which highlight Judy’s pained reactions to the behaviour of an oblivious Scottie. At the same time, the viewer’s distance from Scottie along the evaluative axis is surely increasing as we witness his coercive and entirely self-centred treatment of Judy, meaning that even when the epistemic gap between Scottie and the viewer closes again, the original closeness between protagonist and viewer cannot be recaptured (as Smith might put it, alignment is restored, but allegiance has been destroyed). Vertigo’s expert modulation of distance at a more fine-grained level can be observed in the scene (discussed in the previous chapter) where Scottie sees Madeleine plummet from the top of the bell tower, and then furtively leaves the scene. Until the moment we hear Madeleine’s body land on the roof below Scottie, the sequence has been designed, similarly to the film’s opening rooftop sequence, to induce anxiety in the viewer. In the wake of this moment, the rate of cutting and the tempo of the musical score both drop drastically (and the pitch of the music generally descends), and the camera does not follow Scottie when he descends the tower’s staircase, meaning that he moves further and further away from the viewer. After two optical POV and reaction shots (discussed in the previous chapter),

Distance, representation, criticism  51

we cut to an overhead shot looking down the tower staircase. This reprises the framing of the sequence’s ‘vertigo’ shots, with their combination of tracking and zooming to represent Scottie’s perception, but without the vertigo effect. This time, also, Scottie is in the shot. It is held for what feels like quite a long time as he slowly descends the stairs. Thus do we move from being anxiously caught up in the build-up to a climax to the greater distance and contemplation allowed by the subsequent change in the pace and nature of the filmic presentation and drama, and from beholding the details of Scottie’s stricken face to observing the slow stagger of a retreating figure. The process continues with the ultra-remote perspective adopted by Hitchcock’s camera to observe a now-tiny Scottie emerge from the tower and steal away, before the image fades to black. The modulation of various aspects of distance achieved over the course of this sequence are part of the process whereby the viewer’s perspective is shifted from a focus upon romantic obsession and the supernatural, to a consideration of the cold light in which a law court will view the story of the death of Madeleine Elster, and then of the categories that a mental institution will use to diagnose ‘Mr Ferguson’. We have spent most of the film following Scottie following Madeleine, but in the passage of the film after her death, he retreats to a place where the viewer cannot follow. ‘The closer we look at the concept of distance’, Booth suggests, ‘the more complicated it appears’.32 Like the concept of point of view to which it is inextricably bound, distance is amenable in part to preliminary taxonomisation, which can be a ‘reminder of potential d ­ imensions … that can help to guide interpretation’.33 However, it is only through sustained analysis of a case study that we can see the competing and interrelating aspects of distance patterned across an artwork, and do full justice to Booth’s assertion that any ‘work of any power … is in fact an elaborate system of controls over the reader’s involvement and detachment along various lines of interest. The author is limited only by the range of human interests.’34 The case of Otto Preminger In an issue of the journal Movie published in 1962 principally devoted to an exploration of films directed by Otto Preminger, the opening editorial asserts that Preminger’s aim is to present characters, actions and issues clearly and without prejudice. He is concerned to show events, not to demonstrate his feelings

52  Classical Hollywood cinema about them. This objectivity is a mark of respect for his characters and, particularly, for his audience. He presupposes an intelligence active enough to allow the spectator to make connections, comparisons and judgments. Preminger presents the evidence but he leaves the spectator free to draw his own conclusions.35

In Film as Film (1972) by V. F. Perkins (one of Movie’s original editors), Preminger’s films receive sustained attention. At one point, Perkins presents Hitchcock’s and Preminger’s films as offering illuminating points of contrast to one another: Preminger reveals significance by a dramatic structuring of events which his camera seems only to follow – never to anticipate. Moreover, the image appears to attempt always to accommodate the entire field of action so that it is the spectator’s interest which defines the area of concentration. At the other end of the scale Hitchcock is prepared to indicate areas of concentration very forcibly … Hitchcock allows us no independent selection. Moreover, he is fully prepared to use a camera which anticipates the action.36

‘The contrast between their methods’, Perkins goes on to observe, ‘is further reflected in their narrative styles. Hitchcock tells stories as if he knows how they end, Preminger gives the impression of witnessing them as they unfold.’37 The features identified in the Movie editorial and in Film as Film are evident in Preminger’s 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder, a film whose ­handling of various aspects of distance makes it an ideal case study. Control of distance in Anatomy of a Murder Anatomy of a Murder follows its protagonist Paul Biegler/James Stewart, attorney-at-law, and his two associates as they defend Lieutenant Fredric  Manion/Ben Gazzara against a charge of first degree murder. Manion (‘Manny’) has shot Barney Quill, who is alleged to have raped Manion’s wife Laura/Lee Remick. Paul pursues a defence of temporary insanity. ‘I made Gazzara a very unpleasant character in order to make the point that he’s not acquitted because he’s a nice man’,38 Preminger once noted in an interview. After his first meeting with Manny, Paul describes him to his associate as ‘insolent’ and ‘hostile’. Manny is also, at first, smirkingly unrepentant, and only after Paul’s careful coaching does he begin to talk about having been mad and acted involuntarily.

Distance, representation, criticism  53

The film’s presentation of Laura is also an important element of the film’s control of viewer sympathy. For much of the film, and especially in its early stages, her behaviour barely bespeaks suffering or trauma, and it is only at a very late stage in the film that her alleged rape is proved. For much of the time that she is with Paul (the character with whom we see her interact most), she flirts with him, quite insistently and persistently. This is even true at times when the topic of conversation is her assault. When upon first meeting Laura, Paul asks her to remove her sunglasses (so that he might read her better, I take it), she obliges, revealing severe bruising around her eyes. When Paul expresses consternation, Laura assures him that there is worse. While her words themselves can be seen to merely offer information, her tone of voice and the way she holds eye contact also imply an invitation: ‘You should see, all over.’ The prosecuting attorneys do not let the jury forget that Laura’s account of events could be motivated by her fear of her husband’s violent sexual jealousy, and this is one way that Preminger will not let us forget it either. Indeed, we see more, and earlier, than the jury. Details (damaging to the defence) to do with Laura swearing on a rosary to satisfy her husband that she was telling the truth, and Manny striking a fellow army officer in a bout of jealousy, emerge during the trial, but the first time that the film shows Manny and Laura together, we witness dysfunction, and Paul’s troubled reaction to it: eye contact between the couple is fleeting (Laura has by this point put her sunglasses back on) and physical contact is non-existent. While not overturning the sympathy a viewer is likely to feel by default for (alleged) victims of rape and their families, the specific choices of Anatomy of a Murder do not amplify the possibilities inherent in the basic situation for generating strong sympathies, and, consequently, strong desires having to do with the outcome of the trial. We are not allowed to be certain that Manny’s act was in fact legally excusable, nor are we made to feel that he must not go to jail. That Laura’s victimhood is not what is consistently emphasised about her character (again: especially in the film’s early stages) means that the trial does not become straightforwardly a means by which her ordeal must be officially recognised and acted upon. And the nature of Manny and Laura’s relationship means that we are not made to feel a strong and straightforward desire for their reunion. It is also the case that we are not given strong reasons to desire that Manny be found guilty. Barney Quill is an extremely distant presence

54  Classical Hollywood cinema

throughout the film. Paul surveys photographs of Quill on the wall of the latter’s business, the Thunder Bay Inn, but while he does so, Preminger’s camera holds Paul in long shot, never giving us a detailed view of the images. Later, during the trial, we only very briefly see photographs of Quill’s corpse. Alphonse/Murray Hamilton, bartender at the Thunder Bay Inn, speaks positively of Quill but expresses no real personal emotion regarding his death. Even Mary Pilant/Kathryn Grant, who is eventually revealed to be Barney’s daughter, treats his death with remarkable equanimity. Moreover, neither Manny nor Laura is the film’s main character. We start the film with Paul before he learns about the homicide and accepts the case, and we end it with him after the trial has concluded. Unlike Scottie, Paul is not a man with idle hands but one with a range of interests, most prominently fishing, piano-playing and reading law books with his friend Parnell/Arthur O’Connell. Throughout the trial, Paul is keen to get back to these interests (and even brings them into the courtroom with him, in the form of a fishing device which he uses, as he tells Judge Weaver/Joseph Welch, to help him think, much in the way Deeds uses his tuba). These elements of narrative construction and characterisation prevent us from seeing Paul’s profession as the only important part of his life or identity, or the trial as the only significant thing in the film’s world. To use Leo Braudy’s terms, Anatomy of a Murder, like many of Preminger’s films, tends towards the ‘open’ rather than the ‘closed’: In a closed film the world of the film is the only thing that exists; everything within it has its place in the plot of the film – every object, every character, every gesture, every action. In an open film the world of the film is a momentary frame around an ongoing reality.39

Braudy’s description here suggests a way of reading the first shot of Anatomy of a Murder. We fade in on a quiet road, framed diagonally, in a dusk landscape. A car is approaching. The camera pans left, then tracks alongside the car to keep it and its lone driver – James Stewart – in a close profile for a moment, then halts its lateral motion and lets the car retreat. The shot is an example of a staging schema that Bordwell notes ‘is often seen in postwar neorealist movies and in Hollywood films shot on location (Preminger is especially fond of it in Exodus, 1960, and Advise and Consent, 1962).’40 Anatomy of a Murder also employs location shooting (including in the scene being discussed), and the comparison with neorealism is apt. The impression, created by the camera’s rhetoric, of capturing a world that exists independently of it, rather than creating

Distance, representation, criticism  55

that world, determining its happenings, or having an uncanny degree of knowledge about them (as in Hitchcock’s films, and – to use Braudy’s principal example of a ‘closed’ filmmaker – Fritz Lang’s), complements the descriptions of Preminger’s filmmaking offered above. An opening shot that picks up a character along his journey, follows and observes him briefly, then leaves him to continue his life, provides us with a nice synechdochic representation of Preminger’s approach to the worlds and characters of his films. Our principal attachment to Paul (and, secondarily, his associates) is likely to mean that we would like to see him win the case, but again, such a desire is not intensified by Preminger’s treatment. Unlike Scottie, Paul does not suffer and desire deeply, but remains on an ‘even-keel’41 throughout the film. Our emotional engagement with him is forged in a much less intense crucible than our emotional engagement with Scottie. The nature of the audience’s investment in the trial at the film’s centre is also shaped by what the trial seeks to establish, and what the film chooses to reveal. The trial does not revolve around whether or not Manny killed Quill; he did. It seeks to establish the defendant’s state of mind when that action took place. Although the jury reaches a verdict on the issue, it is not conclusively resolved by the film. This, Perkins argues, ‘is essential to Preminger’s purpose’: ‘the film is designed to examine the mechanism by which a verdict is reached, not to establish the accuracy or fallibility of the verdict itself. A preoccupation with the correctness of the judgement would distract us from the main subject.’42 The courtroom of criticism Anatomy of a Murder distances the viewer from the events that the trial at its centre is centrally concerned with by never showing those events. Instead, the viewer is shown a series of conflicting tellings of those events, and those tellings become the show of a courtroom, and a courtroom drama. Bertolt Brecht, almost certainly the twentieth-century’s most famous theorist (and practitioner) of aesthetic distance, offered as a basic model for the kind of theatre he endorsed – ‘epic’ theatre – a ‘street scene’ in which an eyewitness demonstrat[es] to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place. The bystanders may not have observed what happened … the point is that the demonstrator acts the behaviour of the driver or victim

56  Classical Hollywood cinema or both in such a way that the bystanders are able to form an opinion about the accident.43

This description also applies to much of what occurs in jury trials. Take, as one example among many, the passage from Anatomy of a Murder where the jury, and the rest of the courtroom, and the film’s viewer, are presented with two opposing accounts of Laura’s conduct in the Thunder Bay Inn. The witness under cross-examination is Alphonse Paquette, the inn’s bartender. He is first questioned by Claude Dancer/ George C. Scott, the more able (and cosmopolitan) of the two attorneys for the prosecution. dancer:  Would you say that she was tight? paquette:  Oh she was high alright. dancer:  What did she do to make you think she was high? paquette:  Well, she took off her shoes and went barefooted, and when she played pinball she’d kind of swish around to give the machine inklings. dancer:  You mean she was swishing her … hips around?

Through pausing and intonation, Dancer isolates a frequently fetishised part of female anatomy, and accompanies the description – of Laura playing pinball – with a brief movement of his hips as he walks in front of the jury. Brecht notes that the demonstrator of epic theatre ‘need not imitate every aspect of his characters’ behaviour, but only so much as gives a picture’.44 Dancer is trying to render as vividly and experientially as possible for the jury the likely effect of Laura’s appearance and behaviour – as he chooses to describe them. He is playing to the streak of prudery – and the other side of the same coin, lasciviousness – that he expects to find in the jury. Laura’s presence in the courtroom serves as a kind of prop in this process. When it is Paul’s turn to cross-examine Alphonse he must try to repair some of the damage that Dancer has done. In one of Paul’s strategies we might detect an echo of Perkins’s characterisation of Preminger as a director who favours the wide view over the close-up: biegler:  Is there anything unusual about seeing a barefooted woman in Thunder Bay? paquette: No. biegler:  So Mrs Manion’s taking off her shoes in Thunder Bay, that doesn’t necessarily mean she was being unladylike, does it? paquette:  I guess not.

Distance, representation, criticism  57

Paul steps back from Dancer’s glaring and lascivious spotlight, offering the jury a different perspective on the same scene by bringing out the contextual social information Dancer has strategically not asked about. The classical Hollywood cinema has often been viewed as the antithesis of Brecht’s prescriptions for how drama ought to operate.45 However, this is often the result of a ‘formalist corruption’46 of Brecht, which focuses on the devices Brecht suggested rather than his aims in using those devices. A key effect Brecht sought to achieve was the ‘alienation effect’ or ‘A-effect’, which he described as ‘peculiar to the epic theatre’: What is involved here is … a technique of taking the human social incidents to be portrayed and labelling them as something striking, something that calls for explanation, is not to be taken for granted, not just natural. The object of this ‘effect’ is to allow the spectator to criticize constructively from a social point of view.47

The cross-examinations during the trial at the centre of Anatomy of a Murder are extended exercises in not taking things for granted. The attorneys try to persuade the members of the jury to question the accounts, behaviours and motives of the people called to testify and those whose actions they describe, and to question, and indeed reject, the interpretations offered by opposing counsel. The film’s viewer, who enjoys the luxury of aesthetic distance afforded by the fact that unlike the jury, he or she does not have to decide whether or not to find a man guilty, may also be moved to reflect critically, ‘from a social point of view’, upon, for example, the kinds of attitudes towards and assumptions about women that Dancer feels confident in drawing upon when painting his picture for the jury of Laura’s behaviour in the Thunder Bay Inn. We should not be content to seek to accommodate the classical Hollywood cinema within Brechtianism and leave Brechtianism itself uncriticised. Brecht’s suggestion that the kind of critical perspective he sought to provoke could be provoked only by epic theatre (were ‘peculiar’ to it) is extremely dubious. Brecht opposes epic theatre to what he terms ‘Aristotelian’ drama, characterised by mimesis and empathy. By mistakenly identifying the world of the drama with the social world and furthermore identifying with the drama’s characters, so the logic goes, the viewer of such drama fails to achieve the distance necessary for constructive social criticism and the imagination of alternatives to occur is precluded. However, as Smith has pointed out, ‘if only a revolutionary “productive” textual form can produce a critical spectator, then the ­critical spectator is as much an ‘effect’ of the text as the naïve

58  Classical Hollywood cinema

spectator … [H]ow critical is the spectator who can only be constructed as critical by an estranging text?’48 It is in fact perfectly possible to adopt a ‘Brechtian’ perspective in relation to an ‘Aristotelian’ artwork. Such an approach would be in many ways indistinguishable from critical practice in general. Stanley Cavell offers ‘Why is this as it is?’ as ‘the critical question’, and states that such a question ‘may be directed toward any of the acts and works of human beings and their societies’.49 John Gibbs quotes this suggestion at the start of ‘Filmmakers’ choices’ (2006), an account that demonstrates at length its initial assertion that ‘when investigating a film, a valuable approach is to identify a decision, or a group of decisions, and ask “what is gained by doing it this way?”’50 Such an approach entails the imagination of alternatives. Gibbs is primarily concerned with style, interpretation and aesthetic evaluation here, but Cavell’s and Gibbs’s questions can also be applied to the social world, and the two sets of concerns are not always cleanly separable. After Dancer has finished questioning Alphonse about Laura’s behaviour on the night of the shooting, and it is Paul’s turn, his first question is as follows: ‘Mr Paquette, the attorney for the people asked you if Mrs Manion was tight, and you said that she was high. Now, uh, speaking as a bartender, what’s the difference between the two?’ This is not the first time Paul has lingered upon alternative way of describing something in an attempt to establish which term fits best (for his purposes, at least). In Alphonse’s previous cross-examination, Paul presses Alphonse to go beyond the term ‘woman-chaser’, gets a laugh from the courtroom by ridiculing the archaism of Alphonse’s suggestion of ‘masher’, then himself suggests ‘wolf’, and puts it to Alphonse that such a description might fit Barney Quill.51 These terms all harbour assumptions – social assumptions – about the conduct of men in sexual pursuit of women. There is a world of difference between the relatively benign-cum-­foolish implications of ‘woman-chaser’ and the predatory overtones of ‘wolf’. As Chris Fujiwara notes, ‘the screenplay of Anatomy of a Murder shows extraordinary concern with words, with where they come from, what other words they might be covering for, what effect they might have on people’s perceptions of the object they intend.’52 By pursuing Alphonse’s distinction between being tight and being high, Paul is able to put it to Alphonse that ‘In other words, Mrs Manion was happy.’ Paul turns towards the jury and delivers the last word with an inflection which invests it with a poignancy which places Laura and her actions in a completely different light from that aimed at by Alphonse and Dancer a few moments earlier.

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Earlier in the trial, during the cross-examination of the first witness, after two objections have been overruled before a third is sustained, the judge rules that ‘the question and answer will be stricken and the jury will disregard both the question and the answer.’ We then see Manny lean across the table to ask Paul: ‘How can a jury disregard what it’s already heard?’ ‘They can’t, Lieutenant’, Paul replies, ‘they can’t’. This is a fact Paul repeatedly uses to his advantage. However, a well-phrased objection can alter the jury’s perspective on the information they have received. Much later in the trial, while trying to get at Laura’s motives for getting into a car with Quill, Dancer offers: ‘This was just the first time you were enough afraid to let a man take you home from one of your evening prowls?’ Paul delivers a clipped objection: ‘Use of the word “prowls”, meant to mislead the jury.’ The jury cannot be made to forget that they heard the word ‘prowls’, but Paul’s objection might prompt them to reflect upon how the impression of events they are forming might have been constituted, can help to raise to a level of conscious awareness in them the devices the prosecution is using. The judge’s reference to ‘the record’ might draw our attention to the court stenographer, who is in any case carefully included in the frame at several points. This might in turn encourage us to consider the differences between that record and our total experience of the trial as it unfolds, not just because of what is stricken, but also and more importantly due to the pauses, emphases, intonations and so forth that are used by everyone involved. One can see in various features of the trial – trying to find exactly the right or most efficacious term of description, trying to raise to the level of conscious awareness how an overall impression has been formed, considering what the delivery of the words recorded by the stenographer adds to the words themselves, an emphasis on the ‘how’ as much as the ‘what’, the means as much as the end – an echo of various ways of thinking about aesthetics and of practising criticism. If Hitchcock’s rear window is often taken as offering an allegory for film spectatorship, then perhaps Preminger’s courtroom could be taken as standing in a similar relation to film criticism. Criticising the social from a historical point of view: John Ford and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Anatomy of a Murder would not be an entirely inappropriate title for John Ford’s 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. James Stewart is once again an attorney-at-law, but in this film he does not defend the

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shooting of a man, but shoots a man in self-defence, or so he thinks. As it turns out, Liberty Valance/Lee Marvin was shot from the shadows by a third man, Tom Doniphon/John Wayne, something that is revealed to Ransom Stoddard (Stewart’s character) and the viewer shortly after it occurs, but which never becomes public knowledge, meaning that Ranse, who builds his political reputation upon this questionable foundation, is known to history as ‘the man who shot Liberty Valance’. Gilberto Perez points out that modernist film director Jean-Marie Straub described Ford as ‘the most Brechtian of all filmmakers’.53 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’s use of a single long flashback which fills most of the film’s running time, framed by Ranse telling the story to newspaper men in latter-day Shinbone, comprises one set of features that help to place the viewer at a distance from the events depicted. Perez cites critic William Pechter’s observation that the film’s principal setting, old Shinbone, is ‘to strange effect … recognisably a set’, and adds his own observation that ‘the lead actors … are visibly too old for the parts they play’.54 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is one of three case study films in Robert B. Pippin’s Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (2010).55 At the heart of Pippin’s account of the film is a reflection upon its engagement with questions of political identification in an American context. America, Pippin suggests: does not have a very long historical tradition and very little common ethnic and cultural heritage … Being an American is essentially a political identification … but what is the content, especially the psychological content, of such an identification? What counts psychologically as such a commitment? … Is there much of a psychological reality to political self-­ identification in America, and if not, is that a worrisome problem or not?56

