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THE CINEMATIC CAPTURE OF THE SEXES

This text is of a piece with a film, Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman. It is, so to speak, the written prelude to it, such that reading, in this case, cannot go without seeing, or hearing. It is an “explication de film,” the way we say, or used to say, an “explication de texte.” A genre that is not a critical but a didactic one.

I must nevertheless add: I don’t think that reading a text (explicating it) amounts to enumerating the catachreses, asyndetons, metaphors, or synecdoches in it any more than I think that explicating a film requires identifying its zoom, reverse tracking, or out-of-frame shots. That sort of thing is the bogus formalism of the Diafoiruses and Trissotins¹ of cinema. But nor is it a matter, needless to say, of telling the story, hailing the actors, saying what a great time you had, and taking your leave. The discourse of journalism is not a cure for the discourse of the University.

As usual, I will attempt to use the discourse of the master, which is nothing but the discourse of the Idea, as its passage is inscribed in one form and one alone.

Let’s begin with the title. Identification of a Woman is a true translation of the true Italian title. Let’s say that it’s a true title, or rather the title of a truth. Which truth? This one: what cinema is capable of with respect to sex or sexuation, or even what it alone is capable of, is giving sensible, corporeal form, not, as is too often thought, to the distribution of sexed roles or to the images of that distribution but rather – and this is infinitely trickier, and more original – to the process of identification of what being sexed means for a subject.

The fact that a woman loves a man designates that man as the identifier of that woman. Loving is a desire, hence a duty, because desire and the law are one and the same thing. Loving a woman imposes on you the duty of identifying her. Will you be able to live up to that desire, to that duty? This is not at all a question of a role, or of a type, since it is a question that constitutes a subject.

In Antonioni’s film one of the two women subject to identification, Ida, the second one, played by Christine Boisson, says to her male identifier, the believable Niccolò: “I’m a human being like you. It’s only a matter of chance that I’m not the same sex.” I like to think that what is really at issue in the cinema, where sexuation is concerned, is that chance, the capture of that chance, and of all its consequences: being of one sex or the other.

What Ida claims is that, prior to the chance determination of sex, there is a humanity that is everywhere the same, a generic humanity, a humanity based on identity or resemblance, not on difference or mystery. A particular image of this idea is moreover featured in the film. The male character is a filmmaker, as in Fellini’s 8½, with which Antonioni’s film, perhaps unconsciously, carries on a dialogue of sorts. The filmmaker has a very vague idea for a film that would be about a woman, or would be based on a woman. Consequently, he is looking for a woman’s face. On the wall of his apartment he puts up photos of women – Louise Brooks, obviously, a sort of hopeless nostalgia, and other photos that he cuts out of magazines. The one he likes best is the photo of a terrorist, a member of the Red Brigades most likely. It is the only photo in which the woman is paired with a man, her man, her lover, who is also a terrorist. Both of them are in prison. Niccolò the filmmaker tells Ida: “These lives are coherent,” and he comments that those two have the same world view, they face the same risks, they share everything they are and do. So we can imagine them, or identify them, as representatives of a humanity of identicality and sharedness. We can imagine that the chance difference between the sexes does not undermine that paired identity of a humanity of identicality.

There is one fundamental art that defends the idea of a generic humanity protected by identity, an art in which the universality of human types triumphs, albeit with great violence. That art is the epic, the epic narrative of self-affirmation, the heroic negation of the negative. Cinema joins forces with affirmative humanity when it accepts to take on the epic, its space, its taciturn heroes, its duels in which the Same confronts the Same for the glory of Sameness. This sort of thing happens more than once with Griffith, Eisenstein, or Ford. It doesn’t happen with Antonioni. What is at stake in the film under consideration is only allusively and fleetingly that generic orientation, that humanity whose burden, if there is one, is that of commonalities, not differences. In Antonioni’s cinema, and ultimately in cinema as a whole, the chance addition of sexuation gives rise to radical, painful alienation, to passionate ignorance, to a sort of disordered estrangement. Above all, the contingency of sex foregrounds the need for an identification of the other sex, for an analysis of the heteros, or heterosexuality, whose actual scene, or real process, is nothing but love, or the attempt at love, but of which cinema endeavors to be the privileged artistic witness.

