SOURCE: "The Abstraction of a Lady: La Signora di tutti" in Cinema Journal, Vol. 28, No. 1, Fall, 1988, pp. 65-82.

[In the following essay, Doane identifies Ophuls's distrust of modern technology, and places him beside director George Cukor as a filmmaker successful at depicting female issues in film.]

The films of Max Ophuls consistently manifest an obsession with what the cinema—as a machine—is capable of doing. The extended, elegant tracking shots, which are his trademark, test the limits of the technology, and his play with image and mise-en-scène testifies to a desire to investigate fully the material basis of the medium. Nevertheless, many of Ophuls's statements belie an ambivalence toward the technology of the cinema and a certain anxiety about its relation to representation: "Technology has reached a stage in our profession where it is a threat to our heart"; or "This industrialization—which I have to keep reminding myself in my profession is the guarantee, the material side of its existence—it does leave so much out of account."¹ For Ophuls, one of the dangers of technology is the annihilation of difference, of uniqueness. As he puts it, "drama cannot be mass produced."² The processes of mechanical reproduction act both as the ground and condition of his signifying practice and as a limit against which he continually strains. In this respect, Ophuls participates in the widespread ambivalence about technology that is characteristic of much aesthetic activity in the first half of the twentieth century.³

A second, and quite prominent, aspect of Ophuls's work is his fascination with the figure of the woman and the vicissitudes of her romantic life. Ophuls, like George Cukor, is known as a "woman's director," undoubtedly because his films manifest a predilection for stories about passionate women and doomed love affairs played out in a bourgeois setting. Claude Beylie refers to Ophuls as "assuredly one of the most subtle portraitists of the woman that the cinema has ever given us."⁴ The obsession with the cinema as a technology, a technique, merges in a curious way with the desire to represent and re-represent the woman in an early and seldom discussed film by Ophuls, the 1934 La Signora di tutti.⁵La Signora, the only film made by Ophuls in Italy, was commissioned by newspaper owner and aspiring film producer Emilio Rizzoli, who wanted to adapt the heavily melodramatic novel by Salvator Gotta (serialized in one of Rizzoli's newspapers) for the screen. The title of Gotta's book is linked to an episode narrated within it in which a woman walking by incites a man to think simultaneously of joy and death, causing him to name her "everyone's woman."⁶ An associate of Rizzoli's, Ettore Margadonna, had seen and admired Liebelei and invited Ophuls, then in exile in Paris, to Italy to direct the film.⁷ This invitation was consistent with the Cines studio policy of encouraging international talent to work in Italy and with the corresponding notion of the "art film." La Signora di tutti was a box office success and was awarded a prize as "best technical film" at the Venice Biennial. However, its critical reception was more problematic—film critics responding to it as, in Elaine Mancini's words, a "dangerous sign of decadence in the Italian cinema."⁸ Accusations against the emptiness of technique abound in Ophuls criticism, but the attacks concerning an overemphasis upon technological or formal feats at the expense of "substance" or "ethics" seem to be particularly strong in relation to La Signora. This is somewhat ironic insofar as the film itself produces a discourse on the cinema as a technology—specifically, a technology of temporality.

La Signora traces the life of a brilliant yet tragic star of the cinema, Gaby Doriot, played by Isa Miranda. In the beginning of the film Gaby attempts suicide and the anesthetic she is given on the operating table induces a flashback memory that forms the body of the narrative. As a young girl Gaby is expelled from school when the music teacher falls in love with her and flees abroad, leaving his family. Subjected to the strict regulation of her father, a retired colonel, she is confined to her own home. However, Roberto Nanni, son of a wealthy businessman, Leonardo, invites Gaby and her sister Anna to a graduation party, dances with Gaby, and begins to fall in love with her. This encounter is interrupted by Roberto's invalid mother (Alma), fearful of Gaby's reputation. But Alma herself is attracted to Gaby and asks her to visit and later to stay as a kind of companion. After Roberto leaves on a trip to Rome, his father returns and initiates a passionate romance with Gaby. One night, while Gaby and Leonardo meet secretly in the garden, Alma calls to Gaby. When she discovers Gaby's absence, she frantically searches through the halls of the large house in her wheelchair, ultimately falling down the steep staircase and killing herself. Leonardo and Gaby undertake an apparently endless journey throughout Europe, ignoring the pleas of Leonardo's business associates to return. When they do, Gaby is haunted by the empty house and by her own guilt feelings, and Leonardo is on the verge of bankruptcy. Gaby leaves Leonardo (admonishing him to stay with his dead wife), and he is subsequently convicted of embezzlement and sent to prison. Gaby eventually becomes a major star of the cinema. When Leonardo, worn down and disoriented, is released from prison, he wanders around the foyer of the theater showing Gaby's new film, staring longingly at her images. Improperly dressed for a premiere, he is expelled from the theater, and run over by a passing car. To avoid the ensuing scandal, Gaby's managers call in Roberto to exonerate her. Gaby discovers that it is Roberto she has cared for all along, but it is too late—Roberto has married her sister Anna. She commits suicide, leaving a note detailing the loneliness that has persisted despite her stardom. The film returns to the present, the ether mask is raised, and the doctors confirm her death. The printing presses producing the posters for her film are stopped.

The narrative of La Signora di tutti circulates around an absence that seems to reassert the inaccessibility of its central figure. The film within a film, also entitled La Signora di tutti, is never seen. It is the blind spot of the film's imaging of the woman—it is advertised, discussed, and attended but never given to the gaze of the film's own spectator. What does it mean to structure a filmic narrative around a film that is only mentioned, never viewed? The actual subject matter of Ophuls's film—as announced by its title (which ambiguously names both the unseen film and the woman)—is curiously marginalized, transformed into a kind of narrative afterthought—unless we are to assume that the film we are seeing is, indeed, Gaby Doriot's final film, evoking a vertiginous mise-en-abîme effect barely envisaged in La Ronde (1950). In this case, we would be seeing a film that accurately reflects, in a one-to-one correspondence, Gaby's own life, unlike the book Leonardo gazes at longingly late in the film (a book that produces an elaborate fiction of the star). But I prefer, initially at least, to think of the absent film instead as a pretext for Ophuls's obsession with the intricate and involved relations between the woman, the image, infidelity, exchange, and spectacle, most fully realized, perhaps, in Lola Montes (spectacle) and Madame de . . . (exchange). What informs Ophuls's work in general is a certain economy of the signifier upheld by sexual difference. But it is insofar as it is haunted by nothingness, by a void, that this economy becomes most interesting.

