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Some questions about microfinance and self-help groups
The editorial examines how self-help groups and microfinance may not be what they were once intended to be - the silver bullet to eliminate poverty - and this could soon become a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
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Responses to the Editorial in Phalanx 4
Why Does the Anglophone Indian want to be a Novelist?
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Films: |
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Avatar
by James Cameron
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3 Idiots
by Rajkumar Hirani Read |
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Home > Contents > Essay: MK Raghavendra |
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Unattainable Women
Sexual Anxiety in Three Films by Scorsese, Rohmer and Kiarostami
MK Raghavendra
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The focus, the films
This essay was originally envisaged as a tribute to Eric Rohmer who passed away in 2010. Rohmer, one of the founding fathers of the French New Wave, made films that are largely about social behavior with coupling or pairing - situations in which a man and a woman relate to each other as sexual beings - as a common motif. They are dominated by talk and much of the conversation is improvised by the actors. Although Rohmer is still my principal interest, I wondered if his significance could not be grasped better by comparing his films with those of filmmakers from other cultures who have sometimes dealt with the same themes. There is something uniquely French in Rohmer; while filmmakers from other cultures have rarely shown the same extraordinary interest in the intricacies of observed behavior, several French directors like Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game, 1939), Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim, 1962), Claude Sautet (Vincent, Francois, Paul and the Others, 1974), Jacques Rivette (La Belle Noiseuse, 1991) and Claude Chabrol (Les Bonnes Femmes, 1960) have been deeply responsive to it even when their concerns are different. Among the filmmakers from other cultures who appear sensitive are Yasujiro Ozu, Abbas Kiarostami and Martin Scorsese although their films cannot all be subsumed under the rubric of a 'cinema of social behavior' as most of Eric Rohmer's films can be.
 Since it would be sensible to examine only films which have broadly comparable motifs I decided to put side by side Rohmer's The Aviator's Wife (1981) - about a young postman and his older girlfriend who is gradually moving away from him - and films by Martin Scorsese and the Abbas Kiarostami which deal with similar anxieties.
Although the main thrust of Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) is hardly the same as The Aviator's Wife, it is partly about Travis Bickle's futile wooing of Betsy. Eric Rohmer
Kiarostami's Under the Olive Trees (1994) is about an illiterate mason and a young woman with schooling who are recruited to play 'a couple' in a film being shot and the male lead attempting, hopelessly, to woo the female lead while filming is in progress.
Rohmer's and Kiarostami's films have non-stars or non-actors in Martin Scorsese the lead roles while Scorsese made his film before De Niro became a big star and its characters try to breathe ordinariness.All three films deal with working class protagonists and they are naturalistic in their methods; they are intent on capturing real people in  actual situations. They also get convincing performances from the actors and capture their milieus vividly. Through the comparison, I hope to be able to arrive at a broad appreciation of what 'understanding people' connotes to each of these filmmakers and why. I will discuss the three films in the order in which they were made and begin with Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. I am not as interested in the narrative plotting as in the style of narration and the assumptions underlying this style.
Abbas Kiarostami
Taxi Driver
Taxi Driver begins Travis Bickle driving around New York at night, his eyes darting this way and that, at the people on the streets. The first part of Taxi Driver, the part that interests me more, deals with Travis, (Robert De Niro) obsessed with the sordidness of the city, spotting Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who is a campaign worker for Senator Charles Palantine, a candidate for President of the United States. Betsy, Travis is certain, does not belong in the filth  that is New York; she is the one person with whom he might connect, but she has an admirer Tom, a colleague who has declared his love for her, usually in attendance.