In this sense, cinema, or at least one kind of cinema, albeit an essential one, is an art of love, a witness in thought of love as the identification of difference. The novel, too, is an art of love, but the novel treats love as fate. It inscribes that fate in the gap between the sublimity of renunciation and the lost illusions of symbolic fusion. Cinema of course pays tribute to the novel and therefore to renunciation and to lost illusions as well. But I would at least like to suggest that that is not its own particular genius; that the aim of cinematic capture, which both depends on and elucidates the visible and speech, luminous bodies and dark signs, is identification, the story of identification; and that it concerns the chance determination of sex as such and legitimates it as chance and as a consequence of chance.

Through the exhibition and the evasiveness of bodies, and with its constant repetition of signs, cinema asks: If sex is the contingent supplement that weakens and divides generic humanity, is there any hope of connecting that supplement to that genericity? Is there a human element in sexuation or is it essentially non-human? This question can only be answered by showing how the identification of the other sex, in situations both unique and typical, occurs from within love, or what is assumed to be love. For if that identification were possible, nothing would prevent it from being connected to generic humanity’s capacity for identity and similarity. If it were impossible, however, the split would be irreparable, and the very idea of humanity would be hurt, injured as regards the minimum of identity it requires.

The question can also be phrased as: Is love the scene in which the fundamental Two of the sexes laboriously produces an identifying thought of its own duality? Or is it always the tortured witness of an impossible identification, of a Two that exists only in mystery and alienation when it comes to love?

Or: Is love human or non-human?

The fact that this is one of cinema’s key questions, and the reason why this is so, is attested by one major example: sex scenes, which are both the obsession and the real test of this art of the visible.

Cinema is the only one of the arts that can claim to capture, pin down, and convey the sex act. There are pornographic novels, of course, but imagination is more than enough for them. The power of words to name the non-existent can turn all the paragraphs you like into pornography. There is no need for real sex organs. But cinema testifies, and increasingly so, to the real of organs, positions, cries, and sweat. It arranges their repeating visibility. And for a very long time, under the strictest censorship, cinema announced that it could capture and convey the sex act, that it alone could really do so, and that all it had to do was show, but really show, an ankle, some cleavage, a black stocking, or a symbol for everyone to thrill with pleasure at the idea that everything was visible and that there was nothing intimate that couldn’t be violated and exposed by cinema. In this regard, as has often been remarked, cinema in its essence, or rather in its essential possibility, is pornographic.

Nevertheless, as art, cinema sets up a question, not a business. It does not sell sexual spices. And the question it asks is very clear: Is pornography – understood as the exhibition of sexuality, but taken in terms of its connection to love – human or non-human? Can there exist an exhibition of sexuality – or even just of nudity – that bears witness to a process of identification of difference? Or does any exhibition of sexuality refer to the objective non-humanity of that which involves no thought?

Antonioni courageously confronts the problem in the film’s three sex scenes, which he takes right to the edge of pornography, especially if we consider the date the film was made, 1982. The chief difficulty, as we know, is that the subjectivation of the sex act offers it its only chance to be humanized. Yet how can the signs of such a subjectivation be found in the visible when cinematic capture narrowly circumscribes within the frame the excitement of the bodies or the too prettified, too painterly display of their relaxing after the race? This difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that – as opposed to what some libertarians, for whom sex is multi-faceted liberation as such, would have us believe – there is nothing more monotonous, closed, and finite than the repertoire of sexual positions. It would seem almost impossible to conclude from this that there can be a process of identification of differences in cinema, when the slightest nude scene immediately produces an overwhelming feeling of déjà-vu and what we want more than anything is for the actors to hurry up and get out of that bed in which they are unrecognizable, in which, as opposed to any identification, their identities hardly matter or other ones can be substituted for them. Or when, as has long been the case thanks to the use of body doubles, they are not purely and simply replaced by a surrogate.

The problem can be expressed as follows: How can a sex scene be filmed in immanence? How can it be subordinated to the identifying process of love?

Antonioni attempts to give three different answers to this question. But, when all is said and done, he answers in the negative, in my opinion. Sex, the film tells us in its very attempt to say the opposite, cannot be the locus in which the sexes are identified. The sex act is blind to sexual difference; when it comes to the identification of a woman, it is the locus of the greatest obscurity. But let’s describe Antonioni’s three attempts. All three of them concern the woman who is difficult to identify par excellence: Mavi, the woman who runs away and disappears, the aristocrat who is possibly also a lesbian and a prostitute, unless those categories are only the man’s projections.

