SOURCE: "Narrative, Spectacle, and the Sexes in Ophuls' Le Plaisir," in Film Criticism, Vol. IV, No. 3, Spring, 1980, pp. 17-24.

[In the following essay, Johnson examines Ophuls's Le Plaisir from a feminist perspective.]

The notion of voyeurism, long fruitful for film scholars, has in recent years been taken up by feminist film critics as well. The feminist contribution to the issue has been the insight that a given film's relation to voyeurism is linked not only to its genre (the musical vs. the adventure story) or to its plot (Psycho's voyeur as killer) but importantly to its use of the sexes as well. However, most of the work that has appeared to date has dealt with what can be roughly designated as "male" films. Hitchcock's films, for example, have been particularly subject to such analysis.¹ The voyeuristic predilections of his heroes—and of his audience—have received considerable attention. The purpose of the present essay, then, is to discover how the concept of voyeurism might apply to a work by a filmmaker typically defined as a woman's director: Max Ophuls.

The film selected for this analysis is Le Plaisir, which Ophuls directed in 1952, near the end of his career. La Plaisir is typical of Ophuls's work. In it can be found the elaborate mise-en-scene, and the preoccupation with women and love that is said to be the hallmark of the Ophulsian oeuvre.² Only the structure of the film is unique, consisting as it does of three distinct stories separated from each other by black leader. However, as will become evident, this structural departure from Ophuls's other work is especially consistent with the preoccupations and strategies of a "woman's film." Both its typicality and its uniqueness, then, make Le Plaisir a useful test case for the connection of voyeurism with the woman's film.

Le Plaisir is openly exhibitionist. That is, Ophuls's work invites the spectator's look; unlike many narrative films, Le Plaisir does not pretend to be a closed, private world into which the spectator peers from a position hidden in the dark. This is achieved through the voice-over narrator's³ direct address to the viewer. Occasionally musing upon the relationship between an author and his audience, he makes clear that this film exists to be seen. Even the narrator's invisibility, which might be taken as a suppression of the film's exhibitionism—he says he does not wish to be seen—serves to reinforce the viewer's sense that he is not invading anyone's visual privacy, that he is not "stealing" glances.

However, a desire to produce an atmosphere of sanctioned voyeurism is not the sole reason for the narrator's invisibility. The perhaps more pressing reason why the narrator is made to resist an exhibitionist role is that he is male. In Western culture exhibitionism is associated with women. Accordingly, men who choose to leave the seers for the seen are typically viewed with suspicion. Male actors, dancers, and body builders are thought to be homosexual, as are "behind the scenes" exhibitionists—those men who make careers of preparing women for exhibition: hair dressers, clothing designers, make-up artists.

To the extent that he presents himself as the film's author, the narrator aligns himself with hairdressers as a man who is interested in presenting beautiful women to our view. In this light the film's refusal to show him at all can be read as a denial; to rid him of feminine exhibitionism Le Plaisir rids him of visual presence, displacing his exhibitionism altogether to women and things. And in the final episode the character-narrator is shown looking at the main characters as they move across a beach; he is presented as one who looks, not as one who is looked at—the two beach walkers apparently pretend not to see him. This denial of exhibitionism is carried a step further through the narrator's relative refusal to take responsibility for the visual half of his film stories. He refers to the camera operators as "they," telling us that "they wanted to photograph me."

Shifting from Le Plaisir's voice-over- and character-narrators to the character within the stories, we find that voyeurism is relevant to an understanding of them as well. Moreover, at first sight the sexual division of labor—voyeurism for men, exhibitionism for women—is maintained. The male characters want to look. What they want to see is the female body; hence the artist Jean's rhapsody on the delights of watching Josephine, accompanied by shots of her body. Needless to say, Josephine is not given a similar sequence in which Jean would become the exhibitionist, posed object, and she the appreciative voyeur. The camera work extends this separation of men and women by lingering upon the women's bodies. Whereas males turn up on screen because they have something purposeful to say or do, women can appear simply because they are beautiful. The Josephine montage sequence is a good example, as is the long take of a partially undressed Madame Rosa staring out a window.

That narrative film typically imposes this form of sexual segregation is a charge often leveled by feminist critics, and is supported by the commonplace notion of the woman as "love interest": the lone woman added to the otherwise all-male expedition, cattle drive, research laboratory, etc. The love interest's main function is to be visually appealing and, through this passive appeal, to move the men about her to action. One of the most detailed formulations of this notion is to be found in Laura Mulvey's essay, "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema."⁴ In it she assigns male characters to narrative, female characters to spectacle. That is, males exist in all three dimensions; females are fixed in space without time. Men run the story. What is interesting about her argument is that she sees narrative and spectacle, men and women, as in conflict:

The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative films, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative.⁵

Sternberg's films illustrate the point. The many shots of Dietrich's body repeatedly bring the story to a halt; Sternberg films are never said to be "fast moving." In fact, his films, Mulvey implies, are not "normal narrative films"; they are "spectacle films," films in which spectacle predominates.

