The Dimensions of Difference

Space, Time and Bodies in Women's Cinema and Continental Philosophy

Caroline Godart

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783486564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

The Dimensions of Difference departs from traditional takes on feminist film criticism, and in particular from the psychoanalytical focus on the gaze, to examine the question of sexual difference through three axes: space, time, and bodies. These are some of the most fundamental elements of cinema, which deploys the bodies of actors through space and time, for instance, through camerawork and editing. While this approach may not at first sight seem to be related to questions of gender and sexuality, Caroline Godart demonstrates its relevance to feminist film studies by weaving together careful analyses of space, time, and bodies in women’s cinema with close readings of the same concepts in the works of three philosophers: Luce Irigaray, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze. The book investigates how certain films generate a cinematic experience of sexual difference, and frames this analysis within a careful philosophical inquiry into the notion of alterity itself. These tools provide fruitful resources for feminist inquiry, giving insights into sexual difference as it operates within film aesthetics and, beyond cinema, in the world at large. The result is a compelling reflection on feminism, film form, and continental philosophy.

Chapter 1

The Feminist Distance

Space in Jane Campion’s The Piano

The past two decades have seen a surge of interest in the topic of spatiality in a wide range of disciplines, such as art history, philosophy, cultural studies, or human geography. This focus has been particularly relevant for film studies, as space is one of the essential elements of cinema. Feminist film critics approaching this question have mainly concentrated on the gendered signification of travel and movement, or of certain locations, such as the city or the home. But what would it mean to define spatiality itself in feminist terms? And how could it be made relevant to an exploration of sexual difference in cinema? As noted in the introduction, Irigaray suggests intriguingly in the opening pages of Ethics of Sexual Difference that we will only move beyond phallocentrism once women have developed a space (and a time) of their own, and she elaborates a compelling theory of spatiality. Grounded in a close analysis of Jane Campion’s 1993 movie The Piano, this chapter considers the numerous points of convergence between the philosopher and the director, arguing that they both develop a twofold understanding of space as either the condition of woman’s self-affirmation, or the medium of her disappearance.

The Piano holds a very particular place in the history of cinema, as perhaps the most influential film made by a woman. Not even Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker can rival its combination of its success at the box-office and critical acclaim.1 The movie was a blockbuster and Campion went on to win many awards. Most notably, she was the first (and so far the only) woman to win the Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival, establishing her as the leading female director of her time.2 Further, The Piano was the subject of considerable academic scrutiny, which, given the film’s release in the early 1990s, relied mostly on psychoanalytical and generic perspectives.3 Yet this dense, complex movie invites a much wider array of interpretations.

In this chapter, I argue that the movie is driven by a formal framework that relies chiefly and consistently on the opposition between nearness and distance. In particular, what interests me is the tension that exists between the film’s favorite camera technique, the close-up, and the main trait of Ada’s characterization, which is the insurmountable distance that separates her from the spectator and those who share her life in the movie (with the exception, to a certain degree, of her daughter). I argue that both Irigaray and Campion develop a feminist ethics that is grounded in closeness and distance, and the corresponding interplay of intimacy and autonomy. By investigating the philosophical implications of Campion’s aesthetic choices for feminism, I suggest that her understanding of space in The Piano resonates closely with Irigaray’s concept of the interval.

Campion’s engagement with the politics of spatiality is inextricably tied to a second question, which complicates and deepens the first, which is: How does this conceptualization of space relate to the great conundrum of the movie, which is its treatment of sexual violence? Campion, in spite of her predilection for romance (for instance, her latest film, Bright Star), is at heart a filmmaker of violence, a central theme that dominates most of her work.4 Even though The Piano has been hailed as a love story and marketed as such, Campion suggests that sexual violence is at the center of heterosexual erotics, as it pervades Ada’s relationships with both her husband and her lover (it even seems to be at the source of her love for the latter).5 Like Campion, Irigaray examines sexual difference in general and heterosexuality in particular through the violence that constitutes it in phallocentrism. In the chapter, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” she suggests that sexual violence is the original force that estranges woman from herself and from the close embrace of the lips that form her sex. It is also the mode in which phallocentric sex occurs, and that in which Ada falls in love with Baines. In sum, two understandings of space are sketched out, both in the film and in the philosophical text. On the one hand, a phallocentric logic of intrusion (sexual violence) and alienation (woman does not know herself; man and woman do not speak to each other because the woman has no place). On the other hand, both The Piano and Irigaray propose a feminist spatiality that rests upon nearness, intimacy, and the distance that enables autonomy and intimacy.