Pippin’s ensuing survey of European political philosophers who have contemplated this question includes some thinkers who frame the issue as one of distance. There is, for example, Rousseau’s observation that ‘sociable man is always outside himself’.57 And there is, of course, Marx’s notion of the alienation engendered by the capitalist system of economic relations. When Ranse has finished telling his story, and we return to the film’s framing narrative (its ‘epic situation’), the newspaper editor takes the notes of the junior reporter and feeds them to the stove, justifying his act with one of the most famous and enigmatic lines in film history: ‘This

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is the West, sir: when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ ‘Our newspaper editor is not wrong to worry about Shinbone, so clean and empty and quiet, without its legends’,58 Pippin suggests as part of his conclusion. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he argues, Ford delivers a sophisticated reflection upon the complexities of political psychology: ‘If politics is possible, it requires some sort of commitment, some sort of dedication to one another’,59 and it would appear that such commitment might be inspired and sustained by acts like the one supposedly performed by Ranse and the stories that are subsequently told and retold about them more easily than by the political realities of ‘bourgeois commercial republics’60 – the kind of system that Ranse is a harbinger of. Among the thinkers Pippin adduces in the course of his account of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, there are none who would be described principally as theorists of media. However, retracing the ground Pippin covers using the lens of media and communications theory can offer a supplementary perspective upon the issues he explores. Media, communications and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance The year of the release of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance also saw the release of The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man by Marshall McLuhan, a thinker who ‘ushered in the age of the media, a term and an object of enquiry that he established’.61 McLuhan himself described The Gutenberg Galaxy as ‘a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing and then of printing’.62 Harold Adams Innis, who spent most of his academic career as an economic historian, turned to the matter of communications late in his life. His best-known idea is that of ‘the bias of communication’ (which bears comparison to McLuhan’s even more famous ‘the medium is the message’). Innis was a profound theorist not only of the psychic and social consequences of literacy, as McLuhan points out, but also of communication in the sense of physical transportation, including railroads, and the mutual reinforcement of these two phenomena. This was something he had in common with another North American born in 1894, John Ford. Innis’s master distinction was between time-biased and space-biased media: According to its characteristics a medium may be better suited to the dissemination of knowledge over time than over space, particularly if the

62  Classical Hollywood cinema medium is heavy and durable and not suited to transportation, or to the dissemination of knowledge over space than over time, particularly if the medium is light and easily transported. The relative emphasis on time or space will imply a bias of significance to the culture in which it is imbedded.63

Innis’s argues that there is a general movement in modern Western history from a time-biased culture to a space-biased one, underpinned by the spread of literacy and printing (for few media are lighter than words on a page). Literacy and its affordances play a vital part in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Tom may be right to advise Ranse that when facing Liberty Valance he will find a handgun more effective than law books, but Ranse is adopting the longer view. As he knows, the written word is a more effective long-range weapon (space-binding medium) than a gun. This is a point not lost, it seems, on Liberty Valance, whose most violent outbursts are reactions to moments where words printed on a page threaten his interests: near the film’s beginning, he savagely tears pages from Ranse’s law books before whipping Ranse senseless; much later, it is the temerity that Shinbone Star editor Dutton Peabody/ Edmond O’Brien displays by publishing in a newspaper stories of Valance’s murderous acts of intimidation that leads to Valance almost killing Peabody. Ranse’s commitment to and use of the written word is unvaryingly legalistic and civic. His discovery that Hallie/Vera Miles – the woman he will eventually marry – cannot read occurs when he is asking her to read out a point of law from one of his books. Hallie’s enthusiasm about the ‘comfort’ that being able to read the Bible by and to herself will bring her is not something that Ranse responds to directly (‘In no time you’ll be reading everything,’ he tells her.) Ranse acquires a large and varied class of pupils, whom he teaches in the room adjoining the Shinbone Star’s premises. As Edward Gallafent notes, ‘What we see is not reading or writing especially, but a lesson in civics’.64 ‘We’ve begun the school by studying about our country and how it’s governed’, Ranse tells the class. Later, he reads from ‘the best textbook in the world: an honest newspaper’, an edition of the Shinbone Star bearing the headline ‘cattlemen fight statehood’. In the framing narrative that takes place in ‘new Shinbone’, the medium of communication that is focused on is not writing (or printing, or signs, as Gallafent notes),65 but the railroad, which delivers ‘speed,

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space, movement [and] mobility’.66 Ranse’s exchanges with the operators of the trains he and Hallie travel on focus upon matters of punctuality and speed, and their journeys are aided by the medium that in the first half of the nineteenth century broke ‘the traditional link between transport and the communication of messages’,67 the telegraph: on the couple’s journey from Shinbone back to Washington at the end of the film, the conductor tells Ranse that he has wired ahead to hold the c­ onnecting train. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance dramatises the relocation of authority from the local community ‘to the formal polity and elections’,68 a transition enabled by space-binding media including literacy, printing and railroads. The gains and, more particularly, the losses that such a process entails are a central concern of many westerns, and of the westerns of John Ford in particular, and are a longstanding topic of scholarship in these areas. At least since the publication of Jim Kitses’s Horizons West in 1969, we have learned to be alive to the endlessly varied inflections with which westerns can approach such ‘antimonies’ as honour and institutions, self-interest and social responsibility, solipsism and democracy, empiricism and legalism.69 Pippin’s work on political psychology can be seen in turn as an ‘inflection’ of this tradition. What a film like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and a theorist like Innis help us to see is the part played by media and communications in this story of one culture giving way to another. Innis is often dismissed (and McLuhan yet more so) as a technological determinist. Menahem Blondheim, in a compelling defence of Innis, asserts that we ought rather to see him as a ‘communication determinist’,70 and suggests that in Innis’s accounts technologies can be seen to be figures as ‘agents, rather than sources of change’.71 Literacy does not teach itself and railroads do not build themselves, and from that perspective they are ‘effects’ rather than causes, but that is only the first half of the story. At the beginning of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when Hallie, just arrived in Shinbone, comments that the ‘place has sure changed: churches, high school, shops’, and Link/ Andy Devine (the former marshal) replies, ‘Well, the railroad done that’, we know what he means. Innis’s attachment to the oral tradition, James Carey argues, bespoke ‘a concern with the very possibility of public life’.72 In order to develop these thoughts further we can turn to another theorist who, like Innis, is a theorist of media among other things, and one of whose central works, Strukturwandel der Öffenlicheit73 was published in 1962: Jürgen Habermas.

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Public life versus public relations Habermas’s account of publicness74 is at once historical and theoretical. It proposes a model of the bourgeois public sphere that in many ways constitutes an ideal (a normative model) and is constituted by ‘the critical reasoning of private persons on political issues’,75 and it charts the prehistory of that model, its realisation, and its subsequent disintegration. Habermas’s story is predominantly a European one (if Europe is taken to include Great Britain), and Habermas argues that the emergence of a political public sphere occurs in Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century, and elsewhere in Europe later in that same century. Part of what makes stories of westward expansion in the United States so vivid and compelling is that changes that had unfolded elsewhere over the course of centuries were accelerated and telescoped, and occurred over the course of decades – that is, a human lifespan. The magic of film allows us to see a young Ranse in a lawless outpost and an old Ranse revisiting the same place and finding it transformed into a town complete with railroad, municipal buildings and shops, but it is a magic rooted in a historical reality. In Habermas’s historical and European account, a political public sphere has as its precursor a ‘literary’ public sphere which ‘provide[s] the training ground for a critical public reflection’.76 In Shinbone, the conditions are very different. Ranse teaches basic literacy at the same time as he teaches some of the basic features of an advanced and far-­reaching species of representative democracy, the government of the United States of America, as described in its Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. His pupils are not taught autonomous critical reasoning, but how to best promote their wealth and welfare under a representative system, as exemplified when Nora/Jeanette Nolan stands up and recites a lesson she has learned: ‘The United States is a republic, and a republic is a state in which the people are the boss. That means us. And if the big shots in Washington don’t do like we vote, we don’t vote for them, by golly, no more!’ The telescoping (telescopes being excellent devices for viewing at a distance) of historical developments in the American West is further accentuated by The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’s construction. In the same scene in which we see the establishment of communal public deliberation on matters of mutual interest, we see the enactment of a procedure whereby individuals delegate their authority to an elected representative. The coming together of the residents of Shinbone – or

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more precisely, its white men – in a show of communal defiance against the tyranny of Liberty Valance is at the same time the undoing of their newfound communality. The transition from participatory public life to something more mediated by representation continues in the next political assembly we see: the state convention in Capitol City. The chairman wields a gavel, as Ranse did in the meeting in the Shinbone bar, but this chairman’s ­position not only upon a stage, but at a lectern as well, accentuates the operation of a hierarchy. Debate is overtaken and undercut by performance and spectacle: Buck Langhorn/Tom Hennesy, the delegate of preference for those who wish to keep the territory an open range, stands on stage grinning while a man on a horse – who has leapt onto the stage in a pre-planned act of ballyhoo – twirls a lasso around his head. The placards that feature so prominently and pointedly in the sequence are far from the ideal fulfilment of another particularly prominent piece of writing in a film full of the written word:77 the lesson about lessons contained in the words ‘Education is the basis of law and order’, written on the blackboard in Ranse’s classroom, and rubbed out by Ranse when the threat of Liberty Valance means that the class has to be dismissed. Words of debate are pre-empted by slogans declaring allegiance to one side or another. Politics becomes a matter of, on the one hand, personality, as Peabody celebrates and Major Cassius Starbuckle/ John Carradine condemns Ranse’s shooting of Liberty Valance, and on the other, rights-based representative democracy, as Peabody invokes the emergence of ‘steady hard-working citizens: the homesteader, the shopkeeper, the builder of cities’, and the civic amenities that such subjects require. Peabody sells Ranse as a candidate for public office on the basis of his credentials as a man who charismatically synthesises admirable qualities not often found together in one individual – that is, in one important way in which Richard Dyer has suggested film stars are sold to the public:78 He is a man who came to us not packing a gun, but carrying instead a bag of law books. Yes! He is a lawyer. And a teacher. The first west of the rosy buttes. But more important, he is a man who has come to be known throughout this territory in the last few weeks as a great champion of law and order!

From here, things move quickly. Ranse leaves the convention hall, but Tom is there to stop him, and after breaking the news to Ranse that he is not Liberty Valance’s killer, he insists that Ranse accept his

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nomination as delegate ‘to the Congress at Washington’. Tom feels entitled to insist and Ranse feels obliged to comply not only because of the shooting of Valance, but also because Ranse has, without really trying, usurped Tom in Hallie’s affections. Tom’s final words to Ranse are ‘You taught her how to read and write, now give her something to read and write about!’ At this moment where the fates of both Ranse and the state he represents are sealed, the flashback comes to an end. We return to Ranse in present-day Shinbone. Between them, he and the Shinbone Star’s editor offer a summary of Ranse’s political career with a brevity that makes them appear as an epilogue to the events we have just been shown. In an essay subtitled ‘A tribute to Harold Innis’, James Carey, surveying the history of communication in the United States, sketches the following picture: ‘the growth of long-distance communication cultivated new structures in which thought occurred – national classes and professions; new things thought about – speed, space, movement, mobility; and new things to think with – increasingly abstract, analytic and manipulative symbols.’79 It is a picture that Ford also sketches, with the depth and vividness of a great artist, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Ranse brings the abstract, analytic and manipulative symbols of literacy and law books to Shinbone. In accepting his political nomination, he joins an emerging national class and profession. The railroad is brought to Shinbone, bringing with it increased speed, space, movement and mobility. When Pippin observes that ‘America does not have a very long historical tradition,’80 we might use Innis to suggest that part of the problem that Pippin is pointing to is that the United States of America ­constitutes an attempt to build a polity – across a vast geographical expanse, it should be added – using space-binding media, without the same depth of time-binding traditions that other nations are able to draw upon. Innis often emphasises the ‘power’ and ‘vitality’ of ‘the oral tradition’,81 particularly in relation to the literate culture that superseded it. Old, substantially (though not entirely) pre-literate Shinbone may fall short of the ancient Greek polis and its model of political and philosophical debate and its drama, music and poetry, but it certainly appears to be, as few critical accounts of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance have failed to note, a more communal, convivial and vibrant place than modern, literate Shinbone. Perhaps no small part of the reason that Shinbone has to print its legends lies in the fact that its ­legends have to be printed.

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The public, the private and the social A significant thinker in the writings of Habermas and of Pippin is Hannah Arendt, whose most famous work, The Human Condition, was published in 1958. Part of Arendt’s value, especially if one seeks to achieve analytical distance and a historical perspective on categories that can appear commonsensical almost to the point of immutability, is that her historical and theoretical account forces us to rethink, and to recognise as historically contingent, some key dividing lines of human existence. One example of this is Arendt’s distinction between the public, the private and the social. ‘We no longer think primarily of deprivation when we use the word “privacy”’, Arendt writes, ‘and this is partly due to the enormous enrichment of the private sphere through modern individualism’.82 In ancient Greece, however, Arendt argues, the household sphere functioned overwhelmingly as the realm of bodily necessity, whereas the public ‘realm of the polis, on the contrary, was the sphere of freedom’.83 The status of the private realm in ancient thought is indicated by two of Arendt’s observations regarding terminology: for the ancient Greeks, ‘a life spent in the privacy of “one’s own” (idion), outside the world of the common, is “idiotic” by definition’;84 and the Romans ‘used the words “to live” and “to be among men” (inter homines esse) … as synonyms’.85 This idea has its affinity with Heidegger’s suggestion that ‘the world of Da-sein is a with-world’86 (and Arendt drew much from Heidegger). Arendt sees ‘the rise of the social’87 as a later development, associated with ‘the emergence of the modern age and … the nation state’88 (as ‘the distinction between a private and public sphere’89 is associated with the city-state). ‘In our [contemporary] understanding’, Arendt argues, precisely because of the rise of the social as an intermediate realm between the public and private spheres, ‘the dividing line [between public and private] is entirely blurred, because we see the body of peoples and political communities in the image of a family whose everyday affairs have to be taken care of by a gigantic, nation-wide administration of housekeeping.’90 When using Arendt’s ideas about ancient civilisations in an attempt to illuminate the workings of mid-twentieth-century artworks, caution and circumspection are called for. (This said, it is surely no coincidence that Arendt was drawn to the themes she explores partly as a result of her attunement to the social questions of mid-twentieth-century America, and as Scannell demonstrates, The Human Condition is a book that ‘should be read in conjunction with those by Riesman, Williams and Habermas’91 – and perhaps also, I am suggesting, films of that period,

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including this chapter’s case study films.) I do not believe that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and still less Anatomy of a Murder, can be fully accommodated within Arendt’s public–private–social schema. Nevertheless, the schema remains a good thing to think with. The structuralist legacy of western scholarship and criticism makes us used to treating characters as representing opposite sides of sets of binaries, even if many of the most interesting individual westerns will elude or complicate those binaries. In such a spirit, it is interesting to begin by offering Ranse as a representative of the social. When Ranse endorses democracy to his classroom (composed substantially, and interestingly, of non-voters – women and children), he uses the Shinbone Star’s frontpage article to explain what is at stake in ways that make it clear that voters, by casting their vote the right way, can ensure that their everyday affairs will be safeguarded by the nation (and as we have already seen above, Peabody will later make a similar pitch to the convention delegates): Reading this ought to bring home to everybody south of the picket wire the importance of using that vote. Now the headlines say ‘Cattlemen fight statehood. Small homesteaders in danger.’ It makes it very clear that if the big ranchers north of the picket wire river, if they win their fight to keep this territory an open range, then all your truck farms, and your corn, the small shopkeepers and everything, the future of your kids, it’ll all be, all over, be gone! And they call upon you, in this article, they call upon you to unite behind a real strong delegate, and carry this fight to Washington, if necessary.

It is significant that at this point the class is interrupted by Tom, who enters with news of Valance’s threatening activities in support of those north of the picket wire, and also sends Pompey/Woody Strode, his black servant and companion, back to his ranch to continue work on the house. (He also tells Hallie that she has no business learning to read and write, but she does not agree.) Liberty Valance would fit most definitions of the term ‘antisocial’. His violence is sadistic and excessive, but as noted above, it is also directed not randomly, but with most vehemence towards tokens of the rise of the social: law books and newspapers. Note also the language used by Valance when he tries to coerce the assembled white male citizens of Shinbone to nominate him as delegate, language which tries to identify those people as vulnerable private beings rather than members of a potentially powerful social collective: ‘You sodbusters are a brave bunch when you’re together, but don’t vote

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any way now that you’ll regret later when you’re alone.’ However, Tom Doniphon is also, albeit in a more subtle way, antisocial, as the nature of his interruption described above begins to indicate, but he is antisocial, we might say, from an opposite direction to that of Valance. Valance represents a highly debased form of a commitment to public acts which, if not glorious, certainly tend to inspire awe. Tom, on the other hand, is a thoroughly private individual. He is characterised both as a man who anticipates with apparently deep satisfaction his future life of domesticity married to Hallie, and as a man whose life is already characterised as enjoying a species of domestic intimacy with Pompey, who is accurately described by Pippin as ‘the only dependable erotic link with the world that [Tom] will ever have’.92 ‘We know’, Robert Warshow wrote, that the Westerner ‘is on the side of justice and order, and of course it can be said he fights for these things. But such broad aims never correspond exactly to his real motives.’93 Tom refuses his nomination as delegate to the state convention because, as he tells Ranse by way of explanation, he has ‘personal plans’. When Tom sends Pompey home from class, it is to continue work on the extension to his home that he is building for Hallie, a structure that he burns down in despairing rage when it becomes clear to him that Hallie’s affections now lie elsewhere. The explanation that Tom offers to Ranse for shooting Liberty is similarly personal and private: ‘Hallie’s happy’. Tom neither needs the social for protection in the way that other citizens do, nor does it possess for him the allure that it possesses for Ranse. Tom also recognises, bitterly, that Hallie, by learning to read, is entering this realm (one way of explaining Tom’s attempt to make her stop). Arendt’s categories of public, private and social, offer us less purchase, as one might expect, upon Anatomy of a Murder than The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, given the former’s contemporaneous setting in a location where ‘the social’ is much more thoroughly embedded into everyday life. However, Anatomy of a Murder’s overall treatment of domestic space is sufficiently striking to deserve discussion, discussion which can be conducted with the help of Arendt’s thinking. Exclusively domestic space is almost entirely absent from Anatomy of a Murder. Paul’s house is also his office, and is in certain respects comically dishevelled and chaotic (the principal exception to this being the striking neatness and order of Paul’s volumes of law books and framed qualification certificates). Paul’s fridge (into which we see him put his latest catch of fish when he first returns to the house at the start of the film) is, like much else in the house, noticeably worn and dirty, and

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full of fish and very little else. When Parnell stubs out his cigarette on a doorframe and strikes a match on the piano, Paul does not protest. Even that which is decorative also bespeaks a life outdoors, and is used functionally: the mounted horns, where Maida leaves a note impaled for Paul, and where he later hangs his hat. We never see Parnell or Maida’s homes. Parnell, one line of dialogue suggests, lives at a rooming house. Maida’s reference to her marriage to a soldier in the past tense implies that she is a divorcee (the fact that she is played by Eve Arden encourages such a hypothesis). Barney Quill lived at the Thunder Bay Inn, which he owned; Mary Pilant also lives there, and manages the business. Manny, like his fellow prisoners, lives in public facilities and is subject to virtually constant surveillance. Laura lives in army accommodation (as did Manny before his arrest), and we never get to see the inside of her trailer. We learn from her discussion with Paul that she grew up ‘no place in particular’, divorced her first husband because he ‘didn’t like to move’, and is happy that she and Manny, by contrast, are ‘always going, whenever we get the chance.’ The visiting judge, Weaver, it is implied in one scene, lives in quarters in the courthouse. The exception to this overall scheme is Mitch Lodwick/Brooks West,94 the public prosecutor. Paul visits Mitch’s office (Paul’s old office, which Mitch has altered). Mitch points out a ‘real, genuine Picasso print’ to Paul: his wife has just taken a decorator’s course, he offers by way of explanation. Then he invites Paul to recline in his vibrating chair (‘It sort of does things for you’), and Paul, the closest to horizontal we ever see him, asks, in a humorously shaky voice, ‘How do you switch it off?’ Paul then proceeds to outfox Mitch by pretending to know the results of a lie detector test pertaining to the case they are both working on, a trick which Mitch falls for, hook, line and sinker. ‘I bit, didn’t I?’ Mitch asks, good-naturedly: the domesticated husband is caught by the bachelor hunter. Some of Paul’s hobbies, as just suggested, point to a pioneering thirst for nature which encroaches on his domestic sphere and is not quenched by his professional life. Others are those of the gentleman amateur: Paul dabbles on the piano, and in the evening, as a complement to his professional activities, ‘drink[s] bourbon whisky and read[s] law with Parnell Emmett McCarthy, one of the world’s great men’. Paul is here being generous and sincere, but there is an edge to his endorsement, as Parnell, because of his alcoholism, does not practise law officially, and remains behind the scenes once the murder trial is under way, because, he tells Paul, ‘the sight of this whisky-drinking old man at the counsel table would ruin you’. ‘The location of human activities’95 is another of

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Arendt’s topics in The Human Condition, and at one point she observes that Excellence … has always been assigned to the public realm where one could excel, could distinguish oneself from all others. Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required, and this presence needs the formality of the public, constituted by one’s peers, it cannot be the casual, familiar presence of one’s equals or inferiors.96

Despite the evident pleasure that Paul derives from and the absorption he experiences in his hobbies (which he even takes into the courtroom with him), the film also wants to show that there lingers a desire for the kind of activity and recognition that can only occur in public (a fact which, in the case of Paul’s profession, leads to an interesting tension between the trial’s status as an opportunity for public glory for its attorneys, and its role as an instrument of social justice, discussed briefly below). Just as Paul, by inviting Parnell to join him on the case, is trying to save Parnell from sinking into purely private pleasures, Parnell is likewise trying to persuade Paul to reconnect with his professional identity: Polly it’s a fact. Since Mitch Lodwick beat you out of the office of public prosecutor, you haven’t been worth salt for peanuts. Not that I don’t understand how you feel. A man gets beat out of an office he’s held for a long time, he feels his community’s deserted him, the finger of scorn is pointed at him.

