Gazes into the Abyss

Antonio M. Villalba (Universitat Pompeu Fabra; Escuela Universitaria de Artes TAI)

This video essay emerges from an approach to the histories of cinema created from phantasmatic forms. I explore the blurred boundary separating classicism from modernity, as cinema transitions towards a postmodern narrative characterized by the ambiguous, the relative, the uncertain… Domènec Font references Zygmunt Bauman when he states that “postmodernity is in large part modernity that psychoanalyses itself in order to end up accepting its own impossibility” (2012: 23). Thus, the modern period of Hollywood cinema is characterized as much by its psychological illness as by its unconsciousness in its diagnosis. A realm of phantasmatic forms emerges, built on the inertia of classicism and not fully recognized until postmodernity. Following this perspective, the present research seeks to identify the initial reactions against an increasingly ambiguous narrative through the acting gesture; in essence, the early rejections of impossibility. These are gestures within a classical narrative that become porous:

Mannerism, minimalism, and neo-baroque continue in their ideology hic et nunc, accounting for the porosity of all frontiers. The post-postmodern period is a territory of phantasmatic forms (Font, 2012: 23).

Before specifying the object of study, it is worth considering the forms that determine this ambiguous evolution of the story. From a psychoanalytical point of view, Jesús González Requena defines a formal mannerist tendency, concerning classicism, based on the work of directors such as Douglas Sirk, Luis Buñuel, or Alfred Hitchcock. In this sense, the mannerist story is expressed as a process of introspection on the desires and shortcomings of the hero, which reveals dissonances and ambivalences for the concreteness of the classical story. A gradual distortion of the object of desire produces in the mannerist hero “the anguish of having lost his place” (Requena, 1985: 92).

This thawing of classicism is studied through Deborah Kerr’s gesture, specifically in three films in which her traditional star-image (Dyer, 1986) as a puritanical English woman is disrupted by the moral disorder of the story (Deleyto, 2001) [1]. These are Separate Tables (Delbert Mann, 1958), The Naked Edge (Michael Anderson, 1961) and The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961). With the gesture of Deborah Kerr’s exorbitant gaze as a central reference, other antecedent gestures are contrasted comparatively, as well as Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), as a paradigmatic mannerist film (Requena, 2012). In this way, a reflection on the Mannerist canon is proposed, questioning whether the underlying idealism maintains a certain composed order in the narrative:

Vertigo sees a metaphysical dilemma created by the very act of looking -that the mind selectively idealizes appearances and commits itself to those “looks” with no possibility of any lasting, stable accommodation between reality and ideality (Shaffer, 1984: 383)

Thus, while James Stewart—mostly invisible in the video essay—calmly denies any estrangement from the narrative through his gestures, Deborah Kerr confronts them. Her performance highlights the crazy-violent development of the story, embodied in her male antagonists: David Niven in Separate Tables; Gary Cooper in The Naked Edge; and the child in The Innocents. Madness looms over the representation through Deborah Kerr’s gestures, illustrating a historical transition. In this way, I follow Foucault’s theories on madness:

In the limited and defined space of this contradiction, the discursive knowledge of madness unfolds. Beneath the orderly and calm faces of medical analysis, a difficult relationship is at play in which historical becoming is realized: the relationship between unreason, as the ultimate sense of madness, and rationality as the form of its truth  (Foucault, 2015: 415).

In short, a comparative revision of Deborah Kerr’s gesture is proposed, situating it as a critical alternative to the canon. The entrance to modernity through the exorbitant gazes that confront the moral decomposition of the story. The wickedness of the hero, of love, and childhood are expressed in the critical gesture of an actress hitherto inscribed in the most upright English order.

Notes:

[1] Originally, Kerr’s star image is defined as the “stereotype of the neo-Victorian woman’ and a type of contemporary femininity, a ‘complex and sometimes contradictory” woman (Deleyto, 2001: 122). This is how she expresses herself in her beginnings in the English industry, from Love on the Dole (John Baxter, 1941) to Black Narcissus (Emeric Pressburger; Michael Powell; 1947), as a moderate woman, who glimpses reflections of Antigone and Madame Bovary, but who does not fall into the madness of social incomprehension. This star image was maintained in her first American films until the Hays Code was relaxed in 1953. Then, she shot From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953), where she played an adulterous woman for the first time, beginning the path towards the moral disorder of the mannerist story, which would be definitively manifested in the central films of this investigation.

[2] In the video essay, this transition is represented by the newspaper scene from Separate Tables. This is juxtaposed with a passage from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, where she alludes to lost youth through small everyday gestures, as with Kerr’s character in the film. Similarly, Woolf refers to the reconfiguration of the moral order in the passage from adolescence to adulthood through the disillusionment of an idyllic first love, just as Kerr disillusions the character of her love for David Niven when reading the newspaper in Separate Tables.

Bibliography:

• Deleyto, C. (2001) The nun’s story: feminity and Englishness in the films of Deborah Kerr en Babington, B. (Ed.). (2001) British Stars and Stardom. Manchester University Press.
• Dyer, R. (1986) Stars. British Film Institute.
• Font, D. (2012) Cuerpo a cuerpo. Galaxia Gutenberg.
• Foucault, M. (2015) Historia de la locura en la época clásica I. Fondo de Cultura Económica.
• González Requena, J. (1985) En los límites del cine clásico: la escritura manierista de Douglas Sirk, en Eutopías, vol. I, nº 1-2, Invierno-Primavera, 1985.
• González Requena, J. (2012) Clásico, manierista, postclásico. Los modos del relato en el cine de Hollywood. Castilla Ediciones.
• Shaffer, L. (1984) Obsessed with “Vertigo”, en The Massachusetts Review, vol. 25, nº 3, otoño, 1984.

Filmography:

• Anderson, M. (1961) The Naked Edge. United Artists.
• Baxter, J. (1941) Love on the Dole. British National Films.
• Clayton, J. (1961) The Innocents. 20th Century Fox.
• Hitchcock, A. (1958) Vertigo. Paramount Pictures.
• Mann, D. (1958) Separate Tables. United Artists.
• Pressburger, E.; Powell, M. (1947) Black Narcissus. Independent Producers; The Archers.
• Zinnemann, F. (1953) From Here to Eternity. Columbia Pictures.