Absence is hence the basis of the process of abstraction that is so crucial to La Signora di tutti's signifying work. Not only is the film within a film curiously absent, but its title specifies an unnamed woman as the generalized possession of "everybody" (in a similar way, another Ophuls film, Letter from an Unknown Woman, marks the anonymity of the woman in its title). Furthermore, this process of abstracting the woman and transforming her into a signifier of generalized desire is supplemented by the production of a discourse about mechanical reproduction and its techniques of abstraction. A privileged figure in the film is that of the machine spewing forth identical images of the woman—poster images that are later demonstrated to be absolutely inadequate to the "truth" of the protagonist, the details of her family melodrama. At first glance, film would appear to be a medium that is not particularly predisposed to abstraction, given its concreteness—cinematic concreteness measured by the image's indexicality, its potential to actualize, to make "present." The camera "remembers" everything it has seen without hierarchicalization, much like Funes in Borges's tale, "Funes the Memorious." Funes's hyperperception and flawless memory disallowed abstract thought for, according to Borges, "to think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes there were only details, almost immediate in their presence."' Film mechanically records, accumulating details, hypothetically allowing the spectator's gaze to wander at will through the image. Yet mechanical reproduction, through its pure repetition, its levelling of differences, contributes to abstraction, a movement away from the differentiating detail. And in La Signora di tutti there is a constant tension between the pull of abstraction (manifested in the film's insistence upon situating its protagonist as the signifier of a generalized desire) and the overly replete, inevitably detailed nature of the diegesis.

The technology La Signora invokes so prominently in its framing sequences is closely allied with both the figure of the woman and a certain conceptualization of temporality. The woman is explicitly represented as a construction, as the sum total of a disembodied voice and an image (the two sensory registers of the cinema). Furthermore, it is precisely a technological construct that is at issue here; the mechanization of her voice and image is stressed. The woman becomes the exemplary work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. The first indication of her presence within the diegesis is in the form of a recorded voice emerging from a spinning record, revolving in close-up. Here, as represented by her voice, she becomes the object of a financial transaction, a contractual dispute, signified metonymically by the hands gesturing over the record. The spectator's first glimpse of Gaby is in the image of her poster, rolling repeatedly off a printing press. Later in the film, her death is represented as the bent or warped image produced as a result of the abrupt shutting down of the printing press. From the combination of a disembodied voice and a mechanical image emerges the figure of a generalized Woman—"Everybody's Lady." Here, the woman is indeed the product of the apparatus.

But the woman is also like the cinematic apparatus insofar as she constitutes a lure for the male subject—more dangerous even than the cinema since she frequently leads him to his doom. Yet without knowledge of her effect, she has no access to subjectivity. The narrative of La Signora di tutti is grounded in Gaby's lack of agency. She is the pure object of the desires of men, subject of nothing. As her father points out early in the film, "The girl is dangerous and she doesn't realize it." She unwittingly or unknowingly causes death or disaster. This is accomplished without the category of deception precisely because all subjectivity is lacking. As the unconscious cause of desire, Gaby's operation is that of the detached image or the detached voice, both of which become the fetish objects of the film. Gaby is the Signora di tutti. Possessed by all men and therefore by none in particular, she becomes the axiom of femininity. But this necessitates a process whereby she is clearly differentiated from other women. A character tells her at one point, "You're not like the other girls. I wish I had met you before." Gaby represents the woman in general, but is like none of them in particular.

There is a disorienting contradiction at work here. Gaby becomes the image of Woman because no other—ordinary—woman is like her. The image is characterized by a lack of resemblance. Nevertheless, she somehow represents all women through her incarnation as a generalized femininity, an abstraction or ideal of femininity. The monolithic category of Woman here is not even an alleged average or distillate of concrete women but their abstraction, their subtraction (in its etymological sense, abstraction is a "drawing away from"). Not like other women, Gaby becomes Woman. La Signora di tutti chronicles the expropriation of the woman's look and voice and the consequent transformation of the woman into Woman, a position inaccessible to women. This is not only the process of the narrative trajectory of La Signora di tutti but of the cinematic institution as well, in its narratives, its star system, its spectacle.

Hence, the woman's abstraction in this film is a function of her alliance with a technology of images and sounds that simultaneously singles her out and annihilates her difference in a process of commodification. Gaby's final words—a response to the claim of her inaccessible lover that he will see her soon, when her current film comes to Italy—are "On film, on film, on film . . . ," musingly trailing off into nothing. They indicate the tautological nature of her relation to the medium. The film opens with an optical effect, a gradually widening circular iris, that mimics the mechanical circular movement of the record reproducing Gaby's voice. Similarly, the thumping sound of the machine printing her poster is taken up by the extra-diegetic soundtrack in the next scene so that a music designed to evoke the mechanical is laid over a long tracking movement through the studio tracing the search for the absent woman. In this way, the filmic discourse's own status as a technology is linked to the rigorous repetitiveness of mechanical reproduction that, in its turn, is linked to the desirable image/sound of the woman.

Furthermore, the technolo'gy of the cinema is compatible with a particular view of temporality consistent with the age of mechanical reproduction. Mechanical reproduction, in its photographic, filmic, and phonographic manifestations, suggests a rigid, controllable, and absolutely repeatable ordering of temporality. There is a certain predictability of the machine. Technology presupposes a resolutely linear and teleological view of history that is bound up with this idea of time. From this perspective there is and can be no dead time. Taylorism would be, perhaps, the most extreme manifestation of the impact of the machine upon time as it is subjectively experienced. When Ophuls points to the fact that industrialization "leaves so much out of account," he is referring, at least in part, to laziness: "There's a great miracle. The miracle of laziness. There's no room for it any more, and it's such a beautiful miracle."¹⁰ Laziness is empty time, nonproductive time, the type of time that must be minimalized in a classical narrative structure. Technology appears to us in the guise of an inevitability—in its pace, predictability, and organization of time. In La Signora di tutti this inevitability is subjected to a slippage, from the machine to the woman, insofar as the woman comes to represent a repetitively fatal historical force.