The boundaries between public, private and social continue to be important throughout the film, and are even a way of thinking about the pivotal piece of evidence in the trial: Mrs Manion’s ‘panties’. The panties, purchased from the ‘Smart Shop’, Phoenix, Arizona, function, like much else in the film, as a miniature social hieroglyph. This is a world in which one purchases such intimate items from retailers – social organisations designed to serve private needs. Laura is a particular member of this world who has travelled sufficiently widely to be in possession of an item from a significant distance away, which can thus be confidently identified as belonging to her and not another person. The garment being found in the possession of a male suggests (ruling out Iago-like deception) that sexual activity has occurred; the fact that the garment is torn suggests that sexual violence has occurred. What allows the garment to be found is that Quill, incautiously, disposed of it using the communal laundry chute between his room and that of his daughter in their workplace-cum-residence.

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Let us now leave aside Arendt’s categories in order to discuss in a more common fashion some further important interrogations and representations of the line between publicness and privacy in Anatomy of a Murder. Impression management in Anatomy of a Murder The demonstrator need not be an artist … On the contrary it is important that he should not be too perfect … He must not ‘cast a spell’ over anyone … He need not dispose of any special powers of suggestion.97

Perkins, we will recall, claims that Anatomy of a Murder ‘is designed to examine the mechanism by which a verdict is reached’.98 It is remarkable, therefore, that the film never individuates jury members, holding them at a significant distance throughout the film. This is a further facet of the film’s very careful control of point of view. Preminger also chooses to elide Paul’s and Dancer’s closing statements at the end of the trial (we only get to hear brief opinions of their relative merits). One thing that Preminger does dramatise extensively within the courtroom is the interaction, some of it surreptitious, between Paul and the Manions. At one point in the trial, Paul exhibits directness while practising wiliness. Attempting to head off the damage being done by Alphonse’s testimony (under questioning from Dancer) about Laura’s appearance, Paul stands up to interrupt: Your honour, the defence will concede that Mrs Manion, when dressed informally, is an astonishingly beautiful woman. And we – well, Mrs Manion, stand up please. As a matter of fact – [sotto voce, to Laura:] Take your glasses off. [to the judge and everyone else again:] As a matter of fact it’s pretty easy to understand why her husband became temporarily deranged when he saw such beauty bruised and torn by a beast!

This is one example among many of the attorneys (and Paul especially) attempting to stage-manage impressions, and control how much information different people receive. Paul’s brandishing of Laura’s beauty is a display of forthrightness designed to counteract and distract the jury’s attention from the impression of Laura that Dancer is trying to sketch. However, Paul’s loud instruction to Laura to stand up is followed by an instruction directed to her alone, presumably because a request for her to take off her glasses would seem like too much of a show, but is nevertheless what Paul wants her to do. The film’s audience is privy to both the open instruction and the veiled one.99 This ought to encourage a critical

Distance, representation, criticism  73

perspective upon Paul himself to accompany and qualify (without overturning) our allegiance to him. The trial becomes, as Judge Weaver puts it, a ‘dogfight’ between Paul and Dancer, and the motives of the two attorneys are not in perfect alignment with the larger purpose of the trial itself. While justice demands that the trial seek to establish the facts of the case, the professional roles and personal pride of Paul and Dancer mean that they are seeking to persuade the jury of a version of events that best serves the interests of those whom they represent (that word again). Paul and Dancer appeal to what they assume to be the jury’s desires and drives at least as often as they appeal to their reason. Paul attempts to endear himself to the jury through the frequent use of humour. Dancer, as we have seen, tries to exploit their prudery and lasciviousness. Paul’s justification in the courtroom of why evidence pertaining to Laura’s alleged rape should be deemed admissible is that it is ‘the core of [his] defence’, and that trying to separate the event motivating Manion’s shooting of Quill from the shooting itself is ‘like trying to take the core from the apple without breaking the skin’. However, when Paul talks to Manny in private before he agrees to take the case, he speaks instead of providing a ‘legal peg for the jury to hang their sympathy on’. This is not so very far from Pippin’s suggestion that the legal institutions of bourgeois republics are less stirring and vital to their members than stories of direct and effective violence. Paul is suggesting that what might really motivate the jury to deliver a verdict of not guilty is their endorsement of precisely the type of direct, extra-legal administering of ‘justice’ that the process they have been asked to participate in is supposed to render obsolete!100 By aligning its viewer principally with the attorneys and defendants in a murder trial, and not the jurors, Anatomy of a Murder emphasises the status of trial by jury as a legal procedure conducted by professionals with an impressive command of rhetoric, rather than its status as a truth-seeking and justice-administering responsibility undertaken by citizens. However, unlike Ford, Preminger does not seek to mourn a loss or critique a lack. He represents detachment with his own detachment; he ‘presents the evidence but he leaves the spectator free to draw [her or] his own conclusions’.101 Space, time, publicness and film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance tells the story of a transition from an oral, time-binding culture to a literate, space-binding one. It tells this

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story using the medium of film, but during what we might term the era of television. Although television is frequently, and to the chagrin of its scholars and enthusiasts, treated as a poor relation to film (until recently, at least), when the two media are viewed as media of communication rather than media of expression (or of spectacle), it is the small screen that is often taken to constitute the larger historical watershed. Television differs from print in a way that film does not in the respect that film merely continues the ability of writing and print to inscribe, whereas television adds instantaneous transmission, thus taking its place among other tele-­ technologies (telegraphy and telephony), and of course, its predecessor in broadcasting, radio. Anatomy of a Murder and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance were released after ten years or so in which television had significantly shifted the boundaries between publicness and privacy. To mention just three indicative ‘highlights’: (1) in 1953, after lengthy and complex negotiations with the Palace and the Church of England, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in the United Kingdom was broadcast by the BBC; (2) in the same year in the USA, Person to Person began to air on CBS, a programme in which celebrated investigative journalist Edward Murrow, from a studio in New York, conducted ‘chat’ with famous persons in their homes (including a recently married John F. Kennedy); (3) in 1960, the first ever televised presidential debates took place in the USA, between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. If, as Benjamin supposed, photography, film and other media of ‘mechanical reproduction’ had the democratic effect of destroying the auratic distance of the artwork, then television had the equivalent effect for public persons. Members of royal families became visible during sacred rituals (albeit with strict controls over what could be shown and from what position, especially during key moments of the ceremony).102 Politicians, film stars and other ‘celebrities’ invited television cameras and presenters, and by proxy television audiences, into their homes. Candidates for the highest political office in the USA allowed their reactions, and their complexions, to be subjected to the scrutiny of the viewing, and voting, public – and as Benjamin suggested was the case with the film camera, the television camera allowed the audience to take the position of critics, and declare Nixon’s ­performance to be unappealingly shifty. For television’s non-famous viewers as well as its famous subjects, the boundary between publicness and privacy shifted, albeit in a different way. Raymond Williams, writing in the 1970s, coined the term ‘mobile

Distance, representation, criticism  75

privatisation’ to describe ‘a kind of technology … which served an at once mobile and home-centred way of living’.103 Paddy Scannell suggests that: Broadcasting (radio and television together) creates a spanned spatiality and temporality that is historically unprecedented. Any radio listener or television viewer can and does move back and forth between two worlds and times – their own time and the time of the world; their own world and the broadcast world wherever that may be. That is the unique communicative affordance of radio and television that has come to define our world and to disclose it as such in the last half century.104

Where does film fit within this picture – or rather, why does it not fit? Certainly, what we might term with Scannell the different communicative affordances of broadcasting on the one hand (potentially live, and always at least live in the sense of being transmitted now, even if what is transmitted is recorded material) and film on the other (always recorded, or perhaps more accurately, inscribed) are crucial. Cavell, writing about film, suggests that ‘The reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it; and a world I know, and see, but to which I am nevertheless not present (through no fault of my subjectivity), is a world past.’105 Perez is also moved to reflect upon the elusive ‘tense’ of film images, the ‘combination of presentness and pastness peculiar to [them]’: ‘A photograph is past, a painting is present; a play is present, a novel is past. The tense of the film image is dual, one might say: sometimes it acts like the present, sometimes like the past.’106 McLuhan, with characteristic extravagance, suggests that ‘The movie, by which we roll up the real world on a spool in order to unroll it as a magic carpet of fantasy, is a spectacular wedding of the old mechanical technology and the new electric world.’107 The type of broadcast content that best fits Scannell’s description of broadcasting above is live non-fiction programming, where the two worlds spanned by broadcasting are simultaneous and ontologically equivalent. It is in the case of such content that broadcasting’s spanning of spatial and temporal distance works to its fullest potential – that is, when, to return to the beginning of this chapter, what is broadcast is not only not-film, but also not-fiction and not-art. When what is broadcast is pre-recorded drama – be it a former cinematic feature or a work created specifically for television – then the kinds of distance alluded to by Cavell, Perez and McLuhan come into play. The relationship of American film to publicness in its Habermasian sense has been explored most thoroughly by Miriam Hansen. Hansen

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revises, but does not completely overturn, the historical account of the first two decades of US cinema as constituting an inclusive and progressive cultural institution, before the longstanding pursuit of a m ­ iddle-class audience by members of the industry led to ‘the integration of a relatively autonomous public sphere into a universalised, homogenized mass culture’.108 This social shift was accompanied by a series of changes in film style, and what one might call the textual inscription of an implied spectator and viewing position. The evolution Hansen highlights can be profitably thought of as a set of alterations in distance, not all in the same direction: ‘the systematic improvement of cinematic techniques that guarantee the complete absorption of the spectator into the fictional world of the film and the imaginary flow of linear narrative; the absolute division of screen space and theater space; the institutionalization of private voyeurism in a public space.’109 A Brechtian critique is implicitly at work here, and although I sought to challenge such a critique above, when one arrives at it via this route one might, I think, be more inclined to be sympathetic to it. Similarly, although in the previous chapter one of my concerns was to distinguish novels and films, one can also appreciate the logic and import of Hansen’s suggestion that cinema’s bid for cultural respectability … coincided with the rise to hegemony of the narrative film, [footnote omitted] with its debt to the 18th and 19th-­ century novel, its claim to both realism and universality, its inscriptions of the close-up with connotations of intimacy, interiority, individuality. With regard to the public status of the cinema, these moves suggest a systematic appropriation of characters of the classical, bourgeois public sphere.110

To concede that film is, in the ways described above, at least, less of an epoch-making medium than the literacy and printing that preceded it or the broadcasting that followed and developed alongside it should not, it ought to barely need saying, be seen as devaluing the medium, but rather as helping us articulate the medium’s value, and some of its communicative affordances, more precisely. Film may remain in part, like its predecessors, an old mechanical technology, but it is nevertheless a spectacular one. Screen fiction, which began on film, in the cinema, and has since spread elsewhere, is a mode that places us in a relationship with other humans that remains unique (with respect to distance, among many qualities). Early in the final section of this chapter, I suggested that film continues writing’s practice of inscription, but film is a time-­ binding technology, a technology of record and recording, of a special sort. On film, ‘[t]he past is no longer preserved indirectly in the trace of

Distance, representation, criticism  77

the ­written. It is preserved directly … in its own living immediacy.’111 Of course, in the case of film fiction, the direct preservation of the past is also the creation of fictional moments whose temporality and ‘tense’ are a source of debate (but which I would term, in most cases, present). The star of both of this chapter’s case study films (and half those of the book as a whole) puts it well when he observes: ‘That’s the great thing about the movies … After you learn – and if you’re good and Gawd helps ya and you’re lucky enough to have a personality that comes across – then what you’re doing is – you’re giving people little … little, tiny pieces of time … that they never forget.’112 Screen fiction gives us time, and time again. Sometimes, it does this within its fictions. As the flashback that comprises most of the running time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance reaches its climax and conclusion, we are shown an event, that is, a slice of time, that we have already been shown, again, from a different perspective, which enlarges our understanding (a similar thing occurs, as we noted in the previous chapter, at a different point within Vertigo). Fiction is not usually in the business of providing facts, but it is in the business of disclosing truth and offering revelation. Even if Shinbone’s young reporter were to print the truth and not the legend, it would still be a lesser and more distanced version of the truth than we have witnessed, that the film has revealed to us. If Ransom Stoddard were a twentieth- or twenty-first-century politician and not a nineteenth-­ century one, perhaps we could watch live as he is sworn in as senator, or invites us into his home, or participates in a televised debate, but of course this would not equal the access and disclosure of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Television may have redrawn the lines of publicness and privacy, but film and its screen fiction descendants (including television, some of the time) still traverse those lines more freely. Part of this is film’s ability to carve out moments of privacy within public occasions, a possibility of filmic point of view that, as we noted above, Preminger exploits in the setting of the courtroom. In screen fiction, the only ‘backstage’113 places and times are those that the fictions’ makers decide to keep so. The ability to ‘seek [the imagined world’s] most revealing image’114 is a prerogative that need only be waived in the interests of artistic design. One of the fundamental projects of this book is to demonstrate the depth and the versatility of that hegemonic object, narrative fiction film (and the narrower category which constitutes perhaps the preeminent instance of that mode: classical Hollywood cinema), and more specifically, of the points of view it is capable of constructing. However, to be

78  Classical Hollywood cinema

committed to such a project is not to be committed to the position that narrative films can do everything – and certainly not to the position that they can do everything at once. When one contemplates the vast topic of distance and film fiction, it seems that the only conclusion one can draw is Booth’s: ‘The closer we look at the concept of distance, the more complicated it appears.’115 As I stated near the beginning of this chapter, the distance between a film (in its various aspects) and the viewer is not something that comes even close to being under the complete control of the film’s makers, even if they retain immense scope to shape this relationship. I would like to add in conclusion, again echoing Booth, that distance relationships constitute a dynamic system of pushes and pulls, or to put it another way, gains and losses. We should not, and need not, pretend that the particular (yet still, it bears repeating, much more variable than many commentators would allow) configuration of distance created by fiction film art – especially within what we might, problematically, term its ‘classical’ mode – does not entail costs and limits of the kinds outlined by Hansen (and others); we need only declare, ­emphatically, that what we get in return more than outweighs them. Notes 1 N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 66. 2 V. Shklovsky, ‘Art as technique’ (1916), trans. L. T. Lemon and Marion J Reis, in J. Rivkin and M. Ryan (eds), Literary Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 18; original italics. Shklovsky’s distinction between non-aesthetic and aesthetic perception can be fruitfully compared with Heidegger’s distinction between treating objects as ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden), meaning that they cleave seamlessly to the practical use to which we put them, and treating them as ‘present-to-hand’ (vorhanden), and contemplating their properties as objects. M. Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 67–76. (I use here the more well-established translations of Heidegger’s terms rather than the ones used in Stambaugh’s translation.) 3 L. Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. G. Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 4 See, for example, K. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 5 W. Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. H. Zorn, ed. H. Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 220.

Distance, representation, criticism  79 6 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 213. 7 A. Bazin, What Is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. H. Gray (London: University of California Press, 1967), p. 12. 8 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 217. 9 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 217. 10 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 215. 11 See P. Scannell, Media and Communication (London: Sage, 2007), pp. 57–61 for a clear discussion of what was at stake in Adorno and Benjamin’s disagreement. 12 See, for example, T. W. Adorno, ‘A social critique of radio music’, Kenyon Review, 7:2 (1945), discussed in this book’s postscript. 13 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 222. 14 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 222. Benjamin is here arguing something close to the opposite of Laura Mulvey’s claim that in narrative cinema ‘the conscious aim [is] always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience’ (‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen 16:3 (1975), p. 17). Interestingly, Benjamin follows his talk of ‘identification’ in this passage with a footnote that cites Bertolt Brecht. For a discussion of several of Benjamin’s essays pertaining to a cinema, which includes a consideration of the differences between the most well-known version of Benjamin’s ‘Mechanical reproduction’ essay and an earlier draft, including differences in Benjamin’s discussion of actors on-screen, see M. Hansen, ‘Benjamin, cinema and experience: “The blue flower in the land of technology”’, New German Critique 40 (1987). 15 D. Bordwell, ‘Convention, construction, and cinematic vision’, in D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (eds), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). 16 D. Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 1. 17 The film that I have in mind is of course Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002). The question of how fully that film conforms to the conventions of an earlier phase of Hollywood filmmaking (the subject of my master’s dissertation) is not one I will explore here. 18 Gilberto Perez takes issue with the treatment of Aristotle’s terms by recent narratologists. See G. Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 59–60. 19 G. Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. J. E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p. 164 (original italics). 20 N. Friedman, ‘Point of view in fiction: the development of a critical c­ oncept’, PMLA 70:5 (1955), p. 1169.

80  Classical Hollywood cinema 21 ‘[S]ince summary narrative and immediate scene are equally available … the distance between the story and the reader may be near or far’ (Friedman, ‘Point of view in fiction’, p. 1173). 22 Friedman, ‘Point of view in fiction’, p. 1161. 23 W. C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1983), pp. 155–9. See also W. C. Booth, ‘Distance and point-ofview: an essay in classification’, Essays in Criticism 11:1 (1961). 24 Booth, ‘Distance and point-of-view’, p. 69. 25 Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 123. In the same paragraph, Booth devotes a few sentences to Bertolt Brecht, whom we will encounter later in this chapter. Brecht, Booth suggests, ‘may seem at first to desire an increase in distance of all kinds. But what he really wants is to increase the emotional distance in order to involve the reader’s social judgment more deeply’ (p. 123). 26 Pye himself is quite explicit on the matter of how he thinks the categories he presents should (and should not) be used: ‘It is important to stress that these are nothing more than analytical categories which might act as a checklist of areas likely to be relevant … I want as far as possible to avoid one of the pitfalls of spawning categories: their tendency to take on a life of their own.’ D. Pye, ‘Movies and point of view’, Movie 36 (2000), p. 8. 27 Pye, ‘Movies and point of view’, pp. 8–12. 28 ‘[T]he film incorporates the spectator and his emotional reactions into its pattern. Our involvement becomes as much part of the material as plot and gesture, composition and décor.’ V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 140–1. 29 M. Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 142–227. 30 See J. Zborowski, ‘Beyond the male gaze: Departures from Scottie’s point of view in Vertigo’, CineAction 84 (2011). 31 C. Barr, Vertigo (London: BFI Publishing, 2002), p. 72. 32 Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 123. 33 Pye, ‘Movies and point of view’, p. 8. See n. 26, above. 34 Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 123 (original italics). 35 ‘Why Preminger?’ Movie 2 (1962), p. 11. 36 Perkins, Film as Film, p. 129. 37 Perkins, Film as Film, p. 130. In the first part of Classical Hollywood Cinema, Bordwell cites this last sentence approvingly, and sets Hitchcock and Preminger up at opposite poles of the range of possibilities that he sees classical narration as permitting. D. Bordwell, J. Staiger and K. Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 79.

