NO ONE would dream of writing a book on eroticism in the theater. Not, strictly speaking, because the subject does not lend itself to reflection, but because these reflections would all be negative. Certainly this is not true of the novel, since one whole section of literature is founded, more or less explicitly, on eroticism. But it is only a sector of it, and the existence in the Bibliothèque Nationale of a section known as “hell” points up the fact. It is true that eroticism now tends to play an increasingly important role in modern literature, and novels are full of it, even the popular ones. But aside from the fact that one should doubtless attribute this spread of eroticism largely to the cinema, eroticism remains subject to moral notions of a more general nature which compel us to treat the spreading of it as a problem. Malraux, who among contemporary novelists has assuredly most lucidly expounded an ethic of love based on eroticism, illustrates equally perfectly the modern, historic, and thus relative nature of such a choice. In short, eroticism tends to play a role in contemporary literature similar to that of courtly love in medieval literature. But no matter how powerful its myth, and no matter what future we may foresee for it, eroticism has clearly no specific connection with the literature of the novel in which it appears. Even painting, in which the representation of the human body might well have played a determining role, is only accidentally or secondarily erotic. Licentious drawings, engravings, prints, or paintings constitute only a genre, a variant coming under the same heading as bawdy writing. One could make a study of the nude in the plastic arts but, though one doubtless could not overlook the transmission thereby of erotic feelings, these still remain a subordinate and secondary phenomenon.
It is of the cinema alone that we can say that eroticism is there on purpose and is a basic ingredient. Not the sole ingredient, of course, for there are many films and good ones that owe it nothing, but a major, a specific, and even perhaps an essential one.
Lo Duca* is right, then, to see one of the constants of cinema in this phenomenon: “For half a century the sheet covering the movie screen has borne like a watermark one basic motto: eroticism.” But it is important to know if the ubiquitousness of eroticism, however general, is only an accidental result of the free capitalist play of supply and demand. Needing to attract customers, the procedure would naturally have turned to the most effective stimulus: sex. One might advance in support of this argument the fact that the Soviet cinema is indeed the least erotic in the world. The example deserves thinking about, certainly, but it does not seem conclusive, for one would first have to examine the various cultural, ethnic, religious, and sociological factors which may have come to play in this particular case—and above all one would have to ask whether the puritanism of Soviet films is not a much more artificial and temporary phenomenon than the competition in eroticism among the capitalists. From this point of view the film The Forty-First opens up a lot of new horizons.
Lo Duca seems to see the source of cinematic eroticism in the relationship between seeing a movie and dreaming. “The cinema resembles the dream, with its colorless images like those of a film, and this in part explains the lesser erotic intensity of color films, which in a sense escape the rules of the word of dreams.”
I will not quarrel with my friend except over details. Where do we get this rooted prejudice that no one ever dreams in color? It cannot be said that I am the only one who enjoys this privilege. Besides, I have asked around among friends. The fact is, there are dreams in black and white and dreams in color, exactly as in the cinema, depending on the process. The most I will grant Lo Duca is that the production of color films has outstripped that of dreams in Technicolor. But I certainly will not go along with him in his incomprehensible devaluation of eroticism in color. Well, let us attribute these differences to little personal perversions and not spend more time on them. The essential is still the basically dreamlike quality of cinema, of the moving image.
If this hypothesis is correct, the psychology of the viewer would tend to be identical with that of the sleeper dreaming. And we know that in the last analysis all dreams are erotic.
But we also know that the censorship which presides over dreams is infinitely more strict than all the Mrs. Grundies of the world. The superego of each of us is, unbeknownst, a Mr. Hays. Hence the extraordinary repertory of symbols, general and specific, whose job it is to disguise from our conscious minds the impossible scenarios of our dreams.
Consequently the analogy between dreams and cinema should be extended even further. It lies no less in what we deeply desire to see on the screen than in what could never be shown there. It is a mistake to equate the word “dream” with some anarchic freedom of the imagination. In fact nothing is more predetermined and censored than dreams. It is true, and the surrealists do well to remind us, that this is not due to our reason. It is true also that it is only in a negative sense that censorship can be said to determine the dream, and that its positive reality, on the contrary, lies in the irresistible transgression of the superego’s prohibitions. I am aware too of the difference between cinematographic censorship, which is social and legal, and dream censorship; I only want to point out that the function of censorship is essential to cinema and dreams alike. It is a dialectical constituent of them.
It is this which seems to me to be lacking in Lo Duca’s preliminary analysis, and still more in his enormous collection of illustrations, which constitute a documentation that falls doubly short. The author does know, of course, how exciting things can be that the censor formally prohibits, but he sees them only as a last resort; above all, the intelligence directing the choice of his illustrations exemplifies the contrary thesis. It would have been better to show us what the censor habitually cuts out of films, rather than what he lets pass. I am not denying the interest and certainly not the charm of what the censor leaves in, but I do think, in the case of Marilyn Monroe, that the obligatory photo was not the one from the calendar in which she posed nude (especially since this extra-cinematographic document antedated her success as a star and so cannot be considered a further extension of her sex appeal on the screen) but rather the famous scene from The Seven-Year Itch in which the air from the subway grating blows up her skirt. This inspired idea could only be born in the world of a cinema with a long, rich, byzantine tradition of censorship. Inventiveness such as this presupposes an extraordinary refinement of the imagination, acquired in the struggle against the rigorous stupidity of a puritan code. Hollywood, in spite and because of the taboos that dominate it, remains the world capital of cinematic eroticism.