The central character of La Signora, Gaby Doriot (born Gabriella Murge) has a familiar textual presence. All of Gaby's sexual relations are contaminated by death, but her fatal attraction is not really that of the femme fatale of film noir, that abstraction of the woman posited as simultaneously most fascinating and most lethal to the male. While the femme fatale of film noir is consciously manipulative or conniving, Gaby is apparently devoid of intention or motivation, she floats from experience to experience without awareness. The woodenness of Isa Miranda's acting, the clumsiness or awkwardness of her gestures, underscore her lack of deliberation or intentionality. Gaby's status as zero degree or placeholder in relation to emotionality or personal psychology is thrown into relief by the mother's hysteria and paranoia (her anxious reactions to the thought of being left alone). Gaby simply is and it is her sheer existence that proves to be problematic. Late in the film, Leonardo is overwhelmed by her image, surrounded by these images and her fake "life story." Transfixed by her name in lights and her flashing image, he wanders in a disoriented state out into the street and is run over by a car: her image is murderous. As prefigured in the opening sequences of the film, it is indeed her image that seems to wreak the most havoc. In this context, the two instances in the film in which Gaby gázes (almost longingly) into the mirror—before the Nanni ball when she wonders whether anyone will dance with her and when she dresses in Roberto's mother's evening gown before the opera—are extremely significant. Both immediately precede the initiation of an erotic relation, first with the son, then the father. In a preparatory moment, displaying a kind of narcissistic self-sufficiency, the woman is taken in by her own image. It is almost as though her own desire for her image were deflected, dispersed outwards to infect the men in the film.

This figure of the woman as inadvertent cause, as sexuality without consciousness, is reminiscent of the tradition of the diva in the silent Italian cinema. Lyda Borelli, in Ma L'Amor Mio non Muore (My Love Does Not Die [1913]), is usually referred to as the first diva of the cinema. The diva is a woman of exceptional beauty who incites catastrophe, not by means of any conscious scheming but through her sheer presence. She is also a figure of the silent cinema who is defined by her exaggerated gestures and incessant miming. According to Vinicio Marinucci, Borelli in the 1913 film was "the triumph of the femmes fatales with their languorous poses, their rapacious glances and their jerky movements, stifled by anguish and the imminence of catastrophe, like flowers strewn over the living and the dead."¹¹ Other nationally known female stars who assumed the role of diva include: Francesca Bertini, Leda Gys, Maria Jacobini, Diomira Jacobini, and Pina Menichelli. Georges Sadoul, speaking of the diva, refers to "exaggerated movements of the hips and arms, with the head thrown back, her hair suddenly spilling down her back, contortions, rolling eyes. . . ."¹² The rise of the diva also introduced the development of the star system ( "divismo ") in Italy. The diva's popularity ensured her generous contracts and the women were associated with extravagant spending and high living. With the star system, of course, there arose also the phenomenon of the fan. The neologism "borellismo" was coined to describe the excessive lengths to which Lyda Borelli's fans went to imitate her. As Vernon Jarratt points out, "Girls just leaving school, young married women, shop girls, shorthand typists—they walked like her, did their hair like her, dressed as near to her style as their purses allowed, and whenever they found themselves within reach of a divan they reclined on it with the best imitation they could muster of her peculiarly languid grace."¹³ Few male stars achieved the stature or the ability to dominate the set attributed to the diva. The preferred narratives of the films, however, cast the diva in roles that undermined the offscreen aura of domination and manipulation. In Pierre Leprohon's account:

Nino Frank shrewdly contrasts the femme fatale with the vamp invented in the Nordic countries, more deliberately devastating, the woman who lives off her victims' misfortunes, a kind of vampire. The fate of the Italian femme fatale is often as dreadful as that of her lovers, and this makes her even more appealing. She takes the form of a force against which one is powerless, since she herself is dominated by something stronger than herself. This may well be the reason for the name given to her in awe, which also defines her: diva, or goddess. The man whom she touches and condemns becomes the victim of a kind of holocaust; he is sacrificed to a mysterious superior power. There is something almost religious in the audiences' worship of the diva.¹⁴

The overwhelming sense of a fatal force, of a holocaust, an inevitability, suggests that what we are dealing with here is in fact a certain conceptualization of history, of temporal determination blocked and frozen in a perpetual war of the sexes. It is a history that is, of course, displaced, reworked, privatized, and sexualized—condensed onto the figure of the woman, the cause without consciousness, provoker of events. In histories of the Italian cinema, writers frequently note that the tradition of the diva and the melodramatic mode it entailed was competitive with, and gradually marked a change of direction from, the fascination with costume dramas and historical epics such as The Last Days of Pompeii (1908), Garibaldi (1907), and the well-known Cabiria (1914). Leprohon claims, "Reconstructed history gave way to passion—to psychology even."¹⁵ Events of import were now constrained within the closed and claustrophobic sphere of a privatized space, their sole determinant the inexplicable but inevitable sexuality of the woman.

History, from this point of view, is pure repetition. This is why Gaby's "affair" with the music teacher at the girls' school is required in order to specify her relation with Leonardo as the inevitable, cyclical return to a scenario she is doomed to repeat. Even the words which she tries not to hear are the same—"I can't live without you." Gaby is a diva insofar as she is oblivious of her own destructive effects.¹⁶ She differs from the diva, however, in the impassivity of her body, the absence of the exaggerated gestures of the heroine of silent film. That excess resides instead in the hyperbolic strategies of the Ophulsian style—in camera movement, mise-en-scène, and music, which take up in their repetitive straining, the thematic of the fatal inevitability of history. As in melodrama in general, affect is very much a function of the form and temporal structure of the narrative.

The melodramatic moment of irreversibility, the point in the narrative that Roberto will later refer to nostalgically as the moment at which things might have gone differently, is the scene in the garden at the Nanni ball when Roberto's declaration of love is interrupted by the message from his mother. The son's inability to articulate his love is also represented as a result of the father's intervention in the scene where the two cars meet in the road outside Gaby's house. Gaby's precarious position is then a function of a certain excess or perversion of the familial order. When father and son struggle over the same woman, the figure of the mother is quite definitively evoked. But here, the actual mother herself is also fascinated by and drawn to Gaby. In contrast, Gaby's own family is weakened by the overpresence of a bullying and demanding father (who is a retired colonel and exercises a military discipline over Gaby) and the marked absence of the mother. That absence is palpable in the very beginning of the film when Gaby tells the headmaster that her mother is dead and she has no one to confide in, and is repeatedly referred to in different instances of the narrative: Gaby murmurs "Mama" immediately before the ether cone descends and she loses consciousness; her father's lecture after the incident with the music teacher contains the phrase, "If only her mother were alive"; Gaby tells Alma that she knows her mother through a photograph taken when she was twenty; and finally, Gaby's manager ironically reinvokes that absence by producing a fiction of the mother, riding with Gaby in Paris. The lack of a mother, as an impairment of the family structure, leaves room for the excessive and transgressive (though largely unconscious) sexuality attributed to Gaby. Yet Gaby manages to find a form of mother-substitute in Alma. Above and beyond the oedipal rivalry between father and son, the text invests much of its energy in delineating the place (or perhaps non-place) or the difficulty of the maternal.

