A form of play that models solving the social and psychological riddles that surround us.
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Exactly. You see, Freud in
describes the dream as a rebusa rebus being a riddle that has its solution actually inscribed into its form. It's not as if the solution were concealed inside by a mysterious space; it's actually concealed in the text itself, and the ''reader' of the dream has to decipher the clues through intelligence and imagination, through curiosity engaged by a text. Thinking back to
from the point of view of my work on Pandora, I've realized how important the formal pattern of the film was, in making this kind of engagement possible.
I started being theoretically interested in this means of engaging the spectator through thinking about
and through reading Sitney on structural film,' particularly on that aspect of structural film he called 'participatory film' [See P. Adams Sitney,
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 430435].
Frampton's
and of course, Frampton's
set up a pattern or a system the audience has to engage with. It seemed to me then that this was an important approach, if you're thinking about the pleasure of the text and the pleasure of the look: it provides a way in which the pleasure of the look can become implicated with the pleasure of the rebus. It allows curiosity to be associated not only with narrativity, with wanting to know what happens next, but also with formal engagement where narrativity is transposed onto a kind of grid or pattern.
Recently, I was embarrassed to realizeafter seeing the film all the times I've seen itthat I had never noticed how extensive the mirror structure is. Clearly, the opening three sections and the last three sections mirror each other, but it had never occurred to me to look at how the shots of 'Louise's Story' mirror each other. Shots one and thirteen, and shots two and twelve, and so on
mirror each other . . .
Well, they do and they don't, Scott. The first two shots are indoors, no windows, no outside, a completely enclosed space . . .
Like the last two shots.
Actually that
work, doesn't it? But the very enclosed, nesting space at the beginning is the space of the emotional relationship between the mother and the child, and the space of the last two sequences isit sounds pretentious to saythe space of fantasy, of the enigma of the unconscious, of the enigma of the construction of subjectivity. In the last section they're looking at hieroglyphics. They're not enclosed in their own space; the film has gone beyond their relationship.
[
Hieroglyphics are an exemplary case of a riddle needing to be deciphered. They are also a form of rebus and, of course, Freud saw dreams as structured like hieroglyphs.]
I remember it seemed important to have Louise and Anna walking down the central corridor of the British Museum,
the
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space, breaking the circularity which had been more or less completely controlling their movements up until then. The circularity is still there in the pan, but they make an angle into it. And the child is allowed to walk. And we introduced a new color, red, moving from blue (at the beginning of 'Louise's Story') to red. Red is introduced in the mirror sequence, and Louise is wearing red in the British Museum.
I think one of the interesting things the film accomplishes, and I assume it was one of the things you talked a lot about, was showing a positive development, people becoming aware of themselves and aware of what their potential is, without acting as though the world has suddenly miraculously changed. The differences between the early and late shots in 'Louise's Story' demonstrate that the relationship of Anna and Louise is changing, and that Louise is becoming more independent. And yet, the parallels between these shots imply that living in patriarchy has not only enclosed Louise and Anna in the world of shot one, but that even if they are now out of their enclosure in the home, what they must investigate is the long public history of patriarchy: the British Museum's exhibits are the
form of the same thing that they've experienced in private.
Yes. That was certainly an effect we wanted to get at the end, but in the British Museum shot we were most interested in giving the impression of a 'detour through the unconscious.' The intertext that precedes that shot is 'detour through these texts, entombed now in glass, whose enigmatic script reminds her of a forgotten history and the power of a different language'the language of the unconscious. This now, of course, seems very much in keeping with feminist discussion at the time . . .
