Love in Motion

Erotic Relationships in Film

Reidar Due

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231850513
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

This is a book about how film encountered love in the course of its history. It is also a book about the philosophy of love. Since Plato, erotic love has been praised for leading the soul to knowledge. The vast tradition of poetry devoted to love has emphasized that love is a feeling. Love in Motion presents a new metaphysics and ontology of love as a reciprocal erotic relationship. The book argues that film has been particularly well suited for depicting love in this way, in virtue of its special narrative language. This is a language of expression that has developed in the course of film history. The book spans this history from early silent directors such as Joseph von Sternberg to contemporary filmmakers like Sophia Coppola. At the centre of this study is a comparison between Classical French and American love films of the forties and a series of modernist films by Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut and Wong Kar Wai.

Love in the World

When filmmakers from roughly the mid-1970s onwards have sought new ways of depicting love, they have often developed perspectives that combine meticulous social realism with aesthetic and imaginative freedom.

Withdrawing both from the classical language of moral interpretation and from the sexual politics of the late 1960s, the filmmakers discussed in this section belong to different traditions and do not form one school. Indeed, one could see them as belonging to rival aesthetic movements. What they have in common is that they present original formal means of addressing the dual perspective, the subjective and the cultural, that is constitutive of the love phenomenon, refusing to allow either the subjective perspective of feeling or the cultural perspective of intelligibility to get the upper hand. In each of the films discussed, this encounter with the love phenomenon in its psychological, historical, economic and moral ramifications pushes the films towards a certain inclusiveness: the social world can never be either background or explanation; it cannot just be the stage for an interaction or the set of conditions that makes sense of what the characters do and feel. This inclusiveness also allows these filmmakers to acknowledge the boundariless or transcategorial nature of love, the way that love seems to migrate from one domain of reality to another, and therefore to find a home in no particular discourse. As we shall see it is love’s relation to place that characterises it as a phenomenon without boundaries: for the place in which the lovers live is itself both material and social, historical and economic, a limit and a source of identity.

This is a cinema that reflects upon the cultural space in which love is made intelligible, but the love relation is never fully determined by the forces that shape it. Classical elements are employed, but the discursive or allegorical implications of the film’s style in each case exceed the borders of classical, character-centred intelligibility. In classical cinema, love was defined as a relationship that makes sense in moral and social terms. It is a relation of sexual reciprocity but one that is embedded in cultural categories that make it rationally intelligible both to the characters and to the spectators. In classical cinema, the character is a centre of intelligibility in the sense of a primary signifier. The character is that which primarily produces meaning, but the character is also a primary content, or signified, that which, above all, the audience is encouraged to enquire about and to speak about. The classical film is not only eminently intelligible. It is also, as we have seen, supremely interpretable. Since the psychological character is offered to us as a sort of intellectual spectacle, we are teased and coaxed into an attitude of cultural deliberation. The ideal audience will think about the film in terms of the central character and it will think about this character in terms of the cultural categories that are inscribed within the film’s dramatic structure (theme, relations between characters, conflict, resolution). As viewers of the classical love film, we are invited to extend the attitude we have towards the films towards love itself. Love is also presented as a meaningful, interpretable relationship and emotion. The narrative subject in classical film seeks a point of articulation that will enable him or her, finally, to make sense of desire.

The reflective form challenges this rational optimism. Unlike fantasy spectacle, the reflective form does not withdraw the relation from rational intelligibility, but it maintains some of the constitutive elements of the love narrative and its intelligibility in a sort of suspense or reflective equilibrium. This state of suspense is reflective in the sense of Kant’s reflective judgement: this is a judgement that does not determine a content by the direct application of categories.

Rohmer and Antonioni

Perhaps the two greatest filmmakers of love are Josef von Sternberg and Eric Rohmer. They express in their films both a refined realism and a rigorous aesthetic vision, and both elements, realism and vision, are at the service of love in their films. Rohmer’s initial project is moral and philosophical. He analyses the amorous ego as a psychological and social fact that can be observed from the outside. The narrative and stylistic aim of his films is to present an aesthetic texture in which this ego, and its delusions, becomes objectified, that is, presented in a way that is not identical to how it appears to itself. This critical presentation of the amorous ego is not, however, objectifying in the sense of framing erotic relationships within pre-given categories. Indeed, many of Rohmer’s films have plots based on a pun or a problematisation of a canonical love category, such as seduction, marriage or adultery.