For while the film situates Alma and Gaby in an affectionate quasi-mother-daughter relationship, it also produces a signifying framework within which the two women are juxtaposed as competitive and radically incompatible figures, one taking or resuming her place at the expense of the other. In the first part of the film, Gaby dons the mother's evening gown for the opera and becomes, on the stairway, a spectacle for the gaze of the father. This same stairway is later the site of the mother's grotesque death. When Gabriella returns with Leonardo to the house after their seemingly endless railway journey across Europe, a shadowy bar literally crosses out or negates the portrait of the mother over the fireplace. And the return of the same portrait to Roberto at the auction prepares the way for Gaby's death. In this way, La Signora di tutti emphatically demarcates and opposes the roles of mother and lover and their respective sexualities. The mother's sexual stability (or even asexuality given the fact that she is presented as an anxious invalid) is contrasted with Gaby's sexual mobility, her inability to remain in place. This sexual precariousness of the woman, her inevitable infidelity whether in or out of marriage, is a frequent topic of Ophuls's work (most prominently in Lola Montes and Madame de). It is also, as Tony Tanner points out, the obsession of the nineteenth-century novel in the form of a continual return to adultery—adultery understood in "its larger sense of an improper conjunction, or the bringing together of things that law decrees should remain apart."¹⁷ For Stephen Heath, this concentration of the novel on adultery implies a differential diagnosis of the roles of mother and wife (or by extension, lover):

Adultery, in fact, is "category-confusion," the slide from identity to indifference, a total indistinction of place. What guarantees identity is the woman who is then equally the weak point in its system: if she gives, everything gives; moving from her right place, the adulterous woman leaves no place intact. . . . "Pater semper incertus est, " while the mother is "certissima, " recalled Freud. . . . As mother the woman is sure, as wife always potentially unsure; she is mirrored by the unsureness of the man as father and the compensatory sureness of his juridical instatement as husband-father, pater familias. It is there, in the difficulty of the images of that mirroring reflection, that the society of the novel casts its stories—adultery in the novel, everywhere.¹⁸

While Gaby is not literally in this sense an adulteress, she does transgress the law of marriage, of the family. And La Signora di tutti does appear, at least at one level, to polarize mother and daughter/lover through the opposition between sexual certainty and uncertainty.

Yet it is crucial to examine more closely the status of Gaby's transgression for, again, it is devoid of intention or motivation. The "crossing over of a border" that would constitute her transgression is inadvertent, almost accidental or coincidental. Her anguish at the death of Alma is much keener than that of Leonardo. Ophuls's privileged topic in his European films—the adultery or infidelity of the woman—does not presuppose that the female protagonist is characterized as villainous. Rather, her sexual deviation from a norm is usually quite clearly socially imposed. A rigorous and unrelenting social order governs her options (in La Signora this order is incarnated in the figure of Gaby's father). Hence the spectator is persuaded not to castigate the woman but to sympathize with her, even to mourn her death all the while acknowledging its inevitability. The solicited investment of affect aligns the spectator to some degree with the woman. In the case of the novel, as Tanner points out, "It is just such a tension between law and sympathy that holds the great bourgeois novel together, and a severe imbalance in either direction must destroy the form"¹⁹ One can cry at the injustice of her life and its vicissitudes and simultaneously bow to their necessity. The obligatory balance between law and sympathy emphasizes even more strongly the inexorability of her fate (and of those surrounding her), the obsessiveness of its quasi-historical force.

When sexuality bears the burden of history, space is constricted and time deprived of linearity. The displacement from the realm of the public onto that of the private, where oedipalization becomes excessive and all conflicts and contradictions are sexualized, bears witness to the suffocating closeness of the familial. That closeness is mirrored in the mise-en-scène of La Signora di tutti. As in many melodramas, much of the narratively crucial material is organized around the space of a dominating, semispiral staircase. In a long crane shot, Roberto observes the unfortunate and melancholic Gaby, seated on the sidelines at the dance, and descends to waltz with her. Gaby meets Leonardo on that same staircase, Alma dies on it, and Gaby hallucinates the opera music there. Events are anchored to a space whose function is to articulate the public and private realms within the home. In an earlier scene in Gaby's home, the constraints of space, its lack of potential, are even more perceptible in a scene that stresses the horizontal rather than the vertical dimension of the image. As Gaby's father lectures her sister and aunt behind closed doors on the subject of her incorrigibility, Gaby begins to clear the table. She opens the doors of the dining room and moves back along the hallway, past a dog in the middle plane to the lit door of the kitchen, activating the deep space of the image. But far from invoking the subjective freedom that Bazin associates with the spectator's reading of depth of field, this image, invaded by the harsh and unrelenting voice of the father, suggests its own absolute limitations, a termination of options. Like the bars of the staircase, space repeats itself; it does not open out.

This concentration on sexuality as it is played out within a closed, private space and the consequent dehistoricizing tendency of Ophuls's films are analyzed by Virginia Wright Wexman in relation to Letter from an Unknown Woman. She refers to Ophuls's

repression of history, so eloquently alluded to by the film's fin-de-siècle Viennese setting, that creates the atmosphere of tragic inevitability that hangs over the narrative. Beyond human control, the temporal systems that govern the characters' lives remain fixed and unyielding, impervious to manipulation or negotiation. . . . For Ophuls's style combines lyrical movements of incandescent emotion with endlessly repetitive patterns that only signify within the private space of memory, never as part of a larger historical reality.²⁰

But there are critical differences between the two films as well. While Lisa in Letter submits to a fate that is external and unrelenting, Gaby is that fate. She is also a star, the framing narrative of the film insistently aligning her more closely with the technology of the cinema. The star is in some sense the conflation of the realms of the public and private—she is given a constructed private life for public consumption ("The glamorous impersonates the ordinary," as Laura Mulvey points out).²¹ According to Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, the two themes of La Signora di tutti, one concerning her personal love life, the other her life as a successful film star with an idealized image, are combined in an unusual and disconcerting way: "In showbiz movies, the heroine is usually good by nature but becomes corrupted by artifice and the falsity of the image. But Gabriella is not, in an unambiguous way, naturally good, and if she is to be counted as corrupt it is not the movies that have made her so."²² If the relationship between the two themes is not one of cause-effect, if the cinema does not corrupt Gaby, what is the relationship? Why juxtapose an artificial and somewhat mechanical cinematic existence to the heavy melodrama of personal life enclosed within the central portion of the film?