I am not saying, however, that all true eroticism has to outwit an official code of censorship before it can blossom on the screen. In fact, what is gained by such surreptitious transgression can be more than offset by what is lost. The social and moral taboos of the censors are too arbitrary and stupid to be able to channel the imagination suitably. Though helpful in comedy or film-ballet, for example, they are just a hindrance, dumb and insurmountable, in realistic films.
Thus the one critical censorship that the cinema cannot dispense with is imposed by the image itself, and in the last analysis it is in relation to the image and the image alone that we must attempt to define the psychology and the aesthetics of erotic censorship. I certainly do not intend to outline it here even in the broadest terms, but rather to propose a series of ideas which, linked up, may indicate a direction in which one might explore further.
Before anything else, I must give credit for whatever merit these remarks may have to Jean Domarchi, for they stem from a comment he made to me which seems extraordinarily pertinent and fruitful.
Domarchi, then, who is no prude, told me that he has always been irritated at the orgy scenes on the screen, or in somewhat more general terms, by any erotic scene incompatible with the impassiveness of the actors. In other words, it seemed to him that erotic scenes had to be able to be played like any others, and that actual sexual emotion by the performers in front of the camera was contradictory to the exigencies of art. This austere view at first seems surprising, but it is founded on an irrefutable argument, and on one not resting on moral grounds. If you can show me on the screen a man and woman whose dress and position are such that at least the beginnings of sexual consummation undoubtedly accompanied the action, then I would have the right to demand, in a crime film, that you really kill the victim—or at least wound him pretty badly. Nor is this hypothesis ridiculous, for it is not too long ago that killing stopped being a spectacle. The executions in the Place de Grève were just that, and for the Romans the mortal combat in the circus were the equivalents of orgies. I once wrote, apropos of a notorious newsreel sequence showing officers of Chiang Kai-shek’s army executing “Communist spies” in the streets of Shanghai, that the obscenity of the image was of the same order as that of a pornographic film. An ontological pornography. Here death is the negative equivalent of sexual pleasure, which is sometimes called, not without reason, “the little death.”
The theater would never tolerate anything like this. On the stage everything that relates to the physical side of love derives from the paradox of the actor. No one is ever aroused sexually at the Palais-Royal—neither on the stage nor in the audience. Strip tease, it is true, poses another question, but we can agree that strip tease has nothing to do with the theater, even if it is a spectacle and observe further that it is essential that the woman herself does the undressing. She could not be undressed by a partner without provoking the jealousy of the entire male audience. In reality, the strip tease is based on the polarization and stimulation of desire in the spectators, each one potentially possessing the woman who pretends to offer herself—but if anyone were to leap on the stage he would be lynched, because his desire would then be competing with, and in opposition to, that of all others (unless it turned into an orgy and “voyeurism,” which involve a different mental mechanism).
In the cinema, on the other hand, even a nude woman can be approached by a partner, openly desired, and actually caressed; because unlike the theater, an actual acting space based on consciousness and conflict, the cinema unreels in an imaginary space which demands participation and identification. The actor winning the woman gratifies me by proxy. His seductiveness, his good looks, his daring do not compete with my desires—they fulfill them.
But if the cinema held to this psychology alone, it would idealize pornographic films. On the contrary, it is clear that if we wish to remain on the level of art, we must stay in the realm of imagination. I ought to be able to look upon what takes place on the screen as a simple story, an evocation which never touches the level of reality, at least unless I am to be made an accomplice after the fact of an action or at least of an emotion which demands secrecy for its realization.
This means that the cinema can say everything, but not show everything. There are no sex situations—moral or immoral, shocking or banal, normal or pathological—whose expression is a priori prohibited on the screen, but only on condition that one resorts to the capacity for abstraction in the language of cinema, so that the image never takes on a documentary quality.
This is why And God Created Woman seems to me, despite some good qualities that I recognize, in part a detestable film.
I have put forward my argument, developing logically the remark made by Domarchi. I have now to admit my embarrassment in face of the objections that arise. They are numerous. To begin with, I cannot hide from myself the fact that I have brushed off a good part of the contemporary Swedish cinema. It will be noticed, however, that the masterpieces of eroticism seldom succumb to this criticism. Stroheim himself seems to me to escape it. Sternberg too.
But what troubles me most about the fine logic of my argument is a sense of its limitations. Why do we stop with the actors and not bring the onlooker into the argument? If the aesthetic metamorphosis is perfect, he should be no less impassive than the performers. Rodin’s “Kiss,” despite its realism, provokes no libidinous thoughts.
Above all, is not the distinction between the literary image and the cinematic image false? To consider the latter as of a different essence because it is achieved photographically implies many aesthetic consequences which I will not discuss. If Domarchi’s postulate is correct, it is applicable with proper adaptation to the novel. Domarchi ought to be embarrassed every time a novelist describes acts which he could not imagine with a perfectly cool head. Does the situation of the writer differ all that much from the director and his actors? Only, in these matters the separation of the imagination and the act is fairly dubious, if not arbitrary. To grant the novel the privilege of evoking everything, and yet to deny the cinema, which is so similar, the right of showing everything, is a critical contradiction which I note without resolving.
* Lo Duca, Erotisme au cinéma, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1956.