Clearly, Le Plaisir is a spectacle film. In it spectacle continually disrupts narrative. The shot of Madame Rosa at her window, for example, does little to advance the story. The female body, of course, is not the only source of spectacle in Le Plaisir. Ophuls's long tracking shots also repeatedly stall the narrative. The opening tracking shots are prolonged well beyond the time at which, in the predominantly narrative film, establishing shots would have given way to the story. And in the final episode a crucial narrative event, Jean's successful approach to Josephine, is hidden by the spectacle offered to us by a pan shot.

In short, Le Plaisir is a "feminine" film, "feminine" in a very conventional sense. All of its superficial affinities with the "feminine"—its prettiness, its involvement in the woman's topic of love without a companion "masculine" crime or adventure plot—are supported by structures of feminine spectacle and exhibitionism.

However, to choose spectacle and exhibitionism over narrative and transparency immediately raises two problems for the director who wishes, as Ophuls did, to please a conventional audience. One of these concerns the integration of spectacle and narrative. Whereas in the narrative film described by Mulvey spectacle is the "alien presence" that threatens narrative, in Le Plaisir it is narrative that disturbs spectacle. Narrative events—the hairdresser collapsing, Joseph spiriting Madame Rosa off to his room, the stories' beginnings and endings which plunge the frame into darkness—all break the flow of beautiful women and tracking shots.

To integrate narrative and spectacle, Le Plaisir mutes those aspects of narrative which distinguish it from spectacle: time and change. It achieves this by placing the narrative in the service of the universal. This strategy is begun in the first moments of Le Plaisir when the narrator ironically undermines our belief in change by worrying aloud whether we will appreciate his stories; they are "very old," he tells us, while we are "rather modern as we all like to call ourselves while we are still alive." More explicitly, we are soon told that the hairdresser's story is part of the "eternal drama played every day in every way in the shadows of pleasure." Having made this observation at the end of the first episode, the narrator then proves the point by offering us a second, and then a third story with very similar characters and themes. The stories before us, which begin, progress, and end, become simply individual manifestations of a larger universal play with neither origin nor conclusion. Narrative time and change lose the force they possess in a Western or mystery. Associated with the universal, narrative is thereby integrated with the spectacle that predominates in Le Plaisir.

The second problem created for Ophuls by his emphasis upon spectacle is how to handle the male characters. His "heroes," surrounded by prettiness and required to make love their only concern, could easily become too feminized to support a heterosexual story. Indeed, Le Plaisir males are considerably less conventionally masculine than are their counterparts in Mulvey's narrative films. While they do have professions, in two cases their jobs are intimately connected with their love lives. The old man with the mask has spent his life fixing the hair of women he intends to seduce, and Jean the artist paints portraits of Josephine. Moreover, Joseph's profession, carpentry, is used as the narrative reason for his visit to Madame Tellier and her "flock," with one of whom he will fall in love. (They bring his daughter the communion dress that he cannot afford to give her.) And although carpentry is a conventionally male vocation, being financially less successful than one's sister—than any woman, for that matter—is not.

Not only do men in Le Plaisir devote most of their energies to love, nearly all of their interactions, whether ardent or merely civil, involve women. The male camaraderie which is used so often by American directors to establish masculinity is missing here. The one male group we are shown (the townsmen who make up Madame Tellier's clientele) quickly disintegrates into petty quarreling; similarly, the only close male friendship in the film, that between Jean and the character-narrator, is broken off by Jean because of the former's interference in Jean's love affair with Josephine.

Aside from these obvious matters of sexual definition through work and social interaction, Le Plaisir males are also more exhibitionist than are men in most 1950s films, although their exhibitionism is partially displaced onto women, and so disguised. Jean paints only portraits of women, and, after meeting Josephine, seems to produce only portraits of her; his desire to exhibit the human form to others' vision is transferred to the woman he loves. Similarly, the old hairdresser has made his life's work transforming women into beautiful visual objects, and he uses a mask to make himself into an acceptable visual object as well. Even the least exhibitionist of the three central male characters, Joseph the carpenter, lays the foundation for an entire plot through his desire that his daughter be dressed up beautifully for her first communion.

