Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts Vol. 12, n.2 (2020): pp. XX-XX. https://10.34632/jsta.2020.8527

Audiovisual Essays

Ricardo Vieira Lisboa
Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira

Translation
Carlos Natálio

AUTHOR’S STATEMENT

As with many cinematic genres, the Gothic starts with literature. The precursor titles of the genre are The Castle of Otranto (1764) – that defined the haunted castle ideal – and The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story (1778) – that delineated the archetypes of the young female protagonist. Afterwards, there were Ann Radcliffe’s books The Mysteries of Udolpho (1791) and The Italian (1797) (Hanson, 2007, p. 34). These books would be infinitely repeated and modified according with the most varied of formats (including cinema).

In cinema there are multiple interpretations of these universes that literature inspired. In particular, a group of films produced in the 40’s by the American majors. Throughout the decade all studios produced at least one title that can be included in this genre. Some of the directors that worked within the Gothic are: Vincente Minnelli (Undercurrent, 1946), Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Dragonwyck, 1946), George Cukor (Gaslight, 1946), Alfred Hitchcock (Rebecca, 1940; Suspicion, 1941; Shadow of a Doubt, 1943; Spellbound, 1945; Notorious, 1946; and Under Capricorn, 1949), Fritz Lang (The Secret Beyond the Door…, 1947), Jacques Tourneur (I Walked With a Zombie, 1943; and Experiment Perilous, 1944), Robert Siodmak (The Spiral Staircase, 1946), Orson Welles (The Stranger, 1946), Douglas Sirk (Sleep My Love, 1948), Max Ophuls (Caught, 1949), Robert Stevenson (Jane Eyre, 1943) and William Wyler (Wuthering Heights, 1939).

The researcher Diane Waldmanm, in an important article about the second wave of feminism in the eighties, summarily describes the Gothic film genre this way:

A young and inexperienced woman meets a handsome older man to whom she is alternately attracted and repelled. After a whirlwind courtship (72 hours in Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door, two weeks is more typical), she marries him. After returning to the ancestral mansion of one of the pair, the heroine experiences a series of bizarre and uncanny incidents, open to ambiguous interpretation, revolving around the question of whether or not the Gothic male really loves her. She begins to suspect that he may be a murderer. (Waldman, 1984, pp. 29-30)

Adding to these broad strokes of narrative and the construction of its two main characters, Gothic is also commonly associated to a group of spaces, situations and typical characters. Common décors are the abandoned castle, the ruin, the cemetery, the decadent church, the isolated house, and later, the shadowy apartment, the closed building, the degraded factory or the deserted city. The typical situations involve stairs that lead to hidden secrets kept in humid caves, endless corridors, well-locked and never opened doors, false walls, two-way mirrors, secret passages, candles, ancient books and documents that reveal secrets from the past. The typical characters include the silent butlers or maids, the characters affected by a disabling disease, the handsome young man, the crooked doctor, the aristocrat, the mad scientist, the hidden criminal or the disguised psychopath. In many cases, the male character establishes with the constantly fainting innocent girl a professional or romantic relationship, that takes her to that shadowy place where she is lost, disorientated and submitted to the dimension or fear provoked by the spaces. But she is, most of the times, equally curious, adventurous and willing to discover and clarify the mystery that afflicts her.

This last aspect reflects the double nature of many Gothic narratives, an ambiguity always present both on the nature of the protagonist’s experience, and on us as spectators, who follow the unfolding of the plot with and through her. What the protagonist interprets… is it the result of a difficulty in communication or a truncated understating of reality? Or, inversely, is this experience purposely conditioned by a malefic figure who intends to drive the woman to madness? “(...) the central feature of the Gothics is ambiguity, the hesitation between two possible interpretations of events by the protagonist (...).” (Hanson, 2007, p. 31)

For myself, Rebecca (1940) – the complex adaptation of the famous Daphne du Maurier’s homonymous novel – is one of those films each cinephile guards religiously to himself, like a magic globe, where all the world’s mysteries may be reflected. For me, it has been the fruit of endless pleasures. It’s a film I watch very often, that I know more or less by heart, but still is always able to offer me small discoveries, signs of my demons that infect the film. Or, better still, the demons that find in the film ways of communication with me. It’s in the context of one more of these revisitations to the film, that I began to collect images and sounds that would send me to that abovementioned “essence” of the Gothic genre: the ambiguities of perception (including those of the spectator of the audiovisual essay).