I will end this chapter with a study of the limits of Campion’s affinities with Irigaray and with feminism in general. It can be tempting to read Campion as more of a feminist than she actually is: after all, she presents us with a female character who insists on preserving her independence and her creativity. But Campion also romanticizes a story that finds its source in an eminently unequal power relation between a man and a woman. An analysis of the genre in the film, and in particular of her engagement with melodrama, proves to be an interesting point of departure from which to explore the differences between Campion and Irigaray. The filmmaker is at once engaging with many of the conventions of melodrama (while frequently subverting them), and with a discourse that has been largely absent from commercial cinema—one that celebrates a woman’s autonomy and even an embrace of death, beyond love and beyond the family. Campion is thus at once close to and distant from the norms of genre.

The character of Ada McGrath is one of the most enigmatic and captivating female characters in the history of film: she is so aptly played by Holly Hunter as to appear at once entirely self-evident, and so mysterious as to remain a complete puzzle throughout the film. In this evocative period film, Ada is a nineteenth-century mute Scotswoman pianist who is forced into marriage to a landowner in New Zealand, named Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill). She is shipped to the island with her young daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), who is proficient in sign language and serves as her interpreter. Ada further expresses herself through her piano, with which she entertains a fervent relation. She manages to resist her husband’s advances, but she soon finds herself faced with an almost impossible bargain. George Baines (Harvey Keitel), another white man on the island (albeit one who is close to the Maori population and speaks their language) has bought the piano from Stewart and he offers to give it back to her in exchange for escalating sexual demands. Ada accepts very reluctantly and soon finds herself lying naked in Baines’s bed: a few keys for a few favors. Her initial displeasure and fear are obvious to the viewer, but Baines remains impervious to her feelings, until he unexpectedly declares his love for her. In a surprising turn, Ada falls in love with him, and the two start an intense affair. She also seeks to infuse this blossoming sensuality into her marriage: on two consecutive nights, she wakes Stewart up with caresses that she does not allow him to reciprocate, but he cannot bear being objectified and is noticeably uncomfortable. Yet he develops an amorous passion for his wife. When Flora lets him know about her mother’s liaison with Baines, he is devoured by jealousy and brutally chops off one of Ada’s fingers. He then realizes that he cannot force upon her the kind of intimacy that he craves and tells Baines to take her away. As Baines and Ada are sailing forth to a new life, she demands that her piano be thrown overboard, and lets herself be carried down with it. Once she is under water, a force that she herself describes as her “will” chooses to survive, and manages to get her back to the surface. She is then seen, having started her new life with Baines and Flora in a pretty white house in Nelson, New Zealand. But The Piano has yet another ending; in the very last shot, Ada sees herself, as she sometimes does at night, dead, under the sea, tied to her piano.

Toward Ada: Camerawork and Characterization

The play of nearness and distance pervades The Piano: for example, early in the film, the camera takes a close-up view of Ada looking at her piano on the distant beach. In the terrifying sequence where Stewart chops off her finger, Ada’s hands are shown in close-up before and after her finger is severed, while Ada’s facial expressions remain unfathomable. Similarly, the intimacy between Ada and her daughter, Flora, the warmth that bathes their affection for each other in their intimate, peaceful moments contrasts with the alien presence of those who interrupt them. On the one hand, Campion makes recurrent use of the close-up, and on the other, she establishes an insuperable distance that estranges us, and everyone in the movie, from Ada. The latter is detached from us not only by her muteness and her lack of facial expressions, but also by what can only be described as her grace, the natural elegance that emanates from her and lends her an almost otherworldly quality. The film as a whole stems from the movement between these two opposites: visual proximity and emotional distance.