Distance, representation, criticism  81 38 ‘Interview with Otto Preminger’, Movie 4 (1962), p. 19. 39 L. Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 46. 40 Bordwell’s label for the schema is ‘angular pickup/profiled passing/angular walkaway’ (he has in mind human rather than vehicular motion as the schema’s prototype). D. Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 177–8. 41 Barr, Vertigo, p. 75. 42 Perkins, Film as Film, p. 148. 43 B. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. and ed. J. Willett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1964), p. 121. 44 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, p. 123. 45 C. MacCabe, ‘Realism and the cinema: notes on some Brechtian theses’, Screen 15:2 (1974). 46 A. Britton, Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. B. K. Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), p. 103. 47 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, p. 125. 48 M. Smith, ‘The logic and legacy of Brechtianism’, in Bordwell and Carroll (eds), Post-Theory, p. 139. 49 S. Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition (London: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 187. 50 J. Gibbs, ‘Filmmakers’ choices’, in D. Pye and J. Gibbs, Close-Up 01 (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), p. 5. See also J. O. Thompson, ‘Screen acting and the commutation test’, Screen 19:2 (1978); V. F. Perkins, ‘Moments of choice’, The Movie 58 (1981); and A. Clayton, ‘The texture of performance in Psycho and its remake’, Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 3 (2011). 51 In the novel upon which Anatomy of a Murder is based, the pointedness of this line of questioning is different: Paul knows that Alphonse described Barney as a ‘wolf’ to Laura before her rape and Barney’s murder. R. Traver, Anatomy of a Murder (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), p. 236. 52 C. Fujiwara, The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (New York: Faber and Faber, 2008), p. 237. One of the key writers who has addressed the histories, ideas and attitudes contained within the words we use is Raymond Williams, one of whose books, Keywords, is a series of investigations, organised alphabetically, of words which have ‘at some time, in the course of some argument, virtually forced [them]sel[ves] on my ­attention because the problems of [their] meanings seemed to me inextricably bound up with the problems [they were] being used to discuss.’ R. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 13.

82  Classical Hollywood cinema 53 Perez, Material Ghost, p. 250. See also G. Perez, ‘House of miscegenation’, London Review of Books 32:22 (2010), p. 24. 54 Perez, ‘House of miscegenation’, p. 24. 55 R. B. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (London: Yale University Press, 2010). 56 Pippin, Hollywood Westerns, pp. 62–4 (original italics). 57 Quoted in Pippin, Hollywood Westerns, p. 67. 58 Pippin, Hollywood Westerns, p. 101. 59 Pippin, Hollywood Westerns, p. 100. 60 Pippin, Hollywood Westerns, p. 100. 61 Scannell, Media and Communication, p. 129 (original italics). 62 M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), p. ix. 63 H. Innis, Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), p. 33. 64 E. Gallafent, Letters and Literacy in Hollywood Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 45. 65 Gallafent, Letters and Literacy, p. 48. 66 J. W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Revised Edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), p. 119. 67 A. Briggs and P. Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge: Polity, 3rd edn, 2010), p. 21. 68 M. Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 8. 69 J. Kitses, Horizons West: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship within the Western (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), p. 11. 70 M. Blondheim, ‘Harold Adams Innis and his bias of communication’, in E. Katz, J. D. Peters, T. Liebes and A. Orloff (eds), Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How About These? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), p. 172 (original italics). 71 Blondheim, ‘Harold Adams Innis’, p. 172. 72 Carey, Communication as Culture, p. 125. 73 Translated into English, over twenty-five years after its original publication in German, as J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). 74 As John Durham Peters points out, ‘Öffentlichkeit [the term that becomes “public sphere” in the title and body of the English-language translation]

Distance, representation, criticism  83 literally means publicness … In STPS, Habermas aims to take seriously a key political concept of Enlightenment vintage: he is retrieving, not innovating. Translation has unwittingly created a new concept, “the public sphere”’ (‘Distrust of representation: Habermas on the public sphere’, Media, Culture and Society 15:4 (1993), pp. 542–4). 75 Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 29. 76 Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 29. 77 Gallafent, Letters and Literacy, pp. 41–60. 78 R. Dyer, Stars: New Edition (London: BFI Publishing, 1998), pp. 30–2. 79 Carey, Communication as Culture, p. 119. 80 Pippin, Hollywood Westerns, p. 62. 81 Innis, Bias of Communication, p. 41. 82 H. Arendt, The Human Condition (London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 38. 83 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 30. 84 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 38. 85 Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 7–8. 86 See Chapter 1, n. 21. 87 Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 38–49. 88 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 28. 89 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 28. 90 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 28. 91 Scannell, Media and Communication, p. 265. Habermas has already been discussed above, and both he and Williams feature prominently in the book’s postscript. The Riesman book to which Scannell is referring in particular is D. Riesman with N. Glazer and R. Denny, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (London: Yale University Press, rev. edn, 2001). 92 Pippin, Hollywood Westerns, p. 82. 93 R. Warshow, The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (London: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 110. 94 Interestingly, Brooks West was Eve Arden’s husband. 95 Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 73–8. 96 Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 48–9. 97 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, p. 122. 98 Perkins, Film as Film, p. 148. 99 Mark Shivas offers a similar interpretation of a moment from Advise and Consent where Senator Munson/Walter Pidgeon ‘stands up to extol the virtues of the United States Constitution with its liberty of expression and

84  Classical Hollywood cinema its division of powers, while sending a man across the Senate chamber to silence van Ackerman (George Grizzard) by any means he can’ (‘Advise and Consent’, Movie 2 (1962), p. 29). 100 ‘Even though there is a long tradition of worry about violent passions (and “the mob”) playing a role in politics, it is a dangerously naïve fantasy to believe that … everyday political allegiance is created and reinforced by deliberative procedures guided by a common appeal to reason.’ Pippin, Hollywood Westerns, pp. 100–1. 101 ‘Why Preminger?’, p. 11. 102 P. Scannell, Radio, Television and Modern Life: A Phenomenological Approach, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, pp. 80–6. 103 R. Williams, Television, Technology and Cultural Form (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), p. 20. 104 P. Scannell, Television and the Meaning of Live: An Enquiry into the Human Situation (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), pp. 63–4 (original italics). 105 Cavell, World Viewed, p. 23. 106 Perez, Material Ghost, p. 37. 107 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964, p. 284. 108 M. Hansen, ‘Early silent cinema: Whose public sphere?’, New German Critique 29 (1983), p. 158. 109 Hansen, ‘Early silent cinema’, p. 158. 110 Hansen, ‘Early silent cinema’, p. 151. 111 Scannell, Television and the Meaning of Live, p. 95. 112 James Stewart, quoted in P. Bogdanovich, Who the Hell’s In It? Portraits and Conversations (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), p. 258 (original italics). 113 E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin Books, 1959), p. 114ff. 114 Perkins, Film as Film, p. 122. 115 Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 123.

3 Communication, love and death

‘In this world’, wrote Kenneth Burke, ‘communication is never an absolute’, before adding in parentheses that ‘only angels communicate absolutely’.1 ‘Since Augustine at least’, suggests John Durham Peters, ‘angels have been the epitome of perfect communication, a model of how we would talk if we had no obstructions’.2 The most extended topic of discussion in this chapter will be the representation of the often-troubled communication of two heterosexual romantic pairs from two classical Hollywood films: Only Angels Have Wings and Letter from an Unknown Woman. Both films feature near their ends a climactic face-to-face exchange between the pair, characterised by obstructions rather than by perfect communication, obstructions which have to do with a reticence regarding ‘asking’ or ‘telling’. In Only Angels Have Wings, Bonnie/Jean Arthur declares her intention to leave Geoff/ Cary Grant and the South American sea port where he lives and works because ‘no-one asked [her] to stay’. In Letter from an Unknown Woman, Lisa/Joan Fontaine, who has measured her life by the moments she has had with Stefan/Louis Jourdan and their son – despite the scarcity of such moments with him and the fact that he is unable to remember her and has apparently never known her name – announces to him ‘I have something to tell you’, but will, as it turns out, only deliver on this intention in the form of a letter that she writes on her deathbed. We shall trace a path back to these moments. However, although face-to-face interactions driven by eros are the privileged, perhaps even supreme, species of communication dealt with in this chapter, they are not the only one. When film studies speaks of communication in relation to its object of study, it will often conceive of it in terms of what Bordwell aptly describes as ‘the classic communication diagram: a message is passed from sender to receiver’.3 This is the way that communication is

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c­ onceptualised within accounts of filmic narratology and point of view that postulate ‘sending’ entities such as implied authors and narrators and corresponding ‘receiving’ entities such as implied readers and narratees. It is the way that Kristin Thompson describes what she sees as a widespread ‘communications model of art’ (during the course of articulating her neoformalist alternative): ‘In such a model, three components are generally distinguished: sender, medium, and receiver. The main activity involved is assumed to be the passing of a message from sender to receiver through the medium.’4 The sender–message–receiver triad also looms large in certain models that examine media not as media of expression but of communication. Stuart Hall’s ‘Encoding/decoding’ model, for example, is based upon a message that is encoded into a particular textual form by a sender and then decoded by a receiver.5 As I will go on to argue, not all species of what we should wish to call communication can be accommodated within the bounds of such a model. However, there are important instances of communication which do fit such a model, and which receive representation in film. Communication, communality and professionalism in Only Angels Have Wings Only Angels Have Wings includes a perhaps unusually large number of instances of communication devoted to ‘the orchestration of action’.6 The first human action we witness in the film is a physical signal from a uniformed man standing on a boat approaching port that causes one of his fellow sailors to sound the horn. The first utterance we hear, around half a minute later, is the nautical command ‘Heave the starboard line!’ Many of the film’s most thrilling sequences are based around three-way radio communication between one or two of the film’s many aeroplane pilots while they are up in the air, those on the ground at the base of the (very precariously run) ‘airline’, and the person at the lookout station in the mountain pass which the aeroplanes must travel through on their mail runs (Tex/Donald Barry). As one might expect, the emphasis during such instances of communication is upon ensuring that the relevant information (the message) gets through. Thus, characters’ utterances tend to be clear, to the point, and often offered twice just in case they don’t get through the first time: ‘Hello Joe. Pay attention. It’s all closed-in down here. You’re west of the field. West of the field. Fly due east. Fly due east.’ Attempts to use this medium to communicate about matters other than the life-and-death business of flying are liable to

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attract reprimands. When Joe/Noah Beery, Jr uses the radio channel to ask Geoff to ‘tell that beautiful blonde I’m still in the running’, he is urged: ‘Listen, stick to business will you Joe?’ Joe’s inability to ‘stick to business’ is what costs him his life a mere twenty minutes into the film. He ignores Geoff’s command to circle until the fog clears and instead attempts a landing in the hope of resuming his liaison with Bonnie, crashing and burning in the process. In the communicative action that follows Joe’s death, we move away  from the orchestration of action, and from messages – at least in the sense of ‘semantic content’ – being sent and received. In the bar that adjoins the airfield where Joe has just died, and unable to let the apparently jovial behaviour of the men around her pass without protest, Bonnie – who is still in her first hour in this place, having only just arrived in Barranca on the boat that we saw at the beginning of the film – shouts: bonnie:  Haven’t you any feelings? Don’t you realise he’s dead? geoff:  Who’s dead? les [allyn joslyn]:  Yeah, who’s dead? bonnie: Joe! chorus:  Joe? Who’s Joe? Anybody know Joe?

Quite clearly, none of the questions in the above exchange are requests for information. Bonnie knows that the men know that Joe is dead, they know she knows this, and so on. What sort of communication, then, is this? One way of answering is to reach back to the work of American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey written between the two World Wars. For Dewey, communication is a matter of ‘partaking’.7 An eloquent follower of Dewey is James Carey, who suggests that communication is ‘not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs’,8 and occurs ‘not in the transmission of intelligent information but in the construction and maintenance of an ordered, meaningful cultural world that can serve as a control and container for human action’.9 Thus does Carey distinguish between ‘transmission’ and ‘ritual’ approaches to communication. What Bonnie is faced with when she is asked ‘Who’s dead?’ and ‘Who’s Joe?’ is initiation into an important part of this community’s ‘symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired and transformed’,10 which in this case acts, as Robin Wood puts it, as ‘insulation against pain too great to bear rather than cynical tough-mindedness’.11

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Geoff and Bonnie’s argument climaxes when Bonnie abandons language altogether, and communicates via more antisocial means: she slaps Geoff’s face. Geoff then gently but firmly ejects Bonnie from the bar. When Bonnie returns, she finds Geoff sitting at the piano. She rejoins the group, and leads a musical performance with the other band members (who are not part of the core community of fliers that the film is centrally concerned with). To better grasp some of the issues at stake in this passage, it is illuminating to compare it with the other of our case study films that stars Jean Arthur, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. As we will remember, in that film, Babe and Deeds share a moment of musical performance, part of a scene which I described as marking the beginning of Babe taking Deeds seriously. This transformation is prompted in no small part by Deeds’s mini-speech, which visibly pulls Babe up short. ‘I haven’t met anybody here that I like particularly’, Deeds tells Babe (excluding, of course, his present company). ‘People here are funny. They work so hard at living they forget how to live.’ Up until this point, Babe has seen Deeds as naive – that is, as a person whose lack of the knowledge possessed and shared by those around him is what accounts for his way of being-in-the-world. When Deeds offers his indictment of the world he finds himself in, Babe’s perspective shifts (an aspect dawns, we might say with Wittgenstein), and she comes to see the possibility that it might be her perspective that is limited, and Deeds’s that is expansive. Struggling later to reconcile these two perspectives and seeing that she cannot, Babe tells her friend that Deeds is ‘either the dumbest, stupidest, most imbecilic idiot in the world or else he’s the grandest thing alive’. Capra gives us a parallel moment, again with Jean Arthur, but this time in the company of James Stewart, in Deeds’s closest relative, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). There James Stewart is not a newly minted millionaire but a newly appointed senator, who, like Gary Cooper, is uprooted from his small town and finds himself in a modern metropolis, and Jean Arthur is not a smart-talking journalist but a smart-talking senator’s assistant. In a scene and a speech that parallels that in Deeds, where the two stars find themselves alone together one night, Smith/Stewart tells Saunders/Arthur: [My father] used to say to me: ‘Son, don’t miss the wonders that surround you. Because every tree, every rock, every anthill, every star is filled with the wonders of nature.’ And he used to say to me, ‘Have you ever noticed how grateful you are to see daylight after coming through a long dark tunnel? Well’, he’d say, ‘always try to see life around you as if you’d just come out of a tunnel.’

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During these words of Smith’s, we are shown a gauzy close-up of Arthur responding with recognition and wonder to the words she is hearing. When Deeds asks her about her upbringing, she responds ‘I guess I’ve always lived in a tunnel.’ The point I want to make is this: in both Deeds and Smith, Jean Arthur’s character is prompted by the man who will become her romantic partner to recognise her sophisticated cynicism, which derives in no small part from her particular professional identity, as a form of false, or at least limited, knowledge, and to open herself up to a more expansive point of view; in Only Angels Have Wings, on the other hand, we might characterise the movement as being in the opposite direction. In a moment of (near) privacy, Deeds and Babe are able to be children together, and Babe is able to let her guard down, to allow herself to run the risk of appearing ridiculous. Bonnie, having been sent outside (that is, sent to be alone in the way that children who do not know how to be sociable are), returns inside to demonstrate to Geoff (and herself) that she is ready and able to rejoin the group. There will be no indulgence, or concessions, here. ‘Grown up yet?’ Geoff asks Bonnie – after she has corrected his playing, telling him there should not be a B-flat in the chord he just played. ‘You want to hear how it really goes?’ she asks him. ‘Sure’, he replies, but adds, ‘You’d better be good.’ ‘I won’t be as corny as you’ is her unfazed response, before she takes charge, briefing the other musicians on their roles. At the end of the song, Bonnie turns to face Geoff, and very deliberately solicits his gaze. When Babe turns to Deeds at the end of her performance of ‘Swanee River’, she is not seeking high praise for any skill displayed in her performance; it is a continuation of an invitation to intimacy, of presenting oneself to another openly, and without pride or dissimulation. Bonnie’s smile is different, and she is seeking acknowledgement of a different sort, which Geoff duly provides. His first words to her: ‘Hello professional’. When Babe Bennett makes music in the park with Deeds, she abandons her professional aim of mining him for moments of ridiculousness, and instead participates. When Bonnie sits down at the piano, it is in order to assert a professional identity which she believes (correctly) will ­command Geoff’s respect. Only Angels Have Wings possesses the unique distinction of falling in its director’s career immediately between two films – Bringing Up Baby (Hawks, 1938) and His Girl Friday (1940) – identified by Stanley Cavell as ‘definitive of the genre’ of the Hollywood comedy of remarriage.12 Cavell has also proposed a second genre, the Hollywood melodrama of

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the unknown woman,13 which is in many important respects a negative inversion of the remarriage comedy. One crucial distinction between the two genres is the role of conversation within them. A source that Cavell repeatedly draws upon is John Milton’s The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), and its reference to the ‘meet and happy conversation’ of good marriage, causing Cavell at one point to go so far as to assert that conversation is what he ‘might call the fact of marriage’.14 Such a fact is a central lack in the melodramas of the unknown woman, in which conversations are ‘repeatedly … defeat[ed] … by circling densities of irony’.15 The conversations of the couples in remarriage comedy, by contrast, are characterised by ‘witty confrontation’, conducted with the purpose that the members of such a couple are ‘instructed by each other in their imagined ideals’.16 These last descriptions are offered by Cavell as part of his claim that Longfellow Deeds and Babe Bennett are ‘cousins’17 of the remarriage comedy couples, their (Deeds and Babe’s) conversations being characterised instead by ‘Deeds’s painful sincerity and Mary/Babe’s irony, at first indifferent and eventually tortured.’18 He also notes that the ‘emphasis on conversation’, while ‘as essential to Mr. Deeds as it is to the comedies of remarriage … occurs at a different level’: ‘Deeds’s problem is not to keep his end up in establishing an equal and reciprocal battle of self-examination, but to keep heart in the point of talking at all.’19 I would suggest that, on the basis of the conversations that occur between its couple, Only Angels Have Wings is at least as distant a relation of the comedies of remarriage as is Deeds. The terms upon which Cavell admits films to his genre are complicated. For example, It Happened One Night (Capra, 1934) is offered as an instance because although it lacks ‘the narrative’s removal of the pair to a place of perspective in which the complications of the plot will achieve what resolution they can’20 – what Cavell often calls ‘the green world’, an idea and a place referred to during my discussion of Deeds in Chapter 1 – ‘what compensates for this lack is in effect the replacement of a past together by a commitment to adventurousness, say to a future together no matter what.’21 However, Only Angels Have Wings would appear to lack too many of the key features that Cavell identifies as permitting the kinds of conversations that remarriage couples conduct. Comedies of remarriage must ‘on the whole take settings of unmistakable wealth; the people in them have the leisure to talk about human happiness, hence the time to deprive themselves of it unnecessarily’.22 Such a description, of a context of ‘luxury and leisure’,23 is clearly a poor fit with the

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milieu depicted in Only Angels Have Wings (and the specific orientation towards the future, and the possibility of a future together between two people, encouraged by flying as a profession, is addressed later in the chapter). Only Angels Have Wings lacks a ‘green world’, and it also (and we might say consequently) lacks an attempt by the couple to create a shared past, or a shared childhood, together (we have already contrasted Deeds and Only Angels Have Wings in this regard; we might add parenthetically that, as we will recall, Babe talks about her father to Deeds, whereas Bonnie talks about her father while she is away from Geoff, and recognises her orientation towards the past as something that needs to be jettisoned, or at least suppressed, as a condition of entering Geoff’s world). Cavell offers the remarriage comedies’ couples’ conversations as being ‘surely among the glories of dialogue in the history of the art of talking pictures’.24 It is a stretch to claim such a distinction for Only Angels Have Wings. However, it is not simply that the film fails to measure up to the inventiveness and wit of, say, Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday; rather, conversation occupies different places in these films’ different worlds. Although Only Angels Have Wings lacks a green world it also lacks what Cavell refers to as His Girl Friday’s ‘black world’ (which is that film’s particular deviation from the conventions of the comedy of remarriage), a world characterised in part by ‘gallows humour’.25 The reaction to Joe’s death of his fellow pilots is tough, but it is not cruel, and this is an important distinction. One way of putting all of this together might be to suggest that the film demonstrates a commitment to the positive virtues of taciturnity. Part of being a professional is that one does not always have to articulate what one knows (indeed, there will be situations in which it is inappropriate or even dangerous to do so). This is part of the beauty of the film identified by Wood, who describes Hawks’s depiction of the relationship between Geoff and Kid/Thomas Mitchell as they try to help Joe land safely: ‘Hawks builds the scene on a sense of instinctive awareness between the two men, Mitchell using his ears and Grant his voice as if they were two aspects of the same human being’.26 Beyond the immediate business of flying, we can see that much of the communication of the group is built around them knowing but not saying, and knowing that a crucial part of the knowing is the not-saying. Geoff, it seems, is happy to extend these guiding principles into his relationship with Bonnie. He appears to find it difficult to distinguish between the kinds of communication that befit the communal and those that befit the romantic, or