The first sex scene involves classic sexual positions. The man performs cunnilingus for a long time on the woman, who is fondling her breasts. Then he penetrates her from on top, with her knees raised and her clutching him between her legs. Prior to this, there was the woman’s initiative, the woman making the decision, standing in only her panties on the bed and extending her hand to the man. The filmic supports of subjectivation do not have to do with the succession of sexual positions here, nor with what can be inferred from the faces or the words. They lie above all in the establishing of a distance that is not really one, since the bodies are filmed from too close up for there to be any true objectivity to the scene, any real long shot, any real description, and from too far away for it to be regarded as a pornographic close-up. Rather, everything suggests that the scene’s very passionate and tense physical violence is also a sort of blind linking-up of the amorous subjects and does not lead to any genuine identification.

In the second scene, Mavi’s body is filmed with her lying on her stomach now, and it essentially involves her being masturbated: the woman guides the man’s hands to her buttocks, and we will later see, without any real close-up again, that the man thrusts his fingers, almost roughly, deep inside the woman. Here, too, the distance is both too short and too long. In addition, there are several interpolated shots of the woman’s hands, of the way they grab the sheets when she is on the point of coming. This scene is in any case more about orgasm than about desire. It needs to be linked to the remarks made by a young woman in another of the film’s scenes, a scene that takes place at a strange swimming pool.

This young woman claims to have slept with Mavi and thus gives rise to the lesbian order of identification. When she is questioned by the male protagonist as he is searching for Mavi, who has disappeared, the young woman says three things. First, that chastity might be a solution since she, the young woman, is incapable of love; next, that there is nothing better than masturbation; and finally that masturbation is nicer when performed by a woman than by a man. The scene I was discussing a moment ago is a counter-position to these three notions, because it connects the sex act to the possibility of love; it includes masturbation in a broader spectrum of acts; and it is heterosexual. It is nevertheless true that orgasm in the scene is connected with a violence in which the man, the service provider, is so to speak erased and in which it may well be that he could be replaced by a woman. Thus the lessons of the pool are anticipated via their sexual reverse, as a sort of retroactive curse.

The third scene abandons any attempt at a convincing reproduction of sexual activity. The two bodies are lying beside each other, filmed in a long shot this time, with the woman in front and the man lying against her back, and they move fluidly as in a horizontal dance, immersed in the fluttering of white sheets before them, in the wind coming from nowhere. For the first time we will see, albeit innocently, the woman’s pubic hair, and even fleetingly, for only a second, the man’s penis, completely flaccid. This time what is involved is an explicit estheticization, in which nudity is at the service of the image and of movement, and all of it is really offered to a presumed gaze, at the cost, though, of it all being asexual. In other words, this scene abandons immanence at the same time as it abandons the sex act per se. It tells us, in the sphere of sublimation, that there is no sexual relationship and therefore that there is never any identification whatsoever at the moment of the act.

So Antonioni’s thesis, demonstrated filmically, is indeed that sex, at any rate, never dispels the mystery of sexuality.

The question is whether this thesis has to do with cinema or with the real. Remember that the hero is a filmmaker looking for a woman’s face for his film. Does this then mean that in cinema the identification of a woman cannot come about by way of the exhibition, however refined, of the sex act? Or that what cinema is capable of testifying to is that the sex act never contributes to the identification of a woman? Antonioni’s film takes great care to leave something undecidable about this issue. If we accept that displaying the intra-amorous process of identification of a woman in the visible is what defines a whole swath of cinema; and if it is clear that in cinema the sex act, however under- or over-represented it may be, does not involve that process of identification, then we will tend to think that the thesis of Antonioni’s film is a cinema thesis about the real, a linking of cinema to the real of love. And that, all in all, the truth is that sex is what needs to be identified, not what identifies.

Let us even say, more generally, and to the extent that cinema is the art of stripping bare, that stripping a woman bare is unrelated to identifying her.

In addition to the sex scenes, there is a high frequency, in Antonioni’s film as in countless others, of female nudity, and especially of scenes of stripping or getting dressed again. In connection with the second woman, Ida, now, there is even an exceptionally indecent scene. At the end of a corridor, filmed from a distance, a totally naked Ida gets up from the toilet, wipes herself, and walks out of the shot. What is the point of this? In the discreet economy of the film, these are all inflections of one essential point, which is that a woman’s intimacy is not at all part of her identification. This restrained critique of intimacy and intimism, as the supposed loci of the identification of sexed positions, is highly relevant. Basically, the mystery is a public one and should be treated as such.