Since this is the first film being discussed I will begin in a very basic way by discussing the filming of the interpersonal exchanges. There are different kinds of exchanges in Taxi Driver and in the first kind, Travis deals with the person at the taxi office or with the other taxi drivers like Wizard (Peter Boyle) who are engaged in small talk. In these exchanges, lines of dialogue spoken by Travis are usually cut to the listener-other (the standard shot-reaction-shot format) and there is a back-and forth which is set up. While we are privy to Travis listening to the other person, there is never a situation when Travis is talking and the camera focused on the listener. Travis' countenance when he is listening registers what he is hearing and Travis acquires an 'interiority' that is not granted to the other person(s). This means that while Travis is individuated, the others are merely denoted as 'friends', 'taxi drivers', 'the girl at the counter' or 'the man at the office'. They are not 'interpersonal exchanges' between persons but Travis transacting with an impersonal world. Since it is quite a while before Travis interacts with a 'person' viz. Betsy, he emerges as separate from a world full of faceless people and this is given emphasis by the voice-over when he speaks to us. The dominance of night sequences reduces humanity to the level of fleeting shapes silhouetted against the neon. When close-ups of Travis are constantly cut to these moving shapes, we expect that whatever action occurs in Taxi Driver will originate in Travis' person, action not derived from the relationships - still to be defined - but initiated by his psychology. When film theorists describe American film narrative as driven by 'psychological causation' as an operating principle (1), they imply causation only by those endowed with psychology because all characters are not thus conceived.
The other kind of verbal exchange in Taxi Driver occurs between Travis and Betsy - and later between him and Iris - when there are actually two 'persons' involved. Betsy is introduced to us through a voice over. Travis announces her even before she is seen by the camera. When she is introduced we also see something independently for the first time - without Travis being the mediator. Betsy is in her office interacting with Tom and, when she sees Travis staring at her, Tom is dispatched to send him away. The camera quickly shifts to Travis now and his viewpoint is resumed. Betsy, despite being a 'person', is not allowed the same interiority that Travis has been given. She, in essence, remains defined in terms of what she means to Travis, and causation, evidently, cannot proceed from her.
Taxi Driver is constructed around Travis Bickle, or rather, the individuality that Robert De Niro is seen to possess. Where early cinema depended on the type (the vamp, the family man, the villain) there was, as cinema developed, a move towards more complex types and even ironic reversals of type. This means that films have tried to create individuals, or rather, 'individualities' as types. The factor bestowing a type with 'individuality' is his/her striking separateness from other people - his/her ability to make us believe that he/she is as 'we' are behind our disguises, someone capable of 'defeating our self-defeats' (2). What this means is that there is identification with the star-as-protagonist because he/she represents us as we might have been, if we had had the strength to be what we actually are. We therefore project ourselves into the 'individuality as type', something we do not do with 'character-types'.
American films rely profoundly on the 'individuality' but there cannot be room for more than one or two of these in any film (3). Films therefore also include character-types without which the 'individuality' loses significance. It is perhaps only because of the presence of people indistinguishable from their social roles that the 'individuality' retains its appeal. In Spider-Man (2001), for instance, Peter Parker/Tobey Macguire is the 'individuality', while his uncle and aunt are character-types. The 'individuality' is valued because he/she stands out above his/ her given social role to which the character-type submits.
Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver is the 'individuality' but Betsy is not describable in that way. Betsy is different only because she is physically set apart from other women by her appearance, and the camera dwells on this. There is another convention here, which is the dominance of heterosexual monogamy as an operating principle. This convention implies that the audience will only accept Travis being paired with Betsy and not Tom to whom she will be unattainable. Travis, a Taxi Driver, making such a confident move to woo someone above his class originates in the conventions of cinema, rather than in any social expectations that the audience might ascribe to him. As the only 'individuality' in the film, he is projected by the audience to win her, just as his rival Tom (Albert Brooks) is not. Betsy's brief reappearance at the end is only to reassure us that no pairing has taken place between her and Tom despite her break-up with Travis.
Since my interest in Taxi Driver is principally in Travis' 'futile wooing of Betsy', how is their relationship represented? The film is endowing Betsy with no more than surface and she is what she seems at first glance. This is why Taxi Driver hits on the rudimentary episode of the porn film to induce Betsy to reject him. If she had a psychology of some sort the break-up might have had more complex implications, but here it is left to Travis to initiate it through his thoughtlessness. Also, there being more than an indication that Travis is revolted by the sex industry, is it likely that he would be a porn film addict? The porn film is perhaps only to create grounds for his break-up with Betsy, which must be from his side.
