A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  17. May I say that Almodóvar is dense and complex, that his art is about proliferation, while Mapplethorpe reduces and simplifies? Is this accurate?

  18. Yes.

  19. The most important photo to the logic of the exhibition is the first one—the mask-like self-portrait Mapplethorpe made of himself that reveals only his eyes. The rest of his face is missing. What counts, after all, in what is to follow is a personal vision, the way the artist sees. It’s a photograph about voyeurism, and all photographers and filmmakers are voyeurs in one way or another. They direct their cameras at real people and things, but what appears in their art is an imaginary reality, a product not only of what is there in front of them but of their dreams and fantasies and wishes. This is where the two artists overlap—in the drama of seeing.

  Wim Wenders’s Pina: Dancing for Dance

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  THE camera’s ability to capture events on stage, a choreography, was limited. It automatically became more ‘graphic’ than on stage, more abstract and less corporeal . . . There was, so it seemed to me, a fundamental misunderstanding, or lack of understanding, between dance and film.” In Pina: The Film and the Dancers, a book he coauthored with Donata Wenders, Wim Wenders articulates the perceptual chasm he felt he was unable to bridge. For twenty years he had wanted to make a documentary about the choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch, but for twenty years this gulf between performances on-screen and performances in life had him stumped. Bodies moving on a big flat screen do not have the same effect on an audience as bodies moving on a stage in the world. Cinema abstracts and distances the human body from the viewer, and while these qualities have been used to great advantage in the history of movies, they muted precisely what Wenders was hoping to record—the visceral, emotional, muscular experience of watching Pina Bausch’s dance theater in real space. In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty addresses this physical reality: “To be a body, is to be tied to a certain world . . . our body is not primarily in space: it is of it.” Moviegoers can never literally be of cinematic space. We enter it by route of the imagination, and that was the trouble. Wenders hoped for a way to bring the film viewer closer to the space of the dancers’ bodies.

  The solution arrived with new technology. While watching a U2 concert filmed in new 3-D, the director suddenly felt an avenue had been opened to him, and he could begin work on the documentary. The technology does not mimic actual human perception, nor does it transport spectators into the world of live theater. In 3-D, what is added to the screen is the illusion of depth, a sense that the spectator can fall or walk into the space in front of her, that she can enter it naturally, and the bodies she sees exist in a shared space. While this technology has been used to create spectacular, soaring, and often fantastical effects (in films such as Avatar and Hugo, for example), Wenders employed 3-D in Pina to produce a feeling of intimacy between the viewer and the dancers, one that honors the startling experience of watching a Bausch performance.

  In the book on the film, Wenders reports that he actively resisted going to see Bausch’s Café Müller in 1985. He claims he had no interest in dance whatsoever and was dragged to the production by his companion, Solveig Dommartin. Once he had been seated in the audience and began to watch, however, he found himself so moved by the performance that he wept. I suspect it was this cataclysmic initial response that made Wenders at once eager and cautious about transferring Bausch’s work to film. There is nothing sentimental or soft about Café Müller, or any of Bausch’s work for that matter. Although one can feel the ferocious rigor of her choreographic vision, one does not come away with a message or story that can be explicated. One cannot encapsulate in words what one has seen. Rather, her work generates multiple and often ambiguous meanings, which, for a viewer like me, is precisely what constitutes the extraordinary strength of her choreography.

  An artist’s later acclaim often dims our memory of earlier controversy, so it is helpful to recall that Bausch’s debut in the United States in 1984 was met with confusion, even opprobrium. The dance critic for the New Yorker, Arlene Croce, referred to Café Müller as “thin but flashy schtick” and “meaningless frenzy.” “She keeps referring us to the act of brutalization or humiliation—to the pornography of pain.” The critic for the Washington Post worried in print about where Bausch stood on “the moral spectrum.” The force of Café Müller has little to do with what might be called “the conventions of aesthetic response,” which have often involved analyses of technique and form, or turgid examinations of how one performance compares to another. What perplexed these reviewers was that there was no historical scaffolding on which they could stand, no ready-made conventional response on which they could rely. The work did not tell them how to think or feel, and their lack of orientation generated suspicion, discomfort, and anger. Of course, the history of art is littered with exactly such mystified and hostile responses.

