Fourteen— Feminist Makeovers: The Celluloid Surgery of Valie Export and Su Friedrich
1. The number of operations and other procedures Richards underwent in her changes from man to partial woman to man to woman is mind-boggling. In addition to those I have already mentioned, Garber also lists the removal of Raskind's Adam's apple and breast reduction surgery: after initial hormone treatments Raskind married a woman and found himself embarrassed by his large breasts. The whole cycle began all over again three years later with the end of the marriage. The final stage of Raskind's change to Richards included a penectomy and the construction of a vagina using penile tissue. See further Richards's autobiography. [BACK]
2. In passing, Garber comments that Jackson's age has become increasingly indeterminate, in part as a result of his operations but primarily thanks to his androgynous, ageless, and "raceless" performances. See Garber, 1992: 185.
For years pulp magazines and newspapers have tried to "explain" Jackson's androgyny in order to capitalize on his appeal. According to the weekly magazine For Women First , for example, Jackson "owns up to two nose jobs" but "sources close continue
to [him] number his rhinoplasties as high as seven." The magazine goes on to cite a medical expert, identified as "David Alessi, MD, clinical assistant professor at UCLA," who claims Jackson "looks as if he's had cheek and chin implants, lip reduction and skin lightening. . . . He may have also had liposuction under the chin" ("Plastic Surgery under Fire," 1992: 23).
On an Oprah Winfrey special aired February 10, 1993, Jackson vehemently denied such allegations. He maintained that he had only twice undergone plastic surgery, though he refused to say what had been altered. He also revealed that he suffered from a skin disease that made areas of his skin "white," and said he used powder and makeup to even out the blotches. [BACK]
3. I have only seen Export's three feature films— Invisible Adversaries ( Unsichtbare Gegner , 1976), Menschenfrauen (1978) and Practice of Love ( Praxis der Liebe , 1984)—on video. All are available for rental or purchase from Facets Multimedia, 1517 West Fullerton Ave., Chicago, IL 60614 (800-331-6197). [BACK]
4. See, for example, Lyon, 1991, and Mueller, 1983. [BACK]
5. Export claims the surrealists are precursors of Viennese action art and Western feminist performance art. See Export, 1989. [BACK]
6. Friedrich's longer films— The Ties That Bind (1984), Damned If You Don't (1987), and Sink or Swim (1990)--are available from Women Make Movies, Canyon Cinema, and the Museum of Modern Art. Three of the shorts— Cool Hands, Warm Heart (1979), Gently down the Stream (1981), and First Comes Love (1991)--are distributed by Women Make Movies and Canyon Cinema. Canyon Cinema distributes a fourth short, But No One (1982), as well. [BACK]
7. The term comes from Friedrich's presentation at the 1992 MLA feminist film session I organized, entitled "Lesbian Tongues Untied." [BACK]
8. See Holmlund, "Fractured Fairytales and Experimental Identities." [BACK]
9. The title of Export's article is, of course, itself a makeover of Antonin Artaud's The Theater and Its Double . [BACK]
10. In interviews, Siegel maintains only that "the majority of people in the world . . . are pods, existing without any intellectual aspirations and incapable of love" (Braucourt, 1972: 75). See also Kaminsky, 1991: 154-57. LaValley, however, argues that Siegel was also critical of conformist right-wing 1950s America, though his critiques in Invasion were less pointed than those scripted by left-leaning screen-writer Daniel Mainwaring. See LaValley, 1991: 911. For other interpretations, see, for example, Biskind, 1991: 193-97; Kaminsky, 1991: 178-81; Laura, 1972: 71; LaValley, 1991: 3-17; Rogan, 1991: 201-5; Sayre, 1991: 184; Sobchak, 1987: 123; Steffen-Fluhr, 1991: 206-21; and Warren, 1982: 287. [BACK]
11. As the film opens, an offscreen news broadcaster reports that Chancellor Kreisky's SPO is engaging in "Watergate methods" in its hunt for left-wing radicals. A bit later this same broadcaster mentions Henriette von Shirach, wife of the Nazi youth leader, in connection with a story on the rise of neo-Nazism in Austria. Later mention is made of the prevalence of corruption in the Second Republic. [BACK]
12. See, for example, the description Export offers in Hofmann and Hollein, 1980: 108. [BACK]
13. See Couder, 1984, and Lukasz-Aden and Strobel, 1985: 249. [BACK]
14. See Warren, 1982: 284; Laura, 1972: 72; and LaValley, 1991: 11. break [BACK]
15. Steffen-Fluhr reads the film as more overtly misogynist than I do. For her, the film's major theme is "a dialectic between sleep and wakefulness, between deadly 'alien' passivity and passionate human activity (i.e. between stereotypical female and male modes. [ sic ]) This dialectic is further complicated because, in Invasion, 'to sleep' is linked to the euphemism for sexual intercourse, 'to sleep with'" (Steffen-Fluhr, 1991: 214). [BACK]
16. Because Export repeatedly shows the effects imperialist wars have on people of color, one might argue that she also calls attention to the racial politics which, Robert Eberwein maintains, underpinned the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers . See Eberwein's essay in this volume. [BACK]
17. Unlike the first and last sequences of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which Siegel had to add on to satisfy test audiences and his producers, Export's opening sequence is not part of a frame story, although the principal elements it incorporates are repeated again, with modifications, at the end. [BACK]
18. An old man looks ominous, for example, even though he is just mowing the lawn, because we see him from behind or suddenly in extreme close-up in the foreground of a shot. Since Siegel has hidden the man's face and/or unsettled three-dimensional space, we cannot be sure of his "humanity." [BACK]
19. In the last section of her chapter "Spare Parts," provocatively titled "Postscript: The Transsexual on the Cutting Room Floor," Garber explores a related question: how transsexuals have been represented in recent mainstream and independent films. She does not discuss experimental films or examine the relationships between experimental makeovers and mainstream originals, however. See Garber, 1992: 110-17. [BACK]
20. The related question, "When is a woman a human being (in patriarchal societies)?" is never articulated, though it is obviously the starting point for Export's analysis. Thanks to Lucy Fischer for this observation.
