1 The Director’s Body

Character/Caricature

Of all the auteurs in my study, the one to create a self-projection most consistently with and through his own body is Woody Allen. One might go so far as to claim that the weight of his entire oeuvre rests on his skinny, slightly hunched shoulders. His is a physical presence—body, voice, facial expression, gesture—that is always already a caricature, so that when one does actually see cartoon caricatures of Allen (he uses them in some of his films), they seem redundant. But why is that? Caricatures work through the exaggeration of certain signal and embodied characteristics—in Allen’s case, not only an unruly shock of reddish hair, dark-rimmed glasses framing owlish eyes, and a vulnerable, shrinking posture, but also a certain anxious intonation, nervous blinking and hand-wringing, an attitude of longing coupled with suspicion. Certainly directors (and authors) were caricatured before Allen—it was a hallmark of Hollywood journalism to create caricatures of both actors and directors—but the auteurist period allows for a strong linkage between the caricature and the embodied subject of the film. Through the persistent repetition of these characteristics from film to film, an insistence on their identification with the person called Woody Allen, who is also the director of his films, takes shape in the viewer’s mind and becomes ingrained. This is a person the viewer has come to know, not just as a name or a style but as an embodied being.

That caricatures inherently lack nuance and shading does not prevent viewers from establishing a nearly absolute connection between the fictional character on the screen and the director as person. I say “nearly” because, upon reflection, most viewers would understand that Allen’s cinematic persona is precisely that: a persona, a mask, a screen. But in Allen’s appearances “as himself”—that is, outside the bounds of his film narratives—he seems to uphold the caricature as an accurate representation of his nonfictional self by producing essentially the same gestures, the same nervous voice, the same humor. Perhaps the most striking example of the melding of fictional caricature and nonfictional self occurs in Barbara Kopple’s film on Allen, Wild Man Blues (1997). I would like to place this film, made by another director, next to Allen’s own works because the resulting comparison challenges assumptions regarding fiction versus nonfiction and on-screen versus off-screen/ backstage space, and also because, given the strength of the Allen presence in the film, it could, despite Kopple’s fine work, count as a self-biography.⁸ That is, the film is at least in part “directed” by Allen himself in the sense that he upholds his artistic control over the “Woody Allen” image throughout.

Made in the wake of the scandal surrounding Allen’s relationship with the much-younger Soon Yi Previn, his ex-partner’s adopted daughter, the film follows Allen on a European tour of the Dixieland band for which he plays clarinet. It has often been remarked that when he plays with the band, he leaves his caricatured persona behind, and this appears to be the case in the sequences of Wild Man Blues, in which Allen sits as a member of the band in concert, hands wrapped around his instrument, studiously tapping his foot and swaying slightly with the rhythm of the Dixieland music he loves. But during the interview sequences or the “candid” sequences in which we accompany him to a luxurious hotel room with Soon Yi or to a visit with his parents (in particular during the visit with his parents), the caricature comes roaring back, as “real” as ever, even in this nonfictional space.

Or is it a nonfictional space? The fascinating question surrounding the kind of caricature performance that Woody Allen produces is: Where is the “real” self? Where is the “real” Woody Allen, who in any case was born Alan Konigsberg, so that one is tempted to identify the caricatured self with the pseudonym, and look for the real person back in Brooklyn at the Konigsberg residence. The confusion over the location of the “real” Woody Allen can only take place as a result of this kind of performance, in which the same body appears in the fictional and non-fictional worlds.⁹ In Allen’s films, the medium’s message is frequently the actor’s body. Allen chose for much of his career to have his own body remain the body at the focus of his work, which has fascinating implications for how we identify a body represented in cinema with a particular, historical self.

In watching Wild Man Blues, the viewer might be tempted to think that Allen’s caricature is not a persona at all, not a virtual Allen, but the “actual” Allen. After all, Allen’s mother as she is presented in the documentary irrefutably seems to be the model for the comic but frightening Jewish-mother-in-the-skies as portrayed in Allen’s “Oedipus Wrecks” segment of the compilation film New York Stories (1989). Surely he could not have enlisted his mother as an actor so that she would produce a fictional self-caricature for Wild Man Blues in order to mirror the “Oedipus Wrecks” image and to play off his own perpetual fictional self-caricature? Surely we are looking at his “actual” mother playing herself, a “real” person on whom the New York Stories mother was based? Here is the problem with the documentary form, with Wild Man Blues or any documentary that seeks to capture the “real” version, the backstage version of a self that is fictionalized elsewhere. Perhaps the real person is not the base upon which a fictionalization is based but, instead, the caricature forms the basis for constructing a real person? That is, Allen’s mother plays the stereotypical Jewish mother, and Allen plays the stereotypical Brooklyn Jewish son. They draw on existent stereotypes and cultural practices for their self-performances, whether in a fictionalized context or not. Allen’s production and projection of a self-image point up the difficulty in claiming some kind of difference between a projected and “real” self—uncover the difficulty of defining a “self” at all, which to some degree is constructed out of existing discourses, images, and stereotypes, while at the same time producing and reproducing a highly physical and recognizable self-image.

This point might be brought home by another film by Allen, Celebrity (1998), in which Allen both does not and does appear. By this I mean that though Allen himself does not act in the film, Kenneth Branagh plays the “Woody Allen” figure. It is not infrequently the case that an actor or actors within films by Allen are enlisted to represent the filmmaker, to take on his persona in some way. But Celebrity thematizes this move in surprising ways. Branagh’s character in Celebrity is called Lee Simon, but his gestures, his intonation, his identity as neurotic artist in an unhappy marriage—all of these things signal to the viewer that “Lee Simon” is the figure who, under “normal” circumstances, would be played by the director, Woody Allen.¹⁰ And yet it is Kenneth Branagh, with his boyish charm and stocky build and chubby cheeks and sparkling blue eyes (unframed by glasses) who is supposed to convey “Woody-Allen-ness.” The difficulty in conjuring Allen’s physical presence is compounded by the audience’s recognition of the actor Branagh as not a Jewish stand-up comic but a Shakespearean actor who under “normal” circumstances has a British accent. Yet despite the significant physical and cultural differences Branagh’s presence embodies, the viewer can indeed “see” Woody Allen in him; in the gestures and intonation he so skillfully reproduces, the minute pauses, stutters, and frantic affect. The thing that is “Woody Allen” can be gleaned from viewing the physical body in performance—the gestures and speech and affect can be put on by another person, a very different person, and still recognized.¹¹

