Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 11, May 2003
Paul McEwan
The Voice and Masculinity
_Close Up: Cinema and
Modernism 1927-1933_ Edited by James Donald,
Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus London: Cassell,
1998 ISBN
0-304-33516-9 341pp. Cinema is a unique art
form in that its criticism begins at its birth rather than
following much later. While the essays in this collection
examined film when it was more than 30 years old, the
relative youth of the medium inspired a prescriptiveness
that reflects both the hopes of its early critics and their
cautious hopes for modernity. The writers of _Close Up_,
like numerous other early film critics, are constantly
suggesting plans for an ideal film culture full of
challenging films. While there is much fear about what film
might settle to be, there is little talk about what film is.
The discussion is primarily in the realm of what might
be. That desire to prescribe a
future for cinema is what gives the essays in this
collection most of their bite, and what makes them so
interesting 70 years later. There are few thematic links
between these pieces overall, despite the excellent editing
job that Donald, Friedberg, and Marcus have done. The range
and intelligence of the magazine's contributors means that
it is the potential of cinema that is being explored and
argued for, even if they differ on the details of that
potential. _Close Up_ was an
international publication with mainly British editors and
contributors. The editors' relationship to their home
country's film production is primarily to lament its dismal
status in relation to the French industry or, more
importantly, Soviet cinema. The magazine existed at a key
historical moment, coming into existence right as sound is
added to American film, and well positioned to observe the
spread of this new technology in the ensuing
years. For most of the magazine's
writers sound is a hindrance rather than a help in the
development of the medium. The contribution of Eisenstein,
Pudovkin, and Alexandrov, whose famous 'Statement on Sound'
was first translated into English here, is influential with
a number of authors who fear that greater theatrical realism
will undermine film's avant-garde and political potential.
The editors have wisely chosen to reprint Eisenstein's
contributions to _Close Up_ sparingly, since they are
available elsewhere. Among the more interesting
contributions in the collection is a short section on the
POOL films -- silent movies made by members of the _Close
Up_ collective whose content was apparently as obscure as
their exhibition (most were shown rarely if at all). These
films included _Borderline_, a feature starring Paul Robeson
that is now more widely available. While _Close Up_ editor
Kenneth Macpherson worked on the photoplay for _Borderline_
, the magazine produced a special issue on the 'Negro in
Film'. Two articles from that issue on race in American
cinema by Harry Potamkin and Geraldyn Dismond are
fascinating accounts of the intermingling of art and
politics at the end of the 1920s. While the issue of race
warranted a special issue, arguments about gender and cinema
were a more regular facet of the magazine's output. With a
number of women writers, complex questions about feminism
and film were repeatedly brought to the fore. In addition to
the contributions of Bryher (who supported the magazine
financially), and the poet and novelist H.D., the writings
of Dorothy
Richardson are
particularly fascinating examples of early feminist film
criticism. They are also valuable additions to our
understanding of debates about the coming of
sound. Richardson's primary
contributions to film criticism appeared in _Close Up_ under
the banner 'Continuous Performance', and the editors
reproduce them in their entirety. Richardson tackles a range
of issues in early film, and audiences' reaction to it. The
essays that relate to feminism are not feminist in the sense
that they deal explicitly with women's political issues of
the day -- they are not about suffrage or legal equality.
Interestingly, it is perhaps only in light of the second
wave of feminism that these articles could be regarded as
feminist, in that they deal primarily with female
subjectivity, and the ways in which that subjectivity shapes
ones response to film. Richardson's 'female
subjectivity' is exactly that. It is in some senses
essentializing, arguing that specific ways of thinking, of
considering, are intrinsically and universally female. In
addition, this is a subjectivity that colours all response
to ideas, words, and art. The key facet of this feminine
difference is the differing relationships of men and women
to speech, and thus the primary thrust of Richardson's
argument centers on her dismissal of the talkies. Speech,
she argues, is inherently male, and to add it to film robs
the form of all of its potential to be a distinct form of
communication freed from the usual masculine constraints and
ideas. The 'straight line' thinking that goes along with
clear speech is a male preserve much inferior to women's
memory in the form of passive consciousness, a
memory: 'distinct from a mere
backward glance, as distinct even from a prolonged
contemplation of things regarded as past and done with,
gathers, can gather, and pile up its wealth only round
universals, unchanging, unevolving verities that move
neither backwards nor forwards and have neither speech nor
language' (205-6). Later, when Richardson
refers to women as 'humanity's silent half, without much
faith in speech as a medium of communication' (206), it
might be easy to read her assessment as simply the
reflection of a time when women had comparatively little
right to public speech, despite the progress of the
suffragists. But her attack is not just on speech; it is on
a form of linear thinking that goes along with 'clear'
speech. Richardson is not trying to describe women's
position at a point in history -- her attempt, inspired
somewhat by psychology, is to interpret more substantial
human thought processes. So while the discussions of speech
seem historically specific in some ways, the discussions of
female subjectivity and communication are a recognizable
pre-echo of the roots of much postmodern feminist analysis
in the way that they posit distinctly female ways of knowing
or communicating. Some of Richardson's
discussions of female speech do seem more tied to a specific
time period, but these are no less interesting, albeit for
different reasons. In a piece dealing with the establishing
of codes of conduct for theatre patrons, Richardson both
cherishes and laments the presence of a particular type of
female patron who talks incessantly throughout the film.
While the endless chatter distracts her and prevents 'the
possibility of escape via incidentals into the world of
meditation or thought' (176), she cannot help but admire the
woman for whom men, 'meeting her at her uttermost, here
where so far there is not even a convention of silence to
keep her within bounds, must sometimes need more than all
their chivalry to stop short of moral homicide' (175). At
this moment, where Richardson's love of film collides
directly with her feminism, the feminism seems to win out.
