1. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier . Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 13. [BACK]

2. Ibid., p. 15. [BACK]

3. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema , Indiana University Press, 1981. Particularly the essay "The Question Oshima." [BACK]

4. "We wanted to re-read Ford, not Huston, to dissect Bresson and not René Clair, to psychoanalyze Bazin and not Pauline Kael," T. L. French, " Les Cahiers du Cinéma 1968-1977, Interview with Serge Daney," The Thousand Eyes #2. [BACK]

5. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film , University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. [BACK]

6. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen Volume 15, Number 3, Autumn 1975. [BACK]

7. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema , Indiana University Press, 1984. [BACK]

8. "What interests me . . . in Lizabeth Scott films," Alloway writes, "are those properties specific to popular movies which can be validated by comparison with other films and other mass media." Lawrence Alloway, Violent America: The Movies 1946-1964 , The Museum of Modern Art, 1971. [BACK]

9. "A still from a 40's movie called Shockproof had a fascination that I spent some time analyzing. Everything in the photograph converged on a girl in a 'new look' coat who stared out slightly to the right of the camera. A very wide-angle lens must have been used because the perspective seemed distorted, but the disquiet of the scene was due to other factors. It was a film set, not a real room, so wall surfaces were not explicitly conjoined; and the lighting came from several different sources. Since the scale of the room had not been unreasonably enlarged, as one might expect from the use of a wide-angle lens, it could be assumed that false perspective had been introduced to counteract its effect . . ., yet the foreground remained emphatically close and the reces- soft

sion extreme. All this contributed more to the foreboding atmosphere than the casually observed body lying on the floor, partially concealed by a desk. The three collages . . . are about this image of an interior space—ominous, provocative, ambiguous; with the lingering residues of decorative style that any inhabited space collects. A confrontation with which the spectator is familiar yet not at ease." ( Richard Hamilton , The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1973, page 46.) "I've been looking at the catalogue. There is a wonderful clarity in Hamilton's work. And looking at these pictures some things have come back to me—Pat Knight's rather angular handsomeness, the pale lipstick face, with eyes trying to hide something, and an attitude of sameness about her against the changing backgrounds and melodramatic action." ( Sirk On Sirk by Jon Halliday, The Viking Press, New York, 1972, page 79.) [BACK]

10. "Pop! Go the Movies," Moviegoer #2, Spring, 1964. [BACK]

11. Leonard Maltin's TV Movies and Video Guide , 1987 Edition, Signet Books. [BACK]

12. In his video presentation L'Image du Cinéma , Raymond Bellour provocatively describes the cinema as a "machine that produces couples." [BACK]

13. See John O. Thompson, "Screen Acting and the Commutation Test," Screen , Volume 19, Number 2, Summer, 1978. [BACK]

14. And even this plateau is in a sense provisional, for Scott and Lancaster—dressed in their costumes from Desert Fury —make an appearance in Variety Girl , another 1947 Paramount release. Directed by George Marshall, Variety Girl is a revue-style musical—ostensibly about the charitable organization "The Variety Clubs of America,"—thrown together much along the lines of such wartime musical reviews as Thank Your Lucky Stars, Stage Door Canteen , or Star Spangled Rhythm . A slim plot (coscripted by Frank Tashlin) follows the adventures of Olga San Juan and Mary Hatcher in Hollywood as an excuse to showcase Paramount stars and personalities (among those making cameos: Ray Milland, Paulette Goddard, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Alan Ladd, Dorothy Lamour). The film's finale is a nightclub show with a carnival motif. Ringmaster William Demerest takes us to one exhibit featuring "Buffalo Burt Lancaster and Lizabeth 'Texas' Scott." Lancaster is to shoot a pair of cigarettes out of Scott's mouth from over his shoulder, using a mirror. "Stop breathing," he tells her. "Who's breathing?" she asks. The camera is on Lancaster when he shoots. He turns about looking disappointed. He walks over to where Scott was standing. The space is empty. He looks down indicating he has felled her. He takes a card and places it on a post nearby. It reads "Girl Wanted." [BACK]

15. Paramount News , September 23, 1946. [BACK]

16. Paramount News , November 11, 1946. [BACK]

17. "No, My Desert Daughter," Newsweek , September 15, 1947. [BACK]

18. Running Away from Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn from the Films of the 40's , Grossman Publishers, 1969. [BACK]

19. "We've been begging them on our knees—I mentioned previously women analysts—to try to tell us, well, not a word! Never been able to get anything out of them," Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire Volume XX, Encore , Editions du Seuil, 1975, page 69. [BACK]

21. Paul Smith, "Our Written Experience of the Cinema: An Interview with Jean-Louis Schefer," Enclitic Volume VI, Number 2, Fall, 1982. [BACK]