I have hitherto presented Travis' wooing of Betsy and his rejection by her as being rooted in his psychology - because Betsy is only barely a 'person'. This being the case, is their relationship even a 'relationship' as we understand the term? Even in the submission of the weak to the strong, it is naive to attribute the submission only to the psychology of the strong. My argument is that the film is only interested in charting Travis' emotional trajectory and that Betsy is no more than an appropriate stimulus. Her presence is required only to provide Travis with a fleeting beacon before he lapses into an incurable condition. Another kind of beacon might have been just as effective - although perhaps not as decorative.
The best segment in the film, in my view, contains the moment when Travis has become 'political' and tells Senator Palatine that the whole city should be 'flushed down the toilet'. Optimism and expectations are emotions that politicians live on but Travis is beyond that; although, briefly, he is still connected enough to communicate this to a listener. Travis is incapable of articulating his unease as a social problem with a solution. His own body is, rather, a metaphor for the city and cleansing it is the first step towards cleansing the city.
Taxi Driver is about 'alienation' and Travis is apparently 'pathological' but there is a difficulty with De Niro playing him. De Niro is a charismatic actor; but what is 'charisma' really? It can be argued that 'charisma' implies an audience at whom it is directed. The issue here is how someone could be pathologically alienated and still be charismatic: because 'alienation' implies being cut off from social interactions. If one recollects Mersault from Camus' The Outsider, he is presented as quite colorless. But colorlessness in the 'individuality' would also inhibit projection by the audience.
Whereas the pathological subject should be an unreliable narrator (4), what we see always corresponds to what the Travis has been telling us. The film is depending on point-of-view but it is not merely restricting our field of knowledge to Travis' viewpoint; moral justification for the action is also provided by Travis (5) and he remains 'moral'. Just consider where Travis' 'pathological condition' (6) takes him: to shooting an armed robber, killing a pimp trafficking in minors as well as a dreaded gangster, rescuing a twelve-year-old prostitute and becoming a public hero. Given that Travis is the 'individuality' in whom audiences have invested their emotions, it may be inconvenient to have him being senselessly destructive or even mistaken in his actions.
The cultural significance of Travis Bickle and Taxi Driver will be looked at separately but Scorsese's film valorizes the motivated individual, the person who cannot go wrong even when he/she is as pathological as Travis is. But the stranger aspect of the film is that the unattainable woman is only made unattainable by him; she has no voice in her own 'unattainability'. The fact that all action in the film originates in its only 'individual' ensures this. Theorists have noted how, in American cinema, we only recall the individuality represented by the star and rarely the role (7). In Taxi Driver 'Travis Bickle' is a name made ordinary and given to the role, as a token gesture towards the colorlessness appropriate to the outsider; there is an evident mismatch between it and 'Robert De Niro'.
The Aviator's Wife
Rohmer's film is not nearly as well known as Scorsese's and it needs to be described in greater detail. The male protagonist is Francois, a young postman, and the film begins with a colleague giving him details about a plumber, who is evidently needed by Francois' girlfriend Anne. Anne (Marie Rivère) does not like receiving calls at her office and has no telephone at home. Francois (Philippe Marlaud) has just completed his night shift and must go to her apartment to leave a message for her. But Francois' pen doesn't write and he therefore goes out to a store to get another. Even as he leaves, another man climbs out of a taxi and goes up to Anne's department to drop a note. But Anne wakes  up, sees who it is and hastily prevents him from departing. It comes out that this is Christian (Mathieu Carrière), a pilot, and her boyfriend from whom she hasn't heard for several months. But Christian's wife is pregnant and he has only come for a last goodbye. He is now moving to Paris with his wife and, since it is inappropriate to have two girls in the same city, he is leaving Anne and getting back to his wife - whom he loves.