In my reading of Celebrity, the point of the film is a rather simple yet profound joke. At the story level, “celebrity” undergoes extreme criticism as an object of desire for cretins and the immoral; the viewer is treated to a procession of narcissistic, destructive, untalented people whose only aim is to attract yet more attention and wealth. Thus the viewer’s desire to “touch” the celebrity receives strong disapprobation from the film. But on a more thoughtful level, “celebrity” is the thing that produces the kind of caricatured identity performed by Woody Allen for his various audiences. Celebrity depends on an audience’s ability to recognize a person (actually a persona) through a complex of physical affect and performance. But in choosing Kenneth Branagh to play his persona, Woody Allen moves a good number of physical and cultural degrees away from his self-caricature. For the viewer, this could best be described as an uncanny experience. We recognize the Woody Allen figure because Branagh’s performance is in fact a quite astonishing feat of mimicry; but the caricature’s appearance is strange, altered. And this is not only a joke, but also an educational moment. In watching Kenneth Branagh play the Woody Allen figure in the absence of Woody Allen’s body, we learn that the caricature, the projected persona of Woody Allen’s films, is not precisely Woody Allen, but something a bit separate from whatever an “actual” Woody Allen (Alan Konigsberg?) might be. The caricature is something recognizable apart from the body it originally caricatured. At the same time, we learn that this persona is not exactly only a mask. It does belong to some degree to a particular body originating in a particular place and time; this is what produces the sense of the uncanny in the viewer.

Perhaps it is especially difficult to allow Kenneth Branagh to put on the Woody Allen mask, since Branagh, too, is a celebrity, with his own range of caricatured features that clash with Allen’s in a peculiar way. But Celebrity, like Allen’s earlier film Zelig (1983), argues that a person(a?) remains recognizable when physically and culturally transposed. Zelig is in fact the film in which Allen explores the mystery of selfhood and identity most explicitly, giving it a racial and political spin. Allen plays Leonard Zelig, a “human chameleon,” an unassuming little man who changes his actual body, face, and manner (his persona) to conform to whatever surroundings he finds himself in. He becomes an aristocrat, a professional athlete, a servant, a black man, a mobster, a Chinese man—all while remaining recognizably Leonard Zelig (and further, recognizably Woody Allen).

By this point it should be clear that Woody Allen’s performances as/of Woody Allen present a complex problematic. We have of course no access to a “real” Woody Allen, and there is more than a little hint throughout Allen’s cinematic work that selfhood is simply a matter of self-projection, whether cinematic or outside the cinema. In the narratives of Zelig and Celebrity and Wild Man Blues (which Allen does not, and yet does, ineffably, codirect) and Deconstructing Harry (1997), Allen works on the idea of self-construction (and deconstruction) through the cinematic apparatus. But because Allen’s own body is brought into play, this is a question that does not belong solely to cinema. Rather, it is posed as a philosophical question: What is a self and what is its relation to a body? The cinematic medium makes it possible to experiment with diverse potentials for projecting selfhood, underscoring the ultimate question of what it means to be a self, or whether there can be a true self, a source for the projections, at all. While at first glance it might seem that Allen is a highly self-revealing director, given his bent for autobiography and self-exposure (exhibitionism), one understands rather quickly that this kind of caricatured self-revelation may serve as the most effective mask of all, leading the audience to believe that they know someone intimately who is in fact nothing more than an assemblage of caricatured signs. And Allen’s play with projected selfhood depends on an audience, a particular audience, his audience, who can be depended upon to recognize him in his various guises and follow him in his investigation of identity.

Because Woody Allen is, at least initially and perhaps intrinsically, a comedian, a special relationship exists between him and his audience, and not just for the reasons just cited. Comedy attends to the body in a particular way, attaches interest to the “low” functions of humanity, the physical functions. Allen’s particular obsession is sex, and often the sexual unattractiveness of his embodied cinematic persona serves as the nub of a joke. As he tries, clad only in unflattering boxer shorts and his trademark glasses, to persuade the lovely Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) to have sex with him, he cuts an intentionally laughable figure. Yet she does have sex with him (if reluctantly and not as often as he would like), and so do a host of other beautiful women: Margot Hemingway, Judy Dench, Charlotte Rampling, Mia Farrow. As Allen has grown older, some reviewers have commented on the unbelievable or unappealing nature of his on-screen romances with much younger women. And this distaste has undoubtedly been fueled by the association of his off-screen persona with a sexual scandal in the form of a relationship with a young woman who was also his partner’s adopted daughter, something that only further blurs the boundary between real and reel selves. The boundary is further blurred by his propensity for love affairs with the women who play his lovers in his films: Louise Lasser, Diane Keaton, and Mia Farrow.

In fact, Allen has long played with the incongruity and illicit nature of his sexual attachments as part of the comic persona he inhabits. In Annie Hall (1977), it is Annie’s origins in a WASP-y family from the northern Midwest that set her apart from Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) and his raucous family in Brooklyn. When the two families appear together in a comic split-screen sequence, their differences come into high relief: the bright whiteness of the WASP family’s tablecloth and the sunlight streaming through their large windows set off again the dark, crowded space of the Jewish family’s dinner; the high noise level on the Brooklyn side posed against the occasional clink of silverware against plate on the midwestern side; the wide, open table and symmetrical seating plan of Annie’s family in contrast to the touching and grabbing and jostling going on at Alvy Singer’s home. Cinematically the divergence in physical environments becomes palpable and can be experienced by an embodied spectator as coolness on the one side and warmth (perhaps suffocating warmth) on the other. And Allen sits on the WASP side, sharing Easter ham with Annie’s family, definitely a foreign body in their midst. But the paradoxical nature of his incongruity and foreignness is that the spectator is meant to identify with him. His is the body, his is the gaze through which we experience the strangeness of Annie’s family: the “normal” ones, the Norman Rockwell portrait. Not only is there something eerie about their surface “niceness” (which cracks at moments, such as when the anti-Semitic grandmother directs poisonous glances at Alvy and the mother inquires condescendingly about Alvy’s progress in therapy), but after dinner Alvy has an amusing conversation with Annie’s brother Duane (played by the ultra-blonde Christopher Walken) in which Duane is revealed to be something of a psychopath.

