What passes in Imitation of Life (1959)
2010; ANU Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1834-8491
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoYou can't escape what you are.1 The above epigraph comes from Jon Halliday 's well-known interview with Douglas Sirk, the director of Imitation of Life (1959), and is made in reference to the condition of the racial passer in Sirk's film. It could be said that Sirk's line encapsulates the conservative and essentialist nature of passing-for-white stories in which the mixed-race character's transgressive desire to escape her origins typically ends in the death of her 'false' (because passing) identity. Typically, in such stories, the passer either returns to her authentic identity (her pre-passing life) or is killed off in a melodramatic story that ultimately upholds social or ideological conventions. Undercutting the didacticism of Sirk's remark, however, is the visual veracity of Imitation of Life's passer, Sarah Jane. Played by the Mexican-American actor Susan Kohner, Sarah Jane looks like the white girl who, throughout the film, she repeatedly says she wants and believes herself to be. The implication of Sirk's statement, if understood in the light of Sarah Jane's white-looking appearance, is that who we are is not necessarily how we look. In other parts of the interview - in which he discusses his theatre-directing and film-making career - Sirk both reinforces and challenges ontological assumptions that equate seeing with being. This is especially the case when he states that the camera sees things that the human eye cannot. Sirk's reasoning about who and what Sarah Jane is, what she passes as, can be understood not simply in terms of the director's philosophical understanding of the visual field but in terms of the mechanical, non-human, non-subjective view of the camera lens. As I will show in what follows, the performances of key actors/ characters also exceed Sirk's prescriptive statement given that what his film points to is the primacy of the body as visual spectacle.2 In considering 'what passes in Imitation of Life', this essay highlights the ways in which Imitation of Life, on the one hand, knowingly replays melodramatic conventions and orthodoxies. On the other hand, it is a film that draws attention to the visual presentation of the expressive body. This body is axiomatic to melodrama, to passing narratives and to understandings of subjectivity itself. Imitation of Life, I argue, is a film in which the complexity of the body - especially when viewed through the mechanical lens of the camera - has the capacity to pass unnoticed. In this way, Imitation of Life can be understood as a Hollywood narrative that reminds spectators of the primary importance of the 'seen' at the same time as it dramatises the productive failure or expressive gaps in the medium. In what follows, therefore, I analyse what the melodramatic passing plot conceals as much as what it exposes. The passing-for-white story is - as Sirk claims in no uncertain terms - essential to the film's overall meaning. In the first section, drawing on Sirk's commentary about film-making and production, I connect the racial-passing theme with what the film communicates about cinema as a primarily visual narrative form. Sirk's discussion of the technological apparatus of film-making and his self-reflexive views on what it means to direct, especially his awareness of the difference between what he says about film-making and what his films present, suggest that what passes on screen falls outside the hmits of his own, directorial vision. That is - in tension with Sirk's statement that there is a Sarah Jane who exists prior to her passing self, that is before she attempts to escape who she is - her cinematic subjectivity is constituted through the mechanical lens that presents her as white. Recognition of what passes in Imitation therefore demands a consideration of how the camera presents bodies on screen. In Imitation of Life, the subjectivity of these bodies is rendered visible through categorical determinants (sex as well as race) that can only partially account for human presence. …
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