When Francois returns to Anne's apartment with a pencil (he has dozed off in a café for a while), he finds Anne leaving with Christian. He withdraws discreetly but, later that morning, he sees Christian in a café meeting a blonde woman. Francois gets into the same bus as the two, intending to follow them. On the bus he catches the attention of a younger girl. As luck will have it, the girl gets off at the same spot where Christian, the blonde girl and Francois have got off and she and Francois bump into each other. One thing leads to another and Francois and the girl Lucie (Anne-Laure Meury) are soon following the other two into a nearby park. Francois tells a few untruths but when he finds the girl lively and excited, he tells her everything she needs to know. The two play at detective and try to find out how the two are related. Anne has told Francois little about Christian and the woman could be his wife. When Francois and Lucie find their quarry not only unromantic but also visiting a lawyer, a solution suggests itself - they are getting a divorce! Francois and Lucie part after they learn that Lucie lives close to where he works. If Francois learns more, he will drop a postcard to her without fail.
Rohmer's film looks innocuous in comparison with the apparent 'importance' of Taxi Driver. It is only dealing with two men and two women and the process of couple formation - a more fluid activity than American cinema will allow. Its characters are 'ordinary' and even the camera emphasizes this. The film begins in the post office and the conversation between Francois and his unnamed friend about the plumber. There is nothing marking out Francois as the protagonist and the camera gives equal importance to both men. The more dramatic shot-reaction-shot way of recording the conversation is eschewed and the camera often catches both together, sometimes even looking away or down. The camera also catches gestures and objects which are not part of the drama and 'noise' is deliberately created - to play down the sense that the events chosen for the 'story' are more important than the others. The way this segment emerges, the narrative might well have followed Francois' unnamed friend instead, and got an equally interesting narrative.
The film does not use point of view extensively but has different sections dealing with different people. What happens is that we get information in these segments from people who conceal it from others - especially when the information might be pertinent to them. Even when the information is only partly revealed to these others, it has to be extracted through dogged questioning.
At the climax of the film Anne finally allows Francois to confront her - after avoiding him hitherto. We now have facts about Anne and Francois that they are themselves unaware of and/or hesitant to tell each other. Anne is impatient to break with Francois, who she finds irksome, even when the man she loves has just broken off with her. She is therefore hesitant to tell him about the break-up, which might encourage him. Francois has just had an encounter with Lucie and has been following Christian around the city and he is perhaps too embarrassed to tell Anne that he has been playing the spy. Rohmer does not explain why people conceal so much from each other, and he allows us to appreciate their conduct from what we know about real people. Interpersonal communication is as much about concealment as about revealing because of the implications of revealing. The film recognizes that social behavior depends on the constructs people help create of themselves in other people and that they protect and sustain these constructs.
The climactic scene in The Aviator's Wife begins with Anne intending to tell Francois to find another girlfriend but Francois is certain that he only wants Anne. He has had an encounter with the 15-year-old Lucie meanwhile, and has been given her home address but he is not really considering her. Rohmer needs to stage this scene in such a way that there is some kind of rapprochement between Anne and Francois. Anne is deeply unhappy and Francois is extremely frustrated and jealous, but the exchange between the two of them must be comforting to both without their respective mysteries being breached. To elaborate on this last sentence, Anne and Francois cannot tell each other 'everything' - the mutual confession as often happens at the climax of an American film. They must reveal something about themselves but also not so much that it would jeopardize their own 'safeties' as individuals. Anne cannot seem more vulnerable than she would like to seem, and Francois cannot seem the juvenile person that he is. Anne desperately wants a companion but she also wants to stay alone in her small apartment. Although she wants to be comforted, she cannot allow Francois to kiss her, which might send the wrong signals. Francois tells her that he will work days so he can spend his nights with her and she replies that if they had seen more of each other, they might have broken up a long time ago. It is situations like this that Rohmer's mastery of the medium becomes most apparent; he allows the actors to improvise -include gestures not part of a predetermined 'text'. The tension in the scene comes from people wanting love and comfort from each other but also wary of being hurt. What happens in this climactic scene is the break-up of a relationship but both participants are left with comfort and understanding - as is the spectator. And there is also Lucy to be dealt with - without her providing simple recompense to Francois because she is too independent to merely 'fill the gap' left by Anne.