Ultimately it is the neurotic and sex-obsessed Alvy who is, after all, the normal one in the face of mainstream and sterile American strangeness. In creating his persona and placing it within the film in such a way as to enlist the viewer’s identification, Allen reverses expectations about what is sexy, what is normal, what is American, even as he busily points out his obsessions, neuroses, and abnormalities, and lampoons his own body. The moments at which spectator identification with Allen becomes most obvious are those in which his character goes to the movies, which many of them do, obsessively. In an early film, Play It Again, Sam (1972), we first encounter his figure at a daytime showing of Casablanca.¹² The sequence opens with the action on the screen, the romantic final scene in which Humphrey Bogart leaves a tearful Ingrid Bergman on the tarmac in Morocco with his famous line, “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.” The camera moves from the misty, atmospheric black-and-white image on the screen to a color shot of Allen’s character hunched in his theater seat, popcorn forgotten on his lap, the light from the screen reflected in his glasses as he mouths every word spoken by the characters in the film. Once again the viewer of Allen’s film experiences a moment of comic dissonance as the scrawny and disheveled moviegoer channels the ultra-cool Humphrey Bogart, a dissonance that forms the heart of Allen’s film, which focuses on the confusion between on-screen and off-screen realities, on- and off-screen bodies. But the laugh is not only on Allen—it is on us as well, since this is clearly a mirror image for the spectator: “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”

In total, Allen’s cinematic presence as an actor offers a complex negotiation of on-screen and off-screen worlds, as his viewership becomes more aware of Allen’s romantic entanglements with the women who play his lovers in his films, his participation in a Dixieland jazz band whose tradition informs the music he uses in his films, and the lack of distinction between the Woody Allen persona as it appears in his own films and as it appears elsewhere. It comes as no surprise to read in Eric Lax’s biography of Allen that

Charlie Chaplin had his tramp outfit; Groucho Marx, a broad greasepaint mustache and frock coat. They required specific costumes to fulfill their characters, and audiences did not expect to see them dressed that way on the street; they knew that there was at least some distinction between persona and person. But Woody Allen wears the same baggy corduroy trousers and frayed sweater, the same black-rimmed glasses and sensible shoes, off-stage and on. It is his idea of perfect costuming when he can get up in the morning, pull on whatever clothes he has at hand, go to the set to direct his film of the moment, and then simply step in front of the camera whenever he has a scene, generally without benefit of even a change of shirt, not to mention the addition of make-up.¹³

Here we have a description of the moment that worried Bruss, when the director “simply steps in front of the camera,” but it raises no concern about a lack of control or presence; on the contrary, Woody Allen’s persona represents a model of control and studied play dealing with the question of what constitutes a “true life”; at the same time, this control might feed the idea of the auteur as powerfully ubiquitous.¹⁴

His Master’s Voice

François Truffaut does not appear as often in his own films as Allen does, nor does he seem invested in creating a strong connection between his on- and off-screen personae in terms of appearance, gesture, or character. At the same time, the roles he chooses to perform carry more or less obvious traces of his “real-world” role as director: in The Wild Child (1970), he is the doctor who determines the movements and the emotions of the boy found in the forest; in The Green Room (1978), he plays a man who creates a shrine to his dead wife and conducts a repetitive ritual that approaches a kind of theatrical performance; and in La nuit américaine (Day for Night, 1973), he plays a film director named Ferrand, who directs François Truffaut’s avatar/actor, Jean-Pierre Léaud. But because there is a kind of woodenness, a blankness in Truffaut’s acting presence (one is tempted to say simply that he is a mediocre actor), there is much less caricature, much less for the viewer to use as identification with a “real” person.

When asked why he chose to play Dr. Jean Itard, the historical figure depicted in The Wild Child, Truffaut explained: “The decision to play the role of Dr. Itard myself was a profounder choice than I thought at the time. I saw it at first as a practical convenience, because I didn’t want to hire a star. . . . I felt [the doctor’s role] was a more important role than the director’s because Dr. Itard maneuvered that child and I wanted to do that myself, but it’s probable that it all had deeper meanings.¹⁵ This comment by Truffaut opens up a number of questions about “directing from in front of the camera,” as he terms it.¹⁶ It is worth considering, for instance, why he speaks of both the doctor and director as “roles”—the doctor, after all, appears only within the framework of the film’s story, while the director properly belongs outside the story’s frame. But his decision to play the doctor (as well as the director) illustrates the breaking and penetration of the story frame that is inherent in a particular kind of film authorship.

In an article on Truffaut’s presence in The Wild Child, Julie Codell states flatly that “Truffaut’s impersonation [of Itard] is an autobiographical enactment,” and then wonders, “Is civilizing Victor parallel to or a metaphor for directing actors in a film, or for other aspects of filmmaking? Truffaut is both subject and object, changing his relationship to his audience.”¹⁷ Certainly the actions that Dr. Itard takes in the film—firmly grasping Victor’s legs and manipulating them in order to teach him how to walk, spending hours on lessons to teach him to speak properly, dressing him and forcing him into a pre-scripted role (that of “civilized human”)—bring forcibly to mind the parallel function of a film director. Photographs of Truffaut taken during the making of his films show him in situations that mirror precisely the scenes in The Wild Child when Itard/Truffaut is teaching Victor to walk or talk—he takes hold of the actor’s hands, arms, head, and he models actions for the actor to mimic. Truffaut’s remark that “the doctor’s role was more important than the director’s” indeed hints that he sees the forms of manipulation practiced by Itard as simply a more essential and profound version of what he would do as a director, and his decision to play Itard recalls Buster Keaton’s leap into the projected film in Sherlock Jr.—Truffaut needs to “get in there” and control what is happening at a basic level (though Keaton’s protagonist is initially overwhelmed by the film). Truffaut’s aim was in part to depict his act of touching the actor, to bring that act into the viewing experience. His urge to enter the film, in other words, arises from the auteurist need to be everywhere and the control of the actor’s body, which I will address in chapter 4.