Perhaps the relationship is, instead, one of analogy. The woman does not have to be corrupted by the cinema because in her essence—in the abstract—she is the corruption of the image, her hypnotic effect on the male comparable to that of the cinema. By withholding the film within a film, La Signora di tutti, from the spectator's gaze, Ophuls allows the spectator to imagine that the two films may be the same, that ultimately, there is no difference between the image that circulates and is exchanged (the cinematic image) and the image as determinant cause (the woman as fatal force). Ophuls himself has recourse to revealing language in his description of the way in which the cinema lured him away from the theater: "The camera, this new means of expression which I had at my disposal for the first time, distracted me irresistably from speech, a little like a young mistress distracts a married man from his wife."²³ In a curious abstraction that would wed the seductive woman to the pictorial, Ophuls links infidelity and the image. The cinematic image, in its power and ubiquity, is like the fatal diva. In the beginning of the film the technology surrounding the cinema is also associated with the driving obsessive force of the diva: the producer's voice, mechanically chanting "Continue, continue, continue" is laid over the image of the presses systematically producing posters of Gaby. Later, this strategy of disembodying a voice and ritualizing it as a chant is evoked with the term Vergogna (shame). The similarity of the two moments suggests that the shame of the woman is here mechanized—mechanically reproduced—even spectacularized through melodrama. Yet the rigidity of the image—its death-like pose and its association with death (the warped poster)—is contested by a work which reveals the precariousness of that image, its susceptibility to decomposition and hence the difficulty of smoothly maintaining the commodification of desire. This interrogation of the image takes place on several different levels: in the use of the dissolve, the sustained recourse to camera movement, the deployment of sound in relation to space, and the structuring of the narration.

More than Ophuls's other films, La Signora di tutti makes use of overlapping images, so that the integrity of the image as a unit often seems to be threatened. When Gaby and Leonardo attend the opera, an image of the orchestra is superimposed over the couple watching from the balcony, forming a kind of filmic palimpsest. However, in this case, the strategy allows the camera to fixate on Gaby, neglecting the reverse shot of her point of view, and to reveal that Leonardo, far from watching the opera, is directing his look at Gaby. But more commonly and consistently, the dissolve is the preferred mode of transition from scene to scene, and even from shot to shot within a scene. The dissolve is one of the few cinematic devices that have been subjected to a kind of grammatical codification. Through habitual use, the dissolve has come to designate either a temporal or a spatial change (or both), thus its frequent appearance as a transition between two scenes. Within a scene, it is specifically related to time when it introduces a memory; to space, when it moves us from the outside of a building or house to a room inside. The dissolve receives a psychological codification when a close-up dissolves in order to reveal the thoughts, memories, or dreams of a character.

La Signora di tutti, however, overuses the dissolve to the extent that its status as a more or less willful disintegration of the image becomes manifest. There are dissolves not only between scenes but within scenes as well, often reducing the legibility of temporal and spatial coordinates.²⁴ In the operating room, a shot of the ether cone descending dissolves to Gaby watching in fear. The opening shots of Gaby's memory of the young women singing in the music class are joined by long, slow dissolves. An image of Gaby's family eating dissolves to a menacing close-up of the father. There are numerous other instances where the film departs from the traditional use of the dissolve but the most disorienting, perhaps, is in the scene of the initial meeting between Alma and Gaby. The first shot of this scene is already a dissolve between Gaby listening to Roberto's conveyed invitation to visit his mother and of Alma sitting in her wheelchair. The camera tracks back slowly from Alma and the image dissolves to a similar slow track backwards from Gaby standing at the fireplace. This image, in its turn, dissolves to a two shot of the characters. Since the dialogue is continuous, the dissolves clearly are not being used in the usual way to signal an elision of time. Rather, the dissolves demonstrate an affinity between the mother and Gaby, revealing that there is a sense in which the two female figures are in the same place, despite the narrative's other and massive attempts to polarize them spatially that I discussed earlier. The traditional heavy grammatical codification associated with the dissolve is indicative of the precariousness of its signifying position. When used to signify a temporal or spatial elision, the dissolve signals that there is a time or a space the image does not cover—that the narrative is effectively based on a loss of time. When used within a scene, these connotations do not fully disappear. Rather, the dissolves suggest that there is a lack that inhabits even the normally spatially and temporally homogeneous unit of the scene. The dissolve potentially bears witness to the image's mimetic and historical inadequacy. The image fails to hold its boundaries stable.

That instability of the image is also a function of Ophuls's frequently noted hyperbolic use of camera movement. The camera generally stays with the characters, often in a somewhat convoluted or elaborate manner, as though operating a constant, paranoid refusal of or anxiety about off-screen space. The camera must, at all costs, keep the character in sight. For instance, in the beginning of the film an intricate and sustained camera movement follows a man through the film studio in his search for Gaby. Later, when her agent visits her apartment, the camera's ubiquity is demonstrated by its ability seemingly to pass through walls in order to align itself with the agent's movements. A similar capacity is illustrated when Gaby dances with Roberto at the ball. The shot, in a constant production and annihilation of space, takes on something of the fatalistic force attributed to the woman. Yet in its frantic attempt to negate the haunting absence of off-screen space, to promote the sense of total presence—a gaze which is fully adequate to its object—in its sheer desperation, excessive camera movement constantly points to that absence as a taunting gap. Like the dissolve, camera movement in this film has a perilous relation to the absence that haunts the frame at its borders.