Rohmer's value as a filmmaker comes out of his seeing every kind of person as being inherently of interest. There is no effort in his films to get people to project themselves into characters on the screen. All his later films use minor actors who don't even appear in other people's films. An actor who plays a major part in one Rohmer film could only get a small part in another. I earlier described Rohmer as 'typically French' but other directors like Chabrol and Sautet don't go as far in their democratic attention to all people.
In films like Taxi Driver, scenes where the protagonist is alone are important because they define what he 'is'. In Rohmer's films people are nothing in themselves; they are defined by their transactions. These transactions are not necessarily interpersonal but also implied in the work they do. In a later Rohmer film, the woman protagonist remarks that she finds men most attractive when they are working but that they stop working when they see her. This does not mean that people are not 'alone' in Rohmer's films but there is always something else going on. Anne, for instance, is 'resting' when she is alone in The Aviator's Wife. This sense of people being defined by social transactions is also present in other French cinema, for instance in Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939). The difference in Rohmer's films is the sense we get of the transactions being contingent; people are constantly renegotiating their positions with other people. It is this sense of positions being renegotiated that makes the relationships in Rohmer's films more fleeting and ambiguous (8) than those of, say, Francois Truffaut, who is also telling stories about man-woman relationships, as in The Woman Next Door (1981) and The Man who Loved Women (1983).
I tried to show how action proceeds entirely from the 'individuality' in Taxi Driver but if 'persons' are defined by their transactions in Rohmer's films, what place does the individual have in a film like The Aviator's Wife? Much of the interpersonal rhetoric in the film focuses on 'love', i.e. the notion of individual choice in sexual relationships. My sense is of a mismatch between the contingent nature of each relationship and the rhetoric employed. It is not that Francois does not 'love' Anne but that such an indelible label is attached to something so impermanent and conditional. One falls in love but one could fall out of it - if the circumstances were not congenial. I therefore propose that 'individual choice' in Rohmer's films is partly a rhetorical way of coping with the compulsion to fulfill social roles. But 'compulsion' does not imply that the demands of a role are cast in stone - because they are constantly being renewed and renegotiated.
Under the Olive Trees
Abbas Kiarostami's film is set in Koker in Iran after devastating earthquake and is unusual because appears to be part fiction and part documentary, with people in the region actually playing themselves. It is so cleverly constructed that it is difficult to say which is the documentary part and which is the fiction but I will try to do so and provide an accurate account of the film. Under the Olive Trees begins with a film director (Mohammed Ali Keshavarz) addressing the camera and telling us of the local women recruited to film a story, in which the principal characters are a young couple. After short-listing several candidates, a young woman is soon recruited and the filming starts. The story filmed pertains to a young couple married just after the earthquake and 'Scene 1'  involves the man taking a sack of plaster upstairs to repair a portion of the house. This bare scene is filmed several times but always cut short because, every time, the man does not say the lines he is expected to say. It soon turns out that the man stammers in the presence of women. He is therefore replaced by another young man named Hossain (Hossain Rezai), who has been working in the camp where the crew has its quarters, doing odd jobs. The sequence in which Hossain is driven to the film set is part of the documentary side of Under the Olive Trees and we understand something about the young man about to become an actor.
When the young man is driven to the film set, the coordinator Mrs Shiva (Zarifeh Shiva) finds the road blocked by bricks because a house is being reconstructed. The workers are not prepared to move the bricks immediately and Mrs Shiva and Hossain have to wait. When a worker suggests that Hossain could help, Hossain refuses. He is trained as a mason but he is being employed as an actor now and he will not do the job of a mason -handle bricks. Hossain, it is apparent, is deliberate about what he would like to do and is also upwardly mobile.