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the intimate.27 This is part of what Bonnie has to decide whether or not she is prepared to accept. We will return later and at greater length to this matter of taciturnity in Only Angels Have Wings. First, it is time to turn to our other case study film and consider its representation of the kinds of communication that cultivate, or frustrate, romantic love and intimacy. Lisa and Stefan’s enchanted evening and the creation of a shared world ‘Too often’, Peters argues, ‘“communication” misleads us from the task of building worlds together.’28 What we witness during the one evening that Lisa and Stefan spend together in Letter from an Unknown Woman is their delicate, tentative and, as it will turn out, fleeting, but nevertheless momentarily successful building of a world together. What we witness when Lisa returns to Stefan’s apartment years later, and what makes the scene so devastating, is Stefan’s unwitting demolition of that world. The negative echoes of Lisa and Stefan’s earlier encounter in their later one are part of the film’s careful and intricate patterning of its point of view, its blending of repetition and difference. Such patterning demands careful description. Let us use as a point of entry the film’s famous paired ‘staircase shots’, and the rich layers of critical discussion that have accumulated around them. In the first of the famous paired shots, Lisa witnesses, unseen, from the top of the central winding staircase of the apartment building where Stefan lives (and where Lisa too has lived, until that very day), the late night return of Stefan in the company of a lover. The camera’s highly distinctive location, angle and movement in this shot are motivated by Lisa’s witnessing presence. Adopting an extreme high angle above and behind her, it virtually matches her act of watching, while also incorporating that act into its own. In the second shot, just over twenty minutes of screen time later, this highly distinctive set of formal features is repeated (thus creating, as V. F. Perkins notes,29 a link between these two shots over and above that shared by the numerous shots of this staircase throughout the film), but this time Lisa herself is Stefan’s companion. George M. Wilson and Gilberto Perez, in their accounts of the movie, are in agreement that this repetition makes Lisa ‘simply’30 or ‘merely one of the many’.31 They also agree that ‘Lisa at this juncture lacks any consciousness of herself as an element in a mere recurrence’.32 Their

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interpretations diverge, however, on the issue of what the older Lisa, retrospectively narrating the actions of her younger self, can be taken to understand. Perez notes that ‘the voice we hear in the voice-over narration is the voice of the older Lisa, the retrospective voice of the woman writing the letter’, and suggests that the younger Lisa may not view herself as merely one of the many in the scene, but this ‘is the way the Lisa writing the letter would look back on herself and her experience on that enchanted evening’.33 Wilson argues the opposite, anticipating and rejecting Perez’s interpretation by considering another way in which the repetition might have been handled: If the first of these shots had been a subjective shot that directly presented her field of vision and thus excluded her wholly from the frame, then the echoing second shot would not mark as it does her earlier complicity and later lack of complicity with the camera’s point of view.34

These two opposite interpretations of the meanings we should ascribe to repetition and difference (the older Lisa is the same as the younger Lisa and continues to fail to recognise her similarity, in Stefan’s eyes, to the other woman; the older Lisa is different from the younger Lisa and thus retrospectively recognises, whereas at the time she did not, her similarity) are based upon the same error: a privileging of repetition over difference in the content of the two shots, which results in a misdescription and diminution of what is at stake between the film’s two main characters. ‘Lisa as just another woman’ is not an irony that the older Lisa may or may not share with the film, because it is not an irony that belongs to the film in the first place. Without citing Wilson (he is writing before Perez), Wood notes that a possible response to Lisa during the second of the paired staircase shots could be ‘Look, you fool, you’re just one of a whole nocturnal procession’, before countering: But Lisa is not a fool, and the effect is far more complex … [W]e have seen that [Stefan] has registered [her] difference and is deeply impressed by it. To appreciate Lisa we must do justice to Stefan: to see him as merely worthless and contemptible is to miss much of the film’s complexity, and the depth of its tragic sense.35

Perkins has described in detail the differences between the action of the paired staircase shots, and the second’s ‘radical change of tone’ and the ‘sense of difference’ this creates ‘between this occasion and the one that its images repeat’; ‘frivolous clatter and chatter’ and Stefan’s ‘eagerness to get out of his clothes’ with the first woman are replaced

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by ‘a solemn, considerate grace’ of movement. In short, ‘[a]ll that was sordid has become sacramental’.36 As Wood intimates in the passage quoted above, and goes on to describe,37 the second staircase shot is the culmination of an evening during which Stefan is shown to acknowledge Lisa’s difference from his other companions by departing, albeit not entirely, from his usual routine of seduction. Lisa and Stefan’s journey to the Prater is in an open carriage. On the way, Stefan tells the driver to stop as they pass a flower vendor. This particular vendor knows Stefan, and his habits. Her ability to anticipate Stefan’s purchase allows the film to communicate without stress that his usual lover’s routine is to buy red roses, and that on this evening he decides to depart from it, buying instead ‘a single white rose’. We cut to Lisa and see her pleased reaction as Stefan declares to the flower vendor, off-screen, that ‘this is a special occasion’. After Stefan has returned to the carriage and the journey continues, the driver asks Stefan if he would like the carriage to be closed – clearly an offer of greater privacy. Again, Stefan uses this question to acknowledge to Lisa (and it perhaps causes him to acknowledge to himself) that he views the evening as something more than an occasion for mere frivolity. He gives a deliberate and thoughtful ‘no’ to the driver, looking him in the eye while he takes Lisa’s hand, before he turns to Lisa, seeking eye contact as a further expression of the thought that informs his actions, and to check that she understands them. Her response indicates that she does. The Prater sequence, and particularly the scene within it where Lisa and Stefan sit in the fake train carriage of an amusement park ride while painted backgrounds roll past the carriage window, has often shouldered significant interpretative weight in critical accounts of Letter from an Unknown Woman. It is perhaps most central structurally to Tania Modleski’s account of the film. For Modleski, Lisa’s ‘sit[ting] in a train that stays in place and reminisc[ing] about past journeys with her father’ emblematises the protagonist’s ‘relationship to time and space, desire and memory’, which Modleski’s feminist account, drawing upon the tools of psychoanalysis, wishes to argue is a relationship which may initially appear to be ‘obsessional’ and ‘hysterical’, but is in fact neither.38 Susan White suggests that the scene is ‘the most often-cited Ophulsian commentary on cinematic illusion’.39 Cavell, when he focuses on this allegorical element of the scene, explores the issues it raises for him to do with, on the one hand, what might be termed the ‘excessiveness’ involved in ‘endow[ing] the passing scenes … with incomparably more emotion than [they] can be expected to call for in themselves’, and on

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the other, ‘disillusionment’, as exemplified by the amusement’s ‘bored functionaries’ – who might well be a married couple – ‘for whom the idea of magic in this contraption is either funny or sad, if they have the energy to be either’.40 Modleski’s insights into fantasy and repetition and Cavell’s comments on divergent perspectives receive a slightly different inflection in Perkins’s argument: The foregrounding of servitude and menial labour (often explicitly alienated) as the condition and cost of ‘splendour’ is a constant of Ophuls’s later work, but it has a particular role in Letter from an Unknown Woman. As the disregarded support for an often dazzling way of life, servitude is the skull-beneath-the-skin both of elegance (achieved or attempted) and of romance … Lisa … will avoid recognising the mechanics that construct and maintain the fabric of her idyll with Stefan – for example, the tired ‘railway’ workers … What Lisa cannot see, and this relates to her misreading of Stefan himself, is the substructure of routine on which she elaborates her fantasy of the unique and ordained.41

It seems to me there are two issues at stake here, and that they might be worth separating. We might call the first one the issue of equality, or reciprocity. In a more just society, one person’s splendour, elegance and romance would not be based on another’s servitude – or at least (and more realistically), servitude and splendour/elegance/romance would be more equally distributed, and enabled in a more reciprocal manner. But what of splendour, elegance and romance themselves? This is the second issue: do such things have a place in a better world? I will focus on romance – because it is most germane to the railway carriage sequence, where splendour and elegance do not, I would suggest, play much of a part – but my argument could be extended to the remaining two terms, and any others that have to do with the way in which an occasion is offered or experienced. Lisa and Stefan’s experience of their ‘train ride’ and the experience of those running the attraction are very different (I will leave aside, for the moment, the question of any differences between the experiences of Lisa and Stefan). However, the fact that the functionaries’ experience is less happy should not lead us to the conclusion that it is the more real one, and still less, the only real one. I should acknowledge that I am not suggesting that this is Perkins’s position. Perkins, like Wood and all of the best writers on Letter from an Unknown Woman, recognises the precise and delicately poised ironies of the film’s viewpoint, which neither endorses nor rejects Lisa’s. As Wood puts it (in a formulation

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which provided the initial impetus for this entire project), Ophuls strikes ‘a perfect balance … between sympathy and detachment’.42 I offer the current train of thought not as a correction of substance but merely of emphasis. I agree with Perkins et al. that Ophuls wants us to notice the servitude that supports Lisa and Stefan’s enchanted evening, and wants us to notice that Lisa does not notice it. However, at this specific point in the story, I am not sure how much of a point against Lisa this is. The limitations of Lisa’s awareness, empathy and gratitude are no greater than that of most other members of a society that includes division of labour and commodity exchange, in which labour and care disappear – or more accurately, are absorbed – into what are these days called goods and services (this is the basis of Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism, and Lukács’s related notion of reification). Moreover, demanding that Lisa be attuned to these support systems at this particular moment is a bit like demanding that a bride spend her wedding day concerning herself with the life of her wedding photographer. Stefan’s purchase of a single white rose, his accompanying declaration that ‘This is a special occasion’, and his decision to keep the carriage open all work on Stefan’s part, and in response to his new companion’s demeanour and behaviour, to strike the right mood. Getting one’s companion ‘in the mood’ is of course the stock in trade of a seducer such as Stefan. However, as Scannell, drawing on Heidegger, reminds us, ‘every human situation and occasion’43 possesses (a) mood as a constitutive element of itself, and this mood is something generated and maintained by its participants. The mood of romance is greatly enhanced by (many would be happy to go so far as to say ‘dependent on’) leisure – that is, the carving out of space and time free from labour, necessity and the maintenance of one’s body. This means that often, when one engages in romance and leisure, one pays others to, say, prepare one’s food and clear up afterwards (as Stefan does when he takes Lisa to a restaurant for a meal of lobster and Valpolicella) and to keep the wheels of the romantic backdrop turning (as Stefan does when he pays the railway amusement operators, and then the mini-orchestra who accompany Stefan and Lisa’s dancing). A romantic encounter is also freed from necessity in the senses that its participants are not obliged to be in one another’s company (and if they are, then this fact has to be overcome for romance to be achieved), and that the encounter has no purpose beyond the pleasure that it will itself provide. In other words, romance is a species of sociability. It occurs for its own sake. Talk and other activities, being non-instrumental, take on an aesthetic quality. They become occasions for, and forms of, creativity.

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The world that Lisa and Stefan create together in their railway carriage, they create using a series of ingredients. One is the carriage itself – the gift of the hands that built it, and those that now turn the wheels. This furnishes the space of privacy and relative comfort in which romance and intimacy may be cultivated, as well as being an invitation to imagination and make-believe. Another is Lisa’s personal history, which she discloses to Stefan. Another is the orientation of the pair to one another, which we might begin to characterise as generous receptivity: the trust that one’s utterances will be received with interest, solicitude and even reverence – that one’s jokes will be laughed at, that one’s weaknesses will not be mocked, and so on. When Lisa visits Stefan later in the film this receptivity is something that he declares verbally (‘If it [what you have to tell me] has to do with you I’m very interested’) but does not deliver behaviourally, which is another way of saying that what Stefan says is recognisably insincere. The railway carriage sequence is the only occasion where Lisa talks to Stefan at length about herself. She tells him about her relationship with her father, who would come home from work (at a job doubtlessly better remunerated but, judging by its title, not a great deal more exciting than that of the railway functionaries), put on his ‘travelling coat’, and whisk his daughter away on imaginary journeys across the globe (so long as the weather at their fantasy destination was clement). Modleski offers Lisa’s father as ‘the pre-oedipal, imaginary father Julia Kristeva has ­theorized … the spokesman for creativity and play’.44 Wilson suggests: ‘It is obvious that the father is supposed to have passed on his predilection for the realms of the imaginary to his daughter.’45 Lisa presents her father as a traveller something in the manner of Proust, for whom ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes’, and she concludes her reminiscence by saying that ‘When he finally did go away, he had the nicest eyes.’ Stefan’s reply of ‘Yes, I can see them’ is read by Wilson as being offered by him as ‘simply a pretty compliment’,46 but it is also possible to read it as Stefan intimating that he recognises in Lisa the qualities of her father that she has just sketched  – and even, perhaps, given that shortly before he says these words, he moves from sitting opposite her to sitting by her side, that he wants to join her (and her father) in adopting such a world-view. A short time later, Stefan emerges from the railway carriage to ask the female operator ‘Where haven’t we been yet?’ When she tells him there is nowhere left, he decides to start all over again. ‘We’ll revisit the scenes of our youth’, he tells her. Cavell assimilates this moment, with

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some justification, to the tropes of a romantic couple ‘construct[ing] a childhood together’ and of ‘[v]iewing a film as a return to childhood’.47 However, the utterance can also be interpreted as Stefan adopting the make-believe position of a member of a long-lasting romantic couple, who have been together since their youth(s) and are no longer youthful. Like the scene that follows it, in which Lisa and Stefan outlast the orchestra playing for them (and them alone), this scene is also touching by virtue of its demonstration of Stefan’s recognition of this encounter as one that is not a series of diverting activities with reliable and convenient durations, which are en route to and simply serve to prepare the mood for the bedroom. After the railway journey and the dancing reach their natural endpoints, Stefan and Lisa remain for more. The desire that this reveals, we might say, is a desire to keep talking. Again: this is the sincere enactment of what will later become Stefan’s insincere seducer’s rhetoric that ‘all the clocks in the world have stopped’. Stefan’s final line in the railway carriage sequence, in response to yet another of Lisa’s perceptive comments about his character, is to gently remonstrate: ‘Now, you know far too much about me and I know practically nothing about you. Except that you’ve travelled a great deal.’ That last sentence is, of course, better than would have been ‘Except that your father took you on a series of imaginary journeys when you were a child.’ Much of the critical literature on Letter from an Unknown Woman focuses, understandably, on fantasy as something possessed by Lisa, and Lisa alone, which she to a large degree imposes upon her chosen object, Stefan (although it should be added, as noted in passing at the start of the this paragraph, that Lisa is in many ways clear-sighted about Stefan and his seducer’s temperament, as is indicated, for example, when she tells him, with terrible prescience, ‘I won’t be the one to vanish’). Here, however, Stefan, through what he says and what he does not say, confirms that he has joined the world of make-believe that Lisa created with her father, and in so doing has further cultivated his and Lisa’s shared world. As Perkins notes (echoing Modleski), Lisa and Stefan possess ‘different orientations to time and memory and hope’48 which contribute crucially to the way their story unfolds, but on their one enchanted evening together, these different orientations come together in such a way that the occasion’s mood is congenial to both. When the adult, married Lisa visits the dissipated Stefan (after a chance encounter between the two at the opera the previous night) to offer him her ‘whole life’, the things she has to tell him demand to be received in a mood that Stefan, who is

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working from a very different script, repeatedly proves himself unable to intuit and co-create.49 Lisa’s hope, and ours, that Stefan remembers her is repeatedly raised then dashed. Twice, this is achieved by a combination of Stefan’s looking closely at Lisa, and the dialogue that accompanies this. First, he turns up a lamp (just as he turns one up when he begins to read the letter) and says ‘I thought last night … the darkness might have played tricked with my eyes’, and later, when he lifts back the veil on Lisa’s hat, he tells her ‘I knew last night, didn’t you?’, but in neither case is this utterance followed up by one in which Stefan recalls Lisa’s place in his past. In between these moments, Stefan sends John out to ‘get a few things’. As when Stefan bought her a rose, we cut to a shot of Lisa, and hear, with her, his voice off-screen. However, tonight, for Stefan, is not a special occasion, as he tells John simply to fetch ‘the usual things’. We see Lisa react to these words, first lifting her head to look pensively in Stefan’s direction, then rising from her chair and retreating from him, to a position against a wall, with her arm folded protectively over herself. For her now, the mood being created is neither the intimacy she desires nor the romance Stefan aims for. Stefan’s view of Lisa as one of the many in this scene is further indicated by his idle compliments upon Lisa’s appearance (‘You’re very lovely. That’s a beautiful dress’), conspicuously absent from their enchanted evening together (on that evening, Stefan must recognise, and does, for the most part, that Lisa does not need to be seduced). The moment where Lisa finally loses hope comes after Stefan has told her he ‘knew last night’, then retreated to prepare drinks, talking as he does so, as one worldly person to another, about Europeans and their wives. Lisa is now framed in a frontal medium close-up, and we witness her crushed reaction when Stefan asks her: ‘Do you travel a great deal?’ The negative echo, even down to the phrasing, of Stefan’s ‘knowledge’ in the railway carriage that Lisa has travelled ‘a great deal’, gives this double negation – of not only knowledge but also of a shared world of make-believe, built through conversation – its devastating force. As a result of these cruel blows, Lisa shrinks from dialogue with Stefan, but continues her attempts at communication via other – and, I will argue, more fitting – means. Dialogue, dissemination and death Theodor W. Adorno describes Kierkegaard’s doctrine of love as the call to love everyone as if they were dead. Adorno finds this doctrine both noble and wretched – noble because love would then have to be constant and

100  Classical Hollywood cinema unaffected by rejections or hurt, wretched because love would cease to be a joint journey in which the lover is open to being radically transformed by the beloved.50

In his book Speaking into the Air, Peters ‘stag[es] a debate between the greatest proponent of dialogue, Socrates, and the most enduring voice for dissemination, Jesus’.51 In Plato’s Phaedrus, dialogue is inseparable from eros: it ‘calls for an intimate love that links lover and beloved in a reciprocal flow’.52 In Letter from an Unknown Woman, one key barrier to the kind of dialogue envisaged by Plato is Lisa’s refusal, in effect, and on principle, of a fully reciprocal relationship. When she reaches the point in her letter where she tells Stefan of the existence of his son, Lisa’s explanation for withholding this knowledge from him until now is: ‘I wanted to be the one woman in your life who never asked you for anything.’ Lisa not only refuses to ask things of Stefan; she also – and again on ­principle – refuses to answer questions that he puts to her. When they first encounter one another again after many years apart, Stefan is clearly in earnest when he tells Lisa, outside the opera house, that she lies just over the edge of his memory, yet she offers him no assistance that might help him to travel the rest of the way. She is, as Perkins notes, ‘unwilling to sully the authenticity and spontaneity of Stefan’s recognition by identifying herself’.53 This is part of the ‘very strict terms’ on which Lisa wants Stefan: ‘He must freely recognise their meetings as brought about not under the stars of a particular time and place, but in eternity’s grand design.’54 It has often been noted that Lisa dates the beginning of her ‘conscious life’ not to the day when she first sees Stefan, but when she sees the ‘beautiful things’ of her anonymous ‘new neighbour’ being moved into her apartment building; less often commented upon is that Lisa’s infatuation with Stefan is nurtured not just by an imagined, aspirational relationship to material objects, but also by her ‘tuning in’ to the musical performances that Stefan effectively ‘broadcasts’ to the building. The final segment of the early montage sequence in which Lisa explains, and the film shows, how she goes about ‘prepar[ing] herself’ for Stefan begins with these words in Lisa’s letter: ‘What I really lived for were those evenings when you were alone and I pretended you were playing just for me. And though you didn’t know it, you were giving me some of the happiest hours of my life.’ On-screen, we see Lisa rise from her bed and steal past her mother and across the landing that her apartment shares

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with Stefan’s, and even stretch up to open a window so that Stefan’s music – like the night air we see move through her hair – pours out to be savoured by its solitary listener. In doing so, Lisa is joining countless adolescents who have, in privacy and solitude, and often surreptitiously, read novels, or listened to the radio, or watched television, and imagined themselves to be the sole intended recipient of something disseminated to the many. That the adult Lisa still counts these as among the happiest hours of her life tells us a great deal about the communicative situation that best suits and sustains her desires and fantasies, and about the distance that best allows Lisa to maintain her chosen view of the object of those desires and fantasies. Lisa wants to position herself as Stefan’s perfect audience: the ideal receiver of that which he disseminates, which is received with gratitude and understanding, free of demands. This applies first to Stefan’s music and then to the other main form of seed that Stefan broadcasts across Vienna and beyond, and which for Lisa bears precious fruit. Lisa, it is true, wants to help Stefan, but she wants him to tell her how she can help him, without giving him much help in finding out – and she certainly does not want him to help her (in addition to the definitive line already quoted, about never asking him for anything, one may also recall Lisa’s response to Stefan’s question ‘Don’t you have any problems?’: ‘Not important ones’). The tight coupling that usually accompanies dialogue and eros is hard to accommodate within the principled stance of ‘agape for one’ that Lisa adopts towards Stefan. The messy, iterative and unfolding nature of dialogue (and intimacy) is also hard to square with the particular nature of Lisa’s ideal. Perkins notes that routine is no part of Lisa’s fantasy, and nor is negotiation. Hers and Stefan’s love is not something that should need to be arrived or worked at: it should hit them both (as it has hit her) with the force of revelation. ‘By the time you read this I may be dead.’ So begins Lisa’s letter, but we might note that it is an opening statement implicit in any piece of writing. When Stefan reads these words, they certainly focus his mind, as one might expect. Stefan’s earlier response to the letter, before opening it, after John/Art Smith (his manservant) has left him alone with it, has been one of impatience, even exasperation: he lifts the letter to chest height, scowls at it, then, in a gesture that emphasises its weight, and therefore its demand on his (precious) time (he plans to flee a morning duel, as we already know; we will come to learn that the duel is with Lisa’s husband), lets it drop again to his waist, while pinching the bridge  of his nose to ward off stress and tiredness. Stefan’s life at

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this point, even a first-time viewer might have grounds to hypothesise, may well contain some undischarged debts and/or broken promises – professional perhaps, financial possibly, but romantic almost certainly. Perhaps Stefan is used to receiving letters that make the sort of demands upon him that Lisa made it a point of pride to abstain from. And yet here she is, offering Stefan her life and robbing him of his in the same complex gesture.55 However, the demands of the dead are different from those of the living. Death dissolves the kinds of debts that Stefan appears to fear the letter he holds might contain; the discourse of the dead asks to be honoured in a different way. ‘Honour is a luxury only gentlemen can afford’, Stefan quips to John before beginning to read the letter, and as we will come to see, the Stefan who hardly ever reaches the place he sets out for would appear to be at least as ill-equipped as Lisa to  accede to the often-prosaic day-to-day reality of monogamy. But the letter is written and received when such a thing is no longer a live prospect, even if it was never a realistic one. Indeed, it is only the prospect of being placed beyond the reach of dialogue and reciprocity that prompts Lisa to start writing, and even then, she wonders if she will ‘ever send’ the letter (in fact she never does: it is sent on her behalf by the nuns of the hospital in which she dies). Earlier, I offered the scene in the railway carriage as  a moment  where the differing orientations towards experience of Lisa and Stefan are both happily accommodated, but the deeper and more sustained instance of this is of course the magical communion created by Lisa’s writing and Stefan’s reading of the letter – fused for us by film. A deathbed letter is the ultimate medium for Lisa to lay her whole life before Stefan, and to continue to ask nothing and yet expect everything of him. Lisa narrates not only her own life for Stefan, but his too, thus giving it the meaning that has been, as we see in all of Stefan’s face-to-face encounters with Lisa, the elusive quarry that has haunted his narcissistic consciousness all his life. As Perkins acutely observes, ‘Louis Jourdan’s bearing is eloquent that Stefan [at the end of the film] faces death in better spirit than he faced running off and living on.’56 At the beginning of the film, Stefan jokes to his companions ‘I don’t mind so much being killed, but you know how hard it is for me to get up in the morning.’ Building a sustained shared world in dialogue with a real-life intimate has proved beyond Stefan (as it has proved beyond Lisa), but he possesses the ability (the disposition, one might say) to reflect upon what the letter tells him about his own life, and react with a definitive and singular – because almost certainly fatal – romantic gesture.