The deployment of sound in relation to space also participates in this interrogation of the image and its limits. Sound is consistently associated with a kind of violence evocative of the effects of Gaby's inadvertently destructive sexuality. But sound is also consistently elsewhere—displaced in relation to the image, calling attention to that space to which the camera must be blind. The non-coincidence of sound and image, of voice and body, is marked. The schoolmaster's repetition of "Vergogna" appears both over a forbidding image of Gaby's father and later as an accompaniment to the ticking clock as Gaby sits and waits for Roberto's return from his mother's room. The father's voice of reproval after the scandal is a disembodied, despatialized voice lecturing as she traverses a long, empty hall. The opera music returns to haunt Gaby after the death of the mother, emerging from the fireplace, on the stairs. Even the disembodied voice of Gaby singing "La Signora di tutti" at the beginning of the film is subjected to the violence signalled initially by gesturing hands and off-screen voices. Gaby's only emotionally forceful action is the destruction of the radio, the silencing of the opera music after the mother's death.²⁵

In this context, it is significant that the mother is presented as, above all, an auditor, and hence the recipient of the text's greatest degree of violence. In one of the film's many narrational acts, Leonardo and Gaby jointly recount the plot of the opera as Alma listens, not understanding that at a second level they are recounting, or even enacting, something of their own story (the young officer and the older emperor coveting the same woman, one of the rivals going mad in prison—as Gaby points out, "When a man does that for a woman, isn't it magnificent?")²⁶ Representation here is always "off," somewhat decentered. At the opera, the spectator's access is primarily to the image of Gaby and Leonardo—the representation takes place off-screen. While narrating the opera's plot to Alma, Leonardo and Gaby move behind a large curtain that blocks them from Alma's view so that the image of Leonardo's attempt to kiss Gaby is withheld from her. The only sign of the mother's continued presence is her voice-off, "Is that the end?" She overhears a love scene but mistakenly understands it as a representation.

Alma is also a strangely displaced auditor of the love scene between Gaby and Leonardo in the garden. Listening to the radio rendition of the same opera music and noting Gaby's absence, she becomes anxiety-ridden. The musical representation here seems to drive her to her death, to violently exclude her from the text.²⁷ But the music is also the most "proper" or appropriate accompaniment to the love scene (Leonardo, in the garden, tells Gaby, "Listen. That is our music"). The crosscutting between Gaby and Leonardo's tryst and the frantic search of the mother for Gaby, represented in glimpses of her shadow falling across an empty bed, her cane hitting a window, and the wheel of her wheelchair travelling across the hallway, seems to intensify the hysteria of the other woman, the woman left outside—unsuccessful spectator and distant auditor of a love scene that necessitates her exclusion. In a rather convoluted reorganization of the primal scene, it is strangely appropriate that the mother cannot look back, cannot see what is going on between father and daughter. And what she overhears is ultimately fatal. When Gaby destroys the radio, it is an acknowledgment that what has killed the mother, what has undermined the relation between the two women in the text, is the myth of romantic love.

The scene of the mother's death is a critical turning point in the narrative structure and the intensity of the affect associated with it is unusual—in a way it is the most thoroughly melodramatic moment of the film. The tragedy is exacerbated by the erotic implications of the scene that precedes her death on the stairway in which Gaby climbs into bed with Alma and the older woman strokes and caresses her. The diva or femme fatale is generally the cause of the man's destruction or downfall so that Nanni's bankruptcy and degeneration are actually more legible aspects of the traditional scenario. The formal organization of the scene of Alma's death seems to suggest that the real tragedy is in the separation of the two women. Alma overhears, sees nothing, and dies. Later, Gaby also overhears in the sense of hearing too much—hearing what is not there (the opera music emanating from the fireplace, the stairway). Offscreen sound is generally used in narrative film to guarantee the existence of offscreen space—to deny that the frame is a limit and to affirm the unity and homogeneity of the depicted space. Here the close affiliation between sound and anxiety, death, and hallucinatory effects indicates the ever-present potential of diegetic instability and narrative incoherence.

Yet this constant threat of incoherence is manifested much more explicitly at the level of the structuring of narration in La Signora di tutti. Gaby's story is organized as a long flashback, induced by the anesthesia, and further reinforced by the idea of memory's return in the moments before death. As the memory of her life, it is chronologically ordered and quite legible in its depiction of events. But the source of the narration proves to be more problematic. The narrative is continually starting again—from another place. In the scene in which Roberto waits outside to meet Gaby and is confronted by the driver of another car, a voice-over explains, "The other car stopped. I heard a man talking to him, but I couldn't make out what was said." The source of the voice-over and its context are not made clear until the following scene when the camera moves downwards from a view of the mountains to Gaby and Alma talking on a patio. Yet the extent of the material preceding this scene that can be attributed to Gaby's narrative to the mother remains uncertain. Later this technique is repeated, much more ambiguously, when Gaby leaves Leonardo, their broken communication signaled by phones left off the hook. Gaby's voice-over accompanies the images of the two phones, "I did not have the strength to hang up. . . ." The next scene reveals that this is the final section of Gaby's life story as presented to her manager. But we are only given the endpoint of the narrative; there is no starting point, and it is conceivable that the entire flashback up until that moment is a narrative addressed to the manager. The limits and origins of the act of narration are destabilized, continually shifting. It is as if Gaby's life were presented as a series of originless narratives defined only by the terms of their address. To complicate matters further, Gaby's flashback memory also contains a flashback attributed to Roberto (his memory of the auction and his meeting with Gaby's sister, Anna). As representations and narratives proliferate in the film (the posters, the opera and its various incarnations, the portrait of the mother, Gaby's suicide letter, her stories) the act of narration itself appears to vacillate, to lose its place, to undermine its own spatial and temporal coordinates. Ironically, it is the film within a film, La Signora di tutti, that retains its power despite, or perhaps because, of its absence. Its power is the power to name, to categorize Gaby most precisely outside the constraints of a potentially disruptable and insecure diegesis. For the film within a film is known to the spectator only as a title, an abstraction, without any concrete spatial or temporal coordinates—without, in effect, a diegesis.

