4 - Photographs of the Invisible: Intermedial Figurations of Social Exclusion in Babás and Aquarius

Summary

In her illuminating Death 24× a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), Laura Mulvey ruminates on the ties between the academic practice of textual analysis and the flexible spectatorial modes now identified with domestic viewing. For Mulvey, the ability of viewers to pause, rewind and slow down images replicates textual analysis's dissecting and inspecting eye. Following Raymond Bellour (2011), for whom the appearance of photographs in films gives rise to a ‘pensive spectator’ who reflects on cinema's constitutive stillness as embodied in the photogram, Mulvey envisions an updated version of this spectatorship in relation to the viewer's capacity actually to pause a moving image and change it into a freeze frame. In addition to constituting a new mode of cinephilic engagement, this freezing, for Mulvey, can serve a historiographic function. She writes: ‘delaying the image, extracting it from its narrative surroundings, also allows it to return to its context and to contribute something extra and unexpected, a deferred meaning, to the story's narration’ (Mulvey 2006: 151).

To prove this point, Mulvey analyses the opening of Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959), which foreshadows its racial thematics by showing its main character, the blonde Lora (Lana Turner), looking for her daughter on a crowded beach and brushing past her soon-to-be maid, the black Annie (Juanita Moore). Only by pausing this sequence, Mulvey main-tains, can one notice ‘that black extras both foreshadow and accompany [Lora’s] first appearance’, since the ‘extras are not only on the screen so fleetingly that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to register their presence at 24 frames a second, but they are also placed at the edge of the frame’ (156). For Mulvey, the recovery of these extras standing on the margins add textual weight to the film, in the sense that ‘the fleeting presence of the extras relates to Annie's invisibility as the worker on whom Lora's visibility depends’ (157). But it also endows the film with a renewed contextual significance, insofar as these black extras can be seen as ‘standing in for and conjuring up the mass of “coloured people” rendered invisible by racism and oppression, very particularly by Hollywood's culture and representation’ (158).