Rohmerian dramatic psychology is indebted to French classical thought. The ego was analysed in the seventeenth century, in authors like La Rochefoucauld, as a complex social and psychological phenomenon. It is social in that the ego fashions itself in the light of social expectations. The ego is psychological in that it is generated from desires that originate in vanity and the wish to increase one’s self-esteem.

This moral psychology of the ego is presented by Rohmer within the genre of romantic comedy. Within this genre, a film’s plot, or intrigue in French, has the double meaning of story and scheming: plots of seduction often involve one character plotting to ensnare another. These plots are comical, in Rohmer, because the scheming character mostly becomes a victim of his or her own machinations. Comedy signifies for Rohmer a screen on which the amorous subject’s longings and fantasies are projected for all to see. In Rohmer, comedy puts the subject’s most intimate weaknesses and romantic ambitions into the public domain, as the comic plot displays and objectifies the subject’s vanity, erotic desires and social aspirations. Romantic, and erotic, comedy is for Rohmer a means of demonstrating the fusion, in the amorous subject, of social ambition and erotic fantasy, or better, the unity of erotic ambition and social fantasy.

Erotic and romantic comedy is in Rohmer a very serious genre. It employs the means of naturalism and of philosophical reflection. In the filmic space constructed between comic intrigue, naturalist depiction of a social environment and philosophical reflection, Rohmer’s cinema establishes a difference between an amorous ego and an erotic subject. The amorous ego is self-conscious to the point of self-infatuation. The erotic subject is an agency of choice and a source of action. The erotic subject is not necessarily reflected in a self-conscious image that can be attributed to the ego. The ego is charged with the character’s self-reflections. The subject on the other hand is devoid of content; it is the voice of desire within the world, and within the realm of action. Of the ego we can say what it is, of the subject what it does.

This dual structure of subject and ego embodied in the same character is filtered, in Rohmer’s films, through a sort of reduction, where a character is alternately caricatured in its essential traits and rendered as a composite of various inclinations. Dramatic situations serve to bring out the edge of a character, that is, its essential and radical possibility, but this radical possibility is at the same time subtly embedded in a set of inclinations and other character traits. The Nouvelle Vague is for Rohmer not so much a style – defined by documentary techniques, amateur actors, improvisation, and so on – as it is a programme of cinematic analysis: the characters must be presented in their duality of inclination and radicality, within a place that both motivates their desires and gives them occasions for expressing those desires. In such a circumscribed place, inclinations are in Rohmer’s films a kind of rootedness, but this rootedness is only a spring-board or a starting point and never a fatality. In this, he firmly breaks with the psychological style of classical French cinema. Even when his films are carefully situated in a particular town, class or landscape, there is never the suggestion that this environment would somehow imprison the characters or script their actions.

Rather there is the superficially similar, but in fact opposed, notion that cinema should be naturalist in its depiction of the relation between erotic desire and social environment. This means concretely, in terms of mise en scène and narrative progression, that Rohmer, instead of presenting characters who face a conflict or a dramatic situation, shows them as they are dragged along by the inventiveness of their erotic ambitions; and this process is moulded by place in the manner of a question: what do you do at the beach? What do you do in the new town of the Arc de Triomphe? What do you do if you commute between Mans and Paris, or between Paris and a suburb? There is here the notion that desire is not caused by an environment or by circumstances but that it is perceptually moulded by the environment and life circumstances of the desiring subject. You can only desire what you see. Desire has at least to be related, even if by contrast and imaginary longing, to one’s own actual life with its very specific social-spatial circumstances. Desire is for Rohmer a phenomenon appearing after the fact, filtered through layers of personality, class, language and vanity. The subtlety of his aesthetics resides in the precision with which he depicts both the force of desire and the social circumstances of any erotic relation. This precision is at the same time never reductive – and neither is one allowed, even for a moment, to forget about his characters’ sexual interests and social identity. Part of this interest and this identity is age, which is the threshold between a person’s biological and sexual identity and her social status and place in society. For the ages of major interest to Rohmer are phases of transition between adolescence and youth or between youth and adulthood.

