Documenting the Gaze: Psychoanalysis and Judith Helfand's Blue Vinyl and Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I

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Hilary Neroni is an Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies in the English Department at the University of Vermont. She has published essays on women directors (in particular Jane Campion and Claire Denis) and a book, The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema, on issues surrounding theories of gender and violence in the cinema.

Notes

1. The overnight popularity of films like Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me's (2004) reveal what theorists of the autobiographical documentary have known all along: there is something inexplicably engaging about the tension between the personal and the social in these films (even if you don't like the filmmaker's personality). It is hardly surprising that these mainstream breakthroughs are all male-directed films, considering the accepted traditions and expectations within Hollywood itself. Nonetheless, female autobiographical filmmakers are no longer toiling in complete obscurity either, as their films appearing on Frontline, HBO, and PBS have made their presence felt in the documentary world.

2. Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 98.

3. Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, Feminism and Documentary (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 25.

4. As Mary Ann Doane says a little over a decade later in The Desire to Desire, “we must continue to investigate the representation of female subjectivity or its failure in a variety of discourses—film psychoanalysis, literature, law. The aim of this study is to outline the terms in which a female spectator is conceptualized—that is, the terms in which she is simultaneously projected and assumed as an image (the focal point of an address) by the genre of the woman's film.” (Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987], 8.) After establishing the lineage of feminist formal film theory from Mulvey through de Lauretis, Doane proceeds to argue for exploring the possibilities of female spectatorship through an analysis of the woman's film of the 1940s and its particular way of staging female desire. Thus, Doane's book itself is in conversation with Mulvey's initial thesis and stands as an example of this lineage of Mulvey's feminist formal analysis.

5. Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, Feminism and Documentary, 9.

6. The Ambassadors has provoked many scholarly investigations. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan relied on Jurgis Baltrusaitis’ Anamorphoses: Ou Magie Artificielle Des Effets Merveilleux (Olivier Perrin Editeur, 1969). For other analyses of this painting see: Susan Foister, Ashok Roy, and Martin Wyld, Holbein's Ambassadors (London: National Gallery Publications, 1997); Henry Krips, Fetish: An Erotics of Culture (New York: Cornell University Press, 1999); and John David North, The Ambassador's Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance (London: Hambledon & London, 2002).

7. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 89.

8. For an account of this transition, see Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze (Buffalo, New York: The State University of New York Press, 2007).

9. Slavoj Žižek, “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, eds. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 189.

10. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 84.

11. We can't sustain this experience of the unconscious not because we lack the willpower or the courage, but because it only opens up in a brief instant before reclosing. As Lacan puts it in Seminar XI, “I have constantly stressed in my preceding statements the pulsative function, as it were, of the unconscious, the need to disappear that seems to be in some sense inherent in it—everything that, for a moment, appears in its slit seems to be destined, by a sort of pre-emption, to close up again upon itself, as Freud himself used this metaphor, to vanish, to disappear.” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 43.)

12. Martin O’Shaughnessy sees Varda's films as emblematic of a new trend of political films in France post-1995. About the political nature of Varda's film, he says, “Despite its lightness of touch and resolute good humour, Varda's film also has revolt at its core, in its case refusal of the exclusions and waste associated with the systems of production and consumption of a triumphant capitalist order.” (Martin O’Shaughnessy, “Post-1995 French Cinema: Return of the Social, Return of the Political?” Modern & Contemporary France 11. 2 [2003], 192.)

13. Being both in the other and for you characterizes the form of objet a. As Lacan explains, “a as such and nothing else is the access, not to enjoyment, but to the Other. It is all that remains, starting from the moment when the subject wants to makes its entry in the Other.” (Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre X: L'angoisse, 1962–1963 [Paris: Seuil, 2004], 209, my translation.) In this way, the gaze as objet a not only distorts the visual field but also is the very way that we have access to it.

14. In “‘In his bold gaze my ruin is writ large’,” Slavoj Žižek discusses the moment in Psycho when Norman (Anthony Perkins) sinks Marion's (Janet Leigh) car in a swamp (Slavoj Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) [New York: Verso, 1992]). Žižek suggests that the gaze is located at the moment when the car stops sinking just long enough for the audience to realize that it is on Norman's side because of the desire for the car to sink. In The Real Gaze, Todd McGowan argues that the opaque wind shield of the pursuing truck in Steven Spielberg's Duel (1971) acts as the gaze, as does the moment in most Andrei Tarkovsky films (for example in Solaris and Nostalghia) when different worlds come together in one frame (Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze (Buffalo: SUNY Press, 2006). And Renata Salecl, in “I can't love you unless I give you up,” argues that the gaze can be found in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993) in the glinting window at the end when Newland (Daniel Day-Lewis) turns away from a chance to reunite with his beloved (Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, eds. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek [Durham: Duke University Press, 1996], 170–207).

15. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 95.

16. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 95.

17. “D'abord, si ça a un sens que Petit-Jean me dise que la boîte ne me voit pas, c'est parce que, en un certain sens, tout de même, elle me regarde” (Jacques Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse [Paris: Seuil, 1973], 110, my emphasis).

18. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 96.

19. For other examples not discussed in this paper see: June Cross's Secret Daughter (1996), Tracy Droz Tragos's Be Good, Smile Pretty (2003), and Cathy Henkel's The Man who Stole My Mother's Face (2003).

20. Helfand often uses humor to explore her subjects and express this tension between personal and social. For example, the film starts with the text: “Every three seconds another house in North America is sided with vinyl. (My father did the math.).” The film immediately introduces the large investigative aspect of the piece as well as the humorous autobiographical aspect.

21. In a voice over early on is A Healthy Baby Girl, Helfand explains that another camera crew was making a film on DES babies and they interviewed her. This film crew ends up dropping the topic so she feels the need to make the film herself about her experience and the larger history of DES and the women affected by it.

22. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960), 205.

23. Though originally an extra on the Blue Vinyl DVD, EK VELT finally aired on the Sundance Channel on Mother's Day, May 13, 2007. PBS aired A Healthy Baby Girl, Blue Vinyl, and EK VELT in a row to emphasize their connectedness. Helfand also publicized the event on her website with an announcement that her father had passed away six weeks earlier so that even the airing of these three films was tied to an autobiographical signifier.

24. Recent documentary scholarship has, of course, critiqued and struggled with how to theorize the concept of authenticity and the definition of realism. For scholarship that investigates these issues, see: Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: British Film Institute, 1995); Michael Renov, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (London: Taylor & Francis, Inc, 1993), 12–36; and Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Janet Walker and Diane Waldman's “Introduction” to their Feminism and Documentary (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1999) investigates how the debate over the worth of realist documentary film impacted or came from feminist debates.

25. Clearly, this has not been a debate in fiction film in which the three-dimensional world demands that there is no one point of view. Fiction film employs many points of view (from individual characters to narrative voice to visual emphasis). Though it often weights the film toward one character through point of view, it does not adopt one wholly over another.²⁵ Continuity editing, a cinematic language based on comprehensive space and time, is marked by multiple points of view. A continuous and fluid movement between points of view in fiction, however, is itself what prevents any one point of view from taking hold and thus what creates the three dimensionality of the cinematic fictional world.