How, then, does identification operate, once it has been purged of any intimist hypothesis and therefore of all psychologism, including sexual? What are its terms? I would like to show that what Antonioni’s film, as a film – in its places and its cuts, in its colors and its slow pacing – encourages us to think is that, in love, the process of identification of a woman involves a capacity for decision on the part of the man, which he more often than not lacks. Or that we think a woman is a mystery to the extent that we think it is a matter of knowing her. But it is really a matter of deciding her.

Consequently, the aim of the cinematic capture of the sexes is to deal with the interrelationship among three terms in the visible: decision, disappearance, and mystery. Rather than saying, it is a matter of showing, and therefore of demonstrating, that it is wrong to think that it is a woman’s mystery, as evidenced by her disappearing, that makes it impossible to decide for love. On the contrary, it is the lack of decision that turns everything into a mystery and leads to the woman’s disappearing.

Antonioni’s genius lies in plunging us into the ideological order of male representation, which puts mystery in charge, and in discreetly showing us that a real decision would have cleared everything up. It is for the purposes of this demonstration that the main formal techniques that define Antonioni’s style are brought to bear. It is a style that could be called an understated mannerism or, inversely, an ornate narrative. In the film under consideration, three formal devices in particular can be noted that are clearly connected with the theme I just highlighted, the triangulation among mystery, disappearance, and decision – a triangle in which the process of identification of a woman operates and ultimately fails.

(1) The most well known of these involves making the mystery visible by means of the distanced gaze, or distancing, which can change the meaning of a fragment of the world, depending on how it is framed. That was the theme of an entire film, Blow-Up. Here, too, there is the man who, from a green, or blue, car, is possibly, probably, watching Niccolò’s apartment from the street. In a high angle shot from the window, we see him, a tiny figure, partly hidden by the trees. In the long party scene at the home of the upper-crust friends of Mavi, the woman to be identified, there are also the whispers, the ambiguous glances, the enigmatic group scenes, dissolving slowly into one another with a kind of drawing-room formality à la Visconti, while the confusion and uncertainty of the character thus observed by what he is observing grows. Above all, as a symbol of this opacity introduced by distance into the real, there is a strange object in the branches of a pine tree outside the window, an object that is neither a bird’s nest, nor a pine cone, nor quite a wasps’ nest either, and whose real identity we will never learn. With this object we have the true symbol of non-identification.

But what is important, on balance, is that this undecidability introduced by distance into the gaze hinges entirely on the hero’s inability to decide to do what has to be done to put an end to it. Even when he leaves his apartment to walk over to the supposed spy, it is only because Mavi has suggested the idea to him. He will never go look for the object in the tree. He will not put a stop to his growing anxiety by asking serious questions of the people at the aristocrats’ party. At bottom, mystery suits him. It suits him as a substitute for decision. Why? Because mystery presents the real as a problem of knowledge, whereas the real is always of the order of the act. But the male character isn’t interested in this real act. As a result, identification is presented as a detective-novel problem and, at the same time, eluding the act that alone has the power to found it, it necessarily ends up in a reassuring acknowledgment of failure.

(2) The second formal technique is the dispersal of the identification process in either an empty or obscure space, or both, a space in which everything is reversible and the very traces of the process disappear. First, there is the interminable scene in the fog. For once Niccolò has decided something: he is taking Mavi to an isolated house in the country. But fog blankets the road; the car is stopped by strange, luminous roadblocks. We see flashing high beams; we hear the rumors being spread by the drivers lost in the fog: “they” fired shots, “they” found a body in the river, and so on. Niccolò alternates between brief inquiries in the fog and pointless bursts of anger. A kind of blue-gray shroud of fog makes everything disappear. Fed up with all these trappings of obscurity, Mavi takes off on foot and instantly disappears. A strange apathy then takes hold of Niccolò, who has gone back to his primal indecisiveness. Mavi will return to the car and the lovers will eventually find the house (a big, freezing-cold building ridden with emptiness), but, with joy and enthusiasm gone, everything is ruined, and the final sex scene (the most estheticizing one) will turn out to be the prelude to the ultimate loss of Mavi.

The other scene, with Ida now, likewise bogs an ostensible decision (to spend a few days together in Venice) down in an unsuitable space. This is the scene in the “open lagoon,” the place where the waters of Venice open out onto the sea, a white and gray place with no landmarks, where the lovers go boating and Ida feels nothing but fear and desolation. The lapping of the waves, the only sound in this place (as the man notes), is like a funereal rhythm, or a meaningless monotonous chant. Niccolò apologizes and attributes his fondness for such a deserted place (the gray desert, after the red one) to his quest for cinematic inspiration. But here, too, space is like a time just before the end. The break-up will occur that very day.