The act of driving is essential to the flow of events in Rohmer’s films. In Le Beau Mariage and Conte d’automne is a small portion of real time. It is an occasion to be very close to an actual landscape, to enter the real geographical relationships of the characters and of the story. His main characters in the comedies and season stories are mostly women, and those who drive, the woman of Conte d’automne and the protagonist of Le Beau mariage, drive very ordinary French cars. A point-of-view car-driving sequence begins in Ma nuit chez Maud with a chase of the object of desire. The scene displays a strange intimacy. Here one is not reminded of the smells or noise of driving. The car is not a signifier of modernity or anonymity but, on the contrary, an intimate extension of the body. The small trajectories driven in and around towns – often in search of a lover, or in the company of a prospective lover – are invested with the intensity of anticipation and at the same time part of a world of everyday routines. They stage the narrative subject’s point of view.

In La Boulangère, Rohmer discovers a particular use of the camera, a sort of complicit neutrality in which the implicit subject of enunciation and montage, the ideological point of view that is as if stitched into the fabric of the film, is a particular kind of empathetic yet distant observer. If we compare the distant camera position in Antonioni and Rohmer we find a telling difference on the level of framing. Both directors prefer medium long shots and avoid shot/reverse-shots and other narrative editing conventions within the composition of each scene. Antonioni’s camera finds the characters in the midst of geometrically structured spaces that seem to prescribe for them a limited range of movement. The camera often seems just far enough away from the characters to neutralise emotional identification with them. There the subject of enunciation is indeed an observer, and the observing gaze is, if not disinterested, at least analytical. The relation between camera and character in Rohmer is more obscure and, we might say, dialectical. Rohmer avoids the direct point-of-view shot, but the literary distinction between narrative voice and narrative point of view applies here: the story always has a character at its point of view. The story unfolds around this character and tracks his or her point of view. This point of view is both physical and emotional. In films like Pauline a la plage physical movement organises the space and the plot of the film and the characters display only a limited emotional development. Whether the point of view of the protagonist concerns physical movement or emotional states, the editing and framing of each film are guided by the need to follow the protagonist. A late film that challenges this principle is Conte d’automne, in which the narrative point of view is distributed among a series of characters – but even here framing and editing obey the principle of narrative point of view. The protagonist whose point of view the film obeys is at the same time an object of observation. Curiously this structure becomes even clearer when the protagonist himself is a kind of observer. This is the case in La Boulangère, La Collectioneuse and Le Genou de Claire. The observer observed: already the description of this structure provides the idea of dramatic irony, and in fact these three films are plotted around the irony of an observer and seducer whose great cleverness and intricate scheming are revealed in the course of the film to be other than what they seem in the eyes of another observer within the story world of the film. In La Boulangère a self-satisfied student is afflicted by some form of lethargy, as the woman he has begun to court suddenly disappears from the streets. As a consolation for this loss he begins a patient and somewhat cynical seduction of a girl in a bakery. The protracted campaign is about to succeed when the first woman suddenly reappears. He flees from the bakery girl and quickly gets together with the original object of his affection. She then reveals to him that from her window she has had the leisure to observe all the steps of his attempted conquest.

This small film is visually modest and relies completely on its carefully crafted plot and the device of irony on which it turns. Rohmer’s subsequent films develop more subtle forms of dramatic irony and cover their devices more thoroughly. The observer in Rohmer’s early films is usually a male egotist. The egotist observed – this is the narrative principle behind La Collectioneuse and Le Genou de Claire. These films are genuine psychological studies in erotic desire. They follow directly in the tradition of French eighteenth-century novels such as Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses with their artificially drawn narrative borders that give to the visual space and the story world of the film an experimental intellectual character. These are not erotic films; they are intellectual films about desire, seduction, infatuation and above all the subjectivity of the male seducer. There are thus two objects of psychological analysis in these films: one is the eighteenth-century notion of seduction as a mechanism that can be used by a seducer against the seduced but which also has its own life and is not always within the seducer’s control. The other psychological problem is even more classical, as it is the relationship between ego and subject that we saw in La Rochefoucauld. The seducer is very emphatically a subject: he initiates action and he does so consciously, but furthermore he is acutely aware of being the one who initiates action. His every action is in fact accompanied by self-consciousness and analysis – analysis of the situation, of his prospects of success, analysis in the manner of Mme de Lafayette of a woman’s smallest gestures and reactions. Now, however, we are no longer in the universe of happy transparency of the classical culture. The erotic subject is not always able to read the signs emitted by the object of seduction. On the other hand he is certainly as incapable of reading his own feelings and actions as was the Princesse de Clèves. Being a clever and self-conscious seducer, he is not of course surprised by desire or by an unacknowledged infatuation. His blind spot nests deep within his ego. In his permanent state of self-awareness he is naturally inclined to overestimate his own perspicacity and to ascribe to himself a degree of knowledge that is incompatible with the nature of erotic desire and seduction. The films therefore prove dialectically the life force of erotic communication by showing the failures of seduction. In the two films this dialectic takes different forms.