On the level of story, Codell’s description of Truffaut’s performance in The Wild Child as an autobiographical enactment is not as far-fetched as it at first glance might seem. One might well ask, “What does the life of an eighteenth-century doctor and scientist have to do with the life of a twentieth-century filmmaker?” Certainly The Wild Child would not pass the litmus test of Lejeune’s autobiographical pact; Truffaut is not Itard, and Itard’s history cannot be mapped comfortably onto Truffaut’s life story. But Truffaut’s presence as both director (author) and actor forms a type of link that approaches the author/ protagonist consonance that the pact demands. And there is also a subtle gesture toward the pact before the film’s narrative begins, when we read in a title that the film is dedicated to Jean-Pierre Léaud, the actor who portrayed Truffaut’s autobiographical alter ego, Antoine Doinel, in a series of films. Codell’s argument proceeds strongly from the dedication, and indeed it is a surprising and revealing opening for the film. The dedication, coupled with Truffaut’s presence in the film as the doctor, leads a knowledgeable viewer into an ineluctably autobiographical interpretation. I will allow Codell to lay out the associations:

The dedication . . . to Léaud highlights the array of intersections between biography and fiction in Truffaut’s films, as [Truffaut’s mentor André] Bazin and Truffaut are split and projected in several filmic permutations: Léaud plays the fictional Truffaut as Doinel, and re-enacts some actual events in Truffaut’s life. Bazin was Truffaut’s mentor and saved him from several incarcerations. Truffaut as Itard “plays” Bazin in Truffaut’s own life. [The “wild child”] Cargol (a gypsy boy, and so part of an historically outcast group) as Victor is a young truant Truffaut, and also alludes to Doinel/Léaud. Truffaut as Itard plays Bazin and himself as a mentoring adult. The dedication of L’Enfant sauvage to Léaud secures these convoluted, overlapping connections [and the] dedication conveys the entanglement of Truffaut’s filmic fictions, his actual life, and his autobiography-as-film in this film. . . . Together, Victor and Itard represent a split Truffaut before and after mentoring, as boy and as man respectively. (103)

As if in order to support Codell’s assertion, the American version of the DVD includes a significant error in the form of a note on the cover that indicates that Victor is played not by Jean-Pierre Cargol but by Jean-Pierre Léaud.

In her analysis of Truffaut’s projected presence in The Wild Child, Codell makes reference to Derrida and his destabilization of language and thus of selfhood. And indeed, the complex entanglement of refer-entiality described above would seem to do violence to ordinary linguistic structures of nominal and pronominal usage. Derrida’s theories find further support in a scene in which Dr. Itard/Truffaut names Victor by noting that he responds to the vowel “o” more strongly than to other sounds, and so makes the boy turn around and listen to him pronounce a number of names containing that sound. When the child seems to react most strongly to “Victor,” that becomes his name, and then the doctor has the boy write “Victor” on a chalkboard, points to the name, and explains to the bewildered child: “Victor. Victor, c’est toi. C’est toi, Victor.” Certainly the word on the board is no more the boy than the word “pipe” is a pipe in René Magritte’s famous painting, captioned “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). Yet the boy is asked to see himself in the name on the board in a way not entirely divorced from the way that the initiated viewer feels invited to see Truffaut the director in Itard the doctor. In both cases, we are invited to see equivalence in things that are not equivalent, but linked by acts of representation.

Early in Victor’s sessions with Dr. Itard, the scientist stands behind Victor while the boy is looking at his reflection in a mirror and, from behind, offers him an object to grasp. The boy reaches for the mirrored reflection of the object, predictably, for he has no experience with mirrors. Then he attempts to reach behind the mirror, imagining it to function as a kind of window. But finally he has a flash of understanding and reaches for the object where it “really” is, behind him: success! He has understood the difference between representation and object, something that an animal, for instance, would not be expected to be able to learn. But this little scene, which within the context of the narrative expresses Victor’s movement from a primitive/bestial being to a civilized person, also carries meaning in the context of cinematic spectatorship and the audience’s process of identifying complex patterns of referentiality.

A film viewer does understand, of course, that the images projected on the screen are just that: images, and not persons. But in a metaphorical sense, the introduction of a person who is known to be involved in the making of the film, that is, a person from the “real world” that surrounds the film, confuses the cognitive fields of spectatorship, because in viewing a film, we are meant to assume a “blacking out” of our realization that there is something “real” that produced the images on the screen. We should not be looking in the mirror, or behind us, in a sense, for the “real person.” Since the “real person” is not precisely in our own chronological and physical space, we do not have immediate access to him, so despite our perception that this person is reflected (or more correctly) projected from an actual place, our knowledge of him is in fact part of the representational rather than the “real” world. Nevertheless, we tend to (again, metaphorically) look behind us or try to see behind the mirror/screen in order to combine the information we believe we have from the projecting world with the world projected. Where is the “real” Truffaut?—and this returns us to the question of where we might locate the “real” Allen. Rather than being “blinded” in one of our cognitive fields, however, we do maintain an understanding that there was a projecting place unavailable to us in real time and space that nevertheless originated in real time and space. We have not lost knowledge of that projecting field, and it pushes us toward reading the cinematic representation of a person as both representation and real, both the historical Itard, in this case, and the historical Truffaut. To fail to read the person playing Dr. Itard on the screen as Truffaut (once the viewer has read the credits and seen Truffaut’s name) involves an act of willful blindness that is practically impossible. It is important to mark how the moment of insight or recognition of representation qua representation in the film, as Victor discovers what a mirror is, operates within a framework that paradoxically seems to force a confusion between the represented and the “real,” the fictional character with the director Truffaut. And who, precisely, is the director Truffaut?