  A woman collapses slowly against a wall. Another woman, blind or asleep, stumbles forward while a man removes chairs that stand in her way. A redhead in a coat scurries across the floor. A seated woman shows her naked back to the audience. A man manipulates the body movements of a couple, so that they enact a repetitive ritual of embraces, kisses, lifts, and falls. Their rote motions get faster and faster, mimicking a speeded-up film, and the viewer is left torn between laughter and distress. Café Müller’s dance of search, meeting, seduction, rejection, and retreat, which takes place to the music of Purcell, evokes the ongoing rhythmic narrative of our undying physical need for other human beings, a need that is forever impeded by obstacles, both internal and external. Bausch’s dance forms are reminiscent of dreams, and by their nature dreams are more emotional than waking life. The choreographer exploits their mysterious vocabulary in her work to achieve insights into the affective, often erotic and destructive, pulse of human desire.

  The viewer’s emotion is born of a profound recognition of himself in the story that is being played out onstage before him. He engages in a participatory, embodied mirroring relation with the dancers, which evades articulation in language. Susanne Langer is writing about music in the following passage from Philosophy in a New Key, but her commentary can be applied equally well to dance: “The real power of music lies in the fact that it can be ‘true’ to the life of feeling in a way that language cannot; for its significant forms have that ambivalence of content which words cannot have.” Musical meanings arrive, as Langer puts it, “below the threshold of consciousness, [and] certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking.”

  Although this activation remains below our awareness, it nevertheless allows us to participate in the aesthetic, emotive action of what we are looking at. In her acceptance speech in 2007 when she won the Kyoto Prize, Bausch said, “For I always know exactly what I am looking for, but I know it with my intuition and not with my head.” Indeed, many artists work this way, even artists whose medium is words. There is always a preverbal, physiological, rhythmic, motoric ground that precedes language and informs it.

  A keen awareness of the nondiscursive, intuitively formed character of Bausch’s dance theater informs the documentary Pina throughout. Despite the advent of a new 3-D film that allows the viewer novel access to screen space, technical problems did not vanish. They multiplied. One by one, Wenders and his team solved every glitch, and then they lost their chief collaborator and the subject of their film. Pina Bausch died suddenly on June 30, 2009. The movie came to a halt but was reborn as a memorial and includes not only excerpts from performances of Café Müller, Le Sacre du Printemps, Kontakthof, and Vollmond (the works Bausch and Wenders had settled upon for filming) but also danced tributes from the members of the Tanztheater Wuppertal troupe for their director, choreographer, and fellow dancer.

  Woven into the final film are also interstitial scenes in which the dancers tell an anecdote or story about “Pina.” Although we see the dancers’ heads on-screen and hear them speak, we do not see them speaking. Their stories and commenta
ries, told in several different languages, are heard in voice-over. This simple displacement of the viewer’s expectations—that when heads on-screen talk, their mouths must move—acts as a visual reminder that the language that matters most in this film is made of gestures, not of words.

  One of the remarkable qualities of any successful work of art is that we don’t see or feel the labor that went into making it. The thing feels as if it had to be the way it is. It is salutary to know that after filming had been completed, Wim Wenders had “several hundred hours of material” and that he edited that material for a year and a half. One can only wonder about the thousands of decisions that had to be made during that time. When it was finished, the documentary itself had become a rhythmical sequence achieved through visual repetitions and leaps of editing that are felt in the body of the viewer just as the dances are.