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Intimacy, disclosing and doing The scene in Only Angels Have Wings in which we see Bonnie and Geoff together at their best takes place three-quarters of the way through the film, in Geoff’s room (on Dutchy’s premises). Unlike Stefan’s apartment, this is not a site of luxury or beautiful things, but it is one of relative comfort, a fact emphasised by Geoff’s relief at entering and so escaping from the driving rain outside – and by the fact that Bonnie has come here (unbeknown to Geoff) to take a bath. It is not, we might say, an especially romantic setting, but it is, potentially at least, an intimate one, and this is a potential that Bonnie seeks to draw out by having a pot of coffee warming on the stove for when she emerges from her bath in her dressing gown. At first, Geoff resists Bonnie’s encroachment upon his private space by protesting verbally and twice trying to move the coffee pot. This leads to a humorous call-back to an earlier exchange between the pair, when Bonnie, placing a literal spin on Geoff’s earlier figurative comments about relationships, observes ‘I thought you never did that.’ (‘What?’) ‘Got burned twice in the same place.’ Bonnie’s wit is one thing that starts to thaw Geoff: he laughs appreciatively. The other thing that makes the couple come together is moments where one seeks to care bodily for the other. The first time Geoff burns himself on the coffee pot, Bonnie tries, with a fair degree of insistence, to get Geoff to allow her to apply butter to the wound. The couple-like squabbling that results comes to an end when Geoff reaches for the pot again. Later in the scene, when Geoff thinks that Bonnie’s odd gait is being caused by a damaged ankle (rather than a damaged shoe heel, as is in fact the case), he lifts her off her feet, thus creating the bodily proximity that shortly leads to a kiss. Twice, Bonnie and Geoff are interrupted by visitors to Geoff’s room, and the second visit, from the Kid, causes Geoff to abruptly suspend the encounter (but not without indicating his desire for it to resume when it returns: ‘Keep the coffee warm’ he requests as he leaves). The creation of a shared world of romance and intimacy through leisure, privacy, disclosure and the cultivation of fantasy is clearly not on the cards here. However, what we are given a glimpse of in this scene is intimacy of a different sort. Bonnie is trying in this scene to demonstrate to Geoff that she can be part of his life, and that they can share an intimacy based not upon disclosure but upon doing – an intimacy, we might say, as much familial or social as it is romantic. This is part of what she offers and tries to articulate after the kiss:

104  Classical Hollywood cinema Geoff, you don’t have to be afraid of me anymore. I’m not trying to tie you down. I don’t wanna plan. I don’t wanna look ahead. I don’t want you to change anything. I love you Geoff. There’s nothing I can do about it, I just love you, that’s all. I feel the same way about you the Kid does. Anything you do is all right with me.

Bonnie here declares her changed perspective and her commitment. By the end of the film, Geoff will have also demonstrated his. Being, time and commitment in Only Angels Have Wings Geoff and his fellow fliers serve others and a system with a very different orientation towards time from themselves. The primary business of the airline they work for is the delivery of mail. Whether this mail mainly comprises business correspondence, personal letters or a mixture of the two is not made clear. In any case, writing, which produces a fixed and meaningful artefact of past activity, and is composed in the hope and expectation that it will be received and read in the future, bespeaks an experience of temporal horizons less narrow than that of the pilots, who concern themselves principally with the present, and organise their time around flying missions, any one of which could be their last. It would be misleading to imply that the bags of mail (often referred to, but never picked out visually) in Only Angels Have Wings are granted (or burdened with) much symbolic weight (indeed, Hawks’s general avoidance of symbolism is something that Wood praises him for).57 Rather – and this is the second dimension of the different orientations towards time referred to above – the chief narrative pertinence of the fact that the airline delivers mail is that ‘Dutchy’/Sig Ruman is contractually bound to offer a regular service, whatever the weather. We join the film’s world as Dutchy’s six-month trial period is coming to an end. Geoff is ‘pushing things’, that is, placing himself and others in dangerous situations that push to the front of one’s consciousness an awareness of chance and mortality, so that an orderly, reliable service can be delivered. The potential cost of this attempt to overcome nature (‘weather and luck’ as Sparks/Victor Kilian the radio operator puts it) is the lives of the pilots. It is hard to imagine any of the pilots, and perhaps Geoff most of all, sitting down to write a letter. Lisa’s letter remains meaningful even after she dies (indeed, one might say that her death is a crucial part of its meaning). By contrast, a key part of the pathos of the belongings of the dead fliers that are ritually gathered and deposited on the bar is that they

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are (as Geoff puts it when presented with the belongings first of Joe then the Kid) not ‘much to show’ for all the years of their former owners’ lives. Lisa’s letter is an eloquent container for the experiences of her whole life (at least, since the beginning of the second of what she refers to as her ‘two birthdays’); the fliers’ belongings (unless they are jewellery that retains its exchange value), no longer possessing the use that they were put to in the course of the lives of their owners, simply become ‘junk’.58 Of the belongings of his beloved friend Kid, Geoff picks out one with a wry relationship to the chance-governed existences of the fliers: a coin with heads on both sides. Geoff’s response to the persistent imminent possibility of death is to refuse to plan for, or to fall in with others’ plans for, the future. This is what underpins his statement ‘Don’t believe in laying into supply of anything’, a belief we see enacted every time Geoff needs a match to light his cigarette, and has to use someone else’s box.59 It is also the basis of the not-asking principle that he shares with Lisa. ‘I wouldn’t ask any woman to do anything’ is a declaration that the women he declares it to have grown so tired of hearing that they testily finish it when he, once more, offers it. Geoff shares with Lisa a very demanding species of not-demanding, but unlike Lisa, the demand takes the form of the expectation of reciprocity: because Geoff would not ask any woman to do anything, he feels justified in refusing any demands any woman might make of him. Wood suggests that what secures Only Angels Have Wings’s hopeful conclusion is a mutual modification of attitude effected between Jeff and Bonny. The film, finally, does not simply uphold Jeff’s original attitude. His acceptance of Bonnie, and of the need for feeling and personal commitment even in the sword-of-Damocles world of the fliers, is at least as important as hers of the fliers’ code.60

This meeting halfway is beautifully encapsulated in the film’s climactic exchange. Bonnie will not stay unless she is asked to, but Geoff will not explicitly abandon his not-asking principle. Instead, he enacts an exchange with a double (or rather, single) meaning, using the Kid’s ­double-headed (that is, single-sided) coin. In the same gesture that pretends to leave things to chance or fate, he delivers his request that Bonnie stay: ‘We’ll flip a coin for it: tails you go, heads you stay.’ Bonnie refuses to ‘stay that way’, but Geoff, in lieu of writing a letter to say something that he can’t quite manage in words, face to face, plants the coin in her

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palm before he rushes off to his flight, leaving her with something to turn over and to read once he has gone. The eloquence and the virtues of non-disclosure It may be that only angels communicate absolutely, but for Hawks this dimension of the human condition is not a limitation to be lamented, but a dimension of experience to be treated respectfully. Only Angels Have Wings’s veneration of privacy – the right not to communicate – is most touching during the scene where, following his crash landing, the Kid chooses to die alone, out of fear of the loss of dignity that an audience might create. It is an idea, though, that runs through the film, and often possesses a gendered dimension. As part of Geoff’s attempt to educate, or acculturate, Bonnie, following her frustrated outburst in the face of the men’s behaviour following Joe’s death, he sends her out of the bar, concluding a brief speech about death and emotional reactions with an instruction to her to ‘go on outside and walk around and stay there until you’ve put all that together’. Later, Geoff pours cold water over the head of another woman he knows, partly to sober her up, but also as part of an attempt to forcibly shift her perspective on her husband’s refusal to disclose to her the details of a shameful act he committed before they met: ‘What do you care what he did? Why do you have to know all about it? … If it’s so bad he can’t tell you, how do you think he feels? Why’n’t you think of his side of it?’ Frequently in Only Angels Have Wings we witness, rather than share, characters’ moments of privacy, which are observed, rather than created, by the camera. That is, the moments of privacy occur as something in the manner of an agreement between characters, and are conveyed by these characters’ tactful orientations towards one another, often captured in sustained long shots accommodating both figures, part of the quiet eloquence of Hawks’s direction. Towards the end of the scene where Geoff tests the Kid’s eyesight, the characters and the camera have moved into positions such that both characters are facing the camera, framed from the knees up, but neither can see the other’s face, because Kid is standing at a table, looking down at his cigarette, while Geoff is perched behind on his desk. It is from this position that Geoff stands up to deliver the difficult news ‘You’re through flying Kid’, before further extending his ‘civil inattention’61 by turning away from Kid (and the camera). Earlier in the film, immediately after Joe’s death, Geoff and Dutchy retreat to the radio room. Dutchy sits at a table, while Geoff paces. The argument between

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the two reaches its climax when Dutchy exclaims ‘I just can’t go on killing nice kids like that!’ There follows a moment of silence, underlined by Dutchy and Geoff’s looking down and away from one another (with Geoff’s wide-brimmed hat and the direction of the light meaning that his face falls into shadow). We are shown the two characters granting one another a mutual moment of privacy. In order for Bonnie and Geoff’s final communion to occur (and as part of the process of mutual modification referred to by Wood), Bonnie must follow Geoff into the room where he has just gone, following Kid’s death, in search of privacy. (It is Sparks who repeatedly reassures a disbelieving Bonnie that this is what Geoff would like; it is appropriate that a radio operator should facilitate communication in this way, briefly giving Sparks a role similar to the one it has often been suggested that John performs in Letter from an Unknown Woman.) Geoff turns to face Bonnie, not hiding the tears in his eyes. Wood identifies this as an ‘important stage’ in Geoff’s ‘acceptance of Bonnie, and of the need for feeling’.62 However, when it seems as though intimate disclosure may be imminent, Geoff’s ‘Well, Bonnie’, in response to her ‘Do you want me to stay or don’t you?’ is cut off by the more prosaic communication of Tex over the radio: ‘Calling Barranca! Calling Barranca!’ Geoff breaks away from his moment with Bonnie to resume the ongoing business of his life – the usual things, we might say. However, whereas in Lisa’s case Stefan’s absorption of her into a routine is a fatal blow to her image of their relationship, in Bonnie’s case, it is something that she has been rehearsing for much of the film: it is the species of intimacy (based, that is, upon doing rather than disclosing) that Geoff represents and, tacitly, offers. What Wood describes as Geoff’s acceptance of Bonnie, feeling and commitment, and Bonnie’s acceptance of the fliers’ code echoes Carey’s description of communication as the ‘construction and maintenance of a … meaningful cultural world that can serve as a control and container for human action’.63 All that remains is for Geoff to communicate his desire for Bonnie to stay. She is not as hard to get as Lisa; all he has to do is ask, and what’s more, she is prepared to ask him to do so. Notes  1 Quoted in J. D. Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 279.  2 Peters, Speaking into the Air, p.76.   3 D. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 62.

108  Classical Hollywood cinema  4 K. Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 7.  5 S. Hall. ‘Encoding/decoding’, in S. Hall (ed.), Culture: Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–9 (London: Hutchinson, 1980).  6 Peters, Speaking into the Air, p. 19.   7 J. Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1929), p. 185.   8 J. W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Revised Edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), p. xviii.  9 Carey, Communication as Culture, p. 15. 10 Carey, Communication as Culture, p. 19. 11 R. Wood, Howard Hawks (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, new edn, 2006), p. 14. 12 S. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (London: Harvard University Press, 1981). 13 S. Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 14 Cavell, Contesting Tears, p. 5 (original italics). 15 Cavell, Contesting Tears, p. 205. 16 Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (London: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 195. 17 Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 195. 18 Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 195. 19 Cavell, Cities of Words, pp. 195–6. 20 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 29. 21 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 29. 22 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 5. 23 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 5. 24 Cavell, Contesting Tears, p. 87. 25 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, p. 172. 26 Wood, Howard Hawks, p. 44. 27 My appreciation of the distinction between the romantic and the intimate has been fine-tuned by consulting D. R. Shumway, Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy and the Marriage Crisis (London: New York University Press, 2003). 28 Peters, Speaking into the Air, p. 30. 29 V. F. Perkins, ‘Same tune again! Repetition and framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman’, CineAction 52 (2000), p. 46. 30 G. M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 103. 31 G. Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 77.

Communication, love, death  109 32 Wilson, Narration in Light, p. 104. 33 Perez, Material Ghost, pp. 77–8. 34 Wilson, Narration in Light, pp. 103–4. 35 R. Wood, ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman: the double narrative’, CineAction 31 (1993), p. 9. 36 Perkins, ‘Same tune again!’, p. 46. 37 Wood, ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’, p. 10. 38 T. Modleski, ‘Time and desire in the woman’s film’, Cinema Journal 23:3 (1984), p. 29. 39 S. White, The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of Woman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 169. 40 Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 400. 41 V. F. Perkins, ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’, Movie 29/30 (1982), pp. 65–6. 42 R. Wood, Personal Views: Explorations in Film (London: Gordon Fraser, 1976), p. 126. 43 P. Scannell, Television and the Meaning of Live: An Enquiry into the Human Situation (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), p. 182 (italics added). 44 Modleski, ‘Time and desire’, p. 27. 45 Wilson, Narration in Light, p. 116. 46 Wilson, Narration in Light, p. 116. 47 Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 401. Cavell in fact misquotes Stefan as declaring ‘We will revisit the scenes of our childhood’ (pp. 400–1). 48 Perkins, ‘Same tune again!’, p. 43. 49 Many of the details discussed in the remainder of the paragraph are also highlighted with acuity in White’s account of the film (Cinema of Max Ophuls, pp. 186–7). 50 Peters, Speaking into the Air, p. 154. 51 Peters, Speaking into the Air, pp. 34–5. 52 Peters, Speaking into the Air, p. 35. 53 Perkins, ‘Same tune again!’, p. 43. 54 Perkins, ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’, p. 70. 55 Cavell makes reference to the ‘death-dealing’ consequences of Lisa’s letter (Contesting Tears, p. 171). 56 Perkins, ‘Same tune again!’, p. 45. 57 Wood, Howard Hawks, pp. 3–5. 58 Intriguingly, a small, thin notebook is clearly visible among Joe’s belongings. What might have been written inside? Dates to remember? Names and addresses (of family, or lovers?)? Reminiscences? Favourite poems? Geoff does not appear to think to look in the notebook at all. We might put this

110  Classical Hollywood cinema down to a tacit assumption on his part that what is inside would not be of interest to anyone besides Joe, an act that can be placed alongside other instances of respect for privacy, shortly to be discussed. 59 He seems to make an exception when it comes to the cigarettes themselves! 60 Wood, Howard Hawks, p. 18 (original italics). Note that Wood (mis)spells Grant’s character’s name as ‘Jeff’ throughout, but only (mis)spells Bonnie’s name as ‘Bonny’ once. 61 E. Goffman, Behaviour in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963). 62 Wood, Howard Hawks, p. 18. 63 Carey, Communication as Culture, p. 15.

Conclusion: categories and conversations

It is unusual for an account whose principal concern is point of view to conclude without having proposed its own taxonomy via which point of view might be approached. Rather than reiterating in summary form the arguments of this book, I will use this conclusion instead as an opportunity to reflect upon and defend aspects of the method I have adopted. To explain why this book has abstained from proposing a set of categories to take to a film will be a useful way of framing this reflection. Murray Smith, as part of his argument for replacing ‘point of view’ with ‘a system which posits several distinct levels of engagement with fictional characters, which together comprise what I call the structure of sympathy’1 has pointed to the confusion and imprecision that often accompany the use of the term: ‘[P]oint of view’ tend[s] to designate a variety of quite distinct processes. Criticism often runs together seeing with a character, having access to a character’s actions and thoughts, and sympathizing with a character … We will never prise these distinctive phenomena apart so long as we are seduced by the attractions of elaborating a single metaphor.2

I agree with Smith that one of the values that film studies ought to be dedicated to is the pursuit of precision in its accounts of its object of study. However, I am less certain than Smith that the best route to this goal is the generation of a set of categories which offer a means of framing (one might go so far as to say ‘pre-empting’) our encounter with any conceivable instance of narrative fiction film. In Chapter 1, I argued that  several existing conceptualisations of filmic point of view  are built upon questionable assumptions about a division between an inner realm of thought and feeling and an outer realm of behaviour. In presenting my argument, I attempted to

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s­ ummarise and synthesise the arguments of a range of thinkers, and I drew upon and appealed to my experiences of engaging with my case study films, and sought to do justice on the page to these experiences by trying to arrive at the most precise and evocative descriptions and formulations possible. I drew upon concepts such as ‘being-in-the-world’, for example, but, having questioned the validity of, for example, Smith’s notions of ‘subjective access’ and ‘exclusive attachment’, I did not seek to offer an alternative, replacement schema. To put things negatively for a moment, this is because if we are trying to account for how film can represent character experience, or a viewer’s engagement with a character, then it is not only the case that several of the categories often employed can be questioned; the larger point I would want to make is that categorisation is fundamentally and inevitably inadequate in relation to the phenomenon it aims to address.3 However, to put things more positively: I do not believe that abandoning  the attempt  to categorise (or at least, categorise too comprehensively and rigidly; I am not trying to argue that categories can be dispensed with altogether)4 is the same as abandoning the attempt to theorise, and still less should it be seen as dooming us to a lack of precision and rigour that ought to bring shame to a discipline that considers itself respectably academic. In the second paragraph of my introduction, I stated that I preferred the word ‘metacriticism’ to ‘theory’ as a description of my approach, but perhaps it is time to reclaim ‘theory’ as a word that describes trying to think through the problems that arise when we attempt to understand our engagement with our object of study. Theory, under such a description, would certainly have space for taxonomies, but it would also have space for more discursive modes in which a writer tries to follow, then capture and present, a train of thought. Such an approach may not be as systematic as a taxonomy, but it might easily be just as precise and rigorous, if not more so. My use, in Chapter 2 especially (see also the postscript that follows this conclusion), of work on media as instruments of communication was motivated in part by my belief that studies of point of view stand to benefit from a supplementing of the prevailing narratological approach of leaning forwards, as it were, to scrutinise fictions as rigorously organised textual systems, with a stepping back to look at films in relation to other media, and as part of our social relations more generally. I want to use this suggestion now to undertake a reflexive turn. I offer the following passage, written by Raymond Williams, as applicable not only to narrative fiction film (which this book has been principally concerned

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with), but also academic film studies (which this book is offered as a contribution to): it is through the communication systems that the reality of ourselves, the reality of our society, forms and is interpreted … How people speak to each other, what conventions they have as to what is important and what is not, how they express these in institutions by which they keep in touch: these things are central. They are central to individuals and central to society.5

The proposal of  taxonomies to frame our analyses is one valid and valuable part of the communication system that is film studies. To be sure, they can give rise to conversation and debate concerning their accuracy, validity, and so on, but it is also intended that they will be applied. The more thorough the taxonomisation, the less room is left for the individual artwork to influence how it is to be read, and the less room is left for the reader to chart her or his own course through the work – two things which seem to me to be important, rather than not important, to recall Williams’s phrasing. However (and in order to see this, it helps if we set aside some of the more deadening elements of the film studies communication system: our anxieties that our peers, or sceptics from other disciplines, will think that we are dilettantes; the pursuit of a ‘world-leading’ research ‘output’),6 if we also remember that the film studies communication system is in many ways built on exploratory and iterative conversations – in classrooms, at conferences, on departmental corridors – then this might make us feel more comfortable about, and justified in, framing our written scholarship differently, and in a way that extends greater autonomy to both the artworks we explore and the readers we address. Within such a model, our publications would operate not as disseminations of positions arrived at, in the hope that as many people as possible will regurgitate or re-apply these insights and methods, but as conversations with scholars and artworks, in the hope that as many people as possible will feel compelled to join these conversations, and will try on the ways of seeing traced in the account’s prose, as a way of developing their own ways of seeing. Within this model, categories still have their place, but they become gambits, conversation openers – places to begin, rather than places to end. Notes 1 M. Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 5 (original italics).