The tone of the essay, however, suggests that the talking
woman has value to Richardson only as an annoyance to the
men, and as someone whose escapades occasionally prove
amusing. This is not the portrait of the type of woman
Richardson champions in the rest of her work, a woman who
cherishes the ability to communicate without speech, one
who's state is just to be, rather than becoming. The woman
in the theatre demonstrates Richardson's argument about the
maleness of speech because the speech of the woman has no
real purpose, conveys no important meaning -- everything she
says can be reduced to 'chatter' and summarily dismissed. A
reading of Richardson's work suggests that she recognizes
this chattering as a common feature of women's speech, but
rather than embrace this talking as worthwhile in its own
right, she endorses a more sophisticated silent
communication that is also distinctly female but easier to
see as meaningful. While later feminist critics might
champion women's 'chatter' as crucial to the assembling of
relationships and the transfer of knowledge, Richardson
argues that speech is a trap for women that wrecks their
chance for direct communication; 'all women use speech,
with individual differences, alike: in the manner of a
facade. Their awareness of being, as distinct from man's
awareness of becoming, is so strong that when they are
confronted, they must, in most circumstances, snatch at
words to cover either their own palpitating spiritual
nakedness or that of another. They talk to banish
embarrassment . . . In relation to men their speech is
various. But always it is a facade' (206). If speech is only a facade
for women, it seems likely that its limits are cultural
rather than biological, and thus might also be tied to a
particular time. Richardson's argument is compelling though,
because its relationship to its time mirrors the changing
status of film in that period, as it moves from 'silence'
not to sound, but to speech. A number of Richardson's
pieces deal with specific experiences involving early
talkies, whose sound quality left much to be desired. As
much as she is critical of this technological failure, which
seems to confirm her worst suspicions, she asserts that no
matter what the technology 'no spoken film will ever be able
to hold a candle to silent drama, will ever be so speaking'
(195). Words demand attention that can only draw away from
one's experience of the cinematography. Here Richardson's
argument moves from the feminist to the artistic, although
the two are closely related. Photographic communication is
pure on its own, Richardson argues, and although it can
exist alongside musical sound, it is rendered artificial by
having to fight for a place against recorded
speech. Richardson's championing
of the visual in cinema can seem naive to modern eyes.
Underlying her relentless support for what can be seen is
perhaps a belief that the visual is less corrupted, more
pure, trustworthy, while the verbal is ripe for
manipulation. Later feminist critics like Laura Mulvey have
tried to demonstrate that even the visuals of cinema are
structured around male forms of knowing. More importantly,
filmmakers in Richardson's own time, particularly the
Russians Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov, openly
discussed the ways in which even silent films could be
manipulated to portray political ideas that were surely part
of the male realm Richardson tries to dismiss (83-84).
Richardson was certainly aware of the Soviet work, since she
makes references to it in other contexts, so why does she
retain her faith in the primacy of the image? One explanation is that
the addition of words to film, even one that was explicitly
political in the first place, further limits the range of
possible interpretations the viewer can make. More of the
control of the film experience passes out of the hands of
the spectators into those of the (usually male) filmmaker,
and the film inevitably moves toward narrative, toward a
description of events rather than an image of
existence. Might film have developed
along more feminine lines if speech had never become the
standard for production? Richardson obviously believed so,
but it might be a question that is impossible to answer.
Film certainly developed as a masculine form for more
reasons than the simple imposition of speech. The male
control of studios and the means of production meant that
film reflected the tendencies and beliefs of a male
dominated culture. Of course if film had developed without
speech it would likely have followed a very different path,
one impossible to predict, but that might show some signs of
the forms Richardson champions. Silence would have forever
freed film from the trappings of realism, and opened the
possibility of other ways of telling stories and conveying
ideas. Silence would have forever distanced film from the
theatre and created a reliance on image that would have
altered both the audience's relation to cinematography and
the cinematography itself. Instead, despite the apparent
primacy of image that has remained in film, the audience has
learned to rely on sound to tell the story. Mainstream
filmgoers have always, it seems, preferred to have the story
told to them rather than accept the ambiguity that comes
with too much individual interpretation. In the end, this is
one weakness of Richardson's argument. The choice of silent
film means that one embraces an essentially modern artistic
experience where meanings are greatly dependent on mediation
between filmmaker and audience. This task is not one that
all people are capable of or willing to embrace. When so
much of our outside world depends on speech it is inevitable
that we would be most comfortable with films that do so too.
Perhaps when I say we I mean men, but I am not convinced
that the relationship between masculinity and speech is as
pronounced as it was when Richardson was writing. In the
more recent past, questions about women's speech and their
right to it have come to the forefront in a way that finally
addresses some of the inequalities Richardson points out.
The key has been the move, as part of women's studies, from
a focus on public speech to an interest in private speech,
the way women tell stories and assert themselves to each
other in groups. While it remains to be seen whether these
differences between male and female speech can ever be
completely overcome in a way that would box Richardson's
argument into a corner of historical specificity, her
writing opens up lines of inquiry into the practice of
feminist filmmaking by changing our understanding of all of
the 'vocabularies' of film production. There has been an
explosion of films (particularly documentaries) made by
women in the past 30 years that have attempted to mark out a
place in the cinema for women's voices. The strength of
Dorothy Richardson's work is that it offers possibilities
for finding those voices in image as much as in
speech. If these essays were all
this collection offered, it would be very valuable indeed.
The variety and ferocity of the rest of the selections makes
the book essential reading. Evanston, Illinois,
USA Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2003 Paul McEwan, 'The Voice
and Masculinity', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 11, May 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n11mcewan>. Read another review:
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