Codell, while noting that The Wild Child contains critical moments directed against Itard’s Enlightenment project of civilizing Victor, argues that Truffaut (at least believes) that he is inventing “a sublime version” of himself in playing the “cultural ideal,” Dr. Itard (115). I would emphasize more strongly than she does the Romantic elements of the film that point toward a deep ambivalence regarding Itard and his treatment of Victor, elements that bring The Wild Child more closely into alignment with Truffaut’s cinematic critiques elsewhere of social institutions such as schools, prisons, the military, marriage, and so on (see, for example, The 400 Blows and Small Change). It is true that in interviews about the film, Truffaut expresses a profound admiration for Itard’s work and what he accomplished with Victor. At the same time (as Codell notes), he positions Itard as the harsh taskmaster of the story and creates a fictive situation in which a motherly housekeeper acts as a check against the inhumanity of Itard’s experiments, an inhumanity that strikes one as paradoxical in terms of the idea that he is trying to make a human of the “wild” child. Truffaut’s voice-over narration is taken more or less verbatim from Itard’s diaries, so that we have the scientist’s act of self-observation running parallel to our own view of action as it unfolds. At one point we see Itard punish Victor when the boy answers a question correctly; the narrative voice explains to us (though of course, not to Victor) that this is an experiment designed to find out whether the boy has an inherently “human” sense of justice; Itard expresses gratification at Victor’s howls of outrage even as he notes his own cruelty. The dual (or “telescopic,” as Codell describes it) vision supplied to the viewer by the narration seems to excuse or cover over Itard’s raw actions, which are, for the immediate witnesses (Victor and the housekeeper) unmotivated and apparently arbitrary.

Throughout The Wild Child, Truffaut employs the iris-in, iris-out transition typical of films of the silent era. This strategy could strike the viewer, anachronistically enough, as a reference to the film’s claim to historicity (as well as a reference to the film’s status as film). Though the action of the film takes place in 1798, a century before cinema’s beginnings in the 1890s, this archaic editing technique carries the cachet of “the past,” marking the film as “historical” in medial terms as well as through the story. To be sure, there are spoken lines in the “silent documentary” footage of the film, but they are almost incidental, and there are long sequences in which there is no very significant diegetic speech. One of these silent sequences also lacks any voiceover narrative, and thus escapes the Enlightenment scientific tone of much of the film. For this reason I believe it provides a key moment of criticism directed against the Enlightenment project. A pensive Itard gets up in the night, a candle in his hand, to look for Victor, who is, startlingly, missing from his bed. Because Victor is essentially a highly intelligent caged animal, there is a constant (and not unmotivated) worry that he will escape. Itard/Truffaut sits down in the shadowy corridor just under a drawing of a human skull that is hanging on the wall. Itard’s/Truffaut’s melancholy face, lit by the candle, glows in the darkness and offers a counterpart to the scientific skull depicted just above his head. This person, who lives entirely through his mind, seems to be in despair. Then he rises, walks to a window, and looks out onto a garden flooded with moonlight. There in the garden is a naked Victor, romping ecstatically, his face turned up joyously to the light of the moon. And Itard/Truffaut, rather than rushing out to reclaim his captive, stands at the window and smiles, sadly. This silent sequence emphasizes the doctor’s inability to reach Victor, his surprising emotion of understanding or empathy with the boy, and it also positions Victor’s “wildness” rather differently from the way in which the Enlightenment project sees it. In this scene Victor is in fact a “noble savage,” elevated and euphoric because of his unique connection to the natural world and his comfort within his own skin, a comfort that ordinarily escapes the wooden Itard, rigid and tightly enclosed in suit and tie.

Truffaut would seem to endorse Itard’s project of civilizing Victor without reservation if one reads his comments in interviews and understands his dedication of the film to Jean-Pierre Léaud as a kind of self-congratulatory moment—as Itard “made” Victor, so Truffaut “made” Léaud: “While I was shooting [The Wild Child], I relived a little the shooting of The 400 Blows in which I initiated Jean-Pierre Léaud into the cinema, during which I taught him what cinema basically is.”¹⁸ And not only that; in making The Wild Child, Truffaut claims to have educated and formed the young gypsy boy who played Victor, Jean-Pierre Cargol: “When the film was finished, we saw that the cinema had done a lot for [Jean-Pierre Cargol’s] development. To my mind, the difference in [him] before and after the filming is astounding. The film crew gave him a little 8-mm camera at the end of the shooting, and he said: ‘I will be the first gypsy director.’”¹⁹ Out of the supposed barbarian Cargol, Truffaut creates a self-image, a nascent film director. But even as Truffaut claims credit for a successful exercise of Enlightenment education in the case of his actors, bringing the young delinquent (Léaud) and the young savage (Cargol) into the civilized domain of cinema, he allows a note of skepticism or doubt to creep into The Wild Child by drawing on some of the ideals of his other films in order to produce a critique of “civilizing” institutions: the school for the deaf at the beginning of the film, for instance. It is possible to produce competing perspectives for reading the film based on the connection an informed viewer draws between Itard and Truffaut, the associations that can arise from that connection, and Truffaut’s performance of Itard as at least mildly ambivalent about his “civilization” of Victor. In the labyrinth of identifications and reference set up by Truffaut’s presence as Dr. Itard and the dedication to Jean-Pierre Léaud, the idea of character formation, which would seem to form the basis for The Wild Child, becomes tangled and fraught. In performing Itard, Truffaut doubles himself and takes up variant and nearly simultaneous perspectives on the question of how a self ought to be civilized, how a person is formed in and through society.²⁰

Mirrored Confessions

Ingmar Bergman also occasionally makes brief authorial appearances in his films, but slyly, recessively. His roles are more extended and serious than cameos, though there is a kind of gallows humor in the part Bergman elects to play in his short film The Rite (1969). This odd and disturbing narrative contains a strong self-reflexive element, in that it portrays a trio of actors who suffer prosecution under a malevolent judge for breaking obscenity laws in their interpretation of an ancient ritual (Bergman himself would later be prosecuted under Swedish tax law and often chafed under state censorship). Bergman’s films often repeat the theme of actors persecuted or prosecuted for their art: The Seventh Seal (1957), Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), and The Magician (1958) all provide variations on this theme. In The Rite, the judge is sufficiently shaken by his interviews with the actors to approach a priest in the confessional—and the priest is played by Bergman, a hood drawn discreetly over his head. Bergman’s name does not appear among the actors’ in the credits, although he is one of just five; his voice is heard in a single line on the soundtrack before we see his face (“I’m listening”), and once we do see him, he remains silent. His face is obscured by the cowl he wears and by the shadows of the confession, and we see him from the penitent’s vantage point; that is, behind a screen, a device that suggests the cinematic screen as well. He is both here on-screen and there, behind it, hiding in a guise reminiscent of a scene in The Seventh Seal, when Death poses as a priest in order to trick the Knight into confessing. That he does not “come out” as a recognizable body in the film’s frame but only presents himself coyly, in a partially discernable guise but from the position of narrative (and theological) authority, underscores the power of invisibility. Bergman in fact has it both ways; he cultivates celebrity as well as anonymity, since he was willing to make himself widely available for interviews in print and on television and radio (including such popular American venues as Playboy and Time), in documentary films, and in the informal footage often taken while filming was under way. In other words, he did his best to become recognizable enough for his ghostly presence to be guessed at and interpreted.