Ada is one of the most naturally elegant, fluid characters ever seen on the screen: her every move, from the torsion of her hand when she caresses her daughter’s head to her flight in the woods when Stewart tries to rape her, is marked by the same ethereal poise. The camera itself, when it comes near her, often engages in “lushly graceful movements . . . swirling around her, creating complex arabesques” (Polan 29). The film is made in the image of its main character: the simple beauty of the music, the eerie majesty of the bush, and the perfection of every object.

The film’s last two scenes aptly illustrate the spatial arrangement that underlies Ada’s characterization. After she has survived drowning, we see her leading an idyllic existence in Nelson with Flora and Baines. They live in what seems to be a welcoming, bright white house, Baines has fashioned a metal finger for Ada so that she can continue to play the piano, and she is learning to speak (she had suddenly become mute as a young child). Flora is even seen doing cartwheels in the garden, in a white dress, in slow motion. In a voice-over, we hear Ada say that she is ashamed of her difficulty in pronouncing words, but this does not prevent Baines from being lovingly devoted to her. She practices speaking with a black scarf on her head, which he tenderly removes, and he kisses her with passion. Her adoring gaze tells the measure of her love for him. Nothing, it seems, could trouble such a blissful tableau. But in the next sequence, the brightness of marital life in Nelson is replaced by the dark, cloudy sea. The piano is there, at the bottom of the ocean, covered in algae, and Ada, tied to it with a cord, floats above her instrument. The voice says, “At night, I think of my piano in its ocean grave, and sometimes of myself, floating above it. Down there, everything is so still and silent that it lulls me to sleep. It is a strange lullaby and so it is. It is mine.” She then recites the following lines from Thomas Hood’s poem “Silence”: “There is a silence where hath been no sound/There is a silence, where no sound may be/In the cold grave, under the deep, deep sea.” The camera moves back from a close-up of the piano to the point where Ada has become a distant dark spot in the gloomy, turbid waters.

The great complexity of this vision contrasts with the simplicity of the scene in Nelson. Ada is learning to speak, and thus abandoning what seems to have been her willful isolation from the community. To see her muteness as deliberate or even liberating may seem counterintuitive, as her silence can be read as a metaphor for women’s oppression in the Victorian era, and since it renders her vulnerable, relying on her young daughter for communication. This dependency has dire consequences, since it is Flora who lets Stewart know of her mother’s enduring love for Baines, thereby unwittingly bringing about Ada’s mutilation. However, the film intimates that Ada’s muteness may be a conscious or unconscious personal decision dating back to her childhood. In the very first scene, we hear her “mind’s voice” recall what follows: “I haven’t spoken since I was six years old. Nobody knows why. Not even me. My father says it is a dark talent and the day I take it into my head to stop breathing will be my last.” Her father believes that Ada has chosen to be mute, a resolve that not only gives the measure of her extraordinary determination, but also endows her, in his eyes at least, with a fiendish force. That Ada quotes him suggests that she does not entirely disagree. Her silence can be seen as a form of passive resistance, the weapon of a subject whose powerlessness is matched by a staunch attachment to her sovereignty. She may have been sold into marriage by her father, and sent to the other end of the world to live with a man she has never met, but her not engaging with spoken language has given her a measure of protection. Her muteness allows Ada to remain rooted in her inner world, which in turn enables her to thrive as an artist.

Therefore, that Ada would learn to speak in the penultimate scene raises the question of her autonomy in her new life with Baines, and appears to suggest that she has become compliant with the expectations imposed on nineteenth-century women. Yet the underwater sequence shows that, even in Nelson, a part of her remains inalienable. Ada has not become completely absorbed into the norms of Victorian femininity, but rather keeps that other self in the deep, where she can visit it at will. The final image itself is highly ambivalent, very far from a celebratory embrace of feminine triumph: the old piano is attached to both death (the “coffin,” the “ocean grave”) and sorrow, as it carries the weight of difficult memories. The brightness of the life that she has created in Nelson is replaced by a seemingly self-destructive darkness. But paradoxically, the very permanence of death also marks the immutability of her sense of self: the “strange lullaby,” she insists, is hers. Hence in the last two scenes of the film, Ada appears to be closer to others and to the spectator than she has ever been before (through her middle-class lifestyle and her acquisition of spoken language), at the same ti...