114  Classical Hollywood cinema 2 Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 5. 3 Although I am not making quite the same argument as them, as I wrote this conclusion I was reminded of R. Allen and M. Turvey, Wittgenstein: Theory and the Arts (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001), especially the editors’ introductory first chapter to that collection of essays. 4 Once again I would wish to invoke Douglas Pye’s comment, already cited in Chapter 2, note 26. 5 R. Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy and Socialism (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 22–3. 6 ‘Assessment criteria and level definitions.’ REF 2014 website. . Accessed 13 November 2014.

Postscript: education, communication and film studies Two cheers for conversation Conversation can be a wonderful thing. There is something uniquely precious about free, face-to-face encounters between equals, especially if those equals are loved ones, and it is hard to imagine a life without such encounters being a life worth living. One important element of my case study films that I have tried to do justice to is the care and eloquence with which they stage various kinds of conversation, from rule-­ governed exchanges conducted in the public eye attempting to arrive at a momentous decision, to the private encounters of romantic couples pursued for their own sake and enjoyment, and various points in between. Witnessing character interaction, where not only words but intonation, facial expression, stance, posture, eye lines and so on all possess potential significance, is one of the central pleasures of narrative film fiction, and a place where the aesthetic and the social are inseparable components of effects and achievements secured. My account was also offered in the introduction as a series of conversations with, and between, films. There is, of course, a degree of metaphor in my speaking thus. However, talk about what a film (or other cultural artefact) ‘has to say’, or how it ‘speaks to us’, is commonplace enough. A film cannot hear us if we attempt to speak to it, but we can ask questions of it, and see what answers it might offer. One scholar who has developed this metaphor at length is Wayne C. Booth, in his book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988).1 Booth does so with the help of a further metaphor: that of fictions (and more particularly, their implied authors) as friends, who offer us company, which we choose (or choose not) to keep.2 It is, however, also crucial for Booth that such metaphorical conversations and friendships give rise to conversations between live (if not co-present) interlocutors: ‘To me the most important

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of all critical tasks is to participate in – and thus to reinforce – a critical culture, a vigorous conversation, that will nourish in return those who feed us with their narratives.’3 Stanley Cavell suggests that criticism is ‘a natural extension of conversation’, and offers the Hollywood comedies of remarriage as ‘investigations of (parts of a conversation about) ideas of conversation’.4 F. R. Leavis famously characterised criticism as a conversation in which one statement would implicitly end with ‘This is so, isn’t it?’ and the next would begin with ‘Yes, but …’ (or perhaps ‘No, because …’).5 What characterises, or might characterise, or should characterise, such a conversation? I will not attempt a comprehensive answer to this question, but I would like to reflect briefly upon a particular species of such conversation: the undergraduate humanities seminar. Conversation about films Michael Schudson, in an article about conversation and democracy, seeks to drive a wedge between two species of conversation, ‘sociable’ and ‘problem-solving’: The sociable model emphasizes cultivation and sensibility; conversational partners should develop subtle capacities for fresh, entertaining, and responsive talk. The problem-solving model, in contrast, focuses on argument, the conversational partners’ capacity to formulate and respond to declarative views of what the world is and what it should be like. The sociable model sees conversation as an end-in-itself, an aesthetic pleasure. The problem-solving model sees conversation as a means to the end of good government.6

‘Conversation that serves democracy’, according to Schudson, belongs to the latter species, and ‘is distinguished not by egalitarianism but by norm-governedness and public-ness, not by spontaneity but by civility’.7 Like many humanities scholars, I want to believe that the conversations I participate in and (try not to) lead (too much) during undergraduate seminars serve democracy, at least in part and potentially. However, the (often tacit) norms of such conversations seem to me to cut across the divisions offered by Schudson. A discussion about Vertigo, for example, can at once aim to emphasise cultivation (indeed, cultivate cultivation) and to encourage argument. Discussions about aesthetic pleasure will often be aesthetically pleasurable in themselves, but can still at the same time be rule-governed. Freshness and responsiveness are as much to be encouraged as the formulation of declarations.

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Reading Schudson has helped me to understand that a failure to replicate the level of sociability that occurs among a group of people who choose to be in one another’s company for no reason beyond the pleasure it affords is not a culpable failure for the seminar tutor but is in fact, and in a way, salutary. One of Schudson’s lines of argument is that one very important type of democratic conversation – in a sense the most democratic, or at least the most ‘truly public’8 – is the type that takes place between citizens ‘who may not share [one another’s] views and values’.9 Such conversations, Schudson urges, contain uncomfortableness as a constitutive element of what they are. However, if we cannot, and should not, aspire to perfect sociability, it also seems contrary to the purpose and the spirit of proceedings to accede entirely to Schudson’s instrumental, ‘problem-solving’ model. The reason that this is so is eloquently presented by Stefan Collini during the course of an argument about why, in the recurring debate concerning higher education, ‘which might be parodied as the conflict between the “useful” and the “useless”’, the ‘useful’ side, despite usually having ‘political or economic power on its side as well as arguments with a ready popular appeal’, doesn’t ‘win once and for all’.10 Human understanding, when not chained to a particular instrumental task, is restless, always pushing onwards, though not in a single or fixed or entirely knowable direction, and there is no one moment along that journey where we can say in general or in the abstract that the degree of understanding being sought has passed from the useful to the useless. In other words, it is not the subject-matter itself that determines whether something is, at a particular moment, classed as ‘useful’ or ‘useless’ … Rather, it is a question of whether enquiry into that subject is being undertaken under the sign of limitlessness … where the open-ended quest for understanding has primacy over any application or intermediate outcome. This, we might say, is one mark of an academic discipline, and for this reason attempts to make universities into a type of institution where scholars and students study only what is ‘useful’ are bound, eventually, to end in a kind of failure.11

This is a heartening and vital series of observations about the value of higher education in general. We do the quality of higher education a disservice if we offer it exclusively as a route to an external end, even an end as noble and vital as the cultivation of democratic citizenship. But, the question remains, what of the value of conversations about and the study of film (and/or other kinds of narrative fiction) in ­particular,

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and the relationship between such activities and the functioning of democracy? One of the most prominent voices advocating the vital link between humanistic study, including the study of narrative fiction, and democracy (or ‘public life’, or justice, or citizenship) is Martha C. Nussbaum.12 Although Nussbaum is careful to highlight that ‘[t]he literary imagination is a part of public rationality, and not the whole’,13 she also points out the particular, uniquely valuable qualities of fiction (and specifically, the novel, though I feel justified applying Nussbaum’s description to film) that create effects not shared by, say, ‘history and social science’.14 [T]he novel constructs a paradigm of a style of ethical reasoning that is context-specific without being relativistic, in which we get potentially universalizable concrete prescriptions by bringing a general idea of human flourishing to bear on a concrete situation, which we are invited to enter through the imagination. This is a valuable form of public reasoning, both within a single culture and across cultures.15

Engaging students in such conversation is one particularly powerful, and socially and democratically oriented way of offering training in a habit of thought which John Henry Newman (whose mid-nineteenth-century lectures concerning ‘the idea of a university’ were later published in a book of that name)16 saw as fundamental to a liberal, as opposed to a professional, education, ‘the liberation of the student from all forms of one-sidedness’.17 (Such conversations, Nussbaum takes pains to argue at length elsewhere, need not, indeed should not, exclude consideration of matters of form and style.)18 The idea of humanistic study as ‘the training ground for a critical public reflection’19 has its historical corollary in Habermas’s identification of ‘the literary precursor of the public sphere’.20 As John Durham Peters notes: ‘Literature was revolutionary in the eighteenth century in the sense that it brought publics together and trained people in the art of critical analysis and discussion. Criticism had a decisively public function in that it combined literary, social and political judgements.’21 As part of my discussion of Anatomy of a Murder, I offered that film as a metaphor for the process of criticism, that is, the process of judgment. A courtroom drama can demonstrate with a particular vividness that there are indeed connections and continuities between the process of judging one of one’s peers, and that of judging a work of art.22 And as Nussbaum makes clear in a rather Brechtian passage (and as I hope to have made clear in my account of Anatomy of a Murder), there will often

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be similarities between not only the process of judgment but the nature of the evidence: ‘I am invited … to see how “men and women more or less like” myself (Dickens’s way of describing the people his characters encounter when they read novels) have lived differently from the way I now live, on account of things that might be otherwise.’23 Of course, and thankfully, literary criticism is not and should not be a jury trial: it is not so instrumental, and we are not required to, and should not be aiming, to arrive at an ultimate verdict of guilty or not guilty24 (in both these respects, we might add, literary criticism remains comparable to other processes of judgment just as vital to democracy as trial by a jury of one’s peers). However, and again rather like a jury trial, the offering of judgements about literary works is not an activity that can be entrusted to one person (citizen) alone. Just as it relies upon individual judgements and intellects, it relies upon the public exchange and refinement of such judgements. Such activity is at the heart of what Booth offers as his model for the process evaluative criticism, ‘coduction’: Coduction will be what we do whenever we say to the world (or prepare ourselves to say): ‘Of the works of this general kind that I have experienced, comparing my experience with other more or less qualified observers, this one seems to me among the better (or weaker) ones, or the best (or worst). Here are my reasons.’ Every such statement implicitly calls for continuing conversation: ‘How does my coduction compare with yours?’25

Such a pursuit must by its very nature be a common pursuit.26 A ‘concern for value – for standards, as we say’, Raymond Williams suggests, ‘properly expresses itself in the effort towards a community of e­ xperience on which these standards can rest’.27 The limits of conversation If I am to fulfil my commitment to engage my case study films in conversation, then a crucial fact that, taken as a whole, these films demand that I acknowledge that, frequently, what they dramatise are failures of conversation (and other types of communication). To say that there exists at times between Scottie and Judy, and Lisa and Stefan, a failure to converse successfully is to be guilty of comical understatement. Conversation, we might uncontroversially suggest, and as our films show us, is not always a happy or successful affair. Schudson, to return to our earlier discussion, argues that ‘conversation is not the soul of democracy’ because other, non-conversational (non-discursive, one might say) structures have to

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be in place as a basis upon which effective conversations rely: ‘institutions and norms of democracy give rise to democratic conversations rather than … the inherent democracy of conversation giv[ing] rise to politically democratic norms and institutions’.28 To the suggestion that conversation is not always happy or successful, then, we might add a few more. Conversation is only part, albeit an important part, of democracy; likewise, democracy is only part, albeit often an important part, of conversation. One last banal observation: conversation is only one species of communicative exchange, and not the best species for every conceivable purpose. When offered in such a form, such statements do indeed seem banal, but what might make them worth offering is the often seemingly unassailable esteem enjoyed by conversation as a form of communication (an esteem which I – in good conscience! – took advantage of in my conclusion). ‘It is an instructive fact that all of the political positions represented in contemporary cultural theory and media studies agree on the value of “conversation”’, Peters argues, and proceeds to cite the positions of Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas, John Dewey, James Carey, John Stuart Mill, Elihu Katz, George Gilder and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in support of his contention.29 We can add that two-way exchange rather than one-way transmission is similarly championed in a great deal of writing on higher education, much of which seeks to inform pedagogical practice. In his widely read (and excellent) Learning to Teach in Higher Education, Paul Ramsden offers the view of teaching as ‘transmitting knowledge’ as a ‘narrow vision’ of that endeavour, and the first of two temporary phases on the way to a broadened perspective.30 The status of lectures – the traditional site of dissemination and transmission in higher education – is sharply different in higher education research and higher education as practised, as much of that research points out. University buildings and timetables place lectures centre stage. Meanwhile, most mentions of lecturing in recent and not-so-recent scholarship and research31 emphasise first and foremost its pitfalls and limited effectiveness. However, lecturing stubbornly persists, and the other main way in which educational scholarship acknowledges this is by publishing guides designed to help practitioners perform this part of their duties as well as possible, which will often involve them making their lectures less like lectures (that is, breaking up the learned disquisition of the lecturer with other types of content, ideally ones that involve the students making a more ‘active’ contribution).32

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I am not opposed to the overall view of pedagogy offered in the above accounts and the many others like them. However, as Peters observes: Anyone learning a new language knows that conversation is scarier than newspapers or television, since failure to understand is annoying to others and it is potentially embarrassing if you pretend to understand; the stakes in dialogue are always intensified. Dissemination offers the relief of tuning out or going at one’s own speed.33

Elsewhere, he notes that dialogue can be just as ‘tyrannical’34 as dissemination: ‘If no question could be left unanswered and every question was posed with the demand for a response, what boredom and tyranny would result.’35 Dissemination, ‘mass media’, ‘mass culture’ and democracy One of Peters’s principal purposes in juxtaposing dialogue and dissemination is to argue that dialogue ‘is only one communicative script among many’ and is moreover a bad ‘normative model for the extended, even distended, kinds of talk and discourse necessary in large-scale democracy’.36 One theorist we have already encountered for whom dissemination without dialogue is undesirable is Habermas. As Scannell aptly puts it, the account of ‘[h]istorical forms of publicness’ in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is ‘a drama in three acts … It is a morality tale of the rise and fall of rational, critical public opinion.’37 Habermas attaches part of the blame for the ‘refeudalization of the public sphere’38 to ‘mass media’ (using, interestingly, an account of the communicative affordances of different media reminiscent of the Toronto School, and also, interestingly for us, framing the issue in terms of distance): Radio, film, and television by degrees reduce to a minimum the distance that a reader is forced to maintain toward the printed letter – a distance that required the privacy of the appropriation as much as it made possible the publicity of a rational–critical exchange about what had been read. With the arrival of the new media the form of communication as such has changed; they have had an impact, therefore, more penetrating … than was ever possible for the press. [endnote omitted] Under the pressure of the ‘Don’t talk back!’ the conduct of the public assumes a different form. In comparison with printed communications the programs sent by the new media curtail the reactions of their recipients in a peculiar way. They draw the eyes and ears of the public under their spell but at the same time,

122  Classical Hollywood cinema by taking away its distance, place it under ‘tutelage’, which is to say they deprive it of the opportunity to say something and to disagree.39

Here more than in much else of his account, Habermas sounds like his Frankfurt School predecessors. A couple of decades earlier, Theodor Adorno had also worried about the changes to the form of communication effected by new media, though without the explicit focus upon the possibility of rational–critical exchange. In his ‘A social critique of radio music’, Adorno answers negatively his initial questions ‘Does a symphony played on the [radio] remain a symphony? … Do [the large numbers of people who listen to “good” music] listen to a Beethoven symphony in a concentrated mood?’40 The reason, Adorno suggests, that ‘[t]here exists today a tendency to listen to Beethoven’s Fifth as if it were a set of quotations from Beethoven’s Fifth’41 is that today the commodity character of music tends radically to alter it … [M] usic has ceased to be a human force and is consumed like other consumers’ goods. This produces ‘commodity listening’, a listening whose ideal it is to dispense as far as possible with any effort on the part of the recipient – even if such an effort on the part of the recipient is the necessary condition of grasping the sense of the music.42

Adorno offered ‘autonomous art’ as an alternative, an antidote and a reproach to what he took to be the commodified, reified and instrumental products of mass culture. ‘Literature’ was the category with the equivalent function for Leavis, whose work (partly filtered via Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams)43 provides, along with that of the Frankfurt School (with which it is approximately contemporaneous), one of the major tributaries to contemporary cultural studies and its related disciplines. Leavis, writing with Denys Thompson, offers literature as a substitute for what has been destroyed by ‘the machine’ and ‘mass-production’.44 What we have lost is the organic community with the living culture it embodied. Folk-songs, folk-dances, Cotswold cottage and handicraft products are signs and expressions of something more: an art of life, a way of living, ordered and patterned, involving social arts, codes of intercourse and a responsive adjustment.45

The ‘organic community’ described is clearly in large part an oral, time-binding culture.46 As Scannell notes, ‘[t]here is an often desperate tone to Leavis’s writing about literature and mass culture because both are substitutes for authentic life and experience – the former a best, the latter a worst, alternative to life itself as an art.’47

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The positions of Adorno and Leavis have come to seem narrow, and possibly even reactionary. Raymond Williams, a sympathetic critic of (and in many ways a successor to) Leavis, takes issue with the distinction  between ‘mass civilisation’ and ‘minority culture’ that informs much of Leavis’s work, taking as an illuminating point of contrast T.  S.  Eliot’s combination of ‘the idea of a minority culture with his rejection of the ideas of democracy’ (which places him, Williams suggests, ‘on more consistent, if certainly sourer, ground’), and points out that Leavis’s making of ‘the vital connexion between a whole way of life and the capacity for valuable literary experience’ commits him ‘to a conception of the growth of a society, and its whole way of life, which should more adequately embody such kinds of experience’.48 (Williams also echoes – or rather, anticipates – Nussbaum in pointing out, contrary to Leavis, that the study of literature ‘is properly a central matter of all education, but it is not, clearly, a whole education’,49 and elsewhere, as befits his developed civic consciousness, he proposes that when we teach writing, ‘we need to practise not only the essay, but also the written report, the memorandum and minutes’.)50 Neither Adorno nor Leavis is fundamentally anti-democratic because the foundation of their critiques of their contemporary cultures was not that cultural and other goods had been made available to all (though both come perilously close to such a position at times, and it requires sympathetic reading to tease the relevant issues apart).51 Furthermore, in the case of Adorno’s work quoted above, the emphasis on radio – that is, the medium – is something of a red herring. Adorno takes issues not with the ontologically given communicative properties of the medium, but with its contingent commodified cultural form. ‘As the number of participants in a conversation keeps growing’, Peters observes: at some point not everyone will be able to speak and be heard. An inflection point will be reached and most participants will become spectators … Writing, like broadcasting, but unlike intimate conversation, has an economy of scale; texts and audio or video tape can undergo multiplication without severe pain or alteration in form whereas conversation cannot: this is the hard fact underlying the mass media that continually foils dreams of democratic participation.52

Dissemination therefore becomes a necessary category of communication within large political communities. Indeed, disseminations in fact contribute significantly to the creation of a sense of community. In his

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account in the Imagined Communities of nation states (‘imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’),53 one of the two forms which Benedict Anderson offers as ‘provid[ing] the technical means for “re-presenting” the kind of imagined community that is the nation’54 is the newspaper. The significance of this mass ceremony [of reading the newspaper] – Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers – is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. [footnote omitted] Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.55

James Carey makes a related point in a different register when he describes the public as ‘a group of strangers that gathers to discuss the news’.56 The second form offered by Anderson as representing and creating an imagined national community is, of course, the novel. Anderson quotes a passage from a novel that he offers as ‘the first Latin American work in this genre’, and describes it as depicting ‘the movement of a solitary hero through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside’.57 Hannah Arendt describes the novel as ‘the only entirely social art form’.58 (Walter Benjamin writes: ‘What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature – the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella – is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it.’)59 The novel is also of crucial importance at various points in Habermas’s account. For example: In the course of the eighteenth century, the bourgeois reading public was able to cultivate in the intimate exchange of letters (as well as in the reading of the literature of psychological novels and novellas engendered by it) a subjectivity capable of relating to literature and oriented toward a public sphere. In this form private people interpreted their new form of existence which was indeed based on the liberal relationship between public and private spheres. The experience of privacy made possible literary experimentation with the psychology of the humanity common to all, with the abstract individuality of the natural person.60

I agree with Habermas’s characterisation of the novel’s valuable mediation, as we might put it, of the interface between publicness and privacy