I naturally started by the aphorism that haunts me for years – “Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?” – imposing this way a phantasmatic look on all the images that are about to follow. Then, I tried to implant another doubt, just like one of those husbands, manipulators of young and delicate young wives: to whom belongs that initial letter? “R” from Rebecca or “R” from Ricardo? Signature as appropriation? In what way, does the video essayist makes his the images of the films he uses? The answer: the quotes – literalised by the quotation marks, « ». This followed by a Godard’s quote about his own method, by which he sniffs himself, like a dog chasing his own tail, taken from JLG/JLG - autoportrait de décembre (1994). All this to end in the inner core of Rebecca, the absence of the eponymous character. A film made of images and sounds about a figure without a body or presence.

Another quote follows. As João Bénard da Costa says, we can link the scene where, after Olivier e Fontaine’s marriage, the notary forgets and sends the nuptial agreement from the first floor to the ground, to this other scene where Olivier is at the verge of a cliff. A man and a woman connected by a ghost (Rebecca), by a cliff (the Hitchcockian fall) and the sea, always the sea (see – sea). Also, from the Bénardian writing comes the description of that subjective of Fontaine, that slowly covers all the empty room (where a crime took place). In another words, “the two women merge one into the other: (...) we see through Fontaine’s gaze everything he describes (ashtrays, ropes, etc.) as if everything recapitulates again and came that night, brought by Rebecca’s body and Fontaine’s appearance.” (Costa, 2002) The ghost finds a body in the gaze, like a virus that takes advantage of the senses of the living. However, there is also an appropriation of Maxim’s gaze by Fontaine: her subjective corresponds to his gaze, memory and description. For this reason and for the first time he submits to her gaze. And it’s from then on, that the inversion of powers will take place in the film.

And it all ends in a kind of triviality: a “reportage” of Jornal Português – a series of national actualités produced between 1938 and 1951 (under the supervision of António Lopes Ribeiro, the official filmmaker of the Portuguese dictatorship regime). In particular, a visit of Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh to Portugal in 1941, for the première of Rebecca in Lisbon. This way, one transports the film to a very particular context, the one of its Portuguese première, in the first years of Estado Novo, where – as what happens with Maxim de Winter – the important was not to have gossip. Moreover, this element reminds us the way the commercial circuit of the presentations and reception of images equally impose certain readings and “ambiguous interpretations”, defined by state’s ideologies or personal interests[1]. The spectator can also be manipulated like a helpless young wife and he also has the capacity to understand more than just what he sees or hears.

REFERENCES

Costa, J. B. (2002). Rebecca. In Textos Cinemateca Portuguesa, 59. Cinemateca Portuguesa – Museu do Cinema.

Curtis, B. (2008). Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film. Reaktion Books.

Lisboa, R. V. (2016). A representação do cinema no ‘Jornal Português’: da capital das vedetas à agenda de António Lopes Ribeiro. Aniki: Revista Portuguesa da Image em Movimento, 2(3). https://doi.org/10.14591/aniki.v3n2.220

Hanson, H. (2007). Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and Female Gothic Film. J.B. Taurius & Co. Ltd.

Waldman, D. (1984). At Last I Can Tell It to Someone!: Feminine Point of View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Film of the 1940s. In Cinema Journal, 23(2).

NOTES

[1] On this, I point to the article I wrote on this subject “A representação do cinema no Jornal Português: da capital das vedetas à agenda de António Lopes Ribeiro” (2016).