The problem for Ophuls, then, becomes one of supplying his male characters with enough of the usual male prerogatives—strength, ambition, mastery—to keep the stories from becoming altogether comic. This is achieved in various ways. In addition to displacement of male exhibitionism to females, two other strategies are used. The first of these is cited by Mulvey as common to the Hollywood film; this consists of giving male characters control of the narrative. That is, with certain exceptions to be discussed further on, men make the crucial narrative decisions and perform the crucial narrative acts. In the first story, the old man goes to a dancehall; when he collapses, a male doctor discovers his mask and then takes him home. The implied beginning of the House of Tellier story is Joseph's invitation to his sister; the on-screen beginning consists of townsmen discovering the women's absence. Finally, the painter and his model fall in love when he pursues her; later on, he leaves her as well. And, of course, the self-proclaimed "author" of these stories, the narrator, is also male.

As a second means of protecting the masculinity of its males, Le Plaisir endows them with an almost compulsive heterosexuality. The three central male characters have such high levels of sexual interest that they can scarcely control themselves. Joseph, for example, is so overcome by his desire that he approaches Madame Rosa in his own home, with family and guests all present.

However, the latter solution produces yet a third dilemma. As the phrase "spectacle film" is meant to imply, narrative and spectacle, while integrated by means of the universal, are not thereby promoted to equal status; spectacle predominates. Returning to the Freudian terms with which we began, voyeurism and exhibitionism predominate. Discussing voyeurism, Metz has written, "The voyeur is very careful to maintain a gulf, an empty space, between the object and the eye, the object and his own body."⁶ Because in Le Plaisir woman is bound up with spectacle and exhibitionism, the male's sexual interest threatens her function, endangers her role as spectator. A successful pursuit results in the violation of distance through lovemaking. Thus the hypersexuality that is necessary as a means of establishing masculinity creates problems for the film's desire to subordinate narrative to spectacle.

As a result, Le Plaisir's representation of sexuality is strangely equivocal. Nearly every male is eager to get to bed, yet it is repeatedly suggested that they are limited to the realm of active desire. When the hairdresser's wife describes her husband's long and varied sexual career, saying that he "bragged" to her of his conquests, her listener responds that some men prefer talking to doing. Later, in the second story, both Joseph's and the traveling salesman's advances are rebuffed. Worse yet, marriage does not seem to improve matters. The hairdresser's wife complains that her husband will not make room for her in bed, Joseph's wife apparently sleeps with her daughter, and we are told that after Jean's marriage to Josephine "all life apart from his work ended." Even the prostitutes are strangely inactive. They spurn the salesman, and, returning to the city after a day's absence, they do not immediately pair off with customers, but have a party instead; the narrator tells us that they are still dancing at midnight. When sexual contact does occur it is typically banished off-screen. The travelling salesman's advances are made while the train passes through a dark tunnel, Joseph's to Madame Rosa take place behind a closed door, and the camera never enters Madame Tellier's house. In fact, the sexually aloof Madame Tellier's final capitulation takes place not only outside the frame, but outside the story as well. When the episode ends, Madame Tellier and the rest are still dancing.

In short, the narrative siege upon spectacle is acted out within the stories by the male's pursuit of the female. Le Plaisir offers us two distinct outcomes of this personified aesthetic conflict: marriage and prostitution. In marriage narrative has won the battle. None of the married women in Le Plaisir is beautiful; without a place, a spectacle, they shift to narrative. The hairdresser's wife tells his story, and Josephine becomes a wife by seizing control of the narrative. Abandoned by Jean, she actively pursues him, and, finding him, violently assaults the spectacle role she can still assume for the viewer by pitching herself from a second story window. The result of this shift to narrative is marriage to a guilt-ridden Jean and obliteration as spectacle; when we see her next she is old and crippled.

In prostitution, on the other hand, spectacle has prevailed. All but one of Madame Tellier's ladies are conventionally beautiful, and even the overweight Flora is visually compelling. Moreover, the women groom themselves for spectacle—Madame Flora dresses up as Carmen, Madame Louise as Liberty, and all are eager to adorn their legs with silken garters. In keeping with their allegiance to spectacle, they allow the garter salesmen to watch them don the garters, but reject him when he tries to extend looking to touching. Ophuls further insists upon the prostitutes' status as distanced spectacle when he films their house, where presumably actual lovemaking takes place, only from the outside in an elaborate tracking shot that simultaneously maintains the women as spectacle and keeps them at a physical remove. Josephine, who until her marriage can be grouped with the prostitutes (she is a mistress and is apparently considered unsuitable for marriage by her lover's family), earns her living by presenting herself as spectacle—she is an artist's model.