Hossain takes up his film role immediately and in earnest but there is still something wrong. This time it is the girl Tahereh (Tahereh Ladanian) who is not doing something right. She has known Hossain from before and that is apparently interfering. The facts that emerge is that Hossain saw Tahereh and decided that he wanted her for his wife but her parents aimed for someone better placed, and someone with a house. A day later, however, the earthquake killed Tahereh's parents and leveled her house. Hossain believes that this meant that they were roughly equal now, neither of them with a house. But despite this equalization of their status, Tahereh and her grandmother, with whom she lives, will not have him for the girl's husband. The girl now finds it awkward to be in a film in which Hossain is her husband.
Hossain wants to marry Tahereh because she is literate and he is not. She could help the children with their homework, he believes. There are several subsequent conversations between the director and Hossain in which other facts emerge. Hossain has social views about marriage and he will not marry someone illiterate, regardless of how pretty she is. Rich people must marry poor people and the literate must marry the illiterate so that people can help each other. "What will happen if husband and wife have a house each?" he asks. Would they put their heads in one house and their feet in another? When the director replies that they could live in one and rent out the other, Hossain unhappily admits the possibility.
As I noted earlier, it is difficult to be certain about which are the documentary segments of the film. If one were to describe the film accurately, it enlists two young rustics named Hossain Rezai and Tahereh Ladanian to play two young rustics named Hossain Rezai and Tahereh Ladanian who are enlisted to play two young rustics named Hossain and Tahereh by the film company. It is only in the filming within the film that Hossain and Tahereh are fictional because they are married; the 'real' Hossain's problem in Kiarostami's film is that the 'real' Tahereh will not marry him. What we cannot be certain about is whether Under the Olive Trees is telling the actual story of two persons it has recruited as actors - at least in part. Judging from the discussions between the director and Hossain which seem so authentic, my suspicion is that it is.
At the same time, there are segments in the film which could only have happened in private and in the absence of an intrusive camera. In the first of these, Hossain pursues Tahereh's grandmother asking for her granddaughter's hand without much avail. In the second instance Hossain tries to talk to Tahereh in between shootings, without the girl responding in any way. He talks to her about the bright future for masons after the earthquake and of his eagerness to get back to his profession when she marries him. He tells her what a considerate husband he would be, even making tea for her. Still, Tahereh is adamantly silent and incommunicative. When she is required to address him as 'Mr Hossain' in her fictional role (the way wives address their husbands) she deliberately calls him 'Hossain'. Hossain steps in now and tells the director that nowadays wives address their husbands without prefixing it with a 'Mr' and Tahereh is still being authentic. The film ends with Hossain following Tahereh on the way home - after the filming - to press his suit. The logic of the film tells us that their marriage is not possible. But Kiarostami, when shooting them from a great distance shows the white speck that is Hossain running back as if in glee. The music also becomes cheerful and we presume that he has been finally accepted.
These 'private' sequences appear staged not because they are inauthentic but because they are filmed in long shot, with Hossain speaking sentences that are longer and more eloquent, but also delivered more mechanically. We do not see the faces of the two from near enough to be sure of the 'truth' of the segments. When Hossain follows Tahereh in the last sequence, for instance, we do not see them in the same frame (the real Tahereh might not have consented to act this out) but only put together on the editing table, with the man's voice on the soundtrack as the woman hurries along. Perhaps Tahereh Ladanian was not even aware that at the conclusion of this segment, she would be consenting to marry Hossain Rezai!
Somewhere in the film Mrs Shiva talks to someone who is presumably the actor who plays the teacher in Kiarostami's Where is My Friend's Home and the man asserts he is that in real life - a teacher. If one recollects that film, the children in Where is My Friend's Home are terrified of their teacher although he does nothing in the film that should elicit such terror. Since the terror felt by the children is palpable, what may be happening is that Kiarostami is constructing fiction out of actual people in actual relationships. The teacher perhaps elicits terror from his students in real life. The emotions felt by real people in actual social circumstances are registered in each film and informs the fictional circumstances created in the narrative. In Under the Olive Trees the tensions between Hossain and Tahereh and their social causes are real but the way the tension is resolved is fictional. I suggest that the fictional resolutions provided are, at best, perfunctory and it is the underlying real tensions that are all important in Kiarostami's films.