  Wenders welcomes the viewer first of all to a place, Wuppertal, the town that was home to Bausch’s Tanztheater from the time she became its choreographer in 1973. After I donned my special glasses and settled back in my seat, the first image I saw was of an elevated tram moving over the city accompanied by the opening credits, the letters of which appeared to be suspended in the air only a few feet in front of me, hovering under the ceiling of the movie theater where I was sitting. Those floating words felt utterly magical. From its opening, then, the film created in me what Wenders had hoped for—a cinematic space I could enter in a new way. It also established a fascinating polarity between the realness of the Wuppertal I saw before me and the enchanted, indeed uncanny, presence of those letters in the air. The tram returns in the film and is seen from various perspectives. Dancers will perform their tributes inside it and underneath it. The tram literally binds various parts of Wuppertal together, but it also establishes one pole of an inside/outside and imaginary/real distinction that becomes essential to the documentary’s movement.

  In Sacre du Printemps and Vollmond, Bausch brought the outside into the theater. In her choreography to the famous Stravinsky composition, the dancers wade through, leap over, and roll on a stage covered in peat, and in Vollmond the dancers perform on and near an enormous rock that suggests a shoreline. They shoot water from their mouths, throw pails full of it at one another, and move through it as it rains or cascades over them. When the dancer Rainer Behr performs his tribute dance to Bausch outside on dusty, rocky ground at the edge of a precipice overlooking the fields below, one cannot help but be drawn back into the space of the performances we have witnessed earlier in the film. “The elements were very important to Pina,” Behr says. “Whether it was sand, earth, stone, water . . . At some point icebergs and rocks suddenly appeared onstage.” This outdoor/indoor theme is further enhanced by the charming repetition in the film of a sequence of close-to-the-body gestures that mime the changing of the seasons—spring, summer, fall, and winter. Early in the documentary, we see a dancer on the stage who ceremoniously names the seasons and performs each one of them in a series of precise, piquant arm and hand motions. Near the end of the film, we see the entire troupe march in a long conga line on a hill above the city, their hips swaying and their arms moving as they reiterate the seasonal cycles of warm and hot and cool and cold.

  Wenders’s cinematic leaps demonstrate an acute understanding of what might be called the complex levels of our imaginative entrance into artistic worlds. Two of the dancers stand outside, look down at a miniature model of the stage set for Café Müller, and reminisce about their experiences. I found myself fascinated by this dollhouse structure with its tiny chairs and tables. Before the film cuts to a scene of the dance itself, we are treated to a glimpse of dancers inside the little house—to “real” Lilliputian dancers moving around in that shrunken space. More magic. But this movie magic does not point to itself; it could easily be missed, but there it is in the movie, a play on scale, on scale in the world and scale in film. People grow and shrink depending on the real and imagined spaces they inhabit.

  At another moment when an earlier black-and-white film of Pina Bausch dancing in Café Müller appears in the documentary, the viewer moves from her own theater seat in the actual theater into a virtual seat in another dark but far more intimate room with a whirring projector, where the troupe has gathered to look at the old movie in the old flat style. After the choreographer’s death, her image on this flat screen inside the 3-D screen assumes a ghostly, incorporeal, and elegiac quality that allows the viewer to participate in the grief of losing the inimitable Pina Bausch.

  I have never seen a dancer with more expressive arms. By watching the dancers, by listening to their disembodied words, and by glimpsing the choreographer herself, the viewer participates in the intimacy of collective feeling that fluctuates from pleasure to pain and back again. One of the dancers, Pablo Aran Gimeno, explained that when he first came to Wuppertal, he felt a bit lost, but Pina told him simply, “Dance for love.” This simple bit of advice was obviously helpful, as the young dancer never forgot it.

  Pina is, above all, one artist’s gift to another artist. Wim Wenders’s homage to Pina Bausch scrupulously retains the vigor of the choreographer’s particular sensibility and her uncompromising art, but it does so through the director’s own acute visions and filmic rhythms that become another dance in another genre, another dance for love.

  Much Ado About Hairdos

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  WHEN my daughter was in elementary school, she wore her hair long, and every night before I began reading aloud to her, I sat behind her to comb and then braid it. If left loose during her hours of hectic sleep and dreams, Sophie’s hair was transformed into a great bird’s nest by morning. I especially liked the braiding ritual, liked the sight of my child’s ears and the back of her neck, liked the feel and look and smell of her shiny brown hair, liked the folding over and under of the three skeins of hair between my fingers. The braiding was also an act of anticipation—it came just before we crawled into her bed together, settled in among the pillows and sheets, and I began to read and Sophie to listen.