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and its dramatisation of the importance of the relationship between the two in the social world of liberal democracy. I disagree with Habermas’s offering of this characterisation as something that, due to ‘mass media’, has passed (at least, ‘[i]nasmuch as the mass media today strip away the literary husks from that kind of bourgeois self-interpretation and utilize them as marketable forms for the public services provided in a culture of consumers’).61 This is a continuation of Habermas’s argument quoted at the beginning of this section. Without wanting to deny the differences between novels and films, I would argue that the distance that Habermas sees as being reduced to a minimum by the medium of film is in fact maintained by fiction films’ status, along with novels, as fictions. That is, as I have already argued above, alongside Booth and Nussbaum,62 not only literary fiction but fiction in general, including film fiction, is capable of cultivating the kind of imaginative, socially oriented e­ xperience – that is, the kind of point of view – that Habermas offers above as the exclusive preserve of the novel. Moreover, as I shall now argue in the final section of this postscript, the ‘pressure of the “Don’t talk back!”’ and the deprivation ‘of the opportunity to say something’63 may be, in certain respects, salutary. A plea for listening time In his book Communications, Raymond Williams argues that ‘many of our communications models become, in themselves, social i­ nstitutions. Certain attitudes to others, certain forms of address, certain tones and styles, become embodied in institutions which are then very powerful in social effect.’64 How communication works is determined by neither the technological properties nor what we might call the communicative affordances of a given medium (though both play their part): it is always also a negotiated structure – precisely, a social institution. Novels and telephone directories are both products of the printing press, but they are very different communications models. Thinking of novels as a ­communicative model, Nussbaum invites the reader to consider: what sense of life their forms themselves embody: not only how the characters feel and imagine, but what sort of feeling and imagining is enacted in the telling of the story itself, in the shape and texture of the sentences, the pattern of the narrative … what sort of feeling and imagining is called into being by the shape of the text as it addresses its imagined reader, what sort of readerly activity is built into the form.65

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What attitudes to others, forms of address, tones and styles, feelings and imaginings, are (again: what point of view is) embodied in the communication model of humanistic teaching and study of fiction? It may be that, ultimately, the particular virtue of that particular communicative mode that is the humanistic study of fiction is the virtue of listening (even if most, if not all, of us engaged professionally in practising that mode ought to remind ourselves of this fact more frequently). We devote significant portions of our lives to reading the traces of activity left by other humans, many of whom are long-since dead, in the faith that these texts still have things to say that are worth listening to. Part of our faith that our time will be rewarded is that works of art are compressed containers of human care: the time that has gone into making them exceeds the duration of their reading, one reason that they allow us to live, for that duration, ‘a richer and fuller life than [one] could manage on one’s own’.66 Lisa visits Stefan for what will turn out to be the last time in order to offer him her whole life. Later, that offer is delivered on in the form of her letter. Reading the letter costs Stefan the time in which he could have absconded from his duel, and so probably costs him his life, but as he is given not only Lisa’s life but his own back as a return gift, he appears content with the exchange. The etiquette that governs all polite conversation becomes crucial to the ethics of academic exchange. Principled debate rests upon trying to do justice to others’ positions, rather than treating them as Aunt Sallies, speaking over them, or changing the subject. Every reference and footnote is a sign that one has (or ought to have!) listened to what a previous participant in the conversation had to say. In order to speak with legitimacy, one must first have listened – and for the longer, the better. ‘Listening to others is a profound democratic act.’67 It is also, Cavell suggests (inspired by Wittgenstein), fundamental to philosophy: ‘philosophy does not speak first; a fact I sometimes express by saying that philosophy’s first virtue, as it matters most to me, is responsiveness.’68 After Williams refers, in Communications, to the powerful social effects of communications models, he goes on to observe that ‘The crisis in modern communications has been caused by the speed of invention and by the difficulty of finding the right institutions in which these technical means are to be used.’69 In my lifetime – indeed, in my early adulthood – I have experienced a more recent entry in the seemingly perennial modern crisis of communication, which I suspect will be recognisable to some readers. To my mind, an encounter with a cultural artefact is an occasion for respect, sometimes even reverence. In many

Postscript  127

ways, the respect due a cultural artefact is the same as the respect due to an interlocutor in a public situation. A key element of such respect is that one waits to hear what the other has to say before speaking oneself. Such a relationship – in Williams’s terms, such a communicative model – cannot be maintained when one breaks off from listening to pass premature judgement. Doubtless, such a process is as longstanding as the existence of audiences, but it now runs the risk of becoming institutionalised in the form of social media protocols and undergraduate subcultures. The degree, and more to the point, the depth, of my interaction, with media become poorer, not richer, if I exercise my (democratic) right to instantaneous reply at the expense of my (democratic) duty to wait to hear what was being said in the first place. When looked at from this perspective, the point of view adopted in, and the distance that forms a crucial part of our communicative encounters with, narrative film, including the deprivation of the opportunity (which is also the relief of the obligation) to say something, become central to the virtues of such encounters. Film does not come to us live. Its performers are not present. Fictional characters are beyond any comfort or justice we can hope to offer. And yet such characters, and the stars and other actors who embody them, come back to life for us, are felt to be present, and may win our love. Film, one of the earliest media of mechanical reproduction, quickly developed a fascination with the human face in close-up that it has never since relinquished. Williams, reflecting on the era of ‘mass communication’, famously observed that ‘There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses’,70 but screen fiction’s unique blend of distance and closeness, of separation and intimacy, has surely never been one of these ways. Spared the obligations of dialogue, we can heighten our responsiveness, and better and more deeply involve ourselves in what is perhaps the principal obligation of communication as a whole. Lisa writes to Stefan, knowing that if and when he reads what she has written, she will be beyond response, and yet it is still important to her that he reads, that he listens. Perhaps, like Stefan, these are the circumstances under which we listen best of all. Notes  1 W. C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (London: University of California Press, 1988).  2 Booth, Company We Keep, pp. 169–98.

128  Classical Hollywood cinema  3 Booth, Company We Keep, p. 136.  4 S. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (London: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 7.   5 J. Gibbs and D. Pye, ‘Introduction’, in J. Gibbs and D. Pye (eds), Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 3–4.  6 M. Schudson, ‘Why conversation is not the soul of democracy’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14:4 (1997), p. 300.   7 Schudson, ‘Why conversation is not the soul of democracy’, p. 297.   8 Schudson, ‘Why conversation is not the soul of democracy’, p. 302.   9 Schudson, ‘Why conversation is not the soul of democracy’, p. 302. 10 Collini, What Are Universities for? (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 39. 11 Collini, What Are Universities for?, p. 55. 12 M. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). This is just one of Nussbaum’s books on this topic, among very many. 13 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, p. xvi. 14 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, p. 5. 15 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, p. 8. 16 J. H. C. Newman, The Idea of a University: New Edition (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1931). 17 Collini, What Are Universities for?, p. 45. 18 See, for example, M. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 19 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), p. 29. 20 Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 29. 21 J. D. Peters, ‘Distrust of representation: Habermas on the public sphere’, Media, Culture and Society 15:4 (1993), p. 554. 22 For a stimulating article which draws upon Heidegger, among others, to argue for the important place of judgement within higher education and academic life, see R. Barnett, ‘Assessment in higher education: an impossible mission?’, in D. Boud and N. Falchikov (eds), Rethinking Assessment in Higher Education: Learning for the Longer Term (London: Routledge, 2007). 23 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, p. 8 (original italics). 24 Cf. Booth, Company We Keep, p. 72. 25 Booth, Company We Keep, pp. 72–3 (original italics). 26 F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972). 27 R. Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London: Penguin, 1963), p. 306.

Postscript  129 28 Schudson, ‘Why conversation is not the soul of democracy’, p. 297. 29 J. D. Peters, ‘Media as conversation, conversation as media’, in J. Curran and D. Morley (eds), Media and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 115. 30 P. Ramsden, Learning to Teach in Higher Education (London: Routledge, 2003, 2nd edn), p. 19. 31 See, for example, R. B. Spence, ‘Lecture and class discussion in teaching e­ducational psychology’, Journal of Educational Psychology 19 (1928). Spence  is quoted in G. Brown, Lecturing and Explaining (London: Methuen, 1978). 32 See, for example, G. Gibbs, S. Habeshaw and T. Habeshaw, 53 Interesting Things to Do in Your Lectures (Bristol: Technical and Educational Services, 1984); D. A. Bligh, What’s the Use of Lectures? (San Francisco: JosseyBass, 2000); P. Race, The Lecturer’s Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Learning, Teaching & Assessment (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001, 2nd edn); K.  Exley and R. Dennick, Giving a Lecture: From Presenting to  Teaching (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004). Whilst I am sympathetic on the whole to the notion of the value of soliciting student activity, I am also struck by Peters’s salutary corrective: ‘“Passive listening is one of the worst ideas ever to infest cultural criticism – as if listening were not one of the most difficult things people ever do’ (‘Media as conversation’, pp. 124–5). 33 Peters, ‘Media as conversation’, p. 124. 34 J. D. Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 34. 35 Peters, Speaking into the Air, p. 56. 36 Peters, Speaking into the Air, p. 34. 37 P. Scannell, Media and Communication (London: Sage, 2007), p. 234. 38 Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 195. 39 Habermas, Structural Transformation, pp. 170–1. 40 T. W. Adorno, ‘A social critique of radio music’, The Kenyon Review 7:2 (1945), p. 209. 41 Adorno, ‘A social critique of radio music’, pp. 213–14. 42 Adorno, ‘A social critique of radio music’, p. 211 (original italics). 43 Scannell, Media and Communication, pp. 93–122. 44 F. R. Leavis and D. Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), p. 3. 45 Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, p. 1. 46 One of the founding texts of cultural studies in Britain can be described as an account and a critique of the replacement of an oral, time-binding culture with a mass culture: R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of

130  Classical Hollywood cinema ­ orking-Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments W (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). 47 Scannell, Media and Communication, p. 102. 48 Williams, Culture and Society, p. 254. 49 Williams, Culture and Society, p. 249. 50 R. Williams, Communications (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969, rev. edn), p. 138. 51 Within film studies, the foremost defender of Leavis, and assimilator of Leavis to his own form of democratic socialist feminism, is Robin Wood. 52 Peters, ‘Distrust of representation’, pp. 564–5 (original italics). 53 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991, rev. edn), p. 6 (original italics). 54 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 25 (original italics). 55 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 35. 56 Quoted in Schudson, ‘Why conversation is not the soul of democracy’, p. 298. 57 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 30. 58 H. Arendt, The Human Condition (London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 39. 59 W. Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. H. Zorn, ed. H. Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 87. 60 Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 171. 61 Habermas, Structural Transformation, p. 171. 62 Nussbaum offers Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness as an example of ‘recent criticism [that] has shown convincingly that some films have the potential to make contributions [to our public life] similar to those I imagine novels making’ (Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, p. 6). 63 Habermas, Structural Transformation, pp. 170–1. 64 Williams, Communications, p. 20. See also R. Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp. 22–3; R. Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), pp. 3–25 and pp. 113–28. 65 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, p. 4. 66 Booth, Company We Keep, p. 223. 67 Peters, ‘Media as conversation’, p. 124. 68 S. Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (London: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 324. 69 Williams, Communications, p. 20. 70 Williams, Culture and Society, p. 289.

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Adorno, T. W. ‘A social critique of radio music’, Kenyon Review, 7:2 (1945): 229–35. Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991, rev edn). Arendt, H. The Human Condition (London: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Barr, C. Vertigo (London: BFI Publishing, 2002). Benjamin, W. Illuminations, trans. H. Zorn, ed. H. Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999). Booth, W. C. The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1983). Booth, W. C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (London: University of California Press, 1988). Bordwell, D. On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Bordwell, D. and N. Carroll (eds), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). Bordwell, D., J. Staiger and K. Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985). Branigan, E. Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin: Mouton, 1984). Braver, L. Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (London: MIT Press, 2012). Brecht, B. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. and ed. J. Willett (London: Eyre Methuen, 1964). Britton, A. Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. B. K. Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009). Carey, J. W. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (London: Routledge, rev. edn, 2009). Carroll, N. ‘Toward a theory of point-of-view editing’, Poetics Today 14:1 (1993): 123–41.

132  Classical Hollywood cinema Cavell, S. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedies of Remarriage (London: Harvard University Press, 1981). Cavell, S. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (London: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Cavell, S. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Cavell, S. and A. Klevan, ‘“What becomes of thinking on film?” (Stanley Cavell in conversation with Andrew Klevan)’, in R. Read and J. Goodenough (eds), Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 167–209. Chatman, S. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Collini, S. What Are Universities for? (London: Penguin, 2012). Dreyfus, H. L. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (London: MIT Press, 1991). Friedman, N. ‘Point of view in fiction: the development of a critical concept’, PMLA 70:5 (1955): 1160–84. Gallafent, E. Letters and Literacy in Hollywood Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Genette, G. Narrative Discourse, trans. J. E. Lewin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). Gibbs, J. and D. Pye (eds), Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). Hansen, M. ‘Early silent cinema: whose public sphere?’, New German Critique 29 (1983): 147–84. Harvey, J. Movie Love in the Fifties (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2001). Heidegger, M. Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996). Innis, H. The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964). Katz, E., J. D. Peters, T. Liebes and A. Orloff (eds), Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How About These? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). Kitses, J. Horizons west: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah: Studies of Authorship within the Western (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969). Lodge, D. Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (London: Penguin, 2003). McLuhan, M. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). Merleau-Ponty, M. ‘The film and the new psychology’ (1945), in Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. L. Dreyfus and P. A. Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 48–59.

Select bibliography  133 Modleski, T. ‘Time and desire in the woman’s film’, Cinema Journal 23:3 (1984): 19–30. Mulvey, L. ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen 16:3 (1975): 6–18. Nussbaum, M. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Nussbaum, M. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). Perez, G. The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Perkins, V. F. Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). Perkins, V. F. ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’, Movie 29/30 (1982): 61–72. Perkins, V. F. ‘Must we say what they mean? Film criticism and interpretation’, Movie 34/35 (1990): 1–6. Perkins, V. F. ‘Same tune again! Repetition and framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman’, CineAction 52 (2000): 40–8. Peters, J. D. ‘Distrust of representation: Habermas on the public sphere’, Media, Culture and Society 15:4 (1993): 541–71. Peters, J. D. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Peters, J. D. ‘Media as conversation, conversation as media’, in J. Curran and D. Morley (eds), Media and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 115–28. Pippin, R. B. Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (London: Yale University Press, 2010). Pye, D. ‘Movies and point of view’, Movie 36 (2000): 2–34. Ratcliffe, M. Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Ryle, G. The Concept of Mind (London: Penguin, 2000). Scannell, P. Radio, Television and Modern Life: A Phenomenological Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Scannell, P. Media and Communication (London: Sage, 2007). Scannell, P. Television and the Meaning of Live: An Enquiry into the Human Situation (Cambridge: Polity, 2014). Schudson, M. ‘Why conversation is not the soul of democracy’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14:4 (1997): 297–309. Shumway, D. R. Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy and the Marriage Crisis (London: New York University Press, 2003). Smith, M. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). Taylor, C. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

134  Classical Hollywood cinema Truffaut, F. Hitchcock: Revised Edition (London: Simon & Schuster, 1985). Walton, K. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Warshow, R. The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (London: Harvard University Press, 2001). White, S. The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Magisterial Vision and the Figure of Woman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Williams, R. Culture and Society 1780–1950 (London: Penguin, 1963). Williams, R. Communications (London: Chatto & Windus, rev. edn, 1969). Williams, R. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976). Williams, R. Television, Technology and Cultural Form (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1992). Wilson, G. M. Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations (1953), trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 3rd edn, 2001). Wood, R. Personal Views: Explorations in Film (London: Gordon Fraser, 1976). Wood, R. ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman: the double narrative’, CineAction 31 (1993): 4–17. Wood, R. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, rev. edn, 2002). Wood, R. Howard Hawks (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, new edn, 2006). Zborowski, J. ‘Beyond the male gaze: departures from Scottie’s point of view in Vertigo’, CineAction 84 (2011): 13–23.

Index

Adorno, Theodor 46, 99–100, 120, 122–3 Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959) 52–9, 69–73, 118–19 Anderson, Benedict 123–4 Arendt, Hannah 67–8, 69, 70–1, 124 Ayer, A. J. 12, 13 Barr, Charles 9, 10, 17, 21, 25, 26, 30, 50 Bazin, André 46 being-in-the-world 11, 13, 21–3, 29–34 Benjamin, Walter 45–7, 74, 79n.14, 124 Bluestone, George 8 Booth, Wayne C. 49, 50, 51, 78, 115–16, 119, 125 Bordwell, David 4, 15, 16, 54, 85 Braudy, Leo 54–5 Braver, Lee 11, 37n.19 Brecht, Bertolt 55–8, 60, 72, 76, 79n.14, 118–19, 120 broadcasting see television Capra, Frank 36, 42n.112 see also Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Capra, 1936); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Capra, 1939) Carey, James 5, 63, 66, 87, 107, 120, 124 Carroll, Noël 20–1 Cavell, Stanley 28, 33, 37n.19, 58, 75, 89–91, 94–5, 97–8, 116, 126

character consciousness 8–23 see also dualism character interaction 25–9, 35–6 Chatman, Seymour 3, 8, 9 Collini, Stefan 117 conversation 90–1, 115–21 see also character interaction Cooper, David 10 democracy 64–6, 68–9, 116–27 Descartes, René see dualism Dewey, John 12–13, 39n.33, 87, 120 dialogue versus dissemination 100–2, 113, 120–7 see also conversation dissemination see dialogue versus dissemination distance 44–78 aesthetic 44–8, 49, 55–6, 57 and point of view 48–51 dualism 10–13, 15–16, 17, 19, 21–2, 23, 24, 25–9, 32–3 Ford, John 4, 60, 61, 63, 66 see also The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, 1962) Friedman, Norman 48–9 Frye, Northrop 28, 45 Fujiwara, Chris 58

136  Classical Hollywood cinema Gallafent, Edward 62 Genette, Gérard 9, 37n.8, 48–9 Gibbs, John 58 Habermas, Jürgen vii, 63–4, 67, 75, 118, 120, 121–2, 124–5 Hall, Stuart 86 Hansen, Miriam 75–6, 78 Harvey, James 30, 36 Hawks, Howard 89, 104, 106 see also Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks, 1939) Heidegger, Martin vii, 11, 12, 15, 34, 37n.15, 37n.19, 39n.33, 39n.43, 42n.104, 78n.2, 67, 96, 128n.22 see also being-in-the-world Herrmann, Bernard 10 Hitchcock, Alfred vi, 9, 17, 26, 35, 52, 54–5, 59 see also Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) ‘inner’ versus ‘outer’ see dualism Innis, Harold 61–2, 63, 66 James, Henry 8, 9, 21 Kitses, Jim 63 Leavis, F. R. 116, 119, 122–3 Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls, 1948) 85, 92–102, 107, 126, 127 listening 125–7 Lodge, David 8 McLuhan, Marshall 61, 63, 75 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (Ford, 1962) 59–66, 68–9, 73–4, 77 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 13, 21 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Capra, 1936) 23–5, 27–9, 32–4, 36, 54, 88, 89

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Capra, 1939) 88–9 Modleski, Tania 94–5, 97, 98 mood 96–7, 98–9 Mulvey, Laura 79n.14 Nussbaum, Martha 118, 119, 123, 125 Only Angels Have Wings (Hawks, 1939) 85, 86–8, 89–92, 103–7 Ophuls, Max vi, 95 see also Letter from an Unknown Woman (Ophuls, 1948) Perez, Gilberto 4, 23, 35, 42n.112, 60, 75, 92–3 Perkins, V. F. 4, 15, 39n.43, 52, 55, 56, 72, 77, 92, 93–4, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 102 Peters, John Durham vii, 13, 34, 85, 99–100, 118, 120, 121, 123, 126 phenomenology 13–15 Pippin, Robert B. 60–1, 63, 66, 69, 73, 84n.100 Potts, Neil 9–10, 21 POV shots 9–10, 17, 20–3, 25, 26, 29 Preminger, Otto vi, 51–2, 54–5, 56, 80n.37 see also Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959) privacy 106–7, 109n.58, 124–5 publicness 64–78, 116–19, 124–5 Pye, Douglas 2, 16, 49–50 Ratcliffe, Matthew 14–15, 16, 27, 29–30, 35 Ryle, Gilbert 12–13, 19 Sartre, Jean-Paul 29–30, 34 Scannell, Paddy vii, 75, 96, 121, 122 Schudson, Michael 116–17, 119–20 Schultz, Alfred 27, 28 Shklovsky, Viktor 45, 78n.2

Index  137 Smith, Murray 14, 16, 20, 21, 26, 29, 35, 49, 50, 57–8, 111 Taylor, Charles 10–11 television 74–6, 77 Thompson, Kristin 86 Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) 9–10, 16–27, 29–32, 34–6, 50–1, 54, 55

Warshow, Robert 69 White, Susan 94 Williams, Raymond 67, 74–5, 81n.52, 112–13, 119, 120, 122–3, 125, 126–7 Wilson, George M. ix, 15–16, 92–3, 97 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 11–13, 15, 37n.19, 88, 126 Wood, Robin vi, 4, 9, 30, 31, 35, 87, 91, 93, 94, 95–6, 104, 105, 107