Similarly, Elizabeth Lyon argues that Export inverts the question that Miles asked himself when confronted with the pod Becky's entreaty to "sleep" with her. For Lyon, Export thereby "shift[s] the ground from telling the difference between alien and human to posing the question of the relation between sexual identity and the body" (Lyon, 1991: 1). [BACK]
21. Export's second feature film, Menschenfrauen, incorporates still other performance pieces from this time period. [BACK]
22. Helke Sander talks about her own feminist filmmaking in one of Anna's videos, and the end of Invisible Adversaries quotes Rahel Varnhagen, a nineteenth-century Austrian writer recently rediscovered by feminists. [BACK]
23. Joanna Kiernan makes a similar point about some of Export's short films: "[T]he audience is a necessary part of the transference and the polemic" (Kiernan, 1986-87: 185). [BACK]
24. Menschenfrauen does briefly take up lesbianism. The ending is especially telling: the two main female characters, both pregnant by the same man, leave him for each other. [BACK]
25. MacDonald maintains that Friedrich made Damned If You Don't as a response to the taboo on cinematic and narrative pleasure imposed by certain 1980s feminist filmmakers, because she views such a strategy as a dead end. She says, "I like continue
films that are both sensual and entertaining, that engage me emotionally as well as intellectually. . . . [With Damned If You Don't ], I wanted to make something I (and viewers) would enjoy" (MacDonald, 1992: 295 and 299). [BACK]
26. From the start, Powell insisted that "the atmosphere in this film is everything. . . . Wind, the altitude, the beauty of the settings—it must all be under control" (Powell, 1987: 562-63). [BACK]
27. How much the association of the exotic and the erotic, the Oriental and the feminine, is destined for a Western male gaze is clear in the anecdote Powell provides about his friend Stewart Granger's infatuation with Jean Simmons as Kanchi: "When Stewart . . . saw Jean eating a squashy fruit with a ring through her nose, he went straight out, proposed to her and married her. I always said it was the baggy umbrella she carried. It was the final erotic touch" (Powell, 1987: 585). [BACK]
28. Powell and Pressburger cast fancifully clad British actresses as the most important female Indian characters. May Hallatt played Ayah, the old guardian of the brothel-nunnery and Jean Simmons played Kanchi. Yet as Antonio Rodrig points out, for all Powell and Pressburger's imaginative re-visioning of the Orient, in Black Narcissus "India is not just a decor or a visual backdrop. The natives possess many faces . . ." (Rodrig, 1985: 5). Translation mine. [BACK]
29. Henry Sheehan argues that Powell and Pressburger's title is itself a self-reflexive send-up of racism. For him "the pair's unconsummated flirtations with kitsch" represent "self-conscious depictions of the reality that lurk[s] beneath analysis" (Sheehan, 1990: 39). [BACK]
30. On the attraction of habits for transvestites, see Garber, 1992: 210-23. [BACK]
31. Katharina Sykora makes a similar comment, writing that Friedrich "filters out the erotic connotations through the editing of single frames, revealing the commonality in the women's rivalry, namely, the function 'Man' as the means of confirmation and understanding of their own sexuality" (Sykora, 1989: 100). Translation mine. [BACK]
32. See Brown, 1984 and 1986. [BACK]
33. As I show in another article on Friedrich's work, "Fractured Fairytales and Experimental Identities: Looking for Lesbians in and around the Films of Su Friedrich," reviewers of Damned If You Don't disagreed profoundly on these questions. Martha Gever took an implicitly separatist stance, arguing that Friedrich "introduces a male character in order to exile him from her story" (Gever, 1988: 15). MacDonald insisted, in contrast, that Friedrich is "willing to share . . . pleasure with men (her use of a male and female tightrope walker to announce the love making suggests that the sexual pleasure of women need not be confined to women)" (MacDonald, 1992: 287). [BACK]
34. As one example of such imaginings, see my discussion (in "Displacing Limits of Difference") of Marguerite Duras's experimental makeover, Her Name of Venice in Deserted Calcutta (Son Nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1977), of another of her experimental films, India Song (1976), itself reformulated from a novel ( The Vice Consul [ Le Vice Consul ]) and also staged as a play. The two films share the same sound track and setting, and both deal with imperialism and racism, but Her Name of Venice voids the screen of any and all characters, making it impossible for specta- soft
tors to verify racial or ethnic identity. At one point two actresses appear, motionless, in silhouette, but they are clearly not characters.
I only wish that Roswitha Mueller's intriguing study of Valie Export's work, Valie Export: Fragments of the Imagination, had been available when I wrote this essay in 1992, for it is extremely pertinent to the arguments I advance here. [BACK]