Bergman’s appearance in the role of the priest has something of the same impact as seeing Death cloaked as a priest; the viewer who recognizes Bergman (and also the echo of the scene from The Seventh Seal) gets the sense that this is no priest, but someone else, someone who cannot grant absolution. And in any case the judge who “confesses” is not a believer. His name (Abramson) and his darker coloring give the impression that he might be Jewish, and he indicates to the priest that he does not want to confess, but only needs someone to listen to him. “You know that even unbelievers pray,” he adds. Rather than functioning as a true confession, the entire situation is instead a restaging and reversal of the judge’s interrogation of the actors, where they are expected to confess to him their wrongs as the judge is now moved to ponder his own failings in the confessional. In playing the priest, Bergman both quotes his own work—The Seventh Seal—and indicates something about the director’s role, or specifically, his own persona as a director. There is a sense in which the director defines not only how the actor is to perform, who the actor is supposed to be, but also how the viewer is to perform. One of the ways in which the field of Bergman’s screen becomes complicated is through the introduction of mirrors, which not only create a depth and complexity for the action within the frame (the space opens up, things invisible within the frame—offscreen—materialize, etc.), but also imply that the viewer’s space might become involved, that the viewer might find herself reflected there, as the auteurist director always is.

Not infrequently in Bergman’s films, there is a moment when a person is confronted rather cruelly with his or her own shortcomings. Generally this scene is played out in front of a mirror; two characters will stand facing the mirror, or one will hold up a mirror to the other, and then one of them will begin to describe the other in the most drastic terms.²¹ In the early film Summer Interlude (1951), a ballerina sits before a mirror while her director, reflected in another mirror, dissects her mercilessly. A circus performer in Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) receives a similar scathing treatment from an actor, then turns on him and delivers a devastating assessment of his character; and all the while they are reflected in a tall mirror. A beautiful young woman in Wild Strawberries (1957) holds a small mirror up to her childhood lover, now an elderly man, and forces him to contemplate his wizened face, delivering at the same time a lethal character assassination. In Cries and Whispers, a man describes the features of his former lover’s face as they look into a mirror together, and he assigns to each feature of her aging face the worst possible interpretation: selfishness, cruelty, lust. She turns to him with a cold smile and says, “I think you are describing yourself.” It is a central topos of Bergman’s films, in other words, that one person defines another’s character, and this definition arises out of a power relationship; the person who produces the definition either actually occupies a position of dominance over the other or assumes a position of dominance.

Moreover, there is an element of self-projection involved in the definition, as the last example clearly articulates: “I think you are describing yourself.” In Summer Interlude, the ballet master focuses on the ballerina’s absolute identity with her art, her inability to escape her mask, her persona, while he himself still wears the absurd makeup of the role he has just played. It happens that he was performing Coppelius, the evil figure from Hoffman’s “The Sandman” who creates the mechanical doll Olympia—his role of creating and directing a life-size doll in the ballet thus extends into his “real-life” practice of forming and directing his ballerinas. In other words, his, too, is a mask that he cannot remove. In Sawdust and Tinsel, a young circus actress attempts to crush her ardent seducer with the observation that he is like a girl; she claims, as she stands before her own reflection, looking at his reflection in the mirror, that she could make mincemeat of his mouth in a kiss. This projection will ultimately prove fatal to her, since her belief that he is a weak “feminine” figure will lead her into intimacy with him, and she is the one who will be crushed. Wild Strawberries presents a slightly more complex situation. The scene in which the young Sara confronts her now-elderly former lover Isak with a mirror occurs in one of Isak’s dreams—the confrontation he conjures in his dream would of course not work logically in real-world time. And so Sara’s harsh assessment of him is in fact a self-projection, Isak’s judgment on himself.

Paisley Livingston remarks that “Bergman demonstrates that identity is never simple and immediate in that it does not reside in a static equivalence of self to self. The boundaries of the self are open and fluid; its unity is not rigid, but evolves through contact with others.”²² This is quite in accordance with what Bergman says himself about the formation of selfhood in the acting process: “Without a you there is no I.” Yet it would be a mistake to think of the “fluid” boundaries of selfhood as a wholly positive or even neutral phenomenon in Bergman’s world; the mirror scenes are always about power and often about sadism. And when he enters the mirroring scenario in his own person, the viewer must consider what this might say about the structure of power in directing and acting, directing and viewing.

When Bergman appears in The Rite as a confessor (and it is the only time he plays a fictional figure in one of his films), it seems productive to think of the scene in terms of the projected “confessions” described in the mirror scenes above. The confessor figure in The Rite functions as the mirror in which the judge sees himself, or rather, the situation of the confessional demands a self-account that is elicited by a power structure that produces a sense of guilt, the need to confess, and the possibility of absolution. Because the judge does not in fact confess as a believer, the final aspect of the rite of confession falls out—there will be no absolution. And in a sense, this heightens the effect of all of Bergman’s mirror scenes—there are not two people present, but only one. Or only two separate people, each experiencing an existential solitude in which the “other” is nothing more than a mirror or echo chamber. When Bergman as actor enters this complex, the specter of the director enters as well, and we see how the role of the director parallels in a sense the role of the priest hearing a confession. We might say “exacting a confession,” because though the priest does not require a sinner to confess (that impetus must come from the penitent), the power structure in which the priest plays a central role does demand confession of sins. The director’s role is to coax, persuade, or force the actor to speak assigned lines, to require a particular posture or attitude. One difference between the priest and the director is that the priest does not know what specific lines the penitent will speak, what particular sins will be confessed, while the director (and particularly an auteur) knows in advance precisely what the actor has to say and how he wants the actor to say it. And another, allied difference would be that while the actor does not voice the lines as him- or herself, the penitent speaks out of his or her own situation. There is (meant to be) a sincere speech act involved in confession, while acting only imitates speech acts (as in the opening sequence of Bergman’s Winter Light, where a country priest, played by Gunnar Björnstrand, performs communion with his congregation). But even in a sacred setting, the ritual of confession is played out in scripted lines, both for the priest and the penitent. Though the penitent may come with a highly unique crime on his conscience, a standard ritual will still be performed, with the sin’s specificity buried within a framework of ritualized speech. And there is nothing to ensure that any given confessional act is sincere and not “merely” performative.²³