La Signora di tutti puts into play an abstraction of a lady, "Everybody's Lady, the diva as the fatal inexorability of history misunderstood as uncontrollable sexuality. But its narrative falters. With the various movements of modernism in the early twentieth century, narration becomes more precarious, language loses its stability, its ability to construct a coherent spatio-temporal realm—the illusion of the real—or its ability to adequately convey an experience, as Walter Benjamin points out. Benjamin connects the loss of the art of storytelling with the catastrophic contradiction between bodily experience and mechanical warfare, where even hostility and aggression are made anonymous through technology.²⁸ The body's increasing insignificance and the consequent decrease in the communicability of experience are further emphasized through industrialization and mechanization of labor. For Benjamin, storytelling is an exemplary instance of craftsmanship; the "traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel."²⁹ The art of the storyteller is hence the art of the craftsman coordinating hand, soul, and eye, a phenomenon lost with the advent of mechanical reproduction that no longer permits the slow accumulation of layers of retellings specific to the oral tradition. What is lost is, above all, a certain relation to temporality. The sheer duration attached to the storytelling process is countered by a new attitude toward work that insists upon the compression of time. According to Benjamin, that sense of duration is necessary not only in the production of the story but in its reception as well. For the listener is predisposed to remember and repeat the tale only when "the rhythm of work has seized him,"³⁰ a rhythm most closely associated with the crafts of weaving and spinning that induce a certain boredom, and hence, receptivity.³¹ Benjamin stresses the critical nature of the new orientation toward time by quoting Valéry, "the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated."³²

For Benjamin then, narrative, in being "removed from the realm of living speech" through mechanical reproduction (first through printing in the dissemination of the novel, later, it might be added, through photographic reproduction as the basis of film), loses its specific relation to temporality. Modernism would be one response to such a destabilization of narrative. In the avant-garde of the 1920s and in much modernist work, narrative space and time begin to lose their contours and narrative as history is riddled with gaps. But narrative is clearly restabilized, the threat countered (certainly in the cinema), and the figure of the diva demonstrates that this is partially accomplished through a projection onto the woman of a certain view of history—a view that compensates for the growing unreliability of narrative as a process. The incapacity, inadequacy, or lack of narrative is covered over by the displacement onto the woman of historical determination (and hence, in this context, narrative determination) conceived as inexorable fate. If narrative now lacks the power of the solitary storyteller, the embeddedness in an oral tradition that also once lent to it the weight of its authority, it refinds its mechanism in an internal representation of determination (if not authority), in the image of the woman as cause without consciousness. The diva in the very predictability of the doom she incarnates, in the mechanicity of her effects, embodies a view of history and temporality that is consonant with the era of mechanical reproduction. For all her allure, her aura, her eroticism, the diva is a machine, a narrative machine. Ophuls perhaps perceives this in his recourse to a framing device in which the image of the woman is a function of the machine (the shots in which posters roll off the assembly line). The ostensible desire here may very well be to demonstrate the contrast between the commodified image of the star and the "real" woman of the personal melodrama, but the result is the opposite insofar as the woman—as diva—is shown to have an affinity with the machine.

The crisis of narrative and that of history are linked—to the extent that both are constituted by orderings of events in time. For Benjamin, the historiographical form of the chronicle epitomizes the narrative tendency because the explainability of events is always located elsewhere—for the chronicle, in a divine or natural order that is always already understood; for the story, in the listener's activity of reception. In French and German, the same word denotes both "story" and "history" (histoire, Geschichte). And narrative's failure, its loss of credibility receives a response at the level of a buttressing or reconceptualization of history. Historical determination and temporality are now subject to a thinking inflected by. a technological restructuring of space and time. Technology involves the harnessing of time; time is now managed, organized, directed, compressed, confirming the fears of Valéry, Benjamin, and Ophuls concerning the historical loss of duration and its subjective corollaries—boredom and laziness. Technological time is, above all, sensed as irreversible and linear. It becomes difficult to conceive of technological evolution as anything but progress toward a total state of control over nature. Technology does not move backwards. Its effects are predictable and unyielding.

History, then, in the early years of the twentieth century, is conceptualized in alignment with the mechanical, predetermined movements of an inexorable technology, epitomized perhaps in the cinema and its unrelenting temporality. The time of film viewing is irreversible, determined by the movements of the machine and, unlike the temporality of reading, it does not allow for lingering or contemplation. The technique of film editing, montage, is dependent upon that compression of time cited by Valéry and Benjamin as symptomatic of the modern era. But even the cinematic shot, in its temporal unfolding, suggests a notion of fatalistic determination, the certainty of its own demise. In an analysis of the long-take in Murnau, which in a way aims at a phenomenological description of the essence of the cinema, Alexandre Astruc describes this temporality in revealing terms. Murnau's image is

the meeting place for a certain number of lines of force . . . brought to this /point of extreme tension so that henceforth only their destruction can be conceived and supported. With Murnau, each image demands annihilation by another image. Every sequence announces its own end.

And this is, I think, the key to all of Marnau's work—this fatality hidden behind the most harmless elements of the frame; this diffuse presence of an irremediable something that will gnaw at and corrupt each image the way it wells up behind each of Kafka's sentences. . . . The story of the sequence is the accomplishment of that promise of death. Its temporal unravelling is no other than the definitive realization in time of an original plastic fatality in which everything that must play itself out in these few seconds will be given once and for all.³³

Cinematic temporality is a temporality that is linear, irreversible, and demanding. One cannot look away for a moment. The image insistently advances, continually producing, annihilating, and reproducing its own time and space.

The relation between the cinema and the woman, as it is delineated in La Signora di tutti, shares in this understanding of temporality in terms of fatalistic determination. Mechanical reproduction seems only to solidify and ensure Gaby's inherently dangerous power of seduction. But the film is also clearly uneasy about this alliance between the cinema and the woman, evidencing an anxiety about technology's hold over representation. Ophuls is always at some level the heir of Romanticism, a filmmaker of nostalgia (setting many of his films in turn of the century Vienna, before the age of mechanical reproduction), who through the sheer force of his style attempts to resuscitate the aura of art, despite the limits of cinema as a machine. Undoubtedly, his predilection for including an opera in his films is a way of counterbalancing his dependency upon mechanical reproduction.

Opera activates the same signifying materials as the cinema—voice, music, mise-en-scène, sound effects—but its major difference from filmic signification lies in its presence, its independence from technical reproducibility. In La Signora, as in other Ophuls films, the opera is staged in a space off-screen; it is never shown directly. Nevertheless, the opera is literally enacted by the filmic characters when Leonardo and Gaby narrate its story for Alma. The film within a film, on the other hand, remains entirely divorced from diegetic incarnation; the film's absence is more extreme. Nevertheless, any attempts to maintain a strict opposition between the sign unadulterated by technology (the opera) and mechanical reproduction ultimately fail. For the opera is infiltrated by the technological and tainted by death when its music, reproduced on the radio, instigates Alma's fatal fall. In the same vein, the machine that prints the warped poster signifying Gaby's death is similar, in its operation and appearance, to a film projector or a camera, continually producing still images that only provide the illusion of movement and are contaminated by death. Starkly reminiscent of the filmic movement of frames—twenty-four frames per second—the posters are generated and fall more and more slowly until one is frozen. When the woman dies, the cinema dies, and history/the story has achieved its teleological goal.