Unlike wives, the prostitutes do not play an active role in narrative. They neither cause the story nor tell it. Even their "work" is passive; they do not actively solicit customers. Moreover, time, an essential element of narrative, is irrelevant to these women. Wives, situated in narrative and so in time, grow old. But the prostitutes are able to span all ages, behaving at times like experienced "older" women (Madame Rosa with her past and her cigars), at other times like children (giggling in Joseph's hay cart—Julia calls them "children"), and at still other times like adolescent girls (dancing and flirting in the House).

Finally, the prostitute's relation to speech and sound differs from that of her married sister. Language in Le Plaisir is on the whole associated with narrative—an author "prefers to be heard." But Ophuls bends the prostitutes' use of language away from narrative towards silent spectacle. Very little of their language can be called purposeful in the sense that it either gives the audience information concerning narrative events, or attempts (successfully or not) to cause another character to perform narrative events. It is mostly chatter, which at times becomes simply unintelligible noise. Madame Rosa, the only prostitute allowed more than a few lines, subordinates language to her function as spectacle; she is a singer, and her monologue in the train compartment is accompanied by a slow track into her beautiful face. Narrative is frozen once again into several "moments of erotic contemplation."

Josephine's shifting relationship to language illustrates the point. Confined altogether to spectacle at the story's opening, her verbal acceptance of Jean's advances is not recorded. She gains the use of speech once she and Jean have begun the (implied) sexual relationship which, as a violation of the distance necessary to spectacle, starts Josephine on her course to narrative. Appropriately, her first quarrel with Jean concerns language. He wishes her to remain silent as they walk beside the lake. After this Josephine becomes part of narrative: locking Jean in the house, battling him, and, when he leaves, pursuing him. When she finds him her language is altogether purposeful. She uses it to make demands and a threat which she carries out, producing the next narrative event, their marriage.

Le Plaisir's use of the sexes has certain implications for feminist film theory. There has been debate over whether one should analyze the screen female in terms of her sex role or in terms of her function within the "filmic system." The results of the present analysis suggests that this debate rests upon a false dichotomy; in Le Plaisir the women's functions within the film fit smoothly with their sex roles within the fiction. Madame Tellier, whose uniqueness as a character has thus far been neglected, provides an example. In part prostitute and in part wife (her husband is dead), her function within the film is to integrate narrative and spectacle. Beautiful in every shot, she also causes narrative events—deciding when to return to the city, preventing a sexual union between Joseph and Rosa, and so on. Similarly, her sex role within the story calls for her to exercise a second version of this integrative function. As a Madam her work is to bring men and women gracefully together; when she closes the house fist fights and quarrels break out, and when the house is reopened she presides over a celebration that is allowed to be heady but not out-of-hand.

These two approaches, which have been seen as hostile competitors for the status of favored feminist methodology, are in fact dependent upon each other. In the usual formulation, recent feminist criticism claims to be interested not in the film's "meaning," which would include the film's sex roles, but in "how the meaning is produced." It is difficult to see how one could study the production of a meaning with no clues as to what that meaning is. What this formulation actually assumes is that the feminist critic already knows the meaning, and does not need to investigate it further. More accurately, it implies that recent feminist criticism has been interested in discovering how a film's most obvious meanings are produced via the sexes. In terms of Le Plaisir, for example, it is "obvious" that the film wants us to think that love is much the same, wherever we find it. The question then becomes exactly how the film manipulates the sexes to produce this meaning. The present analysis has attempted to answer this question, and has relied upon an analysis of the film's sex roles in order to do so. The "second wave" of feminist film criticism is an improvement upon, not an abandonment of, the first.

NOTES

¹ The phrase "male film" is used here simply to contrast a large group of films, about which a great deal has been written, with the much smaller group of works known as the "woman's film." In fact, as Molly Haskell points out, the woman's film has no corresponding male "genre."

² The love theme is developed in three separate stories. In the first, an old man, who wears the mask of a young man's face, dances at a dancehall until he collapses. He is taken home to his wife, who tells the attending doctor her husband's life story. In the second story (which appears last in the French version), the prostitutes of Madame Tellier's house go to the country to attend the first communion of Madame Tellier's niece, daughter of her brother Joseph. During their visit an attraction develops between Joseph and Madame Rosa, one of the women from the house. In the last story, a painter falls in love with an artist's model, becomes successful painting her portrait, and then leaves her, whereupon she attempts suicide by leaping from his upper level window. The stories are narrated by their "author" (Peter Ustinov's voice in the English version). In the third story the voice-over narrator becomes a character within the narrative, so that, at this point, he is a character-narrator rather than simply a voice-over-narrator.

³ In following pages the voice-over-narrator will be referred to as simply the narrator, while the character-narrator will in each case be so designated. (See second note.)

⁴ Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema," Screen, 16 (1975), pp. 6-18.

⁵ Mulvey, p. 11.

⁶ Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier," Screen, 16 (1975), p. 61.