The seducer in Genou is, in a sense, highly successful, but his success depends on an action that he has had to orchestrate in such a way that the young woman who is the object of his desire is unaware that the action is taking place. Or rather she is unaware that an erotic act is taking place. Jerome, the protagonist, is a bearded, rather small, rather nice middle-aged man with an excessive fondness for adolescent girls. He is on holiday at the lake of Anecy and makes contact with his neighbour and old friend, a woman with two young daughters, one dark, one blonde, both adolescent. The dark girl falls in love with him and then avoids him. The object of his interest is the older, blonde girl, who is there with her smart and sporty boyfriend of her age. His erotic aim, to use Freud’s technical term, is not intercourse, but more simply and more perversely to caress Claire’s knee. He orchestrates an elaborate sequence of events which brings about a situation in which he appears as the nice old friend who pats her on the knee in a consoling gesture. Thus the action that he had ponderously worked out in his mind returns to his mind, the satisfaction of his very own desire remains his very own satisfaction. No actual erotic event has taken place, since Claire did not play a part in it. The seducer’s gradual self-imprisonment takes a more twisted turn in La Collectioneuse. The protagonist is a handsome, vain and much-loved young man. His tall and languid body, his lock of brown hair casually brushed aside from his forehead, his fashionable polo shirts and his melodious soft voice all signal a playboy of some sort. Yet he is far from rich. He is in fact an impoverished art dealer upholding a lifestyle of leisure through the support of wealthier friends. The film narrates his summer holiday in a villa in Southern France. He has planned to spend the summer away from his girlfriend in the company of a painter friend. The pastoral idyll of these male companions is soon disturbed by the intrusion, as he sees it, of a young woman, Haidee, who also benefits from the rich friend’s hospitality. The rest of the film depicts a kind of war of seduction between the protagonist and Haidee. A voice-over tells us of the protagonist’s thoughts. Well aware of his own near-irresistible effect on women, he is certain that Haidee will fall for him, but he is determined to resist the temptation of an affair and avoid the traps of seduction that he thinks she will put out for him. The events that we see look, on the other hand, somewhat different. We see him eagerly pursuing her in different ways, caressing her body, taking her out at night, putting her down with macho bravado and ridiculing one of her hapless young lovers. This persistent campaign is revealed as such by Haidee late in the film when she says that they have already gone too far in the direction of becoming lovers. Their non-relation takes a different turn, however, in the last episode of the film. After a business deal that he has missed because of her, the ice is broken and they kiss. Before they embark on an affair their car crosses another car with some of her friends. They invite her to join them on a trip to Switzerland. The protagonist just leaves her with her friends, apparently relieved to have escaped the temptation.

The obvious irony of the protagonist believing he is being seduced while acting consistently as the pursuer quickly recedes into the background and is replaced by a different, more interesting problem of seduction. It is in fact not clear who is seducing who or who is trying to seduce who or if anyone is in fact active in the seduction that takes place between the two characters. The film portrays a situation of seduction, where the mere spatial coexistence of these two beautiful people seems...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Ego Love and Melodrama
• Categories of Film Love
• Making Sense
• The Ontology of Love
• Eros in History
• The Social Paradigm
• American Cinema of Choice
• French Cinema of Place
• Hitchcock and Lang
• Love in the World
• Conclusion: On Method
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index