(3) The third and final technique, the crucial one, places the pure moment of non-acting in a closed, or very cramped, space. It is the moment when a gesture will not be made or a word will not be spoken, and identification will fail definitively, along with the love that included the possibility for it. This can be called the mode of counter-flight. Let me explain what I mean by that term. In Antonioni’s films, and in many other works of art, it at first seems as if a woman’s essence is to flee, to disappear.

Take Mavi, for instance, the aristocrat, a woman being closely watched perhaps, a kept woman perhaps, a lesbian perhaps, who will disappear one fine day. And the same goes for her counterpart, Ida, who we will learn at the very end of the film is pregnant by a friend and who had thus concealed, or removed, an essential part of herself from the view of the male protagonist. Yes, the pattern – a woman fleeing, disappearing, and a man wandering around looking for her – does seem to be the plot of many films, and especially Antonioni’s.

But if we take a closer look at it, and if we watch everything again in terms of what I call the filmic moment of non-acting, our opinion will have to be different. In reality, the woman flees in order to create a space of decision for the man she loves but who, precisely because he fails to make any decision, she can’t be sure loves her in return. If she disappears, he will at least have to decide to look for her. And, as Pascal says, if he looks for her it means he has really found her, that is, loved her. Similarly, in Ida’s case, if she reveals what was hidden – the friend by whom she is pregnant – the hero will have to decide whether he loves her enough to disregard that and to take on, with her and for her, fatherhood and friendship, not just companionship and sex.

Yet what does the character, the man, do? He doesn’t even really look for Mavi. The one who understands that that must be his desire is Ida, and it is she who will find the trace of the woman who has disappeared. But now there is the key scene, the filmic moment of non-acting. We are in a narrow staircase, whose spiral form, filmed abstractly, is reminiscent of a labyrinth. Besides, wasn’t it Ariadne-Ida who was able to lead our weak Niccolò-Theseus to the Minotaur, the woman he has to identify? He is all the way at the top of the stairs, on the landing, just above Mavi’s door. She arrives, can’t get the door open right away, suspects his presence, smokes a cigarette … In short, she once again gives him time to make a decision. But he doesn’t move, he lets her go in and shut the door, and he leaves, with his shoulders looking as narrow as the spiral staircase. From the window above, without our being able to tell if she is visible to him or not, Mavi, a dejected look on her face, watches him as he walks away down the street.

And when Ida, between two glass doors, tells Niccolò about the state of affairs (the friend, the baby she is expecting), he says nothing; he acts as though his silence were eloquent; he uses the fake, very male art of eloquent silence, and leaves without our being able to know what he would or could have made of the real that is activated in this way.

Thus we are informed – by the well-organized force of the forms, the blue fog, the distance of the images, the slowness of the rituals, the melancholy sound of the sea, the flight of the women, the indecisiveness of the men, the immobility of the objets d’art, the impotence of the words – about what foregrounds, and leads to the failure of, the central theme of cinema since its invention, the identification of a woman.

What foregrounds the theme is the chance amorous encounter, whereby two fragments of indivisible humanity suddenly become players in the game of difference and its thinking. The sudden sexuation of everything owing to a chance encounter: this is what leads one, above and beyond the aporias of the sex act, into the labyrinth of identification.

But what leads to its failure, at least as far as Antonioni (but many other directors as well) is concerned is, in a word, a philosophical contradiction. For the male polarity – and this is perhaps what is most essential to it – to identify is to know. And since there is in reality nothing to know, since even pornographic nudity provides nothing to know about a woman, there is necessarily mystery, which gradually permeates the whole world. For the female polarity, the whole point is for love to be explicitly decided, if only by a declaration of love. It is the act that matters this time, not knowledge. If too much indecision introduces too much mystery, the latter will be compounded by withdrawal or disappearance, thus affording, through a deliberate increase in mystery, a last chance for a decision to be made.

Antonioni’s exceptional mastery has to do with this process of mystery and with the issue of the missing act, which would dispel its bitter charms. That is why he is really a filmmaker of the identification of a woman, inasmuch as, such an identification being impossible for the man, it remains one of the rare forms of the real still available to him today.

“La différence des sexes est-elle visible?” ed. Jacques Aumont Conférences du Collège d’histoire de l’art cinématographique (Paris: Cinémathèque française, 2000), pp. 127–37