  Even this simple act of plaiting my child’s hair gives rise to questions about meaning. Why do more girl children wear their hair long in our culture than boy children? Why is hairstyle a sign of sexual difference? I have to admit that unless a boy child of mine had begged me for braids, I probably would have followed convention and kept his hair short, even though I think such rules are arbitrary and constricting. And finally, why would I have been mortified to send Sophie off to school with her tresses in high-flying, ratted knots?

  All mammals have hair. Hair is not a body part so much as a lifeless extension of a body. Although the bulb of the follicle is alive, the hair shaft is dead and insensible, which allows for its multiple manipulations. We are the only mammals who braid, knot, powder, pile up, oil, spray, tease, perm, color, curl, straighten, augment, shave off, and clip our hairs. The liminal status of hair is crucial to its meanings. It grows on the border between person and world. As Mary Douglas argued in Purity and Danger, substances that cross the body’s boundaries are signs of disorder and may easily become pollutants. Hair attached to our heads is part of us, but hair clogged in the shower drain after a shampoo is waste.

  Hair protrudes from all over human skin except the soles of our feet and the palms of our hands. Contiguity plays a role in hair’s significance. Hair on a person’s head frames her or his face, and the face is the primary focus in most of our communicative dealings with others. We recognize people by their faces. We speak, listen, nod, and respond to a face, especially to eyes. Head hair and, more intrusively, beard hair exists at the periphery of these vital exchanges that begin immediately after birth, and once we become self-conscious, our concern that our hair is “in place,” “unmussed,” or “mussed in just the right way” has to do with its role as messenger to the other.

  A never-combed head of hair may announce that its owner lives outside human society altogether—is a wild child, a hermit, or an insane person. It may also signify beliefs and polit
ical or cultural marginality. Think of the dreadlocks of Rastafarians or the long matted hair of the sannyasis, ascetic wanderers in India. The combed-out Afro or “natural” for women and men in the 1960s communicated a wordless but potent political story. As a high school student, I thought of Angela Davis’s hair as a sign, not only of her politics, but of her formidable intellect, as if her association with Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School could be divined in her commanding halo. Was the brilliant Davis a subliminal influence on my decision in the middle of the 1970s to apply a toxic permanent wave solution to my straight, shoulder-length blond hair, a chemical alteration that was literally hair-raising? The Afro style (sort of) on me—not just a white girl, but an extremely white girl—turned the “natural” into the “unnatural.” I was hardly alone in adopting the look. As fashions travel from one person or group to another, their significance mutates. Note the bleached-blond hair of famous black sports stars or the penchant for cornrows by certain white people.

  Despite its important role as speechless social messenger, hair is a part of the human body we can live without. Losing a head of hair or shaving our legs and underarms or waxing away pubic hair is not like losing an arm or a finger. “It will always grow back” is a phrase routinely used to comfort those who have suffered a bad haircut. Hair that touches a living head but is itself dead has an object-like quality no other body part has, except our fingernails and toenails. Hair is at once of “me” and an alien “it.” When I touch the hair of another person, I am similarly touching him or her, but not his or her internally felt body.

  I remember that when my niece Juliette was a baby, she used to suck on her bottle twirling her mother’s long hair around her fingers as her eyes slowly opened and closed. It was a gesture of luxurious, soporific pleasure. Well after her bottle had been abandoned, she was unable to fall asleep without the ritual hair twiddling, which meant, of course, that the rest of my sister was forced to accompany those essential strands. Asti’s hair, as part of Juliette’s mother but not her mother’s body proper, became what D. W. Winnicott called a “transitional object,” the stuffed animal, bit of blanket, lullaby, or routine many children need to pave the way to sleep. The thing or act belongs to Winnicott’s “intermediate area of experience,” a between-zone that is “outside the individual” but is not “the external world,” an object or ritual imbued with the child’s longings and fantasies that helps ease her separation from her mother. Hair as marginalia lends itself particularly well to this transitional role.