Another aspect of Under the Olive Trees that deserves examination is Kiarostami's tendency to give the same names to the characters that the actors actually have. This suggests that Kiarostami is not looking at his characters as different from his actors. They are not allowed to act out fiction in the film but are what they are playing. The offhand way in which names are given to the characters is suggested by the sequence in the film within the film when Hossain has to mention the '65 dead' in the man's family. But each time Hossain gives the number as '25' - those deceased in his own family, to be corrected each time and the sequence shot again. The filmmaker is being scrupulous about details here. At the same time, even although Hossain has replaced another actor, the young man he plays is called 'Hossain'. Since it is too much of a coincidence to believe that the character was called 'Hossain' even earlier, we may presume that the director is less fastidious when it comes to proper names for his characters than with the other details. There is, perhaps, a deliberate erasure of individuality in Under the Olive Trees which could be significant.
It is significant that while Hossain uses rhetoric to justify his desire to marry Tahereh, it does not focus on 'love' but on the social need for such an alliance. He has strong views about what kind of marriages would be socially beneficial. In fact, his position is nearly the opposite of Francois' in Rohmer's The Aviator's Wife. In that film, people were, in a sense, trying to cope with social necessities by employing the rhetoric of choice. In this film, one gets the sense that Hossain is being self-serving but has invented a 'social ethic' to justify it. Kiarostami is not judging Hossain in the film but pointing to the endurance of individual aspirations in a cultural milieu that discourages them. The director's indifference to the specificity of proper names perhaps reflects on how the milieu treats individuality.
Conclusion
I have been examining three films about heterosexual anxiety in which there are obstacles to couple formation. Taxi Driver is a specifically American cultural product while The Aviator's Wife is a distinctly French one, and the narrative approaches in the two films rely on notions of individuality specific to the respective cultures. 'Individuality' is perhaps best approached through the notion of 'liberty' and American cinema is informed by a notion of individuality owing to the intellectual tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. This tradition defines 'liberty' and 'freedom' largely in negative terms. Defining freedom as 'the absence of external obstacles', it proposes a legal sphere in which individuals remain unobstructed by the external authorities of church and state. It has looked to laissez-faire capitalism for its fundamental values; emphasizing the independence of the individual ' and above all the 'rational' individual ' from political, social, and economic constraints, this school celebrates the free pursuit of private gain in the open marketplace of material and cultural goods (9). While this tradition is associated with scholars from the United States and Great Britain, it has gained more importance in the United States which was born as a democratic country, whereas Great Britain moved to democracy after being a monarchy. Further, as Tocqueville notes (10), for the majority of the nations of Europe, political existence commenced in the superior ranks and was gradually communicated to the different members of the social body. In America, on the other hand, social organization began at the smallest level. The township was organized before the county, the county before the State, the State before the Union. The simplest kind of social organization led to more complex forms. The individual plays a more significant role in the simpler kinds of social organization and there is perhaps an association between this and the mythical dimensions assumed by 'individuality' in American popular culture.
It is clearly beyond the scope of this essay to examine this deeply, but the proposition that in America the simplest kind of social organization existed independently before leading to more complex forms also accounts for the moral significance of the family (heterosexual monogamy) in cinema. If the genre of the western creates a mythology out of the origins of the American nation, John Ford's westerns look to the white nuclear family as the civilizing influence in the frontier even while the westerner is fighting Indians and making the land safe for civilization. (11)
Another school of thought with regard to liberty comes from France in the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and in the Revolution itself - especially the radical Jacobin phase of 1793-94. This school conceived liberty not as the 'absence of external obstacles' but, rather, as the democratic 'self-rule' both of the individual citizen and of civil society as a whole. It proposed, in other words, to substitute the 'general will of the people' for the particular will of a monarch, and thereby redeployed the authority of the state to secure 'autonomous selfhood' for each member of civil society. Rousseauian liberty comprises not the 'negative' freedom of the individual from interference but rather the participation of all members of society in a 'public power' which is entitled to interfere with every aspect of every citizen's life. The French Revolution itself, especially in its Jacobin phase, represented 'an eruption of the desire for the positive freedom of collective self-assertion' (12). If 'collective self-assertion' is concerned with the political side, how would this show itself in the way interpersonal relationships are explored in a cultural product like cinema? I suggest that where American cinema valorizes 'individuality', French cinema is drawn to dealing with the 'citizen'. Since the 'citizen' exists only as part of a political collective, French cinema may have been led to defining the 'person' only through his/her relationships with other citizens and not as an entity in himself/herself. That may be why, where American cinema invites the spectator to project himself/herself into the 'individuality', French cinema declines to do so. It is impossible to identify with someone in a French film because what are of interest are relationships between 'citizens' - and not 'individualities' whose value comes from their triumphing over their social roles.
