A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Recently, I was embarrassed to realizeafter seeing the film all the times I've seen itthat I had never noticed how extensive the mirror structure is. Clearly, the opening three sections and the last three sections mirror each other, but it had never occurred to me to look at how the shots of "Louise's Story" mirror each other. Shots one and thirteen, and shots two and twelve, and so on

also

mirror each other . . .

Mulvey:

Well, they do and they don't, Scott. The first two shots are indoors, no windows, no outside, a completely enclosed space . . .

MacDonald:

Like the last two shots.

Mulvey:

Actually that

does

work, doesn't it? But the very enclosed, nesting space at the beginning is the space of the emotional relationship between the mother and the child, and the space of the last two sequences isit sounds pretentious to saythe space of fantasy, of the enigma of the unconscious, of the enigma of the construction of subjectivity. In the last section they're looking at hieroglyphics. They're not enclosed in their own space; the film has gone beyond their relationship.

[

Wollen:

Hieroglyphics are an exemplary case of a riddle needing to be deciphered. They are also a form of rebus and, of course, Freud saw dreams as structured like hieroglyphs.]

Mulvey:

I remember it seemed important to have Louise and Anna walking down the central corridor of the British Museum,

across

the

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space, breaking the circularity which had been more or less completely controlling their movements up until then. The circularity is still there in the pan, but they make an angle into it. And the child is allowed to walk. And we introduced a new color, red, moving from blue (at the beginning of "Louise's Story") to red. Red is introduced in the mirror sequence, and Louise is wearing red in the British Museum.

MacDonald:

I think one of the interesting things the film accomplishes, and I assume it was one of the things you talked a lot about, was showing a positive development, people becoming aware of themselves and aware of what their potential is, without acting as though the world has suddenly miraculously changed. The differences between the early and late shots in "Louise's Story" demonstrate that the relationship of Anna and Louise is changing, and that Louise is becoming more independent. And yet, the parallels between these shots imply that living in patriarchy has not only enclosed Louise and Anna in the world of shot one, but that even if they are now out of their enclosure in the home, what they must investigate is the long public history of patriarchy: the British Museum's exhibits are the

public

form of the same thing that they've experienced in private.

Mulvey:

Yes. That was certainly an effect we wanted to get at the end, but in the British Museum shot we were most interested in giving the impression of a "detour through the unconscious." The intertext that precedes that shot is "detour through these texts, entombed now in glass, whose enigmatic script reminds her of a forgotten history and the power of a different language"the language of the unconscious. This now, of course, seems very much in keeping with feminist discussion at the time . . .

MacDonald:

Though not so much in film to that point . . .

Mulvey:

Not so much in film. We were trying to put that question into film. We wanted to make an advance in cinema narrative by having a narrative that was a journey into the psyche, so its "resolution" was literally an "opening," rather than a closing down. It's the same kind of thing, perhapsI hadn't thought of this beforethat Buñuel and Dali tried to do by slitting open the eye in

Un Chien Andalou

and discovering a completely different space with a different kind of logic and a different relationship between figure and event. We didn't have

Un Chien Andalou

in mind at the time, but we were trying to move into a phantasmagoric space in the last two shots.

We used the British Museum not as a real live space where people go to see exhibits, but as an image of the enigmatic and historical nature of the unconscious. That's why there is no one else in the museum. The British Museum isn't on the same register as the shopping center is, or the streets, or even the playground. It's the final stage in the film's

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movement from the space of Sirkian melodrama [melodrama as epitomized in the films of Douglas Sirk] into the space of the psyche.

Yvonne Rainer

MacDonald:

In recent years every time there's a new Yvonne Rainer film, I read someplace, "This is new and accessible work from Yvonne Rainer . . . "

Rainer:

Right. They said that about the last one, and I've heard it about

Privilege

.

MacDonald:

I didn't find

The Man Who Envied Women

[1985] more accessible than earlier workthough there were elements of it I likedbut I do find

Privilege