Thus it might be said that Bergman’s use of confessional acts as performative does not necessarily demarcate an absolute difference between religious and secular confession, nor between a “real” speech act or “mere” performance. Instead, both can be understood as containing a ritual element, and in fact the actors’ performance of their allegedly obscene rite in the film, a performance they carry out in the judge’s chambers, with the judge as sole spectator, demonstrates if anything the enormous power of performed ritual—upon seeing the rite performed, the judge dies. In this little film, Bergman plays with the boundaries between sacred and secular acts of confession, actual and performed speech acts. Dressed and acting as priest/confessor in the scene in which he actually appears, he retains the identity of director as well, both by using his recognizable face for the benefit of the audience and by playing a role that resembles that of a director. Ultimately he raises questions about the significance of ritual in relation to drama and the director’s role in mediating ritual through his actors, but the second of these questions can only be raised when the audience has an acquaintance with Bergman’s physical appearance and his voice.

Bergman withdraws even farther into obscurity when he appears only on the soundtrack, as an unidentified voice-over narrator. But in two of his films, Persona and Cries and Whispers, this directorial voice enters at particularly telling moments. In Persona, the narration occurs as the scene changes from the blank corridors and rooms of a hospital to a sunny summer day in the country. From a distance we see our two protagonists, Nurse Alma and her patient Elisabeth Vogler, as the women, both wearing straw hats, walk along a stone wall typical of the island of Gotland. They seem to be in high spirits, though we cannot hear what Alma is saying (Elisabeth is understood to be mute during the film). At that moment we hear a man’s voice on the soundtrack: “And so at the end of the summer, Sister Alma and Mrs. Vogler move into the doctor’s summer house. The seaside stay agrees very well with the actress. Her former apathy gives way to long walks, fishing, cooking, letter writing, and other diversions. Sister Alma enjoys the seclusion of the countryside and takes great care of her patient.” The narrator’s interjection about the passage of time as well as the developing relationship of the two women is not out of place at this moment in the film, but Bergman could have accomplished this by adding an intertitle, or by using someone else’s voice. For the Swedish cinema-going audience of 1966, it seems likely that Bergman’s voice could be identifiable as belonging to the director, just as it would be surprising if they did not recognize his face in The Rite two years later. He was at that time an important public figure with a high level of recognition in his small country. But an international audience would be less likely to make that connection, and there is nothing in the film credits to indicate Bergman’s contribution in that regard. So why did Bergman speak the lines? If Bergman wanted to establish himself as author and also as authorial narrator, he would accomplish this in the first instance only for the Swedish audience, and to what purpose?

One can understand that the insertion of a third-person narrator into Persona, a film that exercises an extreme emphasis on subjective experience, might offer a kind of telescoping out to a position where the audience could feel comfortable and confident about the truth value of what was being said, particularly if the voice saying it belongs to the director of the film.²⁴ The sheer confidence and serenity of the realistic narrator offers a sense of security. But in fact, it is at this point that the viewer’s sense of a firm footing in the reality of the film’s story begins seriously to falter. Shortly after the intervention of the narrative voice, the women sit at a picnic table comparing hands, which is, as Nurse Alma remarks, an omen of bad luck. It is also a metonymic sign of how their identities will begin to be confused and fused in the scenes that follow, how Alma will fear that she is becoming Elisabeth, how the viewers will begin to suspect that there might not be two women on the island at all, but perhaps only one. Or none. Thus the director’s voice offers a false comfort, a notion that there is an authority in place that will establish “reality” and identity for the viewer, and it follows on the heels of another “authoritative” scene in which Elisabeth’s doctor (played by Margaretha Krook) has just explained to Elisabeth what is really wrong with her.

It is not really necessary for the viewer to recognize the voice-over as Bergman’s in order to receive the (false) message of order and authority, even though a knowledgeable viewer might receive a little frisson of excitement from the recognition. Instead, putting Bergman’s voice on the soundtrack seems to emerge out of Bergman’s need to be there, just as Truffaut expressed his need to perform as Dr. Itard in The Wild Child, in a performance of control. Thus the significance of the voice becomes fully intelligible only in stepping outside the bounds of the film itself, into the space of direction.

In the final moments of the film, another, more pointed gesture toward the off-screen space of production is made as Sister Alma prepares to depart the summer house. A sound much like the horn of a bus is heard, and since we are cued to hear that kind of sound, it comes as something of a surprise when instead of a bus, we first see a camera dolly lowering into the frame. The sound, then, was the horn warning people on the set that a piece of heavy equipment is in motion. One man operates the camera, his face hidden by the apparatus, while another crouches in the shadows to the side of the camera, while we see in the camera’s lens the image they film: Mrs. Vogler’s face. Those familiar with Sven Nykvist’s appearance would be inclined to identify the man on the left as Bergman’s cinematographer, while the man behind the camera is in all likelihood not Bergman himself. But he seems to perform as a stand-in for the author; the film is careful to mask both of the men, one with darkness, the other with the apparatus. This image more than any other points the viewer toward the idea that this film is a created artifact, and that it was created by someone. At the same time, the film refuses to allow us a simple explanation of what it means to be someone. Persona makes a point of calling the viability of individual human subjectivity into serious question, so that the appearance of “authority” (the cavalry?) at this late moment only adds to the film’s essential anxiety and confusion.