Of the three films I have discussed, two come from cultures in which the notion of 'liberty' has been publicly defined. The third film is from Iran in which there has apparently not been any political upheaval (like the War of Independence in America and the Revolution in France) which might have led to the question of 'liberty' being addressed. The Islamic Revolution in Iran brought up religious issues, primarily, and it is difficult - from our perspective - to be certain about its deeper impact upon the country's secular culture. But if there had been such an upheaval in which 'liberty' as an issue had been addressed, perhaps Hossein in Under the Olive Trees would have cited 'love' as a reason for marrying Tahereh instead of inventing an elaborate social ethic. And Abbas Kiarostami might perhaps also have given other names to the young couple involved in the filming within the film.
Notes/ references
| 1. |
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, London: Methuen, 1985, p157. |
| 2. |
Stanley Cavell, Types; Cycles as Genres, selection from Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed from Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fifth Edition, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999, pp337-42. |
| 3. |
Even two stars suggesting interiority in a film is quite rare. John Ford's The Man who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is an example. The film stars John Wayne and James Stewart. |
| 4. |
4. Although their protagonists are not 'pathological', point of view is extensively employed by Hitchcock in Vertigo and Rear Window but the spectator takes a different moral viewpoint from that of the protagonists. We judge Scottie in Vertigo as we do not judge Travis in Taxi Driver. |
| 5. |
When, in the voice over, Travis describes the humanity shown as 'whores, skunks, pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies' and declares he takes every kind in his taxi because it makes no difference to him, Travis is tarring everyone with the same brush, generalizing far too broadly but the film's moral viewpoint still remains Travis' because what we see corresponds to what he is saying. |
| 6. |
The film concludes with a Travis' eyes darting around intensely, suggesting that his veneer of normalcy is superficial and that this is only a respite before another explosion. But even if that occurred, one finds it difficult to believe that Travis's doings might have more regrettable consequences than those of a Rotarian - they would only be 'beneficial to all those concerned'. |
| 7. |
Stanley Cavell, Types; Cycles as Genres, selection from Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed from Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, p 341 |
| 8. |
Another way seeing this would be that 'ambiguity' is a key aspect common to much post-War European art cinema - e.g.: Fellini, Bergman, Rivette, Antonioni and Godard - which is deliberately structured to invite interpretation. See David Bordwell, The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice, from Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, pp 716-25. |
| 9. |
Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp123-30. |
| 10. |
Alexis de Tocqueville, Origin of the Anglo-Americans from Democracy in America, Volume 1, Project Gutenberg Ebook, Trans.: Henry Reeve, 2006. |
| 11. |
"Myth is a kind of language by which the exigencies of a historical moment are given eternal justifications" (Roland Barthes, Mythologies, London: Paladin, 1973, p143) and genre films perpetuate mythologies. My argument is that since the 'westerner' and the 'civilizing white family' are encoded in the mythology of the western, they point to the exigencies of the actual historical moment that engendered the American nation. Also see Thomas Schatz, Film Genre and the Genre Film, from Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford Univrsity Press, 1999, p 647. As Schatz notes, "The western hero, regardless of his social or legal standing, is necessarily an agent of civilization in the savage frontier." |
| 12. |
Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, p 162. |
M. K. Raghavendra is Founder-Editor of Phalanx |
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