The cinematic image, the woman, and a view of history as inexorable fate thus interact in an intricate way to produce the figure of the diva and her descendants. La Signora di tutti puts that abstraction into play, makes it the structural center of the narrative, but does not necessarily agree to all its terms. For the frame of the film and its inner story do not fit together comfortably. In Ophuls's text, we are made aware of the uneasy conjunction between a narrative whose spatial and temporal coordinates are beginning to lose their equilibrium and the machinery of the cinema that produces the death-like pose of the spectacle. The complicity of the cinema in an abstraction of woman that complements its abstraction of temporality and historicity is revealed in the process. La Signora di tutti, through its concentration on absence—the absence of the film of its title, the absence that always threatens to invade the borders of the image—displays that mechanism of abstraction and exposes the basis of its power as a hollowed-out image.

NOTES

¹ Max Ophuls, "Thoughts on Film," in Ophuls, ed. Paul Willemen (London: British Film Institute, 1978), 43, 44.

² Ibid., 45.

³ See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Post-modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 3-15.

⁴ Claude Beylie, Max Ophuls (Paris: Editions Pierre Lherminier, 1984), 6. (My translation.)

⁵La Signora di tutti (Everybody's Lady [1934]): Directed by Max Ophuls; Production Company: Novella Films (Milan); Producer: Emilio Rizzoli; Screenplay: Curt Alexander, Hans Wilhelm, and Max Ophuls, adapted from the novel by Salvator Gotta; Cinematography: Ubaldo Arata; Music: Danièle Amfitheatrof. Cast: Isa Miranda (Gaby Doriot), Memo Benassi (Leonardo Nanni), Tatiana Pavlova (Alma Nanni), Frederico Benfer (Roberto Nanni), Nelly Corradi (Anna). Filmed at Cines Studios, Rome. The film is not widely available in the United States but may be purchased/rented on videotape from Festival Films, 2841 Irving Ave. South, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55408.

⁶ See Maurizia Natali, "Il Fantasma dell'Opera, o a proposito di alcune signore reticenti," Filmcritica 34 (October 1983): 425-30. I am grateful to Gloria Monti for her translation of sections of this article.

⁷ At this time, the Cines Studio, where the film was shot, was relatively free of fascist regulation or censorship in its feature productions. See Elaine Mancini, Struggles of the Italian Film Industry during Fascism, 1930-1935 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), esp. chap. 3, "The Cines Studio," 57-98.

⁸ Ibid., 85.

⁹ Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes the Memorious," in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed., Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1962), 66.

¹⁰ Willeman, ed., Ophuls, 44.

¹¹ Quoted in Pierre Leprohon, The Italian Cinema, trans. Roger Greaves and Oliver Stallybrass (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 34.

¹² Ibid., 35.

¹³ Vernon Jarratt, The Italian Cinema (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951), 23.

¹⁴ Leprohon, Italian Cinema, 35.

¹⁵ Ibid., 37.

¹⁶ The similarity between Isa Miranda as Gaby in La Signora and the diva of the silent cinema has not gone unnoticed. Mancini, for instance, describes Isa Miranda in this way: "In her film acting, she appeared beautiful but bland, passive but powerful in her beauty, a dreamyeyed creature suffering the pangs of human existence. The combinations of those qualities struck another spark. With La Signora di tutti, Isa Miranda was launched as the grand diva of the decade, similar in popularity to the silent stars like Lyda Borelli and Francesca Bertini, similar in looks to Marlene Dietrich, and similar in character portrayals to Greta Garbo" (Struggles of the Italian Film Industry, 82). Mira Liehm also refers to Miranda as "the diva of the thirties, a perfect femme fatale, and a dignified successor to Francesca Bertini . . ." (Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 22).

¹⁷ Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 179.

¹⁸ "Family Plots," Comparative Criticism, vol. 5 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983): 318.

¹⁹ Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, 14.

²⁰ "The Transfiguration of History: Ophuls, Vienna, and Letter from an Unknown Woman," in Letter from an Unknown Woman, ed. Virginia Wright Wexman (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 10-11.

²¹ "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 10.

²² "La Signora di Tutti," Monthly Film Bulletin 49 (September 1982): 212.

²³ Beylie, Max Ophuls, 130. (My translation.)

²⁴ There may be some influence here from the films of French Impressionism, which also use the dissolve in aberrant ways. However, their activation of the dissolve is more frequently associated with a symbolic or graphic motivation, making the dissolves more easily readable. As David Bordwell points out, on the whole, "the transitional functions of such optical effects remain standard" (Bordwell, French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style [New York: Arno Press, 1980], 174. For the full discussion see 172-84).

²⁵ Of all of Ophuls's films, La Signora di tutti is perhaps most intriguing in its use of sound—voice-off, voice-over, and music. Ophuls worked in radio from the early 1920s on, developing a form that orchestrated extracts from novels and poetry with commentaries, sounds, and music effects. In an interview, Ophuls referred to radio as his "secret penchant" (Willemen, ed., Ophuls, 3, 29). For a more extensive discussion of sound in La Signora, see Susan M. White's provocative chapter, "To Hear Is to Obey: Sound and Image in the Genealogy of Guilt in La Signora di tutti" in The Cinema of Max Ophuls: Marginality, Magisterial Vision and the Figure of Woman (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1987), 367-400.

²⁶ I have not yet been able to identify the opera in La Signora. It is quite possible that it is not a citation of an actual opera but a fictional construct.

²⁷ For a discussion of the ambiguous nature of Alma's death, see Andrew Sarris, "La Signora di Tutti," Film Comment 10, no. 6 (November-December 1974): 44-46.

²⁸ Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 84.

²⁹ Ibid., 92.

³⁰ Ibid., 91.

³¹ It is interesting to note that Roland Barthes, who also associates narrative with spinning and weaving, does so from the point of view of production rather than reception, as Benjamin would have it (Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller [New York: Hill and Wang, 1974], 160).

³² Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations, 93.

³³ Quoted in Brian Henderson, A Critique of Film Theory (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980), 51.