In Woody Allen’s many cinematic performances and in Truffaut’s smaller number, the auteur as performer stands at the center of the narrative, and thus the films can be understood to be as much about them as directors as they are about the characters they portray. Bergman’s roles announce his presence differently, but they do refer to him, as they address some of his central concerns about identity and power relationships in identity formation. In other cases, auteurist directors enter their films in cameo roles that seem little more than games. In these instances, one might speak of the auteur’s appearance as a kind of signature that affirms the authorial presence, even as these appearances also function as a kind of wink at the audience: now you see me, now you don’t. Here I am . . . but this isn’t me. Hitchcock is of course the most famous director for his short and often humorous appearances, which serve as a kind of imprimatur: his rotund body, bald head, and deadpan expression make up his signature, the sign that assures the viewer that this is indeed a Hitchcock film, and grants the informed spectator the little thrill of pleasure that accompanies access to privileged information.²⁵

General Erections/Elections

Among the auteurs of this study, Pedro Almodóvar most closely fits Hitchcock’s cameo model in his own appearances. In Almodóvar’s early films, Pepi, Luci Bom, and Other Girls on the Heap (1980), What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1985), and Matador (1986), he creates a different kind of signature through a slightly more exposed appearance than Hitchcock’s, though his performances offer that same spark of recognition to those who have some background knowledge of Almodóvar’s off-screen persona. Almodóvar, arguably Spain’s most recognized auteur figure beginning in the 1980s, had his artistic beginnings as part of the countercultural Madrid movimento, focusing primarily on musical drag shows, pornographic stories and comic books, and Super-8 films starring himself and his friends. His first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom, and Other Girls on the Heap, draws on that milieu and plays with his accustomed media in order to produce a slightly extended version of his favorite type of narrative: a wild pastiche of confused identities, challenges to standard class and gender constructions, and subversion of authority, all played out with high consciousness of color and (counter-)style in interior design, costume, hair, and makeup. In Pepi, Luci, Bom, Almodóvar himself appears in the role of an emcee and judge for a sexual contest entitled “General Erections” (a play on “General Elections”), the nature of which is easy to glean from the title. In Matador, we find the director in a short sequence as the director of a fashion show, and in What Have I Done to Deserve This? Almodóvar performs briefly on a television program watched by the characters in his film—we see him in miniature on the tiny screen as he sings a duet about the melancholic nature of love while dressed in elaborate and flashy “historical” costume, complete with a false moustache. In all of these cameos, Almodóvar produces a projected image that aligns with the aesthetic and social concerns of the movimento, in which he plays an important role. While one might be tempted to label the appearances “autobiographical” in the sense that they seem to imply Almodóvar’s personal off-screen identity as a homosexual and a central figure in the movimento, the most important factor here is that his appearances connect his cinematic work to his earlier artistic corpus and to the framework in which they belong. Almodóvar’s primary concern with identity (his own or anyone else’s) is to understand and demonstrate identity as construct, a concept he examines mostly in the context of gender and sexual orientation, but also in terms of morality, class, and national or regional cultures. It is true that his cameos point the viewer toward the presence of Almodóvar the director, and at least in the case of “General Erections” and in Matador, we see the character he performs as a kind of director, indicating a comic little mise en abyme. But it is important to note how all the cameos refer to show business more generally, and I use the popular term “show business” advisedly, with the accent on “show.” Identity in Almodóvar’s work is about performance and construction, projection on a grand scale. When we see him in the various cameos that point toward performance, we understand that we are not to try to turn toward some “real-world” explanation of who Pedro Almodóvar is or what in his biography might motivate the stories he tells, but instead we are to consider how performance determines identity in our general elections/erections of who we are to be.

One of the moments in his films when this becomes most obvious occurs in All About My Mother. Almodóvar does not appear as a figure in that film (though he claims an autobiographical relationship to the young boy who is killed in the opening sequence), but he presents a short treatise on the problem of self-construction via a speech given by Agrado, a transsexual prostitute turned backstage theater assistant. Given the thankless task of announcing that a theater performance must be canceled, Agrado takes center stage and announces that she/he will relate her own life story as compensation for the canceled show. With tremendous self-irony, Agrado tells the captive audience how much she paid for each of her gender-changing operations: so much for each breast, so much for each ounce of silicon used to form a shapely feminine posterior, so much for her nose, for reducing her chin, and so on. She concludes by observing, to general applause, that “a woman is more authentic the more she resembles what she has dreamed of being” (Una mujer es más auténtica cuanto más se parece a lo que a soñado de si misma). The body, usually the anchor for what is real, what distinguishes one individual from another, becomes a literal construction in this instance. Turning “authenticity” on its head, Agrado insists on the power of the individual to create the body that will reflect some inner vision of authentic selfhood. This notion of selfhood as creative process will hold true for Almodóvar’s figures generally, which raises the question of what Almodóvar’s body means in the context of his films. In the various guises in which he appears, he remains recognizably himself, the auteur’s body as mark of the auteur’s presence and power, even as the actual appearance takes on the form of an inside joke. But since one major point of his cinematic narratives is the disruption of biological essentialism when it comes to gender roles and sexuality, one would have to regard his appearance in his films as an invitation to both underwrite the idea of a cinematic auteur (there he is, the author) and subvert it by placing his own body among these shifting identities. The body, in Almodóvar’s work, is not the stable site of human subjectivity that one might first imagine it to be.

This is far from a catalogue of all the physical interventions performed by auteurist film directors—one would have to include a study of Fritz Lang’s hands or Federico Fellini’s leg in the opening sequence of 8½, Rainer Maria Fassbinder’s series of film appearances, as well as the work of many others. But this sampling of readings indicates how auteurist directors make use of their own bodies and performances in their films in order to call attention to themselves, yes, but also in order to call into question what it means to be a self at all. We want to believe, we continue to say, that there is a person who envisioned what we experience in auteurist film. And the person can be located physically, geographically, historically. But once removed from that physical, geographical, and historical space, what remains of the person besides the images and their relationship to the viewer? To continue along this line of inquiry in a more focused vein, I will turn to films in which the auteurist director performs as a director, to see how the cinematic apparatus is pulled more obviously into the analysis of what it means to be a person in and through cinema.